I decided to use Unmined to look at the underground, but first I used this utility on a copy to delete all unexplored chunks (without torches), which reduced the size of the world by more than half, to about 1,800 chunks, excluding the area around the stronghold I found:
These show everything above the surface, below sea level and below y=13 (equivalent to y=20 in vanilla).
Among other things, you can see the two giant caves I've found so far, near the bottom; near the center is the mine I dug with a medium-large cave on the left side, which I found while digging down, and further to the west is the large ravine I found earlier (latter visible on the lower cave map). Also, over the right half you might notice that many caves are lighter in color, which is because this is under a Forest Mountains biome, which has additional caves generated near to above sea level (in this post I posted maps of the vanilla world which can be used for comparison).
Also, speaking of which, I forgot to post these screenshots of a big mountain I found, seen to the east of my base on the map above:
For the first time ever I got diamond armor from a zombie, boots and leggings:
I didn't take a screenshot since things were rather hectic at the time, as this shows; that was a huge multiple creeper crater (including the sand, up to the water), several trees were also casualties, which I replanted, using the wood from them to help fill in the hole:
As with the pickaxe, I'm keeping them in a chest dedicated to stuff like this.
I found another giant cave, nearly as big as the last one, but closer to the surface:
I tried to pillar up to the top here, but didn't have enough cobblestone (29 blocks):
Of interest, there is a river suspended over the cave, due to how I changed the "water check" code that in vanilla causes caves and ravines to simply cut off, not generating entire segments and often resulting in vertical walls at chunk borders in larger caves, if there is any water in their path, whereas I have it act on a per-block basis, so they contour around water, this is particularly noticeable under oceans, which have considerably more undersea ravines (in particular) as a result, many of which don't generate at all or only generate the ends in vanilla. The result may look weird but I'd rather have caves that don't cut off, and you can always cover up the cave opening and would never know the difference. Notice also that the bottom is covered with sandstone, which is placed instead of sand when underwater sand patches are generated if they are over air; otherwise, most of the river bottom would have collapsed, much more so than in vanilla due the the aforementioned change:
I also rediscovered the stronghold I'd found earlier, just to the west of the cave, except instead of using Eyes of Ender I simply explored caves underground until I reached it; in another world I actually found all three strongholds this way:
Also, check out this roofed forest; note my y-coordinate, and this isn't even an x-hills:
The giant caves are a nice feature to 1.7 and later. Unfortunately I've only seen one, in my very first 1.7 world.
Are you referring to vanilla? There was no change to cave generation itself, other than a reduction in the density of cave systems; the size of individual caves was unchanged. Here is a chart I made that shows the size variation of caves, including one for vanilla; for 1.7+, reduce the frequency by a third; either way, you have to search literally millions of chunks to find a cave with a maximum diameter of about 26 blocks (and that assumes the cave branches no less than 50% of its maximum length, as caves generate in such a way that they start at a minimum width and increase in diameter up to half their length, then get narrower; ravines are generated the same way as caves but with an altered vertical height):
(note that this does not include the extra caves I generate near sea level, and above sea level in some biomes, whcih results in a considerably different distribution of caves underground, the ground is also effectively 7 blocks deeper due to lowering the lava level in caves, the overall amount of air volume was about 1/8 higher)
By contrast, caves in my mod can get up to 84 blocks in diameter (the chart only goes up to 77 since none larger were found, even in 100 million chunks, caves can effectively get larger if they wrap around themselves) and caves with the maximum width seen in vanilla are over a thousand times more common (still only about one per 1,766 chunks), as well as have up to triple the maximum length.
Ravines also have a similar variation, up to about 30 blocks in width and 336 blocks in length; I didn't analyze their size distribution but the largest ravines are generated once every 2,500 chunks (1/8 of ravines have a larger size range, and 4/25 of those (2% of all ravines, which are generated once every 50 chunks, the same as vanilla; the remaining 7/8 of ravines are generated normally) have an additional width/length increase).
I saw a skeleton in diamond armor for the first time ever the last time I played; this is pretty impressive since while I increased the armor chances and chances of better armor on zombies (overall, around 6 times the vanilla chance of diamond armor per zombie) I didn't change anything for skeletons, so this represents "vanilla" behavior:
The exact chance of getting diamond armor is one in 2,332.7 armored mobs, independent of difficulty (prior to 1.8, which removed armored mobs from Easy), which in turn are up to 15% of all mobs for an overall chance of one in 15,551 mobs, which is a fraction of all of the mobs I've ever killed, well over 160,000 (about half of these are zombies). Of course, more than half of those were in my first world, before I changed regional difficulty; this is the first world I've played with the changes (except zombie buffs) in effect.
