Unbelievable Minecraft Discovery: The Gnembon Phenomenon!

Welcome to the Spong chunks episode number 280 for Monday January 15th 2024 my name is Joel Dugen and joining me as always is my friend Johnny but you may know him better on the internet as pixel rips hello sir hello and we are very excited today very delighted to be

Joined by nmon from the team at Mojang working on vanilla Minecraft we’ve already been chatting a little bit on the render distance it’s the extended version of the podcast which patrons can hear by supporting the show over at patreon.com thees spawn chunks but listeners may be familiar with nmon from

Almost a decade of Minecraft YouTube videos in which he unpacks Java Edition game mechanics often leading to Farms which many of us still use today you can find all of those over at youtube.com/ nmon before joining Mojang he was well known for carpet mod a suite of tools which help with technical projects

Benchmarking farms and even introduce sorta mechanics like pushable tile entities these days however he’s a full-time part of the Minecraft team having joined Mojang in 2021 nbon welcome to the show uh hello thank you for your introduction I couldn’t put it better together um you mentioned all the

Important bits um this means that I don’t need to add any anything here and actually you actually forgot to introduce yourself but uh the only the only thing that I will add is that it’s really good to be here thank you so much it’s really good to have you and I have

Joel to introduce me so I I I feel like the the introductions kind of cascade on on the show which is great now Joel and I have been doing this for a while I think everybody knows who we are at this point so uh hopefully if they’re

Listening to the show and if it’s your first time listening to the spawn chunks of course welcome if you’re excited to listen into uh what nmon has to say today then uh obviously welcome on in and we’ve got a bunch of other episodes both featuring Joel and myself other

Guests even other folks from the Minecraft team so we’ve got a a catalog of stuff for everybody to Deep dive if it’s your first time here and as their first time here uh nbon normally when we log in we give our guests the opportunity to log in first so what has

Been new in Minecraft for you lately yeah so uh at moang we have actually a a small company server that we can use to play ourselves and with our families and as you can imagine that will be the best and the safest place to have you and

Your kids to play on so I’ve been playing on there a little bit uh join it to with the intention to play quite casually but you know I previously uh used to do a lot of technical stuff so I would say my Approach right now is more

Like Tech like Tech casual so I basically try to figure out stuff from my memory not looking at it at like tutorials block by blocks and uh do it all in survival without mods and anything and this actually gives a little bit different perspective to how

You play so when I joined that server like my immed mediate reaction was like what do I need first like I need probably like access to Sher boxes so imagine like with iron tools trying to figure out how to make a Sher Farm um and the design I had in mind was

Involved a lot of slime blocks so uh I first started to build quite a rudimentary slime farm uh put together from like using like basic tools um then build immediately then went to the end and build their a Sher Farm and this actually gives a little bit different perspective where if you

Follow like tutorials like they work great but then in in in in real life you don’t have flying and things can go south uh shers can get angry you realize that those designs really do not Encompass like the actual need of a survival player then you try to figure

Out act like how to how to provide the good access to different like components of the farm with Shockers they can get angry at the player and then everything goes to like terribly South so you have to have like I added like mechanisms to allow to remove temporarily Shockers

From the farm and bring them back so if things break then you can actually go there as a survival player and and like and like fix it like adding ladders everywhere so you can easily climb from here and there and then basically I follow this kind of like a rabbit hole of

Uh of uh technical builds so um once I had Sher Farms like okay now it will be good to build some sort of a storage system but then you like you need a lot of iron so I found like an abandoned iron farm that was already broken because like some villagers were missing

Some uh zombies that are used for bait were not there anymore so I fixed it like and then I realized oh I I I for like now I have now I have an Nitra and I need some Rockets So build like another Farm uh to uh to basically have

Some uh gunpowder and other other other mob drops as well then then realized um at this at this point it will be good to have something to cover your experience so obviously I went through a Guardian guardian Farm route recently being digging out the the perimeter for it

Basically just the bounding box of the ocean monument and learned a few things that I actually didn’t didn’t expect like when you’re building walls in survival like players typically sneak and then you can place up to three blocks below you and then you sneak to the next position uh but if

You’re under underwater you can actually Sprint swim while still having this sneak like sneaking enabled and that actually allows you to not only move way faster because when you’re uh swimming underwater you actually way faster than sneaking on land but also you have access to actually four blocks down so

Building those like giant wall like giant Dividing Walls underwat is actually way faster than above water which is interesting I didn’t expect that so you learn you learn new things when you are going through the path of uh Farms from from Farm to farm from resource to Resource and basally

Realizing that oh now I have now I’ve built a guardian Farm in order to have a lot of dark prismarine you have to have a black Dy farm so what do I do for now for that so it’s interesting to get into these kind of relationship and growth

Again so I uh that was fun I want to encourage everybody to wind this podcast back five minutes to where nmon said I joined This Server to play casually and then you just listed all of these Farms that you’re like I I had to have this

And then this I had to have that and I’m doing all of this with only iron tools and man like it’s it’s so cool to hear that especially people who are part of the development team now I mean you’re a a fairly recent addition but obviously you were so involved with the Minecraft

Community before this I think it’s so good to hear that you are still discovering new ways to play and finding new techniques on the Fly even as you are you know being part of the team that’s introducing new features to the game I think that’s incredible yeah and

And this is actually something that many people who I work with who maybe didn’t have too much experience with Minecraft because I don’t know there might be some uh people around like uh I don’t know company Administration or or things like that they don’t have to be Gamers uh

They often realize that the development team at MO is very interesting because in many game studios uh people develop games and they go back home and they play other games or they or they don’t play games at all while at moang lots of people play Minecraft uh all the time

Either during work or after work or like we have also like like dedicated times when we can spend actually playing the game to learn it to learn it better and and yeah that’s actually very interesting to see when you’re coming across an existing Farm like an existing technical project that is older or

Broken as you mentioned with the iron farm do you find it more challenging to tweak it and get it working again or or is it easier for you to start fresh and just do something new on your own yeah that’s actually I before I would say

It’s probably easier to to just uh uh like create from scratch something on on the side but in practice that’s what I’ve been doing I like there was an old Enderman Farm on the server the the like the one that’s uses the y y zero Enderman Enderman spawning um and it was

Broken it was missing the endermite and I was like dang it’s it’s like this is the most difficult part in building the of of this Farm is to is is is to is to get that endered mind in it’s like and I don’t want to watch tutorials for it if

I place it incorrectly another Enderman will get to it and and and it’ll be all in vain so what I did actually is is I redesigned that f a little bit so when you are in a safe spot that the that the players would typically be

Actually remove a bunch of blocks so you can actually aggravate Enderman on your own because they’re not that far away they can they can see you if you want to and this way you have a working farm that doesn’t need that doesn’t need an Enderman just uses the player as the

Bait so you can just choose up to 70 because that’s how many Enderman are there you just choose like look at all 78 Endermen and just wait until they come in you just you’re just all like basally Harvest them get get XP and you

Can just do it in waves and the farm is technically working is maybe it’s not as fast as it used to be but at this is functional it didn’t require an end endermite so and uh I think the reason that endermite is dead is because of the

Recent changes to mob reach thanks to you know mobs being able to reach anything that’s within their hitbox so uh you know who to blame when it comes to that farm being broken as well right so having said that I think in this case it will be that actually the other way

Around uh because Enderman used to have no actually they had a actually no their reach didn’t change at all um because they were Enderman are What’s called the standard size which is the Players which is the player with which is 0.6 blocks so all those mobs that are quote unquote

Standard size zombies uh Endermen they all have the same bre at at this moment of time I think this was just because someone when putting that farm together didn’t put it properly that that’s why so if you are like following tutorials on the on the internet typically there are multiple

Places where things can go wrong and things can go wrong in a way that you don’t even like if you don’t understand how the farm works exactly that’s where you can make mistakes that you may bite you later on down the down the line and

You and farm may work for like two or three weeks and then it’ll randomly stop and you may not know why so that’s uh why I I think like learning how the mechanics works and learning how the farm farm design uh Works rather than learning block by block is better because then

You can uh first of all you can make improvements if if you want to you can customize your builds same same as you customize uh like aesthetic builds yeah um so I think this is like the better way way to play it although this is also very very very difficult I don’t think

The game does a really particularly good job to explain those mechanics to players and that’s something where uh more improvements probably would be needed well it’s something where Community knowledge has taken up the slack for so long I feel like exactly there was a a thread on the Minecraft

Reddit that I was reading this week which I would personally argue with this take but they said Minecraft does not give you enough information to complete the game on your own and people were arguing about how even though we have newer things like I I say newer at this

Point they’re quite old but ruin Nether Portals teaching you what a nether portal should look like and there are a few players who’ve posted YouTube let’s plays in which they’ve completed Minecraft without any spoilers they haven’t been to the Minecraft Wiki or looked up other people’s videos to

Understand how to beat the game and advancements played a huge part in that being able to see the proposed progression of the game through that advancement tree can be helpful but there are some things that remain cryptic and back in the day if you look at early games like Legend of Zelda

