It would be nice if quartz were a farmable mob drop. Perhaps instead of spider eyes or sticks, witches could drop quartz? Of course, you can go into the Nether to mine it, but getting large quantities for large builds is tedious. It's such a great block, it would be wonderful if it were a tad easier to obtain.
I'm working on building a Japanese castle and it requires quite a bit of quartz. I could use concrete, and it's a great block, but the white concrete has a grey/blue undertone. Bone can be used, but it's a bit dingy. Wool is another possibility but the texture isn't smooth. Diorite would be okay if it didn't have the black and grey specks in it. In addition to it's innate beauty, quartz is the only white block that can be slabbed and staired. (I'm not counting sandstone since it's more cream/pale yellow.)
I agree with being able to farm quartz in some way or another. It's the perfect material for farming potential, too. It has very few non-decorative uses, and it's near-impossible to get enough quartz to build anything reasonably big by mining in the Nether.
I do agree with Mastermined that it should spawn in the Nether. Not only does this make sense, and makes sure that quartz is still gated behind Nether travel, but it also gives people a good reason to build a base in the Nether.
Let's not make Minecraft a game focusing around building mob farms, because then it becomes Farmcraft, not Minecraft.
In my opinion, if building the farms requires designing and getting the materials beforehand to build it, it's balanced enough. While you may like building without farms, some people like to think big. Hermitcraft players (Mumbo Jumbo, iskall85, xisumavoid, etc.) and many other players like to build large scale structures, and having to mine hundreds of resources like Iron, Gold or Quartz is a huge barrier between them and building cool stuff. That's why farms are a thing, not just for the sake of amassing hundreds of resources so that you'll never need to go mine for them again.
Do you want to mine for the iron to build a giant spaceship or a huge skyscraper? (Keeping in mind that 7 iron blocks alone require 63 ingots, almost a full stack, so in order to get the 10 or 20 stacks of iron blocks necessary for huge builds, you basically have to be TheMasterCaver.)
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My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
Villagers should sell Quartz instead of adding a new mob, as the latter is an overly-unoriginal way to make something renewable. Another way could be to be able to farm it by finding a new plant that can "extract" minerals from the soil and forms crystal, allowing the player to grow quartz.
I don't really like the idea of farming quartz as a plant, because that sounds very, very mod-like.
A villager trade might be nice, but considering what most villager trades are like for similar items (lapis lazuli, redstone) I don't think it would be great for people trying to get quartz in large quantities.
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My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
I could see this as a Miner type of Villager (possible Blacksmith profession) that sells Andesite/Diorite/Granite, buys different ores, and has Nether Quartz as a later trade. Otherwise it would be good as a drop for a new Nether based mob rather than an existing mob.
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I personally think that being able to farm resources detracts from a huge part of the game, and what does the description for Survival mode say anyway?
"Search for resources" - as in actually mining them, as in Minecraft.
For comparison, this is what Creative mode is described as:
"Unlimited resources" - which is exactly what most farms give you for little or no additional effort once you've built them; farming food or wood is one thing (after all, growing crops is called farming) but resources is another.
As for quartz, I don't even specifically mine it just for the drops, but for the XP, and I get more than I need for my main bases; in my last world I mined over 10,000 ore at the rate of around 1,000 ore per hour - that's 250-550 blocks of quartz per hour (depending on Fortune), and had plenty left over after building this:
That's a lot of quartz - equivalent to 7,578 ore mined without using Fortune (why bother when I get so much anyway, and again, the only time I go to the Nether is to mine quartz to get XP for enchanting, which I do only one time, and to find a fortress; it may as well not exist afterwards) - and I still had around 10 stacks of blocks remaining.
For an example of just how fast I gather resources, this is what I got today from caving (in the Overworld):
Here you can see exactly how much time I spent playing to get that from the dates on session.lock and level.dat (session.lock is only updated once when you load a world while level.dat is the last time the world was saved prior to quitting):
3 hours and 18 minutes or 3.3 hours, meaning that I mined 1,075 ore per hour, including 241 iron per hour; when all resources are included (mineral blocks + other items) I collected a total of 4,147 items at the rate of 1,257 items per hour - and that does not even include the coal that I used.
