The concentration of diamond ore in the latest snapshot is very low. I've been an avid miner for a decade now and I immediately felt something was wrong in the snapshots. I know that as we get closer to the full release things will be balanced out and flesh out more and more, but I feel that it is important to bring up problems as early as possible.
I understand the rarity of diamond ore is due to the massive caves that expose tens of thousands of blocks, but this balances translates HORRIBLY to every other aspect of mining.
The classic caves (the tunnel caves we all know and love) still expose the same amount of blocks as they always had, but the chance of find a diamond ore per block exposed is the same as one of those massive caves, its possible to explore a massive network of these caves and find no diamond ore or just one or two veins, which in the latest update are most frequently 1 or 2 diamonds.
Shafting is even more broken, I have gone through entire unbreaking III Netherite pickaxes and not found a single diamond vein when shafting. Not only is the ore density at the optimal elevation approximately half of what it used to be, but the blocks you dig through take much longer to break, and since the veins are smaller, you are less likely to run into one on average! (if you pick the layer of a chunk that has the diamond ore in it, you are somewhere in the range of 15-25% less likely to find it since only 3-4 strips will expose the vein, instead of 4-5 strips on average.
Just to make sure I wasn't falling victim to horrid luck or some sort of cognitive bias, I surveyed the contents of 400 chunks and did some math to determine ore density in the latest snapshot. I then converted pre 1.17 diamond ore data to match the same units of measurement that my 1.17 measurements are in (diamond ores per 100 chunk layers) and the results are pretty telling.
How could this be adjusted to match the balance of diamond ore that has always been in minecraft with the new cave generation in 1.17?
I would take a two step approach.
1. Distinguish between air blocks in the new large caves to those in the smaller caves.
-This would allow generation testing to decide if veins should be generated with more nuance, perhaps you could cut down the 50% chance to skip generation in smaller caves to 25% or something.
2. Add one final batch of diamond ore that resembles the current generation. A single vein between levels -44 and -64, with perhaps a 1/2 to 2/3rds chance of generating per chunk, with a vein size of 0-10, with a 50% chance of not generating if exposed to water or tunnel cave air, and a 75% chance of not generating if exposed to air in one of those massive caves.
Ultimately it's up to the developers, not me, to decide if and how this should be adjusted, but I definitely stand by my case that diamond ore, at least as of version 21w14a, is far too rare, and should be fixed.
The problem is that this issue is right on the line between intentional change and bug - this post is primarily to gauge sentiment and give feedback to developers (if they see this :E) about one of the larger changes in the current snapshots.
From my own experience in modded worlds which add caves much larger and far more extensive than those in 1.17 (at least from my limited viewing of screenshots others took), the amounts of ores that I find do not differ much from vanilla, and if anything, I actually collect ores at a slower rate; in a vanilla world I averaged 904 ores mined per hour, of which 4.3 were diamond, while in a modded world with nearly twice the overall underground volume and similar ore generation (the only difference being that I lowered cave lava level by 7 layers, along with the ranges of rarer ores) I averaged 803 ores per hour, of which 3.3 were diamond, despite there being about 35% more exposed ores per chunk since the larger caves are more difficult to explore, especially with the mob spawning rates (I've killed over 600 mobs in a single giant cave, compared to an average of about 300 over an entire play session in vanilla).
As a more specific example, while exploring a "giant cave region", a massive regional-scale cave feature in my mod which has a volume of around 1.3 million air blocks across a 300x300 block area, I mined 15,563 ore, including 55 diamond, over about 19 hours, a rate of about 819 ore and 2.9 diamonds per hour (note that I did not use Fortune, which would have increased the number to about 120 and 6.4 per hour, which is still far below what you can get by branch-mining without Fortune):
These are all the resources that I collected, minus coal that I used for torches (of which I placed around 5,500) and fuel:
This is representative of the underground generation in TMCW, with the giant cave region near the upper-right:
A close-up of the giant cave region on layers 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50:
These are screenshots that I took while exploring the giant cave region; in many of the screenshots you can see far enough that fog/unloaded chunks obstruct the view (I was using Optifine to disable void fog, a feature present before 1.8, which also disabled the fog darkening when underground, otherwise the fog is black, as it is in TMCWv4.5):
Note that "vanilla" here refers to 1.6.4, which already had significantly more extensive caves and other underground features than 1.7-1.16. However, there are more ores exposed per length of cave in 1.8+ due to an increase in the size of all veins, which matches my (very limited) experience; I once averaged 1600 ores mined per hour in 1.8, partly due to the fact there was a mob spawning bug that broke mob spawning on lower render distances (I could only run at 4 chunks due to significantly worse performance than 1.6.4), but I also had the impression that ore veins were easier to find (I also once did this in 1.9+ and got similar results despite there being more mobs).
