But a new ore system that is almost entirely based on luck isn't the correct direction to take the game in, in fact having anything based on chance or the amount of free time you have instead of skill, can discourage people from playing. If this is what some people call "balance" then I want no part in it.
Big caves mean nothing to me if the resources in them don't make up for it. Deepslate is not even that good of a material even though it is so common, it has the same blast resistance as stone despite a longer time to mine the stuff.
I hear you.
I seldom use deepslate myself in the overworld unless I’m building a Nether portal, but I appreciate it in the Nether as an alternative to cobble.
The change in ore distribution - especially coal and iron (this was before I discovered the mountains another 2 maps away) - is the reason I immediately started building my enchanting room and thankfully, I was in a place to find both cows and reeds. I concluded early on that Fortune II at minimum was mandatory if I planned to do any serious mining in the area that I was at.
No joke, starting from digging at level 60-something pre-Fortune, I ran out of coal before I found my first diamonds between 15 and 10.
So I managed to get a Looting sword from a villager, built my enchanting table, got Fortune II, and then decided to do some mapping to see if I could find a better place to call home… and when I discovered the mountains, I could kind of see why the ore redistribution happened. I don’t appreciate it myself - amongst other things, my game has inconsistent lighting issues and while people say, “oh, you don’t need to torch so frequently!” I actually do if I want to actually see where I’m going, but I could see why.
Surface coal and iron for days. Oh, and some emeralds, too.
Thing is, especially on Survival, how to carry what you need - mining and food supplies - and leave enough space for treasures to haul back up to the surface?
I’m not late-game, so no shulker boxes or anything fancy. It’s ridiculously easy to get lost and end up mining 3+ different paths back out from sheer frustration. It’s pointless to bring a donkey or llama to help carry things.
I do try anyways, though - enchanted diamond armor, pickaxe, sword, and trident with Mending (tridents mean no arrows); blocks of coal and stacks of wood for torches; stacks of fish or baked potatoes for food; compass, clock, red stone, and a quill and book so I don’t get too lost or go to the surface at a bad time; bucket of water and milk for lava and witch respectively - but with all the prep work, my pockets don’t have much room left.
To mitigate THAT and also out of habit from liking to dig in the old ravines, I build a small base close to the entrance of the cave where I’ll dig and I dump in extra supplies so I at least don’t have to return to the surface, but that doesn’t solve the initial challenge of ore redistribution, needing to torch a ridiculous amount of space in a mountain cave, and getting lost in such a complicated cave network.
It’s a major challenge and on some days, I’ll find it a positive thing, but when I’m looking to chill (most of the time when I play!), it’s a burden I don’t appreciate.
The torches I might be able to live with because I used to mine in ravines all the time anyways, but the cheese holes really make it difficult for me to navigate and getting lost as many times as I have is NOT fun and to run out of torches, wood, and coal while scrambling for a way out is even less fun.
I’d go back to the smaller caves to dig, but there aren’t as many of those anymore… at least, not on my world so far.
Thing is, especially on Survival, how to carry what you need - mining and food supplies - and leave enough space for treasures to haul back up to the surface?
I use an ender chest, along with compacting resources into blocks (I'll set up furnaces to smelt iron and gold when needed), which enables me to mine thousands of ores per play session, more than pretty much anybody will ever need, and yet I only have to return every other session (averaging about 3,100 ores mined, the example given is a more extreme case); the amount of inventory space required for gear isn't much, mostly my hotbar and a few additional slots, you can also put additional items in the ender chest (in modded worlds I have a double chest sized ender chest and carry an additional stack each of food and wood, which are consumed by the time I need the space; likewise, you could bring additional (char)coal for torches and the space will be freed as you use it up):
Note that this is from a vanilla 1.6.4 world, where caves are much denser and mineshafts much more common than in 1.7-1.17, with much greater amounts of iron and coal exposed; in fact, despite the greater depth 1.18 has only half as much iron and a third as much coal per chunk as older versions - and a lot of that won't be exposed in caves - nor do the larger caves in my modded worlds significantly impact my mining rates (if anything, I mine less when exploring the largest caves due to all the time spent on lighting them up):
Vanilla 1.6.4 (from my own analysis with MCEdit; this and the following for 1.8 only counted ores below sea level, where nearly all caves are):
Of interest, I once analyzed ore exposure in 1.6.4 - even just the spawn chunks had over 20,000 exposed ores, though from the numbers above you'll probably be finding far more diamond in 1.18 due to a much wider range exposed in caves, even with reduced air exposure (which doesn't make sense - most players need coal and iron in far greater amounts and even before 1.18, or even 1.7, most players relied on iron farms because they couldn't justify spending the time to mine it):
I use an ender chest, along with compacting resources into blocks (I'll set up furnaces to smelt iron and gold when needed), which enables me to mine thousands of ores per play session, more than pretty much anybody will ever need, and yet I only have to return every other session (averaging about 3,100 ores mined, the example given is a more extreme case); the amount of inventory space required for gear isn't much, mostly my hotbar and a few additional slots, you can also put additional items in the ender chest (in modded worlds I have a double chest sized ender chest and carry an additional stack each of food and wood, which are consumed by the time I need the space; likewise, you could bring additional (char)coal for torches and the space will be freed as you use it up):
Note that this is from a vanilla 1.6.4 world, where caves are much denser and mineshafts much more common than in 1.7-1.17, with much greater amounts of iron and coal exposed; in fact, despite the greater depth 1.18 has only half as much iron and a third as much coal per chunk as older versions - and a lot of that won't be exposed in caves - nor do the larger caves in my modded worlds significantly impact my mining rates (if anything, I mine less when exploring the largest caves due to all the time spent on lighting them up):
Of interest, I once analyzed ore exposure in 1.6.4 - even just the spawn chunks had over 20,000 exposed ores, though from the numbers above you'll probably be finding far more diamond in 1.18 due to a much wider range exposed in caves, even with reduced air exposure (which doesn't make sense - most players need coal and iron in far greater amounts and even before 1.18, or even 1.7, most players relied on iron farms because they couldn't justify spending the time to mine it):
And diamond isn't even a light source, nor can it be used for lighting which is arguably far more important than diamond gear itself in the Overworld, since lighting can prevent you even encountering hostile mobs to start with. You could have the best armour in the game, which is Netherite now, but you still need to be careful to keep it fully repaired because if you don't it'll be destroyed.
And diamond doesn't make people invincible, even if enchanted with mending because it is still possible to die in lava or be insta killed via another hazard like falling. It's not as overpowered as some people keep claiming it is, nowhere near to the same degree as the enchanted golden apple is. All diamond gear does is reduce the chances that you would be killed by a hostile mob or hazard, but without potions you still have to rely on natural regeneration to keep your health bar full.
But it does make sense for resources like iron and coal to be more common than diamond or lapis, because players would be using those resources more often, coal for smelting or cooking in furnaces, cheap and easy to access light sources, or iron for making general tools like shears or an early game tier pickaxe. Even during late game, you need iron for making hoppers, pistons, rails, cauldrons, minecarts, bars, iron doors etc.
That does not excuse making diamonds too uncommon that people wouldn't have enough to keep replaying their gear, but there are far more things in the game that would consume iron and coal than they would for diamonds, as you've just admitted.
