Trending December 2023 # Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Interview, Part Two # Suggested January 2024 # Top 17 Popular

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Uncharted 2’s out on October 13th and the multiplayer demo launches this week, so we caught up with Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells and creative director Amy Hennig for an over-the-shoulder peek at the design process.

This is Part Two. (Part One, Part Three, Part Four)

Game On: Talk about the game as interactive cinema, the sort of thing gamers and non-gamers alike can engage simultaneously.

Evan Wells: I think this is what makes it such a great spectator game. We hear time and again people saying that they really enjoy playing it with their partner or spouse or girlfriend or boyfriend because the person sitting on the couch next to them, even if they’re not playing, they’re still completely engaged because the characters and the story draw them in. Also, the way the story continues even while you’re playing through the action sequences. It doesn’t stop when the cut scenes stop. Even though we have an hour and a half of cinematics, as you’re playing through the game, you’re still getting the constant updates and in-game dialogue between the characters, the banter and such, which continue not only the story, but the character development as well.

GO: My wife was watching me play Uncharted 2 last night, and she kept interrupting to ask questions, slowly tuning in the game. Is gaming becoming collaborative performance art? The game’s the stage, we’re piloting the actors within certain design parameters, and a third entity–not necessarily a gamer–watching what we’re doing like a movie, maybe even interacting by saying “go over there” or “see what that does” or asking “why is that person doing that?”

Our genre almost requires that we rely on traditional cinematics and storytelling methods, so the challenge for us is, how do we make that not too passive an experience? It’s an interactive medium, and you want people to feel like they own the experience. Sometimes with the exposition in games you have to lay things out because you don’t want people to miss the detail.

I can’t wait to start reading the message boards and see that people are playing the game in earnest, because there’s so much I’m curious to see how people react to. They may be expecting in some cases more heavy-handed exposition. “Tell me what happened between these two characters,” that sort of thing. But you know what, I’d rather just have the characters say a couple of lines and let you imagine what might have happened between them in the past. Then it’s your game too.

GO: It’s what I find most attractive about David Lynch, which I realize is getting a little outré for gaming. But then again, we had The Dark Eye, the William S. Burroughs narrated game with Brian Froud-ian puppets sort of “through a glass darkly,” reenacting Edgar Allen Poe stories with pretty surreal backdrops. It came out of nowhere, though we haven’t really seen anything like it since.

AH: Absolutely.

GO: There’s been some debate over whether games should or shouldn’t be narrative beholden. I say they should be, or rather that they are, but more importantly, that they were never anything but. Instead of this adolescent “rebel yell” about how games need to carve out their own space, don’t gamers need to be mindful they’re not asking for the baby out with the bath water?

What I hate is when people say “we must,” as in “we must break away from any forms of traditional narrative,” and that if you’re drawing at all from that established tradition of narrative, you’re somehow this philistine that isn’t challenging yourself enough. I find that offensive.

The fact is, you can look at any form of storytelling, whether you go back to people repeating stories around the fire to early theater to radio to books to films. Every medium is built upon the previous one. So if you say somehow games are completely separate from that, that they should be breaking away from forms of traditional narrative, you’re almost saying that so should have theater, and so should have film. There’s certain commonalities and patterns to human nature and storytelling that transcend medium. You’re just being silly if you think our minds don’t work a certain way in terms of receiving narrative. Yes, it’s a different medium in the sense it’s interactive and these other mediums are more passive, but within a spectrum right? Reading a book is not a passive experience. Listening to a radio play and having to imagine the visuals is not a passive experience. I don’t see how we’re so separate from that tradition. The challenge is to say how do you take that interactivity and build on those traditions and not throw out the baby with the bath water.

This is what we’re trying to do with Uncharted. Every game that we make is an experiment, and then we see the results of the experiment and we adjust. It’s all an iterative process.

Follow me on Twitter @game_on

You're reading Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Interview, Part Two

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Interview, Part Four

This is Part Four. (Part One, Part Two, Part Three)

Game On: You’ve developed Nathan Drake’s acrobatic repertoire in Uncharted 2 substantially. He’s much more procedural now, much less robotic or spasmodic when you maneuver him. You look at EA’s Madden series, and they’ve grappled with this issue for years and years…that juncture where your ability to control the character leaves off and motion capture for the sake of realism or visual ballet takes over. Having the visual satisfaction of seeing a tackle or lunge or spin execute realistically often comes at the expense of perfect control of the character. You seem to have the balance just about right here. How’d you pull it off?

