If you have to TL;DR please answer the question at the very end.
I know I'm going to get flames for this, but I'm just going over the core concepts in my head and it doesn't add up. All of the things they are doing are making exploration harder to do and limit us in various ways. Larger biomes bring more of same terrain. It isn't rewarding to make us travel for longer to see features we could find easially in previous versions.
I mean I don't want to travel hundreds of blocks to find different generations of land, especially if i can't expect the land generation in most biomes to change significantly. This is more tedious than it is fun and it makes for far less interesting backdrops when I do want to settle down and build something. Unless Notch's idea of rewarding us means we need to spend many days searching to find anything interesting to look at since the terrain generations are less interesting.
I'm not referring to the new biomes. The new structures and new biomes are well executed, but the shear lack of randomness just overall sours the experience. If I see a lot of trees in one area I don't want to think oh that absolutely has to be a forest biome. What is the point of exploring a known biome if we can expect the same general generations for all biomes of that type?
This is my main point on biomes in 1.8. They have one size and do not easially mix. In 1.7 you could have super small deserts or medium sized deserts. You could have tiny forests, or huge forests that go on forever. You could have incredibly unique combinations of biomes. It just doesn't work like that anymore.
Food meter
This rewards survival more than anything. It hurts exploration. I don't want to use sprint because it will always mean I will need to replace that energy with a food item. Sprint seems like a gimmick that was added, because you will need to travel far distances to see anything of interest. I know they will balance these things as they go along, but really in order to travel long distance by sprinting you will need massive amounts of food.
Gathering food is not something that is intended to reward exploration.
My main issue with the food meter is that it makes you hesitant to travel in risk of starving. I do have to mention that it goes down very slowly if you aren't sprinting. But really you're vulnerable to dieing if you lose more than one food bar. If you lose your main food supply, then you can't heal yourself.
The main sources of food in 1.9 will be farms. Farms that will require you to spend extended periods of time in one place waiting for things to grow or mutate into more versions of themselves. There will be little reason to go far away from your farms once this happens. Don't expect to spend too much time in a cave without a ridiculous amount of food, because unless your food bar is practically full you can't heal yourself. The new healing system directly inhibits exploration by requiring that we amass abnormal amounts of food before going into any dangerous endeavor.
Removal of popular exploration techniques.
Removing the F toggle and mob signatures was their way of forcing us to explore the natural way. Well the natural way happens to be the most tedious way to find things. I don't know why more tedious and more fun get confused sometimes. Sure it makes a more complete game, yes. Does it reward exploration? No. It just means we have to spend more hours mindlessly digging for monster noises.
The idea of continents
I don't quite agree with turning the Minecraft scape into continents. The world doesn't need massive amounts of water past a certain point of the map. I mean noone is going to want to legitly travel for many minecraft days over these things. You could have nearly endless land generation in 1.7. Adding massive barriers between landmasses just hinders exploration, because you can't expect it to be any different on the other side of the ocean. The grass wont be any greener. It will be the same damn grass and it will add needless MBs onto your World size just to traverse it.
The only things that I can think of that rewards exploration are the new structures and NPCs, the new dungeons and the possible endgame bosses, and the new biomes. The fact that they are going to limit it to one per world is just ridiculous. If you have more than one then people will have a reason to keep exploring. I hope they change their mind about this by part 2 of the 1.8 update. I hope that they continue to improve upon the structure generator as well as the new biomes. Those are the only things that reward exploration and the rest of it either makes it worse or doesn't help at all.
What do you think of the focus towards exploration in 1.8/9?
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote in here.
The only thing I do not agree with, however, is that food makes you "hesitant to travel"
Why? Just bring a furnace, 20 coal, and a ton of food. If you run out, you can just get some more.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
All moderation on forums is biased. Mods and admins do play favorites. Thus there is truly no point in "playing by the rules" since enforcement of said rules is subjective. That is why I refuse to censor my speech and will call things exactly as I see them without reservation.
