Vanilla minecraft is boring.
Bold claim. Original even, I know. There are many that wouldn’t agree with me which is entirely fair, but on the other hand: this is my blog, suck it up. Feel free to email me about how wrong I am ([email protected]).
Play it as long as I have (Beta 1.4) and the standard game becomes a bit of a routine. So much so that playing Vanilla Minecraft on my own isn’t a thought that even occured to me until the time of writing this. Spawn, punch tree, dig stone, craft tools, build house, go mine. Somewhere between building the roof of my shitty wooden planks cabin and digging the stairs down to my mine I start getting existential.
Why am I doing this? What’s the point? Am I wasting my time?
What keeps me engaged with a game like Minecraft is progression. A tangible goal and a sufficient reward for my efforts. Minecraft’s progression system, I think, sucks ass.
For example: when you get full Netherite gear and enchant it to it’s full potential, there isn’t really anything in the game that requires this sort of fire power- with the exception of the Warden; even then, it wasn’t designed for you to kill it. You don’t get anything for doing so either. Once you have full diamond armor it’s smooth sailing. Getting diamond armor isn’t too easy admitedly but it’s something you could achieve in a couple of hours.
A lot of things in Minecraft are, also, kind of worthless. Gold comes to mind. Better than Iron tier gear but have the durabilty of my spine after a year in the IDF. Sure you can make golden carrots, and gold nuggets are used to craft Netherite bars but that’s small potatoes. You’ll never use more than a stack of gold in a playthrough unless you just want to go out of your way to prove me wrong. And if you think Gold has it bad, Copper is even worse. No copper tools, no armor, nothing. You can build a lighting rod and watching it turn into a gross shade of green because of all things Mojang could do with Copper, they only let it oxidize.
Point is: after a few hours on the game, there is nothing much left in the sense of meaningful progression. You’ve seen it all, you’ve done it all.
So, how do I make Minecraft not make me question my limted time on this floating rock in space?
- I play it with Friends.
- A copious amount of Mods.
Playing games with friends makes them more fun? Incredible, do tell me more.
Yes yes, I know, obviously any game is more fun with friends (arguably) but the important part here is why.
I have a sizable friend group, an average of 8 players when the server gets into that “Two-week Minecraft phase” you’ve probably seen some memes about a couple of months ago. Everyone gets on, we open a new server, a blank world. Suddenly Minecraft is transformed into one of the most addictive games I’ve played, and a lot of things I’d find pointless to do in Single Player gain a new meaning. Why am I building a huge ass tower? To make it higher than my friend’s enourmous treehouse, of course. There isn’t anything like watching that empty spot of wildnerness you as a collective argeed to start building from grow into a town filled with your friend’s homes (that wildely vary in quality, but it adds to the charm.) You build the first farm, start bringing animals in; which is a lot less of a chore with more people, and you have a great time shooting the shit, exploring the world, building crap. What Minecraft is really about.
But eventually, those two weeks pass. Maybe even less than that. Everyone finished their homes (or gave up on a way too ambitious project. Talking about myself here,) fully geared up with enchanted Netherite gear, maybe a couple of mob farms were constructed and the Ender Dragon is long since dead. lytras are really cool but by the time you get them there’s nowhere to really fly to anymore. All that’s left is to fuck around with your friends and eventually just go play the newest season of whatever live-service game you’re into. Probably Fortnite. I’ll get to talk about Fortnite one of these days.
Even with the social aspect multiplayer brings, this is still the same old game everyone has played a thousand times; and as we grow older and our schedules get busier (don’t get me started on timezones), it’s hard to excuse what’s left of our time on trying to make our own fun in Minecraft rather than just playing something else.
Unless we make Minecraft into something else.
How to crash your game in 10 not so simple steps!
If Skyrim wasn’t the face of modding in video games, Minecraft would be it. Throw all of my previous complaints about Minecraft getting stale and the lack of new interesting things to do because with the power of modding, Minecraft becomes a seemingly endless well of shit to do. More monsters, more ores, more reasons to go into the world and find whatever the fuck. Anything you can think of and more is probably a Minecraft mod. (personal highlight is the Estrogen mod, which lets you harvest piss from horses to turn into a pill that gives your avatar tits (with jiggle phyics) and the ability to air-dash like in Celeste.)
And that brings me to Create, my favorite mod of all time. The most vanilla friendly a tech mod can get: just like regular Minecraft, Create is a sandbox mod. It gives you a bunch of toys and it’s up to you to put them together: the applications of it are practically endless. Wood choppers, autonamous drills, doors, bridges, elevators and of course: factories to automate everything. Hell, Create has it’s own modding scene and is compatible with other mods: Mods for the mod! That Estrogen mod IS A CREATE MOD MOTHERFUCKER!
Create gives a lot of worthless blocks and materials in Vanilla Minecraft like Andesite and Copper a new purpose, with new receipies for machine parts or to combine Copper and Zinc into Brass. I could ramble about this mod and a plethora of others for hours but I’ll cut to the chase: it makes me look at Minecraft in a new light. It makes me want to go mining and want to pick everything up because now everything has a use! Not only do I progress with better quality items, I also get better at designing new machines and factories that provide me with even more new tools and further grow and build new stuff and–
I don’t want to play Minecraft without Create. So why do my friends dislike it?
“Can’t we play Vanilla for once?”
Is a sentence I heard a couple of times when our friend group talks about playing Minecraft again. It’s not all of them, and it’s not specifically about Create but more moreso about modding as a whole.
Even with all the problems I and others have with Minecraft and all the benefits Mods provide, modding this game also complicates it. All aspects of it. First you need to assemble a functiontion modpack which has all the mods you and others want, then removing half of them becasue of incompatibility and ending up with a good enough compromise. Getting a server up isn’t as simple as using a free Aternos server, you need a hosting service to handle all of that stuff you added to a poorily optimized game coded in Java- and they’re mods. They don’t help when it comes to performance. Having like 10 players running around, loading chunks with like 80 mods installed which can include anything between new world gen, mobs, or literally whatever, can easily get you to 12 GB of RAM and that shit isn’t cheap per month!
Not everyone can play with the mods, some systems can’t run it, or there are case spesific problems or, most importantly, you get to what I like to dub: The Sonic Problem
The Minecraft I like to play isn’t the Minecraft everyone likes to play. Everyone has their own preferences and wants and there’s a limit to what sort of bullshit a given person is willing to put up with. And I’ll be the first to say that I don’t have the patience to try and set up a moddedd server, so Vanilla is an easy, agreeable standard to work with.
Sometiems the lads just wanna play Minecraft. If not, finding a compromise that works for everyone is key: because I play Minecraft to be with my group of idiots. If I was in it for just the machines, I’d just go play Factorio. Or Satisfactory. Or Shapez. Or-