The minimum light level should be removed from the game entirely. I hate how in places where it should be pitch black, you can see clearly, even when your lighting is set to moody. Unlit caves will be pitch black like they should be. Light levels outside at night should vary depending on the moon's current cycle. For example, if it's a new moon, it will be completely pitch black, but if it's a full moon, you should be able to just barely see.
P.S. no "wElL yOu ShOuLd GeT tHiS mOd" replies or any other reductive, dismissive responses please. This is a legitimate suggestion for the default game.
I fully agree with this and implemented both true total darkness and moon phase dependent nighttime lighting in my own mod (but not as extreme; the light level during a full moon is unchanged, approximately equivalent to a light level of 4, while a new moon is equivalent to 3), along with preventing the player from editing options.txt to set gamma to outside of the range of 0-1 (this is more of a general verification check I added to every setting than a specific fix for this exploit, which vanilla omits, even from settings that can corrupt or crash the game, and in any case it wouldn't affect a light level of 0 as it is explicitly set to black).
I also made a thread about this a few years ago (see the last reply I made for better examples after I refined it; I also made it so that render distance fog is pitch black at any time of the day if you are below sea level and there is no sky light (I previously completely disabled "void fog", which broke the fog darkening (this is what it looked like in older versions during the day) and reimplemented the darkening part with some improvements). Likewise, the sky color becomes black and the sun and moon and stars do not render so they are not visible at the end of very large caves which extend out of render distance, as seen in this example):
Note that this does not affect the Nether or End, which may be slightly darker due to rescaling the light range so a light level of 1 is closer to complete darkness for better blending with 0 (this is especially obvious in vanilla due to MC-197497, which I fixed).
Here is what night looks like in TMCW as the moon phase changes; it looks darker here than it does in-game, especially full screen (the spoiler has screenshots for a side-by-side comparison between a new moon and full moon); brightness is set to Bright, which is the default, unlike vanilla, as that is what I play with*:
Here are screenshots with F3 enabled; note the "adj sky" light level displayed at the end of the second to last line on the left side, which is the sky light level adjusted for the time of day (I should probably change this to a decimal number as 3 or 4 is not very precise), as the game doesn't actually change the saved light values, which is always 15 in blocks exposed to the sky, but rather how it is rendered and treated for the purposes of e.g. mob spawning, which itself uses the vanilla calculation so mobs do not spawn on the surface more often during a new moon (the failure rate from light is level/8, thus a level of 4 gives a 50% failure rate); as in vanilla a full moon increases the difficulty factor more (up to 0.25 during a full moon). Also, the first day is a new moon, the opposite of vanilla, so the difficulty factor is at a minimum (unlike 1.8+ the raw difficulty factor is directly used to determine the chance of armor, weapons, etc, as in 1.6.4, the basis for TMCW, and as a result you can see armored mobs on the first day in vanilla 1.6.4):
*Interestingly, Optifine says that Bright works best for properly calibrated monitors, which show Moody as nearly pitch-black, so this is probably what you are referring to ("brightness" is also mislabeled, it changes the "gamma" curve, not the minimum or maximum brightness, or it would if the minimum was actually completely dark):
Minecraft uses non-linear light levels. The difference between level 0 and 1 is much smaller than the difference between level 14 and 15.
On a good calibrated monitor which can show near-black colors the Minecraft night scenes are almost fully black (light level 4). On the other hand, not so good monitors which have problems with near black colors show the night scenes very good. The Brightness setting fixes the Minecraft light levels for properly calibrated monitors. Brightness 0% corresponds to default Minecraft light levels. Brightness 100% uses linear light levels, so the steps between all light levels are equal.
http://optifog.blogspot.com/2011/05/version-1501f.html (Optifine added brightness before it was added to vanilla in Beta 1.8, IDK if vanilla works the same way as Optifine's original implementation but Optifine no longer has its own brightness code)
P.S. no "wElL yOu ShOuLd GeT tHiS mOd" replies or any other reductive, dismissive responses please. This is a legitimate suggestion for the default game.
I think "there's a mod for that LOL" replies are not allowed here.
There's a reason the lighting system still allows you to see in what should be pitch blackness, and that's to help people out if they're stuck in a deep cave but have no light sources left. So just ripping that away from the game would be a terrible move. This would work as an option, but not for the default game.
