This probably wasn't a cave but a hollow, especially if it had grass or whatever on the ground (matching the normal surface) and was quite irregular with no spherical-looking parts. In any case, when I talk of large caves I'm referring to entire cave systems, not individual chambers (the largest of which can reach 27 blocks in diameter and 85 blocks long with a teardrop shape; caves of this size are extremely rare, with 1.7+ having the same size distribution as 1.6.4 but 77% as many caves overall).
It was a cave. No grass on the bottom, very spherical. What I found seemed to be a combo of two to four such teardrop chambers.
I honestly don't understand how someone could find caving to be the only reason to play Minecraft. It's such barebones and repetitive gameplay. At this point I don't know why you don't just go to a different game. This would be like a player buying a fighting game and only fighting the AI, intentionally avoiding fighting other players even though that's literally almost the entire point of the whole genre.
On the other hand, Caver's modding really does show how much of a joke the actual developers of Minecraft are. How can this one man put out so many quality changes to the game in such a small amount of time when it takes an entire team of people YEARS to put out even a fraction of that? When this game took off and made billions, the rate of content output should have completely exploded, but it stayed pretty much the same. One moderately-sized update per year. The nether update is the biggest one they've ever done, and it's quite nice, but I now have to wonder how quickly one single talented modder could have made it.
I honestly don't understand how someone could find caving to be the only reason to play Minecraft. It's such barebones and repetitive gameplay. At this point I don't know why you don't just go to a different game. This would be like a player buying a fighting game and only fighting the AI, intentionally avoiding fighting other players even though that's literally almost the entire point of the whole genre.
A different game? Like what? Maybe like the "game" I've been developing for the past 6 years (which most would just call a "mod" because that's what it is, however there are actual games which originated as a mod before becoming their own game - maybe eventually I'll have rewritten enough code as to avoid any issues with Mojang's copyright), which is still remarkably similar to Minecraft as it was as of 1.6.4 (I've never been into any sort of mods that make complete overhauls, add in a bunch of tech, and all that; indeed, nerfing automation is a major goal of my current development). That's what made Minecraft the most popular game in the world - there are unlimited ways to play the game and it is so easy to customize it yourself (at least on Java).
Also your remark makes it sound like you yourself only play the game for PvP and don't see the point of hostile mobs because they aren't players; Minecraft started as a singleplayer survival game based around mining/caving, hence its current and earlier names (e.g. "Cave Game") - considering that I haven't played any version past 1.6.4 you can't use what they have to offer as an argument because the content they have simply doesn't exist in the game that I play, which is literally a separate game - most games would have released entire new versions by now, not just keep updating the same version for 10+ years, much less provide easy access to older versions (I have added some features taken from or based on ones in newer versions, as well as many of my own, mainly for fun - modding itself is another big attraction - I recently spent two months only working on mods, no normal playing, and had as much fun while doing it, even now I've been alternating between playing one day and modding the next).
Also, even if I don't do much in the way of building while playing you could say my builds are all the biomes and other things I've modded in, and indeed, I consider my entire worlds to be my "builds", which are vastly larger than anything most players have ever attempted (I consider mapping tools like MCMap to not just show what I've explored but what I've "built" - this timelapse may as well be a timelapse of somebody building a house).
My playstyle has nothing to do with PVP, I was just making a comparison to someone playing a game of a different genre and only utilizing 1/4th of the gameplay. In Minecraft, the bulk of the gameplay has nothing to do with caves. Yeah, you have to mine for materials, but caves otherwise serve no purpose. All of the same mobs appear throughout the whole world, the terrain in caves really doesn't vary that much, and aside from ores, mob spawners, and the stronghold, there's nothing you have to go caving for. Mineshafts are fun the first few times you go into one, but then after that they just become a navigation chore.
Modding is entirely different from the basegame, so I don't really know what kind of discussion you were expecting with this topic. "Why I still play on this super-old version" Answer: Modding. Topic done, novels-worth of paragraphs not needed. Why exactly should anyone care about you staying on an old version because it's easier to mod? If it was a topic actually discussing your mod in detail (although that would have to go under the modding subforum instead and I'm sure you already have one somewhere) I could see the point in this topic, but as it stands, I just don't know what you were expecting here.
Literally the only thing in this entire topic that relates to actual basegame Minecraft is cave generation. You have to understand that you are an extremely niche player, nobody else has anywhere near your level of interest in caves and don't consider better cave networks to be worth losing the last few years' worth of updates to the rest of the game.
My playstyle has nothing to do with PVP, I was just making a comparison to someone playing a game of a different genre and only utilizing 1/4th of the gameplay. In Minecraft, the bulk of the gameplay has nothing to do with caves. Yeah, you have to mine for materials, but caves otherwise serve no purpose. All of the same mobs appear throughout the whole world, the terrain in caves really doesn't vary that much, and aside from ores, mob spawners, and the stronghold, there's nothing you have to go caving for. Mineshafts are fun the first few times you go into one, but then after that they just become a navigation chore.
Modding is entirely different from the basegame, so I don't really know what kind of discussion you were expecting with this topic. "Why I still play on this super-old version" Answer: Modding. Topic done, novels-worth of paragraphs not needed. Why exactly should anyone care about you staying on an old version because it's easier to mod? If it was a topic actually discussing your mod in detail (although that would have to go under the modding subforum instead and I'm sure you already have one somewhere) I could see the point in this topic, but as it stands, I just don't know what you were expecting here.
Literally the only thing in this entire topic that relates to actual basegame Minecraft is cave generation. You have to understand that you are an extremely niche player, nobody else has anywhere near your level of interest in caves and don't consider better cave networks to be worth losing the last few years' worth of updates to the rest of the game.
Why should better caves (and better surface terrain!) be mutually exclusive from new updates? I would totally love if TMC or someone else with that level of modding ability and experience mod the newer versions to have better caves and terrain.
And yes, people do play games only for one part or another at times, and that's fine. This is like mod-loving people on here trying to pass me 'get a mod' as an answer to every thing about the game that I don't love.
I never said better caves are mutually exclusive from new updates, I said that the overwhelming majority of players are not willing to hold all of the new updates back just for the sake of bigger holes in the ground. I think everyone can agree that the next huge themed update should be dedicated to caves if it's not an End update. The way I see it, the devs have only 3 potential choices for the next big update if they're smart about it:
1. End update, since it's by far the most empty and boring dimension
2. Nature update, where they cram all of the Minecon Earth biome updates together
3. Cave update, because caves are in dire need of help to be more engaging for the general audience
I never said better caves are mutually exclusive from new updates, I said that the overwhelming majority of players are not willing to hold all of the new updates back just for the sake of bigger holes in the ground. I think everyone can agree that the next huge themed update should be dedicated to caves if it's not an End update. The way I see it, the devs have only 3 potential choices for the next big update if they're smart about it:
1. End update, since it's by far the most empty and boring dimension
2. Nature update, where they cram all of the Minecon Earth biome updates together
3. Cave update, because caves are in dire need of help to be more engaging for the general audience
Agree 100%. I didn't think you were saying they're mutually exclusive either, I was saying they should not be.
