So, I realize that packed ice is difficult to obtain and that's on purpose, and that's fine. It's valuable; it should be hard to obtain. But this leads to a major problem in that, in making it difficult to obtain, it's also not renewable, which means that we have to destroy entire biomes in order to get packed ice in any quantity.
So I was wondering if it might be possible to have it both ways - have packed ice be difficult to obtain, and you still have to find an ice spikes biome, but still have it be a renewable (if a bit painstaking) resource.
I'm thinking... have a technique where you put a packed ice block on top of a regular ice block, and one Minecraft day later, you have two packed ice blocks (one on top of the other)? So you'd need packed ice to start with (still need to find an ice spikes biome), AND an ice farm, AND patience? But, on the plus side, it would be renewable.
[Edit June 16:
Thanks for the support (of the premise, at least!) Those who expressed reservations about the execution are probably right... in retrospect, perhaps it would be better (more accurate to reality, as well as more practical in the game) to have it work more like: put packed ice on top of a snow block, and (maybe) have that snow block be on top of another packed ice. Wait a minecraft day, and you have two (or three, if it required two packed ice to start) packed ice, all piled up on top of each other? Packed ice comes more from snow IRL anyway, and this way it would be farmable in any biome that also supports snow farming (but, again, it would require packed ice to start with). That may be a better way?]
So, I realize that packed ice is difficult to obtain and that's on purpose, and that's fine. It's valuable; it should be hard to obtain. But this leads to a major problem in that, in making it difficult to obtain, it's also not renewable, which means that we have to destroy entire biomes in order to get packed ice in any quantity.
So I was wondering if it might be possible to have it both ways - have packed ice be difficult to obtain, and you still have to find an ice spikes biome, but still have it be a renewable (if a bit painstaking) resource.
I'm thinking... have a technique where you put a packed ice block on top of a regular ice block, and one Minecraft day later, you have two packed ice blocks (one on top of the other)? So you'd need packed ice to start with (still need to find an ice spikes biome), AND an ice farm, AND patience? But, on the plus side, it would be renewable.
i agree it should be a renewable source. but i don't really agree on how you say it is. maybe they could just add snow to the biomes if it's not there already. then have the water in that biome freeze to the packed ice. (if there is a hole in this idea that is because i don't play pc minecraft allot. i prefer xbox minecraft.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Do you like Minecraft? Do you like Pokemon? Click here then! ---->
Do you want Pictures to see what it's like? Click here then! ----> GameJolt
If you want information about the game but don't wanna click either links or you just want more information. then go to my profile Bio, Or send me a message.
Yeah, that guy in the avatar is me. I'm *that* strange. It happens. Sometimes people act like that. Just go with it. I can offer help with suggestions even before you post them - NOT make your suggestions - but help you with them.
That's actually not a bad idea, but does putting the Ice on top of the Packed Ice cause it to melt? If so, then this means this farming process can only be down in taiga biomes, but I find that understandable.
This is actually a pretty useless excuse for not adding or changing a feature to minecraft. Of course, there are mods for everything, so what's the point of suggestions? Why does minecraft need to update at all?
OT: This is a great idea. I think packed ice should just spread to every nearby ice block, maybe at about the same rate as a melon/pumpkin stem growing a melon/pumpkin.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Azulywolf:
Dear Justin Bieber haters,
I owe my life to Justin.
On March 9th, 2013, I was in a coma for 6 months after a terrible car crash.
One day my nurse turned the radio to Justin’s song.
So I got up, and turned the radio off
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man whose gonna burn your house down - with the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that'll burn your house down!"
Those who expressed reservations about the technique are probably right... in retrospect, perhaps it would be better (more accurate to reality, as well as more practical in the game) to have it be: put packed ice on top of a snow block, and (maybe) on top of another packed ice, wait a minecraft day, and you have two (or three, if it took two packed ice to start) packed ice, all piled up on top of each other? Packed ice comes more from snow IRL anyway, and this way it would be farmable in any "cold" biome (but, again, requiring packed ice to start with).
I'll edit my original post with this modified version.
Yeah, that guy in the avatar is me. I'm *that* strange. It happens. Sometimes people act like that. Just go with it. I can offer help with suggestions even before you post them - NOT make your suggestions - but help you with them.
I agree with everyone that your idea for making it renewable is a good idea, but like you said, it is difficult to obtain on purpose.
Here are some of my reasons why it should NOT be renewable:
1. As you may know, packed ice is extremely beneficial when used in mob farms, so having an abundance of it would contribute to an abundance of other materials.
2. The adventure to find an ice spike biome on a multiplayer server would be worthless, because as long as 1 person comes back with a single block of it, the entire server will have packed ice. Not to mention, packed ice is an essential product in a lot of economy servers, and making it renewable would also make it worthless.
3. You mentioned you didn't want to destroy an entire biome for a limited supply of packed ice. To that I say, a single ice spike can get you at least a stack of packed ice, and the ice spike biome is massive, so you wouldn't be destroying the biome any more than the ones surrounding your house.
Again, it's not that I don't support packed ice being renewable, but why would you need it to be? A single biome can supply a small server. This is like saying you would want endstone to be renewable.
Packed ice should NOT simply spread to nearby ice.
Get a SINGLE packed ice block. probably from another player on the server who explore a lot and got stacks and stacks o pakced ice.
Place atop giant ice lake or icy shore between ocean biome and snowy biome.
