Minecraft World Generation Rant

This dude right here, Magnavode knows what's up.
The terrain generation is chock full of weird calculations, most of which are very opaque and suffer from generic variable names like "depth" and "scale".
For each chunk, the game generates three same-sized cubes of perlin noise (Lower Limit, Upper Limit, and Main), then for each position in the cube, it selects a value in between the Upper Limit noise and Lower Limit noise using the value in the Main noise as the interpolation factor. Each biome has a "scale" and "depth" value which is apparently used to affect how tall a given biome can be. Biome Scale/Depth Weight are multipliers for these values, Biome Scale/Depth Offset are additive.
In my experience, here are a few guidelines as to how to use the settings: - Main Noise Scale X/Y/Z adjust the relative size of the generated perlin noise slices, with larger values having a smoothing effect on the terrain. - Height Stretch will "pull" the terrain vertically upward, with smaller values causing more extreme stretching. - Biome Scale/Depth Weight/Offset will also stretch or squash the terrain vertically, but with more per-biome variance as they're affecting the parameters the biomes provide. - Upper Limit Scale / Lower Limit Scale can be used to make the terrain either more solid or more like swiss cheese depending on how close they are in value.