My suggestion is, at the baseline, very simple: do not allow wooden pickaxes to yield anything when they mine stone. They can still mine cobblestone to get cobblestone.
There are still many ways to get yourself some cobblestone, but the easiest and most abundant way would be removed. This would force players to make a small effort and use some ingenuity to get themselves up to stone tier. It would still be pretty easy to get to stone tier, but it would no longer be instant. Wood tools would finally have a purpose for existing (outside of nether-only survival).
Ways to get out of wood tier:
Find lava and water flowing together in a cave
Find a NPC village--they usually have cobblestone roofs
Find any source of lava at an elevation higher than the nearby lake/ocean and build a path for the lava to flow down to the water
Have a creeper explode inside of a cave
Find a dungeon, which has cobblestone in its structure
Find a desert temple, which has TNT; use the TNT on stone to make cobblestone
Make TNT and use it on stone
Find a jungle temple, which has cobblestone in its structure
Purchase a pickaxe from a villager toolsmith
Go to the nether for gold to make a gold pickaxe
Smelt armor/shovels from enemies until you have 27 nuggets of the same type
Find iron/gold ingots or diamonds in loot chests
There's probably more ways that I haven't thought of.
Additional changes that might go well with this change:
Make tools craftable from mossy cobblestone. This would allow players to use the mossy cobblestone boulders in Giant Spruce Taiga biome for tools.
More blocks that perhaps should also require stone pickaxe for yield: andesite/diorite/granite, bricks/stone bricks/nether bricks, end stone/end stone bricks, purpur, prismarine. Blocks that would still give yield when mined with wooden pickaxe: sandstone/red sandstone, terracotta, ice/packed ice/blue ice, basalt, netherrack, bone blocks, coal ore. Why? Because it would give more sense of progression than simply having stone pickaxe be faster.
I think it would be good to have wood tier gain relevance, and to have stone tier feel like at least some sort of accomplishment.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I want ocean content(thanks Möjang!), nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).
I'd like wood tier to have relevancy past those first three stone too, but I'm not convinced this is the way to do it. There is no denying how much this would slow down progression. Everything you mentioned in the list is a way to advance past stone automatically, but the only ones that would work consistently without heavy RNG for good enough loot or proper structure generation would be finding natural water/lava sources close to each other and using creepers.
Using creepers would pose a problem for new players who may not have yet developed the skills to survive creeper blast whether they're on the surface at night or underground. There's also more mobs you have to consider that would spawn.
Personally, I'd say to add a similar mechanic to upgrading to Netherite with the main difference being it can also occur in crafting tables. Maybe even a wooden pickaxe in the center, a stick below and cobblestone in the entire top row in order to upgrade a wooden pickaxe to stone. It's not quite what you suggested, but it wouldn't hurt newer players as much, (remember, Mojang has added several new player-friendly features like the Recipe Book and expanded crafting stations) and it certainly wouldn't slow down progression as much.
Using mossy cobblestone to craft stone tools sounds fine. You could even expand it so the 1.8 stones can be turned into stone gear. As for changing what can be obtained with wood and stone...
Aside from the 1.8 stones (I still say those are fair-game) and stone bricks (which I'm very biased on since I love them, I admit), I don't think many players would even try to find them with wood. Nether bricks are a strong maybe, but then again, Nether survival-only players can mine blackstone in the new snapshots for stone tools. But why would anybody try to take on an End City with wood tools? Or an ocean monument? Those Guardians hit hard, and four damage ain't gonna do squat to them. So at that point, I can't decide if it'd be a good change to dissuade people from doing it with wood tools or a reward for people who somehow do manage to do it with wooden tools.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
I'd like wood tier to have relevancy past those first three stone too, but I'm not convinced this is the way to do it. There is no denying how much this would slow down progression. Everything you mentioned in the list is a way to advance past stone automatically, but the only ones that would work consistently without heavy RNG for good enough loot or proper structure generation would be finding natural water/lava sources close to each other and using creepers.
It would slow down progression, but it seems like an okay thing to me. Some of the early progression seems a bit rushed to me. I think it'd be cool to see players building their house and garden, maybe starting a cow farm for leather armor and food, before jumping down into the caves. It could lead into some more gameplay changes to improve some of the first-tier imbalances (which have never been addressed since the first tier basically doesn't exist): leather armor is harder to get than iron armor, you can't make buckets out of wood, mobs at night are way too strong for newer players as well as for under-geared veteran players, etc. I'd love to see the game actually become more friendly to the idea that you don't have to make a stone pickaxe in order to play Minecraft--it's already been done for surface and shore explorers, but I really think it should be done for the much more common type of player who simply builds a basic house and garden.
Any veteran player who knows lots of ways to get cobblestone, and is skilled at navigating the game world, wouldn't have a significant difficulty in finding cobblestone, though it might raise the skill and/or chance ceiling on speedruns. But I think the most significant impact would be to newer players--in part that it might slow down how quickly they get to stone tier, but also because the attention given to the first tier will lead to positive changes to the new player experience.
Using creepers would pose a problem for new players who may not have yet developed the skills to survive creeper blast whether they're on the surface at night or underground. There's also more mobs you have to consider that would spawn.
I think there's too many mobs at night period, let alone at the beginning of the game when you have no armor, no house, no food, and insignificant weaponry. Ten minutes is barely long enough for me, a veteran player since 1.7, to make arrangements before sundown; I've yet to see a brand new player do anything but die horribly on their first night. I can reliably be geared in full iron armor and iron tools for my first night in a new game; I don't consider that the mark of a veteran player, to me that just seems like a failure of the devs to build the game to be played with anything less than iron. I don't enjoy teching up to iron tier immediately, I do it because it's the only strategy I know of that works consistently.
I don't think slowing down stone tier will make the game significantly harder for new players, because most of them take a long time to get to stone tier for other reasons like learning basic gameplay elements. It also wouldn't make the game much harder for veterans, as stated previously. What I do think it'll do, however, is raise awareness to how broken the game currently is for players who are operating at wood tier, and lead to the game ultimately becoming more fun and engaging for new players as well as for veteran players when making a new world.
Personally, I'd say to add a similar mechanic to upgrading to Netherite with the main difference being it can also occur in crafting tables. Maybe even a wooden pickaxe in the center, a stick below and cobblestone in the entire top row in order to upgrade a wooden pickaxe to stone. It's not quite what you suggested, but it wouldn't hurt newer players as much, (remember, Mojang has added several new player-friendly features like the Recipe Book and expanded crafting stations) and it certainly wouldn't slow down progression as much.
Nice idea, though your specific suggestion (if I'm understanding it correctly) would just use the wooden pickaxe you already have, and wouldn't slow the player down in any other way. I'm open to the idea of giving wood tier relevance through a different means than my suggestion, though.
Using mossy cobblestone to craft stone tools sounds fine. You could even expand it so the 1.8 stones can be turned into stone gear. As for changing what can be obtained with wood and stone...
I'd love to see many types of stone usable for stone tools!
But why would anybody try to take on an End City with wood tools? Or an ocean monument?
Several of those I simply included for consistency. It makes no sense to not consider them, simply because most players won't encounter that part of the game in that way. One of the things I think makes Minecraft great is how each change is considered from as many angles as possible.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I want ocean content(thanks Möjang!), nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).
It could lead into some more gameplay changes to improve some of the first-tier imbalances (which have never been addressed since the first tier basically doesn't exist): leather armor is harder to get than iron armor, So is chainmail. But I've always thought of leather as the decorative tier and chainmail as the treasure tier. It's really only iron and diamond that people use. you can't make buckets out of wood, I've never actually heard anyone suggest wooden buckets. mobs at night are way too strong for newer players as well as for under-geared veteran players, I'd beg to differ on the second statement, personally. I play post-1.9, and I know how to cheese most mobs easily. For instance, hitting a creeper whilst sprinting and then backing up after landing the hit will knock the creeper outside of its explosion radius so it doesn't detonate. And arrows can be blocked by shields, but some people choose to play in pre-1.9 due to the cooldown, so it doesn't always apply. etc. I'd love to see the game actually become more friendly to the idea that you don't have to make a stone pickaxe in order to play Minecraft--it's already been done for surface and shore explorers, but I really think it should be done for the much more common type of player who simply builds a basic house and garden.
It would slow down progression, but it seems like an okay thing to me. Some of the early progression seems a bit rushed to me. I think it'd be cool to see players building their house and garden, maybe starting a cow farm for leather armor and food, before jumping down into the caves. In one of my more recent worlds, instead of building a base immediately, I crafted my first wooden sword in years and decided to just wander around for awhile, killing whatever animals I came across. It ended up lasting maybe five hours before I settled, and I had well over a stack and a half of total meat. It was a fun experience, but I'm not likely to repeat it. I understand what you're saying, though. Instead of immediately jumping into the rush towards diamond, experienced players would be forced to slow themselves down, take a step back and imagine what they want to do with the world.
