What you're saying boils down to "I wish Mojang would get their act together and release real, difficult content with worthwhile rewards".
I agree with that. It's not realistic to expect it, however. They haven't added any new bosses to the game since the Wither, with only the Dragon before that. The Nether update was their chance to add a Nether Boss (The Wither really doesn't count because it's a summonable and you are supposed to do it in the overworld) and they failed to do so, just like they failed to add a Kraken or anything else as a boss to the Update Aquatic. They're obviously not very keen to add more combat stuff to the game and their imagination tends to be very limited. Out of literally the THOUSANDS of creatures that live in real-world oceans, not to mention the thousands of mythical creatures to pull inspiration from and design a new hostile mob out of, we got... water zombies. Whoooooooo. They honestly should be ashamed that water zombies is the best they could do. Once again, if you want better combat and incentive for exploration, just wait for Hytale.
And for your information, I play survival instead of creative because large builds are more impressive when you have to work harder for them, up to a point. I take pride in being a top-tier player by creating a supervillage with all notable enchanted books and gear, and lots of farmers with melon and pumpkin farms to handle the emerald and exp supply. That takes work to set up. It takes skill and knowledge of the villager mechanics to do. That's quite enough.
What you're saying boils down to "I wish Mojang would get their act together and release real, difficult content with worthwhile rewards".
Not quite, my main point in this thread is that precious materials like diamonds and netherite need to be treated with a far higher level of scarcity in order to retain their value in long term play. My comments about incentivizing adventure play is more of a related peripheral point.
I agree with that. It's not realistic to expect it, however. They haven't added any new bosses to the game since the Wither, with only the Dragon before that. The Nether update was their chance to add a Nether Boss (The Wither really doesn't count because it's a summonable and you are supposed to do it in the overworld) and they failed to do so, just like they failed to add a Kraken or anything else as a boss to the Update Aquatic. They're obviously not very keen to add more combat stuff to the game and their imagination tends to be very limited. Out of literally the THOUSANDS of creatures that live in real-world oceans, not to mention the thousands of mythical creatures to pull inspiration from and design a new hostile mob out of, we got... water zombies. Whoooooooo. They honestly should be ashamed that water zombies is the best they could do. Once again, if you want better combat and incentive for exploration, just wait for Hytale.
Or we could flesh out survival Minecraft more, since that is the topic of this discussion. I'm not terribly interested in knock offs or mods.
And for your information, I play survival instead of creative because large builds are more impressive when you have to work harder for them, up to a point.
Exactly as I said, we're merely arguing over the acceptable level of work-reward. So I guess that nullifies your contention that Minecraft is a building game and therefore challenges aren't important. Glad you agree with me.
I take pride in being a top-tier player by creating a supervillage with all notable enchanted books and gear, and lots of farmers with melon and pumpkin farms to handle the emerald and exp supply. That takes work to set up. It takes skill and knowledge of the villager mechanics to do. That's quite enough.
By "top-tier player" you of course mean a player who prefers the current easily obtainable abundance of diamond and effortlessly exploitable villager mechanics because you find the current level of "challenge" satisfying. I disagree. I think they all need a serious nerf.
It may be necessary to implement some sort of standardized resource / loot rate difficulty levels, with the current rates being Easy and a series of difficulties on top of that, for players looking for less of a casually exploitable experience.
You can say what you want, but you really can just not use the elements of the game you disagree with if you really detest them that much, and it shouldn't matter to you what other players do unless you're specifically playing in a server completely dictated by economy. Frankly, you should get over it. You have complete control over how you play the game. Stop trying to advocate for stripping that control away from everyone else because you think the game is too easy. The game has been designed so that all playstyles can do (and not do) what they want and have a good experience.
And yes, being a top-tier player in Minecraft means eliminating as much of the repetitive (and skill-less) tedium as possible so you can actually be productive with your time and work on your builds. If you had your way with the game, there would be no incentive to do anything other than hold your Mine button/key for hours moving in a straight line. Not only is that incredibly boring, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever. Mining for diamonds before all of the fortune enchantments and new diamonds sources and whatever else was never hard. It was never challenging. It was just tedious, repetitive, and boring, and literally anyone could do it.
It may be necessary to implement some sort of standardized resource / loot rate difficulty levels, with the current rates being Easy and a series of difficulties on top of that, for players looking for less of a casually exploitable experience.
You can say what you want, but you really can just not use the elements of the game you disagree with if you really detest them that much, and it shouldn't matter to you what other players do unless you're specifically playing in a server completely dictated by economy.
By that logic, what do you care if other players are provided a higher difficulty level of the game?
Frankly, you should get over it. You have complete control over how you play the game.
Perhaps Mojang can make diamond ore generate at rates as abundant as diorite, andesite and granite combined and you can "get over it" because you're in "complete control over how you play the game"? Oh, I'm sorry, does that sound like it would be too easy to obtain diamond to you? Well I guess that means you and I simply disagree about the appropriate level of work-reward balance and you can't seem to accept the fact that we disagree.
Stop trying to advocate for stripping that control away from everyone else because you think the game is too easy. The game has been designed so that all playstyles can do (and not do) what they want and have a good experience.
Unless we want to actually engage in a core element of the game, searching for precious gems and gear via mining and exploring, without instantly and effortlessly accumulating more diamonds and gear than you would ever have any need for in a matter of hours, sure. (Also, the game has been designed to be accessible to children, not to cater to the desired level of challenge of broad range of players.)
And yes, being a top-tier player in Minecraft means eliminating as much of the repetitive (and skill-less) tedium as possible so you can actually be productive with your time and work on your builds.
The pursuit of diamonds, and the reward for discovering treasure such as diamond gear, is a core element of the gameplay, but it is diminished by the end of the first day because you can quickly amass a surplus of diamonds in a matter of hours. You clearly want to be able to rush toward endgame as quickly as possible so you can enjoy a Creative mode level of control over the game, with minimal survival challenges. Yet you still insist on having some of that survival pursuit-for-diamond / diamond mining gameplay. Which, again, means we're just arguing about the appropriate level of work-reward balance. You're comfortable with the current level, I and many other are not.
If you had your way with the game, there would be no incentive to do anything other than hold your Mine button/key for hours moving in a straight line. Not only is that incredibly boring, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever. Mining for diamonds before all of the fortune enchantments and new diamonds sources and whatever else was never hard. It was never challenging. It was just tedious, repetitive, and boring, and literally anyone could do it
Then why don't we remove mining altogether?
Oh that's right, because you ALSO value mining as a gameplay element.
We (again) simply have a disagreement about the appropriate level of work-reward balance.
SIGH. JUST DON'T USE THEM
I like how you opened your comment by saying it shouldn't matter to me what other players do, and to stop trying to impose my preferred level of gameplay difficulty onto others, then you end your comment by insisting that other players not receive the voluntary option of higher difficulty levels.
Perhaps Mojang can make diamond ore generate at rates as abundant as diorite, andesite and granite combined and you can "get over it" because you're in "complete control over how you play the game"?
When the only way you can argue is with hyperbole, you've lost.
The language you have been using in all of your posts suggests that you don't want these changes as just new difficulty OPTIONS, but REQUIRED changes to the game. Exhibits A, B, and C:
I also think diamond armor / tool / weapon loot in the End should be like 1/10th itβs current rate. Itβs game breakingly frequent.
I personally feel that diamonds ore should spawn at only about 1/4 or 1/3 its current rate (itβs just too abundant currently), and netherite ore should only spawn at about 1/20th the rate of diamond or so. Elytra treasure loot should only spawn about 1/5th its current rate, and shulker shells should only spawn from a much more rare shulker boss rather than from the frequent normal shulkers.
I disagree. I think they all need a serious nerf.
It may be necessary to implement some sort of standardized resource / loot rate difficulty levels, with the current rates being Easy and a series of difficulties on top of that, for players looking for less of a casually exploitable experience.
You did not at any point make even the slightest hint that you meant this for a new option until the very last line. It is undeniably phrased like you want these changes to be made unavoidable in the basegame. While it's true that you said it could be an option at some point LATER, you DID NOT mean it that way in the beginning, and that's the part I'm obviously calling you out on.
like how you opened your comment by saying it shouldn't matter to me what other players do, and to stop trying to impose my preferred level of gameplay difficulty onto others, then you end your comment by insisting that other players not receive the voluntary option of higher difficulty levels.
I never once claimed that the OPTIONS that you want should not be added, so you trying to make it look like I can is just putting words in my mouth and taking me out of context, which is how a weak man argues when he's already lost.
When the only way you can argue is with hyperbole, you've lost.