I think "there's a mod for that LOL" replies are not allowed here.
There's a reason the lighting system still allows you to see in what should be pitch blackness, and that's to help people out if they're stuck in a deep cave but have no light sources left. So just ripping that away from the game would be a terrible move. This would work as an option, but not for the default game.
It is your fault if you are stuck in a pitch black cave without any light sources, just as it is your fault if your pickaxe breaks and you can't find your way out, or your sword/armor breaks while you are fighting a lot of mobs and don't have time or materials to craft more - there is simply no excuse to not have penalty of wood and coal for torches; I bring an entire stack of logs with me and mine over 4,000 coal over the two play sessions it lasts for (if that is still not enough for the caves in 1.18 you can bring even more, and you'll free the space used as you craft torches, and in my case I usually run out of inventory/ender chest space before then).
Also, note what I said in my own suggestion:
One of my biggest pet peeves is people posting screenshots taken in a dark cave which appear to be completely dark to me (or barely visible) yet they claim to clearly see something, or worse, videos that are unwatchable because you can't see anything; the ability to see in total darkness also renders torches unnecessary when caving
Depending on your monitor it is possible to see very clearly in "total darkness" and if my experience and others is anything to go by the majority of players can since the default gamma setting in Windows 10 is terrible (I have to set the slider to as low as it goes in order to get "correct" results). Even "Moody" only goes down to 5% of full brightness, presumably on a properly calibrated display:
In the Overworld with the "Moody" brightness setting, full daylight reaches 98% brightness, while at night brightness is reduced to about 17% and is shaded blue. Full darkness is about 5% brightness.
I even consider this to be enough reason to never play on vanilla, unless there is a way to lower the system gamma even more (on my first computer, with Windows 7, it was basically pitch black even with brightness set to Bright; I could actually just barely see outlines of nearby blocks but for all purposes it was pitch black, and darker than on my current computer with a calibrated display - uncalibrated it is brighter on Moody than it is on Bright with calibration).
Also, the "brightness" setting is internally referred to as "gamma" - it simply changes the curve used to translate in-game light levels to rendered light levels from logarithmic (Moody) to linear (Bright) and a proper gamma curve would not affect the minimum or maximum, which is only true for the maximum in the case of Minecraft because the lowest rendered light level is not 0%. With the way I changed it the minimum is always 0%, even if gamma is set to an extremely high value, as demonstrated here:
0% brightness (Moody):
100% brightness (Bright):
200% brightness:
1000% brightness:
With Night Vision (independent of gamma; in vanilla Night Vision is affected to a degree):
The only change as gamma increases past 100% is the area of maximum brightness (fun fact: even on Moody a block light level of 14 is visually identical to 15; on Bright this includes 13, with sky light being affected to a much greater degree, as shown here), which eventually includes every nonzero light level - but 0 is still pitch-black (exceptions include the Nether/End, which are the same as vanilla, and sky light at the surface, which is always nonzero).
Also, I actually had to modify the code to get the examples for brightness >100% - another major flaw of vanilla is that you can edit many of the settings in options.txt to be outside their intended values, including gamma, which if set very high effectively gives you permanent Night Vision for free (as mentioned above only a block+sky light level of 0 in the Overworld is affected by my true darkness modification so this could still be exploited). Other settings can even crash the game - why isn't there any validation in the code?
It is your fault if you are stuck in a pitch black cave without any light sources, just as it is your fault if your pickaxe breaks and you can't find your way out, or your sword/armor breaks while you are fighting a lot of mobs and don't have time or materials to craft more - there is simply no excuse to not have penalty of wood and coal for torches; I bring an entire stack of logs with me and mine over 4,000 coal over the two play sessions it lasts for (if that is still not enough for the caves in 1.18 you can bring even more, and you'll free the space used as you craft torches, and in my case I usually run out of inventory/ender chest space before then).
Uhhhh yeah that's great and all, but that's how the game is set up. It can be 'my fault' 1,000 times over, but whether someone prepares badly for going in a cave or not, leaving them in absolute black nothingness is still a bad place to be in. Pretty effortless goes-without-saying advice for someone who knows the game, but still an unnecessary beginner's trap for a lot of players out there.
I personally couldn't really care less about this idea existing since I'll never enter a cave without more stacks of coal, torches, planks and logs than I'll ever need. There's many theoretical scenarios in a game with an infinite amount of different outcomes of someone running out of stuff in a cave and being stuck in unhelpful blackness.
