After having worked nonstop for the past month on updating TMCW I've started another world, the 6th such world created with my namesake mod, in this case, TMCWv5.10, so-named because it was released on its 10th anniversary, making TMCW one of the longest-updated mods, almost certainly when considering that it has been on the same vanilla version the entire time, the only other mod that may come close is "Better Than Wolves", which remained on 1.5.2 for a long time until the original developer stopped updating it (others have taken over and plan to update it to newer versions).
Much like every other world I've had, shown below, my main motive for playing is the adventure and thrill of caving, whether it is because of the exploration, mob combat, collecting resources, etc, including finding new biomes and surface structures, which may seem very common to many but my highly constrained playstyle means it can take days to explore a single biome, a month and a half per level 3 map (1024x1024 blocks), I even make it a point not to explore outside the spawn biome (or just around it, e.g. if I need cows or something) with the sole exception of locating a stronghold until I start caving after the "end-game", with much of the time before then spent on making the gear I use while caving, which in this case includes breeding villagers to get "Mending" (a functionally identical replacement for renaming an item so the prior work penalty doesn't increase).
That said, similar to last time I spawned in a Meadow, one of several spawn biomes, one of which is even forcibly added within 256 blocks of the origin if none would otherwise be present, so not that unusual. Unlike last time there was no village despite being quite a bit larger, so I won't have any help from it (e.g. I just transported a couple villagers to my starter base and got carrots and potatoes for trading, neither of which I've gotten yet. I'll note that while they can be helpful they are less significantly so than in modern versions which have a lot more loot and blocks; if you are lucky you can even find diamond equipment in the blacksmith chest, the villager itself is basically free diamond gear, though I made these trades cost more and moved several items to other villagers):
I actually spawned underwater, taking these from the surface; the last time this happened was in TMCWv2: The biome in the first screenshot is Mixed Forest, with the small variants of every vanilla tree and several of my own variants (such as the ovoid-shaped "poplar" made with birch wood and leaves).
Meadows have their own variant of big oak tree, where the leaf clusters are shaped like small trees, otherwise, they are similar to Plains but with greener grass and many more flowers (this biome has no relation to the biome of the same name in 1.18; I added it in TMCWv4, released in early 2017)
Another view back towards where the first screenshot was taken:
Adjacent to the Meadow were Birch Forest, spiced up with my own variant of birch trees, Mountainous Desert (most likely, given how hilly it is right up to the edge, unlike vanilla Desert with Desert Hills in the interior, and which is pretty much the same with higher hills), and Mesa, similar to the 1.7 biome of the same name (minus the red sand, which instead generates in a "Badlands" biome which is more like a red sand desert with the spikes of Mesa Bryce and smaller hills of stained clay):
You might be wondering, is it a coincidence that there are so many "hot / warm" biomes in the same area (this includes Mixed Forest, hence the jungle trees)? Maybe, maybe not, since while I don't have strict "climate zones" I do have regions where hot and cold biomes are more common while excluding the opposite extreme, usually visible as clustering of biomes of the same temperature, with several visible on this map of my previous world (hot to the west of center and near the northern edge, cold to the southeast). Otherwise, any biome can generate next to any other biome in "normal" regions, or along the boundaries between them (hot and cold regions do have a degree of separation, more evident in oceans).
Desert and Mesa are also more interesting to explore underground since the surface blocks extend all the way down to bedrock (even including bedrock, which has biome-specific variants). Meadow is also one of several biomes which has Cherry Grove, a new biome added in TMCWv5.10, as a sub-biome so I could of had one at spawn.
Later on I spotted some additional biomes, including one, TMCW Mega Taiga, my own version of a "mega taiga biome", added before the "vanilla" versions from 1.7, with enormous trees with 3x3 trunks, which was rather rare prior to TMCWv5 as it was exclusive to "cold" climate zones, and I never found it until then (TMCWv2 actually has a few chunks of one near the edge but I never saw it in-game). Also visible is a Big Oak Forest, a biome I added as a memorial to the hasty removal of big oak trees due to causing "performance issues" in 1.7 (rather than fixing them or a regression in the the chunk rendering code, which I did by adding more logs, and later increasing the distance leaves can survive); this includes a larger form with 2x2 trunks which is actually hidden in the vanilla code:
As for my progress so far, I spent most of the session digging out rooms underground and collecting things for trading later on, with a stockpile already being made, as well as the standard materials like leather and paper for books / enchanting:
I've already switched to spruce as my primarily wood source since 2x2 trees are so easy to harvest and give so much wood (there are much larger trees in TMCW but they aren't as easy to cut down):
A map of the area around my base, I actually recentered it (by crafting it with a compass) where I plan to build my main base, you can also easily see the different biomes thanks to the Bedrock (and TMCW, and I presume other mods) - exclusive feature of biome-specific colors:
As simple as it gets:
You might notice (if you know what they looked like before 1.12) that the bed looks a little different? That's because I added colored beds, using a single texture (or overlay) which is recolored with the game's standard built-in dye colors (the same colors used for sheep):
And yes, this is a "cheat" since you only need one dye instead of 3 (I enabled any color of wool to be redyed as well):
I also have chicken pens like this in my first world but for a very different reason, wearing down sacrificial swords so I can use them in repairs (otherwise the cost is 40 levels, just one too many):
I've found wool to be one of the most effective materials to trade for emeralds since it grows back pretty quickly (well, once I stop breeding them since the baby sheep eat a lot) and you don't need to trade as much:
Also, I've already seen a relatively rare "mob", a spider jockey on top of my base in the morning (the spider had become neutral so it couldn't do anything); compared to vanilla there are noticeably more mobs out at night and they start spawning as soon as it gets dark enough because I split the mob cap into semi-independent "cave" and "surface" caps (normally up to 60 mobs will spawn underground with up to 40, for an overall cap of 100, on the surface; if you restrict spawning underground the number of the surface will increase to up to 60):
I'm sure this has happened to everybody (I tried killing a creeper by quickly opening and closing the door. This is not as effective as in vanilla since they can continue moving during their countdown):
I only did a bit of proper mining, most of the coal and iron I got came from digging out my base, but did find 3 diamonds and plan to collect obsidian for an enchantment table (which I really do need but I'll need more leather to get level 30 enchantments) and Nether portal so I can cure zombie villagers; most of my branch-mining is not to get diamonds, which I do use for tools to mine with, but amethyst, which is about 3 times rarer than diamond near bedrock (becoming 8 times rarer on y=3 and above, the layers exposed in caves):
Also, these are links to the other worlds I created with TMCW, I didn't post that much in the earlier ones (TMCWv1 was played on again years later and most of the updates reflect that. You may also notice that I created this world more than a month before the first public release, I may have gotten the incentive to do so, and the name of the mod, from the 12th reply):
It's interesting to see you start up a world after all the massive mining trips with maxed equipment. And I like the scenery. The trees are nice and at least in those pics you have some good terrain- interesting without being crazified.
So what motivates you to start a new world? In my case it's usually mod issues - wanting to try a different world generation, wanting to play a mod that doesn't fit into my current worlds (typically with a new tech ladder to climb; once I've done one there's not much need for another), or needing to playtest or demonstrate some changes I've made to my own mods.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
So what motivates you to start a new world? In my case it's usually mod issues - wanting to try a different world generation, wanting to play a mod that doesn't fit into my current worlds (typically with a new tech ladder to climb; once I've done one there's not much need for another), or needing to playtest or demonstrate some changes I've made to my own mods.
Pretty much the same reasons, and wanting to have everything I do in an update tied to a single world, and in my last world I'd fully explored the entire area within 1536 blocks of the origin, which is in ways different from further out (for example, it is guaranteed to have at least one each of the largest types of caves). There are also many changes and tweaks to various game mechanics, such as a new villager type and village building and new loot which can only be found in structures (even if I play at a relatively low render distance this still resulted in about 10,000 unexplored chunks, or 20% of the total area, with the old generation; if I only explored that area it would take around 100 sessions), although overall world generation is very similar (hence why I didn't call it TMCWv6; by contrast, TMCWv4 and TMCWv5 generate completely different worlds):
One thing I changed was making the largest sizes of caves more common, as seen in a before and after of the seed I used for TMCWv5 (only the largest caves are shown, some of the "new" caves are not actually new, this is most noticeable with circular rooms, which increase in size):
Otherwise, the underground wasn't directly changed (the locations of strongholds and some special cave systems changed so they are more randomly positioned) but the overall impact is still noticeable given the volume of the largest caves; notably, it appears that the average air volume underground is as high as the peak air volume in 1.18* so TMCW still reigns supreme as the most "cavey" version of the game, even before this change (maybe even in volume per chunk since 1.18 appears to drop off a lot more towards bedrock and sea level):
If you enable bedrock and air (cave air is also "air" but appears to be very minimal so I think actual caves do not have it) the peak for bedrock is about 6 billion on layer 0 while air peaks at about 700 million on layer -8, corresponding to 11.667% of blocks being air (coincidentally, the same as the overall percentage in TMCW). Interestingly, air drops to only 3.33% at lava level and just 1.67% at sea level, which are both lower than even vanilla 1.7 (about 5% and 2%). 1.18 also appears to have a similarly uneven distribution as TMCW does (the ripples seen on the graph above, which are due to special cave variants, as I imagine is also the case for 1.18).
Also, this is an older chart which shows the relative contributions of various features (mineshafts by themselves include all the blocks that make them up):
I did keep playing on an existing world for TMCWv4.5 but that was more of a major technical update of the game's internal workings.
There's also the fact that even as I played on the previous world I'd use tools to see what was in the surrounding areas (past x/z 1536) after I fully explored a map, and later used its seed for testing new additions and changes, so I know what is in the surrounding areas (for example, near -2100, -1000 there is a cave with a volume of 847,000 blocks, and two extremely large ravines; around 750, -1700 is a ravine with a volume of over 500,000 blocks, and some ways to the north is a Desert M biome (which I did not find); around -500, -1700 is a mineshaft with a length of around 5000. All these are just off the top of my head).
One of the first things I did on the second day (session) was go to the Nether, which ended up spawning me in a cave far above a huge lava sea; the original portal was at a different location than the one shown (I left the 4 bottom obsidian in as they weren't needed and the ground was literally one block thick):
Compared to vanilla 1.6.4 the Nether is a bit different, with a lot more decorations added, including huge mushrooms, veins and blobs of magma blocks, "nether trees" (based on small oaks but their trunks and foliage are Nether-related blocks), "nether grass" and "nether dead bushes", and nether gold ore, which behaves the same way as Overworld variants, dropping itself; ironically, the only gold that I've found so far has been in the Nether:
I enhanced most of the Nether screenshots shown here so they are easier to see; the original is shown below:
The Nether also has more mobs, including "nether husks", which are behaviorally identical to the vanilla husk in later versions except they are immune to fire, "nethermites", a variant of endermite (also immune to fire), and naturally spawning endermen, also the first time I got ender pearls, with several collected:
It didn't take long to find a fortress, most of the time was finding a way down from the Nether ceiling, and I collected a lifetime supply of blaze rods, still only using a stone sword, they are easy to cheese though, I tunneled towards the spawner and dug a pit next to it, letting them sink into it (I got hit a few times but I only had to back away to get out of sight):
Similar to the map I made in the Overworld I recentered this map at 0,0 after scaling it to level 3:
I also got a Wither skeleton skull, one of only several that I've ever gotten since I've never had the incentive to fight the Wither:
The fortress also had some interesting loot, including a new item added in TMCWv5.10 - wolf armor, both gold and iron (much like horse armor gold is better), as well as a single amethyst gem and a diamond; the amethyst is also a new loot item as I updated their loot for the first time (all previous versions of TMCW had vanilla loot, other items that I added include obsidian, as added in vanilla 1.8, all pieces of gold armor, instead of just a chestplate, and golden apples):
After than I returned to the Overworld to start curing and breeding villagers; on the third day I captured the first zombie villager by letting zombies through the front door, trapping it in the sheep pen, where they were barely able to get around; it turned out to be a blacksmith, though with no useful trades, especially considering how expensive a diamond chestplate can be, in this case, 37 emeralds (I made all diamond gear 3 times more expensive than iron):
However, it is extremely easy to breed villagers - just make a box lined with doors, 3 per villager, you may also notice that the doors look different, a new feature where they use a tile entity to determine their wood type, spruce in this case (this allows code that checks for the vanilla door block, including villagers and villages, to work with them without having to modify it, as well as not needing any new block IDs, I also don't expect anybody to use enough to cause any issues, considering they use standard block rendering (not a "tile entity special renderer", which renders them like entities and is why chests are so hard on the game but not functionally identical barrels):
The first librarian offered Looting II, useful for getting more drops from passive mobs for trading (this is the only time I actually use it); the second one offered Knockback II, a must-have enchantment for my main sword later on, and as its first offer (due to a low probability enchanted books are much more likely to appear later on):
With over 50 levels by now it was really way past time to make an enchanting setup so I did a bit more mining to find more diamonds (I'd only found 4 so far); you'll never guess what I got on the first diamond pickaxe I enchanted for 30 levels, and again on the second one; this was also before I'd really done much branch-mining and while I don't specifically try to get Fortune for anything other than amethyst I'll use it if I get it (in TMCWv5 I got it after I'd finished branch-mining so I only used it on amethyst):
When crafting bookshelves you might notice something; an empty bookshelf? This is part of a feature I added, before vanilla got "chiseled bookshelves" where you can add up to 12 books to a bookshelf; you can also still craft the original bookshelf, or add at least 3 books to an empty bookshelf to power the enchantment table (the original and new bookshelves have different textures to tell them apart. You can also craft the original bookshelf with an empty bookshelf and 3 books in the crafting grid):
The first enchantment in this world - and one of the best items you can get
I spent most of the rest of my levels on a book, which got Efficiency III:
The second pickaxe I enchanted had the same thing as the first (I'd rather have Silk Touch though, then I can start using an ender chest):
Naturally, the first thing I did was mine the single vein of 5 amethyst ore that I've found so far, which yielded 13 amethyst, about half of what I need to make my caving gear, plus a few more for repairs:
It is not so evident but you may notice that the floor is darker than stone should be, since it is actually "stone bedrock", one of many biome-specific variants which use a darker version of the biome's "biome stone" block (there is a video somebody made of them playing on TMCW and they seemed very confused by this, thinking there must be more below even though they were at y=1, I guess they thought I added depth below y=0, but if I ever revisit "double/triple height terrain" I'd add it by pushing sea level up):
Some other examples of features in TMCW; smelting items is much more efficient as you get a lot more back; a clock can be smelted for a whole gold ingot and iron hoes give 6 nuggets, instead of a measly one; I just smelted down brand-new items I got from trading which aren't useful to me but you can also smelt down damaged tools and armor for a proportionally reduced return (down to one nugget):
Some people find them to be tacky but Giants were one of the first mobs added to the game and I've improved them in various ways, such as using a newer AI (which makes them better than some existing vanilla mobs as they still used the older AI as well until 1.8). I also recently added skeletons that spawn with axes, in addition to the swords previously added (80% iron, 16% diamond, 4% amethyst); as axes penetrate armor in the same way as all attacks do since 1.9 (which I think was a poor addition) this makes them more dangerous for armored players (axes deal one less damage than swords, the same as vanilla 1.6.4, reduced by one more due to all tiers below amethyst being nerfed so amethyst is the same as diamond was):
That's a fast access to the Nether. You probably know I consider high caves the easiest area of the Nether.
I like a lot of the changes you've made, lots of QOL there. But one change I've always wanted was making villager breeding more reasonable. "Villages" consisting of vast arrays of doors have always annoyed me. I always thought villager breeding should require: *one* door, a bed, a couple of partial blocks not exposed to sky (=furniture) and a couple exposed to sky (=farm). Or something similar.
Is the Giant data still in the game? Maybe I should make a mod to reintroduce it. I could find several for 1.16 and later, but none for 1.12
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
That's a fast access to the Nether. You probably know I consider high caves the easiest area of the Nether.
I've already spent over 30 in-game days playing, without skipping the night more than a few times, which seems like a decent amount of time (note that when I mention "days" I usually mean play sessions); I've seen people going to the Nether within only a day or two; for example, this stream somebody made while playing on TMCW, and in Hardcore at that (they made three attempts, none of which ended well, and seemed to rage quit due to the extreme difficulty of the mod but I'd put more blame on them, or perhaps they weren't used to older mob mechanics, but surely anybody knows to go under a 2 block high ceiling to avoid endermen and wither skeletons, otherwise creepers got them the other two times, they also didn't seem to understand how my "attack penalty" system worked and kept spam-clicking even after they realized something was up, taking a half-dozen hits to kill a cow, 3 to kill a fish when it should have taken only 2 and 1 respectively):
(deaths at 16:16, 55:48, and 2:14:14)
Is the Giant data still in the game? Maybe I should make a mod to reintroduce it. I could find several for 1.16 and later, but none for 1.12
It is, but Mojang removed their AI (or rather, the original mob AI that was used until then for e.g. zombie pigmen, spiders, etc. It is worth noting that these mobs, while unable to pathfind around obstacles, were bugged in many other ways for some time after 1.8, e.g. spiders lost the ability to see through walls and endermen were just buggy, which may be why they weren't updated right away, though Giants were just using the generic AI).
Here is a post which shows the code changes from vanilla (which is very basic, the actual AI code was in a superclass):
However, re-adding a proper AI is quite easy to do, I just copied most of the AI "tasks" that zombies used:
this.tasks.addTask(0, new EntityAISwimming(this));
this.tasks.addTask(2, new EntityAIMeleeAttack(this, 1.0D, EntityAIMeleeAttack.DEFAULT));
this.tasks.addTask(6, new EntityAIWander(this, 1.0D));
this.tasks.addTask(7, new EntityAIWatchClosest(this, EntityPlayer.class, 16.0F));
this.tasks.addTask(7, new EntityAILookIdle(this));
this.targetTasks.addTask(1, new EntityAIHurtByTarget(this, true));
this.targetTasks.addTask(2, new EntityAINearestAttackableTarget(this, EntityPlayer.class, 0, true));
Another change that is needed is overridding the "getCanSpawnHere" method, or changing "getBlockPathWeight" to reverse the handling of light level (that is, subtract the light level from 0.5 instead of vice-versa, This is actually why they can't spawn in vanilla because they require a light level that is higher than 11 and less than 8. I just changed "getCanSpawnHere" so they will tend to pathfind towards light, unlike most hostile mobs which prefer the dark):
public float getBlockPathWeight(int posX, int posY, int posZ)
{
// Unlike other hostile mobs giants prefer to path to light (e.g. player's bases)
return this.worldObj.getLightBrightness(posX, posY, posZ) - 0.5F;
}
// Note that all code in supers was bypassed
public boolean getCanSpawnHere()
{
// 1/4 chance of a spawn attempt succeeding and only at or above sea level; spawners have no restrictions
if (this.spawnType != SPAWNER && (this.rand.nextInt(4) != 0 || this.blockY() < ChunkProviderTMCW.getSeaLevel())) return false;
return (this.worldObj.difficultySetting > 0 && this.isValidLightLevel() && this.worldObj.checkNoEntityCollision(this.boundingBox) && this.worldObj.getCollidingBoundingBoxes(this, this.boundingBox).isEmpty() && !this.worldObj.isAnyLiquid(this.boundingBox));
}
There's also some custom code here, e.g. the "spawn type" which I use to tell how a mob spawned (e.g. endermen, silverfish, and zombie pigmen spawned from spawners have different behavior from naturally spawned ones) and checking for the actual sea level / top surface of a Superflat world instead of a hardcoded value (I believe 1.8 has a more proper way of getting this, my method requires checking the dimension as well for mobs that spawn in the Nether/End).
