Minecraft 1.14 – Village and Pillage but also Quality of Life
The Minecraft 1.14 update came out recently, bringing with it an absolute ton of new things. The main themes of the update, as implied by the name Village and Pillage, are Villages and Pillagers. With villages spawning everywhere, there are now Pillagers to go alongside Illagers all eager to attack the Villagers. And villages themselves have a lot more going for them, with a ton of new blocks, new village looks and things like that. There is even a new raid system you can stumble into if you accidentally kill a banner-carrying Pillager then go to a village.
But honestly I don’t really care about any of that. I mean, I used to love villages, but part of that love was for how rare yet useless they were, you could only trade random shit for the odd emerald, and maybe you’d find a blacksmith with a chest in it. These days though, although the villages look a billion times nicer and have far more uses, you kinda have to look after the villagers and they’re basically massive beacons for unfriendly mobs to charge towards. It’s rewarding but also a hassle.
The villages, cool as they are, aren’t the important things about the Minecraft 1.14 update. Sure, the new mobs, the crossbow, the raids, they’re all neat, but the majority of the icing here is from the huge amount of both new stuff and quality of life changes they’ve added.
The new stuff involves a bunch of new blocks, such as a Composter that turns plants into bone meal for fertilizer, the Loom which allows you to make banners on a proper interface rather than having to memorize patterns, a special furnace that smelts things twice as fast for half the experience, a Smoker that specifically cooks food (again giving less EXP, but cooking food gave mediocre EXP anyway) and a Stonecutter, which makes it easier to craft stairs and slabs and stuff. The new Grindstone allows you to repair items and REMOVE enchantments, which is useful as heck because many enchantment books and randomly found items have useless enchantments on them. We have come a long, long way from spending 50 levels of experience for three completely random (and usually bad) enchantments.
More importantly, barrels have been added, meaning we finally have more compact storage. I love chests, chests are amazing, but barrels are the future.
Quality of life changes include a bunch of new fences, stairs and slabs for blocks that didn’t have them and the ability to colour the text on signs using dye. This one in particular is neat because you’d have to use mods and plugins for that functionality, and the ability to use Copy and Paste in books and signs is even better.
But there is also the appearance of items that had been put on the back burner for yeaaaars. Namely the Lectern and the Lantern. Both of these items were planned for Minecraft back in Beta and Alpha times, and here they are, in Minecraft (official release) 1.14. So many years later. The Lectern is literally just a stand to put books on, but the Lantern was considered forever ago, along with the idea that torches would burn out eventually. Thank heavens they didn’t go with that idea. Now they are basically pretty, hanging torches that are slightly brighter.
Sadly though, normal Pigmen never made it into the game. I guess we’ll never know where those Zombie Pigmen came from…
The weirdest thing though is the texture update, which apparently had been available as a beta texture pack download for a while but had completely gone over my head. I’m honestly not sure if I like the textures or not, but a big part of that might be because I’m just SO DAMN USED to the original textures. Thankfully someone at Minecraft thought the same thing and added a toggle between the old and new textures. Whoever you are, you’re awesome.
The Village and Pillage update is overall a fucking huge update with a lot of stuff in it. Even if you’re not a fan of newer Minecraft, it’s worth checking out. And with the current launcher that lets you play any version of Minecraft, there’s no reason not to.