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Noise Caves Feedback

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In the latest Snapshot brings in a huge change to how caves are generated in Minecraft, which will make up a major part of Caves & Cliffs later this year. With this being such an important part of the update, we want as much of your feedback as possible! Before you play and let us know what you think, there's a few things to bear in mind:

  • All the noise caves (the new caves) will be water-filled from sea level (y63) down to y30. That means many of the lakes on the surface are actually water-filled cave entrances. That will change later, when we have aquifers enabled at all heights.
  • No biomes generate yet
  • All ore placement at negative Y are tentative and will be updated later.
  • There are no larger bodies of lava underground. That will be added later.
  • Old worlds currently can't be opened in the new snapshot, because of some world conversion issues. That will be fixed in a future snapshot.

For more information on noise caves, aquifers, and everything else in the latest snapshot, check out the full changelog!

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  • 5
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    My feedback for this snapshot;

    I'm fine with large open caves like in the previous snapshot being rare, but it seems that not only have they become more rare, but they've shrunk as well. I've generated many worlds for testing, and could only find a handful of decently large caves, and only 1 or 2 of them came even close to matching the previous cave's sizes. So maybe, their rarity could be toned down just a little, or at the very least have the ones we find be bigger more often. But, IMO, a more important issue came up with the removal of a lot of the large caves. It's caused much of the new underground to be pretty much empty, especially compared to the old cave systems above. I'm sure it's probably in the pipeline, but the old cave generation appearing below y=0 would go a long way in filling the large gaps that exist currently.

    As a matter of fact, having more blending of the old and new cave generation in general would go a long way to make the underground a better place for exploring. As it stands, you mainly have the new cave generation closer to the surface, and all the new cave types down in the grim stone, with the only caves intersecting the two parts being deep diving spaghetti caves. I'd like to be able to use the older caves to have more paths to travel between larger caves deep underground, or have a surprise cheese cavern that is exposed to the surface, making essentially a large crater in the ground, etc.

  • 5
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    I’m another one to agree that I preferred the cave generation in 21w06a or the larger cave generation, makes for more adventures game play and I love going down a tunnel or turning a corner not knowing what lies ahead whether it be a giant aquifer, ravine or epic cave formation - it’s the beauty of caving for me and something that I enjoyed back in the pre 1.6.4 days when cave generation was more frequent.

    I’ve been playing the game since 2011 and have always been a big caver in the game so as you can imagine I was delighted to hear this update. I’ve never submitted feedback before but I felt the need to comment on this. Some other observations that I hope are helpful:

    - noticed there are random blobs of cave now that are isolated

    - I know people are loving the new grimstone and I agree. But it doesn’t look like cave material for me. You’ll never see a real life cave with what looks like bricks. For me the cavern texture has to change.

    - absolutely love the giant aquifers!

    - reading through the comments I really like people’s suggestion of having underground rivers. This would help mimic a sense of realism to have real world caves generate.

    - lastly I think seeing cave mushrooms would be a good idea but only in certain parts. Since the caves a large now I think it would add to a more atmosphere.

    Hope that helped and keep up the great all

  • 4
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    the caves were better in 21w06a  as you could fit the biomes in well and had a ton of area to explore

  • 2
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    the lazycowboy has a point about the diamonds but not the caves

  • 2
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    I'm not really worried about ore generation being balanced until they ACTUALLY fix villagers. I was looking forward to actually building dynamic cities and getting rid of villager trading halls, but it went in the other direction and if you get a decent weaponsmith and toolsmith in single player you might never have to mine a single diamond. It only really matters on servers that use diamonds for currency.

    And there STILL is no point to actually building tons of homes for villagers and letting them roam about, or even really building them dedicated stores. If you ARE going the trading hall direction at least make us build a decent size room, have working hours for the shop, and base the trades off how well the the shop is furnished (multiple work stations/decorations) and what kind of home the shopkeeper has to relax in after hours.

