TAW’s Ocean Expansion

Posted on by

I’ve been up late the last couple nights finishing an Ocean expansion, a process I started almost 2 years ago that I completely forgot what stage it was at. I had to dig through dated posts and files to figure out where I had left things. Well, after scrounging around for a while I soon picked up the pace again and now the eureka moment has finally arrived.

The image above is today’s render of The Ancient World. No tricky photoshopping here. This is the actual world now.

The worldborder has been expanded approximately double what it was before, with all of that vast space being “newly” generated Java 1.19.3 ocean. This was a rather difficult task that took hundreds of hours of testing that would often end in failure until I could finally find a working method.

alternative generation where I’ve aligned TAW off-center, leaving more room on one side.
this rectangular generation might be the best method, as it is the most efficient on chunks and file size while giving the most real estate on one side.
it’s enough space to fit TAW in twice

The new ocean chunk format is built into the world’s seed itself. Which means any newly generated chunks on the world will default to Ocean. I used this to generate the new oceans you see in the image above using the fill function on the worldborder plugin.

It was a neat little hack I worked out after failing repeatedly to copy + paste TAW directly onto a pre-existing ocean world on Amulet editor and other such editing tools, which was too heavy of a task that took days of computer processing with memory leaks and a whole host of other challenges that were always cropping up.

To be honest I don’t even know how this was even possible and I can’t even believe it finally worked. But as you can see from the render above, I have achieved what I was starting to believe was the impossible!

Going forward I will be concepting ideas for newly generated continents or even a new mainland with all the newest blocks, mobs, biomes, and land generation. New lands haven’t been added to the world since the Age of Exploration which was almost 8 years ago. I’m not sure where all that time went, but here we are.

Anyway, it might be a few more years yet until I’m ready to try a whole new age. And we may even be well established on Bedrock by then which will have totally changed the way that the server is operated. There will be no more plugins to speak of – just vanilla survival on an old familiar world.