I don't know how I happened to stumble upon ur post but it's incredible. I'd have never thought this game can be played in this way! Your story and your depth (pun?) of knowledge was motivation enough to read the thread from start to end. Do you really only do it for the exploration and randomness aspect of the caves or is the hoarding of minerals also a goal for you?
All the fascination aside I personally had a practical aspect to read your posts about the generator: I didn't know the caves changed with release 1.7. Honestly, I never thought about them. I'm on the lookout for ideas and I will keep in mind the 'cave aspect' of the game for people like you.
I got one question: due to the height distribution of cave gen and diamonds, don't you almost exclusively find iron, coal and gold? And increasing world height alone won't change this (though I now remember you mentioned changing ore gen rules somewhere). Personally I've never explored caves much except in early game to gather the essential amount of coal and iron that's what the 'usual' caves are best for.
I got one question: due to the height distribution of cave gen and diamonds, don't you almost exclusively find iron, coal and gold? And increasing world height alone won't change this (though I now remember you mentioned changing ore gen rules somewhere). Personally I've never explored caves much except in early game to gather the essential amount of coal and iron that's what the 'usual' caves are best for.
Coal alone makes up about 2/3 of all the ores I mine, with iron being close to another 1/4, and everything else ls less than 1/10, with diamond being about 1/200 of the total; in my first world I've mined a total of 2,413,428 ores, of which 1,612,170 (66.8%) are coal, 589,841 (24.4%) are iron, and 12,661 (0.5246%) are diamond. I've also mined more rails than any ore below iron and more moss stone (from dungeons) than any ore below redstone, and even more mob spawners than emerald ore (vanilla does not show how many spawners you've mined, the number here is since I enabled the stats for them in 2014). The totals and percentages do not include Nether quartz, which I mine to get XP for enchanting and I consider the Nether to basically be a separate world (the Nether and End don't even exist in this world as I deleted them a long time ago to reduce backup size, though they are very small compared to the Overworld):
For comparison, this was a modded world, with cave lava level lowered to y=4 and the distributions of ore adjusted to match (diamond generates up to y=8 instead of 15, with the same per-layer density except for less of a drop-off in the highest layers); some biomes, like Mesa, have iron ore above sea level (this is quite insignificant; the coal/iron ratio is about the same as vanilla); the percentage of diamond is slightly lower, at 0.4204% (I've since made slight adjustments to ore generation to more closely match vanilla):
Blocks mined over 121 sessions/466 hours spent caving:
percent /session /hour
Coal ore: 256837 67.5654 2122.62 551.15
Iron ore: 93786 24.6720 775.09 201.26
Redstone ore: 12831 3.3754 106.04 27.53
Gold ore: 10857 2.8561 89.73 23.30
Lapis ore: 3754 0.9876 31.02 8.06
Diamond ore: 1598 0.4204 13.21 3.43
Amethyst ore: 223 0.0567 1.84 0.48
Ruby ore: 153 0.0402 1.26 0.33
Emerald ore: 92 0.0242 0.76 0.20
Total ore: 380131 3141.58 815.73
Rails: 18053 149.20 38.74
Moss stone: 10173 84.07 21.83
Cobwebs: 8850 73.14 18.99
Ore+other: 417207 78.8156 3447.99 895.29
Spawners: 444 3.67 0.95
Stone mined: 95777 18.0935 791.55 205.53
Total blocks: 529346 (pickaxe) 4374.76 1135.94
538196 (+cobwebs) 4447.90 1154.93
Notes:
Percentages for ores are relative to total ore
Percentages for ore+other and stone are relative to total blocks mined with an amethyst pickaxe
(only used while caving. Spawners are not counted in any totals)
Total blocks is all blocks mined with an amethyst pickaxe plus cobwebs (mined with shears)
I do not go caving to get diamonds though; in fact, when I start out I branch-mine for resources, saving caving until the "end-game" (after defeating the Ender dragon and building my main base), which is easily 10 times faster at obtaining diamonds, and even more efficient when considering how many blocks I need to mine per diamond ore (according to the Wiki you can find as many as one diamond ore every 59 blocks mined, 4-5 times lower than my ratio from caving). Part of this is also because my modded worlds have an ore which is much rarer than diamond (8 times rarer in caves, about half as common at y=1); as far as those worlds go, they do make some changes to ore distribution due to a reduction in the lava level of caves (since there is more room underground the reduction isn't just a simple x layers lower. A more extreme case was my "double/triple height terrain" worlds, where the ground was 64-128 layers deeper and the ranges of ores were adjusted for this).
Why bother with Nether Quartz? Don't you get enough experience from mining coal?
Ruby ore
Does it have the original unused texture?
I think I figured your motivation. Basically the ores are kinda a neat side-quest in the caves for you. You don't use them for anything really, but as a number the stats are cool to look at. It's this little motivational boost too to find something that's rewarding by the gameplay concept (ores)
Interesting seeing another person's opinions on Minecraft updates. I personally prefer the less dense cave systems in 1.7 and later, and I prefer 1.7+ world generation overall. I find the endless cave systems from b1.8 – 1.6 worldgen to be extremely annoying.
Of course, your mod is impressive, and in some cases beats current Minecraft worldgen.
Why bother with Nether Quartz? Don't you get enough experience from mining coal?
