I'm a bit surprised at how popular this suggestion has been, as opposed to say, simply adding some sliders to let us change the size/number of caves to the Customized options (which would take only a few minutes to code in, they can also add settings for other structures as well, which are already available in Superflat).
I still think that increasing the ground depth is unnecessary (coming from actual experience with modding the game to make the ground deeper and playing on such worlds), either though increasing the world height/ground depth or by adding a bunch of dimensions; you can get very large caves and ravines even with the current depth of around 50 blocks (lava level to sea level) since the game currently does not take much advantage of it, as seen in one of my mods, which does lower the lava level by 7 blocks, along with the ranges of rarer ores (there's only 2/3 as much diamond but that is unnoticeable when mining at one level, there is a bit more exposed in caves to offset the increase in depth (overall I mined about the same ratio of diamond to iron as vanilla) but not noticeable either, still only up to 5 layers above lava), but that only adds about 13% to the usable ground depth:
(note that larger ravines have their width:height ratio reduced with width so they aren't so deep, as in cutting all the way down to lava level from the surface; larger caves are also more "flattened" and start deeper down to keep them mostly underground)
Basically, increasing the size variation of caves, ravines, and mineshafts would do a lot more to increase variety; the way things are now, the largest caves are incredibly rare - around a million chunks have to be searched to find a cave in the top 10% of their maximum width - with the vast majority around 6 blocks in maximum width:
(note that they did not change the size of individual caves in 1.7, mainly how they are distributed, with around 3/4 as many caves overall)
For some perspective, I explore around 100 chunks per play session, or around 3.5 hours; a fully zoomed out map is 16384 chunks, taking around 164 play sessions or 574 hours to fully explore - and very few players do as much caving as I do, I'm willing to bet not even in all of their time playing have they done as much caving as I have in each of my longer-term worlds individually (in one world I've crafted/placed over 250,000 torches), so while I've found some rare things most players will likely never encounter them because they are so rare (of course, you don't want them to be too common as to invalidate using seeds).
- It must appeal not only to the "I'll live forever like a dwarf" high-difficulty-grinder-loving player, but to the little kids that want it easy too and make their home on the surface. Climbing 2000 blocks would need what, OVER 6 minutes of playtime ding NOTHING but climbing ! Whoppee !
--massive snip--
Now...I may not agree with most of your negative (but constructive, so its still kinda good) comments, I agree with this. Perhaps some special ender pearl/eye of ender that has a durability, BUT when used tps you back to the overworld?? Whenever it is used some of that durability is used up.
EDIT: Also, I just noticed that's a damn lot to put outside a spoiler
97% of teenagers would cry if they saw Justin Bieber on top of a tower
about to jump. If you're the 3% who is sitting there with popcorn
screaming "DO A BACKFLIP", copy and paste this as your signature.
I'm a bit surprised at how popular this suggestion has been, as opposed to say, simply adding some sliders to let us change the size/number of caves to the Customized options (which would take only a few minutes to code in, they can also add settings for other structures as well, which are already available in Superflat).
I still think that increasing the ground depth is unnecessary (coming from actual experience with modding the game to make the ground deeper and playing on such worlds), either though increasing the world height/ground depth or by adding a bunch of dimensions; you can get very large caves and ravines even with the current depth of around 50 blocks (lava level to sea level) since the game currently does not take much advantage of it ...
(snip) ... For some perspective, I explore around 100 chunks per play session, or around 3.5 hours; a fully zoomed out map is 16384 chunks, taking around 164 play sessions or 574 hours to fully explore - and very few players do as much caving as I do, I'm willing to bet not even in all of their time playing have they done as much caving as I have in each of my longer-term worlds individually (in one world I've crafted/placed over 250,000 torches), so while I've found some rare things most players will likely never encounter them because they are so rare (of course, you don't want them to be too common as to invalidate using seeds).
Edit: Another wall of text so...
Totally agree. So there we have it, two players who spent several thousands of hours (probably several tens of thousand of hours in MasterCaver's case) caving a LOT more than the average player, and also analyzed that aspect a lot (especially MasterCaver, and at least about an order of magnitude above me too), and who also analyzed a sufficient other number of players's underground behavior to know at least a bit of what's what. Both of us agree that while extra depth would be good, the game doesn't need THAT much extra depth in the first place. I personally would like a lot more depth than now, but a factor of about 4 would already be quite sufficient ! MasterCaver seems to think that even only a factor of 2 is more than sufficient.
But original poster is stuck with thinking his idea of making depth over 30 times bigger is so great.
