Minecraft is becoming increasingly deadly…
There’s a trend I’ve noticed with every Minecraft update. Every time a new patch comes along, it gets harder and harder to just live. The game has been slowly getting various difficulty spikes and all sorts. It’s not a significant change, because pre-1.8 Beta Minecraft was pretty easy once you had a place to live and a bed, but I feel this is something worth discussing.
I’ve always been a peaceful player in Minecraft. I mind my own business, I leave all the zombies alone, I explore and observe rather than explore and loot everything for what it’s worth. I tend to my farm and my mine. My worst offense is that, when I find a dungeon near my home, I always convert it into an EXP farm, because I like getting enchantments. The one thing I’ve always liked about Minecraft is that, apart from creepers, playing during the day time is perfectly safe, you can get what you need then retreat to your home and sleep, or spend the night mining. For an explorer like me, I normally hide out in temporary shelters during the night, or use the sneaky bed method to skip to day, then continue my journey onwards. Generally to the edge of the world if it’s a multiplayer server.
The safety of daytime is being slowly eroded though. Creepers not burning in sunlight has always been a thing (although they despawn at noon), but zombies and skeletons are more and more of a threat during the day, since they can hide in shade (especially in biomes with lots of trees), sit in puddles of water or walk around no problem because they happen to have helmets on. Baby zombies don’t burn during the day and remain active all the time. The 1.10 patch has added Husks, a new zombie variant which doesn’t burn during the day at all, making deserts less safe (and attractive to live in). There are also polar bears. Adult ones will automatically attack you if there’s baby polar bears nearby. Let’s hope they’re rare because otherwise they will make traveling the many snowy biomes a pain in the backside.
Even safe places like the seas are no longer safe. Traveling across the sea has always been boring but ocean monuments mean there’s a rare chance you’ll shit yourself as you travel across an empty ocean and suddenly get attacked by a (boringly named) Guardian. If you don’t have milk to cure the Mining Fatigue debuff they inflict on you, have fun mining blocks later on, as it lasts for 5 minutes. Luckily though ocean monuments are genuinely rare and apart from sponges, contain items that you can get variations of elsewhere.
Thing is, there’s already dangerous places that exist. The Nether is incredibly dangerous, a place where lava runs as fast as water, there’s burning stuff everywhere, tons of dangerous mobs and there’s no way to extinguish yourself if you catch fire. Ironically, you can only make fire resistant potions by going to the Nether and collecting Blaze Rods, the only other form of fire resistance is getting lucky with enchanting armor. The End, as boring and pointless as it is, is equally dangerous with a giant fucking dragon in it. Cave systems in the normal world are dangerous too, dark, shadowy places filled with mobs and dungeons and mineshafts and lava. Even night time in an open plain is dangerous as heck due to the sheer number of mobs that spawn.
My point is, there’s loads of risk and danger in playing Minecraft. I’d just like it so day time, or at least the time between noon and sunset, no matter the biome, is safe for a person still using stone tools to use.
That or make mushroom biomes more common.
