@TheMasterCaver what version between 1.5.2 and 1.6.4 do you recommend playing this in?
Definitely not 1.5.2, as there are many blocks and items added in 1.6 which did not exist back then, such as coal blocks. Any version of 1.6 would work though; 1.6.2 may be best since it didn't have structure-saving and if you explore the entire world a huge amount of mineshaft data will be saved (this is not an issue for me since I play on a self-modded version which disables structure-saving for mineshafts. I'm not actually sure how much of an issue this would be since I disabled it for precautionary purposes, not due to actual issues, besides the fact that mineshafts do not need to save any data except to to ensure that partially generated structures fully generate after upgrading to 1.7+, as otherwise many will be cut off due to 1.7 making them less common).
Definitely not 1.5.2, as there are many blocks and items added in 1.6 which did not exist back then, such as coal blocks. Any version of 1.6 would work though; 1.6.2 may be best since it didn't have structure-saving and if you explore the entire world a huge amount of mineshaft data will be saved (this is not an issue for me since I play on a self-modded version which disables structure-saving for mineshafts. I'm not actually sure how much of an issue this would be since I disabled it for precautionary purposes, not due to actual issues, besides the fact that mineshafts do not need to save any data except to to ensure that partially generated structures fully generate after upgrading to 1.7+, as otherwise many will be cut off due to 1.7 making them less common).
I've decided to release my "World1" mod which I use to play this world on, which is mainly a bugfix/optimization mod, fixing many of the bugs that plagued older versions, such as lighting glitches, and even bugs which still affect the latest versions, like smooth lighting (these are all the things I've talked about being added in the next release for TMCW):
16 chunks; FPS would be higher if it wasn't busily updating all the vines growing (vanilla is worse due to all the decaying leaves, which I fixed; this is why the temporarily removed big oak trees in 1.7-1.8. Unlike TMCW, I did not add extra logs but instead inhibit block updates that trigger decay checks during world generation, so jungle and especially big oak trees will still decay if you trigger a block update by breaking leaves or logs). Note also that only 512 MB of memory has been allocated, and less than half of that is actually being used:
Also, this is the game output log from creating a new world, showing how quickly it generated; the Nether and End, as well as switching dimensions, are also much faster than vanilla (I reduced block checks for portals by 90% by taking advantage of the fact that a portal is 2x3 blocks and the obsidian at the top and bottom can also be detected for a total of 2x5):
2020-06-17 21:23:39 [SERVER] [INFO] Starting integrated minecraft server version 1.6.4
2020-06-17 21:23:39 [SERVER] [INFO] Generating keypair
2020-06-17 21:23:40 [SERVER] [INFO] Converting map!
2020-06-17 21:23:40 [SERVER] [INFO] Scanning folders...
2020-06-17 21:23:40 [SERVER] [INFO] Total conversion count is 0
2020-06-17 21:23:40 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing start region for level 0
2020-06-17 21:23:41 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing spawn area: 30%
2020-06-17 21:23:42 [SERVER] [INFO] Preparing spawn area: 53%
2020-06-17 21:23:42 [SERVER] [INFO] TheMasterCaver[/127.0.0.1:0] logged in with entity id 95 at (-91.5, 67.0, 229.5)
Video settings; many of these are self-explanatory, except for "culling", which is "Off", "Advanced OpenGL", or "Height Based", the last option hides chunks underground when you are above ground and vice-versa (may cause occasional unrendered areas to be visible but may run better than Advanced OpenGL, which is highly system-dependent). "Fast Render" uses a faster method to send chunks to the GPU but does not work past a few thousand blocks (chunks start to jitter due to floating point errors, but most players will likely never go far enough out to see this):
"Gamma Offset" adjusts a factor I apply to the light table calculations to smoothen the transition between total darkness and higher levels - yes, dark caves are pitch black so you better make sure you always have light sources on hand! "Chunk Update time" controls how much frametime can be taken up by chunk updates (it does however many can be done within the allotted time, with a minimum of one), "AO Fix Mode" controls a correction for MC-138211 (it should look like the examples given, the default seems to work with NVIDIA GPUs), and many of the other settings have "Default"/"Fast"/"Fancy" settings, with grass also having a "Full Side" option which works like Optifine's "better grass" (top texture used on sides, including when there is snow on top. This also affects items). "Lava Mix Particles" controls the steam that arises when water flows over lava:
Zoom function (LCRTL by default):
16 chunk render distance (note that "Far" in vanilla 1.6.4 is limited to 10 chunks), with fog turned off so you can see how chunks render in a circle, reducing the amount that needs to be rendered (fog normally hides the corners anyway):
Fog distance set to minimum (0.0); the default, seen in the screenshots above, is 0.8 while it can be set as high as 0.9 before being disabled:
This is what smooth lighting is supposed to look like:
This is what lit redstone ore is supposed to look like with smooth lighting (vanilla doesn't apply it to any block that emits light), I also fixed vanilla bugs that cause them to "save" light and/or let light through:
(note that not absolutely every issue has been fixed; stairs and slabs are problematic since they are light-opaque blocks and the game has to read neighboring light levels when taking the light level of a face adjacent to them)
I also added smooth lighting to water - a feature only in Bedrock as of now:
A look down a ravine; note the absence of any lighting glitches (vanilla has not only black spots but phantom light where water flows over lava, caused by light not being updated in "lazy chunks" and trapping light inside the obsidian) and the total blackness of the unlit areas (regardless of monitor settings it is impossible to see anything in the dark. You also can't hack the gamma setting in options.txt, which wouldn't work anyway since I explicitly set a sky/block light level of 0/0 to pure black):
There is also an interesting debug feature - the suffocation overlay doesn't appear in Creative mode so you can easily see underground, sort of like Spectator, though you can't move without teleporting, and the bottom of the world (against y=0) doesn't render:
Note that this also makes some modifications to game mechanics but it can be played on as more or less vanilla; I added rail blocks, cobweb blocks, and compressed mossy cobblestone so I can compact their respective materials while caving (all of these get broken back down for permanent storage so the world download should not have any non-vanilla blocks/items; unlike TMCW they do not appear in statistics and they can be broken down by mining them with any tool or placing them in water, which was done to avoid stats from being affected). There are also some changes to regional difficulty (inhabited time starts at 50% of the maximum, with regional difficulty starting at 0.375-0.5 on Normal, and up to 0.75-1 depending on moon phase. Effects like spiders with potion effects occur on all difficulties, only zombies breaking doors is limited to Hard). Witches, cave spiders, and giants also naturally spawn (cave spiders below sea level while giants above sea level) and zombies spawn with more weapons (all iron and diamond tools except for hoes).
Ironically, perhaps the biggest changes to game mechanics have no impact whatsoever on my playstyle - try to make an iron farm and you'll see what I mean (you must kill them with direct melee combat - that's not even just "recently hit" as most mobs require to drop XP and rare drops - and spawn chunks have been removed. Other mobs that drop mineral resources also require a player kill to drop them and Looting only works on a melee weapon, as originally intended. Mobs also only spawn in 25% of chunks per spawn cycle (this is more than fast enough for normal player movement. Passive mobs also spawn every 10 seconds instead of 20 to help offset their low base spawn rate, and ocelots, which are on the hostile mob spawn list but are passive mobs, have a separate mob cap) and only despawn based on horizontal distance, and if you try to go above the Nether ceiling in Survival you'll be killed by void damage (not that bedrock can be broken in any manner as I added a check to prevent it from being replaced at the lowest level of data access, which were already quite limited in 1.6).
All of these are also things I've talked about being added to TMCW, which itself is close to a major update (not TMCWv5 but TMCWv4.5, which is TMCWv4 + World1; I've finished merging them and just need to test it); as far as World1 goes, while I've been playing on it with no issues, aside from minor rendering issues and tweaking things, I can't say for sure if it is free of major bugs (I only discovered some bugs after I ran it outside of MCP, one of which caused an "IllegalAccessError", which worked within MCP but apparently it didn't reobfuscate it properly). Notably, despite being mainly an optimization/bugfix mod "World1" is significantly larger than any version of TMCW, 1053 KB vs 866 KB for TMCWv4, the latter including not just the mod itself but additional utilities (of course, the next updates to TMCW will be far larger).
This also cannot be used with Optifine, and most likely any other mod. as I completely replaced many of the classes it modifies, including most of the rendering engine (the original classes aren't used so anything trying to modify or hook into them won't work) and otherwise it includes some of its features, like a zoom function (it literally just lowers the FOV) and the ability to change various settings, if not as comprehensive, e.g. I added a toggle for potion particles so I can turn them off while using Night Vision while testing (I also added custom keybindings so you can change them, this includes LCTRL to zoom and R to toggle the "inventory stats". F4 (fixed) forces a fast relight of chunks, which also automatically happens when you load chunks with the mod for the first time, which adds a "LightUpdated" tag to chunks to indicate whether they have been relit).