Also, there is a significant issue with Giants - the method used to check for collision with entities doesn't work properly for entities which are more than a few blocks tall; you can try hitting their head, or firing arrows at them, and they don't register. This is because the game checks for entities per chunk section and expands the bounds of the bounding box by a few blocks, only checking sections that it intersects, so unless a Giant is near the bottom or within the section you (or they, this also applies to their own attacks) are attacking from it will be very buggy. I fixed this by adding a custom method which subtracts 10 from the bottom of the bounding box:
// Used to get bounding box when calculating entity targeting, equivalent to addCoord(x, y, z).expand(1, 1, 1) with minY then
// decreased by 9, which ensures that Giants standing in the next chunk section below can be detected (default expansion of
// 1 block plus 2 in Chunk.getEntitiesWithinAABBForEntity (3 total) plus 9 = 12, compared to their height of 11.8).
public static final AxisAlignedBB getTargetedEntitiesBoundingBox(AxisAlignedBB bb, double x, double y, double z)
{
double var7 = (x < 0.0D ? bb.minX + x : bb.minX);
double var9 = (y < 0.0D ? bb.minY + y : bb.minY);
double var11 = (z < 0.0D ? bb.minZ + z : bb.minZ);
double var13 = (x > 0.0D ? bb.maxX + x : bb.maxX);
double var15 = (y > 0.0D ? bb.maxY + y : bb.maxY);
double var17 = (z > 0.0D ? bb.maxZ + z : bb.maxZ);
return getAABBPool().getAABB(var7 - 1.0D, var9 - 10.0D, var11 - 1.0D, var13 + 1.0D, var15 + 1.0D, var17 + 1.0D);
}
public List getEntitiesWithinAABBExcludingEntity(Entity par1Entity, AxisAlignedBB par2AxisAlignedBB)
{
// Ensures that projectiles can see Giants standing in the next chunk section below (default expansion of 1 block + 2
// additional blocks + 9 = 12, compared to their height of 11.8)
if (par1Entity instanceof EntityArrow || par1Entity instanceof EntityThrowable) par2AxisAlignedBB.minY -= 9.0D;
return this.getEntitiesWithinAABBExcludingEntity(par1Entity, par2AxisAlignedBB, (IEntitySelector)null);
}
Then there is the fact that the game calculates a player's attack reach to the bottom of an entity, so again it needs ti be fixed or it will think you are too far away to hit them; I did this by adding a custom method which in the case of Giants checks 4 points from feet to head:
// Treats Giants as 4 separate points, 0, 3.333, 6.667, 10 blocks above posY to improve collision detection
public double getDistanceSqToTarget(Entity par1Entity)
{
float minDistance = 1000000F;
float dx = (float)(this.posX - par1Entity.posX);
float dy = (float)(this.posY - par1Entity.posY);
float dz = (float)(this.posZ - par1Entity.posZ);
dx = dx * dx + dz * dz;
for (int y = 0; y < 4; ++y)
{
float distance = dx + dy * dy;
if (distance < minDistance) minDistance = distance;
dy += 3.333333F;
}
return (double)minDistance;
}
// Default method in Entity
public double getDistanceSqToTarget(Entity par1Entity)
{
return this.getDistanceSqToEntity(par1Entity);
}
All these changes may be rather invasive to implement via a Forge mod though, plus other mods which use the vanilla methods may not be fixed (how does vanilla do the Ender Dragon then? It handles it as multiple smaller entities/bounding boxes). This may also be why Mojang hasn't added any very large mobs, besides the Ender Dragon (using a single bounding box for more complex entities also has its issues, e.g. Giant's arms, and limbs in general, aren't part of the bounding box so they cant be targeted).
Also, another significant improvement I made to targeting mobs in general was to ignore dying mobs, which is just checking if they are alive in EntityLivingBase.canBeCollidedWith() (most other entities simply disappear without a death animation, notable exceptions include the Wither and Ender Dragon, which override this method so they are still affected but that probably isn't that important):
// Fixes collision checks with dying entities (MC-1246)
public boolean canBeCollidedWith()
{
return this.isEntityAlive();
}
Notably, Mojang claims this is "won't fix" / "works as intended" but it makes a huge difference when there is no general attack cooldown, or just weapons with a high attack speed; I can plow though a pen of chickens killing several per second with no wasted attacks (I intentionally did not fix weapons losing durability when attacking a mob while it was immune to damage, which is greatly compounded by my "attack penalty" which reduces the damage you deal when doing this, or missing entirely too often; in other words, you are free to attack as fast as you can as long as you remain accurate. I suppose Mojang did not do something similar because they wanted more "realism"; I consider the delay when switching weapons to be more significant than the delay between attacks as I usually hold something else and switch to a sword as needed - in fact, so fast that I'd occasionally trigger another bug, the game takes a tick to update your attack damage attribute to reflect the item you are holding, e.g. a diamond sword adds 7 damage, but I saw it dealing only 7.25 damage (unarmed plus Sharpness) or even a non-weapon item like food dealing 8 damage (unarmed plus sword). I fixed this by forcing a sync of attributes prior to dealing an attack, notably, this bug is still unresolved, if less pronounced due to the attack cooldown).
This is the path I took to a stronghold, cutting diagonally across an entire level 3 map, a distance of over 1,400 blocks and the furthest I've ever traveled (for comparison, in 1.6.4 strongholds are located 640-1152 blocks from the origin; in my first world the closest was actually only 560 blocks away since vanilla applies an additional offset of up to 112 when ensuring it is within a non-ocean biome. In TMCW an infinite number of strongholds generate every 8192 chunks in alternating 64x64 chunk regions, except within 800 blocks of the origin. While 1400 blocks is far modern versions (post-1.9) have the innermost ring being 1280-2816 blocks from the origin so they could be up to twice as far away):
This is an underground rendering made with MCMap; the full-size image is 4194 pixels across:
Along the way I found 7 new biomes; Winter Forest, Swamplands, Mega Spruce Taiga, Mega Forest, Quartz Desert, Ice Plains, and Mega Tree Plains; 8 if you count the "Spruce Hills" sub-biome in Mega Tree Plains (I don't normally count variations of the parent biome like hills, river, edge but some are distinct enough, you could also count this as a variant of Taiga):
A view from within the Mesa I found next to the spawn biome, except for the more recent addition of Mesa Plateau Forest (the trees in the distance) this has remained virtually unchanged since it was added in version 1, I later added red sand(stone) but instead created a new biome for it, "Badlands", which is a mesa/desert-like biome:
Past the Mesa was a Winter Forest, a snowy variant of vanilla Forest, they may also have igloos:
This in turn lead to Swamplands (vanilla swamp):
I've often wondered how the size of these trees, in a Mega Forest, compare to other mods, they surely have to be near the top for a naturally generated tree (I recall something about a "rubber tree" which is absurdly huge but it must be grown by the player), even the ones at sea level can reach the clouds (max height of 65 blocks):
After that was another "mega" biome, Mega Spruce Taiga, differentiated from the normal variant by a greater number of leafier trees and pretty much the same as the biomes in 1.7:
After that I came across Quartz Desert, a desert variant with "quartz sand" and "quartz desert pyramids", and Ice Plains (yes, another hot-cold transition. It may be that there is a "cold" climate zone, such as exist, with several "cold/snowy" biomes near each other, which shows just how "large" they actually are, a few biomes across, you'll never find anything like vanilla 1.6.4's Ice Plains regions):
The final biome, with the stronghold, was a Mega Tree Plains, a plains-like biome with the occasional mega tree found in Mega Forest and a "Spruce Hills' sub-biome which has the taller variant of spruce tree:
I thought to note how I "cheated" the Beta mechanic where a mob spawns next to an unsafe bed; all you have to do is pillar up a few blocks and make a 1x3 platform for the bed and a respawn point, with a torch to spawnproof it; as such, this mechanic was buggy in Beta (an incorrect calculation enabled the game to see though walls so you had to place the bed away from them. More precisely, the game checked if a mob could pathfind to within 1.5 blocks of your position, measuring the distance from the northwest corner of a block instead of its center, one of many such bugs/quirks. I changed this to check for a bed block directly adjacent to the final path point, corners are also safe because of this, as well as players only respawning adjacent to a bed block, not in the corners):
A video where somebody just placed a bed down and got woken up by a zombie (or a skeleton and more rarely, witch), at 4:15:
Strongholds themselves are the same as vanilla except there are additional spawners placed under the chests in hallways (cave spiders, creepers, skeletons, witches, zombies), and in libraries (silverfish):
Unlike vanilla seeing cave spiders, even multiple, not an indication of a nearby mineshaft; they are also an uncommon natural spawn below sea level:
The chests also had some interesting loot - I've already found all four variants of wolf armor, including amethyst, one of the rarest items that can be found (after enchanted golden apples):
The "armor toughness (axes)" refers to the fact that axes have the exclusive properly of penetrating armor as all attacks do since 1.9 (I think Mojang's implementation was very poorly thought out, considering it has little impact on weaker attacks and many mobs don't deal much damage, while strong attacks, especially creeper explosions, received a massive buff, making it even more important to get extremely overpowered max armor which makes anything less inconsequential):
The spawners themselves are also loot since mining them with Silk Touch drops an "empty" spawner which is a purely decorative block (or just to show how many I've collected; I've mined more than 5,500 in my first world (over 6,000 including before I enabled stats for them, which are disabled in vanilla 1.6.4 for some reason) and collected an entire chest (1,728) of empty spawners in TMCWv5):
Libraries have two silverfish spawners placed below the bookshelves in the middle; I made it so that they do not produce particles when fully surrounded by blocks so they are harder to find:
Another thing that is different about libraries is that there is a 1/16 chance of a bookshelf being a "full" bookshelf, containing 12 books, which can be removed instead of destroying the bookshelf; they have a different texture so you can tell them apart:
Another difference from vanilla is that most torches in strongholds and mineshafts are "dim" or "burnt-out" torches, which emit half as much light and had previously been redstone torches, and before that, removed entirely so MCMap, and more recently, cave maps, don't reveal unexplored areas (the "normal" torch on the right is actually a "fake" torch, a variant of "dim" torch (same block ID as I added support for light level being determined by metadata), they also generate in villages and other structures, all so nothing is revealed):
The End portal itself was at 1160, 1000, about 1000 blocks away from where I started in both directions, 1,400 total:
Also, I fixed end portals not having bottom and side textures (they appear invisible), which were made to use the obsidian texture, at half-size (1x2 on the sides and 2x2 on the bottom); the top also has a texture which is visible when going far enough away that tile entities stop rendering:
This is a view of the stronghold on a cave map, it was fairly average in size; I analyzed it with CaveFinder and the exact coordinates (center of starting staircase, which is where eyes of ender lead to, and is towards the upper-left, the top was exposed in a cave with a lake above it) were 1076 31 980 with a size of 166 structure pieces (the smallest have at least 100, a limitation I added to ensure they are of a decent size, the largest may exceed 300. The three in my first world (vanilla) are 161, 177, and 302). Another thing that you may notice is how nice and orderly it is, no broken-up bits where caves intersected it since they always fully overwrite air blocks (vanilla does not for the walls, leading to the common impression that caves cut them apart), I also reduce the density of normal caves and prevent special caves and mineshafts from generating too close to them (mineshafts themselves do not cut apart strongholds, even in vanilla, since the game places strongholds afterwards):
On the way back from the stronghold I spotted a desert temple in the Mountainous Desert I saw on the first day, behind a large mountain (which likely exceeds y=128; I keep track of such high peaks with the highest approaching y=190); not only that, as I came closer I saw a dungeon exposed in the side of the mountain, the first one that I've found:
Unlike modern versions husks can spawn in the absence of sky exposure, a mechanic which I think makes no sense and would severely reduce the chance of seeing them considering I spend most of my time underground (past the early game, and when I'll actually be exploring), another thing that is different about newer versions is that zombie spawners can only spawn normal zombies because Mojang made all zombie variants their own entities. You may also notice that the walls look a bit different, this is because they contain "compressed" cobblestone, crafted with 4 normal cobblestone, one of several variations (there is also a compressed variant of mossy cobblestone, which I originally added to my first world as a storage block, the same goes for "rail blocks" and "cobweb blocks" and various other features):
The desert temple was extremely infested with mobs, many coming from two spawners in the floor, plus zombies from nearby caves (maybe there is another dungeon nearby?); and yes, those are baby skeletons, which behave similarly to baby zombies and don't attempt to avoid sunlight since they don't burn:
You'll notice that there is a husk model inside this spawner, which is a special variant which exclusively spawns husks, with several other such special spawner variants (I added a new NBT tag which optionally stores the variant of mob):
It is extra important to check the trap since I replaced stone pressure plates with a sandstone variant, which is much harder to see, and the chests may be trapped chests with 4 extra TNT under them (one or both traps may be present, along with either 2 husk, a husk and skeleton, 2 skeleton , or no spawners for a total of 12 desert temple variants). One interesting thing about sandstone pressure plates is that only players can trigger them so mobs can't set off the trap:
This is the loot from all the chests:
I've completed my branch-mining after finding enough amethyst to make my caving gear (sword, pickaxe, chestplate, leggings, boots, a total of 24 resources, plus a few extra), helped by finding 3 amethyst in chests (such chest loot is fairly significant later on, the ore is so rare that I've gone a week without finding any while caving. For comparison, I found 70 diamond and 10 amethyst ore):
These are two adjacent level 0 cave maps with the branch-mine extending close to the full width of both; the eastern end ran into lava, hence the cut-off tunnels on that end, otherwise there were only a few isolated caves, which I did explore far enough to determine i they were leading to something more substantial. Note that compared to the MCMap rendering in the first spoiler nothing that I didn't directly light up with a torch is shown (MCMap ignores walls while cave maps account for them by using the same algorithm that light propagation uses):
At the bottom you can see a large lake, a special variant of vanilla lake / pond which generates underground and gets up to 30 blocks across (the maximum size a feature can reach is 32x32 blocks, leaving a 1 block margin around the edges for adjacent block checks), I harvested the glow squid for glow ink sacs:
There was also diamond in the lake, one of multiple deposits I found not by branch-mining but by "caving", even as limited as it was, combined with Fortune III I got 39 diamonds in one run and around two stacks total, spending part of the surplus on full diamond armor (I normally use iron until I start caving):
I also found a mineshaft right above my mine, with yet more diamonds, but I haven't explored it yet (I do know where I could start caving if a surface opening nearby happens to be a dead end):
The main thing holding me back now is getting a Mending trade, which is limited by the rate at which villagers breed, slightly impacted by the addition of a new villager type (so librarians are less likely to spawn); you can tell from the durability how many villagers I've "dealt with", either because they were the wrong profession or they didn't give me the right enchantment (I've gotten Knockback, Looting, and Power, the latter was 58 emeralds for Power IV and I didn't consider it to be worth it since Power is easy to get by directly enchanting books), I also placed more doors around the village pen to get them to breed to a higher population, and consequently, at a higher rate:
I've also worn out an entire diamond hoe (at one time Mojang added an achievement for using one until it breaks, this was later changed to just making a netherite hoe) harvesting potatoes and carrots for trading (a feature in TMCW vs vanilla 1.6.4; they take 1.6 times more than wheat so Fortune is needed to make the same-sized farm more profitable. Interestingly, when Mojang added these trades in 1.8 they actually made them cheaper); they are also sold by farmers instead of blacksmiths and hoes are required in order for Fortune to work on crops, while it only got Fortune II from a level 30 enchantment it still significantly increases the net yield (from 1.6 without Fortune to 2.13-2.67-3.2 with Fortune I-II-III):
This shows an interesting consequence of the high repair cost of diamond tools (17 levels for an intact sacrifice); it can be cheaper to place the item you want to repair in the second (sacrifice) slot; note that this is not as practical or profitable in vanilla since you will lose the custom name and have to rename it again in order to keep the penalty at 2 levels (this does not work in TMCW as Mending now does the same thing):
Lots of improvements from vanilla in your version. With bed safety, would it be possible to have checks made for a spider being able to pathfind to the bed as well? And perhaps a last fix would be to see if a spawner skeleton could shoot at you. That should fix the cheese you did. It would still be possible to pillar up a substantial distance with overhangs at some point, but I'm willing to accept that as acceptably safe.
Did you kill the Ender Dragon? Seems like not from your writing, but I wanted to be sure.
Oh, and I like the look of the Badlands.
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Did you kill the Ender Dragon? Seems like not from your writing, but I wanted to be sure.
Oh, and I like the look of the Badlands.
I make an exploration run to loot the stronghold and generally return as one of the final steps before I start caving (as I refer it as, the "end-game").
Also, while Mojang may have renamed them "badlands" in TMCW that refers to a different biome, which does have some aspects of Mesa, as well as the "spikes" in Mesa Bryce (or whatever it is called now) on top of a base of red sand desert; the hardened clay also uses different colors:
For comparison, this is what a Mesa looks like underground, the hardened clay layers go all the way down to bedrock, and this is the biggest difference between the biomes:
It only took a week and mining over 12,000 nether quartz and a total of 68,000 XP (since the start of the world), and trading over 1,500 emeralds and buying/enchanting 274 books but I've finished making all my "caving gear", with most of the time spent enchanting books at level 22 in order to get the main enchantments that I needed, of course, only once I got Mending, along with Unbreaking I as a nice bonus (which really helps, in 1.6.4/TMCW you can't even get it on armor and weapons from the table, not that I directly enchanted anything other than bows (to get Infinity, incidentally, level 22 is also about the best level for it). I did not try to get a higher level of Unbreaking, or other enchantments, because, well, as you can see above trading is quite difficult prior to 1.8 and even more so 1.14 (nerfed in 1.20. However, I'll note that the change to requiring finding a swamp to get a Mending trade wouldn't have been an obstacle for me, I found swamps along the way to a stronghold in each of the last three worlds, and the final enchantment offered is guaranteed to be Mending so you still only need one librarian):
Some of the final enchantments (1x Protection IV and 2x Efficiency V) actually came from level 1 enchantments, where books have an approximately 1 in 5 chance each of getting Efficiency, Power, Protection, and Sharpness, and at only 17 levels each it is much cheaper to obtain, but still rather time-consuming (I didn't actually make most of them entirely from level 1 books. It is entirely practical to do so though since prior to 1.8 the prior work penalty only increased by 2 levels per working/enchantment level upgrade, i.e. making Efficiency V from level 1 books counts as 4 level upgrades due to the way the penalty propagates. Of course, in vanilla you can rename the first book and it won't increase at all but it doesn't matter much).
Also, if you look at the enchantments on my gear you might notice that the boots do not have Unbreaking; this is because they would be too expensive to receive Mending (they could still be repaired indefinitely by using rubies to lower the prior work penalty but that requires finding a biome that has them). Mending and Infinity on a bow? Why not? I think the reason Mojang made them mutually exclusive was to nerf an exploit where Punch bows were used to boost elytra, evidenced by the fact the nerf came in the same update that added firework boosting as a legitimate means of boosting them (similarly, instead of just making shears lose durability when breaking any block, as I did, they removed the ability to put Silk Touch on them to "patch" an exploit where you could use them indefinitely on blocks like glowstone). I only renamed held items, using the same names I've used since I first started using such items (dating back to my first world, in vanilla I remove the space in the names of armor and rename shears twice back to "Shears" (as a custom name, not the original item name).
