Minecraft Forums

I actually don't think much will change short term. Long term will be interesting and could go either way but the same could be said with Mojang in control. Its not like they were going to continue developing past launch forever either. Overall I'm ambivalent to the change but am interested to see what happens.

I actually wouldn't mind a MC 2.0 thats developed from the ground up with AAA level resources (to improve stability, performance, and possibly graphics) and a slightly more coherent game design.

Quote from Zeno410

Except Iron Golem grinders are one of the *least* impressive achievements in the game. All you need is a small chest of cobble and wood, a bucket, a hopper, and to have found a village. It's easier, and available earlier, than developing a trading village, almost any kind of automated crop farm, taming a horse, building any kind of railway, going to the Nether, making a large map, or building a nice house. It's absolutely nothing compared to a mansion or castle, any large redstone construction, anything derived from a Nether trip like a Nether Wort farm, or anything involving the End. Really, almost anything you'd even be proud of is harder and takes more play than an Iron Golem grinder.

Unless you got lucky with a spawn or used a 3rd party tool to find where villages are located it takes a good bit of exploring to find a village which is decent enough investment of time by itself. Most of the time you've already set up a base long before you find the village so you either need to capture villagers and transport them back; transplant your base; or build a transport system with rails and/or nether portals to connect the two areas. All of those are pretty significant investments in time and usually resources as well. You're minimizing this greatly.

Quote from Jogan

Really what we should do is just forget having separate survival and creative modes. Just allow everything in one mode and people can just not use what they don't want to use. It all follows the "If you don't like them don't use them" design philosophy. By that logic no game balancing will ever be needed.

You can't really balance a sandbox game, it wouldn't be a sandbox game anymore.

Quote from SVGK

normally, if minecraft was just an adventuring game, and nobody did these absurd farms, at least 95% of people would think that iron golem spawning was villagers building them, that villagers bred to fill in new homes and were people, that endermen were intelligent, dangerous creatures that could teleport.

Sounds like someone arguing we should abandon science for blind religious belief because it makes the world so much more magical! If it it does for you knock yourself out. You can still believe that in your games.

Quote from SVGK

now, doesn't that make for a far more fulfilling visualization of things in the game then them just being technical bits of data that generate under certain conditions?, that rely on very specific conditions to spawn?.

no...because because I don't care about imagining a back story to the mechanics in my game. However lets say that it is important to me. In that case I'm just discovering the physical rules that govern the rate villagers can build golems and harnessing that knowledge. Still a pretty nice story.

Quote from SVGK

some may argue that minecraft has no story and shouldn't, but i disagree, every game at least needs a set of logical assumptions shared by almost everyone, have you noticed how, in games where you aren't able to abuse game mechanics, the story and general world and exploration feels so much more fulfilling?, nobody thinks of them as entities that are spawned with enough of a certain thing, people take them for what they feel like and seem to be.

If minecraft requires a story for you to play it then great. I hope you come up with a great one. However I don't need it. I never plan on playing with you so why do I need to share your story? Also, I play plenty of other types of games from FPS, to RTS, to turn based strategy, to RPGs. If I wanted a game that didn't allow emergent gameplay to develop from its base ruleset then I've got a myriad of options. That emergent gameplay is what sets Minecraft apart for me and makes it worth playing. So, for me, Minecraft would be far far worse without it.

Quote from Jaiguru

Well maybe Jeb should pull his head from his and have a look at the world around him. Real life automation is not by design. It is about exploring the mechanics of chemistry and physics and finding the ways in which they relate to each other. That people have managed automated functions WITHOUT them being implemented specifically is what humans do and should be ENCOURAGED.

