I haven't had too much trouble with the water-logged ones, but the open dry ones are EVERYwhere. Mining is going to be way different :/ Now that the deep slate is in below y0 it's a bit strange looking too, a very repetitive pattern on the deep slate that really needs to be broken up somehow!
This. I'm gonna be scared to death and either love it or hate it.
The old style of 'mining slow and carefully' just won't work anymore, time to waste ores and get messy.
Caves enterable from oceans are fully underwater. Those not in contact or full contact remain airy.
Based from what I've seen (not from actually playing as I basically do not play "Minecraft" anymore but my own modded versions based on 1.6.4, which may as well be a totally different game) this applies to all caves, not just ones that directly connect to the seafloor, as shown in this map somebody made showing water underground (the small dots where land is are underground lakes and springs):
By contrast, in TMCW the only water you'll find is from lakes and springs, which are more common than in other biomes - even the patches of sand and gravel that cover the bottom of oceans (as they did before 1.7) do not cave in because they check if there is air below and place sandstone/cobblestone over it:
Also, I fixed the way caves check for water; in vanilla they will simply completely abort generation if there is any water within the volume of an entire segment (tunnels are a line of semi-spherical segments, similar to circular rooms, which are a single segment; ravines use cylindrical segments), while in TMCW the water check is done on a per-block basis, with the result that they contour around bodies of water, as seen above (this does mean that there are many more block checks but any performance loss is far offset by other optimizations, e.g. I use a fast true 64 bit RNG in place of Java's slow Random, which by itself halves overall generation time). Amazingly (not to me) Mojang still hasn't fixed this, at least for the "old" caves (if only "old" caves are affected then why not backport whatever code they use to carve the "new" caves? Or better yet, use the same common code for all of them, as TMCW does for "normal" caves, "large" caves, and ravines, which all call a common method, "replaceBlock" which has my custom water check)
Another issue with having flooded caves is that mineshafts will not generate through liquids, so I imagine that most of them are broken up and not interconnected, with the result that overall interconnectivity is greatly reduced, as is also the case with the way caves interact with water, at least the "dry" ones and in earlier versions (in particular, many ravines are broken up or missing):
Caves only (all of these are based on 1.6.4):
Caves and ravines:
Caves, ravines, and mineshafts - the underground is now virtually infinite, aside from perhaps close to the origin, where mineshafts are less common, and the odd pocket here and there (a common complaint about Beta 1.8 is that it made cave networks much bigger; in reality, it was the addition of ravines and mineshafts):
This is one reason why I don't explore that far into oceans, besides the fact they are basically barren wastelands with nothing of interest in terms of terrain or biomes, even in 1.13 or TMCW (I've added more variants of ocean biomes along with things like coral reefs, shipwrecks, and vegetation); of course, 1.13+ would be much worse as I don't consider flooded caves to be worth exploring at all so oceans would become a hard barrier.
Well, so far my experience exploring caves in 21w39a/40a has been fine. There are a lot of sheer deep drop-offs, a water bucket becomes a VERY important tool for vertical movement. The new mob spawn rules means torches can be placed more sparingly and lush caves are rather safe - as well as areas with lava - so a stack of coal goes a long way. There don't seem to be too many waterlogged caves, and the sheer amount of exposed surface means that a lot of ores can be found by caving. But the overall impression is I don't think I ever wanna go actually mining again, with the new ore distribution and all...
what is important about the water bucket? i always get one soon as i can for farming. how does it help your movements?
You can swim up and down waterfalls, or even (if you are daring) jump and place water just before you land, although I personally use ladders and blocks to get up/down big drops (and dislike the 1.18 generation even more if it is mostly vertical drops, this is one reason why TMCW keeps the original ground depth and mostly horizontally oriented caves, even my "vertical" cave systems are really diagonally up/down and can be mostly navigated by jumping; sure, the 200 block deep ravines in TripleHeightTerrain may have looked cool but appearances and actually exploring them in Survival are completely different things).
Also, having hostile mobs only spawn at a light level of 0 is meaningless when you place torches for visibility - yes, all the hundreds of torches I placed in this cave were for visibility, as emphasized by the fact I even placed them on the walls and ceiling (which I access by pillaring up; water buckets won't help here); it just so happens that this keeps the area generally above light level 7 (there are occasional darker areas but mobs rarely spawn because the threshold is not absolute but is 1 - level/8, thus 7 is 12.5% and 0 is 100%). Of course, my own versions also have true darkness - it is impossible to see in a light level of 0, regardless of in-game or monitor settings (most people have horribly uncalibrated monitors if my experience is any indication), though higher levels are mostly the same as vanilla (levels close to 0 are slightly darker).
