The Spawn Chunks – 243 – A Grove-y New Soundtrack // The Spawn Chunks: A Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the spawn chunks episode number 243 for Monday May 1st 2023 my name is Johnny but the internet knows me as pixariffs and is joining me as always is the belated birthday boy Joel Duggan hi Joel hello uh and thank you very much to everyone that reached out from this

Community to wish me a happy birthday I very much appreciate it my birthday was on Saturday for folks that are wondering I am not a spring chicken that’s all I will say and if you want to hear more about what happened over the weekend for my birthday as well as Johnny’s

Experience with some recent war games including the stardew valley tabletop game you can check out the render distance which is the extended version of the podcast you can get that at patreon.com the spawn chunks become a member and get access to extra audio content every week huge thank you going

Out to our patrons who support this podcast every single month it’s a new month we’d like to give you a big shout out and a high five and you’re ongoing support has meant that we can continue to do cool stuff like the chunk mail dispenser it’s an all email episode

Usually the third episode of the month the Minecraft monthly hangout which is an extra audio bit that we do usually the last Saturday of the month where we discuss with our patrons about their builds and they showcase and send in the screenshots and stuff and the quarterly hangout which happens every three months

Where we discuss with our patrons how the podcast is doing things like download numbers YouTube metrics and future plans for the show so all of that is stuff that patrons get and you can become a patron at patreon.com the spawn trucks if you’re curious about the monthly and quarterly Hangouts we had

Both of them very recently as well so if you become a patron load that patrons only RSS feed into your podcatcher of choice and you’ll find some of those near the top of the pile if you’re curious about how that stuff has been going for us recently how’s the Citadel

Been this week you’ve despite it being your birthday week you’ve been quite busy I see the bridge is done hey the bridge is done I feel very good the fireworks in the distance I’m very happy with it and I uh I think in a way uh seeing what you were doing

With castle grayscale and the depth that you had going on really helped me kind of decide what I wanted to do and so what I ended up doing last week was um punching in uh with some extra detail on the cliff side of the bridge and adding in a combination of moss and

Cobblestone and I’ve that’s not a new idea I’ve seen Hermits and other craters using this to great effect and I started moving around and adding in more detail and I had to take a lesson from uh other things other games as well and go more simple with the texture I was really

Frustrated with not being able to put enough texture on the actual stone brick portion of the bridge and thankfully by taking out the underside a little bit and adding in that that depth relief I really only had to add cracked stone bricks and Bricks I didn’t have to do

Much more uh which was great because it kept things uh a lot more simple I added some Mossy bricks down where the pillars go into the water just because you know Moss would kind of get down where it’s wet and that kind of thing and so that

Was uh it’s a successful but minimalist approach to the bridge kind of final details I finished up the towers and just kind of tied everything together and made sure that things on both left and right sides were good and then I spent a good portion of the week doing

The custom clips and after getting into it a little bit I realized that while I know how to do these These are the first two custom Clips I’ve done at this scale everything else has been like four or five blocks by ten blocks like nothing very big and this took forever and I

Learned some things and I don’t know if I can convey it quite as easily without a visual aid but do you know when you have like four or five blocks and they’re all held on top of each other in a nice pyramid and they sort of look

Like the Qbert game you know like they have that very strict kind of Minecraft pile but it’s very perfect and all the vertices of the cubes are kind of coming together and if you looked at it as a line drawing you would have like five or six vertices all converging on one point

Yeah and my advice for people that are trying to make custom Clips is try to remove those vertices wherever you can and you can do that by having different areas of the clip go up by a block and a half so add a slab you

Know or at a stair or have things be much steeper than you think you want them to be but then when you back up they actually look right and it’s frustrating to jump up and down believe me but it looks good in the end it works

Best if you’ve got a texture like stone or Cobble or something that is like a a seamless texture that doesn’t have a border on it yeah and I felt that it came out quite well and was also my first foray into kind of working with Cobble tough

Cobble deep slate at like the base of a cliff to show like different kinds of rock like igneous rock versus sedimentary uh trying to show a little bit of contrast uh trying to have one blend into the other in the same way that you’d see uh diorite or granite in

Minecraft because kind of like you’ve got these veins kind of throughout the world I was trying to do that but in a little much more natural looking way and I think it came out quite well again it took forever so bring your coffee and bring your afternoon but if you can take

The time to to do it then I think it’ll be quite successful and I like the way that the foliage came out and you know like it’s not anything too too crazy um I I moved the road so that the northern Crossroads is now centered when

You walk through the Western gate on the bridge and it all feels now more like you’re entering the valley like you’re entering the West Hill Valley when you come through it from the West which is what I wanted so it took a while to get there it was like 11 streams in total

But it was a big project you know like these kind of things take time and I think for whatever reason around stream eight or nine I really wanted to get it done and I was frustrated that I was taking longer than I wanted and then

I just took a bit of a break you know I did a Lego Stream and then coming back to it I was just kind of like you know this is just going to take as long as it’s going to take I might as well just you know lean into the chill you know

Vibe of it and just kind of like well today I’ll be lucky if we get the clips done you know and if that is that your if that’s your check mark then great but the whole thing’s decorated uh we spawn proof the towers there’s I mean the towers are decorated inside but like

There’s like a bed and a table and that’s kind of it because they’re like four by three inside there’s really not much to them so um but yeah I’m quite happy with it yeah yeah you should be I think they look great I think um the the thing about the

Cubitting effect the the amount of like just single block staircases that we tend to build is so often in service of player movement and I think that’s one of the biggest things when it comes to building natural landscapes like this is that as you’re building them in survival

You’re so concerned about whether you can like maybe subconsciously this might not be a conscious concern but you’re worried about whether or not you’re going to be able to jump up to the next part and how much of a pain it is to get up and down if you’re building too much

Verticality into something that sometimes you don’t prioritize verticality which is a mistake because I think the overhanging section of the cliff that you’ve built on what looks like the right hand side of the bridge if you’re kind of traveling up it I think that’s the most effective part of

This whole thing because it allows the rock formation to look natural casts some Shadow you can have the plants dangling down from the top of it and I think that overhang you’ve got with the stairs and stuff looks really effective but what it involves is building like a

Seven or eight block High vertical walls which you have to detail kind of awkwardly looking up at them from underneath and probably waiting in the river for some parts of it and like if you don’t bring temporary blocks with you if you’re not super keen on using scaffolding those kind of things can

Prove to be quite daunting tasks so persevere is my advice for that because I think building in that level of verticality with terrain doesn’t come naturally but as somebody who’s just built a giant Cliff plateau in my base and is really happy with it I think it’s worth doing Minecraft doesn’t generate

Cliffs like that often enough except in the more extreme cases of caves and cliffs terrain like 1.8 terrain bordering on an ocean like you sometimes find those really extreme Cliffs and they always look impressive even if they look kind of Blocky and weird in Minecraft I think you can get a lot of

Imposing views of stuff with not that much height you don’t have to go overboard but this doesn’t and I think that’s worked really effectively in terms of the perspective you get from down by the river thanks man I really appreciate that and and you’re right in that like I didn’t

Want to use scaffolding because that was a pain and you didn’t need that much of it you’d need like two blocks or something like that uh you know just to kind of reach the when you’re looking up at something um but add in the fact that I have to

Hop over a river every time I want to back up and look at something yeah uh and if I was too lazy to take off my elytra I’d be cursing Mojang for this stupid floaty elytra and water glitch yeah um but I found a new uh a newfound

Appreciation for the fact that I’ve got an ender pearl Farm on the server and I’ve got just tons of them and so I could just because it’s too short of a distance for Rockets you know it’s have you ever played any modded where you get

Like slime boots and you get like a kind of a jump boost from yeah a thing that’s the kind of thing I wanted like I wanted to be able to LEAP the river in one bound and jump up like four blocks and that would have been epic right but but

The fact that I needed to back up some much it actually has made me consider looking at adding the free cam mod for our 1.20 update on the server for projects like this because I’ve got the keep coming to do and I kind of feel

Like I want to give that a try I might even try it before 1.20 just to see what it’s like just to kind of minimize the amount of jumping ender pearls Rockets because I start to get impatient and I start to move around very efficiently in

Minecraft but it might be kind of like jarring for the for audience members you know and um I think it would be beneficial to be able to back up just a little bit somebody brought up on my stream on the weekend like how come you don’t have like a second account like a

Camera account and I thought like you know I I could like it’s there’s it’s not there’s no reason why I don’t um I think it was for more uh back when I first started playing in camera counts were a lot more common before free cam