Then make a mod out of it!
Because as a vanilla suggestion... It. Just. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Ever. Because, all these new weird ores, and also most importantly totally whacking out the entire balance of ores abundance and rarity all around the board, which IMHO that alone is a major enough offense already to warrant zero support. It also breaks several of the game design rules stuff that Mojand itself specifically took care not to do. It creates items that don't even follow how similar items work (like for example ingots that aren't even used like ingots, and so on). As a concept, it just is 100% incomptabile with the vanilla game, thus only good for am eventual mod.
After checking some of MasterCaver's posts again, and rechecking some of the performance aspects of the game, I'm even going to lean even more toward MasterCaver's expert opinion: even 4 times the current depth would be on the EXTRA HIGH side of things.
----------------
If there are going to be changes, they have to be on a scope that can be coded-in relatively easily without totally changing the whole underground aspect of the game or the game balance.
This would mean:
*** As a first step:
- Add in much more caves size and variety. Not just in those custom worlds with the tons of weird settings almost no one understands, but by default on all worlds, either fixed hidden values or with simple and very intuitively named sliders at world creation.
This preserves surface of overworld compatibility with old maps, without requiring adding in anything too special.
It would break map compatibility, sure, but only underground, where it is mostly hidden. It would even be possible to have that when a new chunk that is generated adjacent to an old version chunk, it uses a mix/combo of old vs new underground generation so that you wouldn't even see the transition as "suddenly at the border of the new vs old chunks, all tunnels end up in straight walls", but instead a more-or-less seamless transition (dead ends that shrink down nicely, overlapping open areas, etc.).
In any case, helping the underground have more variety is way more important than adding extra depth.
*** As potential second steps:
- Keep the total world depth of 256 blocks, but raise the ground level + ocean level + cloud level by 64 blocks higher each (ocean level at to 128).
This would effectively double the available depth without needing _major_ changes to the game engine, or adding special portals or whatever.
The rarer ores would simply start appearing twice deeper.
Note however that this would break map continuity both underground AND on the surface. Again, tricks at newly generated boundary chunks can be used to make it seem less like "sudden straight walls at boundaries" and more like "natural borders". Say, putting natural-looking cliff walls at the new chunks (ground and ocean height 128) that adjacent to old previously generated chunks (ground and ocean height 64). Even without doing any of that, that would still not be such a huge humongous problem because total map-breaking has already occured several times in the past already, and each time, people complain initially somewhat, then quickly move on to a new map with the new improved features, and many players (definitely not all) even end up appreciating the forced fresh restart (or end up using tricks like say MCEdit to copy-paste their most important builds, complete with filled chests, from their old map into their new map, for a best of both worlds approach).
- Maybe add a harder-to-break stone that starts appearing around Y=64, creating a vislble boundary and harder access between the early game ores (iron) and the later game stuff (diamond). Maybe also a couple new extra-dangerous mobs in the lower more dangerous half of the underground. Or add a new mob that makes branch mining not as perfectly safe and productive as it now. It takes a LOT more time to mine when you have to follow the natural cave systems compared to just directly dig in the stone straight. But mainly, even without any new mobs, the harder stone would mean that simply digging a straight tunnel or stairway downwards wouldn't be possible with just iron picks, you'd really have to explore dangerous tunnels, not just merely mine down to reach diamonds. Adding extra depth is USELESS if the main features represent shortcuts downward, so yeah adding a "harder stone" layer would work well in making any amount of depth actually seen bigger, without needing to add as much.
- One or two at a time, add in special semi-random and relatively spread-out cave structures (kinda like how an Abandoned Mineshadt is both random , localized, yet somewhat spread out too) with new blocks that mainly focus on interesting looks rather than special powers items. Mushroom caves, crystal caves, underground lakes, and so on. Or maybe introduce fully the concept of underground biomes, encouraging underground exploration and variety. If that is the case then even underground rivers (and, deeper down, underground LAVA rivers) become a possibility.
Note that the more exposed stone surface area is added, the more the actual ore generation needs to be reduced so as to avoid unbalancing the amount of ore players have easy access to. Giant caves would mean less ore must be generated. Sure, that would cut down the efficiency of branch mining, which compared to normal mining is currently way too generous anyway, so that would be more of a two birds with one stone kind of situatiom anyway.
Not making the underground too deep and encouraging geolocalised variety in it means that the player will also more frequently end up exploring new parts of the overworld's surface too, even if he mainly spends his time mining (example: "Hey I'm very far from my main mine now, let's go back up to see where I am").
