Get INSANE ideas in The Spawn Chunks – A Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 285 for Monday February 19th 2024 this the spawn chunks is a podcast all about Minecraft available across all major podcast platforms including on YouTube if you’re enjoying the show consider subscribing wherever you’re listening to this my name is Johnny but

The internet knows me as pixor riffs and joining me as always playing jazz in Minecraft is Joel Dugen hi Joel hello and if you would like to hear a little bit more about jazz music The Old Guard the Old Guard and Minecraft and 50th birthday is not mine not mine uh then

You should listen to the render distance that is the extended version of the podcast you can get that at patreon.com thepa chunks if you consider joining at any level you get access to things like our Discord and access to special events like the monthly Minecraft hangout coming up this Saturday February 24th at

10:00 a.m. Atlantic that’s UTC minus 4 hours or 2: p.m. in the UK that where Johnny and I hang out with our patrons and look at screenshots of what they’ve been building in Minecraft and discuss them there’s show notes to follow up with later after the fact if you can’t

Join the live broadcast but it’s a lot of fun and we hope to see you there the Discord also has a lively your base Channel where people share screenshots of builds throughout the month in the meantime and I’m very excited to talk about what some of these folks have been

Building on the hangout so looking forward to that event but in the meantime we’ve both been playing Minecraft ourselves this week and why don’t you kick us off Joel what’s new on the Citadel well there’s not a lot to show so the screenshots are going to be some very

Basic before and after but I am either delaying finishing the town because I can’t sort out the data pack or or I am just letting the completionist in me take over as I am going through the spruce river which is what I’ve renamed the west river in the valley because the

West Hill River and the West River were too confusing I was like I need to call this something else there’s a giant Tiga biome that basically borders the entire River so it made sense to call it the spruce River it was a s suggestion from some people in chat and basically it’s

One of the last if not the last rivers in the immediate area that still had like sand and gravel and Clay along the border there was a couple places that were not that smooth like kind of janky Minecraft uh generation from before caves and cliffs right so the area was

Generated in 116 or 115 and so I went through and I smoothed out the edges and I got rid of all the sand and that’s really all I had time for this week a couple of streams where I was just kind of going in and smoothing out the riverbed and making sure

Everything looked great and walking into the into the valley and kind of making a mental note of like where you could see the river where things needed some attention and where they didn’t need attention like where you just really can’t see stuff and leaning into some

Happy accidents like I found a a weird weird little pool of water at the top of one of the cliffs and I thought you know what I’m just going to make a little stream we’ll have a little waterfall here and it’ll be able to be seen from

Uh miles away and that will take care of this really big ugly Brown cliff and I don’t have to do as much with it if there’s a cool waterfall to look at and so I’ve got a few things that I’ve added to my to-do list which is not the goal

It’s it’s try to check things off uh but ultimately all I did was you know smooth out the river banks uh smooth out the river bottom I haven’t gone through with the bone meal to add like all the sea grass and some kelp and things because I

Ran out of time but I have gone through in a couple of places where there’s like a spot for potentially like a Fisher Hut uh there’s a bridge that connects the path to U the north of West Hill and there’s one other place near a farm

Where I felt like it might be a place where players might stop and so I’ve added rocks like custom Boulders and stuff within the river but they only just serve a purpose of like a way to break up all the the green seagrass and so they they weren’t really ornate they

Weren’t difficult to make you know just 4×4 bricks you know with with um either and GL Stone maybe have a little bit under the ground that kind of stuff and so the next phase will be swimming through the whole northern part of the river and hitting it with some bone meal

Thinning it out in places that it looks a little bit chunky and then I’ll go through at these other points of interest where I’ve got these rocks do the same thing that I did before where I’ll add in dense seagrass I’ll make some specific choices with either aelia

Bushes or drip leaf or something to say like hey this is probably a pretty spot that you could stop there’s actually one of those spots just before you cross the bridge where it might make sense to have the player kind of Veer off for a quick

Second go oh wow there’s a potato field and with the render distance up you can actually see the front gate of westle in the background and so it’s really cool to see like oh wow I’m I’m kind of coming around the corner the trees are parting and you can kind of see the

River and the Sunshine and the wheat fields and stuff so it’s a fun View and it’s nice when you can kind of cultivate that those experiences as as a player might enter into your your Zone that you’ve been working on for so long but that’s it like it just there’s really

Nothing more to report other than just the easy on the brain but time intensive idea of sculpting a river that’s a couple hundred blocks long if if not several hundred blocks long I like the idea of especially once you built up so much and you’ve got like your entire

City built in in the world having areas that are almost intentionally the spots where people would like get out of the car to take photographs or I suppose like for a period appropriate version you’d have an artist setting up an esol there on the river bank and like

Painting this as a a landscape with the city sort of in the background I kind of I like I like the idea of there being some some nature areas sort of off the beaten path but ones that feel like they’ve got a good composition of all of

The elements in the scene that an artist would be drawn to that’s a it’s a fun way of looking at the landscape and it’s a nice way to have everything within render distance when you’re walking through the West Hill Valley look like it’s been touched and

Tweaked even if it’s just a little bit like there are some Cliffs from just like that’s a huge Cliff I don’t really want to do like landscaping around this entire thing I just planted some extra trees waited for them to grow up and sure enough you know you I spaced them

Out evenly they’re big spruce trees they tend to cover a lot so the big brown ugly Cliff got covered by two or three spruce trees and there’s still some brown there but like it’s mostly a more interesting um composition from a depth situation where the tree kind of sticks

Out more you see the tree and you don’t see the cliff so much as what you’re looking at and so there’s little things like that that you can do to help cultivate that feeling of like you should stop and take a picture here when

You you don’t have to put in a ton of work because I don’t want to I don’t want to make another to-do list as long as my arm as I’m trying to complete this area and so I I find that limiting yourself to like okay I just I really am

Only going to let myself do a couple of points of interest and the rest of this is just really not going to be seen from I think it was like the bridge the farm and the fishing potential fishing Hut location and if I couldn’t see it from

Standing at any of those three spots I didn’t worry about it I wasn’t it wasn’t a big deal and so I I feel like being economic in these choices help because if you don’t then you’re just sculpting stuff underwater that no one is going to see but you right then because you’re

Never going to be down there again you know yeah yeah I you can sort of see the appeal of people claiming plots on servers and sort of sticking to a very specific set of dimensions for like I’m going to do this 500 by 500 area and

That’s going to be it because yeah the to-do list just becomes longer and longer as you go further and further out and uh everything expands from the epicenter of what you’ve been working on which is the town itself and I’m I’m thankful that we have an understanding

On the server of you know not encroaching on people’s areas and even though if we did we’re all friends enough now that it would be easy to work together someone would be like hey I want to build this here I don’t know what to do with this space in between

Like let’s work together and come come up with something because I was thinking about that watching a lot of the the hermitcraft episodes recently where like they’re all building on top of one another essentially in very different styles and ideas and on one hand that’s

Always fun to see on a on a Minecraft server it’s just it’s very much the spirit of sandbox gameplay to me but on the other hand I know for me that would kind of make my eye twitch like how do I how do I you know transition from a

