AmbientSounds is a framework in Minecraft for playing sounds in various situation. Good news, all of it is customizable. The built in engine can be modified or an entirely new engine can be created using resourcepacks. This should provide you an overview of all the things you need to know in order to get started.

You need to understand the basics of a resourcepack and the json format first in order to follow the tutorial. I highly recommend to inform yourself about these two things before starting here.

An engine defines which sounds should be played when and how loud. Furthermore it determines how often the environment should be scanned, the size of air-pocket scan and a lot more. Find more information about it in the dedicated page for engines.

AmbientSounds also includes a way to detect blocks or a combination of blocks. These are called features. A tree is for example a feature. All of them can be custom defined and used as a condition for regions and sounds. To make it simple I can define a feature called tree and make the region forest depend on it, so it is only active if the feature tree can be found. You can find more about it here.

In order to know which sounds to play there 3 layers of groups.

1. Dimension: An engine provides a list of dimensions to choose from, but only one can be active at the same time. A dimension influences the detection of biomes, rain and some other things.

2. Region: Multiple regions can be active at the same time. Each region defines conditions if these are meet the region is active.

3. Sound: Each active region provides a list of sounds to be played. The sounds can have conditions as well.

You do not need to know everything to do certain things. So, the question is what you are trying to do.

• Add/ Modify dimension
• Add/ Modify features
• Add/ Modify region
• Add/ Modify sound

If you want to create your own engine, you will have to do everything from scratch. Read through all the pages and look at the built in engine to get an idea how things work. Once you learned that you are good to do your own thing.