Biomes, mobs & add-ons

Editing the world beyond its blocks — the biome data at every position, the entities living in it, and any add-on packs it ships.

Biome painter

Bedrock stores a biome for every block position — full 3D, not just a map view — and biomes drive grass/foliage/water tint, fog, weather, music and mob spawning in-game. The Biome painter (P) paints them. Pick the biome from the tool's dropdown, then choose how it applies:

• Whole column (default) — every Y under the brush footprint, top of the world to the bottom. Right for reshaping the biome map of terrain.
• 3D brush — a blob at the clicked height, using the brush shape and radius. Right for pockets: a cave ceiling, a floating island's underside.
• Flood enclosed space — click a wall or floor inside a sealed space (a room in a house, a cave chamber) and the biome floods the whole enclosed air volume plus its walls and floor — so the surface tint follows, and the room is swamp all the way into its corners. If the space leaks to the open world, Quarry tells you instead of flooding the map.

There's also Apply to selection: make a box with the Select tool (the room's interior, a build's bounds), then click the button in the Biome options — the whole box takes the biome as one undo step.

Selecting the tool switches on the Biome view (recolour the world by biome) so you can see what you're painting; the 3D modes also enable the Volumes view below. All painting is undoable like any other edit, and only touched chunks are rewritten on export.

Seeing 3D biomes: the Volumes view

Surface recolouring can't show a biome painted into the air of a room — there is nothing to recolour. The Volumes picker in the Biome options (also in View & Rendering as Biome volumes) draws the biome data itself as translucent coloured hulls:

• Pockets — shows only biomes that differ from their column's dominant biome, visible through walls. Your hidden swamp room glows through the house from outside; a mushroom pocket deep in a cave shows from the surface.
• All boundaries — traces every biome border along the terrain and through caves, for auditing the whole biome layout.

Each biome keeps a stable, distinct colour (the same ones the Biome view uses), so a boundary always reads as "these two biomes meet here".

Mobs

Two Mobs tools place and edit the world's entities, shown as their real 3D models — Place and Edit, side by side in the toolbar like Build/Erase. Mobs are visible all the time while you edit (not just with a mob tool active); a Show mobs toggle and a Mob distance cap live in the dock's View & Rendering section if you want them out of the way on huge worlds.

Place: its options (mob, variant, group size) sit in the options bar. Pick a mob from the palette (vanilla types grouped by temperament, any custom entities the world's add-ons define — see Custom entity support — plus anything already living in your world) and a translucent ghost of it follows the ground under your cursor. Scroll or press R to turn it in 45° steps, then click to place. Raise Group size (up to 5) to drop a small, naturally spread pack — companions land a few blocks apart on their own ground columns, facing roughly the same way, like a vanilla spawn.

The palette's Objects group — armour stands, item frames, paintings, boats, minecarts and TNT — draws as real models too, the same as any creature.

Variants: mobs that come in different skins — cats, sheep, rabbits, parrots, llamas, axolotls, foxes and horses — show a Variant picker in the options bar (horses also get Markings). It defaults to Random, so a placed group varies like a natural spawn; pick a specific colour to force it. The variant is written into the world so the mob spawns the same colour in Minecraft. Cats, rabbits, parrots, llamas and axolotls preview their exact skin in the editor and sheep show their dyed wool; foxes and horses get the correct in-game variant while the editor shows their default model. The Edit tool's picker recolours the mob you clicked.

Edit: click a mob to select it (it tints gold) — this works on mobs you placed and mobs that were already in an imported world. Drag the arrow handles to move it (mobs move on a block grid), drag the rotation ring to turn it freely — hold Shift to snap to 45° — or type an exact angle with the Facing slider, and change its Variant. Delete (button or key) removes it; Esc deselects. Every placement, move, rotation, recolour and delete is one entry in the shared undo history.

What's not editable (yet): mob health, equipment and other NBT details, and entities stored in the legacy pre-actor format — those are all preserved untouched in exports. As always, mobs you never edited round-trip byte-for-byte. Mob editing is also disabled while a collab session is connected (entity edits don't sync to teammates yet).

Add-Ons

The Add-Ons panel lists the world's behavior/resource packs, worldgen features, and custom dimensions. Worlds with add-on packs show their custom blocks — real textures and custom models in the viewport, paintable like any block. You can stamp a single-block or ore feature into the world with one click.

Importing packs

Import add-on… in the Add-Ons panel takes .mcaddon, .mcpack, or a plain .zip of either — including an .mcaddon whose packs are themselves .mcpack archives, and packs zipped inside a wrapping folder. You can also just drag the file onto the window: Quarry looks inside it to tell an add-on from a world, so you don't have to use the matching menu item.

Packs already embedded in an imported world are picked up automatically, and every pack — imported or embedded, active or not — is written back untouched when you export.

Two kinds of pack can't be used, and Quarry tells you which: encrypted Marketplace packs, whose files only the game itself can read, and skin packs, which don't affect a world's blocks.