Here are some statistics that give you some idea of how much work I put in to make these items (I've used this as an example of why you should be able to indefinitely repair items; the removal of this in 1.8 (at the time) was such that I even made a mod for 1.8 which reverted all the changes to anvils, I'd do it even since 1.9, or make Mending work the way it does in TMCW, a sit is much more balanced, no infinite "god" gear, just sensibly enchanted items whose cost is dependent on the enchantments and durability):
Ores mined and XP gained (this is your "lifetime" XP so if I died it won't reset, only the value displayed on the death screen and your XP level):
Blocks mined; this includes blocks that vanilla doesn't track, such as crops and fire:
While this says I crafted 12 anvils this is a bit misleading due to a feature I added where you can craft two very damaged anvils into an intact anvil; I never actually broke one since I'd save them after they became very damaged, since they have four damage states (instead of vanilla's three) the total durability from two anvils, with the third also used until it is very damaged, becomes 0.75 * 3 = 2.25, or 12.5% extra (I also have this feature in my first world but here the result is 0.667 * 3 = 2 so there is no bonus; anvils in TMCW also have a 16% (instead of 12%) chance of becoming damaged per use so their average lifetime is the same, 25 uses).
Items crafted; this includes the number of enchanted books bought from trading as well as enchanted on the table (vanilla doesn't track them at all or items traded unless they can be crafted by other means):
Items used; the "uses" for armor counts the number of times I took damage while wearing it, so if this were vanilla I'd have gone through 2-3 sets of diamond armor (without Unbreaking) but in TMCW it has 1500 durability (all pieces; the tradeoff is that it only reduces player damage by 60%, the same as iron in vanilla and making it only half as effective / 20% vs 40% damage taken. Even amethyst is still only 60% as effective as diamond in vanilla). There are also many other items listed which vanilla doesn't track uses for, such as eggs thrown and food fed to animals (e.g. wheat). I also used a lot of stone pickaxes in the Nether (I did some branch-mining for quartz, which is fairly effective):
These are maps of the Nether; the area I explored isn't particularly large, around 1/4 of a level 3 map, which still has something like 90,000 quartz with a fair amount of exposure (there are more "real" caves than vanilla, about twice as many, plus ravines, offset by a slight reduction in the noise threshold to favor more solid areas). I mostly explored the higher levels, between 80-100, with not much going below y=31 (Nether sea level; there are caves deeper down, forming a secondary lava level at y=4, as in the Overworld):
A couple renderings made with MCMap ("surface" and "underground", the latter only showing areas near torches, as with the cave map shown above):
A slice at layer 90 in Minutor, where the most player-visited areas are visible; I placed torches so I can see where I've been as well as to get them to render on maps (less often than I do in the Overworld, where they are placed for visibility, so the mapped areas appear broken up):
Another slice at layer 63; you can see parts of 5 Nether fortresses, only one of which (near the center) I explored, they are about as common as in vanilla 1.6.4 but without the bug that causes them to generate in north-south lines and using a 27x27 chunk grid instead of a 16x16 chunk grid with a 1/3 chance per region (one every 729 chunks vs one every 768 chunks. The bug did make it easier to find them if you knew how they were laid out):
While exploring the Nether I found a total of 9 "nether dungeons", including a couple with zombie pigmen, which are always hostile but do not alert "normal" pigmen when attacked (one of which has spawned inside the dungeon shown) and one with wither skeletons (only ones spawned in fortresses drop skulls. The spawn rate of both of these types of dungeons is lower than for more common/weaker mobs due to the mobs they spawn, this is also true of e.g. zombie vs creeper dungeons in the Overworld):
Witches also seem like a mob that might spawn in the Nether (only in dungeons) due to the fact you need blaze rods to make a brewing stand and potions and they drop glowstone:
Another recent addition are fossils, based on the ones added in 1.16 (I used the schematics given in the Wiki, the actual generation is done with code instead of structure NBT files, which I'll also note is probably way more efficient than storing volumetric block arrays):
Also, I thought to note that I fixed some bugs / made improvements based on my experience in the Nether; I came across some Ghast fireballs which were frozen in midair, which happens when they go into non-entity processing chunks (this makes them stop ticking but their motion is preserved) and then get unloaded; while their momentum could be saved I decided to just despawn them if they stop moving; I also improved the aim of Ghasts so they target the player instead of going over their head (with some "error" added so they will sometimes miss, more on easier difficulties, much like skeleton arrows):
While I'd recently added a lot of slabs and stairs I realized there was another type that could be added - netherrack, which apparently still isn't a thing even in modern versions despite adding tons of slabs and stairs for just about every block (you can make nether brick, which is basically the same thing, but has a very different appearance, sort of like stone/cobblestone vs stone bricks, derived from the same block):
Also, I apparently managed to replicate a bug which appeared in vanilla in 1.8; if a mob, such as a Ghast, hits a zombie pigmen and the mob then dies or despawns they will retarget the nearest player, the first time this happened I thought I'd just hit one with my bow but after it happened again and I knew I hadn't hit any I became suspicious, and sure enough, it only happened in TMCW, not vanilla 1.6.4:
Of course, it only took Mojang 6 years to fix this despite having been reported before 1.8 was even released(!) (if somebody else had reported this to me I'd have fixed it earlier, this would have been present since TMCWv5.10, so only a week or so. Exactly how I inadvertently added it, I added a method which determines if a mob can attack a target, e.g. a non-Creative mode player (fixing some "old AI" mobs becoming aggressive if hit by a player in Creative), and in the case of zombie pigmen replaced "entity instanceof EntityPlayer" with it. This causes their "angerLevel" to be set, which if nonzero and they have no target will cause them to search for the closest visible player. One thing that mitigates this to an extent is that I'd previously fixed another bug which caused zombie pigmen to never forgive (since 1.8 they do after 20-40 seconds, and if not chasing a target, at least in my case), I also haven't updated them to use the "new" AI which enables proper pathfinding (they won't go around corners and only attempt to go straight up a slope even if they only need to go a few blocks to the side to get up. Maybe they are just less intelligent than normal zombies?).
After this I plan to go to the End to fight the Ender Dragon, then build my main base, then I'll finally start my normal gameplay of caving.
Anything that isn't in vanilla will be something I added (not even another mod, TMCW is completely stand-alone, no Optifine, TMI, or anything else, much less world generation mods; if one wanted to make a mod for it they would need to modify its code; this is true of such mods in general, many of which even portray themselves as continuing the vanilla lineage they were based on, e.g. Beta 1.7.4, 1.7.5, etc).
As mentioned before, my second-to-last goal before caving was to defeat the Ender Dragon, which went pretty much as usual, with few changes from vanilla other than naturally spawning endermites in the End (not particularly common but something to watch out for, along with endermites spawning them when they teleport while being aggroed towards a player). Compared to versions since 1.9 there tend to be more obsidian pillars, which randomly generate with a 1/5 chance per chunk (I actually reduced this to 1/8, using a 2x4 chunk grid instead of being completely random, and increased the success rate per chunk by making multiple attempts so they end up being more consistent in number/density. In either case they are randomized per instance; no two worlds will have the same arrangement):
This is what I took with me; the armor has Protection II on each piece, plus Feather Falling IV on the boots, giving maximum protection against fall damage. I did not take a map since I knew where to go (straight to the southeast) and remembered the landmarks along the way:
The entrance platform was a short distance away from the mainland, a good reason to bring some ender pearls (you can also bridge across but that is unnecessary):
No iron bars, just a lot of pillars, 21 to be exact:
A couple renderings of the End; the circular area on the second map (black is air down to y=0) is due to the fact that I don't actually generate or save any chunks more than 12 chunks away from 0,0 unless the player builds something in them (I simply return a chunk that is completely empty of blocks and set a flag not to save it; the time taken to generate chunks this way is extremely fast, as is the End in general, which loaded almost instantly). You can also see that I didn't take out two of the end crystals, on the far left or top, which were out of healing range:
One of the new hazards added to the End, which may appear in packs of up to 4 (endermen were changed to spawn one at a time, instead of in packs of 4, and in 1/4 of chunks as with general mob spawning, thus they spawn only 1/16 as fast, which only impacts the spawn rates of mob farms):
Taking out the dragon itself involved waiting for it to charge and shooting it in the face with a bow, repeat a dozen times or so:
The killing shot:
My inventory before leaving the End, I only needed one stack of arrows but always better to be safe:
The first thing I did when returning from the End was to go to spawn to collect any XP that fell into the exit portal; I know that many people do not do this and lose out on some of it, or even the dragon egg if it fell in (note that in vanilla you only have 5 minutes regardless of where you are before items/XP despawn); this also reveals the exact spawn point, 176, -64 (this will also generally be a multiple of 4 due to the way the game finds a spawn biome):
You may notice that I collected end stone before leaving the End; this is for "diamond ender chests", my own true "end game" item which has a double chest of capacity in addition to normal ender chests (3 chests total), and since TMCWv5, can be used in the same manner (I first added them in TMCWv2 and you only needed diamonds but I disabled Silk Touch so they were used to transport stockpiled materials from a secondary base back to my main base):
I incorporated the need for diamonds and end stone into the existing recipe (surrounding an ender chest with diamonds) by adding "diamond end stone", which despite its appearance is not an ore:
I also made one last enchantment - enchanting a golden helmet at level 30 in order to get a helmet for underwater work; I got Protection IV, Aqua Affinity, Respiration III on the first try (I only cared about the water-related enchantments):
You'll also never guess what I saw the night after I returned from the End - a skeleton in diamond armor - the first of many to come (in TMCWv5 I averaged one mob in diamond or amethyst armor every 4 play sessions; diamond armor is about 12 times more common than it is in vanilla, one in 1250 vs 15551 skeletons or zombies at maximum regional difficulty on Normal, with amethyst being 3 times rarer than diamond, then combine that with "global difficulty" being maxed out after 100 hours and an average of 500 mob kills (all mobs) per session, 50% more than in vanilla, actually more like twice as much considering how few I killed in "double height terrain" with TMCW having more underground volume despite not being deeper):
The cobblestone structure (with a horde of zombies next to it) is where the villagers I saved are (I just let the rest loose, they didn't survive more than a couple nights)
After this I started working on my main base; I'd already cleared out a 32x32 area while waiting for villagers to breed, the final size was extended a few blocks further to the left as seen here:
The first and most important part of the base, reflecting its main purpose, is a huge storage room for all the resources I'll be collecting, sized based on what I collected in TMCWv5, itself considerably in excess of what I'd originally planned (TMCWv5 is the only time I've "maxed out" a world by fully exploring the entire area within +/- 1536 blocks), including 256 barrels of storage across 8 corridors of 32 each (a capacity of 6912 stacks, 442368 items in stacks of 64, or 3.98 million mineral resources as blocks; a full 1/4 of the area is dedicated to coal and another 1/4 is for special items like enchanted books (the ones with signs) and special chest loot and mob drops (item frames). Half the corridor for iron is marked with wool since I didn't have enough iron blocks, I also don't have any rubies yet so I used red wool):
If you look closely at the walls you'll notice that they don't look quite like quartz, those are actually "smooth quartz blocks", which are a variant of double slab which use the bottom slab texture on all sides and have a data value of 15 (you can obtain them with /give in vanilla), which, along with "full smooth stone" and "full smooth sandstone" drop themselves (in vanilla they drop half slabs, in TMCW you can use a hammer to break them apart):
The signs are also spruce, with white text, a recent addition, another interesting this is that the block drops itself, no silly unnecessary item which needs a separate texture (the sign item model is slightly different but uses the same texture as the block, with a special overlay for the item "text". This is one of many such changes I've made to simplify things as I'd otherwise need a dozen textures for each variant of sign. I often wonder why Mojang added separate items for many blocks anyway, I know some have special placement rules but having standard methods within block classes to handle block placement, and they already do have them, would solve that):
Another fun fact about signs: wall signs render as standard blocks, not using a tile entity special renderer, so they are far more performant and don't disappear at a distance (64 blocks; the text still does but it is much less noticeable).
Another block I added are "light blocks", no, not the block added in newer versions (it is interesting how many such blocks, even if only similar by name in some cases, Mojang has added, I think they even made the smooth double slab blocks "legitimate" blocks) but a variant of glowstone obtained by smelting it, giving a block with a smooth gradient texture; this is actually a texture I made all the way back in 2013 for a custom resource pack (TMCW has a total of 3 textures dating from 2013, including glass and lapis blocks, 4 if you count rubies but they are already in vanilla):
Additional features that are helpful include the ability to make glow item frames, signs, and even paintings, smoothening out the lighting on them (only sign text glows):
In vanilla you need to place item frames on glowstone if you want them to be evenly lit:
Note that you can either craft glowing items or right-click on them when sneaking (a normal ink sac removes the effect):
I intentionally covered up lights on the ceiling to show the difference better:
These are screenshots of the completed base, which is on the larger side, mainly due to the storage area, otherwise it follows the same general design that I've used since "Double Height Terrain" in late 2013 (made out of stone-based blocks back then, as seen in the link a couple paragraphs back), I ended up with less than 3 stacks of quartz blocks from the close to two double chests that I'd collected (about 3,000 blocks. If I needed more I'd use Fortune to collect the rest):
The front hall includes all the maps I've made / will make; as shown in a previous spoiler I already set up a 4x4 area for the maps I'll make while exploring, allowing for up to a 4096x4096 area (in TMCWv5 I had to make 5x5 maps to cover a 3072x3072 area, plus around the edges, due to being centered at 0,0, 1024, etc, thus the change to map centering enables me to use less maps):
A closer look at the main base map:
Workroom, this is the main place I visit, with various supplies; the item frames contain the armor I used in the Nether and End (also useful as emergency armor just in case):
Bedroom; I made the beds purple, fitting with my amethyst gear (any guess as to what my favorite color is?); you can also see flowerpots with real tree models (set to a variant of oak/spruce which naturally generates in "Great Forest"), I also keep my music disc collection here (I intentionally got a creeper to drop one, most will come from dungeon chests, which have all 12 types):
Crops; the ones I'll really be using are potatoes and sugarcane (24 per harvest is plenty considering how seldom I need to make new maps, with the 4 centered around 0,0 already made using surplus paper from trading. Speaking of which, there is some incentive for the occasional materials to trade with, buying shears for repairs, of which I already have a dozen from trading so I won't need more for a long time, otherwise, my only real need for iron at this point is anvils):
Enchanting/brewing, which again shows how little I make use of brewing (just Weakness to cure zombie villagers and Fire Resistance in the Nether, I only used one batch). Most of my enchanting is also actually at level 1 (helmets and iron pickaxes from mineshafts, which I combine to as high as Efficiency V, Unbreaking III and use to dig rail tunnels):
The unused space on the first floor was set aside for animals, similar to the wheat and carrot farms this is more of a collection than for practical use:
The second floor contains the trees I harvest for wood for torches (only one is really needed, I'll note though that larger trees take longer to grow, in contrast with vanilla, where 2x2 trees grow faster because any sapling can grow the tree, while I increase the failure rate) and a village which houses the 4 villagers I decided to keep, including the librarians selling Mending and Unbreaking, which are locked up to be extra safe. The light blocks on top of the houses do stand out and I've considered covering them with brown carpets, I think I saw a brown sheep somewhere:
Overall, it took 2.88 days over 17 sessions and 223 in-game days to "complete" the game, continuing a general trend of taking more time to do so, in large part because of changes I've made (TMCWv4 added Mending so I now had to breed villagers to obtain it, more recently, the addition of a new villager type reduced the probability of a librarian. Luck also plays a part, I spawned near a village in TMCWv5 and got Mending earlier but spent more time to get other enchantments):
I'll note that 223 full days (20 minutes) corresponds to about 3.1 days so I skipped the equivalent of about 31 full nights; this fraction will become much smaller as time passes as I rarely sleep when not building a base:
These are charts of my "session statistics" for the first 17 days, successively zoomed in to show smaller values:
For comparison, this was the first 30 days in TMCWv5, where the "early game" lasted 16 days, relatively more of which was spent mining quartz; also, the one day return to the Nether on day 38 was due to finding a "smelting" enchantment and making a new pickaxe with it (I'll note that even if I had found one already, which is possible via Nether dungeons (a 5% chance in one chest of having Smelting or Vein Miner, in addition to the usual chance of any enchanted books), etc, I would still need rubies to reduce the prior work penalty since it costs too much to put Mending on it):
A little surprised Prot 2 armor is good enough vs. the Ender Dragon. I thought she hit pretty hard. But then again, I still haven't done it.
One thing to consider is that I play on Normal difficulty, where it deals 10 damage, as opposed to 15 on Hard / Hardcore, and there is no "armor penetration" effect as implemented in 1.9 (except for axes); considering the protection given by my armor, 60% from the armor itself (I nerfed diamond to be the same as iron in vanilla) plus another 30% from Protection (8 EPF at 3.75% per point, also modified from vanilla), totaling 72%, this reduces it to 2.8, or a bit less than 1 1/2 hearts (needless to say, armor was incredibly OP prior to 1.9, to quote the Wiki, "In full diamond armor + hard difficulty a creeper can knock you down to 2 hearts". and that is with no enchantments (73 damage * 80% damage reduction = 14.6, or 5.4 HP left, so more like 2 1/2 hearts, rounded up to 3 on the health bar); for comparison, since 1.9 they can one-shot you in full Protection IV diamond armor, or very nearly so, with a bit of tweaking so you barely survive. This may have also been when they added armor toughness, they also slightly reduced the damage dealt by explosions; in any case 64 or more damage will reach the penetration cap of 80% of armor for a mere 16% damage reduction remaining - even base leather reduces damage by 28%! Add Protection IV and you take about 19.3 damage, so not even half a heart left).
That said, since 1.9 diamond armor loses 1% protection for every point of damage taken (iron and lesser lose 2%, netherite loses 0.8%, the difference due to "armor toughness"), so 10 damage reduces it to 70%, while Protection reduces damage by an additional 32% (4% per EPF), or close to 80% total, so my changes actually give less protection (the opposite is true for creeper explosions, which I also reduced to 36 max but falling off linearly, down to 6 instead of 1 at 6 blocks*). On Hard armor drops down to 65% and 76% overall, so actually still stronger (you do take more damage than I do, 3.57 or 27.5% more).
Also, vanilla 1.6.4 reduces damage by 80%, then a random 16-32% for a range of 83.2-86.4% or 1.36-1.68 damage taken (the random factor was removed in 1.9 and I removed it as well, setting full Protection IV to reduce damage by 60%, in the middle of the random 40-80% vanilla gives, Mojang set it to 64%, which is closer to the real average when considering damage taken. I also set the cap for special enchantments (e.g. Feather Falling) to 75% (82 blocks survivable), vs 80% since 1.9 (102 blocks survivable, maybe 103 or even 104 due to MC-130639, which I fixed) and a random 52-80% in 1.6.4 (a guaranteed survivable distance of only 44-45 blocks).