    Make us let them wander a bit, give us a bonus for having the bedroom a fair ways from the shop. That way we build TOWNS rather than trading halls, and get paid (given incentive) to let them roam and protect our valuable traders with the most unlocked trades.

    But right now who cares how easy diamonds are to find? Or iron, redstone, quartz, anything villagers sell.

  • 4
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    TheLazyCowboy1 I strongly disagree. Why have a cave update and change the world depth if the underground is just going to be about as empty as 1.16? Sure the noise caves can still get huge, but most of them are just large tunnels. It also doesn't help that smaller caves generate exactly the same way they do in 1.16, leaving the underground very empty. It would be nice if the distribution of smaller caves was noise based, so in some areas it's empty, and in other places it's full of small caves like pre-1.6.4. 

  • 5
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    I got full diamond armor less than a hour with the new cave generation. Maybe you can make it harder to find diamonds by having them surrounded by stone. So you can't just easily stumble upon them. 

  • 0
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    Sure you may have got full diamond armor in an hour with the last snapshot but . . . I've done it in a few hours in normal minecraft myself stair stepping down to Y12 and branch mining. Perhaps not quite as fast or easy, but still easy enough that the Iron age really wasn't a thing . . . and if you get a good village you can go even faster.

    For just finding diamonds though I'm forced to remember that the new biomes aren't in yet and mobs aren't spawning in the vast numbers you would expect below Y0 either. Who cares if the diamond is easy to spot when that big open space is so dark and dangerous?

    I made big caves like this for a mod pack and I know why the spawning is nerfed. It could crash the game if you let all those mobs load in while players are in the middle between the surface and the deep dark region. I expect they are working on that.

    Perhaps mob spawns will go back up if they add in enough light sources and you'll get armies spawning in big open spaces where it actually is dark, or maybe they'll increase the health and damage of mobs as you descend into the earth instead of using the old system where they increase the number of spawns as you go further down.

    Perhaps we'll see something similar to the witch huts or illager outposts spawning underground, maybe revamped dungeons. I don't know. They could make it more dangerous simply by adding a SMALL chance for cave spiders to spawn naturally in those really big, deep, caverns.

    And maybe they'll bury everything.

  • 3
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    The new aquifer rivers in the underground look amazing, but when trying to ride a boat down one of these rivers, you're likely to come across a floating wall of stone whenever the waterline changes height, stopping you from going forward. However, I, and many others, think that these stone walls actually look quite cool floating on the river, and would be a shame if they were to be removed. So I suggest that, instead of removing these stone walls, they should be made in a way that still allows boats through, while still keeping the unique look they have.

    My solution is that a new block be added, known as flowstone (seeing as flowstone is a real thing and the name just makes sense given its purpose) and would be a solid block that would make up these stone walls. It would have a unique function too, allowing boats to flow over it as if it were water. Basically, if a boat was on water and was on the same height as the top block of flowstone, the boat would pass over the flowstone, unlike other solid blocks. This would only work going downwards however, as the flowstone block would have to have an exposed top for boats to pass over (therefore acting almost like a sort of stone waterfall).

    I think this should be added as it would give more purpose and use to the boat aside from just going across oceans. It would also help spice up the new underground rivers, as unique blocks are good at grabbing players' attention and their curiosity.

  • 0
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    Lush caves should generate more commonly on the shores of these lakes.

  • 0
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    I had a post on Halocline Cave Illusions that I thought would be trippin'. Buuut, it was deleted. Perhaps it was because it had an image of a diver floating above the boundary layer, which was "inappropriate" or something in the like, but please do go look it up. I do not know much of how it forms but I assume it occurs in static bodies of water, which is likely a common occurrence in caves that are not exposed to the weather. It occurs where brine water sits below freshwater, and creates the illusion that there is air above the brine water due to their different refractive properties.

    If this post is in the wrong topic, please do not delete it, just move to the right one.

    Thanks.

