I was surprised that you would not immediately switch away from the food item on the hotbar once you've eaten to avoid the bug where a second one gets consumed with no benefit..
The second food is not wasted - it restores hunger just like the first one and can only be eaten if you aren't full (unless it is a golden apple), unless you meant like if you were down by only 1-2 hunger points (as you can still heal, though you need full hunger to take advantage of the 8x faster healing from saturation).
In fact, I regularly exploit this bug, attempting to time it just right (it depends on exactly how long you held down right-click when eating, or something) to make it happen as often as possible - free eating with none of the costs (no slowdown, you can even sprint, though I nearly always have another item (torches, pickaxe, sword in roughly that order) selected so I never keep my food in hand (of course, having two hands changes things), with the main exception when I travel to/from where I've been exploring (also mainly when I sprint, if 1.6.4 tracked distance sprinted separately from walking it would probably be less than 1/10 the total, even in modded worlds with giant caves. I don't constantly sprint-jump either, only jumping when necessary, unless it is on ice, where the speedup is much greater and more worth the massive increase in hunger loss (yet another bugfix here, between 1.3-1.6 sprint-jumping cost no more hunger than regular jumping, as I do it so seldomly it had no noticeable impact on food usage).
I'd probably fix it though if I knew what caused it (it is easy to give me too much credit for fixing bugs myself as I've taken a LOT of my fixes from code posted by others, mainly to the bug tracker, as well as various bugifx mods, though I've fixed my own share of bugs, or improved other's fixes).
(Also, not being uncontrollably compelled to throw eggs at chickens to make them squawk. Or is that only me..?)
I'd always been annoyed by this (I mass breed chickens to wear down swords to lower the repair cost below the anvil limit) and patched the game so eggs deal no "damage" - not even aggroing mobs/dealing knockback - nothing at all - they just break on the mob (in vanilla 1.6.4 this is aggravated by the fact that animals panic indefinitely but I patched that bug a decade ago). Although this does remove one function of eggs, as a way to aggro/knockback mobs without actually damaging them (they do damage the Ender Dragoon due to the way it handles damage dealt to anything other than the head; it divides the damage by 4 and adds 1, hence 0 becomes 1. Snowballs also work for the same reason but this has since been patched/removed).
There's something... different about this tree that I've noticed lately, but more on that in a moment...)
Notice how the log for one of the branches is "diagonally" connected?
They also generate with diagonally connected logs in 1.6.4, so perhaps there was a change in some intermediate version or you just never noticed it? Also, one thing that stands out to me is that modern big oak trees are a lot more sparse, with many fewer branches/leaf clusters (an extreme example, which I've never seen generate in 1.6.4); 1.6.4 big oaks are much fuller (examples in this thread), and I prefer their look (along with the "ragged" big jungle tree canopies, as opposed to the perfect circular shapes since 1.7, which also reduced the number of leaves/branches, perhaps to reduce lag/leaf decay. I do know that they did remove big oak trees from most world generation for several versions for this reason).
Haha I missed you. Welcome back and I hope things are going well.
I've sort of been in "read only" mode on some of the other journals and need to formally catch up on them myself (meaning share feedback about some specific things).
I enjoyed watching the videos and observing how you interact with the terrain. I was surprised that you would not immediately switch away from the food item on the hotbar once you've eaten to avoid the bug where a second one gets consumed with no benefit... then realized oh wait that's not been a thing for years. It got me wondering about what other ingrained things I might be doing that aren't needed any more. I am aware that I've still got a powerful superstition against approaching doors or chests while holding a lava bucket and that's not been an issue since Alpha!
Now you have me wondering what I do that might be unusual. I know of some peculiarities I have but it's always interesting hearing about ones I never would have given a second thought.
I've never heard of the food thing so it might predate my time. Or I was just never aware of it.
I'd never hold a lava bucket (and probably not even have it in my hotbar) unless I was actively using it.
...24 render distance and shaders playing 1.20 like it ain't no thang. And then being capable of recording videos on top of that. I cast an accusing glance at my laptop, which slinks away shamefaced.
I've gone up again to 32 since then, although that's sort of something I pull off since I don't have access to flight in this world. I tried it in my other hardcore world (which I was playing between 16, 20, and 24 before) and the terrain delays to keep up in flight at 32, but on the ground it's fine.
Recording definitely lowers my frame rate, but at 24 it's not enough to put it below refresh rate so I don't notice it. But lately I've observed if I try at 32 or 48 or whatever I notice there's a drop, despite playing being fine.
A lot of modern Minecraft's failings in regards to performance isn't just that it performs worse than before, but that the bar people are asking for is higher. Higher render distances. Flight. Shaders. These weren't as much of things back then (shaders aren't new but they've come a long way).
What a pretty house, and a great interior! Feels so cozy inside. And I need to investigate mud bricks for my tree. I meant to but got distracted and forgot. I like that look a lot.
Thank you. I've really taken a liking to this village. I'll be heartbroken when something happens to this world, haha, but keeping my play focused less on massive builds means I can replicate the style in villages in long term worlds if I want to.
And my recommendation is to play around in creative with mud stone. You'll be surprised how well it can look with certain combinations. I found it pairs well with quartz, and then some sort of dark trim (I used dark oak fences) and I used this for a temple in another world. Also one of my favorite builds.
I wish I could allow all my Testificates to roam free, but as you say the AI is a problem. I've spent a lot of time Testificate-proofing villages - they are absolute geniuses at finding obscure parkour paths to climb up on top of things to fall off and hurt themselves. Then there's zombies, pillagers, thunderstrikes to turn them into witches with no saving throw, or simply clipping into blocks and dying that way because yes in Current Year that is still a thing. Sigh. Any unusual or interesting Testificate gets confined to a minecart for his own safety.
Hm, I have little issues leaving them to their own devices for the most part, but I admit I sleep most nights, and try and have a defense of golems around for nights I am nearby and not sleeping.
I have issues with them falling, especially off the sides of stairs, but no issues with lighting strikes (too rare, and now lightning rods exist) and I don't think I've ever had them get stuck in walls (or at least noticed). I remember horses used to do that in one particular spot in my barn in an old version and it was because the wall was on a chunk border. No other stable had a wall on the chunk border and none of them died, but the ones in the stable with a chunk border would disappear eventually. Worked around it by putting a fence inside along said wall.
But I don't think I've noticed villagers dying from this. Granted I might miss it in my larger villages, but I've spent a lot of time this last year in my hardcore worlds and both have rather small villages and I've never noticed any missing. I'll have to keep an eye on it though.
The lilies of the valley look nice. You sure have a lot of them by now! I don't recall reading - how are you getting them, collecting from natural spawns or using bonemeal to farm?
Collecting as I go. I know they're a very rare flower so any chances I had while exploring to get any, I took. Eventually I had a handful of stacks and could stop.
Nice safe Nether Wastes spawn, that's good. Congrats on making your first Nether trip and not getting killed due to RNG ill fortune.
I immediately looked up when I spawned in, because in my prior hardcore world, lava started coming down and actually hit me. If I were playing in Bedrock in that world, I probably would have died loading in since these nether seems to become active before you even load in (for some reason...). Thankfully that didn't happen here.
I'm happier with the open nether "spawn" but it being offset because of the lava lake and ruining my return trips is slightly unfortunate.
If I had access to fire resistance potions I'd definitely try and find out where the portal "should" be and probably make a bridge to that spot and rebuild it there, but... I don't, and unless I take on the crazy task of mining for netherite (which I'm... somewhat considering), then I won't be traveling to and from here often enough anyway.
They also generate with diagonally connected logs in 1.6.4, so perhaps there was a change in some intermediate version or you just never noticed it?
Always a possibility with me it seems, yes, but given how much I grow these as landscape decoration, it was something that stood out to me, so I figured maybe it was a change. And maybe it was. Even if they were possible before, they didn't seem as common. I'm noticing a trend of "thinner" branches in general more often, and the diagonally (dis)attached logs is just one part of that.
Also, one thing that stands out to me is that modern big oak trees are a lot more sparse, with many fewer branches/leaf clusters (an extreme example, which I've never seen generate in 1.6.4); 1.6.4 big oaks are much fuller (examples in this thread), and I prefer their look (along with the "ragged" big jungle tree canopies, as opposed to the perfect circular shapes since 1.7, which also reduced the number of leaves/branches, perhaps to reduce lag/leaf decay. I do know that they did remove big oak trees from most world generation for several versions for this reason).
Yes, the way they cluster has changed, perhaps numerous times. It's what I meant by I like how the different "types" serve as era reminders of sorts.
I have to sometimes attempt them multiple times before I get one I am satisfied with (I like the larger ones and not the medium-ish ones). While this also happened in the past, requiring many attempts at a desired tree, not as often as these days.
That said, I still find them sufficient and they still grow large at times.
I definitely prefer the modern jungle tree canopies to the older ones though. That's not to say the modern ones are perfect as they absolutely aren't. I wouldn't mind if some random variance was added so they're not perfectly round and all uniform, so they are lacking variety, but what was happening before wasn't ideal either in my mind. Anything that spawns and then can't sustain that state is flawed in my mind, which includes most jungle and large oak trees prior to 1.7 (of course, the outright removal of the large oak in 1.7 is just another reason of many for me to dislike that update). Jungle trees (and perhaps trees in general) all really need a pass on them though, but I think you know my opinion on that. I think trees and forests in general should trend larger than they are now.
Anything that spawns and then can't sustain that state is flawed in my mind, which includes most jungle and large oak trees prior to 1.7 (of course, the outright removal of the large oak in 1.7 is just another reason of many for me to dislike that update).
The real issue, of course, is Mojang's seeming inability to fix so many issues and simply nerfing or removing features instead of fixing them. In fact, post-world generation leaf decay can be prevented by a very simple change - disabling the code that notifies neighboring leaves to check for decay when a leaf or log is broken (this happens a lot when trees grow into other trees, replacing their leaves):
public void breakBlock(World par1World, int posX, int posY, int posZ, int par5, int par6)
{
// Set to false during world generation so that breaking/replacing logs does not notify leaves that they should check
// for decay (also applied to leaves)
if (par1World.generatingTerrain) return;
for (int x = -BlockLeavesTMCW.MAX_RANGE; x <= BlockLeavesTMCW.MAX_RANGE; ++x)
{
int xo = posX + x;
int ax = Math.abs(x);
for (int z = ax - BlockLeavesTMCW.MAX_RANGE; z <= BlockLeavesTMCW.MAX_RANGE - ax; ++z)
{
int zo = posZ + z;
int axz = ax + Math.abs(z);
Chunk chunk = par1World.getLoadedChunkFromBlock(xo, zo);
for (int y = axz - BlockLeavesTMCW.MAX_RANGE; y <= BlockLeavesTMCW.MAX_RANGE - axz; ++y)
{
// Note that y & 255 is unlikely to ever cause issues (i.e. wood at y=0 causes leaves at y=255 to remain)
int bs = chunk.getBlockState(xo & 15, (posY + y) & 255, zo & 15);
if (Block.isLeafBlock(BlockStates.getBlockId(bs)))
{
// Only notifies non-permanent leaves
int meta = BlockStates.getBlockMetadata(bs);
if ((meta & 12) == 0) chunk.setBlockMetadataFast(xo & 15, (posY + y) & 255, zo & 15, meta | 8);
}
}
}
}
}
I also made it so that leaves cannot replace other leaves, which by itself would solve the issue, except in the much rarer case that something else overwrites a log (a log overwrites a leaf block also triggers the decay notification but no decay occurs due to all notified leaves being within range). Of course, it only took until 1.13 before they finally thought to increase the distance leaves can survive, from a measly 4 blocks to a more decent 6 blocks, which is still insufficient when it comes to the larger trees I have (which are ultimately limited by worldgen runaway, +/- 8 blocks assuming the standard offset of 8-23 within a 2x2 chunk area; the largest trees actually do reduce this offset to stay within bounds).
