Yes, that's a frozen peaks (tiny) biome. I can't verify it because no F3 allowed, but that's almost certainly what it is. It looks funny here because it's so small and it barely extends above the rest, but I've seen other spots like this before. I think they're actually neat. Of course if you're looking for a "real" peak mountain they won't be it, but they're neat in their own way.
Cherry blossom biomes tend to generate at "medium" altitudes, like plateaus and such, so you'll often find them around peaks. So it lines up.
The thing with the jungle... that may as well be a running joke at this point.
Someone who first played in my world with me back between 1.3. and 1.5 mostly had their village in a plains biome, but there was a jungle directly nearby, so they also made a jungle treetop location.
I originally intended to do one of my own since way back then.
Then that world was pruned to update to 1.19 and get new terrain generation, and the almost nothing start I had on one was lost (since I removed the region it was in since it had nothing to justify keeping it). It was a rather large biome for 1.6, and rather varying in terrain for 1.6 too, so I'll miss it, but there's another jungle closer now.
Then my plan shifted to making one in my second world, which similarly has a jungle opposite an ocean from my primary location (there's still plans to do this in the second world, but they're not active and likely a ways off).
I was going to do a smaller one here now. Only that just changed of course (and now I'm more sad given your disappointment, haha). It was a combination of a bunch of small things that led to the change of plans. I mean I could still could do one in addition to this, but given how risky this particular world is, I'm less likely to build it up beyond my initial necessary settlement.
Speaking of world risk, since I was doing my "safer" hardcore world in the catch all thread and the riskier one in a dedicated thread, I've thought that if (or when) I do fail, I could always just make another world using the same name and successively number them, and then start anew by continuing in this same thread. I'd then edit the first post, leaving the original content, but adding a link to the post that starts the successor world. That way I'm not making a ton of threads if the worlds perish quickly. But I'm not sure if that would dilute organization. Hopefully they don't just fail back to back to back like that to make it a problem.
With the forth map completed (there will be more done later), it's time to move.
I started running off but forgot my bed. I might need that. No, I'll definitely need that. I thankfully realized before getting far so it was only 20 seconds or so to go back.
I gathered up the crafting table, stove, whatever I could fit in my inventory, and off I went. I expected this would take three or probably four trips total. What's interesting is I'm once again heading what I figure is a couple thousand blocks East of spawn (though a bit Northeast this time). I don't know how it always works out that way. In three of my four worlds it has, and those were the "random" three. In the forth I did settle at spawn, but that's because I scouted that seed before starting it for that world.
Off I go, one of many...
Climate change has come to Minecraft. I've seen many of these in this world in particular.
This is nearby the area I plan to settle. Mountains are my thing.
I don't have a map to show it yet (or, maybe one of the earlier Unmined ones does, actually), but I formally chose this spot in particular to settle, which is actually between two cherry blossom biones and more at sea level.
They showed up again. As if to challenge my claim. Thankfully I've had the luck of them always wandering in the direction away from where I'm wanting to go, so it works out. Maybe I'm less at risk of minding them again in the short term now. And hopefully for good once I have a village going here.
Here's an overview of the area.
I establish my first start of home here, store some stuff and clear up my inventory for another trip.
Not long after leaving, this happens...
One block over and I'm probably dead? I fell around three or four blocks already so I figure the rest of that makes it fatal.
I better watch it. I've had three close calls and all were falls. Maybe not building in the trees above ground is better for me after all. Or maybe all the ground caves risk will balance that out. That is one good thing I'm liking; the caves in the area seem far more promising than what is around the other spot.
Other angles of what almost swallowed me up and ended this world.
I don't mean that lightly. These split seconds from death are harsh realizations, and I dare say merciless ones. I'm a believer that almost all hardcore runs are a test of patience and endurance, and it's less raw skill but more awareness and planning. Eventually you become too careless. The chance of running through a field and just falling to your death is rather low, so you chance it... but it's never zero.
About halfway back, I though this ridge looked good from this angle with the split in it and the sun setting.
Wait... again?
That's the quickest I've ever seen them consecutively spawn. I've now seen them spawn four times total, which might be more than I've seen them in my other hardcore world.
I need a spawn safe settlement fast (realistically, I don't feel much threat from them... but I also don't like them around anyway).
I do have to loop around and go around this to avoid them.
I get back and make a few more trips. I made a video of one of the trips to show the terrain I cross from one to the other, and to show the distance. It's not terribly far. If it doesn't show up yet then it's still uploading or processing or whatever.
I have about one more trip to make to be done, and then I can start, but the supplies I'll need also come from a biome near spawn so I might be making two accounting for that. So I'm not immediately ready to start building, but maybe soon. If I don't fall into a hole before I get the chance to start, that is...
Am I... am I unusual for being probably so far into a world (in terms of days), let alone a hardcore one, and still having not established a shelter? I'm still wanting to explore.
Anyway, the time is coming. I did go gathering some things I'll need from the only known biome so far, and also brought some back near my place of settlement. I also did some more exploration to finish making the maps I had crafted filled out, so I have a 3 x 2 map now.
Since my settlement is near the Northeast, I'll want to explore more in those two directions. I know I also want to add another row to the bottom/South, and I already explored some that way but never mapped it, but that comes later. This will leave the Westernmost edge of the mapped area the line spawn resides at, meaning I won't have anything at all mapped to the West. Whether I add a row for that later is still something I'm undecided on.
At this rate, my map will definitely compare to the one in my other hardcore world, which is something since I have no elytra here. But, I'm also using maps that are zoomed out three times instead of the full four, so each one only has half the space. More maps, but less space is likely how they will compare in the end.
I also wanted to stock up on food (pork chops getting low, and I have a stack of steak but that's it), so I figured I'd do double (or triple) duty and explore (and map) while gathering any pigs and cows I found not too far out of my way.
Oh, and I'm also switching to shaders in this world like I did in my other one.
Time to head out.
I ran into a rude thing throwing stuff at me, and got hit by my first one, so I have a guesstimate of how much damage they do. Possibly three or if not four hits seems lethal. Since you can pretty reliably avoid them with swimming, that makes me feel a little safer in the water.
Expect a lot of these to be "pictures for the sake of showing the landscape", but that's perhaps expected with exploring.
I also turned the render distance up to 24. This will let me spot things further, but I feel like modern Minecraft really wants a bit higher of a render distance than the standard-feeling 16 to show itself off. I still have to do the same amount of exploring for mapping (which has closer to something like a distance of 8 it seems), and as long as I'm not raising it very high just to scout stuff and then turning it back down, it feels fair to me to raise it a bit, as I'll actually be playing here.
Now that I'm beyond my existing mapped area, I craft the two maps and start exploring. Turns out I took that above picture in a timely spot. Juuust beyond it is this! Pretty...
This surprised me because that band of cold region to the south that stretched up diagonally, actually turns and goes the other way, so I wouldn't have expected this. Is this another cold region starting? I sure seem to have a variety filled seed here compared to my other world.
But before I continue, I realize I should probably grab that extra stack of steak, and that I also left my spare bed at home, which I'm not too far from. So I head back to get it, and spot this opening along the side of the cliff of the river that cuts between my side of it, and these new lands.
I also have a video for the short portion of running back and getting the needed things. It shows some temporary stuff (read as, mangrove swamp trees) as well as the map I do have.
I then head back to a village, and find a pretty big surface cave opening.
Here's the video.
Continuing on, I find something very shocking...
Not another cold region... instead something very unusual for 1.18. It's just a random ice spikes biome near high altitude and plains? That cherry grove biome next to it makes it pretty though! I wish that was near the one I planned to make my settlement at (don't worry, I'm not dragging my settlement here).
A close eye may notice something I didn't yet, but was about to. Look above the map.
And here's what it had.
What's with all the mending axes? Forbidden fruit.
I'm using the complimentary reimagined shader, and recently changed the water from the "looks like ice" setting to the so-called "fantasy" one, which looks more like it does in BSL, which I prefer.
But I like the opacity being lower and color being darker. It took some adjustments of the settings, but I got it close. From high altitude or a far distance it doesn't look exactly how I want, but it's close. In turn, it looks nicer underwater than BSL does.
Tradeoffs. I overall prefer BSL for the better lighting, and really hope BSL would one day add the clouds that this one has. The double layer of default-style puffy clouds is gorgeous.
Anyway, getting to the corner of the map, I see a glimpse of a beach beyond the forest, and check it out as night falls. The following morning, the lighting coloring on the water made it look pretty, so I got a picture. I was actually a bit slow so the time of day changed enough and I lost some of it, but still.
The following few have no commentary and are just "terrain generation can be pretty" so I took pictures.
The forest on the cliffs looks nice. With terrain elevation being uncoupled from biomes, it's a vast improvement and you find this regularly.
Way too gorgeous of a valley! Something else you'd seldom see in older versions.
Getting more towards mountainous terrain and forests again to the South, which was expected. It also starts raining, and as the sun is also setting, I get a bit on edge.
Last one for now... but probably not the last time I see this. It's been rather common.
I'll finish by completing the second map to the South, getting more food along the way (my sword broke so my axe is seeing use for this), and then returning home to cook it. As I do I'll start stocking more needed supplies to begin my house. I promise I'll be building eventually!
Yes, you are very unusual in exploring so much early. When I'm playing hardcore, getting a functional base is my #1 requirement. To be fair, you are finding so much stuff so easily that you actually *have* most of the things I want first, like armor and food supply, and you're not going to use a basic enchantment setup.
The current climate system doesn't generate "zones" like the old one did. There's a temperature noise, and when it's above a certain level, the area is "cold". Imagine a parallel world where any place the terrain in *that* world is above a certain level, that place in your world is a cold biome. That means you can have just a little hill where the parallel's world's height pokes above the level, and that generates a little cold microbiome in yours. Of course they tuned the noise to try to minimize that (it's very smooth, no doubt, so not many local hills) but there's a limit to how much you can smooth that without making the biome shapes too boring. You seem to like that little Ice Spikes but it bothers me - it just doesn't look like an "edge" cold biome. Also, having the cold spot on the *side* of the hill looks strange too. I'd really like to see the ground altitude used to alter the functional temperature noise.
Part of the problem is the "bubble biome" concept where everything has to be 100% one biome or another. If the system weren't tethered to biomes, then a barely-cold region there might have snow on the ground and smattering of stunted cherry trees and I would find that less grating.
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.
Yeah, having food is essential, but honestly the tools and perhaps even armor aren't (maybe leather boots for mountains). Give me food, a bed, a map, and maybe a boat (even this is optional) and I'm set.
