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.
I also recently (today in fact) encountered the Terralith datapack, it's rather impressive and I'm tempted to try it out. From what I know it doesn't add any new blocks, instead it just reuses existing vanilla ones.
There's a trailer they made for a recent update that shows off some of the terrain results:
The one thing that always stuns me is how in the hell did they (both Mojang and terrain pack creators) figure this out from math?
Like, it's perlin noise and a bunch of algorithms and it makes mountains and caves and overhangs that are all decorated and such and a river bleeding into a ravine that leads into a giant cave network.
The fantastic part about this video is just how little of actual physics you need to know to create convincing, complex waves. You can skip entire fluid dynamics and condense it to "water molecules move in circles when subjected to a wave".
Forget about Perlin noise, it is useful to getting something but it is IMO dead end if you are for realistic looking world. There isn't a way to fix it because, fundamentally, it is completely disconnected from how land features are created in real life. To get asymptotically to realism you have to start taking into account more and more of physics and passage of time and Perlin noise just completely ignores this.
To get realistic representation you need to build a little model that knows a little bit about how the features are created.
You can even go Dwarf Fortress direction and model processes that create various features of the world over time.
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.
Minecraft is one of the biggest games of my teenage years, starting in Alpha, and I always was a bit paranoid, making backups and copies of things. As the sibling comment points out, you can go back in versions from the game launcher itself and I recently did a nostalgia trip loading up those worlds again, seeing how the game has evolved, how my playing style evolved... By loading them into a few intermediate versions, you can even get them to load in the latest one ! I really appreciate to be able to do that. (Even if I still have a couple of copies of the older versions I could play with !)
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.
The Microsoft acquisition of Minecraft is inexplicably one of the few big tech acquisitions that hasn't completely destroyed the product. It's impressive
Eh, aside from making java and bedrock incompatible, requiring Xbox live accounts to play, deleting customer accounts in the transition to Xbox live, making realms which are different somehow from java and bedrock (many parents had a devil if a time figuring out how to setup a server for kids playing on all the platforms during lockdown)... Aside from this they didn't ruin it.
> Eh, aside from making java and bedrock incompatible
The "Minecraft Pocket Edition" (MCPE) code that became Bedrock predates Microsoft's involvement by over three years. Bedrock is actually Microsoft's effort to unify versions, eliminating the separate legacy console editions and providing cross-play with PC, mobile, and other console users.
Java remains separate because the consoles will never run Java and the modding community that exists around the Java version just can't be replicated on the Bedrock codebase. If it weren't for mods I guarantee Java edition would be dead.
Not to mention, there's no official way to self-host Minecraft servers for Bedrock. I think that's another factor to consider when it comes to the Java edition's survival.
Yeah, I'm a parent that was new to Minecraft during lockdown. It didn't take me long to figure out Bedrock and Java are incompatible, but I did have to explain it to other parents with kids that wanted to play with my kids (my kids play on Bedrock to be most compatible).
My biggest issue is the amount of friction when creating a new Microsoft account for a child. I have to walk through other parents in creating a MS account for themselves (if they don't have one), then how to make a child account with a username, then finding and ticking a bunch of checkboxes to allow online play, then launching Minecraft and signing in with the new child account. It's way too many steps with email verifications. It's >30 minutes. In just my circle there's several parents who gave up and sadly their kid can't play with their group of friends. People outside of tech don't have patience for that crap. This is all outside the fact that each console has their own form of friction in allowing kids to play online.
C'mon Microsoft, you can improve the new user process. Just make an optional in-game wizard asking parents a bunch of questions so kids can play ASAP. And if the issue is that it wouldn't fit in with the one-size-fits-all MS accounts used for everything else, then flag the "wizard-built" accounts as incomplete so parents can go through making a 360 account another day. Damn metrics.
Frankly, this is the kind of friction that I would like to see more in all things involving minors in the internet.
If people can’t be bothered to jump through the hopes required to create a somewhat safe online identity for their kids, one that they should be supervising, maybe it is best their kids stay offline for their own safety, because their parents can’t be bothered to make sure they are safe.
IMO the worst among the things Microsoft is doing to Minecraft is introducing an in-game currency (to an already paid game!).
They target Bedrock for this, and I strongly suspect once it starts bringing in extra money they will essentially kill further Java edition development.
IMO, the Java edition doesn't really need additional development, though. It's absolutely nice to have, but the reason (for me) to play the Java version is the community.
The problem in this scenario will be feature disparity. If they want, they can add cool stuff to Bedrock, and make vanilla Java version feel old and obsolete just the way 1.12 (which probably has the most mods) looks now when compared with fresh 1.18.
Then, by making Bedrock available to people who paid for Java, they would give a hassle-free way for players and modders to try it, and many will probably stick to the latest version.
I do hope, if this scenario comes about, the community will keep the Java version alive by maintaining feature parity, but there’re fundamental issues where some features might not be easily backported on Java due to performance limitations, plus community fragmentation as different modders try to backport same new features in different mutually incompatible ways.
> Then, by making Bedrock available to people who paid for Java, they would give a hassle-free way for players and modders to try it
It would be hassle free for vanilla players, but certainly not for modders. There are years of community support built around the Java version that would need to be moved to bedrock to make moving the modding scene hassle free.
Also mass locking Microsoft accounts that were created without providing a phone number[1].
For some reason they locked my completely unused Microsoft account, that was created for the sole purpose of migrating my Minecraft account to, due to "unusual behavior" (or "activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" if you go by the error message instead of the corresponding knowledge base article).
The reasonable thing to do in such a case if of course to require users to "[verify] [they] are the account owner" by receiving an SMS verification code on an arbitrary phone number (they explicitly mention the possibility of "asking a trusted friend or family member" for this).
>Persson has received criticism for political and social opinions he has expressed on Twitter, such as referring to feminism as a "social disease" and claiming that most feminists are "overtly sexist against men."[50][51] In June 2017, Persson faced criticism for referring to video game developer Zoë Quinn as a "cunt".[50] Later in June 2017, he tweeted in support of a heterosexual pride day, calling opponents to the idea "cunts" and stating that they "deserve to be shot".[51] After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now."[52] In November 2017, Persson was criticized for posting a tweet which reads "It's ok to be white."[53] In follow-up tweets, he said he believed privilege is a "made up metric".[54]
>A March 2019 Minecraft update removed all mentions of Persson from the game's menu, though his name is still in the credits.[55] Microsoft did not explain this action, but its timing led multiple news outlets to conclude it was related to the controversies associated with him.[55][56] Persson was not invited to the game's tenth anniversary event later that year, with Microsoft saying that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang".[8][57] Microsoft then dissociated from Persson due to his controversial comments on his Twitter account.[8]
Who said "liberal" or "better code"? It's about White Supremacy and Racism and Sexism and Homophobia and Transphobia.
