Minecraft's Progression is Awful. Part 1.
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ธ.ค. 2023
- I love Minecraft, but lately, I've had a ton of ideas of how the game could be improved. Mojang is heading in the right direction with 1.21 and the trial chambers, but I think things can be taken further... so let's discuss that and other issues plaguing the game in its current state.
Join this channel to get access to perks:
/ @thegeekfactor_
SUBSCRIBE: / thegeekfactorftw
PATREON: / thegeekfactor
LINK TREE: linktr.ee/thegeekfactor
PLEASE BE AT LEAST 13+ YEARS OF AGE IF YOU JOIN THE DISCORDS.
DISCORD: / discord
MINECRAFT SERVER DISCORD: / discord
All music in this video:
Monolism Remixes of Minecraft Trails & Tales Update (Monolism, Aaron Cherof, Minecraft)
Minecraft Volume Alpha and Beta (C418)
Terraria 1.4.4 soundtrack (Scott Lloyd Shelly)
My Own Original Music
Special thanks to YOU for checking out my content!
All footage is my own. If you want to use any of my footage, ideas or music, please contact me first. ♥
This video was a blast to make. It took me several days to write the script, edit it with Emily, gather the footage, and edit it all together. It's my biggest video yet and I think its a great way to end the year. Thank you guys for making 2023 the best year for my channel yet. We'll be back in 2024 with some banger video essays about Minecraft and other games. - เกม
![[Full Episode] MasterChef Junior Thailand มาสเตอร์เชฟ จูเนียร์ ประเทศไทย Season 3 Episode 6](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/CVUx09Rx0-M/mqdefault.jpg)
Edit: I watch this video from time to time and I find that I disagree with it more and more. I HIGHLY recommend if you are a critic of this video, that you watch my Part 2. I think it remedies a lot of the bad or misguided points that I have made.
WATCH PART 2 HERE:
Minecraft's Progression is Awful. Part 2.
th-cam.com/video/s8M7I9Ny6NQ/w-d-xo.html
I actually have one major point of that I’ll contend to: Automation does not ruin Minecraft, people who do automation then complain the game is boring ruin Minecraft for themselves and are annoying.
Redstone is really fucking cool, and I don’t think I made it clear enough that it’s super impressive what people can pull off. ❤️
Honestly learning how to do Redstone in Minecraft has taught me more about electricity intuitively than any shop or tech classes I took in middle or high schools.
I think redstone automation is a good reward for players knowing the game. It’s a lot more complex, leading to more open ended ways to use it for your benefit. And it’s not just available to you right after you spawn, you have to farm at least little more compared to iron and diamond gear.
I agree with how dumb it is that redstone is never taught to the player though. If redstone wasn’t just a side thing, and was implemented more in some core gameplay loops, then there wouldn’t be nearly as much burn out from the game, since players would be trying to learn the ins and outs of redstone themselves.
De
@DatWingMan that's true, but I now decide to not use it because automation ruins my personal survival experience. Takes away a lot of incentive to explore the world for me. Nevertheless it's cool that Redstone is so advanced and capable of so much.
@@user-zy7jx2rn1j Well, that’s probably cause you follow tutorials on the “most efficient farm”. Not saying you’re playing the game wrong or anything, but that’s probably why it gets boring after you build with redstone. Because you’re already jumping to the best possible build, made by someone else, there’s no process of learning redstone and then being rewarded by making your own farms.
*That’s* what I wish Minecraft encouraged more, the learning and personal mastery of redstone. Cause redstone is a super in-depth mechanic. There would be a lot more personality and fun with making your own contraptions, not just boring monotony following someone else’s video.
Edit: Nevermind, I misunderstood your comment. I stand by what I said, but it’s not necessarily a reply to your comment anymore lol
Minecraft works best when you play it really inefficiently. I could’ve made a villager trading hall but instead I built all my villagers a massive walled-in city with parks and walkways and cute little houses. Took way longer but it gives me more joy
Except when you work on bigger projects and are forced to do it the efficient way.
The only way to play inefficiently, is to be new/clueless, or to purposely handicap yourself, and the latter is not very fun to do. It feels like walking around with your hands taped together: Harder, but pointless and annoying.
I know personally I refuse to do villager breeders. I got mending on all my armour by fishing for it lol
@@joao34386Not really...most people can't make village breeders without tutorials, and imo using outside resources then calling a game lame is...dumb. Like playing a puzzle game with a walkthrough in hand and then saying the puzzle game wasn't fun. Like...???
I'M LITERALLY IN THE PROCESS OF DOING THATTTT. NICE!
My favorite thing Mojang probably didn't expect players to do is set up a farm where they breed sick pandas, put their babies into boats, have them go down a spiral for the rest of their time as a baby and the moment they grown up they're killed by lava.
This is a *peaceful* slime farm. The reason they breed sick pandas is because their babies will drop slime balls through out their time as babies but will stop when they grow up so they're no longer useful and are killed.
Il mango's peaceful minecraft run, first few videos, if anyone is interested
They defenitely need to make peacful more viable to play on so we dont have to kill endangered animals for basic rewards
honestly at that point idk whats more difficult, to make a farm like that or go into a swamp and farm for 15 minuits
@@thegoodboy4699 Well this farm is designed for a peaceful world as in Slimes do not spawn. What's more. Slimes only spawn in swamps on some nights and never during the day.
boohoo @@KylarKrane
On a note about villagers and villages.
I would love some kind of actual interaction system where you do things for villagers. Like maybe quests, resource requests, construction projects or dealing with illagers. That generates goodwill/reputation which could open up services from the village like access to traders. Combine that with biome specific sales like swamps for mending and you have yourself the start of an interesting progression system where your enchantment capability is tied to interbiome village interaction. Incentivising the player to find each type of biome and either f9ind a village or create one.
I admit the villager breeding mechanic is very unengaging. Breaking lecterns repeatedly to get each type of enchantment is boring.
On another note. I think it is important to acknowledge that not many mobs in the game are as special as the villager. Not only can you trade with them but they also have special AI for a variety of instances. If threatened in number they spawn golems which drop iron when killed. Farming villagers throw food to other villagers and they plant crops too. So already these mobs can perform a task that are vital for playing the game. Namely resource generation.
I'd say theyre a damn sight better than they used to be. Which was just hope you RNG find a white coat with mending somewhere on your travels.
There's mode for it... right? There's mode for everything! That's what Minecraft is about. Get boring game and add some bulky and glitchy shit to make it interesting
the village interaction system sounds so cool!
@@Dinnyeify literally Millenaire mod
oh my god not the fetch quests
@@user-kf9rf3zy6b It shouldn't be a mod. Mojang needs to get off their posteriors and make the villagers, especially, more interesting to interact with. Hint: LLMs.
P.s. And Moajang, if you're reading: less village spawns, please.
Man... I can't imagine playing minecraft for anything other than just building. Maybe because I started in alpha Minecraft, that is all we did. There was no enchanting, dragon, the nether was very new with little to nothing in it, diamond gear was the pinnacle, food just restored health, we simply built fun stuff in a lonely word.
When I see things like you talk about Terraria's bosses it makes me think Minecraft went in the wrong direction entirely. Minecraft shouldn't even have boss fights. So many of Minecraft's mechanics just feel incongruent with each other, like they work in a vacuum but they dont come together for the sake of the game.
fr its never talked about how great the new building blocks are
It’s a shame terraria is nowhere near Minecraft
@@danhousden2122 ?? bro is on smth
@@daleanh3279 nah mate it’s just awful game in comparison, that’s why it will never get as many sales
@@danhousden2122 Shut up about sales. Is tetris the best game ever no. Does it have some of the most sales in history yes. Its fun but its not really the best game. Sales only mean something if your a executive or share holder with their head in the sand only caring about how much something sells instead of how good it is. That's the problem todays media has its controlled by a few eejits who own everything meaning everything is trying to make money instead of an actually good product.
Another problem is that nothing feeds into each other, all of the new mobs that drop something you can only make one thing with them and when you have it you have no reason to seek them out anymore.
Exactly. Not even curated modpacks can fix this easily.
That’s the real problem: useless new stuff.
Ez fix just play terraria
Also, the new mobs usually drop mostly useless stuff, in addition to the stuff being isolated in use.
It’s kinda like the opposite of what is added by any new mod.
Also certain basic materials are a pain to acquire for no reason. In some ways it takes more effort to amass leather than diamonds. The mining gameplay itself is fine, I have no complaints, but so many other things are remarkably unintuitive and/or tedious.
Biggest issue of Minecraft is unbalanced threats.
You either risk nothing or spend countless hours to find a place that can cause you to loose all items far away from your base with little to reward you.
thats why in my worlds, I just build at 0, 0 because if I die 10,000 blocks out, I dont want to have to scavenge for food and run thousands of blocks to get back to my base. theres no point to try and set up a home that far out
@@gamefreak2016 Or, you know, you could use a bed
@@LukeSykpeMan but what if he dies traveling, before he finds a place for his base?
@@LukeSykpeMan you must not make any afk farms 🤣
@@LukeSykpeMan I think it's smart to use a bed to respawn where you're adventuring, then get rid of the bed once you're done
i dont necessarily agree with the point that minecraft itself is boring. if you open minecraft to play when you are bored, you will most likely be bored while playing it. it's happened to me a lot of times. but about once a year ill get a surge of creativity and i start a new world. most of the time a new update has been released and i get to try new features. i focus more on building than getting to the end, or getting maxed out gear. it's the enjoyment and satisfaction i get when i finish a build and see my vision be manifested. that's why in my opinion, it's fun factor is dependent on your mindset.
As has been said there seem to be two distinct groups of Minecraft players, and it's split between the extrinsically and intrinsically motivated. Progression is important in any game, and I agree Minecraft has issues with it, but I can't help but feel like it's the extrinsically motivated players like you that're turning the game into something I enjoy less and less. Pretty much all of your solutions seem trivial and cosmetic, I don't really see it fixing anything at all, just a few new keys to jingle in front of the baby. I love Terraria, and I have to admit it's the progression that pulls me in, but once every boss and event has been beaten the game stops. You have to either endlessly repeat what you've already done or pivot into a different game - interaction in the world intrinsically motivated, building things because that's the only thing that could be new. I never have had a Terraria world continue past the Moon Lord because the entire game was in the pursuit of strength to do that very thing, there's no new challenge after that, and if there was I would conquer it and be in the same situation.
My point is that Minecraft's core gameplay exists in the period when there is no further to progress, the progression is therefore made easy and token. Just you and the world, alone. Will you decide to exist and make beautiful things for no reason? Or are you scared of having no one to tell you what to do? I see other players with similar complaints and motivations as you rush to get the best tools and armor, amass mineral wealth, while they lord over dirt, having riches beyond imagination occupy the chests within their boring, uninspired hovels. The kind of progression the extrinsically motivated want bloat the game with meaningless accomplishments. Things such as new high-tier weapons and armor, new bosses, and new dungeons don't really add anything to the game except for temporary distraction. Most of Mojang's decisions to appease to this player base often distracts them from fixing actual issues.
This is all my own perspective, and often it's just the case that I end up not participating in certain things, which is fine. There's no reason why the game can't cater to both players at the same time to a sufficient degree, but I would prefer new content or changes to have a positive impact on my game play rather than at best neutral. The game is, to me, about willful transformation. I play Minecraft to build beautiful things that take real effort, and the progression is my own ability to do that. Getting the best tools or beating bosses often just feel like a chore or roadblock when all I really care is the utility of the thing overcoming it gives me like elytra or sponges. I just don't think they should dedicate a limited development budget to token features like dungeons and combat when main features, such as building and more importantly MINING and CRAFTING (lol), still feel underwhelming and much smaller in scope than the game really needs.
perfect observations! i do feel similarly towards my goals with minecraft. everything i do is to gather different blocks or better gear to build better things. most of my friends are more similar to the extrinsic type, though they're not usually sweaty about it. what usually ends up happening is they set up a chicken farm, for example, and i go pretty it up lol
Are you trying to imply that it's a problem that Terraria ends? Games continuing after the final boss dies is the exception to the rule. I like postgame content as much as the next guy, but... I mean, do you read Don Quixote and complain that after you read every word, the book is done? I feel like you're arguing about weird stuff like this just to essentially agree with the "other side" anyway on the fact that the game's mechanics need more depth and that the designers need to not focus on trivial aspects.
@@thegoosh6469 I'm going to be honest with you, I don't think I particularly oppose anything he talked about, just the amount of conviction he had probably influenced me to take a stronger stance "against" him than I can really justify lol. All the changes he suggested just felt so outside of what I care about the game. Despite my needlessly long comment, I guess I didn't elaborate my position on Terraria and post game content enough. I think it's harmful to use Terraria as an example for progression because, in my opinion, Terraria's whole theme and mechanics revolve around progression - that's the point of the game. Minecraft, on the other hand, has its themes and mechanics centered away from progression. I don't play Terraria to beat the game, just like you don't read a book just to finish it. These things are meant to be progressed through, that was in their design.
