I agree that vanilla Minecraft is a fairly ho-hum game other than the fact that it’s a brand new genre that is incredibly awesome. Good thing “Minecraft” is actually like a thousand different games with all the mods you can install, some of which take the game design very seriously and make it incredibly fun, interesting, new, exciting, etc.
Minecraft isn’t a game, it’s a toy. You can make a game out of it just like you can make a game out of riding a bike. But the fundamental activity of mMinecrat isn’t that you play it, it’s that you play WITH it.
Yeah, ok. Do you want to tell my copy of the sims the bad news or shall I?
You’re right, I completely missed the word “good” in his post."
How are you defining “game” and “toy” here? What makes something one, and not the other?
Innards Snacker - I appreciate you trying to help, but don’t you think it says something that you have to learn so many rules just to be reasonably safe, that there is no absolute 100% surefire way to keep monsters off your back? In the old RPGs (D&D, Ultima, 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy), if you stayed in a civilized area and didn’t cause trouble, you were free and clear. Of course you had to venture out and face danger to accomplish anything, but that was only to be expected.
See, this matters to me. The clear demarcation between safe and unsafe. I don’t mind inherently unsafe areas, or everywhere becoming temporarily unsafe (so long as there’s some justification for it; Ezio becoming a wanted man in Florence in the early part of Assassin’s Creed 2, for example), but when death can show up anywhere and everywhere, and even the supposed countermeasures at best keep the demons at bay, I can’t enjoy that.
dzeiger - Okay, get this right and never forget it: appeal to popularity does not, repeat, DOES NOT wash with me. Hell, pretty much ever high-rated and constantly raved-about show on television I find not worth the time or even outright unwatchable. Hugely popular console games have had a decidedly mixed track record: Assassin’s Creed (of course), after the first rookie mistake-filled installment, has been overall very good, Guitar Hero is plenty of fun but needs more variety in the music, Grand Theft Auto was fun for a while but eventually just became tedious, Tekken is a masterpiece, but I’m not good at fighting games so I can’t enjoy it, Dance Dance Revolution started out absolutely addictive but the later games crashed and burned with all the outrageous requirements, I just plain don’t see anything special about Little Big Planet, etc. Popularity is never an indicator of quality (either way) for me.
I had no idea items dropped where you died. None. Isn’t this something the game should tell us? Especially since items on the ground vanish if you leave them too long?
As for diamond, I’ve always been of the mindset that the lesser should lead to the greater. Get a key, which allows you reach an area where you can obtain a flotation device, which allows you to reach an area where you can obtain a hover jet, etc. In other words, if you are getting tons of coal and plenty of iron, they should at some point…a device, a magic finder, I don’t care, something…allow you to detect more precious minerals. When something vanishingly rare is left to chance (I never saw a single diamond ore block), I can’t keep going.
Miller - Yes, some RPGs do random drops for important items. Yes, some games have insta-death water that’s next to impossible to stay out of (I’ve played some of them). It’s absolute crap and anyone with eyes can see this. There are games that go the ultra-hardcore punish punish punish route, and some of them are quite popular. How did Minecraft become one of them? It’s not about World War 2 kill zones or postapocalyptic terror rival ninja clans or epic space battles. It’s a game where you harvest resources and build things. Why would I think that I’d have to worry about being blown up or hacked to pieces every 30 seconds or that I’d need to put in roughly 3 man-hours for a dispenser (and I very nearly got killed before I could complete it)? Some serious dissonance here, what I’m saying.
everyone - One last question…does the PC version allow you to load other creators’ worlds and explore them? The XBox 360 version doesn’t, and honestly, that’s the only thing I’m interested in doing anymore. (Was able to get the On A Rail achievement. Would’ve taken less time if those flippin’ animals didn’t keep wandering onto the track. No, I’m not interested in how to prevent this.)
Minecraft is a survival game. See also: Don’t Starve (which I don’t like as much). The entire point is that you’re never totally safe, otherwise it wouldn’t be survival.
That said, you can make places pretty damn safe, even with zombies able to break down door. (My admittedly cheaty trick is to place a dirt block in front of the door). Basically make sure your house and the area around it is well lit. The hardest part of Minecraft is really the first 3-4 hours.
Hell, once you have a bed you can pretty much be safe forever by proxy of sleeping every night.
Edit: As for seeing Diamond. It’s really not that rare, you probably weren’t deep enough.
Not really. I am no whiz at video games but I don’t really find it difficult to eke out a humdrum existence. Yeah, creepers will blow you up and that sucks, but death is forgiving and even if I lose something, I can always find more.
Why is it so hard to stay alive?