I like the new exploration. Instead of everything being right on top of each other you have to actually explore to find the area where you want your base. You'll need to gather up resources and plan for your long trip. Set up outposts along the way to restock or take a break (something I never used to do). The large biomes are easier to get lost in, so maps are useful. For me, it really makes exploring feel like an adventure.
To answer your tealdeer:
So you can find stuff like this:
My initial start was x:230 z:-17
The coordinates this image was taken from is x:-622 z:1546
That was a long walk and well worth it to find that overhang to set up home base. I've explored and repaired a local mineshaft to about 20% completion, harvesting all the tracks to make a swift way down from my chateau. Since I want to fix all the broken in that mine, I have a lot to do in the furture.
This game gives what you put into it. If you have no patience to explore and find that perfect spot, may I recommend garry's mod as a creative outlet, and Skyrim for that ultimate adventure (just have to wait a couple more months)
I thought about changing the travel statement. I know you wont starve if you eat after awhile. But it's often easy to forget about the bar and if you are constantly active you can lose up to 4 food bars from just moving around and attacking (in one minecraft day). I mean trying to kill a pig with your hand practically is a single food bar. Being able to very easially change the day also makes it very easy to forget to eat.
If you lose your abnormal supply of food and don't have immediate resources on hand, you can't just amass an abnormal supply of food again. If you are 2000 blocks away from where you left your main food supply and you reset your spawn with a bed you can't just regroup yourself and resupply. That is in my opinion what I dislike about the food bar. You need to carry lots of food on you and if you fall in lava your food goes with you.
Edit: Above
That's a good find. But would you say those kind of generations are more uncommon? How much nothing special landscape do we need to travel to get to something interesting? It was like that to some extent before, but now it is so much more common. You just wont see the same hills that you did in 1.7.
I found a mineshaft with a diamond, iron ingots, redstone, and bread, in just one of the many chest through out a cave I'm exploring, seems extremely rewarding to me. (I used to stay near home, now I'm traveling every day, so it's working for me.) And about food making you less likely to travel, you must not be doing something right. If you fill up your hunger meter with cooked food, it will take a full ingame day for it to begin to drop again, allowing you to explore with just a couple cooked porkchops.
Edit: Also, dont forget about fishing, but I do hope animals spawn like normal in the full version, this totally stinks, good luck finding food in multiplayer.
I agree with most of what you've said. The only way is really "rewards" exploration is in that there are a few more things out there to FIND now. More variety of scenery, towns, strongholds, etc... Gives some incentive to go "FIND" that stuff, but doesn't really reward you in any other way than the one time newness of it.
On the subject of Biomes though. This is something people have been asking for since the instant biomes came out. The original mini-biomes were infuriating since standing at any point you could see the end of the biome, and likely see half a dozen OTHER biomes too. Simply put, it was UGLY! If a guy has a hankering to build in a swamp, on top of a mountain, in the snow, whatever, you tend to expect that scenery to persist to somewhere beyond the horizon, not end 20 blocks away and change to half a dozen other things.
So I see I see this as a good change really, despite it making exploration more tedious in the process.
I also like oceans. Sure, YOU may view it as just that much more crap you have to swim across to find what YOU want... But what about the guy who wants to build an underwater empire? It wasn't terribly practical before short of using a world editor because there simply were no bodies of water large enough to do it. Now, they naturally generate. To me, this is a good thing.
Larger biomes, and more variety in the terrain is a GOOD THING, despite the fact that yes, this does make exploration a bit more time consuming.
Think of the variables in the food meter equation as it relates to travel. Not everyone is the perfect adventurer and some people are just paranoid about it. You shouldn't expect everyone to be super prepared. Even more importantly you shouldn't expect everyone to need to make a farm and spend several minecraft days planning before embarking in a serious adventure. It hinders the exploration experience for the people who don't feel inclined to do the rituals necessary to do the very same things they could just get up and do right away in previous versions.
It can be described as giving someone a piece of cake everyday, guarenteeing that you will have a slice of cake each and everyday. Then the 1.8 update comes and the person then says that you now have to make the cake if you want it from now on. This is hardly the same thing. You can't expect everyone to want to make the cake themselves especially since they didn't have to do it before. The cake in this analogy is Fun in minecraft. We now have to work to receive the same amount of entertainment in Survival mode. We must work for our cake.
