My honest thoughts on recent Minecraft updates

In this Mumbo Jumbo Minecraft video, I take a look back at recent Minecraft updates from the past few years including the Minecraft 1.21 Tricky Trials update, and assess whether or not I believe the added features are good, if Minecraft is heading in the correct direction, and if we have had enough content added over recent years.

[ThatMumboJumbo]

I think this a great example of 'there is no one true Minecraft player'. People speak on behalf of the Minecraft community assuming all players want what they want. The reality is, the game is very broad and has a huge number of play styles that need to be carefully considered with every update. What one player really wants, might make another player quit entirely, so it makes development for Minecraft uniquely challenging.
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My controversial opinion is that Mojang are actually doing really quite well at a fairly impossible job.

[UhOhTheStoveIsOn]

About the mob vote (and I can’t remember if I’m paraphrasing someone’s idea or was just inspired by a video I saw about it), I think it would be much better received by the community if mojang approached it as “what mechanic do we want to introduce.” The largest issue is that, on top of losing out on two mobs, you lose out on two mechanics. Imagine if the glow squid lost, yea the squid would be gone but so would glowing signs. If all three of the mobs did the same thing, people wouldn’t feel fomo about the lost mechanics which would placate a lot of people. Imagine if, for the next mob vote, mojang wanted to introduce a way to farm sand. They suggest three mobs, the mummy, the shrew, and the sand golem. All three of these mobs give the player sand in some way. Now, no matter how the people vote, farmable sand will be added to the game. People are mad because they are voting for mechanics, not mobs. They are given a say in the way the game develops and then often stripped of it. Approaching the mob vote mechanic-first would eliminate this negativity.

[loach]

This man knows a lot about internet discourse for someone with 1 minute of internet access per day

[Camero_V]

As someone who actually lives in a birch forest, they need to make them taller and add underbrush. Personally, I'd base it off of some of the Scandinavian or northern minnesotan forests

[mistermystery]

I’m so old that ocean monuments and horses still feel like new updates

[GilWanderley]

9:08 Actually, poison would be a great reason why frogs should spit a glowing block of gunk after eating fireflies.

[Sathusha]

Honestly, I think the game should have more ambience. In a single player world the game feels so lonely and you're alone in this vast world. Having some birds going through the sky and at night fire flies and nature sounds would make the game more immersive.

[pphead]

My biggest issue with new mobs is that they clearly don’t want you to kill them. Most of the new mobs don’t drop anything. Not even exp.

[Shovelchicken]

Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle has been the Minecraft design philosophy for the past 10 odd years

Plenty of new features, but almost every single one is so self contained you probably wouldn’t run into them unless you were actively seeking them out. It’s as if they’re afraid to inconvenience players with a new thing to do in the core gameplay loop.

[ultimatethor]

I love that the moment he grabs the spyglass he goes "Aha"

[ultra_axe]

I want more birds. Crows for forrests, Ravens in mountains, seagulls for beaches and oceans, Ducks in rivers. Im sure there's more possibilities

[banna_aton]

Catching fireflies in a jar and using it for lighting would be so cool

[NateSurvivor]

My biggest complaint is that the game is a mile long and an inch deep. They need to expand on the features they’ve already added, like look at archaeology, they added the trail ruins and suspicious gravel, like cool, pots and sniffers, now you never need to touch them again. (Although relic is an amazing music disc). The baseline is there, they need to expand rather than adding something new then completely forgetting about it

[wabblemaster]

I actually found that mention of the creeper really funny. If the creeper hadn't been added till recently, and say, won a mob vote, I feel like people would actually hate it. Just randomly getting blown up after hearing a slight hissing sound. Which is interesting to think about, is the creeper not hated just because it's been around for so long and is kind of the mascot for the game?

[thepaleone]

In game design, absolutely everything comes down to "why do players want to play my game?"

Bartle's Taxonomy defines 4 types of players and their reason for playing video games.
- Killers (who want to win over other players)
- Achievers (who want to win over the game itself)
- Socializers (who want to interact with other players)
- Explorers (who want to interact with the game itself)

Most games are made with one or two types in mind. and can gain a few more through emerging communities they didn't expect.

For example, it could be said that dark souls was probably made for achievers. and then thanks to the invasion system, the community of killers began to really grow and prosper long after the game's release, making them the new primary community.

Minecraft found itself in a weird place. Because they made the game a blank slate. One where all 4 types of communities (and many communities that are combinations of multiple types) were able to carve their own little spot. And now they have to KEEP the game as a blank slate. Because if they pander to one type of player, they lose 75% of their player base.

