Biggest advancement in Minecraft, or fatal flaw?

Minecraft has survived for more than a year on the same terrain generator, and now the first of the 1.7 snapshots have arrived, bringing in almost 15,000 lines of changed code, but does it fix all of the game's issues with the terrain? Snapshot 13w36a brings in a total of 32 new biomes, including new variants of old biomes. These new variants include the cliff, stone beach, plateau, and many more. Before continuing on with the biomes, there have been several other changes outside the biomes.



One of these features includes a revamped fishing system. Fishing rods can be enchanted with two new enchantments, lure and luck of the sea. Another addition to fishing includes particles which shows when a fish is about to bite the lure. More fish have been added too including clownfish (which are ultimately useless), pufferfish (practically kills you upon eating, but it allows for the creation of a water breathing potion), and salmon (which is another variant of raw fish, which you can also cook). Another major change to the game includes a revamped achievements and statistics system, which can be tracked per world and can be counted through the scoreboard command system. There have been several other menu changes including an updated sound system, where you can change individual sounds.



The new biomes included in this snapshot come with the Redwood Forest (which contains the new podzol grass variant), the Clay Canyon (which contains several types of hardened clay), Roofed Forest (which is a dark and dangerous version of the regular forest), and the Savanna (a new variant of the plains). The terrain generation system has also been re-written to enforce certain biomes to spawn near each other, so you won't be seeing a snow type biome near a desert or a jungle. The forest and the plains biomes serves as the border between the cold and warm biomes. This change to the system, and the mass amount of new biomes, is surprisingly the biggest flaw in the snapshot. These changes might seem like a big upside, but it ultimately slows down the Minecraft experience, which enforces the player to endure a mass amount of forests, leaving out most of the other biomes including the desert and the ice plains, to hang out to dry. Upon doing a video review for the snapshot for my channel, it took me over an hour just to find a non-forest/plains biome. Not does it only make other biomes rarer to find, it makes generated structures harder to find including villages and temples (although the villages were added with the savanna).



The most important change to Minecraft in this snapshot turns out to become the fatal flaw of this generation of the game. All of the other changes in this snapshot only seem to lessen the blow of the terrain generator



SCORE: 5.8/10



+ Fishing changes!



+ Achievements finally work!



- Disappointing terrain generation



- Too many variants of biomes



- Lack of generated structures (+) = Pro (-) = Con

Review will be updated once another major snapshot has been released.

Check out my channel at:http://www.youtube.com/nman36productions

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