Any veteran player who knows lots of ways to get cobblestone, and is skilled at navigating the game world, wouldn't have a significant difficulty in finding cobblestone, though it might raise the skill and/or chance ceiling on speedruns. But I think the most significant impact would be to newer players--in part that it might slow down how quickly they get to stone tier, but also because the attention given to the first tier will lead to positive changes to the new player experience.
I don't think slowing down stone tier will make the game significantly harder for new players, because most of them take a long time to get to stone tier for other reasons like learning basic gameplay elements. Mojang added an in-game tutorial that teaches players how to do the basics for the first few new world tasks, and advancements are shaping up to teach players new mechanics (e.g. 'Oh, Shiny!' teaching players they can barter with piglins using gold ingots). It also wouldn't make the game much harder for veterans, as stated previously. What I do think it'll do, however, is raise awareness to how broken the game currently is for players who are operating at wood tier, and lead to the game ultimately becoming more fun and engaging for new players as well as for veteran players when making a new world. I've never considered an idea like this being created simply to bring attention to an issue.
Nice idea, though your specific suggestion (if I'm understanding it correctly) would just use the wooden pickaxe you already have, and wouldn't slow the player down in any other way. I'm open to the idea of giving wood tier relevance through a different means than my suggestion, though.
That wasn't what I meant, but now I see how it could seem like that. Dispensers need fully-crafted bows, so that's what I was going for.
I'd love to see many types of stone usable for stone tools!
Several of those I simply included for consistency. It makes no sense to not consider them, simply because most players won't encounter that part of the game in that way. One of the things I think makes Minecraft great is how each change is considered from as many angles as possible.
I suppose consistency would make more sense.
Responses in bold. Some things I didn't have anything to comment on (namely the "I think there's too many mobs at night period" paragraph). I understand why you feel wood tier is completely useless, but I'm so used to advancing to stronger tiers just to get to what I consider fun faster. I never considered that some people may find those lower tiers to be more interesting.
A good middle-ground may be to simply teach players how tools can be useful. Instead of removing stone mining cobblestone, it could drop a stone shard that could be crafted into cobblestone, either in a 2x2 grid or a 3x3 if gameplay really needs to be slowed down. That way, it would still be more efficient to find some way around it, but veterans can still kind of rush through it (since they don't need to learn anything) and new players can still obtain cobblestone, even if it's just to build with. These stone shards could then be expanded, such as using them to craft some kind of weaker arrow.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
So is chainmail. But I've always thought of leather as the decorative tier and chainmail as the treasure tier. It's really only iron and diamond that people use.
Yeah, it is that way. Until we got Netherite, the game effectively had two and a half tiers. I am definitely not in the crowd that thinks the game should have ten or more tiers, but I think five tiers is easily justified. You start at tier 1, move to tier 2 early on (such as after learning most of the basic gameplay), earn tier 3 as your first challenge, get tier 4 when you start to feel like a veteran player, and tier 5 is for when you've mastered the game. It's nice when the majority of players haven't obtained the last tier. After all, most players aren't really playing the game very hard. But many of us want a challenge.
I'd beg to differ on the second statement, personally. I play post-1.9, and I know how to cheese most mobs easily. For instance, hitting a creeper whilst sprinting and then backing up after landing the hit will knock the creeper outside of its explosion radius so it doesn't detonate. And arrows can be blocked by shields, but some people choose to play in pre-1.9 due to the cooldown, so it doesn't always apply.
Yeah, I can fight mobs pretty well with a wooden sword also, but it requires me to focus on combat. In a typical night--assuming I am outdoors and equipped with only a wooden sword--I have to spend the whole night traveling or fighting, and there's a significant chance I'll die at least once. A lot of players consider that challenge to be fun and accessible, but to me and many others it's forcing a gameplay style we don't want. One of the things that makes Minecraft great is that you can choose how much combat (or lack thereof) you'd like to deal with. You can also choose to accept danger or take your time with the slow and safe method. I personally will virtually always choose the slow and safe method, and avoid combat as much as possible, and that's fun for me. But in the early game, when I have wooden or stone tools, no armor, no food, and no significant amount of resources or house for the first night, it's forcing me into combat-oriented gameplay. The only two viable alternatives are 1.) go into a cave for the night, or 2.) dig yourself a hole and wait twelve minutes. I don't need to tell you why the second one is terrible, but I can tell you why so many new players (and sometimes even veterans like myself) will take that approach: it's because the first solution doesn't work very well. First and foremost, I happen to like exploring caves but probably the majority of players feel that the game takes place on the surface, so that's again forcing gameplay that they might not like. Secondly, even though caves can be safer than the surface at night, they're still dangerous and full of combat. And new players generally have no or little concept of spawnproofing, so if they're wandering a cave at night, they will probably be getting their rear path blocked by new spawns. I think it's VERY important that at least the first several nights be a lot more peaceful than they currently are, or something needs to change.
Responses in bold. Some things I didn't have anything to comment on (namely the "I think there's too many mobs at night period" paragraph). I understand why you feel wood tier is completely useless, but I'm so used to advancing to stronger tiers just to get to what I consider fun faster. I never considered that some people may find those lower tiers to be more interesting.
I have a lot of fun thinking about games from the perspective of a new player, which is probably because so many games in the past have lured me in with false promises, and I'd wasted many hours in them by the time I realized they weren't any fun. I want a game to be a good experience at every step, and I think not only does that mean giving the new player a good experience, but it also means making that new player experience play into them having a good time going forward. Minecraft is, for the most part, doing an excellent job with that. But there's a few rather major issues I have with the progression, as stated above.
A good middle-ground may be to simply teach players how tools can be useful. Instead of removing stone mining cobblestone, it could drop a stone shard that could be crafted into cobblestone, either in a 2x2 grid or a 3x3 if gameplay really needs to be slowed down. That way, it would still be more efficient to find some way around it, but veterans can still kind of rush through it (since they don't need to learn anything) and new players can still obtain cobblestone, even if it's just to build with. These stone shards could then be expanded, such as using them to craft some kind of weaker arrow.
It's a cool idea, but it needs something more. As stated, it would just add tedium. I think a good tier unlock should be a discovery. Now, to cater to as many playstyles as possible, that discovery should allow but not require travel. For example, I have often disagreed with my sister about what would be a good rarity of X item in the game--I will be rolling in it and she will almost never see the item. The real difference in our playstyles is that I travel far more than she does.
But I don't think that advancing to a new tier should be just making the player mine 12 or 27 stone instead of 3. That's just mindless tedium, and it's not really fun. Now if they had to combine three different kinds of stones, it could get more interesting and cater to multiple different playstyles: a digger can branch-mine to find stone veins, a caver can explore underground for stone, an explorer can search cliffsides for stones, and an ecologist could maybe stop by an NPC village and barter for stones, or perhaps there is a wooden thing you can build to process stones at home for someone who doesn't want to leave their backyard. I'm not suggesting it, just leaving it here as an example.
If my wooden bucket idea were implemented, then players could of course use them to transport water, but not lava. This means you could use wooden buckets to pour water near any lava you find, or you could use them to build a huge beautiful garden filled with many plants, shrubs, flowers, with a pond and river, and a fountain, all without ever crafting a single stone tool. That would definitely improve the consistency of the method for finding cobblestone for expert players.
P.S.: PLEASE FIX THE ABOMINABLE FORUM EDITOR!!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE IT'S SO, SO, SO BAD!!!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I want ocean content(thanks Möjang!), nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).
This does not sound like a good idea to me. Making a tier objectively worse in order to force players to use it more certainly fixes the problem you have with this part of the game but I'd make the argument that the game suffers as a whole if your change was added. This change forces players to the first tier unless they A. Wander around until they find extremely specific world generation features in a randomly generated game, or B. Play chicken with one of the most dangerous overworld mobs repeatedly until you get 3 cobblestone, all the while you are being shot at by Skeletons, chased by Spiders and Zombies, and you only have a crappy sword and likely have zero armor unless you happened to spawn next to a large herd of cows (as you said, iron armor is often easier to get than leather). Any of the three of us currently in this thread could deal with this, although personally I would not be enjoying it and it sounds like Jancrash wouldn't either. But we could deal.
For new players this would be catastrophic. Unless you are using the wiki or have watched a ton of YouTube videos, the game is already confusing enough for new players. But at least you can kind of piece together what to do with the inclusion of the recipe book. Punch wood, game tells you how to make wood tools, and general understanding of what the tools are in real life can help you figure out mining stone. "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby." is not a hard train of thought to follow.
