I think it would be pretty great to be able to have the old world gen from alpha and beta, mixed with the adventure update gen, AND the modern cave update worldgen, all in the same world. Same thing with biomes as well. I think it would be nice to have another biome that looks like the old neon green one too. maybe call it the "Fresh Growth" biome or something. I don't know, I just think it would be neat to combine all aspects into one single thing. Even though the old "biomes" in beta weren't very different from eachother, I still would like to see those as well. Maybe as rarer variants of the normal forest biome. I know there are already datapacks/mods that can do something similar but usually those change the world to only have one type of worldgen. It would be cool to have your cake and eat it too, you know? What do you all think?
Possible? Yea. But connecting heightmaps of different generators and computation speed is gonna be an adventure. I guess just higher mountains and new caves with beta terrain should be realistic tho
By "mixing", are you talking about making a terrain generator that averages aspects of all prior ones, or actually having the different ones separate in the same world? The last part of your post makes me think it might be the latter?
I think that would be incredibly jarring, and I wouldn't want it.
If you instead meant the former, the current terrain generator does do a fair job of averaging things from both past and present (while introducing its own thing). There's a mix of flat land and non-flat land, and while it's rare, there are spots that resemble what beta and earlier had going on.
Caves are also mixed, so the only way to adjust that is to bring them back to the way they used to be before by lessening cave quantity or reduce the amount of the larger ones. I don't think those would be positive changes, but that's just my subjective opinion.
It's easy to come up with ideas that are "let's mix them all for the best of all of them", but the problem is that something like this is mutually exclusive, or rather, it's a bit of a zero sum game. That means, let's say you wanted to make terrain less flat. Well, now instead of something like 90% of the terrain being relatively flat, you make it something like 40%. You gained more height variety, but lost flat terrain. Everything is a tradeoff; you can't just add the best parts of things and not trade anything off. "Having your cake and eating it" quite literally can't happen here. You have to find some compromise/balance between the two different things you want.
The idea is also vague. You would need to say what, exactly, you want the terrain generator doing down to pretty detailed levels.
I personally find the current one is already pretty close to a balance of many aspects.. The old ones were far more limited in scope, so "mixing them all together" would just effectively mean muting the current one down.
As for biomes, beta actually did what current versions do in that the biome overlays the terrain as a "paint layer". Release 1.0 to 1.16/1.17 had the biomes control the terrain generation, which is partly why those worlds became repetitive far more quickly. "You've seen one X biome, you've seen them all" was the complaint, and all terrain generators will truly become repetitive on a far out enough scale, but it was pretty repetitive, pretty quick in those versions. Versions 1.0 through 1.6 tried to disguise this repetitiveness by making biomes have no natural order (and make them random instead), and then when 1.7 brought the climate system, it exposed the flaw that was there all along. It's a shame it took until 1.18 to rectify that. I would really not like to see anything about that come back. So when release 1.0 (or well, beta 1.8) happened and everyone said "let's go back to biomes not dictating terrain generation", 1.18 listened and did that. So you could say 1.18 is doing what beta did, except it has more/different biomes (and obviously the same exact underlying terrain generation).
There are certainly things, albeit only a very few in my opinion, that beta did better with biomes, and perhaps the prime one was forests. In at least some of the forests (which I think beta called "rain forests"?), large trees were more common, and trees were more spread out. I think one of the things of "terrain generation" that is sorely in need of improvement isn't strictly a terrain generation change itself, but specifically a change to this decorator layer (the trees, in this case) because forests have been rather poor ever since beta 1.8/release 1.0. And now that terrain generation changed with 1.18, it's standing out even more as something that needs changed. Of course, I don't think the answer is to simply make them like the forests of beta, but the idea of having the trees less of a ground level obstruction that is so tightly packed would be the goal in my opinion.
But in a practical sense, finding one of those data packs for newer versions, or using a mod for beta 1.7 (or earlier) that brings "modern-esque" terrain generation is usually your best option. I've yet to see a version, official or via a mod, that truly gives the player control of terrain generation. Some versions give control of specific things, but I've yet to see one allow you to truly control most things.
