i wonder when the people in this thread will realise there's beta generation mods for 1.12.2, etc
Nobody even mentioned that they still play Beta because of changes since then, and everybody probably knows about presets like this one.
As I said before, in my case it is largely because I now develop my own version of the game which I don't even consider to be 1.6.4 anymore (and hardly can be called such, given that my added features, like new blocks (including blocks which were not normally obtainable like bark logs and DV smooth double slabs), nearly equal everything the game had, or far exceed it in the case of 108 biomes, compared to 23 in vanilla, 62 in 1.7-1.12.2, and 73 in 1.13, and not all of the vanilla biomes naturally generate) - I even changed the title of the game window to "TheMasterCaver's World" - I've spent most of the past couple months on its largest update ever, far exceeding any vanilla update, with less than a day of normal gameplay (normally I play about 3.5 hours per day, which is about how much time I've been spending on the mod; this is by far the longest such period that I've spent on updating a mod, previously about a month in late 2016). Some of my latest additions include woodland mansions and shipwrecks (both of my own design; I previously took vanilla structures like igloos and fossils from the blueprints in the Wiki); mansions alone took over 2,700 lines of code and a week to make and debug (including placing them so they are never buried in the ground, unlike village houses; they even generate a staircase if the entrance is above the ground).
I don't know if you still play, but I've been playing in my infdev world for nine years now. When each update came out, I happily upgraded, and when terrarain changed, my world would grow these borders, signifying the end of an era of terrain generation. I might miss the alpha generation or beta generation from time to time, but due to the size of my world, such lands are immortalized. Granted, I only have so much of it, but it's enough for me.
There's so many features from 1.6.4 to now, almost 1.14, that it's overwhelming. I still haven't found my first woodland mansion, defeated an elder guardian, or build automated farms like Ethoslab, but I'm grateful that those options are available to me in the vanilla base game. I have modded my experience, but the vanilla content is all there yet.
I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but world regeneration is fully customizable now. You can create a fully customized world in 1.12.2, and transfer it to future versions using this guide:
I don't know if you still play, but I've been playing in my infdev world for nine years now. When each update came out, I happily upgraded, and when terrarain changed, my world would grow these borders, signifying the end of an era of terrain generation. I might miss the alpha generation or beta generation from time to time, but due to the size of my world, such lands are immortalized. Granted, I only have so much of it, but it's enough for me.
I very much still do play, as evident by my recent posts; just yesterday I explored this insane cave system/mineshaft complex - which is the same way that I've been playing for the past 6 years, and still on the same version (this world is modded to have twice the caves of vanilla 1.6.4 but otherwise it is basically vanilla with improvements and bugfixes):
This gives you an idea of just how extreme my caving (still) is - I do this basically every single day and have done so for years (I made this thread shortly after I added the "stats" to the inventory screen, which record what I've done in the current session, and I'd already been playing like this for over a year at the time):
This shows what I've mined overall, using the actual stats taken from the stats file (instead of per session):
Also, you can see that pretty much all I craft after the "end-game" are torches and mineral blocks (this is not a "normal" world, meaning I start from scratch, doing all the normal stuff you do in a survival world until the "end", which for me is killing the Ender Dragon, after which I start caving, thus these statistics reflect what I do after the "end-game" in a normal world - which really is almost nothing but caving):
As seen here, I've mined all of that over 95 play sessions, meaning that I've mined an average of 3050 ore per play session:
Also, there are most of the worlds that I've had - which are all the same aside from changes to biomes or underground generation; my current world, "InfiniteCaves", is a recreation of the earliest modded world I had (I deleted the original):
I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but world regeneration is fully customizable now. You can create a fully customized world in 1.12.2, and transfer it to future versions using this guide
I know all about the so-called "customization" - and its fatal limitations - like the inability to change how biomes generate besides "all or none" or change the frequency and size of cave systems, or other structures besides dungeons, which is why I made the following suggestion years ago (originally due to the changes in 1.7 but it is still entirely valid as of today):
