SPAWN CHUNKS: EPIC INVENTORY SURGE! // Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 274 for Monday December 4th 2023 my name is Joel Dugen and joining me as always is my FIT friend Johnny AKA pixel reps hello sir hello we’ve been talking about keeping fit and uh you know the The Perils of that also The Perils of

Time travel in the render distance that’s the extended version of our podcast that our patrons get every week so if you’re interested in hearing more about what Joel and I talk about every week there’s a little bit of extra Minecraft and a little bit of extra real

Life stuff that we usually throw in there plus whatever be mo watching listening to any kind of Pop Culture stuff that we happen to be hooked on that particular week you can get that by visiting patreon.com thees spawn Trunks and signing up to be a paying supporter

Of the podcast it is the first episode of December my goodness where has the time gone and we want to thank our patrons as always for their support as we roll into a new month the patron calendar is looking plentiful at this point it is the season of giving after

All but since it is the season of giving we may have a couple of schedule changes this holiday season I’m not certain exactly when if at all we’ll be doing our monthly Minecraft hangout but we’ll probably catch up to that and do a mammoth one in January if we’re not able

To squeeze it into December however we do have a chunk mail dispenser episode where we take a focus on community submitted emails we’ll probably be expecting a few more of those to roll in because of the holidays and uh not having a huge amount of Minecraft news to discuss well presumably the Mojang

Team takes a well-deserved break so stay tuned for any schedule changes all of the information on that for our patrons will be in the patron Discord and the announcements Channel as always so what have you been up to in Minecraft this week it’s been a varied

One for me I have first of all wanted to get some more beacons because I already decided to leave one over at my guardian farm that I was explaining last week I have a resistance and regeneration Beacon set up there just for EAS easier dealing with Guardians not having to

Worry so much about Thorns damage and whatnot and I decided to build a beacon base that was partly motivated by the fact that Ocean Monuments are an even numbered structure like the entrance to an ocean Monument is a 2×2 doorway and so putting a nine block wide base for a

Beacon anywhere around that structure doesn’t feel like it fits with the overall footprint of the structure and I wanted to have this thing outside the entrance made sense to have it fairly Central so the beacon effect was still going to reach me as I dealt with the

Guardians in The Killing chamber so I built a an an additional block onto each layer of the beacon and decided I’m going to put in a second Beacon there so that I can have resistance to and then regeneration and strength on top of that

So I’ve now got that set up and it was a good way to discuss easy ways to kill the Wither for additional beacons I’d already fought the Wither legit on the surface for the first time in a while actually for the introductory episode about the Wither for survival guide and

I decided to do three more wither fights Farm the skulls on a stream and I did one underground I did one underground assisted by iron golems and I did one with the cheese method sort of under the Bedrock portal in the end and I think I

Got hit a total of once the entire time because you know fight fighting the Wither in a one block long tunnel one block wide tunnel is just a matter of backing off hitting it with a Smite weapon every so often and it’s it’s fairly easy was not expecting the Iron

Golems to do as badly as they did but I think the Wither just got into a position where it could fire down on the iron golems and they couldn’t really retaliate um so the Iron Golems suffered more than I did I got a few wither roses

That I was able to talk about as well but then I moved my attention to other stuff I worked on a honey farm so I’ve had honeycomb going for a while but I was finally able to Wrangle some bees into a a proper honey farm so that

Eventually I’ll be able to talk about honey and slime blocks once I have a slime farm set up but I’m still trying to find a slime ch chunk manually every so often and so I wasn’t able to immediately get into slime block Redstone stuff so instead uh I did an

Episode about farming kelp that came out today and uh I’m very much looking forward to the crafter some so some of the dried kelp can be smoked and turned into kelp blocks conveniently so out of those methods for killing the Wither do you have a favorite honestly I still like to fight

The Wither in a tunnel it’s um it feels like it’s not necessarily a fair fight but but it still feels like there is some Jeopardy involved you know what I mean if I needed a bunch of nether Stars if I was trying to get 64 beacons for

Something I would probably do it in the area under the end portal just for convenience and just so I could get out of the way it would feel more like a chore at that point but I do still feel like blasting out a tunnel with it is

Kind of fun it does occasionally expose some rare resources if you’re doing that at like deep slate level and also it still feels like there is some skill involved right I feel a sense of pride in doing that whereas doing it under the uh the end portal still feels kind of cheap to

Me we have the old nether gen so we have our wither squisher in the nether just off of the nether Hub just in in the Bedrock ceiling of the of the yeah Bedrock ceiling yeah little 3×3 area and uh I mean that informed a whole bunch of different decisions design-wise for our

NE Hub as well like we had to design paths to get to it and ladders and all kinds of Collections and stuff like that so um I haven’t fought the Wither in a really long time I feel like I have two or three beacons in in a Ender Chest

Somewhere and um I’ve just not had a project where I need them and then uh like you I I often pick them up and bring them with me like I I don’t tend to leave them um set up in most areas yeah so there once you have a half a

Dozen you don’t tend to need to continue to do it unless you’re using them for decoration or you know something like that where you need an awful lot of them or you just want to have a flex or there’s maybe you know a server where you’re using them for like economy

Selling them for diamonds or something so yeah I don’t know um for for me I I don’t think I’ve ever fought the Wither legit and if I did I would probably I would probably go with the tunnel method uh certainly do that before before fighting it on the surface

And I because when I think of like wither fights on the surface I think I think it was you and Loy maybe that did it together on a on a on a co- stream or something where you did it on the surface and it get away from you um and

It was just it was a nightmare I was like nope I I think I know what you’re talking about but it was the old harmony series with python that the one yeah when when we were we decided because we had like a bunch of RPG mods that were

Supposed to like increase the amount of damage that our weapons would do and so I had an axe that would do like 18 damage per hit or something we were like right this is going to be so easy we’ll take on the wither got absolutely

Wrecked and I have no idea why I think it was just like some weird Quirk of the cave generation that we were fighting it in and we wanted to do it in a slightly more kind of cinematic way but it got out to the surface and we just weren’t

Equipped for whatever reason we we went in really confident and thought this is going to be a cinch and we got smashed and I I think it’s actually even harder for the Wither to break deep slate because of deep Slate’s higher blast resistance than Stone so I think if

Anything the tunnel method is even more effective now because it’s only really able to blast out an area of maybe like a 3X3 around it and then the most damage it does to the terrain is when it’s trying to get to you and if it finds an obstruction it will physically break the

Blocks very easily just to try and get out of whatever like to to stop you being able to trap it in a cage effectively and uh yeah that that happens relatively frequently but it’s just kind of eating the tunnel uh towards you but it’s it’s so much easier I think in deep sleep

Now yeah I’ve never thought about taking it like now the Deep SL is in the game because again the last time I even thought about the Wither or fought it in our little mechanism was before 118 so with the Wither exploding blocks and whatnot does it work like the creeper

Settings where like all the blocks that are destroyed are dropped or does it actually destroy blocks permanently I know if if it if there’s blocks floating on the ground like a diamond ore and it shoots it obviously that’s going to get um destroyed but if there’s diamond ore in the wall

And the Wither shoots the wall does the wall does the diamond block disappear or or will that be just on the ground like everything else I think it breaks it in much the same way a player breaking it would but it doesn’t the explosions from the Wither don’t drop 100% of their

Blocks because it’s I think it’s only TNT that does that by default now on Java I think the other stuff has to be programmed in through like game rules and things but um yeah like I it is something people do people do use it for for mining

And I would erir against that simply because the withers’s blue projectiles can destroy basically any block including stuff like obsidian it basically treats any block that it collides with like it has the blast resistance of something like dirt or stone um and so those can destroy stuff

That they are not meant to including blocks like ancient debris so like some people consider using the Wither to mine for uh for netherite and I just go no because there’s every chance that it might just completely destroy it and when any any of the items drop on the

Ground the only item that is completely blast resistant is the thing the Wither itself drops just so any explosions that are happening around it can’t destroy the nether star when the Wither gets killed so yeah there’s there’s potentially risk involved in that and I would not be surprised if some people

Have lost diamonds from those deep slate tunnels just because the Wither ended up shooting at them and eating them all up I wonder if it’s worth using a Wither to try and clear a perimeter in the nether oh maybe yeah you have to be uh fairly

Precise about it and I think the main problem with perimeters in the nether is the amount of lava source blocks that are in the walls and yeah just those occasional lava Pockets spilling out when you don’t really have the opportunity to go back and correct them

And and kind of block them in here and there because you’re you’re trying to run away from the Wither in in an organized pattern might be uh might be a little rough but who knows I’m sure some mad lad out there has done it I’m looking forward to doing uh a

Kelp Farm myself you know hearing you talk about it and looking forward to the crafter like I that’s that’s something that’s on my to-do list uh I I wanted to get at it right away but now I think I might wait obviously for the crafter in

Order to take full advantage of it uh but uh I think I’m going to continue to use bamboo in the nether though because we don’t need water uh and I mean I guess you could always have like a a kelp Farm in the surface with a nether portal

And bring your items in that way but I I don’t know know whether it’s worth it to have to transport items through another portal yeah yeah it gets kind of awkward doing doing bits and pieces like that um have you used any kelp in your Marsh and

On the Citadel or is that all seagrass and and Mangrove Roots it’s all seagrass and Mangrove Roots because uh very seldom did I dig anything deep enough uh to do um to do kelp and it was just easier to run around with bone meal and punch the empty holes of water and have

Not only the ones that are connected to it you know directly but also diagonally you’d get some fill in with seagrass and it was just enough to give like some green algae looking stuff um in a couple of spaces close to the edge where a player

Might stand and look down I did dig down an extra block and created two high SE grass so that it breaks the surface and Wobbles back and forth a little bit oh right yeah I yeah I do wish that we had things like Cattails or even the ability to bone

Uh one block High seagrass to get it to break the surface like that because it does look so cool it moves like it still animates uh under the surface but you can’t see it very well and so having that in there is is a is a nice touch

And uh I know that it doesn’t matter to most people but for me it actually changes the color of the Block in the map mod that I use in Zero’s mini map and world map and it it changes it to be like a teal color so it actually changes

The waterc color of the marsh when you’re looking at it which is kind of cool um speaking of that’s done I um I finished that this week so the custom Cliff that I was working on at the end of last uh last weekend only took an

Extra stream I think to finish up and I just brought the waterfall kind of all the way over to the bridge and did some custom bushes and things like that it took a while to get right it was actually a lot of back and forth uh to

Get it to look right and ultimately you can’t see it unless you like stand on the very edge of the bridge which is kind kind of frustrating but I know it’s there um but uh I took a couple screenshots uh and as luck would have it

It just happened to be raining when I logged in and I thought you know what this is a mood we’re we’re going to take the the Rainy medieval Town Vibe and just kind of like take some screenshots of of the marsh and I think the the

Runoff worked out very well that was a fun exercise to do it um it’s one of those timec consuming things that ends up looking good in the end so you feel like the investment is worth it uh and then I haven’t done it yet but there’s a

Couple of key points along the marsh where if you stand and you kind of look across it really does feel ominous with the distance and the density of the marsh where you start to you can’t see the water it goes for so far and then you’ve got this giant face of the

Curtain wall of Wes Hill up in front of you and if you were someone that wanted to try to get in there and you weren’t allowed like it would seem just impossible and impassible at the same time and um what I want to do is along

The road which is outside of the town uh I want to create we were talking last week about having little opportunities to fill that space with something like a a road sign that shows you where you’re going a place where a cart might pull off well I thought you know maybe

There’s going to be kids or people hunting for frogs or something or even just people that are walking up to the marsh and just like encouraging some not just like imaginary world building but also like hey as a player you’re walking by if I put a path here you might walk

Down that path and sit at a specific vantage point where I think the view is actually really good and so I’m going to do that I think in a couple of places to kind of say hey look don’t don’t just walk by this March like walk up to it

And go like oh yeah okay that could be cool and I might do the same thing for that um that waterfall part that runoff if I put a path just before the bridge that kind of squeaks off to the left it might encourage somebody to kind of go

Down there go oh he decorated under the bridge too like that’s nice to know like just kind of things that I I don’t want Miss despite the fact that uh I spent so much time on them um and speaking of time investment that’s the other thing

That I’ve been doing I I wanted to take a break from starting anything new and uh the rest of West Hill in the valley still feels kind of Unfinished as you walk by and anything in the town so much of my to-do list is hinging on updating

A data pack for tables and chairs and a couple of other things and I thought I’m just going to wait until 1.2.3 drops and then I’m going to update all the data packs and the mods make sure that they’re working and then I’ll finish the interior stuff in West Hill that needs

To change like I have um The Distillery underneath the keep I’ve got all the furniture in the upper parts of the keep I’ve got a lot of stuff like that it’s not not a big project in terms of time intensity but there’s just a lot of little things to check off my list

Before I’m going to feel better about it and um running around and replacing all the tables and chairs is going to take a while um but what I decided to do while I’m waiting to not get caught up in anything new uh but instead kind of lay

Out some rough ideas for things I either wasn’t happy with or things that I hope to add to West still in the future and that is uh things like moving the East Road and the approach to the east Bridge it just it was too straight and it

Didn’t really Vibe with what I was going with uh so I created a better S curve I’ve learned how to make better roads since I first made it so I I took those skills and applied them and I’ve always wanted to have something on the hill um

I want to have a couple of houses outside of West I don’t want it to be such a flat plane and so I think I’m going to put a little in on the hill with like a teered garden sort of like self-sufficient like they would probably grow their own potatoes and wheat and

Stuff like that for feeding anybody that would be staying there and it’s going to serve two purposes it’s going to break up the skyline a little bit but also the second floor of that Inn is going to have a really good view of all of the

Work that I did on the marsh and the bridge and the the custom Cliffs on the other side of the river so it’ll provide some good opportunities there and then I uh am also taking the North Road which extends out towards the farmlands and stuff it really didn’t go very far as a

Stone Road and it just kind of like trickled off and stopped and turned into dirt so what I did was I pushed it a lot farther I pushed it up past the the river bend and past the first couple of farms and I think it works a lot better

Because then when you’re standing at that crossroads outside of West Hill the stone roads go as far as you can see as a player and it’s not until you get kind of like out into the farmlands that it starts to kind of trickle off um it’s all still working progress I haven’t

Textured the road I haven’t really finished the texture change from um the Cobblestone and and the brick to the dirt I just kind of said like me it’ll be roughly here that it’ll stop uh and then I took the farms and started laying out Farm walls very rough ideas where

Houses might go and also kind of tied in some dirt roads and some lanes that might happen um to get from one Farm to the other because they they’re not all directly on the road so they kind I have to have like little access roads and

Things like that and it was a lot of fun because I didn’t have to finish anything I was just kind of roughing things out and it was a fun discussion to have on on stream because a lot of times people come into this now three-year-old build

And wonder like how did you even do this and the answer is like this you know the town used to look like this with like dirt roads and Cobblestone squares and like little kind of like sectioning off this area roughly and then later on I would come back and and apply the

Changes and one of the things I want to do in this area uh after confirming I popped over to Somerville on the server which is cosmics area and they’ve got piter plants planted like crops like a ton of them and I really like the look

So I think for the the apiary the the little bee farm that I’m going to put in I think along the river I’m going to plant a bunch of two high flowers probably a combination of like lilac rose bushes and I want to say pitcher plants and I’m also Al thinking that one

Of these other Farms might look really cool with torch flowers in there so it’s not just like crops maybe it’s herbs or flowers for medicinal purposes or something like just having some different stuff in there that’s not just potatoes and wheat I think will be uh

Will be fun and create some color uh along the walk to to westle so it’s it’s something that I’m trying not to get carried away with because I want to finish the town and be done with that before I get caught up in what could be a couple of weeks of building farmland

And in the area I I forgot to ask I’m not sure if I’ve asked this before is West Hill really anywhere near anyone else’s projects on the server like is there an area nearby that you could build that road and the road continues until it hits somebody else’s base or

Did you pick an area deliberately where you were like I’m not going to be anywhere near anybody so this project can get as expansive as it wants to so West is kind of nestled in its own little sunflower Plains Valley and the continent or as close as you can get to

One in Minecraft because I don’t think you actually really get continents um is 10,000 blocks from Spawn so we have command blocks near spawn and they teleport players uh anywhere it’s between two and 4,000 to 10,000 blocks to various areas and the idea was that if you’re going to build in the medieval

Area or medieval fantasy area I should say then don’t build a skyscraper there so the modern city is miles from the medieval area so that you don’t have that weird kind of combo um so no one’s real base is kind of close by you can in Dartmouth Meadows walk to a couple

Different places like you can get down south to Matt cast’s area you can get down Southwest to uh Cosmic Somerville is really close to to Dartmouth Meadows and you you can technically walk to alistair’s Avalon area although there’s not an there’s not an overw Road there

Yet although that would be a fun project project um it’s it’s through the nether is really how everybody’s connected um and again you can walk to Steven stair Monument but it’s just it’s there’s no road that exists yet in the Overworld but all of that is really you know as

Far as a six-year-old server is concerned close to spawn um these build areas are a lot farther away although at the end of the stream on I think it was yesterday uh there is another space there’s another little sunflower plain Valley that’s nestled between a dark oak

Forest and a mountain and you have to kind of walk through the dark oak forest to get there and when you get out of those trees it’s like this giant reveal of this beautiful Valley that would be perfect for any kind of you know U Fantasy Castle Village whatever you want

To do and I was just like had to walk away like nope nope I can’t I won’t do it I won’t start not going to build Rivendell here or something right like exactly right yeah yeah but there but so there’s room for like another person on the server I think Cosmic and chat

Suggested that that would be a fun place to have a community fantasy area where everybody could build you know and so it’s not such a daunting project for one person sure and that would be that would be a cool idea too and again like it’s far enough away from West Hill that you

Have to go down a road over a bridge and through a forest so that visually you’re really not anywhere as near you’re certainly not within render distance of West and I think that would be a good kind of rule of thumb for anybody that might be wondering about how to do this

On a on a multiplayer server is that like if you establish some rules first where like look you can build in this area we’re going to connect everything by roads but just make sure that you’re not building some weird you know craggly creepy castle like right next to

Someone’s pretty Elven you know Spire because it’s going to look really weird um unless you unless you both agree that you want that like two towers kind of vibe right yeah yeah yeah totally I I think it’s mainly why I asked was just like the idea of the roads extending

Into the distance and hitting basically basically the render distance on the server for how far away you needed to build so it looked like the roads kind of went off to different places I kind of wondered if there was anywhere else even within ey shot of that or if it was

Just kind of you know put there on its own but it’s cool to have projects like that though I think a lot of times servers will try and Link stuff up but obviously if you’re looking for the ideal terrain to start something or the terrain that really speaks to you for a

Project then you’re going to want to build that wherever you find that terrain and it doesn’t matter if it’s like thousand blocks from spawn or 10,000 or or more it’s it’s really just about finding a place that you feel like fits the uh the project you have in mind

And I chose this area for the medieval fantasy Zone on the server because if memory serves there’s an ice bikes there’s a desert there’s a several Plains there’s a couple of mountains there’s like a rocky Shore uh there’s a couple of dark o orc forests and there’s

A swamp so there’s at least one swamp so there’s opportunities if you wanted to do creepy if if you wanted to do Elvin if you wanted to do dwarves like there’s all kinds of stuff that you could do in this one area and still have it be

Medieval fantasy and have it be close enough that we could do the whole Road connection thing I know that on the realm of vaston they were really adamant about connecting everything with roads because of the story that they wanted to tell yeah sure sure but but I remember

Fixit confessing like roads are the only thing that they do in Creative because they’re just so long right it just it was just too many blocks and just too long and too much effort just to make stuff like that and the the amount of time that I put into the curvature of a

Road like I wouldn’t want to do a road that would go for chunks and chunks and chunks like I just that would not be my cup of tea West Hill is big enough like you can’t see one side of West Hill for the other uh north south is fine but

East west it’s 21 chunks and the render distance is 16 so like you can’t see the other end when you’re at when you’re at uh the the wall on one side which I might change actually I might increase the server render distance if the performance doesn’t tank too much

Because I would really like to see a little bit more of the town sure yeah yeah makes sense no I I haven’t even started putting roads around my main base area on the survival guide yet but mine isn’t really meant to be like a a real thematic build like it’s not meant

To be based around a certain era or anything like that it’s really just a series of functional buildings and then a couple of excuses to build houses here and there like the factory and the other stuff that I built doesn’t necessarily mesal that much so I haven’t felt the

Need to tie it together with realistic feeling roads yet but I have the feeling that’s on the at some stage just to make the area feel a bit more coherent overall I’m looking forward to doing something more modern and even the Sci-Fi area if I have any kind of road

Or transport there it’s going to be fun to do that in very straight lines just like yeah everything grades and stuff yeah makes sense just yeah I think it’ be very organized and fun in that way um but uh I I mean like I want to finish

West Hill like the idea behind West Hill and the medieval fantasy area and all these zones was to not like just build in one for three years I kind of got trapped into that and I’ve enjoyed it but like I want to move on to something

Else and then when the mood strikes to build some medieval fantasy stuff I can just pop back and come back to it and that’s why laying out those Farms I I don’t feel the need to finish them now like I want to finish the this town but

I the farm stuff is just like I’m done with all this concrete and sci-fi Redstone stuff or you know you get frustrated on a redstone Bild you need a break I’m going to go plant some potatoes for an hour you know like can just work on stuff that way and I think

That I need to remember the completionist in me needs to backpedal and just like look you you can leave this stuff for later it doesn’t all have to be done now but um just like The Lion King it’s like everything the light touches like I feel like when I’m

Standing somewhere and you can see something in rendered since it’s like nah I need to fix that no I need to tweak that like that’s I don’t like that tree there like that kind of stuff starts to creep in real quick and just like The Lion King you’ve been on this

Sort of self-imposed Exile in West Hill for the last few years and you need you need you need your tonum Pumba to uh remind you that sometimes it’s okay to take the time out and uh then you need a a call home um but yeah looking forward

To seeing where the rest of that goes and here’s to 2024 bringing some new projects our way speaking of new things coming our way the news this week includes the pre-release and release candidates that are out for 1.2.3 Minecraft Java Edition 1.2.3 pre-release 3 was released on Monday

November 27th yes it came out right after we finished recording last week uh I it only has a couple of changes in it in local storage there is only 20 Ser resource packs that are cached and under packets the client now sends additional updates about packs like download

Success bug fixes of note inconsistent Copper Door block drops when broken with tools weaker than Stone copper doors are not part of the doors item tag copper trap doors are not part of trap doors item tag copper doors and trap doors have the wrong blast resistance and

Dragon respawn is unable to be Frozen with the slash tick freeze command Minecraft Java Edition 1.20 pre-release 4 was released on Tuesday November 28th just two bug fixes in this release uh return execute with in an advancement reward function globally discards all subsequent commands and server list ping

Icon doesn’t display the tool tip Minecraft Java Edition 1.2.3 release candidate one was released on Thursday November 30th and just has one bug fix disparity between the read write logic of the explosion packet and that was it so with release candidates we’re getting closer to seeing 1.2.3 in other Minecraft news the

Biggest update to Minecraft Legends was released last week uh it includes from the article on minecraft.net a new player unit the witch witches are mysterious but eager allies that will launch poisonous potions at your foes and you play a structure was also added The Cauldron as long as they are within

The cauldron’s area of effect your units will deal increased damage and knock back enemies the effect lingers for 20 seconds once the units are out of the structures range so it’s sort of like a beacon effectively but they already used beacons for a lot of other stuff in

Minecraft Legends so The Cauldron being added alongside the wit made a fair bit of sense players also have the opportunity to find a new Mount the frog the frog jumps twice as high as other mounts swims much faster and is resistant to fall damage although not in

Vulnerable there is a new piglin unit and a new piglin structure the unit is the clanger which has battle symbols that stun and knock back nearby opponents it’s basically a piglin equivalent of the player factions grindstone Golem and the new structure is the air Chopper which is a giant fan

That rotates to blow away incoming foes from any direction and helps spread the piglin spores from the nether biomes that they bring with them there are some new custom game settings which allow you to set a world seed resistance to knockback Hazard damage and density so things like thorns and brambles and

Stuff that will get in your way as you explore alongside Lava Lakes and things like that how many alls you start with the laay chest density and yield for how much resource they’re able to gather uh player Health regeneration Tower Buffs mob and structure costs you can enable

And disable mounts the damage llamas will do and a Village attack strength and a lot of other custom parameters are now available as effectively settings you can play around with there is also apparently a setting which converts all water into lava there are also improvements to pathf finding type

Select and banner view Banner view is the one that allows you to direct individual units it’s basically like the fine-tune control uh for directing your troops uh there’s also better RPS combat balancing and difficulty tuning to reward players for favorable mob compositions and vice versa unfavorable mob compositions lead to more punishing

Outcomes so this means that the campaign requires more strategic thinking on all difficulties except for stored which is a more relaxed experience effectively a story mode kind of super easy difficulty if you pick the right allies you win the battle faster now if you pick the wrong

Ones you’ll be able to tell there also PVP updates and improvements including some cost and damage balancing and some faster matchmaking so anybody who’s interested in playing Minecraft Legends can find that update available for download now well I for one I’m definitely crossing my fingers for an early release

This week of Minecraft 1.2.3 I would I would hope for tomorrow but I mean they might have more um release candidates to get to get to but I’m hoping that with only one bug fix last time uh that we’ll see it uh because I would like to uh

Hopefully have some of the mods uh updated before I get into West Hill again fabric mods are usually pretty good uh fabric keeps up with the snapshots often so mod authors are usually aware of what fabric changes have been made so that they can update their mods quite quickly and so I’ve not

Really ever had to wait quite as long I remember the the long weights that people used to have for things like OptiFine and uh one of the reasons we switched the fabric and use things like sodium and indium and those kind of performance mods on the Citadel is

Because we don’t have to wait nearly as long when things update and uh I just I find that the the platform seems to be easier to deal with and from a back end it’s easier to manage so I’m hoping that we’ll get the the fabric updates to to

Different things I’ve seen some of the mods already if I’ve gone to update something that I have right now that’s like 1.20.1 I’ve seen like 1.2.3 betas and things like the mini map mod and some of the other things that I use uh and sometimes when there isn’t any

Changes under the hood it’s not really a big update at all it’s a matter of like changing the version number maybe changing the data pack version number or the or the texture pack version number uh in in the mod and that’s it like there doesn’t really require any coding

Changes to because sometimes you’ll see mods or data packs that’ll say 1.20.1 plus it just means that like any 20. version is just going to work with it because nothing that this mod or data pack addresses has been changed in anything that Mojang has done in like2

Or3 or potentially four so um that that is good news for me I’m hoping that it happens sooner than later are you looking forward to 1.20 like do you have plans to update the the survival guide yeah I mean I’ll definitely update when it arrives uh and I’m

Based on their current track record I’m assuming that we’re going to get another release candidate immediately after we’re done recording here um but yeah I I I assume we’ll get a full. 20.3 release this week and yeah I’ll be I’ll be upgrading the survival guide world

There’s no reason for me not to I don’t rely on any mods that would need updating everything is pure vanilla and the main changes in terms of survival are the new bat model functionality for decorated pots and shield blocking be more accurate when the player is looking

Up um so obviously there are a bunch of other things that got added for Creative tweaks the slash tick command set has been added which is kind of huge but from my perspective I’m interested in just making sure I keep up with all of the survival functionality and I don’t

Immediately have any plans for decorated pots I think a few people were excited about maybe using them as item filters but it doesn’t really make as much sense to do that as it might at first appear I’m just interested to see what we can do with them outside of that and I think

Multiplayer servers will have more fun you know being able to put a decorated pot somewhere and then have somebody else break it to obtain a reward of some kind it can be use for mini games and whatnot that is not necessarily the focus of a single player world but it’ll

Still be kind of fun to have them as a storage option in you know desert builds or something if I end up doing something like that it’d be fun to Chuck a couple of diamonds in there and use it as a piggy bank you know you can only get

Your money out if you smash the thing open decorated pots take up a full block right they’re not they’re not like a chest yeah they okay cuz you could put I’m just thinking about booby traps you you could put like an observer facing up into the pot so when someone breaks it I

Mean you’d give them a split second of like oh no like what what did I just turn on and like maybe it’s a nice fireworks display maybe it’s not I that could be that could be fun maybe it’s just a dud maybe just have an observer there that doesn’t do anything and just

Make them paranoid as to what might just happen yeah yeah I’m tempted to leave traps to myself in my own world and uh figure out if I you know see if I remember what I left there a while ago like what does this Observer do bam just

Like blows me up um keep myself on my toes Uncle Fester style um but yeah the only other thing to talk about really this week cuz a lot of the bugs and stuff are just sort of they’re either arbitrary they’re sort of not the the biggest things in the world or they are

Um you know the kind of things that are relating to 1.21 features so they’re not really things that are going to be in the 1.2.3 update they’re just part of the experimental tag um so the other big news is the Minecraft Legends thing and uh I know you haven’t been back to

Minecraft Legends since you know it initially launched and and neither have I really and I’m hoping that Legends players are going to enjoy this update it seems like they have a a reasonable amount of content to add there um and they they’re still trying to stick to

That sandbox feel of giving players a lot of different options I just don’t really have enough time to reinvest in the game at this point because I’m so busy with vanilla Minecraft and everywhere that that’s going so hopefully people will enjoy the Legends update if they are still around and playing

That do we know what the player base is for Minecraft Legends I know like six or seven months ago they said that it reached like 3 million players but is that is that 3 million downloads or is that 3 million I expect that’s downloads I I

Don’t know if it’s going to be like an active player base of that size anecdotally I’ve heard that people have trouble finding like PVP matchups if they’re looking for a 4v4 game so maybe that it’s not as active or like it maybe reaches Peak activity on weekends as you

Might expect but when it comes to PVP games and like Arena style games like that there’s a lot of choice so I wouldn’t be surprised if you know the new fortnite season is pulling people back into that if they want a more kind of PVP focused experience compared to a

Strategy game like Legends yeah and and this is just my own experience in the past and I can’t think of an example I don’t think Starcraft did this but uh it might it might have had like a mod or something that did it but unpopular opinion and I know I’ve not been keeping

Up on Minecraft Legends but I find when strategy games add things like custom settings that allow players to remove strategy from the game like damage Health starting with more lays than you normally would that’s not normally a good sign like it feels like the feedback has been this is too hard this

Is too timec consuming this is not giving me the reward that I want from this game and so the settings have been changed to like well now just like Minecraft you can make the settings in the game whatever you want well then becomes more of a Sandbox strategy and I

You know like I remember when I was younger I I would think oh well if I can enter this code in to well just I’m going to use Starcraft as an example but I I don’t remember if this is exactly the way that it worked but you know you

End up with like starting with like 10,000 credits or something like that rather than zero and it just means that that’s slow grind at the start of the game was alleviated by the fact that you could build things faster and get your economy up going faster uh but that’s

Not how the game was designed or intended and and to me like when these kind of things are built into the game and not necessarily as cheats they’re just like these are things that you can change if you want to play the game differently then like that just doesn’t sound like a

A a healthy gamer base now story mode I’ve got a different opinion on I like that I I think that’s a good thing to have in game cuz me you know especially as a busy adult when I look at some games that I might want to go play and

They’re renowned for being hard or punishing or just timec consuming if they have a story mode I think okay I don’t I don’t need to prove myself against this video game I don’t need this to be super challenging but I really want to see this I don’t know

Star Wars story or whatever um I don’t mind a story mode I think that’s that’s a great way to do it especially if you’ve got younger people that you know Minecraft player base is Young maybe they don’t have necessarily the skills to play the game the way that it was

Designed and they still want to play it but they’re finding it frustrating having a story mode I can see that being great for younger players families people that want to play with their kids that kind of stuff so I’m not pooing that and I’m not really slamming any of

This I’m just saying that it doesn’t sound like it’s going in the direction that they had originally planned and that’s that’s probably a point of frustration I would think I’m assuming but I just it’s it’s one of those things where like I every time I see an image

From Minecraft Legends I think this looks really cool but having played it I just I know that it’s not an experience that that I want and I really hope that the the Minecraft team can pull some stuff from the Legends team in terms of design because like my gosh the piglin

Clanger like that has got personality to spare yeah and I really wish it was something that you would run into in a pigin Bastion like that would make sense you know like it’s got a knockback effect it’s he looks I he looks like a rock star with symbols like just it’s so

Out there but it Tak makes the stuff that you see in Minecraft which just feels like piglin brutes are just bigger piglins with axes like they they don’t feel all that inventive whereas this you know piglin would just be wild and out there and even just the the the models

You know I’m not saying that you have to do anything wildly different with the gameplay in Minecraft or or the way that you know things are affected but like having different models that have these really unique uh ideas and and um variety I think while sure extra work on

The art Department I I don’t think is something that would be bad for Minecraft like I think Variety in the piglins as you see them or zombies as they come at you would be fun you know so I I don’t know I’m hoping that there’ be some lessons learned from from

Legends that might be applied to Minecraft in the future I was honestly surprised that I know the mob vote this year was three real world animals but I was surprised that we didn’t see any of the golems and stuff that were present in Minecraft Legends like basic units

Coming over into vanilla Minecraft in some form or another because they have that really well-developed kind of aesthetic to them and that and that really solid personality um yeah it’s it’s it’s it’s worth playing if you’ve got the time for Minecraft Legends I think especially with there being a bit

More customization to it and I I’ll take the other point of view here is that the the customization features to a certain extent feel like accessibility settings for players who just really don’t Vibe with a certain thing about the game but would still like to enjoy the strategy

Elements that it has without completely nerfing the difficulty entirely and just focusing on the story um but there’s also the other side of that which is that you can increase the difficulty incrementally and with a finer level of detail than just choosing easy medium hard nightmare or whatever the the

Difficulty settings are in Legends and I I think one of the problems I have overall with difficulty settings in video games in general and this applies to vanilla Minecraft as well is that when you increase the difficulty of something the enemies don’t typically get smarter right they don’t Reserve any

Enemy AI for just on harder difficulties it is much more likely that they either throw enemies at you with higher health so they’re more damage spongy or the enemies do more damage to you so you’re on the ropes a little bit more frequently and it doesn’t really feel

Like it increases the level of strategy that you need you just need more resources to throw at this brick wall and I think the ability to fine-tune some of the more difficult elements so that you can have okay I want a few more of these types of units to appear so

That I can develop a counter strategy for them and just kind of tweak a little bit of the stuff I don’t want as much environmental damage because I know what to avoid at this point but maybe I want the piglin patrols to spawn more frequently so that I can focus on base

Defense cuz I enjoy that element I think if you can customize it in that way that’s fine and that’s good and I think lends to the sandbox element that we come to know from vanilla Minecraft bleeding into the Minecraft Legends World a little bit but overall I just

Hope that the people who are still enjoying Legends are finding new ways to enjoy it and that it’s providing them with a lot of longevity because one of the things I find people expect from Minecraft now is a game that you can play Forever and that might have been a

Lot of people’s disappointment with Legends was how brief it felt compared to the vanilla Minecraft experience that’s a really good comparison the the length of time you can spend in Minecraft and and the longevity of the game compared to something like like Legends because just just like any other strategic game like

Starcraft had an end you know like you could there’s multiplayer but like Starcraft story there was an end and when you if you were playing it for that story that was it like you could you could go back and play matches against the computer but that really wasn’t you

Know rewarding compared to playing on the ladder and stuff like that so I think one of the things that strategy games need to have in order to have that longevity is some sort of really solid multiplayer aspect to it and I never did multiplayer when it was um with I did I

Did co-op with you but I never actually played against somebody so it uh it’s not something I’m aware of in terms of like how it felt in in Legends yeah honestly the problem I had with multiplayer PVP was that it felt like eventually you get to a point where both

Players are so turtled up that you just deplete the resources on the map trying to throw stuff at each other and it’s really who gives up first that’s the the main problem I have with it is like one player will launch a really big attack they’ll throw everything they’ve got at

The enemy base they have no hope of reaching the enemy base and then one when those players resources are depleted the enemy launches a counter attack and they win and that’s sort of the way the matches that I played with some of my friends ended up going uh and

So it may have been a little bit different randomly there’s no sort of competitive ladder so a lot of the matchmaking was just with random players and I think that was another one of the major issues it had on launch was that it was difficult to get into games with

People that you were already friends with on on Xbox and were trying to team up with you could make a lobby with all of them if you had eight players and wanted to do 4v4 but you couldn’t always get a team of four onto the same team if

You wanted to go up against random opponents so maybe some of that stuff has been fixed there have been other incremental updates um preventing players in PvP matches from recalling all of your units if you’re playing with completely random folks that’s another thing that’s happened recently and I

Think they are fine-tuning it it seems to be what they are doing but uh ultimately if the base game didn’t appeal to you then uh maybe Minecraft Legends is not for you after all we’re going to roll on into chunk mail though because both of our emails this week are

Going to tie into the main discussion we have picked out there a bit of a trend in community email and a trend overall in the Minecraft Community discussion that we like to revisit and it’s all about inventory so if you’d like to email the show and chime in on any

Subjects that we talk about and anything else that’s been on your mind Minecraft wise you can email us at spawn chunk [email protected] keep your emails short and to the point and we will potentially read a few more of them on the show especially as we take a focus on

Listener email towards the holidays so this first one comes in from lurm worm with the subject is the crafter an inventory solution hi jol and pix longtime listener first-time writer do you think the crafter is a partial solution to inventory management take everyone’s favorite crafting example the dispense

Instead of having to fill my inventory with Cobble and Redstone throw a bunch of bows on the ground and start crafting I just need to fill input chests with all the necessary materials and let the crafter do its magic freeing time and space in my inventory to complete other

Tasks I can even AutoCraft the bows granted it takes time to fill those input chests but I think that the crafter alleviates The Strain on the inventory when we want to craft large amounts of tedious blocks what do you guys think would you call the crafter an inventory management solution lorm died

From a cave spider whilst trying to hook up their string output from the cave spider farm and accidentally let the spiders out we’ve all been there trust me we’ve all been there I uh triple spider spawner was the first XP grind on the Citadel and I died a lot to cave

Spiders uh or was at least chased away from my task by cave spiders with a lot of shy lauff impressions as I ran away uh I also want to give a shout out to big hippo who wrote in about Crafters as well uh a quick summary of their email

We can’t use Stone Cutters to get better value for our wall or stair crafting with the autoc crafter the they actually seem like this is a really balanced way to get things done uh either higher resource efficiency with the stone cutter or less effort with the autoc crafter this is reminiscent of amethyst

Farms manually mining with Fortune yields more than pistonpowered Automatic Farms and I think that’s a good point that the automatic crafting that’s coming with the crafter needs to use all of the Crafting Table recipes so unlike the stone cutter where you get one stair for one block you have to do the the

Crafting shape in the crafting table and the crafter which leads a little less you know leads to a little bit less uh efficiency as far as your inventory goes or your resources go rather but it means that you don’t have to sit there and craft them yourself yeah like the the amethyst Farm

Example actually makes me think would I be more interested in setting up a piston power automatic amethyst Farm if that then meant I could feed all of the shards into an autoc crafter and have tinted glass made automatically for me and that I wouldn’t have to go in there

And and do stuff manually like if you had a geode that was conveniently around an area where you hang out regularly and you could automate that farm I feel like maybe it would be more of an incentive to do that when you have automatic crafting thrown into the mix as well

Which also kind of makes me wonder what other manual tasks people will relegate to automatic crafting once uh that stuff has been been been taken care of I already know a lot of people who are expecting to use bamboo farms a lot more now that the crafter can automatically

Make wood for them for example so yeah there’s there’s potential for that but in terms of yeah Inventory management I don’t think is the the first notion that came into their heads when they were implementing the crafter but it’s certainly a good example right like yeah anything that features multiple crafting

Ingredients in it if you’re not just making chests for example which is just cram as many planks as possible into your inventory probably as logs first but if you’re talking about Pistons if you’re talking about observers and other more complex Redstone ingredients like having to make all of the Redstone

Torches for comparators and then make sure you’ve got enough quartz and everything for the comparators I think the crafter is really well suited to helping you through that process instead of you having to cram all of the stuff into your inventory even though it’s easier to use it for the more

Straightforward crafting recipes like crafting iron blocks for example incredibly easy because it will just fill up with those ingredients naturally doesn’t matter what order they’re put in I do think the crafter provides the most benefit when it is helping you craft the finicky recipes that exist further down the tech tree

First thing that comes to my mind is something that I’ve never played with in Minecraft Beyond just the basics and that’s fireworks so if you wanted to craft a lot of fireworks for a certain kind of display and you didn’t want to have to sit there and do it manually the

Entire time then I think having the Crafters there would also in the same way have that inventory sort of feel where uh it’s removing two things like it’s removing the inventory crunch for the multiple different kinds of items that you have to have to create the different fireworks but then also you

Don’t have to lay out the the pattern every time you could have a different craft crafter for every kind of Firework and if if you needed them then then you could just kind of pump them out that way um that’s something that comes to mind for me um I know that the dispenser

Is usually top of people’s lists and um I I don’t know how useful it would be because I can’t see myself needing a lot of these but banners would also be something cool to be autografted that I find you have to have a decent amount of

Die in your inventory and you know craft the banners and all that kind of stuff but those things all stack pretty easily so it for me it’s it’s the things that don’t stack I think is where player players are going to be more attuned to using the crafter uh potions and potion

Brewing anytime that you can use the crafter to help out with that maybe would be good but a lot of times that’s the brewing stand so that’s like it’s it’s not so much that you need to have the the crafter to help with the actual potion it’s more the brewing stand and

The automatic feeds and all that kind of stuff going into there that that help with that next even comes from D Muka I hope I’m saying that right landscape artist member in our Discord and more stuff without clutter hi Joel and Johnny I had an idea that tied in with your

Discussion on episode 273 about no GUI crafting and also doesn’t add to inventory clutter how about having different chest types they could be made by shift clicking redstone dust or an iron ingot or a gold ingot Etc on a chest to change it if the chest is

Broken then the player would get the chest and the crafting item back I’m sure there are other blocks where this type of mechanic could work Keen to hear your thoughts on this deuka didn’t get blown up by a creeper because he wasn’t looking in a

GUI always good to avoid and yeah like I I think we we talked about this in 273 was that inventory time while the game is kind of Frozen around you is one of those things where yeah a creeper can sneak up on you and a lot of other games

That involve the level of action and movement that Minecraft does I’m thinking specifically of like games from the shooter genre where you can open your inventory but you still have the power to move your character around you don’t end up with the WD Keys being completely locked off and it’s kind of a

Surprise that you can’t do that in Minecraft but also if you kept moving you might just move away from the inventory you’re supposed to be looking in um so yeah there’s something to be said for uh for at least having a bit more control while you’re in a GUI to avoid those creeper

Explosions I’m assuming that these crafting abilities would be in addition to and not replacing the crafting of a trap chest in the crafting GUI because I think players have to learn how to do it and I think that’s the only hangup that I have with this idea I think it’s great

But I think it it’s hard to then communicate that to the player like how do you tell someone that when you right click on a chest with a redstone dust that it is going to make it a trap chest like I feel like there needs to be some sort of communication there

Um with traps chests I think um that works but with other chests like ender chests that are more obsidian heavy I think that’s where the crafter comes in like that’s where you wouldn’t want to just right click with one block of obsidian on a chest to turn it into an

Ender Chest like you’d want that Ender Chest to be made out of I think it’s it’s it’s eight obsidian right and then yeah and in the middle yeah yeah it’s been a long time since I’ve made one um but and and actually that’s that might be something else that’s a pain in the

Butt to craft if you needed a lot of them you know um and we’re going to have more ideas about this in the main discussion because when when we got these emails and we were talking about um the crafter inventory I’m not sure how much this leans into inventory but

The idea of you know new kinds of chests or other blocks to help with player inventory management I think kind of points our eyes to towards what might be the solutions with an s b to inventory management for players and I think that the stuff here might for me be more

Aimed at player storage rather than player inventory so if you’ve got a complicated build and your inventory is full of all kinds of different blocks this may not help that but I would love to see you know just running with um the email chests of different colors in Wood

Colors yes it would help with decorative things but it would also help with just managing chests without having to put signs or item frames on everything if you have like a large storage system or if you wanted to put things into different boxes now I’ve got different colored shulker boxes for all

Of my building in West Hill but I very quickly run out of like just I I’ve got seven Brown shulker boxes and some of them are dirt some of them are coarse dirt some of them are the various wood types now I use different color boxes for different color kind of wood types

But there’s only so many different color and shulker boxes are small and on big projects I would love to have a double chest for that kind of thing that would be color coded and right clicking on something to change its you know function or or its visual you know

Presentation in Minecraft I mean dyes to me are the first thing that come to mind so if if we don’t get say like you know Cherrywood and jungle wood and all that kind of stuff in chests then the ability to at least color chests would be great

Because then you’ve got a double chest that you can make a certain color and with the crafter I can see some future autocrafting Contraptions that will need to track several different kinds of items in a production chain it would be a lot easier to do that with colored

Double chests you know like your black chests have got your coal in it you know your um your other chests have got different things in it you know white green whatever you’re doing and I think that that would be helpful for people that are making a lot of stuff now that

That’s maybe just my mindset towards fun redstone contraptions that’s probably a small player base so I know I know that it’s not like everybody um but I think just the general population would be happy with being able to dye chests different colors um I for one have been

Playing with a chest texture pack for ages to the point where I forget that regular chest in Minecraft or that weird orange color that that was one of the things I was going to bring up was like what wood type is the default chest made

Out of and the answer is none of them because it’s a completely different col color to any of the other existing wood types we have and I think it was originally because Oak and Birch were basically like the only trees that existed for a while I think it might

Even just have been oak trees at the very beginning my thought always goes to if you start making chests out of all of the different wood types does anything happen to that original one do you still keep that as the original chest for an oak chest and then make all of the other

Ones use the same kind of plank texture or color as the base would in which case why does the oak chest look so weird and then kind of like you know changing the texture of diamond ore is the one that they kept the same as the old ores do

They resist changing the texture of the original chest because it’s just one of those iconic Minecraft things that they really don’t feel like should change at this stage in the game I mean I’ll be a stickler and say it’s 2023 it’s an ugly chest updated

Sure just make make it Oak and move on and then open up the floodgates for the other chest be I I’ve been playing with um Oak chests like Oak plank chests as regular chests and Spruce chests as trap chests on the server forever uh it’s an

Idea I stole from germy boy and I hardly ever use even just Oak chests I normally use the dark oak because or not the dark oak the um the trap chest because they’re Spruce and they just they kind of go better with all of my medieval

Stuff so that that kind of thing I think is is nice now I mean sure there’s texture packs and mods and all that kind of stuff but I just in in terms of the game I think having the control to D them would be fun um I I feel like it’s

I I know that it opens up a Floodgate well like if you can Dy a wood chest how come you can’t Dy a wood block so like there’s there’s a slippery slope there but in terms of just focusing on what it would do to Aid in inventory management

And I I don’t mean player inventory but like game inventory management I think it would be it would be really really cool um also the other thing that was brought brought up was not just the existing chest but like what if you you know applied an iron you know block to

Or iron um Ingot to a chest what about a gold ingot and I started to think of like what other items in the game could you apply to a chest to make a different kind of chest so not just a different color but something that has a different

Function and so I like would an iron chest that only interacts with redstone be useful uh what if you applied lapis to a chest to enchant it and that allowed you to stack potions inside of it but then you still couldn’t stack potions in your inventory it just means

You could sto store more potions in one smaller space and doesn’t change like the PVP nature of it because and and any kind of in-game stuff because like you you can only bring them so many with you right because you only have so much room

U but if you had an iron chest or not an iron chest a a Lapis chest or an enchanted chest to store them all um that could be really cool and could potentially also help with any kind of Auto crafting or Auto Brewing uh I’m just trying to think about other things

That don’t stack that are a really you know a real pain in in Minecraft and I know that there’s um mods that have metal chests and usually what happens is like you get a much larger inventory space within the metal chests that’s usually the go-to um but I think it

Could be more inventive than that I think that more space doesn’t necessarily solve the problem um but I like the idea of even something that’s a little bit more pie in the sky and this is where it gets into a block that’s not just a chest but like we have the

Crafter but I remember seeing in some mods where you can compact blocks so you take nine stacks of cobblestone you place it in the Grid in your crafter and it gives you a compacted you know um stack so you have nine Stacks in one inventory space well that seems a little

Op for just the player inventory like how would that even work but what if it wasn’t the player that did it what if it was something that you had to use the crafter to do you know and then it would be uh maybe it’s a different block maybe it’s called the compactor

Maybe it requires other you know things like maybe you have to have another item in there that makes it work you know like crystals or lapis or something um just to kind of make it not just a crafting recipe but more of a uh something that would be pushed to a

Later stage in the game and then you’d have something that would be requiring setup from the player requiring time as this would actually take time to fill in um but the the the reward would be that you’re compacting your your stone down into one inventory slot now I don’t know

If that means that you can unpack it as a player because if you can’t then that doesn’t really help outside of if you have to move a bunch of stuff from one location to another on your own like you’re saying okay I’m done with this

Build I need to go move over there but I’ve got all of my stuff here and it’s just going to take me forever to move it from here to there in order to be in a convenient spot for building and I think that that could be a potential solution

I don’t know how outside of vanilla Minecraft that feels so like that’s kind of a pie in the sky idea yeah it feels interesting that Minecraft doesn’t have too many items which are like logs in that you can carry them around as a stack in your inventory but whenever you

Want to you can break them down into four times as much material and it’s still all buildable blocks right like I don’t think there are really that many blocks that do that and even when it comes to something like you’re breaking down an iron block into nine ingots but

Then it’s not ingots that you can like place and use as building material so I’m kind of surprised that Minecraft has not taken that route more when it comes to like inventory Solutions in that you could have a like you said a a compacted Cobblestone block that would allow you

To basically turn nine Cobblestone into a block and then stack more of that on you and then Branch it back out again into as much Building Material as you needed and that may just be all about gameplay balance from the developers perspective it may be something that

They decided that’s a little bit too powerful to be able to carry around that much inventory space but in the age of shulker boxes I wonder if that’s a a discussion they could end up revisiting right um yeah there’s a couple of interesting factors about this but that

That is that’s one of the reasons I always recommend whenever you need bridging blocks to go out to the end with to do that initial search for like end cities if you bring a stack of logs with you that’s actually eight stacks of slabs so there’s actually a ton of

Material that you can you can get out of just one stack of material as long as it’s the right material to bring with you but that just doesn’t apply to everything um going back to dea’s email the option of right clicking on something to change the chest I I like

First of all your idea of having those chests be specialized in some way I think that’s that’s a really interesting concept but something you said when you were setting that up kind of it occurred to me that moving anything crafting wise or decoration wise out of something with

A GUI reduces the players chances of finding it because if you are right clicking on something out in the world in order for an interaction like that to happen how does the player know that’s a really interesting concept to me and it occurs to me that crafting as a mechanic while

It is laborious and while it feels like something that’s in grained in Minecraft’s identity from a while back and I think maybe the reason crafting exists in so many games is really just as a template for what the player can do and an interface that you can come back

To over and over again even more so now it has the recipe book to visit what is possible in the game just through the blocks that you can make there are some things that interact in different ways that are difficult to explain except through diagrams like the way beacons

Work and having to build build a beacon pyramid in order to activate the different tiers of effects but that stuff manages to scrape by just through kind of pictographic information and a little bit of community knowledge here and there there are some things that I

Convey to the player like how to build a nether portal that is now conveyed through the existence of ruined nether portals and this implication that you can put the structure back together but when it comes to small interactions with blocks and stuff that you can craft

Really if it doesn’t have a g why there are not that many ways of telling the player how to do something in this game and so I imagine that would be a mechanic that if it existed would be great and players would be able to share information about it and explain how it

Worked to each other but it would be quite difficult explaining to new players without the context of that Community Information pool how that mechanic would work so it’s it’s an interesting challenge it would it would be quite a an interesting development task I guess to come up with a way that players could

Intuitively stumble upon that mechanic without it having been spelled out for them I I’ve never thought about crafting in that way as like as part as a tutorial about like what’s possible and it makes sense like it’s something that and it could be just because of my time

In Minecraft but when I go to craft in other games I kind of intuitively know what I’m doing like I kind of I can kind of I can see the tech tree or I expect a tech tree I expect you know um certain items are going to combine to do do

Different things like if I need a pickaxe in a game I’m going to go for metal and wood you know like I’m not going for anything else just and that’s probably just an assumption and and it’s it’s funny how sometimes the games rely on you being familiar with the genre in

Order to get through like the tutorial stage without it like handholding you um and that can be that can be good and bad because I think that uh relying on G like games relying on you being a gamer is not necessarily good thing yeah I find that they things need to be a

Little bit more like Forefront in the actual game that you’re playing uh I remember that being very frustrating with uh no man Sky it’s better now but I I feel at the early days of no man Sky when I was playing I found that not

Knowing how to do that kind stuff was re really really tricky um and there’s so many items in that game and they all have long complicated names and all that kind of stuff so that was was convoluted but with with things like right clicking on things I kind of wonder if there needs

To be more visual like the things that I like in Minecraft that that they’ve done recently has been when they changed the smithing table and they give you the silhouette of the items and where they could possibly go yeah and if there’s more than one item that could go there

It kind of rotates through a couple of Silhouettes you know and I think that’s very effective because it doesn’t use language it just use shapes colors and and patterns and pattern recognition which is part of Minecraft and so I like that aspect but I don’t know how you do

That outside of a chest now if you opened up a chest and there was an an item slot in the same way that the player has an offhand if there was an item slot like an offhand slot inside of a chest that had a bunch of different

Things rotating by then you’re like oh what happens when I drop in a copper Ingot or a gold ingot or you know um Redstone or whatever that could be a way to do it you know like it it does mean that there’s a UI uh but I like again I don’t know how

You communicate a right click there so it’s it’s difficult but have outside of like the the the notes like the production notes the patch notes for Minecraft was there anything in game that suggests that you can use an axe on copper to strip it I believe there is an

Advancement that tells you to wax stuff and then asks you to remove the wax um so I think that’s one of the ways in which you learn about that I I don’t know if there’s anything else inherently in game but then if you’re exploring a trial chamber for example now in in 1.21

And you find all of the different types of copper everywhere if you weren’t aware of what copper did before then you at least pick it up and you go oh okay this is a waxed block of copper instead of a regular block of copper how can I interact with that and maybe that

Prompts you to explore what’s possible there but yeah I I think the the wax on and wax off advancements are there for that reason so in this case I suppose you could have an advancement be decorate a chest with some sort of precious material and then that could

You know cue you into it in some way um to take another St here um I want to bring up another game as an example um stardy Valley is still getting updates the creator of stardy Valley recently revealed he was adding big chests which are chests with double the inventory

Space and in stardy Valley I think it’s like 12 slots in a row it’s like the numerical Keys plus like the minus and plus keys are the total inventory so that’s 12 I think a total amount of inventory you have in a chest is 36 spaces so roughly the player inventory

In Minecraft actually give or take the hot bar and so big chests in that are obviously going to be a lot larger and I’d say technically we already have something like this in Minecraft because of double chests being a thing and doubling the size of a storage container

In a video game always feels like a great idea on paper um in practice in games like Minecraft where there are maybe similar looking blocks and there can be a lot of inventory clutter if you’re just using that as a chest to throw everything in it’s very easy to

Lose individual items that you’re trying to find in a much larger inventory without a way to search that container somehow which you certainly can’t do in stard Valley but stard Valley also has really great built-in organizational tools along with those chests they have buttons which sort the items in the

Chest I think by category so all of your seeds will group together all of your tools will group together all of your like you know animal products from like sheep and cows and stuff will will group together um and there’s also a button which adds items from the player

Inventory to any existing stacks of those items in the chest but the difference there is also that stackable items in that game stack to 999 so it’s going to take a while before the game needs needs to generate another stack for you to add more you know

Beetroot seeds or whatever in there um whereas with Minecraft if you had something like that the game would more often than not start creating more Stacks because you’re putting in a ton of dirt and it’s going to need to put five stacks of dirt from your inventory

Back into a chest that maybe contains you know a handful of dirt to begin with so the interaction there is already slightly different stardy Valley also has built-in ways to change the color of any chest which was not there at launch it was a feature that was added in a an

Update shortly after the game’s initial release and it’s sort of building popularity and I think that’s a way that Minecraft could do it Minecraft already has a a a an established system for coloring different items which is adding some dye to it right um but I do wonder

If maybe for the sake of chests and inventory organization instead of it being related to Wood types like you said having colored chests of some kind having a black chest that’s going to store all of your gunpowder or whatever it it makes a certain amount of sense

And being able to do that from within the chest GUI whether you have to just put some dye in a slot to change the color or if you just click on a Color Picker and it does that that could potentially work like if it just kind of

Skins the chest with a specific color maybe it could work the same way that it does in in stardy Valley I think the key difference between the two games though is that stardew Valley is not a game with virtually Infinite Space there are obviously a lot of tiles in that game

That you could place a chest on if you needed more storage but a lot of the action of that game a lot of the fun of it is in designing either an aesthetically pleasing Farm or something where your storage is in at least convenient and relevant places for each

Activity and you start by just throwing everything in a chest cuz you can only afford to make one chest with the wood that you have but but eventually by the time your farm gets developed you have a variety of different places you want to store stuff and you can do that in stard

Valley in a fairly compact way whereas to build up a larger amount of item storage in Minecraft especially block storage when you’re talking about the amount of cobblestone and deep slate you acquire just in the process of getting enough iron and diamonds to go up the tool progression you end up needing to

Store a lot more in Minecraft than I think you do in stardew Valley so I think the existence of multiple inventories for Minecraft and multiple chests in a storage system in Minecraft is Just inherent to the format of the game but the game gives you enough space

In order to do that and doesn’t punish you for taking up more space with your storage and that leads to Automation in Minecraft it leads to you know putting together a bunch of item filters to filter your storage and and figuring out inventive ways to use the solutions that

They’ve given you I can see there being a great use for you know labeling chests and and having different ways of organizing them Beyond sticking an item frame on it and and labeling it with the block that it contains I’ve run into issues with my own storage system where I don’t know

How to label the mob drops chests because there aren’t any blocks that I can make out of rotten flesh that really signify hey rotten flesh is in this chest but I think chests having other ways of labeling them is ultimately a good thing for player organization but that’s not NE neily resolving the

Overall solution of what how players want to store items and what they think are solutions to the individual problems that they have with inventory clutter it’s more just about helping the player be more organized which Minecraft could still do a lot for I think I think the best experience that

I’ve had was in a modded playthrough all of fabric 5 I want to say and it took a while to set up and it felt very minecrafty in its design But ultimately it allowed you to connect a bunch of chests with cables and you had an interface and you would log into that

Interface and then similar to the creative menu you could type in it and it would bring up like items that started with Cobble or like whatever and and so you could search for things and you didn’t have to have your items sorted into different chests you could

Put Cobblestone next to wool next to Wood and it didn’t matter you would just throw it all in it would all get stored and then when you wanted to bring it out you would just call it up so it was a little bit more technical in terms of

Like it felt a little bit more futuristic but the the aesthetic of it felt very minecrafty because they everything was made out of wood right so it felt like a weird series of like pneumatic tubes that you were like using to get your stuff um and so that I found

Had the spirit of Minecraft but the convenience of like someone that wanted to use a lot of stuff and when I think about player storage and player inventory I know I’m coming at it from six years in one world where I just have so much crap uh mainly cu because I’m a

Digital packrat and I don’t throw anything away but that comes in handy when I need a landscape of farmland and I have chests and chests of grass and I never have to go get grass like I always have it somewhere same thing with Cobblestone deep slate that kind of

Thing and that kind of stuff I think you know labeling chests uh getting some storage advantages like it means that if you do want to have those long projects in Minecraft it doesn’t mean that you need to have like 17 chests all dedicated to Cobblestone like I feel

Like if there was a way to help manage that it’s it’s not necessarily player inventory but it’s certainly World inventory and World storage that can help a little bit I love the idea of better labeling chests I know that uh there’s been a um a few things like um

Cy Kitty in our chat uh sorry civit Kitty uh in our chat shared a mod uh about amazing shulker boxes which is I think showcased on hermitcraft recently where you can see an item floating on the surface of a box that indicates what’s in it you know or or to

You what the the chest is without a name on it it’s like having a a birthday cick on a pink shulker box you know and just what does that mean to you it means that that’s where maybe that’s where all your candles are you know like just that kind

Of thing and with me having multiple shulker boxes of the same color you know for example the three basic wood types Oak Spruce and dark oak are all in brown shulker boxes but it would be great if I could put an item on the surface of that

That to indicate you know which one was which um my brain thinks Brown for wood but then I need to just decide you know which one is is going to have the right in it and for me the way that I get around that is whenever I set up my

Shulker boxes I always put them in the same order it’s like a memory game you know like I’ve got half a dozen gray shulker boxes and it goes Cobble tough andesite stone stone brick and then carved stuff you know stairs and slabs and whatever and that’s how I remember

Left or right because if I if I don’t do that if I put tough at the end I’m always going to be clicking on the second one looking for tough and it’s going to be andesite or something so I play I have to play a memory game and

It’s okay it’s a it’s the solution that I’ve come up with but I I would love to have a better way of of of labeling and organizing things like chests or shro boxes and like I feel like the ability to have that kind of functionality with The

Whimsy that we’ve seen in Minecraft you know like the ender chest is a weird and wonderful little thing you know uh the the idea of trap chests in interacting with redstone I just like the idea of like iron gold what does a copper chest do how like does does oxidation affect

The chest’s functionality like there could be some fun mechanics there that could be really really interesting and I I I hope that whatever they come up with has the same sort of uh sense of fun or sense of adding gameplay like I don’t want to uh uh

Catch all solution you know uh and I think the crafter as um big hippo pointed out is a really good example of they added something to the game that solves some problems but then adds a bunch of gameplay for people that want it if it’s like it’s there if people

Want it and if you don’t want it don’t don’t use it it’s fine you don’t have to you’re not forced down that road and I think that’s a delicate gameplay design balance to think about how could we add a new kind of chest to Minecraft that doesn’t just negate other gameplay like

You want it to create gameplay not not remove it right now you got my head spinning with ideas for copper chests I’m like if it oxidizes it opens four times as slow as an existing you just get this and then the chest GUI opens I’m like the the only other thing I can

Think of is like you can store less stuff in it as it oxidizes but then it’s just hemorrhaging items every time it ages and that’s just a nightmare for player storage nobody would ever use them um there’s there’s lots of ideas though there’s lots of stuff out there

And if you folks at home have any more ideas for inventory management and how it can be improved of course we’d be happy to hear from you at the usual email address but that’s where we’re going to wrap things up for this episode of the spawn chunks you can find more

Information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today 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

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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 sharing the podcast with your friends is the easiest way to support the show you can find us at the Spong

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Platform you can email the show at spawn chunk [email protected] the RSS feed is linked at the spa chunks. comom 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 bot L go

By pixel riffs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixelist where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I also stream 3 days a week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for the aforementioned YouTube series and over the holidays as

Kind of a shout out to some of my oldest subscribers I’ve also started a playthrough that’s a return to my twitch Roots I’m playing Final Fantasy 9 for a a little bonus holiday playthrough I’m also the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which is still covering season 9 you can find us

Through a quick YouTube search and aside from that I’m at pixel RS on both Instagram and whatever Twitter is calling itself these days Joel where can people find you online links to everything I am up to online can be found at jen.com that includes the SLE Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and

Fantasy entertainment we’ll be recording a new episode this week hope I do have to touch B with Steven but should be on schedule I am Joel Dugen on social media and Joel Dugen on Twitch where I stream normally Thursday through Sunday but satisfactory is good as hooks of me so

You can expect to see me there almost every day uh and we’ll see you in West as well thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite but this chest can fit so much Infinity in It