Porting from Worlds Minecraft 1.6.4 to 1.7.10

If on the off event that there is anyone who wants to port an old 1.6.4 world to 1.7.10, here is a quick hotfix for the old 3.15.6 to allow for the corrected names in 1.7.10. Just a word of warning though, though due to a glitch on my end I don't have the old strawberry code from 1.6.4 so all strawberry stuff will probably be deleted from your world.

Also note that this build is not intended to for general use should only be used to "prep" a world for opening in 1.7.10.

Download Update Build

[Edit]

Ok, so strawberries are in the build that I am working off of, but it is definitely out of date so using this for anything other than prepping a world for use in 1.7.10 is not recommended.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.16 for Minecraft 1.7.10 - Not Quite a Textbook Release.

Well ExtrabiomesXL 3.16 for Minecraft 1.7.10 is finally complete and ready to ship. Aside from getting the last of the door textures on in nothing has changed on our end aside from some organization things and frame work of how we do our build process. That said there are two caveats that you may want to know about.

First off slimes will not spawn in the Green Swamp if you are in single player and have Optifine A4 installed, word on the street is that Optifine has a new build in the works that fixes the incompatibility but sp614x is currently working on the 1.8 update so it may be a while till it sees the light of day.

Secondly you should avoid Minecraft forge 10.13.1.1224, a change was made in it that broke backwards compatibility not only with us but  potentially any mod that adds biomes. That being said we should be compatible with all version of forge from Forge recommended (10.13.0.1180) up to 10.13.1.1223 if you need Java 8u20 support.

All our finalized door textures, with their item variants on the hot bar.

Downloads

Official Direct Download
Direct Download from Curse.

Full Change Log for ExtrabiomesXL 3.16

New Features

• Slimes now spawn in Green Swamps (Please note due to an incompatibility between Forge and Optifine, if you are playing single player and have Optifine installed slimes will not spawn in the Green Swamp. If you are connected to a server or playing without Optifine slimes will spawn under the same conditions as they would in a vanilla swamp.)
• Our biomes now have weights that are configurable, allowing some of them to show up more frequently than others. You can also configure them via the config file to make them more likely to spawn. Please keep in mind that these values must be divisible by ten due to a bug is how the selection code works in vanilla/forge.
• Doors are available in all of our types of wood
• By default they can have up to 64 in a stack like vanilla doors in 1.8 and you get three from each crafting action.
• If you want stacks or one or only one item per crafting action you can change the setting in the config file.
• Like all other mod doors villagers and zombies will not interact with our doors, and our doors are not considered to be part of villages. This will probably not change till Minecraft 1.8 due to how things are coded in minecraft itself.
• Fences are also available for all of out types of wood.
• Crafted using four of one type of our planks, two on the left and two on the right, with two sticks in the middle.
  
• Fence Gates for all of our wood types.
• Crafted using four sticks, two on the left and two on the right, with two planks in the middle.
  

Bug Fixes

• Redrock Stairs were missing the 's' to make them plural.
• Strawberries should now be able to be disable via the config file.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.16 - RC3 for Minecraft 1.7.10

Well lets try this once again with but with heart. Well we keep on finding small things to add to our fix list for getting EbXL 3.16 to full completion while we are waiting on the last textures for the doors. Another new feature has managed to sneak it's way into the release this time, something that has long been on our todo list.

Downloads

Get off Google Drive.

Get off our mirror over at Curse.

New Stuff/Things You May Not Know

Change Log

• New Features
• Slimes now spawn in Green Swamps (Please note due to an incompatibility between Forge and Optifine, if you are playing single player and have Optifine installed slimes will not spawn in the Green Swamp. If you are connected to a server or playing without Optifine slimes will spawn under the same conditions as they would in a vanilla swamp.)
• Our biomes now have weights that are configurable, allowing some of them to show up more frequently than others. You can also configure them via the config file to make them more likely to spawn. Please keep in mind that these values must be divisible by ten due to a bug is how the selection code works in vanilla/forge.
• Bug Fixes
• Sakura fence incorrectly called it's self an Acacia Fence
• Scarecrow bug fixes
• The scarecrow no longer registers itself globally so it should not cause issues with mods like Artifact.
• The scarecrow should also have it's name properly show up in mods that can display entity names such as Waila or Thaumcraft.
• Redrock Stairs were missing the 's' to make them plural.
• Our food, strawberries, chocolate, and chocolate strawberries now use the 1.7.x food mechanics making the compatible with Hunger Overhaul.
• Strawberries should now be able to be disable via the config file.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.16 - RC2 for Minecraft 1.7.10

Just getting out a quick bug fix here at the moment, but aside from textures for the doors this should be stable unless anything new pops up in between now and later this week.

