While exploring the rest of the mineshaft I left off at last time I found another vertical cave system, the second one that I've found so far:
This is what I got out of the cave, plus a bit of the mineshaft:
Vertical caves don't seem to be as good as normal caves in terms of mob spawns, which is due to the way pack spawning works; mobs can only spawn at the same level as the center of a pack. The number of spiders was also particularly low due to the lack of 2x2 areas of level ground:
Also, I came across this Endermen which buried itself in gravel:
Here are updated maps of what I've explored so far; I'm currently exploring below a Swamp, with a Roofed Forest to the north and a Snowless Taiga to the south (both of which I've found before):
I found something new today; I came across a ravine, which initially did not strike me as unusual aside from being a bit small but then it led to several other small ravines, which were clearly too small to be ravines - in other words, I found a ravine cave system, which is made up of cave that resemble small ravines, with the largest being about the size of the smallest ravine while others are as small as 20 blocks long, 1 block wide, and 4-5 blocks deep; they can also have 1-2 additional segments branching off from their center (a 3-4 way intersection).
Here are some screenshots:
A rendering of the cave by itself and a cave system in a test world (all normal caves disabled) as seen with MCEdit:
At this point I've found about half of all the new types of cave systems in TMCWv4 - 2 vertical cave systems, 1 maze cave system, and 1 ravine cave system, while I still have circular room and combination cave systems, and network and giant cave regions to find. I've also found a couple vertical cave clusters and a circular room cave cluster, which are like miniature versions of their respective cave systems with 3-6 caves each (a circular room cave system has 42 to 58 circular rooms, a ravine cave system has 34-44 ravine caves, a vertical cave system has 47-61 vertical caves, and a maze cave system has 8 or 9 maze caves). Other things left to find are a colossal cave system, which is similar to a cave system in my first world and a "giant" large cave (one of the largest sizes, like the ones Mhyroh found).
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
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6/15/2016
Posts:
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Johnisdapoof
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Hey I did some seed exploring today and added the NoExclusion files. Check out the seed "Hunter Pet". you should spawn in a plains with some insane ravines under spawn. Also, how do I get CaveFinder to work? Do I need to add the class files to the jar and then run the batch? (i'm very inexperienced with modding/adding files)
Also, how rare is the minecart with command block in dungeon chests? Was this something added with your mod or something that has been in the game.
Hey I did some seed exploring today and added the NoExclusion files. Check out the seed "Hunter Pet". you should spawn in a plains with some insane ravines under spawn. Also, how do I get CaveFinder to work? Do I need to add the class files to the jar and then run the batch? (i'm very inexperienced with modding/adding files)
Also, how rare is the minecart with command block in dungeon chests? Was this something added with your mod or something that has been in the game.
CaveFinder is entirely separate and should work just by double-clicking the batch file but it requires a system installation of Java (not the one that comes with Minecraft installed) It will also only work on Windows (version should not matter), though there are ways to make batch files for other OSes.
You'll want to edit the batch file to change the seed; the contents look like this:
@echo off
java CaveFinder seed 4929687777867842799 results 100 range 2048
pause
(that's the seed for your world, which has some quite interesting things relatively close to spawn, but I'll let you find out what they are)
You can use any text seed as long as it doesn't have spaces (otherwise they are seen as separate arguments), or its numeric equivalent, and specify 1-999 results and a range of 512-8192, which is always centered around 0,0. Adding "?" or "help" will display instructions for using it:
seed = 64 bit signed integer or string; values outside this range are hashed
to 32 bit integers, as are strings, which must be one word (no spaces). A
randomly chosen seed will be used if omitted.
range = radius in blocks (default 1024, minimum 512, maximum 8192) to search
from the origin. Search area is a square, so the minimum radius of 512 can still
find caves just outside of the 512 block circular radius exclusion zone around
the origin. Maximum range for mineshafts is limited to 3200.
noex = set to disable near-origin exclusion checks, use with NoExclusion patch.
results = number of results to output (default 10, minimum 1, maximum 999).
Mineshafts are limited to a range of 3200 since they are so common and the results will be inaccurate if the number found exceeds the maximum allowed.
Also, you might want to be aware that if you've added the NoExclusion patch to the same version you are playing on and if you have not explored everything within a 40-45 chunk radius (most caves are excluded within 32 chunks but one type is 40, and they extend out a few more chunks) of the origin you'll get messed-up caves across old and new chunks, since it alters the generation of all caves within this area since even "normal" caves are altered by varying their width, curvature, and other variables (on the left is the normal mod, on the right is with NoExclusion; if you look in the corners you can see that they are unchanged since they are outside of the area):
In my own world I finally found a diamond pickaxe in a minecart, in the 25th mineshaft that I've found, which is pretty close to the average if each one has 5 minecarts (the average I found in 30 mineshafts in vanilla), and saw my 4th diamond armored mob and the 5th mob in diamond or amethyst:
Here is an update on what I've found so far:
Play sessions spent caving: 50
Structures found (by number):
83 normal dungeons
72 ravines (up to 5 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
25 mineshafts
10 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
9 large caves (larger than vanilla)
4 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
4 fossils
4 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
4 villages
2 jungle temples
2 igloos (no basements)
2 vertical cave clusters
2 vertical cave systems
1 circular room cave cluster
1 desert temple
1 maze cave system
1 ravine cave system
1 stronghold
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Snowless Taiga
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome)
Mega Tree Plains
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
336 blocks long, 24 blocks wide, 53 blocks deep (calculated volume of 194787)
Largest cave:
174 blocks long, 23 blocks wide (calculated volume of 28644)
After going down the length of the ravine I found before I went to the surface after finding a mineshaft at the end so I could mark it for returning to later and found something very rare:
A pink sheep; unlike vanilla it is also unlikely that there are more nearby since I fixed a bug that caused sheep to have the same wool colors within large areas, which was caused by structure (village and temple) generation improperly using a RNG which is also used to determine the color of sheep (other mobs like horses use their own internal RNG to determine their variants and this RNG is seeded based on the time they spawned so they will be different if you recreate the world). However, sheep wool color is still based on the seed since I set the RNG according to the current chunk.
Actually, because sheep color is randomized per chunk instead of per region (villages and temples use a 32x32 chunk grid and the seed is set to the chunk coordinates / 32, rounded to an integer, which corresponds to region files. Individual flocks can still vary a bit if not every spawn attempt succeeds in the same order) it can be easier to find pink sheep in TMCW since you do not need to find as many flocks, but there will be just one (more can be bred by breeding them with a different color since the game will randomly choose a color for the child if they can't combine to form a new dye color).
