How come this has started to become popular again lately? And I mean in a "many people seem to be legitimately believing it" way? Like even back then, most people seemed to know it wasn't a real thing and was just a thing for its own sake, but today it seems people are giving off the impression they legitimately believe it.
Yes, the update notes are a joke. Herobrine never existed in the game outside mods (don't know about the April Fool updates but I'm not counting them either). Anything else is users wanting to believe it's real or knowing it's false but trying to trick others.
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No, and they haven't ever, even Mojang (which is technically still its own entity) hasn't for many years (I recall seeing at least one of them posting here in a thread from like 15 years ago although I can't find anything right now), since this was never an "official" forum (as stated on the bottom of any page, "NOT AN OFFICIAL MINECRAFT WEBSITE. NOT APPROVED BY OR ASSOCIATED WITH MOJANG OR MICROSOFT"). It may have been used by the developer(s) very early on, when the game was essentially a simple indie game made by a single person, but Mojang has long had their own sites for feedback and reporting bugs.
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It does exist, read my previous reply, post #17 (and "herobrine" has never, ever existed in any official way, only as a modded hoax; I keep telling everybody who does, how come no modder (myself included, one of the most knowledgeable people alive with regards to the coding of old versions) has been able to find any trace of them in the code, which is extremely easy to decompile thanks to being written in Java, and with so many people so eager to find them surely it should have been discovered long ago, but no, nothing; an interesting read: Minceraft, a post mortem).
The recent interest in this specific version is also just bizarre, which also goes back to the conclusion of the aforementioned post about Minceraft, both of which apply perfectly in this case (or rather, being unable to find any evidence of "them", and the "removed" mentions by Mojang simply refer to the removal of the "human" mob, which itself never behaved in any "paranormal" manner):
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They did change mineshafts in 1.13, although what you show is just random variation; they removed the last part of this line of code so they are no longer less common closer to 0,0 (within 80 chunks or 1280 blocks), a feature which I'd long removed because it ruins the "classic" underground (aka how I simply explore from a cave system to a mineshaft, ravine, etc):
Otherwise, the chance has been fixed at 0.004 (0.4% per chunk) ever since 1.7, while it was 0.01 (1%) before; this means that since 1.13 they are only more common than they were in 1.6.4 within 512 blocks of 0,0 (1% * 32/80 = 0.4%), so I wouldn't call this a buff, it would increase the probability of larger networks close to 0,0 but the overall reduction in frequency and changes to caves preclude the interconnectivity of 1.6.4 (once father away from 0,0, of course; "One cave leads to a mineshaft. The mineshaft leads to a ravine and a few other caves, the ravine leads to even more caves and another mineshaft which leads to more caves and another ravine, and all these caves lead to more caves, and more ravines, and more mineshafts which lead to more and more.").
For perspective, this shows how common mineshafts used to be (with their potential range included, not just start, so you can see how likely they would overlap, and the majority do, I consider it to be uncommon to find one that isn't intersected by at least one other mineshaft; conversely, I've found as many as 24 mineshafts directly interconnected):
Shamefully, ChunkBase removed support for older versions but you can still use an archived page, you can also see how much rarer they are near 0,0 (even fully zoomed out there are only a few near the edges of the viewport):
https://web.archive.org/web/20151025040827/http://chunkbase.com/apps/mineshaft-finder#-123775873255737467
Also, it is interesting to note that 1.13 introduced a serious bug, or rather, made an existing bug much worse; notice how the left and right halves halves of this image appear to be flipped? Every mineshaft in one half is in fact the same as the one at its corresponding sign-reversed coordinate pair in the second half, a bug which I'd noticed (and fixed) long ago, especially once I really started modding the underground (it became very apparent once I added much larger caves and ravines; some seeds, like my first world in 1.13, are affected more than others):
For comparison, these are the top 20 largest features in the 1.6.4 version of the seed, only a few of each are paired up (indicated by a *), with ravines being most-affected (about 1/6 overall based on a comparison of volume with all ravines and only sign-reversed pairs mapped):
This seems to be due to changing "nextDouble" to "nextFloat", which has far fewer bits of precision, and/or because of how it extracts bits from the underlying RNG (nextDouble also cycles the generator twice per call; I have no idea why Mojang did this in 1.13, or made similar changes to caves, instead of "nextInt" they now also use "nextFloat"), this is also a major undocumented (or not explicitly stated, everybody just thought it was oceans) change to world generation, affecting not just the underground but many surface features (it is true that there are more minor changes in many versions, e.g. 1.6.4 differs slightly in certain chunks, more so in deserts because of the removal of water lakes from them, but major features are identical; I'd certainly notice if the caves/mineshaft I was exploring suddenly ended at a chunk border, then again, it is obvious that Mojang doesn't expect the average player to do much caving at all):
MC-125618 New underground world generation differs from 1.12.2
MC-124960 Some structures generate at different locations
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You have to use a hoe to till grass blocks (the full block, "tall grass" did not exist until Beta 1.6. these have also changed names over time, "tall grass" now refers to the 2 block high plant added in release 1.7 and the original is now "short grass"):
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Wheat_Seeds#History
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They used AdFly, which no longer exists / was taken over by Linkvertise, ruining every such old link and nobody has ever bothered to fix them (the developer hasn't been active at all since 2016, whether it is because they no longer use the forums or lost interest in the game; they never seem to have updated this thread since the day they created it so I don't know if they ever completed the mod at all).