Put rendering distance to FAR.
Dig a safe hole and hide there
Go AFK.
Overnight you'll have the entire area's ice all turned into packed ice. Way too easy !
IMHO just compacting sand with your bare hands into sandstone doesn't make sense to me at all, no more than just compacting snow into packed ice would be. So for the sake of consistency alone, why not just a crafting recipe ? Sure, that makes the icy spike biome less special but gee what is so dang special about mere ice in the first place ? I hate how minecraft easily allows the player to accomplish incredibly superhuman feats (like carrying well over a thousand TONS of stone!) and break 1 cubic meter of stone in mere seconds, or crush bare sand into well formed sandstone, but make you unable to accomplish even the simplest of primitive tasks like just making ice for builds ! Even 10 years old can make ice castles with slabs and stairs in real-life. Doesn't take an engineering degree ! Packed ice slabs and stairs should exist in game and all the "packed ice" blocks should be easily craftable from snow blocks.
This should be a basic block family, really.
Make blocks that SEEM rare, actually BE rare, but blocks that seem quite easy and common, should not require exploring half the server map to get. Ice, cracks, moss: those are simple easy attributes to add to basic blocks, and NOT "must find rare special structure or rare biome" stuff.
If say 1/20 icy spikes in icy biomes was made of glowing blue packed ice (a new light emitter - icy spike biomes woud make for wonderful sights at night), then hell yeah, RARE BLOCK. But not mere ice !
Look at what happened with moss stone (I think mossy cobblestone would be a better name) : eventualy the recipe was added to craft it directly fro mcobblestone and vines because having the ground of a simple structure be a bigger treasure than what is in a loot chest just doesn't make much sense. Same thing happened with mossy stone bricks. I think the same thing should happen with packed ice too.
Packed ice should NOT simply spread to nearby ice.
Get a SINGLE packed ice block. probably from another player on the server who explore a lot and got stacks and stacks o pakced ice.
Place atop giant ice lake or icy shore between ocean biome and snowy biome.
Put rendering distance to FAR.
Dig a safe hole and hide there
Go AFK.
Overnight you'll have the entire area's ice all turned into packed ice. Way too easy !
IMHO just compacting sand with your bare hands into sandstone doesn't make sense to me at all, no more than just compacting snow into packed ice would be. So for the sake of consistency alone, why not just a crafting recipe ? Sure, that makes the icy spike biome less special but gee what is so dang special about mere ice in the first place ? I hate how minecraft easily allows the player to accomplish incredibly superhuman feats (like carrying well over a thousand TONS of stone!) and break 1 cubic meter of stone in mere seconds, or crush bare sand into well formed sandstone, but make you unable to accomplish even the simplest of primitive tasks like just making ice for builds ! Even 10 years old can make ice castles with slabs and stairs in real-life. Doesn't take an engineering degree ! Packed ice slabs and stairs should exist in game and all the "packed ice" blocks should be easily craftable from snow blocks.
This should be a basic block family, really.
Make blocks that SEEM rare, actually BE rare, but blocks that seem quite easy and common, should not require exploring half the server map to get. Ice, cracks, moss: those are simple easy attributes to add to basic blocks, and NOT "must find rare special structure or rare biome" stuff.
If say 1/20 icy spikes in icy biomes was made of glowing blue packed ice (a new light emitter - icy spike biomes woud make for wonderful sights at night), then hell yeah, RARE BLOCK. But not mere ice !
Look at what happened with moss stone (I think mossy cobblestone would be a better name) : eventualy the recipe was added to craft it directly fro mcobblestone and vines because having the ground of a simple structure be a bigger treasure than what is in a loot chest just doesn't make much sense. Same thing happened with mossy stone bricks. I think the same thing should happen with packed ice too.
I love the idea of the glowing ice block. That sounds really amazing. I think that all ice spike biomes should have a single giant spike somewhere near the middle of the biome that has this "glowing ice" under a layer of packed/normal ice. I think that packed ice should spread, but very slowly, like I said before: One packed ice will spread to one next to it at the same rate of melons or pumpkins growing. You can't convert a whole lake in a few minutes. For a decently sized body of water, it would probably take several in-game days at least.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Azulywolf:
Dear Justin Bieber haters,
I owe my life to Justin.
On March 9th, 2013, I was in a coma for 6 months after a terrible car crash.
One day my nurse turned the radio to Justin’s song.
So I got up, and turned the radio off
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man whose gonna burn your house down - with the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that'll burn your house down!"
I agree with everyone that your idea for making it renewable is a good idea, but like you said, it is difficult to obtain on purpose.
Here are some of my reasons why it should NOT be renewable:
1. As you may know, packed ice is extremely beneficial when used in mob farms, so having an abundance of it would contribute to an abundance of other materials.
2. The adventure to find an ice spike biome on a multiplayer server would be worthless, because as long as 1 person comes back with a single block of it, the entire server will have packed ice. Not to mention, packed ice is an essential product in a lot of economy servers, and making it renewable would also make it worthless.
3. You mentioned you didn't want to destroy an entire biome for a limited supply of packed ice. To that I say, a single ice spike can get you at least a stack of packed ice, and the ice spike biome is massive, so you wouldn't be destroying the biome any more than the ones surrounding your house.
Again, it's not that I don't support packed ice being renewable, but why would you need it to be? A single biome can supply a small server. This is like saying you would want endstone to be renewable.
