Paul Lipinski
Comments
For everyone watching this issue, don't forget to vote it up!
This applies to many generated structures, not just strongholds. Villages will not always be generated where they're supposed to, witch huts, etc.
It seems to be a priority issue. In the world generator, strongholds and other generated structures need to take priority over natural formations like caves, crevaces, etc.
Issues seem to arise where the land cannot support the structure, for example trying to create a village in an extreme hills area. In those cases, tools like Amidst show that the seed wanted to have a structure at a certain location, but apparently the worldgen gave up trying to generate it for one reason or another. The worldgen should perhaps level out the land occupied by the village at a height that's average to the surrounding area and generate it then. These structures are rare enough as it is and don't need to be made more rare by failing to spawn them in unbuildable areas.
Sure we can drop a portal down somewhere, but the whole 'locating with endereyes, discovering the stronghold, navigating to the portal' aspect is lost to all but the first few people who find (and eventually destroy, intentional or not) the original strongholds/portals.
Agreed; they can't be thrown about willy-nilly... but 3 strongholds (provided they generate properly in the first place), especially on larger multiplayer servers, almost guarantees that no one will have access to The End without mods, plugins, MCEdit, etc.
I agree with the infinite stronghold idea, Jens mentioned long ago in a tweet that strongholds would eventually spawn regularly instead of just the 3. That wouldn't damage builds because only new chunks would generate new strongholds.
This bug is listed as fixed in the list of fixed bugs on the launcher screen. What was the final decision by Mojang?
This is still an issue in 1.6.4 and the snapshots for 1.7 as well.