Civcraft2Import:Realisticbiomes

=========RealisticBiomes=========

Limits plant growth and animal reproduction to their naturally occuring biomes, or reasonable ones for plants that do not occur naturally. Growth is persistent, so plants grow even when not connected.

See this spreadsheet for the default configuration of the different plants, animals and actions. This is also the configuration on the civcraft server.

Growth times depends on a base rate per plant/animal/thing, then biome at location, sunlight level, soil blocks beneath, and presence of glowstone (to simulate a greenhouse).

===============Soil Bonus=============== Plants may have a soil bonus (see the column with tower icon in the spreadsheet). This type of block, when placed below the plant-block, gives a boost to growth time. Usually you can use several blocks to get the full boost. They are to be placed at an *offset* below the plant, usually starting from below the block the plant is planted *on*, and further blocks downwards to get full boost.

Examples:

• Crops, carrots, potatoes: place column of 4 blocks of clay below the farmland block where you will plant the crop on.
• Netherwarts: Same as crops, but use soulsand. The soulsand block the warts are planted on is not counted for boost.
• Cocoa: Up to 25 blocks of vine give a huge boost. They must be placed immediately below the cocoa bean.

===============Light bonus=============== Most plants need full sunlight, which is only achieved if it has direct exposure to sky, or at most through transparent blocks such as glass. If the plant is not at full sunlight, a penalty is applied. It may have an extra penalty or boost configured. Netherwarts are the only plants that don't receive a penalty and even get a boost for not being at full sunlight level.

===============Greenhouse=============== You can place a glowstone or redstone-lamp block adjacent to most plants to improve their growth if they are not at ideal biome and light conditions. This means that it is almost always preferrable to grow a plant in their respective biome, but you can still achieve growth elsewhere.

A plant can be configured to ignore biome rate with greenhouse, or not. If biome is ignored, then the biome it is in does not matter and the base rate is used.

This means that with greenhouse you can grow some plants in any biome, althoug with longer growth time. Other plants get better growth time in some (non-ideal) biomes. Some plants cannot ever be grown out of their configured biomes.

To grow pumpkins and melons with greenhouse, place the glowstone block adjacent *to the free block where the fruit block will grow*, and block all other free spots so that the fruit can only grow next to glowstone.

===============Persistence=============== In vanilla minecraft, when an area is unloaded from memory, it won't be processed and so plants will not grow. An area is unloaded if no players are near it. This leads to the necessity for players to "AFK" (sitting around idle) their farms to produce. This has a negative effect on the server, since this obviously increases processing spent in a useless way and it also isn't beneficial to gameplay in any way.

RealisticBiomes introduces persistence: when an area unloads (no players around or disconnection), the plants in it are saved to disk with their current growth progress and unload time. Then when the area is loaded again (players approaching or connecting), the plants are updated to their growth progress counting the offline time, as if the plants had been loaded all the time. Thus the need to AFK farms is eliminated.

Currently, not all types of plants or animals are made persistent, because technically "growth" is applied differently to different things in minecraft. Persistent plants display their time in hours in the spreadsheet, non-persistent plants display a percentage instead. The percentage represents the chance of growth success for a vanilla-growth-event.

===============Using Realistic Biomes=============== There are two ways of getting info about growth time in-game.

Hitting the ground with a plant-able item

When you do this, you will get the growth time of the item in hand at the free block above the block you're hitting, or the block on the side relative to where you're hitting if it is not the top side. For cocoa for example, you will want to hit a jungle tree on it's side to get meaningful growth time.

This growth time includes all factors such as biome, light, and surrounding blocks.

You can also do this with fish-able items, but in this case the fishing probability will only be reported if it is not zero to spare you from chat spam.

Right clicking a plant/animal with stick in hand

This will give you both the time that is left and the total time of an existing plant, similar to hitting the ground with an item. This also has the side effect of physically updating the plant's block according to it's internal growth progress.