EPIC Minecraft Podcast: Wind Charges Breeze In

Welcome to the Spong chunks episode number 284 for Monday February 12th 2024 this is a podcast all about Minecraft available across all major platforms if you’re enjoying the show consider subscribing wherever you’re listening to this my name is Joel Dugen and joining me as always is my friend Johnnie on the

Road to recovery you may know him as pixels hello hello if you’ve been enjoying the road to the Super Bowl uh or if you’re on a road to recovery yourself then you may be interested in listening to the render distance where we talk about both of these things I’ve

Been ill this last week and so I’ve been recovering from that and of course the big game was this Sunday so if that’s your bag you can listen to the render distance that’s the extended version of the podcast by becoming a patron of the show at patreon.com thees spawn chunks we don’t

Talk about football and illness every weekend but occasionally they come up when they’re relevant you can also listen to in the patron RSS feed the monthly Minecraft hangout we recorded at the end of January where we sat down with our patrons and they shared screenshots of all the stuff they’ve

Been building in Minecraft lately and our quarterly hangout recorded at the beginning of February where Joel and I went over some of the behind the scenes facts and figures of the podcast those are still fresh so you can get them now in the patrons RSS feed along with the

Extended version of the show so as we’ve been talking about in the render distance I got ill on Monday night so I have played very little Minecraft since the last show I have played a little bit though so I’ll briefly recap my my latest project ideas and obviously even

If you’re not playing Minecraft actively we talked about it a few shows ago about bringing in inspiration from all sorts of different places so this is a short film that came across my path a little while ago uh somebody I follow on Twitter retweeted it and it’s basically

Like a special effects guy called Paul chadis uh hopefully I’m pronouncing his surname right and uh he came up with a really kind of high concept sci-fi short film about about a corporation in the far future that is effectively industrialized to the point where they are aggressively taking over planets

Mining them for resources and using those resources to create effectively a giant Fleet of like battleships and stuff that just end up like thrown out on the surface of this planet meaning that nobody can really land anywhere and all of this stuff is just waste effectively and it’s kind of like a a

Metacom on capitalism and and and waste in our culture but at the same time features all of these fantastic very detailed very kind of high scale uh sci-fi concept and so I’ve been looking at one of these and thinking this would be a really fun thing to build in

Minecraft I’ve provided a few screenshots and the link to the short film uh for our Discord audience and you can probably find those in the show notes as well but um if you want to imagine a kind of cylindrical oil rig pulling a chunk out of a planet uh like

It’s just taken the core out of an apple and there is evidence in the short film of them having done this multiple times in the same area just trying to like optimize the amount of circular area they can pull out and now imagine that in Minecraft with like the full height

Of the terrain in a chunk um and that’s what I’m aiming to do at some point in the near future uh so I’d be mining out the entire thing from build height to Bedrock you know as much terrain as there was and then floating above the terrain try to recreate the contents of

That Chunk from the bottom up and have it be held in the Sky by this massive factory um lots of grebles as well if you’re familiar with the term from like the Star Wars production design stuff where you know if you wanted to have the outside of a ship covered in radar

Dishes and little kind of components that look like they’ve got some sort of function like planetary sensors and that kind of thing um yeah so that there’s there’s lots of little fascinating details in there that I’m going to try and reproduce and I don’t know if I’ll

Be able to recreate it on the kind of scale that is shown in in the film but I think it’s a uh a kind of fun idea for mining out an area filling up the sky above it with something and then potentially even doing something with the darkness underneath it whether

That’s a a mob farm lower down although having all of the stuff above it wouldn’t necessarily make it the most efficient Farm but I I’ve got some ideas for what’s going to go inside in the meantime that’s a fun idea I I like the concept of like taking the chunk out of

The earth like out of the Minecraft world and then not just removing all those blocks and they end up in a chest but like putting it somewhere else and turning it into something else and have it be clear somehow visually that you know this came from that and now both of

These things the hole in the ground and the thing that’s around have a different function now yeah yeah yeah that’s that’s that’s my my loose notion of it and in the film it’s a very vibrant colorful kind of planet so there’s a lot of different layers almost a little bit

Like the um the layers of Terra Cotta and a Mesa biome and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to find an area like that that I want to do this so I I I I don’t want to do it in a Mesa I’m thinking probably like a jungle biome or

Something like that so you got some vibrant green but then you get to see all of the different layers of Minecraft Terrain through this super structure around it and it’s kind of pulled out everything from Deep slate layers and tough blobs and then veins of diorite

I’m hopefully going to tag a couple of geodes on the way down I don’t have a specific area like planned out for it yet but I think yeah if we get a few geodes in there maybe a couple of landmarks that I can reposition further upwards obviously won’t be able to do

Anything with bedrock and whatnot but yeah I’m kind of curious to see what I’ll be able to pull out if I pick a chunk at random give it a roll of the dice and see what happens and if you’re thinking about it like an alien planet then there’s

Opportunities to create something as to like what does the core actually look like if you get down that deep does it change into a different material like what happens after deep slight and you can put like a a faux layer of your own creation down in the depths you know

Maybe inspired by hitting something like a dripstone cave or a lush cave or uh a geode as you mentioned I I could see hitting a geode and either like leaving it in this wall like a cross-section which would look cool but then also maybe saying all right well I don’t want

It there what if I made it like I actually hit a geode large enough that we we can’t see around it like the whole bottom of the of the cylinder could be like Geo like you use it to kind of create your own texture that could be

Kind of fun too yeah yeah like give it a bit more of a Fantastical approach to the existing Minecraft landscape and I might do a bit of stratification instead of uh the Blobs of dite and granite and stuff that we find like turn those into more like streaks and veins of material

Which I’ve done with the floating island build recently so I I’m a big fan of how that ends up looking so yeah maybe we’ll maybe we’ll um modify it slightly but I also like the idea of being able to fly into the area underneath it and see

Where those things match up so it’s going to be an interesting project but either way give me something to keep myself occupied a lot of choing Tuesday streams are going to be uh probably digging out this large area and then finding a way to replace the blocks

Above it’s some good way to get some resources too yes yeah yeah yeah I I have no idea how much or I’m going to find down there but uh yeah there may well be a good way to stockpile on some diamonds once we get further down uh so

Yeah that’s me that’s it’s really just theoretical right now I haven’t really put any of this into action yet but that’s a project for the near future uh how about you Joel so I have finished the decoration and the Landscaping along the southern river banks of the West Hill River and

So that involved going around the band uh sitting on a couple of different points points of interests like the the big dock on the west side of town There’s a smaller dock just outside of town like a fishing dock and making sure that the river banks that I could see

From that point were decorated to my I guess my standards um but I also made sure that as I rounded the the corner the river curves to the West as it goes south and once I’m around the bend you can’t see West Hill you’re nowhere’s

Near it so at that point I didn’t need to do anymore so it very quickly goes from decorated by Joel to not at all and that’s fine I just I can’t be decorating the countryside I’ll be it’ll take me forever to finish this build if I do