Packed ice should NOT simply spread to nearby ice.
Get a SINGLE packed ice block. probably from another player on the server who explore a lot and got stacks and stacks o pakced ice.
Place atop giant ice lake or icy shore between ocean biome and snowy biome.
Put rendering distance to FAR.
Dig a safe hole and hide there
Go AFK.
Overnight you'll have the entire area's ice all turned into packed ice. Way too easy !
You guys make an interesting point about multiplayer servers. As somebody who only ever plays (and will only ever play) single-player, that hadn't occurred to me. However, I don't think that even for multiplayers, it would be quite as "too easy" as you're making it out to be, especially not the way I'm picturing how farming would work.
I know a couple of other people were talking about packed ice spreading to nearby ice. That wasn't... well... either of my suggestions, though. I agree... that would be too easy, not to mention it would be totally unlike how packed ice works IRL.
What I was thinking was that packed ice would be farmable by following one of these techniques (only one of these would apply, depending on what Mojang chooses):
Technique #1 (my favorite, as it kindasorta mirrors RL, and also because it balances renewability and difficulty):
Put a block of packed ice on the ground.
Put a snow block on top of that.
Put another packed ice block on top of that.
Wait at least one Minecraft day.
You now have three packed ice blocks. Use your pick on the middle one, and replace with a snow block, and begin again.
So to have packed ice in a quantity that would actually support a mob farm (the main use for packed ice, IMO), you'd either have to start with a fairly decent-sized quantity (at least 40) of packed ice blocks and have a 20x1 farm with 2 packed ice in each square, OR you'd have to start with at least two (or, better yet, four) blocks and have the patience to come back each day, cut out and replace the middle block, and grow the farm as you're able. Either way, it's not AFK-able (at least, not unless you're just afk-ing for 10 minutes at a time), and it requires patience and work, which, IMO, negates the "too easy" argument.
As for why we would want to NOT destroy the ice spikes biome... because they're beautiful?
(Other potential techniques:
Technique #2:
Put a snow block on the ground.
Put a block of packed ice on top of it.
Wait at least two Minecraft days.
You now have two packed ice blocks. Use your pick on the bottom one, replace with a snow block, and begin again.
Technique #3 (my original idea, from last night):
Create an ice farm.
Put packed ice on top of an existing ice block.
Wait at least one Minecraft day.
You now have two packed ice blocks. Use your pick to mine both, and to begin again, put one of the packed ice blocks on top of another regular ice block.
Please both see my responses at the bottom: they apply equally well to both comments.
You guys make an interesting point about multiplayer servers. As somebody who only ever plays (and will only ever play) single-player, that hadn't occurred to me. However, I don't think that even for multiplayers, it would be quite as "too easy" as you're making it out to be, especially not the way I'm picturing how farming would work.
I know a couple of other people were talking about packed ice spreading to nearby ice. That wasn't... well... either of my suggestions, though. I agree... that would be too easy, not to mention it would be totally unlike how packed ice works IRL.
What I was thinking was that packed ice would be farmable by following one of these techniques (only one of these would apply, depending on what Mojang chooses):
Technique #1 (my favorite, as it kindasorta mirrors RL, and also because it balances renewability and difficulty):
Put a block of packed ice on the ground.
Put a snow block on top of that.
Put another packed ice block on top of that.
Wait at least one Minecraft day.
You now have three packed ice blocks. Use your pick on the middle one, and replace with a snow block, and begin again.
So to have packed ice in a quantity that would actually support a mob farm (the main use for packed ice, IMO), you'd either have to start with a fairly decent-sized quantity (at least 40) of packed ice blocks and have a 20x1 farm with 2 packed ice in each square, OR you'd have to start with at least two (or, better yet, four) blocks and have the patience to come back each day, cut out and replace the middle block, and grow the farm as you're able. Either way, it's not AFK-able (at least, not unless you're just afk-ing for 10 minutes at a time), and it requires patience and work, which, IMO, negates the "too easy" argument.
As for why we would want to NOT destroy the ice spikes biome... because they're beautiful?
(Other potential techniques:
Technique #2:
Put a snow block on the ground.
Put a block of packed ice on top of it.
Wait at least two Minecraft days.
You now have two packed ice blocks. Use your pick on the bottom one, replace with a snow block, and begin again.
Technique #3 (my original idea, from last night):
Create an ice farm.
Put packed ice on top of an existing ice block.
Wait at least one Minecraft day.
You now have two packed ice blocks. Use your pick to mine both, and to begin again, put one of the packed ice blocks on top of another regular ice block.
I love the idea of the glowing ice block. That sounds really amazing. I think that all ice spike biomes should have a single giant spike somewhere near the middle of the biome that has this "glowing ice" under a layer of packed/normal ice.
Having one giant "glowing ice" icy spike, that is covered in normal packed ice, IMHO would be more complex for less results.
Reasons:
#1 - From the point of view of "nice look" and screenshots, you can say bye-bye to that when the cool light is fully hidden under normal packed ice.