Where for a start they would come with an instruction manual and a foldout map that kind of told you how to do stuff but part of the point of the game was still that you shared information with your friends and that anybody else who had the original Legend of Zelda you’d

Go to their house and they’d show you this cool thing that they found by accident and obviously now with the internet environments like that are becoming more and more scarce and I think game development Chang to match that with the introduction of more obvious tutorials and games teaching you

The mechanics that you will need to understand the game as you progress and Minecraft stands out in being fairly hands off with its approach to teaching new players but that is I think so often because the game relies on community knowledge and has done for more than a

Decade yeah this is not ideal uh in the sense that we know we understand that the game should uh should be um should be more explicit in like uh like letting players know exactly about the mechanics and and this is something that we are striving for with the new

Features to make sure that they are clearly understandable or maybe try to like provide uh provide I don’t know Replacements like for the lack of the where for like like for example with the armadillo you can you can brush it to get skut off of it but if you don’t know

How to do it or if you don’t know that you can use a brush on it it’ll just drop the skute r like like randomly on like from time from time to time so if you if you don’t know it you can just Chase those little like poor little

Critters and just collect the spe this way so uh and and there is also a value in in a discovery of certain like mechanics if you if you don’t if you’re not taught if you’re not told what to do but you discover something on your own that

Brings an extra Joy an extra level of Joy uh so it’s a very fine balance between not telling players what to do and telling players too much yeah we will get more into the armadillo a little bit later in our main discussion um but something you said earlier really

Resonated with me and you were talking about uh building stuff in survival and first of all not following tutorials but also being more reactive to things that went wrong on the fly and as somebody who obviously a lot of your tutorials are presented in Creative because that’s

The best environment for you to uh both show a lot of the mechanics and also not be bothered by shulkers when they’re shooting at you from a shulker farm or or something like that and it’s one of the approaches I’ve taken in my Survival Guide Series where I’m presenting

Tutorials and it’s so tempting to cut to a creative world to explain the setup for the farm that I’m doing but I’ve every step of the way I’ve told myself people need to see the amount of effort that goes into this if they’re going to follow a tutorial it really helps them

To understand how much time they’re going to have to commit to a project of this size I mean you talked about draining the perimeter for a guardian farm and that is always a large timec consuming project and there aren’t many fast ways of doing it if you want to do

It to the extent where everything is drained out there’s no water on the inside in the the area of the the ocean Monument that’s always a big project so it helps people to have their information presented to them but not be given the fast forwarded approach to it

Sort of be be seeing the effort every step of the way yeah and and uh this is a very good example of something that you know some people may actually perceive boring like how many times you can drain an ocean Monument but from my perspective the more I do it the like uh

In in survival the more I learn how to do it better and that and that’s also is something that brings brings me like some levels of accomplishment brings me joy essentially yeah I think one of the things that you mentioned about you know the farms and and scaling

And trying to figure things out has been one of my favorite things about bringing some of your farm designs into the Citadel in that we’re a small server and we don’t need 60,000 drops an hour or whatever the farm happens to put out and I really like the challenge of taking a

Design that I’ve found online and both scaling it down so that I know we can use it and it’s it’s something that I can accomplish in a reasonable amount of time it’s not overkill for what we need uh but then also uh adding the decoration you know you talked about um

Making things look nice earlier and that’s one of the things I really like about building technical things in Survival Minecraft is you’re bringing it into your existing world it’s not just in a void it’s not just floating in space and you have to if you have the

Right you know the kind of mindset that I do I want to bring it into the world and integrate it both functionally but also fashionably you know into the surrounding world so when it comes to things like you know digging out an ocean monument and and learning how to

Do that better I I I hear you and and that’s what I I feel like I get out of taking a technical project and thinking okay well that’s a really cool and efficient box but how can I make it look nice you know so when you’re playing on

On the server and doing the technical things have you have you started to go into the the idea of decorating your farms and and making them look like they are integrated into a multiplayer world I’ve I’ve always stried to essentially do that so um on like on my uh in my

Videos I typically would just focus on the farm itself but whenever I play it in survival I would never just take a functional box and make it so that’s I’m done a part of this basally part of the survival concept for me is to is to put

A story behind it put a building that basically represents that story and give a little bit more meaning uh one of these things would be like the guardian of from I built on the ccra server like three years ago which was like an encased in a large large large like zigurat and

Pyramids B structure that look like an ancient a civilization like the hanging uh Gardens of Babylon and there were interesting challenges there for example uh uh I wanted to incorporate water as the aesthetic as aspect but also I knew that there’s it’s a guardian farm so it shouldn’t have any like basically

Streams of certain lengths because then like in certain places because Guardians would start to spawn or so so this also uh even if you’re working like aesthetically around a particular Tech like technical uh build it’s also important to also know like what are the constraints of the technical build and

Try to fit the aesthetic build around it like if you have a hosle mob farm you know that you you that you cannot have any open top level surfaces for blocks because then suddenly mobs can spawn there so you have to have everything like either carpeted or uh put some

Blocks or tops or using the or using bottom slabs for example but that’s adds an extra interesting requirement for the build I was just thinking about the Hostile mob firms because I I found that challenging myself when you want to build it out and and add some things and you’re like oh

Man wait a minute this all has to be stairs or slabs or carpets or something to in order to not not not mess up all the hard work I did for for the rates do you do you ever do anything that’s like modular so that it can be rearranged and

And fit into different spaces like if you wanted to put something inside of a castle or a wall that it might be better if it was long and thin or tall and skinny that kind of stuff yeah so I think any of the any of the crop

Farms is something that uh typically the unit in that crop Farm is very small it’s typically a place where a crop can grow plus maybe a piston to push it like push it out mhm uh yeah if you think about like uh sugar can Farm or like

Uh like bamboo Farms but then how you put it together and what shape is your building it doesn’t really matter so there there’s a lot of flexibility where you can excel in like trying to squeeze all of all of that in another thing that I really want to get used like get into

At some point is uh if you think about U iron Farms iron Farms is now something where you have those individual cells of three villagers working together because three villagers are required to have an iron golem spawning but then many of the iron Farms use multiple of those

Villages of those villager cells and if you look at like a particular tutorial they give you like the optimal spacing yeah MH which means that your farm will be very geometric and like very like rigid like rigid grid of those cells and while it is true that this is

Like the minimum required distance between them for sample it means that you can actually extend them and maybe you can build like a custom village where you have those little like houses that each house is its own like a small module of a iron farm and I had an idea

Of like this kind of like a like a rain like like a train track that goes in between those houses and then you have iron golem spawning in in in each one of them so maybe it’s not an optimal uh layout and maybe you can make it faster

But it doesn’t really matter that much you can build like a custom houses in like uh not not not really GD gridlike structure more like or more like organically following the terrain for for example but still still B satisfying all those basic requirements for an iron

Farm cell that allow allow all of them to work together to form like a bigger iron iron farm and that’s where like a cross between like a technical knowledge and then the uh and then the creative uh aesthetic builds is really where it really um looks really nice one one

Person that definitely excels at that and we we all know I think about it is Etho Etho has been always very technical player but also he’s he’s able to put um a lot of purpose in in his builds yeah yeah Etho is one of those people who I always watch for an example

Of somebody who’s still learning about the game even though he’s been playing it for so long like his let’s play goes back to you know Alpha versions of the game and so forth but he still talks in his videos about I’m learning about color theory so I can compose builds

Better I’m trying different stuff with shapes and working in mechanics in an aesthetic way is such a great example of what he does it’s it’s really fascinating to watch yeah another example I think recently is quite interesting is the latest play through of Minecraft by Captain Sparkles Captain Sparkles have recently announced that

He’ll be leaving the main stream of Minecraft but he’s still putting up the last vanilla play play through and while he’s doing that in in hardcore you can see that he’s very confident in how he plays very confident in basically do basically going through the game even if

It’s in a hardcore mode where you can make a single mistake and and be gone he he really goes through all of these aspects without anything really that that resembles anything d d dangerous actually shows how the game can be play casually even on the highest

Setting so Johnny what have you been up to this weekend Minecraft I am to be honest procrastinating on starting my floating island build which is uh for nemon’s benefit something I discussed in the previous episode where I’ve taken some concept Arts uh from an artist called Greg fromo it’s a really cool

Floating island but with a shipwreck of a large gallion built on it and it is unclear from his art whether the ship is actually flying the island or whether it’s a ship that has crashed on the island somehow but uh Greg’s art is always grounded in one or two natural

Feeling details but then with the supernatural around them there are whales flying around the Mast of the ship in the air and there are just some really nice compositional elements that I loved so I’m in the process of drafting that into a build for my survival world but I can’t really commit

Long hours to it right now because we have some family staying over and using my room as the guest bedroom so I can’t use my office at the hours that I normally prefer to so in the meantime I have been streaming a little bit I’ve

Been doing some end rating to get a few more shulker boxes um I have also been irritated by shulka levitating me a whole bunch uh in a recent attempt at an end raid I completely forgot to bring arrows I think I must have just tucked

Arrows in a chest before I left and just you know removed everything from my inventory and that included any ammunition so I had a really hard time dealing with the shulkers in those towers and had to dip back to the Overworld to get uh some some arrows