As a mod I just my computer wouldn’t run two instances of mine yeah my frame rate’s going to like 12. yeah so so I put it out of my head now on this new pc I say new it’s four four or five years old but on the PC I have now I’m I

Could probably do it but I don’t know if I could stream at the same time and so I don’t necessarily have a way to log in and look at at something live and and see kind of like a bird’s eye view but the free cam would be kind of like a

Good Midway Point have you used it at all do you guys have that on unemployed we have it we have it on M plus I’ll use it extensively at this point because I want to be able to see stuff from a distance it’s nice to be able to show my

Stream audience some stuff and when your focus is building and there isn’t so much pressure on this is a very even Keel survival server where everybody’s playing with the same advantages and disadvantages and spectating your way through the ground is considered cheating because you might be able to find like dungeon spawners and

Structures and that kind of thing if you don’t care about any of that stuff and if the other people on the server are all fine with it then I really recommend doing it if your focus is on building and you just want to be able to see things from certain perspectives lives

And you know if if the accountability thing is a concern for you you’re streaming all of your gameplay anyway so you have your chat to keep you on the straight and narrow I think it’s fine and I I think without having the free cam mod on Empires I would be logging in

With a camera account or I would be rendering out all of my replay footage right away just so I could see what everything looked like from the outside and make some adjustments but it certainly saves you on fireworks that’s one thing yeah yeah well here’s the

Funny thing I’m in men on the server like I I mean two keys and I’m in Creative or spectator mode spectator mode yeah they do which I do for screenshots all the time I even had to explain to my stream uh because Cosmic had done a fun little birthday build uh

For me and I was instructed not to log in before I started streaming just so that I would be able to be surprised live and uh I had to just get the stream a heads up by the way when I log in I’m probably still in spectator mode from

When I ended the stream two days ago and I was taking screenshots so I will exit that and then we will go look at whatever it is that that Cosmic has built and and you know like it’s the kind of thing where like I just use that

To kind of fly around and take screenshots because I don’t yet have something like replay mod installed to do cool videos and stuff like that so I’m I’m looking at expanding the we’ll call it the Minecraft toolbox in the mod list uh in the coming coming months so

We’ll see how that goes because when West Hill is done I’d really like to learn how to use replay mod and do some cool like slow camera pans with shaders and stuff like that because I can’t stream or record very well with shaders the the frame rate gets pretty choppy so

We’ll have to see um we’ll have to see I might I might pick your brain or at least pick your video where you explain how to use uh replay mod I’m not sure if that’s still um up to date whether replay mod has changed much since you made the how-to

Video but I’ll be I’ll be reaching out yeah yeah I can’t remember if it was still on full drill fabric at that point so yeah difficult to say but yeah it’s it’s worth doing honestly if you can you can um stick the camera to your character like in as though you’re spectating your

Player for replay mode stuff so you could even do like walkthroughs of the town at ground level with like a little bit of view bobbing if that’s how you want it um there’s like a a bit of stuff like that that you can throw in you don’t see

Any hard elements so your inventory and your uh your arm aren’t there aren’t visible but yeah you can definitely do a little kind of Skyrim style glide through of the area if you wanted to I think what I would like to do is that that’s cool and I might include some of

That but I feel like even at normal speed the player walks a little fast I might want to slow the camera down a little bit sure yeah but yeah yeah I’m sure I’ll I’ll figure it out so what have you been up to this week in Minecraft the castle continues because

It must it simply must uh we are I I think we can probably safe to say now because a couple of people are putting out their like finale episodes we are wrapping up Empire’s season two within the month of May so I’m building the heck out of this Castle while I still

Have the opportunity um I’ve added some features to the Courtyard there’s a stockade in there now where there’s a bunch of defenses built around the main gate so as you walk in you’re greeted by a bunch of dispensers pointing at you that might have fire charges in at some stage and a

Few sort of defenses from which uh you know crossbowmen could fire behind or something like that um there are a couple of entrances now one of which doesn’t lead anywhere yet but will lead into the more um the sort of servants area in the castle where the pantry and the kitchen

And all of that kind of stuff is and then one which leads to the main entrance hall which I’ve now decorated starting with the interior and then building the exterior up around it um I decided to go with Mangrove wood for the floor and a bit of red wool kind

Of mixed in here and there as though it’s a really worn out carpet and it’s starting to show through to the floorboards below but still has some of the the kind of red fuzz on the surface uh when it’s been trodden by many feet and I’m sort of shifting from

The the kind of ruined build style uh to something that’s more like attacked but still standing um primarily because that’s where I have a ton of inspiration from stormvale Castle and Elden ring and that that’s like it’s clearly been assaulted at some stage but the majority of it is still an

Environment that the player can explore uh which makes it easier to populate with enemies in the case of Elden ring but uh for me this just feels more satisfying to build if the structure is there and is more complete it feels like it’s going to make a bigger set piece

And a more impressive looking build from a distance if the majority of it is still there and there’s just a couple of like broken out pieces of the wall and that kind of thing um it’s also ironically a bit quicker to build something that is complete versus the extra step of building something

That looks complete and then trying to figure out how it became ruined over time so like if I had more time I might spend a little bit more time breaking down some of the the exterior of the castle and and figuring out where all of those little ruined details are going

Going to be but at this point yeah I do need to get on and build the rest of it really yeah um so I’ve got an Armory that has now been built that’s a taller structure that kind of looks like a tower has a broken bridge leading to one

Of the more cylindrical Towers inside of there I’m working on another section opposite that which is probably going to be the soldiers quarters the sort of Barracks of the castle and that’s going to have an exterior door that’s completely sealed from the outside so you either have to break your way in

With an ax or go around um but yeah there’s going to be a few things where the soldiers could be deployed to the exterior of the castle very easily and they can get from there to a couple of key locations like the courtyard or the entrance hall in case

There was an invasion of some kind but yeah I’m slowly but surely ticking a few things off the list here and uh as you can probably see if the footprint of that is in the show notes um the the the the southern half of the castle uh is the where the entrance is

And that’s a lot more complete than any of the rest of it at this stage but it’s getting there I’m designing this all in creative and then rebuilding it later in survival using like matica so the building process can be condensed down to like two or three hours per section I

Can get one or two buildings and like a couple of sections of wool done in that time so hopefully I’ve got enough time for it this week and I can crack on with a bit more of that I mean you’ve been busy I mean it’s doubled in size since last week in terms

Of you know expanding throughout the different builds I really like these dark oak uh walled buildings that have like a stone base the dark oak wall and then like a stone topper to them with like dark oak and Spruce roof they look really really cool you could even uh to

Simplify some of your ruined States uh when you’re done with some of these you could just like punch a hole in the roof you know like just put like a three by four hole which could look really cool depending on what’s inside with like the right shaders with like sun beams coming

In yeah yeah that could be really really cool looking that’s something I’ve done with the entrance hole actually like a little further down there’s a section of the roof that’s like caved in and I I was stuck for something to go in the sort of Alcove off to that side where

I’ve kind of I’ve walled off different tiers of this thing because it actually goes down a slope it goes down a couple of blocks every you know seven or eight blocks you travel horizontally and so I I wanted stuff to go on either side so I’ve got little storage areas and

Paintings up on the walls and there are windows in a couple of places where Windows actually make sense for this where they would look out towards the outside and then in one of those I was just stuck for what to do I didn’t want to throw a couple more barrels and

Chests and stuff around so I just put a bunch of wooden planks and slabs and then I broke out a section of the roof and had trap doors and fences hanging down as though it had caved in so yeah yeah I’m out a little bit ahead of you

There but I do plan on doing that in a few of the other things just to make it look like a a big rock has been thrown through several of the uh the roofs of these so I can see which one is the the main hall what is that what’s like

What’s the building that I think I guess is in your third screenshot we’ll have these in the show notes for people that want to see them uh it’s the it’s the building that has like the three arches in it on the side revealing the dark oak that’s the Armory that’s the other side

Of the one from the second screen shot that has more of the tough and deep slate detail in there oh okay um yeah the outer faces of a lot of these buildings are less detailed because I wasn’t sure how far up the wall was going to go right and so from certain

Angles they look a little bit different but I’m also working with a few layouts that aren’t completely symmetrical so in some cases I’m having to sort of improvise the way the the buildings look so they’re not exactly regular on all of the sides they don’t have like rotational symmetry that way

Um but yeah that’s at least trying to work out what stuff is going to be visible from over the wall and what stuff is um you know going to be hidden from that perspective is is another fun challenge of building all of this up as I go I I

Need to do more uh and I’m gonna again steal this for when I do my keep I need to do more ridges in roofs so even if you have a very large area of spruce stairs or Spruce blocks or whatever that just happen to be the best texture for