Cyberpunk city to like a fishing Village and it’s it’s such a interesting prob I say problem because it’s it’s a fun problem to have uh and how do you do that like how do you do that in Minecraft where it doesn’t feel too too Stark and uh I’m I’m aware of how easy

It is for me because I have no neighbors and I’m in control of this area so like all of these decisions are made very quickly because I don’t have to transition from my area to someone else’s area so yeah and you don’t have somebody on the other side of the forest

Building a giant pixel art statue of something like this there not a giant pokon or Mario sort of appearing in the distance yeah yeah yeah although that that’s come to my mind as like it would be a fun zone to add to the CIT cuz some some of our zones feel so serious

There’s sci-fi modern city uh medieval fantasy like everything has like it feels strict but having a place where you could just build like Giant cartoon stuff I think would be hilarious I’m not sure what you would call it you know like uh Wonderland or something along

The lines of of what happened in like Wreck-It Ralph you know when they just went from video game to video game and it just really didn’t matter and then when they weren’t in the game all the game characters still kind of mingled amongst one another and there’s all this

Stuff I think it’s because I built the piranha plant in Lego from mar Super Mario over the weekend and like that that to me just feels like that would be so fun and so recognizable such a bright colorful blocky build to throw into Minecraft and if you had an area where

People could do that they could build something from their childhood or bring in something new make giant teddy bear just for fun like just that kind of stuff would be would be really silly especially if you could turn it into something fun and functional kind of like the SpongeBob Village you know

Where SpongeBob lives in a pineapple and Squidward lives in like looks like a an Easter Island head like that kind of stuff and just like make a teddy bear but it’s also a house and the belly button is the door like that kind of stuff would be just hilarious but I

Don’t know quite how to frame it yet as part of a a Zone on the server and thinking back to you said you’d been watching a little bit of hermitcraft I think Joe Hills has some stuff planned for this season where he’s building an area that’s based on a like a

Development in New Jersey somewhere but he’s planning on turning it into effectively like a season long Sculpture Park that people can come and contribute to and build kind of like mid game artistic installations and sort of turn the central part into a museum sort of exhibit that’s more focused on Redstone

And and electronics and things so there there’s there’s some some neat ideas out there and yeah it really is just about designating a space for it and finding a a central concept to build it all around it’s like one of those Midwestern cross country trips where you have to pull

Over and take a picture next to the world’s largest ball of yarn all of roadside attractions and stuff yeah totally yeah I can imagine that going throughout the server you’d have like a a road trip kind of Trail where people just built whatever they wanted to just

Like a giant Lobster statue or something like along the along the side you laugh but I live in Nova Scotia that’s a thing oh yeah I’m sure no I I I’m pretty sure I’m citing from an example I’ve seen before yeah so there’s a whole lot going

On well um I have a little bit of stuff in mind for for what I’m building lately as well but I I’m launch we’re launching a new server on Saturday that I’m not going to reveal the name or the concept or anything yet um but that is where the

Build I mentioned last week where I’m planning on building something based on um Solstice 5 the the uh animated short film with uh with all of the the sort of space uh technology stuff um I have started on that I’ve started digging out a large area with diamond tools and no

Mending uh so going back to discussions we’ve had previously about what we used to do back on decidedly vanilla where we would bury tools because mending wasn’t a thing and So eventually tools would become too expensive to repair and so around the area that I’m digging out

I’ve started to build monuments to the tools which will no longer be serviceable so I got to the point where my first diamond pickaxe which had 14 three and efficiency 4 and everything was now too expensive to repair and so I built like a stone monument out of all

Of the stone I’d been digging out of the ground um put the pickaxe there with the Anvil that I used to repair it because by that point that Anvil was quite damaged as well and started a new pickaxe and and and bits and pieces like that uh we we haven’t opened up the

Nether yet and we’re not going to until the First episodes go up so so far getting XP has been a challenge and let me tell you spending 33 levels to repair a pickaxe was pretty intense when you are used to just getting to 30 levels and then going back down to 27 and

Building up three levels again right um right so so that’s been a fun Challenge and a fun way to uh sort of return to the old school way of playing the game and sort of you know uh appreciate The Mending side of the game better but obviously I’ve got that in Survival

Guide so you know Survival Guide my tools are all men all mending all netherite and I I don’t need to worry as much about it there uh especially since the the latest thing I did in Survival Guide was build neon’s ender mini Enderman Farm um so that’s what I did in

Survival Guide most recently and that’s a very useful Farm if all you want is XP and ender pearls CU having had the guardian Farm as my main like high heeld XP farm lately I I just get tired of using Guardian Farms because they produce so many drops that I’m not

Actively using prismarine blocks yet so at the moment I’m not using them for anything other than sea lanterns and just taking damage constantly as you’re using the farm sort of wears on me after a while and so it’s nice to have a farm where you can just go and mindlessly

Click and and gain tons and tons of levels without really having to do a whole lot um but yeah that that was the the contrast of that and this new server where I’ve basically been fishing and smelting copper to get XP because at the moment we don’t really have any ways of

Getting XP Farms other than a couple of people I think have found spawners by this point just of curiosity do you have to build that Enderman Farm out of leaf blocks is that part of the functionality of it like they can’t teleport to Leaf blocks is that the thing no I mean the

Blocks need to be transparent so glass would work just well okay yeah the the reason I build it out of leaf blocks is easily just is that it’s easy to just acquire a huge amount of the very quickly um and I can get plenty of glass

Now I can smelt up some sand or buy it from Librarians now that I’ve got my villager trading Hall all done but I also like the green against the purple of the Void like it’s something that makes it very easy to see from a distance and you know for Aesthetics

Some people might not want it to be as visible as it is but yeah it’s nice and easy to bridge out with a bunch of of leaf blocks because you can get them in such large quantities so easily um and especially with hose having silk touch I

Can just like carve away at a couple of trees not worry about the tools taking damage at all and uh yeah I I I bridged out there with some flowering aelia and then um just use regular aelia leaves for the rest of the farm and when we had

An embon on the show actually he mentioned that this Farm had broken for a lot of people and that he was switching more to a you know look at the Enderman to aggro them kind of approach and I think it is really just that the Ender can punch anything in the vertical

Range of their hit box now where previously they could only really attack stuff that was by their legs and so the endermite just needs a bit of repositioning and the farm just still works perfectly well so if anyone was worried about that after n Bon’s episode

Where he came on the show and mentioned that don’t worry it does seem to work perfectly fine as far as I can tell you just need to be a little bit more precise about where you put the endermite and everything works fine we’ll have to take a look at hours on

The server uh it’s a slightly different it’s never really been the best in terms of yield because I wanted the Enderman to be like a one hit punch so instead of being at the very bottom of the world the platform is up at the top I think

Full damage based yeah two platforms I think uh so yeah the the platform is at like y30 or something I can’t remember what the exact location it is but but the endermite would be in the old position so probably still reachable from the Enderman but whether or not

They can smack it before they fall down the hole I don’t know so I’ll have to keep an eye on that if we ever go back to returning it but even even as it’s designed which was a design that that numon had put out at that time I think

