The Authentic Adventure Mod: A Nostalgic Reimagining of Minecraft’s Adventure Update
There are plenty of ‘alternate timeline’ minecraft mods, or mods that seek to explore a different path of minecraft entirely, that completely overhaul the game in some major ways. Most of these mods are for very old versions of the game, usually in beta or alpha minecraft, a time in history when updates were insanely frequent, and the game was taking off at an exponential rate. However, the one we are going to cover today is unique, as instead of focusing on a polished, alternate beta experience that coincides with people’s nostalgia, it instead focuses on fixing the update that catapulted minecraft into the modern era – the adventure update. This is Authentic Adventure, a mod for minecraft version 1.2.5 that intends to explore a different path of beta 1.8, aka the adventure update, one of the most controversial updates of all time. It brings back the nostalgic, yet still good game elements of beta minecraft while sticking to the theme of innovation and progress through minecraft’s updates, leading to a perfectly balanced experience. Let’s explore everything the mod has to offer and talk about why it’s simple, yet great.
De-Biomizing the Generator
One of the worst parts of beta 1.8 was the overhaul to the terrain generator. Back in the versions before it, the terrain generation was made to be world specific, with biomes not affecting it, meaning you could get some cool terrain combinations, like epic desert mountains for example. Exploration was fun because you never knew what crazy terrain was hiding in the next chunk. Now, there’s a term coined for beta 1.8’s new generation engine – Biomization. This meant that the generator now relied on rules set for specific biomes, instead of global rules, meaning mountains for example got stuck to the new extreme hills biome and extreme hills only. Pretty much everything else became flat, lifeless, and boring for millions and millions of blocks. Authentic Adventure solves this issue by de-biomizing the generator, meaning the old way of generation was brought back into post adventure update minecraft, meaning the terrain was once again hilly, containing the classic overhangs and cliffs, and more random in the best way. What’s great about it being in 1.2.5 means that we get to see what a jungle biome looks like using beta generation, a rare experience everyone should see at least once in their life. It is just awesome.
Changing the Hunger System
Another problem with this era of minecraft was the oceans. The oceans used to be massive, lifeless, and vast, with 0 variation and really 0 usefulness outside of survival island type seeds and maps. Authentic adventure adds life and variations to these dark ages of the oceans with things like sea crags, and a brand new archipelago biome that scatters a bunch of snaky islands near each other. It comes with a few options for world type as well, like amplified, large biome, where the biomes are double the size, small biome, where the biomes are half the size, and single biome which is pretty self explanatory, but comes with the option to toggle oceans, ocean biomes, beaches, rivers and hills.
Outside of the terrain generation, Authentic adventure tweaks the ever so controversial hunger system to not get rid of it, but combine it with the classic way of eating to restore hearts. So, eating food in authentic adventure actually does instantly heal hearts like it used to. As for the hunger bar, it still functions basically the same way, except it acts as simply a stamina bar for sprint. Once you run out of hunger, you don’t start starving to death, you just simply cannot run fast. And, since food gives both instant health and restores the newfound stamina bar, it’s an even bigger dopamine rush eating food.
Other Tweaks and Items
Authentic Adventure also brings back the improved fencepost recipe, adds all the plank variants of slabs and stairs, removes boat breaking, and increases animal spawn rates considerably. It also improves the lighting system immensely, and completely fixes that longtime lighting bug of the weird complete darkness on cliff faces. There are plenty of other changes and tweaks that can be found in the mod’s changelog on the mod’s github page that lists out all the tweaks, items, and features.
What Comes Next?
The next update of the mod is set to be released for Christmas, so definitely go follow the project for some awesome new upcoming features. Authentic Adventure is meant to be a minimalistic experience, polishing out the terrible quirks and bugs and useless features of the early middle age time period of minecraft, giving the player more sandbox options to their liking, and a better, more balanced experience overall. It’s almost like a vanilla+ type thing. It also bridges the gap between the golden age and modern minecraft players, which I feel like is split right down the middle, with golden age enjoyers playing alpha and beta, and modern players obviously playing the newest versions of minecraft. The middle ages kind of get forgotten about, and Authentic adventure is a great gateway into that forgotten time period.
Due to the way Authentic Adventure interacts with the vanilla code, the mod is unfortunately not really compatible with very many other mods. It is recommended to try it out with your favorite old mods and see if it works, but complete overhaul mods like better than adventure and not so secret saturday are, of course, amazing and impressive and deserve the love that they receive. However, there’s also a demographic of minecraft player that does not like huge changes to the vanilla game like that. A demographic that enjoys these nostalgic subtleties and quality of life changes to older versions. Minimalist golden age mods like Authentic Adventure deserve attention and love, and hence why it’s worth checking out.
For more information, visit the Authentic Adventure Changelog and join the BlueStaggo Discord server.