I've decided to release my "World1" mod which I use to play this world on, which is mainly a bugfix/optimization mod, fixing many of the bugs that plagued older versions, such as lighting glitches, and even bugs which still affect the latest versions, like smooth lighting (these are all the things I've talked about being added in the next release for TMCW):
16 chunks; FPS would be higher if it wasn't busily updating all the vines growing (vanilla is worse due to all the decaying leaves, which I fixed; this is why the temporarily removed big oak trees in 1.7-1.8. Unlike TMCW, I did not add extra logs but instead inhibit block updates that trigger decay checks during world generation, so jungle and especially big oak trees will still decay if you trigger a block update by breaking leaves or logs). Note also that only 512 MB of memory has been allocated, and less than half of that is actually being used:
Also, this is the game output log from creating a new world, showing how quickly it generated; the Nether and End, as well as switching dimensions, are also much faster than vanilla (I reduced block checks for portals by 90% by taking advantage of the fact that a portal is 2x3 blocks and the obsidian at the top and bottom can also be detected for a total of 2x5):
Video settings; many of these are self-explanatory, except for "culling", which is "Off", "Advanced OpenGL", or "Height Based", the last option hides chunks underground when you are above ground and vice-versa (may cause occasional unrendered areas to be visible but may run better than Advanced OpenGL, which is highly system-dependent). "Fast Render" uses a faster method to send chunks to the GPU but does not work past a few thousand blocks (chunks start to jitter due to floating point errors, but most players will likely never go far enough out to see this):
"Gamma Offset" adjusts a factor I apply to the light table calculations to smoothen the transition between total darkness and higher levels - yes, dark caves are pitch black so you better make sure you always have light sources on hand! "Chunk Update time" controls how much frametime can be taken up by chunk updates (it does however many can be done within the allotted time, with a minimum of one), "AO Fix Mode" controls a correction for MC-138211 (it should look like the examples given, the default seems to work with NVIDIA GPUs), and many of the other settings have "Default"/"Fast"/"Fancy" settings, with grass also having a "Full Side" option which works like Optifine's "better grass" (top texture used on sides, including when there is snow on top. This also affects items). "Lava Mix Particles" controls the steam that arises when water flows over lava:
Zoom function (LCRTL by default):
16 chunk render distance (note that "Far" in vanilla 1.6.4 is limited to 10 chunks), with fog turned off so you can see how chunks render in a circle, reducing the amount that needs to be rendered (fog normally hides the corners anyway):
Fog distance set to minimum (0.0); the default, seen in the screenshots above, is 0.8 while it can be set as high as 0.9 before being disabled:
This is what smooth lighting is supposed to look like:
This is what lit redstone ore is supposed to look like with smooth lighting (vanilla doesn't apply it to any block that emits light), I also fixed vanilla bugs that cause them to "save" light and/or let light through:
(note that not absolutely every issue has been fixed; stairs and slabs are problematic since they are light-opaque blocks and the game has to read neighboring light levels when taking the light level of a face adjacent to them)
I also added smooth lighting to water - a feature only in Bedrock as of now:
A look down a ravine; note the absence of any lighting glitches (vanilla has not only black spots but phantom light where water flows over lava, caused by light not being updated in "lazy chunks" and trapping light inside the obsidian) and the total blackness of the unlit areas (regardless of monitor settings it is impossible to see anything in the dark. You also can't hack the gamma setting in options.txt, which wouldn't work anyway since I explicitly set a sky/block light level of 0/0 to pure black):
There is also an interesting debug feature - the suffocation overlay doesn't appear in Creative mode so you can easily see underground, sort of like Spectator, though you can't move without teleporting, and the bottom of the world (against y=0) doesn't render:
Note that this also makes some modifications to game mechanics but it can be played on as more or less vanilla; I added rail blocks, cobweb blocks, and compressed mossy cobblestone so I can compact their respective materials while caving (all of these get broken back down for permanent storage so the world download should not have any non-vanilla blocks/items; unlike TMCW they do not appear in statistics and they can be broken down by mining them with any tool or placing them in water, which was done to avoid stats from being affected). There are also some changes to regional difficulty (inhabited time starts at 50% of the maximum, with regional difficulty starting at 0.375-0.5 on Normal, and up to 0.75-1 depending on moon phase. Effects like spiders with potion effects occur on all difficulties, only zombies breaking doors is limited to Hard). Witches, cave spiders, and giants also naturally spawn (cave spiders below sea level while giants above sea level) and zombies spawn with more weapons (all iron and diamond tools except for hoes).
Ironically, perhaps the biggest changes to game mechanics have no impact whatsoever on my playstyle - try to make an iron farm and you'll see what I mean (you must kill them with direct melee combat - that's not even just "recently hit" as most mobs require to drop XP and rare drops - and spawn chunks have been removed. Other mobs that drop mineral resources also require a player kill to drop them and Looting only works on a melee weapon, as originally intended. Mobs also only spawn in 25% of chunks per spawn cycle (this is more than fast enough for normal player movement. Passive mobs also spawn every 10 seconds instead of 20 to help offset their low base spawn rate, and ocelots, which are on the hostile mob spawn list but are passive mobs, have a separate mob cap) and only despawn based on horizontal distance, and if you try to go above the Nether ceiling in Survival you'll be killed by void damage (not that bedrock can be broken in any manner as I added a check to prevent it from being replaced at the lowest level of data access, which were already quite limited in 1.6).
All of these are also things I've talked about being added to TMCW, which itself is close to a major update (not TMCWv5 but TMCWv4.5, which is TMCWv4 + World1; I've finished merging them and just need to test it); as far as World1 goes, while I've been playing on it with no issues, aside from minor rendering issues and tweaking things, I can't say for sure if it is free of major bugs (I only discovered some bugs after I ran it outside of MCP, one of which caused an "IllegalAccessError", which worked within MCP but apparently it didn't reobfuscate it properly). Notably, despite being mainly an optimization/bugfix mod "World1" is significantly larger than any version of TMCW, 1053 KB vs 866 KB for TMCWv4, the latter including not just the mod itself but additional utilities (of course, the next updates to TMCW will be far larger).
This also cannot be used with Optifine, and most likely any other mod. as I completely replaced many of the classes it modifies, including most of the rendering engine (the original classes aren't used so anything trying to modify or hook into them won't work) and otherwise it includes some of its features, like a zoom function (it literally just lowers the FOV) and the ability to change various settings, if not as comprehensive, e.g. I added a toggle for potion particles so I can turn them off while using Night Vision while testing (I also added custom keybindings so you can change them, this includes LCTRL to zoom and R to toggle the "inventory stats". F4 (fixed) forces a fast relight of chunks, which also automatically happens when you load chunks with the mod for the first time, which adds a "LightUpdated" tag to chunks to indicate whether they have been relit).
I've tried combining this mod with TMCWv4 and I've gotten this error:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: compMossStone
20:18:23.597
at aaf.<init>(CraftingManager.java:153)
20:18:23.597
at aaf.<clinit>(CraftingManager.java:11)
20:18:23.597
at la.d(SourceFile:100)
20:18:23.597
at la.b(SourceFile:79)
20:18:23.597
at aqz.<clinit>(Block.java:1481)
20:18:23.597
at la.a(SourceFile:122)
20:18:23.597
at la.<clinit>(SourceFile:55)
20:18:23.597
at atv.<init>(Minecraft.java:212)
20:18:23.597
at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(SourceFile:83)
I've tried combining this mod with TMCWv4 and I've gotten this error:
This is not compatible with ANY other mod, even Optifine, same for TMCWv4 (aside from Optifine). However, I have just about finished updating TMCWv4 with all the optimizations and bugfixes in World1 (updating TMCWv5 will be much more time-consuming due to its size and the fact it changed a lot of the same code, including earlier versions of the same changes, so I decided to update TMCWv4 in the meantime, which took several days); actually, you can try it right now, but note that I haven't fully tested it (I was planning on releasing it after playing on it, this includes outside of MCP as a normal launcher installation, as I've encountered some issues with code changes that worked within MCP but not outside it. Also, for some reason the launcher complains about legacy.json having an invalid checksum even though I copied the json for 1.6.4 (redownloaded just to be sure) and didn't alter that part, but it does launch it (this may have actually been happening for a while, I only noticed it when I enabled the game output log):
Also, despite being by far the largest update I've ever made, double the size of TMCWv4 (World1 by itself is larger), this is not a content update but it does add a few features and makes some changes, for example, the attack cooldown was replaced with the one in TMCWv5 (you now get penalized for spam-clicking empty air and the penalty applies to all mobs, not just the one you hit; this includes if you attack a mob while it is damage-immune). Also, dark caves are totally pitch black - you better make sure you always have a source of light on hand (the light level at night also varies with moon phase. You can also further adjust brightness with the "gamma offset" setting on the second page of video settings but it doesn't affect complete darkness). You can also generate caves in Superflat worlds by adding "cave" to the preset and change the number of dungeons with (count=number), which also applies to World1 as they share a common code base (TMCW is basically just World1 with new features).
