Player questions

This page seeks to answer the questions most often asked by players, in regards to technical questions or why certain changes have been made.

Technical questions

Why aren't the portals working?

• In 1.18.2 and above, because of significant back-end changes to Minecraft after 1.16.5, the decision was made to use the time to start overhauling mobs, bosses, and dimensions to bring them up to modern standards one at a time. This means that in the meantime, those dimensions/mobs/bosses are not in the mod, and are not accessible until they have been revamped.
• The current priority is the latest version of Minecraft, any versions after 1.16.5 and before the latest Minecraft version will not receive further support.
• Read this section for more details on why the mod is being developed this way.

Playing in LAN/Aternos/Essential/etc. is causing issues

LAN, or any other similar server-hosting software has been known to cause issues with not just Advent of Ascension, but mods in general. The exact reasons for this are currently unknown, but it is generally recommended for players to host their own server when playing with this mod. While the issues seem to be most prevalent in 1.16 and under, there have been reports of issues seen in recent versions like 1.19.4 as well.

"Skills have been disabled by the server owner"

This is the result of the disableSkills Configuration option being set to true. It is supposed to be set to false by default, but LAN and server hosters like Aternos, Essential, etc. seem to mess with the configuration for unknown reasons. This can be fixed by changing the option back to false in the server config.

Changes/Removals

Key concepts

Bloat

Bloat is the concept of having too much content. It is more or less the noun version of "quantity over quality".

Too much content poses a problem as all content takes development time to design, implement, and maintain. It also becomes harder to ensure that content is mostly unique, as new content ends up competing with other new content for roles. These factors result in adding too much content directly leading to a decrease in quality. If content is added just for the sake of having content, these problems will almost certainly show up.

Of course, this doesn't mean it's impossible to have large amounts of content (although there's a limit somewhere). It just takes time to design and improve content, which affects the enjoyment of most players, especially those who prefer content with substance.

The push away from the Overworld

Perhaps the foremost example of bloat was AoA's overworld. The amount of mobs added to the overworld almost reached the triple digits at one point, while AoA dimensions never had any more than 15 at most. These mobs were not exactly of the highest quality, either - the models were often criticized, and they often lacked useful drops or unique AI. This likely correlates with the aforementioned bloat issues.

AoA is a dimension mod, not an overworld mod. It centers around the 20+ dimensions that it's supposed to add, not vanilla dimensions. (Some may have first seen it in a modpack and came to think of it as an overworld mod, but that's not the correct way to view it.) As a result, it didn't make sense to have so much content in the overworld. This isn't to say that the overworld can't have some content, but rather that it shouldn't dwarf whatever the dimensions have.

This was not limited to just mobs. For example, AoA used to add more overworld ores used as tool materials, but some of them were removed, partly due to having so many ores in the overworld also making no sense. (The other factor was that balancing tools around vanilla overworld tools without overtaking nether equipment didn't really work, causing redundancy with multiple tools at or next to Diamond level.)

Many realmstones were also obtained from the overworld in the past, to the point where most of them came from there as opposed to other dimensions. This was an attempt by the original developer to make content more accessible to players, as they were less likely to experience dimensions that required visiting other dimensions to access. However, this has been dropped in favor of reworking the dimensions to greatly increase their quality, which should also solve the issue of players losing interest.

Why does the mod have a smaller amount of skills?

• With the exception of Anima and Creation, all former skill content is present, it is just no longer tied to a skill.
• In 1.16.5, the 5 skills added only represent half of the planned skills. 5 more new skills were going to be added, but were unable to at the time due to a developmental shift that established the smaller updates that slowly re-add content in a reworked form. These 5 skills are still planned.
  • As of 1.20.4, 6 of the 10 skills are trainable.

Why are bosses in Nowhere?