But I've noticed in both hardcore worlds but this one especially, I don't make an initial settlement and prolong it until I'm ready. I sort of live nomadic until then. I feel like I'm still in that early "essential and small resource gathering" phase that should only last a day or a few and I'm... who knows how many days in and filling map after map out. So I still feel "very early game" despite the time spend and things done.
But I'll start building shortly.
And yes, I sort of have a liking to that biome. If it was a common thing, I'd dislike it. If it happened as a cold biome in a warm one or vice versa, I might dislike it. But as it turned out, I don't mind it.
I feel like terrain generation has been moving in a positive direction over the years overall (1.7's repetitiveness being a big exception), so the occasional random biome is fine. Almost like a quirk that coincidentally resembles the older (1.6 and prior) placement. Since it's very rare, I don't mind it, and maybe even say it adds some charm.
It's like the overhangs and floating terrain, or as a good example, how my spawn looks in this world. Normally I don't care for that sort of terrain, preferring the more typical and realistic terrain with controlled climate placement, but the oddities are fine in low severity or numbers I guess.
Pretty much a picture drop of the rest of the exploration... which sort of included a new bottom row of the map. Don't worry, I promise my home is coming next this time!
I'll eventually probably be adding one row to the top and even West (maybe two to the West if I find good enough terrain, as there should be more warm climate and I want to explore more of that).
Right now the map is as large as in my other hardcore world, but only half the land due to zoom differences. Still, since I did this all before having a home, and did it all with elytra in the other world, I'm proud of the difference.
This is sort of a supplement to the above so I won't be commenting on almost any of them and this one is mostly just pictures. I'll let them speak for themselves.
I found an armor villager but left them, as iron isn't lacking in supply right now, and my armor is high on durability.
I spent a bit of time running back to a mangrove swamp for mud, and growing and chopping down trees I had brought back with me. I'm going to need more eventually, but I have enough to start working on a place to live so I'm not sleeping under the stars.
Halfway through, they showed up again...
At least they're not very dangerous. More unsettling, and if you do happen to get to close by not seeing them, you're in for a chase.
But everything was made better when they showed up.
Due to the trader going in and out so often, and him and his llamas being separated, one of the leads eventually broke, allowing me to get one.
Needing more wood to finish the roof, they showed up... again.
Why is it always when I'm taking down a tree? Are they the mangrove swamp tree preservation group or something?
Note that this was late morning.
Late afternoon, and...
No, that's not the same group. That's two on the same day. While I'm not in a desperate rush to get villagers here, I'll be glad when I do.
I took a break for... I can't remember why but I ended up getting this picture.
I then went to get some cherry blossoms. Yes, as much as I love these things, I haven't gotten one until now.
I tend to get things only when I need them sometimes, and I'll be needing them now.
Home is finished!
I have a bit of a path, a small farm, and a tree for now. Not much, but this won't be a big village anyway.
It's sooo much of a different feeling when you have your first shelter up. Especially in hardcore, and especially after being nomadic for so long. It's literally that warm "I'm new at Minecraft and it's my first night in a shelter" safe feeling. Of course, with the pillager patrols able to spawn, I'm still on edge around the area even during the day, but I feel much safer regardless.
Across from the carrot farm, I'll probably put my livestock yards for at least pigs.
I plan to do a much larger wheat farm in this area.
Here's inside. It's not much, and I don't anticipate needing much more for storage, given I don't have as much plans to build this up (but how many times have I said that?).
The basement is where I moved my maps.
And I needed to size the room for it so I committed to indeed expanding it two maps worth to the West from spawn.
I need to get more deep slate to finish the floor, but otherwise the house itself is mostly finished. The only other small thing is to get glowstone from the nether for behind the maps, but that might be a ways off yet. The different light levels on the maps bothers me.
I also remade the map that contains my settlement because I guess the bug (?) with multiple markers staying on the map after moving it is still there and it was bothering me, so here's a couple pictures from that.
I'm not sure if the next thing I'll do is working on part of the map expansion (likely starting with the top row of four) or start working on finding diamonds to upgrade some stuff. Or I can continue working on the village. I'm definitely in no need of food, but I still want to get more of the farms (crops and animals up and going. I know it will be a bit of a process getting villagers here, even if there's two villages that aren't too far. I think I might make two or three houses for them, so again the village won't be very large. Even my own house is rather small.
You sure throw up a nice-looking house in a hurry. It normally takes me ages to get a shelter to the "good looking" stage.
Are pillager patrols that common? That's a huge change to the old implicit contract that outdoors is safe in the day. Sounds worse than the psycho Better Creatures that were causing me so much trouble in my journal. Maybe plastering the plains with villages isn't so bad if it keeps them away.
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 wouldn't say that was in a hurry, haha. Remember I was living nomadic and collecting resources beforehand. I also originally created this in a creative world and then replicated it here.
I think that's part of why I delayed it so much. I'd rather not have to redo things too often as that's actually more work, so even if I'm going for small and simple here, I waited (getting the mud bricks and mangrove wood partly delayed it as well).
Speaking of houses, I don't want to spoil much (though I'll be making an update later today to tell it in detail), but you'll probably like one of my plans and ideas, even if it's probably a ways away.
And I don't know for sure about the pillager patrols. I don't think they're supposed to be this common, but maybe they are? Normally I'm either in a village (safe from them), underground (same), or if I'm out, I'm on the move which means there's a fair chance you probably avoid/miss some spawns of them even if they do occur. This definitely seems high though. I've never seen them on consecutive days, nor multiple on the same day, before this world.
But they're not honestly not too threatening. Even if they match your running speed, you have to get quite close to cause them to give chase. And the biggest penalty is the debuff which causes them to raid the next village you enter, which isn't a concern if you don't regularly live in one (if you do, you're mostly safe from them to begin with).
So I decided to go after expanding the map. I'll probably do this in three adventures, each one being to fill in four maps. First up is the four across the top (I know there's six, but this the four above the existing mapped area).
I decided to do the two on the right first. Sometimes I do two consecutively, and I started doing that here, but then just finished them one by one.
At the Southeast of the Easternmost map, I came across this. Remember the "sunset beach picture" location? It's on fire now!
I ended coming across what must have been a dozen spots like this over the course of four maps, but decided not to get pictures of them all.
This was a cave opening I'd seen before (originally when exploring in the valleys and finding village after village), but it looked even bigger from this angle.
Quite a bit later, once I had gotten North enough to be in new lands, I found another micro biome, this time a savanna.
But I do know there's warm biomes to the West that I expect run diagonally Northeast, so maybe I'm getting closer to more. I am hoping especially to find desert and badlands.
After sleeping one morning, I go to gather lily of the valley flowers as I do when I come across a patch. I was rudely interrupted.
A third came out too, so I'm unsure if there was a dungeon near the surface or if, more likely, it was just a group of zombies that detected me near the entrance of a cave.
Getting beyond the forest, and ah, I'm seeing more signs of warm biomes indeed. There's jungle peeking over the hill, and I know there's going to be a lot of jungle to the West, so I must be coming across that here.
More North, towards the North edge of the map actually..
Now that is what I wanted to find! Not just desert but badlands too!
I check the shipwreck while I'm here too, and while there's no diamonds, it's by no means bad.
But this might be more of a reward...
That may as well say "teal wool" for what I'm gathering it for, haha.
Shame this is just North of the actual area I'm mapping, though. I was hoping to get some on the map itself for variety, but maybe I'll find some pushing down to the West, above or to the left of the area I know is jungle? The future will tell.
I find another village, and while it's been a while since I found a new one, I've also been mostly finding forest where they can't spawn, so that makes sense.
I keep on to the West and find more jungle, and soon a pair of birds! One is one of the types I'm missing.
I stop to gather seeds, and by time I return... both are gone. I'm not keen on going too far out of my way to search for them, and instead hope I'll come across more.
To the West more and I see this...
Maybe it will push South once I get further to the West? I'm hoping.
So I found this, which is a bit unusual for 1.18+ terrain. It's a river that dried up for quite a bit.
Normally it'd be something I wouldn't like, but it's unusual, and it looks nice here. A small area of open terrain in an otherwise dense jungle.
I get to much more mountainous jungle (yay 1.18 terrain) and start finding massive cave openings, this being one.
I'm in a sparse jungle, and soon it starts raining.
The sun is maybe three quarters of the way through the sky, so I'm timid to enter the dense jungle. This is despite the fact I see a ruined portal just within it. But instead of sitting and waiting, I continue South instead, where it's a bit more open as sparse jungle, forest, and rivers.
After the rain stopped, I happened back across the ruined portal eventually.
There wasn't much in it, but it was quality over quantity. There was an obsidian block (I now have enough to construct a portal despite never getting a diamond pickaxe to mine any), a few golden carrots, plus one more golden apple.
And then I finally found two more!
I saved one. Now I just need a Red one. Thankfully those are about the easiest to spot, with the Blue and Green especially often blending in.
I was starting to find more bamboo, which was expected given I was getting to the area close to above my old intended settlement. Which meant I was finding some of these...
...and the little one happened to do a tumble right as I was getting the picture.
I'm always on edge around sunrise and sunset especially in jungle, and this is why...
I also found a skeleton who shot me right in the face, and right in the middle of day. Creepers are what I'm worried most about though.
Eventually the jungle broke to a familiar sight. See the raised terrain in the back? That's the exact spot/hill I came over sighting this ruined portal from originally, so I've looted it before. I'm getting near my original location I was going to settle at.
This is that spot (right about where the crosshair is). What might have been...
Speaking of which, I got a better look at that island (?) from here.
So here's the part I mentioned Zeno might like. Since I'm not planning to build any given location up too much, what I might do is make multiple homes instead. So I'm thinking I might make one somewhere there. But we're at the West edge of the final map, so exploring further that direction will have to wait.
Heading back, I see a sign of what I know happened, but was unaware of...
More arrows I suppose, even if a few.
I continue in the band of jungle on the edge of where I was about to settle, and... suddenly!
I was rushing, noticed a drop late, and went to jump. I just missed it, and thought it might be water anyway. I noticed myself falling... for a long distance.
This is it. I'm dead, and if I'm not, any mob at the bottom will finish the job.
I lucked out and it was a ravine with no mobs and it was still daylight. I took near lethal damage though (two to three hearts left?), and I remained calm enough to dig into the side to have a safe place in case there was mobs.
Night was near, so I set my bed down and slept in my shameful spot of my own doing.
I actually took a break here.
Upon returning, I decided to chance using the stone I gathered to pillar up (once making sure there were no mobs) as opposed to digging up. I had no torches.
