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The extreme hills after 1.7 almost feel like a completely different biome to me from the ones before.

They have different terrain generation. The best way to put it in terms of modern terrain generation references is that extreme hills after 1.7 feel a bit like the current windswept hills (although these are more muted and less extreme than the 1.7 extreme hills), whereas the extreme hills before 1.7 feel a bit like the plateaus that current terrain generation can make.

The ones before 1.7 were almost always grass topped and the ones after were more stone (and sometimes gravel). After 1.7, they were also snow above certain altitudes, and generally had lowlands of spruce trees.

The ones after 1.7 come off more as trying to mimic some of the beta terrain generation aspects (wild formations, overhangs, etc.). Sometimes they were a little wild before 1.7, but not as often and not in the same way.

The extreme hills after 1.7 are... interesting in their own way, but the change/loss of the prior ones is felt here. Also, they feel overly common, especially for how exotic they are. Sometimes, "less is more", and I feel like that applies with them. This era would have been better in this regard if extreme hills were less common than they ended up being in 1.7, and if the old ones still remained and occurred most of the time (maybe something like two-thirds to four-fifths of the time), with the then-new ones being a rarity.

Quote from Zeno410»

What makes 1.7 terrain so unpleasant to traverse is the medium and small scale ruggedness. Even a 10 block hill can be near-vertical, and even flattish terrain can throw in obstacles. Plus all the shrub trees which are disorienting to walk through and prevent you from seeing the scenery you're having to struggle with - and which sometimes intensify the ruggedness issue.

This is exactly what I've been saying! It's what I meant by the mismatch in the increased altitude variety while not having the X and Z scale to back it up, but maybe I worded it poorly. Basically, everything is so rugged and so bunched up that way overall. And yes, the trees make it worse. Hoes being able to clear leaves in later versions help (shears could too, but they have less durability compared to higher tier tools, and they drop the leaves instead of breaking them).

Quote from Zeno410»

One tip for finding extreme climate is that they happen almost only when next to oceans, because oceans block climate smoothing. You can have a hot region and then a narrow ocean, even just a few hundred blocks (shrunk by the land expansion step) and then an icy region on the other side. So your best shots are the northeast and southwest corners.

I thought I remembered you saying something like this (I was thinking of it as I started finding all this ocean), but I thought I recall you saying it in regards to RTG, not vanilla.

Looking Southwest from the current Southwest corner literally has a savanna pictured so there's a hot region there.

I'm hoping to avoid going North if I can, so I'll focus my efforts either East or West now. If no cold region is found there, then I'll shift my map down on the wall and explore North.

Quote from Zeno410»

Technically, didn't you find another hot zone in your 1.20 world - the tiny little spot with two Acacias?

There were a few micro spots like that, yes, but I usually refer to the desert and badlands pairing as hot regions in 1.18+ worlds. I know the game probably classifies things differently since there's multiple layers working together (temperature and humidity) instead of just one so other bioms might be "hot" too, but the desert and badlands in particular are what I would be referring to when I say hot regions in 1.18+ worlds.

The second hot region I did find that I was referring to was a single desert that was very small. It had quite a large area of jungle, savanna, and mangrove swamps all around though.

I'm familiar with the tendency of vanilla (referring to between 1.7 and 1.17) to bounce repeatedly between two climate temperatures while shying away from going beyond that unless you went very far, but my impression was that might only apply to the two temperate climates (for example, my impression was that it would go back and forth between the two temperate climates, while rarely going to the extremes). Does this tendency to alternate between two climates in fact apply to all of them though?

If you need an example of what I mean, would it bouncing between hot and temperate warm (or cold and temperate cool) repeatedly also be expected?

I ask because, yes, I'm noticing since finding that hot region (desert and savanna) that it is also swinging between hot and temperate warm all around that area. There's seemingly multiple disconnected hot regions.

If this tendency to constantly alternate between two temperatures does in fact apply globally and not just to the temperate regions, that means finding a cold region is probably only ever likely very far from known hot regions. Which means... I might not end up finding a cold region in this world before I'm done with it based on findings in my next update.

I have found taiga against desert though, so who knows.

Update 12: It's Getting Hot Again!? (Time to Panic and Give Up on Colder Ambitions!?)

