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This was a fun read. But some of the things attributed to a glitchy AI are just normal Minecraft stuff. For example: "One time I was swimming across a lake and

This was a fun read. But some of the things attributed to a glitchy AI are just normal Minecraft stuff. For example: "One time I was swimming across a lake and noticed that the reflections at the water's edge were looking weirdly spiky." That's kelp, it looks like that in the game because the chunks beyond haven't loaded so it stands out from the sky. Also, the "natural blocks of rare glowstone" are honeycomb blocks, which she thinks might be new "cheese" blocks but in fact have been in the game for over five years.

kqr 2y ago
> over five years I think there is a generation of Minecraft players that participated in the alpha, beta, and early 1.0 releases and then grew out of it. For these people, "in the game for over five years" is basically the same as "new". (I belong to that group. I recently started introducing my four-year old to Minecraft and there is so much stuff that was not there when I played!)
- lynndotpy 2y ago
  Infinidev here :) It's wild to think that some people played Minecraft, had kids, and some of their kids are older than I was when I started playing Minecraft.
- bakugo 2y ago
  Can confirm. Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game. Part of it is because 80%+ of my playtime was before they were added, but I think another part of it is that those things have never really quite fit into the game in my mind.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    The End is akin to an inside joke or maybe a pun. You cannot finish a sandbox game, so Notch deliberately added a dimension that you have to go out of your way for, that is difficult to find, unless someone tells you or you read about it. The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game. You can say "I've reached the end of Minecraft" and it is true by the letter of the words, but untrue by the spirit of the words. Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.
    - bakugo 2y ago
      > The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game. Do you have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it. > Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon. In theory, maybe. But in practice? The mere existence of a tangible end goal fundamentally changes the way people approach the game, even if there's more to do beyond it. Here's a very good video about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDBJg886EA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDBJg886EA
      - asddubs 2y ago
        I agree with this in general but I don't think minecraft falls into this trap because beating the ender dragon is so anticlimactic and trivial that it doesn't feel like you accomplished much. In terraria, an ostensibly similar sandbox game with a much more linear progression, if I beat the final boss, I really do feel like there's nothing else to do and stop playing that world. In modded minecraft packs with quest books, it's the same thing. But in vanilla minecraft, beating the ender dragon is just something you do because you want elytra wings.
        bakugo 2y ago
        Beating the dragon is very anticlimactic, but it's still the "end" of the progression path as designed by the developers. Or at least it was before the Elytra was added, now that's the actual end. But either way, reaching that end goal usually prompts people to ask themselves: "what now?" Once you have an Elytra, you've basically unlocked creative flight in survival, and that's pretty much where survival itself ends, now you're just playing creative except you still have to grind for building materials. There's no better item to go for, so what's the point? Most people stop playing shortly after, and this is where the whole "2 week Minecraft phase" thing originates from.
        bombcar 2y ago
        Elytra is anything but creative flight (as it glides, you can't hover) - but it does destroy any real sense of scale or travel. Some people can't play Minecraft until they rush the elytra, some end up abandoning a world shortly after they get it.
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    >Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game. Same, one of my kids will randomly want me to play and I'm constantly surprised by some 'new' thing that's literally been in the game for 10 years. It's kinda cool that minecraft has existed as a thing for basically my kids' entire lives, and oldest is in college now.
- Akronymus 2y ago
  I stopped playing anything beyond 1.7.10. I still play a lot of 1.7.10 though, because of gtnh. Loving that modpack quite a bit.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    The most surprising thing about GTNH, to me, is how much of "vanilla minecraft" is already present in 1.7.10 and how relatively minor the changes since then (except the resizing of the world) have been.
    - NikkiA 2y ago
      The new underground with caves and caverns, and the amethyst clusters and all that is a massive change. IMO.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  This exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if most HN readers had played a bit of Minecraft 13 to 15 years ago and still represent Minecraft like that even after all that time. I'm definitely one of those BTW.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Same here. Played a lot of it in a brief moment some 13 years ago, then never touched it again. Villagers and stuff is still strictly in the "new" category for me.
- tokai 2y ago