If you didn't spawn proof your base, then no amount of enchanting is going to save you if a Witch spawns and then poisons you down to half a heart while another hostile deals the finishing move. You could just hide in a 2x1x1 hole all night, but where is the fun in this? you spend up to 10 minutes waiting for the sun to rise, with nothing to do except twiddling your thumbs or listening to music in the mean time.
Beds allow you to skip the night, but they can only be used if there are no monsters nearby.
Either way you look at it you still have to spawn proof your base to avoid a lot of unnecessary tediousness.
By making iron more difficult to find than in previous versions, Mojang haven't done the community any favours here,
they're following an obnoxious trend other game companies have done over years and that's nerf after nerf,
You must rely on a bread crumb method to explore caves nowadays, and i have yet to find any small ones.
I’ve been using a combination of contrasting colored blocks (blocks of cobble with torches) paired with trails of redstone. It mostly works okay, but I still get turned around when I’m doing tight turns with significant elevation changes.
The Swiss cheese caves are the most challenging for me; even with my bread crumbs, the holes and cracks everywhere that drop to who-knows-where with the aquifers and lava on different levels confuses me. But that’s what my journal is for - to help me keep track of elevation and major points of interest.
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I feel obliged to point out that because of the off-hand and dual-wielding parity issue between Java and Bedrock - namely, Bedrock is extremely limited in both, Mending is not OP in Bedrock unless you’ve built EXP farms specifically catering to Bedrock’s idiosyncrasies.
In the deep caves, Mending can be a major challenge depending where you are because you have less EXP blocks to mine and you can’t fight mobs with a sword in one hand while holding a pickaxe in the other.
I’ve wrecked my diamond pickaxe with Mending before during one of my earlier cave excursions in Bedrock. I had run out of most of my supplies and was stuck with that pickaxe to find my way back to my cave-base after falling down a hole and getting lost.
Edit: Aaand there’s also a Mending bug in Bedrock. ADO 486287 in the official MCPE bug tracker.
I feel obliged to point out that because of the off-hand and dual-wielding parity issue between Java and Bedrock - namely, Bedrock is extremely limited in both, Mending is not OP in Bedrock unless you’ve built EXP farms specifically catering to Bedrock’s idiosyncrasies.
In the deep caves, Mending can be a major challenge depending where you are because you have less EXP blocks to mine and you can’t fight mobs with a sword in one hand while holding a pickaxe in the other.
I’ve wrecked my diamond pickaxe with Mending before during one of my earlier cave excursions in Bedrock. I had run out of most of my supplies and was stuck with that pickaxe to find my way back to my cave-base after falling down a hole and getting lost.
Edit: Aaand there’s also a Mending bug in Bedrock. ADO 486287 in the official MCPE bug tracker.
The problem with XP farms is they're highly abusable and often involve a one stop shop kill zone where if set up correctly, would mean zero risk to the player.
The legit or non cheaty way to get XP via hostile mob kills would be to be actively engaging in combat with hostile mobs, by this I mean they have a chance to knock you down if you don't take the precaution to back off when your health bar is low or use regeneration potions, for example. And you would also need to pay close attention to armour and tool durability, trying to take the least amount of hits as possible to make mending repair effective
But the XP farms I've seen people build often involve mob spawners AND a half slab block opening where not even Baby Zombies can get through or hit the player, but players are able to hit them for some reason, I don't know if this has been patched since then, it has been a while since I've seen this contraption being done. But I know this is how a lot of people did build their XP farms at one point.
If Mending is to remain in the game as it is now, then we need to get back to basics with this one, have the enchantment work as intended and ask Mojang to make mob spawners less abusable or more risky to take advantage of by increasing the rate of hostile mob spawns, and as TMC suggests, add some sort of cool down on mob drops, players still have the option to keep their gear indefinitely, but they'd need to think more carefully about how to use the XP repair mechanic, as it could only be done a limited amount of times per mob spawner per hour or 3 in-game day/night cycles. Something like this would still be a nerf to mending in a way, but it wouldn't make it useless or make it impossible to repair said items, it'll just be used the way it was supposed to, either engaging in combat, or breeding animals, using furnaces to smelt ore or make charcoal supplies.
Mending isn't supposed to be used in a way that practically awards players free infinite XP
My method of exploring big caves (by which I mainly mean those in 1.6.4, where practically all caves are dense intertwined complexes of tunnels, mineshafts, and/or ravines) is to go through them lighting them up and killing off mobs until I reach a dead end or a complex intersection, then I backtrack, mining the ores and exploring side passages; the only form of navigation that I use is a map to show where I've been in general (I'll almost always be exploring around the edges of the mapped area) and "return points" that I make as I find whole new areas before I've finished exploring the current area or when I need to return due to running out of inventory space.
Some examples of how I explore caves:
This is an animated rendering of what I explored over a 30 day period, each of which averages more than 3,100 ores mined and about 1,000 torches placed, and the overall area is mostly within a level 3 map (1024x1024 blocks); the first frame shows the branch-mine I make when I start a world, afterwards everything I need (many times over) comes from caving, including the XP I need to repair my gear (up to 48 levels or 3,072 XP for my modded gear, whcih is repaired on the anvil as my version of Mending/vanilla 1.6.4's renaming mechanic, simply keeps the prior work penalty down; unlike 1.8+ the cost of a repair factors in enchantments and durability). The path I took reflects the underground interconnectivity - virtually everything shown is part of a single massive network, save for the odd surface cave and occasionally a cave system or two (I generally only explore surface openings in areas I've otherwise explored around), as well as returning to old return points after exploring too far away along a branch or off the edge of the current map (eventually I make new secondary bases, typically one per level 3 map as I explore very far away from my main base/existing bases):
A full-size rendering of the last frame (click to view full-size):
A rendering and spectator mode-like views of a typical large cave system in 1.6.4 as seen with MCEdit; I don't miss much despite not relying on a clear navigation system:
This is a "return point", a cobblestone pillar marking the spot where I returned from caving, or found a new area before I finished exploring the current area and want to make sure I can easily find it again, writing the coordinates down if I don't plan to return to it soon (my first world is so large that it can be years before I go back to an area, otherwise, as they are near the edge of the area I've mapped they can be found by searching around the edge); there are also furnaces behind it as I'll set them up in a known spot to smelt iron and gold so I can craft them into blocks to make more room (I'll also set them in a cave around where I'm exploring):
Large open caves (in my modded worlds) are easier to explore in many ways since you can clearly see across them; most of the time I spent exploring the area shown was spent exploring side caves leading to/from the big cave:
This is a slice through the world, which only shows caves exposed on that layer:
A rendering of the area shown above which shows all the other caves in the area:
An analysis of the area in MCEdit; there are close to 1.1 million air blocks and I placed about 4,400 torches, corresponding to about 4 full play sessions:
Some screenshots I took; big caves are even darker and scarier than in vanilla because a light level of 0 is totally dark (IMO one of the biggest flaws in vanilla is the lack of true darkness; some people even go caving without torches (or you can use Night Vision, which can be safer as you have full visibility and mobs won't be as concentrated, which roughly doubles the density of mobs as I explore along the edges of a nearly fully lit-up area, and much more when I explore into a pocket surrounded by explored areas):
A typical play session and some what I got while exploring the cave shown above; I had to return to the area at least twice to empty my ender chest, even with twice the capacity as vanilla (I generally collect a lot more non-resource items):
You can also see how through I am at lighting up caves; this is for visibility, not spawn-proofing, but that works well given that even with a threshold of 7 (0 in 1.18 and 5 in TMCW) you'll be placing torches close enough that the light level between them will be higher (I place them when the light level is 2-3, corresponding to 8-9 between torches, and place additional torches in any remaining darker areas so everything is lit the same. I do not intentionally place them as such but the spread of light around a torch naturally leads to the staggered-grid arrangement that is more optimal than a regular grid); I light up the ceilings by pillaring up and bridging around, which takes a significant portion of the time but does yield a significant amount of resources and reveals otherwise hidden caves:
ask Mojang to make mob spawners less abusable or more risky to take advantage of [...] the way it was supposed to
The issue here is how enchanting works: I don't "farm" so I know how lame it is to fight stupid mobs while being basically invincible in a modest iron armor, or mining ores I don't really need, for literal hours. It's not fun and it takes time away from exploration and building (you know, the basics of the game). Of course people wanted an alternative to that because the only progression this game offers is based on getting better gear, and enchanting has that role considering how mining stops very soon from being relevant (you just go from iron to diamond, netherite doesn't add much really).
