Insane Fly-Over Features in Minecraft 275

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 275 for Monday December 11th 2023 my name is Johnny but the internet knows me as pixel riffs and joining me as always is a fluidly animated Joel Dugen hi Joel I do not have blue eyes I have green eyes but if you want to hear more

About blue-eyed recommendations The Matrix resurrections and the fourth episode in any series potentially dropping the ball then you might want to check out the render distance which is the extended version of the podcast that we record every week for our paid members over at patreon.com thepa chunks

This week we were digging into some of the things that we’ve been watching along with some recommendations and if you are a paid member then you have a few things that you can look forward to we will be recording some extra episodes to cover our holiday break and we will

Be letting everyone in the Discord know when those episodes will be recorded our members of course get to attend those recordings live and thanks the support on patreon we have the chunk mail dispenser which is a regular spawn chunks episode where we focus the bulk of the show on listener email that goes

Out on the regular feeds and we will be recording extra email content for the holidays as well later on this month so keep an eye out for those changes and uh we’ll be posting those on the regular feed when they come out over the holidays looking forward to digging

Through the mailbag it’s always like an extra stockings worth of presents uh over the holidays for uh yeah for a little bit of extra listener email and there’s a lot of people throwing around some very very good ideas especially with 1.21 on the way uh in the meantime

Let’s get into what we’ve been up to in Minecraft this week uh what’s new on the Citadel Joel I have been uh puttering around in the West Hill Valley we’ll get into the updates to Minecraft in the last um week or so and why that is in the news and

After the news but uh I’ve been taking the time to go around and try and check off some of the boxes it is not the most exciting thing to do uh they are on the bottom of my to-do list for a reason CU it’s not exciting to do landscaping to

Change Rivers all that kind of stuff but I realize that as I keep on walking back and forth which again I think is a great practice for anybody that has a big build or a long-standing build when I need to go repair things or or U make a

Trip for more supplies I walk through the valley and then I take the portal and then after that I’ll fly and do whatever with my elytra but because of that I get to notice the things that are either bugging me or things I like that

I can say oh mental note I should do more of that later and as I was walking through the Farmland I realized wow okay West Hill is feeling pretty feature complete the Farmland leading up to it though is really spotty and and needs some work and so i’ just been planning

Out and smoothing out some of the landscape I have to remind people that the landscape around West Hill is actually from 116 so we don’t have the benefit of 118 generation where the landscape tends to be a little bit smoother when it comes to interacting with rivers and mountains

And things and so I was smoothing out some of the farmland and trying to draw the final Farmland walls and figuring out where I can have a cliff go down to the river and where it’s better to have like a smoother kind of gradual descend to the riverbank that kind of thing what

Might be more fun and functional for the farms and then the other very simple but time consuming task has been uh smoothing out the rivers so again we’ve got default Minecraft River generation from 116 so you’re dealing with very chunky Rivers sometimes they don’t even connect to one another uh and then you

Also have big patches of sand and gravel and Clay all kind of peppered throughout so what I do is I smooth out the edge of the river I I don’t really move it unless it’s really really broken I just try to say okay well I like where it is

I’m going to use that landscape and be inspired by it but I’m going to smooth it out so it feels like more of a nice Meandering River I then go through the edges and remove all the sand and the dirt and the gravel and stuff and in a

Lot of ways I find that the rivers in Minecraft could be really deep and so sometimes I’ll end up filling them in um this all works out well for me because I I’ve actually run out of room in my storage um silos for dirt and grass so

Being able to fill some of this stuff in is great because it means that I’ve got all of a sudden a double chest that’s now free I can put other things in um and so it’s just been a lot of back and forth the process is essentially sculpt

The edge of the river then you drink a couple of water breathing potions and just kind of like Cascade that down until it reaches the bottom that you’re happy with uh and then uh go back through and remove like the gravel and sand and stuff sometimes I leave gravel

Depending on how it looks sometimes it looks quite natural uh but sand I find stands out like a sore thumb especially if it breaks the edge of the river and it goes up into the grassy areas like it just it looks really weird in in Minecraft um and I find that because

I’ve got a special wheat texture that I want that color to be wheat and then if I see that other that color again on the ground it just feels strange to me so I always remove the sand the good news is that I don’t have To Go destroy any

Deserts because I’ve got double chests and shulker boxes full of sand now for any future concrete or glass projects I’ve got going on like I I only I think I could probably take about an hour and do a section of river and I kid you not

I probably end up with three or five stacks of sand easy because of the way that it used to generate in rivers uh and then after that I just grabbed some bone meal and haphazardly swim through the river and just kind of not spam but like kind of slowly Dot some bone meal

Around the bottom to get a lot of seagrass ultimately it ends up with too much A lot of the time and I have to go back and delete some because seagrass kind of comes out in these patches they look very square and if you just delete

Like two or three of them it’ll look more like a zigzag pattern and look more natural it’s a little you know detail oriented for the fact that no one that visits this town is going to go swimming through the rivers and go Joel you missed a spot like that’s just not a

Thing so I’m trying not to get too overly detailed with it uh however one thing I do like to to do when I have a lookoff point like a bridge that you can very clearly see the bottom of the river from or a small dirt path that might go

Down to the River’s Edge I want to try and do some custom kind of design under the water so like you can see some Bush blocks you can see some specific tall uh seagrass that breaks through the surface of the water I might even have some kelp

In those areas and so I’ve done that in one place it’s still very much a work in progress uh I did the Northwest Hill River and I did the East River on the East end but there’s still a part where the East River snakes past the town and

It doesn’t even connect as it travels South like it just stops and just it gets spotty so there’s a few things like that that I have left to do but all of it is just buying me some time until the rest of the mods that we use for

Performance and quality of life stuff on the C are updated to 1.2.4 so um it was one of those things that just needed to be done and I’ve almost kind of been I don’t want to say forced into a corner but certainly motivated to get it done

Now because there’s no point in doing all kinds of work inside the town to finish it up until I can sort out like the data packs and the mods and things so this was kind of just how I spent the weekend and it actually went by fairly

Quickly so focusing on it and kind of like ripping the Band-Aid off it’s nice to kind of check these things off and now whenever you’re looking at the West Hill River or the East River from these Vantage points uh even though the East River doesn’t have any vegetation in it

Yet at least the shape of it it is kind of manicure to the way that I want it as far as the eye can see not necessarily render distance but when it goes around a Bend I just stop caring and so then at least when you walk through the valley

Everything kind of looks the way that I want it to and um it’s it’s timec consuming but I think it pays off yeah yeah I totally agree I I think almost going back to what we were talking about in the render distance with like TV and

Film kind of stuff I remember hearing a uh a set designer props Department person talking about the details that you put into a movie set and I feel like this is an interesting rubric you could follow when designing an environment in Minecraft in that there are primary

Details there are things that are going to be like right there on screen supporting the actors and the audience’s perception of what’s going on in a scene there are secondary details that you might catch on like a second or third rewatch of a movie maybe stuff that the

Camera pans past on the way to the primary shot of the actor and then there are tertiary details which are just things that the actor will probably to help them get immersed into the scene but stuff that isn’t necessarily going to show up on camera and I think this

River is almost a prime example of that third layer of detail where the average person visiting the area isn’t necessarily going to see it a great deal but it’s there almost for your own piece of mind and your own understanding that this area feels As Natural as you want

It to feel and that those little details aren’t going to take somebody out of their immersion as they’re walking past on the way to visiting the town yeah that’s exactly that’s exactly right the the hard part I think is dialing back and not like sculpting the

River banks and going up into the hills and then all of a sudden you’re miles from the town you’re like why am I working over here like I’m just I’m just kind of like seeing a straight line in Minecraft and going like no must be you

Know a certain you know pixel curve or something and just attacking it and like this is on the other side that no one can see like I I need to not spend the next hour doing this so there’s definitely some time management involved but yeah it’s it’s that feeling of I

Know it’s there I know it’s done but I’m also not like swimming along the river bottom and like putting in rocks and details and things like that uh again unless it’s at a very specific point where you can see things like like that custom Cliff that I did in front of the

Marsh uh a couple weeks ago you can see that from the bridge you can see that from the path you can see that from the wall of the town so that has to be done you know but then like the bottom of the river underneath the bridge who cares

Cares you know cuz it’s just it’s not really a thing and like in in a way and from my own experience cuz you know I used to take vacations in some rural areas like you’ll end up with um places where underwater like seagrass and stuff doesn’t necessarily grow that well under