Custom block support

Custom blocks are read from behavior-pack blocks/*.json together with the resource pack's textures, models, and terrain_texture.json aliases. Quarry understands every version of the block format since 2020 — from the earliest blocks (which had no visual components at all and took their textures from blocks.json) through the Holiday Creator Features era, the 1.19 renames, and today's format. That includes:

• Permutations — blocks whose textures, model, or orientation change with their block state, evaluated per block, so a lit lamp differs from an unlit one.
• Custom geometry — models in both the 1.8.0 and 1.12.0+ layouts, read from any .json under the pack's models/ folder (the .geo.json name is only a convention), with box and per-face UVs, drawn with Minecraft's model orientation and UV conventions (including per-face uv_rotation, cube mirroring, and bone rotation on any axis) so a model looks the way it does in Blockbench.
• Material instances — per-face textures, named instances referenced by geometry, tint_method (so a block that asks for a biome tint gets one), and the lighting flags face_dimming and ambient_occlusion, which decorated props rely on to read evenly lit from every side.
• Render methods — opaque, alpha_test, alpha_test_single_sided, blend and the *_to_opaque variants each behave as they do in Minecraft, including which of them hide the blocks behind them. A pack that marks a see-through texture opaque (which Minecraft draws solid) is flagged in the Add-Ons panel instead of tearing holes in the world.
• Block shapes — the built-in minecraft:geometry.full_block and minecraft:geometry.cross (the crossed planes vanilla uses for flowers and saplings) both render correctly.
• Block states — a custom block's declared states, and the ones its placement traits add, appear in the same states picker vanilla blocks use, so you can place a chair facing east or a lamp already lit.
• Animated textures — a texture a pack declares in flipbook_textures.json cycles its frames at the authored speed (the "Animate textures" setting turns custom and vanilla animation on and off together).
• Rotation — minecraft:transformation and the placement-direction traits turn both modelled and full-cube blocks, including uv_lock for a texture that should stay aligned to the world as the block turns. A full cube turns the texture within each face as well as moving it between faces, so patterned paving laid four ways reads four ways.
• Placement — a transformation's translation and scale move and size a modelled block within its cell, so a prop authored part-way up a block sits there. A full cube can only be turned, and a pack that tries to move or resize one is noted in the Add-Ons panel.
• Light — a block's minecraft:light_emission lights the world around it and minecraft:light_dampening decides how much light it lets through, so a pack's lamps glow and its walls and roofs cast interiors into shade.

When you open an add-on, Quarry renders a real isometric icon for each custom block (and each vanilla block a resource pack retextures) and shows it in the block palette and hotbar — the same 3-D view it draws in the world — so a pack's blocks are easy to tell apart instead of appearing as flat colour chips. They never hold up opening the world: the whole set renders in the background (a small progress bar appears by the block palette) and the swatches fill in as they arrive.

A custom block Quarry can't fully resolve still renders — as its authored map_color where it has one, otherwise a solid stand-in colour — and its data always round-trips to export untouched.

Custom entity support

A pack's entities render from their own model and texture, so a map's custom creatures, statues and props look the way their creator built them instead of appearing as the plain coloured boxes Quarry used to draw. Quarry reads the behavior pack's entities/*.json for what an entity is — whether it can be summoned, how big it is, which variants it declares — and the resource pack's entity/*.entity.json for how it looks.

• Render controllers pick the model and skin, including the common case of choosing a texture from an array by the mob's variant, so a creature with several skins shows the right one. Expressions Quarry can't work out ahead of time — anything that depends on the running game, like how many of a mob are nearby — fall back to the entity's default look and are listed in the Add-Ons panel rather than failing silently.
• Vanilla mobs a resource pack restyles show the pack's version. If a pack ships its own entity/cow.entity.json, its cow is what you see.
• Placing them works exactly like vanilla mobs: custom entities appear in an Add-On group at the top of the Mobs picker (see Mobs), with any variants they declare in the variant dropdown. The Add-Ons panel lists them too, each with a Place button that switches to the Mobs tool with that entity selected. Entities a pack marks as not summonable are left out of the picker, and experimental ones are labelled.

Entities are drawn in their resting pose. Quarry doesn't play a pack's animations, so a mob stands still rather than walking or idling — an entity that ships animations says so in the Add-Ons panel.

Diagnostics

The Add-Ons panel's Custom blocks section is a content log: it shows how many custom blocks render fully and lists the exact problem for any that don't — a missing texture file, an absent geometry model, an unreadable permutation, or a texture that overflowed the atlas. Importing an add-on reports the same tally in the status bar, so a pack with problems is obvious right away. Blocks that render fine but ask for something Quarry doesn't draw yet get a note of their own, so a block that looks subtly wrong tells you why rather than leaving you guessing.

Custom entities get the same treatment in their own section: how many render fully, and for the rest what went wrong — a missing client entity, a geometry model or texture that isn't in the pack, a render controller that can't be resolved ahead of time, or animations that won't play.