Despite the controversies about this enchantment, the debates continue to go back and forth, some people even outright advocated for its removal or for it to not be a renewable enchantment book, but be only found in End cities or dungeon chests etc.
But as some posters on this video here correctly pointed out, the problem with non renewable and rare items is people on large multiplayer servers who are selfish or work faster than others, or simply have more time on their hands will just end up taking all of those resources for themselves within all of the generated structures closest to original spawn, which on its own creates unfairness and a non inclusive environment to be in.
But we do need a solution to the problem, otherwise the anti mending people will never shut up about this, likewise pro mending people also.
Do I think it should become a gamerule? absolutely not, imo gamerule commands suck, not every survival player likes using them and will result in the disabling of the achievement system, people should not have to enable cheats just to allow themselves the luxury of more time for building and exploring as a result of skipping grindy gameplay loops in survival, a rebalancing decision shouldn't just happen because a portion of a community thinks it is their right to impose their will on another sector. Sometimes the fairest solutions come from compromises or looking at alternatives, whether it be enchantments, potions, farms or other legitimate features existing in the game according to the current mechanics.
If mending is to remain as it is now and with no change to the anvil mechanics then I think the best thing to do about the enchantment is to add in more world options, not cheats, just world options, which can be changed on the fly like some other ones can in bedrock edition.
This way server admins have more control over what features are and are not allowed on any given multiplayer world, anyone who does not like mending because they feel it breaks the game, they do not have to use it and they can create their own set of rules on a world that forbid its use.
Just as I advocated the addition of another tier game mode for elite or pro players, even though I am not a pro gamer myself, I do think it is time more world options are discussed or considered, and enchantments should not be an exception to this because I do acknowledge there are some people out there who would rather disable certain ones in a multiplayer survival world. Players should be allowed to set their rules.
If it were any other game the criticisms of infinite repair issue with mending would be valid, but Minecraft is not your average video game, it's a sandbox where some people do want to focus more of their spare time on large build projects and do want to avoid the boredom of strip mining if they don't have to and would rather only mine when looking for specific (permanent) materials for their cities, castles, mansions or sky temples etc. Whatever the case may be. They don't deserve to be called cheaters or be accused of not playing the game right in survival as a result of this.
I know a friend who told me in a conversation, lizking10152011, who got accused of this very thing "not playing the game right" by somebody else,
when somebody watched him build a house in survival, just because he would rather do that than fight monsters all of the time, which speaks a great deal about where we are at the moment, video games are supposed to be fun, not an endless war of exclusion.
Reduce the exponential curves on xp gain and enchantment cost with no max cap for anvil enchanting and a max price of 40 XP levels, and anvils should no longer break but instead require additional iron to use or to repair.
Reduce the exponential curves on xp gain and enchantment cost with no max cap for anvil enchanting and a max price of 40 XP levels, and anvils should no longer break but instead require additional iron to use or to repair.
My only issue with this one is how do you deal with diamond? diamonds in their raw or ore form are not exactly easy to come by and while for the time being diamond gear is available in trades, what if a future nerf removed diamond gear from Villagers? then we are in a bind with this one, with no renewable resources to indefinitely repair diamond gear, the mending rework to force players to use anvils for repair becomes a significant problem.
And if gear is to require actual resources for each repair in a future rebalancing of the repair mechanics, at that point some might say you may as well just keep crafting new tools, armour or weapons, because having to use 3 iron ingots or 3 diamonds for full repair from nigh oblivion is costing you the same amount of resources to craft a new pickaxe. Yes you keep enchantments with the repair mechanic, but in my opinion, people bringing up this point are making a copout argument and they don't really provide reasonable alternatives to minimize grindy gameplay loops that most players do find boring, the continuous hassle of having to go back to a strip mine, the less time survival players have for large build projects, whether people accept it or not, this is a problem and it is creating tensions in the community which makes nerfing mending enchantment such a thorny issue in the first place.
My only issue with this one is how do you deal with diamond? diamonds in their raw or ore form are not exactly easy to come by and while for the time being diamond gear is available in trades, what if a future nerf removed diamond gear from Villagers? then we are in a bind with this one, with no renewable resources to indefinitely repair diamond gear, the mending rework to force players to use anvils for repair becomes a significant problem.
And if gear is to require actual resources for each repair in a future rebalancing of the repair mechanics, at that point some might say you may as well just keep crafting new tools, armour or weapons, because having to use 3 iron ingots or 3 diamonds for full repair from nigh oblivion is costing you the same amount of resources to craft a new pickaxe. Yes you keep enchantments with the repair mechanic, but in my opinion, people bringing up this point are making a copout argument and they don't really provide reasonable alternatives to minimize grindy gameplay loops that most players do find boring, the continuous hassle of having to go back to a strip mine, the less time survival players have for large build projects, whether people accept it or not, this is a problem and it is creating tensions in the community which makes nerfing mending enchantment such a thorny issue in the first place.
Make diamonds drop when killing boss or mini boss tier mobs. I don't know.
Also, maybe make enchantments easier to come by and easier to filter. A more advanced grindstone that lets you pick and choose enchantments or even separate them out from books.
because having to use 3 iron ingots or 3 diamonds for full repair from nigh oblivion is costing you the same amount of resources to craft a new pickaxe.
Not if you use Unbreaking, which makes each diamond equivalent to 4 diamonds; armor doesn't benefit as much but you can fully repair any item with just 4 diamonds, including a chestplate, so you effectively double them even without Unbreaking (obviously, you would not use this method to repair tools unless they were so expensive that was the only option; a diamond pickaxe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III can be fully repaired with a new pickaxe but not one with Fortune, which makes sense given how valuable Fortune is and you wouldn't be using it as your only tool. I did at one point but the extra resource and XP costs are negligible for me). Fortune III averages 2.2 diamonds per ore so when combined with Unbreaking you are getting more like 8.8 diamonds per ore. Then there is an interesting feature of anvil repair - when combining items you can get a bonus of up to 12% (compared to 5% in a crafting grid, in either case the combined durability must not exceed 88% or 95%), which adds up to the equivalent of nearly 10 diamonds or more than 3 pickaxes per ore.
Consider the following:
7978 diamonds is enough to make 2659 pickaxes, enough to mine 4.15 million blocks, twice the total number I actually mined; with Unbreaking III they could mine 16.6 million blocks, and as many as 18.6 million if you repaired them to take advantage of the 12% durability bonus you get by combining two items in the anvil - and this isn't even considering Fortune, with which you could mine a staggering 40.9 million blocks! Then consider that I mined only a fraction of all the diamond in the area I explored:
Note that I actually explored only 41834 out of 49997 chunks, giving 35.56 ore mined per chunk (19.5% higher) but this is still only a small portion of the amounts that were originally present (about 8.9% of diamond). Also, these is only about 2/3 as much diamond as vanilla 1.6.4 because I lowered the range by 7 layers, in accordance with cave lava level, partly offset by removing the random bedrock on layers 1-4; even so there is still enough diamond to mine over half a billion blocks (107127 * 2.2 (Fortune) / 3 (per pickaxe) * 1560 (durability per repair) * 4 (Unbreaking III) * 1.12 (repair bonus) = 549.7 million blocks).
How much is that? You could mine out the entire world (49997 chunks) to a depth of about 43 layers - two-thirds of the depth below sea level! I mean all of this:
As noted, diamond is also more common in vanilla - and not just 1.6.4 but 1.18, which has triple the amount of 1.6.4 and about 5 times more than TMCW (a branch-mine at the optimal layers, which is just above bedrock 1.18, will yield more ores per hour in 1.8 and later; yes, even 1.18, since the increased hardness of deepslate doesn't matter much when you use Efficiency V and the peak diamond concentration is higher):
Vanilla 1.6.4 (from my own analysis with MCEdit; this and the following for 1.8 only counted ores below sea level, where nearly all caves are):
In short, there should never be an issue finding enough diamond unless you literally want to mine out the entire world, which can actually be done in 1.18 (about 208 layers stripped away; even vanilla 1.6.4 gets about 64 layers, enough when accounting for bodies of water and how large oceans are) and I only see having to use the anvil to repair items be an issue with netherite due to the need to go out of my way to get more (as it generates in the Nether and I only use it during the early stages of the game).