Anything extra is going way overboard (at least for the state the game is in now), and falls much more in the realm of mods making, than as a solid suggestion for a new vanilla feature.
Personally, even stretching my dispension of disbelief to the maximum, 576 blocks of depth is already "probably too much":
i.e.
Overworld Surface Slice -> the 64 blocks of depth we already have
Overworld Underground Slice -> 256 blocks
Overworld Underdeep Slice -> another 256 blocks
I'd even be ok with 322 blocks of deoth (64 from overworld surface slice + a single other slice of 256 underground depth), but only because I am a such big caver player and I like extra challenges that don' give me access to everything in mere minutes. *MOST* Minecraft players however, and this by a huge margin, would *not* be okay with such a depth at ALL. A suggestion for vanilla is not like a mod that can target a specific tiny audience's wants: it must appeal to the vast majority. Remember that the typical Minecraft player is often only a 12 years old with zero patience for any kind of grind.
Keep in mind that servers make their world size limited for good reason. Most servers I saw tended to have place world size limtis to around 25000x25000 on average. There is a good reason why >2GB file server file data becomes problematic: server starts swapping to hard disk instead of being able to keep the entire world loaded in RAM, which cuts performance drastically causing big lag that everybody hates. Only the smal servers with only a handful of players don't need to do that. I'm not talking a solo world either where only the chunks around the player get loaded, I'm talking active servers with tons of players so yeah loading the entire server files in a RAM disk helps TREMENSOUDLY because everytime chunks are loaded and unloaded, which on a popular server happens ALL THE TIME and A LOT, the chunks get loaded and unloaded from/to a RAM drive instead of a hard drive, which is scores faster. No ned to be sxcores faster whn you have only 5 players online. 100 players, though, and it becomes VITAL.
So yeah having TWO (or even THREE) 256-deep slices instead of only 1, means that the typical world size would need to be cut down because the size that is "fixed" and important is the actual save file size. So you'd gain verticality, but only at the expense of some horizontality. It wouldn't be a factor of 2 (or 3) of course because lots of the underground would simply remain unexplored, but it woul probably be enough to make it so that many server worlds would now be small enough that even the rare biomes might not be on it's map. In 10 years when 32GB Ram drives will be the norm, ok, sure, let's jack up depth by x8, because we will be able to do that without shrinking down the width a the surface! Just not now. Refusing to acknowlege that strong limitation is akin to crossing a highway while blindfolding oneself and refusing to hear all the car horns. "There won't be lag" is just a plain false statement. Even in solo chunk generation will be much longer (it takes 4 times longer to generate tunnrels in an underground of stone 256 deep than when it is only 64 deep, and there is no way around it), causing some lag there too when traveling to new areas. Presently, the overworld layer is 256 tall but that is divided into 16 sections that ar each 16x16x16 blocks, and EMPTY section do NOT get generated nor loaded at all. So ptresently loading a chunk, most of the time, loads only the 4 to 6 bottom sections because ther is nothing above it. On your proposal, you suggest having 256 deep slices all full of data instead. There is simply no way that wouldn't cause very noticeable lag except in the most ideal setups (solo world on a powerful PC strong all around especailly CPU and GPU). Even what *I* suggest as replacement idea, simply a single doubling of the depth from 64 to 128, I am forced to admit that it would already cause quite noticeable lag. Despite it's retro looks, internally Minecraft is a massively resource intensive game, and the tech is just not ready. *Maybe* if Cubic Chunks was implemented first it would be another story. Again, probably only in a solo world and on a strong PC. AFAIK, Cubic Chunks advocates haven't published performance stats for non-negligibly-sized worlds on above-20-players-online multiplayer servers yet.
Note also that Mojang has already adressed the depth issue in some wau: the Nether itself already is the "deeper underground" that you access by portals. The only thing is you made different is your portals need to be put at the bottom of a slice instead of anywhere in the slice. But in the end your suggestion is closer to adding a bunch of new dimensions, than really deailing wih the depth issue.
If you really want to target vanilla, then follow Master Caver's advice.
Personally, I think your suggestion is superbly cool but from a mod's perspective only (otherwise I wouldn't have typed here). I myself would even love to try the challenge of having to go through 2 klicks deep of mining crossing through all kinds of special stuff and areas! But for the "big vanilla picture", however, not taking only my needs into account, but also the younger players too, and also the wide variety of players I have seen from all the players on all the multiplayer servers I have played on, I am sorry to say that I find this 2000-blocks-of-depth idea to be not such a good idea at all.