*A table comparing creeper explosion damage in vanilla 1.6.4 and TMCW; you take more damage at all distances but especially further away, up to 10 times as much (which is only 2 vs 0.2 and this is only for armor itself, with Protection IV point-blank damage ranges from 1.96-5.88 in vanilla and 4.8 in TMCW. Blast Protection changes these to 1.96-4.7 and 3, while this suggests that TMCW may have lower average damage vanilla actually ranges from 52-100% before being clamped to 80%, either way, the consistent protection is definitely advantageous and is likely why Mojang changed it, and previously de-randomized melee weapon enchantment damage in 1.6):
Creeper damage for vanilla and modded / after max armor damage reduction / ratio after armor
D V (80%) M (66.7%) Ratio
0 49 (9.8) 36 (12.0) 1.22
1 37 (7.4) 31 (10.3) 1.39
2 27 (5.4) 26 ( 8.7) 1.61
3 19 (3.8) 21 ( 7.0) 1.84
4 11 (2.2) 16 ( 5.3) 2.41
5 5 (1.0) 11 ( 3.7) 3.67
6 1 (0.2) 6 ( 2.0) 10.00
During the first day of caving I found three mineshafts (one explored), a circular room cave system, and a skeleton in amethyst armor, which also led to the first amethyst/diamond mob drop.
I started caving from a cave opening near my base, the first one I'd come across; such surface openings may or may not lead anywhere but this one did - straight to a mineshalt, technically the second one I've found in this world (the first is right above my branch-mine) but I don't count them until I've actually explored them, using the main room to keep track of them:
I almost immediately (none of my tools have even taken damage yet) got one of the final achievements, "Overkill", as a Sharpness V amethyst (or diamond in vanilla) sword deals 18.25 damage with a critical hit, just over the criteria of 18 (incorrectly stated as 8 hearts in vanilla when it is actually 9). Other achievements that I haven't gotten yet include "Sniper Duel", which I'll get once I find a cave large enough (I could get it easily on the surface but given my playstyle it is appropriate to get in while caving; this is also possible in ravines in vanilla) and "On a Rail" which I'll get once I make a secondary base, which will be once I've explored far enough out from my main base:
Also, the first cave system I explored was a bit different from vanilla, with tunnels which were longer and straighter than normal, an effect of the regional variation I apply to normal caves (otherwise based on the same parameters as vanilla 1.6.4), which varies various parameters within 12x12 chunk regions:
For comparison, vanilla caves have a 1/4 chance of circular rooms per node, a 1/10 chance of larger caves/tunnels, a maximum length of 112, and a curviness of 0.4 (twice as much as shown here, with circular rooms adding 0-3 tunnels per room (0 in this case); other values not mentioned are either the same as or not present in vanilla); these lead to an average width of 6 for small caves and about 12 for large caves, and 11 for circular rooms (none were actually larger than what can be found in vanilla, 17 blocks, as "largerCircularRoons" only adds the possibility). The altitude distribution goes down to -7 instead of 0 because caves were shifted down in accordance with lava level (from 11 to 4), so in areas without additional caves near sea level (including above in various biomes with higher terrain) there are less cave openings (but usually bigger due to the larger caves generated separately):
Normal cave system parameters for center chunk:
largerCircularRooms: true
circularRoomChance: 1/1
largerLargeCaves: false
largeCaveChance: 1/5
widthMultiplier: 0.5
maxLength: 144
curviness: 0.2
verticalVariation: 1/6
circularRoomCaves: 0-0
minWidth: 3.0
extraBranchChance: 50%
extraLavaLevelCaves: true
extraSeaLevelCaves: true
Size 14 cave system at 152 72; total number of caves: 21
Number of cave systems: 1
Initial number of caves: 14
Total number of caves: 21
Additional circular room caves: 0
Additional lava level caves: 6
Additional sea level caves: 1
Number of small caves: 19; average width is 4.65
Number of large caves: 2; average width is 10.32; max width: 11.10 (154 5 74)
Number of circular rooms: 14; average width is 10.29; max width: 16.62 (153 28 78)
Additional caves per circular room: 0.00
Average caves per chunk: 21.0 (1 chunks)
Average altitude: 20.38
Percentage of caves on layers -7 to 2: 23.81
Percentage of caves on layers 3 to 12: 38.10
Percentage of caves on layers 13 to 22: 0.00
Percentage of caves on layers 23 to 32: 4.76
Percentage of caves on layers 33 to 42: 9.52
Percentage of caves on layers 43 to 52: 14.29
Percentage of caves on layers 53 to 62: 4.76
Percentage of caves above layer 62: 4.76
The mineshaft that I explored was actually the second mineshaft I found, distinguishable by having oak wood instead of birch wood (and spruce for the one above my branch-mine), with another mineshaft found further east, also with oak wood; the mineshaft I explored was more or less average size (a length of about 1250) and had a skeleton dungeon and three cave spider spawners, two near each other (in separate corridors. They can also generate in the same corridor but will not be right next to each other as can sometimes happen in vanilla before 1.6.4 and since 1.13 (before 1.6.4 due to lack of structure saving, where the game records whether a spawner was already placed, and requires generating the structure across multiple sessions; since 1.13 due to non-deterministic multithreaded world generation. My double spawners are actually a "legitimate" version of this "feature"; i fixed it by linking spawner placement to the structure, as opposed to decorator RNG, which varies from chunk to chunk):
Locations of abandoned mineshafts by corridor length:
1. 248 40 104 (span: 7, size: 105, length: 1165)
I saw my first mob in amethyst armor, a skeleton, in the mineshaft, which dropped Protection II leggings; this is the only means by which amethyst is renewable, with about a chest of gear collected in TMCWv5 (about twice as much diamond; while amethyst is rarer it has twice the normal drop chance, 10% instead of 5%, and yes, that is less than vanilla's 8.5% but Looting increases it by 2% instead of 1% per level):
While these have almost no durability, relatively speaking, if you use them to repair your gear they would restore close to 600, or half a unit, since the anvils adds 12% of the maximum durability to the repair (thus even an item with 1 durability left would still be useful. The repair cost would also be less than a unit since the durability factors into it, a lot in the case of amethyst, which is impossible to repair with intact sacrifices, even diamond already costs up to 17 levels):
As seen in the mineshaft screenshots it led into a mesa biome, with a unique underground comprised of hardened clay, with dirt and gravel replaced with red clay, a variant added for this reason (it is otherwise functionally identical to the normal gray clay) and ores based on hardened clay, and sandstone in the case of "Mesa Edge" (I'll note that dealing with 3 variants of ore is not really an issue given the amounts I usually collect, i.e. you lose much less inventory space if you get full stacks as opposed to one or or a few items. You can also circumvent this by mining them with a hammer, which drops raw iron and gold, and yes, Fortune works on them, if only half as effective and mining speed if reduced; for the full effect you need to find a Smelting enchantment in a loot chest, which also drops actual ingots):
One of my own mob variants, "red husks",. which are otherwise the same as "yellow" husks / the ones added in vanilla:
There are also biome-specific silverfish variants which naturally spawn underground; only ones spawned form spawners or attacked by a player can hide in blocks (which only includes stone variants and red sandstone as I didn't add variants of infested blocks for every biome-specific block, themselves a special variant of stone or "biome stone", not actual hardened clay, sandstone, etc, which they drop and count as in statistics):
After that I found a "circular room cave system", which is largely made up of circular rooms (or "voids" as the Wiki decided to start calling them at some point; the original article for caves from 2013, which also aptly describes large cave systems) linked with relatively small tunnels; this was one of the first variants of "special" cave systems I added during the development of TMCWv4 in 2016 (before then there were only "normal" caves, not modified much from vanilla, larger caves and ravines, and "colossal cave systems", similar to the largest and densest cave system in my first world (which it actually still is even after a decade, I've found larger cave systems/complexes but not with the density over such a large area):
Locations of circular room cave systems:
1. 264 -56
A more recent minor feature is a "vertical pit cave", made up of several "ravine segments" randomly scattered within an area, which are the cylindrical sections that make up a ravine (this can often be seen in vanilla where they intersect water; as they vary in width and height the shorter ones are able to generate, leading to lines of columns of air under oceans; this also makes it easy to follow otherwise broken-up ravines by digging from one section to the next).
Interestingly this first caving session was quite similar to the first one in TMCWv5, where I first found a circular room cave system (which generate once every 2400 chunks, or one every 24 days at the rate I explore), then a mineshaft. Here are the statistics for the session, with more than 4,000 resource blocks and 3,500 ore mined; the number of mobs killed was significantly lower than average (about 500 per session in TMCWv5) due to the abundance of unlit caves nearby, which will drop off as I establish a core area that has been mostly lit up, as well as not exploring any larger caves (which can have exceedingly large numbers of mobs):
Maybe the most astounding thing about my caving is how much this one session impacted the total amount of resources I've collected so far in this world:
I collected 18 more coal after I made this screenshot, otherwise the difference from above reflects what I collected while caving:
Or how quickly I collected them, averaging one ore mined every 3.5 seconds and 1036 mined per hour; it is also notable how much shorter this session was than any of the previous, which averaged more than 4 hours, reflecting a pattern also seen in other worlds:
I'll also note that while I'll start using a "Vein Miner" enchantment once I find it (and a biome with rubies, for reducing the prior work penalty) it doesn't actually have much of an impact on my overall rates since the time spent actually mining ore is only a fraction of the total time I spend, as seen in this table of the lifetime statistics while caving in TMCWv5, also shown is a 4 month period from my first world (more recently I averaged 866 ore per hour over 8 months). This also shows that while I've already found so many mineshafts they are much less common overall than in vanilla (even my first world was modded to prevent them from generating in denser cave systems, removing about 20%. One major difference from vanilla is that vanilla makes them less common within 1280 blocks of the origin, around 10-20% as common at the distances I've explored so far, so you are much less likely to find many near spawn):
Here is a MCMap rendering of the area I explored, and in-game maps (centered at 512,512 and 512,-512); the area shown on the maps is misleadingly large due to the 128 block update radius (believe it or not, I've actually thought of reducing it, at least without some upgrade):
Also, there was one last thing I did for the first time at the end of the session - repair my pickaxe, which cost 43 levels to restore 1171 durability with one unit; despite having three times the durability of diamond amethyst effectively has only 3/4 the durability because only unit (or very damaged sacrifices) can be used, and even then the repair cost is so high that I had to increase the cap from 39 to 49 levels (this only applies to amethyst items):
At this rate I have three more days until I run out of stockpiled resources (just 3 units) but I could go on for four more before I run out of durability, and worst-case, need to branch-mine for more (this is a major advantage of incremental repairs, I can just repair each item when needed or possible, e.g. repair all three pieces of armor one after another, then catch up on my pickaxe, XP is not an issue even with the much higher costs. In my first world I often have to consider how to repair items so one doesn't run out of durability before I can repair it, and use/wear sacrificial items) and I should find more amethyst by then (a zoomed-in view of the amethyst I found in TMCWv5, most of the days I found some would be from a single deposit), either as ore or chest loot; over the long term I find enough to very slowly accumulate a surplus (this is without Fortune).
I've only been caving for a few days but I've already found so much more than in any other world, including two large caves, one with a volume of over 100,000 blocks, and the largest toroidal cave that can possibly generate, with all three caves having a total combined volume of over 230,000 blocks:
I first found the toroidal cave, a variant of cave which is shaped like a donut or ring, as seen in the lower-right above, and can reach up to 80 blocks in diameter with a tunnel diameter of 28 blocks - which happened to be how large it was after I analyzed it; on average there will be about one cave this large within 1536 blocks of the origin so I've already found it (there may be more, or none, in any given seed. It is interesting that my last world had one relatively close to spawn, and another nearly as large, except I never actually found them because I added a larger variant after I'd generated the area it was in; I did eventually find a max-size cave, right outside the 1536 boundary):
Next I found my first "large" cave, defined as one with a volume of at least 25,000 blocks, or roughly the size of the largest known caves in vanilla 1.6.4 (caves exceeding 30,000, or even 35,000 should be possible but would be incredibly rare), in this case with a volume of about 46,000 blocks, in the lower-left of the image above:
After that I found an even larger cave with a volume of 105,000 blocks, which I consider to be a "giant" cave, as also indicated by the "type", where "type 1" is similar in structure to vanilla caves/tunnels and has an average size similar to a fairly large vanilla cave, with a very wide range. "type 2" averages much larger and generates in a different way, as three tunnels from the starting chunk (instead of one) with two of them being smaller and branching (vanilla caves branch at the end of the first/main tunnel) for a total of 7 tunnels. Another difference is that "type 2" is reduced in size when within 512 blocks of the origin, they don't actually often reach 100,000 blocks in this case but this one happened to generate in such a way as to maximize its volume, with a very long and relatively straight tunnel instead of the a more typical twisted mass:
This was before I'd gone further in and realized how large it actually was:
A bit further in; the end of the tunnel I came in from is already being obscured by fog:
A look down the long tunnel, with a zoomed-in view below:
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that part of the cave came within a dozen blocks of spawn, this also shows how much ground they can cover (the second map wasn't at the easternmost end, just the main chamber) and this cave is still relatively small compared to how big they can get; the largest caves and ravines can extend nearly 400 blocks from end to end:
This also contributed to killing more than 600 mobs in a single session for the first time in this world, with the average otherwise increasing significantly since the first session; my method of exploring these caves is to run in, or around the edge (at first), and place torches, then retreat to kill a wave of mobs:
You can also guess which achievement I got in the cave (the smaller one would have easily worked as well as it was still about 100 blocks across):
If you are wondering how this world compares to previous worlds, in TMCWv5 I found the first large cave on the third day, with a similar size to the smaller one I recently found, while it took 37 days before I found the first giant cave (which ended up being the largest cave I ever found, 584,000 blocks). In TMCWv4 it took about 3 months to find the first giant cave, which were much rarer back then and I considered them to have a volume of only 50,000 or more (TMCWv5 made them much more common and added much larger variants and allowed smaller sizes to generate within 512 blocks of the origin, with another increase a short while after and yet another more recently; the underground is so extreme that the average percentage of air is about the same as the peak layer in 1.18; actually, this suggests that even TMCWv4 had a higher average volume, if not total due to the difference in ground depth; I got my data for 1.18 from this site, where you can use the number of bedrock blocks on the lowest layer to calculate the percentages for other blocks, this also suggests that even vanilla 1.7 has more caves near lava and sea levels than 1.18, which is mostly in the middle):
A before and after of the seed I previously played on showing the addition of new large caves and ravines, and an increase in the size of large circular rooms:
A map of all special caves within 256 blocks of spawn (none of these changed since I made the world):
Ah, one of the great pleasure of playing-modding; getting to see things you really wanted to see.
It must be a moderate amount of hassle to light those roofs. Are you doing it for the pictures or do you go to that trouble to collect exposed ceiling resources?
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It must be a moderate amount of hassle to light those roofs. Are you doing it for the pictures or do you go to that trouble to collect exposed ceiling resources?
I mine every ore in sight, even if it just looks like a single coal; this also reveals caves which would have otherwise been missed, which, of course, I also must explore (the only caves I don't mind missing are those entirely disconnected from anything, ones only connected to the surface are hit-and-miss as I don't comb it for entrances, just whatever I stumble across while traveling on the surface).
Also, the things I've found so far aren't that unusual, considering the following random seeds for a 352 block radius centered at 0,0 (entirely within the area where the largest caves are excluded):
For comparison, this is the first seed within 1536 blocks, which has one cave, two ravines, and three mineshafts larger than any I've ever found (excluding mergers of two or more structures, due to the way mineshafts are placed in TMCW it is unlikely I'll ever find anything like the mega-complexes I've found in my first world):
Also, this is what you might expect to find within an area comparable to my first world (3072 blocks, excluding things without a measured size since they don't change once the number of listed results is reached), as well as the number of each feature and the 10 largest caves and ravines within 8192 blocks (1,048,576 chunks):
170 colossal cave systems
429 circular room cave systems
423 ravine cave systems
442 vertical cave systems
385 maze cave systems
405 CRM combination cave systems
435 RZV combination cave systems
515 random cave systems
599 ribbed tunnel cave systems
622 zigzag cave systems
498 spiral cave systems
492 large cave cave systems
447 dense cave systems (total size >= 40)
79 giant cave regions
180 network cave regions
9780 total large caves
2506 large caves >= 25000
1240 large caves >= 50000
833 large caves >= 100000
411 large caves >= 200000
248 large caves >= 300000
124 large caves >= 400000
55 large caves >= 500000
14 large caves >= 600000
5 large caves >= 700000
3 large caves >= 800000
1 large caves >= 900000
221 large cave clusters >= 25000
19 large cave clusters >= 50000
18559 total ravines
3103 large ravines >= 25000
1407 large ravines >= 50000
676 large ravines >= 100000
324 large ravines >= 200000
137 large ravines >= 300000
47 large ravines >= 400000
17 large ravines >= 500000
1561 large circular rooms (width >= 34)
1099 toroidal caves
6000 mineshafts
767 large mineshafts (length >= 2000)
130 strongholds
Locations of largest caves by volume:
1. -1368 31 7352 (type: 4, length: 474, width: 64, volume: 987252)
2. -1240 30 -7368 (type: 4, length: 500, width: 66, volume: 869219)
3. -5464 31 696 (type: 4, length: 468, width: 60, volume: 813304)
4. 808 34 7224 (type: 3, length: 496, width: 64, volume: 784126)
5. 7848 28 3768 (type: 4, length: 474, width: 54, volume: 744295)
6. 808 32 3384 (type: 4, length: 486, width: 62, volume: 677275)
7. 7720 27 312 (type: 4, length: 426, width: 53, volume: 656178)
8. 808 25 2360 (type: 4, length: 484, width: 55, volume: 648193)
9. 2344 32 568 (type: 4, length: 492, width: 49, volume: 640303)
10. -8024 24 -5192 (type: 4, length: 472, width: 53, volume: 636485)
Locations of largest ravines by volume:
1. -6744 27 2104 (type: 3, length: 368, width: 50, depth: 59, volume: 591711)
2. -7128 35 6328 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 47, depth: 59, volume: 586744)
3. -856 42 -7624 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 50, depth: 59, volume: 586564)
4. -3928 36 3384 (type: 4, length: 370, width: 49, depth: 59, volume: 586420)
5. 1064 24 5816 (type: 4, length: 372, width: 48, depth: 58, volume: 551296)
6. -7000 41 -8136 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 46, depth: 59, volume: 548428)
7. 1192 32 5944 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 43, depth: 59, volume: 544937)
8. 4136 34 -2888 (type: 4, length: 356, width: 45, depth: 59, volume: 535088)
9. 808 32 2488 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 42, depth: 59, volume: 532353)
10. -4952 35 -5064 (type: 4, length: 352, width: 46, depth: 59, volume: 531822)
This is the same seed in vanilla; the largest cave reaches 19,000 while the largest ravine reaches 33,000 (compared to TMCW ravines are much larger on average):
Only a week of caving and I've already found a Cherry Grove, as a sub-biome of the Big Oak Forest I saw on the day I created this world, although while a relatively uncommon biome at about 0.75% of land a significant proportion generates as sub-biomes within other biomes (Plains, Hilly Plains, Forest Mountains, Big Oak Forest, Meadow, and Flower Forest), with a 1/128 chance of a full-size biome within "normal" regions (not "hot" or "cold").