I enjoyed mapping the rivers in the swamp near my spawn, and as for food, I'm not sure what game you are playing but I have never had to worry about food and that is without farming or using the furnace (since it crashes my game) Between finding an NPC village with a wheat farm, and making mushroom stew from the thousands of mushrooms that grow in my swamp I have had no issues. As soon as I do have a problem i'm fully stocked on melon seeds and wheat seeds to start a nice farm.
I'm exploring a lot more than I ever did before and finding lots of great terrain. I imagine that your seed and your play style can drastically alter your perception though.
Not everyone is the perfect adventurer and some people are just paranoid about it. You shouldn't expect everyone to be super prepared. Even more importantly you shouldn't expect everyone to need to make a farm and spend several minecraft days planning before embarking in a serious adventure.
A single cooked porkchop can (And almost always does, if it fills your hunger meter) last a full ingame day/night cycle. Not to mention how many pigs you encounter when running around out there, as well as chickens and cows now dropping food. And food being stackable. Wait, what was so hard about the update again?
If you lose your abnormal supply of food and don't have immediate resources on hand, you can't just amass an abnormal supply of food again. If you are 2000 blocks away from where you left your main food supply and you reset your spawn with a bed you can't just regroup yourself and resupply. That is in my opinion what I dislike about the food bar. You need to carry lots of food on you and if you fall in lava your food goes with you.
With that, I wish there was a way to reset your spawn point within the game. I find it frustrating to the point where I let myself use MCEdit to place my spawn point next to a cave I'm about to explore.. I also do this when I find an area far away from my initial spawn point that I know I'm going to be at for a long period of time.
The way you are tied to your initial spawn point really makes exploration difficult. Who wants to travel an hour away from your start point just to end up back where you started because you were killed? It just makes me want to turn off the game and play something else for awhile.
Also, they gave us these insanely deep ravines, yet no way to build any sort of quick transportation to the bottom of them. I'd love to have a hook-and-rope and the ability to rappel to the bottom.
With that, I wish there was a way to reset your spawn point within the game. I find it frustrating to the point where I let myself use MCEdit to place my spawn point next to a cave I'm about to explore.. I also do this when I find an area far away from my initial spawn point that I know I'm going to be at for a long period of time.
Sounds like a bunch of minor annoyances, some suggestions for tweaks, and summed up as a complaint/rant. This version is the pre-release and isn't at all polished. Many of the points are good feedback, but there's also some hyperbole mixed in to show your disappointment.
I've condesned this to your man points 1.Land variations/biome sizeThe biomes are not done yet, so their internal structures are not complete. However, the larger biomes are much mroe interesting, imo. its not very exciting to explore and find a 20 ft wide patch of sand with a cactus, or a small patch of trees. There is not much exploration when you can climb to the top of a mountain and see every biome. The biomes are actually large enough to do something with now. The plains are big enough to build a city in, you can have a cabin in the woods, instead of a cabin in a patch of trees. It also makes finding a new bome more meaningful when it doesn't happen every 10 seconds. Now its "Hey look, I found a swamp!" instead of "swamp...forest... tundra...forest...plains..." When you are in a biome, it actually feels like you are in a biome. You are deep in the forest, you are in the swamp, you are climbing the mountains. This is much more rewarding than micro-biomes.
And the mountains, at least, have a lot of internal variation. I find exploring mountains to be quite pleasing. finding a cave leading through a peak, finding a hidden valley, navigating sheer cliffs...
All I can say for sure is that I found exploring on foot to be much more satisfying now. 2.Food meter
I can see why you get the impression that it inhibits exploration, but I think it helps.
First, it changes the healing dynamic. This means that stackable food is not a problem anymore. Stackable food means you can carry a lot more with you. Carrying more food means you can take a lot more damage before you run out of food to heal yourself. This means you can go out exploring further before having to return due to lack of food. You can stay out in the world a lot longer with 64 pork than you can with 10 pork, and the 64 pork is only taking up 1 slot now, leaving you with inventory space for other supplies.