I also doubt that it will do much for the mobs that exist prior to exploring a cave, or respawn in darker areas - I regularly kill hundreds of mobs while exploring the huge caves in TMCW (most of that was in a single large cave, not a cave system, while I otherwise average around 350 mobs per session) - don't forget that mobs can't even spawn within a 24 block radius (16 in TMCW), beyond the reach of any light source (most of these mobs are zombies, which have a much greater sight range in 1.6.4, which was later nerfed due to lag, but my philosophy is the fix the source of lag before nerfing anything); exploring these caves consists of running out to place a few torches, then backtracking to kill off a wave of mobs, repeat (if you think this is overwhelming fighting mobs is a major part of why I find caving to be enjoyable - I even increased the density of mobs, as seen by the reduced "safe zone" around the player, from 24 to 16 blocks, as well as spawn radius, from 128 to 96 blocks, while keeping the same mob cap).
Of course, ore density is the same as vanilla 1.6.4 as I also enjoy mining thousands of ores and other resoruces per session, which is also no different than what I find in vanilla 1.6.4; my highest hourly rates are when exploring "vanilla" caves, not large caves, since while large caves do expose a lot of surface area normal caves have a far greater area/volume ratio and are easier to explore:
This is a chart of what I mined over a 100 day period in TMCW:
For comparison, this is what I mined over 61 days in my first world (mostly vanilla, aside from about 20% less mineshafts due to code I added that prevents them from generating in dense cave areas); while I did collect ores at a slightly lower rate it is not significant and I collected more resources overall per session due to a much greater abundance of mineshafts with an average of one found every day (yes, even with only 80% of the vanilla frequency mineshafts cover a majority of the underground in 1.6.4; these charts also only count blocks mined, not drops or chest loot). Otherwise, day-day variability is generally lower due to the more consistent underground generation:
Gotta agree with Scorp, I don't see much initiative to mine with such low ore rates. Monsters being down is replaced by heights being up, and larger caves are always inherently tougher because you have to light up and see the roofs for the ores there, and then get up to them. A simple jump stack pillar can leave you exposed to skeletons, and it's hard to water bucket upwards. Ladders are cool for flatter cave roofs but not for spherical dome like ones.
Gotta agree with Scorp, I don't see much initiative to mine with such low ore rates. Monsters being down is replaced by heights being up, and larger caves are always inherently tougher because you have to light up and see the roofs for the ores there, and then get up to them. A simple jump stack pillar can leave you exposed to skeletons, and it's hard to water bucket upwards. Ladders are cool for flatter cave roofs but not for spherical dome like ones.
1.17 has been a completely lackluster update so far, I hoped it would turn out to be one of the best because of the increased ground depth and build height going up to about 320
but the awful ore generation has completely discouraged me from playing, this and the fact that it took too long for me and a friend to set up a decent trading system with villagers on our newer world in part due to Minecraft crashing and me having to restart it, resulted in me rage quitting last night, lizking10152011 got kicked out and then after restarting the game and loading the world back, two villager librarians he just set up in enclosures had just vanished.
As far as Minecraft goes, this has been our worst nightmare, especially since we like to do builds and for that we need resources for them, but the increased ore rarity punishes that,
why can't we have more updates that are as amazing as Aquatic was? I've never seen a reason to complain about this update, even with the addition of Phantoms that attack after 3 nights of insomnia, we get new hostile mobs and newer items to earn, as well as more enchantments and another weapon type, making the weapon system more diverse.
Sorry, but there's more to Minecraft than just strip or branch mining, and if Mojang insists on forcing players to do unrewarding tasks all day for them, then they should expect due criticism in return. It's not just my opinion, I've spoken to other people who dislike 1.17 for the same reasons I do, and the way it is going it could possibly become the least popular update.
Place a source of water on the edge of a tall drop if and you got a nice safe ride down. You can even scoop up the water back as you start to descend - and just ride the receding water column. Or leave it there for a ride back. Even faster if you have boots with depth strider. Added bonus is water will create a flooded area at the bottom, pushing away any explosive surprises.
You can look up the wall and place water at the highest point you can reach. Swim up the water. While stil holding jump key, scoop up the water and quickly place it 2-3 blocks higher. One can scale vettical walls this way.
Got in touch with lava? Dump a water bucket at your feet.
