I dont see how that assumption is humaly posible considering the title, his username, and the posts in this thread.
I think they meant to post on another thread; the only other possibility was that they were referring to my early gathering of resources, in which case caving is simply not an option given how rare amethyst is, even rarer than emerald ore and monster spawners (based on what I've found so far by caving). I even took the time to enchant a diamond pickaxe with Fortune III to mine what I found in the largest mine I've ever made (in retrospect I might as well have just done some more mining; for diamond I wouldn't bother with it at all).
This should be pretty self-explanatory:
Not only that, 27 of that amethyst came from branch-mining, compared to 85 diamond ore, and perhaps 1% of the coal and iron, and a few emerald ore, thus the ratios are even larger than these raw numbers suggest (i.e. from caving only). In fact, even with the triple diamond durability my pickaxe alone has consumed about 53 amethyst (each one restores 1171 durability, 4684 uses, which is only 2.25 times better per unit than diamond since repairing with new items uses 3/4 as many units); I've also mined over 1800 blocks per amethyst ore found:
Similar logic applies to diamond; I don't want to spend so much time getting it, plus branch-mining enables you to get it without ever fighting any mobs, a point often lost on people who claim it is too easy to get resources by caving (e.g. this thread; naturally, they mainly refer to iron and coal, both of which (or substitutes) can also be easily obtained in a renewable manner and/or with hardly any effort from farms).
(if you think the numbers for ores I've mined are extreme, here is an example of what I mined in my first world; I still have a long way to go to reach that)
Say what?! Was this supposed to be posted on a different thread? Because I can't fathom how somebody could say such a thing, given my username, the thread title, and the contents of most of my posts.
"This may be surprising, but the master caver doesn't do any caving to get resources they need; like everybody else I dig a staircase down, blocking off any caves I encounter"
Maybe you were saying you just don't cave early on in game and I misunderstood you. My bad. I hope you can see where I got confused though, and no, I haven't read through this whole thread.
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The other day I mentioned that I got diamond armor from a zombie, right? Well, the same thing happened again - another zombie in full diamond armor dropped diamond leggings, only this time they weren't enchanted; I also took screenshots of the zombie, which was part of a massive horde spawned from a dungeon:
The baby zombie picked up the leggings right after I took this:
Look at all of the XP!
Most of the zombies came from this dungeon (the cave opening seen near the top of the screenshot above leads to it):
This is also the sort of situation where it is a good thing that instead of limiting your attack speed they gave mobs a temporary invulnerability period, so you can attack multiple mobs in rapid succession; even then I ended up backing through half of the ravine and lost 3.5 hearts (my hunger was full at the beginning) by the time they were killed off.
The rarity of this is probably comparable to the time I saw two zombies in diamond armor within half an hour while playing on my first world, although neither had full armor and neither dropped anything (this was before I modified how regional difficulty is calculated, and the chances of higher tiers after leather or gold and successive pieces of armor after a helmet).
Also, the cave system I mentioned before, including a giant surface opening, turned out to be very large - comparable to a cave system in my first world, which is shown to the right for comparison:
Here are some screenshots from inside:
To give you an idea of how large it was, I mined around 12,000 ores from it over three play sessions, including about a stack of diamonds, but only a single vein of 6 amethyst.
The size and density of this cave system means that it is likely (but not definitely) what I referred to as a "colossal" cave system in an earlier post, a cave system meant to simulate the cave system in my first world, of which you can see some screenshots here for comparison; of course, there are no giant caves in this one (actually, the giant cave in the first screenshot above is not part of it as they and normal cave systems, ravines, and mineshafts cannot generate within a 6 chunk radius of the center, but can intersect the edges):
I've previously mentioned how rare amethyst ore is and that I've found more emerald ore; I used MCEdit to analyze my world over the 59 layers between lava and sea levels (y=4 to 62), and found that overall there was more than twice as much emerald ore (amethyst ore is obsidian with a data value of 1):
Note that amethyst ore becomes more common below y=3 (about half of diamond at y=1, a third at y=1-2) and is more common than emerald ore overall; the amount of diamond ore relative to emerald is underestimated since only what is exposed in caves is shown, although in TMCW there is less ore below y=4 than above due to the limited space and more ore in the upper layers (equivalent to y=13-15) to offset the deeper underground and lower percentage of all air blocks in the deepest 5 layers (about 2 diamond ore per chunk for about 60% above and 40% below).
Also, for comparison, there were about 1 million iron ore and 1.75 million coal ore in 13,725 chunks. There were also about 14 million air blocks for an underground air fraction of 6.7%; a comparable area of my first world had 6.1% air blocks between y=11-62, so the larger caves and ravines don't have much of an impact (the largest ones can contain over 200,000 air blocks to as many as 400,000 for the most extreme case I've seen, the one mentioned in post #109; the cave system I recently explored had about 220,000).
And yes, there are close to 53,000 torches underground, not including a few hundred in my mine, which is entirely below y=4, a couple hundred more above sea level, and a thousand or so used in the Nether (as markers). That's still only about half of my first world - before I'd played on it for another half year or so. Notice also that most of them have a data value of 5, which is for torches standing on the ground, and shows that I do not use them to navigate (i.e. place them on the left or right side); I've also been placing less torches on walls than I did two years ago (about 32,000 on walls and 66,000 on the floor, or about 2.5x more wall torches).
(I probably should have enlarged the window when taking this; normally the map is not obscured by the HUD but I usually use the default resolution to take screenshots)
I've gone so far to the south that I went off the second fully zoomed (2048x2048) map I've made, with the first centered at my main base to the west; the distance I've gone from my main base is about 1700 blocks to the east and 1100 blocks to the south, or a straight-line distance of more than 2000 blocks - all through interconnected caves/mineshafts/ravines, and I've also explored to the west and north of my main base (I haven't gone very far since I didn't find any caves leading further north, or forgot the locations of any caves that do. There are more caves to the southwest though, which I may eventually come back to).