As mentioned before, I save caving for the end-game, long after I've made my "caving gear", and the XP from branch-mining is entirely inadequate, considering that in 1.6.4 (with the old enchantment system) you need 825 XP for a single level 30 enchantment (825 coal or 256 quartz) and not only that, you need books in order to get Unbreaking on armor and weapons, then in my modded worlds (which is to say, every world I've made for the past 6+ years) I use extremely rare and valuable amethyst gear, which you'd certainly never want to risk enchanting directly; you can see how I typically progress here:
Note that in this world I gained over 66,000 XP by the end-game, excluding the XP from the Ender Dragon, I spent around 54,000 XP on enchanting my gear, of which around 35,000 came from more than 10,000 quartz - even with as much coal as I mine while caving it would take about a month to get 66,000 XP from coal alone, and coal is actually less than half the total XP I gain while caving (about 2,122 out of 5,308 XP in TMCWv4). Once I start caving all the XP I get goes towards repairing my gear, which includes such items like Silk Touch pickaxe and shears which are necessary so there is no question of caving without them (my caving sessions last for 6-8 hours, meaning that some additional storage like an Ender chest is a must, while Silk Touch is also required to collect cobwebs prior to 1.9, I also collect emerald ore as the ore rather than just directly mining it for emeralds, and since TMCWv4, you can mine spawners with Silk Touch to get the spawner itself, or rather, a purely decorative "empty spawner" block):
(this shows that I have "Mending" on my gear but all it does is keep the prior work penalty down, with the same repair mechanics as vanilla prior to 1.8, where simply renaming an item would keep the cost from increasing, but the repair cost was very high because you have to pay for both the enchantments, even when not adding/combining them, as well as a durability-dependent repair cost. In fact, I had to increase the anvil cap to 49 levels to make using amethyst practical, as it is, you can only repair them with a single unit for 1171 durability, making them much costlier to repair per durability point than diamond)
Interesting seeing another person's opinions on Minecraft updates. I personally prefer the less dense cave systems in 1.7 and later, and I prefer 1.7+ world generation overall. I find the endless cave systems from b1.8 – 1.6 worldgen to be extremely annoying.
Contrary to widespread belief, Beta 1.8 made no changes to caves other than to fix a bug that made them cut off along chunk borders, but the overall volume of caves remained the same - it is the addition of ravines and mineshafts that made the underground basically infinite. Here are comparisons of the code for Beta 1.1_02, release 1.6.4, and release 1.7.10:
The most important part is the first few lines in the last method at the bottom, which controls the size variance and chance of cave systems (the only change made in 1.7 was to change the 40 in the first line to 15 and 15 in the second to 7):
protected void a(World world, int i, int j, int k, int l, byte abyte0[])
{
int i1 = b.nextInt(b.nextInt(b.nextInt(40) + 1) + 1);
if (b.nextInt(15) != 0)
protected void recursiveGenerate(World par1World, int par2, int par3, int par4, int par5, byte[] par6ArrayOfByte)
{
int var7 = this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(40) + 1) + 1);
if (this.rand.nextInt(15) != 0)
protected void func_151538_a(World p_151538_1_, int p_151538_2_, int p_151538_3_, int p_151538_4_, int p_151538_5_, Block[] p_151538_6_)
{
int var7 = this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(this.rand.nextInt(15) + 1) + 1);
if (this.rand.nextInt(7) != 0)
What did change between Beta and 1.6.4 was the method that actually generates the tunnels:
Beta 1.1_02:
protected void a(int i, int j, byte abyte0[], double d, double d1, double d2, float f, float f1, float f2, int k, int l, double d3)
Random random = new Random(b.nextLong());
Release 1.6.4:
protected void generateCaveNode(long par1, int par3, int par4, byte[] par5ArrayOfByte, double par6, double par8, double par10, float par12, float par13, float par14, int par15, int par16, double par17)
Random var25 = new Random(par1);
The difference is that in 1.6.4 the game passes in a seed as a parameter instead of calling the main RNG function, ensuring that its state remains consistent since the code has an optimization where it will abort tunnel generation if it sees that it can't reach the current chunk, and if the tunnel branches this means it won;t call the RNG in the branches if it aborts before reaching the branch point. This bug also persisted in the Nether until release 1.5: MC-7196 Nether cave/tunnel generator produces incorrect/cut tunnels
Also, this shows how important mineshafts and ravines are for underground interconnectivity; green areas are all interconnected to a point near the center (this is also centered around 0,0, where mineshafts were less common prior to 1.13; 1.7 also made them 2.5 times less common overall, and dungeons half as common):
Contrary to widespread belief, Beta 1.8 made no changes to caves other than to fix a bug that made them cut off along chunk borders, but the overall volume of caves remained the same - it is the addition of ravines and mineshafts that made the underground basically infinite. Here are comparisons of the code for Beta 1.1_02, release 1.6.4, and release 1.7.10:
Huh, never knew that until now. Thanks for clearing up that myth.
Hey MasterCaver, since your playstyle is clearly based around caving, will you consider switching to 1.17 once it comes out? I know you might not want to because of the time you've spent developing mods that exactly fit your playstyle but from the clips we've seen of expansive caverns with more features than just ores and mineshafts it seems to me like something that would interest you.
Hey MasterCaver, since your playstyle is clearly based around caving, will you consider switching to 1.17 once it comes out? I know you might not want to because of the time you've spent developing mods that exactly fit your playstyle but from the clips we've seen of expansive caverns with more features than just ores and mineshafts it seems to me like something that would interest you.
I mainly enjoy caving because of the caves themsleves, not because of ores or other things, which is one reason I haven't added much to TMCW, or been in a hurry to backport such features for the next major update, which was originally going to be released all at once but I've decided to hold off on world generation changes so older worlds can get newer content (I added my own stalagmites and more cave plants and other features as early as 2018 but haven't added them to an official release), and a few large caves here and there with 1.7 cave generation elsewhere will simply not cut it for me - for comparison, TMCW has about double the cave volume as 1.7 with the vast majority of the underground forming a vast world-spanning network (as does vanilla 1.6.4, at slate once you get further away from the origin, where mineshafts are less common - this enables me to explore from one cave system to the next without interruption).
