21 ms·

One decade later, Minecraft world generation is interesting again

485 points by poser-boy 5y ago

CodeGlitch 5y ago
I'm new to Minecraft. Does anyone know if I will need to start a new world to benefit from the 1.18 terrain improvements, or will it work it's way into an existing save game?
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Ok from pcgamer: > Always remember to back up your old save files before loading them into the newest version of the game. With the new changes to world generation, Mojang say that new chunks generated in worlds you bring forward to 1.18 should better blend with the existing terrain in your save file. So long to big flat chunk borders in old worlds!
- tehbeard 5y ago
  It should work with an existing world, but as always, make backups! As for integration. This time round instead of the "harsh" borders we've gotten before (where new and old chunks meet, often resulting in sheer cliffs due to height differences) the borders will be blended and smoothed. Your old chunks will also be upgraded, the bedrock that was at Y0-5 will turn into the deepslate block, and you get the full 0 to -64 Y generated underneath. Ethoslab, a youtuber with a very old world save, is on 1.18 now, and they've got one of the new lush caves in the new negative Y generation under their base.
  - CodeGlitch 5y ago
    Great reply thanks
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Tepix 5y ago
  Usually you will have to go to areas you haven't been to previously to get to see the new world generation. If you have done a ton of exploration it may be a long walk from your spawn point.
jokoon 5y ago
They should really enable a sharded server networking protocol to allow some MMO elements. Each server would handle a limited area and players would automatically connect to a server when they go to a certain distance. I'm sure players would pay to access it if it worked.
- lloydatkinson 5y ago
  That was notch's original idea for portals in multiplayer I recall reading. A portal would take you to another server.
- lom 5y ago
  I remember seeing a project like that (maybe even here, on HN), but unfortunately I can’t find it
  - c-fe 5y ago
    Maybe this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224
  - Malp 5y ago
    WorldQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224
- jon-wood 5y ago
  This is how the big multiplayer servers available via Bedrock edition work, not so much for distance, but for different game modes. Unfortunately players pay by buying predatory micro-transaction items, which I find near unacceptable in a game so squarely targeted at children.
- Qub3d 5y ago
  Hypixel has done that to an extent. The way most servers do it nowadays with with a server proxy that shunts client requests to a specified server transparently -- you "world hop" using in-game mechanics (i.e. walking through a portal, clicking on a sign) https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/about-bungeecord/ https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/about-bungeecord/ And as others have already mentioned, WorldQL is an effort to transparently replicate and shard the world without even requiring "world hopping"
smoldesu 5y ago
It's kinda remarkable how much the new update overhauled world generation. If you've been standing on the sidelines, waiting for "the big one" to draw you back in, I was greatly surprised at how much fun I had exploring some surprisingly realistic and cool vistas. Canyons don't feel sheer, savannas have remarkable valleys and hills, and the cave generation feels... well, "next-gen" for a lack of a better phrase. I have admittedly been pretty unimpressed with Microsoft's handling of the game up until this point, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how fresh it feels now. Bravo, nu-Mojang.
pleb_nz 5y ago
This has me pumped. Time to try it out again.
ykl 5y ago
The new worldgen is incredible, both above and below the surface. Hats off to everyone at Mojang that worked on this! One of my favorite game memories of all time was the first time I played Minecraft during the alpha days and immediately got lost in the world. For me, going into a 1.18 world and finding a giant mountain chain and then finding a cave on the peak of the mountain that falls all the way into a giant underground ocean at the bottom of the world in a huge cavern complete with underground vegetation… it brought me right back to that sense of exploration and wonder that I remember from the very first time I played Minecraft. Also, I found this datapack (sort of like a mod but doesn’t require patching the game since the game natively supports loading datapack files) called Terralith [1] that extends the 1.18 worldgen with even more cool stuff. Wandering around the new 1.18-style mountains is incredible, and then stumbling across something the resembles Yellowstone National Park added by Terralith is even more incredible. It’s worth a try if you like just wandering around in Minecraft marveling at the scenery. [1] https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/terralith-overworld-evolved-100-biomes-caves-and-more/ https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/terralith-overworl...
- Causality1 5y ago
  I wonder how many if those alpha worlds are preserved. I started when the alpha was free and the beta was pay, and the scope of those alpha worlds was just incredible. There wasn't much in the way of nature in the alpha so all those worlds were more art project than construction.
  - ykl 5y ago
    With the current launcher, you can actually pick which version/update to play, including old versions. For Java Edition, it lists versions all the way back to alpha as options.
    - rightbyte 5y ago
      This is so user-unhostile I wanna cry. Most companies just want the power to force antifeutures on the users nowadays.
aliimran 5y ago
kenjken
ralusek 5y ago
Other things to note. One big one is that the world height limit has increased from 256 blocks to 320, which allows for much more verticality. I think the whole field of world generation is awesome. Perlin noise, and the concepts of "smooth noise" that have come from it, and the clever ways people have found to layer noise and use it to map biomes and heights, and spawn locations, etc. And then, even more impressively, with games like No Man's Sky, you have this concept applied to spherical geometry. I just think it's all so cool. Incidentally, his (Sean Murray, creator of No Man's Sky) is the best talk I've ever seen on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU
bagels 5y ago
Does anyone know if the new generator is used on unexplored parts of previous save games?
- zeta0134 5y ago
  Yes! This update goes so far as to blend chunks around the seams, and will fill out the new cave generation at the bottom of your existing world, replacing the bedrock with deepslate. I'm itching to dive in again once the holidays settle down
- nottorp 5y ago
  Also, you can use mcaselector to delete the parts of your old saved games where you haven't built anything and let them regen with the 1.18 algo. I just did that with a save and the new terrain smoothly blended in with the old.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Yes, and not just unexplored areas, but even underneath previously explored areas in the new space created between Y=0 and Y=-64.
fermentation 5y ago
Super excited to try this out, I haven't played much since the alpha ended. Does anyone know how well the RTX support is? I could never tell if that was meant to be a tech demo or an actual feature.
- lom 5y ago
  RTX support isn’t a thing in the java edition, which is showed off in the article here. But you can get minecraft for windows for free if you already have a java key that’s older than 2018.
- willis936 5y ago
  I've used it with a 3070. I love it. Getting it running requires a little reading and experimenting rather than a toggle in a menu, but when it's running it's wonderful. I stop and stare at many things. Sunset on a village is great, the soft glow around my house is great, true black and light occlusion in caves is great. Mob spawn light rules are unchanged and don't match up with the RT front end, but that rarely matters.