Mining close to lava? Put down water so it flows into each block you mine out. If you mine out a block and there is lava under it, water will turn lava into obsidian
thanks for the clues about water. gives me new things to try. i like the one about water because i have mined a diamond and it dropped into lava. and one time i dropped into the lava. mining now is a chore. i am not wearing much armor now. started keeping cows and getting leather for armor.
thanks for the clues about water. gives me new things to try. i like the one about water because i have mined a diamond and it dropped into lava. and one time i dropped into the lava. mining now is a chore. i am not wearing much armor now. started keeping cows and getting leather for armor.
yeah in practice, it's best to either go for cheap armour or for netherite which offers the most lava protection before enchants.
Pretty much in any world, I make a point to find and develop a village. Farmers are the prime emerald source early on - carrots/potatoes to get them out of novice, then pumpkins. Once you have an axe with silk touch, melons are even better. Once iron farm goes up, toolsmiths/weaponsmiths/armorers are unlimited xp and emeralds. And infinite supply of diamond armor and tools. Even without the zombifying and curing, librarians and cartographers are a massive source of free xp. Buy glass from former, make panes, sell to the latter. If either are both are zombied/cured, it is also an infinite emerald generator.
By trapping a villager in a boat in an enclosed space one can rapidly cycle through their first level trade by placing the workstation/checking villager/breaking workstation until you get the trade you want. One can have librarians with all the good trades (Mending, Fortune 3, Silk Touch, Unbreaking 3, Protection 4, Efficiency 5, Infinity etc) real fast as long as you do the prep work of putting up enough beds and optimizing their farms so you get a lot of villagers quick.
The only diamonds I ever need to actually mine/find are those for an enchantment table.
yeah in practice, it's best to either go for cheap armour or for netherite which offers the most lava protection before enchants.
Netherite armour is also the most expensive to repair, and if mending were to receive the kind of nerf people have asked for, where you needed to use an anvil to fix it every time, it wouldn't be practical to use it all the time, not even if you were to use it every time in the Nether, there will be times where it'll be badly damaged but you'll not have enough XP or netherite ingots to do a full repair.
So you'll be back to using leather or iron armour the majority of the time, enchanted or not.
Caves and Cliffs doesn't force this on people, but it's closer to it than any of the previous updates
because of the bad ore distribution problem I brought up earlier.
So you'll be back to using leather or iron armour the majority of the time, enchanted or not.
Why not diamond? I cannot even imagine using anything less while caving (fun fact, I recently tried caving without armor and died within 10 minutes, while I never died at all in many of my worlds; leather is barely better than nothing, especially since 1.9, as is even unenchanted diamond against close-range creeper blasts on Hard (before 1.9 they take up to 7.5 hearts, which is still a lot) and have absolutely no issues maintaining even TMCW's extremely rare and expensive amethyst items, solely relying on mined resources without using Fortune and XP from natural sources, ditto for diamond armor (which can be obtained by trading):
Efficiency V, Unbreaking III, Mending 43 levels
Sharpness V, Knockback II, Unbreaking III, Mending 48 levels
Protection IV, Unbreaking III, Mending 42 levels
Protection IV, Feather Falling IV, Mending 44 levels
All of those are for one unit, which is all that is possible to repair amethyst with, which also more than negates the benefit of having 3 times the durability of diamond since each unit only restores 25% of the durability and all of those items can be fully repaired with a sacrifice for less than 40 levels (the sword requires being slightly damaged, which I do by killing 3 stacks of chickens, which can be traded for enough emeralds to buy a new sword). You can also see that I do not put Unbreaking on my boots because they would be too expensive to repair (as it happens, by just one level, where amethyst items can cost up to 49 levels and Unbreaking III adds 6 levels for a total of 50); the higher material cost is worth it though over forgoing Protection.
