GeoGradient - Climate Generator

Real-world geography for Minecraft. The further you travel north or south, the colder or hotter the world becomes, with poles, equators, and seven climate bands that actually make sense.

Vanilla Minecraft is geographic chaos. A snowy plain shares a border with a desert. A jungle butts up against a tundra. There is no equator, no poles, no concept of "head north and it gets colder." Climate is scattered like confetti, and no matter how far you walk, the pattern never resolves into anything coherent.

GeoGradient replaces that with a real planet.

A World That Acts Like Earth

Your Z coordinate is now your latitude. Travel north (negative Z) and the world cools through familiar territory: subtropical scrub, temperate forest, boreal taiga, tundra, and finally polar ice. Travel south past spawn and you'll cross dry scrubland into hot desert, then at the equator, lush jungle. Keep going and you'll cross the next equator and reach another pole. The full climate cycle repeats every 20,000 blocks.

Seven climate bands fit together using real-Earth surface-area math. Deserts and badlands appear at the same latitudes where Earth's actual deserts sit, around 15° to 30° from the equator. Jungles cluster at the equator where rainfall is heaviest. Temperate forests sit at the mid-latitudes. Biomes show up where they belong instead of wherever vanilla's RNG felt like dropping them.

GeoGradient drives both temperature and humidity into biome selection, not just temperature. That means biomes vanilla normally hides behind specific climate pairings now appear in the right contexts. Borders between bands are warped by simplex noise so transition zones look like real ones, irregular and organic, not ruler-straight lines across the map.

Finding Your Bearings

Press F3 and you'll see your current climate band, raw temperature value, and the nearest landmarks. NP 8320N reads as "North Pole is 8,320 blocks north." The world starts to feel like one you could draw a map of.

Type /geogradient info in chat for the same readout at your current position, or /geogradient info <x> <z> to query any coordinate. Handy for planning a build site or scouting a base location before walking there.

Tune the Planet

The default config gives you a world 20,000 blocks across, cycle to cycle. Set globe_size to 25,000 (or any value up to a million) for a more expansive planet where climate transitions are gentler and exploration covers more ground. Want to spawn somewhere other than the warm subtropical default? Set spawn_latitude to 1.0 to drop yourself at the North Pole, -1.0 to start at the equator, or anywhere in between.

A handful of additional knobs control how warped the band borders are and how smoothly bands blend together. Most players won't need them. They're there if you do.

Works With Your Biomes

GeoGradient does not add a single biome. It changes which vanilla biomes appear at which latitude, and modded biomes that declare standard climate values automatically slot into the right bands too.

TerraBlender is supported out of the box. When present, GeoGradient hooks into its regional biome system with no extra setup. Worldgen mods like Tectonic and Terralith stack on top normally since they affect terrain shape, not climate selection.

Pair with Genesis to see your world's climate bands rendered on the biome preview before you ever create the world. You can pick a seed knowing exactly where the deserts, forests, and ice caps land.

The noise that warps biome borders is seeded from your world seed, so border shapes are deterministic and identical across sessions on the same world.

Compatibility

GeoGradient is built for Minecraft 1.20.1 on Forge and Fabric.

License

Alkeari License Agreement (ALA v2.2)

Issues & Feedback

Found a bug or have a suggestion? Open an issue on GitHub.