The ancient city currently generates less frequent sculk patches inside, compared to the Java counterpart.
How to Reproduce
Find an ancient city and see how many sculk patches there are
Compare them with Java's counterpart
Observed Result
The sculk patches aren't generating frequent enough, compared to Java
Expected Result
The sculk patches generate in the same frequency as Java does
Original Description
The ancient city has no thrill in bedrock because it lacks of sculk, sculk sensor, sculk catalyst, and sculk shrieker. We need more of this like in java edition.
Linked issues
is duplicated by 3
Attachments
Comments 21
has this issue already been resolved or not?
No
Affects 1.19.0.28/29 beta and preview
Affects 1.19.0.30/31 beta and preview
I tried to explore an ancient city and I only found around 2 or 3 shriekers in the entiere city (I played for almsot one hour, only found a few)
Affects 1.19.0.33/32
This issue still appears to be broken, despite its mention in the changelogs for 1.19.0.34 and 1.19.035.
Comparing the sculk patch rule files between Preview 1.19.0.33 (from last week) and Beta 1.19.0.34 (from today) shows no differences, presuming those are the files involving this issue. The files compared are located at:
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.MinecraftWindowsBeta_1.19.33.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\data\behavior_packs\vanilla_1.19.0\features\sculk_patch_feature_ancient_city.json(previous week's preview)
and
C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.MinecraftUWP_1.19.34.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\data\behavior_packs\vanilla_1.19.0\features\sculk_patch_feature_ancient_city.json(new beta from today)
Indeed still seems to affect 1.19.0.35. The center of the city still do not have any sculk patches generating on it, unlike java edition.
[media]
it still lacks of sculk patch shrieker and sculk sensor,🥲
I added screen shots and I explored 3 ancient cities. I also saw a lot of missing sculk patch and sculk shrieker and please add more sculk sensor, I'm still a bit lacking, I feel like it's peaceful when I explore here
TL;DR summary: There could be several causes for the lack of sculk patches. I created two mcaddon workarounds attached to this issue which produce much better results and can be used when creating new worlds (at the cost of losing the ability to gain Achievements) if the "Custom Biome" setting is checkboxed.
This bug is quite a mystery. The Bedrock and Java sculk feature files are functionally identical as of 1.19.10.20. The best I can determine is:
The uniform distribution used by the sculk patch generation may not be quite as uniform as it should be. I tested this by replacing the Y coordinate picker with the line "y": "math.random_integer(-63, 255)" which appears to produce the same lack of sculk as using the built-in uniform distribution curve with an extent of -63, 256.
The sculk generator seems to be starved even though it uses the same number of iterations (256) as Java Edition. When the sculk ceiling was increased from 20 to 256 to fix MCPE-155213 the sculk density decreased greatly. I don't know if internally the iteration count on Bedrock is internally scaled down for mobile device performance reasons, or if Java Edition has an optimization where the heightmap of the Deep Dark biome is used to focus sculk placement to just the inside of the biome, thus creating better density.
Some of the Ancient City structures in Bedrock do not seem to accept sculk growth, like the "tall ruins" structures. Also, some of the structures appear to lack the "extra_growth_chance" enablement tag which is used in the sculk feature definition to produce extra sculk and shriekers around the loot chests.
Ancient Cites sometimes extend outside of the Deep Dark biome and sculk cannot generate outside of the Deep Dark since there is a biome filter for it in the feature file.
To combat the distribution issue, the two mcaddons I created use weighted distribution to focus more of the sculk at Y -55 where it helps the Ancient Cities the most.
[media]uses a windowed Molang hermite blend to do this, while
[media]uses the inverse gaussian curve. There are pros and cons to each approach:
With complete control of the Y function, the Molang version maintains the 256 iteration count so it shouldn't affect mobile devices. The deal breaker is math.random is not deterministic based on the world seed so every time the same world is created, the sculk patches will change.