Those articles simply quoted his own words, and Wikipedia doesn't declare whether he's liberal or conservative, or a good or bad coder.
You're the one who's revealing their assumption that White Supremacists and Racists and Sexists and Homophobes and Transphobes are usually right wing, not liberal.
Unfortunately you're correct and totally justified in that assumption, of course, but that's beside the point, and not what the article said.
Nobody said anything about liberals or conservatives, or writing worse or better code, either.
And if he was "just joking", then Popehat's Rule of Goats applies:
>He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
>He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.
Since you said “Microsoft improved the product” and this is a software product, I don’t see any other possibility than talking about writing better code.
>Do you agree with Markus Persson that Zoe Quinn is a "cunt", and think that Markus was right to tell her so publicly and personally on Twitter?
I don’t know either person but I think they both should have a right to say whatever they want.
>Do you think it's a good business decision for Microsoft to associate themselves with those words?
I think people will care for two days and then forget about it. It’s irrelevant. Some people will boycott the product if they stay associated but then some will like what happened and will buy if they let the guy stay as a way of supporting him. Overall it will make zero difference.
You just really stepped in it, and revealed an extremely ugly side of yourself that you probably didn't intend to. No wonder you're using a freshly minted green throw-away account: you're too embarrassed to stand behind your own words with your real name, you don't belong here, and nobody here agrees with you or cares what you think.
I suggest you go look up "GamerGate" before you humiliate yourself any more in a public discussion about Minecraft by standing up for what Markus Persson said while unconvincingly claiming not to know who he is or what he meant.
>I don’t know either person but [bullshit redacted].
You don't have to personally know both people to have an opinion, but you've already made yours quite clear. So don't bother posting your next formulaic "but" excuse: "I'm not misogynistic, but what's the big deal about calling a female game developer who's been viciously and systematically attacked by GamerGate a cunt?"
You also miserably failed to explain why you mistakenly thought I was talking about code quality, and why you naively think code quality is all that matters in a product, and why you believe Microsoft should stand behind Markus Persson after he publicly called Zoe Quinn a "cunt" (and said a lot more horrible, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and thoroughly asinine things, too) and aligned himself with and carried out the goals GamerGate, like you just did.
So next time, use Google and Wikipedia before opening your big fat mouth and pretending to be ignorant, and stop getting all your news and misogynistic arguments from 4chan. But at least now we all know where you're actually coming from, and just what kind of a person you really are, and why you're embarrassed to associate your own name with your vile opinions.
I won't bother giving you any URLs to prove my point, because your own words already have, and I'm quite sure you know exactly what I'm talking about, but you're just playing coy and falsely claiming "I don't know X, but ..." because you're a troll. And if not, which I doubt, then look it up yourself.
I added the Terralith datapack to a new world on my server, but am I not getting it? Everybody gets the same world right? Yo have to download other seeds? I don't see massive changes, any coordinates that are particularly interesting in the default world?
Edit, I think I found something nice (a cave) at -281, -15, 436, that's not something 1.18 generates by default I guess?
Thank you for mentioning this. I've been out of the "MCraftsphere" for a long time now, so jumping from ~1.6.4 to 1.18, alongside the plethora of mods (data packs now?) is absolutely mind blowing. I had no idea the depth to which it has been taken, but it looks like I now have an afternoon project.
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.
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.
> I believe you've misunderstood the intention and the effect of the change.
No, and I don't think I have made any comment on the intention. I understand what they were going for. My point is specifically what you are saying: It massively changes the game play. If I wanted different game play I would play a different game. Every update so far, including the ones since MS takeover have felt like natural progression of the game to me. I enjoyed those updates and have lots of good things to say about them and the way they expanded the game.
This update feels to me like it should have been a different game, or a mod. That's the contrast I was trying to highlight with my comment.
It's worth noting I'm not claiming anything as a fact. I was stating my personal opinion and concern for the direction the game is headed in, relative to my own expectations, after a decade of playing Minecraft. I explained why I think that way, because we're on HN.
> The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system
Those existed before, just that covering them and getting the materials for it if you're not a fan of big craters and abysses in the ground wasn't a project of its own before.
> So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk.
Cave exploration and mob bashing is still grinding. This will get old fast if you just want to get to it and build your base or whatever self assigned goal you have.
> It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here.
That is entirely subjective.
> 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)
That wasn't my claim, no. I said it is now more difficult to see directly from the water, because the landscape is raised so much relatively the water. Overcoming that is just tedious, not difficult, because you have to get out of the boat every so often to get a view of the landscape.
For me it is comparable to amplified maps no longer being opt-in, basically. It's fun for a change, but not the game experience I am looking for most of the time. Now I no longer get to pick unless I stick with old versions, which of course sucks for online play.
One of the great things about Minecraft is game play can be tailored to a player's particular tastes. In this instance: if you want to dig straight down and build a branch mine to get diamonds and iron, you can; if you want to take the more risky route of exploring caves, you can. Personally, I fall into the former category since my main interests lay in exploration and building. Dropping down to the bottom of the world is a quick way to get the resources required to craft an enchantment table and suit up in armor, leaving more time to explore the surface for things like jungles, mesas, sunken ships, and anything else that will provide the resources for my latest build.
Does 1.18 change things? I'm trying to keep an open mind, trying to convince myself that the new ore distribution adds nuance to my opening moves. When that conviction fails, I look for other things that hold promise. Something that I've toyed around with doing in the past is creating a Zork-esque underground empire, but have always held back on those plans since the old cave networks were bland and cramped. Yet the new underground biomes make such a project more appealing.
> 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.
I'm not a big Minecraft player, but I'm pretty sure the time-optimal strategy for getting diamonds consistently was to set up a deliberate mine topology which is mathematically efficient, not just dig forward in straight lines. AFAIK diamond mining was the only thing that couldn't be automated; for iron the time-optimal way is to construct an iron farm, i.e. engineering, not grinding.
If I recall correctly (I've played it years ago), efficient mining methods make use of 1x1 branches and optimized spacing between branches, which exposes more potential ore spots in less time than a simple 2x1 tunnel. Someone solved the optimization problem and calculated the optimal branch spacing to minimize the time spent on removing the blocks per one block of ore.
Feather mining (the style that uses the 1x1 branches) is more efficient per block mined, but it requires a lot more attention compared to a straight 2x1 hole because of all the turning you need to do. So 2x1 is what most people do. People who have enough resources to make beacons usually speed-mine instead, though. That's because with a beacon giving you Haste II and an Efficiency V pickaxe, you can mine stone blocks instantly, allowing you to clear out 2-tall spaces rapidly. This destroys more blocks per ore but is much faster than anything else in terms of time. That said, in the 1.18 update, diamond ore can only be found at levels where deepslate generates instead of stone. Deepslate cannot be instant-mined, so caving is once again the most efficient way to find ores. I consider this more fun than the old style of mining, so I'm glad they made this change.
