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Biomes checklist
Last weekend I successfully added more RAM to my laptop and de-linted the fan,, which means I can play Minecraft while having other programs open without it being too laggy to be fun and without it shutting down for overheating after about half an hour. It was fine until the 1.19 update, which seems to have just kicked it over not being able to run on a seriously underpowered laptop.
(I should have done that much earlier but honestly having the built-in limit on play was probably good for me, if bad for the laptop. Oh well, it's done now! I also need a new battery, because the old one is basically dead and worryingly swollen, but also I should probably get a whole new laptop, I just don't want a whole new laptop, this one just turned three, and also I don't trust Windows 11 yet. But a battery would be cheaper than the RAM was, so I think I have talked myself into it, as long as the ram-and-fan improvement keep working.)
Anyway, as a result I have been playing a great deal of Minecraft the last few days as a reward for actually making a decision and buying the RAM. I finally found a brewing stand after clearing two entire map squares with only one village between them! So now I can level up my first cleric and get ender pearls and XP bottles, and also level up a cartographer who has item frames, all items in short supply on peace-love-plants mode, which I am still playing in. And then maybe I'll finally light a nether portal!
So, Minecraft has "advancements", and one of the advancements is to visit every "biome" in the game. There are 52 of them, 59 if you add the ones from the other dimensions (which have their own advancements.) I've been sort of vaguely working toward that achievement in real life for awhile, so I thought I'd chronicle my progress so far here! I'm about halfway through the list in both my current Minecraft survival world and real life (my previous MC world and my creative world are both on Large Biomes setting, so it takes longer.)
I am extremely tempted to also do the rest of the advancements lists and see what I've done in RL but that would be a much longer list.
(I should have done that much earlier but honestly having the built-in limit on play was probably good for me, if bad for the laptop. Oh well, it's done now! I also need a new battery, because the old one is basically dead and worryingly swollen, but also I should probably get a whole new laptop, I just don't want a whole new laptop, this one just turned three, and also I don't trust Windows 11 yet. But a battery would be cheaper than the RAM was, so I think I have talked myself into it, as long as the ram-and-fan improvement keep working.)
Anyway, as a result I have been playing a great deal of Minecraft the last few days as a reward for actually making a decision and buying the RAM. I finally found a brewing stand after clearing two entire map squares with only one village between them! So now I can level up my first cleric and get ender pearls and XP bottles, and also level up a cartographer who has item frames, all items in short supply on peace-love-plants mode, which I am still playing in. And then maybe I'll finally light a nether portal!
So, Minecraft has "advancements", and one of the advancements is to visit every "biome" in the game. There are 52 of them, 59 if you add the ones from the other dimensions (which have their own advancements.) I've been sort of vaguely working toward that achievement in real life for awhile, so I thought I'd chronicle my progress so far here! I'm about halfway through the list in both my current Minecraft survival world and real life (my previous MC world and my creative world are both on Large Biomes setting, so it takes longer.)
I am extremely tempted to also do the rest of the advancements lists and see what I've done in RL but that would be a much longer list.
| Biome | Location Visited | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Birch Forest | Wompatuck state park | We stayed here for about a week while visiting my sister in Boston once, it's a very pretty little campground all surrounded by paper birch. I remember mostly that we were there as it finally dried out after days of heavy rain, and the birch bark had soaked up the rain and was drying in stripes. |
| Dark Forest | Talladega National Forest | I am declaring Dark Forest = Temperate Rainforest, and while I can't get a straight answer on whether the Appalachian bits of Northeast Alabama are technically part of the Appalachian rainforest, they certainly felt like it - so much moss! everywhere! so I'm counting it. (The appalachian rainforest is also known for fungus diversity but so far I've been at the wrong time of year for that to be visible.) |
| Flower Forest | Brookside Nature Center | This is the little semi-urban nature center where I did my master naturalist training, and they were very proud of having maintained a "healthy" understory. It was the first place I saw & identified a lot of the 'common' forest wildflowers that are in the books but that deer get in a lot of the patchy forest around here, including spring beauties (although being a patch of land that had been farmed and gardened for centuries, there were also plenty of patches of the non-invasive domesticated bulbs that are the hallmark of Minecraft flower forests.) |
