I don't mind the terrain generation. It's the resource generation that sucks, in my opinion. They made the world bigger, but didn't increase the resources to match. And then they added massive (and small) caves, all of which remove 100% of the resources that would have been present, replacing them with air or water.
The iron availability makes the game unplayable at 1.18 at this time. I had some thoughts about buying Bedrock to see how it plays, but I understand you can't play at older versions like you can in Java. That means I would be forced to play in a world with nowhere near enough iron present. So, they lost a sale there, for certain.
I don't mind the terrain generation. It's the resource generation that sucks, in my opinion. They made the world bigger, but didn't increase the resources to match. And then they added massive (and small) caves, all of which remove 100% of the resources that would have been present, replacing them with air or water.
The iron availability makes the game unplayable at 1.18 at this time. I had some thoughts about buying Bedrock to see how it plays, but I understand you can't play at older versions like you can in Java. That means I would be forced to play in a world with nowhere near enough iron present. So, they lost a sale there, for certain.
I agree, the resource generation in 1.18 destroyed the game, after Christmas I'm going to be hosting a Java 1.16 world for friends to play on. Unfortunately this means I'll have to put up with lag spikes for the time being until I can get a better computer, since Java edition isn't as optimized as bedrock edition. You can minimize the lag problem by keeping the render distance low, but it's still a bad compromise because it ends up affecting what biomes you can see ahead of you.
I don't want strip mining sessions to take 10x as long just to accumulate enough iron and other resources. It was already bad enough that Nether fortresses got made rarer in the Nether update in my opinion. At some point nerfing becomes an unhealthy obsession for developers, because all they end up doing is causing you to waste more time than you should have to, no one likes a game that is tedious to the point where you're repeating the same tasks for several hours for little or no reward. It's the type of thing that pushes people away to other games, or in this case older versions.
I don't mind the terrain generation. It's the resource generation that sucks, in my opinion. They made the world bigger, but didn't increase the resources to match. And then they added massive (and small) caves, all of which remove 100% of the resources that would have been present, replacing them with air or water.
The iron availability makes the game unplayable at 1.18 at this time. I had some thoughts about buying Bedrock to see how it plays, but I understand you can't play at older versions like you can in Java. That means I would be forced to play in a world with nowhere near enough iron present. So, they lost a sale there, for certain.
You mentioned the same thing in another thread but as I replied there it is false that adding more caves materially affects ore amounts; it is all because they made most ores only generate if they aren't exposed, completely contrary to an update that was supposed to make caving more attractive, as well as changed ore distributions so specific layers have more of specific ores (you can no longer find diamonds and coal, maybe even iron, on the same layers, or mostly only one type of ore, so you have to cover the entire ground depth) and my own mods which have significantly more caves than vanilla, even older versions (1.7 actually nerfed the amount of caves and other underground features, which is one reason why I've never updated to newer versions, as mentioned in the last link in my signature) have significantly more exposed ores per chunk even as the overall amounts are slightly lower, but only by 13% at the most compared to a world with no underground features (I do not collect ores faster though as this is more of a function of exposed ores per surface area):
The issue is that the new terrain generation is too... aggressive? It didn't need to be applied EVERYWHERE to such an intense degree. The geography is just broken everywhere, especially with villages. I have yet to see one that isn't completely busted up, sometimes to the point that they can't even have crops because their fields aren't joined together on different levels of the terrain. Buildings can be separated by hundreds of blocks because a mountain area sprouted up right in the middle of them. Iron and emerald is just abundant out in the open, trust me, just live like dwarf in the mountains and you'll have more iron and coal than you know what to do with. But having any sort of level area to build a decent base and all your farms? Not without a LOT of terraforming.
But having any sort of level area to build a decent base and all your farms? Not without a LOT of terraforming.
Meh, that isn't true... There are plenty of flat areas to build your stuff... I would even say that some biomes provide even flatter areas than in the previous generation... For example, in the new "Sparse Jungle" biome the other day I saw flat areas where you could walk like 50 blocks without a single unevenness. I didn't see such flatness since the old 1.6.4 generation, because from 1.7 onwards, even Plains were not completely flat at all and you needed a lot of terraforming to flatten an area.
I didn't see such flatness since the old 1.6.4 generation, because from 1.7 onwards, even Plains were not completely flat at all and you needed a lot of terraforming to flatten an area.
