Minecraft Rants

As the updates have marched onwards, I have noticed something. With the exception of the Nether Update, we are seeing a trend towards more passive mobs and fewer hostile mobs being added. Before I get into the main body of the rant, I just want to give a disclaimer: In this article, I will be talking about the mobs as either passive or hostile. "Technically neutral" mobs that are mostly hostile, like the Piglin, will be regarded as hostile, and neutral mobs that are mostly passive, like the Goat or Bee, will be regarded as passive. Number Crunching So first, let's look back in time to what kind of mobs were being added, and what the balance of passive and hostile mobs was. For much of Minecraft's history, hostile mobs have outnumbered passive mobs. Sometimes quite considerably. Let's look at Minecraft update 1.4.2, which was the first update that released after I started playing. At that time, there were 30 mobs in Minecraft, not counting Jockeys. By my considerat...

(This was an unfinished rant from November 2021 that I only got round to finishing now.) When I was thinking about possibly updating my update rankings to include Caves and Cliffs, I realised I may be slightly biased towards it because it is so new. Caves & Cliffs has only been out for a few weeks now, it is still a very new and novel update. This got me thinking to myself, "How old does an update have to be before I can write an honest review on it? Before ALL the novelty has worn off?" At first I thought a year. Maybe two years. Three. Five. FIVE years?! I then thought back as to what updates actually ARE five years old, and how do I think of them now? What update is actually around about 5 years old NOW? I looked into my encyclopaedic knowledge of Minecraft updates, and realised that the update that is closest to the 5 year mark was actually a very interesting one. 1.11, the "Exploration Update" hasn't exactly gone down in history as being one of the best...

I have awoken. A sculk shrieker finally summoned me out of bed.  Hello everyONE (because I have one reader). Now that there is stuff to rant about again (more than enough I may add!) I have returned. This time to discuss something that has EVERYONE stoked. Something that has gotten everyone talking lately. The ancient cities sure are a doozy - although I have yet to play them in survival - but there is one central aspect that EVERYBODY is talking about. For those who don't know, in the centre of Ancient Cities, there is a very large statue that looks like the head of a Warden in shape. Where the mouth is, there is a very mysterious new block - Reinforced Deepslate. This block is SUPER mysterious and unlike any other block in Minecraft. It exists ONLY to line the "mouth" of this Warden statue. But what is even more peculiar, if broken it can't be obtained in survival . Even with Silk Touch. Very few blocks have this property. Monster Spawners and Budding Amethyst come ...

For many many years, the pre-teen population was fiercely divided. Middle schools were split down the... well... middle, into two teams vehemently at war with each other. Classmates turning on classmates. Friends turning on friends. If any two kids fell onto opposite sides of the dividing line, they could never simply agree to disagree. Kids on one side of the line had to constantly hurl insults at kids on the other, and if you were on one side of the dividing line, you did not DARE engage with the hobby of the kids on the other side of the line. You could never fall on both. You had to pick a side and fight by that side to the death. An everlasting battle of Team Minecraft vs Team Roblox, clashing in the world's biggest pissing contest as to whose beloved game was better. I thought the Minecraft vs Roblox battle was a thing of the past. It had been years since I saw people going at it over which game was better. Especially with the rise of other games that could compete with Minec...

If you've been living under Deepslate, 1.19 is going to be Minecraft's "Wild Update". Some (hopefully some, not all!) of its features were shown off at Minecraft Live in October, and essentially this update's theme is nature and adding more biodiversity to the Overworld. Presumably, this update will add more terrain features such as new trees, new mobs, and new plants. They have said that the scope of the update is to bring diversity to each and every biome in the game, including biomes such as the Birch Forest. Now, so far, we know only of features the Swamp will be getting. We were briefly flashed some concept art of the Birch Forest, but nothing of it was said before the event all-too-hastily wrapped up. So, in this rant, I am going to discuss why I think this theme should have been saved for a later update. This IS A Theme I Have Always Wanted To See... Before I get into the main bulk of this rant, let me just say that I have wanted to see a nature-themed upda...

1.18 is coming TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!! But for those of you who play the snapshots avidly, the majority of this update is nothing new. In fact, we've essentially been playtesting these features since July. It's taken months of iteration after iteration to get this update right. And as this update changes basically the fabric of the world we play in entirely, no update was more important to get right than this one. In an update with zero new blocks, zero new mobs, and zero new items, it can be quite hard to define what counts as a feature in this update. At first, this was going to be a top 10, but I realised if you count all the main features of the update, it only comes to 19 by my count. Therefore, I'll be ranking ALL of the features from worst to best! 19 - Snowy Slopes Biome I don't dislike the Snowy Slopes Biome, but of all the new biomes in the world, the Snowy Slopes is by far the blandest biome. It's exactly what it says on the tin. Snowy slopes. These form the s...