1.14

1.14 tournament faq:

i'm in a relay tournament with msushi and marlin, where we play versions 1.7, 1.14, and 1.16.  i'm playing 1.14, yippee!!


how does this category work?
tl;dr: obtain ender pearls from cleric villager trades, and get blaze rods/blaze powder from the nether.  get emeralds for leveling cleric from stick trades with a fletcher villager, who trades 1 emerald for 32 sticks.  obtain large amounts of sticks by blowing up sources of wood (acacia village houses or dark oak forest trees) with TNT, which you obtain from desert temples

other details/a rant: this version has a bug where on day 2 and only day 2, villagers will indefinitely restock their trades as opposed to only doing it twice a day.  since you need to do some trades more than twice (especially sticks), this is really important for the route.  this means that this category is pretty cycle locked up until day 2, so on night of day 1, you want to sleep as soon as possible to set this cycle.  on normal seeds this usually works out fairly nicely, on godly seeds (like the ones commonly in this tournament) ive had several practice runs be ahead of this cycle by 3 minutes.  this gives you time to do a few other tasks... but it's not unusual to have to stand around and just wait for day 2.  if you're at a village at 10 minutes with all of your TNT spent in go mode for trading, you've got to wait ~2 minutes for the day 2 trading to begin.

this really sucks for the tournament, imo.  feels like how you play the first 11 minutes matters very little, and the rest of the 15 minutes of the run are really bland besides trading.  dragon perch time is also notably a piece of RNG not standardized in the datapack used for the tournament, and can easily decide races.  in general, unless you majorly fuck up end game you should be finishing every 1.14 run in ~25-30 minutes, and there's really not a lot of room to gain a ton of time to give your team an advantage.  the most likely place for you to die is in the end, which is going to be a massive, massive timeloss that probably ruins your team's chances of winning unless the other team takes a death too.  tl;dr - imo category feels low risk low reward, the only place you should be making a major mistake is massively punishing and cycles normalize strong early games super hard.  end game lacks places to gain a significant edge besides the dragon, which is RNG.  i don't hate the category, but i find it super bland compared to both 1.7 and 1.16, and the skill ceiling feels so much lower.


how do the seeds work?
the seeds are found by some of the organizers, and both teams play the same seeds.  these seeds are only "classic" strats since ocean based strats are the new meta, but they rely on finding villages in end game and if a racer takes a wrong turn and doesn't find a village they cannot finish the run.  therefore, these seeds have the following close to spawn:
- a village, often acacia (necessary for villagers, which the entire route revolves around)
- a desert temple (provides TNT, necessary to acquire a ton of wood quickly)
- a source of wood (most often an acacia village since blowing up the houses gives a ton of logs, but dark oak forests work as well)
- an above ground/easy to see lava pool (nether access)
- a nether that doesn't suck balls (fortresses are generally really close and don't require a ton of bridging across lava)

what does the datapack do?
basically normalizes RNG between runners, and removes a lot of "fuck you, you lose" situations the game can throw at you that cannot be recovered from and cannot be played around at all.  the major changes are:
- cleric pearl trade is guaranteed as opposed to 2/3 (not getting this trade instantly ends the run)
- mobs cannot spawn in desert temples (if a mob spawns in the room in the trapped part of the temple, your TNT explodes and the run is instantly over)
- iron golem guaranteed to drop 4-5 iron (3 iron means you can't make flint and steel which can be a big timeloss for a lowroll.  the difference in 4 and 5 iron isn't very significant (lets you make a shield for blaze farm, pretty much))
- blaze drop rates are adjusted to more or less be 66% (follows a pattern of no drop -> drop -> drop -> no drop -> drop -> drop [...])
- every 5th eye of end breaks, as opposed to 20% chance for every throw

these last two are a really big deal since you get a ton of riskless throws, at absolute worst if you majorly fuck triangulation you should never throw more than 14 eyes which means there's absolutely no reason to get more than 7 rods (unless you need to craft a brewing stand) and leaving villages with 13 pearls is super safe (can afford 9 throws, which should be plenty).  confirming triangulation is super safe.



i'll be doing practice runs of this fairly often since it's fairly laid back and it's nice to be able to finish runs guaranteed as opposed to endless 1.16 resetting.  if i'm in a match i'm not allowed to read chat at all, thanks for gl and stuff.