The router's noise caves are one kind of cave. The other kind -- the long
winding tunnels with rooms and side branches, and the ravines that cut down
through the terrain -- is walked, step by step, by a random source, and none of
it existed.
The shape of the work is unusual enough to state plainly. To carve one chunk,
vanilla replays every carver seeded in the 17x17 chunks around it and keeps only
what lands inside, so the same tunnel is walked up to 289 times across a world.
That redundancy is the point: it is what lets a chunk be carved without
generating its neighbours, which is the only way carving fits a generator that
produces one chunk at a time. A carve-once-write-into-neighbours design would be
cheaper and would not reproduce vanilla's mask and ordering.
Two primitives had to be right before any of it could be, and both are pinned
against values captured from the jar:
* setLargeFeatureSeed, which decides which chunks start a cave. It combines
its two products with XOR; setDecorationSeed, which it otherwise resembles,
uses addition and forces the low bit. Getting them the wrong way round moves
every tunnel in the world and nothing complains.
* Mth.sin and Mth.cos, which are a 65536-entry lookup table and not libm.
Mth.sin(-1.0) is -0.8414514 against Math.sin's -0.8414709848078965, and a
tunnel that walks by adding cos(yaw) a hundred times ends up somewhere else
entirely if that difference is smoothed away.
Carving lands between the surface pass and decoration, where vanilla puts it,
and both neighbours matter: the surface rules must already have placed grass for
a cave mouth to be retextured, and decoration must come after so nothing is
planted over a hole. The heights decoration plants against are recomputed
afterwards, which is why vanilla re-primes its heightmaps at the start of the
feature step.
The configs are extracted from the jar rather than transcribed, along with the
flattened #minecraft:overworld_carver_replaceables tag, so the probabilities and
Y ranges are data. Open volume below y=60 rises 28% over sixteen sampled chunks,
tunnels cut at or below y=-56 fill with lava rather than air (869 blocks, no
air), and the cost is inside the noise floor of the density pass.
The router has carried vein_toggle, vein_ridged and vein_gap since the whole of
it was parsed, and nothing read them. So the copper and iron mega-veins -- the
long branching sheets that run through the deepslate and the copper band, not
the small scattered ore blobs -- did not exist.
OreVeinifier is not a decoration feature. It is the second entry of the same
MaterialRuleList the aquifer heads: the aquifer answers first, and only where it
says the position is solid rock does the veinifier get a turn at what would
otherwise be plain stone. That is why a vein never opens into a cave, and it is
why this lands in the density pass rather than in decorate.
Three random draws per position, in a fixed order, from a factory hashed off
"minecraft:ore": solidness, then richness, then the rare raw-ore block.
Reordering them or hoisting the vein_gap compute above the second draw would
change every vein in the world, so the code follows the bytecode's order rather
than the one that reads better.
The Y windows are the sharp edge worth knowing about: a vein's type comes from
the sign of the veininess noise, but its window comes from the type, so
veininess <= 0 anywhere outside -60..-8 is simply not a vein. Over 49 sampled
chunks copper lands in 0..49 and iron in -57..-8, and raw ore comes out at 1.9%
of ore blocks against vanilla's 2%.
Our region files were not Anvil. Three things stood between them and vanilla's
deserializer, and each is enough on its own:
* everything was nested under a "Level" compound. Chunk data lived there until
1.18; SerializableChunkData builds a flat root and never looks for the key.
* a section's Y was an Int. Vanilla writes putByte and reads getByteOr, so
every section of ours decodes as index 0 and overwrites the one before it.
* block palettes were packed at ceil(log2(size)) bits. Strategy's tableswitch
routes bit counts 1 through 4 to the same four-bit configuration, so a
palette of 2..16 states is four bits wide on disk. Ours were one to three,
which makes the long array a quarter of the length vanilla computes, and
SimpleBitStorage rejects the section outright rather than misreading it.
Biome containers were already right: Strategy has no such floor for them, and a
Global configuration above three bits still stores palette indices, just at its
own width. The suspicion that biomes collapsed on save/load was unfounded --
what let it stand is that every round-trip test in this package set blocks and
asserted blocks, so nothing proved biomes survived. They do now, per cell, for
every palette width a section can hold.
Verified against vanilla rather than against our reading of it:
tools/VanillaChunkFormatCheck.java opens a region file we wrote using vanilla's
RegionFile, NbtIo, Strategy and SimpleBitStorage. Sixteen generated chunks pass.
Reverting either the Y type or the palette floor makes it fail with vanilla's
own message -- "Invalid length given for storage, got: 64 but expected: 256" --
so the check can fail, which is the only reason to trust it passing.
Reading a world the official server generated is what the surface-height parity
capture in CLAUDE.md has always needed, and this is half of it.
blocks.json lists a block's states in getPossibleStates() order -- the property
cartesian product -- and separately marks which one is the default. The parser
declared only id and properties, so the default flag was dropped on the floor
and nameToStateID returned states[0]. Those differ for 642 of the 1168 blocks.
What that produced, measured rather than guessed: every redstone vein in the
world was lit=true and glowing, every sunflower was placed as its own top half
with nothing under it, and oak stairs came out upside down and waterlogged. It
also quietly disagreed with the StateGrass, StateOakLog and StateOakLeaf
constants next door in encode.go, which are the real defaults.
Now it starts from the default state and applies the properties it recognises,
keeping the default's value for an unknown key or an illegal value -- which is
what vanilla does when it reads a palette entry. That matters on the disk path:
a chunk written with a property we no longer know used to decode to a random
corner state instead of something sane.
The signature grows an ok result, because air was doing double duty as both a
real block and "no such name".
Separately, blockPaletteEntry filled the Properties compound by ranging a Go
map. nbt.Compound preserves insertion order precisely so encoding is
deterministic, so saving one chunk twice produced different region-file bytes
for every multi-property block. Keys are sorted now.
LevelChunkSection puts two shorts in front of every section: nonEmptyBlockCount
and fluidCount. We wrote the first and then a literal 0 for the second, under a
comment claiming it was a reserved field that vanilla always leaves at zero.
It is not reserved and vanilla does not.
So every client was told every section is fluid-free, in a world where the
aquifer now fills oceans, lakes and flooded caves. The golden test did not catch
it because its fixture is a superflat chunk whose real fluid count is zero.
The count is per block state, not per block: a waterlogged stair holds a fluid
while a dry one does not, and the flag for that comes from the block-state dump
added with the heightmaps.
