Upgrading Minecraft to get to the newest features is always fun unless it breaks your old maps and creates huge and ugly artifacts across them. Read on as we show you how you can take an old Minecraft map and bring it into a new version of Minecraft without risking really ugly glitches in your terrain. What’s the Problem?Minecraft’s enormous and procedurally generated map is created using a terrain generator algorithm fed by the world’s seed (an alpha-numeric string either generated at the time the world is created based on the system timestamp or supplied by the player). This seed serves as a pseudo-random number that is fed into a complex equation that then generates the Minecraft world around the player, chunk by chunk.This system works very well, and it’s the magical underpinning of the Minecraft universe wherein players can keep roaming and roaming with new hills, mountains, caves, and more generated on the fly for them to explore.Where it breaks down (and what we’re concerned with today) is when players bring an old map from a previous version of Minecraft into a new version of Minecraft. The world seed remains with the world map for the life of that map but what the terrain generation algorithm creates based on that seed can change significantly between major Minecraft versions.This means if you load a map created in Minecraft 1.6. into Minecraft 1.8. then the transitional areas between the area you’ve already explored and the new areas you will explore in the future will be very ugly as the terrain generator will generate completely mismatched terrain.
Mountains will plunge down sheer faces into oceans, strange perfectly square patches of forest will appear in deserts, and other ugly artifacts will appear on your maps.Let’s take a look at how ugly that can be by loading creating a map with Minecraft 1.6.4 and then loading in Minecraft 1.8.3. First, here’s a screenshot of our sample map.
About the Map PFAS Contamination in the U.S. For water systems that had one or more detection of PFOS, PFOA or another contaminant, an average was calculated using the all samples collected. Samples with no detections were treated as zero when calculating the average, which in turn may skew the value lower when the contaminant is more common.
The seed for our map, if you wish to play along at home, is 493870342. For information on using seeds, check out our Minecraft lesson.First, let’s highlight our methodology. We’ve loaded the map in Creative mode and flown straight up from our starting square. The view distance is set to “Far” (early versions of Minecraft didn’t allow for numeric chunk-based view distance, but we know that Far is equivalent to a view distance of 16 chunks). This means that surrounding our spawn point there is a grid of 32×32 chunks generated by the terrain generator.After creating this map we waited for all the chunks to generate and our view to populate in all directions. We then we logged out and loaded the same map in Minecraft 1.8.3 and set our view distance to 32 chunks.
After waiting for the distance to render we flew around the edge of the old map (approximately 16 chunks away from the center) and looked at where the edges of map generated with the old algorithm merged with the new one. You know the village you can see in the distance in the desert above? It has a rather peculiar shoreline now.The above screenshot was taken after flying to the other side of the desert village, looking back toward the center of the map from the newly generated terrain. The old generator read the seed and said, “Make this area a desert!” but the new generator said, “Make this area an ocean!” You can see the crisp line traveling horizontally that delineates the old terrain from the new.If that’s not glitchy and ugly enough for you, consider this screenshot from the jungle area seen to the north of the spawn point and the village in the image above.There it is, a big beautiful mountainous jungle biome. Let’s take a look at how great it looks from the other side.Lovely.
More ocean and, thanks to the height of the terrain generated before we loaded the old map into the newer version of Minecraft, the drop from the top of the of the jungle mountain to the ocean below is a around 50 blocks. Perhaps we should be thankful the glitch generated an ocean and not a field as such a drop would have surely done us in.Just in case you’re still not convinced that rendering glitches aren’t completely hideous, let’s to render a 3D Google Earth-style view of the map we’re currently exploring to show you how truly brutal the clashing of terrain generators really is.What we can determine from this top-down view is that the seed in the 1.6.4 generator wanted to create an area around the spawn point that was an intersection of jungle, desert, plains, and taiga snow forests. Select Your MapFor the purposes of this tutorial we’ve opted to use the same seed and the same before and after Minecraft versions as we did in the previous section: Minecraft 1.6.4 and Minecraft 1.8.3.