I know I was supposed to make an article about yesterday’s update but…

I know, I know. I’m supposed to keep up with updates and things like that. Yesterday’s update was actually quite a big one in terms of number of things changed. Some for the better, some for the worse. Everyone’s all excited because it was an update in the early months of the year that wasn’t a couple of small lines and updating the localization files and all that, and because there’s matchmaking stuff hidden away in it all.

The changes I do like? The map fixes are always good and the ability to trade the Steam Treasure Hunt hats is quite nice, it means more people can aspire to be Demopans. Also Matchmaking stuff.

The changes I don’t like? Yet more Mannpower crap, gift-wrapping is now useless and the new sounds for kills and healing with the Crossbow are fucking awful.

But something else also happened lately. Minecraft 1.9 came out. With promises of an actual End. Fuck yeah, because the previous End was fucking awful. Literally just a floating island in a sea of black with fuck all in it apart from a crappy dragon and Endermen. With the idea of a new world to explore, I decided to boot up Minecraft and have a look around.

Except I’d lost my Minecraft.exe. Still had the .minecraft folder, but the .exe was missing. So I went to download it again from Minecraft.net and THEY HAVE AN ACTUAL INSTALLER NOW. You know, like most other programs. I shouldn’t be excited about that though. Once I’d downloaded the game, updated to 1.9 and created a new world (seed: Medic), I decided to explore. Or not, as the game crashed with a EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION (0xc0000005) error. I can’t actually get the game to load a new world. Turns out you can fix it by running Minecraft as an administrator. Although that doesn’t fix the problem entirely.

Phew, I was worried I’d have to talk about TF2 for a second.

Anyway, after much messing around, I remembered why I never really got the whole End thing. It’s just so TEDIOUS.

First, you need decent armour and a diamond pickaxe. Then you need to mine Obsidian and make a Nether portal. Then you need to wander around there and find a TON of Blaze Powder, which comes from Blazes, which only spawn in Nether Dungeons, which can be tricky to find in a landscape of lava and Ghasts. Once you’ve got that, you need to kill a ton of Endermen, who randomly teleport around, and get a ton of Enderpearls. You’ll need probably about 64 of each, more to be on the safe side. Then you need to make Eyes of Ender, by combining Enderpearls with the Blaze Powder, although you need to keep some pearls left for later on. Then you throw the Eyes of Ender, one at a time, and they fly into the air then fall to the ground as an item (or are destroyed, with no item drop) and eventually lead you to a Stronghold, which hopefully has a portal in it. Then you need to make sure you have 12 spare Eyes of Ender to complete the portal and travel to the End, bringing with you your best equipment and a pumpkin hat so you don’t get killed by the swarms of Endermen there. Then you have to fight the Enderdragon, but first you need to destroy these lame crystals on the top of stupidly high towers that heal him, but you can’t just create ladders because the Enderdragon destroys any non-endstone/obsidian/bedrock block, and you have to destroy all of these before you get a decent chance at killing the Enderdragon. The fight is long and dull, you need to avoid looking at Endermen and unless you have a lot of arrows, you need to wait for him to charge at you, stop him with an arrow/sword hit then whack at him while he stands stationary for a bit or occasionally does… something. And when you finally kill him, you have to use a piston or some sort of strange trick to grab the egg he drops. Now that the damn dragon is dead, you can go to the new End. Assuming you have an Enderpearl or five left, as you need to use the Enderpearls to access the Gateway portals.

All that brings you to…

That.

It’s basically the same as the rest of the End except for these ugly tree things. The whole area is a huge pain to get around, as it’s made up of floating islands with an empty void beneath. If you’re very lucky, you might stumble across an End City, although it doesn’t look like a city. Good luck though, even with flying, it took me 20 minutes to find one.

To be fair, the End Cities are impressive, but they don’t look like cities. Maybe End Towers would have been a better name. They have weird enemies (Shulkers) in them that have a similar teleporting mechanic to Endermen and take forever to kill. You know those annoying skull things in Binding of Isaac that take forever to open and fire at you? Like that but worse.

If you’re even more lucky, you’ll find an End Ship just floating in midair.

Yes, completely in mid air. You’ll need yet another Enderpearl to get to these, as they spawn outside the End Cities. They’re SUPPOSED to have an item inside them that allows you to glide, but the ones I found just had chests and Shulkers in them. I looked all over the place. Nothing.

On the plus side, there are now shields and the ability to dual-wield now. And some nice new pretty blocks to brighten your day.

Overall, for those who want a better end-game experience, great, the 1.9 update is brilliant. But as every update goes by, I wonder if Minecraft is losing its touch. It’s no longer a simple, efficient game. You can very easily keep it as a simple game, but every update just adds more and more late-game items. I suppose that’s a good thing, but more and more late-game items means things get rarer and rarer.

Still, nice update. 7/10, lots of stuff, but expected the End to have more than just yellow and purple stuff.

As for the TF2 update? Eh, I dunno. I’ll write about that tomorrow.