Latitude 1.4.0 — Cohesive Horizons (MC 26.1.2)

Latitude 1.4 — Cohesive Horizons (MC 26.1.2)

Latitude 1.4 "Cohesive Horizons" is a worldgen-quality and compatibility release. It makes the climate map read like a coherent, Earth-like world and adds first-class support for custom biome mods.

Custom biome support

• Custom biomes from other mods and datapacks (Biomes O' Plenty, Terralith, Promenade, and similar) can now be slotted into the latitude bands through the globe:lat_* biome tags.
• Added a custom-biome admission safety rail so unknown or climate-incompatible biomes cannot leak into the wrong band; anything not admitted falls back to a sensible vanilla biome for that band.
• Placed Promenade's Glacarian Taiga in the subpolar band and its Blush/Cotton Sakura Groves in the temperate band, as accent biomes that form coherent patches in their climate zone (all marked optional, so they're simply skipped when Promenade isn't installed).
• Made the custom-biome source wrapping more robust on the 26.1 stack: corrected the biome-source hook so structure and surface placement follow the latitude biome map, and deferred wrapping safely when a source mod's biome registry isn't ready yet (fixes a class of world-load crashes with source-side biome mods).

Worldgen rebalance

• Fixed "overwhelming desert in the tropics." The warm-side moisture model was latitude-independent, so dry/desert pockets scattered uniformly across every warm latitude — including the equator. A new Earth-analog latitude wet-bias keeps the equatorial belt humid (rainforest/ITCZ) and pushes arid country out to the subtropics where it belongs, grading into a believable jungle→savanna→desert transition toward the poleward edge.
• Kept the equator varied, not a jungle monoculture. Equatorial humidity is balanced so the rainforest belt stays diverse — a jungle-dominant mix of jungle, bamboo, sparse-jungle clearings, savanna clearings, tropical wetlands, and occasional desert pockets — instead of an endless wall of jungle. Custom tropical biomes from installed mods (e.g. Biomes O' Plenty) are preserved in the humid belt rather than being overwritten with vanilla jungle, so the equator reads richly whether or not you run biome add-ons.
• Greatly reduced biome "confetti." Raised the tier-selection coherence wavelength so secondary/accent biomes (old-growth taiga, sparse jungle, savanna, and similar) form coherent patches instead of single-cell speckles sprinkled through the dominant biome. Across validation seeds, jungle small-fragment share dropped from roughly a quarter to under a tenth, and savanna/desert/taiga fragment counts fell by half or more.
• Reduced cross-province bleed — jungle blobs marooned in desert and desert specks inside jungle are substantially reduced.
• Restored a believable arid mix. Both desert and badlands remain visibly present in the arid belt (with coherent wooded/eroded badlands sub-regions rather than scattered specks), avoiding the earlier over-correction that thinned them out.
• No more badlands at the equator. Badlands/mesa is a subtropical landform on Earth, never an equatorial one, but on some seeds it was leaking into the deep tropics. It's now gated out of the equatorial belt (smoothly fading in toward the subtropics where it belongs) and replaced there by savanna clearings, while the subtropical arid belt is left exactly as-is.
• Thinned desert at the deep equator. True hot desert is essentially absent from Earth's rainforest equator, so the innermost tropics (0–10°) now carry noticeably less desert — partially replaced by savanna clearings — fading back to the full subtropical desert belt by ~12°. Desert is thinned, not removed: it stays present and is untouched everywhere outside the deep equator.

World entry & interface

• Smoother first entry into a new world. The bespoke loading screen now stays up until the world around you has actually finished rendering, so you no longer drop into a half-loaded or empty-looking frame for a moment when entering. (Held until the spawn chunks are loaded and the surrounding terrain is compiled and visible, with a safety timeout.)
• Latitude-aware initial spawn. New worlds place your starting spawn in a latitude-appropriate zone before terrain pregeneration runs, and keep spawn clear of the east/west world-edge warning band.
• Fixed zone and hemisphere titles. The on-screen zone/hemisphere announcement labels are now measured from the world's equator (the world-border center) instead of a fixed line — correcting a case where the hemisphere readout could be inverted or offset — and no longer fire spuriously when you teleport a long distance.

Validation

• Atlas biome-preview balance audited across multiple seeds and world sizes (small and regular) with a band-aware balance analyzer (tools/atlas/band_balance_analyze.py).

Known limitations

• With several custom biome packs installed at once, not every biome will appear. Each latitude band draws from a finite weighted pool, so the more biomes you add, the smaller each one's share — rarer/accent biomes from large stacks can fall below visible frequency. This is expected behavior, not a bug; you'll still get a coherent, climate-appropriate mix, just not 100% coverage of every biome in every installed pack. (Configurable per-pack representation weighting is on the roadmap.)