This is adapted from a thread I previously posted in the modding forum a while back. Upon further reflection, I decided something this crazy could, possibly, work with vanilla. Or, at the very least, in a forum about ideas for Vanilla. And I'm the first to admit that it's pretty out there. Just to establish some things right off the bat:
-Mojang has previously stated that, for the time being, they're more than happy with three dimensions. This makes sense, seeing as said dimensions are currently in the process of a makeover, more or less.
-However, the Infinity Snapshot proved that Minecraft is more than capable of dealing with infinite seeded dimensions. (Okay, nearly infinite, or at least ridiculously big enough to be, for all purposes, infinite.) This April fools update, ironically enough, made for some really cool survival mechanics, if admittedly unbalanced ones.
-This would be more in the way of optional settings that could be enabled or disabled when creating a world.
-I'm kind of curious to see how people feel about this idea. I imagine that if it were implemented, players could decide how dimensions work in the world config options.
-This is, in all honesty, a ridiculously sweeping idea, and something I wanted to try out more out of interest than any certainty that something like this would ever be included in the base game. What Would This Constitute?
First of all, I'd like to clarify what I mean by 'infinite' dimensions to some extent. Many of the weird dimensions in the Infinity Snapshot aren't exactly balanced- they're pretty much all incredibly bizarre, and there's no sure means of determining which dimension you access in the first place. They're cool, but these sort of really weird dimensions ought to be a bit more rare.
From what I can tell, there are generally three types of dimensions featured in the existing game. The Overworld consists of a combination of an underground area, a surface world, and the sky. The Enderworld consists entirely of sky and floating islands, and the Netherworld is the exact opposite, consisting entirely of an extensive underground area. Hence, three basic types of dimensions- which all refer to as type O, E, and N hereafter. Dimensions could generate a combination of these factors- a world that tends entirely towards O would consist of almost entirely flat terrain, whereas adding N would increase underground area, and adding E would increase terrain intensity and sky area.
So dimensions would first be categorized by their terrain- O, N, or E. secondly, they would be categorized by what sort of things they consisted of. These categories would be more general, and would vary in how rare or common they were. Keep in mind that these could be combined with any terrain type, (You could have a wooded Underground world, a wooded Skyworld, or a wooded Overworld, though they'd generate slightly differently based on the terrain.) Some ideas, listed in order of rarity, include:
Wooded Worlds ~ Worlds that consist entirely of forest biomes, with chances of generating much larger trees than normal. In underground worlds, this would mean vast subterranean root networks- in skyworlds, floating isles connected by roots. Wooded Worlds generate, in order of rarity, with Oak, Birch, Spruce, Dark Oak, Acacia, and Jungle Wood. Portals use wooden blocks. Mineral Worlds ~ Consist primarily of stone and minerals. These worlds would generate with a couple of stone types, and one or two types of ore, and would be otherwise barren and largely devoid of life. Portals use stone or metal blocks. Frozen/Desert Worlds ~ Worlds that are incredibly dry and largely barren, consisting entirely of desert or of an ice biome. Picture frozen or sand filled caverns, or floating isles of frigid shards of ice. Portals would use ice or sandstone type blocks. Muddled Worlds ~ Worlds that consist of a completely random combination of mismatched biomes, with a higher chance of generating unusual terrain features. Portals would consist of various combinations of natural blocks from different biomes. Fungal Worlds ~ Worlds that primarily consist of fungal biomes, such as crimson/warped forests and mushroom plains, with unusually large and dense fungal growths. Portals would consist of... you guessed it, fungal blocks. Ruined Worlds ~ Worlds filled with extensive ruins made of various materials- that is, the terrain itself consists of areas that feel manmade- crumbled complexes of sorts, possibly overgrown. This would likely be the most difficult to implement, but also one of my personal favorite ideas. Portals could consist of various types of bricks. Broken Worlds ~ 'Ordinary' world types with purposeful glitches or problems with terrain, resulting from a portal of more random blocks. Strange Worlds ~ More along the lines of some of the weirdness introduced in the Infinity Update, with strange geometric formations, bizarre terrain materials, and other assorted disturbing and incredibly weird areas.The portal could be built using various colorful blocks, such as dyed concrete.