Looks like the cave generation and ore distribution changes in the Caves and Cliffs update have been postponed to a later version, 1.17 as it stands now is poised to keep the current ore generation, so the problem presented in this thread is no longer the case.
I'm going to say it again, and basically echo Webrosc:
I don't think Mojang has a clear idea of what they're doing in this update at all.
Now, I don't blame them for having hesistations or making small mistakes on such a revolutionary and ambitious change to the game.
I do, however, question their choice to release "uncertain" content, especially so much of it, and then take it back - it's more than a tease, it indicates uncertainty from the developers, and makes me feel they should have held off releasing these elevation and cave changes rather than get them out fast only to retract them. Maybe there is a popularity issue here, where some players may entirely quit the game due to the new caves and elevation etc. I can certainly see full time diamond miners getting upset over snapshot 6-14.
I'm going to say it again, and basically echo Webrosc:
I don't think Mojang has a clear idea of what they're doing in this update at all.
Now, I don't blame them for having hesistations or making small mistakes on such a revolutionary and ambitious change to the game.
I do, however, question their choice to release "uncertain" content, especially so much of it, and then take it back - it's more than a tease, it indicates uncertainty from the developers, and makes me feel they should have held off releasing these elevation and cave changes rather than get them out fast only to retract them. Maybe there is a popularity issue here, where some players may entirely quit the game due to the new caves and elevation etc. I can certainly see full time diamond miners getting upset over snapshot 6-14.
IMO, they could have just done what I did in my "double"/"triple" height terrain mods, which was to scale the ranges of ores to the increased height (and lower cave lava level) so you'd find the same relative amounts of each while caving:
This also made deep caves quite lucrative, given that you had 2-3 times the diamond above lava level, along with a higher cave density and much larger and more interconnected cave systems than vanilla (the range for diamond in THT was the same as vanilla but lava level was lower, 6 instead of 11, and cave density reached a maximum at lava level instead of 10-15 layers above it):
That said, the fact that I currently only lower lava level, keeping sea level at y=63, is also telling; I much prefer a more horizontal underground than vertical and you can still fit enormous caves within 59 layers - the only comparable caves I've seen in 1.17 snapshots appear to be due to the use of the "cave" world type (i.e. Nether generation).
I'm going to say it again, and basically echo Webrosc:
I don't think Mojang has a clear idea of what they're doing in this update at all.
Now, I don't blame them for having hesistations or making small mistakes on such a revolutionary and ambitious change to the game.
I do, however, question their choice to release "uncertain" content, especially so much of it, and then take it back - it's more than a tease, it indicates uncertainty from the developers, and makes me feel they should have held off releasing these elevation and cave changes rather than get them out fast only to retract them. Maybe there is a popularity issue here, where some players may entirely quit the game due to the new caves and elevation etc. I can certainly see full time diamond miners getting upset over snapshot 6-14.
Perhaps it's better that they don't make the ground any deeper after 1.17, I know it's an ambitious update and extremely difficult for Mojang to correct with all the features they intend to add in, but it would be wise to not increase the terrain depth and height any further than they're going to.
I don't blame people if they did quit the game due to the increased difficulty to get some ores or gemstones.
But people must understand that this isn't an easy project for Mojang.
Perhaps it's better that they don't make the ground any deeper after 1.17, I know it's an ambitious update and extremely difficult for Mojang to correct with all the features they intend to add in, but it would be wise to not increase the terrain depth and height any further than they're going to.
I don't blame people if they did quit the game due to the increased difficulty to get some ores or gemstones.
But people must understand that this isn't an easy project for Mojang.
I think the 'random noise generated (RNG, ha!) caves' scared me more than the new elevation change. They're massive.
All of these changes are reasons to either entice or disenfranchise players, so either way they go, Mojang may see nonplussed fans, but that's just business as a big company and fandom.
Frankly I don't know how come 1.17 is so much tougher than 1.16. I get that deciding on block and biome functionality is a pain, but elevation depth? Seems to me more like they're scared to alienate people whether they keep these changes or remove them, either way the wind blows...
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I created my world in an older snapshot, but actually found at least 5 veins of diamond totaling about 25 individual diamond pieces in one cave. Given, it was one of the bigger ones and it networked with a lot of others, but I've seen far better on the internet. I only explored it in about half-hour intervals (and didn't explore the whole thing), so I can't really say much about how long collecting would take, and the data may be a bit outdated, but I think this is still something to consider.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Minecraft 2.0
Minecraft 1.VR-Pre1
Snapshot 15w14a
Minecraft 3D
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
I think the 'random noise generated (RNG, ha!) caves' scared me more than the new elevation change. They're massive.
