That seems like a lot of cherry groves in a fairly small amount of space. Luck, or are they actually fairly common?
I only have two samples of experience with 1.20 so I can't say much, and one was a world started in 1.19 and updated to 1.20. Bother are my hardcore worlds.
And if you remember from the first one, I settled in a small recess atop a "mountain" (or a plateau-like area just under a peak, more formally). I think this was a mix of plains and meadow originally in 1.19, and it came with a village, but then in 1.20 the same spot was a massive cherry grove and had no village.
In other words, those cherry groves might have been valid spots for what would have been more villages if this were 1.18 or 1.19. It's ridiculous. That's the one thing I don't like about modern world generation. Seriously, villages (and even shipwrecks and ruins portals) need to be cut in half, and then cut in half again. Or in other words, somewhere between 20% to 33% as common as they are now seems like it might feel better.
I don't like the current rivers because they are super-wind-y and pretty dense and drastically changing in width and there's no logic to their placement. It looks like a swamp on a map.
Ah, so it's sort of what I thought.
I guess I'm able to adapt to things well. Like, yeah, I wouldn't mind if they were less winding and more consistent in width, but I also don't mind them as they are either. I looked on some maps of older worlds and rivers seem pretty winding there, too. Less winding maybe, but still rather winding as opposed to straight. The big change is they seem less wide and less common. I definitely prefer them being wider as opposed to the streams of 1.16 (or 1.17) and before, although maybe they could be slightly less common and be fine.
A lot of this is the kind of stuff you won't see or notice (at least as much) in-game, although maps show it. But even on maps it looks fine to me.
Do keep in mind this is a very zoomed out look, too. Zoom out maps in 1.6 or something with similar random biome placement and they quickly start looking like unpleasant jigsaw puzzles too.
On a practical level, I don't find them useful because they are so wind-y they are usually slower than walking
That's true, but I never looked at rivers as needing to be a way of efficient transportation, and they never were in any version ever.
Maybe that also speaks to who I am as a player as to why I don't mind them. They don't need to be efficient. They need to be fun. I'd enjoy getting in a boat and just following one to see where it goes. You can't entirely do that all the time, but it's much closer than before.
Likewise, that extends to other things like caves, where I find them more fun even if people complain about then because "it doesn't give me as much ore to the minute or resource to the durability use as another version" because there's less ores or they have to pillar up for some or whatever reasons they come up with, and I'm just like... what? Maybe I never cared for that because I play at a far slower pace? And just like to do things for the experience of it and not care if it "gives me the most"? That's playing for the wrong reasons in my opinion. What do I care if it gives me less if it's already more than enough anyway? This same mentality has become so pervasive that people cry about nerfs just because it's a nerf rather than objectively looking at the state of things as a whole. Instead, they are comparing one thing in a vacuum to the same thing in another version and going "it's lower so it's worse". What a silly mentality to have. No wonder the fun is being stripped from the game for many people. What happened to just experiencing the game instead of rushing A to B to Z all the time? Well I wonder why people are bored and finding the need to restart worlds all the time...
Sorry, now I'm ranting. But I'm not playing to accumulate the most of something for it's own sake. Or to have everything that exists be some super efficient thing to justify its existence. That's all pointless to me. I'm also playing for the experience. And that's where it's far better for me than ever before, even if some things took "some steps back". The bigger picture is where it matters. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
I almost certainly dislike it more, largely because of the way biomes generate, due to both the "climate system" introduced in 1.7 and the absurd size of biomes since 1.18.
I'm mixed on this.
While I do miss some of the old biome transition possibilities (a flat desert adjacent to an extreme hills being a classic preference of mine, though... that also relied upon the texture pack I was using and I'd find it less appealing in vanilla), I have come to like the climate system itself despite that. I prefer it to the complete randomness of before. The older way would be so much worse at render distances of today (where 16 isn't the highest anymore but more the norm for Java, and Bedrock is far above that) if there was so much variety, or such harsh type transitions, in a smaller area like in 1.6 and before. It would look awful in game.
This extends to maps too. 1.6 and older worlds look like "random jigsaw puzzles", and your maps are honestly a great example of this. They don't look pleasant to me. At the same time, how maps look isn't quite as important as how it is in-game, as I said above, but even in-game I don't find this as pleasant.
The newer approach being overly aggressive at times is a definite downfall to it, but it seems to me your much slower style of exploration, your focus on the underground, and probably lower render distance, are all reasons why you don't mind the drawbacks to the biome arrangement of 1.6 (and inversely, why you would find the newer style of 1.7 or above detrimental), but the way 1.6 does it is definitely not without its own drawbacks.
Biome size though doesn't feel much different to me? The "large biomes" is in the game separately, by the way, and this isn't it. Look at my screenshot in my first post where I'm setting the world options and the "world type" is "default". Large biomes, amplified, and single biome also exist. And if you look at the maps above, you can see many individual biomes in many cases have about the same size they might in older versions (I even find very small biomes far more often than I would back then). It seems more to me like many biomes might repeat for a while (or "the same biome be placed next to itself" for a lack of better words) due to the climate system, which is leading to more visual repetitiveness than you are used to seeing compared to the "random jigsaw puzzle placement" from 1.6. But the individual biome size in many cases seems largely the same (give or take). I mean, maybe they are different to an extent and my impression is wrong (and in that case, you need to remember this isn't 2012 anymore where a render distance of 8 is called "normal" and the game is bugged and "far" caps to 10, but instead most people are playing well above 4 to 8 now, so the tiny jigsaw biomes with harsh transitions so often wouldn't fly today), but to me the biome size itself seems fine and it's more the climate system that changed. I've played on large biomes in the past and individual biomes felt larger. This maybe feels like a situation where a limited number of biomes (two or three, or sometimes one) repeat a lot and makes individual biomes seem larger? Maybe with more biome types, the modern systems' flaws would be less of an issue? Not sure.
Likewise, that extends to other things like caves, where I find them more fun even if people complain about then because "it doesn't give me as much ore to the minute or resource to the durability use as another version" because there's less ores or they have to pillar up for some or whatever reasons they come up with, and I'm just like... what? Maybe I never cared for that because I play at a far slower pace? And just like to do things for the experience of it and not care if it "gives me the most"? That's playing for the wrong reasons in my opinion. What do I care if it gives me less if it's already more than enough anyway? This same mentality has become so pervasive that people cry about nerfs just because it's a nerf rather than objectively looking at the state of things as a whole. Instead, they are comparing one thing in a vacuum to the same thing in another version and going "it's lower so it's worse". What a silly mentality to have. No wonder the fun is being stripped from the game for many people. What happened to just experiencing the game instead of rushing A to B to Z all the time? Well I wonder why people are bored and finding the need to restart worlds all the time...
I agree with all of this. People are in such a rush to follow the progression, to do everything as quickly and as profitably as possible. Not everything has to be a speedrun any%. Vanilla Minecraft should be about the journey, not the destination. Blowing through the game like a box-ticking exercise (got pearls for Ender eyes, got netherite, got perfect villagers, killed dragon, got elytra, killed wither, built iron farm, built beacon...) inevitably results in boredom, because you can only do that set of things, the most efficient way, so many times in a row before getting sick of it.
Biome size though doesn't feel much different to me?
There is no doubt that biomes are are far larger, I mean FAR larger than before, even if the "unit size" of an individual" biome was the same, which seems doubtful - the smallest biomes in 1.18+ are "sub-biomes", which were truly tiny before - those little specks of water in 1.6 jungles and swamps? "river" sub-biomes on the order of 1 chunk in size; biomes like jungle hills were 4x4 chunks in size and full-size biomes were 16x16 chunks (transformed into random shapes after multiple stages of "fuzzy" zooming are applied).
Here are 1:1 comparisons between two more random seeds in 1.18 to my two largest worlds (World1 and TMCWv5); the only comparably large areas of the same biome are the snowy zones in vanilla 1.6, precisely because they were in fact an early form of "climate zones" (1.7 even reuses the same code to place initial climates; for TMCW I use a completely different method which places a "seed", at the scale of a single biome, and "grows" it in two passes to a maximum of 13 biomes, once per 8x8 biome region (128x128 chunks on default), giving a maximum coverage of about 20% of the area; I can identify what appears to be 2 "hot" areas and 1 "cold" area based on the clusterings of such biomes):
I agree with all of this. People are in such a rush to follow the progression, to do everything as quickly and as profitably as possible. Not everything has to be a speedrun any%. Vanilla Minecraft should be about the journey, not the destination. Blowing through the game like a box-ticking exercise (got pearls for Ender eyes, got netherite, got perfect villagers, killed dragon, got elytra, killed wither, built iron farm, built beacon...) inevitably results in boredom, because you can only do that set of things, the most efficient way, so many times in a row before getting sick of it.
Well this is relieving to read then, because I felt my contributions to this thread so far might have been seen as "pointless" by some because I'm covering the 'boring early days" and because my progression might seem slow.
I keep saying "I'm going out for iron" and then just explore. And I do actually look for iron, and even go in caves and get some (but mostly coal), and then explore, so I was wondering if my "oh, pretty, a nice looking landscape, let's explore" on repeat was turning anyone off, haha.
There is no doubt that biomes are are far larger, I mean FAR larger than before, even if the "unit size" of an individual" biome was the same, which seems doubtful - the smallest biomes in 1.18+ are "sub-biomes", which were truly tiny before - those little specks of water in 1.6 jungles and swamps? "river" sub-biomes on the order of 1 chunk in size; biomes like jungle hills were 4x4 chunks in size and full-size biomes were 16x16 chunks (transformed into random shapes after multiple stages of "fuzzy" zooming are applied).
Here are 1:1 comparisons between two more random seeds in 1.18 to my two largest worlds (World1 and TMCWv5); the only comparably large areas of the same biome are the snowy zones in vanilla 1.6, precisely because they were in fact an early form of "climate zones" (1.7 even reuses the same code to place initial climates; for TMCW I use a completely different method which places a "seed", at the scale of a single biome, and "grows" it in two passes to a maximum of 13 biomes, once per 8x8 biome region (128x128 chunks on default), giving a maximum coverage of about 20% of the area; I can identify what appears to be 2 "hot" areas and 1 "cold" area based on the clusterings of such biomes):
I'll have to yield to you as you definitely know more than me here, and I'm merely speaking from my own (limited) experience as well as observation. I'm also aware that when checking seeds across certain versions, they will also be observable and show the things you're saying. I do see that to an extent too.
But at the same time, in playing them and checking the maps on my particular worlds, the individual biomes don't necessarily seem much larger to me. When they do, it's usually feels like it's in edge cases, especially in climates that lack biomes (namely, cold or hot) because I observe the tendency of the same multiple biomes are on repeat. Seems is the key word. Maybe those biomes are larger actually instead, but I don't think I see massively inflated biome sizes with many other types.
Remember, back in 1.6 and before, we were also locked to render distances of 10 and lower, and I think you still prefer to play this way. These days, we can see farther, so maybe the biomes are larger but don't quite feel like it. That's sort of what I meant when I said I understand why you especially detest the post-1.7 changes. For your play style and conditions (slow exploration rate, and lower render distance), something like 1.7+ and yes maybe worse with 1.18+ must be truly horrendous for you.
As an explorer, though, and someone who spends much of her time on the surface building and exploring, the new version, while it definitely has its edge cases and I'd like to see it be less aggressive, is still preferable to the older way of truly random, jigshaw shaped biomes. And if they were smaller, that would just make it worse. I played in large biomes in older versions (can't remember if this before or after 1.7 though honestly) and I remember it feeling less far varied than I expected it to, even going in and knowing the biomes would four times the area (I think?).
The biomes might indeed be larger but I still think the repetitiveness might be more down to the climate system, because at least in a lot of cases, I'm seeing individual biomes that don't feel a whole lot bigger than they did back then (I'm aware there are also cases they are, though).
I sort of mentioned at the end of the post where I wondered if this issue might be far less of an issue if there was simply more biomes in the game. I think I read someone else (Zeno?) mention this at one point too.
And when I say I see small biomes, I don't know if I'm talking about sub biomes? Are cherry blossoms sub-biomes? Are mangrove swamps? there's tiny ones of those on the map in this world here. I also observe small "sliver" biome shapes at times (there's a forest like this on my map near spawn) so I think I've seen "normal" biomes come out that was in some cases.
I think maybe biomes are just more variable, even if they might trend towards larger on average, especially made worse by the climate system "repeating" them. So they feel much larger, but there's also edge cases the other way? I don't know but that's just the impression I have. I don't know what the coding or values actually show so again I'll yield on any definitive numbers facts, but that's what it seems to be based on what I see on maps and in game.
(I was going to edit this in but then I don't know if you'd miss it.)
Oh, wait, is that your seed you used for your worlds? Honestly, that doesn't look bad to me in the 1.20 version. Within a couple/few thousand blocks, there's all three main climate zones and they're all decently sized by the looks of it. And a good number of cherry biomes (yes, that's a perk for me, haha). Kind of like the seed I'm using this world. I'd have been pretty happy if I got that one, too. I'd say that's good variety for what I would say are reasonable distances. I know they might not be reasonable for your play style but the only way you cram more variety into a smaller space is basically by doing what you did, and going with truly random placement and having smaller biomes. Considering 1.7+ can bemuuuch worse than that, that seems alright to me.