Big Bridges because there’s not a lot of light yeah right and so you can use that too to your advantage to be like all right well I’ll have like piles of gravel and some dirt and stones and things near the bridges and then the seagrass will kind of pick up again as

It gets a little bit farther away it’s it’s an interesting dichotomy because as a player you’re obviously trying to save effort in some places and you’re trying to make sure that the thing that you want to have detail is going to look detailed whilst everything else doesn’t

End up looking too busy and so you don’t end up with just a a a huge broad stretch of detail we talk about this a lot the sort of 703 rule of like you know having something plain for the eyes to rest on but then you think about

Trying to emulate nature and you’re like nature isn’t going to just skip over a bit bits of this River there’s going to be plant life and you know animals and all kinds of stuff around there but you’re just working with the limitations that we have within this medium and I

Think cutting a uh a pretty good balance there between what could be overd detailing and what could simply be immersive detail that works on that level oh absolutely and and if you’re short on uh nature and you are short on ink sacks then just uh do some

Landscaping in a road and you will get a lot you don’t even have to necessarily touch them they’re either going to swim in front of your shovel and and commit uh squid asde or they’re just going to beach themselves on the riverbank and you just all you have to do is just walk

Back and forth and next you’re like how did I get half a stack of ink saacks like okay fine sure along with the the five stacks of sand and gravel and you’re just like well I guess the next build’s going to have a lot of black

Concrete in it when you get to your your sci-fi build eventually yeah I have a shulker box full of clay I think some of it I would have taken out of my swamp base but I think at least half of it has come from the river dredging around

Westle because there’s three rivers that go through the area and so they’re quite large so I I had to get a lot of lot of stuff out of there but man yeah like it just the resources you gather can be it can be really fruitful I recommend if

You don’t have any plans for that clay it’s worth trading it to stonemasons because now that we have renewable clay in the game thanks to Mud being convertible into clay I am much less precious about storing clay and Clay balls for bricks and and Terra Cotta so I think it’s honestly worth taking

Advantage of that stonemason trade now especially if you’ve got a zombified and cured stonemason you can get a very very low rate on that which gets you a ton of emeralds and I’m planning on recruiting a few stonemasons in the near future for trading quartz so that I can start on a

Big kind of white build somewhere in my world either for the nether Hub or somewhere else uh so I’m I’m kind of in interested in stocking up on occasional bits and pieces so yeah might have to do some River terraforming and grab a little bit of extra clay from there

Myself so what have you been up to in Minecraft this week well I’ve been doing something similarly aquatic uh which is breeding Turtles I decided to explore Turtle breeding and get the turtle shell helmet and everything before I got too deep into endgame and it felt kind of

Ridiculous going back to be like oh yeah we haven’t got this helmet yet that I’m probably never going to use and interestingly enough that’s feeding back into a couple of emails we’ve received that are going to form part of our main discussion later on but yeah I went to a

A beach not too far away from my spawn found a couple of turtles very easy bred up 10 baby turtles and then uh enjoyed them popping like popcorn to give me all of the scoots I needed for a couple of turtle shells uh you know ended up

Taking one of those enchanting it and keeping it as part of my My overall gear um but I probably won’t end up using it because now I have a full set of netherite and respiration on that and plenty of access to water breathing potions so the extra benefits of the

Turtle shell aren’t really uh really there interesting though you can still armor trim the turtle shell helmet so there’s opportunities for a little bit of uh customization if you wanted to put like a red headband on one and then a blue and a orange and you know do the

Full ninja turtles thing you could um but yeah I I did that and then I went back to my Mushroom Island where I’ve been digging out chunks around the perimeter to try and locate a slime chunk that was out over in the deep ocean that’s nearby so that I could

Locate a slime farm location for a single chunk farm that I wouldn’t have to do a huge amount of Spawn improving to make it productive so I I managed to find one of those dug the entire thing out um did most of that between clips of

These episodes and then on stream and in the the video I ended up building a bunch of Nether Portals around the perimeter of the chunk which as soon as the slimes spawn in they’re attracted towards Iron Golems they never reach the Golems because they’ve just gone through

A portal to the nether and all of those portals lead to the same place which basically forces them to hop out into a set of Soul campfires that that kill the slimes break them down for slime balls Etc it is absurdly productive and as such being absurdly productive it’s very

Hard to screenshot because the minute the slimes spawn they’ve hopped away towards a Golem and then within seconds they’re through to the Nether and it starts the next spawn cycle so it’s a little bit difficult to provide anything for the show notes and it was difficult

To get a thumbnail for the the YouTube video but ultimately I now have a full shulker box of slime blocks and that took maybe 2 hours FK time so this is an absurdly productive farm for what it is it’s a lot of obsidian but that was just

Taking down a slice of one of the tall towers in the end uh to get hold of all of the obsidian for the portals and it’s five platforms of a 16×16 area just made of slabs and then portals all the way around the outside and enough iron to

Make the iron golems that they could all jump on through and yeah it it generates an absurd amount of slime in a very short amount of time which I’m quite happy with because it’s far enough away from my base that I’m not just going to be hanging around for too long letting

Slime build up passively in the background I wanted something that I could stand in a very spawn Free Zone on the Mushroom Island let the Slime build up quickly and then be able to take that elsewhere and do other stuff with it which is what I’m going to get into a

Bit later this week so how do you handle the the loading of the Nether versus you know loading in the Overworld like when they go through do they is it is that and we talked about this briefly on the show before but like do they do they get

Killed in the nether even if you’re in the Overworld yes they do uh this is something I learned in the process of making this farm and something I was fairly confident of before but I learned more of the specific details of it a nether portal when any entity goes

Through it be that a yeah a snowball or a mine cart this is how people often do chunk loaders with Nether Portals it remember it loads the area around it in a 3X3 chunk area centered on the nether portal for about 15 seconds and so this Farm is producing enough slimes that at

Least one slime is going through this set of Nether Portals every 15 seconds and if there is not another player in the nether Dimension those slimes aren’t going to despawn based on player proximity uh but if there was another player there if it was on a multiplayer

Server and someone was in the nether the slimes might just despawn instantly because they’re not within a player’s radius anymore but the game sort of treats them as background entities doesn’t despawn them and by the time you know they could be out of a player range for long enough they’re just dead before

That anyway um and so it’s very very efficient and the portal stays loaded because there are so many slimes going through it you’re getting at least one every second uh as it you know ramps up so yeah it’s it’s a very straightforward farm for what it does is pretty

Efficient at what it does and uh I’m not sure how many farms like this I will end up building like how many times I will rely on moving mobs out to the nether to get rid of the mob cap and refresh the the spawn rates but it works really well

In the case of this slime farm so once the slimes die in the nether do you then shoot the Slime balls back through a portal to have them stored in the Overworld or are you storing them in the nether I ended up storing them in the nether U from my AFK

Point on the Mushroom Island I just have a portal that takes me to a higher point in the Nether and then I take a ladder straight down to where the collection area is and it’s two double chests full of slime balls at that point um yeah the

First time I used it I maybe afked for about 90 minutes and then it was backed up to like the third row of Hoppers along underneath these uh campfires and I thought y that’s a pretty pretty effective Farm I think I don’t need to use that too much because a Shel box of

Slime is going to keep me going for a very long time oh for sure but that’s going towards you know flying machines in you know a large scale bamboo Farm it’s going to be flying machines for transporting entities I want to in the fullness of time do a project like I did

On season 1 of survival guide where I build a village out in the end islands and start terraforming an area out there just to demonstrate that villagers have a perfectly normal routine while they’re out in the end regardless of there being no visible day night cycle so yeah

There’s lots of fun experiments we can do and lots of neat mechanics to explore later but the slime blocks are a stepping stone towards that and in the future I mean like obviously you don’t need it now because you’ve probably got enough to last you a while but this kind

Of thing could be uh augmented with the crafter you know when it comes out in year or so where you can take those slime balls compress them down into blocks automatically and then not have to store two chests of of slime balls and just have like one shulker box full

Of slime blocks and then you’re solid like you’re good to go right yes yes absolutely um I did also set up a little fun uh slime and honey block piston door in my storage area now as well because I’m I’ve left a bit of room in there but

I’m considering room for expansion in future and not sure what they’re going to add in uh 1.21 that might increase the amount of blocks that we have wood types Stone types whatever it happens to be and so now I’ve got a a piston door that leads through into another section

Of the hillside that my storage room is you know set into uh so I’ve got a little bit of fun technology starting to pop up in the world and being able to install piston doors and and fun little Contraptions like that I think is going to make the world feel a lot more

