They actually reduced the amount of ores that are exposed in caves; I can't say whether the overall density was changed but adding more caves would have minimal impact; even my mods which have far more caves than vanilla 1.6.4 and especially 1.7-1.17 have little impact on overall ore amounts, and actually significantly increase ore exposure, with around 33% more ores exposed per chunk (this does not translate to me mining ores faster though):
Note in particular the charts for total ores (top-left) and percentage of ores exposed (bottom-left), which closely follows air volume with over 20% of all coal exposed at the peak (the larger vein size effectively increases exposure; iron is around 14% and emerald (single blocks) is around 7.5%), which is close to the peak in air volume, about 13% (all that really matters is ores per exposed block, as shown in the lower-right, which is essentially the same as ores per block overall; otherwise, more caves may hinder branch-mining but I've been able to make 200+ block long mines with minimal interruptions (one of the differences between 1.6.4 and 1.7 is that in 1.7 caves are much more scattered, as opposed to mostly within dense cave systems, thus areas free of caves are smaller despite an overall reduction in the number of caves; I have no idea what the underground is like in 1.18 because it doesn't interest me at all but if it is more like 1.7+ cave generation plus the occasional giant caves then it is no better than 1.7; my favorite type of caves to explore are the denser cave systems found in 1.6.4).
Caves, by definition, remove 100% of the resources that would have been present. They are ALL replaced by air, water, or lava. So, adding caves definitely reduced resources.
Regarding whether they reduced overall resource amounts, just play a few games. Mining by the same method I always use, I would get around 100 iron from the surface to zero. Now I never get more than thirty unless I run into a vein (which has only happened once), and even then fifty was the count.
When the uppermost block of a stalactite less than 11 blocks tall gets randomly ticked, it checks for a water source or waterlogged block two blocks above it and a cauldron within 10 blocks under the tip with no non-air blocks in between. If both conditions are satisfied, there is a 45⁄256 (~17.6%) chance for it to drip water and fill the cauldron by one level. If there is a lava source above the stalactite, there is a 15⁄256 (~5.9%) chance for it to completely fill an empty cauldron with lava instead, making lava a renewable resource. Refilling a cauldron with water or lava averages nearly one Minecraft day (19+ minutes) although the actual time for any individual refill varies."
Caves, by definition, remove 100% of the resources that would have been present. They are ALL replaced by air, water, or lava. So, adding caves definitely reduced resources.
And as I've explained all that matters while caving is the exposed surface area:
The first chart is from a modded world with about twice as many caves as vanilla 1.6.4, shown in the second chart - yet you'd never even know that just from looking at them as the only thing that matters as far as my caving efficiency goes is the percentage of exposed blocks that are ores, which are identical, even if TMCW has around 5% less ores overall (and really, did Mojang really make caves THAT much more common?! Even at only 5% of the underground being air many people complained that the underground was like Swiss cheese prior to 1.7).
Here are examples of what caves are like in TMCW:
This is a rendering of an area about the size of a level 3 map (1024x1024 blocks):
One of the largest caves that I found, which contained an enormous lava lake about 100 blocks across (this sort of cave does significantly reduce ore exposure because of the lava but not all large caves are like this):
Some other giant caves, each with a volume of over 100,000 air blocks:
These are the same cave; I increased the render distance in the second screenshot, taken after I explored it, so you can see the entire cave:
This cave formed a massive crater more than 50 blocks across:
There was a slightly smaller cave nearby that almost did the same (water above the cave prevented it from fully breaking the surface):
Likewise, these are some of the largest ravines that I've explored, the largest being about a dozen times larger in terms of volume than the largest possible ravine in vanilla:
This was by far the largest ravine that I've ever found (some of these screenshots show the sky at the end of render chunks as underground fog darkening was disabled due to disabling void fog; the latest release of TMCW restores the darkening, but not the closer fog, and makes the sky black when underground without skylight):
Even from the middle the ends went out of render distance:
A slightly smaller ravine, also taken from the center while looking towards each end:
A cutaway using MCEdit:
These were all from a single "giant cave region" (the large area in the upper-right of the rendering in the first spoiler), with a volume of more than 1.2 million air blocks, equivalent to nearly 100 chunks with nothing but air between layers 52-62 (or 83 chunks between 4-62, the range air-filled caves cover in TMCW); I used around 5,500 torches to light it up:
These are the resources that I extracted from the giant cave region (minus coal used for torches and smelting) - representing 15,563 ore mined, including over 4,000 in a single play session - and I didn't even use Fortune on any of this (I actually find it to be detrimental when caving since my goal is to have fun, not collect resources that I have little use for):
When the uppermost block of a stalactite less than 11 blocks tall gets randomly ticked, it checks for a water source or waterlogged block two blocks above it and a cauldron within 10 blocks under the tip with no non-air blocks in between. If both conditions are satisfied, there is a 45⁄256 (~17.6%) chance for it to drip water and fill the cauldron by one level. If there is a lava source above the stalactite, there is a 15⁄256 (~5.9%) chance for it to completely fill an empty cauldron with lava instead, making lava a renewable resource. Refilling a cauldron with water or lava averages nearly one Minecraft day (19+ minutes) although the actual time for any individual refill varies."
