Biome

Biomes are regions in a Minecraft world with varying geographical features, flora, heights, temperatures, humidity ratings, and sky and foliage colors. Biomes separate every generated world into different environments, paralleling the real world; examples of biomes include the forest, jungle, desert and ice plains.



The term biome is analogous to its scientific usage: on Earth, a biome is climatically and geographically defined by distinctive communities of plants, animals and soil organisms supported by similar climatic conditions. They are often referred to as ecosystems.

Biomes have a temperature value that determines if it snows, rains, or does not have either. The required values are: <0.15 for snow, 0.15 - 0.95 for rain, or >1.0 for none. These values can be used to determine the heights that snow generates in different biomes. For example, Extreme Hills generate snow at y=95, due to highland climate, as the base value is 0.2, and Savannas do not experience rain or snow due to their heat.

Biomes are split into 5 categories based on their temperature: snow-covered, cold, medium, dry/warm, and neutral. They were separated to prevent biomes with huge temperature differences being placed side-by-side (such as Cold Taiga next to a Desert).

Biome types
There are 61 distinct biomes. Biomes can be distinguished by the grass and leaf colors in the biome, along with the types of blocks present (e.g. types of trees or other plants like cacti, sand coverage in deserts). Biomes are pseudo-randomly generated using the map seed.

Biomes are separated into 5 categories. The snow-covered biomes are marked in blue, cold in green , medium/lush in orange and dry/warm in red. The biomes which are not labeled are either neutral or unknown.

Snowy biomes
In these biomes, it snows at any height. The foliage and grass is an aqua-green.

Cold biomes
In these biomes, it begins to snow over a certain height, but before the 256 blocks height. Otherwise, it rains. The foliage and grass is an aqua-green.

Medium/Lush biomes
In these biomes, it begins snowing over the 256 blocks height limit. Otherwise, it rains. The foliage and grass is a vibrant light green, except swamps and roofed forests, which have a dark green grass. Rivers are also exempt from this, as they have a dull blue hue.

Dry/Warm biomes
In these biomes, it neither rains nor snows at all. The foliage and grass is an olive color, except mesa biomes, which have brown grass.

Neutral biomes
These biomes are usually covered with water and have very little land exposed. Either that, or they have many varients of themselves which are also varients of other non-neutral biomes. The foliage and grass in these biomes usually have a dull green grass hue.

Biome IDs
Each type of biome has its own biome number, shown in the following table. These biome numbers are used when creating a customized superflat world. Biome variations seem to have a number of 128 +.

Biome history


Notch, when he was the lead developer of Minecraft, wanted to add biomes, but he couldn't for a long time. He says the intersection points looked terrible and so, biomes weren't added in the Seecret Updates.

Prior to the Halloween Update, every world had only a single theme, either grassy or snowy.

Anvil file format
The Anvil file format allows for biomes to be stored in the world data. In contrast, the Region file format relies on the seed to dynamically calculate biome placement. This would cause biome placement in older worlds to change when the biome generation code was changed. With the current Anvil format, the biome data is stored along with the rest of the world data, meaning it will not change after the world is generated and can be edited by third-party map-editing tools. Furthermore, "edge" biomes allow for biomes to continue extend beyond the edge chunks of an old world. This allows for smooth transitions in world generation after the generation code changes in an update.