Now that I'm exploring much further out, I would be constructing more nether portals. The next one would be to the Southeast, and I calculated that I would need to go 576 blocks East in the nether. I also went 320 blocks South. I overlooked this that would put me a bit further South than the Southwestern portal, which was fine, but the fact that I overlooked it would cause something soon.

I simply dug up near the ceiling in the nether to get there. Before doing that, I found another nether fortress (I turned and was nearly face to face with it...) but there was too large of a sea of lava in the way.

The portal the game created in the overworld ended up being constructed on the surface this time. Amusingly, in the treetops of a dark oak forest. Oh, so you can do it when you want to!?



Being a warm biome, this mean I was unlikely to be very close to any cold biomes, but I somewhat didn't expect to be near any yet with how South I am. There's hot biomes to the Southwest/West.

I cleared some trees, moved it to the ground, and started exploring. As I mentioned, there would be no home here so it's just a portal, but I did enclose it. I've seen enough scenarios where mobs wander through and into the nether only to be waiting on the other side.

I would be doing a region of four maps in a 2 x 2 area. It's worth mentioning that halfway through this exploration, once two maps are complete, I'll have mapped half of my total planned area. But things will change soon...

I expected hot biomes to the Southwest and West eventually, but I was surprised when I encountered some in this area too. That meant I'd likely find no cold biomes on this exact area, but there was still slight hope further North... I hoped.

I still found a new biome, although it was one I had overlooked as needing to find, and that was shattered savanna. I ended up finding two (maybe three?) in this area.



There was also desert, and that meant more buried desert temples.



Deserts, savannas, and plains flip earlier versions "rare villages" trend the other way. Older versions were very inconsistent with villages since they were limited to a few biomes, and in .17+ especially, they were more often occurring in hot regions, less so in temperate, and almost not at all in cooler ones.

Being in a hot region turned up a couple more desert villages. the first had a blacksmith, the first village I've found in a while that did have one, although there wasn't anything exciting.



Here's that village...



...And in almost the same spot, turning around, I saw another.



There was a second desert temple eventually.



I didn't keep the picture, but it was in this area that I found taiga bordering on desert.

In cooler (but not cool) terrain, I found another village in a plains biome.



I finished the area and returned home, and discovered what I was suspecting; I had not mapped the 2 x 2 area I was intending to. I initially started to think I was too far East, but instead I was too far South. This would mean I'm not committed to adding onto the map South instead of North... at least for one of the rows. There was still another column I could play with.

Here's the map.



There's a lot of potentially disconnected hot regions!

A close eye would notice there's now no remaining rows. That is because I decided to remove one since I don't see myself wanting to continue this world too much longer. I'm having enough fun to continue with it for now, but I don't want it to become a world I spend a substantially long time in (I... kind of jumped back into my 1.20 world for the first time since May of last year apparently, and that got me wanting to move back to playing it, and doing a ton more exploring here would burn me out). These worlds are meant to be shorter, so I cut one row off.

This means my map is nearly locked in where it is; at most, I could move it right and add my last available column to the West instead of the East, but I won't be doing that.

While I'm also on the topic of looking towards the end of this world, I'll mention that I'm most likely conclude this world once I finish the map. I probably won't be seeking the stronghold and end/ender dragon out. Originally, I wanted to because they felt like concluding goals, but this world's purpose has definitely been one of exploration, and I'll feel "finished" with it at that point. The goal of my 1.6 world was to relive my original world, and my goal of this world has mostly been to discover the terrain and performance of 1.8 at a further length than I did back then. The end/dragon fight isn't much changed (if at all) since 1.6 so there's nothing I'll gain from doing it here. If I go back and do a 1.2.5 world later, that would most likely be a goal for that world.

So that leaves the remainder of the map above.

My Southwestern home has a portal near the Southwestern edge of the map, so I decided to do my next exploration there. I know there's a lot of ocean there, but how far it goes, I don't know. I also know a savanna biome was spotted just off the Southwest corner.

Well... this one was unremarkable, but that's not bad. It was a lot of ocean (and a lot of ocean monuments) which made it easy to do. There was desert nearby, which isn't surprising since there's the savanna there, but it shifts temperate to the East, only to eventually go back hot since the very first desert I discovered was that way. This all means the Southern area is repeatedly going back and forth between hot and temperate.

