What the mod does
Sparse Structures gives you control over how far apart structures generate. It affects vanilla builds, modded locations, and datapacks. By default, it doubles the separation and spacing between structures, which cuts down on clutter in large modpacks. You can also lower values to make landmarks show up more often.
The mod doesn't alter ore generation, geodes, or similar world features. It makes minor adjustments to trees and terrain, but these shifts stay small. Vanilla Minecraft caps structure separation at 4096 chunks, which is about 65,000 blocks. This mod removes that limit completely.
It changes structure spread.
Key adjustments and fixes
The mod fixes bug MC-177381. Honestly, that bug caused the /locate command to report inaccurate distances between players and targeted structures.
Structure placement clustering gets reduced as well. Many structure mods use a default salt value of zero, which bunches builds together in identical regions. Sparse Structures can generate salt based on the structure ID instead. This keeps different structures from piling on top of each other.
Configuration and commands
All options sit in the config folder inside sparsestructures.json5.
The main spreadFactor setting controls global spacing. This default multiplier is 2, making structures twice as rare. Setting it to 0.5 increases spawn frequency. Setting it to 0 turns off structure generation entirely. Avoid setting extremely small numbers like 0.01 because that slows down world generation.
You can set custom rules for individual structures in the customSpreadFactors list. Each entry takes a structure name and a custom multiplier.
If you don't want to look up structure IDs manually, run /dumpstructuresets. This command exports every loaded structure set into a text file formatted for your config. You must restart the game after changing config values so the mod can reload them.
Technical details and known quirks
This is a server-side mod. It doesn't support client-side installation. Supported mod loaders are Fabric, Forge, and Neoforge. Supported Minecraft versions include 26.2, 26.1.2, and 1.21.11. Fabric users need Fabric API or a Quilt equivalent.
Keep two compatibility details in mind:
First, if you play with Alex's Caves, set its structures to a spread factor of 1 to prevent issues.
Second, running the /locate command on a disabled structure in versions 1.20.X freezes the internal server until restart. That problem doesn't happen on 1.21.X versions.