#2 - From the point of view of block harvesting, a twice as tall an ice spike means that such a giant spike would be worth 8 normal ice spikes worth of blocks. Ok. But not only would it be REAL complex for the current game engine to be able to determine where the center of a biome is in order to place that special spike (because that just ain't how biomes are generated), but the generator would have a hard time determining which other neighboring ice spikes to "prevent" from spawning so that the base of the giant spike isn't too overlapped and crowded by the normal aerial density of the normal spikes. Also I'd rather have more spread-out spikes so that if a player comes and harvest a special ice spike, we do NOT end up with one of the following:
2a) The player wants to not leave an ugly half-mined ice spike behind so he takes all the ice in the spike and thus because this is the only special spike in the entire biome, that player ends up not leaving any for other players. Yes it is still possible to not leave any for others with separate smaller spikes spread out, but much less so, and much easier to "stop at one", and much easier for server admins to establish much clearer limits by saying something like "take only one ice spike and no more" instead of "take only some part of the one big spike".
2b) The player takes only what he needs and then we end up with a now very ugly "partially mined" ice spike.
Just making a few of the spikes be normal size but glowing is much easier, because it fits well with the pseudo-random way that structures are already added in the java code, it already fits with how tree-like structures are distributed. Kind of like how the world generator makes in mixed forests some trees oak and some birch. It would also be much easier to code: in the code, right after the world generator determines that "an ice spike generates here", the engine would just roll for random odd of the ice spike being normal vs magical.
Let's say we have 4% odds: this would be 1 glowing ice spike out of every 25 total ice spikes (on average of course). In other words, in average, for every area of ice spikes that is "about 5x5 ice spikes big", you'd have on average 1 of the ice spikes that would be of the glowy kind. Of course, the actual % can be adjusted to make you see more or less of the glowyness overall. That sure would look nice I think.
An extra nice touch could be if the glowy block would start glowing only at sunset, glow fully at night, and then gradually stop glowing at dawn.
I think that packed ice should spread, but very slowly, like I said before: One packed ice will spread to one next to it at the same rate of melons or pumpkins growing. You can't convert a whole lake in a few minutes. For a decently sized body of water, it would probably take several in-game days at least.
I was NOT talking about a few minutes. I said go AFK and then right after that I said wait overnight. OBVIOUSLY the word "overnight" here refers to the act of going AFK in real-life and thus that means a "real" overnight not a "game" overnight. Otherwise if it was just for a few minutes wait then there would be no real point of actually going AFK ! Thus, that is "several hours", more like 8+ hours really, not "10 minutes".
In Vanilla Minecraft, Steve spends ZERO hunger when immobile doing nothing. So yeah: AFK for hours while in a safe hole in the ground is perfectly easy to do. End of play session, before going to bed in real-life (or to go to school or to work), instead of simply logging out, you put your game in AFK mode while in a safe hole that you dug in a few seconds. Really hard to do, heh ? By the time you come back a bigarea would definitely have been converted. Another AFK marathon and probably it will now have spread so much that even TRYING to put a stop to the spreading would now become a major undertaking - if possible at all. All that land conversion (or destruction, according to point of view) resulting from the humongous effort of placing ONE block ? IMHO the most "blocks changed per single player action" should come from say making TNT explode or finding a big overhand of dirt or sand or gravel that somehow mysteriously holds in the ar and and causing a "chain reaction of falling blocks" by breaking a single one of these block. No more. Take normal grass and mycelium blocks, they grow to nearby blocks, sure. But they do so only on *EXPOSED* normal (not corase) dirt, which really doesn't occur naturally in large patches. Ever. In other words: in vanilla, there are exactly ZERO blocks that are able to "spread" in such a way as to overwrite big areas of already naturally generated biomes. And there shouldn't be !
Given the extremely continuous nature of icy surfaces (lakes, ocean borders, frozen rivers), unless someone takes care to remove the ENTIRE line of packed ice to avoid further spreading to normal ice, on a busy server every time someone would passthat way, the packed ice patch will grow ever a little bit more and more. Eventually, after weeks or months of server uptime, and thus tons of players that would have passed that way, the server would inevitably end up with a HUMONGOUS area of it's cold areas of it's map that will have ended up being "infested" that way. Every time a single player wanted to get easy packed ice, he'd end-up replacing even more of the normal ice of the world that he wanted. Unless drastic administrator actions would be taken, in the long run all the normal ice of the entire coasts and icy oceans and big lakes of almost all of the snowy biomes on the server map would be all "gone". That just ain't a very good idea, and I am still totally convinced that is a way too easy way to "get" packed ice.
To make an analogy, imagine if you planted ONE wheat in a plains biome, and the wheat "slowly spread" to other grass blocks. You don't have to plant any of it one by one, you'd just go AFK for hours and eventually get an entire plains of grown wheat ! That is how "logical" the "packed-ice-spreading-by-itself" idea really is.
Easy crafting straight from snow remains the easiest solution, IMHO.
IMHO just compacting sand with your bare hands into sandstone doesn't make sense to me at all, no more than just compacting snow into packed ice would be. So for the sake of consistency alone, why not just a crafting recipe ? Sure, that makes the icy spike biome less special but gee what is so dang special about mere ice in the first place ? I hate how minecraft easily allows the player to accomplish incredibly superhuman feats (like carrying well over a thousand TONS of stone!) and break 1 cubic meter of stone in mere seconds, or crush bare sand into well formed sandstone, but make you unable to accomplish even the simplest of primitive tasks like just making ice for builds ! Even 10 years old can make ice castles with slabs and stairs in real-life. Doesn't take an engineering degree ! Packed ice slabs and stairs should exist in game and all the "packed ice" blocks should be easily craftable from snow blocks.
This should be a basic block family, really.