Now you know why others have posted threads, including suggestions, that they should nerf the abundances of various resources, possibly including Nether quartz. You also do not "basically have to be TheMasterCaver" in order to collect plenty of resources:
Nether quartz are about as common as coal, but since there is so much open space, it is very very common. I got four stacks in ten minutes.
4 stacks in 10 minutes = 24 stacks or 1,536 items/384 blocks per hour (they did not say if they used Fortune and/or an enchanted diamond pickaxe with Efficiency). A lot more posts in the thread that came from say it is "too common" or "too easy to get" (and no, they did not reduce it later on, as suggested since they had just added it back then and may have been testing it. In fact, 1.8 made all ores more common by increasing the size of all veins by one, which nonlinearly increases the size of veins since the actual relationship is something like x^2; a size of 50 generates veins that are about 100 times larger than a size of 5).
If they did add quartz as a mob drop it should only drop if the player kills them directly, as should everything else (yes, including iron from iron golems, which Mojang implemented it in a 1.8 snapshot but reverted - really, what is so bad about that? They could have removed it altogether). I would even support diamond as a mob drop if it were unfarmable (I even have Giants drop them in a mod, but only with Looting, as a (level * 33%) chance of one, and Giants are very rare, 1-2 per night and not from spawners, which "burn out" after a while if they spawn too many mobs too quickly anyway).
I personally think that being able to farm resources detracts from a huge part of the game, and what does the description for Survival mode say anyway?
"Search for resources" - as in actually mining them, as in Minecraft.
For comparison, this is what Creative mode is described as:
"Unlimited resources" - which is exactly what most farms give you for little or no additional effort once you've built them; farming food or wood is one thing (after all, growing crops is called farming) but resources is another.
Some people (including me) want a mode that's in-between the two, allowing for near infinite building possibilities, but still requiring a bit of effort and thought behind those resources to have something else to do when building gets boring. What if we had another gamemode for that? Oh wait! We don't need one because it's just survival mode but with farms.
Also, while I appreciate the work you've put into Minecraft, heck, I'm often blown away by it, the truth is that very few of the rest of us are anywhere close to the same people. I can't stand mining for more than about an hour before the gray color of the stone starts to tire my eyes, although I like to do it for short periods of time. (I could make a rant about how Minecraft's underground should be more Terraria-like to break up the monotony, but that's offtopic.
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My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
Some people (including me) want a mode that's in-between the two, allowing for near infinite building possibilities, but still requiring a bit of effort and thought behind those resources to have something else to do when building gets boring. What if we had another gamemode for that? Oh wait! We don't need one because it's just survival mode but with farms.
Also, while I appreciate the work you've put into Minecraft, heck, I'm often blown away by it, the truth is that very few of the rest of us are anywhere close to the same people. I can't stand mining for more than about an hour before the gray color of the stone starts to tire my eyes, although I like to do it for short periods of time. (I could make a rant about how Minecraft's underground should be more Terraria-like to break up the monotony, but that's offtopic.
This is a good point. A lot of people say Minecraft should "return to its roots" of being focused on mining and crafting but if I had to guess, fiddling around in a crafting GUI isn't a huge point of enjoyment for most players and that to many, mining gets fairly monotonous as well. I'd certainly welcome an update that adds more mining related content as it is terribly boring to me as it exists but the game having "mine" in the title or the Survival description saying "gather resources" are not good reasons for there not to be a renewable source of a particular mined item.
And I'll say that even as a person who has never had a problem with not being able to get enough Quartz and who doesn't use item farms in general. It isn't like it is an incredibly useful item to begin with, outside of some redstone stuff and as a building block.
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If you want to have tons of quartz, use creative mode. Quartz is one of the nicest materials in game, and it comes at a high price. If witches dropped quartz, it's value would drastically decrease. You would also lose of the few reasons for going to the Nether.
The only way I could see quartz getting more common is if it generates rarely in nether fortress chests.
