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Comment by skykooler | Hacker News Reader

This was a fun read. But some of the things attributed to a glitchy AI are just normal Minecraft stuff. For example: "One time I was swimming across a lake and noticed that the reflections at the water's edge were looking weirdly spiky." That's kelp, it looks like that in the game because the chunks beyond haven't loaded so it stands out from the sky. Also, the "natural blocks of rare glowstone" are honeycomb blocks, which she thinks might be new "cheese" blocks but in fact have been in the game for over five years.

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> over five years

I think there is a generation of Minecraft players that participated in the alpha, beta, and early 1.0 releases and then grew out of it. For these people, "in the game for over five years" is basically the same as "new".

(I belong to that group. I recently started introducing my four-year old to Minecraft and there is so much stuff that was not there when I played!)

Can confirm.

Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game.

Part of it is because 80%+ of my playtime was before they were added, but I think another part of it is that those things have never really quite fit into the game in my mind.

>Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game.

Same, one of my kids will randomly want me to play and I'm constantly surprised by some 'new' thing that's literally been in the game for 10 years. It's kinda cool that minecraft has existed as a thing for basically my kids' entire lives, and oldest is in college now.

The End is akin to an inside joke or maybe a pun. You cannot finish a sandbox game, so Notch deliberately added a dimension that you have to go out of your way for, that is difficult to find, unless someone tells you or you read about it. The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game.

You can say "I've reached the end of Minecraft" and it is true by the letter of the words, but untrue by the spirit of the words. Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.

I'm not convinced this was the intention.

I remember there used to be some writing by Notch on Minecraft's website that went something like (paraphrasing from memory):

"When thinking about whether to make the game easier or harder, I generally lean towards harder. This might make the game frustrating if there isn't some sort of goal, so I think I will have to build in a goal for players."

I'm sure this passage is long gone, I unfortunately don't have time to go digging through the Internet Archive right now. But I assume this "goal" become The End.

> The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game.

Do you have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it.

> Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.

In theory, maybe. But in practice? The mere existence of a tangible end goal fundamentally changes the way people approach the game, even if there's more to do beyond it.

Here's a very good video about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDBJg886EA

I agree with this in general but I don't think minecraft falls into this trap because beating the ender dragon is so anticlimactic and trivial that it doesn't feel like you accomplished much. In terraria, an ostensibly similar sandbox game with a much more linear progression, if I beat the final boss, I really do feel like there's nothing else to do and stop playing that world. In modded minecraft packs with quest books, it's the same thing. But in vanilla minecraft, beating the ender dragon is just something you do because you want elytra wings.

Beating the dragon is very anticlimactic, but it's still the "end" of the progression path as designed by the developers. Or at least it was before the Elytra was added, now that's the actual end.

But either way, reaching that end goal usually prompts people to ask themselves: "what now?" Once you have an Elytra, you've basically unlocked creative flight in survival, and that's pretty much where survival itself ends, now you're just playing creative except you still have to grind for building materials. There's no better item to go for, so what's the point? Most people stop playing shortly after, and this is where the whole "2 week Minecraft phase" thing originates from.

Elytra is anything but creative flight (as it glides, you can't hover) - but it does destroy any real sense of scale or travel.

Some people can't play Minecraft until they rush the elytra, some end up abandoning a world shortly after they get it.

You can basically hover by combining elytra with a Slow Falling potion.

I've actually never beaten the Ender Dragon in Vanilla. But, I've killed lots of Ender Dragons in modpacks, and occasionally either: There is no Ender Dragon, the pack doesn't need this so it's elided entirely or, that's where you start so the Ender Dragon is an early fight.

For example Star Factory clearly doesn't need an Ender Dragon fight, there are no bad guys at all, you're making a factory. For stars.

"The End" is clearly as much as anything a joke, the original game didn't have an end and so people asked for one, OK, here's "The End" for whatever that's worth.

It's like launching the rocket in vanilla Factorio.

I would say it's less of a defined end than that: it basically only exists because Notch was coming up to the official non-beta release and felt like there should be something resembling an ending to the game if he was going to call it 'done'. (and then later on more stuff was added 'after the end': the end dimenson was initially only the island and the dragon)

You have to put the credits somewhere, and that's a good place to put them.

Vanilla factorio is a myth. Factorio without mods, like KSP without mods, is only played by people without internet connections. The DPRK probably has a thriving vanilla factorio community!

Some people don't mod games. I, for example, want to play (and enjoy and judge) exactly what the dev team intended, and if I don't like it, I drop the game. I played vanilla Skyrim, vanilla Minecraft, vanilla Stalker and many more games that are famous for their mod community.

But I'm also an Apple user and I mostly game on PlayStation, so it's probably just part of my personality somehow.