That sounds impressive but in my first world I went more than 3000 blocks from spawn in the same manner, and is pretty much the norm for pre-1.7 worlds, especially once you get far enough from spawn (1280 blocks from 0, 0) that mineshafts reach their maximum frequency of one per 100 chunks (since a mineshaft can extend +/-5 chunks for their center this means they can cover a 10x10, 100 chunk area - in other words, you can have solid mineshafts across the entire world). In fact, I'd almost say that mineshafts are more common than caves at that point, and certainly more common than "large" cave systems (dense clusters of caves) which occur about once per 150 chunks or so based on some maps, although have less volume, around 10% or so of caves.
Of course, I made a new map after I was sure that it was needed; I waited until I'd gone too far off the first for it to update and decided to stop and go back to my secondary base to get materials for a new one after I explored a ravine and found more caves at the other end, which appear to connect to a new cave system:
Notice that I'm at the top of the map, which is centered at 2304, 1792; the reason why it is centered at this point is because the first map I made, before I modified maps, was centered at -256, 256 so I offset level 4 maps by -256, 256 to account for the first map's offset (this offset is only in my own "personal" mod, not the download, whcih is otherwise the same). Unlike 1.8, which chose a weird system involving the point -64, -64 and only level 0 maps are centered around the origin, I have maps be centered around 0, 0 and multiples thereof (0, 128, 256, ... for level 0 to 0, 2048, 4096, ... for level 4), which is consistent with how maps (level 0 only; I did not need to modify these) used to work.
In addition, this is where I came to land (probably part of the same continent to the northwest); a big oak forest with a jungle and probably a regular forest in the distance:
Here is another screenshot showing the marker that I build at each point I come up from a caving session; a 21 block cobblestone pillar with 4 torches, one every 7 blocks; in this case I dug a staircase to the surface:
Also, while they are rather dense in terms of leaf cover big oak forests are pretty open underneath, as well as relatively light due to a modification I made to the block opacity of leaves in certain biomes to help make them less shadowed (hostile mobs can still spawn during the day, like the skeleton seen near the right and a zombie to the left of the first screenshot; of course, these biomes are also rife with the lighting glitches common in older versions):
Also of note, notice the small islands near the bottom of the first map shown above? Those are likely a result of my mod, which made Mushroom Islands 15 times more common but only 1/15 are actually Mushroom Islands, with other biomes replacing the rest; in this case, Winter Taiga (1.6.4 snowy taiga) and Tropical Swamp. There is also something far to the north, which may or may not be an island(s), although I haven't seen what is to the east of it:
Notice something unusual here?
That's right - a gravel beach, which generate next to snowy biomes in place of sand beaches:
In addition, here is a clearer look at the winter taiga - notice that there is snow under the trees, another improvement I made (the snow-free grass in the lower-left is gravel beach, the gravel does not go higher than 2 blocks above sea level, just like beaches back in Beta 1.7.3):
Also, not seen here, gravel beaches have scattered single blocks of gold ore under the surface (I'm not digging them up to find them, just a fun feature I thought to add).
In addition, here is an impressive map of the underground (25% of full size, the original map was 7000 pixels across) and a full-size view of the area I've explored most recently, which included a quadruple ravine complex (all normal size, I haven't found anything noteworthy for a while as far as giant caves or ravines go; I've been finding lots of mineshafts though - including two that intersected each other, the first time I've seen this rare occurrence, rare because they have a minimum spacing between them, thus can only intersect at the edges):
In the lower-right you can see where I last went up, digging a 2x2 spiral staircase, then a normal staircase to dry land; at the top is part of a large complex of caves and mineshafts, near the center are 4 intersecting ravines and a mineshaft, which connects to a second, smaller mineshaft below, which in turn leads to a few caves and another ravine, which in turn connects to more caves on the far right, which I haven't explored yet:
If I get far enough to the south and there is no ocean I'll consider building another base; since it is easy to cross oceans with a boat I haven't considered it yet; similarly, in my first world I'd gone well over 1500 blocks from the nearest base while exploring under the ocean. I'd also probably use boats instead of making a railway (under the seafloor) to travel between them.
I've often mentioned how quickly I can explore caves; in just the past day I explored two more abandoned mineshafts, a ravine and two small cave systems, leading from the place where I previously left off and returned to after making a new map:
There was also a medium-size large cave in one of the cave systems, seen to the left, and a smaller one in the other. One thing that I thought to note is that these caves, even when they are at the low end of their size range, like the second one mentioned, can frequently be identified by having a wider than usual minimum width, which is evident when you find the start of a cave. Normal caves have a minimum width of 3 blocks while these large caves have a minimum width of 4 or 5 blocks, depending on their type (there are actually two types of large caves, one which is relatively common but averages relatively small while another is rare but averages much larger).
The area I'm in appears to have a relatively low concentration of caves, which conversely means more mineshafts since the latter don't generate if there are too many caves in the area, and they can become as common as one every 98 chunks, about the same as the overall average in vanilla 1.6.4 (1/100 chance, 1/250 in 1.7+), except that instead of generating completely randomly they generate to a 14 chunk grid at relative coordinates 0, 0 and 7, 7, with an offset of 0-2 chunks from each point (this is very similar to how villages and other structures generate; by default they use a 32 chunk grid with a variation of 24 chunks, or a min-max spacing of 9-32 chunks).
Also, speaking of variations in cave density, as I've mentioned before the biggest difference between 1.6 and 1.7 is not so much an overall reduction in caves but a reduction in local to regional variation, which is clearly evident in the following charts, which plot the number of chunks found with a given number of caves within 4, 8, and 16 chunk radii. For 1.6.4, at a 4 chunk radius there are actually more chunks with no caves than any other count, which reflects the greater clustering of caves, as evident in the maps I previously posted in post #101, and even at 8 chunks there is a very low chance of no caves:
This is for vanilla but I presume that the distribution is the same in my mod, which changed the way the size/chance of caves is calculated but it should give the same result, and while the large caves I added are added separately I subtract one from the size of normal cave systems whenever one generates, thus the overall number of caves is the same. When actual numbers are compared, 1.6.4 has an average of 0.325 caves per chunk while 1.7+ has 0.25, or 30% more caves for 1.6.4 / 23% less for 1.7 (the actual number of caves is 37.5% higher, or 0.446875 and 0.34375 caves per chunk respectively, since whenever a circular room is generated, which has a 25% chance per individual cave, 1-4 normal caves are generated, leading to an average of 2.5 caves for that 25%, or 0.625, plus 0.75 for the remaining 75% of caves. This also creates an additional variation in density, which is not reflected on these charts).