You apparently don't know what hyperbole is. Hyperbole would be if I misrepresented reality with exaggeration. However, I wasn't speaking about the current reality of the situation, I was posing a hypothetical situation to illustrate that you in fact also have a threshold by which you would consider diamonds to be overabundant, and we therefore simply disagree about the appropriate work-reward balance. A point you're still evading by trying to divert the conversation to arguing about the argument.
The language you have been using in all of your posts suggests that you don't want these changes as just new difficulty OPTIONS, but REQUIRED changes to the game. Exhibits A, B, and C:
Which is why I added the idea of optional difficulty levels for resource generation, because it became apparent that some people have meltdowns at the suggestion that they not be able to obtain endless supply of diamonds and enchanted gear after only a couple hours of casual gameplay.
You did not at any point make even the slightest hint that you meant this for a new option until the very last line. It is undeniably phrased like you want these changes to be made unavoidable in the basegame. While it's true that you said it could be an option at some point LATER, you DID NOT mean it that way in the beginning, and that's the part I'm obviously calling you out on.
Ya got me. I originally argued for it to be standard gameplay. I confess to stating my views. I'm sorry they've ruined your day. Lol.
Considering that you feel perfectly entitled to state your own opinion about how the standard game should work, which effects my gameplay, it is quite bizarre that you've insisted that others cease to state their own views on the basis that it would effect your gameplay, with comments like "Stop trying to advocate for stripping that control away from everyone else because you think the game is too easy." Interesting double standard.
I never once claimed that the OPTIONS that you want should not be added, so you trying to make it look like I can is just putting words in my mouth and taking me out of context, which is how a weak man argues when he's already lost.
On the contrary. By responding to my suggestion that we be provided additional difficulty options by saying "JUST DON'T USE THEM." I wouldn't call it a mischaracterization to say you were rejecting, in a rather insistent manner, the idea that we be provided difficulty options.
That said, I couldn't care less about dissecting interpretations of what either one of us was saying in an attempt to score some pedantic brownie points and pretend to be argument master. If you support the option of higher resource difficulty levels, cool beans. I still think the standard gameplay would benefit enormously from some serious nerfs to resource generation, despite the inevitable meltdown it would elicit from people who want it to remain excessively easy, and I'll continue to debate you on those merits, but I'm happy to accept the endorsement of higher difficulty options for resource generation.
Netherite is only 11% better than diamond for tools, and the difference seems to be similar for armor. It's about as life changing as a protection 1 book on your armor (4% damage protection x 4 armor pieces = >16% reduction), so I'd argue it's really not worth being gated to the incredible activity of strip mining this thread encourages.
Netherite is only 11% better than diamond for tools, and the difference seems to be similar for armor. It's about as life changing as a protection 1 book on your armor (4% damage protection x 4 armor pieces = >16% reduction), so I'd argue it's really not worth being gated to the incredible activity of strip mining this thread encourages.
Then netherite gear needs to be buffed and diamond gear nerfed. Making diamond or netherite so abundant you can obtain either of them in a day just completely defeats the purpose of having a precious gem / material to be sought after and treasured.
Considering that the vast majority of players already make massive autofarms to obtain resources making them even rarer would elicit such a massive outcry that Mojang would be forced to revert the changes. Yes, they actually tried this before with this as the outcome - in a 1.8 snapshot they nerfed iron farms by making iron golems only drop iron if you kill them yourself, but they reverted it soon after due to the outcry it caused. This despite the fact that I've mined well over a thousand iron in a single play session (like seriously, I can't imagine what anybody would need that much iron for, outside of hoppers for autofarms or actually trying to build with iron blocks; there have even been people who say it needs a serious nerf).
All you'd accomplish is to further kill off an already nonexistent part of the game for most players (you know, what the game was originally about, "Cave Game" - a "cave update" would not a difference if there is only a 1 in a million chance of finding a particular item; I myself consider it to be worthless to try to find loot in dungeons and such, especially for my "caving gear", whose entire point of existence is to be used while caving).
Things like this also make my glad that I completely gave up on updates past 1.6.4 and haven't touched them in years, and otherwise never actually played on them (i.e. a normal Survival world) - my own modding abilities means I can create my very own game and not worry at all about what Mojang might do in future updates. This includes enhancing the caving experience and nerfing resource farms - I made it so you even have to directly kill iron golems to get iron (this excludes things like TNT, bows, and splash potions. "Looting" bows, considered to be a bug, also don't work). Meanwhile, structures generally have better loot, even including enchantments which can't be obtained in any other manner (making them actual "treasure" enchantments, unlike Mojang's version, which just means they can't be obtained from the table).
Also, I don't get all the fuss over netherite either - the armor is actually worse than diamond gear was before 1.9, thanks to the ill-thought out "armor penetration" mechanic (this just means you need max-enchanted armor to guarantee survival from creeper explosions, while other mobs deal far less damage since armor penetration depends on the amount of damage so they are much less affected. In vanilla 1.6.4 I wear a diamond chestplate and leggings with Protection IV and diamond boots with Feather Falling IV, on Normal difficulty; I don't wear anything more since I find this is plenty good enough; if I played on Hard (after removing the zombies breaking door mechanic) I'd simply increase my armor to offset the increase in damage).
I also once compared the mining speed of Efficiency V gold and diamond tools and found no difference on many blocks (both mined 150 stone and 133 ores per minute; due to the way the game calculates mining times, rounding them up to the next tick and adding a 0.25 second delay, plus another 0.05 seconds before you can mine the next block, even when "instant-mining" is in effect, differences are only seen on certain blocks, and just 0.05 seconds per block at best, aside from a few blocks like ender chests and obsidian (if gold could mine it). Likewise, the difference between diamond and netherite is much less than the difference in base mining speed would suggest (12/9/8 for gold/netherite/diamond. Efficiency adds (level * level + 1) to this so they are then 38/35/34; the latter is only a 2.9% difference!), and durability is all but meaningless thanks to Mending.
Speaking of Mending, IMO it is far more game-breaking than finding valuable items in chests since you don't need any resources at all to maintain them, just easy to obtain XP - the anvil repair system prior to 1.8 was much better since the cost to repair an item was based on the costs of the enchantments as well as durability restored (instead of a flat 2 levels for any item, so diamond items and items with more and/or higher level enchantments cost more to repair; as a result, diamond items with more than 2-3 enchantments are generally unrepairable), aside from the fact you could simply rename an item to keep the cost down - which Mending should have done instead, along with using the old anvil system, as I made it do in my own game (I allow you to get it from villagers but trading was much less predictable before 1.8, and in any case I don't want to have to spend too much time to get it (in the last world I started it took me 2.44 days of playtime to reach the "end-game", when I really start having fun playing); most players also exploit fishing farms to get it, which do not exist, or at least don't give you anything other than fish). The occasional Mending book in chests (I found several, far less than I needed for my gear, over 4 months of caving for 3-4 hours per day) is absolutely not a game-breaker, same for other items.
This is a useless statistic because you play on such a heavily modded version of the game that basically nothing is the same as the actual game. In addition to this, your obsession with mining is absolutely ridiculous and nobody else enjoys doing it that much. Competent players that want to do literally anything except mine nonstop need more than just one source of iron due to how much iron hoppers, rails, and minecarts take to make.
Also Caver, you really overuse brackets to sandwich sentences together. It makes your posts a chore to read. Just split up your thoughts, it's not that hard.
This is a useless statistic because you play on such a heavily modded version of the game that basically nothing is the same as the actual game.
Sure... like my first world isn't vanilla (basically), and I mine just as many ores per hour as I do in my modded worlds; in fact, some of my single-play session records were set in this world. Even in TMCW, which you obviously know nothing about, my fancy amethyst items are nothing more than exorbitantly expensive diamond items - they mostly have the exact same stats as diamond, which itself was nerfed to make way for a new top tier. Not only that, some of my changes make it harder to cave - imagine doubling the mob cap, which is basically what happens when you reduce the spawn/despawn radius from 128 to 96 - so I spend more time fighting mobs - I even added in my own version of the 1.9 attack cooldown. Note that these changes are not present in my first world, only TMCW):
Vanilla 1.6.4 (MCP calls diamond "emerald", possibly because it was actually called that early on and they never bothered updating the deobfuscation mappings):
WOOD(0, 59, 2.0F, 0.0F, 15),
STONE(1, 131, 4.0F, 1.0F, 5),
IRON(2, 250, 6.0F, 2.0F, 14), EMERALD(3, 1561, 8.0F, 3.0F, 10),
GOLD(0, 32, 12.0F, 0.0F, 22);
The first number is the harvest level (3 = diamond), second is durability, third base speed, fourth base damage, and fifth enchantability; as you can see, amethyst has the same speed and damage as diamond in vanilla, while diamond itself is between vanilla iron and diamond (not that you'd even notice the difference in most cases). The higher enchantability of amethyst (20 vs 10 for diamond) is meaningless as you'd never want to risk getting random enchantments on something with an ore that is far rarer than diamond and cannot easily be obtained in any other way (such as trading), I even had it set to 0 in earlier versions, preventing them from being enchanted in the table at all.