| Forest | American Chestnut Land Trust | Generic Forest is where I live! I'm listing the American Chestnut Land Trust because the forest around here should be full of chestnuts and of course it's not, but that's the closest I'm going to get anytime soon. |
| Old Growth Birch Forest | I have never to my memory been to any Old Growth forest, there's supposed to a few ~100 acre patches not too far from here that I should get to, though. Although at some of the less-walked paths right along the Potomac at Great Falls there were a lot more old growth trees than any of us expected! That's probably the closest I've gotten. | |
| Old Growth Pine Taiga | see above | |
| Old Growth Spruce Taiga | see above | |
| Snowy Taiga | The only arctic place I've been is Iceland, and while some maps class it as taiga, taiga usually involves. Large trees. In Iceland, they say if you get lost in a forest, the way to find your way out is to stand up so you can see over it. | |
| Taiga | see above | |
| Windswept Forest | Asbyrgi | We camped for a week in northern Iceland in Ásbyrgi Canyon, which is shaped like the footprint of Sleipnir, and down in the curve of the canyon is the closest thing Iceland has to old-growth forest (short and twisted as it is) and up on the center canyon wall you will blow off if you're not careful. (Iceland in general is the closest I've ever seen to Minecraft terrain generally since the update that increased the relief. Which I guess makes sense, it's all very new land.) |
| Bamboo Jungle | Bamboo is invasive here and I have been in some very delightful bamboo thickets - the one right on the beach cliffs comes to mind - but there's more to a bamboo ecosystem than just invasive bamboo monoculture. In theory. | |
| Jungle | Never been anywhere tropical! | |
| Sparse Jungle | see above | |
| Frozen Peaks | Never been up on an ice-capped mountain, even in Iceland. I should while I still have a chance. | |
| Grove | The main aspect of this biome in Minecraft seems to be powder snow, and I have been to a ski resort (once) but it was all artificial powder, most of which had been packed down to ice, so I don't think it counts. (Also I can't even remember which one it was.) | |
| Ice Spikes | Am not sure what the best real-world equivalent of this is, but whatever it is, I haven't been there. | |
| Jagged Peaks | I am going to say this is mountain ranges with at least one summit over 3 km high, which I have never even been near. | |
| Snowy Slopes | Have never gone mountain-climbing in winter. | |
| Stony Peaks | Old Rag | There are a few Appalachian mountains with bare summits despite being a bit too short for it, and I have climbed one of them! (Actually I have been to the top twice, but the first time I was being carried in a backpack.) This was tougher climbing than expected with some bits that were outright bouldering, I have no idea how my parents did it with babies in backpacks, but once you get to the top it's not cheating to go down the fire road instead, so it's a nice climb if you aren't a climber but want something a bit adventurous. |
| Windswept Gravelly Hills | Hverfjall | Hverfjall is a 1000 foot high cinder cone in North Iceland that you can climb up. It is very gravel! |
| Windswept Hills | Skagafjorður | My sister's research site is in Skagafjorður in North Iceland which is why I have been there several times, so I'm filling it in for generic Windswept Hills (which is most of the inhabited parts of Iceland.) |
| Meadow | Great Smoky Mountains National Park | Meadows are a weird one because in the classic sense they generally don't really exist without land being deliberately kept for haying and grazing by human farmers (even most land kept by transhumance herders doesn't generally classify as meadow). The closest I've come to a "perpetual" meadow is deciding not to hike all the way up to a bald on my last visit to Great Smoky Mountains (there is some debate whether balds are healthy landscapes in the process of being degraded or degraded landscapes in the process of reviving, though.) The 'meadow' in general is the landscape where I'm least able to forget all the discourse about the concept of a "natural" biome or habitat and whether that's even a concept worth keeping. (If we accept mown/grazed/hayed meadows though, I have been in a lot of them.) |
| Plains | Kansas | I have driven through Kansas and Iowa and Illinois and Indiana. I haven't walked a prairie reserve in any of those places, though. |
| Savanna | Dakota territory | Savanna is another tricky one, both in terms of what counts and in terms of whether it's an ecosystem (in the US at least) that can be separated from deliberate land management for grazing. I have probably travelled through some of this in the Dakotas but nothing sticks out. |
| Savanna Plateau | See above | |
| Snowy Plains | Have never been to the plains in winter! Unless you count my grandparents' backyard, which you maybe could. | |
| Sunflower Plains | Sunflower plains are a weird one, because every Minecraft world is a world so large it seems flat that consists of a thin layer of carefully placed rock and soil over scrith, over airless void. What I am saying is that the Minecraft multiverse is almost certainly actually a Pak megastructure along the lines of a Dyson swarm, and the sunflowers are Tnuctipun, so be very very careful around them. (On Earth, a sunflower monoculture is almost certainly a cultivated field or the remains of one, since sunflowers have been an important domesticated crop since before maize existed, so I guess I have never been to an area that farmed sunflowers as a cash crop.) | |