I've also been getting a lot of highly enchanted gear from mob drops, which have been dropping far more helmets than I can make use of, I've even picked up and used other gear, like the Feather Falling IV boots shown:
Ironically, that makes the game easier in a way since even an unenchanted helmet has a significant effect on the amount of damage blocked, if somewhat less than it would in vanilla due to the change in armor (3.5% damage reduction per point, giving a max of 70%, which allows 30% of damage through, 50% more than vanilla's 4%/80%; this also applies to enchanted armor; full Protection IV diamond/amethyst armor blocks an average of 88% of damage, still letting 50% more damage through than vanilla's 92%, even though the absolute percentage increase (+18% vs +12%) is greater). The armor I normally wear by itself provides 71.65% damage reduction and is equivalent to full iron armor with Protection IV on two pieces and Feather Falling IV boots (iron armor is nearly identical with vanilla, 59.5 vs 60%, with two more armor points, making it the same as diamond minus boots or helmet).
I thought it was interesting to compare what I mined in the screenshots above (which were actually from the day before) to what I mined the last time I played; both of these were from the same cave system (plus a very small abandoned mineshaft and a few ravines), you can tell that I explored the higher layers first, before finally getting down to the deepest layers (I also happened kill the exact same number of mobs on each day):
You can also see that I gained 5315 XP, some from smelting some of the iron and gold I mined last time (I smelt up to a dozen stacks at once, as Ender chest space allows); this is enough to repair my pickaxe (39 levels, 1635 XP) three times over; I've gotten more than 8,000 before. Notice also that 10 in-game days passed, or about 200 minutes/3.333 hours; this also means that I mined an average of 828 ore per hour, a rate which was somewhat reduced by the number of ravines since I spend a lot of time carving out/filling in ledges to reach ores high up on the walls (in smaller ones I can just jump and place torches and use ladders to reach any ores I see), as well as encountering/killing 91.5 mobs per hour, (excluding creepers that exploded).
Contrast this to my experience in 1.8; in about half an hour I only encountered a single mob, which is ridiculous, largely as a result of this game-breaking bug which was forced upon us (they knew this was going to happen since it had been known for many years in multiplayer), and I mined ore at the rate of about 1,600 per hour, partly due to the lack of mobs but also because ores are more abundant (they increased vein sizes by 1 for some reason, a more significant effect than it would appear since the size nonlinearly increases by approximately a square function):
In-game map of explored areas; this is a fully zoomed (2048x2048) map so I've explored an area about 1000x1500 blocks so far:
Underground cave map; you can see my latest exit/return point on the far left, which is a 2x2 spiral staircase to the surface:
I've mined over 50,000 coal ore, plus over 20,000 other ores, made 24,000 torches, and mined 100,000 blocks while caving (I've only used my amethyst pickaxe while caving, with around 36,000 blocks mined with diamond pickaxes):
Believe it or not, that's still only around a tenth of what I did in my first world, and less than half of my second-longest played world; you can see a list of my worlds here:
(I'm posting full links to forum threads since the insert link function is broken, stripping off the first part and leaving only the thread ID and title)
I do think I'll create another off-topic world like this from my main world. Might focus more on efficiency and mob traps/gold and iron farms and such.
It's unbelievable how much caves there are in minecraft nowdays really.
Actually, they significantly reduced the size of cave systems back in 1.7, as this comparison of two 4000x4000 worlds shows, and this does not even show abandoned mineshafts, which were made 40% as common, ravines were unchanged though:
Prior to that, the last significant change to caves was back in InfDev ("Caves are now so clustered that a cave could be described as "Swiss cheese"), although they don't mention a bug fix in Beta 1.8 that fixed a bug that caused caves to generate inconsistently across chunk borders, but I've looked at the code and at least back to early Beta it was nearly identical, including the values that determine the number and frequency of caves (the changes in 1.7 actually double the frequency of chunks with caves, offsetting much of the reduction in the number of caves per cave system with the result being much less clustering of caves, the size of areas with few caves was also reduced).
As for mineshafts, this pretty much sums it up:
You can find my post where I mentioned exploring that here (there is also a long string of caves and mineshafts extending off the top-right); I mined about three times as many rails as I've gotten so far in this world, which is still enough to fill a chest; I haven't really counted but I believe I've found 6-7 mineshafts, about a third the number that are in there:
In fact, I even nerfed their frequency by excluding mineshafts from areas with high concentrations of caves (the base frequency in my mod is about the same as vanilla 1.6.4, close to half are excluded; they are more common closer to the origin since I removed a vanilla reduction in frequency within 80 chunks), as well as changed how the game places them so they can't overlap, with rare exceptions and only the very edges; in vanilla I've found as many as three right next to each other, identified by the large dirt-floored rooms that are their starting point, resulting in stuff like this:
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Absolutely incredible. The mod, the charts, the 3d renderings, the maps, the detail! High level stuff no doubt. I looked at most of the pictures and skimmed the text, reading sections here and there. Really impressive. The underground 3d renderings are really cool. A lot of good info and tools that I will have to look into further. Thanks for sharing.
in vanilla I've found as many as three right next to each other, identified by the large dirt-floored rooms that are their starting point, resulting in stuff like this:
I had to deal with an obnoxious multiple mineshaft intersection (at least 6 from at least 2 systems) in my journal world - but you've got me beat with that one!
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How do you go about creating an effective storage? I'm interested to see where you are putting the cobble and ores.
As you can see from basically every screenshot of him "in the field", he doesn't collect cobble. At all.
I'd assume because he doesn't really build much, his sole build on the world is very simplistic. As seen below it's pretty much just a box, the rest is all on the first page...
