Welcome to the Spawn Chunks, episode number 120 for Monday, December 21st. My name is Joel Duggan and joining me as always is Tinsel Riffs. Hello, sir. Hello. Yes, feeling especially tinselly this close to Christmas. And uh if you are interested in what we're getting up to this close to Christmas or how difficult it is to get Christmas presents Uh you can listen to the render distance, the extended version of the podcast. As always, that's available from patreon.com.
slash the spawn chunks and we should note that this episode is being pre-recorded as will the next episode. Episode one two one is also going to be pre recorded before our usual Christmas break, so we can keep the content coming for you guys and we don't expect a great deal of breaking news from the Minecraft team over the holidays, so
Don't come down too hard on us if we ended up missing something. Having said that, there was a snapshot today and we are going to be covering it. We're recording this on Wednesday, December 16th, and there was a snapshot, but we have spent precisely forty-five minutes.
in that snapshot before we decided to uh sit down and record a show. So we might have missed a couple of things here and there, but we'll try and cover it as comprehensively as we usually do, which is to say, with just a lot of you know, extra discussion and extrapolation from there. Uh but first of all, in the two days since we last spoke, Joel, what have you been up to in Minecraft this week?
Well, I ended up with a short uh midweek stream. I don't always have time to do those, but I jumped on last night and I had sort of blocked out where I wanted a bridge to go over one of the rivers that crosses through the medieval town that I've been working on. And this is one of many ri uh bridges that's gonna be in the in the town.
And it's it connects one side of the town to the other. So it's gonna be a kind of like a heavy influence in terms of like where I envision the foot traffic is gonna go, where the wider streets are going to be, that kind of thing. And I didn't finish it. It just kind of got a good solid start. Uh but I've got a I'll have a link here for our live chat.
And I'm trying to be as simple as I can with some of these designs because I mean, I have to design a whole town. I my my server mates seem to be pretty busy with their own project. So this is kind of like on me. uh to design this town. And so I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. Like I don't want to start getting into like
crazy textures on everything. So I'm approaching it as like as as simple as I can, like I'm uh I'm texturing in layers. Um I did have some fun with the new way that walls connect. This is the first time I've had a chance to play with this in a build. uh and giving some s very subtle depth changes to um the top of the towers on the bridge. And uh so far so good. Like I'm r I'm quite happy with it. Uh it's gonna it's gonna be a lot of fun to complete, I
And um I'm looking forward to working on it more. Um the thing that I like the most about it is that the approach is asymmetrical. So You uh come into it from a ramp on a low lying um ground level and then you enter and go across the bridge and then you exit straight onto the higher ground. There's a difference of about I wanna say ten blocks by the time you're up the ramp and across the thing. Uh maybe not ten, maybe more like six. But it's still it's it's
given me a challenge to design a curved road that goes uphill and so that that kind of stuff has been has been super fun. You know, trying not to Super flat the area, you know, and just kind of trying to go with where the the terrain makes sense. But it's been a lot of fun. Nice, nice. Uh yeah, I I really like.
Little infrastructural stuff like that, as it starts to come together, really builds up a nice picture of an area and we'd already seen Uh on Monday's episode, the last episode where um you were sharing kind of like the over o overheadshot of the town and everything just being like little kind of bits and pieces here and there, just watching stuff pop up like that really starts to bring some life into the area and
a lot of the time, even if it's just as simple as how do people get around this area, you can come up with some really inventive looking stuff. And this bridge is looking great. I think it's uh It it's it's feeling quite like classic Minecraft bridge right now. You got the crenellations at the top and I like the use of trapdoors especially, like just kind of the hanging down sort of ornaments on the tower really uh really kind of shape it out in a nice way.
Thanks, man. I appreciate that. We we tried for quite a while on the stream. Something I really enjoy. I mean, it takes a long time to do trial and error and you know, you're uh up and down a lot looking at stuff, but it's really fun to do it with a live chat because you're just like, okay.
We've got two towers. Let's build one one way, build one the other, and let's just all decide which one we like best. Yeah, like take a take a poll, everybody vote. Yeah, yeah. That kind of thing. I still get veto, but it was it's nice to hear the it's h nice to hear like the Affirmation of the chat when you're like, hmm, what about this? And then you're like, ooh, and then the whole chat's like, ooh, that. Yeah. Definitely do.
You know, and that's what happened with the double the double height trapdoors. Like that was kind of like not a happy accident, but just something I tried on a whim and then everybody's like, Oh, I never thought about that. Mm-hmm. So that kind of thing was really cool. And what's nice about this, which you can't see from the screenshot, but you can in the VOD, is that when you walk through the main gate, that right hand tower is now right in your face. Like it's it's
One of the first things you see walking into the town. And they're tall enough that you can see them over the curtain wall. So even before you get to the front gate, you can kind of see this like. The crenellation of the of the tower kind of like bopping behind the wall. You're like, what is that? You know, like you don't know what it is until you can get close enough to see that it's a bridge. Yeah. So yeah, it's fun to add those layers, like you said, you know, as stuff starts to prop pop up.
this town is gonna feel a lot m less like a you know a Disney Park exhibit and more like an actual place. Yeah. Um I I also like the fact that you've you've snuck in the completely solid walls that we now have.
as part of like uh it's it's not quite recessed all the way back as far as like a full block but I I feel like that's that's super nice. That's like that's the people who wanted vertical slabs getting something that at least looks similar enough that It's gonna gonna work out for design choices like that.
You know, um I think that might have been in the back of my brain because I was checking out your latest video and it was something you had built previously, but you walked by it in the latest video. And that you did the same thing with walls with various different kinds of walls and glass panes because they all connect so nicely.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's really good. I need to mess around with transitions like that more when I build stuff, but I haven't been doing a lot of exterior building lately. It's basically all been museum rooms and stuff like that, so I'll get around to it eventually. Uh in in the rest of my Minecraft doings this week, oh I've had a really busy day, actually. I've I've gone from RTX to Java to snapshot and and back again more or less.