Straight mining also makes you pass through more chunks (16x16 section of the world) per block mined; since ore-gen happens based on chunking this gives you better odds.
Is the strategy you're talking about (digging straight down upon spawn, as I've seen people do) just applicable to speedrunning, or does your average player learn to do that eventually as well?
Digging straight down is a speedrun strategy of last resort for modern versions. The typical progression to enter the Nether is to start by getting 7 iron (3 for an iron pick, 3 for a bucket, 1 for a flint and steel). You want to get that, grab some food, and be in the nether at around 3 minutes.
Doing that by digging down is not really feasible. There are two main routes.
In the village route, you spawn next do a village with a blacksmith. You get some iron or an iron pick from the blacksmith, kill the iron golem for the remaining iron, grab some wheat and then find a nearby lava pool or completable ruined portal. There are variations where you can trade with a villager for a bucket, but by then most speedrunners would have already reset.
The second and more typical modern route is using ocean. You locate a shipwreck which gives you iron and food. Then you find a ravine that has magma blocks (indicating there's lava underneath) and use that to build your portal. To my knowledge this isn't viable in 1.18's world gen though.
When speedrunners do go underground in the overworld, they'll usually try to find a cave first to find exposed iron and lava. Digging down is the last choice.
After doing the basics (stone tools, safe base, light and food), I'd always do that as soon as possible. Diamond stuff is very useful for later parts of the game, and you'll need a lot of redstone to build interesting circuits.
It's its own form of exploration, at least in the versions with fun cave generation: you always end up in some cave complex that you can then explore. But I'm happy to see that it's less needed now, because interesting caves are more commonly accessible from aboveground.
I've been playing since the release of beta and once it was understood in what layers diamond spawned more frequently it became very common. I've seen some people refuse to do it just because it kinda kills the wandering exploration vibes.
Everyone (including children) learns this method over time, be it by checking tutorials online, reading a wiki, or just naturally due to how simple and efficient it is.
You just had to mine straight down to y 8/13 (this changed in the new patch), make a long corridor and then just branch out of that corridor in lines.
At some point every player goes "Where, oh where in the world is the goddamned iron I need?", they google it, find ores spawn differently at certain heights and go from there.
You are mostly correct. My kids and I played Minecraft 1.18 survival even in beta. The new ore distribution rules, especially for iron, greatly increase the grindiness of the beginning of the game. We were compelled to immediately dig down to Y=16, where iron is most common (except for extremely tall mountains that are rare biomes).
We did not find the world "riddled with holes," though, and gaps in Minecraft have always been easy to traverse by simply placing blocks.
1.18 ore distribution sucks. Going caving virtually requires full armor due to mobs, but now to get full armor you need to go caving (or get extremely lucky).
My friends and I converted an existing world to 1.8 (hard difficulty). Even with full iron armor I got wrecked the first time I dug down to the cave beneath our base. Was not expecting the sheer number of mobs.
It seems weirldly like the Minecraft devs tried Minetest and kinda randomly picked a couple of features to copy. The article describes how the new worldgen’s verticality and caves are reminiscent of Minetest, but inventory clutter is also very much like the default Minetest Game (which also has pretty useless copper, albeit as one of too many tiers of tool material, going into the same recipes as stone, iron, gold, diamond, etc.).
I much prefer the Minetest game NodeCore, which is playable with 8 inventory slots (the small HUD bar is all you get, because the game shuns all modal UI except a hints system for figuring out crafting and other gameplay mechanics without using a guide to see whole recipes, which are considered spoilers) and makes the fancy terrain more navigable by letting you scale cliffs and even climb overhangs without placing or mining anything.
It's extremely easy and quick to go >>1k blocks away from spawn looking for good territory if you want to, and I've done so now in three separate worlds. And I didn't have a bunch of resources when I did that either. Iron is easier to find than ever now that it spawns on the surface in mountain biomes. I got over a stack just taking the surface iron on a mountain. Sure, there were also copper veins, but there was plenty of iron. This was the first thing I did after punching down a tree and getting a stone pickaxe btw.
I do agree with you on inventory clutter, but that has been a problem for as long as I have played the game (since about 2010? I don't remember which version). I am disappointed that they have delayed the introduction of the bundle.
I haven't tried but I believe I can't play Minecraft anymore because all players have been forced to convert their Mojang accounts, which is something I simply don't want to do. Funny how a company can just take away something you purchased and you have no recourse.
The game files continue to work, even without an account actually. You can simply keep the old launcher and/or run the game directly.
While I agree with you in principal, the truth is that if you don't update the launcher it doesn't break - and if you do update the launcher it also doesn't break, it just requires you to complete an account migration.
> 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?
In the case of Veloren it’s rather relevant since it’s a community project and this way they actively recruit new contributors among people (interested in) using rust for gamedev.
In a winamp discussion thread a couple of days ago somebody linked to https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ , and I had the same reaction to their "It's written in C++ using the Qt toolkit and GStreamer. Strawberry is compatible with both Qt version 5 and 6.”
It’s definitely weird for end-user software to promote itself based on internal implementation details, but it’s by no means a rust-exclusive phenomenon.
Veloren is a community-developped game that's still far from done, at this point they are looking for contributors much more than players at this point, so that makes sense.
1) The player community and the dev community are not distinct: we involve players in the development process and actively encourage them to become contributors.
2) There are many people that are interested in working with Rust, and it's often a big pull factor for new contributors.
3) Veloren is by far the biggest public domain game written in Rust: it's a good demonstration of what the language can do and how it performs at scale (Veloren's game server scaled up to a 48-thread machine with 181 players online in the same world during the last release party: not many games, let alone voxel games, can manage these numbers). We want to encourage other game developers to consider using it too.
The Veloren developers seem to have forgotten to provide a page of information _anywhere_ giving a non-negligible overview of what the game is about. The main website has little more than a paragraph listing some other games as inspiration, followed by some Minecraft-like screenshots. It also has a manual which is clearly focused on developers and contributors, as it provides next to no information for a new person who just wants to know a bit more about the game without having to actually download it. How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress? How is it similar to Minecraft? How is it different? What do you do in it? Why is it so much work just to find an overview of the game and what it has to offer?
The game is extremely open-ended: there is no overarching objective, and you are free to interact with the world as you please. For most players, this means a combination of exploring, crafting, conquering challenges (dungeons, caves, etc.), finding rare items, and socialising with other players.
The game is 100% free so you have no reason not to jump in and give it a go if you're curious!
> How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress?
