Before the adventure update, "Survival Mode" could be won by digging a hole, jumping in, and covering it. Thirty seconds and problem solved, mode conquered, now you'll never die.
The adventure update added time pressure with the hunger mechanic. Now you're not done "surviving" until you can farm enough food to offset your hunger while not falling prey to scary monsters at night. Assuming you spend a substantial amount of time hiding in your house to wait for morning, this can take a couple of hours.
The adventure update also gave us another goal, to reach "the end" and slay the dragon. This requires us to explore and fight three kinds of monsters and then brave the depths, risking getting lost and stumbling into lava. It also requires us to explore the nether, facing Ghasts and Blazes.
So as the player progresses into more hazardous situations, he's rewarded with the availability of new monster drops and collectable blocks.
I think it's a good model, but it could be implemented much better. In the standard world at the surface, I suggest starting with no monsters (even at night), then increasing the availability of valuables and the challenges in the form of monsters and mechanics as the player moves north or south farther from the spawn. At each stage, the player faces a new challenge and a new reward:
No monsters, very little valuable ore (coal, with little iron).
Zombies only, but with readily available coal, and iron available deeper.
Spiders, opening the possibility for the player to create a fishing rod and bow.
Skeletons, with lots of iron, creepers, and gold deep underground. Bones introduce wolf pets and faster farming. Iron makes better tools and armor suitable for battling creepers effectively.
Creepers at the surface. Zombies can "smell" players, and will break soft blocks to reach them. They'll also extinguish nearby torches.
Cloudy skies and less plentiful livestock make a permanent, productive farm difficult or impossible to maintain. Players must now stock up on supplies to head out into the wilderness, but can more easily find diamonds in the depths, making Nether access probable at this stage.
Anyway, you can see where I'm going with this. By adding mechanics and challenges GRADUALLY, the game is easier to get into for new players AND the experience stays fresh. Today, most of the challenges you can face right in the very beginning, so it's just a grindy slogfest to find the diamonds (same monsters over and over and over again, seen one cave, you've seen them all...). The nether makes things momentarily interesting again, but then it, too, becomes a grind after the initial splash of fun, while you get your blaze rods and collect alchemy ingredients.
Some other suggestions...
1. The nether isn't scary enough. It's safer than nighttime outside your house. It needs more challenge.
2. Similarly for being deep underground. It's safer to be underground at night than standing outside your house, which is silly. Underground should be more challenging. Maybe at night, monsters continue to spawn even in the light below a certain depth.
3. Something to add more variety to monsters would be nice. More flying monsters besides the ghast or some stealth monsters could help.
4. We need more variety than just melee, arrows, and splash potions. Maybe heavy armor will slow you down, or some slower weapons have an arc of attack or longer melee range.
5. Maybe special blocks in high difficulty areas which explode shortly after coming into contact with air?
6. More non-farmable, dungeon-only items which can be used in recipes to create (strategically interesting) rare items. Terraria has a lot of these, although it gives them to you directly at random from a chest, rather than giving you ingredients so you can make a design decision about your play style.
Why do I mention only north and south, and not ALL directions from the spawn? Because on multiplayer servers, areas near the spawn get crowded with builds and run short on resources. New players still need a place to start where the difficulty is manageable. The east/west line gives them that space to get started, and when they're ready, they can move north or south to add challenge.
To give players a sense of which directions will add challenge, I suggest adding foreboding cloud cover near those horizons, even in daylight.
also the bows and swords,this game is not meant to take place in the future its more of a mid evil times style ,all they had were bows and arrows and magic and potions.
Actually Minecraft is timeless. The swords and bow are just simple survival tools and potions can referred to as medicine or drugs.
wat do you mean the nether isnt dangerous enough the minute you step in there your getting blasted by ghasts and blazes and pigmen are swarming you not to mention the fact that theres lava surrounding you
armor does have weight to it you run slower with full diamond on which is why you make speed potions
about the rare items? ummm theres alot of those
also the bows and swords,this game is not meant to take place in the future its more of a mid evil times style ,all they had were bows and arrows and magic and potions.
Cool, didn't know that about the armor.
The nether isn't dark and it's very open, and there aren't many pitfalls (large chunks of land), the zombie pigmen don't attack unless you attack first. The ghasts are scary, true, but they're the only thing and all you have to do to survive is not stand still. Yeah, if you pick a fight with a Blaze, okay. But they don't sneak up on you like creepers and skeletons and zombies in deep, dark, twisting caverns. I find the nether much less threatening than caves in the standard world, but you're entitled to your opinion of course.
It's a game in development, who's to say what Mojang intends? Besides, gameplay trumps setting. And we do have gunpowder, TNT, and electrical wires and gadgets.
