Thread:LOTRMod/@comment-29954640-20170415215125/@comment-25101690-20170415225833

Glflegolas wrote: That can't happen. I believe the LotR Mod uses RGB values for assigning biomes, which run from 0 to 255 inclusive. Therefore, there are theoretically 16.8 million different colours that Mevans can use. Minecraft itself can't handle that many biomes.

Glflegolas (admin) Send a Messenger Not quite correct. The colours in map.png are probably saved in 888 RGB values, which would mean 3 bytes uncompressed space needed per pixel. The PNG format supports palettes of up to 8 bit, so 256 colours are indexed in a colour table beside the pixel data, and each pixel only needs a single byte storage. So if the map has more than 256 colours, it will probably become much bigger. The format is very complex and there are a lot of optimisations possible, so it's hard to clearly predict that.

Internally, Minecraft stores biomes also as bytes, which means no matter what colour format the map.png uses, the mod can only have 256 biomes at all. That's why Mevans introduced biome variants and why the mod needs its own biome register, independant of the overworld biomes. I don't think there is any way to expand the 256 limit, because it's a fixed part of Minecraft's chunk format. Mevans would have to rewrite a lot of the vanilla code to change it. Instead, Mevans will have to find more techniques like biome variants to save biome IDs.