I've seen plenty of "hilly" plains in 1.6.4; for example, these plains have hills reaching y=83 (the small patch of dirt near the center of the leftmost image is the highest dirt layer below the surface grass block layer) and they can likely get even higher (Plains has 1/5 the height "variation" of Extreme Hills so this is equivalent to Extreme Hills reaching around y=160 if they were not limited by the terrain height limit (y=128), which reduces the amplitude of peaks in the noise field above around y=100):
I also find this quite obnoxious given what happens when a village decides to generate on such terrain, and this is why I made them flatter in TMCW, which adds a "hilly plains" variant to maintain variety (both can generate interchangeably as sub-biomes within the other; villages can only generate entirely within vanilla plains, as they only could prior to 1.10, which allowed them to spill over into any biome). Even then I found an area at around y=80 in the middle of a plains, though it was lower relative to the surrounding terrain (about 17 blocks for vanilla and 12 blocks for TMCW; the base height of biomes is gradually varied over large areas and this is why rivers can dry up in vanilla even in plains; I removed this variation and the influence of nearby biomes from rivers in TMCW so they never dry up, except in certain mountain biomes, which is intended):
Also, this is an example of the height (and biome) variation in TMCW, which will be greater in the next version (I added a large-scale noise field that acts as a multiplier with the biome heights which has a wavelength of about 1000 blocks; I've found normal "hills" biomes exceeding y=160):
Each frame is at y=255, 150, 120, 90, 80, and 70; the highest peaks are around y=160 and are near the center to bottom-center:
These are examples of what could be found in the next version in regions of greater height variation (even TMCWv4 may be able to have "hill"s biomes this high; I found a non-hills/mountain biome that reached y=145, higher than the highest peak in an Extreme Hills biome; but they would be much rarer); the only disadvantage of this increased variation (besides the difficulty of getting over them in Survival, which is one reason why I prefer more isolated "hills" sub-biomes over general terrain variation that is able to make giant mountain ranges) is that most structures will not generate in such terrain (the frequency of spawn attempts has been increased so they are about as common as temples and witch huts in 1.6.4 when all land biomes are considered):
(for an example of what can happen with structures in such terrain this is an extreme example (Amplified in I presume 1.17) somebody posted in "seeds" showing a woodland mansion on a large mountain)
I finally found something near the coast. a Plains biome that wasn't completely ravaged by caves and ravines and just HOLES everywhere, and a decent ways away from any mountain generation. That's where I managed to find a village and some open space that felt more stable. But that's... several hours of gameplay in that took me to find that.
I've seen plenty of "hilly" plains in 1.6.4; for example, these plains have hills reaching y=83 (the small patch of dirt near the center of the leftmost image is the highest dirt layer below the surface grass block layer) and they can likely get even higher (Plains has 1/5 the height "variation" of Extreme Hills so this is equivalent to Extreme Hills reaching around y=160 if they were not limited by the terrain height limit (y=128), which reduces the amplitude of peaks in the noise field above around y=100):mountain)
Yes, I guess so... But if you compare 1.6.4 generation with 1.7-1.17 generation, the former is generally much flatter than the latter... That's probably the main problem of 1.7-1.17 generation, which also affects to a certain extent the new 1.18 generation: the increased height limit destroys the flatness of certain biomes intended to be really flat, like beaches and swamps... In 1.6.4 (and I think that in your mod TMCW as well), beaches look like proper beaches and swamps look like proper swamps. In the new generation from 1.7 onwards, you see those ugly beaches climbing mountains everywhere, with sand reaching around y=75 or even more:
The same happens with swamps: small hills everywhere that shouldn't be present in a proper swamp:
I finally found something near the coast. a Plains biome that wasn't completely ravaged by caves and ravines and just HOLES everywhere, and a decent ways away from any mountain generation. That's where I managed to find a village and some open space that felt more stable. But that's... several hours of gameplay in that took me to find that.
The holes are meant to make survival more challenging, problem is if there are too many of them it gets in the way of building, and it also makes exploring a nuisance. By the time you have enchanted armour ravines aren't that much of an issue in terms of how dangerous they are anyway.
You still need to keep a sharp eye out for the ravines because there could be monsters at the bottom, but I can see how too many ravines would be a problem for some people. I don't like building bridges if I don't have to either.
In the new generation from 1.7 onwards, you see those ugly beaches climbing mountains everywhere, with sand reaching around y=75 or even more:
That image is from January 5, 2012 (the date is above the image) so it would have been from 1.1 (you appear to have taken it from this thread, which mentions 1.7 but only as an upcoming update (last updated Jul 8, 2013, before the first 1.7 snapshot); all the complaints and examples are of post-Beta 1.7.3 - Release 1.6.4 generation); maybe a more extreme example but I've seen beaches like this in 1.6.4:
Interestingly, the Wiki states that the height of various biomes were increased in 1.3.1, which would have worsened the issue with beaches (hills sub-biomes generally don't generate adjacent to other biomes though); otherwise, terrain generation seems to have been unchanged until 1.7:
Also, TMCW completely changes how terrain height is handled in beach biomes so they are still flat even next to mountains (the smoothing of heights between biomes was greatly reduced and the the base depth noise that creates gently rolling hills even with no other height variation was removed):
In addition, I compared the source code for 1.6.4 and 1.7 and Plains actually has less height variation in 1.7; in 1.6.4 the heights are set to 0.1 and 0.3 while in 1.7 they are 0.1 and 0.2, in both cases the same as the defaults shown below (the MCP names are a bit misleading; "minHeight" sets the base height relative to a point slightly above sea level and "maxHeight" controls the amplitude of height variations):
