This is a post to brainstorm some ideas about the game and what it could have been. I'll start by listing some old features that I really liked:
As I mentioned in my previous post, isometric screenshots. They just look good.
The old smelting system. It was only in indev version 0.31. You would smelt iron by using flint and steel to ignite a fire in which you would then drop the iron ore onto the fire, producing iron ingots. It was definitely faster and more "atmospheric" than the current way of smelting in my opinioni even though it was simpler.
The saturation of Alpha and below, it makes the simplest places look nice.
The world generation was just way more fun back in beta 1.7
Modern minecraft has tons of biomes but they all look samey, old world gen could make weird looking alcoves and floating islands, it was great.
The problem with world gen is that now it makes these massive holes underground that makes strip mining extremely annoying. You either make a bridge across 100+ blocks of dark cave, or round around said cave lighting it up and looking for ore. It's just exhausting and you don't even get coal while you do it.
It just makes the underground more tedious since you have to dig around anyways. If you could get around without having to dig and build constantly, and just play it kind of like a dungeon crawler, it might have opened an alternative way to find resources. but it's just more walking around an unlit cave, half filled with water, fighting for uiur life to get what looks like diamond from a distqnce but turns out to be somtbing else once you get there. If there was another level below all the holes that was just blocks and ore, that might let both things exist at the same time.
I traveled 10k blocks across the overworld the other day. Rarely even ran into a mountain. Just gradual up and down. Every single biome the same gradual. I realized how much I used to use these generation anomalies as landmarks, and now there are none.
There was something special about the scale too. Obvious seed example"Glacier" really showed off how grand and surreal mountains and outcroppings got in the beta world generator.
Hard agree, when i need to play on modern versions i usually generate a 1.7 world and then transfer it to the new game versions, the terrain inspires me to build in a way modern versions dont.