Redwoods

Introduction

Redwoods is a Minecraft modification that enriches the game world with several new biomes and tree types, the main feature of which are giant towering trees. Have you ever dreamed of walking through a vast coniferous forest, admiring the magnificence of the surrounding landscape? Then this modification is made just for you.

Despite the name, Redwoods adds both sequoias and firs to the game. The mod perfectly complements Traverse, replacing its coniferous forests with biomes closer to classic ExtrabiomesXL. Although Traverse does an excellent job with its biomes, in my opinion, they lack truly enormous trees. That's why I created this mod as an addition to Traverse. While Traverse is not required, its use is highly recommended!

Features

Redwoods introduces two types of large coniferous trees:

• Sequoia: Rich red-brown wood with green foliage
• Fir: Brown wood with greenish hues and green leaves

Each of these tree species comes in two variants, both featuring impressive sizes:

• 1x1 (Normal): Large trees 24-32 blocks tall with a maximum base size of 13x13 blocks
• 2x2 (Mega): Truly gigantic trees 32-48 blocks tall with a maximum base size of 16x16 blocks. This is the absolute limit for a tree's horizontal size that doesn't cause cascading world generation issues

2x2 sized trees use special "quarter" logs that fit together to form a massive solid log with annual rings inside. Both tree variants generate foliage in stacked cone patterns, resembling classic Christmas trees.

Biomes

The modification adds 4 new biomes, each containing various combinations of coniferous trees:

• Redwood Forest: Forest with giant towering sequoias, located on a mountainous but relatively flat plateau
• Lush Redwood Forest: Similar to the regular redwood forest, but also includes 1x1 firs among the sequoias
• Temperate Rainforest: Inspired by Vancouver, this luxurious forest contains both normal and giant firs. The biome is very mountainous with large elevation variations, making exploration both challenging and exciting
• Snowy Rainforest: Exactly like the temperate rainforest, but covered in snow and with a colder color palette

Technical Notes

Implementing such huge trees comes with many technical challenges, especially due to rendering differences between versions 1.7.10 and 1.12.2. Even in 1.7.10, EBXL coniferous forests were almost unplayable without fast graphics.

By default, Redwoods uses an optimization originally found in OptiLeaves, which represents a compromise between fast and fancy graphics. The optimization involves culling the inner faces of foliage blocks (as in fast graphics) but using transparent leaf textures (as in fancy graphics). This significantly increases FPS in forests while maintaining a very attractive appearance for the massive trees. Of course, this option can be disabled in settings, but it's not recommended. If you enable fast graphics with this option, you'll get ugly textures as usual.

Additionally, by default, coniferous leaves don't diffuse light. Although this is also configurable, enabling light diffusion is not recommended because it causes mob spawns during the day and creates extreme lag. Generating a spawn in a Redwoods biome takes 5 seconds without light diffusion and 40 seconds with light diffusion. With light diffusion enabled, there's also severe world generation lag — exploring as a single player can drop TPS to 4. So keep your TPS high and let light pass through leaves.

In short: big trees are hard, and Redwoods uses several optimizations to keep the game playable. You can disable them, but you shouldn't.

Licensing

The code of this modification has similar functionality to ExtrabiomesXL but is completely rewritten from scratch to work with newer Minecraft versions. You can freely distribute this mod (including in modpacks) with the sole restriction of attributing authorship (MIT license). Textures have a separate license (CC BY-SA 3.0) as they are derived from ExtrabiomesXL in accordance with that license.