Uh as an alternate like it’s not going to be as fast as the lower platform but it’s going to be fast I don’t find it fast and so I I feel like either I’ve done something wrong or I just need to re reconsider everything but the one

Thing that I did know about it was uh we made it out of glass magenta glass to kind of make it feel very Enderman it matches their eyeballs uh but I also had to put a lot of like double stacked carpet nearby so that they couldn’t teleport to to different platforms that

Was a thing too yeah that’s what I’ve got around the outside of the farm and where the endite is just to make sure that everything’s kind of teleport free um and I I even ended up with a couple of situations where I was leaving the farm and the end were following me down

The uh the path of leaves because they would just warp to the nearest available Leaf block um but it seems like they don’t do that the rest of the time and honestly I think the old style Enderman Farms while they are still good were invented before sweeping Edge was really

Common and now that the sweeping Edge enchantment lets you deal tons of damage to a group of enemies those Enderman die in like three hits from a netherite sharpness five so it’s it’s really not uh especially slow to kill them even if they don’t take any damage before they

End up in the farm so honestly just for the rates that you get from it and killing them in three hits I think it’s it’s worth it over the full damage designs just for the sheer amount you spawn better to adjust I’m pretty sure I left the original platform and just

Built a higher ones like thinking that if this doesn’t work out I want to be able to go back to the original platform without issue so I might have to make that adjustment right now we just use the gold farm and the Nethers it suits two purposes you know like you talking

About not using the drops from your guardian firm we use the gold drops for golden carrots and stuff yeah absolutely yeah I I think if I if I was in a position to build a gold Farm yet I probably would and that’ll be okay um the other thing I’ve done this week is

Play Minecraft bingo with a bunch of friends which we mentioned briefly in the render distance so I’ll keep it brief here but um it made a really fun change from playing solo and going for best times playing with groups we did it kind of free-for-all and then a 3v3

Match and uh yeah it’s it’s a lot of fun playing with with people so once again I’ll I’ll shout out play Minecraft bingo.com uh is the place to get this specific download it has the original map by logon and the new and improved version by no9 I recommend checking out

Both of those if you’re a Java player and fancy uh playing some some interesting mini games uh but in the meantime we’ll move on to the news because Minecraft Java Edition snapshot 24 w7a was launched this week it was published on February 14th so happy Valentine’s Day to Minecraft I guess uh

Some known issues in the snapshot they headed up with that because the fall damage reduction for the wind charge is not currently working so anybody who’s been testing their uh their jumps and and trying to avoid taking fall damage would be unpleasantly surprised by how much you end up taking otherwise though

In experimental features they have introduced the bogged a new variant of skeletons that shoot poisonous arrows the bogd are faster to take down than normal skeletons they have 16 Health instead of 20 and they attack at a slower interval than regular skeletons attacking in 3.5 second intervals

Instead of 2 seconds they have a chance to drop arrows of poison when killed by players and the mossy and mushroom covered skeletons spawn naturally in swamps and mangrove swamps they can also be found spawning from trial Chambers in some trial chambers that have the right configuration changes in 247a include

That Hoppers can once again pick up items from beehives and be nests following the change last week that meant other full blocks can prevent Hoppers from picking up blocks through them technical changes in 247a the data pack version is now 32 which introduces a couple of things it adds the tag does

Not block hoppers for blocks that will never disable a hopper when placed above one and the gameplay tag panda sneeze loot table for drops when pandas sneeze there are a few bug fixes in 24w 07a a lot of them related to the wind charge so we’ll summarize a few of those here

Wind charges were unable to go through nonsolid blocks when projectiles were reflected from the breeze the projectiles would deflect in the opposite direction in Bedrock but in Java they would always deflect downward that has now been fixed along with breezes being able to be damaged by a

Wind charge and Breeze is not being affected by the Looting enchantment when trying to acquire wind charges Hopper mine carts with a full block above them were uh searching for item entities to pick up again after that bug got fixed uh blocks which typically negate fall

Damage failed to do so from Falls after using wind charges so if you’re falling onto hay bales or beds or something that was causing additional fall damage wind charge bouncing causing fall damage After exiting water was also a problem wind charges were negating all fall damage that didn’t occur below the hit

Point regardless of whether the fall was caused by the wind charge or not full damage was conserved between game modes With the Wind charge so you could switch from survival to creative and then take damage and wind charges shot from breezes no longer exploded and and instead were deleted upon hitting

Breezes after being deflected so all of that stuff has been fixed and there’s a longer list of bug fixes and other tweaks that you’ll find at the minecraft.net change log Linked In Our show notes as far as the bug fixes for the breeze and the wind charge it just

Sounds like a lot of refinement just things not quite behaving as they anticipated and noticing a couple things once it was in the game and different scenarios pop up and they’re kind of squashing those as I as they see them as we March towards the eventual addition

Of the breeze into the game I mean it all it all makes a lot of sense to me I haven’t yet really found a use for me for the wind charge but the fact that they’re making these adjustments so that it has a predictable form of of use and

Behavior when it’s either shot or shot at something I think that it makes a lot of sense yeah I think the difficulty with wind charges for me in terms of seeing them as a practical thing to use all of the time is the fact that they’re consumable which is naturally going to

Be a thing regardless because it it makes sense sense for them to be consumable for for a lot of reasons but I think if I’m going to be using them to like you know boost a jump so I can get up onto a roof that I’m building a

Little more easily or something it is it doesn’t feel as good to have those be consumable and I guess the your counterargument to that is that Rockets are consumable and we use those constantly but Rockets are much easier to farm in large quantities um and maybe once the wind

Charge is added to the game in the full release and once I’ve found a trial chamber and gone through all of that then I’ll start to evaluate whether or not I find Wind charges something that I will want to keep around and will feel kind of indispensable to gameplay but I

Think there’s still plenty of ways around using them at this point it’s just whether or not they feel fun to use is going to determine whether I end up uh using them or not and so I think these refinements are good for the purposes of making them a a fun and

Intuitive and um yeah overall interesting experience for the player I was thinking about this the other day when I was at the Gold Farm which we activate with a snowball like you throw a snowball at a at a piglin zombie fight piglin and and anger them

And I’m so good at it now because I go there so often then I can use one snowball I know right where to aim and I almost always hit the culprit and I thought at one point I should make like a snow goem Farm where we can like have

An unlimited supply of snowballs well there’s one one single chest not a double chest there’s a single chest at one point that I filled with stacks of snowballs which only stacked to 16 and we’ve not even cracked it in terms of the use so I wonder depending on how

Much you can get from Breeze farming wind charges once you get like a couple of stacks like is that going to be enough for like the rest of your gaml you like are there going to be something that you need hundreds of or are you

Going to be good with like a few dozen and you’re just you’re never going to go through them because of the use cases that you find for them just aren’t going to require as many as we currently think you might need because they are consumable yeah well I’ve been having

That conversation with myself with the Enderman Farm is that I’ve got a double chest there that fills up with ender pearls once that reaches capacity I throw the rest of them into the void because I don’t need them and there are definitely people out there who use

