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Version 1.6.4 added a feature that explicitly saved nether fortress and witch hut location boundaries in your save folder (so that changes to terrain generation, like in 1.7, don't break mob spawning in existing witch farms or already-discovered nether fortresses).

Are there any utilities that can read/edit/create these regions, for mapmakers who want to be able to explicitly define where they want nether mobs to spawn?

If not, anyone know how to decipher the values I'm seeing?

I'm pretty sure it is saved in \data\fortress.dat, not sure if the witch farm data is inside the same one, or in a different file. I can open fortress.dat using NBTExplorer, but I'm not really sure what I'm seeing there:



Anyone know how to interpret these?

Very nice pics, ShinzoX! I really like the huge jungle forest! Also, nice brick house and dragon egg!!

BREAKING NEWS: Release 1.7.2 is out!

A few relevant changes since my giant list a page or two ago:

• TREES: We have 2 new saplings (Acacia and Dark Oak) and all accompanying leaves, wood types, plank types, stairs, and slabs. (In earlier snapshots, these tree types were made up of existing wood types.) Some details below:
• Acacia saplings/wood: Gray exterior, red wood interior. These grow in savannas, and require a single sapling to grow.
• Dark Oak: Dark exterior (very close to Spruce), darker interior (darker than spruce). These trees normally grow in a roofed forest. Requires 4 dark oak saplings to grow, like a giant jungle tree. A single dark oak sapling cannot grow a tree.
• Giant Redwood: Not a new wood or sapling type, has spruce wood and leaves, grows in "Mega Taiga" biomes. 4 spruce saplings in a square can now grow a giant redwood tree. A single spruce sapling still grows normal spruce trees.
• Nether fortress/witch hut regions: MCEdit cannot edit these, see discussion in this thread. I can open the "Fortress.dat" in NBTExplorer.exe, but I wouldn't know how to edit/add regions. I've asked if the Amidst utility can do it in this thread here, hoping that's a possibility.
• Free spawning Witches! Witches now spawn (in small numbers) like normal mobs, in addition to spawning in witch huts. This means it should be possible to get witch drops via a normal mob farm (glass bottles, glowstone, redstone, gunpowder, spider eyes, sugar, sticks, plus a few rare drops if killed directly: healing potions, fire resistance potions, swiftness potions, and water breathing potions). Unfortunately, they don't drop weakness potions. They DO, however, THROW weakness potions at you in combat (along with poison, harming, and slowness). While this would require careful planning, and would still be very risky, it seems like this might work as a way to heal villager zombies (zombies are undead and would not die from harming potions, so the witch couldn't kill zombies directly). This could allow us to build a village with zero starting villagers, and no access to the nether! (Hmm, I could even get a village going on the old SkyBlock map!!

A few smaller items that are less likely to impact a new map:

• New /setworldspawn command, not sure if this would help during map construction, or if it is for only the current user
• If you are on fire, you can now extinguish yourself in a cauldron, even in the Nether. Water level will drop, though.
• Maps now will correctly show different colors for wool and stained clay

I think that's all the changes besides bug fixes in the last few snapshots.

So, I didn't see anything about this on the first page, and this might be addressed somewhere in this long thread, but I had a question about Amidst and the new fortress/witch huts saving format introduced in 1.6.4:

Can Amidst read/display fortress/witch huts that are indicated only in these new DAT files? (As opposed to fortresses/witch huts that are generated by the terrain generator)

Does it have the ability to edit/modify these values, to allow mapmakers to define custom fortress/witch hut spawning regions?

Yeah, not sure exactly how the achievements work, if you'd have to have a big bank of command blocks with a redstone timer constantly checking for conditions or something.

There is a simple but cool example of that kind of adventure/challenge map built with command blocks here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1mw5sp/i_used_the_new_commands_to_make_a_fully_scripted/

(It apparently does have a big redstone apparatus under the house.)

