TravellersToasts

TravellersToasts

Vanilla Minecraft features a plethora of biomes, yet many go overlooked due to visual similarities with other biomes. TravellersToasts is a small mod which aims to better express the personalities of each biome by displaying a toast\* when you begin ‘exploring‘ a new biome—take a look!

^{· If you were curious, the shaders used this for demo are Complementary Shaders.}

A longstanding issue I’ve had with vanilla Minecraft is how unrewarding it can feel to visit new biomes. I hope this small addition could help incentivize/reward traveling—if only just a bit more.

Features (Technical Information)

…Well, the singular feature of this mod fairly evident, so I’ll use this section to talk about the various checks in place to ensure biome toasts only show when it makes most sense (that is, to not just mirror whatever biome the debug screen shows).

• Movement Checks (biome toasts will not be immediately shown when entering a new biome until the player’s future position (based on current velocity) remains within said biome for a set amount of time).
• This prevents biome toasts from showing up when traversing through a biome quickly (e.g. riding a boat on ice).
• Cooldown Checks (a biome toast for a given biome will never show up twice within a configurable cooldown period).
• This prevents biome toasts from being invoked constantly when crossing the same border often.
• Location Checks (biome toasts will not be shown when underground, unless in a cave biome (e.g. lush caves)).
• This prevents biome toasts from showing up when—for example—strip mining (as opposed to the default behavior of underground biomes mirroring their surface biomes).
• Additionally, for ocean biomes, toasts will not show if the player is not swimming (e.g. riding a boat).
• Inhabited Time Checks (biome toasts will never be shown when entering a chunk with an inhabited time past a \configurable\* threshold).*
• This prevents biome toasts from showing in bases or commonly explored areas.
• Note: This feature is not available on servers which don’t have the mod installed!

Summarizing, to begin ‘exploring‘ a new biome is to enter a biome whilst passing all the above checks (and probably a few more I forgot to list). Thanks for reading!

^{*Icons were scraped from the Biomes page on the Minecraft Wiki. I am not sure if they are ‘official’ but they fit quite nicely!}