Veloren has an open procedural world with a history generation system. Although work on the history simulation is still very much ongoing, the world already more cohesive than those of many other voxel games. Our end goal is a world that feels as rich and as complex as that of Dwarf Fortress. Whether we end up succeeding is still to be determined!
> How is it similar to Minecraft?
Veloren is a voxel game, so... cubes and open-world exploration. Not much more to say about this one.
It's still under heavy development, AFAIK there is a long time vision but they are still far from there so it wouldn't make sense to discuss about it in the front page.
And at this point they are clearly looking for contributors much more than for players, that's why all the documentation you'll find is targeting the former.
Documentation and marketing material require a lit of work, and doing so continuously against a fast-moving target is a enormous effort.
Parent is checking out a game because it was mentioned on HN and finds that the game’s web page doesn’t have a manual and your response is essentially: “Play the game sight-unseen, learn everything about it, write a manual and contribute it back to the project”? That’s not very realistic.
I could see creating an issue in the tracker, perhaps.
Apologies; I said "submit a pull request" when indeed I just meant "make a contribution". Creating an issue is a reasonable action. Criticizing a volunteer-supported project on hacker news will possibly net you some upvotes but writing this entire complaint in an issue tracker is far more productive in my opinion.
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.
I wouldn't say that it has deeper worldgen, but because it replaces voxel terrain with a lower lod after a certain distance, the world has a feeling of massive scale. You can see a far away mountain range on the horizon and actually journey there, then glide down it to an even further sea.
Afaik the new site2 system also shows lod levels for generated structures.
This seems like a recreation of Cubeworld, which unfortunately seems pretty much dead now (but the developer disappeared for years at a time in the past too, so who knows). Too bad they changed a lot of the systems that made the game great for the Steam release.
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?
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.
Yes, I think (maybe) the reason they use perlin noise is because it’s fast. I’m saying have an actual loading screen when you go to a new area and spend some CPU cycles doing advanced plate tectonics or whatever.
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.
You can by generating Metadata for an area larger than a chunk itself.
Also frequently when using things like peeling noise is to use different scale and resolution of the noise itself.
While on smallest scale there might be 1 noise value per minecraft block. You can can also use a different scale in that 1 noise value is used per 10x10 minecraft chunk (16x16 blocks?)
Also not sure how familiar you are with noise generation like perrin but things have slopes to them and isn't just completely random per point. So even without seeing generated data. You can infer a little bit about the next value depending on the intensity and resolution.
Lastly, you can just not use noise at all and just place things at given coordinates and make the game incorporate them into the proc gen at chunk time. E.g. you want a city always at 1000,1000 coordinate far away from 0 0.
When you get near you can apply smoothing filters in and around the 1000 1000 position thru various math and layering systems so no matter the proc gen at that point. City can be there and it not look completely out of place.
It is stunningly difficult to do something like this within procedural generation. Remember a given xyz coordinate has to generate given only the coordinate number itself and a seed. You couldn't do stuff like plate tectonics within an "infinite" world because that would require generating every block which is akin to generating every digit of pi
If you generate a noise function that dictates where the "plates" are, then the location of the "plates" is already predetermined from the construction of the function. Then the output of that function could be used to alter the mountain/terrain functions.
Thus, no need to pregenerate everything. You pregenerate all of the functions in advance, but not all of the outputs.
You could set up domain boundaries where everything in that domain is relatively isolated from other domains. When nearing an ungenerated domain, do the procedural + evolutionary generation and handle the borders blending. Domains could be tectonic plates. This would cause hitches on exploration, but they would be relatively infrequent and overall few since domains would be so large.
I also find it stunningly difficult, however, when I look at Sebastian Lague's channel [0] (no affiliation, just one of the best channels I follow), I feel like this could be a not so stunningly difficult project for him.
The article suggests that "more realistic" is correlated with "boring".
"Real" is an interesting concept. Any such simulation couldn't really be based on Earth geophysics. Who wants to spend months crossing the steppes? Real magma isn't something you find by accident. Real tunnels can collapse. And so on. So these intelligent developers will need to create a new system of geophysics.
I've read that Dwarf Fortress uses a process more like what you describe.
I think a SimClimate could become a hit. Maybe the dynamics could be gamified for kids, but I bet there are lots of adults who'd also want to just "spend months crossing the steppes" following the seasons pretty much.
There are games for nuclear war and pandemics that are fun and educational about the globe-spanning dynamics of those catastrophes. There are also games like Universal Paperclips that provide an intuition for the exponential dynamics of complex systems.
Seems like there should be a way to fuse these concepts around climate change.
> In the b1.8 update [September 2011], the terrain generator was subject to a rewrite aimed to make the code simpler, and make the terrain more realistic. ... at the time it caused quite a controversy, a thread on the Minecraft Forums decried the new terrain as "boring".
What does "realistic" mean to you? Are you looking at it like a geologist? If we follow rland's idea to completion, Minecraft players should look for kimberlite pipes to find diamonds, etc.
I'm certain some people would love virtual prospecting like this. But I strongly doubt the game would be as popular.
Perhaps I should've re-thought that part. Realism was widely interpreted to be the goal at the time. But the changelog only mentions code simplification.
I'd say if you compare the first two set of screenshots. It is more realistic since you don't get as crazy land formations. But falls short of creating significant mountain ranges to compensate, making it less realistic in a way.
That "in a way" is what I refer to. rland proposed a more physics based model. So I'll look at things through that lens.
The first image, 2011, makes me think of tower carst formations, like Ao Phang Nga National Park or the Li River. It's indeed a "crazy land formation" in that most of the planet is not like that. But well within what a more physics based model might generate.
The second image, 2021, makes me wonder what's going on. How did that concavity appear in the bottom left? Was it limestone? Sandstone, like NM's Natural Amphitheater or CO's Cliff Palace? How is the top of the concavity supported, given that it appears to carry a lot of earth?
What is the geological connection to the ridge above it? How is the ridge supported? It appears highly eroded. Where did the scree go? (Shouldn't some have filled in the exposed concavity?) Why is the transition from light-colored to green so clearly delineated?
In the real-world, large cave systems are rare, and walkable ones even less common. But they are also part of what make Minecraft fun.
So yes, I think a more realistic (in the physics sense) would be less fun than what Minecraft does. (Excepting, perhaps, a small number of more geophysically inclined players.)
Other people are pointing out that real == boring, but I disagree. Perhaps we wouldn’t want a literal real world, but hyper interactive terrain like you suggest could be used to explore new and interesting gameplay ideas.
You can do something like this by layering. E.g. generate a high level coarse map that sets some features like average elevation, and calculates climate from that and derives biome from that, as an input into the lower level worldgen
I believe this is exactly how minecraft's new "3D" worldgen works. It calculates a high-level terrain map, then a temperature map, and then biomes are placed on top of them that fit the characteristics.