Even more fun, I've spent a bit of time in newer versions just to see what they were like (such as how good is Mending, and what's the deal with 1.9 combat?) - and I mined ores at a faster rate than I do in 1.6.4, vanilla or otherwise, in part because of the much simpler caves but also because Mojang made ores more common in 1.8, and no, TMCW does not have more ores than vanilla:
TMCWv4 (I added extra lapis to the lowest few layers but this is irrelevant for caving; the red area is below lava level, which is 7 layers lower than vanilla but you can see that rarer ores are also shifted down):
Fact is, all of my mods are far closer to vanilla 1.6.4 than 1.15-1.16 are, especially actual gameplay mechanics, and regardless of mods I play on all my worlds basically the same way, as I have for the past 7 years. If anything, whenever I see somebody playing in a newer version I get the impression that they are playing on a modpack.
Also, caves expose a LOT of ores as I demonstrated in this thread:
The numbers I found are also in line what what I mine, considering that I explore about 100 chunks per play session; 199562 exposed ore in 6625 chunks = 3012 ores in 100 chunks; of this 716 is iron and 14.65 is diamond; divide these by an average of 3.5 hours per session and you get 204.5 iron and 4.2 diamond per hour, remarkably close to my actual averages:
For comparison, this is what I mined over 13 play sessions in an essentially unmodded 1.6.4 world (I had removed torches from mineshafts at the time so a map renderer that I use would not show unexplored mineshafts), not including any time I did not cave (numbers are total, per session, per hour):
You also only need to look at my worlds to see just how much caving I actually do; based on the frequencies in vanilla 1.6.4 I've explored tens of thousands of individual caves, thousands of ravines and dungeons, and hundreds of large cave systems and mineshafts covering practically the entire generated world:
You can recreate this world with the seed "-123775873255737467" in vanilla 1.6.4 for comparison purposes (it won't be exactly the same due to the fact I created it in 1.5.1, and of course, I've stripped most of the caves of ores, so vanilla should have more):
A full-size animation of what I explored over 10 play sessions, covering an area about 700 blocks across (the entire world is about 6600x6600 blocks and the images above are 10% of full size) - what you see includes multiple large cave systems (much larger than those in modern versions) and numerous mineshafts and ravines:
Here is a link to a world download; you can use this with MCEdit to see if I really jacked up ore generation (perhaps the most common claim that I see regarding my mining rates):
In truth I agree with Drago but I still see the use of a 'difficulty' setting for world generation to make stuff rarer for people who like/are better at grinding. I'm trash at the game in general for many reasons so I like it as is.
However, as to Netherite/diamond armour in bastions: bastions are rare - more so now- hard to find, hard to explore, piglins and hoglins easily hostile, and not every chest even has netherite stuff so it's a gamble - assuming you find a chest.
Think of it like this, Nephes (formerly known as). If we make the game only harder/grindier then people like you can be happy and people like me can't. If we keep the game dummy easy as it is right now, then you can make it harder for yourself artificially, or if you prefer vanilla, ask Mojang to add in options for "fake" difficulty increases. This without cancelling the game for low level people like me. Does having this as an option seem like a good compromise to you? If so, let me know and I'll suggest it to Reddit on your own behalf, credit and alls.
In truth I agree with Drago but I still see the use of a 'difficulty' setting for world generation to make stuff rarer for people who like/are better at grinding. I'm trash at the game in general for many reasons so I like it as is.
However, as to Netherite/diamond armour in bastions: bastions are rare - more so now- hard to find, hard to explore, piglins and hoglins easily hostile, and not every chest even has netherite stuff so it's a gamble - assuming you find a chest.
Think of it like this, Nephes (formerly known as). If we make the game only harder/grindier then people like you can be happy and people like me can't. If we keep the game dummy easy as it is right now, then you can make it harder for yourself artificially, or if you prefer vanilla, ask Mojang to add in options for "fake" difficulty increases. This without cancelling the game for low level people like me. Does having this as an option seem like a good compromise to you? If so, let me know and I'll suggest it to Reddit on your own behalf, credit and alls.
I'd rather see true world customization added, much like it was prior to 1.13 but more - for example, you could change ore generation to be however you like it to be, as well as actually being able to customize cave and biome generation (not just all or none or one), and you can currently use loot tables to change what generates in chests and even mob and block drops. Of course, as before there would be some presets available, including ones that make it more challenging, there was also a randomize option so you could click it and generate a world without looking at the settings so you don't even know what you'd get. Better control over difficulty factors like regional difficulty and mob equipment would also be nice (I think regional difficulty was a bad idea and "hard only" effects should be able to occur on any difficulty, and some should be more common).
I genuinely don't know what to tell a person who thinks that Minecraft players can just "artificially" pretend like they're being challenged to find diamond and netherite even if they're overly abundant. You can't make believe that something is a challenge.
If you don't want to mine or explore for diamonds, then don't. Have less diamonds. You'll quickly find out that, suddenly, they hold quite a lot more value when they're scarce. Which is the entire point. It shouldn't be easy to always remain in diamond tier.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
I'd rather see true world customization added, much like it was prior to 1.13 but more - for example, you could change ore generation to be however you like it to be, as well as actually being able to customize cave and biome generation (not just all or none or one), and you can currently use loot tables to change what generates in chests and even mob and block drops. Of course, as before there would be some presets available, including ones that make it more challenging, there was also a randomize option so you could click it and generate a world without looking at the settings so you don't even know what you'd get. Better control over difficulty factors like regional difficulty and mob equipment would also be nice (I think regional difficulty was a bad idea and "hard only" effects should be able to occur on any difficulty, and some should be more common).
I genuinely don't know what to tell a person who thinks that Minecraft players can just "artificially" pretend like they're being challenged to find diamond and netherite even if they're overly abundant. You can't make believe that something is a challenge.
If you don't want to mine or explore for diamonds, then don't. Have less diamonds. You'll quickly find out that, suddenly, they hold quite a lot more value when they're scarce. Which is the entire point. It shouldn't be easy to always remain in diamond tier.
I can tell you very clearly that I artificially make the game harder for myself by setting up a bunch of rules that seem pointless to most people, but to me, keep the game feeling natural and keep me tense.
For example, I never mine ores other than iron or gold without Fortune III. I don't use redstone contraptions beyond basic things, no big machines. I only dig up natural trees that grew on sand or gravel or floating in midair, and grass that spawned likewise. Everything else is left untouched.
I always keep the animal populations at the level they started or higher and tame animals who attack each other. I refurbish villages and temples. I don't spend diamonds on armour, instead I wait until I can trade it.
I don't create massive farms, I build smaller ones that fit the land shape. In general, I don't terraform and I build everything except mines to go with the natural grooves of the land, which takes more time and means less space, more resources, more effort.
I prefer to cave mine over normal mine. I explore caves slowly and carefully, with more light than needed and using stone walls to block off unexplored areas. And so on.
For me, this is "true vanilla". It may not be everyone's. I like to treat my world with undue respect as if it's a living thing, and try to change as little of the environment as necessary, instead focusing on restoring existing manmade structures and avoiding creating new ones
(or when I do, I build them into small cavelets and alcoves rather than just dump a house on an area. It saves resources, looks better, easier to build, and more hidden. IMO it looks nicer too).
Perhaps more importantly, I'm over-cautious. I overvalue resources in the game because I don't like wasting or throwing away anything, so I spend more slowly and gain more slowly. Caveing has also always scared me and continues to do so, although for some reason underwater caves and the other dimensions don't scare me at all.
If you don't want to mine or explore for diamonds, then don't. Have less diamonds. You'll quickly find out that, suddenly, they hold quite a lot more value when they're scarce. Which is the entire point. It shouldn't be easy to always remain in diamond tier.