I even worked on a mod for 1.8 which would implement this (I abandoned it due to issues with MCP's reobfuscation, and after this pretty much abandoned all modding for non-1.6.4 versions, besides the fact that all of them have never actually been used by myself, even ones like my "old anvil mechanics" mod (re-adding the old anvil mechanics to 1.8, including being able to rename an item to keep the cost down, which was a game-breaking change to me; even with Mending added in 1.9 I'd still prefer the old way - or even have Mending work like renaming did, as I've done in my own mod for 1.6.4):
Note the settings for bedrock (flat bedrock means one layer at y=0, as my modded worlds have) and cave lava level (similar to sea level but it sets the level of lava in caves):
Settings for emerald ore, including the ability for it to generate in any biome:
So many options to customize the way caves generate (all you really need is the size and chance to make caves generate like they used to):
A new preset which changes the way caves generate to be similar to what is seen in TMCW, without otherwise changing terrain (unlike the vanilla "cave" presets. I'd also added a few other changes like making underwater sand/gravel patches generate solid blocks over air so they don't cave in (I consider the flooded caves in 1.13 to be an extremely bad idea, turning oceans into complete no-go zones):
And no, presets that generate bizarre holed terrain like "Caves of Chaos" or 1.13's "cave" world type (which is simply the Nether with different blocks) don't cut it at all. Here is what the last world I played on with my own mod looked like (TheMasterCaver's World, link in signature; as the description suggests I see this as my own version of the game which has evolved independently of vanilla since 1.6.4):
This is an area of the underground, showing the variation in caves:
Even if they ever do add actual customization it is still not going to make me want to upgrade since my own modding abilities means I can basically create my own game (if Mojang ever actually adds some new underground features I'd just backport them, as I did with the 1.8 stone types, fossils, and mesa mineshafts; of course, these aren't really underground features as far as changes to caves go). Either way, I don't really care about anything else in newer versions, which of which I'd never use (as seen in the stats I show above where about all I've crafted are torches, mineral blocks, and a few other things I use while caving; I do craft more in normal worlds but not much) and still spend most of my time in semi-vanilla (e.g. for my first world (and modded worlds) I added a couple blocks so I can craft rails/cobwebs into blocks, much as you can with minerals, greatly reducing the amount of space they take up; for my current world I made Ender chests have the capacity of a double chest, which means I can spend many sessions caving before I have to return, even a regular Ender chest is enough for a couple sessions, so what is the point of shulker boxes).
I very much still do play, as evident by my recent posts; just yesterday I explored this insane cave system/mineshaft complex -
That cave is amazing! Would you mind explaining what "exploring" should entail? When you do caving, do you end up removing all the ore and wood from caves/mineshafts? Do you leave the caves as they are (with all their little pockets and dividing walls) or do you make major changes (e.g. break down walls, smooth floors and ceilings etc.). I'm just trying to understand what "real" caving is like and what the caves look like when you are finished with them.
That cave is amazing! Would you mind explaining what "exploring" should entail? When you do caving, do you end up removing all the ore and wood from caves/mineshafts? Do you leave the caves as they are (with all their little pockets and dividing walls) or do you make major changes (e.g. break down walls, smooth floors and ceilings etc.). I'm just trying to understand what "real" caving is like and what the caves look like when you are finished with them.
I only mine all exposed ores, as well as the moss stone from dungeons and rails and cobwebs (only around cave spider spawners) from mineshafts, and chest loot (resources, diamond horse armor, name tags, golden apples, enchanted books with useful enchantments); everything else is virtually untouched, which is also how I manage to explore so much per play session - an average of about 100 chunks (160x160 blocks) of the underground, which in 1.6.4 has an average of 45 tunnels (112 including branches, where 25% of tunnels are a single tunnel and 75% have 2 branches for a total of 3 (shorter) tunnels per cave tunnel), 8 circular rooms, 2 dungeons, and one mineshaft, and an average of about 3,000 exposed ores, all of which takes a few hours to explore. Even in my current world, with double the caves of vanilla 1.6.4 (30% more than 1.7 and later, with the bigger difference being that cave systems are denser by about 2.8 times, and mineshafts and dungeons are more than twice as common) I've averaged 70 chunks per play session with 65% of the entire world covered (mostly excluding the edges where chunks are loaded further out from the player).