I think that my own "alternate reality"* mod is a good mix of old and new world generation, with much more variety in biomes but still with a reasonably small scale (suitable for exploration on foot, if you want larger biomes there are options for that including my own "medium biomes" which is between default and large).
*This term refers to mods which imagine the game heading in some other direction than the official timeline, such mods are popular among old version players, the most classic one being "Better Than Wolves", the name a reference to how they thought Mojang could have added much better features than wolves, much like my mod is "TheMasterCaver's World [Generation Mod]", due to my despise of world generation since 1.7 (the implementation, that is, not specific features/biomes).
Some examples of terrain:
A large Savanna Mountains biome:
Rocky Mountains,, which creates large mountains with relatively smooth slopes by nesting rings of biomes with successively greater heights:
OG Extreme Hills (as they were before 1.7 made them much smoother):
Forest Mountains (essentially Extreme Hills with more trees):
Some more "normal" terrain which still have a fair amount of height variation (the typical biome has more height variation than a "hills" biome in 1.6.4, and a noise field varies the height parameters over scales of around 1000 blocks), also note the size of the trees in the "Mega Taiga" on the right (my own biome and trees which I originally added before the vanilla Mega Taiga in 1.7):
More mountainous terrain:
On the left is a "Winter Forest" (snowy forest biome), which vanilla could use (in general snowy climates, which had existed since even before 1.7 but snowy biomes (Taiga) weren't exclusive to them until then, are rather plain due to the lack of common biomes, just Ice Plains and (Cold) Taiga, unchanged between 1.6 and 1.7 except for the possible rare variant like Ice Plains Spikes):
One of the more unique biomes as far as terrain goes, "icelands", with generally mountainous terrain and spikes based on those in "Mesa Bryce" in 1.7:
Of course, not everything is so mountainous (I suspect all those screenshots of Beta terrain are just the more extreme cases, else, why do people like such terrain so much? You don't even have e.g. ender pearls, much less elytra, to help get over it):
The same variety seen on the surface also applies to the underground, with over a dozen different variations of caves and more variation in the sizes of ravines and mineshafts, more challenging dungeons with more mobs, etc. "Normal" caves, or variants similar to them, occupying the majority of the underground as far as exploration goes (if not volume but it takes a lot longer to explore the same volume compared to a large open cave) are also based on those from 1.6.4 and earlier, with additional variation in tunnel/room width/length/etc on a regional scale, as opposed to the the watered-down generation since 1.7 (and still as of 1.18, I decompiled the code and found the same values for the density and chance of cave systems as 1.7. 1.18 also still has the same lowered frequency of mineshafts and dungeons (since 1.18 the latter seems to be closer to 1.6.4 according to ChunkBase but not when adjusted for the underground volume) as since 1.7, and 1.18 made ravines rarer, and not really any different (they indicate they may be deeper and slightly longer but that's it); there is also more variation in underground blocks, not always just boring gray stone everywhere (or slightly darker and obnoxiously harder deepslate):
A diagram of all the main variants of caves in TMCW, followed by a couple maps showing all and "special" features only, which also interact in better ways since they exclude other features from generating too close to them, mineshafts rarely overlap, and especially not to the degree they can in vanilla, even within the same structure (i.e. corridors running right on top of each other):
Some screenshots of larger caves I explored, showing off the "underground biomes" feature:
Desert; blocks are based on sandstone with sand lining the floors and the occasional cactus/dead bush, the huge mushrooms are a feature that randomly generate undergone in any biome, more in some areas/biomes:
Quartz Desert (white sand desert):
Mesa:
Badlands (similar to a red sandstone desert underground, with stained clay formations above the surface):
Icelands (a biome similar to Mesa but made out of variants of packed ice):
Ice Hills (predominately packed ice with patches of snow blocks on the floors of caves):
Ice Plains Spikes (predominately snow blocks), this also shows how "ice" biomes" have water instead of lava in the lower layers (otherwise, underground lakes, along with a much larger variant and lakes of magma blocks, generate as they did before 1.18 which removed water lakes):
Cherry Grove; stone and granite are swapped (that is, instead of mostly stone with pockets of granite it is mostly granite with pockets of stone). You may also notice that mineshafts use cherry wood, with the wood type generally matching the trees in the biome they are centered in, instead of always being oak:
Volcanic Wastelands; there are more lava lakes and springs, veins of magma blocks, and magma cubes spawn instead of slimes (slimes will also split into magma cubes when they die in lava so they may be found anywhere it can), not as visible is the swapping of stone and andesite, similar to Cherry Grove:
Of course, this is just what I see as perfect world generation, everybody will have their own ideas, which is where mods come into play (can't depend on in-game customization when they keep changing it, e.g. remember the old "customized" world type in 18-1.12?).
