Minecraft's Most Unbalanced Update Of All Time

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 & Pillage, is what I still view as Minecraft's most unbalanced update of all time. In this rant, I am going to dissect the 1.14 update, as well as rip it a new arsehole, about how this update severely unbalanced certain aspects of Minecraft. And I am not alone in feeling this way - a lot of people I spoke to on Discord agreed with me here.

In ironically what's considered one of the community's most favourite or best updates of all time, the common theme here is that many end-game or powerful items became too easy or too accessible to obtain.

Rare Potion Effects With Only Wood, Mushrooms and Flowers

1.14 added a new food item, known as Suspicious Stew. The idea is that you take Mushroom Stew and add any flower to it, and it will result in a stew that gives potion effects. These can be good or bad, and the effect you get depends on which flower you used. Other players won't know what effect the stew has. The trouble is, powerful and rare effects such as Blindness and even Wither were made accessible here. Admittedly, the effects only last a few seconds. But seriously. Blindness being accessible early game with only wood, flowers and Azure Bluets which are found everywhere in any field?? 8 seconds of Regeneration with a DAISY, when a potion which requires ghast tears, netherwart and blaze rods only gives 45 seconds??

I've put this first to get it out of the way because this is only a MINOR example in comparison to what else this update did.

Iron Farms Became MUCH Easier!

It has to be said, before 1.14 you basically NEVER saw a Golem in your Village. In fact, before 1.14 I NEVER ONCE saw a naturally-spawned Iron Golem in a Village. They were FAR too rare. In 1.14, they took that problem and fixed it. But they fixed it pendulum style and went to the other extreme. Nowadays, Villages are CRAWLING with Golems. Not only does this eliminate a huge amount of threat from night-time mobs such as Zombies, as well as Raiders, Iron Farming became FAR easier, yielding several TIMES more iron than ever before, being much easier and quicker to set up. 

Iron farms went from being a rather advanced and difficult farm, to one of the easiest and most ubiquitous. It's basically THE way to get iron now - so much so that you can fill up entire CHESTS of iron BLOCKS in not much time! What are you even going to use all that iron for???

Now we're getting into the REALLY big ways 1.14 screwed with the balance of the game. These have become SUPER impactful to how people play the game at its core.

TOTEMS GALORE!!!!

Totems remain to be one of the most controversial items in Minecraft. Are the OP? Are they too easy to obtain? Many people saw LukeTheNotable's 1000 and 2000 day Hardcore Series and basically realised you can farm infinite Totems with Raids, and doing so means you will basically never die again.

Before Raids were added, Totems were extremely difficult to obtain. They required the player to embark on a side quest with the Cartographer Villager, seeking out a Woodland Mansion, and defeating the Mansion in order to obtain just two or three totems. And they were also non-renewable.

Obviously, before Raids, totems were maybe a little TOO rare. Especially on servers. There are SO few Woodland Mansions, so they were basically impossible to get on a busy server. But once again, Mojang took the Pendulum approach.

I'm not saying Raids are easy or early-game - trust me, they are NOT - but a player can basically FARM infinite Totems now. They made totems not only renewable, but FARMABLE. This is the problem. Players can now have double chests FILLED with them, and the player will basically never die again or lose their hardcore world. Surviving thousands of days has become FAR less impressive once totems became so easy to get. What made Philza's five-year run incredible was that he basically didn't use totems at all! Now, in theory, a five-year survival is FAR less impressive due to how easy it is to get millions of totems once your raid farm is running.

Also, because totems were the only real treasure to Woodland Mansions, they made Woodland Mansions totally and utterly obsolete with that move.

Now, I've been working up to the REALLY big thing. The thing that made 1.14 a TRUE travesty in balancing. This one last thing is SO broken and SO unbalanced, it has TOTALLY changed how Minecraft is played. This one change singlehandedly drastically reduced the number of blocks one had to travel, the number of hours a player had to put in, to become established. Since this update, you could probably become a god twice as fast as ever before, maybe more. And naturally, I've ranted about it many times before because it is probably the most unbalanced, broken change that has EVER been made to the game since Protection IV became a thing.

I am sorry to be ranting about it once again.... but here goes....

The Freaking Librarian Exploit Is Being Ranted About ONCE AGAIN.

I sound like such a broken record at this point. But seriously, Mojang, PLEASE do something about this exploit. I have ranted about this and ranted about it. It's become a joke amongst my audience of one how often I mention this in rants. But if you've been living under a rock, essentially, you can get ANY enchantment, including Protection IV, Mending, Fortune III, Sharpness V etc., from ANY villager that isn't a Nitwit by constantly employing and unemploying it with a Lectern.

I don't even need to say why this is terrible and game-breaking. I've said it enough times. It really goes without saying in fact why this has completely broken and disrupted the balance of Minecraft entirely. It's amazing that this has been allowed to stay for so long and there are no plans to fix it. There are some VERY easy fixes, such as removing certain enchanted books from the pool of trades, or having enchanted books not be tradeable until a very high level. But nah, in 2021, this exploit still exists and anyone can get chests of Mending.

Final Word

Don't get me wrong, I liked 1.14 as a whole. But when ranking it out of 10 or in comparison to other updates, I do have to knock a few points off for these rather glaring issues and how much of a travesty the update was in terms of balance. It added some fun mechanics, some cool mobs, and the concept of raids, but I have to say in terms of gameplay, this update was very botched.