Going Under, or, “We gotta go back!”
Entry 5 ()
So some stuff happened.
I decided to finally go stronghold hunting, and the first eye of ender I threw from home led me to set out northeast. But I didn’t get far before spying something odd…
Well, I’ve heard this happens sometimes and is easy to fix – MCA Selector even has a dedicated “Swap Chunks” function for it. I’ll just come back to it later. Surely it can’t be that hard to deal with. (I might even have just kept it in if it weren’t for the fact that the world is going to feature a massive ring of the same effect.) Onward to the stronghold!
With the magic inside me, I dove down to see if there was anything obvious. There wasn’t.
Sigh.
There was a pretty nice ravine, at least, and even without the newer ore generation and its preference to stash goodies where they’re not exposed to air, there were easy pickings of gold and lapis, along with plenty of iron to feed my eventual one‐player railway empire. Found the cutest predator while I was down there, too! But I was close. Eyes on the prize. (Heh.) I threw another and followed… and heard moans through the ground…
…but I didn’t get very far inside before realizing I’d missed something after all.
There was little to explore in this part of the stronghold. Its few branches quickly led to dead ends, except for one which opened back onto the ocean.
With a clear view to the surface.
The structure had been cut through – it was a short, clear swim to a larger section of the stronghold where I could mine into a tunnel and keep exploring. And not far inside lay what I was looking for.
I secured the area and destroyed the silverfish spawner, but even if I was ready to take on the dragon (and I wasn’t), I only had eight eyes on me to add to the portal frame. I’d need to come back. The portal I’d recently added at that temple was close, but not super close, and not connected to the network yet besides. I built a new one and hopped through to see where I’d end up this time… maybe some classic ol’ nether wastes?
The other problem, besides the usual inhospitable biome, was that while the Nether‐side portal had generated almost dead‐on the target coordinates laterally, it was rather high up in the world, around Y=75. Ideally, it should be down at Y=23 to match the one in the stronghold.
And I was above the lava ocean.
Metaphorical tail between my legs, I headed home the way I came, and spent the next few days adding to my Nether hub. I could tunnel deep early to avoid most of the lava, then come back up to the portal, but then I’d have to go out of my way. I’d prefer to just have a simple, diagonal ramp down, but as I discovered digging my original (now abandoned) tunnel to Intersylva, doing that into the lava ocean is more trouble than it’s worth. So I decided to keep the line at the usual Y=64 almost to the portal, then spiral down; that way, I’d only need to clear a neat vertical shaft through the forbidden swimming hole.
Heading north from Spawn was fairly uneventful. The spur east for the stronghold quickly became a shooting gallery.
Threats neutralized for now and armed with potions and stone, I got ready for the big dive…
Starting the shaft wasn’t difficult, just nerve‐wracking, even knowing I had over half an hour of fire resistance at the ready. If you’ve ever swam in lava, you know how slowly you move and how little you can see – you have about one meter of visibility, which is further impeded by the fact that you’re on fire.
Still, construction was fairly straightforward: Swim close enough to the bottom to pillar up, then do that. Repeat another 15 times and start chucking gravel down the center.
After running out of blackstone I took a break from construction to do some more fishing, enchanting and trading. Mostly incremental upgrades, but I do have Respiration III and Feather Falling IV now, along with full Protection IV. Oh – and my chestplate is now netherite, ready to be rendered mostly useless once I finally get some elytra. Details in the usual place.
Noticed something interesting back at Intersylva, too. It seems the missing villager found their way back, because now I count five farmers with only four composters to work at. Well, the more the merrier…
I didn’t play for a few weeks due to other priorities in real life, and before coming back, decided to finally look at fixing those swapped chunks I came across earlier. So I opened up MCA Selector…
And then I zoomed out.
Annnnnd out again.
Welp. This sucks.
But that’s why we have backups, right? I filtered for chunks with InhabitedTime > 0 and, thankfully, that covered most of the damage (these screenshots are but a small sample – this happened all over the world). I backed up the whole folder, then deleted the places I’d never been. Okay, that’s a start.
