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Experimental World Generation Snapshot 7 Feedback

Today we bring you what is likely to be our last (tiny) experimental snapshot for now, as we shift focus over to bringing these tweaks to regular Java snapshots and Bedrock betas. So, what exactly is in experimental snapshot 7, you ask? Take a look: 

  • Noodle caves can generate at any height, no longer capped at y 130. This means you'll sometimes find tiny cave openings and cracks in mountain peaks. Tread with care.

  • Some parts of the terrain are ever so slightly smoother (less 3d noise in tech speak)

  • Elytra doesn't take durability damage when gliding, only when using rockets. So you don't HAVE to have mending or unbreaking enchantments to use your elytra, especially now that there are higher mountains and cliffs to launch from.

  • Elytra rocket boost is a bit weaker, so you can't fly as fast with rockets. We are testing this for several reasons:

    • Elytra rocket boosting was so fast that other means of transport were almost redundant. We want to balance it out a bit.

    • Even in earlier versions of Minecraft most servers get laggy when players fly around with elytra & rockets because they fly faster than chunks can load. With the new world height this would probably get worse.

    • There is so much more cool terrain to enjoy now, wouldn't want to zoom past it all too fast right? :)

    • Note that gliding speed is unchanged. This affects just rocket boosting.

And there you have it. Check out the full changelog for more information on what else is new, and don't forget to post your feedback in the comments! 

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  • 25
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    Reducing Elytra rocket boost to assist in making traversal more balanced is not a terrible idea. What I do disagree with is reducing boost to reduce lag. What should instead be done is performance improvements.

    Yes, there's only so much that can be done in regards to multi-threaded support, and the more entities then the more lag - this is indisputable, but optimizations can be made in various aspects of the game that will improve overall performance. Especially with chunk loading/generation and the lighting engine but entity optimizations wouldn't go a miss too. This is now more important than ever as the increase in height limit will mean slower load times and will impact servers negatively, elytra or otherwise.

    That said, elytra speed and boost gamerules would not be a bad thing for server admins. 

  • 25
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    While the elytra change is fine, it brings to mind the fact that transportation Minecraft is rather unbalanced. For most players, there is no reason to build a minecart track, as boats on ice is around 10 times faster. In my opinion, boats on ice should be slowed to 20 and 30 blocks per second with packed and blue ice respectively, and minecarts should be made faster, to somewhere between 16 and 24 blocks per second.

  • 25
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    When it comes to transportation, I think the entire meta is broken. The fact that rails are slower than horses despite requiring established infrastructure makes no sense. There was a snapshot years ago where rails where made much faster, around 24 m/s or something, but they removed it because there were some issues with it. I think the idea has been largely forgotten about since then. A max speed rail system should easily be able to outpace the fastest horses with speed 2. And furnace minecarts should actually be made good for something too. The whole boat ice-road thing is also broken as hell. Elytra are really just the tip of the iceberg. One way they might improve them imo is make it so you can't use leads while flying. Limiting their use only to players and nothing else would gently encourage users to invest in other transportation modes as well without being too harsh. I think it would also be cool if they became less efficient at high altitudes, to encourage players to dive through narrow valleys and stuff. It would make flight way more interesting.

  • 23
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    They could add powder snow over the cave entrances in the mountains, that would further encourage the player to wear leather boots as powder snow is very easy to break.

  • 22
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    I think the elytra changes make sense and are good for the game, though it would be nice to see over methods of transport (like rails) get some improvements.

    Anyway, what I'd mainly like to see changed/improved the most regarding world generation is the size of some of the multi-noises to be larger by default or at the very least easily configurable, or a large biomes option re-added. Perhaps they will be configurable via datapack but even then I really miss the old sliders for changing world gen stuff.

    Either way, I think that the biomes currently are just a bit too small on average (and their sizes are very inconsistent). Maybe increase the scale of all the noises apart from the continentalness one. Also, (could be wrong) it seems like VERY small microbiomes never generate, so if the noise scale was increased wouldn't there be less microbiomes?

  • 22
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    I'm really loving what is happening in these experimental snapshots, and as I've said before, they just keep getting better every week! At this point, there are only a few things that I would still suggest. You guys have done an incredible job.

