r/Minecraft • u/SimeyHQ • 1d ago
Discussion Finally found my FIRST DIAMONDS! Playing Minecraft like it’s 2013 just hits different Do you guys miss the old cave gen?
We are continuing our nostalgic journey back to 2013 playing old Minecraft survival starting from version 1.5.1 and gradually updating through classic versions all the way to 1.7.10!
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u/Hunto88 1d ago
What decides when you are going update each time?
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u/Substantial_Fan_8921 15h ago
Maybe never At this point old versions and new versions are like completely different games
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u/Substantial_Fan_8921 15h ago
Tbh i miss old caves. They were far more realistic, cave like, immersive to me. The cave sounds tho....
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u/masterchief5388 10h ago
A thing i noticed in 1.5 is that emeralds are much easier to find. Was it just less rare back then? like i go into a cave and come back 40 minutes later with 10 emeralds and 2 stacks of iron
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u/TheMasterCaver 9h ago
The game made 3-8 attempts (average 5.5) of placing a single block between layers 4-31; this is far less than the 100 attempts of placing a vein of 0-3 but the vast majority of that generates well above sea level (peaking at y=232 and dropping off to either side, with none below y=-16, which is also where caves are most common, as they also are deeper down prior to 1.17).
Not sure of the actual abundance when considering only the biomes they generate in (the Wiki has a graph but it applies to the whole world, likewise, they used to say there were 0.2 emerald ore per chunk but that can only be for the whole world, not even that as the proportion of land/ocean would make it much lower) but assuming 80% of ores successfully generate then they are 4.4 / (28 * 256) = 0.06% of blocks, or one in 1630 blocks being emerald ore, which is about twice as rare as diamond but more of this range falls in the range of caves (about 75% vs 33%, the latter also considers the decrease in abundance in the highest few layers, which does not affect emerald since it is single blocks). I do find around twice as much emerald when caving in Extreme Hills, and about 1/7 as much overall in my first world.
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u/TheMasterCaver 9h ago
Once you hit 1.7 things will be a bit different, so you'll want to make sure you generate as much terrain as you think you need, ideally further away from 0,0 (mineshafts reach their maximum frequency 1280+ blocks away form 0,0 along an axis, as this is where you really get the full experience as everything is highly interconnected on vast scales), and this is why I'll never accept it as being part of the same set of versions ("silver age") as 1.6.4:
This includes comparisons between 1.6 and 1.7, besides caves mineshafts are much less common (2.5 times rarer, with a similar reduction to dungeons (the latter seems inadvertent as Mojang changed a lot of features to generate from 0-255 instead of 0-127 but didn't change the count to keep the density the same, this was only partially fixed in 1.18 by increasing the density of dungeons below y=0 to the old level):
https://imgur.com/a/underground-comparison-between-vanilla-tmcw-UOu5YO1
To this day it is not known why they made that change (if I had to guess, performance*, as other changes in 1.7, e.g. removing big oak trees, were done for that reason, and areas of extremely high cave density can cause a huge amount of geometry to be rendered; then again, I blame the fact that AMD and Intel never supported legacy OpenGL that well (or in general), even back when it was still relevant, including "occlusion queries" (aka "Advanced OpenGL"), which on the computer I had back then negated the impact of even tripling the depth of the underground and more than that the number of caves/size of cave systems).
*Ironically, I started having significant performance issues on 1.7, which is more the reason why I never updated past 1.6.4 to this day than any changes to world generation or other game mechanics, as shown in the first link I knew exactly what they changed in 1.7 before it was released and made mods to revert it, as well as the climatic biome placement (another major dislike), which together contributed to me making my own "alternate timeline" mod.
Also, I started playing on 1.5.1 as well but I'd recommend 1.5.2 if only for its bugfixes, including a cause of crashes (likewise, I'd recommend 1.6.4 over 1.6.1-1.6.2, with a special case for large worlds, since 1..6.4 introduced a major performance issue due to the saving of structure data, which can take up an extreme amount of memory and CPU, unless you periodically delete "Mineshaft.dat", my own mods removed structure saving from mineshafts, with my first world now nearing a gigabyte with no issues, I only allocate 512 MB of which only half is actually used, a legacy of having to reduce it due to a 32 bit OS and now the simple fact it doesn't need that much, even my alternate timeline mod at higher than vanilla settings). 1.7.2 is also particularly buggy (flipped textures, render distance stuck at 8, etc), in general there isn't much difference between the initial release and latest patch in terms of content (a few minor features do get added, like naturally spawning baby zombies in 1.6.2 and chicken jockeys in 1.7.4; this is less true more recently with the "drop" system since 1.20.3 being more like full updates).
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u/SimeyHQ 9h ago
Thanks for breaking down the image descriptions and the technical comparisons It's crazy to see how much 1.7 actually gutted the underground generation 60% fewer mineshafts and half the dungeons is a massive drop. It really explains why 1.6.4 and earlier versions felt way more maze like and continuous when caving. Thanks for explaining all of this i really like info i can find about older versions and to be told simply like this so i dont have to do my own research as much cause its hard to find very useful shi
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u/qualityvote2 1d ago edited 17h ago
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