That so um but it it it ended up doing very well I changed some of the ways that I was doing it because it went from something that was very close up along the fishing Village to something that was a lot farther away and there was a

Lot more trees closer to the river bank and where the River Bank actually meets the river and so I ended up adding adding a couple of my own I didn’t do custom I just kind of grew a couple of saplings and then went back and just

Kind of added a couple of extra Roots brought some of the mangrove roots and made it look like some of the roots of the trees went down into the water and it’s surprising how effective that is like you don’t have to make a giant custom tree grow a regular Minecraft

Tree and then tweak the bottom and tweak the top and you’re done uh I did Lean one of the trees out over the the water a little bit just to kind of create a more interesting silhouette and it all really work works from a distance so it came together quite nicely uh using

Things like Soul Sand Soul soil and coarse dirt to look like pine needle brush along the base of the trees and then have that kind of break up the monotony of like green grass next to River the whole way around so I was really happy with that the uh the other

Thing that I did was the dreaded bottom of the river uh I I don’t like the mechanics of swimming around in Minecraft and decor in I getting somewhere and doing something underwater briefly is fine um I do in Long streams like this take off my elytra so I’m not

Constantly having that weird bouncing on the surface of the water whenever I come out but the problem is that a lot of this River has been sculpted by me and filled in by me and so not every single block of water underneath the water is a source block some of them are flowing

Downwards and I can’t see them and so you’ll be walking along or swimming along at a regular Pace or a regular position I guess I shouldn’t say swimming you’re moving through the water vertically like like a player I’m not entered into swim mode because I find

You move too fast in swim mode when you’re doing detailed work and when you pass through one of those water columns you get forced down into swim mode and I equate it to turbulence with an airplane I don’t really get seasick when I move the mouse around and I look around with

My character in Minecraft but what affects me is like vertical shifts up and and down so same thing plane turning doesn’t bother me plane dropping vertically by a couple meters during turbulence really uncomfortable for me and and that’s what I I think is it

Happens in in this so it did it did keep my streams short uh in terms of the um length to try to get this done but the good news is that having done this before using you know the economy of where am I going to see the bottom of

The river and where am I just not and have that Focus my my time so things like near the giant loading dock you know near a small Beach head uh near along the um the warf the fishing Warf where it makes sense that you can see it there’s sometimes the river bends or

There’s enough of a shadow from the trees where like you just really can’t see the bottom anyway so it doesn’t matter and they’re just little things like rocks uh vegetation is denser and hand placed around you a little point of Interest like a like a small fishing

Dock or the the big loading dock there’s a more variety there’s like aelia bushes and kelp and uh tall sea grass and they’re all kind of placed in situations that make sense uh dense little clusters here and there when the river might slow down that kind of thing but the rest of

The time it was just me running through the river and spamming bone meal in in the places where it’s not really that important like this is not a place where people are stopping and looking it’s just this is just you know the rivers is moving around and uh it’s really not too

Bad like in terms of the the amount of time it takes because you’re just running through once and spamming the bone meal and then going back the other way and using your shears to thin out the the seagrass because it tends to come in these really weird Square clumps

And I just kind of make it look like it’s flowing the way that the river is Flowing so rather than anything that has a square pattern or a pattern that goes across the river I just kind of make it look like the pattern kind of flows with

The river whether the river is curving there or going in a different direction so that uh is now all done and uh I’ve been able to reorganize the to-do list and break the other rivers into sections so it now feels like a little bit more palatable so when I look at the spruce

River which is what I’ve renamed the River on the west side of the town uh I can look at it and say okay I’ve got the West River Bank North and South I’ve got the bottom of the river north and south and I think that’s it because the the

East side of the river is all town like that’s all done I’ve done that like many moons ago so it provides like a smaller checklist you don’t think like fix Spruce River and it’s just this ginormous task of doing this whole thing around the whole bio so it’s nice to

Have those things finished and I’m really happy with the way it looks uh I wish my shaders naturally had a little bit of a better look underwater I might try to tweak that a little bit but I found a small glitch in that if you go into spectator mode because I’m admin on

The server and this is how I get my screenshots for thumbnails and whatnot as I just I switch to spectator and I fly up in the in the air and just look around for good Vantage points but if you’re in the riverbank like if the player is actually in a block then the

Water renders virtually clear and you still get the reflection of the surface of the water so you can tell that you’re underwater but there’s not this really weird navy blue fog that happens yeah and some of it is because I don’t like the texture that shaders often give to

Water in Minecraft I prefer it to have the Minecraft pixelated texture but still have the reflectivity of water and so when I do that underwater can be a little bit Bland from a Shader perspective but 99% of the time I’m not underwater anyway um but because of that

Little fun visual glitch it’s almost like having a night vision potion uh when you stick your head inside of a block you can see very clearly all the decorating that I’ve done so I I have a couple screenshots I’ll share on the show notes this week that have the

Vibrant very very bright green and it kind of made me wonder like it would be really interesting to make an underwater build but in a way where it would be visually very very clear for people I’m not sure whether it would be a Shader or a data pack or using a conduit or

Whatever to try and like make the the experience as bright and sunny as if you’re outside in the air as possible but still have that cool floaty animated effect because what you don’t get from the screenshots is of course everything is moving with the seagrass and the kelp

Like everything is kind of swaying back and forth and you don’t get that at all in builds above the surface in Minecraft uh unless you have like those wobbly shaders but I never use those so it’s one of those things that feels a lot more alive under the water despite the

Fact that you’re not there very often here is the recommendation I will make and it’s a surprising combination but I think it it works pretty well for getting that level of visibility you’re looking for conduit power night vision potions swamp biome because the water in swamps has more of a gray overlay

Instead of a blue overlay when it comes to the actual water texture and so when you’re in a swamp area you find that everything underwater feels slightly clearer because it doesn’t have that blue tint applied to the entire thing but conduit power really does improve

The range at which you can see which I think is one of the major things is like there isn’t as much like distance fog and fall off of the lighting as happens if you’re just using night vision potions and then night vision helps to clarify all of the other elements and

Like the shadows and whatnot that you’re going to naturally get underwater anyway and once you’ve done some more stuff with lighting maybe you can pull the night vision potions back a little bit but I do think it’s an interesting thing to figure out and I’m kind of surprised

That people don’t do this more frequently is go to a swamp clear out a large area and be able to fill it with water to the extent where you can float around almost as though you could fly in creative mode and do all of your building on water with conduit power so

You don’t lose you know the water breathing effect and I think that’s that’s honestly an interesting canvas for a project like that where like you say you want a bit of the motion to be involved in it you want some of the under physics and everything you shouldn’t

Have to worry about mobs because Dr won’t spawn in a swamp biome unless there’s a dripstone cave under it and I think you could get a lot done in that kind of environment if you have the right circumstances for it yeah for me I just think about the

Movement and I go it’s a cool idea but then like for me and that’s me personally like that’s not all players that’s just me thinking like I don’t want to be seick for hours at a time as I’m underwater floating around in Minecraft being pushed around or whatnot