The impact of my changes on performance/resource usage is quite noticeable; vanilla takes forever to settle down while TMCW/World1 take only seconds, even at a higher render distance (though this has no effect on the random block update radius, which is +/- 7 chunks. Even if a leaf block never actually decays after having its "check decay" bit set it still consumes resources to perform a decay check when randomly ticked):
Vanilla 1.6.4 (the game also seems to leak memory over time when moving around a lot; the screenshots I posted here using vanilla show allocation rising to 100% with 300-400 MB being used, despite identical JVM arguments. It does stabilize at that point but something causes it to hold onto a lot more memory; in my modded versions I can play for hours, riding minecarts long distances and switching dimensions, and it remains at the initial usage):
TMCW/World1 (despite adding so much content the resource usage of TMCW is virtually identical to World1, which is mostly an optimization/bugfix mod), the spike near the beginning was when I increased the render distance from 8 to 16, with no chunks generated past 8 chunks yet::
Otherwise, I previously added (and still do, to a lesser extent) additional branches and logs to trees to ensure no leaf decay occurs (the worldgen fix by itself would only work until you broke any blocks. I also implemented most of these changes in my "World1" mod, minus the extra logs as they are less important when you don't have enormous trees, or bark logs*):
(it is not visible here but big oaks have a additional 1-2 logs extending up into the leaf clusters, otherwise branches only reach the bottom of a cluster)
*One thing I did fix for World1 is covering up the sides and tops of exposed branches in jungle trees with leaves, as shown in this example from the original world (the fact that I never bothered to place leaves to fix these shows that it doesn't really bother me that much, but it is quite obvious when flying around in Creative, especially with the normal logs with their lighter cut ends):
Fun fact, I actually added a "Big Oak Forest" biome in response to Mojang's removal of them:
(this was inspired by this thread, big oak trees were made much rarer in 1.7 due to "lag" - I blame not the trees but whatever "optimization" Mojang did to make even their (presumably high-end) computers lag)
(as evidenced from the screenshot I hadn't even fixed leaf decay yet, or made the branches all-bark logs, but did so not long after, even posting the code in the thread I linked to (comment 21), I do realize that Fancy leaves are much more demanding to render (chunk updates) even on a much better computer and this is probably what they were referring to)
These posts have examples of what my trees look like without leaves (the "mega" trees now have less and better-defined branches due to the increased leaf decay distance - this shows how limiting the old distance of just 4 was):
(note also that all these changes were made in early-mid 2014, not long after the first public release)
Also, another complaint that I've seen is the height of default oak/birch trees, which may be only 1 block above the ground; I increased their height by one so there are at least two blocks (except on hillsides); for similar reasons when I added the 2x2 spruces from 1.7 I did not allow the leaves to generate all the way down to the ground (if you do want this you can place the saplings in a hole):
(note that I mention that forests have more trees (or rather, attempts) but in practice this is only apparent on hillsides since I have code that makes sure they don't grow too close together; to offset the otherwise more uniform overage I added a chance of a chunk containing less trees, as well as dead and/or fallen trees, like in Bedrock Edition)
Small update, maybe my smallest, but it covered a few play sessions, and I'll be exploring again soon, so I figured I'd go over it rather than add to what might be a larger following one.
I went back to a nether to gather more glowstone, and to reinforce the portal.
Of course, with such a large area, I found a ghast before long. I always get this achievement without trying.
I'll just be shooting a bow, and I guess it firest the fireball right as the arrow is about to hit it, and it immediately knocks it back.
I also finished the portal, and while I'm using overworld materials of deep slate instead of blackstone, I felt it matched enough. That, and I already had it.
I was actually getting low on iron, which I needed for lanterns though. I used up my last ingot just getting enough lanterns for this.
I was also getting low on on coal. I figured soon I would go caving for some of both, but not in my branch mine, as that was at far low of a layer for either.
But before that, I decided to develop the return nether portal in the overworld. This is half of what took up a lot of play time, but there's not much to say or show of it, since it's largely shoveling dirt. I made it match the one I had in my village.
And before that, here's a couple of other things.
I used the glowstone to replace the planks behind my map. Finally, a uniform map!
But more of note is that you may notice there's another empty row on the top now. Yes, I decided to add another row. Partly because I wanted more that way, and also because it would give more visual variety to the map (there's desert and bandlands to the North, at least along the center part).
Nothing special about the next one as far as accomplishments go, just a moment I caught all three bees coming out for flowers.
I've noticed I don't (m)any from the other nest though. Do they come out less, or perhaps not at all, if the nest s full of honey? Or have they maybe wondered off? I notice even the above nest had them come out only as I got closer. I'm wondering if they're dying (there's no water or campfires immediately nearby really) or if they're just... not coming out. If it's the latter, I wonder if the nests in my other world actually still have all the bees?
Getting back to the portal, I had a visit while being nearly done from a wandering trader. And then shortly after that, a pillager patrol showed up.
I was a bit surprised to discover the pillage patrol does not seem to attack the wandering trader.
From there, I went caving, and this was spread over a couple play sessions itself, and there's not much to say other than it was rather routine and I got almost a row of coal, and a small boost to my iron. This gave me more lanterns, but more importantly, more iron for compasses for the extra six maps I'd need eventually.
What wasn't quite routine, or at least was a first, was what I believe was my first encounter with skulk in this world. I wasn't too surprised, given I was under an area with higher terrain. If anything, I'm surprised I hadn't encountered any sooner while branch mining, as I should have gone under many areas like that doing so.
No ancient city to go with it, and given there didn't seem to be much promising down there, I ended my trip here. I miiight have become a bit shy at this point since I accidentally flowed down the water and heard a familiar cute sound near the bottom (but thankfully, no skulk shrieker was nearby to be set off as a result).
I plan to resume by exploring, and probably along the missing top row of my map (despite the Left column being there first). I don't know if I'll go after the top five at once or not. Probably not, since four maps tends to be a lot, but at the same time, it saves me from returning home for a break only to want to explore again (but sometimes that break is important).
Once the map is filled, I plan to keep exploring, but perhaps not as much, and I won't map it anymore. While I like mapping, not having to retrace my steps so much from the limited mapping distance will allow my adventures to focus more on exploring new things.
I've noticed I don't (m)any from the other nest though. Do they come out less, or perhaps not at all, if the nest s full of honey? Or have they maybe wondered off?
Check northwest. Their "find home" pathing still breaks: they drift off and eventually get stuck in unloaded chunks. If you have Minutor and are willing to use it (which I personally feel is fair game for this purpose since bees losing track of their hives is a bug, no pun intended) you'll be able to locate them via the passive mobs overlay.
What wasn't quite routine, or at least was a first, was what I believe was my first encounter with skulk in this world.
Ohh nice. Or maybe not nice? Do the--you know what I'm not going to ask questions. I've not found any of that Deep Dark stuff myself yet and I want it to be a surprise when I do.
Wait, really? That might explain why I noticed the bees in my other hardcore world were leaving towards that other mountain close to my village... which was Northwest of my village.
And yes, a bee with a home nest shouldn't go beyond a given distance from it if it can't find its way back. While it might unfortunate to see a bee stay constrained to what might have to be a small area, I'd much rather have that be the case, than to have them wander or die all the time instead and not be around at all. I've moved handfuls of nests to a village and eventually, there are no bees, every time. I presume the ones in that "second" world are all long dead though. Too long has it been since I saw any, and there's a lot of water around (they also need to avoid this, or they need to be immune from water damage).
I think things that always fail to sustain themselves are just... flawed. Old villages were another case of this. Golems were added in the game in 1.3 I think, but would only naturally spawn if a number of villagers or doors or beds (I don't know which exactly) were present, and a natural village never (or almost never) met this requirement. So the functionality was there but never happened. So what was the point? It required the player to act to prevent a village from a likely guaranteed failure to sustain itself? I don't agree with that. Some villages by chance should maybe fail, sure... but not all of them eventually. Thank goodness modern villages are far better in that regard. Unfortunately, there's still other things that seem to fit that "almost always fails to self sustain itself" and bees are one of them.
I think things that always fail to sustain themselves are just... flawed. Old villages were another case of this. Golems were added in the game in 1.3 I think, but would only naturally spawn if a number of villagers or doors or beds (I don't know which exactly) were present, and a natural village never (or almost never) met this requirement. So the functionality was there but never happened. So what was the point? It required the player to act to prevent a village from a likely guaranteed failure to sustain itself? I don't agree with that. Some villages by chance should maybe fail, sure... but not all of them eventually. Thank goodness modern villages are far better in that regard. Unfortunately, there's still other things that seem to fit that "almost always fails to self sustain itself" and bees are one of them.
Considering what zombies are like in 1.6 you'd need a lot of iron golems to be able to handle them (they even caused considerable server lag, leading to Mojang to significantly nerf them in subsequent versions; of course, I went the other way and optimized their pathfinding code). I also tested this before, spawning several iron golems in a village and setting the time to night, and I noticed that sometimes they just ignored the zombies, or were too slow to react, especially against baby zombies (which also didn't burn in the sun and would often pick up drops and thus never despawnI)
Some examples of zombies in 1.6:
https://imgur.com/a/wkJcD (somebody else's screenshots of a massive horde of zombies attacking a village, I counted 29 in the last screenshot, and no, zombie sieges were broken in 1.4-1.7, so just natural spawning. I didn't fix them either, completely removing the code, since they defeat the point of walling in and lighting up a village)
https://i.imgur.com/zmPqhKh.jpg (I see this every morning outside of villages / my main base, the main change I made in my modded versions was to make the pathfinding range always be 60 blocks, instead of a random 40-100, which is actually a nerf (the area covered by 100 is way bigger so the average of 40-100 is not 60, but closer to 75)
https://imgur.com/xCUuUnK (another screenshot somebody else posted of what I often encounter while caving, as suggested by the title, a lot of people got tired of them, they also tend to have armor more often than in newer versions due to changes Mojang made to regional difficulty in 1.8)
Also, based on their response to bug reports like this it seems that Mojang clearly wanted players to have to fix up villages, as also suggested by comments here (IDK what the title even refers to, transparent blocks like tall grass are definitely not treated as "ground", only solid blocks are, but the point is how villages often generated with doors too high or buried in hillsides, compounded by the fact that the minimum altitude of buildings was set to 64 while the ground can be as low as 63 (which is still better than village buildings in deep caves, as I've seen in newer versions, as it is much easier to raise the ground by one block).
Yes, I recall how bad zombies were in 1.6. I'm not sure how that's too relevant to what I'm saying though. Villages existed before 1.6, and villages weren't self sustaining before, even with the zombies of 1.6 out of the picture.