Interestingly, there was one time where Mojang actually did plan to maintain an older world generator; when they added jungles to 1.2 they added a hidden world type called "default_1_1" which omitted jungles and generated terrain and biomes in the same manner as 1.1, which isn't hard when the only change was adding jungles, otherwise with the same biome and noise map, unlike the changes in 1.7 or 1.18, and worked as such up to 1.6.4, but even here they decided against just updating all older worlds to use it, so I've been told (otherwise you'd have to edit the save files to get jungles):
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldenAgeMinecraft/comments/r1yif7/fyi_you_can_force_11_world_generation_in_release/ (a comment says that updating from 1.1 only uses default_1_1 from 12w03a, until 12w07a and worlds from previous snapshots will be set back to default. interestingly, in some bizarre bug Mojang also left this world type in long after 1.7, even breaking 1.7 generation (you get the 1.1 biomes in "hot" zones, sadly, no snowy taigas since in another bizarre move they made them warm and added a new cold biome instead of adding a warm variant, since this means all older worlds will have rain in taigas. I suspect they did this because they hated snowy biomes next to deserts so much, but forgot that existing snow won't simply melt on its own, only from block light)
Do an unobtained run. Make a world in the oldest version you can get and keep updating it until you reach x version you choose or the current version, spending a bit of time in each version to explore an area and collect version-unique objects.
Do an unobtained run. Make a world in the oldest version you can get and keep updating it until you reach x version you choose or the current version, spending a bit of time in each version to explore an area and collect version-unique objects.
This is not the same because of biomes getting lost (defaulting to ocean) and foliage colors getting lost. But the idea in general isnt bad.
I think that my own "alternate reality"* mod is a good mix of old and new world generation, with much more variety in biomes but still with a reasonably small scale (suitable for exploration on foot, if you want larger biomes there are options for that including my own "medium biomes" which is between default and large).
I also think your mod to be a good start with this
why do people like such terrain so much? You don't even have e.g. ender pearls, much less elytra, to help get over it):
My personal opnion is that the high variating terrain is super interesting to explore and look at. But it also helps me building my castles over it, as i use the terrain as "suggestion" in how i form my castles. So i never flatten areas and use the existing terrain to merge with usually. IMO any terrain should have atleast the heightparameters of vanilla 1.6 plains. Maybe mixed with some spots or a wall of Vanilla 1.6 Extreme Hills at the edge. This looks very good even for large area imo. I strongly remind me to the beta 1.8/1.0 time when this mix was common
My personal opnion is that the high variating terrain is super interesting to explore and look at. But it also helps me building my castles over it, as i use the terrain as "suggestion" in how i form my castles. So i never flatten areas and use the existing terrain to merge with usually. IMO any terrain should have atleast the heightparameters of vanilla 1.6 plains. Maybe mixed with some spots or a wall of Vanilla 1.6 Extreme Hills at the edge. This looks very good even for large area imo. I strongly remind me to the beta 1.8/1.0 time when this mix was common
I don't know how common it actually is in Beta but it always comes up, including when people post screenshots of normal gamplay from that time; some terrain like that is nice (mainly for looks) but not if it is everywhere (the same issue Amplified had), and simply making all biomes have such variation causes issues with structures, which is why I added separate variants of biomes with increased height variation while reducing the height variation of biomes with villages (so you now have Plains and Hilly Plains / Hilly Plains Hills, with villages only generating in Plains, and unlike since 1.10 they can only generate within the boundaries of a valid spawn biome. The underlying spawn rate, as well as chance of successfully generating in a marginal location (near the edge of a spawn biome) were increased to make them about as common as in vanilla. Other structures measure the average ground level and height variation around them to decide if it is suitable for generation (all these are 2x2 chunks or less, the maximum allowed size of a single feature placed all at once), the failure rates are high enough, combined with biome frequencies, that they may attempt to generate as often as once every 144 chunks (12x12 chunks, compared to 1024 / 32x32 in vanilla) and still only generate once every 25-30,000 chunks).
