Vanilla Minecraft News Discussion

[Ferrus.Manus]

I think the deal is that they're wasting precious development time in useless features.

Yeah, but that's an old Mojang problem and the main reason why BtW came into existence.

[Battosay]

Well man you've already started down a path with hardcore sheep and chickens... What's holding you back from killing bonemeal now?

Fuck yeah

[FlowerChild]

Really? Ok, I'm a bit surprised by the bonemeal request. Will create a separate thread for this in the suggestion forum, as I don't want to drag this further off-topic.

[Salmonella]

With literally every single feature this update added, I only care about how FC will alter it. I'm particularly excited for what he does with the animals in the Nether.

[FlowerChild]

With literally every single feature this update added, I only care about how FC will alter it. I'm particularly excited for what he does with the animals in the Nether.

Likely just disable them, blow them up, or otherwise eliminate them.

[ThatOneDude]

...Or make it so every time one tries to get a mob into a nether portal, its foot is cut off so it slowly bleeds out, not only regretting its decision, but also loathing Mojang for ever deciding to allow mobs to go through nether portals.
But in all seriousness, I really don't care if FC nerfs some of the easier elements of vMC. In fact, I would actually prefer it if he changed a lot of them. (See: Nether wart in the overworld, potatoes/carrots from zombies, bonemeal, ect.) I believe that for the most part, at least, Mojang is making their game better—they're adding new features that give people reasons to explore and are helping with the modding community. Not to mention the SSP/SMP merge. On the other hand, the second handfull of features that Mojang is adding make the game much easier, and are ruining some of the awesome elements of BTW.

[Sarudak]

Likely just disable them, blow them up, or otherwise eliminate them.

You could go ax crazy on them.... :D

[FlowerChild]

You could go ax crazy on them.... :D

The limping unichickens will live on!!!!!! :)

Actually, the above just reminded me to disable netherwart growth in the overworld. I think I had reconciled with it as an isolated "whatever" change, but now with this animal in the nether thing...no...I'm drawing a line in the soul sand.

[SterlingRed]

You could go ax crazy on them.... :D

The limping unichickens will live on!!!!!! :)

Actually, the above just reminded me to disable netherwart growth in the overworld. I think I had reconciled with it as an isolated "whatever" change, but now with this animal in the nether thing...no...I'm drawing a line in the soul sand.

What about zombie pigman spawns from the portals?

[FlowerChild]

Sorry, my fault but: back on topic please.

[devak]

The most exciting Mojang got me with this snapshot is.... the trapdoor thing.

WTF happened, Mojang?

[destineternel]

https://twitter.com/Dinnerbone/status/2 ... 8444999680

There's lots of confusion about this, so here's a little bit of clarification: Mob exp hasn't changed, but xp mob farms have been nerfed.

https://twitter.com/Dinnerbone/status/2 ... 7313821696

I like the creativity of xp grinders, but I don't like that some feel like they're required to "play seriously" considering their easiness

wait!? what?!

edit: talk is that spawner based xp farms are the ones being nerfed. Only time will tell.

[Rianaru]

Unless they're nerfing spawn rates in general to make the game easier? -.-

[morvelaira]

Well, at least the came out and fucking just SAID it this time. *grumble grumble*

[Battlecat]

Not entirely pleased about this, I love building mob farms. I wish he was being clearer about what exactly was being changed. I get the impression it's just mob spawner farms but it's really not clear.

Oddly enough depending on how the changes were done, this could be a boon to BTW development. Depending on how FC handles the dragon orbs, this change could wind up being be a massive incentive to developing hands off mob processing systems.

[Rianaru]

The incentive is already there. Non-spawner farms may be bigger, but they're exponentially more efficient. I've got one that occupies a 50 block square(only a few layers high, mind you), that gives me around 30-40 levels every few minutes, and a separate spawner farm that easily took five times as long and didn't produce anywhere near the amount of drops.

And I assume that with FCs recent change of heart about changing vanilla, if the change does apply to general spawn rates, he'll do something about it. If it applies only to spawners, then even more incentive to build non-spawner farms!(I assume this what you meant, Battlecat :P)

[Ferrus.Manus]

From preliminary testing it seems that it's liked to a spawner (endermen farms still works like before) so it won't have big impact on BtW.

[Scarrboros]

Seriously, it's a game with many types of gameplay styles, but they still want to make it worse for one of them.

Even though I think that some of the new features will be good for adventure maps, I think that they make true good playing experience out of Minecraft worse than it was.

[TheAnarchitect]

What I want to know is why all the focus on adventure maps? It seems like everything that comes out these days is in some way supposed to make adventure maps cooler.

[Elevatator]

What I want to know is why all the focus on adventure maps? It seems like everything that comes out these days is in some way supposed to make adventure maps cooler.