The Oceanblock server has an achievement system, where you can do:
"/oceanblock challenges list" to see the objectives, then "/oceanblock challenges complete" or something like that. I'm sure that's a server-side plug-in, though.

(I asked this question on Reddit, but wasn't sure if this might be a better place to ask.)

The 1.6.4 release was mainly to fix bug MC_15547, where valid 1.6 location-based structures (Nether Fortresses and witch huts) no longer spawned the appropriate mobs after upgrading to the 1.7 snapshot.

The fix, apparently, was to add something to the map save that explicitly specified where these structures appeared. Players simply had to open their maps in 1.6.4, visit their structures, and once those chunks were loaded, Minecraft would save these locations in the save file.

I don't know anything about how this specific data is saved, but as a mapmaker it sure would be handy to view/move/create/remove these regions. I'd also be curious if the save format only allows for nether mobs or witches, or if it might even allow us to choose other mob types to spawn in a specific region.

Is this something that MCEdit can already do? If not, can this be considered for a future version?

Thanks!

Quote from FwizzleHD

Here is the beginning of the LP I'm doing for this map. Let me know what i can do to improve the series.

Nice start! Not sure if you noticed, but you dug up all your grass blocks, so you won't be able to spawn in any friendly animals. The emergency chest way up above does have a few of each sapling type you lost, but I don't believe it has any grass blocks, you might have to restart or cheat some in.

You will definitely need to protect those villagers, they are key to many of the objectives.

Good luck and have fun!

Quote from 5thHorseman

I'd say it's pretty likely. However I cannot guarantee when it'll come out. I'm going to have some free time over the next month or so but I'm not sure when that time is, and I basically haven't played (or really followed) Minecraft since 1.6 came out so I'm not up on anything that's come in the snapshots since then.

This isn't comprehensive, but some ideas about 1.6 and 1.7 that might start you thinking:

• 1.6 added horses and horse armor (not craftable). It has been reported in this forum thread that it is possible to spawn horses in the plains biome (and in the 1.7 Savannah biome), although I haven't seen that myself. If "spawning all possible creatures" continues to be part of the objective list, it might be cool to have a horse armor hidden in a chest somewhere.
• 1.6 had just a few new blocks/items: hay bales, leads (can attach to mobs and drag them around), wool carpets, hardened clay (cook a clay block), stained clay (8 hardened clay around a dye), block of coal (does not work with charcoal). Not sure how many of these are worth incorporating into challenges, maybe replace the old wool challenge with getting each color of stained clay?
• The major change in 1.7 is new biomes and new biome generation. For a pre-created map like Oceanblock, most of that isn't super relevant, but here are a few changes that are worth knowing:
• Taiga is no longer a snowy biome. To get snow you will need either a Cold Taiga or Ice Plains (possibly some others). In some biomes (Extreme Hills, for example) rain turns to snow at higher elevations (above Y=95), that might be an interesting challenge, building a tall tower/mountain to collect snow from the peak.
• There are a ton of new flowers, each of which crafts to a different dye color. Most of these flowers are biome-specific, you can grow them with bonemeal on grass in the correct place (Flower Forest biome, Swampland, Sunflower Plains, etc). It is unclear whether the 2-tall flowers (sunflowers, rose bushes) can be grown this way, or if they only grow on original world generation. It seems also that specific blocks in a flower forest will always grow the same type of flower.
• A couple of new, biome-specific blocks of dubious value: red sand, Podzol (attainable only with Silk Touch currently, doesn't spread to other dirt blocks).
• Fishing is much more useful in 1.7. You can get 4 types of fish and lots of other stuff, including enchanted fishing rods, enchanted books, name tags, lily pads, saddles, glass bottles, string, leather and boots. One of the fish types (pufferfish) can be used to make a new "Potion of Water Breathing".
• Name tags can be used to name friendly and hostile mobs, which will then never de-spawn. They can't be used to name villagers, without a multiplayer trick, though, because it opens the trade interface when you right-click.
• Not sure if you want to go this direction, but there are new command block options: setblock (programatically place items), testforblock (check for an item in a certain spot), achievement (give player an achievement or stat), summon (create any entity in the game), tellraw (create "buttons" in chat). Lots of cool stuff here that adventure map makers are making good use of, but not sure if it fits with the minimalist style of map.
• The newest snapshot (13w41b) has 16 colors of stained glass, made from putting 8 glass around a dye. 16 colors each of wool, clay, and glass is probably too much, how about an objective that requires all 16 colors, but consisting of some combination of wool/clay/glass?
• Armor, Bows, Fishing Rods and Swords can now get the "unbreaking" enchantment from an enchantment table. Not sure if this impacts any of the enchanting objectives.
• Nether Portals can now be much larger, up to 23x23. The old size, 4x5 with 10 obsidian, is still the minimum size. Ghasts can come through very large portals