There are also some changes to the included utilities; the AMIDST files were removed and replaced with my own biome mapping tool which can properly map everything (there is no legend showing which colors correspond to which biomes as I didn't make it yet but many use the same colors as AMIDST or similar to their blocks, such as Rocky Mountains, Mesa, Extreme Hills, Desert, Plains, Swampland; Winter Forest and Taiga are light green and blue respectively, Savanna is similar in color to the grass in-game, and so on).
I've been playing on this world for about the past month, still exploring the same vast Ice Plains area that I've probably been exploring for at least 6 months of daily gameplay by now, though I may be nearing the end, depending on how much further it extends to the northwest (currently I don't plan to explore off the western edge of the mapped area):
I took these after a trip back to my main base, showing how much I explored over a 7 day period:
Also, I built another secondary base, the 19th one so far, at -2560, -1536, this time inside a mountain (like other secondary bases it only has the basics; a single room with a bed, chest, furnaces, supplies, temporary storage, plus farms for food and trading materials and a jungle tree outside for wood):
The mountain has a fence behind the peak to prevent mobs from coming down over it:
This is a night view of the base in Minutor; the main room is the brown square near the center while the green squares to the right are potato (food) and chicken (used to wear down sacrificial swords so they are cheap enough) farms and the large area to the top is a wheat farm, used to get emeralds for diamond gear:
There was a surface dungeon right next to where I built it (most players would love to find this but I just mined the spawner since they are of no use to me):
On Halloween I captured a couple zombies wearing pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns (back in 2016 I did this with zombies and skeletons at another base, in both cases I gave them wood swords to prevent them from despawning):
Also, I've had to further expand my storage room as I ran out of space for rails - 48 double chests full or 165888 rails, all taken from mineshafts, with an additional 16 double chests added on to the shorter corridor. I also decided to add another corridor for coal instead of stacking chests 2 high, which I previously started doing, with over 1.5 million coal stored as blocks so far:
Before:
After:
A cutaway view of my underground storage area; the two long corridors to the left are for rails while to the right is the new corridor I added for coal, with other resources being placed in additional corridors as needed (redstone will be filled the next time I return; you can see my progress at filling them since signs appear as lighter pixels, with corridors that are completely filled marked with a single sign):
I could also save a lot of space by storing rails and cobwebs as blocks, as I do in TMCW, though in this world I've only been using them for temporary storage while caving and at secondary bases (a rail block is 9 rails and a cobweb block is 4 cobwebs; I used to harvest the latter without Silk Touch and craft the string into wool); at this point is is highly unlikely I'll ever upgrade to a newer version so it would only cause issues with others downloading the world (you'd have to use the mod, while I want it to remain "vanilla compatible").
As far as caving goes, the most interesting thing that I've found is a dungeon which was almost completely overwritten by a lava lake; only parts of the walls survived, which I can't recall seeing before (either way, I've patched this in the next update to TMCW by preventing lakes from generating if any of the blocks they will replace are cobblestone, stone brick, or nether brick, the latter two blocks enabling removal of code which prevented them from generating around those structures; in TMCWv1, prior to adding this code, I found a stronghold library with a lava lake in it):
I've reached an incredible milestone in this world - accumulating an entire chest (half a double chest) of diamond blocks, most of which was not mined with Fortune, with nearly 14,000 diamond ore mined and 15,606 diamonds collected (1,732 blocks in the chest plus two more in the floor as a marker. I also have around 60 loose diamonds in another chest, with only crafted blocks counted):
It took me a total of 156.76 days or 3,762 hours of playtime over 1,075 sessions to collect this, of which an estimated 90% has been spent caving (this would be slightly less than in other worlds due to trading for diamond gear used in repairs, and the time spent on collecting materials, and the time I spend traveling to/from my man base, which currently takes about 18 minutes round-trip, with about an hour in total including the time spent at my main base):
There is one extra diamond block due to having uncrafted one at some point (currently I treat all crafted mineral blocks as permanent):
For perspective, this is an average of about 4.6 diamonds collected and 4.1 diamond ore mined per hour spent caving, which is actually very low when compared to an effective branch-mining strategy (data on the Wiki indicates that you could mine close to a stack of ore per hour if you mined one block per second; 3600 * 0.017 = 61.2). Also, I've mined an average of 269 blocks per diamond ore, based on blocks mined with a diamond pickaxe (I still use iron pickaxes taken from minecarts to dig tunnels for railways), compared to as little as 59 when branch-mining (however, the vast majority of blocks mined have been ores and other "valuable" blocks):
This also shows how many diamonds I would have used to repair my pickaxe if I didn't trade, 1,746, which isn't actually that much, about 11% of the diamonds I've collected, despite a rather low efficiency in terms of diamonds mined per repair (about 24 diamond ore mined per repair/pickaxe; efficient branch-mining can get around 105 without Fortune and 232 with Fortune; the latter means that you only spend 1.3% of the diamonds you collect on repairs). Other tools and armor would roughly double the total diamonds used, which is still only about a fifth of what I collect (I initially used Fortune for the first 4-5 months of caving, then stopped using it, then about two years later I started trading after I found a blacksmith selling diamond pickaxes and decided to buy some. At this point I'd played on this world for about a third of the current time).
Also, for the first time I've made a new map outside of the main 3x3 area centered around the origin so I could fully map the northwestern edge of the continent I've been exploring, which has been explored/mapped along its entire western and northern boundaries so far (I didn't plan to explore outside of the main 3x3 area until I'd explored it but there wasn't much more land left); I'll have to raise the ceiling of the room with my map wall if I want to add maps to the south (currently, this room has remained nearly unchanged for nearly as long as I've had this world. I can also make more room for maps to the east by relocating/removing the chests I use for food and wood as they aren't necessary):
In addition, I recently collected more than 5,000 resources (blocks mined, not drops) in a single play session while exploring a complex of 4 mineshafts, which is one of the more extreme sessions that I've had but still short of my all-time record of more than 6,000 resources; notably, 10 of the 23 diamonds that I found came from minecarts, rather than mined ore (I don't have any stats on the percentage of diamond I collect comes from mineshafts but it is likely significant):
Also, in the first screenshot you can see how many rails and cobwebs I collected from these mineshafts and others I explored between trips back to my main base; I brought back 2,177 rails (mostly as "rail blocks", each equivalent to 9 rails) and 856 cobwebs (as "cobweb blocks", each equivalent to 4 cobwebs, this only includes cobwebs from cave spider spawners), the former more than double the number of rails I used in the railway extension I built to my current base. The "moss stone" is also actually "compressed mossy cobblestone", equivalent to 4 blocks each (all of these blocks are also in TMCW in slightly different forms/as proper blocks; in this world I only use them for temporary storage while caving and at secondary bases).
Here are surface and underground (explored only) renderings of the northwestern part of the world (northwest of -1024, -1024); the area that I've been exploring recently is west of the gap from the north about halfway across, with my current exploration from the northernmost point on the western edge of the gap (at least from the east there are no interconnected caves leading further west into the area; if I end up completely surrounding a large unexplored area I'll look for surface openings, otherwise everything I explore is from interconnections underground), with my current base at a mountain in the taiga biome near the center of the recently explored area:
I've finished exploring the northwestern part of the spawn continent, extending a bit past -3072 and into the surrounding ocean, with two additional maps created to cover that area, centered at -4096,-2048 and -4096,0, with a total of 10 maps covering a 8192x6144 area made so far. I also changed up my map room to accommodate a 5x4 map area, including a new strip of maps to the south and east of the current map area, which I will eventually explore to the furthest reaches of the continent (a 1x2 map area in the southwestern corner will probably never be mapped since there appears to be no land there):
That said, I've stopped playing on this world for the time being to work on the next major update to TMCW (not TMCWv5 but many more of its features will be added; TMCWv5 itself will be the next update that completely changes world generation, much like 1.6.4-1.7), after which I'll spend time playing with it (last year I played on this world twice for a few months each between time spent on modded worlds, prior to then I last played on it in early 2018).
