The past few posts have all been about relatively technical stuff, and I’m sick of it. So for today, we talk about something different: Minecraft.
Like many people, I play Minecraft. I’m hesitant to call it a “game” precisely, but it’s a fun sandbox that I’ve put a lot of time in over the years. I started playing right at the first beta (just narrowly missing the cheaper price of the alpha), and I’ve been playing off and on ever since. The off times usually come when I feel like I’ve exhausted all I want to do in the game, and the next major release usually pulls me back in.
At some point, though, I discovered the mod community for the game, and everything changed. Sorta. I fell in love with a few different mods, and then mod packs, and everything was good. Actually, that’s a lie, everything was buggy as hell, and sometimes it was a miracle I got anything running at all.
But the mods were all fascinating, and when you stumbled across something like RedPower frames or MillĂ©naire or the seasons mod and it all seemed magical. There was something remarkably… earnest about the mods back then, with all their unrefined enthusiasm.
Don’t get me wrong, overall they’ve gotten much better over time, but there was something quaint about the whole thing then. With some exceptions, the modding scene seems to have fallen into a rut. Most mods seem to be one (or more) of a few forms: the “magic block”, the vertical mechanic, and the stuff that just adds a few items.
The magic block is a single (usually obnoxious to craft) block that does something useful. Think the miscellany of powered furnaces, or macerator derivatives, or whatever. A good indication that you’ve fallen into this is that if you strip away the flavor text and texture, it’d be indistinguishable from at least three other mods. The big industrial mods are the main perpetrators of this: Buildcraft, IndustrialCraft, and Thermal Expansion all replicate pretty much the same functionality three different ways. Don’t take this the wrong way, I usually have at least one of those three in any mod pack that I play, but they get a little boring. Occasionally a new kid pops up like Ender IO that does things differently enough to get added to the big packs, but even then it’s pretty disappointingly same-y.
The “vertical mechanic” mods are usually magical, from what I’ve seen. Usually they add a few interesting gimmicks, but their main flaw is that they usually feel like a silo bolted on to the side of the rest of the game. The obvious ones here are Thaumcraft, Botania, Blood Magic, and even stuff like Tinkers’ Construct. Again, don’t get me wrong, I usually use all of the ones I’ve listed, but like I said, they usually feel bolted-on.
There’s very few mods that do something special. The original piston mod was one of those, when you saw it in motion it so obviously needed to be in the game. The idea integrated right in, and made everything else in the game richer just by the interaction. Unsurprisingly, the mechanic wound up in the base game. Ideas like that are hard to come by, and I’d expect even harder to implement in most cases. But that’s the sort of thing I’d like to see more of.
It’s depth that I want, really; something that adds depth to the existing mechanics of the game while being simple on its own. A lot of the appeal of vanilla Minecraft is all the crazy things you can build just by combining the simple physics mechanics of the game. Yes, it tends to be overly elaborate and not particularly reliable, but that’s part of the charm (though not strictly necessary).
I just spent a lot of words talking about stuff I don’t want, and the vague ideas of what I would like. So let’s talk specifics. What areas of Minecraft could use more depth? Well some obvious ones are:
- the Nether
- the End
- overworld generation
- fishing
- villagers and villages
- minecarts
And with some more time, I’m sure I could come up with more, but let’s talk about a few in particular that I’ve had on my mind. First up, world generation.
Vanilla Minecraft uses a noise generator to build the world. That works great and all, but it winds up making worlds with a particular flavor to them, most noticeably via insane biome setup. Mojang has done some to alleviate that recently, with their grouping of biomes by heat and humidity, but it only goes so far and doesn’t really strike at the core of the issue. I’d like to see a mod that tries a little harder to simulate reality and derives biomes, rather than arbitrarily picking them. Ideally it would go down to a rough approximation of something like plate tectonics, then climate and weather, and so on. I don’t know how feasible this is in an infinite 2D plane, but maybe if you used the noise generator to build a heat map of the “mantle” and built up from that. I think it’s certainly worth some experimentation.
The other big issue I have with the overworld generation is the structures, or rather, the lacking implementation. The few we do have are largely just copy- pasted into the world after the basic generation, and once you’ve seen one you’ve largely seen them all. Let’s have something that generates structures based on a prescribed function and a theme. By ‘theme’ I mean a description of preferred block choice and an architectural style. For example, a block set describing the villages would be oak planks or cobblestone for walls, cobblestone or oak logs for major supports, and torches for lighting. The style would be small buildings with single rooms and three-block high floors. Replacing (or randomly generating!) those combinations could go a long way to improving the variety of structures, even before touching on generating the buildings with an intended function.
My problems with the Nether and the End are mostly more functional, and the End is the more extreme case so I’ll talk about it first. Honestly, once you’ve beaten the ender dragon, the only reason to go back is for an ender pearl farm. And that’s boring. I’d like to see something that added mechanics to the End after you beat the Dragon. Honestly, I think the idea of endermen has a lot of potential that really doesn’t go anywhere, despite the lore hinting at more. Why are the endermen constantly taking blocks? Why is there a set of portals to their dimension in the overworld? What is their relationship with the dragon? It’s clearly not on their side, as it cavalierly kills them as it flies around. Is it some sort of oppressor? A creation that went horribly wrong?
There’s space there for a mod that gives the End some real depth once the chaos of the dragon is removed. Perhaps give the endermen some meaningful AI. I’ve often thought it was a shame that endermen make little more than noise with the blocks they pick up.
Villagers could also benefit from a real set of AI, and I think someone could build something interesting with them while learning from MillĂ©naire. As it is, they’re little more than mobile vending machines, despite being the perfect source for some emergent story (Oh, and this is a pet peeve, but don’t use text to convey it. Not only is it a technical lost cause, but there’s something really quite charming about the villagers’ emote-based communication. Use it).
There are more mechanics I could talk about, but I’ve said a lot already and I think I’m gonna call it here. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up post sometime, or maybe I’ll even finish learning my way around the Forge APIs and do some of this myself. Stranger things have happened.