Finally, other random factors would be determined to add additional effects to these worlds. This could include all sorts of things, such as the sky color, odd weather patterns or weird daylight cycles, slight tweaks to how terrain generates, major tweaks to how terrain generates- (Like having biomes generate in geometric patterns), weird structures- such as giant, random stone pillars, extensive ruins or hovering shapes, and variations in biome color palettes- resulting in weirdly colored flora or fauna. How Should This be Implemented?
Aside from the bit about designing code for countless new types of procedural terrain generation, this would be pretty easy to implement. (Sarcasm.) One of the big issues I had with the infinity update was the mechanic of throwing books into a portal- while it works quite well, it's impossible to determine the contents of the dimension you enter, (Excluding the easter egg dimensions.) How to do this? Simply, enough, change the materials required to build portals.
That is, Obsidian is always used for the four corners of the portal. Then, the blocks that make up the frame of the portal determine the contents of the dimension. An ordinary portal frame made entirely of obsidian would take you to the Nether, like usual. However, a portal made out of wooden logs would take you to a wooded dimension, and a portal made of metal blocks would take you to a mineral dimension.
This system could actually be fairly simple. Blocks would each be assigned different statistics for what sort of dimensions they were likely to generate. Wooden blocks would increase the chances of a wooded dimension, metal blocks of a mineral dimension, ice or sand of a frozen or desert dimension, bricks of a ruined dimension, etc. Rarer blocks would further increase the chance of rare resources, and bigger portals would drastically increase the chances of reaching the right type. Once the portal is lit, the resulting configuration of blocks will always lead to the same dimension in your world only.
Finally, another issue with the infinity update was the availability of rare resources- you could find entire dimensions that consisted only of solid diamond. To balance this, a 'simple' fix would be to increase the likelihood of more frequent spawning and more dangerous variants of hostiles depending on the rarity of resources avalible- sort of like in No Mans Sky, how the presence of hostile sentinels tends to imply valuable resources.
Why Should This be a Thing?
Finally, why should this be added- something so radically different from the base game? How would this work with Vanilla? The Overworld, Netherworld, and Enderworld
are already quite unique, and it doesn't seem necessary to add any more places to explore.
First of all, this feature would be largely optional- allowing players to determine whether they had the default three dimensions, one of each type of dimension, or endless dimensions. The key use here is that wooded dimensions, mineral dimensions, fungal dimensions- all give players new ways to specialize, and an incentive to try and colonize hostile new environments.
Secondly, as the Infinity Snapshot proved, this is entirely plausible, and the game is capable of handling countless different dimensions. This idea itself is focused more on reasons for adding something like this, rather than the technical aspects of it, of which I know very little. At the ver least, it would be cool if players were given the option to add Infinity Dimensions in later versions of the game. Another nice option would be the ability to create additional dimensions using commands.
Thirdly, one of the major issues with Minecraft, (In my opinion), and with many sandbox games, (Also in my opinion), is exploration. Once again, consider No Man's Sky- in which, despite a near infinite Universe, planets can begin to grow redundant after a while. I believe Minecraft, on the other hand, is modular enough that this problem could be avoided. New dimensions could be implemented without the need for new creatures, items, or blocks- (Though this could be cool as well, it might be going a little too far. As if the rest of this wasn't going a little too far.)
Finally, one of the best reasonings as of yet: New dimensions would look cool, and provide an excuse to add more music and stuff to the game.
An Even Crazier Idea
Admittedly, it's difficult to come up with anything more far fetched than the idea I've laid out thus far. But I think I've come up with something even more speculative...
What if, among other new dimensions, players could, say, use quartz to access a special dimension -a version of the Overworld shared by all players? That is, essentially an MMO world in which players could interact with each other. I've always thought Minecraft should have a built in large multiplayer mode in addition to servers, and it would be interesting to see how players used this special dimension. Any portals built here would lead back to your personal Overworld. It would be quite an interesting social experiment, and, quite honestly, this feature could be implemented on its own.
Admittedly, I know nothing of the technical implications of this, and this idea more than the others raises quite a few questions. I'm curious to see what you think.
The problem is there isn't an infinite amount of storage space on computers.
While having a near limitless number of parallel universes to go to in the game would seem like a nice idea in theory, in practice it would not work.
A fully generated single world in terms of file size, would exceed the capacities of all the consumer storage drives.
I am for adding in more dimensions, but not hundreds, thousands or millions more. I'm unfortunately going to have to disagree with this one.
There's a much simpler and better solution.
Instead, there should be a limited number of dimensions added to the game that are vastly different from the ones we know.