• While the boss fights themselves take place in Nowhere, this does not change what dimensions they are connected to. Smash is still considered an Overworld boss as his boss token item is accessible in the Overworld.
  • The existence of the Nowhere Disabled Boss Lobby also means a boss' point in progression does not require the player to get the Nowhere Realmstone. I.E. The player does not need to jump through an extra amount of hoops to access a boss. They just need the boss token item for the respective boss.
• The reason boss fights were moved to Nowhere is that Minecraft, as a sandbox game, makes it incredibly easy to defeat a boss in 'cheap' ways with blocks or other sandbox items (Boats, etc.), along with boss fights in open sandbox environments creating other issues.
  • Attempting to design a boss to counter block-placing methods - like allowing them to destroy blocks or go through them would be a developmental sink. More time would be spent developing on how it can counter cheap methods over developing it as an actual boss fight. Developing every boss to counter every same cheap method would also cause every boss to act similarly to each other.
    • E.G. Allowing every boss to destroy a massive amount of blocks would only homogenize all of them to that same block destroying characteristic, cause frustration for players via the terrain destruction, and would be rendered a useless endeavor by the usage of Obsidian or other hard blocks. Attempting to escalate this by countering harder blocks only adds more developmental sink.
  • The environments of various dimensions would also serve to impede boss gameplay; other hostile mobs interfering, flying bosses flying too far out of reach, bosses falling in holes or other pitfalls like the void, boss drops getting destroyed, etc. It was often seen as necessary to spend time building walls or heavily modifying the environment around the boss spawner.
• Out of a desire to have developmental time spent on the actual design of a boss, along with having boss fights that could not be exploited/hindered by Minecraft's sandbox aspects, it was decided to "remove" the sandbox element with bosses being in Nowhere.

Why don't bosses have their own unique arenas?

• This would require waiting for each arena to be a built each time a boss is added/re-added, which would cause possible delays if someone was not available to build it.
• This was also a design choice done for variety and as a compromise:
  • The idea is that if the boss was mechanically sound, it wouldn't really need its own arena.
  • Unique arenas would require a lot of commitment, which is outside scale when development is already focused on many other things, so having a pool of random arenas was also done as a compromise.

Why were events removed?

Overworld events were removed for both gameplay and technical reasons:

• Initially, Overworld events were used to gate certain items, mostly realmstones. However, this created an issue where the items were "timegated" and players could do nothing to get them outside of wait for the event to randomly start.
  • In 3.2, these items were moved away from events, but without any useful rewards, there was no real reason to have events. This also made events pointless for players who didn't care to fight random mobs that looked different. Those who did still had to wait for the event to randomly start.
  • Items to manually start events were also deemed infeasible due to the multiplayer implications.
• Events were a major source of Overworld bloat. Over a quarter of all overworld mobs came from events.
  • All AoA mobs had noted quality issues (including simplistic AI and models), and those from events were no exception. With events in particular, half of them were recolors or variations of each other or existing mobs. As a result, there was ultimately not much to them aside from their different appearance. Fixing events would have required that a large amount of time was spent on redesigning and improving all of the event mobs, which would take even more time from the dimensions.
  • The removal of events is a part of a larger developmental push for content to be diverted to the mod's dimensions instead of the Overworld.
• Minecraft handles spawning by attempting to spawn all mobs randomly, even if they cannot spawn due to factors such as light level. Event mobs were not an exception to this, meaning that they would also constantly attempt to spawn, despite failing most of the time. As the game only attempts a certain amount of spawns at a time, this affected the spawn rate of all mobs, regardless of whether events were active or not. The sheer amount of event mobs made this an issue.

Given all these, the developer decided not to bother with Overworld events.

Why were Ancient Cavern & Immortallis removed?

• These two dimensions were particularly reliant on Tribute and the four gods. However, these thematic elements had their own issues, as described in their sections here. Without them, there was not much to the dimensions, so there was not much point to keeping them in their current state.
• For technical reasons, the developer preferred to have one structure dimension instead of two.
• Both dimensions have been succeeded by Nowhere, which seeks to expand upon the concepts originally presented with the structure dimensions. In the latest versions, it is the center for all the mod's boss fights, making it a successor of sorts to the Ancient Cavern. There is also a planned dungeon section, which would be the successor to Immortallis. However, this is on hold until some dimensions are added.

Nowhere is just a single room! How can it be a good replacement?

Nowhere has more than just a single room.

Nowhere was initially going to be fully added in 1.16.5, starting with the addition of the hub room. At this point, it could be accessed in survival and seen in the realmstone GUI. The portals in the room didn't do anything as the rest of the dimension had yet to be implemented.

However, a sudden developmental shift occurred, leading to 1.16.5 no longer receiving content. Therefore, although the hub existed, the rest of Nowhere was delayed to later versions. Unfortunately, partly due to a lack of communication about future plans for Nowhere, some players thought that this room was all there was to the dimension. This caused complaints that Nowhere, as a single room, was not a good replacement for the structure dimensions.