Ender pearls way more frequently but for me so often I find that the benefits are outweighed by my I guess lack of experience with them so I’m not very good at throwing in a way that will get me to exactly where I want to go 100% of

The time and if it doesn’t do that then it causes me more problems because I’m losing health and then I’m on the other side of the build that I want to be on top of and so I I do Wonder yeah if wind charges are going to fall into the same

Category as ender pearls where some players will swear by them and other players will just see them as an unnecessary frivolity how do you feel about the bogged uh I feel I feel like it needs a two- syllable name I want to call them the bog Ed because I feel like bogged

Just feels like a an ugly word in the throat somehow um and I wish there was like a better way of like it’s it’s it’s a single syllable the same way drowned is so I feel like I should be more comfortable with it but there’s just something about getting your mouth

Around the word bogged that for whatever reason has been the sticking point for me um but as I think that the fact that the name is my major quibble proves that the mob itself is is fine um and I think it’s a arriving at a good time too

Because I remember people being unhappy with the drown being a zombie variant so soon after the Stray and the husk were added and drowned obviously have been refined in their use and now drop copper instead of gold so they feel more useful in that sense and I think once something

Is useful people tend to give it a more of a pass than they do if they’re just looking at a mob critically at face value um but I think it was almost an inevitability after skeletons holding poison arrows were added to the trial Chambers and I think this is a good

Revamp of them they are you know easier to spot at a distance they look distinct it is less goofy than skeletons holding the poison arrow in their offhand which might have been more difficult to see at a distance so you can’t really assess the threat in the same way that you

Would with you know the difference between a skeleton and a stray for example so I think the the addition of the bogged is a good one I don’t know if they’re going to make swamps and Mangrove biomes more painful to build in or you know go hunting for slime or

Whatever um but I think adding them to the Overworld also feels like it gives them more legitimacy than just keeping them in trial Chambers I think it’s a good idea to add them to biome spawning as well just to lend some variety to the Overworld and make them unlike the

Breeze make them uh less exclusive to the trial chamber experience for the most part that’s where I landed as well well I I thought I mean they’re fine but they obviously are an addition to the Overworld because they wanted the challenge of having a poison tipped Arrow firing skeleton in

The trial spawner uh and or the trial chamber rather and I I agree with you I think having a better silhouette uh moving the arrow from the hand having them look distinct different color that all helps in terms of like like what you’re dealing with in a trial chamber

Uh I think it will make Gathering Mangrove wood from a mangrove swamp bigger pain in the butt than it already is now but I mean you can also get creepers and zombies spawning in there too drowned because of all the water stuff around so like it’s not without

Its dangers I guess you just have to have your head on a swivel and I think I was already like that in the swamp as well I’m forgetting that I made a perimeter in my swamp for the witch hut so I removed a lot of the spawnable

Ground it’s all water like I made like a one deep W uh one deep water circle around the witch farm so I don’t have nearly as many spawns on the surface in the swamp as normal because of that and so my memory of what spawning is like in

The swamp is a little bit skewed I haven’t been to an untouched swamp at nighttime in a long time so we’ll have to see how that goes I I kind of thought it was strange if it wasn’t for the trial chamber section of all of this

Then the bog feel like a minor update Edition as opposed to a major update Edition you know and I think that’s why I have to remind myself no no it’s it’s mostly about the trial chamber it’s not really so much about the overw world

It’s a nice tie in but I think the the experience that they’re going for is meant to be more of the the the challenge in the trial Chambers because I’m not really bothered by them now I’m not a PVP guy giant asteris like that’s not really one of the things I get out

Of Minecraft so uh I’m not going to be looking for poison arrows it’s cool that they drop them for people that want them but like that’s not something that I’m interested in it’s fine you know I I think that um my biggest hangup is like

You the name now I don’t know why stray they fine I know exactly what you mean if you say stray precisely I know what you mean bogged just does not seem like it has and I think part of it is that bogged could have very easily been what

You called the drown right that that could have easily been a name for I think bogged I think Swamp Thing right and I think drowned zombie more resembles Swamp Thing than than say these bogged skeletons I mean I don’t know whether people are just going to

Call them bog skeletons to get an extra couple of syllables in there Mossy skeletons would have been an option I would have been fine if they called them Mossy skeletons that would have been fine I believe that’s that’s what the uh the skeletons in the jungle levels of

Minecraft dungeons were cuz they they used to shoot Boyson arrows at you as well so that may be partly where the Genesis of this mob has has come from but um yeah the the other thing is that like it evokes the imagery of bog mummies um like uh preserved bodies of

People can be found in like Pete bogs and stuff from from you know historical digs and and um yeah archaeological digs and whatnot but uh those are usually a lot better preserved um it varies I suppose and so the the fact that they are skeletons coming from bogs feels

More like they should be zombies for that reason like there should still be some um you know remains there Beyond just the skeleton but then obviously this is Minecraft and you know it’s it’s it’s a good reason to put them in a a biome that hasn’t seen much love yet

Especially with the crab not having been part of the mob vote and so mangrove swamps not getting any other additions it’s kind of a neat thing to add them to Mangrove biomes to uh spice up the biome a little bit Yeah mental note first time I encounter one when they’re added to

The game I’m name tagging him Pete yeah absolutely that’s that’s rip for for puns of course um the other thing I wanted to highlight from this that was a good thing is the changes to hoppers being able to pick up stuff from beehives and be nests because that

Allows for honey and honeycomb farming again cuz those were the only farms in which I needed to collect items from within a solid block and it’s part of the mechanics of those blocks that the item generates within like it’s it’s one of the only things where the item

Appears in the center of the block mechanically by default you know and it’s not being glitched into there by you know putting a an item into a block using a dispenser or something and I think that makes sense to add as an exception to Hopper Behavior so I think

It’s a really good idea that they’ve done that because it’s the occasion on which I think players would intuitively want to have a hopper right there to pick up the item and otherwise the randomness of Direction with which the items get spat out is just going to have

Players putting a pad of Hoppers around every be Nest which is gonna you know increase the amount of Hoppers and that sort of has a counterintuitive effect on what they wanted to do with this which is put solid blocks above Hoppers to prevent them from causing more lag by

Checking for items constantly so yeah it it makes a lot of sense they they’ve done uh they’ve done a good thing by not reverting that change but adding an exception for beehives and B nests specifically I think it is very similar to what they’re doing with the wind

Charts right like you make a big sweeping change and then you realize okay we’ve got to make some exceptions make some very special use cases uh things like the hopper Minecart searching above full blocks again like just little things they didn’t expect to happen when you change the behavior of

Hoppers to then make sure that everything is still going to function the way that they intend to and that you can still use full blocks in situations where you want full blocks to be used above a hopper in which case you have to use a hopper mine cart and I and I think

That that makes a lot of sense yeah like that that’s what people rely on Hopper mine carts for in a lot of collection systems now is picking up stuff through four blocks so yeah the idea of uh eliminating that behavior I’m sure was causing a bit of a concern

Within the the technical community but yeah it seems like everything is on the right track and I I don’t think I don’t see any of the uh the changes or the the kind of tweaks in this being especially controversial I’m just looking forward to them putting the wind charge in a