In fact, the next update will even add glow squid, just for the fun of it (I just use a texture I found online and have them drop glowstone dust in addition to ink sacs. Otherwise, the majority of features that I've added have some practical use in world generation; only recently did I add new variants of walls and fences to the official release, which I've never used (I don't think I've ever even crafted a wall in survival before), which shows just how exclusive my playstyle is):
Currently I've made it so that glow squid spawn underground below (sea level - 8) with a separate mob cap from normal squid (the water mob cap was increased with each variant of squid taking part of the cap) so they can spawn in underground lakes independently of surface water; there are also larger variants of lakes added underground:
There are a total of 104 variants of a single block (including netherrack, not shown), based on 7 main variants which come in small and large sizes; whether they render as a stalagmite or stalactite depends on the block above them, as does the color of hardened clay variants (they default to normal hardened clay and take on the color of stained clay they are placed on):
This shows my idea of "underground biomes", a feature which has existed since the first version of TMCW and expanded over time (stone/dirt/gravel are replaced with blocks corresponding to the surface layers of the biome, in this case, sandstone and sand); currently they go down to around y=40 but the next update makes them go down to bedrock, with ores having new variants added to match non-stone blocks)
They even randomly drip water (lava for netherrack variants), although it is purely aesthetical, same for the "gravel sand" with the old gravel texture neat the left side, which randomly replaces 20-80% of gravel within 8x8 chunk regions (the 1.8 stone types also vary in abundance so some regions may have a lot of granite but little diorite and vice-versa):
Normal and giant mushrooms in many more colors and shapes are being added, as well as able to generate in random chunks across the world, not just in giant cave regions; green mushrooms, both normal and giant variants, also glow (only small brown mushrooms glow):
One notable thing about this screenshot is that the dark areas are pitch black, as it should be; I can't even tell if brown mushrooms are actually emitting their own light in vanilla because of the ambient light level, which I consider to be one of the biggest flaws in the game (many players even forgo torches when caving; you certainly never want to be caught without a light source in TMCW):
There are even Mooshroom variants for each color, added purely for fun (the chances that I'll ever find a Mushroom Island are quite low given that I generally stay near land and don't explore a very large area, relatively speaking; I've only found on in my first world. The appearance of the mycelium is due to my own version of "better grass" as TMCW is incompatible with Optifine); you can also craft Mushroom Stew with any combination of 2 colors:
Jungles have a new type of cave which is lined with cobblestone (including moss stone, which is still uncraftable as I think it would spoil its value as it is among the resources that I collect (from dungeons) while caving) near the surface and is filled with vegetation, including a special variant of grass, "cave grass", which can survive in the dark (since 1.7 you can find them in dark caves but this is a bug; in 1.6.4 they will never generate in the dark and will otherwise uproot after a short time):
I've started playing with 1.13.2 aquatic update and fully enjoyed every aspect of minecraft except command blocks.
My first thought was that you can do complex algorithms with this block ingame and create a game within a game.
So i tried messing around with it and came to the conclusion that modding with blocks in a 3d world isn't my strenght.
Before minecraft
i was addicted to warcraft 3 trigger editor, wich allowed me to mostly change the game to what i could think of.
It has an easy to understand GUI. After i absolved a "how to make a tower defence" tutorial,
i had the basic knowledge to copy games with wc3.
During this time i learned recreating algorithms by playing and observing different games.
So i focused on learning how to build famrs and how redstone works.
The years passed and i always followed the new versions, gathered clientside mods and joined a citybuild server.
There i've run an oak shop.
To do efficient advertising for my logs i made myself a camouflage skin with vanilla oak textures and switched to the username Eiche_Brutal.
(My name is a german joke for heavy furniture made from rustic oak.
Rustic in german (rustikal) sounds a bit simular to brutal, so we like to say:
"few, this is oak brutal!")
I was especially hiped for the nether update and it was great!
My playingstyle however has changed.
I've seen everything from 1.13.2 untill the nether update and i've come to realize that i enjoy exploring the most.
So i switchet to version 1.12.2 and started searching for mods that are compatible to my playstile and each other.
The biggest change to me was that swimming wasn't a thing in 1.12.2 wich i was used to from the start.
First i played around with the better diving mod but it added to much stuff i didn't use and like.
Right know i'm playing a modpack with Biomes o plenty, Electroblobs Wizardry and Chococraft.
There are of corse a few more but i lost count and these 3 are the main mods.
It turned out to be a crossover between minecraft and final fantasy and i am enjoying it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My projects:
-are abandoned for now. I might pick 'em up in the future.
For now i'm working on a private modpack that suit's my own playstyle.
I am gonna stay in modded 1.12.2 untill my potato dies. No mercy! :Q
Are you going to upgrade to 1.17? The Cave Update?
My previous replies, and elsewhere, make it pretty clear that I won't - at the very least, not without modding world generation back to 1.6.4, accommodating new features, which would be an impractically difficult task (for one, the modding environment that I use, MCP, hasn't been officially updated since 1.12, and I'm not going to try to learn how to use Forge, ASM, and all that stuff; then there is all the nonsense with block states and models and such, and more convoluted code in general; true, I've only seen decompiled unobfuscated code for newer versions but it looks like a total mess with all the objects, containers, wrappers, and so on; sp614x has also described the code for 1.8+ as such). I'd absolutely not want to ruin my first world with chunk walls everywhere, including underground; this is also why I've made a new world for every version of my own mods that make major changes to world generation and have delayed the release of the next major version of TMCW in favor of adding non-terrain altering features that were originally going to be added in it.
Aside from that, adding some large caves here and there, and apparently very rare (I haven't actually watched any videos or read any detailed information about 1.17 since I'm not interested in it but this is what it sounds like), with 1.7+ cave generation elsewhere is no better than 1.7 by itself; you can barely do much caving without having to search for new areas to explore (one complaint that I've seen is that too many caves end too quickly; a good-size cave system to me takes a full 3-4 hour play session to explore and will lead to mineshafts/ravines/more caves without having to search or dig to find them).
For comparison, this is what I've found in a modded world, averaging about one cave or ravine distinctly larger than vanilla every 2 days (they are actually more common but not all will be noticeably larger; a cave search utility included with TMCW defines a "large" cave as a volume of 25,000 or more, while in vanilla the largest cave I've found in my first world is about 13,000 and even within a 1 million chunk area the largest cave rarely exceeds 20,000), and about 5 underground features every day (this includes some surface structures but they are only a fraction of the total and most were found while caving or traveling to/from the area I'm exploring and bases; all I actually found before my "end game" caving were a jungle temple, village, and stronghold):
Play sessions spent caving: 222 out of 243 total, about 851 out of 935 hours (38.95d)
Structures/caves found (by number):
383 normal dungeons (including 3 "double" dungeons)
314 ravines (up to 10 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
118 mineshafts
67 large caves (larger than vanilla, not including giant caves)
51 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
30 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
19 double dungeons (one combined with a normal dungeon for 3 spawners)
15 giant caves (>50000 in volume)
12 fossils
12 maze cave clusters
12 ravine cave clusters
11 circular room cave clusters
10 circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter (twice as large as vanilla)
7 vertical cave clusters
7 villages (3 Desert, 2 Plains, 1 Ice Plains, 1 Meadow)
6 ravine cave systems
5 circular room cave systems
5 combination cave systems
5 vertical cave systems
4 igloos (2 with basement)
4 network cave regions
3 jungle temples
3 maze cave systems
3 strongholds (2 found by caving)
2 colossal cave systems
2 desert temples
2 desert wells
2 witch huts
1 giant cave region
(1115 individual structures/caves)
The surface of TMCW is also just as varied as the underground, with impossible biome arrangements for vanilla 1.7+ (near spawn) unless you use very specific seeds (TMCW does include many biomes from 1.7+ but there are also many of my own biomes); note that this world is not very large by modern standards (e.g. woodland mansions can be 10,000+ blocks away) and could be all one climate zone in 1.7+:
I've also fixed many bugs which are still present in current versions, including ones I consider to be game-breaking, such as the lack of true total darkness, while not having others at all, such as random chunk corruption. None of the 1.17 blocks or items seem to be interesting; if anything, the addition of amethyst as an vanilla item is more annoying since TMCW itself has its own version of amethyst (which is an armor/tool material with a similar status as netehrite, if added 6 years earlier).
