Archaeology is Cancelled :( (for now anyway)

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 yesterday, they didn't actually state when (or if) archaeology will be coming, other than it won't be in 2021. I do think it will be coming eventually, but this is perhaps the first time since red dragons a promised feature like this has been outright canceled for an update. Features have been scaled back before (like the 1.13 water physics), but I don't ever recall features displayed at MineCon being outright dropped. But the developers are trying to make a super ambitious update in a pandemic and they need more time to prevent a crunch. Less "important" or relevant features have to go. And archaeology is really more than a feature, it's an entire system.

Hopefully we will see archaeology in 2022. Maybe it will be the main feature of 1.19. Or maybe it is on the backburner indefinitely. Only time will tell. I just hope I get to see it before my skeleton becomes part of an archaeological digsite. 😂

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