Dynamic over time so what do you say we jump into some news let’s do it yes uh this week we had the release of Minecraft Java Edition 1.2.3 on December 5th 2023 and the changes are ones we’ve recapped in previous snapshots but it might be worth recapping those here for anybody who is

Just tuning in so in 1.2.3 decorated pots can now store items and can be smashed by projectiles when a player is blocking with a shield the arm with the shield now follows the direction the player is looking at when viewed from a third person perspective and it also

Enables you to block uh damage coming from above as well the B now has a new look there is an accessibility option that allows you to hide the yellow Splash text in the main menu and it adds a recovery screen for worlds with missing data for example if the saving

Failed due to an unexpected shutdown there are a few other minor tweaks those will be on the minecraft.net change log and a lot of those have to do with the technical changes that arrived in 1.2.3 as well so the data pack version is now 26 and resource pack version is now 22

There are a few changes to chat component serialization the names of but non- living entities will now be shown if targeted and a custom name is set or always displayed if a custom name visible is set similar to with living entities and there are changes to downloaded and World resource pack

Handling which we’ve covered in previous weeks as well also covered in previous weeks were the bug fixes that occurred for 1.2.3 there around 85 bugs fixed in the release and in the change log and in our show notes available at the spawn chunks. comom you’ll find a link to the

Issue Tracker Where the bug fixes are covered there was one more bug fix yet to arrive though because suddenly we got a Minecraft Java Edition 1 1. 120.4 there was a release candada the day before but it was ultimately published the day after on December 7th

This was just a hot fix release for Java Edition which fixed a critical bug that could cause items to vanish after being stored in a decorated pot decorated pots could be stashed with items but then might potentially delete some of those items when you logged out and back in So

If you put a stack of d in there you might only get 50 something back when you broke the pot on reloading the world that has now been fixed so make sure to update your launchers to Java Edition 1.20.1 Minecraft Bedrock Edition 1 12050 released concurrently with the Java

Edition 1.20 3 release on December 5th changes in 1.20 15 new features and changes are the same as Java Edition 1.2.3 with the addition of completely remodel the how to play screen and created a new encyclopedia screen fixed various spelling mistakes removed obsolete references to quote unquote old

World and added missing references to netherite related items a variety of other minor gameplay tweaks and Technical changes can be found in the minecraft.net article Linked In Our show notes so I provided a couple of screenshots of the encyclopedia for the folks in our live chat if you haven’t

Seen this because it’s something you’ll only encounter if you’re a Bedrock player and I was kind of curious to see what this ended up looking like because I couldn’t immediately find any screenshots there weren’t any in the Bedrock Edition change log article and the thing that strikes me is that

Encyclopedia isn’t quite the right word for it it still calls itself how to play in the settings menu and it’s a very straightforward readable guide for all ages but it doesn’t go into a huge amount of detail I think encyclopedia to most of us implies something like Wikipedia and the Minecraft Wiki which

This very much is not however it does have some basic tips on how to play the game some very like kidfriendly stuff to explain how to play and obviously in the screenshots I have this is for mouse and keyboard controls but I expect it translates very easily into console

Controls when you’re talking about how to move how to jump how to interact with blocks that kind of thing the other really Charming thing about this is that it has a bunch of pixel art illustrations which seem to be in a relatively new style they’re um isometric pixel art they’re not like the

Uh side on uh pixel art that see in something like the mob vote trailers for example but uh yeah a very neat very cute art style which should hopefully encourage players to explore a little bit and uh will at least help with the early experience of Minecraft for new

Players which I imagine can get kind of confusing given how much is in the game these days you know I think that it’s something that is important especially for younger players or parents that might want to play with younger players that may not be just video game Savvy

And understand like WD or you know controller things like looking and placing blocks and inventory and all that kind of stuff and I mean it kind of gives you the idea like hey this is how you craft a thing inviting the idea well how do you craft other things and you

Can experiment in the game now that you have to you know that you know how to craft one thing it kind of like starts the ball rolling and uh we always talk on the on the show about like that balance between like handholding in game versus like people getting frustrated

And having to look stuff up outside of the game or having absolutely no idea that any this thing exists without you know the community letting you know you know if you’re not watching YouTube videos about Minecraft then there’s a few things that you might just not

Stumble upon at all in the game and um I I think that I’m with you in that it doesn’t feel like an encyclopedia it feels more like a beginner’s guide you know like a guide book or something yeah um and that might be a better name for

It but um I I think that games that have those kind of things I think are really helpful and you don’t want it to be an endless menu scape like no man’s sky for me was that thing where like you’re just constantly in the in the oh what they

Call it not a not a thesaurus it’s a index of you’ve discovered a thing and now that you’ve discovered a thing you get to know all the information about that thing and you have to go look it up in the index and it kind of hints as

Like oh this could be used for crafting or this could be used for fixing your ship and all that kind of stuff and you know if if that kind of stuff gets in there um then that’s great but I think that they’re probably going for more of

A a basic outline and I like the look of it like I don’t play Rock um but I I like the the look of the presentation it least feels pretty straightforward you know like what they don’t give you in like the description of a crafting table there’s also chests littered around with

Stuff in them indicating you can put things in chests like there’s some visual cues that kind of uh make things more interesting but you had some interesting Insight on the art as well yeah it’s curious to me that they’ve adopted a different art style for this which leads to them adding details that

Take liberties with the ACT ual game in in subtle ways but if you take a look at the moving around screenshot it has a pig that seems to be kind of sat on its haunches with a carrot in its mouth and yes on the one hand that implies that

You can feed and Lead pigs around with carrots but on the other hand pigs don’t sit like that and that’s kind of it’s sitting almost the way that a cat or a dog does once you’ve tamed it so there’s a couple of things there that really

Give me the impression of that’s sort of not how that works and the same goes for the other screenshot that I took which was uh the one about the crafting table there are items littering the ground including uh the so from the crafting table which does not exist in game and

It’s is not available as an item so you know the recipe book is there and it’s clear that this player is kind of tinkering how to make a diamond sword but then there are also items laying on the ground there are chests at a 45° angle to the isometric uh pixel art

Style that they’re using and so it’s not misleading necessarily because it’s clear that these are meant to be interpreted in images and it’s very different to how the Minecraft world around you looks but the fact that’s it’s in a different style they’ve taken a few creative liberties with it which

Uh are kind of at odds with the gameplay that you’re going to find as you explore the world I caught the angled stuff too saw that angled chest and the fact that the the chicken is angled is a little bit and the book on the ground as well

And the book’s open on the ground like you just you and books on the ground like you can’t really do that you can put them in an item frame but they just don’t sit on the ground like that and uh I also it’s like the proportions like

The proportions of the chicken is a lot cuter same thing with the pig now granted the pig could be a baby pig but it it it does have like some cuter more Roundy you know proportions uh I noticed the Salmons have got different colors I prefer that salmon texture to the salmon

Texture we have in the game um and it would be nice if they could bring that in something that just dawned on me though as we were talking about it I would really like it if the Minecraft paintings in the game looked like this instead of what we have yeah uh I think

The Minecraft paintings are weird and an echo of yesterday year that don’t make any sense in the game but if you had like landscape paintings which they did introduce recently there was some that were a little bit more on par with what what could be but if some of the

Paintings were art style like this that would be really cool I think that would make a lot of sense it could be like the artist interpretation of the world around them you know yeah yeah it could be and I think there’s there’s room for that I like I would love to see an

Expansion to paintings in future that incorporated some of those art styles and maybe keep the existing library of paintings around as Legacy paintings but it would be kind of neat to see some stuff like this or to have a way for players to design a scene like this

Somehow would be uh be kind of neat in itself either way I I’m really glad that St stuff like this is still being worked on I think the new player experience as somebody who makes tutorials is always something that needs you know a good amount of attention we can’t assume that

Players are going to innately understand how Minecraft works and making the game more approachable to new players is is always a uh is a bonus um so let’s Circle back to the Java Edition releases I guess we’re going to be talking about 1.20 point4 but including the changes

That arrived in in. 3 uh personally I’m really glad the decorated pot bug was caught quickly because I was planning once that feature arrived to cover the changes to pots and figure out a couple of ways I wanted to use them in my world so quite pleased that I didn’t suggest

You know using that to store your pickaxes in and then find that one of my pickax has completely disappeared afterwards um but for you of course this is the thing that’s holding you back from updating the Citadel and making sure all of your uh mods and stuff are

Are ready to go so uh how are you feeling about that now are you any any further into that process at this point had it stayed at 1.2.3 I probably would have been updated by the weekend but because they had that 1.2.4 release and some in some cases uh

