I agree with the above comments. Varying the direction would be a great improvement in my opinion. Two ways I see that this could be achieved, are either (a) per cave if each cave can be instanced as such (not sure that the big regions are), or (b) by sampling super low frequency noise at each, to decide the direction.
The way I would personally implement the noise-based approach, would be to use a simplex based domain warping noise function which outputs a vector2 of bounded magnitude (this is available in some MIT licensed libraries), and use a low frequency instance of that to decide the direction of each stalactite. You could also use two independent ordinary noise instances for nearly as clean of an effect, or other techniques involving noise derivatives. In all 3 of these, there will be mostly places where the directions change slowly and are pointed at angles, and some where they're pointed more straight down. Since the caves already have areas with stalactites and areas without, you could just make it so that the areas that they would point straight down, are just the areas without them.
If there is one thing I would really like to see Minecraft work more to avoid and improve, both in existing features and new features, it's directional bias. This particular instance of it looks straightforward to address.
K JPG
I agree with the above comments. Varying the direction would be a great improvement in my opinion. Two ways I see that this could be achieved, are either (a) per cave if each cave can be instanced as such (not sure that the big regions are), or (b) by sampling super low frequency noise at each, to decide the direction.
The way I would personally implement the noise-based approach, would be to use a simplex based domain warping noise function which outputs a vector2 of bounded magnitude (this is available in some MIT licensed libraries), and use a low frequency instance of that to decide the direction of each stalactite. You could also use two independent ordinary noise instances for nearly as clean of an effect, or other techniques involving noise derivatives. In all 3 of these, there will be mostly places where the directions change slowly and are pointed at angles, and some where they're pointed more straight down. Since the caves already have areas with stalactites and areas without, you could just make it so that the areas that they would point straight down, are just the areas without them.
If there is one thing I would really like to see Minecraft work more to avoid and improve, both in existing features and new features, it's directional bias. This particular instance of it looks straightforward to address.