The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Location:
Hypixel
Join Date:
5/11/2021
Posts:
131
Minecraft:
DragonAnimators
PMC:
DragonAnimators
Member Details
Nice map. Looks cool and pretty fun. My first world was on the coast next to a massive ocean. There was a village nearby that I made into my base by building a wall around it. I then made a floating castle.
Nice map. Looks cool and pretty fun. My first world was on the coast next to a massive ocean. There was a village nearby that I made into my base by building a wall around it. I then made a floating castle.
That sounds fun. My first world was a coast but no village, just taiga, snowy taiga, and forest. I got so lost.
I reached a major milestone in this world today - four million blocks mined with a diamond pickaxe, nearly all while caving (I use iron pickaxes from minecarts to dig out railways and bases):
Notably, my mining rate has increased since the first two million blocks, which took 88.73 days of playtime over 615 sessions, compared to 77.07 days over 514 sessions to mine the next two million blocks, which is 3252 blocks per session and 939 blocks per hour for the first two million and 3891 blocks per session and 1081 blocks per hour for the next two million (the average session length also increased from 3.46 hours to 3.6 hours). Here is a comparison of the general statistics from when I'd reached two million and now; for the most part everything is twice as high:
Here are some more stats; I've mined a total of 2.8 million ore, as well as 203000 rails and 91000 moss stone (representing around 735 mineshafts and 1900 dungeons assuming an average of 275 rails and 48 moss stone per structure), and more than 4000 mob spawners (not including spawners from the first 6 months or so as vanilla does not track their stats, which I enabled by simply removing a "disableStats()" call from the code; Mojang didn't fix this until 1.13):
Interestingly, the rate at which I've mined diamond ore has actually decreased over time, especially when compared to total blocks mined; over the first two million blocks I mined 8020 diamond ore, averaging one every 249 blocks mined and 3.77 per hour while over the next two million I mined 6827, averaging one every 293 blocks mined and 3.69 per hour; this could be explained by changes in the ratio of caves and mineshafts, the latter of which have increased as I've explored further from the origin, as seen by relatively larger increases in rails/cobwebs collected (prior to 1.13 mineshafts were less common within 1280 blocks of the origin, linearly decreasing to none at 0,0; this means that in 1.6.4 they are rarer than in 1.13 within 512 blocks of the origin, as they are 2.5 times more common than in 1.7+) and their average altitude is higher (however, deep mineshafts can yield far more diamond than an equivalent amount of caves; my single session record for this world was 88 ore while exploring a mineshaft which was entirely below y=16).
Note that the time actually spent caving is less than the total time, which is otherwise spent on farming and trading to get emeralds and diamond gear for repairs, trips back to my main base, and less often, building new secondary bases and railways and building walls around villages (this is all I do besides caving; I spend around 2 sessions caving, then return to a secondary base to empty my inventory/ender chest and restock on food/wood, and harvest crops for trading (mostly wheat these days, plus the occasional chicken, which are mainly used to wear down sacrificial swords so they cost less than 40 levels), and immediately return to caving, unless my temporary storage is full, then I return to my main base to put them in permanent storage, as well as trade, then I return to my secondary base and repeat the cycle). This time has likely gradually increased over time, in part because I didn't start trading until late 2015, and not fully (all gear) until about a year later, requiring more time on growing and harvesting crops (the wheat farm in my current base is clearly visible on the cave map below), and the distance traveled by minecart has increased (averaging 978 meters per session for the first two million and 1,357 meters per session for the second two million; that said, at 8 m/s this still represents less than 3 minutes of time spent traveling per session).
I'm currently exploring a level 4 map centered at 2048, 2048, the last of a 3x3 map area around spawn that I have left to explore, excluding ocean (I've already made plans for further exploration to the south and east of this area by making more room for my map wall; I don't have plans as to what to do once the entire continent is explored):
Of note, the coordinates in the upper-left is a new feature I've added to World1/TMCWv5 (they use practically the same codebase except World1 is mostly vanilla) when holding a map, sort of like how maps in Console Edition displayed coordinates on the map (they can also be seen at any time in the Survival inventory, a previously added feature); maps also now display their center coordinates in the item tooltip, making it much easier to find the correct map in a chest (I don't name them so they are just named "Map #"):
So far I've found a village and jungle temple, the 13th and 11th ones that I've found in this world, as well as made a new base near 1536, 1600, the 21st base that I've built. Notably, the village was the first one that I've found in nearly four years, due to spending much of the time until recently exploring a snowy region (more or less the same as 1.7+'s snowy areas, which are actually placed the same way initially. This is also a good example of why I highly dislike the 1.7 biome changes - even if I continuously played on a world it could take years for me to fully explore a climate zone (a level 4 map takes 5-6 months), with only a limited number of unique biomes; it also took around 7 months of daily playtime to find the 12th village after I found the 11th).
Also, here are charts of what I did every day this month, with a total of 111822 resources (blocks mined, not drops), 95623 ores, 8974 rails (representing around 33 mineshafts), 4100 moss stone (representing around 85 dungeons), 180 spawners (this means around 95 were cave spider spawners, or 3 per mineshaft), 10962 mob kills, and 171656 XP collected:
Interestingly, I've collected resources at a faster rate than in my modded worlds, largely due to the higher frequency of mineshafts; I averaged 3476 resources per session over 100 play sessions in TMCWv1, which has about the same mineshaft frequency as 1.7+, though more of this was ore (3254 vs 3085), while I've collected rails at more than triple the rate (86.5 vs 289), and found nearly twice as many mob spawners (3.08 vs 5.81); conversely, the higher surface area of caves increases ore collection rates (today I mined 3703 ore in 3.45 hours, a rate of 1073 per hour, while only exploring caves):
Perhaps the most amazing thing about all of this is that I've been doing this for over 8 years with no signs of letting up (I haven't actually "played" every single day over that period, where "played" means playing on a regular Survival world, as opposed to all the time I've spent on developing and testing mods, particularly in 2018-2019 (the first round of development of TMCWv5 (4.5) and my "Optifine" replacement) and this year (second round of TMCWv5), which I still count as time spent on the game):
I now have two months of daily statistics for this world:
More charts:
Also, here is a comparison between August and September; I averaged slightly more ores per day but less rarer ores (other than coal and iron) with iron increasing the most, and less other resources other than cobwebs, which had a significant increase (amounts and differences per session are rounded, thus don't add up to the totals):
Here are the in-game statistics; I spent 4.49 days playing for an average of 3.6 hours per day, and mined a total of 137639 blocks with a diamond pickaxe, an average of 4588 blocks per day, and crafted (actually, traded) another 21 diamond pickaxes (I probably actually did 22 repairs, as I buy them in batches, I also use the sacrifices until they drop to around 1375 durability for additional uses per repair):
Notably, I'm nearing the 32 bit integer limit for distance walked, which is recorded in centimeters so once it reaches about 21,474.83 km, with about 103 more to go, it will overflow and become negative, but I patched in a temporary work-around which casts the value to a 64 bit value so it will display properly until 42,949.67 km, after which it will reset to 0 (this could be avoided by changing the stats to use a long but that would require more involved changes):
final class StatTypeDistance implements IStatType
{
// Fixed so that the maximum distance that can be accurately displayed is 42,949.67 km, twice that in
// vanilla, by casting the 32 bit signed int value to an unsigned value (long). Also changed so that
// units change from cm to m to km when the value in the previous units reaches 1000 instead of 500.
public String format(int cm)
{
double m = (double)((long)cm & 4294967295L) / 100.0D;
if (m >= 1000.0D) return StatBase.getDecimalFormat().format(m / 1000.0D) + " km";
if (m >= 1.0D) return StatBase.getDecimalFormat().format(m) + " m";
return cm + " cm";
}
}
Another notable milestone is crafting and/or placing a million torches, with about 100-150 thousand left to go (crafted would be more meaningful since they can be placed more than once, but only one will actually be added to the world):
Here are renderings of the current level 4 map, with about a third of it explored so far; however, at least some part of it is ocean, which I've run into on the southern and eastern edges of the explored area; worst-case is that the whole southeastern half is ocean, which could mean that the only land left is to the south of z = 3072, which itself has reached ocean further west (I'm still not sure what I'll do once I fully explore the entire continent; one thing would be to use AMIDST to locate another one and use Nether portals to connect my main base to a central rail hub):
I have not found any structures of note other than 3 witch huts, which I haven't even kept track of since they are so unremarkable (I've never seen a witch in them, only naturally spawning witches and those only because I added them to the hostile mob spawn list at the same chance as 1.7). As far as caving goes, I spent a large part of the month exploring a vast network of mineshafts and associated caves, which covers much of the southern half of the explored area shown above; there were a total of 11 mineshafts within an area about 650 blocks north-south, making it one of largest mineshaft networks that I've found in this world, certainly the largest in extent:
I also found one of the largest single caves that I've found in this world, with a volume of about 11,000 blocks, which is about half the maximum that can be expected to be found within 1 million chunks and a third of the largest possible cave, with two other quite large caves nearby, including one within the same cave system:
These are the locations and the length, maximum width, and volume of the caves, as well as individual cave renderings:
This is a slightly smaller cave that was within the same cave system:
A third cave located in a separate cave system nearby:
Interestingly, the third cave had the potential to be much larger as its maximum width was 24 blocks while the largest cave that I've found was 20; the volume is also dependent on how it twists and turns and when it branches with this cave branching very early (caves with a maximum width of at least 5 branch between 25-75% of their length, with branches always being up to 4-5 blocks wide. If a cave branches before 50% it also won't reach its maximum width).
Note that when I talk about "large caves" in 1.6.4 vs 1.7+ I'm referring to cave systems; the generation of individual tunnels wasn't changed in 1.7. Multiple caves can also intersect to form larger chambers; for comparison, the cave system with the third cave had a total of 37 tunnels, 2 of which were "large" (defined as a maximum width of 9 or more, which is only achievable with an additional width multiplier), 7 circular rooms (these range between 5-17 blocks in diameter with a linear distribution), and a total volume of about 93,000 blocks within a 5 chunk radius, or about 10 times that of the cave alone, with the volume in the area increasing to 127,000 blocks when including ravines and mineshafts:
Size 26 cave system at 2272 1616; total number of caves: 37
Number of cave systems: 1
Initial number of caves: 26
Total number of caves: 37
Additional circular room caves: 11
Number of small caves: 35; average width is 5.99
Number of large caves: 2; average width is 19.02
Number of circular rooms: 7; average width is 13.14
Additional caves per circular room: 1.57
Average altitude: 37.19
Percentage of caves on layers 0 to 9: 8.11
Percentage of caves on layers 10 to 19: 13.51
Percentage of caves on layers 20 to 29: 21.62
Percentage of caves on layers 30 to 39: 18.92
Percentage of caves on layers 40 to 49: 13.51
Percentage of caves on layers 50 to 59: 5.41
Percentage of caves above layer 59: 18.92
Locations of largest caves by volume:
1: 2272 43 1616 (length: 100, width: 24, volume: 9483)
2: 2284 1 1629 (length: 103, width: 14, volume: 4450)
Total air volume is 93260 blocks (6.1745234%); about half of this was concentrated within a 4x4 chunk area, roughly the size of the "solid" mass near the center of a "1.6.4 style" cave system (caves can extend up to 112 blocks/7 chunks in a straight line):
Total air volume is 127356 blocks (8.431938%); including ravines and mineshafts:
Another notable find was a complex of 5 intersecting ravines, which is tied with 6 other instances for the most that I've found in this world (there is an area that would have 7 intersecting ravines if many of them hadn't been disrupted by water):
These are the locations of all instances of 5 intersecting ravines in the order I found them:
My average walking speed (including sneaking and sprinting, which are all counted as the same stat in 1.6.4) is only about 1.45 ms/s, about a third of your walking speed of 4.3 m/s, or a quarter of your sprinting speed of 5.6 m/s. It has been a bit higher more recently, possibly due to the distances I've been going to and from where I've been caving and my current base (I may travel upwards of 1000 blocks, or a 2000 block round-trip every other day, with most of that spent sprinting), as well as having fully fixed MC-30452 (previously, I simply modded the game to only count "flying" distance if the player was in Creative, otherwise completely discarding the distance traveled, hence why my "distance flown" stat is so small and hasn't changed, and is zero in other worlds; more recently I changed it to add it to "distance walked" if the player jumped within the past 2 seconds and hasn't fallen more than 3 blocks or touched the ground, which accurately records the distance traveled when sprint-jumping. Things like explosion knockback are still ignored and would be better put under a "distance knocked back" stat).