Balance is an ecosystem of many things, not one, so the answer there wouldn't have been to arm up villages equally, but instead to address the zombies. Which they rightfully did. And then they also rightfully addressed villages not being self sustaining to any degree, at least if playing on hard. I recall 1.6 specifically was the reason I went back to playing on normal for a while. Hm, this almost want to play in 1.6 just to see how bad it is again.
That bug report isn't too relevant today because current village generation no longer exactly matches that. It seems that villages were just generating along altitude in some ways, and the terrain didn't match, so any altitude changes of terrain might have resulted in houses being a bit above (or below?) the surrounding terrain. I've seen that often back then, and it doesn't happy much anymore. You'll still see odd situations (I noted one with a house in the first village I found earlier in this thread), and that's just Minecraft, but the sort of mismatch you see there isn't common with modern villages. They seem to try and force terrain around them to match to a point. This is apparent with houses on cliff sides, or if you update a pre 1.18 world to 1.18+ and get a village along the new border of an ocean. It puts little "islands" for the houses and other "structures" it generates (like animal pens, paths, etc.).
Being marked "works as intended" doesn't necessarily mean "we don't want villages to always fail being self sustaining without player intervention". It could mean "we understand why it's happening, and the result is not a major enough issue to address". I'd much sooner take it to mean the second one.
Also, as a pre-update (?), I started exploring and will have some new things to show in the next update. That was going well, until an issue with my PC intervened and killed my mood of wanting to continue for now. It's happened before and now that it's clear it wasn't a one off and that an actual issue is there, I will have to look into it. Not fun.
I've been having issues with my PC within the last month. And I'm still dealing with them. I won't go too far into explaining it, but the short of it is that it caused me some setbacks with this world because I had my save get corrupted. I should be sort of okay now, but some of the things were "lost" so to speak.
Namely, this is going to show me mapping some of the new area to the North, and the mapping I accomplished during this play session was all lost. Everything else I did (such as chunks I generated, or items I found) was retained, but I'll have to do the map filling parts again. So in other words, since I have to retrace these steps, in a way, it's a bit of and update that "didn't happen" but "did" simultaneously. I'll be a bit short on pictures as I got videos (yes, plural) of the play session, which makes it all the more of a "twilight zone" type update, as these are now "alternate scenarios that 'didn't' happen" of sorts.
Anyway... on to the update itself before I depress myself more about these issues.
To start off on a much needed happier note, before setting out to explore, I noticed this bee. This is from the nest I hadn't seen any come out from in a short while (so there's at least one still residing in it). I also did not know they consider the "leaves" of these trees as "flowers" they can pollinate?
With that said, it was time to set out. I arranged my inventory for exploring, which mean making sure I had a bed, a boat, a cartography table, the maps themselves, and some paper (for zooming the maps out after using them in their intended area, which is also what the cartography table is needed for). I also bring one additional map with me, and that is the Northeastern-most map on my wall. The reason for this is to ensure the row of five maps I'm about to start on are where they need to be. While I know approximately how far North I have to go, I'm not as sure on the East/West alignment, and while I could probably guess it and come out correct, I wanted to be sure before wasting time, so I just brought the extra map with me.
I'm going on an adventure! (That isn't actually happening in this reality!)
So I head North, across the bridge, and past the village to the North where I sourced my villagers from. There's yet another village North from there in the mountains, with Forest to the North of it. I head that way, but also trend slightly East.
A couple of replies have asked me how I have so many lily of the valleys. This is how.
I see flowers.
I get flowers.
Easy.
I continue heading North through the forest until it starts breaking into savanna biomes, and then desert and badlands. That's how I know I'm far enough North. I also turned my render distance down to 24 here a bit earlier, as I was going to be generating new terrain.
So I use my map, zoom it appropriately (three out of four times), and begin mapping.
Despite it being desert and badlands more to the West, I can see it's reverting back to regular forest here along the Eastern edge of the Easternmost map.
At one point not long into mapping, I spot something unusual in the distance. Could it be...
I get closer, and my guesses are confirmed. Or at least, I think they are.
This appears to the new trails ruins, the first I've ever naturally found. I don't have the... brush (?) nor the know how or probably materials to mess with it now, and have no intention to. But it was neat to find.
Soon, it begins raining, and I'm running along a savanna bordering many other biomes (rivers, oceans, plains, and forests), so there's a lot of raining, and then not raining, and the raining on repeat moments.
I also spot this, which is actually in the area of the map to the South (where I had previously mapped already), and it sort of served as a landmark along the Northern edge of when I was mapping the then-topmost row of maps. But from this angle, it looks like some majestic sea creature coming out of the water.
From here, I have a video of filling in part of the rest of the bottom half of the first map. The quality (and this applies to both) is pretty terrible, maybe due to the length and I cut it too much? I should probably try and learn some more up to date methods for getting these.
To summarize the video, I find the first of many villages in the desert. Before that, I hear a few zombies, which I didn't think much of at the time, but thinking of it now, that may have been a zombie spawner in a dungeon near the surface? In the village, I also find my first other 1.20 feature, a camel, which surprised me as I had almost forgotten about them (and the fact that they were only found in villages).
To the East of the map, and North of the normal village I found, it transitions quickly back to warm climate with a jungle. I find a bird within it... but it's not Red, sadly, haha. Hopefully soon!
Near the end of the video, back near the village, I chance across a friendly spider. Not only did it alert me of the dungeon, but it didn't attack me. If only I could bring it home.
After the video, I started on a second map.
I headed South a bit, and just happened to start another video. Note that this video started maybe a couple or few minutes after the above one ended. Note the song playing, Haggstrom, is the same one that played in the first one. So they played back to back about fifteen to twenty minutes apart. Yet people say Mojang is removing C418's music for some reason...
Of note, everyone can argue about whether it's Sweden or Subwoofer Lullaby or whatever as what they feel is the single "official" Minecraft song. Me? It's Haggstrom, and I'm going down with this ship. If I had to pick one song that perfectly captures what older era Minecraft was, Haggstom is absolutely it.
Anyway...
The second video I'll let mostly speak for itself, but here's some key points.
I find my first (in this world, not first total) warm ocean, with all the things that entails.
I also find a ruined portal, which is more buried than I expected. Something to note about this (and I've mentioned this before and elsewhere) is I've been have a sound "issue". Sound will just... stop for a moment, but only in Minecraft. More strangely, I stop hearing it, but if I happen to be recording (as I was here), sound gets captured. I have zero idea as to what could explain that but it started (or was first noticed) after 1.20. It happens as I'm digging that portal out. For me, I hear sound as I soon start digging sand. Shortly after, I hear nothing, including up until the point I get the chest, and place the blocks to return to the surface. So the entire time I digging that out, getting the chest, and placing any blocks, it's... silent. And I think that may have been the longest it has ever cut out for me (it's usually a few seconds or so).
Once I'm back up (coincidentally, near where my player position was when I first "lost" sound), sound again returns. If I had stopped and brought up the pause menu at that point, it probably would have returned sound much sooner for me, but I didn't want to do that in the video since I figured sound was being captured for that, and it was. Strange issue (but harmless, compared to my recent issues).
From there, I explore the badlands a bit more to wind down my play session.
Someone had trouble parking their mine cart?
I find thus lush cave opening, which is absolutely gorgeous looking!
The desert is full of azalea trees, and it seems badlands might be too. One of these things is definitely not like the others.
Once I complete the mapping progress, I notice another submerged (in sand) ruined portal nearby the final village I stop at that I had missed earlier. It was raining now, which made the lighting from the lava and magma blocks stand out more. I don't bother with it as it's rather buried too, though.
I get another picture of a majestic looking camel.
And then I pause the game, press F11 to switch to window mode, and two seconds later, when I got to open a Windows file explorer window, the system crashes. And there went the world.
This (pressing F11 to go to window mode, or some seconds after) is typically the scenario that gives me crashes, albeit rarely. It seems to happen most often after long play sessions, like ones I've traveled many blocks in, and/or made recordings in. It happened before the hardware change that's suspected to be a cause of my recent PC issues, except in prior occurrences the game would crash as opposed to the whole PC. I have a lot of fun ahead of me... (This is what halted my progress and may delay it a lot more.)
Oh no, what a pain! I'm sorry to hear about the crash. Have you managed to get the world running again? How far does "sort of okay" go?
That's a very nice looking mesa plateau or whatever they're called now. And wow yeah, that is a lovely cave entrance. I've not seen any of that sort of feature in my main world yet as I've not been far enough out to reach new generation. I've got the deep stuff if I mine to it, but not surface openings yet.
Honestly, all of C418's music, or at least that which plays frequently, is iconic Minecraft. I know there are vague rules about when they play and Haggstrom makes me think "outside and doing stuff".
Sorry about the crash. I hate crashes and world damage. I habitually keep backups, yes, even of hardcore worlds, largely because of that. I don't have any trouble staying honest about it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Yes, the world is running again. The level.dat file was corrupt, so deleting and renaming the level.dat_old file got it loading again.
There's issues though, although most are thankfully minor.
I was set back a few minutes (autosave interval is six minutes at least with OptiFine, so it would be some time less than that). While I had paused it before switching to window mode, which usually initiates an autosave, the crash must had happened while it was still in progress, hence the corruption. I had a manual backup almost a month ago, so if worse came to worse, I wouldn't be totally out the world, but losing less than six minutes is definitely better than a month.
The advancements were reset.
Statistics were reset.
Neither major gameplay things, but scars for sure.
So the only "major" thing is the two maps I was filling in since that play session started were somehow corrupt as well. They show nothing, no player marker, and I can't even zoom them out in the cartography table (they are zoomed out three out of four times, and while zooming them out again wouldn't be useful to me, the fact that I can't even do it shows how corrupt they are). Every other map is thankfully fine though! I'd cry if they were all empty.
Everything else seems good. My inventory and containers at home is well. All entities I had tamed are still tamed. So I just ran back and began mapping again.
At this point the bigger hurdle is figuring out what's wrong with my PC, which is looking like an annoying rabbit hole.
And yes, the mesas (now called badlands) look pretty! The poor video quality hides it, but the expansive deserts and mesas in the background look grand. I might also feel that way because my other hardcore world had no desert or mesa regions within a much larger mapped area, and I'm finding this one a while in, so it might the variety I'm liking. But I've added somewhere in this warm climate on my bucket list of places I'd like to build. Two others are on that island with a jungle (which i will probably do first of the three) and another in the opposite climate region, that being a snowy area.
Sorry about the crash. I hate crashes and world damage. I habitually keep backups, yes, even of hardcore worlds, largely because of that. I don't have any trouble staying honest about it.
Oh this post slipped in between before I saw it.
There's nothing wrong with backing up a hardcore world. The thing with hardcore is it's supposed to restrict you from respawning if you die, but that's it. There's nothing about that which makes backing a world up wrong. While backups can be used to circumvent the restriction, you can circumvent it without them as well, so the backing up part never enters into it. You should keep backups for anything you care about, and I do. I even covered this once, maybe not in the "restrictions" in this thread but maybe in the other thread where my other hardcore world was being updated. I mentioned that I back it up (and honestly this isn't even something that needs disclosed because it's just good practice).
The thing with backups is it is a balance of effort versus risk, and I don't bother backing everything up after every single play session. This one just happened to sneak up on me because it happened right before I was feeling another backup was about warranted.
So what's the best way to assert dominance over lost progress? Do it again! That is, after all, the ultimate spirit of hardcore, right!?
