Water Erosion Mod for Minecraft Java Edition

Water Erosion makes the world evolve with streams and waterfalls.

Find Forest brooks and Mountain creeks during your explorations. Dirt and sand wash away to deepen the stream bed and cut banks into the environment. The landscapes become more diverse and unique. Pass through a dry Desert valley one day and find it flooded the next. A stream may even change direction to dry up the original flow.

Goal

Implement Erosion as though it were a regular Minecraft feature making the world more dynamic. It should not break existing gameplay or enable cheating.

Features

Water flowing over edges erode blocks below.
Water flowing into a block wall will dissolve the wall.
Water flow ends (level 7) dissolve the block below them to dig holes deeper and potentially continue the flow.
Water Sources dissolve blocks to the sides in the direction of air spaces.
Erodable blocks include sand, gravel, clay, farmland, dirt, grass, mud, mud bricks, and, rarely, cobblestone and stone bricks.
Erodable blocks have differing resistances to erosion depending on their density, but all erode over time.
Blocks decay during erosion to weaker blocks before disappearing.
Blocks decay upstream in stream beds.
Cobblestone and Stone Bricks grow moss near water.

Decay hierarchy:

Cobblestone -> Mossy Cobblestone -> Gravel
Stone Bricks -> Mossy Stone Bricks -> Gravel
Grass Path -> Grass -> Dirt -> Coarse Dirt -> Mud -> Gravel
Gravel -> Sand -> Clay(rarely) -> Air/Water

Media

Install

Download from: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/water-erosion

Supported versions:

Forge 1.20.x
NeoForge 1.20.x
Fabric 1.20.x

Previously Supported Versions:

Fabric 1.14.4
Fabric 1.15.2
Fabric 1.16.x
Fabric 1.18.x
Fabric 1.19.x
Forge 1.12.2
Forge 1.14.4
Forge 1.15.2
Forge 1.16.x
Forge 1.18.x
Forge 1.19.x

TODO features

Test Areas

Create each world, teleport to the specified location, and, optionally, change the randomTickSpeed setting to speed up the process.

/teleport X Y Z
/gamerule randomTickSpeed NUMBER # Suggest 150

Seed 4465334863609190468

Tested on Minecraft 1.20.1

-388 73 258 - A massive waterfall covers the side of a mountain peak in a swamp
-538 85 1133 - A waterfall fills the floor of a narrow forest crevice
-638 72 1459 - A stream finds multiple routes through the trees in a forest

Inspiration

Reality
Aquarela - Russian documentary about water

Development

Code structure

Common erosion code is in the erosion-common directory and symlinked into the Forge, NeoForge, and Fabric codebases.

Build

The Makefile will build Forge, NeoForge, and Fabric versions

make

Unit tests

Erosion functionality is unit tested within the Forge codebase, run the unit tests with:

make test

Forge Dependencies

Forge dependency versions are specified in:

build.gradle
src/main/resources/META-INF/mods.toml

Check versions at: https://files.minecraftforge.net/net/minecraftforge/forge/promotions_slim.json

Fabric Dependencies

Fabric dependency versions are specified in:

gradle.properties
src/main/resources/fabric.mod.json

Check versions at: https://fabricmc.net/develop/

Technical Notes

This "core mod" adds code to the Water block randomTick() functions using the Mixin framework. The code and functionality is structured to reduce system CPU use, but a CPU increase may still be noticed.

The Minecraft in-game UI shows the opposite water level value than the true block metadata. Data level==1 is displayed as Targeted Fluid level:7. Data level==7 is displayed as Targeted Fluid level:1.

randomTick() is only called by the Minecraft runtime for a 128 block radius around the player, so the odds of erosion occuring are set fairly high. The odds should be reduced if random tick distance or speed is increased.

Source water blocks at or below the world sea level are ignored to reduce CPU use.

13rac1 / Minecraft-Water-Erosion

readme