jonwinstanley 5y ago
Presumably this is just for the PC version? Or do console versions ever get the terrain updates?
- ykl 5y ago
  It’s for both Java and Bedrock, so it should be on all currently supported PC, mobile, and console versions. In general Mojang keeps PC and mobile/console at feature parity with each other and releases updates at the same time across all supported versions now, which is nice.
  - jonwinstanley 5y ago
    Really nice. Didn’t expect that to be the case.
    - gambiting 5y ago
      Minecraft has supported cross platform multiplayer for a while now, so it would be really weird if they broke compatibility with PC like this.
      - lhoff 5y ago
        Mimd you, there are two versions of Mimecraft. Java and Bedrock. Both support PC but only Bedrock supports other plattforms. Cross Plattform multiplayer therefore only works with bedrock. Java isn't compatible with bedrock servers and the other way around.
        kuschku 5y ago
        Although there are mods for the Java edition to allow Bedrock clients to connect to Java servers.
        nottorp 5y ago
        > Both support PC but only Bedrock supports other plattforms. You mean Bedrock supports consoles. Java supports Mac and Linux, so it's also multiplatform. Just different platforms.
rland 5y ago
It's been a while since I've played Minecraft, so I can't speak to the newer terrain. But I always thought they could significantly improve the world gen. Perlin noise is cool, but why not try to fully simulate plate tectonics, weather patterns, drainage? It would go a long way if deserts were in the rainshadow of mountain ranges, islands corresponded to real volcanic activity, etc. I guess there is a limit to what you can do with the chunk-by-chunk approach, but I think a certain type of minecraft player stays basically put within a couple dozen chunks. Having worlds "load" on exploration would be a worthwhile tradeoff. I get that this is a hard, but it is interesting, and it's a problem that would captivate an intelligent developer. They have like a million dollars, why not?
- pests 5y ago
  What do you mean having then load on exploration? That's the current state - a chuck isn't generated until you need to load it. This means when you take an old save to a new version any already-loaded chucks you're stuck with but any new exploration causes new world gen on the new version.
  - herghost 5y ago
    Oh wow. I did not realise this was the case. Thank you!
    - pests 5y ago
      I think this actually might be a slight negative tbh - since everything is split into chunks and generated on demand, you lose the ability to do larger passes over multiple chucks at gen time. No real way to do tectonics or weather patterns as you don't necessarily know what's in your chunk neighborhood.
      - alvarlagerlof 5y ago
        You could do much larger chunks on gen.
      - 5y ago
littlestymaar 5y ago
If you like voxel world generation, I strongly advise you to check out Veloren[1], it has a much much deeper worldgen that what Minecraft offers. [1]: https://veloren.net/ https://veloren.net/ the game is still under development but it has been playable for more than a year now.
- shynrou 5y ago
  Looks like a really cool open source project, will definitely check it out.
- poser-boy 5y ago
  Veloren is great. I'm pretty sure it's worldgen uses Simplex noise, rather than the Perlin noise like MC does.
  - tormeh 5y ago
    It uses simulation, like Dwarf Fortress. Of course randomness is involved, but there's a real attempt at realism in the geology, etc.
- astrobe_ 5y ago
  See also Minetest, which has several native map/terrain generators [1]. In addition, one can define other generators as mods using Lua [2]. Mods can define new biomes [4], place buildings [5], roads [3], etc. If you add all that, though, you might there might be some glitches (roads passing through buildings..) but that's part of the fun. [1] https://wiki.minetest.net/Map_generator https://wiki.minetest.net/Map_generator [2] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27374 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27374 [3] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18529 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18529 [4] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=17096 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=17096 [5] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13589 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13589
- sorenjan 5y ago
  > Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust. This is such a meme by now, I have to assume it's an inside joke. Even games mention that they're "written in Rust" in the first sentence in their official presentation, what other programming language communities does this? Why would anyone except other Rust programmers care?
jl6 5y ago
The new terrain is great, but I have mostly exhausted my patience with Minecraft survival. I hope future releases will put some effort into reducing the grindyness. I know many things can be automated but they tend to rely on extremely arcane game mechanics rather than feeling like an intentional part of the game. Some elements of Factorio were inspired by Minecraft. I think Minecraft could now use some inspiration from Factorio.
- itronitron 5y ago
  MC 1.19 has a new 'Allay' mob planned that will pick up and move items for the player. I can see people using this to create some interesting automated systems.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  Have you considered modded to get a little more Factorio in your minecraft? I'm playing the "Create: Above & Beyond" pack. There is grind, the pack gives you a goal (build rocket, go to moon), but how you get there is up to you and the automation isn't quite so arcane as vanilla, and doesn't rely on "magic blocks" (Where you plonk down a single block and it magically does all the things) instead relying on you making a machine/factory line from multiple blocks.
  - curiousgal 5y ago
    I honestly never understood the appeal of vanilla Minecraft. I only bought the game because of the mods! Mods like AE2 or Thermal Expansion is where the fun is at!
  - willis936 5y ago
    I've pushed java far past its breaking point in previous modded minecraft worlds (30 second GC every 30 seconds, some AE2 leak when millions of items are stored). I like many aspects of bedrock edition, most related to performance. I want a gregtech-like experience in bedrock so badly that I'd go as far as making it myself. I just wish the command interface wasn't so janky. When I've done test blocks and interactions in the past I've run into limitations that would prevent my vision. This was maybe 18 months ago, so I don't think much has changed yet.
baby 5y ago
One thing I always hoped, but that never happened: get people’s creations into the game. Randomly get vetted buildings as biomes. People have created insane things and it’s a shame they couldn’t have been integrated directly into the game. Even a few would have been cool. I guess one thing is that structures without life feels empty, so you’d have to generate random monsters or NPCs for each of them.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Isn't that what servers are for? I joined a server once many years ago and found all kinds of truly amazing things that people had built. My favourite was a vast hollowed out mountain. The only way in was through a door right at the top of the mountain which caused you to descend into this beautifully lit cavern. Exploring this server was like exploring an art gallery.
  - baby 5y ago
    It’s not. I’m talking about player structures being randomly incorporated into your own game.
    - globular-toast 5y ago
      That doesn't make much sense to me. The generated world is meant to be like nature while player structures are man-made things created by inhabitants of the world. Something that makes a bit more sense and possibly quite cool would be to incorporate ruins of famous structures into the generated world.