Reminds me of the AutoBiomes paper! Waiting for something to be integrated into EG a terrain creation tool (no!-MC games), should produce pretty interesting results.
To my knowledge, no. Terrafirmacraft does have strata of different stone types that stretch for large areas, but these aren't tectonic plates. It does generate biomes based on "lattitude" however.
As another comment mentions, dwarf fortress does do all of this though. I don't think this would work in minecraft though, I think minecraft needs a mix of terrain types near each other to be most interesting, and tectonic plates would spread it out.
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.
They _kind of_ have this, within the limits and goals of Minecraft.
They've spoken recently about one of their intentions for Survival is for the world to be a blank slate for players own creations. Adding more and richer structures detracts from that. There's also the part where it's still a game that needs balancing, and just importing arbitrary structures and resources detracts from Survival.
There is the marketplace which has community servers/worlds/levels that showcase what other people have built. I think that's the right level for this.
Otherwise, stuff like this is perfect for the data pack ecosystem they created.
I’m not sure I get your point. VAlves does it with cs:go and dota 2. Players create skins and all, and then vote for the ones they’d like to be incorporated. Sometimes valve incorporates some of the players’ creations.
I think you could completely automate this by training a neural network on local neighborhoods to generate a voxel probability distribution for the center voxel, so a randomly initialized world would converge to a world that has pieces that resemble the worlds that the network was trained on. So in 1D you would take a sequence of voxels ABCDE, and the network would learn to predict C from A,B,D,E.
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.
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.
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.
Valve does it with cs:go and dota2. People submit skins and creations and you can vote. Valve then sometimes accept some of them and integrate them into the game. There’s no reason why players shouldn’t be able to create biomes or structures.
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:
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.
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.
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.
That's what I'm referring to. Behavior packs are json files + assets. It's a real trip to try to have your own variables for things like items inserted, energy level, etc. In java you could edit tile entity metadata with your own java code.
In bedrock minecraft commands must be used to update these states. This is where my understanding started to fall apart.
The problem with those packs, especially ones like tekkit is that they just mash in a thousand different mods of barebones compatibility, some adding the same kind of ore or item slightly differently and you end up with a billion items, some of which are duplicates, no idea where to start from or what to use with what, and all in all a general unbalanced clusterfuck.
Create mod by itself is fine as it is imo, no extra stuff required.
I specifically called out Above & Beyond because it isn't a "kitchen sink" pack thrown together over a weekend with a dozen different game crashing interactions between mods, or 4 ways to create dupe item cycle. Or a hell inducing grindfest like the Gregtech focused packs are.
It's a pack with one goal (build rocket, goto moon), that puts you in the SANDBOX that is the core of minecraft and says, "here are the tools, here's a bit of guidance on what you should automate to progress, but figure it out from tools at hand and have fun in your own way".
The mods are from different authors, but all the recipes have been tweaked and tuned to integrate with each other and provide a cohesive progression curve. Even the textures have been tweaked to make the pack visually cohesive.
> no idea where to start from or what to use with what
A lot of recent packs give you a quest book to guide your progress and push you into the different mods slowly. You get maybe 70-80% through one mod's tech tree and then you're pushed to start on another section before you can progress into that last 20%. The Project Ozone series does a REALLY good job of making sure the different mods balance each other and interact in a way that feels good.
> you end up with a billion items
Yeah that gets bad. Most packs have some sort of inventory organization system (basically a computer you can stick all your items into with no organization and then search them up later) to help alleviate that.
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!
I think Mojang should reconsider its objection to adding an auto-crafting system into the game. There are legitimate concerns that, if it was too easy, it would make one of the defining aspects of the game obsolete, but I think it could be balanced so that users wouldn't bother doing it for simple items like pickaxes.
As an example, the "auto-crafter" block could be powered by chorus fruit, which means the player would not have access to it until after beating the Ender Dragon. That would also mean that truly automating crafting would also require an automated chorus fruit farm, which would give the system a minimum space requirement.
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.
My kids don't play survival at all really and although I have kept trying for years I can't find an actual enjoyable game in there at all really. Like you say, too much grinding, and then it just starts to feel completely pointless and arbitrary.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(.
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/) or the successor to Bukkit, Spigot (and its High-performance fork, PaperMC: 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/
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!
> 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?
Maybe, but I think there was still a risk you'd end up under water? I don't think it ever actually happened to me as I was genuinely scared of getting stuck so I was always prepared and careful.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
I wonder if this new update adds similar generation again?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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!
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.
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.
> Both support PC but only Bedrock supports other plattforms.
Both support windows, but only Java supports other open platforms (where you can install external software, like Linux and Mac PCs, or others OSes/HW architectures).
Bedrock is only published on closed platforms (games consoles, mostly, and app stores) and windows.
Java is the only edition that supports mods.
The android version of bedrock is also unofficially playable on Linux.
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.
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?
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.
> 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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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-overworl...
There's a trailer they made for a recent update that shows off some of the terrain results:
https://youtu.be/zmIvURR_-eg
Like, it's perlin noise and a bunch of algorithms and it makes mountains and caves and overhangs that are all decorated and such and a river bleeding into a ravine that leads into a giant cave network.
Just yesterday I watched this fantastic explanation of how to generate realistically looking ocean surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGEqaX4Y4bQ
The fantastic part about this video is just how little of actual physics you need to know to create convincing, complex waves. You can skip entire fluid dynamics and condense it to "water molecules move in circles when subjected to a wave".
Forget about Perlin noise, it is useful to getting something but it is IMO dead end if you are for realistic looking world. There isn't a way to fix it because, fundamentally, it is completely disconnected from how land features are created in real life. To get asymptotically to realism you have to start taking into account more and more of physics and passage of time and Perlin noise just completely ignores this.
To get realistic representation you need to build a little model that knows a little bit about how the features are created.
You can even go Dwarf Fortress direction and model processes that create various features of the world over time.
The "Minecraft Pocket Edition" (MCPE) code that became Bedrock predates Microsoft's involvement by over three years. Bedrock is actually Microsoft's effort to unify versions, eliminating the separate legacy console editions and providing cross-play with PC, mobile, and other console users.
Java remains separate because the consoles will never run Java and the modding community that exists around the Java version just can't be replicated on the Bedrock codebase. If it weren't for mods I guarantee Java edition would be dead.
My biggest issue is the amount of friction when creating a new Microsoft account for a child. I have to walk through other parents in creating a MS account for themselves (if they don't have one), then how to make a child account with a username, then finding and ticking a bunch of checkboxes to allow online play, then launching Minecraft and signing in with the new child account. It's way too many steps with email verifications. It's >30 minutes. In just my circle there's several parents who gave up and sadly their kid can't play with their group of friends. People outside of tech don't have patience for that crap. This is all outside the fact that each console has their own form of friction in allowing kids to play online.