Do you have any charts that consider the number of blocks (or. if you want to get fancy the number of ore blocks) exposed to air inside the cave across the changes to cave generation? Would be interesting to look at.
Also. as someone who frequently gets lots when exploring caves, I am curious to if you have system to navigate complex cave systems without getting lost.
Do you have any charts that consider the number of blocks (or. if you want to get fancy the number of ore blocks) exposed to air inside the cave across the changes to cave generation? Would be interesting to look at.
Also. as someone who frequently gets lots when exploring caves, I am curious to if you have system to navigate complex cave systems without getting lost.
There shouldn't be any differences in how many ores you'll find exposed in the same length of cave regardless of version; it is all down to how common the ores themselves are; e.g. coal ore is about 1% of stone so any given stone block has a 1% chance of being coal ore. The size of veins also has to be considered; since coal averages around 20 ore per complete vein (based on my findings here; the "size" of a vein, as set in Customized, does not directly control the average size of a vein) this means you are less likely to find a vein than if it were single blocks, but get more ore from one. Also, I mine considerably more coal than its relative abundance to iron would suggest, sometimes by a factor of 2:1 (i.e. coal is about 1.66 times more common than iron but I've mined more than 3 times during a single play session, without going above sea level), which is likely due to the veins being larger, thus more likely to intersect a cave, plus you expose indirectly "exposed" ores when mining out a vein (e.g. a 2x2x2 iron vein may have only one block exposed but you find the other 7 after mining).
That said, in 1.8 the "size" of all ores was increased by one, which doesn't sound like a big difference but together with other changes, there is considerably more ore, as much as 45% over what the Wiki gives for iron.
Also, in terms of overall air volume, narrower caves, including caves that are less dense and intersecting, will expose more ore since a doubling of the width of a cave quadruples the volume (length held constant) but only doubles the surface area; four caves with the original width will have the same volume and four times the area, plus for very large caves I may not see ores in the middle of the ceiling, which is hard to light up, and very deep caves have lava floors. Note that 1.7 did not change the size of individual caves, only the size or density of cave systems and the overall number of caves; otherwise, everything is exactly the same across versions.
In fact, even as far back as InfDev caves were essentially the same as now, with the exception of the later addition of a 10% chance of a cave up to 4 times the normal maximum width (my mod basically expands upon this, with a roughly 2% chance of an even larger cave (split 50/50 into two more size ranges), and a 0.07% chance of a still larger cave, both based on their per-chunk occurrences).
As for my system of exploring caves and navigating around them, it is mainly down to memory and a good sense of direction, along with using maps to roughly see where I am and have been; basically, what I do is explore outwards from a marked surface entrance (as shown in a previous post), returning to it 2-3 times before I go on to the next area I marked, which is usually when I find a new cave system/mineshaft/ravine and haven't finished exploring the previous one yet. Otherwise, I don't use any markers other than torches, which simply indicate that I've been in an area before, and in mineshafts I often place cobblestone between the pillars in intersections, more so that mobs don't come out of them than for navigation; I'll mine them out and not replace them when I go back through. Usually, when exploring caves I'll go through a cave until I reach an intersection or dead end, then backtrack and mine the ores back to the last intersection, then go down another branch.
For a good example of this, I returned back to the marker I previously mentioned (marked as "Entrance") and went down another branch of a cave (circled in red) I'd found intersecting the ravine where I'd left off - which almost immediately lead to a second ravine coming within 10 blocks of the first, and more caves and a third ravine (a modded one; it was around 50% longer than a normal ravine, average width). You can also see where I found a few more caves near the bottom:
This is the largest ravine I've found so far, in terms of width and overall volume - at its widest it was 30 blocks across, which is about 75% of the maximum width they can reach and about 5 times wider than the average ravine:
Compared to smaller ravines these ravines tend to have very rugged walls with multiple ledges, which would also be much larger if I didn't scale down the amplitude of the noise that defines their contour; I also scale down their width-height ratio so they aren't so deep:
While it didn't break the surface there was this cave in the ceiling which lead straight down, just above the waterfall seen in the previous screenshots, which I kept as an elevator to the surface (I previously exited from this cave and marked it for returning to):
Also, here is a rendering in Minutor, which also show how large it is compared to normal sized ravines, like the one in the upper-left; to the east of that ravine is a very long but relatively narrow ravine:
I used MCEdit to see how many air blocks there were and there were about 270,000, including some caves within the rectangular selection, though not that many.
I've decided to return to my main base and explore areas I left off before going off to the east; I know that to the south and southwest are more unexplored areas; this is after I spent around an hour running around in the vicinity of the giant ravine and not finding any more unexplored caves that lead anywhere; I thought of trying points I'd marked further north but those are under an ocean and I'd like to explore more land. Here is an updated map wall, now at three 2048x2048 maps:
(there is a cutoff between the maps to the right since I'd explored further west on the bottom map but did not update the top one)
I've also implemented a novel solution for storing the maps I carry around; I placed a dispenser next to the map wall and put the maps in the corresponding slots; since it is very unlikely I'll ever go more than one map from the spawn map (3x3 maps, 3,072 blocks from center to edge) this is a good storage solution:
Also of note, I recently passed the 1,000 day mark, which is almost but not quite the second-longest I've played any world (based on the time played statistic, which is actually more accurate since it doesn't skip when you sleep in a bed, although I don't sleep that often):
Of interest, here are some of the statistics for the world:
General; the longest I've played on one world is 50.94 days, with second place being 14.72 days:
Looking at this, I just realized that I haven't tamed an ocelot yet, since I haven't caught any fish (there is a jungle to the south and two more to the east).