- tehbeard 5y ago
  This might be more feasible-ish in a community effort? I'm not entirely sure how the jigsaw system (the subsystem the game uses for building villages and bastions from a large palette of pre-builts using a set of rules and connectors) integrates with the custom world generator options, but that would seem the best bet for it in a vanilla game. The problem with an "official" player creations is both vetting them and the social backlash because you didn't pick little Timmy's shack. As well as the disjointedness of theme that could occur with a player's playstyle. I play a modpack. Create: Above & Beyond, they've added a bunch of new random structures to the game, but they're all within a similar theme of quasi-medieval for the surface structures, and a few of the underground ones stray a bit more modern.
teekert 5y ago
It was a pleasant surprise this morning when my son and I discovered the vast cave systems below Y=0 in our existing world! Very well done, really cool, we’re having a blast!
globular-toast 5y ago
> I have stopped in recent years since I find it dangerously addictive I forgot this, but that's actually why I stopped playing it. I was in uni around 2007-08 and realised it was using a serious amount of my time and energy. I just quit cold turkey back then. I've barely played any video games since this point, in fact. What I loved about Minecraft initially was the exploration. I got into it during the beta (I think) when there was no mini-map or any "lifelines" you expect from a normal game. One thing that was possible was to go down into cave system, run out of torches, fall somewhere and just be trapped in the dark. The game was so simple there was a very real fear of losing your save file because you got trapped in a cave forever. Are there any other games that have real stakes in them like the early Minecraft versions?
- simonh 5y ago
  A fair few games have an Iron Man mode where they only save on exit, so you can’t revert.
- kuschku 5y ago
  That's what the hardcore mode in Minecraft is for: if you die, the save is deleted.
- Hinrik 5y ago
  >I was in uni around 2007-08 and realised it was using a serious amount of my time and energy. The first public version of Minecraft came out in May 2009.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    Wow, that's strange, I could have sworn it was earlier. It must have been 2010-2011 when I stopped playing it then.
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  Surely you could always punch your way out? And an unlit cave was never pitch black as far as I'm aware.
MildlySerious 5y ago
Man. I really do want to like it, but this update is the first one that gives me the Microsoft-finally-took-over vibes. Traversal and with that exploration just became so much harder. The landscape is now riddled with holes that you either build scraggly bridges over, or lead to massive detours. The sides of bodies of water are much higher and steeper on average, making it impossible to see the landscape you're passing, and getting up there to take a look is tedious. So you're basically stuck near spawn unless you want to spend much more time getting around. A lot of surface iron was replaced with copper, which is useless, meaning progress is now slower than ever, and grinding becomes even more of a necessity. Generally, many of the items that now clutter the inventory are mostly useless, and the inventory needs constant attention. Minecraft is a fantastic game that I have spent well over a thousand hours on over the last decade, with many more to come very likely. That being said, with the account transition to Microsoft/Xbox and this update that gives me personally the "Microsoft knows whats best for its users" vibes that I still distinctly remember from WLM and Skype, I am definitely less optimistic about the game's future than I was a few years ago. I do hope my caution proves to be unwarranted.
- ninth_ant 5y ago
  I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I believe you've misunderstood the intention and the effect of the changes. Previously, the time-optimal strategy to acquire iron and diamonds was to dig a hole deep into the earth and then bore straight paths. This was exceptionally grindy (fans would say zen, detractors would say tedious), but effective. With 1.18, the optimal strategy is now to enter a cave and find the resources there. The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system, where many resources are available -- though at the risk of encounters with monsters. So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk. It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here. You mention iron, claiming that progress is slower, but in actuality it's significantly easier to acquire useful amounts of iron now. Jump into any random cave and it's all over the place. Sure, there's a lot of relatively useless copper too, but no one is forcing you to mine it. Just skip what you don't need and you don't need to manage it in your inventory. Likewise, the new topology with increased heights means that rivers are significantly more important for exploring. You point out that it makes it more difficult to go from one peak to the next, which is accurate (though in my opinion you overstate the difficulty), but regardless it is quite easy to make long journeys if you follow the rivers and low terrain. So yeah it's harder to go directly in a straight line than it was in before, but now you're paying attention to the terrain in the world and adapting your gameplay as a result. It just requires different navigation techniques. Like it or not, you're absolutely not stuck at spawn.
lloydatkinson 5y ago
One of the best features of the terrain generation that was removed (in beta 1.8 like the article mentions) was overhangs like this: http://i.imgur.com/AHDDS.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AHDDS.jpg I wonder if this new update adds similar generation again?
haolez 5y ago
Something similar happened to No Man's Sky. After a specific update, all planets became very similar regarding their topology. It became boring :(
gswdh 5y ago
I love gaming as much as the next person - I spent most of my teens playing Half Life and the like. I have a genuine question as I’m very naive to Minecraft. I see a lot of time / thought / energy dedicated to making things in Minecraft and can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a waste of time. I think I feel this way because I don’t know much about Minecraft or the community. Other than for pleasure (which is a plenty good enough reason on its own) is there any value generated here? People can obviously do what they like with their time but I would much rather spend my precious hours working on something to add to the real world.
- zimmund 5y ago
  It depends a lot on who's playing. For me it's entertainment, and yes... it may be a time waste? but sometimes I need it. Why should we work every single hour we are awake? I've found positive outcomes from playing the game as well, beyond gaming: for example it helped me realize that you can have a lot of things (in game: build materials) but it doesn't mean anything if you don't use them (in game: build something!). It also helped me reconnect with old friends (we play together in our server, hop into a voice channel sometimes and we also share unrelated stuff outside the game). I know it helped some people get through the pandemic. It's also a good motivation for kids (and grown-ups!) to learn basic server administration, plugin development, community moderation, and some people also like to fiddle with textures as well. The game is a creativity source, very much like Lego bricks. The things you do in-game may not have much value, but I'd say it yields great results in the players :)
- newah1 5y ago
  Are you trying to make a statement in the form of a question? It is a video game, take of it what you will.
- qeng-ho 5y ago