I also found a Savanna, with something quite interesting in it:
The cave opening seen on the left leads to the second largest cave I've found in this world, with a volume of 94,000 blocks:
Also, this shows why I light up the ceilings of these caves, the amount of resources can be considerable, considering that about half the surface area is in the ceiling, and since most mobs have been dealt with it takes less time to access them than it took to light up the floor; normal caves can also generate on top of large caves; with numerous such caves in the ceiling, including one which kept dropping zombies down from a dungeon:
These show the scaffolding I erect to access the ceiling, the length varies, with up to 2 stacks of cobblestone placed before tearing it down and erecting a new one:
This is a screenshot of my map wall, a MCMap rendering of what I've explored so far, and additional screenshots of the Birch Forest and TMCW Mega Taiga I noted on the first day; some of the birch trees are larger than usual, even including a variant with a 2x2 trunk (every vanilla sapling has such a variant. And yes, I'll note that Mojang apparently considered updating Birch Forest at one time but cancelled it (or was that a failed biome vote?), my first additions were the addition of "poplar trees" and "Poplar Grove" as a sub-biome back in 2015):
Another notable discovery includes one of the largest single mineshafts I've found, with 4,120 blocks of corridors and nearly 1,000 rails, two-thirds of the total I've collected so far (already at 1,600, while considerably higher than what I averaged over the long-term in TMCWv5 this is still lower than what I collected in my first world and even that is a bit lower than pure vanilla; well, actually, I wouldn't bother collecting most of them without at least "rail blocks"):
Most of this came from the mineshaft, as well as some caves in and around it:
As seen in a Superflat world:
The mineshaft also had the first "double spawner" that I've found in this world, with two spawners in a single corridor, an intended feature which replaces a vanilla bug where two can generate in the same corridor; unlike vanilla these are consistent, including the exact positions of the spawners (in vanilla this depends on which part of a corridor that spans multiple chunks was placed first) and they can never be right next to each other (always at least one support between them, thus they only generate in corridors with 3-4):
This shows some other changes I made to mineshafts; all parts, not just corridors and crossings, replace air below them with wooden platforms, not readily apparent is a change where the floor is included when the game checks if a new piece will collide with the rest of the structure so there is always at least one block between them (many cases of mineshafts that run on top of each other are not due to separate structures but simply the failure to account for the floor. This also makes mineshafts in TMCW generally less dense than in vanilla even as they can get larger overall):
That's only one small piece of the scaffolding you'd need though, right? Just seems to me like that's a lot of work.
Losing sub-biomes is one of the big losses with the current generations system; something I'm planning to at least partially remedy with my Forests mod. Adding more tree styles like you have could be a good tool, although it would be a lot of work and I'm not sure how to make them all growable with saplings.
Floors in mineshafts - another thing Mojang really should have done in the 15 years they're currently trumpeting in my launcher.
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RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
After having worked nonstop for the past month on updating TMCW I've started another world, the 6th such world created with my namesake mod, in this case, TMCWv5.10, so-named because it was released on its 10th anniversary, making TMCW one of the longest-updated mods, almost certainly when considering that it has been on the same vanilla version the entire time, the only other mod that may come close is "Better Than Wolves", which remained on 1.5.2 for a long time until the original developer stopped updating it (others have taken over and plan to update it to newer versions).
Much like every other world I've had, shown below, my main motive for playing is the adventure and thrill of caving, whether it is because of the exploration, mob combat, collecting resources, etc, including finding new biomes and surface structures, which may seem very common to many but my highly constrained playstyle means it can take days to explore a single biome, a month and a half per level 3 map (1024x1024 blocks), I even make it a point not to explore outside the spawn biome (or just around it, e.g. if I need cows or something) with the sole exception of locating a stronghold until I start caving after the "end-game", with much of the time before then spent on making the gear I use while caving, which in this case includes breeding villagers to get "Mending" (a functionally identical replacement for renaming an item so the prior work penalty doesn't increase).
That said, similar to last time I spawned in a Meadow, one of several spawn biomes, one of which is even forcibly added within 256 blocks of the origin if none would otherwise be present, so not that unusual. Unlike last time there was no village despite being quite a bit larger, so I won't have any help from it (e.g. I just transported a couple villagers to my starter base and got carrots and potatoes for trading, neither of which I've gotten yet. I'll note that while they can be helpful they are less significantly so than in modern versions which have a lot more loot and blocks; if you are lucky you can even find diamond equipment in the blacksmith chest, the villager itself is basically free diamond gear, though I made these trades cost more and moved several items to other villagers):
Meadows have their own variant of big oak tree, where the leaf clusters are shaped like small trees, otherwise, they are similar to Plains but with greener grass and many more flowers (this biome has no relation to the biome of the same name in 1.18; I added it in TMCWv4, released in early 2017)
Another view back towards where the first screenshot was taken:
Adjacent to the Meadow were Birch Forest, spiced up with my own variant of birch trees, Mountainous Desert (most likely, given how hilly it is right up to the edge, unlike vanilla Desert with Desert Hills in the interior, and which is pretty much the same with higher hills), and Mesa, similar to the 1.7 biome of the same name (minus the red sand, which instead generates in a "Badlands" biome which is more like a red sand desert with the spikes of Mesa Bryce and smaller hills of stained clay):
You might be wondering, is it a coincidence that there are so many "hot / warm" biomes in the same area (this includes Mixed Forest, hence the jungle trees)? Maybe, maybe not, since while I don't have strict "climate zones" I do have regions where hot and cold biomes are more common while excluding the opposite extreme, usually visible as clustering of biomes of the same temperature, with several visible on this map of my previous world (hot to the west of center and near the northern edge, cold to the southeast). Otherwise, any biome can generate next to any other biome in "normal" regions, or along the boundaries between them (hot and cold regions do have a degree of separation, more evident in oceans).
Desert and Mesa are also more interesting to explore underground since the surface blocks extend all the way down to bedrock (even including bedrock, which has biome-specific variants). Meadow is also one of several biomes which has Cherry Grove, a new biome added in TMCWv5.10, as a sub-biome so I could of had one at spawn.
Later on I spotted some additional biomes, including one, TMCW Mega Taiga, my own version of a "mega taiga biome", added before the "vanilla" versions from 1.7, with enormous trees with 3x3 trunks, which was rather rare prior to TMCWv5 as it was exclusive to "cold" climate zones, and I never found it until then (TMCWv2 actually has a few chunks of one near the edge but I never saw it in-game). Also visible is a Big Oak Forest, a biome I added as a memorial to the hasty removal of big oak trees due to causing "performance issues" in 1.7 (rather than fixing them or a regression in the the chunk rendering code, which I did by adding more logs, and later increasing the distance leaves can survive); this includes a larger form with 2x2 trunks which is actually hidden in the vanilla code:
As for my progress so far, I spent most of the session digging out rooms underground and collecting things for trading later on, with a stockpile already being made, as well as the standard materials like leather and paper for books / enchanting:
A map of the area around my base, I actually recentered it (by crafting it with a compass) where I plan to build my main base, you can also easily see the different biomes thanks to the Bedrock (and TMCW, and I presume other mods) - exclusive feature of biome-specific colors:
As simple as it gets:
You might notice (if you know what they looked like before 1.12) that the bed looks a little different? That's because I added colored beds, using a single texture (or overlay) which is recolored with the game's standard built-in dye colors (the same colors used for sheep):
And yes, this is a "cheat" since you only need one dye instead of 3 (I enabled any color of wool to be redyed as well):
I also have chicken pens like this in my first world but for a very different reason, wearing down sacrificial swords so I can use them in repairs (otherwise the cost is 40 levels, just one too many):
I've found wool to be one of the most effective materials to trade for emeralds since it grows back pretty quickly (well, once I stop breeding them since the baby sheep eat a lot) and you don't need to trade as much:
Also, I've already seen a relatively rare "mob", a spider jockey on top of my base in the morning (the spider had become neutral so it couldn't do anything); compared to vanilla there are noticeably more mobs out at night and they start spawning as soon as it gets dark enough because I split the mob cap into semi-independent "cave" and "surface" caps (normally up to 60 mobs will spawn underground with up to 40, for an overall cap of 100, on the surface; if you restrict spawning underground the number of the surface will increase to up to 60):
I'm sure this has happened to everybody (I tried killing a creeper by quickly opening and closing the door. This is not as effective as in vanilla since they can continue moving during their countdown):
I only did a bit of proper mining, most of the coal and iron I got came from digging out my base, but did find 3 diamonds and plan to collect obsidian for an enchantment table (which I really do need but I'll need more leather to get level 30 enchantments) and Nether portal so I can cure zombie villagers; most of my branch-mining is not to get diamonds, which I do use for tools to mine with, but amethyst, which is about 3 times rarer than diamond near bedrock (becoming 8 times rarer on y=3 and above, the layers exposed in caves):
Also, these are links to the other worlds I created with TMCW, I didn't post that much in the earlier ones (TMCWv1 was played on again years later and most of the updates reflect that. You may also notice that I created this world more than a month before the first public release, I may have gotten the incentive to do so, and the name of the mod, from the 12th reply):
TheMasterCaver's World (version 1)
TheMasterCaver's World (version 2)
TheMasterCaver's Caving Adventures in TMCW (version 3)
TheMasterCaver's World (version 4 / 4.5)
TheMasterCaver's World (version 5 / TMCWv5)
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?
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Curse PremiumIt's interesting to see you start up a world after all the massive mining trips with maxed equipment. And I like the scenery. The trees are nice and at least in those pics you have some good terrain- interesting without being crazified.
So what motivates you to start a new world? In my case it's usually mod issues - wanting to try a different world generation, wanting to play a mod that doesn't fit into my current worlds (typically with a new tech ladder to climb; once I've done one there's not much need for another), or needing to playtest or demonstrate some changes I've made to my own mods.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Pretty much the same reasons, and wanting to have everything I do in an update tied to a single world, and in my last world I'd fully explored the entire area within 1536 blocks of the origin, which is in ways different from further out (for example, it is guaranteed to have at least one each of the largest types of caves). There are also many changes and tweaks to various game mechanics, such as a new villager type and village building and new loot which can only be found in structures (even if I play at a relatively low render distance this still resulted in about 10,000 unexplored chunks, or 20% of the total area, with the old generation; if I only explored that area it would take around 100 sessions), although overall world generation is very similar (hence why I didn't call it TMCWv6; by contrast, TMCWv4 and TMCWv5 generate completely different worlds):
Otherwise, the underground wasn't directly changed (the locations of strongholds and some special cave systems changed so they are more randomly positioned) but the overall impact is still noticeable given the volume of the largest caves; notably, it appears that the average air volume underground is as high as the peak air volume in 1.18* so TMCW still reigns supreme as the most "cavey" version of the game, even before this change (maybe even in volume per chunk since 1.18 appears to drop off a lot more towards bedrock and sea level):
*I got data for 1.18+ from this site: https://meeples10.github.io/resource-distribution/1.20.2/graphs
If you enable bedrock and air (cave air is also "air" but appears to be very minimal so I think actual caves do not have it) the peak for bedrock is about 6 billion on layer 0 while air peaks at about 700 million on layer -8, corresponding to 11.667% of blocks being air (coincidentally, the same as the overall percentage in TMCW). Interestingly, air drops to only 3.33% at lava level and just 1.67% at sea level, which are both lower than even vanilla 1.7 (about 5% and 2%). 1.18 also appears to have a similarly uneven distribution as TMCW does (the ripples seen on the graph above, which are due to special cave variants, as I imagine is also the case for 1.18).
Also, this is an older chart which shows the relative contributions of various features (mineshafts by themselves include all the blocks that make them up):
I did keep playing on an existing world for TMCWv4.5 but that was more of a major technical update of the game's internal workings.
There's also the fact that even as I played on the previous world I'd use tools to see what was in the surrounding areas (past x/z 1536) after I fully explored a map, and later used its seed for testing new additions and changes, so I know what is in the surrounding areas (for example, near -2100, -1000 there is a cave with a volume of 847,000 blocks, and two extremely large ravines; around 750, -1700 is a ravine with a volume of over 500,000 blocks, and some ways to the north is a Desert M biome (which I did not find); around -500, -1700 is a mineshaft with a length of around 5000. All these are just off the top of my head).
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?
One of the first things I did on the second day (session) was go to the Nether, which ended up spawning me in a cave far above a huge lava sea; the original portal was at a different location than the one shown (I left the 4 bottom obsidian in as they weren't needed and the ground was literally one block thick):
Compared to vanilla 1.6.4 the Nether is a bit different, with a lot more decorations added, including huge mushrooms, veins and blobs of magma blocks, "nether trees" (based on small oaks but their trunks and foliage are Nether-related blocks), "nether grass" and "nether dead bushes", and nether gold ore, which behaves the same way as Overworld variants, dropping itself; ironically, the only gold that I've found so far has been in the Nether:
The Nether also has more mobs, including "nether husks", which are behaviorally identical to the vanilla husk in later versions except they are immune to fire, "nethermites", a variant of endermite (also immune to fire), and naturally spawning endermen, also the first time I got ender pearls, with several collected:
It didn't take long to find a fortress, most of the time was finding a way down from the Nether ceiling, and I collected a lifetime supply of blaze rods, still only using a stone sword, they are easy to cheese though, I tunneled towards the spawner and dug a pit next to it, letting them sink into it (I got hit a few times but I only had to back away to get out of sight):
Similar to the map I made in the Overworld I recentered this map at 0,0 after scaling it to level 3:
I also got a Wither skeleton skull, one of only several that I've ever gotten since I've never had the incentive to fight the Wither:
The fortress also had some interesting loot, including a new item added in TMCWv5.10 - wolf armor, both gold and iron (much like horse armor gold is better), as well as a single amethyst gem and a diamond; the amethyst is also a new loot item as I updated their loot for the first time (all previous versions of TMCW had vanilla loot, other items that I added include obsidian, as added in vanilla 1.8, all pieces of gold armor, instead of just a chestplate, and golden apples):
After than I returned to the Overworld to start curing and breeding villagers; on the third day I captured the first zombie villager by letting zombies through the front door, trapping it in the sheep pen, where they were barely able to get around; it turned out to be a blacksmith, though with no useful trades, especially considering how expensive a diamond chestplate can be, in this case, 37 emeralds (I made all diamond gear 3 times more expensive than iron):
However, it is extremely easy to breed villagers - just make a box lined with doors, 3 per villager, you may also notice that the doors look different, a new feature where they use a tile entity to determine their wood type, spruce in this case (this allows code that checks for the vanilla door block, including villagers and villages, to work with them without having to modify it, as well as not needing any new block IDs, I also don't expect anybody to use enough to cause any issues, considering they use standard block rendering (not a "tile entity special renderer", which renders them like entities and is why chests are so hard on the game but not functionally identical barrels):
The first librarian offered Looting II, useful for getting more drops from passive mobs for trading (this is the only time I actually use it); the second one offered Knockback II, a must-have enchantment for my main sword later on, and as its first offer (due to a low probability enchanted books are much more likely to appear later on):
With over 50 levels by now it was really way past time to make an enchanting setup so I did a bit more mining to find more diamonds (I'd only found 4 so far); you'll never guess what I got on the first diamond pickaxe I enchanted for 30 levels, and again on the second one; this was also before I'd really done much branch-mining and while I don't specifically try to get Fortune for anything other than amethyst I'll use it if I get it (in TMCWv5 I got it after I'd finished branch-mining so I only used it on amethyst):
The first enchantment in this world - and one of the best items you can get
I spent most of the rest of my levels on a book, which got Efficiency III:
The second pickaxe I enchanted had the same thing as the first (I'd rather have Silk Touch though, then I can start using an ender chest):
Naturally, the first thing I did was mine the single vein of 5 amethyst ore that I've found so far, which yielded 13 amethyst, about half of what I need to make my caving gear, plus a few more for repairs:
It is not so evident but you may notice that the floor is darker than stone should be, since it is actually "stone bedrock", one of many biome-specific variants which use a darker version of the biome's "biome stone" block (there is a video somebody made of them playing on TMCW and they seemed very confused by this, thinking there must be more below even though they were at y=1, I guess they thought I added depth below y=0, but if I ever revisit "double/triple height terrain" I'd add it by pushing sea level up):
Some other examples of features in TMCW; smelting items is much more efficient as you get a lot more back; a clock can be smelted for a whole gold ingot and iron hoes give 6 nuggets, instead of a measly one; I just smelted down brand-new items I got from trading which aren't useful to me but you can also smelt down damaged tools and armor for a proportionally reduced return (down to one nugget):
Some people find them to be tacky but Giants were one of the first mobs added to the game and I've improved them in various ways, such as using a newer AI (which makes them better than some existing vanilla mobs as they still used the older AI as well until 1.8). I also recently added skeletons that spawn with axes, in addition to the swords previously added (80% iron, 16% diamond, 4% amethyst); as axes penetrate armor in the same way as all attacks do since 1.9 (which I think was a poor addition) this makes them more dangerous for armored players (axes deal one less damage than swords, the same as vanilla 1.6.4, reduced by one more due to all tiers below amethyst being nerfed so amethyst is the same as diamond was):
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?
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Curse PremiumThat's a fast access to the Nether. You probably know I consider high caves the easiest area of the Nether.
I like a lot of the changes you've made, lots of QOL there. But one change I've always wanted was making villager breeding more reasonable. "Villages" consisting of vast arrays of doors have always annoyed me. I always thought villager breeding should require: *one* door, a bed, a couple of partial blocks not exposed to sky (=furniture) and a couple exposed to sky (=farm). Or something similar.
Is the Giant data still in the game? Maybe I should make a mod to reintroduce it. I could find several for 1.16 and later, but none for 1.12
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I've already spent over 30 in-game days playing, without skipping the night more than a few times, which seems like a decent amount of time (note that when I mention "days" I usually mean play sessions); I've seen people going to the Nether within only a day or two; for example, this stream somebody made while playing on TMCW, and in Hardcore at that (they made three attempts, none of which ended well, and seemed to rage quit due to the extreme difficulty of the mod but I'd put more blame on them, or perhaps they weren't used to older mob mechanics, but surely anybody knows to go under a 2 block high ceiling to avoid endermen and wither skeletons, otherwise creepers got them the other two times, they also didn't seem to understand how my "attack penalty" system worked and kept spam-clicking even after they realized something was up, taking a half-dozen hits to kill a cow, 3 to kill a fish when it should have taken only 2 and 1 respectively):
(deaths at 16:16, 55:48, and 2:14:14)
It is, but Mojang removed their AI (or rather, the original mob AI that was used until then for e.g. zombie pigmen, spiders, etc. It is worth noting that these mobs, while unable to pathfind around obstacles, were bugged in many other ways for some time after 1.8, e.g. spiders lost the ability to see through walls and endermen were just buggy, which may be why they weren't updated right away, though Giants were just using the generic AI).
Here is a post which shows the code changes from vanilla (which is very basic, the actual AI code was in a superclass):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/297957-what-have-you-done-recently?comment=7699
However, re-adding a proper AI is quite easy to do, I just copied most of the AI "tasks" that zombies used:
Another change that is needed is overridding the "getCanSpawnHere" method, or changing "getBlockPathWeight" to reverse the handling of light level (that is, subtract the light level from 0.5 instead of vice-versa, This is actually why they can't spawn in vanilla because they require a light level that is higher than 11 and less than 8. I just changed "getCanSpawnHere" so they will tend to pathfind towards light, unlike most hostile mobs which prefer the dark):
public float getBlockPathWeight(int posX, int posY, int posZ) { // Unlike other hostile mobs giants prefer to path to light (e.g. player's bases) return this.worldObj.getLightBrightness(posX, posY, posZ) - 0.5F; } // Note that all code in supers was bypassed public boolean getCanSpawnHere() { // 1/4 chance of a spawn attempt succeeding and only at or above sea level; spawners have no restrictions if (this.spawnType != SPAWNER && (this.rand.nextInt(4) != 0 || this.blockY() < ChunkProviderTMCW.getSeaLevel())) return false; return (this.worldObj.difficultySetting > 0 && this.isValidLightLevel() && this.worldObj.checkNoEntityCollision(this.boundingBox) && this.worldObj.getCollidingBoundingBoxes(this, this.boundingBox).isEmpty() && !this.worldObj.isAnyLiquid(this.boundingBox)); }There's also some custom code here, e.g. the "spawn type" which I use to tell how a mob spawned (e.g. endermen, silverfish, and zombie pigmen spawned from spawners have different behavior from naturally spawned ones) and checking for the actual sea level / top surface of a Superflat world instead of a hardcoded value (I believe 1.8 has a more proper way of getting this, my method requires checking the dimension as well for mobs that spawn in the Nether/End).
