While exploring a huge mineshaft and associated caves I came across a new biome - Savanna Mountains - which is my mod's version of Savanna Plateau (M), with crazy terrain that can reach around y=190, the maximum height of terrain in my mod (I did not go all the way to 256 since that leaves no room for anything above plus mountains are already impossible to climb without ladders or pillaring up). This one does not appear to have the "extreme" variant, which is higher and more crazified (a term coined by Zeno410, who despises terrain that looks like this):
Also, I got not just one but two amethyst items from zombies, after previously having only gotten a single shovel in more than 3 months of playing (2 1/2 of those spent caving); a sword and a pickaxe:
(a free potato as well)
Also, I could use these items to repair my gear for fewer levels than a single unit, which would cost 48 levels in the case of my sword, restoring 1171 durability, while this sword would restore 1154 durability for 44 levels (592 + 12% of 4686), although I'm keeping them all as trophies:
One thing to note is that amethyst items will never have more than 25% durability left, and diamond items no more than 50%, this more done more so you could actually use them to repair things than to balance out getting them as drops (diamond gear is only worth a handful of emeralds if you have villagers; amethyst can only be gotten from mining, chest loot, and mob drops) as otherwise amethyst is off-the-charts expensive if you use brand-new items, I believe 60-something levels (the anvil cost limit is 49 levels for amethyst items only; diamond and other tiers still have the vanilla cap of 39 levels).
The mineshaft also had a crazy amount of cave spider spawners in it; I collected a total of 15 spawners, 3 from dungeons and the rest cave spiders, as well as more than 500 cobwebs, only the ones around the spawners, and killed more than 100 cave spiders, more than any other mob except zombies:
Also, this shows just how unreliable caving (mineshafting?) can be for getting diamonds - zero, zip, nada out of more than 4500 ores mined, I did not even find any in the numerous minecarts that I found:
Of course, I have gotten more than a stack of diamonds in one day before when exploring a very deep mineshaft in my first world (such mineshafts are much rarer in TMCW since diamonds are 7 layers deeper down but mineshafts have the same altitude distribution; mineshafts that cut through bedrock are entirely absent since there is only one layer) but on average I only find around 4 per hour, much slower than branch-mining (this is even worse in the case of amethyst, where I often go for days without finding any; it is about 8 times rarer than diamond above y=2, which includes the entire range exposed by caves (3 and up), and about a third as common below).
This is some of the stuff that I got today, after making a trip back to my base to empty it out earlier; the 31 amethyst here is nearly all that I have as surplus, with 9 more back at my main base (the iron pickaxe was another zombie drop, I kept it since it had Unbreaking II and will use it, along with pickaxes taken from mineshafts and given level 1 enchantments, when mining a new railway):
(you can also see that the moment I took this screenshot a zombie walked up and attacked me)
Some more screenshots of the mineshaft in a largish cave:
Due to the size of the mineshaft I've explored quite a bit off the southern edge of my current map but will stop exploring southwards after I'm done with it and will soon start exploring a new map (east, west, or north of the first map, centered around 0,0).
Also, I made another minor tweak to TMCW that makes it a bit harder to branch-mine for amethyst; water and lava lakes can generate all the way down to bedrock but do not cut through it or replace it with stone (in the case of lava lakes) whereas before they were limited to y=5 or above (surface of liquid, which is 1-3 blocks deep), the same as vanilla (I simply check if the y-coordinate is 1 or above before replacing any blocks, sort of like the trees replacing bedrock bug, which was caused by branches failing to check the type of block before replacing it):
Interestingly, I also discovered a vanilla bug; water lakes in snowy biomes are supposed to generate frozen-over but the code used the incorrect offset so they were only frozen by other code that adds snow and freezes water, resulting in random areas that are not frozen during world generation since lakes can extend into adjacent and already populated areas (this source from 1.10 shows the bug; the offset on lines 162 and 164 should be 3, not 4, since 4 and above is air). When fixing this ALL lakes, even ones underground, became frozen over until I added a check to make sure that the surface was the highest exposed block (the code calls isBlockFreezable(), which only checks to see if the block is water and the temperature of the biome is less than 0.15).
How do I set up global difficulty to 50 hours instead of waiting 50 hours? I would like to get some great armor drops from Zombies and Skeletons. Do I use NBTEdit?
How do I set up global difficulty to 50 hours instead of waiting 50 hours? I would like to get some great armor drops from Zombies and Skeletons. Do I use NBTEdit?
That is actually 100 hours on Easy-Normal and 75 on Hard (75 and 50 hours respectively during a full moon. Once 100/75 hours pass it remains at the maximum regardless of moon phase, which does still affect some things like slime spawning). You'd either have to AFK/play for that time (by the time I start caving at the "end-game" it is around halfway to the max) or use NBTExplorer to edit level.dat to change the world time to at least 7200000 (ticks, where one hour of real time is 72000 ticks).
Note that you want to change the "Time" field, not "DayTime"; this is also why sleeping in a bed or using commands to change the time has no effect since they only change the latter; conversely, changing the "Time" will have no effect on the number of days displayed in the inventory:
Time: The number of ticks since the start of the level.
DayTime: The time of day. 0 is sunrise, 6000 is mid day, 12000 is sunset, 18000 is mid night, 24000 is the next day's 0. This value keeps counting past 24000 and does not reset to 0.
I got a couple interesting mob drops today, including a diamond helmet from a baby zombie in full diamond armor and a bow with Power II, Punch I, Flame I:
Also, I've now mined more than a quarter-million resources (ores, rails, moss stone, cobwebs, mob spawners, the last of which count since they drop an "empty spawner" block when mined with Silk Touch), still far cry from what I mined in my first world but far more than most players will ever mine:
Including multiple drops from redstone and lapis I've collected closer to 300,000 resources. All of this can fit in less than 10 double chests when crafted into blocks (including rails, while cobwebs are 4 per block).
All of that was mined in less than 14.57 days or 349.68 hours of playing, including the time it took for me to build my main base and everything else up to the Ender Dragon, plus some additional time spent building a 1.2 km railway and a secondary base:
It is interesting to note that despite being found in just one biome I've still found more ruby ore than amethyst ore; ruby is about as common as gold in Rocky Mountains but distributed everywhere below sea level and I found 148 in a single biome, compared to 142 amethyst overall, 22 of which was found by branch-mining, so I've really only found 120 by caving, which also compares to 997 diamond ore, 91 from branch-mining and 906 from caving. I've found less emerald ore though, just 53 from a single emerald-containing biome (Forest Mountains).
Also, I've found 314 mob spawners so far, of which 143 came from 125 normal dungeons and 9 double dungeons (2 each), 9 came from a stronghold, and the remaining 162 were all cave spider spawners.
Here is an updated list of what I've found so far:
Play sessions spent caving: 76
Structures found (by number):
125 normal dungeons
112 ravines (up to 7 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
43 mineshafts
26 large caves (larger than vanilla)
16 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
9 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
7 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
6 villages
5 fossils
3 circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter (twice as large as vanilla)
3 igloos (1 with basement)
2 jungle temples
3 ravine cave clusters
3 ravine cave systems
2 circular room cave clusters
2 combination cave systems
2 vertical cave clusters
2 vertical cave systems
1 colossal cave system
1 desert temple
1 desert well
1 maze cave system
1 network cave region
1 stronghold
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Snowless Taiga
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Savanna Mountains
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
148 (Savanna Mountains)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
296 blocks long, 31 blocks wide, 62 blocks deep (calculated volume of 255799)
Largest cave:
336 blocks long, 22 blocks wide (calculated volume of 49100)
Largest circular room:
45 blocks in diameter (calculated volume of 23856)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
A couple renderings of what I've explored underground, for the entire world (excluding the stronghold and 50% of original size) and the area I most recently explored, including the colossal cave system near the center and the mineshafts I mentioned earlier (which turned out to be 3 separate mineshafts in close proximity, but none overlapping. One of them was pretty large, with more than 600 rails, while another only had about 50, compared to about 300 for the average mineshaft in vanilla):
Have you ever spent a lot of time looking for something, only to find it in the last place that you looked? Well, that is the feeling that I got after what I found today, in the very last bit of the current map, and very close to the first map I explored.
A cave so large that an entire city could be built within it:
Yes, I even pillar up so I can light up and mine any ores in the ceiling, which was up to 34 blocks high; I took the screenshots above before this:
It was more than twice as large as the largest cave that I found until now, which had a calculated volume of 49100, but still only around a fifth the size of the largest possible cave:
Results found for the area from 496, 512 to 575, 591:
Found cave with length of 326, width of 34, and volume of 105596 at 520, 23, 568
The cave was located under the mesa biome in the far northeastern corner of the map, while exploring other caves associated with it I even went northwards off the map, back onto the first map I made, but only now did I return to explore anything left in that corner:
Some of the other caves; there was a quite dense but relatively small cave system connected to the giant cave (which was several times larger than it; I still mined far more ores from this cave system due to the much greater surface area, since area only increases by the square of the width while volume increases by the cube):
Also, I experienced an odd glitch; I mined a mob spawner and the particles remained, which has happened to me a few times before (the first time in this world out of 315 spawners):
Of interest, this is what the largest cave that can possibly generate in my mod looks like (I forced it to generate at the maximum size, with a width of 85 and length of 336, which is effectively 462 with a combined length of 924 blocks for all branches due to the way they generate):
Now you know why they increased the maximum render distance to 32 chunks in 1.8 (well, not really):
Also, not only did I find one of the largest caves, I also found a circular room cave system (unexplored), located just south of what would be the map to the east of spawn; because of this I think I'll start exploring that map next (the largest types of caves are not entirely random; they are more or less common within 16x16 chunk regions, which means that there may be more nearby; the 16x16 chunk regions themselves are random with a 0-25-50-100% chance of a large cave generating during each attempt, with the average of 43.75% amounting to about one every 130 chunks or 2 per region).