The worst part is how spawners were designed before enchanting existed and were never re-balanced after its introduction. And now it's too late to do anything about it because, while not being designed as an official feature, players consider it as such and throw a fit whenever anything threatens to break their precious "farms". Mojang actually keeps introducing new blocks that are basically useless outside farms, it's really a lost cause.
The worst part is how spawners were designed before enchanting existed and were never re-balanced after its introduction. And now it's too late to do anything about it because, while not being designed as an official feature, players consider it as such and throw a fit whenever anything threatens to break their precious "farms". Mojang actually keeps introducing new blocks that are basically useless outside farms, it's really a lost cause.
I can't verify if this was ever in the game or how it would have worked but the Wiki claims that there were tags which seemed to limit the amount of XP given by a spawner which were removed in 1.3 (I found code for 1.0.0 which does not reference them though):
1.3.1 12w21a MaxExperience, RemainingExperience, ExperienceRegenTick, ExperienceRegenRate and ExperienceRegenAmount from MobSpawner have been removed.
This actually gave me my own idea for balancing spawners; in TMCWv1 I greatly increased their spawn rate, as well as added more types of mobs (creepers, witches, endermen); depending on the mob the peak spawn rate is up to 2,160 mobs per hour, or at least 10,800 XP per hour (more when factoring in 1-3 XP per piece of equipment; skeletons average at least 7 XP as they always have a bow, plus any armor).
In TMCWv4 I nerfed spawners by adding a similar system as implied by the Wiki, which works by incrementing a counter every time a mob spawns, decrementing it on each tick, and if it exceeds a threshold, set for about 50 mobs on a continuous basis (maximum mobs per spawn cycle, more if less are spawning as is usually the case outside of a farm designed for maximum efficiency), it will set a flag I added to mobs which disables XP and loot drops; this is generally enough that it never trips while playing (caving) and 50 or so mobs is plenty for most typical needs; 25 blaze rods, the average without Looting, is enough for all my needs on any world so far (a dozen for eyes of ender to find a stronghold, plus the occasional eyes for ender chests, which I place at secondary bases built every month or so), and you can always go back for more later.
That said, things like this, and especially actual bugs, should be implemented or fixed as soon as possible; for example, since 1.8 zombie pigmen will drop XP and rare drops if they are simply aggroed, no need for them to be targeting or recently hit by a player, which should have been a simple matter to fix before it left snapshots but they never did, and have even refused to fix it/revert bug fixes because it would upset too many players:
The other week, the aggro bugs were brought up for discussion, and we decided that while we could fix the aggro bugs, they were also linked to the XP glitch, and that it is too late in the cycle to change that - so the task at hand was "fix aggro, make sure to not break farms". Obviously that didn't happen either, and as a result we're going to fix it by basically adding back the glitch.
(frankly, Mojang is the worst developer when it comes to fixing bugs; I've fixed countless bugs using code examples posted on their own bug tracker, including significant bugs like MC-2025 (this comment has the fix I used; yes, it is that simple, to be extra safe I made the margin 1.0E-6 with 1.0E-9 added to calculateYOffset. I also fixed the related issue of mobs growing up using a fix given on MC-9568); by contrast, I don't have a list of pending bugs that need to be fixed - I fix them as soon as possible; the only reason why some were in so long is because I'm pretty much the only one who uses my mods and nobody else noticed or reported them (when TMCWv4 was released Mending would only work if it was the last enchantment due to erroneously using "hasMending = ench == Enchantment.mending" instead of "if (ench == Enchantment.mending) hasMending = true" inside a loop that iterated through the enchantments; I didn't notice it for 3 years since I normally added it last).
The issue here is how enchanting works: I don't "farm" so I know how lame it is to fight stupid mobs while being basically invincible in a modest iron armor, or mining ores I don't really need, for literal hours. It's not fun and it takes time away from exploration and building (you know, the basics of the game). Of course people wanted an alternative to that because the only progression this game offers is based on getting better gear, and enchanting has that role considering how mining stops very soon from being relevant (you just go from iron to diamond, netherite doesn't add much really).
The worst part is how spawners were designed before enchanting existed and were never re-balanced after its introduction. And now it's too late to do anything about it because, while not being designed as an official feature, players consider it as such and throw a fit whenever anything threatens to break their precious "farms". Mojang actually keeps introducing new blocks that are basically useless outside farms, it's really a lost cause.
It goes back to what I said before, that if they didn't want those things existing in the game then they shouldn't have implementing it in the first place, and humans making mistakes is no excuse, because there is a thing called beta testing which they do in shapshots or experimental builds in bedrock edition.
Now mob spawners exist in the game, with all the features that they have, they are hard to change without causing backlash.
People also need to consider the other side of the issue here, as this is a sandbox, and because this is a sandbox genre players are inclined to believe this entails that the point of the game, even in survival mode, is to share build ideas with friends or even build creatively in solo, sometimes they may use farms to supply them the resources for this, and breaking those farms could heavily inconvenience said players who would then be forced to spend multiple more hours grinding to get the resources they want for their projects, which isn't fun either.
There needs to be a compromise somewhere, how far should Mojang be allowed to go with their rebalancing before we demand that they stop? if we ruin too many people's fun in the game then we become responsible for it if we are the one's who asked Mojang to keep adding in changes that affected other people. We need limits, not going from one extreme to another.
It goes back to what I said before, that if they didn't want those things existing in the game then they shouldn't have implementing it in the first place, and humans making mistakes is no excuse, because there is a thing called beta testing which they do in shapshots or experimental builds in bedrock edition.
How were they supposed to foresee the addition of enchanting back in InfDev, long before enchanting, XP, or most mob drops were added, and when the game was being developed by a single person?
As mentioned before, they seem to have considered nerfing spawners in some way (though again, I can't find any actual evidence; this source code for 1.0.0 has no mention of the NBT tags, so it had to be between 1.0.0 and 1.3.1). Either way, they are extremely reluctant to make any changes that might nerf farms - even reverting important bug fixes; for example, if a ghast hits a zombie pigman and you then kill the ghast (or the pigman manages to kill it) the pigman will attack you, which is what sliced_lime was referring to by "aggro bugs" - yet they decided to revert a fix because doing so would break farms, and this had been known since early in the development of 1.8 so there was no excuse to let it get to the final release, much less persist for nearly a decade.