Also, I want to point out you're using different methods of showing maps. I know you're doing this simply because you don't play modern versions to have UnMined maps for them, and likewise because 1.6 generation might not work whatever you're using to show the 1.20 seeds (?), but even if it's not for any intentional reason, it changes the impression they give. Good comparisons would be to show them like for like.
In the 1.6 map for example, I'm mostly seeing desert, plains, forest, and snow areas on repeat and it looks lacking in variety and bland (I realize the map is super zoomed out and there's of course many more biomes than four, but I'm just saying how and offhand negative impression can be gleaned from anything when presented a certain way).
There's also a real lack of oceans in the map of what I presume is your mod? Did you shrink them, or is that just an example of "sample size of one doesn't speak for everything"? One thing I miss from 1.6 is the occasional massive ocean. They needed toned down, but they went the other way, and as a result I miss the "continental" feel of the world in anything since then. You really had to be a huge explorer and generate a massive world to make them feel good though. I guess for most players they just felt bad (especially since oceans themselves back then were just lacking).
Well this is relieving to read then, because I felt my contributions to this thread so far might have been seen as "pointless" by some because I'm covering the 'boring early days" and because my progression might seem slow.
I keep saying "I'm going out for iron" and then just explore. And I do actually look for iron, and even go in caves and get some (but mostly coal), and then explore, so I was wondering if my "oh, pretty, a nice looking landscape, let's explore" on repeat was turning anyone off, haha.
I took about two years before ever going into the Nether in my main world, so I can certainly relate to the slower playstyle here. Just because Mojang designed Minecraft with a certain structure reflecting how they interpret game progression doesn't mean we have to follow it - you recognize this already. Perhaps, the beauty is in how we interpret the concept of progression, whilst the game exists as more of a creative canvas. In terms of the narrative itself, I imagine there is a story behind every shrub - what you explore on the surface might just ignite the lore for what lies underneath, even if at a much later date.
I think the primary reason for the rather aggressive playstyle that many players foster is that Mojang has given clear objectives for how they think Minecraft is to be played, and people largely view Minecraft as a game with objectives to be completed - as is the case with all games. It's easier to be told what to do than to create your own rules - once you do the latter, you're not playing the same game anymore. As a result, most players will never look past the "game" aspect of Minecraft to explore the artistic medium it functions as so well (hence why they get bored so quickly). I firmly believe that in order to enjoy Minecraft to its fullest, you must first transcend the established narrative of what it is "supposed" to be and play it in the manner that supports what you want it to be.
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LP series? Not my style! Video series? Closer, but not quite. Survival journal, maybe? That's better. Now in Season 4 of the Legends of Quintropolis Journal (<< click to view)!! World download and more can be found there.
(I was going to edit this in but then I don't know if you'd miss it.)
Oh, wait, is that your seed you used for your worlds? Honestly, that doesn't look bad to me in the 1.20 version. Within a couple/few thousand blocks, there's all three main climate zones and they're all decently sized by the looks of it. And a good number of cherry biomes (yes, that's a perk for me, haha). Kind of like the seed I'm using this world. I'd have been pretty happy if I got that one, too. I'd say that's good variety for what I would say are reasonable distances. I know they might not be reasonable for your play style but the only way you cram more variety into a smaller space is basically by doing what you did, and going with truly random placement and having smaller biomes. Considering 1.7+ can bemuuuch worse than that, that seems alright to me.
Also, I want to point out you're using different methods of showing maps. I know you're doing this simply because you don't play modern versions to have UnMined maps for them, and likewise because 1.6 generation might not work whatever you're using to show the 1.20 seeds (?), but even if it's not for any intentional reason, it changes the impression they give. Good comparisons would be to show them like for like.
In the 1.6 map for example, I'm mostly seeing desert, plains, forest, and snow areas on repeat and it looks lacking in variety and bland (I realize the map is super zoomed out and there's of course many more biomes than four, but I'm just saying how and offhand negative impression can be gleaned from anything when presented a certain way).
There's also a real lack of oceans in the map of what I presume is your mod? Did you shrink them, or is that just an example of "sample size of one doesn't speak for everything"? One thing I miss from 1.6 is the occasional massive ocean. They needed toned down, but they went the other way, and as a result I miss the "continental" feel of the world in anything since then. You really had to be a huge explorer and generate a massive world to make them feel good though. I guess for most players they just felt bad (especially since oceans themselves back then were just lacking).
I just took random seeds off of ChunkBase; the seeds I actually used are "-123775873255737467" for World1 and "-4426978636490490569" for TMCWv5 (I did not use these seeds since there is no point in comparing the same seeds).
Also, ChunkBase did used to support versions back to 1.2-1.6 (not just for biomes but structures and everything else present in those versions) but they removed them a year or two back, which is quite shameful of them (I mean, it can't really hurt to keep the options for older versions when they already have up to 8 different versions back to 1.7, and it would make direct comparisons much easier).
Some of the archived pages do work though, although zooming works differently (I can't get the same scale as the maps I posted from the current site):
https://web.archive.org/web/20170703132419/http://chunkbase.com/apps/mineshaft-finder (this shows just how common they were in 1.6, further away from the origin (try unticking "only show starting points", which shows the potential for overlap); and yes, even I think they are really too common, with the overlap being the biggest issue, which can even happen in 1.20 since they have no minimum spacing)
The lack of oceans in TMCW is in part because I don't allow them to generate within about 1000 blocks of the origin (they can sometimes come closer, but still never within about 500 blocks), ensuring that every seed meets my criteria in that regard (likewise, spawn will always be within one of several biomes chosen for being relatively flat and treeless, excluding savanna due to its color); overall about 2/3 of the world is ocean, compared to 3/4 in 1.6.4 and around 1/4 in 1.7 (the 1.7 analysis comes from this thread while the 1.6/TMCW come from my own biome mapping/analysis tools).
Also, Unmined does exist for older versions, although I don't use it much outside of verifying changes to the underground due to lack of support for modded blocks and its color scheme:
The same view in Minutor for comparison (using custom definition files for blocks and biomes):
A view of the whole world in Unmined, which does show variations in terrain height better:
The same world in Minutor (plus the Nether and End):
Here are large-scale comparisons of the land-ocean maps for 1.6.4 and TMCW; the scale is 65536x65536 blocks with each grid cell being 8192x8192 blocks, larger than anything I've ever explored (these are not 100% accurate since I set the biome size to 2, 1/4 the scale of default, which slightly alters biome borders). Note that even vanilla has a bias towards more land around 0,0 but due to random "growth" it isn't guaranteed to become a substantial landmass:
Vanilla 1.6.4, using the seed "0" (the only thing special about this seed is that older versions used it as a flag value to choose a random seed); about 80% of the area is ocean and the "spawn continent" is relatively small and fragmented:
Another example using the seed "10" (a seed which I often used when testing before I changed the generation of landmasses due to having a larger landmass near the origin); about 71% of the area is ocean:
TMCW; using the seed "0"; about 64% of the area is ocean, which is much more fragmented due to the inclusion of more landmasses and islands of various sizes (all the islands far from landmasses on the 1.6 maps are Mushroom Islands, which are only 1/15 of the same-sized islands on these maps):
The seed I used for the world I played on, "-4426978636490490569"; 62% of the area is ocean. An actual map of the world is overlayed, showing the relative size of the area I explored over more than a year; I'd have never found ocean in the seed "10" in vanilla, and have gone nearly 4,000 blocks in one direction from spawn before reaching ocean in my first world, 4,500 along a diagonal to the southeast without encountering ocean yet:
If you look at Master Caver's 1.20 map, you'll see a Plains that goes from X=0 near or at spawn to X=2,600. That is certainly a *large* biome compared to anything you'd see on any prior version. In earlier versions, that might be driven by having few biomes to randomly choose from, but there's something else going on in modern generation; it's using some kind of climate system to generate biomes on a much smaller scale than the fractalized 256x256 chunks of the past. I'm curious how they do it, because it's a hard problem; Highlands did it but had problems with too-thin transition biomes. I tried to think of a way to do it for Geographicraft and couldn't.
FWIW, I agree with your interpretation of that map. To an explorer like you, and me, it's an interesting map - different areas have different personalities; there are reasons to travel substantial distances, and it would be an interesting long-term project to map out a big part of it and discover what is where. I would *enjoy* finding out how far that Plains went, and posting about it, and possibly later building a horse-and-road system to cross it quickly. (I might not think so highly of finding 20+ villages in the process, tho). In fairness, a start around X=3500, Z=-2000 would be rough for all but the most intrepid explorer.
At the same time I see why Master Caver *wouldn't* like that map, which is a totally valid opinion too.
But I do wonder what you find objectionable about the old fractal boundaries. I bet the continent I'm working on now in my journal would be a great demonstration of fractal biomes, but it won't be done for months, probably, so I'll use my current spawn continent as an example:
I *like* the way this looks. Real biome boundaries aren't smooth lines; they really *are* jagged and irregular. Do you really think that map would be more attractive if all the boundaries were smooth curves?
(It's even got two Cherry Blossom Groves in it. I know you have to love it!)
Incidentally, vanilla "large biomes" is 4 times the WIDTH, so 16 times the AREA. So a 1.7-1.17 biome is roughly 1000x1000 blocks. Unless you spawn in a 1.7-1.17 *Jungle* which occurs in climate-sized areas so it would be 4000x4000 -- Master Caver's 1.20 example, except there's absolutely nothing anywhere but jungle - (sounds of screaming ensue).
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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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
My take is that the 1.18+ biome layouts are interesting to look at as maps, while the old ones are interesting to experience in-world. By "old ones" I'm specifically referring to pre 1.7 as I have a lot of vitriol stored up for the climate banding thing: several thousand blocks in a row of desert/savanna/desert/savanna/desert/savanna then several thousand blocks in a row of plains/forest/e.hills/plains/forest/e.hills is not as interesting to me as the old randomness that would give you jungle adjacent to ice plains or desert adjacent to swamp. But I look even further back and prefer Alpha/Beta generation to Adventure Update because it was even more random. 1.18 made a small nudge backwards to Beta generation by decoupling height variation from biome type but it's not enough for me to be content. I still find 1.18 very samey, and its terrain admittedly pretty to look at but not very fun to travel through or build in.
I wonder whether that different perception could be because I'm such a homebody compared to Princess Garnet. I've never yet traveled more than 10,000 blocks out in my primary world. The furthest I've ever gone so far was to visit a mansion and that was only about 7-8k blocks out. So I get a very "micro" level Minecraft experience whereas Princess Garnet, I think, gets a "macro" view.
If you look at Master Caver's 1.20 map, you'll see a Plains that goes from X=0 near or at spawn to X=2,600. That is certainly a *large* biome compared to anything you'd see on any prior version. In earlier versions, that might be driven by having few biomes to randomly choose from, but there's something else going on in modern generation; it's using some kind of climate system to generate biomes on a much smaller scale than the fractalized 256x256 chunks of the past. I'm curious how they do it, because it's a hard problem; Highlands did it but had problems with too-thin transition biomes. I tried to think of a way to do it for Geographicraft and couldn't.
So I made a world in 1.20 with that seed to get a look at it in game, as well as get an UnMined map for a like for like comparison.
It's a little bit as I expected. The not like for like comparison is giving a bad at a glance impression.
That "massive plains" biome? It's not as you might expect.
It's not even all plains. There's a sunflower plains and multiple meadows in there. Yes, the first is a type of plains and meadows are higher altitude "plains-like", but still. Do a bunch of different types of forests in 1.6 count as one massive forest biomes? Yes but also no. But the map being used there made it appear like it might be one big plains biomes.
There's another important distinction though. While a lot of it is still formal plains biomes, if we're comparing to 1.6 and earlier generation, there's a change in terrain generation that should to be accounted for. Altitude is no longer as strictly tied to biome. Specifically, the old "extreme hills" is gone, and a "plains" biome can generate with varying heights, which in the case of plains makes them appear as plains with a lot of "extreme hills-esque" generation. And that's what is going on with a lot of this particular area.
(I should also mention there's a lot of interesting looking terrain here in general, but I find myself saying that a lot for modern versions so maybe that's just me.)
Now is there still a big area of repetitiveness here regardless? Yeah, a bit. I definitely don't dispute that the climate feature can be aggressive and lead to that. My other hardcore world is a good example of that. But this still shows a bit what I was trying to say. It's not necessarily "all biomes in modern versions are large biomes", especially if large biomes actually are 16 times the area and not just four times (this explains why my experience with them even in 1.6 made things so repetitive). Instead, it's seems more like the same few biomes can tend to repeat, along with biomes maybe being somewhat larger (but also possibly smaller). This happens a lot with deserts and badlands (and associated sub types) too.
But it's not quite the same as one big flat 1.6 style plains like the map gives the impression of.
Here's an UnMined map of it (and the concerning eight villages).
Suddenly looks not as big and more varied than that Chunk Base one does? I think so, at least.