Just two days later I have found yet another giant cave a short distance to the north of the last one, while finishing up the last bit of the first map in the southeast corner (I had not explored it before since I did not find any caves leading there until now, from the south. There's a similar area to the northeast which I'm leaving for now but may explore later from the east):
After this I'll build a railway to the east and a new secondary base around 1024,0, the center of a level 3 map east of the first map (around 0,0). The last map, to the south, took about 7 days of playing to explore over about 1 1/2 months. Also, the total time that I've spent in this world will soon be second only to my first world; I've also never made more than one secondary base in any other world.
I encountered my first Diamond Mob in my world. Shortly, I saw 2 iron armored skeletons. I saw a zombie with iron armor earlier and I burned it into the lava.
It was not as large as the last one but was still the second largest cave that I've found:
Results found for the area from 448, 240 to 591, 383:
Found cave with length of 314, width of 23, and volume of 51651 at 520, 19, 312
There was also a medium-large (lengthwise) ravine nearby, the first one that I've found in a while:
Results found for the area from 464, 320 to 607, 463:
Found ravine with length of 214, width of 10, depth of 31, and volume of 35568 at 536, 15, 392
Here is an Unmined rendering of both large caves compared to the largest ravine that I found, which had a calculated volume of 255799, about five times larger than the cave I just found. The cave I just explored is at the bottom and while it has a calculated volume that is half the cave at the top it doesn't appear much smaller since it sprawls out more, and in the case of a perfectly spherical cave (or circular room) a doubling of volume corresponds to an increase in radius of only about 26%:
Also, based on the coordinates of both large caves, with the x coordinates being the same and the z coordinates 256 blocks apart, I'm pretty sure that they are the largest variant (largest average size, as the much more common variant can actually get slightly larger but averages much smaller), with a frequency of about one every 2560 chunks; these caves generate to a 16 chunk grid at relative offsets 0,0 and 8,8, or 256 blocks apart along a single axis and 128 along both (diagonal) with the chance based on the actual chance of a cave system (1/15 with a 75% chance that the "size" will be nonzero, the same as in vanilla 1.6.4).
While exploring the cave I encountered a zombie in full amethyst armor, along with 4 other armored zombies at the same time, including one in full iron armor:
I also came across an oddity - a dungeon with 3 chests, which I can only guess was caused by two dungeons generating on top of each other since only double dungeons can have more than 2 chests. One of the chests also had quite valuable loot in it, including 2 golden apples (out of a total of 22 found so far so that was 10% of what I'd found before), 2 diamonds and 1 diamond horse armor, the others just had some redstone and lapis, a few buckets, iron horse armor, and rotten flesh:
Before exploring further the next thing that I'll be doing is building a railway to the east, stopping at around 1024, 0, depending on what I find there (I'd prefer not to build on a mountain or in a giant tree biome; my last base was built on a frozen lake between two mountains).
I encountered a diamond zombie, and then you encountered a rare zombie.
Oh, and what's the biggest cave seed in your mod?
I don't have any particular seeds but you can use the CaveFinder utility included with the mod to find all of the various types of caves, which sorts them by distance and by their estimated volume (caves, ravines, and circular rooms, the last a recent addition). Note that unless you use the "NoExclusion" version (class files included in a separate folder, add them after the main mod, for CaveFinder there is a separate batch file that has the "noex" parameter added) none of these will ever appear by spawn unless the game spawns you far from the origin, which will pretty much only happen on Large Biomes worlds (I made some alterations to the spawn point finding code so even if a valid spawn biome (plains, forest, jungle, taiga, the same as vanilla, even in 1.7+, plus oasis in Desert M) is not found it will look for a grass-covered biome above sea level before finally using the vanilla code that searches up to 1000 random points which can easily get 1000 blocks away).
Here is an example for the seed "10", the seed I mainly used while testing, using the maximum radius of 8192 blocks (an area of 1048576 chunks):
Here are the largest caves, ravines, and circular rooms found; the latter two reached the largest that they can possibly get (336 blocks long and 39 blocks wide and 71 blocks in diameter respectively):
The three largest caves; the first one is supposedly the largest but actually looks smaller than the other two (it generated under an ocean and it likely went higher, perhaps even breaking the surface); either way, it is over 100 blocks across (wider than its width of 73 since they loop around on themselves)
The three largest circular rooms; unlike caves their sizes are exact and would only be less due to being below lava level or above sea level, but the largest circular rooms are shifted up or down so their center y-coordinate) is always between those layers. The second one also connects to a large cave and the last one has two more large circular rooms nearby:
The three largest ravines; similar to circular rooms their y-coordinate is adjusted towards y=30-40 as they get larger:
I set the FOV to Quake Pro for the last one:
Of course, nothing beats a giant cave region, which is a 12x12 chunk region with numerous large caves, extending across a region about 300 blocks across:
Giant cave regions can be immediately recognized by the presence of giant mushrooms, the only place they can be found underground; they also come in four variants with each style coming in red and brown (instead of only one type for each color)
Here are the results of analyzing a 256x256 block area centered over each giant cave region - more than 1 million air blocks each, averaging 26.6% air over 63 layers below sea level, or equivalent to nearly 73 chunks with nothing but air between layers 4-62 (59 layers):
Also, here is a map of the entire world, showing all the caves that I visited, with the 400x400 block spawn area near the center, between the two giant cave regions (within 1048576 chunks there are hundreds each of large caves and ravines with a calculated volume over 50000, and hundreds of circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter, twice the largest ones in vanilla, and an average of 64 giant cave regions):
As mentioned before I built a new railway to the east, ending in a mesa biome at the exact spot I planned to build a new base:
After a bit of terraforming this is what I built; since I had so much stained clay on hand I decided to use it to build my base, the first time that I've used it:
Here is a level 0 map of the area before I zoomed it out to a level 3 map:
Also, I saw a couple interesting things while digging the railway; a new biome, Poplar Grove (as a full-size biome, not a sub-biome within Birch Forest) and jungle hills rising above cloud level (I did not climb them to see just how high they were):
I've started exploring the map to the east, or rather, the map just to the south of that one, which I also decided to make because the area I'm exploring is right along the z=512 boundary between them:
I don't plan to fully explore the southern (southeastern) map at this time, just the current area of caves, which includes the circular room cave system that I found earlier and a network cave region, the second one that I've found, which can extend as much as 544 blocks from one end to the other, usually no more than 300-350 due to the curvature of the caves (as with giant cave regions caves generate within a 12x12 chunk area, and vary in length from 112 to 176 blocks).
Here are some screenshots of the circular room cave system, which is a special type of cave system made up of 42-58 circular rooms ranging from 9-27 blocks in diameter with narrow tunnels leading from each one to the center of the cave system and a couple caves leading to the surface:
A large cavern formed from at least 5 overlapping circular rooms:
A random screenshot of a mob-filled cave (they all came in after I lit it up and killed the mobs that were already inside):
I did not find any diamonds in the cave system but I did find this (a total of 4 amethyst ore):
I found another jungle temple - the third one so far - they are supposed to be the rarest structure (they do have the highest chance of spawning in their respective biome and I've found quite a few jungles), a witch hut, the first one that I've found despite finding several swamps before, and a massive circular room 57 blocks in diameter.
