Minecraft

[Zeusthecat]

I have never been bothered by the hunger mechanic. I just keep a stack of carrots or something with me at all times and it takes all of 3 seconds to quickly eat one whenever my hunger meter dips. I guess I don't understand how that can be perceived as an inconvenience. In fact, if it went away I would be super bummed because it would take away a big part of what motivates me to get a decent farm running and to try to come up with cool devices to automatically harvest the food I need. Also, one of my favorite parts of the early game (especially on hard difficulty) is trying to juggle getting a shelter set up and establishing a consistent food source so I don't starve.

[SecretAsianMan]

The inconvenience for me is how often I have to do it.  I feel like I have to eat after I do anything and those 3 seconds of chomping food add up.  I also don't find farming and animal husbandry interesting.

[Zeusthecat]

The inconvenience for me is how often I have to do it.  I feel like I have to eat after I do anything and those 3 seconds of chomping food add up.  I also don't find farming and animal husbandry interesting.

 

Fair enough. I don't mean to dictate what I think other people should enjoy about the game, just poorly trying to explain what it is I enjoy about it.

[shammack]

how were you not dying all the time with the old health/food mechanic? I think the way this system is presented makes it feel more in the way, but it beats having to eat food as the only way to regain life. Also, the food now stacks.

 

I just avoided getting injured much. You could potentially survive indefinitely without needing to regain life if you were careful.

[elmuerte]

I'm ok with the hunger mechanic. It doesn't really add much though, it's only something for the early stages of the game. After that it just consumes an inventory slot.

[clyde]

Wait til they put the update in where you have to take medication for your malaria.

[elmuerte]

will it also fix my broken limbs?

[stewmull]

Maybe the time for me to play is over, it was 3 years ago I started playing and must have put hundreds of hours into it over a year and a bit. I think I have lost that spark, I'm going to play some multiplayer with a friend and see if we like it (both stopped playing at the same time).

 

One other thing, this might just be me, but im not sure.

 

The industry as a whole feels different from 2-3 years ago. Minecraft unified the whole pc community, everyone was having super colourful and almost innocent fun with this game. But as it started to fade away and the consoles started to lag aswell as the Lords Management's crept in, I feel the industry feels... I dunno... darker... Less united, groups have splintered. No mans sky could re-spark that but it is not player content generation, just procedural exploration. Im not saying I have not had fun in the last 2 years, I have played and enjoyed a lot of games (around 80-90).

 

Mad ramblings... But I have been thinking about that for the past couple of months. I might just be me and im not as happy as I was 3 years ago haha.

 

Also please don't jump on me for the Lords Management comment.

[clyde]

When Minecraft arrived, it was an incredibly compelling example if what PC gaming had to offer; not only because of the freedom of the mining and crafting mechanics, but also the production-model of paid-alpha.

The darkness which you describe is probably just a matter of enough time passing for people to see the negative side of their wish's realities. It happens with everything that starts with a burst of excited speculation. But when I look at the totality of what Minecraft has grown into (as a product and a cultural force) I consider it to be progressive.

[Dewar]

Minecraft was the harbinger of PC doom. Now every game is a paid beta.

[clyde]

Minecraft was the harbinger of PC doom. Now every game is a paid beta.

But they aren't. The existence of a new form does not remove the established existence of another. I would be very surprised to find out that there are fewer finished-games released than there were in 2009. It's just that now there are paid-alphas too.

[Dewar]

But they aren't. The existence of a new form does not remove the established existence of another. I would be very surprised to find out that there are fewer finished-games released than there were in 2009. It's just that now there are paid-alphas too.

 

That response was, in part, a joke, but we are seeing an awful lot of paid alphas and betas these days, some of which are better than others. Whether it's a positive or negative trend, Minecraft first showed that people would pay for early access.

[Zeusthecat]

It looks like the next update is going to be another pretty substantial one.

 

http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Upcoming_features

 

I've started to kind of dread some of these patches because each one makes my 2-ish year old world feel more and more outdated. I love the idea of the new features but it's reached a point where I'll have to travel pretty fucking far to reach newly generated terrain that will have the latest stuff. I still haven't even managed to venture out and find horses yet and just barely made it far enough in the Nether to find quartz.

[Golden Calf]

Someone is streaming a journey to the edge of the world, which by my calculation should take about 17 days. It's pretty cool to stare at for a little while:

 

http://www.twitch.tv/jl2579

[Security_Tubbs]

How big is the worldsave?

The worldsave is 286 Gigabyte in size! I had to actually buy a bigger SSD for this project because it wouldn't fit on my old one

Hot beans

[clyde]

I saw my 8-year old nephew during the holidays. He's my Minecraft source. He mentioned off hand how he had a different palace, but "Hero Brian destroyed it." I was like "Who is Hero Brian?" My nephew informed me that Hero Brian is a developer who goes into people's single-player worlds and destroys things and/or causes glitches. He's the only one who can go into other people's single-player worlds. My nephew hasn't seen him, but has two instances where he saw signs that Hero Brian had been there. One was the palace he made that had been blown up while my nephew was logged off. According to my nephew it was definately Hero Brian because only Hero Brian can go into your game when you aren't there. I forgot what the other instance was BUT while we were playing (this was Pocket-Edition btw) we saw my niece's character and it looked like the textures on her avatar were not fully loaded. The avatar was quickly changing it's position in the sky even though my neice was on the ground (she was right there on my phone playing with my nephew so I could compare their screens). My nephew said that he saw something similar before Hero Brian first appeared in his game.

So basically there is a glitch-ghost myth in Minecraft that my nephew fully believes. I thought it was super interesting.

[Twig]

I believe it's Herobrine, although your nephew might be mispronouncing it, and that has long been a running joke/urban-legend-type-thing in the Minecraft community.

I'm not surprised a young kid would hear something about that and extrapolate it to this. Or maybe someone said that straight up and he believed it.

The things I believed about video games when I was a kid...

[clyde]

He was talking about Hero Brian with the same confidence with which he speaks of Santa Claus. I love that I'm seeing an early form of a mythology and/or religion. I'm going to ask him for updates next time I see him.

[Twig]

Here's the origin of Herobrine: http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Herobrine

Basically started as a creepypasta and evolved from there.

[tabacco]

Please write into questions@idlethumbs.net with all of this!

[clyde]

Please write into questions@idlethumbs.net with all of this!

I'll need to interview him about it again to make sure I get all the facts straight.

[clyde]

What I wrote in is a lot more mediocre now that I've conducted an interview with my nephew today and tried to corroborate it all. I think my interest and questions have given him reason to reconsider some of his original conjecture.

[Zeusthecat]

I've been getting back into this again lately. I decided to try out some graphical mods and found a good shader and resource pack that make this game look really nice.

 

 

 

 

[Vulpes Absurda]

I do love those shaders. Sadly they conflict with some of the mods on the server I play on.

[Twig]

That looks pretty incredible in stills but do the dynamic shadows look like trash as the sun moves, because that's usually what makes me quit.