Um so I've been back in Minecraft RTX now I have this wonderful new PC and um I recorded Uh I put out one more episode of that today and another episode is now recorded, which is the the final sponsored episode in which I complete the sort of overall progression of Minecraft, go fight the dragon and go to end cities and get Shulka's Elytra, that kind of stuff. And that all came together really well, so I was quite happy about that and it
It didn't take me like you know how sometimes you'll get to the end, it'll take you like y three hours to find a working end city? It was one of those situations where I went through the end gateway and the city was right there and it had a boat. and I didn't even have to walk like five feet before I found it. So uh yeah, I got I got lucky in that respect. Um but yeah, it's it's been really fun. Uh Minecraft RTX is still
Sneaking in these subtle surprises. And once again I should clarify, anything I say on this podcast is not sponsored by NVIDIA. This is entirely my own thoughts about it, but I'm still really enjoying the experience and I was out at night looking for endermans so I could get enough enderpearls. I ended up getting most of my enderpearls from clerics in the end, but
Uh, at night on a planes biome with no light sources around, because I was trying to make sure there was still, you know, ample spawning space around me for Enderman. Um I stumbled across this mountain that had a lava source coming down from one side of it, the way you get a single source of lava and it will just like tumble down a mountain and and flow. And it was lighting up the clouds above it. And that is the thing that really blew my mind was like not only is it lighting blocks which are
several chunks away. The kind of stuff that's clearly not gonna be affected by in game lighting but like the lava glow was bright enough that it's actually bouncing off of blocks, you know, fifty, sixty blocks away. It's also lighting up the cloud layer so that you have light pollution in Minecraft now. And that that was that in itself was just wild. But I'm imagining what happens when you get hold of different light sources and different colored light sources, and if you could make like
cloud art from that somehow. And like my brain immediately starts firing off and it Something that I'm uh I'm hoping that we can, you know, mess around with a little bit more and I'll do some more RTX videos I think in future. I don't normally even play with clouds on, but I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen with default graphics. So it was it was pretty special and I put a picture of that up on Twitter and was like, This is
Not something I expected to enjoy, like uh like I I wasn't coming into this RTX thing thinking, oh yeah, I bet the clouds are gonna light up. But but they do, and it it looks really quite cool. It that screenshot that you just shared is fantastic. And I can only imagine if you wanted to add some player control in there, like
blue um soul fire. You know, if you've got some of those around your build, then the clouds that pass over your spooky blue, you know, evil blue tower are gonna go blue. Like that's really, really cool. Yeah. And wait a minute, in well so in Minecraft RTX like you could put stained glass over any light source and turn it a different color, which means you could change the clouds
With a redstone like device, you could turn like you could have like rainbow clouds like changing from like pink to blue back and forth. Yeah, like what I've found about the RTX stuff is that it's a little bit more subtle when it's glass because
When we saw a lot of the showcase packs for it, what you got a lot of in that was like colour emitting blocks like stuff like the redstone block and diamond block and emerald block were all um like basically turned into sea lantern type blocks where they were super bright. and bright of only one colour. Whereas if you put some stained glass over a white light source, the transparency is going to make it so it's a much more subtle colour check.
Um so it's not like rainbow beacon style where suddenly it's like a really solid colour light. It's it's a little different than that. Even so, that led to some some pretty cool effects and I think with the right resource pack, if you decided to make a a PBR uh texture pack like the NVIDIA guide tells you how to do, you could definitely just
make whatever effects you want out of the blocks you had. You could even do that with glazed terracotta if you don't plan on doing that. You can just make that into sixteen different colors of light source that are just bright emissive light.
and from then on you can do whatever you want with it. It's not necessarily going to affect the uh lighting of the game itself, like the mechanical lighting, the block lighting, but it's going to affect the visual side of things in RTX and that's super fun. Um
But yeah, outside of that, uh I'll talk a little bit more about the RTX stuff later, because we'll probably get into it as part of like a a freeform discussion for the main topic later. Um outside of that, I did a another stream from the hardcore Minecraft server. I am now
seven blocks and eight ingots into a tier one netherite beacon. Uh so that was a bit of fun. We managed to get a couple of stacks on stream and uh didn't have to use a totem of undying or any even any fire resistance potions in the end. So I'm I'm back to my back to my usual netherite gathering grind.
uh for a little bit. And then I'm thinking about actually converting the survival guide world into bedrock edition, like a copy of the world, um, to put it in RTX so I can try and explore some of my existing builds in the RTX world. um and and see what that does to the builds I've already made and see how I would have approached things differently. For like, uh the next episode of Survival Guide is episode three fifty. So I figured I would do some sort of world tour uh
trying out Minecraft RTX in that world. So maybe that's already happened by the time you folks are listening to the recording, but uh yeah, I'm gonna maybe give that a try later this week. Very cool. Moving on into the news, we have a brand new snapshot coming out just in time for the holidays. This is for Minecraft Java Edition twenty W fifty one A, pardon me.
The final snapshot of the year enters Minecraft Java, and what better way to end the year than with something that has been on our bucket list for quite a while? The adorable Max Lot. We hope you'll end the year on a good note and the entirety of the Java team wishes you a happy holiday. New features in 20W51A are of course the Axlotl. They are amphibious.
Axlottles currently live uh sorry love tropical fish, though this may change. Tropical fish or tropical fish buckets can be used to mate axlottles. Axlottles will swim around you if you're holding a tropical fish bucket. Sorry, a tropical fish or tropical fish bucket. Uh when player is killed uh kills a mob, the axe little uh was attacking or being attacked by the axe little will show its appreciation by granting the player temporary regeneration and removing any mining fatigue effects.
You can pick your axlottle up in a bucket of water and carry it around, just like a salmon or cod. Axlottles will also chase after squids and other types of fish. Axlottles are skittish, but they will attack drowned and guardians if you tempt them with their favorite food, tropical fish. Axlottles do not like uh like it out of water and they will dry up and begin taking damage if they are out of water for longer than five minutes.
Anoxlotl will not dry up as long as they are in water or rain. Sometimes when anxlotl takes damage, it will pretend to be dead so it stops being attacked. There are four common varieties and one rare variety of axotl. Axotls do not spawn yet in the world, but you can find spawn eggs in the creative inventory. There are a couple more changes waiting for us in twenty W fifty one A. Bundles and Shulkerbox items will now drop their items when destroyed. So if you
completely destroy a shulker box i in creative mode, for example, then uh they will still drop their items. I think that change is probably being made so you can also preserve netherite stuff that is stored in there, which I think was uh a bit of an issue for that. Uh some changes have also been made to skulk sensors. Skulk sensors have uh previously had an eating start event where the skulk sensor would detect when you started chewing on some food.
Uh and separately detect when you stopped eating the food, when the food was finished being eaten. Um that has now been removed, or or rather like condensed down into just the eating stop event. They said that this was inconsistent with the philosophy around vibrations because for example starting to mine a block but not completely breaking the block so you can, you know, back off uh mining an obsidian block, for example, before you've actually broken it.
Uh that didn't cause a vibration, but then breaking the block would. So starting to eat a vib uh to eat uh an item would not necessarily produce a vibration that way and cause you still end up with the same amount of food. Um it was widely considered to not be a very useful trigger for skulk sensors, and the eating finish is staying and will likely be more useful.
Um we also have walking on wool no longer causing vibrations, throwing wool as an item onto the ground no longer causing vibrations, and skulk sensors no longer making any noise while waterlogged. They are now silent while waterlogged. There is also another change in the vibration frequency table. Well once again this is linked at the uh the Change log uh on Minecraft.net.
Uh which says as we consider uh as we continue to consider feedback from the community, some changes to the frequency ranges have been made. We expect this to change quite heavily up until release. to figure out the most interesting ranges for gameplay and as always feedback is extremely welcome. Here is the newest table in this snapshot. And yeah, all of the different vibrations, frequency values, and so forth will be linked uh in the Minecraft.net article.
A couple of other technical changes in twenty W fifty one A largely includes a new game rule, players sleeping percentage, which is a hundred by default, and it sets what percentage of players need to be sleeping in beds in order to skip the night. Setting it to zero will mean one player is always enough to skip the knight, and you can actually set it above a hundred percent, which prevents players skipping the knight. Entirely.
There are a few other fixed bugs which are worth noting in twenty W fifty one A, including trying to put a candle onto a candle cake, duplicating the candle, which was a problem in previous snapshots. Uh netherites being able to burn while inside of a bundle, and nether stars being blown up while inside of a bundle or a shulker box.