Here's the four, yes four, ocean monuments seen.









All of this ocean was informing me that the "nonexistent" ocean I was finding before wasn't the full extent that 1.7+ was capable of and that it perhaps does match more closely to what 1.18+ does, which is what I originally though.

Here's the map now.



I would be doing one final outing (yes, three!) for this update. I would go back to the portal constructed at the start of this update and do the two maps East of the 2 x 2 area I originally did.

This one is a little more interesting in findings, as it's not just structures.

Namely, I found a couple more interesting ravines. The first was this one.









It's at least two, maybe more? At first, I thought it was two intersecting, but like last time, I think they are brushing up against one another. This means the other portion may be a third one? I don't know.

There's also a lot of visible caves connecting to them.

Seldom do I like ravines, but sometimes they make for interesting finds. I think my biggest issue with them is that they're rather common (though 1.18+ addresses this), but mostly that they're too narrow. The wider ones, interconnected ones, and ones with surface exposure are the ones I like most.

In a plains biomes was a village. It had a blacksmith, but some apples and iron equipment was all it held.



There was another ravine just outside the village. that one wasn't too interesting, but another one not all that far off was...









What looked like a typical ravine at first, then looked like a deep ravine, and then I realized it wasn't a deep ravine but was two almost directly stacked. I've seen multiple ravines connecting where you can see near diamond/lava levels from the surface; one was shown earlier in this same world. I've never seen them directly stacked in a way where they look like a singular deep ravine, and it makes me realize there's something else that I would probably find to be an improvement with ravines; the ability to be deeper. Maybe before 1.18, it made sense since there was less altitude to work with, but 1.18 gives them more altitude to play in.

But it looks neat not just being a single ravine because there's different branches at different altitudes. If ravines had more variety like that, I'd probably find them more interesting too. They're just way too "all the same" and uninteresting most of the time as a result.

But more and more, I'm finding myself glad I didn't disable them for this world...

Returning home, here's the map now.



Okay, okay, I can explain the funny shape.

That last outing added three maps instead of the expected two. I again made a mistake, although I caught it early.

When I left the portal, I knew I was further South, so my mind was thinking the first map I did was the Southernmost one I needed to do... but it wasn't. I started both maps before doing any exploring, and it was then that I realized I wasn't yet supposed to do the Northern one.

I also only had enough maps on me for those two.

I didn't want to return for a single map. I normally gather sugar cane when I'm exploring anyway, so I turned some paper, found a ravine (a pretty typical one) with surface access, and dug down to find some iron and red stone for a compass to make another map.

So, I ended up with the three being done.

That leaves me my plans for the rest, which are likely to be as follows...



It should be somewhat self explanatory, but in case it's not, here's a description.

Yellow circles are locations with nether portals. The Yellow "X" is a planned future one.

The colored boxes represent single outings.

The numbers represent the order I will do the maps in.

The arrows are, of course, my route between maps.

So my next outing will be the two maps the Pink box depicts. I'll head North from the newest portal, start a map, head West for a second map, and then return (home) to the portal.

My outing after that will be a bit different. I'll head South from my main home instead of using a portal. While there's a fair distance to cover, much of it is flat terrain (unusual for 1.7+), so it will be tolerable. I'll then do four maps, West to east, and then use the newest portal to return home.

The final two outings are more subject to change, but should be self explanatory. I might instead do two outings of three maps, in which case I'll do 10 through 12 last (and in that case, 11 and 12 will switch order), but otherwise, those are my plans to wrap up this world.

My biggest complaint with terrain isn't the climate zones. That's one of them, yes, but 1.18+ can have the same problem (In my 1.20 world, I've explored far more than here, and if I ignore that second tiny desert I found, I've still only found one hot/dry region (desert and badlands), yet I love 1.18+ terrain a lot more. I don't subscribe to the idea that it's a problem if every biome isn't local enough to spawn in most seeds (but then certain things that might be hard to get, such as Green dye coming from cactus, should have alternative methods to obtain them, and this only has a partial one with wandering traders). Of course, 1.18+ has better biome structure and everything feels better, but it's still dealing with a very large scale climate system.