It also encourages you to stock up on supplies before setting out. If you are going to go out exploring, you need to equip yourself. Sword, armour, tools, etc. Food is part of that preperation.
Additionally, it makes hunting more valuable. Instead of simply treking across the forst, it becomes beneficial to stop and hunt, replenishing your food supply and extending how long you can adventure. Before, this would just clog your inventory with pork, unless you were injured. 3.Gathering food is not something that is intended to reward exploration.Exploration offers you new food supplies. Granted, that is not very well expanded at this point, but it is there. It does encourage you to establish yourself before setting off. I don't think the intention of this update was for you to spawn, and immediately go running off into the hills. It is expanding on the gameplay, not replacing it. Setting up your shelter, minign for ores, crafting equipment, all of that still occurs. a fair bit of it will occur before you are going to go off into the wilderness away from your shelter. You want to bring enough with you to sustain you. Setting up a food source is part of that.
Additionally, persitent mobs means that they are not a reliable food source for a static settlement, at least not without ranching. However, exploring to new areas will yeild new mobs, so you can go out hunting, following a nomadic lifestyle. This is a possible motivation to go out exploring. 4.Removal of popular exploration techniques.Thats not exploration, that is going to the reward directly. Looking at where dungeons and such are is only resource collection. You go to it, you gather the resources, done. No exploration is involved. You don't go and explore that cave, you just look and see if there is anything there. 5.The idea of continentsA continent gives you a clearly defined area to explore. It limits your capacity to get lost if you know you are on the right continent. If you have less fear of losing your base, you are more likely to explore.
It also opens up the possibilty of more water-related content. Ships did not make sense to add before, since you never had more than a lake to sail on. I've put forth suggestions of how to make ship systems. With a proper ship, you can go out and explore new lands. Sail for adventure, like a pirate. Find the treasure trove on the island, stake out land in a new world. Underwater content too. Diving for sunken ships, exploring coral reefs... the ocean does not have to be a dead zone. It just needs to be fleshed out.
It also makes more sense with maps. If you can get a map showing your continent, it will be much more meaningful than ooking at a random mishmatch of biomes and water. A continent feels like a real place, an area you can explore and find every last nook and cranny of, instead of an endless, undistinguished mash of land. 6.What do you think of the focus towards exploration in 1.8/9?
The game is not trying to use exploration in place of making your base. It is making it so there is a reason to explore, and rewarding those who do. The biome changes alone makes exploring fun; the structures makes exploration rewarding; the food system lets you take longer journeys. While there is still room for improvement, the update does improve exploration.
Agree with everything, besides continents. That just sounds epic in my opinion. The ability to travel for a vast amount of days, after stocking up for reaching a new destination, is intriguing. And once you get there, you have no clue what to expect. And on top of that, it could be an entirely different landscape to your previous continent.
Remember I'm looking at the core concepts here. Biomes should come in small, medium, and large sizes IMO. That is my point about 1.8 biomes. they are all one general size and that limits how things can form. I like the oceans really. I'm referring to the huge oceans that border the edges of the continent. Those go on for 1000s of blocks and are really pointless.
I said the new biomes were well executed. My main complaints are with existing biomes. They kind of got the short end of the stick. Hopefully they will implement canyon biomes in 1.9. Enough of these ravines coming out of nowhere.
Oh and BTW our opinions differ when it comes to awesome terrain generation. There is no such thing as ugly generations. The more chunk errors the better. Snow splotched areas with mixed weather is very interesting to me. I want snowy ravines. If the way biomes form prevents this then I'll be further disappointed.
Really my OP isn't a complete representation of my opinion. I am pointing out how it seems to be. It seems that a large portion of the update harms exploration to some extent. I didn't go as far (in my OP) to say that it made it a worse game overall. (It just doesn't make me want to play SSP even more than I did in previous updates.)
The hunger bar limits exploration and the sprint bar isn't nearly as effective for covering terrain. If one of the focal points was supposed to be exploration, then a lot of this stuff inhibits exploration even if only slightly or in concept. Most of this stuff I am saying is just going against exploration and I am only pointing it out as a stance against exploration.