(this is also a good example of how Mojang overuses objects and IMO results in uglier and harder to read code, even if MCP had given the fields proper names)
The biggest change is actually to Extreme Hills:
// 1.6.4
public static final BiomeGenBase extremeHills = (new BiomeGenHills(3)).setColor(6316128).setBiomeName("Extreme Hills").setMinMaxHeight(0.3F, 1.5F).setTemperatureRainfall(0.2F, 0.3F);
// 1.7
protected static final BiomeGenBase.Height field_150603_i = new BiomeGenBase.Height(1.0F, 0.5F);
public static final BiomeGenBase extremeHills = (new BiomeGenHills(3, false)).setColor(6316128).setBiomeName("Extreme Hills").func_150570_a(field_150603_i).setTemperatureRainfall(0.2F, 0.3F);
In this case 1.6.4 has a base height of 0.3 and a height variation of 1.5 while 1.7 has a base height of 1 and a height variation of 0.5; this results in Extreme Hills being much higher in general but with less height variation, and I think anybody can agree than pre-1.7 Extreme Hills were much more varied, and without the artificial limiting of height variations above around y=100 they would go well above y=128, as they do in TMCW, where the only change I made to the heightmap generation was to change the "limit":
// Vanilla 1.6.4 (the limit corresponds to 8 block increments so 13 corresponds to y=104 and interpolation
// affects the range from 96-104):
if (var46 > 13)
{
double var40 = (double)((float)(var46 - 13) / 3.0F);
var30 = var30 * (1.0D - var40) + -10.0D * var40;
}
// TMCW (heightScale defaults to 19 for most biomes, 21 for "extreme" mountains, and 13 (vanilla) for
// "plateau" biomes like Mesa; unlike 1.7+ I set the maximum possible height of terrain to y=192 as I felt
// that higher terrain was too rare to be worth generating 1/3 more noise (one of the most expensive parts
// of terrain generation) and due to the often highly fragmented nature of terrain that high up):
if (var46 > heightScale)
{
if (var46 > heightScale + 3)
{
var30 = -1.0D;
}
else
{
double var40 = (double)(var46 - heightScale) * 0.3333333333333D;
var30 = var30 * (1.0D - var40) - 10.0D * var40;
}
}
Example of Extreme Hills in TMCW; the main difference from 1.6.4 is that they have sharper peaks due to the flattening point being moved higher up, with the highest peaks exceeding y=180:
Also, this shows that only terrain above around y=100 was affected by these changes (compare the lower half of each image) with mountains previously limited to around y=120 reaching y=165; I increased the limit in TMCWv3 while still playing on a world and never encountered any cliffs, which would have only occurred in higher terrain:
In this case 1.6.4 has a base height of 0.3 and a height variation of 1.5 while 1.7 has a base height of 1 and a height variation of 0.5; this results in Extreme Hills being much higher in general but with less height variation, and I think anybody can agree than pre-1.7 Extreme Hills were much more varied, and without the artificial limiting of height variations above around y=100 they would go well above y=128, as they do in TMCW, where the only change I made to the heightmap generation was to change the "limit":
I agree Extreme Hills were sick as in 1.6 and are very forgettable in 1.7-1.17
The holes are meant to make survival more challenging, problem is if there are too many of them it gets in the way of building, and it also makes exploring a nuisance. By the time you have enchanted armour ravines aren't that much of an issue in terms of how dangerous they are anyway.
You still need to keep a sharp eye out for the ravines because there could be monsters at the bottom, but I can see how too many ravines would be a problem for some people. I don't like building bridges if I don't have to either.
If 1.18 has anything like the examples below I could definitely see it being an issue for some people; you'd need to place thousands of blocks to cover these up (I haven't run 1.18 or seen much of what it looks like in general but I've seen others complain about how caves have removed most of the underground resources, leading me to think the underground is like the Nether or something, though official images like this one seem to show relatively few caves in the side views):
The following were all from a Survival world (I found ravines as large as the ones shown above but they didn't break the surface):
That said, such large cave openings are the exception, though there are still a lot of smaller openings as shown on this night mode rendering of the surface:
Also, in another thread they mentioned that villages were ruined by mountainous terrain, which I agree with and is why I made separate biomes just for villages (even then, as mentioned previously Plains can still have around 20 blocks of variance, but they are flatter in general), which is aggravated by 1.10+ allowing villages to extend into any biome, not just the ones they can spawn in (this causes about a third of villages to fail to generate in vanilla 1.6.4 because they need to have at least 2 structures in addition to the well and the game may attempt to add a path leading into an invalid biome, even if there is room in the other direction):
The second one was almost entirely mountainous, which just destroyed any village generation I came across and made it very difficult to find any spots to plant down and set up and base without a massive amount of teraforming involved.
I miss having real continents with real oceans. I don't miss continents that were super ultra mega uber huge and that oceans where even insanely bigger (way back when), but a middle ground would be nice. Or configurable upon world creation.
I miss while smooth rolling plains and deserts where you could easily find flat areas to build your expansive and wide territory without needing to terraform a complete hilll every 30 blocks.
It's like the map having lots more forested areas than not. A better balance is needed. Look at the map of Mordor: one of the most "moutainous" regions of the lands of Middle Earth. and yet, there are a lot less of the map area dedicated to mountainous regions, than flatter regions. But Mojang serems top think we need steep hills almost EVERYWHERE.
Not a big fan. Honestly, both mountainous and forested areas should each cover no more than 20-25% of the land areas, each. The remaining 50%-60% should be mostly much flatter and much more open asnnd easyy to see far away and to navigate around. No, I don't mean making "Standard Plains" super common. I mean having twice as many relatively flat and open biomes, than for forested biomes or mountainous / hilly biomes.