I'm working on building a Japanese castle and it requires quite a bit of quartz. I could use concrete, and it's a great block, but the white concrete has a grey/blue undertone. Bone can be used, but it's a bit dingy. Wool is another possibility but the texture isn't smooth. Diorite would be okay if it didn't have the black and grey specks in it. In addition to it's innate beauty, quartz is the only white block that can be slabbed and staired. (I'm not counting sandstone since it's more cream/pale yellow.)
That's a weird reason for this.
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Yeah, that guy in the avatar is me. I'm *that* strange. It happens. Sometimes people act like that. Just go with it. I can offer help with suggestions even before you post them - NOT make your suggestions - but help you with them.
There's another reason for making quartz into a mob drop, that being servers. Unless your ore spawns frequently enough that you're basically mining away the entire ground if you try to get rid of all the ore, tens or hundreds of players all mining away in the same area are going to quickly make nearby chunks lose all of their valuable material, and people will need to march through ghasts and lava to find more of it.
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My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
I personally think that being able to farm resources detracts from a huge part of the game, and what does the description for Survival mode say anyway?
"Search for resources" - as in actually mining them, as in Minecraft.
For comparison, this is what Creative mode is described as:
"Unlimited resources" - which is exactly what most farms give you for little or no additional effort once you've built them; farming food or wood is one thing (after all, growing crops is called farming) but resources is another.
As for quartz, I don't even specifically mine it just for the drops, but for the XP, and I get more than I need for my main bases; in my last world I mined over 10,000 ore at the rate of around 1,000 ore per hour - that's 250-550 blocks of quartz per hour (depending on Fortune), and had plenty left over after building this:
That's a lot of quartz - equivalent to 7,578 ore mined without using Fortune (why bother when I get so much anyway, and again, the only time I go to the Nether is to mine quartz to get XP for enchanting, which I do only one time, and to find a fortress; it may as well not exist afterwards) - and I still had around 10 stacks of blocks remaining.
For an example of just how fast I gather resources, this is what I got today from caving (in the Overworld):
Here you can see exactly how much time I spent playing to get that from the dates on session.lock and level.dat (session.lock is only updated once when you load a world while level.dat is the last time the world was saved prior to quitting):
3 hours and 18 minutes or 3.3 hours, meaning that I mined 1,075 ore per hour, including 241 iron per hour; when all resources are included (mineral blocks + other items) I collected a total of 4,147 items at the rate of 1,257 items per hour - and that does not even include the coal that I used.
Now you know why others have posted threads, including suggestions, that they should nerf the abundances of various resources, possibly including Nether quartz. You also do not "basically have to be TheMasterCaver" in order to collect plenty of resources:
4 stacks in 10 minutes = 24 stacks or 1,536 items/384 blocks per hour (they did not say if they used Fortune and/or an enchanted diamond pickaxe with Efficiency). A lot more posts in the thread that came from say it is "too common" or "too easy to get" (and no, they did not reduce it later on, as suggested since they had just added it back then and may have been testing it. In fact, 1.8 made all ores more common by increasing the size of all veins by one, which nonlinearly increases the size of veins since the actual relationship is something like x^2; a size of 50 generates veins that are about 100 times larger than a size of 5).
If they did add quartz as a mob drop it should only drop if the player kills them directly, as should everything else (yes, including iron from iron golems, which Mojang implemented it in a 1.8 snapshot but reverted - really, what is so bad about that? They could have removed it altogether). I would even support diamond as a mob drop if it were unfarmable (I even have Giants drop them in a mod, but only with Looting, as a (level * 33%) chance of one, and Giants are very rare, 1-2 per night and not from spawners, which "burn out" after a while if they spawn too many mobs too quickly anyway).
TheMasterCaver has put this very well. Survival mode is about gathering resources, and that is drifting away. Do we really need another farmable material. If anything, I think we need less farmable materials. Sure, some aspects of gathering the resources are sort of monotonous, but still. You know what, I think I'm going to suggest a new gamemode.