I don't even use any forms of navigation (e.g. signs or other markers), other than memory and the presence/lack of ores and torches; I'll just go down a series of tunnels placing torches and killing any mobs until I reach a dead end or one of those areas that are so dense all tunnels merge together into randomness (when I explored the cave.mineshaft system I mentioned I explored the mineshafts first since they had well-defined pathways), then I backtrack and mine the ores along the way back, going down side tunnels; if I encounter what appears to be a new area, or a new cave system/mineshaft I'll dig to the surface and place a marker (a cobblestone pillar 21 blocks high) so I can come back later after I've finished exploring the current system. I also carry a map with me so I can see where I've been in general, exploring around the edges of the mapped area. From using MCEdit (like Spectator mode) to look at explored areas there is very little that I miss:
These are of the cave/mineshaft complex I just explored; the only significant areas that I missed aren't connected to anything:
Note that the caves in the foreground and left side are not connected to anything; there is a small cave that I missed near the center:
Some screenshots from my first world:
Here is a 10 day animation of an area that I explored in my first world (vanilla), about 700 blocks across, with multiple large cave systems and mineshafts, as also shown in a before and after (I used MCMap (not for 1.13+ though) to make this; it only shows caves if there are torches in them, with naturally generated torches removed from mineshafts with a mod. The before/after was made after using a utility to delete chunks without torches; when done on the entire world about 80% of more than 109000 chunks remained):
All of these images can be clicked on to view full-size in a new tab:
This is a before and after of the area shown above; the new explored area is roughly 700x400 blocks in size, or about 1100 chunks:
This is the largest single cave system that I've ever explored, from my last modded world, which had a volume of 1.2 million air blocks and took less than 5 full sessions to explore (though the tunnels were much larger so the volume/area ratio was much higher than a vanilla-type cave system), which yielded more than 15,000 resources and took 5,500 torches to light up:
The animation shows the area near the upper-right:
This shows all the stuff I got from it, totaling more than 15,000 resources and other items (there were only two dungeons and no mineshafts since big caves aren't suitable for dungeons and my mod prevents mineshafts from generating in these caves, as well as denser vanilla-type caves. The items in the last row are mostly chest loot and mob drops, plus a couple "empty spawners", a decorative block I added):
Here is the entire world (unexplored areas cropped away); for a sense of scale, the small bit in the top-left is a fairly large stronghold (the only part that I didn't explore as part of my regular caving, which I only did after the "end-game"; you can see the branch-mine I made to get resources early on near the top-left of the main area):
Also, for another perspective of my caving, this is a slice of the entire world at layer 20:
I, personally, feel the opposite way about caves and mineshafts. They should be SPECIAL.They should be rare enough that finding one is a big deal and something that I hope for, not the spaces in which I'll spend the majority of my underground time and not something that I dread because each one is a 20-hour detour from whatever I'm actually trying to do down there. They should be small enough that I can keep a mental map of each one in my head, not so big that I'll get lost without putting signs all over the place saying "your base is back this way ====>"
Nonetheless, what we can agree on is that players should be allowed to customize cave-generation to their liking.
Apologies if I'm necroing a dead thread, how easy would it be to make an addon that recreates the old cave generation system in the current version of Bedrock? Not a question for you in particular, just in general to someone who's more knowledgable in Bedrock Add-ons than I am.
Apologies if I'm necroing a dead thread, how easy would it be to make an addon that recreates the old cave generation system in the current version of Bedrock? Not a question for you in particular, just in general to someone who's more knowledgable in Bedrock Add-ons than I am.
This thread is still relevant as long as I still play in 1.6.4, which I still do nearly two years later (I should change the title to six years); I mainly made this to explain why I still play in such an old version (many people can't imagine why I'd do so).
As for changing cave generation, I don't have any experience but I don't think that can be done with an addon; it would require actually modifying the game's code, which is quite difficult to do on Bedrock/MCPE (there have been such mods created so I know it is possible, at least to some extent, but it is unlikely anything on the scale of a Java mod can be done. If the cave generator on Bedrock is based on the same code as Java you could simply change a couple values to get the same cave density/distribution as 1.6.4 (according to the Wiki caves weren't added to Bedrock until 0.9.0, based on Java 1.8 world generation, so it likely never had the old Java generation. Conversely, Bedrock has much deeper and wider ravines than Java; I always see screenshots of surface to lava level ravines (example), which is only possible on Java if two generate on top of each other).
I like 1.6.4 too because of the terrain generation and the old item ID system (with 1.6.4 you could obtain items like half a bed or stationairy lava). Many people who played 1.6.4 didn't like the terrain, but I feel like the old mountains were perfect. All the terrain was quite flat but when you went to an extreme hills biome you suddenly saw big mountains and overhangs. I can generally say that I like old versions of minecraft and their features (thats why I own my server betachy.play-mc.de which is still on beta 1.6.6)
The only problem I have with this version is that there are no working skins and I don't really know how to fix that.