Also, I found a new biome - Mega Forest, with some of the largest trees that I know of in any mod (aside from sacred rubber trees in FTB, which are so huge if one grows over your house you may as well forget about daylight or removing it without using MCEdit or a backup); these were based on jungle trees but use oak wood and leaves and have a lot more leaves and can get up to 64 blocks tall, tall enough to reach the clouds form near sea level terrain, and much higher on hills (I've seen some over y=180). There is also an understory of smaller oaks and big oaks as well as jungle-like bushes (spruce leaves and wood) on the ground:
This biome can cause lag during world generation and very slow world creation if you spawn in one, especially on Large Biomes, although I don't have issues afterwards; the trees have been tweaked to minimize leaf decay, which was bad enough even with vanilla big oaks that they were temporarily removed in 1.7 (in TMCW big oaks are completely free of leaf decay, even if you update blocks next to them, since each leaf cluster has extra logs in the center even when a branch, which do not go to every cluster, is not generated to it). Most of the world generation lag is also due to lighting updates, not the generation of the trees themselves.
Halfway down the ravine I also found something else - a combination cave system, which is a relatively small cave system which contains four different types of caves (circular rooms, ravine, maze, vertical), five if you count the small tunnels that lead from circular rooms:
Maze cave; as mentioned before when I found a maze cave system these are caves which have multiple branches at right angles and resemble small mazes:
A couple intersecting ravine caves:
The largest vertical cave, with another ravine cave near the top:
There are also circular rooms, one of which was cut in half by the ravine:
Unlike other types of caves, instead of displacing normal caves these generate in areas where there are no other caves, ravines, or mineshafts within a 3 chunk radius with a 1/60 chance of an attempt (this is the chance that the "size" of a normal cave system will be zero after a 1/15 chance of an attempt per chunk, so the actual chance of a normal cave system in a chunk is 1/20) and an additional ~10% failure rate due to two or more caves trying to generate within 3 chunks of each other (in this case there will be two cave clusters instead) they only generate once every 3400 chunks. They are also a bit smaller due to the smaller "exclusion" zone around them, 3 instead of 4 chunks, and with 28-37 individual caves.
I finished exploring the largest complex of caves that I've ever found in any world outside of my double/triple height terrain worlds, which included several large caves, including one which would have made a giant surface opening if it hadn't hit a river, which was also the largest single cave that I've found so far, but still short of the 50000 volume required to show up on my CaveFinder app (there don't seem to be many very large caves in my seed but I know that there are 20 such caves within 1536 blocks of the origin, which is more or less typical, since I used a modified version of the app to only print out the numbers of each type of cave found).
According to MCMap (I modified it to count all the torches found; the unmodified program prints out their relative locations) there were more than 7,200 torches in the first rendering and 43,000 in the whole world, meaning that about 1/6 of all the torches that I've used (excluding the Nether) were in this one area. I did not keep track of the resources I got from it but on my last trip back to my main base I took back close to 30,000 resources and my previous trip back was not long before I started exploring it:
This corresponds to the same area shown in the first rendering and covers an area measuring 431x326 blocks:
Also, here is a comparison of my current world to my first world:
This was the largest cave, with a length of 324, width of 21, and calculated volume of 43123:
Some other parts of the cave system:
The southern end of the cave system had a very long ravine, the one I mentioned earlier, extending to the south, which had a length of 244, width of 19, depth of 47, and calculated volume of 101095:
There's at least two more ravines and at least one mineshaft intersecting it (one seen to the right of center in the first image, there is another mineshaft at the very end, far enough away that it could be a different one), which I'll be exploring next:
I saw another zombie in full diamond armor and it dropped its leggings, the first time that I've gotten armor as a drop in this world (I've gotten half a dozen tools so far):
Also, I bred the pink sheep that I found earlier and brought one back to my main base as a trophy, replacing the white sheep that I had (breeding a pink sheep with another color randomly gives you one of the parent's colors since pink doesn't combine with any other color):
This shows how I make intersections (there are inactive powered rails under the minecarts to hold them in place); while not needed yet I made an intersection at 0,0 so when I build bases to the east and west I'll add extensions from this point instead of from my main base, about 250 blocks to the north. When riding I can just right-click to move to the other minecart in the section that I want to go in (in this case I mined the slab and removed the minecart and pushed the sheep to the other side)
In addition, this is what I've mined so far (blocks mined is what I've mined with an amethyst pickaxe, which I've only used while caving):
As impressive as that is, it is still a far cry from what I found in my first world, where I mined more than 1.6 million ore and crafted nearly 2 million resources into blocks, mined another 200,000 non-mineral resources, and found chest loot like 9-10 stacks of name tags, nearly two double chests of diamond horse armor (I don't bother with iron or gold after I get a few, same for saddles and minecarts), a stack and a half of golden apples, several double chests of enchanted books (only ones with enchantments that I use), and more.
Also, compared to my first world I've found significantly fewer rails and cobwebs, about 2/3 as many when compared to ores (in my first world I averaged about 1 rail for every 10 coal) even though I had modded my first world to remove them from dense cave areas, resulting in about 75% as many as vanilla, while TMCW has about 60% as many (since cave density controls the frequency of mineshafts, which would otherwise be as common as vanilla, this suggests that the areas I've explored so far have above-average cave density; when I ran the modified CaveFinder on my world to see how many of each type of cave it had it found 228 mineshafts, averaging one every 161.7 chunks or a frequency that is 61.8% of vanilla, so overall cave density is near average).
