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Man. I really do want to like it, but this update is the first one that gives me the Microsoft-finally-took-over vibes. Traversal and with that exploration just

Man. I really do want to like it, but this update is the first one that gives me the Microsoft-finally-took-over vibes. Traversal and with that exploration just became so much harder. The landscape is now riddled with holes that you either build scraggly bridges over, or lead to massive detours. The sides of bodies of water are much higher and steeper on average, making it impossible to see the landscape you're passing, and getting up there to take a look is tedious. So you're basically stuck near spawn unless you want to spend much more time getting around. A lot of surface iron was replaced with copper, which is useless, meaning progress is now slower than ever, and grinding becomes even more of a necessity. Generally, many of the items that now clutter the inventory are mostly useless, and the inventory needs constant attention. Minecraft is a fantastic game that I have spent well over a thousand hours on over the last decade, with many more to come very likely. That being said, with the account transition to Microsoft/Xbox and this update that gives me personally the "Microsoft knows whats best for its users" vibes that I still distinctly remember from WLM and Skype, I am definitely less optimistic about the game's future than I was a few years ago. I do hope my caution proves to be unwarranted.

ninth_ant 5y ago
I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I believe you've misunderstood the intention and the effect of the changes. Previously, the time-optimal strategy to acquire iron and diamonds was to dig a hole deep into the earth and then bore straight paths. This was exceptionally grindy (fans would say zen, detractors would say tedious), but effective. With 1.18, the optimal strategy is now to enter a cave and find the resources there. The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system, where many resources are available -- though at the risk of encounters with monsters. So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk. It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here. You mention iron, claiming that progress is slower, but in actuality it's significantly easier to acquire useful amounts of iron now. Jump into any random cave and it's all over the place. Sure, there's a lot of relatively useless copper too, but no one is forcing you to mine it. Just skip what you don't need and you don't need to manage it in your inventory. Likewise, the new topology with increased heights means that rivers are significantly more important for exploring. You point out that it makes it more difficult to go from one peak to the next, which is accurate (though in my opinion you overstate the difficulty), but regardless it is quite easy to make long journeys if you follow the rivers and low terrain. So yeah it's harder to go directly in a straight line than it was in before, but now you're paying attention to the terrain in the world and adapting your gameplay as a result. It just requires different navigation techniques. Like it or not, you're absolutely not stuck at spawn.
- honkdaddy 5y ago
  Is the strategy you're talking about (digging straight down upon spawn, as I've seen people do) just applicable to speedrunning, or does your average player learn to do that eventually as well?
  - joconde 5y ago
    After doing the basics (stone tools, safe base, light and food), I'd always do that as soon as possible. Diamond stuff is very useful for later parts of the game, and you'll need a lot of redstone to build interesting circuits. It's its own form of exploration, at least in the versions with fun cave generation: you always end up in some cave complex that you can then explore. But I'm happy to see that it's less needed now, because interesting caves are more commonly accessible from aboveground.
  - officeplant 5y ago
    I've been playing since the release of beta and once it was understood in what layers diamond spawned more frequently it became very common. I've seen some people refuse to do it just because it kinda kills the wandering exploration vibes.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's also what I figured out when I was a kid.
  - peeters 5y ago
    Digging straight down is a speedrun strategy of last resort for modern versions. The typical progression to enter the Nether is to start by getting 7 iron (3 for an iron pick, 3 for a bucket, 1 for a flint and steel). You want to get that, grab some food, and be in the nether at around 3 minutes. Doing that by digging down is not really feasible. There are two main routes. In the village route, you spawn next do a village with a blacksmith. You get some iron or an iron pick from the blacksmith, kill the iron golem for the remaining iron, grab some wheat and then find a nearby lava pool or completable ruined portal. There are variations where you can trade with a villager for a bucket, but by then most speedrunners would have already reset. The second and more typical modern route is using ocean. You locate a shipwreck which gives you iron and food. Then you find a ravine that has magma blocks (indicating there's lava underneath) and use that to build your portal. To my knowledge this isn't viable in 1.18's world gen though. When speedrunners do go underground in the overworld, they'll usually try to find a cave first to find exposed iron and lava. Digging down is the last choice.
c7DJTLrn 5y ago
I haven't tried but I believe I can't play Minecraft anymore because all players have been forced to convert their Mojang accounts, which is something I simply don't want to do. Funny how a company can just take away something you purchased and you have no recourse.
- Tepix 5y ago
  Nope. You can still play with a Mojang account. I do.
  - nathanaldensr 5y ago
    You can, but you have to use the old launcher, which is buried on the Minecraft site and avoid the dark pattern prompts to upgrade.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      And eventually it will be forced they say. Edit: They == Mojang/Microsoft
      - bullen 5y ago
        The second they force it Microsoft Minecraft is dead. I have decompiled it and will make my own fork at that point. I still use this launcher which was made explicitly when I reported some obscure GSON bug a few years back and it will probably work for a long time: http://move.rupy.se/file/launcher.jar http://move.rupy.se/file/launcher.jar
    - Tepix 5y ago
      No, I'm using the latest launcher with my Mojang account.
- shawnz 5y ago
  Why does it matter who administers the account you use to log in to the game?
- 5y ago
nathanaldensr 5y ago
You are mostly correct. My kids and I played Minecraft 1.18 survival even in beta. The new ore distribution rules, especially for iron, greatly increase the grindiness of the beginning of the game. We were compelled to immediately dig down to Y=16, where iron is most common (except for extremely tall mountains that are rare biomes). https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Ore?file=1-18-ore-distribution.jpg https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Ore?file=1-18-ore-distribu... We did not find the world "riddled with holes," though, and gaps in Minecraft have always been easy to traverse by simply placing blocks. 1.18 ore distribution sucks. Going caving virtually requires full armor due to mobs, but now to get full armor you need to go caving (or get extremely lucky).
- spiderice 5y ago
  My friends and I converted an existing world to 1.8 (hard difficulty). Even with full iron armor I got wrecked the first time I dug down to the cave beneath our base. Was not expecting the sheer number of mobs.
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  There is a ton of exposed iron on mountain surfaces.
jacobmartin 5y ago
It's extremely easy and quick to go >>1k blocks away from spawn looking for good territory if you want to, and I've done so now in three separate worlds. And I didn't have a bunch of resources when I did that either. Iron is easier to find than ever now that it spawns on the surface in mountain biomes. I got over a stack just taking the surface iron on a mountain. Sure, there were also copper veins, but there was plenty of iron. This was the first thing I did after punching down a tree and getting a stone pickaxe btw. I do agree with you on inventory clutter, but that has been a problem for as long as I have played the game (since about 2010? I don't remember which version). I am disappointed that they have delayed the introduction of the bundle.
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boogies 5y ago
It seems weirldly like the Minecraft devs tried Minetest and kinda randomly picked a couple of features to copy. The article describes how the new worldgen’s verticality and caves are reminiscent of Minetest, but inventory clutter is also very much like the default Minetest Game (which also has pretty useless copper, albeit as one of too many tiers of tool material, going into the same recipes as stone, iron, gold, diamond, etc.). I much prefer the Minetest game NodeCore, which is playable with 8 inventory slots (the small HUD bar is all you get, because the game shuns all modal UI except a hints system for figuring out crafting and other gameplay mechanics without using a guide to see whole recipes, which are considered spoilers) and makes the fancy terrain more navigable by letting you scale cliffs and even climb overhangs without placing or mining anything.