Your roof it gets repetitive and by just having like a single row of dark oak or something go up like every five or six blocks to kind of separate the roof into sections it does a lot to remove that repetitive nature of Minecraft textures and I think my my issue previously with

All the small buildings on the roads in West Hill is that the roofs are not usually big enough to Warrant that you know like yeah they’re only six or eight blocks or nine blocks wide so you can really only divide it once or if you divide it too many times it starts to

Look maybe too ornate for what you want it to be like if it’s just a candle shop but you don’t want it to look like a church you know yeah yeah and so it could be a little bit difficult but again like I’m going to be pushing the

Scale when I update my keep and a big borrowing and stealing from Castle grayscale I think in certain points so um thank you for your voice epic timing a lot of this has been sort of inspired by seeing West Hill come together in general so like we’re kind of feeding

Into each other’s creative Pursuits at this point yeah the high tide race is all boats right it does and that is really all I’ve had time for this week because a lot of other hectic stuff going on right now but uh luckily Mojang has had time to do some stuff so we can

Get into the news and tell you about Minecraft Java Edition snapshot 23w17a this is a new snapshot with tweaks two new features new advancements new music and some long-awaited technical changes for some time the article says they’ve been focused on working on a new faster light engine and

They are finally ready to share the results special thanks to the community for not only pointing out the issues with the game’s light engine but also to community members that have developed mods and plugins which have highlighted these Performance challenges and served as inspiration for our new implementation so I think probably this

Is the they’re not going to call them out by name and there may be others but the caffeine MC team who produce things like sodium phosphor lithium that Suite of mods I expect are probably the people that they’re calling out specifically there so new features in 23w17a include

Added advancements for trails and tales new trails and tales ambient music and a new music disc obtainable through archeology in terms of the advancements in the husbandry tab you will find smells interesting for obtaining a sniffer egg little sniffs for feeding a snifflet the baby sniffer and planting the past for

Planting any sniffer seed in the adventure tab you’ll find respecting the remnants brush a suspicious block to obtain a pottery shirt careful restoration making a decorated pot out of four Pottery shirts crafting a new look which you get for crafting a trimmed armor at a smithing table and

Then the smithing with style advancement which requires you to apply the Spire snout rib Ward silence Vex tide and wayfinder smithing templates at least once each there is new ambient music for the trails and tales update Aaron sheroff has been drafted in to produce new tracks for Cherry Groves desert jungle

Badlands and flower forest biomes the four of those that you’ll be hearing as you play the game are a familiar room bromeliad Crescent dunes and echo in the Wind alongside those a new music discs by Aaron Sheriff has been added you can find it by brushing suspicious blocks in

Trail ruins and when put in a jukebox it plays a new track titled Relic a few changes in 23w17a as well both types of skulk sensors now stay in a cooldown phase for 10 ticks with other phase timings being adjusted to compensate crafted decorated pots with at least one

Pattern on them now have a hover tool tip displaying the shirt and brick ingredients they’ve updated the credits to include new folks who have been working on the game recently and added the ability to scroll upwards by pressing the up Arrow key going into skulk sensor phases in a

Little bit more detail skulk sensors and calibrated skulk sensors have three phases inactive active and cooldown the default phase is inactive which lasts indefinitely until the block receives a vibration during that phase the block is able to listen to nearby vibrations until one has been scheduled when a scheduled vibration is received the

Block switches to the active phase this phase lasts 30 game ticks for skulk sensors and 10 game ticks for calibrated skulk sensors and during that phase the block stops listening to nearby vibrations Wiggles its tendrils and emits a redstone signal and light as you may have seen them do already after the

Active phase has finished the block switches to a cool down phase which lasts for 10 game ticks it keeps wiggling the tendrils but no longer emits a redstone signal nor a light finally once that phase is finished the block switches back to the inactive phase previously some of those phases

Had different timing values they were active for 40 game ticks for skulk sensors and 20 game ticks first calibrated skulk sensors and the cooldown was one game tick for both types of sensors so the phase timings have been tweaked so it was less common for activated Contraptions to recursively activate the skulk sensor

That powered them in the case of creating piston clocks and that kind of thing a few technical changes have also arrived in 23w13a the resource pack version is now 15 which account for a font and credits update the Legacy Unicode glyph provider has been removed as has the bitmaps used by uniform font

Uniform font has been updated to use unifont 15.0.01 that changes the shape of multiple characters while adding support for new ones they’ve also added a second level of organization of entries in credits.json on top of titles which are called disciplines font textures are included in the debug

Texture dump now if you press F3 and S to get one of those they’ve also added new font glyph providers uni hex and reference to remove Legacy Unicode and they’ve also improved the performance of the light engine there aren’t any extra details of that but it seems like

Hopefully the results will speak for themselves so some notable bug fixes in 23w17a include some of the bugs that have been fixed by this new lighting engine including block light not updating across chunk borders lighting still occasionally lagging behind World Generation light emitted from cave Vines and glow like in on World Generation

Sometimes didn’t propagate across chunk borders sniffer eggs were sometimes spawned in the ground while sniffers breeded sniffers standing a bit too close to players which were tempting them sniffers not properly pathfinding into water whilst they were on fire and sniffer animations not being so smooth on slime blocks all of that stuff and

More has been fixed and will have a link to the changelog in our show notes if you want to see the other list of bug fixes Minecraft Legends has released an article for hot fixes and highlights we’ll have that Linked In Our show notes Minecraft Legends just launched and over

3 million players have already hopped in we’re pleased to announce our first game update which is starting to make its way to supported platforms major changes include added the ability to invite friends to a Lobby to join stream sorry added the ability to invite friends to a

Lobby to join the same team before finding other players in matchmaking lowered the timer to start matchmaking from 60 seconds to 10 seconds matches now start much faster once at least six players have joined the public Lobby there will still be 60 seconds in some matches until all platforms have received the update

Fixed several crashes that could occur during gameplay on the Nintendo switch version improved input latency made several performance improvements for smoother gameplay experience improved World loading speed especially around pigland bases made several improvements to text wrapping with Arabic and Hebrew localization and several changes have also been made to improve the Japanese localization

So we’ll start with Minecraft Legends because I think this is going to be the more brief discussion uh I haven’t really had any time to play this week since I’ve been so focused on vanilla Minecraft so I haven’t tried out the new PVP queue and uh I think it’s obviously

A very positive change for the game it’s one of the major things that emerged as a piece of feedback was we don’t want to join public matches but we also don’t want to just play with our friends so they’ve they’ve found a good compromise there and I’m I’m still hoping that

There are more changes on the way for balance and the long-term health of the game but at the moment I’m worried it might be a little bit too little too late for the folks who wanted to jump in and play at launch that may just be like

You know the bubble that I play in my peer group but people haven’t exactly been raring to go as soon as this update came out so hopefully people are still interested in uh playing a bit of Minecraft Legends out there that’s where I landed as well I mean

Sounds like a good update I’m glad that they did it they’re listing the community because I I did go and look up a couple of other reviews I didn’t always make it through them all because they were not necessarily the best reviews and I didn’t feel like filling

My head with people ranting about Minecraft Legends was necessarily the best way when I still am forming my own opinion of the game um but they all seem to have like big red flags on like why isn’t the PVP public PVP specifically geared the war the way that every other

PVP RTS game is yeah it just seemed like an oversight it seemed like it should have been in the game from the get-go is it great that they’re fixing it yes uh it’s still a bit strange and an oversight that it was not included and not launched that way I don’t know what

The plan was and why it was launched the other way I’d be very curious to hear as to why it was launched the other way uh but I I feel like giving players more options in this way is hopefully going to help the health of the game but I do

Feel and I agree with you that Minecraft Legends has an uphill battle in terms of kind of clawing back from the first impressions that they’ve that they’ve made um so we’ll see uh we’ll see where it goes and I want to give a shout out and

Thank you to people that have um sent in a couple of emails regarding Minecraft Legends I’m going to try to organize a Minecraft Legends focused mailbag in the next week or two we had several people talk about the campaign we had several people talking about their experience

With RTS I didn’t to throw them in this week’s episode because they’re not necessarily spoilery but I wanted to kind of give more people to have time with the game and more time for the legend screw to maybe make some adjustments to address some of the common feedback that we were getting but

A big thank you to the folks that are sending in those emails because they were very well done and gonna be worth checking out in the next couple weeks gives us more time to play the game as well because yeah you you and I not

Having had much time for it is a shame because it’s still relatively new and it’d be nice to at least get through some more of the campaign before I uh you know decide whether I’m going to play it long term or not um moving on to the Java snapshot though