I found my 5th village today, as well as the first full-size Plains biome, 1500 blocks away from spawn; until now the only Plains that I'd found were small sub-biomes within larger biomes, including the one that I spawned in:
You'd think that houses would generate properly on nearly level ground, but no:
Or that villagers would avoid going into caves that they can't climb out of; the villager seen here wandered further into the cave by the time I made it accessible to the surface and was never seen again:
Also, I found what is probably the most dangerous type of dungeon - a double dungeon with witch and creeper spawners, which I took with without much incident:
In another dungeon I found a dungeon chest with 16 stacks of items in it, which is a pretty rare occurrence, with one in 499 dungeon chests having 16 or more stacks:
Also, here is a closer look at the Mega Forest biome I found earlier; despite the size of the trees it isn't very dark because I modified the way the light opacity of leaves is handled in this biome, along with several others with very large trees (a few spots can still get dark enough to spawn hostile mobs during the day):
Only a couple days after I found my fifth village I found yet another village, the fourth one within a single level 3 map, if you can call it a village because all it had was a church and a field, making it the smallest village I've ever found (I've found a few with two houses before, but never one):
Not only that, I found another igloo, the third one so far, and this one had a basement; I released the villager in it and spent a day pushing it it a few hundred blocks to the village I found (I actually found the village later), which I also augmented with extra doors placed in the base of the church so they would breed to at least 4 villagers:
I could have also cured the zombie villager although I just left it there (it won't despawn):
Also, I found a network cave region and as a result I covered a huge area in a single play session, far larger than usual:
The southwards extension seen in the first screenshot was largely due to the big ravine I found earlier, which brought me far to the south:
Network cave regions consist of very long and relatively straight caves leading from circular rooms (when there are more than two caves generated from the same point), which reach up to 176 blocks in length, or 384 blocks end-end and since a cave region is 12x12 chunks (192x192 blocks) in size they can span up to 544x544 blocks or more than a quarter of a level 3 map (actual extent of the one shown in this chart is about 420x360 blocks). I likely reached it earlier since I found another double dungeon, the second in two days and a third of what I've found so far; while they have a 5% chance of generating in place of a normal dungeon in most areas in network cave regions the chance is increased to 20% and the overall chance is about 5.5% as a result. Unlike other types of special cave systems or giant cave regions they only prevent normal caves from generating so there are also large caves, ravines, mineshafts, and cave clusters inside them as well.
Also, I noticed another gray speck appear on the map and went over to investigate it (yet another village?!), and well...
This is likely more of what you see above as seen from underground:
It is rather surprising that I still haven't found any "giant" caves yet given that they are more common than large ravines (based on a calculated volume of 50,000 or more); they must all be somewhere else.
I also came across yet another zombie in diamond armor, which at this point are so common I may as well only mention them if they drop anything (for comparison, in my first world I saw about as many in 10 times the playtime), as well as a double cave spider spawner (nothing that I added, just two that generated next to each other):
Unless you count changing a few textures a "texture/resource pack" I don't use one; it is all default save for a few blocks and the inventory GUI:
I changed glass to a clear texture with a white outline, made the background of the inventory GUI dark gray instead of black, replaced the lapis block texture with the pre-1.6 texture, and replaced steve.png with my skin so I'll always see it even if the skin servers go down (this may not work in 1.8+ if you have the Alex model by default, as I do). I also replaced the files inside the jar since I was modding it anyway and never use anything else so these are the "default" textures; otherwise, I do not use a resource pack.
If you mean the purple colored tools and armor I have, that's part of the mod, not retextured vanilla items (which is really what they are in a sense, I just used GIMP to change the hue of vanilla items).
I've always considered the fire threat from lightning to be nonexistent since I'd never seen any damage that could have been caused by lightning on any of the worlds I've had over the past 4 years, with thousands of hours of playtime.
That is, until now; I was continuing to explore the network cave region I mentioned before (despite the large area I covered in one day the entire region took several days to explore, which included many ravines, 5 large caves, and 3 rather large mineshafts which yielded a total of more than 1,200 rails, in and around it) when a thunderstorm occurred, I did not give it any thought until I was hit with a series of lag spikes and was wondering what was going on. I then noticed that it only happened around a certain area and I became suspicious that there was a fire somewhere because I knew that there was some sort of issue where a fire at the edge of loaded chunks would cause lag spikes far beyond what it would cause if you were next to it (I believe it is some issue with updating chunks that are next to unloaded chunks) and dug to the surface to see is anything was going on, I did not yet suspect lightning but a surface lava lake.
When I came up I found this; it must have started some time before since it was no longer raining at the time and was mostly out:
Another screenshot taken during the day after I returned to cut down the trees that burned and repair the damage, which mostly involved several of the Mega Trees; when I saw this I realized that it must have been lightning because none of the small trees or bushes on the ground were affected - the fire started 10-20 blocks above the ground:
After I cut down the trees, getting 6 stacks of wood, and replanted them:
Here is a view from the top of a burned tree that shows just how tall they are:
After that interruption I finished exploring the network cave region area and next I'll explore the massive ravine I found, which looks to be much wider and deeper than the biggest ravine I found previously (which was the longest possible at 336 blocks long, and 24 blocks wide and 53 blocks deep), easily large enough to cut all the way down from sea level to lava level if it were positioned higher up (the largest possible ravine is up to 39 blocks wide and 70 blocks deep; they would be 117 blocks deep if I did not reduce the width:height ratio as they got wider, which was specifically done to reduce the number that would cut all the way through the ground):
To the right of center is the core area of the network cave region; to the right you can see how far the caves can extend from it, while to the left are a couple large mineshafts, with a third embedded within the cave region. Several large caves can also be seen, such as one below the network cave region. The giant ravine shown above is partially shown in the lower-left:
Seeing as you mine alot you should use this mod called vein miner
That would have little effect on how much I could mine; based on the mining speed of an Efficiency V diamond pickaxe (or my mod's amethyst, which is the same as diamond in vanilla) I could mine as much as 8000 ore in one hour, around 10 times what I actually mine, so I only spend around 10% of the time actually mining, and perhaps another 10% fighting mobs. The majority of the time is simply walking around and other activities.
Also, I would have to code it in myself since it is a Forge mod and Forge is totally incompatible with TMCW; in fact, even one of the most basic changes, removing void fog (I made a method always return false, with just one line changed), is incompatible, crashing Forge with no other mods installed since it overwrites changes that Forge makes (as seen here). The same also applies to core classes like Block and Item; rewriting TMCW to a Forge mod (or a newer version) is also completely out of the question; try refactoring tens of thousands of lines of code over 178 files, not to mention I don't even know how to make a Forge mod, much less the fancy ASM and stuff required to make many of the changes I make to vanilla code (a long time ago I used MCreator to hack in an ore for a Forge mod I used back when I used it for a few mods).
The giant ravine turned out to be much more than just a big ravine - there were 6 more ravines intersecting it for an unprecedented 7 intersecting ravines, 2 more than I've ever found in Survival before, which included once before in this world, another time in my previous world (TMCWv3, all the ravines were vanilla-sized) and twice in my first world (vanilla). The most that I've ever heard of was 8, found in a seed for vanilla 1.6.4 and earlier, and right at spawn.