So yeah, like I said, that last little set of bugs was Uh the solution that they had proposed to bundles and shulker boxes with netherite still being able to be burned in fire or lava Uh and so, you know, if you ended up going on a long ancient debris mining session, as some of us do, and uh you end up gathering a lot of the stuff, and then your shulker box slips, falls in lava, falls in fire, then you effectively lost things that are meant to be fire.
So I'm glad they've done that. That makes a lot of sense. I agree. Yeah. When I w when I was reading through the changes, like, oh okay, I think I know why they're doing Um just'cause it it allows the items to be then treated individually by lava rather than the one single item of the the shulker box or the bundle.
So yeah, if your if your bundle that's thrown on the floor gets destroyed then I wonder if that's the same with explosion damage as well, because that can still, you know, destroy the entity, but then if TNT blows up a bundle item that's been thrown on the ground, does that bundle then drop all of its items which are you know, able to be blown up separately. I'm I'm mainly wondering this because of the issues I've had with charged creepers.
Whenever, you know, I strike a creeper with lightning and there's still, you know, lightning damage happening and it destroys all of the items around me, I wonder if stuff that's in shulker boxes or bundles could then potentially be saved from that. So that might be an interesting uh an interesting solution to that problem. Or intentionally blow it up, like you're putting your bundles into a hopper slash, you know, dispenser that's gonna shoot them out somewhere.
And if each bund bundle is shot out once at a time into the, you know, a TNT chamber and it blows up the bundle, which then spreads the items everywhere. And then those that go individually into your filter system, like that could be one way.'Cause we'cause you can't really
The only way to empty a bundle of its contents on purpose right now is to like right click on it, I think if you've got it. Uh yeah, you you basically use it as though you're using like a like a piece of food or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So if if you could blow up a bundle on purpose, I tha I mean like it's this is the long way around to do something, but like I mean, I've seen people take longer ways. Yeah. Yeah. Uhhuh. You know, I'd just kind of it'd be a loud storage system, but it'll be kinda fun. As long as you've got a rabbit farm so you can produce renewable bundles and y losing one bundle doesn't matter to you so much, but uh yeah.
So uh so outside of the technical changes, which I mean uh let's see we've got the the player sleeping thing is great, I think. Um that's basically uh it's there's a player solution for this already, which is the player sleeping data pack. But there are issues with that in a sense there are a couple of implementations of it that work differently and
Um you know, they need to be updated to each new version to make sure that they worked, right? So when one hundred seventeen comes out you might have to wait for that data pack to be updated. Whereas Having an official implementation that's just based on a game rule and a nice easy percentage number to understand means that
if your server is updating from one sixteen to one seventeen, like it's just a game rule. Likewise in future the game rule will presumably stay the same and it's just data that the server can store, so you don't need to worry about that data pack updating. That's that's good. And it You know, the kind of thing that I don't know of any servers that really don't have the hat.
Because multiplayer servers just need to be able to skip the night and n you know, some people are gonna be mining while some people are being attacked by zombies on the surface and you know, you can't you can't always get to a bed. So it makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, me too. And it's nice that it's treated the same way that Fire Tick is. You know, like you just more options are good. You know, like you just if you've got and you've been on the server or you and once everybody agrees, you just decide what the rules are gonna be and just play the way that you want. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's that's really great. So I think we were going to kind of smash the conversation about, you know, how RTX is going, but also the major parts of the um the news.
uh into um one big fat discussion because there's actually quite a lot to unpack with axe levels. I was um surprised. Yeah. They're they're a pretty rich feature as as I think a lot of these features have kind of come up with A a bunch of extra stuff that we didn't necessarily anticipate, but really adds a lot of depth to uh to some of the newer stuff like Skulk Centers and Axolotl.
As we mentioned, we are pre recording a couple of episodes before the holidays. So if you'd like to email the show in the new year, that's when we'll get them. The email address is spawnchunkmail at gmail.com. This is normally where we'd read those emails. But again, if you want to email the show in the new year, spawn chunk mail. At gmail.com
Uh so did you have an opportunity to play around with the axolottles before the show? I did. Yeah. I I jumped into the snapshot basically as soon as I heard it was out and messed around with a whole bunch of them. And I mean a whole bunch, because one of the notes in the uh in in the changelog is there are four common varieties and one rare variety.
The rare ones are capital R Rare. It's like one in every hundred, it looks like, cause I I must have spawned about a hundred trying to tell the difference, and to be honest, the difference between them is quite subtle. Um there's a pink axolotl, and there is a slightly purple axolotl, and that is the rare one. Uh the other colours being brown, yellow, and a really, really nice white one that's sort of got More like a gradient between like a light bluey purple through to pink.
And that one's my favorite. That's the one I want to take home, you know? That's that's the one if I'm looking at a fish tank full of axolothels, I'm like that one. Um but yeah, I think they're they're fun little critters. Um I think especially in terms of like the ambience that they add.
I think it's nice just to have extra ocean life and once again really cool that ocean life isn't just being considered done after the uh aquatic update. But then A a lot of the the stuff that they do, hunting fish, fighting guardians for you, the drowned even, and the interaction with tropical fish, even if that might end up changing when maybe they have a a preferable food that's implemented with lush caves. I feel like they've got a lot to say for the moment.
Yeah, I was impressed by the AI behavior, just dropping a couple of axlottals into uh a tropical reef just to kind of be around and whatever. uh make sure it was warm water because I I was, you know, flying around a snapshot and I happened to be over a cold ocean. I was like, I don't know what these do in cold ocean. I don't want to spawn them in and just have them die right away. So, you know, we'll we'll mess around in a in a coral reef actually I found. And
They go straight after the the um tropical fish in a very wide range. So a word of caution if you're entering into a tropical reef or a coral reef that has a lot of Fish. You may not want to bring your axe lotle. If you want them to stick around, yeah. Yeah, though they are an apex predator. Like they kill for sport. It's not'cause they're hungry. They're just like, Oh, you're a fish, you're dead and it takes two hits to kill a tropical fish of any type. So
Um now on the flip side, they also go after squids. Takes a little bit longer. Squids were taking five hits to kill. But uh hello Squid Farm. Mm-hmm. Uh so that's a possibility. Um, I just like the idea of these axe letters. It they I guess they're supposed to look like they're biting, but they look like they're head butting, which is even cuter. Um So I thought that was kind of interesting. Uh and they do also go after drowned if you play your cards right. And um it took eight hit.
But I also punched the drowned. So I it might be ten for an axe lotl to take take out a drown. Um one thing that I uh took a while to sort out because they they mentioned that you can use them to attack mobs if you tempt them with their favorite food, which is of course um tropical fish in a bucket or tropical fish in your hand.