I recommend the blaze, or a new mob. By making blazes drop quartz farming would be a challenge, so manual mining would still be ideal until you find a double spawner or make a nether parameter.
-1 You can make farms for pretty much anything nowadays. Let's not make Minecraft a game focusing around building mob farms, because then it becomes Farmcraft, not Minecraft.
This seems like the perfect material to avoid this problem entirely. Prismarine is almost impossible to get sufficient amounts of by hand, so people make guardian farms. You can still go mining for quartz by hand.
In other words, the game isn't even strongly encouraging you to make a quartz farm.
In my opinion, this idea is redundant due to how common Quartz Ore is in the Nether. It's virtually everywhere! And Quartz doesn't seem to be a logical drop for any mob (maybe a quartz golem is the closest thing). You can't make mob farms for everything, you know. This game is called Minecraft for a reason!
And for all those people wanting to build giant quartz shrines, there is a thing called Creative Mode.
If you want to have tons of quartz, use creative mode. Quartz is one of the nicest materials in game, and it comes at a high price. If witches dropped quartz, it's value would drastically decrease. You would also lose of the few reasons for going to the Nether.
The only way I could see quartz getting more common is if it generates rarely in nether fortress chests.
I agree. Quartz isn't even that rare, and it even gives the bonus of a lot of xp. I guess nothing is allowed to require effort anymore...
there is a online generator that you can use to create a mob spawner that will spawn lets say a zombie for example and you can set what it drops or you could create your own loot table, thats more of the advanced stuff tho
You can also add your own loot tables. I've actually made blazes drop quartz for my skyblock map.
I play almost strictly Skyblock, so being able to purchase quartz or individual diamonds from villagers would be perfect.
I feel that altering the loot tables is kind of cheating, and suggesting creative mode is a cop out that doesn't consider the actual issue.
Even in regular survival mode, on a multiplayer server, quartz can be a little hard to come by, but, again, my concern is mostly with playing in Skyblock.
Even if wither skeletons or pigman zombies dropped it as often as regular zombies dropped iron, that would suffice. I really only need the diamonds for the enchanting table and the quartz for some comparitors. I don't want tons of it, just a little here and there.
How about if magma cubes (rarely) dropped nether quartz?
Firstly, some roleplay based arguments:
The only current mob for which it would make sense to drop nether quartz is the magma cube, as magma is basically hot semi-molten rock and as such could contain some nether quartz. No other mob ever seems to use/consume nether quartz in any way.
One issue is that quartz crystals' formation generally require a calm steady environment where it can grow slowly, sufficiently low temperatures and/or some silica water solution, all of which don't happen in the Nether, much less in a bouncy magma cube.
A workaround it is to notice that there already is nether quartz ore in the Nether, which means such appropriate conditions have already been previously achieved there. It is therefore possible that magma cubes somehow manage to incorporate those crystals sometimes when "coming to life" or whatever it is that happens to them. Furthermore, quartz blocks do not melt under any circumstances, even if submerged in lava, so it does make sense that magma blocks could still contain some after all. It is also worth noticing that all non-decorative recipes which involve quartz have some sensory function, and one of magma cubes' most prominent features are their fierce, fiery eyes.
These drops should still be rare, since even if nether quartz is relatively common in the Nether, its proportion to other blocks like netherrack is small. Besides, all that bouncy movement from magma blocks can easily break the quartz, increasing it's surface area, which could make it susceptible to melting after all.
Secondly, some gameplay based arguments:
Magma cubes are a rare spawn in the Nether which can't take fall damage, making them somehow hard to farm (but not impossible). At the moment their only drop are magma creams, which is kind of boring*, specially because they can be crafted with other easily farmable materials. If magma cubes were to rarely drop nether quartz as well, not much would change for most players. However, nether quartz farms would become possible, but only truly worth it for those who pursue monstrously huge projects, and in those cases, I guess farms are okay. By the way. it is an enormous hassle to build a mob farm in the Nether in survival mode. I've never met anyone who has never died trying at some point.
