World spawns are easy to work with dig a shaft to bedrock and you're set. To me minecraft is a little too easy with this type of world and stronger/more aggressive mobs don't do much. so i though instead of making mobs harder, make the world harder. instead of just a solid world with a physical bottom make the entire world floating islands that are as deep as 20 blocks and as wide as 60x60. the world height would be the same so their would be islands up to the top and bottom of the map. were the bedrock would be is a insta-kill zone and islands would only be 3 blocks above it at their lowest points. with small islands scattered about you could finds diamonds right on the surface but no other materials to mine it, or find lots of coal and nothing to smelt. think about this, you spawn on a island with only 34 trees the island is only is only 7 blocks deep and there is no coal but lots of iron. Seems much harder now?
each island would have a abundance of a random resource but scarce of the others.
i will edit it and make it look better later. please leave comments and feedback.
Have you heard of a mod called "Planetoids"? It's basically a map that just has floating spheres made of various blocks, each filled with a random ore, which seems similar to what you've suggested. Anyways, I don't think Notch would implement this kind of thing into the actual game, but I'm sure many mods exist to make the map harder.
I'm not sure the floating island idea would make things that much harder. One would simply need to build suspended walkways off the side of an island and then use gravel or sand's properties to build a pillar down to an isalnd below. Going up is of course pretty easy too. When digging inside an island you'd then wish to emphasize the already pretty standard practice of not digging out the block you are standing on so as not to accidentally fall out of the bottom of an island. Once you connected a few, it would be a lot like it is now, save for the look of the world of course.
Still two things come to mind from your description:
Difficulty setting could also bear some relation to ore frequency. The harder it gets, not only are the mobs more damaging, but ores in general are a little less frequent.
Random generation of a world could have an added GUI where you set a preference (flat, mountainous, biome specific, floating islands, canyons, etc) and the generation algorythm would try to match to some degree, even though its still somewhat random.
As to the first, you'd want to test the difficulty so as it wouldnt make it excessively hard to find a needed ore, but within limits it might be interesting. It could even affect frequency of passive mobs. Something to ponder (I'm not necessarily supporting it fully - just had the idea - need more time to think about it). Certainly agree difficulty settings in my experience really dont have that much impact currently.
As to the second, not sure about feasability, since I dont know how worlds are generated from seed input, ie if said output can be modified/steered towards a desired direction a la 'flat' while still retaining random qualities.
each island would have a abundance of a random resource but scarce of the others.
i will edit it and make it look better later. please leave comments and feedback.
404 Cave.
Oh no. That's way too hard.
Still two things come to mind from your description:
Difficulty setting could also bear some relation to ore frequency. The harder it gets, not only are the mobs more damaging, but ores in general are a little less frequent.
Random generation of a world could have an added GUI where you set a preference (flat, mountainous, biome specific, floating islands, canyons, etc) and the generation algorythm would try to match to some degree, even though its still somewhat random.
As to the first, you'd want to test the difficulty so as it wouldnt make it excessively hard to find a needed ore, but within limits it might be interesting. It could even affect frequency of passive mobs. Something to ponder (I'm not necessarily supporting it fully - just had the idea - need more time to think about it). Certainly agree difficulty settings in my experience really dont have that much impact currently.
As to the second, not sure about feasability, since I dont know how worlds are generated from seed input, ie if said output can be modified/steered towards a desired direction a la 'flat' while still retaining random qualities.
All the difficulty you can ever want.