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Villagers have been in the game since Beta 1.9, the last beta release before 1.0.0 in 2011...

So maybe not the best example.

Elytras have been around for a long time too, but they really are OP

I didn't see an Elytra until I'd been playing with various mods that give you creative flight or at least jet packs, so I was used to at least being able to fly†, and in many cases being able to move arbitrarily in 3D space at a whim.

In fact I think the first Elytra I saw for myself was in a world where I had killed the Dragon with an old-school massively overpowered Tinker's crossbow, while wearing full hover capable power armour. Later I'm like "Ooh, End City, these are new", I find the boat, I see the Elytra and it's just flight again, nothing cool? I think I was more impressed to find a decent EnderIO capacitor or some other new gizmo from a mod in a chest nearby.

† I think this is before Slime Boots and the Slingshot were a thing, these days you might give players zero damage on falling + fling yourself long distances and put off actual flight for the first hours of play.

> Removed supernatural or fantastical minecraft mobs: no zombies, skeletons, creepers, endermen, etc.

No zombies? That is mind-blowing. I love the vision you outline at 13:40-15:40, will play when I get a beefy enough computer for Minecraft mods ;-)

> No lava buckets

But that was available since InDev :'(. Cheers though, I appreciate the points you make and I agree with them. The mod adds too much realism for my taste, but most of the removals are very nice.

I can recommend checking out Vintage Story if you want the refined Minecraft survival experience. Just finished playing it with my wife a few weeks ago — great fun.

Was just about to promote VS here, seems like the parent poster would really enjoy it. More people need to know about it! I just wish development were a little less glacial.

I can only play on hardcore mode now, doing that puts the survival back in. Unfortunately I have no friends willing to join me in that :’)

Hardcore may strain a friendship when one of you die. Better single-player. There are other ways to up the stakes with a friend, e.g. all of these:

1. Hard difficulty

2. No armor or shields

3. Don't stockpile any ore or equipment beyond what you want to carry, so when you respawn you have literally zero iron, diamonds, tools

> Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.

Yeah, it really kinda surprised me that Minecraft went in that direction. What got me hooked was 100% the need for shelter and some landscaping to make sure you wouldn't have eg. a bunch of skeletons standing under each tree on your front lawn every morning, a creeper waiting around the corner of your house, etc. Being able to skip night completely means there's basically never monsters on the surface unless you want there to be, and without that sort of ever-present threat, there's just that much less pressure that the game can put on you towards cautious gameplay and 'functional' protective structures and so on. Of course people keep themselves entertained with amazingly extravagant builds and ridiculously complicated redstone machinery anyway, so I'm not saying it's a bad direction for the game, it obviously worked out well for them etc. I just really wish there was more gameplay directly motivated by basic survival, instead of progressing past survival in the first five minutes.

Conversely I think flying is entirely fine. Unless you're, like, speedrunning, flight is only available once you've progressed through basically the entire game, and I think at that point it's reasonable that there's a more convenient way to explore distant areas.

Now, shields, those are just too powerful for how early they're available!

> Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter

You can make a shelter in less than a minute, so eh.

> you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you

Just?? They don't have that much variety and it's a lot of work, more work than collecting most resources on your own.

> you can get a bed

Beds, from beta 1.3? You're really pining for a specific couple months there.