Mods just didn’t catch up like they they they said that they would be updated they were updated on 1.2.3 but then for whatever reason they just didn’t work on one 1 120.4 a lot of the time it seems to be any kind of mod that might rely on

A library so a good example would be mini HUD which I use for like building really large shapes if I need to uh or um for me I use it mostly for just lighting uh mini Hut has this really cool uh feature that I can use on a

Hotkey which puts a light value in a number on the Block that you’re looking at and it does it for like as far as the I can see and it’s very handy when you’re trying to do subtle lighting and you just want to avoid that zero you

Know uh and so they they show up as red in the very easy to spot and that is updated now actually I just checked this morning because I had a little bit extra time but it wasn’t on the weekend and so in general the major apis and the major

Um mods that we use on the SLE for things like fabric sodium for performance uh the lighting one for lithium is not updated yet but I find that some of the lighting stuff that’s happened in Minecraft over the uh the last couple years like phosphor was a

Mod we used to use but we no longer really need it because one do I think it was 1.20 actually updated a bunch of stuff with it so that it’s it’s so it’s it’s not so much of an improvement from the base game lighting that you just you

Really need it and so a lot of things like that were updated quite quickly like I want to say 1.24 came do4 came out on like a Wednesday or Thursday I think it was Thursday because the original was a Tuesday and then the release candidate for 1. 120.4 was the

Following day so it would have been Thursday by the time the uh the4 release arrived yeah so Friday I was checking before my Minecraft stream and sodium was on four fabric API was on four that’s why we use fabric over another mod loader because it updates so quickly

Cuz fabric the developers that that are on top of things tend to stick with these um snapshots so the the leap from you know a pre-release or a release candidate to a DOT release is is just dollars and cents like it’s not a big

Leap if the mod is already up to date um the thing that I didn’t have time to get into would have been updating all of the data packs and uh I also have had some issues with some long-standing data packs and I think as a whole uh the

Sedal server is going to be moving away from complicated data pack and instead going towards mods I am having a better user experience with mods M and uh I want to be very careful because I I still want to have a vanilla experience on the server thus far the

Mods that we have have all been UI or performance related so things like a map things like moving things out of your inventory um and having it be animated uh things like uh speed and rendering and lighting and having a mod for Connect textures because um I had connected textures with OptiFine but

When I move to sodium you need like a separate mod and a separate mod library for connected textures to bring otm Textures in so there’s things like that um but nothing gamebreaking is currently unavailable so we could update to 1.2.4 like today if I wanted to but then like

Some visual things some visual Fidelity would be behind so I’m just kind of waiting uh as I’m seeing other things trickle in I’m like okay well that’s that’s cool um we’ll go from there but I think what I want to do is try to find uh some other mods that may introduce

Tentatively some uh different blocks mostly things like Furniture just because I’m looking ahead to things like the modern city and I I don’t want to have the headache of having something either not be supported or start to function in a way that you’re not expecting uh in a data pack form I find

That the data packs that we never have to think about they always just seem to work they get updated really frequently are things like vanilla tweak. um things that do one thing like shulker box drops two shulker shells instead of one guaranteed like that just it makes

The quality of life change for the busy adults that are on the server um and and that’s the kind of thing we’re like that data pack just as the one thing and while it is timeconsuming to update like a dozen data packs that have like you know shulker shells and recipes for this

And I have a bunch of wood recipes that I use in the you know stone cutter because it’s just more convenient for me that kind of stuff does take time however they seem to be Rock Solid in their functionality in that they don’t ever really need to be updated in how

They function they just need like a quick data pack version update like it’s typing one number into a into the back end and they’re done and so I think we’re going to be sticking more with either recipe or single function data packs going forward and anything that’s really complicated um with the

Exceptions of things like the wandering Trader mini blocks and and things that um have been been tried and true and have proven that they update quite frequently then we’ll stick with those but I think going forward we’re going to be moving away and moving more towards a

Couple of more mods maybe I don’t know I’m I’m always in that internal debate of like how modded do I want this idle to be and I guess at some point like it’s been six years we’ve all very much experienced the vanilla game and adding

A mod is not the end of the world uh I just I think basically for for this show and my experience with Minecraft I want to try and keep that survival vanilla experience as close as I can yeah yeah it makes sense and what you want is

Ultimately just going to be a server side mod that allows you to install a bit of furniture and that kind of thing if it’s to replace your sort of tables and chairs data pack that you had before and that’s the difficulty really is a lot of the stuff that you’ve been

Talking about has been some of it for performance reasons might be installed server side like sodium and whatnot but it’s been easy to walk it back into vanilla if you ever needed to whereas now if you’re considering serers side content mods that just add additional blocks to the game then that’s a

Slightly different proposition and that’s where my experience of it unfortunately falls apart because I haven’t done a great deal of modded play and most of the modded play I’ve done in the past has been so modded that you wouldn’t consider walking the world back to vanilla if you decided I want to keep

This world but continue on without all of the mods so I’m not quite certain how to best approach that but it seems like you’re at least being cautious which is which is good and having done a lot with just having client side mods with mini HUD and

Everything I think it’s uh you know safe to introduce a couple of uh serers side mods for for Content as long as like you said if if it’s staying vanilla and as long as everyone is happy with it then ultimately the only thing you have to be

Aware of is are these mods going to continue updating in future and there are some pretty reliable mod creators out there so here’s hoping you find the one thanks yeah I think that you know there are some things that have just become so much a part of my gameplay

That I just consider them you know part of Minecraft which they’re not like the the mini map and the and the map mod that I use it looks and feels like Minecraft and it does so much more than just give you a top down map like if we

Wanted to you could use like teleportation in this map mod which we don’t use it’s just we we’re a small server we use the honor System and say like look just don’t use waypoints don’t transport yourself around you know walk or fly or use Nether Portals just like a

Vanilla game U but the top like the map quality is just too good to pass up and I could not have done this River stuff without it because I used that top down view to kind of guide my pixel curve of of the river and it’s become just

Invaluable in in this large project when you know you save yourself so much time not having to fly up you know couple hundred blocks and then look down at something to say like yes that’s good or no I need to move that two blocks to the

Left or whatever you can just pop open the map and say like oh yeah no that’s too much of a straight line I’ll just fix that now and it saves you so much time and and I think also I would say the presentation quality of a content creator you know rather than flying

Around all the time like a like a bat you know you can just go go up and and look at the map and and kind of explain to people what you’re doing and they can get a bird’s eye view immediately and understand oh yeah okay I can see why he

Does this you know and so um yeah there are things like that that I I feel like add to the experience but don’t you know they are all still things that you could absolutely do in vanilla Minecraft it would just maybe take longer or not be

Quite as easy and I think that that’s where I’m trying to draw that line and the the big kind of debate for me has always been like this the furniture stuff that we have but the furniture thing for me is like there’s just no other viable option if Minecraft ever

Said hey yeah we’re adding vanilla Furniture I’d be like sweet no no longer do I need that mod if there was enough going on I’d say like you know what I think we can make do you know we can probably use our imaginations and try to

Come up with some ideas but um for me when I think about like all the different things that I have to fix about West Hill and then I realize man if I had done the modern city and like apartment buildings and like different cafes and there was all these different

Pieces of furniture and that that a pack somehow stopped being supported like that’s just a lot of stuff to fix and so uh with mods not usually undergoing that kind of drastic change uh that tends to be um at least a more stable way to go

Feels like you you can adopt a bit of a vanilla plus uh game style maybe that kind of makes makes a great deal of sense uh let’s move things on into chunk mail which once again is going to feed into our main discussion a little bit

Later if you’d like to email the show the email address is spawn chunk [email protected] and a reminder that we have a couple of episodes coming up where we’re going to focus almost exclusively on listener email as the holidays roll in and it’s nice to do these Community focused mailbag episodes

So get those emails in and it’d be great to hear from some more of you over the holidays uh Joel why don’t you take this first one first email comes in from pan pus an old idea in these times of change dear Joel and pix I’ve been a listener

Of the show since episode 1 and the podcast uh along with the Minecraft survival guide and EXO’s update videos is a tenant of My Life as a Minecrafter so thank you for the great work you’ve been doing like many players I have my pet peeves when it comes to small but

Lifechanging features and there is something I’ve been wanting for the longest time in Minecraft I would love a vanilla way to skip the day in Minecraft in the same way a bed allows us to skip the night my preferred way of achieving this would be a hammock maybe crafted

From string and attached to hooks in which players could nap to sleep the day away I’m more of an Explorer and a builder than I am a technical player and I seldom build mob Farms I prefer the thrill of going mob hunting at night that’s especially the case with slimes I

