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We've all been waiting for e a cave upgrade for a year now, here it is . This is a massive upgrade to the underground and to some aspects of the above-ground terrain.

This update required upgrading entire parts of my custom engine framework. Modularizing prop generators and terrain scanners was extremely important and took a lot of work to get right, but I finally feel confident with the results.

River Tunnels


The humidity inside the river tunnels allows for giant mushrooms and vines to thrive. The walls are populated with shelf mushrooms and the river beds spore different types of giant red and brown mushrooms. Vines link the ceiling to the river.

There are no trees deep inside those tunnels because of the darkness.

Stalactite Mushroom Cave


This cave is themed around moss and humidity. It's occupied by different types of mushrooms and is sometimes bed to lakes. Realistic stalactite and stalagmite formations link the floor and ceiling surrounded by vines and sometimes cobweb.

It's not too rare, but most players will not spawn on top of one, so they'll have to look for it. A system can be up to 500 blocks wide. The long caves can only pierce the sides of this cave and not the lake parts holding water, although this might happen on rare occasions.

Lava Caves


Even deeper underground lava lakes of varying sizes formed multi-layered cavities by melting the ceiling above them. These cavities are very hot and dry, no plant life can survive them. It is possible to settle mining shelters along the upper levels of those caves because the air is colder there .

The long vanilla-like caves can only pierce the top part of these caves.

Performance
Considering the amount of features this update brings one would expect performance to take a significant hit. Well it turns out with some extensive optimization chunk generation time is now 50% faster than 1.0.0.8!

The Regen Command
This update adds the ability to select an area and regenerate it using the regen command. I intended to allow regeneration of very large areas (1000+ chunks) without impacting TPS too much.

To use this feature:
/dwg a - selects chunk A
/dwg b - selects chunk B
/dwg regen - starts the regeneration task

Bedrock Configuration
Bedrock can be set to be smooth in config.yml.

Modular Prop Generator
In the release versions of the plugin the only props that were generated are the long vanilla-like caves and the trees. The code generating them is composed of monolithic functions that receive many variables and output the generated prop. This worked for a small number of props, but I quickly realized that a better modular solution is possible and could speed up the development time and/or increase the complexity of the props.

The modular system works as follows. A prop is made up of parts. As each part generates it calls other parts that are branching off of it. So for example in a basic tree you have the main branch, that would start children branches, and leaves at certain points. Another example is a cave system populated by a village: the main cavern generates and then starts the village room and props generator at different parts of it depending on the allocation algorithm.

The system allows for reuse of generic part generators in combination with custom parts for each prop. For example the branch generator can be used for trees but also for the long vanilla-like caverns (it actually is the same algorithm).

Terrain Pattern Scanner
To place props on walls and cavern ceilings I added another part to the core. This new part allows each prop to define the pattern it needs in order to spawn in a location. You can think of a pattern as a regex statement, it works in a similar way.

This also allows for each prop to report the exact blocks it needs to scan, which improved performance in my tests by about 50% in prop heavy forest areas like the forest.

The JAR
+ lava caves from levels 0 to 30
+ new pattern matching system
+ modular system for some props (no visual difference)
+ regeneration feature
+ bedrock configuration
+ Stalactite Mushroom cave
+ mushroom prop
+ vine prop
+ cobweb prop
+ performance improvements
+ change in version numbering from 1.0.1.0 to 1.1.0 by omitting the second digit
+ river tunnels improved decor
+ vines on oases walls