Dev Diaries: World Generation

Update. So one thing we work with is for example  player styles. Identified quite many player styles actually. We also think it’s important to find  a balance between reward features and journey   features. So journey features they are features  that improve the journey maybe when you are  

Looking for a reward and it can for example be a  new biomes like the lush caves and the gypsum caves.   And reward features they are more like actual  rewards the things you’re searching for it could  

For example be a new mob or a block that you  can use for something cool. And we have learned   that when an update have a really good balance  between these two different kinds of features  

That often is a fun, fun update and fun I mean  that’s the ultimate goal, to be fun and lots of players to like. Hello I’m Henrik. I’m on the Gameplay Design Team here at Mojang. And what I do  

Is basically design and build the features  in the game. The main thing that tells us a   feature is good is when we can’t stop playing  it ourselves when we’re playtesting something   for example I’m in the caves and I can’t stop  play testing I’m just finding an excuse to  

Run around just a little bit more, that’s the  main symptom of that we’re onto something. We really wanted the mountains to feel like more  spectacular more dramatic like add more contrast   to the Minecraft world. We wanted the mountains  to look a bit more like real world mountains  

Of course in a Minecraft way but still really  feel like epic mountains and mountain ranges.   We worked a lot with the actual shape of the  mountains. We worked a lot with height dependent   generation. And another thing, when the terrain  is really steep we made sure to not generate any  

Snow there and that I don’t know exactly why but  it really made the mountains look so much better.   Another thing we really wanted with mountains  is that we wanted to add some gameplay to them.   And I think it’s made two things. One of  the things is the powder snow and that  

Creates natural traps on the mountains so when  you’re out on a mountain adventure you need to   be careful. And the other things are the goat  themselves. So next thing is that we wanted like   the mountains themselves to be the main reward  for the mountains so the dramatic wishes that’s  

The main reward and we really hope that  you all will get inspired from the mountains. The main goal of the caves is that it should  be fun to just travel around even without the   biomes and mobs and all the other stuff just  moving around inside the cave should feel like  

Some kind of grand adventure. So we are inspired by  the, by the surface of the world. Because if you if   you’re on the surface of the world and you, you know, you live in one spot and then you travel  

Off somewhere it’s going to look different. But the underground has kind of been like   once you’ve seen it you’ve kind of seen it all.  So we want the underground to be as exciting. So when you travel off you should be like wow look  you know a waterfall or an underground lake or  

Some huge cliff for a really tiny cramped cave.  And another thing is we want the caves to be   realistic but not limited by realism.  So it shouldn’t feel like you’re on   some other planet or like in some  other dimensions, it should be overworld. 

But we also want to kind of be able to put  in some elements of fantasy or exaggeration.   To find inspiration for the caves I did some  traveling mostly in my memories because I’ve   been, I’ve traveled quite a lot in the past and  seen some pretty cool caves in different countries.  

Particularly New Zealand, South Africa and  West Indies and Spain and also here in Stockholm.   And also the game itself is actually a source of  inspiration just tinkering around with the code   trying things and noticing like wow look what  happens when we add water to the caves, it just  

Made a huge difference, or when we add you know  really huge caves to contrast with really small ones. When doing a cave update we want to have  caves for all kinds of players. And the lush caves  

Are the caves that are supposed to feel a bit more  welcoming a bit more safe more light compared to   most of the other caves. Hey I’m Jasper. I’m the Lead Artist on Minecraft, that means i oversee the art and officials of the game. And I’m  going to be talking about the art in the  

New caves. The lush caves is something you want  to build in because it’s so green, it’s so nice   there’s water and there’s of course the Axolotl. Lush caves don’t really exist in real life   because the sunlight doesn’t get into caves but  in Minecraft we like to bend the rules a bit.  

So for this lush caves we wanted to have a  cave that was full of plants brimming with   life. We decided to have these massive lush finds  everywhere hanging everywhere covering everything   we have added glow berries into the vines  so the lush cave is a very bright and nice  

Looking environment. We have the new addition  of bushes. This is an interesting model because   it’s a block that is also has a plant inside of  it. We’ve made these because we can’t, we didn’t   want to have trees in the lush caves because  that would be literally copying the overworld  

Into the underground and we want them not to be as  similar. So we’ve decided not to have any trees in   lush caves. We wanted the lush caves to feel a bit  humid like an actual cave with moss and stuff. So  

We’ve decided to have like small layers of water  everywhere, lush green caves and a lot of grass. We were trying to figure out  how do we make drip stones   in Minecraft right, because we don’t want like drip  stones in real life they’re very circular very  

Organic shapes. We’re trying to figure out how do  we make this in Minecraft? How do we make this work?   And the first thing you might go to is just  like oh we’ll just make, let’s make blocks we just  

Like stack blocks together and you know it’s  gonna do great. But I think that has too much   detail and it’s a little bit too literal, in  Minecraft art we try to make the shape   in a box we don’t try to make the shape with  boxes, we’ve decided to make it a plant shape.  