Heck, *this* kind of terrain is still relatively "flat and open":
Sparse trees and shrubberry. Ground mostly flat. Sparse tall natural stone pillars dotting the landscape. a few areas of such pillars are much wider, say up to 30 blocks wide, forming smallish plateaux. ots of space between the pillars or plateaux.
Basically, you have to make sure a player on a horse won't be continously blocked by semi-impassable biomes.
Let players ride along most of the world witthuyt constsntly havintg to make his horse jump around.
Otherwise, if it's "let's go all the way into some kind of Highlands Mod mode", then provide players with a way to fly easily without needing any resource or end game item, like building a dirigible or something. lol!
I miss cave systems where there is actuallly more stone than air. Most of the new caves are of the really huge, really open kind. some of it is goodd but most of it? Ouch!
Indeed, it would appear that engine generates the terrain profile first, and then it kinda goes 'what biome I can put here?' This means that any kind of biome that was available in 'Extreme Hills' as well as 'flat', is now in overabundance. My present 18pre5-started world seems to be 70% various kinds of forests: birch, flower, dark roofed, taiga, jungle as those can fit on any terrain except real high peaks. Oceans definitely feel smaller and rarer. Plains type biomes can go from flat to fairly hilly, so those are fairly common. And biomes that can really work only in flat areas - such as swamps - have become quite a rarity. I generated same seed as creative and flew around a bit, mapping about 2000 blocks radius from spawn. It is about 70% various forests, maybe 10% plains, 10% water (oceans/rivers) and 10% for everything else. Found only one swamp and one desert, both not very large.
100% agreement!
Exploring should be about moving around at a good speed (thus, on a horse) thus not too much on the way of obstacles that slow you down or block your path.
And with a relatively good unobstructed sight, too.
This means forested biomes and "steep slopes" areas should total to LESS than half the map. Not something like over about 80%!
This is exactly why I hated the Highlands mod. TONS of interesting biomes that *all* blocked your general path and direction of travel and your sight a lot.
This really should be all set to a much more reasonable default distribution, annd World creation should have a simple way to set the relative ratios.
Say, sliders that can go from 0% to 100%. The totqal doesn't need to be 100% the game just scales everything after so putting everything at 10% works the same as putting everything at 100%. It's the rellative difference that counts.
Each screen would cover one aspect. First, the various "terrain variables" distribution. You could for a world to be wuite extremely hot aned extremely fcold with only rarer "temprate" area, or the opposite. Same for humidity, weirdness, etc. Not a single slider per each, but more like an equalizer.
Say that one would be for "mountainous vs flat" distribution.
Then within each "category" you would also get sliders to ballance out the various biomes. Jagged Peak is a cold mountainous too rare biome? You justu jack that one up! Hate some other cold mountainous biome? Put it to zero! But what is mportant is that the TOTAL biomes amounts would be RELATIVE and NORMALIZED. IF i say i have as much flat as mointainous parts. and only 2 flat biomes and 50 different mountainous biomes, well overall my landmass would share 50% of it for only those 2 flat biomes and the other 50% for the mountainous parts.
As it is thhere is a dire dearth of flat open biomes.
Beaches and swamps suck because since 1.18 snapshots they removed "depth" and "scale" properties from biome json files, which used to dictate how low/high and jagged/flat a specific biome was. Now, everything depends on the general terrain noise and biomes can only dictate vegetation, ores, structure, mobs and such, and this can't even be fixed with data packs as far as I know.
Having said that, I gave a try to 1.18.1 release candidate just to see how much the game has changed (never really played the game as of late) and it surprised me how safe is to travel the new caves without seeing enemies. I gathered enough iron to get a full armor and reached Y -50, and all I met was a single skeleton, a single zombie, and two creepers (in two different places), all of which I could easily defend against because I could see them from far away. I have no idea why people say 1.18 made caves scary again, because to me it seems like even more of a cakewalk, with all those added light sources and the new rule that prevents mob spawning at any non-sky light level above 0.
and all I met was a single skeleton, a single zombie, and two creepers (in two different places)
This sounds incredibly boring; fighting mobs is a major reason why I find caving to be fun, and if you tried exploring a large cave in TMCW you'd be fighting hundreds and hundreds of mobs; even in vanilla 1.6.4 I average more than 300 mobs per play session:
Also, I'd expect that light sources would concentrate mobs in the remaining dark areas; the rate at which I encounter mobs increases as I explore a cave system, which I generally explore from the outside in and top-down (this may have also lead to myths that mobs spawn more often at lower elevations, which is only true if the surface is lower, otherwise the spawning altitude is uniformly distributed). I suspect that they didn't change the mob cap or spawning rules and they are just too spread out, much like in the Nether, or even in TMCW, where I reduced the (de)spawn radius to 96 blocks to offset a greater volume of caves, but the rate of mob encounters isn't that much higher than vanilla due to the higher volume of caves (a radius of 96 has 2.37 times less volume and 1.78 times less area, so this roughly halves the volume), and in either case you'll need to do an extensive amount of caving to light everything up to get the rates that I see (on average half the caves around me have been lit up as I progress outwards from explored areas; even in vanilla I've killed up to 600 mobs in one play session when I found an isolated cave system in the middle of a region I previously explored. Rates are also higher under oceans due to the lower terrain and mobs unable to spawn on the surface at night; conversely, high terrain has lower rates).