  Why do people go for pottery classes, watch tv, ride bicycles, run, read books, or otherwise do anything other than work? I don't mean to be antagonistic but I find your question to be flawed in the first place; why do we have to always "generate value"? Also, what is "the real world"? At this point, considering how massively popular Minecraft is, Minecraft __is__ an extension of the real world at this point. It's very unlikely that we will ever lose Minecraft to history. Commit the worldsave to a repo and that world is as good as the real world.
CyborgCabbage 5y ago
Here's a video by one of the developers talking about some technical aspects of the new terrain: https://youtu.be/TycBrFKEteU https://youtu.be/TycBrFKEteU
- poser-boy 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing! About 7 minutes in, the developer shares that biome and terrain shaping has been decoupled.
seanwilson 5y ago
For random world generation like this, how do you make changes to the generator (like adding taller mountains) without breaking saved games and world seeds that people have written down? Guessing you could let the saved game or the player pick which world generation algorithm to use and you need to keep the code for the old and new generator around? It's probably less of a big deal for e.g. rouge-like games are over for good in a few hours, but not for games like Minecraft.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  maps only generate as far as players have seen. So an old world would have old features until you explore new areas. To expand: Any generated chunk is considered "user modified" and saved whole, since a player could put houses or change blocks there. New areas are generated by the algorithm once reached. This works for new versions of the game as well as mods that add/change biomes.
  - seanwilson 5y ago
    How do you deal with e.g. a chunk saved from the old generator with a low mountain transitioning into a chunk generated by the new generator with a huge mountain? It blends between them somehow so all the old chunks are surrounded by old/new blended chunks until all of those are surrounded by new chunks from then on?
    - Matrix89 5y ago
      Yup, starting with 1.18 the started blending old chunks with the new ones. Earlier there was a hard transition, personally I prefered the hard cut, there was something to it, something mysterious about it, but I get why they wated it removed
      - Alphaeus 5y ago
        1.7 was actually the first version to support blending (for the new generator in that update). 1.18 is a new iteration of that.
Kye 5y ago
I made a video exploring underwater caves in the new worldgen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusWYZ3yWW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusWYZ3yWW0 They seem to go on forever.
dan-robertson 5y ago
My understanding of the height limit (originally 128 and later 256) was that the lighting algorithm was O(height limit), and so it was hard to increase it arbitrarily. And then most of the shape of the terrain is dictated by the height limit—you couldn’t really have big mountains full of false summits, and indeed the terrain generation didn’t really have many low-frequency features that spanned large areas (but maybe they are boring because they are slow to traverse). For comparison, the highest peak in the European part of the Netherlands is around 320m whereas the Minecraft limit wouldn’t let you above 192m above sea level. Denmark has a highest peak of 170m so it would fit but the game wouldn’t generate such a thing as you’d only have 22m above the top to build. I wonder if one way around raising the height limit would be to offset the base height of chunks relative to each other, but that might lead to strange behaviour in other parts of the game. Maybe Microsoft have figured out a better fix to allow increasing the limit.
- kibwen 5y ago
  The extremely low height limit is also influenced by gameplay: many voxel games let you run up slopes that vary by only a single vertical step, but Minecraft forces you to jump to climb, which is much slower. Nobody wants to jump 16,000 times just to get over a mountain range. On the other hand, while I actually really like the traversal and movement in Minecraft and I wouldn't want to change it, the current height and generation limits really are just too low to create anything truly majestic. The new update has increased the limits by 128 (64 blocks each above and below the prior limit, for new extreme Y coords of 320 and -64), which is a welcome change, but IMO they could have gone a bit higher.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Actually +64 above/+64 below is only the new default. Custom worlds will be able to increase the world height limits to +2032/-2032. That leaves a lot of room for activities. I think custom terrain gen data packs like the one mentioned above still have to be adjusted to actually use the full height. I'm excited for mappers that can now build 1-1 scale recreations of real and fantasy locations like everest (~4000m from the base), minas tirith (300m), barad-dur (1400m), courisant senate building (600m), etc.
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arshingleton 5y ago
looks pixelated to me
egberts1 5y ago
Why did that headline come across to me starting out as “‘MICROSOFT’ world generation …”. Oh wait, they both are “one and the same.” https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-purchases-minecraft/ https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-purchases-...
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jccalhoun 5y ago
Even though I'm a videogame player, I hadn't played Minecraft until it was recently added to the XBox Game Pass on windows. I can see why it is so attractive to kids. I didn't know a lot about it so the first time I came across a village was really surprising. Then I got lost and spent tons of time trying to find my way back to my base. Minecraft is a pretty amazing game. I'm only a decade late to finding it out!
- stefs 5y ago
  you're not a decade late, now is a good time as any.
PicassoCTs 5y ago
I always found they had missed a chance regarding biomes. Giant trees, whos tops basically look like hillside if you walk towards them unknowingly..
brarsanmol 5y ago
I've been playing Minecraft on-and-off for the better part of the decade now (since I was 9 or 10 wow!), I've been amazed at some of the recent changes that Mojang has made with improving game engine performance and now this new caving update. I hope they once again push for a revival of modding multiplayer servers, although that is most likely a pipe dream because of the Bukkit DMCA issues in 2013-2014 :(.
- Qub3d 5y ago
  Multiplayer modding is still very much alive and well. There is both the client-side route (where everyone uses a modpack tool like https://atlauncher.com/ https://atlauncher.com/) or the successor to Bukkit, Spigot (and its High-performance fork, PaperMC: https://papermc.io/ https://papermc.io/) Spigot/Paper are bukkit-compatible and you can load modpacks from the spigot.org site, or even bukkit.org, which is still operational to this day. Source: I run several instances myself and I help develop a server management tool for it: https://craftycontrol.com/ https://craftycontrol.com/
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Minecraft world gen has never been interesting, and still isn't. All of the comparison screenshots look exactly alike: Some trees, some cliffs, some water. And a mixture of dirt, grass, sand and snow. To call such bland a landscape "interesting" is an admission of complete lack of imagination. And now we're having a massive celebration because... Microsoft added caves? What a joke. Caves are among the oldest of inventions in human history. Where's the factory biome with weird machinery and pipes running around? Where's the dead biome thick with fog and populated with graves and zombies? Where's the airship biome that floats high above in the sky and takes building effort to get to? There's so much creative potential, totally unrealized, for decades. Minecraft never went anywhere. It will die the moment a more imaginative clone pops on the market. It might by Hytale, or something else.

