Minecraft 1.18 prepping a snapshot & explaining how stuff works

Hello so i’m about to do a bit of survival testing um as part of preparing for a snapshot and um i figure why not share that experience we’ll explore the world and i’ll talk a little bit about what we’re seeing and maybe also explain a little bit about

What’s going on behind the scenes with the world generation we’ll play survival but i’ll set it to creative just in case i need to check something and off we go okay so in case i forget here’s a seed yeah let’s follow the clouds that’ll be our rough direction

Um yeah i guess we do the good ol ritual of breaking some trees i might fast forward past some of these basics all right now that i have some basic tools let’s get going um hello there so what you don’t see is i’m on my com on my other computer i’m actually

Running uh this same seed but on the previous snapshot and i’m running a little a little script that kind of synchronizes the movement so i can see what things looked like before just in case there are any interesting differences and what i hope to do is we’ll find some mountains would be fun

I’m probably mostly going to stay out of the caves um i do like the caves a lot although i am biased i have to admit but um that’s not the focus here because we haven’t changed so much in the caves recently because we’re actually pretty happy with the

Caves but with the overall terrain we’re actually actually also pretty happy with the the terrain but we’ve been doing some tweaks um especially with the biome placement and things like that so just want to check that things kind of look right plus honestly i i really enjoy just just roaming around

Exploring the world it’s really fun so a nice little village um let’s see if we can find some gear there i love these two-story two-story houses wait is this an empty village what that’s boring okay well then they won’t mind me stealing some food i guess but seriously i am really curious why

There’s nobody here but okay sure oh there you guys there you are hey um nice to see that the village is not entirely abandoned but let’s move on we have a bit of food and we’re good let’s check what’s out there a clock and a helmet

Thank you very much see thing is we’re playing a survival and i can be a bit clumsy sometimes we’re probably gonna we’re probably gonna die sometime along the way because something went wrong so my plan is to go roughly in this direction look for some mountains and uh

Camp at night place beds and then leave those beds around so that when slash if i die we at least won’t have to go all the way back to world spawn okay so while we’re here um let me take a quick pause just explain a little bit about what’s going on here

So some people have noticed that there’s new stuff down here which wasn’t there before multi-noise biome builder terrain blah blah i’m gonna explain some of these things as we go so but high level these are what we call noise values so c for example which actually is called continentalness but we abbreviate things

Because we don’t want this debug screen to be too cluttered c stands for continentalness and as you can see when i walk around uh it changes so in this direction the continentals apparently goes up another direction it goes down uh we use that to control both the

Terrain shape and the bind placement so for example continentalist actually works like what it sounds like like the further inland you go that number goes up or more like it’s opposite the higher that number is the more we’re going to generate inland terrain and when that number goes negative then

We’re going to generate oceans so that’s just one example i’ll talk more about these soon and what i’m hoping to do actually is to get lucky and find a saddle or something because i kind of like riding and we made one change that is going to

Make riding a little bit easier in the new terrain so if we’re lucky i’ll have a chance to uh to show that a boat all right let’s see where this takes us we’ve worked quite a lot on rivers to try to make them more kind of traversable and not just always dead end

And it’s actually fun way to explore the world the problem is though if we have too many wide big rivers then land travel becomes a pain so it’s a it is a bit of a trade-off so so far i’m looking at my other screen the world looks pretty much exactly the

Same as last snapshot so we’re not we haven’t found the interesting bits yet although we haven’t made any you know majorly dramatic changes um but uh i guess mainly the placement of kind of cold biomes versus hot biomes so hopefully it should be a little bit more

Yeah kind of consistent now so that you don’t have suddenly you know a big bunch of snow showing up in the middle of planes or something oh no it’s going to become night i haven’t found my sheep yet but oh village equals beds equals not running around fighting all over the place plus

Wow that’s nice terrain and incidentally oh i feel bad i’m not gonna kill the sheep i’m gonna steal a bed instead of take it with me i don’t know i’m just not in the mood for killing animals unnecessarily call me sentimental although just to contradict myself i might bump into some mountains

And if so i might need myself some leather boots to not you know sink into powder snow so let’s actually sacrifice some cows sorry but it’s for a good purpose one leather i kind of like when the villagers climb up slopes like this um a little bit wonky generation sometimes but interesting ah

A bed just for me all right um oh so yeah i’ll stay i’ll steal the bread but i’ll leave leave some food for these vegetables too good morning hello what do you have for me um i am gonna steal some of these too because i like making campfires to kind of mark

Where i’ve been i’ll just make a little campfire at the top of that hill maybe just to kind of mark where i’ve been oh now that is a view this is going to be the place camp number one that’s right i need coal okay no campfire for now we’ll do that later

But this would have been the the spot okay that is nice so yeah i said it was gonna go west so that’s this way uh but i wanna see what’s up here this is a very nice um meadow i believe so one of the things we did for this

For 118 is basically decouple biome generation from terrain shaping so that’s why you get interesting things like like uh those trees up there you normally wouldn’t really get that unless you created a special biome for it it creates a lot a lot of variation which we like

And also i’m hoping uh if we get up high maybe we can find some iron too because uh iron is nice and like i said i’m not going to focus on caves although speaking of caves ha i take that back i’m going to have a

Look at this cave this is oh this is beautiful this is one of the things we kind of want to be able to happen we want um cave by almost be able to kind of leak out a little bit from cave entrances exactly like this this is exactly what we want to achieve

Because it’s really really fascinating and kind of inviting when you see this happen so hello lush caves i’m not going caving officially but uh i can’t resist ah okay i’m not quite ready for this yet um i have a stupid wooden axe can i okay i’m not gonna i’m not gonna be that

Chicken we go um so another thing i really like is the mix of natural lighting inside caves so we’ve kind of tried to make it possible to get these cave openings where where natural light comes down and provides some variation but oh yeah cool it’s great

Are you going to bother me yes you’re going to bother me can i just please just get my coal then i’ll be right out of here um move on and oh okay i’m out of here i know i shouldn’t have gone in here i’m not planning for this to be a combat