However the following is not a logical train of thought: "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby. Wait, this doesn't work. Maybe if I wander in a random direction I will find a sub-tier of Stone that is not commonly found naturally and mine that, even though nothing I have done so far indicates that is possible and the gameplay experiences I HAVE had have told me that my pickaxe won't work on rock items. Or I can find a temple that I've never even heard of or seen before, somehow know there is a hidden basement, and also somehow know there is TNT below that, and if I don't accidentally blow myself to the Nether and back I can use this to blow up the Stone (also I'll very likely find Iron in the temple and can then skip Stone entirely). Or alternatively I can maybe make these strange green creatures blow up the Stone."
See what I mean? The alternatives to get cobblestone are extremely obtuse. Experienced players like us could do them, although I want to dispute your disagreements with changes because you find them tedious because this sounds like the most tedious start to a game I can think of. I'd personally play the tutorial to Kingdom Hearts (the most tedious tutorial I can think of) a dozen times before doing this once. That may be harsh, but I don't mean it in a rude way. I just want to really make it clear how tedious this would be for me. But beyond this being "me using commands to skip wood entirely from now on" tedious, it is completely beyond a new player's comprehension.
I would love to give an alternative fix to this problem but I really don't think it is one. The worst tool tier in the game will always be the worst tier. That doesn't sound like something that needs to be fixed. There will always be a worst food item. There will alway be an enemy that is the easiest to deal with. And that is fine. I really don't see why you want to force people to be stuck in the worst part of the game for an extended period of time.
As for the issues with the editor: Yeah we know about them, and we aren't pleased with the editor either. It is on the list but there are other higher priority things that need to be worked on unfortunately.
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!
You seem to be approaching this from the angle that a player must get stone tools. I'm approaching it from a different angle: they shouldn't be forced to get stone tools in order to have a good game experience.
Unless you are using the wiki or have watched a ton of YouTube videos, the game is already confusing enough for new players. But at least you can kind of piece together what to do with the inclusion of the recipe book. Punch wood, game tells you how to make wood tools, and general understanding of what the tools are in real life can help you figure out mining stone. "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby." is not a hard train of thought to follow.
However the following is not a logical train of thought: "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby. Wait, this doesn't work. Maybe if I wander in a random direction I will find a sub-tier of Stone that is not commonly found naturally and mine that, even though nothing I have done so far indicates that is possible and the gameplay experiences I HAVE had have told me that my pickaxe won't work on rock items. Or I can find a temple that I've never even heard of or seen before, somehow know there is a hidden basement, and also somehow know there is TNT below that, and if I don't accidentally blow myself to the Nether and back I can use this to blow up the Stone (also I'll very likely find Iron in the temple and can then skip Stone entirely). Or alternatively I can maybe make these strange green creatures blow up the Stone."
I didn't say anything about providing the player with a list of the possible ways to get cobblestone. I put the list here for you guys just in case you thought there weren't very many ways to get stone. You're reading into my suggestion TONS of things that aren't there.
1.) There's nothing about crafting a wooden pickaxe that suggests to the new player that it can mine stone for making a stone pickaxe. That is what YOU assume from your experience as a veteran Minecraft player. What is suggested to a new player is that it can be used on stone, and indeed it can. Regular stone takes 5 seconds instead of 10 seconds to break with a wooden pickaxe, were my suggestion implemented.
2.) The recipe book will help new players figure out the recipes regardless of what the recipes are, because the recipe book is updated along with the changes to the recipes. I don't know why I have to say this.
3.) The new player does not automatically assume that they need to immediately upgrade their pickaxe the moment they get it. YOU assume this, because playing Minecraft has taught you this. In fact if the player has a little common sense and has never played any game similar to Minecraft, they will most likely assume that they will NOT be upgrading the pickaxe immediately. Going against this basic common sense is actually damaging to the player's experience, not the other way around.
4.) Your selection of options for gaining cobblestone, which come from a position of experience, are not the selections that a new player will make, and they will not feel some interior drive to go into caves to make creepers explode, nor will they feel a need to hunt for lava on mountains to play with. Much more likely, they will stumble upon a NPC village eventually (because let's face it, in the majority of worlds you will encounter one within your first 500 blocks of travel), and there they will find cobblestone. Since there are so many ways to acquire your pickaxe upgrade, it is a given that a player will eventually encounter at least one of them without ever trying to seek any of them out. All the game needs to do is make sure the player can identify it when they see it.
All of your gripes come from a position of experience and entirely neglect to see how things actually are for a new player.
See what I mean? The alternatives to get cobblestone are extremely obtuse. Experienced players like us could do them, although I want to dispute your disagreements with changes because you find them tedious because this sounds like the most tedious start to a game I can think of.
It's only tedious because you're stuck on the idea that you NEED to get to stone tier. It's also a lot less tedious than you're probably thinking--you should try looking for cobblestone in a fresh world some time and see how long it takes you. More often than not, you will stumble across it in a fresh world before you even have your first permanent house built. A lot of new players will probably wind up with cobblestone randomly in their inventory just because a creeper blew up somewhere in their vicinity.
I'd personally play the tutorial to Kingdom Hearts (the most tedious tutorial I can think of) a dozen times before doing this once. That may be harsh, but I don't mean it in a rude way. I just want to really make it clear how tedious this would be for me. But beyond this being "me using commands to skip wood entirely from now on" tedious, it is completely beyond a new player's comprehension.
Don't knock it till you try it.
I would love to give an alternative fix to this problem but I really don't think it is one. The worst tool tier in the game will always be the worst tier. That doesn't sound like something that needs to be fixed. There will always be a worst food item. There will alway be an enemy that is the easiest to deal with. And that is fine. I really don't see why you want to force people to be stuck in the worst part of the game for an extended period of time.
Why is it the worst part of the game? I think you're insinuating that it's the worst because it's the weakest. But I would argue FAR to the contrary, it's worst for many reasons related to a poor new-player experience, and that veteran players' sense of need to escape it comes less from a desire to advance and more from a negative experience in dealing with it. The raw strength of the tier doesn't determine how fun it is to play in. Every tier can be different strengths and they can all be fun to play in. It's high time we make wood tier fun as well as relevant.
As for the issues with the editor: Yeah we know about them, and we aren't pleased with the editor either. It is on the list but there are other higher priority things that need to be worked on unfortunately.
I have a solution: go back to the old editor. I hate WYSINWYG. Even if it worked, there would still be no need for pre-rendering the details because that's what the preview function is for. Now I'm not saying it's not a nice functionality, but I will say that making a proper WYSIWYG system is actually far easier than this spaghetti mess because this mess is loaded with extra unnecessary algorithms that try to second-guess what the person wanted to do, and makes automatic changes that were uncalled for. It teleports the cursor position (sometimes but not always) when you backspace, adds or subtracts extra line breaks depending on an arcane and poorly thought out list of situational reasoning, adds and subtracts MANY tags under MANY circumstances and frequently can't even keep track of its tags properly, and to make it especially bad, the whole pre-rendering system has a separate write-up from the actual render, so if whoever is editing it forgets to carry a change over from one to the other, what you see drifts even further from what you get.
These aren't bugs, these are FEATURES that are so cumbersome. They aren't failing to work as intended, they are implemented with a lack of foresight and a very strong lack of testing. The solution is to stop adding them and start removing them. It isn't hard to fix, it's hard to keep on breaking it just as it was hard to implement the broken mess in the first place.
Just get rid of it already. Add a lightweight WYSIWYG system that doesn't second-guess anything, no auto-correct, no auto-complete, ONLY tag-tracking. It'll be seventy five times easier to write, three times faster to render, and two thousand times less likely to spit out an incorrect response, and I imagine the base code block will be less than a quarter of the size, not counting all the extra spaghetti code used both to hardcode the pre-renderer separate from the renderer as well as to mitigate all of the undesirable effects of the various poor design features.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I want ocean content(thanks Möjang!), nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).
For new players this would be catastrophic. Unless you are using the wiki or have watched a ton of YouTube videos, the game is already confusing enough for new players.
This argument pretty much sums up why I don't like this idea. This might not seem too bad for experienced or hardened players, but for new players, this would probably be very confusing and not very logical. Instead of breaking stone in a cave, they would have to first find lava and, either find a bucket or make a wooden one, if your idea is implemented. Personally I think the wooden tools are fine as they are. You're not meant to use them for that long.
...for new players, this would probably be very confusing and not very logical. Instead of breaking stone in a cave, they would have to...
Why do they have to get out of wood tier? You're making a fallacy of reasoning from your position as an experienced player who is used to skipping wood tier.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I want ocean content(thanks Möjang!), nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).
Why do they have to get out of wood tier? You're making a fallacy of reasoning from your position as an experienced player who is used to skipping wood tier.
