The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
10/15/2012
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Minecraft:
LocalChamp9139
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I recently went exploring to obtain some of the newer stuff such as acacia/dark oak/corse dirt/podzol/red sand/packed ice. I managed to find most of what I wanted with no problem however after over 10,000 blocks (you have to love ender pearls) and countless regular ice plains biomes I was unable to find an ice spikes variant. I know they are supposed to be rare but considering the block isn't completely amazing I think that it is a bit too rare. The only uses I've seen for packed ice is a few different mob farm designs utilizing it.
I would love to hear others experience in trying to find this biome as I don't know if this is typical or I'm just unlucky.
I've played on at least 15 different worlds since that update (modpacks included) and you're right, it shouldn't be this rare, I explored a big part of every world I played (that's what I do in the beginning to search for a place to build my house) and I only found that biome twice.
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Texturer of the awesome One Piece mod Mine Mine no Mi:
It's rare for aesthetic reasons was the impression I was given, and it's all about your seed as I have found some worlds with no ice spikes in more then 15k in all directions. And others I have found two within a 1000 block radius. Meaning it's all relative to your world.
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I think Mojang wanted it to be rare, but I don't think Mojang wanted it to be *that* rare. If there's no ice spikes in 15K in all directions that means you'd have to search a path almost 1 million blocks to find it - which is to say "never" for a lot of Minecraft players. And the way the math works out if you start a new world it's not much better than just continuing the search - so some people not using mods or side programs like AMIDST would simply have to walk 1 million blocks before they saw an Ice Spikes. That is way too far.
I don't think Mojang *meant* for it to be so rare that some active, frequent, players who actually do exploring and traveling would *never* see Ice Spikes.
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
IIRC, Ice Spikes is the rarest biome in Minecraft. I have found just a couple in some creative worlds. Jungles are also quite rare. If you ask me, the temperate biomes are a little too common. I often find myself in a loop of a small Forest -> Plains -> Dark Forest -> Savanna -> Plains
Bryce is rarer than Ice Spikes, but since it doesn't have a unique resource, people care a lot less about finding it. Technically Jungle Edge M is even rarer but since it's unremarkable and distinguishable from Jungle Edge basically only by F3 it's just academic that it's rare.
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Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Anyways, yeah, the biomes are pretty unbalanced. Forests and savannahs and stuff are too common, while the others are too rare. I've explored to 20,000 blocks before and didn't even find all of them.
I've often been vexed/puzzled at the size and distribution of biomes in Minecraft. In my one and only 1.8 world I spawned within about 200 to 300 meters from an Ice Spikes biome (though it wasn't immediately visible and it took me a while to wander far enough to discover it). I've popped off a few blocks of packed ice for the novelty of it, but otherwise haven't spent any time there at all. It's kind of a shame, though- I've often thought it would be neat to build a little "garden path" through the spikes- it's pretty neat looking.
The snowy biome that contains the Ice Spikes is enormous- kind of a teardrop shape 2 km across at the widest by nearly 3 km high. I've found it to be among the least interesting places in my world and spend very little time there. The only thing going for it is that it's relatively easy/fast to map. It actually has two Ice Spikes regions within it (three, really, as two are barely if at all touching). The largest Ice Spikes region is a blob about 200 x 200, the smallest is probably less than 100 m on a side.
I've gone at least 3 km in every direction from spawn (completely revealing the maps as I go) and have yet to find a Mega Taiga (all I want is a couple of giant mushrooms fer cripes sake!) or a Jungle (or a Mushroom Island, but I'm rather less interested in that). In fact, I've only found two deserts (one as yet explored), one fully explored mesa, and one tiny (but impressive!) Savannah M biome. The rest is forest, forest, roofed forest, plains, more forest, ocean, and a few mountain chains scattered about. And some forest and plains.
I'm just about done with a sub-project I've been working on in my "Mayan Pyramid" thing I'm building. The first thing I'm going to do when I finish is grab an enderchest, a pile of paper and compasses, and take off for a good long walkabout! It will be a looong time before I get 10 km from spawn, but I'll keep looking!
cheers,
tbg
PS: Just did the math- I've fully revealed 29.36 square kilometers worth of territory and no jungle, no mega taiga.
I lucked out and found one during random exploration -- although alas, there wasn't a really good spot to build the ice house I wanted to make overlooking it. (I settled for making the ice house further away in a spot with a nice view of a mountain at the edge of the ice spikes, and then making an overlook that's easily accessible via a Nether portal near the one going to the house for when I want to admire the spikes.)