Madness thing but yeah yeah i can take a hint i can take a hint i’m out of here but how how am i gonna get out of here i’m stuck in this cave okay um so new mission get out of this beautiful cave thing um alive

Okay let’s at least get some stone tools over here uh yes all right let’s uh get out of here using whatever blocks we’ve managed to accumulate is that a way out almost okay let’s go alright i’m out now i’ve completely lost my bearings clouds which way you’re going that way okay cool

So this brings me i guess maybe to the next um multi-noise parameter so i talked about continentalness right so bigger number equals more inland in general e stands for erosion higher erosion we use that basically to make the land flatter and low erosion makes the land more mountainous and

Uneven for example negative 0.9 that would basically be very hilly or very mountainous terrain a very cliffy terrain while erosion 0.7 0.8 high values then it’s basically very flat or kind of swampy type terrain and yes those numbers are used both to control the terrain shape and the biome placement oh

This is beautiful so as you see over there that’s a jungle right and that brings me to the next i guess set of parameters let’s talk about yeah these two temperature and humidity tnh and those two actually don’t impact terrain shaping they just impact a biome placement

And different biomes kind of live in different configurations of these so jungles are are hot and humid so as that number goes up and that number also goes up we’re more likely to find things like jungle well deserts are a little more dry so high temperature and lower

Humidity means you’re more likely to hit a desert and i don’t have a bed and it’s becoming nights i should stop blabbering about that stuff and actually you know i i forgot to steal beds from the villages how dumb is that so i guess this is gonna be an exciting night

We will brave the jungle at night and see if we come out alive but i’ll keep this up so we should probably see temperature and humidity going up as we go near the jungle yeah let’s do this whoo okay yeah boat is a pretty way to stay safe

At night actually so that might be an option unless unless he shoots me off it oh hello yeah temperature going up it’s at 0.2 humidity is also well i don’t know if it’s going up but it’s it’s pretty high already let’s get off here and see what kills us first

Yeah jungle there we go so temperature 0.2 and humidity 0.6 almost and we’re inside of trouble i think we’re gonna stick with the boat bye bye so again here’s an example of the terrain shaping versus bio placement thing this jungle is there because of temperature and humidity

And it will just it doesn’t care about terrain shape so much so it’ll just show you know adapt to whatever terrain is there so that’s how you can get jungles in flat areas or jungle on cliffs or jungles and you know ups mountains to a certain extent creates a lot of variation

Oh we have our first actual mountain a really nice one i bet there’s iron there the nice thing about stony peaks is that you know iron is is visible so i’m gonna brave uh the night and actually try to get up there um yeah

So we should see as we get closer to the mountain we should see the erosion value you see it’s quite low right there 0.5 almost so that’s where that mountain’s like that low erosion means mountainous terrain in most cases so probably it’ll go even lower as we go

Closer and the most extreme mountains they show up when we have a combination of high continentalness which is basically inland and low erosion so we kind of call that tibet internally as our kind of model for what type of terrain we want to see and and the opposite you know

Continental is pretty near zero or more like uh when when erosion is very high then we’ll basically start seeing very flat terrain and we’ll typically place swamps there but yeah i would like to find some sheep so that i can sleep through the night

So this is an example of an old cave a so-called cave carver the the old caves and we’ve deliberately kept them around because uh they’re easier to like they tend to be quite easy to walk around inside they they tend to have kind of a a flat floor

While the the new caves the noise caves they create a lot more variation but they’re not always as easy to walk around inside so you kind of keep the old ones around as well even though they are a bit of a performance hog um yeah shield is going to be the first

Thing that we build when we get iron oh there it is iron cool um we didn’t plan on adding um another mountain biome but we noticed that in like kind of warm areas uh it just didn’t really look so good that all peaks were snowy or icy so we

Wanted to make space for kind of a hot biome variant of peaks let’s uh let’s go up here oh yes this is great oh emeralds too although i don’t need it for this playthrough i’m a little bit nervous that i haven’t actually set my spawn point anywhere so

Now that i found this mountain i kind of don’t want to have to go all the way back to world spawn if i die so let’s be careful so how many did i get that’s good that’s enough for a shield and i guess um sheers i like sheers because

I’m gonna be placing beds as we go oh i hate to mess up the terrain like this but i need to get up there because i need to get up there that’s what’s interesting about peaks they kind of call like they kind of call you and want you to climb up it’s just

I don’t know if it’s human nature or something but if there’s a peak you know a lot of people just feel this irresistible urge to to just want to climb up the peak calcite strip oh this there was more than i thought up here i thought that

Was this would be a single peak but so uh let’s actually gear up a little bit we’ll make a camp at the top of this peak and then uh we’ll look around and see where we go next i like that mountain climbing is kind of a bit of a kind of parkour challenge

Finding the best way up is not always obvious which makes for fun fun gameplay so this is high i know it’s high because i’m above the clouds and that’s high so let’s um right here make up a bit of a camp um now can i do a campfire no what am i

Missing now i got the coal i got the lots of sticks all right um there we go campfire yay right here cool um we might as well make some food while we’re here and take care of this iron so let’s see cloud’s going this way so that’s west that’s our general direction

Um oh yeah i was talking about erosion right so let’s take a look at that erosion is negative 0.6 not as low as i thought it would be but still we got a nice peak here oh yeah that’s an important thing this one down here pv stands for peaks and valleys this noise

Is actually derived from another noise called weirdness over here so at certain places when where this goes up kind of between negative one and one you know gradually and randomly but peaks of valley is like an exaggerated version of that so for example when this value is zero peaks

And valley is going to be negative one it’s going to sharply drop to negative one and when it’s around where it is now peaks and violets kind of sharply goes up and what this pv noise does it basically controls things like this we are right

Now on a mountain peak it’s like kind of like a ridge right you can follow it and um down there you see kind of a ridge as well so that ridge is basically um where peaks and valleys is kind of high then it tends to make ridges and