Slightly better uh place in terms of the full damage reduction so that players can get stuck in and uh see what fun stunts they can do with the uh the wind charge at that point moving on to email this week if you would like to email the show the

Email address is spawn chunk [email protected] little bit of housekeeping off the start here the email form on our website on the spawn chunks. comom is not working uh it has been taken down so it can’t be uh mistakenly used but it looks like it has not been working for a couple of weeks

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[email protected] still works and honestly is probably one of the better ways because then you have control over the subject line you can indicate to us that you’re a patron or not uh you can also have a nice Snappy subject line so we know what your emails about uh in an

Effort to keep the inbox lighter to read and emails easier to include in the podcast please keep emails to a single topic and as concise as possible short and sweet increases the likelihood of being included in the podcast first email comes in from Bren robob helping Builders hi pix and Joel the discussion

On quality of life features for Builders got me thinking about a unique item to assist the building process a quote unquote ghost block ghost blocks are a way to prototype type your build they would be a semi-transparent craftable block available in stair slab and full blocks they would act like an AIR block

So mobs and players could pass through it the player would not be able to place any blocks on ghost blocks except for other ghost blocks they would need to be insta mined and pop whenever another block is placed in their location to be collected again some used case examples

Would be things like testing if a bridge would look better if it was two blocks wide or three blocks wide or if a room should be 9×1 blocks or 7 by10 blocks ghost blocks would provide a way to easily prototype and iterate on builds like a more basic like matica overlay

Bren Rob died from shame after his email got so long so first I’m going to let Bren Rob say that your email is a great length and for those wondering it was about 150 words so just no worries Bren Rob you’re good quite enjoyed

It I think this a neat idea I mean you use light manica I’ve never used it so I’m curious to see how you would feel about something like this yeah I think the real strength of like MAA is not necessarily in prototyping builds so much as it is in allowing you to easily

Copy paste builds from one area to another or overlay a blueprint that you’ve built in a creative world in survival and obviously people use it for a variety of different things it’s quite a versatile tool but I think this is a cool idea I think independ ly of the

Light matica comparison my first thought was of Angel blocks which were a thing in Sky Factory and I forget which mod introduces them um but they were a thing that you could effectively just place in the air block directly in front of you with no attachments with no supporting

Blocks so it allowed you to just place a block in midair and from that you could then build onto it which is not what this idea is at all but it just kind of triggered that memory in in my mind um I like the idea of introducing a way to

Measure builds we were talking about you know a ruler overlay or something that allowed you to kind of place blocks out kind of uh measuring how far out you were doing something or how tall a build was or or something like that allowing you eliminating the counting process

From what you were doing and I think to an extent scaffolding already fulfills some of this purpose although obviously without the stare and slab variants and the ability to kind of insta replace that Bren Rob was suggesting so that functionality I think is a cool thing

But when it comes to measuring out areas like if you’re trying to figure out if a room should be yeah 9x 10 or 7 by 10 I think scaffolding does that pretty well already you’ve just got to be prepared to use it and I think a lot of folks

When scaffolding was introduced went through this phase of am I going to use it to frame out a build and then climb on the frame to create the build and a few few people like took to it and some people didn’t and so if there was a way

To kind of prototype the Prototype if you like and uh you know introduce ghost blocks in a way that you could just test do players build with these does this actually make it a simpler process for for players to build stuff like this I think it’s all about testing the tools

Beforehand and and trying to work out what an intuitive experience feels like if you want players to have this exact experience and beyond that I just wonder if it was a ghost block then how do we craft it you know how how is it then crafted into variants can you imagine

The player at a crafting table trying to carve a ghost into a specific shape you know and and I’m I’m not sure what the the crafting path would be and how you would justify this transparent very kind of ethereal block still being something that we could interact with physically

For the purposes of crafting but not for the purposes of building um and so I think it runs into a couple of like immersion breaking or kind of um physics defying problems which shouldn’t necessarily be the biggest concern considering that physics is already kind of optional in Minecraft but I do wonder

If some of that would feel a little bit weird in the uh keeping it intuitive side of the experience yeah my brain went to more of a creative tool than a survival tool but I mean survival tool is where you want this anyway but I could I could see

Something in Creative where you just have this space block or or area block whatever you want to call it ghost block where if you put it down and every time you put it down it would have a new number on it like 1 2 3 4 5 like that

Would be really cool for counting you just kind of hold the button down and this travel left right up down and it would just count from the original block that could be interesting um but I I feel like with the exception of the horizontal reach of scaffolding being so

Limiting that’s the only thing that keeps scaffolding from basically being this already cuz I I’ve used scaffolding that that’s where my brain went I used scaffolding to double check the height of towers I did it most recently when I added the extra tower on the keep in

West Hill I was constantly adding five or 10 scaffolding blocks then backing up to the other side of town to go like is that tall enough is that could be too tall do I want it to be where do I want the ramp parts to be all this kind of

Stuff and it’s very helpful to do with scaffolding and not have to pillar up one block at a time you can kind of sit there at the bottom you can sort of count if you have a very specific number of scaffolding blocks in your inventory already and you just you don’t have to

Count you just you know you’ve got 60 in a stack because You’ removed four so you know if you place them all then it’s 60 high from where you’re standing that kind of stuff is helpful but not quite in the way if you wanted to do a bridge

Because scaffolding then becomes not as as useful so for those situations I use something that’s very easily removed often dirt something I have a lot of in my inventory I tend not to use grass just because it tends to grow over the landscape and you can’t see what where

Like where you’ve built something a lot of the times I end up using Stone it’s not the easiest block to remove but so much of what I’ve been doing in West Hill is made of stone so I I might as well just use something that may or may

Not be replaced like maybe I’ll only replace about half of it because I’m going to keep the Natural Stone there anyway it’s also something I have a lot of so I’m not worried about you know not being able to have a few stacks of of stone to span like a river or something

Like that but I like the idea but I agree with you in that there’s that immersion breaking of like it’s part UI and part building block and so I feel like the scaffolding is kind of what we’ve got in terms of functional thing in the game to to do this one and being

Instantly breakable like if you use one base block and then you build everything on top of that then you can take down a scaffold instantly by breaking a single block instead of you know multiple blocks and the other thing with this is that you would need to scaffolding anyway if you’re working vertically

Because if you can’t collide with this ghost block then You’ still need to pillar up somehow in order to place it vertically so I think after a certain point it it it sounds like a great idea in principle but you’d run into some um some issues with it that would feel like

It it it stops being an intuitive block to use after a certain point like I like the thinking that’s g into this but I’m not sure this is our solution you know it sounds like it would be an incredibly cool tool to use as a content creator if

You after you’ve built something you want to illustrate to somebody hey this is nine blocks by seven blocks or this is a 15 tall block uh Tower like if you wanted to kind of draw those lines outside of it like right now people would just use Minecraft blocks but if

You had something that was very distinguishable from anything that you’ve built like this is meant to be a UI tool I’m using this to show how high or wide something is that could be fun for people doing tutorials and things like that yeah yeah may maybe this room