Here's a comparison with a spot of an older copy of my "1.6" world where there was a pretty impressively sized extreme hills (and plains) region. There's definitely more variety with some forests mixed in, but older versions could do a lot of plains and extreme hills over a large distance too (even if it was less common).
Also, I have... no idea what the "missing" terrain is from. I just copied a backup version of the world from 1.10 and it just showed up that way. The last time that world was played in 1.120 and loaded in (older versions of) UnMined, it appeared fine though. Those aren't even individual chunks missing but partial chunks missing, and I have no idea what explains such an issue, but as it's not a live world I'm intending to play and just one I copied to get that UnMined map image for, I'm not going to bother with it.
As for your question of modern terrain generation, I have no idea because I know nothing about this. I can merely observe and share my experiences, as I am here. But I wonder if this has any answers to what you're asking? I came across it a while back and while most of it goes over my head insofar as understanding it, it was interesting nonetheless.
But I do wonder what you find objectionable about the old fractal boundaries.
Do you really think that map would be more attractive if all the boundaries were smooth curves?
I don't quite object to them. You're right; they're certainly pleasing in their own way.
At the same time, I don't find the smooth borders completely objectionable either.
While modern generation definitely has its "looks bad at a glance on a map" moments, I find the "jigsaw puzzle" look to be the same thing for older versions.
Of course, how maps look tends to be a rather inconsequential thing. How it looks in game is far more important, and I feel like both are good but also bad for the opposite reasons. The random biome placement of older generation (though this doesn't pertain to the fractal shape so much) looks bad at anything but lower render distances, especially when warm and cold climates border, and the elevation being more tied to biome made variety on a larger scale so awful. This was probably the number one complaint against beta 1.8 through 1.6 generation that 1.7 and prior did better; low biome variety but great variety over a larger scale because elevation wasn't tied to biome. The plus side is variety on a smaller scale is good though.
Meanwhile, the repetitiveness on a smaller scale of the newer versions needs no introduction. And some people might be torn on the smooth lines versus fractals. But otherwise, I think it does things better, namely on a larger scale, and I guess that's why I prefer it.
Over a large enough scale, of course, anything will be repetitive. That's sort of why I liked the continents with large oceans to 1.6. They were awful for travel on a shorter scale (sometimes taking days to cross), but they were great a larger scale. A scale that very few if any people probably realistically played at, though.
There are other biomes in the Plains, but they're (mostly) entirely enclosed, like sub-biomes. We've had sub-biomes for a long time; any large biome in 1.6-era or 1.7-era would have similar sub-biomes, and we wouldn't consider those earlier biomes as not one biome because of it. So in that sense it's still vastly larger than anything pre-1.18.
There is certainly more variety in the terrain than in either of the biome-based generation eras, and that helps with interest. I don't think the hills you show would count as "extreme hills", though, I think they're more analogous to the "xxx hills" biomes we've long had (but not in Plains, because it had *Forest* Hills as a sub-biome). Extreme Hills had additional differences from plains we don't see here - plenty of snow, different coloration, and a different tree set. It was also more different in elevation although the new generation doesn't do so much of that anymore anywhere so that analogy is less clear.
Although I think that long Plains isn't unplayable, as a Minecraft mod landscape designer, my immediate reaction to that is "needs more variety". If my mods had coughed up something like that, I would have come up with a way to increase variety over the area, likely with a sub-biome system to throw in some copses of forest or changes in vegetation, or some addition gradation system. Maybe it's different on the ground when you have to climb over the terrain, but I would not have released something like that without some more work.
I haven't looked at your video but I did take a look at the Minecraft wiki which has a lot on how the new system works and it's fairly interesting. There's a lot of work in it, which shows in the overall improvements compared to prior systems (I agree with you on that), but at the same time I think a 2 billion dollar company could have put a little more polish on it.
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
It's not exactly analogous to the old extreme hills, but I don't think the old relatively rare and small raised portions in forests is a closer analogous to it either. Maybe in technicality (since it is elevation variety untied to biome?), but in practice, which I think matters far more here, those results are far closer to what the old extreme hills were.
The new "extreme hills" are instead elevation differences untied from biome rather than a formal biome itself (which just results in what seems close to what the old extreme hills were when it happens as a plains biome, and sometimes this indeed happens with forests overlaying it). They are more often plateau-like than the ones in 1.6 as well (larger flat areas on the top). When you get larger areas like this with multiple ones especially bordering small bits of plains on each side of a river, it results in these valleys which I absolutely adore.
Although I think that long Plains isn't unplayable, as a Minecraft mod landscape designer, my immediate reaction to that is "needs more variety"
I absolutely agree with this. It could definitely benefit from more variety, but this is bordering on the "climate system is too strict" or "there's not enough biome types for the current strictness" subjects, which is another matter (and something I agree with, by the way).
I certainly don't find it a flaw that a plains region of that size can exist though, but maybe I'm alone in that preference. Now if that was actually a large flat plains all like in 1.6, and each biome was routinely of a size like that, then sure, I'd agree with the saying that "new generation equals large biomes of the past", but we both know that's an unfair comparison of what's actually happening. Instead I'm finding that while biome size may certainly trend larger on average (they can also be much smaller), I'm also finding these are usually "greater biome regions" as opposed to one single massive biome (like in 1.6). And that's not a problem to me. As I said, the biomes sizes of 1.6 just wouldn't fly in today's game with larger render distances and especially larger terrain elevation scale since 1.18. It just wouldn't. So making 1:1 comparisons on a given technical aspect is arbitrary at best, and not very useful for what's actually happening.
Maybe it overshoots it some (it has since 1.7, and I've been on the record as saying 1.18 missed a chance to better address this). Maybe it needs more slightly different sub-biomes to add variety. Sure, I can agree with both of those. But I don't agree that making 1:1 comparisons likening them to single large biomes like those of 1.6 as proper comparison. So after actually looking at it in game, I just wanted to share my impressions and point out the distinctions I felt were valid.
I haven't looked at your video but I did take a look at the Minecraft wiki which has a lot on how the new system works and it's fairly interesting. There's a lot of work in it, which shows in the overall improvements compared to prior systems (I agree with you on that), but at the same time I think a 2 billion dollar company could have put a little more polish on it.
Absolutely agree, but if it wasn't this, it would be something else, so we'd always be finding something that could be better. Which, isn't a bad thing. We should always be critical on what could be improved.
And I was sort of looking forward to hearing if you had any ideas on the video, since you seem to dabble is this yourself. As someone who doesn't understand most of the code or technical stuff, the best I can do is form a reaction on the observable results, and it puts me in awe at times at what the current terrain generation can do (while simultaneously identifying some of its flaws at other times).
So I looked at the video and I think it's very good intro to what they were doing. It all makes perfect sense to me because I have at least thought about everything they did, although in many cases I never actually did it (like the biome assignment system; the thought of partitioning a high dimensional system scared me off). I do immediately understand one of my big complaints with the system - excessive terrain bumpiness: they didn't "squash" the 3D perlin enough. Aesthetically, from working with RTG, I think 3D perlin should be squashed to nothing in most flattish biomes, and they didn't do that.
Interestingly, they took the same broad approach I did to generating interesting terrain from 2D perlin (which tends to be a bit bland alone); combining multiple 2D noises non-linearly although of course exactly how they did it was completely different. I'm a bit impressed at the sweep of the vision of making the ENTIRE world surface level from just 3 perlin noises; I used different approaches for different biomes, in groups, I had a "plains" approach, a "hills" approach, a "mountains" approach, a "plateaus" approach.
I did do a lot of work using a different type of noise he doesn't discuss, which creates basins separated by ridges (called Voronoi noise). I *think* they're using some relative of it for rivers and lakes, which he didn't get into. I found it very powerful for certain effects, though. It's key to my Extreme Hills, which I'm extremely fond of.
The big disadvantage of their biome system is that it's hard to add biomes, and very hard to add a lot of biomes, because they tend to fracture into bits on the ground if the "chunks" of noise space they occupy get too small. That is a part of the reason the biomes are usually so large; each has to cover a relatively large section compared to local variation. I'm curious how BoP works in the new system; they have adapted for it.
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
IMO, height should not be entirely independent of biome - even with the height variation of 1.6 (where I've found variation in excess of 20 blocks in Plains), or even TMCW's even flatter plains I've found plenty of wonky villages (e.g. houses half-buried in hills, or with the doors otherwise inaccessible); I can only imagine how bad it must be in newer versions, especially since 1.10 removed the biome restriction so villages can spread into any biome (before they had to remain entirely within their spawn biomes):
One of the most recent villages I found in my first world; one of the houses is half-buried in a hillside, which reaches y=82 (19 blocks from sea level):
A wider view of the Plains the village is in; I found another area reaching y=80, with higher elevations possible (I recall seeing 85 or so before):
Another village, showing how they do not generate into biomes other than plains and desert (a desert hills is just behind me):
Even in TMCW, where I made the original Plains biome flatter, I've come across stuff like this (this is slightly better than it would be since I modified the code that measures the average ground level below a building so instead of being restricted to the 16x16 "populated chunk" it has access to the entire 2x2 chunk area that can be accessed by decorators; i.e. vanilla might measure as little as one block if only that much of a building intersects the populated chunk (once the altitude has been measured it saves it and will not recompute it once the next chunk gets populated with the rest of the building, else, you'll get buildings split in half along chunk boundaries, an issue which actually could occur prior to the addition of structure saving in 1.6.4 if parts of a structure were generated in different sessions. Interestingly, this seems to have returned in 1.13, which changed how structure saving is handled):
My solution was to add variants of biomes with varying amounts of height variation; vanilla Plains was reduced to 1/3 of its normal variation while I added "Hilly Plains" and "Hilly Plains Hills", the later bordering on vanilla 1.6's Extreme Hills (if you are going to lump Extreme Hills as a variant of Plains then this is even more extreme, with an "Extreme Mountains" sub-biome which can exceed y=180). Deserts likewise include "Mountainous Desert" and "Mountainous Desert Hills" to counteract normal Desert being flatter; these all generate in various combinations of whole biomes, sub-biomes, and edge biomes:
Some of the terrain in biomes like Mountainous Desert can get truly insane; I doubt you can find anything like this in 1.18:
A less extreme desert, with a relatively flat area (normal desert, the hills might be Desert Hills but aren't in the middle of the biome):
A full-size rendering I'd made early on of the last world I played on (unexplored chunks were trimmed), showing a lot of height variation within a relatively small area:
In particular, I use the fact that height variation can be tied to a biome to create my "Rocky Mountains" biome (a couple examples in the rendering above), which has 5 rings of biomes of increasing height ("edge", "main", "peak 1", "peak 2", "summit", where terrain transitions from grass to coarse dirt to stone to as altitude increases, with "summit" having a base block of snow. Rivers are also replaced with "Rocky Mountains River", which does not receive the special treatment that most other rivers get so they carve through anything, as this is one of the few biomes that rivers actually do dry up in, with what would be river becoming valleys at higher altitudes):
(the lower half shows a Volcanic Wastelands biome, which has a similar river treatment, and has "volcano" sub-biomes forming the larger peaks, also with an additional ring of increasing altitude up to the peak biome)
Most other biomes have increased height variation, similar to "x-hills" in 1.6, with those in turn being higher, and the height variation of most biomes is modulated by a noise field with a wavelength of around 1000 blocks.
One example of how this severely restricts world generation in 1.18 is when you try to make a single-biome ocean world that is all water - you can't and instead you'll get plenty of land, even mountains, all being "ocean". Even 1.7's "amplified" world type had a special case which blacklisted ocean from the increased height variation for this reason (they could have still allowed a greater depth, except deep oceans, and oceans in 1.6, already go down to near the minimum depth the height field can attain - going lower actually breaks it and causes an inversion).
Also, by definition "plains" is generally seen as a flat area with little height variation:
A plain or flatland is a flat expanse of land with a layer of grass that generally does not change much in elevation, and is primarily treeless.
Biomes on plains include grassland (temperate or subtropical), steppe (semi-arid), savannah (tropical) or tundra (polar). In a few instances, deserts and rainforests may also be considered plains.
Messed-up villages have been a problem since forever. I think villages need more direct fixes than trying to flatten the biomes they're in. What they need is for each building to have "quality standards" like if too much dirt has to be moved or if the door isn't usable it just doesn't get placed, period. And maybe if they're too different in height from the village start. The 1.18 system also has a parameter to look for - erosion - they could use that to keep villages out of trouble (actually my impression is they kinda do, but could do better).
It's interesting that you (Master Caver) used some of the same broad approaches I did - like increasing variety within biomes, and "ring biomes".
Incidentally, Amplified worlds *also* suppress hypervariation in swamp biomes, and I actually used this in my second 1.7 journal world. I had added Mystcraft, which allows you to create dimensions in-game using "pages" you find in Library structures that define things like Amplified or Normal or has-a-sun. But there are a *lot* of pages, and like trying to get all the cards in a trading card set just by buying, it's hard to get those last few. Plus, I'd added a big sheaf of pages because I integrated it with Climate Control, BoP. and Highlands, so there were also pages for "more hot", "more cold biomes", "more plains biomes", and all the BoP and Highlands biomes.