Conversely when peaks and valleys is low that’s when you get that’s not a river but um yeah rivers basically so whenever we’re inside a river then peaks and valleys will probably be a negative number so the combination of the biggest mountains you’ll find when continentalness is high erosion is low

And and peaks and valleys is is high so shield right oh come on too little wood okay we’ll make a shield later uh we can make the shears and we can make uh some better gear there so we’ll leave the campfire there so that we know that we’ve been here before and

Have a bit of snack and pick up our stuff and keep going oh yeah i know what i need a bucket so i can get around easier so let’s get off this mountain without dying all right here we are i made it down without dying and oh this is actually good stuff

It’s not gonna last but uh it’s good stuff depth strider okay so i’m gonna follow this uh this valley over here let’s see where it takes us what’s our y level 93 okay so this i wonder if this is a saddle valley yeah this is exactly it this is good

So here it says the peaks and valley noise is negative 0.9 that’s about as low it’s almost as low as it can get so this would have been a river but we set it so that if we’re in terrain that is otherwise quite high so erosion is low and continentalness is

Not so low then we don’t always want rivers carving through here because that would be 20 blocks lower and this would be a gorge and gorgeous are really cool but not if they’re all over the place so in this case it got lifted up to this

Nice saddle valley um so it’s a valley with kind of mounts on either side but it’s a nice flat area so instead of this being a super you know steep gorge with the river inside it this is actually an area that i can build stuff on and you

Know run around inside and things so we try to make you know a bit of both so sometimes rivers will carve gorges through a valley and sometimes it’ll rise up and and form this kind of saddle valley so uh okay uh snowy mountains over there that looks uh interesting so let’s check

It out i feel pretty pretty lucky with this seat i’m getting a lot of nice variation are we still inside the saddle valley yes all this would have been river now it’s instead a valley with a higher terrain so it feels like we’re low down but actually yeah we’re at we’re at why

90 here so it we’re higher up than it might seem and at some point the salad valley is going to end and it’s going to end up um with a kind of small cliff down to a river so let’s let’s keep following this valley until we find that and then

Check out this mountain oh it’s beautiful um did i lose the valley i don’t think this is the rally anymore no it’s not okay what’s interesting is since there’s essentially five noises here one two three four five each of these ah okay listen i was talking you don’t blow

Me up when i’m when i’m explaining things to our dear players okay um so nobody here good okay so start over wow this is nice um five noises right so as i move around in the world these numbers all change gradually which means that it’s essentially a five-dimensional coordinate space

So there’s a lot of ways in which the terrain can change uh moving in this direction if let’s say i move in this direction depending on which of these numbers change and in which direction they change that’s gonna impact the terrain so that makes the terrain very unpredictable and kind of interesting

So even though as a developer uh i i you know even as a developer i find it sometimes hard to predict what’s that what’s actually going to happen um i don’t really know i often get surprised and that’s that’s great that’s exactly what we want and it’s night and i still don’t have

Any darn sheep so um let’s head for the mountains naively hoping for safety in there which i doubt but we’ll see oh i see you i i see both i see all what i’ll see all three of you jesus are you guys like preparing to gang out gang up on me

Okay that’s a sheep but that’s a black sheep what is that oh yeah this is great good i don’t want to discriminate against sheep but i want to have many sheep of the same color and you guys are all mixed so how am i going to get a bet if i have

A bunch of i have shears why don’t i use them i’m getting very distracted by the fact that it’s night and the fact that i’m trying to explain things to you guys and the fact that i’m also trying to look for wool so if i seem distracted it’s because

That’s exactly what i am but i’m alive i survived a sneak creeper attack and oh that’s beautiful oh look at that it’s funny although i’ve spent so much time with this strange generation i still get surprised and kind of amazed by by what i see so that’s a beautiful cave

I kind of want to explore it i kind of shouldn’t but i can’t resist i will and why don’t i have any blocks um damn it i don’t want to waste my hate bails but i do have a shield now do i no because i didn’t have wood for it okay

So let’s actually sort that out i do need a shield all right now i’m ready for anything and now should i be wearing this armor isn’t it more useful if it’s actually on me oh this is so cool um some water will come in handy which helmet is better on breaking one or

Me i don’t know haha i have a shield boy oh okay i should use it too so let’s move so i want to get up on this on this beautiful snowy mountain um how the heck am i gonna do that i should probably be wearing my leather boots now i guess but uh

Yeah let’s see if we manage anyway oh that’s a nice coast so here’s an example of the difference i guess now when i look on the other screen this is not a snowy mountain anymore and i think the reason is because temperature um i was about to say because temperature

Is cold but it wasn’t so never mind but i did do some tweaking of when these snowy mountains show up versus when they don’t because the problem we were having was we would have places where you’d have just a splotch of snow in the middle of some terrain because a

Mountain almost formed there just barely almost formed there and that ties into a general challenge we have with these these noise values they move up and down right so let’s say we get to a point where the noise values are exactly at the point where let’s say you know snowy slopes should form

But then the noise one of the noises turns around and goes another direction so then the snowy snopes slopes end immediately so you get this you know tiny bit with like 10 blocks of snow and then it goes away so it’s basically with the current technology we can’t

Set a minimum biome size they’ll just be whatever size they are however we can tweak the configuration of these noises like how fast they change and things like that we can tweak it to make it less likely so a lot of people have been asking about the so-called microbiomes and we

Didn’t design we didn’t want to have microbiomes we didn’t design for it but it is a a consequence of the of the new terrain generation i guess kind of a price we pay for all this awesome variation um sometimes we’ll also get some things that are a little bit ugly um

I don’t want to die up here so you know uh okay i want to go up there actually so yeah microbiomes has been a bit of a challenge um it’s getting better for every snapshot though and i’ve also noticed that it really kind of depends on the type of microbiome like

Having a small force in the middle of planes looks fine it looks good we want to keep that but having a small snowy tundra inside a desert looks horrible so we mainly try to avoid the harsh collisions so one of the changes in this snapshot was i noticed that when plateaus form