| Windswept Savanna | Holtavörðuheiði | On the ring road on the way to Skagafjorður, after you pass Bifrost there is about an hour in Holtavörðuheiði of driving through literally nothing. It's flat as Iceland goes, there's no settlements along the ring road, nothing grows but moss and the occasional shrub-sized birch trees, until you finally see the traveller's rest at Staðarskáli on the very tip of Hrútafjörður. I call it the Last Lonely N1 to annoy my sister because it really does feel like coming to Rivendell after the wastes. |
| Mangrove Swamp | Someday! | |
| Swamp | Great Cypress Swamp | The swamp I know best is the Great Cypress Swamp in the middle of the Delmarva Peninsula, debatably the northernmost cypress swamp in the world. Particularly I know the bit of it in Pocomoke River State Park, where you can both hike the boardwalk and rent a canoe. |
| Badlands | Theodore Roosevelt National Park | The farthest west I have ever been was a stop in the badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park on the way home from North Dakota. I honestly don't remember much of it but the dung beetles because my brain was fairly fried by travel at that point, but the dung beetles were the cutest. |
| Desert | Parts of the area around the badlands are technically desert, but I have never been in a real desert otherwise, and it's top of my list for someday. (who's going to go to Arizona with me?) | |
| Eroded Badlands | This biome is specifically based on Bryce Canyon, but I would take something like the Grand Canyon or even karst spires if I had a chance. (I would also love to visit Bryce Canyon). | |
| Wooded Badlands | Red River Gorge | Red River Gorge is a park in Kentucky of highly eroded sandstone formations like the Grand Canyon or badlands, only it's in Kentucky so it's all completely covered in damp green. Recommend. I should go back someday. |
| Dripstone Caves | Ohio Caverns State Park | I've been to several show caves, but Ohio Caverns State Park, home of what was once the world's largest known stalactite, is probably the one I've been to the most. Show caves are great, a lot of them are fully wheelchair accessible now even! Someday I will drive from Crystal Grottoes to Cathedral Caverns and stop at every show cave on the way. |
| Lush Caves | Mammoth Cave | I don't know that lush caves in the Minecraft sense are quite a real life biome but the main thing that stuck with me about the main cave tour at Mammoth Cave was just how lush the cave entrance was. |
| Beach | Assateague Island National Seashore | I am fond of many beaches. Assateague stands out in that, a) it has horses, and b) I've visited many times and never gone swimming once. (Also my father was a park ranger there one summer.) |
| Cold Ocean | Grettislaug | The beach by Grettislaug in Skagafjorður is officially where I put my toes in the Arctic Ocean. (Luckily Grettislaug is a natural bathing hot spring, so I warmed up after pretty quick.) |
| Deep Cold Ocean | I have never been to non-continental ocean except while flying over it. :( Someday I will | |
| Deep Dark | see above | |
| Deep Frozen Ocean | see above | |
| Deep Lukewarm Ocean | see above | |
| Deep Ocean | see above | |
| Frozen Ocean | Jokulsarlon | Jokulsarlon is the iceberg lagoon that every tourist in Iceland is statutorily required to visit. It's not really frozen ocean because it's all continental glacier melt, but it does look really cool. |
| Lukewarm Ocean | Murrell's Inlet, South Carolina | We visited here with friends, it's the farthest south I've even been to a beach and it's what made me realize that oh, the ocean can actually be nice! and friendly! |
| Ocean | Lewes Delaware | The ocean I know best that isn't a beach is the ferry route from Lewes to Cape May and back, across the mouth of the Delaware Bay, which I haven't managed in years and really should again soon. |
| Snowy Beach | I don't think I've ever really been to a snowy beach - when it snows here we stay home - but we did go down along the harbor in Sauðárkrókur the year we were there for Christmas. | |
| Stony Shore | Acadia National Park | I came to the stony beach at Acadia hoping for the colorful tide pools of song and story, but I forgot that this was the North Atlantic, so it was just all sort of gray-green, cold and slimy, and the main sea animals we found were snails. Still glad I went, though! |
| Warm Ocean | Nope, but somebody's going to take me to the Gulf Coast, right? | |
| Frozen River | Jokulsargljufur | I don't think I have ever seen a river that was fully frozen over in real life, because this is the age of global climate change. Even our small creek doesn't freeze more than a couple of feet out in a cold winter. We did hike along Jokulsargljufur which is a glacial outflow stream that still had some ice along it even in July, but it was very much not frozen. |
| River | Brukner Nature Center | Brukner Nature Center is a small local place along the Stillwater River, but it has some really nice trails that give a great view of the course of the river, and it's where I first got interested in geomorphology via a long walk on one of those trails while my father taught me about meanders. |
| Void | I hold out hope that before I die orbital vacations will be cheap enough that I manage one. But not yet. | |
| Basalt Deltas | Reynisfjara | I made it to several gorgeous columnar basalt formations in Iceland - absolutely as cool as they sound - but the black beach at Reynisfjara is the one that's already most touristy and the first one I visited. (Also: puffins.) |