Not if you use Unbreaking, which makes each diamond equivalent to 4 diamonds; armor doesn't benefit as much but you can fully repair any item with just 4 diamonds, including a chestplate, so you effectively double them even without Unbreaking (obviously, you would not use this method to repair tools unless they were so expensive that was the only option; a diamond pickaxe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III can be fully repaired with a new pickaxe but not one with Fortune, which makes sense given how valuable Fortune is and you wouldn't be using it as your only tool. I did at one point but the extra resource and XP costs are negligible for me). Fortune III averages 2.2 diamonds per ore so when combined with Unbreaking you are getting more like 8.8 diamonds per ore. Then there is an interesting feature of anvil repair - when combining items you can get a bonus of up to 12% (compared to 5% in a crafting grid, in either case the combined durability must not exceed 88% or 95%), which adds up to the equivalent of nearly 10 diamonds or more than 3 pickaxes per ore.
Consider the following:
7978 diamonds is enough to make 2659 pickaxes, enough to mine 4.15 million blocks, twice the total number I actually mined; with Unbreaking III they could mine 16.6 million blocks, and as many as 18.6 million if you repaired them to take advantage of the 12% durability bonus you get by combining two items in the anvil - and this isn't even considering Fortune, with which you could mine a staggering 40.9 million blocks! Then consider that I mined only a fraction of all the diamond in the area I explored:
Note that I actually explored only 41834 out of 49997 chunks, giving 35.56 ore mined per chunk (19.5% higher) but this is still only a small portion of the amounts that were originally present (about 8.9% of diamond). Also, these is only about 2/3 as much diamond as vanilla 1.6.4 because I lowered the range by 7 layers, in accordance with cave lava level, partly offset by removing the random bedrock on layers 1-4; even so there is still enough diamond to mine over half a billion blocks (107127 * 2.2 (Fortune) / 3 (per pickaxe) * 1560 (durability per repair) * 4 (Unbreaking III) * 1.12 (repair bonus) = 549.7 million blocks).
How much is that? You could mine out the entire world (49997 chunks) to a depth of about 43 layers - two-thirds of the depth below sea level! I mean all of this:
As noted, diamond is also more common in vanilla - and not just 1.6.4 but 1.18, which has triple the amount of 1.6.4 and about 5 times more than TMCW (a branch-mine at the optimal layers, which is just above bedrock 1.18, will yield more ores per hour in 1.8 and later; yes, even 1.18, since the increased hardness of deepslate doesn't matter much when you use Efficiency V and the peak diamond concentration is higher):
In short, there should never be an issue finding enough diamond unless you literally want to mine out the entire world, which can actually be done in 1.18 (about 208 layers stripped away; even vanilla 1.6.4 gets about 64 layers, enough when accounting for bodies of water and how large oceans are) and I only see having to use the anvil to repair items be an issue with netherite due to the need to go out of my way to get more (as it generates in the Nether and I only use it during the early stages of the game).
Unfortunately, the anvil mechanics in modern vanilla make it unreasonable to repair most things except when you somehow have an anvil but no crafting table or are in a huge rush to do a quick fix to an enchanted item.
Unfortunately, the anvil mechanics in modern vanilla make it unreasonable to repair most things except when you somehow have an anvil but no crafting table or are in a huge rush to do a quick fix to an enchanted item.
I'd expect that changing them back to before 1.8 would be a given if Mending were to be nerfed so it required repairing items in the anvil, as the post I quoted suggested as a future rebalancing of anvils, with their concern being the consumption of non-renewable resources, assuming that villager trades were also nerfed/removed and/or repairing items with individual diamonds, as was required for more highly enchanted items (after having actually done the calculations even I was surprised that you could actually mine out an entire world with just the diamonds found in the area (easily done in 1.18+, as well as older versions if you only count blocks like stone, as dirt/gravel/sand would be be mined with shovels instead for 1/3 the diamonds per tool/repair), at least if they were mined with Fortune III and you used tools with Unbreaking III, regardless of repairability (the only real advantage in terms of tool uses is the 12% repair bonus).
I should note that that with the exception of Mending and Infinity bows* they have buffed Mending over time, in both availability and effectiveness (prior to 1.16 it would choose an item at random and attempt to repair it even if it was at full durability, meaning that if you had fully repaired armor and a single held item needing repair only 1/5 the XP would go to it, while since 1.16 all of it will go to the held item. However, I did playtest mending in 1.9 before and I had no issues keeping everything topped up).
*This may not be the official reason but I do suspect they made these exclusive as a way to "patch" an exploit where you could spam a punch bow (fired at minimum charge to minimize damage taken) and fly basically forever (or until the elytra wore out); the real bug here is that you are somehow propelled forward from arrows that are hitting you from the front (presumably since they are going in the same direction you are flying, while normally arrows that hit you from the front will be going the other way, knocking you back):
There is also a precedent for this - they removed Silk Touch from shears to patch an exploit that let you use them on blocks like grass blocks and ice without losing durability (instead of just making them always lose durability, as I did, and strangely they did that as well, with the idea that they would eventually break - but this was the same update that added Mending, which does work on on shears, and you can use a Silk Touch pickaxe, shovel, or axe on the same blocks, the only difference (prior to 1.9) being that shears didn't lose durability except on the blocks they were intended to be used on):
Anomie X added a comment - 20/Nov/15 1:52 PM
This is a freaking awful solution to this bug. For a start, what about all the people who already have silk touch shears? Not well thought out at all. Just making shears lose durability when breaking all blocks was enough to fix this, except for cobweb that alone makes it better to put Silk Touch on a diamond tool for general use instead. People with Silk Touch shears left from 1.8 don't matter much since those shears will lose durability and break soon enough.
(granted, since I use Silk Touch shears to harvest cobwebs and they no longer require Silk Touch to drop themselves there would no longer be any point for me to make them, just with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III, which would also cost less to repair under the pre-1.8 system; 18 instead of 29 levels. For quite a while I didn't bother enchanting shears at all, I just crafted the string from cobwebs into wool)
Some nerfs did make sense to do like when they did the combat update in Java edition and added a cooldown on melee abilities which stopped players from Dragonball Zing their way to victory every time with spammed attacks. Now they have to dodge more often or use the shield to block.
But a nerf to mending is a touchy subject, it's not easy to pull off without destroying other aspects of the game for people which I suspect is the reason why Mojang have not already done so yet. And the removal of renewable diamond gear would only make things worse here. Without a mending nerf, the removal of diamond gear from trades would have been fine, but both of them in combination, that makes it too difficult for a lot of people to keep using diamond gear indefinitely.
Play styles differ and not everybody wants to spend the majority of their time in cave systems, some people like using the resources they had collected to do other things beside this which is why there are a lot of people who like mending as it is, mending gives players relief from the boredom of strip mining, if they're penalized for doing that then the likelihood is those players would just end up playing a different game altogether, why should they bother playing this game any longer if that audience is no longer catered to? people need to understand that there is more to this game than just mining. Survival should never be an excuse to inhibit people's creativity or to not allow them to build grandiose structures while in survival. If they wanted to play creative mode, they would have done, but it's obvious that they don't want to and that for whatever reason they find creative mode boring.
As for mending being reworked to require the anvil for each repair, there are 2 problems with this, the first as been discussed is the prior work penalty which keeps increasing and eventually making repairs of enchanted gear impossible, the second is not all resources used for those repairs are renewable which is already a big issue for netherite equipment, and as somebody else already mentioned in a different thread, "without mending, netherite gear is dead", which means players are forced to strip mine for more of the same resources just to carry on gear they had previously met the requirements for making, it doesn't need an explanation why that is repetitive, it's self explanatory and learned from experience. And for some reason some people don't understand where other people are coming from when they get annoyed about having to do this.
It's probably better to just add in more world options so that players can customize their own survival experience and add in restrictions to enchantments so that they can challenge themselves, host servers for players who want this, and not bother every other player in imposing their subjective opinion about what survival should be. While sometimes nerfs do make sense to do, they shouldn't just happen every time a sector of a community complains about existing mechanics.
