First of all, thank you guys, I’m glad you liked it.
But let’s clarify here a few things. Long explanation text ahead!
I’m under the impression that some of you think I developed some kind of multi biome tec (sorry for the misleading tittle). I didn’t. This is a very hacky approach.
Biomes in Stonehearth (for now) works mainly based on elevation. The base height is always plains, then we have a few steps of foothills, and last some steps of rock mountains.
What I did was similar to the Archipelago biome. In that biome, the base height (plains) have a lot of water (this creates the ocean) and the grass from that height is colored like sand (there are your beaches). Then the foothills has normal grass colors. This gives the impression that we have different terrains (green islands with sandy beaches), but in the end is just all grass with different colors.
Here is the catch though. We have only 2 grass options, one for the plains and one for the foothills. In the temperate they both have the same green color, but they are not the same block. The same thing for the desert, their plains and foothills have the same color, but are different grass blocks (colored as sand).
For this biome, you will notice that we have 3 main floor colors!(green grass, not so green grass, and sand) That’s because I actually went ahead of this limitation of two grass blocks and add a third one! So, in the plains we have the common plain grass, colored green. In the foothills we have the common foothills grass, this time colored as a little yellowish-green.
The trick here is that I changed the world generation only for the second (higher) step of the foothills. So instead of using the foothills grass block, it will now use the new block I created, which is colored as sand.
Having a new block also had the bonus effect of having its own loot, different from the other grass, That’s how in the desert you can mine a lot of clay and in the grass you can’t.
I also added a new dirt block, that is used under the sand blocks, so when you mine a hole in the desert you also gets more clay, while the common dirt from the forest area does not give you much.
So, in short. This “multi biome” thing is just a hacky that uses different colors for each elevation of the map, as in the Archipelago. But this time not a simple recolor, but actually a new block.
This is why it is incompatible with Archipelago (and Canyon) biome, they both changes the same world-gen files in the game, but the Archipelago ends up taking precedence, and doesn’t let this biome files load.
(It is possible to make them compatible, but it will require an update from the Archipelago)