I wantt to sum up some of my thoughts on why modern minecraft isn’t as good as it could be, and I want to hear what others think as well.
And I think the place to start is with minecraft’s survival mechanics. I don’t believe modern minecraft really feels like a survival game anymore. In earlier versions the first night was a threat, if you didn’t find shelter for that night you would likely be dead. Modern minecraft doesn’t handle this as well because players can come across villages that have food, shelter, and beds to skip the night. Alternatively modern minecraft players can pretty easily find sheep and craft a bed on day one.
The next big difference is the food system. If you don’t have any food in modern minecraft, it simply feels like an annoyance. It slows you down, you constantly have to keep eating, etc.
The beta 1.7.3 version is better in this regard because when you’re low on food, the only risk is that you die. It doesn’t make you move slower, it is simply a risk of death, and you aren’t annoyed at a movement penalty, because your speed is always the same.
Then there is just the general difficulty. Maybe it was just because I played the game when I was younger, but in the past, nights felt dangerous, that you needed to find shelter and would not be able to survive in the open for very long. Modern minecraft kind of flips that and to a degree expects you to wander in the night for ender pearls. I really think that the night should serve as a threat, and that’s where the old system works better.
Survival minecraft today feels like spending 10ish hours to unlock creative mode. It’s not even really a survival game anymore. The added complexity and progression systems of recent versions also make the game feel less open-ended and more on-rails.
Beta 1.7.3 forever
Fuck beds though. Ruined the whole point of the game which was surviving the night
Thankfully there’s Mods like Modern Beta and Vanilla Tweaks that let you enable and disable certain features to make the game play more like Beta, but you still get modern biome and features if you desire.
That’s exactly what I use. It gives you the best of both worlds. You get the better mechanics of beta versions, while still having the good features from the modern era.
But I think it is worth going a step further. Within my own mod pack I have:
- End only elytra - To stop elytra from being so overpowering
- Custom fog - To bring back the look of beta with it’s classic fog
- Disable Trading - Because villagers are absolutely broken, and they should have only ever really been world aesthetics
And in Nostalgic Tweaks I have enchanting, sprinting, swimming, modern combat, experience, hunger, etc are all disabled. It plays pretty closely to beta 1.7.3, while still having the extra deep worlds of modern minecraft.
And on top of that there’s a couple different resource packs I use.
Survival minecraft today feels like spending 10ish hours to unlock creative mode.
Yeah, that’s absolutely how it feels nowadays, and it sucks. At this point the grind of modern minecraft just puts me off of the game all together. From this point forward I’ll pretty much exclusively be playing my own custom version of 1.18.2 that brings the game in alignment of what beta 1.7.3 was.
The added complexity and progression systems of recent versions also make the game feel less open-ended and more on-rails.
I think this is a big part of why the meme of “yearly two week minecraft binge” is so prevalent. Groups want to play, but then quickly remember how much of a grind it is to start a new world. And then even once players get all the end game gear together, it’s basically a worse version of creative mode but still grindy due to how much of a pain it can be to get building resources. And then the server dies.
Fuck beds though. Ruined the whole point of the game which was surviving the night
Yeah, I have sleeping turned off in my modpack for that exact reason. The night is meant to be threatning, and a time when you go mining or work on the internals of your base. It should make you want to put up walls around your settlement and protect it.
The addition of potion, enchantment and brightness adjustment. I felt like that is what ruin minecraft for me. It used to feel a bit more scary and more grounded.
Agreed on the enchantment and brightness adjustment. I think that the enchantment system was one of the worst directions the game went. Players should not have to expend countless hours to create tools and weapons. Maybe it’s just because I am an adult now and therefore have less tolerance for grinding things out, but at the bare minimum I should have this feeling that I can’t start projects because I don’t have diamond/netherite enchanted gear. And sadly it seems mojang is doubling down with the latest update making netherite even harder to acquire. I’ll definitely be making another post about enchanting in the future.
I disagree a bit on the potions though, I think they were a good addition in that they are a feature that you can get by without, and they aren’t exactly game breaking over powered-ness (at least the initial set of potions that were added). Plus they help ground the game as a loose fantasy game.
I don’t mind Enchantments too much as it gives you more to do, but I think you should be able to choose your enchantments. The fact they’re random sucks because you have to enchant and disenchant until you get what your looking for. Potions I’m not a fan of personally. I think the best implementation for potion like effects would be a Zelda style where you can craft specific foods to give you a desired effect. The brightness thing I sort of get but at least that’s an option so you can still play with it low if you want.
I don’t mind Enchantments too much as it gives you more to do, but I think you should be able to choose your enchantments. The fact they’re random sucks because you have to enchant and disenchant until you get what your looking for.
In my mind, the sweet spot for enchantments is when the player cannot create enchantments and can instead only find pre-enchanted items out while exploring. Couple this with tools generally being faster and more durable, and it is much better balanced.
Enchantments then make tools more interesting, while preventing it from being something you grind for to get the perfect tool/armor. You get what you get and you’ll make do with what you find. But even if you don’t find an enchantment, the durability and speed of tools is acceptable by default.