At the moment there is not anything exciting as I'm just finishing up bug fixes and such. I am prepping for a rewrite to our tree generation code at the moment and hopefully by the time Zenth gets back from his trip and is able to work on the other doors, I'll have something to show from in regards to the trees although most of the work is just removing duplicate code and other not so glamorous things.

Downloads

Download from Google Drive.
Download off Curse.

Change Log

• Bugfixes
• Biomes once again remember custom id's as set in config.
• Scarecrow and cactus paste are once more craftable.
• Redrock slabs and it's variants register prior to creating their crafting recipes so as to no longer create invalid recipes.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.16 - RC 1 for MC 1.7.10

Well it has been a number of months since I have had the free time to devote to modding but I'm back and the past week and a half I have hammering out the last few issues that were left after @asiekierka and @Allaryin finished porting us to 1.7.10.

Here is a quick video overview of the few new things that managed to sneak their way in among my own bug fixing.

If you are seeing performance issues with the Minecraft 1.7.10, I would recommend checking out Fastcraft over on the Industrial Craft forums, as it has done wonders for me in 1.7.10.

Downloads

Get off Google Drive.

Get off our mirror over at Curse.

The New Stuff

Change Log

• Lots of bug fixes left over from porting to 1.7.10
• No more crafting crashes from half slabs do to a change in the recipe manager between 1.6 and 1.7
• All our tree now spawn correctly and mini cacti now spawn as themselves instead of the blocks that they tried to spawn on top of.
• Forestry API has been updated and works again.
• New uses for our wooden planks:
• Doors
• Most of them still have developer art and we will have them complete for the full release
• By default they can have up to 64 in a stack like vanilla doors in 1.8 and you get three from each crafting action.
• If you want stacks or one or only one item per crafting action you can change the setting in the config file.
• Like all other mod doors villagers and zombies will not interact with our doors, and our doors are not considered to be part of villages. This will probably not change till Minecraft 1.8 due to how things are coded in minecraft itself.
• Fences

• Crafted using four of one type of our planks, two on the left and two on the right, with two sticks in the middle.
• Fence Gates

• Crafted using four sticks, two on the left and two on the right, with two planks in the middle.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.16.a17 - Beta for MC 1.7.10

I'm not going to beat this bush or its adjacent areas any more than necessary. EBXL for 1.7.10 is ready for people to play with.

EbXL 3.16.a17 + MC 1.7.10 + Forge 1180 

The download:
ExtrabiomesXL-universal-1.7.10-3.16.a17.jar (Crafting bug with half slabs)
ExtrabiomesXL-universal-1.7.10-3.16.a18.jar


This is still beta quality, so YMMV. There may be bugs. Not all config options are guaranteed to work. If you have problems or observe any weird glitches, please let us know.

1.7.10 - Super Secret Limited Alpha

After several weeks of occasional headaches, and several long nights of more consistent headaches, there is now a very very buggy 1.7.10 build of EBXL 3.16.alpha in testing.

When I say "very very buggy", you probably imagine something that has bugs. Don't. Imagine something with bugs, but those bugs have bugs. And those bugs are on fire.

But it runs and doesn't crash Minecraft any more (that was fun).

The code on github is mostly current. However, I am not going to provide a link to a compiled jar here - you guys don't really want to look yet. But soon, it will get better, and I'll make a more public beta release that people might actually want to play with. 

Many thanks to Asie for doing most of the heavy lifting these last few nights to get things running after I burnt out.

To volunteer your own sanity to the cause, stop by our irc channel, #extrabiomes on irc.esper.net. And for those of you who somehow do come into possession of a copy of the 1.7 alpha branch of the mod, please report any issues on Github.

BiomeDictionary Types

The question has come up of which BiomeDictionary types we're actually registering for everything now. So, in the name of making a really cool chart, I present to you this:

ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.8 - Finally.

I'm sorry about the wait - there's not a lot of good reason why this build wasn't out 2 or 3 weeks ago. But it's here now. Like I promised in April, this is mostly a bunch of bugfixes with a few minor functionality updates. So, without further bumbling apology, the release:

Download ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.8

Change Log

Bugfix:

• Redwood logs are once again craftable into planks.
• Disabling strawberries by setting their block ID to zero no longer ruins everything.
• Fixed crashing bug that sometimes occurred when flowers failed to generate.
• Fixed vanilla biome disabling. It should now be possible to reliably turn off: desert, extreme hills, forest, jungle, swampland, taiga, and plains.

Changes:

• Strawberry plants now break like any other semi-sturdy block.
• Right (or left) clicking once will harvest them if they are ripe.
• Attempting to harvest before they are ready will do nothing.
• Strawberry plants now identify correctly to Waila.
• Explicit Forge BiomeDictionary support.
• We've always had whatever automatic support there is, but now it's official.
• Removed ATG and New Dawn libraries from the jar file.
• This means that things shouldn't explode if you are running a newer but otherwise compatible version of either of these world type mods.
• It also means that the mod is just ever so smaller to download now ;)
• ALL flowers are now registered with Forestry, not just the original four.
• Updated Russian localization.