Thankfully, it went well enough. Here's the fall I took, though I came from the direction I'm now facing. I'm not sure how many blocks it was, but maybe somewhere between 15 to 20 since low 20s is lethal (keeping in mind I jumped)?
All I needed was a creeper to explode behind me, dealing near lethal damage, to send me back into the hole to finish it, right?
Moving on, but with much less running through dense jungle floor now. I'm still finding big holes. these are actually safer, as you see them coming.
Interestingly, I see dripstone caves and lush saves meeting here? There's also a mineshaft.
I also come across the Northernmost jungle temple just above that spot.
I do believe I've now found every structure I "shouldn't have known about" and have mapped mostly beyond everything the Unmined map showed me earlier.
I found another ruined portal, and I actually almost missed it. I happened to see it only because I was making a detour around a cave area. It would have otherwise been between two lines I made.
Near the end, and once I came across a beach to settle for the night, a wandering trader showed up. And... for some reason, made a beeline into the jungle (heading to where I was when it spawned maybe?) and lost not one but both of his poor llamas!
I pet both llamas, gathered the dropped leads, and started getting excited for what will be West when I get to map that way.
But now it was time to head home.
I sooo need glowstone for this.
But I think I might go branch mining for diamonds sooner rather than later.
Small update in content for a change of pace, but large in milestone!
I decided to start branch mining. Normally, if I wanted to match the "spirit" of all the other restrictions I am playing under, I'd try and find diamonds naturally only while caving, but given all of those other restrictions and that this is hardcore... I decided to branch mine to try and get my initial ones.
I decided to start it in a village near my settlement (this will likely be where I source villagers from for mine).
It's not overly pretty, but I made it wide and tall enough, and used stairs for quality of life for when returning. And yes I even went the extra step to make them stone brick stairs. No unsightly cobblestone here.
While I've found Gold before, I believe (?) this is the first I found while mining.
Likewise, just digging down, and not yet in the mines itself, I found two more diamonds, and my first obtained by mining, to add to the lone one I found in a shipwreck before. That makes three total.
In all I crossed three caves digging down, but two sort of brushed against one side and I didn't have to actually cross anything. One I did have to cross, but it was a very narrow split (I don't know what the term for this type of cave is and for those not familiar with 1.18 cave generation it would probably be hard to describe).
Here's the start.
I made a trip back home (two during the process I think) to clear my inventory and smelt/craft the stairs before formally starting. That initial mine hallway (pictured above) even had one diamond in it, making for four total now.
Hopefully I'll find more, as that's what I'm doing this for. Well, I also needed deepslate, but I don't have a formal storage room and ended up with way more than I could contain.
For whatever reason, I was seriously lucking out. I was finding more diamonds than iron or gold. I even came across some caves (luckily I found no mobs in any of these) to compliment that even more.
This isn't 1.20.2 with the boosted diamond rates either, so I have no idea why I was finding so many. All I did was branch a 2x1 tunnel to the West (left) off the pictured one above. I was going so far that when I started returning at the end, I could turn both ways and see the fog (and thus, time of day) at the ends at a render distance of 24. I didn't realize I went that far. I'm just using unenchanted iron pickaxes here (oh, and the people complaining deepslate takes too much longer to mine than stone... all I can say is wow is that overblown because it doesn't feel bad to me).
I came down with between seven and eight pickaxes (one was possibly low durability to begin with) and as the last one broke, my inventory was now also filled. Anyone have an answer as to why I got this many diamonds to iron and gold?
With the four diamonds back at home, that makes 37 total.
I'm sorry but the complaints about diamond costs for things, and speed of mining through deepslate, have no merit to them in my mind. Even if this is good luck (it has to be given the diamond to iron and gold disparity), it's not bad. And this is again before the upcoming diamond rate boost.
So given I have over the needed 24 diamonds, I do the expected thing...
And I decide to use four of the six "coastal" armor trims on them. I might not be able to enchant these to make them permanent with mending, but the hope is my armor will last enough and this given trim is rather common. While netherite is probably not worth it, I thought maybe it would be for armor alone... but I'd have to tackle bastion remnants with no enchants and the piglin brutes terrify me. I'm undecided if I'll go after netherite for armor.
I was wondering what material/color to make for the trim, and after starting a new temporary creative world to test them out, I went with iron...
So that's it. This is as likely as "end game" as it gets for me! Well, unless I got for netherite. I hope I'm more durable now. Well, as long as I can avoid falls because this does nothing there.
Diamonds actually gave a teal color that matched my skin too, but the trim serving as an accent worked better White in my opinion, so I went with iron for the trim. But I would have had no qualms using four diamonds for trim if I felt it looked better.
I also made a diamond sword. I'll probably stick to iron for tool use for a little while longer until I stockpile more diamonds, given I'll be going through them a lot, especially with upcoming work for my "village".
Before getting more, I decided to tend to the farm behind me as the carrots were again fully grown.
I need to get a livestock yard up for pigs soon to start actually using them, though. Farming this twice and I have about a row of carrots now. That's with no fortune enchantment, that's just how much they drop, and hence why the carrot farm is smaller and why the wheat farm will need to be much larger.
I could turn both ways and see the fog (and thus, time of day)
I've seen you mention this before but they really didn't make fog darken when underground? I find it to immersion-breaking to see light fog and even the sky in unloaded chunks, which is why I made it so that they both turn pitch black (the sun/moon/stars also fade to darkness). This also used to happen in vanilla prior to 1.8 (just the fog though), when they removed "void fog", citing non-existent performance issues which were entirely the fault of the particle effect (the fog darkening and reduced distance involved a simple check for the sky light level at the player - which is being done anyway when rendering the player (or arm/held item):
Examples:
There was sky light at my location when I took this, thus the fog and sky weren't darkened:
A different angle with no sky light:
This was taken back when I used Optifine to disable void fog, which also disabled the darkening effect (not just the particles or closing in):
For comparison, it would now look like this - not much clues as to large it might be until I've actually gone in to explore it:
A view from a similar angle (and a higher render distance) after I'd explored it:
Similar to sky light, going above sea level does disable the darkening effect; this also shows another feature which has been missing since 1.8; the area below the horizon used to be blue and helped oceans blend in with the edge of loaded chunks, both in color and by hiding the sub/moon (which became visible above the water, not the seafloor, as they do in newer versions):
I didn't realize I went that far. I'm just using unenchanted iron pickaxes here (oh, and the people complaining deepslate takes too much longer to mine than stone... all I can say is wow is that overblown because it doesn't feel bad to me).
While deepslate does have twice the hardness of stone it takes less than twice as much time to mine, especially once you add an additional 0.3 second delay between consecutive blocks (with an iron pickaxe the raw mining times are 0.4 and 0.75 seconds respectively; consecutive blocks take 0.7 and 1.05 seconds; the differences are less with better/enchanted tools, an Efficiency V diamond or netherite pickaxe takes 0.4 and 0.45 seconds per block). Then again, I do notice a speed increase when upgrading to iron, then diamond as soon as I find them respectively (I don't bother getting Fortune before mining more diamond), I even enchant the pickaxes I use to repair my main pickaxe with Efficiency I (level 1 enchant) as I use them for a bit to maximize the durability per pickaxe (the anvil bonus of 12% corresponds to 187 additional uses, 374 if they happen to get Unbreaking; if they only get Unbreaking I use a book to add Efficiency to them).
Anyone have an answer as to why I got this many diamonds to iron and gold?
Diamond is the second most common ore near bedrock, and is far more common than it used to be, both overall and relative to other ores:
By contrast, this is what ore distribution was like before 1.18; note that this is more comparable to figure A (total blocks) than figure C (percentage, as these are) since they are out of all blocks, not just "ground", so you can see how much they nerfed coal and iron, I don't see much impact of the greater terrain variation either (compare the drop-off in coal above sea level, even as 1.18 increased the percentage as a percentage of ground), the Wiki claims that a 515,000 chunk area was analyzed in 1.18 so it should be quite representative:
1.6.4 (based on my own analysis):
Coal: 155.6
Iron: 88.6
Redstone: 25.3
Gold: 8.5
Lapis: 3.53
Diamond: 3.19
1.17 (also based on my own analysis of a 1.8 world, with no changes until then)
Coal: 185.5
Iron: 111.5
Redstone: 29.1
Gold: 10.4
Lapis: 4.1
Diamond: 3.7
1.18 (based on an analysis somebody posted on Reddit)
Copper: 68.7
Coal: 62.0
Iron: 53.5
Redstone: 24.5
Gold: 17.6
Lapis: 16.3
Diamond: 10.4
Also, for good measure this is a chart I made of the ore distribution in TMCW, including data on ore exposure, which can be quite significant (over 20% of coal between layers 10-30 is exposed; the amount is higher due to its larger veins, and vice-versa for ores like emerald). There is also a noticeable drop in totals in the lower layers due to the volume of caves (I'd seen people complain about caves in 1.18 reducing the amount of ore due to less solid ground but the opposite is true if you consider exposed ores, and there is still plenty of solid ground, considering that the peak air fraction is less than 15% and a lot of that is concentrated in large open caves):
Also, the Wiki has an analysis (very old, from 2012, so based on ore generation before 1.8, and to a lesser extent, 1.7) where they concluded that as much as 1.7% of mined blocks could be diamond ore, with the biggest factor being how far apart you spaced your tunnels (interestingly, it continues increasing past a spacing of 3, which is enough to ensure 2 block wide veins are never exposed by two adjacent tunnels, and is always what I've used, and my efficiency does match what they show for this spacing, about 0.9%):
An example of how I make my mines; they are 250-300 blocks long with tunnels every 4th block, and located on layer 1 due to my amethyst ore being most common on that layer (about half as common as diamond, decreasing to 1/8 as common on layer 3 and above, which are exposed in caves; in this case I found 91 diamond and 23 amethyst out of about 5 km of tunnels):
Did you leave your mine entrance unprotected? Also, I prefer dropshaft mine entrances although they don't look as good.
I don't get the complaints that it's too easy to just buy diamond gear. Maybe it got a lot easier post-1.12, but I find mining up a half-stack of diamond is maybe an hour's work, and way less work than growing up 800 wheat or whatever to sell for 40 emeralds to buy an armor set, along with all the villager management required. In my current journal world, even after months of play, I still find it easier to just dig things up than to trade with vanilla villagers. I'd have to set up some kind of auto-farm to make it really worthwhile.
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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.
I've seen you mention this before but they really didn't make fog darken when underground?
I'm using OptiFine as well as shaders so those mix into things.