My argument is that Minecraft is not designed like this. You can not make progression meaningful enough in the game because the scale is so absolutely different. To the people who think Minecraft ends with defeating some boss like the Ender Dragon or Wither, this new progression will greatly increase the amount of content for them, but for the rest of us who play Minecraft in a way that has us building, sculpting, and designing the world (what I believe to be the point of the game) these changes add very little - 'progressing' through the game will now take 10% of our overall gametime rather than 5% kind of deal. And yeah, Terraria has those things too, but I don't play Terraria to build and sculpt the world, I just feel too constrained with 2(.5) dimensions, and that's why it ends at the Moon Lord for me, which is fine because all the progression and other stuff engaged me enough for me to be satisfied with leaving it there. To play Terraria after you've gotten all the best gear just takes such a different motivation that it essentially becomes a different game. Mind you, my comment isn't very relevant anymore anyway because I hadn't realized when writing it that this guy already made more videos and comments clarifying his position and addressing perspectives like mine, the intrinsically motivated. Just think there is more enriching and relevant update content in other areas of the game, cultivating the fact the Minecraft is mostly beyond a sense of progression.
man, i really wish you were the one who wrote this video, this was far more measured and comprehensive of minecraft's issues while taking both sides of the aisle into consideration
ive seen a resurgence of this attitude towards minecraft, and a lot of it feels like people masking their real feelings behind "progression is the problem!"
those real feelings being: "i am intimidated by the idea of making my own fun, where is the linear structure telling me what to do?"
regardless of how you feel about it, there's definitely a reason people love going back to beta 1.7.3, or even earlier
(i dont personally find any fun in going back to beta, despite the fact that some of my greatest memories in the game were during beta 1.5, its just too simple for me now)
but i do sympathize with people going back, current minecraft has a real obsession with distracting the player and overloading them with decisions that ultimately don't lead anywhere, whereas with old minecraft, the fun came from rising above the limitations imposed on you by the small amount of blocks and features, and making something special despite the lack of extrinsic motivation
it's not that minecraft fails at progression, its that using progression as a lens to measure minecraft is, in itself, wrong
@@IAMJIM196 This view that everyone who takes issue with Minecraft's progression is an idiot who doesn't understand Minecraft and has a shrine in their bedroom to the god of linear game progression sucks. What if I said that your inability to gel with beta versions of Minecraft is actually because you love trivial bullshit? It's a dumb argument that can't be disproven because the real answer is buried in your subconscious and because you can move the goalposts of it infinitely.
What else you can expect from a game that does a vote to add 1 mob out of 3 instead of just... adding them
Billion dollar company too 😭😭
my favorite roast to mojang is whenever a new mob vote is announced a modder makes all 3 of the mobs and publicly posts the mod before mojang can even get to the actual vote.
@@muscleman125really isn't that hard to make a 3D scale of something and code it for a single platform
Isn't that good?
The smartest comment about the video topic:
This is why i personally prioritize building when i play. I'd get bored if i was bothering to focus on progression, but no amount of automatic farms can remove the fun of planning a new build and seeing it come into shape.
Yes, i agree full heartedly
too bad it's such a hassle, Scaffolding is not as helpful as it should be, and inventory management makes thinks way harder
@@haiperbuscreative
@@whatisthis6259 thats true building in creative is the only way i've really had fun in minecraft but it shouldn't be a hassle or an annoyance to build in survival in the first place
There's an entire other video to be made on how Minecraft has shifted focus away from building. You can really tell comparing to older versions. It used to be one of the fundamental focuses around which the game play loop happened - and it's been totally destroyed in modern versions. Hence why Minecraft often seems boring and directionless now.
Some of the issues brought up in this video are generally valid criticisms: asinine systems that are easily abused, unnecessary dependence on community assistance for proper progression, etc.
One key factor which is mentioned in passing in the intro then completely ignored afterwards borderline annuls a lot of the complaints though: Minecraft was and is a creative-focused game. I’m not talking about creative mode, but one of the key aspects of the game you didn’t touch upon in the video.
Minecraft began development with public attention in forums, c418 was hired after notch found him through a forum, builds were shared online for all to see. The reason I mention this is that it sheds some light to the reason why Minecraft relies so much on its community for hints, tactics, and guides; It’s been that way since the beginning. Survival wasn’t even fully implemented in minecraft until classic finished development.
The progression you hound on so much in this video is rooted deeply in this aspect: Its not meant to tie you to a specific direction to accomplish a goal but rather to facilitate and coexist with minecraft’s core feature: your own creativity.
A lot of people play this game, many of them kids or people who have difficulty dealing with fast-paced action. Many of your ideas stated throughout and at the end are reminiscent of common traits of MMO’s or live service games, some of which conflict with Minecraft’s core philosophy of allowing you to solve a challenge or progress in many different ways. You need a fast route to a village? Build a nether portal pass, get an elytra and rockets, maybe a horse will be enough, a boat if it’s over an ocean (maybe an ice bridge?), or go old school and build a railway. You’ll need supplies though, do you want to go mining, maybe build a farm, or maybe find a mineshaft and gather rail?
The open ended design allows for anyone, of any skill level, to build and survive within Minecraft in their own way. It’s one of the few games which achieves this succinctly while still providing the added challenge of losing all your items if you decide to dig straight down.
Considering there’s over 5k comments, I’m assuming many people had the same idea. The game isn’t for everyone, and that open-ended design leaves a lot of people without a sense of direction which is understandable. There’s issues to be solved and features that would be welcomed, for sure, but turning Minecraft into Terraria is not it.
I literally say… in part 2 of my video that I don’t want Minecraft to emulate terraria. There sure are a lot of comments that keep saying a thing that I directly stated I didn’t want.
@TheGeekFactor dude. If people had seen part two, they would comment there. If someone is commenting on part one, 9 times out of 10 it’s because they just watched this specific video and not a later one. Ergo, they would have no way of knowing about something you said in a later video. Your complaint has no leg to stand on, even if the feelings behind it are fully valid.
This is exactly why I love Minecraft. I'm a rather creative person so building is the biggest feature that has made this game my favorite. I remember when Halo 3 came out and they added Forge, I was so exited because I had never seen anything like it. One of my favorite things was either building my own maps or playing in other people's maps, you could really see all the possibilities with just a few items. So when I started playing Minecraft in 2012, my mind was blown away because I had never played a game so open and free to do anything you wanted. I was so scared of zombies lol, so I played on my first world entirely on peaceful, and that didn't stop me from building a massive tunnel network and just keep playing.
Having many ways of achieving the same goal is another big factor that makes me keep coming back to this game. Everyone is so different so naturally we all have different ways to solve problems, and having a way to do that in a game is part of the fun for me. As much as I enjoy story driven games, the freedom to play however you want I think is why this game became so popular and it's still relevant.
I'm not saying people who dislike the "directionless" aspect of the game are not creative or they are wrong for it, but wanting Minecraft to be something that is not, just ends up ruining things for everyone.
@@TheGeekFactor_ Im just saying but the video shouldve been structured better considering its almost an hour long to get the point across
Minecraft and Terraria (and other games you mentioned) are mechanically and systematically completely different so using it as an example of a good progression, and then saying that youre not comparing minecraft to terraria just makes the video confused
Players exploiting game mechanics and progressions are just regular player behavior. Even if Mojang implemented every changes you suggested in the video players *will* find a way to optimize it and make it trivial because thats what always happens in every game ever
This is where servers like hypixel, prisons, factions, and pvp come into play!
Minecraft is not supposed to encourage you to progress through the game, the design and developers have made it clear that they want new features to inspire players to do things in their world, not optimize it. Of course, you can play Minecraft optimally and get the best trades, best tools, best armor, etc, but that's not what they hope for you to do. Players often find Minecraft boring because they're not being creative. I see people talk about it all the time. I was one of those people too, but when I started to think of ideas in my head of where to build things, I started to find that I wasn't playing Minecraft the way it's intended to be played.
For example, I would get bored of worlds fast because I would progress to the point where I questioned why I was doing it. What did those worlds hold? A rectangle house, messy organization, optimized farms, etc. Only up until recently have I been putting care into worlds. In my family's realm I'm currently building a village because I've never done that, so I started. I built some the default 1.14 village buildings but expanded on them with my own unique twists, because I'm not that skilled at building. It's been a blast. I can barely imagine what I haven't imagined for the world. I could build an expansion to my village with all the trades, having some Villagers with the same profession, but giving them personalities through their home design! I could expand my rail system from my house to locations that I have yet to explore, etc. There are many things players can do to motivate themselves to have long-term worlds, but most people choose to blame Minecraft's design for favoring the idea of Minecraft being here for the next 50 years.
Sure, some people find Minecraft boring, and that's okay, but saying Minecraft is flawed and boring because it has some design elements that can be compared to other games, is a flawed perspective when you consider who Minecraft is intending to cater to. Yes, the current progression could be improved, but clearly there is more value with intrinsic motivation rather than a laid out objective for the player to complete. That's what made Minecraft so popular when it came out, people didn't have an objective, they just wanted to play their worlds and build cool things. That's still how Minecraft is.
Then you have the addition of mods and the modding community.
Adding more things that can inspire you to do things, create, for example. Or mod packs, if you want more stuff, like GTNH ( Greg tech new horizons)
I think the real problem with the enchanting system is that the whole system just sucks. Its not fun grinding xp for hours because the enchantment table rng god didn't give you want you wanted for the 12th time. You should be able to spend xp at the enchanting table to pick out what enchants you want on your gear. This would also allow you to add enchants to already enchanted gear so you don't need to make 4 pairs of boots to get all the enchantments. The xp costs would need to be adjusted to balance out picking your own enchants but its a much better system then just rng.
Edit: Also I feel like enchants stats need a slight balance and QOL changes. Stuff like: Why does a power V bow obliterate everything? Why can't I put infinity on a crossbow? Why can't I put multiple protections on an armor but have max protection levels overall be 4? Also enchantments kinda turn you into god and make it very hard to die unless you turbo screw up. I feel like enchants should be nerfed a bit or the player should be provided with more dangerous threats to encourage enchanting.
Maybe for more powerful types of enchants (mending, for example?) they could add a research system where you have to learn different enchantments before you can use them. There's this one mod I've been playing recently called iron's spells 'n spell books, and in that mod there's different types of magic. Most of the types of magic (fire, nature, ice, etc.) in the mod, you don't have to learn, but there's one special type of magic called eldritch. In order to use eldritch spells, you need to go out and get "ancient knowledge fragments" from structures like ancient cities, combine 8 of them with and echo shard to make an eldritch manuscript (I think that's what it's called), and using the eldritch manuscript you can research one of the eldritch spells, allowing you to create scrolls that will let you cast that spell, and allowing you to actually use those spells. With other types of magic, you can find the spell scrolls for them, or you can craft them. You will never find eldritch scrolls. You have to make them.
I think it could be interesting if a similar system were applied to enchanting, with some enchantments requiring you to go out exploring and collecting materials (that can't be farmed) to create an item that will let you research those enchantments, allowing you to actually get them from an enchanting table and use them.
Another idea that just came to me is that perhaps at first, the enchantments you get are random, like they are now, but after getting a book for any given enchantment you can put it on a lectern and "memorize" the enchantment, allowing you to select it whenever you want in an enchanting table and use it, assuming you have the levels.
The largest problem of the enchantment system is that it's all just rng. From enchanting normally, villager rerolling, structure loot and fishing. The main reason why villagers are meta is because you only need to deal with enchantment rng once. With how rng dependent enchanting already is it limits the design space for more enchantments. There are other factors like mending and how efficient emerald farming can become, but for a system that tries to be dynamic and give players multiple ways of progression the current enchantment system as a whole fails completely in terms of balance and design.
@@matthewsmith5967 That going out and finding enchantment knowledge system would be great. Would add the the feeling of progressing as well. You start out with meh enchants but slowly build up your knowledge and improve your gear as you go.
Hell, Mojang KNOWS this! That's why they keep adding means to subvert the table.
- First we got enchanted books, which can abstract the process away from our valuable items
- Then we got the villager update, which fucked the whole system by adding librarian villagers who can spawn with _any_ enchantment, encouraging concentration camps for librarian villagers
- Then we got the grindstone, which can disenchant any item so you can try again
Like, even Mojang agrees that enchanting sucks ass, so why don't they change it?
The worst thing is that not even changing the runes to English helps.
Oh wait, I just remembered they added "hints" a long time ago. Nevermind. No need to do what I said above.