Amy Hennig: It’s a constant challenge, and I think you expressed it beautifully in that you have to be constantly aware that there’s this line between the sort of non-interactive parts of the animation, which are there for beauty and responsiveness, and there’s a lot of games that fail at either one aspect or the other. Part of it is they may not have the complex procedural blended animation system that we developed, which is really our saving grace in this case. There are games where the animation is beautiful but you don’t actually feel like you’re controlling them because you can’t tell that your inputs are being respected. Or there’s such a delay that it doesn’t feel like you’re really playing the game.

For us, gameplay always has to come first. If there was something we really wanted to see Nate do, but it was going to feel sluggish or unresponsive, we killed it and came up with a different way to do it. So there are certain cases where we’d love his animation to be even smoother, but it would have sacrificed responsiveness, and that’s got to be number one. That’s why coming up with this blended animation system was such a priority, and actually an absolute necessity. We couldn’t have done the game without it. It’s the basis of everything, to be able to say I can be running along and still be loading my gun and still be reacting to the gunfire around me and still sort of launching into my next move. Because some of Nate’s moves…you’re not aware of it playing the game, but there may be literally 30 animations blended up on top of the one motion he’s going through right then and there.

One of our imperatives in Uncharted 2 was to create these big over-the-top set piece moments, these action sequences pulled out of a summer blockbuster, like Drake being caught in a building as it’s being bombarded by helicopter missiles, and it starts to collapse and fall. We wanted that not to be a cut scene. We wanted you to be in control and playing that moment, and so that required Drake be able to, as he’s running, be stumbling, because the building’s been rocked by a missile, and yet while you’re doing that, you might be diving into cover and reloading your gun and flinching from a gunshot all at once. Our programmers are just out of this world. We’re really spoiled by having the best in the industry. Ordinarily a game designer’s coming to them asking for a feature or a request to do something crazy in the game, and the programmers cringe and say “No, that’s technically impossible.” Our programmers love the challenge. They’ll dive in and say “Okay, let’s do it–it’s crazy, but let’s do it.”

AH: Not only that, it’s trying to find the sweet spot that your own particular look. I think you could probably flip through a magazine and spot an Uncharted screenshot, even if it was unmarked. I think there’s a look to our games, without being overly stylized, that’s distinctively its own. And I think it’s because we’re starting from a realistic base, then giving the game a slight stylized approach, and I mean the characters as well as the environments.

Some of that’s in the way we use color, something that’s recently seemed unusual in games, because everybody’s been de-saturating for some reason. It’s just like a little bit of exaggeration in our game, and I think that in the case of our characters, that’s part of what helps us avoid the uncanny valley everybody likes to talk about. If you try to make something too much a simulation of reality, whether it’s your characters or the environment itself, there’s something about it that’s dead. Something that sort of falls flat. You just have to pump it up a bit.

So for instance, I don’t know if everybody realizes this, but if you look at our cinematics, yes, everything’s performance-capture or motion-capture. But we don’t capture face. We have four cameras on the stage when we do our cinematics, one master shot and then a close-up on each of the actors so that we have it for reference, and then the animators do all of that facial animation by hand. The reason is, not only is it letting them use some of their traditional skills, as opposed to just processing motion-capture data, but the effect is better than facial capture. I think you have a lot of people in this industry that are so seduced by the idea that they could literally simulate reality by either a facial capture or scan or something, that they don’t realize they’re not actually getting an attractive result.

GO: You know Introversion? The guys that made Darwinia? They did this Wargames movie homage called DEFCON that used stylized vector graphics and that looked a bit like the sequence in the movie where the computer’s simulating global thermonuclear war on these huge screens. The game was stunning beautiful, and without using a single texture or shader. I raise the point to suggest we’ve got visual appreciation in gaming largely backwards.

I mean this has been going on for a while now, right? We’ve had the last couple hardware generations with people saying “Well look at this water,” or “No, look at this grass,” and yeah, there’s a certain amount of excitement to saying “Wow, look how we pulled that off,” and “Did you see how we did the specularity and subsurface?” That’s great, but not if it doesn’t contribute to some overall goal. I think the challenge is to say, “Why are you doing those things?” You know, why are you having your programmers working for months on something? What’s the end goal? For us, with the blended animation system, the goal wasn’t to say look how clever we are, it was to say this is why Nate’s going to be a relatable character. This is why you’re going to feel for him. It’s because he’s more human and flawed and vulnerable than most video game characters.