So I never had anything like a complete set; I could never choose a sun or a normal sky color and had to take what I got for those. And I never got any world type other than "Amplified". So, to make it useable, I put in lots of "more swamp" pages which made Climate Control, when making the world, put in lots and lots of swamp (maybe 1/3 the biomes).
And the result was very interesting: There you see some mod biome, amplified, over (I think) Highlands Mangrove *swamp*, which wasn't. (Also purple sky, which I couldn't control, and lots of other weirdnesses. I was very Myst-ish, actually). The swamp biomes were pretty normal, and I could see and appreciate the amplified terrain from them. It was a cool world, and I spent a lot of time in it.
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
(I will reply to posts after this but I want to keep the update on it's own for clarity, and formatting reasons.)
I went to start playing and found myself in a valley. While they are pretty... why was I here? Where was I going, and in what direction am I going? I kind of ran some circles to get my bearings and then saw a familiar spot. I then remembered during my last update, when i was plotting my path on the map, I was... a but uncertain near the end. Did I actually not entirely finish getting home?
Then it hit me because I knew for a fact that I crossed a certain spot I was crossing again. The way my last play session ended was that the game crashed when I went to switch to window mode (and didn't pause to incur a save). I was seemingly back to my last autosave moment instead, some minutes prior to reaching my village.
In reality I didn't lose anything (but some time to get back), and I ended up finding a handful of iron on the way back, so it had a Silver lining and all.
I grabbed a compass I neglected from one of the cartographer buildings, mad a map, zoomed it out some, and decided to start mapping. I found a bird in a jungle near my village.
A bit later, I noticed some telltale crimson Red while mapping in a forest, and it had brought me to one of the structures I had awareness of from looking at the UnMined map the first time, a ruined portal.
I can't remember if I mentioned this earlier or not, but in case I didn't, any of the structures I saw only because of the UnMined map are ones I am ignoring until I naturally come across them. For example, I know there's another ruined portal just where I plan to settle, but I have yet to go to it because I shouldn't know it is there. So I'm pretending I don't know about them, and will simply loot them only when I come across them while mapping.
And here's what it had.
I keep mapping, getting closer to filling in the corner near spawn (which will be at the corner of four maps, but I only have the one for now).
This was a neat arch, but as it was dark, my sword was low on durability, my shield was away, and the sun was setting, I decided to go around it instead of through it. If you're wondering why the shield is away, I was earlier killing pigs and cows I came across so I had my sword out, so the map was in the offhand. I just kept it this way for the process.
I actually had a slightly audible moment of excitement when I saw these...
Not only did I not expect them, but I thought they were only found in savanna plateaus now. I thought they were removed from "mountainous" terrain (which this barely is anyway I would think). I slept here, and a skeleton wandered out after morning, took some sun damage, but went under a tree, allowing my to get the killing credit and drops. Arrows are very needed now to stock them up. They are going to be a valuable thing in this particular world.
I also don't think, despite filling out as much map area as I did in my other hardcore world, that I ever came across a single llama. I've seen trader llamas, yes, but not natural ones. I've already seen four here, and not too long into the world, and not too far from my village and planned settlement spot. Later when I get leads, I have potential llamas to get.
Well I wonder if I'm getting close to spawn yet...
I find it neat how spawn is this radical terrain but only right at spawn. It sort of serves as a landmark. Better than being some random block in a birch forest.
I just about conclude, saving the worst for last, having to skirt around their dangerous territory.
In doing so, I notice some iron facing a cliff wall and grab it. That's just a bit more, but every bit helps right now.
After concluding the mapping (that's a single map zoomed out... two or three times, I forget, done), I go to look for some more shallow caves, and fine some.
Not far inside, this little one runs at me through a one block tall dirt blocked way.
I soon start hearing more zombies and see them behind the dirt, and at the exact moment the thought crosses my mind that there might be a dungeon nearby, I see the cobblestone confirmation that, yes, there is.
I find this inside. Shame about that enchanted book, huh?
But I'm at three golden apples now.
A bit further in and I find it opens up to an overlook of a much deeper and larger (but not yet massive) cave system, but it's signaling it will likely become one. This might be good, but for later. My inventory is full now so I head back. But I can consider exploring further later as I was starting to think I might just branch mine down until I get enough diamond stuff (I'm not opposed to this, but I'd rather not do it and find it "naturally" as this feels more meaningful to me).
I decide to head back, but coming from a slightly different way I just miss it, and notice a single tree on an "island" I spotted on the shipwreck near my village was actually yet another jungle landmass.
I turn right (North) to see more, but also come across this.
I also notice that buried shipwreck I saw at the North edge of the UnMined map, and since I've naturally come across it, I allow myself to head to it to check it out.
I find a bird on the way... (this might have been the second in the area?)
Upon flying out of the way, there's another bird behind it.
I decide to try and get them, and from here, there's a video of that process as well as the rest of what I do for this update.
It's not anywhere near as long as the last one was going to be before it combusted itself and my game session.
I tame the two birds, check out the buried shipwreck (which has some good loot, including my first diamond), and do some exploration but hold myself back despite wanting to keep going, remembering I should hold off until I get maps.
I sleep to pass a thunderstorm, and then home to sort my inventory, gather the rest of some cooking food, and then stop for now. Maybe more caving next time? My first diamond piece of equipment soon to come? Time will tell.
IMO, height should not be entirely independent of biome...
I remember years and years ago, one of the reasons people seemed to feel the "new" terrain generation (new in this case being the one from beta 1.8 to release 1.6) was because elevation was tied more to biome. Some people felt it shouldn't be.
The common reasoning I recall being stated was beta 1.7.3 and earlier had bad biome variety, but good variety across larger terrain generation, and inversely that beta 1.8 to release 1.6 had good biome variety, but poor variety between biomes since every biome was more or less the same as the rest. You'll eventually get repetitiveness over a large enough scale with everything, but people felt the strength of 1.6 was also its downfall and that the good variety in the short term was all it had going for it and it gave up variety on the larger scale to get it, and I don't disagree with that entirely in hindsight. People said it killed the desire to explore much, and while I still found it fun to explore back then (I consider myself a builder/explorer primarily), I do admit I find it more fun in new versions.
Then Mojang gives the players that and they complain about repetitiveness.
Of course that's not to saw the repetitiveness isn't an issue. I hope it's known where I stand on that issue and I do think it is. But I do identify the difficulty Mojang must be facing in trying to please the community. They can't win no matter what they do. With almost any change, a not insignificant amount of players will always be upset.
I can only imagine how bad it must be in newer versions, especially since 1.10 removed the biome restriction so villages can spread into any biome (before they had to remain entirely within their spawn biomes)
It's pretty bad, and coincidentally the elevation not being tied to biome adds to difficulties with it.
One of the first villages I found (I think the second in total) was on the cliff side which was probably just a plains biome. Since 1.18 it's a bigger thing that this happens. It's neat in its own way, and I'd actually say it should stay if village frequency wasn't so high, but one of the ways they could tone frequency down would be to make checks for villages based on elevation and invalidating a spawn if there's too much variance. I'm not sure how easy that is to code, and to do without side effects, but villages are super common, and a lot of them are those wonky ones.
Messed-up villages have been a problem since forever. I think villages need more direct fixes than trying to flatten the biomes they're in. What they need is for each building to have "quality standards" like if too much dirt has to be moved or if the door isn't usable it just doesn't get placed, period. And maybe if they're too different in height from the village start. The 1.18 system also has a parameter to look for - erosion - they could use that to keep villages out of trouble (actually my impression is they kinda do, but could do better).
The biggest problem with this is that the game has no idea what the terrain is like before placing parts of a multi-chunk structure, including an entire village, which is created as an in-memory map of the structure pieces which is then applied as each chunk that contains part of it is populated; it does measure the average ground level under each individual building but even then it can only check within the 2x2 chunk populated area (otherwise it might access unloaded chunks which is A Bad Thing (this will also cause the structure generator to be called again while in the process of placing the first piece, so you'd end up with the second piece being placed before the first. Depending on the feature/code it may also corrupt its state; this is why the vanilla "BiomeDecorator" crashes the game if it is called again, at least in 1.6.4; Mojang seems to have removed this check in later versions but it resulted in odd bugs when e.g. you made ores too large so they overflowed).
One of the other ways I worked around this was to change "scattered features" (small structures like desert temples, witch huts, as well as my own structures) to generate centered within the 2x2 chunk area and have a maximum span of 32x32 blocks so they can be placed all at once, measuring the ground level across the entire area (in the case of villages they are still placed chunk by chunk but the measured area can be within this entire area, but still only as each piece, not the entire village, is placed). The fact that village buildings are not placed all at once (example of a partially generated village, note also the missing snow on the outermost half-chunk) also precludes being able to match the elevation of the door with the surrounding terrain (my own structures place extra weight on this area).
This could be solved by only placing a village once the entire area has been loaded but it could cause issues with structures overwriting something the player built, or even generating on top of them, or restrict the minimum chunk view distance (the maximum span of a large structure is +/- 8 chunks, though they rarely ever actually get this large).
Also, the previous biome restriction did cause a percentage of villages to fail to generate, making them less common than suggested by tools like ChunkBase, which only consider if a single point is valid; in fact, the "Village.dat" file for the world I created for TMCWv5 lists 9 villages but only 5 actually generated (indicated by "Valid: 1"; all these villages are shown to only have a well since there wasn't enough room to add any paths to it, and in turn, buildings (nothing will be placed unless there are at least 3 pieces, excluding paths). The failure rate appears to be lower in vanilla 1.6.4 as it is more likely for their spawn biomes to form larger contiguous areas):
I've also attempted to reduce the failure rate by offsetting the well to one of 4 points around the initial location, which may still all fail (the code that checks the biome adds a border, and also uses the underlying resolution of 4x4 blocks, as opposed to the smoothed biome map that is applied to generated chunks):
21:04:35 - Failed to generate village at -664 -856 (hasHouse: false; components: 1)
21:04:35 - Failed to generate village at -672 -864 (hasHouse: false; components: 1)
21:04:35 - Generated village at -656 -864 (hasHouse: true; components: 7)
Sorry for a delayed update (sort of). I've actually been spending some more time back in Azura (my other hardcore world) but it's "only" been caving so I haven't really had anything to update on there.
I played more in Gaia and while I've been itching to get towards mining here and earning diamonds, I started by mapping. I was already out far from my settled location and doing that when I last played so may as well finish the two maps I'm doing now.
I started finding a number of these in the ocean.
This one had a drowned come after me right after I got the chest, but thankfully one without a trident, so I could ignore it.
There's also a side turned shipwreck pictured, one of two or three in this ocean I also got.
This last one was where I've been before, but I missed it until now, where the magma blocks underwater from this angle made me aware of it. If you look at the map, spawn is the Northwest corner, the pillager outpost near spawn is the brown below that, and then below that (and above where I am) is the "overhang mountain" with the shipwreck near it I found early on the world.
One note is that I found a "bottle of enchanting" in one of the shipwrecks. This is a small amount of experience in a bottle. While I've disallowed myself from using "potions" I did allow myself to take it, since it's not what I had in mind when restricting myself from potions.
Just beyond this, being back on land, I was mapping the flower forest... or one of many.
I decided to get a picture here only because there were a lot of times my screen was filled with flowers. At the same time, the picture didn't come out making it look as though there was an exceptional amount because I wanted an angle that was more than "screen full of tall flowers right in my face" so it... worked against that. Oh well.
After finishing that corner, that's two more maps done (or... mostly, more on that in a moment), so it was time to return... home?
Because nothing says home like some chests and a bed thrown into a field with some torches around. But this home has birds!
I tossed up a small temporary wall and didn't picture it (I thought I did) with the maps. What I mentioned above about the maps mostly being done was because one was a mountain I had to circle, so the immediate center is unmapped. I need to revisit it with leather boots later.
The map wall was three maps consisting of an "L" shape so I decided to get the top right corner one done too. It was going to need to be bigger but I'd do this one and then shift to either building or caving for some diamonds for better gear.
Starting that, I finally chanced upon sighting this naturally...
That's the one I was aware of from the Unmined map right near where I was planning to settle. So i went to check it while I found it.
The axe had mending, haha. Of course, I left it as I'm not allowed to use enchanted stuff.
I then go over a mountain and find this.
I forgot there was a second one I was aware of via the map. So this was a split moment of "I found something new" before realizing I'd known about it, because I legitimately forgot. This should be the last structure I "shouldn't be aware of" with the exception of one jungle temple to the North (and I usually don't even loot those to be honest) and the village to far East.
Another golden apple and a couple more obsidian.
I continue through the forest and in the Northeast corner of the map I'm working on, I find the area where I once started making that video (the long one that I lost and crashed the game I think).
This is in that valley. The first (of four) villages I found this way is immediately to my left, and will be off the map I'm currently working on.
I happen across another big cave... or at least a big opening. The cave itself may or may not be so big.
Another view of it from a distance once I'm looping back to fill in the map to the south of it.