And so I had a tropical fish in the bucket and what you have to do to get this to work is first get near a knax level to the point where it comes up and follows you, the same way that a chicken will follow you when you've got seeds in your hand. Mm-hmm. And then if you use that bucket to punch a drown. then the dro the axe laudel will completely ignore you and just go after the drown until the drown's dead. Right. It's like it's like Sickem Rex just go and and the axlotl just goes to town. Um
I did witness the Axel getting attacked by something. I think it was a drowned. Uh and It didn't take much for it to start to play dead, so I don't know what kind of damage they can take. Yeah it's not a lot. Yeah, they Which makes sense. They're not very big. They seem to be like
four or five hearts, I think. They're they're they're not like the most resilient creatures, sort of like along the same lines as farm animals like a pig or something like that, I think is Yeah. Uh or like wolves. I feel like wolves is probably the most sensible uh, you know analogy we can draw because they're basically like they're they're dogs in the water, more or less. Like they will fight other stuff for you. It it kind of works the same way.
Um I do like the play dead thing, um, and that works pretty well. Th for my experiment I ended up just finding the nearest ocean monument in a new world. And I spawned a bunch of axolottles and had them fight guardians and
The the scenario I was trying to go through was I spawned in a bunch of gear for myself and figured, you know, this is what I would normally have when I raided an ocean monument. You know, decent diamond armor, depth strider on the boots, respiration on the helmet, a couple of water breathing potions. uh had a sword and a pickaxe and that was it basically. And Uh yeah, I went around with five or six axolotls.
And the problem I was having, I was mainly trying to get that effect where they're supposed to give you regen and remove mining fatigue, and I couldn't really get that to happen. I'm not entirely certain if um the the the the timing of it was off. The fact that like you're supposed to help them out by attacking something that's attacking them or help them attack something, basically. So you either help it uh get out of a tight situation or you help it take down something it's trying to attack.
Um and I couldn't get it to work for whatever reason, and I think it may have been just because there were too many guardians around, and there were a lot of axolothels that were just kind of like swimming around fighting everything that moved, and I couldn't really sit still long enough to just take on one enemy.
So that might in itself be like a tricky thing to happen, and if you're supposed to be doing that in the middle of an ocean monument, which are pretty hectic, and the only real defense against all those guardians is to keep moving, so you break line of sight for them.
I don't know how often that's actually gonna come up. It might need to happen with a slightly larger timing window or over a broader area that they notice you doing this or something like that. But for me I just couldn't get it to work for some reason. Um
Even under slightly more controlled conditions, I went back to a nearby island, made a giant glass tank, spawned in an Elder Guardian to give myself mining fatigue, and then a bunch of axolottals and tried to have them fight. And even then me attacking the Elder Guardian it just for whatever reason wasn't really producing the effect. Um if you smack.
the guardian on the nose with a bucket of tropical fish. Yeah. The axe laws would then all turn to it be like, yo, you're next. Yeah, I I I might I might have to try that as like a supplemental thing for the video just to see if that actually gets the mechanic to work out. Um Outside of that, they're adorable little fellas. And um the I think the the the other problem with using them to raid an ocean monument, which I keep coming back to because it was the example they gave at Minecraft Live.
was um Guardians spawn pretty frequently and infinitely from an ocean monument, while your Axolotls are A, finite, and B easily distracted. They tend to go after basically anything they can fight. Um so if you're bringing axolotls with you and you're attached to them, don't expect many of them to get out alive unless you put them back in a bucket as soon as you see them in trouble.
Uh so yeah, that that's the advice I would give is don't expect these axlottals to basically like run the ocean monument for you and don't get too attached to them if you're gonna try and use them as attack dogs because they will probably take damage. Um, I think I ended up with a bunch of them either I I saw a couple of them die and a couple of them I just didn't see again because I was busy trying to defend myself.
And I think the problem there was that they would either end up getting killed by the Guardians if they took enough damage, or they would swim away and just get distracted by other things, and then they just wouldn't be in the same area that I was. Um But yeah, I took five or six in there and one of them managed to stick it out with me for a good while. I think I took out maybe two of the Elder Guardians in that time, and most of the rest of them were gone.
Um but if you have a whole army that you've bred up, because you can in theory breed them pretty infinitely. and you just wanna like go in there with hundreds of Axolotls and if nothing else, it creates a target rich environment for the Guardians, which means you don't get attacked as much. So if nothing else they provide an excellent distraction for when you otherwise would have ten or fifteen laser beams pointed directly at your face.
Uh so I think that's potentially a good use of them, but they're so adorable I don't want everybody to assume that they're gonna be used as tools the entire time because they're too cute for that. Yeah, yeah. The one thing I I mean I was able to breed them pretty quickly. Um then they do a cute little kind of like
nose to nose swimming dance and then a little baby axe little pops out. You think the big ones are cute, the little ones are cute too. Mm-hmm. Uh and I was having a lot of trouble trying to get them to to I was trying to learn how to do this attack the drowned thing. And The issue that I had was just what you were saying is that they Once you kind of tempt them with a um tropical fish. There's two problems. One, if they follow you around, they follow you so close you can't see them. Mm-hmm.
So they don't stay at an arm's length. They like follow with their nose in your armpit. And then you have to be in third person to even see that they're there. So then you're constantly looking like where does this thing? But when you move, it follows you and it just it's following so close that you can't tell it's following you. So that
That I think maybe needs to be pushed back a bit. Like they need to have like a um a minimum distance that they need to maintain from the player. Um because otherwise you can't keep track. Uh and secondly, I did notice that they, you know, like I would have them, they would be friends. And then I would say, okay, we'll switch to my spawn egg and I'll drop in a drown and then I'll try to fight the drown, see what happens. And then I go to look for my buddy saying, like, hey.
Aren't you supposed to help me? And they're just like a mile away. Yeah. Just completely randomly gone. And it's like they're already fighting COD on the other side of the reef by that point. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know what they need to do and to maybe fix their their wandering mechanic. You know, it's like it's like your horse that wanders off, you know, it's like but but much faster. Much, much faster. Yeah, it's uh and so that I found probably
The they're skittish the way foxes and cats are, where like a cat will be interested in you when you're holding a fish and then as soon as the fish is gone from your hand it's like zoom and it's out. It's like completely gone. Um Yeah, th there's there's a a few sort of things that I think need to be a little bit more forgiving about the Axolotl, and you're right that they get right up in your face. The problem I was having then
especially in how frenzied it is trying to fight guardians in an ocean monument, is occasionally they swim up in front of me while I'm trying to swing my sword and I end up attacking them. And that that That's the thing I was worried about from from Minecraft Live was uh this thing swimming around you so close that you end up swinging accidentally you hit an axolotl. And it's not like they attack you back at that point.
But they're also like yeah, th they're just uh an easy target where especially if you've got like sweeping edge or something, which is less of a problem underwater, I think, but still I I don't want to end up hitting any of these things by mistake. And more often than not, I probably would if I had enough of them that it was really gonna make a difference in an ocean monument.
A purple goose in our live chat wants to remind us that you actually have to kill the thing attacking the axe level to get those beneficial effects. Yeah. Which means that
You'd have to be done with the Elder Guardian before you could have the refects the effects removed, which kind of like well that's not much help. And also more of like a pat on the head. I did as well. Like I killed several guardians that were either targeting or like And an Axelotl would get the first couple of hits in, I'd come in with two sword swings and finish it, and still nothing.
So yeah, I I don't know. I think it's just a tricky one to uh to to have happen. It's gotta be like a very specific set of circumstances that I think right now needs to be a little bit more forgiving if it's gonna help. Um and obviously like removing mining fatigue from an ocean monument is pretty OP, but then if you're going out of your way to bring Axelottls with you
I feel like it should be a little bit more like it should be more forgiving. It should it should happen a little bit more frequently, a little bit more easily for it to be uh really worth having.