485 points by poser-boy 5y ago

I'm new to Minecraft. Does anyone know if I will need to start a new world to benefit from the 1.18 terrain improvements, or will it work it's way into an existing save game?

CodeGlitch 5y ago
Ok from pcgamer: > Always remember to back up your old save files before loading them into the newest version of the game. With the new changes to world generation, Mojang say that new chunks generated in worlds you bring forward to 1.18 should better blend with the existing terrain in your save file. So long to big flat chunk borders in old worlds!
tehbeard 5y ago
It should work with an existing world, but as always, make backups! As for integration. This time round instead of the "harsh" borders we've gotten before (where new and old chunks meet, often resulting in sheer cliffs due to height differences) the borders will be blended and smoothed. Your old chunks will also be upgraded, the bedrock that was at Y0-5 will turn into the deepslate block, and you get the full 0 to -64 Y generated underneath. Ethoslab, a youtuber with a very old world save, is on 1.18 now, and they've got one of the new lush caves in the new negative Y generation under their base.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Great reply thanks
deleted 5y ago
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Tepix 5y ago
Usually you will have to go to areas you haven't been to previously to get to see the new world generation. If you have done a ton of exploration it may be a long walk from your spawn point.

jokoon 5y ago

They should really enable a sharded server networking protocol to allow some MMO elements. Each server would handle a limited area and players would automatically connect to a server when they go to a certain distance. I'm sure players would pay to access it if it worked.

lloydatkinson 5y ago
That was notch's original idea for portals in multiplayer I recall reading. A portal would take you to another server.
lom 5y ago
I remember seeing a project like that (maybe even here, on HN), but unfortunately I can’t find it
- c-fe 5y ago
  Maybe this one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224
- Malp 5y ago
  WorldQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28401224
jon-wood 5y ago
This is how the big multiplayer servers available via Bedrock edition work, not so much for distance, but for different game modes. Unfortunately players pay by buying predatory micro-transaction items, which I find near unacceptable in a game so squarely targeted at children.
Qub3d 5y ago
Hypixel has done that to an extent. The way most servers do it nowadays with with a server proxy that shunts client requests to a specified server transparently -- you "world hop" using in-game mechanics (i.e. walking through a portal, clicking on a sign) https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/about-bungeecord/ https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/about-bungeecord/ And as others have already mentioned, WorldQL is an effort to transparently replicate and shard the world without even requiring "world hopping"

smoldesu 5y ago

It's kinda remarkable how much the new update overhauled world generation. If you've been standing on the sidelines, waiting for "the big one" to draw you back in, I was greatly surprised at how much fun I had exploring some surprisingly realistic and cool vistas. Canyons don't feel sheer, savannas have remarkable valleys and hills, and the cave generation feels... well, "next-gen" for a lack of a better phrase. I have admittedly been pretty unimpressed with Microsoft's handling of the game up until this point, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how fresh it feels now. Bravo, nu-Mojang.

pleb_nz 5y ago

This has me pumped. Time to try it out again.

ykl 5y ago

The new worldgen is incredible, both above and below the surface. Hats off to everyone at Mojang that worked on this! One of my favorite game memories of all time was the first time I played Minecraft during the alpha days and immediately got lost in the world. For me, going into a 1.18 world and finding a giant mountain chain and then finding a cave on the peak of the mountain that falls all the way into a giant underground ocean at the bottom of the world in a huge cavern complete with underground vegetation… it brought me right back to that sense of exploration and wonder that I remember from the very first time I played Minecraft. Also, I found this datapack (sort of like a mod but doesn’t require patching the game since the game natively supports loading datapack files) called Terralith [1] that extends the 1.18 worldgen with even more cool stuff. Wandering around the new 1.18-style mountains is incredible, and then stumbling across something the resembles Yellowstone National Park added by Terralith is even more incredible. It’s worth a try if you like just wandering around in Minecraft marveling at the scenery. [1] https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/terralith-overworld-evolved-100-biomes-caves-and-more/ https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/terralith-overworl...

Causality1 5y ago
I wonder how many if those alpha worlds are preserved. I started when the alpha was free and the beta was pay, and the scope of those alpha worlds was just incredible. There wasn't much in the way of nature in the alpha so all those worlds were more art project than construction.
- ykl 5y ago
  With the current launcher, you can actually pick which version/update to play, including old versions. For Java Edition, it lists versions all the way back to alpha as options.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    This is so user-unhostile I wanna cry. Most companies just want the power to force antifeutures on the users nowadays.

aliimran 5y ago

kenjken

ralusek 5y ago

Other things to note. One big one is that the world height limit has increased from 256 blocks to 320, which allows for much more verticality. I think the whole field of world generation is awesome. Perlin noise, and the concepts of "smooth noise" that have come from it, and the clever ways people have found to layer noise and use it to map biomes and heights, and spawn locations, etc. And then, even more impressively, with games like No Man's Sky, you have this concept applied to spherical geometry. I just think it's all so cool. Incidentally, his (Sean Murray, creator of No Man's Sky) is the best talk I've ever seen on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9RyEiEzMiU

bagels 5y ago

Does anyone know if the new generator is used on unexplored parts of previous save games?

zeta0134 5y ago
Yes! This update goes so far as to blend chunks around the seams, and will fill out the new cave generation at the bottom of your existing world, replacing the bedrock with deepslate. I'm itching to dive in again once the holidays settle down
nottorp 5y ago
Also, you can use mcaselector to delete the parts of your old saved games where you haven't built anything and let them regen with the 1.18 algo. I just did that with a save and the new terrain smoothly blended in with the old.
shawnz 5y ago
Yes, and not just unexplored areas, but even underneath previously explored areas in the new space created between Y=0 and Y=-64.

fermentation 5y ago

Super excited to try this out, I haven't played much since the alpha ended. Does anyone know how well the RTX support is? I could never tell if that was meant to be a tech demo or an actual feature.

lom 5y ago
RTX support isn’t a thing in the java edition, which is showed off in the article here. But you can get minecraft for windows for free if you already have a java key that’s older than 2018.
willis936 5y ago
I've used it with a 3070. I love it. Getting it running requires a little reading and experimenting rather than a toggle in a menu, but when it's running it's wonderful. I stop and stare at many things. Sunset on a village is great, the soft glow around my house is great, true black and light occlusion in caves is great. Mob spawn light rules are unchanged and don't match up with the RT front end, but that rarely matters.