I could go on and on about why something hurts minecraft. Often that ends up with me overstating my points. I don't think I overstated in my OP as I remained rather neutral and stuck to the facts and how they related to exploration. If exploration were to be improved, he certainly didn't help it any.
I'm serious by saying that I'm probably never going to mine for a dungeon in SSP without mob signatures. I'll choose not to go through the tedium of digging out an area without a real point.
Edit: Mystify
You make some very good points. but really how long would it take you to get 64 pork? How much food does it take to take out all the blue spider spawners in a mineshaft and make it out of there? The poison harms you more than the food can heal you and the spawner will keep spawning them.
I really don't agree with stacking food to a max of 64. If anything make it a 16 max for balancing purposes. It just looks ridiculous to see a double digit number next to a pork item. I also find farming incredibly boring. Without bonemeal you have to wait an entire minecraft day in the same chunk for wheat to grow and it will only produce one wheat now.
Really food only gets in the way. I'd rather play on peaceful mode to explore so I don't have to deal with it. I mean sprint should consume a very little amount of food if it was designed towards exploration. How fast you travel shouldn't be limited if you are encouraged to travel 1500 blocks to find something.
My opinion about the biomes isn't completely negative. I just think that small biomes should form along with larger biomes. Then at a future date you can have settings that can change whether you want more smaller biomes or more larger biomes. I think there is a place for smaller biomes in Minecraft and removing them altogether is just Mojang's quick solution of implementing larger biomes. I would be completely happy if they did this as well as include the option to play survival with or without the food bar.
Another thing that would be cool would use experience points. You could use them to make it so that a compass will show your coordinates on screen when you are holding one. That would improve exploration in a meaningful way.
Skills affect the length of time you could sprint would be a welcomed feature.
I know I'm going to get flames for this, but I'm just going over the core concepts in my head and it doesn't add up. All of the things they are doing are making exploration harder to do and limit us in various ways. Larger biomes bring more of same terrain. It isn't rewarding to make us travel for longer to see features we could find easially in previous versions.
I mean I don't want to travel hundreds of blocks to find different generations of land, especially if i can't expect the land generation in most biomes to change significantly. This is more tedious than it is fun and it makes for far less interesting backdrops when I do want to settle down and build something. Unless Notch's idea of rewarding us means we need to spend many days searching to find anything interesting to look at since the terrain generations are less interesting.
I'm not referring to the new biomes. The new structures and new biomes are well executed, but the shear lack of randomness just overall sours the experience. If I see a lot of trees in one area I don't want to think oh that absolutely has to be a forest biome. What is the point of exploring a known biome if we can expect the same general generations for all biomes of that type?
This is my main point on biomes in 1.8. They have one size and do not easially mix. In 1.7 you could have super small deserts or medium sized deserts. You could have tiny forests, or huge forests that go on forever. You could have incredibly unique combinations of biomes. It just doesn't work like that anymore.
Food meter
This rewards survival more than anything. It hurts exploration. I don't want to use sprint because it will always mean I will need to replace that energy with a food item. Sprint seems like a gimmick that was added, because you will need to travel far distances to see anything of interest. I know they will balance these things as they go along, but really in order to travel long distance by sprinting you will need massive amounts of food.
Gathering food is not something that is intended to reward exploration.
My main issue with the food meter is that it makes you hesitant to travel in risk of starving. I do have to mention that it goes down very slowly if you aren't sprinting. But really you're vulnerable to dieing if you lose more than one food bar. If you lose your main food supply, then you can't heal yourself.
The main sources of food in 1.9 will be farms. Farms that will require you to spend extended periods of time in one place waiting for things to grow or mutate into more versions of themselves. There will be little reason to go far away from your farms once this happens. Don't expect to spend too much time in a cave without a ridiculous amount of food, because unless your food bar is practically full you can't heal yourself. The new healing system directly inhibits exploration by requiring that we amass abnormal amounts of food before going into any dangerous endeavor.
Removal of popular exploration techniques.