One of them being an enchanted fairy tale based world based on the Twilight Forest mod, another based on Ice Age which could be Overworld past the Prehistoric dimension which has saber tooth tiger, mammoth and other creatures that existed around that time period but otherwise this world could contain all the biomes and ores the Overworld has except the surface of the biomes be buried in snow and ice.
The other dimensions could be the buffeted Worlds of the Overworld, each generating at random, but you only get one of each, which means you're not going to get 12 mushroom fields ones.
The problem is there isn't an infinite amount of storage space on computers.
A fully generated single world in terms of file size, would exceed the capacities of all the consumer storage drives.
This is not a valid counter-argument, since as you say even a single dimension can already vastly exceed the capabilities of anything less than a supercomputer - but this is only if the player has the time to actually explore that much, which will never happen (even if you fly around in Creative and use 32 chunk render distance it would take about 10,000 years of nonstop flying to generate an entire 60x60 million block world; to actually explore such an area in Survival would take many times longer - at the rate at which I explore it would take over 50 million years to explore an entire world). This is the beauty of on-the-fly procedural generation - it doesn't matter at all how large a world can be or how many dimensions there are, only chunks that have been created will take up storage space; likewise, the game only needs to store chunks around the player in memory, making it possible that my first world only needs around 100 MB despite having around 6 GB of uncompressed data.
The only technical issue I see here is how to randomly generate an effectively unlimited number of dimensions and ensure that they actually make sense (no dimensions of solid diamond blocks) and are unique enough (more than just slight differences in terrain, which otherwise may as well just be a different part of the same world), so it does make sense to only have a limited number of dimensions based on a single biome or a group of biomes, and terrain type. However, I don't see any reason to add more dimensions, if I want a single biome world or one with a few select biomes then I'd make a custom world, and I do not want dimension-exclusive features like biomes with larger trees - add them to the Overworld instead; there should also be no need for a "mining dimension", which suggests that the current Overworld is still woefully lacking in that department (and dimensions made up of solid diamond or whatever would certainly never be added, and otherwise I'd find it very boring to only have 1-2 types of ores to collect, likewise, I think 1.17 is going to backfire because ores are now mostly at separate levels).
This is adapted from a thread I previously posted in the modding forum a while back. Upon further reflection, I decided something this crazy could, possibly, work with vanilla. Or, at the very least, in a forum about ideas for Vanilla. And I'm the first to admit that it's pretty out there. Just to establish some things right off the bat:
-Mojang has previously stated that, for the time being, they're more than happy with three dimensions. This makes sense, seeing as said dimensions are currently in the process of a makeover, more or less.
-However, the Infinity Snapshot proved that Minecraft is more than capable of dealing with infinite seeded dimensions. (Okay, nearly infinite, or at least ridiculously big enough to be, for all purposes, infinite.) This April fools update, ironically enough, made for some really cool survival mechanics, if admittedly unbalanced ones.
-This would be more in the way of optional settings that could be enabled or disabled when creating a world.
-I'm kind of curious to see how people feel about this idea. I imagine that if it were implemented, players could decide how dimensions work in the world config options.
-This is, in all honesty, a ridiculously sweeping idea, and something I wanted to try out more out of interest than any certainty that something like this would ever be included in the base game.What Would This Constitute?
First of all, I'd like to clarify what I mean by 'infinite' dimensions to some extent. Many of the weird dimensions in the Infinity Snapshot aren't exactly balanced- they're pretty much all incredibly bizarre, and there's no sure means of determining which dimension you access in the first place. They're cool, but these sort of really weird dimensions ought to be a bit more rare.
From what I can tell, there are generally three types of dimensions featured in the existing game. The Overworld consists of a combination of an underground area, a surface world, and the sky. The Enderworld consists entirely of sky and floating islands, and the Netherworld is the exact opposite, consisting entirely of an extensive underground area. Hence, three basic types of dimensions- which all refer to as type O, E, and N hereafter. Dimensions could generate a combination of these factors- a world that tends entirely towards O would consist of almost entirely flat terrain, whereas adding N would increase underground area, and adding E would increase terrain intensity and sky area.