So you just assume I skip wood tier? I've been playing this game for around 8 or 7 years now and I always make a full set of wooden tools. I know it would be faster to just make a pick and get some stone straight away. I think making wooden tools is just hard-wired into me now, most likely because I tend to not do any building in the first days until I find a nice place to build. Also what do you mean by "Why do they have to get out of wood tier?", why wouldn't a player want to get out of the wood tier? I feel like people get out of wood tier to move on to the higher tiers faster. It's not like they'll be missing out on much by leaving wood tier. Sticking to wood tier in the first few days is entirely up to the player. If they want to explore first before doing some mining, they'll probably want to make some basic wooden tools. If they'd rather build wherever, they're better off making some stone tools right away to start gathering resources.
div class="quote-body">
You seem to be approaching this from the angle that a player must get stone tools. I'm approaching it from a different angle: they shouldn't be forced to get stone tools in order to have a good game experience.
I'm thoroughly confused by this statement, to the point where I went back and re-read the OP to make sure I didn't miss something. To me nothing about your suggestion makes only having wood tools a better experience. It doesn't make wood tools more fun or more useful in any way. It actually makes them worse in an effort to force the player to use them more. It almost seems like manufacturing Stockholm syndrome, but for a tool tier.Beyond that, there is nothing saying that a player can't have a "good game experience" with only wood tools in the current game. If someone wants to play hardcore survivalist like that they absolutely can. Nothing stops them other than the temptation of knowing that by upgrading they will get to do more cool stuff and be able to get resources faster. Nothing about your change affects that.
I didn't say anything about providing the player with a list of the possible ways to get cobblestone. I put the list here for you guys just in case you thought there weren't very many ways to get stone. You're reading into my suggestion TONS of things that aren't there.
I'm not reading into anything, I never said the game would inform players of how to do that. I said that the game is already confusing for new players trying to figure out how to progress if they don't use external knowledge sources, and that this change would make worse. At some level you know that too, otherwise you wouldn't have gone out of your way to list all the alternative ways to get Cobblestone in order to highlight that players can still progress past wood tools.
1.) There's nothing about crafting a wooden pickaxe that suggests to the new player that it can mine stone for making a stone pickaxe. That is what YOU assume from your experience as a veteran Minecraft player. What is suggested to a new player is that it can be used on stone, and indeed it can. Regular stone takes 5 seconds instead of 10 seconds to break with a wooden pickaxe, were my suggestion implemented.
No, that is what I know because I know what a pickaxe is and what it does. I have since I was about 4 years old, which is before Java existed (and I don't mean Java Minecraft, I mean Java the programming language). And yeah, I am going to assume that most new players are going to have some idea of what a pickaxe is before they pick up the game, even younger kids. I think that is a fair assumption.
2.) The recipe book will help new players figure out the recipes regardless of what the recipes are, because the recipe book is updated along with the changes to the recipes. I don't know why I have to say this.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. The recipe book isn't the problem, the problem is you've locked progressing past the first tier to extremely obscure scenarios which will confuse new users. The problem isn't that they won't be able to see the recipe for the stone pickaxe. The problem is they'll have no idea how to get it and the most obvious solution (use the pickaxe for it's intended purpose, breaking the stone rock that is everywhere in the game) won't work. Instead they have to get lucky enough to find cobblestone in the wild, get TNT and a way to detonate it, or get lucky with a Creeper explosion.
3.) The new player does not automatically assume that they need to immediately upgrade their pickaxe the moment they get it. YOU assume this, because playing Minecraft has taught you this. In fact if the player has a little common sense and has never played any game similar to Minecraft, they will most likely assume that they will NOT be upgrading the pickaxe immediately. Going against this basic common sense is actually damaging to the player's experience, not the other way around.
That is a fair response. A player may not immediately think to upgrade to new tools (provided they are completely unfamiliar with most survival games or any other game with upgraded equipment). I don't think it lends any strength to your idea, but you are correct that some people may not think to upgrade immediately. But they will after playing for a while, wondering why all their equipment sucks and breaks blocks slowly and doesn't drop anything and probably isn't having that much of a "good game experience". But maybe they like that, different strokes for different folks.
4.) Your selection of options for gaining cobblestone, which come from a position of experience, are not the selections that a new player will make, and they will not feel some interior drive to go into caves to make creepers explode, nor will they feel a need to hunt for lava on mountains to play with. Much more likely, they will stumble upon a NPC village eventually (because let's face it, in the majority of worlds you will encounter one within your first 500 blocks of travel), and there they will find cobblestone. Since there are so many ways to acquire your pickaxe upgrade, it is a given that a player will eventually encounter at least one of them without ever trying to seek any of them out. All the game needs to do is make sure the player can identify it when they see it.
Yes, again that is my point. I'm saying you are locking new players into parts of the game that they may not find enjoyable by making it confusing and difficult to proceed past it. You aren't changing anything to make the start of the game more fun, just forcing people to be in it for longer. You've decided that the beginning of the game is fun and are assuming that all new players will feel the same way.
All of your gripes come from a position of experience and entirely neglect to see how things actually are for a new player.
No, my gripes are coming from thinking back to when I started playing this game and how I would have stopped playing if I would have been dropped into the world, got wood tools, and then had no idea what else to do. Luckily I had the wiki to inform me of stuff to do, because this was way back before advancements or the recipe book and all of that stuff that helps inform the player of how to play.Almost all players WANT to feel like they are progressing in games, because that is an innate trait of humans. We are hardwired to get some feeling of satisfaction from getting things done, which is why our brain releases the feel-good endorphins when we do that. That is the core of designing a good gameplay loop. You give the player a task, the player does the task, and you give them a reward and tease a new bigger task.
It's only tedious because you're stuck on the idea that you NEED to get to stone tier. It's also a lot less tedious than you're probably thinking--you should try looking for cobblestone in a fresh world some time and see how long it takes you. More often than not, you will stumble across it in a fresh world before you even have your first permanent house built. A lot of new players will probably wind up with cobblestone randomly in their inventory just because a creeper blew up somewhere in their vicinity.
No, it is tedious because it is tedious. Because it relies on random chance and specific events to occur that are mostly not within the player's control. And just to be sure, I tried it. I started a new world in Creative mode on a random seed, then started wandering off in one direction looking for cobblestone. I imposed a couple rules on myself.One, I would not specifically seek out places where I know cobblestone would generate, meaning I didn't run immediately to the Plains biome because a new player wouldn't know there are Villages in that biome, and they wouldn't know that cobblestone was in Villages. Just straight walking in one direction and occasionally turning to the left or right about 45 degrees and walking that way for a bit. The alternative was to kind of move in a spiral outward from spawn because most new players will likely stay close to home, but I elected to do it this way.Two, I waited half a day to start as a reasonable approximation for a new player to get wood and get those tools.Three, no flying. Only sprinting, walking, or swimming.I was only able to play for 1.5 Minecraft days so far, but no luck. And I want to mention I'm being extremely charitable, because in Creative mode I don't need to worry about mobs or hunger and I can sprint forever. A new player in Survival will not have those benefits.
Don't knock it till you try it. I don't need to be lit on fire to know that I won't enjoy being lit on fire. Sometimes you can know you won't enjoy something without having to actually experience it, based on prior knowledge and knowing things I personally enjoy.
Why is it the worst part of the game? I think you're insinuating that it's the worst because it's the weakest. But I would argue FAR to the contrary, it's worst for many reasons related to a poor new-player experience that you are making worse (imo) and forcing them to stay there longer, and that veteran players' sense of need to escape it comes less from a desire to advance and more from a negative experience in dealing with it. The raw strength of the tier doesn't determine how fun it is to play in. Every tier can be different strengths and they can all be fun to play in. It's high time we make wood tier fun as well as relevant. Again, I want to reiterate my earlier points in this response. This isn't making wood tier more fun to play with, it just forces people to do so for longer. And no, my "need to escape" it has nothing to do with dealing with that particular part of the game, it 100% comes from me wanting to advance because that's where the parts of the game I enjoy are. That is where other tiers and enchantments and making fun redstone contraptions and the Nether and brewing and getting to see more of the world via Nether portal travel and going to a Stonghold and killing the Enderdragon (although I personally think that fight isn't fun) and exploring the End is.And biggest of all, that is where I can do my favorite part of the game, which is work on making large structures or villages or whatever I enjoy WITHOUT needing to sink dozens of additional hours into the game slowly getting resources and being locked out of hundreds of blocks and items) that would come with being stuck on Wood tools.I'm reasonably certain that if you ask a typical person to choose between only being able to do a few things (and being restricted in how fast/well you can do those things) or being able to do all of the things in the first option, being able to do them faster/better if they want to, and being able to do a hundred additional things, the person is likely going to choose the latter. It is the choice between going to a Chuck E Cheese and having to wait in line for each game versus being at Disney World with their Fastpass thing that lets you get to the front of the line (AND still being able to go to the Chuck E Cheese whenever you want to).
