EPIC Minecraft Podcast 277: Insane Chunk Mail Stocking Stuffers!

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 277 recorded December 20th but shared with everybody on Monday December 25th 2023 Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate my name is Johnny but the internet knows me as pixel Rifts and joining me as always is a Holly Jolly

Joel Dugen hi Joel oh I’m Holly and I’m jolly and if I never hear Mariah KY again for the next 12 months it’ll be too soon uh but uh which is funny because I used to really like that song and now social media has just ended it

Just ruined it for you yeah yeah yeah unfortunately but uh speaking of social media if you are interested in the some of the things that Johnny and I have been consuming on YouTube or Tik Tok things about music then you might want to check out the render distance that’s

The extended version of the podcast that we record every week for our patrons you can get access at patreon.com thepunch chunks it’s usually a good 20 to 40 minutes of extra content every week and uh we really really appreciate the support of our patrons that allow us to

Do that uh this is the last live episode of 2023 so a huge shout out and thank you to our patrons to have continued to support the spawn trunks throughout the year both Johnny and I really really appreciate it this is going to be a chunk meal dispenser episode again

Dipping into the uh extra stocking stuffer full of email that we get so we’ll be exploring some email this week that’s brought to you by patrons because that was an lock we had a long long time ago uh the monthly Minecraft hangout that normally happens at the end of the

Month will not be happening in December because Christmas is on a weekend this year and uh we will look forward to a beefier January Minecraft Hangout to make up for the time and the quarterly hangout will also happen in January we’ll announce the date a little bit

Later on uh we have to wait for some of the data on the episodes and the downloads to come in for those that don’t know if you’re new to the podcast uh every 3 months we sit down with their patrons and run over the downloads the performance the YouTube numbers all that

Kind of stuff just to kind of see how the podcast is progressing and that’s called the quarterly hangout and that’s available to our patrons as well so lots of benefits to become a patron over at patreon.com thepot Chucks we talked a little bit even in the pre-show today

Just about our overall impressions of how 2023 has been and we decided it’s been a good year for the podcast overall and it’s been a good year for both of us in Minecraft in general uh but given that we last recorded on Monday and recording this the following Wednesday I

Imagine you haven’t really dipped much into Minecraft uh in the last couple of days Joel but is there anything new in your Minecraft life there’s not much happening obviously on the Citadel I’ve been behind the scenes like looking up uh data packs and and different mods trying to explore mods for potentially adding

Some furniture and things and uh just trying to think about the future a little bit you know looking at um hopefully something that’s going to be a solution for everything like we’d like to have some tables and chairs for the modern city as well as the kind of

Medieval style in Minecraft and it’s tough because I find a lot of mod packs or uh data packs tend to add a lot of things that you don’t necessarily need you know like hey it’s a Furniture pack but then like it also has like blenders and you know stoves and things and we’re

Trying not to over complicate Minecraft on the sigal and we want to maintain that vanilla Vibe as best we can and so I’m actually looking into and leaning towards developing my own mod or at least being able to write a data pack more complicated than just a recipe fix cuz uh the

Construction.com The Citadel to craft wood products in the stone cutter as just a simple way it works pretty much the exact same way as putting a a stone block in there except where you just get you know Wood Products out and it just makes for a faster more economic way to

Craft stuff when you’re building huge towns that require lots and lots of stairs to make roofs and all that kind of stuff it just makes a little bit more sense so those are easy but anything more complicated than that and I find that I’m relying on other people um I

Want to give a huge shout out and thanks to some folks that have either dm’d me on Discord or written to me via email to express uh the interest in helping uh and and pointing me in the right direction I’m sorry I haven’t replied yet it’s just been a very busy week

Prepping for the holidays uh but that’s kind of what I’m looking at right now in in Minecraft it’s more about a behind the scenes focus and trying to figure out a solid plan to put a pin in in west and be happy with it and be happy with

It in a way where we can move forward without having to revisit like every six months because the data pack or the mod has changed or hasn’t updated and therefore it doesn’t work I don’t want all of this work in westel to be something where if someone goes to

Revisit I have to have this giant asteris saying like well it used to look like this but now it looks like this because this that or the other thing that we had in the game has gone away or doesn’t work anymore mhm yeah that’s uh

One of the reasons that I stay away from modded Minecraft in general at least for like my rolling long-term worlds like Survival Guide is because I I worry about these incremental updates especially now now that they’ve been doing those more and more frequently just kind of you know everything having

To be updated so regularly and not wanting to lag behind any potential updates um especially just the small stuff like laay duplication for example like being able to double down on the amount of Ls that you have and and and clone them from a single La such a

Useful feature and that ended up arriving in a situation where on Empires we couldn’t update because we had all of these mods that were fixed on a a set version and weren’t going to be able to update for a while even some custom mods that were written for us by members of

The community and people we were working with so it’s kind of yeah it’s a double-edged sword moded like it allows you to add so much stuff that you think okay I could really use that in Minecraft right now but it just adds to the long-term upkeep of a world that

Sometimes happens in ways you don’t want I would say that modded Minecraft does lend itself more to Worlds or playing experiences that reset more frequently I’m not saying you have to do it every few months but like more than every six years which is what the the

Citadel is going to be seven in 2024 and and I think that that’s definitely one of the frustrations but that’s something else that I think about when I when I look at these mods or data packs that I may want to implement uh or at least the

Ones I want to keep I think about like well what’s the easiest way to do this thinking uh Forward Thinking in a way that will allow me to move forward easily sometimes data packs it’s just a matter of changing the version number because the underlying mechanics in the

Game haven’t changed it’s just that they do update the uh resource pack version the data pack version is now 27 like that kind of stuff and and those are easy fixes it’s just timec consuming and so if you’ve got a dozen data packs and then the version number changes from3

To4 to5 over the course of three weeks you kind of just learn to let the dust settle before you update the version number on everything because it’s it’s a very simple and easy thing to do in a text file but when you have to do it a

Dozen or two dozen times over and you have to do that three times in a row because they keep on updating you’re like okay I’m I’m getting kind of tired of this guys you know like you just have to wait until things are seemingly moving forward at a at a regular pace

And they’re going back to snapshots and not like um dot releases and and hot fixes and things yeah and speaking of snapshots I’m going to save what I’ve been doing in the last couple of days for after our news read because uh as we covered on Monday’s show last Monday uh

Trying to think of this as as next Monday’s show um there was a b snapshot added to the a snapshot that we got for week 51 of the year so snapshot 23 w51 a was released basically as we recorded the December 18th show and we got a B snapshot shortly afterwards um actually

Same day so one was in the morning and another one just uh arrived with a crash fix in the afternoon but that meant that the armadillo and wolf armor and yeah the the associated set of features for those were announced and I got to play around with those a little bit uh we

Will also cover the fact that the technical changes in 23w 51a included an update to data pack version 27 this added a generic scale attribute that can be used to rescale any living entity which does include players player reach distance can now be controlled with a generic block interaction range and

Generic entity interaction range attributes and the maximum number of blocks an entity can step up without jumping is now controlled by the generic step height attribute so that sounds like a lot of customization for maps and other things a couple of parameters that you might want to play around with if

You’re trying to do some more creative stuff even in your survival worlds thinking back to what we did on Empires season 2 where we would have you know funny effects that would grow and Shrink players to certain extents and that is now possible through vanilla commands or

Attributes instead of us having to mod it in using the custom entity models mod that we were using on Empires the block interaction range uh does sound a little bit like the functionality that was intended for the Crab Claw but obviously is locked behind commands right now

There isn’t any kind of stuff associated with it but for players who thought that sounded like an interesting mechanic it’s in the back end of the game now so it is possible for players to mess around with a little bit of that stuff and I didn’t touch on that I went into

The survival features but before we look back around to my experience with armadillos and wolves gel did you have any takeaways from the uh the technical side of this B snapshot so I once again watched Exuma void’s video on it we’ll have a link in the show notes and I I know I’ve

Mentioned X’s content uh recently but the it’s so good and covers all of these like little things that you sometimes miss when you quickly read over notes and go oh yeah they added the armadillo to Java but then you’ve remember that wait a minute Java’s got some different

Stuff behind the wheel than Bedrock so there might have been some other changes than there were and I thought that the block interaction range was really interesting as well as the uh generic scale and it’s a hilarious video you really have to watch to see like giant

