Hi gang! Disclaimer: Some of the pictures used below were made on a private test server. Just so you know that nothing weird is going on if the area suddenly doesn't look familiar. When the Empire was upgraded to 1.8 Aikar and Chickeneer also slipped us a few very cool new features, one of which is still somewhat unknown. I conclude as much because I was asked a few times about it, and also found a question regarding this feature on the forums. SO... Time for a quick guide. How to change the biome of your residence... What is a biome, and why would you want one? A trick question A biome in Minecraft is basically an area type (or area definition) which basically does 3 things: It determines what blocks and/or structures will be automatically generated. It determines how the blocks will look (a little bit, it depends on the blocks). It determines which creatures will or won't spawn. For example: 3 biomes combined... First you'll notice the ice spikes biome, this is a cold area where ice spikes pop out (as the name implies). But if you look closely you'll also notice a few others. The green area with all the trees is a Taiga biome and even the water is a biome by itself (River biome). It might be a little more obvious if you check out the overlay map of this region: Clearly visible: an ice region, a river area and a forest region ("biomes") So why would you care about this whole biome thing? Well, good question. Lets take a look at a (simulated!) residence which has 2 biomes combined: See the brown grass? That looks kind of ugly, doesn't it? As you can see in the distance the blocks which are shown here are really grass blocks. But at the 'bottom' of the residence they look pretty ugly. Brown, as if the whole thing has been completely dried out. That's because we're in the Mesa biome (remember: the clay biome?) and those regions usually only appear within deserts. Which are also very dry and hot areas. So its only natural that the grass looks dried out. So what can we do about it? By changing the biome! If you wanted to do this on a server yourself then it could become a little tricky. You'd need to select an area, change the biome, optionally relog and then things should have changed. I won't bother you guys with that but if you're still curious then check out the spoiler... Selected the area and changed the biome... This is really not to show off the WorldEditCUI plugin in action Or maybe it is So what you see here is that I selected the residence (my server uses WorldEdit / WorldGuard) which is shown by the red grid. I then told the server to change the biome which it did but in "async mode". In short that's another server plugin which makes sure that the server doesn't get overloaded if you perform large(r) changes. And the result? Well, see for yourself: A nice green residence, much more inviting that those brown areas... How to change your biome on the Empire? Up until recently all we could do was call in the help of the cavalry, also known as the Senior Staff. You could pay them off with a large amount of rupee's and then they would come over, change your residence biome and sneak off again (after having charged you for it of course). But thanks to Aikar and Chickeneer we can now do all of this by ourselves! And it doesn't even cost you any rupees either: this is one of the first features which we can purchase using Tokens. 5,000 tokens for a residence change on one of the SMP servers and 10,000 tokens for one on Utopia. So how does this work? It's really quite simple: My re-claimed SMP5 residence Here you can see my recently 're-claimed' SMP5 residence. But unfortunately the grass doesn't look as bright and green as it did before. Checking out the debug screen (F3) learns us that I'm standing in an Ice Plains biome, which means that its really cold here right now. Obviously the grass won't be able to grow as well as it should. What to do? Easy: /res changebiome <new biome name> In my case I picked the Jungle biome because the grass will look a lot brighter that way. So: As you can see: no blocks are destroyed in the process... After you issued the command you'll be taken to a "wool question": you need to click the green wool to confirm your change or click the red wool to cancel it. I obviously clicked the green wool and as you can see I've been charged 5,000 tokens. Now, the change is immediate but your client will need to re-load this area for the new colors and changes to show up. So the best thing to do here is to go to another server and then come back again. And what do you know: This looks much better! And there you have it... If you're wondering what biome you should use for your own residence then check out the biome list page on the official Minecraft wiki. I hope this can help some of you guys!
Also, certain biomes have practical uses, even in town. For example, in taiga, frozen planes, and other such cold biomes, water sources can freeze, creating ice farms. Also, in flower forests, you can get many more types of flowers by using bonemeal.
Yeah, I imagine this is how certain folks manage to get a DC of the blue flowers that only grow in the swamp biome... because collecting a DC out in the Wastelands would be impossible.