Finally, this is important enough to deserve its own section:

In the early snapshots there was concern about existing location-based structures (nether fortresses and witch farms) that work in 1.6 being broken after the upgrade to 1.7 (as the new biome/structure generating code would not generate them in the same place, and the new code had no way to "remember" those areas were supposed to generate witches or blazes).

They fixed this in 1.6.4 by adding some data to the map save that explicitly specified "there is a witch farm at these coordinates", "there is a nether fortress at these coordinates". For players, this simply meant loading up their existing world in 1.6.4 and visiting those locations, and Minecraft would explicitly write that data into the save files once those chunks were loaded.

For map makers, though, the existence of this new data in the world save means (hypothetically) that you could choose any old seed for your map, and then explicitly specify where you want Nether mobs and/or witches to spawn, by directly modifying the save data.

I don't know exactly how the data is saved, or how to edit it. I would guess that MCEdit or some other utility may add this functionality.

Golems don't drop any XP, I think a lot of the older iron farm designs just used the lava softener because hoppers weren't in the game yet. Before hoppers, you had to be there to pick up all the iron drops when the golems die.

Sorry, haven't had a chance to re-do all the charts with the last-round results. Hope to post that soon.

I ran across a new video that illustrates the practical difficulty of creating a "perfect blacksmith" villager:


The villager stuff starts right at 07:00.

Interesting results.

I'm kind of surprised that more people didn't take the "Skyblock" approach like the two griefers did.

Lava, water, some dirt with grass, and a few plant starters (saplings and sugarcane, mainly) should be enough to build a sustainable sky village with ever-renewable resources (cobblestone generator, tree farm, mob farm, animals, etc).

This wasn't possible in the original Skyblock, but with a normal nether you'd be able to get blaze rods and Nether Wort for potions to heal two zombie villagers. Then you can grow a village, make an iron golem farm, build up your trading, eventually trading for all-diamond gear.

Villager trades can also provide glass, redstone, enchanted books, melons, eyes of ender, and tons of other food and gear options.

That's a pretty clever use of a lead, very nice.

So I did, at very long last, get a single ghast to spawn in my little Nether box, so I'm half way to my 6 potion achievement. It was very far from AFK, though, I had to constantly monitor it, and clean out the minecarts every time they got clogged up with magma cubes. I'm wondering whether I'd be just better off without the cart and smother mechanism, and just let the room fill up with pigmen... would ghasts still spawn, do you think?

Quote from Slytherite

well in 1.6.2/1.6.4, they fixed the bug where animals would escape from their pens.

Yeah, I have been keeping this Let's Play on 1.5.2, but I guess there isn't much reason not to use 1.6 instead. Horses aren't relevant, and I don't imagine mutiplying zombies will cause me much trouble this late in the game. I can choose whether I want to use other new items like leads, hardened or stained clay, or hay bales.

Ugh, except for the ever-present villager "HHRMM". That'll be annoying...

To change topics, does anyone have a design for a working "ghast spawning room" for the Nether? I'd prefer not to have them free-floating around the Nether, so I made a 10x10x8 enclosed room (with a roof of slabs to keep them from spawning above). I knew pigman spawning would be a problem, so I ran a powered rail around the edge to pick up the pigmen and smother them.