Okay, I meant rare items that are useful. What do saddles and coffee beans do for you, really, besides make your barbie house the color you want and let you goof around with a farm animal? The seeds are useful, but once you get a single seed, you farm it into all the food you want, so after you find a seed, why bother with dungeons anymore.
The first one is that the player WILL have to make nomadic shelters, and having a base limits them to one spot, players will fear that getting too far from the base will end up losing items.
I don't see why this is a bad thing? As the rewards get bigger, so does the sense of risk and adventure. You need to build a stronger shelter now, or bring more food and other gear because you'll be out longer.
Second one is that the mob distribution would be...well...for some reason I dislike it. Zombies only gives players the feeling that there is not much in the game, and if players are unaware of the system, then :sad.gif:
Nearly 100% of Minecraft is a mystery to players who just start playing. We read wikis and forums to learn about the possibilities - crafting recipes, nether access, how to get to The End. This "move toward the foreboding horizon for more challenge" is just another drop in that bucket. Minecraft doesn't tutor and hand-hold new players, so why expect any different here?
Third is SMP and CMP servers get messed up.
That's why I mention north and south as directional difficulty rather than over time. If the system were based on time, and the server has been up for months, then all new players to the server start in extremely high difficulty. That's not fair to them, and so it simply won't work on multiplayer. You might suggest that the monsters which spawn around a player are determined by how long that player has been on the server, but that means if a high level player visits a bunch of low level players, the monsters will be unfairly difficult - imagine that as a griefing mechanism. Further, some players advance more slowly than others. The distance-based system allows players to move at their own pace. Otherwise, a player who joins a server and doesn't keep up with the pace will have to quit the server, because the challenges will continue to mount higher, even though he isn't getting the player experience and inventory rewards to meet those challenges.
Well, you are supposed to find a safe spot :/
You misunderstood me. I'm saying that there should be no safe spots in the deep underground - there, at night, monsters should continue to spawn even in the torchlight.
Those weapons would be somewhat redundant copies of the sword, sadly.
I agree, I'd appreciate some better ideas, here. But surely, we can have more variety than clicky melee and slow-fire bow. Something with area of effect? Some traps?
Why explosive blocks?
To make tunneling through solid rock a little more interesting - giving players something to react to besides the very rare gravel cave-in or lava spill.
Still, it messes it up. This kind of order is annoying in SMP.
If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it, please. :smile.gif: I don't see any other possibility for a system which will treat new players fairly in a world they share with all other players. Other big-server, gradual-difficulty games like the MMORPG genre do exactly this - partition the world so that as players move away from the starting point, the game gets tougher. That doesn't work exactly as-is for Minecraft because the players who come before you permanently consume the resources you need to advance (in other games, all the stuff you need comes from respawning monsters and repeatable quests).
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I agree with most of your points. I don't really like the progression idea, while I do think that difficulty should increase the farther you get from the spawn point... it just seems like way too much work to scale mob and ore spawning for literally every step you take.
Ways to fix this:
*Add more progression between start and End.
*Add more interesting enemies and ores, and biomes. I can't agree more about "seen one cave, seen them all." Personally, there's few things more interesting than stumbling upon a new enemy deep underground, perhaps something like the (My project has attempted to deal with this, but it'll be ages before anything is close to completion...)
*Add a way the player can make the game harder after the End. Terraria has done the right thing with the new "hardmode" after beating the final boss, with all enemies being upgraded into newer forms, more powerful ore being added, and even entirely new mobs appearing.
I don't like these ideas. It seems to force you to go away and away, destroying the playstyle of those who want to build a home and etc.
Folks don't generally make blocks for their houses out of iron or better, so everybody who wants to can still play house very close to the spawn. No need to adventure out and go on adventures if your goal is just building - you can get wood, coal, stone, wool, and more without even leaving the zombie-only area, because it has all the surface resources plus coal to process the raw materials.
I don't want the initial spawn getting too important again, like the times before we had beds. Plus it's a great disadvantage if somebody doesn't know the system. Therefore, I disapprove of the north-south thing. It doesn't work in 3D.
I agree that the Nether should be more dangerous, and maybe some more biomes / rare structures (wizard tower with a boss in it, etc) would be nice in the overworld, but I disagree with pretty much everything else.
This doesn't assign any special importance to the spawn, just to latitude = 0. Besides, you'll still have your bed.
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Folks don't generally make blocks for their houses out of iron or better, so everybody who wants to can still play house very close to the spawn. No need to adventure out and go on adventures if your goal is just building - you can get wood, coal, stone, wool, and more without even leaving the zombie-only area, because it has all the surface resources plus coal to process the raw materials.
You are kidding right?
In order to get many of the decorative blocks ingame, you need a diamond pick, and people who like building big structures often use of cobblestone, and having to use stone pickaxes instead of diamond ones to mine stone is a right pain in the ****.
