Tall World

Preview

Module: Hard Hoof: Portals (hardhoof_portals)

Preview. The Tall World is in 0.6.0, behind a key on the Create World screen; in 0.7 it becomes the world every new game starts as. Plate tectonics, river channels and floodplains, grown trees, graded village sites, the distant view of real chunks and automatic pregeneration are only in the development build, and are marked new below.

A Tall World is a Hard Hoof Planet eight times as tall: from y -1536 to 1535, 3,072 blocks where vanilla has 384. Sea level stays at 63. The seas are over a kilometre deep, the high ranges over a kilometre high, and the rock warms as you dig until the deep runs hot enough to melt. Everything else about a planet stays: continents with names, climate by latitude, the world map, and the loop at the edge.

Making one

• Create World > World tab: hold Alt and click World Type until it reads Hard Hoof Tall (preview). The preview stays off the normal list until 0.7.
• Customize then shows a Terrain row: Planetary (the Tall World) or Classic (vanilla's y -64 to 319). Tall needs a world of 128 chunks or more. (0.6.0 called this row Height, with Tall and Classic.)
• Tectonics... opens the plate page (new, see below).
• Seasons and Year set the axial tilt and the length of the year (new; see Weather & time).
• Layout picks how tall the world is: Tall (y -1536 to 1535), Deep (-1024 to 1023) or Compact (-512 to 511), and Dig-through centre lets you dig to the middle and cross to the other side (new; see Space & planets). Compact and Deep also appear as their own preview world types.
• On a dedicated server, set level-type=hardhoof_portals:planet_tall in server.properties.
• Operators can make one inside a running world: /hardhoofportals planet tall <name> [size] [terrain] [climate] [ocean].

The defaults: 512 chunks (8,192 blocks round), hills, poles and equator, and 70% sea (Earth has 71%).

Tall is for new worlds, and Classic stays in Customize. The Dimension Creator keeps making Classic planets for now.

Top to bottom

Height	On land	At sea
Up to about y 1,340	Ranges along coasts where one plate dives under another: crests of 700 to 1,000 m and volcanic cones above them, with snow and cold, thin air at the top. Plateaus behind them; rounded ranges of 300 to 600 m inland	-
Sea level to 300 m up	Lowlands, hills, valleys and coasts. Rivers cut their valleys down to the sea	The sunlit shelf, 0 to 200 m deep: vanilla's oceans, with coral only where it is warm and shallow
y 319 to -64	Vanilla's band, kept whole: its ores, lush and dripstone caves, the deep dark with ancient cities, trial chambers	The shelf's edge and the top of the slope
Below y -64	Zones follow the rock's temperature, not a fixed height, so they rise under hot ground: your land's caves while the rock is under 35 °C, Deep Caverns (35 to 75 °C), the Hot Deep (75 to 135 °C; Sulfur Caves under volcanoes), then the Magma Reach	The Twilight Sea from 200 m down, the Midnight Sea from 1,000 m. On the floor: Continental Slope, Abyssal Plain (y -1,150 to -1,350), Vent Field on mid-ocean ridges (crests near y -650), Hadal Trench off the high coasts (to y -1,440), and Oceanic Crust under it all
y -1536	Bedrock	Bedrock

• Rock changes with the heat: deepslate, then tuff and deepslate in the deep caverns, basalt and smooth basalt in the hot deep, and blackstone in the magma reach, where lava fills pockets crusted with magma blocks. Under deep sea floors lies basalt, then deepslate.
• Caves below the band change too: large halls joined by thin tunnels in the deep caverns, the odd chamber in the hot deep (lined with sulfur under volcanoes), lava pockets in the magma reach. Under the sea and within 160 blocks of a coast the rock is soaked: caves there hold water below sea level. Elsewhere no cave breaks into a sea, lake, river or glacier.
• Ore: the band keeps vanilla's ores, and vanilla's ores stop at y -64. Deeper, ore comes in a few large deposits whose kind follows the ground above: iron, redstone, lapis and gold under old continents, with diamonds in rare kimberlite pipes; coal seams under lowland basins; copper, gold and emerald under volcanic ranges; copper and gold on ocean ridges.
• Structures that belong under rock (trial chambers, strongholds, ancient cities) are left out where they would hang in water or air. Ocean monuments only stand on floors above y -40.
• Mobs spawn near your own height, so a tall world's surface is as lively as any other. Monsters deep underground are stronger: their level counts the rock over them (see Adventure RPG).

Plate tectonics (new)

A new Tall World is shaped by plates. Open Tectonics... in Customize to choose the total number of plates and how many are continental, oceanic or mixed. The three always add up to the total.