So I picked up where I was with exploring, and began exploring again. And then I explored some more! Oh... and wait until the end of the adventure. That won't be this post, though. While I am that far in game, I'm going to break it into two updates.
Some of the earlier pictures will be from the areas the first two maps (mostly covered in my prior update), but they'll still be new or interesting things.
The first was this, which I didn't notice last time. It's funny how different your "story" becomes if you do it in a different order... from a different perspective. It really can change a lot.
While this is also part of one of the first two maps, the Easternmost one, The very Northern third or so of the map was never finished before my issue. So I got to see that other side of that "hill" by the village where I found my first camel.
And it turns out it's partly badlands.
This doesn't surprise me, since in the first video I made, and at one point (after leaving the jungle to head back towards the desert), I make a look North and you can see badlands cliff and a jungle up there, which i though was interesting and looked forward to exploring.
Speaking of which...
Unfortunately, the cliff part with the jungle bordering it is small, but the entire area is nice anyway.
I might want to explore North more in the future, but for now, it's time to head West. There's three new maps to do.
Along the way, remember this spot? It's in the second video in my last update. Now I'm looking at it from another angle, too.
I absolutely love the way tall terrain blends into the fog, especially with these shaders but even normally. It makes tall terrain seem that much more majestic, especially when far away, but you sort of need a relatively far render distance to get the effect. I'm of the opinion that 1.18 really wants a render distance of 20 to 24 to show itself off. The larger scale of everything, both in biome size and terrain height (more to come on this shortly) really excels with these distances.
Moving up to the other side of this, we see a rarity for 1.18, and that is desert next to snow!? Impossible!
More towards the South of this new (three of five) map is a ruined portal I sighted and pointed out in a video in my last update, and bypassed about twice even during this trip and almost forgot it.
I can't recall specifically what it had, but as I didn't elect to keep the picture, it must not had been much. One of the ruined portals was literally three or four items and all i took was a single obsidian. It may have been this one.
(I often take many, many more pictures than I end up showing, but not all of them make the cut.)
I started finding quite a bit of exposed iron on the surface near the stony shores. Some is nea a chasm split, and I chance to grab it, despite it raining. I also notice that... *sigh* I'll be having to get many advancements again.
Though I doubt I will get the one for exploring all biomes, you never know. It does disappoint me. At least that was all I was truly lost (and partial statistics). I could have kept those... if I wanted to set back a month, but that would be worse.
Speaking of which, I'm also closing the game and relaunching it somewhat regularly, and backing it up between each session for now. I'm also trying to avoid pressing F11 to go into window mode. I noticed the times it crashed before usually involved longer play sessions, recording, and after switching to window mode, so... I'll minimize those for now.
Down near the ocean, ready to cross it, I noticed it contrasting the sky. Not more fire!
And speaking again of advancements, I also had this come at me and give me another one.
The little gap I got the iron from must had been where it came from. I was worried of a creeper instead, and luckily it was something that made more noise, as it groaned before reaching me so i had warning time (but barely).
Continuing on, near the middle of the third map, I find another nether portal, but again, I didn't save the loot so it must had been mediocre. Don't worry, later ones get better.
Near one of my return loops at the bottom, I find some very attractive terrain.
The way biomes are now just "paint layers" on top of generation is something I'll never get enough of. I love seeing how they come together like this at times.
As I begin to fill in the West half of this map now, I come across one of the more exciting things on the whole adventure...
It might not look like much, but take note that the elevation I'm standing at is already that of the top of a typical plateau level. Not only does it reach very high, but it seems to stay as a badlands biome instead of having jagged peaks. Once again, work of the biomes not dictating terrain. If they did, that mountain would surely only be able to be a mountain.
Here it is from a lower level a bit to the East, which perhaps gives a better indication of its height.
And if that doesn't... then maybe it does after I climb it!?
It's sooo surreal being above clouds! I checked and they occur at layer 192 (I'm not sure if that's where the bottom, center, or top is, but I'd guesstimate bottom (?) since the top isn't quite lining up, and if so that means I'm standing somewhere around layer 200. And if this sounds high, the height limit is 320, so I'm "only" approximately halfway between sea level and the height limit!
Even this is rather rare (though there are certainly mountains that go well above 200), so you can see why I said what I did about a higher render distance almost being mandatory to make the most of at least some situations.
Oh! And going through the cloud was very surreal. I could barely see, haha.
This is the highest I've been in this world, for certain.
As I start to come back down, but while still very high, I catch a glimpse of what will await me at the start of the next map.
It seems the badlands, and maybe deserts, end here and it cuts back to jungle. I knew it would along the Western-most map at least, as I've been along the North edge of the row of maps below this one, and there were jungles and then eventually even standard forests to the North, so it will start trending towards moderate warm and then temperate from here I would guess at this point.
The rest of the five maps along the North (there's really six, but it's counted as the Left column so I'm not doing six here) will be in the next update.
Speaking of which, I'm also closing the game and relaunching it somewhat regularly, and backing it up between each session for now.
+1 recommendation to this strategy. I back up my main world before opening it every day I play it. I've been caught out by chunk errors in the past and never will again.
It's sooo surreal being above clouds! I checked and they occur at layer 192
How things change... My Fortress Alpha's tallest tower is called Cloud Keep because clouds used to go through it. Back when the build limit was 127 blocks. And there you are standing at ~200 with plenty more to go! That mesa has some stunning locations for building.
Good luck finding a red parrot. It looks like a big enough jungle to have a good chance, certainly.
I like the screenshot with the forested clifftops a lot. It's reminiscent of old Beta terrain in a good way.
I forgot to mention this in my prior post. I actually though I discarded the image of it, but it turns out I just missed it. In the second image of my prior post, look in the small badlands area. There's an evening enderman I caught there.
Unfortunately, no, that jungle is actually smaller than it appears. I had the same thought when i first saw it, but it's rather small. There's sparse jungle and then forest beyond it. I basically ran through it once on my initial line down South and... that was it. No Red bird here, sadly.
And I may also be out of the badlands, but that doesn't mean I won't be getting some last sights of them.
While the jungle to the North was small, I did find another to the South. And this is actually part of a rather large (or I'll be honest, massive) jungle that I mapped in the Northwest corner of my currently mapped area. There's still hope.
I found another ruined portal in here.
And, it's not Red, but I find a bird, at least?
Take me to your friends, please!?
I considered getting it, since if I don't end up finding a Red one, I still want to put on the last tree. But I abstain from it for now.
I do realize that if I do find one, I'll need some seeds, so I spend a bit of time gathering some. I'm not a fan of dragging my feet, so to speak, in a forest or jungle, since there's rare chances of mobs, but I break any grass as I go, and get a couple dozen seeds. Hopefully I end up needing and using them.
Beyond the jungle to the North, it starts changing to temperate biomes, as expected, although I do see more savanna to the Northwest.
And yes, the trees along the edges of these plateaus does seem beta-like in a way, doesn't it? I've described before that it seems like modern generation is most similar to beta, only with larger climate zones/biomes (or more like, biomes at all) as well as denser trees. Beta generation was similar but had no formal biomes, but less variety, and the "forests" tended to be thinner.
While the "plateaus" might not be so special to some, I love seeing them, especially the ones like this that are sort of flat like a tall wall.
I climb it, and then as I go to need to come back down, to go back up the other side (river, haha), I get joined by someone wanting to journey with me... but can't.
The last stretches of that jungle region to the North. This would be a good place to want to build a bridge.
And while I'm not mapping up there... yet (foreshadowing?), I go a bit further up the river and get sight of the badlands and desert area extending that way.
I begin making my way back South in another line, and now from the top of that savanna "wall", and more to the West, I see the jungle from the South. Another chance at a Red bird!? Please!?
There's also another pillager outpost. You may notice that ever since I started formally mapping, I've been pointing out less structures. Having a map only record a third of your render distance proves inefficient for natural exploration.
I love having to rely on in-game maps instead of third party ones, but I feel like they need some way to record further. Whether that's just a natural increase to 12 over 8, or a way to make a higher tier map that can record 12 to 16, I don't know, but if modern Minecraft is going to lean into larger scale terrain generation and biome sizes, with render distances being higher, I feel the old map recording distances are a relic that are out of place and need a change there.
This is why I'm torn; I love mapping as it lets me, well... make a map, and it encourages seeing everything instead of random wandering, but the range is seriously way too low. It's why I'll eventually be shifting to exploring without maps I think (but... not yet, and yes that's more foreshadowing).
I get back in the jungle, and it gets quite dense. There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of bamboo. And with all the Green, a bit of Red catches my eye. Could it be?
No, it's just an Apple! In the jungle, the common Red things you'll see are a poppy, a Red bird, or part of a chicken. This is, albeit uncommon, another. The bamboo growing through trees or I guess ground bushes causes some decay it seems, as this sometimes happens.
Continuing back up "the wall" plateau, I find something that really excites me.
So they do still spawn in "savanna plateaus"! I don't even know if that's a biome anymore and this might just be a "savanna" and they spawn at middle heights? They seem much rarer, sadly, since 1.18, as I've only ever found them in a taiga of all places, also at middle elevation, and I don't think I found any in an even larger mapped area in my other hardcore world.
I counted four of them.
And two of them kissed, haha.
Looking Northwest from there, I get a breathtaking view, and spot the first of a couple more villages I'll be finding on the rest of the trip.
This was looking Northeast from there, and it's mostly a "I thought this looked pretty and worth taking a picture of". I feel like many of my pictures, and really maybe this whole post (or at least the adventuring part) is a love letter of sorts to 1.18 terrain generation.
Here's looking Southeast from the village, towards the spot I took two pictures ago from.
Hm, that's actually looking taller than it seemed to be from up there. From here it appears like it might reach past the clouds, but it doesn't. It's definitely pretty high, though.
This gives a clearer answer that it doesn't reach quite as high as the clouds.
West (and a bit South) of the village, it's starts transitioning to formal plains. But there's still forest to the South, and from here, a village that must be on the border of that savanna and the forest make it appear like it might be in the forest.
I finish filling in the Southwestern part of the second to last map, and... shockingly, there's still no red bird! And unfortunately, the jungle is ending. I find a spot where there's a really tiny dark oak forest (I haven't seen many of these in this world yet), and it caught my eye because of the large mushrooms in the jungle. That image didn't survive the cut. The dark oak forest was really tiny, and even more surprisingly, it was transitioning to ":temperate leaning cold" almost right after that, with colder color grass and taiga next to it.
Not long after that point, I find another village, which I had actually spotted from the savanna village. That makes three, and they were all relatively close.
Beginning the final map (for this trip), I wander through a lot of plains, so visibility is high. And then I see another majestic "wall".
There's another ruined portal in the fields. Again, nothing of note here, maybe some gold and iron nuggets at best.
Closing in on the plateau earlier, and you might need to view the full size one to see it, there's a hole that actually goes through it entirely, as I can see forest on the other side. Stuff like this is what I love about modern terrain generation.
Only, I wasn't close enough to it earlier, but there was lava that started falling. oh no, more fires! I run before I start any, knowing I'll unfortunately have to come back close to it later.
Coincidentally, running South to escape it, there was another fire starting in a small patch of forest that had a lava pool in it. *sigh*
It seems I bring fire everywhere I go?
Here's another ruined portal I find, and finally one with something really good. It has golden carrots. See, not all of the ones I found were as disappointing as the first few.