Uh yeah, I'm not so sure how I feel about bopping zombies on the nose with a bucket to get the axle to attack it either. Like I mean the whole idea is that I'd rather not get that close to a zombie. So uh I don't know. I mean the idea was I mean I didn't test this'cause I didn't have a bunch of ranged stuff in my in my hands. But if I had a trident I then made friends with an axe laudl and then switched to the trident and shot the zombie.
would the axe lot will then go fight the zombie?'Cause therefore I would not have to get up close to the zombie. So there's a few things I didn't have time to try, but like yeah, I I feel like there needs to be a if you if you are able to control them and like I can't remember what what kind of a game mechanic this is, but like when you have a squad of of assistants in any kind of video game and you can have the ability to say, Hey, attack that, you know, while I do other things.
Uh then that has to be consistent and it has to be a fairly simple mechanic in order for in order for that to be used. Yeah, it's also it's also the kind of thing where like in a MOBA or something like that, it's probably more of a remote action'cause you're more often than not you're looking at yourself in third person, but if you're ordering a bunch of units in like a real time strategy game to be like, Go hit that guy, it's usually from a distance.
Whereas if you have to get up close to right click something with a a fish, then you you may as well just swing the sword yourself at that point. And I I feel like attacking them with axlottles is like novelty in a sense as well. Um did you No, I was I was on it was in the ocean the whole time. I didn't uh I didn't go under the land. I I I noticed that they I mean they have that kind of silly Minecraft um
look, I guess, where like they've got they look really cool. They're boxy. They kind of match the whole aesthetic, but then like their fins and their feet. Uh or like the pixel plane. Yeah, they they just they're flat. Yeah. Yeah, it looks a little it looks a little bit strange there. But
Um, I was actually surprised that they weren't more vibrant, you know, in terms of um in terms of their design. You know, like there's that one white one that has like purple and pink fins. Mm-hmm. And then the other ones were all the same color.
And I kinda wish that maybe the yellow one had purple fins or the pink one had blue flint. Like, you know, you could probably have two two colors. I mean, they're probably going off what real axols look like in real life and I know that they're very often one color, but Still it would be it would be neat to see.
See some more Minecraft variety in it. Because like you said, like it it immediately you discover which one is your favorite. It's the one that has two colors, you know? Yeah, yeah. It looks it looks nice. The super cute rainbow one, yeah. Um but when they go on land, uh because they are meant to be amphibious, they do take damage after five minutes, but that's still quite a sizable time compared to like
how quickly a squid suffocates when they swim up on land. I say when and not if because they do that constantly. Uh they um They they they look pretty cute. They do the same sort of stance that they do when they're playing dead. They just kind of like spread their legs out. When they're resting on a block at all, even if it's below the surface, they tend to do stuff like this.
where they'll just sort of sit there on a block for a while and they'll look up a little bit and then they'll just kind of Slowly move a little bit. But they move at the pace of turtles. They are really slow. Even if you've got a even if you've got a fish out towards them, they're not like lizards kind of crawling towards you. They are really slow.
Not only that, but they seem to have this behaviour where I'm not sure if it's over the edge of a block and they're trying to like look down as if they're about to like leap back into the water, but I noticed that when they're on a large area I was using like a sandy island to test this. They tend to get towards like halfway onto the next block and they kind of bury their heads in the sand in a fun way.
And I'm not sure if that's intended to be them, you know, preparing to jump off a block or seeing if they can, and they just clip through the block. Or if it's actually meant to be them burying their heads in the sand, but It seems like a a quirky little behaviour that they have at least. Um
Hm. I tried breeding them on land. I think they're moving too slowly that they can actually make contact with each other. It's not quite like turtles where they have to breed on land. But uh Yeah, I think there's there's some some quirks to them right now and they seem appropriately you know, they they they were talking about this at Minecraft Live, the um the kind of this is derpy cute versus scary cute.
kind of scale that they have going on where the warden is scary cute and the axlotl is like at the other end of the scale from Um So I think they're a uh they're a fun addition to Minecraft's landscape in general, and still waiting to see where they spawn, presumably Lush Caves, I think we've had this confirmed in the past.
And uh yeah, a little bit of a little bit of time spent with them I think is gonna determine whether they are useful or not. But I think as far as squid farms go, yeah, absolutely. There there are now
I wouldn't say they're more efficient than having the, you know, fence gate and water source alternating kind of checkerboard squid farm because that just drops squids into an area where they die. But having Axolotl swimming around inside of a an area you know Swids are gonna spawn is a fun alternative and you'll need to figure out how to collect the items from that, but it's a uh a nice easy solution for players who want like a less maybe a less technical or a less kind of um
contrived squid farm design. Like it seems a little bit more organic. Like having a squid farm where guardians are killing them, you know? Um except I think Axolottles might even be more efficient killers than guardians at that point.
Well I think too you could probably build a much smaller farm. Like to build one of those big, you know, grids with squids, like it takes a little while. Whereas if you've got a couple of axlottles and you know that squids are spawning in a place, like you could probably just block it off and have them swim around
and see what happens and and somehow my my issue with that off the top of my head would be to have some running water across the top of your pond to then collect any kind of floating drop. you might also end up killing the axols because you don't know how they behave and how they if they can escape and get dry from moving water. In the same way that I had a waterfall
uh that I had decorated with soul sand uh before 113. Um and then when I put the fish in the pond uh later on the bubbles from the Uh, soul sand ended up creating a cool effect for the waterfall, but they also killed the fish because they would bounce the fish out of water constantly until the fish eventually suffocated. And so and the fish couldn't get out of the bubble trap that I had, you know, made by accident. And so hopefully that won't happen with with axe levels. But my
I I wonder to go back with what you were saying last week about wishing for bioluminescence in Minecraft. I would love for one of the axe laudals to be um glow in the dark in the caves. That would be really cool. Even if it's not the whole thing. Like even if it's just their fins. That would be fun to be able to like
going through a dark cave system and then you kinda something catches your eye flicking about in a in a pool of water and you realize it's a it's a glow in the dark ax axlottl. That would be really fun. Yeah. Also Between axe level?
And skulk sensors. Mojing just hates all podcasters. Like I'm just I'm putting that out there. I'm joking, but it's I'm just it's my mouth is tired. Yeah. The the the amount of like tongue twisting things we're gonna have to say over the next update is gonna be uh is gonna be pretty funny.
Um yeah. So so s uh as soon as they add seashells onto seashores, we can expect all all kinds of trouble. Um yeah, I think that's probably all I've got to say about axolotls for now. Um And I think we'll briefly touch on Skulk Sensor wool mechanics
Uh because they're exactly what we wanted. We mentioned this basically everything that we asked for they have now done. And obviously, like we're not gonna credit ourselves for that, but I'm sure there's been a long discussion with everybody in the technical community and they thought You know, if wool does this occlusion effect then why does walking on it still make noise and
It's it's great now. We have a way of avoiding skulk sensor detection, bring a bunch of wool with you, and as I was saying previously, I think that also could extend to the warden. Um, so maybe walking around on wool is not gonna trip the warden's personal alarms either. Um And then they also have like the counterpoint of uh silencing them by waterlogging, so like just when players get the other hand on skulk sensors, the skulk sensors are now stealthy as well.