    1) Individual forest types need to be bigger. As it is, it's not at all uncommon to find nearly all the wood types in one spot since forest varieties change so quickly. In all the testing I've done, I've never come across a vast dark oak forest - or really, a vast forest of any singular type - like I have seen in previous versions of the game. An increase in the size of individual forest types would *really* help the world feel larger and more varied. (I would especially note that jungles desperately need this. Jungles used to be huge. Now they're so small that you can almost always see to their edges in all directions.)

    2) Extreme biomes should have more distance between them. It's still very common to find a desert/mesa biome within 800-1500 blocks of a large snowy area, and that makes exploring large areas less rewarding. Also, I feel that jungles are a lot more common than they used to be, and making them a little rarer would make finding them much more exciting.

    3) Deepening the ocean would really make the world feel bigger. Since the world has gotten deeper, it seems like this would be a natural step to take. But I don't know what all goes into making a change like that on the technical side, so I understand if it's not doable.

  • 16
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    Instead of just a bunch of random blobs of magma in aquifer caves, they should generate in strips of magma (similar to how calcite generates on stony peaks), alongside obsidian. This way, we can recreate the large magma and obsidian ravines of 1.17, while still having the improved cave generation.

  • 10
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    I definitely agree with the other comments that minecarts need a big upgrade. It just doesn't make sense to go to all the trouble to develop functional minecart railways when other modes of transportation blow minecarts out of the water. For all the resources that are required to make functional railways, minecart travel should be one of the fastest modes of transportation in the game.

  • 9
    Registered User commented
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    Love the new work on the biomes and generation, no complaints about the Elytra changes, as per other comments, please look in to way to improve performance, especially for us server owners.  I host my own MC servers, between 8 and 18 at any one time, with the new changes to heights and caves, my testing shows I will have to drop to 4-6 servers at a time, even with 32 cores and 256GB of ECC ram and every instance running on a m.2 SSD (samsung pro drives for enhanced performance), I am guilty I do run 2 servers per drive though, one low pop and one higher. 

    please look into project mammoth, they found a way to utilize a centralized DB to handle chunk changes and then current MC instances (multiple) can all access the same game world by reading and writing changes to the DB.  This might be something MC could move to in order to prevent rewriting the entire game to allow for better multicore support.

  • 7
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    Shattered/Amplified terrain should, on average, cover much more of the terrain, as it is disappointing to finally find some shattered terrain, only for it to be a tiny, micro-mountain.

  • 6
    Registered User commented
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    This specific change to Elytra doesn't seem to solve any of the problems you outlined. But as an alternative for the issue of chunk loading, is it viable to smoothly slow the player's gliding speed when approaching still-loading chunks? This would be more future-proof while not affecting gameplay when the server loads in time, and could potentially be applied to other forms of travel.

    Nerfing traveling speed as a whole is very dismaying for me. I don't understand why people say being able to travel fast is "unbalanced". How fast you can get somewhere isn't some form of competition. Travel time is basically grinding, and grinding makes any game less fun, and we grinded to get the elytra in the first place. We can still explore the terrain if that's our play style, don't force it on others who don't have the time to like myself.

  • 6
    Registered User commented
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    A bit of biome distribution feedback:

    In my opinion, deserts are way too rare and badlands are way too common. Before 1.18, badlands were very rare, only generating in warm/dry regions marked as "special," which worked out to less than 0.5% of the world. I'm sure most players are open to badlands becoming more common than they used to be, but the change is drastic in these experimental snapshots.

    Deserts have the opposite problem -- Deserts used to be a very common biome in hot/dry regions of the old biome system, but they've gotten much rarer in the experimental snapshots and usually show up next to badlands. Savannas are much more common than deserts or badlands -- perhaps some of the areas that are currently savannas could be switched to desert under certain circumstances?

    Completely unrelated feedback:

    Please reduce the light level for monster spawners. At light level 11, it is impossible to prevent spawns with redstone lamps in a 9x9x8 room, the most common configuration for grinder spawn rooms, without placing blocks in potential spawn areas.

