My honest thoughts on recent Minecraft updates

My honest thoughts on recent Minecraft updates

today we’re going to be talking about Minecraft updates there has been a whole lot of discussion online recently about how feature filled or unfeature filled Minecraft updates have been recently these discussions started up around the time of the splitting of the caves and cliffs update and I would say they’ve gotten gradually louder ever since then so I thought I would try my best to engage with this conversation try and give my honest thoughts from all beit a biased perspective spoiler alert I do love this game uh I just wanted to add in everything into the world that has been introduced in the past couple of years these are all of the new features that we’ve had since 2021 and I thought I’d go down through the list and also talk about a handful of controversies as well Minecraft building blocks and I think it’s safe to say I’m shooting my best shot early with this one because building has been completely revolutionized over the past few years the Minecraft block palette has become much more Rich it’s become much more diverse we’ve got much more Nuance between blocks we’ve got subtle differences in textures if I just quickly go down the line here all of the Moss stuff completely reol iiz the way that people build organic grassy looking bus there’s just so much nature and variety with moss and then if we come into the copper Zone goes without saying just absolutely gorgeous deep slate as well the darker gray tones are amazing black stone and bassal they’re pretty good but this just absolutely hits the nail on the head The Mangrove it’s just a stunning stunning look probably one of my favorite wood types I absolutely love it and then we move on to the packed mud which I’ve said many times honestly one of my favorite blocks in the game game it’s just so good for making well trodden looking areas hanging signs fantastic detail to add into basically any build just immediately starts making them look good the bamboo wood it’s very bright very saturated at first seems hard to work with but when you get it right it looks amazing Cherrywood is just fantastic for making slightly cuter looking builds I would say and then we get into the copper and the tough blocks which just look how well these blocks go together the greeny Hue in this is just it’s so good it was actually a little bit depressing placing all of these blocks because it made me realize I haven’t actually gotten better at building over the past couple years just Minecraft has gotten better for building there’s no doubt Minecraft building has seen some absolutely enormous changes over the past couple years and I think everyone’s pretty happy about that except there are a decent number of people that believe there’s not much vertical progression in Minecraft this is my table of criticisms by the way and I’ll be making my way through them throughout the video so building blocks are a good example of horizontal progression whereas vertical progression is gradually beating progressively harder mobs progressively harder bosses and getting progressively better gear now while I agree Minecraft is lacking some vertical progression and I wouldn’t necessarily be against it being in the game optionally maybe as a specific game mode or something I personally probably wouldn’t engage with it just because the way I like to play Minecraft is I start a new world spend the first few days struggling and gradually upgrading my gear until I don’t have to worry about mobs anymore and can crack on with the creative projects that I actually want to work on I think if I had a long list of bosses that I needed to beat before I could get started I probably burn out quite fast I’d also be curious to know how vertical progression will work on something like a Minecraft server would new players joining an older world just immediately get hammered by super buffed skeletons their dirt Hearts obliterated by nuclear creepers I’d be interested to hear all of your thoughts on this down in the comment section and now let’s move on to biomes there’s actually been quite a few biomes added over the past couple of years and also there’s been a huge change to the way that biomes generate with New Vertical biomes and that allows us to have cool different types of caves the Lush caves being arguably my favorite naturally generating Minecraft terrain oh diamonds I’m also a very big fan of the jagged Peaks and the biome that was added most recently the Cherry Grove is obviously just really beautiful I mean the particle effects that you get when you’re in these biomes are gorgeous I love all of the pink flowers just cascading down the hill and I guess the recent addition of singular biomes in recent Minecraft updates means that the work that Mojang put into changing how old worlds update is actually functioning Mojang used to add biomes in bulk because when you updated when the new biomes generated in it would create horrific World Generation errors that now all seems to be fixed which is great it means that we should see more frequent albeit smaller biome updates as Minecraft gradually updates but I guess we can’t talk about biomes without talking about the Birch Forest controversy Mojang announced that they were going to be adding in Birch Forest forest and then