Reto Häner

I suppose you'd have to have two options: Either the underground height system is absolute, or relative to chunk height. If it's absolute, that would mean that at high altitudes you wouldn't have access to the full "spectrum" of ores and monsters: For example if you'd dig down from a high chunk, you'd just reach the mantle (or some other barrier at the world floor) before encountering deep ores or dangerous monsters. The big problem here is that it would disincentivise players from settling at higher altitudes. If it's relative to chunk height, then you could encounter "deeper" content by digging further into a mountain horizontally, and digging down 100 blocks from a high place would give you similar results as digging down 100 blocks at sea level. That honestly doesn't sound all too bad: It makes sense to me that digging far into a mountain should give you similar dangers and rewards. It wouldn't be too janky if the changes in chunk height are kept gradual: You'd need some crazy height changes for there to be chromite at a cave entrance, for example. The downside here would mainly be in terms of predictability and complexity, since the altitude at which you find certain ores and monsters would be variable. You'd not only have to know your absolute Y position, but your Y position relative to the chunk you're standing in. I should stress that the changes in chunk height should be very gradual, even when the terrain is steep. While that would put a limit on the height of features like cliffs, it would prevent a lot of potential jank. Excessively tall cliffs are annoying in gameplay terms anyway.

Just a thought I had once, which might be relevant with the whole river thing coming up: Currently terrain generation is limited by the world height, which obviously is necessary for performance. It does however cause major limitations for the world topography. Terrain features need to be abrupt and janky in order to make them have any sort of significance. A mountain has to be comically steep, otherwise it won't feel tall because it can't be tall. It's definitely a major reason why the terrain gen often feels bizzarre and the world can be very annoying to traverse. My idea would be to "cheat" this by giving every chunk its own height stat assigned to it during world gen. So if the world height is say, 256, then every chunk still has a height range of 256 blocks (or whatever it is). However, every individual chunk's world floor and ceiling could be shifted around. So let's say a chunk has a height stat of +50, that would place its floor at 50 (or 51?) and its ceiling at 306. The actual volume of the chunk would stay the same, the difference would be in its location in the world. The most obvious benefit would be that you could have much higher mountains without really changing the world height, so hopefully you'd get nicer terrain at little to no performance cost. The really valuable thing however would be in the smaller gradual changes, since it would let rivers flow smoothly from a high source down to the sea, for example. It could also just generally allow the worldgen to be a bit more coherent and "continental" in feeling. The obvious downside (aside from the mammoth task of redoing a bunch of things to accomodate it) is that it could result in some weirdness, especially if you set the world height to be really low. The shifting world floor means that it would be possible to reach the mantle in some places by digging horizontally into a mountain until you reach a chunk where the world floor is as high as your starting point. This would require some pretty extreme changes from chunk-to-chunk to realistically be an issue IMO. When kept within reason, the changes would always be fairly subtle. After all, even if you could in theory have realistically scaled terrain, you wouldn't actually want that for gameplay and view distance reasons.

One way to achieve much more realistic terrain could be to give every chunk its own 0 point for the Y axis. So let's say you've got a 512 block world height, but where those 512 blocks are depends on the chunk, they can be shifted up and down to create a world that is much more than 512 blocks high. There'd be an obvious downside, which is that you could reach the bottom of the world by digging horizontally through a tall mountain, but IMO it would still be worth it. You could have much more interestingly scaled landmasses and allow rivers to flow in a far more reasonable way than with the current limitations. Combined with having something like Farseer by default, you could allow for some pretty spectacular worldgen that would also probably be far less annoying to navigate than what we have right now. 1000m+ high mountains, very gradual shifts in terrain height alllowing for things like proper highlands, rivers that flow realistically, etc. Stuff that simply isn't possible with the default 256.

People here are acting like even the most basic sailing mechanics require a rocket science degree or something. In JoS you adjust the sail with just two keys, it's as simple as looking at the wind angle and pressing W or S until your sail is at a good angle. Sailing mechanics can get a lot more complex and engaging than that of course, but at their most basic they're less work than conventional WASD controls, except if you have to go straight upwind. Mobile bases are the logical end-point of multi-block vehicles, but not something that should be in the vanilla game IMO. As a mod though? Absolutely.

Based on the video posted a while back, the sailboat in 1.20 will function basically like a motorboat: W to go forward, S to go backwards, etc. I think the Joy of Sailing mod has shown that simple sailing mechanics would be a much better option, giving the player at least something to do while sailing, such as trimming the sails to get as much speed as possible, and tacking if you're going against the wind. If we assume that there'll still be no autorun without mods, then they're less annoying too, because you wouldn't have to hold W the whole time. When we compare sailing to riding from a mechanical perspective, I think sailing needs to function a fair bit differently in order to keep it fun and interesting. When riding a mount, you still have additional things going on like terrain to navigate, enemies to avoid/fight, etc. If you're in the open ocean, you need something more to do than just hold forward, otherwise there's practically no gameplay. I don't know how far it would be sensible to go in terms of adding depth to the sailing mechanics, both in terms of gameplay and the engine side. For example, should it be possible to capsize in strong winds if you don't manage the sails right, or would that be too punishing? What about waves, is there a feasible way to add large waves in a game like this? Would that even be fun for most players? I'd enjoy such things, but I'm not sure if I represent the average player. I think simple sailing mechanics would be a good place to start, and a good compromise for the base game.