And as I've explained all that matters while caving is the exposed surface area:
The first chart is from a modded world with about twice as many caves as vanilla 1.6.4, shown in the second chart - yet you'd never even know that just from looking at them as the only thing that matters as far as my caving efficiency goes is the percentage of exposed blocks that are ores, which are identical, even if TMCW has around 5% less ores overall (and really, did Mojang really make caves THAT much more common?! Even at only 5% of the underground being air many people complained that the underground was like Swiss cheese prior to 1.7).
Here are examples of what caves are like in TMCW:
This is a rendering of an area about the size of a level 3 map (1024x1024 blocks):
One of the largest caves that I found, which contained an enormous lava lake about 100 blocks across (this sort of cave does significantly reduce ore exposure because of the lava but not all large caves are like this):
Some other giant caves, each with a volume of over 100,000 air blocks:
These are the same cave; I increased the render distance in the second screenshot, taken after I explored it, so you can see the entire cave:
This cave formed a massive crater more than 50 blocks across:
There was a slightly smaller cave nearby that almost did the same (water above the cave prevented it from fully breaking the surface):
Likewise, these are some of the largest ravines that I've explored, the largest being about a dozen times larger in terms of volume than the largest possible ravine in vanilla:
This was by far the largest ravine that I've ever found (some of these screenshots show the sky at the end of render chunks as underground fog darkening was disabled due to disabling void fog; the latest release of TMCW restores the darkening, but not the closer fog, and makes the sky black when underground without skylight):
Even from the middle the ends went out of render distance:
A slightly smaller ravine, also taken from the center while looking towards each end:
A cutaway using MCEdit:
These were all from a single "giant cave region" (the large area in the upper-right of the rendering in the first spoiler), with a volume of more than 1.2 million air blocks, equivalent to nearly 100 chunks with nothing but air between layers 52-62 (or 83 chunks between 4-62, the range air-filled caves cover in TMCW); I used around 5,500 torches to light it up:
These are the resources that I extracted from the giant cave region (minus coal used for torches and smelting) - representing 15,563 ore mined, including over 4,000 in a single play session - and I didn't even use Fortune on any of this (I actually find it to be detrimental when caving since my goal is to have fun, not collect resources that I have little use for):
You can use all the charts you want to, but they're irrelevant. If there are 30000 blocks (about one chunk's worth), you have some percentage of that which is resources. If a cave spawns in part of that volume, ALL of the resources that would have been in that cave are replaced by air (or water or lava, for aquifers). That's 100%. Every single block that was a resource is gone. if, for example, 10% of that volume is a cave, then only 90% of the resources remain.
IT DOES NOT MATTER whether you can SEE other resources (in the walls, floor, or ceiling). The resources IN THE CAVE, that would have been present, are GONE.
You can use all the charts you want to, but they're irrelevant. If there are 30000 blocks (about one chunk's worth), you have some percentage of that which is resources. If a cave spawns in part of that volume, ALL of the resources that would have been in that cave are replaced by air (or water or lava, for aquifers). That's 100%. Every single block that was a resource is gone. if, for example, 10% of that volume is a cave, then only 90% of the resources remain.
IT DOES NOT MATTER whether you can SEE other resources (in the walls, floor, or ceiling). The resources IN THE CAVE, that would have been present, are GONE.
That would only be relevant if you played on a very small world. If you play on a normal world with no limits, the only relevant factor is air exposure (assuming that the most profitable way to get ores is cave mining, of course).
