First of all: We wish you all a Merry Christmas!! 
Finally the long awaited biomes arrived, just in time for Christmas! You will find a bunch of new landscapes in Rising World now, among others deserts, savannas, snowy areas and more. Of course this also includes a bunch of new animals (for example penguins, giraffes, elephants or tigers) as well as new plants (cactus, acacia, poplar and more).
More biomes will follow in the future, together with the water update.
You will also find new sound effects (especially new ambience sounds for the different biomes) and 4 new music tracks in this update.
As usual we also fixed several bugs or did other improvements, you find the full changelog attached.
Have fun and a Merry Christmas
Changelog 2015-12-24:
- [New] Biomes, among others desert, savannah, tundra, taiga, polar region
- [New] New animals: Penguin, giraffe, elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, jaguar
- [New] New tree types: Acacia, cactus, palm, poplar, dead trees (spruce, maple, apple)
- [New] New plants: Welwitschia, scrubs
- [New] New grass types: Flowers, dry grass, frozen grass, snowy grass
- [New] New ambience sounds for different biomes
- [New] Added 4 new music tracks
- [New] New decoration object: Christmas tree (3 different sizes)
- [New] Added version check for multiplayer server (you see a notification in the output console on startup)
- [New] Old serverlogs will now be deleted after a given amount of time (can be adjusted in server.properties)
- [New] Added beep to ore detector
- [New] New Lua function: 'player:getPlayerGroup()' to get the current (permission) group of a player
- [Change] Increased max world height (sky) by 64 blocks (total world height: 1216 blocks)
- [Change] Changed ore textures
- [Change] Changed some world textures (e.g. sand) and added new ones (e.g. dry grass)
- [Change] Adjusted some animal sounds (e.g. rooster)
- [Change] Adjusted previews when placing objects/plants/constructions etc.
- [Change] Keybinding for console can be changed in the config.properties now
- [Change] Plants will now be influenced by static light
- [Change] Reduced strength of tree stumps
- [Change] Adjusted some item sounds (e.g. sickle)
- [Bugfix] Fixed wrong sounds when breaking blocks
- [Bugfix] Fixed "transparency" of plants
- [Bugfix] Fixed issues when creating a world with too long seed
- [Bugfix] Fixed wrong calculation of light direction on plants
- [Bugfix] Fixed glass panes being partly visible through plants
- [Bugfix] Fixed bug which caused a crash in some situations
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Bugfix 2015-12-25:
- [Change] The new animals (tigers, elephants etc) can be disabled now when creating a new world
- [Change] Adjusted spawnrate of animals and trees in snow biome
- [Bugfix] Fixed ore texture (items)
- [Bugfix] Fixed texture preview in terrain edit tools (creative mode)
- [Bugfix] Fixed rotation issues with objects, images and construction elements
- [Bugfix] Poplars drop saplings now
- [Bugfix] Fixed crash on Linux (Standalone only)
- [Bugfix] Rotation of construction elements no longer resets when closing the console
Thanks 
