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.
If you like voxel world generation, I strongly advise you to check out Veloren[1], it has a much much deeper worldgen that what Minecraft offers.
[1]: https://veloren.net/ the game is still under development but it has been playable for more than a year now.
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?
One thing I always hoped, but that never happened: get peopleâs creations into the game. Randomly get vetted buildings as biomes. People have created insane things and itâs a shame they couldnât 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 youâd have to generate random monsters or NPCs for each of them.
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.
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 limitâyou couldnât really have big mountains full of false summits, and indeed the terrain generation didnât 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 wouldnât let you above 192m above sea level. Denmark has a highest peak of 170m so it would fit but the game wouldnât generate such a thing as youâd 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.
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 :(.
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, weâre 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?
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.
It's kinda remarkable how much the new update overhauled world generation. If you've been standing on the sidelines, waiting for "the big one" to draw you back in, I was greatly surprised at how much fun I had exploring some surprisingly realistic and cool vistas. Canyons don't feel sheer, savannas have remarkable valleys and hills, and the cave generation feels... well, "next-gen" for a lack of a better phrase. I have admittedly been pretty unimpressed with Microsoft's handling of the game up until this point, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how fresh it feels now.
Bravo, nu-Mojang.
Something similar happened to No Man's Sky. After a specific update, all planets became very similar regarding their topology. It became boring :(
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?
Here's a video by one of the developers talking about some technical aspects of the new terrain: https://youtu.be/TycBrFKEteU
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.
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.
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!
I always found they had missed a chance regarding biomes. Giant trees, whos tops basically look like hillside if you walk towards them unknowingly..
Presumably this is just for the PC version? Or do console versions ever get the terrain updates?
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 made a video exploring underwater caves in the new worldgen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OusWYZ3yWW0
They seem to go on forever.
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?
Does anyone know if the new generator is used on unexplored parts of previous save games?
This has me pumped. Time to try it out again.
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 Iâm very naive to Minecraft. I see a lot of time / thought / energy dedicated to making things in Minecraft and canât help but feel itâs a bit of a waste of time. I think I feel this way because I donât 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.
looks pixelated to me
kenjken
Why did that headline come across to me starting out as ââMICROSOFTâ world generation âŚâ.
Oh wait, they both are âone and the same.â
https://news.microsoft.com/announcement/microsoft-purchases-...
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 doesnât 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. Itâs worth a try if you like just wandering around in Minecraft marveling at the scenery.
[1] https://www.planetminecraft.com/data-pack/terralith-overworl...