The storage is more of the same, it's just double chests in a plain room. I guess he "effectively" sorts the ores by placing the type of ore for each row of chests in the floor. You can see in the 2nd screenshot it goes Coal>Iron>Redstone>Lapis>Diamond and I'd assume Gold is the last one. I'd imagine he doesn't get enough Emerald to warrant it's own row.
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Quote from Swingerzetta »
This forum has made me decide that I now want kids, so that when they get old enough, I can forbid them from coming here. it's a terrible place.
As you can see from basically every screenshot of him "in the field", he doesn't collect cobble. At all.
I'd assume because he doesn't really build much, his sole build on the world is very simplistic. As seen below it's pretty much just a box, the rest is all on the first page...
The storage is more of the same, it's just double chests in a plain room. I guess he "effectively" sorts the ores by placing the type of ore for each row of chests in the floor. You can see in the 2nd screenshot it goes Coal>Iron>Redstone>Lapis>Diamond and I'd assume Gold is the last one. I'd imagine he doesn't get enough Emerald to warrant it's own row.
Few things are more off-putting than people who think Minecraft is all about building (hint, it is a sandbox game) and that you suck if you don't build fancy mansions; you should at least appreciate that I actually added decoration and used more than just plain quartz (or cobblestone) and one type of planks (which basically describes what I built in my first world).
As for how I store the resources I find, I have one row of 10 double chests each for coal, iron, and redstone, then I have lapis/gold/mossy cobblestone (from dungeons; the fact that it is craftable in 1.8 sort of spoils its value), then diamond/emerald/amethyst (sort of pointless considering that I have only about 30 surplus amethyst, getting barely more than I use), wool (made from cobwebs mined around cave spider spawners, otherwise I leave it alone), quartz, glowstone, and mineshaft rails; these are in a double wide corridor so I can mark individual chests, instead of pairs on opposite sides; then a final corridor for cobblestone, dirt, gravel, etc (most of this from branch-mining and clearing the land for my base; while caving I use up cobblestone at more or less the same rate at which I mine stone, and rarely have more than one stack in my inventory; I also made unpolished granite/diorite/andesite drop cobblestone unless you use Silk Touch so that isn't an issue).
This is also pretty much what I have in my first world, except I made the storage area bigger, with 16 double chests per row and lapis/mossy cobblestone/mineshaft rails having entire rows to themselves; I even had to make a new row for coal (16 double chests is 55,296 blocks, 497,664 resources, so go figure), which isn't a problem since I put it underground; when I fill a chest I just place a sign reading "Full" over it, in this world I've already filled up 1 1/2 double chests with coal blocks and more than half of one with iron.
I found the biggest ravine ever, and that's not an exaggeration (actually, I've seen bigger ones in test worlds, in length, width, and/or depth):
These were taken at opposite ends of the ravine - spanning a distance of about 240 blocks east-west, which is more than twice the average and maximum length of ravines in vanilla (98.5 and 112 blocks, which is also the average/maximum length of 7/8 (87.5%) of ravines in TMCW):
Also, notice the biome in the second screenshot; the area of water on the map is a "lake" biome, not an ocean, which is an underwater biome with a depth similar to vanilla rivers, shallower than oceans, and can appear as a full-sized biome (which can have small islands with some other biomes in it) and as small sub-biomes in many other biomes (snowy biomes have a "frozen lake" variant).
Here are some screenshots from around the ravine; similar to the other big ravine I found (see post 33) it has several bends which prevent the other end from being seen (which would go outside the render distance, even Far would leave the end in fog):
Also, there are two other ravines linked to this one, which merge together into a single larger ravine in the middle:
Here is a rendering of the ravines, with a cross-section taken at y=20 at the top and the corresponding underground rendering across all layers below:
Surprisingly enough, aside from the eastern end I only found a single short cave intersecting the ravine along most of its length. Notice also that aside from ravines you don't see much on the normal rendering cutaway; the size and closeness of cave systems are exaggerated in these 3D views due the way they are rendered (caves at y=60 will be rendered higher up (towards the top, which is also northeast) than caves at y=10).
I also discovered a new biome (in addition to the lake biome mentioned above, if you don't count the sub-biome variant) - Mega Taiga, of which there are actually three variants; my own version which has 3x3 spruce trees and two "vanilla" variants which are the same as the 1.7 Mega Taiga and Mega Spruce Taiga biomes, including coarse dirt and podzol on the ground; this is one of the latter biomes (I copied the trees from 1.7, which only required changing references to block IDs and including code from the class they extended, which doesn't exist in 1.6.4; these can also be grown from 2x2 spruce saplings with a 50% chance of either variant):
Few things are more off-putting than people who think Minecraft is all about building (hint, it is a sandbox game) and that you suck if you don't build fancy mansions; you should at least appreciate that I actually added decoration and used more than just plain quartz (or cobblestone) and one type of planks (which basically describes what I built in my first world).
Sorry, that probably came off rude. I was simply stating facts. I thought your name was "TheMasterCaver", not "TheMasterBuilder". If I check this thread, I expect to see some new "largest cave I've ever seen!", or like your following post, "I found the biggest ravine ever", not some new elaborate build that took you weeks to construct.
