if there is to be a cave update then I've said it before the subterranean environment of Minecraft needs to be expanded, literally.
Let's take some notes from cubic chunks mod to implement this
Y 5 to 0 no longer has bedrock in the overworld, the bedrock at this coordinate is now replaced with more stone, andesite, diorite, granite, dirt, water, lava and ores. And this now extends down as far as 2047 negative Y, the new bedrock layer becomes -2048 to -2053, void below but impassible in survival.
More ores could be fitted as well as underground structures with new types of mobs, depending on what people are asking for.
The same thing happens in the nether, just netherrack, gravel, magma blocks, gold, lava and quartz ore replacing the rest, with bedrock moved down to -2048 to -2053.
Also the bedrock layer on top of the nether at around 128 Y is removed, and replaced with near endless terrain going up, this patches the exploit people used to get above bedrock in the nether permanently since now the exploit becomes meaningless to pull off again, the new bedrock layer would be so far up nobody would want to bother with it anymore, we're talking at 30 million Y, and you get plenty of netherrack to replace what was lost to Ghast.
it means more nether fortresses, crimson forests, basalt deltas and bastions can be found since the nether would be affected by the cave update which bundles in 1 more useful feature.
Can you imagine the lag caused by chunks being 8 times taller? Most players can't even fly around in the end without end islands not loading properly.
Cubic chunks would also introduce more efficient chunk handling which would reduce the lag on your worlds. The chunks would be loaded in a 16 x 16 x 16 pattern, not the current 16 x 16 x 256 cuboid shaped ones,
hence the name cubic.
In other words what you would see would be limited by the render distance you have enabled on your world, but on the Y access also, not just X and Z.
this removes the 256 blocks limitation on the Y axis without adding the enormous strain that would normally come with it on your hardware.
The biggest problem with cubic chunks isn't the performance, it is how terrain would generate and what inconveniences they could cause players in survival mode which need to be tweaked out before they can become part of the vanilla experience.
I think going that deep is overkill. Now, I do hope with the mountains update, we get a new height limit increase to 512, and you could add another 32 blocks onto the standard ground depth. More than that starts to be a little overkill IMO. I don't think we need these giant, nigh-limitless underground regions, but a small expansion would be cool.
I think going that deep is overkill. Now, I do hope with the mountains update, we get a new height limit increase to 512, and you could add another 32 blocks onto the standard ground depth. More than that starts to be a little overkill IMO. I don't think we need these giant, nigh-limitless underground regions, but a small expansion would be cool.
I don't support having unlimited underground region, but I think a max ground depth of negative 2048 Y is reasonable in both overworld and the nether, and it allows deeper oceans and more cave systems to be found, as well as more gemstones. I don't think bedrock should be reached as easily as Y 5. It feels too restricting, whether it'll make the game easier or harder is another thing, although my guess is it'll make it harder due to more deadly ravines and more chance of deadly encounters with lava or cave spiders.
and when I supported having the terrain generate as much as 30 million Y in the nether it is because of the nether exploit at the bedrock ceiling which makes the nether broken. Perhaps we don't need to expand the upward terrain this much to discourage the exploit though, limiting the terrain generation to about 4096 Y could work and discourage enough players from using exploits to get above bedrock for it to be useful.