I don't like how you said it but I agree completely with your line of thinking. That is one of the main reasons I love minecraft so much is the emergent gameplay redstone and pistons allow and the fact that you can start with nothing and with lots of time and effort slowly move from the stone age to the industrial age and master your environment. Sorry but I find that far more rewarding and entertaining than constantly running around killing things for basic materials all day. I'll go play WoW again if I wanted to do that. I don't mind doing it once. That is what makes completing a huge grinder an achievement but beyond that its just busy work. More to the point I think Minecraft would be far less amazing if everything were locked down into defined options.

That said I can understand Jebs reservations. Since the functionality isn't intentional it can make it difficult to make changes elsewhere that won't affect the unintentional gameplay. I'd certainly appreciate if we got more sanctioned ways to automate things as a replacement though.

Quote from RobertFrans

Sunflowers do mostly face towards east, so it is just reasonable that they do that also in Minecraft.

Thank you. Finally someone mentioned this. Sunflowers facing east isn't a replacement for a compass its simply mimicking what real sunflowers tend to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower - see Heliotropism Misconception and there is a lovely pic of a field of sunflowers all facing east. Lovely.

Quote from Rufus

I see that 1.5.2 has done nothing to fix the yo-yo-ing frame rate and terrible stuttering. So, umm, what's the point of the update again? Anybody?

To dash your hopes of receiving your pet improvement.

Quote from malkzay

my point is that not all (or the big part) of the content should be in the first snapshoot, it should be divided

It seems like it would have been more evenly distributed if Mojang hadn't made the decision to put fireworks in 1.4 so it would be out for New Years. It sounded like they had been working on fireworks as part of 1.5 and continued to work on 1.5 as the fireworks were beta tested and polished so once they were done with 1.4 the first snapshot of 1.5 had a ton of content ready to go. I'm not complaining myself.

Quote from buster_the_dog

when yesterday's snapshot came out, they mentioned that we may have a potential prerelease of 1.5 in a few weeks.

I feel that they have not sufficiently added enough content for a major update

I thought that was the point. Isn't 1.5 is starting a shift to themed updates which are smaller and more focused on one aspect of the game but more quickly released.

Quote from Calacbolg

How about you guys just go out and admit that you believe every single option, that's not the one you chose, is a terrible design choice?

First they change bonemeal so that you need more(This is the exact same as before. You just need a different number of bonemeal per plant). Then they make it less reliable in exchange for decreasing the general amount required.

I personally didn't care what system was used as long as it was not random. This makes the dispenser ability to use bone meal much less useful to me because you can't be sure how many uses are needed to get your crops to an appropriate level. That might be ok if you could somehow detect what stage your plant is at but that isn't really possible for anything but trees. If they added a crop growth stage detector I'd be happy again because then you could automate growing all your crops to full growth again. Randomization even makes a system where you have to manually push a button for each dose on your farm less useful because the plants will all grow at a different rate and waste a ton of bone meal unless you do each plot individually (at which point you might as well just spread it with your hand). I suppose the work around is to set everything to dump like 10 doses to ensure it works no matter what. I should be ok with that since I didn't care what amount of doses was required before but the loss of precision is still annoying despite that logic.

In other words with this tweak the insta-growers are now a bit happier, the "bone meal is too abundant" crowd got a little less happy, and the redstone/automation crowd got much less happy. I guess the inst-growers were a larger than the other two.

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Quote from wandmdave

It won't

Was it tweeted/posted at an earlier time that automatic crop planting will never happen or is that a guess?

sad to see the heavy bugfix snapshots start because it means this update is winding down. Still hopeful dispensers will plant crops though. Either way its been the best update I've been around for so far.

Quote from Benjamin5349

Nah, that was the first thing I tried.

Shoot. Those are still some nice feature updates to differentiate the dispenser and the dropper but planting seeds would have been some great icing on that cake.

I like exploring everything the game has to offer but the only feature I find truly compelling is forging machines and technology from nothing and taming the wilderness. Redstone devices are integral to that so this update is shaping up to be the best yet based on my play style.

Man I wish I could install and play this snapshot right now. If they can equip armor and use flint and steel can they also plant seeds now?