It's perfectly fine that you don't want to build things, but let's be realistic, your builds are VERY simple. Complex builds require time, which you don't want to spend on them. This is why you're able to amass so many resources, it's like literally all you spend your time on.
I do think it would be interesting if you tried your hand at some more builds though. I can only stay interested in screenshots of your statistics and how many resources you got from your last play session for so long.
You don't always need to build a fancy mansion, it could just be an automatic melon farm. I struggle with redstone sometimes and a decent sized melon farm might take me as long to build as a fancy mansion... It would give me much more satisfaction completing the farm though.
I'm pretty sure that won't ever happen however lol. How would that help you explore more caves after all? You don't even have a beacon and those things are extremely helpful, just not when you're wandering miles away from them in a random cave system...
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Quote from Swingerzetta »
This forum has made me decide that I now want kids, so that when they get old enough, I can forbid them from coming here. it's a terrible place.
I finally found something worth mentioning that doesn't have anything to do with caving - my first village, if you can call it one:
Yep, only a couple huts, and only one actually had a door, a wheat field, and two villagers. I just threw a simple (of course!) cobblestone wall around it, removing the well in the process, and added more doors, some just against the inside of the wall, so there were 11 total, which gave a third villager while I was working on it. I also killed over 100 zombies in the process (I worked on it through the night, barricading the door of the one house the villagers were in).
In addition, I found a couple new biomes; Savanna and Extreme Hills, the former on the other side of the river shown in the screenshot (the village itself is in a plains):
(the "acacia" trees are the same as those first added to 1.7, with oak leaves and jungle wood; oak saplings in savannas will randomly grow into acacia trees and small oak trees with 80/20 probability, the same as during world generation).
In the other direction there is a nice view of Forest Mountains, peaking at y=120, part of the same biome that lies east of spawn, where it is relatively flat, even below sea level in spots:
This brings the number of biomes I've found so far to 21, 26 if you include five river variants (normal, frozen, jungle, mesa and desert; the latter three were added to improve river transitions in their respective biomes, jungle river replaces the small pond-like rivers seen in 1.6.4 jungles and are based on the jungle biome, so they don't leave bare, discolored patches in the middle of jungles; desert and mesa are similarly based on their biomes, replacing normal rivers; frozen rivers also generate in any snowy biome, not just ice plains). Perhaps 10-15 more including hills sub-biomes.
All of these biomes are within a relatively small area, less than 1,000 blocks from spawn, and I still have a lot of the map to fill out:
Including hills sub-biomes there are a total of 75 biomes (77 including the End and Nether, using biome IDs from 0 to 76), 54 of which are new ones I added.
Why did you keep the acacia with the oak leaves and jungle logs? I must say personally that's disappointing as I enjoyed the new blocks and textures, the new models are nice also, but I could live without them.
Why did you keep the acacia with the oak leaves and jungle logs? I must say personally that's disappointing as I enjoyed the new blocks and textures, the new models are nice also, but I could live without them.
Well, 1.6.4 doesn't have acacia wood or leaves...
Basically, I've avoided adding new blocks as much as possible, not necessarily because it is hard - you can actually load one of my modded worlds into vanilla and only the amethyst items (note that the game really dislikes invalid items; you'll probably get a crash and/or regenerated chunks, at least prior to 1.7.1) and diamond Ender chests and their inventory would disappear; some of the biomes would look funny since 1.7 would think they are another biome, while biomes that have no corresponding vanilla equivalent are treated as plains, with no adverse effects otherwise.
Other trees that I made include roofed forest trees with oak leaves and spruce wood - also the same as the first vanilla trees, both mentioned here, as all of my own tree veriants use vanilla wood, leaves, and saplings, with saplings choosing a type of tree based on the biome they are in; for example, in most biomes single oak saplings will grow into normal small oak and big oaks with the normal 90/10 probability but always grow into big oaks, larger than usual, in Big Oak Forests, while in swamps they become swamp trees, which are not growable in vanilla, and in savannas they grow into savanna trees and small oaks in the same percentages as world generation (80/20, the same as 1.7). In a similar manner small jungle trees grow complete with vines and cocoa pods in jungles and become palm trees in beach biomes; all variants of small spruce trees can be grown in taigas, otherwise only the shorter leafier variant, and so on.
The new flowers I added are variants of dandelions, instead of roses (which are unchanged; single roses and poppies, in addition to rose bushes, can be found; the 2-high flowers had their textures modified a bit to better fit as 1-high flowers), generating in a ratio such that if loaded into vanilla you'd have about the same proportion of roses and dandelions as 1.6.4. Of note, the game uses incorrect metadata when rendering flowers in flower pots; placing any of the new flowers, including dandelions, into a flower pot renders it as a peony, as seen here (breaking it returns a dandelion). This is not normally an issue because invalid metadata is ignored; I did not try to fix flower pots or their rendering (saplings are handled in a special way as to retain their metadata; 1.7 also made them tile entities so they can hold more blocks; fixing the rendering means modifying the block rendering class (a single huge class used for most blocks) and possibly breaking Optifine)
I even added packed ice by making it a variant of regular ice, not a new block (which does mean that it acts like a transparent block with an opaque texture, unlike the 1.7 version; melting is disabled by checking the data value). The 1.8 stones and podzol/coarse dirt are completely cross-compatible with 1.8/1.7 since they have the same data values (I made the unpolished stone variants require Silk Touch so they don't get in the way of mining, an older version of the mod included an optional patch to use this feature, which I'd only used for myself back then).