We would automatically select a colder biome just because it’s a plateau and that sounded like a good idea in theory but in practice not because sometimes we would get you know a plateau barely forming and then going away again so then we would have a colder biome barely forming for a little

Little small section of the world just looked very ugly so we changed it so that being on a plateau or not does not impact the temperature of the biome being generated okay this was a oh goats hello goats um let’s go say hi to the goats and hope

They don’t push us off here push that guy off not me yeah push him off hey come on okay so oh hello um no we can’t make a bed yet uh but nevertheless i think i’m gonna do the campfire thing up here because i also need more food and as usual hey

You did it you whacked me cool i’m glad i’m still on the mountain yeah so okay no campfire because i don’t have a log and there’s no logs up here when will i learn yeah so we’ll move on and i think i’m gonna follow this ridge

Okay we’ll get on the ridge enjoy the sunrise and um maybe i will talk some more i don’t know if it’s you know it’s interest like let me know in the comments if you enjoy these little kind of tech tech things kind of describing how things work um

I know that when i when i tweet about those kind of things people tend to appreciate it and say that it’s very interesting to know kind of how things work behind the scenes so that’s why i’m i’m taking time to stop and explain things a little bit

So we’ll go to the top here and then have a little chit chat hey that and that’s a tree so i can make my stupid campfire actually so let’s actually do that so this commonly happens when you have a ridge going around like that and then lower terrain in the middle

Then typically some other non-mountainous biome will form in the middle which usually makes for some really nice kind of shangri-la type mountain valleys or also it can also create something that looks like a like a dormant volcano or something because yeah this kind of crater up in the up in

The mountain between the ridges so let’s go up there and if i get yeted off the mountain by goat and die i will consider that an honor that’s that that that that’s a cool way to die whoa that’s not a cool way to die that’s a dumb way to die um okay

I guess i should be smart and stop and eat here but i’m gonna be a bit gutsy because i kind of want to go to the top there um but i’m going to be extra careful famous last words so i’m going to be extra careful well it just goes on and on

And i have a half heart and i shouldn’t be climbing mountains on a half heart but what the heck up we go i haven’t bumped into any powder snow so far which i guess is a good thing because i’m not wearing my leather boots but oh whoa okay um

Maybe it will be a goat that kills me after all here we go this my friends is the spot this is definitely the spot there and some food and we have other more tasks to do no um oh i do have some other food to grill as

Well so let’s actually be a bit lazy and do that and this and that and this so yeah i was going to talk a bit so let’s see what else do we have here um so these are the noise values right continentalness is how far inland we are

Erosion is basically how mountainous we are although it’s opposite low valley means high mountains uh temperature humidity impact the choice of of biome all the biomes are also impacted by these first two and weirdness uh indirectly um drives the peaks and valleys noise but weirdness also when it clips between

Negative and positive that also influences which biome variant we get so for example if we are in planes um sometimes we’re going to be in the flowery planes instead and then it’ll make a negative value same thing with like jungle versus bamboo forest or bamboo jungle down here biome builder this is basically

The categorized version of these numbers so each interval has a name so for example um well actually not all intervals do but for example continentalness of 0.232 is within the interval that we call mid inland if we go near a coast this number goes down and finally it’ll say coast there for example

And same thing with these numbers erosion and temperature and humidity we basically slice them up into intervals and each interval has a number so this is a very low erosion value so that’s erosion zero or erosion index zero when that goes up we’ll after well hit erosion index one

And i think it goes all the way up to five or six and that that’s what bionics care about whenever that number changes we are at a threshold which may switch which biome we’re in so we’re erosion index zero temperature index two humidity index four okay enough blabbering um let’s actually

Have some breakfast or some lunch i guess it’s lunch so note itself while i’m traveling no the campfire is supposed to stay there oh okay the sticks get lost don’t they no what am i missing now ah the logs okay i think this this whole episode is gonna

Be the story of henrik’s failures to make campfires okay in fact my failure to make camps in general i i envisioned you know a bed and a campfire and maybe a chest to dump some stuff in and kind of making mini camps every night but i guess that’s minecraft for you things

Don’t always turn out as planned floating blocks this is one of those things kind of you know famous minecraft quirkiness things and it is actually possible for us to we could eliminate floating blocks entirely by just changing some numbers we can make it impossible to happen but if we did that

We would also make some really interesting terrain impossible to happen so everything would become more predictable more kind of samey and it would be kind of boring so we prefer to keep the configuration in such a way that we allow for crazy terrain including floating blocks because it just makes the game more

Interesting and enjoyable but the rule of thumb is like the majority of the crazy stuff should be good crazy versus just bad crazy okay hello goat what oh okay you’re jumping around so um this is actually quite interesting this um we are at low erosion very low erosion

Right negative 0.8 and we are hitting a coast because continentalness is approaching zero so that means it says mid-england now right as we go closer to the coast that’s gonna change to uh coastal or near inland yeah they’re changed right going back mid inland going forward near england that’s because coastal the

C value went below a certain threshold i guess 0.3 in this case and when we get low enough we’re actually well that’s dangerous when we get low enough we’re actually going to um it’s going to turn into ocean it basically lowers the terrain dramatically when we hit the coast

And what’s interesting is the shape of the terrain depends on what was the erosion at when we hit the coast so here we have high erosion or it’s more like we have very low erosion and a coast so therefore we get cliffs because low erosion means mountainous kind of cliffy

Terrain so that’s what generates these awesome crazy cool cliffs if we were at a high erosion area which means flat terrain near sea level we would be seeing flat beaches and flat terrain so it’s the combination of these noises that makes for interesting terrain variation let me quickly check

What did the old world look like for the old snapshot kind of similar still yeah the changes are quite minor they’re going to be not noticeable in most cases but hopefully we’ll see fewer microbiomes i also made some changes to uh aquifers um we might take a look at that