For something like that in future but I think with we can’t count content creators as the main reason to add stuff like this so yeah we’ll uh we’ll see if Mojang themselves have any any uh ideas for improving quality of life for builders in the near future in the

Meantime we’ll move on to CJ’s email CJ is Wroten on the subject of refreshing old things hi jol and pix on episode 281 you mentioned that you’ve enjoyed seeing more things getting a bit of a refresh in minor Minecraft updates I’ve been enjoying this as well with spider eyes

Getting a new use in breeding armadillos decorated pots getting a stack of storage space and camels eating Cactus I love that Cactus and spider eyes which have been in the game since Alpha 1.0.6 and 1.0.0 are getting additional uses as someone who’s been playing the game since before they were added it’s really

Nice seeing old items getting refreshed 14 years later are there any specific items in Minecraft that you would like to see refreshed a little bit cheers CJ died after choking on a tough rabbit hide as he decided to eat it since bundles have yet to be added to the game

So I was actually just talking about this the other day on stream and where my mind went even though it’s not the oldest item I think slime balls could be used in crafting more things not necessarily slime blocks they seem to have a lot of uses but slime balls

Specifically don’t really do much other than leads and making slime blocks right uh refresh me and let me know if I’m I’m I’m correct there but I was collecting a lot of flowers again not sure what to do with all of them because I’m not using a

Lot of them I use specifically a lot of white flowers around westle but I was thinking it would be nice to have die blocks and using something like slime one slime in a grid of another eight die blocks around that to make a colored block but something with texture to it

Like so not like red or yellow concrete but something that might have a little bit of texture sort of like Coral perhaps but like then not limited to being placed near water and having your full range of the 16 colors that are available you know from the different

Dieses in Minecraft that to me would be a really cool use for slime balls specifically also I was thinking like sticky lanterns and this is a little bit weird and fun solving the no lanterns on walls problem in a very minecrafty way you’re not creating a new piece of iron

To stick it to the wall you’re like no why would I do that when I have slime balls I’m just going to put a bit of goo on the back and just stick it to the wall I don’t think I want to see the Slime behind the lantern cuz that would

Be a little bit weird but it would be even fun uh more fun if it made like a little squish when you put it on the wall in addition to the the little you have like a Clank when you put a lantern down now and it would be neat if it kind

Of made like a Clank and a squish because you have like a sticky Lantern stuff like that I think could be more fun uh and then the last thing that uh I got to was uh pitcher pods and torch flow seeds I was looking over a list uh

On the Minecraft Wiki of different items now these are brand new so this isn’t necessarily things that are old that need more love but this is something that’s new that really only does the the one thing which is plant a new plant and I like

The idea of when they add a new item to the game that does more than one thing it would be cool if you could use these seeds maybe even other seeds to go back to the original email about older stuff from CJ about things like maybe wheat

Seeds or Beet Root seeds or different seeds if you can combine those with something like wool to get maybe a different textile cuz the wool textures like they’re okay but I don’t really find that I can use them that often and if you use torch flower seeds and

Picture pods to create a new textile uh I think that could be really really fun too yeah yeah um I I think there’s there’s a lot of great ideas for using reusing old items but I still find it very difficult to think off the top of

My head of items that don’t have enough uses because the game is really good at hiding some of those uses away like to use your example of slime balls I think the one people always forget about that’s kind of mind-blowing when you remember it is that you can craft Magma

Cream um and and that allows for you know if you’ve got a blaze farm and a slime farm you can skip magma cubes Al together because you can make magma blocks you can get fire resistance Potions all of that stuff comes through uh slime balls and slime balls have just

Recently had the Frog breeding part added to it so thanks to uh G the b in our live chat for uh for reminding us about frog breeding so yeah there are again these these little ways in which some of those older items are now being

Res cycled in and I think one of my favorites although it doesn’t you know get a great deal of use after that is the fact that trip wire hooks have been a thing in the game for ages and previously players used to craft them on mass to get trapped chests but then that

Was back in the time when you couldn’t put two regular chests side by side because the code wouldn’t allow you to because it was would try and join the chests together and so since that’s been eliminated the only thing players typically are going to craft a trip wire hook for as a redstone

Contraption or a crossbow the crossbow added in 1.14 with pillagers means that the trip wire hook got a new lease of Life there but I don’t see that many people using crossbows and you can get them from pillagers so I guess it doesn’t necessarily even out that way

But yeah I I agree with CJ first of all that rabbit drops could have more uses I do recall when the bundle was added and we had the discussions about the bundle people were reluctant to kill rabbits just for the sake of it so maybe adding

Stuff of rabbit hide is not going to be the best idea but it does eliminate the sense of redundancy that I think rabbit drops currently have right now the only thing that interests me about rabbit drops is that sometimes they an item in Minecraft Bingo that I have to get but

The rest of the time I leave rabbits well enough alone um I personally like the idea of using more unique feeling items like totems of undying for something other than their current purpose because they aren’t a crafting ingredient they cannot be crafted they notra crafted into anything else they’re

Just an item that you hold and it’s like a tool it’s just there to save your life if you put yourself in a dangerous situation and I like the idea of them being almost like a form of currency I’ve talked in the past about having a

Villager who maybe buys one from you uh along with a bunch of emeralds and then they can change the weather or something like that and I I like the idea of those being used for something a little different and the other one that occurs to me is Nautilus shells and hearts of

The sea which are currently both only used to craft the conduit and once you’ve made a conduit that you can take with you to use like a beacon the only other reason to have more of them is if you want to expand into a much larger ocean area or use them for lighting

Which I’ve done in the past but I don’t think most people are that interested in doing especially with hearts of the sea not being renewable so I would like there to be something we could do with those maybe crafting like a sea shell block or you know craft that together

With sand or dirt dirt or something to enhance Beach biomes and it could be an aesthetic block but it could still have additional uses for Nautilus shells when otherwise you can’t really do a whole lot with them um so those are my kind of my pulls from the list of items but I

Think it is worth noting that having looked through that list of items on the Minecraft Wiki there are so many that I think wait no that has like seven or eight different uses I just don’t use any of them too frequently because there are other paths to getting to the

Results that those items give you this just came to me while we were chatting earlier and I added it in quickly so I haven’t had time to really brainstorm but I’m curious to get your feedback on ender pearls because we can use them to teleport we can use them to

Make Eyes of Ender but there’s not anything else that we can really do with them correct me if I’m wrong but seeing as you now have a ton of Ender Pearls like what would you like to do with them that you currently can’t now uh I I

Don’t know what you could use ender PLS for I think the most common modded use for them is that you make like teleporter blocks right that sort of allow you to get from floor to floor in your base using almost like an elevator and I don’t know what I would use ender

Pearls for other than their current uses because their current uses feel so intrinsically linked to the item like it’s an item that allows you to teleport in the same way that an Enderman does almost so the the it’s hard to think of an item that respects that use of Ender Pearls and

The the sort of phys defying properties that you think of those items as having without either making ender pearls obsolete or you know fundamentally changing certain mechanics maybe it was if if it was something that you could link to a very specific place like if if you could guarantee that you teleport to