You are kidding right?
In order to get many of the decorative blocks ingame, you need a diamond pick, and people who like building big structures often use of cobblestone, and having to use stone pickaxes instead of diamond ones to mine stone is a right pain in the ****.
I thought the only block requiring a diamond pick was obsidian? Besides, to get the diamonds to make your pick in the first place, don't you have to spend a lot of time either digging down (with stone or iron) or exploring caves?
But yes, I do admit this would make getting the high end stuff harder. That's the point of survival - challenging yourself to achieve your goals. These changes would make your "mansion made of gold blocks in survival" all the more cooler when you finish it, since everyone would understand the increased effort involved. For folks who just want to build a cool construction without going through the trouble of earning the materials or engineering a process for efficient building, there's creative mode. Your comments make you sound like a creative mode kind of person to me.
Besides, think of all the frustration you save by being able to build at night and not worrying over creepers and skeletons.
There's always creative mode if you just wanna play house.
Are you insane? Half of the fun of survival is constructing the best possible thing you can without the aid of infinitely many items or one-hit blocks.
I've seen people construct huge castles and bridges legitimately, because it's one of the ways to have fun. Survival isn't just "survive", it's "build to survive".
Furthermore, if survival really only lasts a few hours, then you seriously aren't trying, like at all. This game is only as fun as you make it. If you make the game last a few hours before you get bored and quit, that's your problem, not the game's. If you seriously can find absolutely nothing to do in your world, then I suggest downloading mods, so you can have infinitely many more things to do in the game.
My whole point is that if you really can't find anything to do in the near infinite world, with the near infinite possibilities, with the near infinite storylines, construction sites, mysterious ruins, huge cliffs, gigantic canyons, and expansive oceans, then you must have some kind of blockage in your brain causing you to lose all sense of logic.
I think it's a good model, but it could be implemented much better. In the standard world at the surface, I suggest starting with no monsters (even at night), then increasing the availability of valuables and the challenges in the form of monsters and mechanics as the player moves north or south farther from the spawn. At each stage, the player faces a new challenge and a new reward:
Reading only this section, your idea sounds pretty much perfect. Unfortunately it is not, at least the way you proposed to implement it, but the core mechanics of your suggestion are quite good and I think would work with Minecraft.
No monsters, very little valuable ore (coal, with little iron).
Personally I think this is a poor suggestion, unless that area was about 5 blocks wide. While it would force the player to actually explore, the problem is that nobody would probably return to this area. So you could scrap this altogether.
Zombies only, but with readily available coal, and iron available deeper.
Completely eliminating the other ores within a certain radius is a bad idea, too. While making them far less common would be a good way to implement it, completely taking them away would just seem silly. Not to mention it might seem odd considering it would be within a radius from where you spawned (or from coordinate 0x,0z, since the player rarely actually spawns at that coordinate any more).
Spiders, opening the possibility for the player to create a fishing rod and bow.
Skeletons, with lots of iron, creepers, and gold deep underground. Bones introduce wolf pets and faster farming. Iron makes better tools and armor suitable for battling creepers effectively.
Personally I feel that these two areas should be combined; start 'em off with just zombies, then force them to face a few new types of monsters above-ground, with the creeper being below-ground. Also, hopefully you were simply talking about bones now introduced for taming wolves rather than wolves being introduced at this level, since they are tied to the different biomes; biomes aboveground should remain randomly generated, as it is now.
Creepers at the surface. Zombies can "smell" players, and will break soft blocks to reach them. They'll also extinguish nearby torches.
A good idea. It isn't that much more challenging than how the world is in the previous areas, so there isn't a need for some kind of reward or anything.
Cloudy skies and less plentiful livestock make a permanent, productive farm difficult or impossible to maintain. Players must now stock up on supplies to head out into the wilderness, but can more easily find diamonds in the depths, making Nether access probable at this stage.
Along with diamonds perhaps becoming more common, perhaps this could be the area in which dungeons are introduced (the End-portal-realm dungeons, of course; the original dungeons should appear with the introduction of zombies).
1. The nether isn't scary enough. It's safer than nighttime outside your house. It needs more challenge.
Sadly, this is true. The Nether, while a bit better with Blazes now, is still not much of a challenge for anyone with decent skills. You can avoid having zombie-pigmen attack you altogether, and Ghast fireballs are easy enough to dodge/deflect if you're fast enough. Drink a fire-immunity potion and Blazes do diddly-squat against you. More mobs that would actively attack you, in addition to perhaps more reasons to actually GO to the Nether (aside from collecting Blaze powder to make Ender eyes) would develop it much further.
2. Similarly for being deep underground. It's safer to be underground at night than standing outside your house, which is silly. Underground should be more challenging. Maybe at night, monsters continue to spawn even in the light below a certain depth.
