The Spawn Chunks – 266 – Mob Vote Fact Or CAP // The Spawn Chunks: A Minecraft Podcast

Welcome to the Spong chunks episode number 266 for Monday October 9th 2023 my name is Joel Dugen and joining me as always is my friend and fellow turkey Johnny also known as pixs on the interwebs hello sir gobble gobble friends uh it’s almost that time for folks in the states um turkey doesn’t

Show up here until a little later in the year but for Joel it has been Canadian Thanksgiving and we are of course thankful for Joel um you can hear more of Joel talking about Canadian Thanksgiving along with a couple of other you know diversions in the conversation over at the patreon where

Patreon.com thees spawn chunks is the link you can get the render distance the extended version of the podcast by supporting the podcast financially and uh for the price of a coffee every month you can effectively get a bunch of extra content you get access to an extended

Pre and post show on every recording and we have some Patron events some of which are coming up later this month like our monthly Minecraft hangout which is usually on the last Saturday of the month which will be October 28th and our quarterly hangout is likely happening on

October 21st details will be posted in the Discord for when we manage to arrange that and that’s where you get the behind the scenes facts and figures of how the podcast is doing numbers wise a little bit of insight into our metrics on YouTube all that kind of stuff we

Will also have a chunk mail dispenser which is something our patrons unlocked from our patreon campaign a long time ago now and we’re happy to keep it rolling where we can focus on community email and that’s going to be later in the month it would normally fall on the

Third show of the month but that is of course going to be us unpacking everything that’s happening at Minecraft live speaking of which Minecraft live is happening on October 15th at 1:00 p.m. Eastern 5:00 p.m. UK time and uh that’s going to be covered on my twitch Channel

At twitch.tv/ piix orfs where the spawn chunks podcast will have a very uh formal layout and everything and Joel and I will be unpacking everything live as it happens from Minecraft live 2023 looking forward to that actually it’s uh it’s a a curious time you know coming into that and we’ll we’ll get

Into a little bit more I think later in the show today but you know moving into uh the new cycle the way that Mojang is running things now and and seeing what we’ve been seeing I’m I’m curious because they’ve certainly laid a uh some questions in front of me yeah for this

Week’s show that I’m I’m very curious to see the answers for um but speaking of questions what have you been doing in Minecraft this week I’ve been doing a fair bit now that I have elytra I’m getting used to flying again and for the survival guide I did an episode all

About how to fly and the thing that struck me the most was that now that weather is more consistently rainy having a rip tide on a trident handy is very powerful and I ended up using that a little bit more this week because my main job over the weekend was Excavating

A a trail ruins which I had finally located in a Northerly part of the world in a Tiger Biome and so we found the site on the surface with the suspicious gravel and the Terra Cotta identified it as a trail ruins and I excavated the entire thing it was partly underwater

Was the main problem with this because uh the way that the terrain had generated there was a river nearby but there was also one of those sort of Ravine aquifers that was bisecting that and as I dive under I can see you know three or four of the trail ruin houses

Some of the gravel has already updated and fallen through the bottom of it so whatever artifacts I might have had from that and now unfortunately gone but there were plenty of more intact houses and so I ended up just kind of Excavating everything from the top down

As much as I could and then came back with sponges and a conduit and ended up explaining those Concepts as well but going to and fro from this area with fireworks took me about a minute and a half’s work worth of fly time just a couple of fireworks over the top of the

Mountains with Rip Tide about 10 seconds it’s like it’s a maybe 1500 Block Journey something like that and it’s over in a split second with rip tide and amaz amazingly the world can render in front of me that fast uh it’s when I’m thankful for having a decent PC but man

It’s so quick and it’s something I could rarely take advantage of before because rain would always be reset by sleeping in a bed every night and since they fixed that in 118 or whenever it was the uh the whole thing has been made a little bit more like it’s it’s a mixed

Back because you don’t want it to be raining for the sake of videos or streams or whatever like it always feels a little bit oppressive and it always happens first thing after you sleep and so you can’t get rid of it for another 10 minutes but the speed it gives you

With Riptide is almost worth the trade-off for me I don’t think I have ever used Riptide I maybe I tried it back when I was watching cubfan 135 do like the golf stuff is that rip tide because you’re standing in water yeah you you stand in

Water and then you fling an ender pearl at the top of your like Riptide Arc and that’s how the uh the ender pearl golf thing worked which was a really neat concept I love that implementation of it and it’s not the kind of thing that you typically do in survival gameplay but

When you’ve got the uh the hermitcraft amount of time and effort that you can put into building a golf course in a server then it’s it’s a really fun idea oh I agree I thought it was very very cool but I just remember it being so

Alien to me because I never bothered but you know I’m the kind of player that curses the rain because I constantly am trying to figure out can I sleep through this is this a thunderstorm like it’s always kind of happening in the way um and some ways it’s kind of fun and that

It adds that medieval mood to the Citadel and and West Hill when I’m walking around but when you’re trying to see what you’re doing and building something specifically if you’re outside and you want to see like you know what this looks like in the sunshine and how

Green is you know this and isn’t the right texture combo like I do find it a little bit distracting but that’s wild that you can move so fast with Riptide through the rain and I think in a lot of ways like players forget about that kind

Of stuff that you know that kind of thing I mean like we coming what five years ago that was added to the game yeah yeah more or less as this podcast started was that we were getting trid with Riptide yeah yeah that’s how I remember it and I think that you know

When features in the game start to get that kind of longevity uh and the conversation around Minecraft is very often always thirsting for new features and what’s happening next I mean it’s one of the things that to show you know pivots on uh I think that it can be

Easily you know forgotten when you have things like that like rip tide and flying through the rain and things like that and going over the basics of elytra and what exactly is possible with elytra I think is a really uh worthwhile Adventure you know because I mean I use

Them all the time but I don’t know if I do any new tricks or I don’t I don’t really explore the full breadth of it like I’m very often just using one rocket to kind of like Superman hop from like build back to storage room and then

Back to build again and trying not to smash my forehead off of stuff you know like it’s it’s pretty pretty simple I think the one thing that I would say as far as a ltra flight that I am good at is like a soft Landing or extending that

Flight as long as I can like flying through an open double door and like rather than having to walk the whole of the church I can actually fly most of it like that kind of a thing um really getting the most of one rocket um I also

Find it kind of relaxing and I know maybe not as relaxing when you’re traveling at break neck speeds but like when you’re doing things with elyra do you find that there’s a certain relaxation to like not rocket spamming and like trying to come in for like a a

Leisurely landing and and like more like you’re gliding than you’re kind of zooming around yeah it sort of gives you time to think like travel time is always like that you know even even in the real world I feel like a lot of people do thinking on their drive time or on the

Commute to work or whatever and I I think it’s uh it’s kind of like that for Minecraft players you’re off the ground you’re not doing the tinkering with the build or the Redstone or whatever and you’re you’re just allowing yourself to take a little bit of a break you’re

Probably looking at the sky so there’s not much visual information cluttering the screen and it does feel a lot a lot calmer up there except yes I think if you’re spamming rip tide which is sort of like spamming fireworks but you have to worry about durability rather than

The amount of fireworks you’ve got left and there’s really not much of a downside to it it just accelerates you and accelerates you and so at that point it becomes is a mountain going to load in front of me and am I going to go

Splat against the side of it which is a different kind of game to play but um yeah going back to the trail ruins dig I was I was really happy with this one we ended up with 88 total fins I definitely broke at least two suspicious gravels so

There were upwards of 90 artifacts there but from that I got four copies of The Relic music disc I got all four of the armor trims you can find in the trail ruins uh seven different Pottery shirts which I looked it up afterwards and that is I think the maximum amount you can

Get uh in terms of the variety that you can get from those structures and the others are all found elsewhere so I got basically everything I needed out of this dig so very happy with that and I’m looking forward to finding another one in future and maybe trying a different

Approach to it whether that’s a different way of digging it out or maybe I preserve this one in its current state but then restore the next one that I find and populate it with villagers since there are already a few villager workstations in there and I got a couple

Of really insightful comments from the folks watching this video because it just went up on my channel this morning and some people noted that the colors of Terra Cotta in this Trail ruin specifically and I’m not sure how some of the others differ but they are kind

Of similar to the colors on the coat of the wandering Trader and some of the items that you find DED that theing Trader will trade you and it is a logical leap but not a particularly large one to imagine that the wandering Traders civilization began here was lost to time and that’s when