Play styles differ and not everybody wants to spend the majority of their time in cave systems,
Not again!
So, I mined about 2.1 million blocks while caving, sounds like a lot? Well, I could have mined up to 41 million blocks - 20 times more - with all the diamonds I could have collected if I used Fortune - in other words, I'd have spent only five percent of my time just to collect the resources I actually needed - and do you actually mine five thousand blocks per play session, every single time you play? I bet not, same for killing 500 mobs, every single time you play - my playstyle is not just at the top in terms of resource collection but surely in resource usage.
Really, you seriously overestimate how much time you'd need to spend mining:
A good efficiency is reached at a spacing of around 6 blocks (that is, 6 solid blocks left in-between the tunnels). At this spacing, efficiency is about 0.017, corresponding to 1.7% of blocks removed being a diamond.
1.7% of all blocks mined - that's one in 59 blocks - if you take even as much as 2 seconds to mine each block (surely you are using at least stone, right?) that's about half a stack of diamond ore per hour - times 2.2 with Fortune III and you get over a stack of diamonds, capable of making about 22 new pickaxes - which in turn are equivalent to about 90 pickaxes if they have Unbreaking III on them, which in turn increases to about 100 with optimal item repair in the anvil (12% durability bonus) - which in turn can mine about 156,829 blocks (140,026 without the repair bonus) - from just one hour of mining - which spent only 1,800 of those uses!
Also, my caving is extremely inefficient compared to branch-mining since I mined less than 1/6 as much diamond per hour and mined far more blocks per diamond ore found, about 265 vs 59 (4.5 times more) - combine those and branch-mining is a staggering 28 times more efficient than caving (this is not true if all ores are considered, but over 90% of what I find is coal and iron, and you don't have to collect everything; part of my low efficiency is because I don't only explore diamond-level caves).
Even better, the numbers on the Wiki reflect the density of diamond in 1.6.4 (the data is from 2012); you can expect even higher rates in 1.18 since diamond ore is more common just above bedrock level (too many people are probably still mining at y=11), and as pointed out above deepslate is a non-issue if you use any sort of decent tool (2 seconds per block includes plenty of time for going back to the start of your mine to empty your inventory as even stone pickaxes take just 1.15 seconds to mine deepslate; diamond is twice as fast). Ancient debris has a similar concentration on layers 14-15 as diamond and netherrack can be mined instantly, or blown up with beds with no danger of being destroyed due it its blast resistance (whether beds need to be made to not explode is another issue)
After having actually crunched the numbers I now fully understand why "golden age" players (Beta 1.7.3 and earlier) think that enchantments are so broken (the same hour yields the same amount of diamond ore but now you can mine only 15,932 blocks with the pickaxes they could make - almost 10 times less). No, I'm not one of these players; I've even stated many times that one reason why I branch-mine to get my first resources is because it is much more efficient than caving (this has even confused people; "why don't you cave?", and my reply).
So, I mined about 2.1 million blocks while caving, sounds like a lot? Well, I could have mined up to 41 million blocks - 20 times more - with all the diamonds I could have collected if I used Fortune - in other words, I'd have spent only five percent of my time just to collect the resources I actually needed - and do you actually mine five thousand blocks per play session, every single time you play? I bet not, same for killing 500 mobs, every single time you play - my playstyle is not just at the top in terms of resource collection but surely in resource usage.
Really, you seriously overestimate how much time you'd need to spend mining:
1.7% of all blocks mined - that's one in 59 blocks - if you take even as much as 2 seconds to mine each block (surely you are using at least stone, right?) that's about half a stack of diamond ore per hour - times 2.2 with Fortune III and you get over a stack of diamonds, capable of making about 22 new pickaxes - which in turn are equivalent to about 90 pickaxes if they have Unbreaking III on them, which in turn increases to about 100 with optimal item repair in the anvil (12% durability bonus) - which in turn can mine about 156,829 blocks (140,026 without the repair bonus) - from just one hour of mining - which spent only 1,800 of those uses!
Also, my caving is extremely inefficient compared to branch-mining since I mined less than 1/6 as much diamond per hour and mined far more blocks per diamond ore found, about 265 vs 59 (4.5 times more) - combine those and branch-mining is a staggering 28 times more efficient than caving (this is not true if all ores are considered, but over 90% of what I find is coal and iron, and you don't have to collect everything; part of my low efficiency is because I don't only explore diamond-level caves).
Even better, the numbers on the Wiki reflect the density of diamond in 1.6.4 (the data is from 2012); you can expect even higher rates in 1.18 since diamond ore is more common just above bedrock level (too many people are probably still mining at y=11), and as pointed out above deepslate is a non-issue if you use any sort of decent tool (2 seconds per block includes plenty of time for going back to the start of your mine to empty your inventory as even stone pickaxes take just 1.15 seconds to mine deepslate; diamond is twice as fast). Ancient debris has a similar concentration on layers 14-15 as diamond and netherrack can be mined instantly, or blown up with beds with no danger of being destroyed due it its blast resistance (whether beds need to be made to not explode is another issue)
After having actually crunched the numbers I now fully understand why "golden age" players (Beta 1.7.3 and earlier) think that enchantments are so broken (the same hour yields the same amount of diamond ore but now you can mine only 15,932 blocks with the pickaxes they could make - almost 10 times less). No, I'm not one of these players; I've even stated many times that one reason why I branch-mine to get my first resources is because it is much more efficient than caving (this has even confused people; "why don't you cave?", and my reply).
But shouldn't the game have more customization features for those players you speak of? beta version players or otherwise, the reality is the same, they are forced to put up with features they do not like the same as everybody else, but this is supposed to be a sandbox survival, is it not? despite that there isn't much "sandbox" about it unless you include mods, which by definition are non official features and created by people not affiliated with Mojang in any way.
Whether people branch mine or not, and this doesn't just apply to you, it doesn't change the fact that the resource gains would be many times slower if we had to keep spending our diamonds on repairing our pickaxes which we do not want to break.
What is the solution to this? keeping diamond gear in trades? introducing unbreaking 4 to make our gear last longer before repairs are needed? this isn't even factoring in the grind of finding ancient debris to repair netherite gear which still are not renewable either.
If all you're doing is clearing away Netherrack in Nether, or sandstone in a desert, fine, stone pickaxes clear them away fast enough, but with 1.18 we now have Deepslate in the Overworld at negative Y coordinates, which means mining is nowhere near efficient at gathering resources as it once was, that is not taking into consideration the complaints about the ore distribution system which is also less generous on resources like iron ore.
I'd expect that changing them back to before 1.8 would be a given if Mending were to be nerfed so it required repairing items in the anvil, as the post I quoted suggested as a future rebalancing of anvils, with their concern being the consumption of non-renewable resources, assuming that villager trades were also nerfed/removed and/or repairing items with individual diamonds, as was required for more highly enchanted items (after having actually done the calculations even I was surprised that you could actually mine out an entire world with just the diamonds found in the area (easily done in 1.18+, as well as older versions if you only count blocks like stone, as dirt/gravel/sand would be be mined with shovels instead for 1/3 the diamonds per tool/repair), at least if they were mined with Fortune III and you used tools with Unbreaking III, regardless of repairability (the only real advantage in terms of tool uses is the 12% repair bonus).
I should note that that with the exception of Mending and Infinity bows* they have buffed Mending over time, in both availability and effectiveness (prior to 1.16 it would choose an item at random and attempt to repair it even if it was at full durability, meaning that if you had fully repaired armor and a single held item needing repair only 1/5 the XP would go to it, while since 1.16 all of it will go to the held item. However, I did playtest mending in 1.9 before and I had no issues keeping everything topped up).