Uh I’m very happy we have a new music uh selection a new music disc and a new composer being added to the roster and I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the the main discussion this week which is going to focus on this since it

Feels like the most pertinent news for this week new music is always exciting I had to listen uh to a almost twice through to the the new tracks before the show so I’ll be looking forward to chatting with you about that later but I I did notice

Something that uh Exuma void pointed out in in his um summary video that that he does with snapshots and that very often when a music disc is added and new music tracks are added in the snapshot cycle we’re usually closer to release than not yeah and now that Minecraft Legends is

Out and you know Mojang wouldn’t be eating their own foot if they released you know um Tails and Trails at the same time uh did I say that backwards Trails intentionally it’s it’s still taking some getting used to you exactly at the same time as Legends now that Legends is

Out uh they are free and clear to release you know uh the new update whenever it is ready and so it could be sooner than later I have some prep that I have to do on on this little before before 1.20 drops uh there’s some

Another rate that I need to get and um I think that uh it’s interesting that you know we’re starting to notice these kind of patterns you know with new music and potentially closer to the end of the cycle that kind of thing uh the changes that they’re making to the skulk sensors

And these gulp related blocks are they feel more like honing right they’re not adding new things they’re just kind of like further refining uh the nature of things and from what I can tell it all seemed to be the positive changes like shorter reload times any kind of delay

Means that you’re going to have less opportunity to create accidental Loops within your skulk sensor you know Contraptions that you want to come up with it all seemed to lend themselves to one differentiating the calibrated skulk sensor from a regular skulk sensor but also kind of making sculpt sensors in

General better more useful more practical for people to use and experiment with and have some fun with um I had an interesting experience with uh my birthday this past weekend where Cosmic uh our moderator and and a server mate of mine logged in and created like this cool skulk birthday Forest that had

Like a birthday cake in the middle and all this kind of stuff so of course you go to you’re like oh birthday cake and you go in and then there was a hidden skulk sensor and Shrieker in there so it went from this very pretty blue kind of

Forest with like skulk on the leaves and stuff too creepy and screaming yeah very quickly uh and it was it’s very cool and it made me realize like some of the ambience and some of the things Beyond just redstone contraptions that uh you can use your skulk sensors for and that

Again with all these controls that they’re adding in the snapshot is going to give people more creative control for maybe not the people that are necessarily Redstone Builders but people that are creative and fun and experienced Builders mini game Builders like people that want that kind of a

Thing in Minecraft they’re going to have I think more control with the changes to to skulk sensors and stuff yeah the most recent time I used skulk sensors I wanted to build a version of one of my frog light trees which just spat out frog lights from a dispenser every time

You walked close to it and there were three different dispensers for the three different types of frog lights but I ended up with the recursive problem where the sound of one dispenser was triggering the other dispensers right and I kind of left it like that I just

Kind of like snuck away as best I could but I was building this for somebody else and I can only assume that when he turned up at this tree he got all of the dispensers over the course of about five minutes it was just having to like grab

All of the Frog lights running around the tree in circles because uh I don’t think that would have stopped once the clock got going so yeah kind of nice that they’re thinking about this stuff and still trying to hone that in for people who were less experienced with

Redstone and wouldn’t know how to fix that the other thing I wanted to talk about really briefly was the uh the advancements that we’re getting once again a really you know a good sign that we are on the way to 1.20 being close to release because advancements usually

Mean there’s no more you know features and little bits and pieces that they want to add advancements connected to and the one I want to refer to specifically here is the advancement that requires you to get all of the smithing templates and it’s not all of

Them it’s not a hundred percent of them but it needs you to get templates from an end City a Bastion a nether fortress both the ones you can find in an ancient city a woodland Mansion a trail ruins and the ocean Monument one that you get from Elder Guardians

Um and so that’s actually a pretty substantial list of the more dangerous structures in the game because notably that excludes shipwrecks strongholds Pillager outposts desert pyramids jungle temples and I think there are three other templates that you can find in trail ruins uh wayfinder is the only one

You need for this advancement but you find host shaper and Razer or something like that I think it’s what they’re called so you’ll actually find a good deal of challenge in acquiring all of the smithing templates that you need to get that advancement I mean this kind of stuff that you know

Having advancements along with the new features is is a great way to kind of and I guess the only way in game that they communicate that these are out there and available yeah for players it encourages the exploration and encourages you know taking advantage in engaging with the new content because

You know like if I was more of an advancement you know Hunter then I would I would probably be moving to complete these things and in part it’s not necessarily that I just don’t like them it’s more that my server or server host for whatever reason either I don’t think

It’s my fault but people if you if you know the reason for this please write in spunjunkmail gmail.com and let me know uh every time I update whether it’s from a DOT 2.3 whether it’s from you know 1.19 to 1.20 all of the advancements and and player I guess progress seems to be

Removed and I’ve not done anything this is the thing I’ve not I don’t download and upload the world I download a backup but I don’t like download necessarily trim and then replace the world every time we update uh there are options within my server host to just like move to the

Next version of Minecraft I usually have to wait until fabric is available because there’s like a fabric install that they just do for us um it’s not as finite control as I could have but I just I’m very busy so it’s easier to kind of update this way but

What happens is like I log in and I punch a tree in Minecraft is like this is the first tree you’ve punched I’m like no no it’s not and recipes unlock and like all that kind of stuff continues to happen so like even weeks later like if I haven’t crafted a

Certain block like just the other day I crafted something and it was like new recipes unlocked I’m just like because I use like Blackstone or something for the first time in a while and it’s like uh no that’s not correct at all because then you know viewers are confused like

What do you mean you’ve never crafted a Blackstone wall it’s been out for four years you know and I and I so I don’t know how to um fix that issue and as a result I don’t go out of my way to go and like complete the advancement trees because

They’re just gonna reset you know the next time that I update the game so if anybody knows the reason for that or how I might be able to uh avoid that then I would probably spend some time I mean I’m going to go look for some of these

Armor trims and stuff for the show anyway but yeah it’s it’s a frustrating point for me on on my little situation on this little and uh for the people who are more advancement hunters and want to go out looking for all the biomes and that kind of stuff like the things that

Take a longer time and are much more about you know the amount of time you’ve spent in the world and travel and killing all of the monsters and that kind of thing that’s that’s got to be yeah kind of kind of heartbreaking to have all of that progress wound back

Um but yeah excited for more advancements excited to see what people end up doing with those and it’s good that some of them are still a challenge like the uh the ones that involve shooting Phantoms with a crossbow for example like those things are out there

Really for the people who want to do them and so I think having the smithing with style advancement with all of these different templates like encouraging you to go and check out the more dangerous structures of the game seems like definitely one for the adventure Tab and definitely something that people are

Going to appreciate being there you ready for some email yes let’s do it if you’d like to email the show send in the message to spun chunkmail gmail.com please use that email address that’s the one that we checked that’s the one that we use to file uh based on subject based

On uh what you’re talking about in the email how we can work it into the show keep them short keep them sweet and hopefully that will get you on to an upcoming episode first email is from Prince blue33 a new landscape member and the subject is Fuller flowers

Hello Johnny and Joel I’ve been a huge fan of the show for a long time now and was happy to join the Discord recently as a landscape artist I wanted to write in to talk about flowers in Minecraft when it comes to using them for decorating and Landscaping they tend to

Fall a bit flat due to their nature of being very simple and singular I’ve seen numerous content creators find Creative Solutions so uh to sorry I’ve seen numerous content creators find Creative Solutions to this scar used Coral instead of flowers to decorate the centerpiece of scarland and Whip made

His own texture pack to make flowers Fuller on the Block I think it’s safe to say that this needs Improvement and I’m curious how you think Mojang might be able to fix this I have two ideas first the new cherry blossom pills give the player the

Ability to add one to four petals to a block and it makes me think the same could apply to flowers if you place one down the flower appears as it does now but if you place multiple on the same block it becomes a little cluster of flowers

Second and this is a bit more of a stretch but I’d love to have a sort of flower bush maybe if you right click any Leaf block while holding a flower that block becomes a flowery bush with a little bud in the color of the flower this would add so many possibilities for

Landscaping with colorful bushes as well as having other colored blocks similar to flowering Azalea that we could use in custom trees do you agree that we could use improved flowers and what solutions would you like to see to make flowers more substantial Prince Blue 33 drowned while

Trying to collect enough Coral fans for their Landscaping for good cause I mean yeah absolutely you know it’s if you have you’ve got color dreams you know like I appreciate that um I I need to do more with coral I did a little bit in Westdale and to like