Because just blocking with a shield the entire time was not working for me but the other thing I did this week on stream was play a bit more Minecraft Bingo which I’ve talked about on the show before uh it now has a very useful landing page at play Minecraft bingo.com

Which shows the history of the game the original logon 111 map and no einer is the sort of latest successor in the series sort of like how people carried on Sky Block and continued to develop that as a game modee no ner has been working on a version which is

Consistently updated to the latest versions of the game and has now introduced a blind bingo card mode so you can start the game having played a few rounds having gotten familiar with the format and the types of items you’ll need and the bingo card is completely

Blank and so what you do is you go around collecting items that you think might be on it and they’ll pop up if they are on the card and those will lock in but you have to find 25 items and you don’t know what any of them are at the

Beginning and that’s a cool game mode for multiplayer servers especially because it allows players to compete and once one team discovers that an item is on the bingo card the other team has more information and they can go and grab it but in single player it’s effectively

A test of your knowledge within a test of your knowledge in a sense cuz Minecraft Bingo is great for finding those obscure items and finding basically a shortcut to the fastest way to obtain something but in in that it’s now a test of how well do I remember

Which items might be required do I go after glow ink because it could be part of either a glow item frame or just the glowing item on its own when I acquire squid ink from regular squids that could then break down into black Dy or it

Could be a booken quill or it could be some gray Dy that I have to get white to combine with and it was really fun trying this out I eventually completed a card and it took me over an hour and a half but what I learned in the process

Of that was that Inventory management was way more important than it was in a regular Bingo run where I could just throw stuff out of my inventory once I knew I didn’t need it anymore at that point it could have been that several of those items were still necessary so it

Was a really fun way of testing my skills and a good way to spend a couple of hours if you feel like uh blowing off some steam in Minecraft but not committing to any large scale projects I haven’t yet tried Minecraft bingo I know there’s been some community events you

Know within ours and within um my community as well and I’ve certainly U tuned into to you when you’ve been been playing and I think sliced lime as well yes and I like I find it interesting but I’m also a lot of times when I run into

It online it feels like a speedrun like there’s that kind of trying to beat the clock how quickly can you complete a bingo card and I think for me I’d have to set a goal like I need to complete the bingo card before my stream is over

Not not in 33 minutes and 5 Seconds you know or whatever the the current you know Target is cu I I am embarrassingly out of touch with early game Minecraft like it’s been so long since I’ve done any new world stuff and I know that it

Would take me a really long time to remember how to how to do things you know like I I’m very often like even been asking my chat for like recipes for things that I probably should know as someone that does a Minecraft podcast but I’m just like I haven’t crafted one

Of these in 3 years like how do I do it again you know yeah and and like which which tools can I make with this like you know can I can I just make a wooden hoe If I don’t need a full netherite one yeah there’s uh there is some stuff that

Comes up during Minecraft Bingo runs that you just don’t interact with if you play Survival the way you and I do Joel like I think we are neither of us that interested in killing rabbits as of the gameplay progression at the moment rabbit hide is not useful for any

Particular recipes other than crafting more leather and we all have buckets of leather from cow farms and so rabbit hide and occasionally rabbit meat being on the Minecraft bingo card in no n’s version means that you can you know you interact with those items in a way that

You don’t they become objectives in a way that they are not typically in a survival playthrough n Bon have you done any Minecraft Bingo run throughs not not I mean not myself but I’ve seen other other people play it uh it’s definitely an interesting game mode or mini game

That I would love to try but didn’t have a chance maybe I should now yeah I’m surprised sliced lime doesn’t have the whole office playing it at this point because yeah uh both he I and um another streamer from Uruguay called Bruno Dani we sort of have this three-way rivalry

Going on a little bit I mean it’s mostly me and Bruno I don’t think slic really like gets into it that hard but me and Bruno will send each other our personal times and we kind of go back and forth on it quite a lot so it’s uh it’s fun to

Do it’s it’s a fun test of your knowledge in a way that feels very different to typical survival yeah I used to like watching it like on on like YouTube like Minecraft is also a really good game that is good to watch people play MH um and I’ve I remember like

Watching play like watching a lot of players playing bingo was actually also interesting what’s new with you Joel what’s new on the Citadel well I haven’t been procrastinating but but I have indeed been easing myself back in I’ve been keeping my streams pretty short uh

Kind of in the sub 2 hours 1 hour 45 2 hour sort of range uh as I am still working on the West Hill Rivers uh I’m working behind the scenes on updating some data packs and I had a list I I did take some time when I got back in which

I highly recommend people doing which is to take the existing list of stuff that you’ve been working on that you might have like have several pages of things that have been completed and just making a new list with just the in complete stuff so instead of an eight-page book

I’ve got like a four-page book now in Minecraft of things that I want to complete and that helped me wrap my head around what was left and it feels like a lot less than I previously had in my brain because when you’re flipping through an eight-page book you think oh

Man I still have this huge list but most of it had check marks so uh I am still working on the outside of West Hill I went through and did a lot of bone meal and seagrass on the riverbeds um thankfully all the hard work was done

Before the holiday so all the shaping of the rivers and whatnot um but now I’m going through and doing the really fun stuff which is adding points of interest like small docks paths things like you know that you want to bring a player down to the riverbank to look at or

Entice them to explore and in doing that the thing that’s left on the checklist is uh when I get down to like a small dock or a little path that goes down to maybe a fishing spot or something uh in a river I also want to take a little bit

Of extra time and decorate the bottom of the river just nearby you know add a couple of stones maybe have a little bit of gravel runoff or something that kind of stuff is still left um but on the East River I added a small Spruce dock

Uh I try to change these up but the good news is that they’re not very big builds they’re only like 5 by seven maybe and you can change a few things here and there to make sure they each look unique but then you can also iterate and

Realize okay well I liked what I did on this one in the north but I also like some of the features I did on this one in the west so I’m going to going to combine those and kind of make kind of a new idea and I never go into these with

A plan it’s one of my favorite things about Minecraft is adding these details where like you just you kind of walk by an area and go huh you know what a dock would look really good there or I’d like to make a path or I’d like to do some

Some texturing here and for the longest time I’ve had a lot of coarse dirt paths around the area and I don’t texture them until the very end on purpose because sometimes you need to move it you know two blocks to the left and if you spent an hour texturing you know well maybe

Not an hour but if you spent some time texturing things and then you have to move them it feels really you know repetitive so uh I finally textured the path that’s been there for quite a long time really enjoying the combination of coar dirt rooted dirt and packed mud as

A combination and uh as I get closer to the to the riverbank I’ve actually been using a little bit of path block as well in there and I find it really effective combining it with Spruce for of course all of my spruce trap doors and and

Spruce planks for for the wars and I’ve just been having a lot of fun you know uh getting that feeling of finishing up an area that you know has been a little bit blank for the last you know four or five weeks on stream it’s nice nice to

Check that off and be like all right all the foliage is done I’ve done a little bit of grass and bushes and I’ve made the path the way that I want and it looks the way that I want from different angles and so I’m looking forward to doing more of these because unlike

Bigger projects like a bridge or a farm or a building I can generally complete one of these points of interest within a stream sometimes too depending on how big they are and so that always leaves you with a feeling of accomplishment when you’re done something about the

Level of detail you’ve put into the small dock with the little fishing boat reminds me of one of those like you build this in an hour Lego sets you know what I mean I think it’s just something about you just got a few simple objects there you’ve got one piece that’s just

Part of the scene like in the boat it’s just sort of flexible it could go anywhere but the way I mean it’s also the fact that you’ve you’re good at taking screenshots and you know a lot about composition but something about this looks like the little the the

Photograph that you get on the front of a Lego box that’s like little fishing Village scene uh set and you just have a couple of very simple elements that feel individual and the fact that you’ve got a repertoire of those and you can kind of dot those in here and there and just

Change them up that’s something that takes a lot of experience getting into uh to building those thanks man yeah I and I think that that’s one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed learning over the course of the three plus years on this project is that you just now have this visual

Library of at any point in time if I want to build a little dock or a little barn or a foot Bridge of any kind you know uh it’s kind of fun stuff where like maybe you play on a shortterm survival server with a bunch of friends

For like a month and you you don’t have to make dirt Bridges like you can you can pull one of these Stone Bridges out of out of your mind and have it look pretty decent you know with very minimal you know blocks available and it just

It’s kind of a fun artistic Flex to kind of have that library of like I know how to make one that’s like 9×13 or 3×7 or like I just I have all this kind of stuff in my brain and I think the other lesson is is leaning

Into um the lack of plan like obviously you plan the city but that when it comes to these details you just kind of put them where your your gut wants them to go and I I think that can be um really freeing after being kind of like

Confined within the town walls for so long and the challenges of that space out in the you know in the wild when you’re doing landscaping like if you don’t like the way that that that Hill is just remove it you know or or change the the angle of the grassy null so that

It works just the way that you want or add flowers where you want it’s very freeing to kind of add those details and really make it you know feel like the way that you want it to look in the end nbon once you’ve built up a bunch of