On the other hand, repairing with units means I can maintain a large durability buffer; I repair items when they drop below 75% durability and I have enough levels; sometimes I don't have enough just as it hits 75% but that doesn't matter, I've never had any item fall below 50%, including back when I repaired diamond gear in vanilla with units (in this case I'd repair armor with 3 units at a time, leaving a buffer of 25%); as seen here all my amethyst items are always close to full durability (the helmets are from mob drops, otherwise I don't wear one):
This shows just how exceedingly rare amethyst is - it is even rarer than ancient debris on a per-chunk basis (the figures below are for exposed ores found while caving, not total ore per chunk), and the only way to obtain it is by mining, much like netherite, and the rare mob drop (which may be usable in a repair as they are always very damaged, lowering the cost, but they are too rare to be useful):
22796 chunks explored (within 1 chunk of a torch, 30353 total), 102.7 per caving session
Blocks mined over 222 sessions/851 hours spent caving:
percent /session /hour /chunk
Coal ore: 464009 67.8397 2090.131 545.251 20.3548
Iron ore: 168525 24.6389 759.122 198.032 7.3927
Redstone ore: 22041 3.2225 99.284 25.900 0.9669
Gold ore: 19098 2.7922 86.027 22.442 0.8378
Lapis ore: 6817 0.9967 30.707 8.011 0.2990
Diamond ore: 2833 0.4142 12.761 3.329 0.1243
Amethyst ore: 348 0.0509 1.568 0.409 0.0153
1283647 XP gained, 1215292 while caving, 5474 per caving session and 3255 per non-caving session
At this rate it would take 59 hours of nonstop caving exploring a 634x634 block area (1572 chunks) to find enough for all the gear I use while caving (24 for pickaxe, sword, chestplate, leggings, boots), while diamond would take only 7.2 hours (as mentioned before, caving, at least as I do it, is not a good way to find diamond). Even if you used Fortune it would still take 3.7 times longer to find enough amethyst than if you mined diamond without Fortune.
If you are wondering, I added amethyst in part to have something that was rare even with my playstyle; obviously, most players would never use it if you had to use resources to repair it, even as I nerfed diamond gear, which has the protection, mining speed, and attack damage of iron in vanilla when used by players (mob gear is not affected and amethyst is even stronger). Also, the fact that ancient debris requires going to the Nether would make it a complete no-go for me as I wouldn't want to have to go out of my way to find more to keep my gear in repair (I only use the Nether to get blaze rods and mine quartz for XP to make my caving gear and build my main base), so in this case I wouldn't want Mending to be changed (then again, netherite doesn't have much of an advantage over diamond, especially when enchanted - in fact, with Efficiency V wood mines stone just as fast as gold).
Pretty much in any world, I make a point to find and develop a village. Farmers are the prime emerald source early on - carrots/potatoes to get them out of novice, then pumpkins. Once you have an axe with silk touch, melons are even better. Once iron farm goes up, toolsmiths/weaponsmiths/armorers are unlimited xp and emeralds. And infinite supply of diamond armor and tools. Even without the zombifying and curing, librarians and cartographers are a massive source of free xp. Buy glass from former, make panes, sell to the latter. If either are both are zombied/cured, it is also an infinite emerald generator.
By trapping a villager in a boat in an enclosed space one can rapidly cycle through their first level trade by placing the workstation/checking villager/breaking workstation until you get the trade you want. One can have librarians with all the good trades (Mending, Fortune 3, Silk Touch, Unbreaking 3, Protection 4, Efficiency 5, Infinity etc) real fast as long as you do the prep work of putting up enough beds and optimizing their farms so you get a lot of villagers quick.
The only diamonds I ever need to actually mine/find are those for an enchantment table.
Netherite armour is also the most expensive to repair, and if mending were to receive the kind of nerf people have asked for, where you needed to use an anvil to fix it every time, it wouldn't be practical to use it all the time, not even if you were to use it every time in the Nether, there will be times where it'll be badly damaged but you'll not have enough XP or netherite ingots to do a full repair.
So you'll be back to using leather or iron armour the majority of the time, enchanted or not.
Caves and Cliffs doesn't force this on people, but it's closer to it than any of the previous updates
because of the bad ore distribution problem I brought up earlier.
Yeah, I'm highly dependent on mining to replenish tool damage. 1.18 is going to make that nigh impossible, which might balance mending out a bit. You can still also get it by killing mobs en masse though, and the overworld remains easy enough to one or two shot enemies with if you have the right enchants.
Why not diamond? I cannot even imagine using anything less while caving (fun fact, I recently tried caving without armor and died within 10 minutes, while I never died at all in many of my worlds; leather is barely better than nothing, especially since 1.9, as is even unenchanted diamond against close-range creeper blasts on Hard (before 1.9 they take up to 7.5 hearts, which is still a lot) and have absolutely no issues maintaining even TMCW's extremely rare and expensive amethyst items, solely relying on mined resources without using Fortune and XP from natural sources, ditto for diamond armor (which can be obtained by trading):
At this rate it would take 59 hours of nonstop caving exploring a 634x634 block area (1572 chunks) to find enough for all the gear I use while caving (24 for pickaxe, sword, chestplate, leggings, boots), while diamond would take only 7.2 hours (as mentioned before, caving, at least as I do it, is not a good way to find diamond). Even if you used Fortune it would still take 3.7 times longer to find enough amethyst than if you mined diamond without Fortune.