Varying degrees of success uh Cosmic on our server has done fields of coral and and combining it with flowers and it’s epic especially if you get things in there like netherwort and other things that are very bright in the game that are not necessarily like terrestrial Overworld flowers like you can really

Make stuff look look interesting yeah I agree though I think that multiple flowers per block is a great idea I think that it will be a great way to update flowers without having to redo flowers you know like uh in terms of of the no you don’t have to add more kinds

Of flowers just take the flowers we already have we have a good variety of colors uh they’re pretty natural they’re found in various places in in the world but being able to add them in the same way that we do with candles sea pickles and now petals is a great idea it adds

More models to Minecraft but it doesn’t add more items to the inventory which I think is another good selling point for it uh I think it would give more control to players which is what they want right now my biggest frustration with flowers and really anything that you plant is

That it doesn’t go in the center all the time you might have the corner of a sidewalk or the corner of an entrance to a building you think man I would love to have a nice little blue flower right there and you place it down and the blue

Flower is half hidden because it’s so far to the side of the block that it’s inside the bush or the door frame or whatever it is that you’ve got next to it and so it doesn’t look the way that you want it so ultimately you either

Have to live with it or you just don’t place it there and a lot of my foliage ends up being bushes and things that I know I can control the placement of and I I feel like a good example is the Sweet Berry bush like that’s always in

The center and I think that that kind of thing could benefit uh I’m sure there’s a or I mean the reason in my mind and people can correct me if they think that I’m wrong is that there reason why these things are offset is so when you look at

A giant plane’s biome that the grass isn’t on a grid you know like the sunflowers aren’t on a grid it doesn’t look you know but everything else is on a grid uh so I I feel like a good way to compensate that would be instead of having the blocks or the flowers excuse

Me placed randomly if over the course of a meadow there was a random assortment of two flowers one flower three flowers four flowers like that to me would also remove it from the grid because the Cherry Groves have that look they don’t look like they’re on a grid right and

And I feel like that would be a great way to bring them you know kind of together we use a data pack on the Citadel called pump Kate flowers I’ll have a link in the show notes in response to um Prince Blue 33’s email and all this data pack does is give a

Second model for flowers and it randomly assigns it so if you put a flower pot down depending on what Block it’s on you might get a single flower or you might get like a cluster of three dandelions in the pot and it really helps it really makes things feel different especially

If you’ve got two flower pots next to one another right like if you can have a triple blossom in one and a single blossom in the other it makes it feel different it doesn’t feel like this or you’re repeating the same thing over and over again but I would really like to

Have the more finite control I haven’t pulled the trigger yet and done something custom like what flip has done I need to look at see what flip is doing because I’ve always loved the custom textures that he’s does and um a lot of that is because I do this

Show and I do want to stick as close to vanilla as I can I don’t think flowers are really that heavier change you know it’s like my hay bale like that’s a different texture but I’m not like really breaking the mold I’m not giving myself like a different stair or anything too crazy

Um but I’d like I’d like to try and do something different and I’m curious to see if someone uh is making a texture pack or will make a texture pack where flowers in Minecraft might look a little bit more like flowers in Minecraft Legends I really like the landscape in

Minecraft Legends I don’t necessarily think that the self Trace you know kind of like outline in Minecraft Legends translates to Minecraft but the shape of things the fact that flowers have a model and they have some thickness to them they feel very more cartoony and

Chunky uh I I think that could be a really fun addition and I think that it would it’s so different from vanilla Minecraft that rather than people kind of like wondering like are you using a mod like what are you doing they’re like oh that’s really cool that’s obviously

Custom you know like it just that kind of thing uh could be fun and I think that those little changes I think help make Minecraft vanilla Minecraft feel more like a game in in 2023 yeah I I really like the example of the new cherry blossom petals here and the

Ability to place them in like the space of a block I I’m kind of I’m gonna play Devil’s Advocate a little bit here and just for the sake of this discussion I think I’m fine with them adding more items to the inventory and for inventory management to get like just a little bit

Harder with like two or three extra items if they had more things like cherry blossom petals but individually from flowers because the key is always having variety and that’s the kind of thing that flips um your resource pack ads is based on where they are placed the same kind of

Block data that determines how far over a flower is placed on the the grid of a 16 by 16 block that’s the same thing that determines whether that’s a single flower or like three or four flowers growing from the same cluster of leaves and that kind of thing so I do think there’s

There’s a lot for players to like mess around with there when you’ve got multiple different varieties there but when you’re dealing with just one flower here and there if it’s the same flower and over and over again it’s still going to feel as repetitive so I think variety is is

Really the key to it I I will fight back a little against the idea of the size of flowers becoming more substantial because that has to bring with it an increase in the size of the hitbox so that you’re not just like flailing at the side of a flower wondering why

You’re not picking it up because the hitbox is still the size of like a flower pot like something that’s a little smaller and the problem there is if you’ve ever fought a creeper in tall grass or if you’ve ever thought a baby zombie in a situation where there’s a

Lot of like grass growing around inevitably you end up breaking those blocks of grass instead of dealing damage to the Mob you’re trying to fight because the hitbox for the thing whether it’s yeah a rose bush or a a piece of tall grass or whatever gets in the way

And so if you’re expanding the the size of hitboxes of stuff like flowers which are going to grow all over the place I think it’s kind of important to keep in mind that players need some dexterity when they’re fighting mobs and don’t want to be breaking flowers instead of

Defending their base and themselves so I think that there’s there’s an extent to which the low-lying cherry blossom petals work well as a compromise because they have about the thickness of carpet and that works really well for them but I think if you start to work with a you

Know a 3D model or one of those cross-shaped models that flowers in Minecraft currently use making it to large risks a a Nerf to the player’s manual dexterity in a sense because you’re going to have to like swing around some of the stuff that’s planted nearby and especially in the case of

Something like baby zombies or a chicken jockey you really need the Precision to be able to hit something that’s at ground level um with creepers obviously if they’re two blocks tall it’s a slightly different story but I think there there is a certain amount to which players don’t always consider the mechanical

Implications of an aesthetic change like this so I think that’s also worth bearing in mind as we discuss stuff like that this is completely unrelated but I just kind of had this brain fart of how cute it would be if baby zombies tried to attack you through a field of cherry blossoms and

They would yet subdued and distracted by the cherry blossoms and just kind of like forget you were there and just kind of literally stop and smell the roses it makes me want to build my base in a Cherry Grove even more than I already do yeah like I have something to distract

Those guys yeah oh yeah I just I think it’s I think it’s the influence of the the quirky and cute uh piglet animations from the Minecraft Legends cutscenes and stuff like that have the zombie just Railing at you and they’re kind of like wait a minute these are kind of pretty

And they’re just gonna completely lose their track of thought um I like the idea of adding flowers to the bushes too again it doesn’t necessarily add more things to your inventory if if you break the the flowered Bush block that you’ve just created and you get the azalea bush back

Or Is the Azalea Leaf block back and the flower back separately I’m assuming you have silk touch uh then that would be great I mean it’s a lot of extra work to like write like Place something down and right click it but we kind of have that

Mechanic now with like waxing copper or stripping logs and I think that could add some really cool ideas and color to to Minecraft like one of the things I really like about modded Minecraft is not necessarily the extra building blocks that I get but the extra Variety

In the world of foliage really makes the world feel more unique and I mean adding purple pink yellow blue flowers to a tree means that you can create all kinds of different stuff now it’s not going to turn the leaves blue maybe but I think

That you know you could do all kinds of stuff including like you know adding me making something like a um something that would look like a Vineyard or a what’s we’re looking for an orchard you know like apple blossom series that kind of thing would be very

Very cool and I I love the idea of that kind of control um I I know that if it was something that you would get the new block then you just exponentially add dozens of new blocks to the game and so I like the mechanic suggestion uh from Prince Blue

33 of right clicking with flowers to add flowers to to Leaf blocks it’s a neat idea you’re sort of combining the the the the the gardening thing you’re sort of introducing new species into the environment it’s uh it’s a fun concept for sure uh we also have another concept

Coming in from darshulous who writes in with a micro builds concept hey guys my Minecraft name is darchless I’m a Bedrock player and I’ve just recently subscribed to the podcast I also just recently started watching Minecraft YouTubers like the Hermits and have been taking inspiration from the builds folks

Are doing I’ve slowly been increasing the ambition of the types of builds I’ve been doing but have sometimes found the pile of Pickup Sticks that doing a big build represents to be daunting in listening to the recent back catalog I heard a discussion where Joel mentioned the idea of micro builds where you’re