Um so I think that's cool. I think that's a a nice way of compromising on, you know, the the wall mechanics being a a silent thing but then skulk centers also having that sound that we've talked about wanting to get rid of just for you know, you not wanting your automatic door to go wood every time you walk through it, right?
Um I I think that deserves some clarification too, um, from the sh from the change logs because I was confused at first. I was like, what do you mean? Did they they not power underwater? Because that's gonna that was dumb because I thought I was looking forward to m messing with skulk sensors underwater, but it's
The sound. Yeah. And this is what what you brought up like a couple of weeks ago with with um Logical Geek Boy is that sounds our vibrations. And for anybody that knows that, the differential The differentiation in Minecraft between vibration and sound is a little maddening. Yeah. Um so I did some tests uh with some waterlogged trapdoors and some waterlogged skulk sensors, and they work as advertised and as you would expect them to be.
It didn't I didn't really clue in until I read that a second time. It was like, oh, they're not making any noise. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So they're not making that little wobble. So so technically You could like waterlog a skulk sensor, surround it by a block so that the water's not flowing everywhere. uh and then use it to do other things and pull it a con to compare well, I don't know if a comparator would get washed away. You'd have to find something that wouldn't that wouldn't um
uh wash away with water. So I'm not like I don't know how you get a skulk sensor to receive a signal and output a redstone signal. While it's waterlogged without something making noise. Yeah. So it's a little bit tricky. It totally depends. Um remember that of course you can compare stuff through blocks. Like a comparator will read the output of something through a solid block.
So you could just as easily have a skulk sensor that's waterlogged, but then a solid block next to it and then a comparator next to that, and you're still gonna get the same effect. So So do do skulk sensors hard power blocks? Yeah, they should do. Yeah. Um I if if you have like the the way I did it I ended up just putting redstone lamps on three sides of it and a glass
block on the front and then waterlog the skulk sensor. Water can't escape, but then if I walk in front of the glass block, the skulk center lights up. And I'm fairly certain that they will just like it's the same way that like a comparator can detect how many slices of cake have been eaten if the cake is on the other side of a wall.
Right. Like that that works. And the cake isn't gonna emit any redstone by itself, right? What happens is the the comparator is detecting what's on the other side of a single block. So you know, it wouldn't really matter whether the skulk sensor powered the block or not, the comparator is still detecting that and having different outputs. Um Can a can a comparator detect the contents of a sh of a chest through a block? Yeah.
Yeah, they absolutely can. I guess I probably knew that I'd probably just never implemented. Yeah, it it's it's mainly so you can conceal that kind of stuff from like, you know, traps or or hidden entrances or something. Um but yeah, I I I've seen enough redstone shenanigans to know that that is how you hide comparator outputs, so
There's uh there's some nice easy ways of doing it. And yeah, I I think the the waterlogging thing, even in contraptions and stuff like that, it's simple enough to barricade it off so it's We're not talking about putting a skulk sensor underneath the ocean. We're just talking about one block of water that the skulk sensor sits in surrounded by other stuff that's gonna hold the water in, and then it can still be read as an output for whatever contraption you want without it making noise.
Uh perfect. I I think it's really good and obviously is going to lead to a lot of people getting stumped by traps that they didn't hear because they were, you know, they were listening out for Skulk Sense. I think um Simply Sark on Twitter said something like RIP uh right click detecting uh skulk sensors, so you you can you can no longer perform an action that's gonna trigger a skulk sensor to let you know that it's there. before you end up getting triggered into the the trap to begin with.
Um but yeah, it's it's an interesting landscape and seeing it all change and seeing refinements made to a mechanic that could be as important as this one. is is uh a really, really fun thing. They've talked about the frequency tables and stuff still being very much under um under scrutiny and
Figuring out what's going to be added to that and removed from that is is a very collaborative process with the community right now. So spend time with your skull sensors over Christmas and hopefully we'll get to uh have a little bit more input and them in the new year. Uh with regards to
The skull sensors and the wool. They mentioned wool specifically. Did they mention carpet? Do we know if carpet works? Like if you walk along a grass block or a stone block or a bone block, but it's got carpet on top of it, will that also I I didn't test carpet.
I don't know. One thing I did notice though, and it's something I brought up in my video on the subject, is that when Minecraft is detecting where you are on a block It's actually detecting your horizontal position more than it is your vertical position, because if you stand on a wool block that is placed on like on top of grass, And then you shift so you are walking all the way over onto the edge of a wall block.
But you're not over onto the grass block. You haven't like fallen down onto the grass. And you jump up and down because your horizontal position is is indicating you're technically more over the grass block than you are over the wool block. The skulk sensor can still detect you. It's a really weird example. Oh. Um and it's uh it's it in the same way that I don't know if you've ever done this where you fall onto a slime block, but you fall onto the edge.
and you take damage because technically the game thinks you are further over onto the block to the sli to the side of the slime block than you are like on the slime block itself. Like there is like a very small like pixel thin window there where technically the game is like actually you're on the next block over.
And even if you are vertically, you know, there's no way you can be but on top of the slime block, you still end up taking full damage. Um and so that happens with with wool here too. And I'm wondering How they can refine that so that
you know, y i if you're if you're walking around and you're like, say you're jumping from wool block to wool block, it doesn't think oh, actually you're on the next block over because you just jumped on the edge of that particular wool block. It could be very difficult to finesse that. Um But yeah, it's a weird example and a very niche example and probably not something anyone's gonna worry about, but that's what made me think of that was you saying if the carpet is on top of some other block
Uh, so we know that if you're running around on carpet you still get the wool noises, but the particles that come up from the carpet are often like the block that you're you know, walking on top of or the the the carpet is laid on top of, right? And the same thing for like when you're running on carpet that's on top of soul sand. it slows you down or ice, you have the ice physics, like how does that apply?
I haven't tested it with Carpet and I feel silly that I haven't done that now because as soon as they changed it so wool muffles your footsteps, I'm like, Yeah, it sh should have should have maybe changed should have maybe checked if Carpet did that now. Well'cause I feel like The sound effect is the same.
Like when you walk on carpet versus walking on wool. But but as we know, sounds are not vibrations. No, I know. Yeah, I know. I know, I know. I I I this kind of thing opens my mind to like the kind of things where like you could have a wallless maze. You know, where you've got wool. that's that's spread out throughout the the the maze and you can see the whole thing.
But you have to stay on the wool. Mm-hmm. Like you can't if you cross onto any of the blocks, then the skull sensor is gonna be like, no, no, no, no. And then bad stuff happens. Mm-hmm. It releases a warden. And then the warden has to be fooled by you walking on the wool as well. Oh man.
Yeah, they didn't say anything like that about the w warden. It just it's it's just the skulk sensors so far. Yeah. I'm I'm still waiting to see if the warden is any different, if they're implementing the same mechanics for the warden as skulk sensors, which would make sense intuitively, but then If they still want the warden to be a threat and if they think wall blocks are a slightly too easy of a solution to avoiding it, then who knows?