just haven’t really spoken about it since and that’s a shame I would really like to see Birch forests not sure why they did that that being said although the concept art for the Birch forest was eye-wateringly gorgeous the Birch forest in game would have to do some incredible things to make these blocks look good because my personal opinion is birch leaves are quite ugly Birch blocks are quite ugly and then the desaturated grass is also quite ugly so while I’d absolutely love to see prettier versions of this incredibly ugly biome I’m still not sure it will ever be pretty enough for me to want to settle there so now let’s talk about Minecraft structures the first one is the amethyst geode which is kind of cool then we have the ancient cities which are ridiculously cool they’re probably one of the most epic looking Minecraft structures and they are genuinely too scary for me to navigate and while I do agree that the loot is pretty bad for how hard these things are to get around Swift sneak is an incredible enchantment if you are building something large that requires you to hold shift a lot it’s a game changer and this is the only place that you can get it so you have to Brave it then of course we’ve got all of the archaeology features that were added to the existing structures in Minecraft Archaeology is one of those things I’ve only done once but my time spent doing it was so much fun like I genuinely really really enjoyed it and although the things that you get from it are fundamentally fairly pointless I think it adds richness to the game and then of course the most recent structural Edition is the trial chamber I love that these are designed with the wind charge and Redstone in mind I think they look look absolutely incredible but to be frankly honest if I encountered a TR chamber uh I would probably just kill all the mobs and then steal all of the Cobble blocks I don’t know if I’d actually make my way to a trial chamber to get loot from the various different vaults my personal problem is my desire to engage with structures like the ancient city and the trial chamber and even things like the Ender Dragon and bastions is so low that the loot has to be incredible for me to go over there I definitely wouldn’t have Swift sneak in a single player world if I had to actually fight the Wither and not just put it into Bedrock I would never have a beacon I don’t think I would reluctantly fight the Ender Dragon just to get elra but a lot of people think that the elyra is actually overpowered this is a strong criticism of Minecraft and this is something that I firmly disagree on just because elas make big builds manageable in Survival Minecraft without them the building process of making something large especially if it’s vertically large is just so grindy and painful that while I guess that kind of proves my point that they are overpowered because they are essential I think it’s a necessary overpowered so now let’s move on to mops and quite a few have been added in the past couple years you’ve got the Axel AAL glow squid we’ve got the goat Al the warden camel frog sniffer armadillo the breeze the bogged and the new dog types and I’ll be honest a lot of these are pretty ambient you know they’re not really mobs that I interface with too often the alyss are useful in redstone contraptions they’re great for sorting out unstackable items the warden probably has some of the best mob design in Minecraft I think it’s absolutely stunning it’s so atmospheric and so genuinely scary the breeze adds wind charges which are useful for Redstone Contraptions other than that they all just kind of exist in the world they add a little bit of richness a little bit of variety which brings me on to a pretty big controversy which of course is the mob votes and my thoughts on this one are kind of complex while I agree that the mob vote feels a little bit weird in that they’re showing us three awesome things and we’re never going to get two of them is it better that we’re not involved in the decision making process at all would I rather have no say I honestly don’t know would I rather it was about something more inconsequential than a mob but then as I’ve just discussed a lot of the mobs that have been added are fairly inconsequential and ambient even ones with genuinely incredible feature sets like the AL end up being used in Fairly Niche and uncommon circumstances and I know everyone says they should just add all three there should be no mob vote the latest Minecraft update added three new mobs and also added a bunch of retexturing to wolves so technically we did get three new Mobs if there hadn’t been a mob vote would the community have assumed that those three mobs would have been up for votes would they be satisfied and would they assume that they had gotten all the options or would they want more mobs would they want five or maybe six more but then as I’ve just discussed there’s only a limited amount of functionality that you can can really add to mobs and there’s only so many ambient mobs that the game can really cope with without feeling unnecessarily bloated which actually if I just move from one criticism to another the Firefly being removed or I guess never added uh Mojang’s reasoning I think was a little bit weak and I think that’s why a lot of people got a tiny bit frustrated some frogs finding