Minecraft Forums

Maybe it's just me, but doesn't the Warden look goofy af? The way it looks, especially the big head with coral-like horns/whatever, and the way it moves, feel more comical than fear inducing to me.

I'm really considering not updating at all. Not only because I spent months designing a custom worldgen pack that won't work on versions higher than 1.7 and I have no idea how to fix, but it doesn't feel like I'm really missing something. It's mostly gimmicks that don't make the game any better, who cares.

"Realism", whatever that means in a game featuring bees the size of turkeys. One RL example of white(ish) frogs is the cuban treefrog, but actually it isn't even native to places where mangroves are found, and the most ironic thing is that it would fit in mangrove swamps if only mangroves would look like RL mangroves, which bark is often light gray (https://i0.wp.com/wilderness-society.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/mangroves-105646.jpg) - it doesn't help how the biome surface is mostly covered in dark gray goo either, while RL mangrove forests look so much better with all those white trees growing directly out of the water and almost no ground is visible.

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

because this is a sandbox genre players are inclined to believe this entails that the point of the game, even in survival mode, is to share build ideas with friends or even build creatively in solo, sometimes they may use farms to supply them the resources for this

This is probably the key issue here: there's no middle ground between old style Survival mode (fight and work hard to get what you need) and Creative (instantly get infinite amounts of everything while being immortal), and obviously lot of people need that middle ground because they find Survival tedious and Creative not challenging. Since Mojang never gave them a dedicated game mode, they kind of created their own.

This might be fine if only it wasn't so inelegant (it's basically manipulating bugs, gameplay loopholes, and the game's inner limitations while ignoring its intended gameplay cycle) and especially unbalanced: nobody cares how someone gets their resources in a sandbox game unless it's a game that wants to cater to all kind of gamers and also let them play together in the same framework.

Who do heck wants to compete with players that are x100 more successful just because they play a different way? Not to mention how even merely knowing that obstacles to progress can easily be circumvented make them less fun even to people who normally wouldn't abuse the game.

I know we're quite off topic here but to me there's one solution to this: discard the whole concept of basing the progression on killing stupid mobs, which has nothing to do with a game supposedly based on gathering resources and building, and split Survival in two different modes, one where getting resources requires work, and one with less risks and official ways of automating production based on block properties.

Otherwise Minecraft will always be the game that want to have its cake and it eat too.

ask Mojang to make mob spawners less abusable or more risky to take advantage of [...] the way it was supposed to

The issue here is how enchanting works: I don't "farm" so I know how lame it is to fight stupid mobs while being basically invincible in a modest iron armor, or mining ores I don't really need, for literal hours. It's not fun and it takes time away from exploration and building (you know, the basics of the game). Of course people wanted an alternative to that because the only progression this game offers is based on getting better gear, and enchanting has that role considering how mining stops very soon from being relevant (you just go from iron to diamond, netherite doesn't add much really).

The worst part is how spawners were designed before enchanting existed and were never re-balanced after its introduction. And now it's too late to do anything about it because, while not being designed as an official feature, players consider it as such and throw a fit whenever anything threatens to break their precious "farms". Mojang actually keeps introducing new blocks that are basically useless outside farms, it's really a lost cause.

After the last Ask Mojang episode it's clear how not only hinted or vaguely implied features, but also announced features are really just a pipe dream: Mojang would like to do them but when and how is totally a mystery. And update titles are not a promise either, they're just there for color and don't really mean anything.

Add to that how even features available in snapshots, like the bundle, can be scrapped at any time, the community has literally now way to tell what is supposed to be released in the future, at least until it makes it to a prerelease version.

The sooner we'll accept that, the sooner we'll realize how it's pointless to even try anticipating the future of this game, no matter if announced, promised, hinted or whatever else. Can't happen soon enough.

People complained that the biome is super rare and you never spawned inside one, so it was surprising when it happened to me after my first try of the latest snapshot.

World preview made with uNmINeD:

You're welcome.

Considering how time is only relevant during fights (the only thing that you must react to in real time) it seems pointless having to wait for what is just a different way to craft things, also because the real cost of smelting/brewing is fuel and there's really no reason to put one more. It's probably just one of the many features that are there because it's "realistic", no matter how many people think MC never was intended to be (by cherry picking examples).

Aside from the scare factor that will probably go away as soon as players get used to the new dark biome and its Warden, to me it looks like the usual wasted opportunity because the only reasons to go there are a not very useful enchant and blocks with complicated behaviors that doesn't seem that useful outside of the Deep Dark itself. Basically another Ocean Monument. And so far mangroves, frogs and fireflies seems totally useless, unless they give mangrove wood its own unique color (hopefully gray).