Wow. Just wow.
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
I decided to use Unmined to look at the underground, but first I used this utility on a copy to delete all unexplored chunks (without torches), which reduced the size of the world by more than half, to about 1,800 chunks, excluding the area around the stronghold I found:
These show everything above the surface, below sea level and below y=13 (equivalent to y=20 in vanilla).
Among other things, you can see the two giant caves I've found so far, near the bottom; near the center is the mine I dug with a medium-large cave on the left side, which I found while digging down, and further to the west is the large ravine I found earlier (latter visible on the lower cave map). Also, over the right half you might notice that many caves are lighter in color, which is because this is under a Forest Mountains biome, which has additional caves generated near to above sea level (in this post I posted maps of the vanilla world which can be used for comparison).
Also, speaking of which, I forgot to post these screenshots of a big mountain I found, seen to the east of my base on the map above:
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?
For the first time ever I got diamond armor from a zombie, boots and leggings:
I didn't take a screenshot since things were rather hectic at the time, as this shows; that was a huge multiple creeper crater (including the sand, up to the water), several trees were also casualties, which I replanted, using the wood from them to help fill in the hole:
As with the pickaxe, I'm keeping them in a chest dedicated to stuff like this.
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 found another giant cave, nearly as big as the last one, but closer to the surface:
I tried to pillar up to the top here, but didn't have enough cobblestone (29 blocks):
Of interest, there is a river suspended over the cave, due to how I changed the "water check" code that in vanilla causes caves and ravines to simply cut off, not generating entire segments and often resulting in vertical walls at chunk borders in larger caves, if there is any water in their path, whereas I have it act on a per-block basis, so they contour around water, this is particularly noticeable under oceans, which have considerably more undersea ravines (in particular) as a result, many of which don't generate at all or only generate the ends in vanilla. The result may look weird but I'd rather have caves that don't cut off, and you can always cover up the cave opening and would never know the difference. Notice also that the bottom is covered with sandstone, which is placed instead of sand when underwater sand patches are generated if they are over air; otherwise, most of the river bottom would have collapsed, much more so than in vanilla due the the aforementioned change:
I also rediscovered the stronghold I'd found earlier, just to the west of the cave, except instead of using Eyes of Ender I simply explored caves underground until I reached it; in another world I actually found all three strongholds this way:
Also, check out this roofed forest; note my y-coordinate, and this isn't even an x-hills:
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?
The giant caves are a nice feature to 1.7 and later. Unfortunately I've only seen one, in my very first 1.7 world.
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Are you referring to vanilla? There was no change to cave generation itself, other than a reduction in the density of cave systems; the size of individual caves was unchanged. Here is a chart I made that shows the size variation of caves, including one for vanilla; for 1.7+, reduce the frequency by a third; either way, you have to search literally millions of chunks to find a cave with a maximum diameter of about 26 blocks (and that assumes the cave branches no less than 50% of its maximum length, as caves generate in such a way that they start at a minimum width and increase in diameter up to half their length, then get narrower; ravines are generated the same way as caves but with an altered vertical height):
(note that this does not include the extra caves I generate near sea level, and above sea level in some biomes, whcih results in a considerably different distribution of caves underground, the ground is also effectively 7 blocks deeper due to lowering the lava level in caves, the overall amount of air volume was about 1/8 higher)
By contrast, caves in my mod can get up to 84 blocks in diameter (the chart only goes up to 77 since none larger were found, even in 100 million chunks, caves can effectively get larger if they wrap around themselves) and caves with the maximum width seen in vanilla are over a thousand times more common (still only about one per 1,766 chunks), as well as have up to triple the maximum length.
Ravines also have a similar variation, up to about 30 blocks in width and 336 blocks in length; I didn't analyze their size distribution but the largest ravines are generated once every 2,500 chunks (1/8 of ravines have a larger size range, and 4/25 of those (2% of all ravines, which are generated once every 50 chunks, the same as vanilla; the remaining 7/8 of ravines are generated normally) have an additional width/length increase).
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 saw a skeleton in diamond armor for the first time ever the last time I played; this is pretty impressive since while I increased the armor chances and chances of better armor on zombies (overall, around 6 times the vanilla chance of diamond armor per zombie) I didn't change anything for skeletons, so this represents "vanilla" behavior:
The exact chance of getting diamond armor is one in 2,332.7 armored mobs, independent of difficulty (prior to 1.8, which removed armored mobs from Easy), which in turn are up to 15% of all mobs for an overall chance of one in 15,551 mobs, which is a fraction of all of the mobs I've ever killed, well over 160,000 (about half of these are zombies). Of course, more than half of those were in my first world, before I changed regional difficulty; this is the first world I've played with the changes (except zombie buffs) in effect.
