256 – Resisting Perfection // The Spawn Chunks: A Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 256 for Monday July 31st 2023 my name is Joel Duggan and joining me as always is Johnny also known as pixel riffs hopefully returning to the Minecraft Survival Guide sometime soon hello sir hello yes I am hopefully returning um fingers crossed my PC

Should be arriving again later this week although I don’t want to jinx it so I’ll say no more but uh in the meantime happy four stacks of episodes of the spawn chunks episode 256 was always going to be a milestone for those of us who have an eye for Minecraft numbers and the

Render distance this week the extended version of the podcast we’ve been talking a little bit about Minecraft projects upcoming specifically for Joel’s sci-fi projects and how some influences from TV and film could play into that some stuff about foundation on Apple TV and a little bit of Joel’s

Forays in secret Wars on Disney plus so if you’re interested in any of that stuff we talk about all kinds of stuff on the render distance but typically it’s what we’ve been up to that week while we’ve been watching what our other influences are and anything we want to

Recommend that’s over at patreon.com the spawn chunks patrons get access to a whole bunch of features like the extended version of the podcast there’s about 20 to 30 minutes of extra material on every single show every week and we even have a few Patron related events which should hopefully be coming up once

My regular recording schedule resumes so expect news of the monthly Minecraft hangout and the quarterly Hangout to be coming up in future that’s all going to be in the Discord for patrons as well so keep an eye on that announcements Channel if you want to learn more

And we have an anniversary coming up next week oh gosh we do yeah I better have my PC back for that we need to we do make an event of it yeah I had to quickly check the dates but the first episode of the spawn chunks was

Published on August 10th five years ago so next week the show is going to record on like the 7th or something on the Monday uh so that week that week of the 10th is our five year anniversary wow it’s it’s flown by strangely

Um but but here we are and uh as as you might expect I don’t have a great deal to contribute to our quick login this week where we usually talk about what’s new in our Minecraft lives because I have nothing to report except that my PC should hopefully return this week uh if

It does the first thing on the agenda is getting back into the survival guide where I will probably be getting horses and potentially a camel possibly some sniffers I want to tackle some of the early game stuff before it sort of becomes irrelevant before we go into the

End and get a light show and all other forms of transportation are left by the wayside at least for a while um so I’m thinking yeah talking about horses and camels and and horse breeding especially with the changes to that recently seems like a a priority I have also left a

Blacksmith’s house unbuilt around my super smelter which is one of the topics I wanted to cover quickly before the PC went away and I said to myself I’m just going to build a floor like a platform coming off the side of this uh Stone staircase that leads up to my starter

House and I’m gonna build a house around this eventually but I don’t really have time to plan out and build and You Know sketch and creative and then rebuild in survival this blacksmith’s house so that’s probably going to be first on the agenda as well simply because I don’t

Know if I’ll be able to live with the super smelter that’s just a big ugly platform for the minute but that’s uh that’s what’s been on my mind recently when it comes to planning out the return of the survival guide but aside from that theoretical Minecrafting nothing

Much to report so what’s new with you Joel well before I get into what’s new with me I just thought of something when you because you’ve been away from Minecraft for so long and I know you often plan what you’re doing in Minecraft in Minecraft like in creative

Mode or stuff like that have you by chance been using any other tools other than like writing down ideas and notes like have you drawn anything graph paper used any like CAD programs or photoshop or something like that to like sketch out ideas or or kind of plan out what

You might want to do when you do get your PC back I have not and I think the main reason for that is because I am more Adept at visualizing stuff in Minecraft than I am in a traditional medium of any kind um so I’m not great at drawing and I

Don’t have a whole lot of graph paper around but even then the graph paper I think would be useful for me in measuring stuff out rather than in the design process right so like if I wanted to count out how big of an area I needed for something then maybe it would be

Helpful but really what I’m missing is the creativity of being able to drop in with a bunch of materials and say how do I turn these into something that approximates a house and like how do I build on this style and and the experimentation and that side of things

Is really what works for me in game that I have a hard time reproducing outside of a game environment so yeah like using Photoshop or whatever might work for some people but it’s not something that I have a huge amount of I guess patience for as well as ability

For like I’m not really from a traditional art background at all so uh not right now is the answer to that but I’ve played enough Minecraft that I think I’m able to piece things together in my head better than I am trying to visualize them anywhere other than in Minecraft itself

And that makes a lot of sense because I’m at a stage now in Minecraft where I feel like I do the same where I I don’t I don’t even need to really go into creative a lot of the time to figure something out I think maybe the only

Thing would be a really complicated Redstone circuit or something like that yeah but yeah you know or spacing or or something like that but now that I’ve got enough of a repertoire uh of building in Minecraft a sense of scale an understanding of how deep and where

To leave yourself room to avoid mistakes like I feel a lot more comfortable just straight ahead going for it in survival uh and and I think that that’s part of just having that experience in Minecraft despite having art skills because that’s something I did I think I used to design stuff in

Um Photoshop because I would look at something like our another Hub six years ago on the server like oh gosh how am I going to attempt this thing it’s like 100 blocks tall and there’s lava everywhere and I gotta have the four entrances and all this stuff and so I

Just designed it in Photoshop because I was faster at it right because those are the skills that I had and now I I think there might be something something of that scale I might again use Photoshop and a in a pixel image to measure something

But I don’t think I would need it to design it was just like okay I needed to start an end here I need like three pillars to this giant bridge and after that I’m comfortable with how it looks in game and figuring that out in game I

May only use it as a measuring tool now um and even then like I feel like I don’t know if I’d use Photoshop I might try to find something else like I might even just use a couple of online tools like we’ve all talked about um the the

Sphere tool what is it um something.uk uh plots plot stock okay yeah so for different shapes for like you know spheres and and ellipses and stuff like that and I use that all the time and I don’t I don’t necessarily use it to design something I use it to figure out

Okay how much room does that give me if I make this Tower a diameter of nine or a diameter of 11 or whatever that happens to be and I I think that those are the things that I use more often than than my traditional art skills

Because I I honestly feel now like I kind of draw or paint in Minecraft like I’m using it like a painters palette in in a lot of sense um and to get into what I’ve been doing uh first I’ll share with our our live Discord a couple of screenshots from

Yesteryear uh these are from 2021. uh I added a bunch of different shops to the East Market one of them was a Cooper a barrel Builder and when I went around and started doing the hanging signs uh I noticed that the Cooper was really lagging behind other builds in terms of

The detail in terms of the overall design it felt very plain had like a plain Spruce plank roof that kind of thing and so I put it on my to-do list to go back and retexture it and it didn’t take very long it was like a very

Short two-hour stream and I went through and changed a bunch of stuff and it worked out very well and it I think it just goes to show like as you play Minecraft longer uh and you repeat things like building roofs building windows uh figuring out what block combinations work really well to achieve

Different things uh you you really sort of outpace yourself and as difficult as it is to resist going back and and redoing things this is very visible it’s right on the river I see it quite a bit and I I really felt like it needed an update

And so I went back and I updated it and it didn’t take a lot it was like adding some barrels into the roof adding a dormer with a window in it into the roof throwing in a couple different roof textures uh changing some of the bricks

And the blocks and the walls uh I’ve got a lot of I called them design cues like I like putting a upside down polished andesite stair above a lot of the doors in West Hill especially if it’s a decent sized building it makes it feel like it

