Using the Monolith Finder Tool
So, first you'll need the monolith finder tool: https://kahomayo.github.io/monolith-renderer/
As soon as you pull up the website, you'll see this huge map with a random seed loaded up. As the site description states,
Now, it's not kidding about that rough water and land correlation. If you pull up the seed of a world you're already playing, this map will be totally unfamiliar to you. The green and blue blobs likely won't be accurate at all to the actual terrain of your world, but the monoliths will be, and that's all we care about.The map displays how Minecraft version inf-20100611 to a1.1.2_01 generated terrain. Blue and green areas correspond roughly to water and land. Monoliths are displayed in bright red.
Finding your World Seed
All you need to find monoliths in a world you already have is to paste your world seed in the box and click show seed. But in these versions of the game, the option to create your own seed or see it didn't yet exist. To get your world seed, you will need an NBT editor. I use NBTexplorer. It's free and quick to download, and you can find installations for Windows and Mac here: https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/m ... ws-and-mac
Once you've got the NBT editor booted up, you'll need to open your level.dat file. So click open, and navigate to your world save folder. Inside at the bottom should be your level.dat file. This file stores a ton of important stuff info about the player and your world. It also stores your world seed. Copy it, and paste it into the monolith finder tool.
Locating Monoliths
After poking around a bit, you might find some red blobs on the map visualizer, which is where the monoliths are. You just need to take note of the coordinates, which can be done by zooming in right on the red spots, and then travel there in your world. But here's another issue. These versions don't have coordinates in the F3 screen. To find them, you can use this mod: https://modrinth.com/mod/coordinates-(old-mc)
This will work for most versions between Infdev 20100618 and Alpha 1.1.2_01. This'll make exploring your world and finding those monoliths a breeze. It's a jar mod, so just add to the minecraft.jar using a third party launcher like Betacraft, MultiMC, or Prism. But, if you don't want to download the mod, or you can't, or you're playing an earlier version of Infdev, you can still find your coordinates using the NBT editor. It'll just be a bit harder.
When you open your level.dat file, which should not be opened when your world is running, by the way, it'll display the player's coordinates at the last log off location. So, it follows that if you keep opening your world, moving around, closing it and then checking your coordinates with the NBT editor, you should be able to get your bearings. Maybe use signs to mark which is where.
This is how I did it because I liked the idea of coordinates being obfuscated in my world, but my monolith was less than 2 thousand blocks away so I was able to just find my world center and kind of aim in its general direction. You might not be that lucky, so I really would just recommend getting the mod, even if it's temporary.
Generating Monoliths in an Existing World
Now, let's say you've checked your world seed, but you can't find any monoliths, or any ones you do find are a hundred thousand blocks away. What do you do? You could teleport yourself to these locations by changing the player's coordinates in the NBT editor, but that's impractical. You could change your world spawn coordinates to be near the monoliths, but you may not want to do that in an existing save if your base is far away. You have two other options. You can generate a new seed, or you can change the seed of your existing world to the seed of a world with monoliths close by.
As long as you haven't loaded any chunks where the monoliths will generate, once the seed is changed in the level.dat file, the game will start generating new terrain when you explore new chunks. That means you can get monoliths to generate in your world. There will be a sharp boundary between old and new chunks, so be aware of this. Before you change your seed you might want to load some more chunks around your base or something so the terrain isn't interrupted.
If you HAVE previously generated those chunks in your world, the monoliths will not generate over existing terrain. You CAN delete the region files to remove those chunks from existence, but be very careful. You don't want to accidently remove your base or something else important. I would not recommend doing this, but if you know what you're doing, then you should be alright.
Using the monolith finder tool, you can randomly generate brand new seeds. And you can keep doing this until you see one with some red spots near the center of the world. If that's the one you want, copy that seed, and paste it over your previous seed in the NBT editor. It is worth backing up your world before you do this, by the way. Click save, close the editor, and you're good. You can open your world and start exploring using the methods discussed previously.
Generating a New World with Monoliths
The last thing I'm going to tell you how to do is how you can create a brand new world with monoliths. As I said before, you can't pick your seed in these versions within the game, but there is a way around this. If you've got a seed with monoliths pre-selected, all you have to do is create a new world, save, and exit. Then open that world's level.dat file in the NBT editor, change the seed to the new one, save, and exit. Then open the save file itself, and delete all region folders. This means everything except level.dat, level.dat_old, and session.lock. This will delete all the chunks in your world and allow the new ones from the seed to generate instead.
When you log back on, your player will still have the previous position, so you could end up stuck in the mountain or floating over a cliff. If you die, you'll respawn like normal so don't worry about it. You can change your world spawn in the NBT editor if you really want to. Now that you've got your brand new world, you can find your monoliths using the methods I've discussed.
Generating Monoliths in a Newer Version
If you want monoliths in a version newer than Alpha 1.1.2_01, just generate them in these older versions first, explore all the chunks containing the monoliths, and then update the world accordingly.
Please note: If you want to update your world all the way to the current version, you will need to load your save in these versions first:
- Release 1.1 (converts it to McRegion format)
- Release 1.17.1 (converts it to Anvil format)
- Release 1.21.1 (brings it up to speed with the extended chunk format/chunk blending)
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And, I believe that's everything! Hopefully you found this helpful. Please leave a comment if you have questions