A specific block then that would be that would be an interesting one um but right now I’m planning to use most of the Ender Pearls to craft Eyes of Ender and then make a lot of Ender Chest because I think of ender chests as compact obsidian storage after a certain point

CU you can always break them down again into eight obsidian if you’re not using a silk touch pickaxe so that’s a way of of mass storing obsidian and also making sure that you’re never going to run out of ender chests um so that’s something that I I usually think about with Eyes

Of Ender um but then yeah the ender pearls themselves really don’t do a whole lot other than the teleporting thing I just think the teleporting mechanic is relatively unique in the way that it can be controlled with an ender pearl like a A Chorus plant let’s say

Where you can eat the fruit and it teleports you randomly I do think it’s strong enough to let the item stand on its own for now but who knows there could be more uses for it in the future I went down the teleportation route as well but I was thinking items

Like a dumb waiter in your in your base take like shooting items from one position to another as opposed to player um but I mean like that’s already that can already be done with Hoppers and it does like it’s not a teleportation it’s not instant but I thought it would be an

Interesting solution in the nether where you can’t use water to to move items around like you can in the Overworld that kind of stuff could could be cool the other thing that could be neat would be using it on Armor trip do we have a

Purple armor trim I don’t know if we do um purple armor trim I mean are you using a resource pack that turns ends purple because ends are by default they’re green yeah yeah that’s right I am using a texture pack that turns in purple you’re right

Yeah the the the the purple armor trim is amethyst so yeah you get that and there is an ey shaped armor trim that you get from uh from the strongholds so you can you can kind of tie the two together but yeah it’s it’s it’s an interesting one I think there’s there’s

Room for expansion for a lot of different items and that’s perhaps why they are more sparing about adding new items to the game these days but I do wonder if you know a few years down the line we’ll be seeing a bunch of new crafting recipes coming to something

Like the wind charge after that’s been you know used by players for long enough that it feels mundane in its current uses you know yeah I can see some fun like maybe not as practical as some of the other things we’ talked about but brewing a potion out of an ender pearl

Like what does that do like does it teleport you like a coar fruit plant but farther is it more dangerous is it more random like but then could you make a miname out of that you know like where you’re just leaving it completely up to chance as to where players are

Teleporting around your game board and maybe they they die maybe they don’t maybe they survive but it’s just pure luck because they had to drink three of these potions to get across the map you know on a trial I don’t know there’s stuff like that that I could be could be

Fun but I think mostly when I because of the Builder and me like when I think what could an item be used for my brain goes new block give me a new block you know kind of or even I mean I would be happy for two reasons a new block made

Out of Ender Pearls one you could store ender pearls a lot more efficiently right uh if you could condense them into blocks and then then if that then allowed you to then uncraft them into ender pearls later on similar to what you were talking about with uh with

Ender chests uh but that’s normally where my brain goes would be would be new blocks next email comes in from Sage vaults and trial chamber construction hi Joel and pix the new Vault block is a great way to make trial Chambers enjoyable for more than just first

Players to find them but I think the fact that the trial Chambers are built largely out of copper runs counter to this idea normally large amounts of oxidized and waxed copper blocks require plenty of work to obtain but the trial Chambers somewhat trivialize those systems players who want lots of copper blocks

Will be incentivized to tear the chambers apart leaving the combat challenges and loot rewards intact but not the fun environment they are housed in one suggestion I have to fix this would be to add another common Stone type for the trial Chambers to be built

Out of perhaps a nice set of blue stone bricks like the microcin from dwarfen Fortress sorry Dwarf Fortress I could also generate the it could also generate in the world similar to Granite andesite and diid Sage died from beas stings while harvesting wax from his copper blocks I I do

Wonder if if there’s a uh a new set of stone like blue stone bricks that the trial Chambers are made out of people are just going to go and get those as well right like like if if that’s the place that you find them in large quantities in the world people are often

Going to try getting that instead of mining out a vein um so so I think changing up the pallet of trial Chambers is not necessarily the answer unless it’s mundane blocks that we’re already used to you know um but I I do see the um the the the point here which is that

Yes players are going to tear apart the environment of trial Chambers and it’s going to leave it effectively like a a stripped out area with just you know tough blocks or deep slate or whatever around it and you’re not going to have a coherent environment in which to uh to

Test that but I think that’s down to individual play style right like I I think there are players who are going to want to do that and if you don’t want them to do that if you’re playing together on a server then that’s an agreement that you have to come to as a

Server uh don’t strip out the trial chamber until we’ve all had a chance to run through and and unlock the vault and I think that sort of that that comes down to communication more than it comes down to the uh the the gameplay team having to make concessions to individual

Players play Styles I think they’ve already talked about wanting the trial Chambers to be a destination for people to go and get copper because people don’t always like letting copper age and having to go through that whole process so I think the decision to make them out of copper blocks is fairly deliberate

And will have taken that into account in people’s play Styles when they designed the uh the rooms themselves and I think that you know we have to wait to see how often these are going to show up and if they change that or if it seems to be something that’s

Abundant then like you could just designate as you said on a server communicate with your your friends and server mates all right everything’s South just don’t mind those ones you know and and leave the ones uh to the north for the people that want to M them

Out and that way people can know where to go rather than at random thinking you’re going to run into a trial chamber and then having after a few blocks realized oh crap someone’s already mined out all of this and maybe hasn’t finished it so there’s like a bit of a

You know bit of a false Herring right uh I I mean on a single player world like I mean you can do whatever you want you can destroy it if you want you can keep it if you want and so I think the the conversation there is is kind of moot

But I I agree that if they made them out of something else it would be the exact same problem I I don’t think that would be that useful but I’ve not played dwarf Fortress but from what I can tell the microcline is like a light gray blue I

Guess MH and I mean I’m team blue stone blocks so if we get team blue roof tiles then I’m on board but tough already has a bit of that going on so like they kind of already did that you know you just you have tough variants that you can go

And get and I mean you could just you could make those tough variants out of your own tough if you wanted to as well so in that light because they are made out of existing blocks in the game that you can get elsewhere it means that the

Argument for if there was a big back and forth in a server saying like well we want to destroy the trial Chambers for the blocks and we don’t then the argument there is like well you have other ways to get copper and tough you don’t have to destroy a trial chamber to

Get them and I think that’s important if the blocks that the trial Chambers were made of were the only places to get them then they would 100% be mined out for those resources I think Sage also said that they would want this new block to spawn in the world just like diorite and

Granite and stuff so um I don’t want to mince words there but yeah I I think that it would be a cool way and a cool spot to add those blocks but they would be more than likely stripped out the moment the people found them yeah yeah

And and I think having played around a lot with Copper at this point there are certainly ways to get hold of copper in veins and in certain biomes like you go to a dripstone cave there’s copper everywhere you find a copper vein mixed with granite you can do a lot of mining

There and it’s entirely possible for players to indulge in that habit of going out mining for materials instead of you know stripping out a trial chamber when they find it now they’re just they’re not going to you know they they’re going to go and find the pre-made sections of

Material regardless and and nobody is going to a stronghold specifically for stone bricks but they might go to a stronghold specifically for bookshelves like I recently raided a woodland Mansion instead of getting book bookshelves for an enchanting setup and I think that like that kind of play

