LET’S PLAY: REALISTIC BIOMES

Realism. It’s not a word we usually associate with Minecraft, unless we’re being sarcastic or have recently enjoyed a major head injury. Because let’s be honest, there’s not much realism to be found in a game full of floating blocks, magical potions, and swimming zombies. Everyone knows real zombies can’t swim. That’s just science.

But that all changed when we discovered Realistic Biomes by Oreville Studios in the Minecraft Marketplace. As the title implies, this add-on gives the biomes of your Overworld a realistic makeover. Was Minecraft about to become the most realistic game ever made? Would it from now on be as fun as toiling down an actual mine?

Some add-ons take a little bit of exploring and experimentation before you see how they’ve changed your Minecraft world. That is absolutely not the case here. As soon as we make a new world, our eyes do a double-take as we see the snow biomes in a whole new light.

Spectacular, but also the kind of bright-light-on-white scene that makes us wish we were cool enough to play Minecraft while wearing sunglasses. This is a bit like being poked in the eyes, albeit by the world’s prettiest fingers. We move to a slightly less overwhelmingly bright spot so we can oooh and ahhhh more safely.

Oreville Studios clearly weren’t telling fibs when they promised this add-on featured ‘realistic lens flares, lighting, shading, VFX & more!’ Lens flare is light being scattered or flaring, usually because of a bright light (like the sun, for example), creating an artefact in an image. Not an artefact as in a precious statue - here artefact means more of an error in the image, like you might get on a photo when you take it on a sunny day.

But why would you want an error? Isn’t Minecraft bug-filled enough already? (if any of the developers are reading this, that was a joke - please don’t take our lunch money and shove us into a locker).

Well, because this lens flare ‘error’ is a great way of showing off how bright something is! The filmmaker JJ Abrams, director of Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens, and Star Wars Episode 9: Oh Dear, is famous for his love of lens flare as a cinematic technique. And now you can feel like you’re trapped in one of his films in Minecraft, just like you’ve always secretly dreamed. Yes you have. Stop denying it.

It’s amazing how these lighting adjustments change the Overworld so dramatically. We switched to Creative Mode so we could zoom around as swiftly as possible. It’s a little harder to see where you’re going with so much pretty VFX on-screen, but it’s hard to care when you can admire the sunset reflected on the ocean’s surface.

Nightfall is handy for admiring the more subtle effects, like the powerful amount of light emitting from fireflies, and rays of white light beaming through the leaves of the trees. Surviving the night would be a lot easier if we weren’t so distracted taking photos of these pretty effects while skeletons fill us with arrows, but ho hum. That’s life.

Fans of trauma and misery will be pleased to know it isn’t all extra-pretty sunshine. Realistic biomes also adds a bunch of new weather effects, something we had the misfortune of discovering while taking a nighttime stroll through a forest.

We promise you that the following screenshot is NOT from the new Silent Hill.

Probably.

Oh wonderful. Looks like we’re sleeping with the night light on again for the foreseeable future.

Cue a long, long night spent whimpering and wandering the foggy forest, squealing every time we heard a sound and apologizing profusely every time we accidentally walked straight into a zombie (“beg pardon, good sir! By jove, it’s not very gentlemanly to nibble on us just for knocking into you, is it now?”).

We thought looking up at the sky would help, as we’d heard rumors of shooting stars. What we actually saw was a thousand times better. Look! It’s the… *hastily looks up spelling* aurora borealis!

Or should we say aurora BLOCK-realis! No. No, we most definitely should not say that :(

Some of the effects are irritatingly hard to capture in images unless you’re quick on the screenshot key. Effects like the way snowflakes whoosh through the breeze, and raindrops occasionally make little circular splashes when they hit the floor.

Luckily, after a few hours of hammering the screenshot button until it took a restraining order out on us (fair), we did manage to get a picture of the snowflakes and a streak of white in the sky. We’ve helpfully labelled it for you in the following image:

Wandering the Overworld, and all its familiar biomes, feels fresh again with this big box of tricks. True, it’s tougher to see further away with such retina-scorching effects hogging the frame, and it can be much scarier to explore at night, but that’s the price of beauty. But you know that already, of course, because all of Minecraft.net’s readers are unbearably handsome (if anyone ever tells you that flattery won’t get you anywhere, ignore them - they’re an idiot).

Realistic Biomes by Oreville Studios is available now in the Minecraft Marketplace. Search for it on your favorite Minecraftin’ device, or click this lovely line of green text to be taken straight there. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to see if that mysterious figure in the mist is a hungry zombie, or a fan asking for our autograph because of how wonderful this piece of writing was. Assuming it’s the latter, see you next month!