Don’t think the hammock would be a gamebreaker manually hunting mobs at night is still a grind after all and it would never be as efficient as an optimized Farm I would love to hear your thoughts pan pus died from a mob attack because he was too slow getting out of his

Hammock yeah I can imagine that being the case I’ve uh not used a hammock a great deal in in real life and I always feel like I’d be kind of awkward getting out of them depends on the the quality of the hammock I suppose um I like the

Idea of of pan being hit by a zombie in a hammock and then like spinning around Looney Tune style yeah just getting wrapped up in it wrapped up in it yeah and a hammock seems like it’s on the technology level of Minecraft I like the fact that it was a hammock and not

Something I don’t know like a higher Tech kind of thing um Rosie in our live chat was saying uh in in high school their friend recommended an armchair for that purpose just being able to like while away the afternoon on on your porch or something like that seems like

A an appealing way of doing it as well and could potentially if they if they put an armchair or hammock in there give you more furniture options to avoid the uh the switch to uh to including content mods for that um yeah I I kind of of

Agree with the the premise here I’d like more control over the environment in this game especially once we reach endgame so not just over day and night but over the weather as well and I’ve talked in the past about how useful rainstorms and thunderstorms become once you have access to Trident but how

Limited you are in your ability to cause them as the player so more often than not you end up just having to wait around until a convenient one happens um especially if you’re getting charged creepers for mob heads or or anything like that thunderstorms can be

Annoyingly brief so I would love ways of having more potential to manipulate the world around you how do you feel about that idea Joel so with thunderstorms it just it rains all the time on the Sidle I’m not sure what it is with our server but like every time I turn around it’s

Raining and I got to wait to sleep to get rid of it and so if sleeping through the day also changed the weather cycle and remove the rain then granted I’d be back to nighttime again but if I had a hammock next to the bed that I can sleep

Through both and just be right right back to a sunny morning so that’s that’s a potential um I was actually just having this discussion the other day uh on stream because uh I was talking about the Oddity of like carrying a bed around with you to like throw down in the grass

And it’s like a wooden bed with bed sheets and a pillow and sleeping uh which by the way you can do underwater if you’re sculpting a river and you’re like I don’t even want to bother to surface I’m just going to throw the bed down and sleep in the water I I call

That I call that move the seabed because I I do that a lot when I’m out in the ocean I have a lot of oceans on the survival guide World which are they take quite a while to cross on by boat at least and uh more often than not by the

Time I reach the other side and I’m getting into like a village or something like that night is falling I’m worried about zombies and so I’ll sleep maybe like a couple of dozen blocks from shore on the the sea Flor and so I put down

The seabed and uh we can get that that taken care of but yeah no it is it is useful although completely unrealistic to be able to sleep underwater while you working on this stuff for sure and I like I I get the motivation here like I

Can understand and I think that’s a neat idea like I I like that it’s not I want the game to be easier for me it’s more like I just want this extra thing that kind of mirrors what happens when we sleep in a bed but I want it to skip the

Day instead of the night and going out and fighting the moms rather than making a big mom Farm no shame at your very efficient you know slime farm because I would I would go your road I would definitely go with the efficient Farm over fighting mobs at night um because

West Hill Valley is not lit up and it is very dangerous at night time I do not want to walk around I’ve seen like six creepers all like two chunk areas it’s just it’s not not fun at all um but for me a hammock ends up being tied to trees

Like you have to put it somewhere you have to tie it up to something and so you’re kind of limited what if you’re in a desert and you want to skip the daytime Cactus well I guess yeah you could do that it might be a little bit of a prickly

Awakening yeah don’t trip over that one uh I for me I thought you know maybe like a sleeping bag or a bed roll would make more sense to bring around with you and that’s just like an RP thing like I mean it does the same it could do the

Same thing as a bed but then like you’re sitting there going all right well a sleeping bag that’s also meant to sleep through the night most of the time common sense and so how do you then differentiate and tell the player that a sleeping bag goes through the day and a

Bed goes through the night um because if you’re out I wouldn’t say camping but if you’re out in the wilderness people would probably bring a sleeping bag with them uh especially if it’s easier to craft or you know faster to put down or whatever um and so I remember sleeping

Bags came up as an idea back when they added the campfires to the game and that led me to think all right well you know a hammock still works in terms of sleeping through the day but what if it you know that kind of control was something that Mojang maybe wanted to

Put more towards the end game so rather than having players accidentally sleep through the day that maybe are not good enough to fight things at night and having them be in night again when they don’t want to be uh because of any kind of in-game confusion unless it’s of

Course in the new Bedrock encyclopedia page um I feel like maybe something magical like maybe some sort of alter or block like the respawn anchor that we have uh some sort of magical way to then skip the day because then it becomes very intentional like you 100% have to

Have this block with this item to skip the day and if that’s the case then you’re probably going to be experienced enough as a player where because you want to skip the day you know what you’re in for you’re less inclined to have a bad time uh going into the

Evening and so that was my idea was like rather than like a traditional hammock or or sleeping through the day it would be something that you could then use to control either the moon rising or the sunset or something like that I love the idea of being able to use that with the

Clock item that we already have because there are so few reasons to craft a clock more often than not players are going to know what time it is just by looking at the sky and so having more uses for the clock being able to set it in something like an enchanting table

And dial in the time that you wanted on the clock would be a really tactile way of of introducing that as a concept um I feel like the one of the other potential pitches for being able to skip the day would be it’ll be useful for skipping

Moon phases because at a a new moon no slimes ever spawn in swamps like it has to be one of the waxing waning or full phases of the moon in order for slimes to spawn so there’s one night of the eight night cycle in which you don’t get

Any slimes in swamps so it’d be really good to be able to skip that moon phase not just by skipping the night on which it occurs but being able to skip the day as well just get to the next night quicker and be able to farm slimes if

You wanted to um but I I think the main reason we don’t already have something like this is that on multiplayer servers when you’re not like you don’t have the kind of agreement with everybody that yeah we we all want to make sure that it stays daytime and we skip the night um

You could end up with people effectively competing over whether it was nighttime or daytime right as soon as somebody sleeps in a bed to skip the night you sleep in a hammock to skip the day and that person goes back to being in Jeopardy when they’re trying to escape

From some mobs and they just wanted to sleep to get rid of them I think that’s part of the the problem here is that in single player it makes sense but in multiplayer it introduces all sorts of potential points of friction between players that I don’t think Mojang

Necessarily wants to go down that route something that I do on the Citadel which I didn’t mention when we were talking about the modded play is that um because of the different zones we have command blocks that teleport the player between four and 10,000 blocks away from

Our main kind of Spawn Hub and we do that just to make sure that skyscrapers don’t get built next to castles uh but that’s a quote unquote portal that’s operated by a command block you you walk up to what looks like a cool magical portal but you have to press a button

And then the command block just runs a very simple teleport player have them face a certain Direction when they land and that’s it you could do that with the you know forward time command you know like you could uh have a command block in the game now um that you give

Yourself access to especially if you’re on single player I like your point about multiple player um but I on single player like you can just make a command block that you press a button and it just either sets it to a certain time of day or fast forwards so many minutes

Throughout the day and and use that um and if you wanted to play honest with yourself rather than a button maybe you can hook it up with like a a hopper or something with a filter so that you have to throw in a diamond you know in order

To fast forward the day that could be a good way to kind of create some um gameplay learn a little bit about commands and do it that way um but I I agree with you on the multiplayer server like I I think that that would cause all

Kinds of problems unless again like you had an agreement across the players or a system set up where it would require every player to sleep you know at the same time in order to fast forward the day like you say hey does everybody have a hammock I really want to fast forward

The day is that okay with everybody and if you know the other two players are underground doing whatever they want then like it doesn’t matter you know yeah kind of like the multiplayer sleep command you can have it maybe separated for for day or for night um well since

We’ve already discussed the opportunity of bringing in data packs and mods into the mix I will shout out Aro plays from our chat who uh posted a link to the Comforts mod which is available on both Forge and fabric and if you’re you know comfortable with installing mods this

Makes it possible to skip through the day actually using hammocks so great minds think alike I suppose uh there are also sleeping bags that allow you to sleep without resetting Your Spawn if you’re interested in installing something like that I also took a quick look through the data pack creators that

I’m aware of and Voodoo beard has a data pack for vanilla Minecraft it’s updated for Minecraft 1.20 which is I believe based on a previous sleep menu you but effectively you stand on a bed you can select from day or night and you can also select the types of weather as well