They did make a newer post (Feb 12, 2014) in another thread for the 1.1.0 Beta version of the mod with a link for the latest version but it is broken (forbidden, which generally means it was deleted for some reason and as often is the case the Wayback Machine never properly archived it, only a single entry for a redirect):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding-java-edition/minecraft-mods/1292298-1-6-4-forge-terramine-mod-terraria-stuff-in?comment=13
That aside, 1.0.0 appears to be the newer version of the mod, as also reflected by the dates the threads were made ("beta" generally means an incomplete developmental version and generally has its own versioning scheme, just like how Beta 1.7.3 is older, not newer, than Release 1.0.0)
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I don't understand the question, of course it exists, unless you are on a much older version of the game:
Prior to this you literally just fall through the ground past 30 million; extremely old versions, Beta 1.7.3 and earlier, had "far lands", extremely deformed terrain due to a breakdown in the terrain generator, but otherwise not an actual border (I don't know if you just fall through the ground after 30 million in these old versions; the following is from 1.6.4):
Only caves generate since they are part of the terrain; lighting also doesn't work properly:
Why have a border at all? Computers have limits; most of the game uses 32 bit numbers, which have a range of a bit more than +/- 2 billion; 64 bit could be used but use more memory and are not faster, even slower as a result (modern computers are very heavily limited by main memory latency, which is hundreds of times slower than CPUs, which do get around this, often quite well, by using special high-speed caches but they can only hold a limited amount of data); "floating point" (decimal numbers), used by things like entity positions, also have a finite amount of precision (even normal gameplay near 0,0 can be impacted by this, causing entities to glitch into/through walls, unless measures are taken to account for floating point precision errors).
Also, who even legitimately (just plain survival, no commands or editors) even goes that far out, or needs to for anything other than the sake of it? (anything you can name, no matter how rare, is essentially infinite, unless it was coded to only generate a limited number of times, such as strongholds, and even here only on Java Edition; multiply the time it takes to travel 60 million blocks by the number of passes needed to cover the entire 60x60 million area, even with unbreakable elytra and infinite fireworks, and you are looking at thousands of years; 60,000,000 / 33.5 m/s = 20.73 days; spaced every 1024 blocks (width of 32 chunk render distance, really a bit less if you want a full clear view, the system also needs to be fast enough to generate and render the whole area) means about 58,600 passes taking 3,325 years; never mind how much disk space you would need).
