🌍 TifWorldGen

Build the real world in Minecraft – from your own GIS data.

TifWorldGen replaces vanilla world generation with your own GIS data. Feed it a heightmap of your country, region or city and it builds a 1:1 Minecraft world – hills, valleys, rivers, lakes and real forest coverage – powered by the industry-standard GDAL library (a fully offline GeoTIFF file reader).

Built and tested on a full real-world dataset: parts of the Slovakia DMR terrain model (73,000 × 48,000 blocks, 14 GB GeoTIFF).

🔒 Privacy

TifWorldGen collects nothing – no telemetry, no analytics, no network access of any kind. It only reads the map files (GeoTIFF heightmaps/water/forest masks) that you select yourself in the in-game config screen, and it works fully offline. "GIS" in this description refers only to those local input map files.

✨ Features

• 🏔️ Real terrain from heightmaps – Float32 GeoTIFF, automatic min/max detection or manual height remapping (e.g. 1 m = 1 block)
• 🌊 Rivers & lakes from water masks – adaptive riverbed carving (shallow banks, deeper mid-river), organic riverbed blocks
• 🌲 Real forests & biomes – map forest classes to any biome per altitude band (broadleaf → forest, coniferous → old growth taiga, peaks → snowy slopes)
• 🏰 Structure whitelist – allow villages & structures only where your map says
• 🕳️ Vanilla-style caves – cheese/spaghetti/noodle caves that follow your terrain, aquifers, lava lakes, Deep Dark / Lush / Dripstone underground biomes
• ❄️ Seasonal snow line – Serene Seasons integration: rain below, snow above a moving altitude freeze line
• 🔭 Distant Horizons LOD pregeneration – /tifworldgen dhpregen fills DH with terrain, rivers and trees without generating real chunks
• ⚙️ In-game config GUI (press O) – map import with native file browser, biome rule editor with presets, slope & water tuning

📦 Installation

1. Install Forge 47.x for Minecraft 1.20.1 and drop both jars into mods/:
tifworldgen-<version>.jar + tifworldgen-lib-<version>.jar

2. Install dependencies:

3. GDAL native libraries (the offline GeoTIFF map-file reader – pick your platform):

🪟 Windows

1. Install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2015–2022 (x64)
2. Download a GDAL x64 build from GIS Internals (e.g. release-1929-x64-gdal-3-12-1-mapserver-8-6-0)
3. Extract the whole release into .minecraft/tifworldgen/native/Win/ (must contain gdal.dll + gdalalljni.dll + ~40 DLLs; subfolders are scanned; a README with instructions is generated there on first launch)

🐧 Linux

1. Install your distribution's GDAL package:
   • Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install gdal-bin (+ libgdal-java if the version differs)
   • Fedora: sudo dnf install gdal (+ gdal-java if the version differs)
   • Arch: sudo pacman -S gdal
2. If your distribution doesn't provide GDAL Java bindings (e.g. Arch): download libgdalalljni.so (from the GitHub repository root) and drop it into .minecraft/tifworldgen/native/Linux/.
   (Note: this build matches GDAL 3.13.x – on other distros, prefer your distribution's libgdal-java / gdal-java package, which always matches your GDAL version.)
3. A README with all options is generated in .minecraft/tifworldgen/native/Linux/ on first launch

4. Create a new world → world type “Tif World Map” → press O to import your maps

🗺️ Map formats

⌨️ Commands

❤️ Credits & Support

Built on GDAL · Distant Horizons LOD integration · Serene Seasons compatibility · Snow! Real Magic · terrain test data: Slovakia DMR.

If you enjoy the mod, please consider supporting development as I am a single developer:

📄 License

All Rights Reserved.