Incidentally, part of this may be because of the negative reception to nerfing iron and gold farms in a 1.8 snapshot; much as I did myself they made it so they would only drop iron and gold (including nuggets) if killed by a player:
Interestingly, this is the most upvoted comment on the first page:
Iron farms are abusing the mechanics already... like any monster farm.
(of course, there is a reply to me from somebody who thinks you need to constantly mine for hours on end to find enough iron to do anything; as I've said countless times before, I do not play as I do because I need the resources; everything is just stored away)
The problem with XP farms is they're highly abusable and often involve a one stop shop kill zone where if set up correctly, would mean zero risk to the player.
The legit or non cheaty way to get XP via hostile mob kills would be to be actively engaging in combat with hostile mobs, by this I mean they have a chance to knock you down if you don't take the precaution to back off when your health bar is low or use regeneration potions, for example. And you would also need to pay close attention to armour and tool durability, trying to take the least amount of hits as possible to make mending repair effective
But the XP farms I've seen people build often involve mob spawners AND a half slab block opening where not even Baby Zombies can get through or hit the player, but players are able to hit them for some reason, I don't know if this has been patched since then, it has been a while since I've seen this contraption being done. But I know this is how a lot of people did build their XP farms at one point.
If Mending is to remain in the game as it is now, then we need to get back to basics with this one, have the enchantment work as intended and ask Mojang to make mob spawners less abusable or more risky to take advantage of by increasing the rate of hostile mob spawns, and as TMC suggests, add some sort of cool down on mob drops, players still have the option to keep their gear indefinitely, but they'd need to think more carefully about how to use the XP repair mechanic, as it could only be done a limited amount of times per mob spawner per hour or 3 in-game day/night cycles. Something like this would still be a nerf to mending in a way, but it wouldn't make it useless or make it impossible to repair said items, it'll just be used the way it was supposed to, either engaging in combat, or breeding animals, using furnaces to smelt ore or make charcoal supplies.
Mending isn't supposed to be used in a way that practically awards players free infinite XP
just by cheesing mob spawners.
Yeah but farming the food needed for fair fight farming is slow and boring.
This game has way too much grinding, you say this yourself quite often.
because this is a sandbox genre players are inclined to believe this entails that the point of the game, even in survival mode, is to share build ideas with friends or even build creatively in solo, sometimes they may use farms to supply them the resources for this
This is probably the key issue here: there's no middle ground between old style Survival mode (fight and work hard to get what you need) and Creative (instantly get infinite amounts of everything while being immortal), and obviously lot of people need that middle ground because they find Survival tedious and Creative not challenging. Since Mojang never gave them a dedicated game mode, they kind of created their own.
This might be fine if only it wasn't so inelegant (it's basically manipulating bugs, gameplay loopholes, and the game's inner limitations while ignoring its intended gameplay cycle) and especially unbalanced: nobody cares how someone gets their resources in a sandbox game unless it's a game that wants to cater to all kind of gamers and also let them play together in the same framework.
Who do heck wants to compete with players that are x100 more successful just because they play a different way? Not to mention how even merely knowing that obstacles to progress can easily be circumvented make them less fun even to people who normally wouldn't abuse the game.
I know we're quite off topic here but to me there's one solution to this: discard the whole concept of basing the progression on killing stupid mobs, which has nothing to do with a game supposedly based on gathering resources and building, and split Survival in two different modes, one where getting resources requires work, and one with less risks and official ways of automating production based on block properties.
Otherwise Minecraft will always be the game that want to have its cake and it eat too.
Yeah but farming the food needed for fair fight farming is slow and boring.
This game has way too much grinding, you say this yourself quite often.
There needs to be more engaging ways to get resources, but slowing down the reward for RNG items to a half or so some people get an unfair advantage over other's purely by chance isn't the best way to do it, it's lazy, and rewarding luck is always the worst thing to do with enchantments in my opinion. Sure, patience could be considered a skill, to a point, but not everybody has the free time to just spend every day on this game, children have to go to school, most adults have to go to work etc.
I've suggested before to add in newer hostile or even neutral mobs that have their own drops for players for defeating them, or increasing the chances of existing hostile mobs to carry enchanted items, but in so doing making them much more dangerous for players to fight.
Beds could be made to only be allowed to be used in a base that is protected properly in a given radius, a base that is properly lit up, not outside in the dark. They technically already do, but if no monsters have spawned yet, players can simply skip the night before they even have a chance to spawn, which is a bit OP. Also beds should receive a nerf so they can no longer be stolen from Villagers, players would need to craft them if they want to use one at their base. Wool could also be obtained by use of shears only or wool blocks crafted with spider string, not upon death on sheep, this way, beds are rebalanced in a way to make night time more threatening to players. Lastly, it would make sense to redesign beds so there is a cool down if players leave the server while it is still night time, players who left the server would then need to wait 2 minutes before they could rejoin, so they a day length penalty for attempting to cheese the bed system. Obviously, solo players would be the least affected with this, but it makes sense.
There are lots of ways to improve the game,
without adding in unnecessary grind or annoyances to players who
The funny thing is that bedrock is much more rewarding RNG wise with far higher chances of getting weapons off mobs and fishing good gear etc
That's why I'm looking forward to 18 hours from now when 1.19 comes out and all players get both versions.
I'm obviously not looking forward to it at all; I completely ignored the previous offer (for a time older Java players were able to get Bedrock for free), and otherwise you can simply mod the game to change things you don't like (I actually reduced the chance of mobs dropping equipment in TMCW from 8.5% to 5% (Looting increases this by 2% per level, up from 1% in vanilla), but on the other hand it is far more common; for example, the chance of armor is up to 10-20-30% on Easy-Hard (vs 15% in vanilla) and the chances of higher tiers is significantly increased; even on Normal I see mobs in iron armor several times a day and diamond armor every few days, even two in a single day on multiple occasions (once within a couple minutes, they probably even existed at the same time), as opposed to every 6 months or more in my first world, and even that world had the inhabited time calculation modified to start at 25 hours (out of 50, which still only averages about 2/3 in the areas I'm exploring; by contrast, in TMCW regional difficulty is only based on total time spent in the world so it reaches a maximum after 100 hours. Zombies have a 3.3-6.7-10% chance of weapons, including pickaxes, axes, and hammers (a new tool type), with axes having an armor penetration effect (the only weapon that does so, unlike 1.9), compared to only 1% on Easy-Normal and 5% on Hard in vanilla, and so on:
This is basically the equivalent of seeing a mob in netherite in modern versions (they are quite similar in tier and rarity, except amethyst is found in the Overworld, and was added years before so it actually has no relation to netherite or Mojang's amethyst); even this is more commonly seen than diamond armor in vanilla:
This also shows another feature - skeletons can naturally spawn with a sword instead of bow; like Wither skeletons they move much faster, and all types other than Wither skeletons also have a baby variant:
These skeletons were in the same mineshaft:
Just an interesting thing I found while building a new base:
Also, these are inhabited time maps of my current world and my first world; the only area that reaches the maximum (white) is around my main base, despite playing on these worlds for over 22 days (528 hours) and 180 days (4320 hours), which shows how ridiculous the 50 hour requirement is unless you spend all your time in the same area:
There is another base to the south but it only shows up as a slight reddish tinge to some chunks, where pure green is 12.5 hours, pure red is 25 hours, pure yellow is 37.5 hours, and pure white is 50 hours:
This map of my first world looks a lot smoother because of the way I modified chunk saving in TMCW; vanilla always saves chunks when unloading them even if they weren't modified since the last time they were saved, which is quite wasteful, but the code that increases inhabited time does not mark them as modified so they may not be saved (I could have even just omitted it entirely as it has no purpose in TMCW), the large-scale variations in inhabited time are due to the fact that it wasn't added until 1.5 (central-northern parts) , and I later on reduced the view distance to match the client-side render distance (fixed at 10 chunks in vanilla 1.6.4, reduced to 8 chunks; this causes it to be lower mainly to the west and northeast):
Also, 1.8+ is even worse since the "raw" difficulty (displayed in F3) has to reach at least 2 to have any effect, in particular, this means that it is impossible for mobs to have armor on Easy, and only after a considerable time on Normal, while in vanilla 1.6.4 you can see them on the first day on Easy since effects start from 0). In addition, I see no point in adding "Hard-only" features; why can't spiders have potion effects on all difficulties (up to 5% on Easy, 10% on Normal, and 15% on Hard, compared to 10% on Hard only in vanilla)? The only such feature that I did not make universal is zombies breaking doors, I also removed the code for zombie sieges entirely instead of fixing it (it was broken from 1.4-1.7); naturally spawned zombies are easily enough to decimate an unprotected village without adding ridiculous spawning rules that defeat any such defenses (walled in and lit up) or require that the village be within a certain radius.