jonwinstanley 5y ago

Presumably this is just for the PC version? Or do console versions ever get the terrain updates?

ykl 5y ago
It’s for both Java and Bedrock, so it should be on all currently supported PC, mobile, and console versions. In general Mojang keeps PC and mobile/console at feature parity with each other and releases updates at the same time across all supported versions now, which is nice.
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  Really nice. Didn’t expect that to be the case.
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Minecraft has supported cross platform multiplayer for a while now, so it would be really weird if they broke compatibility with PC like this.
    - lhoff 5y ago
      Mimd you, there are two versions of Mimecraft. Java and Bedrock. Both support PC but only Bedrock supports other plattforms. Cross Plattform multiplayer therefore only works with bedrock. Java isn't compatible with bedrock servers and the other way around.
      - kuschku 5y ago
        Although there are mods for the Java edition to allow Bedrock clients to connect to Java servers.
      - nottorp 5y ago
        > Both support PC but only Bedrock supports other plattforms. You mean Bedrock supports consoles. Java supports Mac and Linux, so it's also multiplatform. Just different platforms.

rland 5y ago

It's been a while since I've played Minecraft, so I can't speak to the newer terrain. But I always thought they could significantly improve the world gen. Perlin noise is cool, but why not try to fully simulate plate tectonics, weather patterns, drainage? It would go a long way if deserts were in the rainshadow of mountain ranges, islands corresponded to real volcanic activity, etc. I guess there is a limit to what you can do with the chunk-by-chunk approach, but I think a certain type of minecraft player stays basically put within a couple dozen chunks. Having worlds "load" on exploration would be a worthwhile tradeoff. I get that this is a hard, but it is interesting, and it's a problem that would captivate an intelligent developer. They have like a million dollars, why not?

pests 5y ago
What do you mean having then load on exploration? That's the current state - a chuck isn't generated until you need to load it. This means when you take an old save to a new version any already-loaded chucks you're stuck with but any new exploration causes new world gen on the new version.
- herghost 5y ago
  Oh wow. I did not realise this was the case. Thank you!
  - pests 5y ago
    I think this actually might be a slight negative tbh - since everything is split into chunks and generated on demand, you lose the ability to do larger passes over multiple chucks at gen time. No real way to do tectonics or weather patterns as you don't necessarily know what's in your chunk neighborhood.
    - alvarlagerlof 5y ago
      You could do much larger chunks on gen.
    - 5y ago

littlestymaar 5y ago

If you like voxel world generation, I strongly advise you to check out Veloren[1], it has a much much deeper worldgen that what Minecraft offers. [1]: https://veloren.net/ https://veloren.net/ the game is still under development but it has been playable for more than a year now.

shynrou 5y ago
Looks like a really cool open source project, will definitely check it out.
poser-boy 5y ago
Veloren is great. I'm pretty sure it's worldgen uses Simplex noise, rather than the Perlin noise like MC does.
- tormeh 5y ago
  It uses simulation, like Dwarf Fortress. Of course randomness is involved, but there's a real attempt at realism in the geology, etc.
astrobe_ 5y ago
See also Minetest, which has several native map/terrain generators [1]. In addition, one can define other generators as mods using Lua [2]. Mods can define new biomes [4], place buildings [5], roads [3], etc. If you add all that, though, you might there might be some glitches (roads passing through buildings..) but that's part of the fun. [1] https://wiki.minetest.net/Map_generator https://wiki.minetest.net/Map_generator [2] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27374 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27374 [3] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18529 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18529 [4] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=17096 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=17096 [5] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13589 https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13589
sorenjan 5y ago
> Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust. This is such a meme by now, I have to assume it's an inside joke. Even games mention that they're "written in Rust" in the first sentence in their official presentation, what other programming language communities does this? Why would anyone except other Rust programmers care?

jl6 5y ago

The new terrain is great, but I have mostly exhausted my patience with Minecraft survival. I hope future releases will put some effort into reducing the grindyness. I know many things can be automated but they tend to rely on extremely arcane game mechanics rather than feeling like an intentional part of the game. Some elements of Factorio were inspired by Minecraft. I think Minecraft could now use some inspiration from Factorio.

itronitron 5y ago
MC 1.19 has a new 'Allay' mob planned that will pick up and move items for the player. I can see people using this to create some interesting automated systems.
tehbeard 5y ago
Have you considered modded to get a little more Factorio in your minecraft? I'm playing the "Create: Above & Beyond" pack. There is grind, the pack gives you a goal (build rocket, go to moon), but how you get there is up to you and the automation isn't quite so arcane as vanilla, and doesn't rely on "magic blocks" (Where you plonk down a single block and it magically does all the things) instead relying on you making a machine/factory line from multiple blocks.
- curiousgal 5y ago
  I honestly never understood the appeal of vanilla Minecraft. I only bought the game because of the mods! Mods like AE2 or Thermal Expansion is where the fun is at!
- willis936 5y ago
  I've pushed java far past its breaking point in previous modded minecraft worlds (30 second GC every 30 seconds, some AE2 leak when millions of items are stored). I like many aspects of bedrock edition, most related to performance. I want a gregtech-like experience in bedrock so badly that I'd go as far as making it myself. I just wish the command interface wasn't so janky. When I've done test blocks and interactions in the past I've run into limitations that would prevent my vision. This was maybe 18 months ago, so I don't think much has changed yet.

baby 5y ago

One thing I always hoped, but that never happened: get people’s creations into the game. Randomly get vetted buildings as biomes. People have created insane things and it’s a shame they couldn’t have been integrated directly into the game. Even a few would have been cool. I guess one thing is that structures without life feels empty, so you’d have to generate random monsters or NPCs for each of them.