Uhhhh yeah that's great and all, but that's how the game is set up. It can be 'my fault' 1,000 times over, but whether someone prepares badly for going in a cave or not, leaving them in absolute black nothingness is still a bad place to be in. Pretty effortless goes-without-saying advice for someone who knows the game, but still an unnecessary beginner's trap for a lot of players out there.
I personally couldn't really care less about this idea existing since I'll never enter a cave without more stacks of coal, torches, planks and logs than I'll ever need. There's many theoretical scenarios in a game with an infinite amount of different outcomes of someone running out of stuff in a cave and being stuck in unhelpful blackness.
Late reply. I think the presence of hardcore darkness would already tell players "hey, don't get lost in here". Even then, how would they get lost? Of course, they're not just going to enter a cave and run around without torches. For nighttime, natural intuition will already tell players that nighttime will be dark and scary, and they will set up a shelter, naturally. Minecraft players continually complain about a lack of challenge, so why not start with actual darkness?
Hardcore darkness would make lighting a completely essential thing again. Nowadays, players have their brightness set all the way up, and it's LITERALLY just a free night vision potion. Not to be rude, but Minecraft darkness is pathetic. Even MoistCr1tikal thinks so, in this one remark he made (EDIT: It's at 3:14):
I think the implementation of hardcore darkness in Better than Wolves is awesome, and really sets a good example of how it can be successfully implemented in vanilla.
The link to the mod is here, it's available via MC forums.
There is a thing called gloom which corresponds to zero light level, and makes the corresponding block pitch black. Moody and Bright brightness levels work like normal, but gloom is always pitch black.
To counter balance the argument of getting stuck and lost in a dark cave, in gloom you eventually die - think like Don't Starve. This way you never get indefinitely stuck in dark caves + interesting design to stop building a dark dirt shack and use natural sun/moon light.
Also, like TheMasterCaver has in his mod, the moon phase affects brightness, with full moon normal, and new moon zero light, aka gloom.
I see zero reason why this isn't an optional feature of vanilla.
Another great feature to complement this, albeit somewhat contentious, is that torches should have limited lifetimes, 20 minutes, burn out and cannot be re-lit. But to reward going to Nether ect, you should be able to make infinite duration torches that do not burn out.
Better than Wolves also implements this and I think it works excellently, it makes caving very suspenseful and a lot of fun honestly!
I've uploaded some images to help share what I mean, taken from Better than Wolves CE1.3.
Uhhhh yeah that's great and all, but that's how the game is set up. It can be 'my fault' 1,000 times over, but whether someone prepares badly for going in a cave or not, leaving them in absolute black nothingness is still a bad place to be in. Pretty effortless goes-without-saying advice for someone who knows the game, but still an unnecessary beginner's trap for a lot of players out there.
I personally couldn't really care less about this idea existing since I'll never enter a cave without more stacks of coal, torches, planks and logs than I'll ever need. There's many theoretical scenarios in a game with an infinite amount of different outcomes of someone running out of stuff in a cave and being stuck in unhelpful blackness.
I think killing the player (gradually after 30s-60s, not all of a sudden) in pitch black darkness nullifies your concern about stranding players and not being able to see anything, and being stuck indefinitely.
Another great feature to complement this, albeit somewhat contentious, is that torches should have limited lifetimes, 20 minutes, burn out and cannot be re-lit. But to reward going to Nether ect, you should be able to make infinite duration torches that do not burn out.