Here are several renderings of the ravine, with many of the others, all normal sized (two of them meet end-end, which I thought was a single very long ravine until I'd lit it up more), also visible:
Several more screenshots:
This was taken from the other end, from what I showed before:
These were taken from near the middle, looking down each end:
Another screenshot taken from higher up:
Looking down from another ravine that breaks the surface:
Some of the other ravines that intersected it; four of them directly intersected while two more intersected those ravines:
Also, this was the result of killing multiple large slimes that kept spawning in the ravine:
Here are the results from analyzing the area around the giant ravine; it was 40 blocks shorter than the previous biggest ravine but 7 blocks wider and about 31% larger in terms of volume:
Found ravine with length of 296, width of 31, depth of 62, and volume of 255799 at -376, 22, 1336
With a maximum depth of 62 the ravine could have gone all the way to the surface (sea level) if it had been located higher up, centered between layers 32-35 (28-39 for the largest ravines, which are not much deeper).
Also, to top things off one of the ravines intersected a ravine cave system, the second one that I've found so far.
I got an amethyst shovel from a zombie - the first time that I've ever gotten an amethyst item as a drop, not just in this world but ever, as I only added it to mob equipment near the end of playing my previous world:
Also, I made my third trip back to my main base, with more than 30,000 resources this time:
This is 13986 coal, 6066 iron, 3906 redstone, 1773 lapis, 837 gold, and 117 diamonds, for a total of 26685 resources:
Here there are 1974 rails, 900 cobwebs, 750 moss stone, 150 chiseled stone bricks, 50 empty mob spawners, and 91 other items for a total of 30600 resources (I also found a handful of amethyst from ores and chest loot but still have only about half a stack of surplus after subtracting what I've used for repairs; unlike other resources I do not have any dedicated storage area for it because it is so rare and I use most of it):
I also found another relatively large cave, with a length of 194 and width of 24, and the second largest cave I've found in terms of volume:
Here is an update on what I've found so far:
Play sessions spent caving: 61
Structures found (by number):
100 normal dungeons
95 ravines (up to 7 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
32 mineshafts
21 large caves (larger than vanilla)
13 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
8 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
6 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
6 villages
4 fossils
3 igloos (1 with basement)
2 jungle temples
2 ravine cave clusters
2 ravine cave systems
2 vertical cave clusters
2 vertical cave systems
1 circular room cave cluster
1 combination cave system
1 desert temple
1 desert well
1 maze cave system
1 network cave region
1 stronghold
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Snowless Taiga
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
336 blocks long, 24 blocks wide, 53 blocks deep (calculated volume of 194787)
Largest cave:
324 blocks long, 21 blocks wide (calculated volume of 43123)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
Here are renderings of the whole world, including a surface rendering with unexplored areas trimmed away:
I found a cave system with multiple giant caves in it, including the largest cave that I've found so far and several giant circular rooms (these are not included as "large caves" but are normal circular rooms with a larger width variation).
This was the largest cave with a length of 336, width of 22, and calculated volume of 49100:
Another large cave, with a length of 122 and width of 15; there were several others but they were not that large, as well as a ravine that was about twice as long and as wide as an average ravine:
The three giant circular rooms, from smallest to largest, with diameters of 32 (above lava), 35, and 45 blocks, the last being about 2.65 times wider and 18.5 times more voluminous than the largest circular room in vanilla:
As with large caves, circular rooms can get very large - up to 71 blocks in diameter and 73 times the volume of the largest room in vanilla, which is 17 blocks in diameter (unlike other large caves the volume can easily be calculated (as pi / 6 * width^2 * width / 2) and this will be close to their actual volume given that they are not filled with lava, above sea level, or under water):
Note that this was not naturally generated, so giving the seed and coordinates is meaningless; I forced the game to generate a circular room with the maximum possible width 1% of the time so I could easily find one since I do not have any way to find them as I do with other caves (the code involved is much more complex):
One of the circular rooms was absolutely packed with mobs - I killed over 50 before I was able to secure it, placing 1-2 torches before backing away as yet another wave of mobs came out of the darkness (spawning on the other side; the large flat floor is ideal for mob spawning):
I also found another fossil, the fifth one so far, which was the second largest skull:
Over the past week I explored one of the largest and densest cave systems that I've ever seen, only matched by a cave system that I found in my first world nearly four years ago. In other words, I found a "colossal" cave system, which is intended to replicate that cave and make them common enough that you can actually find one in any given seed within a reasonable distance from spawn, if still relatively rare (two per level 4 map, which takes me about half a year of daily playing to explore). I suspected that I'd found one as soon as I saw just how dense it was, and confirmed it after checking the area.
Here are some screenshots, the ground was pretty much like foam in the lower levels:
Here is a comparison to the cave system in my first world, at the top:
Also, here are renderings of the whole world made with Unmined, at layer 62 (sea level) and layer 13 (equivalent to layer 20 in vanilla, where dense cave systems stand out best; this also means that sea level is equivalent to layer 69 in vanilla), after cropping away chunks which were not explored (I used this tool on a copy to delete all chunks without torches):
Despite their name, colossal cave systems are far from the largest things that you can find underground, even ordinary caves often form larger complexes, if so rarely as dense over such a large area. The largest ravine that I've found so far had about 25% more air volume and the largest ravines and caves can be more than double, while giant cave regions can have more than a million air blocks (66 chunks between layers 4-62, or 75 between layers 11-62; they resemble the Nether more than any ordinary cave).
At this point the only things left to find are a giant cave region and a circular room cave system, and one of the larger "large caves", as none of the ones that I've found so far were large enough to even show up if I used my CaveFinder utility (I use a modified version which shows eveything within a limited area to see just how large something I've found is. Also, I recently updated it to include circular rooms, which I count, and keep track of, if they are at least 34 blocks wide, twice the width of the largest ones in vanilla).
Also, while I mined around 15000 ore from the cave system and surrounding caves and mineshafts I only found a single vein of 4 amethyst ore, later on I found another vein of 4 in the third ravine cave system that I've found so far; despite more than two months of caving and more than 200000 ore mined in total I currently only have 42 surplus amethyst.
In addition, I recently made an interesting change which would cause a huge uproar if Mojang ever added it to vanilla (they actually did plan to do something like this at one time; see the removed spawner NBT tags) - mob spawners will "burn out" after spawning too many mobs in too short of a time, equivalent to about 50 spawned at the maximum rate (100% success rate, a lower rate only slowly increases the number of mobs required); they do not stop spawning mobs, rather, mobs will stop dropping loot and XP, with the occasional mob that does (about two per minute for a zombie spawner) as an internal counter slowly decrements, then rises above the threshold again; it takes 10-40 minutes for it to completely reset itself (the counter decreases 4x faster if the player is outside its activation range and it is below the threshold; when below the threshold but above 0 it only reduces the number of mobs needed to trip it again. The counter is saved to NBT so unloading chunks will not reset it, it is also added to spawners generated before it was added).
