Stony Cliffs Are Cool Wiki

Steep ground in Minecraft shows dirt, because that is what hills are made of. On a real slope the soil would have slid off long ago and the rock beneath would be visible.

Stony Cliffs Are Cool closes that gap with a single narrow rule applied while land is generated: dirt that is exposed on a steep face becomes stone. The result is hillsides with rock faces instead of dirt walls.

Only dirt that is already part of a steep, exposed face is eligible, and only where stone is already present nearby. That condition is what keeps ordinary countryside untouched - a rolling meadow has no exposed vertical faces, so nothing there qualifies.

The grass layer on top is preserved, so from above the land still looks green. The change is visible from the side, on the cut.

Every overworld biome is covered, so the effect is driven by how steep the ground is rather than which biome you are standing in. Ridges, plateau edges, valley walls and lake rims pick it up; flat terrain naturally shows little because it has few steep faces.

Nothing is added to the world - no blocks, items, mobs, structures or recipes - and no terrain height or shape is altered.

The rule is applied at generation time. Land already generated keeps its original appearance, so installing this into a world in progress will not alter the ground around anything you have built.

New territory generates with stone faces from the moment it is installed, and the world remains perfectly playable if it is later removed.

This is a subtle, world-wide change rather than a set-piece. Individual screenshots show less of it than travelling does; the clearest way to see it is to compare the same slope with and without it, where the dirt wall becomes a banded rock face.

Terraced hill country shows it best, since those slopes are made almost entirely of short vertical cuts.

There is nothing to configure and nothing that needs maintaining. Because the work is finished by the time a chunk exists, it has no ongoing cost while you play.

It is safe to combine with other content, though anything else that also rewrites overworld terrain surfaces may overlap with it on the same slopes.