My problem with the villager changes is that it isnt actually harder, it doesnt make you excited for the new challenge. It just makes you take a longer and more tedious route for the same reward.
Agreed. It's just slightly more work to create villager breeders in each biome and make a nether highway to those biomes. It's just a little more inconvenient, not more challenging.
Yeah instead of making enchanting tables and anvils usable they made villager trades a bit more tedious
@@ninjaguys1000maybe they can change and buff the enchanting table. Also put in the loot of the structures more often books of mending, prot 4 and that really good enchantments.
Yeah. That’s also the problem with the smithing template for netherite. You have to find a bastion to get a template, but it all comes down to just mindlessly mining diamonds again instead of doing something new and rewarding. More tedious = -more challenging-
@@smallxplosion9546standing still vs walking are literally the options
The issue I have with this video’s premise is that Minecraft isn’t going for such an RPG style as you suggest it should go the video. Ever since Alpha, the game was about survival and building, not progression. And while the game has added many more RPG elements, it still is a survival game with a focus on resource gathering and base building. And my biggest disagreement is that what makes the game so great is the open ended nature that you say ruins the progression and that is, in my opinion, actually the greatest strength of Minecraft. Because Minecraft is the truest sandbox I have ever seen, where you can literally do anything you want. You make the game fun. And so, people who get bored of the game by using exploits like villager profession resets are digging their own holes and falling into it. So, in conclusion, comparing Minecraft to games like Terraria is missing the key point that they are each attempting two different styles of game design which means that they won’t feel similarly satisfying.
Definitely. I really don’t understand this video, he’s criticizing Minecraft not living up to something it’s not even trying to fit. I hate games with set progression because every playthrough starts to feel the same. I love how Minecraft is a game you can truly make to fit your play style instead of being cornered in to something because of progression. Me personally, I hate killing mobs and all that but i love building and resource gathering, but if i played terraria i would be cornered in to killing bosses because of muh progression, meanwhile on Minecraft i can fully avoid any sort of boss fight
counterpoint; once you have you first farm, (a literal farm, not a mob farm) there basically is no challenge to the whole survival objective. Outside of the painfully dull enemy encounters, the only real threat is hunger and self-imposed environmental hazards (lava, fall damage). Before you even the mid-game, it stops being a survival game.
If you don't want players to dig themselves into the holes, the devs should not make it so that it's the natural endpoint of anyone wanting to FULLY engage with the games mechanics. Redstone and building leads to machines. Machines need purpose. Resource gathering is the only thing left.
I mean, technically Minecraft does have an end point. It's not just a sandbox game, because there's a final goal the game wants you to reach. You beat the dragon you get the end credits. Yes, it has sandbox elements, obviously, but at its core, Minecraft is a survival game that has a set progression system. In a traditional sense, it wouldn't be classified as an RPG, but it HAS bosses, it's had bosses for a really long time. It has enemies. It has NPCs. I think the point the video is trying to make is that the progression system Minecraft has is not good nor engaging. The elements are disjointed. If it's supposed to be a game that solely relies on players finding their own fun, then why add all of these RPG/survival aspects in the first place if they're not going to add to said fun?
@@ellrigIf you read the text in the end credits (which aren't really credits), you see that it's saying that you've just reached the beginning, and that a lot still lies ahead, in this world, another, or out of game.
Modern minecraft survival is creative mode but you have to wait.
Ruins multiplayer
Just a small heads up, the conditions to naturally spawn the Eye of Cthulhu isn't dependent on what armor you have, its actually based on how much health you have. If you have 200 or more health, 10 defense or more (so I guess it _does_ count armor), as well as having 4 town NPCs in the world.
Still learning new things after all these years
Edit: nah, nevermind, I was wrong, just went to check lol... Weird that I was sure it was only hp... Maybe another case of Mandela effect?
From what I know it's just 200 HP (more exactly 5 crystal Hearts used, so if a friend use 2 and u 3, eoc can also spawn)
@@TheGeekFactor_also, eye is a joke in normal difficulty. In general I think that a new player who picked normal difficulty is most likely to have an easy time beating the game
@@tant_necromant2757 We're assuming a new player. That may not be using the wiki too much. Hell, they may be new to this particular kind of "action" game. EoC might not be hard at that point, but it's a decent initial challenge and gear check.
Of course, to someone experienced like you or arguably myself, most of normal mode is gonna be easy, but to someone without the knowledge and experience, they might need to work up a bit.
The rules for the EoC to spawn are: one player has both 200 HP or more, a defence rating of 10 or higher, there are at least 4 town NPCs present in the world, and the Eye hasn't been defeated yet. So while 5 Heart Crystals is the minimum needed, in multiplayer it does NOT count the total crystals used, but the highest Max HP on the server.
For me, Minecraft was always something I played entirely to experience a vibe rather than whatever intrinsic challenge the game offered
Same 👌 I personally love to ‘challenge’ myself with worlds like single biome or super flat survival. As, my favourite part of Minecraft is the grind. I could honestly spend hours just mindlessly chopping trees. 💀 That’s all I need tbh. But I get the people want more. 👍
As for me, you’ll find me vibing to the peaceful music, making tree farms, and grinding for iron on my super flat so I can finally get a bucket. (I’ll have to cheat in a lava bucket after that to go further, but hey! Still fun. ^^)
Same, I had played for literal years before ever setting foot in the Nether. Just the whole vibe of the game is so chill, even if that does mean just mining a load of diamonds that I don't need. One of my favourite games of all time.
Thing is you can do that with all the things he has explained. Iron should still be fairly easy to get, and peaceful and easy are meant to be peaceful and easy. What he is saying is that it needs to be changed in the normal and hard difficulties, as well as late game items need to be harder to get. If you wanna experience the vibe, iron is perfectly fine. Diamond gear in my opinion is around where it should be in terms of difficulty, but enchants are way too easy to get. Also in normal and hard difficulties bastions need to me much harder, as getting the upgrade templates is way too easy. Something like in hard gold armor doesn't work, and the mobs are buffed in the bastions. There should also be some different pathways, something like an end ore similar to netherite with its own upgrades that is also equally hard to get. The game is perfect for the casual gameplay, but when going to endgame or playing for long periods of time, the progression needs a lot of work.
I was honestly the happiest when I just started playing Minecraft and discovering everything. I really started playing in 1.17 and the only guide I had was a guide from 1.7. It was so fun to spend long times on a boat and stumble upon my first jungle temple and mushroom fields. When I first entered the Nether, I was so confused because I had no idea about the Nether update. I was immediately sent off the tree by a piglin and catapulted into the lava lake by a group of hoglins loosing all my items.
@lynxer3808 you can play however you want. No one will force you to become OP. You're literally only limited by your own creativity.
Im playing a sandbox game and it expects ME to put fun stuff in it and make stuff that makes my life easier? How dare it?
The fair criticism you could give is that terraria systems are more worked out and are actually updated on. Where as minecraft updates suck.
I so often forget that there is a left-hand mode and seeing it throws me off guard so much
I can’t explain why but enchanting feels more like a roadblock rather than a progression.
exactly, getting the enchantments you want feels like a chore instead of a journey, and mojang is making it more of a chore
Yeah, it always feels like something you HAVE to do.
Most other progression is much simple since you just have to craft it and its done, enchanting om the other hand requres crafting, xp grinding, and a whole bunch of luck
@@ahmedmourad1683 exactly, everything else in the game becomes so much harder unless you enchant
Because the way it's structured makes it a mandatory roadblock, instead of part of the progression system. You don't build your resources up over time, you wait until you get exactly what you want, spend everything on that, and only bother with it again when you have to.
i’ve ALWAYS thought about that point you made of enslaving villagers contrasted with the fireflies. it is INSANE to me that they would refuse to add fireflies to the game because they’re poisonous to frogs, but then they’re completely fine with implementing a system where players trap villagers for the rest of their lives so they can buy enchantments from them. the firefly logic truly makes me so angry
My favourite part of this is that the solution they came up with is feeding the frogs magma instead. "Hmm, I just found out Fireflies are toxic to frogs, uh, what do frogs eat? Molten rocks? Sure, we'll go with molten rocks."
they also refuse to add sharks because they dont want to encourage the fear and murder of them
@@cruncyart Stuff like this isn't even the development teams fault..its Microsoft breathing down their necks. They wanted to implement that feature enough where they put it in a whole video, already decided on by the whole team that's what they wanted to do. But they do not have the final say. I doubt that they just "found out" a fact after already discussing, storyboarding, and animating a whole-ass feature and decided to scrap it completely! I honestly feel bad for the team.
There's also the parrot and cookies feature, where feeding a parrot a cookie instantly kills them BECAUSE chocolate is toxic to parrots
mojang is afraid to harness the fact theyve made a sandbox game and theyre constantly trying to push this "realism" aspect into the game. Realism went out the fkn window when we enslaved thousands of villagers for trading, constantly scare villagers so they spawn iron golems and then we burn the golems for their iron, trap villagers to keep pillagers raiding them so we can farm the raids for thousands of emeralds and totems yet mojang will continually ignore that and say they love the realism aspect of Minecraft
I think the issue is that Minecraft at its core is a game meant for those who play games for intrinsic value. For many of us Minecraft is something we played as kids and as many people know children are much more imaginative and do things more often for intrinsic value. However as we aged we started placing importance in goals that can be met with noticeable gain or effects. Minecraft on the other hand is a game that has to apply to a vast amount of ages but still has to remember its main player base is majority children.
Basically it’s hard to make a RPG game completely kid friendly… especially with today’s young gamers who’s idea of the best games are things like Fortnite where the dopamine is generally always spoon feed to the player and even when you reach a low point you just restart immediately into the dopamine loop again.
The point of Minecraft is to build, not to progress. Some servers even ban the end dragon fight to encourage more building.
Minecraft has no point. I also never said the point of Minecraft was to progress. In fact, at the beginning on this essay I state “you could say Minecraft is more of a building game… …and I’d say you’re correct”
One of the best ways, in my opinion, to find fufillment in minecraft is to focus on having fun and not worrying too much about efficiency. Like, I just started a world and immediately launched into building a huge house inside of a mountain, and still have not made so much as one piece of iron armor. Instead of food, ores, resources, etc, I have chests full of cobblestone. While, according to the achievements, I've done next-to-nothing, I have succeeded at making an awesome house. I think a lot of it has to do with mindset.
Right on! I find that the game has become rather bloated, and with mostly things I won't ever want to really even use... Key complaint is the sheer amount of stone blocks that I never build with, don't like the look of, and simply are there to make getting cobblestone harder than it ever was. I'm almost tempted to start a 1.7 playthrough lol
@@iceicebabie I totally get that! tbh, as someone who grew up watching a lot of minecraft content, one of the ways I've really found myself enjoying the game is trying out mods I watched other people play as a kid (esp if they're on older versions of the game, like mo creatures).
I agree ! I’ve always had fun because I just screwed around. I never really worried about flying through the game. I’d just dig out a chunk to bedrock and make a maaaaaassive farm
I've had a map for well over a year and I didn't start putting my large copper dome roof together on my base until yesterday lol. I even built mosaics of trees (largest tree in the middle leads to enchanting area) and a bear and tiger fighting (they are divided by a thin strip of sky leading to the sun where my bed is) on the floors of the inner rooms of the fortress too. I try to just make my own shit up as I go and even on console without ever spending a dime on the game past the game itself I've had loads of fun, bought it more than twice lol.
Bro these replies 💀
The deep dark is such a great concept, and so is the warden. I just think it’s a little heavy handed for mojang to hear players saying they want a challenge and dropping an unkillable death machine on us
"fine... here ya go" lmao
It would be nice if there were more bosses to battle with a greater variety of rewards.
The whole point of the warden is for you to avoid it though.
Yet that is still easy because you can just run away from it lol
A problem I see is how vast the audience of Minecraft is to the point where a feature simply can’t be enjoyed by most. Most mob vote mobs are received negatively due to how low of an impact they have. First thing pros did when they saw the warden was how to kill it quick as possible while some are still struggling with it. A redstoner will immediately create a farm for any new resource, making the exploration to get it redundant. You just can’t appease anyone.
I think that Minecraft isn't about that. The progression is seeing your world build up around you... I still buy diamond tools from my village and I rarely use good armour, and I'm having a great time! People who claim Minecraft needs Terraria-like progression just don't get what kind of game Minecraft is
I wouldn't say it's that they don't understand the game, more that it's just not what they wish it was.
Thats not how minecraft survival works
My biggest problem is how as a player you skip right over 3 tiers of armor and just go straight to iron. Making leather chainmail and gold useless
Same with tools. You only ever need a wood pickaxe, and if you're really rushing a stone pickaxe. Iron is usually when it slows down enough for other tools to be worth making.