Than again, like all my other "extreme" stats, it is simply the fact that I've spent over 170 days playing on this world - nearly half a year of nonstop gameplay - and is a testament to the sheer amount of caves underground in 1.6.4; on average a single level 4 map contains about 7300 cave tunnels averaging about 150 blocks each for a total length of 1100 km; then you have about 328 ravines, averaging 100 blocks each for another 32.7 km, more when counting every ledge along the sides (i.e. I go back and forth many times, even if I only go through each cave twice that's 2200 km, then count the distance spent waking to each ore deposit, or backtracking to fight off a wave of mobs); then there are an average of 164 mineshafts with a corridor length of around 250 km with a conservative estimate of 100 pieces per structure (many have more than this, where each corridor piece is 2-4 sections long, each 5 blocks in length, plus the occasional intersections and staircases) - in all, there are around 1400 km of underground features per level 4 map - enough to cross the map more than 680 times, and as mentioned I go through the same areas more than once.
Also, even before I start caving I accumulate a good amount of distance walked; in TMCWv4 (the last world I started) I walked 318 km with an average rate of 1.5 m/s before I started caving and 2464 km at an average rate of 1.42 m/s while caving, which is actually slightly slower, with an area equivalent to about 3/4 of a level 4 map explored (this is not a direct comparison though since overall cave volume is about twice that of vanilla; however, this doesn't mean twice the passage length):
This was taken right before I started caving:
After I stopped playing on the world for the time being, with nearly all the time spent caving (121 out of 125 sessions; overall about 86% of the time spent on the world was spent caving):
Surface and underground renderings of the world; when cropping away chunks without torches underground and not including the stronghold (on the far left) there were about 12000 chunks left, or about 3/4 of a level 4 map:
I have now walked more than 21,474.8 km, which as mentioned before cannot be displayed correctly without a fix I applied (I added it a few years ago):
Of interest, this appears to have been common enough to have been reported in the bug tracker, with a fair number of upvotes; it appears to have been officially "fixed"* in 20w07a (I implemented my fix years before in anticipation of this eventually happening):
*It seems that Mojang simply made the stats stop increasing once hitting the 32 bit limit, which is IMO quite lazy of them and not a true fix (then again, my own fix only converts the underlying 32 bit int to a 64 bit long when displayed so it will still eventually overflow, but this does double the maximum count that the game can properly display. A full fix would be to use a long to store the value, which would be trivial to implement):
Of note, to overflow "time played", which is stored in ticks (20/s) you'd need to play for about 1242.76 days or 3.4 years, which is likely to only be reached if you spend serious amounts of time AFK over a long period of time (e.g. 8 hours a night = 10 calendar years), while it would take me about 60 years at the current rate (including all days since I started playing, not just on this world, which has accumulated about 20 days of playtime per calendar year). The same overflow also applies to all other statistics but they are much less likely to ever reach that point (even with instant-mining it would take at least 1242.76 days to mine 2.147 billion blocks as you can only mine up to one block per tick).
Also, another change I made was to change the way time is displayed so it will keep displaying days once it reaches half a year since it gives better precision (stats are always displayed with 2 decimal places; 0.01 years is 87.6 hours while 0.01 days is 14.4 minutes; and normally use the next higher unit once they reach half of it; 30 seconds, 30 minutes, 12 hours, 182.5 days), otherwise, I added the total world time to the debug screen, which has a precision of 1 second (example) and will keep working after the 32 bit integer limit is reached (the limit is 20 times higher since I cast the world time, which is a long, to an int after dividing it by 20), and is also world-specific (1.6.4 saves stats client-side with a single file shared across all worlds within the same game directory but it is easy to keep them separate, and in my case, mandatory due to the use of different modded versions).
A 32 bit int can represent numbers in the range of -2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,647, while a 64 bit long goes from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to +9,223,372,036,854,775,807 - there is no way that the latter would ever be exceeded in any of the statistics, including time, as it would take about 14.6 billion years - longer than the age of the universe - to overflow (if it were handled as an unsigned value, of which Java does not have).
The way that my fix works is by effectively converting from a signed to unsigned value by using a bit mask and a larger storage unit that can hold it (as mentioned before, only when displaying it):
This shows what happens when a 32 bit integer overflows; note that the last bit is used as the sign bit:
For comparison, this is what happens with a 64 bit integer (or "long", or as shown here a "qword" / "quad word", which goes back to the days when computers were 16 bit, which was called a "word"; likewise, a 32 bit value is also called a "dword" / "double word"); note that the lower 32 bits are identical:
Note that direct assignment (e.g. longValue = intValue) preserves the sign by assigning 1 to all higher bits; the value that I use for the mask, 4294967295, is the maximum unsigned 32 bit value, and strips away these bits:
There is actually a way to display even larger numbers, up to the unsigned 64 bit limit, by casting to a double and adding the 64 bit limit (or using an unsigned long, as is available in languages like C++, not sure why Java doesn't natively support unsigned values), although this wouldn't work for storing them due to precision loss (a double has 53 bits of precision, meaning that it can only accurately represent whole numbers up to 2^53 or 9,007,199,254,740,992, which is 1024 times less than the range of a long. After this point it can only represent every other integer, until 2^54, after which it drops to every 4th integer, and so on. If used as a counter, as in the time statistics, it will stop incrementing after 2^53).
Another way to extend the range is to store time in seconds instead of ticks and increment it once every 20 ticks, which will increase the maximum time by 20-fold; likewise, distance could be stored in meters instead of centimeters for 100 times the range (these solutions would cause some accuracy loss since if it only updates every second/meter fractional parts would be discarded, over a play session it won't matter though, e.g. an hour is 3600 seconds and I walk around 20 km per session so the loss would only be up to 1/3600 and 1/20000 respectively. In any case, the statistics already have accuracy loss because it rounds the distance traveled per tick to the nearest centimeter; 4.3 m/s is 21.5 cm/tick, or 22 when rounded. Likewise "damage dealt" is recorded with a precision of 1/10 of a unit (it is multiplied by 10 when stored and divided by 10 when displayed) and it increments by 14.3 per hit with my sword (in 1.6.4 a Sharpness V diamond sword does 14.25 damage).
The month of October was quite interesting; I made a new secondary base, found two villages, a jungle temple, saw a zombie in diamond armor, found the largest single cave that I've found in this world, and on the same day reached a total of 3 million ore and 2 million coal mined.
First, I decided to make another secondary base at 2560, 2560 after having explored around half the current map; this is the 21st secondary base that I've built in this world and one of the, if not the, furthest from my main base at spawn, nearly 5 km away by rail. The first of two villages was found close to the location I chose for the base, which landed in a forest in the middle of a plains (I chose the location based on the coordinates without knowing what would be there; while I've always built my main base in a plains I build secondary bases in all biomes, even on water in one case, only shifting the location a bit if there is a better place for it nearby):
While securing the village I saw a zombie with an enchanted diamond helmet, the first diamond armored mob that I've seen this year; the last one I saw in this world was in May 2020, showing how rare they are in vanilla, even with the number of mobs I regularly encounter and my change to regional difficulty so the inhabited time factor starts at 50% of the maximum (I did not make any changes to armor chances):
I found another village while passing through a desert nearby about a week later (I always investigate any plains and deserts I find to see if they have villages to avoid caving under them before they are protected); both of these show how I light up and wall in villages, even if I don't use them for anything (I generally only trade with villagers in my main base; a few secondary bases have been located in villages near where I planned to build them, I did not do this for the current base as it was not found until I'd nearly reached the location):
I also found the 12th jungle temple that I've found in this world after I dug up to the surface to return from a caving session (the cobblestone pillar in front is how I mark return points, which are usually 14 blocks tall, taller if necessary to be easily visible from a distance):
A more notable finding was the largest single cave that I've found so far in this world, with a volume of 15,378 blocks, compared to 12,851 for the largest cave that I previously found about 5 years ago; there was also another relatively large cave with about half the volume in the same cave system:
These are the caves shown by themselves, followed by everything within a 10 chunk radius; the total air volume was 78953 blocks from caves only and 128481 blocks when including ravines and mineshafts (none of the latter were within this area):
This is the smaller cave; both caves also merged with ravines and other caves to form larger open areas:
To put this cave into perspective, the largest single cave within a 1 million chunk area (about 8 times larger than this world) has a volume of about 20,000 blocks and the largest cave that I've ever seen had a volume of about 26,000 blocks, which was found with my own search tool:
Obviously, these are all for 1.6.4; the actual size of caves and mineshafts did not change in 1.7, and between 1.7-1.12.2 it is even possible that some of the mineshafts listed exist as they were only made rarer with no changes to their locations (this is also rarely possible for caves; since 1.13 they are all completely different because it changed the "chunk seed"), while a reduction in the density of cave systems means it is very improbable that a cave system as dense as the ones listed can ever generate; even the last one listed, which is in my own world, is still extremely dense.
Also, even the largest cave is barely enough to be a "large cave" by the standards of TMCW, whose "CaveFinder" utility only lists caves with a volume of at least 25,000, and the largest known cave has a volume of nearly 1.1 million blocks, about 42 times larger, with both caves shown below:
Also, this is an analysis of the cave system with the largest cave in this world, with the volume of each individual cave measured separately; there were a total of 56 caves within a 10x10 chunk area, of which 46 had a measurable volume (at least one air block between layers 11-62), and the majority had a volume between 1-2,000 blocks (a "large cave", as listed here, is a cave with a maximum width of at least 9 blocks, which is only attainable through a 10% chance of a multiplier being applied to the initial width value, otherwise it is 3-9 blocks. Even then not every cave with an increased multiplier will be this wide since it can be as low as 1 and the initial width can be as low as 3; the maximum possible width is 27, which is exceedingly rare, but could produce a cave with a volume as high as 35,000 blocks if it generated perfectly):
Size 3 cave system at 2848 1584; total number of caves: 3
Size 2 cave system at 2752 1600; total number of caves: 2
Size 1 cave system at 2832 1616; total number of caves: 1
Size 7 cave system at 2800 1648; total number of caves: 7
Size 7 cave system at 2832 1648; total number of caves: 7
Size 12 cave system at 2848 1664; total number of caves: 19
Size 11 cave system at 2816 1728; total number of caves: 17
Number of cave systems: 7
Initial number of caves: 43; largest cave system: 12 (2848 1664)
Total number of caves: 56; largest cave system: 19 (2848 1664)
Additional circular room caves: 13
Number of small caves: 54; average width is 5.97
Number of large caves: 2; average width is 17.00; max width: 20.55 (2851 27 1678)
Number of circular rooms: 9; average width is 10.81
Additional caves per circular room: 1.44
Average caves per chunk: 0.56 (100 chunks)
Average altitude: 28.29
Percentage of caves on layers 0 to 9: 33.93
Percentage of caves on layers 10 to 19: 12.50
Percentage of caves on layers 20 to 29: 19.64
Percentage of caves on layers 30 to 39: 1.79
Percentage of caves on layers 40 to 49: 10.71
Percentage of caves on layers 50 to 59: 7.14
Percentage of caves above layer 59: 14.29
Another rare find was a double dungeon, the rarity of which is underscored by the fact that I find an average of 2-3 dungeons every day, yet this is the first one I've found in months:
However, the highlight of the month was reaching an incredible total of 3 million ores mined, followed by 2 million coal within the next hour, showing how close it has been to 2/3 of all ores mined (in fact, even what I mined over just an hour was nearly exactly 2/3 of the total ores; 430 coal out of a total of 646 ore is 66.563%; that said, it varies a lot from play session to play session):
Also, within the next few days my "score" will hit 5 million, equivalent to the XP from 5 million coal or 1 million mobs (assuming no equipment, which adds 1-3 per piece to the base of 5; in particular, skeletons average at least 7 XP since they always have a bow). Note that the score in the inventory is separate from the score displayed in the death screen; only the latter will be reset if I ever die, which is a feature I added to TMCW and the custom version I use for this world (the game actually uses two separate variables to track your score/total XP, which are normally always the same; I'm guessing that there are two for legacy reasons and they never bothered removing the redundant variable but I used this to my advantage so I can track two separate scores, where the inventory shows the lifetime total for the world (since around 2015 for this world). Notably, I also modified XP orbs so your own XP orbs do not double-count to the lifetime XP total, only adding to the "death score", which was done by recording the name of the player who dropped them (this is "vanilla-safe" since vanilla will ignore unknown NBT data, plus I only save the tag for player-dropped XP orbs).