Depending on the situation, yes. I think it would be best if perhaps some mobs remained as above-ground only mobs while others are below-ground only mobs. If Mojang can just learn to code properly instead of relying on spawners (*cough* cave spiders *cough*), underground areas can provide more of a challenge.
4. We need more variety than just melee, arrows, and splash potions. Maybe heavy armor will slow you down, or some slower weapons have an arc of attack or longer melee range.
While perhaps a few new things wouldn't be so bad, to be honest I really like the balance between the different armors, weapons, and potions. Potions especially added a ton more depth to the game.
5. Maybe special blocks in high difficulty areas which explode shortly after coming into contact with air?
6. More non-farmable, dungeon-only items which can be used in recipes to create (strategically interesting) rare items. Terraria has a lot of these, although it gives them to you directly at random from a chest, rather than giving you ingredients so you can make a design decision about your play style.
For one, don't make Terraria references when talking about Minecraft. Secondly, this just sounds unnecessary.
Why do I mention only north and south, and not ALL directions from the spawn? Because on multiplayer servers, areas near the spawn get crowded with builds and run short on resources. New players still need a place to start where the difficulty is manageable. The east/west line gives them that space to get started, and when they're ready, they can move north or south to add challenge.
That shows some foresight; excellent job.
To give players a sense of which directions will add challenge, I suggest adding foreboding cloud cover near those horizons, even in daylight.
Perhaps the sky grows a bit darker as you progress further, making night shorter so that the hostile mobs appear more often and last longer.
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You are kidding right?
In order to get many of the decorative blocks ingame, you need a diamond pick, and people who like building big structures often use of cobblestone, and having to use stone pickaxes instead of diamond ones to mine stone is a right pain in the ****.
People who like building big structures often use creative, that's what it's there for.
Are you insane? Half of the fun of survival is constructing the best possible thing you can without the aid of infinitely many items or one-hit blocks.
I've seen people construct huge castles and bridges legitimately, because it's one of the ways to have fun. Survival isn't just "survive", it's "build to survive".
Furthermore, if survival really only lasts a few hours, then you seriously aren't trying, like at all. This game is only as fun as you make it. If you make the game last a few hours before you get bored and quit, that's your problem, not the game's. If you seriously can find absolutely nothing to do in your world, then I suggest downloading mods, so you can have infinitely many more things to do in the game.
My whole point is that if you really can't find anything to do in the near infinite world, with the near infinite possibilities, with the near infinite storylines, construction sites, mysterious ruins, huge cliffs, gigantic canyons, and expansive oceans, then you must have some kind of blockage in your brain causing you to lose all sense of logic.
Are you insane? The other half the the fun of survival is defending a ramshackle house while trying to find the best possible equipment. I strongly agree with Bigscary, most people play survival to to do what it was made for: survive. Also, adding adding new challenges will only increase the fun of trying to find rare blocks to make gigantic castles with.
Furthermore, many people would agree that survival does only last a few hours before becoming samey, that isn't his problem. This is one of the games MANY problems (I could name various others, but I wont because it might start a flame war).
My whole point is that most people really can't find anything to do in a near infinite world made up of all the same things, the same mysterious ruins over and over (so that they aren't the least bit mysterious), huge cliffs and gigantic canyons that aren't at all inspiring and expansive oceans with nothing in them then you have a perfectly healthy brain with perfect logic.
@Bigscary. Some other stuff to add would be more mobs and biomes, and randomly generated structures, rather than procedurally generated ones (so no 2 structures will be the same).
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No, there has never, ever been a sandbox game with a story or ending... except Grand Theft Auto... and Saints Row... and Red Dead Redemption... and Crack Down... and Assassins Creed...
Reading only this section, your idea sounds pretty much perfect. Unfortunately it is not, at least the way you proposed to implement it, but the core mechanics of your suggestion are quite good and I think would work with Minecraft.
Personally I think this is a poor suggestion, unless that area was about 5 blocks wide. While it would force the player to actually explore, the problem is that nobody would probably return to this area. So you could scrap this altogether.
Completely eliminating the other ores within a certain radius is a bad idea, too. While making them far less common would be a good way to implement it, completely taking them away would just seem silly. Not to mention it might seem odd considering it would be within a radius from where you spawned (or from coordinate 0x,0z, since the player rarely actually spawns at that coordinate any more).
Personally I feel that these two areas should be combined; start 'em off with just zombies, then force them to face a few new types of monsters above-ground, with the creeper being below-ground. Also, hopefully you were simply talking about bones now introduced for taming wolves rather than wolves being introduced at this level, since they are tied to the different biomes; biomes aboveground should remain randomly generated, as it is now.
A good idea. It isn't that much more challenging than how the world is in the previous areas, so there isn't a need for some kind of reward or anything.