Has a keystone or a header above it it kind of emphasizes the door they work really well over Windows sometimes because it again makes it feel like some sort of structural support for the roof above it and uh I you know just those little things as you go around and do

That kind of influence build also helps separate the building which is made out of stone bricks from the road which is also made of stone bricks so adding some texture to the walls and things was something that really needed to happen and I had already gone through and added

Like the hanging sign from Minecraft 1.20 as well as the Barrel in that sign which is part of the armor statue use data pack for vanilla tweaks where the barrel looks like it’s kind of carved into or hanging on the sign without the need for me to say like Barrel shop you

Can just kind of like infer what’s going on so I’m really happy with the way that it turned out I had some details to some of the roof bits uh added kind of like a roof slope or a sag that I often do when I was working on it I off actually

Came to the conclusion I must have just kind of got to the end of a stream where it was done enough and thought I’ll come back and finish this later and just completely forgot because it was it was like 80 85 there it just it didn’t have

All those finishing touches that I seem to be putting on everything else so I obviously just forgot about it uh so it’s nice to be able to go back and do that kind of stuff I do keep myself from doing it all over the place especially on simpler builds that have very little

Consequence like just a house or a a Barracks Shack or something like that I’m not really worried about the details in the roof that I built two years ago that’s it’s fine you know like it’s not something that you notice a lot it’s not like on a street corner that kind of thing

Um speaking of details the other stuff that I was sort of working on was the detail list on the West Hill keep and I started with the tower the one of the the tallest point actually now in West Hill is the tower on the keep and so the

Top of it wasn’t done and didn’t have a rampart it didn’t have like a proper way to get up there I needed to finalize the stairs actually to maximize the rampart instead of having the stairs go all the way up to the top of the tower I added

Like a very top floor so the stairs stop at the top floor when there’s a couple of Windows and then there’s just a straight ladder that takes you up to the small three by three area at the top so rather than losing like three of my nine

Blocks to a staircase I just have a single hole that you can come up and take a look around the the city and there’s they’re really the only purpose of it is to just be up there and go like wow cool yeah because you can look

Around you know um but it really kind of struck me as I’m getting closer to the end of of West Hill and I’m trying to muscle through I don’t want to say burnout but like do you ever have any of these Monumental tasks where it’s a lot

Of work and you’ve done a lot of the work but there’s just these last little bits that you have to do in order to finish it up and you’re almost procrastinating on it yeah it’s a combination of like not wanting it to end but also like I’m also so done with

This like I’ve just been working on this for so long and um I’m really hoping to finish this soon it things seem to be coming along and having lists really help um and and that’s kind of what I’ve been doing now so I’ve added it to my list

Things that are part of the keep uh including now the exterior textures so now that I’m happy with the structure things on the inside are still up in the air but the outside it’s not moving because there’s a lot a lot of places where it just can’t move

And I really like the gradient that I did on the Riverside which I shared a couple of weeks ago and so I’ve decided to pull that around for a good portion of uh the keep now the nice thing about this is that I’ve kind of got a y level where

These certain textures appear you know like the it starts as Stone from the top of the wall it turns into andesite then it turns into Cobble tough and then deep slate and it kind of gets darker as you go down but there’s like a y level where

That happens so what’s cool about this is that I can actually kind of draw like a a contour line around the keep and say okay well if I keep this all the same then the good news is like not every wall is going to turn out to be mostly

Black or mostly dark blocks it’s it’s really only going to determine it’s like where the bottom of that wall is visible from and so this has helped me like separate it from other things I’ve added in more foliage which I think I shared last week as well

I’m just kind of doing different things like that and bringing up the textures and it’s slow going it takes like a full stream as you like go up on scaffolding make some changes go back down back up look look at it you know decide what you

Look like you know whether it’s good bad but I really like the finished feel it’s really now starting to be a town where no matter where you look I’ve finished almost everything in your view or it feels intentional it feels like it’s been touched you know and not

Just plunked down and forgotten about the towers still don’t have the textures but those are like different items on on the list and I think that’s the biggest takeaway that I’ve had from the last few months on the Citadel is making the list was super important because if I’m not

In the mood to stream you know if I’m tired you know as I mentioned in the pre-show uh if you know you’re just you’re having it’s a hot you know hot summer day sometimes work can be a slog that kind of stuff I don’t have to come up with

Anything to do I just look at the list and say like you know what I’m in the mood for something simple let’s just decorate this you know storage room or this thing that’s very simple it’s a five by five like it’s really not going to take very long and before you know

You’ve checked off three things off your list you’re like that’s great I feel accomplished like I feel like I’m working towards the end goal and one of the biggest things I did which leads me to a discussion about Minecraft books is I took my 12 to 15 page book of things

On my to-do list which were mostly checked off and I created a new book with just the unchecked items in it which was like three pages which is way easier to leap through as you’re looking for the next thing and I really wish that Minecraft books would let you leave

Off on a page like if you’re on page 10 of 20 now that there’s like I mean what can there be like 99 Pages or something like if you exit that book you have to like spam click to get to where you left off if you’re on like the mid of the

Book so I really wish there was a way to bookmark it like if there was a third button at the bottom that says like you know sign the book done with the book or like mark space and just like wait back to it you’re gonna open up to that page

Because it would provide it makes it a a better in-game tool for keeping track of things like this yeah because lecterns will do that but you can’t carry a lectern around with you is the point so like if you’re walking around your town trying to figure out sure like what what

Do I need to apply details to next and checking off a list you don’t always want to be going back to the center of town where you have your lectern to grab the book out of it edit it and then put it back and everything yes so there’s uh

Although that’s a good point I should I should put I should maybe put one on electron as well just to kind of have it in a central spot because sometimes I’m just referring to it like you know what what do I need to do next as I’m like in

My storage room so that would be a logical place to put if nothing else it’d make a great artifact for the history of the town uh yes you know Joel’s to-do list enshrined in a place of honor somewhere in West Hill I think that’s that’s it’s gonna be nice for

Anybody who wants to visit and leaf through and look at all of the stuff that you yeah noted down to do to the place and so I mean those are the things that I have left to do uh I’ve got a lot of texturing a lot of outside wall work uh

There is a lot of interior design in the keep thankfully like giant medieval Halls they don’t have a lot of furniture in them like they’re just kind of meant to be like statements of power and space and Gathering of people like if the townspeople were all going to be there

For a meeting they would all be standing around it’s not like there has to be seating for everybody so that is going to be pretty simple I also don’t want to hide the floor because the floor pattern is really cool however it brought me to a bottleneck where the new version of

The tables and chairs data packed by Axel uh will require me to replace every single table and chair currently in West Hill they had to rewrite it because Mojang changed the way that data packs interacted with or worked with uh the vanilla game and so some of the

Functionality of the data pack was removed it doesn’t just break any of the display of the chairs but it or the tables but it removes any functionality so I can’t remove a table or a chair in my world because I cannot replace it uh it has to

Stay the same so if a creeper builds up somewhere I’m gonna be mad uh it’s it’s one of those things that is really frustrating where I mean it’s it’s a bed that you make when you decide to use data packs or use mods like you’re at

The mercy of that mod being supported in the future uh you’re at you know that that mod author being able to maintain a consistent mod or a consistent data pack and I mean their hand was forced so like I get why they had to redo it but unfortunately um