I also took a rather high, but not like threatening in any way, fall when trying to get the gold blocks at the top. Rather than pillar up, I jumped from a tree top nearby and missed making it to the top of the portal itself. Oops.
Nearing of the end of this particular adventure, in the Northwest corner, I find the hill I was able to see through earlier (of which the lava started catching things on fire, yes) is actually part of another majestic wall, this time of a forest.
Imagine clearing some of the forest in the corner and building a village...
More lily of the valleys, haha. And yes, I gather them.
I come across the final ruined portal I find, and again, it's something good. The best of them all, even. More golden carrots, and quite a bit of them. That's about a third of a stack from one chest, and the flint honestly isn't bad, either. I need it for arrows, and honestly I think I'm needing feathers more than flint now. Without a constant supply of flint, I haven't found it warranted to keep chickens around.
Time to head back. These are just some pictures, some even from spots I've mapped long before.
A flower forest.
This is the West of that 200 height peak, although you can't see it from here, and the forest and grass hides this. If you reference the picture of it in my prior post though, you can see a stony peaks spot to the left, with Forest to the left as well.
And finally... back home, with the maps up on the wall.
Now I need to get the Westernmost column. But, and here's what I was foreshadowing... I decided to add more to my plate before I was done! I'll be wanting to add yet another row to the top/North. I then might also want to add another column to either the West again, or the East, to keep the map a bit wider rather than taller. I'm thinking it will be to the East, as I think there's a mushroom island in an ocean that way. If you look to the spot East of my crosshair, there's just barely a spot of an ocean there, and from there I sighted it. Speaking of which, I haven't found much oceans yet, at least not many large ones. The one by spawn is the largest, and then other is just nearby it. The others I've found have all been small. I mean, many are larger than they look due to the map size, but that's still small. If I do add all of this to the map, it'll ensure I have much to do, but will push back my map-less exploration (well... nothing is stopping me from doing that in between, I suppose).
I'll also have to make the room larger, but that can be done.
Following that, I relaxed a bit for my most recent play session, and only got two pictures. I mostly did some farming, and decided I wanted to try and get back the missing achievements that I could.
That one wasn't even attempted, but again, happened.
These were the ones I got.
I think I have all of them besides blocking with a shield and getting lava with a bucket. The others would be any in progress ones, such as biomes visited, but referencing the shown ones in the advancements menus, I think I have all of them back except those two.
I love having to rely on in-game maps instead of third party ones, but I feel like they need some way to record further. Whether that's just a natural increase to 12 over 8, or a way to make a higher tier map that can record 12 to 16, I don't know, but if modern Minecraft is going to lean into larger scale terrain generation and biome sizes, with render distances being higher, I feel the old map recording distances are a relic that are out of place and need a change there.
A-men. I'd say the map distance limitation is pretty painful on earlier generation as well. I'm running at 16, usually, in my modded 1.12 world and the map not recording things which are plainly visible is really painful. I tried to increase it in an earlier version of explorercraft but I couldn't figure out the algorithm they used for adding dots to the map. When I just increased the numbers it didn't fill everything in.
Yes, there's still a Savanna Plateau biome. I think they carried all the biomes forward even though the new generation system obviated the purpose of most of the sub-biomes and M biomes (e.g. Savanna Plateau was there to provide height variation in Savanna, many M biomes provided some more rugged terrain, etc.)
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.
The second food is not wasted - it restores hunger just like the first one and can only be eaten if you aren't full (unless it is a golden apple), unless you meant like if you were down by only 1-2 hunger points (as you can still heal, though you need full hunger to take advantage of the 8x faster healing from saturation).
In fact, I regularly exploit this bug, attempting to time it just right (it depends on exactly how long you held down right-click when eating, or something) to make it happen as often as possible - free eating with none of the costs (no slowdown, you can even sprint, though I nearly always have another item (torches, pickaxe, sword in roughly that order) selected so I never keep my food in hand (of course, having two hands changes things), with the main exception when I travel to/from where I've been exploring (also mainly when I sprint, if 1.6.4 tracked distance sprinted separately from walking it would probably be less than 1/10 the total, even in modded worlds with giant caves. I don't constantly sprint-jump either, only jumping when necessary, unless it is on ice, where the speedup is much greater and more worth the massive increase in hunger loss (yet another bugfix here, between 1.3-1.6 sprint-jumping cost no more hunger than regular jumping, as I do it so seldomly it had no noticeable impact on food usage).
I'd probably fix it though if I knew what caused it (it is easy to give me too much credit for fixing bugs myself as I've taken a LOT of my fixes from code posted by others, mainly to the bug tracker, as well as various bugifx mods, though I've fixed my own share of bugs, or improved other's fixes).
I'd always been annoyed by this (I mass breed chickens to wear down swords to lower the repair cost below the anvil limit) and patched the game so eggs deal no "damage" - not even aggroing mobs/dealing knockback - nothing at all - they just break on the mob (in vanilla 1.6.4 this is aggravated by the fact that animals panic indefinitely but I patched that bug a decade ago). Although this does remove one function of eggs, as a way to aggro/knockback mobs without actually damaging them (they do damage the Ender Dragoon due to the way it handles damage dealt to anything other than the head; it divides the damage by 4 and adds 1, hence 0 becomes 1. Snowballs also work for the same reason but this has since been patched/removed).
They also generate with diagonally connected logs in 1.6.4, so perhaps there was a change in some intermediate version or you just never noticed it? Also, one thing that stands out to me is that modern big oak trees are a lot more sparse, with many fewer branches/leaf clusters (an extreme example, which I've never seen generate in 1.6.4); 1.6.4 big oaks are much fuller (examples in this thread), and I prefer their look (along with the "ragged" big jungle tree canopies, as opposed to the perfect circular shapes since 1.7, which also reduced the number of leaves/branches, perhaps to reduce lag/leaf decay. I do know that they did remove big oak trees from most world generation for several versions for this reason).
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?
Haha I missed you. Welcome back and I hope things are going well.
I've sort of been in "read only" mode on some of the other journals and need to formally catch up on them myself (meaning share feedback about some specific things).
Now you have me wondering what I do that might be unusual. I know of some peculiarities I have but it's always interesting hearing about ones I never would have given a second thought.
I've never heard of the food thing so it might predate my time. Or I was just never aware of it.
I'd never hold a lava bucket (and probably not even have it in my hotbar) unless I was actively using it.
I've gone up again to 32 since then, although that's sort of something I pull off since I don't have access to flight in this world. I tried it in my other hardcore world (which I was playing between 16, 20, and 24 before) and the terrain delays to keep up in flight at 32, but on the ground it's fine.
Recording definitely lowers my frame rate, but at 24 it's not enough to put it below refresh rate so I don't notice it. But lately I've observed if I try at 32 or 48 or whatever I notice there's a drop, despite playing being fine.
A lot of modern Minecraft's failings in regards to performance isn't just that it performs worse than before, but that the bar people are asking for is higher. Higher render distances. Flight. Shaders. These weren't as much of things back then (shaders aren't new but they've come a long way).
Still debating on if I want to do something around there. It's not overly far from where I'm at, which is a perk.
Thank you. I've really taken a liking to this village. I'll be heartbroken when something happens to this world, haha, but keeping my play focused less on massive builds means I can replicate the style in villages in long term worlds if I want to.
And my recommendation is to play around in creative with mud stone. You'll be surprised how well it can look with certain combinations. I found it pairs well with quartz, and then some sort of dark trim (I used dark oak fences) and I used this for a temple in another world. Also one of my favorite builds.
Hm, I have little issues leaving them to their own devices for the most part, but I admit I sleep most nights, and try and have a defense of golems around for nights I am nearby and not sleeping.
I have issues with them falling, especially off the sides of stairs, but no issues with lighting strikes (too rare, and now lightning rods exist) and I don't think I've ever had them get stuck in walls (or at least noticed). I remember horses used to do that in one particular spot in my barn in an old version and it was because the wall was on a chunk border. No other stable had a wall on the chunk border and none of them died, but the ones in the stable with a chunk border would disappear eventually. Worked around it by putting a fence inside along said wall.
But I don't think I've noticed villagers dying from this. Granted I might miss it in my larger villages, but I've spent a lot of time this last year in my hardcore worlds and both have rather small villages and I've never noticed any missing. I'll have to keep an eye on it though.
Collecting as I go. I know they're a very rare flower so any chances I had while exploring to get any, I took. Eventually I had a handful of stacks and could stop.
I immediately looked up when I spawned in, because in my prior hardcore world, lava started coming down and actually hit me. If I were playing in Bedrock in that world, I probably would have died loading in since these nether seems to become active before you even load in (for some reason...). Thankfully that didn't happen here.
I'm happier with the open nether "spawn" but it being offset because of the lava lake and ruining my return trips is slightly unfortunate.
If I had access to fire resistance potions I'd definitely try and find out where the portal "should" be and probably make a bridge to that spot and rebuild it there, but... I don't, and unless I take on the crazy task of mining for netherite (which I'm... somewhat considering), then I won't be traveling to and from here often enough anyway.
Always a possibility with me it seems, yes, but given how much I grow these as landscape decoration, it was something that stood out to me, so I figured maybe it was a change. And maybe it was. Even if they were possible before, they didn't seem as common. I'm noticing a trend of "thinner" branches in general more often, and the diagonally (dis)attached logs is just one part of that.
Yes, the way they cluster has changed, perhaps numerous times. It's what I meant by I like how the different "types" serve as era reminders of sorts.
I have to sometimes attempt them multiple times before I get one I am satisfied with (I like the larger ones and not the medium-ish ones). While this also happened in the past, requiring many attempts at a desired tree, not as often as these days.
That said, I still find them sufficient and they still grow large at times.
I definitely prefer the modern jungle tree canopies to the older ones though. That's not to say the modern ones are perfect as they absolutely aren't. I wouldn't mind if some random variance was added so they're not perfectly round and all uniform, so they are lacking variety, but what was happening before wasn't ideal either in my mind. Anything that spawns and then can't sustain that state is flawed in my mind, which includes most jungle and large oak trees prior to 1.7 (of course, the outright removal of the large oak in 1.7 is just another reason of many for me to dislike that update). Jungle trees (and perhaps trees in general) all really need a pass on them though, but I think you know my opinion on that. I think trees and forests in general should trend larger than they are now.
Heh heh heh. I have some stuff coming.
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.
The real issue, of course, is Mojang's seeming inability to fix so many issues and simply nerfing or removing features instead of fixing them. In fact, post-world generation leaf decay can be prevented by a very simple change - disabling the code that notifies neighboring leaves to check for decay when a leaf or log is broken (this happens a lot when trees grow into other trees, replacing their leaves):
I also made it so that leaves cannot replace other leaves, which by itself would solve the issue, except in the much rarer case that something else overwrites a log (a log overwrites a leaf block also triggers the decay notification but no decay occurs due to all notified leaves being within range). Of course, it only took until 1.13 before they finally thought to increase the distance leaves can survive, from a measly 4 blocks to a more decent 6 blocks, which is still insufficient when it comes to the larger trees I have (which are ultimately limited by worldgen runaway, +/- 8 blocks assuming the standard offset of 8-23 within a 2x2 chunk area; the largest trees actually do reduce this offset to stay within bounds).