Underrated feature of the new terrain: windswept/shattered terrain appearing outside of the respective biomes. It really balances out the realism and resembles the noisy unshackled terrain we saw more often before beta 1.8 , albeit on crack with new world height and the newer biomes added since. Rarer to find large areas of it though, the conditions seem to be more specific.
Doesn't always look that exaggerated either, the factor value varies:
I'm not going to lie, I do not like this new update. The new ore distribution is terrible. Finding something as basic as coal or iron is like winning the lottery at times. I genuinely prefer just digging down to y=12 and strip mining to find everything rather than having to have several sets of mines to find each ore individually. I "downgraded" back to 1.17, though going from 1.18 to 1.17 is an upgrade if you ask me, and am currently much better off in terms of ore with less time spent playing than in my 1.18 world. I will not be going back to 1.18 until I can find a mod that fixes the ore distribution problem.
That would only be relevant if you played on a very small world. If you play on a normal world with no limits, the only relevant factor is air exposure (assuming that the most profitable way to get ores is cave mining, of course).
Incorrect. For one thing, I play on normal worlds.
But you're also totally wrong. It has to do with resource density. Your error is in assuming the most profitable way to get ores is cave mining, which it simply false.
With respect to the 1.18 Update, I like it a lot. The last version I played routinely was 1.12 because of customized worlds. That does not mean I haven't played Minecraft since 1.12 was released, but rather have mostly played the 1.12 version. The fact that you can do that in Minecraft is another reason why it's so outstanding compared to other games.
After they removed customized worlds as it existed in 1.12, new world generation was boring. So we continued playing on a 1.12 customized world that we liked a lot, which had tall mountains which needed large biomes to generate properly. We had a Realm's subscription for a couple of years, but abandoned it and went back to running our own servers because of the limited view limits.
So we eagerly awaited the 1.18 update and generally love the expanded y-coordinate ranges (still running our own server because view distance is important to us), with some caveats.
Number 1 is that we found a seed which has absolutely glorious mountains ("Inconceivable" as the seed, large biomes enabled), but it's downside is that we spawned at such a high elevation we kept falling through the snow and died numerous times from the cold before being able to escape (remember, most of us were used to 1.12, and have been playing Minecraft since before zombies were the only hostile mob and before they dropped anything), and had no idea what was going on, but so would a brand new Minecraft player). One player was more fortunate, and so was able to dig his way through to us to lead us to safer ground. i.e. the devs need to re-do their spawning scheme to not only place spawn points near x, z = 0, but also a y coordinate that isn't fatal for a new player.
The second is that the large biomes combined with making biome adjacency more realistic also results in the possibility that the same few biomes occur over and over again, for tens of thousands of blocks, which it does in the seed I mentioned above.
I was fine with 1.18 changes in ore distribution. Strategic mining could be more interesting.
Did 1.18.1 nerf that though? My diamond mine was fine before it, but after an hour of mining diamonds tonight, at the same y=-53 as I did before didn't yield a one. Maybe the RNG factor. Time will tell.
lol, I decided to test random seeds, and the second one I tried spawned me in the middle of an ocean, no land in sight. So scratch what I just said. Spawn points need to be survivable by a newb who doesn't even know how to move/swim, etc.
Incorrect. For one thing, I play on normal worlds.
But you're also totally wrong. It has to do with resource density. Your error is in assuming the most profitable way to get ores is cave mining, which it simply false.
and I really don't believe cave mining should be more profitable than strip mining either, if it were made that easy it would mean the majority of the Minecraft terrain would be wasted since there wouldn't be much materials to justify digging through the ground, you would instead find everything you need in caves. You can set up stone masons to give you all the diorite and other building materials you could need for decoration.
Sadly neither method is particularly efficient at getting ore materials now.
I'm not going to lie, I do not like this new update. The new ore distribution is terrible. Finding something as basic as coal or iron is like winning the lottery at times. I genuinely prefer just digging down to y=12 and strip mining to find everything rather than having to have several sets of mines to find each ore individually. I "downgraded" back to 1.17, though going from 1.18 to 1.17 is an upgrade if you ask me, and am currently much better off in terms of ore with less time spent playing than in my 1.18 world. I will not be going back to 1.18 until I can find a mod that fixes the ore distribution problem.