GO: Since you mention the snow, I have to backstep slightly on everything I just said about indifference to graphics, because when I walked through the snow at the beginning of Uncharted 2 and saw it was actually piling up around Nate’s legs and leaving a trail, I had my little geek moment. Everyone else does snow like it’s just shiny hard-pack.

AH: Yeah, and we do spend a bunch of time on that stuff, like worrying in the first game about how wet Nate could get, and would the water only go up to his knees, and how would we do that. Or in Uncharted 2, he’s marching through the snow, so it should gather more around his ankles, and if he rolls through it, you want to see the accretion of the frost on his clothing. I mean yeah, we geek out on that stuff too because it’s fun, but the whole point is to say how authentic does this feel? Emotionally authentic, rather than just visually authentic so you’re not drawn out of the experience. We always say we’ve done our job right if you’re not aware how hard it was and how many months we spent on a certain thing. If we’ve done it right, it’s invisible, and you’re not pulled out of the experience even subliminally.

AH: Yeah, it’s just one big pipe with everybody’s stuff coming through.

EW: I do think it was an oversight on our part though. We have several events that we allow people to mark for Twitter updates, and on all except the chapter updates, we have frequency limiters so that we wouldn’t end up spamming people’s feeds. So yeah, it was an oversight on our part, so we took it down and now we’re working on a patch to put a frequency limiter on the chapter updates just like the others. An update or two a day is bearable, as opposed to a chapter every hour or two.

AH: Especially when you’ve got a game that we keep hearing people just want to sit down and play through in one long stretch. That could get ridiculous when the game comes out. Imagine Facebook becoming “So and so just finished chapter one.”

AH: I think the other thing is, it could give people the impression that the game is short, when it’s not at all. I don’t know whether it’s a fluke of the way the game sends reports, but even I was looking at some of the gamer reviewers’ Twitter feeds and thinking “There’s no way this person just finished that.” We have to get it fixed, so we don’t give people the wrong impression.

EW: That player could’ve been playing on easy. You never know. [Laughs]

AH: [Laughs] Very easy.

EW: It’s certainly something I’d like to see, given the fact that we’re encouraging the franchise to grow beyond the PS3. We’ve already got the movie deal in production, so yeah, it’d be nice to see someone do a PSP version. I can say straight up that we aren’t developing for the PSP, we’re focusing entirely on the PS3 right now, but that’s not to exclude the possibility of finding a partner to work with somewhere in the future.

GO: Really-actually last question. Without giving anything away, Uncharted 2 leaves the door open, right? It’s not the end of the franchise?

GO: Thanks Evan and Amy.

Follow me on Twitter @game_on

How To Integrate Google Services Into Your Linux Desktop (Part 2)

This is the continuation of the “Integrate Google Services into Your Linux Desktop” series.

While Google’s online storage was previously just the folders you kept your Google Docs in, now the company wants to position it as an alternative to services like Dropbox and chúng tôi (i.e. as a generic online storage medium). In addition, the expansion of the Android Market to “Google Play” brings with it movies, TV shows, music, books, and magazines. The community, including Google itself, has had its work cut out for it keeping up with all these developments. But fortunately, solutions exist for Linux users to enjoy these services as well.

Documents

Google Drive isn’t as transparent of an online file store as, say, chúng tôi (which is accessible via WebDAVS). But in addition to the InSync application recently highlighted here there are two other solutions that will allow Linux users to easily access these files:

Grive: Grive is a command-line client that will synchronize a local directory with your GDrive. Currently an in-development project, it’s installable via the excellent Web Upd8 PPA in Ubuntu, which as of this writing is up to date with the latest version. Once installed, the simple command “grive” will synchronize your current directory with Google Drive.

The figures above show this authentication process, where the command line program asks you to open a URL. Once you open this, Google will confirm that you want to give grive access to your account.

Once you confirm, you’ll be given a code to paste back into the terminal where you ran the grive command.

GWOffice is also available in Ubuntu by adding this PPA to your software sources.