While exploring the rest of the mineshaft I left off at last time I found another vertical cave system, the second one that I've found so far:
This is what I got out of the cave, plus a bit of the mineshaft:
Vertical caves don't seem to be as good as normal caves in terms of mob spawns, which is due to the way pack spawning works; mobs can only spawn at the same level as the center of a pack. The number of spiders was also particularly low due to the lack of 2x2 areas of level ground:
Also, I came across this Endermen which buried itself in gravel:
Here are updated maps of what I've explored so far; I'm currently exploring below a Swamp, with a Roofed Forest to the north and a Snowless Taiga to the south (both of which I've found before):
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 found something new today; I came across a ravine, which initially did not strike me as unusual aside from being a bit small but then it led to several other small ravines, which were clearly too small to be ravines - in other words, I found a ravine cave system, which is made up of cave that resemble small ravines, with the largest being about the size of the smallest ravine while others are as small as 20 blocks long, 1 block wide, and 4-5 blocks deep; they can also have 1-2 additional segments branching off from their center (a 3-4 way intersection).
Here are some screenshots:
A rendering of the cave by itself and a cave system in a test world (all normal caves disabled) as seen with MCEdit:
At this point I've found about half of all the new types of cave systems in TMCWv4 - 2 vertical cave systems, 1 maze cave system, and 1 ravine cave system, while I still have circular room and combination cave systems, and network and giant cave regions to find. I've also found a couple vertical cave clusters and a circular room cave cluster, which are like miniature versions of their respective cave systems with 3-6 caves each (a circular room cave system has 42 to 58 circular rooms, a ravine cave system has 34-44 ravine caves, a vertical cave system has 47-61 vertical caves, and a maze cave system has 8 or 9 maze caves). Other things left to find are a colossal cave system, which is similar to a cave system in my first world and a "giant" large cave (one of the largest sizes, like the ones Mhyroh found).
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?
Hey I did some seed exploring today and added the NoExclusion files. Check out the seed "Hunter Pet". you should spawn in a plains with some insane ravines under spawn. Also, how do I get CaveFinder to work? Do I need to add the class files to the jar and then run the batch? (i'm very inexperienced with modding/adding files)
Also, how rare is the minecart with command block in dungeon chests? Was this something added with your mod or something that has been in the game.
Survival Minecraft, never modded (until now, TMCWv4), since alpha 1.2.1.
CaveFinder is entirely separate and should work just by double-clicking the batch file but it requires a system installation of Java (not the one that comes with Minecraft installed) It will also only work on Windows (version should not matter), though there are ways to make batch files for other OSes.
You'll want to edit the batch file to change the seed; the contents look like this:
(that's the seed for your world, which has some quite interesting things relatively close to spawn, but I'll let you find out what they are)
You can use any text seed as long as it doesn't have spaces (otherwise they are seen as separate arguments), or its numeric equivalent, and specify 1-999 results and a range of 512-8192, which is always centered around 0,0. Adding "?" or "help" will display instructions for using it:
Mineshafts are limited to a range of 3200 since they are so common and the results will be inaccurate if the number found exceeds the maximum allowed.
Also, you might want to be aware that if you've added the NoExclusion patch to the same version you are playing on and if you have not explored everything within a 40-45 chunk radius (most caves are excluded within 32 chunks but one type is 40, and they extend out a few more chunks) of the origin you'll get messed-up caves across old and new chunks, since it alters the generation of all caves within this area since even "normal" caves are altered by varying their width, curvature, and other variables (on the left is the normal mod, on the right is with NoExclusion; if you look in the corners you can see that they are unchanged since they are outside of the area):
In my own world I finally found a diamond pickaxe in a minecart, in the 25th mineshaft that I've found, which is pretty close to the average if each one has 5 minecarts (the average I found in 30 mineshafts in vanilla), and saw my 4th diamond armored mob and the 5th mob in diamond or amethyst:
Here is an update on what I've found so far:
Structures found (by number):
83 normal dungeons
72 ravines (up to 5 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
25 mineshafts
10 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
9 large caves (larger than vanilla)
4 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
4 fossils
4 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
4 villages
2 jungle temples
2 igloos (no basements)
2 vertical cave clusters
2 vertical cave systems
1 circular room cave cluster
1 desert temple
1 maze cave system
1 ravine cave system
1 stronghold
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Snowless Taiga
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome)
Mega Tree Plains
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
336 blocks long, 24 blocks wide, 53 blocks deep (calculated volume of 194787)
Largest cave:
174 blocks long, 23 blocks wide (calculated volume of 28644)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
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?
Today I got a diamond sword from a zombie, found a Mending book in a dungeon, and found another very long ravine:
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?
After going down the length of the ravine I found before I went to the surface after finding a mineshaft at the end so I could mark it for returning to later and found something very rare:
A pink sheep; unlike vanilla it is also unlikely that there are more nearby since I fixed a bug that caused sheep to have the same wool colors within large areas, which was caused by structure (village and temple) generation improperly using a RNG which is also used to determine the color of sheep (other mobs like horses use their own internal RNG to determine their variants and this RNG is seeded based on the time they spawned so they will be different if you recreate the world). However, sheep wool color is still based on the seed since I set the RNG according to the current chunk.
Actually, because sheep color is randomized per chunk instead of per region (villages and temples use a 32x32 chunk grid and the seed is set to the chunk coordinates / 32, rounded to an integer, which corresponds to region files. Individual flocks can still vary a bit if not every spawn attempt succeeds in the same order) it can be easier to find pink sheep in TMCW since you do not need to find as many flocks, but there will be just one (more can be bred by breeding them with a different color since the game will randomly choose a color for the child if they can't combine to form a new dye color).
Also, I found a new biome - Mega Forest, with some of the largest trees that I know of in any mod (aside from sacred rubber trees in FTB, which are so huge if one grows over your house you may as well forget about daylight or removing it without using MCEdit or a backup); these were based on jungle trees but use oak wood and leaves and have a lot more leaves and can get up to 64 blocks tall, tall enough to reach the clouds form near sea level terrain, and much higher on hills (I've seen some over y=180). There is also an understory of smaller oaks and big oaks as well as jungle-like bushes (spruce leaves and wood) on the ground:
This biome can cause lag during world generation and very slow world creation if you spawn in one, especially on Large Biomes, although I don't have issues afterwards; the trees have been tweaked to minimize leaf decay, which was bad enough even with vanilla big oaks that they were temporarily removed in 1.7 (in TMCW big oaks are completely free of leaf decay, even if you update blocks next to them, since each leaf cluster has extra logs in the center even when a branch, which do not go to every cluster, is not generated to it). Most of the world generation lag is also due to lighting updates, not the generation of the trees themselves.