• A new world starts with eight plates: two continental, three oceanic, three mixed. Plate count is separate from continent count.
• Raising the total adds mixed plates; lowering it scales the types down together. Raising one type takes from mixed plates first. The most you can have depends on the world's size: area in chunks divided by 1,024, between 2 and 32 (a 128 by 128 world allows 16).
• 0 plates uses the earlier Tall terrain. One plate has no boundaries.
• Sea percentage is still its own setting. Oceanic crust can poke above the sea, and continental crust can be drowned.
• Customize shows a preview with three views: Terrain, Plates and Terrain + plates, with motion arrows and boundaries. After you make the world, press 8 on the world map for the same picture. Nothing needs unlocking.

What each kind of boundary makes:

Boundary	In the land
Continental collision	Broad uplift and ranges
Subduction	A trench beside the boundary, uplift and heat on the plate that rides over, and volcanic cones where land allows
Divergence	Ocean ridges or continental rifts, with more heat near the axis
Transform	A narrow, lowered fault corridor

These are simplified relationships, frozen when the world is made. The plates never move and never move your blocks. Local noise, rivers, glaciers and hotspots still shape the finished land. Existing Tall saves keep their earlier generation. The mountain ranges the plates make also steer the weather: rain strengthens on windward slopes and fades in the lee. Subduction zones under the sea are where tsunamis can start.

Rivers and floodplains (new)

New Tall Worlds plan their rivers as one drainage network that leads to the sea. Channels are graded, tributaries join, and width and depth grow downstream. Beside them lie low floodplain terraces, flat ground the river can spill onto. Rivers begin as narrow streams in the headwaters and round into their banks. Steps in the river are small cascades between sloping reaches. The valleys are carved when the world is made: flowing water never digs terrain during play. Older saves keep their terrain and get the new water. The Water layer (9) on the map shows rivers, basins and floodplains.

Trees and building sites (new)

• Grown trees. A Tall World grows its own trees. Each is shaped to the ground it stands on. Trunks end upright but sweep downhill and curve up on slopes, crowns reach toward the open side, over cliffs and over water, roots grip the slope, and trees on ledges grow out sideways. Ridge trees are shorter and hollow trees taller. Near the treeline hardy trees thin out and become low windswept krummholz flagged downwind. There are eleven kinds: oak, birch, spruce, pine, fir, dark oak, jungle, acacia, cherry, swamp oak and poplar. Mangroves, pale oaks and Hard Hoof's rubber trees are untouched.
• Level villages. Villages, pillager outposts, desert pyramids, jungle temples, igloos and mansions stand on level ground. A building that would hang over a drop or sink into a hillside is dropped, house by house for villages. The ground under what stays is graded: a flat pad, with banks of at most a block of fall per block and a gentler cut on the uphill side. Paths climb to doors one block at a time. Underwater ground is never cut.

Distant view and automatic pregeneration (new)

• Real chunks past the live view. Chunks out to your render distance (up to 32) are shown as real chunks, then the far terrain takes over. They are frozen: nothing ticks or changes in them until you come near. Chunks you walk away from stay in view the same way. In single player the game's own server keeps only the simulation distance plus two chunks live, so a high render distance costs far less. On a server, the game rule hardhoof_portals:distant_chunk_radius sets the reach (0 to 32, default 32); 0 turns it off.
• Pregeneration with nothing to switch on. The server slowly generates the land round every player, out to 768 blocks (48 chunks), whenever it has time to spare, nearest first. Walking on later loads saved chunks instead of generating them. The game rule hardhoof_portals:auto_pregen (on by default) turns it off. It gives way when the server is busy and does not run for players high above the planet or in space.

Seeing it

Vanilla draws only a render distance's worth up and down, which in a world this tall would hide the peaks from the valleys and every deep sea floor. On any Hard Hoof client:

• You see twice your render distance up and down (up to 48 sections).
• Fog counts height at half weight, so it ends where that view ends. It comes as a built-in resource pack, Hard Hoof tall-world fog, which is always on.
• Deep water darkens at the surface, so a floor too deep to draw doesn't show the sky through it.

The world map (M) shows sea depths as well as heights.

Still rough in the preview

• Ways up and down: rope and lifts are in 0.6.0; elevators come later.
• Pressure, temperature and air act on your body (thin air, the bends, cold and heat), forgiving by default; the Plumb and its instruments read them.
• The upper continental slope is oceanic crust, not continental rock.

See also: Hard Hoof Planet for continents, Customize, the world map and the edge.