Terra Continua – Smart smooth step and terrain

Smooth Terrain

Natural terrain that looks smooth, still made of the same blocks.

WARNING – Currently we are experiencing performance issues and visual glitches. Keep in tune for the next update were we will fix those and add more compatibilities.

Smooth Terrain turns the staircase look of hills and slopes into continuous ramps by stretching the existing blocks: the top edge of each step lowers and the bottom edge of the next one rises until they meet, so the vertical face of every step disappears. No extra geometry is stacked on top, no new blocks are added and everything keeps its normal texture, breaking and placing. Cliffs, double steps, lone blocks and rough ground stay as ordinary cubes, so the Minecraft look is kept wherever the terrain is abrupt.

Forge 1.20.1 · client and server · name provisional

✨ Highlights

• 🏔️ Smooth slopes, cubic cliffs. Only steps of exactly one block that continue in a line are smoothed. Hill tops are rounded, a single block poking out of the ground is not.
• 🧱 Same blocks, same textures. Dirt, grass, sand, gravel, stone, terracotta, snow blocks and more bend with the ground. Edit the list with the smoothterrain:smoothable block tag. Things you build with other blocks are not touched.
• 🕳️ Reaches below the surface. The two or three layers under the ground keep a softened version of the deformation, so breaking a block leaves no sharp seams.
• 🚶 Automatic, smooth step-up. Walk into a one-block step of natural terrain and climb it without jumping; the camera glides instead of snapping. It also works on servers that don’t have the mod.
• 🎨 Plays well with your visuals. Compatible with Embeddium, Oculus shaders (checked with Photon and Eclipse), Continuity, OptiFine-format resource packs with connected textures, and Conquest Reforged.
• ⌨️ F8 to compare. Toggle between smooth terrain and plain cubes at any time (rebindable in Controls).

🔧 Configuration

• Client (config/smoothterrain-client.toml): turn the effect on or off, choose how side faces are textured, choose which blocks are wrapped, and tune the step-up (autoStepHeight, autoStepOnlyTerrain, smoothStepCamera, smoothStepSeconds).
• Server (serverconfig/smoothterrain-server.toml): how far the top edge drops and the bottom edge rises, how many layers below the surface follow, how strict the filters are, and a bit of deterministic variation. These affect the shape of the terrain, so clients and servers must agree.
• Collision can follow the visible surface (collision.mode = "DEFORMED") so you walk up slopes without jumping. It is off by default and experimental; the automatic step-up works without it.

⚠️ Good to know

This is a pre-release beta version. Many bug fixes, improvements, and new features are currently being developed. Any suggestions are welcome.

• Install it on the client to see smooth terrain. On a server without the mod you still get the look and the automatic step-up; the collision just stays vanilla.
• Block changes next to a smoothed area re-mesh a slightly larger neighbourhood.
• Voxy / distant-horizon style LODs are not smoothed, so there is a visible difference between far terrain and nearby terrain.
• This is an early version: report anything odd together with your other rendering mods.