Minecraft Made Caving More Annoying, and it’s Brilliant

Minecraft 1.18 was released on November 30th 2021, and brought the second half of the game’s Caves & Cliffs update. If you’re familiar with Minecraft and want a detailed breakdown of everything new in this update, I recommended looking at this page. To summarize, they completely overhauled world generation by expanding the floor and ceiling of the world, separated terrain generation from biome generation (allowing biomes to appear at any height, even on the tops of mountains). Caves can now spawn with different biomes such as lush caves or dripstone caves, and also include more features like massive amethyst geodes and ore veins. The new caves are a wonder to explore, and are so much more interesting than the previous version of caves.

Caving and Ores in 1.18 vs 1.17

Why then, is caving more annoying than before? Before I get into that, I’d like to quickly explain how you would prepare for a caving trip before Caves & Cliffs. First, you would stock up on important gear: armour, a sword or two, a few pickaxes, a shield, a bucket of water. These things last a long time, and you wouldn’t need many new ones during the course of your trip. Things that you would use a lot of mainly included food and torches. However, you would be gathering plenty of stone, coal, and iron, so as long as you brought a stack or two of raw wood and a few stacks of food you could explore to your heart’s content, since you could use the wood to make more torches and tools. Torches in particular could run out rather quickly, but 1 raw wood combined with 4 coal could produce 32 torches, so running out wasn’t an issue. Instead, I would be forced to return to base because my inventory was full and I simply couldn’t carry any more.

Enter Caves & Cliffs. Individual rooms in caves have the potential to be much larger, meaning more torches are required to light them up properly (to avoid mobs spawning). That’s no problem right? Torches are a dime a dozen! Well… not so much. You see, Caves & Cliffs changed ore distribution. Before, ores either spawned at a certain height with certain odds, or they didn’t. In other words, it didn’t matter if you were at y=120 or y=0, you had the same odds of finding coal. Since the rarer ores (redstone, diamond) only spawned from y=16 and lower, you would just go down as deep as you could and gather all ore types with the best odds. It was efficient, but not particularly interesting. Now, the odds of finding ores is not evenly distributed, and varies as you get lower. In particular, redstone and diamond are now the only ores that get more common as you approach the bottom of the world: every other ore gets less common. However, most ores still have a small chance of spawning no matter how deep you go. The exception is coal, which stops spawning entirely around y=0 (even though the world now goes down to y=-64). See the picture below for the visual comparison of ore distributions.

The Coal Problem

Not allowing coal to spawn below y=0 has had a profound effect on the gameplay loop of mining/caving. As I mentioned above, you would find plenty of coal as you explored. This meant the number of torches you could produce was limited to the amount of wood you carried, with a wood to torch ratio of 1:32. In Caves & Cliffs, the number of torches you can produce is now limited by the amount of coal you can carry with you, with the coal to torch ratio being 1:8. This means that you now have to stockpile on coal before heading farther down into the world. Coal can be condensed into coal blocks, so this isn’t a huge issue for inventory space. Instead, the problem is with how easy it is to obtain a large amount of coal. In previous Minecraft versions, coal was incredibly common no matter what height you were at. Now, coal is only common around y=48 and above. This means that in order to stockpile on coal, you actually need to do some exploring/mining at a much higher y level with the specific goal of finding coal. You may run across some iron and copper as well, but at the heights where the most coal is found you aren’t likely to find a lot of any other ore. Additionally, I personally found that even at higher y levels coal was much less common to find exposed near the surface or in a cave system. You also are a lot less likely to have coal in your inventory when you return to your base to smelt all of the ores you just gathered.

This creates an interesting loop of exploring a massive underground cave system, only to be forced to return make your way back in order to mine some coal for a while to replenish your supply. It gives a sense of adventure and reaching past your limits while exploring deeper caves. Obviously the new cave generation adds to this: caves being bigger inherently makes them more dangerous. I also spent around 6 hours exploring the first cave system I found in Caves & Cliffs, and I feel like I had only seen a small percentage of the entire cave system. This made me feel like I was biting off more than I could chew, and such a massive cave system to explore made getting lost a lot easier. The need for coal also meant I had to take more trips back and forth, providing more opportunities for me to lose my bearings. Whenever I was mining for coal, I was only thinking about the next paths I wanted to take in the deeper parts of the cave system. And of course, the more time I spent mining coal, the less I would remember about the path down to the last room I explored.

The other major factor that adds to this sense of exploration is deepslate. Minecraft previously only went down to y=0, but now goes to y=-64. Once you get to y=0, the stone that makes up the walls, floors, and ceilings of the caves you’re in transitions into deepslate. Since I know that coal doesn’t generate in deepslate, I knew when I crossed that threshold that I was entering an area where my resources would eventually be drained, adding to the sense of biting off more than I could chew. I’ve also found a few places where the cave generated in such a way where I could see all the way from deepslate to surface. In the picture below I’m at y=-47, staring at sunlight from a cave entrance around 120 blocks above me. A cave would never have generated in this way before Caves & Cliffs, and it was quite an impressive sight to stumble across.

Wrap Up

Caves & Cliffs has done a marvelous job of adding in a ton of fascinating new things to explore in caves. Changing coal’s distribution emphasizes these changes by forcing you to go on specific trips for coal, limiting your time in these massive cave systems and making you crave more. Some of the world generation is awe-inspiring, introducing naturally occurring wonders that would have never existed with the old world generation. I hope that Mojang continues to add new biomes to caves, supporting one of the oldest and more core aspects of one Minecraft.