Unlike mods I don’t find that data packs will roll forward all that well to the point where some older data packs will just crash your game like you just can’t load the old version of the data pack in there and have it um and have it work uh so what we’re doing

On the Citadel is we’re looking to grab a fabric mod because we do run fabric it is a technically it is a modded server most of the mods if not almost all of the mods are quality of life uh UI and performance related mods I think the

Biggest gameplay mod is the map the zeros mini map and zeros world map and that is updated like weekly sometimes so the mod author on that keeps very up to date and that can almost be a little bit tedious but at least you know that it’s

Always going to be up to date and working it’s the very first mod that works when a new version of Minecraft comes out xero’s mini map is like ready to go you know so we’re looking at something like maybe a Doran which is something that I’ve played with a little

Bit uh when I was playing the olive fabric five Modpack the tricky thing for me is trying to find a mod pack that will allow me to change the textures of some objects if it’s just as simple as doing a texture pack then I could be

Very very easy because with a lot of modded they tend to go beyond what is just vanilla looking stuff it tends to get into really really specific things like you know modern Grill ranges and barbecues and mailboxes and stuff like that and sometimes those mods can also have functionality and that’s something

We may not want that said Zero’s mini-map allows people to teleport it allows people to put down markers and we on the server just don’t do that we just we use it as a visual map and that’s it just like it’s a visual map in any

Modern game that you might pick up today so we’re looking at adding a mod for furniture and I’m fingers crossed hoping to find something that would also allow me to bring Furniture into the modern city so rather than just the wooden tables and chairs that are very specific

To vanilla Minecraft and we’ve used a little bit of them in the um the modern city the dark oak tables and chairs look just fine in a cafe like that’s that’s fine but it would be really nice to have modern sofas modern armchairs perhaps something that even looks like a toilet

Or a sink you know in some of the kitchens rather than putting a cauldron and a lever or a tripwire hook and having people use their imagination in in a modern city I think some of the things we might be able to get out of a more advanced furniture

Mod like Adorn or something similar could be fun I’m just on that weird fence of like I’ve been playing what I feel is vanilla quote unquote Minecraft for so long getting into the slippery slope of something like Adorn or other similar Furniture mods I like I kind I’m

Not sure if I want to pull the trigger I still have to double check with everybody on the server too so like there’s there’s that conversation to be had as well but that’s where I am I’m disappointed that uh I’m gonna have to switch it up but I think the one Saving

Grace is that I’ve noticed this before I did anything in the keep and so if the furniture and inside decoration in the keep was made with a mod at least there’s that boundary of the stuff in the keep is one way and the stuff in the town is the other and it

Sort of makes sense so I’ve kind of I can kind of convince my brain that even though I’ve switched resources mid-build or close to the end of the build it’s not going to break your immersion of it um and I unfortunately just have to keep

The old data pack on the server in order for people to walk through West Hill and look at stuff yeah but it makes sense I think long term if you have something that’s both more versatile and more robust especially if it’s a mod that seems to be fully like up to date and

And keeps up with other versions then that’s that’s going to be potentially good for you long term I think well this is normally where we would read a little bit of news but once again there’s not a lot going on in the Minecraft space this week it is still summer vacation time

I’m sure there’s a lot of creative recharging going on at Mojang and we will of course keep people posted if anything develops on a similar note if small things happen in the community uh highlights circulate in our Discord if you’re member of our patreon server that’s at patreon.com so you have access

To the Discord server so be sure to check it out if you’re already a member or if you want to become a member you can join the community keep tabs on what even players are doing you know even if there’s not news per se in the Minecraft

Space you can always check in with a bunch of like-minded players and see what’s happening yeah there’s there’s always new links being posted in the resource mine channel for like helpful tools to help you build or like you know color palettes for Stuff there’s all kinds of really interesting tools that

Get shared there and even when there is news that we’ll be talking about on the show like snapshots and when the development cycle kind of kicks into gear and we start to see more of that approaching players um we’ll have a pretty Lively discussion in the snapshot chat Channel there about

All of the new releases and anything that else that happens around them so definitely a good way to keep track of everything but as far as the show today goes uh I guess we’re moving on into email uh if you’d like to email the show the email address is spawn chunk file

Gmail.com and I personally want to extend a big thank you to everybody who’s written in over the last couple of weeks because it’s naturally been difficult for me to generate any kind of conversation for the show considering that I’m not playing Minecraft on a daily basis like I usually am so it’s

Been really nice to have a fresh raft of emails uh that has been you know coming in on a somewhat regular basis this one comes in from kija who is a landscape artist member of our Discord and the subject is building the real world howdy picks and Joel on your newest

Episode that was last week’s Show episode 255 pix presented a question about block picking from The Real World I moved to a brand new city at the beginning of the year for University and it has been refreshing to see new buildings around where I now live during

The spring when I cycled to my university on the waterfront I started paying more attention to the architecture how something was built and I started getting inspired there are a couple of older factories built in the 1900s that have inspired me to incorporate more bricks into my builds I

Look for Alleyways how they look and how it could incorporate something like that into Minecraft I’m also constantly on the lookout for nice color palettes wherever I am looking at the real buildings and the surrounding area where I live has definitely given me numerous ideas for future builds kicha was

Impaled by drowned while trying to figure out how to build Curves in the middle of an ocean I’m going to assume that kija means early 1900s because I was also built in the 1900s yeah me too funnily enough so out of out of squishier stuff than

Bricks uh yes and I don’t feel like I was part of the Industrial Age so there’s there’s a large gap there yes uh but I I do remember doing similar things to this when I was trying to work out buildings in Southport the modern city on Citadel there’s just so much to

Consider and once you start opening up your eyes to those kind of things and I think it’s really helpful when you are in a new area it’s such a neat kind of anecdote that this happened when they moved for University yeah and you know when you’re in a an area that has

Unfamiliar buildings a different history depending on how far afield you’ve gone for University like did you go Two Towns over did you go two countries over like like where did you go did the culture shift that kind of stuff uh even if you’re on vacation I know you’ve spoken

Before about going on vacation in Spain and just being like a sponge for the Spanish architecture how Wild it is all that kind of stuff um and for me I think that there’s a few things that I look for when I’m out looking at buildings and the first is

Scale when I’m considering how to build it in Minecraft like you’ve obviously got a door on most buildings you can say okay do I need to make it a double door how do I uh how do I make a door that works in Minecraft uh similar to this

And how do I scale the rest of the building so that it fits the other of course conundrum is like you know Minecraft blocks being a meter thick you know like how much of a bulk do you have to add to the outside of this building

For you to be able to have the outside be one color and the inside be another you know you’re dealing with builds that often have a two meter thick wall if not three around them depending on how you uh want to do it I also think that the palette thing is an interesting

Conversation you often get bottlenecked with looking at something and going like that looks really cool but that color doesn’t exist in Minecraft we’ve talked about the blue tiles on medieval roof builds before I see a lot of different brick colors in the world we’ve got a

Lot of beige brick around here not so much red brick but it’s kind of like like the school that I went to school in growing up two of them were like a Sandy brick color but Sandstone doesn’t cut it like it doesn’t look like Sandstone it looks like small bricks just like the

Red bricks in Minecraft but they’re beige not not red and I think that sometimes those limitations can can cause a bit of frustration uh and then the big thing and this is what really kind of took me by surprise when I was working in Southport and designing that part of the city was