Adding a small piece to a larger or more complex build that has really helped me to reinvigorate my Approach because I can see the project of renovating a spawn generated Village into a more coherent town as a more discreet set of smaller projects house by house or city

Block by city block I just recently went through and put in little personal vegetable gardens and flower pots around some houses and it really improved things also having a book where I keep a to-do list of these micro builds was a helpful idea not only to keep distractions at Bay but also keep

Basically a rolling change log of what I’ve done that over time just Blends into the environment of my build I really appreciate the conversations you’ve been having and look forward to each new episode darchesless died by falling off a roof because he broke the block under his own feet

I’ve that’s great stuff I’m glad that we were able to help I mean it’s not so much a a full email discussion but I I really have been enjoying my use of the to-do list the book that I made in westel I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t

Do it sooner because of the scale of the build uh but I highly encourage people to give it a go uh even if it’s not in game because Minecraft books don’t have a lot of text characters per page uh can get kind of cumbersome if you have a big

Project but even if you have like a notebook or something on the side I used to have a graph paper notebook I picked up the dollar store that I would use because I could also I could write it in and take notes but I could also quickly

Draw you know block scales or like different measurements or something like that in Minecraft to have next to me so having that kind of log and plan really really helps and if you are a content creator or a budding content creator having a to-do list that you can share

In-game on screen with folks is a great way to communicate to your viewers what your plan is not only just immediately now in front of you but also just like larger scale you can see what what you know what the plans are for the area if

You open up the book and you’re checking things off people can read the other things that you’ve done in the past so they can kind of see where you’re going with stuff uh people can pause you know vods and read the whole thing if they want like it’s a really interesting idea

And I really appreciate the email I’m glad that we were able to help with that um daunting feeling of starting bigger projects or having not done a big project before in Minecraft and feeling overwhelmed by all of the stuff that you have to do in order to get it up and

Running and breaking it down into into smaller tasks you know and it’s a it’s an interesting thing that people don’t necessarily think about but there’s a skill to looking at something like for example your uh grayscale Castle picks and like quickly realizing what things you have to do first before

You dive into that so that you’re not stuck in the middle and having to like put the brakes on to like go collect more stuff or you know get to a point in the build where you you didn’t plan out this section of the wall good enough and

So now you’re kind of like you’ve painted yourself into a corner like to avoid all that you kind of you have to kind of think ahead and do a bit of planning and I think that it can do two things it can help you feel more confident in the mission overall but it

Can also help you section off things like all right well today I’m tackling this Tower I don’t have to think about the rest of this too much because I know that I’ve planned it out roughly in my head and so that you can tackle things

That way do you find that even with like a a build like as as singular as your castle that you’re breaking it down into like pieces oh yeah I have to like I already have to focus on one build at a time and like sometimes I’ll just jot

Down a little quick idea even in game like I’ll just build up a tower to a certain height because I know it needs to be this high so I can continue building like the entrance to the entrance hall or the Gatehouse or whatever yeah but there’s definitely

Some things that I need to do all in one go as a self-contained piece and it’s just developing an understanding of how those pieces are going to fit together that’s the most important part of it so yeah it can be tricky but it’s definitely worth breaking a build down

Into more modular pieces and I’ll recommend a couple of people just uh since this is part of the discussion and it’s something we’ve provided to you maybe somebody else can benefit from this as well Andy as Yoda is a great long-term Minecraft content creator who’s got a five by five build system

That he explains and details in a bunch of tutorial videos and it’s really just breaking down a build into five by five squares and deciding what’s going to go in each section uh building sort of towers and then you know a five block wide thing connecting the towers and

Then suddenly you’ve got a Gatehouse out of that that you can you know lead into something else and building Courtyards around that and it’s all odd numbered builds which means you don’t run into any of those weird issues is where a roof is going to look too fat in the

Center or like various other issues like doors can look kind of nice and narrow and it all fits to play a scale so definitely check that out I will also preemptively plug something because the video is not out yet but I’ve seen the first draft of it my friends Louis XP

Who I do the hermitcraft recap with has a video coming up in which he’s redesigning village houses and so we’ll try and link to that when the video comes out he says he’s gonna get it done fairly soon and he’s been doing that with a view to redesigning them for the

Individual villager professions lots of really cool details in there and it’s a really great way to focus down on one specific build and bring a lot of inspiration to the table because you’re thinking what does a Shepherd actually need like how does the loom function in

Terms of the way it helps you create stuff out of wool and you know does the Cartographer have a taller house because he can get a better view of his surroundings and be able to map stuff better like just little obvious logical leaps like that that lead to the builds

Themselves being quite creative and fun and they’re all like small things that you could add to your own village if you wanted to so if you need some inspiration definitely check that video out once it arrives so um let’s move on into our main discussion this week we’re going to be

Talking about the Minecraft trails and tales original game soundtrack by Aaron sheroff as we mentioned earlier in uh in the the news read I I immediately wanted to take some notes because I felt like you know this is a cool opportunity for new new music to

Come to Minecraft and see how it fits into the landscape that’s already been created by three composers at this point obviously C418 is the most well known of all of those but then Lena Rayne and Kumi tanioka have contributed uh Lena Reign starting in the nether update and

Then kumutanioka coming in for caves and cliffs as well so we’ve had a lot of new music recently and Aaron sheroff is adding his name to the list um to briefly uh recap a little bit of what he does he describes himself on his own website as a composer of ambient and

Maximalist melodic Electronica and adds on his band camp page that he listens to a lot of jazz fusion library music and City pop as his main influences his previous work includes the soundtrack for Sunshine heavy Industries which is an indie spaceship Building puzzle game that’s available on Steam uh moment to

Midnight which is a short story based game in a game Jam kind of time frame Red Ice which was our hockey game with a bunch of monster characters and a cartoony platformer called Newton in which you play a hamster and a hamster ball um he’s had a bunch of individual album

Releases which are all available on bandcamp all listenable on Spotify if you want to check out his other work but most recently of course is the trails and tales update so we’ve both had a listen it’s available to listen to on Spotify I’m pretty sure there’s links to

It from the tweets that the Minecraft team has been putting out about the soundtrack so it’s nice and easy for people to queue it up and dive in I really like it uh it’s it’s different and uh easy to listen to and it did remind me that you know as someone that

Has an apple music subscription that I should go and just kind of like make a playlist of all the Minecraft soundtrack stuff uh and and especially when new things come out you know because I’m sure it’s probably available on iTunes and wherever people listen to music as

Well I know it’s on YouTube as well um it’s it’s really interesting uh and I have to remind myself because I don’t play with music in game like a lot of times creating content on stream uh I’ve got separate break music that plays and so I don’t often have Minecraft music playing

Especially because Minecraft music doesn’t play all the time like yeah there’s like moments where it doesn’t play um I’ve seen other creators like I think yourself as well will use the like the Minecraft soundtrack in the background playing on a different player uh and then play that in the background while

They’re playing Minecraft and streaming and stuff like that as well yeah I tend to queue up a lot of the Minecraft soundtrack if I’m playing it on stream and then I I don’t typically play with the music on either because it gets spliced up by the edit when I’m editing

It for YouTube videos so what I tend to do with my YouTube output is I add in tracks that suit the mood of each clip each sort of scene of a video and lately I’ve been really leaning on Lena Reigns tracks for that because her music is a

Lot more kind of hopeful and adventurous than C418 stuff which um starts to feel a little bit more Melancholy and lonely and I think having listen to these I’ll be adding Aaron Sheriff’s music to the rotation of stuff that I edit into my videos because there’s quite a broad range of like

Moods in the five tracks that he’s contributed so far so um yeah I think we should dive into them so I guess in general and you could probably confirm this more because you’re a little bit more um musical than I am there definitely feels to be more of

Like a soundscape Vibe than a traditional soundtrack or score when I’m looking listening to these comparing them to other Minecraft soundtracks that we’ve had previously uh yeah you think that’s that’s that more accurate yeah I’d agree uh there’s a lot of layering of different instruments in here the synths and the traditional instruments

There’s a lot of like piano tracks which have synths going on in the background or sometimes like swelling up and overwhelming the piano stuff just for the sake of the the mood and yeah I’d say that a fair amount of them don’t have like a strong like melodic hook

Except in certain parts of the song so it sort of changes several times it will change from minute to minute and they’re all quite long tracks compared to C418 stuff which when it shows up in game you sort of think of it as only showing up

For a short time and then going away again because most of the ones that play throughout survival gameplay are only like a minute to two minutes long and it’s like music plays when the Sun rises or when the sun sets and you only get like a couple of minutes of that because

Pretty soon you’re going to be left with night time for a few minutes and then the sun’s going to come up again and it doesn’t want to get too repetitive um so yeah like there’s a bit more longer music in c418’s repertoire from the creative tracks