There is a reason why my own mods do not make the underground (much) deeper, which i did experiment with, including a "triple height terrain" mod which added 128 to the ground depth (a total of about 3.5 times the usable space when factoring in the removal of most bedrock and a lower cave lava level, the latter of which is still present in newer mods); I did not feel like it added much and scaling cave systems up to fill the ground made them ridiculously large, then there is the fact that I'd barely cover any ground (THT is my smallest world in terms of area but not in terms of caves explored); the biome layout in 1.7+ is already bad enough, now imagine if a single biome had hundreds of thousands of blocks worth of caves under it:
I think most people do not realize just how tiny vanilla caves are and just how much larger they can be made even with only 59 blocks to work with; the largest single caves in vanilla (ravines) have a volume of only around 25,000 blocks; for example, this is what a cave with a volume of 685,000 blocks looks like, and it could be even larger (the theoretical maximum is more than 1 million):
Much of a stronghold is suspended inside the cave (strongholds prevent large caves from generating within a 6 chunk radius but they can still be so large as to intersect them. However, unlike vanilla the walls of strongholds always replace blocks, including air blocks, so from inside the stronghold you may never realize it is floating in a cave unless you came across one of the open dead ends):
This is a large cave I recently found in my Survival world, it had a volume of "only" 199,000 blocks but was still vastly larger than anything possible in vanilla (for comparison, this cave had a "length" of 342 and "width" of 48, compared to 112 and 27 for the largest cave in vanilla, multiply these numbers together (with width squared) and you get a volume that is about 10 times larger, actually even more since caves branch into two smaller tunnels, which in vanilla are only up to 4-5 blocks wide regardless of the width of the main tunnel while in TMCW large cave branches are 1/3-2/3 of the width. The main tunnel itself starts out with a width of 3 and widens to the maximum at half the total length, with vanilla caves branching as early as 25% so they never actually reach the maximum, while TMCW's large caves branch at 50% minimum):
I increased the render distance for these screenshots:
Then I have "giant cave regions" which are made up of multiple large caves, each larger than the largest single cave in vanilla, with an overall volume of around 1.25 million blocks over a 300x300 block area, which is still only about 22% of all blocks (for comparison, this is about 4 times the average underground volume from all underground features in 1.6.4 and 5 times in newer versions):
This is an animation of various slices through a giant cave region that I explored:
A zoomed-out view, covering a 1024x1050 block area; besides the giant cave region are various other extremely large caves and ravines, each dozens of times larger than the average cave/ravine in vanilla, all within 59 layers of ground (from lava level at y=4 to sea level at y=63, which represents a 13.5% increase from vanilla's 52 layers from 11-63):
This is another view of the same area, created with my "CaveFinder" utility which can separately map special cave variants, including those larger than vanilla and new variations not found in vanilla. All the caves shown have a total volume of about 3.7 million blocks, about the average of everything within the entire area in vanilla 1.6.4, of which nearly half is in the giant cave region and the largest cave and ravine together (to the west of the giant cave region. The "small" ravine between the cave and giant cave region gives you an idea of how small vanilla ravines are as it is still larger than them):
This is an analysis of a 300x300 area 63 blocks deep centered over the giant cave region shown above; it took about 5,500 torches to light it up and it yielded more than 15,000 ores and I killed nearly 2,000 mobs while exploring it over a bit more than 4 normal play sessions
There is a reason why my own mods do not make the underground (much) deeper, which i did experiment with, including a "triple height terrain" mod which added 128 to the ground depth (a total of about 3.5 times the usable space when factoring in the removal of most bedrock and a lower cave lava level, the latter of which is still present in newer mods); I did not feel like it added much and scaling cave systems up to fill the ground made them ridiculously large, then there is the fact that I'd barely cover any ground (THT is my smallest world in terms of area but not in terms of caves explored); the biome layout in 1.7+ is already bad enough, now imagine if a single biome had hundreds of thousands of blocks worth of caves under it:
I think most people do not realize just how tiny vanilla caves are and just how much larger they can be made even with only 59 blocks to work with; the largest single caves in vanilla (ravines) have a volume of only around 25,000 blocks; for example, this is what a cave with a volume of 685,000 blocks looks like, and it could be even larger (the theoretical maximum is more than 1 million):
Much of a stronghold is suspended inside the cave (strongholds prevent large caves from generating within a 6 chunk radius but they can still be so large as to intersect them. However, unlike vanilla the walls of strongholds always replace blocks, including air blocks, so from inside the stronghold you may never realize it is floating in a cave unless you came across one of the open dead ends):