*I understand they want to emphasize the parallels with slimes, which also only have one drop, a drop not only itself quite similar to magma creams, but part of a recipe to craft them. However, magma cubes are not slimes, they're very similar to them in many ways, except that they are quite literally made of magma.
It would be nice if quartz were a farmable mob drop. Perhaps instead of spider eyes or sticks, witches could drop quartz? Of course, you can go into the Nether to mine it, but getting large quantities for large builds is tedious. It's such a great block, it would be wonderful if it were a tad easier to obtain.
I'm working on building a Japanese castle and it requires quite a bit of quartz. I could use concrete, and it's a great block, but the white concrete has a grey/blue undertone. Bone can be used, but it's a bit dingy. Wool is another possibility but the texture isn't smooth. Diorite would be okay if it didn't have the black and grey specks in it. In addition to it's innate beauty, quartz is the only white block that can be slabbed and staired. (I'm not counting sandstone since it's more cream/pale yellow.)
I agree with being able to farm quartz in some way or another. It's the perfect material for farming potential, too. It has very few non-decorative uses, and it's near-impossible to get enough quartz to build anything reasonably big by mining in the Nether.
I do agree with Mastermined that it should spawn in the Nether. Not only does this make sense, and makes sure that quartz is still gated behind Nether travel, but it also gives people a good reason to build a base in the Nether.
In my opinion, if building the farms requires designing and getting the materials beforehand to build it, it's balanced enough. While you may like building without farms, some people like to think big. Hermitcraft players (Mumbo Jumbo, iskall85, xisumavoid, etc.) and many other players like to build large scale structures, and having to mine hundreds of resources like Iron, Gold or Quartz is a huge barrier between them and building cool stuff. That's why farms are a thing, not just for the sake of amassing hundreds of resources so that you'll never need to go mine for them again.
Do you want to mine for the iron to build a giant spaceship or a huge skyscraper? (Keeping in mind that 7 iron blocks alone require 63 ingots, almost a full stack, so in order to get the 10 or 20 stacks of iron blocks necessary for huge builds, you basically have to be TheMasterCaver.)
My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
I don't really like the idea of farming quartz as a plant, because that sounds very, very mod-like.
A villager trade might be nice, but considering what most villager trades are like for similar items (lapis lazuli, redstone) I don't think it would be great for people trying to get quartz in large quantities.
My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
I could see this as a Miner type of Villager (possible Blacksmith profession) that sells Andesite/Diorite/Granite, buys different ores, and has Nether Quartz as a later trade. Otherwise it would be good as a drop for a new Nether based mob rather than an existing mob.
Want some advice on how to thrive in the Suggestions section? Check this handy list of guidelines and tips for posting your ideas and responding to the ideas of others!
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I personally think that being able to farm resources detracts from a huge part of the game, and what does the description for Survival mode say anyway?
"Search for resources" - as in actually mining them, as in Minecraft.
For comparison, this is what Creative mode is described as:
"Unlimited resources" - which is exactly what most farms give you for little or no additional effort once you've built them; farming food or wood is one thing (after all, growing crops is called farming) but resources is another.
As for quartz, I don't even specifically mine it just for the drops, but for the XP, and I get more than I need for my main bases; in my last world I mined over 10,000 ore at the rate of around 1,000 ore per hour - that's 250-550 blocks of quartz per hour (depending on Fortune), and had plenty left over after building this:
That's a lot of quartz - equivalent to 7,578 ore mined without using Fortune (why bother when I get so much anyway, and again, the only time I go to the Nether is to mine quartz to get XP for enchanting, which I do only one time, and to find a fortress; it may as well not exist afterwards) - and I still had around 10 stacks of blocks remaining.
For an example of just how fast I gather resources, this is what I got today from caving (in the Overworld):
Here you can see exactly how much time I spent playing to get that from the dates on session.lock and level.dat (session.lock is only updated once when you load a world while level.dat is the last time the world was saved prior to quitting):
3 hours and 18 minutes or 3.3 hours, meaning that I mined 1,075 ore per hour, including 241 iron per hour; when all resources are included (mineral blocks + other items) I collected a total of 4,147 items at the rate of 1,257 items per hour - and that does not even include the coal that I used.