The only problem I have with this version is that there are no working skins and I don't really know how to fix that.
You can use a resource pack to get a custom skin; I've even exploited this fact in TMCW by adding my own skin to the mod assets, so you get to play with my skin, sort of like my signature (I also included a basic resource pack, which you can download here, so you can easily change it; if you use another resource pack you'd have to combine them since only one can be used at a time). I originally replaced the default skin long before the server shutdown as insurance against outages and never noticed until somebody else mentioned it.
Of course, this only works well on singleplayer, as in multiplayer everybody will use the default skin (or whatever you changed it to), same for heads and any mods that used the skin server (I've seen a mod that added NPCs with player skins). In my case this isn't an issue since I only play singleplayer.
I do kinda miss the old 1.6.4 underworld -- I remember moving underground and setting up wheat and tree farms down there (even jungle trees), rail systems running between continents, and so on. That said, there's also a surface that's gotten way more interesting over time (let alone the oceans). I'm currently based in a 1.1.4.3 (snapshot) village, and there's a whole new game with both the new villages and their raids. Let alone the End Cities!
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I did some CraftTweaker scripts for Mystical Agriculture. They fill in a couple of small gaps in MA, and also let you make or duplicate not only vanilla plants, but the blocks, plants and wood from Quark and Biomes O'Plenty. Also spawn eggs for most vanilla mobs! The scripts are here on Github.
I don't mean to selfishly piggy-back just to make a "me too, sort of, and here's my story", but well... that's what this is! But really, I am in your spot of deciding not to update, only with a different version, with different reasons, and different solutions (I certainly didn't and can't code my own fixes like you). I have also been behind the curve, so to speak, with 1.6.4 coincidentally enough being the last time I was entirely current. I think I may have been for a mere few weeks with 1.10, but I'm not sure.
I am currently on 1.10.2, and it seems like every few versions, they radically change something, be it texture pack format (or whatever) which results in me having to do more work than I care to, simply to keep things looking exactly as they are, or changes to rendering or code, slowing the game down for me massively (I play at higher render distances, currently 38 chunks). It might sound silly, but when all of your play time is in one world, and you get used to how far you can see, and how everything is designed around a single texture pack (with some customization/peculiarities), having to drop almost half the render distance (first world problem, I know, but this lessens the immersive scope/scale of things for me once you get used to it higher), deal with changes to the look of some things, and lose performance, makes you finally just go and give up. 1.13 may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for me (and having to adjust my existing villages for the changes they bring isn't something I care to do, especially with the awful way 1.8 dealt with water temples), and so I will likely indefinitely stay with 1.12 at the most (once I get around to updating even to that). 1.13 is just too slow on performance, and the final strike in a long-time-coming process that has been wearing on me. It's great the game updates still, but for me, for my world, for this world, this seems to be it's limit.
Side not; I started beta 1.3 the other day and was shocked at how fast it generated a new world, and how fast it ran. What happened?
Anyway, what I WILL likely do is now start another world, in a new installation, with a new texture pack (and lower render distance) for 1.14+ versions. Using a texture pack that, by all counts, was officially unsupported somewhere between 1.2.5 and 1.4 or so, and kept going by the good people of the community, it's still been wearing thin in keeping it looking how I want/as it used to while working with new versions. Since the world was always played with this pack, though, I'm partial against changing away from it when playing this world (which is 99.999~%+ of my play time).
While I "play" with 1.10.2, and while there's areas with 1.7+ terrain, this world originally from 1.2.5 has the same generation as 1.6.4 (more or less) and it's where the core of the world (which I never really leave) is, so I basically play "in" a 1.6 world myself, with the new features of 1.10.
Every time I've tried starting a new world to have new generation, it never lasts, mainly for two reasons. One is, I don't have my existing developed world with me. I don't mind the item loss; I can farm things back, but losing all my locations hurts. The other reason is, I love the new biomes of 1.7, but NOT the generation (referring to the temperate system or whatever it is). With 1.13+ and now 1.14 being so radically different, it might fix one of those issues.
So, my hybrid solution is to keep my current world at 1.10 (eventually 1.12) indefinitely, most likely permanently, and still largely playing it, but picking up a new world that hopefully sticks somewhat, even if it sees less play, that allows me to enjoy new features. My existing world will likely not be replaced by it (way too much build up), but it'll still let me play the new stuff without having to deal with constant headaches of keeping an increasingly aged world updated.
