trying to reduce generated structures

[dull light]

Helping someone host a private survival server with large biomes, and we feel there are too many generated structures. I tried asking chatgpt for help and no luck. It made me make a datapack folder looking like this:
reducedstructure

• pack.mcmeta
• data
  -- minecraft
  --- worldgen
  ---- structure_set
  ----- village.json

pack.mcmeta contains this:
{
"pack": {
"pack_format": 15,
"description": "Reduces vanilla structure spawn rates"
}
}

and village.json contains this:
{
"structures": [
{ "structure": "minecraft:village_plains", "weight": 1 },
{ "structure": "minecraft:village_desert", "weight": 1 },
{ "structure": "minecraft:village_savanna", "weight": 1 },
{ "structure": "minecraft:village_snowy", "weight": 1 },
{ "structure": "minecraft:village_taiga", "weight": 1 }
],
"placement": {
"type": "minecraft:random_spread",
"spacing": 640,
"separation": 120,
"salt": 10387312
}
}

I am not a good coder and it's probably obvious to someone experienced with this, i just want this to work, hopefully understand it enough so i can repeat it with other things without coming back asking more questions

[ashen sequoia]

Look at this in-depth guide

[solemn lantern]

Now by sheer luck, this structure_set file does happen to be correct, and will make villages incredibly rare

If you want to reduce the frequency of other structures too, you'll need to overwrite their structure_set files as well. You can find those on Misode as presets, or in the vanilla data pack inside your version's jar.

If you want to adjust the village frequency from here, check out that guide to see what values in this file to adjust

[dull light]

it does not work, we deleted the world folder, started the server (to generate a new world) placed this inside datapacks, checked the console for datapacks, enabled this one, then joined the server and there were still villages right around spawn, nothing changed (also checked further away like 1k blocks)

[solemn lantern]

What Minecraft version?

Also if you add the data pack after worldgen, yeah you're gonna get inconsistent results

[dull light]

1.21.11

[solemn lantern]

Your pack.mcmeta is outdated, the pack may not be loading
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Pack.mcmeta

[dull light]

the world shouldn't generate before anyone joins, its just to get the world folder so i have somewhere to place the datapack

[dull light]

okey, ill check this

so what i've found is that the structures generate per biome, and istead of having one village json, i need one for each biome

testing this now

[solemn lantern]

Not quite

Individual structures do only generate in valid biomes, but their frequency is handled here in the structure_set file, and for villages, each biome variant is collected in one structure_set file.

What this means in practice is that the game makes an attempt to spawn a village every X chunks according to the spacing and separation here, then checks the biome at that attempted location. If it's one of the biomes that one of those listed village types can spawn in, it generates that village. Otherwise, it skips that attempt

[dull light]

but the datapack should override this spacing and seperation number, and make it so the game wants to spawn them further away from each other, however it's not working in practice

[solemn lantern]

It may not be working, but the solution is not a different structure_set file for each village type

[dull light]

or is the datapack only adding additional villages at these spacings? so vanilla spawns occur on top of the sparse ones i'm trying to generate?

[solemn lantern]

We need to actually figure out why it's not working.

[solemn lantern]

Could be if you named it incorrectly and it's not overwriting

Have you checked what the vanilla village structure_set file is called?

It may not be village

[dull light]

no idea how to check that

[solemn lantern]

You can look at the presets on Misode, or open up your Minecraft jar with an archive program like 7Zip or WinRAR and take a look at the internal data pack via the data folder

[dull light]

i think my only issue right now is the mcmeta file, my datapack says broken when i try to load it, however i check the version (94.1 or 94.0) and it should be correct, am i missing something?

here's the contents:

{
"pack": {
"description": "Reduced Structures Datapack",
"pack_format": 94.0
}
}

also pulled the json contents of the minecraft data folder to find the correct script to use for spacing etc.

[solemn lantern]

That's not correct syntax

In lieu of the deprecated pack_format field, you need min_format and max_format, and their values must be in the form of [94,0], not 94.0

This is all on the wiki page I shared

[dull light]

i got it working with the help of someone in VC:

solution:

the correct pack format was found with the command /datapack create test while in a singleplayer creative game: then i copied the pack.mcmeta content.

then for the structure editing, it was copying the data file from the java folder (appdata, roaming, .minecraft, versions, the version you're using, open the jar file with winrar and copy the data folder to the desktop) then i found the root for villages and copied the content and edited spacing and separation numbers for the correct spacing in the minecraft world. (testing this out right now, as i want sparse but not impossible to find villages)