I've said before, but I love the wide, winding rivers through valleys with plains and plateau ridges on opposite sides. This is something you'd seldom see in versions back when I started playing. If I saw this back then...
...I'd absolutely be planning to make a village here.
Especially since I saw this just above that spot.
And once I get to it and then go to double back the other way, as I've reached the end of the map, I see this...
That's the village I found way back near the start of the world, where I went to the East a lot, saw a massive cherry blossom biome, went "oh pretty" and then went back as I didn't want to venture too far. Before I continued though, I decided to take in the cherry blossom biome a bit. Maybe a mistake...
So this is where I'm going to say something disappointing, and if not to anyone else then maybe to me.
I decided (for now, as these things change) that I want to build my home settlement here. I originally want to make it near the jungle because that was different from my previous world, and something a bit new for me. But while my previous world was made near high elevation and later had cherry blossom trees accommodating the area, I decided to make it here anyway. While I wanted to try playing with bamboo wood, I could find anything that worked. Maybe I will later, but I don't want to put things on hold for that. I did instead find something that worked with different types though, and while it'd "fit" better near a jungle or other warm biome, it shouldn't be too out place here, either. You'll see once I have it started.
And instead of making a bridge over the river, I now can do it from one plateau to another (also over a river!). I'll need to anyway to get villagers here from the nearby village.
There's a lot of interesting cave openings nearby too (and no doubt, ancient cities beneath).
Coincidentally, this is the rough area where I had my tumble and almost died in this world. How else do you assert dominance? By building there and putting a bridge over it, of course!
Near the end of the day, I found some friends! I think (?) this is the first time I've seen these in this world.
And I noted a few of these nearby...
This might help me transport my stuff here. I already have some saddles.
The next day, I came across this, but I've found this one before (it was the first one I found in this world, in fact).
I then saw these, and while not technically the first, it was the first "in the wild" (the other first time they were still a spawned patrol, but right near a pillager outpost, so not so much out in the wild, so to say).
It's actually relieving sighting them in the distance, as you know you will be more safe from randomly coming face to face with them in the immediate future.
I swear it was like this when I got here.
I then also saw this, which again is a spot I pictured before early in this world, but this time from another spot and angle. That's the village "in the cliffside" I found early in the world.
In the river below it, I noticed a spot of fog showing up at sea level despite a large plateau being there. Only in a space a few blocks big. As I drew near, it turned Black, and I realized what it was. It must have been a very small opening to what was a large cave inside, if I saw fog despite being that close to it (meaning the wall on the opposite side was too far to see within render distance). I approached it and that's indeed what it was. Sorry if it's a bit dark but here's a picture from just inside the opening.
Funny how sometimes the big openings have disappointing and small caves that end soon 9as I had happen twice earlier in this world), and some tiny openings hide the biggest ones.
I finished mapping and returned "home". Well, until I move it. Sorry if that disappoints anyone, but my next goal is to start moving that here.
I have a creative world with a test house built and I will be looking forward to getting a real home built. But I still have more resources to collect before I can truly do that.
I admit to being disappointed you're not doing the Jungle Edge build because I was really looking forward to what you would do with it. I sometimes like not knowing what I'm doing and trying multiple plans and revisions over time - like revamping the windows and the width on the Starlight, or all the styles I threw into Lazy River Landing, or the multiple revisions in my To the Edge of the World spawn fort.
What's the white blobby thing in the Cherry Grove? A micro cold biome?
I agree the windy rivers look nice. I wonder if there are any techniques I could adopt into RTG.
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I'm... very glad nobody noticed I almost died... like it never happened, haha.
More the opposite and I feel like I'm the only one around here who likes it.
I only have two samples of experience with 1.20 so I can't say much, and one was a world started in 1.19 and updated to 1.20. Bother are my hardcore worlds.
And if you remember from the first one, I settled in a small recess atop a "mountain" (or a plateau-like area just under a peak, more formally). I think this was a mix of plains and meadow originally in 1.19, and it came with a village, but then in 1.20 the same spot was a massive cherry grove and had no village.
In other words, those cherry groves might have been valid spots for what would have been more villages if this were 1.18 or 1.19. It's ridiculous. That's the one thing I don't like about modern world generation. Seriously, villages (and even shipwrecks and ruins portals) need to be cut in half, and then cut in half again. Or in other words, somewhere between 20% to 33% as common as they are now seems like it might feel better.
Ah, so it's sort of what I thought.
I guess I'm able to adapt to things well. Like, yeah, I wouldn't mind if they were less winding and more consistent in width, but I also don't mind them as they are either. I looked on some maps of older worlds and rivers seem pretty winding there, too. Less winding maybe, but still rather winding as opposed to straight. The big change is they seem less wide and less common. I definitely prefer them being wider as opposed to the streams of 1.16 (or 1.17) and before, although maybe they could be slightly less common and be fine.
A lot of this is the kind of stuff you won't see or notice (at least as much) in-game, although maps show it. But even on maps it looks fine to me.
Do keep in mind this is a very zoomed out look, too. Zoom out maps in 1.6 or something with similar random biome placement and they quickly start looking like unpleasant jigsaw puzzles too.
That's true, but I never looked at rivers as needing to be a way of efficient transportation, and they never were in any version ever.
Maybe that also speaks to who I am as a player as to why I don't mind them. They don't need to be efficient. They need to be fun. I'd enjoy getting in a boat and just following one to see where it goes. You can't entirely do that all the time, but it's much closer than before.
Likewise, that extends to other things like caves, where I find them more fun even if people complain about then because "it doesn't give me as much ore to the minute or resource to the durability use as another version" because there's less ores or they have to pillar up for some or whatever reasons they come up with, and I'm just like... what? Maybe I never cared for that because I play at a far slower pace? And just like to do things for the experience of it and not care if it "gives me the most"? That's playing for the wrong reasons in my opinion. What do I care if it gives me less if it's already more than enough anyway? This same mentality has become so pervasive that people cry about nerfs just because it's a nerf rather than objectively looking at the state of things as a whole. Instead, they are comparing one thing in a vacuum to the same thing in another version and going "it's lower so it's worse". What a silly mentality to have. No wonder the fun is being stripped from the game for many people. What happened to just experiencing the game instead of rushing A to B to Z all the time? Well I wonder why people are bored and finding the need to restart worlds all the time...
Sorry, now I'm ranting. But I'm not playing to accumulate the most of something for it's own sake. Or to have everything that exists be some super efficient thing to justify its existence. That's all pointless to me. I'm also playing for the experience. And that's where it's far better for me than ever before, even if some things took "some steps back". The bigger picture is where it matters. Don't miss the forest for the trees.
I'm mixed on this.
While I do miss some of the old biome transition possibilities (a flat desert adjacent to an extreme hills being a classic preference of mine, though... that also relied upon the texture pack I was using and I'd find it less appealing in vanilla), I have come to like the climate system itself despite that. I prefer it to the complete randomness of before. The older way would be so much worse at render distances of today (where 16 isn't the highest anymore but more the norm for Java, and Bedrock is far above that) if there was so much variety, or such harsh type transitions, in a smaller area like in 1.6 and before. It would look awful in game.
This extends to maps too. 1.6 and older worlds look like "random jigsaw puzzles", and your maps are honestly a great example of this. They don't look pleasant to me. At the same time, how maps look isn't quite as important as how it is in-game, as I said above, but even in-game I don't find this as pleasant.
The newer approach being overly aggressive at times is a definite downfall to it, but it seems to me your much slower style of exploration, your focus on the underground, and probably lower render distance, are all reasons why you don't mind the drawbacks to the biome arrangement of 1.6 (and inversely, why you would find the newer style of 1.7 or above detrimental), but the way 1.6 does it is definitely not without its own drawbacks.
Biome size though doesn't feel much different to me? The "large biomes" is in the game separately, by the way, and this isn't it. Look at my screenshot in my first post where I'm setting the world options and the "world type" is "default". Large biomes, amplified, and single biome also exist. And if you look at the maps above, you can see many individual biomes in many cases have about the same size they might in older versions (I even find very small biomes far more often than I would back then). It seems more to me like many biomes might repeat for a while (or "the same biome be placed next to itself" for a lack of better words) due to the climate system, which is leading to more visual repetitiveness than you are used to seeing compared to the "random jigsaw puzzle placement" from 1.6. But the individual biome size in many cases seems largely the same (give or take). I mean, maybe they are different to an extent and my impression is wrong (and in that case, you need to remember this isn't 2012 anymore where a render distance of 8 is called "normal" and the game is bugged and "far" caps to 10, but instead most people are playing well above 4 to 8 now, so the tiny jigsaw biomes with harsh transitions so often wouldn't fly today), but to me the biome size itself seems fine and it's more the climate system that changed. I've played on large biomes in the past and individual biomes felt larger. This maybe feels like a situation where a limited number of biomes (two or three, or sometimes one) repeat a lot and makes individual biomes seem larger? Maybe with more biome types, the modern systems' flaws would be less of an issue? Not sure.
I agree with all of this. People are in such a rush to follow the progression, to do everything as quickly and as profitably as possible. Not everything has to be a speedrun any%. Vanilla Minecraft should be about the journey, not the destination. Blowing through the game like a box-ticking exercise (got pearls for Ender eyes, got netherite, got perfect villagers, killed dragon, got elytra, killed wither, built iron farm, built beacon...) inevitably results in boredom, because you can only do that set of things, the most efficient way, so many times in a row before getting sick of it.
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There is no doubt that biomes are are far larger, I mean FAR larger than before, even if the "unit size" of an individual" biome was the same, which seems doubtful - the smallest biomes in 1.18+ are "sub-biomes", which were truly tiny before - those little specks of water in 1.6 jungles and swamps? "river" sub-biomes on the order of 1 chunk in size; biomes like jungle hills were 4x4 chunks in size and full-size biomes were 16x16 chunks (transformed into random shapes after multiple stages of "fuzzy" zooming are applied).
Here are 1:1 comparisons between two more random seeds in 1.18 to my two largest worlds (World1 and TMCWv5); the only comparably large areas of the same biome are the snowy zones in vanilla 1.6, precisely because they were in fact an early form of "climate zones" (1.7 even reuses the same code to place initial climates; for TMCW I use a completely different method which places a "seed", at the scale of a single biome, and "grows" it in two passes to a maximum of 13 biomes, once per 8x8 biome region (128x128 chunks on default), giving a maximum coverage of about 20% of the area; I can identify what appears to be 2 "hot" areas and 1 "cold" area based on the clusterings of such biomes):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Well this is relieving to read then, because I felt my contributions to this thread so far might have been seen as "pointless" by some because I'm covering the 'boring early days" and because my progression might seem slow.
I keep saying "I'm going out for iron" and then just explore. And I do actually look for iron, and even go in caves and get some (but mostly coal), and then explore, so I was wondering if my "oh, pretty, a nice looking landscape, let's explore" on repeat was turning anyone off, haha.
I'll have to yield to you as you definitely know more than me here, and I'm merely speaking from my own (limited) experience as well as observation. I'm also aware that when checking seeds across certain versions, they will also be observable and show the things you're saying. I do see that to an extent too.
But at the same time, in playing them and checking the maps on my particular worlds, the individual biomes don't necessarily seem much larger to me. When they do, it's usually feels like it's in edge cases, especially in climates that lack biomes (namely, cold or hot) because I observe the tendency of the same multiple biomes are on repeat. Seems is the key word. Maybe those biomes are larger actually instead, but I don't think I see massively inflated biome sizes with many other types.
Remember, back in 1.6 and before, we were also locked to render distances of 10 and lower, and I think you still prefer to play this way. These days, we can see farther, so maybe the biomes are larger but don't quite feel like it. That's sort of what I meant when I said I understand why you especially detest the post-1.7 changes. For your play style and conditions (slow exploration rate, and lower render distance), something like 1.7+ and yes maybe worse with 1.18+ must be truly horrendous for you.
As an explorer, though, and someone who spends much of her time on the surface building and exploring, the new version, while it definitely has its edge cases and I'd like to see it be less aggressive, is still preferable to the older way of truly random, jigshaw shaped biomes. And if they were smaller, that would just make it worse. I played in large biomes in older versions (can't remember if this before or after 1.7 though honestly) and I remember it feeling less far varied than I expected it to, even going in and knowing the biomes would four times the area (I think?).
The biomes might indeed be larger but I still think the repetitiveness might be more down to the climate system, because at least in a lot of cases, I'm seeing individual biomes that don't feel a whole lot bigger than they did back then (I'm aware there are also cases they are, though).
I sort of mentioned at the end of the post where I wondered if this issue might be far less of an issue if there was simply more biomes in the game. I think I read someone else (Zeno?) mention this at one point too.
And when I say I see small biomes, I don't know if I'm talking about sub biomes? Are cherry blossoms sub-biomes? Are mangrove swamps? there's tiny ones of those on the map in this world here. I also observe small "sliver" biome shapes at times (there's a forest like this on my map near spawn) so I think I've seen "normal" biomes come out that was in some cases.
