I host a SMP server on a VPS and lately there's been a couple of hard crashes at the hosting facility which has caused some interesting biome glitches.
The initial spawn area and the surrounding blocks were forest/rainforest when the world was first created. Also I claimed a rainforest island and started working on it, putting easily 60 hours into developing it so far.
However, because of the crashes, it seems that the biomes are glitched. Now instead of being a nice lush rainforest, I'm living in TUNDRA. I even checked with the biome checking plugin for bukkit and it seems that the biome for my island has totally switched.
My question is, how can I fix this? Is there a bukkit plugin or some kind of editor that I can use?
Best Answer
One possible reason could be data corruption. The Random Seed of each map is saved in the file, and this seed determines how the world looks. Due to data corruption during the crashes it could be that this seed has changed, which would effectively screw everything (but would deliver interesting results for sure).
Another possible explanation is that you either got a completely new map1 or chunks got corrupted/replaced/lost.
Anyway, my best advice is to restore from backup. Even if you change the seed back (given that you know the original one) or find the corrupted chunks, there's not much to gain. Parts of the world are already corrupted and you could only remove them and let them regenerate.
1: Don't laugh, that happened to me once...took me ten minutes to figure that out.