I think it would be pretty great to be able to have the old world gen from alpha and beta, mixed with the adventure update gen, AND the modern cave update worldgen, all in the same world. Same thing with biomes as well. I think it would be nice to have another biome that looks like the old neon green one too. maybe call it the "Fresh Growth" biome or something. I don't know, I just think it would be neat to combine all aspects into one single thing. Even though the old "biomes" in beta weren't very different from eachother, I still would like to see those as well. Maybe as rarer variants of the normal forest biome. I know there are already datapacks/mods that can do something similar but usually those change the world to only have one type of worldgen. It would be cool to have your cake and eat it too, you know? What do you all think?
Possible? Yea. But connecting heightmaps of different generators and computation speed is gonna be an adventure. I guess just higher mountains and new caves with beta terrain should be realistic tho
Minecraft 1.6.4 Performance Comparison
By "mixing", are you talking about making a terrain generator that averages aspects of all prior ones, or actually having the different ones separate in the same world? The last part of your post makes me think it might be the latter?
I think that would be incredibly jarring, and I wouldn't want it.
If you instead meant the former, the current terrain generator does do a fair job of averaging things from both past and present (while introducing its own thing). There's a mix of flat land and non-flat land, and while it's rare, there are spots that resemble what beta and earlier had going on.
Caves are also mixed, so the only way to adjust that is to bring them back to the way they used to be before by lessening cave quantity or reduce the amount of the larger ones. I don't think those would be positive changes, but that's just my subjective opinion.
It's easy to come up with ideas that are "let's mix them all for the best of all of them", but the problem is that something like this is mutually exclusive, or rather, it's a bit of a zero sum game. That means, let's say you wanted to make terrain less flat. Well, now instead of something like 90% of the terrain being relatively flat, you make it something like 40%. You gained more height variety, but lost flat terrain. Everything is a tradeoff; you can't just add the best parts of things and not trade anything off. "Having your cake and eating it" quite literally can't happen here. You have to find some compromise/balance between the two different things you want.
The idea is also vague. You would need to say what, exactly, you want the terrain generator doing down to pretty detailed levels.
I personally find the current one is already pretty close to a balance of many aspects.. The old ones were far more limited in scope, so "mixing them all together" would just effectively mean muting the current one down.
As for biomes, beta actually did what current versions do in that the biome overlays the terrain as a "paint layer". Release 1.0 to 1.16/1.17 had the biomes control the terrain generation, which is partly why those worlds became repetitive far more quickly. "You've seen one X biome, you've seen them all" was the complaint, and all terrain generators will truly become repetitive on a far out enough scale, but it was pretty repetitive, pretty quick in those versions. Versions 1.0 through 1.6 tried to disguise this repetitiveness by making biomes have no natural order (and make them random instead), and then when 1.7 brought the climate system, it exposed the flaw that was there all along. It's a shame it took until 1.18 to rectify that. I would really not like to see anything about that come back. So when release 1.0 (or well, beta 1.8) happened and everyone said "let's go back to biomes not dictating terrain generation", 1.18 listened and did that. So you could say 1.18 is doing what beta did, except it has more/different biomes (and obviously the same exact underlying terrain generation).