Make blocks that SEEM rare, actually BE rare, but blocks that seem quite easy and common, should not require exploring half the server map to get. Ice, cracks, moss: those are simple easy attributes to add to basic blocks, and NOT "must find rare special structure or rare biome" stuff.
If say 1/20 icy spikes in icy biomes was made of glowing blue packed ice (a new light emitter - icy spike biomes woud make for wonderful sights at night), then hell yeah, RARE BLOCK. But not mere ice !
Look at what happened with moss stone (I think mossy cobblestone would be a better name) : eventualy the recipe was added to craft it directly fro mcobblestone and vines because having the ground of a simple structure be a bigger treasure than what is in a loot chest just doesn't make much sense. Same thing happened with mossy stone bricks. I think the same thing should happen with packed ice too.
Just quoting the part that seems directed to me, since I'd actually suggested making it farmable by compacting a snow block between two packed ice blocks, waiting a farming cycle (well, actually I'd said a "minecraft day"), removing the middle packed ice block, replacing with a snow block, and beginning again.
First of all, IRL, ice and packed ice are two different things. Ice is what happens when water gets cold. Packed ice is what happens when snow gets compacted for a long time. It takes time and certain conditions to make packed ice. To make regular ice, all that's required is the ability to make water cold.
In the game, as well, ice and packed ice are two different things. Ice is not spawnable. Packed ice is, making it extremely useful for ultra-efficient mob farms. In fact, that's the main use for it. That makes it a valuable resource, and therefore should be... not rare, and definitely not non-renewable, but it should be difficult.
This is why I like the idea of needing two packed ice and a snow block and having to come back periodically to remove and replace the new packed ice block. It keeps it difficult, while still making it create-able (just like it would be IRL).
Any crafting recipe, even one that requires an existing packed ice as an ingredient, would be far too easy. Especially if it involves snow. All you'd need is a snow golem with a nearby crafting table and you'd have all the packed ice you need for a super-efficient mob farm, in less than three minutes.
Having one giant "glowing ice" icy spike, that is covered in normal packed ice, IMHO would be more complex for less results.
i think you misread that post unless i did. all the packed ice would glow at night. meaning that at night packed ice basically turns into glowing packed ice.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Do you like Minecraft? Do you like Pokemon? Click here then! ---->
Do you want Pictures to see what it's like? Click here then! ----> GameJolt
If you want information about the game but don't wanna click either links or you just want more information. then go to my profile Bio, Or send me a message.
But a typical icy spike, wether the low fat ones or the tall thin ones, contain about 4 to 5 stacks of packed ice each. A giant central icy spike that would only be "one and a half as big" as a normal icy spike, would thus contain about 15 stacks of the blocks. That's in the range of about 1000 blocks. If it is twice the size of a normal spike instead of 1.5 times, then you double that to about 2000 blocks.
Having that many blocks all "transform" together between the 2 block types, every morning and every sunset, that would tax the server a lot. And how would the server know which packed ice blocks to convert (those from giant central icy spike) and which to not convert (those from normal icy - That would be next to Impossible. And if you mean converting ALL the packed ice, not just those central spikes but ALL the spikes, then we're talking not a couple 1000 blocks but more like several tens of thousands of blocks. Potential server crash.
Now, if you mean just keep the one packed ice block and make it glowy at night, that "block conversion" problem is avoided, but I think that "Packed Ice" should be that, and only and just that: ice that is packed. No more. No magic. Except for rare special spikes, sure, but then for those rare wspecial spikes their blocks should't be named Packed Ice, but a more exotic and magical name like Moon Ice or whatever.
Having ALL of the icy spikes be of the "magical packed ice" type would kind of reduce the "special magic uniqueness" of such a block. This is like finding the one special magical tree in a forest vas an entire forest of magical trees. Or making the whole nether made of gloswtone instead of netherrack.
So I'd go at it this way:
- Normal Packed Ice for most icy spikes.
- A new block that looks "nearly like" packed ice, that also glows emits lights, but only at night time. I'd call it Moon Ice.
- Each icy spike has 1% odds of being made entirely of Moon ice instead of normal Packed Ice. This means that when you look at an ice plains spikes biome, looking all around you you'd typically be able to see a handful of those, and no more.
This would minimize the coding required. No need to change anything i nthe ice plains spike biome not even add new icy spikes structure models, just the 1% random check whenver the world generator places an ice spike to determine if it places Moon ice instead of Packed Ice.
The giant version is interesting too but would require much more coding.
...not craftable... farmable.
So, I realize that packed ice is difficult to obtain and that's on purpose, and that's fine. It's valuable; it should be hard to obtain. But this leads to a major problem in that, in making it difficult to obtain, it's also not renewable, which means that we have to destroy entire biomes in order to get packed ice in any quantity.
So I was wondering if it might be possible to have it both ways - have packed ice be difficult to obtain, and you still have to find an ice spikes biome, but still have it be a renewable (if a bit painstaking) resource.
I'm thinking... have a technique where you put a packed ice block on top of a regular ice block, and one Minecraft day later, you have two packed ice blocks (one on top of the other)? So you'd need packed ice to start with (still need to find an ice spikes biome), AND an ice farm, AND patience? But, on the plus side, it would be renewable.
