Minecraft Rants

See my ranking of all the Caves & Cliffs BLOCKS so far: https://minecraftrants2.blogspot.com/2021/04/every-new-block-in-caves-cliffs-so-far.html Now, I am going to rank the new ITEMS out of 10. Bear in mind, this is as of 21w17a. The update is not finished yet, and the textures of some of these sprites are still being changed every week. Bucket of Axolotl - The axolotl poking its head out of the bucket is so cute! I always feel a bit bad after scooping up a virtual, pixelated and unrealistic axolotl in a bucket though. 7.5/10. Amethyst Shard - It doesn't have a whole lot of uses yet, being used only to craft the block of amethyst, the incredibly useless tinted glass and the spyglass. It really needs more uses, but it definitely has potential. It's a cool item nonetheless, and looks good. 6/10. Glow Ink Sac - The drop from the infamous Glow Squid. It has a couple of very niche uses, none of which I will ever really use. If I have a sign or an item frame, it's probably go...

A lot of mobs in Minecraft are fairly basic, and there isn't much that can be added to them. Cows are for meat. Skeletons shoot arrows at you. There really isn't much need to add any additional functionality to these mobs. Sure there are always ways they can be improved - cows could do with more skins and skeleton AI can always be improved. But there is one mob in particular that comes to mind that is a really great mob....... but it could've been SO much better. It's a shame to see how this mob was the start of something so incredible, but ultimately wasn't. This mob could've been the best in the game. It is extremely unique, has some really amazing concepts, really sticks out from all the other mobs in the game in the best way possible...... yet at the same time feels incredibly half-baked. This is a mob that could've and should've been a mini-boss, but instead it just became an easy foe that can be punched to death even on hard mode. I am of course ta...

I knew what a creeper was before I knew what Minecraft was. I didn't know where they came from, but I knew what a creeper looked like, that it was called a creeper, that they exploded, and that they were a huge internet meme. The creeper has been woven into the fabric of Minecraft's existence since the very start. So much so that even the logo of the game has a creeper face on it. Show the creeper face to almost anyone and they will recognise it. It's basically Minecraft's logo at this point. Those eyes with that blocky frowny face. There is absolutely no denying creepers are Minecraft's icon. Creepers are so iconic in fact, they are basically exempt from changes to their appearance or behaviour. Even the developers don't dare touch the creeper. But creepers didn't get their status and reputation for standing around looking pretty. Creepers are not the Kardashians. They are an insanely powerful force of destruction. The creeper keeps players who have been pl...

This is a follow-up to a post I made several months ago:  https://minecraftrants2.blogspot.com/2021/02/7-things-id-love-to-see-in-117.html With Caves & Cliffs having its development cycle extended by 6 months, people have wondered if they will "compensate" for the delay by adding more features. I do not believe this to be the case, as they have delayed specifically to give them more time for the features they are already working on. That being said, there are still features I would love to see in Caves & Cliffs. I am not actually expecting to see any of these in Caves & Cliffs or any future update, nor am I affiliated with Mojang in any way. These are simply ways I would flesh out the update even more if I were on the team and the team had unlimited time to make Caves & Cliffs. 1 - Ice Caves One of the most requested features in Caves & Cliffs is Ice Caves that generate beneath icy biomes, or underneath mountains. It's understandable people yearn for m...

Every block coming in 1.17 rated out of 10! Let's go! Powdered Snow - I can't believe Mojang finally added milk blocks to Minecraft! So realistic, you can even freeze to death in it! A fun little trap block, but can be mined out of almost instantly. 6/10. Rooted Dirt - It's dirt, 10/10! Just kidding. If dirt is 2/10, rooted dirt is 2.5/10. Dripstone Block - Not a fan of the texture, will never use in a build. 3/10. Pointed Dripstone - A block that wants to kill you! Awesome! These make for some really awesome looking builds and look incredible in caves. 9/10. Deepslate - Man, caves made out of this stuff are awesome! I wish it was called Deepstone though. 8/10. Tuff - I think this block is just trying to look bad. Also, I heard diorite, andesite and granite are extremely useful so why not add another new blob-formation stone to the mix? 2/10. Copper Ore - I bloody love how funky this ore block looks! A really great-looking ore block. Not affecting the rating, but I wish cop...

5 days ago, it was announced that the Caves & Cliffs update would be getting split into two updates. The first part would coming this summer, and the second part at Christmas. Part 1 (1.17) will include all the blocks, items and mobs we've seen so far (although not all of them will occur in survival), as well as a few generation features. These include geodes, copper ore, the updated mineshafts and dripstone clusters. Deepslate can also occur between y0 and y16. Part 2 (1.18) will now include the world height, new caves, cracks, cave biomes, warden, deep dark and the new mountains. Oh and archaeology has been outright cancelled. F in chat for archaeology. Why have they done this? Simply because the developers need more time due to the magnitude of the update (and working in a pandemic). It seems they have been crunching to get this update out for the summer, and they need a break and more time to polish the update even more. It's now been a few days, so I can say what my th...

The Pocket Problem... If you've ever explored your Minecraft world in modern versions for any substantial length of time, you will have experienced the following:  You are deep underground, mining through all the stone types as you try to find diamonds. You have several stacks of iron ore. You have loads of half-stacks of andesite, granite, tuff and diorite. And some gravel too. And a random flower. And dirt. By the time you find Diamonds, you're not picking them up. Blast. Inventory is full again. Later in that same mine, you've found a lot more resources. But when you need to go into a new stack of diamond... Blast. Inventory is full again. I've thrown away all the stacks of stone and still can't make room. I'm going to have to throw away a stack of redstone. You are in a Nether Fortress trying to get your hands on a Wither Skull. You're carrying random Nether resources such as shroomlight, crying obsidian, blaze rods, some netherrack, coal, bones etc. You...