*This may not be the official reason but I do suspect they made these exclusive as a way to "patch" an exploit where you could spam a punch bow (fired at minimum charge to minimize damage taken) and fly basically forever (or until the elytra wore out); the real bug here is that you are somehow propelled forward from arrows that are hitting you from the front (presumably since they are going in the same direction you are flying, while normally arrows that hit you from the front will be going the other way, knocking you back):
There is also a precedent for this - they removed Silk Touch from shears to patch an exploit that let you use them on blocks like grass blocks and ice without losing durability (instead of just making them always lose durability, as I did, and strangely they did that as well, with the idea that they would eventually break - but this was the same update that added Mending, which does work on on shears, and you can use a Silk Touch pickaxe, shovel, or axe on the same blocks, the only difference (prior to 1.9) being that shears didn't lose durability except on the blocks they were intended to be used on):
(granted, since I use Silk Touch shears to harvest cobwebs and they no longer require Silk Touch to drop themselves there would no longer be any point for me to make them, just with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III, which would also cost less to repair under the pre-1.8 system; 18 instead of 29 levels. For quite a while I didn't bother enchanting shears at all, I just crafted the string from cobwebs into wool)
Yeah, I'm all for this. Nerf mending, boost anvils.
it doesn't change the fact that the resource gains would be many times slower if we had to keep spending our diamonds on repairing our pickaxes which we do not want to break.
If all you're doing is clearing away Netherrack in Nether, or sandstone in a desert, fine, stone pickaxes clear them away fast enough, but with 1.18 we now have Deepslate in the Overworld at negative Y coordinates, which means mining is nowhere near efficient at gathering resources as it once was
You are simply not reading and/or understanding what I say - not, it is NOT "many times slower" when you literally only need to spend 1.3% of the diamonds you find on repairing your tools:
Let me demonstrate again:
1.7% of blocks being diamond ore = 1 every 59 blocks mined, equivalent to one diamond every 26.74 blocks mined when Fortune is used.
A diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III can mine about 6240 blocks, or 2080 blocks per diamond used.
2080 / 26.74 = 77.8.
Yes, you get 77.8 times more diamonds than needed to repair your pickaxe!
How much does that slow down resource gathering?
By a mere 1.3%, or 98.7% of the rate if you did not need to spend resources (diamonds in this case, not even considering anything else, yes, anvils need iron too but I shouldn't have to calculate how much you'd need given that it is much more common and you need less per repair).
I also consider issues with the 1.18 ore distribution to be invalid - that should be in another thread about how it can be changed because it is so bad it is reason alone to not update to 1.18 or use a mod to fix it. After all, if you are going to overhaul Mending ore distribution should also be changed, and most of all, people need to actually want to go caving (this is exactly why I added additional ores which only generate in the walls of caves, though branch-mining is still a lot faster, and added enchantments to speed up mining, including the ability to mine multiple blocks at once and automatically smelt iron and gold - I don't know what Mojang was thinking when they made a "cave update", just like the last one in 1.7).
Incidentally, this is an analysis of a 1000 chunk area of my "double height terrain" world, which has the same ground depth as 1.18:
That's about twice as much iron ore per chunk as vanilla had before 1.18 and triple of what 1.18 has, even including what generates above sea level (which isn't much overall) - because I simply doubled the range and count, with coal increased by 50% (128 to 192 layers) and rarer ores adjusted relative to cave lava level (i.e. you find about the same amount relative to each other as you would in vanilla 1.6.4). "triple height terrain" extended this to three times the original ground depth - resulting in some crazy numbers for ores per chunk, including more than 300 iron and 500(!) coal, while not necessarily making it easier to collect since you have to go through 3 times the volume of caves to find them and branch-mining is dependent on the per-layer density (conversely, what Mojang did in 1.18 makes you have to go through a lot more caves to find the same amount as before):
(it is interesting that even THT only had about as much diamond ore as versions between 1.8-1.17; it is actually the same as vanilla 1.6.4 (range/count/vein size) but the removal of random bedrock allows more to generate, with the increase in exposure in caves due to an further reduction in lava level)
Also,what about deepslate?
Wooden 2.25
Stone 1.15
Iron 0.75
Diamond 0.6
Netherite 0.5
Golden 0.4
I seriously hope you are NOT using wooden tools - note that I used a VERY conservative mining speed of one block every 2 seconds in my calculations - even stone is only about half of that time and I really hope you do as I do and upgrade to better tools as you get the resources - I see absolutely no reason to not use diamond tools to branch-mine and as shown above it hardly hinders my resource collection (which does include diamonds for diamond gear in vanilla). In fact, I don't even bother getting Fortune for diamonds!
You are simply not reading and/or understanding what I say - not, it is NOT "many times slower" when you literally only need to spend 1.3% of the diamonds you find on repairing your tools:
Let me demonstrate again:
1.7% of blocks being diamond ore = 1 every 59 blocks mined, equivalent to one diamond every 26.74 blocks mined when Fortune is used.
A diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III can mine about 6240 blocks, or 2080 blocks per diamond used.
2080 / 26.74 = 77.8.
Yes, you get 77.8 times more diamonds than needed to repair your pickaxe!
How much does that slow down resource gathering?
By a mere 1.3%, or 98.7% of the rate if you did not need to spend resources (diamonds in this case, not even considering anything else, yes, anvils need iron too but I shouldn't have to calculate how much you'd need given that it is much more common and you need less per repair).
I also consider issues with the 1.18 ore distribution to be invalid - that should be in another thread about how it can be changed because it is so bad it is reason alone to not update to 1.18 or use a mod to fix it. After all, if you are going to overhaul Mending ore distribution should also be changed, and most of all, people need to actually want to go caving (this is exactly why I added additional ores which only generate in the walls of caves, though branch-mining is still a lot faster, and added enchantments to speed up mining, including the ability to mine multiple blocks at once and automatically smelt iron and gold - I don't know what Mojang was thinking when they made a "cave update", just like the last one in 1.7).
Incidentally, this is an analysis of a 1000 chunk area of my "double height terrain" world, which has the same ground depth as 1.18:
That's about twice as much iron ore per chunk as vanilla had before 1.18 and triple of what 1.18 has, even including what generates above sea level (which isn't much overall) - because I simply doubled the range and count, with coal increased by 50% (128 to 192 layers) and rarer ores adjusted relative to cave lava level (i.e. you find about the same amount relative to each other as you would in vanilla 1.6.4). "triple height terrain" extended this to three times the original ground depth - resulting in some crazy numbers for ores per chunk, including more than 300 iron and 500(!) coal, while not necessarily making it easier to collect since you have to go through 3 times the volume of caves to find them and branch-mining is dependent on the per-layer density (conversely, what Mojang did in 1.18 makes you have to go through a lot more caves to find the same amount as before):
(it is interesting that even THT only had about as much diamond ore as versions between 1.8-1.17; it is actually the same as vanilla 1.6.4 (range/count/vein size) but the removal of random bedrock allows more to generate, with the increase in exposure in caves due to an further reduction in lava level)
Also,what about deepslate?
I seriously hope you are NOT using wooden tools - note that I used a VERY conservative mining speed of one block every 2 seconds in my calculations - even stone is only about half of that time and I really hope you do as I do and upgrade to better tools as you get the resources - I see absolutely no reason to not use diamond tools to branch-mine and as shown above it hardly hinders my resource collection (which does include diamonds for diamond gear in vanilla). In fact, I don't even bother getting Fortune for diamonds!
Wooden tools are a beginners item, once a player has made it to iron tier there is no reason to be using wooden tools any longer, especially considering iron tools can be obtained from Villager trades. You don't even need to kill an Iron Golem for this either, so no, I am not using wooden tools.
I do agree that the ore distribution system should be changed if mending is to be made to require anvils for repair, but don't you think some resources in the game should be renewable? if not for diamond gear post ore distribution improvement, at the very least iron which is now middle tier in terms of durability and effectiveness? otherwise conservative play styles will involve the use of stone tools, which are complete rubbish given how quickly they break. You can't seriously with a straight face try to justify going through more than 10 pickaxes just to fill up a single chest of anything, even in my most conservative of tool use, I'd only consider using stone tools for terrain clearance or making dirt paths, or tilling farmland for crops, even then I'd rather use something better when available, as would other people.
People only get 131 uses out of any stone tool without unbreaking, before any stone tool is destroyed.
Stone tools being renewable because of stone generators is irrelevant to the issue, the fact is their durability is still low.
Nerfing mending on its own is already enough of a nerf as it is, without ruining people's methods of getting renewable gear that is actually useful.