For a dedicated player, diamond armour is no sweat but the average player is far from dedicated either on effort or time.
I'm quite slow when I play on singleplayer (or was, 1.17 has convinced me to change my playstyle), and going fast shows it is easy enough to get full diamond armour from just a few mining trips in one area (splitting a trip into several to reduce the chance of losing them - thank 1.13+ water elevators for fast ascent and descent).
Yeah, I'm highly dependent on mining to replenish tool damage. 1.18 is going to make that nigh impossible, which might balance mending out a bit. You can still also get it by killing mobs en masse though, and the overworld remains easy enough to one or two shot enemies with if you have the right enchants.
For a dedicated player, diamond armour is no sweat but the average player is far from dedicated either on effort or time.
I'm quite slow when I play on singleplayer (or was, 1.17 has convinced me to change my playstyle), and going fast shows it is easy enough to get full diamond armour from just a few mining trips in one area (splitting a trip into several to reduce the chance of losing them - thank 1.13+ water elevators for fast ascent and descent).
It also depends on what you use diamonds for. If all you ever use diamonds for is tools and armour, plenty of diamonds exist on the world for that, and you'll have a surplus if you put in the work. But for players who choose to use it for decoration, jukeboxes and such, not just armour and tools, even for dedicated players diamonds can be extremely time consuming to get in vanilla survival without cheats.
This is part of the reason why people get upset when changes to ore generation are being made that affect the distribution in later versions of the game.
The other problem is the fact you paid for a licensed copy of the game, because you liked the features it had, then later on, big brother developer removes said feature from the game, and nobody else is able to stop them regardless of whether it actually improves the game in any meaningful way or not.
I never had an issue with diamonds being moved further down, it did make sense because of the extra amount of terrain.
However strip mining is a repetitive task that you said yourself that gets boring after a while, making diamonds rarer, is going to discourage strip mining for them even further, and it'll make people opt for iron instead for the majority of their tools and armour. And with 250 durability points per tool, that does suck, it means the tool would break after 250 uses not counting unbreaking or mending enchantments or repairs on the anvil.
I don't like having to use tools that will break just by cutting down a few trees.
This. I'm gonna be scared to death and either love it or hate it.
The old style of 'mining slow and carefully' just won't work anymore, time to waste ores and get messy.
i agree
To whom? Mind saying a bit more?
What game have you been playing?
Caves enterable from oceans are fully underwater. Those not in contact or full contact remain airy.
Based from what I've seen (not from actually playing as I basically do not play "Minecraft" anymore but my own modded versions based on 1.6.4, which may as well be a totally different game) this applies to all caves, not just ones that directly connect to the seafloor, as shown in this map somebody made showing water underground (the small dots where land is are underground lakes and springs):
By contrast, in TMCW the only water you'll find is from lakes and springs, which are more common than in other biomes - even the patches of sand and gravel that cover the bottom of oceans (as they did before 1.7) do not cave in because they check if there is air below and place sandstone/cobblestone over it:
Also, I fixed the way caves check for water; in vanilla they will simply completely abort generation if there is any water within the volume of an entire segment (tunnels are a line of semi-spherical segments, similar to circular rooms, which are a single segment; ravines use cylindrical segments), while in TMCW the water check is done on a per-block basis, with the result that they contour around bodies of water, as seen above (this does mean that there are many more block checks but any performance loss is far offset by other optimizations, e.g. I use a fast true 64 bit RNG in place of Java's slow Random, which by itself halves overall generation time). Amazingly (not to me) Mojang still hasn't fixed this, at least for the "old" caves (if only "old" caves are affected then why not backport whatever code they use to carve the "new" caves? Or better yet, use the same common code for all of them, as TMCW does for "normal" caves, "large" caves, and ravines, which all call a common method, "replaceBlock" which has my custom water check)
Another issue with having flooded caves is that mineshafts will not generate through liquids, so I imagine that most of them are broken up and not interconnected, with the result that overall interconnectivity is greatly reduced, as is also the case with the way caves interact with water, at least the "dry" ones and in earlier versions (in particular, many ravines are broken up or missing):
Caves and ravines:
Caves, ravines, and mineshafts - the underground is now virtually infinite, aside from perhaps close to the origin, where mineshafts are less common, and the odd pocket here and there (a common complaint about Beta 1.8 is that it made cave networks much bigger; in reality, it was the addition of ravines and mineshafts):
This is one reason why I don't explore that far into oceans, besides the fact they are basically barren wastelands with nothing of interest in terms of terrain or biomes, even in 1.13 or TMCW (I've added more variants of ocean biomes along with things like coral reefs, shipwrecks, and vegetation); of course, 1.13+ would be much worse as I don't consider flooded caves to be worth exploring at all so oceans would become a hard barrier.