In current versions, three of the portals have been made functional (the dungeon is still on hold). To rectify the communication issue, Nowhere itself was made inaccessible and removed from the realmstone GUI in the latest versions for 1.16.5.

Why was Tribute removed?

• One of the defining characteristics of Tribute - building up Tribute during the day to gain a potion effect at night, was relegated to the Overworld. As mentioned earlier, this is part of the larger developmental push for content to be diverted to the mod's dimensions.
• Tribute was hard to balance around.
  • In the dimensions, where Tribute gave a persistent passive potion effect, it was proven hard to balance around these tribute effects. If a dimension was not balanced around its potion effect, then the difficulty was compromised. However, if the dimension was balanced around it, then the effect was just a pointless formality.
  • The actions required to earn points were often arbitrary, and the fact that they differed so much created situations where some gods were easier to please than others. This made balancing the effects even harder.
• At its core, Tribute as a system was another avenue to obtain potion effects that can already be obtained in other places, making it viewed as a redundant, impractical alternative to gaining potion effects and their effectiveness.
  • Just making potions directly is usually much more convenient and effective than relying on tribute effects.
• The thematic elements tied to Tribute have been criticized for being barebones and only served to generate a false idea that there was more to it, when there wasn't. There is a lack of interest in expanding upon these old thematic elements.

The four gods

Earlier AoA versions had minimal lore, most of which revolved around the four gods. Even though the current lore is still far from complete, there is still more now than there was back then.

In addition to this lore, some effort was made towards directly integrating them with gameplay through tribute and the structure dimensions. However, as explained in their sections, this content lacked substance or proved hard to work with, so it was either scrapped or moved away from the four gods.

As for the gods themselves, there was not much to them besides a name, a color, a potion effect, a concept that they represented, and a set of dimensions assigned to them.

• The tribute-reliant dimensions did not add much to this aside from a set of bosses. Immortallis doesn't count for much as the actions there were similar to the existing Overworld tribute actions.
• Most elements tied to the four gods - such as essences, tribute, the overworld night messages, the natures of the structure dimensions, and those of the gods themselves - were vaguely, if at all, defined, leaving too much to the player's imagination. This created a situation where some players would think that the concept had more substance than it actually did.

While the mod has some incomplete background lore, the developer found it hard to work with multiple gods. As a result, he opted to just use Krasaun as a single god and left the other four gods out.

The four gods are unlikely to return in the future. If they do, their return will be organic and not due to demand. They would also almost certainly remain exclusive to the lore as directly involving them in gameplay did not work well.

Development

Developmental shift

Up to a certain point, releases were large themed updates that overhauled a large amount of content (such as loot, mod compatibility, or skills) at once while staying on whatever Minecraft version was popular at the time. However, in the middle of the skill update, this process stopped working for multiple reasons:

• With some exceptions, earlier versions were mostly code rewrites, bugfixes, and direct ports that didn't require many new assets (outside of resprites done at a relaxed pace). However, the skill update and subsequent ones would require large amounts of new assets, which would in turn require more stringent planning with other staff. The fact that anything could change between Minecraft versions made this planning harder and put mental pressure on the staff.
  • Planning was also made more difficult by the fact that all areas of content were intertwined. For example, it's difficult to touch skills without adding new items and changing various systems.
  • The fact that updates were so large caused a psychological issue where staff would feel pressured to do large amounts of work for a single update, while simultaneously worrying about when, or if, the updates would come out.
• Extensive backend changes in 1.16.5+ versions required many changes to the mod.
  • Perhaps the most important change was that all dimensions and mobs with older models (the vast majority) had to be redone in order to work in those versions. The previous models - due to being quite old and made with old software, could not render properly in versions past 1.16.5.
    • Additionally, the old models were also considered low quality, remaking them as they were was deemed a waste of time (as they would have to be remade again later). However, it was not possible to create the sheer amount of code and assets required to release a version on 1.18.2+ with all of this non-reworked content present.
  • Aside from this, these changes made planning even more difficult, as it is impossible to plan around new content and extensive rewrites for multiple updates at once.
  • Various factors resulted in the decline of "stable" modded Minecraft versions. This meant that staying on 1.16.5 would not only stop AoA from using new features in new updates, but also greatly reduce the amount of potential players in the future.

The resulting psychological burnout caused AoA development to slow significantly, to the point where it almost halted. As a result, the developer changed the process in order to provide relief from these issues.