Also, here is a series of renderings of how the world grew over the 5 main periods that I played on it (early-late 2013, mid-late 2015, most of 2016, mid 2017 to early 2018, two separate periods in 2020); the world currently measures 6912x6672 blocks and 121185 chunks with a file size of 583 MB (Overworld only, I deleted the Nether and End years ago and have never been back, though they wouldn't make much of a difference to the overall size at this point as seen in this example of another world):
A comparison to all of my other worlds, excluding a few early worlds (these were also before I adopted my caving playstyle):
Also, here are updated statistics for this world and for all of my worlds; TMCWv1 is listed as "replayed" with the original time below as I restarted from an older backup after I found a backup of old worlds which I had originally deleted and decided to keep them, with the intent to replay on TMCWv1 for at least as long as the original, which ended up being much longer. InfiniteCaves, the first modded world using a 3rd-party mod that let you change cave generation (I made it generate twice as many caves as 1.6.4, the recreation used my own mod which replicated it) was likewise completely recreated from scratch:
World1 159.71 days 3833.04 hours 1093 sessions (3.51 hours/session)
TMCWv1 (replayed*) 42.56 days 1021.44 hours 284 sessions (3.59 hours/session)
TMCWv4 38.95 days 934.80 hours 243 sessions (3.85 hours/session)
TMCWv3 15.83 days 379.92 hours 104 sessions (3.65 hours/session)
InfiniteCaves (recreation) 15.62 days 374.96 hours 122 sessions (3.07 hours/session)
World1v2 8.57 days 205.68 hours 73 sessions (2.82 hours/session)
TripleHeightTerrain 8.25 days 198.00 hours 53 sessions (3.74 hours/session)
World1v3 7.27 days 174.48 hours 59 sessions (3.08 hours/session)
TMCWv2 5.62 days 134.88 hours 52 sessions (2.59 hours/session)
Total 302.38 days 7257.12 hours 2083 sessions (3.48 hours/session)
*TMCWv1 (original) 14.72 days 353.28 hours 103 sessions (3.43 hours/session)
(replayed started from 11.32 days / 83 sessions)
It is quite impressive that World1 still represents over half my total playtime and has nearly four times the playtime of any other single world despite being more or less vanilla, without most of the modifications I've made to caves/world generation in other worlds (mostly bugfixes, with the most significant change being preventing mineshafts from generating in dense cave systems) - vanilla 1.6.4 world generation is more than enough for me, as are all the blocks and items it has, many of which I do not use as-is (I only added two new blocks/items to this world, "rail blocks" and "cobweb blocks", which let me compact rails and cobwebs in the same manner as minerals and wool (I used to use non-Silk Touch shears to clear cave spider spawners and crafted the string into wool, otherwise I hadn't explored that far away yet so all the rails I currently get from mineshafts, which are also more common further away from spawn, wasn't such a problem); unlike my modded worlds I only use these for more storage while caving and in temporary storage at secondary bases, converting them back to their vanilla items at my main base so there are no persistent modded blocks/items in this world; likewise, some changes to mob spawning/behavior does not introduce anything that would be incompatible with vanilla, e.g. naturally spawning witches, cave spiders, and giants. I did add a "LightUpdated" field to the chunk data to track light updates but vanilla ignores this).
i put the seed from your post, 123775873255737467, and playing 1.16.201 which comes up on my xbox. i come up in an ice world next to a normal world and a damp world with the lily pads, etc. i was wanting to try out your descriptions, etc. anyway, there is a village about 200 clicks or more from my base and i just go there in the day. the folks are still there ok. three farmers and i have been trading with them. wheat, beets and potatoes. when i look at the seed i have now its 1026295931. though i probably don't understand seeds. thank you for the help you have given me. chas
i am going to try and read all the messages on this thread. it is interesting and i might learn what i am not understanding. thanks, chas
i put the seed from your post, 123775873255737467, and playing 1.16.201 which comes up on my xbox. i come up in an ice world next to a normal world and a damp world with the lily pads, etc. i was wanting to try out your descriptions, etc. anyway, there is a village about 200 clicks or more from my base and i just go there in the day. the folks are still there ok. three farmers and i have been trading with them. wheat, beets and potatoes. when i look at the seed i have now its 1026295931. though i probably don't understand seeds. thank you for the help you have given me. chas
i am going to try and read all the messages on this thread. it is interesting and i might learn what i am not understanding. thanks, chas
Pretty sure all of this is on PC, Java Edition. The seeds won't work on Xbox, as it's a completely different version of the game. Also, 1 klick is 1 kilometer - you said that village is 200 klicks away from your base. 1 kilometer is 1,000 meters, a block in Minecraft is 1 meter, so you're saying you travel over 200,000 blocks to get to that village and back?
"It's funny when you think about it Mr. Rayleor" - Benedict of the Supremacy
"Hey, I'm not trying to start fights, and you shouldn't either." - Lord Proto
"If your life has no problems, you're not really living it." - Ryan Higa
"Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon... No matter how good you are, the bird is going to crap on the board and strut around like it won anyway" - Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
"Those that matter, don't mind. Those that mind, don't matter." - James Sayers
"An eye for an eye and the world goes blind..." - Markus RK200
Pretty sure all of this is on PC, Java Edition. The seeds won't work on Xbox, as it's a completely different version of the game. Also, 1 klick is 1 kilometer - you said that village is 200 klicks away from your base. 1 kilometer is 1,000 meters, a block in Minecraft is 1 meter, so you're saying you travel over 200,000 blocks to get to that village and back?
It also won't work on any version of Java other than 1.2.5-1.6.4 (with minor differences across those versions); world generation was completely changed in 1.7, and they may have also used the wrong seed if they actually used "123775873255737467" (as they posted) and not "-123775873255737467" (note the negative), and either way Bedrock only supports 32 bit seeds (within about +/- 2 billion) so it will be treated as a string and hashed to a valid numerical value (I presume, this is what Java does to numbers outside the 64 bit range).
Pretty sure all of this is on PC, Java Edition. The seeds won't work on Xbox, as it's a completely different version of the game. Also, 1 klick is 1 kilometer - you said that village is 200 klicks away from your base. 1 kilometer is 1,000 meters, a block in Minecraft is 1 meter, so you're saying you travel over 200,000 blocks to get to that village and back?
Yeah I don't understand either.
Also, tree avatar, Tree Puncher title, checks out.
It also won't work on any version of Java other than 1.2.5-1.6.4 (with minor differences across those versions); world generation was completely changed in 1.7, and they may have also used the wrong seed if they actually used "123775873255737467" (as they posted) and not "-123775873255737467" (note the negative), and either way Bedrock only supports 32 bit seeds (within about +/- 2 billion) so it will be treated as a string and hashed to a valid numerical value (I presume, this is what Java does to numbers outside the 64 bit range).
Or in layman's terms, Bedrock edition is garbage. Legacy console was so much better ._.
What's your take on the proposed changes so far with 1.17's new caves? I think it'll bring much needed changes to mining, I very much agree that they ruined mining and caving after that update. Been a player since 2011, started in Beta 1.6. If I could choose one thing to cange about 1.17, I would increase amount and size of caves in the stone layer, and increase the amount of large caves in the deepslate layer.
Also, tree avatar, Tree Puncher title, checks out.
This has been my avatar on Minecraft Forum for as long as I can remember lol, didn't notice that coincidence until a few years ago. It works quite well, haha
"It's funny when you think about it Mr. Rayleor" - Benedict of the Supremacy
"Hey, I'm not trying to start fights, and you shouldn't either." - Lord Proto
"If your life has no problems, you're not really living it." - Ryan Higa
"Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon... No matter how good you are, the bird is going to crap on the board and strut around like it won anyway" - Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
"Those that matter, don't mind. Those that mind, don't matter." - James Sayers
"An eye for an eye and the world goes blind..." - Markus RK200
Or in layman's terms, Bedrock edition is garbage. Legacy console was so much better ._.
What's your take on the proposed changes so far with 1.17's new caves? I think it'll bring much needed changes to mining, I very much agree that they ruined mining and caving after that update. Been a player since 2011, started in Beta 1.6. If I could choose one thing to cange about 1.17, I would increase amount and size of caves in the stone layer, and increase the amount of large caves in the deepslate layer.
This has been my avatar on Minecraft Forum for as long as I can remember lol, didn't notice that coincidence until a few years ago. It works quite well, haha
It works well because you either post rarely, or prefer this title over higher-ranking ones (which would mean you chose it on purpose, hmm...)