Here are the stats for the end of the month; I've now mined a total of 4.26 million blocks with a diamond pickaxe (this does not include around 4700 blocks mined for a railway and clearing out underground rooms in my base, for which I used iron pickaxes taken from minecarts and enchanted/combined to as high as Efficiency V and Unbreaking III):
Also, here is a before and after rendering of what I explored since building my latest base, which is visible at the end of a line off to the right (the rail tunnel); much of the exploration was actually going away from the base, to the north along the eastern third of the map, as I did not find interconnected caves into that area until I'd explored far to the south (the path I take while exploring underground is often highly complex, as shown in the 30 day rendering here; this includes a lot of "dead ends" where I can't progress further so I go to another return point and continue on from there, with the occasional isolated pocket explored once I've explored around them and if they have surface caves, otherwise, they remain undiscovered unless I break into them while mining ores or notice liquid dripping from the ceiling):
A higher resolution rendering of after; my bases are easy to spot because of the large wheat farms that are my primary source of materials for trading (only the underground portions are shown as I only mapped areas below y=64, and otherwise MCMap requires a 2 block thick ceiling to be considered "underground"):
My current base is to the south of the mapped area near the lower-right (I avoid looking at the map until I've reached it underground) while my previous base is just to the south of the taiga (snowy area) near the upper-left:
Compared to previous months there was a significant drop in my daily mining rates, with only one resource, redstone, seeing an increase, due to the time I spent digging a railway and building a base, and to a lesser extent, walling in the villages, especially the desert village (I use sandstone for the wall, which was mined out from under the houses; the plains village was much easier as I just used some of the large amount of cobblestone I collected from the rail tunnel, the rest was consumed over the next week while caving). There were also significantly fewer mineshafts in the area I explored, leading to a relatively larger drop in the amount of resources collected (the time spent on collecting resources is a small percentage of the overall time spent caving, thus the collection rate mostly depends on how often I encounter them):
Here are charts, you can see the big drop near the beginning of the month (days 71-72), followed by a smaller drop a week later when I found the desert village; while I found less mineshafts during October I did set a single day peak of 766 rails for the three month period thanks to a triple mineshaft complex; there was also a big spike in mob kills, up to 655, which occurred while exploring below an ocean:
Also, the continent that I'm on may be larger than I thought; the oceans I mentioned previously are basically large lakes with most of the map (aside from southeast of 2560, 2560) being land, including off the edges, I also analyzed level 4 map-sized areas to the east and south and found them to be around 33-67% land (I did not actually map the areas so I don't know the exact composition; I made my own biome mapping tool for TMCW, which I also adapted to vanilla 1.6.4 so I don't have to depend on 3rd partly tools, aka AMIDST, that rely on a launcher profile and can break with launcher updates).
In contrast with previous months, November saw significant increases in resources collected per play session, including some of my most extreme hourly rates, peaking at more than 1,200 ores mined per hour on several days, largely due to a significant increase in dense cave systems and mineshafts, and overall underground interconnectivity; the only resource that I found less of compared to October was emerald ore:
As noted before, October had lower daily rates in large part due to spending time to build a new secondary base and railway, as well as less mineshafts within the areas I explored, but November was still substantially higher than August and September. Another possible factor in the increased rates was a reduction in mobs, from around 350 to 300 mobs killed per session, which was likely due to the greater underground volume and lack of watery biomes (the area I explored in October included a small inland sea), increasing mob spawns on the surface at night.
There is also another factor - as in some modded worlds I decided to modify Ender chests to have a double chest of capacity (this is considered to be "vanilla-safe" since it simply ignores the extra rows, so when I update the world download I only have to make sure only the first three rows have items) to help offset the ever-increasing distance I have to travel back to my main base, with the result that I don't have to go back as often, which is evident in the distance traveled by minecart per day; even then I still averaged more than over the lifetime of the world; more significant may be the doubling in length of "caving sessions" from about 2 to 4 play sessions (the time I spend caving between trips back to a secondary base):
Distance by minecart per day:
September: 1.459 km
October: 1.669 km
November: 1.305 km
Overall: 1.175 km
This is not the first modification to help me handle the resources that I collect; 6 years ago I added "rail blocks", which combine 9 rails into a block and vice-versa, which has really helped considering I've collected upwards of 1,000 rails in a single play session (in one case over 2,000 on two consecutive days) and a year later I added "cobweb blocks", which combine 4 cobwebs into a block (prior to this I mined cobwebs with unenchanted shears and crafted the string into wool). About a year ago I added "compressed cobblestone", including a mossy variant, which combines 4 blocks into one block (these blocks are all present in TMCW but they behave a bit differently; the World1 versions do not require a tool to mine, break much faster, are all destroyed by water, cannot be uncrafted in the crafting grid, and are not counted in statistics; the latter are to prevent contamination e.g. if I uncrafted rail blocks they would count as crafting 9 rails, likewise, it is impossible to craft cobblestone and cobwebs in vanilla).
I also do not use these blocks as permanent storage blocks, although I may as well since it is obvious that I'll never update this world to newer versions (rail blocks in particular would save an enormous amount of space considering that I've collected over 200,000 rails, or over 58 double chests, while blocks would require only 7; that said, the space they need is not much of an issue and not using them ensures you don't need to use a mod or 1.6.4 to play on the world download).
Here are updated charts of my daily progress and in-game statistics; I've now played on this world for 179.59 real-life days and more than 13,000 in-game days and mined more than 3.1 million ore out of a total of 4.4 million blocks mined:
Also, I spent 4.49 days playing in November for an average of 3.592 hours per day, which gives an average mining rate of 1058 resources and 917 ore per hour, even more if only the time I spent caving is counted (I don't keep track of this but the time spent on trips back to my secondary base and main base amounts to around 15 minutes per day, which would mean I spent 4.1775 days caving for 1137 resources and 986 ore mined per hour).
Here are renderings of the area I've explored over the past 4 months, mostly within a level 4 map centered at 2048, 2048 (south and east of x/z 1024 and extending a bit past x/z 3072):
This is a full-size view of the area I explored in November (excluding the far upper-left corner):
I explored the northwestern quadrant in August, southwest in September, northeast in October, and southeast in November (the northernmost and westernmost edges were partly explored in the past as I will explore a bit off the current level 4 map if the current cave/mineshaft/ravine goes outside it):
The sheer scale of my exploration can be realized when I've placed over 125,000 torches within this area alone, as seen sliced at layer 32 in Minutor:
One of the more notable findings over the month was not just one but two pink sheep, in widely separated areas - the first time that I've found pink sheep in this world in 6 years, and only the second and third times overall:
This is partly the result of a bugfix I added to this world; there is/was a bug in vanilla where sheep would have (mostly) the same wool colors within 512x512 block regions, due to sloppy coding that used the same RNG for structure (villages and temples) generation and sheep wool colors, ans structures would set it to the same state within a region, which I fixed before playing on this world again recently; while the overall frequency of pink sheep is not increased the regional-scale variation in colors is now 1024 times greater since the color is now per-chunk instead of per-region. This does mean that you are unlikely to ever find more than one pink sheep at a time but you can breed them with any other color to get more since pink doesn't combine with any other color to give a new color. I previously fixed this in TMCW and similarly have found single pink sheep many times in different worlds (the last time I analyzed this world in MCEdit it found 7341 sheep, of which 12 can be expected to be pink based on a 0.164% chance per sheep).
Other significant findings include several very large and dense cave systems, 5 intersecting ravines for the 8th time in this world (I haven't found more than 5, though there would have been 7 at one location if an ocean hadn't destroyed it), and the third largest single cave that I've found in this world, part of one of the densest cave systems that I've found in this world:
This is the largest cave system that I found during the month; there were also numerous ravines within and around it, including 5 intersecting ravines, which together gave it a volume nearly as high as the cave system at -800, -1050 within a 12x12 chunk area centered on it (that cave system is still much larger and denser in terms of caves only; a cave system near 2100, 500 is likewise denser when ravines are included, and interestingly, it also has 5 intersecting ravines):
Center: 2704 2432, radius: 96 blocks
Size 5 cave system at 2704 2368; total number of caves: 5
Size 21 cave system at 2720 2384; total number of caves: 26
Size 2 cave system at 2640 2400; total number of caves: 3
Size 32 cave system at 2704 2400; total number of caves: 37
Size 10 cave system at 2688 2416; total number of caves: 14
Size 7 cave system at 2720 2416; total number of caves: 11
Size 18 cave system at 2688 2432; total number of caves: 26
Size 10 cave system at 2720 2448; total number of caves: 16
Size 9 cave system at 2752 2448; total number of caves: 13
Size 2 cave system at 2624 2464; total number of caves: 5
Size 1 cave system at 2640 2480; total number of caves: 1
Size 1 cave system at 2720 2496; total number of caves: 4
Size 8 cave system at 2752 2496; total number of caves: 8
Number of cave systems: 13
Initial number of caves: 126; largest cave system: 32 (2704 2400)
Total number of caves: 169; largest cave system: 37 (2704 2400)
Additional circular room caves: 43
Number of small caves: 165; average width is 6.07
Number of large caves: 4; average width is 12.08; max width: 13.98 (2732 7 2392)
Number of circular rooms: 27; average width is 11.08
Additional caves per circular room: 1.59
Average caves per chunk: 1.1736112 (144 chunks)
Average altitude: 33.62
Percentage of caves on layers 0 to 9: 24.26
Percentage of caves on layers 10 to 19: 16.57
Percentage of caves on layers 20 to 29: 9.47
Percentage of caves on layers 30 to 39: 14.20
Percentage of caves on layers 40 to 49: 11.24
Percentage of caves on layers 50 to 59: 5.33
Percentage of caves above layer 59: 18.93
Locations of largest caves by volume:
2728 23 2394 (length: 95, width: 10, volume: 4115)
2728 53 2396 (length: 85, width: 11, volume: 4078)
Total air volume is 231734 blocks (12.088821%)
Total air volume is 166345 blocks (8.677687%) (caves only)
Total air volume is 60251 blocks (3.143102%) (ravines only)
Total air volume is 11789 blocks (0.6149944%) (mineshafts only)
Note that the individual volumes for caves, ravines, and mineshafts add up to 238385, meaning that less than 3% of the overall volume was lost due to overlap (this would be much greater if overlap between individual caves is included, as best seen when comparing 1.6.4 to 1.7, where 1.7 has about 23% less caves but only 15% less volume due to cave systems being much less dense).
