How to Enable Tectonic, Restart Requirements, and the Basic On/Off Toggle

guide

Tectonic is a world-generation mod that reshapes terrain, and its main switch lives in its settings interface rather than in crafting or world creation. This guide covers turning it on and off, and when a game restart is needed.

Enabling and Disabling Tectonic

The mod's primary control is a single toggle. When you switch it off, Tectonic goes dormant and stops affecting anything — it simply does nothing while disabled.

Flip the toggle back on to have the mod take effect again.

Restart Requirements

Two settings carry an explicit restart warning, and you should treat both as requiring a full game restart before the change applies:

The main enable/disable toggle. Its description states that a game restart is required when it is disabled.
The option controlling whether old caves and ravines generate. This one also states that a game restart is required.

For every other setting listed in the interface, no restart requirement is stated, so changes there are handled by the mod itself.

How to Operate the Settings

Open Tectonic's interface and adjust values directly. Each entry shows a short description of what it changes, and most of the terrain-shaping options are numeric sliders or value fields you tune up or down.

Because Tectonic works through its own interface and hotkeys, there is no crafting step and no item to obtain. If a control has a hotkey bound to it, use the corresponding hotkey (set it in the controls menu) to trigger that action.

What the Main Settings Control

The toggles and values you will meet most often shape the overall terrain:

Vertical Scale stretches terrain above sea level vertically. Doubling the value doubles how high a given point sits above sea level.
Mountain Scale boosts how strongly Vertical Scale affects mountainous ground, so mountains and plateaus grow faster than lowlands.
Squash smooths terrain heavily, similar to an earlier version of the mod, removing staircasing artifacts — though deep oceans and windswept biomes may generate strangely.
Continental Scale, Erosion Scale, and Ridge Scale all work horizontally, scaling continents, erosion (mainly mountains), and ridge noise (mainly rivers and surrounding plateaus). Lower values mean larger features and more space between them.
Ocean Bias skews terrain toward or away from oceans. Lower values produce more ocean; above -0.45 deep oceans stop spawning, and above -0.2 oceans stop spawning entirely.
Minimum Y and Maximum Y set the generation and build limits. The older Increased Height option set the maximum to 640.
Snow Start Offset shifts the height at which snow begins in cold biomes such as taigas.

Biome, Cave, and Island Options

Further settings refine specific parts of generation:

Temperature and humidity controls adjust how extreme, how close together, and how common warm, cold, wet, or dry biomes are. Higher values push toward extremes, deserts, or lush vegetation; lower values push toward moderate, cold, or sparse biomes.
Cave options cover Cheese Caves, Noodle Caves, and Spaghetti Caves, each with a density value where lower numbers mean larger caves. Depth Cutoff Start and its companion distance control where caves stop generating below the surface.
Underground Rivers let rivers continue beneath mountain ranges for smoother boat travel, and they can appear with hanging lanterns or with ice under snowy biomes.
Island settings scale island size, boost how often normal and mushroom islands appear, and shift the balance between the two.
Ocean Monument Offset repositions vanilla ocean monuments for deeper oceans, and Remove Frozen Ocean Ice clears surface ice so frozen oceans are as navigable as deep frozen oceans.

Notes Before You Change Things

Alternate Noise Scaling improves terrain near mountains and oceans at larger scales, but it is not compatible with C2ME's hardware acceleration. Improved Jungle Pillars makes jungle pillars twice as common, larger, and flatter on top. Ore Generation adjusts ore placement to suit a lowered minimum height, and Lava Tunnels occasionally appear deep at the bottom of the world.