All of these changes are reasons to either entice or disenfranchise players, so either way they go, Mojang may see nonplussed fans, but that's just business as a big company and fandom.
Frankly I don't know how come 1.17 is so much tougher than 1.16. I get that deciding on block and biome functionality is a pain, but elevation depth? Seems to me more like they're scared to alienate people whether they keep these changes or remove them, either way the wind blows...
I think the added material variants more than justify the increased ground depth, , deepslate, crystals, copper, as well as iron and gold ore that can now be fortuned, (older versions of these two ores couldn't), it also leaves plenty more room for newer materials to be added later on while keeping the classic feel of the game intact.
I doubt 1.17 is going to make any aspect of the game that much more difficult, except for fighting the Warden which you aren't even supposed to kill in the first place. Any of the loot in the deep dark biome from what I've seen can be grabbed without fighting him, then you can run away.
The newer biome I'd frequent would be the dripstone ones, lots of space to move around, not too many tough enemies to fight, ideal for building mineshafts in.
The concentration of diamond ore in the latest snapshot is very low. I've been an avid miner for a decade now and I immediately felt something was wrong in the snapshots. I know that as we get closer to the full release things will be balanced out and flesh out more and more, but I feel that it is important to bring up problems as early as possible.
I understand the rarity of diamond ore is due to the massive caves that expose tens of thousands of blocks, but this balances translates HORRIBLY to every other aspect of mining.
The classic caves (the tunnel caves we all know and love) still expose the same amount of blocks as they always had, but the chance of find a diamond ore per block exposed is the same as one of those massive caves, its possible to explore a massive network of these caves and find no diamond ore or just one or two veins, which in the latest update are most frequently 1 or 2 diamonds.
Shafting is even more broken, I have gone through entire unbreaking III Netherite pickaxes and not found a single diamond vein when shafting. Not only is the ore density at the optimal elevation approximately half of what it used to be, but the blocks you dig through take much longer to break, and since the veins are smaller, you are less likely to run into one on average! (if you pick the layer of a chunk that has the diamond ore in it, you are somewhere in the range of 15-25% less likely to find it since only 3-4 strips will expose the vein, instead of 4-5 strips on average.
Just to make sure I wasn't falling victim to horrid luck or some sort of cognitive bias, I surveyed the contents of 400 chunks and did some math to determine ore density in the latest snapshot. I then converted pre 1.17 diamond ore data to match the same units of measurement that my 1.17 measurements are in (diamond ores per 100 chunk layers) and the results are pretty telling.
How could this be adjusted to match the balance of diamond ore that has always been in minecraft with the new cave generation in 1.17?
I would take a two step approach.
1. Distinguish between air blocks in the new large caves to those in the smaller caves.
-This would allow generation testing to decide if veins should be generated with more nuance, perhaps you could cut down the 50% chance to skip generation in smaller caves to 25% or something.
2. Add one final batch of diamond ore that resembles the current generation. A single vein between levels -44 and -64, with perhaps a 1/2 to 2/3rds chance of generating per chunk, with a vein size of 0-10, with a 50% chance of not generating if exposed to water or tunnel cave air, and a 75% chance of not generating if exposed to air in one of those massive caves.
Ultimately it's up to the developers, not me, to decide if and how this should be adjusted, but I definitely stand by my case that diamond ore, at least as of version 21w14a, is far too rare, and should be fixed.
The problem is that this issue is right on the line between intentional change and bug - this post is primarily to gauge sentiment and give feedback to developers (if they see this :E) about one of the larger changes in the current snapshots.
From my own experience in modded worlds which add caves much larger and far more extensive than those in 1.17 (at least from my limited viewing of screenshots others took), the amounts of ores that I find do not differ much from vanilla, and if anything, I actually collect ores at a slower rate; in a vanilla world I averaged 904 ores mined per hour, of which 4.3 were diamond, while in a modded world with nearly twice the overall underground volume and similar ore generation (the only difference being that I lowered cave lava level by 7 layers, along with the ranges of rarer ores) I averaged 803 ores per hour, of which 3.3 were diamond, despite there being about 35% more exposed ores per chunk since the larger caves are more difficult to explore, especially with the mob spawning rates (I've killed over 600 mobs in a single giant cave, compared to an average of about 300 over an entire play session in vanilla).