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?
Well, so far my experience exploring caves in 21w39a/40a has been fine. There are a lot of sheer deep drop-offs, a water bucket becomes a VERY important tool for vertical movement. The new mob spawn rules means torches can be placed more sparingly and lush caves are rather safe - as well as areas with lava - so a stack of coal goes a long way. There don't seem to be too many waterlogged caves, and the sheer amount of exposed surface means that a lot of ores can be found by caving. But the overall impression is I don't think I ever wanna go actually mining again, with the new ore distribution and all...
what is important about the water bucket? i always get one soon as i can for farming. how does it help your movements?
You can swim up and down waterfalls, or even (if you are daring) jump and place water just before you land, although I personally use ladders and blocks to get up/down big drops (and dislike the 1.18 generation even more if it is mostly vertical drops, this is one reason why TMCW keeps the original ground depth and mostly horizontally oriented caves, even my "vertical" cave systems are really diagonally up/down and can be mostly navigated by jumping; sure, the 200 block deep ravines in TripleHeightTerrain may have looked cool but appearances and actually exploring them in Survival are completely different things).
Also, having hostile mobs only spawn at a light level of 0 is meaningless when you place torches for visibility - yes, all the hundreds of torches I placed in this cave were for visibility, as emphasized by the fact I even placed them on the walls and ceiling (which I access by pillaring up; water buckets won't help here); it just so happens that this keeps the area generally above light level 7 (there are occasional darker areas but mobs rarely spawn because the threshold is not absolute but is 1 - level/8, thus 7 is 12.5% and 0 is 100%). Of course, my own versions also have true darkness - it is impossible to see in a light level of 0, regardless of in-game or monitor settings (most people have horribly uncalibrated monitors if my experience is any indication), though higher levels are mostly the same as vanilla (levels close to 0 are slightly darker).
I also doubt that it will do much for the mobs that exist prior to exploring a cave, or respawn in darker areas - I regularly kill hundreds of mobs while exploring the huge caves in TMCW (most of that was in a single large cave, not a cave system, while I otherwise average around 350 mobs per session) - don't forget that mobs can't even spawn within a 24 block radius (16 in TMCW), beyond the reach of any light source (most of these mobs are zombies, which have a much greater sight range in 1.6.4, which was later nerfed due to lag, but my philosophy is the fix the source of lag before nerfing anything); exploring these caves consists of running out to place a few torches, then backtracking to kill off a wave of mobs, repeat (if you think this is overwhelming fighting mobs is a major part of why I find caving to be enjoyable - I even increased the density of mobs, as seen by the reduced "safe zone" around the player, from 24 to 16 blocks, as well as spawn radius, from 128 to 96 blocks, while keeping the same mob cap).
Of course, ore density is the same as vanilla 1.6.4 as I also enjoy mining thousands of ores and other resoruces per session, which is also no different than what I find in vanilla 1.6.4; my highest hourly rates are when exploring "vanilla" caves, not large caves, since while large caves do expose a lot of surface area normal caves have a far greater area/volume ratio and are easier to explore:
For comparison, this is what I mined over 61 days in my first world (mostly vanilla, aside from about 20% less mineshafts due to code I added that prevents them from generating in dense cave areas); while I did collect ores at a slightly lower rate it is not significant and I collected more resources overall per session due to a much greater abundance of mineshafts with an average of one found every day (yes, even with only 80% of the vanilla frequency mineshafts cover a majority of the underground in 1.6.4; these charts also only count blocks mined, not drops or chest loot). Otherwise, day-day variability is generally lower due to the more consistent underground 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?
I like these caves, they have started to look better, but it's still boring underground (((
My minecraft website - https://planet-minecraft.com/!
Gotta agree with Scorp, I don't see much initiative to mine with such low ore rates. Monsters being down is replaced by heights being up, and larger caves are always inherently tougher because you have to light up and see the roofs for the ores there, and then get up to them. A simple jump stack pillar can leave you exposed to skeletons, and it's hard to water bucket upwards. Ladders are cool for flatter cave roofs but not for spherical dome like ones.
1.17 has been a completely lackluster update so far, I hoped it would turn out to be one of the best because of the increased ground depth and build height going up to about 320
but the awful ore generation has completely discouraged me from playing, this and the fact that it took too long for me and a friend to set up a decent trading system with villagers on our newer world in part due to Minecraft crashing and me having to restart it, resulted in me rage quitting last night, lizking10152011 got kicked out and then after restarting the game and loading the world back, two villager librarians he just set up in enclosures had just vanished.
