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Mojang reveals the first addition of Minecraft's new year-round update schedule – the Pale Garden and its attendant Creaking monster will come to the game "in the next few months"
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- Title
- Mojang reveals the first addition of Minecraft's new year-round update schedule: A creepy forest biome haunted by a tough-to-kill monster
- Authors
- Ted Litchfield
- Published
- Sep 28 2024
- Word count
- 309 words
I'm very glad minecraft allows players to go back to different versions of the game, because I haven't been a fan of a single update since 1.14. Most of the updates are easy to ignore, but this is the kind of thing that I think doesn't really belong. Not really complaining that hard though, because I can just go back to simpler updates.
How come you didn't like the 1.17-1.18 duo? I recall most of the community being pretty excited about the cave update.
The mods that it allowed for are really cool, but it just didn't feel that much different on the surface. I think they missed a chance to make diamonds actually rare again and instead tried to pad out the mid-game with deepslate. That said, it could have been the slow rollout that made it feel less impactful than it was. My current long-term world is on version 1.1 from 2012, so maybe I'm just a minecraft luddite lmao.
EDIT: So I don't sound like a total downer, I think I should add that current minecraft is a lot of fun with friends, there's a lot more to do as a group with the expanded exploration opportunities.
Deepslate made branch mining tedious and the caves broke the rates in my farms. I left my world on 1.17.1 and will not update it.
Same, I left my world at 1.16.5 (Nether update).
There's a few neat elements (white wood and a neat mob), but the whole biome kind of feels empty. Which feels like that's the point, but for a game that can already feel vast and empty sometimes (but has gotten a lot better with more mob additions and villagers and such), this feels like kind of a shallow addition. One new mob for a whole biome doesn't feel that enticing to explore. I can see wanting to stay very minimal, but I just doesn't feel like a finished idea. I can't put my finger quite on what feels like it's missing to make it an update I'd be excited about.
My first impression was "that's really cool, I wonder what else there is to this?" but the full trailer is underwhelming. Mojang talked about this new biome being "atmospheric and spooky" but more than anything it feels like a placeholder. I don't think there's a real reward to seeking out or exploring this biome.
Off the top of my head I have a few ideas to spice it up: The Pale Garden isn't nearly scary enough. Add tangle roots to snare your feet. Increase Creaking damage, make them surround the player faster to make them feel like they're working against the clock to find the Heart. Get rid of the beam showing you the Heart's location location, instead add a thick black tree made of slow-to-break logs and put the Heart in the center. Make the player really search for it. Have the Heart drop tree sap that can be used to brew potions of paralysis or anything useful. Someone on YouTube suggested adding fireflies that are the same shape and color as Creaking eyes, and I think that would be fantastic too.
Though there's almost 0 chance that all of the things mentioned in your comment are added, I do expect that they'll make some minor additions and/or alterations to the update based on community suggestions. They do of course have a history to "under-deliver" compared to what the community expects, but I always take these trailers as more of a "proof of concept" than a "promise".
I'd be curious to know, if anyone is informed and feels so inclined, a summary of what direction/vision Minecraft seems to moving in? As a casual player I feel like I've completely lost the plot and it doesn't feel like a sandbox game any more. But maybe that was the case pre-acquisition too...?
As far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), Mojang still has control of the creative decisions for the game, so it's not like Microsoft is forcing them to add all these things. I definitely recall a few tweets from actual Mojang employees mentioning this as a fact, but I no longer have a
twitterxxitter account to be able to find them.I don't think they're going down any specific path. Some of their updates were things that the community suggested as "general themes and ideas" that Mojang put their own flair on (e.g. nether update, cave update, trials update). Some updates were minor and just added a couple of things they didn't manage to add during another update (e.g. 1.20). Some updates brought almost nothing but optimisations to the game (e.g. 1.15). And some updates were just things Mojang decided to do.
However, they seem to not find their old "major releases" model very sustainable (for a multitude of reasons, including what the community expects from them), and they're currently moving more towards a "many minor additions in parallel with a larger addition" model. So, content mentioned in the article is more of a minor update than a major one.
That being said, I was playing exclusively 1.8 and 1.7 until 1.18 released and finally got me to migrate to a modern version. For the time being, all my personal worlds are still on 1.18, but there's also the tildes community server where we play on the latest version. So I get what you're saying.