SimplySarc – Why Netherite Replacing Diamond is Huge

In 2020, with Minecraft 1.16s ‘Nether Update’, Mojang did something unprecedented; they disrupted the game’s tech tree. A tier system that has been in place from the very beginning and that has never been tampered with quite like this. Personally, I never thought this

Kind of thing would happen. Mojang has been resolute on certain parts of this game’s design and there are some things they’ve unwaveringly, never budged on. I thought this was one of the hills they’d die on… And yet, here we are today.

As exciting as it is to see the new ‘netherite’ tier added to the game, this change means so much more than just a new set of gear. This decision is a massive shift in philosophy and has opened a box with consequences that reach every corner of this game we call Minecraft.

So subscribe if you like what you see, I’m SimplySarc, Diamond is dead and the future of Minecraft is suddenly looking a lot spicier. To understand why this is so surprising and why the addition of Netherite is much bigger

Than the sum of its parts, we need to look back into Minecrafts past. From practically the get go, Minecraft’s tier tree has looked like this; Wood, stone, iron, gold (placed dubiously somewhere around here) and finally diamond. This was the progression set out

By Notch and it has remained untouched throughout it all. *Why* it’s remained like this is an interesting question and it has all sorts of different answers. The simplest is that when something remains unchanged for long enough, people start to

Grow attached and the longer you put off doing anything the harder and harder it becomes to prise those roots out of the ground. For good or bad, the Minecraft tech tree became iconic for how it worked. You punch a tree with your bare hands, you craft in your silly

Little squares, you never dig straight down and at the end of it all, there is a shiny blue rock in a cave above lava and it, and it alone, is the ultimate item. The actual gameplay structure became part of Minecraft’s brand itself and you do not mess with your

Brand identity without a very good reason. One of the more interesting points is about how Minecraft’s progression isn’t actually that important. In fact, it’s kind of intentionally unimportant. The funny thing is, that even though the diamond tier has always been Minecraft’s highest tier, it can be laughably easy to

Reach it. It presents itself as the ‘end game’, but with a touch of luck and planning you can actually get diamonds in your very first day, under 10 minutes or even less if you’re really fortunate. This could be seen as shallow in depth; the

Progression is barebones and is over before you really start feeling it. But it’s also a clever way on keeping the focus of the game where it’s meant to be; player creativity. There are two kinds of feedback loops and different people tend to prefer one over the

Other. The first is where people like to be told what to do and the other is where people want to be left to their own devices. A great way of illustrating this is with Vanilla Minecraft versus Modded Minecraft. Modded Minecraft excels at catering to that

First type of person; a heavy progression system with what can feel like an endless amount of pre-prepared activities. They’re laid out for you straight out the oven and the finishing line is miles away. It’s out on the horizon and who knows how long it’ll

Take to get there. The satisfaction loop stems from getting rewarded for completing a task, then being given a new task, over and over again. It’s fun because you don’t have to think much about it, just do this, we’ll treat you, then we’ll give you something new to do.

The reason some people don’t like Minecraft and struggle to get into it is because Vanilla doesn’t rely too much on that feedback loop. It teaches you that you have to make your own fun, goals and tasks. And some people don’t like that. They want to be told what

To do, they want a clear path to follow. But for people who enjoy that freedom and independence, they’re essentially given a different kind of satisfaction loop; Because the only limits are your imagination, there’s theoretically never an end, as long as you can think of

Something to do. This is the reason some people can play Minecraft for years without ever getting bored. While Modded offers much more tangible content, it instills this idea in your mind that you’re only having fun when there’s that next shiny

Gadget coming up. And when you literally do get to the end, regardless if it took weeks to get there, there’s now nothing left to do. Because the game was teaching you that *it* would feed you, not you yourself.

If we return to our main theme, you can see how Minecraft’s original tech tree encouraged that sort of independent mindset and it makes sure not to distract you for too long. The journey to diamond tier isn’t stretched out and by reaching it quite early into the

Game it doesn’t facilitate this hand-holdy feedback loop. You get satisfaction for making your own choices and seeing them to completion, not because there’s a hundred new tiers you still need to work through. It could be argued that by abolishing this long-established precedent and expanding the equipment tiers, you’re encouraging an expectation

In player’s minds that the game is about hitting hard milestones and not making them for yourself. Of course, this simplified tier system has downsides too. And it’s the core reason that many other aspects of the game have been bottlenecked as a result of its existence.