Actually because you should be able to find um ocean caves better now you should build this on the ocean floor you should be able to see cave entrances actually lead to some place so yeah this is a good example so erosion is now we’re at erosion index one and over there it’s flat

So probably erosion is going to be it’s going to keep going up as we go this direction it’s at negative 0.7 now right or erosion index one and soon we’ll hit a threshold and erosion index would go to two probably so one of our our our hopes is that uh

You know kind of map makers will and like creators will be able to take these uh like make make their own configuration of of of terrain shaping and bio placement so you can create your own custom worlds that may be completely different from from this just by playing around with the configuration

So we’re now we’re still erosion one emotion is still becoming higher and higher so we should hit another threshold at some point i thought i had more food than that okay i’ve been jumping around okay sorry pigs but you know oh wait a sec i got these things but i

Want to use those for campfires so yeah sorry pigs oh sheep thank you okay no more tech talk i’m gonna focus on actually getting beds so we can stop having to fight our way through the nights thank you because this is going to be tonight’s camping spot

And this one actually i want to see this one from a distance because i’m not on a mountaintop so let’s do this higher smoke we put hay bale under campfires and i should be able to make a bed wonderful okay so where were we yeah erosion nobody attacking me good whoa this is

Beautiful this is beautiful let’s just stand here and admire the view for a while wow i love the combination and this is something we worked hard for the combination of flat big flat areas like this well flat-ish and then kind of surrounded by mountains and peaks of various sorts

Because you know what good are mountains and cliffs if you can’t see them because when you’re in them you can’t really see them but if you’re kind of a little bit away from them then you can see them and admire them and the same thing in another direction

If i’m standing on top of a peak and look down on a big flat area that’s also really beautiful erosion still one okay so there goes my theory i thought this would be a higher erosion area but i guess not so let’s move on let’s actually check that thing about the caves underwater

I also want to mention something about aquifers let’s actually do that here hey are you friendly you’re friendly good this here is an aquifer or more like this is this is this is a cave okay it is a probably a noise cave maybe a carver

And the way it works is uh when caves are being kind of dug out they may or may not place water and water is decided by by aquifers so an aquifer is basically a part of the world where there is a local water level and what we’ve noticed is

If the water level here would be different from sea level right let’s say the water because here this water level is at y63 which is sea level if this bit here would have a lower water water level it looks kind of ridiculous so what we’ve done is we’ve made

The aquifers take into account if we’re near rivers or coasts or not you can see that right here it says near water right uh as i move inland um that that that’s gonna change and as we go further and further in it’s after all gonna decide that we’re

Not near water what is all this near water i should probably configure this a little bit because this isn’t very near water so what this means is any any caves generating right here are gonna use sea level so uh in this case i would say that’s probably wrong

Because we aren’t near water so i would want caves here to be dry like for example okay oh here good it just ended right let’s go back uh where did it end here near water right and as we go over here no longer near water which means we got lucky because that’s

What allows this cave to be actually a cave entrance right we could go down here and find caves um but if this was near water then this would have all been sea level and again the reason for that is because we noticed that local water level looks really ugly when it’s right near

Coastlines all right i’m back at camp um and suddenly i realized i need some food but while cooking let’s talk about the water so these caves noise caves and carvers can also form inside oceans and the challenge there is um as you swim into them we don’t want

Uh aquifers to kind of collide with each other we don’t we don’t want hanging water so as you swim down an ocean and you end up in a cave um quite often you don’t end up in a cave because it just gets blocked off because that cave is dry

And if you swim straight down and there’s a dry cave we don’t want the water to just be hanging in the air however now i made up some tweaks that makes it a little more likely that you’ll find water filled caves beneath the ocean and

Be able to swim through them and be able to come up inside a non-water filled cave it’s a little bit hard to find but it can happen a lot more often than in the past so i doubt we’ll find one now and let’s get really lucky but let’s at

Least have a look and at the very least we should be able to find um ocean caves that at least we can swim into while in last snapshot which i’m looking at right next to me um basically you would very rarely find caves in on ocean floors and if you do

Find them they will almost immediately end in in a barrier or something so you can’t go below let’s take a swim uh oh yeah we’ll probably need need a door it’s really dumb this door thing um but it’s convenient so we’re keeping it for now because yeah basically doors are like the early

Game version of you know stopping to breathe underwater because doors are not waterloggable so there are a lot of quirks in the game and we we tend to keep the quirks in the game if they solve a problem that that isn’t solved in any other way

Um so early game ability to dive down solved by doors right now okay so oh we got very lucky we immediately found one so this kind of i’m looking at at my other screen and there is no ravine here it got blocked off immediately i might need to brighten this part oh

This is a perfect example yeah actually it’s not a perfect example but it’s a good example i’m inside water caves that definitely were not generating last snapshot in fact this right here looking at my other screen it’s a dry cave in the last snapshot of course dry caves are good right we

Don’t want everything to be too flooded but because it’s a dry cave you would not be able to swim into it from above while here it’s it’s a wet cave so you can swim into it and with a bit of luck we could swim from a wet cave into a drive cave

So here’s the thing about about carvers this is a carver carver’s always dead end they’re kind of designed for it because carvers have a finite size and the only reason why you can find connected caves in minecraft 1.17 and earlier is because you know carver’s always dead end but

They sometimes meet other carvers and then the system continues so that’s the nice thing about noise caves is they they’re not limited in that way they can continue forever basically so if you find a lot of dead ends it’s probably because we’re in the old carvers um but as i mentioned before

They still have a a place um in the caves at least at least for now wasn’t i just over here before i feel like i’m just going back and forth i have i have a mixed feelings about the door trick it’s kind of funny and quirky but also a bit immersion breaking like

It doesn’t really make sense it’s dark i can’t see okay i’m starting to panic here i’m not claustrophobic but this is claustrophobic don’t die not like this okay but i’ve at least managed to establish that we now can get ocean caves and ocean carvers and that’s nice because that was