Totally agree. So there we have it, two players who spent several thousands of hours (probably several tens of thousand of hours in MasterCaver's case)
That's quite a big exaggeration; I've probably spent around 3,000 hours playing Minecraft over close to three years (around 25,000 hours of non-stop playing since then - you'd have to basically do nothing but play Minecraft to rack up tens of thousands of hours since the game was released), which is quite a lot but probably not more than the average dedicated player; I know some who have more in-game time on their worlds than I have on my first and by far longest-played world, which is currently at around 55.75 days (I've seen over 100 before, though that may include AFKing overnight, which I never do); the biggest difference is simply that I spend most of my time caving and do it quite fast (it only takes me around an hour to explore an abandoned mineshaft, perhaps 3-6 for an average size cave system, "average" meaning for 1.6.4, where they are about as big as the largest (very rare) cave systems in 1.7+; a while ago I explored a 9 mineshaft "mega complex", including associated caves and ravines, over just a few days); recently, somebody else who mines/caves a lot posted maps and statistics for one of their worlds (here, with comparisons to what I've done) and despite the fact that they mostly branch-mined I've actually found more diamond per hour of playing.
Er ok probably. My next second most played world, on a SMP server for about 4 months I went on a kind of "get a life" Minecraft mining rampage and spent nearly 100% of my free time mining in Minecraft, mining everything connected in something around a 2000x3000 blocks area (don't remember too clearly and they did reset that map). So, 12 weeks at a minimum of 3 hours per week day + 9 hours per weekend day = that is only about 400 hours. That definitely was my most "mining intensive" life period, so yeah overall counting 4 years of Minecraft total now, I surely must have exagerated both mine and yours mining amount by some factor. Still, that remains quite a lot of mining ! It's too easy to overguesstimate such things wrong just by using memory only, without doing a bit of math too.
My longest solo played world reached around day 1200 or something, that's 400+ hours, or about 17 real-life days, but that definitely wasn't 100% spent on mining, very far from it. And I played a LOT of worlds above 100 in-game days each. I also never do the AFK overnight thing.
1 hour for a mineshaft that is super fast for me. Usually it takes me several multi-hours gaming sessions. I kind of tend to light up and clean up everything. Sometimes even after I was finished, all the tunnels rendered perfectly nice smooth stone 3x3 tunnels, not even a single dirt or gravel block showing, with slabs and stairs added for smooth walking and so on. Nowadays, though, I stopped that kind of obsessive compulsive thing.
Well, in any case, at *my* mining speed, it probably would have taken you >10000 hours to mine as much as what *you* mined lol.
If the depth had been higher I suppose I would have mined the same amount of time, but covered a much smaller total area.
Nether Caverns: Gravel and Soul Sand spawn more frequently, Coal Ore and Hellstone Ore can be found
Magma Chambers: A large ravine in the Nether. Hardened Netherrack can be found here. Large amounts of lava falls. Contains the Fire Crystal, which grants permanent fire resistance and the ability to walk on lava.
End Surface: pretty normal
End Caverns: accessed by a portal in the End City, contains Purpur Crystals
End Dungeon: a maze of Purpur Crystal Blocks.
Mysterious Chasm: a place dripping with End Acid (more deadly than Molten Iron) and the bones of the Ender Dragon
I just took the Minecraft Noob test! Check out what I scored. Think you can beat me?!
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97% of teenagers would cry if they saw Justin Bieber on top of a tower
about to jump. If you're the 3% who is sitting there with popcorn
screaming "DO A BACKFLIP", copy and paste this as your signature.
I like this. My only problem is with the texture for ametrine, and its colors... But that's OK.
I also noticed that it doesn't say how often these caves spawn, or at least the portal.
I think the portal should have a small chance of spawning, and brings you to another dimension, which I guess would prevent lag.
But I love this idea, but I want it to be rare... and I have a feeling that leaving the cave would be annoying/hard. Maybe you could change that
Support
The temple already brings you to another dimension. The only way to not do this would be with a Cubic Chunks thingy, which would be great if it was implemented.
97% of teenagers would cry if they saw Justin Bieber on top of a tower
about to jump. If you're the 3% who is sitting there with popcorn
screaming "DO A BACKFLIP", copy and paste this as your signature.
97% of teenagers would cry if they saw Justin Bieber on top of a tower
about to jump. If you're the 3% who is sitting there with popcorn
screaming "DO A BACKFLIP", copy and paste this as your signature.