Just a quickie. I made lots of jokes about archaeology being the "forgotten" feature of Caves & Cliffs, and even joked about archaeology secretly being cancelled. Sadly, yesterday they announced archaeology actually now has been shunted to the "indefinite backburner", along with the losing biome votes. It's a shame, I was really looking forward to the archaeology system simply because it was so out there and unique and fresh. It was something so unlike anything we'd ever seen before. In fact, it was so out there it took quite a bit of time for the feature to grow on me because it felt so much like a mod. But by now I was really looking forward to a new way to find stuff underground. To craft a new tool, the brush, out of copper. To scrape away at dirt and gravel underground and try and locate a potential digsite. To see what cool treasures would be hidden, to see what ceramic shards I can uncover and fire up into a pot in my house...  In the announcement...

I'll be blunt: I struggle to think of a feature with as much wasted potential as the trident. The first actual new weapon added to Minecraft in almost its entire history, you would think the addition of the trident would have been absolutely MASSIVE. And it certainly was... for all of a few weeks until the novelty wore off. 9 melee damage compared to the Diamond Sword's 7 certainly seemed good, as did the fact it also has a ranged attack doing 8 damage per hit and moving freely through water. It seemed good on paper, but it quickly became apparent that the trident had many issues which stopped it from being practical. In this rant I will discuss what went wrong with the trident, and why it hasn't found its way into very many survival playthroughs. And bear in mind, I am talking about the trident as of 21w14a (1.17). A few changes have been made in the combat snapshots, but the combat snapshots have yet to appear in an actual version of Minecraft. Strap yourselves in, this i...

In this rant, I will be reviewing how I find the placement of the ores in the 1.17 CAVES. I can't yet say how I feel about strip-mining since I haven't done extensive strip-mining since the ore distribution was changed up. The ore distributions were first changed in 21w07a, the week after the underground got a big extension. Since then, they've gone through several changes and iterations. I am reviewing the ore distribution as of 21w14a. I don't think they changed it at all in the latest snapshot, so I guess this applies to 21w13a too. I will be looking at all 8 of the ores, but will also discuss Amethyst Geodes, as they are... kinda like an ore. To a degree, the y-levels of the ores in the Minecraft world are based on how early or late-game the resource is supposed to be. Early-game ores are found nearer the surface, whereas later-game ores are found in higher abundance further down. Many ores have a "bell-curve" distribution, where they peak at a certain y-l...

Judging these updates by how much they've aged is difficult for a very simple reason: all the updates have different ages. 1.2 has had a LOT more ageing to do than the far more recent 1.13. Six years' difference in fact. Because of this, I have to be fair and take into account the actual age of the update.  If the majority of the features quickly lost their relevance once the novelty wore off, I will say the update has not aged well. The same can be said if their features seem dated, or have since been rendered obsolete by later updates. And it's also worth mentioning: I first started playing when 1.3 was the latest update - so for 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, I will have to judge these updates based on how much I use their features. I will not be looking at any update that is less than three years old, as they have not done enough ageing. Therefore, I will only be discussing updates up until 1.12. 1.1 - Age: Over 9 years This was a very small update, mostly bugfixes. However, I have ...

Since 1.0, almost every update has had a very similar development cycle. The update cycle starts with the first weekly snapshots, many of which are new-feature-heavy. Then in the later snapshots, they become primarily focused on bug-fixes and tweaks, before we move into the pre-releases. After the pre-releases comes the actual release of the update. After that, there is a break from snapshots, and some additional patches on the update are released, mainly to fix bugs and very occasionally add some additional new features that didn't make it into the first release. After a bit of a hiatus, we then start getting snapshots for the next update and the cycle starts over again. All that has changed since 2011 is the time these updates have taken. In the beginning, up until 1.7, we had a major release every 2-5 months. The updates lacked any sort of themes until 1.4. In 2012 and 2013, we saw four and three major releases respectively. But after 2013, something strange happened. The update...

I have mentioned this exploit in many rants to date, and now it's finally getting its own rant. Once upon a time, your God-tier enchanted tools used to not stick around forever. At best, they were at the mercy of Unbreaking III. It might stick around a while, but it would break eventually. And then they added Mending. The ultimate enchantment that basically meant your ultimate tool of ultimate power ultimately never broke. But it was very rare, and could only be found rarely in fishing and loot chests, so you had to really work (or fish for hours) to get your hands on the ultimate enchantment. And then they added an exploit that allowed you to easily and quickly obtain an entire double chest of Mending books. What they never added was a fix to this exploit. In fact, ANY enchantment can be "farmed" using this exploit, and it is, in my mind, a gamebreaking bug that has existed for years and never been addressed. Enchantments are not rare anymore. The treasure enchantments a...

If you're one of the 1 people who read this, you may know I have quite a few problems with the enchanting system. It's outdated, it's luck-based, and I feel some enchantments are poorly balanced. Specifically, with the latter point, some enchantments are just WAY too powerful to the point they basically remove challenge from the game once obtained. In this post I am going to talk about some enchantments I feel are way too powerful, and how I feel they should be rebalanced. And first off, I am going to say once again: that villager exploit MUST be removed. Right, with that out of the way... the first overly powerful enchantment that comes to mind, is of course... Mending The Mending enchantment basically means your gear will never break again. Your god-tier tools are here to stay forever. Before 1.9, when there was no mending, you would invest more sparingly in your gear with the knowledge it would break eventually. Even with Unbreaking III and anvil repairs, all tools must ...