I yeah yeah it’s it’s an appealing idea that I think it’s appealing idea for somebody else to do yeah I think the the other alternative is that you get so used to it that you feel like an astronaut coming back from space when you step on land and you’re like oh what

Is this gravity that I have to deal with now you know so yeah I I I think it’s it’s like you said not for everyone but an interesting Prospect if you want uh a a weird project to take on at some stage moving on into the news this week

Minecraft Java Edition snapshot 24 W6 a was published on Wednesday February 7th 2024 experimental features in 246a the wind charge using a wind charge will fire off a wind charge projectile similar to the Bree’s attack the wind charge fired by a player will grant 10% more knockback than a breezes wind

Charge but will have a much smaller area of impact just like the projectile fired by the breeze wind charges fired by the player also deal damage if they hit an entity directly the breezes drops between four and six wind charges when killed there is a half-second cooldown

After each use wind charges can be fired from a dispenser and players that launch themselves with a wind charge only accumulate fall damage below the Y level of which they collided with the wind burst the texture of vaults has been tweaked to make them easier to distinguish from trial spawners changes in 24

W6a armadillos do not panic when damage but in instead roll up and hide their head and feet armads Peak out to see if the coast is clear before unrolling there are new animations and sounds for rolling up unrolling and the peek out animation quote with these changes work

On the armadillo is done for now and we will be switching our attention to Wolf armor instead tamed wolves and wolf armor tamed wolves now have 40 Health points 20 Hearts instead of 20 Health points which was 10 hearts they no longer take half damage from most environmental sources like they used to

In most cases this change will make no difference given that the health boost is there but they can now withstand more damage from players and arrows feeding a wolf now heals twice as many Health points Japanese font variants a new Option has been added to select Japanese variants from the cjk characters

Replacement glyphs come from the Japanese version of the unifont font this new option is included in the font settings menu accessible from the language menu the difficult value the default value of this option is based on system local language settings and the force Unicode button has been moved to

Font settings technical changes in 24 w6a the dape version is now 31 potion effect amplifiers can be restricted between 0 and 255 again the former behavior of effects such as jump boost levitation and Mining fatigue over 127 have been replaced with new attributes added generic gravity attribute to control downward acceleration when

Falling added generic Safe Fall distance an attribute to control the fall distance after which The Entity will take fall damage added generic fall damage multiplier an attribute to multiply overall fall damage amount renamed horse jump strength to generic jump strength and now applies to all entities this controls the base impulse

From a jump before jump boost or modifier on a block added player block break speed attributes that act like a multiplier over block breaking speeds for players a variety of other attributes have been renamed for formatting consistency separating words using underscores and switching to lowercase characters improved Hopper

Performance a hopper will no longer try to pick up entities if there is a full block placed above it this will improve performance for many Redstone builds but will break some mechanics that relied on glitching items into a block above a hopper fixed bugs of note in 24

W6a Snow Golems snowballs would damage wolves instead of just pushing them tamed wolf Health would reset when NBT is loaded example when a player re logs Hoppers could pick up items through a downward-facing barrel baby armadillos did not make an eating sound when feeding spider eyes the music tracks sh

And Dragonfish and Ox lottle no longer played when underwater and horse armor and wolf armor could disappear when right clicking in the air a full list of bug fixes and other technical changes can be found in the minecraft.net change log Linked In Our show notes at the spun chunks.

Comom so the biggest thing in this is the addition of the wind charge and I think that’s perhaps what many of us expected to happen with the breeze since it has a fairly unique attack similar to The Blaze we have a fire charge which doesn’t quite act like a blaze Fireball

Since the player can’t throw it but you can use a dispenser to fire it and then of course it can set a fire if right clicked on a block so it seems like there is a fairly logical line to be drawn between oh this is the breeze it

Kind of looks like a wind version of the blaze it kind of drops something that feels like a fire charge and they calling it a wind charge when it was used to attack the player and the beginning sort of led to us thinking sure why not a wind charge item but as

An item I think it seems to have a good amount of utility right like you can already imagine people using this in like a SkyWars style setting for like a PVP combat being able to knock somebody into the air with ranged knockback attacks is a an interesting Prospect for

PVP but I think where a lot of survival players are going to find themselves using this is to boost short range jumps because first of all I think it’s it’s really smart that they’ve accounted for the increase in Fall damage you need to fall further you need to like fall past

The height you started from in order to start accumulating full damage so if you boost yourself off a cliff yeah it’s going to hurt but if you boost yourself up onto a ledge and still fall a couple of blocks you’re not going to take any damage so effectively you’re giving your

Self like the equivalent of a frog jump or a goat jump right um so that’s that’s kind of an attractive Prospect apparently it takes a bit of skill in timing to boost a jump but you can get up to like N9 or 10 blocks high which is

Huge and with them being consumable we now have a reason to farm trial Chambers which I think is one of the major interesting factors here because a lot of people were thinking of trial Chambers as a place where you go there once you kind of raid the whole thing

Maybe get some loot maybe you find some interesting spawners but most of the time you’re just going to leave it alone after that the breeze having a wind charge having a farmable drop that you can’t craft or get anywhere else is going to give players a reason to come

Back and I think that’s a fairly important thing for the longevity of a trial chamber structure I’m curious to see what the projectile could be used for Beyond just shooting at other players and mobs in a battle situation I mean it’s cool it’s a it’s a

Nice way to to you know manipulate in in a different way to to fight stuff but like at at the time that you’re taking on a trial chamber you’re probably already going to have a bow and arrow which I think is going to be more efficient against things like skeletons

And creepers and zombies anyway so like I can’t say myself saying oh now that I have a wind charge I’m just never going to use a b and arrow again you know like I feel like there’s a very specific use case for them and it could be something

As cool as an easier way to move mobs around like if you’re trying to set up an iron farm or and you need to move some villagers or you’re trying to get a you know a a bait mob into a specific area and you’re trying to you know move

Them around by not throwing the wind charge directly at them but like next to them so that they blown into the boat or they get blown into the the little holding cell that you had ready for them that kind of thing uh could be interesting I do wonder if it would be

Better if it wasn’t just a consumable item in the same way that like a snowball is consumable like you can get them easily and if people figure out how to farm trial Chambers then you’ll be able to get the wind charge easily but as it as you use it it just kind of

Diminishes and then you have to go get more it would be cool if they also added something that you could craft with the wind charge and be able to be using that over and over again I’m not really suggesting anything that the player would hold but I’m thinking along the

Lines of combining the wind charge with something else to make something like a fan block or something like a call it a puffer or or something more fun in in Minecraft because of the use in the dispenser that it shoots out you know that it it actually fires the projectile

Is cool but it would be neat if similar to how shears in a dispenser you can use them to shear sheep and I feel like it would be neat if you put a wind charge in a dispenser I mean obviously in this case it gets shot out but if there was a

Different way that it could be crafted with a dispenser to make it blow air and that could be really interesting uh to in order to move items around thinking like we use water streams a lot in the Overworld but you can’t do that in the nether because water just evaporates it

Would be neat to be able to use like wind power to move things around in the nether if you wanted to that kind of stuff something like the the equivalent of a bubble column but uh yeah something that could be arranged in different axes as well like if if you have uh

Horizontally placed like fans or whatever then uh having having that stuff could be fun and it’s the kind of thing that you see in um like platforming games like the old Sonic the Hedgehog games sometimes like with the emphasis being on speed and moving stuff around sometimes there were fans that

You could hop over from platform to platform or there’d be stuff that was slowing you down through certain sections and you couldn’t run as fast but you could maybe power through them if you had enough momentum and imagine that being applied to mini games and

Stuff in in Minecraft is a a fun concept but even just having a dispenser firing wind charges out you down a one wide Corridor is going to you know get give a a little bit of an opportunity for players to play around with them as obstacles and I honestly do think the

Jump boost thing is going to be quite valuable because while they are if they’re consumable then it’s kind of similar to using ender pearls to get around but I don’t use ender pearls a lot because I find myself wanting to land on a specific block and more often

Than not the block I want to land on is above me and so I can’t always throw the Arc of an ender pearl accurately enough to land above me but a few blocks in front like I always overshoot and end up on the other side of the thing I’m

Trying to get to so I think maybe we end up uh you know using wind charges as an easy way of getting up onto roofs of a bu a house that you’re working on or like a you know jump up to a ledge or something even in stuff like parkour maps like if

You get a limited amount of these in a chest somewhere and you have to use them sparingly throughout the map to get around I think there there’s there’s all kinds of uses for a mechanic as simple as being able to boost your jump and so I think that’s what we’ll find the

Majority of players using them for rather than as any kind of PVP situation I think you’re very likely to find players using these as a a movement technique as a a traversal mechanic here’s an idea what if you use a wind charge when you’re flying with an

Elytra and it fires you in the opposite direction but without turning you around oh giv like like a backup button like air brakes right like so many people want to be able to stop flying with the elyra because the way that you slow down now is you spin

Around in order to slow your momentum and you still kind of Glide forward but at least you’re not going at the same speed you were but it would be really interesting to be able to slow elytra flight down like maybe you blast off with a rocket and you’re going too fast

To really see what you want to look at so you shoot you know maybe it’s not as abrupt like maybe one wind charge is not going to be enough to turn you around backwards but it will slow you down by a certain percentage so if you fired three

Of them in Rapid succession then you might start to back up but being able to slow your elytra down with a wind charge would be really interesting I can also see the wind charges being used for elytra takeoff but then I don’t think they’re going to be as uh easy to get a

Hold of as Rockets are cuz Rockets are so eminently farmable and craftable so I I don’t I don’t know if we’ll see people using them for Electro flight through other means but it could be a a fun way of getting around it could be a way to yeah launch yourself using a dispenser

Or something so you can get into a a kind of Rocket Silo um Step In close the door and then get catapulted up and then use that to boost your initial flight like I I can see people doing stuff like that do they uh do they stack like if

You shot the wall next to you with one wind charge would you go so far but if you shot it with four wind charges at the same time would you go four times as far I don’t know if the effect cuz it has a cool down right it said in the the

Change log I haven’t had a chance to hop in and experiment with them myself but it does have a half second cool down so you would have to time it so that multiple people or multiple dispensers all shot at once and I don’t know how that would work out but there’s a

There’s a possibility of that um the individual item Stacks to 64 as well so it’s not like ender pearls where you can only carry 16 of them at once that’s good so yeah I I think there’s there’s been some thought put into how players are going to be using that and if the

Breeze is going to drop four to six of them maybe that gets Amplified with looting apparently it’s not yet but if it does then you know you could end up with players farming them for as many as 10 a pop and if your trial chamber is

Going to produce a couple of breezes per round and you’ve maybe got a setup that can kill the breezes easily or or allow you to get in there and loot them without the breeze being able to escape and run around I think there is uh plenty of opportunity to farm these in

Larger quantities without needing to be there for a really long period of time so I I I think I can imagine setups where because the breezes occur in specific rooms of a trial chamber and the trial Chambers have the the 30 minute cool down on the spawners right

Now you could have a Minecart Track on a timer that takes you to one room and then the breezes in there die through whatever means lava blade whatever you need and then once that’s happened it takes you around to the next room where those breezes can spawn once the spawner

Is on the cool down and you can AFK that slightly so that you could Farm those uh yourself and and have multiple of them being farmed from within the same trial chamber just for uh maximizing the output a little bit so that again this is opening up interesting opportunities

And ways that I can think of using trial Chambers after I’ve been there to have the initial experience of one which is I think the positive side of this what do you think about the changes and the apparent final changes or almost final changes to the armadillo yeah I

Believe them when they say the armadillo is done now and think it’s um it’s it’s solid I think it it cuts a nice kind of Middle Ground between people who thought that the the face still peeking out felt like a little bit not quite true to life

And I like the the cuteness of still having their heads Peak out to see like are they gone you know as it’s safe to come out um and so I think that’s that’s fun there’s also new animations and stuff which yeah I need to actually

Check out but I think that’s a good set of changes and the armadillo isn’t doing anything you know gamebreaking or whatever but it has enough to distinguish it now from uh some of the other passive mobs out there that I think it has its own character which is

What I wanted from the armadillo to begin with really I agree and I’m one of those people that thought that the way that it was rolling up was a little bit odd and I think that these changes make a lot of sense add some flavor to it uh I like

That it kind of pops out to look around when it when it’s ready to come out and it makes sense that instead of being threatened and running around like a chicken with its head cut off like other mobs do it just kind of turtles in and

And does a little ball thing uh I I like the changes I think it it looks good it’s they’re cute little noises I watched Zuma void’s video and they it all seems like right on par with everything else that we’re we’re getting in Minecraft in most recent updates like

The new sounds make sense they’re unique they they you’re not going to mistake them for something else like it doesn’t make the same noise as anything else in the game so you’re not going to like is that a goat or an armadillo that I’m hearing like you’re going to be able to

Tell the difference which I think is is nice I’m also all about the hopper changes I think that that makes sense as long as you know it doesn’t cause a lot of problems for for players it’s a good change and I think that the larger benefit outweighs the few Farms that use

That mechanic of of Hoppers sucking a block out from within a block above them I think that having a block cuz previous I think you had to put in a block with an inventory that had nothing in it above a hopper to yeah or likeu the composters are the most

Commonly used one for that because they only have one inventory slot and it’s not it’s not even something that a player interacts with in the same way you do a chest or something and so that reduced lag a great deal but yeah I like the fact that you can now have basically

Any block above them the only thing that I think this alters for me is honey and honeycomb Farms because both of those currently rely on the uh the honey bottle or honeycomb being inside the hive block and being collected by Hoppers below but that’s an easy fix

Since you can probably just put Hopper mine carts under each of your hives and the hopper mine carts aren’t affected by the same thing because they’re entities and they process things differently so yeah for the few farms in which this feels like it would be a significant

Change there’s an easy fix and I think for larger things like the amount of Hoppers I have in my storage system for example I have 128 slices of an item filter and I need to make sure that the items get between those so I have additional hoppers on the corners making

Sure that they’re all connected and that’s a lot for a server to take on it’s fine in a single player world cuz it’s just me playing there but I do think it’s going to uh yeah it’s going to allow for players to have fewer issues with that and obviously not need

To craft tons and tons of composters to optimize the uh amount of lag that they’re going to make on on servers where that’s going to be an issue all the stuff about attributes is above my pig grade but it sounds like things like this are going to be good

For data pack and mod authors map makers that want to play with different things like player gravity and all the different changes uh I wonder though if the attributes and they’ve been rewarded and repositioned are the result of new items in the game like the wind charge

Or if perhaps there’s more coming in 1.21 that we don’t know about and that these are part of making that stuff work but then also saying oh well we’ve had to make these changes to get ready for one 21 that also means that we can make these attributes available for data pack

Authors and mod authors yeah I mean it makes sense to do that I think the uh the safe full distance attribute is the one that’s obviously relates to the wind charge because that controls the full distance after which an entity takes full damage so you can modify that

Number as they you know leap With the Wind charge and then if it’s tracking the the y coordinate at which you started then yeah you can fall a little bit further so that that makes a lot of sense I do think having the others there

It kind of goes in hand inand with what we were saying previously about it feeling like something that the developers can code back into the game in a smart way instead of feeling like an effect that players relied on a sort of Niche effect but one that does affect

Some players is going to uh be removed from the game entirely with the changes to potions and it seems like the potion effective amplifiers are back in that range between zero and 25 so they figured out a way to code around the way that was stored before but then

Reintroduced the numbers so that if there are any like Legacy maps for example that apply those potion effects at a certain level that it’s not going to uh cause issues with those and and you know throw up a bunch of Errors when a certain mechanic should be happening

So yeah I think it’s it’s good that they’ve uh obviously they’ve not like rolled back those changes instead they’ve continued to progress things until it’s back to a place the community can be happy with moving on to chunk mail if you’d like to email the show the address is spawn chunk [email protected]

Please keep emails brief and focused on a single topic or idea we’ve seen an increasing amount of very long emails lately and while we really appreciate the enthusiasm they’re difficult to fit into the show Johnny do you want to grab this first one yes this is a great

Example of the kind of length of email we’re looking for actually this one comes from Kumbaya baby and the subject is an laay override Hello Johnny and Joel I’m a Bedrock player and predominant Builder by trade in episode 283 regarding building quality of life you mentioned a great idea of a

Potential block that acts like a spy cam what if you could take control of a tamed laay to have a different POV maybe an LA that has been tamed by you could be taken over by your player which would then be temporarily unmanned so be careful a block travel limit while

Operating the LA would be set with a block range limit counter appearing on screen while you’re close to reaching the end of the range I’m not sure how this would work mechanically that’s way out of the realm of my understanding let me know your thoughts come be our baby

Died of old age waiting for usable shaders to be added to bedrock they’ve snuck in a personal gripe at the end there but uh yeah and I think um this is an interesting extension to the idea that I had which was a fixed block like a security camera

Block that you could put down somewhere and able to look through a spy glass to view it almost as though you were looking into a viewfinder but this is more like operating a drone you know it’s it’s an extension of that in in in a very different way one that allows you

To have a bit more control over the range and I don’t really know about the um the UI stuff like that feels a little bit too electronic to me which is not naturally what you would expect from the experience of uh like piloting an laay

This way um but I don’t know what was your first reaction to this one Joel it was the same like when I heard about the UI I was like well I don’t know if that’s necessarily the way that Mojang would go with that and also I don’t know

How essentially possessing in La would go they’re very cute and you’re trying to rescue them putting them under mind control feels like the opposite of what you’re trying to evoca behavior right like this is what the evokers have been trying to do this whole time is set up security cameras in the Woodland

Mansions armed with iron swords um yeah yeah it does feel a little bit evil for something that people have already identified as a very cute mob that we then immediately give stuff to do um but it’s kind of like villagers in that way where it’s like yes we’re using them for

Their mechanics but that’s they’re part of the game that’s it’s a game that’s that’s part of the reason that these mechanics exist but yeah I agree possessing them feels a little bit uh a little bit much but it made me think that there is Magic in the game and there’s also maps

In the game and I was thinking along the lines of something like a magic mirror uh so imagine if you maybe used copper and glass to make yourself yourself a magic mirror and if you sort of I don’t know tap an aay with that like a right

Click like interact with an laay the laay will just give you what it’s seeing so you can use the mirror perhaps in your offhand thinking like picture in picture when you’re in watching like a TV or a Sports Broadcast or something and you could then look at the mirror to

See what the LA is looking at now the trick there is that I guess you’d have to get the LA to the vantage point that you want and get it to stay there and look at the same thing I don’t know how that’s done but I something more

Whimsical like a magic mirror or convincing the LA to share what it sees with you uh would make more sense and if there was any kind of UI I could see it being more as kind of like a hazy overlay as opposed to any kind of digital information so in the same way

That you get that wobble when you go through uh a nether portal I could see like maybe when if you wanted to have a full screen effect instead of having just the like looking at some sort of mirror object in your hand there could be some sort of veil like probably blue

You know to say like oh just like the frost effect when you’re freezing if the outline of my vision is blue that I know that I’m Looking Through The Eyes of the LA you know and that could be pretty fun I think I I don’t know how you get the

Player up there or the LA up there and have them stay put I like there’s a bunch of things about that that I’m not really sure on but it could be dually useful like we were talking as as Builders last time about this kind of

Thing but if you could keep the LA there for any length of time and you’re doing any kind of like miname on your server or if there’s a PVP match like having alls that could see down into people coming up behind you in the base or

You’re waiting to trigger a trap and you don’t want to have any obvious triggers like you want to trigger it manually you have to wait for that person to walk by and having an LA tucked up in a tree somewhere that can see what’s going on

Would be fantastic there your eye in the sky right like the the the overview of the whole thing yeah like that Prospect is always really appealing to me I think and just being being able to change perspective has all kinds of uses within the game but yeah I think the problem

With relying on an laay having any kind of natural movement is similar to if you’ve ever clicked on a mob in spectator mode it’s a Java thing for the most part so I can see as our correspondent is a Bedrock player you might not have an idea of why this is

Frustrating but a lot of the mobs are going to have random movement you imagine the way a cow or a sheep moves if they are moving they’re moving pretty much constantly and they’re constantly like spinning and looking around and a player is going to have less control over their perspective if you’re just

Inhabiting that LA’s field of view but you’re not controlling which way it’s looking or which direction it’s traveling and so that’s going to be the immediate problem with not having some level of control which is one of the aspects of their suggestion uh with that

