Cloudlands are barren with no plant cover

[orbea]

minetest: 5.2.0
cloudlands: 52b3959
ethereal: https://notabug.org/TenPlus1/ethereal/commit/94f52e9fd7cd138938c1e7d742f523ed3c7abc50

When I run cloudlands with ethereal and mapgen v7 I notice the floating islands are very barren. There are few or almost no plants spawned. This is unlike the screenshots I see in the README, is there a way to improve this? It would be nice if there were many more grasses, plants, flower and even mushrooms spawned.

Between the default, ethereal, farming (redo) and flowers mods there should be plenty of choices.

Please see these images for an example.

The ground

The cloudlands

[Treer]

Ethereal limits its biomes and the trees that grow in them by altitude, giving it an alpine line which most trees don't grow above. Above that, at about 140(?) high you may find golden apple trees.

So the two simplest things you can do to get ethereal trees on cloudlands is to go into settings -> all settings -> mods -> cloudlands and try lowering "altitude of islands", and/or toggling the value of "Use lowland biomes".

If "Use lowland biomes" is disabled then cloudlands will take on the natural biomes at their altitude, which in Ethereal is likely to be alpine/snowy.

If "Use lowland biomes" is enabled then cloudlands will take on the biome directly below them near sea level, but I think this leads to the images you posted - where the only trees that grow on that lowland biome soil won't grow at that height because the game biome is alpine.

A third option is to look into how Ethereal defines where its trees grows and allow them to grow higher - If Ethereal grasses & trees were keyed off the soil of a biome rather than the biome itself or a max_y then they'd grow on the islands. Any biome that has a unique soil could have its vegetation converted. I don't expect you to go down that path as it's quite a lot of effort, but would like to hear what you find if you did try it.

Note that changing settings like altitude or "Use lowland biomes" in an already generated world will result in no changes where it's already generated, and islands mismatched along chunk boundaries where it hasn't.

Example image of "Use lowland biomes" being disabled: Ethereal alpine biome with golden apple trees at about 130 high. Higher up it becomes barren, suggesting the trees have a max y

[orbea]

Thanks for the detailed information on this problem.

I think the only good choice is to look into ethereal's code and see if I can modify it enough for this to work well, I'll let you know if I make any progress.