Sea turtles and a giant villager and I if you’ve ever seen um the the the universal animation the monsters one with like the the sea monster and the giant um the giant I think it was a bee or a hamster or something something like that like and or if you’ve ever seen

Ant-Man get large and he gets like really deep voice and he kind of feels very slow and lumbering like just the imag like the imagination behind a 40 block tall villager and the honk noise instead of being a regular honk noise if somebody also puts a data pack or a

Resource pack in there where the honk noise is like slowed down super deep you know like just it’s wild when you think about the bizarre things that you could do and for a little while we had a data pack on the server just for fun where the longer you didn’t sleep the larger

The Phantoms would appear and so it was kind of a fun game to see like could you get a phantom the size of an airplane and yeah you could if you didn’t sleep for long enough uh then you can get them to come in really really quite large

Which was fun because the hitbox increased as well so it made them a lot easier to shoot if you were having trouble kind of you know dealing with them um ultimately we just removed it because I mean it was a fun fad but it didn’t last but I like the idea of that

Kind of interaction for any kind of fun things uh accessible in vanilla commands and data packs I also like the idea of a block range thing and that just reminded me of be the amount of satisfactory that I’ve been playing lately and just the difference in building in that game

Versus Minecraft now you it’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges you know satisfactory is a Sci-Fi game they have like inflatable pocket dimensions and so having a longer reach with like a laser pointer makes a lot more sense right but it just increases the speed at which you can be creative in

Satisfactory and I think it’s it’s really interesting to think about maybe people that don’t have a lot of time in Minecraft are just so tired of like having to jump up three blocks to decorate the ceiling of their house and if they could just have that extra reach

Then they could do it a lot faster and they’re not tweaking anything else they’re just like I just want to reach three or four blocks instead of you know or five or six blocks instead of three or four whatever that happens to be uh I’m sure you and I have both been in

Situations where you’re doing texturing on a wall That’s 40 blocks high and you’re really wish you didn’t have to scaffolding up and do all that kind of stuff and that to me is is really interesting and I was thinking about it from also an accessibility standpoint in

That lately because of all the river work that I’ve been doing on the Citadel I get kind of motion sick with the up and down of the swimming I find that side to side of Minecraft doesn’t bug me too much but the the floating around and the constantly having to tap the space

Bar as you kind of like floating around uh in the river and doing some underwater landscaping and stuff uh really kind of keeps my Minecraft set sessions short and another thing that drives me nuts is that when you come out of the river you’re nowhere is near any

Kind of stair or path so you’re constantly jumping up the one block kind of staircase up the riverbank yeah and one of the things that was in the Exuma Void video was changing the default step up to one block instead of half block so default is 0. five which is slaps right

Yeah and then the generic step height attribute can be changed to 1 three five I mean five is kind of silly but one block if you were someone that got motion sick really easy if you were someone that had motor control skills and you had a lot of trouble like

Jumping and stuff in Minecraft and it was just easier to constantly walk up a single block without having to jump all the time than you could just turn that on and then your Minecraft experience is going to be just a little bit different than everybody else but if it means that

You can move around easier and enjoy the game more great you know and I think the these kind of changes are are really cool to see yeah yeah it’s effectively turning the player into like a horse or something because horses can can do that and that’s one of the advantages of

Having them to ride over large Landscapes is you can do that without stopping or jumping or whatever so yeah I think it’s it’s neat that you can do that you can also maybe apply that on the back end in let’s say an adventure map setting which is something we were

Talking about in the previous episode um you can apply that to like if you’re wearing a certain set of boots you get like boots of long striding or whatever and then suddenly you can jump up a too high block and you know if if you add in some stuff that modifies the attributes

On the Fly then you can do some really creative stuff thinking about the block interaction range imagining something along the lines of the world border modifying Maps like captive Minecraft by the farlanders group where you can um you have a world border that expands allowing you access to more and more

Terrain with additional advancements that you earn and so every advancement that you get builds Out The World Slightly more so that you can interact with stuff further a field and they use that to control what you have access to imagining something where you can level

Up your player so that now that they get additional reach or additional range at which they can interact with animals you can feed your cows at a distance you can you know or or maybe you scale it back so that they can only interact with things that are directly in front of

Them at first and then you have to do all of your Mining and fighting at close range you put yourself in more danger but then as you level up it starts to become a bit more like traditional Minecraft cuz it’s really a superpower to be able to mine something that’s 5 m

Away from you you know it’s not something that people can do in real life without some heavy machinery so I think that’s a really interesting thing to give us control over I also thought it was interesting that the armadillo is not part of the experimental features in the Java

Snapshot it’s part of the 1. 120.5 snapshot just like straight up so with your you know experience in it like how how is that it was good I was yeah I was confused by that and I thought well maybe that’s just been put in the wrong section maybe it’s still intended for

1.21 but it’s not behind that 1.21 experimental features toggle so I am slightly confused about whether we are getting these in 1. 120.5 or or not because they can add them to the game already it’s not like they have functionality that is intrinsically linked with other features that were

Announced for 1.21 or you know trial Chambers or anything like that and wolves are in the game already so wolf armor can obviously be a thing but it’s a surprise if they add an entire New Mob to a minor update and the Curious Thing for me there is were we not voting to

Make it part of the next update or were we just voting to add it as soon as possible you know it feels like a strange way of presenting that to us now so I’m not certain on that yet I don’t want to say definitively yes this is

Going to be a 1.2.5 and and then it turns out that it’s not but um having you know seen a few screenshots and videos of the armadillo I was interested in getting in there and taking a look at them myself once they arrived in Java so

I did dip into uh 51b the snapshot and uh fortunately enough was able to spawn somewhere that had a lot of warm biomes nearby so I encountered armadillos right away um just Trek through a desert and a bad lands and then I was there and the first interaction with them you spot

Them at a distance they Stand Out amid the Savannah grass color they are a distinct kind of I I think the closest thing I can compare it to in game is something like dripstone they would blend in perfectly well in a dripstone cave but they’re kind of like that

Pinkish purple color so you spot them on a hillside nearby and then you run over to them and they immediately curl into a ball and I think encountering for them them for the first time they’re very cute the walk cycle is is really nicely animated and I think they have have

Something that the art team has brought to the sniffer and the Frog where there’s a bit more consideration taken into how smoothly they move the speed at which they move based on their walk cycle and their size and so they don’t seem to be floating in the same way that

Sheep and cows do they they feel a bit more natural and the scared Behavior just makes them adorable to to look at um I think honestly the head and paes or feet or whatever you’d call them uh poking out at the of them is the right

Call just to make them an appealing mob visually speaking um because if they just killed into a ball I’d kind of go okay what is that and then it uncurls and I’m like oh okay armadillo uh but it it doesn’t have the oh it’s a cute

Little guy kind of feeling that it does when you you walk up on this block that has a head and a little pink nose you know I guess you could have both experiences if it’s curled up but not facing you like if you’re coming up on

It from behind then you’re going to be seeing just the box and so um being able to circle around that and go oh okay so I mean I guess the first clue would be like it’s probably not on the grid you know like it’s because they don’t have

To face the you know the cardinal directions they can just kind of be at whatever angle they were at you know before they got scared and curled up into a ball I can imagine people going at them with a pickaxe before they uncurl but thankfully they uh they

Uncurl pretty quickly um and yeah the the other thing that happens quickly with them is when you brush them for skuts I was expecting it to be a slow animation based thing like with suspicious sand and ground and so I held down the right click button and my brush basically broke

Instantly because brushing them for sko it drops a skoot right away in the same way that you shear a sheep but it’s not like a a thing that goes away and then they have to regrow it you just get a sco right away and each sco takes 16

Durability from your brush which has a maximum of 64 durability so four scoots and it breaks and so I just immediately broke a tool on this thing and panicked in the way that I’m used to panicking when I I hear that breaking sound and go oh no these tools were permanent you

Know um but obviously from a from a fresh survival start it was not the worst thing in the world and I had enough copper and feathers that I could immediately make another one but I was just surprised by how instant the interaction was compared to how slow and

Methodical we have to be using the brush in other places and then how much durability it took in retrospect I understand the balance of durability to the amount of resources that we get because they don’t want you to stand around brushing an armadillo forever and then never interact one again because

You’ve got like a stack of scoots already you know um you could theoretically do that with one armadillo if you had an inventory full of brushes but I think they wanted to make it something that they can’t necessarily limit the amount of them that you get

From an armadillo at once they could but it wouldn’t necessarily feel right for the creature so instead they limit the amount that you can brush with a tool because of how much durability it takes but there’s nothing else in the game that depletes durability like that it’s

The equivalent I feel of you know when you hook your fishing rod on land instead of it Landing in water and then you retract it and you end up with like five or so durability taking off the fishing rod it’s like that but on a whole other level like it’s it’s kind of

A shock at first that it uh brushes them as quickly as it does given the crafting recipe for a brush do you feel like it’s too fast because you need I want to say six scoots to make wool farmer and if it breaks after four uses it’s a brush and

A half basically yeah yeah brush and a half so one brush is not going to get you one wolf armor so for the first time people are experiencing this they go they find an armadillo they brush it four times the brush breaks and you’re like cool what can I do with this

Nothing you’ve got to go get another brush yeah you know I mean I guess there’s the opportunity where it might have already dropped a scoot or two or if you follow it as you kind of sit they’re bewildering looking at your empty hand where the brush used to be

There might be two more scoots that fall on the ground and that you could you know potentially use those to make the wolf armor but um yeah I I kind of wonder whether they should change the durability to the point where you get at least six out of the interaction just to

Kind of make sure people have that reward for finding the armadillo did you you did you find them tough to find no not at all I mean they were easy enough to spot at first I didn’t see them in like the first biome that I went to but

It was a weird tall Savannah that was very kind of split up and didn’t have a great deal of room for Mob spawns anyway so lot of height differences yeah yeah so I I climbed up that just in case there were armadillos like on the peak

Uh but there weren’t so I I went and found a big flat lands and and they were all over the place I ended up finding one and you know luring it around with a spider eye to be like okay let’s go and find another one and let’s breed them

And then the next one I found there was another one just standing right next to it so I didn’t even need to you know drag it all of that way um but yeah like I think honestly the brush thing is is balanced enough because I was collecting resources from scratch in this world

Obviously sticks you just get from anywhere so that’s no problem I mined one copper ore and I had four copper raw Copper from that so I smelted a couple of ingots and then I killed one chicken and I got two feathers so that was enough to make two brushes anyway right

You’re not expecting to bring two brushes with you all over the place but I I think it’s one of those mistakes that you’re not going to repeat twice right like you’re probably you’re probably not going to run into a situation where you’re like oh I forgot

To bring a second brush when you know that the armadillo is going to take a lot of durability off of those tools so did you make wolf armor with the scoots afterwards I did I did and it took me longer to find a wolf than it

Took me to do basically anything else in this video I was I was traveling for a while cuz wolves are forests and then anywhere spruce trees grow so it’s Groves uh tiger biomes uh Mega tiger like old growth tiger um and like snowy tiger so you find them in the places you

Find foxes but also a couple of other biomes and I think I found mine on the border of a Grove biome and a forest but it was thousands of blocks away from Spawn because all the biomes around my spawn area were warm biomes including like the oceans and stuff right so it

Was jungles savanas deserts no wolves around anywhere and I haven’t gone like intentionally looking for wolves in any world recently because I’m not really a wolf guy like I don’t tame them all that much in in in Minecraft don’t find them all that useful as they currently are

And it was kind of a weird thing of like you know the the one thing you’re looking for you can’t find it you know um so so it took a while to do that eventually got a wolf tamed it using a couple of Bones added the wolf armor on

First Impressions I think it looks cool like I think in person when you’re used to wolves looking just generic and normal and that’s what every wolf has looked like since they were implemented in Minecraft they look different with the wolf armer on and that alone is a

Novelty that makes it like oh okay this is kind of cool um I think the armor looks natural on them when they’re moving around because they’ve got separate kind of uh parts of their body and when they get in water and then they shake off um the armor sort of changes

Color with the wolf texture which kind of gets a little bit darker and grayer as though it’s saturated with water and then it gets back on the on dry land it shakes off and then uh that color goes and so does the color of the Woolf armer

It sort of looks like this sort of dull water logged kind of pinkish color and then it Mellows out back to the uh almost like leather armor color that it has naturally so there’s a bit of dynamic to it you know it feels like a a reasonable merging of the dog and and

The armor in texture terms and I ended up using them as an assist in combat which I’ve not done for a while and I don’t think it’s necessarily down to the armor the armor has not changed the game as far as wolves go but I looked I

Looked back at them and think they do actually have some helpful aspects in terms of the combat experience in Minecraft now I think the last time I actually used a wolf for anything combat related must have been before the combat update before 1.9 and they’re actually pretty good at

Chasing off skeletons cuz skeletons in survival PVE combat they’re a pain they run away from you so they can get at range and then they tend to strafe a lot so they can be quite difficult to catch up to if you’re used to melee combat you

Can return fire with a bow um but when a wolf is active in your little group The Wolf will chase off the skeletons and the skeletons interrupt what they’re doing and focus on running away from the wolf which is pretty useful they’re the only ranged mob you’re going to

Encounter frequently and a single wolf was chasing off like two or three skeletons at a time so it was actually pretty effective um wolves also won’t attack they they attack anything that you do so if it sees you starting on a zombie then the wolf will come in with

An assist and if a wolf sees you getting attacked by something else it will also jump in and try to defend you but they won’t attack creepers under any circumstances so I’ve seen a lot of people comparing it to like you know does the wolf armor defend it from a

Creeper explosion probably not because point blank with hard difficulty a creeper is doing a lot of damage and that’s going to on-shot a player much less something something more fragile in the in theory like a like a wolf um but the only reason a creeper will explode

Near a wolf is if a player doesn’t do a good job handling the creeper so in a way that’s on you like it’s still Mojang’s internal philosophy of like creepers don’t do damage to your buildings you effectively are the one who does the damage by not taking care

Of the creeper in the right way like not giving it the space not attacking it from range whatever so ultimately if if the wolf dies it’s your fault is what I’m saying it’s kind of a harsh um you know harsh philosophy to take but yeah

The only time I uh let the wolf explode next to a creeper I was playing on normal difficulty it was Point Blank the wolf was standing directly next to the creeper and it didn’t die it had the armor on it was probably at full health it’s kind of measured by the height of

The tail on Wolves and the tail was like all the way down it was like drooping but it’s still survived point blank from a normal mode Creeper explosion and I think that’s a benchmark like I think if you’re playing on hard you are putting yourself in a situation where you expect

The game to be more difficult so that’s the kind of thing that you need to take into account when you’re playing on a higher level of difficulty and that’s the level of difficulty I expect a lot of players will be testing for because a lot of people play on hard there are

Certain benefits to doing so but you end up with you know a larger amount of Creeper damage as a result and I think people should be prepared for that if they’re expecting to use wolves for combat on harder difficulties my only other note for wolf- based combat is

They could use a speed buff and I don’t know if that’s something related to the armor or just like once you’ve tamed a wolf they should be faster but they were implemented absolutely ages ago and their speed doesn’t really seem to have changed but I think wolves should be

Faster than players and they should definitely be faster than skeletons because if you get a wolf chasing a skeleton across a flat plane and the skeleton is constantly moving and the Wolf is constantly moving the wolf is never catching the skeleton Because the skeleton is always running away at

Exactly the same speed so the only thing that allows the wolf to catch up is either you intervening and maybe like knocking back the skeleton so it’s in the wolf’s attack range or the skeleton having to climb up a block or something so that it slows down to do that and

Make the jump and then the wolf can step in and attack it but I do think given that they are graceful agile animals in the real world I think if we’re going to encourage players to use wolves for combat by introducing wolf armor I think they could honestly use a little bit of

A speed boost just so that they can keep up with the player and keep up with the pace of combat and be useful in that circumstance I think keeping up with a player would be really handy because then you’re going to have less you know wolves getting caught underneath the

Overhang of something or caught in a little you know River or small you Minecraft water Poole where they just they can’t get up the other side because they’re trying to paast you and as far as the attacking goes I kind of wonder whether that could have something like

Um a a brief speed bump you know like a a charge attack or something when you know when it’s after a skeleton specifically which makes sense thematically in which you know they already attack skeletons you know if they just if they get excited and they just they Rush after the you know they

Get skeleton Zoomies and they decide to go Absolut and and take take out the skeleton I think that would make a lot of sense like they’re a dog chasing a bone at that point yeah absolutely like they deserve to have a little a little faster Pace to them and if you’re taking

On zombies or if you’ve got some spare food on you you’re going to be able to heal your wolf throughout combat and I was able to basically spend a night fighting stuff with this wolf and getting enough rotten flesh that I can just feed the wolf as we go meant that

You know it wasn’t taking any fatal damage at any point and the Wolf survived the entire experience as long as I was at least you know helicopter parenting this wolf little bit I kind of had to hang around and make sure that it it wasn’t getting severely damaged

Eventually I let a zombie attack me it was a unequipped zombie as well it didn’t have like a sword or anything cuz it would have done more damage if so but I let a zombie just attack me within melee range and then let the wolf fight

The zombie and the difference is if you don’t attack the zombie it will change its targeting to the first thing that attacks it so the wolf will go after the zombie because it’s hit you but then because the wolf attacks the zombie the zombie switches its targeting to the

Wolf and is going to attack the wolf in exchange and I wanted to see who won that fight and the Wolf won but just barely again it was like drooping tail situation probably needs a good bit of healing so one-on-one against a zombie they’re about on even footing and that’s

Something that you need to be aware of if you’re bringing it in there and expecting it to defend you and expecting you to take a more passive role in a a combat situation or if you get surrounded by stuff in a cave it’s probably not going to go super well for

You ultimately though I think the main problem with Wolves is not changed at all by wolf armor and the problem is Hostile Mobs will respawn infinitely and your pets don’t and that’s the the main issue is that you know everything around you is going to be a constant and

Consistent threat which you know leaves you able to respawn but your pets not so much and I think we are so used to as a society loving and taking care of pets dogs especially the Beloved the world over like I don’t see anybody starting to treat wolves as a

Disposable resource in the way that the game mechanics invite you to and this is my problem something else I highlighted in the video with taking axotal into an ocean Monument raid is that you end up losing a lot of axotal in the process and if you’ve got attached to them if

You’ve even named them or whatever you find that they’re getting picked off by The Guardian and yes they can fight back against the Guardians and often win but then the Guardians are just going to be respawning elsewhere in the structure and you’re not really doing anything to limit Guardian spawning at that stage

Because you’re still working in a completely water logged environment and that’s the main problem so I think we should aark that for a future discussion if we’re seeing a a push from the community to have a a broader conversation around wolf armor I think we should talk about whether or not pets

Should be able to respawn because I think that’s a discussion that should be had alongside introducing mechanics that firm up the combat options for tamed wolves and other combat focused mobs like this one of the things that jumps into my mind for that discussion is the

Idea of a pet bed which I’m sure lots of people would want for both cats and dogs and maybe it could be a singular item that you could assign to either a cat or a tamed wolf in the game but that kind of thing meaning that uh a tamed wolf

That you’ve obtained if it dies could die permanently unless you build it a pet bed at which point it will then I know I’m not sure how you would assign it to that bed but if it does if it does die then the penalty is like it’s no

Longer with you on your adventure you’ve lost that uh that challenge but when you get home that pet is just waiting for you because it respawned in its bed just like the player does you know yeah yeah and and I think uh somebody on in the

Comments of my video today had the same suggestion which also brings to mind like you know it’s it’s got a low the chunk to appear there in the same way that like putting a mob through a nether portal it has to load the chunks around the nether portal so that it can go

Through into The Nether and be there next time and so I feel like maybe there are performance issues inherent to having you know a wolf dies on one end of the map and reappears at your base on the other end of the map but I I suppose

That’s no different to some of the other mechanics we already have in the game so yeah it’s an interesting discussion but one I think we will aark for another time so moving on to our email this week if you would like to email show the address is spawn chunk [email protected]

First one comes in from empty Empires a rail of a tail Hello Johnny and Joel happy holidays as much as I don’t think we need more copper blocks I can’t stop wondering what if we could craft copper rails similar to powered rails they would give your Minecart a little boost

However similar to the new copper bulb depending on the oxidation state it would Propel the mine cart at different speeds The Greener the copper the the slower the velocity of the minecart this would allow players to have more diversity when it comes to adding kinetic energy to their builds not to

Mention I imagine it would have some Redstone uses as well as always I would love to hear your thoughts empty Empires was launched off the rails into a NeverEnding sea of copper yeah I uh first of all happy holidays to you Mt Empires uh thank you and yeah the the

Connection of Empires and copper for me is a is a very different one um but yeah I I like the suggestion it’s it’s a wellth thought through one and once again anything which gets added as a feature for copper you have to work out what oxidation does to it right and that

Was one of the potential discussions something that was never fleshed out about copper buttons that would have been added with the copper Golem and so I do like the thought process here of having different oxidation stages to Pro Propel the mine cart at different speeds I think the overall issue is

What does this do that is not just powered rails and how we use powered rails already and also does it end up devaluing powered rails since they are theoretically at least in the early game sense more expensive if you look at the powered rail crafting recipe it’s six

Gold ingots and if you were to craft rails out of copper it would be six copper ingots which you’re probably getting out of the average block of copper once you have a fortune pickaxe you’re getting you know up to 20 raw copper out of a single ore block and

You’re not getting that with gold so I think if they implemented copper rails and they worked similarly to powered rails there would have to be a downside there would have to be some sort of balancing act there and the idea of oxidation slowing it down does make a

Certain amount of sense at least it requires you to invest more resources into like waxing them with honeycomb to make sure that they don’t end up decaying anymore for example yeah from a control standpoint I like the idea and then from a transport transport standpoint I think that’s

Slower mine carts is not what most people want I think usually faster is what people are looking for yeah but I do like the idea when you think about Redstone is the idea of slowing down something like a chest mine cart or a hopper mine cart where the longer it

Takes to go over a hopper underneath it the more items are sucked out of it and that could be really interesting if you know what you’re doing with redstone and you want either a specific amount of things coming out or you want more things coming out to make the uh the

Cart more efficient like a a more efficient trip rather than than a cart having to zigzag back and forth six or eight times maybe you could just make one trip slowly and empty its entire contents like maybe that’s more efficient for your farm or whatever it is that you’re building so I think

That’s interesting it has some ideas um I I see what you mean about the the waxing though because that’s where I think like well I already find Minecart rails to be tedious so to then have to place them all down after after building them all and then go back and wax them

All at a specific type of of oxidation state it’s a very specific use case even though it’s cool I don’t know if it’s something that I would want to do on mass because I feel like that would be a real a real issue as far as like the the

Fun Factor like it becomes a chore as opposed to a cool feature that’s kind of like that kind of delicate line for me um but on the opposite end of that you know you think about leaning into mine carts that go faster uh and thinking about like how we’d have to wax copper

Rails I I wonder if there’s a way to like quote unquote Grease the tracks you know slime and honey are already sticky in the game so maybe wax is the way to do it uh or maybe instead of um just copper to make copper rails maybe you

Have to combine them with ice rails and maybe copper rails end up going faster you know like a pure Copper Rail could be faster than a powered rail or maybe you have to combine them uh with something like maybe the powered rail is the thing that makes the mine cart go

But the Copper Rail that is uh the least oxidized actually has the ability to increase the speed of an already moving mine cart because it’s you know it’s it’s Slicker somehow but again like that’s difficult to communicate visually and I mean it’s less fun than the cartoony idea of like rocket powered

Mine carts or you know different things like that so I’m not sure where the Balan is there but I like the idea of the like the metals that we have in the game being being implemented in different ways and trying to pull from one another we’ve had a couple emails

Over the last few weeks about um Iron uh and iron blocks and having trying to pull that oxidation feature of copper to iron and try to get more out of iron blocks than what we have now and um I think it’s interesting to see how players are thinking about the different

Metals in the game and what they do and you’re like wait a minute you know copper is a metal and iron makes rails what if you know copper rails were a thing and I I kind of Wonder Too whether um copper because it’s so conductive could somehow be implemented I don’t

Know how but like you know we see calls for like vertical Redstone and all that kind of stuff sometimes and I’m wondering if copper could instead of going the root of rails be lean into that realm you know or maybe conductive rails even though that’s what powered

Rails are I kind of wonder whether you could do something similar with with copper in a way that would I don’t know somehow balance that out I like you said it’s it’s earlier game than gold in terms of the amount that you can get and

So I feel like there’d have to be some sort of like dialback function but maybe that’s a good way to introduce people to Redstone like maybe that’s if copper rails were a less complicated Redstone feature than powered rails with the gold then it might be like a stepping stone

But I don’t know if it’s necess necessarily A needed stepping stone yeah I I think there’s there’s a few potential Redstone uses outside of rails I sort of like the idea of copper rails being like uh kind of having the the third electric rail um that that gets

Applied to trains in real life um that you could maybe have a redstone current traveling along with the rail and so it keeps the same signal strength from one side to the other and then you know technically it counts as a minecart rail but it can also be a conduit for a

Redstone wire as in addition and so it doesn’t necessarily increase the minecart speed but it has other Redstone benefits um I also like the idea of maybe either increasing the amount the powered rails boost the maximum speed of mine carts mine carts themselves have a basically a predefined speed limit um

And they move eight blocks per second in One Direction so they can travel slightly faster diagonally in theory um but then uh if you double that and then maybe make the either have like the different stages of oxidation mean double the speed of powered rails in its kind of fresh Copper State but

Then that dips to 1.5 times speed in uh an oxidized like when it starts to uh exposed copper um when it starts to weather and then weathered copper flips that and it’s like 0.75 times speed so it’s slower than a powered rail and then fully oxidized at like half speed or

Something like that you you could you could maybe play around with a little bit of that and I don’t know how a mine cart would really handle the changes in traveling from one type of rail to the to the next you know if if it gets

Boosted by a regular set of copper rails but then it immediately alternates between oxidized and fresh and oxidized and fresh like how is how is the mine cart speed going to be affected by that because it’s not like a a linear immediate change it it breaks it slows

Down it has momentum that the rails need to you know either impede or assist so so there’s there’s some some weird mechanics to go into it that’s not just like when it’s traveling on this block it is moving exactly this speed what if it was a copper mine cart instead of the

Rail I mean maybe yeah that that that could be another thing um I I I also got a comment earlier where someone said why uh doesn’t Mojang realize that you can turn copper into buckets uh and and my response to that was like what would copper buckets do that iron buckets

Don’t you know like yes it it is convenient to be able to make something out of two different materials but you know yeah so now all of your copper is made out of buckets you still have a bunch of iron that you’re just going to use for something else like it doesn’t

It just shifts the economy around you know and so I don’t know if copper mine carts really have anything else to add unless there is something like instead of having momentum in the way an iron mine cart does a copper mine cart moves at exactly this speed if it is traveling

Over this type of rail but then you obviously have to include a different type of rail that allows for those mechanics to be supported uh so it’s it’s a it’s a tough one um going back to what I was thinking about earlier though with the electric rail idea I kind of

Wonder If copper could ultimately end up presenting players with a way of maintaining a certain level of signal strength without having to spend resources on comparators because right now if you’ve got a signal strength of eight and you need a sign strength of eight to get to somewhere else in your

Circuit you either have to refresh that somewhere along the way so that it counts down goes through a repeater gets back to 15 and then has enough room that it goes back to a full signal strength of it goes back to eight from a full signal strength of

15 or you have to basically put comparators in between blocks or redstone dust or whatever so that the comparator will pick up the signal strength going in and repeat the same signal strength coming out so it goes eight signal strength comparator eight signal strength comparator over and over

Again in a chain and comparators are expensive components so that ends up being quite costly I wonder if you could have a copper version of redstone dust that is good at maintaining signal strength rather than just having to work with these other limitations of redstone and we we speculated ages ago about

Copper being conductive and having copper wire and how that differs from Redstone Dust is always the uh the difficult part of the equation but I wonder if like coppered redstone dust or copper and Redstone kind of mixed together could be uh could be an answer to

That I wonder if you could combine that visually with the idea of the rail in that maybe a Copper Rail doesn’t have to look like a minecart rail maybe it could look like a monor rail and if it still worked the same way as a rail you would

Get the the rail functionality out of it with a different aesthetic but then if it was to go that wire route that you’re talking about and have that um that aesthetic it like it would look like a wire too and still have that that maintaining the constant function I love

The idea of a redstone wire or a redstone signal that doesn’t Decay but can go over x amount of distances I’d imagine they’d have to limit the distance yeah before you’d have to repeat it again but if it was just even if it was the same thing is like every

15 blocks you’ve got to put in a repeater then that’s fine but the difference is that over the course of those 15 blocks you have the exact same signal that you started out with whether it’s 2 8 5 15 whatever I I love that idea yeah and I mean rails work that way

Right like it it doesn’t Decay the amount of power that each rail is getting it gets a fixed amount of power but it has a cut off at a certain point where it can’t power more than 25 pieces of rail in a line before it has to you

Know be powered from another source so yeah there’s there’s options but uh I do like the idea of copper having more of a a handle on Redstone and rail technology in future we will see moving on though a second email comes in from Spectre Vamp and the subject now is empowered goat

Horns Hello Johnny and Joel I was listening to episode 273 and when you read the email about the cold resist potion I had an idea for a use for a breeze drop what if the breeze drop a wind charge is a good idea can be

Combined with the goat horn be it in the smithing table or not to imbue it with an effect similar to the wind horn in Minecraft dungeons maybe you need to craft or Smith the horn and the breeze drop together with some copper to give it this effect further tying it to the

Trial Chambers this could also add the copper horn texture back into the main game maybe it’s just because I’ve been playing Minecraft dungeons a lot with my family recently but I think it would be a fun item with a lot of use for exploration and PVP uses the idea of

Being able to Yeet a goat off a cliff with its own horn is kind of funny to me Spectre Vamp got yeed by his friends using an empowered goat horn what goes around blows around I guess yeah um so so for people who are unfamiliar with the item from Minecraft

Dungeons I am very familiar with this because it was the key to one of my strategies when I was trying to do a uh a weaponless run back in the day um the goat Horn uh sorry the wind horn in Minecraft dungeons is an artifact you

Can use has a cooldown so you can use it maybe every 10 seconds or so and all it does is push enemies back if they’re within a certain block radius of you so it’s effectively an area of effect not back tool that doesn’t deal any damage but just pushes them and in Minecraft

Dungeons it slows them down so you can clear a bit of space around you end up giving your opponents a speed debuff basically yeah slows them down like a slowness potion would in vanilla Minecraft and in certain circumstances you can use that to push them into pits

Where they can fall to their death and so on and so forth so you can imagine players using that to great effect in let’s say SkyWars or whatever like challenge map like that a PvP map where there are lots of pits to fall into you know there’s lava whatever like it could

Be a very effective weapon in the right hands I think there’s a really interesting idea there too for players that don’t like PVE you know like don’t want to deal with a zombie having trouble with a skeleton don’t like creepers like if you had this on your

Person as you’re you know walking around a mountain and you get surprised by a creeper you can just like quickly you know pull the trigger and just like push it far enough away that it’s not going to explode you know and same thing with skeletons push them in range sending zombies off a

Cliff I thought it was funny that Spectre Vamps first use was to go back to a goat and basically give it a dose of its own medicine uh I’ve not actually seen any goats outside of uh jokes that have been delivered to me on the Citadel

So I’ve not had to deal with them in game but uh it sounds like they can be kind of a pain in the butt but I like the idea it makes sense you know for taking the the breeze drop and and applying it to to the goat horn I

I hope that we get more than that though because I feel like that’s such a single use situation and I kind of was hoping that you’d have you know the ability to do something rep like more with it and I guess if you put a goat horn that has

This kind of wind charge attribute in it in a dispenser then maybe you could use it to move mobs around or push players back on a multiplayer server from coming in your front door you know like having triggered effects you could have like a skull sensor that triggers and just

Basically blow people off your drawbridge like that kind of stuff that could be really fun I mean as long as you’re not being malicious about it you know and killing people but like I think that it could be a fun kind of like yeah sure come on over if you can you know

And people just can’t get in the front door because there’s constantly being blown around by by wind horns um it’s fun like it has some Whimsy to it I just hope that whatever the breeze does drop eventually uh is going to be something that we can like craft something out of

Maybe you know Brew something out of like I want it to be just more than a single use thing yeah I would agree with that I think it’s always good when you have multiple uses for any given item um which is why the armadillo scute just

Being used to make wolf armor and if players aren’t going to use that then that feels again like a a missed opportunity or something that has room for expansion in future um the reason like spect Vamps idea so much is that it encourages players to connect two very

Different parts of the game and this is sort of like how we’re required to bring frogs to the nether to eat magma cubes or use blaze rods and popped chorus to craft end rods I think it’s really cool when it gives you something like the breeze which is only in trial Chambers

And something like the goat horn which you can only find goats on like tall mountains or maybe you occasionally get lucky and you find one in a in a pillage at Outpost but I think it’s a really neat way of combining two completely different areas you’re going from the

Tallest mountains to the deepest depths in search of the ingredients you need to craft this thing and it feels like a little subquest effectively it’s something that you know the game isn’t going to handhold you through it’s not going to tell you hey go and collect

This and then this and then bring them back to me and I will make you this incredible weapon like it it lets you do it yourself but I I do like miniature objectives like that that encourage players to experiment put the game together in odd ways and see what it

Does I feel like that’s uh something that really has Merit in the type of game Minecraft is the sort of experimental sandbox crafting environment sort of like if you went to the Nether and get a blaze rod and combined it with a a wind charge and it

Gave you a trumpet and then you could finally communicate with villagers or something just just at them whenever it’s it’s a weird dialect they don’t speak that one anymore language has evolved um yeah but but no I think that there’s there’s some there’s some fun to

Be had with it and I think one of the things I like is when mechanics like that will surprise you right like even even in my example with the uh Expedition I had to go on to find a wolf I was taking a mob from the Savannah and

Getting items from that and then I was taking that item to a completely different set of biomes in order to find a wolf who that’s typically only in forests and and colder climates right so you are being encouraged to do more exploration as an indirect result of

That without them saying hey this is specifically an exploration feature so yeah I I do I do think the breeze deserves some kind of drop that has something interesting like that and the wind horn makes a lot of sense for that because it has a similar functionality

To what the breezes when charge attack does but much more controlled by the play I wonder if there would be a way to apply the reverse uh you know like left click and right click for using the horn to displace things or the reverse it would

Suck things towards you you know and I’m just again thinking about a dispenser where I’m not sure what you could do with it in terms of like you power it or then you depower it or a signal strength of like you know eight and above is strong and therefore it’s

Uh going to dispel things and if it’s a weak signal seven or less then it’s going to actually suck things towards it I’m just thinking about the kinetic energy comment we had earlier where if you could have things in the game that could move back and forth because of a

Dispenser with a goat horn in it that’s got this cool you know feature to it then that could be really fun for moving things back and forth up and down you know you think about a lot of them in a row you could make like a giant pipe

Organ looking thing that like plays music music with note blocks but then has things bobbing up and down just for Aesthetics and fun like there could be some really interesting things happen I guess the other thing that you have to think about is like if it’s going to

Make a noise it can’t be like a big honk like it had it would have to be more of like a silent whistle maybe it only makes a noise when the player uses it but when a dispenser uses it it’s just more of like a breeze noise um because

Because having the the the sound without being able to control it would be kind of annoying as well but yeah I mean I can see some potential there especially because like if it does make a sound with or without the player like again what does that what sound does

That register or vibration does that register with a skull sensor and you know that gets into like what we talk about where it overlays with a bunch of different aspects of the game but I’d be curious to see whatever could happen with um something like because the

Breeze I mean it looks like a um Blaze so there’s maybe a tie that you could make to the nether but I wonder like if you get something like that new to the game like a new drop from an aggressive mob if there should be like a list of

Like well not just one area far field like you were saying you know with um Coors fruit and blaze rods but what if there was something in every realm like the end the Nether and the Overworld and they like so it crafts three different things you know like the goat horn is is

Far a field in the Overworld but what’s the thing in the nether that you could craft it to what’s the thing in the end that you could craft it to that would create something interesting and fun for the player you know yeah you think about blaze rods you can break those down into

Blaze powder from that you can make fire charges you can also make magma cream it fuels potions which are also made with a brewing stand that needs the Blaze Rod it’s like so intrinsically linked to several mechanics in the game and obviously the Blaze Rod has been around

For a while so it makes sense that it has a lot of uses some of those have been added later with things like end rods and you know the magma cream being made into magma blocks now is like a a separate thing that’s sort of tangentially related to blaze powder

Blaze powder wasn’t initially required for potion brewing as well that got added as a a later addition so things have evolved like that and I think whatever gets added for these even if it has a single use for the moment and even if it has a sort of uninspiring use to

Certain play Styles there is always room for it to be developed in future so whatever the breeze ends up dropping there’s a chance that that could change in future our next email comes in from Jumbo sale a Content engineer in our Discord the subject is letting my pets wander hi

Johnny and Joel now that wolf armor is almost in the game it kept me wondering if it will start to bring my wolves out of my base and then on to thinking about having pets in Minecraft in general the issue I have with my pets is just how

Static they feel in my base as I just forced to make them sit down I hope the AI for tamed mobs can be improved so they can behave more predictably and more like pets some things that I would like getting pets in and out of Nether Portals easily getting pets to roam

Around in my base without them wandering off and fixing how mobs like wolves and cats teleport in an unreliable way I feel tame mobs have a lot of potential in making our Minecraft Builds feel much more alive do you think changing the AI for Tame mobs will make you change your

Mind about not having pets in Minecraft thank you so much for building an awesome Community jumbo sale frantically searched for his log files for his missing pet and really hoped its name would not appear in any death messages I’ll give another shout out to Viper tricks who wrote in about wolf

Overhauls as well their question was more along the lines of do you think that there’s a chance Mojang will finally throw wolves a bone and bring wolf variants to vanilla but rather than going to the length to go uh talk about dog breeds it was more about just adding

Actual different colors of wolves like a black wolf white wolf gray wolf maybe even a red wolf that kind of thing so I thought that kind of all tied in with like a a wolf overhaul given that wolf armor is coming into the game uh jumbo

Sale added some short lists of how those uh wishlist items would be implemented and I thought that was interesting as well uh tamed mobs will follow owner within line of sight or if the owner is staring at them sort of like an Enderman or if the owner is too far away way but

Staring at a pet that pet can then teleport wolf or cat uh to the owner uh which is going to be start the behavior you know like an Enderman uh there’s also owner last interacted as a tag that was an idea for tamed Mobs with coordinates when the owner last

Interacted with them so if an owner is out of sight non-sitting tamed mobs would wander but occasionally tries to path find back to the last spot where they interacted with the owner and if the owner is in a different world like nether Overworld Etc then they would not

Wander until the owner is back in line of sight so there was some thought from Jumbo sa Bo like I think what you were talking about earlier pix was about um the the chunks having to be loaded where the pet is and all that kind of stuff

And I think that it you know the idea of changing the AI for mobs in game is is great because I remember when I first got a dog well I’ve I had two uh the first one died when I was making a pond and I was just really disappointed I was

Like okay well fair that the game made me actually care about this little pixel dog so that that’s a win but also frustrated that it died doing something silly because of terrible pathf finding now this was like six years ago so like like old old stuff um but then I got a

New one and out of fear of it dying again I just made a little dog house for it and made it sit in front of my house and it hasn’t moved since it’s very it’s very good dog um strong strong listing skills um and then of course I haven’t been in the Meadows

Very much so like I barely ever see it so I don’t I haven’t really given a second thought but I love the idea especially as someone that’s been dreaming about getting a dog for a while that you know you’d have some sort of interaction or an AI for the mob would

Have like okay this is where I’ve been tamed or this is the last place that my owner told me to sit I will come back here and sit a couple times a day but I’ve got a Wandering radius of like two chunks that I can just or four chunks

Whatever it is and I can just do whatever I want you know and I think you could have some real fun with that especially if they added some animation to the dog like I mean if there’s a tree nearby does it walk up and take a pee

Like just does it does it pretend to dig in the ground like a sniffer will sniff in the ground and kick up some particles no blocks just being destroyed just like doing dog things and I think that that could be really fun yeah I think the groundwork for mechanics like this has

Already been laid with the 1.14 overhaul to villages with points of interest you could apply exactly the same type of system to pets and they would interact with the same objects lock it to the day night cycle even so they have different times of day the dog needs to go out and

Like touch grass every so often or whatever like you know put putting it delicately um yeah like you don’t necessarily want to have the same relationship with an animal than you do in the real world because obviously our pets are incredibly dependent on us for both their routine and their food and

Other things like cleaning up after your dog and I think Minecraft players don’t want to deal with all of that stuff but they still want to have the feeling that they are caring for an animal or that an animal can care for itself and that it has some measure of Life Beyond just