Logically mobs ought to drop what they're carrying. Your fix with making powerful armoured and armed mobs more common doesn't account for, say, how drowned with tridents in java are rare but their trident drop is rarer so you basically never get trident and they're a pain to fight every single time because they're hard to expect among the weak normal drowned and (imo) overpowered.
Logically mobs ought to drop what they're carrying. Your fix with making powerful armoured and armed mobs more common doesn't account for, say, how drowned with tridents in java are rare but their trident drop is rarer so you basically never get trident and they're a pain to fight every single time because they're hard to expect among the weak normal drowned and (imo) overpowered.
I understand balancing a game so that enemies aren't too easy to defeat or too frustrating that a lot of players end up hating the game that was supposed to be entertaining them. It's not an easy job, and Wedhro is right on this one, there is no hybrid mode that offers something for survival mode players that have a primarily build play style but do occasionally like fighting hostile mobs, and while there hasn't been a massive increase in difficulty with hostile mobs yet, excluding say the Warden who is dangerous, who is to say Mojang won't do it to general hostile mobs later on?
My suggestion is merely an idea, but I see what you mean, forcing this on everyone not playing on peaceful difficulty or creative mode, could potentially lead to overpowered hostile mobs and numerous deaths for players that are not combat orientated players or simply aren't good at the survival aspect of the game.
I agree, dealing with Drowned Zombies in possession of tridents is bad enough, but if they were to have these in combination with say enchanted armour, buffing their defence, not every player is going to be happy with the result. We do need a compromise.
In the end we're going to need another game mode that is designed to improve the overall experience for every player.
Survival+ or survival elite, still has unlimited respawns, but contrary to regular survival mode that grants players more freedom to explore, mine and build without too many interruptions, it could be designed to be more difficult and have buffed hostile mobs that will be carrying enchanted gear, and one's that already do, like Skeletons, will carry it more often, furthermore, Pillagers could receive a buff that allows them to dismantle fences, wooden doors and even use flint and steel in areas that have Villagers, increasing the challenge for players who do survival mode purely for the challenge, not just building and exploring. The enchanting and potion system could also be rebalanced, in this mode I suggested before.
This design is also consistent with the idea of Minecraft being a sandbox,
because players are given more freedom in how they play the vanilla game, without having to use mods
or keep asking Mojang to increase the difficulty or rebalance things when there will be a game mode designed for it.
I hear you.
I seldom use deepslate myself in the overworld unless I’m building a Nether portal, but I appreciate it in the Nether as an alternative to cobble.
The change in ore distribution - especially coal and iron (this was before I discovered the mountains another 2 maps away) - is the reason I immediately started building my enchanting room and thankfully, I was in a place to find both cows and reeds. I concluded early on that Fortune II at minimum was mandatory if I planned to do any serious mining in the area that I was at.
No joke, starting from digging at level 60-something pre-Fortune, I ran out of coal before I found my first diamonds between 15 and 10.
So I managed to get a Looting sword from a villager, built my enchanting table, got Fortune II, and then decided to do some mapping to see if I could find a better place to call home… and when I discovered the mountains, I could kind of see why the ore redistribution happened. I don’t appreciate it myself - amongst other things, my game has inconsistent lighting issues and while people say, “oh, you don’t need to torch so frequently!” I actually do if I want to actually see where I’m going, but I could see why.
Surface coal and iron for days. Oh, and some emeralds, too.
Thing is, especially on Survival, how to carry what you need - mining and food supplies - and leave enough space for treasures to haul back up to the surface?
I’m not late-game, so no shulker boxes or anything fancy. It’s ridiculously easy to get lost and end up mining 3+ different paths back out from sheer frustration. It’s pointless to bring a donkey or llama to help carry things.
I do try anyways, though - enchanted diamond armor, pickaxe, sword, and trident with Mending (tridents mean no arrows); blocks of coal and stacks of wood for torches; stacks of fish or baked potatoes for food; compass, clock, red stone, and a quill and book so I don’t get too lost or go to the surface at a bad time; bucket of water and milk for lava and witch respectively - but with all the prep work, my pockets don’t have much room left.
To mitigate THAT and also out of habit from liking to dig in the old ravines, I build a small base close to the entrance of the cave where I’ll dig and I dump in extra supplies so I at least don’t have to return to the surface, but that doesn’t solve the initial challenge of ore redistribution, needing to torch a ridiculous amount of space in a mountain cave, and getting lost in such a complicated cave network.
It’s a major challenge and on some days, I’ll find it a positive thing, but when I’m looking to chill (most of the time when I play!), it’s a burden I don’t appreciate.
The torches I might be able to live with because I used to mine in ravines all the time anyways, but the cheese holes really make it difficult for me to navigate and getting lost as many times as I have is NOT fun and to run out of torches, wood, and coal while scrambling for a way out is even less fun.
I’d go back to the smaller caves to dig, but there aren’t as many of those anymore… at least, not on my world so far.
I use an ender chest, along with compacting resources into blocks (I'll set up furnaces to smelt iron and gold when needed), which enables me to mine thousands of ores per play session, more than pretty much anybody will ever need, and yet I only have to return every other session (averaging about 3,100 ores mined, the example given is a more extreme case); the amount of inventory space required for gear isn't much, mostly my hotbar and a few additional slots, you can also put additional items in the ender chest (in modded worlds I have a double chest sized ender chest and carry an additional stack each of food and wood, which are consumed by the time I need the space; likewise, you could bring additional (char)coal for torches and the space will be freed as you use it up):
Note that this is from a vanilla 1.6.4 world, where caves are much denser and mineshafts much more common than in 1.7-1.17, with much greater amounts of iron and coal exposed; in fact, despite the greater depth 1.18 has only half as much iron and a third as much coal per chunk as older versions - and a lot of that won't be exposed in caves - nor do the larger caves in my modded worlds significantly impact my mining rates (if anything, I mine less when exploring the largest caves due to all the time spent on lighting them up):
Of interest, I once analyzed ore exposure in 1.6.4 - even just the spawn chunks had over 20,000 exposed ores, though from the numbers above you'll probably be finding far more diamond in 1.18 due to a much wider range exposed in caves, even with reduced air exposure (which doesn't make sense - most players need coal and iron in far greater amounts and even before 1.18, or even 1.7, most players relied on iron farms because they couldn't justify spending the time to mine it):
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2529746-how-many-ores-do-caves-expose
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
thanks guys
You must rely on a bread crumb method to explore caves nowadays, and i have yet to find any small ones.