Also, they finally added a block that is not that easy to destroy, allowing for actual fortresses and such, but they made it unobtainable. Just why.

Quote from Agtrigormortis»

The problem with this is passive mob AI doesn't need to be stupid in order to increase the challenge of the game

Most of what Mojang did in the last years was reducing the challenge, not increasing it; and the rare times they did, it backfired, see how combat works now or how a more careful distribution of ores is making the game even more grindy but still predictably random as it always was. Not enough players care about having a proper challenge for Mojang to cater to them.

So they just don't care about fixing a thing they probably don't think it's worth fixing. Also because, let's face it: getting new pets or starting new farms is often trivially easy.

I agree, but let's face it: bad design is all over the place and very often they either don't do anything about it or the patch is worse than the injury, see what happened with "the sky is boring because there's no flying hostiles". Assuming it's a company that's supposed to make money to Microsoft, they know you get more children to buy the game by adding more toys, not by fixing old things (unless some popular youtuber makes a fuss about it).

Maybe the answer is simple: better pathfinding requires more resources from your machine, not to mention dev time (still remember when they hired a guy to make it less derpy years ago), and Mojang doesn't think it's a priority, also because they're kind of banking on this unfinished indie game vibe and pets who do all sort of stupid mistakes fits it.

Quote from GreenJonan»

Could you elaborate on what things you don't like or think or broken?

Honestly I'm still salty over beta 1.8+ terrain >:(

I wish there was an option for beta 1.7 and previous terrain. Though, the fabric mod Modern Beta really fills this itch, but wish it included more modern new biomes.

IIRC there's at least a data pack attempting to give a beta-like feel to modern worlds while at the same time keeping new biomes, but it's kind of a mess updating worldgen data packs right now because the format changes after each update (it's still considered an experimental feature after all) so such packs are likely to break after each update. And the whole gradual change of biomes is gone forever anyway, not to mention flat beaches, now that it's impossible (as far as I know) to tell a biome to stay flat instead of following the overall random change of height like every other biome.

Having said that, the things I dislike the most about the new updates are mostly divided in 3 categories:

• Things that are too convenient compared to how difficult is to get them, or vice versa. Shipwrecks and buried chests, villager trading, obtaining sponges, beacons or elytras, the list is looong. Just examples, this lack of balance is all over the place and it keeps getting worse.
• Adding a lot of things that don't have any impact on the gameplay (such as pandas or beetroot), or often are introduced expecting players to use them to do X while instead the always use them to do Y because it's much more convenient. Examples: wandering traders that are not worth trading with and are only slaughtered for their drop, or axolotls that are not worth taking with you in underwater battles and are instead kept in aquariums. So much development time wasted in pointless or misdesigned features.
• Making changes that limit the players' freedom instead of increasing it, most notable examples being having to either sleep or fight OP mobs that gives an useless drop (in early game), taking away the option of fighting frenzily (instead of just adding the option of timing attacks for more damage), or saying no to extremely basic requests for more decorative blocks such as vertical slabs and furniture (while they keep adding more that are barely useful being mostly cubes).

I have no idea who they think their average player is (of if they care about them instead of new players buying the game for the first time), but for sure it's not what we think an average Minecraft player is. Whoever is right about that.

I have no idea what you mean by "losing its magic" so I'll just add my two cents: to me it feels like a group of modders started injecting mods I would never install if I had the choice. Simply, I don't agree with any of their post-Notch policies and I don't think they're good at designing compelling gameplay. There's a bunch of quality of life new features that I would miss on older version, but otherwise the game plays pretty much the same, and the worst mistakes can still be fixed with gamerules/datapacks/mods; which is kind of a drag, but better than playing a super-obsolete version.

They never cancel anything. They just put things they're not sure about in a bin, that might or might not be eventually opened again. Nobody knows.

I started playing in beta 1.2 and what I enjoyed most was exploring, finding unusual terrain features, and build something inspired by those. It was the days of seed hunters, when world felt always different. I also opened a small server for like-minded players.

In beta 1.18 everything went down the toilet because the update messed biomes, and new terrain was extremely bland and uninspiring. So I decided to wait for their world customizer, and after years of waiting and months of trial & errors, I finally got a worldgen that I liked again. Until a few months later they decided to scrap the world customizer, so I resumed waiting. Years later, they release the new, experimental world generator and I spend months designing my worldgen again. Maybe we're finally done. Except it's experimental and it means that every update can break it, and in fact it broke beyond repair with version 1.18; this time I have no idea how to make my worldgen work, so I'm stuck.

Basically, Minecraft to me was a long, long wait to get what I already had back in 2010. And the wait goes on.