| Nether Wastes | Leirhnjúkur | Leirhnjúkur is a "geothermal" area in North Iceland,within the caldera of an active volcano. It basically looks like this nether biome and the ground is steaming and warm to walk on even on a day of cold rains. There's a crater lake you can circumnavigate named "Hell". It is also the site of a major geothermal plant, and all the installations for the plant are enclosed in geodesic domes, so it absolutely feels like you are walking on another planet. (I kind of want to put geodesic domes in my Minecraft nether, except that makes my brain hurt a bit.) |
| Soul Sand Valley | Myrdalssandur | When you take the ring road clockwise around Iceland, at about 5 PM on the clock you start to travel among the sandurs, vast outwash plains of nothing but gray-black mixes of volcanic sand and loess. Every so often sandstorms cover the road impassibly. Every attempt to settle or tame the land of Myrdalssandur has failed when another eruption of Katla sends huge, deadly jokulhlaups down its slopes down to refresh the sandur. Nothing grows there except occasional patches of plants deliberately placed in failed attempts to stabilize the land. This is as close as you are ever going to get to soul sand valleys on Earth. |
| Mushroom Fields | I am stuck on what to do about the mushroom biomes. The closest we've ever had to a mushroom biome on Earth is just after the dinosaurs died, when the main biological activity on Earth was rot for a couple of years. I'm tempted to put in the Boston Harbor Islands national park for this one, since an archipelago built of urban trash is at least spiritually akin to mushroom islands, but there's not that many mushrooms there, because landfill doesn't acually rot very well. | |
| Crimson Forest | see above | |
| Warped Forest | see above | |
| The End | Everyone gets here eventually, but I think I'm going to hold off on it as long as I can. |
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There's also stuff you can do in the Minecraft video settings to reduce memory load - you can probably Google and get better answers for that than I have - but on 1.19 I did that and lag was still unplayably bad. There's also various modpacks that are supposed to help - a lot of the streamers recommend Sodium atm - but I haven't messed with that (I knew I was underpowered on RAM anyway so I started there, when I bought this laptop I figured the most memory-intense thing I've be doing was fandom stats spreadsheets.)
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Ah, that's good to know, I will look into the video settings and tracking memory usage. The laptop had a good amount of RAM when I bought it (because of the very issue that I usually keep laptops for as many years as at all possible, haha), but yeah that was 5 years ago.
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Other advancements are fun to imagine too. Even "Getting an Upgrade" would be tricky! "Ice Bucket Challenge" could be doable depending on your definition of "block." And "Hidden in the Depths" depending on your definition of "ancient debris." "Is it a bird?" is definitely doable, and "Monster Hunter," and "Light as a Rabbit" and "What a Deal"; "Ol´ Betsy" could be a bit harder but fun, "The Cutest Predator" is doable but not easy... "Sweet Dreams" is the easiest, of course.
Yay for playing actual Minecraft without lag! (Fortunately the only times I have bad problems with lag is when flying. Annoying but not annoying enough for me to do something about it.)
I am starting to get the impression that playing on peaceful mode is actually the hardest way, because so many resources are so much harder to get. It would also be mean if one of the new armor trims really was only available was an Elder Guardian drop because I think that would make it unavailable in peaceful mode.
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But yeah, IIRC at least two of the new armor trims won't be accessible on peaceful, and I think there were a few other things in the 1.20 snapshots that won't be either, I should go look that up and make a proper list.
(Also I'm not *just* playing on peaceful, I'm currently playing on a) hardcore, so no deaths; and b) "peace love and plants" which isn't actually a game mode, it's a private resolution to not kill any mobs at all. Items frames would not be on the rare list if I was willing to kill cows for leather. But they are so cute, and trusting.)
*even just make it possible to move eyes from one end portal to another! I would be willing to manually hunt down enough strongholds to do it that way! But no.
I could *probably* do Getting An Upgrade because I have done some flint-knapping and keep meaning to get serious enough at it to actually get good (I couldn't actually make a 'pickaxe' obviously but I could make a hand-axe if I actually practiced and got a big enough piece of good flint or glass, which I would probably count.) The doability of a lot of the others varies, though...
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A hand-axe should definitely count for that imo.
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Also if you come down for spring break we can go to the gulf. It’s still a pretty long drive from here though.
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Get another Reykjanes fire going and I'll think about it though!