We have a bit more control over the LA but like we said that still doesn’t really feel right and if anything it might feel a bit too powerful to Pilot a flying mop you wouldn’t be able to do much you wouldn’t be able to like attack

Things but I think it it might seem a little bit much and then the obvious kind of ways of keeping a mob stationary like putting them in a boat or something like that is just going to feel like an unnecessary step when the mechanic is supposed to get you from that mob’s

Perspective in the first place the idea that you have to trap them in a boat seems silly it’s like why is this not just a block at that point um and I can see why they wanted to put a range on it because the other solution if it didn’t have a

Range was that you just fly your La down into caves and use them to look through chests or at least figure out where the chests are in an ancient city where it’s not going to trigger the warden or something like that right so there are many ways that you could exploit that to

Various degrees and it’s the kind of thing that would work really well in a miname context but then map makers are smart enough that they can figure out ways to implement stuff like that anyway if it’s in controlled circumstances and not in in Survival Minecraft I still

Think the most balanced solution to a mechanic like this is a block that gives you a fixed Viewpoint and potentially even a fixed angle of rotation if you think about how when you’re in a boat you can only really look around you within 180° I think it’s it it’s ideal to set

Things up like that and then be able to look at something from a fixed vantage point because that way your block isn’t going to wander off and it’s not going to you know fly off into rendered chunks or something like that I think it it makes a little bit more sense appealing

Though the idea is of having a la help you with another thing and maybe make them useful to players who don’t find their item Gathering mechanics useful right now I think the LA is not the best candidate for this ultimately I wonder if there could be

Some sort of theme to The Block so rather than like a camera block as you you know because just that’s an easy way to describe it but it also feels very technical for Minecraft yes having something like uh a little laay gargoyle or a block that has the LA’s face carved

Into it similar to how you see the the Wither you know in Sandstone like that kind of stuff could be interesting if you had you know one of those blocks and it could be hard to get you know something like uh a load stone is difficult to get you could do something

Like that where it’s hard for the player to get it requires the sacrifice of some fancy resource that they probably don’t want to give up and as a result then you’ve got this one block that has like you said that 180 degree probably both vertical and horizontal but only the

Front field of vision like you can’t look behind you and because it’s not moving then you could also um eliminate that kind of exploitative idea of flying something through caves and and potential dangers uh and I guess at that point too you’d have to figure out like

If you want it to be in in a in a base but not detectable by their players like how do you hide it uh because it has a very distinct look player is GNA be say well that’s that’s a stone block but that’s an aay face on that stone block

So I know that the player could potentially see me but it all depends on whether they’re using that Vision right now you know I I I sort of like that idea in the context of there being a base raid situation where like they’d be able to identify what the security

Cameras were and maybe black them out using wool or something and I I that that could itself provide some some interesting Mechanics for the player to rely on I think there are other complications to detaching the camera like what happens if you try to go into third person mode if you’re observing

Something else that’s happening on this camera which is again another reason why I think attaching it to something like the spy glass makes sense and the spy glass also makes it a slightly more challenging uh quest for resources because then of course you’ve got to make a spy glass out of geode materials

So you’ve still got to go and find a geode they’re not super expensive to make but again like not to bring it back to Echo shards because we have so so many emails in our sort of in our past of people suggesting things for the echo

Shards but maybe if you make a spy with an echo Shard instead of an amethyst Shard it becomes something like this I I don’t know I think it’s it’s it’s it’s silly at this point suggesting more uses for the echo Shard but maybe it’s uh feasible in the

Future I can imagine the shenanigans that would happen on a multiplayer server where you’re building something you’ve got your very obvious you know Vision block up in the air for your own use and then you go to check it and what you see is like that scene from The

Incredibles where Edna Mode is talking on like FaceTime on some straight up her nose it’s just some other players like and all you see is like you know two eyeballs in the top of a Minecraft player head you know like I can see people trolling one another like

That and it would be pretty funny you know yeah yeah great great opportunity for a spy glass jump scare yeah you you yeah you you look down the barrel of this thing and then suddenly you know Mario is there or something yeah you can you can do some some fun stuff with it

For sure well speaking of multiplayer servers this has actually sparked an idea for a discussion here for me I’ve been watching the new hermitcraft season as I’m sure you have with the hermit surprising nobody I have been watching hermitcraft yes shocked uh and they have a number of 1.21 experimental features

Available to them through data packs including the Crafter and we thought it would be fun to talk about the pros and cons of adding experimental upcoming features to the game early this is done through a data pack on GitHub called No trial Chambers a simple data pack that enables the

Updates of 1.21 experimental features but disables the trial Chambers and the breeze the idea behind this from what I can gather is that they wanted to have access to the new tough blocks the new Cofer blocks and the new crafter block but they didn’t want to get trial

Chambers rendering in their world before they’re ready right so things like the crafter they felt were pretty solid and they wanted to try that they didn’t feel like the the tough blocks were going to go through great changes and so they felt that it was safe to do that but we

Thought we discussed the pros and cons of of trying to do something like this yeah yeah it makes a lot of sense because trial Chambers they’re still adding vaults to them they’re still kind of tweaking bits and pieces yeah it makes a lot more sense for them to uh to

Hold off on the trial Chambers but yeah um I have been watching a fair bit of it the people who have been using the crafter have surprisingly been using it for a variety of ways I’m pretty sure good times with scar has been using it as a building block uh where obviously

The technical players like uh I know impulse and Tango made an iron farm and just had their iron converting directly into blocks doc M has been using them to great effect he now has from like the early stages of the of the service sort of week one he put together something

That now crafts pistons for him thanks to a combination of uh Cobblestone farms and iron farm a witch farm for red stone and a bamboo farm that produces wood planks so he’s autocrafting multiple ingredients so that they can be condensed down into pistons and is now you know autogenerating pistons and

Shulker boxes and and and whatever else and his long-term goal is obviously start another you know World eater style thing build a perimeter it’s a shortcut and it’s removing a lot of the uh the the extra steps of crafting all of that stuff for him which is I think one of

The obvious advantages right like it’s saving a lot of time and it means that they don’t have to wait for the 1.21 update to come along and effectively invalidate their crafting grind I think it’s a a good thing that the server has access to this now

Because you know if if they waited five to six months for these features to come out then it would just be like well why didn’t I just wait for this to arrive it’s sort of like when you or I have talked in the past about waiting for a

Specific building block and either not wanting to build something because you know this block is going to come out or building something in the knowledge that I’m just going to come back later and change all of this and it sort of feels like why put the effort in now when we

Could just wait a couple of months and put the effort in later but you still want to move forward with those projects and you still want to have some of the stuff that you have been working on for a while done so that you can move on to

New things so there is a justification I think for uh for throwing in these features now and just letting them have at it and I think it’s a calculated risk you know you look at the crafter and as you said like it’s it’s pretty much complete and and I think that the the