Urban planning and if you want a school in this see if you can find someone that is an urban planner professionally playing a game like City skylines or Sim City or like one of those City Builder games but playing it from the the perspective of a city planner and I

Forget the link I might have shared it on the show before but I actually found the same creator that was a city planner playing City skylines was also producing a couple of videos where they were flying around Minecraft cities that were made by like you know servers full of

People or whatever and they were kind of like criticizing not in a bad way but like in an educational way like oh look they’ve added this green space between the highway and the residential residential area that’s real like that makes sense we do that in real life to

Keep the noise down from the Cars so that you’re not sitting in your backyard constantly bombarded by 18 wheelers going by and I just those kind of things that you have to consider if you want to make a realistic representation of what you’re seeing in the modern world when

You walk around it as you ride your bike you know towards your University there’s just so much to consider from an urban planning standpoint it’s almost like you have a to-do list a mile long before you place a single block you know when building modern stuff in Minecraft yeah

And I feel like that’s often what presents an intimidating image building no much less the scale that you have to build on to achieve anything that looks contemporary um but yeah like I I find that the planning aspect of it and wanting to make a city feel like a city is often a

Bit of a hurdle to get over mentally because you’re you’re trying to figure out like okay there would be all of this and and the the amount of stuff you have to do just kind of multiplies outwards from wherever you start um but there’s it’s it’s certainly

Achievable and you can you can get some really great results that way I think it’s it’s so interesting as well hearing that people who have this as their profession are still sort of interested in the way we do it in the Video Game World as well

Um going back to Bricks because you sort of touched on this briefly but this is something that living in a neighborhood that is mostly bricks I always run up against this problem I find that at first at least bricks are so difficult to use because they’re so clean and

Identical and bricks in real life just don’t turn out that way they are fired at different temperatures they are fired for different lengths of time they end up looking like a variety of different colors within a square meter of brick you have maybe like 10 or 12 different

Hues and that’s just not what Minecraft bricks look like and there aren’t often many blocks that you can blend them with texturally so you can’t blend clay brick into Nether Bricks or red Nether Bricks in the same way that we have stone bricks for Blackstone deep slate a few

Other materials that can sort of form a gradient and the way you tend to approach this when you’re building with bricks is to do the uh occasional stone bricks in a wall of Natural Stone kind of thing where you get something else that’s vaguely the

Same sort of color maybe you put them in a wall of terracotta or granite or something like that and you throw occasional brick blocks in there so that the texture isn’t obvious and repetitive and overwhelming but it’s still kind of implies that there are bricks in there

And as somebody who lives in an area with a lot of brick houses I wouldn’t build any of them purely out of bricks in game because then they look unrealistic they look almost cartoonish um so yeah like maybe sections of bricks can peek out from a wall where they’ve

Been plastered over and the plaster has crumbled or something like that but yeah I find that bricks in particular become very difficult to use in contemporary builds if you expect to use them just how you’re seeing them on the street every day because how they look on the

Street is very different to how they look in Minecraft and you’ve also got things like graffiti and um I don’t know I don’t want to say rebuilding but like there’s a lot of layers to a city that I think the straightforward approach to building something in Minecraft is to make it

Like build it and and have it be finished and complete and it’s so hard in any kind of modern palette in Minecraft to get that wear and tear and that weathering or that um what happens a lot around Halifax is there’s a lot of protected buildings downtown but they’re unsafe so they have

To be torn down they have to be updated in order them to be livable or workable or whatever but what they do is they keep like the brick facade that’s on the building and you’ll often see like uh when when the building is being redone there’ll be all this metal scaffolding

That will be holding up the brick face of the building and then behind it is nothing and then and then they put in a new building modern you know like air conditioning and like all the different things properly insulated uh sealed basements all that kind of stuff but

They keep that front entrance and so it maintains the historic feel of downtown Halifax uh and and then you can still have a modern building in inside with all the modern Comforts and that brings in like an a layer of history that I think is difficult to build from scratch yeah when you’re

Doing a Minecraft city or a modern block or something like that I think that’s why a lot of people in Minecraft when they attempt a city they attempt like the small town city you know the the little Harborside Place rather than like a big Urban landscape because one it’s just a huge undertaking

It’s also kind of boring you know like when you think about a snapshot of a city there’s going to be a couple of key buildings that are going to look cool they’re probably going to be the newer ones you know especially if you see any of these like cool buildings from from

You know China or or Japan where there’s like lots of green spaces and I saw a really cool thing the other day in Spain where to combat Urban temperatures Rising they have canopies of vegetation that are hung over the Alleyways between buildings and so it does a whole bunch

Of things it provides shade it removes you know carbon dioxide from the air and it provides all kinds of like Greenery and spaces for birds and bees and all that kind of stuff so it’s all kind of benefit but you know very difficult to do in Minecraft because of just how kind

Of unique they are and the angles there you could kind of like do a Minecraft version maybe but that kind of stuff is always new and cool but a lot of cities are a lot older than that and so in this 70s skyscrapers are boxes and I can tell

You from building a couple of skyscrapers in Minecraft even though I tried to make them interesting they’re boring to build like they look cool when they’re done but it is a lot of repetition like it’s the same floor stacked and stacked and stacked and stacked because it’s meant to be

Apartment so it’s meant to be uniform you know office space that kind of stuff I keep it interesting for me by hiding things like a concrete maker or you know a spawning Farm to kind of remove the mobs from the streets below are all kind of being hidden in the skyscraper so not

Every skyscraper is just apartment after apartment I also tried to farm the decorations of the insides of the apartment which also got repetitive because like they’re the same floor plan as you just kind of keep on going up and up and up and say like hey if you want

To come to the modern city and build server mates then why not decorate a department for me so I don’t have to do one yeah yeah that kind of stuff um but yeah it can be really challenging and in the context of skyscrapers you have to add other buildings around of

Them otherwise they’re just gonna look like somebody’s built a high-rise apartment Block in the middle of nowhere and that’s that was the uh the thing about the first season of decided to leave vanilla when I joined that server uh another guy called Logan who I don’t think makes videos all that much anymore

I think he moved into like digital art and other stuff and and editing but he built a reproduction of a skyscraper that I think was in um Minneapolis or somewhere like that and yeah he he rebuilt this building out of sandstone destroyed an entire desert to do it and

Then it was just a skyscraper in the middle of nowhere like it was by a forest you know I think his nether portal was in a tree somewhere you know so there’s there’s some stuff that you can do that can be a really rewarding project to finish that one build but

Then if you want to go Urban you want to go contemporary and modern then suddenly you’ve got a whole other like Challenge on your hands I’ll have links to uh City beautiful a YouTube channel and city planner plays another YouTube channel uh in our show notes this week uh City beautiful is the

One that I mentioned about a urban planner reviewing Minecraft cities and city planner plays focuses more on a game like cities skylines but if you’re into doing cities you’re looking to do more modern building in Minecraft the ideas and the tips about layout and Urban Design would would carry over and

They would it would be good good to watch it’s also very entertaining it’s very satisfying I I don’t often play cities skylines because I don’t have the time and I find it a little bit repetitive but as a Minecraft player as a builder watching it being played is

Also very satisfying to like throw it on while you’re doing the dishes or you know whatever it’s it’s a it’s a fun thing to do especially when you’re watching someone that knows what they’re doing because it’s not frustrating it’s just they they really kind of understand