I'm absolutely against any implementation of this; how would you even manage to fully explore any real cave (not just a tunnel or two, like many caves in 1.7-1.17, for all I know even "normal" caves in 1.18) within just 20 minutes?! It took me about 18 hours of extreme caving (about 15,500 ores mined and 1,900 mobs killed) to fully explore the largest single cave feature in TMCWv4, with about 5,500 torches required to light it up, and hundreds each in the largest single caves and ravines, and even upwards of a thousand or more in a single "1.6.4 type" cave system, like the ones mentioned in this post (reminder: I place torches for visibility, not to prevent mobs from spawning, and lighting up caves actually increases the amount of mobs I encounter as they become more concentrated in dark areas):
The area near the upper-right is a "giant cave region", a large-scale feature composed of numerous large caves spreading out over a 300x300 block area with an average volume of about 1.3 million air blocks; you can also see several extremely large caves and ravines to the west and south, with the largest cave and ravine each having a volume of about 250,000 blocks, in addition to "normal" cave systems, which are based on vanilla 1.6.4 cave generation, when they were much larger and denser than since 1.7:
This is an analysis of a 300x300 area below sea level centered over the giant cave region near the upper-right, which had a volume of about 1.25 million air blocks, prior to removing about 15,500 ores and placing about 5,500 torches; the amount of exposed lava (obsidian) is equivalent to a single lava lake with a diameter of about 141 blocks (obsidian with a data value of 1 is amethyst ore, which is 1/8 as common as diamond above y=3, the lowest layer exposed in caves, hence why the animation goes down to y=4):
These are the "session stats" for each of the 5 play sessions (more like 4 1/4) that I spent exploring the giant cave region, to give you an idea of what I mean by "extreme" caving; based on the total number of days that passed I spent up to 19 hours playing (assuming the first day averaged as long as the next 3), though I did sleep after returning to a base between each session if it was night by the time I went back to caving, so say 18 hours. Also, the ratio of mobs killed per ore mined generally increased over time, peaking at about 1:5 on the last day as the last remaining dark areas were discovered:
I also do not think it should be totally pitch-black at night, even during a new moon as that would absolutely cripple the ability to travel without having to spam torches everywhere (and ironically, a full moon makes mobs more dangerous, though it has no impact on spawn rates, including in TMCW, where only the rendered light level changes; compared to a dark cave the probability of a surface spawn is reduced by about 75% due to the effective light level of 4 plus a raw skylight level of 15 roughly halving the spawn chance. Not that this matters much when they can only spawn on the surface, such as in areas I've explored and lit up nearly every cave; there are often so many mobs it is ridiculous, so again torches having a limited lifetime would make the game easier, and I'd absolutely never want to have to go out of my way, especially to another dimension just to get infinite torches - for me the entire point of caving is to have fun playing without a care in the world, including the need to collect resources I need, beyond what I see as just a byproduct of caving).
The minimum light level should be removed from the game entirely. I hate how in places where it should be pitch black, you can see clearly, even when your lighting is set to moody. Unlit caves will be pitch black like they should be. Light levels outside at night should vary depending on the moon's current cycle. For example, if it's a new moon, it will be completely pitch black, but if it's a full moon, you should be able to just barely see.
P.S. no "wElL yOu ShOuLd GeT tHiS mOd" replies or any other reductive, dismissive responses please. This is a legitimate suggestion for the default game.
i'm intrigued! but you might be eaten by a grue
bootleg fishcenterlive
I also made a thread about this a few years ago (see the last reply I made for better examples after I refined it; I also made it so that render distance fog is pitch black at any time of the day if you are below sea level and there is no sky light (I previously completely disabled "void fog", which broke the fog darkening (this is what it looked like in older versions during the day) and reimplemented the darkening part with some improvements). Likewise, the sky color becomes black and the sun and moon and stars do not render so they are not visible at the end of very large caves which extend out of render distance, as seen in this example):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/suggestions/2868193-a-light-level-of-0-should-be-totally-dark
Note that this does not affect the Nether or End, which may be slightly darker due to rescaling the light range so a light level of 1 is closer to complete darkness for better blending with 0 (this is especially obvious in vanilla due to MC-197497, which I fixed).
Here is what night looks like in TMCW as the moon phase changes; it looks darker here than it does in-game, especially full screen (the spoiler has screenshots for a side-by-side comparison between a new moon and full moon); brightness is set to Bright, which is the default, unlike vanilla, as that is what I play with*:
Here are screenshots with F3 enabled; note the "adj sky" light level displayed at the end of the second to last line on the left side, which is the sky light level adjusted for the time of day (I should probably change this to a decimal number as 3 or 4 is not very precise), as the game doesn't actually change the saved light values, which is always 15 in blocks exposed to the sky, but rather how it is rendered and treated for the purposes of e.g. mob spawning, which itself uses the vanilla calculation so mobs do not spawn on the surface more often during a new moon (the failure rate from light is level/8, thus a level of 4 gives a 50% failure rate); as in vanilla a full moon increases the difficulty factor more (up to 0.25 during a full moon). Also, the first day is a new moon, the opposite of vanilla, so the difficulty factor is at a minimum (unlike 1.8+ the raw difficulty factor is directly used to determine the chance of armor, weapons, etc, as in 1.6.4, the basis for TMCW, and as a result you can see armored mobs on the first day in vanilla 1.6.4):
*Interestingly, Optifine says that Bright works best for properly calibrated monitors, which show Moody as nearly pitch-black, so this is probably what you are referring to ("brightness" is also mislabeled, it changes the "gamma" curve, not the minimum or maximum brightness, or it would if the minimum was actually completely dark):
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 think "there's a mod for that LOL" replies are not allowed here.