So that tells me the issues with 1.7+ go well beyond climate zones. It's more the other factors. It added a lot of new biomes, yet it still felt like it might not have been enough for the way the climate system was implemented. And the way it arranges what it has feels pretty bad too.

Instead, what I think is my biggest complaint is the terrain itself. There's so many pictures I could have shown to depict the typical terrain I deal with, but 90% of this thread would then be complaining about the terrain. Untying terrain generation from biomes was one of the best things this game ever did.

Edit: Oh, and yeah, I'm definitely not expecting cold regions in maps 1 through 6. The Northern half of map 1 and especially the map to the right of it are trending cooler though, so I'm hoping I'll find one somewhere in the final 3 x 2 region.

My other hope is that I might find a jungle or badlands somewhere in the row along the bottom, since that's a hot region, but I'm not exactly expecting it.

Quick turnarounds as of late. Don't confuse that to mean I'm having too much fun. Instead, it's more that I'm just wanting to get it over with.

Update 13: Wrapping Up Explorations

I do the first two maps, and there's not much to show. As I mentioned in my last post, the North of the first map, and the map to its East, are hinting at trending cooler. Whether that means anything, remains to be seen.

One map had a bit of extreme hills. Other than that, I found a single village with a blacksmith, but it held nothing noteworthy.



Here's the Southeast corner of the map with those two added.



I noticed a small problem; I missed some of the map! There's no ruined nether portals in this old version, so the dark red stood out. I almost never miss parts (I don't think I have yet in my other world?), but it was bound to happen eventually, and of course it was with desert.

If it was far out of the way, I'd leave it, but I'd be passing North of the area after my next outing, so... I brought the map with me.

I expected one of three things in this unexplored area.

1. A continuation of the shift between hot and warm regions.

2. The same, with it shifting back to temperate to the South.

3. The same (as 1), with a potential jungle and/or badlands biome.

I hoped for three, but expected one. And... it was a mix of one and two. So, no jungle or badlands biome will be found in this world (unless one is surprisingly in the unexplored Northeast area, but I really doubt that).

I found a three desert temples, and two villages.











The second village had what was, I believe, my first horse armor. No, really.



I found one other notable thing, and that was a pretty large cavern. I cleared some of the dirt on the top to get a better view.





After that, I filled in the missing parts of the unfinished map, and headed home. Here's the map.



It's almost finished! I have the Northeast region left, and that would see my creating my final nether portal.

Before that, I decided finalize my equipment. It was already mostly done, but my swords had Sharpness IV on one, and Sharpness III, Knockback II, and Looting II on another. My bow also had Power IV. I wanted to bring both of those up to the fifth level. I also needed to dig a lot of netherrack for the new portal, so more diamonds were needed for repairs (and swords for enchanting).

Here's what may be the last diamonds I ever find.



I got my desired enchantments for my swords and bow (not pictured).



And apparently, I never had this achievement until now. I was fighting mobs for experience (quartz is getting sparse in the nether unless I venture way out) and string, by the way.



Staying up at night gave me a chance to see a rarity in older versions; rain!



With that situated, I went and made the portal and stepped through to wherever it would lead me. I ended up in a forest.



I decided to do only two maps for now, and those would be the maps numbered 7 and 8 at the end of the last update.

I found... nothing noteworthy besides a village with nothing worth mentioning.



The map is still consistently cool (a lot of taiga) to the North and East still, mostly regarding the first map, but it's sort of temperate cool and warm (with ocean) above the other. There was so many extreme hills that I'm tired of seeing this biome...



The next update will be the concluding one. I will start on the Westernmost map, head East, and then South. Will i find a cold region!? I think there's a chance, particularly in either of the Easternmost maps, but I wouldn't be surprised if I don't and it merely remains temperate cool. At this point, I don't particularly care if I find one or not. Either way, I'll be ready to move on all the same.

Update 14: The End! (And Good Fluffy Riddance)

I'm finished! Here's my closing scene. I can't wave, but it's the thought that counts?



It felt fitting, but don't worry, the archway will come with us!

So... did I find a cold region? Did I? Well... did I!?