It may not be complete, but it's definitely way better than nothing. And it seems pretty close to feature-complete, actually. Only a few levels have yet to be added, and most other features have been (future suggestions notwithstanding).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
~~~~~~~~
Fall into the hands of sorrow
Drawn by the darkest bay
Walk into the pit of silence
I am the one calling your name
~~~~~~~~
97% of teenagers would cry if they saw Justin Bieber on top of a tower
about to jump. If you're the 3% who is sitting there with popcorn
screaming "DO A BACKFLIP", copy and paste this as your signature.
The one thing I dislike is how you promptly forget about the near-nether aspect. Logically, going deeper should make it more nether-like, but it doesn't. Other than that, PLEASE MAKE THIS A THING! Support.
I'm a bit surprised at how popular this suggestion has been, as opposed to say, simply adding some sliders to let us change the size/number of caves to the Customized options (which would take only a few minutes to code in, they can also add settings for other structures as well, which are already available in Superflat).
I still think that increasing the ground depth is unnecessary (coming from actual experience with modding the game to make the ground deeper and playing on such worlds), either though increasing the world height/ground depth or by adding a bunch of dimensions; you can get very large caves and ravines even with the current depth of around 50 blocks (lava level to sea level) since the game currently does not take much advantage of it, as seen in one of my mods, which does lower the lava level by 7 blocks, along with the ranges of rarer ores (there's only 2/3 as much diamond but that is unnoticeable when mining at one level, there is a bit more exposed in caves to offset the increase in depth (overall I mined about the same ratio of diamond to iron as vanilla) but not noticeable either, still only up to 5 layers above lava), but that only adds about 13% to the usable ground depth:
(note that larger ravines have their width:height ratio reduced with width so they aren't so deep, as in cutting all the way down to lava level from the surface; larger caves are also more "flattened" and start deeper down to keep them mostly underground)
Basically, increasing the size variation of caves, ravines, and mineshafts would do a lot more to increase variety; the way things are now, the largest caves are incredibly rare - around a million chunks have to be searched to find a cave in the top 10% of their maximum width - with the vast majority around 6 blocks in maximum width:
(note that they did not change the size of individual caves in 1.7, mainly how they are distributed, with around 3/4 as many caves overall)
For some perspective, I explore around 100 chunks per play session, or around 3.5 hours; a fully zoomed out map is 16384 chunks, taking around 164 play sessions or 574 hours to fully explore - and very few players do as much caving as I do, I'm willing to bet not even in all of their time playing have they done as much caving as I have in each of my longer-term worlds individually (in one world I've crafted/placed over 250,000 torches), so while I've found some rare things most players will likely never encounter them because they are so rare (of course, you don't want them to be too common as to invalidate using seeds).
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?
Now...I may not agree with most of your negative (but constructive, so its still kinda good) comments, I agree with this. Perhaps some special ender pearl/eye of ender that has a durability, BUT when used tps you back to the overworld?? Whenever it is used some of that durability is used up.
EDIT: Also, I just noticed that's a damn lot to put outside a spoiler
Edit: Another wall of text so...
Totally agree. So there we have it, two players who spent several thousands of hours (probably several tens of thousand of hours in MasterCaver's case) caving a LOT more than the average player, and also analyzed that aspect a lot (especially MasterCaver, and at least about an order of magnitude above me too), and who also analyzed a sufficient other number of players's underground behavior to know at least a bit of what's what. Both of us agree that while extra depth would be good, the game doesn't need THAT much extra depth in the first place. I personally would like a lot more depth than now, but a factor of about 4 would already be quite sufficient ! MasterCaver seems to think that even only a factor of 2 is more than sufficient.
But original poster is stuck with thinking his idea of making depth over 30 times bigger is so great.
Then make a mod out of it!
Because as a vanilla suggestion... It. Just. Ain't. Gonna. Happen. Ever. Because, all these new weird ores, and also most importantly totally whacking out the entire balance of ores abundance and rarity all around the board, which IMHO that alone is a major enough offense already to warrant zero support. It also breaks several of the game design rules stuff that Mojand itself specifically took care not to do. It creates items that don't even follow how similar items work (like for example ingots that aren't even used like ingots, and so on). As a concept, it just is 100% incomptabile with the vanilla game, thus only good for am eventual mod.
After checking some of MasterCaver's posts again, and rechecking some of the performance aspects of the game, I'm even going to lean even more toward MasterCaver's expert opinion: even 4 times the current depth would be on the EXTRA HIGH side of things.
----------------
If there are going to be changes, they have to be on a scope that can be coded-in relatively easily without totally changing the whole underground aspect of the game or the game balance.
