Version War

Background

The version war was the result of months of indecision about the primary Minecraft version we wanted the Nosiphus Modded Server to be on. While the conflict itself only lasted for a couple years, its lingering effects continued for many more. I had all but given up home the central reason for it would ever be solved, until one day in June 2024, when I discovered the perfect solution.

The Adventure Update and its Effects: September 14, 2011 - January 3, 2013

The version war was caused by changes to the game made by Mojang well before I started playing Minecraft. On September 14, 2011, Mojang released Beta 1.8, the Adventure Update, and to say this update caused controversy in the community at the time would be a cosmic understatement. There was uproar about the multitude of changes made to the game, notably the hunger system, but the change that received the most ire from players was the new world generation algorithm.

This wasn't the first time Mojang had changed the world generation, but the previous change, made in Alpha 1.2 on October 30, 2010, happened when Minecraft's audience was significantly smaller. While some players liked the new world generation style, many did not, and stuck to Beta 1.7.3, which is now considered the definitive "Golden Age" version. Mojang continued to make adjustments to this world generation algorithm, most notably, the additions of jungles on March 1, 2012 in 1.2, which slightly altered biome distributions. While there were some additional slight tweaks along the way, this world generator remained in the game through version 1.6.4.

Some players, who liked the new features apart from the terrain generation, took it upon themselves to create mods to restore the Beta 1.7.3 terrain generation to these newer releases. Keep this fact in mind, as it will become important later on in this story.

No Issues At All: January 3, 2013 - October 25, 2013

I began playing Minecraft on January 3, 2013, in version 1.4.7, but I did not create the world that would become home to the Flying Clown House until February 24. When it was created that day, it was generated randomly, and its seed ended up being -5517325077632123817.

I used this map as my primary singleplayer map for four months afterwards. When 1.5 was released, I upgraded my world to it once all the mods I had were available. Eventually, when the server came along on June 24, Wyatt and I were unaware that we also needed the config folder for our mods to work properly, so we started the original Nosiphus Modded Server in vanilla and agreed to add the mods in later. When generating the new world, however, I made sure to use the same world seed, and the result was that the N Tower was built in the same position as the Flying Clown House was.

With a brief exception in July, where we switched to the first version of the mansion world, this world seed would remain in use until March 2, 2014.

The Update that Changed the World: October 25, 2013 - June 26, 2014

The legacy of the Beta 1.8 terrain generator was laid to rest on October 25, 2013, with the release of Minecraft 1.7.2, known as the Update that Changed the World. This was a massive overhaul of the game's terrain generator. It didn't just incorporate new biomes that altered the biome distribution, it altered how biomes were distributed as well. It created temperature zones, and drastically scaled back the oceanic worlds of Beta 1.8. Now, the world was essentially a giant continent.

Compared to 1.6.4, our world seed looked drastically different at the same coordinates, and it wasn't just different: it was hideous. Gone were the forest, taiga, and river, and in its place was a coastal savanna.

Thankfully, I didn't have to give it much consideration. The first build of Minecraft Forge for 1.7.2 didn't release until December 26, 2013, and this early build was far from stable. It would take a significant amount of time for Forge to stabilize, and throughout 2014, Mojang continued to release updates for 1.7. These two factors prevented modding from stabilizing on the new version, and accordingly, 1.6.4 reigned supreme for modders well into the summer of 2014.

The Conflict Begins to Rumble: June 26, 2014 - November 17, 2014

Mojang released the final update to 1.7 on June 26: 1.7.10. Little did anyone know it at the time, but this version would go on to be in a class of its own in terms of Minecraft modding. To this day, no other version even compares: it is the single most heavily modded version of the game ever released, and its rise to prominence wouldn't take very long, either.

I began to test 1.7.10-based servers in July, but at that point, several mods were still unavailable, and what was available was unstable and crash-prone. However, by the middle of August, that was no longer the case: mod availablity and stability were outpacing that of 1.6.4. In addition, 1.7 had an additional, killer feature that 1.6 did not have: the ability to load multiple resource packs at the same time.

For us, this feature was a godsend, as it solved two big issues we had. Before this point, anyone who wanted to use a resource pack that supported mods needed to add those extra textures into the vanilla pack. This wasn't the easiest thing to do if you weren't computer-savvy, so many just uploaded the pre-patched resource pack publicly. The problem is that for Sphax PureBDcraft, redistribution of the base pack was strictly forbidden by its license, meaning that I was forced to place only the modded texture compilation up and guide people through patching it.

Additionally, I was not a mod developer at this point: neither YogMod nor its predecessor, NosLabs Custom Blocks, existed at this time. The special textures for the lab were simply stored as overrides for the base pack textures. This meant that for our server, I had to maintain two different copies of the modded patch: One that included the overrides and one that didn't, and this got even more confusing to maintain and for users to keep up to date.

