Minecraft Wasteland Terrain Generator Mod
Sick of always being spawned in a welcoming world full of grass and trees and sheep and other lovely bouncing mobs just begging to be slaughtered for their resources? Well, there's a mod for that. It's called the Wasteland Mod, and it generates a hostile world you'll have to actually fight to survive in.
When you install the Wasteland mod and generate a new world, you generate a world with no grass and no chickens, pigs, sheep or cows. The dream of cake seems to be a very distant one. We do not know who struck first, us or them – but we do know that it was us who scorched the sky. Which is my Matrix-y way of saying that the sky is a burned red. Instead of wild grass, you get dead saplings, which means there are dead saplings as far as the eye can see. The occasional tree does spawn, but even then it has no leaves.
The exception to all these rules are 'oasis', small patches of grass where trees grow leaves and there are flowers and mobs do spawn.
In order to assist your journey through the arid and inhospitable landscape. There are modified dungeons which appear above ground and contain chests with much (and not so much) needed supplies in them. Some are infested with harmful traps, you have been warned.
So how does this mod stack up? Very interestingly as it happens. There are a couple of versions of the mod available, one that you can just toss into your minecraft.jar (once you have mod loader installed) and go from there. This is the version I tested and the problem with it is the fact that the oases occur so frequently that the wasteland feel of the place is somewhat lost. Dungeon shelters are equally prolific. I have a feeling that this is not intended but is probably the result of the default Minecraft terrain generator having an obsessive need to change biomes every three blocks or so. The other version of the mod works with Hippoplatimus' World Generator Mod, which is more configurable.
Good news however, there's also a version for multiplayer – so you can play with your friends on a devastatingly depressingly wasteland server. There's also a few other addons for mutated mobs and other mod support which you should check out if you're a prolific mod user.
For even more fun, install this mod then go for a wander in an already existing world. It doesn't affect the terrain already generated, but you'll come to a border where the normal world ends and the wasteland begins, and that's ever so jolly.