They began their nomadic lifestyle and I really like that as an interpretation of this it’s not one that I had previously considered that the wanding trader might have been a static villager at one point but then decided to take up the wandering lifestyle after this so I really like that

Interpretation that’s a really cool idea and I can see it like with the screenshots that you shared uh in our live chat like I yeah I can totally understand how that would be a visual parallel is this the first Trail ruin that you’ve excavated since we hung out

With her plays yeah this is the first one I’ve done solo and yeah the first one that I’ve done since that stream and this one was very different structurally to the one that we encountered in terms of the layout in terms of the variety of houses that were there there were still

A couple of typical features like I think that tower that appears in each of them has to be there because that’s the part that breaches the surface and that you can see from outside so you know that there’s a structure there at all but then there was a a kind of an area

That I thought of as like a kiln area a lot of fired materials and mud bricks and there’s coal blocks nearby and stuff like that but then the individual houses or or whatever You’ think of as houses uh along the road part of it were different they were different structures

And so it’s really neat to see them having that sense of individuality and they’re so different from ruin to ruin that it makes me want to dig up more of them in my world and see how the others have changed yeah and it sounds like they’re

Absolutely worth it like if you take the time to do it properly and you get seven shirs you’ve got uh the discs you know you’re you’re able to get all those fines like it’s not just like a couple of things for all the effort like you

Know 80 fins plus you know the the valuable things for decoration that you pick out of them like it sounds like it’s well worth it right yeah yeah definitely I mean it’s a lot of it is the kind of thing that you can craft yourself uh but in terms of unique items

There were maybe 12 that I pulled out total it’s all four of the armor trims the four music discs and I mean yeah I guess the the the shirs on top of that probably makes it more like 15 uh items that that like you can’t get anywhere else and so they’re definitely worth

Getting if you are a collector certainly um if you want to have one of every type of armor trim then it’s essential um but I do think yeah like some people aren’t going to have the patience for this kind of thing and you know are going to go

For more valuable rewards like diamonds and stuff that they can use to upgrade and improve their equipment but I think once you’ve got that upgraded equipment it’s worth going to one of these and spending a few hours just uncovering it and seeing what’s there um I’m moving on

To the technical stuff this week though I’m building a mob farm l ler this week so that I can have more gunpowder since I’ve already used about half the Rockets I crafted after I got my elytra um and yeah I I need more reasons to build structures as well so I’m kind of

Looking through what I’ve done previously and kind of seeing where the inspiration Falls in this world to decide what I’m going to build next well I have been building outside of West Hill this week continuing on with the East Road graveyard that I uh finished the planning of I think the

Last time that we spoke and I’ve moved on to start the final block selections and decorations and things uh on the inside I haven’t really ventured on the outside yet but for the most part the the block pette and the style in which I want to do things has been sorted uh

I’ve got about onethird of the graveyard finished uh the way that the path kind of cuts through the graveyard it doesn’t divide it in half it’s kind of divides it into like different chunks and so I decided to just work on one finish it all up and then say okay well that’s the

Blueprint I can now kind of copy paste with lack of a better way to say it and do the rest of it and so it’ll be nice to have all the different placeholder Cobblestone you know uh gravestones moved or you know updated to whatever I want them to be uh there’s a special

Fenced in area or walled in area at the back that I’m trying to try to put some special gravestones in like right now I’m using a lot of Mossy Cobble andesite polished andesite that kind of thing I’m kind of want to see if I can get maybe

Some calite or or diorite in some of the gravestones and maybe separate those out um and it’s weird a lot of it actually is making me remember my summer vacations as a kid this is going to sound very strange but I Used to Vacation with family in a small town in

U Port Elgen uh in New Brunswick and uh I would hang out with my cousins you know at a time when it was totally fine for us to be roaming around in the evenings you know hanging out uh but there’s a lot of churches and there’s a

Lot of graveyards and there’s no Parks there’s no real like playgrounds for kids to run around in so we would play hideand-seek basically in church cemeteries and uh you just basically build up this memory of like all the different styles of gravestones like the flat ones on the ground the tall ones uh

A lot of time the church yards would have like a fountain or some sort of little place where people could sit and reflect and so I’m trying to incorporate those so now instead of just having a graveyard with a wall around it there’s like a mountain and there’s like a place

Where I can people could light candles and place them down that I haven’t finished yet but I’ve got the idea for it and there’s like the the the functional part of it like the the grounds keeper shed that’s going to be at the back uh and then I’ve also got um

The Crypt and I decided as we were discussing last week to pull the trigger and start digging out underneath the graveyard uh there’s a staircase inside that Crypt that goes down to a space that is going to have I want to say around 60 double chests I’m not going to

Pack them like next to one another I I want to kind of pull inspiration from what you did and try to make it look like a crypt and and have some double chests there that will be good for some overflow storage good for some odds and

Ends that kind of thing um stuff I can put shulker boxes in to help kind of like keep um the storage system alive but um I’m going to have to eventually remove my bulk storage system underneath the keep CU I want to turn it into a uh

A mead Distillery or some sort of wine seller or something and so uh I need a place to put all of that and I didn’t want it to be miles away and so the graveyard is just outside the East Gate so it’s actually a pretty convenient

Location and uh so that’s what I was working on and I’m trying desperately not to go down the rabbit hole of like trying to make this Crypt look really super fancy and decorated like I I’m trying to keep it basic because it’s not huge but it’s also like it’s not

Something you see you know on a regular well you’ll see on my videos but you’re not going to see it if you’re a guest or a server mate walking through the town it’s really not a a showpiece I want it to be cool looking but I want it to be

Functional so I’m kind of using it for like a little bit of practice and like I think we’ve all experienced those things when you either start a new world or you’re on a new server and you want to get up and running and you need some functionality but you don’t want it to

Be ugly because you know that if you get it functioning and leave it ugly you just tend to not update it like you just it just stays a functional room and it just always looks like you’ve carved out a cave and there’s nothing happening so

I want to try and do something with deep slate I don’t know what I’m going to do with the floor um it it’s the kind of thing where like I really wish we had things like instead of Mossy bricks I wish we had dirty bricks like I’d love

To have that kind of detail but like it’s it’s not something I want to put too too much effort in but it’s coming together pretty pretty nicely I like the idea of having it there uh it’s it’s I like these little Easter eggs they’re

Just for me H and in the process of kind of like backing up and looking at how this is coming together I really like the size of it I feel like it’s a nice complement to everything and I’ve included a couple screenshots of like a

Down a top down view from the map mod that we use the zeros world map and it sort of gives you the idea of when you have a build like West Hill and you’re getting close to finishing it and you’re wondering why it is complete for the

Most part in your head but it doesn’t feel complete and it’s because I don’t have enough yet smaller lower to the ground like uh shorter builds next to the town to help it blend into the countryside yeah so you can see like along the bottom there’s like the little

Fishing Village there’s the Tiga Forest that helps a great deal and the rivers help a great deal there’s a decorated lawn that I did a few months ago outside this the church to the South that really helps blend the the the player made Town into the Minecraft generated landscape

And the graveyard is now serving that function on the east side so as you travel east like you leave the wall of the city and the gate and everything and then you’ve got the graveyard between it and the rolling planes of Minecraft and I think that once I get the Landscaping

Done on the West Hill River to the Northeast and the swamp to the north finished then West Hill is really going to start to feel like it has a home in the world and I’m going to feel a lot more comfortable to it uh and I think

That that’s one of the things I’m picking up from this graveyard is like okay lesson learned like one of the reasons why this is feeling so close but yet so far is because I just I have these uh Landscaping things that I have to do or these small builds like this

Graveyard where you don’t really it’s not like a complicated build you have to plan like a house or a castle or something like that but a large swamp is just it’s a lot of trial and error it’s like you just have to roll up your sleeves get in there with a decent

Amount of foliage blocks and dirt blocks and stuff and just kind of start making it and kind of like start at one end and just kind of keep on going and it’s it’s relaxing in it’s not overly challenging work it is a little timec consuming but

I think the reward at the end is like it feels like your you know your player made build starts to um I guess transition from that into the natural Minecraft landscape and it’s challenging but it’s it’s um I should say it’s not the work itself is not challenging

Coming up with what to put where is challenging like it took me a long time to decide oh I’m going to put a swamp at the front of this place I had no idea for years you know what was going to be in the front of this so uh but so far so

