Minecraft wiki entry for Before_1.18, associated text: Biome generation was initialized as a 1 to 4096 scale of ocean, with a few spots of landmasses scattered throughout. This map was then scaled and additional landmasses shuffled around to decrease the amount of ocean, twice, to reach a scale of 1 to 1024. Additional layers that decrease the amount of ocean were repeatedly applied until the ratio of land to ocean was about 50-50. Snowy biome categories were then assigned to a few spots of land, which was then shuffled around a final time to obtain a ratio of 33% ocean and 67% landmass.