Actually on the to-do list so uh magma should be showing up in these caves and i actually just increased it a little bit but yet i’m not seeing any so maybe it should be increased further and don’t tell am i gonna have to dig my way out of this cave

Yeah i feel like i’m just going around in circles is there a way out of here okay let’s dig i’m lost i will admit i am utterly and completely lost okay so the plan is digger dig your way into that wall there and then dig our way up

All right sound like a plan yeah so i’m hired we’ve had increased the iron rates not this snapshot but last snapshot and hopefully it’s a bit better balance now okay cool oh great um we do have a camp don’t we no no no no leave me alone no i said leave me alone

Where’s my camp hey smoke it’s useful okay why am i getting food before sleeping instead of after sleeping all right we’ve got some food now i’ll let you live i have enough food um we’ll cook a little bit more and while doing that i’ll explain another thing

Some of these noises are 3d noises others are 2d noises and what i mean by that is let’s say i’m going to tower up a little bit right continentalness and erosion are examples of 2d noises they don’t change as i go up they stay the same so they only change when you go

Horizontally well temperature and humidity are 3d noises so you can see the numbers change right it can go up or down and the reason for that is because temperature and humidity don’t they aren’t used for terrain shaping they’re only used for biome placement and biomes are 3d because there might be

A lush caves down here somewhere and lush caves only show up in a certain temperature interval so by having this very vertically that means that um an underground biome could show up in a specific vertical range so i could find a lush cave and then blow it there might

Be some other you know underground biomes so that’s why temperature and humidity are 3d noises while the others are are 2d noises but let’s continue our journey let’s go to the ocean in fact i’m kind of curious how big is that ocean so we’re working quite hard to find a

Balance because you know the new terrain generation is really cool and interesting but there’s also value in the old and familiar and traditional minecraft we don’t want to you know just break all ties with history like minecraft is a super popular game for for a reason

So we want to we want to respect the kind of the history of minecraft and how minecraft looks like and we want minecraft you know 1.18 to feel like it’s still minecraft it’s not some new game so a balance between new and cool terrain versus old and familiar

Oh yeah so here we can see continentalness is negative means we’re in ocean and there’s land so that means that that land got created because continentalness went back up again oh i love jumping dolphins so this coastline is somewhat rough because erosion is negative and over here it looks like we have a

Flatter coastline so i bet erosion is going to be higher over there so we’re at erosion 3 right now that was a pretty well placed pilgrim post they have like a view over the coast here can defend it yeah erosion four so now we’re at more high erosion land which means

Flat and if erosion gets really high then we get two swamps yep this is definitely a flat area so i haven’t talked about caves so much that might be another episode but the hole here was not created by terrain shaping it was not influenced at all by these multi-noise parameters

Instead uh there’s a whole different set of noises that are not visible in the f3 screen and those noises will decide whether we should be placing you know cave entrances and carving out big chunks of land things like that so that’s what happened here so we’re still heading west ish

I kind of felt most of what i’m looking for but i guess if it’s something i would like to find before calling it quits is really a a hot biome seeing some badlands a desert or something just to check that everything is okay there and again obviously i

Could just fly around and check but survival when testing a survival i tend to notice things that i would miss otherwise small details oh yeah i haven’t talked about factor where is it am i blind there f f 505 f stats for factor it’s a dumb name but it’s basically like

When the world is created it’s basically all like that like there’s no surface it’s just a crazy mess of of of stone and air all over the place it’s just it’s crazy imagine like shattered terrain but times 10. and then all that gets flattened down by some factor and that’s what this means

So when the factor is high then the train is flatter if a factor is low then we see more of the original unflattened version of the crazy terrain that is used in the beginning of terrain generation so we’ve configured the world so that factor also varies so let’s let’s watch

Watch that number right let’s let’s get on land right so factor is 388 right now as that number goes down normally i think the default is around 600 when you’re running around and most terrain has 600 which is pretty much typically planes type flatness right and this is

Independent of like the plateaus and mountains this is added on top right but some some parts of the world are configured to get more 3d noise just 3d noise is our term for this this kind of thing and uh as that number goes down we’ll we’ll see that the terrain get more and

More crazy ouch so factors 299 and as we go here factor goes down to 163 and 138 and um there we go 80. that’s about as low as it gets you won’t find any place that goes lower than 80. this is what we call shattered terrain if you go to old

Minecraft and go and find a shattered savannah which is really hard to find by the way you can’t see these numbers on the debug screen but factor will be 80. and factor 80 basically creates that kind of terrain sometimes even crazier um but we have some places in the world where we set

Um factors to late let’s say 200 or so and 200 or 175 that’s basically the old mountains that are now called um extreme hills so factor’s still 80. so factor doesn’t automatically mean that the terrain is crazy it just means that it can get crazy in fact there’s still aid here and again

Here it says near water so any caves around here are going to use sea level and what’s nice about that i don’t know if we’ll see that here but it creates really cool cave entrances that kind of look very piratey yeah we’ll we’ll keep an eye out for those kinds of cave entrances

The nice thing about this f3 screen is if i see something really strange in the terrain that looks kind of broken like why did this biome show up here or why did this terrain look like this i can look at those numbers and i can look at the code and analyze exactly why

That happened and then it’s easier to debug and improve the terrain but it’s again our goal is not to eliminate all strange terrain sometimes things are going to be allowed to look crazy and stupid because it’s worth it because that’s also that that same code that gives us stupid

Trades is also what gives us interesting terrain so as long as the interesting terrain like that that’s like really interesting as long as the proportion is right like like most terrain that looks crazy should be crazy like in a nice looking way rather than just a bad looking way

And this is a perfect example you know you almost think that i planned this that i kind of scouted in advance but you know this is random i just created a scene and popped in and ran around and wow this is amazing so is this a factor

A factor 200 that’s a good example of that so some parts of the world effect 200 you’ll see terrain that is kind of interesting and crazy but not you know shattered savannah level of craziness and it’s a nice compliment to the to the more realistic looking and new mountains