Along with diamonds perhaps becoming more common, perhaps this could be the area in which dungeons are introduced (the End-portal-realm dungeons, of course; the original dungeons should appear with the introduction of zombies).
Sadly, this is true. The Nether, while a bit better with Blazes now, is still not much of a challenge for anyone with decent skills. You can avoid having zombie-pigmen attack you altogether, and Ghast fireballs are easy enough to dodge/deflect if you're fast enough. Drink a fire-immunity potion and Blazes do diddly-squat against you. More mobs that would actively attack you, in addition to perhaps more reasons to actually GO to the Nether (aside from collecting Blaze powder to make Ender eyes) would develop it much further.
Depending on the situation, yes. I think it would be best if perhaps some mobs remained as above-ground only mobs while others are below-ground only mobs. If Mojang can just learn to code properly instead of relying on spawners (*cough* cave spiders *cough*), underground areas can provide more of a challenge.
While perhaps a few new things wouldn't be so bad, to be honest I really like the balance between the different armors, weapons, and potions. Potions especially added a ton more depth to the game.
For one, don't make Terraria references when talking about Minecraft. Secondly, this just sounds unnecessary.
That shows some foresight; excellent job.
Perhaps the sky grows a bit darker as you progress further, making night shorter so that the hostile mobs appear more often and last longer.
I agree with what you said, except for night being shorter as you go farther. I think The Day/Night cycle should be the same universally, except for going East/West should shift the time a little bit (just enough for the time to change 24 hours going from 1 side of the map to the other).
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Please click the dragons, they need to grow. Also, my fully grown dragons can be found in my bio.
I think, this should be added to hardcore mode. Because we all know, hardcore mode is the most half-assed project ever put into the game. It was embarassing for me, and adding this could earn Minecraft my respect again.
-Nice ideas
-Hardcore mode would have a reason to be called hardcore mode
-Would add a whole new perspective to the game
-If people don't like it, they can play survival (regular)
3. Something to add more variety to monsters would be nice. More flying monsters besides the ghast or some stealth monsters could help.
If you add a larger variety of flying monsters, then meaning they have to be either passive or neutral. Another problem with adding these monsters is housing. If a "bomb dropping" (bombers as i would call them) flying mob appeared you are going to need a whole lot of layers of roofing to survive one night with those. While certain things in minecraft are getting dull, could still need improving, but not as much as you said.
Half of the fun of survival is constructing the best possible thing you can without the aid of infinitely many items or one-hit blocks.
I agree with you 100%. The other poster said that he didn't like the idea of making materials harder to get - he wants to build very quickly, and for that, he wants easy access to diamonds and other valuables. So for HIS case, I suggested creative mode.
Like you, I too enjoy survival. I just want my cool builds to be all the cooler, and for that, I'd like to be required to adventure more. As it stands, one need adventure very little to get all the coolest build materials - down for diamonds and obsidian, out a little to find sand, and slightly into the nether for glowstone and netherrack (granted, those who want to defeat the ender dragon must explore the nether much more). Under the new system I'm suggesting, one would have to go much farther to find the best building stuff, encouraging more adventure out into the practically infinite world. :smile.gif:
I think, this should be added to hardcore mode. Because we all know, hardcore mode is the most half-assed project ever put into the game. It was embarassing for me, and adding this could earn Minecraft my respect again.
-Nice ideas
-Hardcore mode would have a reason to be called hardcore mode
-Would add a whole new perspective to the game
-If people don't like it, they can play survival (regular)
I think that's a good idea. The current "hardcore" mode is another prime example of the worst possible implementation of "difficulty" - give players the same challenges, but punish them more for each mistake. I think hard mode should deliver new challenges, and some of these suggestions may qualify.
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The adventure update added time pressure with the hunger mechanic. Now you're not done "surviving" until you can farm enough food to offset your hunger while not falling prey to scary monsters at night. Assuming you spend a substantial amount of time hiding in your house to wait for morning, this can take a couple of hours.
No... hunger only goes down as you walk,sprint,attack or get hurt.
You can stand still for literally hours in real life and never die.
No... hunger only goes down as you walk,sprint,attack or get hurt.
You can stand still for literally hours in real life and never die.
Umm okay, granted. But if you're not doing anything, you're not really playing the game. So just like other games, you can't fail if you're not playing. I can also stand perfectly still during the Halo tutorial, not following the guy's instructions, and that way I'll never lose the game.
Besides, night comes and bad guys spawn and kill you.
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The adventure update added time pressure with the hunger mechanic. Now you're not done "surviving" until you can farm enough food to offset your hunger while not falling prey to scary monsters at night. Assuming you spend a substantial amount of time hiding in your house to wait for morning, this can take a couple of hours.