This would mean:
*** As a first step:
- Add in much more caves size and variety. Not just in those custom worlds with the tons of weird settings almost no one understands, but by default on all worlds, either fixed hidden values or with simple and very intuitively named sliders at world creation.
This preserves surface of overworld compatibility with old maps, without requiring adding in anything too special.
It would break map compatibility, sure, but only underground, where it is mostly hidden. It would even be possible to have that when a new chunk that is generated adjacent to an old version chunk, it uses a mix/combo of old vs new underground generation so that you wouldn't even see the transition as "suddenly at the border of the new vs old chunks, all tunnels end up in straight walls", but instead a more-or-less seamless transition (dead ends that shrink down nicely, overlapping open areas, etc.).
In any case, helping the underground have more variety is way more important than adding extra depth.
*** As potential second steps:
- Keep the total world depth of 256 blocks, but raise the ground level + ocean level + cloud level by 64 blocks higher each (ocean level at to 128).
This would effectively double the available depth without needing _major_ changes to the game engine, or adding special portals or whatever.
The rarer ores would simply start appearing twice deeper.
Note however that this would break map continuity both underground AND on the surface. Again, tricks at newly generated boundary chunks can be used to make it seem less like "sudden straight walls at boundaries" and more like "natural borders". Say, putting natural-looking cliff walls at the new chunks (ground and ocean height 128) that adjacent to old previously generated chunks (ground and ocean height 64). Even without doing any of that, that would still not be such a huge humongous problem because total map-breaking has already occured several times in the past already, and each time, people complain initially somewhat, then quickly move on to a new map with the new improved features, and many players (definitely not all) even end up appreciating the forced fresh restart (or end up using tricks like say MCEdit to copy-paste their most important builds, complete with filled chests, from their old map into their new map, for a best of both worlds approach).
- Maybe add a harder-to-break stone that starts appearing around Y=64, creating a vislble boundary and harder access between the early game ores (iron) and the later game stuff (diamond). Maybe also a couple new extra-dangerous mobs in the lower more dangerous half of the underground. Or add a new mob that makes branch mining not as perfectly safe and productive as it now. It takes a LOT more time to mine when you have to follow the natural cave systems compared to just directly dig in the stone straight. But mainly, even without any new mobs, the harder stone would mean that simply digging a straight tunnel or stairway downwards wouldn't be possible with just iron picks, you'd really have to explore dangerous tunnels, not just merely mine down to reach diamonds. Adding extra depth is USELESS if the main features represent shortcuts downward, so yeah adding a "harder stone" layer would work well in making any amount of depth actually seen bigger, without needing to add as much.
- One or two at a time, add in special semi-random and relatively spread-out cave structures (kinda like how an Abandoned Mineshadt is both random , localized, yet somewhat spread out too) with new blocks that mainly focus on interesting looks rather than special powers items. Mushroom caves, crystal caves, underground lakes, and so on. Or maybe introduce fully the concept of underground biomes, encouraging underground exploration and variety. If that is the case then even underground rivers (and, deeper down, underground LAVA rivers) become a possibility.
Note that the more exposed stone surface area is added, the more the actual ore generation needs to be reduced so as to avoid unbalancing the amount of ore players have easy access to. Giant caves would mean less ore must be generated. Sure, that would cut down the efficiency of branch mining, which compared to normal mining is currently way too generous anyway, so that would be more of a two birds with one stone kind of situatiom anyway.
Not making the underground too deep and encouraging geolocalised variety in it means that the player will also more frequently end up exploring new parts of the overworld's surface too, even if he mainly spends his time mining (example: "Hey I'm very far from my main mine now, let's go back up to see where I am").
Anything extra is going way overboard (at least for the state the game is in now), and falls much more in the realm of mods making, than as a solid suggestion for a new vanilla feature.
Personally, even stretching my dispension of disbelief to the maximum, 576 blocks of depth is already "probably too much":
i.e.
Overworld Surface Slice -> the 64 blocks of depth we already have
Overworld Underground Slice -> 256 blocks
Overworld Underdeep Slice -> another 256 blocks
I'd even be ok with 322 blocks of deoth (64 from overworld surface slice + a single other slice of 256 underground depth), but only because I am a such big caver player and I like extra challenges that don' give me access to everything in mere minutes. *MOST* Minecraft players however, and this by a huge margin, would *not* be okay with such a depth at ALL. A suggestion for vanilla is not like a mod that can target a specific tiny audience's wants: it must appeal to the vast majority. Remember that the typical Minecraft player is often only a 12 years old with zero patience for any kind of grind.