1.7's new feature meant that I could simply supply the modded texture compilation and the custom lab textures as separate files, and the user could load them at the same time as the base pack without making any changes to it. The lab textures could be loaded and unloaded as a user entered NosLabs.

These factors collectively meant that remaining on 1.6.4 meant holding ourselves back for the sake of the world generator. We thought about simply reusing the mansion world from scratch, but we'd grown tired of it: we wanted to return to our original world seed. Sadly, this wasn't possible to do if we wanted the world to have modded features in it, and as discussed, our seed in 1.7's native generator was awful.

I started looking to see if a mod existed to create this terrain, and discovered the knowledge that this had happened before when Beta 1.8 had been released, and that many people had created mods to restore the world generation algorithm of Beta 1.7.3 to newer versions of Minecraft. I tried one of these mods, ted80's Better World Generation. I was disappointed to see that it did not support the terrain of Minecraft 1.6.4, but I was hopeful that it would come in time. However, I did decide to see how our seed would look in the world generation of Beta 1.7.3.

After exploring for a bit, I liked it. It wasn't what I actually wanted, of course, but it was a significant improvement over what we would get from the vanilla terrain generation of 1.7.10. We would use this map from August 23 through the rest of the summer and most of the autumn, all the way to November 17. That being said, we did not build the headquarters at it normal position, instead, it was placed several hundred blocks to the north to take advantage of a natural harbor.

The Phony War: November 17, 2014 - May 31, 2015

The first strike in the version war occurred in November 17, 2014, but this did not set off an instant back-and-forth. Instead, we simply returned to using the 1.6.4 mansion world for several months. This is because the reversion was not caused by the terrain generation.

The first return to 1.6.4 was actually motivated by the fact that an important set of mods had not been updated yet: Calclavia's. He was the author of the Universal Electricity mods that had formed the core of the Voltz modpack. This pack had been prominent in early 2013, and its mod set was one of the main things we wanted to focus around for the server. We found ourselves particularly missing ICBM.

I had updated the server to 1.7.10 in August thinking they would just a little longer, and we would carry on without them for the meantime. However, by November, they still weren't available, and by this point we really wanted to use them. We made the decision to downgrade back to 1.6.4 for the next few months, and we stayed there without interruption until April 2015.

There was one alteration, however. We had enjoyed using several of the new mods we added to our 1.7.10 pack, so if any of those mods had a 1.6.4 variant, it was added to NosPack.

The Conflict Erupts: May 31, 2015 - May 27, 2016

The version war finally ignited at the end of May, and would last for nearly a year. We changed Minecraft versions and world saves several times over the following year. We started by briefly using the 1.7.10 native generator, but it was so terrible that we ditched it after just two days.

After that, we returned to 1.6.4, but this time, we didn't return to the mansion. Instead, we regenerated the original seed in 1.6.4 and started from there. This version of the server would be around for a while, until December, and whenever we jumped back to 1.6.4, this would be where we would go.

1.7 gained two massive points in its favor during the summer: ProjectE. This was a recreation of the legendary Equivalent Exchange 2 from Tekkit Classic, and had not been updated since 1.2.5. Then, a 1.7 port of ICBM was released called DefenseTech. The case for staying with 1.6.4 became harder to justify with these features, and I relented to an upgrade on July 27. This world used a different seed. In fact, our main seed wouldn't be used on any 1.7 world we had for several months.

This world stuck around for a while, but we ended up resetting it with a new seed on October 17. On November 25, we decided to split the server into two: we started a new map with yet another seed on 1.7, a survival server, and we made the 1.6 server into our creative server. Although we did add new buildings to the creative server, most of our time was focused on the survival map.

We re-updated the creative server to 1.7 in January 2016 with a new map, and reset it again in March. Both of these maps have been lost to time. I thought at the time that this cycle of dissatisfaction with the world was an unending cycle, but I kept looking for a way to resolve it.

Stability of Biomes O' Plenty: May 27, 2016 - June 10, 2018

The conflict of the version war ended on May 27, 2016, but its effects would linger for eight more years. I decided to grow our modpack significantly, and accordingly, I added a number of biome mods to Telkit I, including Biomes O' Plenty. We brought back our original world seed, and while this map did get reset a couple times early on in its use, after the second reset on September 23, 2016, this map would remain in place for nearly two years. This added a sense of stability after the rapid-fire world switches of the previous year.