Farms is your goal with Farms to reach a point where you can build whatever you want and you simply have all of the resources of the game available to you or do you find the Farms are the reason for more aesthetic builds do you ever dip into building something that’s

Purely aesthetic or do you find that your aesthetic builds are mostly centered around hiding Farms or decorating Farms from the more technical Bare Bones of them I think it’s both uh I like I always try to hide them and I always try to hide like either hide them

Or put something aesthetic around it so it’s actually part of part of my base or part part of uh my area that I’m developing um but all like but but but also like if you want to like build a castle you need you need you need

Resources for it and if you for examp example real like want to make one with uh let’s say dark prismarine as roofs you need to have a gardien farm to give you that pris that prismarine so it’s both ways but typically like once I build all the farms and cover them with

Aesthetic builds that’s typically all I have uh all I have time for so that’s probably where where it ends moving on to the news for this week we have an article on minecraft.net about Minecraft Legends in this article announcing the latest lost Legends challenge map for Minecraft Legends the team has also

Announced it will be the final lost Legends quoting the article since launch we’ve listened to community feedback and implemented a series of changes and tweaks to make the game better with that complete we’re now going to take a step back from development while we won’t be releasing any new content I.E updates

Lost Legends or Marketplace DLC for Minecraft Legends the fun doesn’t stop here we’ll continue having a blast playing the game alongside our community because those Rowdy piglins are showing no signs of slowing down plus we’re leaving you one last freebie the brigh eyed hero skin which you can claim now

On the Minecraft Legends Marketplace so Minecraft Legends launched in April 2023 um and now here in January 2024 9 months later we see development ceasing um it story was not wholly dependent on the same DLC strategy Minecraft dungeon had where it felt like the default game the

Base game was a self-contained story but then obviously as the DLC levels came out the orb of dominance was shattered and different shards ended up in different biomes and effectively to complete the story you ended up going through all of the DLC and finally the

End DLC brought the end of the game um I’m not wholly surprised to see Minecraft Legends ending development both because of I think the community reception of the game has been fairly mild and also because the story didn’t have more places to go from here it felt

Like once you complete the campaign that was it there were a few fun maps to play but nothing on the scale of rolling out DLC every couple of months the way Minecraft uh dungeons did I’m also unsurprised that the development sto uh I despite even spending the time you

Know to research for the Spong chunks I haven’t really seen much of Minecraft Legends on any screen or I certainly haven’t been thinking about it you know in all of the media that I watched you know the YouTube and the twitch and stuff I just I haven’t seen Minecraft

Legends I haven’t been looking for it specifically but it just hasn’t popped up in my radar you know yeah uh nmon have you dipped into Minecraft Legends much did you have a great deal of time to step into Legends while you were working on vanilla Minecraft I did I did

Try it uh I played a little bit but it was not really my style of the game and I’ll talk about it in the moment but once uh but once the game was released we pretty much knew right away that it didn’t really land it as we as we really

Were hoping for so it was it’s not surprised that the that the lifespan of the game is a little shorter than we expected U on the other hand like for example dungeons was doing really really well and was actually running for many many years and was actually was was

Actually received way way better and it’s still a very very popular game that resonates with many players um with game development apart from the core Minecraft which is on its own a phenomenon you get more or less success with various Ventures like these and um

One Can Do Better one can do a little worse so I know that the team has that was working on the Legends is now focusing on something very different and we also learned a whole lot about what went right and what didn’t go so well and uh I hope that that definitely has

Will have some positive impact on the future games that moan will be working on yeah it’s it’s by no means the team’s first like you know the first experience with this uh thinking back to Minecraft Earth for example um that was a really Innovative idea and a really interesting

Way to take Minecraft into a different medium but for various reasons didn’t work out you know on a technology level it wasn’t ready for a lot of devices a lot of devices weren’t ready for the the AR compatibility battery life was an issue and ultimately it came out right

Before a global pandemic which shut a lot of people inside so uh it was partly just a a I don’t know a miscommunication of what was required for the game and a lot of disappointment as a result of that and then obviously circumstances well beyond our our control um but I I

Think the team learning from this and the team taking positive lessons in that moving forward is is a really good sign um does the vanilla Minecraft learn a lot of lessons from spin-off games like Legends and dungeons or does that feel like it has a really strong trajectory

Of its own and lessons are more likely to be taken into other spin-off games I think uh vanilla Minecraft is like as I said it’s a phenomenon on its own and we want to keep it this way although like when uh when this when the studio is

Working on other games uh lots of that creative work that went into into development of let’s say interesting mobs or interesting mechanics sometimes um we just keep that and and we put that into into into the vanilla game as well uh what personally didn’t like resonate

With me with ls is was very fastpaced because that was the style of the game that it represented what I like like like about Minecraft is that you can always have this uh idea you can always step back and if you’re really pinched

You can hide in a one by one hole in a wall and just regroup and reorganize your stuff try to figure out how to get out of this situation and this similar was with Legends sorry with dungeons you could always is like move back to the area of the dungeon that you have

Explored and try to reconstitute yourself if if if you’re if you figure out that that the that the challenge Ahad ahead of you is too much and try to figure out what to do next so maybe that’s why it didn’t uh resonate with me uh maybe that’s why it it didn’t

Resonate with some of our players uh so yeah we had some lessons learned and I we’ll see we’ll see where where it leads next yeah that’s a that’s a really interesting point though that I haven’t seen expressed elsewhere is the ability to take a step back and the sense of

Recovery and almost like regaining peace that you can have in vanilla Minecraft where Minecraft Legends as you say is very focused on pressure and with it being a competitive game usually in the the player versus player kind of sense you feel like you always have to be on

Your toes and that can be quite stressful especially for a game franchise that is known for being chill there are obviously ways you can play which are a lot more intense and and put pressure on the player but Minecraft even through stuff like the soundtrack and you know the the reputation the game

Has had as a Sandbox game a lot of it is about taking things at a slower pace so yeah that’s that’s really insightful I I can see that being something that a lot of players will have felt but didn’t necessarily know how to express when there is a spin-off game like Minecraft

Legends or Minecraft dungeons does that happen in isolation from the Minecraft team I I know that you mentioned some of the those creative assets and things you just can keep them around because they’re cool but I mean with the Minecraft team being so busy are there

Any cross team meetings like do you get brought in to see how things are going on something like Legends or dungeons uh definitely those are not games that are developed uh by other Studios or even if they they are like developed with help of other Studios uh lots of the creative

Direction comes from from us and with so we actually do try to develop them in as one big family and this also boils down not just to the actual like B creatives and assets and stuff like that in the game but also the lore behind it so

There are certain elements of of the lore in in legends that come from vanilla and there are potentially some seeds in the Legends and IND dungeons that we planted to refer to in vanilla in some time so it actually creates this kind of effect of uh oh I’ve seen it

Somewhere in some other game and now it’s pops up in in vanilla so that’s yeah so that’s interesting um uh kind of like a development style I would say it’s really cool that it’s not done in in a silo because I I feel like that for me thinking about what it might

Be work what it might be like to work on a game like Minecraft in just like any other long-term project it would be a fun creative stretch to work on something new or contribute to something new even if briefly it’s kind of like a nice little coffee break you know even

If or when you know obviously the developers at Mojang love Minecraft but when you’re that steeped in it it must be nice to kind of stretch your legs and kind of get some ideas that maybe don’t work technically in vanilla Minecraft but could maybe see um fruits of Labor

Happen in another game or another Avenue yeah so with with with with like with Legends the idea was that that that game happened in the times way way before what you currently see in in vanilla right so when so that’s when all the creatures of the Overworld were living

Peacefully together without conflict so players would live basically among skeletons and among creepers and treat them basically like any other animal or friends and and uh and then they basically they’ll basically Unite to fight the common foe which is the which is the yeah which is the Nether and then

There is something in between that went like terribly wrong that now like creepers and skeletons turn against the players we don’t know what happened but we but through Legends we see how it looked like before so that’s uh part of like the lore we are just basically

Filling in the lore pieces and we just leaving certain things unexplained so so you can build your own story I really like the framework of that it sort of reminds me of what Marvel is doing with their whatif animations and you know exploring different side scenarios and uh little

Facets of the world that could fill out in parallel universes or anything like that it’s it’s super fun uh we’re going to move on into our listener email segment so uh if anybody wants to email the show and potentially get your question read on a future episode the email address is spawn chunk

[email protected] we have one question specifically for nmon which we’ll get into in our main discussion but first we thought we’d throw out another scenario and see how a Minecraft developer reacts to this so this one comes in from Erica with the subject of windowed chests hi pix and

Joel and nmon I like the ideas that you discussed in episode 274 and have some thoughts that might make them more minecrafty a cardinal rule of Minecraft that every item changes depends on resources iron blocks use iron stripping logs uses X durability ET Etc what do

You think about the idea of a windowed chest it could be crafted with a chest and a pane of glass the resulting chest would have a small window and display the first item from the inventory in the window that way you get some visibility without introducing a phantom item or