Staples of the new update process:

• The dimensions and mobs that didn't work on newer versions were left out. If they are deemed as content worth adding, they will be added back to the mod as they are reworked.
• The newest version of Minecraft is now the only version that receives content updates. It is simply not feasible to manage content updates for multiple versions at once, especially if the content relies on a feature only present in the newer Minecraft version. This allows for planning to account for all of the latest changes, so that less time is spent worrying about potential rewrites.
  • This means that porting occurs immediately after the release of a new Minecraft version. While this took large amounts of time in the past, it is much faster for the reason that most time was spent redoing old features that stopped working with newer versions, along with internal changes made to the mod and modloader.
• Updates are more frequent. Instead of keeping changes stored up for a large release, they now just come as content is reworked. Of course, this means that updates aren't nearly as large as they were. However, this also makes development more relaxed, as there is no more pressure from large releases.

As of June 2023, work on the Overworld, Nether, and Precasia has mostly completed, though they can still receive new content.

When will the mod be 'finished' re-adding all the missing content?

It's not an easy question to answer. The aforementioned developmental shift, the more barren state of the early reworked versions (~1.18.2-1.19) obligating old warnings in places like the Curseforge page, and predispositions to how the mod (and other games/mods in general) was developed in the past, have created the perception that the mod is in an 'incomplete/unstable' state getting all content from 1.16.5 re-added in a changed state, when this isn't true in traditional ways.

• While it is true that 're-implementing' desired dimensions and mobs is a goal, it is moreso being treated as a stable mod adding to itself as it goes - adding new content inspired by the content in 1.16.5.
  • Due to the sheer amount of differences reworked content has from 1.16.5 counterparts, treating 1.16.5 content as a concrete checklist of what's missing isn't the right way to look at it. Anything about a piece of content can change - what it looks like, how it acts, where it is, its theme, what it's called, if it will stay around, or anything else to the point where it's effectively new content inspired by pre-rework versions of the mod.
    • It is infeasible to presume the mod will have all the exact same content as 1.16.5.
  • Content is reworked from the ground up. For the most part, when content is reworked, it is treated as a completely blank slate that is then added to with no remnants of old assets.
  • Completely new content with no conceptual connections to old content has already been added.
• As of 1.20.4 and beyond, the mod is in a stable, survival-ready state.
• In general, viewing the mod as only being in a 'complete' or 'incomplete' state isn't correct - AoA has never been complete. 1.16.5 is not the 'finished' version of the mod, it is just the last version before the development shift forced a different approach to adding content.
• As mentioned before, this approach to development is also being done for the sake of developer health and alleviating burnout.
• The front page of the wiki will be used to display what 1.16.5 dimensions are currently in the "reworked" version of the mod, along with their completion status.
  • Note that dimensions labelled 'complete' can still have content added in a future update.

Why doesn't the mod stick to one version of Minecraft?

• As it stands, there is no reason to assume that a Minecraft version will outlast the next versions in terms of modding popularity. This, along with the modern relative ease of porting, results in currently no obligation to stick to a version.
  • Sticking to one version will only result in more difficult porting as the current version gets farther. It is also unknown in how long community support for an older version will last. All "popular" versions have eventually dwindled in popularity.
• Modern updates especially have been introducing desirable technical changes that would benefit the mod overall, along with other content the mod can utilize.

Other

Something on the wiki does not match what is ingame

• If a recipe, mob model, etc. on the wiki does not match what is ingame, this is because you are on a version the wiki does not support, or you are on 1.16 looking at information made around the 1.18.2+ versions.
• As it stands, the wiki is mostly made up of information pertaining to the latest 1.16 version of the mod, and information for the reworking 1.18.2+ versions of the mod (focused on the latest version of Minecraft).
  • Changes/additions in the 'reworked' versions will take priority over everything else. While 1.16 information will stay around, changes for the reworked versions will take priority.
• If you need information for an older version of the mod, you can use the 'history' section of a page and view an older version of it from there.

Why doesn't the wiki wait until the mod is finished reworking itself?

• Due to the very small editor team, it is unreasonable to wait until the mod is 'finished' and therefore be swamped with having to update the wiki with an unfathomably large amounts of edits.
  • Sometimes, official changelogs will miss changes. It's easy to spot these undocumented changes when it's one update at a time.
• 1.16.5 won't be treated as a supported version forever. Even once the versions past that only have a few dimensions, they will still be more than survival-ready from a practical standpoint. I.E. It is pointless to keep the wiki in a version that will soon be considered outdated.