Sorry for the rant, but there's my story like yours. I never posted it, despite seeing you make this years ago, after I always saw you repeatedly post the story in other threads about it.
very interesting to see someone else's play style! I didn't know caves were changed so much, just thought I kept getting unlucky... I personally play for the building and exploration, caves tend to get kinda repetitive for me, so I tend to use mods like quark. my personal update preference would probably be 1.12.2 for this reason, as well as the fact that there's almost as many mods for that as 1.7.10 now. I don't actually think I've ever actually built a tree farm, come to think of it...
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I still play on 1.6.4 mainly because of the chunk borders than appear when you update.
i wonder when the people in this thread will realise there's beta generation mods for 1.12.2, etc
hey!:D
My Discord ign is The_Naked_OwO#6969/308030940280520734, i don't add people i don't know though.
Nobody even mentioned that they still play Beta because of changes since then, and everybody probably knows about presets like this one.
As I said before, in my case it is largely because I now develop my own version of the game which I don't even consider to be 1.6.4 anymore (and hardly can be called such, given that my added features, like new blocks (including blocks which were not normally obtainable like bark logs and DV smooth double slabs), nearly equal everything the game had, or far exceed it in the case of 108 biomes, compared to 23 in vanilla, 62 in 1.7-1.12.2, and 73 in 1.13, and not all of the vanilla biomes naturally generate) - I even changed the title of the game window to "TheMasterCaver's World" - I've spent most of the past couple months on its largest update ever, far exceeding any vanilla update, with less than a day of normal gameplay (normally I play about 3.5 hours per day, which is about how much time I've been spending on the mod; this is by far the longest such period that I've spent on updating a mod, previously about a month in late 2016). Some of my latest additions include woodland mansions and shipwrecks (both of my own design; I previously took vanilla structures like igloos and fossils from the blueprints in the Wiki); mansions alone took over 2,700 lines of code and a week to make and debug (including placing them so they are never buried in the ground, unlike village houses; they even generate a staircase if the entrance is above the ground).
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 don't know if you still play, but I've been playing in my infdev world for nine years now. When each update came out, I happily upgraded, and when terrarain changed, my world would grow these borders, signifying the end of an era of terrain generation. I might miss the alpha generation or beta generation from time to time, but due to the size of my world, such lands are immortalized. Granted, I only have so much of it, but it's enough for me.
There's so many features from 1.6.4 to now, almost 1.14, that it's overwhelming. I still haven't found my first woodland mansion, defeated an elder guardian, or build automated farms like Ethoslab, but I'm grateful that those options are available to me in the vanilla base game. I have modded my experience, but the vanilla content is all there yet.
I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but world regeneration is fully customizable now. You can create a fully customized world in 1.12.2, and transfer it to future versions using this guide:
I very much still do play, as evident by my recent posts; just yesterday I explored this insane cave system/mineshaft complex - which is the same way that I've been playing for the past 6 years, and still on the same version (this world is modded to have twice the caves of vanilla 1.6.4 but otherwise it is basically vanilla with improvements and bugfixes):
This gives you an idea of just how extreme my caving (still) is - I do this basically every single day and have done so for years (I made this thread shortly after I added the "stats" to the inventory screen, which record what I've done in the current session, and I'd already been playing like this for over a year at the time):
This shows what I've mined overall, using the actual stats taken from the stats file (instead of per session):
Also, you can see that pretty much all I craft after the "end-game" are torches and mineral blocks (this is not a "normal" world, meaning I start from scratch, doing all the normal stuff you do in a survival world until the "end", which for me is killing the Ender Dragon, after which I start caving, thus these statistics reflect what I do after the "end-game" in a normal world - which really is almost nothing but caving):
As seen here, I've mined all of that over 95 play sessions, meaning that I've mined an average of 3050 ore per play session:
Also, there are most of the worlds that I've had - which are all the same aside from changes to biomes or underground generation; my current world, "InfiniteCaves", is a recreation of the earliest modded world I had (I deleted the original):