Tying up a precious item in an item frame Erica was engulfed by her own chest monster never to be seen again I like the idea of a windowed chest or a chest with window as it would probably be named in vanilla Minecraft it sounds like a straightforward way to display a

Hint as to the contents of the chest from the outside I imagine players would use it in a similar way as they might use item frames now in the game with the item that’s in the frame giving you kind of like a theme or a hint or a color

Organization as to what might be in this row of chests or or you know this individual chest uh I’m also really excited to have nmun on the show to talk about this because something that I lack is the behind the- scenes knowledge of like entities and how difficult this

Would be technically it it might sound like a great idea for the players out there but I’m wondering what hurdles it might have you know in terms of actually you know is it a good idea can it be implemented in the game so nmon what do

You think of of a chest with a window in it yeah I I personally feel on a little on the fence with that uh mostly due to the balancing game balancing concerns because like what that would make a regular chest better about like so when coming up with features you have

To not just think about what that feature brings new to the game but also what that feature potentially takes away from the existing features and how does it uh and can players U create their own uh situations where they can basically make this makes make a similar functionality as you

Mentioned you can use an item frame with an item on it and then basally and basally put it on on the side of the chest with similar effect effect um another consideration here would be performance so basically something that you would always need to render that item on top of the chest

Behind some window it’ll probably work perfect if you only have one or two or five of them but if if you if you build like a giant giant storage system um it’ll it’ll tank your frames significantly comparing if to to let’s say using regular chests like we do have

Blocks that have similar functionality for very specific use cases for example the Chisel bookshelves you can only use it to store books and you can only store a way less books than you would normally be able to store like in a chest but you you Al but you can use that to actually

Display where the books are so you can pick individual books as well so it’s a very thin balancing act like the idea sounds uh good on the surface and probably would work like in a modded setting but but like in in the vanilla game you need to think like do we really

Need that and like one of the good example of it of something that I know that there is a common sentiment uh in the Design Group of of like of like Minecraft is the existence of beds is something that’s basically a single block that represents a bed it means

That every bed in every build that you would see typically is the same bed um and if we didn’t have beds as blocks players would basically try to make a bed using uh combinations of like various walls and carpets and trap doors and May and maybe fences so adding some

Blocks that are that have very specific use case often times decrease the creativity what players can do with with with the game so it is actually a little bit dangerous I think so but that’s just my my opinion other people can have a different opinion and that’s that’s the

Beauty of of the game yeah it’s it’s interesting you compare this to the way modded Minecraft handles storage because I think in a lot of storage mods you often find displaying items takes priority and so a lot of the time this feels like the kind of thing players

Have seen solved over and over again and wonder why there isn’t a solution for it in vanilla Minecraft and the answer so often is to create your own solution with the tools that you’re given and going back to the your example of beds effectively being a one block solution

For that where more creativity could come out of not having bed blocks in the game you find players you know rejecting item frames in favor of something that I do with my storage system placing blocks in the floor to label them instead or now you have way more options with signs

And glow ink and the different color dieses and you can D text on different sides of signs even so that you have more options there I think one of the great strengths of recently developed features in Minecraft is that they are so considered as to have multiple uses

And not be so specific in their either functionality or in their aesthetic um there is obviously some stuff that’s happening that you can’t really use any other way like wolf armor for example we’ll get onto that more in a second but uh wolf armor at the moment is just a a

One use item similar to to horse armor in that way but I’ve seen people in the past use horse armor as a model which you if you invert it it looks a little bit more like a futuristic like a gun or something and then players in PvP arena

Games will use those as though they are weapons and you know they’ll code some stuff in to use vanilla textures and vanilla items but give them different functionality so there is example of creativity that can be taken out of even something that feels really pigeon hold

Into a a single use so for the main discussion this week obviously both Johnny and I are excited to talk to nmon about uh his history with Minecraft and for those of you that are are not up to speed from a Minecraft focused YouTube channel that launched in the summer of

2015 to now joining Mojang in 2021 numon has gained a reputation as a highly respected technical player creator of carpet mod and now a developer on vanilla Minecraft we’d like to discuss what brought you into Minecraft your exploration of the technical side of the game and your new role as you’ve joined

Mojang as well as you know features that you’ve worked on within the game but to start at the top we have that other email that came in from Dylan a what’s in a nmon hello gentlemen I was so excited to hear that the one and only nmon would be joining the spun chunks

For an episode I’m sure pix and Joel will cover lots of great Minecraft questions nmon what does your username mean what is its backstory how did you choose it thanks Dyan a so nmon uh I’m just as curious as to how you chose your your online handle oh the story is like

Less uh less exciting than then it seems like basically when I was way way younger I needed to uh use some IGN some nickname in in a game and and this was basically a character from from a from a novel that I was reading at the time for for my

School and I was like this is like a cool character lets me use that uh name and and that’s what stick and then then then from game to game I was like what should I use now for an IGN I would just use oh I just use Gambon and and

And basically there is no particular reason why I chose this one it’s Pro like probably if I would read a different book at that time or or or was or was surrounded by different characters or maybe when I’m watching some other movies at that time I would

Choose a different um name but I just I just stuck to it I just kept using it uh from game to game until I Stumble up upon Minecraft and I chose that as my player IGN and that’s yeah so that’s essentially the backstory nothing like super crazy but something that I’ve been

Using since I was very little it’s amazing how how those things stick with you right like there are references from like you know your childhood or your younger days that can can really stick with you and in my case having to effectively invent my username from scratch when I started my YouTube

Channel it was sort of based on previous projects I’d done before and a desire for pixel art to show up in the games a bit more but yeah it must be in a way kind of affirming to have this identity that you’ve carried through your entire creative life and see you know your

Early interest in games and everything all taken from one place and then taking you all the way to working on one of your favorite games must be kind of satisfying yeah it’s actually interesting like like possibly if you try to search for uh my nickname on the

Internet you’ll be able to like find some of my previous ventures in other areas that’s not Minecraft but uh it’s not it’s never like like connected to who am I as a person which I think is really interesting like what I do personal like in my like my in my

In my real life it doesn’t matter let’s it doesn’t really go in line with what gon is doing on the internet and and I feel it like great I mean in the sense that nki now I know that like now we know that I live in Sweden because I work for moang

But where lived before it doesn’t really matter it doesn’t it’s not that important or or what did they do before it doesn’t matter yeah I think there’s an interesting lesson in there too in that you know when you are choosing a username to do something on the Internet

Whether it’s streaming on Twitch or making YouTube videos or just logging in with friends to play you know an online game uh when you choose a handle you never know if that’s something that’s going to end up being with you for a very long time and so you know choosing

A name of a favorite character from a book or a song or maybe your your a spin on your favorite artist or something uh is is something that’s personal to you doesn’t necessarily lead back to you in terms of your personal life but then also because it’s a it’s a name that was

From another medium it’s it’s not you know followed by 11 numbers and and hashtags and it’s not you know a meme or it’s not meant to be jokey and I think that there’s some young people out there when they choose usernames they just kind of throw caution to the wind and

And do whatever they they think is funny at the time and um I am uniquely outside of that I’ve used my real name across all platforms that that I’m on but that was a choice that I made and and I’m fine with it um and as a young artist it

Was beneficial to me for people to say like oh yeah I saw him do artwork on this live stream how do I find him well he was using his real name so you Google me and I’m pretty easy to to track down um but I I think that it’s in an

Interesting way that you know um like my Xbox handle or my um I think my steam name is still a very old animation company that I started in my early 20s and like I can’t change it because the steam doesn’t let you change it and like

Had I thought about it at the time I would have much preferred to have my steam name as just my name uh I don’t I don’t know why I chose that that name um but it’s it’s one of those things that you know some things you just can’t

Change so it’s an interesting lesson you know when you think about these names that you never know like you just one minute you’re um playing Minecraft and making cool technical videos on on YouTube and fast forward to seven years later and you’re working at Mojang and

That name you know gets listed you know when you’re interviewed for developer you know videos it gets posted underneath your face you know when you’re when you’re being interviewed I think I think that’s really cool that it’s something that um you’ve kind of made your own you know and brought

Forward I’m I’m always worried about the future of Ninja’s career when he inevitably gets called up to be a martial artist and uh is he going to to struggle with some of that maybe yeah I like always like remember like I think iscal 85 he he was a different nickname

Before when he was creating his uh YouTube account and his YouTube and his YouTube account link still is based on his previous nickname that he was using it has nothing to do with his name it has nothing to do with his with iscal but I I I remember him like answering

Questions what what this this name I think it’s Al Victor has to do with uh iscal and he said just nothing it’s just this previous name that he was using that he decided to like Rebrand and and because of how YouTube links work you can’t change it so yeah yeah I mean

That’s the uh the hermitcraft recap channel uh started off as a separate channel that we ran for the foolcraft recap when iscal was doing that series with a bunch of friends and so uh at the time hermitcraft recap was was made on a separate channel that was owned by the

Hermits and eventually we kind of had a discussion about our own ownership of the channel and split off into the channel that we already had full control over and uh so the the URL where the majority of hermitcraft recap has found its success Still Remains full craft

