Tectonic Mod Guide: Vertical and Horizontal Scaling, Height Limits, and Terrain Shaping

Tectonic reshapes overworld terrain through a set of scaling, height, and noise controls that you adjust directly in its interface. This guide covers the vertical and horizontal scale options, the minimum and maximum height settings, ocean skew, continents, erosion, ridges, and the smoothing toggle.

Enabling the Mod

tooltip is the master switch. While it is disabled, Tectonic stays dormant and changes nothing about terrain generation. Turning it back on requires a game restart before the change takes effect.

Vertical Scaling and Height

Vertical Scale stretches terrain upward above sea level. The relationship is direct: doubling the value doubles how high the surface sits above sea level at any given point.

Mountain Scale amplifies what Vertical Scale does specifically on mountainous ground. Mountains and plateaus grow faster than lowlands when you raise it.

Minimum Height sets the lowest level used for building and generation. Maximum Height sets the highest. For reference, the older Increased Height option placed the maximum at 640.

Snow Start Offset shifts the y-level where snow begins appearing in cold biomes such as taigas.

Ocean Skew and Continents

Ocean Skew pushes terrain toward or away from oceans. Lower values produce more ocean. Two thresholds matter: once the value rises above -0.45, deep oceans stop appearing, and above -0.2, oceans stop appearing entirely.

Continent Scale controls continent size horizontally. Lower values make continents larger and widen the oceans separating them.

Ocean Monument Offset repositions vanilla ocean monuments so they sit correctly when oceans are deeper.

Remove Frozen Ocean Ice clears surface ice from Frozen Oceans, leaving them as navigable as Deep Frozen Oceans.

Erosion and Ridges

Erosion Scale works horizontally and mainly affects mountains. Lower values give you thicker mountain ranges and more terrain between them.

Ridge Scale works horizontally on ridge noise, which primarily shapes rivers and the terrain around them, including plateaus. Lower values mean wider rivers and more ground between them.

Plateau Threshold marks where plateau terrain transitions into flatter terrain. Positive numbers push toward flat ground; negative numbers push toward plateaus.

Smoothing

Smoothing heavily flattens the terrain in the style of Tectonic v2, eliminating staircasing artifacts. The trade-off is odd or broken generation in deep oceans and windswept biomes.

Islands

Island Scale stretches islands horizontally. Lower values enlarge islands and the oceans between them. Island Noise Multiplier makes normal and mushroom islands more frequent. Island Noise Offset shifts the balance: higher values favor normal islands, lower values favor mushroom islands. Island Height Offset uses sea level as zero, so -0.5 places islands 64 blocks below sea level.

Operating the Settings

Every option above is adjusted through the mod's interface rather than through crafting. Where a control has a dedicated hotkey, use the corresponding hotkey and set it in the controls menu. Changes that state a restart requirement, such as tooltip and the old caves toggle, only apply after you restart the game.