C'mon Microsoft, you can improve the new user process. Just make an optional in-game wizard asking parents a bunch of questions so kids can play ASAP. And if the issue is that it wouldn't fit in with the one-size-fits-all MS accounts used for everything else, then flag the "wizard-built" accounts as incomplete so parents can go through making a 360 account another day. Damn metrics.
They target Bedrock for this, and I strongly suspect once it starts bringing in extra money they will essentially kill further Java edition development.
Then, by making Bedrock available to people who paid for Java, they would give a hassle-free way for players and modders to try it, and many will probably stick to the latest version.
I do hope, if this scenario comes about, the community will keep the Java version alive by maintaining feature parity, but there’re fundamental issues where some features might not be easily backported on Java due to performance limitations, plus community fragmentation as different modders try to backport same new features in different mutually incompatible ways.
It would be hassle free for vanilla players, but certainly not for modders. There are years of community support built around the Java version that would need to be moved to bedrock to make moving the modding scene hassle free.
For some reason they locked my completely unused Microsoft account, that was created for the sole purpose of migrating my Minecraft account to, due to "unusual behavior" (or "activity that violates our Microsoft Services Agreement" if you go by the error message instead of the corresponding knowledge base article).
The reasonable thing to do in such a case if of course to require users to "[verify] [they] are the account owner" by receiving an SMS verification code on an arbitrary phone number (they explicitly mention the possibility of "asking a trusted friend or family member" for this).
[1] https://github.com/MultiMC/Launcher/issues/4093
Realms are obviously different because the two versions are incompatible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markus_Persson#Controversy
>Controversy
>Persson has received criticism for political and social opinions he has expressed on Twitter, such as referring to feminism as a "social disease" and claiming that most feminists are "overtly sexist against men."[50][51] In June 2017, Persson faced criticism for referring to video game developer Zoë Quinn as a "cunt".[50] Later in June 2017, he tweeted in support of a heterosexual pride day, calling opponents to the idea "cunts" and stating that they "deserve to be shot".[51] After facing backlash, he deleted the tweets and rescinded his statements, writing "So yeah, it's about pride of daring to express, not about pride of being who you are. I get it now."[52] In November 2017, Persson was criticized for posting a tweet which reads "It's ok to be white."[53] In follow-up tweets, he said he believed privilege is a "made up metric".[54]
>A March 2019 Minecraft update removed all mentions of Persson from the game's menu, though his name is still in the credits.[55] Microsoft did not explain this action, but its timing led multiple news outlets to conclude it was related to the controversies associated with him.[55][56] Persson was not invited to the game's tenth anniversary event later that year, with Microsoft saying that his views "do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang".[8][57] Microsoft then dissociated from Persson due to his controversial comments on his Twitter account.[8]
"It's okay to be white":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_okay_to_be_white
Minecraft Creator Tells Women on Twitter ‘Act Like a Cunt, Get Called a Cunt’:
https://observer.com/2017/06/minecraft-gamergate-markus-pers...
Minecraft’s Creator Excluded From the Game’s 10th Anniversary Due to Racist, Sexist, Transphobic Comments
https://www.themarysue.com/notch-minecraft-bad-comments-and-...
Minecraft Creator Sparks Cries of Homophobia
https://fortune.com/2017/07/02/minecraft-markus-persson-homo...
‘Minecraft’ Creator Excluded From Anniversary Due to ‘Comments and Opinions’ (EXCLUSIVE)
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/minecraft-creator-exclu...
The Creator of Minecraft Tweeted Some Dumb Stuff About Race
https://www.gq.com/story/notch-whiteness-tweets
Microsoft removes references to game creator Notch in latest Minecraft update
https://www.techspot.com/news/79403-microsoft-removes-refere...
Some References to ‘Minecraft’ Creator Notch Removed From Game
https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/notch-removed-minecraft...
Minecraft creator Notch won't be included in the game's 10 year anniversary event
https://www.vg247.com/minecraft-creator-notch-absent-from-an...
Those articles simply quoted his own words, and Wikipedia doesn't declare whether he's liberal or conservative, or a good or bad coder.
You're the one who's revealing their assumption that White Supremacists and Racists and Sexists and Homophobes and Transphobes are usually right wing, not liberal.
Unfortunately you're correct and totally justified in that assumption, of course, but that's beside the point, and not what the article said.
Nobody said anything about liberals or conservatives, or writing worse or better code, either.
And if he was "just joking", then Popehat's Rule of Goats applies:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s%...
>Popehat's Law of Goats
>He who fucks goats, either as part of a performance or to troll those he deems has overly delicate sensibilities is simply, a goatfucker.
>He claimed he was just pretending to be racist to trigger the social justice warriors, but even if he is telling the truth, Popehat's Law of Goats still applies.
So back to the point: What did you think of the words that Markus said?
Do you agree with Markus Persson that Zoe Quinn is a "cunt", and think that Markus was right to tell her so publicly and personally on Twitter?
Do you think it's a good business decision for Microsoft to associate themselves with those words?
I don’t know either person but I think they both should have a right to say whatever they want.
>Do you think it's a good business decision for Microsoft to associate themselves with those words?
I think people will care for two days and then forget about it. It’s irrelevant. Some people will boycott the product if they stay associated but then some will like what happened and will buy if they let the guy stay as a way of supporting him. Overall it will make zero difference.
I suggest you go look up "GamerGate" before you humiliate yourself any more in a public discussion about Minecraft by standing up for what Markus Persson said while unconvincingly claiming not to know who he is or what he meant.
>I don’t know either person but [bullshit redacted].
You don't have to personally know both people to have an opinion, but you've already made yours quite clear. So don't bother posting your next formulaic "but" excuse: "I'm not misogynistic, but what's the big deal about calling a female game developer who's been viciously and systematically attacked by GamerGate a cunt?"
You also miserably failed to explain why you mistakenly thought I was talking about code quality, and why you naively think code quality is all that matters in a product, and why you believe Microsoft should stand behind Markus Persson after he publicly called Zoe Quinn a "cunt" (and said a lot more horrible, sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and thoroughly asinine things, too) and aligned himself with and carried out the goals GamerGate, like you just did.
So next time, use Google and Wikipedia before opening your big fat mouth and pretending to be ignorant, and stop getting all your news and misogynistic arguments from 4chan. But at least now we all know where you're actually coming from, and just what kind of a person you really are, and why you're embarrassed to associate your own name with your vile opinions.
I won't bother giving you any URLs to prove my point, because your own words already have, and I'm quite sure you know exactly what I'm talking about, but you're just playing coy and falsely claiming "I don't know X, but ..." because you're a troll. And if not, which I doubt, then look it up yourself.