And diamond isn't even a light source, nor can it be used for lighting which is arguably far more important than diamond gear itself in the Overworld, since lighting can prevent you even encountering hostile mobs to start with. You could have the best armour in the game, which is Netherite now, but you still need to be careful to keep it fully repaired because if you don't it'll be destroyed.
And diamond doesn't make people invincible, even if enchanted with mending because it is still possible to die in lava or be insta killed via another hazard like falling. It's not as overpowered as some people keep claiming it is, nowhere near to the same degree as the enchanted golden apple is. All diamond gear does is reduce the chances that you would be killed by a hostile mob or hazard, but without potions you still have to rely on natural regeneration to keep your health bar full.
But it does make sense for resources like iron and coal to be more common than diamond or lapis, because players would be using those resources more often, coal for smelting or cooking in furnaces, cheap and easy to access light sources, or iron for making general tools like shears or an early game tier pickaxe. Even during late game, you need iron for making hoppers, pistons, rails, cauldrons, minecarts, bars, iron doors etc.
That does not excuse making diamonds too uncommon that people wouldn't have enough to keep replaying their gear, but there are far more things in the game that would consume iron and coal than they would for diamonds, as you've just admitted.
If you didn't spawn proof your base, then no amount of enchanting is going to save you if a Witch spawns and then poisons you down to half a heart while another hostile deals the finishing move. You could just hide in a 2x1x1 hole all night, but where is the fun in this? you spend up to 10 minutes waiting for the sun to rise, with nothing to do except twiddling your thumbs or listening to music in the mean time.
Beds allow you to skip the night, but they can only be used if there are no monsters nearby.
Either way you look at it you still have to spawn proof your base to avoid a lot of unnecessary tediousness.
By making iron more difficult to find than in previous versions, Mojang haven't done the community any favours here,
they're following an obnoxious trend other game companies have done over years and that's nerf after nerf,
with little to justify the extra work you put in.
I’ve been using a combination of contrasting colored blocks (blocks of cobble with torches) paired with trails of redstone. It mostly works okay, but I still get turned around when I’m doing tight turns with significant elevation changes.
The Swiss cheese caves are the most challenging for me; even with my bread crumbs, the holes and cracks everywhere that drop to who-knows-where with the aquifers and lava on different levels confuses me. But that’s what my journal is for - to help me keep track of elevation and major points of interest.
I feel obliged to point out that because of the off-hand and dual-wielding parity issue between Java and Bedrock - namely, Bedrock is extremely limited in both, Mending is not OP in Bedrock unless you’ve built EXP farms specifically catering to Bedrock’s idiosyncrasies.
In the deep caves, Mending can be a major challenge depending where you are because you have less EXP blocks to mine and you can’t fight mobs with a sword in one hand while holding a pickaxe in the other.
I’ve wrecked my diamond pickaxe with Mending before during one of my earlier cave excursions in Bedrock. I had run out of most of my supplies and was stuck with that pickaxe to find my way back to my cave-base after falling down a hole and getting lost.
Edit: Aaand there’s also a Mending bug in Bedrock. ADO 486287 in the official MCPE bug tracker.
The problem with XP farms is they're highly abusable and often involve a one stop shop kill zone where if set up correctly, would mean zero risk to the player.
The legit or non cheaty way to get XP via hostile mob kills would be to be actively engaging in combat with hostile mobs, by this I mean they have a chance to knock you down if you don't take the precaution to back off when your health bar is low or use regeneration potions, for example. And you would also need to pay close attention to armour and tool durability, trying to take the least amount of hits as possible to make mending repair effective
But the XP farms I've seen people build often involve mob spawners AND a half slab block opening where not even Baby Zombies can get through or hit the player, but players are able to hit them for some reason, I don't know if this has been patched since then, it has been a while since I've seen this contraption being done. But I know this is how a lot of people did build their XP farms at one point.
If Mending is to remain in the game as it is now, then we need to get back to basics with this one, have the enchantment work as intended and ask Mojang to make mob spawners less abusable or more risky to take advantage of by increasing the rate of hostile mob spawns, and as TMC suggests, add some sort of cool down on mob drops, players still have the option to keep their gear indefinitely, but they'd need to think more carefully about how to use the XP repair mechanic, as it could only be done a limited amount of times per mob spawner per hour or 3 in-game day/night cycles. Something like this would still be a nerf to mending in a way, but it wouldn't make it useless or make it impossible to repair said items, it'll just be used the way it was supposed to, either engaging in combat, or breeding animals, using furnaces to smelt ore or make charcoal supplies.
Mending isn't supposed to be used in a way that practically awards players free infinite XP
just by cheesing mob spawners.
My method of exploring big caves (by which I mainly mean those in 1.6.4, where practically all caves are dense intertwined complexes of tunnels, mineshafts, and/or ravines) is to go through them lighting them up and killing off mobs until I reach a dead end or a complex intersection, then I backtrack, mining the ores and exploring side passages; the only form of navigation that I use is a map to show where I've been in general (I'll almost always be exploring around the edges of the mapped area) and "return points" that I make as I find whole new areas before I've finished exploring the current area or when I need to return due to running out of inventory space.
Some examples of how I explore caves:
A full-size rendering of the last frame (click to view full-size):
A rendering and spectator mode-like views of a typical large cave system in 1.6.4 as seen with MCEdit; I don't miss much despite not relying on a clear navigation system:
This is a "return point", a cobblestone pillar marking the spot where I returned from caving, or found a new area before I finished exploring the current area and want to make sure I can easily find it again, writing the coordinates down if I don't plan to return to it soon (my first world is so large that it can be years before I go back to an area, otherwise, as they are near the edge of the area I've mapped they can be found by searching around the edge); there are also furnaces behind it as I'll set them up in a known spot to smelt iron and gold so I can craft them into blocks to make more room (I'll also set them in a cave around where I'm exploring):
Large open caves (in my modded worlds) are easier to explore in many ways since you can clearly see across them; most of the time I spent exploring the area shown was spent exploring side caves leading to/from the big cave:
A rendering of the area shown above which shows all the other caves in the area:
An analysis of the area in MCEdit; there are close to 1.1 million air blocks and I placed about 4,400 torches, corresponding to about 4 full play sessions:
Some screenshots I took; big caves are even darker and scarier than in vanilla because a light level of 0 is totally dark (IMO one of the biggest flaws in vanilla is the lack of true darkness; some people even go caving without torches (or you can use Night Vision, which can be safer as you have full visibility and mobs won't be as concentrated, which roughly doubles the density of mobs as I explore along the edges of a nearly fully lit-up area, and much more when I explore into a pocket surrounded by explored areas):
A typical play session and some what I got while exploring the cave shown above; I had to return to the area at least twice to empty my ender chest, even with twice the capacity as vanilla (I generally collect a lot more non-resource items):
You can also see how through I am at lighting up caves; this is for visibility, not spawn-proofing, but that works well given that even with a threshold of 7 (0 in 1.18 and 5 in TMCW) you'll be placing torches close enough that the light level between them will be higher (I place them when the light level is 2-3, corresponding to 8-9 between torches, and place additional torches in any remaining darker areas so everything is lit the same. I do not intentionally place them as such but the spread of light around a torch naturally leads to the staggered-grid arrangement that is more optimal than a regular grid); I light up the ceilings by pillaring up and bridging around, which takes a significant portion of the time but does yield a significant amount of resources and reveals otherwise hidden caves:
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
The issue here is how enchanting works: I don't "farm" so I know how lame it is to fight stupid mobs while being basically invincible in a modest iron armor, or mining ores I don't really need, for literal hours. It's not fun and it takes time away from exploration and building (you know, the basics of the game). Of course people wanted an alternative to that because the only progression this game offers is based on getting better gear, and enchanting has that role considering how mining stops very soon from being relevant (you just go from iron to diamond, netherite doesn't add much really).