I feel like the villager change just makes it more annoying but not more challenging, having to transport villagers to that biome just to do the same thing you normally do for trades
I think the villager change is somewhat a good change. It prevents people from grinding villagers off rip as its extremely tedious to do so. But if you're progressed to a certain point its easy to do and might even be better as you have less rng to get the trades you want
"having to transport villagers to that biome just to do the same thing you normally do for trades"
Yeah this isn't some objective point but rather a subjective one.
If Villager Trading has always been just like the New Villager Trades; this point completely fall apart of any value and is more of a bad response for an ultimately better change, I don't blame you but it shouldn't be a basis on how you actually balance and design a game.
it adds a bit of strategy which i like but the update also fucks with other important trades needlessly
im all to delete mending from villager trades and make something more interesting with it
coz librarian trade cycling sucks and i hate it
This brings me back to 1.7
My dad, a programmer, found a way to create interesting dungeons with various enemies and items and put them onto a vanilla map so that he, my brother, myself and some of out friends could play on a nice little server.
The dungeons were genuinely terrifying. No clue how he did it tho
can he share? Im also a developer and curious to the code
DUDE now you must share it in some ways i wanna play that too lmao
he did this by editing Minecraft's source code
@@anon1963 thanks captain obvious
@@Burbanana well op wrote that he has no clue how he did it so I'm telling him, screw off
I can’t for the life of me tell if this guy is joking or is actually somehow offended for the villagers we treat inhumanly for mending books
I'm not sure I'd call it offense, they are after all just mobs in a game. It's simply that the way the game's mechanics incentivize treating a human-looking creature is a little alarming. It seems like the game is promoting treating real humans like this, although that was almost certainly not the intention of the creators. The fact that the villagers have large noses really doesn't help because it conjurs images of concentration camps and other unfortunate incidents in real life history. Again, this was almost certainly accidental on the part of Mojang, but frankly they ought to have thought of this. Nintendo punishes you for killing fictional birds, in order to not promote killing real life birds. It's true that players will inevitably try to be cruel in video games, whether out of annoyance or schadenfreude or in the name of efficiency. But, the games can punish the player or mechanically prevent the player from doing these things. For example, villagers could need to actually gather resources rather than just randomly having them and children could need to be near adults in order to grow up. This way, the incentive would be to protect an existing village with a wall, or build a village at your base, rather than putting them in what is effectively a prison (plus, no cheating the progression system by villager trading for things like soul sand and high tier tools). Also, the presence of things like leaf blocks, cacti and flowers could make breeding more likely and trades cheaper. The zombie curing mechanic isn't terrible, but it should not result in more favorable trades. It should just be a way to get villagers.
This is one of the main reasons I think as to why there's a sudden resurgence in classic beta Minecraft players. With the lack of sprint, structures, enchantments, and darker lighting, it makes finding resources in caves more challenging. You actually have to go out and find the resources to progress instead of just walking around and being given them for free from a village. And it takes time to find those resources since you're at a walking pace. And even when you do get those tools, the veins aren't too common to find and the tools aren't as strong, still taking time to mine stuff whilst breaking pretty quickly still after prolonged use.
It's also what made diamonds so valuable. In my own Beta 1.7.3 world, I've only found 1 cluster of diamonds so far, reaping 4 diamonds total. In my 1.20.1 world, I managed to acquire over 8 diamonds on my second in-game day playing. This also had to do with how the monster spawning was nerfed so that any light level prevented hostile mobs from spawning, whilst in Beta 1.7.3, you frequently got jump scared by monsters coming at you from the darkness since light level 7 and below spawned monsters. This had to be done to accommodate for the size of the new caves in 1.18, but as a consequence made navigating caves much more easier, and paired with the new ore spawn mechanic made finding ores just too easy and stupid. Especially diamonds, since in Beta 1.7.3, diamonds could only be found at or below Y=16 and were rare to find universally. In 1.18 and after, not only did diamonds become more easier to find the further down you went below Y=16 due to world height changes and the new ore generation, but Mojang also made diamond ore veins more common than before as an additive feature. This same thing happened to iron ore as well, except for the fact that Mojang had to reduce the generation size multiple times and tweak the Y values at which they generated at most likely because iron ore was spawning too frequently.
To me, villager trading is what's the big problem currently. When it was first added, the use of emeralds as a currency was a total ripoff. Emeralds at this point were essentially twice as rare as diamonds, spawned as just 1 ore block, and could only buy junk resources that could be acquired just a few chunks away from the village. Instead of reworking the trade system, they simply added more functionality to villagers by giving the Librarian the chance to trade Mending, which is suppose to be hard to get because emeralds are hard to find in caves but can be earned in stacks by trading literal sticks for them. There's almost no value to the emerald. Even with the increased size and chance of finding Emerald Ores, the trades from all too common villages allow literal transmutations of 2 coal for 1 emerald to occur.
Minecraft's best dungeon in vanilla in my opinion has to be the Ocean Monument. When you first arrive, the "boss" gives you mining fatigue 3, which essentially prevents you from breaking blocks underwater then. To even get in the dungeon then, you'd need water breathing potions to survive. Then there's the Guardians, who can attack players with their beam so long as there's a line of sight. To complete the dungeon, the player has to kill the Elder Guardians which will remove the Mining Fatigue and give the player control again, allowing them to harvest Prismarine, which only forms to create Ocean Monuments. And even if the "boss" doesn't give the player anything in regards to a tool or armor for a reward, the Ocean Monument is the only place I know of that has sponges available, which are far more useful for clearing out large bodies of water than what countless stacks of sand or gravel can do.
I very much agree with what was discussed in this video, I really do! I run mods not to make the game easier, but to make it much harder. Adding more types of tool tiers, enhancing the enemy AI, and reworking base mechanics as to make the gameplay not only tougher, but take time as well. One of my favorite mods (despite not being available for my preferred mod loader) is Numismatic Overhaul, which adds an honest currency for villagers to use that can't be mined or crafted, but only earned from trading or rarely from killing mobs. Another mod along this line too is Dynamic Villager Trades, which resets what villagers trade each day, even choosing themselves relevant items to sell based on previous trades the player made with that villager.
It honestly feels like someone went into Mojang Studios, got behind the scenes on how Minecraft is coded, changed all the coding to make it easier for them to play, then left whilst no one batted an eye. It feels more like a kids game than it did not even 5 years ago. But it needs to be said first before anything can be done. For that, you made a great video to illustrate these points perfectly! Many veteran players out here (me included) have been saying this and have been felt feeling ignored or dismissed for not getting caught up to date with the newest features still. These videos help show other people exactly what we're talking about when we say how easy Minecraft has become and why it's killing the game. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
(Apologies for the essay, lol. I didn't realize how much there was for me to vent about here, but the video really just spoke to me on a deeper level than anticipated. I don't know where you've been at as a channel up until now, but consider me as a permanent subscriber now!)
Fantastic comment overall, but especially what beta gameplay was like. I will also add the old food system really changed the dynamic. You couldn't just take a stack or two of food and have infinite healing on your mining trip, it really made you consider if risking taking damage was worth it. Also no shields to trivialize creepers and skeletons.
Bro just casually said killing mobs and the ender dragon is too easy... I think I might be bad at Minecraft.
Sorry but I think it is true. Ender Dragon is just a gimmick boss. You don't even need endgame gear to beat her.
He's right. It's actually very easy
It is too easy sadly, you can nuke it with beds very quickly
Depends on the method you use, but its more stressful than hard imo
You've probably not gotten good gear or know/use strats that are well known
Tools and weapons and armor shouldn’t be destroyed when they “break”, they should just turn into a broken item that no longer works until you repair it. This would be much more fun and interesting to hold onto a fully enchanted item that was in a “broken” state and needing to repair it for it to work again, rather than the item just disappearing, which isn’t really an interesting mechanic as much as it is just annoying. The durability bar should also be replaced with a simple visual illustration of the item at different stages of decay, similar to the cracked anvil.
If the elytra is like this, I don't see why anything else can't be
This would be great. Durability is a massive issue imo considering if mending will be less easily acquired. I hate the idea of a fully enchanted diamond or netherite piece of gear breaking, given that with my enchanting rng it takes hours to get decent enchantments
Reward players with a broken piece of enchanted armor and it instantly creates a quest to find the materials necessary to repair it
I think that should only apply to certain items - you'd hardly want to have to lug around broken wooden pickaxes or whatever unless they were trivial to repair.
You wouldn’t have to lug around a broken wooden pickaxe. You can just throw it out.@@maskedkoopa6252
“Do you feel good after you set up your “labor camp” to get Mending?”
Yes
Next question
You shouldn’t. It’s fucking boring
@@TheGeekFactor_ so true. yet i always do it
I think Minecraft was better when there was no progression except the goals you set yourself.
On part 5, specifically this 35:03, I've probably quoted it a hundred times, but “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game” sums it up. Generally if players don't use the tools they are given, they feel like they are just doing something stupid, so they strive to play it the best way they can find, and when that method is not fun, the game isn't fun.
I think the ocean monuments were a step towards meaningful dungeons in way of the mining fatigue, because unless you are bringing milk with you, it forces you to tackles the dungeon the fun way by going though the front door, not the most optimized way by mining directly to what you want.
if only you couldn't use tnt and a few blocks 😞😞 I love ocean monuments so much they're so fun to go through normally
@@colecube8251 Oh yeah, I'm not 100% sure all the ways you probably can break them, but the attempt gave me some hope they would try some more systems to prevent cheesing dungeons.
But you see, the problem with most dungeons in Minecraft, especially Monuments, is that they are trash. Literally, look at how this dungeon contributes to your progression, it doesn't. It only gives gold (which is barely useful and overrated because of its irl value), sponges which are only useful for building underwater, and the rest are purely decorative.
The mechanic is a great idea, although in my opinion it should be made permanent in every dungeon. Just put the player in adventure mode, then they can't cheese the challenge. Although for that you'd have to come up with a fun mechanic and worthwile loot to begin with, which Mojang proves again and again they can't do.
I know its a lot easier on paper, but I still think Mojang is dissapointing regarding intrinsic content
@@tamas9554I think that trident should be the reward for ocean monuments, they should remove the sponges from the dungeon and make them craftable using sniffer's plants.
@@mechanical_squid4047 But you see, there is another problem, tridents are also not good. They want to be good for both ranged and melee combat, except they don't excel in either of them.
Bows and crossbows are better for ranged, and swords are better for melee. Its outclassed even as a means of travel.
Minecraft just has so many problems under the surface, literally everything that is inside the game could be improved, even if its not outright bad
I think the biggest problem with the progression system is that the non-cheese ways of getting things done become very tedious very quickly. To get a lot of diamonds, you have to either go caving, which is inconsistent and creepers sometimes drop out of the sky to kill you instantly, or you have to go strip mining, which involves left clicking a bunch of grey rocks until you stumble on some slightly bluer rocks once every ten minutes. There is no way to get better at this. You can get better tools that expedite this process, but after you learn the basic branch mining method you're pretty much at the skill ceiling for the core mechanic of the game. Every time I go mining for diamonds, I think about how I'm not actually playing a game, and I'm just waiting for something to happen. Maybe if crafting was more hands-on, like if you found an ore, and you had to carve out the material from the stone somehow, and the more precisely you accomplished this, the more yield you got from that block. Instead of dropping raw iron into a furnace and getting the ingot so easily, you had to go through a more involved progess, like heating a specific furnace to a melting point, getting molten iron, casting it, and waiting for it to cool. As you progress to the later parts of the game, you would be able to automate this process, and craft hotter furnaces that smelt things faster. Maybe instead of randomly rolling the enchatment table and hoping you get lucky, you can set up rituals with candles and stuff in certain biomes to enchant books. I wouldn't want to cheese these processes if the base gameplay I'm shortcutting wasn't so mindless and tedious. I think the main problem with my more hands on approach to crafting and enchanting is that it's hard to explain in game how to do those things. Maybe they're little shortcuts for people who have been playing a while. Idk I'm not a game dev.
Try vintage story
Oh boy you're gonna love Vintage Story
automate things. build a tunnel bore. that will keep you occupied for a good long while, and then you can mine diamonds or ancient debris much faster than before. it's not "cheese" if it takes 10 hours of good solid gameplay to build the machine to do it. automation = "getting better." There are still different levels of tunnel bore from simple to huge and complex so there is plenty of progression to be had too.
i love how more people are finding this game@@geoffreydegraaf9164
Villagers and villager trading helps with stuff like this but at the same time brings up the same issue. Yeah you can get diamond gear from trades but making all the farms and waiting for a few hours to get the necessary emeralds is boring
"Wanting more of a purpose out of Minecraft is a big part of what drove me to make Terraria"
~Redigit
Both games can exist simultaneously. I dont think minecraft needs to Become terraria in order to work. External motivation can be limiting for internal motivation
I find that my issues lie within a lack of a defined ultimate goal. I know that’s the point of the game, the goal is yours to set, but even still, I wouldn’t mind fighting the Ender Dragon if there was more of a journey along the way. It’s probably why Terraria just does it for me way more, despite playing both games for well over a decade.
