What is terraforming in Minecraft?

Minecraft has a unique terrain and terrain generation engine. When a player creates a new world, the game procedurally generates a brand-new world with unique terrain. No two worlds have the same terrain in any biome or dimension. For several years now, players have closely studied how the game generates terrain for different biomes.

Later on, some players started manually creating terrain that looked similar to the one the game creates. The community called this method terraforming. Let's look at the method a bit closely.

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Everything to know about terraforming in Minecraft

What does terraforming mean in Minecraft

Terraforming is the process of manually building natural terrain according to the biome. (Image via Sportskeeda Gaming || Mojang Studios)

Terraforming is a technique to manually create naturally looking terrain. The player-made terrain can either replicate the game's terrain or not. However, it must look like a natural terrain generation.

This process requires players to gather loads of natural blocks and place them in layers to create a vertical gradient of varying heights. It also requires them to place other biome details like rivers, trees, etc., as naturally as possible. The randomness of the game's terrain needs to be captured as closely as possible to create a believable terrain that looks natural.

For example, in the picture above, the Plains biome has a gradual height increase, but the blocks are layered quite irregularly. In some areas, the height increases steeply, while in others it is gradual. Furthermore, the blocks are not in a straight line, which should also be achieved by players while terraforming an area.

The need for terraforming is essentially to create a natural-looking terrain before starting to build a structure that players want. If the area around the structure is terraformed, it makes the structure blend in a lot more with the environment.

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How to terraform a Minecraft terrain?

If players want to start terraforming in Minecraft, the best way to do so is to take a screenshot of a biome with simple terrain like Plains, and then head to a flat world to start manually creating that same terrain.

Gradually, players will learn how to create different terrain by intentionally adding randomness and irregularities between layers and blocks, which will eventually look a lot natural than the game's original terrain. With enough practice, players can start working with existing terrain in a regular world itself.

Another important tip is to observe the existing terrain and work with it rather than completely destroying it and starting fresh. If players find a decent terrain where they think their structure will fit well, they can observe the terrain and then start making smaller changes to it to fit their structure better.

They can start by flattening the area a bit and then adding blocks in a natural way while still making enough space to fit the structure.

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