Blocks mined; compared to my first world I've been mining more stone, though some can be attributed to the largest branch-mine I ever dug; larger ravines are the most likely reason since I carve out ledges to make them easily walkable, and ravines have rougher walls in general; I've also used less ladders (not shown) as a result:
Despite recently exploring a large area under the ocean and otherwise non-emerald-bearing biomes I've still mined about a third more emerald ore than amethyst, which has averaged 8.2 times rarer than diamond so far; 18% of all the amethyst I've mined still came from a few hours of branch-mining when I mined for my first resources:
Amethyst items; I've also mined about 39,000 blocks with a diamond pickaxe, which I used for nearly all non-caving related mining so the amethyst pickaxe almost entirely reflects caving (except for emerald ore and Ender chests, mined with a Silk Touch diamond pickaxe):
In addition, I found a mod like my own that makes caves and ravines bigger, although it appears to have made all of them bigger (they posted code showing that they multiplied what I know is the width by 5, so the average ravine is about as wide as the one I just found, and changed the height to be 300000 times the width instead of 3, which is extreme overkill) and basically turned the surface into a warzone cut apart by giant ravines which always cut through the entire ground layer and even through the ocean:
As I mentioned last time, I decided to return to my main base and explore areas nearby, this time to the southwest:
So far I've found another gigantic cave and a village, the third one I've found so far, with the cave almost right under the village. The cave was one of the deepest that I've seen, going from y=4 (lowest non-lava layer) up to the surface, a more or less spherical chamber some 60 blocks in diameter:
I've found quite a few of these so far, although they aren't particularly common unless you specifically search for them or do a lot of caving; the largest variant generates once every 3,000 chunks on average, or an average spacing of about 876 blocks between caves (the actual frequency would be somewhat higher since another variant, which is much more common, can get just as large, but has a much smaller average size), and with the amount of caving that I do I can expect to find about one every 30 days or so.
Here's a look at the village after I put a wall around it (the cobblestone I've been using for this is mostly from the branch-mining I did early on; I don't take any with me while caving except for whatever I have in my inventory), as well as some of the surrounding landscape (near the left you can see the surface opening of the giant cave on the other side of the river):
Notice the forested biome in the background, which is a mixed forest biome, densely populated with most small tree types (oak, spruce, birch, jungle and "poplar", which are made from birch wood and leaves):
This is the second mixed forest I've found, but the first one did not have poplar trees since I added them later on, including a small sub-biome containing them inside birch forest, the latter of which I found earlier.
In the other direction is the "mega" version of mixed forest, with all types of giant trees (jungle, 2x2 spruce (from 1.7), mega taiga (3x3 spruce trees), big oak forest (2x2 large oaks), and mega trees (giant 2x2 oak trees similar to jungle trees in structure); the height of the trees is amplified by rather hilly terrain (the mega trees can get tall enough to reach cloud level from sea level). There is also another mega mixed forest behind the regular mixed forest shown above (you can just see the fog-obscured outlines of trees to the left):
While I've now found multiple instances of many biomes I still haven't found them all, not even every otherwise common vanilla biome; I haven't found a regular swamp or desert yet (the desert you see on the map is a mountainous desert, which as its name suggests usually has hilly to mountainous terrain; patches of normal desert can generate inside them but I don't count that as finding a normal desert, which is also the only way to find desert temples). As for "special" biomes (outside the normal biome areas), it is possible to find ice plains outside of snowy zones, although they aren't that common and are less likely to be large enough to contain sub-biomes (ice hills and ice spikes; the latter can also rarely generate as a normal size biome in snowy areas).
I finally found a new biome, after not having found any for a while (the ones mentioned last time I found previously, as far back as when I searched for a stronghold) - Mega Forest, containing the tallest trees that I know of in any mod (not that I know of many, I'm sure there are mods with bigger trees); as mentioned before they can get tall enough to reach the clouds from sea level with a maximum trunk height of 63 blocks, plus a few more for the leaves and get up to 18-19 blocks wide:
Also, here is a view of the mountainous desert; of note, rivers that run through deserts are actually a different biome from normal rivers, similar to frozen river, and use "desert" as their base biome, so they are entirely covered with sand:
I covered quite a large area over the past day - almost off the southern edge of the map and about 500 blocks to the south of the village/giant cave:
Here is another view of the mega forest along with coordinates; for comparison, spawn and the center of the map is near -256, 256:
Here is a rendering of caves over the whole area, from the giant cave on the far left to the mega forest to the far right with desert caves between; caves in deserts have sandstone walls and ceilings and sand floors down to a depth of around y=45, with normal stone behind (in 1.7 deserts are solid sandstone underneath the sand above sea level). Ores can also be found in these caves since they are added before I replace exposed stone with sand and sandstone, as well as any stone that touches iron and coal (so mining it out will leave a sandstone-lined pocket); dirt and gravel only generate up to y=48 with pockets of sand replacing them higher up:
Also, here is a look at a more typical "big cave":
On the right you can see the "start" of the cave, which begins at 4 blocks across and widens out to reach the maximum width at 50% of the length; normal caves start out narrower, making it easy to tell them apart if you can find the start:
The cave then spirals upwards while gradually widening:
At this point the cave splits into two smaller branches, which are between 1/3-2/3 of the width and in this case not much different from normal caves:
Interestingly, none of the caves I explored this time had any diamonds in them and little of anything other than coal and iron, and not as many mobs as usual either (a witch dungeon provided some excitement; after getting poisoned by and killing several I got attacked by more a few minutes later, then saw one drop from a hole in the ceiling; not exactly the best location for a dungeon):
This further explains why, as I explained here, I don't go caving to get resources when I start out in a new world - it is just too unpredictable for rarer resources; sure, I did get 60 diamonds one time but that is the exception (getting none also is, but generally it would take me 2-3 days to get enough for full diamond gear; of course, exploring everything I come across, not just the deepest layers).
