If you have read about my interests, then you know that procedural generation is an interest of mine. Although I was interested in it, I lacked a canvas to test out my ideas. My dream was to program a procedural generator for Minecraft, but alas, for so long this goal seemed out of reach.

The classic option of using MCEdit filters wasn't going to cut it. For one thing, they lack the fidelity that I wanted. For another thing, MCEdit hasn't been developed since 2016, and doesn't work on newer versions of Minecraft. All seemed lost for my dream – until I found Amulet.

Amulet is the next generation of Minecraft world editors. It is in active development. When I found it, the project was in it's infancy, and I had no clue what was going on in the code. There was basically no API documentation. So, I did the only thing that I knew to do - hack. The result of this hacking was DwarfCraft.

The rationale for DwarfCraft was that caves in Minecraft are boring. You go down into the cave, there are some monsters, but there are only monsters because it is dark. The only thing to see is stone, gravel, and occasionally ore ¹⁾. I wanted more interesting caves.

DwarfCraft added:

• Ore difficulties. More valuable ore tended to spawn deeper in the map than, say, iron. This is significant because the danger of the world also increases the deeper you go.
• Lots of cave generation “upgrades”. Depending on how you look at them, some of these could be considered downgrades.
  • Caves no longer have a bias to be up or down. One thing you might not know about vanilla minecraft caves is that they are biased to be easy to walk around in. Well, screw that. In DwarfCraft they can go in any direction- up, down, left, right, sideways, you name it. This leads to some very unique cave generation.
  • Configurable size. Cave size can be configured from the command line. Caverns more your style? Set it big. Like claustrophobic passages? Set it small.
  • Configurable density. You can make caves as rare or common as you want.
• Glowstone clusters. These stalactites would provide natural, eerie lighting in the depths.
• Lava pools. These are similar to vanilla lava pools, but they can be configured to (at cost of processing time) fill caves systems. More likely to occur at greater depths.
• Spawners. They spawn monsters. The deeper you go, the more likely they are to be buffed with armor, weapons, and potion effects. In terms of difficulty, the command line reference warns: “Be careful: Even 5% [spawn chance] was too much.”
• Cave bushes. Trees that just kind of go everywhere. The only source of wood in the caves.
• Biomes. Different block types for caves. The two options were stone (the default) and organic (grass blocks, flowers, etc)
• Water Pools. Spawn with sand, sugarcane, etc.