Removing the F toggle and mob signatures was their way of forcing us to explore the natural way. Well the natural way happens to be the most tedious way to find things. I don't know why more tedious and more fun get confused sometimes. Sure it makes a more complete game, yes. Does it reward exploration? No. It just means we have to spend more hours mindlessly digging for monster noises.
The idea of continents
I don't quite agree with turning the Minecraft scape into continents. The world doesn't need massive amounts of water past a certain point of the map. I mean noone is going to want to legitly travel for many minecraft days over these things. You could have nearly endless land generation in 1.7. Adding massive barriers between landmasses just hinders exploration, because you can't expect it to be any different on the other side of the ocean. The grass wont be any greener. It will be the same damn grass and it will add needless MBs onto your World size just to traverse it.
The only things that I can think of that rewards exploration are the new structures and NPCs, the new dungeons and the possible endgame bosses, and the new biomes. The fact that they are going to limit it to one per world is just ridiculous. If you have more than one then people will have a reason to keep exploring. I hope they change their mind about this by part 2 of the 1.8 update. I hope that they continue to improve upon the structure generator as well as the new biomes. Those are the only things that reward exploration and the rest of it either makes it worse or doesn't help at all.
What do you think of the focus towards exploration in 1.8/9?
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=155932
Crates
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239467
Item Scrolling
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174539
The only thing I do not agree with, however, is that food makes you "hesitant to travel"
Why? Just bring a furnace, 20 coal, and a ton of food. If you run out, you can just get some more.
So you can find stuff like this:
My initial start was x:230 z:-17
The coordinates this image was taken from is x:-622 z:1546
That was a long walk and well worth it to find that overhang to set up home base. I've explored and repaired a local mineshaft to about 20% completion, harvesting all the tracks to make a swift way down from my chateau. Since I want to fix all the broken in that mine, I have a lot to do in the furture.
This game gives what you put into it. If you have no patience to explore and find that perfect spot, may I recommend garry's mod as a creative outlet, and Skyrim for that ultimate adventure (just have to wait a couple more months)
If you lose your abnormal supply of food and don't have immediate resources on hand, you can't just amass an abnormal supply of food again. If you are 2000 blocks away from where you left your main food supply and you reset your spawn with a bed you can't just regroup yourself and resupply. That is in my opinion what I dislike about the food bar. You need to carry lots of food on you and if you fall in lava your food goes with you.
Edit: Above
That's a good find. But would you say those kind of generations are more uncommon? How much nothing special landscape do we need to travel to get to something interesting? It was like that to some extent before, but now it is so much more common. You just wont see the same hills that you did in 1.7.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=155932
Crates
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239467
Item Scrolling
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174539
assuming you killed all of the animals in your original chunks.
Uhh, I don't think that is how Minecraft works.
Edit: Also, dont forget about fishing, but I do hope animals spawn like normal in the full version, this totally stinks, good luck finding food in multiplayer.
On the subject of Biomes though. This is something people have been asking for since the instant biomes came out. The original mini-biomes were infuriating since standing at any point you could see the end of the biome, and likely see half a dozen OTHER biomes too. Simply put, it was UGLY! If a guy has a hankering to build in a swamp, on top of a mountain, in the snow, whatever, you tend to expect that scenery to persist to somewhere beyond the horizon, not end 20 blocks away and change to half a dozen other things.
So I see I see this as a good change really, despite it making exploration more tedious in the process.
I also like oceans. Sure, YOU may view it as just that much more crap you have to swim across to find what YOU want... But what about the guy who wants to build an underwater empire? It wasn't terribly practical before short of using a world editor because there simply were no bodies of water large enough to do it. Now, they naturally generate. To me, this is a good thing.
Larger biomes, and more variety in the terrain is a GOOD THING, despite the fact that yes, this does make exploration a bit more time consuming.
basically if someone gets the drop on you, you're f***ed 10 times over
It can be described as giving someone a piece of cake everyday, guarenteeing that you will have a slice of cake each and everyday. Then the 1.8 update comes and the person then says that you now have to make the cake if you want it from now on. This is hardly the same thing. You can't expect everyone to want to make the cake themselves especially since they didn't have to do it before. The cake in this analogy is Fun in minecraft. We now have to work to receive the same amount of entertainment in Survival mode. We must work for our cake.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=155932
Crates
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239467
Item Scrolling
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174539
I'm exploring a lot more than I ever did before and finding lots of great terrain. I imagine that your seed and your play style can drastically alter your perception though.