Edit, I think I found something nice (a cave) at -281, -15, 436, that's not something 1.18 generates by default I guess?
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.
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.
No, and I don't think I have made any comment on the intention. I understand what they were going for. My point is specifically what you are saying: It massively changes the game play. If I wanted different game play I would play a different game. Every update so far, including the ones since MS takeover have felt like natural progression of the game to me. I enjoyed those updates and have lots of good things to say about them and the way they expanded the game.
This update feels to me like it should have been a different game, or a mod. That's the contrast I was trying to highlight with my comment.
It's worth noting I'm not claiming anything as a fact. I was stating my personal opinion and concern for the direction the game is headed in, relative to my own expectations, after a decade of playing Minecraft. I explained why I think that way, because we're on HN.
> The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system
Those existed before, just that covering them and getting the materials for it if you're not a fan of big craters and abysses in the ground wasn't a project of its own before.
> So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk.
Cave exploration and mob bashing is still grinding. This will get old fast if you just want to get to it and build your base or whatever self assigned goal you have.
> It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here.
That is entirely subjective.
> 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)
That wasn't my claim, no. I said it is now more difficult to see directly from the water, because the landscape is raised so much relatively the water. Overcoming that is just tedious, not difficult, because you have to get out of the boat every so often to get a view of the landscape.
For me it is comparable to amplified maps no longer being opt-in, basically. It's fun for a change, but not the game experience I am looking for most of the time. Now I no longer get to pick unless I stick with old versions, which of course sucks for online play.
Does 1.18 change things? I'm trying to keep an open mind, trying to convince myself that the new ore distribution adds nuance to my opening moves. When that conviction fails, I look for other things that hold promise. Something that I've toyed around with doing in the past is creating a Zork-esque underground empire, but have always held back on those plans since the old cave networks were bland and cramped. Yet the new underground biomes make such a project more appealing.
I'm not a big Minecraft player, but I'm pretty sure the time-optimal strategy for getting diamonds consistently was to set up a deliberate mine topology which is mathematically efficient, not just dig forward in straight lines. AFAIK diamond mining was the only thing that couldn't be automated; for iron the time-optimal way is to construct an iron farm, i.e. engineering, not grinding.
Doing that by digging down is not really feasible. There are two main routes.
In the village route, you spawn next do a village with a blacksmith. You get some iron or an iron pick from the blacksmith, kill the iron golem for the remaining iron, grab some wheat and then find a nearby lava pool or completable ruined portal. There are variations where you can trade with a villager for a bucket, but by then most speedrunners would have already reset.
The second and more typical modern route is using ocean. You locate a shipwreck which gives you iron and food. Then you find a ravine that has magma blocks (indicating there's lava underneath) and use that to build your portal. To my knowledge this isn't viable in 1.18's world gen though.
When speedrunners do go underground in the overworld, they'll usually try to find a cave first to find exposed iron and lava. Digging down is the last choice.
It's its own form of exploration, at least in the versions with fun cave generation: you always end up in some cave complex that you can then explore. But I'm happy to see that it's less needed now, because interesting caves are more commonly accessible from aboveground.
Everyone (including children) learns this method over time, be it by checking tutorials online, reading a wiki, or just naturally due to how simple and efficient it is.
You just had to mine straight down to y 8/13 (this changed in the new patch), make a long corridor and then just branch out of that corridor in lines.
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Ore?file=1-18-ore-distribu...
We did not find the world "riddled with holes," though, and gaps in Minecraft have always been easy to traverse by simply placing blocks.
1.18 ore distribution sucks. Going caving virtually requires full armor due to mobs, but now to get full armor you need to go caving (or get extremely lucky).
I much prefer the Minetest game NodeCore, which is playable with 8 inventory slots (the small HUD bar is all you get, because the game shuns all modal UI except a hints system for figuring out crafting and other gameplay mechanics without using a guide to see whole recipes, which are considered spoilers) and makes the fancy terrain more navigable by letting you scale cliffs and even climb overhangs without placing or mining anything.
I do agree with you on inventory clutter, but that has been a problem for as long as I have played the game (since about 2010? I don't remember which version). I am disappointed that they have delayed the introduction of the bundle.
While I agree with you in principal, the truth is that if you don't update the launcher it doesn't break - and if you do update the launcher it also doesn't break, it just requires you to complete an account migration.
Edit: They == Mojang/Microsoft
I have decompiled it and will make my own fork at that point.
I still use this launcher which was made explicitly when I reported some obscure GSON bug a few years back and it will probably work for a long time:
http://move.rupy.se/file/launcher.jar
[1]: https://veloren.net/ the game is still under development but it has been playable for more than a year now.
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?
It’s definitely weird for end-user software to promote itself based on internal implementation details, but it’s by no means a rust-exclusive phenomenon.
1) The player community and the dev community are not distinct: we involve players in the development process and actively encourage them to become contributors.
2) There are many people that are interested in working with Rust, and it's often a big pull factor for new contributors.
3) Veloren is by far the biggest public domain game written in Rust: it's a good demonstration of what the language can do and how it performs at scale (Veloren's game server scaled up to a 48-thread machine with 181 players online in the same world during the last release party: not many games, let alone voxel games, can manage these numbers). We want to encourage other game developers to consider using it too.
Otherwise I mostly only see this when it’s “for developers by developers”
The game is extremely open-ended: there is no overarching objective, and you are free to interact with the world as you please. For most players, this means a combination of exploring, crafting, conquering challenges (dungeons, caves, etc.), finding rare items, and socialising with other players.
The game is 100% free so you have no reason not to jump in and give it a go if you're curious!
> How is it similar to Dwarf Fortress?
Veloren has an open procedural world with a history generation system. Although work on the history simulation is still very much ongoing, the world already more cohesive than those of many other voxel games. Our end goal is a world that feels as rich and as complex as that of Dwarf Fortress. Whether we end up succeeding is still to be determined!
> How is it similar to Minecraft?
Veloren is a voxel game, so... cubes and open-world exploration. Not much more to say about this one.
And at this point they are clearly looking for contributors much more than for players, that's why all the documentation you'll find is targeting the former.
Documentation and marketing material require a lit of work, and doing so continuously against a fast-moving target is a enormous effort.
Parent is checking out a game because it was mentioned on HN and finds that the game’s web page doesn’t have a manual and your response is essentially: “Play the game sight-unseen, learn everything about it, write a manual and contribute it back to the project”? That’s not very realistic.
I could see creating an issue in the tracker, perhaps.
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
[2] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=27374
[3] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=18529
[4] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=17096
[5] https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=13589
I'm personally not fond of the (pretty crude) lod view, especially because of the moiré in it.
https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/lod-level-of-de...
https://github.com/PorkStudios/FarPlaneTwo
https://picroma.com/
https://i.imgur.com/YtDraMh.jpg
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?