I think maybe biomes are just more variable, even if they might trend towards larger on average, especially made worse by the climate system "repeating" them. So they feel much larger, but there's also edge cases the other way? I don't know but that's just the impression I have. I don't know what the coding or values actually show so again I'll yield on any definitive numbers facts, but that's what it seems to be based on what I see on maps and in game.
(I was going to edit this in but then I don't know if you'd miss it.)
Oh, wait, is that your seed you used for your worlds? Honestly, that doesn't look bad to me in the 1.20 version. Within a couple/few thousand blocks, there's all three main climate zones and they're all decently sized by the looks of it. And a good number of cherry biomes (yes, that's a perk for me, haha). Kind of like the seed I'm using this world. I'd have been pretty happy if I got that one, too. I'd say that's good variety for what I would say are reasonable distances. I know they might not be reasonable for your play style but the only way you cram more variety into a smaller space is basically by doing what you did, and going with truly random placement and having smaller biomes. Considering 1.7+ can bemuuuch worse than that, that seems alright to me.
Also, I want to point out you're using different methods of showing maps. I know you're doing this simply because you don't play modern versions to have UnMined maps for them, and likewise because 1.6 generation might not work whatever you're using to show the 1.20 seeds (?), but even if it's not for any intentional reason, it changes the impression they give. Good comparisons would be to show them like for like.
In the 1.6 map for example, I'm mostly seeing desert, plains, forest, and snow areas on repeat and it looks lacking in variety and bland (I realize the map is super zoomed out and there's of course many more biomes than four, but I'm just saying how and offhand negative impression can be gleaned from anything when presented a certain way).
There's also a real lack of oceans in the map of what I presume is your mod? Did you shrink them, or is that just an example of "sample size of one doesn't speak for everything"? One thing I miss from 1.6 is the occasional massive ocean. They needed toned down, but they went the other way, and as a result I miss the "continental" feel of the world in anything since then. You really had to be a huge explorer and generate a massive world to make them feel good though. I guess for most players they just felt bad (especially since oceans themselves back then were just lacking).
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Curse PremiumI took about two years before ever going into the Nether in my main world, so I can certainly relate to the slower playstyle here. Just because Mojang designed Minecraft with a certain structure reflecting how they interpret game progression doesn't mean we have to follow it - you recognize this already. Perhaps, the beauty is in how we interpret the concept of progression, whilst the game exists as more of a creative canvas. In terms of the narrative itself, I imagine there is a story behind every shrub - what you explore on the surface might just ignite the lore for what lies underneath, even if at a much later date.
I think the primary reason for the rather aggressive playstyle that many players foster is that Mojang has given clear objectives for how they think Minecraft is to be played, and people largely view Minecraft as a game with objectives to be completed - as is the case with all games. It's easier to be told what to do than to create your own rules - once you do the latter, you're not playing the same game anymore. As a result, most players will never look past the "game" aspect of Minecraft to explore the artistic medium it functions as so well (hence why they get bored so quickly). I firmly believe that in order to enjoy Minecraft to its fullest, you must first transcend the established narrative of what it is "supposed" to be and play it in the manner that supports what you want it to be.
LP series? Not my style! Video series? Closer, but not quite. Survival journal, maybe? That's better. Now in Season 4 of the Legends of Quintropolis Journal (<< click to view)!! World download and more can be found there.
I just took random seeds off of ChunkBase; the seeds I actually used are "-123775873255737467" for World1 and "-4426978636490490569" for TMCWv5 (I did not use these seeds since there is no point in comparing the same seeds).
Also, ChunkBase did used to support versions back to 1.2-1.6 (not just for biomes but structures and everything else present in those versions) but they removed them a year or two back, which is quite shameful of them (I mean, it can't really hurt to keep the options for older versions when they already have up to 8 different versions back to 1.7, and it would make direct comparisons much easier).
Some of the archived pages do work though, although zooming works differently (I can't get the same scale as the maps I posted from the current site):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180105144414/https://www.chunkbase.com/apps/biome-finder
Also of interest (works for 1.6):
https://web.archive.org/web/20180106015009/http://chunkbase.com/apps/village-finder (they can be quite common in areas with land, not much different from current versions, though 1.20 does seem to have more villages than should exist given one per 32x32 chunk region)
https://web.archive.org/web/20170703132419/http://chunkbase.com/apps/mineshaft-finder (this shows just how common they were in 1.6, further away from the origin (try unticking "only show starting points", which shows the potential for overlap); and yes, even I think they are really too common, with the overlap being the biggest issue, which can even happen in 1.20 since they have no minimum spacing)
The lack of oceans in TMCW is in part because I don't allow them to generate within about 1000 blocks of the origin (they can sometimes come closer, but still never within about 500 blocks), ensuring that every seed meets my criteria in that regard (likewise, spawn will always be within one of several biomes chosen for being relatively flat and treeless, excluding savanna due to its color); overall about 2/3 of the world is ocean, compared to 3/4 in 1.6.4 and around 1/4 in 1.7 (the 1.7 analysis comes from this thread while the 1.6/TMCW come from my own biome mapping/analysis tools).
Also, Unmined does exist for older versions, although I don't use it much outside of verifying changes to the underground due to lack of support for modded blocks and its color scheme:
The same view in Minutor for comparison (using custom definition files for blocks and biomes):
A view of the whole world in Unmined, which does show variations in terrain height better:
The same world in Minutor (plus the Nether and End):
Here are large-scale comparisons of the land-ocean maps for 1.6.4 and TMCW; the scale is 65536x65536 blocks with each grid cell being 8192x8192 blocks, larger than anything I've ever explored (these are not 100% accurate since I set the biome size to 2, 1/4 the scale of default, which slightly alters biome borders). Note that even vanilla has a bias towards more land around 0,0 but due to random "growth" it isn't guaranteed to become a substantial landmass:
Another example using the seed "10" (a seed which I often used when testing before I changed the generation of landmasses due to having a larger landmass near the origin); about 71% of the area is ocean:
TMCW; using the seed "0"; about 64% of the area is ocean, which is much more fragmented due to the inclusion of more landmasses and islands of various sizes (all the islands far from landmasses on the 1.6 maps are Mushroom Islands, which are only 1/15 of the same-sized islands on these maps):
The seed I used for the world I played on, "-4426978636490490569"; 62% of the area is ocean. An actual map of the world is overlayed, showing the relative size of the area I explored over more than a year; I'd have never found ocean in the seed "10" in vanilla, and have gone nearly 4,000 blocks in one direction from spawn before reaching ocean in my first world, 4,500 along a diagonal to the southeast without encountering ocean yet:
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?
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Curse PremiumIf you look at Master Caver's 1.20 map, you'll see a Plains that goes from X=0 near or at spawn to X=2,600. That is certainly a *large* biome compared to anything you'd see on any prior version. In earlier versions, that might be driven by having few biomes to randomly choose from, but there's something else going on in modern generation; it's using some kind of climate system to generate biomes on a much smaller scale than the fractalized 256x256 chunks of the past. I'm curious how they do it, because it's a hard problem; Highlands did it but had problems with too-thin transition biomes. I tried to think of a way to do it for Geographicraft and couldn't.
FWIW, I agree with your interpretation of that map. To an explorer like you, and me, it's an interesting map - different areas have different personalities; there are reasons to travel substantial distances, and it would be an interesting long-term project to map out a big part of it and discover what is where. I would *enjoy* finding out how far that Plains went, and posting about it, and possibly later building a horse-and-road system to cross it quickly. (I might not think so highly of finding 20+ villages in the process, tho). In fairness, a start around X=3500, Z=-2000 would be rough for all but the most intrepid explorer.
At the same time I see why Master Caver *wouldn't* like that map, which is a totally valid opinion too.
But I do wonder what you find objectionable about the old fractal boundaries. I bet the continent I'm working on now in my journal would be a great demonstration of fractal biomes, but it won't be done for months, probably, so I'll use my current spawn continent as an example:
I *like* the way this looks. Real biome boundaries aren't smooth lines; they really *are* jagged and irregular. Do you really think that map would be more attractive if all the boundaries were smooth curves?
(It's even got two Cherry Blossom Groves in it. I know you have to love it!)
Incidentally, vanilla "large biomes" is 4 times the WIDTH, so 16 times the AREA. So a 1.7-1.17 biome is roughly 1000x1000 blocks. Unless you spawn in a 1.7-1.17 *Jungle* which occurs in climate-sized areas so it would be 4000x4000 -- Master Caver's 1.20 example, except there's absolutely nothing anywhere but jungle - (sounds of screaming ensue).
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
My take is that the 1.18+ biome layouts are interesting to look at as maps, while the old ones are interesting to experience in-world. By "old ones" I'm specifically referring to pre 1.7 as I have a lot of vitriol stored up for the climate banding thing: several thousand blocks in a row of desert/savanna/desert/savanna/desert/savanna then several thousand blocks in a row of plains/forest/e.hills/plains/forest/e.hills is not as interesting to me as the old randomness that would give you jungle adjacent to ice plains or desert adjacent to swamp. But I look even further back and prefer Alpha/Beta generation to Adventure Update because it was even more random. 1.18 made a small nudge backwards to Beta generation by decoupling height variation from biome type but it's not enough for me to be content. I still find 1.18 very samey, and its terrain admittedly pretty to look at but not very fun to travel through or build in.
I wonder whether that different perception could be because I'm such a homebody compared to Princess Garnet. I've never yet traveled more than 10,000 blocks out in my primary world. The furthest I've ever gone so far was to visit a mansion and that was only about 7-8k blocks out. So I get a very "micro" level Minecraft experience whereas Princess Garnet, I think, gets a "macro" view.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
So I made a world in 1.20 with that seed to get a look at it in game, as well as get an UnMined map for a like for like comparison.
It's a little bit as I expected. The not like for like comparison is giving a bad at a glance impression.
That "massive plains" biome? It's not as you might expect.
It's not even all plains. There's a sunflower plains and multiple meadows in there. Yes, the first is a type of plains and meadows are higher altitude "plains-like", but still. Do a bunch of different types of forests in 1.6 count as one massive forest biomes? Yes but also no. But the map being used there made it appear like it might be one big plains biomes.
There's another important distinction though. While a lot of it is still formal plains biomes, if we're comparing to 1.6 and earlier generation, there's a change in terrain generation that should to be accounted for. Altitude is no longer as strictly tied to biome. Specifically, the old "extreme hills" is gone, and a "plains" biome can generate with varying heights, which in the case of plains makes them appear as plains with a lot of "extreme hills-esque" generation. And that's what is going on with a lot of this particular area.
(I should also mention there's a lot of interesting looking terrain here in general, but I find myself saying that a lot for modern versions so maybe that's just me.)
Now is there still a big area of repetitiveness here regardless? Yeah, a bit. I definitely don't dispute that the climate feature can be aggressive and lead to that. My other hardcore world is a good example of that. But this still shows a bit what I was trying to say. It's not necessarily "all biomes in modern versions are large biomes", especially if large biomes actually are 16 times the area and not just four times (this explains why my experience with them even in 1.6 made things so repetitive). Instead, it's seems more like the same few biomes can tend to repeat, along with biomes maybe being somewhat larger (but also possibly smaller). This happens a lot with deserts and badlands (and associated sub types) too.
But it's not quite the same as one big flat 1.6 style plains like the map gives the impression of.
Here's an UnMined map of it (and the concerning eight villages).
Suddenly looks not as big and more varied than that Chunk Base one does? I think so, at least.
Here's a comparison with a spot of an older copy of my "1.6" world where there was a pretty impressively sized extreme hills (and plains) region. There's definitely more variety with some forests mixed in, but older versions could do a lot of plains and extreme hills over a large distance too (even if it was less common).
Also, I have... no idea what the "missing" terrain is from. I just copied a backup version of the world from 1.10 and it just showed up that way. The last time that world was played in 1.120 and loaded in (older versions of) UnMined, it appeared fine though. Those aren't even individual chunks missing but partial chunks missing, and I have no idea what explains such an issue, but as it's not a live world I'm intending to play and just one I copied to get that UnMined map image for, I'm not going to bother with it.
As for your question of modern terrain generation, I have no idea because I know nothing about this. I can merely observe and share my experiences, as I am here. But I wonder if this has any answers to what you're asking? I came across it a while back and while most of it goes over my head insofar as understanding it, it was interesting nonetheless.
I don't quite object to them. You're right; they're certainly pleasing in their own way.
At the same time, I don't find the smooth borders completely objectionable either.
While modern generation definitely has its "looks bad at a glance on a map" moments, I find the "jigsaw puzzle" look to be the same thing for older versions.
Of course, how maps look tends to be a rather inconsequential thing. How it looks in game is far more important, and I feel like both are good but also bad for the opposite reasons. The random biome placement of older generation (though this doesn't pertain to the fractal shape so much) looks bad at anything but lower render distances, especially when warm and cold climates border, and the elevation being more tied to biome made variety on a larger scale so awful. This was probably the number one complaint against beta 1.8 through 1.6 generation that 1.7 and prior did better; low biome variety but great variety over a larger scale because elevation wasn't tied to biome. The plus side is variety on a smaller scale is good though.