This is a large cave I recently found in my Survival world, it had a volume of "only" 199,000 blocks but was still vastly larger than anything possible in vanilla (for comparison, this cave had a "length" of 342 and "width" of 48, compared to 112 and 27 for the largest cave in vanilla, multiply these numbers together (with width squared) and you get a volume that is about 10 times larger, actually even more since caves branch into two smaller tunnels, which in vanilla are only up to 4-5 blocks wide regardless of the width of the main tunnel while in TMCW large cave branches are 1/3-2/3 of the width. The main tunnel itself starts out with a width of 3 and widens to the maximum at half the total length, with vanilla caves branching as early as 25% so they never actually reach the maximum, while TMCW's large caves branch at 50% minimum):
I increased the render distance for these screenshots:
Then I have "giant cave regions" which are made up of multiple large caves, each larger than the largest single cave in vanilla, with an overall volume of around 1.25 million blocks over a 300x300 block area, which is still only about 22% of all blocks (for comparison, this is about 4 times the average underground volume from all underground features in 1.6.4 and 5 times in newer versions):
This is an animation of various slices through a giant cave region that I explored:
A zoomed-out view, covering a 1024x1050 block area; besides the giant cave region are various other extremely large caves and ravines, each dozens of times larger than the average cave/ravine in vanilla, all within 59 layers of ground (from lava level at y=4 to sea level at y=63, which represents a 13.5% increase from vanilla's 52 layers from 11-63):
This is another view of the same area, created with my "CaveFinder" utility which can separately map special cave variants, including those larger than vanilla and new variations not found in vanilla. All the caves shown have a total volume of about 3.7 million blocks, about the average of everything within the entire area in vanilla 1.6.4, of which nearly half is in the giant cave region and the largest cave and ravine together (to the west of the giant cave region. The "small" ravine between the cave and giant cave region gives you an idea of how small vanilla ravines are as it is still larger than them):
This is an analysis of a 300x300 area 63 blocks deep centered over the giant cave region shown above; it took about 5,500 torches to light it up and it yielded more than 15,000 ores and I killed nearly 2,000 mobs while exploring it over a bit more than 4 normal play sessions
This update would be primarily to help those who like hording resources to build large structures or to keep spare sets of diamond tools and armour for multiple players on the server, but want to remain in the same general area their bases are in for longer periods of time before having to relocate their mines. I don't believe they're going to care if expanding the ground depth will result in more grinding or more risk, as long as the resources gained are proportional to the effort put in, which they will be.
Yes the caves would be bigger with an update like this but I think the benefits gained would be worth it.
"This update would be primarily to help those who like hording resources to build large structures or to keep spare sets of diamond tools and armour for multiple players on the server, but want to remain in the same general area their bases are in for longer periods of time before having to relocate their mines"
I would prefer if that wasn't a viable thing to be honest. Settings up transport between there and another mining site a few hundred blocks away is an interesting concept, and I think it should have a bit more use.
"This update would be primarily to help those who like hording resources to build large structures or to keep spare sets of diamond tools and armour for multiple players on the server, but want to remain in the same general area their bases are in for longer periods of time before having to relocate their mines"
I would prefer if that wasn't a viable thing to be honest. Settings up transport between there and another mining site a few hundred blocks away is an interesting concept, and I think it should have a bit more use.
You do realize mine cart systems can be set up to transport items and players uphill and downhill, and not just horizontally, right? the same principle of transport could be used in a mine that is deeper than Y 0. The real reason this limitation is present is not because of gameplay, it is to reduce lag because expanding ground depth and mountain peaks would increase load on people's computers if the same chunk loading system were used.
Cubic chunks gets rid of the inefficiencies of the older chunk handling system and introduces one that removes the 256 Y restriction as well as chunks being loaded in smaller pieces and presumably be entirely dependent on your render distance. And it gives players more things to do with their worlds now that the height limitation for building is gone.
Minecarts can be set up, yes, but nobody would do it because both bubble columns and gravity exist and are faster than minecarts.
Jumping into a pool of water only works for downward travel, going upstream on a waterfall is a slow method of transport, not to mention risky, if you fall off the waterfall and hit the ground too hard, you're dead.
powered rail mine cart systems are fast and would get you to your upward destination quicker, but are more costly on resources.
You can use a bubble column, but you still need soulsand which requires a trip to the nether, not something you start off with in the overworld.
And unless you have shulker boxes from the End, transporting large amounts of resources from mine to base on topside is massively inconvenient compared to a minecart system.
if there is to be a cave update then I've said it before the subterranean environment of Minecraft needs to be expanded, literally.