A single cooked porkchop can (And almost always does, if it fills your hunger meter) last a full ingame day/night cycle. Not to mention how many pigs you encounter when running around out there, as well as chickens and cows now dropping food. And food being stackable. Wait, what was so hard about the update again?
With that, I wish there was a way to reset your spawn point within the game. I find it frustrating to the point where I let myself use MCEdit to place my spawn point next to a cave I'm about to explore.. I also do this when I find an area far away from my initial spawn point that I know I'm going to be at for a long period of time.
The way you are tied to your initial spawn point really makes exploration difficult. Who wants to travel an hour away from your start point just to end up back where you started because you were killed? It just makes me want to turn off the game and play something else for awhile.
Also, they gave us these insanely deep ravines, yet no way to build any sort of quick transportation to the bottom of them. I'd love to have a hook-and-rope and the ability to rappel to the bottom.
Build a bed. Sleep in it.
1.Land variations/biome sizeThe biomes are not done yet, so their internal structures are not complete. However, the larger biomes are much mroe interesting, imo. its not very exciting to explore and find a 20 ft wide patch of sand with a cactus, or a small patch of trees. There is not much exploration when you can climb to the top of a mountain and see every biome. The biomes are actually large enough to do something with now. The plains are big enough to build a city in, you can have a cabin in the woods, instead of a cabin in a patch of trees. It also makes finding a new bome more meaningful when it doesn't happen every 10 seconds. Now its "Hey look, I found a swamp!" instead of "swamp...forest... tundra...forest...plains..." When you are in a biome, it actually feels like you are in a biome. You are deep in the forest, you are in the swamp, you are climbing the mountains. This is much more rewarding than micro-biomes.
And the mountains, at least, have a lot of internal variation. I find exploring mountains to be quite pleasing. finding a cave leading through a peak, finding a hidden valley, navigating sheer cliffs...
All I can say for sure is that I found exploring on foot to be much more satisfying now.
2.Food meter
I can see why you get the impression that it inhibits exploration, but I think it helps.
First, it changes the healing dynamic. This means that stackable food is not a problem anymore. Stackable food means you can carry a lot more with you. Carrying more food means you can take a lot more damage before you run out of food to heal yourself. This means you can go out exploring further before having to return due to lack of food. You can stay out in the world a lot longer with 64 pork than you can with 10 pork, and the 64 pork is only taking up 1 slot now, leaving you with inventory space for other supplies.
It also encourages you to stock up on supplies before setting out. If you are going to go out exploring, you need to equip yourself. Sword, armour, tools, etc. Food is part of that preperation.
Additionally, it makes hunting more valuable. Instead of simply treking across the forst, it becomes beneficial to stop and hunt, replenishing your food supply and extending how long you can adventure. Before, this would just clog your inventory with pork, unless you were injured.
3.Gathering food is not something that is intended to reward exploration.Exploration offers you new food supplies. Granted, that is not very well expanded at this point, but it is there. It does encourage you to establish yourself before setting off. I don't think the intention of this update was for you to spawn, and immediately go running off into the hills. It is expanding on the gameplay, not replacing it. Setting up your shelter, minign for ores, crafting equipment, all of that still occurs. a fair bit of it will occur before you are going to go off into the wilderness away from your shelter. You want to bring enough with you to sustain you. Setting up a food source is part of that.
Additionally, persitent mobs means that they are not a reliable food source for a static settlement, at least not without ranching. However, exploring to new areas will yeild new mobs, so you can go out hunting, following a nomadic lifestyle. This is a possible motivation to go out exploring.
4.Removal of popular exploration techniques.Thats not exploration, that is going to the reward directly. Looking at where dungeons and such are is only resource collection. You go to it, you gather the resources, done. No exploration is involved. You don't go and explore that cave, you just look and see if there is anything there.