My nearest jungle, on the other hand, is 8,000 blocks away and I confess, I wanted jungle trees to build a treehouse so badly, that when someone mentioned how far away jungle is in the demo world (the world I'm playing in) I broke down and used ChunkBase to find it. I can't say I really regret as I really like my treehouse and I haven't even finished exploring 2k blocks from spawn in every direction -- it would have been forever before I found it. (I also really wanted to find cats, but maybe karma reared its ugly head there -- I've yet to see a single ocelot.)
I really lucked out on the mushroom island -- I was exploring my nearest Nether fortress, randomly slapped down a portal to see where it went, and popped out on a mushroom island.
I've yet to find a Mega Tiaga (too bad as I'd like podzol) or a Mesa biome. I do want a mesa as I'd like to build myself a cliff dwelling but haven't gotten desperate enough to try ChunkBase again.
It does seem like it would be nice if there were a way to guarantee you'd get every biome (or at least every major one) within a certain distance from spawn.
It does seem like it would be nice if there were a way to guarantee you'd get every biome (or at least every major one) within a certain distance from spawn.
The way Minecraft does generation it would be nearly impossible to guarantee all the biomes are within a certain distance of spawn, barring using a seed somebody found. I believe there is ONE, count it, ONE known seed that has all the major rarish biomes within 2K of spawn.
It would be very easy to reduce the typical distances with minor changes to the world gen parameters. I know, because that's how my Climate Control mod does it. The defaults reduce the search times by a factor of 4 to 8 for the amount of land you have to search to find all the rarish biomes, and you could reduce them even further with some changes to the config files.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
either 1.10 made ice spikes less rare, or I'm insanely lucky. I generated a world for my minecraft realm, I spawned on an island right next to an ocean monument, and there was an ice spike biome a 5 minute boat ride away.
either 1.10 made ice spikes less rare, or I'm insanely lucky. I generated a world for my minecraft realm, I spawned on an island right next to an ocean monument, and there was an ice spike biome a 5 minute boat ride away.
Just lucky. As far as I know there were no changes to terrain generation other than Magma blocks added to the Nether and gold ores generating at higher Y values in mesas.
Cold biomes aren't that much rarer than hot ones, it's just that they're clumped on a big scale and you happen to have gotten a lot of hot. The endless temperate biomes can get rather oppressive IMO - you've avoided some of that because the extreme biomes are much more common on coasts because of the way the smoothing routines work. Deep inland it's almost all temperate. On a long land trip I get to "OMG not another Forest" pretty fast.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
I have never found one before. Then, again, I don't do too much exploring outside of a few thousand blocks, so no wonder I haven't found one yet. Too bad, the biome looks pretty from pictures I see.
I must just be lucky, because I live in an Ice Spikes biome, on the edge of a cold region that spans at least two maps in every direction and contains no less than four separate Ice Spikes regions. It's the Bryce biome that's giving me trouble.
This was just pure luck, but i managed to find one in my current Survival World the other day. I wasn't actually looking for one, I was on the hunt for a Spruce Forest. But i stumbled across Ice Spikes instead. I don't really understand why it's so rare...there's nothing that exciting about it. Maybe that's just me though, because i don't really care for the snow biomes anyways.
I'm playing in a 1.7.10 modded survival world. I don't play the latest version of Minecraft because it doesn't have the mods i like.
Browsing the biomes in the wiki and how they are determined by temperature, I find the warm biomes are favored over any others(neutral and cold). It even makes it somewhat easy to spawn a canyon biome.
It just honestly feels like cold biomes are discouraged or set at a lower percentage chance to occur.
So it's no wonder that it is even harder to find icespike biomes.
While they should be rare enough to remain a treasure to see, which they are, they shouldn't be downright mythical.
I would like to see biome generation a bit more balanced as far as warm and cold climates go.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
In the real world, you stick your head in the dirt to hide from problems.
In Minecraft, you stick your head in the dirt to find problems.
I recently went exploring to obtain some of the newer stuff such as acacia/dark oak/corse dirt/podzol/red sand/packed ice. I managed to find most of what I wanted with no problem however after over 10,000 blocks (you have to love ender pearls) and countless regular ice plains biomes I was unable to find an ice spikes variant. I know they are supposed to be rare but considering the block isn't completely amazing I think that it is a bit too rare. The only uses I've seen for packed ice is a few different mob farm designs utilizing it.
