InLand Waters

Inland Waters

A lightweight server-side mod that changes natural inland lake biomes to minecraft:river (or minecraft:frozen_river if cold or frozen).

What It Does

• Brings Lakes to Life: Turns empty lakes into river biomes with aquatic mob spawning.
• Modded Biome Support: Fully works with modded biomes out of the box.
• Smart Detection: Only converts deep water (minimum_lake_depth >= 2). Preserves shallow puddles.
• Full Retrogen: Works retroactively on already generated chunks in existing worlds as you explore them.
• World Rollback: Dedicated command to batch-restore original vanilla seed biomes across all world chunks.
• Safe for your world: Never corrupts, resets, or damages chunks.

GameRules

• /gamerule inland_waters:convert_lake_to_river <true|false> (default: true) — Master toggle for lake detection and replacement into river biomes.
• /gamerule inland_waters:minimum_lake_depth <int> (default: 2) — Minimum water depth in blocks required to classify surface water as an inland lake.

Biomes excluded from conversion are data-driven via the tag #inland_waters:excluded_biomes (by default includes swamps, mangrove swamps and #c:is_swamp).

Commands

Requires operator permission level 4:

• /inland_waters restore — Sets convert_lake_to_river to false and batch-restores all generated world chunks back to seed biomes.
• /inland_waters restore status — Displays the progress percentage and chunk count of an ongoing restoration in chat.

Requirements

• Fabric Loader (0.20.0+) for Minecraft 26.3
• Fabric API

100% server-side. Vanilla clients can join without installing the mod. Works in singleplayer and multiplayer.