I think a problem with this analysis (though minor) is that the progression comparison is not framed 1-1. The terraria progression is presented as if it's from a relatively new player, while the minecraft progression is from someone who knows minecraft. Now this is only a minor problem, because even with knowledge of terraria you just go through the progression faster, you can't skip to the end entirely.
It's pretty common to se "100 day" videos where they beat the end dragon as their 'starting task'.
It's really goofy that beating the final boss is the quickest way to start 'playing the game'lol
before the update that brought up the crafting book, if you weren't playing with mods to give you recipes, the new user experience without looking up online is pretty much mining a thing and not knowing what you can do with it... at all. That's a fault of Minecraft's crafting system which there's many games with crafting, like Terraria, which took the simpler way to just tell you to collect some resources to craft that one thing at that crafting bench or furnace or forge.
Thinking about it as I write this : Wouldn't that be interesting to see Minecraft do away with that crafting system entirely and just go the route like Terraria? And get you to unlock the crafts as you collect resources. This alone would do a good bit to improve the experience but I can recognise that it would worsen the current issues of the game.
@@shijikori I think that would end up just making minecraft even more grindy. Take terraria for instance, a small starter house takes about 80 wood to make, but that's acceptable because while the tools are slow, the yield per tree is like 20. Whereas in minecraft a small house will cost you about the same amount of trees, but each tree takes longer to cut down because you have to cut it one block at a time.
@seraphcreed840 this only goes to show how minecraft is the best sandbox game. The skill celling is so high that players chose to beat the final boss as a starting task. There is no final boss for minecraft anyway the dragon really just serves as a goal for speedruners. The player deceides when they have beat the game, which, if they chose can never happen
@@vansenjoyer "The skill celling is so high that players chose to beat the final boss as a starting task." That is so backwards. How did you come to that conclusion? Being able to beat the end game boss with little to no challenge means it's easy not hard. Now if it was incredibly challenging to beat the boss at the beginning of the game but still possible then you would have a point but that's not what's happening here.
I get that the people killing the ender dragon with beds and such are really good at the game and that not everyone is like that but the skill ceiling for Minecraft isn't comparable to other games that let you fight the final boss immediately. The comparison Geekfactor makes with BoTW works here. You could go to the end game area in BoTW immediately but the challenge is much more insane (and more rewarding) than running into the end with beds and cheesing the boss.
One of the most important things ive learned from game design, is that players will optimize the fun out of a game. And something a game dev needs to do is be aware of this
Microsoft is not aware at all huh
@@NaisanSama microsoft doesn't care about minecraft, they are doing everything in their power to keep the game alive by allowing the devs to only roll out updates that never change anything significant, they want to keep the game as it is while changing the least things possible
@@KanwiNeKo I hate how true and not true this is. Its true because the villager change changes the game enough to be 'new' but it also is not harder or new at all.
Also the lack of new mob drops recently also shows the lack of risk taking too.
@@xd3athclawx554what? it takes 20 hours to get one mending book and thats on a good seed. what the hell are you talking about?
I like to compare it to the often joking advice of "just don't get hit."
For as useless as the advice is it's also completely true, in many games players able to avoid a majority of damage can stack nothing but attack increases to make progress faster than any other approach.
Honestly, slave basements are one of the main appeals to me. Making your own "community", investing into it and reaping the rewards. I'll take working on my little town and expanding it over braindead strip mining any day.
All the stuff with zombiefying and healing them is dumb though, same with killing them if you don't immediately get the best trade. Making it look decent-ish (or at least open, like an actual basement or underground town) is preferable too, not just boring 1x1x2 cages.
27:50 That just seems really limiting and not very fun for me. It's so restrictive that there's pretty much only one thing you can do, you can't take advantage of the sandbox nature of the game. By trying to avoid "Cheesing", it just makes the game linear and against its open nature.
I understand where he’s coming from with this analysis. However, if it’s a problem that you don’t like, don’t use it. No one is forcing you to make a villager trading prison or use mending. I’ve been playing since 2014, and I’ve never once used mending or fortune. Yeah it’s tedious, but it forces me to explore and dig deeper
I think the warden was a spitting image of what this video is talking about, a genuine threat and challenge to get through. Just for absolutely nothing when killed, and honestly pathetic xp. It’s really no wonder why it was forgotten about so fast.
The main challenge of the Warden is not really to fight it, but to instead try to get the loot it is guarding.
It isn't a threat though, since you can be safely detected 2-3 times typically you can crouch walk to 2-3 chests, break those, leave, come back later. That is why it is forgotten about, it isn't even a threat.
You can literally easily run away and be safe before it crawls out of the ground.
@@ConcavePgons it is just as powerful as a whither and can be considered a 3rd boss.
Killing the Ender dragon you get an egg, signifying that you beat the game.
Killing the whither gets you a nether star, allowing you to make beacons that basically allow you to get even closer to creative mode.
And killing a warden, you get nothing, absolutely nothing. Not even a cosmetic item showing such an achievement.
It’s not worth fighting or grabbing the loot, because chances are, you probably already have AT LEAST regular netherite by then.
So pushing loot aside, The Warden gives about as much xp as fishing or breaking an ore. Ultimately, it’s worthless.
It's an enviromental hazard.
@@justanegg8478 "It's not worth fight" EXACTLY. The challenge is not summoning the warden. If killing the warden is part of the challenge, players will purposefully summon it, which negates the whole experience.
For me, the nether is still very challenging. Just getting near a fortress means you are swarmed by wither skeletons and then you have to fight a bunch of blazes. The main problem with those two are the efects they cause (wither and burning) and it would be interesting to see more of that on the overworld: as you said skeletons with typed arrows are a possibility to make hard mode harder
Yeah I'd day I'm a pretty average player, maybe even a little above average, and last night I decided to enter the nether in my new world with just iron gear. I did manage to find a fortress and get some good loot while exploring, but I also died like 10 times. The Nether is pretty difficult if you aren't a pro player and/or don't have diamond/netherite gear
@@randyquaid3381the nether still scares me so this very day. I have done 30 seed running runs all of the ended in them nether.
Just get fire potions from gold trades and use blocks for skeles or a bow
@@soulzy3596That means you've prepared to avoid doing something difficult, not that it isn't difficult in the first place.
The nether is literally perfect
A risk with changing things up too much is that it could throw off players who aren't so focused on RPG/combat.
I would heavily argue that the risk vs reward to get netherite armor isn't worth it. Netherite armor is incredibly underwhelming, has what most would consider inconsequential benefits over diamond, and isn't worth the time mining and fighting off piglin brutes and hoglins for it
For me, the biggest problem with modern minecraft updates is their lack of interconnectedness.
A lot of features are just left as-is, with no new addition to them; no new link.
Some small features, like the Calbrated Sculk Sensor and the ability to feed spider eyes to armadillos, are great. They're giving things that have little use more ways of impacting the game. But there's still so much more that can be done.
Smelting Rotten Flesh to get Leather, letting players boil water and using it to make slime with bones, letting Scutes be used to upgrade armor akin to netherite... the list goes on. Features need more links between each other.
yeah!! a lot of the new updates are self contained things that don't interact with any other part of the game. Archeology is a great example of this. The only things you can get out of it are pottery shards and sniffer eggs, both of which do not interact with any other system other than themself
1.21 gave new uses to Tuff and Copper tho both being now a good set of building blocks and a compact t flip flop with Copper Bulbs (which also gives new recipe for Blaze Rods).
1.20's Smithing template is litearally made to be a diamond sink since it's mostly useless let's be honest here because you only use diamonds once and get mending after that,
It also made use of a relatively old feature by expanding Bamboo's usage in decorations, it gave new recipes for Chains and Wood (Hanging Signs and Chiseled Bookshelves), Copper and Feathers (Brush), Amethyst (with Calibrated Sculk Sensor as you mentioned), Bricks (for Decorated Pots) and new uses for Mob Heads with note blocks
In comparison:
1.4 added new recipes for Egg, Sugar and Wheat (Pumpkin Pie), Obsidian and Glass (Beacons), Golden Nuggets (Golden Carrots), Fishing Rod (Carrot on a Stick) and Iron (Anvil)
Really, interconnectedness of features from Modern and Old Updates are seriously not that different, it has always been this way and people just didn't bother to pay attention...
What you are saying here is instead that Updates should focus more on connecting features together instead of exploring new mechanics, which makes sense today now that they have a lot of stuff to work with when it comes to that.
So much this. Make copper more than just a cosmetic ore, maybe it's lighting channeling could interact with redstone in unique ways, if not be it's own alternative outright. Give mobs more reasons to be a threat or helpful than just doing a specific thing in a specific situation. Why can't we have more mobs that affect blocks for example?
Mojang wants to add new things to Minecraft while keeping the original mechanics as the dominant force, But all that's doing is bloating the game and making it more stale than it was before.
@@lukebytes5366 Unless you are living under a rock; Copper is having more and more uses with each update and there's a pretty significant use of it in 1.21 just recently.
Mobs that interact with blocks? We literally just had Breezes which does exactly that.
@@user-tzzglsstle585e38 There was a massive era (1.13 to 1.19) where there was almost no interconnectedness. And this era seems to be coming to an end.
I think the devs know of a lot of these issues but they know if they do something about it the community will go bat crazy about it, example, villager changes
Yeah, but to be fair, the currently planned villager changes are terrible with the way the game works.
Nerfing them is a much needed change, but scattering their trades across multiple biomes, including ones they cannot naturally spawn in, is complete overkill. It's extremely tedious for a start, making them a worse alternative to just using the rng of the enchantmentable, and it will make worlds laggy by way of enforcing exploration far and wide just to have access to certain enchantments. This is not good when the game doesn't save worlds based on player interaction, but rather just saves every single chunk a player has set foot in, hence why SMPs tend to have shrunk down world boarders.
A much better idea would have been to only reduce the value of tradeable goods and then give the villagers their own niche. The various craftsmen could lean into the smithing system for example, providing the player with templates for equipment specializations in place of the diamond gear trade. That could also make the game more immersive with the player character needing to do the itemized equivalent of learning from a master of the trade to gain access to more refined gear options.
@@remor698 well I like the villager changes
Minecraft will never change meaningfully so long as it's still owned by microsoft, who are utterly terrified of changing the game and ruining their lightning in a bottle.
No the villager changes are just bad and honestly the worst way to go about it we want them to nerf mending not make it harder to get they didn’t fix the problem they made it more annoying
@@Reesemike I stand by my earlier comment
Marks:
Early: 1. Do not compare Teraria to minceraft. 2. Minecraft isnt made for progression
Later than early: I’m literally playing a survival single player
4:51 those aren’t in the same genre of minceraft
5:19 uuuuuugh
5:44 without keep inventory+on hard, so does minceraft
6:36 that was kinda rude ngl
9:10 1. Guns are too violent for a E/E10+ rating 2. Most other ranged, or general weapons are too
13:56 have you thought about it being hard to have an open ended game with good progression
14:46 getting netherite is still quite hard and time consuming also the first few levels are armor in terraria, were mining
19:52 I only use Liberians for unbreaking and mending because they’re convenient, but yes, the villagers changes are good
24:12 you were literally complaining about how easily you could get iron…
36:20 oops the keys unlock a box
38:15 you’re disproving your own point
38:43 NOT THROUGH FISHING, check up on grain in Hermitcraft 10…
39:54 CRABS
40:17 ok…
40:43 yeah…
41:05 mhm…
41:38 Minda countering your previous points…
43:54 I do agree with your solutions
Minecraft gets boring if it's about progression, it's a game of player solutions, and getting better items isn't very creative.
Getting an elytra for fast travel sucks, now travel is boring, constructing a railway or ice lane or whatever is much more engaging as it requires creation.
If tools get more efficient, mining get's more boring as resources become too easy to get, minecraft is at it's best when it's rutheless but simple.
You remember the hover inferno from the first mob vote? I've always wanted that added into the game to be a major threat to fortresses. And I've always had the idea of taking one of their shields and turning it into a fire based shield that, when you block a hit, ignites the enemy/arrow. I feel like that would be a much cooler reward for going to a fortress than just getting some rods to make the eyes to go fight the dragon, and this could even pose the question of "Do I want to hold a totem, or the fire shield?"
