Under the hood, BTA is very different from vanilla beta 1.7.3. The majority of existing bugs have been ironed out and fixed, and almost the entire game has been rewritten and optimised to make the development of new additions much, much easier. For example, the game’s implementation of McRegion has been rewritten to allow for 256 block-high worlds, the game now has native support for HD texture packs, and the block ID system has been overhauled to allow for thousands of blocks, instead of beta 1.7.3’s hard-limit of 256.

BTA offers a plethora of new features and mechanics. The biggest of which is probably the new “seasonal cycle”.

Seasons

Minecraft worlds now cycle through 4 seasons, over a span of 28 days (7 days per season). These seasons provide an interesting spin on survival gameplay; as the seasons change and winter begins to fall, the game will become progressively more challenging. Crops start to grow less often, mobs spawn more frequently, and the nights will become longer. It is important you plan around the changing seasons, stocking up on resources to survive the cold winter

Revamped Beta World Generation

The iconic beta world generation has also been given a major touch-up in BTA. First and foremost, the sea-level has been risen to 128, which means 128 blocks of underground, and 128 blocks of overworld. This also means mountains can grow to twice the size they could than before, leading to even wackier terrain than normal.

Biomes have been changed too, they now generate at around twice the size they used to, meaning no more ugly micro-deserts. Existing biomes have also been touched up to make them more unique, for example, swamplands now spawn with fields of algae and mossy trees, and seasonal forests spawn groves of cherry trees that shine a bright pink in the spring.

We also added 3 new biomes as well, the meadow, a flat plains with heaps of flowers, the boreal forest, a warm taiga with giant spruce trees, and the outback, a scorched red desert with groves of Eucalyptus trees and spinifex bushes!

Creative Mode

One thing that beta 1.7.3 and below did lack was a functioning creative mode where you can test out contraptions and plan builds in a world with infinite blocks and health. This has been added to BTA, however its not just a simple port of beta 1.8’s creative mode. We thought we’d try and improve on it by adding better flying controls, a more readable creative inventory, and a list of single player commands.

New Blocks

3 new types of stone with brick and cobbled variants (Basalt, Granite and Limestone), painted wooden planks in 16 different dye colours, dirt paths, fence gates, new slab and stair variants for existing blocks, coloured Redstone lamps and many, many more blocks to expand your building capabilities with. As well as that, BTA also adds new blocks for Redstone contraptions, such as retractable ‘spike traps’ that damage mobs when stepped on, ‘motion sensors’ that activate when mobs move past them, and ‘mesh blocks’ that allow items to pass through them, yet block off mobs and players.

Steel

Exploring the nether now has a purpose with the addition of steel, a refined form of iron, made from smelting iron bars in a blast furnace with a new nether-exclusive ore called “nether coal” that offers extremely high durability tools at the cost of being slightly slower at mining than diamond. It can also be used to make a rocket launcher???!!

The Guidebook

Because we understand that sometimes recipes can be difficult to discover, especially in modded games, we decided to add a “guidebook” accessed by pressing R in-game that tells you each of the recipes found in the game. However, this book works a little differently to how you’d expect…

The book starts with all the items blacked out, filling out each item once obtained by the player to maintain the sense of discovery for those who enjoy finding things out for themselves. It also offers as a completion objective for players who wish to fill out the book completely and “craft ‘em all”. (But alternatively if you just want to see the new recipes for yourself, try opening the book in creative)

A: Welcome! Better than Adventure is a mod for Minecraft Beta 1.7.3. It was originally intended to add a few new features for a personalised experience, but has since grown into a full-fledged fork of Minecraft, adding dozens of new features for players to enjoy. Our philosophy is to add new gameplay that enhances and improves on the existing aspects of the game, without drastically changing the core experience. The question we like to ask ourselves is, "Would Mojang have added this to the vanilla game back in 2011?" If the answer is yes, it's probably a good candidate for BTA

A: The recommended method of playing BTA is via our handy MultiMC update utility, which you can find here!

To install the utility, simply drag and drop that link onto your MultiMC instance list, then run it. It'll generate a managed instance of BTA, which you can then run to launch the mod. The neat part is, whenever the mod releases a new update you can just run the update utility again and it'll automatically upgrade your managed instance to the latest version! No more messing around with jar files, and all your saves, screenshots and settings will be in exactly the same place

A: Lots of things! We've added so much new stuff to this mod that it's honestly impossible to keep track of it all. A good place to start if you want to know everything is our Wiki.

However, an experience we find a lot of people seem to enjoy is just going in blind and discovering new stuff as you play. We're always happy to answer any questions you might have on our Discord server, so feel free to join and ask!

There's also a recipe book called the Guidebook built into the game, which is bound to R by default. Recipes start blacked out, but progressively reveal themselves as you discover the items that comprise them. Don't be afraid to experiment!

A: The lead developer, founder, and benevolent dictator of BTA is Mak, aka @Mak#7981 over on Discord.

There's also, @jonkadelic#4422 - My handy co-developer.

Our overall organisation structure is pretty informal. We also have a few contributors who chip in with help and technical expertise and are very much appreciated.

A: Thanks for the interest! There's a few ways you can help with BTA: firstly, if you're a programmer, feel free to ask us about becoming a contributor on our Discord, as we're always eager to get new people with different abilities and skillsets involved with development. Just be aware that the standards expected are pretty high, so we'll need to see some evidence of your ability before giving you access.

Secondly, if you're a texture artist, stick around! We pretty frequently ask the community for new textures, since there's a lot of talented people out there who can make far better art than we can. Thirdly, post suggestions in suggestion-discussion! We're always looking for new ideas to make the mod better.

If none of those things apply, spread the word! Tell your friends, partners, coworkers, or even strangers on the street about BTA. After all, the more the merrier!

A: Yes and no - BTA is only compatible with mods specifically made for it. Most mods you can think of will not work, as a lot of our optimizations means we have had to change/rewrite way too much of the codebase for anything else to be compatible. This means that until someone miraculously ports it over, you won't be able to play BTA with Aether, or BTA with Moon Mod, so on and so forth.

A: You can! The recipe is just a little different. In BTA, zombies drop cloth rather than feathers. The bed recipe requires 2 cloth and 1 wool, rather than 3 wool:

Yes, we could if we wanted to, but that's not really our philosophy. If there's a feature from a later version we'd like to include in BTA, we ask ourselves how we can reinvent that feature in a way that still gets us there while also giving players a new experience.

For example, modern Minecraft features multiple different varieties of wooden planks, and so does BTA. However, in BTA ours come from giving the player the ability to dye oak planks, which gives them a fun new pastel color palette to play with.

A: When it's ready. We used to give release dates for updates, but frankly it led to a lot of stress for us and a lot of disappointment for everyone else because we'd almost invariably miss those dates.

So now we just publish updates when we feel they're in a good enough place to go out, no matter how long it takes.