I find caving far more fun since 1.18 than any time before, regardless of ore distribution. Maybe that's just me though.
I've seen you post Unmined renderings recently and I've always wondered what a large-scale rendering of the underground looks like, I mean like the ones here (2048x2048 blocks), and in particular, just how common and large the giant caves are, and what the "old caves" look like (from some descriptions I've gotten the perception that they are literally everywhere / the underground is more like the Nether, which I would not like; I most enjoy the dense networks found in vanilla 1.6.4, which also yield the highest hourly rates for ores (as long as the ceilings aren't so high that they require a lot of pillaring up to reach them, large open caves also have more mobs); harder to tell from just a rendering is how interconnected everything is (how far can you travel with little or no mining, just following interconnected caves).
What do you mean, like a comparison of underground before and after 1.18? I could probably make a comparison of that with one of my two worlds, since I still have backups of them from before either were updated to 1.18. I'll use my second (newest) world that I started in 1.16. If you're wanting comparisons to before 1.7 and after 1.18, I could also use my first (oldest) world for that.
This was my world on the last backup I had from 1.16 (also generated in 1.16 too) before updating to 1.18.
And this is it now, in 1.19.
I'm not sure much the addition of ancient cities in 1.19 are going to throw this off for whatever you're looking for, or if it doesn't matter. As far as I would guess, the "deep dark" doesn't actually overwrite any caves (just replaces some of the deep slate with sculk with the addition of the biome itself) but maybe I'm wrong on that. The ancient cities themselves though definitely would replace spots that otherwise would be caves. The Turquoise coloring on the bottom left corner and on the right middle are sculk stuff, and there's three ancient cities pictured by my count.
The Blue box in the center was 1.16 generated regions that I carried forward (the rest were purged). Updating to 1.18 will have added new caves below level 0 in those regions, but everything above level 0 will be "old caves". So I guess those two serve as good "in between" mixes.
The terrain blending that 1.18 does also doesn't seem to apply to caves or the underground. So levels 0 ground level on those borders will just be cut off on either side.
I'm not sure if that's what you were interested in.
What do you mean, like a comparison of underground before and after 1.18? I could probably make a comparison of that with one of my two worlds, since I still have backups of them from before either were updated to 1.18. I'll use my second (newest) world that I started in 1.16. If you're wanting comparisons to before 1.7 and after 1.18, I could also use my first (oldest) world for that.
The second one was what I wanted to see; I already know what older versions look like (caves changed in 1.13 but only in the relative locations). It is hard to directly compare 1.18 to older versions since the ground is twice as deep and it would be easier if the lower and upper halves could be separated (I don't know if Unmined can only render layers 0-62; I still only have the "original " version which only lets you adjust the maximum). However, it appears that the underground is still mostly dominated by "old" caves and the "giant" caves are comparable in size to the ones in my own mod (which has even larger "giant cave regions"); it is hard to see at the scale but it appears that mineshafts are quite rare, even compared to 1.7-1.17, though ChunkBase claims that there was no change since 1.13 (as noted above the locations but not frequencies of many features changed).
Here is a direct comparison to TMCWv5, which has about 2.35 times the underground volume of 1.6 and 2.82 times the volume of 1.7 (over 59 layers instead of 52); the area of my map is 3328x3328 blocks; a feature not seen in 1.18 is larger ravines (ChunkBase indicates that Bedrock has "mega ravines" which are much older than 1.18; quite oddly, it also shows that ravines became rarer in 1.18, despite having twice as much ground to generate in):
Also, one thing that is unfortunately not possible without the sort of mapping tool I wrote for my own mods (and vanilla 1.6/1.7) is the ability to see each type of cave/feature by itself (my standalone mapping tool generates the underground part of the world in the same way the actual game does and renders a map from it, it is also much faster, generating and mapping about 3,000 chunks per second):
Special caves (larger variants as well as various "special" cave systems with different cave types), as well as "large" mineshafts, and strongholds:
Ravines only (all sizes):
Mineshafts only (all sizes):
A list of the 30 largest/closest features of each type within the area; on average there was one underground feature with a volume of at least 100,000 every 541 chunks, or about 1.9 per region/level 2 map (27 caves, 22 ravines, 16 large cave cave systems, 7 network cave regions, 5 colossal cave systems, and 3 giant cave regions. Network cave regions and colossal cave systems might not be counted as "large open spaces" as they are either relatively narrow tunnels or particularly large and dense "1.6.4 swiss cheese cave systems"):
Also, considering that I explored an average of 25.5 chunks per hour this meant I found one such feature every 21.2 hours; the time taken to explore them ranged from 1-2 hours for the smallest caves to 20 hours for a giant cave region; if they took an average of 4 hours each then about a fifth of the total time was spent exploring them, which can be compared to about a third of the total underground volume being within these features (all special caves/features account for about 2/3 of the total volume with the rest being modified variants of vanilla 1.6.4 caves, excluding larger circular rooms).
Now that you mention it, I'm noticing cutoffs in other spots besides those from where 1.16 terrain meets 1.18 or newer terrain. I'm really not sure why. I originally purged my world of all but 4 regions from 1.16 before updating to 1.18. However, I AGAIN purged things (but retained at least 2 additional regions with the same original 4) after 1.19 released to get the mangrove swamps and deep dark biomes. But some of these cuttoffs look like they are between spots that I'm not sure if they were generated from different versions or not. So I'm not sure if 1.19 has the same generation as 1.18 or if something else explains those cutoffs. I'd have to make a world in 1.18 and then update to 1.19 to see if the underground has cutoffs to be sure but I'm too lazy to test that.
Anyway, yes, UnMined let's you set a lower and upper limit.
Here's another spot (and zoomed to 1:1 in case that's more what you wanted) showing -64 to 61 (all underground layers), 0 to 61 (no new deeper layers), and -64 to 0 (only new deeper layers).
I'm not sure what's what when it comes to cave types. But it certainly FEELS like the larger cave systems are far more common ever since 1.18. And I like it that way. Or, it might be because of their size but by count they aren't most common? I don't know. But they do look and seem (while playing) to be more common than the older, smaller type.
If mineshafts are less common, that's an improvement (merely in my opinion).
And yes, the new caves can often be so, so voluminous that reaching ores on tall walls or ceilings would be a real chore, so you might not prefer it. I mostly tend to get the stuff that's accessible and leave the rest and still come out with more than I need, plus I like caving more for the improved experience itself, regardless of whether it's more or less efficient.
Despite the controversies about this enchantment, the debates continue to go back and forth, some people even outright advocated for its removal or for it to not be a renewable enchantment book, but be only found in End cities or dungeon chests etc.
But as some posters on this video here correctly pointed out, the problem with non renewable and rare items is people on large multiplayer servers who are selfish or work faster than others, or simply have more time on their hands will just end up taking all of those resources for themselves within all of the generated structures closest to original spawn, which on its own creates unfairness and a non inclusive environment to be in.
But we do need a solution to the problem, otherwise the anti mending people will never shut up about this, likewise pro mending people also.
Do I think it should become a gamerule? absolutely not, imo gamerule commands suck, not every survival player likes using them and will result in the disabling of the achievement system, people should not have to enable cheats just to allow themselves the luxury of more time for building and exploring as a result of skipping grindy gameplay loops in survival, a rebalancing decision shouldn't just happen because a portion of a community thinks it is their right to impose their will on another sector. Sometimes the fairest solutions come from compromises or looking at alternatives, whether it be enchantments, potions, farms or other legitimate features existing in the game according to the current mechanics.
If mending is to remain as it is now and with no change to the anvil mechanics then I think the best thing to do about the enchantment is to add in more world options, not cheats, just world options, which can be changed on the fly like some other ones can in bedrock edition.
This way server admins have more control over what features are and are not allowed on any given multiplayer world, anyone who does not like mending because they feel it breaks the game, they do not have to use it and they can create their own set of rules on a world that forbid its use.
Just as I advocated the addition of another tier game mode for elite or pro players, even though I am not a pro gamer myself, I do think it is time more world options are discussed or considered, and enchantments should not be an exception to this because I do acknowledge there are some people out there who would rather disable certain ones in a multiplayer survival world. Players should be allowed to set their rules.