I know all about the so-called "customization" - and its fatal limitations - like the inability to change how biomes generate besides "all or none" or change the frequency and size of cave systems, or other structures besides dungeons, which is why I made the following suggestion years ago (originally due to the changes in 1.7 but it is still entirely valid as of today):
Customizable cave/structure generation, plus other suggestions for "customized" settings
I even worked on a mod for 1.8 which would implement this (I abandoned it due to issues with MCP's reobfuscation, and after this pretty much abandoned all modding for non-1.6.4 versions, besides the fact that all of them have never actually been used by myself, even ones like my "old anvil mechanics" mod (re-adding the old anvil mechanics to 1.8, including being able to rename an item to keep the cost down, which was a game-breaking change to me; even with Mending added in 1.9 I'd still prefer the old way - or even have Mending work like renaming did, as I've done in my own mod for 1.6.4):
Settings for emerald ore, including the ability for it to generate in any biome:
So many options to customize the way caves generate (all you really need is the size and chance to make caves generate like they used to):
Where are these settings in vanilla? You can actually change most of these in Superflat; shame on Mojang for not including them in Customized:
A new preset which changes the way caves generate to be similar to what is seen in TMCW, without otherwise changing terrain (unlike the vanilla "cave" presets. I'd also added a few other changes like making underwater sand/gravel patches generate solid blocks over air so they don't cave in (I consider the flooded caves in 1.13 to be an extremely bad idea, turning oceans into complete no-go zones):
And no, presets that generate bizarre holed terrain like "Caves of Chaos" or 1.13's "cave" world type (which is simply the Nether with different blocks) don't cut it at all. Here is what the last world I played on with my own mod looked like (TheMasterCaver's World, link in signature; as the description suggests I see this as my own version of the game which has evolved independently of vanilla since 1.6.4):
This is an area of the underground, showing the variation in caves:
Even if they ever do add actual customization it is still not going to make me want to upgrade since my own modding abilities means I can basically create my own game (if Mojang ever actually adds some new underground features I'd just backport them, as I did with the 1.8 stone types, fossils, and mesa mineshafts; of course, these aren't really underground features as far as changes to caves go). Either way, I don't really care about anything else in newer versions, which of which I'd never use (as seen in the stats I show above where about all I've crafted are torches, mineral blocks, and a few other things I use while caving; I do craft more in normal worlds but not much) and still spend most of my time in semi-vanilla (e.g. for my first world (and modded worlds) I added a couple blocks so I can craft rails/cobwebs into blocks, much as you can with minerals, greatly reducing the amount of space they take up; for my current world I made Ender chests have the capacity of a double chest, which means I can spend many sessions caving before I have to return, even a regular Ender chest is enough for a couple sessions, so what is the point of shulker boxes).
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?
That cave is amazing! Would you mind explaining what "exploring" should entail? When you do caving, do you end up removing all the ore and wood from caves/mineshafts? Do you leave the caves as they are (with all their little pockets and dividing walls) or do you make major changes (e.g. break down walls, smooth floors and ceilings etc.). I'm just trying to understand what "real" caving is like and what the caves look like when you are finished with them.
I only mine all exposed ores, as well as the moss stone from dungeons and rails and cobwebs (only around cave spider spawners) from mineshafts, and chest loot (resources, diamond horse armor, name tags, golden apples, enchanted books with useful enchantments); everything else is virtually untouched, which is also how I manage to explore so much per play session - an average of about 100 chunks (160x160 blocks) of the underground, which in 1.6.4 has an average of 45 tunnels (112 including branches, where 25% of tunnels are a single tunnel and 75% have 2 branches for a total of 3 (shorter) tunnels per cave tunnel), 8 circular rooms, 2 dungeons, and one mineshaft, and an average of about 3,000 exposed ores, all of which takes a few hours to explore. Even in my current world, with double the caves of vanilla 1.6.4 (30% more than 1.7 and later, with the bigger difference being that cave systems are denser by about 2.8 times, and mineshafts and dungeons are more than twice as common) I've averaged 70 chunks per play session with 65% of the entire world covered (mostly excluding the edges where chunks are loaded further out from the player).