I've tested the ATG/ND changes as much as I am able, but it is entirely possible that I still messed something up there. If you are using either mod and suddenly EBXL gets all wonky on you, please report the issue to us immediately so I can get another patch out.

Future Plans

Unless my tinfoil hat rusts and the aliens find my underground bunker... or you know, there are more bugs to fix, we have every intention of making EBXL4.0 our next release.

And while it will have a lot of changes under the hood, the surface of the mod should be largely familiar - so it will be released for MC1.7, with no backporting of features to MC1.6.

We're saving a lot of the really big updates for 4.1 and the addons...

Still Alive

So, it's apology time. We're way behind on our release schedule and it's about 80% my fault. Even my kids are starting to pester me for an update. We have good excuses including multiple illnesses and ridiculous work schedules - but nobody cares about that.

The main reason things have been taking time is that our work on the 1.7.x release was stalled when we saw some of Mojang's patch notes for 1.8 - that completely invalidated things that Shecky was working on at the moment. And that's kind of demoralizing - knowing we have to make a change... that we will have to undo in the immediate future.

But we're back on top of things and progress on the 1.7 update is moving along nicely - it's still not there but it's coming along. That said, we do have an update for 1.6 in testing. It is primarily a bugfix release but fixes strawberries a bit and should make upgrading to 1.7 easier when that time comes.

Strawberry Behavior Update
My initial strawberry release had things working how Pam's Harvestcraft regrowing crops work. They're nigh indestructible and replant themselves at 50% growth when you harvest their fruit by breaking them. The way you get rid of them is digging the ground out underneath and maybe then breaking the floating plant. It's not the most elegant solution but it's fast and a major food mod uses it.

But it's not what most people expect. So, I've rewritten things to work more like Natura's cotton. Left or right clicking will harvest the crop if it is ready (and won't reset its growth by accident). Holding left click for a few seconds to break the block will break the plant and require you to replant it.

So hopefully this is more useful for everyone.

Bugfixes
There are also some minor issues with strawberries and Waila that we will definitely be fixing for the next update.

Right now, the only real outstanding bug is a potential issue reported with newer versions of ATG. We've not had a chance to look into this yet - but we will do so soon and will include any necessary fix in the release if we find one.

So bear with us, we're getting there, it's just taking a bit longer than anyone hoped it would.

Add-ons and Mod Focus

We're kind of awash with ideas and plans here at EBXL headquarters. And it's getting to be a problem. See... we want to provide all of these features, but in so doing we risk damaging the focus of the mod. Eventually every large mod has to choose whether or not to stick to their original plan or go the kitchen sink route and start implementing tangential features that stray further and further from the core.

My strawberries are a good example of this dangerous border territory.

Is it appropriate for a biome mod to provide decorative flowering plants? Of course. Is it appropriate for those plants to also be useful? Absolutely. But how useful? How many systems can they provide before those systems start to get in the way of what was previously largely aesthetic?

It doesn't make sense not to provide edible plants here and there... but it also doesn't make sense to inundate the player with 30 new types of fruit and a system for mixing custom beverages out of them. Strawberries themselves are appropriate for inclusion in the mod, but certain features that I wanted to implement with them were not.

But I AM going to write those features. And I'm going to write lettuce, onions, and tomatoes too... I'm just not putting them all in EBXL Core.

When we release our 1.7.x build of the mod, we will be introducing the concept of official EBXL add-ons. These will be mods developed by the team that implement things that we want to see but also realize that some people may not - so we aren't going to force them on you. The main mod will continue to provide all of the functionality that it traditionally has - but it will also serve as a launching point for any add-on mods that we release.

In general, these add-on mods will be released separately from the main mod, and should maintain compatibility with a number of EBXL Core versions. Add-ons will also typically increase the complexity and difficulty level of the world in various ways.

Right now, we have 2 submods that we're talking about implementing - with numerous other ideas that haven't quite yet been categorized.

Farming Add-on

The first add-on we will release is (for lack of a better name) EBXL Farming. It will eventually grow to be a fully featured food mod with interesting crops and even more interesting ways to use them.

Strawberries will remain in Core, and we will be joined by a handful of other edible wild plants. They will, however, not be farmable. So I will be nerfing Core's wild strawberry plants and removing the seed recipe. Seeds and reliably renewable sources of custom food will go into the add-on. The add-on will also be adding a lot more edible plants that don't fit in the main mod.