Good like I I like the way that it’s it’s all come together it’s about adding context I think at this point it’s kind of like you’ll know this as an illustrator like if you you design a main character kind of like front and center of the image that you really like

And something is missing from that and it’s the background it’s like the setting there’s like you don’t need to put as much detail into that as you have the front and center character but it’s all about adding the context that makes them stand out and so I think that’s the

Fa the phase you’re at with with West Hill at this point is just trying trying to figure out what’s going to help it blend and what’s going to give it life and history from an exterior perspective which can be tricky but it seems like you’ve got a a good notion of how to

Pull that off and the farm the graveyard that kind of stuff like I I think they almost look like little um speech bubbles or something the way they’re kind of outlined from the top down View and it’s like you know here is here’s what the town is saying and it’s saying

Graveyard right now apparently well and it’s it’s almost like um giving certain districts you know like it’s almost like in in the same way that within a town you’d have like the market you’d have like where people live you’d have like the business downtown you’d have like

Maybe the the spiritual area where there might be a chapel or church or some sort of you know Gathering space like that kind of stuff and it’s the same thing when you start to get outside the town like there’s the graveyard there’s the farms and then what kind of farm is it

Well the one that’s got a wall around it with all the yellow is the wheat farm and then the one that’s green is the potato farm and it’s like that kind of stuff it’s it starts to uh inform the viewer or the player what that space

Is used for and that then like you said like adds the context is a great way to put it actually it’s perfectly way to to illustrate it yeah moving on to the news this week we have all three of the mobs for you that have been introduced by

Mojang coming up for the Minecraft live mob vote the crab the armadillo and the Penguin each mob has a video on YouTube that you can go and watch we’ll have links to all of these uh in our show notes as well as a minecraft.net article that explains what will happen with the

Mob if it is indeed voted into Minecraft starting with the crab uh the crab has one gigantic claw which it likes to wave around as it scuttles through its home in the mangrove swamp if a player finds one of these giant claws they can use it to place blocks farther away the article

And video both suggest crabs would be able to climb mangrove trees and hide among the vines the armadillo calls the Savannah Biome its home plotting serenely between the long grass unless you surprise it just like a few of its real world counterparts the armadillo can roll into

A blocky ball if startled the armadillo also drops a special scoot which can be used to craft wolf armor you’ll find the penguin in the Stony Shores biome waddling around the beach or swimming in the nearby ocean the penguin is Happy on both land and in

The water though it can be a little clumsy when walking the penguin can help your boat travel faster the mob vote opens at 1:00 p.m. eastern Daylight Time on October 13th and closes at 1:15 p.m. eastern Daylight Time on the 15th which is the day of Minecraft live the winner

Will then be announced during Minecraft live which starts at 1:00 p.m. eastern time on October 15th surprisingly we had a Minecraft Java Edition snapshot this week as well this is Snapshot 23 w48 once again there’ll be a link to the minecraft.net article Linked In Our show notes that

Was released on Wednesday October 4th and is the first snapshot for 1.2.3 on Java Edition the snapshot contains improvements for Shields changes to chat component serialization and Bug fixes the major change when a player is blocking with a shield the arm with the shield now follows the

Direction the player is looking at when viewed from a third person perspective and the bug fix related to that is that Shields do not block damage while the player was facing in straight up that’s now been fixed so you can now block damage coming from above you some

Additional bug fixes in 23 w4a include nether portal teleportation being inaccurate at large coordinate values mending incorrectly calculating overflow after a full repair and clocks and Compasses in item display entities not showing the correct time or Direction there are a few other bug fixes and Technical changes which also include the

Data pack version now being 19 and a few minor changes to component serialization if you need more details about the technical changes and the full list of bugs those can be found at the minecraft.net Chang log that’s Linked In Our show notes so I’m not sure about you

But I was a little surprised to see a snapshot this week yeah I I was um it seems like to this is the impression that I get and I may be wrong about this but the team is now large enough that they don’t all have to drop everything

When there’s a Minecraft live coming up right like you would assume in previous years that the development team has been a tight-knit enough group that all of their effort is going into what’s next what’s the update how can we present the update in the most concise way that the

Community is going to be excited about whereas now you have a bunch of people who are dedicated to bug fixes minor updates the kind of stuff that we’re getting in these dot releases for the major updates which means that everyone who is working on New Concepts can be getting excited about their Minecraft

Live stuff while the remainder of the team is still plugging away at the technical side of 1.20 do3 now and I think that you know it’s worth noting that this is the first Minecraft live that we’ve come up to after they’ve introduced the minor updates and yeah

You you forget that you know with Minecraft live they’re going to be announcing what’s happening in one. to one and that is many months away you know we don’t know how many but many usually and so there’s it’s re you know comes to reason that there’s going to be

At least one if not maybe two dot releases for 1.20 like we could see we’re obviously going to see a three we could see a four you know or maybe even a five between now and whenever 1.21 comes out that may even include stuff like the experimental villager changes

If they decide that those are going to be ready in in in time for that kind of thing yeah so um yeah a couple of small changes like this a couple of gameplay quality of life changes balancing tweaks that kind of stuff seems likely especially if they are building up

Towards reinforcing certain things like Shoring up certain mechanics of the game ahead of whatever they have in mind for 1.21 I am not someone that uses a shield all that often I think the specialized case that I would use it is is where my thoughts go with the news about the

Changes of the shield and that’s in an N City Raid and I’m wondering if the shield changes will make n city raids a little easier for people that find them either intimidating or hard to execute um I’m I’m not sure about that because I haven’t tested out the snapshot but uh

It it feels like a positive change you know in terms of the the blocking ability of The Shield yeah I think accuracy when it comes to that stuff because it’s easy for you to look up while holding a shield in game but then still take damage and wonder why in

Earth that’s happening I think it’s um nice to get some consistency in the behavior there and I’m somebody who uses a shield all the time I carry a shield basically whenever I don’t have anything more important in my off hand and so yeah I I’m used to using Shields

Constantly and I think that’s that’s a uh a good change um now if only it didn’t take up half the screen when I was using Riptide that’s my my major wish list even with the lower shield resource pack that I use from vanilla tweaks I still end up with the riptide

Kind of covering half the screen with a shield whenever I use it in first person um but yeah being able to block at more angles is welcome the fact that it renders that way when you’re seeing it in third person is going to make for some fun you know visual it’s fairly

Obvious on on multiplayer servers when you’re looking at somebody which direction they’re facing could even use it to gesture at certain things if you wanted to I suppose so yeah I think that’s that’s a really solid change look forward to seeing if there’s any fall out from that maybe the the PVP

Community was thinking this is the one thing we can use to get the drop on our opponents but I think most of the PVP Community is still using an older version of Minecraft that doesn’t have shields anyway right I have not really found n city raids challenging but I always

Thought that it was just quirky the way that it that it blocked some bullets from shulkers and not others and I didn’t realize it was actually a bug that it you know it might have been not that um I wasn’t facing the right way or just oh quote unquote that’s just Minecraft

You know I just kind of thought well whatever I’ve I’ve never been good at any kind of melee combat in a firstperson game yeah uh I one of the big things I really did not like about uh Skyrim with my limited time in it was like anytime I had to sword fight and

Block with a shield like in first person I just like I just I don’t know what’s going on yeah it always felt very weird and clunky to me in the same way that when you see third party video of a VR game now that’s kind of what like that’s kind of

Firsters melee combat feels like to me in all games like I just I find it very awkward uh so I’m glad to know it wasn’t just me um but we’ll we’ll see how it how it affects things going forward if you’ve noticed a pretty mob votes shaped

Gap in what we’ve been talking about so far that’s because it’s going to be the main discussion this week so before that we’re going to head on into the mail bag and see what’s coming up in the chunk mail if you’d like to email the show the email address is spawn chunk

[email protected] this EMA email comes in from the AP named Minecrafter man and the subject is a needed update hello pix and Joel after a conversation and consensus with my friends that all of the mobs this year are great choices we were discussing updates that we all

Wanted in the game though things like an update to the end were mentioned we came to the agreement that our number one update would be for an update to Minecraft nature and mobs the foliage and forer update if you will the part would be an update to the outdated

Feeling Forest Birch Forest Tiger dark oak forest and jungle biomes these would not need to be that large of changes as the mega tiger and cherry blossom Grove feel good to us just add some new blocks and ambient additions to bring life to the forests some of the blocks and