The adventure update also gave us another goal, to reach "the end" and slay the dragon. This requires us to explore and fight three kinds of monsters and then brave the depths, risking getting lost and stumbling into lava. It also requires us to explore the nether, facing Ghasts and Blazes.
So as the player progresses into more hazardous situations, he's rewarded with the availability of new monster drops and collectable blocks.
I think it's a good model, but it could be implemented much better. In the standard world at the surface, I suggest starting with no monsters (even at night), then increasing the availability of valuables and the challenges in the form of monsters and mechanics as the player moves north or south farther from the spawn. At each stage, the player faces a new challenge and a new reward:
Anyway, you can see where I'm going with this. By adding mechanics and challenges GRADUALLY, the game is easier to get into for new players AND the experience stays fresh. Today, most of the challenges you can face right in the very beginning, so it's just a grindy slogfest to find the diamonds (same monsters over and over and over again, seen one cave, you've seen them all...). The nether makes things momentarily interesting again, but then it, too, becomes a grind after the initial splash of fun, while you get your blaze rods and collect alchemy ingredients.
Some other suggestions...
1. The nether isn't scary enough. It's safer than nighttime outside your house. It needs more challenge.
2. Similarly for being deep underground. It's safer to be underground at night than standing outside your house, which is silly. Underground should be more challenging. Maybe at night, monsters continue to spawn even in the light below a certain depth.
3. Something to add more variety to monsters would be nice. More flying monsters besides the ghast or some stealth monsters could help.
4. We need more variety than just melee, arrows, and splash potions. Maybe heavy armor will slow you down, or some slower weapons have an arc of attack or longer melee range.
5. Maybe special blocks in high difficulty areas which explode shortly after coming into contact with air?
6. More non-farmable, dungeon-only items which can be used in recipes to create (strategically interesting) rare items. Terraria has a lot of these, although it gives them to you directly at random from a chest, rather than giving you ingredients so you can make a design decision about your play style.
Why do I mention only north and south, and not ALL directions from the spawn? Because on multiplayer servers, areas near the spawn get crowded with builds and run short on resources. New players still need a place to start where the difficulty is manageable. The east/west line gives them that space to get started, and when they're ready, they can move north or south to add challenge.
To give players a sense of which directions will add challenge, I suggest adding foreboding cloud cover near those horizons, even in daylight.
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It just doesn't feel like the right way to improve minecraft IMO
Actually Minecraft is timeless. The swords and bow are just simple survival tools and potions can referred to as medicine or drugs.
Cool, didn't know that about the armor.
The nether isn't dark and it's very open, and there aren't many pitfalls (large chunks of land), the zombie pigmen don't attack unless you attack first. The ghasts are scary, true, but they're the only thing and all you have to do to survive is not stand still. Yeah, if you pick a fight with a Blaze, okay. But they don't sneak up on you like creepers and skeletons and zombies in deep, dark, twisting caverns. I find the nether much less threatening than caves in the standard world, but you're entitled to your opinion of course.
It's a game in development, who's to say what Mojang intends? Besides, gameplay trumps setting. And we do have gunpowder, TNT, and electrical wires and gadgets.
Okay, I meant rare items that are useful. What do saddles and coffee beans do for you, really, besides make your barbie house the color you want and let you goof around with a farm animal? The seeds are useful, but once you get a single seed, you farm it into all the food you want, so after you find a seed, why bother with dungeons anymore.
Please try to translate your gut feeling into words. :smile.gif: Your input might help to improve the idea.
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Risky in what sense?
The first one is that the player WILL have to make nomadic shelters, and having a base limits them to one spot, players will fear that getting too far from the base will end up losing items.
I don't see why this is a bad thing? As the rewards get bigger, so does the sense of risk and adventure. You need to build a stronger shelter now, or bring more food and other gear because you'll be out longer.
Second one is that the mob distribution would be...well...for some reason I dislike it. Zombies only gives players the feeling that there is not much in the game, and if players are unaware of the system, then :sad.gif:
Nearly 100% of Minecraft is a mystery to players who just start playing. We read wikis and forums to learn about the possibilities - crafting recipes, nether access, how to get to The End. This "move toward the foreboding horizon for more challenge" is just another drop in that bucket. Minecraft doesn't tutor and hand-hold new players, so why expect any different here?
Third is SMP and CMP servers get messed up.
That's why I mention north and south as directional difficulty rather than over time. If the system were based on time, and the server has been up for months, then all new players to the server start in extremely high difficulty. That's not fair to them, and so it simply won't work on multiplayer. You might suggest that the monsters which spawn around a player are determined by how long that player has been on the server, but that means if a high level player visits a bunch of low level players, the monsters will be unfairly difficult - imagine that as a griefing mechanism. Further, some players advance more slowly than others. The distance-based system allows players to move at their own pace. Otherwise, a player who joins a server and doesn't keep up with the pace will have to quit the server, because the challenges will continue to mount higher, even though he isn't getting the player experience and inventory rewards to meet those challenges.