First, I spotted the jungle temple after building a marker pillar for returning to later to continue exploring caves from that point; it did not have anything particularly valuable in it, some gold, redstone, lapis, iron horse armor (not worth taking) and half a stack of bones:
More interestingly, I "discovered" it again while caving; I was mining coal in the ceiling of the giant circular room when gravel fell down and exposed the bottom, I thought it was a dungeon but it was the bottom of the jungle temple:
The witch hut, which I've never paid much attention to, they never have any witches because they immediately despawn (this was fixed in 1.11) unless you teleport to one or (post-1.7.4) use a low render distance, nor have I ever seen any spawn in them (I never saw a witch in Survival until I added them to natural spawning):
The giant circular room, the largest one that I've found so far at 57 blocks in diameter, with a ravine cutting through the middle. The four blocks of gravel near the top center of the first screenshot are directly below the jungle temple I found:
Results found for the area from 944, 512 to 959, 527:
Found circular room with width of 57 and volume of 48391 at 949, 50, 521
Here is a rendering of what I've explored recently; in the center is the network cave region, of which I've explored the y=50 level and a bit of the y=30 level so far, at the bottom is the circular room cave system and just to the left is one of the giant caves I found earlier, with a mineshaft above both, while the giant circular room is near the top right, with the jungle temple above it. Another mineshaft, which I have not explored yet, is near the center, within the network cave region. Below this is a rendering of the entire world:
I discovered a new biome today - Mega Mixed Forest, which is the big tree version of Mixed Forest (which I spawned within), and contains every type of big tree (2x2 or larger) in my mod; jungle, oak, spruce, Mega Forest, and TMCW Mega Taiga, the last having 3x3 trunks:
As with several other biomes with big trees the light opacity of leaf blocks is handled differently so they do not block as much light, although it can still get pretty dark in areas (note that this means that if you use MCEdit on a world and it relit chunks in one of these biomes it would become much darker. The other biomes affected are Mega Forest, Big Oak Forest, and TMCW Mega Taiga):
This brings the total number of biomes that I've found to 28, excluding river, hills, and edge sub-biomes and sub-biomes which I also found as full-size biomes (Plains, Forest, Lake, Poplar Grove; one other biome, Frozen Lake, also generates as its own full-size biome but I have not found it yet and it only generates in cold climate zones):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Taiga (snowless)
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Savanna Mountains
Poplar Grove
Mega Mixed Forest
Including all sub-biomes would at double the number of unique biomes that I've found; River alone has 4 variants (normal, froze, desert, mesa) plus 4 more Riverbank biomes (8 total, the latter are added along rivers to help smooth out height differences), and I've technically found Savanna as an edge biome of Savanna Mountains, which in turn has an Extreme Savanna Mountains sub-biome; many biomes have 2-3 sub-biomes, such as Mixed Forest, which has Plains and Lake (the former is what I actually spawned in; the game could have instead spawned me in a Jungle to the west, and would have if I had not added Plains to Mixed Forest). Including vanilla biomes there are a total of 94 biome IDs used, 92 for the Overworld, plus one "fake" biome, used for a special variant of Ice Hills that has Ice Plains Spikes as an edge biome (this is only a separate biome within the biome generation code, which uses a special value in order to separate Ice Hills technical biomes within Ice Plains from the full-size version so only the latter has an edge biome, and its "ID" is replaced with the real one by the end of the biome generation process).
Also, I found another double dungeon, the 10th one so far out of a total of 151 dungeons; of the 141 normal dungeons that I've found only two were connected to each other:
I knew that this was a double dungeon before I opened it since I saw chiseled stone bricks along the bottom, which replaces cobblestone in the floor:
I also mention this because I recently made a change to mob spawners; because you can't actually get the block with Silk Touch, instead getting an "empty spawner" block, the lack of XP dropping, as with ores mined with Silk Touch, was not necessary so I made them always drop XP (if I had implemented this from the start I'd have gotten around 9000 additional XP, not that I need it):
Also, here is another dungeon that I found, just skeletons shooting themselves:
These are some things that I've found over the past few days:
Jungle Hills rising to y=130; these are the same ones that I noticed earlier while building a railway, and are the fourth instance of terrain rising above y=128 (previously, Rocky Mountains at y=156, Ice Mountains at y=165, Roofed Forest at y=128; plus a single floating block of Winter Forest at y=128 but I don't count that, nor do trees count). There are technically two peaks, both topping out at y=130:
A zombie dropped an iron pickaxe enchanted with Fortune I; it is possible to get higher levels as well, even Efficiency IV, Fortune III, Unbreaking III on Hard, where gear can receive level 30 enchantments (5-13 on Easy, 5-22 on Normal, and 5-30 on Hard, with the upper bound increasing with playtime). Due to the higher enchantability of amethyst it may be possible to get Fortune III with a level 22 enchantment:
A skeleton in full diamond armor (caught in the act of shooting an arrow); this is only the second time that I've seen one in diamond or amethyst, while I've seen numerous zombies with it; this is not because they have a lower chance of better armor than zombies but because zombies are much more common (they actually have the same spawn chances as well but zombies target the player from much further away):
This is all of the diamond and amethyst gear, plus a few other items, that I've gotten from mob drops as well as minecarts (4 diamond pickaxes); the three iron pickaxes in the bottom row were taken from minecarts and are used to dig railways (I had a whole row before I dug the latest one, they have at least Efficiency I):
I came across a large cave opening, along with what looks like another relatively large cave next to it, neither of which I've explored yet:
Finally, here is my updated map wall after returning to my main base for the first time since I built my latest base (some of the area was explored from my main base, I did not go to my current base until I went more than 100 blocks off the center map). the large cave shown above is large enough to be easily visible as a gray dot near the easternmost explored edge:
Also, since there aren't that many documented seeds for my mod I decided that I'll occasionally check out random seeds; the seed that I used today was 8715517392029181155:
Here are maps of the surface and underground (below layer 40 instead of sea level so large caves, which are always below y=30, show up better); spawn is at the player marker near the upper-right:
Some screenshots of interesting terrain and other things that I came across; I mainly explored to the west of spawn because there is an ocean to the east and I covered an area of at least 1024x1024 blocks:
Spawn was near -100, -240, near the shore of a Mega Tree Plains with a Spruce Hills sub-biome nearby so you don't have to cut down one of the huge trees (a pretty big job that can take half an hour). Note that only the tall type of spruce with a cluster of leaves at the top grows in Spruce Hills, but you can grow the other type in Mega Tree Plains (or 2x2/3x3 spruces in either):
At -484, -167 is a Forest Mountains reaching y=154; this seed has quite a few high peaks close to spawn:
At -620, -384 is a Winter Forest Mountains reaching y=143:
These Extreme Hills at -324, 73 are relatively modest by comparison, only rising to y=131, but they can get much higher:
Nearby is a Big Oak Forest with an interesting floating formation with a large (2x2) tree on it at -420, 90, rising well above the rest:
Further south I found a pink sheep at -460, 285:
Some more Extreme Hills at -280, 530, rising to y=124:
An interesting land formation in a Mixed Forest at 0, 300:
Another in a Roofed Forest at -775, -285:
I also came across a couple villages within the same Meadow, at -965, -270 and -1150, -80; the latter narrowly avoided generating over a ravine and cave:
Here is a list of the nearest/largest caves within 1536 blocks of the origin (3x3 level 3 maps):
These are the largest caves and ravines listed, which are not shown on the map above; the largest circular room does appear and is near the left side (it is actually two circular rooms that generated very close to each other, with the larger one, 67 blocks in diameter, completely engulfing the smaller one, at 39 blocks). The third largest ravine listed can also be seen the north of the cave:
Also, the large cave is actually even larger than indicated by CaveFinder, which calculated a volume of 373,109; I used MCEdit to measure it, filling in some caves and ravines nearby first to make it more accurate, and found an actual volume of well over 400,000 air blocks (it is possible to measure the exact volume by actually generating them, which I've done before to find the largest cave systems in vanilla; this can easily be done outside the game since caves operate on the raw chunk data, which is a simple array and block IDs can be simplified to 1 or 0, the only limitation is that it won't account for terrain above sea level or underwater). The ravine is obviously smaller than indicated since part of it is above sea level or underwater; otherwise, they are much more consistent since they do not curve much (in earlier versions of TMCW they could loop around on themselves but I limit the maximum angle to +/- 45 degrees from the start, or a 90 degree bend) and do not branch:
I encountered a skeleton in full amethyst armor - and a short while later a zombie in full diamond armor - only the second time that I've ever seen two diamond armored or better mobs in one day (in my first world I saw two zombies in diamond armor within half an hour, which was in some ways even more impressive since that was vanilla). The skeleton also dropped Protection III boots, the first time ever that I've gotten amethyst armor as a drop:
Unlike some of the other items that I've gotten I can't even use these to repair my boots if I wanted to (they cost 44 levels for a single unit); you pretty much have to use unenchanted items, and if I got another pair of boots and crafted them together to remove their enchantment(s) the durability may be too high (item repair does cost fewer levels for the same amount of durability but the issue here is the enchantment cost; while I reduced the cost to repair items by removing part of the enchantment cost calculation (adding Mending more or less offsets this, so Mending items cost about the same as before, while non-Mending items can get a few more repairs and/or more enchantments) it is not removed when adding enchantments, even if they don't actually apply):
Note that I did not rename my boots since you never see the name when using them and it is only cosmetic, as in 1.8 and later (I did rename my tools and weapons):
I also encountered no less than 5 skeletons with Flame bows.
Also, I found a medium-large ravine, or rather, two ravines, the larger of the two being 186 blocks long and 19 blocks wide while the other was a relatively large normal-size ravine:
In total, I've now found 140 ravines, 9 of which were recognizably larger than normal; 161 dungeons, including 10 double dungeons (2 normal dungeons also intersected each other); 52 abandoned mineshafts; 30 caves which were recognizably larger than average; and 20 "large" cave systems (cave systems large and/or dense enough to be unlikely to generate post-1.7).
Based on how common these are this means that I've fully explored around 8,000 chunks, as in everything within two level 3 maps. That's still far from what I explored in my first world, around 60,000 chunks or 14.6 level 3 maps (this is an accurate figure obtained by using a tool to delete all chunks without torches; I previously calculated what I'd found in that world). Also, this is still only about half the area (on average) that needs to be explored to find the rarest type of cave (ignoring the largest possible sizes of large caves and ravines), a giant cave region, which generates once every 16384 chunks (excluding the area near the origin this is an exact figure; 1 out of 8 possible locations within a 128x128 chunk area is a giant cave region, with 3 being network cave regions and 4 being vertical cave systems. Each region has a random offset, and the entire 128x128 grid is also offset so it is unlikely they will align to level 4 maps, thus they can have 0-4 giant cave regions).
