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What are we going to do with this awkward snow generation. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I loaded up this world. Having a snowy peak is super cool, but the adjacent peaks not being covered in snow broke immersion.

I thought about a couple options. Placing more snow on the other peaks, potentially building a volcano on the slightly taller peak. Both of these options would be a lot of work.

While walking my dog I noticed something on a mountain side. It got me thinking about other mountains I’ve seen throughout North Western Canada and Alaska.

Windward

The slope with the snow could actually be a windward slope.

What’s a windward slope? We don’t have wind in Minecraft?

A windward slope is the side of a mountain or hill that faces the prevailing (common) wind direction. There’s no wind in Minecraft but your mind doesn’t understand that when scanning generated terrain for authenticity.

How does imaginary wind direction help fix this awkward snow generation? Windward slopes receive more precipitation (snow) and dry out the air so that successive slopes get less precipitation (no snow). If that precipitation falls as  snow you can get a build up and avalanches that bring that snow down to the base of the slope.

This helps because by adding some trees to frame the natural snow generation and to hide the other high points we end up with something that looks natural to your mind.

The dirt peak immediately adjacent the snowy peak will need to be removed or have snow added. I’m thinking this strategy will avoid the need to turn the entire mountain top into a snowy peak. I may need to make the individual peak taller; but should be able to avoid a massive terraforming job.

When completed this peak will appear as though snow has accumulated on the peak and there have been avalanches. It’s likely summer or spring and most of the snow has melted away except where it has accumulated in large amounts; the peaks and avalanche zones.

Tree planting

I think jumping into this will help the visual learners or anyone who hasn’t seen this in their backyard. I’ve started by adding some small spruce trees around the base and edges of the snowy slope.

Then I added some 2×2 trees and around them and more small spruce trees. I’m leaving what looks like avalanche run out zones. Even while doing this I was getting flash backs to being in the  back country so I’m on the right track.

We are going to start on the windward (South) and the south east and south west slopes as the sides that are most visible during game play. I’ll tackle the other slopes as I build around the mountain top in the future.

I’m relying on vanilla trees to save time (weeks) compared to making custom trees. I am placing 2-4 blocks of dirt before placing a sapling to get more height. I’ll then replace the dirt with logs.

As I get closer to the River between the two islands and clearings around this forest I’m going to start mixing broad leaf trees and other foliage into the mix.

Vanilla minecraft doesn’t have a lot of bio diversity; this is not the case in real life. Real world biomes or ecosystems have a mixture of tree and plant species and may even contain a number of the same or visually similar species but in different mixes compared to another ecosystem.

I’ve found that mixing trees from different biomes in minecraft you get a more realistic ecosystem. What the dominant tree type is defines the overall biome type visually. In this case a conifer forest.

I’ve decided to use Mangrove trees and remove the roots to get some tall deciduous trees. I like their foliage shape and height variation. I’ve left some root blocks here n there as rotting stumps or other forest floor debris.

I started including azalea trees as well. Again I like the shape, but more significantly for foliage variety. I thought these 3 tree variations (spruce, mangrove and azalea) would give me the canopy variation I needed; however, something was missing.

Birch, I need some birch.

It was an instant improvement, the colour contrast perfectly rounded out the canopy for me. The birch trees are small unfortunately, but by placing a couple close together and by placing dirt first I can make the tree taller (like I did with the spruce trees). Now there is a good mix of greens and textures.

It was at this point that I realized a lot of these pics were taken from the air via freecam. I’m going to take more pictures from ground level, the perspective that things are going to be experienced playing without elytra.

I hope the perspective change makes the pictures and this blog more immersive.

Moss is the easy way out

And I will be taking the easy way out. I placed a single moss block and got lots of bone meal . Chaining together the spread around the edge of the forest. We only have one small shrub in Minecraft. Two if you include the berry bush I guess.

I think effort vs reward spreading moss and it’s associated greenery is the best approach to making a landscape look better. I did the same thing along the river; however, I did add some bushes there manually.

I could add some drip leaf in the forest itself to act like ferns, maybe I’ll do that in the future. But mostly I write that to acknowledge that drip leaf could add to the aesthetic here. I’ll be skipping it as I don’t have any at this point and their impact wouldn’t be significant without some reason to be closer or in the forest.

Future plans

I’m not going to spend time working on the snow and the peaks. It’s still early game and some resources are still hard to get in massive quantities.

Once I’m able to build a snowball farm I’ll come back and improve that. I also want to add some water run off from the melting snow. That will be easier once I have a stock pile of tuff and gravel.

There are some great palettes for snow and ice with some of the other blocks in the blue and white palette. I’ll work those into the snow and mountain. Here’s my home base portal from simple:

You can see diorite, iron bars, packed ice, blue ice, calcite all mixed in to create texture in the snow. There’s some birch in there to simulate footprints but that isn’t visible from this angle. The ability to place snow in layers and access to diorite walls, slabs and stairs; really means you can create a lot of shape and depth in snow. I think snowy builds are an underused build option.

The two objectives I had in planting this forest was to visually fix the out of place snow and to create division between areas. I’ve achieved this with the work I’ve done. Here’s the stats for the project to date:

Build Stats

Real Life Days: 10

Minecraft Days: 46

Hours: 9