[MduPwnn]

It is absolutely possible to have "vertical progression" that isn't exclusionary.

Access to netherite tools is vertical progression. It doesn't prevent anyone else from participating in the same activities - you never need netherite tools.

Access to elytra is vertical progression. It doesn't prevent anyone else from getting anywhere: anywhere you can get with elytra, you can get without elytra.

This idea that we can't have vertical progression because it would hurt accessibility is one of the worst aspects of the game, and it's really dragging down the design. There is enormous opportunity in Minecraft for vertical progression that just eliminates tedium. Just like as you progress, you can unlock faster, more efficient tools, beacons, faster movement through the nether, etc. The game barely scratches the surface of the opportunities here though. There are an absolute ton of possibilities.

There could be more vertical progression that helps bridge the gap between playing with and without mob farms - not as efficient as mob farms, but letting you be more efficient so you don't feel like you absolutely NEED mob farms. Some of it is already almost in the game - iron veins make cheesy iron farms a much less essential thing...except that there's no way to find them without a ton of tedium that would be better spent just making an iron farm. If you could earn a way to find them through progression, that would change the game (while still leaving iron farms useful).

A lot of simple world-edit features could absolutely be part of vertical progression: a way to place a wall faster, flood-fill, making spheres, etc. It'd still be a lot less powerful than worldedit, there's nothing you couldn't build without them, you'd have to earn them, but they'd be fitting rewards.

Inventory management is just begging for it. Things like toolbelts to swap inventory rows, ways to organize inventory, etc. Again, none of these things are exclusionary: if I've unlocked a way to sort my inventory and you haven't, you can still do all the same things as me. If I've unlocked toolbelts that swap the items in hotbar more conveniently, you can still do basically all the things I can do.

What if you could unlock a successor to scaffolding - same purpose, but more convenient (like imagine a platform you could punch to move it sideways or down)?

What if you could unlock a way to blueprint and ghost a building? You stick some glasses on your head slot and a schematic in your off-hand and you see ghostly outlines of where blocks go to help you build something. Imagine what that could do for build tutorials too!

What about a way to control/influence weather?

There are so many possibilities it's crazy.

Some of the existing vertical progression just needs to be reworked. Enchanting is balanced around a decade-old idea that tools should be disposable, to prevent making uber-tools...but that's what everyone aims for now, just with a bunch of clunky extra complexity. A simple mod that removes the prior work penalty for combining enchantments makes a huge positive difference to the feel of progression.

There is also very little sense of progression outside of combat. Even without cheesey mob farms, I can build fantastic contraptions with automated farms that feed automated smelters that feed automated crafters that feed automatic sorters. But why? It makes for a cool youtube video, but there's no point to any of that in the game. Even for megabuilds, which are not a normal activity for normal players, you only need a fraction of that. What if there was some progression there? Like some useful power you could achieve by being able to pump a ton of fuel into smelters - maybe a magic furnace that takes a ton of fuel to transmute blocks or something.

On the whole, I think the updates have been fine, just very, very conservative. They are clearly very, very afraid of messing with the formula, which makes sense given how much money is involved. I'm sure there are twenty layers of bureaucracy around every addition to the game, and the default answer is "no". Mods have also had kind of a negative effect here too - things that probably would have been put in the game end up relegated to modding, and even when those things do get added to vanilla, it's very begrudgingly, after years and years, like the really obvious addition of the autocrafter.

[Xacris]

The firefly situation is an interesting one to me. It seemed clear to me that the fireflies were just the answer to the question "what do the frogs eat?", and so when Mojang found out that they're actually poisonous to frogs they changed the food source. Fireflies were never intended to exist on their own and were always secondary, but people fell in love with the idea of fireflies in the swamps. I think it's more interesting as an examination in how much of early prototyping do you show off? If people fall in love with an idea that gets scrapped it can be difficult to handle

[gapple]

If mojang added
1. Vertical slabs
2. Light sources that could emit different colors of light
3. A way to make dark areas without worrying about mob spawns
4. A Redstone component that acts as a pulse-extender without being so bulky
I'd loose my mind

[Purplers]

The trouble with movable tile entities is that there's lots of redstone out there right now that relies on them not being movable, and would break very badly if they did become movable. So if Mojang doesn't want to face an angry mob of redstoners, they have to add a bunch of equivalent blocks to the game all at the same time that can fulfill all the roles of the previous tile entities

[Elian]

I don't think I've EVER beaten the ender dragon in survival, and I've been playing the game for 12 years. I just never felt the need to.