Um like there are a few of those that range to like eight or nine minutes um but these in the Aaron Sheriff additions to the soundtrack are all between four and five minutes long so they’re all a pretty even length um and I think in that time he has a lot

Of room to play around with establishing a Melody maybe subverting it a little bit later and then either returning to it later or ending on something completely different to kind of leave that air of mystery in in the uh the soundscape so I think there’s there’s a

Lot to be said for that approach I don’t know if it’s going to work for everybody um but you’re not exactly going to get catchy melodic hooks from everything I think the exception to that though is well Lake because that one I mean the it opens with a chiptune synth that feels

Kind of like a Fanfare um and I get immediate Vibes of c418’s tracks cat and dog cat is the one that’s part of a music disc in game and then dog is the sort of follow-up track that’s just on the Minecraft soundtrack and that feels a bit like the end

Credits song of like a Sonic the Hedgehog game and I mean that with 100 positivity like the Sonic soundtracks were something I held up for the longest time as like this is where chiptune music should be at um and yeah that’s probably the one that fits most into uh Aaron Sheriff’s sort

Of self-described melodic Electronica label I think that that kind of defines that pretty well I think overall that track hits a really interesting note with when it comes to being called Relic and being a treasure music disc that you find in trail ruins because it’s got the kind of

Nostalgic tip chiptune vibe to it it’s got some production decisions that make it feel old from an in-game perspective like it’s hearkening back to like original music discs like C418 stuff but it also starts with that kind of scratchy record noise that kind of indicates that the disc is old and Dusty

It’s kind of like the equivalent musically of putting film grain onto digital video and it kind of feels like it’s evoking an older time it’s also kind of catchy and like when I said this is the one that really has a melody I think making these music discs

Desirable that players are going to want to go out and find them and find additional copies of them is a really interesting balancing act because I don’t really know anybody who really went after music disc five other than just to collect it because it’s an ambient soundscape kind of Story disc

It’s a law disc about a you know an unseen player encountering the warden or something like that whereas this is much more along the lines of other side or Pig step like it’s something you can put on and actually like you know jam out to for four minutes and then I immediately

Want to listen to it again so I I think it’s it’s one of those things that strikes a really good balance of being a desirable item in game whilst also providing a little bit of lore without going into the soundscape sound effects style of uh producing that kind of disk

It’s really funny that you bring that up first because that’s the one that I didn’t like hmm so and I didn’t know that it was a music disc it makes more sense now right I just listened to the the tracks as they were listed on Spotify this was the last

One that came up and for me like I didn’t really like the staticky sound of it when it started and I mean I appreciate what you’re saying about like you know the idea of the lore of it being an older disc and all that

Kind of stuff but at the time when I was listening to it like this doesn’t match any of the other four tracks that I just listened to yeah and while I appreciate that you know the tradition of like synthesizer or chiptune music in Minecraft is is long-standing this one pulled me

Out of what I can describe as the landscape of the other tracks yeah yeah and I think that’s by Design because this is one that players are going to be able to put on themselves rather than one that starts playing when you’re in a Cherry Grove like I can totally see like

If you’re not putting this on to listen to it specifically it doesn’t really fit with any of the biomes so if if anything it’s good that it didn’t fit any of the biomes because that’s a signal of the intent of that track rather than it being something that they’ve sort of

Misplayed it in game somehow exactly yeah and and I think again like so it feels I it it doesn’t get any knocks from me for not fitting in now knowing that it’s a music disc and not part of the soundtrack at the time though I was like oh wow

That’s different uh I think too that uh it still feels like a chill building game track like it still feels like that but it still it feels like it’s from another game and I I perhaps haven’t listened to enough of the discs I mean I listen to them when they come out like

When Lena Rayne came out with one and when the new ones were added I listened to them but like I I don’t I’m not listening to them every time I you know play or even every once in a while like I listen to them the once usually to

Talk about here on the show and I really don’t mess with music discs much in the game so um I’m not as familiar as you are um but it definitely I don’t think it’s going to be in rotation for me especially if I am listening to the

Other tracks you know in addition to the extra Minecraft uh soundtracks that are out there uh you know throwing in the other tracks in there I think will mesh better um they’re different they still feel like Minecraft but they they definitely have like I said that more of a

Soundscape thing I think the one that stood out for me the most was echo in the wild which is the first track on the playlist yeah and this one feels like a lot more like uh it starts with bells and Chimes it feels like a wind chime so

Yeah immediately it’s got that kind of relationship to the title and it’s sort of sustained piano this sort of melancholy mystery feel that feels more evocative in the way that C418 stuff did um and it really deepens after the bass notes kick in as well it’s really nice to listen to on headphones

Um I feel like the production style feels more modern than C418 stuff it’s it’s more in line with I agree yeah Lena Raymond kumitanioka’s work it’s it’s um it’s kind of layered in a way that is more modern feeling but still has c418’s sense of kind of like lonely open spaces

And the it’s like a plucked or hammered instrument I can’t tell if it’s synthesized or if it’s actually played live and is just kind of mixed in really well there’s like a dulcimer kind of sound or something that like plays this really Meandering Melody and I think that works really well for Minecraft’s

Musical style as well as like the style of exploring the game um it sort of feels location agnostic to me and the Minecraft Wiki kind of confirmed that for me because uh according to the wiki it plays in Badlands Cherry Groves flower forests and Lush caves which is quite a range of

Environments like the idea that yes it’s it’s playing in Cherry Grove’s flower Forest those are fairly similar Lush caves have that kind of you know organic vibe to them but it being there for Badlands as well really makes it feel like this can fit in a variety of

Different locations and I think that’s that’s kind of a neat like reversal of like a Badland is almost the opposite environment to the other three biomes this plays in it would be neat to see a behind the scenes featurette of how you know these tracks are put together what The

Inspirations were you know hear hear from the composer and and hear about how they’re made up and confirm your you know you know suspicions about like the dulcimer or whatever it is that’s making these sounds and how they’re being adjusted that I would be on board for

That that’d be very cool and uh I wonder if they end up play testing them in specific environments to figure out where they’re going to play in game as well like I I presume that the Cherry Grove being the new biome and Lush cave still being relatively new as an

Environment they’ll want to specialize these tracks and kind of test how they play in in other environments but um the fact that it’s being added into Badlands and flower forests as well is kind of interesting to me I’d love to to understand the decision making that goes into that

Um a familiar room is the next track and that feels almost like a contrast to Relic in that it’s very downbeat it’s soft piano with a low pass filter is what it’s called where you you lose all of the kind of treble stuff and it sounds almost kind of muted as though

Somebody’s like laying an arm or a piece of fabric across the strings of the piano and you’re just getting some of the the kind of warm Ambience of the lower end of the piano um you even get some electric piano style warm distortion on the louder notes and this immediately feels kind of

More grounded and traditional from the Minecraft Canon as far as um as far as the musical landscape of Minecraft goes that works very well with the title it’s a familiar room it’s a familiar musical style and this is the one that’s a bit more towards c418’s Melancholy you know evocative and emotional register

Um I wrote that this is the kind of thing that might play in a Pixar movie when the main character is longing for home and has been on this long journey but just remembers what life is like back at home it kind of tugs at the heartstrings a little bit

Um but it resolves in a really interesting way towards the end which leaves it I think in a major key or at least on a major chord and leaves it feeling a bit more positive and wistful towards the end so I think this one’s maybe going to be in acquired taste I

Don’t know if I feel like there’s a time and a place for this one versus some of the others which are more nice to kind of jam out to but I can see this playing over like emotional scenes in videos pretty well yeah I found it it’s had sad I was

Listening to it I was like oh wow this is this is a change from echo in the in the wild I I know they’re all supposed to be pretty chill soundscape sort of essence in terms of their like what the they’re trying to convey but uh I did

Feel like this one was more melancholy uh than most things that I’ve listened to in the Minecraft soundtrack and I don’t want to say too sad but like it’s the kind of thing that I would probably hit the skip key if I wasn’t in the

Right mood for it or if it played in in a shuffle if it played immediately after something really happy and he’s like oh wow no yeah but a tunnel Whiplash yeah yeah yeah exactly you know the minor key you’re like oh man no this is not um but

I think your description of having it you know imagining it being played in a Pixar film when there’s that contemplative scene or you know that they’ve missed the you know Andy’s uh car driving away or something sure yeah yeah like I feel like that’s definitely an accurate way to describe to describe

The track but uh Still Still well done I’m not slamming I’m just saying that yeah it’s not something that would be on my regular rotation because of just the the mood of it I think bromeliad is probably my favorite track on the EP I know you said

