OpenTerrainGenerator: The Death of an 11-Year-Old Minecraft Mod

One of the biggest cult classic Minecraft mods, OpenTerrainGenerator, an entire ecosystem enabling beautiful world generation in Minecraft, is currently on its deathbed. Odds are it won’t make it. The mod in question is one of the oldest and most complex Minecraft mods of all time, and I had a VIP seat to its demise.

NOTE: My new fork of OpenTerrainGenerator is now in active development for Minecraft 1.19 and can be downloaded at the website

I enjoyed TerrainControl and, later, OpenTerrainGenerator a lot as a kid. The worldgen defines pretty much everything about how a game is played, and it was my favorite thing to mod. After getting upset about the post-1.13 worldgen options since OTG failed to update, I eventually gave up and created my own. You can see how to do so in the tutorial here: How to Make a World Generation Algorithm in Bukkit/Spigot. PG85, the lead OpenTerrainGenerator developer, reached out to me from that article and asked if I wanted to help get it updated to 1.16. I accepted, knowing that I would waste the next 9 months on a project that was doomed to fail from the beginning.

Meet the OTG Team

Once I became part of the team, I quickly realized the “social dynamic” that was going on behind closed doors. PG85 was a reasonable person, but that was his primary issue. He wasn’t stubborn. Everyone else on the team was. On the internet, you simply need to be stubborn to survive, and PG would often find himself getting pushed around by the team’s “project manager”, Wahrheit.

Wahrheit’s day job was as a lawyer. Wahrheit expected “professionalism” from every member of the team. Slight mess-ups could lead to extremely charged, heated words. You couldn’t make a single joke without him badgering you. He never even contributed code for the team, and when brought up about his contribution, he would say, “I’m sorry my work is invisible, but that’s the way it has to be.” I only believe a single team member was actually using him for “project management,” and that team member had stopped contributing pretty much entirely by the time I joined.

Then there was MCPitman. MCPitman had somehow made himself the “official” preset developer. He had created a number of “preset quality” qualifications that the team abided by. Still, they were simply excuses to create qualifications that only his presets abided by and others didn’t. When Pit worked on his presets, he was “benefitting the community”. When others did they were “creating something to benefit themselves”. Both MCPitman and Wahrheit realized they could play PG85 like a fool and succeeded.

My Contributions

One of my primary contributions to the project was the “illusion of progress.” When nobody else was interested, I would often do a bunch of work to help the project so that people reading the git logs would not think the project was dead. Just before the 1.16 release, I authored a lot of code for the project because the other developers hadn’t figured out that the project was ready for release. Then, I contributed a lot for several months after the developers suddenly lost interest.

I would often fuss at the rest of the team for not doing any work developing the project. They claimed they were busy, but towards the end, it became abundantly clear that was a lie. Their last commit except for two others I forced out of people was on December 15th, 2021. The other developers had lost interest in the project. I had realized I was taking this alone. Just a couple of weeks ago, I fussed at them one final time. I gave them a list of tasks to complete before I came back from lent. I’m still off of lent, but the tasks haven’t started yet. (I am giving up Discord and coding for Lent).

Admittedly, I was somewhat rough in how I would talk to them towards the end. However, that was because my favorite mod of all time as a teenager was dying off, and I was witnessing it. I had a “maternal” mindset and saw them as negligent babysitters. I would always mask my frustration with their negligence with humor, though, so it would not upset them too much. However, this would be their justification for kicking me off the team. Yes, they justified kicking me off the team because I was trying to get them to act like a team.

My “Invisible” Contributions to OTG

I, too, like Wahrheit, had “invisible” contributions. Unlike Wahrheit, my invisible contributions were real. I took it upon myself to become a “developer of the people,” per se. One of the first things I did was get NLBlackEagle, the author of Dregora, to release Dregora for 1.16 in expectation of OpenTerrainGenerator’s Minecraft 1.16 release, which happened several days later. Had I not done that, OTG for Minecraft 1.16 would have never been noticed. Because of Dregora’s early release, swarms of people from all sides of the internet came to take beautiful screenshots and feature OTG presets everywhere.

In addition, incognetis, the developer of Far From Home, and LanToaster, the developer of the popular tool bo3_bulkedit, had been banned several years ago because they dared to become competition for MCPitman. I ensured that the news of whatever changes had been made that they could use had been delivered to them timely so they could take advantage of it. Without me, their presets would be outdated, and they would not know all the new features being added or the things they needed to update.

MCPitman even fussed at one of the screenshotters building the community back up for featuring presets other than his more often than his own. (That wasn’t why he gave it, but it was obvious). I became the middle-man for posting and crediting these people’s screenshots because they were afraid of posting anything.

People like Wahrheit and MCPitman didn’t like me for a simple reason: I was doing everything I could to ensure that they couldn’t continue to be the community’s puppet masters. I told the truth. We all know what happens to those who tell the truth.

Conclusion of OpenTerrainGenerator

1.18.1 will be the last update the OpenTerrainGenerator lives for. I attempted to start the development of 1.18.2, but Mojang yet again changed basically everything in a 1.13-level change. They haven’t quite recovered from 1.13 yet; they still haven’t fully recovered from 1.17 and 1.18. The project is as good as dead. No person has authored a commit since my last commit before I was kicked off.

NOTE: They have released OTG for Minecraft 1.18.2 in a messed-up form that regularly crashes. However, my fork, available on the OTG website, maintains a 1.18.2 release that is not broken.

When they kicked me off the team, they entered a competition to see who had the high ground. While they may have had the authoritative high ground, I was the one who had the moral high ground. Ultimately, that authority they had was built on top of a pillar of sand. That sand is collapsing as we speak, as all of them neglect the project since they do not seem to care. When 1.22 rolls around, years from now, all that will have mattered is the moral high ground. OpenTerrainGenerator will be long dead.

When I informed them they would kill the project one last time, Wahrheit said, “This project has been around long before you and will outlive you.” However, everything must die at one time. Nothing is immortal. Projects that have survived for much longer have died of neglect by their authors and have been far too complex for anyone to take up for themselves. The only people alive who can understand the OpenTerrainGenerator code are the OTG dev team, who are not interested.

There’s been talk of a “ReformedTerrainEngine,” where I fork the project and take it under my wing. I did want to do that; however, after the horrible mess I witnessed when I attempted to port it to 1.18.2, that simply isn’t happening. (See bold note above). Some things are better as memories than constantly being kept in a more and more broken state. Sometimes, you have to let go. OTG truly died in 1.12. Everything after that had been constant work to continue dated presets.

A Few Words to My Friends in the Community

Our journey doesn’t end here. The friendships that I have made with you guys don’t have to rely on OTG. NLBlackEagle, I hope to continue to be your “only good American.” JDaddy, I’m sure you can find plenty else to render in your free time, and I might write a tutorial soon on getting Chunky to work so you can make better renders, even if they can’t be done with OTG. LanToaster, I suppose this means you can finally be free from developing bulkedit.

To anyone sad to see OTG go, I wish I could recommend you to other good WorldGen mods. However, my initial recommendation, Terra, appears to be swamped with 1.18 just as much as we were. From looking at their GitHub, it doesn’t look like they’ve even started yet! If you’re on Paper, I would suggest TerraformGenerator to you. Hex and his code taught me how to code worldgen in the first place, and it’s a beautiful mod. However, if you want my real recommendation, and this might sound rude it’s true: https://www.tripadvisor.com. Go see some irl worldgen. It’s 1000 times cooler.