Recap so we have to be quite careful when we give out the URL to point people directly through a link that doesn’t necessarily have full craft recap in it so they don’t get the wrong idea so Nan going back to the start of your your Minecraft uh career do you

Remember your first impressions of Minecraft do you remember your first session in the game I do I do it was actually I I very rarely get into the games like in the sense that I spend a very long time on them but when I do I I

I I I basically know right away that there is something special about the game so when I was very little uh I did play a lot of like Heroes of Might and Magic games uh then I had a little bre break and then uh when a friend of mine

Told me about Minecraft I was like I I I can give it a shot uh I can give it a try and I I opened the game I didn’t know really what to do like as you as we just said the game doesn’t really explain how this works like uh I found

Some tutorials on the internet how to change game modes I didn’t know what game modes are I was surprised that like Hostile Mobs don’t are not interested in me anymore block blocks are not popping out when I break them and I I was I was just switched to creative I didn’t know

That I did that uh I didn’t know what creative is I didn’t know what survival is then I started to like uh like create simple like roller coasters and I was like this this is this this this game is really interesting where we can build from blocks entire setups like Lego for

Like like Legos for computer and but then I like when I realized okay not okay then I watch watched a few playthroughs on on YouTube which were quite popular at the time um how to survive and thrive your first night I basically realiz okay now that’s

How you play it and then I opened the game started the seat and one of my first impressions of the game were were basically terrifying squids I thought from day one that squids are hostile mobes because when they open their their tentacles you have a big mouth there and I thought those

Are jaws that will bite you and I remember maybe I maybe I like suffocated and underwater or basically drowned maybe that’s why I took damage but I thought those were actually connected to those squids that trying to eat me and I was and I was and I was at the beginning

Trying to really avoid Rivers because I thought this is where the this is where the biggest terrified best terrifying creatures are and the only safe place is on the land and then at at the end like when I realized that squids are like the most peaceful and the most

Um passive mobs really that just go about their life and don’t do anything to the player I was like okay that was a bad judgment but that’s what like the artwork of like this Open Jaw uh it was like uh B basally created that false false impression on me and I

Still have that uh in my mind I still laugh laugh about it I think this was interesting and that kept that kept me in so I guess this worked out and you uh you laugh about it now as you farm them for millions of ink sacks to go along

With your guardian farm right that’s the we’ve already heard the end of this story at the top of the episode is that you’re you’re now uh you know punishing squids for scaring you so badly the first time yeah but if if you if you

Take a look at at its at its texture and and and in its animation I wouldn’t blame a younger me to basically judge incorrectly that this might be a scary mob oh absolutely I’m I’m right there with you it is terrifying the first couple of times you

Encounter them but then I I always realize that they’re swimming away from me and if they swim towards you then they have to swim kind of head first so maybe yeah you get a slightly different impression but I can imagine not wanting to spend time around them for too long I

Could see that connection as well because the only other thing in the game that has multiple legs like that as a spider and they’re kind of like spiders of the sea I I can see that you know anybody that has like Arachnophobia I can see them maybe not being afraid of

Octopus and squid but also being like a little irked out like that’s more legs than I’m comfortable with you know I I can see that being something that people might come to a conclusion on right anybody who’s seen those old like Creature Feature be movies like Deep Rising or whatever where there’s like

The the villain is a sea monster that drowns a cruise ship or whatever you can right you can you can make those connections so once you got over your fear of squids what brought you into the more technical side of the game I think it was because of basically once I

Started playing the game I I also realized that the game is also interesting to be played as a backseat game in a sense in the newer setting where basically you would basically watch people on the on the YouTube play it it’s basically like the modern approach to back seat to to bisy back

Seat gaming and I seen like players like like suzuma void and Etho play it and they were making certain Contraptions and decisions and I also played the game myself and I was like but you can do it better you can do it a little bit like um I figured out

That it’s not true uh that you that you can actually get that done in a better way and I was like the only way really to con to convey it was to figure out how to record the game and also put it on on YouTube and basically

Maybe try to message those those people or just basically try to send the message that maybe this is the better way to do it I think one of my first videos was about uh how to set up better like a grid of TNTs to basically blow up an area uh that was

Like a response to me watching somebody else doing it according to my feeling my gut feeling not in the best way uh and then another was uh a sand conversion Farm basic you back in the days you could convert one color of sand into another color of sand like yellow

To to Red using some very weird and bug and I think Panda who is now on the moang team as well he was basically he basically had a had a had had a stream and he experimented with with that and I came up in my mind how to do it in a

Simpler way and I made a little little video about it and I think that’s how it started basically trying to trying to share with other people uh how to Sol things in the game like basically treating this as like a puzzle game where each technical challenge is is

It’s its own puzzle I really like that that approach came from an education standpoint like not a you’re doing it wrong it’s a oh that’s interesting I think I might be able to hone that I might be able to craft that into either a more concise way or explain how it’s

How it’s working and provide an alternative perhaps better for your situation way to do it I I like that approach so much better than what you often see which is like in the YouTube comments of like you’re doing it wrong and and I think that that’s that’s a

Really cool way and it’s really interesting that your pull into technical Minecraft was creating content so not just you know for your own satisfactory of crunching numbers and and going through that the the inside of the game but like sharing it was was a drive to get you more into the technical

Side yeah and then uh going into like uh then further mods and more technical aspects was basically I realized that the game really is an open source in the sense that you can have when you’re modding at you also have access to the to the source code so if you are trying

To research some very very weird behaviors and like basically cross behaviors between different blocks and entities uh in order to get like the gold truth you can basically go into the game and try to read it and then not many people are able to do that uh but

Then I think my role and my kind of like the vision of what I’m supposed to do is when I learn something I should just very quickly uh share it with other people so they can have that knowledge even if they are not able to like read the

Source code of the game uh so that’s basically what I really wanted to do back in the days and that also brought me into into modding because once you are into into source code reading and and basically game an game analysis from this angle you basically quickly realize

That with a few tweaks you can actually make the game better or the game better according to your particular needs and then you basically start releasing that as a mod so that’s how it started was that something you had experience in before game development or was Minecraft really the first game that encouraged

You to step into learning what the code meant and and understanding it on that level from the game development perspective yes this was the first my first uh my first for Bally foray into game development uh obviously I do have a programming background and that was not the problem but that actually taught

Me quite a bit of like how to design a game and how Minecraft is designed and and so that uh really feels like an origin story for what you’re known for outside of uh your uh YouTube channel and working for Mojang now which is carpet mod and I think it’s really

Interesting that you’ve outlined this desire for the gold truth as you put it like the utmost understanding of how everything functions and how efficient things are it’s something that I have often wondered about my real life like if I could know exactly how many pens I

Have used over the course of my life if there was something like the Minecraft statistics page for real life that that would be absolutely fascinating but you’ve gone beyond what Minecraft’s statistics can really give you or at least can give you in terms of they’ll show you what the player does but not

What the Farms do and so what was the path to deciding hey what I really need is something that can track the output of farms like uh at what point did that start to become the roadblock that you realized you needed to go through yeah in many cases that was actually for the

For the presentation for uh for the YouTube content because like uh I can I can try to understand a particular mechanic myself and I can read into it and I can and I can explain to my like to myself clearly how things work and I

Can use it um as I learn it but then when I need to present it to other people it’s better to have some visuals on the screen and to show EX exactly what’s going on and then for that you realize that maybe I need some extra

Tools like to draw things on this on in the game or maybe I need some extra uh tools to actually measure things to show yes like be in between these two approaches this one is better not because I know it should be better but here are the numbers here is the proof

That this approach like for example causes the game to to like trigger certain certain Behavior more often and I think that’s where building of the mods that support that Discovery uh started so with carpet mod being something that you you know you created to help communicate the the video and

And content that you were making what’s the backstory of going from that point to becoming a part of the Mojang team and working on Minecraft I mean the sense that uh of being part of of the of the ccraft crew we were invited in 2019 I believe to Nashville in ten in

Tennessee for Minecon and that’s where also we met uh we met the developers the developers met us we knew each other from like the discords and from YouTube from various like content places but this was like the first place where we could actually uh see each other in face

And basically be able to chat about the game so that’s basically where where that connection started and because I was basically looking into like the the game mechanics how it all works out together uh basically that’s what uh game developers are into and that’s what

Interest them as well so we kind of uh share the common know share the common language between us so that’s actually something that um I think we resonated quite well it’s great when you uh you you make those connections early and you kind of think well this could just be

Like a solid friendship or could lead to like more opportunities and then the the fact that you then get to go and work on the game is is fantastic I mean let’s let’s chat about some of your work and in particular the latest additions that we’ve seen to the game in snapshots and

And betas which are the armadillo and wolf armor like I was pretty surprised to learn that you worked on these features directly and I think it’ll probably surprise a few of our listeners as well because what you are known for is the technical side of things the

Under the hood statistics and more kind of block based stuff and so uh I wanted to really kind of pick your brain about the armadillo and wolf armor starting with were you and your colleagues on the development team were you surprised that the armadillo won the 2023 mob vote uh