I have a solution: go back to the old editor. I hate WYSINWYG. Even if it worked, there would still be no need for pre-rendering the details because that's what the preview function is for. Now I'm not saying it's not a nice functionality, but I will say that making a proper WYSIWYG system is actually far easier than this spaghetti mess because this mess is loaded with extra unnecessary algorithms that try to second-guess what the person wanted to do, and makes automatic changes that were uncalled for. It teleports the cursor position (sometimes but not always) when you backspace, adds or subtracts extra line breaks depending on an arcane and poorly thought out list of situational reasoning, adds and subtracts MANY tags under MANY circumstances and frequently can't even keep track of its tags properly, and to make it especially bad, the whole pre-rendering system has a separate write-up from the actual render, so if whoever is editing it forgets to carry a change over from one to the other, what you see drifts even further from what you get.
These aren't bugs, these are FEATURES that are so cumbersome. They aren't failing to work as intended, they are implemented with a lack of foresight and a very strong lack of testing. The solution is to stop adding them and start removing them. It isn't hard to fix, it's hard to keep on breaking it just as it was hard to implement the broken mess in the first place.
Just get rid of it already. Add a lightweight WYSIWYG system that doesn't second-guess anything, no auto-correct, no auto-complete, ONLY tag-tracking. It'll be seventy five times easier to write, three times faster to render, and two thousand times less likely to spit out an incorrect response, and I imagine the base code block will be less than a quarter of the size, not counting all the extra spaghetti code used both to hardcode the pre-renderer separate from the renderer as well as to mitigate all of the undesirable effects of the various poor design features.
I'm not going to respond to this portion any further because it is off topic of the actual thread. If you want to bring it up further, feel free to make a thread in Forum Discussion and Info on it. But again, we 100% are aware and agree. But we can't just revert to the old editor willy-nilly or just introduce a new editor out of nowhere. These things cost time and money to do properly, and things (inadvertently) not being done properly in the past is why the current editor has problems.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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!
The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
2/11/2017
Posts:
662
Member Details
This would bring the progression almost to a standstill, especially for new players or worlds that generate with specific biomes. Literally all of the solutions you present or reliant either on structure spawning, a high general skill level, or random numbers (except the one about the nether), which is a horrible way to progress, especially in a game like Minecraft. It would not be "pretty easy", especially if you can't find the structures or don't know what your doing (such as in the case of new players). I know that personally I would have to think for a while before I could even figure out how to progress, and I consider myself an expert on Minecraft. The entire advancement system would need a rework as well since almost all the advancements require you to get a stone pickaxe first. Wood pickaxes already have a purpose, and it is to obtain stone at first. It isn't a very bad problem anyway since wood has countless other uses that makes it far from irrelevant. I'm not even sure if survival without wood is even possible. The game isn't designed for you to get to the nether before doing anything else, and it is incredibly hard to do so anyway. Finally, this suggestion would make it near impossible to get any armor higher than leather in the first days, which is alarming because you'll really need the protection if you're going to be fighting mobs in order to get out of wood tier.
If a player does find cobblestone, they will have no way to figure out what to do with this unless they collect it, which can only be done by mining, which likely won't be done with the pickaxe because of the general unintuitiveness of the mining system itself (as well as the lack of a decent tutorial system for this). They wouldn't even know that stone could possibly drop anything because so far they haven't experienced it.
If all new players just have to go out and fight mobs or search far and wide for specific structures, and then solve the puzzle of what to do afterward, Minecraft would appeal to almost nobody.
Without stone tools, you can't play at least 50% of the game, so you're basically just locking a giant amount of content behind a door that may be simple to open, but is also incredibly confusing and unintuitive. Since Minecraft is supposed to encourage creativity, this is not at all desirable.
Literally the only thing I like about this is that it incentivizes the actual exploration of caves instead of strip mining, which most people do. The game is about exploration, after all.
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
I think one simple change might make this suggestion slightly more feasible: Flint tools.
Craft wood, find gravel, sift through it for flint. Make a flint pickaxe and bob's your uncle, you've gotten to stone and beyond.
I remember a long time ago someone suggested basically exactly this, except they also wanted to remove punching trees for wood and have the player break leaf blocks for sticks. Leaf blocks actually do drop sticks now, dropping the wood tools entirely for a flint tier could make things make some more sense and make starting out a bit more engaging. The flint axe would have to be more of a hatchet and fit in the 2x2 grid, though.
I think one simple change might make this suggestion slightly more feasible: Flint tools.
Craft wood, find gravel, sift through it for flint. Make a flint pickaxe and bob's your uncle, you've gotten to stone and beyond.
I remember a long time ago someone suggested basically exactly this, except they also wanted to remove punching trees for wood and have the player break leaf blocks for sticks. Leaf blocks actually do drop sticks now, dropping the wood tools entirely for a flint tier could make things make some more sense and make starting out a bit more engaging. The flint axe would have to be more of a hatchet and fit in the 2x2 grid, though.
That's even more confusing. Don't get me wrong, every player has to break a block to understand that he can do that. Once the player decided to punch a tree he may discover his first usefull crafting recipes, since Trees are (mostly) all over the place. If the player has to figuere out that he has to get flint and sticks all by him self, without any tutorial then minecraft becomes a very unsatisfying death expierience game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My projects:
-are abandoned for now. I might pick 'em up in the future.
For now i'm working on a private modpack that suit's my own playstyle.
I am gonna stay in modded 1.12.2 untill my potato dies. No mercy! :Q
We might instead remove both stone and wood tiers as their own, and instead, make "primitive" tier - wooden shovels, flint axes, hoes and picks, no sword at that point, axe has to do, like in real life. Flint is too brittle to build long blades of swords or wide plates of shovels, but is good for breaking softer materials in axe, hoe or shovel, and wood is too soft to cut wood, stone or effectively deal with flesh and bone, and gets blunt easily after plowing a field, but a wide piece of hardwood will make a half-decent shovel blade. That way swords would be restricted to metals and cyan carbon fiber diamonds.
To make matters easier, gravel should be available in most biomes as soft-buffer between stone and dirt, exactly like sandstone between stone and sand in the deserts, and there should be fairly common flint ore in all biomes. You read that right.Flint ore. No smelting needed though, like in case of coal or diamond. Here is historical example of flint mineshaft where people dug flint as a tool material from limestone like raisins from the cake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzemionki
Also, flint tools should have about two times as high durability as our current cheaper-than-dirt stone tools, so should wooden shovel now-made from 1 log (and 2 sticks) rather than 1 plank (and 2 sticks).
As of the Nether - gravel is there already to pick the flint from, so not much changes.
When the update with new "primitive tools" kicks in, the all wooden and stone tools should be converted into their respective primitive equivalents.
As for wooden and stone swords - since they got no equivalents, they should be replaced with axes.
Wither Skeletons, on the other hand, should get iron swords.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
We might instead remove both stone and wood tiers as their own, and instead, make "primitive" tier - wooden shovels, flint axes, hoes and picks, no sword at that point, axe has to do, like in real life. Flint is too brittle to build long blades of swords or wide plates of shovels, but is good for breaking softer materials in axe, hoe or shovel, and wood is too soft to cut wood, stone or effectively deal with flesh and bone, and gets blunt easily after plowing a field, but a wide piece of hardwood will make a half-decent shovel blade. That way swords would be restricted to metals and cyan carbon fiber diamonds.
To make matters easier, gravel should be available in most biomes as soft-buffer between stone and dirt, exactly like sandstone between stone and sand in the deserts, and there should be fairly common flint ore in all biomes. You read that right.Flint ore. No smelting needed though, like in case of coal or diamond. Here is historical example of flint mineshaft where people dug flint as a tool material from limestone like raisins from the cake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzemionki
Also, flint tools should have about two times as high durability as our current cheaper-than-dirt stone tools, so should wooden shovel now-made from 1 log (and 2 sticks) rather than 1 plank (and 2 sticks).
As of the Nether - gravel is there already to pick the flint from, so not much changes.
When the update with new "primitive tools" kicks in, the all wooden and stone tools should be converted into their respective primitive equivalents.
As for wooden and stone swords - since they got no equivalents, they should be replaced with axes.
Wither Skeletons, on the other hand, should get iron swords.
I'm noticing one major problem with this post. You said flint is too brittle to be usable beyond small hatchets, which is true. Then you said the stronger tools should be reserved for metal. But you also specifically said that flint can't effectively break stone. So how would you be able to gather the ores in addition to stone for a furnace?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
I'm noticing one major problem with this post. You said flint is too brittle to be usable beyond small hatchets, which is true. Then you said the stronger tools should be reserved for metal. But you also specifically said that flint can't effectively break stone. So how would you be able to gather the ores in addition to stone for a furnace?