I agree that caves should be increased, within reason. Some people do want to avoid big caves, whether they like small caves or just prefer to mine and not spelunk.
What's your take on the proposed changes so far with 1.17's new caves? I think it'll bring much needed changes to mining, I very much agree that they ruined mining and caving after that update. Been a player since 2011, started in Beta 1.6. If I could choose one thing to cange about 1.17, I would increase amount and size of caves in the stone layer, and increase the amount of large caves in the deepslate layer.
I have very little opinion on an update I'll never play on, though I'd say that for one, ores should be left as-is; my own mods that made the underground deeper simply expanded the ranges to keep the same relative amounts above cave lava level; and I don't care for a deeper underground which is why I currently only make bedrock one layer and lower lava level from 11 to 4, giving 13.5% more room while keeping the overall depth the same - you can still do a lot with that and I much prefer horizontal exploration over vertical exploration.
Also, my own mod still has far more variation in cave features; even the "normal" cave systems which use the 1.6.4 size/density parameters as a base have various parameters (tunnel width, length, curviness, branching) changed within 8x8 chunk regions, in additional to cave systems made with different types of caves beyond the standard tunnels, as well as more types of biome-specific underground, which will all be greatly expanded in a major update I've spent much of this year on during the time I'd normally be playing (in fact, I haven't actually played, outside of modtesting, for the past month or more, with the time spent per day comparable to if not greater than the time I'd spend playing. The update also includes features that I've been working on for the past three years, just to give an idea of the amount of effort I've spent on it (version 4.5 is basically an intermediate update, much like 1.17/1.18, so the difference between version 4 and version 5 reflects the full update), for example, here is an early post I made on it, with some features from updates as recent as 1.17 added for fun, such as glow squid and lightning rods; and, of course, even larger(!) caves - the lava lake alone is nearly 100 blocks across and even maximum render distance fails to get the entire cave in view and at this point the underground volume is the highest of any of my mods in terms of percentage, double that of vanilla 1.6.4).
Clearly, with so much effort spent on TMCW over the past 7 years, even 7 1/2+ (some of the changes to caves were implemented in earlier mods) I am absolutely not inclined to just throw it all away just to get... what? I'm that hard-pressed to even say what might be so appealing about newer updates, considering also all the downsides - by using an already ideal version as a base it is much easier to add or change things to my liking; the code is also far simpler (the creator of Optifine has described 1.8+ as an "over-engineered monster", which is also quite evident when comparing the size of the jar file and number of classes to older versions; the majority of the increase between 1.7 and 1.8 was not due to new features, same for 1.12 to 1.13. This may also be a reason why MCP, the modding environment that I use, has not updated since 1.12 (at least officially; much like newer versions I'll absolutely never use Forge/Fabric/whatever for modding, I mean, even a simple change like using your own cave generator seems to be difficult to implement, much less completely refactoring literally half the game).
I have very little opinion on an update I'll never play on, though I'd say that for one, ores should be left as-is; my own mods that made the underground deeper simply expanded the ranges to keep the same relative amounts above cave lava level; and I don't care for a deeper underground which is why I currently only make bedrock one layer and lower lava level from 11 to 4, giving 13.5% more room while keeping the overall depth the same - you can still do a lot with that and I much prefer horizontal exploration over vertical exploration.
I've been saying this for a long time, leave ore generation or abundance vs scarcity as is.
If people want ores to be rarer they should either be given the option to make a custom world with that feature,
or have a newer difficulty mode between hard and hardcore and just let those people test their limits if that's their hobby.
But some people like one of the threads you were in although you didn't agree with them, wanted this feature imposed on every player in the game.
But as allyourbasesaregone argued, not everyone plays the game just to have a boring endless grind session in branch or strip mining,
some people want to do other things besides spending the majority of their time underground searching for diamonds and lapis.
If diamonds were to be 4x rarer or worse, I'd have much less incentive to mine for them and instead I'd be making the majority of my tools out of iron, and although iron ore is more abundant than diamonds, it's still a nuisance to get in the quantities I require for some big projects I've got planned, although the 1.17 update is about to change this evidently, since iron ores will be affected by fortune enchantment this time, meaning I won't need an iron golem farm, and I also doubt anybody else would, although I'm open to being proven wrong on that, perhaps somebody could still make a good case for using them.
The reason I use diamond and netherite tools is simple and it's pretty much the reason why others who have the same would be using them, I don't like having weak materials that force me to go to repair stations in every session I'm in. Iron is bad on durability but for some weird reason some wanted those nerfed, even though an iron shovel or pickaxe can be feasibly broken within 1 Minecraft day/night cycle, think about it, 1 day/night cycle, somehow according to some people this is apparently OP. I do facepalm at some people's suggestions, sometimes literally not just metaphorically.
Although suggestions may be well intentioned, having good intentions doesn't always yield good results, there's a lot of factors to consider when changing how something in a game works, and you know this.
I'm not saying the 1.17 is flawless, and Mojang are still working through the problems, but I'm glad you agree that as far as the standard game goes, current ore generation should be left alone, not have their probability of generating messed with just because some whined.
1.17 did add some nice newer materials in addition to the increased ground depth, so in mine and allyourbasesaregone's opinion, the increased ground depth was justified. Having the ground extended down to negative 64 Y isn't too much of an increase, and you can get down there within less than an hours worth of gameplay in survival assuming you were lucky enough to not have to dig your way around a dripstone cave to make a safe entrance.
Deepslate adds another decoration block that can be used to add more details to player buildings and it doubles as an alternative that can be used to make stone tools and furnaces in the Overworld, just like blackstone can in the Nether, it just adds more ways to customize your builds without having to resort to mods or texture packs, it's in the vanilla experience.
What doesn't work? The seed? You must use use 1.6.4 or earlier as world generation was completely changed in 1.7, and it also only works on Java, as noted in an earlier reply a few posts back (you should read at least the topic and last page of comments in a thread, which will likely answer any questions you have).
Definitely not 1.5.2, as there are many blocks and items added in 1.6 which did not exist back then, such as coal blocks. Any version of 1.6 would work though; 1.6.2 may be best since it didn't have structure-saving and if you explore the entire world a huge amount of mineshaft data will be saved (this is not an issue for me since I play on a self-modded version which disables structure-saving for mineshafts. I'm not actually sure how much of an issue this would be since I disabled it for precautionary purposes, not due to actual issues, besides the fact that mineshafts do not need to save any data except to to ensure that partially generated structures fully generate after upgrading to 1.7+, as otherwise many will be cut off due to 1.7 making them less common).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Thanks for the direction!
