Mojang developers are back from vacation and have brought Minecraft 1.18 Experimental Snapshot 3 for players. As rumored, many developers have returned from their holidays and started working on Minecraft Caves and Cliffs Part 2.
Earlier in July, Mojang released a couple of experimental snapshots featuring new world gen with caves and mountain biomes. However, introducing such a massive change is not simple and easy. There were many bugs, broken world generation and performance issues in Minecraft experimental snapshots.
Minecraft 1.18 Experimental snapshot continues to receive tweaks and bug fixes related to the new world generation in its third release. The 1.18 experimental snapshot 3 brings changes to biome formation, mountains, aquifers and more.
Minecraft 1.18 Experimental Snapshot 3
Mojang developers have received tons of feedback from the Minecraft community from the last two releases. They seem to have taken almost all of them into consideration and introduced many changes to the entire world generation in Minecraft experimental snapshot 3.
Here are the official patch notes for Minecraft experimental snapshot 3:
Changes in Experimental Snapshot 3 compared to previous Snapshot
- Tweaked biome placement to reduce the risk of temperature clashes (such as a snowy biome in the middle of a desert). Temperature clashes still happen, but not as often.
- Tweaked biome placement to allow for more noisiness and diversity again, essentially dialing back some of the changes from last snapshot.
- Red sand is back! Tweaked badlands so they sometimes show up in flat areas next to plateaus, and made the red sand generate higher up (to account for the generally higher terrain).
- Made peak biomes and meadows less likely to generate in flat low elevation areas.
- Smoothed out the cliffs in shattered terrain a bit, so they don't look like chunk errors.
- Snowy slopes and snowcapped peaks no longer place dirt under the snow. Mountains look less dirty now :)
- Added a new mountain biome: Stony peaks. This is just a variant of lofty/snowcapped peaks that uses stone and gravel instead of snow and ice.
- Added structures to some of the new mountain biomes. Pillager outposts generate in all the new mountain biomes. Villages generate in meadows.
- Tweaked beaches a bit, to make them more inclined to show up on flat coastlines rather than hilly areas. Also reduced the amount of stone shores.
- Coastlines and river banks are less likely to get messed up by aquifers. Cave openings and ravines that intersect an ocean or river will mostly use sea level.
- Inland low-elevation areas are less likely to have flooded caves all over the place.
- Aquifers can go deeper and are more likely to connect with cave systems further down.
- Added more high-frequency variation to aquifers, to reduce the risk of massively huge areas with waterfilled caves everywhere. Underground lakes and flooded regions are more likely to be spread out instead of concentrated in one region.
- Fixed goat spawning
- Swamps are less likely to overlap cold or dry biomes, and they no longer place hanging water. Swamps are even happier now.
- Desert temples spawn on the surface rather than at a fixed y level.
- Eroded badlands no longer create floating pillars on top of the water surface.
- Grass no longer generates under water
- Reduced the risk of incorrect surface placement such as grass patches in deserts.
- Reduced the risk of river biome generating in dry mountain gorges.
- Mob spawning no longer speeds up in low terrain or slows down in high terrain. \
- Fixed an issue where players in multiplayer can face far more or far fewer enemies than intended, particularly when other players are flying.
Players can still face performance issues and lag spikes since developers focused on fixing the world generation first. Unlike regular snapshots, experimental snapshots cannot be downloaded from the Minecraft launcher. Players will have to download the third Minecraft experimental snapshot from here and then install it manually.
