LET’S PLAY: ETERNAL CAVES

Imagine you’re looking at a big lovely slice of cake. “Yummy!” you’re thinking. “I’m not going to share this with anyone!” you’re also thinking, but don’t worry, your selfish secret is safe with us.

Now imagine you bit down into that cake, only to discover that hidden just beneath the icing was zombies, creepers, spiders, and lumps of lava instead of the more traditional chocolate. Ugh!

But come on now, isn’t that exactly what playing Minecraft is like? It looks lovely on the surface, but dig down just a little and you’ll find a sprawling cave network of hostile horrors. At least, unlike cake, Minecraft’s caves don’t give you tooth decay, though we can’t rule that out in future updates.

So it was with some trepidation, then, that we started Eternal Caves V1.1 by Panascais at Minecraft Marketplace. It massively expands the caves and gives them a glow-up. A literal glow-up, in fact, bringing some very welcome light to the caves! And, well, some far less welcome new monsters. Sigh…

It’s one of the most expansive add-ons we’ve ever featured. 22 caves! 550+ blocks and items! Over 60 animals, monsters, and bosses (sob – when will someone release an add-on that somehow adds fewer bosses?)

It’s not just the new caves that feature all the new stuff either. We immediately dug straight down – don’t try that at home, kids – and plummeted into a vanilla cave, where we made a bunch of non-vanilla new friends. And by ‘new friends’ we actually mean ARGHHHHHH.

What is that new creature called? Shockingly, we didn’t stick around to ask it. But Eternal Caves fortunately has the perfect tool for cowards like us. It’s called the Seers Relic. When you have it equipped, you can stare at any block or creature in the game and it’ll analyse it for you, complete with cool glowy yellow effect.

Then a little window pops up on the left with some information. Mob name, item name, whether it’s a core Minecraft feature or if it’s new for Eternal Caves, etc. Good news for Minecraft.net writers who didn’t do enough research and had to delete four thousand words from this post about an exciting new block called ‘dirt’ when they realized it wasn’t new at all.

Er, hypothetically.

The seers relic takes a few seconds to work its magic. A few seconds you might not have if what you’re attempting to analyse is currently trying to chew your face off. So we tried a more cautious approach, slowly creeping through the caves.

That would be a lot easier if the caves weren’t famously the favorite hangout spot of countless hostile mobs. And oh goody – this add-on throws in tons of new ones to worry about. If you like being blown up by the creeper then you’ll adore being blown up by the new petrified creeper.

Why put yourself through such a gloomy gauntlet of hostile horrors? Because ‘gloomy’ is entirely the wrong word. The new caves are beautiful, and the lighting and fog effects in the OG caves are no visual slouch either. 

They’ve added some clever ways of getting around the cave's famous darkness problem, too. Glowroot carrots are a tasty health-bar restoring treat and cause you to glow, lighting up the cave around you. Nice! …Wait, does this make it easier for hostile mobs to find us?

The moonflutter, a massive pale butterfly with a delightfully derpy face, is probably our favorite of the new mobs, and not just because it’s not trying to hurt us (at time of writing).

But there’s loads of others to find. This is easily the cutest woodlouse we’ve ever seen in a game, which is barely a compliment. The deer are deer-lightful (we got paid to write that – paid in money). And look how cute the pipcap is! LOOK AT IT.

But stay on your guard. For every lovely feature in these caves, there’s about a dozen more that are more hostile and dangerous than you are after you’ve found out your worst cousin has deleted your Minecraft save.

Case in point, when we found this glowing green rune that was pouring beams of light through the cave, we assumed we’d won a treat! Nope. Runes are what you use to summon boss monsters. Why in the Overworld would we want to… bad rune! Bad!

We opted for running in the opposite direction instead. This flawless strategy might have worked if we’d been playing ‘Tiny Caves with Lots of Visible Exits’, the admittedly-rather-dull-sounding add-on that we sadly just made up. But Eternal Caves, true to its name, seem to go on forever. 

We found a house in a swamp cave, new rats and bugs scurrying through another cave, and the realisation that we were hopelessly lost when we ended up back in the moonflutter’s lair again. Except, we didn’t find the moonflutter this time. We found a boss. Oh joy.

Wanna see more screenshots? No problem! Oh, except it sent us to the You Died screen with one hit. Rude. Yes, if you are going to take on these caves, we’d recommend good armor, weapons, supplies, torches, and maybe someone competent to do all the fighting for you. Y’know, basically everything we didn’t bring. Learn from our mistakes.

It’ll be worth the effort. Here’s a final taste of some of the new friends (hopefully?) you’ll make down there!

If you wanna try spelunking yourself, look up Eternal Caves V1.1 by Panascais in Minecraft Marketplace, or click this lovely line of green text to be taken straight there. Best of luck! Tell the surface I miss it!