Because the new mountains look fairly realistic but if everything is realistic that’s boring right we want we want minecraftiness and minecraftiness is is this so a combination of minecraftiness and and realism um and sometimes exaggerated realism like a a mountain that is kind of realistic but over the top like exaggerating everything

And that’s also something that we kind of like just to you know inspire people right another nice thing about kind of semi-broken terrain let’s say a river that gets cut cut off in this one place or a village where the houses are kind of disconnected because there’s a big ravine between them

All those kind of glitches although they might seem a little bit ugly they invite the player to do something right as a player you’d be inclined to maybe connect those two you know houses with a bridge over the ravine and yeah it just gives you gives

You stuff to do and lets you feel like feel like the the hero of the story factor 200 yeah so as you see it’s quite up and down here it’s quite you know messy and that’s also the case in in earlier you know in minecraft 1.17 some biomes had

Uh more 3d noise so force for example always have 3d noise more than planes with this terrain generation we’ve kind of decoupled that so we’ve basically said that some parts of the world have more 3d noise regardless of what biome happens to be there and that’s nice because again variation

You can get a super flat forest or you can get a plane that’s not quite super flat just like in just like in reality so what what are we looking for i guess i said uh oh yeah a hot biomes let’s uh let’s let that be our last goal find a

Really hot biome check that things look okay and if so then we call it quits and then maybe we have something snapshotable we kind of don’t really like this is interesting in one sense we want to get rid of this right we want to say that that river should connect to this one

Always but actually that’s wrong because suppose i’m riding a horse and i didn’t manage to get a horse this time which is a bummer but if i’m riding a horse it’s really nice to find things like this right i can cross the river with a horse but

One change we did for this snapshot was actually make horses follow golden apples and golden carrots which they should and they do in bed rocks that’s also a parody thing they’re pretty slow at swimming but that means that if you do need to cross a wide river

This river wouldn’t really really be a problem but let’s say here you want to cross this wide river with a horse it’s a pain but now with this change you can at least if you manage to get a hold of a golden apple which i did here or a

Golden carrot which isn’t really that hard to get a hold of then you can lead your horse across of course a lead would work too but they’re sometimes a bit hard to get a hold of so we want people to be able to get around the world on horse basically

And hopefully this should help that yeah here’s another good example of the of the near water thing right it says near water here that means this this is not part of the river because it doesn’t say valley here right peaks and valleys is not valley which means that

The river is basically over here you should say valley soon yeah and the river technically ended here but then a noise cave happened and because we’re near water that noise cave is where that aquifer is forced to use sea level which means that this noise cave doesn’t even look like a cave

It’s disguised it looks like the river continues but happens to get really deep which is really interesting so now you can go like whoa way down here and find a cave system maybe and if we’re lucky we would find a dry cave a nice thing about the the this kind of

System with the noises is even though as a player you should never need to look at this you shouldn’t have to care it’s just you know if you’re if just if you’re interested in the technology or if you’re gonna make custom worlds this kind of stuff is

Super interesting as a player you don’t really need to care about it but indirectly you’re affected by it because you can learn as a player that oh look savannah that’s kind of dry and hot if i keep going in that direction i’m probably more likely to find other hot

Biomes such as deserts and badlands just kind of just like in reality right if you get in a generally hotter climate you’re more likely to find hotter biomes so that’s exactly what we’re going to do we’re going to go there in hopes of finding even hotter lands we weren’t really planning on making

Aquifers in the beginning of this update we kind of felt that that would be cool but we’ll see if we have time but we were forced to because we noticed that if we don’t do that then all the caves will be water filled below sea level automatically just because of the

Way minecraft works so we realize that we have to make aquifers otherwise all caves are flooded but i’m glad we did because they were really hard to do the technology was pretty complicated but it turned out really nice i find and it really does add spice to the underground when you can

Find like you know a big lake or even an underground sea or travel by boat waterfalls et cetera it just makes the underground really interesting so i’m near the top of a hill and it’s becoming night so i would say that’s our perfect cue for making the next camp right here

Please tell me i can make a bed yes i can there so let’s follow the savannah and see if it takes us to a desert i like that train this terracing that’s very nice oh that’s what i was talking about perfect yeah when the noise caves and carvers are

Forced to obey the rule of you know sea level and coastalness that allows this to happen so i don’t know if that is a river or not but there the river ends and this would have been just a cliffside but a cave happened to form there and

That cave was forced or that aquifer was forced to use sea level which means you get this really cool looking cave that kind of the river continues in and they can continue really far if you’re lucky you can basically get you know if you’re lucky you could just

Travel by boat under this this whole plateau and come out on the other side which is absolutely fascinating a funny note about aquifers this whole thing about local water levels is completely unrealistic in reality if you if you’re in caves below sea level they will almost always be water filled

Unless you happen to find some kind of gas pocket at high pressure in which case you wouldn’t be able to breathe or be there anyway so uh that’s where we decided that gameplay trumps realism it’s fun to be able to go deep and underground and find a lake down there

And swim into the lake and somehow pop up into the ocean that’s completely crazy but fun um i don’t know okay ah come on that was lucky okay so i’m gonna try to find vantage points we can kind of look around for deserts or badlands we’ve had we had a lot of

You know kind of trouble configuring badlands because badlands are one of those biomes that really don’t work as microbiomes it looks horrible when you get a tiny badland so they kind of should be big when they show up and because we technically wait it’s like wow this is pretty cool

Terracing but anyway because we technically can’t set a minimum size for a biome we have to kind of tinker with the noise configurations to make it at least less likely to happen so that’s what we’ve done with badlands and now they tend to be large in fact

They sometimes have to be too large but that’s i guess a trade-off we’ve made oh speaking of which look at that let’s go check it out um wow let’s just have a quick look at this yeah here you can see what exactly what happened um coastal

Right or near ocean we’re not near we’re not near water now technically but somewhere over here that threshold happened near water so here we’re near water therefore we must use sea level and over here we’re not near water therefore the aquifer gets to random randomly decided to seal at a water

