no dirt sand or soil on new worlds

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pottery
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Joined: Sun Aug 07, 2022 19:34

no dirt sand or soil on new worlds

by pottery » Post

Greetings! My gratitude to anyone who reads this; your time is appreciated.
I am a complete computer dunce but I learned about minetest and how it is friendly to people just learning to program. It interested me, not only for my sake, but for my childrens’ as they would need to know such things.
I am writing to ask a question about a problem with generating new maps. The issue is this: After downloading the game minetest 5 “the real test” (in lord of the rings style font) any world I generate doesn’t have dirt, sand (except clumps of silver sand in rock), soil, or any of the other top layer stuff, though there is still water. There was no error message at the top of the screen either. Interestingly, there is still equisetum and ferns spawning in some places, so maybe it is not purely a biomes issue? This is in any of the mapgen versions, in minetest and mineclone. (the latter I installed to see if the problem carried over.) I am on a linuxmint computer, so I downloaded off flatpack which is minetest 5.5.1. The same problem happened on my windows computer after downloading the hades game.
First, I checked the settings tab of the minetest home menu, turning on and off all the mapgen and biome settings, as well as a few others, to no avail. Next I tried uninstalling minetest and reinstalling, (deleting everything and reinstalling is what worked on the windows computer) but all the mods and saved worlds were still on it when I reinstalled, and the problem was unchanged. Next I uninstalled it and tried manually finding and deleting all the minetest files in storage. I found them, but they were labeled as owned by “root” and I could not modify or delete them. Then I tried deleting all worlds and all mods, again fruitless. Here is another interesting thing; the mods “skeleton mobs” and “homedecor” were not on the list so I could not uninstall them from the mod list, instead deleting from the “contents” tab. I couldn’t find the minetest 5 game either. Now I have multiple copies of minetest5.5.1 (also I think an older version of minetest from the software manager) on my hard drive that I can’t do anything with. It automatically stored in the “file system,” I have a feeling that is not where they should be. Should I ask the linux community about the “owned by root” issue? That is where I am at currently.
As an end note, in addition to fixing the above mentioned problem, I also need to be able to access the files on my computer so we can start playing with programing. Thanks again, I am eager for any assistance.

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Mantar
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Re: no dirt sand or soil on new worlds

by Mantar » Post

Check your mapgen settings, under the All Settings button, look for Mapgen->Mapgen flags and make sure it's set to generate everything. I've had those flags get disabled by something, resulting in barren worlds of water and stone.
Lead dev of Exile, git repo: https://codeberg.org/Mantar/Exile

Tesseract
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Joined: Thu Dec 16, 2021 21:34

Re: no dirt sand or soil on new worlds

by Tesseract » Post

Pottery, I saw the same thing as you. Per the wiki page on biomes, the default terrain generation without any mods is just stone, so I suspected something was messing with biome generation. I renamed my library folder so Minetest would think it was a fresh install, then v7 mapgen worked properly. When I copied my old minetest.conf file into the new library folder, new v7 worlds generated with only stone. By copying sections of my old minetest.conf into the new one a bit at a time, I eventually found the offending line:

mg_flags = caves,dungeons,light,decorations,nobiomes,ores

The "nobiomes" option is obviously the culprit. I've been playing Mintest since sometime in the 4.x branch, and I suspect that option is left over from an earlier version. After restoring my library folder and removing that one line from minetest.conf, my new v7 worlds generate with biomes as they should.

Check your minetest.conf for "mg_flags" and remove that line, or just back up your minetest.conf file and re-set all your settings from scratch, then you should see worlds that aren't vast expanses of barren stone.

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