How to go about those games and have them look really cool yeah I will be checking out both of those links because it seems like food for thought definitely our next email comes in from Jay D builds about spell books Hello Johnny and Joel I was listening to your

Discussion about potion brewing in episode 255. particularly about how there really aren’t many in-game clues for recipes or potions and it makes me think of something along the lines of a potential solution what if in witch Huts a player could find a chiseled bookshelf with witch’s spell books in them on the

Shelf in a witch’s spell book a player would find picture recipes for a specific potion or perhaps a partial potion with a question mark or missing ingredient for the player to experiment with to complete the recipe a witch hut could spawn with one or maybe two spell books with different

Potion recipes in each book I think this would fit in with the 1.20 exploration Factor giving the witch hut an update in the process I know I would love to display a collection of spell books in my Apothecary would love to hear your thoughts on this idea JD build’s first

Ever survival mode death years ago was to a witch but even though they still scare him he’d go on a Witch Hunt rating for spell books I really like that the sign off was a callback to JD build’s first death yeah in Minecraft and Well Done surviving long enough that a witch

Was the thing that took you out I find that you know there’s creepers and zombies and all kinds of stuff before I ever encounter witches um but yeah I I really like this idea primarily because we talked recently about um renewing people’s interest in certain structures and I think ever since the

Advent of stacking raid farms and those being a source of all of the witch drops in even a higher rate than um than than which Farms used to be which Huts have largely been ignored I think the change in height of the world was also about something to do with this

Because that effectively made which Farms less effective due to their relative y position in the world so I mean technical details aside people don’t go to witch Huts unless maybe they want a guarantee of taming a black cat and that’s kind of the only reason to go

Now so I do like the idea of giving some more value to witch Huts even though people who are familiar with potion brewing at this point might not go there for spell books like this it’s a really great idea to revamp witch Huts include some of the newer features and also give them

Something that helps new players understand potion brewing better I think that’s a very good way of concisely solving a lot of problems I really liked it as well I think that it could even be taken further by instead of collecting separate books for each spell what if you were collecting

Pages similar to how we collect Pottery shirts and that with each page that you get and perhaps a single recipe isn’t on a single page maybe you have like two different pages that you have to put together I don’t mind the idea of a minion game like a puzzle to kind of fit

Together to figure out how to to make a potion because the cool thing about that is if you just find one like let’s say you find two or three pages you manage to put together one recipe that will kind of teach you how to make a basic

Recipe or or Brewing recipe in Minecraft and then you could either experiment on your own or go looking for the other recipes and try to figure out how many there are I think it would be important to communicate in the game somehow that there are X number of recipes like

You found one of 15 or one of 20 or like whatever whatever that number is so that you um you don’t think you found all of them and you’ve only found three like that kind of a deal uh I I like the context in which JD builds presented uh the idea like for

All the reasons you mentioned and just bringing in Exploration bringing in the idea of new functionality for an existing block updating an older structure that in my opinion also feels dated and I think could use a bit of a refresh I I think that it’s such a nice way to suggest an

Improvement or solution for this problem in the game rather than just give us a recipe book like we have uh for our crafting recipes in our inventory just there right like that’s that’s the easy fix but that’s not inventive or fun and it doesn’t incorporate all the different

Things that the Mojang team has worked on over the years adding to the game and I think that it’s such a great way to provide feedback in that like just it takes into all these different things into account um I think that as you do that like as you unlock these

Recipes as you find them I think after that it would be cool to then have something when you go to a brewing stand you could have your recipe book there and it would contain all of the recipes that you’ve learned so far so not everything but at least then you

Wouldn’t have to go back to your separate bookshelves to try to remember how do I make a swiftness potions like how do I make a potion of fire resistance uh for the more complicated stuff were the things that you don’t brew that often it would be nice to have

That stuff in like a central place where it’s like the player has quote unquote learned it and therefore the player person in the world can can then refer to that next to the brewing stand rather than having to go and pull off individual books off the shelf because the problem that I have

There is that when you’re looking at a bookshelf a chisel bookshelf if it contains books that have stuff in them there’s nothing on that bookshelf to indicate what each book is right so like if unless you have them in a memorized order uh you really are just pulling

Books at random until you find oh yeah that’s where I left the swiftness potion like that kind of stuff like I I wouldn’t want to have to go through a entire wall of you know enchanted books on bookshelves trying to figure out where I left the potion book that I want

So I think there are some Hang-Ups with the idea but all of which could be you know iterated on and I think brought to a a proper solution this could also be a really good opportunity to revisit potion brewing and cauldron mechanics and how they differ between Bedrock Edition and Java

Because the cauldron is much more important to brewing in Bedrock Edition you can fill cauldrons with a specific type of potion that’s how tipped arrows are crafted and I think if we’re going to look at revising witch huts and including more potion brewing uh you

Know hints and tips uh in in that kind of structure then it also makes sense to revisit the way those Mechanics Work just so there isn’t any miscommunication and and things don’t get like you know the the the the potion brewing recipes don’t get added for the wrong

Version for the version that they wouldn’t really be associated with I’m pretty sure Bedrock Edition even has one potion type that isn’t on Java or maybe it’s been removed but they had a Wither effect potion for a while that I don’t think is it has ever been a thing on

Java so yeah really kind of curious that there are still disparities between the two of them the nookie in our live chat just pointed out that you could have tool tips when hovering over a book in the Shelf similar to when you hover over something in your inventory there’s not enough

Room to read anything on the side of a book in the resolution of a chisel bookshelf but it would make sense as if you’re reading like the side binding you know of a book so you know which one is which um yeah I like that idea I think that’s

A cool that’s a cool solution as well when you look when you’re looking at an item in an item frame like when you see the name hovering over it if you’ve renamed it in an anvil it can be a similar kind of thing yeah and and if language is an issue or to

Avoid that kind of stuff uh they could also have ins if they are planning on changing the shape of all the different potions they already have them as different colors instead of hovering over the book and getting the name of that potion you could just have like the

Symbol of that potion come up and be just like oh that’s that’s the book that has the recipe for fire resistance potion because an orange potion kind of popped up that that could be cool too just to kind of bridge that language Gap because that or have both like you could

Have you could have the title and the symbol pop up but stuff like that I think would be would be very very cool yeah thanks for continuing the discussion JD builds that’s a a very elegant solution I thought moving on to our main discussion this week perfectionism in Minecraft and this

Also comes in from an email from Joseph J perfectionism when playing Minecraft greetings Joel and pix I hope you’re both having an amazing day I’ve been playing Minecraft for over five years now but recently I’ve developed the need to be a perfectionist when playing I am

In no way a perfectionist in real life for instance I feel the need to make one side of a branch mine identical to the other so that it will be aesthetically pleasing or when a creeper blows up I feel the need to patch the hole returning it to

The train as it was when the world was first generated so it doesn’t feel tainted and it hasn’t lost its natural beauty the main thing I’m a Perfection about is building when I’m designing a build I never know when to stop designing it because I want the build to be perfect

Because I want my builds and my worlds in general to be perfect I can never settle on good enough I feel like my world isn’t perfect even if it spent endless hours sorry I have to say that again even if I feel like my world isn’t perfect even if I’ve spent endless hours

Working on it I end up starting a new world I know these thoughts and actions are irrational and that there is no such thing as a perfect Minecraft world I’ve been trying to change my mindset but I just can’t figure out why and figured I’ll ask you guys