I've also been getting a lot of highly enchanted gear from mob drops, which have been dropping far more helmets than I can make use of, I've even picked up and used other gear, like the Feather Falling IV boots shown:
Ironically, that makes the game easier in a way since even an unenchanted helmet has a significant effect on the amount of damage blocked, if somewhat less than it would in vanilla due to the change in armor (3.5% damage reduction per point, giving a max of 70%, which allows 30% of damage through, 50% more than vanilla's 4%/80%; this also applies to enchanted armor; full Protection IV diamond/amethyst armor blocks an average of 88% of damage, still letting 50% more damage through than vanilla's 92%, even though the absolute percentage increase (+18% vs +12%) is greater). The armor I normally wear by itself provides 71.65% damage reduction and is equivalent to full iron armor with Protection IV on two pieces and Feather Falling IV boots (iron armor is nearly identical with vanilla, 59.5 vs 60%, with two more armor points, making it the same as diamond minus boots or helmet).
I thought it was interesting to compare what I mined in the screenshots above (which were actually from the day before) to what I mined the last time I played; both of these were from the same cave system (plus a very small abandoned mineshaft and a few ravines), you can tell that I explored the higher layers first, before finally getting down to the deepest layers (I also happened kill the exact same number of mobs on each day):
You can also see that I gained 5315 XP, some from smelting some of the iron and gold I mined last time (I smelt up to a dozen stacks at once, as Ender chest space allows); this is enough to repair my pickaxe (39 levels, 1635 XP) three times over; I've gotten more than 8,000 before. Notice also that 10 in-game days passed, or about 200 minutes/3.333 hours; this also means that I mined an average of 828 ore per hour, a rate which was somewhat reduced by the number of ravines since I spend a lot of time carving out/filling in ledges to reach ores high up on the walls (in smaller ones I can just jump and place torches and use ladders to reach any ores I see), as well as encountering/killing 91.5 mobs per hour, (excluding creepers that exploded).
Contrast this to my experience in 1.8; in about half an hour I only encountered a single mob, which is ridiculous, largely as a result of this game-breaking bug which was forced upon us (they knew this was going to happen since it had been known for many years in multiplayer), and I mined ore at the rate of about 1,600 per hour, partly due to the lack of mobs but also because ores are more abundant (they increased vein sizes by 1 for some reason, a more significant effect than it would appear since the size nonlinearly increases by approximately a square function):
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=3688
Also, here is a look at my progress so far:
Underground cave map; you can see my latest exit/return point on the far left, which is a 2x2 spiral staircase to the surface:
I've mined over 50,000 coal ore, plus over 20,000 other ores, made 24,000 torches, and mined 100,000 blocks while caving (I've only used my amethyst pickaxe while caving, with around 36,000 blocks mined with diamond pickaxes):
Believe it or not, that's still only around a tenth of what I did in my first world, and less than half of my second-longest played world; you can see a list of my worlds here:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/survival-mode/2396463-whats-the-longest-youve-played-on-one-world
(I'm posting full links to forum threads since the insert link function is broken, stripping off the first part and leaving only the thread ID and title)
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?
Actually, they significantly reduced the size of cave systems back in 1.7, as this comparison of two 4000x4000 worlds shows, and this does not even show abandoned mineshafts, which were made 40% as common, ravines were unchanged though:
Prior to that, the last significant change to caves was back in InfDev ("Caves are now so clustered that a cave could be described as "Swiss cheese"), although they don't mention a bug fix in Beta 1.8 that fixed a bug that caused caves to generate inconsistently across chunk borders, but I've looked at the code and at least back to early Beta it was nearly identical, including the values that determine the number and frequency of caves (the changes in 1.7 actually double the frequency of chunks with caves, offsetting much of the reduction in the number of caves per cave system with the result being much less clustering of caves, the size of areas with few caves was also reduced).
As for mineshafts, this pretty much sums it up:
You can find my post where I mentioned exploring that here (there is also a long string of caves and mineshafts extending off the top-right); I mined about three times as many rails as I've gotten so far in this world, which is still enough to fill a chest; I haven't really counted but I believe I've found 6-7 mineshafts, about a third the number that are in there:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=3424
In fact, I even nerfed their frequency by excluding mineshafts from areas with high concentrations of caves (the base frequency in my mod is about the same as vanilla 1.6.4, close to half are excluded; they are more common closer to the origin since I removed a vanilla reduction in frequency within 80 chunks), as well as changed how the game places them so they can't overlap, with rare exceptions and only the very edges; in vanilla I've found as many as three right next to each other, identified by the large dirt-floored rooms that are their starting point, resulting in stuff like this:
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?
Absolutely incredible. The mod, the charts, the 3d renderings, the maps, the detail! High level stuff no doubt. I looked at most of the pictures and skimmed the text, reading sections here and there. Really impressive. The underground 3d renderings are really cool. A lot of good info and tools that I will have to look into further. Thanks for sharing.