Nah, I'm a die-hard Linux user that's been running heavily customized Arch for as long as it's been around, and I have the same attitude towards games. Spent countless hours in Minecraft¹, zero desire to mod it.

¹: with a good internet connection that's been used to download podcasts to go along with it

I think this is an interesting take to have beneath a comment about Factorio, considering the new DLC of Factorio (Space Age) is basically a more polished version of a popular mod (Space Exploration) to the extent that Wube hired the mod creator to help them build their first DLC.

That feels compatible with my approach. The mod obviously fits the devs' vision, which makes it canon to me. Especially when it fits so much that they hired the modder.

...interestingly, I have basically the same attitude as you, except with game guides instead of mods. Using a guide means playing a game contrary to what the developer intended. Outside of exceptional circumstances, if a game isn't fun without a guide, I drop the game†.

—except, Minecraft totally breaks that! You can't really play Minecraft without a guide, how would you even make a crafting table? Maybe you could figure it out after hours of hitting your head against the wall, but it wouldn't be a good experience.

But what is the intended way to play Minecraft? Should the Minecraft Wiki be considered part of the game?

(Note: I haven't played Minecraft in years, so I'm referring to Minecraft 1.0 more-or-less.)

----

† However, asking friends in real life is allowed, because sharing knowledge and discoveries within a group is a fun social experience. Except, what if someone else previously referenced a guide? Have they poisoned the well? I think about these things far too often and still don't have good answers.

This is the personality equivalent of wonderbread.

Hard agree, modding is what makes games fun. What is the point of playing a game that I can't change the rules, the "board" and everything else? What the devs made I see it more as a canvas, a framework, a suggestion.

Exactly. I do this with boardgames too, beyond just "house rules".

For me, Stratego, my favorite chess-esque battle simulator, is a wonderful canvas.

The game becomes infinitely better when players roll for the number of turns each player gets. This simulates the moving "tempo" of war, speeds up the game dramatically depending on the turn multiplier used, and dramatically opens up the types of play available. I've experimented with far more, including custom maps, allowing joint attacks with multiple turns (pooling attack scores), and other mods.

I don't care if this is autism or it turns off normies. The thinkpad user ricing out modded dwarf fortress has a more rewarding time with their videogames compared to macbook pro user playing vanilla skyrim in 2025.

> personality equivalent of wonderbread

> thinkpad user ricing out modded dwarf fortress has a more rewarding time with their videogames compared to macbook pro user

Ok, now I feel a little bit offended by the bread thing, and also: how can you just assume how rewarding my experience is playing vanilla games? We’ve already established, that you can’t relate to me.

The big difference IMO between modding Factorio and KSP is that Factorio has achievements (and modding the game disables them).

Minecraft has been around for more than 15 years, and the game was already fully recognisably itself by around 2012. There's 13 years of additions that will always feel mostly unnecessary to many players.

These people will have to buy a second account because Microsoft up and deleted them when they bought Minecraft, and haven't been sued yet. If you were paying attention at the time they offered a migration process for Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts... and then turned it off because 'fuck you that's why'.

Instead, people are apparently suing them because Microsoft banned gun mods.

America in a nutshell.

Also they added their god-awful Microsoft SSO to Minecraft which, coupled with the Xbox app means that you have to be careful with the sequence of action when requesting a password change otherwise the whole thing will just go blank and not let you reset.

My partner and I are each on our second copy because at some point it was just not worth the hassle of recovering our old accounts.

FWIW, I eventually got mine migrated, but it took months and a lot of back and forth with customer support.

I elected to just pay them the extra $15 when I decided to start playing with my kid.

If you actually begin the steps of suing them in small claims court (which after the dropping of mandatory arbitration clause, is the official dispute mechanism for Minecraft), suddenly support has no problem giving you your account back.

If you bought the game back in the Notch-owned Mojang days, you have a license guaranteeing your right to access all future Minecraft versions. It's a pretty open-and-shut case.

>These people will have to buy a second account because Microsoft up and deleted them when they bought Minecraft, and haven't been sued yet. If you were paying attention at the time they offered a migration process for Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts... and then turned it off because 'fuck you that's why'.

I'm pretty sure you have literal years to migrate. I suspect you still can if you contact their support.

I sure did contact support and they told me to pound sand.

For an organization of Microsoft’s size, to be so incompetent at migrating accounts was a choice. If their underlying system was incapable of linking the product to my account, they could have just emailed brand new codes to everyone registered with the “lifetime” mojang entitlement.

I contacted support in 2021 as well, trying to regain access to my account made in 2010. They told me that they wouldn’t help me.