While only about half the overall size this cave system had a much denser core with a very large semi-open chamber where multiple caves intersected, including the third largest single cave that I've found in this world, with a volume of 11,730 blocks, which led to a single chunk with an air volume of more than 47% of all blocks between layers 11-62, and a 4x4 chunk area was more than 28% air:
Center: 2288 2336, radius: 64 blocks
Size 27 cave system at 2272 2336; total number of caves: 33
Size 25 cave system at 2288 2336; total number of caves: 38
Size 1 cave system at 2224 2352; total number of caves: 1
Size 2 cave system at 2224 2384; total number of caves: 4
Size 8 cave system at 2336 2384; total number of caves: 9
Number of cave systems: 5
Initial number of caves: 63; largest cave system: 27 (2272 2336)
Total number of caves: 85; largest cave system: 38 (2288 2336)
Additional circular room caves: 22
Number of small caves: 81; average width is 5.91
Number of large caves: 4; average width is 13.28; max width: 16.55 (2303 39 2348)
Number of circular rooms: 13; average width is 10.80
Additional caves per circular room: 1.69
Average caves per chunk: 1.328125 (64 chunks)
Average altitude: 31.85
Percentage of caves on layers 0 to 9: 21.18
Percentage of caves on layers 10 to 19: 17.65
Percentage of caves on layers 20 to 29: 24.71
Percentage of caves on layers 30 to 39: 9.41
Percentage of caves on layers 40 to 49: 8.24
Percentage of caves on layers 50 to 59: 1.18
Percentage of caves above layer 59: 17.65
Locations of largest caves by volume:
2303 39 2348 (length: 111, width: 17, volume: 11730)
2288 26 2338 (length: 101, width: 16, volume: 7031)
2280 31 2338 (length: 93, width: 11, volume: 3660)
Total air volume is 116176 blocks (13.636193%) (radius: 4 chunks)
Total air volume is 60186 blocks (28.257399%) (radius: 2 chunks)
Total air volume of 6357 blocks (47.753906%) (chunk at 2296 2328)
This shows both cave systems mentioned here, with this one near the left side:
Hi, first of all thank you for your mod, me and some friends really enjoyed playing it, which I was thinking, have you ever considered posting the diff patches of your game from mcp (eg: comparing the original mcp source and yours to get a patch)? I would love to get the basic Minecraft Dedicated Server on TMCW. I think there's no need to upload them on Github or somewhere, the patches could just be included in the zip.
Hi, first of all thank you for your mod, me and some friends really enjoyed playing it, which I was thinking, have you ever considered posting the diff patches of your game from mcp (eg: comparing the original mcp source and yours to get a patch)? I would love to get the basic Minecraft Dedicated Server on TMCW. I think there's no need to upload them on Github or somewhere, the patches could just be included in the zip.
The changes that I've made are so extensive that patches wouldn't be that useful; for example, this is a diff of the "World" class, which contains the core logic for running the world, and which originally had 4284 lines and currently has 3714, with 3117 removals and 2448 additions - a number that together exceeds the original line count (I presume if a line changed it counts as both), and it appears that the extent of the changes caused it to completely break as it is attempting to compare completely different sections of code:
Note that it is at "notifyBlocksOfNeighborChange" in vanilla but at "setBlockMetadataWithoutUpdate" in TMCW; even if the methods did match they would still be marked as different since I renamed all parameters and most variables:
That said, there are many Forge/modloader-based mods which have publicly available source which was modified to a much lesser extent; for example, this basic mod for changing cave generation just copied+pasted an entire method from vanilla with only a couple small changes to replaced hard-coded numbers with variables, whereas my own cave generator is almost completely different except for the basic tunnel-carving algorithm, and in any case nearly 95% of all the code would be my own ("MapGenCavesRavines_World1" is from my "World1_custom_client" and only includes bugfixes so it is basically vanilla except it combines what was originally 3 separate classes):
For similar reasons there is a thread claiming that most major mods contain upwards of 100+ violations of the EULA (this would include not just things I copied directly from vanilla, like the 1.8 stone variants, but even things like amethyst items, which are recolored versions of vanilla textures, thus do not qualify as "original work"), but the only time I've actually seen somebody get in trouble is if they uploaded an entire modified Minecraft jar, or somebody uploaded the entire decompiled source on GitHub (I've seen such repositories be taken down by a DMCA from Mojang, many don't even seem to be modified), or in the case of Bukkit, they applied a GPL license to the source code.
Also, MCP won't even compile unless you remove a lot of the original vanilla sources because references in them have been invalidated (e.g. they try to refer to fields and methods that were changed or removed; others need to be removed or MCP will mark them as modified when reobfuscating even though they were unmodified; because of this, I've made a backup of the entire MCP source, not just modified/new classes, though they can easily be separated by date).
Some parts of the code will also not work in multiplayer without significant refactoring; for example, to properly fix MC-673 (sky not darkening properly during thunderstorms) requires modifying the packets used to send weather (I simply use a static field which is shared between threads, which enables modifying no additional classes, which I generally only do if that is the only way). Likewise, I fixed many server-side particles by using a static class as a bridge between the server-client threads (vanilla does have a method, "playAuxSFX" that is used to send particles to the client but it only allows integer coordinates, an ID, and a 32 bit "data" parameter, so it won't work for e.g. enderman/dragon egg teleportation particles, which have two sets of coordinates as doubles, or water/lava "steam/smoke" particles, which use fractional y-coordinates, although the latter could be refactored to use the "data" parameter to specify a fraction). The "attack cooldown" system would require sending all attacks, not just ones that actually hit an entity, to the server (there are two components to this; server-side handles actual attacks while client-side handles missed attacks). Of course, there is also the fact that the skin server that 1.6.4 used no longer exists (hence why I include my own skin and the "CustomSkin" resource pack).
Also, this is the wrong thread; for some reason people keep thinking that TMCW and this world are related when they are not, other than that I use another mod with it which includes a few of its features, but is otherwise vanilla.
While I often point out the changes to caves in 1.7 the most notable feature of the underground before 1.7 is not the caves but the mineshafts, the abundance of which are absurd, exemplified by the most recent mega complex I've found, with a total of nine mineshafts directly intersecting, and nearly touching a couple more, with an incredibly dense central core where three separate mineshafts overlap, two of which are in adjacent chunks (I've even seen three in a 2x2 chunk area before):
From top-left are all underground features, mineshafts only, interconnected mineshafts (fences and platforms were omitted to ensure they interconnect), and mineshaft rooms only. Near the upper-left edge you can see part of another mineshaft, which is just one block away and at about the same altitude (offset by a block or two), while near the bottom is a mineshaft which is a few blocks above the one below (when other caves and ravines are included the upper-left mineshaft is interconnected while the one at the bottom isn't at least not in a direct route).
Here are the locations and sizes of the individual mineshafts, which have a total of 13.5 kilometers of corridors - twice the width of the entire area I've explored in this world within an area measuring about 300x450 blocks, and containing an average of 3,150 rails based on a 1/3 chance of a corridor having rails and a 70% chance of each block having one (I collected more but some may have come from adjacent mineshafts):
I spent about 7 days exploring the area around the mineshaft complex, with 25,000 ores and 30,000 resource blocks mined in one of my most productive periods ever, especially on this world; the most productive single day averaged more than 1,200 ores and 1,500 resource blocks mined per hour:
2023-06-16 17:21:14 [SERVER] [INFO] TheMasterCaver joined the game
2023-06-16 20:18:24 [CLIENT] [INFO] Session stats: 4461 3547 2323 672 186 277 70 19 0 0 618 146 150 9 324 5556
Also, I found one of the largest single caves that I've found in this world, with a volume of 9,500 blocks; while this may seem very small by modern standards (or my own mods, where I define a "large" cave as having a volume of at least 25,000, and 100,000 for a "giant" cave, which may rarely exceed a million, or more than 100 times larger) I've only found 11 caves with a volume of at least 10,000 within an explored area of around 115,000 chunks:
Mineshafts are for sure not larger in newer versions though, but large intersecting complexes should still be possible if they still generate randomly throughout the world, as opposed to using a gridded spacing system like most other structures do (e.g. there can only be one village per 32x32 chunk region with a minimum spacing of 9 chunks between any two structures). This is also one reason why individual mineshafts can become much larger in TMCW, as they generate aligned to a 14x14 chunk grid at 0,0-2,2 and 7,7-9,9 and nearly half do not generate because the cave density is too high or they are too close to larger caves (I actually did implement this in my first world but it is much less aggressive, only excluding them from the densest regions).
For comparison, this is the largest mineshaft complex I found in TMCWv5, and any version of the mod, which was only about half the size but only had two mineshafts, and a comparison of vanilla 1.6.4 to TMCW; they don't seem less common in TMCW and much less dense since they aren't overlapping so much (it is actually fairly uncommon to find isolated mineshafts in vanilla), and even individual mineshafts are less dense (vanilla allows corridors to run directly over each other (without a floor/ceiling/floating rails, or planks, depending on the generation order) as only the interior is part of the bounding box; I included the floor so there must be at least one block between them:
Another thing to note is that prior to 1.13 mineshafts were made to be less common closer to 0,0 so their abundance may not be immediately obvious; they only reach their maximum frequency at 1280 blocks from the origin (defined as a random number from 0-79 being less than the maximum chunk coordinate, this also means they can never generate right at 0,0, and within 512 blocks they are less common than they are since 1.13. I removed this in my own mods, even the one I use on this world since I've long since explored the entire area within 1280 blocks so it won't have any effect, and without mineshafts the underground is far less interconnected, making my sort of playstyle harder).
9 mines!? That's terrifying. No wonder kid me hated the underground lol. I was so scared of getting lost or attacked from behind in big complex areas.
This isn't even the largest one I've found; a long time ago (like 10 years) I found a complex that was about twice as large, as mentioned in this post, which itself describes one with 10 mineshafts:
More details of the super-complex, which had literally nothing but mineshafts in some places (all ground was replaced with parts of mineshafts); not every mineshaft may actually directly intersect but they are all close enough that you might as well not notice, and actually, there could be as many as 21 under this criteria, as shown below:
Maybe the most amazing thing is that I'd explored that before I added in "rail blocks" so I can craft 9 rails into a single block (5,000 rails is about 78 stacks, but less than 9 full stacks of rail blocks); apparently I'd also collected less than 30,000 rails at this point so this was about a fifth of all the rails I'd collected before then (up to this point I'd explored more or less northwards and a lot of the area was within the area of lower mineshaft density within 1280 blocks):
I must have mined 5,000 rails (and dozens of cave spider spawners) over the past week... I've already made two trips back home with half to two-thirds of a double chest of rails each time and have had to make return trips to my secondary base much more often than usual due to all of the rails filling up my Ender chest
Another complex of 9 mineshafts, plus one with 3 just before that:
Also, this illustrates just how often mineshafts generate close enough to intersect, or at least overlap at different levels; this is a 1536x1536 area centered on the super-complex (-64 -1684); there are numerous complexes of 2-4 mineshafts all over the place, including 7 pairs in adjacent chunks (including diagonals), with only about 12 out of 93 mineshafts being visibly separated (excluding the small bits around the edges):
Here is the same area in the seed "12345", which has only 77 mineshafts (the average for this area is 92) but still has a complex larger than the one I recently found, plus three mineshafts in a 2x2 chunk area (an "L" shape near the left side, itself part of a complex of 7 mineshafts):
I'm a bit surprised mineshafts aren't something you changed in all this time. They've always been one of the things I'd like to see changed/improved (though, I guess that sort of goes for a lot of things, like dungeons).
Mineshafts would be nice if they were rarer, and also maybe had some perks, like more ore exposed within them maybe? Probably just personal preference, but while they are nice to exist, they don't feel enjoyable to explore as they are (maybe because they are too large/overwhelming/risk to get lost? I don't know) and have no advantages to entice exploring them, so I pretty much always avoid them. When I do explore them, it's usually because I found one in a cave and want to see if it connects to another cave system (or to see if there's an easily findable minecart with a chest); I almost never fully explore them for their own sake.
I would have looked at that and just... checked out.
