This is a post to brainstorm some ideas about the game and what it could have been. I'll start by listing some old features that I really liked:
As I mentioned in my previous post, isometric screenshots. They just look good.
The old smelting system. It was only in indev version 0.31. You would smelt iron by using flint and steel to ignite a fire in which you would then drop the iron ore onto the fire, producing iron ingots. It was definitely faster and more "atmospheric" than the current way of smelting in my opinioni even though it was simpler.
The saturation of Alpha and below, it makes the simplest places look nice.
The world generation was just way more fun back in beta 1.7
Modern minecraft has tons of biomes but they all look samey, old world gen could make weird looking alcoves and floating islands, it was great.
The problem with world gen is that now it makes these massive holes underground that makes strip mining extremely annoying. You either make a bridge across 100+ blocks of dark cave, or round around said cave lighting it up and looking for ore. It's just exhausting and you don't even get coal while you do it.
I traveled 10k blocks across the overworld the other day. Rarely even ran into a mountain. Just gradual up and down. Every single biome the same gradual. I realized how much I used to use these generation anomalies as landmarks, and now there are none.
There was something special about the scale too. Obvious seed example"Glacier" really showed off how grand and surreal mountains and outcroppings got in the beta world generator.
Hard agree, when i need to play on modern versions i usually generate a 1.7 world and then transfer it to the new game versions, the terrain inspires me to build in a way modern versions dont.
I switched back to Java version specifically because of that. If I can't safely walk away from the game by pushing a single button, I can't play it. Real life comes first.
Why do caves look so ugly? I got into a Minecraft binge a few weeks ago for the first time in years and was shocked at how ugly the caves were. I get that there are new materials, but it makes exploring suck with how bad it all looks. Anyone else?