The Spawn Chunks 132: Rushing Into Lush Caves

Mar 15, 2021

Joel and Jonny talk new deepslate textures and new OpenGL rendering,  before hanging out with some cave vines, glow berries and overgrown abandoned mine shafts in the new lush cave biome.

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  • Joel
    • Started, and completed, a blacksmith build over the weekend.
      • Forgot what it feels like to finish a Minecraft build in less than six hours. Ha!
    • Started to frame out the chapel building in the square.
      • It’s coming out larger than I anticipated from the outside, but it feels pretty good inside.
      • The town curtain wall needs to move but that’s a problem for future Joel.
  • Jonny
    • Raided a woodland mansion in Skyblock.
    • Working on the infrastructure and tidying up at The Museum in the Survival Guide.

Chunk Mail

FROM: J Juggler
SUBJECT: Arcade Resurgence

Ahoy there Pix and Joel!

Prior to the pandemic, I was an arcade regular and part-time pinball machine cleaner. Arcades have seen a huge boom in the past few years! My thinking is that it is in response to the trend towards handheld gaming devices. As screens get smaller and multiplayer takes place on separate screens, playing on a cabinet with your friends seems special again. Arcades also give physical experiences that you are not easily able to fit into your own house such as pinball and driving games with molded cockpits.

Anyway, that’s my two chunks!

JJuggler

P.S. I too was surprised by this news item and wonder if Minecraft Dungeons will be a success as an arcade game.

FROM: GundarHStriker – Landscape Artist Member
SUBJECT: Hardware Or Optimization Issues

Hi Johnny and Joel!

I’ve been playing on a Realms server for a few months now, in which the world has been set to Amplified during creation. Playing on this server, I noticed I got significant frame stutters when crossing certain chunk borders; this is due to the amount of blocks that must be rendered in an Amplified world of course and is to be expected of course, as there is a warning message at the world creation screen telling the user that Amplified requires a “beefier setup”.

At the time, I was playing on an older computer that had a GTX 970 graphics card, (It’s a card from 2014 to help clarify its quality), I blamed my old rig for any performance issues I had. I even had frame drops below 60 whenever I used shaders, which lined up with the Amplified performance.

What was alarming to me however, is after I got a new computer recently, (featuring a 3070 card from Nvidia), I was still getting stutters in the same world, in the exact same chunk border spots. What this got me thinking about is the new mountain generation and world height in the Caves & Cliffs update. It would seem the amount of blocks in the snapshot worlds is probably the same or more than an Amplified world, which would mean they will need to do a lot of optimization to assure smooth gameplay.

What are your thoughts on the topic, and how do you think Mojang will tackle performance in these larger worlds?

Don’t take things for granite,

GundarHStriker

P.S. The screen freeze/stutter with the older PC took about 2-3 seconds to come back from, whilst the stutter on the new rig is less than a second. So, the new hardware helped, but doesn’t solve the problem.

Lush Caves

Joel and Jonny are ready to rush into lush caves and everything to be found inside! Speculation on azalea trees and how to grow them, mining with moss blocks, and the layers that lush caves add to deepslate caves, abandoned mineshafts, and strongholds.