I didn't get why they couldn't just add all of the original community vote mobs like the inferno would fit perfectly for the Nether update, the giant squid for the aquatic update which lost to a flying stingray somehow and rework the Trapinch lookin fella for the Caves And Cliffs somehow. Still waiting on the other Biomes to get updated like the swamp with frogs, mangroves and such. Where's my tumbleweeds and termites? Ostriches and Meerkats? Been like 3 years
@@kidflasher Mojang does the Mob Vote to create an artificial sense of choice amongst the playerbase and to work even less on their game. That's it. The Mob Vote exists solely to build up more social media engagement and to make it so they only have to work on one mob instead of three with the excuse of "oh, that's what the people want!", even though that's bs and they know it.
@@kidflasher Just because they may have fit the theme doesn't mean they'd actually fit in. Mob C became the grindstone. And all of those Updates were filled with content. They don't have unlimited time for unlimited features every update. Plus they have said they don't plan on bringing the 2017 mobs back.
@@plumfadoodle4908 I know that but they could still rework them to fit like they did with the grindstone, blaze shields that are immune to fire projectiles or the inferno's helmet to gain fire res with the caveat that it's weaker than diamond, the giant squids could be cool bones you can find in the ocean or we could get harpoons to pull mobs like a trident fishing rod as a reference to the squids. I don't think Mojang cares about balance when the Elytra, easy endgame loot in the End Cities and huge influx of village spawns with alot of useful blocks, resources, beds and the possible librarian villager trades. I don't think anyone would be mad if they backtracked and added the 2017 vote mobs, it's not like the community trusts them anyways since we haven't received the rest of the biome updates that they did promise to add later like the swamp update.
Fun Fact: It was actually added to Minecraft Dungeons and given the name 'The Wildfire'.
About the armor debacle: The biggest issue with it is that the *Only* viable tier of armor before Diamondd is Iron. Chainmail? Literally rare vanity armor. Leather? Durability and defense too low for the effort. Gold? Not meant to be used. So that leaves us with just the incredibly bland choice of Iron. The same goes for tools, since stone is so mind numbingly slow and Iron is so easy to obtain. The only 'fix' for these things is to tweak stats to add more variety. Cows should drop more leather (And consequently all leather crafts should be nerfed), Chainmail mobs should be more common at higher difficulties and far higher durability. Iron itself should ideally have more durability and Mending should get nerfed. Mobs should be made harder. It's a really complicated issue that necessitates a complete game restructuring.
Lost me at nerfing mending
They could add copper tools/armor that are slightly worse then iron but go faster then any other tools, and chainmail armor should be highly effective against melee attacks but weaker to ranged attacks
Mending is a necessary band-aid to get around the moronic system that is durability. Losing your gear permanently isn't fun in any way, and resource repair is far too expensive for seemingly no reason whatsoever. Instead of nerfing it, fixing the repair system as well as preventing gear from permanently breaking would go a long way in fixing these issues.
I've suggest making Leather through Iron side-grades (which is kind of what happens already with Gold). Maybe vulnerable to different kinds of attack.
One could possibly change mending to:
1. Removes the repair limit for items.
2. No longer converts EXP to durability.
3. Increases the amount repaired when using identical items or associated materials (so spending a single diamond to repair a Mending Pickaxe becomes more economical than building a new one).
4. Sets the maximum EXP spent to repair items to 10 levels.
Or something something.
It is wild to me that the trident and ocean monuments aren't related. Like theres this powerful multipurpose weapon that has unique enchants and capabilities and you just find it on some guy in the water (granted a rather strong guy). we have this big cool dungeon entirely underwater which poses unique challenges and enemies. then when you you've fully explored it and fight the bosses within what is the reward? some gold and sponges??
I love ocean monuments I think they have a very interesting design game play wise and asthetically, but there isnt much point in exploring them.
I think my biggest problem with progression is enchanting. Like yeah they kinda fixed it a little by making enchanted books limited by biome, but it’s still boring and honestly just a chore. I think it’d be more fun if specific books could only be found in certain structures. Like you could limit mending books to be a late game item by putting them in end cities. Or you could give people an incentive to go to woodland mansions by putting silk touch or infinity in them.
Well said. I like how mods for minecraft have more progression than the vanilla game. I still enjoy playing the vanilla game, although it be like once a year for like a couple of weeks, lol. But I wish mojang would give more uses for the dragon egg and the nether star. Like maybe you can unlock some secret boss battle by using the nether star and the dragon egg, or something else.
Combine the nether star and ender dragon for the nether dragon which make the air so hot that you have to wear a special armor to survive would be a cool idea
@@kocant1274to bad mojang devs can't work for more than 30 minutes per week.
totally@@cloaker2829
@@cloaker2829 30? You mean 5
Go play Elden Ring then.
Minecraft is ultimately a sandbox game where progression is just one small part of it and I think a lot of the comments make valid points, but sandboxes should have a large variety of options as to what you can do and better progression can really improve the experience and even lead to more creativity.
Yeahs, like I would like alternatives ways to progress in the games without relying on tradings, but ong trading farms are SO EASY to make and you receive INFINIT ITEMS that it invalidate every other ways to progress the games.
then dont make it
you guys are ruining your experience and blaming the game for some reason@@kiattim2100
After so many years ive still never actually beaten the ender dragon. So when they keep adding endgame stuff like netherite and armour trims it doesnt appeal to me. I wish theyd add more early and mid game features such as intermediate tools tiers (copper is an obvious one). And a backpack slot would be dreamy.
Everyone complains that it's too easy to get stuff or that Minecraft is boring or whatever
Like yeah if you bulid 1000 automatic farms it's boring
But over here it's boring for me because getting anything interesting is a massive grind
Looking back on my most active years playing Minecraft, so like 2012-2019 (I don't game much anymore at all, I still watch a lot of Minecraft content though), I noticed I really didn't play much unmodded singleplayer survival. Once I got a hang of the game, most of my time spent by myself was messing with commands and mods and other fun technical things, and most of my time spent with others was on servers and filling worlds with builds. There was the occasional singleplayer survival world, but they were mostly short-lived to just test out new features. It really feels like I barely touched the core of the game.
I think the Cave Update was actually a breath of fresh air for Minecraft. It shows that, if willing, Mojang can create a really fun, replayable experience for a lot of people, but no, they're more worried about a mob vote that polarizes the audience into three separate camps instead of just adding all of them anyway.
the cave update sucks and mining is so very boring now
the cave update sucks and mining is so very boring now
@@diegoaugusto1561 Proof of the mc community's pettiness
Nah the new caves suck
The new caves are ok
Theyre cool but i want an option to turn them off when creating a world
Correction: Eye of Cthulhu in Terraria doesn't care much what your armour is; it's a factor, but not the only one. Eye of Cthulhu has a chance to spawn when all of the following conditions are met:
- EoC hasn't been defeated on the current world some other way. (like using the Suspicious Looking Eye)
- One or more players has a maximum HP of 200 or more, *AND* 10 defence or more.
- Four or more town NPCs are present. (in later versions that includes pets and the Travelling Merchant)
Note, *all* of the above conditions. If you have someone with 400 health, 120 defence, and no EoC on the current world yet, but only 3 NPCs or less, EoC will never spawn.
I've been playing terraria for 10 years and have like 3000+ hours, how have i never known defense plays a part in the Eye of Cthulhu's spawn conditions lmao
@@Steamworker_EvolairNever looked at any of the wikis, I guess?
@@DaWrecka quite the contrary, i basically lived on the wiki back in the day, seeing as way back when i never actually had the courage to fight any of the bosses. Pair that with me being on mobile, which was consistently years behind desktop in terms of updates, and i ended up frequently reading the wiki for fun, quickly becoming the way i experienced everything post eye of cthulhu (i didn't know what youtube was back then lol). My only guess for how i forgot was because, well, not much of a reason to read the eye of cthulhu wiki page anymore, y'know? Still, makes me wonder how much more of the game I've forgotten about...
‘doesn’t care’ …. ‘it’s a factor’ …. HUH?? Dude you are contradicting yourself.
@@dusting1593 Reading comprehension, does you has it? Apparently not. The word "much" after "doesn't care" changes the meaning dramatically, meaning that there is no contradiction when you *actually read the entire thing instead of just bits of it.*
These two games aren't even the same kind of game, you're comparing Apples and Oranges here.
Compare Terraria to Starbound instead, that would be more like comparing Red Delicious to Granny Smith.
They are both sandbox games. They are both survival sandbox games. One is focused on combat and extrinsic rewards, the other has been trying to move in that direction since 2011 and keeps failing.
´killing mobs is easy´
warden: am i a joke to you?
I think an issue with Minecraft is that truly fixing the issues you presented-all of which I agree with-would require not just adding more content but completely altering things that have been around for over a decade; it would be an entirely different game. It would surely cause a lot of controversy
Start slow but with communication with the community, this isn’t the Justice league it’s a slow unplanned but coming together progress.
the reason minecraft updates used to be so good is because they changed the core progression, like the addition of the end and nether
I think people generally look back at updates like 1.13 and 1.16 positivly and those are prime examples of changing things that have been around for years. But yes there will allways be someone trying to maintain Minecrafts so called "simplicity" in reality its not the simplicity they remember its nostalgia of a bad progression system.
@@smarty265 Changing the world and changing how you interact with it are two different things, The combat update is an example of the latter which people didn't like.
@@smarty265 i am nostalgic for when notch used to just add stuff that he of the community thought would be cool
My solution has always been relatively simple:
Enchanting should be overhauled completely. Make it require research in the form of the enchanting table - the table can randomly imbue enchantments, which you can then place onto your items deliberately as you discover them.Treasure enchantments should be treasure only, with more being added - Ideally, I'd want three quarters of all enchantments being treasure. Crazy stuff, too, with enchantments being applicable to weird items, like buckets or leads or nametags, giving them new utility. How about a bucket enchanted with Void, which erases any liquid placed within? A sponge infused with the essence of the Nether, allowing it to work like the sponges of old? A pair of goggles enchanted with truesight, allowing you to see monsters through walls? A pair of elytra enchanted with impermeability, allowing you to fly through solid rock as though it were air?
Have these treasure enchants distributed across dungeons and bosses and enemies, wherever they make sense.
i feel like mojang is too afraid to make stuff "op" so they overcorrect it and make most stuff rather meaningless (this applies even to netherite gear). actually powerful items like this could allow for so much more progression. though a problem arises with these treasure enchantments in multiplayer and with how rng may work. people may seek out specific enchantments and will be rather annoyed if the process of finding it just involves going into many copies of a singular structure over and over again until you get lucky. either make those enchants obtainable from mob drops (would be nice if you could strip enchants off gear onto books), or create another method to obtain them. id say a cool way that works with the way enchanting works currently is special bookshelves that expand the enchantment pool that can be found in certain structures. or i have an idea of you having to build a multiblock altar of sorts that you then expand with pillars or statues that you get from accomplishing certain feats that then allows you to infuse your gear and books with magic of sorts.
@@ilovehumongoushonkers Turning enchantments from items into knowledge held by the player would also work. So you find an enchanted book, use it, and it gives you a treasure enchantment from the pool the book originated from.
So say you loot a desert temple. The desert temple enchantment table contains a lot of sand-themed enchantments, enchants about entropy and decay and undeath. Say, for the sake of example:
- *True Grit,* which applies to grindstones and allows them to raise the sharpness enchantment on any item by one rank
- *Duster,* which applies to Elytra and allows you to boost in midair when in a desert
- *Bone Dry,* which applies to buckets and lets you empty water onto undead mobs to dissolve them into mud
You've already found Duster long ago, so now when you read the tome, it chooses between the two remainders and gives you that enchantment into your knowledge store, to apply later using an enchantment mechanic.
If you have all enchantments in a particular pool, that book should say so, allowing you to sell it on if you're in multiplayer or toss it out if you're in singleplayer.
@@JRexRegis I usually dislike a lot of people’s ideas for enchantment overhauls, and I can’t say I’m a big fan of your research based enchanting, but your enchantment ideas are actually really cool. They seem fitting with the game and as a person that doesn’t really like the thought of searching the world for a specific treasure, the idea of having to go looking for a desert temple to find the Bone Dry enchantment or something like that is really appealing. I also agree that Mojang should let us enchant more stuff, your ideas about bucket or nametag enchantment hold a lot of potential I think.
bro make a mod rn
I completely agree with the enchantment critique when it comes to villagers, and the villager slave farming extends beyond just enchantments. You can get bottles of XP, golden carrots, ender pearls, and other important items too which can be reasonably categorised within the best gear category. Ender pearls allows you to teleport as well all know, golden carrots is the best food item and etc. It is a borderline integral part of the game now, if you do not own a villager slave colony, you are just worse off than other play.