[Edit June 16:
Thanks for the support (of the premise, at least!) Those who expressed reservations about the execution are probably right... in retrospect, perhaps it would be better (more accurate to reality, as well as more practical in the game) to have it work more like: put packed ice on top of a snow block, and (maybe) have that snow block be on top of another packed ice. Wait a minecraft day, and you have two (or three, if it required two packed ice to start) packed ice, all piled up on top of each other? Packed ice comes more from snow IRL anyway, and this way it would be farmable in any biome that also supports snow farming (but, again, it would require packed ice to start with). That may be a better way?]
i agree it should be a renewable source. but i don't really agree on how you say it is. maybe they could just add snow to the biomes if it's not there already. then have the water in that biome freeze to the packed ice. (if there is a hole in this idea that is because i don't play pc minecraft allot. i prefer xbox minecraft.
Good idea and very well balanced. Sure, support.
Yeah, that guy in the avatar is me. I'm *that* strange. It happens. Sometimes people act like that. Just go with it. I can offer help with suggestions even before you post them - NOT make your suggestions - but help you with them.
Unofficial Suggestions Guide (2.0) - by Theriasis
Unofficial Critics Guide - by yoshi9048
That's actually not a bad idea, but does putting the Ice on top of the Packed Ice cause it to melt? If so, then this means this farming process can only be down in taiga biomes, but I find that understandable.
Support.
Support!
I have a world where I do a lot of the buildings and to the packed ice is magnificent!
Nothing to see here.
Support! I like packed ice, but hate destroying the aesthetics of the biome. This would solve that problem!
I don't feels strongly about the way you make it, but I can't come up with an alternative, so I guess its ok.Your way's fine, ignore this durpSupport!
This is actually a pretty useless excuse for not adding or changing a feature to minecraft. Of course, there are mods for everything, so what's the point of suggestions? Why does minecraft need to update at all?
OT: This is a great idea. I think packed ice should just spread to every nearby ice block, maybe at about the same rate as a melon/pumpkin stem growing a melon/pumpkin.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man whose gonna burn your house down - with the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that'll burn your house down!"
-Cave Johnson
This is a good idea, this would be great to have a renewable amount of that resource.
Support.
"The only way to do great work is to love what you do" - Steve Jobs
Thanks, all.
Those who expressed reservations about the technique are probably right... in retrospect, perhaps it would be better (more accurate to reality, as well as more practical in the game) to have it be: put packed ice on top of a snow block, and (maybe) on top of another packed ice, wait a minecraft day, and you have two (or three, if it took two packed ice to start) packed ice, all piled up on top of each other? Packed ice comes more from snow IRL anyway, and this way it would be farmable in any "cold" biome (but, again, requiring packed ice to start with).
I'll edit my original post with this modified version.
"Just use a mod" posts aren't allowed here.
Yeah, that guy in the avatar is me. I'm *that* strange. It happens. Sometimes people act like that. Just go with it. I can offer help with suggestions even before you post them - NOT make your suggestions - but help you with them.
Unofficial Suggestions Guide (2.0) - by Theriasis
Unofficial Critics Guide - by yoshi9048
I agree with everyone that your idea for making it renewable is a good idea, but like you said, it is difficult to obtain on purpose.
Here are some of my reasons why it should NOT be renewable:
1. As you may know, packed ice is extremely beneficial when used in mob farms, so having an abundance of it would contribute to an abundance of other materials.
2. The adventure to find an ice spike biome on a multiplayer server would be worthless, because as long as 1 person comes back with a single block of it, the entire server will have packed ice. Not to mention, packed ice is an essential product in a lot of economy servers, and making it renewable would also make it worthless.
3. You mentioned you didn't want to destroy an entire biome for a limited supply of packed ice. To that I say, a single ice spike can get you at least a stack of packed ice, and the ice spike biome is massive, so you wouldn't be destroying the biome any more than the ones surrounding your house.
Again, it's not that I don't support packed ice being renewable, but why would you need it to be? A single biome can supply a small server. This is like saying you would want endstone to be renewable.
Packed ice should NOT simply spread to nearby ice.
Get a SINGLE packed ice block. probably from another player on the server who explore a lot and got stacks and stacks o pakced ice.
Place atop giant ice lake or icy shore between ocean biome and snowy biome.
Put rendering distance to FAR.
Dig a safe hole and hide there
Go AFK.
Overnight you'll have the entire area's ice all turned into packed ice. Way too easy !
IMHO just compacting sand with your bare hands into sandstone doesn't make sense to me at all, no more than just compacting snow into packed ice would be. So for the sake of consistency alone, why not just a crafting recipe ? Sure, that makes the icy spike biome less special but gee what is so dang special about mere ice in the first place ? I hate how minecraft easily allows the player to accomplish incredibly superhuman feats (like carrying well over a thousand TONS of stone!) and break 1 cubic meter of stone in mere seconds, or crush bare sand into well formed sandstone, but make you unable to accomplish even the simplest of primitive tasks like just making ice for builds ! Even 10 years old can make ice castles with slabs and stairs in real-life. Doesn't take an engineering degree ! Packed ice slabs and stairs should exist in game and all the "packed ice" blocks should be easily craftable from snow blocks.
This should be a basic block family, really.
Make blocks that SEEM rare, actually BE rare, but blocks that seem quite easy and common, should not require exploring half the server map to get. Ice, cracks, moss: those are simple easy attributes to add to basic blocks, and NOT "must find rare special structure or rare biome" stuff.
