About the world (and site)

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About the world

Idea

The plan for Broken Halo was hatched for three reasons:

  1. I first played Minecraft all the way back in Beta 1.3, but until recently, various life/computer issues have kept me from playing long‐term (or much at all, for that matter) – and I’ve long been jealous of people who’ve been able to keep their worlds for years and years, complete with those abrupt shifts in landscape where the world gen changed between updates. (My old worlds are lost to time and hardware.)
  2. I was nostalgic not just for the (pre‐Adventure Update) Beta era’s beautifully weird terrain generation, but also for its feel of lonesomeness that paired so well with C418’s soundtrack and came from being the only human in a world of animals, monsters, and shy misunderstood interdimensional horrors.
  3. I saw this minecart track selector tutorial this one time that listed “2012 Minecraft” as a destination, and I thought, “…yeah.”

Creation

Graph visualizing the concentric, square rings of the world as described in “creation.”

2020 Minecraft with the Core of Solitude

Starting in 1.16.5, I created two new worlds with the same seed, differing only in whether the “generate structures” option was enabled. I used the world-pregen data pack to generate terrain in both – the first out to X/Z ±6,144 (that is, a big square from (−6,144 W / −6,144 N) to (+6,144 E / +6,144 S)), and the second, without structures, only to X/Z ±2,048. (The pregeneration does go a bit past these bounds, but that’s easily trimmed off later.)

Next, in the regular (with‐structures) version of the world, I used MCA Selector to find any structures that could generate with (or later spawn) villagers or illagers or witches, who are technically not illagers – that’s villages, igloos, woodland mansions, pillager outposts, and witch hutsnote 1 – and, as long as they were at least partially within X/Z ±2,048, delete their chunks (plus one more in each direction for good measure, just in case anyone wandered off). These holes were then filled with the matching chunks from the no‐structures version, surrounding Spawn with a central “Core of Solitude.”

The result is that the early game still has (potentially dangerous) abandoned or ruined places to stumble upon, but no easy access to trading and other village resources, preserving some of that old‐school lonesome feel. (For the same reason, doPatrolSpawning and doTraderSpawning are both turned off. Because – for me personally – they’re annoying and make the game less fun, they will remain off. (Anyone know of a data pack that lets the wandering trader spawn in villages but nowhere else?)) I did my best not to pay close attention to the map while editing, and then let the world sit for some months before I actually started playing it in October 2021. It was over 16 game months before I found a village.

2011 Minecraft: The Halo

Around this vast area (from X/Z ±6,144 to ±7,168) is the Halo, a ring of 2011 Minecraft taken from Beta 1.7.3. This had its difficulties – to get started, I had to use MultiMC to get such an old version of the game running, as it just crashes if I try loading it from the official launcher. Then, since data packs weren’t yet a thing in Beta, generating terrain meant lots of manually flying around with Single Player Commands (with frequent breaks to save and quit due to Beta’s tendency to run out of memory and crash).

The next problem was that, back then, the game actually calculated biome data on the fly – the McRegion save format used at the time simply didn’t keep track of it. The solution there turned out to be updating the Beta world only to 1.2.5 (by which time the current Anvil format had been introduced), then spending some time in Biome Painter applying that tool’s biome maps, which are at least close fascimiles of the Beta biomes originally generated. After moving the world forward once more to 1.17.1 (which I was playing on by then), that just left importing it in MCA Selector as usual and cropping off the excess.

2022+ Minecraft

Due to the deep dark being pushed back a second time to the Wild Update, the world was never updated to Caves & Cliffs Part II. (I want all my negative Y‐levels to come with a chance of surprise horror stealth minigame, darn it, not just the distant ones.) All terrain beyond the Halo will be from 1.19 or beyond. Since the new terrain generator tries to blend the boundaries with old worlds, reducing that abrupt transition that I actually want to preserve, I’ve generated a new 1.19 world out to 12 chunks beyond the Halo and imported just that narrow ring.

But what’s beyond that? Just whatever the game throws at me as it updates and I explore, really. This is a living world now and I don’t plan on manually creating any more layers.

