See this? It's a never-finished custom map from 2018.
I don't remember what this map is called, but it's a Complete the Monument build attempt like Super Hostile, and it was screwed over in 2018 by the emergence of ha-ha-you-can't-have-customized.
It's hard to express just how critical the custom world type was for this. Especially if you're a Minecraft player who doesn't remember. Not just the world type Customized, but the world type being just the way it was in 2017. Not with a lot of changes, not with a small change, not with a mandatory json editing interface, it had to be JUST the way it was. I'm going to explain why the removal and subsequent changes upon reentry totally screwed over thousands of untold possible custom maps and survival worlds that could have been made.
Customized, in its best days, was a pretty easy to use world type with an admittedly hard-to-use name in conversation. Like I hated trying to convey what I was talking about when telling people. The name sucks. But it was more than just being like "oh let's do an Amplified world". Oh no, the untapped potential of Minecraft Customized as a world type built into every new version from 2014 onward was MASSIVE. That's like having every Nintendo console from 2008 onward coming bundled with an extensive Mario homebrew kit. It gave you a fuckload of options and innovations to find. You don't want to come on to this post and tell me Mojang "brought it back", because there are some serious asterisks on what the new version does, and implications of removing Customized in some modern versions has, and what features I think are still missing in the replacement version. Plus, the "buffet" world type was a fucking insult.
Customized in 2017 was an absolute boon of full release Minecraft players. It was a wonder of the modern MC world, a thing to make even old versions like Beta - modded or unmodded - a little jealous. Just having Customized available in addition to all the stuff with command blocks and automatic functions was enough to justify playing Minecraft 1.11. And I have PROBLEMS with Minecraft 1.11. It was easy to deploy and write, the sliders though unexplained were documented surprisingly well on the right wiki, and there was an entire community on a website exclusively for Superflat and this world type. I even contributed one of mine to the website that got featured by fucking ANTVENOM. Yeah I can't believe it either. It was called The Low Heights and it's accessible here. It was 2016 and back then FR was so sturdy compared to now that surprisingly, I still really liked it at the time.
Now we need to talk about ore distribution and lava worlds.
I'm not joking when I say that lava oceans and cheaty ore settings are probably the biggest casualties of The Update Aquatic hiatus BS and "Json Mode". It ties right back into making CTM maps. The map in the screenshots you see above were absolutely POWERED by the inclusion of 1) the ability to change or remove ores, 2) the ability to make the whole world a "single biome" and 3) lava oceans. It even makes the job really easy because it reduces the amount of time you have to spend in MCedit reshaping the areas that your players are supposed to spend the most time in. Before Mojang removed the fucking world type for god knows how long, it was more viable than ever to pragmatically construct BOUNDARY-LESS COMPLETE THE MONUMENT SURVIVAL MAPS. Think about this. If you can make all oceans and islands lava-based and hostile, and you can stop players from having access to iron and diamond ore, you don't have to write in the rules that a player's playthrough is invalid if they got out of bounds. Because then there ARE no bounds, the whole world is either edited by you manually or a wasteland that won't let you grind and cheat. If Customized is back now, I'm pretty sure it's not still good enough to fix this. This is the second problem of three. The first is that they even removed it from the game in the first place, and the third is that adding it back in a version after 1.14 is too late - I no longer like the version of the game.
In 2019 I was waiting forever for some hint of Mojang bringing the world type back, just some message, something saying "hey yeah we'll bring it back soon and it'll be fine" but nothing happened. And then one day they "brought it back", in the most "we did it Patrick, we saved the city" display Mojang has ever done in my experience.
On the forgotten day one year that I checked out the NEW Customized, this is what I found:
Independent X and Z noise stretching was gone, so you couldn't make long mountains anymore. That's stupid, what if you want to make a mountain that's 7 blocks thick and 50 blocks wide?
The interface in the game itself was gone, so you had to learn a suffocatingly complicated json format to type in.
The lava world I tried to make was glitched out and really dark.
I seem to recall not being able to change ores.
If you're thinking now that you have to tell me these issues were fixed in Minecraft 1.22.420_069, it doesn't matter. Like I said, it's too late. Because if a version from 1.15 and beyond fixed these issues, it's not a version that's fun and well-designed enough (for my purposes as one player) for me to give a shit about playing - I just don't think the up to date release is good anymore, and I already lost my motivation to build custom maps five years ago. I could have just kept the CTM on 1.12, and tried to finish it as a map that people should open on 1.12, but I was trying and failing to make my lesser-promising custom map projects work for years since The Message, and watching your map become pushed out of compatibility with the latest version of the game during development is really soul-crushing. It is rather unlikely that the lava CTM would have been finished and successful, but at least in that other timeline I wasn't FORCED to lose one of the best things about it.
