Uh oh… I’m having fun again. Message dated, November 3rd at 1:48am. It was right around this time I began playing with Minecraft’s options file, which ultimately led to the creation of my most recent video. Up until last week, the options file was something that I had never really Experimented with. I love breaking Minecraft, I do it all the time on this channel… so how had I never come across it before? This was the start of the most fantastic butterfly effect that I have ever experienced in Minecraft. That’s something I noted in my initial video, Which you really should watch. But… when I said it… I wasn’t referring to the events that occurred in that video. I was referring to the events that followed. The events, for todays video. The time is now just past 3am. The initial research for the first video had concluded, But my brain was still in “Breaking Minecraft” mode. So, I began to wonder. If I can break Minecraft’s options file… what else can I break, tonight? Without hesitation, I set my sights on Minecraft’s individual world’s level data file. Any controllable details pertaining to how your World generates and behaves is housed within this file, with a few exceptions. Because I’ve actually broken this file many times before, my first thought was “how can I break it differently?”. This time, the thought was to change the data TYPE for some value. Deleting a value, and re-making it With a different data-type changes how high or low the value can be set, and I’ve used this to break Minecraft’s enchantment system for a video before. The value that I chose to attack this time, was, “Time”, since I’ve also made a video about that… but… nothing happened. So then, I attacked what I THOUGHT was just the world seed. This doesn’t visibly break anything, but I noticed something… strange. When I closed the original world, deleted the world chunks, changed that seed to something I thought might be broken, reloading the world and using the seed command presented me With a different, and still valid world seed, but the world in front of me was exactly the same… well… almost. The trees are in different places, and there’s a village when there once was not. I was dumbfounded, but not for very long. What I ultimately learned was, Minecraft does not Store only one seed within the level data file. It stores seven of them. Three that affect any one dimension. What that means is, these seeds are not the “Master” world seed, since there’s only one of those. These three seeds affect different layers of Minecraft’s world generation, All of which you can individually customize to generate a world that is entirely your own, that can not be generated by just setting a seed when creating a new world. By the way, you can do more than just shuffle around some trees. A lot more. A… whole lot more. Individually controlling the Variables that I am about to explain, has never been possible within the unmodified game before. Let’s dig through these one at a time. To start, I’ve generated a world with the master world seed set to “0”, using the “pollinating sandboxes” exploit to get this seed to generate. This world Is entirely unmodified, so it’ll serve as our template. The first seed we’ll modify is called the “Features Decorator” seed, which applies to every dimension, and affects all in-game features and decorations. Basically anything that gets placed after the biomes have taken shape apply here. In no particular order, ores; fossils; dungeons; mineshafts; strongholds; ocean Monuments; lakes; trees; ruined portals, pyramids, temples, and villages, and it also alters carvers like cave generation, even if it’s not solely responsible for it. If you absolutely adore the shape of your world and the biomes that inhabit it, but would like to try out having a better Cave system below your spawn point, or see if you can get a village to appear near your spawn point, this is the option you want to mess with. Just keep in mind that if you want a specific feature to spawn somewhere, like a village, the biome and terrain specific conditions that determine Whether or not it can spawn must still be valid for where you want it to appear. I could get into more specifics than that… but honestly, I think just about all of these items are much more intuitive to understand just by looking at them and comparing them for a while. The Features seed is the most basic of the three to understand, so let’s move on to the second seed. Our next two items are the “Terrain Height Map” seed, and later on the “Biome seed”. These are dimension specific seeds, meaning you can set them to be different values in each dimension. That’s Actually why there are “seven” seeds, but only three that affect any one dimension at a time. First, we’ll cover the “Terrain Height Map” seed. If only this seed is modified, but the “Features” and “Biome” seeds are left at “0”, then what happens is actually fairly self explanatory. We’re changing the “Terrain Height Map” seed, so only the height map of the terrain is shifting around, while the biomes, and