Well, you are supposed to find a safe spot :/
You misunderstood me. I'm saying that there should be no safe spots in the deep underground - there, at night, monsters should continue to spawn even in the torchlight.
Those weapons would be somewhat redundant copies of the sword, sadly.
I agree, I'd appreciate some better ideas, here. But surely, we can have more variety than clicky melee and slow-fire bow. Something with area of effect? Some traps?
Why explosive blocks?
To make tunneling through solid rock a little more interesting - giving players something to react to besides the very rare gravel cave-in or lava spill.
Still, it messes it up. This kind of order is annoying in SMP.
If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it, please. :smile.gif: I don't see any other possibility for a system which will treat new players fairly in a world they share with all other players. Other big-server, gradual-difficulty games like the MMORPG genre do exactly this - partition the world so that as players move away from the starting point, the game gets tougher. That doesn't work exactly as-is for Minecraft because the players who come before you permanently consume the resources you need to advance (in other games, all the stuff you need comes from respawning monsters and repeatable quests).
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Ways to fix this:
*Add more progression between start and End.
*Add more interesting enemies and ores, and biomes. I can't agree more about "seen one cave, seen them all." Personally, there's few things more interesting than stumbling upon a new enemy deep underground, perhaps something like the (My project has attempted to deal with this, but it'll be ages before anything is close to completion...)
*Add a way the player can make the game harder after the End. Terraria has done the right thing with the new "hardmode" after beating the final boss, with all enemies being upgraded into newer forms, more powerful ore being added, and even entirely new mobs appearing.
Folks don't generally make blocks for their houses out of iron or better, so everybody who wants to can still play house very close to the spawn. No need to adventure out and go on adventures if your goal is just building - you can get wood, coal, stone, wool, and more without even leaving the zombie-only area, because it has all the surface resources plus coal to process the raw materials.
This doesn't assign any special importance to the spawn, just to latitude = 0. Besides, you'll still have your bed.
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You are kidding right?
In order to get many of the decorative blocks ingame, you need a diamond pick, and people who like building big structures often use of cobblestone, and having to use stone pickaxes instead of diamond ones to mine stone is a right pain in the ****.
I thought the only block requiring a diamond pick was obsidian? Besides, to get the diamonds to make your pick in the first place, don't you have to spend a lot of time either digging down (with stone or iron) or exploring caves?
But yes, I do admit this would make getting the high end stuff harder. That's the point of survival - challenging yourself to achieve your goals. These changes would make your "mansion made of gold blocks in survival" all the more cooler when you finish it, since everyone would understand the increased effort involved. For folks who just want to build a cool construction without going through the trouble of earning the materials or engineering a process for efficient building, there's creative mode. Your comments make you sound like a creative mode kind of person to me.
Besides, think of all the frustration you save by being able to build at night and not worrying over creepers and skeletons.
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Are you insane? Half of the fun of survival is constructing the best possible thing you can without the aid of infinitely many items or one-hit blocks.
I've seen people construct huge castles and bridges legitimately, because it's one of the ways to have fun. Survival isn't just "survive", it's "build to survive".
Furthermore, if survival really only lasts a few hours, then you seriously aren't trying, like at all. This game is only as fun as you make it. If you make the game last a few hours before you get bored and quit, that's your problem, not the game's. If you seriously can find absolutely nothing to do in your world, then I suggest downloading mods, so you can have infinitely many more things to do in the game.
My whole point is that if you really can't find anything to do in the near infinite world, with the near infinite possibilities, with the near infinite storylines, construction sites, mysterious ruins, huge cliffs, gigantic canyons, and expansive oceans, then you must have some kind of blockage in your brain causing you to lose all sense of logic.
[quote=Badgerz]You have to keep in mind that people are stupid.
[quote=Catelite]Just because you don't understand how something works, doesn't make it broken or pointless. >_<
[My Suggestion] Safes/ Locked Chests http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/881982-a-safe-vault-a-balanced-approach/
Reading only this section, your idea sounds pretty much perfect. Unfortunately it is not, at least the way you proposed to implement it, but the core mechanics of your suggestion are quite good and I think would work with Minecraft.
Personally I think this is a poor suggestion, unless that area was about 5 blocks wide. While it would force the player to actually explore, the problem is that nobody would probably return to this area. So you could scrap this altogether.
Completely eliminating the other ores within a certain radius is a bad idea, too. While making them far less common would be a good way to implement it, completely taking them away would just seem silly. Not to mention it might seem odd considering it would be within a radius from where you spawned (or from coordinate 0x,0z, since the player rarely actually spawns at that coordinate any more).
