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[TD1]

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[SealyStar]

Notch isn't greedy per se, he just has development ADD.
Minecraft doesn't really have a design direction, which caused the sorry state vanilla Minecraft is in now.

Is it weird that I actually like vanilla Minecraft and don't mind most (not all, see below) of the new features?

There are some single-player mods that I like but too many multiplayer server mods are a huge turn-off because most of them just take vanilla gameplay and make it less open and therefore less fun.

That said, I have long wished for a mod that removes some of the more bizarre features and takes the game in some of the directions which Notch and later Mojang hinted at early on. It's just hard to get specific about what I mean because it's heavily based on personal interpretation of early devlogs/promised features.

[Biag]

I think my problem with the "new" stuff is just that there's so much of it that doesn't really add any depth. The biggest weakness of the game IMO is that there's never really any reason to branch out and build more than two or three rooms, let alone separate houses/colonies/etc. I would be quite happy if they put more effort into sprucing up world generation and adding more reasons to explore. For as long as the game's been out, and especially since they've increased the build limit, I've wanted to see things like real mountains and valleys that are actually impressive in size. There are some mods and custom maps that include towering mountains and it's absolutely fantastic because it feels like you're in a real place instead of a toy world.

A more complex example: tweaking ore placement in different biomes. Mesas and deserts could have more coal, mountains could have more iron, the stranger biomes like ice fields and 'shroom forests could have more diamonds, and so on. Not only would it just make sense, but it would give you a reason to explore and set up mining colonies in different areas, as well as making resource gathering more focused and efficient. Currently, if you need one specific ore, you can't really do anything to combat that; you just dig into the wall until you find what you're looking for. If ores were distributed less evenly, you would know that "oh, I'm running low on iron, I'd better go to the iron mine," and you would actually get what you wanted quicker.

[Graknorke]

Can we have our monthly circlejerk about how the old terrain generation actually managed to create more interesting and unique landscapes than biomes do? It is so backwards but nontheless true.

[Orange Wizard]

I think biomes are fine, but more reason to explore away from your house is something I'd like to see. Right now you never need to go any distance, except for sand or podzol or whatever. And even then you're just hopping through a portal a couple of times.

[SealyStar]

I thought and figured out what my problem with the game's development is:

They've focused too much on exploration and adventuring. Maybe that sounds absurd, but that's the best way I can put it. Survival mode has taken a direction where you are subtly encouraged to move around rather than, or in addition to, having a permanent base, and to prioritize bland dungeoneering over exploring the overworld.

In addition to hard-set mechanics like mobs getting harder as you stay in an area longer, many useful resources are locked away in dungeons, the Nether, the End, or rare biomes, and usually arbitrarily. Like, giving things like records or rare crafting materials as dungeon rewards is reasonable, but so many things (horse armor, mossy cobblestone, frickin' emeralds) are arbitrarily impossible to find outside of where the devs want you to find them.

In alpha and most of beta, building the coolest base could be done with the resources from a local area, with maybe a few expeditions to other dimensions or far-off biomes to find the rarest materials, and you could generally forego them anyway. With some of the post-gold updates it feels like majority of new content is inaccessible without traveling to the farthest land conquered by the heart of man and battling new enemies of serially-escalating difficulty.

On one hand, it's good to have a true endgame, something that a lot of open/sandbox games fail at. On the other hand, players shouldn't have to go through it all to "win" survival mode on their own terms, or experience something new. I really think this is part of why I don't do survival: five years ago, I bought a Lego simulator with the expectation that I would wind up with a city-builder/fantasy life sim thing. Five years later, the Lego simulation (i.e. Creative) is stronger than ever, while the city-building life sim has given way to an RPG with destructible terrain.

[Graknorke]

while the city-building life sim has given way to an RPG with destructible terrain.

Ah, there it is. That describes my feelings pretty well also. The whole "get stuff and build with it" concept has more or less disappeared into the sidelines, replaced with an action RPG with a shallow crafting system and dodgy combat.

[SealyStar]

while the city-building life sim has given way to an RPG with destructible terrain.

Ah, there it is. That describes my feelings pretty well also. The whole "get stuff and build with it" concept has more or less disappeared into the sidelines, replaced with an action RPG with a shallow crafting system and dodgy combat.