There are certainly things, albeit only a very few in my opinion, that beta did better with biomes, and perhaps the prime one was forests. In at least some of the forests (which I think beta called "rain forests"?), large trees were more common, and trees were more spread out. I think one of the things of "terrain generation" that is sorely in need of improvement isn't strictly a terrain generation change itself, but specifically a change to this decorator layer (the trees, in this case) because forests have been rather poor ever since beta 1.8/release 1.0. And now that terrain generation changed with 1.18, it's standing out even more as something that needs changed. Of course, I don't think the answer is to simply make them like the forests of beta, but the idea of having the trees less of a ground level obstruction that is so tightly packed would be the goal in my opinion.
But in a practical sense, finding one of those data packs for newer versions, or using a mod for beta 1.7 (or earlier) that brings "modern-esque" terrain generation is usually your best option. I've yet to see a version, official or via a mod, that truly gives the player control of terrain generation. Some versions give control of specific things, but I've yet to see one allow you to truly control most things.
*This term refers to mods which imagine the game heading in some other direction than the official timeline, such mods are popular among old version players, the most classic one being "Better Than Wolves", the name a reference to how they thought Mojang could have added much better features than wolves, much like my mod is "TheMasterCaver's World [Generation Mod]", due to my despise of world generation since 1.7 (the implementation, that is, not specific features/biomes).
Rocky Mountains,, which creates large mountains with relatively smooth slopes by nesting rings of biomes with successively greater heights:
OG Extreme Hills (as they were before 1.7 made them much smoother):
Forest Mountains (essentially Extreme Hills with more trees):
Some more "normal" terrain which still have a fair amount of height variation (the typical biome has more height variation than a "hills" biome in 1.6.4, and a noise field varies the height parameters over scales of around 1000 blocks), also note the size of the trees in the "Mega Taiga" on the right (my own biome and trees which I originally added before the vanilla Mega Taiga in 1.7):
More mountainous terrain:
On the left is a "Winter Forest" (snowy forest biome), which vanilla could use (in general snowy climates, which had existed since even before 1.7 but snowy biomes (Taiga) weren't exclusive to them until then, are rather plain due to the lack of common biomes, just Ice Plains and (Cold) Taiga, unchanged between 1.6 and 1.7 except for the possible rare variant like Ice Plains Spikes):
One of the more unique biomes as far as terrain goes, "icelands", with generally mountainous terrain and spikes based on those in "Mesa Bryce" in 1.7:
Of course, not everything is so mountainous (I suspect all those screenshots of Beta terrain are just the more extreme cases, else, why do people like such terrain so much? You don't even have e.g. ender pearls, much less elytra, to help get over it):
The same variety seen on the surface also applies to the underground, with over a dozen different variations of caves and more variation in the sizes of ravines and mineshafts, more challenging dungeons with more mobs, etc. "Normal" caves, or variants similar to them, occupying the majority of the underground as far as exploration goes (if not volume but it takes a lot longer to explore the same volume compared to a large open cave) are also based on those from 1.6.4 and earlier, with additional variation in tunnel/room width/length/etc on a regional scale, as opposed to the the watered-down generation since 1.7 (and still as of 1.18, I decompiled the code and found the same values for the density and chance of cave systems as 1.7. 1.18 also still has the same lowered frequency of mineshafts and dungeons (since 1.18 the latter seems to be closer to 1.6.4 according to ChunkBase but not when adjusted for the underground volume) as since 1.7, and 1.18 made ravines rarer, and not really any different (they indicate they may be deeper and slightly longer but that's it); there is also more variation in underground blocks, not always just boring gray stone everywhere (or slightly darker and obnoxiously harder deepslate):
Some screenshots of larger caves I explored, showing off the "underground biomes" feature:
Desert; blocks are based on sandstone with sand lining the floors and the occasional cactus/dead bush, the huge mushrooms are a feature that randomly generate undergone in any biome, more in some areas/biomes:
Quartz Desert (white sand desert):
Mesa:
Badlands (similar to a red sandstone desert underground, with stained clay formations above the surface):
Icelands (a biome similar to Mesa but made out of variants of packed ice):
Ice Hills (predominately packed ice with patches of snow blocks on the floors of caves):
Ice Plains Spikes (predominately snow blocks), this also shows how "ice" biomes" have water instead of lava in the lower layers (otherwise, underground lakes, along with a much larger variant and lakes of magma blocks, generate as they did before 1.18 which removed water lakes):
Cherry Grove; stone and granite are swapped (that is, instead of mostly stone with pockets of granite it is mostly granite with pockets of stone). You may also notice that mineshafts use cherry wood, with the wood type generally matching the trees in the biome they are centered in, instead of always being oak:
Volcanic Wastelands; there are more lava lakes and springs, veins of magma blocks, and magma cubes spawn instead of slimes (slimes will also split into magma cubes when they die in lava so they may be found anywhere it can), not as visible is the swapping of stone and andesite, similar to Cherry Grove:
Of course, this is just what I see as perfect world generation, everybody will have their own ideas, which is where mods come into play (can't depend on in-game customization when they keep changing it, e.g. remember the old "customized" world type in 18-1.12?).