  The kids teased me so much for trying to build an obsidian generator. Almost the whole game was new for me.
  - khedoros1 2y ago
    I've got a map full of redstone gadgets that I made like...13 years ago, I suppose. Few of them work in the current version of the game. I played a bunch around the 2010 timeframe, then around 2015, then around 2021. It was a strange mix of familiar and new each time.
- TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
  Minecraft has been around for more than 15 years, and the game was already fully recognisably itself by around 2012. There's 13 years of additions that will always feel mostly unnecessary to many players.
  - mapt 2y ago
    These people will have to buy a second account because Microsoft up and deleted them when they bought Minecraft, and haven't been sued yet. If you were paying attention at the time they offered a migration process for Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts... and then turned it off because 'fuck you that's why'. Instead, people are apparently suing them because Microsoft banned gun mods. America in a nutshell.
    - jaredhallen 2y ago
      FWIW, I eventually got mine migrated, but it took months and a lot of back and forth with customer support.
      - pavel_lishin 2y ago
        I elected to just pay them the extra $15 when I decided to start playing with my kid.
    - belval 2y ago
      Also they added their god-awful Microsoft SSO to Minecraft which, coupled with the Xbox app means that you have to be careful with the sequence of action when requesting a password change otherwise the whole thing will just go blank and not let you reset. My partner and I are each on our second copy because at some point it was just not worth the hassle of recovering our old accounts.
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      Oh that’s why my login doesn’t work anymore?
- Filligree 2y ago
  You never tried any of the many, many mods?
  - kqr 2y ago
    No, I found the base game to have the appropriate level of complexity in terms of construction and making infrastructure. I did play a lot of Vechs' survival/complete the monument maps, which to this day I think are marvels of top game design.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I remember modding 10 years ago and it was a fucking mess. Not at all surprised if most people haven't.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      2015 was past the halcyon days of modding because of the big update that broke half the mods. ~2011 was when you had great mods like Industrial Craft 2. /oldmanyellsatcloud
      - bombcar 2y ago
        The correct way to play modded minecraft is to play a modpack that still develops for some ancient version. https://howoldisminecraft1710.today https://howoldisminecraft1710.today Oh look, there's GTNH! https://www.gtnewhorizons.com https://www.gtnewhorizons.com Where they've brought 1.7.10 to modern Java, and replaced Optifine, and done some other minor changes ;)
      - NikkiA 2y ago
        Meh, the Forge / Fabric split in 2020-2021(?) represented another peak point for MC modding - which is still alive and well.
- Modified3019 2y ago
  This was me. Played the beta for a little bit, didn’t find what was there very compelling and stopped with the year. A decade later it turns out my sister got into it that she had a realms server with friends and I joined. Basically a completely different game, which is mostly a positive. Though mojang really needs to fix inventory management bullshit, which is not fun. There are many more possible items now, but with the same inventory space as the game started with, meaning anything you do results in inventory constantly filling up.
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Building item sorters is a fun red stone project. You just dump your inventory in a chest and it gets sorted automatically.
    - Modified3019 2y ago
      In theory, sure I guess. But my biggest issue is being unable to go exploring more than 100 steps without having to dump stuff into a chest. I’m working on fixing this with mods.
      - portaouflop 2y ago
        Shulkers help tremendously with that as well, imo you don’t need mods. I just carry a couple empty shulkers - but I guess every play style varies
        Modified3019 2y ago
        I’ve have and use shulkers (and a shulker farm). This does not address the fundamental problem of having just 27 inventory + 9 hotbar slots over 1000 possible items (which is constantly increasing) that can be picked up, many of which don’t even stack, and having to manually move things where you want them. Dealing with that turns exploring+looting into the promise of a grinding chore unless you simply don’t collect things. Which will hurt during future building projects. I would not enjoy a game where I manually swapped out memory to disk. Yet often games demand the same as part of their “gameplay”. The only viable fix is mods.
- iamthepieman 2y ago
  I first played Minecraft when Notch was posting demos as zip files on the TIGSource forums. I playtested and kept playing off and on until a little after the 1.0 release but that was still over 10 years ago. Some of the early demos also had object impermanence. You would leave a chunk and when you went back to it, it had been re-generated.
danudey 2y ago
For what it's worth, I'm fully aware of honeycomb blocks and have played Minecraft recently, but I've never seen a honeycomb block in person. It's entirely possible she plays casually or has played casually recently but doesn't engage with media or wikis enough to know about blocks that she hasn't had reason to see.