I've decided to release my "World1" mod which I use to play this world on, which is mainly a bugfix/optimization mod, fixing many of the bugs that plagued older versions, such as lighting glitches, and even bugs which still affect the latest versions, like smooth lighting (these are all the things I've talked about being added in the next release for TMCW):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/k73ameapyc4qru8/world1_custom_client.zip?dl=0
Some screenshots:
16 chunks; FPS would be higher if it wasn't busily updating all the vines growing (vanilla is worse due to all the decaying leaves, which I fixed; this is why the temporarily removed big oak trees in 1.7-1.8. Unlike TMCW, I did not add extra logs but instead inhibit block updates that trigger decay checks during world generation, so jungle and especially big oak trees will still decay if you trigger a block update by breaking leaves or logs). Note also that only 512 MB of memory has been allocated, and less than half of that is actually being used:
Also, this is the game output log from creating a new world, showing how quickly it generated; the Nether and End, as well as switching dimensions, are also much faster than vanilla (I reduced block checks for portals by 90% by taking advantage of the fact that a portal is 2x3 blocks and the obsidian at the top and bottom can also be detected for a total of 2x5):
Video settings; many of these are self-explanatory, except for "culling", which is "Off", "Advanced OpenGL", or "Height Based", the last option hides chunks underground when you are above ground and vice-versa (may cause occasional unrendered areas to be visible but may run better than Advanced OpenGL, which is highly system-dependent). "Fast Render" uses a faster method to send chunks to the GPU but does not work past a few thousand blocks (chunks start to jitter due to floating point errors, but most players will likely never go far enough out to see this):
"Gamma Offset" adjusts a factor I apply to the light table calculations to smoothen the transition between total darkness and higher levels - yes, dark caves are pitch black so you better make sure you always have light sources on hand! "Chunk Update time" controls how much frametime can be taken up by chunk updates (it does however many can be done within the allotted time, with a minimum of one), "AO Fix Mode" controls a correction for MC-138211 (it should look like the examples given, the default seems to work with NVIDIA GPUs), and many of the other settings have "Default"/"Fast"/"Fancy" settings, with grass also having a "Full Side" option which works like Optifine's "better grass" (top texture used on sides, including when there is snow on top. This also affects items). "Lava Mix Particles" controls the steam that arises when water flows over lava:
Zoom function (LCRTL by default):
16 chunk render distance (note that "Far" in vanilla 1.6.4 is limited to 10 chunks), with fog turned off so you can see how chunks render in a circle, reducing the amount that needs to be rendered (fog normally hides the corners anyway):
Fog distance set to minimum (0.0); the default, seen in the screenshots above, is 0.8 while it can be set as high as 0.9 before being disabled:
This is what smooth lighting is supposed to look like:
(https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-43968)
(https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-68129)
(https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-138211)
This is what lit redstone ore is supposed to look like with smooth lighting (vanilla doesn't apply it to any block that emits light), I also fixed vanilla bugs that cause them to "save" light and/or let light through:
(note that not absolutely every issue has been fixed; stairs and slabs are problematic since they are light-opaque blocks and the game has to read neighboring light levels when taking the light level of a face adjacent to them)
I also added smooth lighting to water - a feature only in Bedrock as of now:
A look down a ravine; note the absence of any lighting glitches (vanilla has not only black spots but phantom light where water flows over lava, caused by light not being updated in "lazy chunks" and trapping light inside the obsidian) and the total blackness of the unlit areas (regardless of monitor settings it is impossible to see anything in the dark. You also can't hack the gamma setting in options.txt, which wouldn't work anyway since I explicitly set a sky/block light level of 0/0 to pure black):
There is also an interesting debug feature - the suffocation overlay doesn't appear in Creative mode so you can easily see underground, sort of like Spectator, though you can't move without teleporting, and the bottom of the world (against y=0) doesn't render:
Note that this also makes some modifications to game mechanics but it can be played on as more or less vanilla; I added rail blocks, cobweb blocks, and compressed mossy cobblestone so I can compact their respective materials while caving (all of these get broken back down for permanent storage so the world download should not have any non-vanilla blocks/items; unlike TMCW they do not appear in statistics and they can be broken down by mining them with any tool or placing them in water, which was done to avoid stats from being affected). There are also some changes to regional difficulty (inhabited time starts at 50% of the maximum, with regional difficulty starting at 0.375-0.5 on Normal, and up to 0.75-1 depending on moon phase. Effects like spiders with potion effects occur on all difficulties, only zombies breaking doors is limited to Hard). Witches, cave spiders, and giants also naturally spawn (cave spiders below sea level while giants above sea level) and zombies spawn with more weapons (all iron and diamond tools except for hoes).
Ironically, perhaps the biggest changes to game mechanics have no impact whatsoever on my playstyle - try to make an iron farm and you'll see what I mean (you must kill them with direct melee combat - that's not even just "recently hit" as most mobs require to drop XP and rare drops - and spawn chunks have been removed. Other mobs that drop mineral resources also require a player kill to drop them and Looting only works on a melee weapon, as originally intended. Mobs also only spawn in 25% of chunks per spawn cycle (this is more than fast enough for normal player movement. Passive mobs also spawn every 10 seconds instead of 20 to help offset their low base spawn rate, and ocelots, which are on the hostile mob spawn list but are passive mobs, have a separate mob cap) and only despawn based on horizontal distance, and if you try to go above the Nether ceiling in Survival you'll be killed by void damage (not that bedrock can be broken in any manner as I added a check to prevent it from being replaced at the lowest level of data access, which were already quite limited in 1.6).
All of these are also things I've talked about being added to TMCW, which itself is close to a major update (not TMCWv5 but TMCWv4.5, which is TMCWv4 + World1; I've finished merging them and just need to test it); as far as World1 goes, while I've been playing on it with no issues, aside from minor rendering issues and tweaking things, I can't say for sure if it is free of major bugs (I only discovered some bugs after I ran it outside of MCP, one of which caused an "IllegalAccessError", which worked within MCP but apparently it didn't reobfuscate it properly). Notably, despite being mainly an optimization/bugfix mod "World1" is significantly larger than any version of TMCW, 1053 KB vs 866 KB for TMCWv4, the latter including not just the mod itself but additional utilities (of course, the next updates to TMCW will be far larger).
This also cannot be used with Optifine, and most likely any other mod. as I completely replaced many of the classes it modifies, including most of the rendering engine (the original classes aren't used so anything trying to modify or hook into them won't work) and otherwise it includes some of its features, like a zoom function (it literally just lowers the FOV) and the ability to change various settings, if not as comprehensive, e.g. I added a toggle for potion particles so I can turn them off while using Night Vision while testing (I also added custom keybindings so you can change them, this includes LCTRL to zoom and R to toggle the "inventory stats". F4 (fixed) forces a fast relight of chunks, which also automatically happens when you load chunks with the mod for the first time, which adds a "LightUpdated" tag to chunks to indicate whether they have been relit).
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 have not gotten around to setting up the mod today, sadly. I'll see about Saturday or maybe tomorrow evening.
I've tried combining this mod with TMCWv4 and I've gotten this error:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: compMossStone
20:18:23.597
at aaf.<init>(CraftingManager.java:153)
20:18:23.597
at aaf.<clinit>(CraftingManager.java:11)
20:18:23.597
at la.d(SourceFile:100)
20:18:23.597
at la.b(SourceFile:79)
20:18:23.597
at aqz.<clinit>(Block.java:1481)
20:18:23.597
at la.a(SourceFile:122)
20:18:23.597
at la.<clinit>(SourceFile:55)
20:18:23.597
at atv.<init>(Minecraft.java:212)
20:18:23.597
at net.minecraft.client.main.Main.main(SourceFile:83)
This is not compatible with ANY other mod, even Optifine, same for TMCWv4 (aside from Optifine). However, I have just about finished updating TMCWv4 with all the optimizations and bugfixes in World1 (updating TMCWv5 will be much more time-consuming due to its size and the fact it changed a lot of the same code, including earlier versions of the same changes, so I decided to update TMCWv4 in the meantime, which took several days); actually, you can try it right now, but note that I haven't fully tested it (I was planning on releasing it after playing on it, this includes outside of MCP as a normal launcher installation, as I've encountered some issues with code changes that worked within MCP but not outside it. Also, for some reason the launcher complains about legacy.json having an invalid checksum even though I copied the json for 1.6.4 (redownloaded just to be sure) and didn't alter that part, but it does launch it (this may have actually been happening for a while, I only noticed it when I enabled the game output log):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ioa73iyby4nl3sg/tmcwv4.5.zip?dl=0
Also, despite being by far the largest update I've ever made, double the size of TMCWv4 (World1 by itself is larger), this is not a content update but it does add a few features and makes some changes, for example, the attack cooldown was replaced with the one in TMCWv5 (you now get penalized for spam-clicking empty air and the penalty applies to all mobs, not just the one you hit; this includes if you attack a mob while it is damage-immune). Also, dark caves are totally pitch black - you better make sure you always have a source of light on hand (the light level at night also varies with moon phase. You can also further adjust brightness with the "gamma offset" setting on the second page of video settings but it doesn't affect complete darkness). You can also generate caves in Superflat worlds by adding "cave" to the preset and change the number of dungeons with (count=number), which also applies to World1 as they share a common code base (TMCW is basically just World1 with new features).
There are also some changes to the included utilities; the AMIDST files were removed and replaced with my own biome mapping tool which can properly map everything (there is no legend showing which colors correspond to which biomes as I didn't make it yet but many use the same colors as AMIDST or similar to their blocks, such as Rocky Mountains, Mesa, Extreme Hills, Desert, Plains, Swampland; Winter Forest and Taiga are light green and blue respectively, Savanna is similar in color to the grass in-game, and so on).