So it effectively turns the bed into your One-Stop shop for all of the different possible day night States and uh weather setups that you might want and those are all available through commands like you said so it’s it’s nice and easy to imagine that set up as a

Vanilla data pack instead of something a bit more complex our next email comes in from Kagan W with the subject of burrows and carts Hello Joel and Pi on episode 274 there was a lot of talk about player inventory and World inventory very thought-provoking in that discussion I

Don’t remember hearing how pack animals are used in the game which I could say is underrated for example llamas with yellow carpets could hold your sand llamas with brown carpets could hold the dirt Etc I will admit that donkeys and llamas are not especially useful since

They only have one chest if that much however adding a cart that a donkey could pull that holds more items maybe a transportable storage room or perhaps a new way to organize chests One cart could have seeds of all kinds another cart could have player tools I think it

Would be a fun and inventive way to organize your storage and keep it from being a giant chest monster in a basement somewhere thanks for the podcast Kagan w got run over by a cart man chests and my goods attached to mobs that move around despite all of my

Best efforts to keep them from moving around no thanks I I know that these are in the game I I know that players use them all the time and I just I can’t can’t be bothered especially if they’re making noise like I just going into your storage room and having everything

Honking at you and spitting at you potentially no again I’m out I’m it’s it’s right up there with why there’s no villagers in West Hill because I just don’t want to listen to them um if you are a player that can handle llamas though uh I did a little bit of a

Refresh uh they can carry shulkers and desending depending on their strength they can have up to 15 inventory slots once they’re tamed and adorned with a chest so like that’s a decent amount of storage early game if you happen to find a llama and you want to move some stuff

Like uh a chest boat across water great but that’s slowo on land and good luck going up a block or two whereas if you have a llama with you and it has enough inventory slots granted if you’re that early game you’re not going to have um

Any shulker boxes um but maybe if you’re at a point where you’ve lost your elytra or it’s just it’s it’s something you want to to move things around for for inventory for storage then sure um I just the idea of you know a llama full of shulker boxes that can die and

Drop all of its stuff I you know fall into lav like I just that to me just it’s too much of a risk I like my stuff where I can see it and grab it you know yeah yeah the the fragility of mobs is kind of the same argument with tamed

Wolves right it’s like why am I bringing this thing into a combat situation where it could potentially die and then I lose whatever benefit I had in the first place um and my biggest problem with llamas is the effort required to breed them up to that maximum inventory

Capacity because they can have as few as three inventory slots where the maximum is 15 and there’s actually a very small chance of that strength value increasing when you breed them so finding one that has I think nine slots might be the maximum you can get you know from a

Natural llama and then you have to breed them for additional strength but um either way you you have to kind of roll the dice finding them in the first place it’s kind of like finding a horse that’s fast enough and and can jump high enough

And that kind of thing it’s it’s a bit of a Gamble and then the amount of time it takes to breed them to the point where they have 15 strength from which point I believe if you breed two with 15 strength you’re basically guaranteed that The Offspring will uh have the same

Amount of inventory space so it it becomes easier as you go along but there’s a very small chance of that strength value increasing meanwhile donkeys have 15 slots by default so you don’t need to put as much effort into breeding a donkey from there it’s more

About like do you want to breed a donkey for stats the same way you do with a horse can you make the donkey faster than the default one and so on and so forth um they don’t follow in a caravan the way llamas do and the Caravan really

Feels like the most unique facet of llama behavior is the fact that you can have basically 10 of them following you which you can imagine with 15 inventory slots each that’s room for 150 items which is a great deal more than the player inventory and a and a double

Chest but that’s still relying on 10 llamas being able to follow you and that’s uh quite a big ask you also have the fact that you could also do the same thing with donkeys and there’s no real limit to how many animals you can attach to leads other than just

Practicality so yeah llamas are a a difficult one and uh this sort of leads into our main discussion because I’ve been considering doing an episode about llamas for a while but much like the turtle shell and turtle breeding stuff I really wasn’t sure where it fit into the gameplay progression because I consider

It more or less like a a fly over a pass by feature Minecraft being such a broad game a lot of these features can seem useful at one very specific point in the game and then their value diminishes once you hit anything else that is slightly more effective like a lot of

The time elytra and shulker boxes are just going to make a lot of the previous options in the game obsolete um so I wanted to talk a bit about how many of those were worth coming back back to and how they could be given more value in

The late stages of a world but uh is there anything else you wanted to address from Kagan W’s episode before we uh from Kagan W’s email before we get into that I I like the idea of a donkey with a cart only because it’s a cool aesthetic but like right now there’s a

Chest boat and that’s to me is the in-game parallel again not Overland very well but uh it does have more capacity and so it’s probably faster if you can get there in the water to just put a chest booat in a river you know uh and

And get there that way if you can and rather than kind of going over land with with the donkey or you know get into The Nether and travel with stuff I I feel like as you mentioned so many of these things in terms of early game inventory

Get surpassed as soon as you have shulker boxes or even an Ender Chest like that seems to be the early early game thing would be an Ender Chest where you’re like okay well now that I have this I can carry a bunch of stuff with me inside the ender chest and it’s not

It’s not g to have shulker boxes in it in the very moment that you get it but you’re going to be able to fit a lot more in that ender chest and have that be in your inventory then you can fit in any donkey or llama and I know that the

U the Kagan W email was mostly suggesting that because llamas have carpets you could then color code your llamas and like have like grass in the Green carpet llama and dirt in the brown carpet llama that kind of thing um but that to me just isn’t practical like

Even if you have them in a very small stall somewhere like you still going up to them and getting stuff out of them just doesn’t seem to me uh to be all that all that practical yeah the only time I recall animal inventory being invaluable was in the one block at a

Time snapshot the April Fool Snapshot from a couple of years ago in which people found that inventory worked normally because they hadn’t removed access to horses with chests in so it effectively allowed you to use stuff the way you normally would um but yeah like

Like I was saying um we’ve had a couple of emails recently and you found another one that kind of relates to our discussion topic today about features that we just kind of Overlook and stuff that if you come back to it in endgame it’s more of a a curiosity than it is a

A convenience and something that feels like it’s part of modern Minecraft gameplay yeah shout out to the Piano Man 89 and I’ll paraphrase the email because it was a longer one but I did flag it and set it in our little inbox folder for potential discussion and uh they

Said that that the recent mob vote introducing the idea of a crab in Minecraft made me realize the contradiction between the existing enchantment Bane of anthropods and the intentional design behind the neutral crab to drop its claw rather than be hunted for it are there any other things

You have noticed that cause problems between old and new Minecraft Gameplay and for people that aren’t following crabs are anthropods and so a bane of anthropods enchantment on an axe would make very quick work of a crab if you were supposed to kill it but they were not aggressive mobs in the description

Of the mob vote right so the the idea of them dropping their claw for the player to then collect was more along the lines of how sniffers kind of sniff up seeds and leave them behind you don’t kill sniffers for items you follow them around for items right yeah yeah and so

The the the list of arthropods grows thin uh when it comes to you know we can just add more spiders you know more bugs I believe it also works well on bees um and silverfish because they are bug like at least and so yeah there there’s a

Couple of things that it works for but I I kind of agree with that there are some odd like holdovers from a previous era where Minecraft wasn’t super Forward Thinking with its features which is you know ascribing maybe an unfair um characteristic to it because they they were probably thinking ahead but not

This far ahead because now the game has seen this much success I feel like they develop a lot of newer features with the future in mind much more so than used to happen when they weren’t sure where the game was ultimately going to go um so

Between the old and new I find that there’s a few sticking points for me having spent a bunch of time on a mushroom Island lately it occurred to me that Phantoms bypass a lot of the benefits to building on a mushroom Island players used to pick mushroom

Islands to build on because you could work with more subtle lighting and you didn’t have to sleep through the night so you could do some cool stuff with lighting up builds to be more shadowy or creating an environment that felt kind of Cozier and and more dimly lit at

Night without having to worry about hostile mob spawns and then 1.13 introduces Phantoms and that then leads to well you still have to make sure you get into a bed to reset that insomnia counter every few days and that might interrupt the project that you had going

On there and then later on once 1.18 arrives and changes mob spawning to require a zero light level that’s still a good thing in my book but it allows people to work with more subtle lighting everywhere so now mush islands are much less sought out you don’t hear of people

Turning them into bases and shopping districts and whatnot as much if anything it’s just a convenient land mass in the middle of an ocean if you want an island base but you don’t have to worry as much about the mob spawning requirements anymore yeah i’ I’ve not spent much time