Also, I recently updated my charts of cave size vs frequency to include their volume, not just width, and circular rooms, and a comparison to vanilla:
The chunks listed in the tables correspond to level 0-4 maps and 9 level 3 maps (the largest area I currently plan to explore):
Thanks for telling me enchantment chances for mobs.
I play normal. I use to play on hard, (no wonder why skeletons shot me with Punch II on hard.)
Does hardcore have the same level enchantments for mobs. (Level 5-30?)
Hardcore is the same as Hard except for only one life, the same as vanilla. Also, the enchantment levels in vanilla are 5-13 on Easy, 5-22 on Normal and 5-26 on Hard (corresponding to a maximum difficulty of 0.5, 1 and 1.25. The code actually allows Hard to get as high as 1.5, the same as TMCW, but the calculated value never gets that high; since 1.8 this is capped to 1 so the chances of effects are actually lower in newer versions, plus this is dependent on the inhabited time of a chunk (1.8 also added a small component based on total playtime) so you have to stay in the same area long enough, at which point vanilla 1.6-1.7 will fluctuate between 1-1.25 on Hard while 1.8+ remains at 1). Another significant change since 1.8 is that regional difficulty is scaled from 0-1 as the calculated difficulty (as seen in the debug screen) varies between 2-4 (on Easy it never reaches 2 so mobs never spawn with armor or any other effects, which can occur on the first day in earlier versions because the first day is a full moon and effects can start as soon as the difficulty rises above 0).
This is the code that I use to calculate regional difficulty:
The first line calculates a value which reaches 1 after 7.2 million ticks, equivalent to 300 days or 100 hours, plus 0-0.25 depending on moon phase; this is then divided by 2 on Easy, unchanged on Normal, and multiplied by 2 on Hard; then it is clamped to a maximum of 0.5 on Easy, 1 on Normal, and 1.5 on Hard. During a new moon it takes 100, 100, 75 hours of playtime to reach the maximum, while during a full moon it takes 75, 75, 50 hours.
In this case the inhabited time is used instead of the total time played, divided by 3.6 million for 50 hours to reach a maximum of 1, which is then multiplied by 0.75 on Easy-Normal and 1 on Hard, prior to adding up to 0.25 for the moon phase, or up to 1 or 1.25 (unlike TMCW the moon phase factor is not scaled with difficulty). On Easy this is then multiplied by 0.5 for a maximum of 0.5; the clamping of the maximum value on the last line is not actually necessary since it will never exceed 1 on Easy-Normal or 1.5 (1.25) on Hard (both of these also always return 0 on Peaceful, which is difficulty 0; 1 is Easy, 2 is Normal, and 3 is Hard. I don't think anything actually uses this on Peaceful though).
I just added another interesting feature - Efficiency on tools acts like Sharpness when held by a mob, which means that an Efficiency V amethyst axe will deal as much damage as a Sharpness V diamond sword, relatively more when wearing armor since axes penetrate armor in the same way as 1.9's armor penetration (1 armor point for every 2 points of damage, down to a minimum of 20%. In the case of a player dealing damage this is reduced to 1 every 4 points and 40%. Enchantments are not affected and will reduce all damage that bypasses armor, not just the damage that gets through without penetration, making them more effective than otherwise, this is also what 1.9 does).
Also, on Hard all damage is multiplied by 1.5 - including enchantment damage (for players enchantment damage is added after all other calculations so it is not affected by critical hits or Strength; both of these are vanilla behavior) - so they can deal quite a lot of damage; in fact, I put Sharpness V and Efficiency V on an amethyst axe and gave it to a zombie - which killed me in one hit despite wearing full amethyst armor. Luckily, they will never spawn with Sharpness and if Efficiency V is possible it is very unlikely (even iron tools have a very small chance of getting it at level 30). Note that weapons also add 1 more damage than indicated when a mob holds them, which I previously did to compensate for the reduction in player damage (an amethyst sword adds 7 to a player, 8 to a mob. Without this addition mobs like zombie pigmen would deal 1 less damage).
When factoring in other changes I've taken considerably more damage than in vanilla, where I dealt 14.4 times more damage than I took, while in my current world I've dealt only 9.5 times as much:
Note that in TMCW the damage dealt stat tracks the exact amount of damage required to kill a mob; killing a tiny slime registers 1 point regardless of the weapon used while a zombie is 21.7 (20 health + 2 armor points at 4% each). As a result, the ratio of damage taken vs mobs killed is a better indicator; in my first world I took an average of 1.72 damage per mob while in TMCW I've taken 2.02, a 17.7% increase, which is not really that much. However, I also killed a good number of passive mobs in my first world to get materials for trading, certainly more than I have in my current world (a Sharpness V diamond sword deals 14.25 damage in vanilla, which rounds to 14.3 in the stats, and this is the amount of damage recorded per passive mob, while most hostile mobs record 28.6). For the same reason the number of hostile mobs that I've killed per play session is higher than indicated (277 vs 304 mobs per session).
Also, as far as the sustainability of using amethyst goes, at least with my playstyle, I've used about 87% of what I've found while caving, not including what I've found in chests; my pickaxe has had about 83 repairs while my sword and armor have each had 12-13 (it just so happens that I've been repairing my sword at about the same time I repair armor, both the same number of times. Since I repair with single units and generally keep durability at 75% or more I can put off repairing my pickaxe while repairing all four items, during which time it loses about half its durability, then catch up over the next few repairs):
(22 amethyst was mined while branch-mining, most of which was used to make my gear)
When considering the XP costs, I've spent around 278,600 XP to repair my pickaxe (2177 per repair; this one item took about 2/3 of the total), sword (3012 per repair), chestplate and leggings (each 1205 per repair) and boots (2330 per repair). This is about 60% of the XP that I've gained while caving, with some additional XP spent to repair other items (shears about 8 times for 766 XP each, bow just once for 887).
Also, while amethyst is technically 9 times rarer than diamond above layer 2 it is more like 7-8 times rarer when factoring in ore that is exposed while mining other ore, like this one I found next to a diamond vein at y=1 (I've found 1145 diamond ore and 153 amethyst ore while caving, a ratio of 7.48. To really put things into perspective I've mined around 189,000 coal ore - 1240 for each amethyst; compared to vanilla I've found less diamond due to differences in cave distribution even as it is more common in the uppermost part of its range, without the drop-off that vanilla has above y=12):
I found yet another giant cave, even larger than the last two, and made even larger by another large cave which generated nearby (for exploration purposes I've counted both as a single cave); I measured its volume with MCEdit and found around 140,000 air blocks; I also used nearly 400 torches to light it up:
Results found for the area from 720, -256 to 799, -177:
Found cave with length of 196, width of 18, and volume of 20712 at 792, 17, -248
Found cave with length of 303, width of 38, and volume of 116358 at 776, 29, -200
Here are several screenshots; the cave was so large that it went out of render distance (some can get so large that even Far is not enough, albeit it is actually only 10 chunks due to the internal server's view distance always being 10, even Optifine does not fix this unless set to 17 or higher (or you fix it yourself; it sets it to 10 unless render distance is above 16, when it should be 10. For TMCW you can actually go down to 8 without affecting mob spawning, which is within 96 blocks/6 chunks, or block updates, which are always within a 7 chunk radius in 1.6.4). Ravines in particular can extend up to 21 chunks from end-end):
That's a 60 block drop:
Here is a view of the cave as well as the ravines I found before in Unmined; the cut-off caves nearby are the result of deleting chunks without torches in them as I have not completely explored them yet (there were 8031 chunks, so my estimate of having explored about 8000 chunks was almost spot-on):
Also, I made a couple surface renderings of the whole world in Unmined and Minutor, using a radius of 2 chunks from explored chunks to minimize gaps (for caves I use a radius of 0; I use this tool, which still works despite being 5 years old and should be compatible with any version since Beta 1.3). I included both since Minutor uses more realistic colors (e.g. stained clay and stone) and can even include mod blocks while Unmined shows height variations better (it does not recognize stained clay while stone is green unless it is underground, then it is brown):
For the fourth time in as many days I found a mob in full diamond or amethyst armor; while most of the mobs that I've seen so far have been zombies three of the four were skeletons:
While not as large as the last three big caves I found this cave was still about as large as the largest possible cave in vanilla, which is so rare that they may as well not exist (on average, one every several hundred million chunks):
I found another fossil, the 6th one that I've found so far, which is equivalent to fully exploring 384 chunks of desert or swamp:
I discovered a new biome, Savanna Plateau, the 29th biome that I've found so far (excluding rivers, hills and edge biomes):
Also, here are some screenshots of the area around me, which is within a Mountainous Desert, including Desert sub-biomes, with Poplar Grove nearby:
Here is an update on everything that I've found so far:
Play sessions spent caving: 94
Structures found (by number):
153 normal dungeons
132 ravines (up to 7 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
53 mineshafts
32 large caves (larger than vanilla)
21 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
10 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
9 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
6 fossils
6 villages
4 circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter (twice as large as vanilla)
4 ravine cave clusters
3 igloos (1 with basement)
3 jungle temples
3 ravine cave systems
3 vertical cave clusters
2 circular room cave clusters
2 combination cave systems
2 network cave regions
2 vertical cave systems
1 circular room cave system
1 colossal cave system
1 desert temple
1 desert well
1 maze cave cluster
1 maze cave system
1 stronghold
1 witch hut
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Taiga (snowless)
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Savanna Mountains
Poplar Grove
Mega Mixed Forest
Savanna Plateau
(29 unique biomes)
Largest ravine:
296 blocks long, 31 blocks wide, 62 blocks deep (calculated volume of 255799)
Largest cave:
303 blocks long and 38 blocks wide (calculated volume of 116358; combined with another large cave with an overall measured volume of 139928)
Largest circular room:
57 blocks in diameter (calculated volume of 48391)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
Other:
2 skeletons in amethyst armor
2 skeletons in diamond armor
1 zombie in amethyst armor
8 zombies in diamond armor
3 Notch apples found in dungeon chests
386 mob spawners collected
Also, I've been on quite a roll lately; over each of the past three days I mined more than 4,000 ore and collected more than 5,000 resources; the entire area to the north of the railway (z=0), as well as the ravine and surrounding areas to the south in this rendering was explored over that time (the whole area is a level 3 map centered around 1024, 0 and also contains more than 12,000 torches with a quarter of them to the north of z=0):
While exploring a huge mineshaft and associated caves I came across a new biome - Savanna Mountains - which is my mod's version of Savanna Plateau (M), with crazy terrain that can reach around y=190, the maximum height of terrain in my mod (I did not go all the way to 256 since that leaves no room for anything above plus mountains are already impossible to climb without ladders or pillaring up). This one does not appear to have the "extreme" variant, which is higher and more crazified (a term coined by Zeno410, who despises terrain that looks like this):
Also, I got not just one but two amethyst items from zombies, after previously having only gotten a single shovel in more than 3 months of playing (2 1/2 of those spent caving); a sword and a pickaxe:
(a free potato as well)
Also, I could use these items to repair my gear for fewer levels than a single unit, which would cost 48 levels in the case of my sword, restoring 1171 durability, while this sword would restore 1154 durability for 44 levels (592 + 12% of 4686), although I'm keeping them all as trophies:
One thing to note is that amethyst items will never have more than 25% durability left, and diamond items no more than 50%, this more done more so you could actually use them to repair things than to balance out getting them as drops (diamond gear is only worth a handful of emeralds if you have villagers; amethyst can only be gotten from mining, chest loot, and mob drops) as otherwise amethyst is off-the-charts expensive if you use brand-new items, I believe 60-something levels (the anvil cost limit is 49 levels for amethyst items only; diamond and other tiers still have the vanilla cap of 39 levels).
