Minecraft Forums

Minecraft has come a long way since the first couple of years of its release. Alpha and beta are soon gone. I'm fine with not having the bright greens of alpha, but beta lighting and generation looked really cool in my opinion. I will attach an image in this thread of the worlds from that time.

In my opinion, the colour of that old water and the sun and fog, makes it look really good, especially with the dark crevices inbetween blocks. It feels more like Minecraft. Also in that image we can see a huge mountain. I really like old generation. The colours of the grass and the biomes back then also just had a really dream-like quality to them. I feel if we had options to bring these features back, it would help a lot. It would also put all of the old complainers to rest.

I'm not sure what you are talking about by "dark crevices between blocks", unless you mean the darker shadows in corners (ambient occlusion), which has always been around if smooth lighting is enabled (maybe the intensity has since changed, IDK, as I still play on 1.6.4, which looks just like the screenshot (this is from a modded version but lighting is vanilla. Also, note that if you use Optifine it has a setting for "smooth lighting level", which changes the intensity of shadows, where 100% is vanilla).

Otherwise, 1.16 is re-adding custom world generation in a vastly more powerful form - you can even adjust the terrain parameters of individual biomes, though you can't replicate some of the features like beaches or caves (the Wiki doesn't even mention any options whatsoever for caves, just astounding):

biomes: A list of biomes, including their likelihood.
: A biome and its properties
biome (string): The biome.
parameters: Properties of the biome.
altitude (float):[needs testing]
weirdness (float):[needs testing]
offset (float):[needs testing]
temperature (float): Affects rain/snow and the color of leaves and grass; see Biome § Biome colors.
humidity (float):[needs testing]

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Custom

The colors of grass and leaves can also be changed with a resource pack; you can even make most biomes the same color, aside from swamps, mesa, and roofed forest, which all use hardcoded colors, by coloring the texture all the same color (or in 1.16, use world customization to set the temperature and rainfall, e.g. setting both to 1 will make them have the lush green of jungles. It may still be easier to use a resource pack as you just need to recolor a couple images).

Other than that, they can add a fog distance slider similar to Optifine's, though I'd prefer that it to be a fine adjustment than just a few discrete steps (the 1.6.4 version of Optifine has fixed settings of 0.2, 0.6, 0.8), similar to what I implemented myself, where it smoothly goes from 0-0.9, then off (I personally much prefer the fog in 1.7+, which is equivalent to 0.8; the default fog in 1.6.4, which is equivalent to 0.25, just looks awful, compare this image to this one, same render distance but different fog due to Optifine). Likewise, an option for adjusting cloud height would be nice, especially for higher/deeper worlds (in my double/triple height terrain mods I increased the height to 192 and 256 respectively so clouds would be at the same height relative to the ground; Optifine also lets you increase it from the default of 128 to 256, but not lower; I added a setting which varies it from 96 (the Beta height) to 256).

Of course, these settings can also be made per world/dimension, in which case the in-game settings will only change the settings for that world/dimension (similar to the difficulty setting), with the game defaulting to whatever you last set them to when creating a new world so if you prefer a certain setting you don't need to keep setting it.