A lot of "scarcity" is also skill-based; just as I regularly mine amounts of ores that are unbelievable to many people there are conversely those who complain that they can't find any diamonds even after hours spent mining - one difference is that skilled players know the most efficient ways to find resources; as the Wiki says, up to 1.7% of blocks mined while branch-mining can be diamond ore - that's a rate 14 times higher than its per-block abundance. Likewise, I mine ores so quickly while caving because I blast through them - no cautiously placing a torch and retreating in the case of mobs; I just sprint through spamming torches and if I run into mobs then I stop to kill them, continuing on until I finally reach a dead end or an overly complex intersection before backtracking and mining every single ore, even coal, which by itself is 2/3 of all ores I mine (I'm sure most players do not mine every bit of coal) and going down any side passages.
For another example of how efficient caving can be, and that I'm not as great of an anomaly as some think (or take advantage of mods/hacks), there is a gamemode called "ABBA caving" where players try to collect as many resources as possible in a limited amount of time, all in vanilla:
On average, a 20-minute match consisting of 3 players in a good cave system will yield a total of 30 diamond ore, 40 lapis ore, 80 gold ore, 200 redstone ore, and 300 iron ore.
Total accumulated jackpot found by all 3 players that Tifreak8x won: 20 diamond ore, 8 emerald ore, 62 lapis ore, 116 gold ore, 187 redstone ore, and 472 iron ore!
TIME LIMIT: 30 Minutes
Net Ore Count: 40 diamond, 28 lapis, 95 gold, 492 iron, 292 redstone
Those rates vastly exceed anything I've ever found in the same amount of time, even considering that a single player would find a third as many resources in the same amount of time, or conversely, these would be the rates over an hour (3 players = 20 minutes, 1 player = 60 minutes). This is mostly because I do not specifically seek out rarer ores - I treat all ores equally, unless you count mining emerald ore with Silk Touch. Even 300 iron ore in an hour is near the higher end of my hourly rates, which have exceeded a thousand of all ores per hour, but again, mostly coal, which they don't bother with here because it is too common (the Wiki suggests that some rules consider iron to be worthless as well).
Then again, you have players who can't seem to find more than a few iron or any diamonds in the same amount of time:
It shouldn't be easy to always remain in diamond tier.
Thing is, you only need 30-40 diamonds and you are set for life thanks to Mending, provided that you don't die and lose your items - all making diamond or other resources rarer does is increase the time needed to get them in the first place, and otherwise increases the exploitation of farms to collect resources. This is why I've said that Mending should have worked like renaming an item used to, requiring resources and anvils to repair them, and along with the old anvil mechanics prohibiting the indefinite use of excessively enchanted gear unless you want to regularly replace it.
I can tell you very clearly that I artificially make the game harder for myself by setting up a bunch of rules that seem pointless to most people, but to me, keep the game feeling natural and keep me tense.
Well that's adorable, but pretending that diamond resources aren't abundant to induce the illusion of a challenge is not the same as an actual challenge, and the value dynamic of precious gems quickly falls apart when a player who is genuinely trying to find diamonds has to voluntarily pretend that diamonds aren't abundantly available. This would be like a billionaire LARPing as a penniless entrepreneur and thinking they experienced a genuine economic challenge. If the limitations aren't forcibly imposed by the framework of the game, they're not real limitations, and they're not real challenges.
All that said, you yourself have a threshold by which you would also consider diamonds to be too common, for example if diamonds were as common as granite, diorite and andesite you would consider that preposterous and it would immensely dampen the joy of Survival gameplay, so you know full well that expecting players to LARP as though diamonds aren't abundant is not an actual solution. I suspect you and I would also agree that players should not be able to easily build an entire castle out of diamond or netherite, which means that you and I both agree that the grind of mining should limit players from amassing large quantities of precious gems, we simply disagree about the appropriate level of work-reward balance.
I think the game would actually become far richer and more emotionally rewarding if iron was the highest tier in the game to effortlessly maintain, and diamond and netherite were genuine challenges to reach and maintain. As it stands now, diamond is so insanely over-abundant that there's literally no reason to even bother enchanting any iron items at all, because you can have a full set of diamond gear in like 20 minutes. Yet you are perfectly capable of playing the entire game in iron tier, with one diamond pickaxe. Iron meets all your gameplay needs, except for the mere 9 diamond it takes to craft an entire set of insta-mining tools. You simply feel entitled to effortless access to the top resources in the game. I disagree.
Let's be perfectly clear, you and all other players have a limit to which you would tolerate "grinding" for diamonds. Which means that making diamonds more rare wouldn't make the game more "grindy", it would just mean you would have less diamonds.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
I think the game would actually become far richer and more emotionally rewarding if iron was the highest tier in the game to effortlessly maintain, and diamond and netherite were genuine challenges to reach and maintain. As it stands now, diamond is so insanely over-abundant that there's literally no reason to even bother enchanting any iron items at all, because you can have a full set of diamond gear in like 20 minutes. Yet you are perfectly capable of playing the entire game in iron tier, with one diamond pickaxe. Iron meets all your gameplay needs, except for the mere 9 diamond it takes to craft an entire set of insta-mining tools. You simply feel entitled to effortless access to the top resources in the game. I disagree. They should be genuinely rare.
What about what I keep saying about Mending? You only need 30-40 diamonds to make all the gear you'll ever need and making diamond ore rarer will only make it take longer to find enough - in my first world I've mined over 3 million blocks with the same diamond pickaxe, repaired over and over and over (of course, Mending doesn't exist in 1.6.4 so I did need more diamonds to repair it, over 1,500 in fact), but my unique playstyle makes that a non-issue, both for resources and XP - note that most players do not do nothing but cave or mine and rely on XP farms to keep their Mending gear repaired, so they definitely feel that resources (XP in this case) aren't common enough (meaning that anybody, regardless of playstyle, would never need any extra input to maintain their gear).
Many players even feel that iron isn't common enough to justify mining it and were so outraged when Mojang decided to nerf iron golem drops that they "had" to revert the changes. This says it all; yes, somebody actually made a petition on change.org to protest the nerf, and I've seen others say they would quit playing if such changes were made, or even have quit due to the threat:
Also, I doubt Mojang wants the game to be that hard, considering the main demographic it is targeted to, and being easy is a major selling point of the game (see the third item listed; for me the the main attraction is the second one):
That's not to say that I haven't done anything to make the game more challenging, and fun at the same time, like increasing mob spawn rates so I get more to fight while caving, and well as the chances of them having various effects (invisible spiders on Normal? Sure), or making mobs like cave spiders spawn in caves (why are they called cave spiders if they only spawn from spawners in mineshafts?). TMCW also adds an ore which is 8 times rarer than diamond in caves, which is still enough to sustainably use it without the need for Fortune (I accumulated less than stack of surplus over 466 hours of caving though) - of course, I have no doubt that nobody else would want to use it when it is barely better than diamond, and much worse when considering per-repair durability costs. I also made it up to half as common as diamond deeper down so it isn't too difficult to branch-mine for it, but I still had to mine more than 10,000 blocks, about 3 hours of non-stop mining at the rate of one block per second, to find enough with the help of Fortune (I found 22 amethyst ore and 91 diamond ore).
Note also that the average player likely does not play for 3-4 hours per session (enough to make the aforementioned mine in one sitting), and even if they did it would take over a month to complete the game, even without the "extras":
Single-Player
Main Story 104h 25m
Main + Extras 159h 08m
Completionists 242h 57m
For comparison, it took me about 58.6 hours to "complete" the game in my last world, which would most closely fall under "Main Story" since I don't bother with things like the Wither, only the Ender Dragon, and don't try to find structures or biomes other than a stronghold and Nether fortress; everything after this point is caving for fun, which took another 466 hours to find at least one of every underground feature, plus 14.5 additional hours to build secondary bases, railways, and wall in villages. This is also longer than I'd take in vanilla 1.6.4, and probably current versions since in vanilla 1.6.4 you only need to rename your items to keep the cost down, while I added my own version of Mending to the same effect, which meant I had to breed and trade with villagers, just as I would in 1.9+, and it is easier to get a specific enchanted book trade, including Mending, in 1.8+. I also wouldn't need to mine as much quartz, which takes around 12 hours, to get XP for enchanting, especially with 1.8's enchanting and 1.14's grindstones.
I'll have to respond to and break this down this in parts, sorry.
Well that's adorable, but pretending that diamond resources aren't abundant to induce the illusion of a challenge is not the same as an actual challenge, and the value dynamic of precious gems quickly falls apart when a player who is genuinely trying to find diamonds has to voluntarily pretend that diamonds aren't abundantly available. This would be like a billionaire LARPing as a penniless entrepreneur and thinking they experienced a genuine economic challenge. If the limitations aren't forcibly imposed by the framework of the game, they're not real limitations, and they're not real challenges.