Pictures

Google’s Picasa is steadily losing mindshare to photo-only services such as chúng tôi but the availability of an API means the free software community can support it with Linux applications. The F-Spot and Eye of Gnome (both installable from the universe and main repositories in Ubuntu, respectively) both include functions to upload pictures to Picasa, as does Shotwell, the default picture manager. The figure below illustrates activating the Picasa plug-in in Eye of GNOME (this requires installing the eog-plugins package), and the resulting menu item that will upload the currently-viewed picture to Picasa.

While a Linux version of the Picasa application was available at one time, it’s also possible to install the Windows version using WINE by following these instructions.

Music

This concludes our Google services on Linux Desktop series. What other ways do you use to access Google services on your Linux desktop?

Aaron Peters

Aaron is an interactive business analyst, information architect, and project manager who has been using Linux since the days of Caldera. A KDE and Android fanboy, he’ll sit down and install anything at any time, just to see if he can make it work. He has a special interest in integration of Linux desktops with other systems, such as Android, small business applications and webapps, and even paper.

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Icons Among Us: Room 222

I met Robert Pinsky, a CAS professor of English and three-time U.S. poet laureate, in Room 222 to ask what the space “with a little glimpse of the Charles” means to him. Through the window, ivy thickens the walls of Hillel House across the road. Wooden desks creaked beneath us as if the doors of time were opening. I ran my hand over the worn surface and wondered if Sexton ever sat at this desk, scribbled nascent lines, cigarette in the other hand.

“Of all of the classrooms I’ve taught in — Harvard, Berkeley, University of Chicago, Stanford — this is my favorite,” Pinsky says. “The legend of Lowell teaching Plath, Sexton, and Starbuck is only part of it. I like the echoes. But I now have my own memories of all the students I’ve taught in this room over 16 years. And I like knowing that my colleagues Louise Glück, Leslie Epstein, Ha Jin, Rosanna Warren are using this room, too. I like knowing it’s ours.”

A few years ago, thanks to a generous graduate, Room 222 got a makeover: new windows, ceiling, recessed lighting, refinished floors, a blackboard (or greenboard). Another alum donated a Persian rug.

One of Pinsky’s former students, Maggie Dietz (GRS’97), now a CAS lecturer, head of the Robert Lowell Memorial Lecture Series, and herself a fine poet, remembers dull brown carpeting, a dropped ceiling, harsh lighting, and drafty windows. But it was the room’s feeling that was significant, she says.

“It felt intimate, and also serious, in part because I had the sense that it was historically charged,” Dietz says. “When you sit in a place where you think Plath and Lowell might have been, you just hope that through some kind of osmosis you might grow a little bit as a poet and become worthy of having sat in the room.”

Today, Dietz sees her own students starry-eyed and open to possibility. She points out that Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, and Plath (above), author of The Bell Jar and posthumous recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer for poetry, were unknown students writers at the time, just like they are, just like she was. Sexton was a troubled stay-at-home mom dabbling in poetry at her therapist’s suggestion, while Plath was just auditing.

In the early ’90s, the room’s legend was further juiced, this time on the fiction side. The program produced future Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri (GRS’93, UNI’95,’97), National Book Award winner Ha Jin (GRS’94), and acclaimed writers Peter Ho Davies (GRS’92) and Daphne Kalotay (GRS’94, UNI’98). Sue Miller (GRS’80) and Arthur Golden (GRS’88) helped pave the way in the previous decade. Poetry wasn’t slouching, either, churning out Carl Phillips (GRS’93) and Erin Belieu (GRS’95), among others. Heavyweight guest lecturers have held forth over the years, too: John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Norman Mailer, Amos Oz. Room 222 has taken on the quality of an organic museum, a vessel for the collective literary imagination.

But doubt has been cast on the facts of the creation myth. So I phoned longtime department administrator Harriet Lane (DGE’55, CAS’57, GRS’61), who retired last year after a 50-year tenure and had been enrolled in the program in the 1950s. Her late husband took classes with Lowell. Lane says other departments occupied the second floor when Lowell taught at BU, and that like other English professors, he was assigned random, generic classrooms in the CAS building.

“At that time, the English department was only on the fourth floor of the brownstone on Bay State Road,” Lane says. “In fact, in one of his poems, Lowell refers to a room in which he taught as a ‘shoebox.’”

Lane says she later found and installed the 15 desks still in Room 222 when the Creative Writing Program moved to the second floor, some time after the mythical heyday.

I felt deflated, but as Dietz says, what matters is that these future titans of poetry met together on campus, not where they sat. I perked up when Lane described Sexton, who later taught at BU, as “charming and articulate” and said that “her students thought very highly of her.”