So, Elder Scrolls: Pixel Edition?

seriously i do like elder scrolls but it must be said

[TheBronzePickle]

Elder Scrolls without any of the necessary breadth to keep you hooked. The Scrolls might not always be very deep games, but at least there's a huge variety of stuff to do, so you can swap between them when you get bored. There's only a few things that you can do in vanilla survival, and they all take an inordinate amount of work. Even just walking around often requires you to defend yourself, when it's night or when you end up in a dark oak forest.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here somewhat disappointed that after all this time, vanilla Minecraft still doesn't have solid stone or brick fences instead of just cobblestone, and there's no mods to add such that don't come with a million other things I don't care about.

[Kadzar]

Yeah, I think the reason I don't play Minecraft anymore is the fact that it's built around the idea that you have a plot of land that you want to improve, but to do that you need to go out an explore. But exploring isn't fun because the game is built around the idea that you're only ever going to stay in one place, so, to gear up, you either need to return to base or recreate the base in a new place, so you have to decide between needing to run back-and-forth a lot or having to redo all the same stuff you've already done in another place.

Plus, resource distribution is almost entirely random, with no sort of external indicators of where a thing might be, and there's often not large deposits of the stuff, especially for ore, so often you're just randomly searching or digging around, hoping you'll blindly stumble across the thing you need. So exploring is pretty much a lot of boring, usually unfruitful work, with very little potential payoff.

[Orange Wizard]

So people don't like that Minecraft relies too much on exploring, and I don't like that it doesn't rely on exploring enough?

I guess my friends weren't lying when they said my preferences are completely fucked up. Although that might have been in reference to someting else, but watever.

[Chiefwaffles]

I'd say (based off of other's opinions) that it's not necessarily the exploration, but just the fact that the game expects you to have a single base of operations, and to return to that and improve that frequently. But then the game encourages/forces/tells you to explore far away from that base, with a return trek every time.

[Orange Wizard]

I guess so. The fact that you can only take a small amount of stuff with you doesn't help, either.

[Sappho]

I also like exploring. But I haven't had any interest in vanilla Minecraft for a long time. And I have to say, I don't have *any* of the grievances you guys all seem to have. I usually play with my mom on peaceful with a custom mod pack that adds challenge without the arbitrary boring same few monsters always trying to kill you. You get hungry even on peaceful and have to eat a variety of foods to survive. When you go mining, you have to watch out for poisonous/explosive gases and keep an eye on the oxygen levels to make sure you don't suffocate underground. Chisel and carpenter's blocks add in TONS of options for building without messing with any other aspects of the game. Lately we're trying some of the magic mods, but we don't bother with any of the tech. We just explore, looking for interesting things to do, or find a good spot and start building our own little empires. We set our own goals and find our own reasons to explore (with things like biomes o' plenty, we might go searching for a rare biome with blocks we want to use, or we might use botania or ars magica and go out hunting for the items we need to do magic, etc.), or make personalized dungeons/mazes/etc. to challenge each other.

If you want a truly interesting and challenging experience, try out Epic Craft on the FTB launcher. When I play single-player lately, that's what I'm using. It adds SO much to the game. It's challenging enough on peaceful that if you don't want to deal with monsters, you're still not going to have an easy time. Or Regrowth, where the world starts out completely dead and it's up to you do bring it back to life. Or TolkeinCraft, where the world is full of NPCs and quests and pre-built cities and landscapes, and it feels a bit like an MMO.

I think folks who are anti-modding have probably only tried the big, crazy mod packs full of tech stuff and other insanity. I don't use any of those. They're too chaotic. But whatever you're looking for out of Minecraft, I'll bet you can find it if you locate the right mods. Inventory too small? Backpack mod. Tired of walking back and forth? Minimap with waypoints. Want to build more interesting things without adding tech? Chisel and carpenter's blocks. These problems are solved very easily.

[miauw62]

All the "big" modpacks are usually full of bloat and lack direction. The packs we usually use for our modded servers are often much lighter (still with little direction, but some mods provide their own progression).

I actually really enjoy cave exploring in Minecraft. It makes mining actually pretty fun. (especially with journeymap so I don't have to walk through kilometers of explored caves). I don't really like much of the other exploration, though

That said, thaumcraft has a midgame item called boots of the traveller, which makes Minecraft much more fun in general. You walk and jump faster and automatically go up one block slopes. It removes so much tediousness.

One other thing I HATE is ender pearls. They're required in all endgame content everywhere for some convulted reason, and the only way to get them is to fight endermen, who don't appear every night, are rare, are horribly annoying to fight and aren't even guaranteed to drop a pearl. Fuck endermen.

Some tech mods provide automated mob spawners,luckily.