Configuring Your Pack

Anatomy of a Pack

Terra configuration packs can be divided into sub-folders each containing different configuration file types. Every pack has a unique ID, used for setting up world generators and loading everything correctly. If you have already read through Creating a Pack, then you should already know how to set up the ID for a pack.

Pack Structure

Here is what to expect when looking inside a Terra config pack. You can expand the following sections to read descriptions of each:

📄 pack.yml

Pack Manifest documentation

If you followed Creating a Pack, then you should already be familiar with pack.yml. The pack manifest controls broad scale things like how biomes are arranged, and defines things integral to a pack such as the author, version and pack name.

📁 biomes

The biomes folder contains user-defined Biome Configurations.

Aside from pack.yml, you will probably be configuring the bulk of your work inside this folder, as it contains everything that makes biomes unique.

Biomes generally take many assets defined in other folders (or even other biomes!) and combines them together to define a singular unique biome. Many biomes can share aspects such as the blocks that make up the landscape, what trees within the biome, and how ores spawn etc. For a full list of biome parameters you can check out the Biome Configuration documentation.

📁 carving

The carving folder contains user-defined Carver Configurations.

Carver configurations define the behaviour of basic caves in Terra. Biomes can pick and choose which carvers they take from this folder to use when generating. If you want to change how caves look, then is the folder to go to.

📁 flora

The flora folder contains user-defined Flora Configurations.

Flora configurations define aspects like grass and flowers that will be used within biome configurations, but can also be generalized to other aspects of generation such as sugarcane, lily-pads, water springs etc.

Flora is generally configured to be a block or stack of blocks that only spawns under certain conditions. For example sugarcane would only generate on grass and sand that is adjacent to water, and can only replace air blocks. You can think of flora like a post-processor.

If you want to configure your own flora, you would do it in this folder. Alternatively, Terra also provides various preset flora configs included within the plugin.

📁 ores

The ore folder contains user-defined Ore Configurations.

Ore configurations determine how various individual deposits of blocks behave. Aspects like what block deposits are made of, and how large deposits are can be controlled here. Note that ore configurations pertain to how singular deposits behave, meaning that aspects like where and how frequent deposits are not handled in this folder (Those factors are defined within biomes).

Another thing to note is that aspects like dirt and granite pockets are also defined here, meaning that ore configurations are not specific to just ores.

📁 palettes

The palettes folder contains user-defined Palette Configurations.

📁 structures

The structure folder contains several Terra defined sub-directories as follows:

📁trees

Tree Configuration documentation
📁structures

Structure Configuration documentation
📁loot

Loot tables
📁data

Terrascript documentation

Sub-folders

Just about every configuration file within each pack sub-directory can be further nested in user-defined folders for organization. This can be very useful for pack development as it will make files much easier to locate and edit, and is a good practice to do to make things neater. For example, here is what an organized biome folder structure might look like:

# Terra defined folders
pack
└ biomes
# User defined folders
  ├ land
  │ ├ hot
  │ │ └ desert.yml
  │ ├ temperate
  │ │ ├ forest.yml
  │ │ └ plains.yml
  │ └ cold
  │   └ tundra.yml
  └ water
    ├ ocean.yml
    └ river.yml

Adjusting the Generator

! This section is incomplete !

Terra has a vast amount of options for configuring world generation from the ground up. We don't expect you to be able to pick up every little aspect as there is a lot to take in, but you will have to put in some work grasping a handful of important concepts, if you're looking to develop a pack. These topics include:

Reloading edits

When adjusting your configuration, you might think that you will need to restart your whole server for any changes to take effect. This is not the case with Terra; you can simply reload your configurations live while the server is running. If your server is in debug mode (which is covered in Creating a Pack), simply run /te reload to reload all configurations.