Then I looked around some more and found there was still plenty of damage in places I had been. Crap. This is where my map here on the site came in handy in a way I hadn’t predicted – I was able to look around everywhere I’d placed a banner and confirm that those, at least, appeared to be in unaffected areas. Okay, good. That made me more comfortable mass‐deleting anywhere that looked scrambled. Granted, I haven’t really built much away from spawn yet, but I’d feel cheaty if I replaced, say, a looted desert temple with an unlooted one, even if I never went back to raid it anew. I probably did end up replacing some random bits of surface ore I’d happened to mine while out exploring and mapping, but on the whole, I think it was probably fine.
Alright – damage cleared; time to import chunks from the backup. I’m on a Mac these days, so for my backup solution I’d gone with the included zero‐effort option, Time Machine. I loaded it up, waited forever for it to respond, then picked a random point a couple months back. Into MCA Selector it went… annnd this one was damaged too. Crap. How long ago did this happen?
I went further and further back, each time finding the world damaged in different ways. Then something weird happened.
I loaded up one restore point and found that Spawn was scrambled.
Spawn was absolutely not scrambled in the world I’d been playing.
So then I started searching online trying to find the cause and, hopefully, an easy fix.
The cause, it turns out, was MC-226112. See, I’d accidentally upgraded the world to 1.18.1 (which I don’t want to do, since I consider the Caves & Cliffs Update unfinished until we get the deep dark in 1.19) after playing on that version with friends, so I used Time Machine to undo the change, which apparently introduced corruption in the process. It seems this is a known issue, Apple blames Mojang, and Mojang hasn’t commented since the issue was opened almost a year ago. Great.
Fortunately, the fix was also easy, given the process I’d gone through creating this world. I still had an untouched copy from before I’d started playing on it, so all I had to do was import chunks from that. All done. Super annoying, though.
So, PSA for any other Mac users who happen to stumble across this post: Don’t rely solely on Time Machine to back up your Minecraft worlds. Use the in‐game Backup button periodically to save a zipped copy, and Time Machine should handle those just fine. I’m curious if the issue is Apple‐specific or also affects rsync and similar software…
Anyway. Problem solved.
While I was at it, I decided to finally get around to adding the “Halo” to the world. I only had a bit more flying around to do to generate the last of the 2011 Minecraft, so I finished that up, converted it, and imported it into a test copy of the world.
Two problems.
First, it seems I wasn’t finished generating it after all – there were a few random holes in the terrain here and there. (Beta is prone to running out of memory and crashing, and that had happened a few times, so probably things didn’t save properly.) Second, the biomes were wack. McRegion (the save format used from Beta 1.3 to release 1.2) didn’t support saving biome data with the world, letting Minecraft calculate it on the fly instead, but this isn’t accounted for when upgrading the world to Anvil; instead, it just applies the biome map as if the world were being generated from scratch in the current version of the game. This created some neat artifacts, like water in what was once a desert now being distinctly‐colored with the area now tagged as swamp – but I wasn’t going for neat weird artifacts; I was going specifically for 2011 Minecraft.
Ironically, the Broken Halo was broken.
I did the sensible thing and started over in generating the Beta terrain. This was probably overkill, but I wanted to make sure it was complete and accurate. That solved one problem. But what of the other?
After some searching, I discovered a classic old tool I’d forgotten about – Biome Painter. It hasn’t been updated in almost 9 years, and took some trial and error to get running (no thanks to Apple’s sponsorship of the War on Backwards Compatibility), but it has a very useful feature: It can calculate the biome map for pre‐Anvil versions of the game and apply it to converted worlds. One region at a time, but still: Accurate‐ish Beta biomes! (The old temperature/humidity‐based grass/foliage colors are no more, and there aren’t always 1:1 equivalents between the available biomes in Beta and in 1.2.5, but it does a pretty good job aiming for a close match.)
Finally back in the world, I got back to finishing up my new rail line.
In site news, I’ve done a bit more polishing, including adding this fancy new logo to the home page:
The About page has been updated and now features this extremely high quality graph illustrating the structure of the world because I suck at words:
That’s all for now. All for this month, probably – though I do have some screenshots I could dig out from before I started blogging here…