Because plant shapes in Minecraft are already very  organic. So how can I make the drip stone fit with   more blocks in the area? So the granite is red  right, and I thought maybe it would make more sense  

For the drip stone to be brown because brown is  a neutral color just like greystone. So I decided   to make it brown because it also fits very well  with the sand and also dirt and many other blocks.   So a question that I get very often is  what are spaghetti caves and cheese caves?  

And the best way to understand it is if you  imagine an old television set with static   noise black and white dots right. And if you  take those dots and you smoothen it out using a   technique called purlin noise a mathematical  technique and you decide that those white  

Blobs are air and everything else is  stone. If you look at that, that becomes   almost like a map of a cave system. And  that’s kind of how we generate the caves.   And if you look at that picture those blobs look  kind of like the holes in swiss cheese, at least  

We thought so, that’s why we just call that cheese  caves. But we also want tunnels connecting them.    So in a similar way we can create another noise field  right the black and white dots smudge it out using  

Purlin noise and then we can decide that instead  of white blobs being air and the rest being stone   we decide that the border between white and black  that thin ridge becomes air and the rest is stone.   And that gives us spaghetti-like caves. So  putting those together, cheese caves gives  

Us these big kind of caverns, spaghetti caves  gives us these connecting tunnels between them   and then we add the old cave generation  on top of that we get a ton of variation. One thing I’m actually very excited about is the  new really big ore veins that we are going to add.  

They’re going to be really rare but when you find  one that’s quite an exciting moment. When I play   Minecraft I really like to tell stories,  and to me it’s something very inspiring   with finding something that’s quite unique in the  world and so for me like my imagination started  

Spinning, goes like so the person that’s  found this ore vein maybe now wants to build a   castle or maybe like a build a full mining village  around it and what are the stories about everyone   that live in this mining village that was built  thanks to the ore vein. And I think that’s exciting.  

This update has been kind of tricky because  we’re changing basically everything about how   the world is generated in Minecraft. But two  of the main challenges especially for caves   has been world height first of all. We’re making  the world higher and lower so the y-coordinate  

Starts at negative 64 instead of at zero and then  extends too much higher than before and that’s   hard because there’s so much code that assumes  a certain world height, we have to change so much   code and do so much testing and fix so many bugs.  Plus performance, a bigger world means more stuff  

Going on more stuff to load and that can slow things  down, so that’s one challenge. The other challenges   is water levels, we love local water levels  they’re really cool you get lakes and waterfalls.   But it’s really tricky to deal with when these  different water levels meet. How do we avoid  

Walls of water for example and things like that.  I’ve been making textures for a long time now   and the hardest part of making textures is  making flat textures like the polished granite   or andesite or diorite. You know it’s really  hard to have a flat surface that has quite a lot  

Of detail like imagine, imagine just a rough  stone surface it has very tiny specks of like   crystals or glass or sand and in Minecraft the  textures are very tiny like you have really   big blocks so it’s like super hard to fit  that like into a flat texture.  

It’s important to try to include as many voices  and as many diverse voices as possible and also   preferably as early as possible in the process  of crafting an update. So and here of course the   community is super important, because we are very  thankful that we have such a huge community and  

It’s a diverse community and really getting  input feedback suggestions for the community   it means a lot because for us it’s important  we create something that truly is for everyone. I want the players to be like wow this  is amazing. And I think with the underground update  

We really did that. So upgrading the underground  was such a nice experience, such a cool experience.   It’s the cave update, it’s the update that the  community has been asking for for such a long time.   It’s become of course very important for us to  really meet what preferably exceed the player  

Expectations. And I really feel proud how we all  have got together and really tried to achieve that   and I feel proud, I feel we have a very  good update and a good set of features with a   lot of variation and with something for everyone.

I really hope that you’re all really gonna enjoy the Caves & Cliffs update and that it will inspire you to play Minecraft in your own way.