Telescopes are just Mojang's way of implementing a zoom feature, aka Optifine or my own mod (which both simply involve pressing a button, no need to carry around an item and press F1 to hide the overlay. Supposedly, telescopes can zoom in more but I could easily change it myself if I wanted to (all it does is lower the FOV, to 17.5 or 1/4 of normal in my case), or even add a "zoom FOV" slider to adjust it). Bundles might be useful for some of the rarer things I collect (e.g. diamond horse armor, enchanted books, golden apples), but I've heard that unstackable items take up the whole thing and otherwise they are easily offset by my own "rail" and "cobweb" blocks (storing 9 and 4 of their respective items in the same manner as coal/iron/etc blocks; to get an idea of their impact, the last time I went back to my main base I had nearly 4 full stacks of rail blocks, equivalent to 34 stacks of rails (I just use my inventory and ender chest, up to 63 slots, to transport resources back; 63 slots may not sound like much but this can hold as many as 36,288 items crafted into blocks of 9, with about 2/3 of slots being blocks and the rest other stuff, which is enough for about a week's worth of resources collected).
Do you intend to port some of the quality of life features (blast furnaces, setting spawn points at day, hay bales reducing fall damage, etc.) into your mod/game at any point?
Do you intend to port some of the quality of life features (blast furnaces, setting spawn points at day, hay bales reducing fall damage, etc.) into your mod/game at any point?
For the most part I've added features that I find useful myself; faster furnaces just for smelting ores don't appeal since I just set up a big wall of furnaces each with a stack of ore while caving and leave them there, not returning until long after they have finished smelting (about 11 minutes, while I may leave furnaces at a "return point" until I end my current caving session, hours later; likewise when cooking a batch of potatoes I just throw them in furnaces and take them out the next time I return to my base or after I've chopped down a jungle tree for more wood, harvested crops, etc). I have added some features just for fun, such as more wall and fence variants (I haven't ever actually used walls), but generally they have some purpose, at least in world generation, which is my main focus.
Many of my most useful additions (for my playstyle) aren't even in any vanilla version, such as blocks for rails and cobwebs (the addition of coal blocks in 1.6 remains the one vanilla feature that has had the biggest impact on my playstyle, enabling me to mine 2,000+ coal per play session without constantly having to return to empty my inventory - after 1.6 came out I even re-explored caves I'd previously explored in 1.5 just so I could extract all the coal I left behind). Likewise, bigger ender chests enable me to carry more resources back to my main base (I initially made ender chests have 54 slots, then I added a new variant which is in addition to vanilla ender chests for a total of 81 slots; I did use a "large" ender chest for a while while caving but I currently use a normal one since the addition of rail/cobweb blocks). You could argue that shulker boxes could allow me to carry even more back (up to hundreds of thousands of resources) but I don't find that as fun (I actually do like the occasional breaks from caving to build new secondary bases and railways, which I never did in the worlds where I used a large ender chest or a backpack mod while caving).
It was a cave. No grass on the bottom, very spherical. What I found seemed to be a combo of two to four such teardrop chambers.
I honestly don't understand how someone could find caving to be the only reason to play Minecraft. It's such barebones and repetitive gameplay. At this point I don't know why you don't just go to a different game. This would be like a player buying a fighting game and only fighting the AI, intentionally avoiding fighting other players even though that's literally almost the entire point of the whole genre.
On the other hand, Caver's modding really does show how much of a joke the actual developers of Minecraft are. How can this one man put out so many quality changes to the game in such a small amount of time when it takes an entire team of people YEARS to put out even a fraction of that? When this game took off and made billions, the rate of content output should have completely exploded, but it stayed pretty much the same. One moderately-sized update per year. The nether update is the biggest one they've ever done, and it's quite nice, but I now have to wonder how quickly one single talented modder could have made it.
A different game? Like what? Maybe like the "game" I've been developing for the past 6 years (which most would just call a "mod" because that's what it is, however there are actual games which originated as a mod before becoming their own game - maybe eventually I'll have rewritten enough code as to avoid any issues with Mojang's copyright), which is still remarkably similar to Minecraft as it was as of 1.6.4 (I've never been into any sort of mods that make complete overhauls, add in a bunch of tech, and all that; indeed, nerfing automation is a major goal of my current development). That's what made Minecraft the most popular game in the world - there are unlimited ways to play the game and it is so easy to customize it yourself (at least on Java).
Also your remark makes it sound like you yourself only play the game for PvP and don't see the point of hostile mobs because they aren't players; Minecraft started as a singleplayer survival game based around mining/caving, hence its current and earlier names (e.g. "Cave Game") - considering that I haven't played any version past 1.6.4 you can't use what they have to offer as an argument because the content they have simply doesn't exist in the game that I play, which is literally a separate game - most games would have released entire new versions by now, not just keep updating the same version for 10+ years, much less provide easy access to older versions (I have added some features taken from or based on ones in newer versions, as well as many of my own, mainly for fun - modding itself is another big attraction - I recently spent two months only working on mods, no normal playing, and had as much fun while doing it, even now I've been alternating between playing one day and modding the next).
Also, even if I don't do much in the way of building while playing you could say my builds are all the biomes and other things I've modded in, and indeed, I consider my entire worlds to be my "builds", which are vastly larger than anything most players have ever attempted (I consider mapping tools like MCMap to not just show what I've explored but what I've "built" - this timelapse may as well be a timelapse of somebody building a house).
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?
My playstyle has nothing to do with PVP, I was just making a comparison to someone playing a game of a different genre and only utilizing 1/4th of the gameplay. In Minecraft, the bulk of the gameplay has nothing to do with caves. Yeah, you have to mine for materials, but caves otherwise serve no purpose. All of the same mobs appear throughout the whole world, the terrain in caves really doesn't vary that much, and aside from ores, mob spawners, and the stronghold, there's nothing you have to go caving for. Mineshafts are fun the first few times you go into one, but then after that they just become a navigation chore.
Modding is entirely different from the basegame, so I don't really know what kind of discussion you were expecting with this topic. "Why I still play on this super-old version" Answer: Modding. Topic done, novels-worth of paragraphs not needed. Why exactly should anyone care about you staying on an old version because it's easier to mod? If it was a topic actually discussing your mod in detail (although that would have to go under the modding subforum instead and I'm sure you already have one somewhere) I could see the point in this topic, but as it stands, I just don't know what you were expecting here.