Pinsky and Dietz think it’s possible the room was informally commandeered. “I’d bet Lowell did teach a class here,” Pinsky says. “It might have been some weird outrider that this was consigned as a space.”

Starbuck went onto to become director of the program, and his one-time colleague and successor Leslie Epstein supports 222’s pedigree. “This was the room,” he says. “That’s what George told me, and as far I know, it’s the truth.” Then again, Epstein points out, more often than not the class met at the Ritz Lounge over drinks, parking their cars in the “loading zone,” as Starbuck, who died in 1996, used to joke.

Regardless, the whiff of mystery feels appropriate. Art is about reconciling perception and reality, illuminating the truth rather than defining it. The lessons taught in 222 apply to itself.

While Epstein appreciates the room’s persona, students are here for the business of writing, so he strives to put their awe on the shelves along with the literary journals.

“It’s impossible to teach with a sense of awe,” he says. “I expose my prejudices, my likes and dislikes, my flaws, because the whole year is dedicated to noticing flaws. I don’t want to build up a sense of awe about the room. You’re not supposed to eat in there — we eat in there. Not supposed to drink in there — we drink in there. I used to make my students do push-ups. It’s a place where we violate rules. You can’t be a writer if you don’t violate rules, be a little subversive.”

In that spirit, I tattoo in my mind the image of a bright-eyed Sexton in Room 222, back-and-forthing with a disheveled Lowell, a cloud of smoke in the air, Plath jealously looking on.

I choose to believe.

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Caleb Daniloff can be reached at [email protected].

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Minecraft 1.18 Caves And Cliffs Part 2 Update: Features, Release Date, Downloads, & More

With the new version 1.18 update, Minecraft is going all out with a ton of new features for its community. We have new biomes, mobs, and a whole new terrain generation lined up. This update is also going to be the one that brings Minecraft Java and Bedrock Edition closer with identical world generation with the same seeds. There’s a lot to unpack here, and the excitement keeps rising as the 1.18’s release date gets closer. But worry not, our team is ready to cover every important detail you might want to know about the new Minecraft 1.18 Caves and Cliffs part 2 update. We have already covered the best Minecraft 1.18 seeds for you to get ready for the new world generation. Though, that’s not all. With the update just around the corner, let’s take a look at everything you can expect from the new Minecraft 1.18 Caves and Cliffs part 2 update. That includes the release date, new biomes, supported platforms, download links, and much more.

The new Minecraft 1.18 update brings 8 new biomes, a new ore generation system, and realistic caves and cliffs, as the name suggests. And these are just the major features that we learned about from Minecraft version 1.17. There are several things to talk about in this article, so let’s first understand the specifics of the update itself before we jump into the new features.

In June 2023, Minecraft released the version 1.17 update called Caves and Cliffs Part 1. It added minor but significant changes in the game, including new blocks, items, mobs, and plants. Expanding on that, the Minecraft 1.18 update majorly focuses on the new overworld and underground terrain generation in the game.

Minecraft is using both of these updates to address complaints about the boring underground exploration and the repetitive stagnant world generation of the overworld. Before the Caves & Cliffs update, Minecraft offered caves that didn’t look any better than random holes in the ground. Similarly, even the cliffs in-game were more or less non-existent.

As per the latest official announcement, Minecraft 1.18 is going to be released on November 30, 2023. Consulting the release time of the previous edition, you can expect the update to go live between 10:00 am EST (7:00 am PST/ 8:30 pm IST) to 1:00 pm EST (10:00 am PST/ 11:30 pm IST).

Do keep in mind that the release time is the same for all editions of the game, but there can be delays depending upon the traffic on each platform’s server.

Minecraft 1.18: Supported Platforms

With the new 1.18 update, Minecraft is leaving behind a majority of older generations of the consoles, including Xbox 360, PS3, and others. As for PC users, you can expect the Java edition to work on macOS High Sierra or Windows 8 and previous versions too, but not at its peak quality. The platforms that are fully compatible with the Minecraft 1.18 update are:

Xbox Series X

Xbox Series S

Playstation 5

Playstation 4

Xbox One

Nintendo Switch 

iOS

iPadOS

Android

Windows 10 & 11.