Another notable thing - this is now my second longest played world, surpassing a world I played using the first version of TMCW, though still less than a third as long as my first world.
I think they meant to post on another thread; the only other possibility was that they were referring to my early gathering of resources, in which case caving is simply not an option given how rare amethyst is, even rarer than emerald ore and monster spawners (based on what I've found so far by caving). I even took the time to enchant a diamond pickaxe with Fortune III to mine what I found in the largest mine I've ever made (in retrospect I might as well have just done some more mining; for diamond I wouldn't bother with it at all).
This should be pretty self-explanatory:
Not only that, 27 of that amethyst came from branch-mining, compared to 85 diamond ore, and perhaps 1% of the coal and iron, and a few emerald ore, thus the ratios are even larger than these raw numbers suggest (i.e. from caving only). In fact, even with the triple diamond durability my pickaxe alone has consumed about 53 amethyst (each one restores 1171 durability, 4684 uses, which is only 2.25 times better per unit than diamond since repairing with new items uses 3/4 as many units); I've also mined over 1800 blocks per amethyst ore found:
Similar logic applies to diamond; I don't want to spend so much time getting it, plus branch-mining enables you to get it without ever fighting any mobs, a point often lost on people who claim it is too easy to get resources by caving (e.g. this thread; naturally, they mainly refer to iron and coal, both of which (or substitutes) can also be easily obtained in a renewable manner and/or with hardly any effort from farms).
(if you think the numbers for ores I've mined are extreme, here is an example of what I mined in my first world; I still have a long way to go to reach that)
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?
"This may be surprising, but the master caver doesn't do any caving to get resources they need; like everybody else I dig a staircase down, blocking off any caves I encounter"
Maybe you were saying you just don't cave early on in game and I misunderstood you. My bad. I hope you can see where I got confused though, and no, I haven't read through this whole thread.
If you're interested in an awesome, white-listed, pure vanilla server, consider applying!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/servers/pc-servers/2811770-axiba-smp-community-focused-vanilla-survival#c4
The other day I mentioned that I got diamond armor from a zombie, right? Well, the same thing happened again - another zombie in full diamond armor dropped diamond leggings, only this time they weren't enchanted; I also took screenshots of the zombie, which was part of a massive horde spawned from a dungeon:
The baby zombie picked up the leggings right after I took this:
Look at all of the XP!
Most of the zombies came from this dungeon (the cave opening seen near the top of the screenshot above leads to it):
This is also the sort of situation where it is a good thing that instead of limiting your attack speed they gave mobs a temporary invulnerability period, so you can attack multiple mobs in rapid succession; even then I ended up backing through half of the ravine and lost 3.5 hearts (my hunger was full at the beginning) by the time they were killed off.
The rarity of this is probably comparable to the time I saw two zombies in diamond armor within half an hour while playing on my first world, although neither had full armor and neither dropped anything (this was before I modified how regional difficulty is calculated, and the chances of higher tiers after leather or gold and successive pieces of armor after a helmet).
Also, the cave system I mentioned before, including a giant surface opening, turned out to be very large - comparable to a cave system in my first world, which is shown to the right for comparison:
Here are some screenshots from inside:
To give you an idea of how large it was, I mined around 12,000 ores from it over three play sessions, including about a stack of diamonds, but only a single vein of 6 amethyst.
The size and density of this cave system means that it is likely (but not definitely) what I referred to as a "colossal" cave system in an earlier post, a cave system meant to simulate the cave system in my first world, of which you can see some screenshots here for comparison; of course, there are no giant caves in this one (actually, the giant cave in the first screenshot above is not part of it as they and normal cave systems, ravines, and mineshafts cannot generate within a 6 chunk radius of the center, but can intersect the edges):
Believe it or not, you can find cave systems far larger than these in vanilla, and that one certainly isn't "the largest cave system ever/possible" (less dense networks of caves also easily exceed these in areal extent, if not overall volume; for example, a huge complex of caves and mineshafts I found in my first world).
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've previously mentioned how rare amethyst ore is and that I've found more emerald ore; I used MCEdit to analyze my world over the 59 layers between lava and sea levels (y=4 to 62), and found that overall there was more than twice as much emerald ore (amethyst ore is obsidian with a data value of 1):
Note that amethyst ore becomes more common below y=3 (about half of diamond at y=1, a third at y=1-2) and is more common than emerald ore overall; the amount of diamond ore relative to emerald is underestimated since only what is exposed in caves is shown, although in TMCW there is less ore below y=4 than above due to the limited space and more ore in the upper layers (equivalent to y=13-15) to offset the deeper underground and lower percentage of all air blocks in the deepest 5 layers (about 2 diamond ore per chunk for about 60% above and 40% below).
Also, for comparison, there were about 1 million iron ore and 1.75 million coal ore in 13,725 chunks. There were also about 14 million air blocks for an underground air fraction of 6.7%; a comparable area of my first world had 6.1% air blocks between y=11-62, so the larger caves and ravines don't have much of an impact (the largest ones can contain over 200,000 air blocks to as many as 400,000 for the most extreme case I've seen, the one mentioned in post #109; the cave system I recently explored had about 220,000).
And yes, there are close to 53,000 torches underground, not including a few hundred in my mine, which is entirely below y=4, a couple hundred more above sea level, and a thousand or so used in the Nether (as markers). That's still only about half of my first world - before I'd played on it for another half year or so. Notice also that most of them have a data value of 5, which is for torches standing on the ground, and shows that I do not use them to navigate (i.e. place them on the left or right side); I've also been placing less torches on walls than I did two years ago (about 32,000 on walls and 66,000 on the floor, or about 2.5x more wall torches).
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 need a new map:
(I probably should have enlarged the window when taking this; normally the map is not obscured by the HUD but I usually use the default resolution to take screenshots)
I've gone so far to the south that I went off the second fully zoomed (2048x2048) map I've made, with the first centered at my main base to the west; the distance I've gone from my main base is about 1700 blocks to the east and 1100 blocks to the south, or a straight-line distance of more than 2000 blocks - all through interconnected caves/mineshafts/ravines, and I've also explored to the west and north of my main base (I haven't gone very far since I didn't find any caves leading further north, or forgot the locations of any caves that do. There are more caves to the southwest though, which I may eventually come back to).