In vanilla, I don't know but I think (?) it may. I think it might get darker but it doesn't get anywhere near Black so it doesn't matter anyway. It sticks out and ruins the immersion whether it's slightly darker or not.
Though if you're running at a high enough render distance (this typically means around 16, or 12 minimum), it's typically not an issue in all but the largest of caves. Some of them can be large enough to expose fog though, sometimes even at a render distance of something like 20 (usually this in cases with ancient cities and it's still minor), and yes it can ruin the immersion seeing a dark Grey or Blue color (or sunrise/sunset mixed in) where you expect darkness.
But the base game doesn't make things with a light level of 0 totally dark either like you changed yours to do, which I guess also factors into this.
And I prefer the lack of the darker Blue below the horizon. I always thought that looked awful, especially at higher altitudes. It's not always oceans on the horizon.
The best combination I've seen of fog/edge hiding/immersion is with BSL and with it set to make things truly dark in light lacking areas. None of the sillyness of seeing the edges of chunks during sunrise/sunset or seeing odd horizontal lines on the horizon when at high altitude. You do still get bright fog in caves but I avoid that by having the render distance at least at 16, and you can get it dark in caves (at least below the layer of 0) but this has a tradeoff... any caves that are below that layer but also have sky access will leave you seeing a totally Black sky as well and it looks awkward.
Diamond is the second most common ore near bedrock, and is far more common than it used to be, both overall and relative to other ores:
Well that's good to know then. Maybe it's not so unusual after all, but when I did branch mining in my other world (started in 1.19), I recall coming out with a bit more iron relatively.
Did you leave your mine entrance unprotected? Also, I prefer dropshaft mine entrances although they don't look as good.
That depends on how useful or useless you find iron golems to be, haha. It is in a village.
It's otherwise just open access though, yes, and I don't see the problem with this. The mines are so far uderground, and go so far away as well, so it's not like I'll be near or close enough that stuff will spawn there often.
I can always sleep near the bottom if I go to come up and see it is dark too.
Maybe I'm strange but I've never seen or had the need to lock things down with walls or fences or floods of light to be safe enough. Even in my other hardcore world, I don't have walls around my village, nor is every spot of space within the village lit up enough at night. I don't see the need to do that. There's simply enough golems that I feel it's able to defend itself. Maybe over a very long term it would fall, but it's certainly self sustaining in the short term. I tend to be sleeping most of the time I'm there at night anyway, and I routinely enough can repair the golems too (since iron is beyond being an issue in that world). In all I think I've only noticed one missing door the entire time in that world.
What is a dropshaft mine? Like a ladder down or something? I thought of that but the stairs seemed like they would be faster and less effort.
And I prefer the lack of the darker Blue below the horizon. I always thought that looked awful, especially at higher altitudes. It's not always oceans on the horizon.
This might have been a side-effect of the internal server limiting the view distance to 10 when you set it to "Far" so loaded chunks don't cover it; I don't see it appearing in any screenshots taken from high up, even when looking down from very high up (as you go higher up the game shifts it down until it disappears into fog, but still cuts off the sun/moon/stars, until you go so high up it goes outside of the view frustum (far plane distance), but that is impossible in Survival (even the terrain eventually disappears if you go high enough).
If you are almost always asleep at night, I guess you don't need to secure your base but I hate having to drop what I'm doing to go to sleep whenever the sun goes down. And my experience is that Iron Golems absolutely don't do a good job protecting things and especially me and my stuff from Creepers.
Yes, a ladder dropshaft is a 1x1 hole with a ladder going straight down. I used to think it was faster than stairs to traverse but looking at the wiki now it seems to be about the same going down and a little slower going up - although you can convert it into a jumpshaft going down, and that, of course, is a *lot* faster. However, it's faster to dig, because you only need to dig out 5 block for every three going down (to be safe, you need to carve out side spots to stand on as you go down instead of 12 blocks for every three for a stairway.
The other advantage, which I guess would be a disadvantage for you, is that your upper and lower bases are in the same chunks so your machines and farms in both continue to operate as you move back and forth. But it would be a bad thing if it meant hostile mobs could wander around your base at night.
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.
This might have been a side-effect of the internal server limiting the view distance to 10 when you set it to "Far" so loaded chunks don't cover it; I don't see it appearing in any screenshots taken from high up, even when looking down from very high up (as you go higher up the game shifts it down until it disappears into fog, but still cuts off the sun/moon/stars, until you go so high up it goes outside of the view frustum (far plane distance), but that is impossible in Survival (even the terrain eventually disappears if you go high enough).
Maybe I'm thinking of that, but 1.6 was a long time ago for me so I thought I was dealing with it more recently. I did just check now though and it behaves almost as you say, except the sun and moon get visible lower than the horizon if you go high enough. Also, the fog fails to obstruct the chunk edges during sunrise and sunset which I find annoying.
If you are almost always asleep at night, I guess you don't need to secure your base but I hate having to drop what I'm doing to go to sleep whenever the sun goes down. And my experience is that Iron Golems absolutely don't do a good job protecting things and especially me and my stuff from Creepers.
I typically sleep at night by default, though it's not necessarily something I always ensure I do.
I guess the golems must be doing well enough for me. Like I mentioned, I don't know if it would be perpetually sustainable that way, but it's definitely something that's sustaining in the short term and doesn't require me to force a wall and perfect lighting into my settlements.
Yes, a ladder dropshaft is a 1x1 hole with a ladder going straight down. I used to think it was faster than stairs to traverse but looking at the wiki now it seems to be about the same going down and a little slower going up - although you can convert it into a jumpshaft going down, and that, of course, is a *lot* faster. However, it's faster to dig, because you only need to dig out 5 block for every three going down (to be safe, you need to carve out side spots to stand on as you go down instead of 12 blocks for every three for a stairway.
I have what I feel are good enough looking mines of that type then, but they're in my oldest world and not this one.
But yes, I used ladders for storage in my main location in my oldest world too. Never again. Always stairs.
Also, your words made me put some time and effort into it. It probably doesn't look like much changed which is disappointing with how much time it actually took.
I added stairs for the ceiling, put log pillars every sixth block to clean up torch placement, and cleared out all the dirt, gravel, andesite, diorite, and granite in them, making all the walls smooth stone above the transition, and deesplate below (without silk touch, I have no method to get deepslate in its natural form so the removal of things below the transition layer were filled with tuff).
And as I was running up the stairs, I heard a known noise, turned around, went closer to get it to give chase, and led it back to the center of the village. That's what he gets.
Normally I wouldn't put all this effort into a mineshaft in what is still a lesser world, but your comment made me do it, haha. I also ran back and forth between my place and this village so much that I think it should be time I made that bridge over the river. Once I do that, I'll be a big step towards ready to bring villagers over . I'll still need to craft a lot of rail though (and I'm actually low on iron at the moment).
Next I decided to start terraforming to prepare for expanding my settlement, and to grow and farm some cherry trees.
This update might feel slightly mundane as opposed to the others. Normally I'd basically skip out on showing progress of such things, but sometimes I jump straight from nothing to the end so I thought maybe someone would like to see it for once, even if it wasn't of a build. I'll try and show more progress of the bridge I'll be building later like this.
Most of this will be showing my gathering some dirt from the immediate area in order to use it to fill in another area I want to level for expanding to.
Right when I started, they showed up.
The reward of the wandering trader showing up is the livelihood of the llamas as I work.
And then... they show up.
You can also see the outline I intend on filling in.
Some of them have "locked on" to me, meaning they'll stay this way until they either despawn, or I get close enough to cause them to give chase. The next morning, they are still there tracking me in my house. Unnerving.
At least they're not threatening until I get very close, but this will force me to start filling in the other side only first. Which is fine, since I have so much dirt I need to gather to do that, so they should be long gone by time I need them to be.
Here's what I need to fill in.
On the left, I've already filled some in with many stacks of dirt, but I'm already out. This is going to need a lot, despite looking like so little. This is what I mean by some things can look like little to no change, but take a lot of time, effort, and worse, used or broken tools.
So, time to gather more.
The following morning, and... I love walking out the door to start a day and seeing that.
What's funny is most were locked onto me, but at least one wasn't. So he was pacing back and forth, probably because he was set to follow the captain, who wasn't going anywhere?
I ignore them and keep focusing on what matters. It's coming along... slowly...
But now I need more dirt, so...
By the next morning, they were finally gone, and now I was down to just a small area left to be filled.
That evening, the first arrivals were still there, which is very welcome. They despawned a bit after this picture though.
I was just thinking about how it hadn't rained in many days, and likely would soon. Around a day after thinking that, it did. And then shortly after that...
Come on, again!?
So I take the long way around to gather a bit more dirt, which should hopefully be the rest I need for now.
Night comes, forcing me to sleep, and I finish the following morning.
It's ready for expansion. But first, I have the trees to tend to and ready crops I can farm again.
Again, it's mundane, but I got a video of my uneventful day of gathering trees, in case anyone is interested.
Next I can start expanding some paths and I'll probably get the wheat farm and an area for livestock up next. Additional houses will come later, so I can postpone the bridge a bit, but I'll need that done before I can get villagers here.
And I'll need a lot of iron (I have like... ten ingots?) for rail to bring them here.
On the left, I've already filled some in with many stacks of dirt, but I'm already out. This is going to need a lot, despite looking like so little. This is what I mean by some things can look like little to no change, but take a lot of time, effort, and worse, used or broken tools.
Oh, I am SO aware that Minecraft dirt moving is vastly more work than it looks like. I've spent entire episodes basically earthmoving in my journal too.
I am a bit surprised you care about leveling what looks like a one block drop. With your usual building style of well-spaced medium sized buildings I wouldn't think it would make much difference if some were a block or two higher than others.
Could you just snipe those illagers, one by one? I guess right now you couldn't afford the arrows, but in general it seems like an opportunity to practice long distance archery.
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.
You're right, it's only a one block difference but that's probably also why I'm leveling it. The village isn't going to be too large, and I guess I'd either rather have it be totally flat, or have a little bit more variation (like two or three, varying either way). In other words, one way or the other but the one block difference would probably bother me so mentally it was like a "I just want to level it" scenario.
It was more the spot in front of the house that spurred that, but it applied to the other spot too given the wheat farm might be rather large. Mentally, I think I was going to need more flat land for them so it was either level it down directly up to the path which I felt would have been awkward, or raise it up. I went with the latter.
I'll also likely lower the hill directly behind the house. I have the "square" up now. I already did something with the spot directly in front of the house so I put it in "front" of the other side the house has access to the area around it (I didn't want it "behind" the house as that would have felt strange for such a small village).