Keep in mind that servers make their world size limited for good reason. Most servers I saw tended to have place world size limtis to around 25000x25000 on average. There is a good reason why >2GB file server file data becomes problematic: server starts swapping to hard disk instead of being able to keep the entire world loaded in RAM, which cuts performance drastically causing big lag that everybody hates. Only the smal servers with only a handful of players don't need to do that. I'm not talking a solo world either where only the chunks around the player get loaded, I'm talking active servers with tons of players so yeah loading the entire server files in a RAM disk helps TREMENSOUDLY because everytime chunks are loaded and unloaded, which on a popular server happens ALL THE TIME and A LOT, the chunks get loaded and unloaded from/to a RAM drive instead of a hard drive, which is scores faster. No ned to be sxcores faster whn you have only 5 players online. 100 players, though, and it becomes VITAL.
So yeah having TWO (or even THREE) 256-deep slices instead of only 1, means that the typical world size would need to be cut down because the size that is "fixed" and important is the actual save file size. So you'd gain verticality, but only at the expense of some horizontality. It wouldn't be a factor of 2 (or 3) of course because lots of the underground would simply remain unexplored, but it woul probably be enough to make it so that many server worlds would now be small enough that even the rare biomes might not be on it's map. In 10 years when 32GB Ram drives will be the norm, ok, sure, let's jack up depth by x8, because we will be able to do that without shrinking down the width a the surface! Just not now. Refusing to acknowlege that strong limitation is akin to crossing a highway while blindfolding oneself and refusing to hear all the car horns. "There won't be lag" is just a plain false statement. Even in solo chunk generation will be much longer (it takes 4 times longer to generate tunnrels in an underground of stone 256 deep than when it is only 64 deep, and there is no way around it), causing some lag there too when traveling to new areas. Presently, the overworld layer is 256 tall but that is divided into 16 sections that ar each 16x16x16 blocks, and EMPTY section do NOT get generated nor loaded at all. So ptresently loading a chunk, most of the time, loads only the 4 to 6 bottom sections because ther is nothing above it. On your proposal, you suggest having 256 deep slices all full of data instead. There is simply no way that wouldn't cause very noticeable lag except in the most ideal setups (solo world on a powerful PC strong all around especailly CPU and GPU). Even what *I* suggest as replacement idea, simply a single doubling of the depth from 64 to 128, I am forced to admit that it would already cause quite noticeable lag. Despite it's retro looks, internally Minecraft is a massively resource intensive game, and the tech is just not ready. *Maybe* if Cubic Chunks was implemented first it would be another story. Again, probably only in a solo world and on a strong PC. AFAIK, Cubic Chunks advocates haven't published performance stats for non-negligibly-sized worlds on above-20-players-online multiplayer servers yet.
Note also that Mojang has already adressed the depth issue in some wau: the Nether itself already is the "deeper underground" that you access by portals. The only thing is you made different is your portals need to be put at the bottom of a slice instead of anywhere in the slice. But in the end your suggestion is closer to adding a bunch of new dimensions, than really deailing wih the depth issue.
If you really want to target vanilla, then follow Master Caver's advice.
Personally, I think your suggestion is superbly cool but from a mod's perspective only (otherwise I wouldn't have typed here). I myself would even love to try the challenge of having to go through 2 klicks deep of mining crossing through all kinds of special stuff and areas! But for the "big vanilla picture", however, not taking only my needs into account, but also the younger players too, and also the wide variety of players I have seen from all the players on all the multiplayer servers I have played on, I am sorry to say that I find this 2000-blocks-of-depth idea to be not such a good idea at all.
Yah big wall o' text ... That's like trying to gulp down a 1-meter-wide pill I guess. Added missing spoilers, sorry.
I should have been a novelist !
That's quite a big exaggeration; I've probably spent around 3,000 hours playing Minecraft over close to three years (around 25,000 hours of non-stop playing since then - you'd have to basically do nothing but play Minecraft to rack up tens of thousands of hours since the game was released), which is quite a lot but probably not more than the average dedicated player; I know some who have more in-game time on their worlds than I have on my first and by far longest-played world, which is currently at around 55.75 days (I've seen over 100 before, though that may include AFKing overnight, which I never do); the biggest difference is simply that I spend most of my time caving and do it quite fast (it only takes me around an hour to explore an abandoned mineshaft, perhaps 3-6 for an average size cave system, "average" meaning for 1.6.4, where they are about as big as the largest (very rare) cave systems in 1.7+; a while ago I explored a 9 mineshaft "mega complex", including associated caves and ravines, over just a few days); recently, somebody else who mines/caves a lot posted maps and statistics for one of their worlds (here, with comparisons to what I've done) and despite the fact that they mostly branch-mined I've actually found more diamond per hour of playing.