Players on hermitcraft feel the same way and even if there are some changes to it like it’s probably going to be maybe a small texture change so if anybody it might be scar that has to adjust you know the way that he’s using it and I

Think that’s a good thing to point out too and and why he’s excited because it goes back to something we talked about last week which is the Crafter is a new functional block but it’s completely placed in any orientation you want yeah and that means that you as a

Builder get access to every texture on all six sides of it and I think that’s really interesting and hopefully that’s how they treat these kind of new blocks in the future because it means that it’s dually usable for both Builders and people that want to do redstone stuff

And and any way that the thing changes to um how it functions the people that are this excited about the crafter that they want to put it in early are no slouches when it comes to Redstone so if there is adjustments that have to be made they’ll figure it out it’s not like

It’s going to be the end of the world I don’t think they’re going to have to rebuild entire Contraptions yeah just because it might change a little bit it’ll be like you know change the value of this repeater or maybe have a different Redstone puls or signal or

Timing that kind of stuff and that’s just kind of a we just want it now learning on the Fly and I and I agree with you I think that because people on these big servers and people that are excited about getting this block early have been playing Minecraft for a while

And it’s a way to positively impact the hundredth time that you’ve done early game Minecraft and as you said remove a lot of that early game grind if it’s not something that you like if it’s something that you’re just busy and you’d rather not have to spend the countless hours of gathering everything

Back up to get yourself to to endgame level and if this is going to save you time and energy by crafting stuff in the background uh I my first thought is like the amount of tree chopping that you save by condensing your materials automatically into things like bone

Going down into bone meal and then into bone block which means you don’t have to have like a tower of chests for a skeleton Farm you can just have a couple of double chests you’re fine even one double chest is plenty for early game and that I think is is saving players a

Lot of time I also think it’s fun like I’m I’m glad to see that they’re getting some uses out of it I think too that for people like us watching that either either won’t or have not yet added things like a crafter data pack to the game it’s giving me a pre-release

Tutorial on perhaps some of the trial and error Lessons Learned on how to use the crafter and I there was I can’t remember the specific example but there was it was either an iron farm or something where somebody had to adjust on the Fly because of the way that

Certain items were coming through and they just decided oh it’s it’s going to be better for me to to do this like I think it might have been a an iron farm and the adjustment was the poppies were being saved but now they’re being turned into bone meal and it was like an

Additive change so stuff like that I think is just like the things that you have to think about and if you’re going to have an iron farm with Crafters involved instead of just getting rid of all the poppies it’s almost like well wait a minute once I

Get a double chest full of poppies or red dye then I can say well all the Overflow I could just put into bone meal and just create bone blocks like it’s not going to be super fast cuz it’s going to take forever for poppies to fill up a composter but like still it’s

It’s better than nothing and the fact that you can do that and use all the parts of the Buffalo you know to use the that phrase it’s just like it means that you’re going to get so much more out of any farm that has like more than one

Item coming out of it you know yeah yeah and and I think going going back to the justifications for adding it in the first place and and thinking why now I think it speaks volumes about players confidence in Mojang’s new approach to development that they don’t worry that

The crafter might just be taken away at this point you know because obviously when we’re told about a raft of features beforehand and people are looking forward to specific stuff there is always the concern that yeah like they might decide through the snapshot process that this feature isn’t ready

Yet and it’s not going to arrive for a while and so we have to continue working with the experiment Al version of it but now they’ve started only releasing features when they are basically ready to be put into the game and they’ve only started announcing stuff when it’s going

To be put into the game they can implement it on a server like this in the knowledge that the backend technical stuff of this is not going to change much so presumably when they roll into full release 1.21 they won’t need to go through and replace all of the experimental Crafters

With the new real Crafters they’ll just be the same block so I think that’s that’s the other thing that like in previous worlds I wouldn’t ever put the survival guide into snapshots not simply because it was a pain to update and there might be some compatibility issues

But because I never was certain whether it was okay for me to start making tutorials about these features because they were still going to be undergoing changes but now at this point we can assume the crafter as a complete feature the texture might still be open to

Change but I think that’s only that’s the riskiest use of it is in building we haven’t seen texture changes for the last few weeks we haven’t seen any changes to it functioning I think changes to timing would be arbitrary and changes to function aren’t really possible because then you’re changing

Fundamentally what the crafter does which is an automatic crafting tool so I think it makes perfect sense for them to start using it now I think the main downsides to talk about like the the the cons of this for a bit here is that it reduces the impact of the full release of

1.21 and mostly for the players but I think also for the audience and that’s the the thing I’m looking at from like the the sort of sociological Community side of things is that a lot of the critical narrative around updates recently despite evidence to the contrary in my opinion uh is that player

Perception of them is that they are small or they don’t add much uh which is obviously a a shortened a condensed version of an opinion that they don’t add much that that particular player would be interested in um but I I think like players are from previous updates

Thinking back to stuff like the nether update or the update aquatic the really thematically strong and focused ones players are looking at groupings of features and features being focused in one area of the game as more important than the spread of features that we’ve gotten from more recent updates but with

Players already playing with some of the more powerful features of 1.21 like the crafter if people get used to those and sort of accept them as yeah those those are the blocks that we’ve had in the game already for a while five or six months ahead of their actual release

People stop seeing them as new when they reach full release and then all that happens is that hermitcraft adds the trial Chambers and whatever other features are upcoming in 1.21 and players see that as the update and not that plus tough blocks copper blocks crafter and a few other bits and pieces

And the armadillo which is presumably arriving in a minor update relatively soon so I I I think there is a a concern that I have and it it’s part of the reason I kind of I I did a bit of a double take when I realized that they

Were actually putting stuff like the crafter into hermitcraft this this season this early uh is that it feels like you’re sort of eating your dinner for lunch you know what I mean like you’re you’re kind of having your meal too early and then is it going to lessen

The impact of the update for the broader community and is it going to lessen the impact it will have on maybe revitalizing some of the lagging ideas and the sort of ideas Mill that goes into content creation isn’t going to have as much fuel once 1.21 actually

Arrives yeah that was my I feedback as well is that there’s some concern about like reducing this the specialness of of these things I mean in some ways I mean using the data pack and the fact that they’re on Java and it it means that there could be a lot of

People watching that just don’t have the technical Savvy don’t have the time or energy or desire to get under the hood and they’re just like well whatever I’ll watch this but I’m going to wait I’m not going to get access until until whenever 1.21 comes out and I’ll be excited for

My own access when that happens but you know maybe I’ll I’ll just enjoy and watch Vic like live vicariously through other people that are doing it but I I feel like the the risks there are as you said more on the texture stuff so I was surprised when the data pack included

The tough blocks and the new copper blocks I was like oh okay they’re going all in I thought it was just that they wanted access to the to the crafter and that was it and for me it’s I see changes to textures a lot easier to Implement and potentially more likely to

Happen so I wouldn’t want to be using the new tough texture blocks or the new copper blocks in any kind of big build in case over the next few months that they ended up changing I could see myself using in them in a small thing like a little starter house as an