As far as Minecraft goes, this has been our worst nightmare, especially since we like to do builds and for that we need resources for them, but the increased ore rarity punishes that,
why can't we have more updates that are as amazing as Aquatic was? I've never seen a reason to complain about this update, even with the addition of Phantoms that attack after 3 nights of insomnia, we get new hostile mobs and newer items to earn, as well as more enchantments and another weapon type, making the weapon system more diverse.
Sorry, but there's more to Minecraft than just strip or branch mining, and if Mojang insists on forcing players to do unrewarding tasks all day for them, then they should expect due criticism in return. It's not just my opinion, I've spoken to other people who dislike 1.17 for the same reasons I do, and the way it is going it could possibly become the least popular update.
Place a source of water on the edge of a tall drop if and you got a nice safe ride down. You can even scoop up the water back as you start to descend - and just ride the receding water column. Or leave it there for a ride back. Even faster if you have boots with depth strider. Added bonus is water will create a flooded area at the bottom, pushing away any explosive surprises.
You can look up the wall and place water at the highest point you can reach. Swim up the water. While stil holding jump key, scoop up the water and quickly place it 2-3 blocks higher. One can scale vettical walls this way.
Got in touch with lava? Dump a water bucket at your feet.
Mining close to lava? Put down water so it flows into each block you mine out. If you mine out a block and there is lava under it, water will turn lava into obsidian
thanks for the clues about water. gives me new things to try. i like the one about water because i have mined a diamond and it dropped into lava. and one time i dropped into the lava. mining now is a chore. i am not wearing much armor now. started keeping cows and getting leather for armor.
yeah in practice, it's best to either go for cheap armour or for netherite which offers the most lava protection before enchants.
Pretty much in any world, I make a point to find and develop a village. Farmers are the prime emerald source early on - carrots/potatoes to get them out of novice, then pumpkins. Once you have an axe with silk touch, melons are even better. Once iron farm goes up, toolsmiths/weaponsmiths/armorers are unlimited xp and emeralds. And infinite supply of diamond armor and tools. Even without the zombifying and curing, librarians and cartographers are a massive source of free xp. Buy glass from former, make panes, sell to the latter. If either are both are zombied/cured, it is also an infinite emerald generator.
By trapping a villager in a boat in an enclosed space one can rapidly cycle through their first level trade by placing the workstation/checking villager/breaking workstation until you get the trade you want. One can have librarians with all the good trades (Mending, Fortune 3, Silk Touch, Unbreaking 3, Protection 4, Efficiency 5, Infinity etc) real fast as long as you do the prep work of putting up enough beds and optimizing their farms so you get a lot of villagers quick.
The only diamonds I ever need to actually mine/find are those for an enchantment table.
Netherite armour is also the most expensive to repair, and if mending were to receive the kind of nerf people have asked for, where you needed to use an anvil to fix it every time, it wouldn't be practical to use it all the time, not even if you were to use it every time in the Nether, there will be times where it'll be badly damaged but you'll not have enough XP or netherite ingots to do a full repair.
So you'll be back to using leather or iron armour the majority of the time, enchanted or not.
Caves and Cliffs doesn't force this on people, but it's closer to it than any of the previous updates
because of the bad ore distribution problem I brought up earlier.
Why not diamond? I cannot even imagine using anything less while caving (fun fact, I recently tried caving without armor and died within 10 minutes, while I never died at all in many of my worlds; leather is barely better than nothing, especially since 1.9, as is even unenchanted diamond against close-range creeper blasts on Hard (before 1.9 they take up to 7.5 hearts, which is still a lot) and have absolutely no issues maintaining even TMCW's extremely rare and expensive amethyst items, solely relying on mined resources without using Fortune and XP from natural sources, ditto for diamond armor (which can be obtained by trading):
All of those are for one unit, which is all that is possible to repair amethyst with, which also more than negates the benefit of having 3 times the durability of diamond since each unit only restores 25% of the durability and all of those items can be fully repaired with a sacrifice for less than 40 levels (the sword requires being slightly damaged, which I do by killing 3 stacks of chickens, which can be traded for enough emeralds to buy a new sword). You can also see that I do not put Unbreaking on my boots because they would be too expensive to repair (as it happens, by just one level, where amethyst items can cost up to 49 levels and Unbreaking III adds 6 levels for a total of 50); the higher material cost is worth it though over forgoing Protection.