I I think th this is an interesting um counterpoint to the email we got last week about how having leather boots you know, muffling your footsteps and we we thought that might be a little bit too easy. I think giving it to something like wool balances it slightly because wool is a finite resource. You know, you can fill your inventory full of the stuff, you're probably not gonna have much room for anything else and then
eventually you run out of wool and then what? Right? So I think it's more interesting when you're given a finite resource and that's your your ticket out of there. That's your way around the warden attacking you. is by by placing wool that it can't hear you placing and walking on wool and it can't hear you do that. As a bit of a teaser, we have an interesting email to that effect for the next episode.
That folks should stay in touch for. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome stuff. We'll get to that after Christmas. Uh let's let's talk about some of the other stuff that we had planned to talk about. Briefly, I want to talk about um Minecraft Dungeons Howling Peak. because uh I managed to play a little bit of that this week and um we didn't really get much of a chance to talk about it other than the fact that it was it was out. Uh so I gave that a try and it's it's fun.
It's a a uh a really neat level. Uh there's three levels in it, uh but the the um the whole sort of environment, the campaign of Howling Peaks, the sort of three stage uh section has a really nice balance of new mechanics.
uh a few puzzles, like block puzzles and moving elements to the scenery. Uh the levels are quite long in the same way that the Jungle Awakens levels were, but not in the way that you are just exploring down the same few paths and encountering the same few enemies. There are More like structures to explore. And um Yeah, there's there's a a lot of stuff going on there. The final boss battle
is really quite good. Uh it takes a little strategy to figure out. It's not just hit this thing enough times, uh, which is a strategy you can employ, but it constantly like moves you away from it. So it's like pushing you back with wind and paddles that it has in front of it and stuff. And so there's a few mechanics that you have to figure out before you can figure out how to take the boss down. Um And I think the environment is really cool and
is a real step away from the vanilla Minecraft block palette. Like you remember how different stuff like um the Desert Temple was, where you're looking around at the blocks and you're like, none of this is in Vanilla Minecraft? Yeah. It's kind of like that with Howling Peaks. Like the the way they've designed the temples has vibes of stuff like Quart.
And there's like some cyan stuff in there and there's gold in there but none of the blocks a lot of the blocks are more detailed than the average Minecraft block. They've got like gold trim going around some stuff. and blocks that kind of connect in a pattern but you know, individually you wouldn't find those blocks in Minecraft because they wouldn't sit the same on their own. You know what I mean? Like the yeah like you're kind of designing a labyrinth of them in a way. Um
And it's it's a step away from vanilla Minecraft as a look, but it's still very believable for the world of dungeons. Like they've given themselves license to work with more interesting textures and environments like this and doesn't stop me from wanting it all in Minecraft so I can build cool stuff with it, but I think it it comes down to a really uh a really interesting aesthetic.
And uh I'm surprised that doesn't exist yet. I'm surprised there's not a a texture pack for Minecraft that's just called Minecraft Dungeons that some fan hasn't just like gone and tried to make as as much as they could, you know, kind of bring over um the Minecraft dungeons look into into Minecraft. Yeah. I I think there's just a lot of blocks to retexture at that point. And I think a lot a lot of them are close enough. Like uh in the same way that the um
what's it called the the harvest looking level, the fall level. Um Pumpkin Pastures, uh from from the the main the base game has that kind of orangey brown fall grass look to it. Uh the the grass in Howling Peaks is red. It's like I I I you know not not sure what you'd equate it to kind of like saffron or something maybe, I don't know. Um it's meant to look a little bit more kind of mountainous Tibetan almost. Um but but yeah, it's it's it's like a really deep kind of crimson red.
and still looks natural and and I feel like it's just like a retexture of grass but in a in a different kind of environment. Um and works really well with the stuff they built there. And when I think about like what I know about Minecraft Dungeons, they've designed all of the environments in Minecraft Bedrock Edition, but with a special kind of
version of Minecraft bedrock edition that allows them to do all of the environment stuff. So technically speaking, that texture pack does exist. It's just not publicly available as far as I know. And and somebody, like you said, might have might have gone through and re-textured some of that.
Yeah, I I really like the levels though. Um I wasn't super keen on the extra artifacts and stuff like that, but my playstyle is very fixed at this point. I'm just punching things. Um and yeah, there was uh a little goat pet that you got. Uh along with the uh the season pass, like you get DLC uh cosmetic pets that run around with you. So I had a little goat that was just constantly getting lost.
on my way around the levels but uh yeah it's it's fun. I think it's it's a good expansion to the game and I think The fact that the environment design is so different is probably going to sway back towards vanilla Minecraft for the next few updates, because the next stuff is oceans, the nether and the end. And all of those have pretty specific identities in Minecraft now.
that they can pull from quite easily, especially with the amount of new nether biomes, right? They can they can do stuff with those that I think means they don't need to take those extra leaps of design in order to make this feel super different.
Um Yeah, although in that light I'd love for them to take those leaps and bounds with the end. Yes. No, that's that's what I was gonna say next was like if they if they start doing cool stuff with the end then that potentially gives us if not insight into what the future of the end is for vanilla Minecraft, then at least they're considering those ideas and they have a pool of ideas to draw from if they want to uh work over the end in future. Mm-hmm.
So uh do you have like with with the addition of your the RTX stuff that you've been doing? Like, I mean obviously I I don't have access, but like has there been Any noticeable changes in RTX from the last time you were playing with it to this Uh, not since the last time I played with it, because it's now the the only thing that's really changed about it is that it's now incorporated into the f the current release of Bedrock Edition.
Um but since I started the RTX series about a month and a half ago, nothing has really changed. It hasn't been refined anymore as far as I can tell. It's just been incorporated into, you know, the current state of Minecraft. which means adjustable volume sliders in bedrock edition, which is still great. Um but then there's a few things that I notice about Minecraft RTX as I play it that are Like I don't know.
Th it it's still a a really cool experience and there's just stuff that I've gotten used to overlooking that now I've spent a little bit more time with that I'm realising is happening. Like you've used
um like three D modeling stuff where you've had to render a scene before, I would imagine. Yes. Yep. Um So you know when you're rendering a scene, if you look at a preview of the render, a lot of the time it's got this kind of graininess to it before it sorts out how all of the light is gonna be acting in the scene. And it's it's like it's like if you're a photographer, you'll know about this, taking an image with like high ISO where um there's a lot of kind of almost coloured pixels in there.
while the uh the the image is trying to interpret what's going on in darker areas. That happens a lot if you are mining and swinging a pickaxe. You almost get like this after image, this kind of blur that happens and what I realize is happening is that in real time it's rendering each of those as if it's a scene in a three D programme, which is kind of mind blowing when you see it happening and only slightly immersion breaking when you realize there's all of this kind of
This grainy texture is happening on the blocks around you as you're swinging your pickaxe. Um and that's the thing that like really sticks out to me now as like If technology was just like a little bit further on, then they'd probably be able to do that so fast that the human eye wouldn't be able to detect.