The mineshaft also had a crazy amount of cave spider spawners in it; I collected a total of 15 spawners, 3 from dungeons and the rest cave spiders, as well as more than 500 cobwebs, only the ones around the spawners, and killed more than 100 cave spiders, more than any other mob except zombies:
Also, this shows just how unreliable caving (mineshafting?) can be for getting diamonds - zero, zip, nada out of more than 4500 ores mined, I did not even find any in the numerous minecarts that I found:
Of course, I have gotten more than a stack of diamonds in one day before when exploring a very deep mineshaft in my first world (such mineshafts are much rarer in TMCW since diamonds are 7 layers deeper down but mineshafts have the same altitude distribution; mineshafts that cut through bedrock are entirely absent since there is only one layer) but on average I only find around 4 per hour, much slower than branch-mining (this is even worse in the case of amethyst, where I often go for days without finding any; it is about 8 times rarer than diamond above y=2, which includes the entire range exposed by caves (3 and up), and about a third as common below).
This is some of the stuff that I got today, after making a trip back to my base to empty it out earlier; the 31 amethyst here is nearly all that I have as surplus, with 9 more back at my main base (the iron pickaxe was another zombie drop, I kept it since it had Unbreaking II and will use it, along with pickaxes taken from mineshafts and given level 1 enchantments, when mining a new railway):
(you can also see that the moment I took this screenshot a zombie walked up and attacked me)
Some more screenshots of the mineshaft in a largish cave:
Due to the size of the mineshaft I've explored quite a bit off the southern edge of my current map but will stop exploring southwards after I'm done with it and will soon start exploring a new map (east, west, or north of the first map, centered around 0,0).
Also, I made another minor tweak to TMCW that makes it a bit harder to branch-mine for amethyst; water and lava lakes can generate all the way down to bedrock but do not cut through it or replace it with stone (in the case of lava lakes) whereas before they were limited to y=5 or above (surface of liquid, which is 1-3 blocks deep), the same as vanilla (I simply check if the y-coordinate is 1 or above before replacing any blocks, sort of like the trees replacing bedrock bug, which was caused by branches failing to check the type of block before replacing it):
Interestingly, I also discovered a vanilla bug; water lakes in snowy biomes are supposed to generate frozen-over but the code used the incorrect offset so they were only frozen by other code that adds snow and freezes water, resulting in random areas that are not frozen during world generation since lakes can extend into adjacent and already populated areas (this source from 1.10 shows the bug; the offset on lines 162 and 164 should be 3, not 4, since 4 and above is air). When fixing this ALL lakes, even ones underground, became frozen over until I added a check to make sure that the surface was the highest exposed block (the code calls isBlockFreezable(), which only checks to see if the block is water and the temperature of the biome is less than 0.15).
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?
How do I set up global difficulty to 50 hours instead of waiting 50 hours? I would like to get some great armor drops from Zombies and Skeletons. Do I use NBTEdit?
That is actually 100 hours on Easy-Normal and 75 on Hard (75 and 50 hours respectively during a full moon. Once 100/75 hours pass it remains at the maximum regardless of moon phase, which does still affect some things like slime spawning). You'd either have to AFK/play for that time (by the time I start caving at the "end-game" it is around halfway to the max) or use NBTExplorer to edit level.dat to change the world time to at least 7200000 (ticks, where one hour of real time is 72000 ticks).
Note that you want to change the "Time" field, not "DayTime"; this is also why sleeping in a bed or using commands to change the time has no effect since they only change the latter; conversely, changing the "Time" will have no effect on the number of days displayed in the inventory:
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?
I got a couple interesting mob drops today, including a diamond helmet from a baby zombie in full diamond armor and a bow with Power II, Punch I, Flame I:
Also, I've now mined more than a quarter-million resources (ores, rails, moss stone, cobwebs, mob spawners, the last of which count since they drop an "empty spawner" block when mined with Silk Touch), still far cry from what I mined in my first world but far more than most players will ever mine:
Including multiple drops from redstone and lapis I've collected closer to 300,000 resources. All of this can fit in less than 10 double chests when crafted into blocks (including rails, while cobwebs are 4 per block).
All of that was mined in less than 14.57 days or 349.68 hours of playing, including the time it took for me to build my main base and everything else up to the Ender Dragon, plus some additional time spent building a 1.2 km railway and a secondary base:
It is interesting to note that despite being found in just one biome I've still found more ruby ore than amethyst ore; ruby is about as common as gold in Rocky Mountains but distributed everywhere below sea level and I found 148 in a single biome, compared to 142 amethyst overall, 22 of which was found by branch-mining, so I've really only found 120 by caving, which also compares to 997 diamond ore, 91 from branch-mining and 906 from caving. I've found less emerald ore though, just 53 from a single emerald-containing biome (Forest Mountains).
Also, I've found 314 mob spawners so far, of which 143 came from 125 normal dungeons and 9 double dungeons (2 each), 9 came from a stronghold, and the remaining 162 were all cave spider spawners.
Here is an updated list of what I've found so far:
Structures found (by number):
125 normal dungeons
112 ravines (up to 7 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
43 mineshafts
26 large caves (larger than vanilla)
16 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
9 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
7 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
6 villages
5 fossils
3 circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter (twice as large as vanilla)
3 igloos (1 with basement)
2 jungle temples
3 ravine cave clusters
3 ravine cave systems
2 circular room cave clusters
2 combination cave systems
2 vertical cave clusters
2 vertical cave systems
1 colossal cave system
1 desert temple
1 desert well
1 maze cave system
1 network cave region
1 stronghold
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Snowless Taiga
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Savanna Mountains
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
148 (Savanna Mountains)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
296 blocks long, 31 blocks wide, 62 blocks deep (calculated volume of 255799)
Largest cave:
336 blocks long, 22 blocks wide (calculated volume of 49100)
Largest circular room:
45 blocks in diameter (calculated volume of 23856)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
A couple renderings of what I've explored underground, for the entire world (excluding the stronghold and 50% of original size) and the area I most recently explored, including the colossal cave system near the center and the mineshafts I mentioned earlier (which turned out to be 3 separate mineshafts in close proximity, but none overlapping. One of them was pretty large, with more than 600 rails, while another only had about 50, compared to about 300 for the average mineshaft in vanilla):
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?
Have you ever spent a lot of time looking for something, only to find it in the last place that you looked? Well, that is the feeling that I got after what I found today, in the very last bit of the current map, and very close to the first map I explored.