For Minecraft Java Edition:

Windows

macOS

Linux

Depending upon your platform, you can get Minecraft 1.18 update from the respective store on each platform. For the PC version, based on the experimental snapshots, we estimate the Minecraft 1.18 update size to be around 800 MBs or higher if you are updating from the 1.17 version. It might be smaller for the mobile version of the game due to the limited space of those devices.

If you are on one of the supported platforms, you can buy and download the game before the update releases next week:

Now comes the part you have been waiting for. Minecraft 1.18 has tons of exciting new features for you to try. However, a majority of them revolve around the new Minecraft biomes that are getting added to the game. Fortunately, the snapshots allowed us to test them all for you. Let’s see what each of these biomes has to offer.

Lush Caves

Home to glow berries and spore blossom, this is probably the most beautiful biome of the Minecraft 1.18 update. These caves generate in different sizes but can be easily identified with the greenery in them. The ceilings are covered with spore blossoms, glow berries, and moss blocks. Meanwhile, the floor is made up of moss blocks, flowering azalea, and a lot of grass. You can also find ores like coal and copper in this biome. Other than moss blocks, you can also find stone blocks taking up a lot of space in this biome.

Dripstone Caves

In contrast to the lush caves, the Dripstone caves are the less colorful cave biome in this update. These caves are made up of stone, granite, and dripstone blocks. There are no plants in this biome, but you can find pointed dripstones (which replicate stalactites from real-world caves) in different sizes. Also, there are several underwater dripstone caves that you can stumble upon in the 1.18 update. In terms of ores, copper is most abundant in this biome.

Meadow

Meadow is a mountain-based biome that spawns between mountains and hills. At first glance, it looks like a combination of plains and flower forest biomes. You can also find flowers, grass, rabbits, and sheep in this biome. If there are any trees in here, they usually spawn with beehives on them.

Grove Frozen Peaks

This biome gives us snowy mountains but with leveled smoother slopes. You can find snow and packed ice covering stone blocks in this biome. This biome focuses more on packed ice than snow. There are often goats wandering in the area, so you can choose to tame them or gather food and resources from them. Moreover, you can even find Pillager outposts in this new Minecraft 1.18 biome.

Jagged Peaks

Jagged Peak is a biome that truly defines the cliffs part of this 1.18 update. It provides us with realistic-looking mountains that are made out of stone and covered in the snow when you reach the peak. Unlike snowcapped mountains, the world generation of this biome isn’t smooth but rather irregular. Usually, powdered snow doesn’t spawn in this biome.

Stony Peaks

Similar to snowy peaks, this biome features stone at top of the mountain instead of snow. The mountains in this biome can be either flat and smooth or can have irregular ups and downs. Even though there is no snow here, you can still find goats in this biome. You can even find ores like coal on the surface level (see screenshot) of this biome.

Snowy Slopes

The last new biome in Minecraft 1.18 is also the most popular cliff biome. It gives us beautiful but steep mountain peaks with a lot of snow. There is even some powered snow layered on top of each other that can trap you within it. As for the mobs, you can easily find goats and rabbits in this biome.

Unused Biomes

Badlands Plateau

Bamboo Jungle Hills, Birch Hills, and Dark Forest Hills

Desert Hills and Lakes

Giant Spruce and Giant Tree Taiga Hills

Gravelly Mountains

Modified Jungle Edge and Modified Jungle

Modified Badlands Plateau and Wooded Badlands Plateau

Mountain Edge

Mushroom Field Shore

Shattered Savanna Plateau

Snowy Mountains and Snowy Taiga Mountains

Taiga Hills and Mountains

Various Hill variants, including Jungle, Snowy Taiga, Tall Birch, Swamp, and Wooded Hills

To implement tall peeks and a new underground system, Minecraft developers decided to change the world generation completely. Even though all these changes are for the best, some of them can be a little heavy for your system. Fortunately, installing Optifine in Minecraft can help you increase your FPS and improve performance. With that out of the way, let’s understand the new world generation changes in the Minecraft 1.18 update.

Terrain and Biomes

The first major change is how terrains generate in Minecraft 1.18. Terrains are the physical features or how a landmass is generated in the game. It involves mountains, hills, and plateaus generated in the area. In the earlier versions, the game focused more on the biomes, and each biome had its limited variety of terrain. That’s no longer the case.

Plains biome generated on mountainous terrain

Now, the terrain generation is given a priority. So, instead of having separate terrains, each Minecraft biome will automatically adjust itself to whatever terrain it is on. It’s the reason why you can now see plains and forest biomes spawning as mountains throughout your overworld in Minecraft. The screenshot above is a prime example of the new terrain-based world generation.