That said, this will certainly mean that you can mine ores at a much faster rate; I've exceeded 2000 ores per hour while caving in Peaceful with Night Vision to test my mods, double the highest rates I've gotten in actual gameplay, and had a rate nearly as high when I once played in 1.8 to see the impact of changes to ore abundance (all ores were made about 20% more common), though it was highly inconclusive due to the fact I barely saw any mobs due to a bug that caused low spawn rates on low render distances (I could only handle 4 chunks due to how bad the performance of 1.8 was):
I was testing out the latest 1.8.2 pre-release and while doing so I decided to compare caving in 1.8 to 1.6.4; I just gave myself some equipment (Efficiency V diamond pickaxe, etc) and found a cave, with pretty interesting results; note that the world was default and unmodded ... I probably spent 10 minutes checking things out (in Creative) before actually caving (switching to Survival), so I spent around 35 minutes or so doing so; based on this, even with the smaller caves in 1.7+, I vastly exceed what I can mine in my 1.6.4 world, mining 928 ore in that time period for nearly 1,600 ore mined in an hour ...
That's right, I only killed a single zombie (plus a bat I accidentally hit with my pickaxe; the zombie also didn't even notice me) - in sharp contrast to the hundreds of mobs I regularly kill in 1.6.4!
(the remark about the zombie not even noticing me is a "feature" that was added in 1.8; previously, mobs would instantly see the player while 1.8 added a random delay, presumably to make it more "realistic", which again helps reduce the threat from mobs)
I'm under the impression Mojang thought people don't go spelunking because it's too scary, while they don't because it's (arguably) less efficient than strip-mining. And, as usual, their solution creates more problems to not fix an non-issue. Unless someone at Microsoft told them to make the game even more child-friendly, an hypothesis that might be a little far-fetched but, hey, they're running a business, not a hippie commune.
I'm under the impression Mojang thought people don't go spelunking because it's too scary, while they don't because it's (arguably) less efficient than strip-mining. And, as usual, their solution creates more problems to not fix an non-issue. Unless someone at Microsoft told them to make the game even more child-friendly, an hypothesis that might be a little far-fetched but, hey, they're running a business, not a hippie commune.
You completely made all that up. What sort of company would add vexes and scarier Zombie textures to their game, then say 'deep water is too scary'? Why don't they just remove cave noises for that matter? I'm not sure what you're trying to prove - are you just trying to throw dirt at Mojang and Microsoft?
I'm under the impression Mojang thought people don't go spelunking because it's too scary, while they don't because it's (arguably) less efficient than strip-mining. And, as usual, their solution creates more problems to not fix an non-issue. Unless someone at Microsoft told them to make the game even more child-friendly, an hypothesis that might be a little far-fetched but, hey, they're running a business, not a hippie commune.
Maybe they reduced the mob spawning rates underground just for performance reasons and to preserve mobs spawning on the surface... When you have huge caves underground, you may end up with hundreds of entities below in a few minutes, reaching the mob cap and getting no mobs on the surface (and in the rest of the server in multiplayer).
I don't mind the terrain generation. It's the resource generation that sucks, in my opinion. They made the world bigger, but didn't increase the resources to match. And then they added massive (and small) caves, all of which remove 100% of the resources that would have been present, replacing them with air or water.
The iron availability makes the game unplayable at 1.18 at this time. I had some thoughts about buying Bedrock to see how it plays, but I understand you can't play at older versions like you can in Java. That means I would be forced to play in a world with nowhere near enough iron present. So, they lost a sale there, for certain.
I agree, the resource generation in 1.18 destroyed the game, after Christmas I'm going to be hosting a Java 1.16 world for friends to play on. Unfortunately this means I'll have to put up with lag spikes for the time being until I can get a better computer, since Java edition isn't as optimized as bedrock edition. You can minimize the lag problem by keeping the render distance low, but it's still a bad compromise because it ends up affecting what biomes you can see ahead of you.
I don't want strip mining sessions to take 10x as long just to accumulate enough iron and other resources. It was already bad enough that Nether fortresses got made rarer in the Nether update in my opinion. At some point nerfing becomes an unhealthy obsession for developers, because all they end up doing is causing you to waste more time than you should have to, no one likes a game that is tedious to the point where you're repeating the same tasks for several hours for little or no reward. It's the type of thing that pushes people away to other games, or in this case older versions.
