Hello everyone, In this post I'll be talking about how Minecraft lead me to finding two of my life passions, and I'm majoring in one of them now.

So it was back in around mid 2011, I was browsing YouTube, and I stumbled upon a weird 90's looking game, so I clicked that thumbnail and watched the video. I was fascinated, you can build a house and live in it! what?! That video was about Minecraft Pocket Edition. So I went to my father and asked him to buy it. And I did, it was fun, slowly it spread around our family, my cousins started playing it with me, it was a lot of fun.

Later, I was looking at some Minecraft videos on YouTube, and I stumbled upon something that shocked me, what is this?! you can place doors that open and close?! Yes, that wasn't a thing back then on pocket edition. After some research I realized this was on PC. And my only PC was a 2GB RAM, 1.3GHz (or so) dual core processor notebook. It was horrendous. But I tried getting Minecraft on there, and it was… playable..? barely, but it worked, and I enjoyed it.

As I played Minecraft more and more, I started watching more Minecraft on YouTube. This is where I discovered Etho (Ethoslab) and SethBling. I saw Etho doing some redstone, it was game changing for me! That was right up my alley. So I created a single player world, and started just learning redstone alone. Forward several months later, Sethbling uploaded a Lua tutorial for ComputerCraft. From there I started programming some turtles in Minecraft, automatic farms and whatnot. At that moment, I decided what I'm going to major in, 6 years early.

From Lua and ComputerCraft, I started learning Visual Basic, then slowly started Java and Bukkit plugin development. But it was getting frustrating, the bigger the redstone builds get, the more unplayable the game gets on my notebook. So I decided to get a new laptop, for Minecraft. Having barely any knowledge in computers back then, the laptop I bought was still not the best, but it was fairly playable.

As time went by, I was exposed to the world of PC gaming, I downloaded Steam, and realized how light Minecraft is after looking at all those Steam games. But I was still not satisfied with the laptop's performance with Minecraft. So I thought about buying a desktop PC, until one of my friends told me about his built PC, and I never knew that's a thing back then. So I started looking into it. I started by copying his build, and when that build was done. I realized how great the PC master race is. Since then, I've been upgrading my PC alone, and I fairly understand all of its in's and out's.

Jump to present day, I'm a freshman majoring in computer science. Running a multi-threaded prime number finder script on my PC, thanks to Minecraft.

TL;DR: Through Minecraft I discovered my passion in PC building and programming. Which lead me to major in computer science.

It's about time for an update to Minecraft's terrain. Not the biomes, but the shape of the terrain. The current default terrain generator is flat out BORING because the terrain's maximum height basically has been reduced from y128 to y100. Epic terrain never spawns in any variant of forests, deserts OR taigas. All editions of Minecraft, including mobile and xbox, generate this homogenous terrain.

Here are the kinds of gems the old generator used to produce. In the days before the Beta 1.8 generation, amazing mountains and overhangs that generated all the way up to y=128 could generate in any biome whether it was a forest, desert or taiga. Think this is just nostalgia speaking? Think again. A landscape like that could never spawn in any forest biome in the new generator. Beta's terrain had plenty of calm terrain like rolling hills and plains as well; it was far from nonstop amplified terrain everywhere. The unpredictability of the terrain made exploration fun.

Today, the game's height limit has increased to a whooping 256. Yet terrain rarely goes over y=95 in any biome, even in Hills or M biomes, outside of Extreme Hills and Savanna Plateau M. And even those two biomes are homogenous in their own right, having only mountains and little flat land to separate mountains. The eye candy of cliffs and overhangs that Minecraft used to have are now gone from forests, deserts, taigas, almost every biome.

Why did it have to become like this? This isn't fun. This isn't realistic. This takes away everything fun from exploration and the danger of "daytime mobs" in shaded areas.

I'm aware that customized presets and mods exist that can improve the terrain. However that does not give an excuse for the default terrain generator, the one that mobile players and the majority use, to be this dull and repetitive. Despite everything added to the creative side of the game, Minecraft is no longer known for generating landscapes of eye candy. Who could blame the community for shifting its focus from survival and exploration to pvp and minigames when every world in Minecraft had become boring and predictable?

The solution to this does not involve adding more biomes or variants of biomes. That's what 1.7 did and yet it failed to fix the real problem that makes the terrain repetitive – the lack of height variation. Amplified everything won't fix this problem either. The terrain generator will not be varied until we can set the entire world to one biome type and still generate unique kinds of terrain ranging from flat to hilly to epic mountains. That's what a generator from 2011 could do despite having a limited number of biomes. Perhaps a good start would even be to paste all the new biomes and features over the old terrain generator and increase the height limit.

Mojang, please make the worlds of Minecraft unique and fun to explore again. This is more important than adding miscellaneous mobs, blocks and commands. This is something that can improve all platforms of the game.