So how do you both deal with perfectionism when playing Minecraft how does one overcome the need to be a quote-unquote perfect Minecraft player and when is a build good enough I’ve been listening to you guys podcasts since the beginning of 2023 and I’m loving it so far thank you both so much

And keep up the amazing work Joseph was blown up by a creeper while trying to perfectly patch an old creeper hole the irony of that death message is not lost on me well well played uh and thank you for the kind words I’m really glad that you’re enjoying the podcast and uh

Welcome to the team of being a perfectionist in Minecraft um I know that uh I want to kick things off and say that I’m not a perfectionist nope definitely not I I don’t know I don’t know what you’re talking about uh that’s a quote from my twitch chat it

Happens often enough uh because I am usually lost in details uh and wanting things to be just so um I think that I hesitate to use the world word perfect or perfectionist I I just I want things to be as I’ve conceived them to be in my

Brain uh my career in art specifically Commercial Art when there’s other people telling you when something is good and done uh has led to me living in an uncomfortable comfortable place that just that does perfect doesn’t exist and I’ll leave a a quote here from

Um right now I think the artist that has been pushing this the most is Jake Parker he’s an illustrator in the US um and I’ve met him once or twice actually and I feel like the perfect is the enemy of done is a really really good way to look at things because if

You’re always noodling with something and trying to make it perfect you’re never going to finish it you’re never going to be able to push away and as an artist having that ability to push yourself away from the desk and say like that’s finished it’s a skill you have to

Learn it and it’s not easy especially if it’s your work like it’s your personal work like you’re not doing it for client you’re just you’re trying to draw for me it was my webcomic like when I was working on Starcrossed like trying to push away from that and not spend 12 16

Hours on a comic that I really had to finish in one work day was really difficult for me and I had to kind of learn some shorthand I had to learn like what’s good enough I had to accept that it’s an iterative process and that the

Comic was going to get better over time repetition was going to be my friend and that you know resist going back and and redrawing the original Comics something that I had to do when I put the comics together in a book collection and I was collecting like three years of comics or more

Because they only came out once a week into a a large book and you’re dealing with something that you’ve drawn from three years ago like the characters didn’t even look the same to me and now to the untrained eye they probably looked okay but to me I’m just like oh

My gosh it looks so different you can see something like that in a long running cartoon like Garfield or peanuts or something like that when you look at how they first were drawn versus how they were drawn after 20 30 years of experience by the artist and I think it’s an interesting

Um battle that that creative people and I think that Minecraft you know players obviously are put in that that same bucket of like you’re doing something creative you’re trying to express yourself and you have it just so in your head and you’re trying to get it down

Into the Minecraft world much like an artist is trying to get it down on on paper and if it doesn’t go your way then it can be very very frustrating um but I know that you had an interesting you know kind of tidbit to kick off the discussion as well yeah um

I I want to put it out there that there is no wrong way to play and this is yeah something that I’ll go over before I talk about my own struggles with perfectionism but time spent enjoying yourself in Minecraft is not wasted and if you get joy from designing and

Redesigning a build in order to make it perfect maybe that’s how you play Minecraft maybe that’s not such a bad thing I think it is it kind of goes along with the desire to emulate other people and the desire to get more out of the game as an experience that these questions arise

It’s sort of the same thing of like how do I not get bored in Minecraft whenever that discussion comes up I’m kind of like why are you worried about getting bored in Minecraft you know what why does Minecraft have to be a certain way to you and so if you find yourself

Frustrated by the perfectionism then that’s clearly a sign that something needs to change but if you find yourself getting your kicks out of redesigning a build and thinking yeah that’s perfect but what if I just tweak this other thing like would that make it any better

And if it keeps feeling like it’s a good thing to do then then not necessarily such a bad thing I also prefer to patch up holes in terrain when a creeper explodes because I don’t know I might want to reuse that landscape at some point for something else and the creeper

Has done something that was not not necessarily a voluntary act on my part of modifying the landscape and I like being the one person or one of the group of people who is in charge of how that world changes um because the Minecraft world doesn’t change much without players input so I

Think that’s that’s obviously part of it it’s an unexpected change um personally when it comes to perfectionism I sort of feel the push and pull of this throughout my work as a professional content creator because I have a very detail-oriented audience who will notice when something isn’t quite

Correct but I have a need to move forward into the next topic or video instead of dwelling on something for a while and if anything the amount of feedback I get from the community has actually helped me embrace imperfection because I’m never going to please some people I’m never going to play Minecraft

Efficiently enough for some people there will there will be people who will call me out for putting seven items in a furnace with a piece of coal when I could have smelted eight and those people are obviously very detail-oriented and they prefer to play Minecraft in an effective in an

Efficient way and in a way that you know I would find prohibitive in the sense that I couldn’t move on from some of that stuff and that’s a difficult line to walk like the more perfectionist you end up the more you are stifling yourself in just getting on and doing

Whatever it is you want to do next um it might be very different for me if I was a hobbyist player but I find that it slows me down to consider so many of these aspects so closely especially if they’re not the topic of the video that

They’re not the task I’m trying to complete that day I’m not worried about anything else I’m just worried about what’s in front of me and the mechanics I’m trying to explain so yes I will occasionally smelt seven iron instead of eight or I’ll use you know the wrong

Amount of sticks and one of them will disappear and burn into nothing or whatever and that just happens sometimes and understanding that Minecraft craft is made up of so many different moments that cannot be perfect or so many different ways in which you can play the game imperfectly can kind of be freeing

In a way it can actually feel like you are giving yourself a license to be imperfect because to play the game optimally requires so much constant vigilance that it’s almost exhausting and I’m not ready to be exhausted by this video game by just making sure I’ve done everything

A hundred percent correctly so one thing I want to say is if this desire for Perfection is a habit you’ve developed recently it may not last forever if it’s something that has only come up in your recent thoughts then maybe it’s just a passing phase and will disappear again

But I think we can come up with a few suggestions for uh how to avoid perfectionism becoming your enemy in this case I think that’s really interesting that you brought up game mechanics because my perfectionism or my need to have everything’s just so very heavily revolves around builds and and

Aesthetics and how they look I do not care after six years on a server how much coal is being used when I smell something yeah exactly I just don’t look I just I have resources coming up my ears you know I don’t care about leaving blocks on the ground if they disappear

Sometimes I throw them on the ground on purpose because I just don’t have any room in my inventory like there’s stuff like that I I really game mechanics not worried about it you know I don’t have a perfect sword uh I I’m not worried about having a perfect uh uh Enderman Farm we

Have an Enderman Farm in the end that I visited recently just because I was down there looking around and it doesn’t work quite as intended for whatever reason I just don’t want to rebuild it I didn’t find building it fun I don’t know why it’s not going crazy like some Enderman

Farms do and I just you know I can’t be bothered and is it perfect no does it function yeah good enough but right now our you know zombified piglet Farm is the better way to get XP plus you get gold and other stuff while you’re there

I think that to to touch on you know ideas for addressing any kind of perfectionist tendencies in the game I I definitely get caught up in details in Minecraft that are a Time sink and oftentimes they’re inconsequential uh I spent a couple of streams in the last

Week I’m sure decorating closets in West Hill like storage closets they’re full of barrels and chests they’re five by seven maybe smaller they’re you can’t see them from the outside unless you are in my build walking around you’re never going to find these things could I have

Just put a door on them and shut them absolutely I could even have a fake door that leads to Nowhere that just suggests that there’s a closet there but part of the challenge that I’ve given myself when building West Hill was to design it in full like to have it feel like it’s

Lived in much like you would find a town in an RPG game and usually in those you know those kind of builds if you can open the door to a room there’s going to be something inside you know think about walking around an inn in in World of

Warcraft like you couldn’t open up the wardrobes and look inside but you could absolutely go upstairs and there would be beds and you know probably an NPC standing around that kind of stuff and they’re not just an empty facade from the outside so that was my goal I enjoy that it

Doesn’t take that long but you know games that are a Time sync you know you mentioned about the the time investment and stuff like that in Minecraft it’s one of the reasons why I moved it in to try making it part of my job is because

I do find myself enjoying the detail you know oriented building and the the time it takes to do that because it’s a block by block game and I just thought man if I’m sinking this kind of time to this game which I at first when I started

Playing like I couldn’t help it like I was just playing for hours and hours and hours like this is gonna I either need to find a way to fold this into my job or I need to figure out a way to not play it so seriously because uh it

Really it really can and can be a battle um something that I found that has helped me though is when a build that I’m trying to create doesn’t come out exactly as I have conceived it I kind of lay that at the limitations of

My craft you have to work with a lot of approximations at that you know a lot of the time and I think that if you lay that down as this is as good as I can make it in Minecraft as opposed to it’s not perfect but like it’s never going to be perfect

Just because Minecraft is full of blocks and they’re a meter wide like you there’s so many things that you’re not going to be able to do uh to the level of what you might see as as perfect so the good enough which feels defeatist

Turns into this is as good as I can make it in Minecraft because Minecraft has limitations and I think that that’s a something that’s helped me a great deal uh when wanting to make something a specific size or length or line things up now sometimes that involves some

Patience where I know I don’t want to finish these two buildings and have them be off-center by two blocks well that means I need to take the time and measure out the foundations and triple check that measurement before I build both of them and so I think that some of

It is like hindsight is 2020 if something’s really bugging you then the next time you do something like that a similar build make sure you kind of do your due diligence before you start I think that can help a lot of the things that make people’s eyes twitch you know yeah

On the flip side you know I built the wall around West Hill and then I’ve been cramming buildings inside this wall the wall was dictated by the landscape and the rivers and uh so is the land inside the town just like a real town if that’s where it

Was decided to be developed you’d be limited you know unless you start putting platforms over the river like you really have to figure out how to build around this stuff and that to me is a fun challenge we’ve talked about that before where you know you’re forced

Into a box pardon the pun and you have to figure out how to fit a small you know uh Bakery in a in a space where you thought you had more room but now you’ve got a wall in a river and it’s shaped like a triangle well how do you do that

Well if you can figure it out you know maybe that leads to a cruel outside space you know maybe that leads to you know a triangle shaped oven inside the the bakery just to kind of help you kind of get around those problems and I think that accepting those challenges and kind

Of like making them your own and moving forward with them is another great way to handle when things don’t go exactly as planned and and are there for your mind you know not perfect yeah like there’s a couple of things I can recommend um and it goes back to what you were

Saying earlier about having some oversight when you were a commercial artist like whether it’s setting yourself some deadlines or having somebody else hold you accountable for something this might seem like a very extreme way to handle perfectionism but like if you have a partner if you have

You know somebody else like a roommate a friend somebody else that you’re even maybe playing on a Minecraft server with have them come over and look at it and tell you that it’s okay like or I’ll tell you that it’s done or just say you know yeah like maybe do another day on

This and then call it good and like other people’s feedback on that topic can also help you move on from some of that stuff like even if it’s self-imposed even if it’s setting yourself some deadlines like I’m gonna work on this build for exactly one week presuming you have a reasonable amount

Of time within a week to play Minecraft but then at the end of that week you move on it can be a fun exercise it could even be a fun way to live a nomadic exist if you build in one area for a fixed amount of time and then in

Game physically move away from it I think that could be a fun way of structuring your time in a world and that would also scratch the age of restarting the world in the hope that that was going to provide something new that might stick for that particular time is because effectively moving away

From where you you know where your spawn point is or wherever it is you’re currently building is effectively the same thing as starting a new world just without the grind for tools and everything else and I can recognize that that’s also a helpful way to reset your mentality is

To go and looking for that stuff and finding you know cool landmarks and abandoned mine shafts and that kind of thing but you can do the same thing just by dropping all of your stuff in a chest and going somewhere else I like the idea of accountability and I

Think that’s one thing that the Citadel has is that there are several other server members that have also put in a lot of time on the server they feel ownership over their builds over certain sections of the server and over where the server as a whole so any decision to

Ever restart decision would involve a large meeting and everyone would have to be on board I wouldn’t be on I wouldn’t be comfortable with it if it was like even five to one like I would really want everyone to be like okay let’s this is exciting let’s let’s move forward

There’d have to be a really good reason for it and not to say that it would ever get deleted like we would have backups and downloads and you know yeah sure keep it around and stuff like that um just because it’s it’s a lot of my

Professional work but also just a lot of just passionate work by other friends and uh and fun times and memories you know from a lot of people I think uh when you’re dealing with Minecraft and the endless gameplay looking at the broader Minecraft world you’re talking about like

Um either resetting or you were talking about like dumping all your stuff and going the the distance um I think that there’s a lot of quote-unquote imperfections in the Minecraft world and wanting to fix them and make them better make them your own is I think a natural progression as a

Player like I think that in the same way that you and I will look at Mojang releasing a block and be like that’s cool but what if they did this like we just we always have like a what if we could be you know put on our little game

Developer hats and and have an opinion and I think that the same is true of the Minecraft world is like well I know it’s procedurally generated but why did the cave do that you know like why is the village hanging off the edge of this Cliff like that’s weird let’s fix it you

Know it provides an opportunity for gameplay uh and I do find it odd that I see this pattern in Minecraft in the community of being dissatisfied with the world you’ve been working on and restarting it expecting a different result yeah it’s it’s gonna it’s gonna look different but you’re going to get

The same problems it’s you’re you’re never gonna get what you’re expecting or what your mind’s eye is Desiring so I really really encourage people to work through the dissatisfaction if you don’t like the way your build looks you can change it infinitely now that’s a rabbit

Hole but if you don’t like the way a Minecraft River Winds you can move it if you don’t know how to move it you can learn how to move it and I think that that will then start to push you into learning new skills keeping things fresh going from building houses to doing

Landscaping to doing Redstone builds to like I don’t have enough of this block I guess I have to learn how to make an iron farm like that kind of stuff can really snowball into you are never going to be bored in Minecraft because there’s always going to be something new now it

Takes time it takes patience and if you lack one or both of those things that’s where I think you know Johnny’s point to accountability can come in because if you’re not able to put in the time all the time to make these big farms well having servers with server mates

Where people can work together to achieve these goals can help quite a bit and then that loosens the restrictions on what you’re doing elsewhere in the world individually and you can all move on and and do the things that you need to do um I think there however is a tremendous

Sense of Pride when you can look over a Minecraft landscape and realize that you have either accepted tweaked or completely reinvented everything within render distance and it’s taken years but that’s the feeling I get when I look around West Hill and I really want to emphasize the acceptance part there are

Some parts of the landscape that I just looked at and thought I could change this but it would be a lot of boring work and I’d just rather not so I the challenge was well let’s accept this and move forward I talked before on this on

The show about the game of yes and accepting something a server mate has done and building upon it you know rather than being negative even saying like no I don’t like it saying all right well that exists how can we move forward with it and I treat the Minecraft

Landscape in the same way it exists how can we move forward with it you know like is is this Valley a real problem for me is it only 20 blocks wide sure I that’s not my Minecraft experience tells me that that’s going to take me 30

Minutes to fill in and I’m going to be happier because of it let’s go you know then I look at other things like a giant Ravine and you’re like I don’t want to take the time to erase this how can I work this into my build like what what

Could I do with this for it to be something that doesn’t make my eye twitch but is instead an accent or something that um increases the visual you know value of the area I think with with West Hill one of the things that I’ve learned has been to

Accept a lot of things that are around and try to work with them rather than constantly trying to change them because for me the wall that I hit when I’m noticing that I’m getting to we’ll say perfectionist about something is when I’m struggling to get what I want and

I’m no longer having fun and that’s I find when I go all right I just can’t do this in Minecraft this just isn’t a thing that’s possible because I’m a pretty intelligent guy I’m an artistic person I have the resources I have the experience in the game if I can’t get

This Cliff or bush or road to look exactly how I want it I have to kind of back up and say like there’s just I’ve tried six different ways to do this I’m gonna have to pick the one I dislike the least and go with that and I think that

That’s kind of where I draw the line is like the moment that I start to feel frustrated I’m just like that’s not cool like I want to remain having a fun time in Minecraft and that’s where I think that I’m able to turn back to that

Phrase I said earlier which is this as good as I can make it in Minecraft if I was in Photoshop I could absolutely get this to look the way that I want but I’m not you know yeah yeah it’s often about embracing the lesser of two evils and I

Think one of the ways of avoiding perfectionism is by trying to think one step ahead of what you’re doing at all times so say for example in in your in your medieval Town you’re designing the perfect looking wall you’ve got the wall gradient all kind of figured out if

You’re spending ages just making sure every block of that is in the right place so that it doesn’t look too checkerboardy and that the gradient flows and that there’s occasional kind of highlights in it then you can get stuck into that for ages but if you think

I could spend all of that time doing that but my next step is to build a tree in front of this which is going to obscure 30 of it anyway then you can put 30 less effort into making that wall perfect and focus on what’s next and

Focus on building the tree so I think getting stuck in the present moment is part of the struggle of perfectionism it’s you’re you you’re having trouble seeing what’s next and what’s gonna move you on from this and so I think if you try and keep a list of activities and

Always add one thing to that list when you you know strike one off and say that’s done then that’s going to constantly help you think one step ahead of where you’re at and potentially get you excited about moving on to those things which will make it easier for you

To leave the current activity behind um one specific example I can give when it comes to uh creeper explosions which were mentioned in the email one good exercise is to make lemonade from those lemons if a creeper blows up some nearby terrain instead of fixing it you can

Consider how it could be made into a feature instead of patching it up if it blows a hole sort of in the side of a hill maybe that becomes the entrance to a mine if it blows up something in the middle of a plane’s biome congratulations you have a new frog pond

And you can work with stuff like that and I think that can be a good exercise in reimagining some of those perceived imperfections as something that can enhance the world and I think that’s a really nice way of working around that problem um alternatively if you want to go

Completely the other route disable mob griefing if you want sheep and villagers Etc to still affect their environment then you’re gonna have to look into data packs but if you you know remove mob griefing and remove the opportunity for creepers to do damage to the landscape then you can say goodbye to unwanted

Holes in the terrain and stop that from holding you up with what you want to do next so that’s another another option the last thing I will suggest is to set an objective other than building because Joseph mentioned in the email that building is the thing that’s driving the

Perfectionism right now and it’s harder to judge that kind of perfect in making progress towards things like advancements because they have win conditions you have completed the advancement or you have not and it’s a very black and white kind of thing which can lead to you at least feeling like

You can step away from the thing that you’re getting frustrated over for a while and whether that’s just eating every type of food in Minecraft or if it’s acquiring a trident so that you can get the trident-based advancements or anything like that it will at least give

You time away and give you time to come back to that build with fresh eyes and then that might give you a bit of an impetus to go okay well no I think on on reflection that’s actually looking better than I thought it was when I left

It let’s work with that maybe tweak a couple more things and then call it done and I think it’s it’s a little easier to do that if you have a variety of activities in your Minecraft game so that you’re not dwelling on the building a hundred percent of the time

I like the advice to step away I do that all the time with builds where I’m just like I’m frustrated with this I don’t know what to do next whatever I’m gonna go do something else in this town I’m gonna walk by this thing a hundred times

In the next week and I’ll either get the idea about how to fix it or I’ll have to force my hand in in a week or so and I find that that usually helps um or uh popping somewhere else and doing something first for a server mate like I

I helped Cosmic with their um stiffer farm that was a stream away from West Hill wasn’t at all thinking about medieval stuff I was just making a minecart collection system totally fine nice brain break uh I I like also um the idea of challenges we talked

About that a couple weeks ago on the on this show and uh specifically for like resetting worlds if you’re up for a challenge give yourself six months give yourself a year you know and don’t reset the world as like a how many days similar to how people brag about how

Long they’ve survived in uh Hardcore Minecraft like how many days can you play Minecraft and not reset the server and I would be very curious to see what the mindset would be at the end of the 12 months are you itching to reset or have you invested too much work and no

Longer want to reset and you want to keep the world even longer than you thought you could when you first tried it I as someone that has a six year old server I understand I’m a little bit biased but I feel like it’s it’s a interesting thing to challenge yourself

With and I I’d be very surprised um to see the results I think people would learn a lot more than than they anticipate yes and we could continue this discussion for a very long time we could be tweaking and adjusting the details of our arguments but would that make this

The perfect podcast uh we’ll leave that up to you listeners because that’s where we’re going to leave this episode of the spawn chunks we’re going to step away from our creative projects and go and edit the episode probably you can find some more information about this show

And links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today over at thespawnchunks.com the music for the show is composed by me and the spawn chunks is proud to be a listener supported podcast we have made four stacks of episodes with the wonderful support of our community of patrons and

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Distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online I go by Pixar ifs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com pixarifts where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season and hopefully should be seeing new episodes around this time

Next week I also stream at three days a week on Twitch when my PC is behaving itself so expect those streams to resume fairly soon as well and the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search and aside from that I’m at pixarifts on

Both Instagram and whatever Twitter is calling itself these days Joel where can people find you online everything that I’m doing online can be linked at joelduggan.com including the Citadel Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment and if you missed the render distance discussion this week we are going to be

Talking about secret Invasion myself and Steven ESC will be talking about that uh that was uh finishing up on Disney plus this past week so there will be spoilers but we will give people warning on the show and it’s going to be a fun time to talk about that with Stephen we’re both

Big Marvel fans so it should be an excellent podcast I’m Joel Duggan on social media and Joel Duggan on Twitch where I stream Thursday through Sunday starting with the Citadel Minecraft server on Thursday a brief break for Lego on Fridays where I’ve started the motorized Lighthouse very cool build and

Then the weekends are spent back in Minecraft thanks for this doing the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite and imperfect and that’s fine