Literally the only thing in this entire topic that relates to actual basegame Minecraft is cave generation. You have to understand that you are an extremely niche player, nobody else has anywhere near your level of interest in caves and don't consider better cave networks to be worth losing the last few years' worth of updates to the rest of the game.
Why should better caves (and better surface terrain!) be mutually exclusive from new updates? I would totally love if TMC or someone else with that level of modding ability and experience mod the newer versions to have better caves and terrain.
And yes, people do play games only for one part or another at times, and that's fine. This is like mod-loving people on here trying to pass me 'get a mod' as an answer to every thing about the game that I don't love.
I never said better caves are mutually exclusive from new updates, I said that the overwhelming majority of players are not willing to hold all of the new updates back just for the sake of bigger holes in the ground. I think everyone can agree that the next huge themed update should be dedicated to caves if it's not an End update. The way I see it, the devs have only 3 potential choices for the next big update if they're smart about it:
1. End update, since it's by far the most empty and boring dimension
2. Nature update, where they cram all of the Minecon Earth biome updates together
3. Cave update, because caves are in dire need of help to be more engaging for the general audience
Agree 100%. I didn't think you were saying they're mutually exclusive either, I was saying they should not be.
I don't know how I happened to stumble upon ur post but it's incredible. I'd have never thought this game can be played in this way! Your story and your depth (pun?) of knowledge was motivation enough to read the thread from start to end. Do you really only do it for the exploration and randomness aspect of the caves or is the hoarding of minerals also a goal for you?
All the fascination aside I personally had a practical aspect to read your posts about the generator: I didn't know the caves changed with release 1.7. Honestly, I never thought about them. I'm on the lookout for ideas and I will keep in mind the 'cave aspect' of the game for people like you.
I got one question: due to the height distribution of cave gen and diamonds, don't you almost exclusively find iron, coal and gold? And increasing world height alone won't change this (though I now remember you mentioned changing ore gen rules somewhere). Personally I've never explored caves much except in early game to gather the essential amount of coal and iron that's what the 'usual' caves are best for.
Administrator of Macrochasm w/ jared2013
Coal alone makes up about 2/3 of all the ores I mine, with iron being close to another 1/4, and everything else ls less than 1/10, with diamond being about 1/200 of the total; in my first world I've mined a total of 2,413,428 ores, of which 1,612,170 (66.8%) are coal, 589,841 (24.4%) are iron, and 12,661 (0.5246%) are diamond. I've also mined more rails than any ore below iron and more moss stone (from dungeons) than any ore below redstone, and even more mob spawners than emerald ore (vanilla does not show how many spawners you've mined, the number here is since I enabled the stats for them in 2014). The totals and percentages do not include Nether quartz, which I mine to get XP for enchanting and I consider the Nether to basically be a separate world (the Nether and End don't even exist in this world as I deleted them a long time ago to reduce backup size, though they are very small compared to the Overworld):
For comparison, this was a modded world, with cave lava level lowered to y=4 and the distributions of ore adjusted to match (diamond generates up to y=8 instead of 15, with the same per-layer density except for less of a drop-off in the highest layers); some biomes, like Mesa, have iron ore above sea level (this is quite insignificant; the coal/iron ratio is about the same as vanilla); the percentage of diamond is slightly lower, at 0.4204% (I've since made slight adjustments to ore generation to more closely match vanilla):
I do not go caving to get diamonds though; in fact, when I start out I branch-mine for resources, saving caving until the "end-game" (after defeating the Ender dragon and building my main base), which is easily 10 times faster at obtaining diamonds, and even more efficient when considering how many blocks I need to mine per diamond ore (according to the Wiki you can find as many as one diamond ore every 59 blocks mined, 4-5 times lower than my ratio from caving). Part of this is also because my modded worlds have an ore which is much rarer than diamond (8 times rarer in caves, about half as common at y=1); as far as those worlds go, they do make some changes to ore distribution due to a reduction in the lava level of caves (since there is more room underground the reduction isn't just a simple x layers lower. A more extreme case was my "double/triple height terrain" worlds, where the ground was 64-128 layers deeper and the ranges of ores were adjusted for this).
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?
Why bother with Nether Quartz? Don't you get enough experience from mining coal?
Does it have the original unused texture?
I think I figured your motivation. Basically the ores are kinda a neat side-quest in the caves for you. You don't use them for anything really, but as a number the stats are cool to look at. It's this little motivational boost too to find something that's rewarding by the gameplay concept (ores)
Administrator of Macrochasm w/ jared2013
Interesting seeing another person's opinions on Minecraft updates. I personally prefer the less dense cave systems in 1.7 and later, and I prefer 1.7+ world generation overall. I find the endless cave systems from b1.8 – 1.6 worldgen to be extremely annoying.
Of course, your mod is impressive, and in some cases beats current Minecraft worldgen.
As mentioned before, I save caving for the end-game, long after I've made my "caving gear", and the XP from branch-mining is entirely inadequate, considering that in 1.6.4 (with the old enchantment system) you need 825 XP for a single level 30 enchantment (825 coal or 256 quartz) and not only that, you need books in order to get Unbreaking on armor and weapons, then in my modded worlds (which is to say, every world I've made for the past 6+ years) I use extremely rare and valuable amethyst gear, which you'd certainly never want to risk enchanting directly; you can see how I typically progress here:
TheMasterCaver's World (version 4)
Note that in this world I gained over 66,000 XP by the end-game, excluding the XP from the Ender Dragon, I spent around 54,000 XP on enchanting my gear, of which around 35,000 came from more than 10,000 quartz - even with as much coal as I mine while caving it would take about a month to get 66,000 XP from coal alone, and coal is actually less than half the total XP I gain while caving (about 2,122 out of 5,308 XP in TMCWv4). Once I start caving all the XP I get goes towards repairing my gear, which includes such items like Silk Touch pickaxe and shears which are necessary so there is no question of caving without them (my caving sessions last for 6-8 hours, meaning that some additional storage like an Ender chest is a must, while Silk Touch is also required to collect cobwebs prior to 1.9, I also collect emerald ore as the ore rather than just directly mining it for emeralds, and since TMCWv4, you can mine spawners with Silk Touch to get the spawner itself, or rather, a purely decorative "empty spawner" block):
(this shows that I have "Mending" on my gear but all it does is keep the prior work penalty down, with the same repair mechanics as vanilla prior to 1.8, where simply renaming an item would keep the cost from increasing, but the repair cost was very high because you have to pay for both the enchantments, even when not adding/combining them, as well as a durability-dependent repair cost. In fact, I had to increase the anvil cap to 49 levels to make using amethyst practical, as it is, you can only repair them with a single unit for 1171 durability, making them much costlier to repair per durability point than diamond)
Contrary to widespread belief, Beta 1.8 made no changes to caves other than to fix a bug that made them cut off along chunk borders, but the overall volume of caves remained the same - it is the addition of ravines and mineshafts that made the underground basically infinite. Here are comparisons of the code for Beta 1.1_02, release 1.6.4, and release 1.7.10:
Beta 1.1_02:
Release 1.6.4:
Release 1.7.10:
What did change between Beta and 1.6.4 was the method that actually generates the tunnels:
Beta 1.1_02:
Release 1.6.4:
The difference is that in 1.6.4 the game passes in a seed as a parameter instead of calling the main RNG function, ensuring that its state remains consistent since the code has an optimization where it will abort tunnel generation if it sees that it can't reach the current chunk, and if the tunnel branches this means it won;t call the RNG in the branches if it aborts before reaching the branch point. This bug also persisted in the Nether until release 1.5: MC-7196 Nether cave/tunnel generator produces incorrect/cut tunnels
Also, this shows how important mineshafts and ravines are for underground interconnectivity; green areas are all interconnected to a point near the center (this is also centered around 0,0, where mineshafts were less common prior to 1.13; 1.7 also made them 2.5 times less common overall, and dungeons half as common):
Caves only:
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?