You mentioned the same thing in another thread but as I replied there it is false that adding more caves materially affects ore amounts; it is all because they made most ores only generate if they aren't exposed, completely contrary to an update that was supposed to make caving more attractive, as well as changed ore distributions so specific layers have more of specific ores (you can no longer find diamonds and coal, maybe even iron, on the same layers, or mostly only one type of ore, so you have to cover the entire ground depth) and my own mods which have significantly more caves than vanilla, even older versions (1.7 actually nerfed the amount of caves and other underground features, which is one reason why I've never updated to newer versions, as mentioned in the last link in my signature) have significantly more exposed ores per chunk even as the overall amounts are slightly lower, but only by 13% at the most compared to a world with no underground features (I do not collect ores faster though as this is more of a function of exposed ores per surface area):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/recent-updates-and-snapshots/3104615-minecraft-1-18-update-opinion-thread?comment=397
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
The issue is that the new terrain generation is too... aggressive? It didn't need to be applied EVERYWHERE to such an intense degree. The geography is just broken everywhere, especially with villages. I have yet to see one that isn't completely busted up, sometimes to the point that they can't even have crops because their fields aren't joined together on different levels of the terrain. Buildings can be separated by hundreds of blocks because a mountain area sprouted up right in the middle of them. Iron and emerald is just abundant out in the open, trust me, just live like dwarf in the mountains and you'll have more iron and coal than you know what to do with. But having any sort of level area to build a decent base and all your farms? Not without a LOT of terraforming.
Meh, that isn't true... There are plenty of flat areas to build your stuff... I would even say that some biomes provide even flatter areas than in the previous generation... For example, in the new "Sparse Jungle" biome the other day I saw flat areas where you could walk like 50 blocks without a single unevenness. I didn't see such flatness since the old 1.6.4 generation, because from 1.7 onwards, even Plains were not completely flat at all and you needed a lot of terraforming to flatten an area.
I've seen plenty of "hilly" plains in 1.6.4; for example, these plains have hills reaching y=83 (the small patch of dirt near the center of the leftmost image is the highest dirt layer below the surface grass block layer) and they can likely get even higher (Plains has 1/5 the height "variation" of Extreme Hills so this is equivalent to Extreme Hills reaching around y=160 if they were not limited by the terrain height limit (y=128), which reduces the amplitude of peaks in the noise field above around y=100):
I also find this quite obnoxious given what happens when a village decides to generate on such terrain, and this is why I made them flatter in TMCW, which adds a "hilly plains" variant to maintain variety (both can generate interchangeably as sub-biomes within the other; villages can only generate entirely within vanilla plains, as they only could prior to 1.10, which allowed them to spill over into any biome). Even then I found an area at around y=80 in the middle of a plains, though it was lower relative to the surrounding terrain (about 17 blocks for vanilla and 12 blocks for TMCW; the base height of biomes is gradually varied over large areas and this is why rivers can dry up in vanilla even in plains; I removed this variation and the influence of nearby biomes from rivers in TMCW so they never dry up, except in certain mountain biomes, which is intended):
Also, this is an example of the height (and biome) variation in TMCW, which will be greater in the next version (I added a large-scale noise field that acts as a multiplier with the biome heights which has a wavelength of about 1000 blocks; I've found normal "hills" biomes exceeding y=160):
These are examples of what could be found in the next version in regions of greater height variation (even TMCWv4 may be able to have "hill"s biomes this high; I found a non-hills/mountain biome that reached y=145, higher than the highest peak in an Extreme Hills biome; but they would be much rarer); the only disadvantage of this increased variation (besides the difficulty of getting over them in Survival, which is one reason why I prefer more isolated "hills" sub-biomes over general terrain variation that is able to make giant mountain ranges) is that most structures will not generate in such terrain (the frequency of spawn attempts has been increased so they are about as common as temples and witch huts in 1.6.4 when all land biomes are considered):
(for an example of what can happen with structures in such terrain this is an extreme example (Amplified in I presume 1.17) somebody posted in "seeds" showing a woodland mansion on a large mountain)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I finally found something near the coast. a Plains biome that wasn't completely ravaged by caves and ravines and just HOLES everywhere, and a decent ways away from any mountain generation. That's where I managed to find a village and some open space that felt more stable. But that's... several hours of gameplay in that took me to find that.
Yes, I guess so... But if you compare 1.6.4 generation with 1.7-1.17 generation, the former is generally much flatter than the latter... That's probably the main problem of 1.7-1.17 generation, which also affects to a certain extent the new 1.18 generation: the increased height limit destroys the flatness of certain biomes intended to be really flat, like beaches and swamps... In 1.6.4 (and I think that in your mod TMCW as well), beaches look like proper beaches and swamps look like proper swamps. In the new generation from 1.7 onwards, you see those ugly beaches climbing mountains everywhere, with sand reaching around y=75 or even more:
The same happens with swamps: small hills everywhere that shouldn't be present in a proper swamp:
The holes are meant to make survival more challenging, problem is if there are too many of them it gets in the way of building, and it also makes exploring a nuisance. By the time you have enchanted armour ravines aren't that much of an issue in terms of how dangerous they are anyway.
You still need to keep a sharp eye out for the ravines because there could be monsters at the bottom, but I can see how too many ravines would be a problem for some people. I don't like building bridges if I don't have to either.