A cave so large that an entire city could be built within it:
Yes, I even pillar up so I can light up and mine any ores in the ceiling, which was up to 34 blocks high; I took the screenshots above before this:
It was more than twice as large as the largest cave that I found until now, which had a calculated volume of 49100, but still only around a fifth the size of the largest possible cave:
The cave was located under the mesa biome in the far northeastern corner of the map, while exploring other caves associated with it I even went northwards off the map, back onto the first map I made, but only now did I return to explore anything left in that corner:
Some of the other caves; there was a quite dense but relatively small cave system connected to the giant cave (which was several times larger than it; I still mined far more ores from this cave system due to the much greater surface area, since area only increases by the square of the width while volume increases by the cube):
Also, I experienced an odd glitch; I mined a mob spawner and the particles remained, which has happened to me a few times before (the first time in this world out of 315 spawners):
Of interest, this is what the largest cave that can possibly generate in my mod looks like (I forced it to generate at the maximum size, with a width of 85 and length of 336, which is effectively 462 with a combined length of 924 blocks for all branches due to the way they generate):
Also, not only did I find one of the largest caves, I also found a circular room cave system (unexplored), located just south of what would be the map to the east of spawn; because of this I think I'll start exploring that map next (the largest types of caves are not entirely random; they are more or less common within 16x16 chunk regions, which means that there may be more nearby; the 16x16 chunk regions themselves are random with a 0-25-50-100% chance of a large cave generating during each attempt, with the average of 43.75% amounting to about one every 130 chunks or 2 per region).
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?
Just two days later I have found yet another giant cave a short distance to the north of the last one, while finishing up the last bit of the first map in the southeast corner (I had not explored it before since I did not find any caves leading there until now, from the south. There's a similar area to the northeast which I'm leaving for now but may explore later from the east):
After this I'll build a railway to the east and a new secondary base around 1024,0, the center of a level 3 map east of the first map (around 0,0). The last map, to the south, took about 7 days of playing to explore over about 1 1/2 months. Also, the total time that I've spent in this world will soon be second only to my first world; I've also never made more than one secondary base in any other world.
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?
I encountered my first Diamond Mob in my world. Shortly, I saw 2 iron armored skeletons. I saw a zombie with iron armor earlier and I burned it into the lava.
Oops, that was an accident.
This is the big cave that I found before:
It was not as large as the last one but was still the second largest cave that I've found:
There was also a medium-large (lengthwise) ravine nearby, the first one that I've found in a while:
Here is an Unmined rendering of both large caves compared to the largest ravine that I found, which had a calculated volume of 255799, about five times larger than the cave I just found. The cave I just explored is at the bottom and while it has a calculated volume that is half the cave at the top it doesn't appear much smaller since it sprawls out more, and in the case of a perfectly spherical cave (or circular room) a doubling of volume corresponds to an increase in radius of only about 26%:
Also, based on the coordinates of both large caves, with the x coordinates being the same and the z coordinates 256 blocks apart, I'm pretty sure that they are the largest variant (largest average size, as the much more common variant can actually get slightly larger but averages much smaller), with a frequency of about one every 2560 chunks; these caves generate to a 16 chunk grid at relative offsets 0,0 and 8,8, or 256 blocks apart along a single axis and 128 along both (diagonal) with the chance based on the actual chance of a cave system (1/15 with a 75% chance that the "size" will be nonzero, the same as in vanilla 1.6.4).
While exploring the cave I encountered a zombie in full amethyst armor, along with 4 other armored zombies at the same time, including one in full iron armor:
I also came across an oddity - a dungeon with 3 chests, which I can only guess was caused by two dungeons generating on top of each other since only double dungeons can have more than 2 chests. One of the chests also had quite valuable loot in it, including 2 golden apples (out of a total of 22 found so far so that was 10% of what I'd found before), 2 diamonds and 1 diamond horse armor, the others just had some redstone and lapis, a few buckets, iron horse armor, and rotten flesh:
Before exploring further the next thing that I'll be doing is building a railway to the east, stopping at around 1024, 0, depending on what I find there (I'd prefer not to build on a mountain or in a giant tree biome; my last base was built on a frozen lake between two mountains).
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?
I encountered a diamond zombie, and then you encountered a rare zombie.
Oh, and what's the biggest cave seed in your mod?
I don't have any particular seeds but you can use the CaveFinder utility included with the mod to find all of the various types of caves, which sorts them by distance and by their estimated volume (caves, ravines, and circular rooms, the last a recent addition). Note that unless you use the "NoExclusion" version (class files included in a separate folder, add them after the main mod, for CaveFinder there is a separate batch file that has the "noex" parameter added) none of these will ever appear by spawn unless the game spawns you far from the origin, which will pretty much only happen on Large Biomes worlds (I made some alterations to the spawn point finding code so even if a valid spawn biome (plains, forest, jungle, taiga, the same as vanilla, even in 1.7+, plus oasis in Desert M) is not found it will look for a grass-covered biome above sea level before finally using the vanilla code that searches up to 1000 random points which can easily get 1000 blocks away).
Here is an example for the seed "10", the seed I mainly used while testing, using the maximum radius of 8192 blocks (an area of 1048576 chunks):
Here are the largest caves, ravines, and circular rooms found; the latter two reached the largest that they can possibly get (336 blocks long and 39 blocks wide and 71 blocks in diameter respectively):
The three largest circular rooms; unlike caves their sizes are exact and would only be less due to being below lava level or above sea level, but the largest circular rooms are shifted up or down so their center y-coordinate) is always between those layers. The second one also connects to a large cave and the last one has two more large circular rooms nearby:
The three largest ravines; similar to circular rooms their y-coordinate is adjusted towards y=30-40 as they get larger:
I set the FOV to Quake Pro for the last one:
Of course, nothing beats a giant cave region, which is a 12x12 chunk region with numerous large caves, extending across a region about 300 blocks across:
Here are the results of analyzing a 256x256 block area centered over each giant cave region - more than 1 million air blocks each, averaging 26.6% air over 63 layers below sea level, or equivalent to nearly 73 chunks with nothing but air between layers 4-62 (59 layers):
Also, here is a map of the entire world, showing all the caves that I visited, with the 400x400 block spawn area near the center, between the two giant cave regions (within 1048576 chunks there are hundreds each of large caves and ravines with a calculated volume over 50000, and hundreds of circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter, twice the largest ones in vanilla, and an average of 64 giant cave regions):
As mentioned before I built a new railway to the east, ending in a mesa biome at the exact spot I planned to build a new base:
After a bit of terraforming this is what I built; since I had so much stained clay on hand I decided to use it to build my base, the first time that I've used it:
Here is a level 0 map of the area before I zoomed it out to a level 3 map:
Also, I saw a couple interesting things while digging the railway; a new biome, Poplar Grove (as a full-size biome, not a sub-biome within Birch Forest) and jungle hills rising above cloud level (I did not climb them to see just how high they were):
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?
I've started exploring the map to the east, or rather, the map just to the south of that one, which I also decided to make because the area I'm exploring is right along the z=512 boundary between them:
I don't plan to fully explore the southern (southeastern) map at this time, just the current area of caves, which includes the circular room cave system that I found earlier and a network cave region, the second one that I've found, which can extend as much as 544 blocks from one end to the other, usually no more than 300-350 due to the curvature of the caves (as with giant cave regions caves generate within a 12x12 chunk area, and vary in length from 112 to 176 blocks).
Here are some screenshots of the circular room cave system, which is a special type of cave system made up of 42-58 circular rooms ranging from 9-27 blocks in diameter with narrow tunnels leading from each one to the center of the cave system and a couple caves leading to the surface:
A large cavern formed from at least 5 overlapping circular rooms:
A random screenshot of a mob-filled cave (they all came in after I lit it up and killed the mobs that were already inside):
I did not find any diamonds in the cave system but I did find this (a total of 4 amethyst ore):
A rendering of the cave system in MCMap:
Another cave system as seen with MCEdit:
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?
I found another jungle temple - the third one so far - they are supposed to be the rarest structure (they do have the highest chance of spawning in their respective biome and I've found quite a few jungles), a witch hut, the first one that I've found despite finding several swamps before, and a massive circular room 57 blocks in diameter.
First, I spotted the jungle temple after building a marker pillar for returning to later to continue exploring caves from that point; it did not have anything particularly valuable in it, some gold, redstone, lapis, iron horse armor (not worth taking) and half a stack of bones:
More interestingly, I "discovered" it again while caving; I was mining coal in the ceiling of the giant circular room when gravel fell down and exposed the bottom, I thought it was a dungeon but it was the bottom of the jungle temple:
The witch hut, which I've never paid much attention to, they never have any witches because they immediately despawn (this was fixed in 1.11) unless you teleport to one or (post-1.7.4) use a low render distance, nor have I ever seen any spawn in them (I never saw a witch in Survival until I added them to natural spawning):
The giant circular room, the largest one that I've found so far at 57 blocks in diameter, with a ravine cutting through the middle. The four blocks of gravel near the top center of the first screenshot are directly below the jungle temple I found:
Here is a rendering of what I've explored recently; in the center is the network cave region, of which I've explored the y=50 level and a bit of the y=30 level so far, at the bottom is the circular room cave system and just to the left is one of the giant caves I found earlier, with a mineshaft above both, while the giant circular room is near the top right, with the jungle temple above it. Another mineshaft, which I have not explored yet, is near the center, within the network cave region. Below this is a rendering of the entire world:
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?