I would love to hear others experience in trying to find this biome as I don't know if this is typical or I'm just unlucky.
I've played on at least 15 different worlds since that update (modpacks included) and you're right, it shouldn't be this rare, I explored a big part of every world I played (that's what I do in the beginning to search for a place to build my house) and I only found that biome twice.
Texturer of the awesome One Piece mod Mine Mine no Mi:
It's rare for aesthetic reasons was the impression I was given, and it's all about your seed as I have found some worlds with no ice spikes in more then 15k in all directions. And others I have found two within a 1000 block radius. Meaning it's all relative to your world.
I think Mojang wanted it to be rare, but I don't think Mojang wanted it to be *that* rare. If there's no ice spikes in 15K in all directions that means you'd have to search a path almost 1 million blocks to find it - which is to say "never" for a lot of Minecraft players. And the way the math works out if you start a new world it's not much better than just continuing the search - so some people not using mods or side programs like AMIDST would simply have to walk 1 million blocks before they saw an Ice Spikes. That is way too far.
I don't think Mojang *meant* for it to be so rare that some active, frequent, players who actually do exploring and traveling would *never* see Ice Spikes.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
IIRC, Ice Spikes is the rarest biome in Minecraft. I have found just a couple in some creative worlds. Jungles are also quite rare. If you ask me, the temperate biomes are a little too common. I often find myself in a loop of a small Forest -> Plains -> Dark Forest -> Savanna -> Plains
Figured it was time for a change.
Bryce is rarer than Ice Spikes, but since it doesn't have a unique resource, people care a lot less about finding it. Technically Jungle Edge M is even rarer but since it's unremarkable and distinguishable from Jungle Edge basically only by F3 it's just academic that it's rare.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Can we have your seed?
Anyways, yeah, the biomes are pretty unbalanced. Forests and savannahs and stuff are too common, while the others are too rare. I've explored to 20,000 blocks before and didn't even find all of them.
All-
I've often been vexed/puzzled at the size and distribution of biomes in Minecraft. In my one and only 1.8 world I spawned within about 200 to 300 meters from an Ice Spikes biome (though it wasn't immediately visible and it took me a while to wander far enough to discover it). I've popped off a few blocks of packed ice for the novelty of it, but otherwise haven't spent any time there at all. It's kind of a shame, though- I've often thought it would be neat to build a little "garden path" through the spikes- it's pretty neat looking.
The snowy biome that contains the Ice Spikes is enormous- kind of a teardrop shape 2 km across at the widest by nearly 3 km high. I've found it to be among the least interesting places in my world and spend very little time there. The only thing going for it is that it's relatively easy/fast to map. It actually has two Ice Spikes regions within it (three, really, as two are barely if at all touching). The largest Ice Spikes region is a blob about 200 x 200, the smallest is probably less than 100 m on a side.
I've gone at least 3 km in every direction from spawn (completely revealing the maps as I go) and have yet to find a Mega Taiga (all I want is a couple of giant mushrooms fer cripes sake!) or a Jungle (or a Mushroom Island, but I'm rather less interested in that). In fact, I've only found two deserts (one as yet explored), one fully explored mesa, and one tiny (but impressive!) Savannah M biome. The rest is forest, forest, roofed forest, plains, more forest, ocean, and a few mountain chains scattered about. And some forest and plains.
I'm just about done with a sub-project I've been working on in my "Mayan Pyramid" thing I'm building. The first thing I'm going to do when I finish is grab an enderchest, a pile of paper and compasses, and take off for a good long walkabout! It will be a looong time before I get 10 km from spawn, but I'll keep looking!
cheers,
tbg
PS: Just did the math- I've fully revealed 29.36 square kilometers worth of territory and no jungle, no mega taiga.
I lucked out and found one during random exploration -- although alas, there wasn't a really good spot to build the ice house I wanted to make overlooking it. (I settled for making the ice house further away in a spot with a nice view of a mountain at the edge of the ice spikes, and then making an overlook that's easily accessible via a Nether portal near the one going to the house for when I want to admire the spikes.)
My nearest jungle, on the other hand, is 8,000 blocks away and I confess, I wanted jungle trees to build a treehouse so badly, that when someone mentioned how far away jungle is in the demo world (the world I'm playing in) I broke down and used ChunkBase to find it. I can't say I really regret as I really like my treehouse and I haven't even finished exploring 2k blocks from spawn in every direction -- it would have been forever before I found it. (I also really wanted to find cats, but maybe karma reared its ugly head there -- I've yet to see a single ocelot.)