The Nether

The Nether has no “Core of Solitude” because I figured that whole idea didn’t really make sense there. Otherwise, though, it’s similarly ringed at the appropriate 1:8 scale, with its Halo spanning from X/Z ±768 to ±896. The change is less dramatic than in the Overworld, as the Nether’s terrain generation has actually stayed pretty consistent since Beta. Sure, there have been additions (fortresses, quartz and magma, ravines, and of course the entire Nether Update) – but the underlying terrain hasn’t really changed, something that surprised me when I was combining the two worlds.

I’ve made a rule for myself not to use the Nether as a “let’s see where we end up” thing: All portals must be opened from the Overworld side, with fast travel only allowed after first having taken the long way.

Miscellany

The seed for all source worlds is 5347607270556138971, generated at random when the first was created and then copied to the other three.

I don’t stray too far from vanilla:

  • All world settings were left as default except for the two game rules mentioned above.
  • I usually play with the Faithful 32x resource pack, some of its add-ons, and a few from Vanilla Tweaks. I do avoid any that feel “cheaty” to me, like Lower Shield or No Pumpkin Overlay – this is entirely subjective and inconsistent and is a personal preference only, not a judgment on anyone who does use them ☺︎
    • List of Faithful Add-ons
      • Better Tiling Deepslate Tiles
      • Big Dripleaf Fix
      • Colored Sheep
      • Deepslate Ore Top Textures
      • Hozz’s Doors and Trapdoors (pending a 1.20 update)
      • Splash Experience Bottle
      • Telescopic Piston Arms
      • Visual Banner Pattern Items
      • Visual Explorer Maps
      • Visualized Enchanted Books
    • List of Vanilla Tweaks
      • Quieter Minecarts
      • Quieter Pistons
      • Numbered Hotbar
      • Dark UI
      • No Java Edition Title
      • Iron Bars Fix
  • The only data packs (besides world-pregen) are Anti Enderman Grief and Villager Death Messages, both also from Vanilla Tweaks.
  • No gameplay mods, but I do use the Fabulously Optimized modpack for performance and quality‐of‐life reasons. (Dynamic lights are disabled for the aforementioned “feels cheaty” reason, but also because they trip me up figuring out where I have and haven’t properly lit up caves, and at least on my machine they don’t perform well anyway.) Additionally, I’ve added Villager Names for flavor, Better Biome Blend for better‐looking colored water (pending a 1.20 update) MiniHUD to help prune my torchspam and save me having to decipher the wall of F3 when captioning screenshots (etc.), and Litematica for occasional schematic handling.

I just play on Normal difficulty, partially because I’m not hard enough for Hard, but mostly because I just don’t want zombies breaking down doors. Apparently there are data packs to address that, though, so I may step up in the future.

Besides the aforementioned “no Nether travel without going there in the Overworld first” rule, my other house rule going forward is “no villager rerolling.” (I know I already let that genie out of the bottle with my Mending guy in Intersylva, but that’s what made me realize just how OP that trick is.) From now on, librarians are to be a rarity: I’ll just play the cards (or trades, rather) that the game deals me, and if a village doesn’t generate with a library, I can only provide them with one lectern.

I’m not entirely certain how I named the world, but I was on a Black Dresses kick at the time and I think my brain tried to mash up “SHARP HALO” with their “broken peace sign” logo.

Currently using the “marcy wu <3” skin by korbuls; earlier screenshots used the “Gender Neutral” skin by MiahMy.

About the site

This site is built with Zoner, except for the map, which is built with Papyri. I’ve customized both to my needs. (Well, the Python side of Papyri that builds everything is still vanilla, but I have tweaked the JavaScript side that displays it.) There’re some random scavenged bits of HTML and CSS (and JS in the map’s case) where I was long too rusty to figure things out on my own (what do you mean <center> and <a name> were deprecated over a decade ago‽), though I’ve since rewritten quite a lot of it now that I more or less know what I’m doing. (I’ve done my best to balance “Web 1.0” personality with modern practicality. Won’t be bringing back the entirety of that ’90s homemade homepage aesthetic, though – I already lived through it the first time, thanks, and my old eyes would rather leave its revival to Neocities’s very active retro‐web scene.)

Minecraft font family by Jacob Debono/JDGraphics Fonts. Logo by Textcraft. Skin rendering by Visage.