If say 1/20 icy spikes in icy biomes was made of glowing blue packed ice (a new light emitter - icy spike biomes woud make for wonderful sights at night), then hell yeah, RARE BLOCK. But not mere ice !
Look at what happened with moss stone (I think mossy cobblestone would be a better name) : eventualy the recipe was added to craft it directly fro mcobblestone and vines because having the ground of a simple structure be a bigger treasure than what is in a loot chest just doesn't make much sense. Same thing happened with mossy stone bricks. I think the same thing should happen with packed ice too.
I love the idea of the glowing ice block. That sounds really amazing. I think that all ice spike biomes should have a single giant spike somewhere near the middle of the biome that has this "glowing ice" under a layer of packed/normal ice. I think that packed ice should spread, but very slowly, like I said before: One packed ice will spread to one next to it at the same rate of melons or pumpkins growing. You can't convert a whole lake in a few minutes. For a decently sized body of water, it would probably take several in-game days at least.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade! Demand to see life's manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I'm the man whose gonna burn your house down - with the lemons! I'm gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that'll burn your house down!"
-Cave Johnson
You guys make an interesting point about multiplayer servers. As somebody who only ever plays (and will only ever play) single-player, that hadn't occurred to me. However, I don't think that even for multiplayers, it would be quite as "too easy" as you're making it out to be, especially not the way I'm picturing how farming would work.
I know a couple of other people were talking about packed ice spreading to nearby ice. That wasn't... well... either of my suggestions, though. I agree... that would be too easy, not to mention it would be totally unlike how packed ice works IRL.
What I was thinking was that packed ice would be farmable by following one of these techniques (only one of these would apply, depending on what Mojang chooses):
Technique #1 (my favorite, as it kindasorta mirrors RL, and also because it balances renewability and difficulty):
So to have packed ice in a quantity that would actually support a mob farm (the main use for packed ice, IMO), you'd either have to start with a fairly decent-sized quantity (at least 40) of packed ice blocks and have a 20x1 farm with 2 packed ice in each square, OR you'd have to start with at least two (or, better yet, four) blocks and have the patience to come back each day, cut out and replace the middle block, and grow the farm as you're able. Either way, it's not AFK-able (at least, not unless you're just afk-ing for 10 minutes at a time), and it requires patience and work, which, IMO, negates the "too easy" argument.
As for why we would want to NOT destroy the ice spikes biome... because they're beautiful?
(Other potential techniques:
Technique #2:
One and two are the best ones, support 100% now!
Having one giant "glowing ice" icy spike, that is covered in normal packed ice, IMHO would be more complex for less results.
Reasons:
#1 - From the point of view of "nice look" and screenshots, you can say bye-bye to that when the cool light is fully hidden under normal packed ice.
#2 - From the point of view of block harvesting, a twice as tall an ice spike means that such a giant spike would be worth 8 normal ice spikes worth of blocks. Ok. But not only would it be REAL complex for the current game engine to be able to determine where the center of a biome is in order to place that special spike (because that just ain't how biomes are generated), but the generator would have a hard time determining which other neighboring ice spikes to "prevent" from spawning so that the base of the giant spike isn't too overlapped and crowded by the normal aerial density of the normal spikes. Also I'd rather have more spread-out spikes so that if a player comes and harvest a special ice spike, we do NOT end up with one of the following:
2a) The player wants to not leave an ugly half-mined ice spike behind so he takes all the ice in the spike and thus because this is the only special spike in the entire biome, that player ends up not leaving any for other players. Yes it is still possible to not leave any for others with separate smaller spikes spread out, but much less so, and much easier to "stop at one", and much easier for server admins to establish much clearer limits by saying something like "take only one ice spike and no more" instead of "take only some part of the one big spike".
2b) The player takes only what he needs and then we end up with a now very ugly "partially mined" ice spike.
Just making a few of the spikes be normal size but glowing is much easier, because it fits well with the pseudo-random way that structures are already added in the java code, it already fits with how tree-like structures are distributed. Kind of like how the world generator makes in mixed forests some trees oak and some birch. It would also be much easier to code: in the code, right after the world generator determines that "an ice spike generates here", the engine would just roll for random odd of the ice spike being normal vs magical.
Let's say we have 4% odds: this would be 1 glowing ice spike out of every 25 total ice spikes (on average of course). In other words, in average, for every area of ice spikes that is "about 5x5 ice spikes big", you'd have on average 1 of the ice spikes that would be of the glowy kind. Of course, the actual % can be adjusted to make you see more or less of the glowyness overall. That sure would look nice I think.
An extra nice touch could be if the glowy block would start glowing only at sunset, glow fully at night, and then gradually stop glowing at dawn.
I was NOT talking about a few minutes. I said go AFK and then right after that I said wait overnight. OBVIOUSLY the word "overnight" here refers to the act of going AFK in real-life and thus that means a "real" overnight not a "game" overnight. Otherwise if it was just for a few minutes wait then there would be no real point of actually going AFK ! Thus, that is "several hours", more like 8+ hours really, not "10 minutes".
