What will happen to old worlds in Minecraft 1.18 update?

Minecraft 1.18 update will change the Overworld beyond anybody's imagination. Players have wanted a cave update for a long time. Mojang is finally ready to bring not only the much-awaited cave revamp, but an entire Overworld makeover.

Minecraft 1.18 update features massive mountains and deep caves, which Mojang couldn't add in Caves and Cliffs Part 1. Players will discover astoundingly tall mountains reaching heights of 260 and abyssal caves generating down to Y -59.

Many players are worried about how they will find these new world generation features in their old worlds. In the recent video on the official Minecraft channel, developers answered various questions about moving old worlds to version 1.18.

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Moving old worlds to Minecraft 1.18 update

Ever since Minecraft's launch, developers have made sure players can upgrade their old worlds to the next update without any issues. Old worlds are filled with memories, hard work, and hours' worth of gameplay. Players will be able to move their worlds safely to Minecraft 1.18.

Henrik Kniberg, Minecraft Game Developer, speaks about what players will see after upgrading old worlds to version 1.18:

When you open your existing world in Minecraft 1.18, at first, you won't see anything different. You'll see your existing world. But when you start traveling and exploring, you'll start seeing dramatic new terrain in the unexplored areas, mainly mountains and caves and the new terrain generation.

But if you go down below your existing areas, then you'll find that the bedrock has been replaced by deepslate, and if you dig down below that, you'll find new amazing caves – hopefully!

The old bedrock layer was one of the many tough challenges developers faced while creating the Minecraft 1.18 update. In Caves and Cliffs Part 2, the Overworld bedrock layer is set at Y -64, while the older versions had the bedrock layer at Y 0.

Check out the Minecraft Skindex here.

Old bedrock is replaced by deepslate (Image via Mojang)

To fix this issue, developers decided to replace the old bedrock blocks in the Overworld with deepslate. Below the deepslate layer, players will discover new caves made of deepslate and tuff blocks.

Whenever an update with new world generation features was released, old world players had to travel to new chunks to have a chance at finding them. But with Minecraft 1.18 update, players can discover new caves right underneath the existing Overworld chunks.

The detailed Minecraft Beginners Guide is available here.

Sadly, players will still have to travel new chunks to find sub-mountain biomes. Developers also worked on making the biome blend between old chunks and new chunks as smoothly as possible. Players won't see abrupt increases in terrain height or glitched chunks in old worlds.

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