I discovered a new biome today - Mega Mixed Forest, which is the big tree version of Mixed Forest (which I spawned within), and contains every type of big tree (2x2 or larger) in my mod; jungle, oak, spruce, Mega Forest, and TMCW Mega Taiga, the last having 3x3 trunks:
As with several other biomes with big trees the light opacity of leaf blocks is handled differently so they do not block as much light, although it can still get pretty dark in areas (note that this means that if you use MCEdit on a world and it relit chunks in one of these biomes it would become much darker. The other biomes affected are Mega Forest, Big Oak Forest, and TMCW Mega Taiga):
This brings the total number of biomes that I've found to 28, excluding river, hills, and edge sub-biomes and sub-biomes which I also found as full-size biomes (Plains, Forest, Lake, Poplar Grove; one other biome, Frozen Lake, also generates as its own full-size biome but I have not found it yet and it only generates in cold climate zones):
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Taiga (snowless)
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Savanna Mountains
Poplar Grove
Mega Mixed Forest
Including all sub-biomes would at double the number of unique biomes that I've found; River alone has 4 variants (normal, froze, desert, mesa) plus 4 more Riverbank biomes (8 total, the latter are added along rivers to help smooth out height differences), and I've technically found Savanna as an edge biome of Savanna Mountains, which in turn has an Extreme Savanna Mountains sub-biome; many biomes have 2-3 sub-biomes, such as Mixed Forest, which has Plains and Lake (the former is what I actually spawned in; the game could have instead spawned me in a Jungle to the west, and would have if I had not added Plains to Mixed Forest). Including vanilla biomes there are a total of 94 biome IDs used, 92 for the Overworld, plus one "fake" biome, used for a special variant of Ice Hills that has Ice Plains Spikes as an edge biome (this is only a separate biome within the biome generation code, which uses a special value in order to separate Ice Hills technical biomes within Ice Plains from the full-size version so only the latter has an edge biome, and its "ID" is replaced with the real one by the end of the biome generation process).
Also, I found another double dungeon, the 10th one so far out of a total of 151 dungeons; of the 141 normal dungeons that I've found only two were connected to each other:
I also mention this because I recently made a change to mob spawners; because you can't actually get the block with Silk Touch, instead getting an "empty spawner" block, the lack of XP dropping, as with ores mined with Silk Touch, was not necessary so I made them always drop XP (if I had implemented this from the start I'd have gotten around 9000 additional XP, not that I need it):
Also, here is another dungeon that I found, just skeletons shooting themselves:
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?
These are some things that I've found over the past few days:
Jungle Hills rising to y=130; these are the same ones that I noticed earlier while building a railway, and are the fourth instance of terrain rising above y=128 (previously, Rocky Mountains at y=156, Ice Mountains at y=165, Roofed Forest at y=128; plus a single floating block of Winter Forest at y=128 but I don't count that, nor do trees count). There are technically two peaks, both topping out at y=130:
A zombie dropped an iron pickaxe enchanted with Fortune I; it is possible to get higher levels as well, even Efficiency IV, Fortune III, Unbreaking III on Hard, where gear can receive level 30 enchantments (5-13 on Easy, 5-22 on Normal, and 5-30 on Hard, with the upper bound increasing with playtime). Due to the higher enchantability of amethyst it may be possible to get Fortune III with a level 22 enchantment:
A skeleton in full diamond armor (caught in the act of shooting an arrow); this is only the second time that I've seen one in diamond or amethyst, while I've seen numerous zombies with it; this is not because they have a lower chance of better armor than zombies but because zombies are much more common (they actually have the same spawn chances as well but zombies target the player from much further away):
This is all of the diamond and amethyst gear, plus a few other items, that I've gotten from mob drops as well as minecarts (4 diamond pickaxes); the three iron pickaxes in the bottom row were taken from minecarts and are used to dig railways (I had a whole row before I dug the latest one, they have at least Efficiency I):
I came across a large cave opening, along with what looks like another relatively large cave next to it, neither of which I've explored yet:
Finally, here is my updated map wall after returning to my main base for the first time since I built my latest base (some of the area was explored from my main base, I did not go to my current base until I went more than 100 blocks off the center map). the large cave shown above is large enough to be easily visible as a gray dot near the easternmost explored edge:
Also, since there aren't that many documented seeds for my mod I decided that I'll occasionally check out random seeds; the seed that I used today was 8715517392029181155:
Some screenshots of interesting terrain and other things that I came across; I mainly explored to the west of spawn because there is an ocean to the east and I covered an area of at least 1024x1024 blocks:
Spawn was near -100, -240, near the shore of a Mega Tree Plains with a Spruce Hills sub-biome nearby so you don't have to cut down one of the huge trees (a pretty big job that can take half an hour). Note that only the tall type of spruce with a cluster of leaves at the top grows in Spruce Hills, but you can grow the other type in Mega Tree Plains (or 2x2/3x3 spruces in either):
At -484, -167 is a Forest Mountains reaching y=154; this seed has quite a few high peaks close to spawn:
At -620, -384 is a Winter Forest Mountains reaching y=143:
These Extreme Hills at -324, 73 are relatively modest by comparison, only rising to y=131, but they can get much higher:
Nearby is a Big Oak Forest with an interesting floating formation with a large (2x2) tree on it at -420, 90, rising well above the rest:
Further south I found a pink sheep at -460, 285:
Some more Extreme Hills at -280, 530, rising to y=124:
An interesting land formation in a Mixed Forest at 0, 300:
Another in a Roofed Forest at -775, -285:
I also came across a couple villages within the same Meadow, at -965, -270 and -1150, -80; the latter narrowly avoided generating over a ravine and cave:
Here is a list of the nearest/largest caves within 1536 blocks of the origin (3x3 level 3 maps):
Also, the large cave is actually even larger than indicated by CaveFinder, which calculated a volume of 373,109; I used MCEdit to measure it, filling in some caves and ravines nearby first to make it more accurate, and found an actual volume of well over 400,000 air blocks (it is possible to measure the exact volume by actually generating them, which I've done before to find the largest cave systems in vanilla; this can easily be done outside the game since caves operate on the raw chunk data, which is a simple array and block IDs can be simplified to 1 or 0, the only limitation is that it won't account for terrain above sea level or underwater). The ravine is obviously smaller than indicated since part of it is above sea level or underwater; otherwise, they are much more consistent since they do not curve much (in earlier versions of TMCW they could loop around on themselves but I limit the maximum angle to +/- 45 degrees from the start, or a 90 degree bend) and do not branch:
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?
Thanks for telling me enchantment chances for mobs.
I play normal. I use to play on hard, (no wonder why skeletons shot me with Punch II on hard.)
Does hardcore have the same level enchantments for mobs. (Level 5-30?)
I encountered a skeleton in full amethyst armor - and a short while later a zombie in full diamond armor - only the second time that I've ever seen two diamond armored or better mobs in one day (in my first world I saw two zombies in diamond armor within half an hour, which was in some ways even more impressive since that was vanilla). The skeleton also dropped Protection III boots, the first time ever that I've gotten amethyst armor as a drop:
Unlike some of the other items that I've gotten I can't even use these to repair my boots if I wanted to (they cost 44 levels for a single unit); you pretty much have to use unenchanted items, and if I got another pair of boots and crafted them together to remove their enchantment(s) the durability may be too high (item repair does cost fewer levels for the same amount of durability but the issue here is the enchantment cost; while I reduced the cost to repair items by removing part of the enchantment cost calculation (adding Mending more or less offsets this, so Mending items cost about the same as before, while non-Mending items can get a few more repairs and/or more enchantments) it is not removed when adding enchantments, even if they don't actually apply):
Note that I did not rename my boots since you never see the name when using them and it is only cosmetic, as in 1.8 and later (I did rename my tools and weapons):
I also encountered no less than 5 skeletons with Flame bows.
Also, I found a medium-large ravine, or rather, two ravines, the larger of the two being 186 blocks long and 19 blocks wide while the other was a relatively large normal-size ravine:
In total, I've now found 140 ravines, 9 of which were recognizably larger than normal; 161 dungeons, including 10 double dungeons (2 normal dungeons also intersected each other); 52 abandoned mineshafts; 30 caves which were recognizably larger than average; and 20 "large" cave systems (cave systems large and/or dense enough to be unlikely to generate post-1.7).
Based on how common these are this means that I've fully explored around 8,000 chunks, as in everything within two level 3 maps. That's still far from what I explored in my first world, around 60,000 chunks or 14.6 level 3 maps (this is an accurate figure obtained by using a tool to delete all chunks without torches; I previously calculated what I'd found in that world). Also, this is still only about half the area (on average) that needs to be explored to find the rarest type of cave (ignoring the largest possible sizes of large caves and ravines), a giant cave region, which generates once every 16384 chunks (excluding the area near the origin this is an exact figure; 1 out of 8 possible locations within a 128x128 chunk area is a giant cave region, with 3 being network cave regions and 4 being vertical cave systems. Each region has a random offset, and the entire 128x128 grid is also offset so it is unlikely they will align to level 4 maps, thus they can have 0-4 giant cave regions).
Also, I recently updated my charts of cave size vs frequency to include their volume, not just width, and circular rooms, and a comparison to vanilla:
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?