If it were any other game the criticisms of infinite repair issue with mending would be valid, but Minecraft is not your average video game, it's a sandbox where some people do want to focus more of their spare time on large build projects and do want to avoid the boredom of strip mining if they don't have to and would rather only mine when looking for specific (permanent) materials for their cities, castles, mansions or sky temples etc. Whatever the case may be. They don't deserve to be called cheaters or be accused of not playing the game right in survival as a result of this.
I know a friend who told me in a conversation, lizking10152011, who got accused of this very thing "not playing the game right" by somebody else,
when somebody watched him build a house in survival, just because he would rather do that than fight monsters all of the time, which speaks a great deal about where we are at the moment, video games are supposed to be fun, not an endless war of exclusion.
Reduce the exponential curves on xp gain and enchantment cost with no max cap for anvil enchanting and a max price of 40 XP levels, and anvils should no longer break but instead require additional iron to use or to repair.
My only issue with this one is how do you deal with diamond? diamonds in their raw or ore form are not exactly easy to come by and while for the time being diamond gear is available in trades, what if a future nerf removed diamond gear from Villagers? then we are in a bind with this one, with no renewable resources to indefinitely repair diamond gear, the mending rework to force players to use anvils for repair becomes a significant problem.
And if gear is to require actual resources for each repair in a future rebalancing of the repair mechanics, at that point some might say you may as well just keep crafting new tools, armour or weapons, because having to use 3 iron ingots or 3 diamonds for full repair from nigh oblivion is costing you the same amount of resources to craft a new pickaxe. Yes you keep enchantments with the repair mechanic, but in my opinion, people bringing up this point are making a copout argument and they don't really provide reasonable alternatives to minimize grindy gameplay loops that most players do find boring, the continuous hassle of having to go back to a strip mine, the less time survival players have for large build projects, whether people accept it or not, this is a problem and it is creating tensions in the community which makes nerfing mending enchantment such a thorny issue in the first place.
Make diamonds drop when killing boss or mini boss tier mobs. I don't know.
Also, maybe make enchantments easier to come by and easier to filter. A more advanced grindstone that lets you pick and choose enchantments or even separate them out from books.
Not if you use Unbreaking, which makes each diamond equivalent to 4 diamonds; armor doesn't benefit as much but you can fully repair any item with just 4 diamonds, including a chestplate, so you effectively double them even without Unbreaking (obviously, you would not use this method to repair tools unless they were so expensive that was the only option; a diamond pickaxe with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III can be fully repaired with a new pickaxe but not one with Fortune, which makes sense given how valuable Fortune is and you wouldn't be using it as your only tool. I did at one point but the extra resource and XP costs are negligible for me). Fortune III averages 2.2 diamonds per ore so when combined with Unbreaking you are getting more like 8.8 diamonds per ore. Then there is an interesting feature of anvil repair - when combining items you can get a bonus of up to 12% (compared to 5% in a crafting grid, in either case the combined durability must not exceed 88% or 95%), which adds up to the equivalent of nearly 10 diamonds or more than 3 pickaxes per ore.
Consider the following:
7978 diamonds is enough to make 2659 pickaxes, enough to mine 4.15 million blocks, twice the total number I actually mined; with Unbreaking III they could mine 16.6 million blocks, and as many as 18.6 million if you repaired them to take advantage of the 12% durability bonus you get by combining two items in the anvil - and this isn't even considering Fortune, with which you could mine a staggering 40.9 million blocks! Then consider that I mined only a fraction of all the diamond in the area I explored:
Per Chunk MCEdit Mined Total Total Mined % Mined Coal 6326604 987953 7314557 146.30 19.760 13.507% Iron 3992307 362043 4354350 87.09 7.841 8.315% Redstone 803918 59684 863602 17.27 1.194 6.911% Gold 394223 45209 439432 8.79 0.904 10.288% Lapis 200675 16227 216902 4.34 0.325 7.481% Diamond 99149 7978 107127 2.14 0.159 7.447% Ruby 56965 4090 61055 1.22 0.082 6.699% Emerald 51784 3536 55320 1.11 0.071 6.392% Amethyst 20017 981 20998 0.42 0.019 4.672% Total 11945642 1487701 13433343 268.68 29.756 11.075%Note that I actually explored only 41834 out of 49997 chunks, giving 35.56 ore mined per chunk (19.5% higher) but this is still only a small portion of the amounts that were originally present (about 8.9% of diamond). Also, these is only about 2/3 as much diamond as vanilla 1.6.4 because I lowered the range by 7 layers, in accordance with cave lava level, partly offset by removing the random bedrock on layers 1-4; even so there is still enough diamond to mine over half a billion blocks (107127 * 2.2 (Fortune) / 3 (per pickaxe) * 1560 (durability per repair) * 4 (Unbreaking III) * 1.12 (repair bonus) = 549.7 million blocks).
How much is that? You could mine out the entire world (49997 chunks) to a depth of about 43 layers - two-thirds of the depth below sea level! I mean all of this:
As noted, diamond is also more common in vanilla - and not just 1.6.4 but 1.18, which has triple the amount of 1.6.4 and about 5 times more than TMCW (a branch-mine at the optimal layers, which is just above bedrock 1.18, will yield more ores per hour in 1.8 and later; yes, even 1.18, since the increased hardness of deepslate doesn't matter much when you use Efficiency V and the peak diamond concentration is higher):
In short, there should never be an issue finding enough diamond unless you literally want to mine out the entire world, which can actually be done in 1.18 (about 208 layers stripped away; even vanilla 1.6.4 gets about 64 layers, enough when accounting for bodies of water and how large oceans are) and I only see having to use the anvil to repair items be an issue with netherite due to the need to go out of my way to get more (as it generates in the Nether and I only use it during the early stages of the game).
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?
Unfortunately, the anvil mechanics in modern vanilla make it unreasonable to repair most things except when you somehow have an anvil but no crafting table or are in a huge rush to do a quick fix to an enchanted item.
I'd expect that changing them back to before 1.8 would be a given if Mending were to be nerfed so it required repairing items in the anvil, as the post I quoted suggested as a future rebalancing of anvils, with their concern being the consumption of non-renewable resources, assuming that villager trades were also nerfed/removed and/or repairing items with individual diamonds, as was required for more highly enchanted items (after having actually done the calculations even I was surprised that you could actually mine out an entire world with just the diamonds found in the area (easily done in 1.18+, as well as older versions if you only count blocks like stone, as dirt/gravel/sand would be be mined with shovels instead for 1/3 the diamonds per tool/repair), at least if they were mined with Fortune III and you used tools with Unbreaking III, regardless of repairability (the only real advantage in terms of tool uses is the 12% repair bonus).
I should note that that with the exception of Mending and Infinity bows* they have buffed Mending over time, in both availability and effectiveness (prior to 1.16 it would choose an item at random and attempt to repair it even if it was at full durability, meaning that if you had fully repaired armor and a single held item needing repair only 1/5 the XP would go to it, while since 1.16 all of it will go to the held item. However, I did playtest mending in 1.9 before and I had no issues keeping everything topped up).
*This may not be the official reason but I do suspect they made these exclusive as a way to "patch" an exploit where you could spam a punch bow (fired at minimum charge to minimize damage taken) and fly basically forever (or until the elytra wore out); the real bug here is that you are somehow propelled forward from arrows that are hitting you from the front (presumably since they are going in the same direction you are flying, while normally arrows that hit you from the front will be going the other way, knocking you back):
There is also a precedent for this - they removed Silk Touch from shears to patch an exploit that let you use them on blocks like grass blocks and ice without losing durability (instead of just making them always lose durability, as I did, and strangely they did that as well, with the idea that they would eventually break - but this was the same update that added Mending, which does work on on shears, and you can use a Silk Touch pickaxe, shovel, or axe on the same blocks, the only difference (prior to 1.9) being that shears didn't lose durability except on the blocks they were intended to be used on):
MC-8180 Silk touch Shears don't lose durability when mining grass, ice, etc.
