The Spawn Chunks 349: This Is Not A Minecraft Block

Welcome to the Spawn Chunks, episode number three hundred and forty-nine for Monday, May twelfth, twenty twenty five. This is a podcast all about Minecraft available across all your major podcast platforms, including a video version on YouTube that's also goes out on Spotify now.

Uh if you're enjoying the show, please consider subscribing wherever you're listening to this. My name is Johnny, but the intent knows me as Pixelriffs, and joining me tuning in today is a hopefully slightly better, Joel Duggan. Hi Joel. Hello, I am feeling a heck of a lot better. I may still sound like a Disney villain, but I'm I'm on the mend. Uh and uh first I want to give a big shout out and thank you to Eloise for filling in last week on the show for me.

Very much appreciated and a fantastic episode. I had the pleasure of kicking back and listening. while I was still feeling quite ill. And so it was really fun to uh listen to the show that I've been on for three hundred and forty seven episodes like It was wild when I realized how long it's been since I missed an episode. So the streak is broken, but uh if you're gonna break it, I encourage you to grab Eloise to to help you out in a in a pinch, because I I think she did a fantastic job.

Uh and if you want to talk about dialing in Uh, and Star Wars, then you should listen to the render distance because I was talking about watching Andor. And I was also talking about the new Lego set that I have, which you can see behind me if you're watching the video version. It's the Lego Retro Radio. And uh we were dialing in the first few bags last week on stream. So check that out at the render distance that is on our Patreon page, which is patreon.com slash the spawn chunks.

It's a good half an hour of extra content that our patrons get every single week. Uh also monthly we do Minecraft hangouts, which is where we talk with our patrons about what they've been doing in Minecraft. Include screenshots. stories about what they've been doing. Uh very similar to the quick login that Johnny and I do every week, but with our patrons and coming up later this month.

We also have the quarterly hangout, and that's where Johnny and I go over the downloads, the numbers, the YouTube metrics, so things that might be of interest to people that are supporting the show in terms of how we're doing and how the show is growing.

Well, speaking of the quick login, uh hopefully you've had a little bit of time to play Minecraft while you've been recovering, Joel. What's new on the Citadel? So I have been slowly but surely going through the uh in-game Minecraft book that I have as a to-do list in West Hill. And uh I just logged in for a short stream because I have to kind of limit how long uh I'm on mic these days.

Uh, and I just found one of the items on the list that sounded like it was a good thing to check off. And it was called the Undercroft, or like that's what I decided to name it in the book. And essentially the top of the m the hill that West Hill is on had a bunch of those open caves, you know, like when you're walking along a plains biome and then all of a sudden there's like a big

chasm and you can j drop down in and then there's this cave network that just goes on for miles. Mm-hmm and so I had covered that over and that's where the keep and the barracks and a lot of the upper kind of level of the the town is. And one of the basements of one of the houses up there, uh a warehouse actually, was unfinished. It just kind of opened up into like this giant cave network. I'm just like, Well that's not

Great, that doesn't feel very finished. So I did a couple things. The cave was already lit up, so I didn't have to worry about that. But I closed off the basement. And then across the way there was a ladder coming down from another building, and I realized that I had also kind of dug into uh the the basement of another building, an unfinished uh area. uh across the way. So I made uh as one does, another secret tunnel that goes underneath uh the street. Just

because it was fun to kind of like connect the two. I had already had that idea months ago and forgotten about it, but left it unfinished. It was really just an excuse to play around with candles and lighting and texture. to try to figure out like what would be like the minimal amount of light to keep this area spawn proof. But also if anybody ever pokes their nose down there for them go like, wait a minute, I can see a light at the end of this tunnel.

from the candles that are like around the corner that you can't see. And I had to put three candles there to just get it to illuminate enough that you kind of make out the doorframe. uh and then I had to put candles in around the the other walls and kind of like insert them into little nooks in the wall and I stuff I've done before. So it was a fairly straightforward build, but it was also nice to kind of go through

and um just kind of work with some textures, do a little practice. I also added some details in the basement. Nothing crazy, just like a couple of trapdoors around a block of sand to make it look like a barrel of grain. uh barrels and my noteblocks are textured like crates. So just a few little doodads just around to make sure that it didn't feel unfinished, but it's all part of that.

completionist checkbox. Like I just don't want to have any of those fake facades where like it looks like a building but then inside there's nothing. And I'm trying to just check all those off and make sure that I've closed off all the gaps and All that kind of stuff. So that's now done and I'm on to whatever the next thing is. There's a few things like that on the list. Um the biggest one left is is the uh Spruce River, but I have to still update the server to 1.21.5 for that.

