#shipwreckers

(Edit: I finished making it!)

Or, How to Land in a World that is Only Deep Lukewarm Ocean and Die Repeatedly Looking for a Door

~

22nd September 2019

~

Me and Jay like Minecraft, and we specifically like the survival bit at the beginning. We also like challenges that make us think around corners a little bit. We have in the past enjoyed Skyblock, and also this cute game where you’re in an ordinary land biome but you are a tree and you start with one sapling and you’re only allowed to walk on logs of your tree.

In a hunt for a new way to make Minecraft harder and more interesting, me and @jay-avery hatched a plan.

We would make a Minecraft world that is only ocean.

~

THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

It turned out that making a plugin to remove biomes isn’t as easy as making one that adds them, but you can make it so that a world contains only one biome.

Jay (codemonkey) did some research on the features and downsides of various biomes, and found that “deep lukewarm ocean” has lots of the pros and very few of the cons. It has ocean monuments and shipwrecks, as well as caves and abandoned mines (deep ones). All ocean mobs can spawn in them. Most importantly, it has NO LAND WHATSOEVER. >:D

There are some items etc. that are unavailable in that biome, but fewer than you’d think.

Saplings, sugarcane, coral, ice and flowers can be traded from wandering traders (the ones with llamas), who can spawn anywhere except in water.

Sugar can be obtained from witches.

Paper is often in shipwreck chests.

Edible crops can be found in chests (seeds) and zombie drops (carrots and potatoes).

If you can get stuff for potions and you find some golden apples in chests, you can convert and cure zombie villagers and start a floating (or cave) village.

However, that leaves animals, of which many can only spawn in land biomes (so dirt platforms in the sea won’t work), and coral, which only grows in warm ocean biomes. Also the small matter of… grass.

So here’s what Jay made.

~

THE ACTUAL THING

It’s a surprisingly simple change to get your head around.

The only biome for the entire world is “deep lukewarm ocean”. The Nether and the End stay the same (strongholds can generate in the ocean and at bedrock).

In single player it’d just be a buffet type setting, but it’s more tricky with servers. Shipwreckers can be used with single player and on a server, and will make sure you also occasionally find in treasure chests the items and animals that would otherwise be completely unattainable in deep lukewarm ocean.

There are special loot tables that you have to include (provided), to make it possible to obtain anything (as far as we can remember) that would otherwise be unavailable in an all-ocean world. Every loot chest (shipwrecks, abandoned mineshafts, ruins, etc) will contain one stack from a new pool of possibilities:

a single spawn egg for any passive land animal (farm animals are more likely)

a single grass block

a single mycelium block

a single sea pickle

a single sweet berry

~

SETTING IT UP

It’s not a typical plugin installation situation. You have to create the world and then add the data pack and then delete and regenerate the world.

Here’s Jay’s instructions. For the purposes of this tutorial, [worldname] will probably be “world” (or “New World”, that’s the default for single player).

1. Create new world (in vanilla 1.14) > choose buffet world type > choose deep lukewarm ocean biome > save and quit immediately once created

2. Add the special loot tables: put this ‘shipwreckers’ folder into the saved game’s data packs folder (at minecraft/saves/[worldname]/datapacks).

3. Regenerate the world to make sure the new loot is added: delete the 'region’ folder (minecraft/saves/[worldname]/region).

Now it’s ready to play single player.

If you want to play with friends you can upload the whole save folder to a server for multiplayer, and players won’t need to do anything except connect. (We can’t help you here - methods will vary depending on what kind of server set-up you’ve got.)

~

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO PLAY

Starting out SUCKS. :D To begin with, we tried harvesting fish to eat, but they are not very nourishing, and the problem is… there are water zombies everywhere, and they will attack you and the fish won’t heal you fast enough, so you’re just going to die and drop all the fish and get sent back to spawn anyway.

When you find a shipwreck (of which there are many), there’s no way to swim all the way down and “harvest” some wood to make tools or a door, there’s just no time and you drown. Your only hope is to by chance find a shipwreck that happens to contain a door (which makes an air pocket), and even then there will probably be water zombies and maybe even trident guys down there who will kill you.

So you just have to… swim around looking at shipwrecks in the hope of finding a door, dying repeatedly and being sent back to spawn. And then when you find a door, cling onto it and turn your shipwreck into a minibase by harvesting lots of wood and turning it into doors.

It is SO DIFFICULT compared to vanilla or even Skyblock! So frustrating!!! AHHHHHHH

Anyway, from there you can build up to make a platform for mobs (pray for a wandering trader, get creepers) or dig down to start a mine. Even though the world is one uniform biome, it's still interesting to explore because there's variation in the plants and mobs and also the generated structures.

The first few hours were great, because when we’d find a shipwreck there would be much excitement over the animal eggs and other rare goodies we’d find in the chests, and then getting it all home safely in order to stash it was really fun, along with getting excited when you find a second animal egg so you can breed them (except chickens, which are conveniently parthenogenetic). Until you have really good armour the trident dudes are always a significant threat. Jay says, “I am repeatedly amazed and horrified by how powerful trident guys are, and because they are ranged attack they knock you back and you can't swim towards them fast enough to hit them before they throw at you again aaahhhhh”

The main limiting factor we’ve had so far is lack of trees. If we need wood we get in a boat and go and find a shipwreck, and just totally dismantle it. We’ve got a tidy collection of farm animals and crops going on, but no trees or flowers. We’ve had one wandering trader spawn, but he wasn’t selling sugarcane or saplings. We’ve got some enchanting stuff going on (books and paper from shipwrecks), and we’ve got potions stuff since we found some blazes in the Nether, but we’ve not made it to the End yet because endermen don’t spawn much due to all the water.

We haven’t yet made water-breathing potions, nor have we managed to enchant a hat with some kind of water-breathing charm, but we’re not unduly hampered by this because we take doors everywhere we go for emergency underwater air pockets.

Here’s a Dynmap screenshot of where we’re at so far. It’s fun to note that when you’re boating about you can always tell when you’re nearly home because the kelp is all really tall. :D (You can also use it as a fuel source! It’s just incredibly slow!)

Behold, me fishing under the mob spawner XP farm thing I just made:

(The texture pack is not included, but it’s made by Jay and can be found here.)

~

NB: Me and Jay aren’t available for tech support, and if this thing stops working with future versions we’re not available to update it. Sorry about that! However, it has some kind of free software license that means you can edit and share it, so you are welcome to update it yourself and republish it.

~

Shipwreckers (Playstation Demo Version):