If villager trading was more complex and included the player having to respect the villagers somehow and not making them into slaves then maybe trading would be better, but hard to say, I personally don't like the aspect at all. You can create automating farms of resources, what, pumpkins, melons, and even iron, and you can easily trade this for emeralds, you can even ruin the villager economy by buying certain items from some villagers, and selling it for more at other vendors. On a server I played with two friends we had one of these slave colonies and we literally called it the Gulag.
I made a simple humane chicken farm of my own one time! The way it worked was a large & regular chicken pen, but underneath it was a minecart rail with with a hopper in a minecart so the chickens could walk around and fit in with everything else I built to look nice. At the time I was also teaching a person how to use redstone, and I showed them a replica with glass on the bottom to see how it worked. Instead of going "here is how to make good looking chicken farm" I specifically showed them how hoppers in minecarts are able to grab a block above them, as well as show how the repeaters let the minecart deposit items out for a while instead of immediately leaving once hitting the Detector Rail.
I'm currently unable to talk to that person anymore due to IRL stuff but I hope they were able to make some farms from what I showed them ^- ^
They could probably remove random enchantments entirely, and make enchanting books consumable items that "teach" you how to create the enchantment. Maybe enchantments cost specific items in addition to XP, like cornflowers and bees wax are needed to make protection enchantments. You use the table to select from enchantments you've learned, this can also double to explain exactly what enchantments do in the game rather than requiring you to look it up on the Wiki. Then your goal is to trade with villagers to unlock their enchantments, and perhaps applying enchantments many times is how you level them up. Perhaps mending is replaced by a durability enchantment with levels 1-5, and after breaking and remaking a tool you can produce level 5 durability enchantments, so now your tools last so long that you can realistically use it forever
IMHO, this is probably the best proposed revision in the comment section I've read so far. It feels RPG-like (which seems to be what those who don't like MC's progression are accustomed to having), but leaves enchantments feeling like something of an accomplishment, and does not break any other MC systems. It not only fits in with the existing systems, but _uses_ of them (specifically, using gathered consumables for enchantments), which is even better, and something which the MC devs actually take into account when developing Minecraft themselves.
The above suggestions would take Minecraft a little further from the days of Beta, but it's a choice. Going in the other direction, for those who like Minecraft Beta's gameplay, but want a little revision or update, I'd recommend checking out ReIndev. ReIndev is probably one of the most Minecrafty of the Minecraft mods in existence, with respect to Beta's core gameplay and UX, though it adds or tweaks a considerable amount of content.
So you want mending to become unbreaking?
@@cameronthompson4196 sure, remove mending, add more levels of unbreaking so max level lasts for a very long time, maybe 10x more than original durability
@@almicc awful idea. I do not want to spend another 12 hours getting what I had already
I have an even better idea: keep the random enchants, but once you get enchantment X, you learn it and it shows in readable text what you're getting. That way it's a smaller change and keeps the progression aspect by making you slowly learn all the enchantments like recipes.
ive always liked how there are slot specific armor pieces, turtle shellmet and elytra. i wish there were more thinks like that that can change the you capabilities and encourage you play the game slightly different
Edit: just watched further in the video and yes the trident is really cool too. i want more things like this in minecraft
Quality over quantity should be the rule for such item additions though, otherwise you'll end up with an overwhelming selection of items where 90% of them are useless.
What would be interesting would be an alchemy or reputation system. Reputation in particularly would be really interesting, having to make more spacious villager halls and provide some supplies. Also, it may be interesting to have like shards in different structures to make artefacts which could be given to different villages in different biomes to unlock special items. By making only some accessible after defeating bosses (beating the elder guardian allows player to enter a section of the ocean like a Peruma triangle with many new islands and stuff, wither = citadel or something and etc…) it could add more progression while also giving players a choice if they want to do that.
also different armor goals, like how gold for peaceful Nether trading, or that elytra are a trade off of a whole chestplate, or leather boots for powdered snow.
i would honestly prefer that to the enchantment system
imagine not being creative and then blaming it on an advancement system made to guide new players
Yo im sorry to break it down like this for you bro but.
Minecraft is just ass.
@@verybored7361 Why do people insist on calling the most popular video game ever made, in the making since 15 years ago, and that has spawned many people's successful careers- "ass"?
@@rettungsanker6157 bro thinks external stuff makes the game better, minecraft is starting to suck
@@m4x_g4mer90 Minecraft isn't good because lots of people play it; lots of people play Minecraft because it's good.
28:28 in my opinion, “cheesing” dungeons in minecraft (or as i would call it, thinking outside the box) is a lot of the appeal of minecraft for me. being able to, for instance, quickly build a wall between you and a skeleton so you can have a moment to use a potion and/or eat something before they get to you. heck, even if you use the mechanics to cheese the boss, i’d argue that’s also thinking outside the box and being creative with what you have. heck, a lot of people clown on minecraft because the fastest way to beat the final boss is with, of all things, beds, but this is that creativity in action within the community. someone had to use a bed in the end, see it explode, and get the idea to fight the dragon with it. then they would’ve needed to ask a bunch of questions and try a bunch of things (“can i place them on the pillars?”, “when’s the dragon closest to the ground?”, “will it reach if i place it on the ground when the dragon’s perching?”, “can i place it on the portal spire thing?”, “can i stand in the portal while the dragon’s perching?”, “would placing blocks on the portal spire shield me from the explosion?”), and afterwards, they shared their findings with the world, and now it’s how every speedrunner kills the ender dragon. minecraft encourages creativity, especially with its’ combat scenarios.
As much as I love terraria, I have to admit it definitely does have a wiki checking issue (aside from the slow early and mid game, since those are on purpose)
Put a person who does not know anything to play minecraft...
I never had to look anything up until mods, then they add so much shit It's impossible to keep track of it all. I remember the only thnig I couldn't figure out to get in the base game was the Uzi, casue it drops from those jungle vines monsters and I always just ran past them lol
the guide is in the game, which you can talk to if you don't know what to do
@@portablejea7014and in terraria we have the gide
@@portablejea7014 which Terraria also has.
For me personally it has nothing to do with competitiveness. It's just that after beating the ender dragon the last thing i wanna do is go back to the mines and start grinding out iron again because i ran out of it. I don't mind having to work for a farm, but i'd still like to have the option of automation.
you can make an iron farm
@@nintySW OP knows that already. They're just responding to the youtuber's point about removing automation.
I just don't build giga-bases or get deep into item farms (aside from crops and maybe cobblestone for construction). It keeps me involved in the game rather than sitting at my desk with a bag of chips, waiting for my iron farm or something.
Never built giga-bases, never plan to. I don't find automating a game fun, but that's just me. I'm a miner at heart, and by the gods I yearn for them
Unfortunately they won't. They're too afraid to make the necessary changes because they're afraid to scare off the player base that buys skins and pays for Realms every month. They bought a good mine and don't know what to do with it
i genuinely love Create mod, its simple but filled to the brim and it doesnt feel off like most modpacks that add ridiculous stuff.
Just discovered it recently myself, and it has singlehandedly made me want to play the game more than I have in years
It’s nice that create adds automation which is actually difficult to set up tbh
(Until the schematic cannon where you can build the same gold farm 11 times over)
its also implemented amazingly. the tutorials are genuinely incredible
I think the problem with Minecraft is everybody rushes through it. My dad and I play it together and we're happier than pigs in mud to stay in iron for ages while we mine, explore the overworld, build our base and eventually go to the nether. Yes, I know it counts as playing with another person but on our own solo worlds we both play like this, and have only one world per big update.
The thing about minecraft is that, unlike Terraria, it's focus is on self created projects. Terrarria gives you a basic goal, get stronger to beat the next thing. Which is fine, Minecraft is a different type of game, while it has survival and combat elements, it's core focus is instead on player vanity projects in the form of either making something that looks cool, something that does something cool, or something that makes achieving either of those goals simpler. Comparing the two games is like comparing Legos to model building.
It’s baffling to see how much cool gear and equipment Mojang introduces in the *spin-off* games but doesn’t bother to make the same kinds of simple Or extravagant gear in the MAIN game. Like seriously it can’t be THAT hard to make a wolf pelt or knight armor in Minecraft and implement that into the game’s world
alright. i think there's a big problem with this. it's that there's a pretty noticeable split in the community. there are casuals who want a peaceful (probably literally) experience. then there are people like me and you who want a more involved, more fleshed out, more balanced experience and want loot, resources, enchantments, and tools to feel rewarding.
i think a way to implement this better is to add an actual hard mode. not hardcore, an actual hard mode (or revamp "hard" difficulty to actually feel hard). i'm attempting this myself via a datapack which rebalances the game and increases the difficulty. the casuals can player on easy/peaceful, and people who want a more investing game experience can play hard. because i feel changing the core game at the moment will just divide the community at best and completely ruin it for most of the playerbase at worst. mojang has gone in too deep with catering to the casual players, is what i'm saying. and that isn't to say being a casual player is a bad thing (i.e, i'm not using "casual" as a pejorative). but what i am saying as that there are different types of people who play minecraft, and different people want different things from the same game.
Yeah. I’m not a great player, but I like to try to challenge myself with the current Minecraft progression. I think I might actually BE good enough to do these things, but since I’ve never done them before (I played exclusively creative mode for 8 years, idk why I did that either or why I wasn’t often bored) I get too scared to try. I was excited to finally try getting netherite armor/tools for the first time, by actual mining, but then they made netherite upgrades? They made it so that netherite was even HARDER to get. I didn’t NEED netherite to be harder. I was only JUST building confidence to go for it. Now it’s suddenly got a whole extra layer to it?! Immediately back to not wanting to try going for netherite. SIGH.
In case you’re confused how this is relevant to the comment, it’s because it shows how I agree with it lol. People wanted netherite to be harder, which is totally fine for them to want for themselves! But for a noob like me, it just made the game worse. Netherite already HAD multiple steps why did they make ANOTHER STEP. So a harder hard mode would be nice, so I can continue getting netherite easy before trying the harder method when I feel ready. None of this is touching on the fact that not even people who wanted netherite to be harder like the update lol but it’s not really relevant, unless the new netherite method was extremely fun I would’ve been upset that it was harder no matter what lmao.
@@poppyseed799 to be honest game designers shoudlnt focus on individual cases and do things well in a more general way.
you didnt think it was already hard enough to get netherite, you were just scared of it. Its two different thing. Netherite is the endgame ore, it needs to be challenging and unique to get. Mining around the Nether isnt unique enough
@@aykandogan9049 …I did think it was already difficult to get netherite. Thats why I was scared of it.
It just occurred to me that a way to change villager trading could be by "upgrading the village". Restructure the houses, build some more, have more iron golems and cats to spawn, give them multiple professions and trade with them.
By increasing your "Village Level" or reputation, the odds of giving you better stuff could increase but so are the chances of having Pillagers show up which leads to raids. However, the more you save the village, the more reputation you gain and the better rewards you earn.
It would be a bit complicated to pull off, but it might be a way for players to stop slaving the villagers and actually have them mine*Craft* their world.
would also integrate raids better, atm they're kinda your fault and don't feel like you're deserving of hero of the village as you're the one who caused the raid
have both systems, equally effective
This is way better than making some enchantments for some biomes or something
Theres a farm life game called Staxel that basically mixes parts of minecraft with story of seasons. In that game, you upgrade the villager homes by adding new rooms, furniture, decorations, etc. It is just a simple checklist with a few tiers. Even a simpler version of that would make minecraft villages so much more interesting.
If modders made the content for rl craft I don’t understand how Mojang can’t make anything when they have infinitely more resources than modders
Im so glad I'm not the only one who hates villager farming. I was in an smp and way too much of my time was spent mindlessly farming enchantments in one place. My favorite moments were exploration though, and exploring caves, and hunting fir biomes, and building roads and stuff, I want more of that, not more farming
I think they should make villager trades scale with the size of the village somewhat. If you want the best stuff like mending, you need to build more houses and shit
Its just a little difficult to correctly track the size of a village the player builds. How will the game know what is part of the village and what is not
@@marci8746 The game can already tell what a house for a villager is (at least a 2x2 enclosed space with a door facing the outside), and there's already a village radius(32 or 64 blocks from the bell). Just count the amount of houses in the radius. Use more bells to extend the radius.
Then someone would design some kind of hellhole that the game would think is a "village" with thousands of "houses" using the mechanics of the village detection system to break the game.
Or, basically, that would make a lot of problems much worse.
@@DudeTheMighty I think people should be allowed to play like that if they want.