    Also, I fully support the elytra changes (although maybe Riptide should reduce durability too)

  • 6
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    The Elytra change is really good, because now there is incentive to use horses and minecarts, but I think there can be some othe changes:

    • Boats on ice shouldn't slide, or at least they should be a lot slower than now
    • Horses should be a bit faster
    • Minecart should be faster, at least 20 m/S
    • Elytras should receive a bit less acceleration by Riptide tridents

    Regarding the terrain

    • Maybe a bit more continental generation, with continents separated by  big oceans, instead of being all connected in some way
    • Bigger oceans, not necessarily deeper
    • A shallower areas near beaches, instead of a big drop

    Maybe all this can be made like this

    • Continent with its biomes
    • Normal ocean biomes for 100-300 blocks from the coast
    • Deep ocean biomes by 400-600 blocks from the coast
    • This will be the same for all continents, so travelling on boat in oceans, would be more adventurous
    • This type of generation would resemble a more realistic terrain

    Also, maybe adding that in Snowy biomes, at night or during snowstorms, maybe we should get the freezing effect.

    Also, maybe the icebergs shouldn't generate near warm or hot biomes, and only in open oceans or near Snowy biomes

  • 5
    Registered User commented
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    Well, im late to the party, but i just watched the last recently posted dev diaries, and i makes me want to give some feedback again. So, here we go.

     

    Nothing to complain, actually. The world generation is just epic.

    • There's mountains that are really easy to find, perfect. 
    • Mountains are sooo amazing. There's a good balance between the steep and the roundy mountains. Excelent.
    • Caves connection are very good. They connect really well with the mountains and the other caves, it's just... Wow. 
    • Some terrain, normally next to big mountains, are elevated. So you can play like you're in y60 but you're actually at y90 or something. This is really cool.
    • Rivers and beaches? No comments. They feel harmonic with the rest of terrain.
    • I dont know if um just crazy or something, but i feel that the "Smooth Terrain" from this XSnapshot make the terrain even more natural and harmonic too.
    • Elytra changes are very good. Keep it.
    • After all, the powder snow ends up being a cool challenge. I underestimated its design.

    Some suggestions:

    • Shattered terrain, specially eroded badlands, feels so... Tiny? I would like to see a higher, larger and more caotic terrain to call "Shattered". 
    • Keep the skeletons without bows! During those snapshots the skeleton spawners spawn skeletons withou bows. Keep it as a rare chance to occur, it's very cool.

    Again, you guys are doing an excellent work. Have a nice day!

  • 5
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    I hope The Warden can swim, 'cause you're going to have a hard time finding a dry cave for him! 

    Seriously, it's gotten pretty hard to get to diamonds and redstone levels. In fact, I'm having trouble getting anything dry below sea level. Mountains help a bit, but still pretty wet down there. 

  • 5
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    I also feel like giant caves, and especially giant cave openings on the surface, are still far too common. I have statistical evidence to back up this claim as well.

    On one creative world, I explored a 2048x2048 map that was 15-20% ocean. In this area, there were not 5, not 10, not 15, but 18 cave openings that went from surface level to -50 or below. (-54 is the level where caves are cut off by lava lakes.) Furthermore, this number does not take aquifers of any sort into account; I never traveled through water to find deeper parts of any cave, so there are likely more surface-exposed giant caves that I missed. I also counted separate cave openings that obviously connected to the same large mega-cave as one opening instead of two. To put the number 18 in perspective, this means that on average, there is one surface opening that leads to a cave reaching -50 per ~483 square-meter area. Most (10) of the entrances to these mega-caves were larger than what you'd normally find in older versions; 3 were about the same size as old cave openings; 4 were MASSIVE; and 1 was smaller than most old cave openings. And I didn't even nearly explore all the surface caves on the map.

    I feel like this is just too much. Deep surface caves should be very scarce, as should HUGE cave openings. The ones I found looked awesome!... But frankly, the amount of big cave openings that I found really diminished their amazingness. I really think that the amount of huge surface caves should be vastly decreased.

  • 4
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    I think Riptide also should take elytra durability, otherwise it's a little OP to spam Riptide III and elytra durability stays same.

  • 4
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    With all due respect I think it's a pretty horrible change to nerf elytras, I feel it would be better to improve other forms of transportation instead of nerfing Elytras

  • 4
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    I believe the elytra movement speed nerf is not a great choice when balancing mobility in the game. It is an end game item.
    I think instead of nerfing the elytra to balance mobility, you should instead buff other forms of movement. Make rails faster or add new rails or minecarts that can move faster.
    Make horses faster. Maybe add enchants to saddles or horse armour that could increase movement speed so that there is progression (maybe give horses frost walker).
    I understand that increased movement speed can lead to performance issues in the game but I firmly believe that the Mojang team would be able solve these issues without taking out or limiting a part of the game.