I’ve read Zan’s blog which is like a personal side thing and not any kind of official Source but he said that a lot of people on the team were expecting either the penguin wins because it’s cute or the crab wins because the functionality might be useful to people

So were you surprised the armadillo one at uh first maybe yes but very quickly like if You observe the polls it was quite apparent that wolf armor is something that really resonates with a lot of players of different players play styles that uh really like the having a

Pet as pet aspect in the game but this was not really that fulfilled and uh in uh the and in this year’s m both those three options that players had they were they they were basically an animal plus some basically trait attached to it and uh among those

Those three options we know that for the armadillo uh the the trade part was like the biggest aspect not the not the armadillo itself so it was not a surprise to me that armadillo won that’s essentially it uh we knew that the basic that pairing it with the wool farmer

Would be would make a very strong candidate for a lot of players yeah yeah and it’s something that I think we are getting more emails and you know you know questions here on the show related to the wolf armor side than the armadillo side so I think those those

Instincts are proving very well founded um so once the armadillo wins the 2023 mob vote uh one thing I’m really curious about from your side of things is how does the development team take ownership of new features like a lot of these are going to have been generated beforehand

The community is given three options but then do you call dibs on working on the armadillo is it assigned to you by your department lead do you just kind of have a big discussion about it and how collaborative is that process once you start working on those features directly

So to some extent yes you have you can say that I’m interested in working in this feature and I maybe not interested in working in that feature and if there’s enough people that uh agree together that what they really like prefer to work on then there is no

Problems in like taking like one person take taking one aspect another taking basically something else one thing that is important to note is that there are two distinct uh uh development groups in in moang gameplay uh one is working on the current update the big update for

The year and the other group is like working on like ex external things that that are around it and often those those like groups inter intertwine so I worked on summer 23 which was the which was the tales and trails update and uh naturally the team that worked on pre-life to work

On the features that we would announce and also share immediately after life we’re basically focusing on that while we finished the development on the on the tales and trails so now uh the team that is focusing on on on the on the summer 24 update um is they are focusing on that well

Things like a mob vote is uh put on the on on that now smaller team which is responsible for all the additional content for example the changes to the to the like the changes and improvements to the decorated pot uh that you can use it as a container or the or the bat

Rework the basically battery model was something that we’ve done in the in that smaller Development Group and uh that’s also something that we got tasked with which is the AR armadillo and wolf armor or the mob vote winner and basically that’s that’s what I’m working on right

Now and also that’s why this is not part of the summer 24 update uh so it’s basically it with something that uh came to surprise to some people because on jav on Bedrock it was it was released under under its own development toggle and uh because because on Bedrock you

Have you have releases almost every month uh while on Java our next next next minor release will actually contain the Ramadan Woolf farmer which is later in the year but it’s like now straight in main so we don’t have to enable any toggles to actually have armadillos

Which is an indication that this is not part of the big update that will actually come earlier yeah and it makes sense for you working on those as two separate Apartments but yeah from a player perspective I was certainly surprised that it wasn’t behind the experimental toggle at first I thought

There’ been some kind of mistake but then realizing that the team is now committed to developing little tweaks to additional features and minor features like that for these minor decimal point updates it doesn’t need to be something that comes up in 1.21 and the armadillo and wolf armor only really affect things

That are already in the game like wolves so I think it’s a very smart approach to development especially if it means you can put this thing in the player’s hands a little bit earlier and work with the community on different iterations of it which is what you’re doing right now um

So uh considering that you’re known for focusing on more technical aspects of the game is it a challenge for you to code something like the armadillo and and wolf armor I mean to the player obviously these feel very different to blocks and dispenser interactions and things like that but do they feel

Different to code to you or is this absolutely in your wheelhouse uh this is something that you learn it’s not that very difficult and uh different mob behaviors and mobs themselves uh didn’t interest me that much before like I as I said like as you

Said like I was more into like block and blocks and how blocks react to each other um but mobs works as as fine I mean I don’t see any big challenges basally for that it’s it is pretty it is it is it is it is pretty

Interesting work to work on the mobs as well and so the challenge comes from getting it to a place where the community is happy with it right which I expect is a a more abstract challenge than something you can handle just by fine-tuning the code so is there

Anything left to try with the armadillo and wolf armor are you happy with where it is right now or is the team still kind of workshopping some stuff is there anything about that that you can tell us yes so uh something that we’ve uh we’ve done differently this year uh comparing

To for example the previous years with previous uh mobs that we released is uh we basically wanted to share our work way earlier in the development Pro like process than than before if you for example look at the at the sniffer sniffer was uh worked on for like about

About half a year and was basically released in the snapshots when it was pretty much done and if if you learn a little bit about the development process for games and like the certification that we have to go through uh for Xbox and also like there are dependencies

That we have to follow through with things like merchandise um departments and like like all those like little like plushies of the mobs they need to be made on time and they need to be designed and made on time for the uh for when the mobs are

Out they need to know which side of the face the armadillo’s eyes are going on so they can turn it into a plushy right exactly uh so all of that all of that needs to be finalized pretty early in the development process and with things like

Uh with things like sniffer it was kind of developed um behind the curtains and then it was basically B basically revealed to the public and any feedback that was taken really we couldn’t apply it right away without any like extra hurdles so with armadillo and Woolf armor our basically

One of our takes was that first of all show the community that we can actually develop mobs and MOB related features quickly so the voting was done in October and two months after there was the first snapshot where armadillo and wolf armor was was like released it was

Also released in a kind of like a very bare form so armadillo is essentially an animal that spawns in in savanas exactly that was shown and and basically you can obtain skuts from them and you can craft those cutes into wolf armor and you can put that wolf armor similarly to horse

Armor on on your pet and that gives a little bit more armor to it and that’s it uh and that’s it for now this we actually intending to work on it more uh here what the comp’s opinions are like where the dev where the development they they feel is lacking where the the

Development should go um and because of that we are able to actually adapt and because we do it early on we can change the design as much as we want right now and basically and basically direct the feature where we wanted to go like where people actually that our players wanted

To go for example now we know that in terms of like how much you care for armadillo versus wol Armor we know that the split is roughly 20 30% towards arm 70% towards wool farmer which means that we uh we treat the both features as equally important but we know that we

Should spend more time on making the wool farmer as bestes as we can make comparing to making armadillo as interesting mob as armadillo can be yeah yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and it’s putting the community’s chief interests at the Forefront of developing

These features right and yeah I I I absolutely agree it seems like the community was much more excited about wolf armor than they were about the mob but there are still going to be those people who love armadillos you know they’re part of you know maybe they’re from somewhere like Texas where

Armadillos are relatively common and they’ll consider them part of the landscape around them so it feels like something they can identify with more ingame if mobs from you know animals from their local ecosystem are present in Minecraft but then the majority of people are going to be thinking well one

How can my dog die less and secondly how can I make my dog look pretty um so is there is there going to be more work with the art team there on like the Aesthetics of wolf armor can you say much about that or is that still something you’re uh you’re kind of

Working on behind the scenes we are still working on on how to do it or what what would be the best way to do it but we know that both the Aesthetics of the wool farmer and uh as well as the functionality of it like how it should

Work are two very important things that lots of players really care about if you think about like uh if you think about like going with you with your pet for an adventure a player has this advantage that when a player dies a player responds so you can pretty much get your

Stuff together go back where you ended up and and then basically try to reclaim your things and continue from where you where you left off with uh with with Wolves and dogs that are meant to be as well as combat basically combats like combat creatures you you currently don’t

Have that chance like if a wolf dies it dies so we have to figure out how to make it a comparable experience in the sense that uh not only will your wolf will be will be stronger but also if you are are in a pickle players would probably likely die themselves rather

Than let their wolf die and you want to make sure that maybe uh if you make some mistakes early on it’s not it’s not as SP punishing for your pet yeah and that that’s something I kind of put together in my latest episode about the snapshots and and

Where I featured wolf armor and I I had a fun time using a wolf in combat for the first time in a long time and was able to kind of observe Its Behavior and figure out what felt still missing about it and you touched on the the main thing

Which is that yeah wolves don’t respawn and the player does and hostile mobs are respawning infinitely around you so sooner or later the wolf is going to be put under enough pressure that it becomes a risk but also players are still so attached to dogs in the real

World that they aren’t willing to see wolves as a disposable resource in the way they might seem other things and so that’s uh not necessarily a mindset that modern Minecraft wants to promote like you’re not trying to make wolves more disposable you’re going the other way you’re trying to make them feel more

Like stalwart companions that can stay with you and not suffer the same risks while still keeping them balanced and it must be a really difficult line to walk yeah and and and that’s where I think Community feedback early on is very is very important to us so we

Observe like what player suggestions are and what player think that uh the armor should help them with uh will which will be able to like Focus Us in areas where uh where uh where players really need the wolf armor to go as well as armadillos themselves like uh it’s a

Cute animal yes it and it checks checks that box right now but maybe what are the other interesting mechanics that we can introduce to make them more more unique and we have a few ideas I think we will be starting the uh the like the snapshot series uh very soon I think