fireflies poisonous seems like a good reason for the frogs not to eat the fireflies instead of just removing the fireflies entirely while I have just said that the game can’t have too many am ENT mobs that don’t serve any purpose I think the addition of tiny ambient mobs almost particle ambient mobs would actually be quite nice everything in Minecraft is pretty massive and actually a lot of the recent mob editions have been huge so it would be cool if we had some tiny Critters flying and crawling around however I would say that the community’s reaction to the announcement that they weren’t going to be added was probably a little bit too strong now let’s move into Redstone and Technical changes and there have been a ton of big ones in recent years there’s some obvious ones in here things like skull sensors calibrated skull sensors the Crafters the copper bulbs but there’s also been some slightly smaller ones things like powdered snow which is a dispensable and undisputable block the fact that jukeboxes can now have records put into them and removed from them using Redstone which is great for changing Redstone signal strength from the Block Mangrove Roots being water loggable which means you’ve got a water source that can’t flow only wear which is great for compact redstone contraptions that require that things like small Cobblestone generators chest boats which are massive in terms of their hit box which allows you to run loads of Hoppers into them and out of them Bamboo block which allow for cheap creation of large quantities of bulk chests or Hoppers wind charges which allow for wireless Redstone even things like the lightning rod which technically can be used for Redstone Contraptions if you want to channel the power of lightning but more importantly if your Redstone build has a lot of entities inside of it things like Hopper mine carts and things you can redirect lightning so that it’s never going to strike it so you’re never going to lose all of them so these past few years have been pretty good as a Minecraft Redstone engineer the only things that I’d say are missing are chain Stone and movable block entities I genuinely thought when Nom got hired by Mojang those two things would be coming immediately but no for those you who don’t know nmon made the carpet mod and it introduces a bunch of quality of life features which I guess kind of nicely brings me on to this point right here and I do agree mods are absolutely incredible and I the beauty of mods are they’re pretty easy to install into the game and if you want them you can add them in the beauty of mods is that they can be designed specifically for the sort of player who will be installing them for example create mod can be designed for people that enjoy creating mechanical Contraptions do I think all of the things that are in create mod should be in Minecraft no absolutely not so yes while it does look like mods introduce tons of new features and it seems to take Mojang a really long time to introduce what is essentially a smaller number of things Mojang also need to take into account the entire player base of Minecraft and the entire game as a whole Minecraft is the biggest game in the world so they have a lot of players and they have a game that they really need to try and keep balanced so that means that they do have to play it quite safe when it comes to adding new things I’ve often heard it said that current Mojang wouldn’t add the creeper and while I do agree I also don’t think that modern Minecraft audiences would accept the creeper as a mop those are the source of crazy choices that only a small Indie studio with a small number of players can make and while of course I would love to see more Minecraft updates I do have to commend Mojang for actually maintaining the balance of Minecraft pretty well whilst also coming up with creative and unique ways to add features to the game now quickly tack on the criticisms around the potato update to the end of this discussion a lot of people were quite upset with Mojang for a bunch of features into the potato update when they should have been adding a bunch more features into 1.21 this was a bit of a confusing argument to me because it was pretty evident that all the features in the potato update were quite quickly put together but even if they weren’t it comes back to the same thing that I was talking about with the mods it’s kind of a zero Stakes update it’s a bit of a joke it’s a bit of a laugh they don’t need to spend too long deliberating about how it’s actually going to fit into the game which speeds up the development process considerably and although definitely a non-zero amount of time was spent on the potato update I wouldn’t say it was significant enough to impact the 1.21 update I also think it’s worth mentioning that April Fool’s updates have historically been used to try out and put out feelers for features that Mojang actually want to add into the game so I’m never going to be against them let’s take a look at some of the recent quality of life changes now there’s been an absolute tonnage of them over the past few years but I thought I’d include some of my personal favorites build height being increased obviously abs absolutely awesome the fact that fortune now works on all ores the fact that you can now update your old Minecraft worlds without