@@DudeTheMighty yeah? but at least there's a more natural way to get these enchantments, instead of just having to go with slavery
my biggest critique of this video is the Path you ride your horse down at 1:09, it's way too smooth and perfect, I'd personally replace some of the dirt path with Coarse Dirt blocks, and some of the Stone with cobble. Other than that, very solid video
the stairway is a little steep too
a fellow builder of culture I see
packed mud/mud bricks looks good in paths as well (Just thought I'd add that in with your list of well curated path blocks)
I also can't overlook the fact that he made the walls of his house in 6:56 out of dirt...
@@ArturoPladeado There's a massive difference between looking lived in and old and decrepit.
I think Minecraft just isn’t aimed towards the same people as terraria. Minecraft’s priority is creativity, combat is 2nd
Minecraft's current progession is to enter a cave by day 2, leave on day 5 with half a stack of diamonds, be in the nether by day 6 and have full netherite by day 10. The enderdragon is so easy to cheese that you can kill it with no armour and stone tools, and nobody really cares about fighting the wither. The warden doesn't drop anything, and ocean monuments are just annoying to go through.
The only real "progression" comes from your own self imposed challenges. Can I build "x", can I collect "y" [insert resource] etc. There isn't really a gameplay "loop" as much as there is a grind for grinding sake...
I am getting so dizzy and nauseated with the shield on the right side
to be honest. getting a full villager hall with every single enchantment is already a huge grind and pretty difficult, i honestly do feel good about it. but no, its not fun lol. villagers definitely need something more engaging… im excited for the variant trades
@@ArturoPladeado i mean, the difficulty is having the willpower 💀
@@lionlance146 are you talking about the willpower to...
1. watch a 5 minute youtube tutorial
2. spend a few hours playing the game
like. I understand there is more "willpower" to break and place a lectern over and over again for half an hour, just because it is boring, but that's not like, difficult to accomplish. it doesn't take any actual skill, which is the exact point that the video makes.
rewatch 38:11, "maybe on higher difficulties mending should only be found in end cities, or randomly through the enchanting table. not through fishing, villager trades, nothing like that, *mending is supposed to be an end game enchantment*."
"it's a huge grind... But im excited for them to make it more of a grind" -your comment paraphrased.
@@contaminatedquarantine3802
ive spent a full hour breaking and placing a lectern to get one enchantment out of 38 💀it would be more of a grind to get one specific enchantment in most cases, for sure. but it SHOULD be. mending shouldn't be super easy to get en masse, of course. However, doing the same tedious and brainless task for every enchantment in the game is absurd and plain boring, yeah. I think that transporting villagers once to make completing an entire villager hall much less tedious is a welcome and unique challenge.
i honestly don't think that combat is the only way to make something difficult. transporting villagers is already an ordeal... sure, it's kinda an endgame enchantment. but it's also an enchantment that's just quality of life. it doesn't drastically change gameplay like elytras do, it eliminates some of the other limiting factors of the game, durability and replacing tools, WHEN ACCOMPANIED with a sustainable source of experience. i don't think it should be easy to get, but i also think that putting time and resources into an infrastructural project to sustainably source it makes more sense to me from a basic standpoint than end raiding. You can still get it from end raiding. If you don't like villagers, you can now safely ignore them for the most part, if it's not your playstyle, because other players can't abuse them to easily get tons of mending within a few hours of the world opening, at least not as nearly as easily as previously. i honestly think end raiding is pretty much easier to do quickly, rather than harder, if you're setting up villagers for the long run.
@@lionlance146 so ur saying you'd rather spend 5 hours locating a biome with a village(or transporting villagers there and waiting for them to breed there) just to get one enchant? And the biome lock is iirc only for major ones like unbreaking and mending etc. the rest are gotten the same way as before. I'm not saying the task isn't tedious and could be changed a bit but to be excited for a change that's going to drastically increase the time it would take to get even one enchant is ironic. Minecraft is a open world sandbox game and imo isn't intended to have a specific way to play it, and adding components that basically force the player to experience and play the game in a specific way ruins the fun of it being a sandbox in the first place.
This video rings so true for me and I've always thought that Minecraft could learn some things from Terraria. One thing that really rings true for me is the idea of making components that can be used for automation more understandable. In Minecraft, I usually build all of my automation stuff from tutorials because all the components for automation feel so inaccessible that I wouldn't know how to start. Terraria has less automation that you can do, but you can automate mob grinding using dart traps and stuff like that. The difference between Minecraft and Terraria is that in Terraria there are a bunch of dart traps all over the world meant to try to kill you. This gave me an understanding of how to set them up, so when I made an auto mob farm in Terraria, I never even thought to look up a tutorial and just tried to figure it out on my own which was super fun and engaging. It may not have been the most perfectly optimized, but it worked and I felt accomplishment from figuring it out on my own.
Watching the Minecraft update cycle feels like watching the Star Wars shows as a fan. You watch the IP you love fall into the same traps over and over again, and every once in a while it shows some flashes of brilliance, but the creators can never replicate that brilliance for long enough to start fixing the mess they've made.
The thing with difficulty is if you're experienced player the game is EASIER on harde difficulties. Like villagers having 100% chance to zombify or more mobs in a raid and on easy zombies cannot pick up items which is used to prevent them from despairing
36:44 The surprising part about this, if you didn't know - minecraft does actually do this! Just not in a terribly noticeable or impactful way. That's what your "Local Difficulty" values are - it includes things like world progression, time since dying, etc; and is what actually _does_ make mobs sometimes (at least try to) spawn "more difficult" variants, ie, changing what armour, weapons, and enchantments mobs can have when they load in. Unfortunately, this... doesn't really balance well, and in my experience, has never been noticeable enough to actually impact gameplay.
wow, I've never heard that. It's really cool
yeah it's a really cool system, it's just a shame it's so limited in scope
They should just make it so villagers have randomized trades, but dont reroll when they get the same job again
As someone who has many many hours in both terraria and Minecraft, I agree that Minecraft progression ends very quickly and you have no incentive to keep going. I spent a lot of time in the just, building a wood base, and beating the game stage when I was younger. Then I started taking time to build. I would spend 20 hours building a massive manor before getting diamond tools, I became kinda good at building decent bases, but eventually, that got boring as well. I have done slow burn build everything playthroughs, quick speedrun playthroughs, get every advancement playthroughs, hardcore, peaceful, and it just kinda gets boring. Minecraft progression is done the moment you get iron. Iron armor is really good, iron tools are decent, and that is all you need to beat the game (with a bit more challenge) or just do everything. Enchanted Nethirite is a bit more grindy, but that is, grindy. A lot of terrarias progression is locked behind challenges, beating bosses. Yes, there are grindy stages of terraria, but it's balanced by challenges so you are constantly switching it up. Minecraft's progression is almost entirely just grind, grind for a villager trading hall, grind for diamonds. Beating the wither or ender dragon is the only case of a challenge, but they both give optional items you can go an entire playthrough without. Terraria on the other hand I can consistently play new playthroughs a month apart and enjoy them a lot. I can spend a good 6 hours at the start of the game building, and it's fun, unlike Minecraft. In terraria you are motivated by the game to build different builds in all the biomes for pylons, giving you an incentive to explore and build, unlike Minecraft. Sure you can just plop down a shack but you can spend a lot of time making unique biome-specific builds for every area, and you get rewarded! Additionally, you need to build houses to progress in certain parts. Minecraft has no motivation to build besides the joy of creation. You need a base to protect yourself and store all your stuff, but after that, you dont need anything. Even if you also make a nice base in Minecraft, you have no motivation to make more besides, I want to build. This is fine, but eventually, I lose the motivation to keep building and making the game fun myself when the game doesn't try and make building rewarding. In terraria many events come to you, bringing scary enemies right on your doorstep. This means you have a motivation to build a strong base that can protect you, and as you build more bases you feel like you are conquering the world and it makes you feel safer further out from spawn. Most normal terraria enemies act like Minecraft ones, they can't get through solid blocks or doors. However the rarer event enemies can sometimes shoot through walls, entirely fly through them, break down your doors, et cetera. This makes these events a threat to you even inside your base. In Minecraft you can dig a hole in the ground, or build a base and just have a small parkour jump to the door, and boom you are safe. Nothing scary comes to you, and inside that base, mobs aren't a threat even if you have half a heart. I mean, Minecraft hardcore, one of the hardest challenges can be beaten the moment you kill a wither. If you have a regen beacon you can't die of hunger, it outheals that. So you set that up and just hide in a hole in the ground, and boom you can make a, I survived 1000 years in Minecraft hardcore video. In terraria even if you have end-game armor some events can spawn if you go AFK that might occasionally kill you, but at the same time terrarias progression is about becoming an unkillable god at the end, Minecraft you are supposed to be challenged even in the end game, but you can just sit in a hole and survive until the end of time, with no threat. Anyhow I have seen too many things about how people who find Minecraft boring are the people who never build or take the time to enjoy the game. However, as someone who loves building in any game terraria gives you a reward to build but Minecraft survival is just creative mode with more steps, your only real goal being to build after you spend 10 hours progressing.
I think people tend to forget that Terraria is mainly a boss rush and Minecraft is a sandbox, so of course Terraria is gonna have better progressions because progression is mostly its focus while minecraft at its core has been about the building and exploration side of things
There is little motivation to explore since there is nothing to find. Simply saying its a sandbox at its core doesnt excuse a poor progression in survival which leaves little motivation to actually build which is the point of the game.
@@smarty265 never really said it excuses that, but I definitely agree, I hate that about minecraft because there's literally nothing in-game motivating you to do anything which is why I liked it when they add more structures during updates because it makes you actually wanna go out explore
Both are sandbox games
Terraria simply have more focus on the battle due to its 2D aspect. Even then, that doesn't change the fact Minecrfat has poor progression too
To me it seems that Mending should be harder to get but also regular repairing should be easier. It should not cost XP to repair, or at at least not an ever increasing amount. Maybe they could have repair kits for different tool tiers found in redoable dungeons. That way if you want to keep using better tools you need to learn to do a certain difficulty of dungeon. At first it's really difficult to obtain diamond repair kits, but it's not that bad because diamond has pretty good durability anyway. But over time you acquire more and more cool and powerful items that help you reliably complete these dungeons and you just use diamond for everything because repairing isn't that hard. It's just sad that if you want to use any tool for an extended period, such as when you want to invest enchantments into it you need to have Mending, otherwise you spend an ever increasing amount of time just grinding for maintenance. Also a more loot-based enchantment system might be nice. Like finding enchantment scroll, which are consumable and after reading them you unlock the ability to buy the enchantment at the table with no randomness, or maybe you store these in the table and you need to build your altar to certain specifications to house these scrolls. Something like that would be cool, depends on how different you are willing to make it from the way it is now.
First video I’ve watched from your channel. I’ve been recovering from skin cancer surgery the past few weeks and have a lot of down time so I’ve taken advantage of it to really dig in to a new Minecraft world.
Minecraft came out when I was about 12 years old. It’s an extremely nostalgic and comforting game. In fact I’d say it’s one of my favorite games, if not my favorite of all time..
Depending on the day it can change but it’ll always be in my top 3. That I’m confident of.
Also I should say this is more significant that I’m playing Minecraft because I haven’t had the free time to play any video game between work and college for the past two years almost..
I actually watched this video in the background while playing lol this was a well made video. I am always curious to other perspectives but frankly, I do agree with the criticism itself. I just view Minecraft as a more sandbox experience. I set goals for myself.
Like while starting a new world when I get a supply of cobblestone. I make a full tool set and try to make leather armor. Then I don’t allow myself to have iron tools until I make the necessary other things like a bucket for example, as well as when I get enough for a full iron armor and tool set and some leftover. That being said I do allow myself an iron pickaxe for the random occurrence I stumble across something.
But I repeat that process with each tool and armor material.
Another way is that I build everything in survival from materials I have to manually collect. I say manually because I don’t like using exploitative farming. In fact I completely reject the infamous villager jail. The most farming I’ll do is shut off an area with fences and breed animals.. but that’s about it. It does take away the fun and rewarding aspect of collecting all materials manually. Especially when building or having simple project like pathways to connect maybe some naturally spawning structures such as villages or just my own builds to those structures. For me personally this is fun.
To touch on something I said again, setting goals for myself, sometimes the goals I set are just building and collecting the materials to do those builds are goals/progressing for me.
Also I should say I primarily and almost always play survival solo. That definitely has an effect on my enjoyment on taking things slow and making my own progression as, like you stated, I don’t feel pressure from playing on a server with players who take advantage of automation and everything.
Another way I look at progression in a sandbox perspective is finding all or different biomes as progression along with that is finding new structures. Which granted maybe I’m slow at doing so or this specific world/seed I’m on they’re hard to find so it’s still rewarding. Which I understand my view on Minecraft is common in defense of the lack of progression but it was one of my favorite games so I am always down to talk about it.
Minecraft is the ultimate sandbox, it is what you make of it.