5.The idea of continentsA continent gives you a clearly defined area to explore. It limits your capacity to get lost if you know you are on the right continent. If you have less fear of losing your base, you are more likely to explore.
It also opens up the possibilty of more water-related content. Ships did not make sense to add before, since you never had more than a lake to sail on. I've put forth suggestions of how to make ship systems. With a proper ship, you can go out and explore new lands. Sail for adventure, like a pirate. Find the treasure trove on the island, stake out land in a new world. Underwater content too. Diving for sunken ships, exploring coral reefs... the ocean does not have to be a dead zone. It just needs to be fleshed out.
It also makes more sense with maps. If you can get a map showing your continent, it will be much more meaningful than ooking at a random mishmatch of biomes and water. A continent feels like a real place, an area you can explore and find every last nook and cranny of, instead of an endless, undistinguished mash of land.
6.What do you think of the focus towards exploration in 1.8/9?
The game is not trying to use exploration in place of making your base. It is making it so there is a reason to explore, and rewarding those who do. The biome changes alone makes exploring fun; the structures makes exploration rewarding; the food system lets you take longer journeys. While there is still room for improvement, the update does improve exploration.
I said the new biomes were well executed. My main complaints are with existing biomes. They kind of got the short end of the stick. Hopefully they will implement canyon biomes in 1.9. Enough of these ravines coming out of nowhere.
Oh and BTW our opinions differ when it comes to awesome terrain generation. There is no such thing as ugly generations. The more chunk errors the better. Snow splotched areas with mixed weather is very interesting to me. I want snowy ravines. If the way biomes form prevents this then I'll be further disappointed.
Really my OP isn't a complete representation of my opinion. I am pointing out how it seems to be. It seems that a large portion of the update harms exploration to some extent. I didn't go as far (in my OP) to say that it made it a worse game overall. (It just doesn't make me want to play SSP even more than I did in previous updates.)
The hunger bar limits exploration and the sprint bar isn't nearly as effective for covering terrain. If one of the focal points was supposed to be exploration, then a lot of this stuff inhibits exploration even if only slightly or in concept. Most of this stuff I am saying is just going against exploration and I am only pointing it out as a stance against exploration.
I could go on and on about why something hurts minecraft. Often that ends up with me overstating my points. I don't think I overstated in my OP as I remained rather neutral and stuck to the facts and how they related to exploration. If exploration were to be improved, he certainly didn't help it any.
I'm serious by saying that I'm probably never going to mine for a dungeon in SSP without mob signatures. I'll choose not to go through the tedium of digging out an area without a real point.
Edit: Mystify
You make some very good points. but really how long would it take you to get 64 pork? How much food does it take to take out all the blue spider spawners in a mineshaft and make it out of there? The poison harms you more than the food can heal you and the spawner will keep spawning them.
I really don't agree with stacking food to a max of 64. If anything make it a 16 max for balancing purposes. It just looks ridiculous to see a double digit number next to a pork item. I also find farming incredibly boring. Without bonemeal you have to wait an entire minecraft day in the same chunk for wheat to grow and it will only produce one wheat now.
Really food only gets in the way. I'd rather play on peaceful mode to explore so I don't have to deal with it. I mean sprint should consume a very little amount of food if it was designed towards exploration. How fast you travel shouldn't be limited if you are encouraged to travel 1500 blocks to find something.
My opinion about the biomes isn't completely negative. I just think that small biomes should form along with larger biomes. Then at a future date you can have settings that can change whether you want more smaller biomes or more larger biomes. I think there is a place for smaller biomes in Minecraft and removing them altogether is just Mojang's quick solution of implementing larger biomes. I would be completely happy if they did this as well as include the option to play survival with or without the food bar.
Another thing that would be cool would use experience points. You could use them to make it so that a compass will show your coordinates on screen when you are holding one. That would improve exploration in a meaningful way.
Skills affect the length of time you could sprint would be a welcomed feature.
My mind is scattered. i'll just end this post.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=155932
Crates
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239467
Item Scrolling
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174539
I didn't know sleeping reset your spawn point. Thanks. :smile.gif: