EPIC 276: Armadillos & Ancient Mobs | Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 276 for Monday December 18th 2023 my name is Joel Dugen and joining me as always is my friend Johnny by you may know him as the flying slime pixel ref hello s that’s sounds like a martial arts school the uh you know Fist of the

Flying slime or something like that well yeah uh get getting squishy over on the survival guide this week but uh in the meantime we’ve been talking about uh the future and where TV and film franchises could take it along with a little bit of chat about VR and the potential of that

Technology you can hear that at patreon.com thees spawn chunks if you sign up to be a paid patron of the show you get access to the render distance which is the extended version of the podcast a little bit of pre and post show chat every episode and it’s occasionally worth listening to because

We have some insightful thoughts about the state of things and usually just what we’ve been up to that that week uh today’s episode we’re going to dip into the mailbag and focus on the community and you folks sending in your opinions on Minecraft and ideas for the future of

Minecraft we’re also going to do the same thing next Monday because if you check your calendars next month is December 25th which to those who celebrate is Christmas so we are still going to have an episode out it’s going to be pre-recorded and it’s nice and

Easy for us to dip into the uh extra Santa sized uh mail sack to pull out a couple of emails that we can talk about next week as well after that we have already pre-recorded an episode that’s going to go out on January 1st and that’s a fantastic chat

With Aro plays who came back to talk to us about archaeology now it’s been in the game for a little while so got a couple of great episodes to look forward to stay tuned for those in your feed and then we’ll be back in January on the 8th

For the regular schedule in the meantime for our patrons our monthly Patron hangout will also be back in January we’re skipping December because we usually do these at the end of the month and Joel and I will be spending some time with our families you can also expect a quarterly hangout towards the

End of January beginning of February when the quarter ends so Joel and I will be taking the next couple of weeks off we’ll still be hanging around dipping into the Discord here and there but those pre-recorded episodes will still be going out on December 25th and January

1st so this week I really have not been spending a lot of time in Minecraft uh I’m still working on updating some mods and data packs in the background and the West Hill River sculpting is slowo and just more of the same so there really

Isn’t a lot to talk about in in that realm so what have you been up to in Minecraft this week this week uh and you’ll hear a little bit about this on the archo plays episode in a couple of weeks as well uh I have been setting up

A plot-based tree farm I got sick of just spreading podz all around the front yard outside of my my starter house and my storage room so I decided to formalize the area where I gather wood and I do that quite frequently because you always need wood for stuff I’m

Always thinking about how I can use use it in certain builds and I like to have a stockpile of it so I don’t have to drop everything and go and farm trees for 3 hours when I want to get started on a on a project uh so I decided to set

Up this plot-based tree farm with effectively a similar sized area for each of the different wood types and it started off with just the oak Birch and Acacia because those are the ones that you can grow single trees of and they don’t really have any benefit for growing them in different shapes and

Sizes behind that I did a row for the 2x two trees so dark oak has to be grown that way and Spruce Wood and jungle you get more leaves and saplings and ultimately more more wood out of growing them in a 2X two so I find that

Beneficial and then behind that is the uh the more abstract wood types which is I guess Cherry because it grows in weird formations and so it’s difficult to plot out exactly when the branches are going to abstract the other trees below from growing then you have the Warped and

Crimson fungus from the nether because those require a field of nyum on which to grow so you can’t exactly mix them in with the other trees and I wanted to have a formal place to put that and farm the mushrooms and everything else and then finally a big old Square for

Mangrove because that takes up a lot of space and I tend to grow them in a diagonal line so that they don’t end up deleting the saplings next to them when I’m trying to grow them from propagules all of this is connected up or at least the spaces in between each of these

Plots have a series of connected waterways and that Cascades downhill so this is built on a slope and the idea is that I can throw in logs as I go from basically any of these tree plots and they’ll all end up going to the same place which is a set of shulker box

Loaders it just goes around in a circle delivering the uh delivering the logs to a set of Hoppers that filter the logs and each of those filters gets fed into a mechanism that’s constantly loading in New new shulker boxes every time an old one fills up and it drops the full

Shulker boxes into a barrel that I can just go and collect them when I’m done tree farming so with some of these I doubt I will produce a full shulker box of wood particularly often but let’s say I want to come back here and I’m just looking to get Birchwood because I have

A big thing I want to do with stripped birch logs I can throw a couple of Shel boxes in there you know go to town on some birch trees for a while and then come away with as many Shel boxes as I want to load up um it’s a long-term

Thing for the world which is something I haven’t been thinking about too much aside from my storage system and it’s a big project like it takes up a lot of space but the landscape of my world is rolling enough and there are enough Hills and stuff that you can’t see this

From my St base even though it is relatively close by it’s only on the other side of the the mountain from my storage system but it it just gets obscured by the roll of the hills and uh it’s actually Fair fa discreet where it is kind of next to the the fishing shack

I set up in the early game it never ceases to amaze me how big manual tree farms end up being you know because you you want to have it so that when you’re chopping down trees manually the saplings that you’ve planted will be growing up as you’re chopping which

Means you’ve got to be chopping in the area long enough for that sapling to be loaded and then potentially grow yeah so you need like plots to be like rough the size of what you have which they’re what you know look like 11 by 11 or 14 by 14

Something like that yeah close to that yeah but then when you start multiplying that by all the different wood types in the game all of a sudden you’re dealing with you know 50 60 70 by 70 blocks you know and I love the canal idea like that’s something that I find tedious

About collecting a lot of items you know whether you’re looking for stone you’re looking for you’re doing it kind a branch mining whatever it is it it it always seems to be an inconvenience despite desite the fact that you can zip back with elytra and drop stuff in a

Chest that you have to do that every so often when you just kind of want to plow through and get it done and I love the idea of just walking up to a Waterway just completely emptying your inventory of whatever you know related blocks are in your filter and then just like all

Right cool I just had an inventory full of all kinds of different logs and now it’s empty and I can just keep on chopping yeah and and it also makes a cool project and it looks fun and I I’m a sucker for water transportation I think I prefer it over just about any

Mode of moving items around in the game just cuz it looks so much fun yeah yeah and you’ve done stuff in the past with more complicated waterways and like switching the points basically like switching the direction that the water’s going to flow to sort items and stuff oh

Yeah yeah I remember that yeah like I I could get into stuff like that and in this case it was a great way to you know explain a few other mechanics that are useful in storage systems all of my storage so far has been Hopper directed

It’s all been you know lines of Hoppers going around the entire room which in the case of my storage room is like 12 item filters plus the other Hoppers that you need to put in in the middle to connect those as they change orientation

In the room and so yeah this felt like a a breath of fresh air by comparison it felt right to do it by natural means considering it’s a natural feeling tree farm and I I really appreciated the suggestion that I got from my twitch chat when I was setting this up of using

Terra cotta to outline the waterways because it feels like plant pot material it’s you know the same color as you know decorated and flower pots that are already in the game so I think it’s a nice way of implying some decoration and implying some infrastructure that feels like you know effectively this could

Almost be a greenhouse but on a macro scale you know it’s it’s kind of like little little planting areas like seedlings or whatever but they still grow into these these massive plants the other thing which is more difficult to see from the screenshot I’ve provided

But you can sort of see it at the back is I’ve set up an area with a set of note blocks that will chime and composters underneath those so that at the back where the mangrove and the nether trees are uh I can have some alls flying around and give them the

Different blocks as I farm the different materials so that they can compost the Nether wart and warped wart blocks for me and all of the nether foliage that I’m not turning into more giant fungus and they can Farm all of the um the mangrove leaves for me so because those

Don’t drop saplings except the propagules that hang from below them so I can get all of those composted for me as well and that is going to make the whole project a lot easier but I only needed them for those three wood types so I just needed to have the laay thing

At the back and it doesn’t have to interfere with the running of the rest of the farm you know I can just chop away everything else manually and I’ll get all the saplings back that I need so I’m looking forward to using that going to use it a bit this week because

Naturally chopping Tuesday is coming up and that’s my usual routine but uh now I need to go and get more shulker boxes because of course I’ve got 10 different wood types represented here I haven’t done anything with bamboo yet because I’m going to make a you know sweeping

Flying machine farm for that with a much larger bamboo field um and that will be near this but not necessarily part of the tree farm because it’s really a different kind of thing maybe even waiting for the crafter before I do anything too intensive with that but uh

Yeah now I’ve got 10 shulker box loaders with I think only one Shel box each at the moment because I just didn’t have enough shells to make more so I think a trip to the end is probably on the cards for me this week as well any plans to make a shulker farm

Eventually yes but for now no and I recognize that as I go out to these end cities and keep you know killing shulkers I’m probably diminishing my chances of getting one that’s easy to take back to the Overworld um but yeah I I think I think sooner or later I will

Set up a shulka farm it seems like a natural thing to do but it also feels like a very Advanced thing to do and something that removes a pretty major hurdle in terms of well now these Shel boxes are abundant like all of the farm designs I’ve seen you get a full double

Chest in a matter of a couple of hours and then you never really need to touch it again so I’m I’m I’m sort of I’m playing in a way that’s trying not to eliminate the scarcity of those things completely at this stage in the game because I still don’t have farms for a

Lot more stuff that I would consider less advanced than shulker boxes so I’m sort of biting my time on that one and waiting for the right time to introduce it you know as long as we’ve been playing on the Citadel we still have manual tree farms uh I tend to chop down

Spruce as my type of wood for any kind of utility chests for Hoppers like all that kind of stuff sticks that kind of thing uh but then the other wood types like it’s really just been aelia Mangrove and um dark oak was more of a

Thing that we did in the modern city but again it’s just a manual plot I just took one of the blocks of the city that was underdeveloped and just turn it into a manual temporary tree farm and like I said earlier it was big enough where you’d have probably two dozen dark oak

Trees spaced out a bit and they’re spaced out on purpose so that you get lots of saplings when the leaves Decay and you just kind of go through a rhythm of starting on one side and by the time you’re done you know the the final tree

There’s just a ton of saplings on the ground because the leaves have had time to Decay and uh it’s it’s one of those things where I I don’t I haven’t decided if the work that goes into the the automatic tree farms that use TNT is

Is worth it like you’d have to have one a massive project that would need a lot of wood but then two you I feel like a lot of the times people use TNT duping for those and we don’t have that on the server we decided that we’d rather stick

Stay away from that and just go with manual TNT and I have a TNT Farm like that which I manually Supply with TNT and that’s for concrete in Southport the modern city Zone and uh as a result like we’re a lot more careful with the concrete that we use

And and all that kind of stuff so I I I’m always on the fence about building a a uh an automatic tree farm and I think too that once you kind of get good at and efficient at harvesting trees manually it’s not that big a deal you

Know like it’s it’s something that you can do quite easily once you know a couple of tricks I I really like the the trick where you put uh the 2 by two Spruce down uh saplings down for a large spruce tree and then you throw a ender

Pearl straight up and you bone meal the the sapling and the tree grows before the ender pearl comes down and you end up landing on the top of the tree and then you just mine straight down after that yeah and and I I mean I find it

Super super fast to like I can get in 10 minutes I can get like 10 stacks of wood like it’s it’s really quite quite easy and I think it’s the other trees that I I I think like man maybe I should get like a an automatic tree farm for things

Like Mangrove or or um cherry or some of the things that are a little bit harder to to get um or even just like a plot because we have plots on the sidel but it’s such an old area that people have built up around it and now we don’t have

Room to add cherry trees um I think maybe somebody added Mangrove or maybe Cherry I can’t remember but it there’s some bigger trees now in things in the game where that we just can’t add them and I don’t think we have room for crimson and warped stuff in that area

And it would also look kind of funny like I mean you’ve got yours tucked in the back but the way that ours is decorated in Dartmouth Meadows like putting those in there would be kind of weird and actually this leads me to another question I wanted to ask you

Because you’re focusing on getting the Warped H and the Crimson stems and all that kind of stuff right yes yeah yeah so I built Cosmic on our server a shifting floor design so you don’t get the full mushroom trees it’s for everything else it’s for like the fungi

And the and the mushrooms and the um the the little stuff on the ground yeah the like sprouts and stuff like that yeah sprouts and stuff do you have any plans for like an additional thing just for that stuff or are you getting enough from this that you can then use that for

Other things that’s something I plan to add to the back of this farming setup is just a small area that will do both because it’s one of those things where you can set up half of it as one type of nyum and half of it as the other type

And have it basically produce both types of foliage um so so we I I will probably add one of those as a separate example of a of a mechanic that I I didn’t want to include in in the video that I was doing all of this stuff but yeah that’s

Definitely on the cards I think uh it’s a much better way of farming the fungus than just bone mealing a large patch of nyum like you want to be able to plant that stuff out as deliberately as you do saplings and then you know chop them all

Down in one go instead of switching tasks constantly it feels like you can concentrate on one thing just use one tool you’re using your time and your energy a bit more efficiently that way so yeah that is that is the ultimate plan um and eventually we will uh we’ll

Get around to adding that but for the moment it’s uh it’s not there yet but then again neither is the bamboo farm so plenty of stuff I can add to this later moving on into the news since the last time that we were here the armadillo has

Rolled into testing an early version of the armadillo is coming to testing in Minecraft Bedrock Edition preview and beta and the Java Edition snapshot this holiday season we’ll have an article uh describing those plans uh in our show notes this week and also a link to Minecraft Bedrock Edition preview 1.20

60 .23 that was published on December 13th changes in this preview they’ve added the armadillo it’s a neutral mob which spawns in the savannah biomes it drops armadillo scoots periodically which can be crafted into wolf armor players can also get these scoots by brushing an armadillo using the brush

Tool this can even be automated by having a dispenser use the brush on an armadillo they eat and breed with spider eyes gross when an armadillo detects a threat it rolls up examples of threats include sprinting players players on a mount or in a vehicle and Undead mobs like zombies and

Skeletons it does not roll up if it’s fleeing in water in the air or if being led when an armadillo is rolled up it does not walk it cannot eat and will not be tempted by food it continues to scan for threats and if there are no threats

Detected for three seconds it will unroll players can equip adult tamed wolves with wolf armor only a wolf’s owner can put wolf armor on their tamed wolf and with this in mind dispensers cannot put wolf armor on wolves this armor can be removed from a wolf using

Shears only a wolf’s owner can Shear wolf armor from it and with this in mind dispensers cannot remove wolf armor from wolves wolf armor gives the same protection as Diamond horse armor if a wolf dies while wearing armor it will drop the armor Bedrock Edition preview 1

120602 3 also contains a bunch of gameplay tweaks and Bug fixes but the full list of those can be found on the Chang log at minecraft.net which is also linked in our show notes this week uh breaking news has actually happened whilst we’ve been gearing up for this News segment Minecraft Java Edition

Snapshot 23w 51a has just arrived and brings the armadillo armadillo scoots and wool armer along with it they are functionally the same so we won’t give you the same news read again uh the header of this article does say this is the first snapshot for Minecraft 1.

120.5 so there might be some bug fixes and whatnot added for this as well but a lot of the changes seem to be to do with experimental features including the armadillo so we will link that in our show notes as well but it doesn’t seem to contain anything that we wouldn’t

Have already put in the Bedrock Edition news read and with that said we also discussed the armadillo briefly on the episode that will be coming out on January 1st so if we retread any of this or if you feel like you know there’s a a

Two we echo in the room um when it comes to the January 1st episode then you’re just going to get our opinions twice uh on some of this stuff although we’ll try and keep it a little bit more um you know fresh this week but it we’ve already kind of given our first

Impressions on an episode you will hear later but in the meantime we get to talk about it now so how do you feel about the armadillo so far now that we’ve seen it in action in game Joel so I haven’t looked at it myself uh

In game but uh I have watched uh Exuma voice video uh one of the ways I usually catch up on Snapshot stuff is watching X’s content and because I find it very thorough and uh I like the detail that that they went into on it I I feel like

It I mean it looks like and feels like it’s still in production you know like I I think it’s a very good first draft I’ll confess that I’m not super excited for the armadillo so if I seem like I’m a little negative on it it’s not that

It’s I think it’s you know a bad mob I just I’m not super keen on it or or I’m not excited about it I guess I should say uh because I don’t know if it really offers much for me as a as an endgame kind of like late game long-term World

Player um but from a cartoonist perspective from an artist and a designer I uh I think it’s cute you know like I think the scale of it the color of it um the the idea of Its Behavior I think is is really interesting and uh I I remember seeing some concept art from

A few weeks ago where it had more of a 3D look like I think it had like a bigger shoulder area and then I I think it had um a third dimension to the ears much like wolves and piglins have and I hope they go back that way I think

There’s something that gets lost for me in the way that the ears are kind of pointed up and are be they’re they’re eclipsed by the size of the armadillo body because of how um blocky Minecraft has to be and how the the body has to be like a giant box essentially and because

The ears don’t break that silhouette they do kind of get lost and I think by adding a third dimension to them they would probably be a little bit more distinct and stand out more so there’s that uh I um I know that armadillo ears this this is be a little bit realist but

I armadillo ears I believe are pointy in in real life I kind of wonder whether they could turn a a shape like a a shape on its Edge so like instead of the top of the ears being flat like a a box or cube I kind of wonder if they turn the

Ears a little bit on an angle so that the highest point of the ear is actually the the vert like the where the vertices of a of a 3D shaped meet as opposed to a flat surface right that could be um something that might help it look a

Little bit more pointy um but other than that like I I think it’s it’s neat I thought it was a little bit weird that it didn’t tuck its head in when it rolled up like again that’s but that’s like the I’ve mentioned this before that’s like the the cartoonist brain you

Know going like wanting this thing to roll up into a ball and roll forward like you see in cartoons um and and I think that it’s I I know it’s in some way it’s realistic because that’s what armadillos they can’t roll but they they do tuck themselves up entirely to

Protect themselves um but I think I think that there’s something where you can you can take some creative Liberties and do that kind of stuff in Minecraft I don’t think that everything has to be super realistic even if it is a realistic animal in the game and or an

Animal from The Real World and so I’d like to see it be more Whimsical I guess is my My overall Vibe but again I’m hopeful for it because like this is just the first you know iteration that we’ve seen there’s lots of time for changes and feedback from from people so I

Encourage people to be constructive and and give their feedback on it um but so far I mean it’s it’s Unique I think in in how it acts it’s not the same as the cat or the dog or you know um other animals that we’ve we’ve dealt with in

Containment in the past um and I think the most unique thing about it so far for me is actually that it eats spider eyes I think that’s pretty cool yeah yeah we were speculating before about armadillos effectively being insect eaters and thinking oh are they going to introduce termites you know what else

Could they have as food are they just going to like completely like pull something else and just go oh they eat carrots now like that’s the kind of thing do do a bit more of a like a Wy coyote cartoon kind of Bugs Bunny attempt to them but no they they’ve just

Ended up uh you know an existing insect in the game technically speaking spider eyes are also edible by players so you kind of think of them as food to begin with and yeah it makes sense that the armadillo prays on at least the the pieces of existing insect there is no

Word on whether or not they are aggressive to spiders it seems like they’re still just neutral to mobs in general for now um we speculated a little bit on the uh the episode that’s going to be released in 2 weeks about the potential for Mob detectors that

Rely on the curling up Behavior because they will curl up in the presence of Undead mobs which include skeletons and so the mobs which previously might be you know it might affect zombies or might you know have a reaction to zombies like villagers for example are

Not affected by skeletons so this is the first one that really thinks Undead mobs are a bad time and uh you know there’s potentially stuff that you could do with mob detectors there my problem with that is that player and MOB detectors all feel a bit bit redundant now that we

Have skull sensors and calibrated skull sensors even which uh you know act as a a really customizable way of of implementing anything like that so I I don’t know if the armadillo is necessarily going to find much utility in that behavior but I like the fact

That they’ve a added that as a behavior that players could play around with not the most practical thing but a way to use it mechanically other than just as a sko farm and also they’ve added it as a characteristic because it gives the thing more personality which I think is

Is kind of important for any mob that doesn’t want to just fall by the wayside and be ignored by the majority of the community um while you’ve been dwelling on the ears I’ve seen a lot of community debate over whether the armadillo’s eyes should be on the front or the sides of

The mob in all of the concept art that we saw of them previously the eyes were on the sides and when they were released in Bedrock Edition and now it seems like in the Java snapshot as well the eyes are on the front and they’re just two

Single Pixel eyes so it’s not like they wrap around to the sides of the head in the same way that some other animals do like I’m pretty sure the Frog’s eyes go around the sides and the goat’s eyes are straight up on the side of the block you

Don’t see the goat’s eyes if you’re looking directly at the head from the front and so a few people kind of weighed in about this and it’s the the usual argument about not wanting Minecraft to be too quote unquote realistic but also wanting it to be consistent and there’s a bit of a

Disconnect between those two things uh to the point where Jasper burer actually weighed in on Twitter for folks who don’t know he is the the art team lead uh at at Mojang and he said the eyes of the armadillo are in the front because when they are on the side you’re looking

At uh if if you’re looking straight on at the armadillo with an empty forehead it was difficult to create a connection with it and considering that this was a mob that players would want to interact with potentially quite frequently he felt like that was important uh he also

Quotes says its head Peaks out when it’s bowled up because we thought it would be funny or cute but apparently people prefer realism he also said they were still looking at feedback and taking it into consideration when they continue development on the armadillo so as you pointed out earlier Joel entirely

Possible that this is just a first pass and they’re going to make some additional tweaks depending on player feedback but the way he seemed to think of it if they put the uh eyes on the sides they would get the feedback that they should be on the front and you know

S one faction or other of the player base is going to find some issue with it regardless of uh you know wh- which way they went on the decision uh people apparently gave some feedback that the goat having the eyes on the sides felt weird uh so it’s kind

Of funny that they’ve reversed that decision and they’re still getting feedback on it this time around I think this is mostly a resolution problem there’s the the the texture on the armadillo’s head is three pixels wide so you really don’t have a lot of room I I think this is something

That that does bother me a little bit and I couldn’t put my f finger on it until you mentioned it in in the show notes I was like oh that’s why it looks weird and it’s because the eyes are both on they’re on the top of the head and

When you think about a mammal if that was the case like it’s it’s only like primates and cats and things like dogs like even dogs are a little bit a little bit more to the side but when you get into like a lot of livestock and well

Any kind of prey animal usually the eyes are on the side because they need to be able to see what’s chasing them it’s prey animals it’s all for like field of view basically like it allows them to see more of the environment around them and potentially detect if they’re being

Like crept up on by a predator but then that doesn’t necessarily have to translate to how they look in Minecraft because we don’t know of any Predators they don’t like Undead mobs but Undead mobs don’t attack them so you know it’s entirely possible that players who wanted to yeah adopt an armadillo

Effectively are going to find it more emotionally connected uh if the alad Dillo is able to look directly at them you know I guess um and yeah I I think goats with their eyes on the front would look weird honestly it doesn’t bug me that much about the armadillo I also

Don’t expect that this is a mob I’ll interact with too much but I I imagine the art team has at least tried putting the eyes on the sides because they’ve done so in the concept art and if they decided actually this doesn’t quite represent the mob that we want then I

Trust them to make that decision ultimately um but you know players may end up advocating hard enough that they decide to change it and it’s something that a simple resource pack would fit if anybody still has an issue with whichever version ends up in the full

Release so not the not the biggest of deals really um I like you have not dipped into Bedrock Edition to try out the armadillo but now we have a Java Edition snapshot I will probably do a quick video looking for them in survival seeing how they interact and then

Deciding for myself how I feel about their their overall behaviors but yeah I think that’s that’s kind of a a fun implementation of the armadillo they give you the scoots in a different way to what turtles do uh which I think is good Turtles currently you only get the

Scoots when they grow from a small turtle into an adult turtle and that means you end up overpopulating your world with turtles unless you want to kill them which a lot of players don’t want to do because Turtles are endangered in the real world and also like quite an appealing little mob um

People have no reason to kill Turtles and all they give you is seagrass if you kill them so uh I think finding a way that the armadillo doesn’t have to be either bred to the point where it becomes nuisance or slaughtered on mass or both uh for you to acquire your wolf

Armor that you might want is um yeah fairly sensible thing I think that’s a that’s a decent approach to it to be able to use the brush on them also adds another use to the brush which I think is is delightful to see newish features which still don’t have a lot of expanded

Broad uses uh getting something else to add to their their column you know I agree I like I like the passive stuff I think I’ve compared it to the sniffer where you don’t don’t kill the sniffer for what you want you follow the sniffer around to help you find what you

Want yeah and the armadillo is kind of like a slight spin on that and adding the brush where if you don’t want to wait you can just use the brush and and get it a lot faster and I think that’s kind of an interesting way to appeal to

The players that either don’t have a lot of play time are a little bit more impatient or uh want to have that kind of instant gratification when as soon as you find an ill if you’re looking for one then you’re going to be excited and

If you have to go all right now we just kind of stare at one another you know until until you drop a scoot uh and I think having the brush idea helps with that more interactive and engaging you know process of of of getting the scoots

How do you feel about wool armer so far uh I still think it needs more customization I like the ability if not different shapes or whatever then at least different colors um they have the excuse that it’s made of armadillo skute and not Leather So dying it is maybe not

As easy and you you might not get the full range of colors that you get from leather armor but I think even if they stuck to just 16 colors it would give players who enjoy interacting with Wolves a lot more variety and a lot more fun with that like you can currently dye

The collars on dogs but you can only really see that from certain angles because it’s a flat thing on the front of the dogs body texture and so I think it would be nice to have something in the same way that you’re able to dress up horses in you know a variety of

Armors so that you know maybe like the diamond armor one is the fast horse you know they have different stats sure but people are going to get more attached to dogs they’re going to give them different names I think giving them like uh a couple of different outfits at

Least lends to them being able to do you know whatever like Paw Patrol roleplay kind of thing with their kids just to get their kids into playing a little bit of interactive Minecraft with them I think that that makes a lot more sense to me than leaving it with just one

Color but again I’m I’m speaking from a position of I don’t know how difficult this stuff would be to implement and and how frequently they expect players to use this versus the amount of effort they put into the feature to begin with I think if we end up getting any

Kind of different colors two things that that I would imagine one or one I hope for is that they don’t go the way that terracotta goes and that if you die something you get more of a purple or vice versa it adds the the the background color the sort of Base color

Of Terra Cotta to whatever D you’re adding to it yeah because I think for personalization people that want to have a green armored dog they’re going to want it to be green not come some sort of swamp Brown you know uh and and I think the other thing that might be um

Might be true is that if they do allow players to customize the armor with a color it might not be the whole thing like you might just be able to either get the trim to be a color like red and then then the rest of it’s going to look

Like armadillo scoot or vice versa maybe the trim remains armadillo scoot colored and then the uh body of the armor the plate sort of section becomes the part that’s dyed because if you think about some colors like gray or white it might be really hard to tell which AR which

Wolf has armor if you allow the player to dye the whole thing a certain color and I don’t know what that would what implications that might have other than just like not being clear that it has armor um would be would be weird um I mean the good news is that Tamed Wolves

At least for now are all white so most colors are going to stand off against the body of the wolf so you’re going to be able to tell pretty early on when it’s got wolf armer or not um I I I think it looks kind of overly complex on

The wolf I I think it could be maybe a simpler silhouette um I uh right at a distance right now it just looks like a a wolf with spots like a dog with spots like a border collie and like it doesn’t really read his armor yeah so I don’t

Know what they might want to do to change that and maybe it’s because it’s all one scoot color that it doesn’t read very well maybe the armor itself needs to have some high contrast where you’re like okay spots on animals don’t look like that you know that that obviously

Is something on the dog or on the wolf uh rather than than um just part of the texture the other thing I’ve seen a lot of people debating is its Effectiveness because there is evidence at least that it can’t survive a Creeper explosion um the the thing the thing about this for

Me is also creeper explosions veryy dependent on difficulty right so if you’re playing on easy and you’re running around with a wolf and a creeper blows up near it and I think the damage is also dependent on the distance you are from the creeper as well so there’s

A much broader range than I think people are testing for when they go can it survive a creeper and then they just drop a creeper into the same block as a wolf on hard difficulty which does I think like like you know 30 hearts of damage or something like that and then

They go no okay it can’t it dies um but I think yeah it the the for the type of gameplay that you’re expected to bring a wolf hunting with you or whatever um I think it’s at least good that they have some extra defense and wolves can be

Healed instantly by feeding them stuff like rotten flesh so if this thing attacks a zombie the zombie hits it back a couple of times it’s probably going to win that fight and then you can give it the rotten flesh the zombie drops to heal it up a little bit and it has a

Better chance at survival overall so I don’t think it’s necessarily A a bad thing that it exists I don’t think it’s a waste as such um I just think yeah I I think people are going to have to go into it with realistic expectations that

This armor is not going to make your dog invulnerable to damage you’re still not going to take it into an ancient city it’s going to get killed by the warden but you know that already because you’ve been to an ancient city or you’ve seen the the warden and you know to be

Cautious around that stuff I think this is an interesting new feature and given our conversation last week about flyover features I wonder what Mojang will do to help wool Farmer and the armadillo not be that yeah so I’m I’m curious as what they’re going to do uh hopefully

Optimistic you know because the Voting is over this is what’s happening and I you know like you can’t complain necessarily about new stuff being added to the game because there’s something for everyone in Minecraft so even though the armadillo is not for me uh from a perspective of game development and and

You know just interesting ideas that Mojang tends to come up with I’m just curious to see where they’re going to go with it yeah absolutely uh in the meantime we’re going to move on into chunk mail we’ve got plenty to read this week because this is our chunk mail

Dispenser episode so I’m going to start with this first one if you’d like to email the show at this point you’re probably going to get your email red in the new year but keep them short and sweet and we’ll be picking some out of the mail bag fairly shortly the email

Address is spawn chunk [email protected] send them in uh the first one comes in from Shadow falling this week Shadow falling is a landscape artist member of our Patron Discord and the subject is a desolate landscape hi Johnny and Joel with the recent updates to Minecraft underground in terms of structures I’ve

Been wondering if the surface of the world is beginning to feel disproportionately desolate ancient cities trial Chambers strongholds and abandoned Min shafts are all large sprawling structures that suggest the presence of a bustling and thriving civilization the surface however gives the impression of a much more sparsely developed world do you think the

Overworld structures need to be reworked to match the development of underground ones I think more surface ruins of larger structures like towns and cities would fit in well Shadow falling fell off the edge of the world looking for a long-lost civilization so while I can follow Shadow fallings line of thinking here I

Think the Overworld is sparsely populated with large structures on purpose it’s got some life in villages but they’re low profile Piller o posts are not a really big build and there’s a few other key structures like jungle temples and desert temples and stuff like that but I think it’s meant to feel

Like a blank canvas to encourage imagination and reinforce sbox gameplay like I think players are going to are wanting to be encouraged to build the things that shadow falling is talking about find in the world and I think there’s that line between if you were playing an RPG

You know like an Elden ring or or a Zelda or whatever you’d want to find these ruins around like You’ absolutely want to stumble upon that kind of stuff but I think that in in Minecraft having things like the trail ruins exist but you only get to see the top of them and

Then you have to dig them out the cool thing is that if you are not interested in trail ruins then you really are not going to have them be something that impedes you know your vision you know I think ultimately players would have to remove things like this if they didn’t want

Them like if I found the perfect spot for a modern city and there was a giant ruin of a castle that Minecraft had generated in this perfect kind of waterfall area that I wanted to use as a modern city or a Sci-Fi build or something I would just have to remove it

And I think that that’s the opposite of what you know they want players to have as a as an emotional reaction to the world you want to you want to find something and go oh that’s really cool not man that’s in the way right like I think that’s two different complete you

Know completely different moves when it comes to that kind of stuff and why it can still happen but removing something like a jungle temple or a Piller Outpost doesn’t take very long right like they’re not overly large builds and you if you really are you know feeling like

It’s in the way then you can get rid of it I mean even less so with with a trail ruin like if you don’t need to dig like down into the ground you can just chop the top off of it or you know pave over it with whatever you whatever block you

Want and forget it’s there you know and there just no harm no foul right um I think that they could use a little bit of an update though because you know when you stumble upon a jungle temple or desert temple um granted we’ve got archaeology now in the in the desert temple so

There’s been some changes there but I I feel like uh in some cases more so the jungle temple really could use some updates you know like I feel like that could have a different block pet a combination of some of the newer blocks and some of the different things that

Have been introduced to Minecraft over the years to make it feel like a little bit more of a cool Discovery I’m not saying make it bigger I’m just saying maybe make it more complex or maybe have a variety of them available uh in the same way that we have a variety of of

Available Trail ruins and other structures in the game um there are big structures like Woodland Mansions are big but they’re quite rare like like thousands of blocks apart it’s not like they’re everywhere and the next biggest structure that came to mind in the Overworld is the ocean Monument but

They’re underwater yeah so it’s unlikely that they’re going to be you know in the way of of what you’re doing um and chances are you’re actually wanting to find an ocean Monument not the other way around yeah yeah definitely and there are some folks who play there’s a lot of

Different play styles that work here like there are there are people who decide to take over a structure like that and turn it into their base which if they don’t feel like doing a lot of building or if they want to do like a effectively a renovation project or

Something like that they can do that but a lot players I find don’t tend to think of pre-existing structures as oh here’s a fun jumping off point to start building from like some players want to get rid of that blank canvas feeling that you get by looking at a planes biome but most

People you know if you start a fresh Minecraft world or if you start a world where you’re building something else the thematically you start a new project in the same world you’ve got a theme in mind already and that’s not necessarily going to match where where the the Minecraft build style goes

You know if you want to build something sci-fi you know having a woodland Mansion there is not going to help there’s nothing in Minecraft that encourages you to build outside of that sort of uh fantasy medieval sort of style um and existing surface structures never really match the scale of what I

Want to do either like if I’m building a desert civilization after I’m done building something like that the desert pyramids are going to be relatively small structures by comparison because I will want to build something much larger or a much larger settlement around it um and so yeah I find that stuff like

Jungle temples and and those structures don’t necessarily match the scale of what I want to do we’ve had a couple of Patron Hangouts where somebody in our community and I forget who so apologies to them uh has been taking the Pillager Outpost towers and effectively making them pillars and and watchtowers around

A wall for a much larger castle and that’s an example of where you can take those structures as a jumping off point and use them as inspiration but I don’t think they’re doing that at the the actual site of a Pillager Outpost because then you just have pillagers spawning around your base

All of the time and you probably don’t want that um and I find that when Python and I did the harmony series back in the day we had a a mod or two in there that included a bunch of additional surface structures and features we ended up

Building in a place that had none of those because we wanted to build something from scratch and I feel like sometimes additional builds like that I mean if they’re ruins fair enough they’re not necessarily going to feel intimidating in terms of what you can build but larger structures in general

Often take the wind out of your sales as a builder because you’re trying to measure up to stuff that’s already out there in the world and that’s often my problem with with modded Minecraft when it adds those structures is okay now I feel like whatever I want to build has to exist in

A world where all of this other stuff exists as well instead of the blank canvas feeling the sort of lonely but hopeful starting out of a fresh Minecraft world is is sort of at stake when they if they decide to include more structures as part of the surface in the

Overworld that’s why I think the the underground especially with 64 additional layers to it now has been such a great place for them to add new content is because it’s tucked away and you don’t know about it and so you don’t have to look at it all of the time or

Take it down um to your point to about removing structures as well we often underestimate quite how many blocks are in a larger structure even the ones that we look at and go wow a a woodland Mansion is huge I’ve taken down a couple of piglin bastions block for Block I’ve

Done ocean Monument Guardian Farms where I tear down the entire Monument it’s a huge amount of blocks it takes a lot of time to erase and it also requires a lot of storage if you’re planning on keeping the materials and not just letting them despawn so it’s an Endeavor and if that happens

To be like a larger settlement on the surface that you think oh I could just if I just tore down this entire thing if this didn’t exist then this would be the perfect place to build it’s either going to add to your workload or it’s going to

Maybe put you off building there at all which is not what the game wants to do I remember when I took down only part of our ocean Monument to build the guardian farm and I found myself laughing and thinking like in the process of removing the top of this and

Clearing out the water and shaping this place and taking out the pillars uh I you don’t need a prismarine farm anymore I I don’t need a prismarine farm anymore now that was back when like I was building at much smaller scales and now that I know the scope of the things that

I’m I’m capable of in Minecraft it’s like okay well I’m glad I have the farm in case I ever need it and and um if nothing else sea lanterns were a big a big thing that everybody wanted on the server anyway so it was more than just

Me but yeah like I I do find that you do underestimate the amount of blocks that you would have to remove I’d be curious to see how many you know blocks of cobblestone are in a jungle temple it’s it’s probably a lot more than I I think

Because they don’t use any or not many stairs like it’s mostly solid blocks in the shape of the outside of it like it’s very chunky and uh and be curious to see what that would that would have I’ve seen some mods where they’ve added various jungle temple you know like very

Mayan pyramid inspired stuff like there’s a giant pyramid in the jungle and things like that and and I think it’s neat from a gameplay perspective if you’re going on like the I want to have more of an adventure map experience where I find this thing and then I have

Like several rooms potential loot uh Mob challenges Darkness all that kind of stuff happening within it and that’s kind of cool um but I often look at that kind of thing and think well maybe from a creative standpoint point because I’m a builder like I either think like well

One I’d want to make that better and cool that’s a project like you can augment it and kind of make it your own or are you just like well I want to make it better and I would rather have a blank canvas to do that and that’s kind

Of where I go I go back and forth on this but either way like it’s interesting that we don’t even really get anything low-lying like um I think there is a village that’s supposed to be like a ruined Village but I’ve I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one in game

Outside of like screenshots and stuff I’ve never come across one myself they are um they’re variants of existing Villages so you can find them in a few different village types and it’s just a small chance for it to be abandoned and what that does is remove a few of the

Blocks of the village structures at random and replace some of them with cobwebs and then all of the village population are zombie villagers most of which burn in the sun trying to get to you when you show up uh assuming you show up during the day but yeah like

It’s effectively a variant of an existing Village rather than a set of structures in its own right there’s no difference in design between the normal village houses and what you get from an abandoned Village I’m curious as to whether there could be more happening uh obviously we

Don’t have a lot of underground biomes right now I mean there’s several more than there used to be but it would be interesting if you’d have something on the surface I’m going to use ston Hedges just like an example because it’s just what’s at the top of my head but

Something unique in minecrafty that could indicate oh there’s a dripstone cave down here or oh there’s a new kind of thing down below you should look here and then players could either keep it they could um make their own story around it but have it be something a

Little bit more um like a like a landscape feature as opposed to like a structure you know yeah or just like in in a lot of cases and this is something you might be able to speak to things like ancient Roman walls across you know Europe and just there’s just these

Natural stone walls that have just been decayed over you know a thousand years and having that kind of stuff in little bits in Minecraft could be interesting you know like just and again it’s more of a a prompt rather than um a huge finished structure that then has to be

Dealt with by the player yeah yeah something a bit more like you know the ruins of an Old Fort but the walls are only like waist high kind of thing so there the the footprint of a structure but not any kind of um you know established building guide for you or I

Like that you know potentially yeah yeah I think uh I I I think there would if they implemented something like that in the game now there would probably honestly be a backlash to the minimal amount of effort that it was perceived that had been put into it because they

Were like they’ve added a new structure and they’ve just given us a bunch of stone blocks but I think if you’re trying to emulate something like a ruined civilization that is long gone then that’s one way of doing it I suppose our next email comes in from

Soupi EST metal ice spikes or custom trees hi Johnny and Joel I’ve been listening to the podcast for two years now and love to listen while I mine for diamonds or mow the lawn I have a quick question for you in a server with

Friends I set up a castle as a base near it is a lake with ice bikes and cherry trees in the distance I needed a project so I decided to make a town around it with a little inspiration from West the castle in town don’t fit in with the

Nearby lake or biomes is it better to try and incorporate the natural terrain into my build somehow or should I cover it with custom terrain suest metal quit his first Minecraft world after seeing sugarcane thinking it was an exploding green thing his brother had told him about th those stacks of green Dynamite

That I’ve been warned about that’s pretty funny and I also like the implication that mining for diamonds and mowing the lawn are either both things you do in Minecraft or both things you do in the real world yeah yeah yeah I was I was the the

Lawn mower when I was a kid that was one of my household chores when I back when I lived with my parents you see I was I was the Diamond miner in our household uh yeah so but I I understand the struggle to find something to listen

Listen to like when you’re a teenager and you’ve got to take like even if it’s only 45 minutes like it feels like an eternity when you want to do other stuff oh yeah and try and get get through the chore like to have something to listen

To is is great but uh I hope you’re protecting your ears I hope you don’t have to crank us to to hear hear us over the lawnmower yeah yeah noise cancelling headphones maybe I I do that I listen to stuff when I mow the lawn now oh totally

Yeah for me it was music for me it was always like you know whatever music was in at the time I there was no podcasts back then unfortunately man do I wish there was um to me it sounds like cherry trees and Ice bikes are what

Drew you to the area in the first place so I’m going to lean into that and obviously this is just subjective but this is the kind of how I would probably approach this and this is without not knowing the biome that the lake is actually in so I’m going to guess just

From mine Minecraft kind of Statistics it’s probably something like a Plains maybe a forest something similar you might have a flower forest in there um but rather than doing completely custom terrain uh which is timec consuming and labor intensive so if you’re into that then like maybe go for it but if you’re

Looking to maybe approach it in a step-by-step basis one of the things you could do is is depending on the distance that the Cherry Grove is from your town you can maybe take some of the cherry trees and start to pull them into the other biomes so a Cherry Grove is really

Not terribly different from a plains biome outside of the cherry trees and some of the pink Petals in the ground so you could do that but with a little bit more of a sparse you know spread on the cherry trees and the cherry blossoms or the pink petals rather and that could

Help kind of blend you know the area and kind of make it look like well maybe this Plains gradually turns into the Cherry Grove and that could also you know tie things together nicely uh I think that you could also connect your town to the ice bikes and

Cherry Groves with a road and similar to what I was talking about earlier with you know RPGs they do this all the time where you can control the players’s kind of point of view by having a castle reveal when you walk around a Bend you know maybe

There’s a giant tree in your way until you get around the tree then you say oh wow there’s this really pretty Vista and maybe that’s just a cliff with a you know a valley or something and sometimes it’s a big build like a castle or a dungeon or something and you could do

Something similar if you connected the town with the reason why you built there in the first place and then as a player or a server mate would walk along that road you could add points of interest like maybe there’s a little um Vineyard or maybe there’s a little Cherry you

Know Pie Bakery or something that you could add there to kind of like bring in some sort of theme and then again you’re not doing the entire biome you’re just kind of building detail where you want players to look and where you don’t need players to look you can just kind of pepper

Around some pink petals maybe put an odd uh cherry tree um or depending on the distance again not knowing uh you could actually go and get some of the cherry blossom leaves and use those in the town as like either decoration maybe there’s wall Vines or anything that kind of

Would connect the two and that way when you’re looking at the Cherry Grove in the distance you can still see a little bit of pink happening in the town I think that might help them feel more uh in tune with one another yeah I think I think there are lots of approaches here

That don’t all necessarily involve terraforming um because the question really here is do I build something or do I terraform and I don’t know if covering it up is even the the the right approach really like I think I think like you said blending it makes a little

Bit more sense and I have seen a few instances in when I was picking out the seed for the survival guide this season in which Cherry Grove and packed ice spikes ended up close together and I think the two of them look really nice so I wouldn’t necessarily want to remove

Those from each other because I think they make quite a nice complimentary kind of like pastel color palette um so my my Approach Ro to this kind of problem would be to separate the town with some sort of hard boundary and take it in a slightly kind of more story

Focused direction or just sort of imagining in the fiction of the world why people set up the town there in the first place and do they have to battle against the elements if they are this close to a biome where there are large large ice spikes you know does does

There need to be a wall built around there as though the town has to Shield itself from from these wintry conditions maybe even go with like a a slightly more Game of Thrones inspired thing where you are you are staving off the Terrors of the Frozen north um

Alternatively they could use it as a resource you know do the people of the Town carve the ice and use that to keep ice boxes cold for long-term food storage if it’s a medieval settlement then they would have to have some way of keeping food fresh and you know that’s

That’s something that you can do in in real life big old chunks of ice you know um we even see evidence of that in Minecraft in the ice boxes that you find in ancient cities so there’s there’s some some Minecraft lead inspiration to be found there so potentially pick a

Couple of the big ice spikes build a scaffold of sorts around them and make it look like the town’s people are effectively carving chunks out of them and that could be a fun way of connecting it thematically with the area that you’re Building without really

Doing too much um the other thing I was considering was separating the ice spikes Cherry area and effectively treating that as a second project or a sub project where there are two kingdoms side by side and one has the medieval Lake Town aesthetic that you’ve worked

On so far and maybe the other one is a bit more Fantastical and they’re sort of you know rival kingdoms that happen to be near each other or something like that you could go in a a variety of different directions with it I think you also could give yourself license to

Consider making the builds there more of a collage instead of aiming for strict realism so if it doesn’t quite make sense that the medieval town is there then maybe take some steps outside of the medieval Town style you could take a road out to the Cherry Grove through

This ice spikes and it could be like a pilgrimage to a an East Asian inspired Mountaintop Monastery or Temple surrounded by the Cherry leaves falling um and you don’t necessarily have to stick to the same build style I’ve been using so far which gives you an opportunity to get creative with it and

Push the envelope a little our next email comes in from Joel S with the subject of non-gi crafting Clues hi pix and Joel other Joel here in episode 274 you were brainstorming ideas for conveying rightclick functionality to the player what if when your cursor is hovering over a nearby block a slot on

Your hot bar would get highlighted if the item in that slot has rightclick functionality with the block for example if you’re holding an ax in your hot bar it would be highlighted in some manner maybe the icon pulses anytime you hover over the game crosshairs over a waxed

Copper block or a log that could be stripped perhaps over time players would put two and two together what do you think the other Joel dropped his ax because it was pulsing too hard thankfully it didn’t kill him I think that’s a pretty elegant idea yeah like

It makes sense it’s um the kind of thing that I’ve seen this in I think games like stardy Valley will do this where if you can interact with something it will kind of the the the Sprite will sort of uh zoom in and out a little bit in the

Hot bar it’s kind of a difficult effect to explain but I suppose yeah pulsing is kind of the the right way of putting it where if you can use a tool on something it sort of holds your hand through it a little bit and I feel like

Maybe it’s the kind of thing that you could try and Fade Out over time like if you’re hovering over an axe an ax over a log and it goes oh okay you can use the the A on this log you can also maybe Intuit it from that that you could break

The log with an X as well and that’s the other problem right it’s like do does this confirm that the tool can be used to break the block or does it have another interaction then you have to sort of gauge what the game is trying to

Tell you and then after a while if it does it each time you kind of think yeah I know game like cool it so I I I sort of wonder if maybe it does that the first hand full of times and then once you’ve interacted with a block a few

More times the game realizes okay yeah you you understand that mechanic now we don’t need to keep signposting it to you anymore for me that’s what it would have to be or a slider that kind of turns tips on and off uh when it comes to that

Stuff because I think maybe I would find it a little distracting after a while if it was constantly like that that’s where my head went too was that if this is going to happen all the time it needs to be subtle but if it’s really subtle our player’s going to catch on

And there’s that kind of back and forth with people like me that play the game in a single world for years and years then you don’t like I know I know that I have to strip it with an axe like I don’t need it to be constantly reminding

Me so um I thought that you know one of the solutions there would be like similar to the first time that you pick up wood you get that toast in the top right hand corner that that says like now you can craft a bunch of things or

Um I know that there’s achievements in the game like the wax off advancement um sorry uh is uh in the husbandry section and that’s kind of like a a tip but I mean as someone that barely goes into the you know advancement section and I don’t know how often new players do it

So I I feel like relying on that is still not quite Forefront for new players so I think that you know having something that maybe animates once you know like I it’s like the first time that you build an axe if there was some sort of thing that Pro popped up you

Know and said like hey you can use an axe to chop wood and strip logs or just something to that effect uh I think would be great now again with popups and game like I’m I am guilty of this for sure especially when it’s a game that I feel like I should

Know how to play where I won’t read the popup because like we’re just so used to popups on browsers right we just dis them like just you know you just immediately get rid of them and you’re like oh was that important you know maybe maybe I should have read that that

Before I got rid of the thing that was popping up in in my face because we’re so used to that being advertising right and and so in Minecraft it’s it’s a difficult balance but I do like the idea of maybe something in the hot bar my brain goes to for anybody that’s

Familiar with the Mac OS platform one of the things that you can do with your Dock at the bottom or the side depending on where you put it is that when you roll over it they kind of enlarge like they kind of go up and and become larger

And in m is just a single box that like highlights your your hot bar and I’m one of the weird folks and and please chime in if you’re if you’re weird like me I don’t use the number Keys across the top of my keyboard to switch to different

Items on my hot bar I scroll with my mouse wheel I’ve just been become really good at judging the distance and like a single scroll I miss sometimes but I can go like two I can go three I can go five like I I can kind of move around really

Really quick and if if that was something that would be highlighted and popping out in in that way then that might be a way to indicate to players but I like your idea of there being a slider just like we can control the nausea effect and the effect of going

Through a nether portal uh if that became annoying or if it was distracting for players or too flashy you know people didn’t like it then being able to turn down the the the tool tips I guess maybe was what they could be called if you could either say like no I’m an

Experienced player and that again could be something in the settings that could be quite communicative which would be uh turn up the tool tips uh yes I’m new to Minecraft please turn up all the tips or no i’ I know what I’m doing don’t show

Me any tips and if that was like your sliding scale then I think that that would be quite clear like oh no no I’m new I should probably leave this on for a little while until I know where I’m at right yeah yeah I think I mean the game

Already has the advanced tool tips thing that you can toggle using an F3 short cut on Java Edition I think ultimately it would be about whether or not you could do this on Bedrock as well cuz you’d want it to be a crossplatform thing so that’s maybe a bad example but

Yeah like I I think it it makes sense to have it be something that people who’ve been playing this game for a decade at this point can say yeah I understand how that works other than that I find that a lot of people if they if they play anything

Like me I accidentally right click on logs relatively frequently when I’m building whether it’s cuz I want to block with a shield or I’m trying to do something else and I didn’t realize I had my axe in my hand at the time so I think a lot of people discover mechanics

Like stripping logs entirely by accident and I think that’s not necessarily a bad way of them understanding it because then if it’s an accident if it’s a mistake then it sticks in your brain more than it would something that you were told at one point maybe like if

It’s something that you can learn by doing even if you feel like you’re doing it wrong at the time then maybe that’s something that you you retain and then you experiment with later you think can I strip all of the other types of logs

Like this as well what if I do that with a piece of bamboo does that work okay it doesn’t what if I do it with a block of bamboo it does so yeah you can kind of piece stuff together that way yourself it would be really interesting to see if

Any of the folks who do completely unspoiled Minecraft Let’s Plays like Pito or whoever had discovered the uh strip log mechanic and and how they discovered it in the course of their gameplay because yeah that that’s the thing I’m I’m kind of curious about is how people already get that stuff

Signposted to them in ways that we don’t necessarily think about because of how long we’ve been playing the game do you get the recipe for a hanging sign before you get stripped logs like if you get a chain do you get a recipe for a hanging sign that says

You need chains and strip logs even if you haven’t discovered strip logs yet I don’t know I want to say maybe but I don’t know for certain what the trigger is for the recipe popping up for the first time um yeah that’s an interesting one I’d have to actually try that in a

Fresh world to give you a definitive answer and I’m not sure it’s going to be particularly easy to like look up on the wiki right now or anything but uh yeah I I expect it’d be one or the other but if you think about it there aren’t that

Many uses for chains so I think maybe it would show up as a crafting recipe when you got chains but there also aren’t that many things that require stripped logs either so it could be an either or thing or it could be that it requires just you know strip logs because that’s

The the largest amount of material involved in producing a hanging sign you definitely need those yeah my memory of this is from a snapshot so this could have changed but I’m pretty sure that I like as you know someone that does this show I knew that it was going to be

Stripped logs and chains going into the snapshot and I grabbed some logs and stripped them and then couldn’t get the rest recipe to come up and I think I was then stuck looking for iron forever because I I could I couldn’t make the recipe without both but again that was a

Snapshot so like I I don’t I don’t know if that’s true but our last email comes in from Rush C more ancient mobs in Minecraft hi Joel and Johnny trails and tals focused heavily on the ancient past of Minecraft with pots and pottery shirs Trail ruins new plants and the sniffer I think

Minecraft has a lot of potential in this area it would be nice if Mojang added more ancient mobs or biomes to Minecraft maybe a pink dinosaures creature or a Cherry Grove related sniffer or a new mob in Lush caves possibly an ice caves biome with arctic themed creatures

Something in oceans and maybe some new fossil-like items or plants to go along with them what do you guys think maybe you could think of other ideas I would love to hear your opinions I’ve been listening to the Spong chunks for a few months you guys are so Technical and so

Easy to understand keep up the awesome work well thanks very much for the compliment that’s nice to know that we’re clearly communicating all of our ideas because man the longer we do this show the more there is to remember yeah and and as you just found out like

There’s also more to forget in terms of the details yes but I feel like you and I even if we don’t have the answers we can usually like ask the right question to then find out later you know to for prompting maybe listeners to be like I

Don’t know maybe let’s go test to see if that hanging sign thing works and maybe that’s how you discover you know how to strip a log with with axe in in Minecraft the uh the answer is always to test it yourself I find yeah well that’s

Fair yeah that’s uh that’s my my my usual response to anybody who’s like hey doesn’t it work this way I’m like try it and find out and report back to me when you do because that’s how I learn sometimes too so I mean obviously uh Rush is

Getting a fair amount out of uh trails and tales what what do you think would be a cool way to add more ancient mobs into Minecraft see here’s the thing I’m in two minds about this because I think about the ancient world in our world and

I get plenty of examples from that like like I like the idea of something being out there Frozen in the ice in a frozen ocean biome or something I think of the the opening scene from Avatar the Last air bender where they discover Ang the Avatar just Frozen in an iceberg in the

Middle of an ocean and like that makes makes a ton of sense to me as a mechanic for finding stuff in Minecraft because it can just sit there until you go to a giant Iceberg where something is in there and it’s like you know the egg of

A woolly mammoth or something like that I know everything in Minecraft comes from eggs so eggs mammoths not normally the way that works but you know whether it’s a a big kind of mob that’s frozen in there and you can free it in a Megalodon sort of way uh or if it’s you

Know something else that you find in a similar way I like discovering the sniffer I think despite the fact that people will complain it doesn’t do a whole lot I think it has bags of personality and quite an interesting way of reintroducing it to the ecosystem

That feels like you’re doing a good deed by bringing this mob back from the past so I think that makes a lot of sense but where I feel the game is lacking in history at least the history that the world itself can convey to you is in

Dimensions like the end and we talk about the end in terms of it feeling Baron and needing more life out there but I would love the idea of them approaching an end themed update from the perspective of trying to tell more of a story about why the end is the way

It is is the dragon protecting it because it contains wonders or because the dragon has brought ruin on the dimension and are there reasons that the Ender are you know launching ships from these cities are they leaving are they just exploring are they trying to find something that was lost out there we

Know so little about it as a place and they brought history to the nether with the nether update which already you know the nether had Nether fortresses at that stage but the piglin bastions are ruined structures so you naturally get a sense that they were a civilization at one

Point you even find ancient debris there and that’s the stuff that has fallen away into the past and they are no longer the great civilization they perhaps once were so what does that look like for the end and its inhabitants if they want to unpack that mystery a

Little bit or give the player a little bit more you know fuel to the uh the theoretical fire I would really love them to approach the history of Minecraft in that way using the end Dimension as a conduit for that rather than relying solely on the Overworld

Because it feels closest to our own world it’s yeah that you’d certainly have a lot of freedom in terms of whatever ancient mobs or ancient history that you would create because of course the entire thing is just completely fantasy and yeah that that would be kind of like

A blank slate for whatever you’d want to want to make in the same way that I guess the nether sort of is I mean The Strider is wonderful and weird and and uh I mean I could honestly even see the Strider despite the fact that it walks

Around in lava but I could see The Strider being quite at home in the end in terms of like the color palette and the weirdness of It kind of looks like an Enderman but with no arms like that kind of a Vibe so yeah that’s that’s an

Interesting take uh I went more literal with this I I was thinking more um just mobs that you would encounter in the Overworld as a player and I don’t know like how strict Minecraft wants to be about like adding purely fantasy stuff like the sniffer obviously completely made up for Minecraft you

Know but what if there were other ways to bring in different cultures from around the world uh different fantasy creatures I mean obviously there’s a dragon in the game but you don’t see that in the overw world but I was thinking something along the lines of

Maybe like a Bigfoot don’t call it that but have it be kind of you know Bigfoot inspired and have that a crypted of some kind basically yeah that’s a great way to you know less frequently seen and um I feel like the warden is probably the closest thing that falls into that

Crypted category of like you you maybe want to wake it up kind of thing and I think that there could be a lot of fun and character and Whimsy and that kind of stuff uh I’ve recently seen a trailer for a movie called if which is a new family film about imaginary

Friends directed by John krinski and there’s a large purple furry character voiced by Steve Carell uh and that is kind of what I think of when I think about like a Bigfoot or a Yeti like I’m not thinking about something that looks like a giant gorilla I mean like really

Whimsical kind of Miyazaki type inspired thing where it looks imposing but then it acts like a child and maybe it’s really friendly and maybe it brings you things or maybe you can give it blocks and it eats them and then gives you something back that’s a new building

Block like it polishes things for you or um leads you to a new mineral or a new item or interactive thing in the game I just it could be really fun to have that kind of almost like a spirit of the forest kind of vibe to

Something and I think one of the reasons why I’m just going with that big characters like that tends to be the kind of thing that I like in in character designs I like the big lumics like the big lovable o you know Sully from Monsters Inc absolutely yeah kind

Of stuff you know that’s kind of where I’m drawn I always want I like the big characters that are like this weird kind of like they’re really physically imposing uh but then they’re also very sweet like um Ludo from Labyrinth samea yeah yeah yeah and and I think that that

Could be really fun but I mean the challenge there is that big mobs like that take up space in Minecraft and you get to you know they get to watch for bumping into trees and getting their pathing and all that kind of stuff done but that’s kind of where my mind went um

And then in the same way that you went to the end and we’re and we’re thinking about like how free and and and imaginary that could be I was thinking that if it was a ocean mob that was a madeup animal like not like a real real

World ocean mob U but something that was just completely new that could be also pretty freeing as well because things like uh Avatar uh way of water I think was the second one like the kind of things that they did there where yeah sort of looks like a horse but it sort

Of looks like a dolphin but it works like a seahorse like all the different things that they kind of weave into the um not it’s not na’vi or the name of the people Pandora is the name of the planet so the the pandoran like biology and everything kind of looks unique but you

Can sort of see the the the DNA of the planet and everything and it would be really interesting to see if you know you look at the sniffer and maybe they come up with something completely new like different shape different function all that kind of stuff but if there’s

Some sort of like oh I can sort of see like the the way that the like the sniffer kind of looks like that kind of vibe in this new thing it would be interesting if they kind of tied it to that kind of biology so rather than going completely fantasy they kind of

Make up their own you know biological history of of the Minecraft world and give players hints to that and and again not in a way where it’s laid out maybe block for Block but in a way that could Inspire players to be like oh wow okay

These sort of look alike I wonder what if I made you know a a sniffer new sea creature Sanctuary or maybe I come up with something completely in between like that kind of stuff I think is really really interesting and I certainly think that they would have

More luck and more fun with completely made up stuff rather than just you know adding new Mobs like the armadillo is fine but I I think that I get really excited about things like the sniffer uh the laay like that kind of flavor to Minecraft is kind of where I just think

Oh yeah oh this is really fun I think in terms of History it seems more likely that they are going to explore the history of the Minecraft world as its own thing rather than try to use Minecraft to explore our own world’s history they do that in much more

Abstract ways as we’ll hear in the January 1st show with arop plays but I think the mobs that they’ve added that are real world animals are obviously a an opportunity to learn more about that animal from our world but they don’t do the same thing with real world landmarks

Or real world historical events or anything like that because I think a lot of those things deserve to be more abstract and Minecraft has developed a kind of Mythos of its own when it comes to the history of the world and what we presume has happened or you know

Anything that lends itself to a story within Minecraft so I do think it makes sense for them to continue to pursue that angle whether it’s through structures or through mobs it makes sense to Plum the depths of Minecraft as an original space instead of worrying too much about it being connected to

Real world history so I I totally agree with you I think you know the Cryptids the ancient cities stuff like that are an effective way of telling a story that feels unique to Minecraft and learning more about the world’s ancient history without it being linked so specifically

To our own ancient history um that is where we’re going to leave this episode of the spawn chunks we have one more email that we will tackle in the render distance that comes in from another Patron so stay tuned for that if you’re a patron and if you aren’t you will have

Some information shortly about where you can sign up to be1 if you’re interested but in the meantime you can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today at the spawn chunks. comom the music for the show is composed by me

And the spawn chunks is proud to be a listener supported podcast if you’re getting some value out of the show why not consider putting some value back in you can visit patreon.com thees spawn chunks to join our community we’re pledging at any level we’ll get you an

Invite to our patrons only Discord chat you can listen to the show live when we record it every Monday once we’re back into our regular recording schedule after the holidays and we have our monthly Minecraft audio hangout that’s going to resume in January so we can

Take a look at what everybody else has been up to in Minecraft that month we currently have 329 patrons which is down one from last week There’s plenty of room for more people to jump on board and special thanks go out to our content engineer patrons Hunter 555 jumbo sale

Mind trip media party voyage and yets thank you all for your support on this episode sharing the podcast with your friends is the easiest way to support the show you can find us on social media at the spawn chunks and a personal recommendation is by far the best way to

Share the podcast just tell a friend about the show and let them know that they can listen on iTunes Spotify Google podcasts and even YouTube be sure to leave a rating and a review on your favorite platform you can email the show at Spong chunk [email protected] the RSS

Feed is linked at the spun.com and the patron only RSS feed is on the patreon page that’s where you can listen to the render distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online I go by pixor riffs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixel riffs

Where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I stream 3 days a week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for the Apple mentioned YouTube series probably going to be taking some sensible breaks over the holidays but stay tuned for more on that

Schedule and in the meantime I’m the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which is concluding with season 9 of hermitcraft but we’ll be back for season 10 you can find us through a quick YouTube search aside from that I’m at pixars on social media Joel where can people find you online everything that

I’m doing online can be found at Joel du.com including a link to the cital cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment there’s a new episode out with myself and Stephen ESC right now I’m Joel Dugen on social media and Joel Dugen on Twitch where I stream

At least three days a week but as pix mentioned also taking some uh breaks over the holidays I would say probably experimenting with some other games as well I I do stick to satisfactory in Minecraft mostly these days and over the holidays I like to try and throw in some

Fun new games maybe some Indies just to kind of kind of go with the potential inconsistency of the twitch schedule as we’re all visiting family thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite happy Holidays