I don't even use any forms of navigation (e.g. signs or other markers), other than memory and the presence/lack of ores and torches; I'll just go down a series of tunnels placing torches and killing any mobs until I reach a dead end or one of those areas that are so dense all tunnels merge together into randomness (when I explored the cave.mineshaft system I mentioned I explored the mineshafts first since they had well-defined pathways), then I backtrack and mine the ores along the way back, going down side tunnels; if I encounter what appears to be a new area, or a new cave system/mineshaft I'll dig to the surface and place a marker (a cobblestone pillar 21 blocks high) so I can come back later after I've finished exploring the current system. I also carry a map with me so I can see where I've been in general, exploring around the edges of the mapped area. From using MCEdit (like Spectator mode) to look at explored areas there is very little that I miss:
These are of the cave/mineshaft complex I just explored; the only significant areas that I missed aren't connected to anything:
Note that the caves in the foreground and left side are not connected to anything; there is a small cave that I missed near the center:
Some screenshots from my first world:
Here is a 10 day animation of an area that I explored in my first world (vanilla), about 700 blocks across, with multiple large cave systems and mineshafts, as also shown in a before and after (I used MCMap (not for 1.13+ though) to make this; it only shows caves if there are torches in them, with naturally generated torches removed from mineshafts with a mod. The before/after was made after using a utility to delete chunks without torches; when done on the entire world about 80% of more than 109000 chunks remained):
This is a before and after of the area shown above; the new explored area is roughly 700x400 blocks in size, or about 1100 chunks:
This is the largest single cave system that I've ever explored, from my last modded world, which had a volume of 1.2 million air blocks and took less than 5 full sessions to explore (though the tunnels were much larger so the volume/area ratio was much higher than a vanilla-type cave system), which yielded more than 15,000 resources and took 5,500 torches to light up:
The animation shows the area near the upper-right:
This shows all the stuff I got from it, totaling more than 15,000 resources and other items (there were only two dungeons and no mineshafts since big caves aren't suitable for dungeons and my mod prevents mineshafts from generating in these caves, as well as denser vanilla-type caves. The items in the last row are mostly chest loot and mob drops, plus a couple "empty spawners", a decorative block I added):
Here is the entire world (unexplored areas cropped away); for a sense of scale, the small bit in the top-left is a fairly large stronghold (the only part that I didn't explore as part of my regular caving, which I only did after the "end-game"; you can see the branch-mine I made to get resources early on near the top-left of the main area):
Also, for another perspective of my caving, this is a slice of the entire world at layer 20:
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?
Congratulations on sticking to your guns.
I, personally, feel the opposite way about caves and mineshafts. They should be SPECIAL.They should be rare enough that finding one is a big deal and something that I hope for, not the spaces in which I'll spend the majority of my underground time and not something that I dread because each one is a 20-hour detour from whatever I'm actually trying to do down there. They should be small enough that I can keep a mental map of each one in my head, not so big that I'll get lost without putting signs all over the place saying "your base is back this way ====>"
Nonetheless, what we can agree on is that players should be allowed to customize cave-generation to their liking.
Still playing on 1.8 rn, I know this post is old but, just wanted to share tbh.
If a group of mouse is called mice, then is a group of houses called hice?
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Apologies if I'm necroing a dead thread, how easy would it be to make an addon that recreates the old cave generation system in the current version of Bedrock? Not a question for you in particular, just in general to someone who's more knowledgable in Bedrock Add-ons than I am.
*laughs in Phantom*
Defender of the 1.14 Textures/Bedrock Edition
This thread is still relevant as long as I still play in 1.6.4, which I still do nearly two years later (I should change the title to six years); I mainly made this to explain why I still play in such an old version (many people can't imagine why I'd do so).
As for changing cave generation, I don't have any experience but I don't think that can be done with an addon; it would require actually modifying the game's code, which is quite difficult to do on Bedrock/MCPE (there have been such mods created so I know it is possible, at least to some extent, but it is unlikely anything on the scale of a Java mod can be done. If the cave generator on Bedrock is based on the same code as Java you could simply change a couple values to get the same cave density/distribution as 1.6.4 (according to the Wiki caves weren't added to Bedrock until 0.9.0, based on Java 1.8 world generation, so it likely never had the old Java generation. Conversely, Bedrock has much deeper and wider ravines than Java; I always see screenshots of surface to lava level ravines (example), which is only possible on Java if two generate on top of each other).
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 like 1.6.4 too because of the terrain generation and the old item ID system (with 1.6.4 you could obtain items like half a bed or stationairy lava). Many people who played 1.6.4 didn't like the terrain, but I feel like the old mountains were perfect. All the terrain was quite flat but when you went to an extreme hills biome you suddenly saw big mountains and overhangs. I can generally say that I like old versions of minecraft and their features (thats why I own my server betachy.play-mc.de which is still on beta 1.6.6)
The only problem I have with this version is that there are no working skins and I don't really know how to fix that.