Heh: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Shears#Enchantments
(granted, since I use Silk Touch shears to harvest cobwebs and they no longer require Silk Touch to drop themselves there would no longer be any point for me to make them, just with Efficiency V and Unbreaking III, which would also cost less to repair under the pre-1.8 system; 18 instead of 29 levels. For quite a while I didn't bother enchanting shears at all, I just crafted the string from cobwebs into wool)
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?
Let's not remove mending please.
Some nerfs did make sense to do like when they did the combat update in Java edition and added a cooldown on melee abilities which stopped players from Dragonball Zing their way to victory every time with spammed attacks. Now they have to dodge more often or use the shield to block.
But a nerf to mending is a touchy subject, it's not easy to pull off without destroying other aspects of the game for people which I suspect is the reason why Mojang have not already done so yet. And the removal of renewable diamond gear would only make things worse here. Without a mending nerf, the removal of diamond gear from trades would have been fine, but both of them in combination, that makes it too difficult for a lot of people to keep using diamond gear indefinitely.
Play styles differ and not everybody wants to spend the majority of their time in cave systems, some people like using the resources they had collected to do other things beside this which is why there are a lot of people who like mending as it is, mending gives players relief from the boredom of strip mining, if they're penalized for doing that then the likelihood is those players would just end up playing a different game altogether, why should they bother playing this game any longer if that audience is no longer catered to? people need to understand that there is more to this game than just mining. Survival should never be an excuse to inhibit people's creativity or to not allow them to build grandiose structures while in survival. If they wanted to play creative mode, they would have done, but it's obvious that they don't want to and that for whatever reason they find creative mode boring.
As for mending being reworked to require the anvil for each repair, there are 2 problems with this, the first as been discussed is the prior work penalty which keeps increasing and eventually making repairs of enchanted gear impossible, the second is not all resources used for those repairs are renewable which is already a big issue for netherite equipment, and as somebody else already mentioned in a different thread, "without mending, netherite gear is dead", which means players are forced to strip mine for more of the same resources just to carry on gear they had previously met the requirements for making, it doesn't need an explanation why that is repetitive, it's self explanatory and learned from experience. And for some reason some people don't understand where other people are coming from when they get annoyed about having to do this.
It's probably better to just add in more world options so that players can customize their own survival experience and add in restrictions to enchantments so that they can challenge themselves, host servers for players who want this, and not bother every other player in imposing their subjective opinion about what survival should be. While sometimes nerfs do make sense to do, they shouldn't just happen every time a sector of a community complains about existing mechanics.
Not again!
So, I mined about 2.1 million blocks while caving, sounds like a lot? Well, I could have mined up to 41 million blocks - 20 times more - with all the diamonds I could have collected if I used Fortune - in other words, I'd have spent only five percent of my time just to collect the resources I actually needed - and do you actually mine five thousand blocks per play session, every single time you play? I bet not, same for killing 500 mobs, every single time you play - my playstyle is not just at the top in terms of resource collection but surely in resource usage.
Really, you seriously overestimate how much time you'd need to spend mining:
1.7% of all blocks mined - that's one in 59 blocks - if you take even as much as 2 seconds to mine each block (surely you are using at least stone, right?) that's about half a stack of diamond ore per hour - times 2.2 with Fortune III and you get over a stack of diamonds, capable of making about 22 new pickaxes - which in turn are equivalent to about 90 pickaxes if they have Unbreaking III on them, which in turn increases to about 100 with optimal item repair in the anvil (12% durability bonus) - which in turn can mine about 156,829 blocks (140,026 without the repair bonus) - from just one hour of mining - which spent only 1,800 of those uses!
Also, my caving is extremely inefficient compared to branch-mining since I mined less than 1/6 as much diamond per hour and mined far more blocks per diamond ore found, about 265 vs 59 (4.5 times more) - combine those and branch-mining is a staggering 28 times more efficient than caving (this is not true if all ores are considered, but over 90% of what I find is coal and iron, and you don't have to collect everything; part of my low efficiency is because I don't only explore diamond-level caves).
Even better, the numbers on the Wiki reflect the density of diamond in 1.6.4 (the data is from 2012); you can expect even higher rates in 1.18 since diamond ore is more common just above bedrock level (too many people are probably still mining at y=11), and as pointed out above deepslate is a non-issue if you use any sort of decent tool (2 seconds per block includes plenty of time for going back to the start of your mine to empty your inventory as even stone pickaxes take just 1.15 seconds to mine deepslate; diamond is twice as fast). Ancient debris has a similar concentration on layers 14-15 as diamond and netherrack can be mined instantly, or blown up with beds with no danger of being destroyed due it its blast resistance (whether beds need to be made to not explode is another issue)
After having actually crunched the numbers I now fully understand why "golden age" players (Beta 1.7.3 and earlier) think that enchantments are so broken (the same hour yields the same amount of diamond ore but now you can mine only 15,932 blocks with the pickaxes they could make - almost 10 times less). No, I'm not one of these players; I've even stated many times that one reason why I branch-mine to get my first resources is because it is much more efficient than caving (this has even confused people; "why don't you cave?", and my reply).
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?
But shouldn't the game have more customization features for those players you speak of? beta version players or otherwise, the reality is the same, they are forced to put up with features they do not like the same as everybody else, but this is supposed to be a sandbox survival, is it not? despite that there isn't much "sandbox" about it unless you include mods, which by definition are non official features and created by people not affiliated with Mojang in any way.
Whether people branch mine or not, and this doesn't just apply to you, it doesn't change the fact that the resource gains would be many times slower if we had to keep spending our diamonds on repairing our pickaxes which we do not want to break.
What is the solution to this? keeping diamond gear in trades? introducing unbreaking 4 to make our gear last longer before repairs are needed? this isn't even factoring in the grind of finding ancient debris to repair netherite gear which still are not renewable either.
If all you're doing is clearing away Netherrack in Nether, or sandstone in a desert, fine, stone pickaxes clear them away fast enough, but with 1.18 we now have Deepslate in the Overworld at negative Y coordinates, which means mining is nowhere near efficient at gathering resources as it once was, that is not taking into consideration the complaints about the ore distribution system which is also less generous on resources like iron ore.
Yeah, I'm all for this. Nerf mending, boost anvils.
You are simply not reading and/or understanding what I say - not, it is NOT "many times slower" when you literally only need to spend 1.3% of the diamonds you find on repairing your tools:
Let me demonstrate again:
1.7% of blocks being diamond ore = 1 every 59 blocks mined, equivalent to one diamond every 26.74 blocks mined when Fortune is used.
A diamond pickaxe with Unbreaking III can mine about 6240 blocks, or 2080 blocks per diamond used.
2080 / 26.74 = 77.8.
Yes, you get 77.8 times more diamonds than needed to repair your pickaxe!
How much does that slow down resource gathering?
By a mere 1.3%, or 98.7% of the rate if you did not need to spend resources (diamonds in this case, not even considering anything else, yes, anvils need iron too but I shouldn't have to calculate how much you'd need given that it is much more common and you need less per repair).
I also consider issues with the 1.18 ore distribution to be invalid - that should be in another thread about how it can be changed because it is so bad it is reason alone to not update to 1.18 or use a mod to fix it. After all, if you are going to overhaul Mending ore distribution should also be changed, and most of all, people need to actually want to go caving (this is exactly why I added additional ores which only generate in the walls of caves, though branch-mining is still a lot faster, and added enchantments to speed up mining, including the ability to mine multiple blocks at once and automatically smelt iron and gold - I don't know what Mojang was thinking when they made a "cave update", just like the last one in 1.7).
Incidentally, this is an analysis of a 1000 chunk area of my "double height terrain" world, which has the same ground depth as 1.18:
That's about twice as much iron ore per chunk as vanilla had before 1.18 and triple of what 1.18 has, even including what generates above sea level (which isn't much overall) - because I simply doubled the range and count, with coal increased by 50% (128 to 192 layers) and rarer ores adjusted relative to cave lava level (i.e. you find about the same amount relative to each other as you would in vanilla 1.6.4). "triple height terrain" extended this to three times the original ground depth - resulting in some crazy numbers for ores per chunk, including more than 300 iron and 500(!) coal, while not necessarily making it easier to collect since you have to go through 3 times the volume of caves to find them and branch-mining is dependent on the per-layer density (conversely, what Mojang did in 1.18 makes you have to go through a lot more caves to find the same amount as before):
(it is interesting that even THT only had about as much diamond ore as versions between 1.8-1.17; it is actually the same as vanilla 1.6.4 (range/count/vein size) but the removal of random bedrock allows more to generate, with the increase in exposure in caves due to an further reduction in lava level)
Also,what about deepslate?