Survival Journal - Atlantis 2001: A Sea Odyssey
in vanilla I've found as many as three right next to each other,
identified by the large dirt-floored rooms that are their starting
point, resulting in stuff like this:
I had to deal with an obnoxious multiple mineshaft intersection (at least 6 from at least 2 systems) in my journal world - but you've got me beat with that one!
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
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As you can see from basically every screenshot of him "in the field", he doesn't collect cobble. At all.
I'd assume because he doesn't really build much, his sole build on the world is very simplistic. As seen below it's pretty much just a box, the rest is all on the first page...
The storage is more of the same, it's just double chests in a plain room. I guess he "effectively" sorts the ores by placing the type of ore for each row of chests in the floor. You can see in the 2nd screenshot it goes Coal>Iron>Redstone>Lapis>Diamond and I'd assume Gold is the last one. I'd imagine he doesn't get enough Emerald to warrant it's own row.
The BEST way to mine diamond, layer 12 and you.
Few things are more off-putting than people who think Minecraft is all about building (hint, it is a sandbox game) and that you suck if you don't build fancy mansions; you should at least appreciate that I actually added decoration and used more than just plain quartz (or cobblestone) and one type of planks (which basically describes what I built in my first world).
As for how I store the resources I find, I have one row of 10 double chests each for coal, iron, and redstone, then I have lapis/gold/mossy cobblestone (from dungeons; the fact that it is craftable in 1.8 sort of spoils its value), then diamond/emerald/amethyst (sort of pointless considering that I have only about 30 surplus amethyst, getting barely more than I use), wool (made from cobwebs mined around cave spider spawners, otherwise I leave it alone), quartz, glowstone, and mineshaft rails; these are in a double wide corridor so I can mark individual chests, instead of pairs on opposite sides; then a final corridor for cobblestone, dirt, gravel, etc (most of this from branch-mining and clearing the land for my base; while caving I use up cobblestone at more or less the same rate at which I mine stone, and rarely have more than one stack in my inventory; I also made unpolished granite/diorite/andesite drop cobblestone unless you use Silk Touch so that isn't an issue).
This is also pretty much what I have in my first world, except I made the storage area bigger, with 16 double chests per row and lapis/mossy cobblestone/mineshaft rails having entire rows to themselves; I even had to make a new row for coal (16 double chests is 55,296 blocks, 497,664 resources, so go figure), which isn't a problem since I put it underground; when I fill a chest I just place a sign reading "Full" over it, in this world I've already filled up 1 1/2 double chests with coal blocks and more than half of one with iron.
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 found the biggest ravine ever, and that's not an exaggeration (actually, I've seen bigger ones in test worlds, in length, width, and/or depth):
Also, notice the biome in the second screenshot; the area of water on the map is a "lake" biome, not an ocean, which is an underwater biome with a depth similar to vanilla rivers, shallower than oceans, and can appear as a full-sized biome (which can have small islands with some other biomes in it) and as small sub-biomes in many other biomes (snowy biomes have a "frozen lake" variant).
Here are some screenshots from around the ravine; similar to the other big ravine I found (see post 33) it has several bends which prevent the other end from being seen (which would go outside the render distance, even Far would leave the end in fog):
Also, there are two other ravines linked to this one, which merge together into a single larger ravine in the middle:
Here is a rendering of the ravines, with a cross-section taken at y=20 at the top and the corresponding underground rendering across all layers below:
Surprisingly enough, aside from the eastern end I only found a single short cave intersecting the ravine along most of its length. Notice also that aside from ravines you don't see much on the normal rendering cutaway; the size and closeness of cave systems are exaggerated in these 3D views due the way they are rendered (caves at y=60 will be rendered higher up (towards the top, which is also northeast) than caves at y=10).
I also discovered a new biome (in addition to the lake biome mentioned above, if you don't count the sub-biome variant) - Mega Taiga, of which there are actually three variants; my own version which has 3x3 spruce trees and two "vanilla" variants which are the same as the 1.7 Mega Taiga and Mega Spruce Taiga biomes, including coarse dirt and podzol on the ground; this is one of the latter biomes (I copied the trees from 1.7, which only required changing references to block IDs and including code from the class they extended, which doesn't exist in 1.6.4; these can also be grown from 2x2 spruce saplings with a 50% chance of either variant):
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?
That looks like a fault that would soon cause an earthquake.
Want to read some awesome journals? Try this: Survival Journals/Worlds list
I always love seeing these "Survival Journal" type of posts. Also good job on the text it's most defiantly thorough. Keep up the good work friend!
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do" - Steve Jobs
Sorry, that probably came off rude. I was simply stating facts. I thought your name was "TheMasterCaver", not "TheMasterBuilder". If I check this thread, I expect to see some new "largest cave I've ever seen!", or like your following post, "I found the biggest ravine ever", not some new elaborate build that took you weeks to construct.
It's perfectly fine that you don't want to build things, but let's be realistic, your builds are VERY simple. Complex builds require time, which you don't want to spend on them. This is why you're able to amass so many resources, it's like literally all you spend your time on.
I do think it would be interesting if you tried your hand at some more builds though. I can only stay interested in screenshots of your statistics and how many resources you got from your last play session for so long.