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 been playing on this world for about the past month, still exploring the same vast Ice Plains area that I've probably been exploring for at least 6 months of daily gameplay by now, though I may be nearing the end, depending on how much further it extends to the northwest (currently I don't plan to explore off the western edge of the mapped area):
Also, I built another secondary base, the 19th one so far, at -2560, -1536, this time inside a mountain (like other secondary bases it only has the basics; a single room with a bed, chest, furnaces, supplies, temporary storage, plus farms for food and trading materials and a jungle tree outside for wood):
The mountain has a fence behind the peak to prevent mobs from coming down over it:
This is a night view of the base in Minutor; the main room is the brown square near the center while the green squares to the right are potato (food) and chicken (used to wear down sacrificial swords so they are cheap enough) farms and the large area to the top is a wheat farm, used to get emeralds for diamond gear:
There was a surface dungeon right next to where I built it (most players would love to find this but I just mined the spawner since they are of no use to me):
On Halloween I captured a couple zombies wearing pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns (back in 2016 I did this with zombies and skeletons at another base, in both cases I gave them wood swords to prevent them from despawning):
Also, I've had to further expand my storage room as I ran out of space for rails - 48 double chests full or 165888 rails, all taken from mineshafts, with an additional 16 double chests added on to the shorter corridor. I also decided to add another corridor for coal instead of stacking chests 2 high, which I previously started doing, with over 1.5 million coal stored as blocks so far:
Before:
After:
A cutaway view of my underground storage area; the two long corridors to the left are for rails while to the right is the new corridor I added for coal, with other resources being placed in additional corridors as needed (redstone will be filled the next time I return; you can see my progress at filling them since signs appear as lighter pixels, with corridors that are completely filled marked with a single sign):
I could also save a lot of space by storing rails and cobwebs as blocks, as I do in TMCW, though in this world I've only been using them for temporary storage while caving and at secondary bases (a rail block is 9 rails and a cobweb block is 4 cobwebs; I used to harvest the latter without Silk Touch and craft the string into wool); at this point is is highly unlikely I'll ever upgrade to a newer version so it would only cause issues with others downloading the world (you'd have to use the mod, while I want it to remain "vanilla compatible").
As far as caving goes, the most interesting thing that I've found is a dungeon which was almost completely overwritten by a lava lake; only parts of the walls survived, which I can't recall seeing before (either way, I've patched this in the next update to TMCW by preventing lakes from generating if any of the blocks they will replace are cobblestone, stone brick, or nether brick, the latter two blocks enabling removal of code which prevented them from generating around those structures; in TMCWv1, prior to adding this code, I found a stronghold library with a lava lake in it):
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 reached an incredible milestone in this world - accumulating an entire chest (half a double chest) of diamond blocks, most of which was not mined with Fortune, with nearly 14,000 diamond ore mined and 15,606 diamonds collected (1,732 blocks in the chest plus two more in the floor as a marker. I also have around 60 loose diamonds in another chest, with only crafted blocks counted):
It took me a total of 156.76 days or 3,762 hours of playtime over 1,075 sessions to collect this, of which an estimated 90% has been spent caving (this would be slightly less than in other worlds due to trading for diamond gear used in repairs, and the time spent on collecting materials, and the time I spend traveling to/from my man base, which currently takes about 18 minutes round-trip, with about an hour in total including the time spent at my main base):
There is one extra diamond block due to having uncrafted one at some point (currently I treat all crafted mineral blocks as permanent):
For perspective, this is an average of about 4.6 diamonds collected and 4.1 diamond ore mined per hour spent caving, which is actually very low when compared to an effective branch-mining strategy (data on the Wiki indicates that you could mine close to a stack of ore per hour if you mined one block per second; 3600 * 0.017 = 61.2). Also, I've mined an average of 269 blocks per diamond ore, based on blocks mined with a diamond pickaxe (I still use iron pickaxes taken from minecarts to dig tunnels for railways), compared to as little as 59 when branch-mining (however, the vast majority of blocks mined have been ores and other "valuable" blocks):
This also shows how many diamonds I would have used to repair my pickaxe if I didn't trade, 1,746, which isn't actually that much, about 11% of the diamonds I've collected, despite a rather low efficiency in terms of diamonds mined per repair (about 24 diamond ore mined per repair/pickaxe; efficient branch-mining can get around 105 without Fortune and 232 with Fortune; the latter means that you only spend 1.3% of the diamonds you collect on repairs). Other tools and armor would roughly double the total diamonds used, which is still only about a fifth of what I collect (I initially used Fortune for the first 4-5 months of caving, then stopped using it, then about two years later I started trading after I found a blacksmith selling diamond pickaxes and decided to buy some. At this point I'd played on this world for about a third of the current time).
Also, for the first time I've made a new map outside of the main 3x3 area centered around the origin so I could fully map the northwestern edge of the continent I've been exploring, which has been explored/mapped along its entire western and northern boundaries so far (I didn't plan to explore outside of the main 3x3 area until I'd explored it but there wasn't much more land left); I'll have to raise the ceiling of the room with my map wall if I want to add maps to the south (currently, this room has remained nearly unchanged for nearly as long as I've had this world. I can also make more room for maps to the east by relocating/removing the chests I use for food and wood as they aren't necessary):
In addition, I recently collected more than 5,000 resources (blocks mined, not drops) in a single play session while exploring a complex of 4 mineshafts, which is one of the more extreme sessions that I've had but still short of my all-time record of more than 6,000 resources; notably, 10 of the 23 diamonds that I found came from minecarts, rather than mined ore (I don't have any stats on the percentage of diamond I collect comes from mineshafts but it is likely significant):
Also, in the first screenshot you can see how many rails and cobwebs I collected from these mineshafts and others I explored between trips back to my main base; I brought back 2,177 rails (mostly as "rail blocks", each equivalent to 9 rails) and 856 cobwebs (as "cobweb blocks", each equivalent to 4 cobwebs, this only includes cobwebs from cave spider spawners), the former more than double the number of rails I used in the railway extension I built to my current base. The "moss stone" is also actually "compressed mossy cobblestone", equivalent to 4 blocks each (all of these blocks are also in TMCW in slightly different forms/as proper blocks; in this world I only use them for temporary storage while caving and at secondary bases).
Here are surface and underground (explored only) renderings of the northwestern part of the world (northwest of -1024, -1024); the area that I've been exploring recently is west of the gap from the north about halfway across, with my current exploration from the northernmost point on the western edge of the gap (at least from the east there are no interconnected caves leading further west into the area; if I end up completely surrounding a large unexplored area I'll look for surface openings, otherwise everything I explore is from interconnections underground), with my current base at a mountain in the taiga biome near the center of the recently explored area:
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?
Wow that is truly an amazing amount of diamonds found Not to mention the crazy pickaxe statistics
Signature removed by popular demand.
I've finished exploring the northwestern part of the spawn continent, extending a bit past -3072 and into the surrounding ocean, with two additional maps created to cover that area, centered at -4096,-2048 and -4096,0, with a total of 10 maps covering a 8192x6144 area made so far. I also changed up my map room to accommodate a 5x4 map area, including a new strip of maps to the south and east of the current map area, which I will eventually explore to the furthest reaches of the continent (a 1x2 map area in the southwestern corner will probably never be mapped since there appears to be no land there):
That said, I've stopped playing on this world for the time being to work on the next major update to TMCW (not TMCWv5 but many more of its features will be added; TMCWv5 itself will be the next update that completely changes world generation, much like 1.6.4-1.7), after which I'll spend time playing with it (last year I played on this world twice for a few months each between time spent on modded worlds, prior to then I last played on it in early 2018).
Also, here is a series of renderings of how the world grew over the 5 main periods that I played on it (early-late 2013, mid-late 2015, most of 2016, mid 2017 to early 2018, two separate periods in 2020); the world currently measures 6912x6672 blocks and 121185 chunks with a file size of 583 MB (Overworld only, I deleted the Nether and End years ago and have never been back, though they wouldn't make much of a difference to the overall size at this point as seen in this example of another world):
A comparison to all of my other worlds, excluding a few early worlds (these were also before I adopted my caving playstyle):
Also, here are updated statistics for this world and for all of my worlds; TMCWv1 is listed as "replayed" with the original time below as I restarted from an older backup after I found a backup of old worlds which I had originally deleted and decided to keep them, with the intent to replay on TMCWv1 for at least as long as the original, which ended up being much longer. InfiniteCaves, the first modded world using a 3rd-party mod that let you change cave generation (I made it generate twice as many caves as 1.6.4, the recreation used my own mod which replicated it) was likewise completely recreated from scratch:
It is quite impressive that World1 still represents over half my total playtime and has nearly four times the playtime of any other single world despite being more or less vanilla, without most of the modifications I've made to caves/world generation in other worlds (mostly bugfixes, with the most significant change being preventing mineshafts from generating in dense cave systems) - vanilla 1.6.4 world generation is more than enough for me, as are all the blocks and items it has, many of which I do not use as-is (I only added two new blocks/items to this world, "rail blocks" and "cobweb blocks", which let me compact rails and cobwebs in the same manner as minerals and wool (I used to use non-Silk Touch shears to clear cave spider spawners and crafted the string into wool, otherwise I hadn't explored that far away yet so all the rails I currently get from mineshafts, which are also more common further away from spawn, wasn't such a problem); unlike my modded worlds I only use these for more storage while caving and in temporary storage at secondary bases, converting them back to their vanilla items at my main base so there are no persistent modded blocks/items in this world; likewise, some changes to mob spawning/behavior does not introduce anything that would be incompatible with vanilla, e.g. naturally spawning witches, cave spiders, and giants. I did add a "LightUpdated" field to the chunk data to track light updates but vanilla ignores 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?
i put the seed from your post, 123775873255737467, and playing 1.16.201 which comes up on my xbox. i come up in an ice world next to a normal world and a damp world with the lily pads, etc. i was wanting to try out your descriptions, etc. anyway, there is a village about 200 clicks or more from my base and i just go there in the day. the folks are still there ok. three farmers and i have been trading with them. wheat, beets and potatoes. when i look at the seed i have now its 1026295931. though i probably don't understand seeds. thank you for the help you have given me. chas
i am going to try and read all the messages on this thread. it is interesting and i might learn what i am not understanding. thanks, chas
Pretty sure all of this is on PC, Java Edition. The seeds won't work on Xbox, as it's a completely different version of the game. Also, 1 klick is 1 kilometer - you said that village is 200 klicks away from your base. 1 kilometer is 1,000 meters, a block in Minecraft is 1 meter, so you're saying you travel over 200,000 blocks to get to that village and back?
