Latitude

First Latitude release for Minecraft 26.3. It carries everything from Beta 4 and Beta 5 on 26.2 and adds Minecraft's new Dappled Forest to Latitude's climate map.

New

• Minecraft 26.3. Latitude's terrain settings, features, and world-border rendering are ported to the 26.3 world-generation format. A seed lays out essentially the same climate map on 26.3 as it did on 26.2, apart from a scattering of single cells at coasts and biome edges; the only new element is the Dappled Forest below.
• Dappled Forest. Minecraft 26.3's new forest joins the temperate band. It is a cool-climate forest, so Latitude admits it only along the cool edge of the temperate zone: lowland ground in the transition where temperate gives way to the subpolar taiga, roughly 43° to 51° on a Regular world, wandering a couple of degrees either way where the boundary itself meanders. That strip is a fixed 700 blocks or so deep, so it spans a wider stretch of latitude on a small world and a narrower one on the largest. It steps aside where wetlands or the Pale Garden take the ground. Every new world reserves a guaranteed patch of Dappled Forest somewhere in that strip, so there is always one to find. Where the Dappled Forest is not allowed, terrain keeps the biome it would have had before, so the rest of the temperate zone is unchanged.
• Existing worlds get the Dappled Forest too, in terrain you have not explored yet. The first time a 26.2 Latitude world opens on 26.3, Latitude stamps it once so that eligible cool-border terrain generated from then on may contain the Dappled Forest. Explored chunks are never rewritten, the world's original biome plan is unchanged, opening the world again adds nothing further, and if all the eligible ground was explored already the biome simply stays unavailable in that world. Carried-over worlds do not get the reserved patch that new worlds do. This applies to worlds made by a recent Latitude with the current world-generation policy; worlds made by an older Latitude, or whose Latitude data is incomplete, are left exactly as they are. Back up a world before opening it on 26.3: saving there can update Minecraft's own data, so taking that save back to 26.2 is unsupported.
• A still background for the create-world screen. A Still tab hangs under the bottom-left corner of Latitude's create-world panel, styled like the World and Settings tabs above it. Switch it on to swap the moving panorama for a flat dark backdrop; the choice is remembered between sessions. (Also in Beta 5 for 26.2, 26.1, 1.21.11 and 1.21.1.)
• Loading-screen phrases for 26.3. Eleven new phrases about the Dappled Forest and the abandoned camps join the rotating loading-screen text, and they show three times as often as the older ones.

Improved

• Mushroom Fields are vanilla islands again. Latitude no longer reserves a spot in the ocean and builds an island there. Mushroom Fields now appears exactly where vanilla would put it: on the low natural islands the terrain itself raises in the deepest ocean, in any climate band. The flat sea-level apron and stepped terraces of the built island are gone with it. Small worlds may have no Mushroom Fields at all, as in vanilla. Existing worlds keep any built island they have already generated; unexplored ocean follows the vanilla rule.
• Less repeated work while chunks generate and while the HUD is on screen. A check for the Mushroom Fields island no longer runs heavy trigonometry for every block in the world, several per-column debug values are no longer computed when their debug switch is off, biome lookups on the compass HUD are cached per tick, and the loading-screen compass is drawn in far fewer draw calls. Apart from the Mushroom Fields change below, worlds generate exactly the same terrain and biomes: the same seed gives the same map, cell for cell.
• Smoother transitions into the polar region. Taiga now thins out in patches across the subpolar edge instead of disappearing along a straight latitude line. The polar tree line is preserved. (Also in Beta 4 for Minecraft 26.2.)
• Edge storm warnings now say whether the storm is to the east or west. (Also in Beta 4 for 26.2.)
• Less repeat work while exploring new terrain. Latitude no longer repeats a custom-biome scan that was only needed for disabled diagnostics during chunk decoration. (Also in Beta 4 for 26.2.)
• Create-world screen layout. Panels sit tighter with less empty space, the World and Settings tab headers are now real buttons you can reach and activate from the keyboard (and Minecraft's narrator announces them), and panel backgrounds are slightly see-through so the panorama behind shows through.

Fixed

• The create-world screen's "start with compass" choice no longer carries over into other saves opened later in the same session.
• Cycling the world size with the arrows no longer rebuilds the screen and steals keyboard focus from the world-name field.
• A closed create-world screen no longer stays in memory, together with the world data it loaded, until the game exits.
• When a /locate search is already running, the second player is now told whose search it is and that only one runs at a time, instead of being promised a result that never arrives.
• About 1,200 lines of development-only and unreachable code no longer ship inside the public jar.

Known issues

• Minecraft's own biome tags decide where the Dappled Forest variant of the Abandoned Camp can generate. Latitude never places camps itself; it can only turn a structure down when it would straddle the wrong biome or sit in the border danger zone. A camp inside a Latitude Dappled Forest has not yet been confirmed in testing.

World-generation changes apply to newly generated terrain. Existing chunks keep their current biomes.