Halfway down the ravine I also found something else - a combination cave system, which is a relatively small cave system which contains four different types of caves (circular rooms, ravine, maze, vertical), five if you count the small tunnels that lead from circular rooms:
A couple intersecting ravine caves:
The largest vertical cave, with another ravine cave near the top:
There are also circular rooms, one of which was cut in half by the ravine:
Unlike other types of caves, instead of displacing normal caves these generate in areas where there are no other caves, ravines, or mineshafts within a 3 chunk radius with a 1/60 chance of an attempt (this is the chance that the "size" of a normal cave system will be zero after a 1/15 chance of an attempt per chunk, so the actual chance of a normal cave system in a chunk is 1/20) and an additional ~10% failure rate due to two or more caves trying to generate within 3 chunks of each other (in this case there will be two cave clusters instead) they only generate once every 3400 chunks. They are also a bit smaller due to the smaller "exclusion" zone around them, 3 instead of 4 chunks, and with 28-37 individual caves.
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 got a Sharpness II diamond sword from a zombie before.
I finished exploring the largest complex of caves that I've ever found in any world outside of my double/triple height terrain worlds, which included several large caves, including one which would have made a giant surface opening if it hadn't hit a river, which was also the largest single cave that I've found so far, but still short of the 50000 volume required to show up on my CaveFinder app (there don't seem to be many very large caves in my seed but I know that there are 20 such caves within 1536 blocks of the origin, which is more or less typical, since I used a modified version of the app to only print out the numbers of each type of cave found).
According to MCMap (I modified it to count all the torches found; the unmodified program prints out their relative locations) there were more than 7,200 torches in the first rendering and 43,000 in the whole world, meaning that about 1/6 of all the torches that I've used (excluding the Nether) were in this one area. I did not keep track of the resources I got from it but on my last trip back to my main base I took back close to 30,000 resources and my previous trip back was not long before I started exploring it:
This corresponds to the same area shown in the first rendering and covers an area measuring 431x326 blocks:
Also, here is a comparison of my current world to my first world:
This was the largest cave, with a length of 324, width of 21, and calculated volume of 43123:
Some other parts of the cave system:
The southern end of the cave system had a very long ravine, the one I mentioned earlier, extending to the south, which had a length of 244, width of 19, depth of 47, and calculated volume of 101095:
There's at least two more ravines and at least one mineshaft intersecting it (one seen to the right of center in the first image, there is another mineshaft at the very end, far enough away that it could be a different one), which I'll be exploring next:
I saw another zombie in full diamond armor and it dropped its leggings, the first time that I've gotten armor as a drop in this world (I've gotten half a dozen tools so far):
Also, I bred the pink sheep that I found earlier and brought one back to my main base as a trophy, replacing the white sheep that I had (breeding a pink sheep with another color randomly gives you one of the parent's colors since pink doesn't combine with any other color):
This shows how I make intersections (there are inactive powered rails under the minecarts to hold them in place); while not needed yet I made an intersection at 0,0 so when I build bases to the east and west I'll add extensions from this point instead of from my main base, about 250 blocks to the north. When riding I can just right-click to move to the other minecart in the section that I want to go in (in this case I mined the slab and removed the minecart and pushed the sheep to the other side)
In addition, this is what I've mined so far (blocks mined is what I've mined with an amethyst pickaxe, which I've only used while caving):
As impressive as that is, it is still a far cry from what I found in my first world, where I mined more than 1.6 million ore and crafted nearly 2 million resources into blocks, mined another 200,000 non-mineral resources, and found chest loot like 9-10 stacks of name tags, nearly two double chests of diamond horse armor (I don't bother with iron or gold after I get a few, same for saddles and minecarts), a stack and a half of golden apples, several double chests of enchanted books (only ones with enchantments that I use), and more.
Also, compared to my first world I've found significantly fewer rails and cobwebs, about 2/3 as many when compared to ores (in my first world I averaged about 1 rail for every 10 coal) even though I had modded my first world to remove them from dense cave areas, resulting in about 75% as many as vanilla, while TMCW has about 60% as many (since cave density controls the frequency of mineshafts, which would otherwise be as common as vanilla, this suggests that the areas I've explored so far have above-average cave density; when I ran the modified CaveFinder on my world to see how many of each type of cave it had it found 228 mineshafts, averaging one every 161.7 chunks or a frequency that is 61.8% of vanilla, so overall cave density is near average).
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 found my 5th village today, as well as the first full-size Plains biome, 1500 blocks away from spawn; until now the only Plains that I'd found were small sub-biomes within larger biomes, including the one that I spawned in:
You'd think that houses would generate properly on nearly level ground, but no:
Or that villagers would avoid going into caves that they can't climb out of; the villager seen here wandered further into the cave by the time I made it accessible to the surface and was never seen again:
Also, I found what is probably the most dangerous type of dungeon - a double dungeon with witch and creeper spawners, which I took with without much incident:
In another dungeon I found a dungeon chest with 16 stacks of items in it, which is a pretty rare occurrence, with one in 499 dungeon chests having 16 or more stacks:
Also, here is a closer look at the Mega Forest biome I found earlier; despite the size of the trees it isn't very dark because I modified the way the light opacity of leaves is handled in this biome, along with several others with very large trees (a few spots can still get dark enough to spawn hostile mobs during the day):
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?
Only a couple days after I found my fifth village I found yet another village, the fourth one within a single level 3 map, if you can call it a village because all it had was a church and a field, making it the smallest village I've ever found (I've found a few with two houses before, but never one):
Not only that, I found another igloo, the third one so far, and this one had a basement; I released the villager in it and spent a day pushing it it a few hundred blocks to the village I found (I actually found the village later), which I also augmented with extra doors placed in the base of the church so they would breed to at least 4 villagers:
Also, I found a network cave region and as a result I covered a huge area in a single play session, far larger than usual:
Network cave regions consist of very long and relatively straight caves leading from circular rooms (when there are more than two caves generated from the same point), which reach up to 176 blocks in length, or 384 blocks end-end and since a cave region is 12x12 chunks (192x192 blocks) in size they can span up to 544x544 blocks or more than a quarter of a level 3 map (actual extent of the one shown in this chart is about 420x360 blocks). I likely reached it earlier since I found another double dungeon, the second in two days and a third of what I've found so far; while they have a 5% chance of generating in place of a normal dungeon in most areas in network cave regions the chance is increased to 20% and the overall chance is about 5.5% as a result. Unlike other types of special cave systems or giant cave regions they only prevent normal caves from generating so there are also large caves, ravines, mineshafts, and cave clusters inside them as well.
