BTA Evolution Challenge

[TheKingOfNachos™]

Out of curiosity, boredom and procrastinating from my college assignments I decided to do an Evolution Challenge for BTA. I will be documenting my progress in this thread unless I forget to in which case feel free to bug me about it in discord.

CURRENT VERSION: 1.7.5

If you're familiar with "The Evolution Challenge"; starting a world from old version of Minecraft and then updating to the next update sequentially until you reach the latest current release. This challenge would be based on that for every major versions of BTA.

Here's a guideline to the challenge if you want to tackle it as well:

1. Make a fresh instance and start from Minecraft Beta 1.7.4 (via the BTA Installer; make sure you have advanced checked to change versions).

2. Check the wiki for each respective versions and find every new features added.
Here is the link https://bta.miraheze.org/wiki/Version_history

3. Each new features added in that version are your goals. Your goal is to make a build (preferably more if you want to) out of the new blocks from that update. This is to make the challenge more interesting than just crafting a block and then stuffing into the chest and be done with it quickly.

4. Once your goals are reached, you may proceed into the next MAJOR UPDATE until you have reached the current stable build 7.3_04. An exception can be made if there is a bug that you think may stop your progression (i.e diamond tools not being able to be crafted in 1.7.4_01)

5. Snapshots, prereleases, nightly builds and the april fools updates are not allowed. I don't care if you have some super secret ass version that was found covered in shit, grease and used needles behind jonk's dumpster.

6. There is no time requirements take as much time as you want and as long as you'd like. Be it a week, a month or 50 years - play it at your own pace and have fun.

7. You can add any extra challenges to your run if you want.

8. DON'T FORGET TO BACKUP YOUR WORLD

Expect bugs and crashes, you're playing old versions of a mod for an old version of an old game.
Feel free to post your run in this thread as well.

[TheKingOfNachos™]

hole : )

2026-03-19_17.51.51.png (266.97 KiB) Viewed 7531 times

[TheKingOfNachos™]

two creepers at the door
I don't think they're here to sell cookies

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[TheKingOfNachos™]

Alright folk, I have played for about 6 hours now and here's what i had done so far

A bunch of dogs

2026-03-19_19.05.18.png (291.92 KiB) Viewed 7520 times

A tree farm

2026-03-19_19.33.03.png (562.02 KiB) Viewed 7520 times

You may think that's not much, well that's because I spent most of the time mining BUT here's the kicker: the ore textures are missing

[TheKingOfNachos™]

Alright folk, I have played for about 6 hours now and here's what i had done so far

A bunch of dogs
2026-03-19_19.05.18.png
A tree farm
2026-03-19_19.33.03.png

You may think that's not much, well that's because I spent most of the time mining BUT here's the kicker: the ore textures are missing

Here are some redstone ores, it's not obvious until you see the red particles.

no ores.png (70.52 KiB) Viewed 7520 times

And here's the same redstone vein after I updated to 1.7.5

yes ores.png (123.92 KiB) Viewed 7520 times

And I know the textures aren't missing because within the first hour I mined coal and iron before and the textures were normal. And when I checked the terrain.png the ore overlay is still there

ore texture.png (27.41 KiB) Viewed 7520 times

So because of this strange bug, I am forced to update to 1.7.5
EDIT: Found out if you disable smooth lighting it hides the ores, I am going insane
This concludes my first day, majonkplsfix

[AUserNamedName]

Alright folk, I have played for about 6 hours now and here's what i had done so far

A bunch of dogs

Seems like you have done the most important thing in the game

now do the 2nd most important thing and build them a dog house

[TheKingOfNachos™]

Whoops. I forgot this thread exists

Anyways, it's been a while. I am still in 1.7.5 mostly because I was busy with life so I didn't have much free time to play and some other personal stuff I won't get into. But I have been making progress, a few of you might have seen some snippets I posted on discord. Here's what I have done for the past few months:

March 2026:
Nether Portal opened, it's very noisy I may need to relocate it

2026-03-20_01.15.48.png (506.09 KiB) Viewed 2596 times

House is built and the First Base is decommissioned

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2026-03-22_00.19.57.png (395.34 KiB) Viewed 2596 times

[TheKingOfNachos™]

April and May 2026:
Spent all of April and first half of May building a Slime farm

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Then I built a storage room in May before I went on a hiatus

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[TheKingOfNachos™]

July 2026:
Ported my world into my steam deck because I was on a trip in China where I spent my downtime on the world
Decorated my room

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Made a wheat and sugarcane farm

farm.png (924.17 KiB) Viewed 2592 times

And a duper house for sands and gravel

duper.png (360.83 KiB) Viewed 2592 times

[TheKingOfNachos™]

August 2026:
Built an Ice farm that looks like a boxer engine

boxer ice.png (160.27 KiB) Viewed 2586 times

A very normal looking Lighthouse and the Hub area around the world spawn which would also be a museum of sorts later and a stations for the EATS (Ethos Advanced Transportation System) road

hub and lighthouse.png (699.38 KiB) Viewed 2586 times

EATS.png (668.29 KiB) Viewed 2586 times

That's pretty much what I've done so far and it's almost 3 am so I'm pretty exhausted right now. I wish I could show more but the 3 attachment limit is really frustrating so I'm considering to just record a short tour of the world before I update to the next major version instead, whenever that happens who knows.

Thank you very much for checking out this stupid thread, it's quite fun to share things I've made and I wish I have more energy, motivation and more importantly time to do more of these. Could be a neat little series but I'm not making any promises