As to not displace diamond as the top dog, the concept of enchantments was created. This was a good compromise that allowed the game to protect its branding and convention, but also buff up tools, weapons and armor to ease parts of the game players felt were becoming

A little tedious. While this worked quite well, eventually people started getting hungry for new content again, but Mojang had backed themselves in the corner a bit; they couldn’t really push more and more enchantment levels without the game just becoming an enchantment manager, but they also still didn’t want to add new tiers.

This is where the biggest flaw to the lightweight tier system kicks in; the tiers don’t have enough breathing room from one another to differentiate themselves. Because block hardness can be defined on a scale of ‘wood’ to ‘diamond’, that means other tool types also need to adhere to this small scaling system. The difference

In strength between a wooden sword and a diamond sword is actually quite marginal. In fact if you look at it from iron to diamond, that line becomes extremely blurry. To the point that diamond, the top tier, doesn’t have that much advantage over the much more common,

Iron tier. There’s the added insult that because these tiers were designed to be so close together, it’s hard to justify retroactively introducing mid-tiers between the existing types. And because they’d used the enchant system to create secondary properties, like fortune and silk touch, they’d lost the ability

To create meaningful off-shoot tiers via perks like that; if a new pick was added with the ability to insta-smelt iron and gold ore, shouldn’t that have just been an enchantment instead? However the issue runs even deeper into the

Game. The scaling problem is a major factor as to why Minecraft combat feels so bland. With such a small damage scale to work with, it’s difficult to create interesting exchanges, because the variety in enemy health points needs to be heavily restricted.

Most Minecraft enemies have about 20 health points. Stone, a tier that can be reached in the realm of a minute, deals 5 damage. Sharpness V diamond deals 10. The difference in blows required to defeat the most common health point type is… 2. From the beginning

Of the game to the end the breadth of combat is a difference… of 2 blows. And because the damage output is restricted by the tier system, this also means enemy health can only go so high. An enemy can’t have 1,000 health points, because even a sharpness

V diamond sword would take too long to get through it. But that also means lower tier weapons are still decently effective against, what should be, high level enemies. Combat is unrewarding because the game has to fit the entire cast of enemies (early and late

Game) into basically the same damage scale. And it’s unsatisfying because it doesn’t feel like you needed to progress much to be able to beat them. There’s also an issue Minecraft has related to loot. A lot of the time it feels like the

Game doesn’t know what to give you as a prize and some rewards seem rather stingy and uninspired. You get through a woodland mansion and you don’t really feel like you’ve been given much. And this all stems back to the tier system. If End Cities, the final

Challenge, at last, actually get to give you the best tools the game has to offer, then what do you fill in the loot pools everywhere in between? You get to a village, this is an early game thing, and you’re rewarded with iron tools. Wood and stone would be too

Worthless even then, so iron’s where it’s at. That means from the beginning of the game to the end you basically only have enchanted iron and regular diamond as tiers until you have to start giving out the good stuff. And

The loot pools really suffer because the game can’t be too generous with things like Dungeons, Mineshafts and Strongholds because they have to hold out till the End Cities. And this begs the question, if new later game content were to be added in the future, what can you

Offer the player now the cities already maxed out the loot pool? The solution Mojang has to these problems seems to be; they’re gonna need to relent and come up with creative solutions to the issue. That means rocking the boat and messing with long-held conventions, but it also means navigating carefully and approaching things

Cleverly. While Netherite is a new, stronger tier than diamond, it was also designed to complement diamond rather than completely oust it. Netherite isn’t wildly faster at mining and it doesn’t deal crazy more damage. To make sure diamond wasn’t made irrelevant, Netherite leans on secondary enchantment-like

Perks such as reduced knockback and lava resistance. These are nice to have, but not outright essential. They’ve also made Netherite pretty darn hard to find and forge. And technically speaking, it’s actually a derivative of diamond gear, so diamond can’t be skipped like how players often skip gold.

Overall, I’m glad to see Mojang are still open to new ideas and are willing to push the boundary when necessary. Netherite mixes up the meta and with it, could see even more unexpected surprises in the future. But anyway, that’s pretty much all I have

To say on the matter for now. Let me know your own thoughts on the new tier and what you think this means for the future of the game. But again, thanks very much for watching, I’ve been SimplySarc and I will catch you… in the next one!