Yes, you need to build a house, and it can take some scrambling to get a safe house built by the first nightfall. But a simple house that’s just a pit dug in the ground with a door and some torches works fine.
Mobs won’t spawn unless it’s dark. There’s your safe area. Build a house and stick 20 torches inside, and put some torches outside around the door too. Done. Your house is 100% safe.
Yes, it’s dangerous to wander around outside at night. If you don’t want to do that, then make a bed and sleep at night and only go outside during the day.
Or explore underground at night, it’s always night underground. Just make yourself 200 torches and place them every five feet, and you only have to worry about mobs when you connect to a new cave system. And that’s easy to handle, just wall off the cave system and only explore it when you feel like.
You are 100% safe if you are in a well lighted house with thick walls. Creepers only attack if they can see you. If you’re worried about zombies breaking down the door, just wall it off for the night.
Or don’t play on Hard. I think that’s the only setting where they can break down a wooden door. (Or make an iron door but then you need a switch or button to open it.)
edit: I have yet to find a problem that couldn’t be fixed by /gamemode c
DKW, nobody’s gonna make you like a game you’re determined not to like. But some of your complaints strike me as easily avoided.
Minecraft requires outside support. I can’t imagine trying to play it without having a Wiki. This is my biggest complaint, in fact: if it’s going to require a Wiki to play, I think it oughtta be embedded in the game.
That said, if you have the Wiki, the first thing you need to do is read a beginner’s guide. If you’d read one, you could have avoided a lot fo the problems you’ve had, such as not knowing about dropped items.
In my current MC game, I’ve got several diamond pickaxes (far and away my favorite use of diamonds), an enchanting table built with diamonds, and about 50 or so diamonds in storage. Yeah, they’re rare, but not that rare. Read a mining guide to figure out how to get them, or just follow this advice:
- Dig down until you hit bedrock (the stuff you can’t dig through). I like to make it a stairway going down. Then go up about 5 blocks or so.
- Dig a really long tunnel until you get bored.
- Dig branches off of that long tunnel, spaced about 2-3 blocks apart.
- Profit! This is how I’ve found most of my diamonds (that and caving at this level).
As for death, when I start a new world I die a lot. But then I reach a certain point after which death is very rare.
I’m still glad the risk is there, with the difficulty in getting equipment back. For example, at one point I was building a rail line to go far off from my main tower, and I wanted to make it straight, so I built a bridge across a long canyon. Because of the risk of death, I was tense as I built that bridge, and it was a lot more fun than it otherwise would have been.
Oh, and by the way, I don’t use redstone, and I use minecarts all the time. What you do is you build a coal cart or whatever it’s called, and then you create a platform next to and above the rail line, and you stand on that as you load the coal cart and then jump into the minecart in front of the coal cart. Easy enough.
It’s not as critical for the xbox version because the crafting system just makes stuff if you have the materials. You don’t need to know that a pickaxe is two sticks in the middle and 3 blocks across the top. If you have 2 sticks and 3 cobblestone, you can just select the stone pickaxe and it will plop it in your inventory.
Ah, didn’t know that! But still you’re gonna want the wiki to figure out how, for example, to make a coal cart or an enchanting table.
It is entirely possible to build completely safe zones. A 5x5x5 room with no door and two torches on each wall is completely safe: no monster will ever show up in that room.
That’s the basic version. It’s possible to build more complex structures and keep them monster free. I’ve got a game I’ve been playing in for about two years, now. My main base is a compound of six buildings, well-lit, with a fence around it. I don’t think I’ve seen a monster inside the compound in about six months or so. Of course, it took a long time for me to completely secure that big a complex, but that’s part of the fun for me - figuring out how to build something just right to get exactly the desired effect.
I did have to rebuild that barn a hell of a lot before I finally managed to keep the Creepers out entirely, though.
Honestly, it seems really weird that you didn’t figure this one out on your own - particularly given how often you seem to be dying. I don’t think it’s something that generally needs to be called out specifically. Most players are going to stumble on it on their own, and usually at a place in the game where they’re not going to be carrying anything particularly valuable.
This might actually be a problem with the X-Box version. The world-generation algorithm doesn’t do a great job of making sure resources are adequately distributed. On the PC, this works out rather well, because it gives you an impetus to explore farther afield than you might normally - and given that the world is effectively infinite, you’re always going to find the resource somewhere, if you walk far enough. But in the X-Box version, the world size is relatively small. I think it’s possible that, on that scale, its possible for the world-generating algorithm to create a world that’s entirely missing a particular resource. I played a game on the X-Box once that appeared to be entirely devoid of sheep, for example. I searched a significant portion of the map without ever finding one.