Features could overlap between each biome fallen leaves for example since the jungle is mostly foliage Mojang could add jungle ruins which would tie in with the current jungle temple like Igloo it could have zombie villages in it and hint at jungle villagers being in the game the forer part of the update

Would be new animations and or features to older mobs such as the zombie which feels completely outdated compared to the warden and the sniffers which are full of life and character with their animation and sound design wolves for example could have a change in how they fight entities which could bring more

Use to the potential wolf armor from the armadillo an update like this would be the perfect time to add some of the previous mob vote losers moo blooms could be put into flower forests glares in the Lush caves and the iser and possibly The Illusionist could be added

With a new enchantment system my friends and I all have differing play Styles ranging from building to PVP Redstone making data packs and being in-game Nomads and all of us thought this foliage and fora idea would be a good update would love to hear your thoughts Minecraft man died by an iser and

Illusionist Ambush while petting a mu bloom in a jungle ruin one of the things that I liked about this email was that it was not one player writing in to say this is what I think mojen should do to update Minecraft but it was a consistence of friends all of

Whom play in different ways in Minecraft as many of the player base does uh discussing what the possible updates could be realizing it probably wouldn’t be something like the end update and then saying okay well what would make sense and what would we all be happy

With and I like seeing this kind of discourse in the Minecraft community and I love the idea of a foliage and fauna or Laura and fauna uh update and I feel like while on the surface like it makes sense in terms of like you know you

Could have the moo Bloom to the forest you could bring in the glare to the Lush cave the way that Mojang seems to be marching forward updates the last few years you really only get one New Mob at a time and I’m not saying that they

Wouldn’t do a flora and fauna update but I feel like if they did um a lot of it would be updates to existing mobs perhaps like say new animations for cows and horses and you know maybe some new animation for a zombie or something like that because there’s a certain number of

Uh I guess new things that I feel like they have to use as flagships for uh for new updates things like a new biome and then a new mob in that biome but you don’t tend to get more than one biome usually and you don’t tend to get more

Than one mob usually and I and I feel like now that we’ve had like that big 118 update with caves and clips that they’re probably going to go uh in smaller increments and I don’t know whether Mojang reserves a new mob like a mu bloom or or like a glare if they ever

Get into the game for a Big Dot release or or like a big version release or if they say you know what we’re okay with putting this into a a minor release in between you know themed updates uh and so in one way I guess that could be an

Interesting way to look at something like a foliage and funa update that Minecrafter Mena suggested in that maybe you’ll get some big this works for marketing it’s a new biome or it’s a new update to you know this this animal or this foliage and then perhaps the dot

Releases over the life of that update could add you know either animations to and and visual updates to existing mobs which I think is more likely but then like maybe they decide well this is going very well we’re going to use one of these dot releases and it’s going to

Be you know the the glare update or it’s going to be the MU Bloom update or something like that and I just I think it’s an interesting idea and a really cool um consensus of thought from all these players that of all the things that they

Could ask for or could want in Minecraft they basically came to we want the Overworld to look better better and feel in my opinion I feel like what they’re getting at is that they want the Overworld in Minecraft to feel more like a modern game yeah yeah and I agree I

Think especially with the mob vote discussion right now seemingly dividing the player base in in a in a fairly friendly way but usually these things tend to get a little bit uh uh tribal I guess for one of a better word like people tend to pick a side in a lot of

These things it is nice to have an email that focuses on people reaching an agreement and they being kind of community Spirit involved and finding common ground um but yeah I I think there’s there’s some interesting aspects to this I think one facet of this to play Devil’s Advocate on ideas like this

Is that a lot of the Minecraft player base is going to be looking for new features and I think one of the issues that you run into with revision of older features is that it is harder to point to a feature of an update and say that

Was the new thing that came around this time and I think we’ve had that problem with the trails and taals update because a lot of the newer features have been things that were augments to additional like existing stuff so the trail ruins a really large structure with a lot of new

Items in it in terms of the pottery shirs and the um new music disc and the the armor trim templates is pretty much exclusively buried and was added to older biomes it’s not like a new biome that has this new structure in it it’s the kind of thing that you have to go

Back through older biomes in order to find and when you find it it seems sort of underwhelming until you dig down past it the past the surface and you see what the entire thing looks like I think the problem with making these sort of revisions to older feeling biomes like

Forests and and jungles and that kind of thing is that you end up with a few players who want something new and juicy to sink their teeth into just feeling like the stuff they already have has been tweaked you know it’s like putting new batteries in an old toy it’s you

Know it’s renewed with life for a few minutes but then it’s still just going to feel like you’re playing with all your old toys instead of getting something new um I I don’t deny that something like this should happen eventually because I think like you said the old biomes are sort of showing

Themselves at this point the ones that have not been dramatically Changed by the terrain changes that we got in in 118 you know it hasn’t felt like a huge overhaul to forest biomes to have a variety of terrain shape in there because they’re still just the same

Mixture of Oak and birch trees and I think beehives are probably the newest thing that’s really been added to forest biomes for for the last little while and so I think eventually stuff like that should start to roll around but whether it needs to be the focus of an update or

Whether it’s just something that can trickle in slowly over over time as they add new features I I think Mojang’s approach is going to be a little bit of both it’s going to be something for the old and something for the new in the case of stuff like trails and tales

Where we saw that creeping in even the Wild update I think started out with the swamp revision idea but then had to break that out into an entire new biome once they realized that mangrove trees really felt like they had their own character and there was the opportunity

To add mud blocks and a few other things so I think that’s that’s really where Mojang seems to stand on this is that why revise a lot of things in a small way when you can get one big revision and it feels like something new for the

Players you want something to grab on to yeah I would agree and I and I think that you know if I was to have one criticism over the idea that you know Minecrafter man and their friends are putting it Forward is that there’s an awful lot of that email you’d never get

That all in one update that’s that seems like several updates worth of of ideas and I think that that’s the thing and one of I think probably one of the keys as to why Minecraft has lasted so long you know as it enters into what 13 years

14 years now yeah I I I feel like that’s one of the things that keeps it uh such a long-standing game is that they do Pace themselves and and I think we’ve heard as well uh from the developers specifically Agnes I remember on one developer interview saying how much they

Like to carefully consider and think about what’s going in the game and it’s not just like oh that’s a cool idea yeah everybody agrees let’s do it it’s more like okay well what does it mean what what could we do to this idea in Minecraft to make it like a big deal

Like how does this really add value to the game they they ask hard questions of themselves I think when they when they add new stuff and I think that’s one of the reasons that Minecraft is so successful yeah when you have a long-term strategy like that you start

To think well this is a marathon not a Sprint and throwing in of these features right up top is potentially going to cheapen them and you end up with the you know wanting to one up yourself with future updates and that just leads to you burning out with the amount of

Effort you have to put into something much as the community is grousing right now over the fact that we can’t have all three mobs of the mob vote uh added to the game at once because they all seem like good ideas and good Ambience for the biomes they’re going to be

Introduced to and all of that kind of thing they take a craft person’s approach to this and making sure the experience is shaped to the point where there are very few rough edges um so this obviously naturally brings us into our discussion about the 2023 mob vote

Uh you’ve heard our predictions we were absolutely wrong or at least I was I will I will own up to being wrong about that because I was expecting fantasy creatures another Golem you know a bit more of a repeat of the stuff that we’ve had in the last couple of years and then

Jeb says cute animals and I’m like well what does cute animals really mean like you know anything in Minecraft could in theory be an animal as long as it’s not like an automatan like the Golems are and then they came out and released three cute real world animals and we went well

That’s that’s our opinions out of the window now enjoy our opinions about the three mobs they have announced for the 2023 mob vote uh do you want to give us your general thoughts uh up top Joel what do you think about the additions that they have proposed so generally speaking and this

Is going to be a little bit of a devil’s advocate approach uh I’m not overly excited about them that doesn’t mean I don’t like them I’m just saying I’m not really blown away but I think that that kind of goes to your comment from last week where you’re just like they save

The big explosions the Big Time stuff for the major you know releases that are controlled by mojing they don’t want the players voting on something that’s going to be gamechanging right and I and I think that that’s true of these moms as they’ve come you know through um I do