Let's take some notes from cubic chunks mod to implement this
Y 5 to 0 no longer has bedrock in the overworld, the bedrock at this coordinate is now replaced with more stone, andesite, diorite, granite, dirt, water, lava and ores. And this now extends down as far as 2047 negative Y, the new bedrock layer becomes -2048 to -2053, void below but impassible in survival.
More ores could be fitted as well as underground structures with new types of mobs, depending on what people are asking for.
The same thing happens in the nether, just netherrack, gravel, magma blocks, gold, lava and quartz ore replacing the rest, with bedrock moved down to -2048 to -2053.
Also the bedrock layer on top of the nether at around 128 Y is removed, and replaced with near endless terrain going up, this patches the exploit people used to get above bedrock in the nether permanently since now the exploit becomes meaningless to pull off again, the new bedrock layer would be so far up nobody would want to bother with it anymore, we're talking at 30 million Y, and you get plenty of netherrack to replace what was lost to Ghast.
it means more nether fortresses, crimson forests, basalt deltas and bastions can be found since the nether would be affected by the cave update which bundles in 1 more useful feature.
Can you imagine the lag caused by chunks being 8 times taller? Most players can't even fly around in the end without end islands not loading properly.
Cubic chunks would also introduce more efficient chunk handling which would reduce the lag on your worlds. The chunks would be loaded in a 16 x 16 x 16 pattern, not the current 16 x 16 x 256 cuboid shaped ones,
hence the name cubic.
In other words what you would see would be limited by the render distance you have enabled on your world, but on the Y access also, not just X and Z.
this removes the 256 blocks limitation on the Y axis without adding the enormous strain that would normally come with it on your hardware.
The biggest problem with cubic chunks isn't the performance, it is how terrain would generate and what inconveniences they could cause players in survival mode which need to be tweaked out before they can become part of the vanilla experience.
I think going that deep is overkill. Now, I do hope with the mountains update, we get a new height limit increase to 512, and you could add another 32 blocks onto the standard ground depth. More than that starts to be a little overkill IMO. I don't think we need these giant, nigh-limitless underground regions, but a small expansion would be cool.
I don't support having unlimited underground region, but I think a max ground depth of negative 2048 Y is reasonable in both overworld and the nether, and it allows deeper oceans and more cave systems to be found, as well as more gemstones. I don't think bedrock should be reached as easily as Y 5. It feels too restricting, whether it'll make the game easier or harder is another thing, although my guess is it'll make it harder due to more deadly ravines and more chance of deadly encounters with lava or cave spiders.
and when I supported having the terrain generate as much as 30 million Y in the nether it is because of the nether exploit at the bedrock ceiling which makes the nether broken. Perhaps we don't need to expand the upward terrain this much to discourage the exploit though, limiting the terrain generation to about 4096 Y could work and discourage enough players from using exploits to get above bedrock for it to be useful.
In 1.15 they changed it so that portals can successfully take you to the nether ceiling. I think Mojang is ok with this exploit for that reason.
