Boats. They have been a part of Minecraft since Alpha 1.0.2, but they have changed little since they were added to the desktop version. Pocket Edition has seen some variation, with oars and new wooden models, but functionally, boats are almost exactly how they have always been - fast, reasonably cheap to make, and almost irrationally flimsy. Hit the shore with your boat? It shatters. Hit a passing squid with your boat? It shatters. Sail within 500 meters of something in multiplayer? Shatters. At times, the noble and majestic boat is almost more trouble than it's worth.
Boats are exceptionally useful on the open ocean. Even dropping a 1x1 land-bridge as the player walks isn't as fast, and takes more resources. The trouble only really begins when it's time to make landfall. Other than soul sand (or a carefully positioned chest), boats cannot run into anything at any appreciable speed without exploding into parts. It is perhaps because of this that boats see very little use outside of niche applications in custom maps. This begs the question: what would be an ideal fix for boats?
Making them invincible is impractical, since nothing else in the game shares that property. While it would be nice to slam into the shore at 100 knots without consequence, it just doesn't fit the theme of the game. One suggestion included having boats use a durability rating, like tools, with a fixed amount of damage they can suffer before breaking, while being fixable with tools and materials. A somewhat simpler solution offered that boats simply have a higher durability, so they are not so fragile. Another possibility is having the boat drop itself, instead of wood and sticks, when it "breaks" on something.
There are many possibilities for making boats better, each with their ups and downs. If it were up to you, what would you change about boats?
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Posted Sep 24, 2015They made them several orders of magnitude stronger, several times. Bit they still break.
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Posted Sep 27, 2015Thing is, I seem to recall there was one update a few years ago, right after the 'get out of your boat, find yourself 100 blocks away' issue got really bad, where they fixed boats. They worked perfectly. Getting out of one put you right next to the boat, and you could hit the shoreline at reasonable speed and not break them.
Next update, the boats were broken again. ::sigh:: It reminds me of all the times they would fix lighting issues (dark boxes on the surface, or lighting on stairs), only to have the exact same issue return in the next version. Are they losing the fixed code when they change versions, or what?
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Posted Sep 24, 2015Why not make them invincible? I don't understand how that breaks the theme of the game. If the desync issues weren't prevalent, then perhaps durability would make sense. As it stands now, you can't avoid hitting things so making the boats break is just punishment for what I consider a bug, the desync issues.
Making boats drop boats when they break? Why? What purpose does that serve besides making me have to place the boat and get back in. Just make them stop when they hit something.
At the very least. Make then stack. Since I have to carry a bunch of boats with me to replace the ones that constantly break....save me some precious inventory space. IRL, boats usually stack together quite well, one inside the other.
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Posted Sep 24, 2015There's a reddit thread where some are saying "make boats not break (except by lava/cacti/players) and make players and boats a single entity so desync isn't so much of an issue" and I agree.
I don't get the stacking limitation, either. They decided to make doors stack, but forgot:
There is really NO REASON to prevent any of those from stacking. All it accomplishes is making inventory management that much more annoying.
Also, you can probably extend stacking even more, under the condition that items with durability or action CANNOT BE USED unless there is at least 1 free inventory spot for the unused stack to move to:
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Posted Sep 24, 2015I agree with most of your ideas to make more items stack, but not anything with durability or enchanted books, because those would really just be a hassle to code in most cases, and would probably lead to glitches. If you installed single player commands, and made, say a diamond pick, stack to 8, and you had a half broken one and a new one, depending on how you stacked it, it would fix both picks or make both picks half durability. Enchantments also cause problems.
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Posted Sep 24, 2015Those aren't really issues because damaged items wouldn't stack at all. Enchantments (with books or tools) would only stack if their NBT data matched, or in other words, only if they had exactly the same enchantments.
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Posted Sep 25, 2015The boat desync bug is here on the bug tracker. Everybody who thinks this is a major issue should go there and upvote it.
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Posted Oct 6, 2015I think the reason that boats are so easily broken is to keep them from being used as refuges. Imagine if they even stacked, you could hide from zombies and creepers in any deep bodies of water. if your boat broke, just pop out the next boat in the stack. in large body of water, you could even hide from skeletons, I think breaking boats was for game balance.
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Posted Oct 6, 2015That's not really an issue since if you go far from land (not even 'deep' water needed! also you can go on small islands to get away from mobs....) most mobs won't see you. Also, not sure if it is like that in the snapshots, but mob have never been good with water, and at some point mob AI makes them almost not move at all in water.
Even if zombies followed you, you could just knock them back with your fists, so that's not much of an issue. The biggest impact is that storage of boats is awkward (especially for servers) so saying they aren't stackable for balance when building a house or even digging a two-block hole in the side of a hill until morning kinda makes that pointless. For the amount of wood it takes to build 2 boats, you can surround yourself with wood blocks for the night.
That and probably about half of the players don't care about how 'hard' the game is... it's a way to express creativity. They don't make the game harder, they make it more annoying.
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Posted Oct 6, 2015You make some good points, But if I've been followed to a hole in the the wall by a creeper I didn't see. When i opened the door, there went all my xp. That was much more annoying. An optimal fix would be to not have boats broken by terrain. You still wouldn't be able to hide indefinably in a deep body of water. Yet you wouldn't have problems just trying to get to shore.
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Posted Oct 6, 2015I'm not sure why losing XP would be an issue, since in the start of the game, there's almost no way for you to use it anyways.
Also, I don't think anybody is advocating making boats completely invincible, in fact I've seen several people say "only drops by players, cacti, lava, and explosions" plus YOU could still take damage in a boat, so if mobs were trying to attack you it would still be an issue.
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Posted Oct 6, 2015Lol, what a nub. Why do you use boats??? Use the freaking nether. 8x as fast
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Posted Oct 6, 2015I always prefer to use the nether for for resources not for travel. Traveling by boat allows me to map more completely.
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Posted Sep 24, 2015I just want to not have my boat break in the middle of the ocean because of a random squid.
I think a durability bar to see how much you have left would be a nice add(also increasing the durability), maybe even adding a second boat made with wood and some iron for a boat that could destroy lily-pads when it hits them, or actually survive a squid encounter.
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Posted Sep 24, 2015This one makes sense! A boat is durable, but not invincible! If we were to have a durability bar (like a health bar with the horses) I would craft the boats!
Also, I want a way so that you can pick the boat up again and repair it in an anvil or so.
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Posted Sep 25, 2015that would be good but its so much cheaper to make a new one than to waste levels on fixing one
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Posted Sep 28, 2015You need to put a sword on the front of the boat. DEATH TO SQUIDS!
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Posted Sep 24, 2015Horses, minecarts, and even players can slam into walls at high speed without any consequences. That is the property of the game, with boats being the outlier.
Get rid of the boat's impact mechanics, period. (this wouldn't make it invincible, as it could still be destroyed by lava, cacti, and attacks)
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Posted Sep 24, 2015I second this idea, even though boats are made of wood, it'd still make sense because you can ram a minecart into a wood wall with no consequences. (The wood doesn't break.)
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Posted Sep 24, 2015This is probably the simplest solution.