Feel like compared to last year and maybe because the moms last year were so wild and weird uh that we have a lot less information to go on this time around uh like it’s you get one little factoid about the mob and then you’re asked to vote on it and unfortunately

Because players like us and I think a lot of players in the game are excited about these things they want to know more you’re left with a lot of questions and mean like well that’s cool but how does it work or how would that be implemented or like what does that mean

Uh and then you’re asked to vote on your favorite without all the information and I always find that a little bit frustrating about the mob vote uh I’m assuming that the mob vote continues on year after year because it’s a good engaging tool and it gets people to

Watch Minecraft live it gets people to participate it gets people to think about the update and I’m sure it’s a great marketing Tool uh I don’t know how practical it is in terms of getting a mob in that you know that really deserves it but at the same time we’ve

Also seen things like you know the idea of a frog you know in Minecraft uh that as you mentioned earlier spins out into an entire you know biome and they have to separate things and then they end up with uh different variants of frogs that we didn’t expect like there’s all kinds

Of stuff like that that we don’t know and so in that light in a positive light you know depending on which of these mobs is your favorite there might be variants there could be different things that spool out of it that we are just not anticipating and as we’ve seen

Recently with the new experimental Village trading uh updates and features that are in the snapshots I mean as this mob which everyone is chosen gets to veloped over the course of time we may see opportunity for player feedback you know in terms of how it functions uh and

Whether or not you know it’s it’s coming together the way that players envisioned even though it was the one that got voted in so we’ll see um I always find it curious how this stuff rolls together yeah I think the thing to remember is to vote for the mobs based on the

Information they have given us and then to advocate for tweaks to the mobs once we know which one we’re getting right like we we don’t want to make any assumptions about the features that they’ve been given doing more than they say they’re going to but if you look at

The LA as an example I think some of the functionality that was added to the LA was not clear from the original presentation and it may not have even been part of their vision for the LA but with Community feedback with some testing in snapshots how does this

Mechanic feel for players to actually use in the world some tweaks were made to their follow range to you know where they go to drop off items to of being able to duplicate them using amethyst shards in a jukebox you know there’s there’s some things like that that weren’t necessarily part of their

Original Vision that the community has been able to uh if not persuade then at least advocate for uh when Mojang have been workshopping the mob once they’ve made it because the other thing to remember is that none of these mobs actually exist yet and I think this is

My answer really to the why don’t we add all three of them argument is that they are not asking for us to be given three things and then have two of them taken away we are voting for which one of these ideas do we add to the scope of

This update and actually develop into a real feature uh it’s like you know there there are definitely people out there who can mock up these ideas ahead of time but obviously these ideas have been through several iterations before they even make it to the cute animated feature where they are each introduced

Um so let’s go through the three of them uh starting I think with the crab since it was the first one we knew about um personally I like the design of the crab I like the functionality that the Crab Claw is going to add for players I have

No idea how the two are connected I mean obviously the crab is connected to the claw and is going to drop the claw somehow uh it’s unclear how but I presume it’s kind of like a goat horn maybe the crab jumps down from a tree onto a hard block like Stone instead of

The soft mud of the mangrove swamp and the claw breaks off and then players find the claw according to the video instead of killing the crab to get the claw or shearing the crab to cut its claw off or something equally brutal um the thing about the Crab Claw for me is

That it’s obviously a tool of some kind but Crab Claw doesn’t immediately say to me okay you can place things further away with that you know unless we’re crafting it into one of those extendo grip kind of tools it seems unusual to me that the implication for Crab Claw is

Immediately we can put a block further away and if we can put a block further away with a crab claw why can’t we grab stuff from further away that that seems like the kind of functionality I would expect from a claw is something that helps me pick stuff up rather than stuff

That helps me put stuff down how do you feel about the the functionality proposed for the Crab Claw well that’s what grabbed my attention for the crab it was the functionality I mean don’t get me wrong I like the design I love the asymmetry of it that it’s got a big

Claw and a small claw and I think that a crab fits into Minecraft in that it’s it’s a very unique even a a visual mob we don’t really I mean we’ve got spiders but I feel like the crab has just got that little bit of a different vibe to it uh

Especially if like in the little cartoon they it climbs things vertically like if it can kind of scale up a wall yeah sideways um that kind of stuff would be really cool um but for me I had the same questions you know like when I when I

Thought about okay well the claw extends the pl reach for placing blocks I mean just like you I went straight to a a toy I had when I was a kid uh and it took me a while to find the screenshots for these but this this is a a circus toy

Which is what I had to queue in to see if I could like find the image uh modern versions look more mechanical but the the thing that I had as a kid was a yellow stick with a crab claw on the end of it and a little string and a trigger

On the other end and it allowed you to basically like grab stuff it just it was just a silly little little toy um but that’s what I thought of immediately so I was like okay well I can sort of see how they go from you know crab and

Extended reach and stuff like that but like you I thought well I was using to pick it up mostly you know and so I don’t know the questions that I come into are like I don’t know how this is implemented like how does this extend

Your reach do you have to hold it in your inventory slot does that take up an inventory slot because that’s not the most appealing way to do this because it’s just we already have enough of in our inventory right uh my my last couple streams in that graveyard I have had

Lots of inventory pain because of all the different things and textures I want to use at the same time and so like so that’s a question is like how does it get implemented um do you use a claw to then enchant a tool that you have to

Have but then if you’ve got the tool in your hand you can’t place a block at the same time so there’s a lot of questions that I have about it um I do notice this and through the other mob the armadillo that um the mobs are dropping these

Things it looks like it’s not that they drop on death it’s like it’s a natural part of you know what’s going on yeah uh I we saw that with turtles they drop their scoots um when they grow up uh the I mean crabs Mt and when they grow um

Crabs can also just lose a limb and grow it back so like maybe the crab gets startled and drops claw and runs away and then just you know eventually it’ll grow back I don’t know uh in in Minecraft uh so I think that that’s that’s neat uh so if you wanted

To like if it’s a consumable thing like say what if you have to make a potion with it and and and drink it and then you have longer reach for a limited amount of time uh is 8 minutes long enough you know if that’s if that’s the

Time limit on it and I feel like if it is consumable while that would be a pain in the butt it would also Foster ideas like well now I want to make a crab Farm you know can I breed crabs can I in the same way that we have sniffer Farms

Where they roam around a pasture and they sniff up seeds that that you can collect and and then do your you know your ancient flowers with can you know could players do that with crabs where like they wanted several crab claws if they just kind of had a little crab Farm

The crabs would be happy you know they walk around they do their thing and every once in a while they drop a claw and then you just you pick it up and then you have several I like it does you know open up some some cool ideas but I

Guess it depends on is that amount of effort worth it for a player that wants to just be able to reach a few extra blocks yeah and I think there’s a couple of mechanical issues with it and and first of all like to to address what you

Just said I think um a lot of the mobs that they add that are real world animals have this pattern now of not needing to kill them in order to acquire the the stuff like it’s it’s kind of like a bit more understanding of you know stewardship of the natural

Environment and not killing stuff unnecessarily not feeling that sort of Blas about the lives of animals around you obviously the educational stuff for kids doesn’t really need to be stated anymore than we already have but um yeah I I like I like the idea of farming them

To get hold of this thing because I presume it’s going to be a tool and not some kind of passive effect or buff for either having one in your inventory or turning it into a potion because if it increased your placement range without you holding it then it would also have

To allow you to break blocks or attack at an increased range because what you can place blocks against is indicated by that wireframe that you see around the block that you’re looking at and if you can’t see the wireframe then you can’t place a block there but you also can’t

Break that block and if you can see a wireframe it feels weird and unintuitive to not let you break a block from that far away but allow you to place a block against it from that far away and so having it as a holdable tool mitigates

That but with that in mind if it is something you hold how do you know which blocks you are using with the Crab Claw do you have to load it up with block blocks first in which case do you need to open your inventory and add a stack

To it manually every time you want to switch blocks I feel like using pick Block in that case would be a good idea if they have a unique pick block behavior that allows you to load up the crab claw where the block you’re looking at instead of just swapping it out for

The blocks from your inventory um the other option is using the offhand whether you’re like holding the Crab Claw in your off hand and the blocks you want to place in your main hand and they operate in tandem or alternatively you hold the Crab Claw in your main hand and

The blocks in your off hand but that’s not currently possible for Bedrock Edition players and so whether or not the usage of the Crab Claw encourages them to implement the offhand in a more robust way for Bedrock players is another potential knock-on effect of the