Also, there is a significant issue with Giants - the method used to check for collision with entities doesn't work properly for entities which are more than a few blocks tall; you can try hitting their head, or firing arrows at them, and they don't register. This is because the game checks for entities per chunk section and expands the bounds of the bounding box by a few blocks, only checking sections that it intersects, so unless a Giant is near the bottom or within the section you (or they, this also applies to their own attacks) are attacking from it will be very buggy. I fixed this by adding a custom method which subtracts 10 from the bottom of the bounding box:
// Used to get bounding box when calculating entity targeting, equivalent to addCoord(x, y, z).expand(1, 1, 1) with minY then // decreased by 9, which ensures that Giants standing in the next chunk section below can be detected (default expansion of // 1 block plus 2 in Chunk.getEntitiesWithinAABBForEntity (3 total) plus 9 = 12, compared to their height of 11.8). public static final AxisAlignedBB getTargetedEntitiesBoundingBox(AxisAlignedBB bb, double x, double y, double z) { double var7 = (x < 0.0D ? bb.minX + x : bb.minX); double var9 = (y < 0.0D ? bb.minY + y : bb.minY); double var11 = (z < 0.0D ? bb.minZ + z : bb.minZ); double var13 = (x > 0.0D ? bb.maxX + x : bb.maxX); double var15 = (y > 0.0D ? bb.maxY + y : bb.maxY); double var17 = (z > 0.0D ? bb.maxZ + z : bb.maxZ); return getAABBPool().getAABB(var7 - 1.0D, var9 - 10.0D, var11 - 1.0D, var13 + 1.0D, var15 + 1.0D, var17 + 1.0D); } public List getEntitiesWithinAABBExcludingEntity(Entity par1Entity, AxisAlignedBB par2AxisAlignedBB) { // Ensures that projectiles can see Giants standing in the next chunk section below (default expansion of 1 block + 2 // additional blocks + 9 = 12, compared to their height of 11.8) if (par1Entity instanceof EntityArrow || par1Entity instanceof EntityThrowable) par2AxisAlignedBB.minY -= 9.0D; return this.getEntitiesWithinAABBExcludingEntity(par1Entity, par2AxisAlignedBB, (IEntitySelector)null); }Then there is the fact that the game calculates a player's attack reach to the bottom of an entity, so again it needs ti be fixed or it will think you are too far away to hit them; I did this by adding a custom method which in the case of Giants checks 4 points from feet to head:
// Treats Giants as 4 separate points, 0, 3.333, 6.667, 10 blocks above posY to improve collision detection public double getDistanceSqToTarget(Entity par1Entity) { float minDistance = 1000000F; float dx = (float)(this.posX - par1Entity.posX); float dy = (float)(this.posY - par1Entity.posY); float dz = (float)(this.posZ - par1Entity.posZ); dx = dx * dx + dz * dz; for (int y = 0; y < 4; ++y) { float distance = dx + dy * dy; if (distance < minDistance) minDistance = distance; dy += 3.333333F; } return (double)minDistance; } // Default method in Entity public double getDistanceSqToTarget(Entity par1Entity) { return this.getDistanceSqToEntity(par1Entity); }All these changes may be rather invasive to implement via a Forge mod though, plus other mods which use the vanilla methods may not be fixed (how does vanilla do the Ender Dragon then? It handles it as multiple smaller entities/bounding boxes). This may also be why Mojang hasn't added any very large mobs, besides the Ender Dragon (using a single bounding box for more complex entities also has its issues, e.g. Giant's arms, and limbs in general, aren't part of the bounding box so they cant be targeted).
Also, another significant improvement I made to targeting mobs in general was to ignore dying mobs, which is just checking if they are alive in EntityLivingBase.canBeCollidedWith() (most other entities simply disappear without a death animation, notable exceptions include the Wither and Ender Dragon, which override this method so they are still affected but that probably isn't that important):
// Fixes collision checks with dying entities (MC-1246) public boolean canBeCollidedWith() { return this.isEntityAlive(); }Notably, Mojang claims this is "won't fix" / "works as intended" but it makes a huge difference when there is no general attack cooldown, or just weapons with a high attack speed; I can plow though a pen of chickens killing several per second with no wasted attacks (I intentionally did not fix weapons losing durability when attacking a mob while it was immune to damage, which is greatly compounded by my "attack penalty" which reduces the damage you deal when doing this, or missing entirely too often; in other words, you are free to attack as fast as you can as long as you remain accurate. I suppose Mojang did not do something similar because they wanted more "realism"; I consider the delay when switching weapons to be more significant than the delay between attacks as I usually hold something else and switch to a sword as needed - in fact, so fast that I'd occasionally trigger another bug, the game takes a tick to update your attack damage attribute to reflect the item you are holding, e.g. a diamond sword adds 7 damage, but I saw it dealing only 7.25 damage (unarmed plus Sharpness) or even a non-weapon item like food dealing 8 damage (unarmed plus sword). I fixed this by forcing a sync of attributes prior to dealing an attack, notably, this bug is still unresolved, if less pronounced due to the attack cooldown).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
This is the path I took to a stronghold, cutting diagonally across an entire level 3 map, a distance of over 1,400 blocks and the furthest I've ever traveled (for comparison, in 1.6.4 strongholds are located 640-1152 blocks from the origin; in my first world the closest was actually only 560 blocks away since vanilla applies an additional offset of up to 112 when ensuring it is within a non-ocean biome. In TMCW an infinite number of strongholds generate every 8192 chunks in alternating 64x64 chunk regions, except within 800 blocks of the origin. While 1400 blocks is far modern versions (post-1.9) have the innermost ring being 1280-2816 blocks from the origin so they could be up to twice as far away):
This is an underground rendering made with MCMap; the full-size image is 4194 pixels across:
Along the way I found 7 new biomes; Winter Forest, Swamplands, Mega Spruce Taiga, Mega Forest, Quartz Desert, Ice Plains, and Mega Tree Plains; 8 if you count the "Spruce Hills" sub-biome in Mega Tree Plains (I don't normally count variations of the parent biome like hills, river, edge but some are distinct enough, you could also count this as a variant of Taiga):
Past the Mesa was a Winter Forest, a snowy variant of vanilla Forest, they may also have igloos:
This in turn lead to Swamplands (vanilla swamp):
I've often wondered how the size of these trees, in a Mega Forest, compare to other mods, they surely have to be near the top for a naturally generated tree (I recall something about a "rubber tree" which is absurdly huge but it must be grown by the player), even the ones at sea level can reach the clouds (max height of 65 blocks):
After that was another "mega" biome, Mega Spruce Taiga, differentiated from the normal variant by a greater number of leafier trees and pretty much the same as the biomes in 1.7:
After that I came across Quartz Desert, a desert variant with "quartz sand" and "quartz desert pyramids", and Ice Plains (yes, another hot-cold transition. It may be that there is a "cold" climate zone, such as exist, with several "cold/snowy" biomes near each other, which shows just how "large" they actually are, a few biomes across, you'll never find anything like vanilla 1.6.4's Ice Plains regions):
The final biome, with the stronghold, was a Mega Tree Plains, a plains-like biome with the occasional mega tree found in Mega Forest and a "Spruce Hills' sub-biome which has the taller variant of spruce tree:
I thought to note how I "cheated" the Beta mechanic where a mob spawns next to an unsafe bed; all you have to do is pillar up a few blocks and make a 1x3 platform for the bed and a respawn point, with a torch to spawnproof it; as such, this mechanic was buggy in Beta (an incorrect calculation enabled the game to see though walls so you had to place the bed away from them. More precisely, the game checked if a mob could pathfind to within 1.5 blocks of your position, measuring the distance from the northwest corner of a block instead of its center, one of many such bugs/quirks. I changed this to check for a bed block directly adjacent to the final path point, corners are also safe because of this, as well as players only respawning adjacent to a bed block, not in the corners):
A video where somebody just placed a bed down and got woken up by a zombie (or a skeleton and more rarely, witch), at 4:15:
Strongholds themselves are the same as vanilla except there are additional spawners placed under the chests in hallways (cave spiders, creepers, skeletons, witches, zombies), and in libraries (silverfish):
Unlike vanilla seeing cave spiders, even multiple, not an indication of a nearby mineshaft; they are also an uncommon natural spawn below sea level:
The chests also had some interesting loot - I've already found all four variants of wolf armor, including amethyst, one of the rarest items that can be found (after enchanted golden apples):
The "armor toughness (axes)" refers to the fact that axes have the exclusive properly of penetrating armor as all attacks do since 1.9 (I think Mojang's implementation was very poorly thought out, considering it has little impact on weaker attacks and many mobs don't deal much damage, while strong attacks, especially creeper explosions, received a massive buff, making it even more important to get extremely overpowered max armor which makes anything less inconsequential):
The spawners themselves are also loot since mining them with Silk Touch drops an "empty" spawner which is a purely decorative block (or just to show how many I've collected; I've mined more than 5,500 in my first world (over 6,000 including before I enabled stats for them, which are disabled in vanilla 1.6.4 for some reason) and collected an entire chest (1,728) of empty spawners in TMCWv5):
Libraries have two silverfish spawners placed below the bookshelves in the middle; I made it so that they do not produce particles when fully surrounded by blocks so they are harder to find:
Another thing that is different about libraries is that there is a 1/16 chance of a bookshelf being a "full" bookshelf, containing 12 books, which can be removed instead of destroying the bookshelf; they have a different texture so you can tell them apart:
Another difference from vanilla is that most torches in strongholds and mineshafts are "dim" or "burnt-out" torches, which emit half as much light and had previously been redstone torches, and before that, removed entirely so MCMap, and more recently, cave maps, don't reveal unexplored areas (the "normal" torch on the right is actually a "fake" torch, a variant of "dim" torch (same block ID as I added support for light level being determined by metadata), they also generate in villages and other structures, all so nothing is revealed):
The End portal itself was at 1160, 1000, about 1000 blocks away from where I started in both directions, 1,400 total:
Also, I fixed end portals not having bottom and side textures (they appear invisible), which were made to use the obsidian texture, at half-size (1x2 on the sides and 2x2 on the bottom); the top also has a texture which is visible when going far enough away that tile entities stop rendering:
This is a view of the stronghold on a cave map, it was fairly average in size; I analyzed it with CaveFinder and the exact coordinates (center of starting staircase, which is where eyes of ender lead to, and is towards the upper-left, the top was exposed in a cave with a lake above it) were 1076 31 980 with a size of 166 structure pieces (the smallest have at least 100, a limitation I added to ensure they are of a decent size, the largest may exceed 300. The three in my first world (vanilla) are 161, 177, and 302). Another thing that you may notice is how nice and orderly it is, no broken-up bits where caves intersected it since they always fully overwrite air blocks (vanilla does not for the walls, leading to the common impression that caves cut them apart), I also reduce the density of normal caves and prevent special caves and mineshafts from generating too close to them (mineshafts themselves do not cut apart strongholds, even in vanilla, since the game places strongholds afterwards):
On the way back from the stronghold I spotted a desert temple in the Mountainous Desert I saw on the first day, behind a large mountain (which likely exceeds y=128; I keep track of such high peaks with the highest approaching y=190); not only that, as I came closer I saw a dungeon exposed in the side of the mountain, the first one that I've found:
Unlike modern versions husks can spawn in the absence of sky exposure, a mechanic which I think makes no sense and would severely reduce the chance of seeing them considering I spend most of my time underground (past the early game, and when I'll actually be exploring), another thing that is different about newer versions is that zombie spawners can only spawn normal zombies because Mojang made all zombie variants their own entities. You may also notice that the walls look a bit different, this is because they contain "compressed" cobblestone, crafted with 4 normal cobblestone, one of several variations (there is also a compressed variant of mossy cobblestone, which I originally added to my first world as a storage block, the same goes for "rail blocks" and "cobweb blocks" and various other features):
The desert temple was extremely infested with mobs, many coming from two spawners in the floor, plus zombies from nearby caves (maybe there is another dungeon nearby?); and yes, those are baby skeletons, which behave similarly to baby zombies and don't attempt to avoid sunlight since they don't burn:
You'll notice that there is a husk model inside this spawner, which is a special variant which exclusively spawns husks, with several other such special spawner variants (I added a new NBT tag which optionally stores the variant of mob):
It is extra important to check the trap since I replaced stone pressure plates with a sandstone variant, which is much harder to see, and the chests may be trapped chests with 4 extra TNT under them (one or both traps may be present, along with either 2 husk, a husk and skeleton, 2 skeleton , or no spawners for a total of 12 desert temple variants). One interesting thing about sandstone pressure plates is that only players can trigger them so mobs can't set off the trap:
This is the loot from all the chests:
I've completed my branch-mining after finding enough amethyst to make my caving gear (sword, pickaxe, chestplate, leggings, boots, a total of 24 resources, plus a few extra), helped by finding 3 amethyst in chests (such chest loot is fairly significant later on, the ore is so rare that I've gone a week without finding any while caving. For comparison, I found 70 diamond and 10 amethyst ore):
At the bottom you can see a large lake, a special variant of vanilla lake / pond which generates underground and gets up to 30 blocks across (the maximum size a feature can reach is 32x32 blocks, leaving a 1 block margin around the edges for adjacent block checks), I harvested the glow squid for glow ink sacs:
There was also diamond in the lake, one of multiple deposits I found not by branch-mining but by "caving", even as limited as it was, combined with Fortune III I got 39 diamonds in one run and around two stacks total, spending part of the surplus on full diamond armor (I normally use iron until I start caving):
I also found a mineshaft right above my mine, with yet more diamonds, but I haven't explored it yet (I do know where I could start caving if a surface opening nearby happens to be a dead end):
The main thing holding me back now is getting a Mending trade, which is limited by the rate at which villagers breed, slightly impacted by the addition of a new villager type (so librarians are less likely to spawn); you can tell from the durability how many villagers I've "dealt with", either because they were the wrong profession or they didn't give me the right enchantment (I've gotten Knockback, Looting, and Power, the latter was 58 emeralds for Power IV and I didn't consider it to be worth it since Power is easy to get by directly enchanting books), I also placed more doors around the village pen to get them to breed to a higher population, and consequently, at a higher rate:
I've also worn out an entire diamond hoe (at one time Mojang added an achievement for using one until it breaks, this was later changed to just making a netherite hoe) harvesting potatoes and carrots for trading (a feature in TMCW vs vanilla 1.6.4; they take 1.6 times more than wheat so Fortune is needed to make the same-sized farm more profitable. Interestingly, when Mojang added these trades in 1.8 they actually made them cheaper); they are also sold by farmers instead of blacksmiths and hoes are required in order for Fortune to work on crops, while it only got Fortune II from a level 30 enchantment it still significantly increases the net yield (from 1.6 without Fortune to 2.13-2.67-3.2 with Fortune I-II-III):
This shows an interesting consequence of the high repair cost of diamond tools (17 levels for an intact sacrifice); it can be cheaper to place the item you want to repair in the second (sacrifice) slot; note that this is not as practical or profitable in vanilla since you will lose the custom name and have to rename it again in order to keep the penalty at 2 levels (this does not work in TMCW as Mending now does the same thing):
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?
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Curse PremiumLots of improvements from vanilla in your version. With bed safety, would it be possible to have checks made for a spider being able to pathfind to the bed as well? And perhaps a last fix would be to see if a spawner skeleton could shoot at you. That should fix the cheese you did. It would still be possible to pillar up a substantial distance with overhangs at some point, but I'm willing to accept that as acceptably safe.
Did you kill the Ender Dragon? Seems like not from your writing, but I wanted to be sure.
Oh, and I like the look of the Badlands.
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I make an exploration run to loot the stronghold and generally return as one of the final steps before I start caving (as I refer it as, the "end-game").
Also, while Mojang may have renamed them "badlands" in TMCW that refers to a different biome, which does have some aspects of Mesa, as well as the "spikes" in Mesa Bryce (or whatever it is called now) on top of a base of red sand desert; the hardened clay also uses different colors:
For comparison, this is what a Mesa looks like underground, the hardened clay layers go all the way down to bedrock, and this is the biggest difference between the biomes:
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?
It only took a week and mining over 12,000 nether quartz and a total of 68,000 XP (since the start of the world), and trading over 1,500 emeralds and buying/enchanting 274 books but I've finished making all my "caving gear", with most of the time spent enchanting books at level 22 in order to get the main enchantments that I needed, of course, only once I got Mending, along with Unbreaking I as a nice bonus (which really helps, in 1.6.4/TMCW you can't even get it on armor and weapons from the table, not that I directly enchanted anything other than bows (to get Infinity, incidentally, level 22 is also about the best level for it). I did not try to get a higher level of Unbreaking, or other enchantments, because, well, as you can see above trading is quite difficult prior to 1.8 and even more so 1.14 (nerfed in 1.20. However, I'll note that the change to requiring finding a swamp to get a Mending trade wouldn't have been an obstacle for me, I found swamps along the way to a stronghold in each of the last three worlds, and the final enchantment offered is guaranteed to be Mending so you still only need one librarian):
Some of the final enchantments (1x Protection IV and 2x Efficiency V) actually came from level 1 enchantments, where books have an approximately 1 in 5 chance each of getting Efficiency, Power, Protection, and Sharpness, and at only 17 levels each it is much cheaper to obtain, but still rather time-consuming (I didn't actually make most of them entirely from level 1 books. It is entirely practical to do so though since prior to 1.8 the prior work penalty only increased by 2 levels per working/enchantment level upgrade, i.e. making Efficiency V from level 1 books counts as 4 level upgrades due to the way the penalty propagates. Of course, in vanilla you can rename the first book and it won't increase at all but it doesn't matter much).
Also, if you look at the enchantments on my gear you might notice that the boots do not have Unbreaking; this is because they would be too expensive to receive Mending (they could still be repaired indefinitely by using rubies to lower the prior work penalty but that requires finding a biome that has them). Mending and Infinity on a bow? Why not? I think the reason Mojang made them mutually exclusive was to nerf an exploit where Punch bows were used to boost elytra, evidenced by the fact the nerf came in the same update that added firework boosting as a legitimate means of boosting them (similarly, instead of just making shears lose durability when breaking any block, as I did, they removed the ability to put Silk Touch on them to "patch" an exploit where you could use them indefinitely on blocks like glowstone). I only renamed held items, using the same names I've used since I first started using such items (dating back to my first world, in vanilla I remove the space in the names of armor and rename shears twice back to "Shears" (as a custom name, not the original item name).