globular-toast 5y ago
Isn't that what servers are for? I joined a server once many years ago and found all kinds of truly amazing things that people had built. My favourite was a vast hollowed out mountain. The only way in was through a door right at the top of the mountain which caused you to descend into this beautifully lit cavern. Exploring this server was like exploring an art gallery.
- baby 5y ago
  It’s not. I’m talking about player structures being randomly incorporated into your own game.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    That doesn't make much sense to me. The generated world is meant to be like nature while player structures are man-made things created by inhabitants of the world. Something that makes a bit more sense and possibly quite cool would be to incorporate ruins of famous structures into the generated world.
tehbeard 5y ago
This might be more feasible-ish in a community effort? I'm not entirely sure how the jigsaw system (the subsystem the game uses for building villages and bastions from a large palette of pre-builts using a set of rules and connectors) integrates with the custom world generator options, but that would seem the best bet for it in a vanilla game. The problem with an "official" player creations is both vetting them and the social backlash because you didn't pick little Timmy's shack. As well as the disjointedness of theme that could occur with a player's playstyle. I play a modpack. Create: Above & Beyond, they've added a bunch of new random structures to the game, but they're all within a similar theme of quasi-medieval for the surface structures, and a few of the underground ones stray a bit more modern.

teekert 5y ago

It was a pleasant surprise this morning when my son and I discovered the vast cave systems below Y=0 in our existing world! Very well done, really cool, we’re having a blast!

globular-toast 5y ago

> I have stopped in recent years since I find it dangerously addictive I forgot this, but that's actually why I stopped playing it. I was in uni around 2007-08 and realised it was using a serious amount of my time and energy. I just quit cold turkey back then. I've barely played any video games since this point, in fact. What I loved about Minecraft initially was the exploration. I got into it during the beta (I think) when there was no mini-map or any "lifelines" you expect from a normal game. One thing that was possible was to go down into cave system, run out of torches, fall somewhere and just be trapped in the dark. The game was so simple there was a very real fear of losing your save file because you got trapped in a cave forever. Are there any other games that have real stakes in them like the early Minecraft versions?

simonh 5y ago
A fair few games have an Iron Man mode where they only save on exit, so you can’t revert.
kuschku 5y ago
That's what the hardcore mode in Minecraft is for: if you die, the save is deleted.
Hinrik 5y ago
>I was in uni around 2007-08 and realised it was using a serious amount of my time and energy. The first public version of Minecraft came out in May 2009.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  Wow, that's strange, I could have sworn it was earlier. It must have been 2010-2011 when I stopped playing it then.
Dylan16807 5y ago
Surely you could always punch your way out? And an unlit cave was never pitch black as far as I'm aware.

MildlySerious 5y ago

Man. I really do want to like it, but this update is the first one that gives me the Microsoft-finally-took-over vibes. Traversal and with that exploration just became so much harder. The landscape is now riddled with holes that you either build scraggly bridges over, or lead to massive detours. The sides of bodies of water are much higher and steeper on average, making it impossible to see the landscape you're passing, and getting up there to take a look is tedious. So you're basically stuck near spawn unless you want to spend much more time getting around. A lot of surface iron was replaced with copper, which is useless, meaning progress is now slower than ever, and grinding becomes even more of a necessity. Generally, many of the items that now clutter the inventory are mostly useless, and the inventory needs constant attention. Minecraft is a fantastic game that I have spent well over a thousand hours on over the last decade, with many more to come very likely. That being said, with the account transition to Microsoft/Xbox and this update that gives me personally the "Microsoft knows whats best for its users" vibes that I still distinctly remember from WLM and Skype, I am definitely less optimistic about the game's future than I was a few years ago. I do hope my caution proves to be unwarranted.

ninth_ant 5y ago
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I believe you've misunderstood the intention and the effect of the changes. Previously, the time-optimal strategy to acquire iron and diamonds was to dig a hole deep into the earth and then bore straight paths. This was exceptionally grindy (fans would say zen, detractors would say tedious), but effective. With 1.18, the optimal strategy is now to enter a cave and find the resources there. The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system, where many resources are available -- though at the risk of encounters with monsters. So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk. It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here. You mention iron, claiming that progress is slower, but in actuality it's significantly easier to acquire useful amounts of iron now. Jump into any random cave and it's all over the place. Sure, there's a lot of relatively useless copper too, but no one is forcing you to mine it. Just skip what you don't need and you don't need to manage it in your inventory. Likewise, the new topology with increased heights means that rivers are significantly more important for exploring. You point out that it makes it more difficult to go from one peak to the next, which is accurate (though in my opinion you overstate the difficulty), but regardless it is quite easy to make long journeys if you follow the rivers and low terrain. So yeah it's harder to go directly in a straight line than it was in before, but now you're paying attention to the terrain in the world and adapting your gameplay as a result. It just requires different navigation techniques. Like it or not, you're absolutely not stuck at spawn.

lloydatkinson 5y ago

One of the best features of the terrain generation that was removed (in beta 1.8 like the article mentions) was overhangs like this: http://i.imgur.com/AHDDS.jpg http://i.imgur.com/AHDDS.jpg I wonder if this new update adds similar generation again?

haolez 5y ago

Something similar happened to No Man's Sky. After a specific update, all planets became very similar regarding their topology. It became boring :(

gswdh 5y ago

I love gaming as much as the next person - I spent most of my teens playing Half Life and the like. I have a genuine question as I’m very naive to Minecraft. I see a lot of time / thought / energy dedicated to making things in Minecraft and can’t help but feel it’s a bit of a waste of time. I think I feel this way because I don’t know much about Minecraft or the community. Other than for pleasure (which is a plenty good enough reason on its own) is there any value generated here? People can obviously do what they like with their time but I would much rather spend my precious hours working on something to add to the real world.

zimmund 5y ago
It depends a lot on who's playing. For me it's entertainment, and yes... it may be a time waste? but sometimes I need it. Why should we work every single hour we are awake? I've found positive outcomes from playing the game as well, beyond gaming: for example it helped me realize that you can have a lot of things (in game: build materials) but it doesn't mean anything if you don't use them (in game: build something!). It also helped me reconnect with old friends (we play together in our server, hop into a voice channel sometimes and we also share unrelated stuff outside the game). I know it helped some people get through the pandemic. It's also a good motivation for kids (and grown-ups!) to learn basic server administration, plugin development, community moderation, and some people also like to fiddle with textures as well. The game is a creativity source, very much like Lego bricks. The things you do in-game may not have much value, but I'd say it yields great results in the players :)
newah1 5y ago
Are you trying to make a statement in the form of a question? It is a video game, take of it what you will.
qeng-ho 5y ago
Why do people go for pottery classes, watch tv, ride bicycles, run, read books, or otherwise do anything other than work? I don't mean to be antagonistic but I find your question to be flawed in the first place; why do we have to always "generate value"? Also, what is "the real world"? At this point, considering how massively popular Minecraft is, Minecraft __is__ an extension of the real world at this point. It's very unlikely that we will ever lose Minecraft to history. Commit the worldsave to a repo and that world is as good as the real world.