In my long-running 1.7 journal, I spawned above what must have been at least two overlapping complexes. It was a mess and a huge headache for the first 60 episodes or so, after which I mostly switched to mining at other bases. At one point I encountered 3 parallel and adjacent corridors intersecting 2 parallel and adjacent corridors, and even though that's nothing like some of the horrors you show, it was still plenty of too much for me (it was in a mod biome that had ice blocks in the stone which made it even worse). IMO, also, there's just too many mineshafts in vanilla.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Nice map. Looks cool and pretty fun. My first world was on the coast next to a massive ocean. There was a village nearby that I made into my base by building a wall around it. I then made a floating castle.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel for Hypixel content: DragonAnimators - YouTube
That sounds fun. My first world was a coast but no village, just taiga, snowy taiga, and forest. I got so lost.
I reached a major milestone in this world today - four million blocks mined with a diamond pickaxe, nearly all while caving (I use iron pickaxes from minecarts to dig out railways and bases):
Notably, my mining rate has increased since the first two million blocks, which took 88.73 days of playtime over 615 sessions, compared to 77.07 days over 514 sessions to mine the next two million blocks, which is 3252 blocks per session and 939 blocks per hour for the first two million and 3891 blocks per session and 1081 blocks per hour for the next two million (the average session length also increased from 3.46 hours to 3.6 hours). Here is a comparison of the general statistics from when I'd reached two million and now; for the most part everything is twice as high:
(2 million stats from https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=5379)
Here are some more stats; I've mined a total of 2.8 million ore, as well as 203000 rails and 91000 moss stone (representing around 735 mineshafts and 1900 dungeons assuming an average of 275 rails and 48 moss stone per structure), and more than 4000 mob spawners (not including spawners from the first 6 months or so as vanilla does not track their stats, which I enabled by simply removing a "disableStats()" call from the code; Mojang didn't fix this until 1.13):
Interestingly, the rate at which I've mined diamond ore has actually decreased over time, especially when compared to total blocks mined; over the first two million blocks I mined 8020 diamond ore, averaging one every 249 blocks mined and 3.77 per hour while over the next two million I mined 6827, averaging one every 293 blocks mined and 3.69 per hour; this could be explained by changes in the ratio of caves and mineshafts, the latter of which have increased as I've explored further from the origin, as seen by relatively larger increases in rails/cobwebs collected (prior to 1.13 mineshafts were less common within 1280 blocks of the origin, linearly decreasing to none at 0,0; this means that in 1.6.4 they are rarer than in 1.13 within 512 blocks of the origin, as they are 2.5 times more common than in 1.7+) and their average altitude is higher (however, deep mineshafts can yield far more diamond than an equivalent amount of caves; my single session record for this world was 88 ore while exploring a mineshaft which was entirely below y=16).
Note that the time actually spent caving is less than the total time, which is otherwise spent on farming and trading to get emeralds and diamond gear for repairs, trips back to my main base, and less often, building new secondary bases and railways and building walls around villages (this is all I do besides caving; I spend around 2 sessions caving, then return to a secondary base to empty my inventory/ender chest and restock on food/wood, and harvest crops for trading (mostly wheat these days, plus the occasional chicken, which are mainly used to wear down sacrificial swords so they cost less than 40 levels), and immediately return to caving, unless my temporary storage is full, then I return to my main base to put them in permanent storage, as well as trade, then I return to my secondary base and repeat the cycle). This time has likely gradually increased over time, in part because I didn't start trading until late 2015, and not fully (all gear) until about a year later, requiring more time on growing and harvesting crops (the wheat farm in my current base is clearly visible on the cave map below), and the distance traveled by minecart has increased (averaging 978 meters per session for the first two million and 1,357 meters per session for the second two million; that said, at 8 m/s this still represents less than 3 minutes of time spent traveling per session).
I'm currently exploring a level 4 map centered at 2048, 2048, the last of a 3x3 map area around spawn that I have left to explore, excluding ocean (I've already made plans for further exploration to the south and east of this area by making more room for my map wall; I don't have plans as to what to do once the entire continent is explored):
Of note, the coordinates in the upper-left is a new feature I've added to World1/TMCWv5 (they use practically the same codebase except World1 is mostly vanilla) when holding a map, sort of like how maps in Console Edition displayed coordinates on the map (they can also be seen at any time in the Survival inventory, a previously added feature); maps also now display their center coordinates in the item tooltip, making it much easier to find the correct map in a chest (I don't name them so they are just named "Map #"):
So far I've found a village and jungle temple, the 13th and 11th ones that I've found in this world, as well as made a new base near 1536, 1600, the 21st base that I've built. Notably, the village was the first one that I've found in nearly four years, due to spending much of the time until recently exploring a snowy region (more or less the same as 1.7+'s snowy areas, which are actually placed the same way initially. This is also a good example of why I highly dislike the 1.7 biome changes - even if I continuously played on a world it could take years for me to fully explore a climate zone (a level 4 map takes 5-6 months), with only a limited number of unique biomes; it also took around 7 months of daily playtime to find the 12th village after I found the 11th).
Also, here are charts of what I did every day this month, with a total of 111822 resources (blocks mined, not drops), 95623 ores, 8974 rails (representing around 33 mineshafts), 4100 moss stone (representing around 85 dungeons), 180 spawners (this means around 95 were cave spider spawners, or 3 per mineshaft), 10962 mob kills, and 171656 XP collected:
Interestingly, I've collected resources at a faster rate than in my modded worlds, largely due to the higher frequency of mineshafts; I averaged 3476 resources per session over 100 play sessions in TMCWv1, which has about the same mineshaft frequency as 1.7+, though more of this was ore (3254 vs 3085), while I've collected rails at more than triple the rate (86.5 vs 289), and found nearly twice as many mob spawners (3.08 vs 5.81); conversely, the higher surface area of caves increases ore collection rates (today I mined 3703 ore in 3.45 hours, a rate of 1073 per hour, while only exploring caves):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2992751-the-results-of-100-play-sessions-of-caving
Perhaps the most amazing thing about all of this is that I've been doing this for over 8 years with no signs of letting up (I haven't actually "played" every single day over that period, where "played" means playing on a regular Survival world, as opposed to all the time I've spent on developing and testing mods, particularly in 2018-2019 (the first round of development of TMCWv5 (4.5) and my "Optifine" replacement) and this year (second round of TMCWv5), which I still count as time spent on the game):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/2173592-so-i-often-talk-about-how-much-i-cave
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'm having trouble downloading your map, is the link broken?
More charts:
Also, here is a comparison between August and September; I averaged slightly more ores per day but less rarer ores (other than coal and iron) with iron increasing the most, and less other resources other than cobwebs, which had a significant increase (amounts and differences per session are rounded, thus don't add up to the totals):
Here are the in-game statistics; I spent 4.49 days playing for an average of 3.6 hours per day, and mined a total of 137639 blocks with a diamond pickaxe, an average of 4588 blocks per day, and crafted (actually, traded) another 21 diamond pickaxes (I probably actually did 22 repairs, as I buy them in batches, I also use the sacrifices until they drop to around 1375 durability for additional uses per repair):
Notably, I'm nearing the 32 bit integer limit for distance walked, which is recorded in centimeters so once it reaches about 21,474.83 km, with about 103 more to go, it will overflow and become negative, but I patched in a temporary work-around which casts the value to a 64 bit value so it will display properly until 42,949.67 km, after which it will reset to 0 (this could be avoided by changing the stats to use a long but that would require more involved changes):
Another notable milestone is crafting and/or placing a million torches, with about 100-150 thousand left to go (crafted would be more meaningful since they can be placed more than once, but only one will actually be added to the world):
Here are renderings of the current level 4 map, with about a third of it explored so far; however, at least some part of it is ocean, which I've run into on the southern and eastern edges of the explored area; worst-case is that the whole southeastern half is ocean, which could mean that the only land left is to the south of z = 3072, which itself has reached ocean further west (I'm still not sure what I'll do once I fully explore the entire continent; one thing would be to use AMIDST to locate another one and use Nether portals to connect my main base to a central rail hub):
I have not found any structures of note other than 3 witch huts, which I haven't even kept track of since they are so unremarkable (I've never seen a witch in them, only naturally spawning witches and those only because I added them to the hostile mob spawn list at the same chance as 1.7). As far as caving goes, I spent a large part of the month exploring a vast network of mineshafts and associated caves, which covers much of the southern half of the explored area shown above; there were a total of 11 mineshafts within an area about 650 blocks north-south, making it one of largest mineshaft networks that I've found in this world, certainly the largest in extent:
I also found one of the largest single caves that I've found in this world, with a volume of about 11,000 blocks, which is about half the maximum that can be expected to be found within 1 million chunks and a third of the largest possible cave, with two other quite large caves nearby, including one within the same cave system:
These are the caves that I've found with a volume of at least 10,000 blocks:
This is a slightly smaller cave that was within the same cave system:
A third cave located in a separate cave system nearby:
Interestingly, the third cave had the potential to be much larger as its maximum width was 24 blocks while the largest cave that I've found was 20; the volume is also dependent on how it twists and turns and when it branches with this cave branching very early (caves with a maximum width of at least 5 branch between 25-75% of their length, with branches always being up to 4-5 blocks wide. If a cave branches before 50% it also won't reach its maximum width).
Note that when I talk about "large caves" in 1.6.4 vs 1.7+ I'm referring to cave systems; the generation of individual tunnels wasn't changed in 1.7. Multiple caves can also intersect to form larger chambers; for comparison, the cave system with the third cave had a total of 37 tunnels, 2 of which were "large" (defined as a maximum width of 9 or more, which is only achievable with an additional width multiplier), 7 circular rooms (these range between 5-17 blocks in diameter with a linear distribution), and a total volume of about 93,000 blocks within a 5 chunk radius, or about 10 times that of the cave alone, with the volume in the area increasing to 127,000 blocks when including ravines and mineshafts:
Number of cave systems: 1
Initial number of caves: 26
Total number of caves: 37
Additional circular room caves: 11
Number of small caves: 35; average width is 5.99
Number of large caves: 2; average width is 19.02
Number of circular rooms: 7; average width is 13.14
Additional caves per circular room: 1.57
Average altitude: 37.19
Percentage of caves on layers 0 to 9: 8.11
Percentage of caves on layers 10 to 19: 13.51
Percentage of caves on layers 20 to 29: 21.62
Percentage of caves on layers 30 to 39: 18.92
Percentage of caves on layers 40 to 49: 13.51
Percentage of caves on layers 50 to 59: 5.41
Percentage of caves above layer 59: 18.92
Locations of largest caves by volume:
1: 2272 43 1616 (length: 100, width: 24, volume: 9483)
2: 2284 1 1629 (length: 103, width: 14, volume: 4450)
Total air volume is 93260 blocks (6.1745234%); about half of this was concentrated within a 4x4 chunk area, roughly the size of the "solid" mass near the center of a "1.6.4 style" cave system (caves can extend up to 112 blocks/7 chunks in a straight line):
Total air volume is 127356 blocks (8.431938%); including ravines and mineshafts:
Another notable find was a complex of 5 intersecting ravines, which is tied with 6 other instances for the most that I've found in this world (there is an area that would have 7 intersecting ravines if many of them hadn't been disrupted by water):
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?
How does one walk so damn much in survival? lol
My average walking speed (including sneaking and sprinting, which are all counted as the same stat in 1.6.4) is only about 1.45 ms/s, about a third of your walking speed of 4.3 m/s, or a quarter of your sprinting speed of 5.6 m/s. It has been a bit higher more recently, possibly due to the distances I've been going to and from where I've been caving and my current base (I may travel upwards of 1000 blocks, or a 2000 block round-trip every other day, with most of that spent sprinting), as well as having fully fixed MC-30452 (previously, I simply modded the game to only count "flying" distance if the player was in Creative, otherwise completely discarding the distance traveled, hence why my "distance flown" stat is so small and hasn't changed, and is zero in other worlds; more recently I changed it to add it to "distance walked" if the player jumped within the past 2 seconds and hasn't fallen more than 3 blocks or touched the ground, which accurately records the distance traveled when sprint-jumping. Things like explosion knockback are still ignored and would be better put under a "distance knocked back" stat).