Crab Claw being added and this is one of the reasons why this can’t all be done overnight you know what I mean like you you can’t develop something like this in a day because you have to consider the mechanical implications across multiple platforms how does this feel for mobile

Players to use that kind of thing um and I’m not sure how much internal prototyping they do on any of these ideas or if they just throw the idea out there worry about how they’re going to implement it later maybe have some sort of basic ideas but see what the

Community thinks but I’m curious how this Crab Claw would feel to use because if it doesn’t feel good and it takes up as you said another inventory slot I can imagine Builders just ignoring it in favor of just scaffolding closer to the thing they want to build right the kind

Of stuff that we the shortcuts that we already take to make sure that we can you know build an arch around a doorway that’s just like one block higher you just peel her up a block how convenient is it going to be to use this Crab Claw

Just to reach that little bit further um then again if you look back to our discussions about when they changed the reach on crouching uh you were excited and I was in in very excited about just being able to place an additional block further down downward like if you’re

Building a wall from the top down and you’re just kind of like moving along and adding three blocks as you go in that kind of pattern that you do when you’re building a large wall of a single block of material imagine being able to place four blocks as you go and how much

That speeds up the process so there are definite advantages to this it’s just how well it is implemented and how intuitive it feels to use how convenient it feels is going to make or break that as a feature the crab design completely aside I think the function of the claw

Is going to be the most contentious thing if it ends up getting added and I think that’s one of the things that’s preventing this from being the out andout winner for me is that I don’t know how the Crab Claw is going to change any other aspect of gameplay and

It’s impossible to know that until they start implementing it which they clearly haven’t yet and there’s a few things that I I try to and this is all pure speculation you know looking into the the text that they have in the article and some of the things that they have

Have in the different videos as we’ll go through these different mobs but one thing that they mentioned was just like its real world counterparts the crab is important to the mangrove swamp ecosystem which is why you can find it hiding between the vines of its mud

Tastic biome and so I don’t know if that’s just simply a reference to tell the player where you can find the crabs and you might have to look around to grab them they’re not necessarily going to be on the ground they could be up into the roots and up into the vines of

A mangrove swamp but you know if the crab gets in one of the features that it could have that we don’t know about yet could be something to do with a new feature in the mangrove swamp because of of integration into the ecosystem I don’t know what that could be but it it

It has some potential to add more to the mangrove swamp and not just be a crab with a claw that has something to do with the player and so I’m I’m hoping to hear this is why I want to hear more about like I’d like to hear more about

That kind of stuff to to see whether it inches its way up or down in my list of what I might be voting for crabs in real life come in all kinds of different types and colors and you know we have questions about whether or not the same the claw

Could allow players to break blocks as well as place blocks well maybe there could be a different crab for that you know I mean when I think of a crab I’m not sure about you but I think of a red crab on a beach is basically or an

Orange crab on the beach the kind of where my cartoon braid goes immediately so I was surprised when they said crab and it was blue you know with it with an orangey Yellow Claw but I think that’s great cuz it it go it goes outside of what players expect but you know beaches

Uh the beach biomes in Minecraft could use a little love um Frozen oceans also uh having different types of crabs in the same way that we have different types of uh frogs in the game uh could be fun for flavor it could also add functionality if that’s the way they

Want to go so maybe you have to get you know a king crab from a frozen ocean to be able to break blocks from further away and you need to get a mangrove crab from a mangrove swamp in order to place blocks further away I don’t know how

That’s implemented I have all the same questions that you do but there are ways I feel like adding a crab could be more than just the one in the same way that adding frogs it’s not yes we’ve got um three different colors and in themselves they don’t do anything different from a

Um behavioral standpoint but they do give you three different colors of uh frog lights so there’s things like that that could be brought into the game and it like who knows where it could go I do feel like the crab has a lot of potential but there’s just as many

Questions uh as I have like excited speculative notes you know yeah and I think giving it that amount of potential is one of the things that I think would sort of preclude it from being introduced in a vote in the first place if they planned to add that kind of

Additional stuff I think this is all stuff that players would end up maybe advocating for as an exp expansion to the crab idea once it got voted in um so you can’t assume any of that stuff ahead of time although I do really like in an almost a parody of those old iPhone

Adverts where they’d say there’s an app for that I like the idea of there’s a crab for that it’s it’s got It’s got good branding potential I like that um the other thing I’ve seen people suggest just based on the idea of being able to place blocks further away is the effect

It could have on the PVP Community provided of course that the PVP Community plays on a more recent version of Minecraft but um the ability to place lava buckets from further away than somebody’s attack reach changes PVP in a big way um being able to build a wall in

Front of somebody before they get to you from further away um the there’s a few things like that that maybe in a niche Community is really going to shake up gameplay if it is added and there’s there’s excitement in the potential of that I think for me when it comes to the

Crab um so yeah I’m I’m on the offense about the crab functionality wise but I agree with you I think it sounds like something that has a lot of potential uh let’s move on to the armadillo this is the one that will add life to savanas

Curls up into a ball drops a sko in a similar way to what the turtle does and that would allow the player to craft armor for wolves and I think you mentioned this earlier um I recognize that the average casual Minecraft player enjoys taming mobs and adopting a

Managerie of pets in Minecraft so the community in general is probably going to love this but I simply don’t care about the wolf armor I am not one of those guys I don’t like having pets in Minecraft I don’t use wolves when I go exploring when I’m you know taking on a

Horde of skeletons or whatever I I just don’t bother with them um the only example I can think of using wolves in recent memory is for the utility of them scaring skeletons so that you can separate out mobs from a general mob farm or with a skeletons if you want

Them to run a certain way they can run away from wolves um that kind of thing but in terms of the stuff I do daytoday I don’t use Wolves at all so I’m I am not the audience for the armadillo even though I think it’s a cool mob and I

Like the design of it more than I like the crab I feel like in terms of minecrafty animal something that effectively turns into a block when it’s frightened almost like the opposite of the shulker that turns into an attacking sort of creature when it’s threatened I

I like the idea of the the armadillo almost being the reverse of that um but yeah I I’m I’m not necessarily the target audience for the the wolf armor concept how about you I fallen in the same camp I don’t really see the peel of

Wolf wolf armor I feel like this is a tailor made feature for people that put sweaters on their dogs you know that mat that match their own this this is the thing I think if the armadillo gets voted in um I think maybe people are already assuming that you can add armor

Trim to Wolf armor which is a pretty big assumption because the most comparable thing we already have is horse armor and you can’t do that with horse armor it is absolutely something Mojang should consider doing if the armadillo wins that’s again another thing that I will say the player base should advocate for

Because if we don’t end up getting different dog breeds in game I think a good compromise for the people who love dogs and want more customization for dogs would be the ability to give them cool sweaters and so I think having additional functionality given to armor trim retroactively by introducing

Trimmable wolf armor is going to be a good compromise I think for people who want yeah that that level of customization over their wolves appearance I for one would prefer different breeds of dog you know in terms of and a and a an update to the

The Wolves and the dogs you can have in the game because if wolf armor comes into the game you can almost put a pin in any kind of different dog breed because they’re unless they keep them all the same size and they just don’t give anybody any small dogs ever because

I feel like it would be just that much more work to have armor for dogs that would also fit on models of different breeds of dogs if they were smaller I mean we’re getting down a rabbit hole here but like that that it’s just not something that’s high on on on my list

And I think from a practical standpoint too um early game you spent a couple hours in Minecraft and you very quickly don’t need a wolf to help you fight mobs like that’s just it’s not something that I ever thought was very useful Beyond maybe early day just to kind of see if

You could do it um I know that they’ve had some improvements but I do find the pathing on tamed wolves quite rough you’re more likely going to have them teleport to a weird ledge near you or drown than they are going to be of any use when you’re fighting you know mobs

Uh I do know that people sometimes use them for like skeleton Farms but I also know that it’s hard to keep those dogs alive so maybe wool farmer would be something that would appeal to Redstone Contraption people that want to make you know a skeleton Farm or something like

That and have the mobs die in just a unique way but like there are more efficient ways to do almost everything that a dog currently does in the game uh era wolf currently does in the game so that’s why I don’t really see this as um

A function of the armadillo that I find appealing I think as you do the design of the armadillo is appealing I think adding a unique animal to the Savannah will certainly help the biome feel more alive more unique yes um yeah I can I feel like there’s a little bit of confusion