Flint is harder than stone. Flint pickaxe is meant to break coal, lapis, iron ore, and deal with stone as easily as current stone pickaxe. Except being more durable, to compensate more sparse mineral.
If you mean "flint soft-buffer", I mean a buffer from gravel that is leaky, where the layer varies in thickness and might have holes in it.
I said at most that wood is too soft to break stone.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
My suggestion is, at the baseline, very simple: do not allow wooden pickaxes to yield anything when they mine stone. They can still mine cobblestone to get cobblestone.
There are still many ways to get yourself some cobblestone, but the easiest and most abundant way would be removed. This would force players to make a small effort and use some ingenuity to get themselves up to stone tier. It would still be pretty easy to get to stone tier, but it would no longer be instant. Wood tools would finally have a purpose for existing (outside of nether-only survival).
Ways to get out of wood tier:
There's probably more ways that I haven't thought of.
Additional changes that might go well with this change:
Make tools craftable from mossy cobblestone. This would allow players to use the mossy cobblestone boulders in Giant Spruce Taiga biome for tools.
More blocks that perhaps should also require stone pickaxe for yield: andesite/diorite/granite, bricks/stone bricks/nether bricks, end stone/end stone bricks, purpur, prismarine. Blocks that would still give yield when mined with wooden pickaxe: sandstone/red sandstone, terracotta, ice/packed ice/blue ice, basalt, netherrack, bone blocks, coal ore. Why? Because it would give more sense of progression than simply having stone pickaxe be faster.
I think it would be good to have wood tier gain relevance, and to have stone tier feel like at least some sort of accomplishment.
I want
ocean content(thanks Möjang!),nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).I'd like wood tier to have relevancy past those first three stone too, but I'm not convinced this is the way to do it. There is no denying how much this would slow down progression. Everything you mentioned in the list is a way to advance past stone automatically, but the only ones that would work consistently without heavy RNG for good enough loot or proper structure generation would be finding natural water/lava sources close to each other and using creepers.
Using creepers would pose a problem for new players who may not have yet developed the skills to survive creeper blast whether they're on the surface at night or underground. There's also more mobs you have to consider that would spawn.
Personally, I'd say to add a similar mechanic to upgrading to Netherite with the main difference being it can also occur in crafting tables. Maybe even a wooden pickaxe in the center, a stick below and cobblestone in the entire top row in order to upgrade a wooden pickaxe to stone. It's not quite what you suggested, but it wouldn't hurt newer players as much, (remember, Mojang has added several new player-friendly features like the Recipe Book and expanded crafting stations) and it certainly wouldn't slow down progression as much.
Using mossy cobblestone to craft stone tools sounds fine. You could even expand it so the 1.8 stones can be turned into stone gear. As for changing what can be obtained with wood and stone...
Aside from the 1.8 stones (I still say those are fair-game) and stone bricks (which I'm very biased on since I love them, I admit), I don't think many players would even try to find them with wood. Nether bricks are a strong maybe, but then again, Nether survival-only players can mine blackstone in the new snapshots for stone tools. But why would anybody try to take on an End City with wood tools? Or an ocean monument? Those Guardians hit hard, and four damage ain't gonna do squat to them. So at that point, I can't decide if it'd be a good change to dissuade people from doing it with wood tools or a reward for people who somehow do manage to do it with wooden tools.
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
It would slow down progression, but it seems like an okay thing to me. Some of the early progression seems a bit rushed to me. I think it'd be cool to see players building their house and garden, maybe starting a cow farm for leather armor and food, before jumping down into the caves. It could lead into some more gameplay changes to improve some of the first-tier imbalances (which have never been addressed since the first tier basically doesn't exist): leather armor is harder to get than iron armor, you can't make buckets out of wood, mobs at night are way too strong for newer players as well as for under-geared veteran players, etc. I'd love to see the game actually become more friendly to the idea that you don't have to make a stone pickaxe in order to play Minecraft--it's already been done for surface and shore explorers, but I really think it should be done for the much more common type of player who simply builds a basic house and garden.
Any veteran player who knows lots of ways to get cobblestone, and is skilled at navigating the game world, wouldn't have a significant difficulty in finding cobblestone, though it might raise the skill and/or chance ceiling on speedruns. But I think the most significant impact would be to newer players--in part that it might slow down how quickly they get to stone tier, but also because the attention given to the first tier will lead to positive changes to the new player experience.
I think there's too many mobs at night period, let alone at the beginning of the game when you have no armor, no house, no food, and insignificant weaponry. Ten minutes is barely long enough for me, a veteran player since 1.7, to make arrangements before sundown; I've yet to see a brand new player do anything but die horribly on their first night. I can reliably be geared in full iron armor and iron tools for my first night in a new game; I don't consider that the mark of a veteran player, to me that just seems like a failure of the devs to build the game to be played with anything less than iron. I don't enjoy teching up to iron tier immediately, I do it because it's the only strategy I know of that works consistently.
I don't think slowing down stone tier will make the game significantly harder for new players, because most of them take a long time to get to stone tier for other reasons like learning basic gameplay elements. It also wouldn't make the game much harder for veterans, as stated previously. What I do think it'll do, however, is raise awareness to how broken the game currently is for players who are operating at wood tier, and lead to the game ultimately becoming more fun and engaging for new players as well as for veteran players when making a new world.
Nice idea, though your specific suggestion (if I'm understanding it correctly) would just use the wooden pickaxe you already have, and wouldn't slow the player down in any other way. I'm open to the idea of giving wood tier relevance through a different means than my suggestion, though.
I'd love to see many types of stone usable for stone tools!
Several of those I simply included for consistency. It makes no sense to not consider them, simply because most players won't encounter that part of the game in that way. One of the things I think makes Minecraft great is how each change is considered from as many angles as possible.
I want
ocean content(thanks Möjang!),nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).Responses in bold. Some things I didn't have anything to comment on (namely the "I think there's too many mobs at night period" paragraph). I understand why you feel wood tier is completely useless, but I'm so used to advancing to stronger tiers just to get to what I consider fun faster. I never considered that some people may find those lower tiers to be more interesting.
A good middle-ground may be to simply teach players how tools can be useful. Instead of removing stone mining cobblestone, it could drop a stone shard that could be crafted into cobblestone, either in a 2x2 grid or a 3x3 if gameplay really needs to be slowed down. That way, it would still be more efficient to find some way around it, but veterans can still kind of rush through it (since they don't need to learn anything) and new players can still obtain cobblestone, even if it's just to build with. These stone shards could then be expanded, such as using them to craft some kind of weaker arrow.
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
So is chainmail. But I've always thought of leather
as the decorative tier and chainmail as the treasure tier. It's really
only iron and diamond that people use.
Yeah, it is that way. Until we got Netherite, the game effectively had two and a half tiers. I am definitely not in the crowd that thinks the game should have ten or more tiers, but I think five tiers is easily justified. You start at tier 1, move to tier 2 early on (such as after learning most of the basic gameplay), earn tier 3 as your first challenge, get tier 4 when you start to feel like a veteran player, and tier 5 is for when you've mastered the game. It's nice when the majority of players haven't obtained the last tier. After all, most players aren't really playing the game very hard. But many of us want a challenge.
I'd beg to differ on the second statement,
personally. I play post-1.9, and I know how to cheese most mobs easily.
For instance, hitting a creeper whilst sprinting and then backing up
after landing the hit will knock the creeper outside of its explosion
radius so it doesn't detonate. And arrows can be blocked by shields, but
some people choose to play in pre-1.9 due to the cooldown, so it
doesn't always apply.
Yeah, I can fight mobs pretty well with a wooden sword also, but it requires me to focus on combat. In a typical night--assuming I am outdoors and equipped with only a wooden sword--I have to spend the whole night traveling or fighting, and there's a significant chance I'll die at least once. A lot of players consider that challenge to be fun and accessible, but to me and many others it's forcing a gameplay style we don't want. One of the things that makes Minecraft great is that you can choose how much combat (or lack thereof) you'd like to deal with. You can also choose to accept danger or take your time with the slow and safe method. I personally will virtually always choose the slow and safe method, and avoid combat as much as possible, and that's fun for me. But in the early game, when I have wooden or stone tools, no armor, no food, and no significant amount of resources or house for the first night, it's forcing me into combat-oriented gameplay. The only two viable alternatives are 1.) go into a cave for the night, or 2.) dig yourself a hole and wait twelve minutes. I don't need to tell you why the second one is terrible, but I can tell you why so many new players (and sometimes even veterans like myself) will take that approach: it's because the first solution doesn't work very well. First and foremost, I happen to like exploring caves but probably the majority of players feel that the game takes place on the surface, so that's again forcing gameplay that they might not like. Secondly, even though caves can be safer than the surface at night, they're still dangerous and full of combat. And new players generally have no or little concept of spawnproofing, so if they're wandering a cave at night, they will probably be getting their rear path blocked by new spawns. I think it's VERY important that at least the first several nights be a lot more peaceful than they currently are, or something needs to change.