Meanwhile, the repetitiveness on a smaller scale of the newer versions needs no introduction. And some people might be torn on the smooth lines versus fractals. But otherwise, I think it does things better, namely on a larger scale, and I guess that's why I prefer it.
Over a large enough scale, of course, anything will be repetitive. That's sort of why I liked the continents with large oceans to 1.6. They were awful for travel on a shorter scale (sometimes taking days to cross), but they were great a larger scale. A scale that very few if any people probably realistically played at, though.
Yes, I automatically love it.
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Curse PremiumThere are other biomes in the Plains, but they're (mostly) entirely enclosed, like sub-biomes. We've had sub-biomes for a long time; any large biome in 1.6-era or 1.7-era would have similar sub-biomes, and we wouldn't consider those earlier biomes as not one biome because of it. So in that sense it's still vastly larger than anything pre-1.18.
There is certainly more variety in the terrain than in either of the biome-based generation eras, and that helps with interest. I don't think the hills you show would count as "extreme hills", though, I think they're more analogous to the "xxx hills" biomes we've long had (but not in Plains, because it had *Forest* Hills as a sub-biome). Extreme Hills had additional differences from plains we don't see here - plenty of snow, different coloration, and a different tree set. It was also more different in elevation although the new generation doesn't do so much of that anymore anywhere so that analogy is less clear.
Although I think that long Plains isn't unplayable, as a Minecraft mod landscape designer, my immediate reaction to that is "needs more variety". If my mods had coughed up something like that, I would have come up with a way to increase variety over the area, likely with a sub-biome system to throw in some copses of forest or changes in vegetation, or some addition gradation system. Maybe it's different on the ground when you have to climb over the terrain, but I would not have released something like that without some more work.
I haven't looked at your video but I did take a look at the Minecraft wiki which has a lot on how the new system works and it's fairly interesting. There's a lot of work in it, which shows in the overall improvements compared to prior systems (I agree with you on that), but at the same time I think a 2 billion dollar company could have put a little more polish on it.
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
It's not exactly analogous to the old extreme hills, but I don't think the old relatively rare and small raised portions in forests is a closer analogous to it either. Maybe in technicality (since it is elevation variety untied to biome?), but in practice, which I think matters far more here, those results are far closer to what the old extreme hills were.
The new "extreme hills" are instead elevation differences untied from biome rather than a formal biome itself (which just results in what seems close to what the old extreme hills were when it happens as a plains biome, and sometimes this indeed happens with forests overlaying it). They are more often plateau-like than the ones in 1.6 as well (larger flat areas on the top). When you get larger areas like this with multiple ones especially bordering small bits of plains on each side of a river, it results in these valleys which I absolutely adore.
I absolutely agree with this. It could definitely benefit from more variety, but this is bordering on the "climate system is too strict" or "there's not enough biome types for the current strictness" subjects, which is another matter (and something I agree with, by the way).
I certainly don't find it a flaw that a plains region of that size can exist though, but maybe I'm alone in that preference. Now if that was actually a large flat plains all like in 1.6, and each biome was routinely of a size like that, then sure, I'd agree with the saying that "new generation equals large biomes of the past", but we both know that's an unfair comparison of what's actually happening. Instead I'm finding that while biome size may certainly trend larger on average (they can also be much smaller), I'm also finding these are usually "greater biome regions" as opposed to one single massive biome (like in 1.6). And that's not a problem to me. As I said, the biomes sizes of 1.6 just wouldn't fly in today's game with larger render distances and especially larger terrain elevation scale since 1.18. It just wouldn't. So making 1:1 comparisons on a given technical aspect is arbitrary at best, and not very useful for what's actually happening.
Maybe it overshoots it some (it has since 1.7, and I've been on the record as saying 1.18 missed a chance to better address this). Maybe it needs more slightly different sub-biomes to add variety. Sure, I can agree with both of those. But I don't agree that making 1:1 comparisons likening them to single large biomes like those of 1.6 as proper comparison. So after actually looking at it in game, I just wanted to share my impressions and point out the distinctions I felt were valid.
Absolutely agree, but if it wasn't this, it would be something else, so we'd always be finding something that could be better. Which, isn't a bad thing. We should always be critical on what could be improved.
And I was sort of looking forward to hearing if you had any ideas on the video, since you seem to dabble is this yourself. As someone who doesn't understand most of the code or technical stuff, the best I can do is form a reaction on the observable results, and it puts me in awe at times at what the current terrain generation can do (while simultaneously identifying some of its flaws at other times).
Also, new update for the actual world soon.
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Curse PremiumSo I looked at the video and I think it's very good intro to what they were doing. It all makes perfect sense to me because I have at least thought about everything they did, although in many cases I never actually did it (like the biome assignment system; the thought of partitioning a high dimensional system scared me off). I do immediately understand one of my big complaints with the system - excessive terrain bumpiness: they didn't "squash" the 3D perlin enough. Aesthetically, from working with RTG, I think 3D perlin should be squashed to nothing in most flattish biomes, and they didn't do that.
Interestingly, they took the same broad approach I did to generating interesting terrain from 2D perlin (which tends to be a bit bland alone); combining multiple 2D noises non-linearly although of course exactly how they did it was completely different. I'm a bit impressed at the sweep of the vision of making the ENTIRE world surface level from just 3 perlin noises; I used different approaches for different biomes, in groups, I had a "plains" approach, a "hills" approach, a "mountains" approach, a "plateaus" approach.
I did do a lot of work using a different type of noise he doesn't discuss, which creates basins separated by ridges (called Voronoi noise). I *think* they're using some relative of it for rivers and lakes, which he didn't get into. I found it very powerful for certain effects, though. It's key to my Extreme Hills, which I'm extremely fond of.
The big disadvantage of their biome system is that it's hard to add biomes, and very hard to add a lot of biomes, because they tend to fracture into bits on the ground if the "chunks" of noise space they occupy get too small. That is a part of the reason the biomes are usually so large; each has to cover a relatively large section compared to local variation. I'm curious how BoP works in the new system; they have adapted for it.
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
IMO, height should not be entirely independent of biome - even with the height variation of 1.6 (where I've found variation in excess of 20 blocks in Plains), or even TMCW's even flatter plains I've found plenty of wonky villages (e.g. houses half-buried in hills, or with the doors otherwise inaccessible); I can only imagine how bad it must be in newer versions, especially since 1.10 removed the biome restriction so villages can spread into any biome (before they had to remain entirely within their spawn biomes):
A wider view of the Plains the village is in; I found another area reaching y=80, with higher elevations possible (I recall seeing 85 or so before):
Another village, showing how they do not generate into biomes other than plains and desert (a desert hills is just behind me):
Even in TMCW, where I made the original Plains biome flatter, I've come across stuff like this (this is slightly better than it would be since I modified the code that measures the average ground level below a building so instead of being restricted to the 16x16 "populated chunk" it has access to the entire 2x2 chunk area that can be accessed by decorators; i.e. vanilla might measure as little as one block if only that much of a building intersects the populated chunk (once the altitude has been measured it saves it and will not recompute it once the next chunk gets populated with the rest of the building, else, you'll get buildings split in half along chunk boundaries, an issue which actually could occur prior to the addition of structure saving in 1.6.4 if parts of a structure were generated in different sessions. Interestingly, this seems to have returned in 1.13, which changed how structure saving is handled):
My solution was to add variants of biomes with varying amounts of height variation; vanilla Plains was reduced to 1/3 of its normal variation while I added "Hilly Plains" and "Hilly Plains Hills", the later bordering on vanilla 1.6's Extreme Hills (if you are going to lump Extreme Hills as a variant of Plains then this is even more extreme, with an "Extreme Mountains" sub-biome which can exceed y=180). Deserts likewise include "Mountainous Desert" and "Mountainous Desert Hills" to counteract normal Desert being flatter; these all generate in various combinations of whole biomes, sub-biomes, and edge biomes:
Some of the terrain in biomes like Mountainous Desert can get truly insane; I doubt you can find anything like this in 1.18:
A less extreme desert, with a relatively flat area (normal desert, the hills might be Desert Hills but aren't in the middle of the biome):
A full-size rendering I'd made early on of the last world I played on (unexplored chunks were trimmed), showing a lot of height variation within a relatively small area:
In particular, I use the fact that height variation can be tied to a biome to create my "Rocky Mountains" biome (a couple examples in the rendering above), which has 5 rings of biomes of increasing height ("edge", "main", "peak 1", "peak 2", "summit", where terrain transitions from grass to coarse dirt to stone to as altitude increases, with "summit" having a base block of snow. Rivers are also replaced with "Rocky Mountains River", which does not receive the special treatment that most other rivers get so they carve through anything, as this is one of the few biomes that rivers actually do dry up in, with what would be river becoming valleys at higher altitudes):
(the lower half shows a Volcanic Wastelands biome, which has a similar river treatment, and has "volcano" sub-biomes forming the larger peaks, also with an additional ring of increasing altitude up to the peak biome)
Most other biomes have increased height variation, similar to "x-hills" in 1.6, with those in turn being higher, and the height variation of most biomes is modulated by a noise field with a wavelength of around 1000 blocks.
One example of how this severely restricts world generation in 1.18 is when you try to make a single-biome ocean world that is all water - you can't and instead you'll get plenty of land, even mountains, all being "ocean". Even 1.7's "amplified" world type had a special case which blacklisted ocean from the increased height variation for this reason (they could have still allowed a greater depth, except deep oceans, and oceans in 1.6, already go down to near the minimum depth the height field can attain - going lower actually breaks it and causes an inversion).
Also, by definition "plains" is generally seen as a flat area with little height variation:
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?
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Curse PremiumMessed-up villages have been a problem since forever. I think villages need more direct fixes than trying to flatten the biomes they're in. What they need is for each building to have "quality standards" like if too much dirt has to be moved or if the door isn't usable it just doesn't get placed, period. And maybe if they're too different in height from the village start. The 1.18 system also has a parameter to look for - erosion - they could use that to keep villages out of trouble (actually my impression is they kinda do, but could do better).
There you see some mod biome, amplified, over (I think) Highlands Mangrove *swamp*, which wasn't. (Also purple sky, which I couldn't control, and lots of other weirdnesses. I was very Myst-ish, actually). The swamp biomes were pretty normal, and I could see and appreciate the amplified terrain from them. It was a cool world, and I spent a lot of time in it.
It's interesting that you (Master Caver) used some of the same broad approaches I did - like increasing variety within biomes, and "ring biomes".
Incidentally, Amplified worlds *also* suppress hypervariation in swamp biomes, and I actually used this in my second 1.7 journal world. I had added Mystcraft, which allows you to create dimensions in-game using "pages" you find in Library structures that define things like Amplified or Normal or has-a-sun. But there are a *lot* of pages, and like trying to get all the cards in a trading card set just by buying, it's hard to get those last few. Plus, I'd added a big sheaf of pages because I integrated it with Climate Control, BoP. and Highlands, so there were also pages for "more hot", "more cold biomes", "more plains biomes", and all the BoP and Highlands biomes.
So I never had anything like a complete set; I could never choose a sun or a normal sky color and had to take what I got for those. And I never got any world type other than "Amplified". So, to make it useable, I put in lots of "more swamp" pages which made Climate Control, when making the world, put in lots and lots of swamp (maybe 1/3 the biomes).
And the result was very interesting:
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
(I will reply to posts after this but I want to keep the update on it's own for clarity, and formatting reasons.)
I went to start playing and found myself in a valley. While they are pretty... why was I here? Where was I going, and in what direction am I going? I kind of ran some circles to get my bearings and then saw a familiar spot. I then remembered during my last update, when i was plotting my path on the map, I was... a but uncertain near the end. Did I actually not entirely finish getting home?
Then it hit me because I knew for a fact that I crossed a certain spot I was crossing again. The way my last play session ended was that the game crashed when I went to switch to window mode (and didn't pause to incur a save). I was seemingly back to my last autosave moment instead, some minutes prior to reaching my village.
In reality I didn't lose anything (but some time to get back), and I ended up finding a handful of iron on the way back, so it had a Silver lining and all.
I grabbed a compass I neglected from one of the cartographer buildings, mad a map, zoomed it out some, and decided to start mapping. I found a bird in a jungle near my village.
A bit later, I noticed some telltale crimson Red while mapping in a forest, and it had brought me to one of the structures I had awareness of from looking at the UnMined map the first time, a ruined portal.
I can't remember if I mentioned this earlier or not, but in case I didn't, any of the structures I saw only because of the UnMined map are ones I am ignoring until I naturally come across them. For example, I know there's another ruined portal just where I plan to settle, but I have yet to go to it because I shouldn't know it is there. So I'm pretending I don't know about them, and will simply loot them only when I come across them while mapping.
And here's what it had.
I keep mapping, getting closer to filling in the corner near spawn (which will be at the corner of four maps, but I only have the one for now).
This was a neat arch, but as it was dark, my sword was low on durability, my shield was away, and the sun was setting, I decided to go around it instead of through it. If you're wondering why the shield is away, I was earlier killing pigs and cows I came across so I had my sword out, so the map was in the offhand. I just kept it this way for the process.