Being there and that’s the problem with wolves and cats is that they are either with you running around and following you and making sure they are right next to you by teleporting to you quite frequently or they are just fixed in one place and yeah I I expect if there was something

Like pet bed that they would return to and so you could put one of those down they’d pair to it like a villager pairs to a bed as a point of interest and go okay while I’m around this I don’t have to follow like so if you like roll up

The pet bed and stick it in a chest the dog goes oh okay we’re going on a trip and then that activates like a more permanent following behavior in the dog there’s stuff like that obviously there are a few situations in which like maybe your dog has wandered out of the area I

Had this happen with my horses actually where my horses were leashed up to a fence post but the fence post was just over the line into a neighboring chunk my horse was standing closer to me and that chunk unloaded unloading the fence post that they were leashed up to and

The horse wandered far enough because the fence post wasn’t loaded that the lead broke and the horse could just keep roaming and so I ended up with a couple of the horses and donkeys that I have out the side of front of my house getting out because the thing that they

Were tied up to unloaded and so if you end up with the the dog bed loading while your dog is roaming around then it loses contact with that point of interest and it starts to go elsewhere and I think that’s also sometimes why people’s Villages behave weirdly and

Start wandering off is because at certain times when the player is around doing other bits and pieces caving and you get a little bit further away from the village you find that a villager loses their points of interest maybe drops their profession starts walking out into the river trying to find

Wherever the heck else they want to go to and that’s when you end up with you know awall villag so I think there are so many nuances to implementing mechanics like this that at a certain point since Minecraft is not purely a pet simulation game they might

Have decided it’s not worth the effort um but but I do think implementing more solid mechanics like this would give players a lot more control and a lot more of the feeling that the experience of having a a tamed wolf as a dog in their game was more what they wanted so

Yeah I I think Jumbo’s idea and the different tags and different behaviors and associations with existing mechanics in the game are all really well thought through I just don’t know if it’s something that the broader Community would appreciate on the level that I feel like they should given the amount

Of effort that would have to go into it yeah and I think that’s the same thing with the the dog breed situation that we’ve had on a conversation about before which is the scale becomes an issue because cats are generally all roughly the same size and they come in different

Coats and colors and things and I know they have very different features but like in general from a Minecraft pixel cat standpoint you can get a variety of different cats on the same model without a big deal yeah domest domestic cats in real life are all basically the same

Size and shape yeah roughly right but then you get into like dogs and I mean dogs comes in all kinds of sizes like some of them are almost the size of horses and then you’ve got Chihuahua and so like ultimately you’d be leaving somebody out for trying to pre you know

Please all the dog owners out there but I like the Viper Trick’s idea of just having different colored wolves in the same way that you can collect all the different patterns for cats in the game if there was a black wolf a white wolf a gray wolf you know maybe a timber wolf

Or something you know that you can collect and again to go back to how Minecraft likes to send people exploring maybe those only appear in different biomes you know maybe the timber wolf is only in mega tigas you know maybe the white wolf is only going to be in arctic

Areas in in cold climate biomes there could be some fun exploration there um to to bring bring in some variety to wolves that don’t are are not going to be a huge effort from a programming development standpoint but are going to help diversify the wolf at least a

Little bit you know and um I’m not sure I think black wolves actually even in Minecraft might be a little bit spooky you know uh I’m not sure if you’ve ever seen footage of a big black wolf in like on social media or something like that

But they are terrifying yeah yeah I bet they look really creepy really really creepy I think it’s because of the the they have such um I I want to say close set eyes they’ve got very binocular sort of set of of of eyes compared to to more

Domestic dogs just because of being a hunter and all that kind of stuff and there just their size in general yeah um but I find they look a lot more like lions than they do dogs when you see a really big one um but yeah it’s it’s

Interesting to see that kind of stuff and see if you can pull that kind of thing into into Minecraft does do wild wolves in Minecraft do they like hunt sheep and stuff like will you find them attacking things in the in the game so

That so that AI is there yeah so I guess it’s just a matter of trying to figure out what kind of pattern you could apply to um a tamed wolf in game I don’t think they’d ever get to the point where you could like program it but I like the

Idea of point of interest you know like a dog or a pet Bowl I guess it should say because to simplify things if you had a pet bowl and a pet bed then it wouldn’t matter whether it was a dog or a cat that you’ve tamed like you could

Apply it to both um I think the only thing that would be missing out of that list would be like a toy but I I don’t know like again even if I was able to play with a dog in Minecraft I don’t know how much time I would be spending

Doing it so it’s such a very specific idea but I think worth talking about because it’s sparked by well they’re giving some love to the Wolves by getting armor you know and and I think that it just kind of is is also pointing out by the way there’s really nothing

Else that you can do with a wolf you know and so by adding the wolf armor they’re kind of also shining a spotlight on like the lack of features in wolves right now yeah yeah it’s funny reading on the Minecraft Wiki about the amount of behaviors wolves have that you don’t

Typically see just because of the not the the the lack of jux toos between like where the wolf spawns and some of the stuff that they interact with like so they’re hostile towards sheep you see that quite frequently occasionally if you stumble upon them in a Tiger Biome you might see them being

Hostile to rabbits because rabbits do spawn occasionally there and foxes do as well so foxes and wolves basically like fight or the Wolves will chase the foxes they’re also hostile towards baby turtles which I didn’t know um so that’s quite amusing in itself but you don’t typically see wolves like at the beach

After you’ve tried to hatch some Turtles um but one more thing to bear in mind they also apparently Chase bats despite being unable to reach them and they avoid llamas so that’s like that’s a surprise to me like there are so many mechanics under the surface here that are related

To wolves and their interactions with other mobs that just aren’t part of the wolf’s natural ecosystem and I don’t think any of those really apply to tamed Wolves at that point so I think they might they still Chase skeletons I don’t know if they go after sheep once you’ve

Tamed them but I doubt it because typically you have wolves around your base and they they they don’t I don’t think I think they go after the Sheep um and so yeah they probably don’t go after baby turtles or chase bats around or or avoid llamas at that stage and it’s it’s

Just a strange thing that there are all of these little interactions that you don’t get to see the rest of the time we have one more email for our big old mail bag today this one comes in from Safir Alan who is a landscape artist member of

Our Discord and the subject is Minecraft player Improvement we thought this was a great one to wrap up the show with they say hi jool and pixel riffs well Rec cing my last year in Minecraft I realized that I really improved in different fields in the last 12 months I

Got better at flying with elytra thanks for the flying tutorial pics I’m way less afraid of the deep dark and I explored new build Styles and built bigger structures what do you think of the things you got better at in Minecraft in the last year where would

You like to improve in the new year I want to get better at terraforming and Landscaping happy holidays and keep up the great work sappire aen will find the perfect sign off some days after sending this email it’s always the case you know you finish an argument or you just you walk

Away from the situation where you were you know talking about something and you just you think of the best thing that you could have said the funniest joke at that party a day and a half later he was like man why am I not witty faster you

Know um so I was looking back through some screenshots that I have on this you know computer and a good chunk of 2023 for me was spent in the western part of West Hill which has fancier builds windy streets and generally is a little bit more jam-packed and less uniform than

The rest of the town and as a result I think I got better at getting shape and detail into smaller Footprints and smaller builds than the kind of I’ll say quote unquote bog standard houses in either boxes or L shapes that I was making in the other side of town when I

Was just new like just learning how to do more medieval style builds and I think that that’s that kind of forced uh lack of space uh it it pushed some creativity it pushed some problem solving and uh made me make some Bolder choices because at a certain scale if

You start to Pepper in texture it just looks kind of speckled like it doesn’t really Jive when you have like a 20 block high wall it’s so much easier to have like a gradient on that than on anything else and I also found that because of that was pushing the roof

Pitch a lot higher so that on these smaller Footprints of builds I could have a little bit more variety in the roof blocks that weren’t just like a four to six High block roof it was more like eight or 10 and that gave me enough

Room to do a bit of a gradient you know I remember working with Beehives and some other things um I also think I got better at laying in paths and stairs and dens looking Flora in the weirdly shaped blank spaces between those builds so winding staircases down to a river

Trying to connect two builds and we like oh you know what maybe I could just put like a a pedway there like a an above ground path that connects to the the wall or you know leaning into the the game of yes and in that I’ve built this