Level in this case it decided to set it the water level really low so it places a barrier automatically to avoid the water just hanging there and it allows for holes in the barrier to allow for waterfalls so that’s that’s why this happened again not realistic but definitely fun

It’s a lot of interesting kind of cliffside cave addresses here i like this area a bit of a pain to get around but it’s cool this is a nice big savannah actually in the beginning i thought we would have to tone down the cave entrances a bit i

Was planning to do that i thought there was a little bit too many crazy big cave interests but then i noticed that a lot of people you know were were tweeting and making youtubes and kind of showing off really cool big cave mattresses and kind of it was generating a lot of excitement

So i decided to to not tone them down as much as planned and kind of leave them let them be crazy um of course they shouldn’t be everywhere but i’m leaving more big caverses than originally planned because people seem to like them and that’s what’s great about these snapshots because

Yeah as developers we have our own preferences and we have our own guesses about player preferences but at the end of the day you know this should be a game for everyone uh not just a game for us so so uh we listen to community feedback and then

Try to kind of make an informed decision about how the world should look like based on that feedback so depending on how hot and how how dry it is we get desert or badlands here’s an example not great or actually maybe it’s okay i think it’s one of those cases where different

Players have different preferences but oh look at this a geo down there a cave entrance under the water down there it’s yeah just interesting stuff hiding everywhere but yeah some players would say this is ugly others would say oh this is really nice it’s like an oasis in the desert or something but

Whatever you feel about it the reason why it happens is if we look at these threshold values right we’re at erosion index two temperature index four humidity index two right and these biomes care about temperature and humidity so let’s watch those numbers right temperature for humidity two

Uh there humidity became three so it got just a little bit more humid and that was enough to toggle you know this jungle edge my own instead of desert and that would have been fine if it continued that way but then we got up here and humidity is now going back down

Again because it’s random right so humidity goes back to oh no sorry what happened here was actually let’s see here what is happening here why is it why are we at badlands here does it have to do with whether we’re near inland or not all right i’m gonna figure this out i’m

Curious now why is there badlands here i’ll be right back i’m gonna figure this out all right so i slept on it a little bit and i looked at the configuration and so here’s the thing mid inland we are a mid inland here and normally high temperature this is the highest temperature index

Only that means badlands but as we go down so the question really was why is there not badlands here if it’s hot well that’s because we switched from mid inland to near inland which means continentalness went down from 0.035 to below 0.3 which i guess is a threshold so

Because we’re starting to near the coast we don’t want badlands right near the coast that’s why there’s jungle edge here but then the question is why does it then become badlands again over here or more like why did it become desert down here and the reason why it became desert was

Because it suddenly became drier so we had this double shift happening we got closer to the coast here so suddenly it becomes jungle edge and then it became drier so it suddenly became desert so those two things in combination caused this little tiny jungle and i was a little bit curious because

Over here it says like up in the badlands it says mid inland so this combination of of different values basically gives us plateau territory you can see lots of plateaus here it looks kind of cool and badlands is configured to kind of want to be generated there but then as we go down

Here continentalness goes down or at least where we go here continents here it says near inland but then when we keep going towards what looks like the coast continentals is going up again so i was a little bit curious about why i mean that looks like a coast to me

And going all the way down here looking at the number it’s still a positive number and i’m literally in the water now and it says mid inland so i’m going even more inland now than before so this is a river this whole darn thing is a river pretty crazy huh

And you can see that here it says uh valley there hey my god what are you guys oh do you want to hear about this you want to listen okay yeah so this is a valley uh technically which means it’s a river and not a lake or ocean

I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing what do you think it’s a little bit crazy um but um yeah it looks beautiful so maybe it’s okay and as we go up here it says we’re now out of the rivers this is not a river

Anymore this is actually still a wooded badlands plateau so in case you’re wondering we are inside wooden battle with advantage plateau right now right got it yeah anything else you guys are wondering over there cool great can i can i can i go now yeah okay thank you for listening there let’s go

One of them was out fishing so it wasn’t a bug it was just a quirk another quirk is this that the leaves become kind of dry as we start blending these two biomes i don’t know if it’s a good a bad thing but it is a thing

We’ll see what we do about it if we do anything about it personally i think it’s it’s kind of cool dead bushes everywhere is is wrong it shouldn’t be dead bushes everywhere but i don’t think we need to debug that right now it’s not high priority

So i think we’re about to wrap this up now i’m just going to get up to the top of this just because i’m curious how big is this bad lens because it looks pretty darn big i must say the badlands in 118 don’t really look

Like in 117 but i think they look better because 117 badlands look really nice but they all they tend to look the same because they’re designed they’re coated to look in a very specific way here they’re subject to a lot more randomness so there are some badlands that are

Really ugly but overall i think they’re more interesting you get a lot more variation and also sometimes you get badlands mountains peaks essentially and those look amazing let’s see if we can find one we are we are in fairly low erosion areas so uh maybe we’ll get lucky and find a badlands mountain

I’ll keep finding one more thing i want to do but actually i should go eat breakfast because it’s early morning here and i’m really hungry i i know that like during development we find that um a if we can’t stop playing if we keep wanting to play and keep wanting to

Explore and look around the next corner or look over the next mountaintop that’s a good sign that means we’re on the right track and i find that happens a lot nowadays so i feel pretty happy about the terrain generation now um so the fixes we’re making now are mainly

Kind of like just the last things the last major issues um and i think we got them kind of under control now um so that we can focus on performance because performance is the most important thing right now i would say now that the terrain is starting to look decent

I kind of like how badlands interacts with with uh deserts like this and i think i see mountains over there let’s uh let’s run over there all right so i climbed up to the top of this badlands plateau and i see some beautiful stuff around i don’t see any badlands mountains

Though so i think i’m gonna call this a day it’s been super fun exploring and i’m really happy to to share this with you so i’m gonna end the day by making my final camp um Campfire and i don’t have coal so i can’t make a campfire oh well anyway thanks for watching have a nice day or night or wherever you are