The impact of my changes on performance/resource usage is quite noticeable; vanilla takes forever to settle down while TMCW/World1 take only seconds, even at a higher render distance (though this has no effect on the random block update radius, which is +/- 7 chunks. Even if a leaf block never actually decays after having its "check decay" bit set it still consumes resources to perform a decay check when randomly ticked):
TMCW/World1 (despite adding so much content the resource usage of TMCW is virtually identical to World1, which is mostly an optimization/bugfix mod), the spike near the beginning was when I increased the render distance from 8 to 16, with no chunks generated past 8 chunks yet::
Otherwise, I previously added (and still do, to a lesser extent) additional branches and logs to trees to ensure no leaf decay occurs (the worldgen fix by itself would only work until you broke any blocks. I also implemented most of these changes in my "World1" mod, minus the extra logs as they are less important when you don't have enormous trees, or bark logs*):
(it is not visible here but big oaks have a additional 1-2 logs extending up into the leaf clusters, otherwise branches only reach the bottom of a cluster)
*One thing I did fix for World1 is covering up the sides and tops of exposed branches in jungle trees with leaves, as shown in this example from the original world (the fact that I never bothered to place leaves to fix these shows that it doesn't really bother me that much, but it is quite obvious when flying around in Creative, especially with the normal logs with their lighter cut ends):
Fun fact, I actually added a "Big Oak Forest" biome in response to Mojang's removal of them:
These posts have examples of what my trees look like without leaves (the "mega" trees now have less and better-defined branches due to the increased leaf decay distance - this shows how limiting the old distance of just 4 was):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/1294926-themastercavers-world?comment=21
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/1294926-themastercavers-world?comment=36
(note also that all these changes were made in early-mid 2014, not long after the first public release)
Also, another complaint that I've seen is the height of default oak/birch trees, which may be only 1 block above the ground; I increased their height by one so there are at least two blocks (except on hillsides); for similar reasons when I added the 2x2 spruces from 1.7 I did not allow the leaves to generate all the way down to the ground (if you do want this you can place the saplings in a hole):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/1294926-themastercavers-world?comment=32
(note that I mention that forests have more trees (or rather, attempts) but in practice this is only apparent on hillsides since I have code that makes sure they don't grow too close together; to offset the otherwise more uniform overage I added a chance of a chunk containing less trees, as well as dead and/or fallen trees, like in Bedrock Edition)
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?
Small update, maybe my smallest, but it covered a few play sessions, and I'll be exploring again soon, so I figured I'd go over it rather than add to what might be a larger following one.

I went back to a nether to gather more glowstone, and to reinforce the portal.
Of course, with such a large area, I found a ghast before long. I always get this achievement without trying.
I'll just be shooting a bow, and I guess it firest the fireball right as the arrow is about to hit it, and it immediately knocks it back.
I was actually getting low on iron, which I needed for lanterns though. I used up my last ingot just getting enough lanterns for this.
I was also getting low on on coal. I figured soon I would go caving for some of both, but not in my branch mine, as that was at far low of a layer for either.
But before that, I decided to develop the return nether portal in the overworld. This is half of what took up a lot of play time, but there's not much to say or show of it, since it's largely shoveling dirt. I made it match the one I had in my village.
And before that, here's a couple of other things.
I used the glowstone to replace the planks behind my map. Finally, a uniform map!
But more of note is that you may notice there's another empty row on the top now. Yes, I decided to add another row. Partly because I wanted more that way, and also because it would give more visual variety to the map (there's desert and bandlands to the North, at least along the center part).
Nothing special about the next one as far as accomplishments go, just a moment I caught all three bees coming out for flowers.
I've noticed I don't (m)any from the other nest though. Do they come out less, or perhaps not at all, if the nest s full of honey? Or have they maybe wondered off? I notice even the above nest had them come out only as I got closer. I'm wondering if they're dying (there's no water or campfires immediately nearby really) or if they're just... not coming out. If it's the latter, I wonder if the nests in my other world actually still have all the bees?
Getting back to the portal, I had a visit while being nearly done from a wandering trader. And then shortly after that, a pillager patrol showed up.
I was a bit surprised to discover the pillage patrol does not seem to attack the wandering trader.
From there, I went caving, and this was spread over a couple play sessions itself, and there's not much to say other than it was rather routine and I got almost a row of coal, and a small boost to my iron. This gave me more lanterns, but more importantly, more iron for compasses for the extra six maps I'd need eventually.
What wasn't quite routine, or at least was a first, was what I believe was my first encounter with skulk in this world. I wasn't too surprised, given I was under an area with higher terrain. If anything, I'm surprised I hadn't encountered any sooner while branch mining, as I should have gone under many areas like that doing so.
No ancient city to go with it, and given there didn't seem to be much promising down there, I ended my trip here. I miiight have become a bit shy at this point since I accidentally flowed down the water and heard a familiar cute sound near the bottom (but thankfully, no skulk shrieker was nearby to be set off as a result).
I plan to resume by exploring, and probably along the missing top row of my map (despite the Left column being there first). I don't know if I'll go after the top five at once or not. Probably not, since four maps tends to be a lot, but at the same time, it saves me from returning home for a break only to want to explore again (but sometimes that break is important).
Once the map is filled, I plan to keep exploring, but perhaps not as much, and I won't map it anymore. While I like mapping, not having to retrace my steps so much from the limited mapping distance will allow my adventures to focus more on exploring new things.
Check northwest. Their "find home" pathing still breaks: they drift off and eventually get stuck in unloaded chunks. If you have Minutor and are willing to use it (which I personally feel is fair game for this purpose since bees losing track of their hives is a bug, no pun intended) you'll be able to locate them via the passive mobs overlay.
Ohh nice. Or maybe not nice? Do the--you know what I'm not going to ask questions. I've not found any of that Deep Dark stuff myself yet and I want it to be a surprise when I do.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Wait, really? That might explain why I noticed the bees in my other hardcore world were leaving towards that other mountain close to my village... which was Northwest of my village.
And yes, a bee with a home nest shouldn't go beyond a given distance from it if it can't find its way back. While it might unfortunate to see a bee stay constrained to what might have to be a small area, I'd much rather have that be the case, than to have them wander or die all the time instead and not be around at all. I've moved handfuls of nests to a village and eventually, there are no bees, every time. I presume the ones in that "second" world are all long dead though. Too long has it been since I saw any, and there's a lot of water around (they also need to avoid this, or they need to be immune from water damage).
I think things that always fail to sustain themselves are just... flawed. Old villages were another case of this. Golems were added in the game in 1.3 I think, but would only naturally spawn if a number of villagers or doors or beds (I don't know which exactly) were present, and a natural village never (or almost never) met this requirement. So the functionality was there but never happened. So what was the point? It required the player to act to prevent a village from a likely guaranteed failure to sustain itself? I don't agree with that. Some villages by chance should maybe fail, sure... but not all of them eventually. Thank goodness modern villages are far better in that regard. Unfortunately, there's still other things that seem to fit that "almost always fails to self sustain itself" and bees are one of them.
Considering what zombies are like in 1.6 you'd need a lot of iron golems to be able to handle them (they even caused considerable server lag, leading to Mojang to significantly nerf them in subsequent versions; of course, I went the other way and optimized their pathfinding code). I also tested this before, spawning several iron golems in a village and setting the time to night, and I noticed that sometimes they just ignored the zombies, or were too slow to react, especially against baby zombies (which also didn't burn in the sun and would often pick up drops and thus never despawnI)
Some examples of zombies in 1.6:
https://imgur.com/a/wkJcD (somebody else's screenshots of a massive horde of zombies attacking a village, I counted 29 in the last screenshot, and no, zombie sieges were broken in 1.4-1.7, so just natural spawning. I didn't fix them either, completely removing the code, since they defeat the point of walling in and lighting up a village)
https://i.imgur.com/zmPqhKh.jpg (I see this every morning outside of villages / my main base, the main change I made in my modded versions was to make the pathfinding range always be 60 blocks, instead of a random 40-100, which is actually a nerf (the area covered by 100 is way bigger so the average of 40-100 is not 60, but closer to 75)
https://imgur.com/xCUuUnK (another screenshot somebody else posted of what I often encounter while caving, as suggested by the title, a lot of people got tired of them, they also tend to have armor more often than in newer versions due to changes Mojang made to regional difficulty in 1.8)
Also, based on their response to bug reports like this it seems that Mojang clearly wanted players to have to fix up villages, as also suggested by comments here (IDK what the title even refers to, transparent blocks like tall grass are definitely not treated as "ground", only solid blocks are, but the point is how villages often generated with doors too high or buried in hillsides, compounded by the fact that the minimum altitude of buildings was set to 64 while the ground can be as low as 63 (which is still better than village buildings in deep caves, as I've seen in newer versions, as it is much easier to raise the ground by one block).
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?
Yes, I recall how bad zombies were in 1.6. I'm not sure how that's too relevant to what I'm saying though. Villages existed before 1.6, and villages weren't self sustaining before, even with the zombies of 1.6 out of the picture.
Balance is an ecosystem of many things, not one, so the answer there wouldn't have been to arm up villages equally, but instead to address the zombies. Which they rightfully did. And then they also rightfully addressed villages not being self sustaining to any degree, at least if playing on hard. I recall 1.6 specifically was the reason I went back to playing on normal for a while. Hm, this almost want to play in 1.6 just to see how bad it is again.
That bug report isn't too relevant today because current village generation no longer exactly matches that. It seems that villages were just generating along altitude in some ways, and the terrain didn't match, so any altitude changes of terrain might have resulted in houses being a bit above (or below?) the surrounding terrain. I've seen that often back then, and it doesn't happy much anymore. You'll still see odd situations (I noted one with a house in the first village I found earlier in this thread), and that's just Minecraft, but the sort of mismatch you see there isn't common with modern villages. They seem to try and force terrain around them to match to a point. This is apparent with houses on cliff sides, or if you update a pre 1.18 world to 1.18+ and get a village along the new border of an ocean. It puts little "islands" for the houses and other "structures" it generates (like animal pens, paths, etc.).
Being marked "works as intended" doesn't necessarily mean "we don't want villages to always fail being self sustaining without player intervention". It could mean "we understand why it's happening, and the result is not a major enough issue to address". I'd much sooner take it to mean the second one.
Also, as a pre-update (?), I started exploring and will have some new things to show in the next update. That was going well, until an issue with my PC intervened and killed my mood of wanting to continue for now. It's happened before and now that it's clear it wasn't a one off and that an actual issue is there, I will have to look into it. Not fun.
So this update is going to be a bit different.


I've been having issues with my PC within the last month. And I'm still dealing with them. I won't go too far into explaining it, but the short of it is that it caused me some setbacks with this world because I had my save get corrupted. I should be sort of okay now, but some of the things were "lost" so to speak.
Namely, this is going to show me mapping some of the new area to the North, and the mapping I accomplished during this play session was all lost. Everything else I did (such as chunks I generated, or items I found) was retained, but I'll have to do the map filling parts again. So in other words, since I have to retrace these steps, in a way, it's a bit of and update that "didn't happen" but "did" simultaneously. I'll be a bit short on pictures as I got videos (yes, plural) of the play session, which makes it all the more of a "twilight zone" type update, as these are now "alternate scenarios that 'didn't' happen" of sorts.
Anyway... on to the update itself before I depress myself more about these issues.