Thing I like this thing but now I’ve got to figure out what’s going to go next to it or I’ve built these two things that I really like what on Earth I’m going to put in between them in this weird little windy space and I found that I learned a

Lot about uh density and trying to make things feel like they’ve been around for a while so that’s kind of like where I was in terms of things that I felt like I got better at and now that I have that in my wheelhouse I feel like I’ve got

That that pallet of options now in Minecraft so when it comes to doing like a little path down to a brook or a quick build I’m just like oh yeah I remember how to do shrubs now you know with uh dark oak fences and a mangr of leaves it

Looks like a Thicket you know so I can do that because it’s really dense or if I want some something else you know I can start to bury um aelia saplings in the ground to get a very different look you know for the textures and I think

Those little tricks when you start to do them over and over again and try to not repeat yourself you end up with this nice variety of of pallet work that you can do in terms of of building so that’s kind of where I pulled myself you know

Uh from you know in 2023 I think is just going through those stages of like working through puzzles and I think that’s one of the benefits of a long-term project is that when you look at the the progress from a retrospective you can see that you were forced to work through these spatial

Problems these textural challenges and when you come out the other side even though you may not be 100% happy with everything and you say okay well Lessons Learned I know what to avoid but I think it it makes you less scared to approach certain things you know like the next

Time I’m you know painted into a corner so to speak in another build I’m not really going to be that intimidated by it because I know that I can figure out what to do and and what scale to to do it at yeah so so that’s where I’m sitting it for for

2023 in my case I began 2023 with two massive projects which felt very different from each other I started with the castle on Empires season 2 which was massive Castle bigger than anything I’ve ever built before on top of a plateau that I had basically built by hand um in

In the savannah in in the Empire’s 2 world and that was an unfinished project it never got completed to the scale that I was like I’m done with this structure I I basically had to call it done once we reached a point where the server was

Going to be taken down and I I felt like we had to move on from that series and onto the next projects and at the same time I ended Survival Guide season 2 but having not done any work in that world really for a while and so that was a

Really kind of a flurry of Castle Building for the first three or four months of the year and I love doing that and I think I got better at that as I went uh studying form and uh the scale of structure from like really oversized examples because I was pulling

Inspiration from Elden ring where the environment is something that the player has to interact with in a very different way to how we interact with things in Minecraft and they’re able to cram a ton of detail in while still making a really large imposing structure and so I was

Focusing on sight lines I was focusing on what aspects of it I could pull from the that game and what I had to fill in with my own knowledge my own experience and just kind of winging it with some things and and tying that all into the

Story of what I wanted the area to feel like so on the one hand I was doing that and on the other hand I was perfect the Redstone for my copper aging machine and making that a palatable and more automated structure than I’d made it previously more automated redstone

System and I think that was a really interesting education in my own ability to craft Redstone systems which is not something I’ve really done a great deal of before I’ve done Farms that are mostly sort of based in game mechanics rather than how you string together Redstone components to achieve the

Desired result and as is often the case with redstone things something you could have done manually but the time saved in making it a redstone Contraption or just the sheer satisfaction of watching something happen automatically instead of placing all of the blocks manually in different areas made a lot of sense to

Me and that started to click in a way that I think has improved my instincts as a technical player and improved my ability with redstone just understanding how the components worked and how they could fit together and so much of that was done through experimentation and not

By looking up tutorials and figuring out how this counter system works and and what this and that can do and I think that’s really galvanized my own approach to Redstone in general which is that I want to do a lot more experimentation and figure out what I can do to improve

Systems that I would like in my own world rather than you know follow through on other people’s tutorials for it and so then the second half of 2023 was me starting Survival Guide season 3 and that has all felt like revision since like I don’t know if we’re

Necessarily at the point where I’m exploring too many new mechanics other than a couple of things that were added in 1.20 like armor trim which don’t really feel like something you need to improve about your game play um but I think I’ve gotten better at explaining myself at

Articulating why game Mechanics Work the way they do or why I take a certain approach to building or exploring or Redstone or you know resource Gathering or whatever it happens to be so I think my presentational style as a YouTube Creator and as a streamer has gotten

More concise and I’ve got a better outline going forward of what I want to do in 2024 so I think that’s really where I’m at we’re probably going to save a bit of our chat about what we’re looking ahead to in 2024 for the render distance this week because we are coming

To the end of our show here but any final thoughts on 2023 as we uh wrap it up here Joel I think even though I started West Hill in 2020 not in 2023 uh hitting that home stretch and trying to think about how to finish West Hill was definitely

Forefront in my mind and I’m glad I didn’t like verbalize a deadline you know like I think I’ve maybe casually mentioned that I try to get it done or try to get certain things finished by the end of the year um but I think that

Uh I’m glad that I didn’t really put a hard deadline or or push myself to play more often than I wanted or or grind through a bunch of things and one of the things that I’ve learned over the grand scheme not just in 2023 but I think I’ve

Been more able to articulate it in 2023 is the patience on a big build like this is really key and you have the ability to make better decisions when you’re not really sure how to do something or where you think a build might go maybe that farm goes there maybe that Tower is

Going to be so high by roughing it in and walking away and going about something in another part of the build where you know what you’re going to do you know you know you’re going to put a butcher shop there or you know that that road needs texture so

Let’s just go do that for the next you know couple hours and then as you continue to walk by naturally you will either be bothered by the the short rough idea that you put in and say like that Tower needs to be four blocks to the left I’m really glad I didn’t build

The whole thing and I decided to move it at a later you know just the frame of it and then fill it in that kind of thing uh or you just you just don’t know what’s going to go in that space so you kind of rough in I want the road to

Curve here I don’t know what’s going to go there I’ll kind of let that percolate and then as you walk by it more and more you know you’ll say while I was ready to build something there previously I now know exactly what I want and the wonderful thing about about Minecraft is

You know you can move things like if you if if it’s tedious if it’s a full build but if you’ve only just kind of roughed in the road and you’ve not spent an hour texturing it then if you have to move the road four blocks then it doesn’t

Bother you you know like I’ve moved roads a couple times but I’ve left the texture of those roads to the very last minute where everything around them is built I’m not moving anything and I feel like the patience there is is key to like if you don’t rush through it then

You’re not going to get frustrated by mistakes because you’ve taking the time to kind of let ideas percolate and build the ones that you’re sure of first and if you’re not sure of like you know rough something in and move on and come back to it later coming back to it later

Is is always a good uh a good way to approach things within reason because you don’t want to like you know just procrastinate necessarily you know yeah here’s to uh procrastinating less and being more deliberate and giving yourself the freedom to make those decisions in 2024 um and with those

Words we’re going to wrap up this episode of the spawn chunks thank you so much for listening folks throughout all of this year and we hope that you’ll join us for our next episode which is going to be a uh look back at archaeology with archo plays so stay

Tuned for that uh that will be dro dropping on January 1st we are we’ve pre-recorded it for New Year so that you can start your year right with the spawn chunks in the meantime you can find more information about our show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked

About over 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 the show why not consider putting some value back in you can visit patreon.com thepa chunks to

Join our community we’re pledging at any level we’ll get you an invite to our Patron only Discord chat you can participate in the live show recording which happens in Discord every week we have our monthly Minecraft Hangouts returning in January and a quarterly hangout coming up as well we currently

Have 329 patrons but there is always room for more special thanks go out to our content engineer patrons Hunter 555 jumbo sale mind trip media party Voyager and yets thank you all for your support on this episode and this year sharing the podcast with your friends is the easiest way to support

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Extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny online IO by pixel Rifts you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixel Rifts where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I will also stream 3 days a week on Twitch once I’m back from

My holiday vacation with my family and do behind the scenes work for my YouTube series and play a couple of other games from time to time I’m also the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which will be back for season 10 in the New Year whenever that happens to start you

Can find us through a quick YouTube search and aside from that I’m @ pixel riffs on both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online links to everything that I’m doing online can be found at jen.com that includes the Citadel Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment I’ll be

Recording the annual holiday round table with several friends later on today so you can look for that over the holidays I am Joel Dugen on social media and Joel dougen on Twitch where I normally stream Thursday through Sunday but it looks like that schedule is going to change

Over the holidays so just stay tuned on social media and in my Discord for when I will be streaming I split my time between Minecraft and satisfactory lately but I might throw in some other games over the holidays thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world

Outside is infinite but maybe wait a few days before punching your Christmas Tree