My collection of quotes:
"It's funny when you think about it Mr. Rayleor" - Benedict of the Supremacy
"Hey, I'm not trying to start fights, and you shouldn't either." - Lord Proto
"If your life has no problems, you're not really living it." - Ryan Higa
"Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon... No matter how good you are, the bird is going to crap on the board and strut around like it won anyway" - Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
"Those that matter, don't mind. Those that mind, don't matter." - James Sayers
"An eye for an eye and the world goes blind..." - Markus RK200
It also won't work on any version of Java other than 1.2.5-1.6.4 (with minor differences across those versions); world generation was completely changed in 1.7, and they may have also used the wrong seed if they actually used "123775873255737467" (as they posted) and not "-123775873255737467" (note the negative), and either way Bedrock only supports 32 bit seeds (within about +/- 2 billion) so it will be treated as a string and hashed to a valid numerical value (I presume, this is what Java does to numbers outside the 64 bit range).
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?
Yeah I don't understand either.
Also, tree avatar, Tree Puncher title, checks out.
Or in layman's terms, Bedrock edition is garbage. Legacy console was so much better ._.
What's your take on the proposed changes so far with 1.17's new caves? I think it'll bring much needed changes to mining, I very much agree that they ruined mining and caving after that update. Been a player since 2011, started in Beta 1.6. If I could choose one thing to cange about 1.17, I would increase amount and size of caves in the stone layer, and increase the amount of large caves in the deepslate layer.
This has been my avatar on Minecraft Forum for as long as I can remember lol, didn't notice that coincidence until a few years ago. It works quite well, haha
My collection of quotes:
"It's funny when you think about it Mr. Rayleor" - Benedict of the Supremacy
"Hey, I'm not trying to start fights, and you shouldn't either." - Lord Proto
"If your life has no problems, you're not really living it." - Ryan Higa
"Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon... No matter how good you are, the bird is going to crap on the board and strut around like it won anyway" - Scott D. Weitzenhoffer
"Those that matter, don't mind. Those that mind, don't matter." - James Sayers
"An eye for an eye and the world goes blind..." - Markus RK200
It works well because you either post rarely, or prefer this title over higher-ranking ones (which would mean you chose it on purpose, hmm...)
I agree that caves should be increased, within reason. Some people do want to avoid big caves, whether they like small caves or just prefer to mine and not spelunk.
I have very little opinion on an update I'll never play on, though I'd say that for one, ores should be left as-is; my own mods that made the underground deeper simply expanded the ranges to keep the same relative amounts above cave lava level; and I don't care for a deeper underground which is why I currently only make bedrock one layer and lower lava level from 11 to 4, giving 13.5% more room while keeping the overall depth the same - you can still do a lot with that and I much prefer horizontal exploration over vertical exploration.
Also, my own mod still has far more variation in cave features; even the "normal" cave systems which use the 1.6.4 size/density parameters as a base have various parameters (tunnel width, length, curviness, branching) changed within 8x8 chunk regions, in additional to cave systems made with different types of caves beyond the standard tunnels, as well as more types of biome-specific underground, which will all be greatly expanded in a major update I've spent much of this year on during the time I'd normally be playing (in fact, I haven't actually played, outside of modtesting, for the past month or more, with the time spent per day comparable to if not greater than the time I'd spend playing. The update also includes features that I've been working on for the past three years, just to give an idea of the amount of effort I've spent on it (version 4.5 is basically an intermediate update, much like 1.17/1.18, so the difference between version 4 and version 5 reflects the full update), for example, here is an early post I made on it, with some features from updates as recent as 1.17 added for fun, such as glow squid and lightning rods; and, of course, even larger(!) caves - the lava lake alone is nearly 100 blocks across and even maximum render distance fails to get the entire cave in view and at this point the underground volume is the highest of any of my mods in terms of percentage, double that of vanilla 1.6.4).
Clearly, with so much effort spent on TMCW over the past 7 years, even 7 1/2+ (some of the changes to caves were implemented in earlier mods) I am absolutely not inclined to just throw it all away just to get... what? I'm that hard-pressed to even say what might be so appealing about newer updates, considering also all the downsides - by using an already ideal version as a base it is much easier to add or change things to my liking; the code is also far simpler (the creator of Optifine has described 1.8+ as an "over-engineered monster", which is also quite evident when comparing the size of the jar file and number of classes to older versions; the majority of the increase between 1.7 and 1.8 was not due to new features, same for 1.12 to 1.13. This may also be a reason why MCP, the modding environment that I use, has not updated since 1.12 (at least officially; much like newer versions I'll absolutely never use Forge/Fabric/whatever for modding, I mean, even a simple change like using your own cave generator seems to be difficult to implement, much less completely refactoring literally half the game).
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 been saying this for a long time, leave ore generation or abundance vs scarcity as is.
If people want ores to be rarer they should either be given the option to make a custom world with that feature,
or have a newer difficulty mode between hard and hardcore and just let those people test their limits if that's their hobby.
But some people like one of the threads you were in although you didn't agree with them, wanted this feature imposed on every player in the game.
But as allyourbasesaregone argued, not everyone plays the game just to have a boring endless grind session in branch or strip mining,
some people want to do other things besides spending the majority of their time underground searching for diamonds and lapis.
If diamonds were to be 4x rarer or worse, I'd have much less incentive to mine for them and instead I'd be making the majority of my tools out of iron, and although iron ore is more abundant than diamonds, it's still a nuisance to get in the quantities I require for some big projects I've got planned, although the 1.17 update is about to change this evidently, since iron ores will be affected by fortune enchantment this time, meaning I won't need an iron golem farm, and I also doubt anybody else would, although I'm open to being proven wrong on that, perhaps somebody could still make a good case for using them.
The reason I use diamond and netherite tools is simple and it's pretty much the reason why others who have the same would be using them, I don't like having weak materials that force me to go to repair stations in every session I'm in. Iron is bad on durability but for some weird reason some wanted those nerfed, even though an iron shovel or pickaxe can be feasibly broken within 1 Minecraft day/night cycle, think about it, 1 day/night cycle, somehow according to some people this is apparently OP. I do facepalm at some people's suggestions, sometimes literally not just metaphorically.
Although suggestions may be well intentioned, having good intentions doesn't always yield good results, there's a lot of factors to consider when changing how something in a game works, and you know this.
I'm not saying the 1.17 is flawless, and Mojang are still working through the problems, but I'm glad you agree that as far as the standard game goes, current ore generation should be left alone, not have their probability of generating messed with just because some whined.
1.17 did add some nice newer materials in addition to the increased ground depth, so in mine and allyourbasesaregone's opinion, the increased ground depth was justified. Having the ground extended down to negative 64 Y isn't too much of an increase, and you can get down there within less than an hours worth of gameplay in survival assuming you were lucky enough to not have to dig your way around a dripstone cave to make a safe entrance.
Deepslate adds another decoration block that can be used to add more details to player buildings and it doubles as an alternative that can be used to make stone tools and furnaces in the Overworld, just like blackstone can in the Nether, it just adds more ways to customize your builds without having to resort to mods or texture packs, it's in the vanilla experience.
It doesn't work for me
What doesn't work? The seed? You must use use 1.6.4 or earlier as world generation was completely changed in 1.7, and it also only works on Java, as noted in an earlier reply a few posts back (you should read at least the topic and last page of comments in a thread, which will likely answer any questions you have).
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?