That sounds impressive but in my first world I went more than 3000 blocks from spawn in the same manner, and is pretty much the norm for pre-1.7 worlds, especially once you get far enough from spawn (1280 blocks from 0, 0) that mineshafts reach their maximum frequency of one per 100 chunks (since a mineshaft can extend +/-5 chunks for their center this means they can cover a 10x10, 100 chunk area - in other words, you can have solid mineshafts across the entire world). In fact, I'd almost say that mineshafts are more common than caves at that point, and certainly more common than "large" cave systems (dense clusters of caves) which occur about once per 150 chunks or so based on some maps, although have less volume, around 10% or so of caves.
Of course, I made a new map after I was sure that it was needed; I waited until I'd gone too far off the first for it to update and decided to stop and go back to my secondary base to get materials for a new one after I explored a ravine and found more caves at the other end, which appear to connect to a new cave system:
Notice that I'm at the top of the map, which is centered at 2304, 1792; the reason why it is centered at this point is because the first map I made, before I modified maps, was centered at -256, 256 so I offset level 4 maps by -256, 256 to account for the first map's offset (this offset is only in my own "personal" mod, not the download, whcih is otherwise the same). Unlike 1.8, which chose a weird system involving the point -64, -64 and only level 0 maps are centered around the origin, I have maps be centered around 0, 0 and multiples thereof (0, 128, 256, ... for level 0 to 0, 2048, 4096, ... for level 4), which is consistent with how maps (level 0 only; I did not need to modify these) used to work.
In addition, this is where I came to land (probably part of the same continent to the northwest); a big oak forest with a jungle and probably a regular forest in the distance:
Here is another screenshot showing the marker that I build at each point I come up from a caving session; a 21 block cobblestone pillar with 4 torches, one every 7 blocks; in this case I dug a staircase to the surface:
Also, while they are rather dense in terms of leaf cover big oak forests are pretty open underneath, as well as relatively light due to a modification I made to the block opacity of leaves in certain biomes to help make them less shadowed (hostile mobs can still spawn during the day, like the skeleton seen near the right and a zombie to the left of the first screenshot; of course, these biomes are also rife with the lighting glitches common in older versions):
Also of note, notice the small islands near the bottom of the first map shown above? Those are likely a result of my mod, which made Mushroom Islands 15 times more common but only 1/15 are actually Mushroom Islands, with other biomes replacing the rest; in this case, Winter Taiga (1.6.4 snowy taiga) and Tropical Swamp. There is also something far to the north, which may or may not be an island(s), although I haven't seen what is to the east of it:
That's right - a gravel beach, which generate next to snowy biomes in place of sand beaches:
In addition, here is a clearer look at the winter taiga - notice that there is snow under the trees, another improvement I made (the snow-free grass in the lower-left is gravel beach, the gravel does not go higher than 2 blocks above sea level, just like beaches back in Beta 1.7.3):
Also, not seen here, gravel beaches have scattered single blocks of gold ore under the surface (I'm not digging them up to find them, just a fun feature I thought to add).
In addition, here is an impressive map of the underground (25% of full size, the original map was 7000 pixels across) and a full-size view of the area I've explored most recently, which included a quadruple ravine complex (all normal size, I haven't found anything noteworthy for a while as far as giant caves or ravines go; I've been finding lots of mineshafts though - including two that intersected each other, the first time I've seen this rare occurrence, rare because they have a minimum spacing between them, thus can only intersect at the edges):
In the lower-right you can see where I last went up, digging a 2x2 spiral staircase, then a normal staircase to dry land; at the top is part of a large complex of caves and mineshafts, near the center are 4 intersecting ravines and a mineshaft, which connects to a second, smaller mineshaft below, which in turn leads to a few caves and another ravine, which in turn connects to more caves on the far right, which I haven't explored yet:
If I get far enough to the south and there is no ocean I'll consider building another base; since it is easy to cross oceans with a boat I haven't considered it yet; similarly, in my first world I'd gone well over 1500 blocks from the nearest base while exploring under the ocean. I'd also probably use boats instead of making a railway (under the seafloor) to travel between them.
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've often mentioned how quickly I can explore caves; in just the past day I explored two more abandoned mineshafts, a ravine and two small cave systems, leading from the place where I previously left off and returned to after making a new map:
There was also a medium-size large cave in one of the cave systems, seen to the left, and a smaller one in the other. One thing that I thought to note is that these caves, even when they are at the low end of their size range, like the second one mentioned, can frequently be identified by having a wider than usual minimum width, which is evident when you find the start of a cave. Normal caves have a minimum width of 3 blocks while these large caves have a minimum width of 4 or 5 blocks, depending on their type (there are actually two types of large caves, one which is relatively common but averages relatively small while another is rare but averages much larger).
The area I'm in appears to have a relatively low concentration of caves, which conversely means more mineshafts since the latter don't generate if there are too many caves in the area, and they can become as common as one every 98 chunks, about the same as the overall average in vanilla 1.6.4 (1/100 chance, 1/250 in 1.7+), except that instead of generating completely randomly they generate to a 14 chunk grid at relative coordinates 0, 0 and 7, 7, with an offset of 0-2 chunks from each point (this is very similar to how villages and other structures generate; by default they use a 32 chunk grid with a variation of 24 chunks, or a min-max spacing of 9-32 chunks).