Huh, never knew that until now. Thanks for clearing up that myth.
Hey MasterCaver, since your playstyle is clearly based around caving, will you consider switching to 1.17 once it comes out? I know you might not want to because of the time you've spent developing mods that exactly fit your playstyle but from the clips we've seen of expansive caverns with more features than just ores and mineshafts it seems to me like something that would interest you.
I mainly enjoy caving because of the caves themsleves, not because of ores or other things, which is one reason I haven't added much to TMCW, or been in a hurry to backport such features for the next major update, which was originally going to be released all at once but I've decided to hold off on world generation changes so older worlds can get newer content (I added my own stalagmites and more cave plants and other features as early as 2018 but haven't added them to an official release), and a few large caves here and there with 1.7 cave generation elsewhere will simply not cut it for me - for comparison, TMCW has about double the cave volume as 1.7 with the vast majority of the underground forming a vast world-spanning network (as does vanilla 1.6.4, at slate once you get further away from the origin, where mineshafts are less common - this enables me to explore from one cave system to the next without interruption).
In fact, the next update will even add glow squid, just for the fun of it (I just use a texture I found online and have them drop glowstone dust in addition to ink sacs. Otherwise, the majority of features that I've added have some practical use in world generation; only recently did I add new variants of walls and fences to the official release, which I've never used (I don't think I've ever even crafted a wall in survival before), which shows just how exclusive my playstyle is):
There are a total of 104 variants of a single block (including netherrack, not shown), based on 7 main variants which come in small and large sizes; whether they render as a stalagmite or stalactite depends on the block above them, as does the color of hardened clay variants (they default to normal hardened clay and take on the color of stained clay they are placed on):
This shows my idea of "underground biomes", a feature which has existed since the first version of TMCW and expanded over time (stone/dirt/gravel are replaced with blocks corresponding to the surface layers of the biome, in this case, sandstone and sand); currently they go down to around y=40 but the next update makes them go down to bedrock, with ores having new variants added to match non-stone blocks)
They even randomly drip water (lava for netherrack variants), although it is purely aesthetical, same for the "gravel sand" with the old gravel texture neat the left side, which randomly replaces 20-80% of gravel within 8x8 chunk regions (the 1.8 stone types also vary in abundance so some regions may have a lot of granite but little diorite and vice-versa):
Normal and giant mushrooms in many more colors and shapes are being added, as well as able to generate in random chunks across the world, not just in giant cave regions; green mushrooms, both normal and giant variants, also glow (only small brown mushrooms glow):
One notable thing about this screenshot is that the dark areas are pitch black, as it should be; I can't even tell if brown mushrooms are actually emitting their own light in vanilla because of the ambient light level, which I consider to be one of the biggest flaws in the game (many players even forgo torches when caving; you certainly never want to be caught without a light source in TMCW):
There are even Mooshroom variants for each color, added purely for fun (the chances that I'll ever find a Mushroom Island are quite low given that I generally stay near land and don't explore a very large area, relatively speaking; I've only found on in my first world. The appearance of the mycelium is due to my own version of "better grass" as TMCW is incompatible with Optifine); you can also craft Mushroom Stew with any combination of 2 colors:
Jungles have a new type of cave which is lined with cobblestone (including moss stone, which is still uncraftable as I think it would spoil its value as it is among the resources that I collect (from dungeons) while caving) near the surface and is filled with vegetation, including a special variant of grass, "cave grass", which can survive in the dark (since 1.7 you can find them in dark caves but this is a bug; in 1.6.4 they will never generate in the dark and will otherwise uproot after a short time):
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 playing with 1.13.2 aquatic update and fully enjoyed every aspect of minecraft except command blocks.
My first thought was that you can do complex algorithms with this block ingame and create a game within a game.
So i tried messing around with it and came to the conclusion that modding with blocks in a 3d world isn't my strenght.
Before minecraft
i was addicted to warcraft 3 trigger editor, wich allowed me to mostly change the game to what i could think of.
It has an easy to understand GUI. After i absolved a "how to make a tower defence" tutorial,
i had the basic knowledge to copy games with wc3.
During this time i learned recreating algorithms by playing and observing different games.
So i focused on learning how to build famrs and how redstone works.
The years passed and i always followed the new versions, gathered clientside mods and joined a citybuild server.
There i've run an oak shop.
To do efficient advertising for my logs i made myself a camouflage skin with vanilla oak textures and switched to the username Eiche_Brutal.
(My name is a german joke for heavy furniture made from rustic oak.
Rustic in german (rustikal) sounds a bit simular to brutal, so we like to say:
"few, this is oak brutal!")
I was especially hiped for the nether update and it was great!
My playingstyle however has changed.
I've seen everything from 1.13.2 untill the nether update and i've come to realize that i enjoy exploring the most.
So i switchet to version 1.12.2 and started searching for mods that are compatible to my playstile and each other.
The biggest change to me was that swimming wasn't a thing in 1.12.2 wich i was used to from the start.
First i played around with the better diving mod but it added to much stuff i didn't use and like.
Right know i'm playing a modpack with Biomes o plenty, Electroblobs Wizardry and Chococraft.
There are of corse a few more but i lost count and these 3 are the main mods.
It turned out to be a crossover between minecraft and final fantasy and i am enjoying it.