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?
Er ok probably. My next second most played world, on a SMP server for about 4 months I went on a kind of "get a life" Minecraft mining rampage and spent nearly 100% of my free time mining in Minecraft, mining everything connected in something around a 2000x3000 blocks area (don't remember too clearly and they did reset that map). So, 12 weeks at a minimum of 3 hours per week day + 9 hours per weekend day = that is only about 400 hours. That definitely was my most "mining intensive" life period, so yeah overall counting 4 years of Minecraft total now, I surely must have exagerated both mine and yours mining amount by some factor. Still, that remains quite a lot of mining ! It's too easy to overguesstimate such things wrong just by using memory only, without doing a bit of math too.
My longest solo played world reached around day 1200 or something, that's 400+ hours, or about 17 real-life days, but that definitely wasn't 100% spent on mining, very far from it. And I played a LOT of worlds above 100 in-game days each. I also never do the AFK overnight thing.
1 hour for a mineshaft that is super fast for me. Usually it takes me several multi-hours gaming sessions. I kind of tend to light up and clean up everything. Sometimes even after I was finished, all the tunnels rendered perfectly nice smooth stone 3x3 tunnels, not even a single dirt or gravel block showing, with slabs and stairs added for smooth walking and so on. Nowadays, though, I stopped that kind of obsessive compulsive thing.
Well, in any case, at *my* mining speed, it probably would have taken you >10000 hours to mine as much as what *you* mined lol.
If the depth had been higher I suppose I would have mined the same amount of time, but covered a much smaller total area.
I have a suggestion for this thread
Nether Surface: pretty normal
Nether Caverns: Gravel and Soul Sand spawn more frequently, Coal Ore and Hellstone Ore can be found
Magma Chambers: A large ravine in the Nether. Hardened Netherrack can be found here. Large amounts of lava falls. Contains the Fire Crystal, which grants permanent fire resistance and the ability to walk on lava.
End Surface: pretty normal
End Caverns: accessed by a portal in the End City, contains Purpur Crystals
End Dungeon: a maze of Purpur Crystal Blocks.
Mysterious Chasm: a place dripping with End Acid (more deadly than Molten Iron) and the bones of the Ender Dragon
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WHY WONT VANILLA MINECRAFT MAKE THIS!!!
THESE IDEAS ARE PRETTY AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Everyone like post #796 if you actually read it all.
And Ouchateur, it's actually more like a 3-meter pill.
I like this. My only problem is with the texture for ametrine, and its colors... But that's OK.
I also noticed that it doesn't say how often these caves spawn, or at least the portal.
I think the portal should have a small chance of spawning, and brings you to another dimension, which I guess would prevent lag.
But I love this idea, but I want it to be rare... and I have a feeling that leaving the cave would be annoying/hard. Maybe you could change that
Support
The temple already brings you to another dimension. The only way to not do this would be with a Cubic Chunks thingy, which would be great if it was implemented.
needs nether after labrinth
SUPPORT!!!!
Since it's not on this page, so people may not know about it, someone actually made a mod out of this suggestion (and it's really good).
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/wip-mods/2350259-deeper-caves-go-beyond-the-void-alpha-4000
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Fall into the hands of sorrow
Drawn by the darkest bay
Walk into the pit of silence
I am the one calling your name
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Yes, but it's not complete.
It may not be complete, but it's definitely way better than nothing. And it seems pretty close to feature-complete, actually. Only a few levels have yet to be added, and most other features have been (future suggestions notwithstanding).
~~~~~~~~
Fall into the hands of sorrow
Drawn by the darkest bay
Walk into the pit of silence
I am the one calling your name
~~~~~~~~
please make this a mod ._.
If you had looked up literally three comments, you would see that it is already made into a mod.
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Fall into the hands of sorrow
Drawn by the darkest bay
Walk into the pit of silence
I am the one calling your name
~~~~~~~~
Holy *redacted*! The three comments above the one above yours are ALL ABOUT THE MOD!!
This is what I hate: people who don't even read the page they are posting on and just blindly type away. *glower*
The one thing I dislike is how you promptly forget about the near-nether aspect. Logically, going deeper should make it more nether-like, but it doesn't. Other than that, PLEASE MAKE THIS A THING! Support.
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Curse PremiumHow is this, NOT a thing yet?