I agree, and I feel you on that. I too would like the option to make ores rarer, I just don't want it to be the only option. I still think it's better too easy than too hard, the game has more to it than ores and again, not everyone is smart enough to mine efficiently. It's all relative, as you say.
You can call my gameplay 'adorable' just as well, it's all opinion. For me it brings the game to life and makes it feel like a story. Perhaps your idea of mining longer is what you consider fun and I think it's adorable - oh wait oops, forgot, you're the superhero who can instantly mine tons of ore easily and doesn't spend lots of time in the rock no matter how rare the ores get. Sorry, I'm not quite at that level. I don't gather ores up like dots in agar.io.
I'm not speedrunning the game or brute forcing through resources with no care for what I leave behind or how I get back to base. Some people like a slow game and that's okay too. You can play fast and say it's too fast, but is it really any more fair for me to go slower so you can go faster than for you to go too fast so I can go slower? Neither way works out, that's why the option thing is my answer.
All that said, you yourself have a threshold by which you would also consider diamonds to be too common, for example if diamonds were as common as granite, diorite and andesite you would consider that preposterous and it would immensely dampen the joy of Survival gameplay, so you know full well that expecting players to LARP as though diamonds aren't abundant is not an actual solution. I suspect you and I would also agree that players should not be able to easily build an entire castle out of diamond or netherite, which means that you and I both agree that the grind of mining should limit players from amassing large quantities of precious gems, we simply disagree about the appropriate level of work-reward balance.
Yeah, totally. It's all relative. I don't want mass amounts of diamonds either. On a typical half-hour to one hour mine though, I only get one to three ores so basically a quarter stack before enchantments.
I think the game would actually become far richer and more emotionally rewarding if iron was the highest tier in the game to effortlessly maintain, and diamond and netherite were genuine challenges to reach and maintain. As it stands now, diamond is so insanely over-abundant that there's literally no reason to even bother enchanting any iron items at all, because you can have a full set of diamond gear in like 20 minutes. Yet you are perfectly capable of playing the entire game in iron tier, with one diamond pickaxe. Iron meets all your gameplay needs, except for the mere 9 diamond it takes to craft an entire set of insta-mining tools. You simply feel entitled to effortless access to the top resources in the game. I disagree.
And you feel "entitled" to a challenge? If everyone who ever wanted something without getting it themselves entirely was entitled, we wouldn't have society, much less Minecraft arguments. Again, not all people are good at this game. You may think that people who want it easy are lazy, but it may be a real challenge for them as it is right now.
You have to understand that you can't speak for everybody and you also can't decide as a corollary what is and isn't rare and what is and isn't fun or unfun, or rewarding versus boring. Trying to make an objective claim, even as a majority, is entitlement as well just as much. Not everyone can be catered to, but most people should be and the range of people catered to should be as wide as possible. This is both just good business as well as The Right Thing To Do.
Let's be perfectly clear, you and all other players have a limit to which you would tolerate "grinding" for diamonds. Which means that making diamonds more rare wouldn't make the game more "grindy", it would just mean you would have less diamonds.
It would mean it because if you needed x diamonds and that took you y minutes and it now takes you y+z minutes, you lost z minutes for what purpose? Is there some sort of fun in delayed gratification here, rarer pulses of adrenaline or dopamine? I don't really get it lol. I don't have a lot of diamonds to begin with because *I'm not a good miner* and frankly I don't use many - 2 for an enchantment table and one for a jukebox is the most I need - I don't do fireworks and I can get by on enchanted iron armour because I'm okay at fighting - if I really need diamond for some reason for tools or stuff I'll farm villagers.
Portals can be made with just buckets, nerfing that would make it slightly more relevant to me although the Nether is not my main jig, abandoned structures and natural small caves and alcoves are. It's not like I would go from 30 diamonds to 10 or something, it means I may take an extra ten to twenty minutes longer to get those three diamonds for my appliances and that's not less diamonds, that's none at all if I don't feel like mining.
Making things rarer like this to increase value is exactly what grinding is born from. Rarity =/= balance. Value can also be made by difficulty, like solving an actually hard redstone puzzle or fighting a lot of mobs. Anyone can sink their pickaxe into some stone, it's boring. The only way I can see ores being rarer as a good thing is for mining because there are honestly too many of them in caves to the point that mining them makes some caves hard to walk through or look unsightly (plus creepers become more of a cost if they blow up).
And for your information, I play survival instead of creative because large builds are more impressive when you have to work harder for them, up to a point. I take pride in being a top-tier player by creating a supervillage with all notable enchanted books and gear, and lots of farmers with melon and pumpkin farms to handle the emerald and exp supply. That takes work to set up. It takes skill and knowledge of the villager mechanics to do. That's quite enough.
The keywords are "up to a point". That point isn't the same for everyone. I have a pretty low patience for building giant structures unless I need them somehow such as the type of village you like to make. On the other hand, I'm more than glad to build tons upon tons of smaller structures and join them into a bigger one over time.
I agree with the points made about how Netherite should not be able to be found in chests, However, when i kept reading you said that it should take more than one ingot and this is where i disagree. If you had to find enough Ancient Debris to craft tools and armor it would take hours and even days because you need to find 4 and combine it with 4 gold just to make 1 ingot. I would like to see a change in maybe not being able to find it in chests but I will have to disagree that it should take more than 1 to upgrade.
What you're saying boils down to "I wish Mojang would get their act together and release real, difficult content with worthwhile rewards".
I agree with that. It's not realistic to expect it, however. They haven't added any new bosses to the game since the Wither, with only the Dragon before that. The Nether update was their chance to add a Nether Boss (The Wither really doesn't count because it's a summonable and you are supposed to do it in the overworld) and they failed to do so, just like they failed to add a Kraken or anything else as a boss to the Update Aquatic. They're obviously not very keen to add more combat stuff to the game and their imagination tends to be very limited. Out of literally the THOUSANDS of creatures that live in real-world oceans, not to mention the thousands of mythical creatures to pull inspiration from and design a new hostile mob out of, we got... water zombies. Whoooooooo. They honestly should be ashamed that water zombies is the best they could do. Once again, if you want better combat and incentive for exploration, just wait for Hytale.
And for your information, I play survival instead of creative because large builds are more impressive when you have to work harder for them, up to a point. I take pride in being a top-tier player by creating a supervillage with all notable enchanted books and gear, and lots of farmers with melon and pumpkin farms to handle the emerald and exp supply. That takes work to set up. It takes skill and knowledge of the villager mechanics to do. That's quite enough.
Not quite, my main point in this thread is that precious materials like diamonds and netherite need to be treated with a far higher level of scarcity in order to retain their value in long term play. My comments about incentivizing adventure play is more of a related peripheral point.
Or we could flesh out survival Minecraft more, since that is the topic of this discussion. I'm not terribly interested in knock offs or mods.
Exactly as I said, we're merely arguing over the acceptable level of work-reward. So I guess that nullifies your contention that Minecraft is a building game and therefore challenges aren't important. Glad you agree with me.
By "top-tier player" you of course mean a player who prefers the current easily obtainable abundance of diamond and effortlessly exploitable villager mechanics because you find the current level of "challenge" satisfying. I disagree. I think they all need a serious nerf.
It may be necessary to implement some sort of standardized resource / loot rate difficulty levels, with the current rates being Easy and a series of difficulties on top of that, for players looking for less of a casually exploitable experience.
πͺπͺπͺ Blocky World πͺπͺπͺ - [ Whitelist / Survival / Redstone / Civilization ]
You can say what you want, but you really can just not use the elements of the game you disagree with if you really detest them that much, and it shouldn't matter to you what other players do unless you're specifically playing in a server completely dictated by economy. Frankly, you should get over it. You have complete control over how you play the game. Stop trying to advocate for stripping that control away from everyone else because you think the game is too easy. The game has been designed so that all playstyles can do (and not do) what they want and have a good experience.
And yes, being a top-tier player in Minecraft means eliminating as much of the repetitive (and skill-less) tedium as possible so you can actually be productive with your time and work on your builds. If you had your way with the game, there would be no incentive to do anything other than hold your Mine button/key for hours moving in a straight line. Not only is that incredibly boring, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever. Mining for diamonds before all of the fortune enchantments and new diamonds sources and whatever else was never hard. It was never challenging. It was just tedious, repetitive, and boring, and literally anyone could do it.
SIGH. JUST DON'T USE THEM.
By that logic, what do you care if other players are provided a higher difficulty level of the game?
Perhaps Mojang can make diamond ore generate at rates as abundant as diorite, andesite and granite combined and you can "get over it" because you're in "complete control over how you play the game"? Oh, I'm sorry, does that sound like it would be too easy to obtain diamond to you? Well I guess that means you and I simply disagree about the appropriate level of work-reward balance and you can't seem to accept the fact that we disagree.
Unless we want to actually engage in a core element of the game, searching for precious gems and gear via mining and exploring, without instantly and effortlessly accumulating more diamonds and gear than you would ever have any need for in a matter of hours, sure. (Also, the game has been designed to be accessible to children, not to cater to the desired level of challenge of broad range of players.)
The pursuit of diamonds, and the reward for discovering treasure such as diamond gear, is a core element of the gameplay, but it is diminished by the end of the first day because you can quickly amass a surplus of diamonds in a matter of hours. You clearly want to be able to rush toward endgame as quickly as possible so you can enjoy a Creative mode level of control over the game, with minimal survival challenges. Yet you still insist on having some of that survival pursuit-for-diamond / diamond mining gameplay. Which, again, means we're just arguing about the appropriate level of work-reward balance. You're comfortable with the current level, I and many other are not.
Then why don't we remove mining altogether?
Oh that's right, because you ALSO value mining as a gameplay element.
We (again) simply have a disagreement about the appropriate level of work-reward balance.
I like how you opened your comment by saying it shouldn't matter to me what other players do, and to stop trying to impose my preferred level of gameplay difficulty onto others, then you end your comment by insisting that other players not receive the voluntary option of higher difficulty levels.
SIGH. XD
πͺπͺπͺ Blocky World πͺπͺπͺ - [ Whitelist / Survival / Redstone / Civilization ]
When the only way you can argue is with hyperbole, you've lost.
The language you have been using in all of your posts suggests that you don't want these changes as just new difficulty OPTIONS, but REQUIRED changes to the game. Exhibits A, B, and C:
You did not at any point make even the slightest hint that you meant this for a new option until the very last line. It is undeniably phrased like you want these changes to be made unavoidable in the basegame. While it's true that you said it could be an option at some point LATER, you DID NOT mean it that way in the beginning, and that's the part I'm obviously calling you out on.
I never once claimed that the OPTIONS that you want should not be added, so you trying to make it look like I can is just putting words in my mouth and taking me out of context, which is how a weak man argues when he's already lost.
You apparently don't know what hyperbole is. Hyperbole would be if I misrepresented reality with exaggeration. However, I wasn't speaking about the current reality of the situation, I was posing a hypothetical situation to illustrate that you in fact also have a threshold by which you would consider diamonds to be overabundant, and we therefore simply disagree about the appropriate work-reward balance. A point you're still evading by trying to divert the conversation to arguing about the argument.
Which is why I added the idea of optional difficulty levels for resource generation, because it became apparent that some people have meltdowns at the suggestion that they not be able to obtain endless supply of diamonds and enchanted gear after only a couple hours of casual gameplay.
Ya got me. I originally argued for it to be standard gameplay. I confess to stating my views. I'm sorry they've ruined your day. Lol.
Considering that you feel perfectly entitled to state your own opinion about how the standard game should work, which effects my gameplay, it is quite bizarre that you've insisted that others cease to state their own views on the basis that it would effect your gameplay, with comments like "Stop trying to advocate for stripping that control away from everyone else because you think the game is too easy." Interesting double standard.
On the contrary. By responding to my suggestion that we be provided additional difficulty options by saying "JUST DON'T USE THEM." I wouldn't call it a mischaracterization to say you were rejecting, in a rather insistent manner, the idea that we be provided difficulty options.
That said, I couldn't care less about dissecting interpretations of what either one of us was saying in an attempt to score some pedantic brownie points and pretend to be argument master. If you support the option of higher resource difficulty levels, cool beans. I still think the standard gameplay would benefit enormously from some serious nerfs to resource generation, despite the inevitable meltdown it would elicit from people who want it to remain excessively easy, and I'll continue to debate you on those merits, but I'm happy to accept the endorsement of higher difficulty options for resource generation.
πͺπͺπͺ Blocky World πͺπͺπͺ - [ Whitelist / Survival / Redstone / Civilization ]
Netherite is only 11% better than diamond for tools, and the difference seems to be similar for armor. It's about as life changing as a protection 1 book on your armor (4% damage protection x 4 armor pieces = >16% reduction), so I'd argue it's really not worth being gated to the incredible activity of strip mining this thread encourages.
Then netherite gear needs to be buffed and diamond gear nerfed. Making diamond or netherite so abundant you can obtain either of them in a day just completely defeats the purpose of having a precious gem / material to be sought after and treasured.
πͺπͺπͺ Blocky World πͺπͺπͺ - [ Whitelist / Survival / Redstone / Civilization ]
Considering that the vast majority of players already make massive autofarms to obtain resources making them even rarer would elicit such a massive outcry that Mojang would be forced to revert the changes. Yes, they actually tried this before with this as the outcome - in a 1.8 snapshot they nerfed iron farms by making iron golems only drop iron if you kill them yourself, but they reverted it soon after due to the outcry it caused. This despite the fact that I've mined well over a thousand iron in a single play session (like seriously, I can't imagine what anybody would need that much iron for, outside of hoppers for autofarms or actually trying to build with iron blocks; there have even been people who say it needs a serious nerf).
All you'd accomplish is to further kill off an already nonexistent part of the game for most players (you know, what the game was originally about, "Cave Game" - a "cave update" would not a difference if there is only a 1 in a million chance of finding a particular item; I myself consider it to be worthless to try to find loot in dungeons and such, especially for my "caving gear", whose entire point of existence is to be used while caving).
Things like this also make my glad that I completely gave up on updates past 1.6.4 and haven't touched them in years, and otherwise never actually played on them (i.e. a normal Survival world) - my own modding abilities means I can create my very own game and not worry at all about what Mojang might do in future updates. This includes enhancing the caving experience and nerfing resource farms - I made it so you even have to directly kill iron golems to get iron (this excludes things like TNT, bows, and splash potions. "Looting" bows, considered to be a bug, also don't work). Meanwhile, structures generally have better loot, even including enchantments which can't be obtained in any other manner (making them actual "treasure" enchantments, unlike Mojang's version, which just means they can't be obtained from the table).
Also, I don't get all the fuss over netherite either - the armor is actually worse than diamond gear was before 1.9, thanks to the ill-thought out "armor penetration" mechanic (this just means you need max-enchanted armor to guarantee survival from creeper explosions, while other mobs deal far less damage since armor penetration depends on the amount of damage so they are much less affected. In vanilla 1.6.4 I wear a diamond chestplate and leggings with Protection IV and diamond boots with Feather Falling IV, on Normal difficulty; I don't wear anything more since I find this is plenty good enough; if I played on Hard (after removing the zombies breaking door mechanic) I'd simply increase my armor to offset the increase in damage).
I also once compared the mining speed of Efficiency V gold and diamond tools and found no difference on many blocks (both mined 150 stone and 133 ores per minute; due to the way the game calculates mining times, rounding them up to the next tick and adding a 0.25 second delay, plus another 0.05 seconds before you can mine the next block, even when "instant-mining" is in effect, differences are only seen on certain blocks, and just 0.05 seconds per block at best, aside from a few blocks like ender chests and obsidian (if gold could mine it). Likewise, the difference between diamond and netherite is much less than the difference in base mining speed would suggest (12/9/8 for gold/netherite/diamond. Efficiency adds (level * level + 1) to this so they are then 38/35/34; the latter is only a 2.9% difference!), and durability is all but meaningless thanks to Mending.
Speaking of Mending, IMO it is far more game-breaking than finding valuable items in chests since you don't need any resources at all to maintain them, just easy to obtain XP - the anvil repair system prior to 1.8 was much better since the cost to repair an item was based on the costs of the enchantments as well as durability restored (instead of a flat 2 levels for any item, so diamond items and items with more and/or higher level enchantments cost more to repair; as a result, diamond items with more than 2-3 enchantments are generally unrepairable), aside from the fact you could simply rename an item to keep the cost down - which Mending should have done instead, along with using the old anvil system, as I made it do in my own game (I allow you to get it from villagers but trading was much less predictable before 1.8, and in any case I don't want to have to spend too much time to get it (in the last world I started it took me 2.44 days of playtime to reach the "end-game", when I really start having fun playing); most players also exploit fishing farms to get it, which do not exist, or at least don't give you anything other than fish). The occasional Mending book in chests (I found several, far less than I needed for my gear, over 4 months of caving for 3-4 hours per day) is absolutely not a game-breaker, same for other items.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
This is a useless statistic because you play on such a heavily modded version of the game that basically nothing is the same as the actual game. In addition to this, your obsession with mining is absolutely ridiculous and nobody else enjoys doing it that much. Competent players that want to do literally anything except mine nonstop need more than just one source of iron due to how much iron hoppers, rails, and minecarts take to make.
