Ocean with continents on 1.21?

[jaelyn666]

I want continents, but I also don't want the oceans to be so huge they are annoyingly big, I would like the continents to be big and surrounded by water, does anyone have any settings that work well for this? Continents and smaller oceans or at least not insane oceans?

[Crick]

It depends on what you mean by "annoyingly big" oceans but in my experience playing around with world generation settings, these two options work pretty well:

• For a large continuous continent with large continuous oceans:
  • Landcover: 60%
  • Landcover Scale: 150%
  • Landform Scale: 100% (default)
• For islands and continents surrounded by a large ocean:
  • Landcover: 40%
  • Landcover Scale: 200%
  • Landform Scale: 200%

You can always tweak with these settings to find exactly what you're looking for, but hopefully these serve as good starting points!

[jaelyn666]

Anyone who stumbles upon this in the future: I have found the best settings for continents surrounded by ocean is 30% land cover 300% land scale :3 got me exactly what I was shooting for 

[dakko]

Came here to ask this very same question. Thank you so much, @jaelyn666 for posting your solution.

[jaelyn666]

6 hours ago, dakko said:

Came here to ask this very same question. Thank you so much, @jaelyn666 for posting your solution.

I'm really glad I could help you! I was super frustrated trying to find the info I needed and I made over ten test worlds trying to get the settings I wanted so I'm glad you could benefit from my experiment :3 I hope you enjoy the settings and get what you wanted :3

[Bruno Willis]

On 9/16/2025 at 12:07 PM, jaelyn666 said:

I have found the best settings for continents surrounded by ocean is 30% land cover 300% land scale

Sure, it's nice, it does make good islands with plenty of ocean, but it could be better... And now it is! I have uncovered the actual best settings for continents: 

Landcover: 40% Landcover scale: 75% Landform scale: 120%. No other settings can get you better continents and seas. I think. 

In all seriousness, I like the 30 - 300, but it has produced quite small islands for me which made finding reeds hard, and would make elk sort of pointless. The 40, 75 set up makes large continents which might take between 1-2 in game days hard riding to cross, and each continent is separated by enough ocean that sailing is a viable travel option. Adding landform scale at 120 just makes elk travel more viable - sometimes - and gives each continent a different vibe, even if they've got the same stone type and temperature.

[jaelyn666]

22 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

Sure, it's nice, it does make good islands with plenty of ocean, but it could be better... And now it is! I have uncovered the actual best settings for continents: 

Landcover: 40% Landcover scale: 75% Landform scale: 120%. No other settings can get you better continents and seas. I think. 

In all seriousness, I like the 30 - 300, but it has produced quite small islands for me which made finding reeds hard, and would make elk sort of pointless. The 40, 75 set up makes large continents which might take between 1-2 in game days hard riding to cross, and each continent is separated by enough ocean that sailing is a viable travel option. Adding landform scale at 120 just makes elk travel more viable - sometimes - and gives each continent a different vibe, even if they've got the same stone type and temperature.

Thank you for the info! :3 it's really cool when gamers work together to get the info we need

[Echo Weaver]

Thanks to @Bruno Willis for doing what sounds like a lot of experimentation

On 9/20/2025 at 8:33 AM, Bruno Willis said:

Landcover: 40% Landcover scale: 75% Landform scale: 120%. No other settings can get you better continents and seas. I think. 

The default values are Landcover 97.5% and Landcover scale 500%, so this is pretty different. I have to wonder, 500% of what though? It seems quite possible that the default values end up being pretty similar to this, but this is pretty complex.

I don't understand what triggers saltwater oceans vs really big freshwater seas. I changed the settings for my upgraded "forever" world to encourage oceans to generate on new chunks. I didn't find any saltwater when I flew around in creative to be sure that I hadn't triggered horrible chunk boundaries. I didn't go crazy far out in any direction, though, because I was mostly exploring boundaries between chunks where the settings had changed.

Older threads talk about oceans being "on" or "off", but I don't see any current worldgen settings like this in 1.21, so I assume saltwater and freshwater are both included in all worlds now? 

[Bruno Willis]

7 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

The default values are Landcover 97.5% and Landcover scale 500%, so this is pretty different. I have to wonder, 500% of what though? It seems quite possible that the default values end up being pretty similar to this, but this is pretty complex.

The game tells me landcover scale "determines how much ocean will be between pieces of land" so when there is almost no ocean, setting it at 500% might mean you actually get oceans of a real size, just very very rarely? So when you have 40% landcover, having 500% landcover scale (read ocean scale) would try to distribute that 40% of the land really evenly across the world, leading to many smaller islands. I think what's happens is that by dropping landcover scale to 75% the world still has to have only 40% of the world as land, but the oceans aren't forced to be maximally large, so that 40% of land can end up being a bit larger and more interestingly shaped. 

7 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

I don't understand what triggers saltwater oceans vs really big freshwater seas. I changed the settings for my upgraded "forever" world to encourage oceans to generate on new chunks. I didn't find any saltwater when I flew around in creative to be sure that I hadn't triggered horrible chunk boundaries. I didn't go crazy far out in any direction, though, because I was mostly exploring boundaries between chunks where the settings had changed.

It seems like it, although the saltwater vs freshwater boundaries are a bit weird at the moment - i.e. dead straight. 

11 hours ago, jaelyn666 said:

Thank you for the info! :3 it's really cool when gamers work together to get the info we need

Yes! I've been really wanting a good ocean travel world with decent continents, so I've been checking what anyone else had already tried. I hope people keep figuring out the vanilla world gen settings, because it genuinely looks so good and true to real geography now, but the controls are so unintuitive.