On Mushroom Island I know it’s where I want to build my sci-fi Zone but I I know that the the biomes can now differ depending on whether it’s 118 generation because you can still get mob spawns underneath the island if it’s in like a lush cave or

Yeah yeah the cave biomes do uh do vary um and I don’t I don’t think you ever get deep dark under a mushroom Island because there’s rarely enough elevation in a mushroom Island for it to uh to generate deep do so you don’t get the benefit of zero mob spawns down there as

Well yeah so like I I haven’t looked too much into that but I the thing that kind of piqued my interest about this kind of stuff for me it’s it’s hard because I’m just so endgame and there’s so many things that I do now that just I don’t

Bother to look back at other things that I I would have either needed or used or even new things that have been added to the game a lot of times even on the show I’m just like well I don’t don’t really have a lot to chime in on because like I

I’m so past that like they’ve added cool things to the mid game or early games like I haven’t had early game in a really long time and so when I’m at the end with like elytra and shulker boxes and all that kind of stuff I think mostly about lighting changes and I mean

I like the lighting changes I think that they’re good um in terms of a it might have removed the novelty of a of a mushroom Island although I I like the idea of just not having to worry about spawns at all that’s kind of a nice a

Nice thought but um the drawback that I had with thinking about a mushroom Island for um for my sci-fi zone is that I want to do a bunch of farms I want to do a bunch of like you know mob farms and item farms and things like that and

So that will those will have to be designed and built outside of the Mushroom Island because otherwise they won’t work so yeah so that’s that’s a tough call as well so like maybe a desert or maybe a mushroom Island close to a desert would be a good idea that

Kind of thing I say a mushroom Island I should say it’s it’s interesting the classification of that biome has changed so it’s now called mushroom Fields because I think people were finding especially a newer generation that they still can connect to other land masses in certain circumstances so they’re not

Always islands and so it may actually be worth looking for one which has a land border with another biomes so that you can mess around with mob farms and and potentially get resources from other places otherwise having had success with it with my slime farm I do recommend

Building stuff in the ocean just like a block or so away from the island because if you’re not hitting anything that’s still covered by the biome you can get some pretty effective spawn rates if you’re looking for Mob farming and unless looking at doing some custom landscaping and things like where the

Ground is going to be a different color entirely than grass and just so the myum in the grass color doesn’t matter so I could easily build that kind of stuff out into the ocean and then extend the island or Peninsula or whatever it is that I’m dealing with out to to meet

That um I just thought it would be a neat idea to play in that in that zone especially because to start off it looks kind of alien anyway so you could kind of like Get Away with I haven’t landscape yet but it still kind of matches with what I’m doing you know in

Terms of I mean it does kind of look like a No Man’s Sky Planet in a lot of ways um the um the the mushroom Fields um the the thing that I look at when I look at things like this is things for me that I noticed in endgame with

Regards specifically to things like the Piano Man or or other um gameplay changes mending has drastically reduced the need for diamonds like we’ve had a hard time figuring what to do with diamonds on the Sidle for ages we we even have an issue with an economy on the server because we’re all just

Friends and we just trade stuff so then we have like here’s a shop and it’s like two or three diamonds for a stack of bones or whatever and and like people don’t shop there because ultimately someone just like hey I’ll trade you like four stacks of bones for two stacks

Of like dirt or grass or sand or what like whatever somebody else needs and so it ends up being more of a barter economy than it does any kind of like real cash economy and I think the addition of armor trim and the diamond costs associated with crafting and armor

Trim and now also netherite upgrades as well has brought back more use for Diamond so there’s a there’s a change in like a good way where it hasn’t created a problem but it’s created a a more um a more Dynamic use for something that I guess mending maybe created the problem

And then the addition of armor trim is kind of one step towards fixing that problem because I mean early on sure you want a lot of diamonds but like on a long-term server like the sigil which is six plus years old like I don’t ever need diamonds I’ve got stacks of diamond

Ore and diamonds and blocks like I just I don’t I don’t see myself ever needing to go specifically looking for some unless I’m doing something wild like making some pyramid out of diamonds for a flex on the server yeah I’m I’m considering turning some of mine into a diamond Beacon at

Some stage it’s just having having diamond blocks to build with it so rarely comes up there’s such a specific texture and the the tiling on them is not something that you can just make a floor out of casually unless you want to look very ostentatious in a very

Minecraft sort of way um but yeah like I I agree with you I think mending is one of those things that it’s such a huge quality of life and we’ve obviously had the discussion recently with the uh the villager trading changes about the accessibility of mending and it’s quite

Clear that they want to walk back a little bit of how widely mending is used but it’s going to be difficult for the player base in general to reduce that while in the meantime recognizing that yes unless you intentionally want to repair your tools and use diamonds for

That for a while before you have enough mending books that you’ve found naturally or traded naturally it becomes like you know a cash reserve of diamonds builds up to the point where they’re they’re functionally kind of useless um for me it’s it’s more things like mobs in particular like turtle breeding was

Really the thing that kicked off this idea for me as I mentioned earlier I had like a full set of netherite because I didn’t really feel like exploring and breeding Turtles right away and I sort of feel like I missed my opportunity to get the most out of the turtle shell as

A helmet and I find it even funnier that the shell helmets other uses in potion brewing and at that time the shell helmet becomes virtually obsolete because you can Brew water breathing potions so you end up with a potion ingredient that gives you was it slowness and resistance for so it’s it’s

Like a a a a tricky trade-off to decide whether or not you want to use the turtle Master potion but then effectively turtle shells only really need to be used for Brewing from that point on because once you’ve got Brewing the turtle shell is effectively just a

Different color iron helmet it has the same stats and you don’t really need to worry about water breathing a couple of people pointed out in the comments on my episode though that unlike the natural breath meter that you have that now needs to be after a couple of changes to

It uh a little while ago you can’t refresh your oxygen instantly by stepping out of water anymore like you used to be able to do but with the water breathing effect on the turtle shell helmet all it needs is one tick of air and it refreshes that 10c water

Breathing effect that it gives you so you can still place a torch underwater to create a temporary air pocket and you can get another 10 seconds of water breathing so potentially it can save your bacon in certain cases but I rarely find myself needing that underwater and

The maintenance of having to refresh the effect every 10 seconds almost takes away its utility for me because there’s only 100% specific circumstances in which you can do that right you kind of dip through an air pocket made by a door or or a torch or you use a bucket of

Water in front of you or something like that and that uh doesn’t really feel convenient after you’ve done it for the h 100th time just so you can get another 10 seconds of water breathing I spent half my weekend underwater in Minecraft like I you know the potions were absolutely the way to

Go if the turtle helmet gave you infinite underwater breathing sure you know if it had like reduced you know um armor and you know had different hit points and like you have to be careful not to get hit because you might lose it like but if it gave you the ability to

Breathe underwater but again like that’s what conduits are for right if you’re going to be underwater for that long so you know I just I there’s these weird little stop gaps that just for the amount of effort to breed Turtles and make a turtle helmet it is 100% not

Worth it but again like I I don’t know what that would be like if I was starting a game new and I happen to be on a beach with some turtles then yeah sure I’m going to go that road because that’s going to be happening sooner than potentially brewing potions if I haven’t

Gone to the nether yet we on the Citadel have a you know Wizard Tower actually looks not enough not like your wizard tower um and and there’s a bunch of Auto Brewers in the bottom that Mast belt so like whenever one of us is out of

Potions you go there with a bunch of empty bottles you donate the empty bottles you fill up the water and supplies when you can and you walk away with ready-made potions for water breathing fire resistance strength speed all that kind of stuff and so while it

Was a bit of a trip to go get you know a half dozen water breathing potions they last for what eight minutes I think so you know between me not being in the depths of the ocean I’m in a river so like if I’m if my potion runs out like

It’s not going to be dangerous for me I just rise up four blocks and I’m good but it’s it for me was a lot more convenient to be underwater all the time and just not have to worry about it and I think that one of the solutions could

Be to like to have either Maybe not the natural Turtle helmet as it is but like maybe if you added something to it like a golden Turtle Helmet or you know M like gave it something an enchanted Turtle helmet like anything that could take it from being this weird stop Gap

In early game to like oh no this is actually useful if you want to be underwater for a while you don’t have access to a conduit you know or maybe it’s just not convenient in the same way like I dig out these rivers and it would

Be faster with a beacon but like I don’t want to bother to set up a beacon because I’m not going to be there that long you know yeah and I feel like there’s those weird kind of options that some of these older things could be could be

Bumped up I know what you mean about mobs too though you know when you talked about mobs I was thinking about the Strider you know like fire resist potions and elytra they eliminate any need to ride a Strider over lava yeah you know they’re they’re slow uh you are going to get