Also frequently when using things like peeling noise is to use different scale and resolution of the noise itself. While on smallest scale there might be 1 noise value per minecraft block. You can can also use a different scale in that 1 noise value is used per 10x10 minecraft chunk (16x16 blocks?)
Also not sure how familiar you are with noise generation like perrin but things have slopes to them and isn't just completely random per point. So even without seeing generated data. You can infer a little bit about the next value depending on the intensity and resolution.
Lastly, you can just not use noise at all and just place things at given coordinates and make the game incorporate them into the proc gen at chunk time. E.g. you want a city always at 1000,1000 coordinate far away from 0 0. When you get near you can apply smoothing filters in and around the 1000 1000 position thru various math and layering systems so no matter the proc gen at that point. City can be there and it not look completely out of place.
Sure you do. When you want to apply tectonics to a chunk, it's easy to calculate (and cache) the pre-tectonics version of all the neighbors.
The problem isn't effects that need to know about their neighborhood, it's effects that need detailed info from 50 chunks away.
If you generate a noise function that dictates where the "plates" are, then the location of the "plates" is already predetermined from the construction of the function. Then the output of that function could be used to alter the mountain/terrain functions.
Thus, no need to pregenerate everything. You pregenerate all of the functions in advance, but not all of the outputs.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmtyQOKKmrMVaKuRXz02jbQ
"Real" is an interesting concept. Any such simulation couldn't really be based on Earth geophysics. Who wants to spend months crossing the steppes? Real magma isn't something you find by accident. Real tunnels can collapse. And so on. So these intelligent developers will need to create a new system of geophysics.
I've read that Dwarf Fortress uses a process more like what you describe.
There are games for nuclear war and pandemics that are fun and educational about the globe-spanning dynamics of those catastrophes. There are also games like Universal Paperclips that provide an intuition for the exponential dynamics of complex systems.
Seems like there should be a way to fuse these concepts around climate change.
https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Climate_(Civ6)
I wouldn't say so. With the increased mountain height I'd argue the terrain is more realistic than ever, and not boring.
> In the b1.8 update [September 2011], the terrain generator was subject to a rewrite aimed to make the code simpler, and make the terrain more realistic. ... at the time it caused quite a controversy, a thread on the Minecraft Forums decried the new terrain as "boring".
What does "realistic" mean to you? Are you looking at it like a geologist? If we follow rland's idea to completion, Minecraft players should look for kimberlite pipes to find diamonds, etc.
I'm certain some people would love virtual prospecting like this. But I strongly doubt the game would be as popular.
I'd say if you compare the first two set of screenshots. It is more realistic since you don't get as crazy land formations. But falls short of creating significant mountain ranges to compensate, making it less realistic in a way.
The first image, 2011, makes me think of tower carst formations, like Ao Phang Nga National Park or the Li River. It's indeed a "crazy land formation" in that most of the planet is not like that. But well within what a more physics based model might generate.
The second image, 2021, makes me wonder what's going on. How did that concavity appear in the bottom left? Was it limestone? Sandstone, like NM's Natural Amphitheater or CO's Cliff Palace? How is the top of the concavity supported, given that it appears to carry a lot of earth?
What is the geological connection to the ridge above it? How is the ridge supported? It appears highly eroded. Where did the scree go? (Shouldn't some have filled in the exposed concavity?) Why is the transition from light-colored to green so clearly delineated?
In the real-world, large cave systems are rare, and walkable ones even less common. But they are also part of what make Minecraft fun.
So yes, I think a more realistic (in the physics sense) would be less fun than what Minecraft does. (Excepting, perhaps, a small number of more geophysically inclined players.)
https://cgvr.cs.uni-bremen.de/papers/cgi20/AutoBiomes.pdf
As another comment mentions, dwarf fortress does do all of this though. I don't think this would work in minecraft though, I think minecraft needs a mix of terrain types near each other to be most interesting, and tectonic plates would spread it out.
They've spoken recently about one of their intentions for Survival is for the world to be a blank slate for players own creations. Adding more and richer structures detracts from that. There's also the part where it's still a game that needs balancing, and just importing arbitrary structures and resources detracts from Survival.
There is the marketplace which has community servers/worlds/levels that showcase what other people have built. I think that's the right level for this.
Otherwise, stuff like this is perfect for the data pack ecosystem they created.
Similar idea without neural networks:
https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse
I'm surprised no one applied this idea to Minecraft yet. There's even a 3D version:
https://i.imgur.com/IEOsbIy.png
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.
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
Some elements of Factorio were inspired by Minecraft. I think Minecraft could now use some inspiration from Factorio.
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.
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.
In bedrock minecraft commands must be used to update these states. This is where my understanding started to fall apart.
Create mod by itself is fine as it is imo, no extra stuff required.
It's a pack with one goal (build rocket, goto moon), that puts you in the SANDBOX that is the core of minecraft and says, "here are the tools, here's a bit of guidance on what you should automate to progress, but figure it out from tools at hand and have fun in your own way".
The mods are from different authors, but all the recipes have been tweaked and tuned to integrate with each other and provide a cohesive progression curve. Even the textures have been tweaked to make the pack visually cohesive.
A lot of recent packs give you a quest book to guide your progress and push you into the different mods slowly. You get maybe 70-80% through one mod's tech tree and then you're pushed to start on another section before you can progress into that last 20%. The Project Ozone series does a REALLY good job of making sure the different mods balance each other and interact in a way that feels good.
> you end up with a billion items
Yeah that gets bad. Most packs have some sort of inventory organization system (basically a computer you can stick all your items into with no organization and then search them up later) to help alleviate that.
As an example, the "auto-crafter" block could be powered by chorus fruit, which means the player would not have access to it until after beating the Ender Dragon. That would also mean that truly automating crafting would also require an automated chorus fruit farm, which would give the system a minimum space requirement.
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.
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 :(.
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/
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?
The first public version of Minecraft came out in May 2009.
I'm sure players would pay to access it if it worked.
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"
Bravo, nu-Mojang.
I wonder if this new update adds similar generation again?
Mob spawn light rules are unchanged and don't match up with the RT front end, but that rarely matters.
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.
Both support windows, but only Java supports other open platforms (where you can install external software, like Linux and Mac PCs, or others OSes/HW architectures).
Bedrock is only published on closed platforms (games consoles, mostly, and app stores) and windows.
Java is the only edition that supports mods.
The android version of bedrock is also unofficially playable on Linux.
You mean Bedrock supports consoles.
Java supports Mac and Linux, so it's also multiplatform. Just different platforms.
i used PC because in the parent comment PC was used as well.
Desktop is also not ideal because it runs on Laptops as well.
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.
They seem to go on forever.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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 :)
Oh wait, they both are “one and the same.”
https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-purchases-...