I actually had a slightly audible moment of excitement when I saw these...
Not only did I not expect them, but I thought they were only found in savanna plateaus now. I thought they were removed from "mountainous" terrain (which this barely is anyway I would think). I slept here, and a skeleton wandered out after morning, took some sun damage, but went under a tree, allowing my to get the killing credit and drops. Arrows are very needed now to stock them up. They are going to be a valuable thing in this particular world.
I also don't think, despite filling out as much map area as I did in my other hardcore world, that I ever came across a single llama. I've seen trader llamas, yes, but not natural ones. I've already seen four here, and not too long into the world, and not too far from my village and planned settlement spot. Later when I get leads, I have potential llamas to get.
Well I wonder if I'm getting close to spawn yet...
I find it neat how spawn is this radical terrain but only right at spawn. It sort of serves as a landmark. Better than being some random block in a birch forest.
I just about conclude, saving the worst for last, having to skirt around their dangerous territory.
In doing so, I notice some iron facing a cliff wall and grab it. That's just a bit more, but every bit helps right now.
After concluding the mapping (that's a single map zoomed out... two or three times, I forget, done), I go to look for some more shallow caves, and fine some.
Not far inside, this little one runs at me through a one block tall dirt blocked way.
I soon start hearing more zombies and see them behind the dirt, and at the exact moment the thought crosses my mind that there might be a dungeon nearby, I see the cobblestone confirmation that, yes, there is.
I find this inside. Shame about that enchanted book, huh?
But I'm at three golden apples now.
A bit further in and I find it opens up to an overlook of a much deeper and larger (but not yet massive) cave system, but it's signaling it will likely become one. This might be good, but for later. My inventory is full now so I head back. But I can consider exploring further later as I was starting to think I might just branch mine down until I get enough diamond stuff (I'm not opposed to this, but I'd rather not do it and find it "naturally" as this feels more meaningful to me).
I decide to head back, but coming from a slightly different way I just miss it, and notice a single tree on an "island" I spotted on the shipwreck near my village was actually yet another jungle landmass.
I turn right (North) to see more, but also come across this.
I also notice that buried shipwreck I saw at the North edge of the UnMined map, and since I've naturally come across it, I allow myself to head to it to check it out.
I find a bird on the way... (this might have been the second in the area?)
Upon flying out of the way, there's another bird behind it.
I decide to try and get them, and from here, there's a video of that process as well as the rest of what I do for this update.
It's not anywhere near as long as the last one was going to be before it combusted itself and my game session.
I tame the two birds, check out the buried shipwreck (which has some good loot, including my first diamond), and do some exploration but hold myself back despite wanting to keep going, remembering I should hold off until I get maps.
I sleep to pass a thunderstorm, and then home to sort my inventory, gather the rest of some cooking food, and then stop for now. Maybe more caving next time? My first diamond piece of equipment soon to come? Time will tell.
I remember years and years ago, one of the reasons people seemed to feel the "new" terrain generation (new in this case being the one from beta 1.8 to release 1.6) was because elevation was tied more to biome. Some people felt it shouldn't be.
The common reasoning I recall being stated was beta 1.7.3 and earlier had bad biome variety, but good variety across larger terrain generation, and inversely that beta 1.8 to release 1.6 had good biome variety, but poor variety between biomes since every biome was more or less the same as the rest. You'll eventually get repetitiveness over a large enough scale with everything, but people felt the strength of 1.6 was also its downfall and that the good variety in the short term was all it had going for it and it gave up variety on the larger scale to get it, and I don't disagree with that entirely in hindsight. People said it killed the desire to explore much, and while I still found it fun to explore back then (I consider myself a builder/explorer primarily), I do admit I find it more fun in new versions.
Then Mojang gives the players that and they complain about repetitiveness.
Of course that's not to saw the repetitiveness isn't an issue. I hope it's known where I stand on that issue and I do think it is. But I do identify the difficulty Mojang must be facing in trying to please the community. They can't win no matter what they do. With almost any change, a not insignificant amount of players will always be upset.
It's pretty bad, and coincidentally the elevation not being tied to biome adds to difficulties with it.
One of the first villages I found (I think the second in total) was on the cliff side which was probably just a plains biome. Since 1.18 it's a bigger thing that this happens. It's neat in its own way, and I'd actually say it should stay if village frequency wasn't so high, but one of the ways they could tone frequency down would be to make checks for villages based on elevation and invalidating a spawn if there's too much variance. I'm not sure how easy that is to code, and to do without side effects, but villages are super common, and a lot of them are those wonky ones.
The biggest problem with this is that the game has no idea what the terrain is like before placing parts of a multi-chunk structure, including an entire village, which is created as an in-memory map of the structure pieces which is then applied as each chunk that contains part of it is populated; it does measure the average ground level under each individual building but even then it can only check within the 2x2 chunk populated area (otherwise it might access unloaded chunks which is A Bad Thing (this will also cause the structure generator to be called again while in the process of placing the first piece, so you'd end up with the second piece being placed before the first. Depending on the feature/code it may also corrupt its state; this is why the vanilla "BiomeDecorator" crashes the game if it is called again, at least in 1.6.4; Mojang seems to have removed this check in later versions but it resulted in odd bugs when e.g. you made ores too large so they overflowed).
One of the other ways I worked around this was to change "scattered features" (small structures like desert temples, witch huts, as well as my own structures) to generate centered within the 2x2 chunk area and have a maximum span of 32x32 blocks so they can be placed all at once, measuring the ground level across the entire area (in the case of villages they are still placed chunk by chunk but the measured area can be within this entire area, but still only as each piece, not the entire village, is placed). The fact that village buildings are not placed all at once (example of a partially generated village, note also the missing snow on the outermost half-chunk) also precludes being able to match the elevation of the door with the surrounding terrain (my own structures place extra weight on this area).
This could be solved by only placing a village once the entire area has been loaded but it could cause issues with structures overwriting something the player built, or even generating on top of them, or restrict the minimum chunk view distance (the maximum span of a large structure is +/- 8 chunks, though they rarely ever actually get this large).
Also, the previous biome restriction did cause a percentage of villages to fail to generate, making them less common than suggested by tools like ChunkBase, which only consider if a single point is valid; in fact, the "Village.dat" file for the world I created for TMCWv5 lists 9 villages but only 5 actually generated (indicated by "Valid: 1"; all these villages are shown to only have a well since there wasn't enough room to add any paths to it, and in turn, buildings (nothing will be placed unless there are at least 3 pieces, excluding paths). The failure rate appears to be lower in vanilla 1.6.4 as it is more likely for their spawn biomes to form larger contiguous areas):
I've also attempted to reduce the failure rate by offsetting the well to one of 4 points around the initial location, which may still all fail (the code that checks the biome adds a border, and also uses the underlying resolution of 4x4 blocks, as opposed to the smoothed biome map that is applied to generated chunks):
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?
Sorry for a delayed update (sort of). I've actually been spending some more time back in Azura (my other hardcore world) but it's "only" been caving so I haven't really had anything to update on there.
I played more in Gaia and while I've been itching to get towards mining here and earning diamonds, I started by mapping. I was already out far from my settled location and doing that when I last played so may as well finish the two maps I'm doing now.
This one had a drowned come after me right after I got the chest, but thankfully one without a trident, so I could ignore it.
There's also a side turned shipwreck pictured, one of two or three in this ocean I also got.
This last one was where I've been before, but I missed it until now, where the magma blocks underwater from this angle made me aware of it. If you look at the map, spawn is the Northwest corner, the pillager outpost near spawn is the brown below that, and then below that (and above where I am) is the "overhang mountain" with the shipwreck near it I found early on the world.
One note is that I found a "bottle of enchanting" in one of the shipwrecks. This is a small amount of experience in a bottle. While I've disallowed myself from using "potions" I did allow myself to take it, since it's not what I had in mind when restricting myself from potions.
Just beyond this, being back on land, I was mapping the flower forest... or one of many.
I decided to get a picture here only because there were a lot of times my screen was filled with flowers. At the same time, the picture didn't come out making it look as though there was an exceptional amount because I wanted an angle that was more than "screen full of tall flowers right in my face" so it... worked against that. Oh well.
After finishing that corner, that's two more maps done (or... mostly, more on that in a moment), so it was time to return... home?
Because nothing says home like some chests and a bed thrown into a field with some torches around. But this home has birds!
I tossed up a small temporary wall and didn't picture it (I thought I did) with the maps. What I mentioned above about the maps mostly being done was because one was a mountain I had to circle, so the immediate center is unmapped. I need to revisit it with leather boots later.
The map wall was three maps consisting of an "L" shape so I decided to get the top right corner one done too. It was going to need to be bigger but I'd do this one and then shift to either building or caving for some diamonds for better gear.
Starting that, I finally chanced upon sighting this naturally...
That's the one I was aware of from the Unmined map right near where I was planning to settle. So i went to check it while I found it.
The axe had mending, haha. Of course, I left it as I'm not allowed to use enchanted stuff.
I then go over a mountain and find this.
I forgot there was a second one I was aware of via the map. So this was a split moment of "I found something new" before realizing I'd known about it, because I legitimately forgot. This should be the last structure I "shouldn't be aware of" with the exception of one jungle temple to the North (and I usually don't even loot those to be honest) and the village to far East.
Another golden apple and a couple more obsidian.
I continue through the forest and in the Northeast corner of the map I'm working on, I find the area where I once started making that video (the long one that I lost and crashed the game I think).
This is in that valley. The first (of four) villages I found this way is immediately to my left, and will be off the map I'm currently working on.
I happen across another big cave... or at least a big opening. The cave itself may or may not be so big.
Another view of it from a distance once I'm looping back to fill in the map to the south of it.
I've said before, but I love the wide, winding rivers through valleys with plains and plateau ridges on opposite sides. This is something you'd seldom see in versions back when I started playing. If I saw this back then...
...I'd absolutely be planning to make a village here.
Especially since I saw this just above that spot.
And once I get to it and then go to double back the other way, as I've reached the end of the map, I see this...
That's the village I found way back near the start of the world, where I went to the East a lot, saw a massive cherry blossom biome, went "oh pretty" and then went back as I didn't want to venture too far. Before I continued though, I decided to take in the cherry blossom biome a bit. Maybe a mistake...
So this is where I'm going to say something disappointing, and if not to anyone else then maybe to me.
I decided (for now, as these things change) that I want to build my home settlement here. I originally want to make it near the jungle because that was different from my previous world, and something a bit new for me. But while my previous world was made near high elevation and later had cherry blossom trees accommodating the area, I decided to make it here anyway. While I wanted to try playing with bamboo wood, I could find anything that worked. Maybe I will later, but I don't want to put things on hold for that. I did instead find something that worked with different types though, and while it'd "fit" better near a jungle or other warm biome, it shouldn't be too out place here, either. You'll see once I have it started.
And instead of making a bridge over the river, I now can do it from one plateau to another (also over a river!). I'll need to anyway to get villagers here from the nearby village.
There's a lot of interesting cave openings nearby too (and no doubt, ancient cities beneath).
Coincidentally, this is the rough area where I had my tumble and almost died in this world. How else do you assert dominance? By building there and putting a bridge over it, of course!
Near the end of the day, I found some friends! I think (?) this is the first time I've seen these in this world.
And I noted a few of these nearby...
This might help me transport my stuff here. I already have some saddles.
The next day, I came across this, but I've found this one before (it was the first one I found in this world, in fact).
I then saw these, and while not technically the first, it was the first "in the wild" (the other first time they were still a spawned patrol, but right near a pillager outpost, so not so much out in the wild, so to say).
It's actually relieving sighting them in the distance, as you know you will be more safe from randomly coming face to face with them in the immediate future.
I swear it was like this when I got here.
I then also saw this, which again is a spot I pictured before early in this world, but this time from another spot and angle. That's the village "in the cliffside" I found early in the world.
In the river below it, I noticed a spot of fog showing up at sea level despite a large plateau being there. Only in a space a few blocks big. As I drew near, it turned Black, and I realized what it was. It must have been a very small opening to what was a large cave inside, if I saw fog despite being that close to it (meaning the wall on the opposite side was too far to see within render distance). I approached it and that's indeed what it was. Sorry if it's a bit dark but here's a picture from just inside the opening.
Funny how sometimes the big openings have disappointing and small caves that end soon 9as I had happen twice earlier in this world), and some tiny openings hide the biggest ones.
I finished mapping and returned "home". Well, until I move it. Sorry if that disappoints anyone, but my next goal is to start moving that here.
I have a creative world with a test house built and I will be looking forward to getting a real home built. But I still have more resources to collect before I can truly do that.
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Curse PremiumI admit to being disappointed you're not doing the Jungle Edge build because I was really looking forward to what you would do with it. I sometimes like not knowing what I'm doing and trying multiple plans and revisions over time - like revamping the windows and the width on the Starlight, or all the styles I threw into Lazy River Landing, or the multiple revisions in my To the Edge of the World spawn fort.
What's the white blobby thing in the Cherry Grove? A micro cold biome?
I agree the windy rivers look nice. I wonder if there are any techniques I could adopt into RTG.
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.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.