So dimensions would first be categorized by their terrain- O, N, or E. secondly, they would be categorized by what sort of things they consisted of. These categories would be more general, and would vary in how rare or common they were. Keep in mind that these could be combined with any terrain type, (You could have a wooded Underground world, a wooded Skyworld, or a wooded Overworld, though they'd generate slightly differently based on the terrain.) Some ideas, listed in order of rarity, include:
Wooded Worlds ~ Worlds that consist entirely of forest biomes, with chances of generating much larger trees than normal. In underground worlds, this would mean vast subterranean root networks- in skyworlds, floating isles connected by roots. Wooded Worlds generate, in order of rarity, with Oak, Birch, Spruce, Dark Oak, Acacia, and Jungle Wood. Portals use wooden blocks.
Mineral Worlds ~ Consist primarily of stone and minerals. These worlds would generate with a couple of stone types, and one or two types of ore, and would be otherwise barren and largely devoid of life. Portals use stone or metal blocks.
Frozen/Desert Worlds ~ Worlds that are incredibly dry and largely barren, consisting entirely of desert or of an ice biome. Picture frozen or sand filled caverns, or floating isles of frigid shards of ice. Portals would use ice or sandstone type blocks.
Muddled Worlds ~ Worlds that consist of a completely random combination of mismatched biomes, with a higher chance of generating unusual terrain features. Portals would consist of various combinations of natural blocks from different biomes.
Fungal Worlds ~ Worlds that primarily consist of fungal biomes, such as crimson/warped forests and mushroom plains, with unusually large and dense fungal growths. Portals would consist of... you guessed it, fungal blocks.
Ruined Worlds ~ Worlds filled with extensive ruins made of various materials- that is, the terrain itself consists of areas that feel manmade- crumbled complexes of sorts, possibly overgrown. This would likely be the most difficult to implement, but also one of my personal favorite ideas. Portals could consist of various types of bricks.
Broken Worlds ~ 'Ordinary' world types with purposeful glitches or problems with terrain, resulting from a portal of more random blocks.
Strange Worlds ~ More along the lines of some of the weirdness introduced in the Infinity Update, with strange geometric formations, bizarre terrain materials, and other assorted disturbing and incredibly weird areas.The portal could be built using various colorful blocks, such as dyed concrete.
Finally, other random factors would be determined to add additional effects to these worlds. This could include all sorts of things, such as the sky color, odd weather patterns or weird daylight cycles, slight tweaks to how terrain generates, major tweaks to how terrain generates- (Like having biomes generate in geometric patterns), weird structures- such as giant, random stone pillars, extensive ruins or hovering shapes, and variations in biome color palettes- resulting in weirdly colored flora or fauna.
How Should This be Implemented?
Aside from the bit about designing code for countless new types of procedural terrain generation, this would be pretty easy to implement. (Sarcasm.) One of the big issues I had with the infinity update was the mechanic of throwing books into a portal- while it works quite well, it's impossible to determine the contents of the dimension you enter, (Excluding the easter egg dimensions.) How to do this? Simply, enough, change the materials required to build portals.
That is, Obsidian is always used for the four corners of the portal. Then, the blocks that make up the frame of the portal determine the contents of the dimension. An ordinary portal frame made entirely of obsidian would take you to the Nether, like usual. However, a portal made out of wooden logs would take you to a wooded dimension, and a portal made of metal blocks would take you to a mineral dimension.
This system could actually be fairly simple. Blocks would each be assigned different statistics for what sort of dimensions they were likely to generate. Wooden blocks would increase the chances of a wooded dimension, metal blocks of a mineral dimension, ice or sand of a frozen or desert dimension, bricks of a ruined dimension, etc. Rarer blocks would further increase the chance of rare resources, and bigger portals would drastically increase the chances of reaching the right type. Once the portal is lit, the resulting configuration of blocks will always lead to the same dimension in your world only.
Finally, another issue with the infinity update was the availability of rare resources- you could find entire dimensions that consisted only of solid diamond. To balance this, a 'simple' fix would be to increase the likelihood of more frequent spawning and more dangerous variants of hostiles depending on the rarity of resources avalible- sort of like in No Mans Sky, how the presence of hostile sentinels tends to imply valuable resources.
Why Should This be a Thing?
Finally, why should this be added- something so radically different from the base game? How would this work with Vanilla? The Overworld, Netherworld, and Enderworld
are already quite unique, and it doesn't seem necessary to add any more places to explore.First of all, this feature would be largely optional- allowing players to determine whether they had the default three dimensions, one of each type of dimension, or endless dimensions. The key use here is that wooded dimensions, mineral dimensions, fungal dimensions- all give players new ways to specialize, and an incentive to try and colonize hostile new environments.