Experiment and excitement to use them but then I would be like well I don’t want to do any giant giant build something that’s GNA be really labor intensive in case they change because changing something like the tint of the tough bricks to be a little bit more

Green or a little bit more blue for me in where I would choose to put them would potentially ruin my day you know having having to go back and change all that stuff so it’s more about the the visual way that they’re represented in in the world those features for me than

The technical stuff the only thing I could think of that would be a big change that might come to the crafter would be like if somewhere somehow they just decided that’s a little bit too powerful and they change the the length of time it took to craft something like

A cool down or something that to me would mean that anybody that had a really complex Redstone contraption that utilized the crafter and timing would have a lot of adjusting to do but again those people probably have enough knowledge that they one they know the risk they’re taking if they’re making a

Giant Contraption to use the crafter and two they probably also know how to adjust on the Fly they go oh the problem is the timing I’ll just adjust the timing and those that know how to do that it’s not as big of a hurdle for those of us that are more outside the

Redstone Community going like I don’t even know how this works in the first place and if I cop your build and it breaks I don’t know how to fix it so that like there’s that that I guess back and forth before we get too far away from the textures thing I honestly think

The same is true of builders in in terms of their willingness to adapt I I think if if the tough brick textures changed overnight there could be two potential solutions to that the first being obviously adjust the build and I’m sure that a lot of the builders on

Hermitcraft would be able to adapt if they relied so heavily on the color or the the you know texture that tough bricks had to begin with they could find some alternative to it the other thing is hermitcraft has proven in the past that it is not against the idea of just

Retexturing stuff they’ve done it with custom items and things in the past and I would say that the blocks having a different texture is a different kind of problem to the notion of the crafter’s functionality changing because it’s a lot easier for the player to retexture something for a resource pack than it’s

Going to be to completely change the back end of how the crafter works if some change was made to it and they decide no we want it to go back to what it was before like they would have to effectively write a mod to do that versus creating a resource pack that

They could just apply in game very easily um and and and individual players could apply that resource pack if they didn’t want to do it universally server side so I think there’s there’s definitely um an approach that requires some adaptation if the textures are going to change as well but even if they

Do plan on making a few changes I’m sure that the uh the players wouldn’t notice anything too completely out of place and uh I’m sure they’d find ways to adapt around it and I have some personal experience with my next point to to relay and that is it’s specific to

Content creation but as a person that’s sharing your Minecraft content online I feel like you’re going to be explaining a lot that the crafter and the tough blocks are in the game to people that are not watching Maybe every hermitcraft video or every Creator out there if

You’ve got people in your community that are relatively new and they’re trying to figure out why your Minecraft looks different than others uh I have uh coarse dirt slabs they are petrified Oak slabs that are only available via uh craft like a crafting data pack you can’t get them outside of creative in

The game and it allows me to add something like a dirt coarse dirt uh textured slab without sa sacrificing another slab in the game but I get a lot of people coming into my chat room on Twitch just kind of going of course dirt slab like what like where’s that in the

Game are you playing modded and it just leads this you know to the point where we have a command in chat that just kind of lets people know yeah there are some data packs here’s here’s where you can find them so you don’t have to go down the rabbit hole of answering those

Questions over and over and over again and I feel like while it’s announced in those videos and it’s relying on people watching like the hermitcraft videos from the beginning of the season uh I think when it comes to other things like streams you’re going to see a lot of

People coming in go who wait is the crafter in the game no no it’s not in the game we have a data pack and it’s just it’s something that you probably have to realize that you’re taking on if you are a content creator and you’re

Going to be using data packs to bring in you know experimental features outside of you know even putting it in just the title of your Twitch stream people don’t read the titles yeah you know like it’s you you could put you know experimental features active on the Citadel come hang

Out and they would just be like why do you have this in the game is it out now it’s like did you not even read the title so that kind of stuff and it could be also I mean I’m not throwing viewers under the bus I think it could be the

Platform they’re watching on like you go in through a mobile phone mean that title might not be even fully readable like the first two words might be there and the rest might not be depending on how you’re holding your phone and you know what the app is doing so it’s uh

It’s something that that that information is something that you’re going to have to be con communicating to your audience a lot yeah and the flip side of that is that some people who are not necessarily regular Minecraft players but are regular Minecraft Watchers are going to think that 1.21 is

Just out yes and that’s the other thing is that people are going to come into our streams and go why aren’t you building with the new tough blocks and me saying because they don’t exist yet they’re not actually here and so yeah like obviously that’s not hermit Craft’s

Problem they’re free to do whatever they want but I think it’s kind of funny when people have this assumption because they don’t keep up with the news nearly as frequently as we do uh that you know the the features must be out by now cuz I heard about them back in October and

Surely it doesn’t take that long for a Minecraft update to be made of course it does um the other counterargument I think to my point from earlier about the notion of these features not seeming new is that they haven’t felt new since October when they were new uh they’ve

Been in snapshots for a few months now and Technical players within about a week I think had created a factory that could craft every recipe in the game so I don’t think using them in survival feels that different at this point especially if you can be confident in

Them being ready for survival and you know a feature that’s not going to change significantly before the full release I think it doesn’t feel necessarily out of place to be using them in this context already and you were talking earlier about like getting a bit of a pre- tututorial on them

Before 1.21 actually comes out there have been people making tutorials on them since October since the initial snapshot started so I think I think it’s it’s fine for them to be using them in this context and uh yeah I I think the the notion that they are going to be old

News by the time 1.21 comes out Crafters are going to be in the game for ages you know at this point it’s it’s a a bit of a rat race just to figure out who’s going to make content on them first and I think we’re going to be using them for

A long enough time they’re going to have a strong enough impact on the game going forward that I think it doesn’t matter how soon you are adopting them they’re going to be a useful feature to you regardless you think that any recipe that they add to the game in the near

Future as long as it doesn’t require specialized crafting is something that you can pipe through the crafter so this thing is going to be relevant to the game for years and and potentially the game’s entire lifespan from this point forward um obviously this is going to be

A subject that will Garner some strong opinion so we’d love to hear from you if you’re interested in writing in about the crafter as Joel said earlier please do keep emails short and sweet I know this is a subject on which we like to wax philosophical but it’s always nice

To get some concise thoughts via the email that’s where we’re going to wrap up this episode of the spawn chunks though you can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today at the spawn chunks. comom the music for

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Render distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online go by pixels you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixels where hope I should be back into the Minecraft Survival Guide later this week I also stream 3 days a week on Twitch and I

Should be well enough to do that this week as well where I’ll be doing behind the scenes work for the aforementioned YouTube series I’m also the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search and aside from that I’m at pixels on

Both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online everything I’m doing online can be linked through jen.com that includes the Citadel Cafe my podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment I’m Joel Dugen on social media and Joel Dugen on Twitch where I stream Thursday through Sunday mostly

These days building the West Hill build on the Citadel trying to finish that up before I move on to something new thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite and we’re feeling the Winds of Change