I did not.

In fact, the Northeast corner started hinting that it could be trending back warmer perhaps.

The far East (so, just South of that) remained cool though.

The final four maps were mostly unremarkable.

I found four villages, which I guess was a bit for four maps. One had a blacksmith with some diamonds, so my prior statement that my previously found diamonds might be my last ended up not being the case.











I also almost fell into this ravine, which felt fitting. Perhaps I do "tra la la" over them a little too carefree like? No, it's the game trying trip me up in the final moments, I swear.



I returned home, and here's the final map.



With the world done, I wanted to look beyond what I had explored. Here's the explored area...



...And here's a larger area.



There's some interesting observations.

The area to the South would have continued to an even larger hot region. It may be multiple.

There was the known one to the Southwest.

The Northeast going cool only to trend warm at the last moment would indeed lead to yet another hot region.

Likewise, the Northwest lead to a hot region.

Also, it's amusing how close some of the hot and cold regions are. Some are nearly, if not outright, touching! I notice this more where ocean is nearby, which I presume is why.

Here's my explored area outlined on that same area, along with the remaining biomes I was searching for.



The White box is my explored area. The dotted line signifies my sort of "initial" area before I decided on how I would expand the map. I'll come back to this.

The remaining biomes I wanted to find were a cold region (so, snowy plains, mountains, and ice spikes), a badlands biome, a jungle, and/or a mushroom island.

Amusingly, almost all of those were nearby!

The Green outline is jungle.

The Blue outline is a cold region, but it's pathetically small and it has no ice spikes biome, so the closest of that is denoted in a separate cold region.

The Pink outline is a mushroom island.

The Yellow outline is badlands.

All of them, with the exception of the ice spikes biome, is in a column or row surrounding my explored area! You might think I'm pretty upset then, right?

To the contrary, I'm not, and for two reasons.

I'd rather find out there was more variety nearby rather than not.

More importantly, I was never going to find all of them within my map size. Remember that dotted line? From that point, I had one (maybe two) rows of maps North and/or South to play with, and three columns East and/or West to play with.

I ended up going entirely East and South. That did find me two biomes I wouldn't have found otherwise, and those were windswept gravelly hills and shattered savannas. Going West instead would have gained me no new biomes, but perhaps the terrain would have been more interesting. I'd have been further from coming close to a jungle or cold region though. So whether I went East or West was largely inconsequential, but East was the slightly better call.

North and South is a different matter, and it depends on if you look at the original two rows I had to play with, or the reduced one row.

With one row, going South gained me... nothing. I came close to a mushroom islands though.

By contrast, going North would have found me a badlands, which is ironic since I went South specifically for that reason.

If we presume the initial two rows I had to play with, and if I went North for both, then I would have found badlands and a cold region (even if I still went entirely East as I would have just barely seen it in the Northwest corner then).

At the end of the day, a sample size of one seed is still just a sample size of one. Sometimes you get more variety and sometimes you don't. And I honestly don't mind that.

Instead, and I was going to talk about it here before Zeno said something that had me bring it up a few posts ago, my problem with terrain here isn't in the climate region sizes or the chances of finding a particular biome within a particular distance of spawn. Instead, it's the actual terrain itself. It's a constant up and down and up and down and up and down with rugged terrain and micro cliffs with steep sides in forests. You're constantly stopping to dig paths up or go way around desired routes and the terrain slows you down so much and is just exhausting to deal with. It's not good to look at, it's not good to traverse, and it's not good to build on. Having steep terrain is one thing; 1.18 also has this, but my goodness, it is so much worse and also everywhere here. For this reason alone, I am disgusted with terrain generation between 1.7 and 1.17. That is what my "good riddance" phrase is in reference to. I want to add that I'm sort of intentionally being a bit harsh for "dramatic effect". This is a version of the game over a decade years old, so criticizing its terrain generation now when terrain generation changed is moot, and they were working with different criteria (biomes still controlled terrain generation, hardware was slower, render distances were lower, and so on). But, part of the point of these playthroughs is to speak on my experiences, and my experience was that terrain generation really felt awful, perhaps even in the best of times. I like a lot of the things that this terrain generation era did first... and yet I think I'd rather play in worlds with 1.6 and prior terrain generation despite those things. At least its only crime is "low biome variety" and "hot to cold extreme bordering biomes" due to random biome placement, which aren't great... but I'd take that over what 1.7 through 1.17 had going on.