Also, speaking of variations in cave density, as I've mentioned before the biggest difference between 1.6 and 1.7 is not so much an overall reduction in caves but a reduction in local to regional variation, which is clearly evident in the following charts, which plot the number of chunks found with a given number of caves within 4, 8, and 16 chunk radii. For 1.6.4, at a 4 chunk radius there are actually more chunks with no caves than any other count, which reflects the greater clustering of caves, as evident in the maps I previously posted in post #101, and even at 8 chunks there is a very low chance of no caves:
This is for vanilla but I presume that the distribution is the same in my mod, which changed the way the size/chance of caves is calculated but it should give the same result, and while the large caves I added are added separately I subtract one from the size of normal cave systems whenever one generates, thus the overall number of caves is the same. When actual numbers are compared, 1.6.4 has an average of 0.325 caves per chunk while 1.7+ has 0.25, or 30% more caves for 1.6.4 / 23% less for 1.7 (the actual number of caves is 37.5% higher, or 0.446875 and 0.34375 caves per chunk respectively, since whenever a circular room is generated, which has a 25% chance per individual cave, 1-4 normal caves are generated, leading to an average of 2.5 caves for that 25%, or 0.625, plus 0.75 for the remaining 75% of caves. This also creates an additional variation in density, which is not reflected on these charts).
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?
Do you have any charts that consider the number of blocks (or. if you want to get fancy the number of ore blocks) exposed to air inside the cave across the changes to cave generation? Would be interesting to look at.
Also. as someone who frequently gets lots when exploring caves, I am curious to if you have system to navigate complex cave systems without getting lost.
There shouldn't be any differences in how many ores you'll find exposed in the same length of cave regardless of version; it is all down to how common the ores themselves are; e.g. coal ore is about 1% of stone so any given stone block has a 1% chance of being coal ore. The size of veins also has to be considered; since coal averages around 20 ore per complete vein (based on my findings here; the "size" of a vein, as set in Customized, does not directly control the average size of a vein) this means you are less likely to find a vein than if it were single blocks, but get more ore from one. Also, I mine considerably more coal than its relative abundance to iron would suggest, sometimes by a factor of 2:1 (i.e. coal is about 1.66 times more common than iron but I've mined more than 3 times during a single play session, without going above sea level), which is likely due to the veins being larger, thus more likely to intersect a cave, plus you expose indirectly "exposed" ores when mining out a vein (e.g. a 2x2x2 iron vein may have only one block exposed but you find the other 7 after mining).
That said, in 1.8 the "size" of all ores was increased by one, which doesn't sound like a big difference but together with other changes, there is considerably more ore, as much as 45% over what the Wiki gives for iron.
Also, in terms of overall air volume, narrower caves, including caves that are less dense and intersecting, will expose more ore since a doubling of the width of a cave quadruples the volume (length held constant) but only doubles the surface area; four caves with the original width will have the same volume and four times the area, plus for very large caves I may not see ores in the middle of the ceiling, which is hard to light up, and very deep caves have lava floors. Note that 1.7 did not change the size of individual caves, only the size or density of cave systems and the overall number of caves; otherwise, everything is exactly the same across versions.
In fact, even as far back as InfDev caves were essentially the same as now, with the exception of the later addition of a 10% chance of a cave up to 4 times the normal maximum width (my mod basically expands upon this, with a roughly 2% chance of an even larger cave (split 50/50 into two more size ranges), and a 0.07% chance of a still larger cave, both based on their per-chunk occurrences).
As for my system of exploring caves and navigating around them, it is mainly down to memory and a good sense of direction, along with using maps to roughly see where I am and have been; basically, what I do is explore outwards from a marked surface entrance (as shown in a previous post), returning to it 2-3 times before I go on to the next area I marked, which is usually when I find a new cave system/mineshaft/ravine and haven't finished exploring the previous one yet. Otherwise, I don't use any markers other than torches, which simply indicate that I've been in an area before, and in mineshafts I often place cobblestone between the pillars in intersections, more so that mobs don't come out of them than for navigation; I'll mine them out and not replace them when I go back through. Usually, when exploring caves I'll go through a cave until I reach an intersection or dead end, then backtrack and mine the ores back to the last intersection, then go down another branch.
For a good example of this, I returned back to the marker I previously mentioned (marked as "Entrance") and went down another branch of a cave (circled in red) I'd found intersecting the ravine where I'd left off - which almost immediately lead to a second ravine coming within 10 blocks of the first, and more caves and a third ravine (a modded one; it was around 50% longer than a normal ravine, average width). You can also see where I found a few more caves near the bottom:
After:
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?
This is the largest ravine I've found so far, in terms of width and overall volume - at its widest it was 30 blocks across, which is about 75% of the maximum width they can reach and about 5 times wider than the average ravine:
Compared to smaller ravines these ravines tend to have very rugged walls with multiple ledges, which would also be much larger if I didn't scale down the amplitude of the noise that defines their contour; I also scale down their width-height ratio so they aren't so deep:
While it didn't break the surface there was this cave in the ceiling which lead straight down, just above the waterfall seen in the previous screenshots, which I kept as an elevator to the surface (I previously exited from this cave and marked it for returning to):
Also, here is a rendering in Minutor, which also show how large it is compared to normal sized ravines, like the one in the upper-left; to the east of that ravine is a very long but relatively narrow ravine:
I used MCEdit to see how many air blocks there were and there were about 270,000, including some caves within the rectangular selection, though not that many.
I've decided to return to my main base and explore areas I left off before going off to the east; I know that to the south and southwest are more unexplored areas; this is after I spent around an hour running around in the vicinity of the giant ravine and not finding any more unexplored caves that lead anywhere; I thought of trying points I'd marked further north but those are under an ocean and I'd like to explore more land. Here is an updated map wall, now at three 2048x2048 maps:
(there is a cutoff between the maps to the right since I'd explored further west on the bottom map but did not update the top one)
I've also implemented a novel solution for storing the maps I carry around; I placed a dispenser next to the map wall and put the maps in the corresponding slots; since it is very unlikely I'll ever go more than one map from the spawn map (3x3 maps, 3,072 blocks from center to edge) this is a good storage solution:
Also of note, I recently passed the 1,000 day mark, which is almost but not quite the second-longest I've played any world (based on the time played statistic, which is actually more accurate since it doesn't skip when you sleep in a bed, although I don't sleep that often):
Of interest, here are some of the statistics for the world:
Looking at this, I just realized that I haven't tamed an ocelot yet, since I haven't caught any fish (there is a jungle to the south and two more to the east).