Now you know why others have posted threads, including suggestions, that they should nerf the abundances of various resources, possibly including Nether quartz. You also do not "basically have to be TheMasterCaver" in order to collect plenty of resources:
4 stacks in 10 minutes = 24 stacks or 1,536 items/384 blocks per hour (they did not say if they used Fortune and/or an enchanted diamond pickaxe with Efficiency). A lot more posts in the thread that came from say it is "too common" or "too easy to get" (and no, they did not reduce it later on, as suggested since they had just added it back then and may have been testing it. In fact, 1.8 made all ores more common by increasing the size of all veins by one, which nonlinearly increases the size of veins since the actual relationship is something like x^2; a size of 50 generates veins that are about 100 times larger than a size of 5).
If they did add quartz as a mob drop it should only drop if the player kills them directly, as should everything else (yes, including iron from iron golems, which Mojang implemented it in a 1.8 snapshot but reverted - really, what is so bad about that? They could have removed it altogether). I would even support diamond as a mob drop if it were unfarmable (I even have Giants drop them in a mod, but only with Looting, as a (level * 33%) chance of one, and Giants are very rare, 1-2 per night and not from spawners, which "burn out" after a while if they spawn too many mobs too quickly anyway).
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?
Some people (including me) want a mode that's in-between the two, allowing for near infinite building possibilities, but still requiring a bit of effort and thought behind those resources to have something else to do when building gets boring. What if we had another gamemode for that? Oh wait! We don't need one because it's just survival mode but with farms.
Also, while I appreciate the work you've put into Minecraft, heck, I'm often blown away by it, the truth is that very few of the rest of us are anywhere close to the same people. I can't stand mining for more than about an hour before the gray color of the stone starts to tire my eyes, although I like to do it for short periods of time. (I could make a rant about how Minecraft's underground should be more Terraria-like to break up the monotony, but that's offtopic.
My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
This is a good point. A lot of people say Minecraft should "return to its roots" of being focused on mining and crafting but if I had to guess, fiddling around in a crafting GUI isn't a huge point of enjoyment for most players and that to many, mining gets fairly monotonous as well. I'd certainly welcome an update that adds more mining related content as it is terribly boring to me as it exists but the game having "mine" in the title or the Survival description saying "gather resources" are not good reasons for there not to be a renewable source of a particular mined item.
And I'll say that even as a person who has never had a problem with not being able to get enough Quartz and who doesn't use item farms in general. It isn't like it is an incredibly useful item to begin with, outside of some redstone stuff and as a building block.
Want some advice on how to thrive in the Suggestions section? Check this handy list of guidelines and tips for posting your ideas and responding to the ideas of others!
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If you want to have tons of quartz, use creative mode. Quartz is one of the nicest materials in game, and it comes at a high price. If witches dropped quartz, it's value would drastically decrease. You would also lose of the few reasons for going to the Nether.
The only way I could see quartz getting more common is if it generates rarely in nether fortress chests.
Quartz is pretty plentiful in the Nether. I don't see much point in having a mob drop it.
That's a weird reason for this.
Yeah, that guy in the avatar is me. I'm *that* strange. It happens. Sometimes people act like that. Just go with it. I can offer help with suggestions even before you post them - NOT make your suggestions - but help you with them.
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There's another reason for making quartz into a mob drop, that being servers. Unless your ore spawns frequently enough that you're basically mining away the entire ground if you try to get rid of all the ore, tens or hundreds of players all mining away in the same area are going to quickly make nearby chunks lose all of their valuable material, and people will need to march through ghasts and lava to find more of it.
My avatar is a texture from a small block game I made in Python. It's not very good and it probably won't work if you install it.
I'm very alone in my Minecraft worlds as I don't have a very good internet connection to run a server. If you're like me, you might be interested in my Posse mod suggestion.