I seriously hope you are NOT using wooden tools - note that I used a VERY conservative mining speed of one block every 2 seconds in my calculations - even stone is only about half of that time and I really hope you do as I do and upgrade to better tools as you get the resources - I see absolutely no reason to not use diamond tools to branch-mine and as shown above it hardly hinders my resource collection (which does include diamonds for diamond gear in vanilla). In fact, I don't even bother getting Fortune for diamonds!
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?
Wooden tools are a beginners item, once a player has made it to iron tier there is no reason to be using wooden tools any longer, especially considering iron tools can be obtained from Villager trades. You don't even need to kill an Iron Golem for this either, so no, I am not using wooden tools.
I do agree that the ore distribution system should be changed if mending is to be made to require anvils for repair, but don't you think some resources in the game should be renewable? if not for diamond gear post ore distribution improvement, at the very least iron which is now middle tier in terms of durability and effectiveness? otherwise conservative play styles will involve the use of stone tools, which are complete rubbish given how quickly they break. You can't seriously with a straight face try to justify going through more than 10 pickaxes just to fill up a single chest of anything, even in my most conservative of tool use, I'd only consider using stone tools for terrain clearance or making dirt paths, or tilling farmland for crops, even then I'd rather use something better when available, as would other people.
People only get 131 uses out of any stone tool without unbreaking, before any stone tool is destroyed.
Stone tools being renewable because of stone generators is irrelevant to the issue, the fact is their durability is still low.
Nerfing mending on its own is already enough of a nerf as it is, without ruining people's methods of getting renewable gear that is actually useful.
I find caving far more fun since 1.18 than any time before, regardless of ore distribution. Maybe that's just me though.
I've seen you post Unmined renderings recently and I've always wondered what a large-scale rendering of the underground looks like, I mean like the ones here (2048x2048 blocks), and in particular, just how common and large the giant caves are, and what the "old caves" look like (from some descriptions I've gotten the perception that they are literally everywhere / the underground is more like the Nether, which I would not like; I most enjoy the dense networks found in vanilla 1.6.4, which also yield the highest hourly rates for ores (as long as the ceilings aren't so high that they require a lot of pillaring up to reach them, large open caves also have more mobs); harder to tell from just a rendering is how interconnected everything is (how far can you travel with little or no mining, just following interconnected caves).
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?
On one of my servers we have an old style cave system at the start of our mine and a lush biome deeper down. That's a nice balance.
What do you mean, like a comparison of underground before and after 1.18? I could probably make a comparison of that with one of my two worlds, since I still have backups of them from before either were updated to 1.18. I'll use my second (newest) world that I started in 1.16. If you're wanting comparisons to before 1.7 and after 1.18, I could also use my first (oldest) world for that.
This was my world on the last backup I had from 1.16 (also generated in 1.16 too) before updating to 1.18.
And this is it now, in 1.19.
I'm not sure much the addition of ancient cities in 1.19 are going to throw this off for whatever you're looking for, or if it doesn't matter. As far as I would guess, the "deep dark" doesn't actually overwrite any caves (just replaces some of the deep slate with sculk with the addition of the biome itself) but maybe I'm wrong on that. The ancient cities themselves though definitely would replace spots that otherwise would be caves. The Turquoise coloring on the bottom left corner and on the right middle are sculk stuff, and there's three ancient cities pictured by my count.
The Blue box in the center was 1.16 generated regions that I carried forward (the rest were purged). Updating to 1.18 will have added new caves below level 0 in those regions, but everything above level 0 will be "old caves". So I guess those two serve as good "in between" mixes.
The terrain blending that 1.18 does also doesn't seem to apply to caves or the underground. So levels 0 ground level on those borders will just be cut off on either side.
I'm not sure if that's what you were interested in.
The second one was what I wanted to see; I already know what older versions look like (caves changed in 1.13 but only in the relative locations). It is hard to directly compare 1.18 to older versions since the ground is twice as deep and it would be easier if the lower and upper halves could be separated (I don't know if Unmined can only render layers 0-62; I still only have the "original " version which only lets you adjust the maximum). However, it appears that the underground is still mostly dominated by "old" caves and the "giant" caves are comparable in size to the ones in my own mod (which has even larger "giant cave regions"); it is hard to see at the scale but it appears that mineshafts are quite rare, even compared to 1.7-1.17, though ChunkBase claims that there was no change since 1.13 (as noted above the locations but not frequencies of many features changed).
Here is a direct comparison to TMCWv5, which has about 2.35 times the underground volume of 1.6 and 2.82 times the volume of 1.7 (over 59 layers instead of 52); the area of my map is 3328x3328 blocks; a feature not seen in 1.18 is larger ravines (ChunkBase indicates that Bedrock has "mega ravines" which are much older than 1.18; quite oddly, it also shows that ravines became rarer in 1.18, despite having twice as much ground to generate in):
Also, one thing that is unfortunately not possible without the sort of mapping tool I wrote for my own mods (and vanilla 1.6/1.7) is the ability to see each type of cave/feature by itself (my standalone mapping tool generates the underground part of the world in the same way the actual game does and renders a map from it, it is also much faster, generating and mapping about 3,000 chunks per second):
Ravines only (all sizes):
Mineshafts only (all sizes):
A list of the 30 largest/closest features of each type within the area; on average there was one underground feature with a volume of at least 100,000 every 541 chunks, or about 1.9 per region/level 2 map (27 caves, 22 ravines, 16 large cave cave systems, 7 network cave regions, 5 colossal cave systems, and 3 giant cave regions. Network cave regions and colossal cave systems might not be counted as "large open spaces" as they are either relatively narrow tunnels or particularly large and dense "1.6.4 swiss cheese cave systems"):
Also, considering that I explored an average of 25.5 chunks per hour this meant I found one such feature every 21.2 hours; the time taken to explore them ranged from 1-2 hours for the smallest caves to 20 hours for a giant cave region; if they took an average of 4 hours each then about a fifth of the total time was spent exploring them, which can be compared to about a third of the total underground volume being within these features (all special caves/features account for about 2/3 of the total volume with the rest being modified variants of vanilla 1.6.4 caves, excluding larger circular rooms).
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 had no idea the saves changed with 1.13.
Now that you mention it, I'm noticing cutoffs in other spots besides those from where 1.16 terrain meets 1.18 or newer terrain. I'm really not sure why. I originally purged my world of all but 4 regions from 1.16 before updating to 1.18. However, I AGAIN purged things (but retained at least 2 additional regions with the same original 4) after 1.19 released to get the mangrove swamps and deep dark biomes. But some of these cuttoffs look like they are between spots that I'm not sure if they were generated from different versions or not. So I'm not sure if 1.19 has the same generation as 1.18 or if something else explains those cutoffs. I'd have to make a world in 1.18 and then update to 1.19 to see if the underground has cutoffs to be sure but I'm too lazy to test that.
Anyway, yes, UnMined let's you set a lower and upper limit.
Here's another spot (and zoomed to 1:1 in case that's more what you wanted) showing -64 to 61 (all underground layers), 0 to 61 (no new deeper layers), and -64 to 0 (only new deeper layers).
I'm not sure what's what when it comes to cave types. But it certainly FEELS like the larger cave systems are far more common ever since 1.18. And I like it that way. Or, it might be because of their size but by count they aren't most common? I don't know. But they do look and seem (while playing) to be more common than the older, smaller type.
If mineshafts are less common, that's an improvement (merely in my opinion).
And yes, the new caves can often be so, so voluminous that reaching ores on tall walls or ceilings would be a real chore, so you might not prefer it. I mostly tend to get the stuff that's accessible and leave the rest and still come out with more than I need, plus I like caving more for the improved experience itself, regardless of whether it's more or less efficient.