Blocks mined; compared to my first world I've been mining more stone, though some can be attributed to the largest branch-mine I ever dug; larger ravines are the most likely reason since I carve out ledges to make them easily walkable, and ravines have rougher walls in general; I've also used less ladders (not shown) as a result:
Despite recently exploring a large area under the ocean and otherwise non-emerald-bearing biomes I've still mined about a third more emerald ore than amethyst, which has averaged 8.2 times rarer than diamond so far; 18% of all the amethyst I've mined still came from a few hours of branch-mining when I mined for my first resources:
Amethyst items; I've also mined about 39,000 blocks with a diamond pickaxe, which I used for nearly all non-caving related mining so the amethyst pickaxe almost entirely reflects caving (except for emerald ore and Ender chests, mined with a Silk Touch diamond pickaxe):
In addition, I found a mod like my own that makes caves and ravines bigger, although it appears to have made all of them bigger (they posted code showing that they multiplied what I know is the width by 5, so the average ravine is about as wide as the one I just found, and changed the height to be 300000 times the width instead of 3, which is extreme overkill) and basically turned the surface into a warzone cut apart by giant ravines which always cut through the entire ground layer and even through the ocean:
[1.5.2] Crazy Ravines (and Caves) Mod
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?
As I mentioned last time, I decided to return to my main base and explore areas nearby, this time to the southwest:
So far I've found another gigantic cave and a village, the third one I've found so far, with the cave almost right under the village. The cave was one of the deepest that I've seen, going from y=4 (lowest non-lava layer) up to the surface, a more or less spherical chamber some 60 blocks in diameter:
I've found quite a few of these so far, although they aren't particularly common unless you specifically search for them or do a lot of caving; the largest variant generates once every 3,000 chunks on average, or an average spacing of about 876 blocks between caves (the actual frequency would be somewhat higher since another variant, which is much more common, can get just as large, but has a much smaller average size), and with the amount of caving that I do I can expect to find about one every 30 days or so.
Here's a look at the village after I put a wall around it (the cobblestone I've been using for this is mostly from the branch-mining I did early on; I don't take any with me while caving except for whatever I have in my inventory), as well as some of the surrounding landscape (near the left you can see the surface opening of the giant cave on the other side of the river):
Notice the forested biome in the background, which is a mixed forest biome, densely populated with most small tree types (oak, spruce, birch, jungle and "poplar", which are made from birch wood and leaves):
This is the second mixed forest I've found, but the first one did not have poplar trees since I added them later on, including a small sub-biome containing them inside birch forest, the latter of which I found earlier.
In the other direction is the "mega" version of mixed forest, with all types of giant trees (jungle, 2x2 spruce (from 1.7), mega taiga (3x3 spruce trees), big oak forest (2x2 large oaks), and mega trees (giant 2x2 oak trees similar to jungle trees in structure); the height of the trees is amplified by rather hilly terrain (the mega trees can get tall enough to reach cloud level from sea level). There is also another mega mixed forest behind the regular mixed forest shown above (you can just see the fog-obscured outlines of trees to the left):
While I've now found multiple instances of many biomes I still haven't found them all, not even every otherwise common vanilla biome; I haven't found a regular swamp or desert yet (the desert you see on the map is a mountainous desert, which as its name suggests usually has hilly to mountainous terrain; patches of normal desert can generate inside them but I don't count that as finding a normal desert, which is also the only way to find desert temples). As for "special" biomes (outside the normal biome areas), it is possible to find ice plains outside of snowy zones, although they aren't that common and are less likely to be large enough to contain sub-biomes (ice hills and ice spikes; the latter can also rarely generate as a normal size biome in snowy areas).
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 finally found a new biome, after not having found any for a while (the ones mentioned last time I found previously, as far back as when I searched for a stronghold) - Mega Forest, containing the tallest trees that I know of in any mod (not that I know of many, I'm sure there are mods with bigger trees); as mentioned before they can get tall enough to reach the clouds from sea level with a maximum trunk height of 63 blocks, plus a few more for the leaves and get up to 18-19 blocks wide:
Also, here is a view of the mountainous desert; of note, rivers that run through deserts are actually a different biome from normal rivers, similar to frozen river, and use "desert" as their base biome, so they are entirely covered with sand:
I covered quite a large area over the past day - almost off the southern edge of the map and about 500 blocks to the south of the village/giant cave:
Here is another view of the mega forest along with coordinates; for comparison, spawn and the center of the map is near -256, 256:
Here is a rendering of caves over the whole area, from the giant cave on the far left to the mega forest to the far right with desert caves between; caves in deserts have sandstone walls and ceilings and sand floors down to a depth of around y=45, with normal stone behind (in 1.7 deserts are solid sandstone underneath the sand above sea level). Ores can also be found in these caves since they are added before I replace exposed stone with sand and sandstone, as well as any stone that touches iron and coal (so mining it out will leave a sandstone-lined pocket); dirt and gravel only generate up to y=48 with pockets of sand replacing them higher up:
Also, here is a look at a more typical "big cave":
The cave then spirals upwards while gradually widening:
At this point the cave splits into two smaller branches, which are between 1/3-2/3 of the width and in this case not much different from normal caves:
Interestingly, none of the caves I explored this time had any diamonds in them and little of anything other than coal and iron, and not as many mobs as usual either (a witch dungeon provided some excitement; after getting poisoned by and killing several I got attacked by more a few minutes later, then saw one drop from a hole in the ceiling; not exactly the best location for a dungeon):
This further explains why, as I explained here, I don't go caving to get resources when I start out in a new world - it is just too unpredictable for rarer resources; sure, I did get 60 diamonds one time but that is the exception (getting none also is, but generally it would take me 2-3 days to get enough for full diamond gear; of course, exploring everything I come across, not just the deepest layers).
Another notable thing - this is now my second longest played world, surpassing a world I played using the first version of TMCW, though still less than a third as long as my first world.
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?