Hardcore is the same as Hard except for only one life, the same as vanilla. Also, the enchantment levels in vanilla are 5-13 on Easy, 5-22 on Normal and 5-26 on Hard (corresponding to a maximum difficulty of 0.5, 1 and 1.25. The code actually allows Hard to get as high as 1.5, the same as TMCW, but the calculated value never gets that high; since 1.8 this is capped to 1 so the chances of effects are actually lower in newer versions, plus this is dependent on the inhabited time of a chunk (1.8 also added a small component based on total playtime) so you have to stay in the same area long enough, at which point vanilla 1.6-1.7 will fluctuate between 1-1.25 on Hard while 1.8+ remains at 1). Another significant change since 1.8 is that regional difficulty is scaled from 0-1 as the calculated difficulty (as seen in the debug screen) varies between 2-4 (on Easy it never reaches 2 so mobs never spawn with armor or any other effects, which can occur on the first day in earlier versions because the first day is a full moon and effects can start as soon as the difficulty rises above 0).
This is the code that I use to calculate regional difficulty:
The first line calculates a value which reaches 1 after 7.2 million ticks, equivalent to 300 days or 100 hours, plus 0-0.25 depending on moon phase; this is then divided by 2 on Easy, unchanged on Normal, and multiplied by 2 on Hard; then it is clamped to a maximum of 0.5 on Easy, 1 on Normal, and 1.5 on Hard. During a new moon it takes 100, 100, 75 hours of playtime to reach the maximum, while during a full moon it takes 75, 75, 50 hours.
For comparison, this is the vanilla 1.6.4 code:
In this case the inhabited time is used instead of the total time played, divided by 3.6 million for 50 hours to reach a maximum of 1, which is then multiplied by 0.75 on Easy-Normal and 1 on Hard, prior to adding up to 0.25 for the moon phase, or up to 1 or 1.25 (unlike TMCW the moon phase factor is not scaled with difficulty). On Easy this is then multiplied by 0.5 for a maximum of 0.5; the clamping of the maximum value on the last line is not actually necessary since it will never exceed 1 on Easy-Normal or 1.5 (1.25) on Hard (both of these also always return 0 on Peaceful, which is difficulty 0; 1 is Easy, 2 is Normal, and 3 is Hard. I don't think anything actually uses this on Peaceful though).
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?
I just added another interesting feature - Efficiency on tools acts like Sharpness when held by a mob, which means that an Efficiency V amethyst axe will deal as much damage as a Sharpness V diamond sword, relatively more when wearing armor since axes penetrate armor in the same way as 1.9's armor penetration (1 armor point for every 2 points of damage, down to a minimum of 20%. In the case of a player dealing damage this is reduced to 1 every 4 points and 40%. Enchantments are not affected and will reduce all damage that bypasses armor, not just the damage that gets through without penetration, making them more effective than otherwise, this is also what 1.9 does).
Also, on Hard all damage is multiplied by 1.5 - including enchantment damage (for players enchantment damage is added after all other calculations so it is not affected by critical hits or Strength; both of these are vanilla behavior) - so they can deal quite a lot of damage; in fact, I put Sharpness V and Efficiency V on an amethyst axe and gave it to a zombie - which killed me in one hit despite wearing full amethyst armor. Luckily, they will never spawn with Sharpness and if Efficiency V is possible it is very unlikely (even iron tools have a very small chance of getting it at level 30). Note that weapons also add 1 more damage than indicated when a mob holds them, which I previously did to compensate for the reduction in player damage (an amethyst sword adds 7 to a player, 8 to a mob. Without this addition mobs like zombie pigmen would deal 1 less damage).
When factoring in other changes I've taken considerably more damage than in vanilla, where I dealt 14.4 times more damage than I took, while in my current world I've dealt only 9.5 times as much:
Note that in TMCW the damage dealt stat tracks the exact amount of damage required to kill a mob; killing a tiny slime registers 1 point regardless of the weapon used while a zombie is 21.7 (20 health + 2 armor points at 4% each). As a result, the ratio of damage taken vs mobs killed is a better indicator; in my first world I took an average of 1.72 damage per mob while in TMCW I've taken 2.02, a 17.7% increase, which is not really that much. However, I also killed a good number of passive mobs in my first world to get materials for trading, certainly more than I have in my current world (a Sharpness V diamond sword deals 14.25 damage in vanilla, which rounds to 14.3 in the stats, and this is the amount of damage recorded per passive mob, while most hostile mobs record 28.6). For the same reason the number of hostile mobs that I've killed per play session is higher than indicated (277 vs 304 mobs per session).
Also, as far as the sustainability of using amethyst goes, at least with my playstyle, I've used about 87% of what I've found while caving, not including what I've found in chests; my pickaxe has had about 83 repairs while my sword and armor have each had 12-13 (it just so happens that I've been repairing my sword at about the same time I repair armor, both the same number of times. Since I repair with single units and generally keep durability at 75% or more I can put off repairing my pickaxe while repairing all four items, during which time it loses about half its durability, then catch up over the next few repairs):
(22 amethyst was mined while branch-mining, most of which was used to make my gear)
When considering the XP costs, I've spent around 278,600 XP to repair my pickaxe (2177 per repair; this one item took about 2/3 of the total), sword (3012 per repair), chestplate and leggings (each 1205 per repair) and boots (2330 per repair). This is about 60% of the XP that I've gained while caving, with some additional XP spent to repair other items (shears about 8 times for 766 XP each, bow just once for 887).
Also, while amethyst is technically 9 times rarer than diamond above layer 2 it is more like 7-8 times rarer when factoring in ore that is exposed while mining other ore, like this one I found next to a diamond vein at y=1 (I've found 1145 diamond ore and 153 amethyst ore while caving, a ratio of 7.48. To really put things into perspective I've mined around 189,000 coal ore - 1240 for each amethyst; compared to vanilla I've found less diamond due to differences in cave distribution even as it is more common in the uppermost part of its range, without the drop-off that vanilla has above y=12):
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?
I found yet another giant cave, even larger than the last two, and made even larger by another large cave which generated nearby (for exploration purposes I've counted both as a single cave); I measured its volume with MCEdit and found around 140,000 air blocks; I also used nearly 400 torches to light it up:
Here are several screenshots; the cave was so large that it went out of render distance (some can get so large that even Far is not enough, albeit it is actually only 10 chunks due to the internal server's view distance always being 10, even Optifine does not fix this unless set to 17 or higher (or you fix it yourself; it sets it to 10 unless render distance is above 16, when it should be 10. For TMCW you can actually go down to 8 without affecting mob spawning, which is within 96 blocks/6 chunks, or block updates, which are always within a 7 chunk radius in 1.6.4). Ravines in particular can extend up to 21 chunks from end-end):
That's a 60 block drop:
Here is a view of the cave as well as the ravines I found before in Unmined; the cut-off caves nearby are the result of deleting chunks without torches in them as I have not completely explored them yet (there were 8031 chunks, so my estimate of having explored about 8000 chunks was almost spot-on):
Also, I made a couple surface renderings of the whole world in Unmined and Minutor, using a radius of 2 chunks from explored chunks to minimize gaps (for caves I use a radius of 0; I use this tool, which still works despite being 5 years old and should be compatible with any version since Beta 1.3). I included both since Minutor uses more realistic colors (e.g. stained clay and stone) and can even include mod blocks while Unmined shows height variations better (it does not recognize stained clay while stone is green unless it is underground, then it is brown):
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?
While not as large as the last three big caves I found this cave was still about as large as the largest possible cave in vanilla, which is so rare that they may as well not exist (on average, one every several hundred million chunks):
I found another fossil, the 6th one that I've found so far, which is equivalent to fully exploring 384 chunks of desert or swamp:
I discovered a new biome, Savanna Plateau, the 29th biome that I've found so far (excluding rivers, hills and edge biomes):
Also, here are some screenshots of the area around me, which is within a Mountainous Desert, including Desert sub-biomes, with Poplar Grove nearby:
Here is an update on everything that I've found so far:
Structures found (by number):
153 normal dungeons
132 ravines (up to 7 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
53 mineshafts
32 large caves (larger than vanilla)
21 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
10 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
9 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
6 fossils
6 villages
4 circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter (twice as large as vanilla)
4 ravine cave clusters
3 igloos (1 with basement)
3 jungle temples
3 ravine cave systems
3 vertical cave clusters
2 circular room cave clusters
2 combination cave systems
2 network cave regions
2 vertical cave systems
1 circular room cave system
1 colossal cave system
1 desert temple
1 desert well
1 maze cave cluster
1 maze cave system
1 stronghold
1 witch hut
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Taiga (snowless)
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Savanna Mountains
Poplar Grove
Mega Mixed Forest
Savanna Plateau
(29 unique biomes)
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
148 (Savanna Mountains)
130 (Jungle Hills)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
296 blocks long, 31 blocks wide, 62 blocks deep (calculated volume of 255799)
Largest cave:
303 blocks long and 38 blocks wide (calculated volume of 116358; combined with another large cave with an overall measured volume of 139928)
Largest circular room:
57 blocks in diameter (calculated volume of 48391)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
Other:
2 skeletons in amethyst armor
2 skeletons in diamond armor
1 zombie in amethyst armor
8 zombies in diamond armor
3 Notch apples found in dungeon chests
386 mob spawners collected
Also, I've been on quite a roll lately; over each of the past three days I mined more than 4,000 ore and collected more than 5,000 resources; the entire area to the north of the railway (z=0), as well as the ravine and surrounding areas to the south in this rendering was explored over that time (the whole area is a level 3 map centered around 1024, 0 and also contains more than 12,000 torches with a quarter of them to the north of z=0):
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?