Similarly, the chocolate recipe will remain in Core. It's honestly something that Mojang should have implemented themselves in vanilla. But since they didn't, we'll provide the recipe ourselves out of all vanilla components. And we'll continue to provide a recipe for chocolate covered strawberries. But those recipes will just use the vanilla 3x3 crafting grid.

The add-on will introduce new cooking mechanics. This means new machines/tools/etc... that are outside of the scope of the main mod. If you install the add-on, it will optionally disable any vanilla-style cooking recipes that we add to Core in favor of more interesting ones.

If it sounds like I'm being vague, well... maybe I am. The full scope of the farming mod is just a bit too big for this post. I'll go into more detail when the time comes. But one other thing I will mention is that you won't need to run electrical wires from a generator in order to can your strawberry jam. Our machines will remain relatively low tech - no plugs involved.

Fantasy Add-on

The second add-on will be EBXL Fantasy (also for lack of a better name). This is were biomes that don't exist in the real world will go. Like the old Forgotten Nature (Trees++) crystal forest. We've not forgotten about it, but crystal trees just don't fit in a mod that tries to base everything on reality.

I have no clue what else might eventually actually go into this add-on, but we've got a laundry list of features that may change the behaviors of existing biomes. Like wasteland. Something will probably happen to it in the fantasy add-on. Probably.


If all goes well, the farming add-on will ship its first public build within hours (or days - but not weeks) of our public 1.7 release candidate. Fantasy is still way out there - we are still just in the planning phase there.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.7 - More Bug Fixes/1.7 Update Prep

Just a quick update to get this bug-fix out in the wild. There is a little under the hood prep work for making the transition between 1.6 and 1.7 that will cause MC to complain again about blocks being changed but it should not cause any issues.

Download ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.7

Change Log

Bug Fix:

• Sakura Log side texture is the correct size once more so that it no longer shows up as a missing texture.
• Fixed and NPE while generating Large Fir Trees.

Changes:

• Updated some of the internal block references to make them compatible with the new 1.7 versions.

EbXL 3.15.6 Less Crashing - (Small 1.7 Update)

Well the time has come to get a few more crashes out of the way. We had a major server crash that some how managed to slip through testing on our end, along with a client side crash with tukMC is also installed and you looked at one of our quarter, elbow or mini logs due to tukMC trying to render an a block with invalid metadata.

We also started updating some of the block "names" that minecraft/forge stores in maps in preparation for upgrading to 1.7. This will cause MC to complain that blocks have changed but is just MC/forge letting you know that we updated stuff on our end so that once the fully get rid of external id's you won't have to type something like "extrabiomes.block.BlockCustomFlower:extrabiomes.block.BlockCustomFlower" and instead be able to do something more along the lines of "extrabiomesxl:flower1", much easier on the keyboard ehh?

Oh and we back-ported the new localization and smart tool tip code so that flowers and such can now have their tool tips localized. If anyone has any suggestions for flavor text for any of the flowers that don't have descriptions feel free to chime on in, although Annysia would probably prefer that you do it over on the official forums thread where you gets notifications about such any posts.

Download EbXL 3.15.6

Change Log

Bug fixes:

• Fixed crash with tukMC and any other mod that creates fake items for render resulting in invalid metadata in the item form for Mini, Quarter and Elbow logs.
• Fix server crash from missed placed SideOnly in BlockCustomFlower.

Changes:

• Tool tips for flowers are now localized, and will automatically wrap text so that it does not need to manually be formatted as such in the localization.
• Flower names localization has changed for easier translation in the future. No more extrabiomes.flower.0, as the localization string now says the flower name. This breaks most existing translation, but will be better in the long run.
• Some blocks had their internal "keys" changed in preparation for updating to 1.7, this will result in MC saying that some blocks have changed but it is not an issue as it will not break anything in 1.6.

1.7 Update Blurb

Not much new news about 1.7 at the moment as I personally have been catching up on sleep and dealing with my full time job, and other outside of modding stuff along with getting 3.15.6 out the door.

That said I do have stairs completed so there is that, but they may end up getting a little more work as they way that vanilla handles stairs is a little restrictive for what I would like to do with the block config file, but that will have to wait for the moment.

EbXL 3.15.5 Log Spam be Gone! (1.7 update - Tooltip Localization)

Another emergency fix for the 3.15.x branch to deal with log spam slowing down world generation.

Download EbXL 3.15.5

Bug fix:

• Commented out debug code from flower generation that was causing lag due to log spam.

I've been working on finally getting the EbXL 3.15 branch ready to be re-synced with github again so that we can finally have other people able to contribute to out code again, along with doing some minor tasks on the build for 1.7, mainly focusing on code that we can bring back to MC 1.6 stuff such as localization in tool tips. It is almost ready to be re-synced again and we just need to make sure that everything matches on up and then we will be good to go and other's can once more push bug fixes if they are needed.

