LOAD ALPHA WORLDS in MODERN MINECRAFT?!

Minecraft is over seven years old and has changed so much in that time. Today, we’re going to be experimenting with loading very old worlds in new versions of Minecraft I mean, how does that even work? Let’s take a look.

A common Minecraft Question revolves around loading very old worlds in new versions of Minecraft. It’s not a perfect process but thankfully Mojang has made it possible to load the oldest worlds in the newest versions of the game. Before blindly trying to load an Alpha world in the latest version of Minecraft

Let’s quickly understand the limitations of this process so that you don’t go destroying your old worlds. Over time, Minecraft has had three distinct “chunk types” that define what version the world can be loaded on. The first is “Alpha Save Format” the second is “MCRegion” and the current one is “Anvil”.

Alpha lasted from Infdev through Beta 1.2 MCRegion from Beta 1.3 through Release 1.1 and the current format has been with us since Release 1.2 If you want to load up an Alpha world in modern Minecraft you need to convert your world from Type 1 over to Type 2

And then Type 2 over to Type 3 you can’t go directly from Type 1 to Type 3 but Minecraft does allow you to convert down the line. When you convert a world from one type to another you can’t go back. So I’d recommend backing up all of your old worlds

In case anything goes wrong. So lets give this a try. I’m gonna load up a world from Chunk Type 1 It’s an extremely old map made by an old YouTuber named Kiershar He’s the pioneer of the modern TNT cannon It contains all kinds of Redstone Traps

And will be a really good example of this process. So loading this map up in Chunk Type 1 obviously nothing is going to break it’s the version that the map belongs in. And “Spoiler Alert!” nothing major is even gonna break as we increase the chunk version.

It’s just important that you do it correctly. However, little things like doors, items within chests, and signs can break between versions as well as paintings on walls However, blocks placed on the ground won’t change at all. Alright. So let’s go ahead and let’s convert the map to Chunk Type 2

Which is the MCRegion format. So to do this correctly you wanna open up any version of Minecraft between Beta 1.3 and Release 1.1 If you choose a version beyond Release 1.1 the map won’t load up at all as you’re trying to go from Chunk Type 1

Directly to 3 and that’s what’s important here You need to go from Chunk Type 1 to 2 to 3 you can’t skip from 1 to 3 and you can’t go backwards. As you can see pretty much everything looks fine Between Type 1 and Type 2 not much is gonna change at all.

However, when going from Type 2 to Type 3 as of Minecraft 1.10 there exists a bug that allows Guardian Temples to generate over existing terrain. As of right now, I’m not aware of any way to prevent this besides changing the level.dat file to generate new terrain as “Superflat” which isn’t a difficult process.

Hopefully this is an issue that gets fixed before too much longer. Another major concern about loading up old worlds is the fact that land generation changed over time. While there’s no way to prevent the large cliffs that will occur when loading new chunks on new versions, here’s a quick rundown of which versions

Caused those changes. The best way to think about this is to think about the various “Noise Maps” that Minecraft had. Whenever Mojang changed one of these Noise Maps the land generation would change. So from Infdev though Alpha 1.1 was the first Noise Map that Minecraft had. Alpha 1.2 through Beta 1.7

Was the second Noise Map From Beta 1.8 through Release 1.6 the Noise Map changed so many times as new biomes were added that I really couldn’t keep track. And the version that we’re on now has been around since Release 1.7 And that is pretty much everything you need to know about loading

Old worlds in new versions of Minecraft. One sidenote is that if you try and load a newer map in an old version within the same Chunk Type as mentioned earlier in the video it will work, but corruption can occur and blocks that didn’t exist in the old version you loaded in will disappear.

So, just don’t do it, unless you wanna watch the world burn So anyways, I hope you learned something and I hope you enjoyed this video. Since you’re still watching I’d really appreciate it if you left a rating on the video before you go You’re all pretty awesome! I hope I get to meet some of you at MineCon 2016. I hope you all enjoyed.

My name is AntVenom and I bid you all, farewell! Thanks so much for watching.