Minecraft Rants

I think about balance in Minecraft a lot, as you one person has probably realised by now throughout previous rants. I'm always harping on about how one feature may feel unbalanced, overpowered, underpowered, downright broken, too easy with too much reward, or too hard with too little reward.  I feel there are a lot of areas of the game where the balance is off - by a little or a lot. And naturally, new updates can shake things up even more. Rebalances are happening in every update, as well as a lot of new features with their own sense of balance. However, there is one update in particular that was... to put it lightly... a bit of a travesty in terms of balance. This update brought some VERY unbalanced features. Whereas some updates such as 1.13 and 1.16 added certain features that were way too hard to obtain for the reward they give you AHEMtridentsAHEMburiedtreasureAHEMsoulspeedAHEMpigstepAHEMAHEM there was one update that did quite the opposite. 1.14, also known as Village & ...

While the community was locked in an eternal battle of Dream Stans vs Non-Dream Stans, there was one piggy in the middle that everyone forgot. Like two parents screaming at each other, completely ignoring the fact their child is in the room, watching, on the verge of tears that totally wasn't a daily occurrence for me as a kid . The one that everyone forgot. The team nobody rooted for. The third wheel. The add-on. The also-ran. A contender to the nuclear dumpster fire that was the 2020 (I could stop that sentence here tbh) mob vote so forgotten and neglected that people literally named it the Piss Cow. Oh yeah, the Piss Cow exists too. Why was the Piss Cow so forgotten about? Was the Piss Cow actually doomed to fail? How Did The Piss Cow Actually Perform In the Infamous Vote? Actually, not as badly as you might think. It might be tempting to believe it only scored 10% of the votes. And yes, it was the mob that was knocked out in round 1. But actually, the votes for round 1 were as ...

Anyone who has played survival Minecraft for more than a year has probably realised that, once you know the ropes of the game, the survival aspect rather quickly diminishes. Once you're at the top of the tech tree, sporting maximally enchanted Netherite armour, Netherite sword, a God bow, and entire chests of totems and potions that you'll never use, beacons for fences, and a Mending Elytra on your back with a creeper farm to provide infinite rockets, you realise... there is nothing left to do. There are a bunch of side quests, sure, but none of them will kill you. You're indestructible to all except the End Void. Now what? What now? It's flexing time, boys and girls and everything in-between. Do you start punching iron golems to death just because you can, and you want SOMETHING to fight that won't go down almost instantly? Do you jump off a tall building just to burn a totem because you just have THAT MANY of them? Do you start grinding for infinite Diamonds with ...