Latitude 1.5.0 — for Minecraft 26.2

The first Latitude release on the mod platforms since 1.3. The 1.4 line was only ever tagged on GitHub, so this build carries two full development cycles: the 1.4 worldgen and custom-biome overhaul, plus the whole 1.5 polish campaign on top of it.

If you played 1.3, this will not feel like a point release.

☞ Latitude 2.0 is still in production. The larger overhaul that I've been showcasing publicly on YouTube, with its more elaborate mechanics, is a separate line and still in development. 1.5 is the final polish release of the 1.x line.

➤ Watch Peetsamods on YouTube

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⚠️ Before you update

Back up your worlds first.

Coming from 1.3 (MC 1.21.11) or 1.4 (MC 26.1.2), Minecraft converts your save to the 26.2 format on first open, and that conversion cannot be undone. Keep a copy of the save folder before you launch.

Existing worlds keep their original biome selection — including in chunks you have not visited yet. The climate-model and custom-biome work below therefore applies to newly created worlds. That is deliberate: it stops terrain you have already explored from changing underneath you.

The tree line and snow caps are the exception. Those are applied as terrain generates, so they will show up in newly generated chunks of an existing world too. Already-generated chunks are untouched, so an older save can show a seam where forested summits meet the new bare-and-snowcapped ones.

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Mountains feel like mountains

New in this release and on by default: a real tree line, and snow-capped peaks whose snowline follows latitude.

Forests now thin out with altitude instead of climbing to the summit — trees start dropping away around Y140 and stop entirely by Y168, so the tree line arrives as a gradual thinning rather than a hard edge. Above it, ground gives way to exposed alpine rock, with a fading shelf of meadow just above the line so the change does not read as a painted stripe.

Higher still, peaks wear snow, and where snow begins depends on your latitude — shaped after Earth's real climatic snowline, which sits lowest near the poles and rises toward the dry subtropics. Polar terrain is snow-covered almost throughout; subpolar has a low snowline; temperate peaks are capped; in the subtropics only the highest summits are; and there are no equatorial glaciers at all.

The snowline is noise-warped rather than a flat contour, so caps sit unevenly along a ridge the way real snow does instead of cutting every peak at the same height. And the snow zone deliberately carries no grass, so nothing pokes up through the caps.

The climate map reads like a real world

The warm-side moisture model used to ignore latitude, so deserts scattered evenly across every warm band — including the equator. That model has been rebuilt around an Earth-analog wet-bias: the equatorial belt stays humid, arid country sits out in the subtropics where it belongs, and you travel through a believable jungle → savanna → desert gradient instead of a shuffled bag of biomes.

The equator stayed varied rather than becoming a wall of jungle, badlands stopped appearing at the equator (it's a subtropical landform on Earth), and biome "confetti" is largely gone — accent biomes now form real patches instead of single-cell speckles. On validation seeds, jungle small-fragment share fell from roughly a quarter to under a tenth.

Also fixed along the way: Pale Garden forms one coherent inland region, Mushroom Fields is actual land instead of a water-coloured label, caves are reliably represented, temperate coasts and beaches were tightened, and windswept mountains came back.

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Custom biome packs actually get represented

Latitude admits biomes from other mods through its globe:lat_* tags, with a safety rail so nothing lands in a climate it doesn't belong in.

In 1.5 the selection was rebuilt. It used to be driven by a fixed seed and a single tag-size-weighted roll, which let big packs crowd out entire providers and made different worlds repeat the same choices. Latitude now picks a provider first, then a biome inside it, using your world seed — so a pack's share no longer depends on how many biomes it happens to ship.

With Biomes O' Plenty and Terralith both installed, sampled worlds came out around a fifth BoP, a quarter to a third Terralith, and about half vanilla, with dozens of distinct custom biomes present. Terralith's orchid swamp and amethyst regions and BoP's marsh, wetland and tropics all show up in the right latitudes, and temperate forest went from a near-monoculture to a genuine mix. Exact shares vary by seed, world size, and which packs you have installed.

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The poles feel like the poles

Polar blindness is now a whiteout fog you can read as weather. Frost damage in the final zone was steadied, foliage is suppressed beyond 80°, and the polar warnings and zone titles were reworked.

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A new create-world screen

A square Atlas preview replaces the old disc. Smaller worlds show a faint Regular-world reference underneath and larger worlds a darkened one inset, so you can actually compare sizes. The Atlas stays put while you cycle sizes, and the compact-world note no longer shoves it around.

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A customizable compass HUD

HUD Studio brings HUD customization into one tabbed screen with a live preview. Drag the title, compass, and a new biome/zone readout wherever you want, snap-to-grid or free, with independent text scaling and six analog compass themes.

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Operator commands

Public builds now ship a few operator-gated tools under /latitude: here and explainHere to see your latitude, band and why a biome was chosen; probe to sample the surrounding distribution; and tpLat / tpBand to jump to a latitude or band. Inspection and navigation only — Latitude's development tooling is excluded from release builds by policy.

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Compatibility

Existing Latitude worlds load and keep generating without rewriting chunks you've already explored.

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Known limitation

With several large biome packs installed, you will not see every biome. Each latitude band draws from a finite weighted pool, so the more you add, the thinner each one's share. 1.5 substantially improves which biomes appear and stops whole packs being crowded out, but it does not make coverage complete. Per-pack representation weighting is on the roadmap.