I have one more mister gamey gamerpants post to make this week before we get back to the land of engineering and education. I appreciate your patience. I am still at zero dollars trying to get you to read books that I have not yet read, and I suppose shame is not a powerful marketing tool. I guess I shall keep working for a living.
We finished migrating all of our family Minecraft accounts from Mojang to Microsoft this year. As a result, I now have Minecraft goodness on many different devices. Since it is almost as good a game as Terraria, and is much much shallower, I decided earlier this year to start a clean world and go through to Win The Game by killing the Ender Dragon. I used to do this all the time on classic minecraft.
How hard could this possibly be?
To begin with, there are now two flavors of Minecraft: Java Edition and Bedrock Edition. I decided to play Bedrock Edition. I started my world, ripped up some trees with my bare hands and started building Chateau de Szeder, as one would normally do.
The first thing I learned is that the bottom of the world is no longer zero. You do not dig down to level 13 to 16 anymore in order to load up on lucrative diamonds—You Must Dig Deeper!
The new world goes to -64, and the bottom of the earth is filled with a new type of rock that is harder to mine. Finding diamonds is now harder and slower.
You might see where this is going.
Once you get enough diamond to make a diamond pickaxe and mine some obsidian, the next step is to get into the Nether and find a Nether Fortress. Nether Fortresses have two things that are important. You will find blazes in Nether Fortresses that drop blaze rods. These are needed to create Ender eyes and win the game. You will also find nether wart. Nether wart is needed to make potions. These are not strictly necessary to win the game, but they sure do help.
Exploring the Nether is frustrating. It is filled with lava and a number of creatures that are frustrating to fight. I spent the next two months intermittently running around and making tunnels and bridges, trying to find a Nether Fortress without much luck. The big problem is that while the spawn rate for Nether Fortresses within specific Nether biomes has not changed, they added a number of new biomes that made finding a Nether Fortress harder.
I decided to do a little reading online to learn that the recommended solution is to get a saddle, either from a chest or by purchasing one from a leather worker in a town. I was not able to find a saddle in any chests, and none of the nearby towns to my starting zone had a leather worker.
I was reasonably frustrated and decided to start over.
This time I prioritized finding a leather worker before going to the Nether. Fortunately, the third town near my starting point had a leather worker. You have to level up the NPC leather worker through tedious, mundane trading in order to get them to a skill level needed to create a saddle. While I was going through the process of killing rabbits and dodging polar bears, I wondered why they did not simply let you craft a saddle, like every other item in the game.
After getting set up with a saddle, I finally proceeded to enter the Nether and start traveling around on the surface of the lava on a lava strider. It did not take me long to find a Nether Fortress. I was able to farm blaze rods in order to create the Ender Eyes needed to open the final portal. I did need to explore around the lava quite a bit more this time around in order to find another structure that contained Nether Wart.
At this point I made a time consuming mistake. Rather than going back to the origin of the world, I decided to use the Ender Eyes near a portal that could take me right back to the Nether Fortress. This is a bad idea because the final portals to the End spawn according to a radial pattern, and it took me a few days to triangulate the location of the End portal. I should have backtracked to my starting point, because they generally drop one at a reasonable distance from the starting coordinates. I built a road to the portal when I finally found it. It was roughly 10,000 units away from where I started looking. This is about 30 minutes of running which is more than an entire Minecraft day.
The portal itself was under water (of course) and required some significant excavation work to reach successfully.
At this point I was able to enter the End level and confront the Ender Dragon. There was one final frustration. The Endermen in the End level are much more aggressive than in other zones. Not only do you have to deal with a giant dragon flying around and regenerating until you smash its multiple regeneration orbs atop large pillars, you will also have 2-3 random angry Endermen trying to crack your skull open.
There was really only one good way to handle this: I decided to death-run the pillars with stacks of sand.
If you carve a pumpkin into a jack o’lantern, you can stick it on your head and then you will not aggro any of the Endermen.
So I spent about an hour and a half making giant stacks of sand, running around the final level of the game wearing no armor except for a pumpkin on my head. All I could think about as I died around twenty times, trying to destroy the glowing orbs on top of the pillars in the End, was “I am going to have to write a post about running around the End level wearing nothing but a pumpkin on my head, aren’t I”?
I was able to beat the game shortly after, but it was a time consumed, friction-filled process. It was nowhere near as pleasurable as it used to be.
For a new player, the expanded biomes and new mechanics may be fun. If you ever played through the original Minecraft, it was easy and frictionless to get to the end, possibly too easy.
For me these changes do not make the game better.
I do think that the Minecraft team is headed in the right direction by adding updates. I think that the one thing they are doing wrong is making significant changes to existing zones, creatures, and biomes.
I think that Minecraft would be twice as successful as it is today, or more, if they decided instead to leverage the portal model. Put new creatures, new rules and new biomes into new worlds that are gated by portals. Instead of having all of these friction filled changes threaded into the existing worlds, add a new portal recipe that is usable in the End to create a new gate to a world that contains these biomes. The dopamine fix you get from “first night syndrome” in Minecraft is i n t e n s e. If they released a new set of worlds with a new set of biomes every six or nine months they would be able to dramatically increase the value of the franchise.
Thank you again for reading along! I hope you derived some mirth from my four months of Minecraftian struggles. It was a valuable experience for me even if I think that the game sucks more than it used to. I promise to return to engineering leadership conversations again soon. I have at least a month of new material from conversations in the past few weeks. These past two posts on World of Warcraft and Minecraft have been therapeutic. You know what else would be therapeutic for me? Getting some free nickels from Amazon for an Affiliate purchase. You cannot go wrong with Ben Rigg’s interesting book on Dungeons and Dragons!