Echo was yours but I think um yeah bromeliad is one of my favorites this one apparently is going to appear in jungles Cherry Groves flower forests and regular forests and the name kind of suggests it right bromeliads are uh like really beautiful looking flowers um and this starts as another piano LED

Track and there’s some sort of subtle synth touches in the background but then the synth swells and this is one of the ones that you were saying like kind of throws you a little bit and doesn’t stick to one thing I I think the the tone changes maybe after the first

Minute and it starts to feel kind of more metallic and chimey and this sort of layered Ambient Drone builds up and then drums came in and I was like hang on a second because this one like typically in the Minecraft soundtrack you don’t get a lot of

Percussion a lot of like rhythmic kind of sounds to stuff because you sort of dictate the Rhythm at which the player is playing at that point and the fact that the Minecraft soundtrack is so ambient is almost a choice in that sense because you’re not like trying to

Do stuff to the rhythm of the music the way you might in other games and I think mostly the drum tracks that you hear on other songs from the soundtrack are all in the music discs and not in the ambient music that plays as you’re walking around the world this kind of

Breaks that up a little bit though by having a really unusual time signature like it feels like it begins in like 11 8 and then starts playing either four bars of three four and one of four four or like phrasing that makes it feel that way like it’s it’s slightly like off of

Like a marching Rhythm like a 4-4 Rhythm uh and and like yeah the drums kind of threw me at first but but it’s more just like a a scratchy percussion track that starts in the background that you could fairly easily ignore I think and it doesn’t last for very long

Um but I really like this it definitely rewards repeat listens there’s a lot going on in this one the synths layered over piano and Chimes and all kinds of other stuff so this is what I’m probably gonna come back to quite regularly I think

I this is one I think I only get to listen to The Once and there I think what you’re describing about it is what made me think it didn’t quite fit and I think it’s because I it well one I found that as I was listening while I

Was putting together some show notes that because the tracks are so long it is hard to compare them yeah you know like you can’t listen to two one minute tracks back to back and go like oh yeah okay I can totally tell the difference like you’re you’re five minutes into

This into a song and then you get a switch and listen to the other five minute song and I I did find I got lost in this one where I checked a couple times to see whether the track had changed because I was trying to make a note of

Like what I’m going to talk about and how they the songs made me feel I was just like oh no I’m still on the same track that’s weird yeah and so like I’ve switched it up on you a couple of times yeah so I I but but again like it’s kind

Of thing where like I listen to it maybe once so like I need to go back and and listen again but I I I think that they they definitely get points for being different uh I think that you know um given the more recent music from from Minecraft they definitely fit in like

You said more with letter Reigns stuff and and other more modern stuff rather than the C418 um but that’s good like I’m glad that I’m glad that Minecraft is not just sticking to the way that things were done early early on uh I think that there are definitely some iconic and

Recognizable things in Minecraft uh music but I think that um you know moving forward is and again things I say a lot about making Minecraft feel like a more modern game I think this is a great way to do it you know and I think that it’s it’s great

That it’s just like the updates themselves are getting the soundtracks so like it’s not like they wait forever and then they release a um an album that has like 20 tracks on it right like it’s just each update seems to be getting its own handful you know as they expand at a new

Biome or they add a new experience like um like uh getting a uh archeology stuff and more time in deserts so they added a track to the deserts like that kind of stuff I think is is really interesting uh yeah is is bromeliad the one that starts to sound

Like kind of like what you would imagine in in like a general Hollywood movie that starts in the desert uh I think that’s more that’s Crescent Dunes I think that’s the one you’re thinking of that’s the oh I’m getting ahead of myself then yeah that’s that’s

The the last one on this this quick list um which is the one that kind of starts with a drone and there’s sort of like string sort of guitar instrument being played kind of chaotically in the background yeah absolutely and there’s lots of like perfect fifths in that which is very

Kind of droney kind of uh sound almost like power chords being played on a guitar but it’s being played on different instruments and then like a marimba or a thumb piano or some kind of like wooden percussive but still melodic instrument comes in and that’s kind of

Carrying The Melody of this one and then it sort of shifts halfway through um it’s it starts to layer up and there’s this piano and Melody and sense all kind of working in different directions but sort of creating the soundscape and then it pauses and then

It comes back with a Melody where it feels like everything is working towards the same goal like instead of providing layers and structure they’re all kind of carrying each other along um and so that feels kind of more upbeat and curious than the other tracks which

Feel a little bit more you know pensive or Melancholy um and this one is the the Badlands and desert track so again it’s it’s in Badlands to give them a little bit more soundscape to them but it’s a desert thing as well and that makes sense because we’re gonna find players playing

A lot in deserts if they’re looking for desert temples and Wells for archeology yeah this one felt less cohesive to me compared to the other tracks that I was listening to I’m not saying that’s bad just different and so knowing that it plays in deserts and Badlands like that

Makes sense because those are drastically different than walking through the planes or the sunflower Meadows or you know whatever um so yeah I mean I I liked it I feel like I again I as I get closer to the end of the list I didn’t make it through the entire thing twice so

Um this warrants another real listen closely for me um but again like I liked the initial I certainly like the first part of it better I think than where it went um but that again that’s the kind of thing where like you know you like something and then it gets to be

Different and that initial playthrough I can think of all kinds of songs that I like that I maybe didn’t like the start of you know yeah yeah and on all kinds of music genres and and then but the more that you listen to it like you you

Like the your favorite part is the middle or like or that it kicks up to a bridge that you that really slams you know like whatever it is that you like about you know a beat dropping or something uh you can sometimes forgive the way that some things start um but

For me it was the opposite I like the way that it started but I wasn’t sure how it twisted in the middle and I and how it ended up but that to me could just be like well now that I have a little bit more context for it uh I mean

The Crescent Dunes just kind of give like a desert Vibe into the title um and and I think that’s cool it’s interesting that um two of the titles I guess really three of the titles if you include Relic kind of insinuate kind of like what the

Purpose of the track is yeah whereas a familiar room an echo in the wild like those are kind of like broad you can kind of there’s nothing about the title that suggests where the music might land in the game whereas bromeliad and Crescent Dunes makes a lot of sense yeah

Yeah and it’s sort of it works for the tone of the other ones that they are like I said mobile agnostic I think um a familiar room is just part of the general soundtrack so it focuses on playing it in Lush caves but it can just

Be playing anywhere else in the same way that most of the C418 tracks cycle up through so yeah that’s that’s kind of interesting and I think the key to this is going to be experiencing them with the environment in game which is not something we’re doing right now we’re

Listening to them on Spotify so we have we have it isolated from the gameplay experience and I think the success of these is already going to be borne out by when you wander into a badlands biome and Crescent Dunes starts playing do you feel like it fits the environment and or

Is it like you know does it draw attention to itself or does it just enhance the environment by playing in the background as you’re looking around that’ll be the really interesting thing the secondary objective is do these sound like something I want to put on in the background while I’m building a

Castle and that’s something I’m going to be finding out for the rest of today because I have a lot of Castle Building to do but for now I think that’s that’s something I better go and do so we need to wrap up this episode of the spawn chunks there

Thank you so much for listening folks you can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today at thespawnchunks.com the music for this show was composed by me and the spawn chunks is proud to be a listener supported podcast if you’re getting some

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RSS fade is linked at thespawntrunks.com and the patron only RSS feed is on the patreon page that’s where you can listen to the render distance the extended version of the podcast my name is Johnny but online I go by Pixar ifs you can find most of what I do

At youtube.com pixarifts where as I mentioned Empire’s SMP is going to be wrapping up soon and I’ll probably have one big video in which I build an entire Castle so look forward to that if you want to see the behind the scenes of the castle being built I do stream three

Days a week on Twitch the schedule is likely to be a little disrupted by my mother-in-law coming to town and she’s going to be staying in my office so we’ll see how many streams I get done but hopefully fingers crossed there will still be some in the meantime you can

Also hear me as the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can just find through a quick search on YouTube and aside from that I’m at pixel riffs on both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online everything I’m doing online could be linked at joelduggan.com that includes

The sizzle Cafe my podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment you can follow me at Joel Duggan on social media and Joel Duggan on Twitch where I stream every day but Monday Lego on Fridays boy is there a lot to build there’s an unboxing video that’s going to be out on

YouTube today so check that out at Joel Duggan vods on YouTube and we are focusing on Minecraft and trying to get the West Hill build finished and this weekend satisfactory made a return thanks for visiting the sport and chunks the world outside is infinite but it all takes place in a familiar room Foreign