Interestingly, there was one time where Mojang actually did plan to maintain an older world generator; when they added jungles to 1.2 they added a hidden world type called "default_1_1" which omitted jungles and generated terrain and biomes in the same manner as 1.1, which isn't hard when the only change was adding jungles, otherwise with the same biome and noise map, unlike the changes in 1.7 or 1.18, and worked as such up to 1.6.4, but even here they decided against just updating all older worlds to use it, so I've been told (otherwise you'd have to edit the save files to get jungles):
https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldenAgeMinecraft/comments/r1yif7/fyi_you_can_force_11_world_generation_in_release/ (a comment says that updating from 1.1 only uses default_1_1 from 12w03a, until 12w07a and worlds from previous snapshots will be set back to default. interestingly, in some bizarre bug Mojang also left this world type in long after 1.7, even breaking 1.7 generation (you get the 1.1 biomes in "hot" zones, sadly, no snowy taigas since in another bizarre move they made them warm and added a new cold biome instead of adding a warm variant, since this means all older worlds will have rain in taigas. I suspect they did this because they hated snowy biomes next to deserts so much, but forgot that existing snow won't simply melt on its own, only from block light)
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?
Do an unobtained run. Make a world in the oldest version you can get and keep updating it until you reach x version you choose or the current version, spending a bit of time in each version to explore an area and collect version-unique objects.
This is not the same because of biomes getting lost (defaulting to ocean) and foliage colors getting lost. But the idea in general isnt bad.
I also think your mod to be a good start with this
My personal opnion is that the high variating terrain is super interesting to explore and look at. But it also helps me building my castles over it, as i use the terrain as "suggestion" in how i form my castles. So i never flatten areas and use the existing terrain to merge with usually. IMO any terrain should have atleast the heightparameters of vanilla 1.6 plains. Maybe mixed with some spots or a wall of Vanilla 1.6 Extreme Hills at the edge. This looks very good even for large area imo. I strongly remind me to the beta 1.8/1.0 time when this mix was common
Minecraft 1.6.4 Performance Comparison
I don't know how common it actually is in Beta but it always comes up, including when people post screenshots of normal gamplay from that time; some terrain like that is nice (mainly for looks) but not if it is everywhere (the same issue Amplified had), and simply making all biomes have such variation causes issues with structures, which is why I added separate variants of biomes with increased height variation while reducing the height variation of biomes with villages (so you now have Plains and Hilly Plains / Hilly Plains Hills, with villages only generating in Plains, and unlike since 1.10 they can only generate within the boundaries of a valid spawn biome. The underlying spawn rate, as well as chance of successfully generating in a marginal location (near the edge of a spawn biome) were increased to make them about as common as in vanilla. Other structures measure the average ground level and height variation around them to decide if it is suitable for generation (all these are 2x2 chunks or less, the maximum allowed size of a single feature placed all at once), the failure rates are high enough, combined with biome frequencies, that they may attempt to generate as often as once every 144 chunks (12x12 chunks, compared to 1024 / 32x32 in vanilla) and still only generate once every 25-30,000 chunks).
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?