their placement within are not changing. It may look like the “features” I mentioned before are shifting around, but That’s only because the differing terrain shape is causing features to generate a little differently. Note however, this one tree, out in the middle of no where, generates every time, because not enough things surrounding the tree are changing that would cause it’s generation to fail. If you absolutely adore the “features” of your world, and the layout of the biomes within, but want to see if an altered height-map will make things look even cooler, consider messing with this item. So, last up, and certainly one of the most interesting, is the “Biome” seed. This item, is actually pretty difficult to explain, but it’s much easier to show off visually. The first part of the explanation I’ll give comes from mooing_cowmilk of the Minecraft@Home project. Think of the Minecraft world as the mold of a jigsaw puzzle, Where everything is blank, just showing the creases between each piece. Each puzzle piece is a tectonic plate that defines the shape and size of a biome in-game. Every time you place down one puzzle piece, it affects the heat map of the surrounding area, changing the range of Biomes that can placed next. If the collision of two or more tectonic plates have the same color, a seamless transition is formed that you can’t see in-game. If the two pieces are different colors, a biome boundary is formed. And if two pieces are separated from each other, a gap is formed, And Minecraft places a river there. So now for my words. Changing the biome seed to truly random values results in worlds that look almost completely different on the surface. However, it’s easy to tell that a different biome doesn’t always mean differently shaped terrain When the terrain seed is kept the same. If you were to drop somebody into a world with just differing biome seeds, and told them to tell you the differences without being able to compare two screenshots together, they would probably tell you that they are entirely different world Surfaces. However, because the “Terrain Height Map” seed is the same across all of these worlds, some very similar, or even identical terrain height map features can be seen. Whether or not these similarities occur depends on a LOT of factors that are well outside the Scope of this video, but just know that the the “Terrain Height Map” seed and the “Biome” seed work together to form the surface of the world. So when I lock one of those two, to the same seed, We can get similarities such as this. However, if I change both of these, and generate a new world, I get a world that is entirely different, but with an underground that is, again, the same. So full disclosure. Minecraft has had these options available within the world’s Level data file ever since Minecraft snapshot 20w21a. That was over 18 months ago. However, this is the exact version that implemented experimental support for custom dimensions, with custom biomes coming 7 snapshots later. Given that most people were focused on those Features when these snapshots came out, it’s understandable why the ability to modify these seeds may have flown under the radar. If you’re willing to use data-packs, the level of world customization you’re able to implement DOES extend far beyond what I’ve shared today… But something feels different about this. It’s all vanilla, no data-packs. After finishing up with the research for today, I gave a considerable amount of time to seeing if anybody covered this subject in this manner, and I came up empty, aside from videos focusing on the custom dimension And biome support. If you know if any major creators who covered the contents of this video, please do not comment about it unless it’s going to be a constructive or positive comment. So, are you going to try modifying any of these for new worlds you create? That just about Does it for me for now. I hope you all enjoyed, subscribe if you did, and thanks for watching! Video Information
This video, titled ‘I B̡̨̮̭̽͐͗̾̕R̻̯̝̾͆̇̚̕Ò̺̤͎͆̊̏ͅK̞̽̀͊̕E̛̻ the Minecraft World Seed System…’, was uploaded by AntVenom on 2021-11-22 17:02:44. It has garnered 655610 views and 46339 likes. The duration of the video is 00:10:57 or 657 seconds.
Each Minecraft world has not one, but SEVEN unique world seeds… » MORE Seed Videos – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCzo6ZMfKa4&list=PLR50dP3MW9ZVroRgiFnWys-cU23bX9u2Y » Get 25% Off a Minecraft Server – http://mcph.to/AntVenom
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When Minecraft generates a world, it uses the world seed to feed the math that forms your world. Minecraft uses this seed in multiple places. However, Minecraft now stores this seed seven times within the level data file, and you can change each of them.
0:00 The Seven Deadly Seeds… 3:39 Features Seed 5:26 Terrain Height Map 6:52 Biome Seed 9:22 Outro
Special Thanks @MinecraftAtHome Neil, mooing_cowmilk, DylanDC14, Matt, MrSpike, Tom
Co-Writer » Furx
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