Highlights

  • Minecraft's procedural generation creates lasting memories and inspires creativity through its diverse landscapes and unexpected world structures.
  • The old "Customized" world generation option, which allowed for extensive customization of Minecraft worlds, should be brought back to enhance player creativity.
  • Minecraft Bedrock Edition lacks significant world customization options, and bringing back classic customization features would help level the playing field and provide more variety for players.

For all of Minecraft's customization capabilities, brimming as it is with near-infinite possibility, there's one abandoned feature that would improve this potential further yet. A certain long-forgotten option for world generation really ought to find its way back into Minecraft.

Minecraft's generation facilitates player creativity. This doesn't just apply to its potential to create breathtaking vistas—from floating islands to sprawling caverns—but to those happy accidents where a structure is wedged in a mountain or when one biome awkwardly cuts into another. From tense battles spurned by pillager outposts stuck in villages to the inspiration spawned from Savannah mountains daring the clouds, Minecraft's procedural generation is an engine that inevitably creates memories for the ages.

A collage of different mobs roaming a Minecraft world at night
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Minecraft Needs To Bring Back Old World Generation Options

Naturally, players want to meddle with this generation for even greater results, with many of these options available in Minecraft's world creation menu. However, these options have been slowly chipped away at over the years, reducing the ways that fans can have an impact on how their world generates. Given the huge size of Minecraft worlds, this isn't too much of a problem—but given that many options were ones players once had and that were taken away, it only makes sense for Mojang to add something to replace them. Even if Minecraft worlds are already rife with possibility, more options are always a good thing, especially for a sandbox title.

Minecraft's Old 'Customized' World Setting

Prior to 1.13, Minecraft's Java edition had a 'Customized' option. Available to be toggled on when creating a world, this gave players a smorgasbord of options to shake up their world. The plurality of different structures could be shifted, the player could choose which biomes they did and didn't want, biome size could be switched up, ore generation could be changed, and much more. This hugely in-depth customization was much missed when it got the axe in 1.13, cut due to the update's changes to Minecraft's world generation.

The option was replaced by a 'Buffet' choice, which lets one biome compose an entire world. There's also a new 'Custom' option, but it's more than a little complex to execute with limited customization features, relying on data packs. Neither are really satisfactory when compared to the options that have been lost. Though Minecraft's world generation can be volatile, even negative results spurned by it can make for a good story or inspire a new build. Just bringing back a few of these options would further facilitate this ethos; it could cause some odd results, but it's all in good fun if players know what they're getting into.

Minecraft Bedrock Has Gotten The Short End Of The Stick With World Customization

Despite being the more popular version of the game by a country mile, Minecraft's Bedrock Edition lags behind in many aspects. World customization is extremely limited on Bedrock, lacking both the old 'Customized' and the new 'Buffet' options. In addition, Bedrock doesn't have the 'Amplified' feature (which makes terrain far more mountainous and perilous to traverse) nor does it have many choices for Superflat world generation. What makes this worse is that these options were available for pre-Bedrock console ports, making a jarring contrast for the many transitioning players expecting to see them.

While it makes sense for Bedrock to be limited in this regard, given the limited capabilities of its supported devices compared to Java, scrapping the less-intensive 'Old World' feature from the edition becomes even stranger. Old Worlds weren't infinite, meaning they'd have been a great way to maintain customization for Bedrock. Larger non-infinite worlds combined with some customization features could be a solid alternative to default infinite ones. Considering how Minecraft's Bedrock version is so often beaten down, any way to bring it some classic world-gen customization options would even the playing field.