Than again, like all my other "extreme" stats, it is simply the fact that I've spent over 170 days playing on this world - nearly half a year of nonstop gameplay - and is a testament to the sheer amount of caves underground in 1.6.4; on average a single level 4 map contains about 7300 cave tunnels averaging about 150 blocks each for a total length of 1100 km; then you have about 328 ravines, averaging 100 blocks each for another 32.7 km, more when counting every ledge along the sides (i.e. I go back and forth many times, even if I only go through each cave twice that's 2200 km, then count the distance spent waking to each ore deposit, or backtracking to fight off a wave of mobs); then there are an average of 164 mineshafts with a corridor length of around 250 km with a conservative estimate of 100 pieces per structure (many have more than this, where each corridor piece is 2-4 sections long, each 5 blocks in length, plus the occasional intersections and staircases) - in all, there are around 1400 km of underground features per level 4 map - enough to cross the map more than 680 times, and as mentioned I go through the same areas more than once.
Also, even before I start caving I accumulate a good amount of distance walked; in TMCWv4 (the last world I started) I walked 318 km with an average rate of 1.5 m/s before I started caving and 2464 km at an average rate of 1.42 m/s while caving, which is actually slightly slower, with an area equivalent to about 3/4 of a level 4 map explored (this is not a direct comparison though since overall cave volume is about twice that of vanilla; however, this doesn't mean twice the passage length):
After I stopped playing on the world for the time being, with nearly all the time spent caving (121 out of 125 sessions; overall about 86% of the time spent on the world was spent caving):
Surface and underground renderings of the world; when cropping away chunks without torches underground and not including the stronghold (on the far left) there were about 12000 chunks left, or about 3/4 of a level 4 map:
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 have now walked more than 21,474.8 km, which as mentioned before cannot be displayed correctly without a fix I applied (I added it a few years ago):
Of interest, this appears to have been common enough to have been reported in the bug tracker, with a fair number of upvotes; it appears to have been officially "fixed"* in 20w07a (I implemented my fix years before in anticipation of this eventually happening):
MC-79944 Various statistics overflow at 32-bit integer limit
*It seems that Mojang simply made the stats stop increasing once hitting the 32 bit limit, which is IMO quite lazy of them and not a true fix (then again, my own fix only converts the underlying 32 bit int to a 64 bit long when displayed so it will still eventually overflow, but this does double the maximum count that the game can properly display. A full fix would be to use a long to store the value, which would be trivial to implement):
MC-176901 Statistics freeze at signed 32 bit integer limit
Of note, to overflow "time played", which is stored in ticks (20/s) you'd need to play for about 1242.76 days or 3.4 years, which is likely to only be reached if you spend serious amounts of time AFK over a long period of time (e.g. 8 hours a night = 10 calendar years), while it would take me about 60 years at the current rate (including all days since I started playing, not just on this world, which has accumulated about 20 days of playtime per calendar year). The same overflow also applies to all other statistics but they are much less likely to ever reach that point (even with instant-mining it would take at least 1242.76 days to mine 2.147 billion blocks as you can only mine up to one block per tick).
Also, another change I made was to change the way time is displayed so it will keep displaying days once it reaches half a year since it gives better precision (stats are always displayed with 2 decimal places; 0.01 years is 87.6 hours while 0.01 days is 14.4 minutes; and normally use the next higher unit once they reach half of it; 30 seconds, 30 minutes, 12 hours, 182.5 days), otherwise, I added the total world time to the debug screen, which has a precision of 1 second (example) and will keep working after the 32 bit integer limit is reached (the limit is 20 times higher since I cast the world time, which is a long, to an int after dividing it by 20), and is also world-specific (1.6.4 saves stats client-side with a single file shared across all worlds within the same game directory but it is easy to keep them separate, and in my case, mandatory due to the use of different modded versions).
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?
Why is a long a 'proper' fix?
A 32 bit int can represent numbers in the range of -2,147,483,648 to +2,147,483,647, while a 64 bit long goes from -9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to +9,223,372,036,854,775,807 - there is no way that the latter would ever be exceeded in any of the statistics, including time, as it would take about 14.6 billion years - longer than the age of the universe - to overflow (if it were handled as an unsigned value, of which Java does not have).
The way that my fix works is by effectively converting from a signed to unsigned value by using a bit mask and a larger storage unit that can hold it (as mentioned before, only when displaying it):
For comparison, this is what happens with a 64 bit integer (or "long", or as shown here a "qword" / "quad word", which goes back to the days when computers were 16 bit, which was called a "word"; likewise, a 32 bit value is also called a "dword" / "double word"); note that the lower 32 bits are identical:
Note that direct assignment (e.g. longValue = intValue) preserves the sign by assigning 1 to all higher bits; the value that I use for the mask, 4294967295, is the maximum unsigned 32 bit value, and strips away these bits:
There is actually a way to display even larger numbers, up to the unsigned 64 bit limit, by casting to a double and adding the 64 bit limit (or using an unsigned long, as is available in languages like C++, not sure why Java doesn't natively support unsigned values), although this wouldn't work for storing them due to precision loss (a double has 53 bits of precision, meaning that it can only accurately represent whole numbers up to 2^53 or 9,007,199,254,740,992, which is 1024 times less than the range of a long. After this point it can only represent every other integer, until 2^54, after which it drops to every 4th integer, and so on. If used as a counter, as in the time statistics, it will stop incrementing after 2^53).
Another way to extend the range is to store time in seconds instead of ticks and increment it once every 20 ticks, which will increase the maximum time by 20-fold; likewise, distance could be stored in meters instead of centimeters for 100 times the range (these solutions would cause some accuracy loss since if it only updates every second/meter fractional parts would be discarded, over a play session it won't matter though, e.g. an hour is 3600 seconds and I walk around 20 km per session so the loss would only be up to 1/3600 and 1/20000 respectively. In any case, the statistics already have accuracy loss because it rounds the distance traveled per tick to the nearest centimeter; 4.3 m/s is 21.5 cm/tick, or 22 when rounded. Likewise "damage dealt" is recorded with a precision of 1/10 of a unit (it is multiplied by 10 when stored and divided by 10 when displayed) and it increments by 14.3 per hit with my sword (in 1.6.4 a Sharpness V diamond sword does 14.25 damage).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Well, that was a tad bit more existential than I expected, thanks.
The month of October was quite interesting; I made a new secondary base, found two villages, a jungle temple, saw a zombie in diamond armor, found the largest single cave that I've found in this world, and on the same day reached a total of 3 million ore and 2 million coal mined.
First, I decided to make another secondary base at 2560, 2560 after having explored around half the current map; this is the 21st secondary base that I've built in this world and one of the, if not the, furthest from my main base at spawn, nearly 5 km away by rail. The first of two villages was found close to the location I chose for the base, which landed in a forest in the middle of a plains (I chose the location based on the coordinates without knowing what would be there; while I've always built my main base in a plains I build secondary bases in all biomes, even on water in one case, only shifting the location a bit if there is a better place for it nearby):
While securing the village I saw a zombie with an enchanted diamond helmet, the first diamond armored mob that I've seen this year; the last one I saw in this world was in May 2020, showing how rare they are in vanilla, even with the number of mobs I regularly encounter and my change to regional difficulty so the inhabited time factor starts at 50% of the maximum (I did not make any changes to armor chances):
I found another village while passing through a desert nearby about a week later (I always investigate any plains and deserts I find to see if they have villages to avoid caving under them before they are protected); both of these show how I light up and wall in villages, even if I don't use them for anything (I generally only trade with villagers in my main base; a few secondary bases have been located in villages near where I planned to build them, I did not do this for the current base as it was not found until I'd nearly reached the location):
I also found the 12th jungle temple that I've found in this world after I dug up to the surface to return from a caving session (the cobblestone pillar in front is how I mark return points, which are usually 14 blocks tall, taller if necessary to be easily visible from a distance):
A more notable finding was the largest single cave that I've found so far in this world, with a volume of 15,378 blocks, compared to 12,851 for the largest cave that I previously found about 5 years ago; there was also another relatively large cave with about half the volume in the same cave system:
2851 27 1678 (length: 103, width: 21, volume: 15378)
2850 16 1677 (length: 106, width: 13, volume: 7288)
This is the smaller cave; both caves also merged with ravines and other caves to form larger open areas:
To put this cave into perspective, the largest single cave within a 1 million chunk area (about 8 times larger than this world) has a volume of about 20,000 blocks and the largest cave that I've ever seen had a volume of about 26,000 blocks, which was found with my own search tool:
-3210732490760851971 2206 34 450 (length: 108, width: 25, volume: 25955)
7738058006459585553 -4695 44 -4682 (length: 112, width: 25, volume: 24563)
5 -6723 20 -632 (length: 106, width: 25, volume: 24010)
2714333224431573570 -2530 31 -314 (length: 102, width: 25, volume: 23835)
7430286187330320156 -4850 26 4954 (length: 111, width: 24, volume: 23800)
Largest mineshafts:
-7141342483444208127 664 3080 (size: 364)
7047656164810810937 -2840 2392 (size: 359)
5444022222483946360 -632 -3160 (size: 354)
-8961410212600831696 2984 3112 (size: 349)
6234685046964652597 -2136 -664 (size: 347)
Largest and densest cave systems (radius = 96):
-7501191248410737040 -384 224 (volume: 447652 blocks)
-6923329256941061233 176 256 (volume: 358640 blocks)
5893237509307972984 -2400 -7136 (volume: 346957 blocks)
-981332682469638445 46720 116208 (volume: 339556 blocks)
7330129818377892634 6624 3792 (volume: 311701 blocks)
-123775873255737467 -816 -1040 (volume: 243771 blocks)
Obviously, these are all for 1.6.4; the actual size of caves and mineshafts did not change in 1.7, and between 1.7-1.12.2 it is even possible that some of the mineshafts listed exist as they were only made rarer with no changes to their locations (this is also rarely possible for caves; since 1.13 they are all completely different because it changed the "chunk seed"), while a reduction in the density of cave systems means it is very improbable that a cave system as dense as the ones listed can ever generate; even the last one listed, which is in my own world, is still extremely dense.