I had just gotten back from another run to spawn to get more mud for mud bricks before this. One bell came from a village that had two bells in the snow area I found on my mapping adventures. The other? Let's just say another village is without a bell now.
And yes, the pillagers aren't worth the arrows. I can usually avoid them because if they don't lock onto you, they usually wander off (in my experience, in a direction away from you), and while they did lock onto that time, I had time to be patient due to having other areas to work in. Now if I needed them moved right then and there, I can always leave the area which forces them to despawn by being far enough away. Either way you go with it, they're not a real threat or roadblock. Of course, I still plan to make this a village, and not just to give myself an area that they can't spawn near but also for that.
Come to think of it... I wonder if staying awake at night and trying to get a villager zombies to cure would be worthwhile. While I've limited from potions in this world, the meaning behind that restriction is more to prevent myself from getting buffs. I'd still limit myself from using them for debuffs in combat situations, but I'd probably make an exception here. Though, zombie villagers are rare in my experience, and I'd need at least two. I'd save me the time, effort, and material for rail I'd otherwise not need though. Hm.
Yes, that's a frozen peaks (tiny) biome. I can't verify it because no F3 allowed, but that's almost certainly what it is. It looks funny here because it's so small and it barely extends above the rest, but I've seen other spots like this before. I think they're actually neat. Of course if you're looking for a "real" peak mountain they won't be it, but they're neat in their own way.
Cherry blossom biomes tend to generate at "medium" altitudes, like plateaus and such, so you'll often find them around peaks. So it lines up.
The thing with the jungle... that may as well be a running joke at this point.
Someone who first played in my world with me back between 1.3. and 1.5 mostly had their village in a plains biome, but there was a jungle directly nearby, so they also made a jungle treetop location.
I originally intended to do one of my own since way back then.
Then that world was pruned to update to 1.19 and get new terrain generation, and the almost nothing start I had on one was lost (since I removed the region it was in since it had nothing to justify keeping it). It was a rather large biome for 1.6, and rather varying in terrain for 1.6 too, so I'll miss it, but there's another jungle closer now.
Then my plan shifted to making one in my second world, which similarly has a jungle opposite an ocean from my primary location (there's still plans to do this in the second world, but they're not active and likely a ways off).
I was going to do a smaller one here now. Only that just changed of course (and now I'm more sad given your disappointment, haha). It was a combination of a bunch of small things that led to the change of plans. I mean I could still could do one in addition to this, but given how risky this particular world is, I'm less likely to build it up beyond my initial necessary settlement.
Speaking of world risk, since I was doing my "safer" hardcore world in the catch all thread and the riskier one in a dedicated thread, I've thought that if (or when) I do fail, I could always just make another world using the same name and successively number them, and then start anew by continuing in this same thread. I'd then edit the first post, leaving the original content, but adding a link to the post that starts the successor world. That way I'm not making a ton of threads if the worlds perish quickly. But I'm not sure if that would dilute organization. Hopefully they don't just fail back to back to back like that to make it a problem.
With the forth map completed (there will be more done later), it's time to move.


I started running off but forgot my bed. I might need that. No, I'll definitely need that. I thankfully realized before getting far so it was only 20 seconds or so to go back.
I gathered up the crafting table, stove, whatever I could fit in my inventory, and off I went. I expected this would take three or probably four trips total. What's interesting is I'm once again heading what I figure is a couple thousand blocks East of spawn (though a bit Northeast this time). I don't know how it always works out that way. In three of my four worlds it has, and those were the "random" three. In the forth I did settle at spawn, but that's because I scouted that seed before starting it for that world.
Off I go, one of many...
Climate change has come to Minecraft. I've seen many of these in this world in particular.
This is nearby the area I plan to settle. Mountains are my thing.
I don't have a map to show it yet (or, maybe one of the earlier Unmined ones does, actually), but I formally chose this spot in particular to settle, which is actually between two cherry blossom biones and more at sea level.
They showed up again. As if to challenge my claim. Thankfully I've had the luck of them always wandering in the direction away from where I'm wanting to go, so it works out. Maybe I'm less at risk of minding them again in the short term now. And hopefully for good once I have a village going here.
Here's an overview of the area.
I establish my first start of home here, store some stuff and clear up my inventory for another trip.
Not long after leaving, this happens...
One block over and I'm probably dead? I fell around three or four blocks already so I figure the rest of that makes it fatal.
I better watch it. I've had three close calls and all were falls. Maybe not building in the trees above ground is better for me after all. Or maybe all the ground caves risk will balance that out. That is one good thing I'm liking; the caves in the area seem far more promising than what is around the other spot.
Other angles of what almost swallowed me up and ended this world.
I don't mean that lightly. These split seconds from death are harsh realizations, and I dare say merciless ones. I'm a believer that almost all hardcore runs are a test of patience and endurance, and it's less raw skill but more awareness and planning. Eventually you become too careless. The chance of running through a field and just falling to your death is rather low, so you chance it... but it's never zero.
About halfway back, I though this ridge looked good from this angle with the split in it and the sun setting.
Wait... again?
That's the quickest I've ever seen them consecutively spawn. I've now seen them spawn four times total, which might be more than I've seen them in my other hardcore world.
I need a spawn safe settlement fast (realistically, I don't feel much threat from them... but I also don't like them around anyway).
I do have to loop around and go around this to avoid them.
I get back and make a few more trips. I made a video of one of the trips to show the terrain I cross from one to the other, and to show the distance. It's not terribly far. If it doesn't show up yet then it's still uploading or processing or whatever.
I have about one more trip to make to be done, and then I can start, but the supplies I'll need also come from a biome near spawn so I might be making two accounting for that. So I'm not immediately ready to start building, but maybe soon. If I don't fall into a hole before I get the chance to start, that is...
More exploring!

Am I... am I unusual for being probably so far into a world (in terms of days), let alone a hardcore one, and still having not established a shelter? I'm still wanting to explore.
Anyway, the time is coming. I did go gathering some things I'll need from the only known biome so far, and also brought some back near my place of settlement. I also did some more exploration to finish making the maps I had crafted filled out, so I have a 3 x 2 map now.
Since my settlement is near the Northeast, I'll want to explore more in those two directions. I know I also want to add another row to the bottom/South, and I already explored some that way but never mapped it, but that comes later. This will leave the Westernmost edge of the mapped area the line spawn resides at, meaning I won't have anything at all mapped to the West. Whether I add a row for that later is still something I'm undecided on.
At this rate, my map will definitely compare to the one in my other hardcore world, which is something since I have no elytra here. But, I'm also using maps that are zoomed out three times instead of the full four, so each one only has half the space. More maps, but less space is likely how they will compare in the end.
I also wanted to stock up on food (pork chops getting low, and I have a stack of steak but that's it), so I figured I'd do double (or triple) duty and explore (and map) while gathering any pigs and cows I found not too far out of my way.
Oh, and I'm also switching to shaders in this world like I did in my other one.
Time to head out.
I ran into a rude thing throwing stuff at me, and got hit by my first one, so I have a guesstimate of how much damage they do. Possibly three or if not four hits seems lethal. Since you can pretty reliably avoid them with swimming, that makes me feel a little safer in the water.
I also turned the render distance up to 24. This will let me spot things further, but I feel like modern Minecraft really wants a bit higher of a render distance than the standard-feeling 16 to show itself off. I still have to do the same amount of exploring for mapping (which has closer to something like a distance of 8 it seems), and as long as I'm not raising it very high just to scout stuff and then turning it back down, it feels fair to me to raise it a bit, as I'll actually be playing here.
Now that I'm beyond my existing mapped area, I craft the two maps and start exploring. Turns out I took that above picture in a timely spot. Juuust beyond it is this! Pretty...
This surprised me because that band of cold region to the south that stretched up diagonally, actually turns and goes the other way, so I wouldn't have expected this. Is this another cold region starting? I sure seem to have a variety filled seed here compared to my other world.
But before I continue, I realize I should probably grab that extra stack of steak, and that I also left my spare bed at home, which I'm not too far from. So I head back to get it, and spot this opening along the side of the cliff of the river that cuts between my side of it, and these new lands.
I also have a video for the short portion of running back and getting the needed things. It shows some temporary stuff (read as, mangrove swamp trees) as well as the map I do have.
I then head back to a village, and find a pretty big surface cave opening.
Here's the video.
Continuing on, I find something very shocking...
Not another cold region... instead something very unusual for 1.18. It's just a random ice spikes biome near high altitude and plains? That cherry grove biome next to it makes it pretty though! I wish that was near the one I planned to make my settlement at (don't worry, I'm not dragging my settlement here).
A close eye may notice something I didn't yet, but was about to. Look above the map.
And here's what it had.
What's with all the mending axes? Forbidden fruit.
I'm using the complimentary reimagined shader, and recently changed the water from the "looks like ice" setting to the so-called "fantasy" one, which looks more like it does in BSL, which I prefer.
But I like the opacity being lower and color being darker. It took some adjustments of the settings, but I got it close. From high altitude or a far distance it doesn't look exactly how I want, but it's close. In turn, it looks nicer underwater than BSL does.
Tradeoffs. I overall prefer BSL for the better lighting, and really hope BSL would one day add the clouds that this one has. The double layer of default-style puffy clouds is gorgeous.
Anyway, getting to the corner of the map, I see a glimpse of a beach beyond the forest, and check it out as night falls. The following morning, the lighting coloring on the water made it look pretty, so I got a picture. I was actually a bit slow so the time of day changed enough and I lost some of it, but still.
The following few have no commentary and are just "terrain generation can be pretty" so I took pictures.
The forest on the cliffs looks nice. With terrain elevation being uncoupled from biomes, it's a vast improvement and you find this regularly.
Way too gorgeous of a valley! Something else you'd seldom see in older versions.
Getting more towards mountainous terrain and forests again to the South, which was expected. It also starts raining, and as the sun is also setting, I get a bit on edge.
Last one for now... but probably not the last time I see this. It's been rather common.
I'll finish by completing the second map to the South, getting more food along the way (my sword broke so my axe is seeing use for this), and then returning home to cook it. As I do I'll start stocking more needed supplies to begin my house. I promise I'll be building eventually!
Yes, you are very unusual in exploring so much early. When I'm playing hardcore, getting a functional base is my #1 requirement. To be fair, you are finding so much stuff so easily that you actually *have* most of the things I want first, like armor and food supply, and you're not going to use a basic enchantment setup.