  • 1
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    Aquifers occasionally cut off caves, sometimes with no indication that there's an aquifer there at all. To make it more clear where aquifers are cutting off caves, the border of aquifers should be randomly composed of 10% clay. This would help indicate where caves are cut off due to aquifers.

  • 2
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    I am one of the few that think the cave sizes are fine in 21w07a. I've never found the amount of big caves lacking when compared to the last snapshot. There are still plenty around. Plus, even if they are rarer, I think that's kind of the deal. We want the act of stumbling into these massive caverns to be a wonderous and intimidating feeling, a feeling that would soon burn out if they were too commonplace. That is not to say that I don't like these large caves. I really do. But generally speaking, these massive caves are quite unbalanced, and it's difficult to figure out whether there are too many mobs, or too many ores. Some might say that there is a balance to all that, but I don't know. Something about them just feels a bit off...

  • 0
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    Add cracking noises in caves

  • 0
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    try 12w06a with dripstone caves and then in 2107a and see how big they feel

  • 1
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    It is confirmed that noise caves will be buffed so they're not mostly small like 21w07a, but not absolutely everywhere like 21w06a. I believe this is a great compromise because it helps fill the underground without making it too excessive.

  • 0
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    When you add the lava level back, ramp up the diamond generation under it and nerf it above. Make it so that the player can choose to go dangerously deep but also have better chances of getting diamonds

  • 1
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    This piece of feedback is based on the situation as it is in snapshot 21w07 which is the last snapshot up to date for now.

    I have a 1500 words limit so i will make multiple of this in sequence on this page this is page 1

    I will start with pointing out what I find is not working at the moment:

    1. Cave descent is too fast, at the current moment there are a lot of caves, the big ones near the higher Y coordinates which interesect with others down the Y axis, and this happens a lot actually, entering one of those means that if you are willing to take some damage or use a bucket of water for fast descent you will gain access to the lower Y like -18 from Y 50 in just 20-25 seconds and that at the moment is the biggest problem of this snapshots
    2. Relating to cave descent I think that it could be solved by a clever-er use of "old" cave types. In the current state there are very few of them generating but what I think should address a lot of generation weirdness and cave gen being unbalanced is the following: the old cave type should generate more than now (like being 30-35 per cent of caves) and in let's say in 30 per cent of cases they should create the "old" caves and in the other 70 they could be used to create a "network". The old caves in "network" use case could go up or down a bit inand mostly be horizontal (with the up and down component like bringing you 10-15 blocks lower if you go across it) and they should interesect into bigger caves "the new ones"... continuing on page 2
  • 1
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    Page 2 of feedback about snapshot 21w07

    this will manage to slow down descent and make caving a little bit more claustrophobic as we are used to. The current caves could generate likw they do now and so could make cave descent faster but at the same time it would be slowed down by the "old" cave network and the distraction it can give you to explore those caves too balancing out cave descent speed in general.

    3. No big caves like in the first cave snapshot (Mr. Kniberg said he will add them back in next snapshot so I will wait to see how it goes).

    4. The grimstone caves do not use the full limit downwards in a lot of generation, many stop at around -20 height and do not go down to -64, but of course also this piece of feedback needs to correlete with how and where deep dark will generate, so no further ideas or options about grimstone caves now.

    5. Not so many caves with stalagmites and stalactites?

    6. The geodes containing amethists could be tweaken in the way they generate with the opening: a lot of them spawn with a part in open areas but a lot of time that part is not the opening but is the closed part of the shell: you could make more likely for geodes who spawn inside a cave to have the opening in the exposed area, and perhaps have them be a full sphere when genereta fully buried.

    7. Cave interesctions looking weird, a lot of caves end like it they where truncated but if you mine just 1 block you gain access to another cave? Is this a bug? continuing on page 3...

  • 1
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    Page 3 of feedback about snapshot 21w07

    .... still point 7. Even if it not a bug consider tweaking it to happen less often because caves look weird this way.

    8. Too less underwater caves, having big underwater lakes which lead to underwater caves which lead to other underwater caves happening a little bit more often would be a nice touch.

