Northbound

Overview

Northbound changes Minecraft’s world generation to place biomes based on latitude (your position north or south of the spawn point), placing biomes into climate zones similar to the real world.

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Map of a world generated using Northbound, centered around the spawn point.

Typically, you’ll spawn in a temperate biome such as plains or forest. As you move north, you’ll eventually encounter some colder biomes such as dark forests and taigas, then finally, you’ll reach the polar zone and come across snowy biomes.

Similarly, as you move south, you’ll first travel through arid biomes such as deserts and badlands, then you’ll reach the tropical zone filled with biomes such as jungles and mangrove swamps.

| Climate Zone | Common Biomes |
| — | — |
| Tropical | Jungle, Savanna |
| Arid | Desert, Badlands |
| Temperate | Plains, Forest |
| Cold | Taiga, Giant Tree Taiga |
| Polar | Snowy Plains, Snowy Taiga |

Notes

• Most commonly, you’ll spawn in a temperate biome, but sometimes you may not. Regardless though, you’ll still find colder biomes going north and warmer biomes going south (you’ll always spawn in the “Northern Hemisphere”, except for extremely rare circumstances where a large ocean forces you to spawn far from 0, 0.)
• It is possible for all vanilla biomes to generate, but their distribution is changed. Some biomes like deserts and flower forests are more common than in vanilla, others like savannas and dark forests are less common.
• The climate zones repeat around every 16,000 blocks on the Z-axis (or 65,000 blocks when using large biomes).

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Repetition of climate zones.

Compatibility

This datapack (which is also packaged as a mod) is only supported for Minecraft versions 26.2, 26.1, 1.21.1, and 1.20.1. Minecraft won’t stop you from loading the datapack version for versions in between, but you can expect some things to not work properly. Northbound works with all vanilla world types, including default, large biomes, and amplified.

Northbound is known to be compatible with:

• Terralith
• Biomes O’ Plenty
• Continents

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Compatibility between Northbound and Continents.

Northbound is known to be incompatible with:

• Tectonic
• A compatibility patch is currently being developed.
• Concurrent Chunk Management Engine
• Ironically, this mod fixes a bug that Northbound relies on in order to be possible in vanilla.

Other world generation mods may or may not be compatible. In general, mods or datapacks that only add new biomes without changing terrain generation are likely to be compatible, while mods or datapacks that change terrain generation are most likely incompatible.

No generative AI was used in the creation of this datapack.