Minecraft - How To Turn Into The Ultimate Exploration Game
Intro
Today I'm going to be showing you how to turn Minecraft into the ultimate exploration game. And what I mean by this is that most of the mods that I'll include in this article make you want to go explore your world and just make it a lot more interesting to do so. I'm also going to be keeping this pretty vanilla-friendly, so most of the mods in here have features that would fit in very well in the vanilla game.
Let's go ahead and get into the article alright.
World generation
For the first section, we're going to be focusing on world gen mods, which are the kinds of mods that generate new biomes or structures in your world, and this is obviously going to give you a huge amount of variety when it comes to places that you can discover.
The first mod I've installed is Bioms of Plenty. Now, for this, you can go with pretty much any World Generation mod you prefer, so if you want all the biomes, you can go with that one, but I just still really think Pounds of Plenty is the best at what it does, so that's the mod I'm building off of.
In addition to bioms of plenty, I've also installed atmospheric. This mod just adds two new biomes to the game, although each biome has like four variants, so it actually has a pretty good number of new biomes. This will work perfectly with other mods, so you will be able to come across both biomes of plenty and atmospheric biomes, and the two of these mods combined are going to give you a massive number of new biomes to discover next.
I've included Valhallcia Structures, which adds a bunch of randomly generated structures to your world, and these come in a pretty wide variety. You can come across abandoned castles or secret caves, and it adds quite a few new blocks to the game. If you can think of a structure in vanilla Minecraft, it probably has a variant with this mod now.
Caves
For this next section, we're going to be focusing on mods that make exploring caves far more interesting, and because at this time, at 1.18, it hasn't been released yet, caves are. Still pretty boring so this is especially important, but hey if you watch this one, 1.18 is out, you can still install these mods, and it'll just be absolutely fantastic in the caves, and anyway, the first cave mod we'll be installing is Young's Better Caves.
This is, in my opinion, easily the best cave generation you can get in this version of Minecraft, and what I mean by this is just the shape of the cave's generation. This gives you literally, like infinitely, more variety than the current vanilla Minecraft and will continually surprise you. In addition to this, we'll be installing Young's better strongholds.
Young's Better Mine Shafts, in case you can't tell, makes some pretty good mods, and both of these mods do exactly what you would expect them to do. Young's better mine shafts expands on Minecraft in pretty much every way possible, adding both giant and far more detailed versions and better strongholds, just completely revamped strongholds, adding far more rooms to explore, and really just making them actually live up to their name.
After that, I've installed the cork mod, and I'm including this in the cave section because cork is quite possibly the biggest mod in this entire list. It adds so many amazing features to the game that unless it's just not available for your version, I can't imagine not playing with this mod installed.
For caves specifically, it adds things like stalagmites and stalactites. Several different cave biomes and even things to come across, such as bigger dungeons and if you want caves similar to the 1.18 update, you can always go with a mod like caves and cliffs. Again, this just comes down to preference.
I'm nearing the end of the cave section, where I've installed artifacts. This adds several dozen new unique items to the game, which can only be found through exploring. Most of these are going to be found underground, in chests, and obviously, this is going to make you spend even more time underground as you try and hunt these things down.
Finally, the last mod we'll be installing for the cave section is dynamic surroundings, and this is another mod that doesn't just affect caves, but it certainly makes a huge difference in them. For example, reverb. It will now be present in caves, which I think it should be in vanilla Minecraft water.
This mod makes more sound than just a little bit of bubbling, which again I think should be in vanilla Minecraft, and many other features that boost both the game's audio and visuals, and this mod is very customizable, so you can change just about any feature you don't like, and for this particular article I decided to disable the ambient audio simply because with all the mods we're going to be installing, we really don't need additional biome sounds.
Other world gen
This one's totally up to you though now the next section is a really short one and this is just mods that add new generations to kind of their own areas, the first of which is Upgrade Aquatic, and this mod adds several new creatures to the water in your worlds along with quite a few new blocks.
I'll give you a warning now: one of the creatures from this mod is absolutely terrifying. The other mod we'll be installing is Better End, and this mod completely changes the end to the point that it is pretty much unrecognizable. And this is one of the mods I'm including that isn't that vanilla-friendly, so if you don't want to install it because it changes so much, you certainly don't have to next.
Mobs
We'll be moving on to the mobs section, and as you would probably guess, we're going to be adding a lot of creatures right here. The first mod we'll be installing for this section is Alex's Mobs. This mod is the mo creatures of modern Minecraft. It adds dozens of new mobs to the game, and all of them have something unique about them, whether that's something they drop or an ability they have.
There's something about all of these mobs that makes them unique. After that, I've included Mousey's Mobs, and this mod adds some of the coolest creatures of any mod available, and most of them are going to provide you with some pretty difficult fights. The designs of these creatures do stray a little bit from vanilla Minecraft, but honestly, they just look so good and are so much fun to fight against that I'm easily willing to overlook that.
Next we have the mod that potentially adds the most difficult creatures to the game on this entire list, and that is mutant beasts, formerly. Known as mutant creatures, this mod was so ahead of its time back in the day. Keep in mind though, in order for the mutant beasts to spawn inside of your world, you're going to have to enable that in the config of this mod.