Also, even the largest cave is barely enough to be a "large cave" by the standards of TMCW, whose "CaveFinder" utility only lists caves with a volume of at least 25,000, and the largest known cave has a volume of nearly 1.1 million blocks, about 42 times larger, with both caves shown below:
Also, this is an analysis of the cave system with the largest cave in this world, with the volume of each individual cave measured separately; there were a total of 56 caves within a 10x10 chunk area, of which 46 had a measurable volume (at least one air block between layers 11-62), and the majority had a volume between 1-2,000 blocks (a "large cave", as listed here, is a cave with a maximum width of at least 9 blocks, which is only attainable through a 10% chance of a multiplier being applied to the initial width value, otherwise it is 3-9 blocks. Even then not every cave with an increased multiplier will be this wide since it can be as low as 1 and the initial width can be as low as 3; the maximum possible width is 27, which is exceedingly rare, but could produce a cave with a volume as high as 35,000 blocks if it generated perfectly):
Size 2 cave system at 2752 1600; total number of caves: 2
Size 1 cave system at 2832 1616; total number of caves: 1
Size 7 cave system at 2800 1648; total number of caves: 7
Size 7 cave system at 2832 1648; total number of caves: 7
Size 12 cave system at 2848 1664; total number of caves: 19
Size 11 cave system at 2816 1728; total number of caves: 17
Number of cave systems: 7
Initial number of caves: 43; largest cave system: 12 (2848 1664)
Total number of caves: 56; largest cave system: 19 (2848 1664)
Additional circular room caves: 13
Number of small caves: 54; average width is 5.97
Number of large caves: 2; average width is 17.00; max width: 20.55 (2851 27 1678)
Number of circular rooms: 9; average width is 10.81
Additional caves per circular room: 1.44
Average caves per chunk: 0.56 (100 chunks)
Average altitude: 28.29
Percentage of caves on layers 0 to 9: 33.93
Percentage of caves on layers 10 to 19: 12.50
Percentage of caves on layers 20 to 29: 19.64
Percentage of caves on layers 30 to 39: 1.79
Percentage of caves on layers 40 to 49: 10.71
Percentage of caves on layers 50 to 59: 7.14
Percentage of caves above layer 59: 14.29
Locations of largest caves by volume:
1: 2851 27 1678 (length: 103, width: 21, volume: 15378)
2: 2850 16 1677 (length: 106, width: 13, volume: 7288)
3: 2852 21 1676 (length: 105, width: 8, volume: 2986)
4: 2821 29 1742 (length: 106, width: 7, volume: 2482)
5: 2764 20 1613 (length: 101, width: 7, volume: 2329)
6: 2847 56 1654 (length: 100, width: 7, volume: 2296)
7: 2857 24 1670 (length: 108, width: 7, volume: 2168)
8: 2832 45 1659 (length: 109, width: 6, volume: 2148)
9: 2850 25 1676 (length: 98, width: 7, volume: 2071)
10: 2840 16 1651 (length: 94, width: 7, volume: 1969)
11: 2851 10 1668 (length: 102, width: 6, volume: 1966)
12: 2860 8 1590 (length: 90, width: 7, volume: 1944)
13: 2851 56 1664 (length: 99, width: 6, volume: 1881)
14: 2827 18 1733 (length: 94, width: 6, volume: 1815)
15: 2818 41 1730 (length: 91, width: 6, volume: 1781)
16: 2840 23 1652 (length: 111, width: 5, volume: 1780)
17: 2817 13 1742 (length: 97, width: 6, volume: 1711)
18: 2862 24 1669 (length: 95, width: 5, volume: 1698)
19: 2853 4 1666 (length: 93, width: 6, volume: 1585)
20: 2818 41 1730 (length: 85, width: 6, volume: 1546)
21: 2859 2 1675 (length: 110, width: 8, volume: 1530)
22: 2803 4 1656 (length: 99, width: 7, volume: 1530)
23: 2825 13 1740 (length: 89, width: 6, volume: 1495)
24: 2818 0 1736 (length: 85, width: 7, volume: 1466)
25: 2859 2 1675 (length: 102, width: 6, volume: 1281)
26: 2807 1 1653 (length: 100, width: 6, volume: 1158)
27: 2862 48 1677 (length: 111, width: 4, volume: 1078)
28: 2818 41 1730 (length: 95, width: 4, volume: 1062)
29: 2821 29 1742 (length: 104, width: 4, volume: 1015)
30: 2821 29 1742 (length: 96, width: 8, volume: 940)
31: 2851 56 1664 (length: 102, width: 7, volume: 900)
32: 2814 61 1655 (length: 109, width: 5, volume: 853)
33: 2845 37 1658 (length: 93, width: 4, volume: 851)
34: 2816 21 1740 (length: 88, width: 4, volume: 851)
35: 2818 0 1736 (length: 85, width: 8, volume: 565)
36: 2850 56 1585 (length: 109, width: 4, volume: 452)
37: 2859 2 1675 (length: 102, width: 7, volume: 445)
38: 2818 0 1736 (length: 110, width: 4, volume: 439)
39: 2834 42 1653 (length: 90, width: 4, volume: 427)
40: 2853 4 1666 (length: 104, width: 8, volume: 221)
41: 2845 9 1653 (length: 85, width: 5, volume: 161)
42: 2853 4 1666 (length: 86, width: 8, volume: 143)
43: 2820 11 1736 (length: 111, width: 6, volume: 111)
44: 2808 65 1652 (length: 85, width: 5, volume: 68)
45: 2851 5 1674 (length: 112, width: 7, volume: 29)
46: 2859 2 1675 (length: 102, width: 4, volume: 13)
Another rare find was a double dungeon, the rarity of which is underscored by the fact that I find an average of 2-3 dungeons every day, yet this is the first one I've found in months:
However, the highlight of the month was reaching an incredible total of 3 million ores mined, followed by 2 million coal within the next hour, showing how close it has been to 2/3 of all ores mined (in fact, even what I mined over just an hour was nearly exactly 2/3 of the total ores; 430 coal out of a total of 646 ore is 66.563%; that said, it varies a lot from play session to play session):
Also, within the next few days my "score" will hit 5 million, equivalent to the XP from 5 million coal or 1 million mobs (assuming no equipment, which adds 1-3 per piece to the base of 5; in particular, skeletons average at least 7 XP since they always have a bow). Note that the score in the inventory is separate from the score displayed in the death screen; only the latter will be reset if I ever die, which is a feature I added to TMCW and the custom version I use for this world (the game actually uses two separate variables to track your score/total XP, which are normally always the same; I'm guessing that there are two for legacy reasons and they never bothered removing the redundant variable but I used this to my advantage so I can track two separate scores, where the inventory shows the lifetime total for the world (since around 2015 for this world). Notably, I also modified XP orbs so your own XP orbs do not double-count to the lifetime XP total, only adding to the "death score", which was done by recording the name of the player who dropped them (this is "vanilla-safe" since vanilla will ignore unknown NBT data, plus I only save the tag for player-dropped XP orbs).
Here are the stats for the end of the month; I've now mined a total of 4.26 million blocks with a diamond pickaxe (this does not include around 4700 blocks mined for a railway and clearing out underground rooms in my base, for which I used iron pickaxes taken from minecarts and enchanted/combined to as high as Efficiency V and Unbreaking III):
Also, here is a before and after rendering of what I explored since building my latest base, which is visible at the end of a line off to the right (the rail tunnel); much of the exploration was actually going away from the base, to the north along the eastern third of the map, as I did not find interconnected caves into that area until I'd explored far to the south (the path I take while exploring underground is often highly complex, as shown in the 30 day rendering here; this includes a lot of "dead ends" where I can't progress further so I go to another return point and continue on from there, with the occasional isolated pocket explored once I've explored around them and if they have surface caves, otherwise, they remain undiscovered unless I break into them while mining ores or notice liquid dripping from the ceiling):
A higher resolution rendering of after; my bases are easy to spot because of the large wheat farms that are my primary source of materials for trading (only the underground portions are shown as I only mapped areas below y=64, and otherwise MCMap requires a 2 block thick ceiling to be considered "underground"):
My current base is to the south of the mapped area near the lower-right (I avoid looking at the map until I've reached it underground) while my previous base is just to the south of the taiga (snowy area) near the upper-left:
Compared to previous months there was a significant drop in my daily mining rates, with only one resource, redstone, seeing an increase, due to the time I spent digging a railway and building a base, and to a lesser extent, walling in the villages, especially the desert village (I use sandstone for the wall, which was mined out from under the houses; the plains village was much easier as I just used some of the large amount of cobblestone I collected from the rail tunnel, the rest was consumed over the next week while caving). There were also significantly fewer mineshafts in the area I explored, leading to a relatively larger drop in the amount of resources collected (the time spent on collecting resources is a small percentage of the overall time spent caving, thus the collection rate mostly depends on how often I encounter them):
Here are charts, you can see the big drop near the beginning of the month (days 71-72), followed by a smaller drop a week later when I found the desert village; while I found less mineshafts during October I did set a single day peak of 766 rails for the three month period thanks to a triple mineshaft complex; there was also a big spike in mob kills, up to 655, which occurred while exploring below an ocean:
Also, the continent that I'm on may be larger than I thought; the oceans I mentioned previously are basically large lakes with most of the map (aside from southeast of 2560, 2560) being land, including off the edges, I also analyzed level 4 map-sized areas to the east and south and found them to be around 33-67% land (I did not actually map the areas so I don't know the exact composition; I made my own biome mapping tool for TMCW, which I also adapted to vanilla 1.6.4 so I don't have to depend on 3rd partly tools, aka AMIDST, that rely on a launcher profile and can break with launcher updates).
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?
In contrast with previous months, November saw significant increases in resources collected per play session, including some of my most extreme hourly rates, peaking at more than 1,200 ores mined per hour on several days, largely due to a significant increase in dense cave systems and mineshafts, and overall underground interconnectivity; the only resource that I found less of compared to October was emerald ore:
As noted before, October had lower daily rates in large part due to spending time to build a new secondary base and railway, as well as less mineshafts within the areas I explored, but November was still substantially higher than August and September. Another possible factor in the increased rates was a reduction in mobs, from around 350 to 300 mobs killed per session, which was likely due to the greater underground volume and lack of watery biomes (the area I explored in October included a small inland sea), increasing mob spawns on the surface at night.
There is also another factor - as in some modded worlds I decided to modify Ender chests to have a double chest of capacity (this is considered to be "vanilla-safe" since it simply ignores the extra rows, so when I update the world download I only have to make sure only the first three rows have items) to help offset the ever-increasing distance I have to travel back to my main base, with the result that I don't have to go back as often, which is evident in the distance traveled by minecart per day; even then I still averaged more than over the lifetime of the world; more significant may be the doubling in length of "caving sessions" from about 2 to 4 play sessions (the time I spend caving between trips back to a secondary base):
This is not the first modification to help me handle the resources that I collect; 6 years ago I added "rail blocks", which combine 9 rails into a block and vice-versa, which has really helped considering I've collected upwards of 1,000 rails in a single play session (in one case over 2,000 on two consecutive days) and a year later I added "cobweb blocks", which combine 4 cobwebs into a block (prior to this I mined cobwebs with unenchanted shears and crafted the string into wool). About a year ago I added "compressed cobblestone", including a mossy variant, which combines 4 blocks into one block (these blocks are all present in TMCW but they behave a bit differently; the World1 versions do not require a tool to mine, break much faster, are all destroyed by water, cannot be uncrafted in the crafting grid, and are not counted in statistics; the latter are to prevent contamination e.g. if I uncrafted rail blocks they would count as crafting 9 rails, likewise, it is impossible to craft cobblestone and cobwebs in vanilla).
I also do not use these blocks as permanent storage blocks, although I may as well since it is obvious that I'll never update this world to newer versions (rail blocks in particular would save an enormous amount of space considering that I've collected over 200,000 rails, or over 58 double chests, while blocks would require only 7; that said, the space they need is not much of an issue and not using them ensures you don't need to use a mod or 1.6.4 to play on the world download).
Here are updated charts of my daily progress and in-game statistics; I've now played on this world for 179.59 real-life days and more than 13,000 in-game days and mined more than 3.1 million ore out of a total of 4.4 million blocks mined:
Also, I spent 4.49 days playing in November for an average of 3.592 hours per day, which gives an average mining rate of 1058 resources and 917 ore per hour, even more if only the time I spent caving is counted (I don't keep track of this but the time spent on trips back to my secondary base and main base amounts to around 15 minutes per day, which would mean I spent 4.1775 days caving for 1137 resources and 986 ore mined per hour).