getting disgusting terrain borders changes to the way the ores are spawning and specifically or veins mean that the average player no longer has to make an iron farm I think that’s great this is a really tiny one but you no longer stop sprinting if you’re slightly scraping up against the wall the recent updates have introduced more personalization for example we can create our own decorated pots and decorate our own armor the variable difficult of the trial Chambers is really interesting all of the new paintings we’ve got new Banner patterns ominous bits you can customize our dogs these days and of course they’ve recently added a new weapon which behaves in a really interesting way which of course does bring me on to the combat controversy this is probably the oldest one on the list and to be honest with you it’s not something that I can really give too much input on I personally like the current combat system the cool down system but I will also freely acknowledge that I was not really into PVP and never have been so while for me timing your attacks around the cool down seems slightly more interesting than repeatedly clicking I wasn’t the one that was doing it I have heard that Mojang is still working on the combat tests so hopefully we might see some future updates on that soon so now let’s move on to items and to be honest with you there aren’t too many items in here that we haven’t covered in the various different sections I guess some of the key ones are the spy glass I kind of like this because this is Mojang’s way of adding a zoom into the game while still keeping it in line with vanilla Minecraft like if you want to have your own crazy zooms then of course you can you can install mods that do that but this is a very minecrafty way of zooming around and of course we’ve got things like the recovery Compass which are incredibly useful for people who are bad at the game like me Swift sneak which I’ve already acknowledged is an absolute Game Changer if you can face the ancient cities and there’s a bunch of other potions and enchantments and and poisoned arrows and things all very cool now I can’t help but notice that I have left some of the biggest controversies towards the end of the video oh gosh I’ll try my best to give my honest thoughts on all of them the for switch to Microsoft accounts I think was wrong I was actually negatively affected by this it was frustrating I don’t like this I would imagine that wasn’t Mojang’s decision the potential villager changes I’m not really liking where the tests currently are at I do think villager trading is a little bit overpowered but equally it takes quite a lot of effort to set up a villager trading Hall so is it Justified overpowered and finally we’ve got the chat reporting and the Skins Ban two of the most controversial ones definitely caused the biggest stir when they were announced in an Ideal World Mojang wouldn’t have to deal with any of this and it would just be the server owners but this isn’t an ideal world and I do think Mojang should have the ability to stop people being vile and disgusting on their game however the big fear when it was announced was that there would be false flags and as far as I can tell there haven’t been that many false Flags I could find very few legitimate examples of false flags and For Better or For worst a lot of servers actually run plugins to avoid this entire system and to be honest I haven’t heard that much about the chat Reporting System since it was initially announced and everybody thought they were going to lose their accounts so let’s do a quick summary I definitely shot my best shot early with the building blocks because I think it’s safe to say that modern Minecraft building has been defined by the recent Minecraft updates I would struggle to find a recent Minecraft build that doesn’t strongly rely on at least one of these subset of blocks biome updates have been good and the fact that we now have a framework for future biome updates is fantastic the new structures are really interesting even if some of them aren’t for me the new mobs are very varied some of them with interesting functionality that is useful for other parts of the game for example in technical redstone contraptions which we have done very well in especially over the past year there’s been some absolutely enormous quality of life changes as well and while I do think that some of the controversies that have come up in the community are entirely Justified I think a decent number of them were quite overblown in my personal opinion and yeah I I think this has actually been really useful for me to get a real good feeling of where my head’s at with Minecraft so I’m looking forward to reading the conversation down in the comment section please keep it civil I think I’ve included that a little bit too late to be honest with you um but I hope you enjoyed the slightly different sort of video and uh I will catch you in the next one see you

In this Mumbo Jumbo Minecraft video, I take a look back at recent Minecraft updates from the past few years including the Minecraft 1.21 Tricky Trials update, and assess whether or not I believe the added features are good, if Minecraft is heading in the correct direction, and if we have had enough content added over recent years.

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