The Minecraft Logs #14: Onwards to 1.18

It is becoming a sort of bad joke in this series that every time I start to get close to accomplishing something interesting I end up deciding to restart for a reason or another.

This time the trigger was when I decided to check what was new in the latest Create mod update, version 0.5. There is some cool stuff in there, more specifically the Steam engine which seems like an excellent replacement for the Furnace Engine (now gone).

The only problem was that 0.5 is only available on Minecrat version 1.18. I was playing on version 1.16 so the change was one of necessity if I wanted to play with the latest Create additions.

But that wasn’t the only reason. There were a lot of little things that I wasn’t happy with and it reflected mostly in the mods I removed this time around.

The removed mods

I won’t go through all of them because it would take forever and none of the ones I changed were because they were bad. It is simply that I found alternatives that suited my tastes better or they haven’t been updated to 1.18 at the time of this write.

I will touch on a couple big ones though. The first one is Tetra. I like the concept of the mod but there were some parts about the implementation that just weren’t for me.

For example, I didn’t like how that diamond heads for the tools won’t settle. This means that they won’t get upgrades as you use them and makes it an awkward progression compared to vanilla Minecraft.

My way to bypass that was to get some vanilla diamond pickaxes to mine the obsidian and then continue my progression with Tetra tools once I got better materials. It just felt cheaper than crafting diamond head parts to upgrade my Tetra tools.

The second nitpick was that Tetra didn’t work with the vanilla enchanting system. If you wanted to enchant your tools you had to use Tetra’s workbench to do it. Which means you have to get the enchantment in a book first to then enchant what your tools/weapons.

I get that it is to allow to enchant different parts individually but I am not sure the gains are worth it. If I recall correctly there were also restrictions on what kind of enchantments you could use. For example mending didn’t work meaning you always would have to repair your tools/weapons at some point.

The last, and admittedly silliest, nitpick is that it didn’t have a similar system for armor. Maybe it is something the author is planning down the line and just didn’t the time for it. Or maybe they don’t feel the need for it. Whatever the case it just felt like a big omission when other similar mods cover tools, weapons and armor.

Another mod that is gone is Astral Sorcery. This one is mostly because at the time of this writing it doesn’t have a version for 1.18. Although I admit I didn’t like how it didn’t work with shaders. To be fair, the problem with shaders though is optfine’s fault and not Astral Sorcery.

Speaking of which I also substituted Optfine for other mods that do a similar function and so far, feel like they do it better. More about that below.

Those are the big ones that I can remember that affected me more directly.

New mods I am testing

To replace Tetra I looked into two options. My first idea was to use Tinkers’ Constructs. I gave up on that idea very quickly as the whole process to upgrade tools, weapons and armors seems very involved. That is not something I wanted to deal with at this time.

Instead I opted for Silent Gear. Crafting and upgrading equipment is a lot simpler but also has some interesting upgrades. So far I have been enjoying it although there are still things I am trying to learn about it.

One big mod that I added was MineColonies. I am almost regretting it honestly because if you want to really get into this mod you will be spending a lot of time just gathering materials for your colonists and planning how to develop your colony.

Granted, the materials part does get better as you progress and build the places that can gather and process said materials. It does take a while to get to that point though.

The problem is that learning how MineColonies work mixed with the changes with Minecraft 1.18 has been a bit of daunting task. So much that I restarted about 3 times because in my first two attempts I kind of botched the location for my colony or did some other stupid newbie mistakes.

Even now I am not sure I am doing much better to be honest as the location I chose has a large chasm cutting across town and I have been placing my buildings almost willy-nilly.

So word of advice for anyone who decides to try MineColonies: Think twice about the location you are placing your town hall. Also try to plan as much as you can the placement of all your buildings.

I think there is a lot of options that are unlocked from the start. You can craft those, choose where to place them with a preview and then if you don’t like it you can pick it up and place somewhere else before committing to build it.

Which leads me to one nitpick about MineColonies: the preview system isn’t the best. The whole building is shown semi-transparent which can some times make it hard to see where the entrance to it is. For example, I had to order my builder to deconstruct my Town Hall and then rebuild it again because I didn’t realize the front door was facing the wrong side!

Other than that it has been an interesting experience.

I also added a new mod to change the Nether, called Incendium. It basically tries to do to the Nether what 1.18 did for the overworld: make the terrain generation bigger and more interesting. It also adds some new biomes, new structures, among other things.

I only took a peak at it in my Creative world and the Nether does look much bigger. Not sure if it will be a more hellish place to explore or not. I will have to test that out whenever I get to the Nether in my Survival world.

Another mod I am testing out right now is Water Strainer. This one I just installed today so haven’t really played with it much.

The reason for adding it is that upgrading some buildings in MineColonies require clay which can be a bit of a pain for me to get right now. This mod seems like a good way to build up a stock of clay while I do other things but we’ll see if it will pay off. Initial testing has been positive though.

There were also a few replacements. Instead of Optfine I am now using Rubidium, Oculus and Radium Reforged. The first two essentially do the same thing as Optfine but better. With the last one being a bunch of optimizations.

They are all ports of Fabric mods to Forge. The best part of it is that Build Guide which didn’t work with Optfine for me, actually works with shaders now!

The other substitution was Roughly Enough Items, a.k.a REI, to replace Just Enough Items, a.k.a JEI. It has some extra features compared to JEI but honestly I haven’t used them much. I installed it mostly out of curiosity to see how they compare and so far no complaints! XD

Thoughts about 1.18

I don’t have that many thoughts about it yet as I haven’t had the time to explore much of 1.18, what with me having to build a colony and what-not! So this will be mostly observations about obvious things that anybody who spends 5 minutes with this version can see by themselves.

Terrain generation is a lot more interesting right now. There aren’t those large, empty, flat plains anymore. Caves are also much more common and bigger than in previous versions.

The caves also make it easier to find ores now as well as being fun to explore. However we also need to go deeper to find the levels where certain ores are more common. Iron seems to be more plenty at Y 16 now, with gold being at Y -16 and diamonds at Y -58. I have no idea how deep we need to go to Bedrock now as I haven’t gotten that far yet. Did I mention I have been busy building a colony? No? Well, that is where my time has been mostly spent. :p

Anyway, the terrain generation still has some silliness. Like villagers housing floating over chasms or lone dirt blocks floating in the middle of air. But for the most part it is a huge improvement over previous versions.

There is much more I want to see that was added in 1.18 but until my colony is more self-sufficient I am afraid that is the most I will be able to explore for now. I am excited though as I have been looking forward to play with this version of Minecraft for a while! There is a lot of good stuff on it, so much that I just can’t imagine me going back to any previous version. 🙂