TheMasterCaver has put this very well. Survival mode is about gathering resources, and that is drifting away. Do we really need another farmable material. If anything, I think we need less farmable materials. Sure, some aspects of gathering the resources are sort of monotonous, but still. You know what, I think I'm going to suggest a new gamemode.
Check out my suggestions! Here is one of them:
I recommend the blaze, or a new mob. By making blazes drop quartz farming would be a challenge, so manual mining would still be ideal until you find a double spawner or make a nether parameter.
This seems like the perfect material to avoid this problem entirely. Prismarine is almost impossible to get sufficient amounts of by hand, so people make guardian farms. You can still go mining for quartz by hand.
In other words, the game isn't even strongly encouraging you to make a quartz farm.
People have already made auto farms for it actually.
In my opinion, this idea is redundant due to how common Quartz Ore is in the Nether. It's virtually everywhere! And Quartz doesn't seem to be a logical drop for any mob (maybe a quartz golem is the closest thing). You can't make mob farms for everything, you know. This game is called Minecraft for a reason!
And for all those people wanting to build giant quartz shrines, there is a thing called Creative Mode.
sometimes, nullposts must be made.
My avatar: Faiya the dragon
404: eggs not found
I agree. Quartz isn't even that rare, and it even gives the bonus of a lot of xp. I guess nothing is allowed to require effort anymore...
Check out my suggestions! Here is one of them:
You can also add your own loot tables. I've actually made blazes drop quartz for my skyblock map.
I play almost strictly Skyblock, so being able to purchase quartz or individual diamonds from villagers would be perfect.
I feel that altering the loot tables is kind of cheating, and suggesting creative mode is a cop out that doesn't consider the actual issue.
Even in regular survival mode, on a multiplayer server, quartz can be a little hard to come by, but, again, my concern is mostly with playing in Skyblock.
Even if wither skeletons or pigman zombies dropped it as often as regular zombies dropped iron, that would suffice. I really only need the diamonds for the enchanting table and the quartz for some comparitors. I don't want tons of it, just a little here and there.
How about if magma cubes (rarely) dropped nether quartz?
Firstly, some roleplay based arguments:
The only current mob for which it would make sense to drop nether quartz is the magma cube, as magma is basically hot semi-molten rock and as such could contain some nether quartz. No other mob ever seems to use/consume nether quartz in any way.
One issue is that quartz crystals' formation generally require a calm steady environment where it can grow slowly, sufficiently low temperatures and/or some silica water solution, all of which don't happen in the Nether, much less in a bouncy magma cube.
A workaround it is to notice that there already is nether quartz ore in the Nether, which means such appropriate conditions have already been previously achieved there. It is therefore possible that magma cubes somehow manage to incorporate those crystals sometimes when "coming to life" or whatever it is that happens to them. Furthermore, quartz blocks do not melt under any circumstances, even if submerged in lava, so it does make sense that magma blocks could still contain some after all. It is also worth noticing that all non-decorative recipes which involve quartz have some sensory function, and one of magma cubes' most prominent features are their fierce, fiery eyes.
These drops should still be rare, since even if nether quartz is relatively common in the Nether, its proportion to other blocks like netherrack is small. Besides, all that bouncy movement from magma blocks can easily break the quartz, increasing it's surface area, which could make it susceptible to melting after all.
Secondly, some gameplay based arguments:
Magma cubes are a rare spawn in the Nether which can't take fall damage, making them somehow hard to farm (but not impossible). At the moment their only drop are magma creams, which is kind of boring*, specially because they can be crafted with other easily farmable materials. If magma cubes were to rarely drop nether quartz as well, not much would change for most players. However, nether quartz farms would become possible, but only truly worth it for those who pursue monstrously huge projects, and in those cases, I guess farms are okay. By the way. it is an enormous hassle to build a mob farm in the Nether in survival mode. I've never met anyone who has never died trying at some point.
*I understand they want to emphasize the parallels with slimes, which also only have one drop, a drop not only itself quite similar to magma creams, but part of a recipe to craft them. However, magma cubes are not slimes, they're very similar to them in many ways, except that they are quite literally made of magma.