Therein-lies the problem, we shouldn't have to mod the game to reverse an erroneous update, I'd much rather just set up a vanilla 1.16 Java server and be content with the game that way since then I can be safe in the knowledge my worlds will no longer be tampered with by Mojang. There's a big difference between rebalancing a game for the purposes of making it more engaging, and making it monotonous to the point where it feels like your time and effort isn't being rewarded, one thing you should never do is make a game boring, because that discourages people from playing, making it take too long to get enough resources also encourages cheating, and I can't see how this is beneficial for the game.
Normally I would be playing bedrock edition because of how well optimized it is, but after this blunder, it simply isn't an option for me any longer. And that isn't going to be an option for you seeing as the mods you're waiting for will most likely never happen on bedrock edition.
New ore distribution has been great so far for me, branch mining for diamonds and iron is more rewarding than ever, and coal is plentiful especially above ground, you just don't run out of it anymore. It just requires you to change things up, which after over a decade of things being the same I can understand is hard for some, but being able to mine every resource at the same y-level has felt dumb to me since alpha days, which would be even more dumb with a deeper world.
I don't get the people saying caving is always the better option now, the air exposure rules literally mean branch mining is better in general. But caving is a lot more fun if the player chooses it.
After the 1.18.1 patch, in an area where I had not been in the chunk before, my diamond yield after over 3 hours of mining, at y=-53, was 3.
After the 1.18.1 patch, mining in an area where I was sure I had been in the chunk before, my diamond yield after 2 hours of mining, at also y=-53 was 62.
Fortunately, there are still a lot of chunks I've been in that I haven't yet mined for diamonds.
My main complaint would be that hotter biomes like Savannahs and Jungles have gotten rarer I feel. Deserts are now exceedingly rare, I haven't even seen one yet and I've walked around quite a bit. Other than that this is the best update ever I think.
My main complaint would be that hotter biomes like Savannahs and Jungles have gotten rarer I feel. Deserts are now exceedingly rare, I haven't even seen one yet and I've walked around quite a bit. Other than that this is the best update ever I think.
It seems that in an effort to balance the biome temperatures, hot biomes are now as rare as cold ones.
honestly this is the worst update i’ve seen in minecraft, ore generation is terrible, the caves are void of ore, tools break way to fast, mobs either don’t spawn in caves at all or spawn in massive swarms, the terrain is just sloppy and harder to traverse for no reason, rollback to 1.17 and remake caves and cliffs? lots of lost potential
honestly this is the worst update i’ve seen in minecraft, ore generation is terrible, the caves are void of ore, tools break way to fast, mobs either don’t spawn in caves at all or spawn in massive swarms, the terrain is just sloppy and harder to traverse for no reason, rollback to 1.17 and remake caves and cliffs? lots of lost potential
if you roll back to 1.16, you lose deepslate, candles, azalea tree, moss block, tuff, copper and dripstone, which is fine if you don't care for them. I agree though, if we stick to 1.18 we end up with the worst the game has to offer in terms of resources per hour, kind of defeats the purpose of having that extra terrain there when strip mining is no longer effective.
Caves, by definition, remove 100% of the resources that would have been present. They are ALL replaced by air, water, or lava. So, adding caves definitely reduced resources.
Regarding whether they reduced overall resource amounts, just play a few games. Mining by the same method I always use, I would get around 100 iron from the surface to zero. Now I never get more than thirty unless I run into a vein (which has only happened once), and even then fifty was the count.
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Pointed_Dripstone
"Cauldrons
When the uppermost block of a stalactite less than 11 blocks tall gets randomly ticked, it checks for a water source or waterlogged block two blocks above it and a cauldron within 10 blocks under the tip with no non-air blocks in between. If both conditions are satisfied, there is a 45⁄256 (~17.6%) chance for it to drip water and fill the cauldron by one level. If there is a lava source above the stalactite, there is a 15⁄256 (~5.9%) chance for it to completely fill an empty cauldron with lava instead, making lava a renewable resource. Refilling a cauldron with water or lava averages nearly one Minecraft day (19+ minutes) although the actual time for any individual refill varies."