So in starting in EbXL 3.15.x we started adding tool tip flavor text to things like flowers and other such things. There were two minor issues with it, firstly for longer flavor text/descriptions each line of the text had to be manually separated, and hard coded into the mod itself. With the work that we have been doing in 1.7 that will no longer be an issue, as we will be able to simple enough back port the update to allow for wrapping formatted text in tool tips.

EbXL 3.15.4 for MC 1.6.4 & 1.7 Update Progress

Another critical patch for if you have had issues upgrading from 3.14.x and early versions.

Download 3.15.4 Here

Change Log
Bug Fixes:

• Old block/item ids are kept when upgrading from versions prior to 3.15.
• Blocks/items can once more be disabled by setting them to 0 in the config. Some blocks that are used in recipes such as redrock can not be disabled without all the things that are made from them being disabled as well.
• The redrock in the Forestry carpenter recipe has be fixed so that it does not use a random fluid instead of water.

Well it took longer that I had hoped, but we have made some great progress. All of our terrain blocks with the exception of quicksand are in game. In relation to terrain blocks, I finally took a look over at the the terrain generation code, namely the chunk constructor code/biome filler/topblock code, and it looks like we will be able to use any type of block, even if it has metaData in terrain generation. We haven't had a chance to test this out, but what it means if I read the code correctly is that we can use any type of block as the top of the biome, and what's more we can pack up to 32 block types into the existing block id's that we already use.

Just a quick Update

I don't have much to report today, but I have leaves about 90% coded back into 1.7, with the main things that are not complete as of yet being the dropping of saplings and other items as saplings are not in the game.

However things are far enough along that I can get a build on out for other team members to start crafting trees that I can then turn into the basis for code later on.

1.7 Update - Existing Logs Complete

Well all the logs that we had have in ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.3 for Minecraft 1.6.4 have been re-implemented in the new system that we are designing for Minecraft 1.7.x.

The last of the logs to complete is our Mini Logs which received a bit of an upgrade, they now support the ability to have multiple types of log in one block and can come in varying sizes, as shown in the picture above. The shot is a dev test so the smaller log is just reusing the Sakura log's textures, but it shows the basic concept and power of the new design. We also had to deal with a rendering issue with the log in item form that didn't make itself present until 1.7. It is what I get for hacking together the rendering code for it before I fully took the time to understand it. The logs could still use a bit more work on their normal rendering, as since they use custom rendering code for their "nubs" to allow them to attach to things like other branches or leaves, they don't do smooth lighting properly. This will probably get pushed to the side for the moment as getting the rest of the mod updated is a little more important, and once I finish the update if some wants to contribute and push a change to fix that issue on github they would be more than welcome to do such.

As part of the update I discovered the Block.isWood method, so the mini logs now are able to connect to any block that reports that it is wood, much better over how I was try to do it before, and it has the benefit of supporting any type log that reports that it is wood. I had originally tried using the block material, but planks, wooden stairs and wooden half slabs all use the the wood material so that was out since initially I wrote the code to check to see if the adjacent block used the same block id. If you look closely you can see where the mini log is connecting to the leaf block an you can see the nub stick out to connect there.

I also worked on the fixing up the whole multi-block system a bit so that if you some how had an invalid sub-block in your inventory or in the world it no longer crashed the game, but instead indicated that the block was invalid. The texture could probably still use a little more work for invalid blocks and items and I need to see if I can get it to render as 2D although that does not look to be all that promising with out some base edits that we will probably not do.

I also started in on the leaf blocks, they are going to take a little bit of work as they are getting a complete overhaul.  I am manually de-obfuscating all the code that I can so that we can actually tell what is going on internally (leafRange and chunkRange are much easier to understand than b0 and i1), and so that each leaf block does not end up eating 32768 integers like vanilla leaf blocks do and we do in EbXL 3.15.3 and below.

I'll try to have another update out tomorrow and I hope to have enough time to have the leaves up and running by then so that I can move on to the flowers, and Annysia, Zenth can play around with the blocks and get to creating template trees that myself and the other coders can create tree generation algorithms that generate similar results. It is one thing to say I want a Sugar maple tree that is approx 20 meters tall and a whole other thing to create code that generates the parts of said tree to give it a somewhat realistic feel.

Allaryin has been busy working on extracting all references to Project Dandelion, our top secret project that we want to really wow people with, from our private dev branch.  This way we can re-sync the public git, to allow others to contribute once again.

3.15.3 Thaumcraft 4 Hot Fix - More 1.7 Progress

Just to let every one know Thaumcraft updated to 4.1 today, and we had been including the API in our jar when we did not need to do.  When Thaumcraft 4.1 updated it's API, which we were accidentally overwriting due to not forcefully loading after Thaumcraft, as it would have lead to an infinite loop with Forestry. Anyways, just re-download 3.15.3 and you will be good to go again. (I really need to talk with Scott to so that we can update our Thaumcraft calls so we don't need to include the classes in our work space like he did with the old IC2 API.)