Shot by a gas if you’re moving that slow and and like it just it they’re cute like don’t get me wrong I like them I think the Whimsy that they add to the game they’re weird weird I I think they they add a lot of character but their

Utility not so much yeah yeah and I think that’s that’s part of the I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily an issue it’s part of the direction that you realize you have to take with the later game is that a lot of mobs become Ambience you know they become something

That feels like a background detail because with blocks and items at least you can use them decoratively whereas especially because many of us playing the game are conscientious humans you don’t necessarily want to keep your mobs in captivity it feels weird just keeping cows in a pen forever it started to feel

Weird for me now 6 months into my world that I just have this mass of cows you know in a fairly restrictive area of fence because I used them for food once upon a time and I haven’t needed them for a while so you build a cow pasture

And then the cows become effectively decorative but you don’t necessarily need them for much except the occasional you know handful of leather every so often and glow Len was another one of those features that came to my mind as a more recent feature which has its niche

In the game especially now that they have reduced the light level of mob spawns because if it was going to be light level seven then that’s functionally useless prior to 1.18 but now that it’s got a light level of seven and mobs require zero it has vital functionality in the form of

Lighting it’s functionality that’s mirrored by a variety of other blocks but glow Len is available early game most people are going to ignore it in late game but it still has decorative and functional uses which doesn’t occur as often with Mobs because they can’t have that hardcoded functionality of it

Stays in one place and it provides light it deters other mobs you occasionally get those interactions like how cats scare off creepers and Phantoms but you don’t end up using that everywhere because you’re moving around quite a lot and you don’t want to spam cats throughout your entire world um and yeah

I I think llamas we discussed earlier are sort of part of the same equation you know I rarely find an occasion on which llamas would be essential and I have no better options the same goes for the camel really by the time I’ve done enough exploring to find a desert

Village I don’t really know what I would do with a camel because I’m probably already either riding a horse or I have to go back over the sea to get back to where I started and there’s no point bringing a camel with me that way and

You know eventually I get a ltra and the camel becomes virtually obsolete granted I’m doing that from the perspective of a single player world and part of the functionality of the camel is to have two passengers but it’s it’s an odd one that and yeah I I think there are some

Characteristics that you can apply to blocks and items that will keep them viable into late game because they’re part of a color palette you know they’re part of a Vibe of of an area they’re part of a a set of blocks that you want to incorporate into a build style even

Things like diamond blocks that we were talking about earlier can be used in certain types of builds and that can work around the idea of the item itself feeling obsolete to you once you’ve gathered enough of them but with Mobs it’s not like that with turtles if you

Keep breeding them to get the turtle shell Helmet or you know just the scoot item eventually you have a 100 Turtles that you have nothing to do with but potentially coal so that you can keep your world alive and prevent performance issues from all of the mob pathfinding

AI so it it gets difficult when it comes to mobs specifically and I think that mobs like the copper Golem and the tough Golem that were proposed a little while ago trended towards what I think is ultimately a good idea for certain types of mobs is that they become part of the

Furniture they provide Ambience from a stationary block grid persp perspective and that kind of allows a little bit more creativity on the part of the player because you can incorporate a mob into a build without worrying about it wandering off and it sort of becomes a bit more like a decorative feature

That’s intended to be a decorative feature rather than using cows or sniffers or whatever as a decorative thing and just kind of ignoring them from that point onwards when it comes to Transportation I was thinking about things like like boats chest boats horses mine carts like I don’t use any

Of that stuff as a late game player but even when I start over like I don’t you know the very odd time that I’ve I’ve even played like mod packs where you’re still dealing with Minecraft early game if I know a lra or a thing because it’s

Not my first time playing Minecraft then I absolutely don’t bother with anything but maybe boats when I’m exploring trying to find a place you know but horses don’t bother too much it’s too much of a hassle for the limited amount of time that I’m going to be using it uh

And same thing with uh with mine carts you have to lay down all the track it’s a lot of materials it’s just not worth it unless you’re just moving items over a short distance you know I think that’s one of the reasons things like Minecarts have always had that call to be updated

Um ever since elyra have been in the game because Minecarts are cool you know like they’re part of the aesthetic of Minecraft you think about like Splash art and you think about Abandoned M shafts you think about uh all the character and fun that they they have in

Minecraft dungeons and and then think about um even like mine carts in the Minecraft Lego sets like they just they have this really fun kind of retro idea to them but because they’re outmatched by the um the elytra and then nether portal travel then they just get used for small functionality rather than

Transport and having those be updated could be a way to like not necessarily go with the piano man’s idea of solving a problem but like bring features that have been um I guess made obsolete into something more interesting I I don’t necessarily know how you do that in a

Way that works within the game but I think that you know having that kind of stuff looked at and if you can’t make it more functional than if you can make it more fun than I think that that that’s one way to to kind of make it more

Interesting and cool again like textures you like you said using blocks and and entities as decoration you like if you had different color mine cart s or if you had different kinds of mine carts that had different textures if they could be used in other ways where it

Also looks you know like part of a a machine or it looks like it could be used in a Sci-Fi build then people might use them to just have them around rather than just using them specifically for their function in the game and then with

Mobs if we look at the future we’ve got the armadillo coming I don’t know how those scoots are going to differ from Turtle scoots and you know if we have tamed wolf armor if that’s purely cosmetic I can’t see that being practical for very long right like if you’re going to

Bring a wolf into a fight and you want it to have armor like again once you’re powered up enough that you don’t need a wolf’s help to fight mobs or you’re just better at the game and zombies and skeletons just don’t seem to be a problem for you then like you don’t need

The wol farmer anymore it just becomes purely cosmetic and so there’s a lot of like resources and time and effort that’s going to go into the armadillo and this is speculative because of course we have not seen anything in game in any kind of snapshots with it but

Like I don’t know what the use case or the lifespan of that feature in the game is going to be other than a bunch of players going like huh cool anyway and then just moving on because like it’s just it’s not to provide you any utility

And like it or not a lot of times Minecraft players are looking for the straightest line to how do I play this game efficiently yeah and and I don’t mean that necessarily in a bad way I’ll just take it from my own standpoint and the people on the cult server we’re all

Busy adults people have spouses families kids jobs duties like you have to be an adult and you don’t have hours to play Minecraft and so if something is just like well this is kind of a waste of time I’d rather just wait and get elytra or just wait and get netherite armor

Than like I’m just not going to bother yeah yeah and and I think the flip side to stuff like that is bees which are obviously like taken from Real World example bees are very important to our own you know ecology and so forth but from bees in Minecraft you have an

Interaction with flowers that’s a reason to keep flowers around you have something that produces a honeycomb that we can use to wax copper make candles turns into blocks then honey is a food and also a technical block that you can use for a variety of things and that’s a

Ton of depth that just comes from bees whereas with the armadillo yes it’s part of the mob vote but it’s one of those things that it adds one thing and that one thing can be used for one thing and it doesn’t have that cascading like tip of the iceberg effect effect that

Something like bees have in terms of the the depth of the features they provide so I hope that in future we can end up with a few more mobs that Trend in that direction whether they’re based on real world animals or not I think there’s there’s room for stuff like that and

That can build on the foundation of old Minecraft while introducing new stuff and doesn’t necessarily have to feel like there is a disconnect between old and new gameplay um and I think there’s there’s a few examples here they’re like lingering potions where it’s almost the reverse situation those are only really

Available in late game once you’ve beaten the dragon and everything but they don’t see much use once you get there but we’re seeing New Uses come in for them like trial Chambers are starting to incorporate those into their dispensers and I think that’s a good place for them they work best in that

Closed environment where there’s a bit of a challenge Arena going on so I think maybe there is room for that stuff to sort of be inverted and we’ll see how things go in the future for now though I think that’s where we’re going to wrap up this episode of the spawn chunks you

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Page that’s where you can get the render distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online I go by pixor ifs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ Rift where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I also stream 3 days a

Week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for the aforementioned YouTube series and I’m the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search aside from that I’m at pixels on all the social media that matters you can decide for yourself which ones matter Joel

Where can people find you online everything that I’m doing online can be linked through jen.com that includes the Citadel Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment had a fantastic conversation with my buddy Steven ESC last week and that’s going to be going up on the feed soon I’m Joel

Dugan on social media and Joel dougen on Twitch where I schedule streams Thursday through Sunday but satisfactory and Minecraft it’s got their hooks in me and I’ve been playing almost every day so check it out twitch.tv/ chol thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite but when’s the last

Time we used That