Because Adventure Mode/Maps were a long planned feature.

Even our beloved redstone, got implemented to be used for adventure maps!

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/779956568/ ... r-redstone

[Battosay]

This post is really interesting, I forgot its existence.
Quoting it for the lazy ones :

Written Jul 07 2010
“But why”, some people ask, “are you making Minecraft programmable?”. The reason is, adventure mode!

The three main game modes when the game is finished will be:

* Creative mode. You can build anything for free, and there’s no health bar, and no inventory.
* Survival mode. There’s a health bar, an inventory, and you need to gather resources to be able to build.
* Adventure mode. There’s a health bar and an inventory, but you can’t destroy or place blocks, you can only use items.

(You can combine at least the two latter game modes for different players in multiplayer)

I foresee a future where people can design “challenge maps” in creative or survival mode, then share them with people so that they can try to beat them in Adventure mode. Being able to create interesting puzzles or trigger events requires some more advanced programming than the sand and water based stuff we’ve seen so far, yet still I don’t want to introduce real programming into the world.
I think the Redstone Dust (which is, and always has been[*] the official name for the red stuff) fits fairly well with the pseudo fantasy theme of Minecraft, and it will certainly have more uses in the future, mainly for alchemy and possibly other forms of magic.

Also, I’m a huge cellular automata nerd.

[*] I made it up last night.

[SterlingRed]

Stalking dinnerbones twitter about the spawner XP thing had clarified a few things, to much to quote so I'll just summarize.
The change only effects spawners, and the mechanic reduces XP earned from them over a period of time and it resets occasionally. The purpose of this was so that "you can't get 1000 levels in two hours"
Dinnerbone has acknowledged that XP grinders are creative and he isn't directly opposed to them but that with the new XP system they make levels too easy.

Obviously that's what every good game designer would do when something is unbalanced, make some extra rules to discourage people using it! The designer certainly wouldn't balance the feature by adjusting the XP system itself, or encourage the creativity of the player by allowing them to do more with the XP. No, that would just be terrible. /sarcasm

[Calcifire3691]

Obviously that's what every good game designer would do when something is unbalanced, make some extra rules to discourage people using it! The designer certainly wouldn't balance the feature by adjusting the XP system itself, or encourage the creativity of the player by allowing them to do more with the XP. No, that would just be terrible. /sarcasm

to play devil's advocate here, I can understand why he did it:
option 1: adjust the xp system: best case scenario, people would just find another overpowered method of XP gathering, worst case, you destroy the balance of XP completely, onemeans your programming time was wasted because it's subverted by the players, the other you've wasted time by introducing a shitload of bugs
option 2: add more things to do with XP: it still doesn't solve the problem of people AFKing for hours to farm the XP, and you've now added MORE of a reason to AFK.
option 3: add restrictions on mob spawner AFKing, solves the problem, limits new bugs to just spawners, and is only felt by people who were abusing the old system, people using it correctly wouldn't be affected.

it seems to me like he made the right choice for use of time, possibility of causing new bugs, and solving the problem by only breaking things for exploiters

[shifty]

From reddit, Dinnerbone:

Hello and stuffs.
The goal behind this change isn't to stop you from using xp grinders - I know that this cannot be done and I wouldn't even try even if it could. It's not to punish you for using them, or to force you to "have fun some other way". It's just to dissuade you from using them constantly verses other means. We don't want players to feel like they have to have a mob grinder if they want to play minecraft "seriously"; that may be how it was before 1.3, but it's changed a lot now and it's really easy to level up even without these.
XP grinders will still work, they just can't be abused so often for so much gain. The system in place currently is all completely arbitrary figures and this snapshot was just for testing if the mechanic worked at all; it isn't tuned in the slightest towards real numbers. I think currently it'd let you gain about 6 levels per 40 minutes per mob spawner. I've already adjusted them for the next snapshot to be 15 levels per 15 minutes per mob spawner, but even that's not going to be the final figure - it's all trial.

[SterlingRed]

But that's the thing, it doesn't solve the afk problem. It just makes it slightly less rewarding. It's a feel good fix to a problem that exists because of a fundamental design strategy, that doesn't actually fix anything. Will they still afk? Yes. The real problem is that vanilla has no reason not to afk, meaning there's too little to do tech wise and no way to collect XP without mining or spam left clicking. Btw fixes the core problem by providing a way to collect xp from systems while we do anything else.

Basically in vanilla let's say I want ice in my desert for aesthetic reasons so I need silk touch. I've mined everything I need for a while and spam left clicking glitchy mobs doesn't sound like fun. But an xp farm running while I'm at work? Yeah that will work! That kind of logic well never go away in vanilla. Obviously the same can be done with btw, but it's less inviting because there's always things to do that you want to do while xp is collected for you.

Edit: ninjas poking holes in my theory.