Also, I noticed another gray speck appear on the map and went over to investigate it (yet another village?!), and well...
This is likely more of what you see above as seen from underground:
It is rather surprising that I still haven't found any "giant" caves yet given that they are more common than large ravines (based on a calculated volume of 50,000 or more); they must all be somewhere else.
I also came across yet another zombie in diamond armor, which at this point are so common I may as well only mention them if they drop anything (for comparison, in my first world I saw about as many in 10 times the playtime), as well as a double cave spider spawner (nothing that I added, just two that generated next to each other):
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?
What is that resource pack you use?
Unless you count changing a few textures a "texture/resource pack" I don't use one; it is all default save for a few blocks and the inventory GUI:
I changed glass to a clear texture with a white outline, made the background of the inventory GUI dark gray instead of black, replaced the lapis block texture with the pre-1.6 texture, and replaced steve.png with my skin so I'll always see it even if the skin servers go down (this may not work in 1.8+ if you have the Alex model by default, as I do). I also replaced the files inside the jar since I was modding it anyway and never use anything else so these are the "default" textures; otherwise, I do not use a resource pack.
If you mean the purple colored tools and armor I have, that's part of the mod, not retextured vanilla items (which is really what they are in a sense, I just used GIMP to change the hue of vanilla items).
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 always considered the fire threat from lightning to be nonexistent since I'd never seen any damage that could have been caused by lightning on any of the worlds I've had over the past 4 years, with thousands of hours of playtime.
That is, until now; I was continuing to explore the network cave region I mentioned before (despite the large area I covered in one day the entire region took several days to explore, which included many ravines, 5 large caves, and 3 rather large mineshafts which yielded a total of more than 1,200 rails, in and around it) when a thunderstorm occurred, I did not give it any thought until I was hit with a series of lag spikes and was wondering what was going on. I then noticed that it only happened around a certain area and I became suspicious that there was a fire somewhere because I knew that there was some sort of issue where a fire at the edge of loaded chunks would cause lag spikes far beyond what it would cause if you were next to it (I believe it is some issue with updating chunks that are next to unloaded chunks) and dug to the surface to see is anything was going on, I did not yet suspect lightning but a surface lava lake.
When I came up I found this; it must have started some time before since it was no longer raining at the time and was mostly out:
Another screenshot taken during the day after I returned to cut down the trees that burned and repair the damage, which mostly involved several of the Mega Trees; when I saw this I realized that it must have been lightning because none of the small trees or bushes on the ground were affected - the fire started 10-20 blocks above the ground:
After I cut down the trees, getting 6 stacks of wood, and replanted them:
Here is a view from the top of a burned tree that shows just how tall they are:
After that interruption I finished exploring the network cave region area and next I'll explore the massive ravine I found, which looks to be much wider and deeper than the biggest ravine I found previously (which was the longest possible at 336 blocks long, and 24 blocks wide and 53 blocks deep), easily large enough to cut all the way down from sea level to lava level if it were positioned higher up (the largest possible ravine is up to 39 blocks wide and 70 blocks deep; they would be 117 blocks deep if I did not reduce the width:height ratio as they got wider, which was specifically done to reduce the number that would cut all the way through the ground):
To the right of center is the core area of the network cave region; to the right you can see how far the caves can extend from it, while to the left are a couple large mineshafts, with a third embedded within the cave region. Several large caves can also be seen, such as one below the network cave region. The giant ravine shown above is partially shown in the lower-left:
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?
That would have little effect on how much I could mine; based on the mining speed of an Efficiency V diamond pickaxe (or my mod's amethyst, which is the same as diamond in vanilla) I could mine as much as 8000 ore in one hour, around 10 times what I actually mine, so I only spend around 10% of the time actually mining, and perhaps another 10% fighting mobs. The majority of the time is simply walking around and other activities.
Also, I would have to code it in myself since it is a Forge mod and Forge is totally incompatible with TMCW; in fact, even one of the most basic changes, removing void fog (I made a method always return false, with just one line changed), is incompatible, crashing Forge with no other mods installed since it overwrites changes that Forge makes (as seen here). The same also applies to core classes like Block and Item; rewriting TMCW to a Forge mod (or a newer version) is also completely out of the question; try refactoring tens of thousands of lines of code over 178 files, not to mention I don't even know how to make a Forge mod, much less the fancy ASM and stuff required to make many of the changes I make to vanilla code (a long time ago I used MCreator to hack in an ore for a Forge mod I used back when I used it for a few mods).
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?
The giant ravine turned out to be much more than just a big ravine - there were 6 more ravines intersecting it for an unprecedented 7 intersecting ravines, 2 more than I've ever found in Survival before, which included once before in this world, another time in my previous world (TMCWv3, all the ravines were vanilla-sized) and twice in my first world (vanilla). The most that I've ever heard of was 8, found in a seed for vanilla 1.6.4 and earlier, and right at spawn.
Here are several renderings of the ravine, with many of the others, all normal sized (two of them meet end-end, which I thought was a single very long ravine until I'd lit it up more), also visible:
Several more screenshots:
These were taken from near the middle, looking down each end:
Another screenshot taken from higher up:
Looking down from another ravine that breaks the surface:
Some of the other ravines that intersected it; four of them directly intersected while two more intersected those ravines:
Also, this was the result of killing multiple large slimes that kept spawning in the ravine:
Here are the results from analyzing the area around the giant ravine; it was 40 blocks shorter than the previous biggest ravine but 7 blocks wider and about 31% larger in terms of volume:
With a maximum depth of 62 the ravine could have gone all the way to the surface (sea level) if it had been located higher up, centered between layers 32-35 (28-39 for the largest ravines, which are not much deeper).
Also, to top things off one of the ravines intersected a ravine cave system, the second one that I've found so far.