Personally I feel that these two areas should be combined; start 'em off with just zombies, then force them to face a few new types of monsters above-ground, with the creeper being below-ground. Also, hopefully you were simply talking about bones now introduced for taming wolves rather than wolves being introduced at this level, since they are tied to the different biomes; biomes aboveground should remain randomly generated, as it is now.
A good idea. It isn't that much more challenging than how the world is in the previous areas, so there isn't a need for some kind of reward or anything.
Along with diamonds perhaps becoming more common, perhaps this could be the area in which dungeons are introduced (the End-portal-realm dungeons, of course; the original dungeons should appear with the introduction of zombies).
Sadly, this is true. The Nether, while a bit better with Blazes now, is still not much of a challenge for anyone with decent skills. You can avoid having zombie-pigmen attack you altogether, and Ghast fireballs are easy enough to dodge/deflect if you're fast enough. Drink a fire-immunity potion and Blazes do diddly-squat against you. More mobs that would actively attack you, in addition to perhaps more reasons to actually GO to the Nether (aside from collecting Blaze powder to make Ender eyes) would develop it much further.
Depending on the situation, yes. I think it would be best if perhaps some mobs remained as above-ground only mobs while others are below-ground only mobs. If Mojang can just learn to code properly instead of relying on spawners (*cough* cave spiders *cough*), underground areas can provide more of a challenge.
While perhaps a few new things wouldn't be so bad, to be honest I really like the balance between the different armors, weapons, and potions. Potions especially added a ton more depth to the game.
For one, don't make Terraria references when talking about Minecraft. Secondly, this just sounds unnecessary.
That shows some foresight; excellent job.
Perhaps the sky grows a bit darker as you progress further, making night shorter so that the hostile mobs appear more often and last longer.
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People who like building big structures often use creative, that's what it's there for.
Are you insane? The other half the the fun of survival is defending a ramshackle house while trying to find the best possible equipment. I strongly agree with Bigscary, most people play survival to to do what it was made for: survive. Also, adding adding new challenges will only increase the fun of trying to find rare blocks to make gigantic castles with.
Furthermore, many people would agree that survival does only last a few hours before becoming samey, that isn't his problem. This is one of the games MANY problems (I could name various others, but I wont because it might start a flame war).
My whole point is that most people really can't find anything to do in a near infinite world made up of all the same things, the same mysterious ruins over and over (so that they aren't the least bit mysterious), huge cliffs and gigantic canyons that aren't at all inspiring and expansive oceans with nothing in them then you have a perfectly healthy brain with perfect logic.
@Bigscary. Some other stuff to add would be more mobs and biomes, and randomly generated structures, rather than procedurally generated ones (so no 2 structures will be the same).
I agree with what you said, except for night being shorter as you go farther. I think The Day/Night cycle should be the same universally, except for going East/West should shift the time a little bit (just enough for the time to change 24 hours going from 1 side of the map to the other).
Why does everyone think I don't have an avatar? Is there anyone who can see the one black pixel.
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-Nice ideas
-Hardcore mode would have a reason to be called hardcore mode
-Would add a whole new perspective to the game
-If people don't like it, they can play survival (regular)
If you add a larger variety of flying monsters, then meaning they have to be either passive or neutral. Another problem with adding these monsters is housing. If a "bomb dropping" (bombers as i would call them) flying mob appeared you are going to need a whole lot of layers of roofing to survive one night with those. While certain things in minecraft are getting dull, could still need improving, but not as much as you said.
I agree with you 100%. The other poster said that he didn't like the idea of making materials harder to get - he wants to build very quickly, and for that, he wants easy access to diamonds and other valuables. So for HIS case, I suggested creative mode.
Like you, I too enjoy survival. I just want my cool builds to be all the cooler, and for that, I'd like to be required to adventure more. As it stands, one need adventure very little to get all the coolest build materials - down for diamonds and obsidian, out a little to find sand, and slightly into the nether for glowstone and netherrack (granted, those who want to defeat the ender dragon must explore the nether much more). Under the new system I'm suggesting, one would have to go much farther to find the best building stuff, encouraging more adventure out into the practically infinite world. :smile.gif:
I think that's a good idea. The current "hardcore" mode is another prime example of the worst possible implementation of "difficulty" - give players the same challenges, but punish them more for each mistake. I think hard mode should deliver new challenges, and some of these suggestions may qualify.
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No... hunger only goes down as you walk,sprint,attack or get hurt.
You can stand still for literally hours in real life and never die.
Umm okay, granted. But if you're not doing anything, you're not really playing the game. So just like other games, you can't fail if you're not playing. I can also stand perfectly still during the Halo tutorial, not following the guy's instructions, and that way I'll never lose the game.
Besides, night comes and bad guys spawn and kill you.
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