Here are some statistics that give you some idea of how much work I put in to make these items (I've used this as an example of why you should be able to indefinitely repair items; the removal of this in 1.8 (at the time) was such that I even made a mod for 1.8 which reverted all the changes to anvils, I'd do it even since 1.9, or make Mending work the way it does in TMCW, a sit is much more balanced, no infinite "god" gear, just sensibly enchanted items whose cost is dependent on the enchantments and durability):
Ores mined and XP gained (this is your "lifetime" XP so if I died it won't reset, only the value displayed on the death screen and your XP level):
Blocks mined; this includes blocks that vanilla doesn't track, such as crops and fire:
While this says I crafted 12 anvils this is a bit misleading due to a feature I added where you can craft two very damaged anvils into an intact anvil; I never actually broke one since I'd save them after they became very damaged, since they have four damage states (instead of vanilla's three) the total durability from two anvils, with the third also used until it is very damaged, becomes 0.75 * 3 = 2.25, or 12.5% extra (I also have this feature in my first world but here the result is 0.667 * 3 = 2 so there is no bonus; anvils in TMCW also have a 16% (instead of 12%) chance of becoming damaged per use so their average lifetime is the same, 25 uses).
Items crafted; this includes the number of enchanted books bought from trading as well as enchanted on the table (vanilla doesn't track them at all or items traded unless they can be crafted by other means):
Items used; the "uses" for armor counts the number of times I took damage while wearing it, so if this were vanilla I'd have gone through 2-3 sets of diamond armor (without Unbreaking) but in TMCW it has 1500 durability (all pieces; the tradeoff is that it only reduces player damage by 60%, the same as iron in vanilla and making it only half as effective / 20% vs 40% damage taken. Even amethyst is still only 60% as effective as diamond in vanilla). There are also many other items listed which vanilla doesn't track uses for, such as eggs thrown and food fed to animals (e.g. wheat). I also used a lot of stone pickaxes in the Nether (I did some branch-mining for quartz, which is fairly effective):
These are maps of the Nether; the area I explored isn't particularly large, around 1/4 of a level 3 map, which still has something like 90,000 quartz with a fair amount of exposure (there are more "real" caves than vanilla, about twice as many, plus ravines, offset by a slight reduction in the noise threshold to favor more solid areas). I mostly explored the higher levels, between 80-100, with not much going below y=31 (Nether sea level; there are caves deeper down, forming a secondary lava level at y=4, as in the Overworld):
A couple renderings made with MCMap ("surface" and "underground", the latter only showing areas near torches, as with the cave map shown above):
A slice at layer 90 in Minutor, where the most player-visited areas are visible; I placed torches so I can see where I've been as well as to get them to render on maps (less often than I do in the Overworld, where they are placed for visibility, so the mapped areas appear broken up):
Another slice at layer 63; you can see parts of 5 Nether fortresses, only one of which (near the center) I explored, they are about as common as in vanilla 1.6.4 but without the bug that causes them to generate in north-south lines and using a 27x27 chunk grid instead of a 16x16 chunk grid with a 1/3 chance per region (one every 729 chunks vs one every 768 chunks. The bug did make it easier to find them if you knew how they were laid out):
While exploring the Nether I found a total of 9 "nether dungeons", including a couple with zombie pigmen, which are always hostile but do not alert "normal" pigmen when attacked (one of which has spawned inside the dungeon shown) and one with wither skeletons (only ones spawned in fortresses drop skulls. The spawn rate of both of these types of dungeons is lower than for more common/weaker mobs due to the mobs they spawn, this is also true of e.g. zombie vs creeper dungeons in the Overworld):
Witches also seem like a mob that might spawn in the Nether (only in dungeons) due to the fact you need blaze rods to make a brewing stand and potions and they drop glowstone:
Another recent addition are fossils, based on the ones added in 1.16 (I used the schematics given in the Wiki, the actual generation is done with code instead of structure NBT files, which I'll also note is probably way more efficient than storing volumetric block arrays):
Also, I thought to note that I fixed some bugs / made improvements based on my experience in the Nether; I came across some Ghast fireballs which were frozen in midair, which happens when they go into non-entity processing chunks (this makes them stop ticking but their motion is preserved) and then get unloaded; while their momentum could be saved I decided to just despawn them if they stop moving; I also improved the aim of Ghasts so they target the player instead of going over their head (with some "error" added so they will sometimes miss, more on easier difficulties, much like skeleton arrows):
While I'd recently added a lot of slabs and stairs I realized there was another type that could be added - netherrack, which apparently still isn't a thing even in modern versions despite adding tons of slabs and stairs for just about every block (you can make nether brick, which is basically the same thing, but has a very different appearance, sort of like stone/cobblestone vs stone bricks, derived from the same block):
Also, I apparently managed to replicate a bug which appeared in vanilla in 1.8; if a mob, such as a Ghast, hits a zombie pigmen and the mob then dies or despawns they will retarget the nearest player, the first time this happened I thought I'd just hit one with my bow but after it happened again and I knew I hadn't hit any I became suspicious, and sure enough, it only happened in TMCW, not vanilla 1.6.4:
MC-69032 When a mob hits a zombified piglin [sic], and that mob dies, the zombified piglins attack you
Of course, it only took Mojang 6 years to fix this despite having been reported before 1.8 was even released(!) (if somebody else had reported this to me I'd have fixed it earlier, this would have been present since TMCWv5.10, so only a week or so. Exactly how I inadvertently added it, I added a method which determines if a mob can attack a target, e.g. a non-Creative mode player (fixing some "old AI" mobs becoming aggressive if hit by a player in Creative), and in the case of zombie pigmen replaced "entity instanceof EntityPlayer" with it. This causes their "angerLevel" to be set, which if nonzero and they have no target will cause them to search for the closest visible player. One thing that mitigates this to an extent is that I'd previously fixed another bug which caused zombie pigmen to never forgive (since 1.8 they do after 20-40 seconds, and if not chasing a target, at least in my case), I also haven't updated them to use the "new" AI which enables proper pathfinding (they won't go around corners and only attempt to go straight up a slope even if they only need to go a few blocks to the side to get up. Maybe they are just less intelligent than normal zombies?).
After this I plan to go to the End to fight the Ender Dragon, then build my main base, then I'll finally start my normal gameplay of caving.
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?
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Curse Premiumdestroying fireballs that got stuck in unloaded chunks is the obvious thing to do. The target is almost certainly gone.
Nether dungeons are something you added, right?
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RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
Anything that isn't in vanilla will be something I added (not even another mod, TMCW is completely stand-alone, no Optifine, TMI, or anything else, much less world generation mods; if one wanted to make a mod for it they would need to modify its code; this is true of such mods in general, many of which even portray themselves as continuing the vanilla lineage they were based on, e.g. Beta 1.7.4, 1.7.5, etc).
As mentioned before, my second-to-last goal before caving was to defeat the Ender Dragon, which went pretty much as usual, with few changes from vanilla other than naturally spawning endermites in the End (not particularly common but something to watch out for, along with endermites spawning them when they teleport while being aggroed towards a player). Compared to versions since 1.9 there tend to be more obsidian pillars, which randomly generate with a 1/5 chance per chunk (I actually reduced this to 1/8, using a 2x4 chunk grid instead of being completely random, and increased the success rate per chunk by making multiple attempts so they end up being more consistent in number/density. In either case they are randomized per instance; no two worlds will have the same arrangement):
The entrance platform was a short distance away from the mainland, a good reason to bring some ender pearls (you can also bridge across but that is unnecessary):
No iron bars, just a lot of pillars, 21 to be exact:
A couple renderings of the End; the circular area on the second map (black is air down to y=0) is due to the fact that I don't actually generate or save any chunks more than 12 chunks away from 0,0 unless the player builds something in them (I simply return a chunk that is completely empty of blocks and set a flag not to save it; the time taken to generate chunks this way is extremely fast, as is the End in general, which loaded almost instantly). You can also see that I didn't take out two of the end crystals, on the far left or top, which were out of healing range:
One of the new hazards added to the End, which may appear in packs of up to 4 (endermen were changed to spawn one at a time, instead of in packs of 4, and in 1/4 of chunks as with general mob spawning, thus they spawn only 1/16 as fast, which only impacts the spawn rates of mob farms):
Taking out the dragon itself involved waiting for it to charge and shooting it in the face with a bow, repeat a dozen times or so:
The killing shot:
My inventory before leaving the End, I only needed one stack of arrows but always better to be safe:
The first thing I did when returning from the End was to go to spawn to collect any XP that fell into the exit portal; I know that many people do not do this and lose out on some of it, or even the dragon egg if it fell in (note that in vanilla you only have 5 minutes regardless of where you are before items/XP despawn); this also reveals the exact spawn point, 176, -64 (this will also generally be a multiple of 4 due to the way the game finds a spawn biome):
You may notice that I collected end stone before leaving the End; this is for "diamond ender chests", my own true "end game" item which has a double chest of capacity in addition to normal ender chests (3 chests total), and since TMCWv5, can be used in the same manner (I first added them in TMCWv2 and you only needed diamonds but I disabled Silk Touch so they were used to transport stockpiled materials from a secondary base back to my main base):
I also made one last enchantment - enchanting a golden helmet at level 30 in order to get a helmet for underwater work; I got Protection IV, Aqua Affinity, Respiration III on the first try (I only cared about the water-related enchantments):
You'll also never guess what I saw the night after I returned from the End - a skeleton in diamond armor - the first of many to come (in TMCWv5 I averaged one mob in diamond or amethyst armor every 4 play sessions; diamond armor is about 12 times more common than it is in vanilla, one in 1250 vs 15551 skeletons or zombies at maximum regional difficulty on Normal, with amethyst being 3 times rarer than diamond, then combine that with "global difficulty" being maxed out after 100 hours and an average of 500 mob kills (all mobs) per session, 50% more than in vanilla, actually more like twice as much considering how few I killed in "double height terrain" with TMCW having more underground volume despite not being deeper):
After this I started working on my main base; I'd already cleared out a 32x32 area while waiting for villagers to breed, the final size was extended a few blocks further to the left as seen here:
The first and most important part of the base, reflecting its main purpose, is a huge storage room for all the resources I'll be collecting, sized based on what I collected in TMCWv5, itself considerably in excess of what I'd originally planned (TMCWv5 is the only time I've "maxed out" a world by fully exploring the entire area within +/- 1536 blocks), including 256 barrels of storage across 8 corridors of 32 each (a capacity of 6912 stacks, 442368 items in stacks of 64, or 3.98 million mineral resources as blocks; a full 1/4 of the area is dedicated to coal and another 1/4 is for special items like enchanted books (the ones with signs) and special chest loot and mob drops (item frames). Half the corridor for iron is marked with wool since I didn't have enough iron blocks, I also don't have any rubies yet so I used red wool):
If you look closely at the walls you'll notice that they don't look quite like quartz, those are actually "smooth quartz blocks", which are a variant of double slab which use the bottom slab texture on all sides and have a data value of 15 (you can obtain them with /give in vanilla), which, along with "full smooth stone" and "full smooth sandstone" drop themselves (in vanilla they drop half slabs, in TMCW you can use a hammer to break them apart):
The signs are also spruce, with white text, a recent addition, another interesting this is that the block drops itself, no silly unnecessary item which needs a separate texture (the sign item model is slightly different but uses the same texture as the block, with a special overlay for the item "text". This is one of many such changes I've made to simplify things as I'd otherwise need a dozen textures for each variant of sign. I often wonder why Mojang added separate items for many blocks anyway, I know some have special placement rules but having standard methods within block classes to handle block placement, and they already do have them, would solve that):
Another fun fact about signs: wall signs render as standard blocks, not using a tile entity special renderer, so they are far more performant and don't disappear at a distance (64 blocks; the text still does but it is much less noticeable).
Another block I added are "light blocks", no, not the block added in newer versions (it is interesting how many such blocks, even if only similar by name in some cases, Mojang has added, I think they even made the smooth double slab blocks "legitimate" blocks) but a variant of glowstone obtained by smelting it, giving a block with a smooth gradient texture; this is actually a texture I made all the way back in 2013 for a custom resource pack (TMCW has a total of 3 textures dating from 2013, including glass and lapis blocks, 4 if you count rubies but they are already in vanilla):
Additional features that are helpful include the ability to make glow item frames, signs, and even paintings, smoothening out the lighting on them (only sign text glows):
Note that you can either craft glowing items or right-click on them when sneaking (a normal ink sac removes the effect):
I intentionally covered up lights on the ceiling to show the difference better:
These are screenshots of the completed base, which is on the larger side, mainly due to the storage area, otherwise it follows the same general design that I've used since "Double Height Terrain" in late 2013 (made out of stone-based blocks back then, as seen in the link a couple paragraphs back), I ended up with less than 3 stacks of quartz blocks from the close to two double chests that I'd collected (about 3,000 blocks. If I needed more I'd use Fortune to collect the rest):
The front hall includes all the maps I've made / will make; as shown in a previous spoiler I already set up a 4x4 area for the maps I'll make while exploring, allowing for up to a 4096x4096 area (in TMCWv5 I had to make 5x5 maps to cover a 3072x3072 area, plus around the edges, due to being centered at 0,0, 1024, etc, thus the change to map centering enables me to use less maps):
A closer look at the main base map:
Workroom, this is the main place I visit, with various supplies; the item frames contain the armor I used in the Nether and End (also useful as emergency armor just in case):
Bedroom; I made the beds purple, fitting with my amethyst gear (any guess as to what my favorite color is?); you can also see flowerpots with real tree models (set to a variant of oak/spruce which naturally generates in "Great Forest"), I also keep my music disc collection here (I intentionally got a creeper to drop one, most will come from dungeon chests, which have all 12 types):
Crops; the ones I'll really be using are potatoes and sugarcane (24 per harvest is plenty considering how seldom I need to make new maps, with the 4 centered around 0,0 already made using surplus paper from trading. Speaking of which, there is some incentive for the occasional materials to trade with, buying shears for repairs, of which I already have a dozen from trading so I won't need more for a long time, otherwise, my only real need for iron at this point is anvils):
Enchanting/brewing, which again shows how little I make use of brewing (just Weakness to cure zombie villagers and Fire Resistance in the Nether, I only used one batch). Most of my enchanting is also actually at level 1 (helmets and iron pickaxes from mineshafts, which I combine to as high as Efficiency V, Unbreaking III and use to dig rail tunnels):
The unused space on the first floor was set aside for animals, similar to the wheat and carrot farms this is more of a collection than for practical use:
The second floor contains the trees I harvest for wood for torches (only one is really needed, I'll note though that larger trees take longer to grow, in contrast with vanilla, where 2x2 trees grow faster because any sapling can grow the tree, while I increase the failure rate) and a village which houses the 4 villagers I decided to keep, including the librarians selling Mending and Unbreaking, which are locked up to be extra safe. The light blocks on top of the houses do stand out and I've considered covering them with brown carpets, I think I saw a brown sheep somewhere:
Overall, it took 2.88 days over 17 sessions and 223 in-game days to "complete" the game, continuing a general trend of taking more time to do so, in large part because of changes I've made (TMCWv4 added Mending so I now had to breed villagers to obtain it, more recently, the addition of a new villager type reduced the probability of a librarian. Luck also plays a part, I spawned near a village in TMCWv5 and got Mending earlier but spent more time to get other enchantments):
I'll note that 223 full days (20 minutes) corresponds to about 3.1 days so I skipped the equivalent of about 31 full nights; this fraction will become much smaller as time passes as I rarely sleep when not building a base:
These are charts of my "session statistics" for the first 17 days, successively zoomed in to show smaller values:
For comparison, this was the first 30 days in TMCWv5, where the "early game" lasted 16 days, relatively more of which was spent mining quartz; also, the one day return to the Nether on day 38 was due to finding a "smelting" enchantment and making a new pickaxe with it (I'll note that even if I had found one already, which is possible via Nether dungeons (a 5% chance in one chest of having Smelting or Vein Miner, in addition to the usual chance of any enchanted books), etc, I would still need rubies to reduce the prior work penalty since it costs too much to put Mending on 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?
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Curse PremiumA little surprised Prot 2 armor is good enough vs. the Ender Dragon. I thought she hit pretty hard. But then again, I still haven't done it.
White text on spruce is a nice touch; it's pretty hard to read the black text.
I love the idea of glowframes. Would make map walls/floors so much easier!
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
One thing to consider is that I play on Normal difficulty, where it deals 10 damage, as opposed to 15 on Hard / Hardcore, and there is no "armor penetration" effect as implemented in 1.9 (except for axes); considering the protection given by my armor, 60% from the armor itself (I nerfed diamond to be the same as iron in vanilla) plus another 30% from Protection (8 EPF at 3.75% per point, also modified from vanilla), totaling 72%, this reduces it to 2.8, or a bit less than 1 1/2 hearts (needless to say, armor was incredibly OP prior to 1.9, to quote the Wiki, "In full diamond armor + hard difficulty a creeper can knock you down to 2 hearts". and that is with no enchantments (73 damage * 80% damage reduction = 14.6, or 5.4 HP left, so more like 2 1/2 hearts, rounded up to 3 on the health bar); for comparison, since 1.9 they can one-shot you in full Protection IV diamond armor, or very nearly so, with a bit of tweaking so you barely survive. This may have also been when they added armor toughness, they also slightly reduced the damage dealt by explosions; in any case 64 or more damage will reach the penetration cap of 80% of armor for a mere 16% damage reduction remaining - even base leather reduces damage by 28%! Add Protection IV and you take about 19.3 damage, so not even half a heart left).
That said, since 1.9 diamond armor loses 1% protection for every point of damage taken (iron and lesser lose 2%, netherite loses 0.8%, the difference due to "armor toughness"), so 10 damage reduces it to 70%, while Protection reduces damage by an additional 32% (4% per EPF), or close to 80% total, so my changes actually give less protection (the opposite is true for creeper explosions, which I also reduced to 36 max but falling off linearly, down to 6 instead of 1 at 6 blocks*). On Hard armor drops down to 65% and 76% overall, so actually still stronger (you do take more damage than I do, 3.57 or 27.5% more).
Also, vanilla 1.6.4 reduces damage by 80%, then a random 16-32% for a range of 83.2-86.4% or 1.36-1.68 damage taken (the random factor was removed in 1.9 and I removed it as well, setting full Protection IV to reduce damage by 60%, in the middle of the random 40-80% vanilla gives, Mojang set it to 64%, which is closer to the real average when considering damage taken. I also set the cap for special enchantments (e.g. Feather Falling) to 75% (82 blocks survivable), vs 80% since 1.9 (102 blocks survivable, maybe 103 or even 104 due to MC-130639, which I fixed) and a random 52-80% in 1.6.4 (a guaranteed survivable distance of only 44-45 blocks).
*A table comparing creeper explosion damage in vanilla 1.6.4 and TMCW; you take more damage at all distances but especially further away, up to 10 times as much (which is only 2 vs 0.2 and this is only for armor itself, with Protection IV point-blank damage ranges from 1.96-5.88 in vanilla and 4.8 in TMCW. Blast Protection changes these to 1.96-4.7 and 3, while this suggests that TMCW may have lower average damage vanilla actually ranges from 52-100% before being clamped to 80%, either way, the consistent protection is definitely advantageous and is likely why Mojang changed it, and previously de-randomized melee weapon enchantment damage in 1.6):
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?
During the first day of caving I found three mineshafts (one explored), a circular room cave system, and a skeleton in amethyst armor, which also led to the first amethyst/diamond mob drop.
