Minecraft 1.18. The highly anticipated Caves
& Cliffs Part 2 update was released today! Linked below is a lengthy video all about
what's in the update and how I feel about it. One critical feature of 1.18 that I did
not discuss in that video is chunk blending, as it wasn't available yet in any form. For
those unaware, your entire Minecraft world is made up of 16 block long and wide "chunks",
all stitched together when loading a world. If you've ever somebody reference a "chunk
error", an event caused by one of these chunks failing to save or load properly, now you
know where the name comes from. Since 1.18 has now been released, I think the main concern
that just about every single player is going to have is whether or not this new blending
feature is going to completely destroy their world. Okay maybe that's a bit extreme, but
I think you get the idea. Long story short, blending prevents this crap from ever happening
again. Any new chunks that you generate in 1.18 that border pre-existing chunks will
be blended together. But, does it work? How does it work? Is it safe? Are there limits?
Can we break those limits? Now we're asking the right questions. So let's go ahead and
check it out. So let's start with the basics. You have a
world that you want to load in 1.18, and you want to make sure it's safe. Right off the
bat, I'm gonna tell you that it's a good idea to back up worlds that you care about. If
Figonometry, the first person to ever walk to Beta 1.7's "Corner Far Lands" can keep
their 131 gigabyte world backed up, you can back up yours too. So now, let's set the stage.
This is my first ever Minecraft map that I call, "The Peaceful Map". It's over 11 years
old, and was started way back in Alpha 1.2. While I've not updated the content of this
map since November of 2013, around the time 1.7 was released, I actually did a pretty
difficult upgrade to the map in June of this year while dealing with really aggressive
chunk-loading problems in versions beyond 1.12. This map means a lot to me, and I wanted
to ensure those who came across it in modern times could enjoy it to the fullest. For the
first demonstration, I've used a program called Amulet to prune everything beyond a 10 by
30 chunk area surrounding the spawn point, so we know exactly where the chunk borders
will be. I've also changed the biomes within those chunks to be either be a forest biome
or an ocean biome, as it used to be one massive plains biome. With the world ready for 1.18,
let's go ahead, and let's fire it up. Upon loading up the world, a few things are
immediately obvious, one of which is that nothing has gone catastrophically wrong. If
anything, I am seriously impressed as to how well this has worked. So, how does it work?
What behavior should you look out for? Well, first off, Minecraft 1.18's blending will
not change any blocks within pre-existing chunks at all. All of the blending happens
within new 1.18 chunks only, which prevents naturally generated structures on the edge
of your old world from blending with the new terrain. For the sake of demonstration, I
intentionally created this scenario behind my mountain house's entrance. As you can see,
the blending, just, works. It doesn't attempt to blend straight up the wall or anything
weird like that. The only place where things went sort of wrong is at my minecart bridge,
where the blocks underneath it meet up with the new terrain. But even that isn't a major
problem. As we continue to look around, we can very clearly see where the old and new
terrain meet within the ocean biome, but that's only because worlds generated before Beta
1.8 have no under-water block variety, and their sea level is set one block higher than
all versions after Beta 1.8, meaning it's another problem you're not likely to deal
with. The only place you are likely to notice a significant difference is when terrain of
extremely differing heights are forced to blend together, in which case the blending
will look a little overly smooth. Now hang on a minute. While flying around
some more, I found a straight line of sand where the old terrain meets the new terrain.
What gives? Is this a bug? Is this something you'll have to deal with? Again, no. 1.18's
chunk blending pays attention to what biomes exist next to the terrain that it will be
blending with. This instance of my Peaceful Map was all forest and ocean before blending,
so let's run an experiment outside of the Peaceful Map. To see how this will actually
look in practice, let's generate a normal world in 1.17, move around a bit so the world
isn't a perfect square of chunks, close the world, swap out the level data file with that
of a 1.17 single-biome ice spikes world, and then load it up in 1.18. So long as you don't
load the world a second time in 1.17, Minecraft 1.18 will blend the normal terrain with a
new ice spikes biome, because as far as Minecraft 1.18 is concerned, it's blending what it thinks
is a 1.17 single-biome ice-spikes world. As you can see now, there are no solid lines
of blocks anywhere. If this were just a normal 1.17 world loaded in 1.18 without the level
data file changes, it might be difficult to tell that anything happened at all, and that's,
kind of the point. One last note I'll make above ground is that
structures that were queued to spawn within 1.17, but that appear within 1.18 terrain
seem to follow the shape of what the terrain would have been in 1.17, resulting in this
absolutely hilarious floating village that occurred with the world that just generated.
Above ground is not the only point of contention with chunk blending however, so let's go underground,
where things get... messy, but reasonably so. As I mentioned before, blending will not
mess with pre-existing chunks. If a new cave does coincidentally meet up with an old cave,
and / or if the old cave is big enough, some blending does appear to occur within new chunks,
but it isn't much. Using Amulet again, we can see where the 1.17 cave systems for this
world end, and what that looks like in-game in 1.18. The cave systems do not line up at
all. Plain and simple. That really does explain everything that's going on above bedrock underground,
so let's go below bedrock. All bedrock blocks that used to exist between a y level of 0
and 4 have been replaced with deepslate now. Because the bottom bedrock layer was always
supposed to be solid, nothing will ultimately connect through this barrier within your old
world chunks. But seeing as absolutely everything below 0 is brand new, on both new and old
chunks, everything below 0 generates like you would expect for 1.18, with no chunk blending
artifacts impacting this area at all. If you do upgrade your world, but you don't want
to venture too far, consider adventuring downwards. If you watch my videos a lot, then you know
what's coming next. I'm going to try and break chunk blending. Key word, try. If you've enjoyed
the video up to this point, please consider subscribing if you haven't already. As you've
seen throughout this video, chunk blending works really quite well, but there are some
things we can do. First off, you know how I've been swapping level data files around
throughout this video? Well, if we take this instance of the Peaceful Map, but slap in
the level data file for a floating island ice spikes world, we get, this. This, is awesome!
The Peaceful Map almost looks like a hidden valley amongst the floating ice spikes chaos.
The actual terrain blending along the old chunk border is a little bit rough with this
broken setting, even with the seed being the same, but I can tell you from experience that
this result is inconsistent, and heavily world dependent. I could probably do this all day
long with a variety of different level data settings, so let's get crazy. Using the same
program as before, I'm gonna delete a checkerboard pattern of chunks, and change the level data
file to that of a 1.17 caves crimson forest preset. Upon loading up the world, ehhhh...
what?! Yeah... the caves preset no longer works properly in 1.18, nor is an even option
when creating a new world in 1.18 anymore. Even though the crimson forest blocks aren't
here, the actual blending works pretty well, all things considered. For now, let's try
two more items that I think you're gonna want to see. First, taking a 1.17 superflat world
and blending it with a normal 1.18 world. This works far better than I expected it to,
and it provides us with a nice perspective of how the whole process works. Even when
blending is forced to work under such extreme circumstances, for the most part, it just
does. So last up, and one I really think you're all gonna want to see is, the Far Lands. Using an old Minecraft 1.15 mod that I've
shown off before, I've forced the Far Lands back into existence, and forced them to generate
only 47 blocks from spawn. After doing so, I loaded this world into 1.18, flew to where
the far lands chunks would end, anddddd... wow. This is everything that I expected it
to be. And while I might be out of time for today's video, this really does show just
how many possibilities there are for tinkering around with Minecraft 1.18's new chunk blending
feature. Are you gonna update your worlds to 1.18? Are you gonna try anything that you
saw today? Let me know in the comments below, and thanks for watching!