This Wednesday is the first one that we are planning for we’ll see how this goes but there might be some surprises for Arad lovers I’m very excited to hear that that’s really cool and like you said given that these are still early in their development it’s sort of unusual

For players to have this much still to anticipate with a feature like that so that’s really cool um so many of our listeners probably expected you to be here talking about the crafter and the recent addition of the tick command um because they’re fairly similar to pre-existing carpet mod features so I

Imagine hopefully those listeners are still with us they’re wondering why we’ve been talking about the armadillo for so long um but I was wondering if you could give us some insight into what role you played in bringing these features to vanilla Minecraft were they something that you pitched to the team

Did the team approach you when you joined for a more vanilla implementation or were these features mostly worked on by other developers so it depends which feature you ask uh for because uh for the like for the for the for the crafter when I joined it became apparent that

The the entire team was was having discussions about how the automatic crafting should be done in the game uh so this was not a New Concept and and uh however I’m I’m hoping that some of my work that I’ve done through mod development had some influence definitely on those on those prototypes

That was that were basically floating around the office and uh also like the team that was working on the actual implementation for the uh for like for the summer 24 we chatted quite a bit about like the details or what do you think like this should behave like uh

Like to have like a good block that is very flexible towards like the technical players and allow a lot more uh creativity through automation but also is easy to use for players that that uh don’t have that those technical skills but want to use it on the basic aspects

Of it that’s why we came up with the idea of like toggleable slots so if you want like to only do basic recipes that follow certain shape as long as you find a way to to deliver ingredients in a correct order you should be able to Auto to automatically craft it but for

Players that want to use them in a very flexible way and very customizable for the automation part of things they can still use the entirety of the crafting grid and figure out the way how to add and remove items from it using some filters so it’s it’s a mix it’s a block

That I think it’s very well designed in terms of like uh uh the power that it gives to very Advanced players but also is approachable for players that just started with redstone and figure uh stuff out as they go yeah I think that’s going to be the biggest surprise for

People is that first of all discussion about automatic crafting were happening prior to when you joined in 2021 and also that this wasn’t just something that you said I come in with this idea I’m bringing you the crafter and that like you know the the crafter is not

Solely down to something that you’d already developed in in carpet mod um so let’s talk about the the tick command then um when vanilla tick was implemented you posted an explanation on your GitHub page we’ll have that Linked In Our show notes if anybody wants to read that of how it differed from

Carpet’s tick and there were obviously some compromises there you’ve outlined them very clearly um can you give us an insight into why vanilla Minecraft can’t adopt all the features of a pretty successful mod like carpet and as as the mod author do you feel like the vanilla implementation is nerfed or is it

Streamlined and how do you feel about the uh the differences between the vanilla implementation and your original modded implementation yeah so uh tick command is something that’s uh is in Stark opposition to the crafter this was entirely done by me uh by basically internal agreement that yes we actually

Want to have that uh functionality and that and that and that and that uh Power not just for ourselves for internal development of the game but also for other people to use without the need of mods and that’s something that I worked myself and that actually also shows as

You mentioned that’s a very good example of the difference between the development of a mod as a mod and the development of something that actually goes into the game and is is shipped to all the players um so the implementation that we have in currently in vanilla I

Would say it’s more streamlined version it’s a little bit cut down from what carpet mode had because carpet mode had some features that are I would use the word junky but functional and and with and and with implementation that goes up with the rest of the command system and and and

Commands uh in in in in the game you won’t stand that absolutely Solid Rock Solid also when when you are developing a mode you typically first of all care only about your your own group of players that are that are that are basically using it you only care about

One particular use case that you are decided on that this is exactly what I want and need from it uh and also you don’t care about maintainability and F and like future proofing of of your code that you’re working on while you’re working on on the game itself and B you realize that

All of those aspects are as important as the feature itself and then it first of all it took way longer to get that implemented in vanilla even if I had a reference code ready and F few like fully functional and tested over years and then I had to also cut basically cut

Out some bits that were little like weird like why this work this way because like there were specific use cases where I needed that particular use of that command but it still feels weird so it was removed from uh from the final final like final command one thing that

For example I didn’t really care for when I was developing it as a mod was how the game looks visually when it’s frozen for example uh so in the in the version that was basally Bas in the version that was in the carpet mode the game was would

Would like pretty much pause mechanic wise but everything was kept being animated and would could like uh rack doll and and Jitter and I really didn’t care because I needed that to control the game from the mechanics P like perspective but if you think about it

Like players now can use it to like create like cinematics in the game um and and for that this needs to look perfect yeah so then you basically realize that you have a lot more work cut out for you uh when you want to actually develop it for all the all the

People that can potentially use it yeah I think that’s one of the things that as the audience for the game we’re so focused on our own perspective that we failed to consider all of the other potential perspectives and even in going back to Wolf armor the amount of people

Like Joel and I are not typically people who use wolves for combat situations in the game and we’ve talked about that on the show in the past but recognizing that there must be so many players out there who would like to play that way I think it’s an important part of viewing

Any new features in a a balanced way and so the same must be true for technical features like this in that the technical community must be begging for a complete implementation and it doesn’t matter to us what it looks like because you know it just does the job and it gets us the

Gold truth about our Farms it gets us the results that we want to see but as a developer of the game and as somebody who’s trying to still contribute to a polished final product you have to consider things like Aesthetics purely because the broader player base is going

To demand those and I think it’s really cool that the the use of a slash tick command with on the surface you know to my mind evokes technical play uh that that the team was considering players that might want to use it to make cinematics to make essentially little

Cartoons within Minecraft for video expression like whatever it is that you want to do cuz that’s not the first thing that I would think of you know and I think that’s just such a great way to consider all of the type of play uh that that feature could then um be

Used be used for or just it’s almost like you have to imagine emergent gameplay or the possibility thereof before you add that to the game you know yeah and one thing that is is also a good example is with like wolf armor we can make it this basically this

Basically the strongest as we can make it so then players who hold dearly their pets uh they they basically won’t see them die but then on the other hand you have the community of like pvpers where we don’t want to like throw that out of balance where the success in a PVP

Situation would only basically result of how fast you can feed and heal your dog because now it becomes this like unbeatable tank that the in order to succeed in any PVP situation you just need to create that uh basically basically create that battle wolf and

And because we try to to uh make it as as undable as as possible makes vesy throws off balance other aspects of different play Styles so this also a very interesting perspective here we we cannot wait to hear what kind of balance you strike and we’re looking forward to

The future developments in the armadillo and wool armer and presumably some more features that we obviously know nothing about yet but looking forward to what 2024 has to offer for now though that’s where we’re going to have to wrap up our discussion here on the spawn chunks nbon

Thank you so much for joining us is there anything you want to quickly draw people’s attention to before we sign off and where can people go if they want to see more of you and what you do yeah so uh right now I I honestly have nothing

To plug uh if you want to see more of the Minecraft development definitely go to the Minecraft YouTube channel we have we po we are posting shorts and longer videos when we actually show tidbits of how we are working and what we are working on uh we don’t have any actors there to

Play our roles it’s all it’s all developers it’s all us so if you want to get uh us know better that’s that that’s the place to go well thank you so much once again for joining us uh you can find more information about the show and

Links to some of the stuff that we’ve talked about today over at the spawn trunks.com the music for the show was composed by me and the spawn chunks 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 at any level we’ll get you invite to our patrons only Discord chat you can listen to the regular shows live when we record those in Discord every week we also have our monthly Minecraft audio hangout

Coming out fairly soon and as a reminder uh the pre-show and postow are also for patrons where we’ll have a little bit of extra chat with nmon before and after this episode so if you’re interested in joining once again patreon.com thees spawn chunks is the place to do that we

Currently have 322 patrons which is steady on from last week there is always room for more special thanks go out to our content Engineers Hunter 555 jumbo sale mind trip media party Voyager and yets thank you all for your support on this episode sharing the podcast with

Your friends is the easiest way to support the show you can find us at the spawn chunks on social media a personal recommendation is by far the best way to share the podcast just tell a friend about the spawn chunks and that they can listen on Apple podcasts Spotify and

Even YouTube be sure to leave a rating and a review on your favorite platform you can email the show at spawn chunk [email protected] the RSS feed is linked on the spun huns.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 go by pixel riffs you can find most of what I do at youtube.com/ pixel Rifts where the Minecraft Survival Guide is currently in its third season I also stream 3 days a week on Twitch where I

Do behind the scenes work for the aforementioned YouTube series and I’m the voice of The Unofficial hermitcraft recap which is currently on a season break but when you want to see us again you can find us through a quick YouTube search aside from that time at pixel on

Both Twitter and Instagram Joel where can people find you online everything that I’m doing online can be linked through jen.com including the Citadel Cafe my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment we had to rescheduled the chat about Rebel Moon part one so that’s going to be coming up

On the 17th and I’ve also started watching The Echo miniseries on Disney plus that’s a Marvel Series so that’s been fun as well I’m Joel Doug on social media very easy to find and Joel Dugen on Twitch where I stream Thursday through Sunday mostly building on the

Cal server in still but I play other games too thanks for visiting the spawn chunks the world outside is infinite even to its Creators