And as I've explained all that matters while caving is the exposed surface area:
The first chart is from a modded world with about twice as many caves as vanilla 1.6.4, shown in the second chart - yet you'd never even know that just from looking at them as the only thing that matters as far as my caving efficiency goes is the percentage of exposed blocks that are ores, which are identical, even if TMCW has around 5% less ores overall (and really, did Mojang really make caves THAT much more common?! Even at only 5% of the underground being air many people complained that the underground was like Swiss cheese prior to 1.7).
Here are examples of what caves are like in TMCW:
This is a rendering of an area about the size of a level 3 map (1024x1024 blocks):
One of the largest caves that I found, which contained an enormous lava lake about 100 blocks across (this sort of cave does significantly reduce ore exposure because of the lava but not all large caves are like this):
Some other giant caves, each with a volume of over 100,000 air blocks:
These are the same cave; I increased the render distance in the second screenshot, taken after I explored it, so you can see the entire cave:
This cave formed a massive crater more than 50 blocks across:
There was a slightly smaller cave nearby that almost did the same (water above the cave prevented it from fully breaking the surface):
Likewise, these are some of the largest ravines that I've explored, the largest being about a dozen times larger in terms of volume than the largest possible ravine in vanilla:
Even from the middle the ends went out of render distance:
A slightly smaller ravine, also taken from the center while looking towards each end:
A cutaway using MCEdit:
These were all from a single "giant cave region" (the large area in the upper-right of the rendering in the first spoiler), with a volume of more than 1.2 million air blocks, equivalent to nearly 100 chunks with nothing but air between layers 52-62 (or 83 chunks between 4-62, the range air-filled caves cover in TMCW); I used around 5,500 torches to light it up:
These are the resources that I extracted from the giant cave region (minus coal used for torches and smelting) - representing 15,563 ore mined, including over 4,000 in a single play session - and I didn't even use Fortune on any of this (I actually find it to be detrimental when caving since my goal is to have fun, not collect resources that I have little use for):
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?
Cool! Thank you!
You can use all the charts you want to, but they're irrelevant. If there are 30000 blocks (about one chunk's worth), you have some percentage of that which is resources. If a cave spawns in part of that volume, ALL of the resources that would have been in that cave are replaced by air (or water or lava, for aquifers). That's 100%. Every single block that was a resource is gone. if, for example, 10% of that volume is a cave, then only 90% of the resources remain.
IT DOES NOT MATTER whether you can SEE other resources (in the walls, floor, or ceiling). The resources IN THE CAVE, that would have been present, are GONE.
That would only be relevant if you played on a very small world. If you play on a normal world with no limits, the only relevant factor is air exposure (assuming that the most profitable way to get ores is cave mining, of course).
Underrated feature of the new terrain: windswept/shattered terrain appearing outside of the respective biomes. It really balances out the realism and resembles the noisy unshackled terrain we saw more often before beta 1.8 , albeit on crack with new world height and the newer biomes added since. Rarer to find large areas of it though, the conditions seem to be more specific.
Doesn't always look that exaggerated either, the factor value varies:
They need to make the desert temple more common - but here Link Removed minecraft revealed that they were going to do that.
I'm not going to lie, I do not like this new update. The new ore distribution is terrible. Finding something as basic as coal or iron is like winning the lottery at times. I genuinely prefer just digging down to y=12 and strip mining to find everything rather than having to have several sets of mines to find each ore individually. I "downgraded" back to 1.17, though going from 1.18 to 1.17 is an upgrade if you ask me, and am currently much better off in terms of ore with less time spent playing than in my 1.18 world. I will not be going back to 1.18 until I can find a mod that fixes the ore distribution problem.
Incorrect. For one thing, I play on normal worlds.
But you're also totally wrong. It has to do with resource density. Your error is in assuming the most profitable way to get ores is cave mining, which it simply false.
With respect to the 1.18 Update, I like it a lot. The last version I played routinely was 1.12 because of customized worlds. That does not mean I haven't played Minecraft since 1.12 was released, but rather have mostly played the 1.12 version. The fact that you can do that in Minecraft is another reason why it's so outstanding compared to other games.
After they removed customized worlds as it existed in 1.12, new world generation was boring. So we continued playing on a 1.12 customized world that we liked a lot, which had tall mountains which needed large biomes to generate properly. We had a Realm's subscription for a couple of years, but abandoned it and went back to running our own servers because of the limited view limits.
So we eagerly awaited the 1.18 update and generally love the expanded y-coordinate ranges (still running our own server because view distance is important to us), with some caveats.