To start off on a much needed happier note, before setting out to explore, I noticed this bee. This is from the nest I hadn't seen any come out from in a short while (so there's at least one still residing in it). I also did not know they consider the "leaves" of these trees as "flowers" they can pollinate?
With that said, it was time to set out. I arranged my inventory for exploring, which mean making sure I had a bed, a boat, a cartography table, the maps themselves, and some paper (for zooming the maps out after using them in their intended area, which is also what the cartography table is needed for). I also bring one additional map with me, and that is the Northeastern-most map on my wall. The reason for this is to ensure the row of five maps I'm about to start on are where they need to be. While I know approximately how far North I have to go, I'm not as sure on the East/West alignment, and while I could probably guess it and come out correct, I wanted to be sure before wasting time, so I just brought the extra map with me.
I'm going on an adventure! (That isn't actually happening in this reality!)
A couple of replies have asked me how I have so many lily of the valleys. This is how.
I see flowers.
I get flowers.
Easy.
I continue heading North through the forest until it starts breaking into savanna biomes, and then desert and badlands. That's how I know I'm far enough North. I also turned my render distance down to 24 here a bit earlier, as I was going to be generating new terrain.
So I use my map, zoom it appropriately (three out of four times), and begin mapping.
Despite it being desert and badlands more to the West, I can see it's reverting back to regular forest here along the Eastern edge of the Easternmost map.
At one point not long into mapping, I spot something unusual in the distance. Could it be...
I get closer, and my guesses are confirmed. Or at least, I think they are.
This appears to the new trails ruins, the first I've ever naturally found. I don't have the... brush (?) nor the know how or probably materials to mess with it now, and have no intention to. But it was neat to find.
Soon, it begins raining, and I'm running along a savanna bordering many other biomes (rivers, oceans, plains, and forests), so there's a lot of raining, and then not raining, and the raining on repeat moments.
I also spot this, which is actually in the area of the map to the South (where I had previously mapped already), and it sort of served as a landmark along the Northern edge of when I was mapping the then-topmost row of maps. But from this angle, it looks like some majestic sea creature coming out of the water.
From here, I have a video of filling in part of the rest of the bottom half of the first map. The quality (and this applies to both) is pretty terrible, maybe due to the length and I cut it too much? I should probably try and learn some more up to date methods for getting these.
To summarize the video, I find the first of many villages in the desert. Before that, I hear a few zombies, which I didn't think much of at the time, but thinking of it now, that may have been a zombie spawner in a dungeon near the surface? In the village, I also find my first other 1.20 feature, a camel, which surprised me as I had almost forgotten about them (and the fact that they were only found in villages).
To the East of the map, and North of the normal village I found, it transitions quickly back to warm climate with a jungle. I find a bird within it... but it's not Red, sadly, haha. Hopefully soon!
Near the end of the video, back near the village, I chance across a friendly spider. Not only did it alert me of the dungeon, but it didn't attack me. If only I could bring it home.
After the video, I started on a second map.
I headed South a bit, and just happened to start another video. Note that this video started maybe a couple or few minutes after the above one ended. Note the song playing, Haggstrom, is the same one that played in the first one. So they played back to back about fifteen to twenty minutes apart. Yet people say Mojang is removing C418's music for some reason...
Of note, everyone can argue about whether it's Sweden or Subwoofer Lullaby or whatever as what they feel is the single "official" Minecraft song. Me? It's Haggstrom, and I'm going down with this ship. If I had to pick one song that perfectly captures what older era Minecraft was, Haggstom is absolutely it.
Anyway...
The second video I'll let mostly speak for itself, but here's some key points.
I find my first (in this world, not first total) warm ocean, with all the things that entails.
I also find a ruined portal, which is more buried than I expected. Something to note about this (and I've mentioned this before and elsewhere) is I've been have a sound "issue". Sound will just... stop for a moment, but only in Minecraft. More strangely, I stop hearing it, but if I happen to be recording (as I was here), sound gets captured. I have zero idea as to what could explain that but it started (or was first noticed) after 1.20. It happens as I'm digging that portal out. For me, I hear sound as I soon start digging sand. Shortly after, I hear nothing, including up until the point I get the chest, and place the blocks to return to the surface. So the entire time I digging that out, getting the chest, and placing any blocks, it's... silent. And I think that may have been the longest it has ever cut out for me (it's usually a few seconds or so).
Once I'm back up (coincidentally, near where my player position was when I first "lost" sound), sound again returns. If I had stopped and brought up the pause menu at that point, it probably would have returned sound much sooner for me, but I didn't want to do that in the video since I figured sound was being captured for that, and it was. Strange issue (but harmless, compared to my recent issues).
From there, I explore the badlands a bit more to wind down my play session.
Someone had trouble parking their mine cart?
I find thus lush cave opening, which is absolutely gorgeous looking!
The desert is full of azalea trees, and it seems badlands might be too. One of these things is definitely not like the others.
Once I complete the mapping progress, I notice another submerged (in sand) ruined portal nearby the final village I stop at that I had missed earlier. It was raining now, which made the lighting from the lava and magma blocks stand out more. I don't bother with it as it's rather buried too, though.
I get another picture of a majestic looking camel.
And then I pause the game, press F11 to switch to window mode, and two seconds later, when I got to open a Windows file explorer window, the system crashes. And there went the world.
This (pressing F11 to go to window mode, or some seconds after) is typically the scenario that gives me crashes, albeit rarely. It seems to happen most often after long play sessions, like ones I've traveled many blocks in, and/or made recordings in. It happened before the hardware change that's suspected to be a cause of my recent PC issues, except in prior occurrences the game would crash as opposed to the whole PC. I have a lot of fun ahead of me... (This is what halted my progress and may delay it a lot more.)
Oh no, what a pain! I'm sorry to hear about the crash. Have you managed to get the world running again? How far does "sort of okay" go?
That's a very nice looking mesa plateau or whatever they're called now. And wow yeah, that is a lovely cave entrance. I've not seen any of that sort of feature in my main world yet as I've not been far enough out to reach new generation. I've got the deep stuff if I mine to it, but not surface openings yet.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
Honestly, all of C418's music, or at least that which plays frequently, is iconic Minecraft. I know there are vague rules about when they play and Haggstrom makes me think "outside and doing stuff".
Sorry about the crash. I hate crashes and world damage. I habitually keep backups, yes, even of hardcore worlds, largely because of that. I don't have any trouble staying honest about it.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Yes, the world is running again. The level.dat file was corrupt, so deleting and renaming the level.dat_old file got it loading again.
There's issues though, although most are thankfully minor.
I was set back a few minutes (autosave interval is six minutes at least with OptiFine, so it would be some time less than that). While I had paused it before switching to window mode, which usually initiates an autosave, the crash must had happened while it was still in progress, hence the corruption. I had a manual backup almost a month ago, so if worse came to worse, I wouldn't be totally out the world, but losing less than six minutes is definitely better than a month.
The advancements were reset.
Statistics were reset.
Neither major gameplay things, but scars for sure.
So the only "major" thing is the two maps I was filling in since that play session started were somehow corrupt as well. They show nothing, no player marker, and I can't even zoom them out in the cartography table (they are zoomed out three out of four times, and while zooming them out again wouldn't be useful to me, the fact that I can't even do it shows how corrupt they are). Every other map is thankfully fine though! I'd cry if they were all empty.
Everything else seems good. My inventory and containers at home is well. All entities I had tamed are still tamed. So I just ran back and began mapping again.
At this point the bigger hurdle is figuring out what's wrong with my PC, which is looking like an annoying rabbit hole.
And yes, the mesas (now called badlands) look pretty! The poor video quality hides it, but the expansive deserts and mesas in the background look grand. I might also feel that way because my other hardcore world had no desert or mesa regions within a much larger mapped area, and I'm finding this one a while in, so it might the variety I'm liking. But I've added somewhere in this warm climate on my bucket list of places I'd like to build. Two others are on that island with a jungle (which i will probably do first of the three) and another in the opposite climate region, that being a snowy area.
Oh this post slipped in between before I saw it.
There's nothing wrong with backing up a hardcore world. The thing with hardcore is it's supposed to restrict you from respawning if you die, but that's it. There's nothing about that which makes backing a world up wrong. While backups can be used to circumvent the restriction, you can circumvent it without them as well, so the backing up part never enters into it. You should keep backups for anything you care about, and I do. I even covered this once, maybe not in the "restrictions" in this thread but maybe in the other thread where my other hardcore world was being updated. I mentioned that I back it up (and honestly this isn't even something that needs disclosed because it's just good practice).
The thing with backups is it is a balance of effort versus risk, and I don't bother backing everything up after every single play session. This one just happened to sneak up on me because it happened right before I was feeling another backup was about warranted.
So what's the best way to assert dominance over lost progress? Do it again! That is, after all, the ultimate spirit of hardcore, right!?

So I picked up where I was with exploring, and began exploring again. And then I explored some more! Oh... and wait until the end of the adventure. That won't be this post, though. While I am that far in game, I'm going to break it into two updates.
Some of the earlier pictures will be from the areas the first two maps (mostly covered in my prior update), but they'll still be new or interesting things.
The first was this, which I didn't notice last time. It's funny how different your "story" becomes if you do it in a different order... from a different perspective. It really can change a lot.
And it turns out it's partly badlands.
This doesn't surprise me, since in the first video I made, and at one point (after leaving the jungle to head back towards the desert), I make a look North and you can see badlands cliff and a jungle up there, which i though was interesting and looked forward to exploring.
Speaking of which...
Unfortunately, the cliff part with the jungle bordering it is small, but the entire area is nice anyway.
I might want to explore North more in the future, but for now, it's time to head West. There's three new maps to do.
Along the way, remember this spot? It's in the second video in my last update. Now I'm looking at it from another angle, too.
I absolutely love the way tall terrain blends into the fog, especially with these shaders but even normally. It makes tall terrain seem that much more majestic, especially when far away, but you sort of need a relatively far render distance to get the effect. I'm of the opinion that 1.18 really wants a render distance of 20 to 24 to show itself off. The larger scale of everything, both in biome size and terrain height (more to come on this shortly) really excels with these distances.
Moving up to the other side of this, we see a rarity for 1.18, and that is desert next to snow!? Impossible!
More towards the South of this new (three of five) map is a ruined portal I sighted and pointed out in a video in my last update, and bypassed about twice even during this trip and almost forgot it.
I can't recall specifically what it had, but as I didn't elect to keep the picture, it must not had been much. One of the ruined portals was literally three or four items and all i took was a single obsidian. It may have been this one.
(I often take many, many more pictures than I end up showing, but not all of them make the cut.)
I started finding quite a bit of exposed iron on the surface near the stony shores. Some is nea a chasm split, and I chance to grab it, despite it raining. I also notice that... *sigh* I'll be having to get many advancements again.
Though I doubt I will get the one for exploring all biomes, you never know. It does disappoint me. At least that was all I was truly lost (and partial statistics). I could have kept those... if I wanted to set back a month, but that would be worse.
Speaking of which, I'm also closing the game and relaunching it somewhat regularly, and backing it up between each session for now. I'm also trying to avoid pressing F11 to go into window mode. I noticed the times it crashed before usually involved longer play sessions, recording, and after switching to window mode, so... I'll minimize those for now.
Down near the ocean, ready to cross it, I noticed it contrasting the sky. Not more fire!
And speaking again of advancements, I also had this come at me and give me another one.