Here are renderings of the area I've explored over the past 4 months, mostly within a level 4 map centered at 2048, 2048 (south and east of x/z 1024 and extending a bit past x/z 3072):
This is a full-size view of the area I explored in November (excluding the far upper-left corner):
I explored the northwestern quadrant in August, southwest in September, northeast in October, and southeast in November (the northernmost and westernmost edges were partly explored in the past as I will explore a bit off the current level 4 map if the current cave/mineshaft/ravine goes outside it):
The sheer scale of my exploration can be realized when I've placed over 125,000 torches within this area alone, as seen sliced at layer 32 in Minutor:
One of the more notable findings over the month was not just one but two pink sheep, in widely separated areas - the first time that I've found pink sheep in this world in 6 years, and only the second and third times overall:
This is partly the result of a bugfix I added to this world; there is/was a bug in vanilla where sheep would have (mostly) the same wool colors within 512x512 block regions, due to sloppy coding that used the same RNG for structure (villages and temples) generation and sheep wool colors, ans structures would set it to the same state within a region, which I fixed before playing on this world again recently; while the overall frequency of pink sheep is not increased the regional-scale variation in colors is now 1024 times greater since the color is now per-chunk instead of per-region. This does mean that you are unlikely to ever find more than one pink sheep at a time but you can breed them with any other color to get more since pink doesn't combine with any other color to give a new color. I previously fixed this in TMCW and similarly have found single pink sheep many times in different worlds (the last time I analyzed this world in MCEdit it found 7341 sheep, of which 12 can be expected to be pink based on a 0.164% chance per sheep).
Other significant findings include several very large and dense cave systems, 5 intersecting ravines for the 8th time in this world (I haven't found more than 5, though there would have been 7 at one location if an ocean hadn't destroyed it), and the third largest single cave that I've found in this world, part of one of the densest cave systems that I've found in this world:
This is the largest cave system that I found during the month; there were also numerous ravines within and around it, including 5 intersecting ravines, which together gave it a volume nearly as high as the cave system at -800, -1050 within a 12x12 chunk area centered on it (that cave system is still much larger and denser in terms of caves only; a cave system near 2100, 500 is likewise denser when ravines are included, and interestingly, it also has 5 intersecting ravines):
Note that the individual volumes for caves, ravines, and mineshafts add up to 238385, meaning that less than 3% of the overall volume was lost due to overlap (this would be much greater if overlap between individual caves is included, as best seen when comparing 1.6.4 to 1.7, where 1.7 has about 23% less caves but only 15% less volume due to cave systems being much less dense).
While only about half the overall size this cave system had a much denser core with a very large semi-open chamber where multiple caves intersected, including the third largest single cave that I've found in this world, with a volume of 11,730 blocks, which led to a single chunk with an air volume of more than 47% of all blocks between layers 11-62, and a 4x4 chunk area was more than 28% air:
This shows both cave systems mentioned here, with this one near the left side:
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?
Hi, first of all thank you for your mod, me and some friends really enjoyed playing it, which I was thinking, have you ever considered posting the diff patches of your game from mcp (eg: comparing the original mcp source and yours to get a patch)? I would love to get the basic Minecraft Dedicated Server on TMCW. I think there's no need to upload them on Github or somewhere, the patches could just be included in the zip.
The changes that I've made are so extensive that patches wouldn't be that useful; for example, this is a diff of the "World" class, which contains the core logic for running the world, and which originally had 4284 lines and currently has 3714, with 3117 removals and 2448 additions - a number that together exceeds the original line count (I presume if a line changed it counts as both), and it appears that the extent of the changes caused it to completely break as it is attempting to compare completely different sections of code:
Note that it is at "notifyBlocksOfNeighborChange" in vanilla but at "setBlockMetadataWithoutUpdate" in TMCW; even if the methods did match they would still be marked as different since I renamed all parameters and most variables:
That said, there are many Forge/modloader-based mods which have publicly available source which was modified to a much lesser extent; for example, this basic mod for changing cave generation just copied+pasted an entire method from vanilla with only a couple small changes to replaced hard-coded numbers with variables, whereas my own cave generator is almost completely different except for the basic tunnel-carving algorithm, and in any case nearly 95% of all the code would be my own ("MapGenCavesRavines_World1" is from my "World1_custom_client" and only includes bugfixes so it is basically vanilla except it combines what was originally 3 separate classes):
For similar reasons there is a thread claiming that most major mods contain upwards of 100+ violations of the EULA (this would include not just things I copied directly from vanilla, like the 1.8 stone variants, but even things like amethyst items, which are recolored versions of vanilla textures, thus do not qualify as "original work"), but the only time I've actually seen somebody get in trouble is if they uploaded an entire modified Minecraft jar, or somebody uploaded the entire decompiled source on GitHub (I've seen such repositories be taken down by a DMCA from Mojang, many don't even seem to be modified), or in the case of Bukkit, they applied a GPL license to the source code.
Also, MCP won't even compile unless you remove a lot of the original vanilla sources because references in them have been invalidated (e.g. they try to refer to fields and methods that were changed or removed; others need to be removed or MCP will mark them as modified when reobfuscating even though they were unmodified; because of this, I've made a backup of the entire MCP source, not just modified/new classes, though they can easily be separated by date).
Some parts of the code will also not work in multiplayer without significant refactoring; for example, to properly fix MC-673 (sky not darkening properly during thunderstorms) requires modifying the packets used to send weather (I simply use a static field which is shared between threads, which enables modifying no additional classes, which I generally only do if that is the only way). Likewise, I fixed many server-side particles by using a static class as a bridge between the server-client threads (vanilla does have a method, "playAuxSFX" that is used to send particles to the client but it only allows integer coordinates, an ID, and a 32 bit "data" parameter, so it won't work for e.g. enderman/dragon egg teleportation particles, which have two sets of coordinates as doubles, or water/lava "steam/smoke" particles, which use fractional y-coordinates, although the latter could be refactored to use the "data" parameter to specify a fraction). The "attack cooldown" system would require sending all attacks, not just ones that actually hit an entity, to the server (there are two components to this; server-side handles actual attacks while client-side handles missed attacks). Of course, there is also the fact that the skin server that 1.6.4 used no longer exists (hence why I include my own skin and the "CustomSkin" resource pack).
Also, this is the wrong thread; for some reason people keep thinking that TMCW and this world are related when they are not, other than that I use another mod with it which includes a few of its features, but is otherwise vanilla.
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?
While I often point out the changes to caves in 1.7 the most notable feature of the underground before 1.7 is not the caves but the mineshafts, the abundance of which are absurd, exemplified by the most recent mega complex I've found, with a total of nine mineshafts directly intersecting, and nearly touching a couple more, with an incredibly dense central core where three separate mineshafts overlap, two of which are in adjacent chunks (I've even seen three in a 2x2 chunk area before):
From top-left are all underground features, mineshafts only, interconnected mineshafts (fences and platforms were omitted to ensure they interconnect), and mineshaft rooms only. Near the upper-left edge you can see part of another mineshaft, which is just one block away and at about the same altitude (offset by a block or two), while near the bottom is a mineshaft which is a few blocks above the one below (when other caves and ravines are included the upper-left mineshaft is interconnected while the one at the bottom isn't at least not in a direct route).
Here are the locations and sizes of the individual mineshafts, which have a total of 13.5 kilometers of corridors - twice the width of the entire area I've explored in this world within an area measuring about 300x450 blocks, and containing an average of 3,150 rails based on a 1/3 chance of a corridor having rails and a 70% chance of each block having one (I collected more but some may have come from adjacent mineshafts):
I spent about 7 days exploring the area around the mineshaft complex, with 25,000 ores and 30,000 resource blocks mined in one of my most productive periods ever, especially on this world; the most productive single day averaged more than 1,200 ores and 1,500 resource blocks mined per hour:
Also, I found one of the largest single caves that I've found in this world, with a volume of 9,500 blocks; while this may seem very small by modern standards (or my own mods, where I define a "large" cave as having a volume of at least 25,000, and 100,000 for a "giant" cave, which may rarely exceed a million, or more than 100 times larger) I've only found 11 caves with a volume of at least 10,000 within an explored area of around 115,000 chunks:
Mineshafts are for sure not larger in newer versions though, but large intersecting complexes should still be possible if they still generate randomly throughout the world, as opposed to using a gridded spacing system like most other structures do (e.g. there can only be one village per 32x32 chunk region with a minimum spacing of 9 chunks between any two structures). This is also one reason why individual mineshafts can become much larger in TMCW, as they generate aligned to a 14x14 chunk grid at 0,0-2,2 and 7,7-9,9 and nearly half do not generate because the cave density is too high or they are too close to larger caves (I actually did implement this in my first world but it is much less aggressive, only excluding them from the densest regions).
For comparison, this is the largest mineshaft complex I found in TMCWv5, and any version of the mod, which was only about half the size but only had two mineshafts, and a comparison of vanilla 1.6.4 to TMCW; they don't seem less common in TMCW and much less dense since they aren't overlapping so much (it is actually fairly uncommon to find isolated mineshafts in vanilla), and even individual mineshafts are less dense (vanilla allows corridors to run directly over each other (without a floor/ceiling/floating rails, or planks, depending on the generation order) as only the interior is part of the bounding box; I included the floor so there must be at least one block between them:
Another thing to note is that prior to 1.13 mineshafts were made to be less common closer to 0,0 so their abundance may not be immediately obvious; they only reach their maximum frequency at 1280 blocks from the origin (defined as a random number from 0-79 being less than the maximum chunk coordinate, this also means they can never generate right at 0,0, and within 512 blocks they are less common than they are since 1.13. I removed this in my own mods, even the one I use on this world since I've long since explored the entire area within 1280 blocks so it won't have any effect, and without mineshafts the underground is far less interconnected, making my sort of playstyle harder).
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?
9 mines!? That's terrifying. No wonder kid me hated the underground lol. I was so scared of getting lost or attacked from behind in big complex areas.
This isn't even the largest one I've found; a long time ago (like 10 years) I found a complex that was about twice as large, as mentioned in this post, which itself describes one with 10 mineshafts:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=5335
More details of the super-complex, which had literally nothing but mineshafts in some places (all ground was replaced with parts of mineshafts); not every mineshaft may actually directly intersect but they are all close enough that you might as well not notice, and actually, there could be as many as 21 under this criteria, as shown below:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=3424
Maybe the most amazing thing is that I'd explored that before I added in "rail blocks" so I can craft 9 rails into a single block (5,000 rails is about 78 stacks, but less than 9 full stacks of rail blocks); apparently I'd also collected less than 30,000 rails at this point so this was about a fifth of all the rails I'd collected before then (up to this point I'd explored more or less northwards and a lot of the area was within the area of lower mineshaft density within 1280 blocks):
Another complex of 9 mineshafts, plus one with 3 just before that:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=4618
Also, this illustrates just how often mineshafts generate close enough to intersect, or at least overlap at different levels; this is a 1536x1536 area centered on the super-complex (-64 -1684); there are numerous complexes of 2-4 mineshafts all over the place, including 7 pairs in adjacent chunks (including diagonals), with only about 12 out of 93 mineshafts being visibly separated (excluding the small bits around the edges):
Here is the same area in the seed "12345", which has only 77 mineshafts (the average for this area is 92) but still has a complex larger than the one I recently found, plus three mineshafts in a 2x2 chunk area (an "L" shape near the left side, itself part of a complex of 7 mineshafts):
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'm a bit surprised mineshafts aren't something you changed in all this time. They've always been one of the things I'd like to see changed/improved (though, I guess that sort of goes for a lot of things, like dungeons).
Mineshafts would be nice if they were rarer, and also maybe had some perks, like more ore exposed within them maybe? Probably just personal preference, but while they are nice to exist, they don't feel enjoyable to explore as they are (maybe because they are too large/overwhelming/risk to get lost? I don't know) and have no advantages to entice exploring them, so I pretty much always avoid them. When I do explore them, it's usually because I found one in a cave and want to see if it connects to another cave system (or to see if there's an easily findable minecart with a chest); I almost never fully explore them for their own sake.
I would have looked at that and just... checked out.
In my long-running 1.7 journal, I spawned above what must have been at least two overlapping complexes. It was a mess and a huge headache for the first 60 episodes or so, after which I mostly switched to mining at other bases. At one point I encountered 3 parallel and adjacent corridors intersecting 2 parallel and adjacent corridors, and even though that's nothing like some of the horrors you show, it was still plenty of too much for me (it was in a mod biome that had ice blocks in the stone which made it even worse). IMO, also, there's just too many mineshafts in vanilla.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.