That image is from January 5, 2012 (the date is above the image) so it would have been from 1.1 (you appear to have taken it from this thread, which mentions 1.7 but only as an upcoming update (last updated Jul 8, 2013, before the first 1.7 snapshot); all the complaints and examples are of post-Beta 1.7.3 - Release 1.6.4 generation); maybe a more extreme example but I've seen beaches like this in 1.6.4:
https://imgur.com/vevWg
Interestingly, the Wiki states that the height of various biomes were increased in 1.3.1, which would have worsened the issue with beaches (hills sub-biomes generally don't generate adjacent to other biomes though); otherwise, terrain generation seems to have been unchanged until 1.7:
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_1.3.1#World_generation_2
Also, TMCW completely changes how terrain height is handled in beach biomes so they are still flat even next to mountains (the smoothing of heights between biomes was greatly reduced and the the base depth noise that creates gently rolling hills even with no other height variation was removed):
In addition, I compared the source code for 1.6.4 and 1.7 and Plains actually has less height variation in 1.7; in 1.6.4 the heights are set to 0.1 and 0.3 while in 1.7 they are 0.1 and 0.2, in both cases the same as the defaults shown below (the MCP names are a bit misleading; "minHeight" sets the base height relative to a point slightly above sea level and "maxHeight" controls the amplitude of height variations):
(this is also a good example of how Mojang overuses objects and IMO results in uglier and harder to read code, even if MCP had given the fields proper names)
The biggest change is actually to Extreme Hills:
In this case 1.6.4 has a base height of 0.3 and a height variation of 1.5 while 1.7 has a base height of 1 and a height variation of 0.5; this results in Extreme Hills being much higher in general but with less height variation, and I think anybody can agree than pre-1.7 Extreme Hills were much more varied, and without the artificial limiting of height variations above around y=100 they would go well above y=128, as they do in TMCW, where the only change I made to the heightmap generation was to change the "limit":
Example of Extreme Hills in TMCW; the main difference from 1.6.4 is that they have sharper peaks due to the flattening point being moved higher up, with the highest peaks exceeding y=180:
Also, this shows that only terrain above around y=100 was affected by these changes (compare the lower half of each image) with mountains previously limited to around y=120 reaching y=165; I increased the limit in TMCWv3 while still playing on a world and never encountered any cliffs, which would have only occurred in higher terrain:
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I agree Extreme Hills were sick as in 1.6 and are very forgettable in 1.7-1.17
I hate life :_)
If 1.18 has anything like the examples below I could definitely see it being an issue for some people; you'd need to place thousands of blocks to cover these up (I haven't run 1.18 or seen much of what it looks like in general but I've seen others complain about how caves have removed most of the underground resources, leading me to think the underground is like the Nether or something, though official images like this one seem to show relatively few caves in the side views):
The following were all from a Survival world (I found ravines as large as the ones shown above but they didn't break the surface):
That said, such large cave openings are the exception, though there are still a lot of smaller openings as shown on this night mode rendering of the surface:
Also, in another thread they mentioned that villages were ruined by mountainous terrain, which I agree with and is why I made separate biomes just for villages (even then, as mentioned previously Plains can still have around 20 blocks of variance, but they are flatter in general), which is aggravated by 1.10+ allowing villages to extend into any biome, not just the ones they can spawn in (this causes about a third of villages to fail to generate in vanilla 1.6.4 because they need to have at least 2 structures in addition to the well and the game may attempt to add a path leading into an invalid biome, even if there is room in the other direction):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Definitely agree on both counts.
I miss having real continents with real oceans. I don't miss continents that were super ultra mega uber huge and that oceans where even insanely bigger (way back when), but a middle ground would be nice. Or configurable upon world creation.
I miss while smooth rolling plains and deserts where you could easily find flat areas to build your expansive and wide territory without needing to terraform a complete hilll every 30 blocks.
It's like the map having lots more forested areas than not. A better balance is needed. Look at the map of Mordor: one of the most "moutainous" regions of the lands of Middle Earth. and yet, there are a lot less of the map area dedicated to mountainous regions, than flatter regions. But Mojang serems top think we need steep hills almost EVERYWHERE.
Not a big fan. Honestly, both mountainous and forested areas should each cover no more than 20-25% of the land areas, each. The remaining 50%-60% should be mostly much flatter and much more open asnnd easyy to see far away and to navigate around. No, I don't mean making "Standard Plains" super common. I mean having twice as many relatively flat and open biomes, than for forested biomes or mountainous / hilly biomes.
Heck, *this* kind of terrain is still relatively "flat and open":
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XG1OMYKM0Fk/UHKObwqo3gI/AAAAAAAAJJ0/cafioU3Zk2s/s1600/Isimila 1 (1).jpg
Sparse trees and shrubberry. Ground mostly flat. Sparse tall natural stone pillars dotting the landscape. a few areas of such pillars are much wider, say up to 30 blocks wide, forming smallish plateaux. ots of space between the pillars or plateaux.
Basically, you have to make sure a player on a horse won't be continously blocked by semi-impassable biomes.
Let players ride along most of the world witthuyt constsntly havintg to make his horse jump around.
Otherwise, if it's "let's go all the way into some kind of Highlands Mod mode", then provide players with a way to fly easily without needing any resource or end game item, like building a dirigible or something. lol!
I miss cave systems where there is actuallly more stone than air. Most of the new caves are of the really huge, really open kind. some of it is goodd but most of it? Ouch!
100% agreement!
Exploring should be about moving around at a good speed (thus, on a horse) thus not too much on the way of obstacles that slow you down or block your path.
And with a relatively good unobstructed sight, too.
This means forested biomes and "steep slopes" areas should total to LESS than half the map. Not something like over about 80%!
This is exactly why I hated the Highlands mod. TONS of interesting biomes that *all* blocked your general path and direction of travel and your sight a lot.