I went AFK last night, and didn't get a single ghast to spawn. I got tons of pigmen, of course, and then a few small magma cubes clogged up the minecarts, so the pigmen stopped getting killed. Not sure if I hit the mob cap or something.

So are Ghast spawns just much rarer than pigman spawns? Do I just need to give it more time? Or am I doing something wrong?

I thought I had already uploaded this video, this is my house build and tour, recorded way back right after I upgraded to 1.5, and incorporated hoppers into my farms:

Yes, I can confirm that a 3x3 center hole avoids "golem jams" much better than a 2x2.

Shooting an arrow works, I would bet that tossing a snowball would unclog them just as well.

I came across an awesome video from Panda9449 that dives deep into a lot of the technical detail we're talking about in this thread: (Skip ahead to 11:50 for the trading stuff)


A few things in this video that I don't believe we've discussed in this thread:

1. He says a NEW offer always locks after exactly 8 trades (14:35). After unlocking, it can take between 3 and 13 trades before it locks again. This is news to me, but sounds plausible, he shows this on a new villager. Anyone up to testing this to see if it is consistent?

2. He says that the chances of unlocking a gold trade in a Librarian's 9th and last slot are 0.00011% (at 29:29). I think we are still awaiting our 100 million trials on the 9th trade slot, I'll be curious to see if our testing confirms his figure.

3. Starting at 31:30 he shows two different ways that villagers can get their only trade locked. These were both also mentioned by Tempus64 on page 1 of this thread, but are worth mentioning again:

• First method: if you max out the first trade before unlocking the second, there is a chance that the randomly chosen new trade will be another version of the current trade, and you will be stuck. The solution is to trade with a brand new villager one item at a time, to be sure it unlocks a new trade before their first one locks.

• Second method: if you max out the first trade, then disconnect (or otherwise unload the chunk) in the two seconds before a new trade is generated, then the villager will "forget" that it was supposed to be generating a new trade, and it will be locked.

4. Starting at 34:40, he shows a clever trick to keep villager trades from getting locked: trade with a villager who has just passed through a nether portal. He explains that villagers are "cloned" when going through the portal, so your trades with the one on "this side" (that has just disappeared) don't lock the clone's trades on the other side of the portal. Pretty complicated, but I could see some use for this, let say for a very valuable (but expensive) enchanted book trade that you don't want to be replaced with a cheaper one.

Butcher Test Results

Final set of test results, for the butcher. Here are the Probability Values per round, based on how many existing trades have been opened:



and how that impacts the tested probability per round:



and the chance of gold per round:



And the raw data dump:

Trade Item,0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
Coal,21053418,17128944,13445387,11234363,9666710,8708329,7900484,7187679,6558015,5992539
Cooked Pork,7930104,8729608,9185276,9461205,9659740,10104899,10479882,10809179,11096542,11365546
Cooked Steak,7937865,8720757,9184198,9458308,9660174,10102581,10481589,10807247,11103492,11362298
Gold,792868,9701,2875,570,118,99,33,20,8,2
Leather Boots,7938513,8732005,9184086,9466423,9661414,10103361,10482266,10818806,11103494,11368446
Leather Cap,7941035,8731940,9192312,9470504,9660921,10109962,10481913,10818305,11108727,11370569
Leather Chest,7934522,8728592,9193866,9465595,9666567,10112261,10492936,10816244,11108487,11372844
Leather Pants,7937603,8737415,9189756,9465521,9661466,10108991,10490826,10818395,11107386,11363964
Raw Beef,14009503,12712119,12797869,12818179,12827859,11728155,10787100,9970651,9249772,8601685
Raw Pork,14007917,12709704,12789914,12821404,12832422,11727280,10789801,9974620,9253336,8601917
Saddle,2516652,5059215,5834461,6337928,6702609,7194082,7613170,7978854,8310741,8600190