Noticeably Beta 1.8 is a mod that is based on a version of Minecraft widely thought of as the update that changed the game forever, marking a turn in the road that saw an entire updating video game have no way to go back to how it was in a distinct pre-existing era of its life again. Through extensive modding of Minecraft Beta 1.8, the mod Noticeably Beta 1.8 - or, "NBODE" - has turned the patch into a weird experience that is actually quite comparable to Beta 1.7 and other classical places in Minecraft. In Beta 1.7 and earlier, it's about building and you can't easily outrun monsters or starve. Minecraft Beta in the middle with extra features is ultimately the kind of Minecraft you are going to play if you sign up for this mod, with a few unexpected surprises.

That is what to expect if you play this mod.

If you've never played Minecraft Beta before, picture a more basic version of Minecraft where there are no potions, no enchants, no Ender Dragon, no hunger, most food not stacking, and no concrete goals for endgame offered by the mechanics in the game. Back then, it revolved around building, and the survival aspect was both harder and something made to serve the objective of building stuff. Though Beta 1.8 had abandoned mineshafts to explore and NBODE does add a sort of dungeon to be challenged.

More changes are bound to come later as I foreseeably continue to make new versions of the mod post-release. It's only Alpha 1.0.0 right now. I don't see it as finished.

First Things to Know About Noticeably Beta 1.8 Survival

Quick Note: Movement

There's no "fast run" mechanic. Sprinting easily away from monsters can't be done here and NBODE is also like Beta 1.7 in that way.

Tall Grass

First thing's first, tall grass will not randomly drop seeds for wheat. If you just smash tall grass with your hand or a random item, it'll drop nothing. You can still get wheat from the landscape. You need to hit tall grass with a sword. It'll harvest as tall grass and you can pick it up. At this point, the block can either be used for decoration, burned as a bunch of 5 tall grass to cook one thing in a furnace, or turned into seeds. To turn it into seeds, put it and one sword in the crafting square. You will keep your sword, but the act of turning tall grass into wheat seeds will damage it really fast, so for more seeds it's a good idea to grow them in a farm from what you already have.

Hard Mattress Mode

There is a setting every time you create a new world that lets you choose to make beds 50% more useless. It's a sort of challenge legacy throwback gamemode, and makes the game more difficult. It stops you from being able to skip nighttime in a bed, even though you still "sleep". Turn this on if you want to have the sort of challenge and balancing that you get from Minecraft Alpha survival.

Doors

Doors craft the same way as before in Noticeably Beta 1.8, but you get more of them per craft. Because I see beyond the illusion and am a bloody genius, I have figured out how to do something that no other being on Earth has ever achieved in Minecraft: I made doors behave according to what blocks are touching their hinges. You can break a block below a door and the door won't fall off.


The blocks beside a door, on the other hand, may have some effect on it. Right now the implication of this is how difficult people might have of a time trying to figure out how to place the door at first. The best way to do this is to stand in front of an empty doorway and turn slightly toward the wall, then try to place the door. You can't just look at the ground and right-click anymore, though later on I might work on this enough to make it 100% convenient.

Cobblestone and Concrete

This mod allows you to use two different history place cobblestone textures for building at once. First there is "Cobblestone", which may be the first rock you mine, and then there is "Concrete", a solid block that is crafted from cobblestone and gravel. Both varieties can be turned into slabs and stairs. You can also 1:1 convert cobblestone slabs and stairs to concrete versions of them with gravel crafting recipes, though the recipes are a bit complicated. For example, the slab one is shapeless with two cobblestone slabs and one gravel block.

Stuff in The Hills

If you find a hilly area in Noticeably Beta 1.8, it's a good idea to mine some rooms in it. You don't have to put your base there - not everybody needs to protect their home bases with pre-generated walls the same way, but the underground inside big mountains is actively encouraged by the design of this mod. There's something new in there.

Try Random Stone Recipes

This is just about everything you need to know if you want to kind of go in unaware and get surprised while also getting support to know what manually learning otherwise would drive you crazy. Following the concrete recipe, which as it says up there is one cobblestone and one gravel, you can guess all sorts of new rock building blocks intuitively. Try putting dirt and stone together. Try putting sand and cobblestone together. The idea was to make new stoney blocks without meddling with the design of block type terrain generation underground. Soilstone is plentiful but you don't have to get interrupted in a cave and dig through it.

Hopefully I'll get to submit this mod to a public mod portal soon.