You don't always need to build a fancy mansion, it could just be an automatic melon farm. I struggle with redstone sometimes and a decent sized melon farm might take me as long to build as a fancy mansion... It would give me much more satisfaction completing the farm though.
I'm pretty sure that won't ever happen however lol. How would that help you explore more caves after all? You don't even have a beacon and those things are extremely helpful, just not when you're wandering miles away from them in a random cave system...
The BEST way to mine diamond, layer 12 and you.
I finally found something worth mentioning that doesn't have anything to do with caving - my first village, if you can call it one:
Yep, only a couple huts, and only one actually had a door, a wheat field, and two villagers. I just threw a simple (of course!) cobblestone wall around it, removing the well in the process, and added more doors, some just against the inside of the wall, so there were 11 total, which gave a third villager while I was working on it. I also killed over 100 zombies in the process (I worked on it through the night, barricading the door of the one house the villagers were in).
In addition, I found a couple new biomes; Savanna and Extreme Hills, the former on the other side of the river shown in the screenshot (the village itself is in a plains):
(the "acacia" trees are the same as those first added to 1.7, with oak leaves and jungle wood; oak saplings in savannas will randomly grow into acacia trees and small oak trees with 80/20 probability, the same as during world generation).
In the other direction there is a nice view of Forest Mountains, peaking at y=120, part of the same biome that lies east of spawn, where it is relatively flat, even below sea level in spots:
This brings the number of biomes I've found so far to 21, 26 if you include five river variants (normal, frozen, jungle, mesa and desert; the latter three were added to improve river transitions in their respective biomes, jungle river replaces the small pond-like rivers seen in 1.6.4 jungles and are based on the jungle biome, so they don't leave bare, discolored patches in the middle of jungles; desert and mesa are similarly based on their biomes, replacing normal rivers; frozen rivers also generate in any snowy biome, not just ice plains). Perhaps 10-15 more including hills sub-biomes.
All of these biomes are within a relatively small area, less than 1,000 blocks from spawn, and I still have a lot of the map to fill out:
Including hills sub-biomes there are a total of 75 biomes (77 including the End and Nether, using biome IDs from 0 to 76), 54 of which are new ones I added.
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 thoroughly enjoy reading your posts
Survival Journal - Atlantis 2001: A Sea Odyssey
Why did you keep the acacia with the oak leaves and jungle logs? I must say personally that's disappointing as I enjoyed the new blocks and textures, the new models are nice also, but I could live without them.
by c0yote
I tried it with terrible results. I gave my wife my glasses for a second, a creeper showed up and now my wife is pregnant.
Stupid 3D..
Well, 1.6.4 doesn't have acacia wood or leaves...
Basically, I've avoided adding new blocks as much as possible, not necessarily because it is hard - you can actually load one of my modded worlds into vanilla and only the amethyst items (note that the game really dislikes invalid items; you'll probably get a crash and/or regenerated chunks, at least prior to 1.7.1) and diamond Ender chests and their inventory would disappear; some of the biomes would look funny since 1.7 would think they are another biome, while biomes that have no corresponding vanilla equivalent are treated as plains, with no adverse effects otherwise.
Other trees that I made include roofed forest trees with oak leaves and spruce wood - also the same as the first vanilla trees, both mentioned here, as all of my own tree veriants use vanilla wood, leaves, and saplings, with saplings choosing a type of tree based on the biome they are in; for example, in most biomes single oak saplings will grow into normal small oak and big oaks with the normal 90/10 probability but always grow into big oaks, larger than usual, in Big Oak Forests, while in swamps they become swamp trees, which are not growable in vanilla, and in savannas they grow into savanna trees and small oaks in the same percentages as world generation (80/20, the same as 1.7). In a similar manner small jungle trees grow complete with vines and cocoa pods in jungles and become palm trees in beach biomes; all variants of small spruce trees can be grown in taigas, otherwise only the shorter leafier variant, and so on.
The new flowers I added are variants of dandelions, instead of roses (which are unchanged; single roses and poppies, in addition to rose bushes, can be found; the 2-high flowers had their textures modified a bit to better fit as 1-high flowers), generating in a ratio such that if loaded into vanilla you'd have about the same proportion of roses and dandelions as 1.6.4. Of note, the game uses incorrect metadata when rendering flowers in flower pots; placing any of the new flowers, including dandelions, into a flower pot renders it as a peony, as seen here (breaking it returns a dandelion). This is not normally an issue because invalid metadata is ignored; I did not try to fix flower pots or their rendering (saplings are handled in a special way as to retain their metadata; 1.7 also made them tile entities so they can hold more blocks; fixing the rendering means modifying the block rendering class (a single huge class used for most blocks) and possibly breaking Optifine)
I even added packed ice by making it a variant of regular ice, not a new block (which does mean that it acts like a transparent block with an opaque texture, unlike the 1.7 version; melting is disabled by checking the data value). The 1.8 stones and podzol/coarse dirt are completely cross-compatible with 1.8/1.7 since they have the same data values (I made the unpolished stone variants require Silk Touch so they don't get in the way of mining, an older version of the mod included an optional patch to use this feature, which I'd only used for myself back then).
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?