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Improvements to Rivers

Currently, rivers generate with the same water level as all ocean biomes in the world. However, in real life, rivers move downhill towards larger bodies of water. Rivers should start in mountain biomes, narrower and at a much higher y-level. Along rivers, waterfalls could generate in order for the river to travel downward. These waterfalls could also be a variant of the river biome, where fish such as salmon can spawn more frequently. This could add more interesting generation to Minecraft worlds, and make the game more realistic.

Also to make rivers more realistic, maybe water blocks in the river biome could have a slightly different animation, so that they appear to be flowing more, but without actually being a flowing water block.

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  • 2
    Registered User commented
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    ADD BEAVER TOO. we need beaver.

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Realistic rivers would be great, but I'm afraid it's very complicated to implement with the procedural generation.
    Basically, the game would need the entire map to be generated prior to calculating the rivers path...
    A solution might exist, and would require to apply a complicated function to the perlin noise (height and climate), but that's a whole mathematical problem I doubt anyone at Mojang or in the community has the knowledge for (calculating paths on weird surfaces is it's own mathematical domain).

    By the way, rivers don't necessarily come from glaciers. They don't even necessarily come from mountains. They create when a large area of terrain is sloping : rain water usually fills the dirt like a sponge, and trickles down from it. You don't need the slope to be tall, you need it's surface to be big, and obviously, a lot of rain and/or humidity.
    Also, some rivers never reach the ocean.

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    Registered User commented
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    There should also be willows growing on the sides