There's a reason the lighting system still allows you to see in what should be pitch blackness, and that's to help people out if they're stuck in a deep cave but have no light sources left. So just ripping that away from the game would be a terrible move. This would work as an option, but not for the default game.
It is your fault if you are stuck in a pitch black cave without any light sources, just as it is your fault if your pickaxe breaks and you can't find your way out, or your sword/armor breaks while you are fighting a lot of mobs and don't have time or materials to craft more - there is simply no excuse to not have penalty of wood and coal for torches; I bring an entire stack of logs with me and mine over 4,000 coal over the two play sessions it lasts for (if that is still not enough for the caves in 1.18 you can bring even more, and you'll free the space used as you craft torches, and in my case I usually run out of inventory/ender chest space before then).
Also, note what I said in my own suggestion:
Depending on your monitor it is possible to see very clearly in "total darkness" and if my experience and others is anything to go by the majority of players can since the default gamma setting in Windows 10 is terrible (I have to set the slider to as low as it goes in order to get "correct" results). Even "Moody" only goes down to 5% of full brightness, presumably on a properly calibrated display:
I even consider this to be enough reason to never play on vanilla, unless there is a way to lower the system gamma even more (on my first computer, with Windows 7, it was basically pitch black even with brightness set to Bright; I could actually just barely see outlines of nearby blocks but for all purposes it was pitch black, and darker than on my current computer with a calibrated display - uncalibrated it is brighter on Moody than it is on Bright with calibration).
Also, the "brightness" setting is internally referred to as "gamma" - it simply changes the curve used to translate in-game light levels to rendered light levels from logarithmic (Moody) to linear (Bright) and a proper gamma curve would not affect the minimum or maximum, which is only true for the maximum in the case of Minecraft because the lowest rendered light level is not 0%. With the way I changed it the minimum is always 0%, even if gamma is set to an extremely high value, as demonstrated here:
100% brightness (Bright):
200% brightness:
1000% brightness:
With Night Vision (independent of gamma; in vanilla Night Vision is affected to a degree):
The only change as gamma increases past 100% is the area of maximum brightness (fun fact: even on Moody a block light level of 14 is visually identical to 15; on Bright this includes 13, with sky light being affected to a much greater degree, as shown here), which eventually includes every nonzero light level - but 0 is still pitch-black (exceptions include the Nether/End, which are the same as vanilla, and sky light at the surface, which is always nonzero).
Also, I actually had to modify the code to get the examples for brightness >100% - another major flaw of vanilla is that you can edit many of the settings in options.txt to be outside their intended values, including gamma, which if set very high effectively gives you permanent Night Vision for free (as mentioned above only a block+sky light level of 0 in the Overworld is affected by my true darkness modification so this could still be exploited). Other settings can even crash the game - why isn't there any validation in the code?
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?
Uhhhh yeah that's great and all, but that's how the game is set up. It can be 'my fault' 1,000 times over, but whether someone prepares badly for going in a cave or not, leaving them in absolute black nothingness is still a bad place to be in. Pretty effortless goes-without-saying advice for someone who knows the game, but still an unnecessary beginner's trap for a lot of players out there.
I personally couldn't really care less about this idea existing since I'll never enter a cave without more stacks of coal, torches, planks and logs than I'll ever need. There's many theoretical scenarios in a game with an infinite amount of different outcomes of someone running out of stuff in a cave and being stuck in unhelpful blackness.
Late reply. I think the presence of hardcore darkness would already tell players "hey, don't get lost in here". Even then, how would they get lost? Of course, they're not just going to enter a cave and run around without torches. For nighttime, natural intuition will already tell players that nighttime will be dark and scary, and they will set up a shelter, naturally. Minecraft players continually complain about a lack of challenge, so why not start with actual darkness?