Number 1 is that we found a seed which has absolutely glorious mountains ("Inconceivable" as the seed, large biomes enabled), but it's downside is that we spawned at such a high elevation we kept falling through the snow and died numerous times from the cold before being able to escape (remember, most of us were used to 1.12, and have been playing Minecraft since before zombies were the only hostile mob and before they dropped anything), and had no idea what was going on, but so would a brand new Minecraft player). One player was more fortunate, and so was able to dig his way through to us to lead us to safer ground. i.e. the devs need to re-do their spawning scheme to not only place spawn points near x, z = 0, but also a y coordinate that isn't fatal for a new player.
The second is that the large biomes combined with making biome adjacency more realistic also results in the possibility that the same few biomes occur over and over again, for tens of thousands of blocks, which it does in the seed I mentioned above.
I was fine with 1.18 changes in ore distribution. Strategic mining could be more interesting.
Did 1.18.1 nerf that though? My diamond mine was fine before it, but after an hour of mining diamonds tonight, at the same y=-53 as I did before didn't yield a one. Maybe the RNG factor. Time will tell.
lol, I decided to test random seeds, and the second one I tried spawned me in the middle of an ocean, no land in sight. So scratch what I just said. Spawn points need to be survivable by a newb who doesn't even know how to move/swim, etc.
and I really don't believe cave mining should be more profitable than strip mining either, if it were made that easy it would mean the majority of the Minecraft terrain would be wasted since there wouldn't be much materials to justify digging through the ground, you would instead find everything you need in caves. You can set up stone masons to give you all the diorite and other building materials you could need for decoration.
Sadly neither method is particularly efficient at getting ore materials now.
Therein-lies the problem, we shouldn't have to mod the game to reverse an erroneous update, I'd much rather just set up a vanilla 1.16 Java server and be content with the game that way since then I can be safe in the knowledge my worlds will no longer be tampered with by Mojang. There's a big difference between rebalancing a game for the purposes of making it more engaging, and making it monotonous to the point where it feels like your time and effort isn't being rewarded, one thing you should never do is make a game boring, because that discourages people from playing, making it take too long to get enough resources also encourages cheating, and I can't see how this is beneficial for the game.
Normally I would be playing bedrock edition because of how well optimized it is, but after this blunder, it simply isn't an option for me any longer. And that isn't going to be an option for you seeing as the mods you're waiting for will most likely never happen on bedrock edition.
New ore distribution has been great so far for me, branch mining for diamonds and iron is more rewarding than ever, and coal is plentiful especially above ground, you just don't run out of it anymore. It just requires you to change things up, which after over a decade of things being the same I can understand is hard for some, but being able to mine every resource at the same y-level has felt dumb to me since alpha days, which would be even more dumb with a deeper world.
I don't get the people saying caving is always the better option now, the air exposure rules literally mean branch mining is better in general. But caving is a lot more fun if the player chooses it.
1.18 was great for diamonds.
After the 1.18.1 patch, in an area where I had not been in the chunk before, my diamond yield after over 3 hours of mining, at y=-53, was 3.
After the 1.18.1 patch, mining in an area where I was sure I had been in the chunk before, my diamond yield after 2 hours of mining, at also y=-53 was 62.
Fortunately, there are still a lot of chunks I've been in that I haven't yet mined for diamonds.
My main complaint would be that hotter biomes like Savannahs and Jungles have gotten rarer I feel. Deserts are now exceedingly rare, I haven't even seen one yet and I've walked around quite a bit. Other than that this is the best update ever I think.
It seems that in an effort to balance the biome temperatures, hot biomes are now as rare as cold ones.
honestly this is the worst update i’ve seen in minecraft, ore generation is terrible, the caves are void of ore, tools break way to fast, mobs either don’t spawn in caves at all or spawn in massive swarms, the terrain is just sloppy and harder to traverse for no reason, rollback to 1.17 and remake caves and cliffs? lots of lost potential
I actually like 1.18's surface terrain but the cave issues are there.
if you roll back to 1.16, you lose deepslate, candles, azalea tree, moss block, tuff, copper and dripstone, which is fine if you don't care for them. I agree though, if we stick to 1.18 we end up with the worst the game has to offer in terms of resources per hour, kind of defeats the purpose of having that extra terrain there when strip mining is no longer effective.