The little gap I got the iron from must had been where it came from. I was worried of a creeper instead, and luckily it was something that made more noise, as it groaned before reaching me so i had warning time (but barely).
Continuing on, near the middle of the third map, I find another nether portal, but again, I didn't save the loot so it must had been mediocre. Don't worry, later ones get better.
Near one of my return loops at the bottom, I find some very attractive terrain.
The way biomes are now just "paint layers" on top of generation is something I'll never get enough of. I love seeing how they come together like this at times.
As I begin to fill in the West half of this map now, I come across one of the more exciting things on the whole adventure...
It might not look like much, but take note that the elevation I'm standing at is already that of the top of a typical plateau level. Not only does it reach very high, but it seems to stay as a badlands biome instead of having jagged peaks. Once again, work of the biomes not dictating terrain. If they did, that mountain would surely only be able to be a mountain.
Here it is from a lower level a bit to the East, which perhaps gives a better indication of its height.
And if that doesn't... then maybe it does after I climb it!?
It's sooo surreal being above clouds! I checked and they occur at layer 192 (I'm not sure if that's where the bottom, center, or top is, but I'd guesstimate bottom (?) since the top isn't quite lining up, and if so that means I'm standing somewhere around layer 200. And if this sounds high, the height limit is 320, so I'm "only" approximately halfway between sea level and the height limit!
Even this is rather rare (though there are certainly mountains that go well above 200), so you can see why I said what I did about a higher render distance almost being mandatory to make the most of at least some situations.
Oh! And going through the cloud was very surreal. I could barely see, haha.
This is the highest I've been in this world, for certain.
As I start to come back down, but while still very high, I catch a glimpse of what will await me at the start of the next map.
It seems the badlands, and maybe deserts, end here and it cuts back to jungle. I knew it would along the Western-most map at least, as I've been along the North edge of the row of maps below this one, and there were jungles and then eventually even standard forests to the North, so it will start trending towards moderate warm and then temperate from here I would guess at this point.
The rest of the five maps along the North (there's really six, but it's counted as the Left column so I'm not doing six here) will be in the next update.
Will I finally find my Red bird!?
+1 recommendation to this strategy. I back up my main world before opening it every day I play it. I've been caught out by chunk errors in the past and never will again.
How things change... My Fortress Alpha's tallest tower is called Cloud Keep because clouds used to go through it. Back when the build limit was 127 blocks. And there you are standing at ~200 with plenty more to go! That mesa has some stunning locations for building.
Good luck finding a red parrot. It looks like a big enough jungle to have a good chance, certainly.
I like the screenshot with the forested clifftops a lot. It's reminiscent of old Beta terrain in a good way.
Journals - Gregtech New Horizons | Tree Spirit Challenge [current]
That's a lotta Badlands! Feels strange since they used to be rare-ish.
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 forgot to mention this in my prior post. I actually though I discarded the image of it, but it turns out I just missed it. In the second image of my prior post, look in the small badlands area. There's an evening enderman I caught there.

Unfortunately, no, that jungle is actually smaller than it appears. I had the same thought when i first saw it, but it's rather small. There's sparse jungle and then forest beyond it. I basically ran through it once on my initial line down South and... that was it. No Red bird here, sadly.
And I may also be out of the badlands, but that doesn't mean I won't be getting some last sights of them.
I found another ruined portal in here.
And, it's not Red, but I find a bird, at least?
Take me to your friends, please!?
I considered getting it, since if I don't end up finding a Red one, I still want to put on the last tree. But I abstain from it for now.
I do realize that if I do find one, I'll need some seeds, so I spend a bit of time gathering some. I'm not a fan of dragging my feet, so to speak, in a forest or jungle, since there's rare chances of mobs, but I break any grass as I go, and get a couple dozen seeds. Hopefully I end up needing and using them.
Beyond the jungle to the North, it starts changing to temperate biomes, as expected, although I do see more savanna to the Northwest.
And yes, the trees along the edges of these plateaus does seem beta-like in a way, doesn't it? I've described before that it seems like modern generation is most similar to beta, only with larger climate zones/biomes (or more like, biomes at all) as well as denser trees. Beta generation was similar but had no formal biomes, but less variety, and the "forests" tended to be thinner.
While the "plateaus" might not be so special to some, I love seeing them, especially the ones like this that are sort of flat like a tall wall.
I climb it, and then as I go to need to come back down, to go back up the other side (river, haha), I get joined by someone wanting to journey with me... but can't.
The last stretches of that jungle region to the North. This would be a good place to want to build a bridge.
And while I'm not mapping up there... yet (foreshadowing?), I go a bit further up the river and get sight of the badlands and desert area extending that way.
I begin making my way back South in another line, and now from the top of that savanna "wall", and more to the West, I see the jungle from the South. Another chance at a Red bird!? Please!?
There's also another pillager outpost. You may notice that ever since I started formally mapping, I've been pointing out less structures. Having a map only record a third of your render distance proves inefficient for natural exploration.
I love having to rely on in-game maps instead of third party ones, but I feel like they need some way to record further. Whether that's just a natural increase to 12 over 8, or a way to make a higher tier map that can record 12 to 16, I don't know, but if modern Minecraft is going to lean into larger scale terrain generation and biome sizes, with render distances being higher, I feel the old map recording distances are a relic that are out of place and need a change there.
This is why I'm torn; I love mapping as it lets me, well... make a map, and it encourages seeing everything instead of random wandering, but the range is seriously way too low. It's why I'll eventually be shifting to exploring without maps I think (but... not yet, and yes that's more foreshadowing).
I get back in the jungle, and it gets quite dense. There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of bamboo. And with all the Green, a bit of Red catches my eye. Could it be?
No, it's just an Apple! In the jungle, the common Red things you'll see are a poppy, a Red bird, or part of a chicken. This is, albeit uncommon, another. The bamboo growing through trees or I guess ground bushes causes some decay it seems, as this sometimes happens.
Continuing back up "the wall" plateau, I find something that really excites me.
So they do still spawn in "savanna plateaus"! I don't even know if that's a biome anymore and this might just be a "savanna" and they spawn at middle heights? They seem much rarer, sadly, since 1.18, as I've only ever found them in a taiga of all places, also at middle elevation, and I don't think I found any in an even larger mapped area in my other hardcore world.
I counted four of them.
And two of them kissed, haha.
Looking Northwest from there, I get a breathtaking view, and spot the first of a couple more villages I'll be finding on the rest of the trip.
This was looking Northeast from there, and it's mostly a "I thought this looked pretty and worth taking a picture of". I feel like many of my pictures, and really maybe this whole post (or at least the adventuring part) is a love letter of sorts to 1.18 terrain generation.
Here's looking Southeast from the village, towards the spot I took two pictures ago from.
Hm, that's actually looking taller than it seemed to be from up there. From here it appears like it might reach past the clouds, but it doesn't. It's definitely pretty high, though.
This gives a clearer answer that it doesn't reach quite as high as the clouds.
West (and a bit South) of the village, it's starts transitioning to formal plains. But there's still forest to the South, and from here, a village that must be on the border of that savanna and the forest make it appear like it might be in the forest.
I finish filling in the Southwestern part of the second to last map, and... shockingly, there's still no red bird! And unfortunately, the jungle is ending. I find a spot where there's a really tiny dark oak forest (I haven't seen many of these in this world yet), and it caught my eye because of the large mushrooms in the jungle. That image didn't survive the cut. The dark oak forest was really tiny, and even more surprisingly, it was transitioning to ":temperate leaning cold" almost right after that, with colder color grass and taiga next to it.
Not long after that point, I find another village, which I had actually spotted from the savanna village. That makes three, and they were all relatively close.
Beginning the final map (for this trip), I wander through a lot of plains, so visibility is high. And then I see another majestic "wall".
There's another ruined portal in the fields. Again, nothing of note here, maybe some gold and iron nuggets at best.
Closing in on the plateau earlier, and you might need to view the full size one to see it, there's a hole that actually goes through it entirely, as I can see forest on the other side. Stuff like this is what I love about modern terrain generation.
Only, I wasn't close enough to it earlier, but there was lava that started falling. oh no, more fires! I run before I start any, knowing I'll unfortunately have to come back close to it later.
Coincidentally, running South to escape it, there was another fire starting in a small patch of forest that had a lava pool in it. *sigh*
It seems I bring fire everywhere I go?
Here's another ruined portal I find, and finally one with something really good. It has golden carrots. See, not all of the ones I found were as disappointing as the first few.
I also took a rather high, but not like threatening in any way, fall when trying to get the gold blocks at the top. Rather than pillar up, I jumped from a tree top nearby and missed making it to the top of the portal itself. Oops.
Nearing of the end of this particular adventure, in the Northwest corner, I find the hill I was able to see through earlier (of which the lava started catching things on fire, yes) is actually part of another majestic wall, this time of a forest.
Imagine clearing some of the forest in the corner and building a village...
More lily of the valleys, haha. And yes, I gather them.
I come across the final ruined portal I find, and again, it's something good. The best of them all, even. More golden carrots, and quite a bit of them. That's about a third of a stack from one chest, and the flint honestly isn't bad, either. I need it for arrows, and honestly I think I'm needing feathers more than flint now. Without a constant supply of flint, I haven't found it warranted to keep chickens around.
Time to head back. These are just some pictures, some even from spots I've mapped long before.
A flower forest.
This is the West of that 200 height peak, although you can't see it from here, and the forest and grass hides this. If you reference the picture of it in my prior post though, you can see a stony peaks spot to the left, with Forest to the left as well.
And finally... back home, with the maps up on the wall.
Now I need to get the Westernmost column. But, and here's what I was foreshadowing... I decided to add more to my plate before I was done! I'll be wanting to add yet another row to the top/North. I then might also want to add another column to either the West again, or the East, to keep the map a bit wider rather than taller. I'm thinking it will be to the East, as I think there's a mushroom island in an ocean that way. If you look to the spot East of my crosshair, there's just barely a spot of an ocean there, and from there I sighted it. Speaking of which, I haven't found much oceans yet, at least not many large ones. The one by spawn is the largest, and then other is just nearby it. The others I've found have all been small. I mean, many are larger than they look due to the map size, but that's still small. If I do add all of this to the map, it'll ensure I have much to do, but will push back my map-less exploration (well... nothing is stopping me from doing that in between, I suppose).
I'll also have to make the room larger, but that can be done.
Following that, I relaxed a bit for my most recent play session, and only got two pictures. I mostly did some farming, and decided I wanted to try and get back the missing achievements that I could.
That one wasn't even attempted, but again, happened.
These were the ones I got.
I think I have all of them besides blocking with a shield and getting lava with a bucket. The others would be any in progress ones, such as biomes visited, but referencing the shown ones in the advancements menus, I think I have all of them back except those two.
A-men. I'd say the map distance limitation is pretty painful on earlier generation as well. I'm running at 16, usually, in my modded 1.12 world and the map not recording things which are plainly visible is really painful. I tried to increase it in an earlier version of explorercraft but I couldn't figure out the algorithm they used for adding dots to the map. When I just increased the numbers it didn't fill everything in.
Yes, there's still a Savanna Plateau biome. I think they carried all the biomes forward even though the new generation system obviated the purpose of most of the sub-biomes and M biomes (e.g. Savanna Plateau was there to provide height variation in Savanna, many M biomes provided some more rugged terrain, etc.)
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.