You can use a resource pack to get a custom skin; I've even exploited this fact in TMCW by adding my own skin to the mod assets, so you get to play with my skin, sort of like my signature (I also included a basic resource pack, which you can download here, so you can easily change it; if you use another resource pack you'd have to combine them since only one can be used at a time). I originally replaced the default skin long before the server shutdown as insurance against outages and never noticed until somebody else mentioned it.
Of course, this only works well on singleplayer, as in multiplayer everybody will use the default skin (or whatever you changed it to), same for heads and any mods that used the skin server (I've seen a mod that added NPCs with player skins). In my case this isn't an issue since I only play singleplayer.
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 do kinda miss the old 1.6.4 underworld -- I remember moving underground and setting up wheat and tree farms down there (even jungle trees), rail systems running between continents, and so on. That said, there's also a surface that's gotten way more interesting over time (let alone the oceans). I'm currently based in a 1.1.4.3 (snapshot) village, and there's a whole new game with both the new villages and their raids. Let alone the End Cities!
I don't mean to selfishly piggy-back just to make a "me too, sort of, and here's my story", but well... that's what this is! But really, I am in your spot of deciding not to update, only with a different version, with different reasons, and different solutions (I certainly didn't and can't code my own fixes like you). I have also been behind the curve, so to speak, with 1.6.4 coincidentally enough being the last time I was entirely current. I think I may have been for a mere few weeks with 1.10, but I'm not sure.
I am currently on 1.10.2, and it seems like every few versions, they radically change something, be it texture pack format (or whatever) which results in me having to do more work than I care to, simply to keep things looking exactly as they are, or changes to rendering or code, slowing the game down for me massively (I play at higher render distances, currently 38 chunks). It might sound silly, but when all of your play time is in one world, and you get used to how far you can see, and how everything is designed around a single texture pack (with some customization/peculiarities), having to drop almost half the render distance (first world problem, I know, but this lessens the immersive scope/scale of things for me once you get used to it higher), deal with changes to the look of some things, and lose performance, makes you finally just go and give up. 1.13 may have been the straw that broke the camel's back for me (and having to adjust my existing villages for the changes they bring isn't something I care to do, especially with the awful way 1.8 dealt with water temples), and so I will likely indefinitely stay with 1.12 at the most (once I get around to updating even to that). 1.13 is just too slow on performance, and the final strike in a long-time-coming process that has been wearing on me. It's great the game updates still, but for me, for my world, for this world, this seems to be it's limit.
Side not; I started beta 1.3 the other day and was shocked at how fast it generated a new world, and how fast it ran. What happened?
Anyway, what I WILL likely do is now start another world, in a new installation, with a new texture pack (and lower render distance) for 1.14+ versions. Using a texture pack that, by all counts, was officially unsupported somewhere between 1.2.5 and 1.4 or so, and kept going by the good people of the community, it's still been wearing thin in keeping it looking how I want/as it used to while working with new versions. Since the world was always played with this pack, though, I'm partial against changing away from it when playing this world (which is 99.999~%+ of my play time).
While I "play" with 1.10.2, and while there's areas with 1.7+ terrain, this world originally from 1.2.5 has the same generation as 1.6.4 (more or less) and it's where the core of the world (which I never really leave) is, so I basically play "in" a 1.6 world myself, with the new features of 1.10.
Every time I've tried starting a new world to have new generation, it never lasts, mainly for two reasons. One is, I don't have my existing developed world with me. I don't mind the item loss; I can farm things back, but losing all my locations hurts. The other reason is, I love the new biomes of 1.7, but NOT the generation (referring to the temperate system or whatever it is). With 1.13+ and now 1.14 being so radically different, it might fix one of those issues.
So, my hybrid solution is to keep my current world at 1.10 (eventually 1.12) indefinitely, most likely permanently, and still largely playing it, but picking up a new world that hopefully sticks somewhat, even if it sees less play, that allows me to enjoy new features. My existing world will likely not be replaced by it (way too much build up), but it'll still let me play the new stuff without having to deal with constant headaches of keeping an increasingly aged world updated.
Sorry for the rant, but there's my story like yours. I never posted it, despite seeing you make this years ago, after I always saw you repeatedly post the story in other threads about it.
very interesting to see someone else's play style! I didn't know caves were changed so much, just thought I kept getting unlucky... I personally play for the building and exploration, caves tend to get kinda repetitive for me, so I tend to use mods like quark. my personal update preference would probably be 1.12.2 for this reason, as well as the fact that there's almost as many mods for that as 1.7.10 now. I don't actually think I've ever actually built a tree farm, come to think of it...