The current climate system doesn't generate "zones" like the old one did. There's a temperature noise, and when it's above a certain level, the area is "cold". Imagine a parallel world where any place the terrain in *that* world is above a certain level, that place in your world is a cold biome. That means you can have just a little hill where the parallel's world's height pokes above the level, and that generates a little cold microbiome in yours. Of course they tuned the noise to try to minimize that (it's very smooth, no doubt, so not many local hills) but there's a limit to how much you can smooth that without making the biome shapes too boring. You seem to like that little Ice Spikes but it bothers me - it just doesn't look like an "edge" cold biome. Also, having the cold spot on the *side* of the hill looks strange too. I'd really like to see the ground altitude used to alter the functional temperature noise.
Part of the problem is the "bubble biome" concept where everything has to be 100% one biome or another. If the system weren't tethered to biomes, then a barely-cold region there might have snow on the ground and smattering of stunted cherry trees and I would find that less grating.
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.
Yeah, having food is essential, but honestly the tools and perhaps even armor aren't (maybe leather boots for mountains). Give me food, a bed, a map, and maybe a boat (even this is optional) and I'm set.
But I've noticed in both hardcore worlds but this one especially, I don't make an initial settlement and prolong it until I'm ready. I sort of live nomadic until then. I feel like I'm still in that early "essential and small resource gathering" phase that should only last a day or a few and I'm... who knows how many days in and filling map after map out. So I still feel "very early game" despite the time spend and things done.
But I'll start building shortly.
And yes, I sort of have a liking to that biome. If it was a common thing, I'd dislike it. If it happened as a cold biome in a warm one or vice versa, I might dislike it. But as it turned out, I don't mind it.
I feel like terrain generation has been moving in a positive direction over the years overall (1.7's repetitiveness being a big exception), so the occasional random biome is fine. Almost like a quirk that coincidentally resembles the older (1.6 and prior) placement. Since it's very rare, I don't mind it, and maybe even say it adds some charm.
It's like the overhangs and floating terrain, or as a good example, how my spawn looks in this world. Normally I don't care for that sort of terrain, preferring the more typical and realistic terrain with controlled climate placement, but the oddities are fine in low severity or numbers I guess.
Pretty much a picture drop of the rest of the exploration... which sort of included a new bottom row of the map. Don't worry, I promise my home is coming next this time!
I'll eventually probably be adding one row to the top and even West (maybe two to the West if I find good enough terrain, as there should be more warm climate and I want to explore more of that).
Right now the map is as large as in my other hardcore world, but only half the land due to zoom differences. Still, since I did this all before having a home, and did it all with elytra in the other world, I'm proud of the difference.
This is sort of a supplement to the above so I won't be commenting on almost any of them and this one is mostly just pictures. I'll let them speak for themselves.
I found an armor villager but left them, as iron isn't lacking in supply right now, and my armor is high on durability.
A zombie came out in the morning and hugged me.
The long overdue home begins!

I spent a bit of time running back to a mangrove swamp for mud, and growing and chopping down trees I had brought back with me. I'm going to need more eventually, but I have enough to start working on a place to live so I'm not sleeping under the stars.
Halfway through, they showed up again...
But everything was made better when they showed up.
Due to the trader going in and out so often, and him and his llamas being separated, one of the leads eventually broke, allowing me to get one.
Needing more wood to finish the roof, they showed up... again.
Why is it always when I'm taking down a tree? Are they the mangrove swamp tree preservation group or something?
Note that this was late morning.
Late afternoon, and...
No, that's not the same group. That's two on the same day. While I'm not in a desperate rush to get villagers here, I'll be glad when I do.
I took a break for... I can't remember why but I ended up getting this picture.
I then went to get some cherry blossoms. Yes, as much as I love these things, I haven't gotten one until now.
I tend to get things only when I need them sometimes, and I'll be needing them now.
Home is finished!
I have a bit of a path, a small farm, and a tree for now. Not much, but this won't be a big village anyway.
It's sooo much of a different feeling when you have your first shelter up. Especially in hardcore, and especially after being nomadic for so long. It's literally that warm "I'm new at Minecraft and it's my first night in a shelter" safe feeling. Of course, with the pillager patrols able to spawn, I'm still on edge around the area even during the day, but I feel much safer regardless.
Across from the carrot farm, I'll probably put my livestock yards for at least pigs.
I plan to do a much larger wheat farm in this area.
Here's inside. It's not much, and I don't anticipate needing much more for storage, given I don't have as much plans to build this up (but how many times have I said that?).
The basement is where I moved my maps.
And I needed to size the room for it so I committed to indeed expanding it two maps worth to the West from spawn.
I need to get more deep slate to finish the floor, but otherwise the house itself is mostly finished. The only other small thing is to get glowstone from the nether for behind the maps, but that might be a ways off yet. The different light levels on the maps bothers me.
I also remade the map that contains my settlement because I guess the bug (?) with multiple markers staying on the map after moving it is still there and it was bothering me, so here's a couple pictures from that.
I'm not sure if the next thing I'll do is working on part of the map expansion (likely starting with the top row of four) or start working on finding diamonds to upgrade some stuff. Or I can continue working on the village. I'm definitely in no need of food, but I still want to get more of the farms (crops and animals up and going. I know it will be a bit of a process getting villagers here, even if there's two villages that aren't too far. I think I might make two or three houses for them, so again the village won't be very large. Even my own house is rather small.
You sure throw up a nice-looking house in a hurry. It normally takes me ages to get a shelter to the "good looking" stage.
Are pillager patrols that common? That's a huge change to the old implicit contract that outdoors is safe in the day. Sounds worse than the psycho Better Creatures that were causing me so much trouble in my journal. Maybe plastering the plains with villages isn't so bad if it keeps them away.
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 wouldn't say that was in a hurry, haha. Remember I was living nomadic and collecting resources beforehand. I also originally created this in a creative world and then replicated it here.
I think that's part of why I delayed it so much. I'd rather not have to redo things too often as that's actually more work, so even if I'm going for small and simple here, I waited (getting the mud bricks and mangrove wood partly delayed it as well).
Speaking of houses, I don't want to spoil much (though I'll be making an update later today to tell it in detail), but you'll probably like one of my plans and ideas, even if it's probably a ways away.
And I don't know for sure about the pillager patrols. I don't think they're supposed to be this common, but maybe they are? Normally I'm either in a village (safe from them), underground (same), or if I'm out, I'm on the move which means there's a fair chance you probably avoid/miss some spawns of them even if they do occur. This definitely seems high though. I've never seen them on consecutive days, nor multiple on the same day, before this world.
But they're not honestly not too threatening. Even if they match your running speed, you have to get quite close to cause them to give chase. And the biggest penalty is the debuff which causes them to raid the next village you enter, which isn't a concern if you don't regularly live in one (if you do, you're mostly safe from them to begin with).
So I decided to go after expanding the map. I'll probably do this in three adventures, each one being to fill in four maps. First up is the four across the top (I know there's six, but this the four above the existing mapped area).

I decided to do the two on the right first. Sometimes I do two consecutively, and I started doing that here, but then just finished them one by one.
I ended coming across what must have been a dozen spots like this over the course of four maps, but decided not to get pictures of them all.
This was a cave opening I'd seen before (originally when exploring in the valleys and finding village after village), but it looked even bigger from this angle.
Quite a bit later, once I had gotten North enough to be in new lands, I found another micro biome, this time a savanna.
But I do know there's warm biomes to the West that I expect run diagonally Northeast, so maybe I'm getting closer to more. I am hoping especially to find desert and badlands.
After sleeping one morning, I go to gather lily of the valley flowers as I do when I come across a patch. I was rudely interrupted.
A third came out too, so I'm unsure if there was a dungeon near the surface or if, more likely, it was just a group of zombies that detected me near the entrance of a cave.
Getting beyond the forest, and ah, I'm seeing more signs of warm biomes indeed. There's jungle peeking over the hill, and I know there's going to be a lot of jungle to the West, so I must be coming across that here.
More North, towards the North edge of the map actually..
Now that is what I wanted to find! Not just desert but badlands too!
I check the shipwreck while I'm here too, and while there's no diamonds, it's by no means bad.
But this might be more of a reward...
That may as well say "teal wool" for what I'm gathering it for, haha.
Shame this is just North of the actual area I'm mapping, though. I was hoping to get some on the map itself for variety, but maybe I'll find some pushing down to the West, above or to the left of the area I know is jungle? The future will tell.
I find another village, and while it's been a while since I found a new one, I've also been mostly finding forest where they can't spawn, so that makes sense.
I keep on to the West and find more jungle, and soon a pair of birds! One is one of the types I'm missing.
I stop to gather seeds, and by time I return... both are gone. I'm not keen on going too far out of my way to search for them, and instead hope I'll come across more.
To the West more and I see this...
Maybe it will push South once I get further to the West? I'm hoping.
So I found this, which is a bit unusual for 1.18+ terrain. It's a river that dried up for quite a bit.
Normally it'd be something I wouldn't like, but it's unusual, and it looks nice here. A small area of open terrain in an otherwise dense jungle.
I get to much more mountainous jungle (yay 1.18 terrain) and start finding massive cave openings, this being one.
I'm in a sparse jungle, and soon it starts raining.
The sun is maybe three quarters of the way through the sky, so I'm timid to enter the dense jungle. This is despite the fact I see a ruined portal just within it. But instead of sitting and waiting, I continue South instead, where it's a bit more open as sparse jungle, forest, and rivers.
After the rain stopped, I happened back across the ruined portal eventually.
There wasn't much in it, but it was quality over quantity. There was an obsidian block (I now have enough to construct a portal despite never getting a diamond pickaxe to mine any), a few golden carrots, plus one more golden apple.
And then I finally found two more!
I saved one. Now I just need a Red one. Thankfully those are about the easiest to spot, with the Blue and Green especially often blending in.
I was starting to find more bamboo, which was expected given I was getting to the area close to above my old intended settlement. Which meant I was finding some of these...
...and the little one happened to do a tumble right as I was getting the picture.
I'm always on edge around sunrise and sunset especially in jungle, and this is why...
I also found a skeleton who shot me right in the face, and right in the middle of day. Creepers are what I'm worried most about though.
Eventually the jungle broke to a familiar sight. See the raised terrain in the back? That's the exact spot/hill I came over sighting this ruined portal from originally, so I've looted it before. I'm getting near my original location I was going to settle at.
This is that spot (right about where the crosshair is). What might have been...
Speaking of which, I got a better look at that island (?) from here.