Same. They asked for proof that I bought it, I sent the PayPal transaction ID and then they went like "lol we don't actually have any records from back then."

I made a hacked version of the old launcher after that and now a couple friends and colleagues and I run a custom server and play on that occasionally.

Oh that’s why my login doesn’t work anymore?

Possibly, they did provide notice and time to migrate your account. But if you didn't read news on the launcher or didn't see a headline (both very possible if you wheren't playing at the time) you would have just 'lost' your account (practically just not legally, they changed the terms post purchase). If you have had the account from before M$ bought Mojang and just now realized you cant log in, it was this.

This was me. Played the beta for a little bit, didn’t find what was there very compelling and stopped with the year.

A decade later it turns out my sister got into it that she had a realms server with friends and I joined. Basically a completely different game, which is mostly a positive.

Though mojang really needs to fix inventory management bullshit, which is not fun. There are many more possible items now, but with the same inventory space as the game started with, meaning anything you do results in inventory constantly filling up.

Building item sorters is a fun red stone project. You just dump your inventory in a chest and it gets sorted automatically.

Item sorters are great for storage, but don't help with the mess of items that end up in your inventory if you're exploring, or building. And while shulker boxes help a little, a) they're an end-game item and b) they are a pain to use if you're switching items often (place down shulker box, swap your inventory items with those in the box, mine the box, every time you need an item that's not in your inventory).

In theory, sure I guess. But my biggest issue is being unable to go exploring more than 100 steps without having to dump stuff into a chest.

I’m working on fixing this with mods.

Shulkers help tremendously with that as well, imo you don’t need mods. I just carry a couple empty shulkers - but I guess every play style varies

I’ve have and use shulkers (and a shulker farm).

This does not address the fundamental problem of having just 27 inventory + 9 hotbar slots over 1000 possible items (which is constantly increasing) that can be picked up, many of which don’t even stack, and having to manually move things where you want them.

Dealing with that turns exploring+looting into the promise of a grinding chore unless you simply don’t collect things. Which will hurt during future building projects.

I would not enjoy a game where I manually swapped out memory to disk. Yet often games demand the same as part of their “gameplay”.

The only viable fix is mods.

Bundles are a nice addition that helps with this as well

This exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if most HN readers had played a bit of Minecraft 13 to 15 years ago and still represent Minecraft like that even after all that time. I'm definitely one of those BTW.

Same here. Played a lot of it in a brief moment some 13 years ago, then never touched it again. Villagers and stuff is still strictly in the "new" category for me.

Infinidev here :) It's wild to think that some people played Minecraft, had kids, and some of their kids are older than I was when I started playing Minecraft.

The kids teased me so much for trying to build an obsidian generator. Almost the whole game was new for me.

I've got a map full of redstone gadgets that I made like...13 years ago, I suppose. Few of them work in the current version of the game.

I played a bunch around the 2010 timeframe, then around 2015, then around 2021. It was a strange mix of familiar and new each time.

I first played Minecraft when Notch was posting demos as zip files on the TIGSource forums. I playtested and kept playing off and on until a little after the 1.0 release but that was still over 10 years ago. Some of the early demos also had object impermanence. You would leave a chunk and when you went back to it, it had been re-generated.

I stopped playing anything beyond 1.7.10.

I still play a lot of 1.7.10 though, because of gtnh. Loving that modpack quite a bit.

The most surprising thing about GTNH, to me, is how much of "vanilla minecraft" is already present in 1.7.10 and how relatively minor the changes since then (except the resizing of the world) have been.

The new underground with caves and caverns, and the amethyst clusters and all that is a massive change. IMO.

You never tried any of the many, many mods?

No, I found the base game to have the appropriate level of complexity in terms of construction and making infrastructure.

I did play a lot of Vechs' survival/complete the monument maps, which to this day I think are marvels of top game design.

I remember modding 10 years ago and it was a fucking mess. Not at all surprised if most people haven't.

2015 was past the halcyon days of modding because of the big update that broke half the mods. ~2011 was when you had great mods like Industrial Craft 2. /oldmanyellsatcloud

The correct way to play modded minecraft is to play a modpack that still develops for some ancient version.

https://howoldisminecraft1710.today

Oh look, there's GTNH! https://www.gtnewhorizons.com

Where they've brought 1.7.10 to modern Java, and replaced Optifine, and done some other minor changes ;)

Meh, the Forge / Fabric split in 2020-2021(?) represented another peak point for MC modding - which is still alive and well.

For what it's worth, I'm fully aware of honeycomb blocks and have played Minecraft recently, but I've never seen a honeycomb block in person. It's entirely possible she plays casually or has played casually recently but doesn't engage with media or wikis enough to know about blocks that she hasn't had reason to see.

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