Also Caver, you really overuse brackets to sandwich sentences together. It makes your posts a chore to read. Just split up your thoughts, it's not that hard.
Sure... like my first world isn't vanilla (basically), and I mine just as many ores per hour as I do in my modded worlds; in fact, some of my single-play session records were set in this world. Even in TMCW, which you obviously know nothing about, my fancy amethyst items are nothing more than exorbitantly expensive diamond items - they mostly have the exact same stats as diamond, which itself was nerfed to make way for a new top tier. Not only that, some of my changes make it harder to cave - imagine doubling the mob cap, which is basically what happens when you reduce the spawn/despawn radius from 128 to 96 - so I spend more time fighting mobs - I even added in my own version of the 1.9 attack cooldown. Note that these changes are not present in my first world, only TMCW):
Even more fun, I've spent a bit of time in newer versions just to see what they were like (such as how good is Mending, and what's the deal with 1.9 combat?) - and I mined ores at a faster rate than I do in 1.6.4, vanilla or otherwise, in part because of the much simpler caves but also because Mojang made ores more common in 1.8, and no, TMCW does not have more ores than vanilla:
Vanilla 1.12:
https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/File:PercentOfOreByHeight.png
TMCWv4 (I added extra lapis to the lowest few layers but this is irrelevant for caving; the red area is below lava level, which is 7 layers lower than vanilla but you can see that rarer ores are also shifted down):
Fact is, all of my mods are far closer to vanilla 1.6.4 than 1.15-1.16 are, especially actual gameplay mechanics, and regardless of mods I play on all my worlds basically the same way, as I have for the past 7 years. If anything, whenever I see somebody playing in a newer version I get the impression that they are playing on a modpack.
Also, caves expose a LOT of ores as I demonstrated in this thread:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2529746-how-many-ores-do-caves-expose
The numbers I found are also in line what what I mine, considering that I explore about 100 chunks per play session; 199562 exposed ore in 6625 chunks = 3012 ores in 100 chunks; of this 716 is iron and 14.65 is diamond; divide these by an average of 3.5 hours per session and you get 204.5 iron and 4.2 diamond per hour, remarkably close to my actual averages:
https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/discussion/2812077-mining-rates
You also only need to look at my worlds to see just how much caving I actually do; based on the frequencies in vanilla 1.6.4 I've explored tens of thousands of individual caves, thousands of ravines and dungeons, and hundreds of large cave systems and mineshafts covering practically the entire generated world:
A full-size animation of what I explored over 10 play sessions, covering an area about 700 blocks across (the entire world is about 6600x6600 blocks and the images above are 10% of full size) - what you see includes multiple large cave systems (much larger than those in modern versions) and numerous mineshafts and ravines:
Here is a link to a world download; you can use this with MCEdit to see if I really jacked up ore generation (perhaps the most common claim that I see regarding my mining rates):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mjsawpqbhq1pbdv/World1.zip?dl=0
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
In truth I agree with Drago but I still see the use of a 'difficulty' setting for world generation to make stuff rarer for people who like/are better at grinding. I'm trash at the game in general for many reasons so I like it as is.
However, as to Netherite/diamond armour in bastions: bastions are rare - more so now- hard to find, hard to explore, piglins and hoglins easily hostile, and not every chest even has netherite stuff so it's a gamble - assuming you find a chest.
Think of it like this, Nephes (formerly known as). If we make the game only harder/grindier then people like you can be happy and people like me can't. If we keep the game dummy easy as it is right now, then you can make it harder for yourself artificially, or if you prefer vanilla, ask Mojang to add in options for "fake" difficulty increases. This without cancelling the game for low level people like me. Does having this as an option seem like a good compromise to you? If so, let me know and I'll suggest it to Reddit on your own behalf, credit and alls.
I'd rather see true world customization added, much like it was prior to 1.13 but more - for example, you could change ore generation to be however you like it to be, as well as actually being able to customize cave and biome generation (not just all or none or one), and you can currently use loot tables to change what generates in chests and even mob and block drops. Of course, as before there would be some presets available, including ones that make it more challenging, there was also a randomize option so you could click it and generate a world without looking at the settings so you don't even know what you'd get. Better control over difficulty factors like regional difficulty and mob equipment would also be nice (I think regional difficulty was a bad idea and "hard only" effects should be able to occur on any difficulty, and some should be more common).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
If you don't want to mine or explore for diamonds, then don't. Have less diamonds. You'll quickly find out that, suddenly, they hold quite a lot more value when they're scarce. Which is the entire point. It shouldn't be easy to always remain in diamond tier.
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
Yeah this sounds pretty good too tbh.
I can tell you very clearly that I artificially make the game harder for myself by setting up a bunch of rules that seem pointless to most people, but to me, keep the game feeling natural and keep me tense.
For example, I never mine ores other than iron or gold without Fortune III. I don't use redstone contraptions beyond basic things, no big machines. I only dig up natural trees that grew on sand or gravel or floating in midair, and grass that spawned likewise. Everything else is left untouched.
I always keep the animal populations at the level they started or higher and tame animals who attack each other. I refurbish villages and temples. I don't spend diamonds on armour, instead I wait until I can trade it.
I don't create massive farms, I build smaller ones that fit the land shape. In general, I don't terraform and I build everything except mines to go with the natural grooves of the land, which takes more time and means less space, more resources, more effort.
I prefer to cave mine over normal mine. I explore caves slowly and carefully, with more light than needed and using stone walls to block off unexplored areas. And so on.
For me, this is "true vanilla". It may not be everyone's. I like to treat my world with undue respect as if it's a living thing, and try to change as little of the environment as necessary, instead focusing on restoring existing manmade structures and avoiding creating new ones
(or when I do, I build them into small cavelets and alcoves rather than just dump a house on an area. It saves resources, looks better, easier to build, and more hidden. IMO it looks nicer too).
Perhaps more importantly, I'm over-cautious. I overvalue resources in the game because I don't like wasting or throwing away anything, so I spend more slowly and gain more slowly. Caveing has also always scared me and continues to do so, although for some reason underwater caves and the other dimensions don't scare me at all.
A lot of "scarcity" is also skill-based; just as I regularly mine amounts of ores that are unbelievable to many people there are conversely those who complain that they can't find any diamonds even after hours spent mining - one difference is that skilled players know the most efficient ways to find resources; as the Wiki says, up to 1.7% of blocks mined while branch-mining can be diamond ore - that's a rate 14 times higher than its per-block abundance. Likewise, I mine ores so quickly while caving because I blast through them - no cautiously placing a torch and retreating in the case of mobs; I just sprint through spamming torches and if I run into mobs then I stop to kill them, continuing on until I finally reach a dead end or an overly complex intersection before backtracking and mining every single ore, even coal, which by itself is 2/3 of all ores I mine (I'm sure most players do not mine every bit of coal) and going down any side passages.
For another example of how efficient caving can be, and that I'm not as great of an anomaly as some think (or take advantage of mods/hacks), there is a gamemode called "ABBA caving" where players try to collect as many resources as possible in a limited amount of time, all in vanilla:
Those rates vastly exceed anything I've ever found in the same amount of time, even considering that a single player would find a third as many resources in the same amount of time, or conversely, these would be the rates over an hour (3 players = 20 minutes, 1 player = 60 minutes). This is mostly because I do not specifically seek out rarer ores - I treat all ores equally, unless you count mining emerald ore with Silk Touch. Even 300 iron ore in an hour is near the higher end of my hourly rates, which have exceeded a thousand of all ores per hour, but again, mostly coal, which they don't bother with here because it is too common (the Wiki suggests that some rules consider iron to be worthless as well).
Then again, you have players who can't seem to find more than a few iron or any diamonds in the same amount of time:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/gklc8z/ive_been_strip_mining_for_3_hours_at_depth_8_and/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/gkl33x/im_playing_the_current_snapshot_on_java_and_cant/
Thing is, you only need 30-40 diamonds and you are set for life thanks to Mending, provided that you don't die and lose your items - all making diamond or other resources rarer does is increase the time needed to get them in the first place, and otherwise increases the exploitation of farms to collect resources. This is why I've said that Mending should have worked like renaming an item used to, requiring resources and anvils to repair them, and along with the old anvil mechanics prohibiting the indefinite use of excessively enchanted gear unless you want to regularly replace it.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Well that's adorable, but pretending that diamond resources aren't abundant to induce the illusion of a challenge is not the same as an actual challenge, and the value dynamic of precious gems quickly falls apart when a player who is genuinely trying to find diamonds has to voluntarily pretend that diamonds aren't abundantly available. This would be like a billionaire LARPing as a penniless entrepreneur and thinking they experienced a genuine economic challenge. If the limitations aren't forcibly imposed by the framework of the game, they're not real limitations, and they're not real challenges.