So how would I describe 1.8? Honestly... overrated, perhaps for lack of better terms. And I mean that in both senses, towards both the good and bad reputation it often has.

Let me clarify that my use of the phrase "overrated" doesn't necessarily mean "bad". I'm using the term to express how I feel like it has higher emphasis of attention than it deserves.

Its good reputation comes almost entirely from the PVP community. If you dislike the combat changes of 1.9, then you'll merely like 1.8 by default (since it was the last version before combat mechanics changed), instead of for any reason 1.8 itself did. It's the same way with many other favorite versions; they are usually liked because they are the last of a kind and represent the "capstone" to a given era. Beta 1.7.3, release 1.6, and some others come to mind. 1.6 was considered a pretty mediocre update itself, but... it was still "1.5 with more good things added", so that makes it better by default, even it was a mediocre update itself. And since 1.7 brought major changes, then 1.6 serves as a potential favorite for those who disliked those changes. I find the same to be true of 1.8's praise; it's praised because it's the last of the old combat system, not because it did a whole lot of great things (game/content-wise, anyway).

Its bad reputation comes almost entirely from its performance/technical matters, and wow oh wow are these misunderstood. I was someone who disliked 1.8 for performance reasons back in its day, but playing through 1.6 and 1.8 back to back was enlightening. I found that 1.6 (or more accurately, anything before 1.8) performs incredibly poorly in regards to chunk rendering, and it needs multi-threaded chunk rendering to address that. 1.8 adds this by default. If you were using this feature of OptiFine in 1.7 or earlier, then 1.8's major benefit was negated for you, and you would simply see it as a heavier version. And it was a heavier version. The increased RAM use gets way too much focus though (resource utilization != performance), but instead it was heavier on the CPU (as almost always, it's always down to the CPU with this game). However, on what is now very aged hardware, perhaps even for 1.8's time, I was able to get pretty good performance... (always 60 FPS) as long as the render distance was kept low (and a render distance of 12 in those days may have been more "normal" rather than "low" anyway?). The reality is, a lot of people will always exist with what are aged and slow systems for the time, so anything that increases the hardware requirements will be the ones those people attribute to worse performance. But higher hardware requirement floor != worse performance, and 1.3 through 1.6 showed that well. While those "singleplayer-is-multiplayer" versions brought bugs and higher hardware requirements, they had some better performance benefits than prior versions too. I see 1.8 in much the same way. Even on that aged hardware, 1.8 typically performed better for me than 1.6. The lone exception was new chunk generation, which already stuttered a bit in 1.6, but stuttered a bit more in 1.8 (maybe my increased render distance of 10 or 12 over 8 completely explains that though).

So instead of being great or terrible... (terrain generation aside, which is terrible!) I find it to be just an... average version. It's pretty unremarkable, so it's "overrated" in both its good and bad reputation. The performance and technical aspects were mixed (vast improvement in rendering/chunk loading performance when looking at vanilla, but higher requirements leading to very low end systems being pushed to hopeless states, leading to mixed results depending on which side you fell on), and it added little content over 1.7, so.. I'd say 1.8 instead deserves the reputation that 1.10 through 1.12 often have attributed to them as being "lull" updates, (and 1.11 deserves a better reputation than that because elytra flight with rocket boosting and shulker boxes were both incredibly major meta defining changes). It did bring its share of bugs, such occlusion culling issues, or its design choice to drop water temples in preexisting chunks (I consider this major enough to be a "bug"), but it did resolve the lighting issues of 1.6 and earlier... mostly. And that was one of my most major behavioral objections with 1.6.

All in all, despite the mixed conclusions I've come to, just as with my 1.6 world, I did enjoy my time in it despite that.

*sneezes*The-terrible-terrain-generation-aside*sneezes*

Sorry, excuse me.

It was interesting to give some older versions a retrospective look, so to speak, and it enlightened my opinions on some things. It made me appreciate how far the game has come, but I don't dislike older versions...