Hardcore darkness would make lighting a completely essential thing again. Nowadays, players have their brightness set all the way up, and it's LITERALLY just a free night vision potion. Not to be rude, but Minecraft darkness is pathetic. Even MoistCr1tikal thinks so, in this one remark he made (EDIT: It's at 3:14):
I think the implementation of hardcore darkness in Better than Wolves is awesome, and really sets a good example of how it can be successfully implemented in vanilla.
The link to the mod is here, it's available via MC forums.
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/3117153-1-5-2-better-than-wolves-community-edition-v1-3-4
There is a thing called gloom which corresponds to zero light level, and makes the corresponding block pitch black. Moody and Bright brightness levels work like normal, but gloom is always pitch black.
To counter balance the argument of getting stuck and lost in a dark cave, in gloom you eventually die - think like Don't Starve. This way you never get indefinitely stuck in dark caves + interesting design to stop building a dark dirt shack and use natural sun/moon light.
Also, like TheMasterCaver has in his mod, the moon phase affects brightness, with full moon normal, and new moon zero light, aka gloom.
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I see zero reason why this isn't an optional feature of vanilla.
Another great feature to complement this, albeit somewhat contentious, is that torches should have limited lifetimes, 20 minutes, burn out and cannot be re-lit. But to reward going to Nether ect, you should be able to make infinite duration torches that do not burn out.
Better than Wolves also implements this and I think it works excellently, it makes caving very suspenseful and a lot of fun honestly!
I've uploaded some images to help share what I mean, taken from Better than Wolves CE1.3.
I think killing the player (gradually after 30s-60s, not all of a sudden) in pitch black darkness nullifies your concern about stranding players and not being able to see anything, and being stuck indefinitely.
I'm absolutely against any implementation of this; how would you even manage to fully explore any real cave (not just a tunnel or two, like many caves in 1.7-1.17, for all I know even "normal" caves in 1.18) within just 20 minutes?! It took me about 18 hours of extreme caving (about 15,500 ores mined and 1,900 mobs killed) to fully explore the largest single cave feature in TMCWv4, with about 5,500 torches required to light it up, and hundreds each in the largest single caves and ravines, and even upwards of a thousand or more in a single "1.6.4 type" cave system, like the ones mentioned in this post (reminder: I place torches for visibility, not to prevent mobs from spawning, and lighting up caves actually increases the amount of mobs I encounter as they become more concentrated in dark areas):
This is an analysis of a 300x300 area below sea level centered over the giant cave region near the upper-right, which had a volume of about 1.25 million air blocks, prior to removing about 15,500 ores and placing about 5,500 torches; the amount of exposed lava (obsidian) is equivalent to a single lava lake with a diameter of about 141 blocks (obsidian with a data value of 1 is amethyst ore, which is 1/8 as common as diamond above y=3, the lowest layer exposed in caves, hence why the animation goes down to y=4):
These are the "session stats" for each of the 5 play sessions (more like 4 1/4) that I spent exploring the giant cave region, to give you an idea of what I mean by "extreme" caving; based on the total number of days that passed I spent up to 19 hours playing (assuming the first day averaged as long as the next 3), though I did sleep after returning to a base between each session if it was night by the time I went back to caving, so say 18 hours. Also, the ratio of mobs killed per ore mined generally increased over time, peaking at about 1:5 on the last day as the last remaining dark areas were discovered:
I also do not think it should be totally pitch-black at night, even during a new moon as that would absolutely cripple the ability to travel without having to spam torches everywhere (and ironically, a full moon makes mobs more dangerous, though it has no impact on spawn rates, including in TMCW, where only the rendered light level changes; compared to a dark cave the probability of a surface spawn is reduced by about 75% due to the effective light level of 4 plus a raw skylight level of 15 roughly halving the spawn chance. Not that this matters much when they can only spawn on the surface, such as in areas I've explored and lit up nearly every cave; there are often so many mobs it is ridiculous, so again torches having a limited lifetime would make the game easier, and I'd absolutely never want to have to go out of my way, especially to another dimension just to get infinite torches - for me the entire point of caving is to have fun playing without a care in the world, including the need to collect resources I need, beyond what I see as just a byproduct of caving).
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?