All that said, you yourself have a threshold by which you would also consider diamonds to be too common, for example if diamonds were as common as granite, diorite and andesite you would consider that preposterous and it would immensely dampen the joy of Survival gameplay, so you know full well that expecting players to LARP as though diamonds aren't abundant is not an actual solution. I suspect you and I would also agree that players should not be able to easily build an entire castle out of diamond or netherite, which means that you and I both agree that the grind of mining should limit players from amassing large quantities of precious gems, we simply disagree about the appropriate level of work-reward balance.
I think the game would actually become far richer and more emotionally rewarding if iron was the highest tier in the game to effortlessly maintain, and diamond and netherite were genuine challenges to reach and maintain. As it stands now, diamond is so insanely over-abundant that there's literally no reason to even bother enchanting any iron items at all, because you can have a full set of diamond gear in like 20 minutes. Yet you are perfectly capable of playing the entire game in iron tier, with one diamond pickaxe. Iron meets all your gameplay needs, except for the mere 9 diamond it takes to craft an entire set of insta-mining tools. You simply feel entitled to effortless access to the top resources in the game. I disagree.
Let's be perfectly clear, you and all other players have a limit to which you would tolerate "grinding" for diamonds. Which means that making diamonds more rare wouldn't make the game more "grindy", it would just mean you would have less diamonds.
There is a sixth dimension beyond that which is known to Steve. This is the dimension of imagination, an area which we call... The Blocky Place.
What about what I keep saying about Mending? You only need 30-40 diamonds to make all the gear you'll ever need and making diamond ore rarer will only make it take longer to find enough - in my first world I've mined over 3 million blocks with the same diamond pickaxe, repaired over and over and over (of course, Mending doesn't exist in 1.6.4 so I did need more diamonds to repair it, over 1,500 in fact), but my unique playstyle makes that a non-issue, both for resources and XP - note that most players do not do nothing but cave or mine and rely on XP farms to keep their Mending gear repaired, so they definitely feel that resources (XP in this case) aren't common enough (meaning that anybody, regardless of playstyle, would never need any extra input to maintain their gear).
Many players even feel that iron isn't common enough to justify mining it and were so outraged when Mojang decided to nerf iron golem drops that they "had" to revert the changes. This says it all; yes, somebody actually made a petition on change.org to protest the nerf, and I've seen others say they would quit playing if such changes were made, or even have quit due to the threat:
https://www.change.org/p/mojang-team-please-don-t-remove-drops-for-mobs-that-die-naturally
Also, I doubt Mojang wants the game to be that hard, considering the main demographic it is targeted to, and being easy is a major selling point of the game (see the third item listed; for me the the main attraction is the second one):
That's not to say that I haven't done anything to make the game more challenging, and fun at the same time, like increasing mob spawn rates so I get more to fight while caving, and well as the chances of them having various effects (invisible spiders on Normal? Sure), or making mobs like cave spiders spawn in caves (why are they called cave spiders if they only spawn from spawners in mineshafts?). TMCW also adds an ore which is 8 times rarer than diamond in caves, which is still enough to sustainably use it without the need for Fortune (I accumulated less than stack of surplus over 466 hours of caving though) - of course, I have no doubt that nobody else would want to use it when it is barely better than diamond, and much worse when considering per-repair durability costs. I also made it up to half as common as diamond deeper down so it isn't too difficult to branch-mine for it, but I still had to mine more than 10,000 blocks, about 3 hours of non-stop mining at the rate of one block per second, to find enough with the help of Fortune (I found 22 amethyst ore and 91 diamond ore).
Note also that the average player likely does not play for 3-4 hours per session (enough to make the aforementioned mine in one sitting), and even if they did it would take over a month to complete the game, even without the "extras":
For comparison, it took me about 58.6 hours to "complete" the game in my last world, which would most closely fall under "Main Story" since I don't bother with things like the Wither, only the Ender Dragon, and don't try to find structures or biomes other than a stronghold and Nether fortress; everything after this point is caving for fun, which took another 466 hours to find at least one of every underground feature, plus 14.5 additional hours to build secondary bases, railways, and wall in villages. This is also longer than I'd take in vanilla 1.6.4, and probably current versions since in vanilla 1.6.4 you only need to rename your items to keep the cost down, while I added my own version of Mending to the same effect, which meant I had to breed and trade with villagers, just as I would in 1.9+, and it is easier to get a specific enchanted book trade, including Mending, in 1.8+. I also wouldn't need to mine as much quartz, which takes around 12 hours, to get XP for enchanting, especially with 1.8's enchanting and 1.14's grindstones.
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
I agree, and I feel you on that. I too would like the option to make ores rarer, I just don't want it to be the only option. I still think it's better too easy than too hard, the game has more to it than ores and again, not everyone is smart enough to mine efficiently. It's all relative, as you say.
You can call my gameplay 'adorable' just as well, it's all opinion. For me it brings the game to life and makes it feel like a story. Perhaps your idea of mining longer is what you consider fun and I think it's adorable - oh wait oops, forgot, you're the superhero who can instantly mine tons of ore easily and doesn't spend lots of time in the rock no matter how rare the ores get. Sorry, I'm not quite at that level. I don't gather ores up like dots in agar.io.
I'm not speedrunning the game or brute forcing through resources with no care for what I leave behind or how I get back to base. Some people like a slow game and that's okay too. You can play fast and say it's too fast, but is it really any more fair for me to go slower so you can go faster than for you to go too fast so I can go slower? Neither way works out, that's why the option thing is my answer.
Yeah, totally. It's all relative. I don't want mass amounts of diamonds either. On a typical half-hour to one hour mine though, I only get one to three ores so basically a quarter stack before enchantments.
And you feel "entitled" to a challenge? If everyone who ever wanted something without getting it themselves entirely was entitled, we wouldn't have society, much less Minecraft arguments. Again, not all people are good at this game. You may think that people who want it easy are lazy, but it may be a real challenge for them as it is right now.
You have to understand that you can't speak for everybody and you also can't decide as a corollary what is and isn't rare and what is and isn't fun or unfun, or rewarding versus boring. Trying to make an objective claim, even as a majority, is entitlement as well just as much. Not everyone can be catered to, but most people should be and the range of people catered to should be as wide as possible. This is both just good business as well as The Right Thing To Do.
It would mean it because if you needed x diamonds and that took you y minutes and it now takes you y+z minutes, you lost z minutes for what purpose? Is there some sort of fun in delayed gratification here, rarer pulses of adrenaline or dopamine? I don't really get it lol. I don't have a lot of diamonds to begin with because *I'm not a good miner* and frankly I don't use many - 2 for an enchantment table and one for a jukebox is the most I need - I don't do fireworks and I can get by on enchanted iron armour because I'm okay at fighting - if I really need diamond for some reason for tools or stuff I'll farm villagers.
Portals can be made with just buckets, nerfing that would make it slightly more relevant to me although the Nether is not my main jig, abandoned structures and natural small caves and alcoves are. It's not like I would go from 30 diamonds to 10 or something, it means I may take an extra ten to twenty minutes longer to get those three diamonds for my appliances and that's not less diamonds, that's none at all if I don't feel like mining.
Making things rarer like this to increase value is exactly what grinding is born from. Rarity =/= balance. Value can also be made by difficulty, like solving an actually hard redstone puzzle or fighting a lot of mobs. Anyone can sink their pickaxe into some stone, it's boring. The only way I can see ores being rarer as a good thing is for mining because there are honestly too many of them in caves to the point that mining them makes some caves hard to walk through or look unsightly (plus creepers become more of a cost if they blow up).
The keywords are "up to a point". That point isn't the same for everyone. I have a pretty low patience for building giant structures unless I need them somehow such as the type of village you like to make. On the other hand, I'm more than glad to build tons upon tons of smaller structures and join them into a bigger one over time.
I agree with the points made about how Netherite should not be able to be found in chests, However, when i kept reading you said that it should take more than one ingot and this is where i disagree. If you had to find enough Ancient Debris to craft tools and armor it would take hours and even days because you need to find 4 and combine it with 4 gold just to make 1 ingot. I would like to see a change in maybe not being able to find it in chests but I will have to disagree that it should take more than 1 to upgrade.