Secondly, as the Infinity Snapshot proved, this is entirely plausible, and the game is capable of handling countless different dimensions. This idea itself is focused more on reasons for adding something like this, rather than the technical aspects of it, of which I know very little. At the ver least, it would be cool if players were given the option to add Infinity Dimensions in later versions of the game. Another nice option would be the ability to create additional dimensions using commands.
Thirdly, one of the major issues with Minecraft, (In my opinion), and with many sandbox games, (Also in my opinion), is exploration. Once again, consider No Man's Sky- in which, despite a near infinite Universe, planets can begin to grow redundant after a while. I believe Minecraft, on the other hand, is modular enough that this problem could be avoided. New dimensions could be implemented without the need for new creatures, items, or blocks- (Though this could be cool as well, it might be going a little too far. As if the rest of this wasn't going a little too far.)
Finally, one of the best reasonings as of yet: New dimensions would look cool, and provide an excuse to add more music and stuff to the game.
An Even Crazier Idea
Admittedly, it's difficult to come up with anything more far fetched than the idea I've laid out thus far. But I think I've come up with something even more speculative...
What if, among other new dimensions, players could, say, use quartz to access a special dimension -a version of the Overworld shared by all players? That is, essentially an MMO world in which players could interact with each other. I've always thought Minecraft should have a built in large multiplayer mode in addition to servers, and it would be interesting to see how players used this special dimension. Any portals built here would lead back to your personal Overworld. It would be quite an interesting social experiment, and, quite honestly, this feature could be implemented on its own.
Admittedly, I know nothing of the technical implications of this, and this idea more than the others raises quite a few questions. I'm curious to see what you think.
Cooking with Mindthemoods ~ Biomes ~ Archeology
---
~ My Portfolio ~ Skindex ~ Test ~ Discs ~
The problem is there isn't an infinite amount of storage space on computers.
While having a near limitless number of parallel universes to go to in the game would seem like a nice idea in theory, in practice it would not work.
A fully generated single world in terms of file size, would exceed the capacities of all the consumer storage drives.
I am for adding in more dimensions, but not hundreds, thousands or millions more. I'm unfortunately going to have to disagree with this one.
There's a much simpler and better solution.
Instead, there should be a limited number of dimensions added to the game that are vastly different from the ones we know.
One of them being an enchanted fairy tale based world based on the Twilight Forest mod, another based on Ice Age which could be Overworld past the Prehistoric dimension which has saber tooth tiger, mammoth and other creatures that existed around that time period but otherwise this world could contain all the biomes and ores the Overworld has except the surface of the biomes be buried in snow and ice.
The other dimensions could be the buffeted Worlds of the Overworld, each generating at random, but you only get one of each, which means you're not going to get 12 mushroom fields ones.
This is not a valid counter-argument, since as you say even a single dimension can already vastly exceed the capabilities of anything less than a supercomputer - but this is only if the player has the time to actually explore that much, which will never happen (even if you fly around in Creative and use 32 chunk render distance it would take about 10,000 years of nonstop flying to generate an entire 60x60 million block world; to actually explore such an area in Survival would take many times longer - at the rate at which I explore it would take over 50 million years to explore an entire world). This is the beauty of on-the-fly procedural generation - it doesn't matter at all how large a world can be or how many dimensions there are, only chunks that have been created will take up storage space; likewise, the game only needs to store chunks around the player in memory, making it possible that my first world only needs around 100 MB despite having around 6 GB of uncompressed data.
The only technical issue I see here is how to randomly generate an effectively unlimited number of dimensions and ensure that they actually make sense (no dimensions of solid diamond blocks) and are unique enough (more than just slight differences in terrain, which otherwise may as well just be a different part of the same world), so it does make sense to only have a limited number of dimensions based on a single biome or a group of biomes, and terrain type. However, I don't see any reason to add more dimensions, if I want a single biome world or one with a few select biomes then I'd make a custom world, and I do not want dimension-exclusive features like biomes with larger trees - add them to the Overworld instead; there should also be no need for a "mining dimension", which suggests that the current Overworld is still woefully lacking in that department (and dimensions made up of solid diamond or whatever would certainly never be added, and otherwise I'd find it very boring to only have 1-2 types of ores to collect, likewise, I think 1.17 is going to backfire because ores are now mostly at separate levels).
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?