     

    As of now I have no other thoughts about these snapshots.

  • 3
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    There should be lava aquafiers, there isn't a lot of lava in the new caves, making the collection of obsidian kinda hard 

  • 0
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    i hope we can configure  the carvers size in data packs

    and some seem to small still height and width   

  • 2
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    I'm really liking the 21w08a cave generation; it's a great balance! Once the buggy lava is fixed, as well as the normal lapis ore generating in deepslate areas sometimes, then I think the cave generation will be perfect!

  • 1
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    The larger caves are pretty, but they're much less interesting to explore imo. With smaller caves, you're constantly making little discoveries as you look around corners and go further into them, but with these large caves, you see everything as soon as you enter. Then it's just a tedious process of lighting the whole thing up and digging out every last bit of ore.

  • 3
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    Cave Spider nests when out in the open should have more spread put webs rather than a uniform set up lining up with the mineshaft. I think instead it should be wideout with a ton more around that part of the mineshaft to give a more realistic and infested feel.

  • 1
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    There should be infested versions of deepslate

  • 0
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    If we were to have lava versions of aquifers they should be a lot rarer.

  • 2
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    A few changes that should be made to the cave generation.

    • Having deepslate is great, and it is already slightly harder to mine, but it should be even more difficult. In normal stone, I generally mine with a large quantity of stone and one ore two iron picks for ores. It would work well, provide more progression, and make mining lower down more difficult. I would like to see mining time increased to 1.5-1.75 times that of normal stone.
    • One feature that I have felt should change for a while is silverfish. Infested stone currently only generates under mountain biomes, but with the separation of the underground from the above ground, as well as the fact that it is an interesting and engaging feature that could provide challenge in more areas and get widespread use, it should be able to generate anywhere. This would also come with an infested deepslate variant.
    • While the current ore distribution is okay, it could be much better. It seems very similar to how it used to be, and this is a time to make ore rarity better, not just to conform it to fit the new caves. First of all, I would decrease iron rarity by a third to half of its current rarity. Copper should remain the same, and gold should go down by about 1/4. Redstone could be slightly rarer, coal is fine for now. Diamond should be cut to half its current rarity. It is far too easy to acquire for the highest tier (excluding netherite, which it directly bridges to).
  • 2
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    • Next, I am still not sure if the underground is large enough to accommodate the new cave biomes. For an optimal experience that feels like cave biomes, the caves must be large enough to hold 3 cave biomes stacked on top of each other. With each cave biome area holding its own multiple caves stacked on top of each other, a decent estimate would be 64 blocks of vertical space for a cave biome, plus some. By this, the underground would need an additional 64 blocks of space, which the sky would likely get too, bringing it to a 512 block height limit.
    • Finally, cave biomes. We currently have three confirmed cave biomes, as well as mesh caves, which sounds more like generation than a biome. With the deep dark predominantly generating at the bottom of the world, it might not feel like much of a biome, and more a part of the world. If some sort of lava/magma oriented biome was added, it would keep the challenge of the deep dark, though in its own way, and would together with the plain biome, add some variety to that layer. For middle biomes, a giant mushroom grotto like biome, which many have requested, would work excellently, with a nice magical feel.
    • I recognize that this would be a lot of work to do, but I am sure the developers would be able to pull it off. I would be easily willingly to wait longer for it, even pushing the release date up into late August or September if necessary, if we could get two more cave biomes.
  • 2
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    About 21w08a:

    In my opinion the caves size/rarity is now well balanced.

    I'm still unsure if this is a bug or meant to be but quite often a one wide wall will spawn between one cave and another.

    The new ore generation is quite nice, can't wait for the new mountains to see how emerald and iron will spawn.

    There seems to be a problem with some ores spawning with the wrong texture in the transition zone around level 0. 

    Water ravines still seem to be missing or maybe I’m just unlucky. 

    This has been said before, but glow lichen would look better in bigger patches.

    All in all, great update thanks for the hard work you are putting into this one.