Minecraft Forums

Well, it depends on what you need diamonds for. For example, if you make a huge city full of villagers, you can trade with them to get some basic diamond gear. That is also a lot of work, but it's also fun.

Quote from Sceadugengan

From Mojangs point of view: 10-Year-Plan; no need to earn more money with Minecraft.

Mojang might not need to earn money and that's great, but if you think about the cool stuff they continually put into the game, and what's possible to do in Minecraft, they ought to just be getting started, not just giving up on it. What does survival mean? What does hardcore mode mean when you are in diamond armor at the end of day one?

I can totally understand someone wanting to experiment with the way ores are generated. It's not necessarily going to be used for cheating, but there needs to be rules to follow. I think we need some guidance here in regards to what's legit. Messing with ore generation ought to automatically enable cheat mode, if for no other reason than to make a statement that it is in fact cheating. I realize you can do a lot with NBTExplorer to turn cheat mode on and off, but I still think that some official stand should be made.

How do we as players know when we have crossed the line into cheat territory? I am inclined to think that generating big mountains or loopy floating islands is not cheating, but increasing things like iron and diamonds definitely is, but that's just my point of view. I'd like some official word on that.

Quote from sazrocks

he's trying to say that eating the ingredients individually is better than eating the soup.

and ultimately takes less inventory space!

I get asked this a great deal from the new forums when I want to close the tab or even when I try to navigate within the site. I don't think it's necessary for any reason.

I'm trying to look at this through Mojang's point of view. I can play my way and you can play your way. I care about me and you care about you. Mojang has to care about both of us, and how the changes they make affect our collective enjoyment of the game.

Here's my prediction if this goes in... Every new player under age 15 will quickly ruin the game for themselves because they almost universally lack patience, and without new players, the minecraft community will age and die off sooner than it would otherwise.

Quote from SomethingSlimy

You're comparing brain surgery to playing Minecraft.

Good game design isn't rocket science. It's harder than rocket science! To do it right you have to be either really good or really lucky.

So far, the vote is 50/50. I'm glad that the issue is at least contraversial. There are plenty of ways to cheat in minecraft, if you want something to happen, you can make it happen with little effort. This change seems like a bit of an endorsment though, like the makers are saying, 'go ahead and cheat'.

The problem has gone away. I don't know what happened.

Quote from SomethingSlimy

who's to say I'm not an expert at what would be fun for me?

Just because nobody can say you aren't an expert, doesn't mean they can say that you are. By giving you that kind of control though, they are strongly suggesting that you are, but probably you are not. If I'm your brain surgeon and you are paying me as such, and you say,

'hey, hand me that scalpel'

and then I say, 'yeah, sure go to town, the tumor is just above your left eye. Blink three times if you need help.'

I would go to jail! I would be in breach of my obligation to you.

I've noticed that sometimes the edit button is gone sometimes. Is there a time limit? Sometimes it is very useful to edit the OP to reflect the observations of others in the thread, such as if you are compiling a list of mods or whatever.

There is another observation I would like to make. A few snapshots ago, they actually removed the ability for golems and pigmen to drop metal unless killed by the player. They were concerned about automation and scarcity. Personally, I'm glad they nixed that idea. I think item farms are legit because it takes a lot of research and labor to make them work. I find it interesting that they wanted to stop that practice, while at the same time planning to allow unlimited ore generation! It's a bit schizophrenic.

Let me exaggerate a bit to make my point more clear.

If you publish a game without rules, and people are coming away with the impression that your game is pointless, because it has no rules, do you then blame them for not making their own rules? It's their fault that they think that your game is lousy, and that's ok?

Quote from Sceadugengan

In single player the world the player generates is his own responsibility. If he kills his enjoyment for this game due to overgenerating precious stuff then it's his own fault.

For multiplayer ... I guess there is a need for some form of indicator how easy it is to get, for example, diamonds.

But from Mojang's point of view, if most people are killing their enjoyment by such means, have you succeeded in your game's design?

All the new world gen options are great for aesthetic reasons, but I question the wisdom of letting people generate much larger than normal occurrence of important minerals. Almost the entirety of the games flow in survival and hardcore mode is based on the rarity of materials. There's a progression from wooden tools to stone, to iron and finally diamond. It's fun that way. You're diamond pickaxe for obsidian mining is valuable.

Changing that progression is a major, major change. It eliminates the need to beat the game in creative ways. Things like iron and gold farms accomplish much the same result in terms resource availability, but from an understanding and manipulating of game rules. There is no known way to farm diamonds, those are really special! Do you really want to destroy all this creative thought that defines Minecraft?

Diamonds are hard to find. Every new player asks the internet, 'how can I find more diamonds?' Should the standard answer be, 'spawn more diamonds in world gen, then there will be lots.'. Minecraft becomes a very different experience at that point.

Letting players control the rarity of these spawns is like letting the patient use the scalpel during surgery. There's a reason why we pay experts to make our games.

I've made a couple of things I wanted to show off. The idea is to make resource farms that look like something else to disguise their utilitarian function.

My first example is my jungle temple gold farm, on a lake deep within an enormous jungle. It's a full day's journey from the jungle edge as long as you don't make any mistakes in the extremely rough terrain. The gold farm itself is from a youtube video, I just dressed it up. It basically spawns a bunch of pigmen who crowd each other into a central shaft to be killed, sorted etc.




Now that I have lot's of gold, now I can put it to use! Here is my iron farm. As you can imagine with the suicidal tendencies of villagers, I needed a lot of golden apples while learning to keep them on a mountain top safe. They found the darndest ways to jump to their deaths. It is on a savannah natural spire, filled out a bit with lava casting to make room on top for a village.

There are two villages here, one on top and one at the base of the spire. It's not a super fast iron farm, but it nearly filled a double chest in the time it took to build my hill top headquarters. I found that the best way to move villagers into an artificial village is to have them chase you as zombies to a water elevator underground that is directly under the target village. Then you cure them and stuff them into the elevator. Have a clock on the wall and a bed so the villagers you've already cured don't have to survive the night.