In Vanilla Minecraft, Steve spends ZERO hunger when immobile doing nothing. So yeah: AFK for hours while in a safe hole in the ground is perfectly easy to do. End of play session, before going to bed in real-life (or to go to school or to work), instead of simply logging out, you put your game in AFK mode while in a safe hole that you dug in a few seconds. Really hard to do, heh ? By the time you come back a bigarea would definitely have been converted. Another AFK marathon and probably it will now have spread so much that even TRYING to put a stop to the spreading would now become a major undertaking - if possible at all. All that land conversion (or destruction, according to point of view) resulting from the humongous effort of placing ONE block ? IMHO the most "blocks changed per single player action" should come from say making TNT explode or finding a big overhand of dirt or sand or gravel that somehow mysteriously holds in the ar and and causing a "chain reaction of falling blocks" by breaking a single one of these block. No more. Take normal grass and mycelium blocks, they grow to nearby blocks, sure. But they do so only on *EXPOSED* normal (not corase) dirt, which really doesn't occur naturally in large patches. Ever. In other words: in vanilla, there are exactly ZERO blocks that are able to "spread" in such a way as to overwrite big areas of already naturally generated biomes. And there shouldn't be !
Given the extremely continuous nature of icy surfaces (lakes, ocean borders, frozen rivers), unless someone takes care to remove the ENTIRE line of packed ice to avoid further spreading to normal ice, on a busy server every time someone would passthat way, the packed ice patch will grow ever a little bit more and more. Eventually, after weeks or months of server uptime, and thus tons of players that would have passed that way, the server would inevitably end up with a HUMONGOUS area of it's cold areas of it's map that will have ended up being "infested" that way. Every time a single player wanted to get easy packed ice, he'd end-up replacing even more of the normal ice of the world that he wanted. Unless drastic administrator actions would be taken, in the long run all the normal ice of the entire coasts and icy oceans and big lakes of almost all of the snowy biomes on the server map would be all "gone". That just ain't a very good idea, and I am still totally convinced that is a way too easy way to "get" packed ice.
To make an analogy, imagine if you planted ONE wheat in a plains biome, and the wheat "slowly spread" to other grass blocks. You don't have to plant any of it one by one, you'd just go AFK for hours and eventually get an entire plains of grown wheat ! That is how "logical" the "packed-ice-spreading-by-itself" idea really is.
Easy crafting straight from snow remains the easiest solution, IMHO.
Just quoting the part that seems directed to me, since I'd actually suggested making it farmable by compacting a snow block between two packed ice blocks, waiting a farming cycle (well, actually I'd said a "minecraft day"), removing the middle packed ice block, replacing with a snow block, and beginning again.
First of all, IRL, ice and packed ice are two different things. Ice is what happens when water gets cold. Packed ice is what happens when snow gets compacted for a long time. It takes time and certain conditions to make packed ice. To make regular ice, all that's required is the ability to make water cold.
In the game, as well, ice and packed ice are two different things. Ice is not spawnable. Packed ice is, making it extremely useful for ultra-efficient mob farms. In fact, that's the main use for it. That makes it a valuable resource, and therefore should be... not rare, and definitely not non-renewable, but it should be difficult.
This is why I like the idea of needing two packed ice and a snow block and having to come back periodically to remove and replace the new packed ice block. It keeps it difficult, while still making it create-able (just like it would be IRL).
Any crafting recipe, even one that requires an existing packed ice as an ingredient, would be far too easy. Especially if it involves snow. All you'd need is a snow golem with a nearby crafting table and you'd have all the packed ice you need for a super-efficient mob farm, in less than three minutes.
i think you misread that post unless i did. all the packed ice would glow at night. meaning that at night packed ice basically turns into glowing packed ice.
Ah. Well yeah I misunderstood.
But a typical icy spike, wether the low fat ones or the tall thin ones, contain about 4 to 5 stacks of packed ice each. A giant central icy spike that would only be "one and a half as big" as a normal icy spike, would thus contain about 15 stacks of the blocks. That's in the range of about 1000 blocks. If it is twice the size of a normal spike instead of 1.5 times, then you double that to about 2000 blocks.
Having that many blocks all "transform" together between the 2 block types, every morning and every sunset, that would tax the server a lot. And how would the server know which packed ice blocks to convert (those from giant central icy spike) and which to not convert (those from normal icy - That would be next to Impossible. And if you mean converting ALL the packed ice, not just those central spikes but ALL the spikes, then we're talking not a couple 1000 blocks but more like several tens of thousands of blocks. Potential server crash.
Now, if you mean just keep the one packed ice block and make it glowy at night, that "block conversion" problem is avoided, but I think that "Packed Ice" should be that, and only and just that: ice that is packed. No more. No magic. Except for rare special spikes, sure, but then for those rare wspecial spikes their blocks should't be named Packed Ice, but a more exotic and magical name like Moon Ice or whatever.
Having ALL of the icy spikes be of the "magical packed ice" type would kind of reduce the "special magic uniqueness" of such a block. This is like finding the one special magical tree in a forest vas an entire forest of magical trees. Or making the whole nether made of gloswtone instead of netherrack.
So I'd go at it this way:
- Normal Packed Ice for most icy spikes.
- A new block that looks "nearly like" packed ice, that also glows emits lights, but only at night time. I'd call it Moon Ice.
- Each icy spike has 1% odds of being made entirely of Moon ice instead of normal Packed Ice. This means that when you look at an ice plains spikes biome, looking all around you you'd typically be able to see a handful of those, and no more.
This would minimize the coding required. No need to change anything i nthe ice plains spike biome not even add new icy spikes structure models, just the 1% random check whenver the world generator places an ice spike to determine if it places Moon ice instead of Packed Ice.
The giant version is interesting too but would require much more coding.