CyborgCabbage 5y ago

Here's a video by one of the developers talking about some technical aspects of the new terrain: https://youtu.be/TycBrFKEteU https://youtu.be/TycBrFKEteU

poser-boy 5y ago
Thank you for sharing! About 7 minutes in, the developer shares that biome and terrain shaping has been decoupled.

seanwilson 5y ago

For random world generation like this, how do you make changes to the generator (like adding taller mountains) without breaking saved games and world seeds that people have written down? Guessing you could let the saved game or the player pick which world generation algorithm to use and you need to keep the code for the old and new generator around? It's probably less of a big deal for e.g. rouge-like games are over for good in a few hours, but not for games like Minecraft.

mysterydip 5y ago
maps only generate as far as players have seen. So an old world would have old features until you explore new areas. To expand: Any generated chunk is considered "user modified" and saved whole, since a player could put houses or change blocks there. New areas are generated by the algorithm once reached. This works for new versions of the game as well as mods that add/change biomes.
- seanwilson 5y ago
  How do you deal with e.g. a chunk saved from the old generator with a low mountain transitioning into a chunk generated by the new generator with a huge mountain? It blends between them somehow so all the old chunks are surrounded by old/new blended chunks until all of those are surrounded by new chunks from then on?
  - Matrix89 5y ago
    Yup, starting with 1.18 the started blending old chunks with the new ones. Earlier there was a hard transition, personally I prefered the hard cut, there was something to it, something mysterious about it, but I get why they wated it removed
    - Alphaeus 5y ago
      1.7 was actually the first version to support blending (for the new generator in that update). 1.18 is a new iteration of that.

Kye 5y ago

I made a video exploring underwater caves in the new worldgen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusWYZ3yWW0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusWYZ3yWW0 They seem to go on forever.

dan-robertson 5y ago

My understanding of the height limit (originally 128 and later 256) was that the lighting algorithm was O(height limit), and so it was hard to increase it arbitrarily. And then most of the shape of the terrain is dictated by the height limit—you couldn’t really have big mountains full of false summits, and indeed the terrain generation didn’t really have many low-frequency features that spanned large areas (but maybe they are boring because they are slow to traverse). For comparison, the highest peak in the European part of the Netherlands is around 320m whereas the Minecraft limit wouldn’t let you above 192m above sea level. Denmark has a highest peak of 170m so it would fit but the game wouldn’t generate such a thing as you’d only have 22m above the top to build. I wonder if one way around raising the height limit would be to offset the base height of chunks relative to each other, but that might lead to strange behaviour in other parts of the game. Maybe Microsoft have figured out a better fix to allow increasing the limit.

kibwen 5y ago
The extremely low height limit is also influenced by gameplay: many voxel games let you run up slopes that vary by only a single vertical step, but Minecraft forces you to jump to climb, which is much slower. Nobody wants to jump 16,000 times just to get over a mountain range. On the other hand, while I actually really like the traversal and movement in Minecraft and I wouldn't want to change it, the current height and generation limits really are just too low to create anything truly majestic. The new update has increased the limits by 128 (64 blocks each above and below the prior limit, for new extreme Y coords of 320 and -64), which is a welcome change, but IMO they could have gone a bit higher.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Actually +64 above/+64 below is only the new default. Custom worlds will be able to increase the world height limits to +2032/-2032. That leaves a lot of room for activities. I think custom terrain gen data packs like the one mentioned above still have to be adjusted to actually use the full height. I'm excited for mappers that can now build 1-1 scale recreations of real and fantasy locations like everest (~4000m from the base), minas tirith (300m), barad-dur (1400m), courisant senate building (600m), etc.

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arshingleton 5y ago

looks pixelated to me

egberts1 5y ago

Why did that headline come across to me starting out as “‘MICROSOFT’ world generation …”. Oh wait, they both are “one and the same.” https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-purchases-minecraft/ https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-purchases-...

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jccalhoun 5y ago

Even though I'm a videogame player, I hadn't played Minecraft until it was recently added to the XBox Game Pass on windows. I can see why it is so attractive to kids. I didn't know a lot about it so the first time I came across a village was really surprising. Then I got lost and spent tons of time trying to find my way back to my base. Minecraft is a pretty amazing game. I'm only a decade late to finding it out!

stefs 5y ago
you're not a decade late, now is a good time as any.

PicassoCTs 5y ago

I always found they had missed a chance regarding biomes. Giant trees, whos tops basically look like hillside if you walk towards them unknowingly..

brarsanmol 5y ago

I've been playing Minecraft on-and-off for the better part of the decade now (since I was 9 or 10 wow!), I've been amazed at some of the recent changes that Mojang has made with improving game engine performance and now this new caving update. I hope they once again push for a revival of modding multiplayer servers, although that is most likely a pipe dream because of the Bukkit DMCA issues in 2013-2014 :(.

Qub3d 5y ago
Multiplayer modding is still very much alive and well. There is both the client-side route (where everyone uses a modpack tool like https://atlauncher.com/ https://atlauncher.com/) or the successor to Bukkit, Spigot (and its High-performance fork, PaperMC: https://papermc.io/ https://papermc.io/) Spigot/Paper are bukkit-compatible and you can load modpacks from the spigot.org site, or even bukkit.org, which is still operational to this day. Source: I run several instances myself and I help develop a server management tool for it: https://craftycontrol.com/ https://craftycontrol.com/

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

Minecraft world gen has never been interesting, and still isn't. All of the comparison screenshots look exactly alike: Some trees, some cliffs, some water. And a mixture of dirt, grass, sand and snow. To call such bland a landscape "interesting" is an admission of complete lack of imagination. And now we're having a massive celebration because... Microsoft added caves? What a joke. Caves are among the oldest of inventions in human history. Where's the factory biome with weird machinery and pipes running around? Where's the dead biome thick with fog and populated with graves and zombies? Where's the airship biome that floats high above in the sky and takes building effort to get to? There's so much creative potential, totally unrealized, for decades. Minecraft never went anywhere. It will die the moment a more imaginative clone pops on the market. It might by Hytale, or something else.