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This has no relation to how biomes are laid out in 1.7-1.17 though; the game simply places biomes into a set of four lists, some in multiple lists, all the temperature and rainfall values do is determine their colors:
Note that Plains is in three categories and Extreme Hills is in two; "cool" may also have Mega Taiga, "warm" Jungle, and "hot" Mesa added as larger areas (so it isn't entirely correct to say that 1/4 of "cool" is Extreme Hills). Biomes are simply chosen from each list at random, just as they were in 1.6.4, except there was only one list back then, as shown for "cool" (a special value which is set at a different stage of biome generation determines if an area is Mega Taiga):
For comparison, 1.6.4 simply had a single list, with Ice Plains handled separately (in fact, 1.7 uses the same code to initially add climate zones):
It is worth noting that Ice Plains ended up being about as common as the other biomes but appears much rarer when looking at a map of a world due to its size, the same issue that happened with jungle and other biomes in 1.7:
The frequency of a given biome should also account for "hills" and "edge", e..g Extreme Hills totals 10.59%, Plains will be less regardless since its sub-biome is Forest, Jungle and Swampland have "river" as small "lakes", and Taiga is the most common "normal" biome since it is the only one allowed in Ice Plains regions (a lot of the "river" shown generates around the edges of continents as "shallow ocean"; Frozen Ocean only seems to exist as as a fluke and is only a fraction of frozen "ocean" around Ice Plains)
The proportion of biomes in my first world may not exactly reflect the above, but should be close when considering the mix of "normal" biomes (besides Ocean, Ice Plains, and Mushroom Island):
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The only change to cave generation in 1.7 was to the size/density of cave systems and overall distribution of such, while the individual caves (tunnels/rooms) remained exactly the same as they had since Beta 1.8 added a chance of tunnels reaching up to 27 blocks wide instead of 3-9, and not really that much rarer overall (77% as common). That cave would be large even by 1.6.4 standards, where I've found only 14 caves of comparable size (volume of at least 10,000 blocks) within an area of about 9 level 4 maps.
For comparison, these are the 10 largest caves within 512 blocks of 448, 448 (covering your map), with the one you show being the first (these figures assume the entire cave could generate, including one that starts at y=91, which could be in a mountain; I use "1.7-1.12" because for some reason Mojang changed how caves and many other features are placed in 1.13 but until 1.18 the only actual change was to mineshafts, which no longer become less common closer to the origin):
The corresponding maps of the same area; 6.15% of the underground in 1.6.4 was air while in 1.7 the figure was 4.52%; there were also 31 mineshafts in 1.6.4 and 14 in 1.7 (the single biggest change was a reduction in mineshafts by 60%, followed by half as many dungeons in 1.7. Ravines were unchanged, but do head in different directions from their starting end; dungeons and ravines differ because Mojang blindly changed every instance of 128 to 256 even though neither benefit from higher terrain, even breaking some things, e.g. mushrooms were limited to below 128 in the Nether so they wouldn't generate on the Nether roof but they changed that to 256 anyway):
1.7-1.12; the cave you show is in the lower-right (colored green as it is exposed to the surface, these maps only go up to sea level). There is also a large complex of caves and mineshafts near the center (probably large enough for many to declare that there were no underground changes in 1.7 since they don't do much caving):
Also, this is the same seed in TMCW, showing just how different it is from vanilla and why you shouldn't use anything I show as an example of it, not even remotely close (I've had more than one person confuse them before, thinking that this was what caves were like in 1.6.4); the underground volume was 12.56%, or 2-3 times that of vanilla (even 1.18 is only about 6.66%, if a bit more in absolute terms due to the greater depth) and the largest single cave was over 50 times larger than in either vanilla version, with a total of 26 caves reaching at least 10,000 (which doesn't even include caves within several "large cave cave systems", and other such features), which represents over 60 times the density of what I've found in my first world (closer to 50 if you include a few caves that failed to actually generate due to ocean; all the datasets here do include fairly small areas and even vanilla has a lot of variance over such areas):
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This means that you need to use Java 21, as some modders will use a newer version to compile their mods than what the vanilla game requires (Java 17),. which should be stated in the download page for the mod (IMO they should be using the same version):
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10382929/how-to-fix-java-lang-unsupportedclassversionerror-unsupported-major-minor-versi/11432195#11432195
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Giants never even naturally spawned in any version; Mojang removed their AI since they used an older (and very basic) AI system which was entirely removed in 1.8, so why bother taking the time to code a new one in for them (actually, not that hard at all*).
*I updated them to the new AI system myself by simply adding these lines of code, copied from zombies (this is from 1.6.4, where they still had an AI but as mentioned above it was very crude):
There is also some other stuff to consider, e.g. their bad hitbox detection (they can only attack/be attacked from their feet since the game only checks distance to that point, I fixed this by considering them as a line of points):
As for the issues with attack damage, no idea why they were given so much damage, way more than creepers did back then (they were only increased to their current 49 (Normal; as of the original discussion in 2015) much later, before being reduced to 43 so they don't one-shot players in full Protection IV diamond on Hard due to the armor changes in 1.9), I reduced it to 10 (6 Easy, 15 Hard), which is still two hits to kill an unarmored player on Normal and Hard.