ninth_ant 5y ago

I'm no Microsoft apologist, but I believe you've misunderstood the intention and the effect of the changes. Previously, the time-optimal strategy to acquire iron and diamonds was to dig a hole deep into the earth and then bore straight paths. This was exceptionally grindy (fans would say zen, detractors would say tedious), but effective. With 1.18, the optimal strategy is now to enter a cave and find the resources there. The holes in the ground that you dislike are entry points to that system, where many resources are available -- though at the risk of encounters with monsters. So the transition is from a static grind to the new system based on cave exploration and risk. It's more dynamic and engaging, directly the opposite of your claim here. You mention iron, claiming that progress is slower, but in actuality it's significantly easier to acquire useful amounts of iron now. Jump into any random cave and it's all over the place. Sure, there's a lot of relatively useless copper too, but no one is forcing you to mine it. Just skip what you don't need and you don't need to manage it in your inventory. Likewise, the new topology with increased heights means that rivers are significantly more important for exploring. You point out that it makes it more difficult to go from one peak to the next, which is accurate (though in my opinion you overstate the difficulty), but regardless it is quite easy to make long journeys if you follow the rivers and low terrain. So yeah it's harder to go directly in a straight line than it was in before, but now you're paying attention to the terrain in the world and adapting your gameplay as a result. It just requires different navigation techniques. Like it or not, you're absolutely not stuck at spawn.