The reason for this stability was simple. While we had been playing far to the south in an outback, and had even found a coast where we had some survival builds, I decided to fly to the coordinates of the headquarters to see what was there. To my unexpected delight, what I found was not the dreaded savanna, but a forest. Even better, the terrain around the HQ site matched that of the 1.6.4 world generation fairly well, even if the area was still coastal. I decided to place the N Tower here and build the city around it. This finally ended the period of conflict, and this world remained in place for the remainder of Telkit I's lifespan as our main modpack.

Slightly Less Stable: June 10, 2018 - July 13, 2019

When it came time for us to upgrade to Telkit II and Minecraft 1.12.2, the changeover was clean. It was a seamless migration where the world was reset with a new generator. We felt that after two years of the previous world, it was time for something new, and for me, that meant something old. I had spent a lot of time playing early versions of the game, and decided to return to Beta 1.7.3 terrain.

I brought the seed from one of my Beta survival worlds over, and even rebuilt my house from that world. However, this world didn't last long-term, and it would take a while before we settled on a permanent map. The remnants of the version war still lingered: after all, until the original seed was usable on a modern version of the game, we wouldn't have a permanent world. That being said, while returning to 1.6.4 may have been justifiable in 2015, it was no longer the case by 2018; too many vanilla features had been added, and it was time to move forward.

We would reset the map once on September 22, moving to a large biomes world using the vanilla terrain generation. This world would remain in use until July 13, 2019.

Earth: July 13, 2019 - October 10, 2019

Briefly during the first version war, we had experimented with a secondary survival server where used a map of the real world, divided up amongst ourselves. This had been attempted again at the end of 2017 using a short-lived 1.10.2 modpack.

While neither of these Earth maps found their way to the main creative server, when we discovered Terrarium, that changed. On July 13, we started using that mod to generate the real world in-game. We did reset a few times to alter the scale factor, but the trouble with this world generator was twofold: apart from the shape of the continents, we hated how the world looked, and trying to spread our settlements out over that much size effectively meant we were never playing together. It was too isolating. Wyatt and I often spent more time in each other's territories than in our own since the point of multiplayer was to play together.

By October 10, we had grown sick of the gimmick and decided to start afresh with a different terrain style.

Biomes O' Plenty Returns: October 10, 2019 - May 6, 2020

We decided not to go back to using the map we had been on before the Terrarium experiment. Instead, we decided to use Biomes O' Plenty again, and for the first time since we had upgraded to 1.12.2, we put our original world seed back into use.

This world, like the previous Biomes O' Plenty map from 1.7.10, stuck around for quite a while, even if it did get reset a couple times at the beginning. This map remained as our primary creative server map through the remainder of Telkit II's lifespan as our main modpack. However, unlike with Telkit I, that remaining lifespan didn't last quite as long.

Another Rough Transition: May 6, 2020 - February 1, 2021

When we moved to our first long-term Biomes O' Plenty world, 1.7.10 was in its modding heyday, but 2016 had also been a year into a period of decline for Minecraft as a whole. It had lost some of its cultural relevance. In addition, the reason that 1.7.10 had become the prominent modded version had nothing to do with that version's specific merits, and everything to do with its successor's changes: 1.8 had drastically overhauled the game internally. It took even longer for Forge to update to 1.8 than it had taken to update to 1.7. Additionally, the versions from 1.8 to 1.12 were either considered forgettable, or in the case of 1.9's Combat Update, controversial. All these factors contributed to a stagnating community and a stagnant game.

This had started to change at the end of 2018, and by mid-2019, Minecraft was in the middle of a cultural renaissance. 1.13, the Update Aquatic, had been the biggest reason. This update drastically overhauled water mechanics and made the ocean truly interesting for the first time ever. However, 1.13 shared something in common with 1.8: it was a massive technical overhaul of the game as well, and this time, it made 1.8's changes look tiny by comparison. The development team for Minecraft Forge effectively decided to re-engineer the entire mod loader to clean out the cruft of legacy technical debt.

This meant that once again, the version immediately preceding the big changes would become the primary target for modders, and accordingly, 1.12.2 became the primary modded version over the course of 2018 and 2019. The problem was that unlike 1.8, which hadn't offered that much to 1.7.10 players in 2014, the new updates had a lot of content that was incredibly desirable to have. Additionally, because Forge was in the middle of this reconstruction, new mod loaders arrived to compete with it: Rift, and later, the more consequential Fabric.

By May 2020, 1.15 had been out for a few months, and there were some mods available for it. I decided that I wanted to build an experimental test pack for it, so I assembled a new version of Telkit Development Edition for 1.15.2. Instead of assembling a patch for Sphax PureBDcraft as I normally would've done, I elected instead to test this pack with shaders. More importantly, however, I had found this new terrain generation mod that I wanted to try out: TerraForged.