The inverse gaussian version does not have that problem - world creation will be consistent. However, because a partial window cannot be created with the built-in distribution curves. Instead, I had to use the top of the deep dark biome to clip the part of the curve I didn't want applied. So the number of iterations had to increase to 512 which may affect mobile devices. I myself have a 7 year old Windows 10 box with a Skylake CPU and these changes run fine for me.
So these add-ons will fix the issue for the most part - save for the structures which don't seem to grow sculk on them, nor when the Ancient City is partially outside of the Deep Dark. Those are separate issues from this sculk patch generation bug. I also boosted the "spread_rounds" property to get the sculk shriekers to generate at Java Edition levels (which is a separate issue) from 1 to 2.
Affects 1.19.0 and 1.19.10.22 preview.
Updated my mcaddon workaround (and removed the old ones) to a new implementation
[media]which:
Uses uniform distribution for all three axes (XYZ).
Adds several can_place_sculk_patch_on and can_place_on blocks so city structures are properly infected.
Sets growth_rounds to 1 which fixes the sculk shrieker issues.
Offsets that extra CPU usage by reducing the number of iterations to 249, charge_amount to 27, and halves the spread_attempts to 32.
The sculk_patch_feature_ancient_city.json and sculk_vein_feature.json have also been optimized to further offset the CPU requirements of growth_rounds.
Additional optimization could be achieved if there was a way to customize the shrieker-to-sensor ratio during world generation. However, it appears the 1-to-10 ratio seemed to be hard-coded in C++.
Playtesting this in the Deep Dark and Ancient Cities for the past two days has been a lot of fun. Give it a try.
I didn’t see it in the 1.19.10.24 Preview changelog, so it probably affects 1.19.10.24 Preview.
Updated
[media]slightly (251 iterations instead of 249 and 35 charge instead of 32) to generate sculk patches which more closely resemble Java Edition's by a bit.
Also added two more files from MCPE-153525 which also generate extra sculk and shriekers. These three add-ons generate roughly the same result in different ways (while using the same constrained Y-extent of 128):
uses growth_rounds = 1 and spread_rounds = 1
uses growth_rounds = 0 and spread_rounds = 2 with extra_growth_chance present to generate extra shriekers.
uses growth_rounds = 0 and spread_rounds = 1 with extra_growth_chance present to generate extra shriekers.
All three have different GUIDs so they can be installed at the same time. Only one will be active, however, since they all change the same features (sculk patches, sculk veins, and ancient city sculk patches).
Affects 1.19.10
As of 1.19.20.23, Ancient City has more frequent sculk patches generating on it, however, it is still possible to find places with no sculk patches;
Also, ancient cities still seems to lack a amount of sculk shriekers (MCPE-153525)
Interestingly, the only outwardly visible change to the feature definitions is the fix for MCPE-156669 - namely, allowing sculk patches to generate on more block types. Whether there was an internal change to the sculk patch feature runtime is unknown.
If there wasn't, it's a testimony to how allowing the block check to fail less often helped generate more sculk patches.
However, it still isn't quite up to Java Edition levels yet. If a C++ runtime fix is not in the cards, I still feel reducing the high end of the Y-extent from 256 to somewhere between 128 and 140 (and leaving everything else the same) would greatly help increase the sculk patch density (and shrieker counts) since the Deep Dark biome cannot currently generate that high. In other words, the code is currently wasting CPU cycles on iterations which will always fail the feature's biome check.
I remember this being fixed before, but it's now present again in version 1.20.0
What seed are these new images taken with? On my Windows 10 version of Bedrock sculk patches are still generating as they did when this issue was fixed in 1.90.40 ( ? ). Please keep in mind both Bedrock and Java Edition can generate Ancient Cities with very little sculk in parts of them if the city generates in certain locations where the Deep Dark cannot generate - for example at tall seaside cliffs where the surface height suddenly drops to sea level. The Ancient Cities that are completely underneath tall mountains or high meadows still have sculk patches everywhere due to the Deep Dark biome covering the entire city.
It also affects deep dark biome, there are very few sculk shrieker, which means you can explore them without being sneaky.