My projects:
-are abandoned for now. I might pick 'em up in the future.
For now i'm working on a private modpack that suit's my own playstyle.
I am gonna stay in modded 1.12.2 untill my potato dies. No mercy! :Q
Are you going to upgrade to 1.17? The Cave Update?
My previous replies, and elsewhere, make it pretty clear that I won't - at the very least, not without modding world generation back to 1.6.4, accommodating new features, which would be an impractically difficult task (for one, the modding environment that I use, MCP, hasn't been officially updated since 1.12, and I'm not going to try to learn how to use Forge, ASM, and all that stuff; then there is all the nonsense with block states and models and such, and more convoluted code in general; true, I've only seen decompiled unobfuscated code for newer versions but it looks like a total mess with all the objects, containers, wrappers, and so on; sp614x has also described the code for 1.8+ as such). I'd absolutely not want to ruin my first world with chunk walls everywhere, including underground; this is also why I've made a new world for every version of my own mods that make major changes to world generation and have delayed the release of the next major version of TMCW in favor of adding non-terrain altering features that were originally going to be added in it.
Aside from that, adding some large caves here and there, and apparently very rare (I haven't actually watched any videos or read any detailed information about 1.17 since I'm not interested in it but this is what it sounds like), with 1.7+ cave generation elsewhere is no better than 1.7 by itself; you can barely do much caving without having to search for new areas to explore (one complaint that I've seen is that too many caves end too quickly; a good-size cave system to me takes a full 3-4 hour play session to explore and will lead to mineshafts/ravines/more caves without having to search or dig to find them).
For comparison, this is what I've found in a modded world, averaging about one cave or ravine distinctly larger than vanilla every 2 days (they are actually more common but not all will be noticeably larger; a cave search utility included with TMCW defines a "large" cave as a volume of 25,000 or more, while in vanilla the largest cave I've found in my first world is about 13,000 and even within a 1 million chunk area the largest cave rarely exceeds 20,000), and about 5 underground features every day (this includes some surface structures but they are only a fraction of the total and most were found while caving or traveling to/from the area I'm exploring and bases; all I actually found before my "end game" caving were a jungle temple, village, and stronghold):
Structures/caves found (by number):
383 normal dungeons (including 3 "double" dungeons)
314 ravines (up to 10 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
118 mineshafts
67 large caves (larger than vanilla, not including giant caves)
51 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
30 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
19 double dungeons (one combined with a normal dungeon for 3 spawners)
15 giant caves (>50000 in volume)
12 fossils
12 maze cave clusters
12 ravine cave clusters
11 circular room cave clusters
10 circular rooms at least 34 blocks in diameter (twice as large as vanilla)
7 vertical cave clusters
7 villages (3 Desert, 2 Plains, 1 Ice Plains, 1 Meadow)
6 ravine cave systems
5 circular room cave systems
5 combination cave systems
5 vertical cave systems
4 igloos (2 with basement)
4 network cave regions
3 jungle temples
3 maze cave systems
3 strongholds (2 found by caving)
2 colossal cave systems
2 desert temples
2 desert wells
2 witch huts
1 giant cave region
(1115 individual structures/caves)
The surface of TMCW is also just as varied as the underground, with impossible biome arrangements for vanilla 1.7+ (near spawn) unless you use very specific seeds (TMCW does include many biomes from 1.7+ but there are also many of my own biomes); note that this world is not very large by modern standards (e.g. woodland mansions can be 10,000+ blocks away) and could be all one climate zone in 1.7+:
I've also fixed many bugs which are still present in current versions, including ones I consider to be game-breaking, such as the lack of true total darkness, while not having others at all, such as random chunk corruption. None of the 1.17 blocks or items seem to be interesting; if anything, the addition of amethyst as an vanilla item is more annoying since TMCW itself has its own version of amethyst (which is an armor/tool material with a similar status as netehrite, if added 6 years earlier).
Telescopes are just Mojang's way of implementing a zoom feature, aka Optifine or my own mod (which both simply involve pressing a button, no need to carry around an item and press F1 to hide the overlay. Supposedly, telescopes can zoom in more but I could easily change it myself if I wanted to (all it does is lower the FOV, to 17.5 or 1/4 of normal in my case), or even add a "zoom FOV" slider to adjust it). Bundles might be useful for some of the rarer things I collect (e.g. diamond horse armor, enchanted books, golden apples), but I've heard that unstackable items take up the whole thing and otherwise they are easily offset by my own "rail" and "cobweb" blocks (storing 9 and 4 of their respective items in the same manner as coal/iron/etc blocks; to get an idea of their impact, the last time I went back to my main base I had nearly 4 full stacks of rail blocks, equivalent to 34 stacks of rails (I just use my inventory and ender chest, up to 63 slots, to transport resources back; 63 slots may not sound like much but this can hold as many as 36,288 items crafted into blocks of 9, with about 2/3 of slots being blocks and the rest other stuff, which is enough for about a week's worth of resources collected).
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?
Do you intend to port some of the quality of life features (blast furnaces, setting spawn points at day, hay bales reducing fall damage, etc.) into your mod/game at any point?
For the most part I've added features that I find useful myself; faster furnaces just for smelting ores don't appeal since I just set up a big wall of furnaces each with a stack of ore while caving and leave them there, not returning until long after they have finished smelting (about 11 minutes, while I may leave furnaces at a "return point" until I end my current caving session, hours later; likewise when cooking a batch of potatoes I just throw them in furnaces and take them out the next time I return to my base or after I've chopped down a jungle tree for more wood, harvested crops, etc). I have added some features just for fun, such as more wall and fence variants (I haven't ever actually used walls), but generally they have some purpose, at least in world generation, which is my main focus.
Many of my most useful additions (for my playstyle) aren't even in any vanilla version, such as blocks for rails and cobwebs (the addition of coal blocks in 1.6 remains the one vanilla feature that has had the biggest impact on my playstyle, enabling me to mine 2,000+ coal per play session without constantly having to return to empty my inventory - after 1.6 came out I even re-explored caves I'd previously explored in 1.5 just so I could extract all the coal I left behind). Likewise, bigger ender chests enable me to carry more resources back to my main base (I initially made ender chests have 54 slots, then I added a new variant which is in addition to vanilla ender chests for a total of 81 slots; I did use a "large" ender chest for a while while caving but I currently use a normal one since the addition of rail/cobweb blocks). You could argue that shulker boxes could allow me to carry even more back (up to hundreds of thousands of resources) but I don't find that as fun (I actually do like the occasional breaks from caving to build new secondary bases and railways, which I never did in the worlds where I used a large ender chest or a backpack mod while caving).
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?