Download EbXL 3.15.3

As for the 1.7 update, it is coming along and with the new block loading code adding the Quarter Logs (which are being renamed to Corner Logs in order to support larger trees in the future) was rather trivial.   Even with having to rename the textures to match the new naming convention, converting the last four logs only took about 2 minutes to get them added and in the game. One thing that I like about the new block id system in 1.7, is that blocks will appear in the order that they are created now since MC automatically assigns their internal numerical id's, meaning that we can control the order that blocks are sorted in our creative tabs with nothing more than changing the order of the blocks in the config file. Talk about convenience.

On a 1.6.4 to 1.7.x transition note one of the upcoming 1.6.4 releases will be generating a ton of ID mismatch messages, as the way that we currently register blocks/items is a little troublesome and is not user friendly. As long as you do NOT delete your config file this will not break you world, it should just make updating to 1.7.x possible without breaking everything.  However, the 1.7 version will probably have some new biomes, so you are going to get issues with chunk borders, if added to an existing world, so that should not be any more of an issue than it would be otherwise.

I still would recommend creating a new world in 1.7 though as it chunk borders are ugly, and time willing we may have an enhanced world type in 1.7. (Which would most likely make it EbXL 4, but that is not confirmed at the moment.)

3.15.3 Server Side Bug Fixes (Oh and 1.7 Update Progress)

Well it turns out there were a couple of bugs relating to how EbXL interacts with other mods and not doing things properly that led to us causing crashes on servers.
Download EbXL 3.15.3

Change Log:

Bug fixes:

• Eelgrass no longer causes crashes on servers if a mod asks for the unlocalized name on the server.
• Our custom dyes no longer cause a crash if another mod asks for the unlocalized name on the server.
• Deleted Thaumcraft API from the jar to prevent it from breaking with Thaumcraft 4.1. (It also makes for a smaller download too.)

Changes:

• Eelgrass can now grow on grass block under water so as to curtail it breaking if a dirt block changes due to grass spread.

Well, work on the 1.7 update has finally started, and at the moment the foundations of the mod are undergoing a rewrite to try and make things easier to maintain in the future. As of right now, we are not totally sure if the 1.7 update will be version 3.17 or the final dawning of EbXL 4, it really all depends on how much it breaks.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.2 - Happy Chocolate Day!

So here we are again. The 3.15.2 patch is actually pretty big - and while we were feature complete on Tuesday, the team has spent the last few days hunting down some bugs. We hope you like it. And by it, I mean chocolate covered strawberries.

You can download it here.

It has long been one of my biggest complaints with vanilla MC that they never really make good use of the materials they provide you with. I mean, take pumpkins for example. They have have been around since alpha but have only been edible since 1.4.

In this case, MC provides us with all of the raw ingredients for chocolate - but doesn't actually let us make "chocolate". Sure, we can make cookies, but the recipe is strange, and have you ever eaten a cookie that doesn't contain any sugar? *shudder*

EbXL 3.15.2 introduces farmable strawberries. You can find them growing wild in a variety of places. The bushes regrow, so you only need to plant them once and then punch them when they're ready to harvest.

By themselves, strawberries aren't terribly valuable as food. But because of the effort involved in producing it, chocolate is a bit more filling. And chocolate covered strawberries are more valuable than their individual ingredients would be if eaten separately.

These strawberries are the first of what will be many interesting crops that we plan to introduce, and are really meant as a test of the crop system. EbXL 3.16 will flesh out the system with more types of crops and recipes from them. We will, however, try not to be overwhelming with it - and are thinking about making an optional addon that contains additional crops and recipes for those who really like that sort of thing.

Bone meal super powers activate!

In addition to crops, we're also adding two new classes of plant to EbXL. Namely - underwater and vine plants. Expect to see more interesting varieties of these in the future. :) We've also added another regular flower that turns into cyan dye and have added custom dyes to provide colors that vanilla reuses for other purposes - which means we produce all dye colors except grey and dark grey.

Eelgrass grows under water.

Gloriosa flowers grow like vines.

Changelog

• Added delphinium belladonna and blue poppies.
• Added new dyes for white, black, brown, and blue.
• Updated some flowers to now produce these dyes.
• Added eelgrass subaquatic plant.
• Added gloriosa vines.
• Added configuration settings to control the density of new flowers in each biome.
• Added strawberries, chocolate, and chocolate covered strawberries.
• Improved ability of flowers to spawn in snowy biomes.
• Removed toadstools from snowy biomes.
• Fixed some plants that were unintentionally changing colors to match their biome.
• Fixed the "already decorating" errors sometimes encountered when generating large trees.