Style is totally fine like even if it means destroying something that feels like a permanent feature of the world and a structure that you want to preserve it’s all just going to come down to play style um I am absolutely like you on board with there being a new

Block in the game like I I I’m not going to argue with new light gray blue blocks um and like you i’ I’ve I’ve I’ve played Dwarf Fortress but I didn’t get far enough to be familiar with this kind of material but yeah I think uh the idea of

Varying trial Chambers and that kind of stuff sounds like a cool idea for the future and maybe a cool idea for some player created alternate structures in the same way that some mods will add like alt jungle temples or desert temples but um I I think for now at

Least it’s uh just going to be exciting for players to have another way of getting copper if they find that more convenient moving on to our last email this one comes in from hibiscus with the subject of a nether structure hi pix and Joel listening to do episode 281 and the

Email about nether structures peaked my interest I am that person I love playing Minecraft as a NE only survival challenge I love the idea of taking on the challenge to thrive in the dying Wasteland I’ve been into it ever since 116 snapshots started coming out but

After a couple of weeks playing it it becomes obvious it has some big flaws in response to the episode email I’d like to add the idea of transitional biomes biomes that are the blend of two existing ones for example Crimson Plains would be an intermediary step between

Nether wastes and Crimson forests I feel the current transitions are quite harsh going from a lifeless Cavern to a lush dense forest what do you guys think hibiscus has reached the goal postmortem everybody died no Happy Endings today uh I find some of the nether biomes to be harsh

Transitions as well and I think a lot of that lands on two specific biomes the nether wastes and soulan valleys because they are very syy when you’re in them and then when you see them up against something like a Basalt Delta or a Crimson Forest the borders of those feel

Very very harsh Al together whereas there’s so many different vertical transitions in a Crimson Forest even when it butts up against a warped Forest their color changes immediate but it doesn’t feel quite as bad because it’s it’s not like a rolling plane it’s very Jagged and often kind of jumping up on

Different floating islands and there’s all kinds of different things happening vertically and so I think that’s one of the reasons why the nether wastes stick out to me I also think that nether wastes are a bit too large I you could probably argue that Soul Sand valleys

Are also pretty large too uh and too frequent so I like the idea of having this um mixture of a Crimson Forest into a nether waste and calling it like a crimson waste however I think that you still need that reprieve for players that don’t want to spawn into The Nether

And immediately be run at by hog so if you’ve got these variants of say nether wastes with the other biomes to act as kind of like a transitionary biome I think you have to have like the playing mechanics of the nether wastes but then the aesthetic visually of the other

Biomes you’re trying to blend so that if you do finally not open your first ender portal not ender portal your nether portal into uh a Basalt Delta you know you’re finally in a nether waste where you’re relatively safe you know on your first steps into The Nether then it’ be

Good if you just didn’t have yet another side go oh but it’s a crimson waste so now there’s like piglins and and hoglins and stuff everywhere so I think that would be the only caveat that I would have is like I’d want it to be something that would be visually blending but not

Necessarily bring those mechanics closer to where you want to start your nether Adventure yeah I can see where this line of thinking is coming from though because the Overworld has what like 50 biomes and the nether even though the changes feel recent to people and the nether still feels fresh as a result

Compared to what it used to be still only has five biomes and I do wonder if there is still room for expansion in that sense and transitional biomes like say going from a jungle through the sparse jungle biome into a Plains or a forest or something like that feels good

In the Overworld and so I like that and I I I think that’s it’s got some Merit it’s just whether or not you feel like the effort is better spent introducing new biomes and therefore new resources to the nether or if it’s worth just making the landscape feel smooth and for

What it’s worth the nether is not meant to be a particularly Pleasant place so I think the idea of making the nether aesthetically pleasing in a way feels counterintuitive to the experience of being in that dimension in the first place but as usual I will advocate for

Being the change you want to see in the world and if if you feel like you care enough about the Aesthetics of your your environment if you feel like a nether native at this point that is the game creating objectives for players to act on and it feels like it should be for

The player to smooth that transition and to create a transitional biome as a challenge to yourself I think it’ll be a really fun way to play the game is to you know introduce a natural nether ecology that still respects the biomes that you find there instead of transforming the nether completely

Adapting the nether and allowing it to have like a more subtle transition makes perfect sense to me um so I I recommend giving that some thoughts and giving it a try yourself and maybe even coming up with some custom nether biomes of your own with the blocks that we already have

And obviously you’re not going to be able to apply that to the entire Dimension but applying it to the areas that you’re traveling in more frequently is going to make the whole thing feel a bit more coherent I really like what I’ve seen players do over the years in something like

A mushroom island or is it is it called a mushroom field now uh where they take the Warped and the Crimson foliage probably just because they mushrooms and mushrooms you kind of like bring those two together in your head and then they create their own biome in the Overworld

With some of the resources that they have in the nether but without all the danger and without some of the things that they don’t like you know and then it’s customed so it’s better Blended that you can have Overworld trees and different stuff mixed in there uh Acacia

Tends to look pretty cool when you mix it up with Nether um colors so stuff like that I think is really really interesting and and cool I’ve also seen that happen where people have like their nether portal where they have like the nether portal is kind of barfing out the

Nether into the Overworld like it’s taking over and so they do like crying obsidian and and lots of magentas and purples and blacks and stuff and try to Ripple veins of corruption coming out into the Overworld and I think you could do you could do the reverse too like you

Could take your portal in the nether could have the Overworld bleeding into it and having that be a transition like what does another desert look like besides the Soul Sand Valley like what if it was real sand you know what do you use concrete powder instead like is it

All purple sand who knows right you could do some really cool stuff and uh yeah by by doing that you also make your nether Hub or whatever sort of nether portal Network you have more intuitive to use because it’s really obvious which biome you’re stepping out into if you have some of the

The foliage from it and the the Terin around which is a smart way of doing things um I recently saw a post on the Minecraft subreddit which was posted as a a controversial opinion but somebody was arguing that you should never look for pretty landscapes to build in you

Should look for the uglier looking Landscapes because a pretty landscape in Minecraft should be preserved and then the ugly ones are something that the player themselves can work on by either building there or terraforming and adapting the landscape so that it looks closer to the kind of prettier Rolling

Hills with Lush forests and that kind of stuff like so I think the nether can be an example that you can take from this like if if you find some aspect of the nether beautiful then work to preserve those while modifying the aspect of the nether you don’t find aesthetically

Pleasing and work to create the uh the harmony that you want to see from the nether biomes but I think that’s where we’ll leave it for today folks food for thought maybe thank you so much for list list to this episode of the spawn chunks you can find more information about the

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Distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online IO by pixor ifs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixor ifs where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I stream three days a week on Twitch for behind the scenes

Work for the aforementioned YouTube series and I’m the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search aside from that I’m @ pixel riffs on both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online everything that I’m doing online can be found at

Joel du.com that includes the Citadel Cafe my other 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 building on the Cal Minecraft server but the Friday Lego’s chats have returned so tune in on Fridays for Lego

And the rest of time I’ll be working on wesel thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite do you believe in ghost blocks