Sinkhole Restorer

Starting with version 1.19.3, aquifers stopped generating at the bottom of the world, where sea level sits and the peaks and valleys noise produces extremely negative weirdness values. Seeds that once showed sinkholes there began to show ordinary terrain, which many players found disappointing in deep lakes. The mod restores the earlier behavior by changing how the game chooses where aquifers appear, so such landscapes return on newly generated terrain.

The change targets the aquifer generation code directly and does not rely on data packs. Because the mod alters vanilla worldgen, existing chunks keep their current shape: loading or unloading the mod affects only chunks generated afterwards. Worlds that were already created before the change keep their original terrain, so the mod suits players who want the sinkholes in a world they start or extend after upgrading.

Sinkhole Restorer is server-side only, so players join without installing it. The server needs it, and the code is open source under the MIT License. Files are published for Fabric, Forge and NeoForge across 26 release versions, 1.19.3 – 26.3, with snapshot builds also published.