Nice. Well, uh we've joked in the past about you having a game of hide and seek in West Hill. I'm imagining also a game of Cluedo, or I guess clue to American audiences where like you've now got a secret passage that goes from the conservatory to the kitchen or the equivalent thereof in in West Hill. So yeah, really fun that like stuff like that that you've almost forgotten that you've done is coming back around maybe even years later after you've established some of that stuff. And

Yeah, I totally w know what you mean about having those caves that you just kinda paper over and then you dig out the wrong block and you just fall into them later and you go, Well I need to do something about this. So yeah, it's cool that you've been uh finding uses for a while.

It's funny that you mentioned that because I was going through the book uh la like the last time I streamed, so two weeks ago now, because of the time off when I was sick, and I was looking and it's like finish the undercrop. What the heck is the undercroft? I'm like I just I was I took me I was like or whatever, I'm sure it'll come to me as I was walking around.

And then like at some point I either looked at something or went up that direction. I was like, oh, I know what I meant. And so the very next thing I did was in the book where it said undercraft, I put the coordinate. 'Cause it's just like in case I forget again and I don't get to this in the next couple weeks, like I need to remember where this is and what I've called it. Cause I'm not even sure if that's the right technical term for it. It's just this giant cave that's like under everything.

So anyway, it's it's all fixed now, but there's there's one more area where there's actually like an underground ravine that goes underneath the west side of the town. And you can access it at one point under one of the dock towers. And I'm just debating like what I'm going to do, if anything, with that. Whether I'm going to seal it up, whether I'm going to leave it. It just felt like such a

a waste to like put a couple of blocks and completely seal it off. Because right now it looks like this kind of balcony over this like really weird kind of like underground cave. And I'm not sure what we could I could do there, but we'll we'll figure it out. I mean also I just m I may just want to move on. Like I keep on making more things for me to do. So like it might be time to just like, well, maybe put a couple of couple of blocks there and call it done, you know?

Yeah, it's the kind of thing that's out of sight, out of mind when it comes to all the stuff that's going on underneath you at Minecra in Minecraft at any given time. There's always more stuff that you can discover, so yeah, it may be best to uh to wallpaper over some of that and and move on.

Um I'm glad you've been doing plenty because I have been kind of stuck in a loop on the Misadventures SMP at least. I am still on my grind for the Skeletal Wolf mount. Uh, which has in the meantime at least acquired me a ton of coins, enchanted books and bones. As I run this skeleton based dungeon over and over again, grab a reward at the exit, and uh unfortunately fail to get the skeleton dog to drop it.

uh associated mount. Uh so I'm about five hundred attempts into that now, so uh with odds of one in one thousand it'll be another five hundred before I'm officially getting bad luck. But either way, uh I'm I I'm determined at least to get hold of it at some stage. In the meantime, uh I have needed to go back to the resource world every so often to get food so that I can at least sustain a few skeletal hits and a few like sprint jumps and things like that as I make my way through the dungeon.

and I've been fighting against the resource world on some days. There was one day where the spawn point was a single block of sand in the middle of an ocean. And this is the spawn point in the resource world sets you in a random radius probably within about

twenty f uh like two hundred and fifty or three hundred blocks away from what the natural spawn point of the world would be, just to spread you out. And you can even type the command in multiple times to teleport you to the resource world and it will pick a new location. Not so this single block of sand in the middle of the ocean, it was the only block that it would let you spawn on for seemingly a few hundred blocks radius.

And so if I moved and then hit the resource world command again, it would just warp me back to where I was standing half a second earlier. Uh so yeah, ended up having to bring a boat with me so that I could get to the nearby landmass, find some sheep and cows and that kind of thing to to gather some some dungeoneering food.

But uh yeah, unfortunately Misadventures has seen very little in the way of building progress,'cause I'm still on this grind. In the meantime, though, I have been digging more into craft mine. I've just recorded my fourth episode of that, I guess. And I have finally managed to finish one of the challenge mines that pop up every four Basically, you can do three levels and then it throws you a curveball, like it puts in a cave environment that you have to clear waves of enemies.