The worst part is how spawners were designed before enchanting existed and were never re-balanced after its introduction. And now it's too late to do anything about it because, while not being designed as an official feature, players consider it as such and throw a fit whenever anything threatens to break their precious "farms". Mojang actually keeps introducing new blocks that are basically useless outside farms, it's really a lost cause.
I can't verify if this was ever in the game or how it would have worked but the Wiki claims that there were tags which seemed to limit the amount of XP given by a spawner which were removed in 1.3 (I found code for 1.0.0 which does not reference them though):
This actually gave me my own idea for balancing spawners; in TMCWv1 I greatly increased their spawn rate, as well as added more types of mobs (creepers, witches, endermen); depending on the mob the peak spawn rate is up to 2,160 mobs per hour, or at least 10,800 XP per hour (more when factoring in 1-3 XP per piece of equipment; skeletons average at least 7 XP as they always have a bow, plus any armor).
In TMCWv4 I nerfed spawners by adding a similar system as implied by the Wiki, which works by incrementing a counter every time a mob spawns, decrementing it on each tick, and if it exceeds a threshold, set for about 50 mobs on a continuous basis (maximum mobs per spawn cycle, more if less are spawning as is usually the case outside of a farm designed for maximum efficiency), it will set a flag I added to mobs which disables XP and loot drops; this is generally enough that it never trips while playing (caving) and 50 or so mobs is plenty for most typical needs; 25 blaze rods, the average without Looting, is enough for all my needs on any world so far (a dozen for eyes of ender to find a stronghold, plus the occasional eyes for ender chests, which I place at secondary bases built every month or so), and you can always go back for more later.
That said, things like this, and especially actual bugs, should be implemented or fixed as soon as possible; for example, since 1.8 zombie pigmen will drop XP and rare drops if they are simply aggroed, no need for them to be targeting or recently hit by a player, which should have been a simple matter to fix before it left snapshots but they never did, and have even refused to fix it/revert bug fixes because it would upset too many players:
(frankly, Mojang is the worst developer when it comes to fixing bugs; I've fixed countless bugs using code examples posted on their own bug tracker, including significant bugs like MC-2025 (this comment has the fix I used; yes, it is that simple, to be extra safe I made the margin 1.0E-6 with 1.0E-9 added to calculateYOffset. I also fixed the related issue of mobs growing up using a fix given on MC-9568); by contrast, I don't have a list of pending bugs that need to be fixed - I fix them as soon as possible; the only reason why some were in so long is because I'm pretty much the only one who uses my mods and nobody else noticed or reported them (when TMCWv4 was released Mending would only work if it was the last enchantment due to erroneously using "hasMending = ench == Enchantment.mending" instead of "if (ench == Enchantment.mending) hasMending = true" inside a loop that iterated through the enchantments; I didn't notice it for 3 years since I normally added it last).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
It goes back to what I said before, that if they didn't want those things existing in the game then they shouldn't have implementing it in the first place, and humans making mistakes is no excuse, because there is a thing called beta testing which they do in shapshots or experimental builds in bedrock edition.
Now mob spawners exist in the game, with all the features that they have, they are hard to change without causing backlash.
People also need to consider the other side of the issue here, as this is a sandbox, and because this is a sandbox genre players are inclined to believe this entails that the point of the game, even in survival mode, is to share build ideas with friends or even build creatively in solo, sometimes they may use farms to supply them the resources for this, and breaking those farms could heavily inconvenience said players who would then be forced to spend multiple more hours grinding to get the resources they want for their projects, which isn't fun either.
There needs to be a compromise somewhere, how far should Mojang be allowed to go with their rebalancing before we demand that they stop? if we ruin too many people's fun in the game then we become responsible for it if we are the one's who asked Mojang to keep adding in changes that affected other people. We need limits, not going from one extreme to another.
How were they supposed to foresee the addition of enchanting back in InfDev, long before enchanting, XP, or most mob drops were added, and when the game was being developed by a single person?
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Java_Edition_Infdev_20100625-2
As mentioned before, they seem to have considered nerfing spawners in some way (though again, I can't find any actual evidence; this source code for 1.0.0 has no mention of the NBT tags, so it had to be between 1.0.0 and 1.3.1). Either way, they are extremely reluctant to make any changes that might nerf farms - even reverting important bug fixes; for example, if a ghast hits a zombie pigman and you then kill the ghast (or the pigman manages to kill it) the pigman will attack you, which is what sliced_lime was referring to by "aggro bugs" - yet they decided to revert a fix because doing so would break farms, and this had been known since early in the development of 1.8 so there was no excuse to let it get to the final release, much less persist for nearly a decade.
Incidentally, part of this may be because of the negative reception to nerfing iron and gold farms in a 1.8 snapshot; much as I did myself they made it so they would only drop iron and gold (including nuggets) if killed by a player:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/recent-updates-and-snapshots/382717-iron-farms-nerfed
Interestingly, this is the most upvoted comment on the first page:
(of course, there is a reply to me from somebody who thinks you need to constantly mine for hours on end to find enough iron to do anything; as I've said countless times before, I do not play as I do because I need the resources; everything is just stored away)
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Yeah but farming the food needed for fair fight farming is slow and boring.
This game has way too much grinding, you say this yourself quite often.
This is probably the key issue here: there's no middle ground between old style Survival mode (fight and work hard to get what you need) and Creative (instantly get infinite amounts of everything while being immortal), and obviously lot of people need that middle ground because they find Survival tedious and Creative not challenging. Since Mojang never gave them a dedicated game mode, they kind of created their own.
This might be fine if only it wasn't so inelegant (it's basically manipulating bugs, gameplay loopholes, and the game's inner limitations while ignoring its intended gameplay cycle) and especially unbalanced: nobody cares how someone gets their resources in a sandbox game unless it's a game that wants to cater to all kind of gamers and also let them play together in the same framework.
Who do heck wants to compete with players that are x100 more successful just because they play a different way? Not to mention how even merely knowing that obstacles to progress can easily be circumvented make them less fun even to people who normally wouldn't abuse the game.
