Questions About World Size

[Malfiros]

1) Does having a smaller world size increase the density of biomes? Like, will they be smaller and more closely packed together?
 

2) Does having a smaller world make finding particular resources easier? For instance, finding bees, limestone, or tin?

3) Will having a taller world allow you to mine deeper?

[Streetwind]

1.) No. 2.) No. 3.) Yes.

Changing the world size just cuts off the world generation at the new border. It does not affect how it generates at all. The setting is pretty much only relevant for multiplayer, where it can be used to keep the maximum file size of the world in check.

If you would like to compress the climate zones together, modify the Pole-Equator Distance setting. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Climate will change more rapidly along the north-south axis if you make it smaller.

Try not to think of biomes as you would in a Minecraft context. That is not how VS does things. A biome is merely a secondary result of climate parameters like average temperature, humidity, and forestation level. If the terrain generator spits out an area where all three of those are very high, for instance, the world will then decide that there should be a lot of trees here (high forestation), a lot of undergrowth (high forestation plus high humidity), and they should be kapok trees (high temperature plus high humidity). That's how you get what you think of as a "jungle biome". And it won't have fixed borders; the jungle simply stops where the conditions are no longer right. For instance, if the humidity gradually drops, it'll fade out into a savannah, with kapok replaced by acacia trees.

There is currently no way to affect the scale of rock layer generation.

[Silent Shadow]

3) Keep in mind that the number of ore deposits depends on the ore density map and the base spawn chance (tries per chunk). Height does not factor into ore deposits spawning at all nor their average thickness, this means that taller worlds will have a lower density of ore when you take the stone volume into account.

[Malfiros]

Thank you both for the detailed explanations. Much appreciated!

[Ari]

Also be aware that if you make really tiny worlds, they are currently bugged and will not work properly. I don't know what the minimum threshold is but after a lot of experimentation I found that if you make a really small world (less than 1000 blocks or so), when you leave the world and try to reopen it it will give you an error and fail to load. I left a bug report on this ages and ages ago in the bug tracker and it was acknowledged but there have never been any updates - I guess it's not a priority for the devs. (I do hope they fix it eventually. I want to make tiny arena worlds for multiplayer events.)