Welcome Back!

Welcome Back!

Our team is very pleased to welcome back to EBXL, Scott Killen, whom as many of you that follow EBXL know, was part of the team for a long time.  Scott retired from actively modding about a year ago, although he still continued to write hooks for Forge as well as helping behind the scenes with several mods.  He was instrumental in making EBXL one of the most popular biome adding mods for Minecraft.  This is in part due to the high standards he has for everything he does, as well as being an all around genuinely nice person.

It's a shame that you can only list one person as the "author" or "creator" of the mod because EBXL is the result of team work and not any one person.  We have an outstanding team of people that work together to bring EBXL to you, our players.  I feel very lucky to be able to work with such a wonderful group of people.

We have many new and exciting things that will be happening in the coming weeks and months.  We will be releasing 3.15.2 in the next day or two.  It will contain some tweaks to flower generation as well as adding a few new plants and dyes. (A full list of changes will be posted when it is released.) It will also have a special Valentine Day present for everyone!

At this time we plan on releasing 3.16 as the last update to 1.64 before moving on to 1.7.

Late night crunch releases can result in derps. ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.1

Well, I just got reminded again of the fact that trying to release an update after working for nearly all day, when one is still under the effects of a cold can result in a few derps. It turns out that yesterday's release was supposed to be 3.15, not 3.14.6.  Things got changed in some places and not in others, so mcmod.info was reporting that the mod was 3.14.6 and internally the mod was saying that it was 3.15. Also, we missed a couple other things, such as the day after we finished updating the New Dawn API, it was updated.  The missed change was causing crashes, which should be taken care of in this patch. Also, due to the late hour and my not having a written checklist for release procedures at the time, (Annysia is in the process of writing one up so I don't goof things up again.) I forgot to do testing in dedicated server mode, and look over the forge log for any warnings/error so a small error with trying to load textures on the server got through. I have to give a grateful thanks to our team member joe12o, for getting the fix to that written up after it was reported, while I was sleeping.

Anyways here is ExtrabiomesXL 3.15.1, which should fix those issues. I am still looking forward to trying to get another balancing release in on Monday or some time later this week.

Change Log

Bug Fixes:

• Updated New Dawn API
• Fixed crash on Server due to code running that should only run on the client.
• Fixed version number in mcmod.info and previous blog post.

ExtrabiomesXL 3.15 - Back in Business (3.14.6 it was not.)

[EDIT]3.14.6 is bugged and should have been called 3.15, read more and get the fixed D/L.

Well boys and girls, oh, and you ladies and gentlemen in the modded Minecraft community, we are back in business, and finally despite the perfectionists and various troublesome bits of code have a new release for you all to tinker around in.

For those of you who could care less about any news and just want the download link, go have at it. Although you might want to read the change list as there were a couple things that you may want to know if you run into any issues, and a few things have changed. For those of you who are willing to wait a little while, please continue reading.

What is this sorcery?

We have a top secret project that we had hoped to preview/demo in this build, but things haven't worked out quite as well as we had hoped, so we had to push it back a little longer. No, this secret project is not v4, although it has helped me breakthrough some of the things that had been holding me back. I really can't say to much more with out giving away to many things. But to sum it up, it is something that as far as we know, has never been done before and when the entire project is complete it might even blow one or two people's minds.

On the note of v4. after about 6 months, I think I am finally understanding the hooks that Scott added to forge over a year ago, and I finally have figured out how to incorporate them into the v4 world generator.  This would allow us to do things like finally control the rate that biomes spawn, so lets say you wanted a world that has very few wastelands you can finally allow that. All in all I have to say that the hooks that Scott wrote are totally awesome, and that I have been considering using a couple of them to write a super small utility mod to "deal" with troublesome players like Annysia, who hate all things that attack you, would like to have on your survival server. The big thing that has held me back is that with some of the new features that are being added to the 1.8 snapshots, it looks like it might be doable in vanilla with command blocks come 1.8, if they add just one more thing to commands. (The only thing thing that is missing for it to work in vanilla as it stands now is the ability to select entities that are in certain distance from a specific player. If this is possible feel free to let me know.)

Anyway, we've got a number of things lined up and with more team members, we think we can knock them out. I must say that it has been fun working back and forth on our secret project, with Allaryin and myself pushing code back and forth, and extending each other's ideas when one of us hits a road block.

On to what is new/changed in this release. We should have better support for Thaumcraft 4 (Finally), and some of our old quarter logs have finally been replaced with more user friendly versions that are a little more inter mod friendly. The old ones are still in but they are only able to be crafted into the new version and will no longer be generated, and only exist so that people don't suddenly have trees that are missing their trunks. There was a bunch of code cleanup, and a few minor things managed to slip through the cracks that were not discovered till after we had our release candidate and we had already delayed releasing longer than intended so since they didn't break anything we decided to let them go for the moment. I may do a build on Monday to just fix the few things that I discovered at the last moment.