*sneezes*Other-than-1.7-through-1.17-terrain-generation*sneezes*

(Sorry, I must have something.)

...That is, I can appreciate them as long as I'm looking at them with the standards of their own time, and not the higher expectations I'd place on them today. Doing that, they haven't aged well.

Will I continue this further? Maybe. I probably won't be doing 1.12 or 1.16 though...

*sneezes*I'm-alergic-to-that-terrain*sneezes*

Oh, so that's what my allergy is!

1.12 and 1.16 are ones I'd like to consider doing, but I don't know if I will because terrain generation is... allergy inducing, and the canvas the world creates is important to me. If I do those versions, I won't be exploring with maps like this, that's for sure.

But I could definitely see myself doing a 1.2.5 world... eventually. If 1.6 showed me anything, it's that I might have a lot more issues with my first version when revisited, but I'd be interesting in it anyway. But it probably won't be too soon, as I'm wanting to get back to more recent versions.

Other than that... "good fluffy riddance 1.8". Thank you for the experience, but on to much better pastures.

Here's the statistics.

Quote from Zeno410»

The areas were all "close", but finding them would have required exploring a strip around your currently explored area about as large as what you'd already explored. Pretty gruesome.

That's diminishing returns for you.

Since my exploration method is "thorough" in that I'm exploring until I've filled in the entire map before moving on, yes, it takes an increasingly long time to explore further terrain, especially with the very limited distances that maps fill in. If I was, say, playing on a higher render distance and wandering freely, as opposed to systematically like this, and using third party maps (like UnMined) to manage my explored terrain? Then this all becomes far less of an issue.

Quote from Zeno410»

It's a pity you didn't do a minimally modded 1.6 with Explorercraft added so you could have made a comparable map wall. That would have made an interesting comparison. I can see why I couldn't find a map wall bigger than the 10,000 x 10,000 one in my second 1.7 world. In vanilla 1.7, why bother?

"Never say never" comes to mind, but... it's unlikely.

If I was going to do it for mapping purposes, it would definitely need to be modded in regards to world generation because vanilla terrain generation in any version before 1.18 wouldn't be anything I'd want to see further at this point. I imagine mods would only partially address the verious issues I have with worlds of older versions (for example, a mod that adds biomes might addresses the lack of biome variety before 1.7... but then are there still small biomes, no biome structuring due to random placement, no real terrain generation since biomes control this [resulting in "seen one, seen them all"], and fractal shape biomes?). If anything, I'd probably be better off doing terrain generation/biome addition mods in more recent versions due to what I desire out of a world canvas.

Let's set all that aside and pretend there is something interesting enough for me. Even then, there's way, way, way too many quality of life, performance, and behavioral issues that get worse the further back in game version I go. Mods are another consideration on top of all that as they seem to be hit or miss for me in how well things work (I was unfortunately having serious issues with RTG in 1.12 and Better Forests in 1.20).

And lastly, although maybe this could also be filed under the "lack of quality of life" reasoning mentioned above as opposed to being mentioned as a separate reason, just setting up mods for older versions seems to get more involved than I'm willing to deal with the further back it goes.

The most pressing reason is that of time. I'm more interested in getting back to my 1.20.1 world (and I may update that before doing so).



Or, other games entirely.

I had fun with 1.6 and 1.8, but they were only meant to be limited worlds that ended eventually. Maybe, maybe, I'll want to consider a modded instance (non-vanilla world generation) some day... but that won't be soon, if at all.

All in all, it's very unlikely that I'll ever go back to "older" versions (which is probably something like 1.16/1.17 and prior for me) for any medium-to-long term worlds, especially for exploration purposes. The game still has its share of issues here and there today, so why subject myself to more, and far worse, ones? Some of those older versions of things have failed to move on/adapt to the changing world around them (the rest have made newer versions of themselves available for the current versions of the game), and have instead taken a "you adapt to me instead" mindset, and I don't have willingness for that. When I need to set up an entirely different PC, or have certain hardware, or tolerate certain behaviors, or go to further lengths to set an instance up... I have limited patience for that. I imagine it's going to be tough enough doing a 1.2.5 world, but I'll probably do that since it will be short term and not for exploration. But even that one won't be occurring anytime too soon.