I started caving from a cave opening near my base, the first one I'd come across; such surface openings may or may not lead anywhere but this one did - straight to a mineshalt, technically the second one I've found in this world (the first is right above my branch-mine) but I don't count them until I've actually explored them, using the main room to keep track of them:
I almost immediately (none of my tools have even taken damage yet) got one of the final achievements, "Overkill", as a Sharpness V amethyst (or diamond in vanilla) sword deals 18.25 damage with a critical hit, just over the criteria of 18 (incorrectly stated as 8 hearts in vanilla when it is actually 9). Other achievements that I haven't gotten yet include "Sniper Duel", which I'll get once I find a cave large enough (I could get it easily on the surface but given my playstyle it is appropriate to get in while caving; this is also possible in ravines in vanilla) and "On a Rail" which I'll get once I make a secondary base, which will be once I've explored far enough out from my main base:
Also, the first cave system I explored was a bit different from vanilla, with tunnels which were longer and straighter than normal, an effect of the regional variation I apply to normal caves (otherwise based on the same parameters as vanilla 1.6.4), which varies various parameters within 12x12 chunk regions:
For comparison, vanilla caves have a 1/4 chance of circular rooms per node, a 1/10 chance of larger caves/tunnels, a maximum length of 112, and a curviness of 0.4 (twice as much as shown here, with circular rooms adding 0-3 tunnels per room (0 in this case); other values not mentioned are either the same as or not present in vanilla); these lead to an average width of 6 for small caves and about 12 for large caves, and 11 for circular rooms (none were actually larger than what can be found in vanilla, 17 blocks, as "largerCircularRoons" only adds the possibility). The altitude distribution goes down to -7 instead of 0 because caves were shifted down in accordance with lava level (from 11 to 4), so in areas without additional caves near sea level (including above in various biomes with higher terrain) there are less cave openings (but usually bigger due to the larger caves generated separately):
The mineshaft that I explored was actually the second mineshaft I found, distinguishable by having oak wood instead of birch wood (and spruce for the one above my branch-mine), with another mineshaft found further east, also with oak wood; the mineshaft I explored was more or less average size (a length of about 1250) and had a skeleton dungeon and three cave spider spawners, two near each other (in separate corridors. They can also generate in the same corridor but will not be right next to each other as can sometimes happen in vanilla before 1.6.4 and since 1.13 (before 1.6.4 due to lack of structure saving, where the game records whether a spawner was already placed, and requires generating the structure across multiple sessions; since 1.13 due to non-deterministic multithreaded world generation. My double spawners are actually a "legitimate" version of this "feature"; i fixed it by linking spawner placement to the structure, as opposed to decorator RNG, which varies from chunk to chunk):
Locations of abandoned mineshafts by corridor length:
1. 248 40 104 (span: 7, size: 105, length: 1165)
I saw my first mob in amethyst armor, a skeleton, in the mineshaft, which dropped Protection II leggings; this is the only means by which amethyst is renewable, with about a chest of gear collected in TMCWv5 (about twice as much diamond; while amethyst is rarer it has twice the normal drop chance, 10% instead of 5%, and yes, that is less than vanilla's 8.5% but Looting increases it by 2% instead of 1% per level):
While these have almost no durability, relatively speaking, if you use them to repair your gear they would restore close to 600, or half a unit, since the anvils adds 12% of the maximum durability to the repair (thus even an item with 1 durability left would still be useful. The repair cost would also be less than a unit since the durability factors into it, a lot in the case of amethyst, which is impossible to repair with intact sacrifices, even diamond already costs up to 17 levels):
As seen in the mineshaft screenshots it led into a mesa biome, with a unique underground comprised of hardened clay, with dirt and gravel replaced with red clay, a variant added for this reason (it is otherwise functionally identical to the normal gray clay) and ores based on hardened clay, and sandstone in the case of "Mesa Edge" (I'll note that dealing with 3 variants of ore is not really an issue given the amounts I usually collect, i.e. you lose much less inventory space if you get full stacks as opposed to one or or a few items. You can also circumvent this by mining them with a hammer, which drops raw iron and gold, and yes, Fortune works on them, if only half as effective and mining speed if reduced; for the full effect you need to find a Smelting enchantment in a loot chest, which also drops actual ingots):
One of my own mob variants, "red husks",. which are otherwise the same as "yellow" husks / the ones added in vanilla:
There are also biome-specific silverfish variants which naturally spawn underground; only ones spawned form spawners or attacked by a player can hide in blocks (which only includes stone variants and red sandstone as I didn't add variants of infested blocks for every biome-specific block, themselves a special variant of stone or "biome stone", not actual hardened clay, sandstone, etc, which they drop and count as in statistics):
After that I found a "circular room cave system", which is largely made up of circular rooms (or "voids" as the Wiki decided to start calling them at some point; the original article for caves from 2013, which also aptly describes large cave systems) linked with relatively small tunnels; this was one of the first variants of "special" cave systems I added during the development of TMCWv4 in 2016 (before then there were only "normal" caves, not modified much from vanilla, larger caves and ravines, and "colossal cave systems", similar to the largest and densest cave system in my first world (which it actually still is even after a decade, I've found larger cave systems/complexes but not with the density over such a large area):
Locations of circular room cave systems:
1. 264 -56
A more recent minor feature is a "vertical pit cave", made up of several "ravine segments" randomly scattered within an area, which are the cylindrical sections that make up a ravine (this can often be seen in vanilla where they intersect water; as they vary in width and height the shorter ones are able to generate, leading to lines of columns of air under oceans; this also makes it easy to follow otherwise broken-up ravines by digging from one section to the next).
Interestingly this first caving session was quite similar to the first one in TMCWv5, where I first found a circular room cave system (which generate once every 2400 chunks, or one every 24 days at the rate I explore), then a mineshaft. Here are the statistics for the session, with more than 4,000 resource blocks and 3,500 ore mined; the number of mobs killed was significantly lower than average (about 500 per session in TMCWv5) due to the abundance of unlit caves nearby, which will drop off as I establish a core area that has been mostly lit up, as well as not exploring any larger caves (which can have exceedingly large numbers of mobs):
Maybe the most astounding thing about my caving is how much this one session impacted the total amount of resources I've collected so far in this world:
I collected 18 more coal after I made this screenshot, otherwise the difference from above reflects what I collected while caving:
Or how quickly I collected them, averaging one ore mined every 3.5 seconds and 1036 mined per hour; it is also notable how much shorter this session was than any of the previous, which averaged more than 4 hours, reflecting a pattern also seen in other worlds:
I'll also note that while I'll start using a "Vein Miner" enchantment once I find it (and a biome with rubies, for reducing the prior work penalty) it doesn't actually have much of an impact on my overall rates since the time spent actually mining ore is only a fraction of the total time I spend, as seen in this table of the lifetime statistics while caving in TMCWv5, also shown is a 4 month period from my first world (more recently I averaged 866 ore per hour over 8 months). This also shows that while I've already found so many mineshafts they are much less common overall than in vanilla (even my first world was modded to prevent them from generating in denser cave systems, removing about 20%. One major difference from vanilla is that vanilla makes them less common within 1280 blocks of the origin, around 10-20% as common at the distances I've explored so far, so you are much less likely to find many near spawn):
Here is a MCMap rendering of the area I explored, and in-game maps (centered at 512,512 and 512,-512); the area shown on the maps is misleadingly large due to the 128 block update radius (believe it or not, I've actually thought of reducing it, at least without some upgrade):
Also, there was one last thing I did for the first time at the end of the session - repair my pickaxe, which cost 43 levels to restore 1171 durability with one unit; despite having three times the durability of diamond amethyst effectively has only 3/4 the durability because only unit (or very damaged sacrifices) can be used, and even then the repair cost is so high that I had to increase the cap from 39 to 49 levels (this only applies to amethyst items):
At this rate I have three more days until I run out of stockpiled resources (just 3 units) but I could go on for four more before I run out of durability, and worst-case, need to branch-mine for more (this is a major advantage of incremental repairs, I can just repair each item when needed or possible, e.g. repair all three pieces of armor one after another, then catch up on my pickaxe, XP is not an issue even with the much higher costs. In my first world I often have to consider how to repair items so one doesn't run out of durability before I can repair it, and use/wear sacrificial items) and I should find more amethyst by then (a zoomed-in view of the amethyst I found in TMCWv5, most of the days I found some would be from a single deposit), either as ore or chest loot; over the long term I find enough to very slowly accumulate a surplus (this is without Fortune).
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 only been caving for a few days but I've already found so much more than in any other world, including two large caves, one with a volume of over 100,000 blocks, and the largest toroidal cave that can possibly generate, with all three caves having a total combined volume of over 230,000 blocks:
I first found the toroidal cave, a variant of cave which is shaped like a donut or ring, as seen in the lower-right above, and can reach up to 80 blocks in diameter with a tunnel diameter of 28 blocks - which happened to be how large it was after I analyzed it; on average there will be about one cave this large within 1536 blocks of the origin so I've already found it (there may be more, or none, in any given seed. It is interesting that my last world had one relatively close to spawn, and another nearly as large, except I never actually found them because I added a larger variant after I'd generated the area it was in; I did eventually find a max-size cave, right outside the 1536 boundary):
Next I found my first "large" cave, defined as one with a volume of at least 25,000 blocks, or roughly the size of the largest known caves in vanilla 1.6.4 (caves exceeding 30,000, or even 35,000 should be possible but would be incredibly rare), in this case with a volume of about 46,000 blocks, in the lower-left of the image above:
After that I found an even larger cave with a volume of 105,000 blocks, which I consider to be a "giant" cave, as also indicated by the "type", where "type 1" is similar in structure to vanilla caves/tunnels and has an average size similar to a fairly large vanilla cave, with a very wide range. "type 2" averages much larger and generates in a different way, as three tunnels from the starting chunk (instead of one) with two of them being smaller and branching (vanilla caves branch at the end of the first/main tunnel) for a total of 7 tunnels. Another difference is that "type 2" is reduced in size when within 512 blocks of the origin, they don't actually often reach 100,000 blocks in this case but this one happened to generate in such a way as to maximize its volume, with a very long and relatively straight tunnel instead of the a more typical twisted mass:
A bit further in; the end of the tunnel I came in from is already being obscured by fog:
A look down the long tunnel, with a zoomed-in view below:
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that part of the cave came within a dozen blocks of spawn, this also shows how much ground they can cover (the second map wasn't at the easternmost end, just the main chamber) and this cave is still relatively small compared to how big they can get; the largest caves and ravines can extend nearly 400 blocks from end to end:
This also contributed to killing more than 600 mobs in a single session for the first time in this world, with the average otherwise increasing significantly since the first session; my method of exploring these caves is to run in, or around the edge (at first), and place torches, then retreat to kill a wave of mobs:
You can also guess which achievement I got in the cave (the smaller one would have easily worked as well as it was still about 100 blocks across):
If you are wondering how this world compares to previous worlds, in TMCWv5 I found the first large cave on the third day, with a similar size to the smaller one I recently found, while it took 37 days before I found the first giant cave (which ended up being the largest cave I ever found, 584,000 blocks). In TMCWv4 it took about 3 months to find the first giant cave, which were much rarer back then and I considered them to have a volume of only 50,000 or more (TMCWv5 made them much more common and added much larger variants and allowed smaller sizes to generate within 512 blocks of the origin, with another increase a short while after and yet another more recently; the underground is so extreme that the average percentage of air is about the same as the peak layer in 1.18; actually, this suggests that even TMCWv4 had a higher average volume, if not total due to the difference in ground depth; I got my data for 1.18 from this site, where you can use the number of bedrock blocks on the lowest layer to calculate the percentages for other blocks, this also suggests that even vanilla 1.7 has more caves near lava and sea levels than 1.18, which is mostly in the middle):
A before and after of the seed I previously played on showing the addition of new large caves and ravines, and an increase in the size of large circular rooms:
A map of all special caves within 256 blocks of spawn (none of these changed since I made the world):
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?
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Curse PremiumAh, one of the great pleasure of playing-modding; getting to see things you really wanted to see.
It must be a moderate amount of hassle to light those roofs. Are you doing it for the pictures or do you go to that trouble to collect exposed ceiling resources?
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.
I mine every ore in sight, even if it just looks like a single coal; this also reveals caves which would have otherwise been missed, which, of course, I also must explore (the only caves I don't mind missing are those entirely disconnected from anything, ones only connected to the surface are hit-and-miss as I don't comb it for entrances, just whatever I stumble across while traveling on the surface).
Also, the things I've found so far aren't that unusual, considering the following random seeds for a 352 block radius centered at 0,0 (entirely within the area where the largest caves are excluded):
For comparison, this is the first seed within 1536 blocks, which has one cave, two ravines, and three mineshafts larger than any I've ever found (excluding mergers of two or more structures, due to the way mineshafts are placed in TMCW it is unlikely I'll ever find anything like the mega-complexes I've found in my first world):
Also, this is what you might expect to find within an area comparable to my first world (3072 blocks, excluding things without a measured size since they don't change once the number of listed results is reached), as well as the number of each feature and the 10 largest caves and ravines within 8192 blocks (1,048,576 chunks):
Within 8192 blocks:
170 colossal cave systems 429 circular room cave systems 423 ravine cave systems 442 vertical cave systems 385 maze cave systems 405 CRM combination cave systems 435 RZV combination cave systems 515 random cave systems 599 ribbed tunnel cave systems 622 zigzag cave systems 498 spiral cave systems 492 large cave cave systems 447 dense cave systems (total size >= 40) 79 giant cave regions 180 network cave regions 9780 total large caves 2506 large caves >= 25000 1240 large caves >= 50000 833 large caves >= 100000 411 large caves >= 200000 248 large caves >= 300000 124 large caves >= 400000 55 large caves >= 500000 14 large caves >= 600000 5 large caves >= 700000 3 large caves >= 800000 1 large caves >= 900000 221 large cave clusters >= 25000 19 large cave clusters >= 50000 18559 total ravines 3103 large ravines >= 25000 1407 large ravines >= 50000 676 large ravines >= 100000 324 large ravines >= 200000 137 large ravines >= 300000 47 large ravines >= 400000 17 large ravines >= 500000 1561 large circular rooms (width >= 34) 1099 toroidal caves 6000 mineshafts 767 large mineshafts (length >= 2000) 130 strongholds Locations of largest caves by volume: 1. -1368 31 7352 (type: 4, length: 474, width: 64, volume: 987252) 2. -1240 30 -7368 (type: 4, length: 500, width: 66, volume: 869219) 3. -5464 31 696 (type: 4, length: 468, width: 60, volume: 813304) 4. 808 34 7224 (type: 3, length: 496, width: 64, volume: 784126) 5. 7848 28 3768 (type: 4, length: 474, width: 54, volume: 744295) 6. 808 32 3384 (type: 4, length: 486, width: 62, volume: 677275) 7. 7720 27 312 (type: 4, length: 426, width: 53, volume: 656178) 8. 808 25 2360 (type: 4, length: 484, width: 55, volume: 648193) 9. 2344 32 568 (type: 4, length: 492, width: 49, volume: 640303) 10. -8024 24 -5192 (type: 4, length: 472, width: 53, volume: 636485) Locations of largest ravines by volume: 1. -6744 27 2104 (type: 3, length: 368, width: 50, depth: 59, volume: 591711) 2. -7128 35 6328 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 47, depth: 59, volume: 586744) 3. -856 42 -7624 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 50, depth: 59, volume: 586564) 4. -3928 36 3384 (type: 4, length: 370, width: 49, depth: 59, volume: 586420) 5. 1064 24 5816 (type: 4, length: 372, width: 48, depth: 58, volume: 551296) 6. -7000 41 -8136 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 46, depth: 59, volume: 548428) 7. 1192 32 5944 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 43, depth: 59, volume: 544937) 8. 4136 34 -2888 (type: 4, length: 356, width: 45, depth: 59, volume: 535088) 9. 808 32 2488 (type: 4, length: 384, width: 42, depth: 59, volume: 532353) 10. -4952 35 -5064 (type: 4, length: 352, width: 46, depth: 59, volume: 531822)This is the same seed in vanilla; the largest cave reaches 19,000 while the largest ravine reaches 33,000 (compared to TMCW ravines are much larger on 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?
That didn't take long:
Only a week of caving and I've already found a Cherry Grove, as a sub-biome of the Big Oak Forest I saw on the day I created this world, although while a relatively uncommon biome at about 0.75% of land a significant proportion generates as sub-biomes within other biomes (Plains, Hilly Plains, Forest Mountains, Big Oak Forest, Meadow, and Flower Forest), with a 1/128 chance of a full-size biome within "normal" regions (not "hot" or "cold").
I also found a Savanna, with something quite interesting in it:
The cave opening seen on the left leads to the second largest cave I've found in this world, with a volume of 94,000 blocks:
-72 33 264 (type: 2, length: 284, width: 34, volume: 94499)
Also, this shows why I light up the ceilings of these caves, the amount of resources can be considerable, considering that about half the surface area is in the ceiling, and since most mobs have been dealt with it takes less time to access them than it took to light up the floor; normal caves can also generate on top of large caves; with numerous such caves in the ceiling, including one which kept dropping zombies down from a dungeon:
These show the scaffolding I erect to access the ceiling, the length varies, with up to 2 stacks of cobblestone placed before tearing it down and erecting a new one:
This is a screenshot of my map wall, a MCMap rendering of what I've explored so far, and additional screenshots of the Birch Forest and TMCW Mega Taiga I noted on the first day; some of the birch trees are larger than usual, even including a variant with a 2x2 trunk (every vanilla sapling has such a variant. And yes, I'll note that Mojang apparently considered updating Birch Forest at one time but cancelled it (or was that a failed biome vote?), my first additions were the addition of "poplar trees" and "Poplar Grove" as a sub-biome back in 2015):
Another notable discovery includes one of the largest single mineshafts I've found, with 4,120 blocks of corridors and nearly 1,000 rails, two-thirds of the total I've collected so far (already at 1,600, while considerably higher than what I averaged over the long-term in TMCWv5 this is still lower than what I collected in my first world and even that is a bit lower than pure vanilla; well, actually, I wouldn't bother collecting most of them without at least "rail blocks"):
136 37 184 (span: 11, size: 387, length: 4120), 983 rails, 12 chests, 6 spawners; 184x221x36 blocks
Most of this came from the mineshaft, as well as some caves in and around it:
As seen in a Superflat world:
The mineshaft also had the first "double spawner" that I've found in this world, with two spawners in a single corridor, an intended feature which replaces a vanilla bug where two can generate in the same corridor; unlike vanilla these are consistent, including the exact positions of the spawners (in vanilla this depends on which part of a corridor that spans multiple chunks was placed first) and they can never be right next to each other (always at least one support between them, thus they only generate in corridors with 3-4):
This shows some other changes I made to mineshafts; all parts, not just corridors and crossings, replace air below them with wooden platforms, not readily apparent is a change where the floor is included when the game checks if a new piece will collide with the rest of the structure so there is always at least one block between them (many cases of mineshafts that run on top of each other are not due to separate structures but simply the failure to account for the floor. This also makes mineshafts in TMCW generally less dense than in vanilla even as they can get larger overall):
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?
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Curse PremiumThat's only one small piece of the scaffolding you'd need though, right? Just seems to me like that's a lot of work.
Losing sub-biomes is one of the big losses with the current generations system; something I'm planning to at least partially remedy with my Forests mod. Adding more tree styles like you have could be a good tool, although it would be a lot of work and I'm not sure how to make them all growable with saplings.
Floors in mineshafts - another thing Mojang really should have done in the 15 years they're currently trumpeting in my launcher.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Better Forests Varied and beautiful trees and forests, in modern Minecraft.