This really should be all set to a much more reasonable default distribution, annd World creation should have a simple way to set the relative ratios.
Say, sliders that can go from 0% to 100%. The totqal doesn't need to be 100% the game just scales everything after so putting everything at 10% works the same as putting everything at 100%. It's the rellative difference that counts.
Each screen would cover one aspect. First, the various "terrain variables" distribution. You could for a world to be wuite extremely hot aned extremely fcold with only rarer "temprate" area, or the opposite. Same for humidity, weirdness, etc. Not a single slider per each, but more like an equalizer.
Say that one would be for "mountainous vs flat" distribution.
Then within each "category" you would also get sliders to ballance out the various biomes. Jagged Peak is a cold mountainous too rare biome? You justu jack that one up! Hate some other cold mountainous biome? Put it to zero! But what is mportant is that the TOTAL biomes amounts would be RELATIVE and NORMALIZED. IF i say i have as much flat as mointainous parts. and only 2 flat biomes and 50 different mountainous biomes, well overall my landmass would share 50% of it for only those 2 flat biomes and the other 50% for the mountainous parts.
As it is thhere is a dire dearth of flat open biomes.
This for example could be an interesting biome:
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/040/732/666/large/michal-kvac-dark-elf-pillars-small.jpg?1629736119
Note how most of the land is very flat, and easy to nagivate, with a very far sight range, yet has interesting elevated features.
Beaches and swamps suck because since 1.18 snapshots they removed "depth" and "scale" properties from biome json files, which used to dictate how low/high and jagged/flat a specific biome was. Now, everything depends on the general terrain noise and biomes can only dictate vegetation, ores, structure, mobs and such, and this can't even be fixed with data packs as far as I know.
Having said that, I gave a try to 1.18.1 release candidate just to see how much the game has changed (never really played the game as of late) and it surprised me how safe is to travel the new caves without seeing enemies. I gathered enough iron to get a full armor and reached Y -50, and all I met was a single skeleton, a single zombie, and two creepers (in two different places), all of which I could easily defend against because I could see them from far away. I have no idea why people say 1.18 made caves scary again, because to me it seems like even more of a cakewalk, with all those added light sources and the new rule that prevents mob spawning at any non-sky light level above 0.
This sounds incredibly boring; fighting mobs is a major reason why I find caving to be fun, and if you tried exploring a large cave in TMCW you'd be fighting hundreds and hundreds of mobs; even in vanilla 1.6.4 I average more than 300 mobs per play session:
Also, I'd expect that light sources would concentrate mobs in the remaining dark areas; the rate at which I encounter mobs increases as I explore a cave system, which I generally explore from the outside in and top-down (this may have also lead to myths that mobs spawn more often at lower elevations, which is only true if the surface is lower, otherwise the spawning altitude is uniformly distributed). I suspect that they didn't change the mob cap or spawning rules and they are just too spread out, much like in the Nether, or even in TMCW, where I reduced the (de)spawn radius to 96 blocks to offset a greater volume of caves, but the rate of mob encounters isn't that much higher than vanilla due to the higher volume of caves (a radius of 96 has 2.37 times less volume and 1.78 times less area, so this roughly halves the volume), and in either case you'll need to do an extensive amount of caving to light everything up to get the rates that I see (on average half the caves around me have been lit up as I progress outwards from explored areas; even in vanilla I've killed up to 600 mobs in one play session when I found an isolated cave system in the middle of a region I previously explored. Rates are also higher under oceans due to the lower terrain and mobs unable to spawn on the surface at night; conversely, high terrain has lower rates).
That said, this will certainly mean that you can mine ores at a much faster rate; I've exceeded 2000 ores per hour while caving in Peaceful with Night Vision to test my mods, double the highest rates I've gotten in actual gameplay, and had a rate nearly as high when I once played in 1.8 to see the impact of changes to ore abundance (all ores were made about 20% more common), though it was highly inconclusive due to the fact I barely saw any mobs due to a bug that caused low spawn rates on low render distances (I could only handle 4 chunks due to how bad the performance of 1.8 was):
(the remark about the zombie not even noticing me is a "feature" that was added in 1.8; previously, mobs would instantly see the player while 1.8 added a random delay, presumably to make it more "realistic", which again helps reduce the threat from mobs)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I'm under the impression Mojang thought people don't go spelunking because it's too scary, while they don't because it's (arguably) less efficient than strip-mining. And, as usual, their solution creates more problems to not fix an non-issue. Unless someone at Microsoft told them to make the game even more child-friendly, an hypothesis that might be a little far-fetched but, hey, they're running a business, not a hippie commune.
You completely made all that up. What sort of company would add vexes and scarier Zombie textures to their game, then say 'deep water is too scary'? Why don't they just remove cave noises for that matter? I'm not sure what you're trying to prove - are you just trying to throw dirt at Mojang and Microsoft?
Maybe they reduced the mob spawning rates underground just for performance reasons and to preserve mobs spawning on the surface... When you have huge caves underground, you may end up with hundreds of entities below in a few minutes, reaching the mob cap and getting no mobs on the surface (and in the rest of the server in multiplayer).
Honestly i've been using this Mod for a while now and i wonder why this isnt in Minecraft yet tbh