World Reset Decision

Phil will be making the world reset decision soon. If he does end up resetting the map, we'll be doing the following things:

1) Phil will provide everyone with a download of the most recent uncorrupt backup of the world. You'll be able to move this to your single player world folder and return to it, if you want to preserve your projects.

2) Everyone will be given ample time to preserve their items prior to the map reset. If we go with resetting, you'll probably want to start tearing down your more resource-intensive structures (mine cart tracks, dyed wool, etc.). Any changes you make now likely won't be included in the provided Single player save file, anyway. Only player inventories (not chests) can be preserved, so choose what you want to carry over wisely. I'd recommend placing a priority on items which are finite in a given area of explored land (Diamonds, Gold, Iron, Redstone, Lapis Lazuli, Roses, Dandelions, and anything which use those as ingredients). If you have room leftover you could bring things like mob drops and wood, but remember that these are potentially infinite for a finite area of the map. If you're running out of space remember that 9 diamonds/iron/gold/lapis lazuli can be combined and stacked as blocks up to 64 (allowing up to 576 of a single resource in one inventory slot).

3) Some of the benefits to resetting the map include the following:

a) Terrain generation has been wonky since the biome update; if you look at the map now you'll see some messed-up looking square chunks all over the map. Mojang has acknowledged this as a bug and the fix might actually be in before Phil completes the reset. If the fix isn't in, there's a server mod we could use temporarily to keep all terrain generation smooth.

b) Everything within about 1200 blocks from the old spawn point was generated prior to the biome update. As such, there is no tundra, desert, forest, or anything beyond the vanilla Minecraft Alpha farmland for quite a distance from the spawn, which is unfortunate, because the spawn area is where most building occurs. By generating a new map we will get biomes immediately, as well as the new tree types added in the last update.

c) We can play around with world generation a little bit to get a cool looking, serviceable spawn point.