So here's the part I mentioned Zeno might like. Since I'm not planning to build any given location up too much, what I might do is make multiple homes instead. So I'm thinking I might make one somewhere there. But we're at the West edge of the final map, so exploring further that direction will have to wait.
Heading back, I see a sign of what I know happened, but was unaware of...
More arrows I suppose, even if a few.
I continue in the band of jungle on the edge of where I was about to settle, and... suddenly!
I was rushing, noticed a drop late, and went to jump. I just missed it, and thought it might be water anyway. I noticed myself falling... for a long distance.
This is it. I'm dead, and if I'm not, any mob at the bottom will finish the job.
I lucked out and it was a ravine with no mobs and it was still daylight. I took near lethal damage though (two to three hearts left?), and I remained calm enough to dig into the side to have a safe place in case there was mobs.
Night was near, so I set my bed down and slept in my shameful spot of my own doing.
I actually took a break here.
Upon returning, I decided to chance using the stone I gathered to pillar up (once making sure there were no mobs) as opposed to digging up. I had no torches.
Thankfully, it went well enough. Here's the fall I took, though I came from the direction I'm now facing. I'm not sure how many blocks it was, but maybe somewhere between 15 to 20 since low 20s is lethal (keeping in mind I jumped)?
All I needed was a creeper to explode behind me, dealing near lethal damage, to send me back into the hole to finish it, right?
Moving on, but with much less running through dense jungle floor now. I'm still finding big holes. these are actually safer, as you see them coming.
Interestingly, I see dripstone caves and lush saves meeting here? There's also a mineshaft.
I also come across the Northernmost jungle temple just above that spot.
I do believe I've now found every structure I "shouldn't have known about" and have mapped mostly beyond everything the Unmined map showed me earlier.
I found another ruined portal, and I actually almost missed it. I happened to see it only because I was making a detour around a cave area. It would have otherwise been between two lines I made.
Near the end, and once I came across a beach to settle for the night, a wandering trader showed up. And... for some reason, made a beeline into the jungle (heading to where I was when it spawned maybe?) and lost not one but both of his poor llamas!
I pet both llamas, gathered the dropped leads, and started getting excited for what will be West when I get to map that way.
But now it was time to head home.
I sooo need glowstone for this.
But I think I might go branch mining for diamonds sooner rather than later.
Small update in content for a change of pace, but large in milestone!

I decided to start branch mining. Normally, if I wanted to match the "spirit" of all the other restrictions I am playing under, I'd try and find diamonds naturally only while caving, but given all of those other restrictions and that this is hardcore... I decided to branch mine to try and get my initial ones.
I decided to start it in a village near my settlement (this will likely be where I source villagers from for mine).
It's not overly pretty, but I made it wide and tall enough, and used stairs for quality of life for when returning. And yes I even went the extra step to make them stone brick stairs. No unsightly cobblestone here.
While I've found Gold before, I believe (?) this is the first I found while mining.
Likewise, just digging down, and not yet in the mines itself, I found two more diamonds, and my first obtained by mining, to add to the lone one I found in a shipwreck before. That makes three total.
In all I crossed three caves digging down, but two sort of brushed against one side and I didn't have to actually cross anything. One I did have to cross, but it was a very narrow split (I don't know what the term for this type of cave is and for those not familiar with 1.18 cave generation it would probably be hard to describe).
Here's the start.
I made a trip back home (two during the process I think) to clear my inventory and smelt/craft the stairs before formally starting. That initial mine hallway (pictured above) even had one diamond in it, making for four total now.
Hopefully I'll find more, as that's what I'm doing this for. Well, I also needed deepslate, but I don't have a formal storage room and ended up with way more than I could contain.
For whatever reason, I was seriously lucking out. I was finding more diamonds than iron or gold. I even came across some caves (luckily I found no mobs in any of these) to compliment that even more.
This isn't 1.20.2 with the boosted diamond rates either, so I have no idea why I was finding so many. All I did was branch a 2x1 tunnel to the West (left) off the pictured one above. I was going so far that when I started returning at the end, I could turn both ways and see the fog (and thus, time of day) at the ends at a render distance of 24. I didn't realize I went that far. I'm just using unenchanted iron pickaxes here (oh, and the people complaining deepslate takes too much longer to mine than stone... all I can say is wow is that overblown because it doesn't feel bad to me).
I came down with between seven and eight pickaxes (one was possibly low durability to begin with) and as the last one broke, my inventory was now also filled. Anyone have an answer as to why I got this many diamonds to iron and gold?
With the four diamonds back at home, that makes 37 total.
I'm sorry but the complaints about diamond costs for things, and speed of mining through deepslate, have no merit to them in my mind. Even if this is good luck (it has to be given the diamond to iron and gold disparity), it's not bad. And this is again before the upcoming diamond rate boost.
So given I have over the needed 24 diamonds, I do the expected thing...
And I decide to use four of the six "coastal" armor trims on them. I might not be able to enchant these to make them permanent with mending, but the hope is my armor will last enough and this given trim is rather common. While netherite is probably not worth it, I thought maybe it would be for armor alone... but I'd have to tackle bastion remnants with no enchants and the piglin brutes terrify me. I'm undecided if I'll go after netherite for armor.
I was wondering what material/color to make for the trim, and after starting a new temporary creative world to test them out, I went with iron...
So that's it. This is as likely as "end game" as it gets for me! Well, unless I got for netherite. I hope I'm more durable now. Well, as long as I can avoid falls because this does nothing there.
Diamonds actually gave a teal color that matched my skin too, but the trim serving as an accent worked better White in my opinion, so I went with iron for the trim. But I would have had no qualms using four diamonds for trim if I felt it looked better.
I also made a diamond sword. I'll probably stick to iron for tool use for a little while longer until I stockpile more diamonds, given I'll be going through them a lot, especially with upcoming work for my "village".
Before getting more, I decided to tend to the farm behind me as the carrots were again fully grown.
I need to get a livestock yard up for pigs soon to start actually using them, though. Farming this twice and I have about a row of carrots now. That's with no fortune enchantment, that's just how much they drop, and hence why the carrot farm is smaller and why the wheat farm will need to be much larger.
I've seen you mention this before but they really didn't make fog darken when underground? I find it to immersion-breaking to see light fog and even the sky in unloaded chunks, which is why I made it so that they both turn pitch black (the sun/moon/stars also fade to darkness). This also used to happen in vanilla prior to 1.8 (just the fog though), when they removed "void fog", citing non-existent performance issues which were entirely the fault of the particle effect (the fog darkening and reduced distance involved a simple check for the sky light level at the player - which is being done anyway when rendering the player (or arm/held item):
Examples:
A different angle with no sky light:
This was taken back when I used Optifine to disable void fog, which also disabled the darkening effect (not just the particles or closing in):
For comparison, it would now look like this - not much clues as to large it might be until I've actually gone in to explore it:
A view from a similar angle (and a higher render distance) after I'd explored it:
Similar to sky light, going above sea level does disable the darkening effect; this also shows another feature which has been missing since 1.8; the area below the horizon used to be blue and helped oceans blend in with the edge of loaded chunks, both in color and by hiding the sub/moon (which became visible above the water, not the seafloor, as they do in newer versions):
While deepslate does have twice the hardness of stone it takes less than twice as much time to mine, especially once you add an additional 0.3 second delay between consecutive blocks (with an iron pickaxe the raw mining times are 0.4 and 0.75 seconds respectively; consecutive blocks take 0.7 and 1.05 seconds; the differences are less with better/enchanted tools, an Efficiency V diamond or netherite pickaxe takes 0.4 and 0.45 seconds per block). Then again, I do notice a speed increase when upgrading to iron, then diamond as soon as I find them respectively (I don't bother getting Fortune before mining more diamond), I even enchant the pickaxes I use to repair my main pickaxe with Efficiency I (level 1 enchant) as I use them for a bit to maximize the durability per pickaxe (the anvil bonus of 12% corresponds to 187 additional uses, 374 if they happen to get Unbreaking; if they only get Unbreaking I use a book to add Efficiency to them).
Diamond is the second most common ore near bedrock, and is far more common than it used to be, both overall and relative to other ores:
(original source)
By contrast, this is what ore distribution was like before 1.18; note that this is more comparable to figure A (total blocks) than figure C (percentage, as these are) since they are out of all blocks, not just "ground", so you can see how much they nerfed coal and iron, I don't see much impact of the greater terrain variation either (compare the drop-off in coal above sea level, even as 1.18 increased the percentage as a percentage of ground), the Wiki claims that a 515,000 chunk area was analyzed in 1.18 so it should be quite representative:
1.6.4 (based on my own analysis):
Coal: 155.6
Iron: 88.6
Redstone: 25.3
Gold: 8.5
Lapis: 3.53
Diamond: 3.19
1.17 (also based on my own analysis of a 1.8 world, with no changes until then)
Coal: 185.5
Iron: 111.5
Redstone: 29.1
Gold: 10.4
Lapis: 4.1
Diamond: 3.7
1.18 (based on an analysis somebody posted on Reddit)
Copper: 68.7
Coal: 62.0
Iron: 53.5
Redstone: 24.5
Gold: 17.6
Lapis: 16.3
Diamond: 10.4
Also, for good measure this is a chart I made of the ore distribution in TMCW, including data on ore exposure, which can be quite significant (over 20% of coal between layers 10-30 is exposed; the amount is higher due to its larger veins, and vice-versa for ores like emerald). There is also a noticeable drop in totals in the lower layers due to the volume of caves (I'd seen people complain about caves in 1.18 reducing the amount of ore due to less solid ground but the opposite is true if you consider exposed ores, and there is still plenty of solid ground, considering that the peak air fraction is less than 15% and a lot of that is concentrated in large open caves):
Also, the Wiki has an analysis (very old, from 2012, so based on ore generation before 1.8, and to a lesser extent, 1.7) where they concluded that as much as 1.7% of mined blocks could be diamond ore, with the biggest factor being how far apart you spaced your tunnels (interestingly, it continues increasing past a spacing of 3, which is enough to ensure 2 block wide veins are never exposed by two adjacent tunnels, and is always what I've used, and my efficiency does match what they show for this spacing, about 0.9%):
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Mining#Efficiency_vs_Thoroughness
An example of how I make my mines; they are 250-300 blocks long with tunnels every 4th block, and located on layer 1 due to my amethyst ore being most common on that layer (about half as common as diamond, decreasing to 1/8 as common on layer 3 and above, which are exposed in caves; in this case I found 91 diamond and 23 amethyst out of about 5 km of tunnels):
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?
Did you leave your mine entrance unprotected? Also, I prefer dropshaft mine entrances although they don't look as good.