I really lucked out on the mushroom island -- I was exploring my nearest Nether fortress, randomly slapped down a portal to see where it went, and popped out on a mushroom island.
I've yet to find a Mega Tiaga (too bad as I'd like podzol) or a Mesa biome. I do want a mesa as I'd like to build myself a cliff dwelling but haven't gotten desperate enough to try ChunkBase again.
It does seem like it would be nice if there were a way to guarantee you'd get every biome (or at least every major one) within a certain distance from spawn.
I believe those biomes are as rare as the canyon biomes; I have never encountered a single Ice Spikes Biome, but a handful of Canyons on servers.
The way Minecraft does generation it would be nearly impossible to guarantee all the biomes are within a certain distance of spawn, barring using a seed somebody found. I believe there is ONE, count it, ONE known seed that has all the major rarish biomes within 2K of spawn.
It would be very easy to reduce the typical distances with minor changes to the world gen parameters. I know, because that's how my Climate Control mod does it. The defaults reduce the search times by a factor of 4 to 8 for the amount of land you have to search to find all the rarish biomes, and you could reduce them even further with some changes to the config files.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
either 1.10 made ice spikes less rare, or I'm insanely lucky. I generated a world for my minecraft realm, I spawned on an island right next to an ocean monument, and there was an ice spike biome a 5 minute boat ride away.
Just lucky. As far as I know there were no changes to terrain generation other than Magma blocks added to the Nether and gold ores generating at higher Y values in mesas.
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..
Cold biomes aren't that much rarer than hot ones, it's just that they're clumped on a big scale and you happen to have gotten a lot of hot. The endless temperate biomes can get rather oppressive IMO - you've avoided some of that because the extreme biomes are much more common on coasts because of the way the smoothing routines work. Deep inland it's almost all temperate. On a long land trip I get to "OMG not another Forest" pretty fast.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
I have never found one before. Then, again, I don't do too much exploring outside of a few thousand blocks, so no wonder I haven't found one yet. Too bad, the biome looks pretty from pictures I see.
You can just call me Canary.
How not to look like a total fool in the forum games
It would be nice if they use bands of biomes that loop from left to right, just like it is on Earth.
Desert, Savanna, Jungle, Mesa continuously from east to west.
A band of Plains, Birch, Roofed, Swamp if you go north and south from the previous band.
further North or South you get Taiga, Mega Spruce, Cold Taiga and Extreme Hills.
Then going even further North/South, a band of Ice Spikes, Frozen Ocean, and Ice Plains.
Then the further North or South you go, it reverts backwards over and over.
It should also have all Rivers, Extreme hills mixed with M variants to form vertical bands of mountain ranges and canals, breaking up biomes.
Finally, Ocean and Mushroom Islands possible at any level.
That way you know where to go to find a biome you want, based on weather and location. Either travel East/West or North/South.
I must just be lucky, because I live in an Ice Spikes biome, on the edge of a cold region that spans at least two maps in every direction and contains no less than four separate Ice Spikes regions. It's the Bryce biome that's giving me trouble.
I support this, this, and this. And this now. Also this.
I've been hopping around with random coords, and I've only have found one within about 2 hours.
", sans-serif">Follow your heart's dream.
This was just pure luck, but i managed to find one in my current Survival World the other day. I wasn't actually looking for one, I was on the hunt for a Spruce Forest. But i stumbled across Ice Spikes instead. I don't really understand why it's so rare...there's nothing that exciting about it. Maybe that's just me though, because i don't really care for the snow biomes anyways.
I'm playing in a 1.7.10 modded survival world. I don't play the latest version of Minecraft because it doesn't have the mods i like.
Browsing the biomes in the wiki and how they are determined by temperature, I find the warm biomes are favored over any others(neutral and cold). It even makes it somewhat easy to spawn a canyon biome.
It just honestly feels like cold biomes are discouraged or set at a lower percentage chance to occur.
So it's no wonder that it is even harder to find icespike biomes.
While they should be rare enough to remain a treasure to see, which they are, they shouldn't be downright mythical.
I would like to see biome generation a bit more balanced as far as warm and cold climates go.
In Minecraft, you stick your head in the dirt to find problems.