kqr 2y ago

> over five years I think there is a generation of Minecraft players that participated in the alpha, beta, and early 1.0 releases and then grew out of it. For these people, "in the game for over five years" is basically the same as "new". (I belong to that group. I recently started introducing my four-year old to Minecraft and there is so much stuff that was not there when I played!)

lynndotpy 2y ago
Infinidev here :) It's wild to think that some people played Minecraft, had kids, and some of their kids are older than I was when I started playing Minecraft.
bakugo 2y ago
Can confirm. Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game. Part of it is because 80%+ of my playtime was before they were added, but I think another part of it is that those things have never really quite fit into the game in my mind.
- imtringued 2y ago
  The End is akin to an inside joke or maybe a pun. You cannot finish a sandbox game, so Notch deliberately added a dimension that you have to go out of your way for, that is difficult to find, unless someone tells you or you read about it. The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game. You can say "I've reached the end of Minecraft" and it is true by the letter of the words, but untrue by the spirit of the words. Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.
  - bakugo 2y ago
    > The End dimension isn't meant to fit in the game. It's meant to subvert the idea of a sandbox game. Do you have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it. > Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon. In theory, maybe. But in practice? The mere existence of a tangible end goal fundamentally changes the way people approach the game, even if there's more to do beyond it. Here's a very good video about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDBJg886EA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDBJg886EA
    - asddubs 2y ago
      I agree with this in general but I don't think minecraft falls into this trap because beating the ender dragon is so anticlimactic and trivial that it doesn't feel like you accomplished much. In terraria, an ostensibly similar sandbox game with a much more linear progression, if I beat the final boss, I really do feel like there's nothing else to do and stop playing that world. In modded minecraft packs with quest books, it's the same thing. But in vanilla minecraft, beating the ender dragon is just something you do because you want elytra wings.
      - bakugo 2y ago
        Beating the dragon is very anticlimactic, but it's still the "end" of the progression path as designed by the developers. Or at least it was before the Elytra was added, now that's the actual end. But either way, reaching that end goal usually prompts people to ask themselves: "what now?" Once you have an Elytra, you've basically unlocked creative flight in survival, and that's pretty much where survival itself ends, now you're just playing creative except you still have to grind for building materials. There's no better item to go for, so what's the point? Most people stop playing shortly after, and this is where the whole "2 week Minecraft phase" thing originates from.
        bombcar 2y ago
        Elytra is anything but creative flight (as it glides, you can't hover) - but it does destroy any real sense of scale or travel. Some people can't play Minecraft until they rush the elytra, some end up abandoning a world shortly after they get it.
- Suppafly 2y ago
  >Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game. Same, one of my kids will randomly want me to play and I'm constantly surprised by some 'new' thing that's literally been in the game for 10 years. It's kinda cool that minecraft has existed as a thing for basically my kids' entire lives, and oldest is in college now.
Akronymus 2y ago
I stopped playing anything beyond 1.7.10. I still play a lot of 1.7.10 though, because of gtnh. Loving that modpack quite a bit.
- bombcar 2y ago
  The most surprising thing about GTNH, to me, is how much of "vanilla minecraft" is already present in 1.7.10 and how relatively minor the changes since then (except the resizing of the world) have been.
  - NikkiA 2y ago
    The new underground with caves and caverns, and the amethyst clusters and all that is a massive change. IMO.
littlestymaar 2y ago
This exactly. I wouldn't be surprised if most HN readers had played a bit of Minecraft 13 to 15 years ago and still represent Minecraft like that even after all that time. I'm definitely one of those BTW.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Same here. Played a lot of it in a brief moment some 13 years ago, then never touched it again. Villagers and stuff is still strictly in the "new" category for me.
tokai 2y ago
The kids teased me so much for trying to build an obsidian generator. Almost the whole game was new for me.
- khedoros1 2y ago
  I've got a map full of redstone gadgets that I made like...13 years ago, I suppose. Few of them work in the current version of the game. I played a bunch around the 2010 timeframe, then around 2015, then around 2021. It was a strange mix of familiar and new each time.
TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
Minecraft has been around for more than 15 years, and the game was already fully recognisably itself by around 2012. There's 13 years of additions that will always feel mostly unnecessary to many players.
- mapt 2y ago
  These people will have to buy a second account because Microsoft up and deleted them when they bought Minecraft, and haven't been sued yet. If you were paying attention at the time they offered a migration process for Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts... and then turned it off because 'fuck you that's why'. Instead, people are apparently suing them because Microsoft banned gun mods. America in a nutshell.
  - jaredhallen 2y ago
    FWIW, I eventually got mine migrated, but it took months and a lot of back and forth with customer support.
    - pavel_lishin 2y ago
      I elected to just pay them the extra $15 when I decided to start playing with my kid.
  - belval 2y ago
    Also they added their god-awful Microsoft SSO to Minecraft which, coupled with the Xbox app means that you have to be careful with the sequence of action when requesting a password change otherwise the whole thing will just go blank and not let you reset. My partner and I are each on our second copy because at some point it was just not worth the hassle of recovering our old accounts.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    Oh that’s why my login doesn’t work anymore?
Filligree 2y ago
You never tried any of the many, many mods?
- kqr 2y ago
  No, I found the base game to have the appropriate level of complexity in terms of construction and making infrastructure. I did play a lot of Vechs' survival/complete the monument maps, which to this day I think are marvels of top game design.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I remember modding 10 years ago and it was a fucking mess. Not at all surprised if most people haven't.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    2015 was past the halcyon days of modding because of the big update that broke half the mods. ~2011 was when you had great mods like Industrial Craft 2. /oldmanyellsatcloud
    - bombcar 2y ago
      The correct way to play modded minecraft is to play a modpack that still develops for some ancient version. https://howoldisminecraft1710.today https://howoldisminecraft1710.today Oh look, there's GTNH! https://www.gtnewhorizons.com https://www.gtnewhorizons.com Where they've brought 1.7.10 to modern Java, and replaced Optifine, and done some other minor changes ;)
    - NikkiA 2y ago
      Meh, the Forge / Fabric split in 2020-2021(?) represented another peak point for MC modding - which is still alive and well.
Modified3019 2y ago
This was me. Played the beta for a little bit, didn’t find what was there very compelling and stopped with the year. A decade later it turns out my sister got into it that she had a realms server with friends and I joined. Basically a completely different game, which is mostly a positive. Though mojang really needs to fix inventory management bullshit, which is not fun. There are many more possible items now, but with the same inventory space as the game started with, meaning anything you do results in inventory constantly filling up.
- portaouflop 2y ago
  Building item sorters is a fun red stone project. You just dump your inventory in a chest and it gets sorted automatically.
  - Modified3019 2y ago
    In theory, sure I guess. But my biggest issue is being unable to go exploring more than 100 steps without having to dump stuff into a chest. I’m working on fixing this with mods.
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      Shulkers help tremendously with that as well, imo you don’t need mods. I just carry a couple empty shulkers - but I guess every play style varies
      - Modified3019 2y ago
        I’ve have and use shulkers (and a shulker farm). This does not address the fundamental problem of having just 27 inventory + 9 hotbar slots over 1000 possible items (which is constantly increasing) that can be picked up, many of which don’t even stack, and having to manually move things where you want them. Dealing with that turns exploring+looting into the promise of a grinding chore unless you simply don’t collect things. Which will hurt during future building projects. I would not enjoy a game where I manually swapped out memory to disk. Yet often games demand the same as part of their “gameplay”. The only viable fix is mods.
iamthepieman 2y ago
I first played Minecraft when Notch was posting demos as zip files on the TIGSource forums. I playtested and kept playing off and on until a little after the 1.0 release but that was still over 10 years ago. Some of the early demos also had object impermanence. You would leave a chunk and when you went back to it, it had been re-generated.

danudey 2y ago

For what it's worth, I'm fully aware of honeycomb blocks and have played Minecraft recently, but I've never seen a honeycomb block in person. It's entirely possible she plays casually or has played casually recently but doesn't engage with media or wikis enough to know about blocks that she hasn't had reason to see.