World Height Setting Breaks Terrain Generation - Makes Beautiful Default Gen Look Like a Glitched Mess

[Teo9631]

Hey everyone,

So I've been doing some research into world generation settings and wanted to bring up something that's been bugging me. As a recent buyer, I initially cranked the world height up to 384 blocks right away (trying to get something similar to Minecraft's world size), and my first impression was honestly that the world generation was just... broken.

The default world generation in this game is actually pretty nice - leave everything on default and you get these natural-looking landscapes that are great to explore and build in. But here's the thing: if you touch that "World Height" setting at all, everything goes to hell.

I started playing in 1.20, then tried the TerraPrety mod (https://mods.vintagestory.at/terraprety), then moved to 1.21 when it came out with the world gen changes. Did a bunch of testing with different combinations of settings - landcover, upheaval rate, landform scale, and the world height setting.

Here's what I found: Most of these settings are actually pretty harmless to mess with. The absolute best looking worlds seem to come from just bumping the landform scale up to around 200% - this makes each "noise region" bigger so you get to actually enjoy each biome/terrain type for longer instead of everything changing every few hundred blocks. Honestly, 200% landform scale should just be the default IMO - it seems close to perfect.

But that world height setting? It completely breaks everything.

You'd think increasing world height would just give you deeper caves and taller mountains, right? Like, same nice terrain but with more vertical space to work with. Instead, what actually happens is the noise generation gets completely screwed up. The hills become super jittery, mountains turn into these jagged monstrosities, and the whole landscape just looks unnatural and sometimes unplayable.

It's like the setting is scaling the noise functions instead of just expanding the available height range. So instead of "normal terrain but bigger," you get "completely broken terrain."

I've seen other posts around the internet where people complain that the world gen sucks, but I think in reality they're just using broken settings without realizing it.

My suggestion? Disable this setting entirely and put a big red warning about what it actually does and how it can mess up world generation. Or rework it so it actually does what it sounds like it should do - just increase the maximum depth and height without destroying the underlying noise patterns.

 

Here are some screenshots of the current world I play in. I think it is astonishing.

landform 200%, the rest is default. Seed: 835186430

[Teo9631]

For comparison here are pictures of the exactly same seed with the landform 200% (Like in the above screenshots) but with height changed to 384 blocks.

As you can see it completely breaks the map in some places and removes most flat regions.

Edited August 13, 2025 by Teo9631

[DUCATISLO]

Well the higher the height limit is the more chaotic the world becomes sure you will still get flat areas but oceans will be deeper and you will also have bigger hills and mountains overall I keep it at 320