In the function with dropping a scoot Turtles also drop scoots I guess they’ll have to differentiate the scoots somehow I guess they’ll just be called armadillo scoots and turtle scoots but I could just I and I know that the turtle scoots are used to make armor you used to make

A turtle helmet so like I they they have like a kind of a a crossover there but it does seem a little bit syy from stuff that we already have in the game um I liked the little personality of the squeal of the armadillo like when when

Um when he when little um mini yens when he tiny yens tiny yens yeah tiny yens yeah when tiny Yen startles it and it kind of squeaks um and then you mentioned the shulker box I just kind of see this like endless loop of like the shulker Box Grumble shooting a bullet

And then the armadillo squealing and hiding and then rinse and repeat you know like if you got them next to each other they become a good a good double don’t they little comedy routine between the two yeah armadillo dubstep uh yeah like it could be it could be cute in

That way um that the cartoonist to me and this is where you know I go off the rails there’s a really unique opportunity if they want to go this way with the armadillo I would love for it to be able to roll around in that ball I

Know that’s not how they travel but if anybody has seen R and The Last Dragon the Disney film uh tuck tuck is like an armadillo like fantasy mob he gets to be the size of a horse and ends up being a mount but when he first starts out he’s

Like gerbal size and he rolls up into a ball and that’s how he travels around and I just I think it would be really interesting and fun and Whimsical not very practical to have the armadillo like roll around like that now I don’t know how you get a box to roll around in

Minecraft I think it might even be funnier that way uh if that was how it happened uh but that’s the kind of thing where like it doesn’t really add any functionality to the game it’s just about flavor and seeing things now if the armadillo does get in you know

You’re talking about players advocating for different things if that is the thing that players find the most appealing would that or could that lead to well if we’re going to be updating the armadillo in the uh Tiga biome does that also mean that they would then update the Tiger Biome because I went

And looked up what armadillos eat they’re omnivores but they eat mostly insects like termites which was part of the proposal for an update to the Savannah a long time ago and so so like there’s some potential there if the armadillo is the direction that the um

The player base wants to go where Moen can say all right well if we’re going to go here then it might be worth adding a little bit more to the ecosystem of the Savannah to make the armadillo feel more like it’s not just added from a mob vot

But it’s actually part of a more um symbiotic update and and something a little bit more organic and so that could be fun if if the armadillo gets in and it ends up updating the Savannah so in that way it’s kind of appealing but I

Like I it doesn’t really add a lot of function and I’m I’m looking for a mob for me personally that is both appealing visually has some fun you know Whimsy added to the game but then also brings some new gameplay specifically yeah yeah um I I would

Assume that going by the scoot thing they will probably drop them when they grow from baby to adult like turtles so there’s some breeding involved there so again like you said they have to have some kind of food whether that comes with the armadillo in that addition or

If they just you know Recon that it eats beetroot seeds or something like that I don’t I don’t know I’m not sure which way they go with that um I like yeah I like the ball idea quite a lot um Aro plays in our chat went the same way I

Did uh and thinking of Road to El Dorado where they play a game which Wikipedia tells me is called Ama or at least the uh uh modern version of it is um it’s effectively like a hoop based ball game um where they use an armadillo and it helps them win basically because they

Cheat um but yeah there’s there’s some there’s some fun to be had there but I don’t know if it’s ever going to be part of armadillo functionality especially considering that we’re not supposed to be harming these creatures kicking one around like a ball seems kind of unlikely um so yeah there’s there’s some

Interesting opportunities again for the armadillo to be expanded as an interaction and I expect it would just end up with you farming the scoots to get more more wool farmer but yeah the concept is one that I enjoy more than the crabs but the functionality the crab ads is

Something I would probably end up using or at least giving a a fair Shake which seems unlikely for me with uh with wol armer and I’m sort of feeling the same way about the penguin idea because I love the design penguins are classic looking animals they have a really recognizable silhouette beloved

Character several animated movies based on them um but I’m not sure on the functionality the helping you push boats part is I think intentionally vague and I think players would end up having input into whether the penguin gets in the boat with you or my personal preference hangs off the back like an

Outboard motor uh so I think there’s there’s potential there for again players to have input into exactly how this idea is implemented and this is one of the reasons why they don’t want to just shove their own implementation in it and ship it tomorrow um I I think

They want to understand what players want of something like this they are quite clearly rockhopper penguins as well they have the kind of um frilly plumage on their heads so they’re not Arctic Antarctic rather Penguins so that’s why you end up seeing them on Stony Shores rather than in ice spikes

Or somewhere where people might stereotypically expect to see Penguins so they’ kind of pitched you a curveball uh right out of the gate but um I think the main point of contention with penguins that the community is discussing is whether or not the moving boats faster functionality work works

Out of water because in the video they state that penguins are much more graceful in water than they are on land and the majority of the community is interested in this presenting a faster travel option which combined with the current usage of boats on ice roads through long stretches of terrain in the

Overworld or in the Nether um that’s one of the faster ways to travel and so if you can have a penguin pushing you at the same time that you’re on this ice road is that going to make your boat faster um I don’t know if they’ll necessarily

Go to those lengths because there are some folks who already have trouble with terrain loading in fast enough for their ice booat roads to work but I want to encourage players to think about the transport options for let’s say peaceful players as a completely different um gameplay style people who don’t have

Access to faster transport options like elytra unless they use a data pack to import that in or cheat them in using commands um I think the ability to travel faster and set up canals and waterways that can be penguin enhanced is an appealing Prospect for people with

A certain gameplay style in much the same way that the increased reach option gives the PVP Community something to think about I think also if the penguin isn’t in the boat with you if it’s not taking up the passenger slot of the boat consider that it will be easier to

Transport mobs from different biomes say you’re getting a mushroom back from a mushroom Island to your base and you don’t want to go through the nether because there’s a chance the mushroom will die and you’ll have to start the journey all over again same goes with villagers if you want to transport

Villagers back to a central trading Hall from a swamp or a jungle or somewhere that you’ve had to get them in order to get certain book trades in the revised villager trading rebalance being able to push those boats faster get the job done quicker you’re going to be saving time

Overall if you have a penguin helping you push the boat so there is potential for that feature to be usable in ways that players dismiss too easily because they’re used to flying around with a lra I think the penguin for me I think has the most potential to be both fun and useful

For for those reasons you know like it’s got a great design as you mentioned not not a normal kind of traditional penguin like you’d think most people would would put in or think of if they think of penguin they think of like bowling pin you know uh and I think that having the

Raw copper penguin in there really keeps that feeling unique from a you know a visual standpoint uh the the boat functionality and stuff because of the potential to have it be like racing boats and you know mini games and all the things that you can do there for

Transportation compared to also you know that’s the fun part and then also the practicality of like if the penguin isn’t in the boat as the passenger then you could move moms around easier on land I picked up on just how much time they were spending with yens rowing very

Slowly across the desert or the Savannah mhm uh or no he was in a bad lands uh like that kind of stuff really made me think of like okay well like that could mean that the the Penguin on land could could help the player move the boat

Faster but then like in order to have that be practical and and something worth doing putting a penguin in the boat has no appeal because if that if that takes up the pth passenger SLO and well that’s just I mean who cares uh there are much faster ways to get around

Uh so I think there could be some inventive ways the again this is my cartoonist brain thinking like if the Penguin sat on your head like it’s in a crow’s nest while you’re in the boat like you become the Mast and it then somehow enhances your speed of

Navigation just because it can see farther because it’s higher and that’s how you move faster on land I mean that is all that’s funny Whimsical cute and also gives you a a cargo space in the boat you know to put your chest or to put your you know your um your villager

Or your other mob to move around so I feel like it does kind of do the best part of marrying what I think are the three things functionality fun and appeal like cuteness um the one thing that I think is concerning with all three cute animals I think armadillo and

Penguin being cute wouldn’t really call Crab cute um but I feel like there are a a section of players that none of this matters they’re just going to vote the one for the animal that they think is the cutest right sure yeah like if I can’t think of another

Cute animal that they that isn’t already in Minecraft like stereotypical like you know puppy kitten bunny like that kind of stuff but if the crab was replaced with something else that was really adorable then like I think it would it functionality would matter less and

People are just going to go I’m going to say penguin just because that’s probably what people are going to find the cutest and it’s just going to be like oh penguins are my favorite animals I don’t care what it does I just want a penguin to look at in Minecraft right and so