On the other hand, repairing with units means I can maintain a large durability buffer; I repair items when they drop below 75% durability and I have enough levels; sometimes I don't have enough just as it hits 75% but that doesn't matter, I've never had any item fall below 50%, including back when I repaired diamond gear in vanilla with units (in this case I'd repair armor with 3 units at a time, leaving a buffer of 25%); as seen here all my amethyst items are always close to full durability (the helmets are from mob drops, otherwise I don't wear one):
This shows just how exceedingly rare amethyst is - it is even rarer than ancient debris on a per-chunk basis (the figures below are for exposed ores found while caving, not total ore per chunk), and the only way to obtain it is by mining, much like netherite, and the rare mob drop (which may be usable in a repair as they are always very damaged, lowering the cost, but they are too rare to be useful):
22796 chunks explored (within 1 chunk of a torch, 30353 total), 102.7 per caving session Blocks mined over 222 sessions/851 hours spent caving: percent /session /hour /chunk Coal ore: 464009 67.8397 2090.131 545.251 20.3548 Iron ore: 168525 24.6389 759.122 198.032 7.3927 Redstone ore: 22041 3.2225 99.284 25.900 0.9669 Gold ore: 19098 2.7922 86.027 22.442 0.8378 Lapis ore: 6817 0.9967 30.707 8.011 0.2990 Diamond ore: 2833 0.4142 12.761 3.329 0.1243 Amethyst ore: 348 0.0509 1.568 0.409 0.0153 1283647 XP gained, 1215292 while caving, 5474 per caving session and 3255 per non-caving sessionAt this rate it would take 59 hours of nonstop caving exploring a 634x634 block area (1572 chunks) to find enough for all the gear I use while caving (24 for pickaxe, sword, chestplate, leggings, boots), while diamond would take only 7.2 hours (as mentioned before, caving, at least as I do it, is not a good way to find diamond). Even if you used Fortune it would still take 3.7 times longer to find enough amethyst than if you mined diamond without Fortune.
If you are wondering, I added amethyst in part to have something that was rare even with my playstyle; obviously, most players would never use it if you had to use resources to repair it, even as I nerfed diamond gear, which has the protection, mining speed, and attack damage of iron in vanilla when used by players (mob gear is not affected and amethyst is even stronger). Also, the fact that ancient debris requires going to the Nether would make it a complete no-go for me as I wouldn't want to have to go out of my way to find more to keep my gear in repair (I only use the Nether to get blaze rods and mine quartz for XP to make my caving gear and build my main base), so in this case I wouldn't want Mending to be changed (then again, netherite doesn't have much of an advantage over diamond, especially when enchanted - in fact, with Efficiency V wood mines stone just as fast as gold).
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?
You've got it all figured out.
Yeah, I'm highly dependent on mining to replenish tool damage. 1.18 is going to make that nigh impossible, which might balance mending out a bit. You can still also get it by killing mobs en masse though, and the overworld remains easy enough to one or two shot enemies with if you have the right enchants.
For a dedicated player, diamond armour is no sweat but the average player is far from dedicated either on effort or time.
I'm quite slow when I play on singleplayer (or was, 1.17 has convinced me to change my playstyle), and going fast shows it is easy enough to get full diamond armour from just a few mining trips in one area (splitting a trip into several to reduce the chance of losing them - thank 1.13+ water elevators for fast ascent and descent).
It also depends on what you use diamonds for. If all you ever use diamonds for is tools and armour, plenty of diamonds exist on the world for that, and you'll have a surplus if you put in the work. But for players who choose to use it for decoration, jukeboxes and such, not just armour and tools, even for dedicated players diamonds can be extremely time consuming to get in vanilla survival without cheats.
This is part of the reason why people get upset when changes to ore generation are being made that affect the distribution in later versions of the game.
The other problem is the fact you paid for a licensed copy of the game, because you liked the features it had, then later on, big brother developer removes said feature from the game, and nobody else is able to stop them regardless of whether it actually improves the game in any meaningful way or not.
I never had an issue with diamonds being moved further down, it did make sense because of the extra amount of terrain.
However strip mining is a repetitive task that you said yourself that gets boring after a while, making diamonds rarer, is going to discourage strip mining for them even further, and it'll make people opt for iron instead for the majority of their tools and armour. And with 250 durability points per tool, that does suck, it means the tool would break after 250 uses not counting unbreaking or mending enchantments or repairs on the anvil.
I don't like having to use tools that will break just by cutting down a few trees.
It's already annoying having to craft new ones.