When I loaded up this pack with the server for the first time, I was floored by the sight. It was beautiful. The beach was gorgeous, the reflections of the sky, the ripples in the water, the way the sun shone down, and the shape of the landmass in general... all of it made Telkit II look terrible by comparison.

Although I told them that this was a test modpack that was unstable, I invited my friends to this test server, and they were as captivated as I was. This test server became home to several of the best buildings we've ever constructed. Unfortunately, the lack of feature completion meant this new pack couldn't replace Telkit II just yet, even as it became more stable with time.

I backported the shader into Telkit II, and on August 1, wrstarted a survival server using that modpack. Although this server also didn't replace the main creative one, we spent more time on this survival server over the next few months than we did on the main one. This survival server ran in parallel with the main creative server as well as several 1.16 test servers until November 24, when mod availability on 1.16 finally allowed us to start attempting to properly move to the new version of the game.

We would reset our early Telkit III maps several times as we tried to find the balance. We tried to use the vanilla generation algorithm first, on December 9. This map was replaced on December 17 with another vanilla attempt, with a slightly different mod list. The pack was being changed rapidly, as mods were added, removed, and had their configurations altered, and as a result, it was impossible to get a stable, permanent world. That, however, didn't mean it wasn't an enjoyable time, as we got to experiment with new mods for the first time in years.

In early 2021, we briefly returned to 1.12.2 using a souped-up version of Telkit II called Nosiphus Unleashed, which had about one hundred more mods. We also used Terrarium for this survival world, which we started on January 4, before resetting with a different scale factor on January 9. This map would last until February 1, when we permanently returned to 1.16.5's Telkit III.

TerraForged's Last Stand: February 1, 2021 - April 16, 2022

TerraForged would serve as the world generation mod we used for the remainder of Telkit III's lifespan as our main modpack, save for about two weeks.

We started over on a new TerraForged map on February 1, and this map lasted until we decided to change to another vanilla map on May 29. This world would be short-lived, being reset on June 9, before we ditched that map for another TerraForged-based one on July 15. This world would last through the rest of the summer and most of the autumn, leading to our penultimate true map reset.

On November 10, for the final time that wasn't forced by a version upgrade, I reset the world's map. This final TerraForged-based world would remain as our main map until Telkit III's lifespan as our main pack ended in April 2022.

We Thought This Was It: April 16, 2022 - June 29, 2024

I recognized that the upcoming update, 1.18, the Caves and Cliffs Update, offered us a chance to do what we always wanted to do: bring back the original world.

My biggest concern with using a pregenerated world was that it would have no modded features in it. This would not be the case in 1.18: there would be new terrain that spawned below the old bedrock layer, and anything generated down there would have new modded features. This would bring a practical end to the constant world swapping that had plagued us for eight years by this point.

On April 16, I took the time to load up Minecraft 1.4.7 with the original world seed, and pre-generated a huge chunk of the map. Then, I copied it over to the new Telkit IV server, and loaded it up.

Finally, after eight long years, we would never have to worry about a world swap ever again. Our favorite world was back. Mekanism retogeneration also helped us: it placed some of its ores and features above the y=0 point, so the surface wasn't completely barren of new stuff.

This world would serve as our main world for over two years, and not once was it reset, nor did we ever consider resetting it. I didn't think we'd ever have to: the block ID system was gone, and most mods that were published by this point tend to stick around for a long time. Version transitions were seamless: we migrated Telkit IV from 1.18 to 1.19 without issue, the first and only time we'd ever been able to pull off a straight update with no complications. I planned to do the same with 1.20. After all, there was no way anyone would finally fulfill the dream of natively generating the terrain of 1.6 with a mod after all this time...

Moderner Beta Fulfills the Dream after All this Time: June 29, 2024

It happened. Someone fulfilled my decade-old dream and brought 1.6.4 world generation back from the dead. The discovery of Moderner Beta was an incredibly joyous moment for me.

I considered simply taking our existing world and altering our level.dat file to use the new generation past the point we had already built, but since the WorldEdit operation to copy everything over would be easy since the terrain would be mostly the same, I decided to instead do a reset, and move the server to the 1.20.1-based Telkit V. I also took the time to update all my old forum posts requesting the feature, so anyone who had the same question I had over the years and stumbled across my posts would find the answer.

I had to do one final reset a couple weeks in, when the mod updated its name internally and broke all the biome names. Nevertheless, the WorldEdit operation was once again seamless. The only real difference on the surface was foliage, such as trees, but this wasn't a big annoyance: anything with a sharp leaf edge could be cut down and replanted.

Moderner Beta had done it. For the first time since 2014, we would never again have to worry about how our world was going to look, and we could build the server as we had originally intended to do. At long last, we had our world, the Nosiphus world, back.