So, its possible that the world you were playing in just didn’t have any diamond in it. If that’s the case, that’s a serious bug with that version of the game. On the PC, diamond is rare, but not especially so - if you spend enough time in deep mines, you shouldn’t have that much trouble finding it.
Keeping your earlier admonishment about appeals to popularity in mind, the rare-drop model of player reward has proved to be extremely successful for a number of franchises. It would appear that this is a popular mechanic (heh) among gamers. I’m not suggesting that it’s popularity means it’s objectively good, of course. But the fact you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s objectively bad. People like games that reward large time investments with incremental rewards. They’re not wrong to do so.
Anyway, insta-death in water is harder to defend as anything other than lazy game design, but legitimately hostile environments are a common element in video games, and not an unacceptable one, in my view. Games that take place in vacuums, or the ocean floor, or the inside of a volcano, often feature instantly lethal terrain. It’s a common enough design element that I don’t think it’s entirely fair to single out Minecraft, particularly given that it’s far from the most unforgiving implementation of the concept.
Not postapocalyptic? Look around the world in Minecraft. How many human beings do you see? And how many walking dead?
Clearly, Minecraft takes place after the zombie apocalypse.
More seriously, Minecraft is a hard-core game in the mold of other indie titles like Dwarf Fortress. There’s a retro-aesthetic involved in these games that goes beyond the 8-bit graphics. When I was a teenager, there was this meme among gamers that manuals were for the weak. A real gamer could just boot up a game and figure it out. Minecraft is, to a large extent, deliberately catering to people nostalgic for that mindset. (Ironically, people with this mindset - and I’m including myself, here - are also nostalgic for games that came with phone-book sized printed manuals. I recently kickstarted a sequel to the PC classic Wasteland, and pitched in at the level that gets me a printed manual. I can’t wait to not read it!)
Yeah, on the PC version, your game data is saved as an easily-accessible folder. Just drag it into the save game folder of any copy of Minecraft, and you can access the saved game data, regardless of who created it.
Two words: sheep holocaust.
I may be misunderstanding you, but are you suggesting people play Minecraft without the manual?
I’d actually say the opposite: it makes me nostalgic for old games when you NEEDED the manual, because there was no tutorial, and the game dropped you in the deep end right away. Without the manual for Masters of Orion, you were lost; without the wiki for Minecraft, I’d be lost, too.
I still don’t get redstone.
I think part of the fun of Minecraft is experimenting with materials and discovering what you can do with them on your own. The extent to which someone wants to be a purist about it is up to them. I use guides quite a bit, myself. But I do think the lack of any in-game tutorial (which, again, only applies to the PC version - there’s a pretty good tutorial in the X-Box version) is a deliberate aesthetic choice that’s repeated at many level of the game design, most notably the 8 bit graphics.
Right, see, among my peers at the time, reading the manual before playing MoO was considered an admission of weakness.
Either way, it’s making both of us nostalgic for the same games.
I know I’ve seen videos of people who fall into lava and manage to drink a fire resist potion before they die. Certainly not easy, but it does show some of what progression does exist–digging around level 10 can be much more dangerous on your second night of play than it is once you’ve been to the nether and dealt with a few blazes and magma cubes.
I’m not entirely certain how much the lack of a manual and such was due to the way development happened–I recall the Alpha versions, at least, had a “Tutorial” button that was never developed (looks like the 360 version does have a tutorial), so it was certainly a thought at one time.
I suspect the problem may have been how popular the game became while it was still in Alpha–you obviously don’t expect a real manual at that point, but so many people were playing that there was already a huge community knowledge base available, Wikis, hundreds of “how to survive your first night” Youtube videos, etc–in short, little or nothing Mojang could have created would have been better than what was already out there, so why spend limited resources on that instead of further features?
Something like Terraria seems geared toward this: crafting is automatic if you have materials, and there’s limited in-game help for crafting. But Minecraft on the PC is much more difficult, with the requirement of exact placement of materials. Beyond the first very basic stuff like axes and pickaxes, crafting gets way too complicated for experimentation to be very fruitful for me.
Call me a weakling, then! 
I always considered reading the manual to be a basic part of playing the game when I was a kid, and when I got a game, it was the first delicious tantalization on the way home from the store. I remember my delight at reading The Legend of Zelda and Blaster Master in the back seat of the Honda, anticipating the fun I’d have.
YMMV, natch.
Actually not even that’s necessary. On my first night or two I usually just build a dirt cubbyhole that’s too small for any monsters to spawn inside of it with me.
Weakling!
In fairness, you probably did a lot better at then games than I did. I don’t think I figured out about reassigning workers in the city screen until about Civ III.