I have a lot of fun thinking about games from the perspective of a new player, which is probably because so many games in the past have lured me in with false promises, and I'd wasted many hours in them by the time I realized they weren't any fun. I want a game to be a good experience at every step, and I think not only does that mean giving the new player a good experience, but it also means making that new player experience play into them having a good time going forward. Minecraft is, for the most part, doing an excellent job with that. But there's a few rather major issues I have with the progression, as stated above.
It's a cool idea, but it needs something more. As stated, it would just add tedium. I think a good tier unlock should be a discovery. Now, to cater to as many playstyles as possible, that discovery should allow but not require travel. For example, I have often disagreed with my sister about what would be a good rarity of X item in the game--I will be rolling in it and she will almost never see the item. The real difference in our playstyles is that I travel far more than she does.
But I don't think that advancing to a new tier should be just making the player mine 12 or 27 stone instead of 3. That's just mindless tedium, and it's not really fun. Now if they had to combine three different kinds of stones, it could get more interesting and cater to multiple different playstyles: a digger can branch-mine to find stone veins, a caver can explore underground for stone, an explorer can search cliffsides for stones, and an ecologist could maybe stop by an NPC village and barter for stones, or perhaps there is a wooden thing you can build to process stones at home for someone who doesn't want to leave their backyard. I'm not suggesting it, just leaving it here as an example.
If my wooden bucket idea were implemented, then players could of course use them to transport water, but not lava. This means you could use wooden buckets to pour water near any lava you find, or you could use them to build a huge beautiful garden filled with many plants, shrubs, flowers, with a pond and river, and a fountain, all without ever crafting a single stone tool. That would definitely improve the consistency of the method for finding cobblestone for expert players.
P.S.: PLEASE FIX THE ABOMINABLE FORUM EDITOR!!! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE IT'S SO, SO, SO BAD!!!
I want
ocean content(thanks Möjang!),nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).This does not sound like a good idea to me. Making a tier objectively worse in order to force players to use it more certainly fixes the problem you have with this part of the game but I'd make the argument that the game suffers as a whole if your change was added. This change forces players to the first tier unless they A. Wander around until they find extremely specific world generation features in a randomly generated game, or B. Play chicken with one of the most dangerous overworld mobs repeatedly until you get 3 cobblestone, all the while you are being shot at by Skeletons, chased by Spiders and Zombies, and you only have a crappy sword and likely have zero armor unless you happened to spawn next to a large herd of cows (as you said, iron armor is often easier to get than leather). Any of the three of us currently in this thread could deal with this, although personally I would not be enjoying it and it sounds like Jancrash wouldn't either. But we could deal.
For new players this would be catastrophic. Unless you are using the wiki or have watched a ton of YouTube videos, the game is already confusing enough for new players. But at least you can kind of piece together what to do with the inclusion of the recipe book. Punch wood, game tells you how to make wood tools, and general understanding of what the tools are in real life can help you figure out mining stone. "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby." is not a hard train of thought to follow.
However the following is not a logical train of thought: "Hey, I can make a pickaxe. Pickaxes are used for mining. There is stone nearby. Wait, this doesn't work. Maybe if I wander in a random direction I will find a sub-tier of Stone that is not commonly found naturally and mine that, even though nothing I have done so far indicates that is possible and the gameplay experiences I HAVE had have told me that my pickaxe won't work on rock items. Or I can find a temple that I've never even heard of or seen before, somehow know there is a hidden basement, and also somehow know there is TNT below that, and if I don't accidentally blow myself to the Nether and back I can use this to blow up the Stone (also I'll very likely find Iron in the temple and can then skip Stone entirely). Or alternatively I can maybe make these strange green creatures blow up the Stone."
See what I mean? The alternatives to get cobblestone are extremely obtuse. Experienced players like us could do them, although I want to dispute your disagreements with changes because you find them tedious because this sounds like the most tedious start to a game I can think of. I'd personally play the tutorial to Kingdom Hearts (the most tedious tutorial I can think of) a dozen times before doing this once. That may be harsh, but I don't mean it in a rude way. I just want to really make it clear how tedious this would be for me. But beyond this being "me using commands to skip wood entirely from now on" tedious, it is completely beyond a new player's comprehension.
I would love to give an alternative fix to this problem but I really don't think it is one. The worst tool tier in the game will always be the worst tier. That doesn't sound like something that needs to be fixed. There will always be a worst food item. There will alway be an enemy that is the easiest to deal with. And that is fine. I really don't see why you want to force people to be stuck in the worst part of the game for an extended period of time.
As for the issues with the editor: Yeah we know about them, and we aren't pleased with the editor either. It is on the list but there are other higher priority things that need to be worked on unfortunately.
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!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/2775557-guidelines-for-the-suggestions-forum
You seem to be approaching this from the angle that a player must get stone tools. I'm approaching it from a different angle: they shouldn't be forced to get stone tools in order to have a good game experience.
I didn't say anything about providing the player with a list of the possible ways to get cobblestone. I put the list here for you guys just in case you thought there weren't very many ways to get stone. You're reading into my suggestion TONS of things that aren't there.
1.) There's nothing about crafting a wooden pickaxe that suggests to the new player that it can mine stone for making a stone pickaxe. That is what YOU assume from your experience as a veteran Minecraft player. What is suggested to a new player is that it can be used on stone, and indeed it can. Regular stone takes 5 seconds instead of 10 seconds to break with a wooden pickaxe, were my suggestion implemented.
2.) The recipe book will help new players figure out the recipes regardless of what the recipes are, because the recipe book is updated along with the changes to the recipes. I don't know why I have to say this.
3.) The new player does not automatically assume that they need to immediately upgrade their pickaxe the moment they get it. YOU assume this, because playing Minecraft has taught you this. In fact if the player has a little common sense and has never played any game similar to Minecraft, they will most likely assume that they will NOT be upgrading the pickaxe immediately. Going against this basic common sense is actually damaging to the player's experience, not the other way around.
4.) Your selection of options for gaining cobblestone, which come from a position of experience, are not the selections that a new player will make, and they will not feel some interior drive to go into caves to make creepers explode, nor will they feel a need to hunt for lava on mountains to play with. Much more likely, they will stumble upon a NPC village eventually (because let's face it, in the majority of worlds you will encounter one within your first 500 blocks of travel), and there they will find cobblestone. Since there are so many ways to acquire your pickaxe upgrade, it is a given that a player will eventually encounter at least one of them without ever trying to seek any of them out. All the game needs to do is make sure the player can identify it when they see it.
All of your gripes come from a position of experience and entirely neglect to see how things actually are for a new player.
It's only tedious because you're stuck on the idea that you NEED to get to stone tier. It's also a lot less tedious than you're probably thinking--you should try looking for cobblestone in a fresh world some time and see how long it takes you. More often than not, you will stumble across it in a fresh world before you even have your first permanent house built. A lot of new players will probably wind up with cobblestone randomly in their inventory just because a creeper blew up somewhere in their vicinity.
Don't knock it till you try it.
Why is it the worst part of the game? I think you're insinuating that it's the worst because it's the weakest. But I would argue FAR to the contrary, it's worst for many reasons related to a poor new-player experience, and that veteran players' sense of need to escape it comes less from a desire to advance and more from a negative experience in dealing with it. The raw strength of the tier doesn't determine how fun it is to play in. Every tier can be different strengths and they can all be fun to play in. It's high time we make wood tier fun as well as relevant.
I have a solution: go back to the old editor. I hate WYSINWYG. Even if it worked, there would still be no need for pre-rendering the details because that's what the preview function is for. Now I'm not saying it's not a nice functionality, but I will say that making a proper WYSIWYG system is actually far easier than this spaghetti mess because this mess is loaded with extra unnecessary algorithms that try to second-guess what the person wanted to do, and makes automatic changes that were uncalled for. It teleports the cursor position (sometimes but not always) when you backspace, adds or subtracts extra line breaks depending on an arcane and poorly thought out list of situational reasoning, adds and subtracts MANY tags under MANY circumstances and frequently can't even keep track of its tags properly, and to make it especially bad, the whole pre-rendering system has a separate write-up from the actual render, so if whoever is editing it forgets to carry a change over from one to the other, what you see drifts even further from what you get.
