Thread:LOTRMod/@comment-29954640-20170415215125/@comment-25101089-20170416222241

There is no danger of running out of biome colours, as Glflegolas said, there are more available colours than all the modders in the world working together could ever need.

If need be I could expand the size of the biome list fairly easily. I already modified the chunk data to add one byte for biome variants (256 bytes per chunk, each block column); if need be, I could add another byte for "biome ID extra data" and thus raise the total number of biome IDs to 65536, without too much trouble. I very much doubt that will ever be necessary though.

And for the record, the biome variants wasn't so much to save IDs as it was to create variety "automatically" at less effort. It's much easier to define 100 biomes + 10 generic variants, for a total of 100 * 10 = 1000 "biomes", than to define the full 1000 biomes individually.