I don't get the complaints that it's too easy to just buy diamond gear. Maybe it got a lot easier post-1.12, but I find mining up a half-stack of diamond is maybe an hour's work, and way less work than growing up 800 wheat or whatever to sell for 40 emeralds to buy an armor set, along with all the villager management required. In my current journal world, even after months of play, I still find it easier to just dig things up than to trade with vanilla villagers. I'd have to set up some kind of auto-farm to make it really worthwhile.
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'm using OptiFine as well as shaders so those mix into things.
In vanilla, I don't know but I think (?) it may. I think it might get darker but it doesn't get anywhere near Black so it doesn't matter anyway. It sticks out and ruins the immersion whether it's slightly darker or not.
Though if you're running at a high enough render distance (this typically means around 16, or 12 minimum), it's typically not an issue in all but the largest of caves. Some of them can be large enough to expose fog though, sometimes even at a render distance of something like 20 (usually this in cases with ancient cities and it's still minor), and yes it can ruin the immersion seeing a dark Grey or Blue color (or sunrise/sunset mixed in) where you expect darkness.
But the base game doesn't make things with a light level of 0 totally dark either like you changed yours to do, which I guess also factors into this.
And I prefer the lack of the darker Blue below the horizon. I always thought that looked awful, especially at higher altitudes. It's not always oceans on the horizon.
The best combination I've seen of fog/edge hiding/immersion is with BSL and with it set to make things truly dark in light lacking areas. None of the sillyness of seeing the edges of chunks during sunrise/sunset or seeing odd horizontal lines on the horizon when at high altitude. You do still get bright fog in caves but I avoid that by having the render distance at least at 16, and you can get it dark in caves (at least below the layer of 0) but this has a tradeoff... any caves that are below that layer but also have sky access will leave you seeing a totally Black sky as well and it looks awkward.
Well that's good to know then. Maybe it's not so unusual after all, but when I did branch mining in my other world (started in 1.19), I recall coming out with a bit more iron relatively.
That depends on how useful or useless you find iron golems to be, haha. It is in a village.
It's otherwise just open access though, yes, and I don't see the problem with this. The mines are so far uderground, and go so far away as well, so it's not like I'll be near or close enough that stuff will spawn there often.
I can always sleep near the bottom if I go to come up and see it is dark too.
Maybe I'm strange but I've never seen or had the need to lock things down with walls or fences or floods of light to be safe enough. Even in my other hardcore world, I don't have walls around my village, nor is every spot of space within the village lit up enough at night. I don't see the need to do that. There's simply enough golems that I feel it's able to defend itself. Maybe over a very long term it would fall, but it's certainly self sustaining in the short term. I tend to be sleeping most of the time I'm there at night anyway, and I routinely enough can repair the golems too (since iron is beyond being an issue in that world). In all I think I've only noticed one missing door the entire time in that world.
What is a dropshaft mine? Like a ladder down or something? I thought of that but the stairs seemed like they would be faster and less effort.
This might have been a side-effect of the internal server limiting the view distance to 10 when you set it to "Far" so loaded chunks don't cover it; I don't see it appearing in any screenshots taken from high up, even when looking down from very high up (as you go higher up the game shifts it down until it disappears into fog, but still cuts off the sun/moon/stars, until you go so high up it goes outside of the view frustum (far plane distance), but that is impossible in Survival (even the terrain eventually disappears if you go high enough).
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?
If you are almost always asleep at night, I guess you don't need to secure your base but I hate having to drop what I'm doing to go to sleep whenever the sun goes down. And my experience is that Iron Golems absolutely don't do a good job protecting things and especially me and my stuff from Creepers.
Yes, a ladder dropshaft is a 1x1 hole with a ladder going straight down. I used to think it was faster than stairs to traverse but looking at the wiki now it seems to be about the same going down and a little slower going up - although you can convert it into a jumpshaft going down, and that, of course, is a *lot* faster. However, it's faster to dig, because you only need to dig out 5 block for every three going down (to be safe, you need to carve out side spots to stand on as you go down instead of 12 blocks for every three for a stairway.
The other advantage, which I guess would be a disadvantage for you, is that your upper and lower bases are in the same chunks so your machines and farms in both continue to operate as you move back and forth. But it would be a bad thing if it meant hostile mobs could wander around your base at night.
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.
Maybe I'm thinking of that, but 1.6 was a long time ago for me so I thought I was dealing with it more recently. I did just check now though and it behaves almost as you say, except the sun and moon get visible lower than the horizon if you go high enough. Also, the fog fails to obstruct the chunk edges during sunrise and sunset which I find annoying.
I typically sleep at night by default, though it's not necessarily something I always ensure I do.
I guess the golems must be doing well enough for me. Like I mentioned, I don't know if it would be perpetually sustainable that way, but it's definitely something that's sustaining in the short term and doesn't require me to force a wall and perfect lighting into my settlements.
I have what I feel are good enough looking mines of that type then, but they're in my oldest world and not this one.



But yes, I used ladders for storage in my main location in my oldest world too. Never again. Always stairs.
Also, your words made me put some time and effort into it. It probably doesn't look like much changed which is disappointing with how much time it actually took.
I added stairs for the ceiling, put log pillars every sixth block to clean up torch placement, and cleared out all the dirt, gravel, andesite, diorite, and granite in them, making all the walls smooth stone above the transition, and deesplate below (without silk touch, I have no method to get deepslate in its natural form so the removal of things below the transition layer were filled with tuff).
And as I was running up the stairs, I heard a known noise, turned around, went closer to get it to give chase, and led it back to the center of the village. That's what he gets.
Normally I wouldn't put all this effort into a mineshaft in what is still a lesser world, but your comment made me do it, haha. I also ran back and forth between my place and this village so much that I think it should be time I made that bridge over the river. Once I do that, I'll be a big step towards ready to bring villagers over . I'll still need to craft a lot of rail though (and I'm actually low on iron at the moment).
Next I decided to start terraforming to prepare for expanding my settlement, and to grow and farm some cherry trees.

This update might feel slightly mundane as opposed to the others. Normally I'd basically skip out on showing progress of such things, but sometimes I jump straight from nothing to the end so I thought maybe someone would like to see it for once, even if it wasn't of a build. I'll try and show more progress of the bridge I'll be building later like this.
Most of this will be showing my gathering some dirt from the immediate area in order to use it to fill in another area I want to level for expanding to.
Right when I started, they showed up.
The reward of the wandering trader showing up is the livelihood of the llamas as I work.
You can also see the outline I intend on filling in.
Some of them have "locked on" to me, meaning they'll stay this way until they either despawn, or I get close enough to cause them to give chase. The next morning, they are still there tracking me in my house. Unnerving.
At least they're not threatening until I get very close, but this will force me to start filling in the other side only first. Which is fine, since I have so much dirt I need to gather to do that, so they should be long gone by time I need them to be.
Here's what I need to fill in.
On the left, I've already filled some in with many stacks of dirt, but I'm already out. This is going to need a lot, despite looking like so little. This is what I mean by some things can look like little to no change, but take a lot of time, effort, and worse, used or broken tools.
So, time to gather more.
The following morning, and... I love walking out the door to start a day and seeing that.
What's funny is most were locked onto me, but at least one wasn't. So he was pacing back and forth, probably because he was set to follow the captain, who wasn't going anywhere?
I ignore them and keep focusing on what matters. It's coming along... slowly...
But now I need more dirt, so...
By the next morning, they were finally gone, and now I was down to just a small area left to be filled.
That evening, the first arrivals were still there, which is very welcome. They despawned a bit after this picture though.
I was just thinking about how it hadn't rained in many days, and likely would soon. Around a day after thinking that, it did. And then shortly after that...
Come on, again!?
So I take the long way around to gather a bit more dirt, which should hopefully be the rest I need for now.
Night comes, forcing me to sleep, and I finish the following morning.
It's ready for expansion. But first, I have the trees to tend to and ready crops I can farm again.
Again, it's mundane, but I got a video of my uneventful day of gathering trees, in case anyone is interested.
Next I can start expanding some paths and I'll probably get the wheat farm and an area for livestock up next. Additional houses will come later, so I can postpone the bridge a bit, but I'll need that done before I can get villagers here.
And I'll need a lot of iron (I have like... ten ingots?) for rail to bring them here.
Oh, I am SO aware that Minecraft dirt moving is vastly more work than it looks like. I've spent entire episodes basically earthmoving in my journal too.
I am a bit surprised you care about leveling what looks like a one block drop. With your usual building style of well-spaced medium sized buildings I wouldn't think it would make much difference if some were a block or two higher than others.
Could you just snipe those illagers, one by one? I guess right now you couldn't afford the arrows, but in general it seems like an opportunity to practice long distance archery.
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.
You're right, it's only a one block difference but that's probably also why I'm leveling it. The village isn't going to be too large, and I guess I'd either rather have it be totally flat, or have a little bit more variation (like two or three, varying either way). In other words, one way or the other but the one block difference would probably bother me so mentally it was like a "I just want to level it" scenario.

It was more the spot in front of the house that spurred that, but it applied to the other spot too given the wheat farm might be rather large. Mentally, I think I was going to need more flat land for them so it was either level it down directly up to the path which I felt would have been awkward, or raise it up. I went with the latter.
I'll also likely lower the hill directly behind the house. I have the "square" up now. I already did something with the spot directly in front of the house so I put it in "front" of the other side the house has access to the area around it (I didn't want it "behind" the house as that would have felt strange for such a small village).
I had just gotten back from another run to spawn to get more mud for mud bricks before this. One bell came from a village that had two bells in the snow area I found on my mapping adventures. The other? Let's just say another village is without a bell now.
And yes, the pillagers aren't worth the arrows. I can usually avoid them because if they don't lock onto you, they usually wander off (in my experience, in a direction away from you), and while they did lock onto that time, I had time to be patient due to having other areas to work in. Now if I needed them moved right then and there, I can always leave the area which forces them to despawn by being far enough away. Either way you go with it, they're not a real threat or roadblock. Of course, I still plan to make this a village, and not just to give myself an area that they can't spawn near but also for that.
Come to think of it... I wonder if staying awake at night and trying to get a villager zombies to cure would be worthwhile. While I've limited from potions in this world, the meaning behind that restriction is more to prevent myself from getting buffs. I'd still limit myself from using them for debuffs in combat situations, but I'd probably make an exception here. Though, zombie villagers are rare in my experience, and I'd need at least two. I'd save me the time, effort, and material for rail I'd otherwise not need though. Hm.