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 got an amethyst shovel from a zombie - the first time that I've ever gotten an amethyst item as a drop, not just in this world but ever, as I only added it to mob equipment near the end of playing my previous world:
Also, I made my third trip back to my main base, with more than 30,000 resources this time:
Here there are 1974 rails, 900 cobwebs, 750 moss stone, 150 chiseled stone bricks, 50 empty mob spawners, and 91 other items for a total of 30600 resources (I also found a handful of amethyst from ores and chest loot but still have only about half a stack of surplus after subtracting what I've used for repairs; unlike other resources I do not have any dedicated storage area for it because it is so rare and I use most of it):
I also found another relatively large cave, with a length of 194 and width of 24, and the second largest cave I've found in terms of volume:
Here is an update on what I've found so far:
Structures found (by number):
100 normal dungeons
95 ravines (up to 7 intersecting; large ravines counted separately)
32 mineshafts
21 large caves (larger than vanilla)
13 large cave systems (the sort of swiss cheese cave found prior to 1.7)
8 double dungeons (a special type, not two dungeons intersecting)
6 large ravines (larger than vanilla)
6 villages
4 fossils
3 igloos (1 with basement)
2 jungle temples
2 ravine cave clusters
2 ravine cave systems
2 vertical cave clusters
2 vertical cave systems
1 circular room cave cluster
1 combination cave system
1 desert temple
1 desert well
1 maze cave system
1 network cave region
1 stronghold
Biomes found (by order found):
Plains (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Mixed Forest
Lake (technical biome in Mixed Forest and others)
Jungle
Birch Forest
Poplar Grove (technical biome in Birch Forest)
Desert
Tropical Swamp
Big Oak Forest
Snowless Taiga
Rocky Mountains
Ice Plains
Roofed Forest
Mesa
Winter Forest
Forest Mountains
Bushlands
Mountainous Desert
Swampland
Hilly Plains
Winter Taiga
Frozen Lake (technical biome in Winter Forest and others)
Mega Tree Plains
Spruce Hills (technical biome in Mega Tree Plains)
Mega Forest
Plains
Forest (technical biome in Plains)
Forest
Lake
Highest terrain found (y=128 or higher):
165 (Ice Mountains)
156 (Rocky Mountains)
128 (Roofed Forest Hills)
Largest ravine:
336 blocks long, 24 blocks wide, 53 blocks deep (calculated volume of 194787)
Largest cave:
324 blocks long, 21 blocks wide (calculated volume of 43123)
Largest mineshaft:
757 rails mined
Here are renderings of the whole world, including a surface rendering with unexplored areas trimmed away:
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 found a cave system with multiple giant caves in it, including the largest cave that I've found so far and several giant circular rooms (these are not included as "large caves" but are normal circular rooms with a larger width variation).
This was the largest cave with a length of 336, width of 22, and calculated volume of 49100:
Another large cave, with a length of 122 and width of 15; there were several others but they were not that large, as well as a ravine that was about twice as long and as wide as an average ravine:
The three giant circular rooms, from smallest to largest, with diameters of 32 (above lava), 35, and 45 blocks, the last being about 2.65 times wider and 18.5 times more voluminous than the largest circular room in vanilla:
As with large caves, circular rooms can get very large - up to 71 blocks in diameter and 73 times the volume of the largest room in vanilla, which is 17 blocks in diameter (unlike other large caves the volume can easily be calculated (as pi / 6 * width^2 * width / 2) and this will be close to their actual volume given that they are not filled with lava, above sea level, or under water):
One of the circular rooms was absolutely packed with mobs - I killed over 50 before I was able to secure it, placing 1-2 torches before backing away as yet another wave of mobs came out of the darkness (spawning on the other side; the large flat floor is ideal for mob spawning):
I also found another fossil, the fifth one so far, which was the second largest skull:
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?
Over the past week I explored one of the largest and densest cave systems that I've ever seen, only matched by a cave system that I found in my first world nearly four years ago. In other words, I found a "colossal" cave system, which is intended to replicate that cave and make them common enough that you can actually find one in any given seed within a reasonable distance from spawn, if still relatively rare (two per level 4 map, which takes me about half a year of daily playing to explore). I suspected that I'd found one as soon as I saw just how dense it was, and confirmed it after checking the area.
Here are some screenshots, the ground was pretty much like foam in the lower levels:
Here is a comparison to the cave system in my first world, at the top:
Also, here are renderings of the whole world made with Unmined, at layer 62 (sea level) and layer 13 (equivalent to layer 20 in vanilla, where dense cave systems stand out best; this also means that sea level is equivalent to layer 69 in vanilla), after cropping away chunks which were not explored (I used this tool on a copy to delete all chunks without torches):
Despite their name, colossal cave systems are far from the largest things that you can find underground, even ordinary caves often form larger complexes, if so rarely as dense over such a large area. The largest ravine that I've found so far had about 25% more air volume and the largest ravines and caves can be more than double, while giant cave regions can have more than a million air blocks (66 chunks between layers 4-62, or 75 between layers 11-62; they resemble the Nether more than any ordinary cave).
At this point the only things left to find are a giant cave region and a circular room cave system, and one of the larger "large caves", as none of the ones that I've found so far were large enough to even show up if I used my CaveFinder utility (I use a modified version which shows eveything within a limited area to see just how large something I've found is. Also, I recently updated it to include circular rooms, which I count, and keep track of, if they are at least 34 blocks wide, twice the width of the largest ones in vanilla).
Also, while I mined around 15000 ore from the cave system and surrounding caves and mineshafts I only found a single vein of 4 amethyst ore, later on I found another vein of 4 in the third ravine cave system that I've found so far; despite more than two months of caving and more than 200000 ore mined in total I currently only have 42 surplus amethyst.
In addition, I recently made an interesting change which would cause a huge uproar if Mojang ever added it to vanilla (they actually did plan to do something like this at one time; see the removed spawner NBT tags) - mob spawners will "burn out" after spawning too many mobs in too short of a time, equivalent to about 50 spawned at the maximum rate (100% success rate, a lower rate only slowly increases the number of mobs required); they do not stop spawning mobs, rather, mobs will stop dropping loot and XP, with the occasional mob that does (about two per minute for a zombie spawner) as an internal counter slowly decrements, then rises above the threshold again; it takes 10-40 minutes for it to completely reset itself (the counter decreases 4x faster if the player is outside its activation range and it is below the threshold; when below the threshold but above 0 it only reduces the number of mobs needed to trip it again. The counter is saved to NBT so unloading chunks will not reset it, it is also added to spawners generated before it was added).
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 found a large cave in 1.7.10
Lol this is gonna be a hefty read. But it'll give me something to do.
If you're interested in an awesome, white-listed, pure vanilla server, consider applying!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/servers/pc-servers/2811770-axiba-smp-community-focused-vanilla-survival#c4