Do Not Adjust Your Set

Howdy, my name is Allaryin and I just tricked the others into giving me write access to the dev blog ;)

First off, by way of personal introduction. I'm a professional software developer and have been around the modding community for about two years now - primarily releasing small patches for other peoples' mods and hanging out on irc. I had made some small changes to EBXL in the past (mostly config file improvements iirc) before officially joining the team last month. I am also one of the developers on MCUpdater as well as several small mods that were doomed to obsolescence as Vanilla (or other big mods like Thermal Expansion) beat me to feature releases.

We have big plans for EBXL, and I am going to make sure we actually inform people of interesting progress as we start making more regular releases in the very near future. If all goes according to my evil plan, we will be updating to MC1.7 in the next couple of weeks as well as making at least one final MC1.6 release after this last one.

One thing I've been playing with is New Dawn support. It is in the early stages, but since New Dawn itself is pretty young too, I don't feel bad letting people see what we've got. The mod is a cool alternative terrain generator, and it gives me really interesting controls over what sort of conditions biomes appear in.

Speaking of this release, it is almost ready - but a few of us have had some real life emergencies come up that are cramping the schedule a bit. We will be releasing 3.15 within the next 24 hours, hopefully sooner than later.

In the worst case, where we still have not vetted all of the patch's changes, I will make sure we still release the stable updates and make quick mini releases to follow up in the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy this soothing image while I go pound out the last few bugs with a hammer.

New Release Friday

I was hoping to get the rest of the team to write a post, as I think it's nice to get to know the whole team as well as get their perspective on things.  However, our coders, Shecky, Allaryin and Joe12o, are busy coding and our texture guy, Zenth, is busy making textures for all the new things, so you are stuck with me posting again this week. :P

The team has been hard at work so that we can get some new content out to you all.  But before we can do that we needed to do quite a bit of clean up to the code as well as some other behind the scenes things,  which while not very exciting, will make EBXL much better.

That being said, we are hoping to have a little bit of new content in the release planned for this Friday.  We are adding new flowers of our own, plus Zenth has worked on getting textures redone for the flowers from Forgotten Nature and More Than Just Trees mods.  If you follow our blog or thread you know that many things from those 2 mods are being incorporated into EBXL.

We will also be adding in tooltips for some items.  Right now, most of you are probably familiar with most of the things that EBXL adds, but with all of the new content we are going to be adding over the next few months, we thought it would help everyone learn about what different items do if we added tooltips.

This release will also include Thaumcraft 4 support as well as beta support for the New Dawn mod, and perhaps a few more things if we can get them completed in time.

We are hoping to add more content in the next release, which we are wanting to have ready within 2 or 3 weeks from the release this Friday.  After that, we will see where Forge is at in regards to a stable release for 1.7 and either add some more content to 1.6.4 or release a version for 1.7.

We're Not Dead!

We have been very busy these last few months and have added 2 more people to our team, Allaryin and Joe12o.  They are both great additions to the team and have already had some fantastic ideas.  While waiting for Forge to get closer to releasing a stable version so that we can update to 1.7, we are planning a couple of releases to our 1.6.4 version.

Some of the things we are hoping to put in these 2 release are:

• Tweaking support for the New Dawn mod
• Starting to implement things from FN (Forgotten Nature) and MTJT (More Than Just Trees) mods into EbXL
• Changing out our redwoods for the ones added by FN
• Adding new fir and pine trees to existing biomes
• Adding flowers from FN and MTJT
• Adding the fruit and nut trees and berry bushes from FN
• Adding food recipes utilizing the fruit, nuts and berries
• Add a couple of biomes from FN
• Helpful tool tips
• A completely new item, in it's beta form, which will only be available in creative mode for right now as it is being tested and we work on the ideas we have to implement it fully into the game.

We are hoping that after these 2 releases, Forge will have a stable version and we can then update to 1.7 and start looking ahead to 1.8.

We have A LOT of new things coming up in the next few months.  I don't want to give away to much, but just a few of those things are:

• A contest
• New biomes
• Revamping of existing biomes 
• Removal of some biomes
• An EBXL villager or 2, with their own building and possibly a quest
• Villages made out of materials found in the biome where they are located
• More trees and plants
• Add on mods that will contain such things as fantasy biomes and crops
• Terrain generation
• Much, much more!

We will also be trying to update the blog on a weekly or bi-weekly basis with information and screenshots of what we are working on.  As always, we look forward to hearing ideas and feedback from our players.  Please feel free to post them here on the blog or on our thread on the Minecraft forums.