There is a reason why my own mods do not make the underground (much) deeper, which i did experiment with, including a "triple height terrain" mod which added 128 to the ground depth (a total of about 3.5 times the usable space when factoring in the removal of most bedrock and a lower cave lava level, the latter of which is still present in newer mods); I did not feel like it added much and scaling cave systems up to fill the ground made them ridiculously large, then there is the fact that I'd barely cover any ground (THT is my smallest world in terms of area but not in terms of caves explored); the biome layout in 1.7+ is already bad enough, now imagine if a single biome had hundreds of thousands of blocks worth of caves under it:
I think most people do not realize just how tiny vanilla caves are and just how much larger they can be made even with only 59 blocks to work with; the largest single caves in vanilla (ravines) have a volume of only around 25,000 blocks; for example, this is what a cave with a volume of 685,000 blocks looks like, and it could be even larger (the theoretical maximum is more than 1 million):
Much of a stronghold is suspended inside the cave (strongholds prevent large caves from generating within a 6 chunk radius but they can still be so large as to intersect them. However, unlike vanilla the walls of strongholds always replace blocks, including air blocks, so from inside the stronghold you may never realize it is floating in a cave unless you came across one of the open dead ends):
This is a large cave I recently found in my Survival world, it had a volume of "only" 199,000 blocks but was still vastly larger than anything possible in vanilla (for comparison, this cave had a "length" of 342 and "width" of 48, compared to 112 and 27 for the largest cave in vanilla, multiply these numbers together (with width squared) and you get a volume that is about 10 times larger, actually even more since caves branch into two smaller tunnels, which in vanilla are only up to 4-5 blocks wide regardless of the width of the main tunnel while in TMCW large cave branches are 1/3-2/3 of the width. The main tunnel itself starts out with a width of 3 and widens to the maximum at half the total length, with vanilla caves branching as early as 25% so they never actually reach the maximum, while TMCW's large caves branch at 50% minimum):
I increased the render distance for these screenshots:
Then I have "giant cave regions" which are made up of multiple large caves, each larger than the largest single cave in vanilla, with an overall volume of around 1.25 million blocks over a 300x300 block area, which is still only about 22% of all blocks (for comparison, this is about 4 times the average underground volume from all underground features in 1.6.4 and 5 times in newer versions):
A zoomed-out view, covering a 1024x1050 block area; besides the giant cave region are various other extremely large caves and ravines, each dozens of times larger than the average cave/ravine in vanilla, all within 59 layers of ground (from lava level at y=4 to sea level at y=63, which represents a 13.5% increase from vanilla's 52 layers from 11-63):
This is another view of the same area, created with my "CaveFinder" utility which can separately map special cave variants, including those larger than vanilla and new variations not found in vanilla. All the caves shown have a total volume of about 3.7 million blocks, about the average of everything within the entire area in vanilla 1.6.4, of which nearly half is in the giant cave region and the largest cave and ravine together (to the west of the giant cave region. The "small" ravine between the cave and giant cave region gives you an idea of how small vanilla ravines are as it is still larger than them):
This is an analysis of a 300x300 area 63 blocks deep centered over the giant cave region shown above; it took about 5,500 torches to light it up and it yielded more than 15,000 ores and I killed nearly 2,000 mobs while exploring it over a bit more than 4 normal play sessions
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?
This update would be primarily to help those who like hording resources to build large structures or to keep spare sets of diamond tools and armour for multiple players on the server, but want to remain in the same general area their bases are in for longer periods of time before having to relocate their mines. I don't believe they're going to care if expanding the ground depth will result in more grinding or more risk, as long as the resources gained are proportional to the effort put in, which they will be.
Yes the caves would be bigger with an update like this but I think the benefits gained would be worth it.
"This update would be primarily to help those who like hording resources to build large structures or to keep spare sets of diamond tools and armour for multiple players on the server, but want to remain in the same general area their bases are in for longer periods of time before having to relocate their mines"
I would prefer if that wasn't a viable thing to be honest. Settings up transport between there and another mining site a few hundred blocks away is an interesting concept, and I think it should have a bit more use.
You do realize mine cart systems can be set up to transport items and players uphill and downhill, and not just horizontally, right? the same principle of transport could be used in a mine that is deeper than Y 0. The real reason this limitation is present is not because of gameplay, it is to reduce lag because expanding ground depth and mountain peaks would increase load on people's computers if the same chunk loading system were used.
Cubic chunks gets rid of the inefficiencies of the older chunk handling system and introduces one that removes the 256 Y restriction as well as chunks being loaded in smaller pieces and presumably be entirely dependent on your render distance. And it gives players more things to do with their worlds now that the height limitation for building is gone.
Minecarts can be set up, yes, but nobody would do it because both bubble columns and gravity exist and are faster than minecarts.
Jumping into a pool of water only works for downward travel, going upstream on a waterfall is a slow method of transport, not to mention risky, if you fall off the waterfall and hit the ground too hard, you're dead.
powered rail mine cart systems are fast and would get you to your upward destination quicker, but are more costly on resources.
You can use a bubble column, but you still need soulsand which requires a trip to the nether, not something you start off with in the overworld.
And unless you have shulker boxes from the End, transporting large amounts of resources from mine to base on topside is massively inconvenient compared to a minecart system.