World Limit Increased

For both Minecraft Java and Bedrock editions, the total built height has been expanded to 384 blocks. It means the lowest point and the highest point in a Minecraft world can now have 384 blocks between them. This extension allows deeper caves and higher mountains to easily form in the game.

Seed Generation

The seeds in Minecraft 1.18 use a new random world number generator. It means that the worlds you get each time will be more random than earlier. It also means that none of the best Minecraft seeds from earlier versions will look the same on this version. Thankfully, you also won’t have to look for Java and Bedrock Edition seeds separately after this update.

The biomes are the biggest feature that most players are excited about in the new update. But that’s not all. Let’s go over each of the major new features that Minecraft 1.18 has to offer.

Java and Bedrock Compatibility

If you are someone like me who isn’t a fan of having two separate Minecraft editions, this update is perfect for you. One major way the 1.18 update brings Java and Bedrock Minecraft closer is with world generation. Most Minecraft 1.18 seeds generate worlds that look very similar in both editions of the game. The worlds still won’t be exactly the same, but they wouldn’t feel like two separate seeds either. An example of this improved compatibility between the Java and Bedrock editions can be seen below:

Expanded Ore Distribution

Due to changes in world limits and the introduction of the new cave biomes, the ore distribution of Minecraft has changed a lot. The most significant change is that the ore veins or the groups of several ore blocks now generate longer chains.

Each ore has undergone unique individual changes as well. Let’s go over each of them to understand the new ora system better:

Diamond ores now only generate below Y=16. They generate more as groups and in higher quantity near the bedrock layer at Y=-64.

Coal ores generate underground on top of mountains too. You can find them at heights as high as Y=256 and as low as Y=0.

Copper ores also have a diverse range of generation, going from Y=-16 to Y=112. You can find them in dripstone and lush caves too.

The popular iron ores generate at various places in Minecraft 1.18, starting from as low as Y=-32 and going as high as Y=256. Its quantity and chances of spawning vary a lot at different heights. You can find most iron at Y=56.

Gold ores usually generate between levels Y=-64 and Y=32. Not to forget, you can find more gold in the badlands biome. There, it spawns between Y=79 and Y=256.

Restone ores generate between Y=-32 and Y=-64. You can find it generating most closer to the bedrock level, often next to diamond ores.

The least popular but equally important emerald ore has an inverse relation with height. Its generation decreases as you go deeper. It usually generates between Y=-16 and Y=256.

Finally, the lapis lazuli ores generate between Y= -64 and 32. Unlike earlier versions of the game, it’s no longer rare in world generation.

New Music in Minecraft 1.18

As for the music we can manually use in the game, there’s only one new addition. The update adds a new music disc that has blue and green colors in its rings and is called “Otherside”. But fortunately, that’s not all. Minecraft is offering us plenty of new in-game music that you will notice right from the home menu. And as the case is with each new biome, Minecraft is giving us new music for each of the new in-game biomes.

The tracks are titled “Comforting Memories”, “One More Day”, “Wending”, “Stand Tall”, “Left to Bloom”, “Infinite Amethyst”, “One More Day”, “Floating Dream”, and “An Ordinary Day”. These 8 new music tracks will also randomly play on the main menu. Meanwhile, you can listen to each of them in different new biomes. Some even have overlapping biomes, so you will hear the music that the game randomly selects.

Other Minor But Important Changes & Additions

The new spawn algorithm ensures that the player doesn’t spawn in the ocean, lava, or similar awkward locations.

The Java version has a new “/jfr” command that records in-game events like chunk generation, server traffic, and load time among others.

There are new in-game achievements too, including “caves & cliffs”, “feels like home”, “star trader”, and “sound of music”.

You can find Pillager outposts in almost any of the mountain biomes. Most that we noticed were in Frozen Peaks.

The Java edition’s debug screen (“F3 key”) now also shows terrain, biome builder, and multinoise information that includes features about the biome placement.

The settings also received a few new options like chunk builder, lightening toggle, audio outpost, and simulation distance.

The video settings received an option to turn on/ off the autosave indicator for single-player mode.

Like every other update, there are dozens of minor texture and spawn changes for a few blocks, mobs, and structures. You can even find hundreds of bug fixes in the logs of this update.

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