You know, you'd like you've eliminated that, it'd be happening at like a hundred and twenty FPS and it'd be a single frame that that was happening and you really wouldn't notice it as much, but Um as far as refinements to the system go, it's pretty solid now. Like that that is the one nitpick I have about it, is like in low light it feels a little bit like a high ISO photograph, but that
That that's that's the only way I can really fault it. Like, as an experience it's still really cool and I still get slightly mad when people compare it to shaders because Like what it's trying to do is simulate natural light. Like it's not trying to make Minecraft look prettier. It's doing so in the process because of natural light being pretty beautiful as a a resource in itself. But um yeah, as far as like
Tweaking things, um, I I wouldn't do much to it right now. I think a lot of the stuff that people are expecting from RTX is cosmetic stuff they've added in shaders because that's how shaders operate and that you can you can have a little bit more fine tuning over it. Um and with RTX you don't get that stuff. You don't get like grass swaying and leaf sway and like the artificial creation of a breeze.
and that kind of thing. But I think that's the first thing I turn off with shaders, by the way. And I think a lot of that stuff has been added because of it being effectively like player fantasy at that point. It's like this is what players wish happened in Minecraft was that it felt like there was a more natural ecosystem going on.
And dynamic lighting is another example of this with with Optifine or with shaders, you get a torch in your hand and it lights up the environment around you. That doesn't happen in Minecraft RTX, and I think it's because they are working in tandem with
Minecraft's vision for itself, like the the Minecraft team's vision for how any of that stuff should work. And that largely speaking is like, well, items don't generate light unless you place them in a scene and then they can create block light and that's actually
influencing what happens in the world around you. That argument starts to fall apart a little bit in my previous example where you have a lava source that's lighting up blocks about sixty feet away. Um but then It still is consistent with the idea that glow squids shouldn't actually glow and you know uh a glowstone block in your hand doesn't really activate until you put it down in a scene.
Um what I want to do with Minecraft RTX next is really get stuck into building something with light in mind. And what I've had the time to do in this brief series that I've done, this sort of five episode run of it, is mess around with some of that stuff and get a feel for it. But what I really want to do now is dive into Now I know how some of this affects the environment around it.
How do I then conceal lighting in interesting ways or, you know, make lighting a feature in interesting ways while still working with basic Minecraft block lighting mechanics?
Um so that's that's where I'm at with it right now. I also want to go to the end in one sixteen, uh not the end, the nether in one sixteen, because the map I was working with was made pre one point sixteen and does not update because it's part of the Minecraft marketplace and so even the zombie pigmen were old zombie pigmen and there were no new other biomes, there wasn't, you know blue fire in soul sand valleys and that kind of stuff. There there was just like empty nether waste.
So I really wanna mess around with some of that stuff and do what you were saying earlier of having, you know, blue fire up near the clouds and see if that tints the clouds blue in the way that the lava did. Uh oh man. I when I was watching your video, even the old nether still looked pretty neat. Yeah. With RTX. Like to to imagine it with
That blue fog and the soul fire in in uh Sol Sand Valley And particles falling in the basalt delta and yeah. Yeah, oh man, the basalt delta too. And all the lava pools shining up From the you know, I mean what happens when a gas when it flies over a lava pool in the basalt delta? It probably looks like a roasted marshmallow. Uh it r it really does. Yeah. I I end up I end up taking a few screenshots from a one hundred sixteen uh because now we can um You know, we you can put a minecraft
RTX texture pack on any new Minecraft world. You don't have to um to just download maps from the marketplace. And so I was messing around with a few of those and I went to a couple of places in the uh in the the one sixteen nether and was like, yeah, ghasts lit from below look really cool to begin with, but then ghosts in a soul sand valley where there's like red light from the lava and then blue light from
from the Soulfire looks really cool. And I have a couple of screenshots of that that we can put in the show notes as well. But I'm looking forward to playing around with that as an environment and Like all of the uh the basalt delta stuff glowing with magma blocks and lava looks looks really neat. So yeah, messing around with some of that uh is is next on the docket for me. But it's nice to say that I'm not done with Minecraft RTX after this sponsored series.
Like I've been, you know, sponsored to do five episodes and now I'm still wanting more out of the experience. I think that's that's a really interesting time because that means effectively like there's a whole new Minecraft like a whole new way to play out there at this point. Yeah.
So as a content creator, is there a temptation to go creative with RTX so that it doesn't take as long to do the neat stuff? Or are there things that you're noticing that are a drawback when you're trying to create videos because of the
The lighting. I think as far as my own temperament, I'm just not much of a creative player. I think that's the main thing. It's like I don't I don't always like starting with a flat world or even like a a a default Minecraft world and then doing like a let's build style series. Because I I don't know, I really enjoy exploring stuff and finding stuff like those nether screenshots and and and finding scenes like that happening naturally rather than creating them artificially.
And so I sort of want it to be in a survival way so that I can still mess around with that stuff. And then I don't know, maybe it'll lead to some creative building further down the line. But I think in the meantime I I sort of want to see what it's like. stumbling across that stuff. Like I I don't think I'd have been nearly as impressed with the the mountain in the distance lighting up the clouds if I had
just found that in a creative world. You know? I I think because I was running around on the planes and I stumbled upon it organically, it felt like much more of a an authentic experience to me than it would if I was flying around in a creative world I've just gone, Oh, that's cool and then moved on.
There's a certain amount of ownership that happens when you start to take the time in survival to make something, a house, a mine, you know, establish yourself in the world, give yourself some safety and some shelter and some food. and do a little bit of adventuring and then there's that moment when you have enough stuff and enough gear that you can go wandering and it feels like
your planet. You know, like it feels like your space that you haven't yet claimed, but that's not stopping you, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I I I have an urge to build a castle at some point. Like and I think a a castle in Minecraft RTX could be really cool. Depending on uh what kind of theme you end up going with it, you could you could do some really cool stuff with the lighting blocks. Even in vanilla.
All right, uh well I think that's probably where we're gonna wrap up our discussion for today and this episode of The Spawn Chunks. Uh thank you folks so much for listening. Uh you can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we've talked about today at thespawnchunks.com. The music for the show is composed by me and the Spawn Chunks is proud to be a listener supported podcast.
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My name is Johnny, but online I go by PixelRifs. You can find most of what I do at youtube.com slash pixelriffs where I attempt to make sense of this crazy and wonderful game in a series called the Minecraft Survival Guide. You can also check out my RTX adventures there too. I do stream three days a week on Twitch doing behind the scenes work for the survival guide, but I'm taking a bit of a break.
Over the holidays. I'll be back to that shortly. Uh I'm also the voice of the unofficial Hermitcraft recap, which you can find through a quick YouTube search. And aside from that, I'm at Pixelriffs on both Twitter and Instagram. Joel, where can people find you online? Everything I am doing online, including my illustration and design portfolio, is at joeldugan.com. The Citadel Cafe is my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment. We're this week
I'm going to be touching base with some of the people that have been on over the year talking about their nerdy highlights from 2020 as well as what they're looking forward to in 2021. You can also follow me at Joel Duggan on social media and Joel Duggan on Twitch. where I am taking some time off from work over the holidays to do more streams. So check out twitch.tv slash Joel Duggan for Minecraft, No Man's Sky, probably some satisfactory, and anything else if you have recommendations.
Drop it in the chat, let me know. Thanks for visiting the Spawn Chunks. The world outside is infinite. Happy holidays.