When we start to speculate about all these functionalities I feel like the majority of players that that are out there voting I don’t know if any of this really matters and so and that’s why I go back to like my earlier comment about the the MBO being more of a marketing

Thing for Minecraft live and less of an actual I guess at this stage to to your point at this stage for for me it’s a marketing thing it’s only after the mob is selected that then we get into the player feedback and the advocation for different features and really finding

Out okay well this get voted in because it’s cute but what what can we do with it now and I think that that’s an important thought to keep in the back of everyone’s mind in that it’s it’s not going to be interesting before the vote it’s going to get interesting after the

Vote yeah I I honestly think functionality is still going to be a lot of the community’s concern like you look at the LA vote for example I think that year the glare was probably the cutest it was effectively a grumpy lettuce it was definitely cuter than the copper

Golem even though the copper Golem’s like you know it’s a little guy um and then the LA I guess like maybe has the kind of fairy appeal for people who are into that sort of aesthetic but I I don’t think the LA was necessarily the cutest and it won out because of the

Potential functionality had and people advocating for that side of things I think the sniffer was the cutest option last year but I also think the Rascal and the tough Golem didn’t have enough functionality to make them more appealing than the sniffer and I think this year we’re sort of left with the

Same issue where Aesthetics is going to matter more because the functionality doesn’t seem to right make it really gamechanging or like anything that has a huge amount of depth I think the most depth comes from the Crab Claw IDE AA but not necessarily the way the Crab

Claw would function whereas with the LA it was like Hey something that picks up items and and carries them to you and and you know finds more items of the same type that’s a mechanic we’ve never really seen before whereas we’ve seen a mechanic of reaching further like people

Mod stuff like that in all the time and frequently don’t use them or you know people are just able to get closer to the thing that they’re building and I think people have seen inventory assistance mods and that kind of stuff enough to know what kind of functionality is going to improve their

Life and what isn’t um and so I’m kind of I’m on the fence about this and I honestly think if people just vote for the cutest mob then that’s at least a compelling reason for them to vote because like you said at the beginning I’m not super compelled by any one of

These there isn’t an obvious answer for me um I did make the joke in our Discord is it too late to repackage these as Golems so that a Golem can win can there be a claw Golem a Terra Cotter Golem and a speedboat Golem um but but honestly

I’m tentatively on team crab um because it feels like it’s the most impactful on the game mechanically speaking and I think about this in a long-term mob vote as design brief kind of look at the the situation where like if Mojang sees players voting for something because it helps mechanically with block placement

Reach perhaps they consider finding ways to augment other aspects of building with fure future additions because it’s clear that’s something that the player base would like on the flip side of that of course they’ve given the player base who likes building one thing so maybe they focus on other aspects of the game

Because they feel like those players have been appeased uh so it’s not necessarily A foolproof idea but I do wonder if maybe Mojang takes some of their cues from the idea of well we’ve seen that the players consistently vote for the type of mob that adds functionality to the game that adds

Certain beh avors to the game that adds something that appeals to a broad range of play Styles let’s focus on stuff like that for future additions honestly I think the average player will be much more excited about dog armor than I am so my strong suspicion is that the

Armadillo is going to win not even necessarily because people like the armadillo but because people love their dogs so much and I’d be fine with that too I still enjoy the designs of the armadillo and the Penguin and as we’ve discussed I think they have their own

Merits as mobs but I’m expecting that the armadillo is going to have a strong popular vote um they’re not necessarily like I I hate to say it this way but like the thinking man’s Choice um I I say that in huge sarcasm quotes um but I

Think they are the kind of thing that if people want that sort of stuff in game I’ve certainly seen people advocating for the idea of dog armor before this idea ever came along and I haven’t seen that many people say hey you know what would really change the game for me if

We could reach one block further when placing blocks so I do think that the armadillo has a strong contingent that could see it win out in future we did take a little reaction poll at the beginning of this uh Discord call where we record the podcast with our community

Listening in and uh the crab wins with 13 votes to the armadillos 9 and the Penguins 7 but they’re still relatively close and that may just be that our community is focused on a variety of gameplay more technical stuff more Builders and they feel like that’s a functionality that repres presents them

But who’s to say what the broader Community thinks for me the crab is also my number one but I wouldn’t be upset at all if the penguin won like I just I’m not really married to either I think that they’re both interesting they both could add some Whimsy and and interesting

Things to the game for the same reason that you think the crab is number one I think also the crab for me would be the most interesting and Broad reaching Edition uh in in some of the follow that could happen afterwards in terms of what it might trickle down and affect other

Systems in the game um and I put the armadillo at the bottom not because I don’t think the armadillo is cute I just don’t think that the functionality that it adds is really appealing to me um as far as the cute thing goes I I want to

Be specific in saying I think that only applies to this year uh I wasn’t thinking cute at all last year but I think again I’m glad that you brought up the comparison to the um the Rascal the laay and or sorry the um the sniffer and

The other stuff uh was the the copper Golem and the it was tough Golem sniffer Ras that was last year right yeah so but we had more information about those three than we do these three the new ones uh the sniffer they gave you quite a lot of information about what it was

Going to do the the type of plant that arrived was pretty um was a surprise but the fact that it was going to give it an ancient seed and that it was going to give you something new that you could Harvest and plant stuff I I just I feel

Like they gave us a lot more information I felt that the sniffer one not just because it was an appealing mob but because it also offered the most clear kind of functionality and the expectations would be met um I don’t see that in any of the mobs this year so

That’s why I’m just kind of like well like I they’re all okay and so if they all get in or not all get in but if if any one of them gets in rather uh I’m not going to be like Boo like bad decision like it’s it’s fine you know

It’s all fine and I think that that’s kind of why this year for me is just a little bit um little a bit less exciting than previous years I don’t think it’s so much that we have less information it’s just that there is less information to convey about these mobs because their

Functionality all seems to be fairly streamlined I think honestly they’re not doing anything as complex with these mobs as having it work like the sniffer does um they’re they’re existing mobs they’re natural world mobs I think something is said about each of them by the fact that they already exist so

Players have preconceived notions about liking a penguin already you know they don’t have to do a hard sell on the penguin people already love penguins so I do and and crabs are obviously like internet meme happy and you know armadillos have a a fair few kind of you know cultural touchstones reference

Points to them so we went through a couple of them already so I do think there’s there’s room for players to already be attached to those without them having to promise a ton of stuff along with each mob um but either way it’ll be interesting to see which way

Things go for the community vote that’s going to be happening at Minecraft live and you can vote through the Minecraft launcher a Bedrock Minecraft server that will be open for the duration of the vote and through minecraft.net logged in with your user profile so make sure to

Cast those votes it’s happening from the 13th to the 15th and as long as you vote within that range we’ll get the results at Minecraft live and we’ll get to see what goes on there that wraps up this episode of the spawn chunks and you’ll be seeing us simultaneously casting

Minecraft live over at twitch.tv/ piix Joel and I will be giving our thoughts as the spawn chunks podcast as the announcements unfold in the meantime you can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today at the spawn chunks. comom the music for

The show was composed by me and the spawn trunks is proud to be a listener supported podcast if you’re getting some value out of the show why not consider putting some value back in you can visit patreon.com thees spawn chunks to join our community where pledging at any

Level gets you an invite to our Patron only Discord chat you can listen to the show live when we record it in Discord every week and our monthly Minecraft audio hangout is the typical milestone for the end of the month where people get to discuss what they’ve been doing

In Minecraft that month there’s also lots of lively discussion going on in the Discord about the mob vote and there will be I’m sure Lively discussion about whatever features are announced at Minecraft live we currently have 321 patrons which is up from last week but there is always room for more special

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My name is Johnny but online I go by pixel riffs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixel riffs where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I also stream 3 days a week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for the YouTube series

That’s where you’ll be finding the Minecraft live stream as well I’m also the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which you can find through a quick YouTube search and aside from that I’m at pixel riffs on both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online links to everything that I’m

Doing online can be found at jen.com including The Citadel Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment I’m Joel Dugen on social media and Joel Dugen on Twitch where I stream Thursday through Sunday building the Citadel Minecraft server most of the time and live Lego on Fridays working my

Way through the UCS X-Wing starf Fighter it’s coming together quite quickly it’s very fun thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite get to the Polls