  • 4
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    After visiting 10 lofty_peaks, 10 snowcapped_peaks, 10 stony_peaks, and 3 very tall areas of other biome types - all across 28 different mountain ranges in a creative world - I collected the following statistics:

    -The average height of mountain ranges containing the one or more of the three "peak" biomes is about 159 blocks, which is 34 blocks below could height.

    -Snowcapped peaks (avg. 174 blocks) appear to be the tallest mountain biome, followed by stony peaks (avg. 162 blocks) and then lofty peaks (avg. 156 blocks). This difference is fairly small though.

    -Only 7 out of the 33 peaks I found surpassed cloud height, and most of these only barely did.

    -The highest peak I found was 237 blocks tall. It was very impressive.

    -The lowest of the three peak biomes that I found was a splotch of snow at Y 106. It definitely did not look like a mountain.

    Considering these things, I would suggest a slight increase to the average mountain height. In survival mode, it would be difficult to find the big, cloud-scraping mountains, even after a long time of dedicated exploration. If the average mountain height were increased by something as little as 19 blocks, the highest mountain I found would have reached 256 (barely) and 5 of the near-cloud-scraping mountains I found would have been cloud-scraping, making the ratio of cloud-scrapers to non-cloud-scrapers ~36% instead of ~21%. I feel like this would be a reasonable change.

  • 4
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    The old cave entrances almost always end in a dead end. I'd be really happy if you could fix that and make them more connected to the big caves below y0 :)

  • 3
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    In my opinion, the elytra changes to the durability are wayy to OP. Maybe a solution to this is if a player hits a certain speed with an elytra it starts to reduce durability? (e.g. if a player glides down fast enough that they'd die when hitting a block, their elytra could start losing durability).

  • 3
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    I like the reduced 3D noise. The world still has plenty of height in lots of places, but you also get plenty of flat, spacious areas that are great for building. It also makes natural village generation more common, which is nice.

  • 3
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    The Elyta changes do make sense, I prefer this new durability change compared to the original one. Now you can glide/ use it a little longer than before.

  • 3
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    I've been playing some survival for this new snapshot for about 10 minecraft in game days

    issues: the gameplay kind of falls apart for me when I'm swimming in aquifers or mining in them in general, sometimes I'll see an ore and if anything I'll get demotivated to mine in the water because there's not that many places to breath and the only way ill go down there is when i have a door on me, this is a big issue because when playing on bedrock doors are waterlogged, and the fact that mining is slower under water doesn't help either

    suggestions to fix: add more magma blocks and places to breath in aquifers and make the swimming like how it is in bedrock, the movement when you swim in bedrock above water is quick and feels so much better, why not bring it over to java?

    again this is really important because aquifers are such a big feature in the update and they need to be accessible enough to mine in, i dont want aquifers to be an end game mining place, aka i have to use water breathing just to mine some ores in there

    other than that the terrain feels pretty great

  • 3
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    Add ice caves into the mountains

  • 3
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    Parrots aren't spawning in jungles, I even used "effect @e[type=parrot] glowing 100 1" and it said no entities were found. This was across multiple jungles and hundreds of blocks.

  • 3
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    Can we get some 1.17 and/or 1.18 things as banner patterns? Maybe an axolotl, goat, glowberry, pointed dripstone, or Warden related item to be a banner pattern? Or maybe be able to make a layer glow with the glow ink paired with an ink color?

  • 3
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    Could you please put all the Java snapshot features into bedrock Beta?

  • 3
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    In the new Generation I noticed something that I REALLY liked. I found a cold snowy volcano mountain with a large enough area at its peak and deep enough to conceal and create a large village. sadly there was no lava inside. There was also no lava burried deeper under/inside the peak. this could've been an improovement to find. I have yet to find a volcano with lava.

    I would also love to see more slime. I find that slime is just too difficult to find for average players. I have for years now not been able to find naturally generated slime without resorting to either summon or using tools online to find slime chunks. Slime fail.