I know we're quite off topic here but to me there's one solution to this: discard the whole concept of basing the progression on killing stupid mobs, which has nothing to do with a game supposedly based on gathering resources and building, and split Survival in two different modes, one where getting resources requires work, and one with less risks and official ways of automating production based on block properties.
Otherwise Minecraft will always be the game that want to have its cake and it eat too.
There needs to be more engaging ways to get resources, but slowing down the reward for RNG items to a half or so some people get an unfair advantage over other's purely by chance isn't the best way to do it, it's lazy, and rewarding luck is always the worst thing to do with enchantments in my opinion. Sure, patience could be considered a skill, to a point, but not everybody has the free time to just spend every day on this game, children have to go to school, most adults have to go to work etc.
I've suggested before to add in newer hostile or even neutral mobs that have their own drops for players for defeating them, or increasing the chances of existing hostile mobs to carry enchanted items, but in so doing making them much more dangerous for players to fight.
Beds could be made to only be allowed to be used in a base that is protected properly in a given radius, a base that is properly lit up, not outside in the dark. They technically already do, but if no monsters have spawned yet, players can simply skip the night before they even have a chance to spawn, which is a bit OP. Also beds should receive a nerf so they can no longer be stolen from Villagers, players would need to craft them if they want to use one at their base. Wool could also be obtained by use of shears only or wool blocks crafted with spider string, not upon death on sheep, this way, beds are rebalanced in a way to make night time more threatening to players. Lastly, it would make sense to redesign beds so there is a cool down if players leave the server while it is still night time, players who left the server would then need to wait 2 minutes before they could rejoin, so they a day length penalty for attempting to cheese the bed system. Obviously, solo players would be the least affected with this, but it makes sense.
There are lots of ways to improve the game,
without adding in unnecessary grind or annoyances to players who
want to get their build projects done.
The funny thing is that bedrock is much more rewarding RNG wise with far higher chances of getting weapons off mobs and fishing good gear etc
That's why I'm looking forward to 18 hours from now when 1.19 comes out and all players get both versions.
I'm obviously not looking forward to it at all; I completely ignored the previous offer (for a time older Java players were able to get Bedrock for free), and otherwise you can simply mod the game to change things you don't like (I actually reduced the chance of mobs dropping equipment in TMCW from 8.5% to 5% (Looting increases this by 2% per level, up from 1% in vanilla), but on the other hand it is far more common; for example, the chance of armor is up to 10-20-30% on Easy-Hard (vs 15% in vanilla) and the chances of higher tiers is significantly increased; even on Normal I see mobs in iron armor several times a day and diamond armor every few days, even two in a single day on multiple occasions (once within a couple minutes, they probably even existed at the same time), as opposed to every 6 months or more in my first world, and even that world had the inhabited time calculation modified to start at 25 hours (out of 50, which still only averages about 2/3 in the areas I'm exploring; by contrast, in TMCW regional difficulty is only based on total time spent in the world so it reaches a maximum after 100 hours. Zombies have a 3.3-6.7-10% chance of weapons, including pickaxes, axes, and hammers (a new tool type), with axes having an armor penetration effect (the only weapon that does so, unlike 1.9), compared to only 1% on Easy-Normal and 5% on Hard in vanilla, and so on:
This is basically the equivalent of seeing a mob in netherite in modern versions (they are quite similar in tier and rarity, except amethyst is found in the Overworld, and was added years before so it actually has no relation to netherite or Mojang's amethyst); even this is more commonly seen than diamond armor in vanilla:
This also shows another feature - skeletons can naturally spawn with a sword instead of bow; like Wither skeletons they move much faster, and all types other than Wither skeletons also have a baby variant:
These skeletons were in the same mineshaft:
Just an interesting thing I found while building a new base:
Also, these are inhabited time maps of my current world and my first world; the only area that reaches the maximum (white) is around my main base, despite playing on these worlds for over 22 days (528 hours) and 180 days (4320 hours), which shows how ridiculous the 50 hour requirement is unless you spend all your time in the same area:
This map of my first world looks a lot smoother because of the way I modified chunk saving in TMCW; vanilla always saves chunks when unloading them even if they weren't modified since the last time they were saved, which is quite wasteful, but the code that increases inhabited time does not mark them as modified so they may not be saved (I could have even just omitted it entirely as it has no purpose in TMCW), the large-scale variations in inhabited time are due to the fact that it wasn't added until 1.5 (central-northern parts) , and I later on reduced the view distance to match the client-side render distance (fixed at 10 chunks in vanilla 1.6.4, reduced to 8 chunks; this causes it to be lower mainly to the west and northeast):
Also, 1.8+ is even worse since the "raw" difficulty (displayed in F3) has to reach at least 2 to have any effect, in particular, this means that it is impossible for mobs to have armor on Easy, and only after a considerable time on Normal, while in vanilla 1.6.4 you can see them on the first day on Easy since effects start from 0). In addition, I see no point in adding "Hard-only" features; why can't spiders have potion effects on all difficulties (up to 5% on Easy, 10% on Normal, and 15% on Hard, compared to 10% on Hard only in vanilla)? The only such feature that I did not make universal is zombies breaking doors, I also removed the code for zombie sieges entirely instead of fixing it (it was broken from 1.4-1.7); naturally spawned zombies are easily enough to decimate an unprotected village without adding ridiculous spawning rules that defeat any such defenses (walled in and lit up) or require that the village be within a certain radius.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Logically mobs ought to drop what they're carrying. Your fix with making powerful armoured and armed mobs more common doesn't account for, say, how drowned with tridents in java are rare but their trident drop is rarer so you basically never get trident and they're a pain to fight every single time because they're hard to expect among the weak normal drowned and (imo) overpowered.
I understand balancing a game so that enemies aren't too easy to defeat or too frustrating that a lot of players end up hating the game that was supposed to be entertaining them. It's not an easy job, and Wedhro is right on this one, there is no hybrid mode that offers something for survival mode players that have a primarily build play style but do occasionally like fighting hostile mobs, and while there hasn't been a massive increase in difficulty with hostile mobs yet, excluding say the Warden who is dangerous, who is to say Mojang won't do it to general hostile mobs later on?
My suggestion is merely an idea, but I see what you mean, forcing this on everyone not playing on peaceful difficulty or creative mode, could potentially lead to overpowered hostile mobs and numerous deaths for players that are not combat orientated players or simply aren't good at the survival aspect of the game.
I agree, dealing with Drowned Zombies in possession of tridents is bad enough, but if they were to have these in combination with say enchanted armour, buffing their defence, not every player is going to be happy with the result. We do need a compromise.
In the end we're going to need another game mode that is designed to improve the overall experience for every player.
Survival+ or survival elite, still has unlimited respawns, but contrary to regular survival mode that grants players more freedom to explore, mine and build without too many interruptions, it could be designed to be more difficult and have buffed hostile mobs that will be carrying enchanted gear, and one's that already do, like Skeletons, will carry it more often, furthermore, Pillagers could receive a buff that allows them to dismantle fences, wooden doors and even use flint and steel in areas that have Villagers, increasing the challenge for players who do survival mode purely for the challenge, not just building and exploring. The enchanting and potion system could also be rebalanced, in this mode I suggested before.
This design is also consistent with the idea of Minecraft being a sandbox,
because players are given more freedom in how they play the vanilla game, without having to use mods
or keep asking Mojang to increase the difficulty or rebalance things when there will be a game mode designed for it.