honkdaddy 5y ago
Is the strategy you're talking about (digging straight down upon spawn, as I've seen people do) just applicable to speedrunning, or does your average player learn to do that eventually as well?
- joconde 5y ago
  After doing the basics (stone tools, safe base, light and food), I'd always do that as soon as possible. Diamond stuff is very useful for later parts of the game, and you'll need a lot of redstone to build interesting circuits. It's its own form of exploration, at least in the versions with fun cave generation: you always end up in some cave complex that you can then explore. But I'm happy to see that it's less needed now, because interesting caves are more commonly accessible from aboveground.
- officeplant 5y ago
  I've been playing since the release of beta and once it was understood in what layers diamond spawned more frequently it became very common. I've seen some people refuse to do it just because it kinda kills the wandering exploration vibes.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  It's also what I figured out when I was a kid.
- peeters 5y ago
  Digging straight down is a speedrun strategy of last resort for modern versions. The typical progression to enter the Nether is to start by getting 7 iron (3 for an iron pick, 3 for a bucket, 1 for a flint and steel). You want to get that, grab some food, and be in the nether at around 3 minutes. Doing that by digging down is not really feasible. There are two main routes. In the village route, you spawn next do a village with a blacksmith. You get some iron or an iron pick from the blacksmith, kill the iron golem for the remaining iron, grab some wheat and then find a nearby lava pool or completable ruined portal. There are variations where you can trade with a villager for a bucket, but by then most speedrunners would have already reset. The second and more typical modern route is using ocean. You locate a shipwreck which gives you iron and food. Then you find a ravine that has magma blocks (indicating there's lava underneath) and use that to build your portal. To my knowledge this isn't viable in 1.18's world gen though. When speedrunners do go underground in the overworld, they'll usually try to find a cave first to find exposed iron and lava. Digging down is the last choice.

c7DJTLrn 5y ago

I haven't tried but I believe I can't play Minecraft anymore because all players have been forced to convert their Mojang accounts, which is something I simply don't want to do. Funny how a company can just take away something you purchased and you have no recourse.

Tepix 5y ago
Nope. You can still play with a Mojang account. I do.
- nathanaldensr 5y ago
  You can, but you have to use the old launcher, which is buried on the Minecraft site and avoid the dark pattern prompts to upgrade.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    And eventually it will be forced they say. Edit: They == Mojang/Microsoft
    - bullen 5y ago
      The second they force it Microsoft Minecraft is dead. I have decompiled it and will make my own fork at that point. I still use this launcher which was made explicitly when I reported some obscure GSON bug a few years back and it will probably work for a long time: http://move.rupy.se/file/launcher.jar http://move.rupy.se/file/launcher.jar
  - Tepix 5y ago
    No, I'm using the latest launcher with my Mojang account.
shawnz 5y ago
Why does it matter who administers the account you use to log in to the game?
5y ago

nathanaldensr 5y ago

You are mostly correct. My kids and I played Minecraft 1.18 survival even in beta. The new ore distribution rules, especially for iron, greatly increase the grindiness of the beginning of the game. We were compelled to immediately dig down to Y=16, where iron is most common (except for extremely tall mountains that are rare biomes). https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Ore?file=1-18-ore-distribution.jpg https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Ore?file=1-18-ore-distribu... We did not find the world "riddled with holes," though, and gaps in Minecraft have always been easy to traverse by simply placing blocks. 1.18 ore distribution sucks. Going caving virtually requires full armor due to mobs, but now to get full armor you need to go caving (or get extremely lucky).

spiderice 5y ago
My friends and I converted an existing world to 1.8 (hard difficulty). Even with full iron armor I got wrecked the first time I dug down to the cave beneath our base. Was not expecting the sheer number of mobs.
dwaltrip 5y ago
There is a ton of exposed iron on mountain surfaces.

jacobmartin 5y ago

It's extremely easy and quick to go >>1k blocks away from spawn looking for good territory if you want to, and I've done so now in three separate worlds. And I didn't have a bunch of resources when I did that either. Iron is easier to find than ever now that it spawns on the surface in mountain biomes. I got over a stack just taking the surface iron on a mountain. Sure, there were also copper veins, but there was plenty of iron. This was the first thing I did after punching down a tree and getting a stone pickaxe btw. I do agree with you on inventory clutter, but that has been a problem for as long as I have played the game (since about 2010? I don't remember which version). I am disappointed that they have delayed the introduction of the bundle.

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boogies 5y ago

It seems weirldly like the Minecraft devs tried Minetest and kinda randomly picked a couple of features to copy. The article describes how the new worldgen’s verticality and caves are reminiscent of Minetest, but inventory clutter is also very much like the default Minetest Game (which also has pretty useless copper, albeit as one of too many tiers of tool material, going into the same recipes as stone, iron, gold, diamond, etc.). I much prefer the Minetest game NodeCore, which is playable with 8 inventory slots (the small HUD bar is all you get, because the game shuns all modal UI except a hints system for figuring out crafting and other gameplay mechanics without using a guide to see whole recipes, which are considered spoilers) and makes the fancy terrain more navigable by letting you scale cliffs and even climb overhangs without placing or mining anything.