These aren't bugs, these are FEATURES that are so cumbersome. They aren't failing to work as intended, they are implemented with a lack of foresight and a very strong lack of testing. The solution is to stop adding them and start removing them. It isn't hard to fix, it's hard to keep on breaking it just as it was hard to implement the broken mess in the first place.
Just get rid of it already. Add a lightweight WYSIWYG system that doesn't second-guess anything, no auto-correct, no auto-complete, ONLY tag-tracking. It'll be seventy five times easier to write, three times faster to render, and two thousand times less likely to spit out an incorrect response, and I imagine the base code block will be less than a quarter of the size, not counting all the extra spaghetti code used both to hardcode the pre-renderer separate from the renderer as well as to mitigate all of the undesirable effects of the various poor design features.
I want
ocean content(thanks Möjang!),nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).This argument pretty much sums up why I don't like this idea. This might not seem too bad for experienced or hardened players, but for new players, this would probably be very confusing and not very logical. Instead of breaking stone in a cave, they would have to first find lava and, either find a bucket or make a wooden one, if your idea is implemented. Personally I think the wooden tools are fine as they are. You're not meant to use them for that long.
Why do they have to get out of wood tier? You're making a fallacy of reasoning from your position as an experienced player who is used to skipping wood tier.
I want
ocean content(thanks Möjang!),nether biomes(again thanks!!), and savanna passive mobs (meerkats incoming!?).So you just assume I skip wood tier? I've been playing this game for around 8 or 7 years now and I always make a full set of wooden tools. I know it would be faster to just make a pick and get some stone straight away. I think making wooden tools is just hard-wired into me now, most likely because I tend to not do any building in the first days until I find a nice place to build. Also what do you mean by "Why do they have to get out of wood tier?", why wouldn't a player want to get out of the wood tier? I feel like people get out of wood tier to move on to the higher tiers faster. It's not like they'll be missing out on much by leaving wood tier. Sticking to wood tier in the first few days is entirely up to the player. If they want to explore first before doing some mining, they'll probably want to make some basic wooden tools. If they'd rather build wherever, they're better off making some stone tools right away to start gathering resources.
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!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/2775557-guidelines-for-the-suggestions-forum
This would bring the progression almost to a standstill, especially for new players or worlds that generate with specific biomes. Literally all of the solutions you present or reliant either on structure spawning, a high general skill level, or random numbers (except the one about the nether), which is a horrible way to progress, especially in a game like Minecraft. It would not be "pretty easy", especially if you can't find the structures or don't know what your doing (such as in the case of new players). I know that personally I would have to think for a while before I could even figure out how to progress, and I consider myself an expert on Minecraft. The entire advancement system would need a rework as well since almost all the advancements require you to get a stone pickaxe first. Wood pickaxes already have a purpose, and it is to obtain stone at first. It isn't a very bad problem anyway since wood has countless other uses that makes it far from irrelevant. I'm not even sure if survival without wood is even possible. The game isn't designed for you to get to the nether before doing anything else, and it is incredibly hard to do so anyway. Finally, this suggestion would make it near impossible to get any armor higher than leather in the first days, which is alarming because you'll really need the protection if you're going to be fighting mobs in order to get out of wood tier.
If a player does find cobblestone, they will have no way to figure out what to do with this unless they collect it, which can only be done by mining, which likely won't be done with the pickaxe because of the general unintuitiveness of the mining system itself (as well as the lack of a decent tutorial system for this). They wouldn't even know that stone could possibly drop anything because so far they haven't experienced it.
If all new players just have to go out and fight mobs or search far and wide for specific structures, and then solve the puzzle of what to do afterward, Minecraft would appeal to almost nobody.
Without stone tools, you can't play at least 50% of the game, so you're basically just locking a giant amount of content behind a door that may be simple to open, but is also incredibly confusing and unintuitive. Since Minecraft is supposed to encourage creativity, this is not at all desirable.
Literally the only thing I like about this is that it incentivizes the actual exploration of caves instead of strip mining, which most people do. The game is about exploration, after all.
Remember those versions that minecraft pranked us with? Specifically:
Those are still downloadable! Watch this video for 2.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQdu9LKAdIU
To download the other ones you need to make a folder in the versions folder for minecraft and put the client and JSON file for the versions in there. They all need to be named the same aside from file extensions. Once you do that, you will be able to choose that version when making a new profile with the minecraft launcher.
15w14a is on this link:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/15w14a
1.RV-Pre1 is here:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/1.RV-Pre1
Minecraft 3D is here:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Java_Edition_3D_Shareware_v1.34
I think one simple change might make this suggestion slightly more feasible: Flint tools.
Craft wood, find gravel, sift through it for flint. Make a flint pickaxe and bob's your uncle, you've gotten to stone and beyond.
I remember a long time ago someone suggested basically exactly this, except they also wanted to remove punching trees for wood and have the player break leaf blocks for sticks. Leaf blocks actually do drop sticks now, dropping the wood tools entirely for a flint tier could make things make some more sense and make starting out a bit more engaging. The flint axe would have to be more of a hatchet and fit in the 2x2 grid, though.
To read the haiku that you
Just finished reading
That's even more confusing. Don't get me wrong, every player has to break a block to understand that he can do that. Once the player decided to punch a tree he may discover his first usefull crafting recipes, since Trees are (mostly) all over the place. If the player has to figuere out that he has to get flint and sticks all by him self, without any tutorial then minecraft becomes a very unsatisfying death expierience game.
My projects:
-are abandoned for now. I might pick 'em up in the future.
For now i'm working on a private modpack that suit's my own playstyle.
I am gonna stay in modded 1.12.2 untill my potato dies. No mercy! :Q
We might instead remove both stone and wood tiers as their own, and instead, make "primitive" tier - wooden shovels, flint axes, hoes and picks, no sword at that point, axe has to do, like in real life. Flint is too brittle to build long blades of swords or wide plates of shovels, but is good for breaking softer materials in axe, hoe or shovel, and wood is too soft to cut wood, stone or effectively deal with flesh and bone, and gets blunt easily after plowing a field, but a wide piece of hardwood will make a half-decent shovel blade. That way swords would be restricted to metals and
cyan carbon fiberdiamonds.To make matters easier, gravel should be available in most biomes as soft-buffer between stone and dirt, exactly like sandstone between stone and sand in the deserts, and there should be fairly common flint ore in all biomes. You read that right. Flint ore. No smelting needed though, like in case of coal or diamond. Here is historical example of flint mineshaft where people dug flint as a tool material from limestone like raisins from the cake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krzemionki
Also, flint tools should have about two times as high durability as our current cheaper-than-dirt stone tools, so should wooden shovel now-made from 1 log (and 2 sticks) rather than 1 plank (and 2 sticks).
As of the Nether - gravel is there already to pick the flint from, so not much changes.
When the update with new "primitive tools" kicks in, the all wooden and stone tools should be converted into their respective primitive equivalents.
As for wooden and stone swords - since they got no equivalents, they should be replaced with axes.
Wither Skeletons, on the other hand, should get iron swords.
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
I'm noticing one major problem with this post. You said flint is too brittle to be usable beyond small hatchets, which is true. Then you said the stronger tools should be reserved for metal. But you also specifically said that flint can't effectively break stone. So how would you be able to gather the ores in addition to stone for a furnace?
Watch out for the crabocalypse. Some say the day will never come. But it will.
Feel free to drop by for a chat whenever.
If you'd like to talk with me about other games, here are a few I play.
Team Fortress 2
Borderlands series (Borderlands 2 is my favorite game, ever. TPS combat is a lot of fun and makes up for the lower-quality story, in my opinion)
Elder Scrolls series
Warframe (IGN is something like That_One_Flesh_Atronach)
Pokémon series (HGSS forever)
Rocket League
Fallout series
Left 4 Dead 2 (Boomer files always corrupt though)
SUPERHOT (SUPERHOT is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!)
Dead Rising series (Dead Rising 2 is one of my favorite games, and the 3rd was a lot of fun. 1st has poor survivor AI and the 4th is bad)
Just Cause series
Come to think of it, I mainly play fighting-based games.
Flint is harder than stone. Flint pickaxe is meant to break coal, lapis, iron ore, and deal with stone as easily as current stone pickaxe. Except being more durable, to compensate more sparse mineral.
If you mean "flint soft-buffer", I mean a buffer from gravel that is leaky, where the layer varies in thickness and might have holes in it.
I said at most that wood is too soft to break stone.
Dwarf gamer found:
Buildings - square, not round
Materials - from rubble mound
Dark caves - lit 'n' cleaned out
Settlements - deep underground
Farmability - to grinder bound
Shields - made creepers but sound
Axes and crossbows - taking mobs out
The absolute madlad.
Make leather armour easier to get (i.e. makes mobs drop more leather/rabbit hide) and I'm sold.