As a more specific example, while exploring a "giant cave region", a massive regional-scale cave feature in my mod which has a volume of around 1.3 million air blocks across a 300x300 block area, I mined 15,563 ore, including 55 diamond, over about 19 hours, a rate of about 819 ore and 2.9 diamonds per hour (note that I did not use Fortune, which would have increased the number to about 120 and 6.4 per hour, which is still far below what you can get by branch-mining without Fortune):
This is representative of the underground generation in TMCW, with the giant cave region near the upper-right:
A close-up of the giant cave region on layers 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50:
These are screenshots that I took while exploring the giant cave region; in many of the screenshots you can see far enough that fog/unloaded chunks obstruct the view (I was using Optifine to disable void fog, a feature present before 1.8, which also disabled the fog darkening when underground, otherwise the fog is black, as it is in TMCWv4.5):
Note that "vanilla" here refers to 1.6.4, which already had significantly more extensive caves and other underground features than 1.7-1.16. However, there are more ores exposed per length of cave in 1.8+ due to an increase in the size of all veins, which matches my (very limited) experience; I once averaged 1600 ores mined per hour in 1.8, partly due to the fact there was a mob spawning bug that broke mob spawning on lower render distances (I could only run at 4 chunks due to significantly worse performance than 1.6.4), but I also had the impression that ore veins were easier to find (I also once did this in 1.9+ and got similar results despite there being more 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?
Looks like the cave generation and ore distribution changes in the Caves and Cliffs update have been postponed to a later version, 1.17 as it stands now is poised to keep the current ore generation, so the problem presented in this thread is no longer the case.
found 8 diamond at level 12 fairly quickly. 21w15a
I'm going to say it again, and basically echo Webrosc:
I don't think Mojang has a clear idea of what they're doing in this update at all.
Now, I don't blame them for having hesistations or making small mistakes on such a revolutionary and ambitious change to the game.
I do, however, question their choice to release "uncertain" content, especially so much of it, and then take it back - it's more than a tease, it indicates uncertainty from the developers, and makes me feel they should have held off releasing these elevation and cave changes rather than get them out fast only to retract them. Maybe there is a popularity issue here, where some players may entirely quit the game due to the new caves and elevation etc. I can certainly see full time diamond miners getting upset over snapshot 6-14.
IMO, they could have just done what I did in my "double"/"triple" height terrain mods, which was to scale the ranges of ores to the increased height (and lower cave lava level) so you'd find the same relative amounts of each while caving:
This also made deep caves quite lucrative, given that you had 2-3 times the diamond above lava level, along with a higher cave density and much larger and more interconnected cave systems than vanilla (the range for diamond in THT was the same as vanilla but lava level was lower, 6 instead of 11, and cave density reached a maximum at lava level instead of 10-15 layers above it):
That said, the fact that I currently only lower lava level, keeping sea level at y=63, is also telling; I much prefer a more horizontal underground than vertical and you can still fit enormous caves within 59 layers - the only comparable caves I've seen in 1.17 snapshots appear to be due to the use of the "cave" world type (i.e. Nether generation).
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?
Perhaps it's better that they don't make the ground any deeper after 1.17, I know it's an ambitious update and extremely difficult for Mojang to correct with all the features they intend to add in, but it would be wise to not increase the terrain depth and height any further than they're going to.
I don't blame people if they did quit the game due to the increased difficulty to get some ores or gemstones.
But people must understand that this isn't an easy project for Mojang.
I think the 'random noise generated (RNG, ha!) caves' scared me more than the new elevation change. They're massive.
All of these changes are reasons to either entice or disenfranchise players, so either way they go, Mojang may see nonplussed fans, but that's just business as a big company and fandom.
Frankly I don't know how come 1.17 is so much tougher than 1.16. I get that deciding on block and biome functionality is a pain, but elevation depth? Seems to me more like they're scared to alienate people whether they keep these changes or remove them, either way the wind blows...
I created my world in an older snapshot, but actually found at least 5 veins of diamond totaling about 25 individual diamond pieces in one cave. Given, it was one of the bigger ones and it networked with a lot of others, but I've seen far better on the internet. I only explored it in about half-hour intervals (and didn't explore the whole thing), so I can't really say much about how long collecting would take, and the data may be a bit outdated, but I think this is still something to consider.
Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQdu9LKAdIU
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
15w14a is on this link:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/15w14a
1.RV-Pre1 is here:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/1.RV-Pre1
Minecraft 3D is here:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_3D_Shareware_v1.34
I think the added material variants more than justify the increased ground depth, , deepslate, crystals, copper, as well as iron and gold ore that can now be fortuned, (older versions of these two ores couldn't), it also leaves plenty more room for newer materials to be added later on while keeping the classic feel of the game intact.
I doubt 1.17 is going to make any aspect of the game that much more difficult, except for fighting the Warden which you aren't even supposed to kill in the first place. Any of the loot in the deep dark biome from what I've seen can be grabbed without fighting him, then you can run away.
The newer biome I'd frequent would be the dripstone ones, lots of space to move around, not too many tough enemies to fight, ideal for building mineshafts in.