And I thought that was the only one, because it had come up for me a couple of times already, but by the time I leveled up my skill tree enough to fix the one problem I had, which is that I couldn't get any food from that environment. The next one threw me into a completely different challenge where you started on a floating island with an igloo on it, and around you, sort of skyblock style, were a bunch of different icy islands at different heights.

Some of them had polar bears, some of them had Arctic foxes, a couple had snow goals.

and the exit was up away from you in the distance and fairly high up. So you sort of had to play Skyblock with the snow and figure out, you know, can I tear down this igloo and recraft all of the snow blocks so that I can pillar up to somewhere there are snow golems and when I have access to the snow golems I can break all of the snow layers that they produce in order to farm snow blocks and you know, path around that way.

some uh upgrades in terms of like speed, so I was getting a really long jump, and I had a double jump or two in reserve as well. So I could maybe skip a few of the islands by kind of hopping between them that way. A little bit of moon gravity. Uh but it was still An interesting challenge, like a thought experiment of like how do I get across here? Are the snow golems gonna be aggressive and try to snowball me and knock me down like it's a sky block, like a Skywars?

uh PvP match or am I gonna have to avoid the polar bears if they've got cubs nearby and that kind of thing. So yeah, in the end uh I I got a slightly easier ride than I had done with the uh the skeleton based dungeons before. But I was finally able to figure out what happens when you get one of those challenge mines completed. It gives you a key.

And the key opens up one of these two glowing doors on either side, which are iron doors, so you don't have access to them otherwise unless you've opened them up with a key. Uh but in the hub world these doors appear on either side of the starting platform. Once you've opened one of them, it leads to another room complete with this sort of matrix style like glowing text falling on all sides. And this one contained an N City ship.

with a bunch of other doors leading off from it in various different directions. So I'm now understanding that in addition to the level crafting mechanics, which I've now leveled up to the point where I can add so many different elements into the worlds and try and, you know, get the best combination for the best amount of XP yield. Once you start completing these challenge mines, there's a maze here as well, and you've got to somehow find your way through this series of rooms.

to maybe get to some sort of exit or maybe maybe a boss fight or something like that. I'm not entirely certain what is awaiting me at the end of this, but I've now unlocked that next step of the puzzle, and so I'm very determined to find out what's next.

It sounds a lot deeper than I was anticipating with an April Fool's snapshot, right? Like this is going on for Oh while and you're getting a lot of content out of it. It's like it's it's it's just as deep as, you know, the the kind of RPGs that I I hear you're talking about, you know, Elden Ring, that kind of stuff. It's it sounds like it has that kind of uh depth. How d do you think it has some replayability?

I think so, yeah. I think the main thing I would do with replayability is I'd hone the formula a little bit. In the same way that when you're getting started in a Minecraft world, you sort of know the steps to get a quick start so you're back up to like Getting enchanting set up really fast and you know, diamond equipment and that kind of thing.

I think now I would know what to prioritize in the skill tree and I would honestly know some things to completely avoid. Like there are some elements of it that I maybe wouldn't choose the next time around. Unfortunately my community was warning me off some of them before I'd even selected them. There is one that's actually a a hotly requested feature. You basically get the ability to draw blocks and items in from further away when you gather them.

Um so it it's just like a magnet effectively that attracts items to you from a much wider radius and seemingly a lot more efficiently. The problem with that is I'm so used to just throwing stuff on the ground out of my inventory.

when I'm like not using it, like flowers or something that I picked up on the way, that you can't do that anymore because even if you start running away as soon as you drop it, the stuff has a long enough radius that unless you're throwing it off a cliff or into lava, it's gonna pop back to you.

Uh so I would probably not choose that the second time around. I'd maybe prioritize getting equipment and food as I start the levels because that was the thing that really let me down on the challenge mines when they came around. Um but yeah, I think it's really about like

You're building a character instead of setting up a world the way you would in Minecraft. So what passes for the infrastructure setup of establishing a base, making sure you have shelter, getting good tools going, maybe acquiring mending and being able to like

reuse your tools over and over again becomes much more about how do you want to start each level, where do you want to set up your character? Do you want to start with a full brewing stand kit, knowing that that's going to clutter your inventory with like glass bottles and

glowstone and gunpowder and that kind of stuff right at the beginning of a level, or do you want a more streamlined approach that can, you know, give you access to the stuff that you need but then allows you to explore and do what you want.

Uh outside of that, with the maze aspect of this and opening these glowing doors, I genuinely have no idea what's coming next in that regard, so I'm gonna have to uh, you know, play a couple more sessions before I really understand what the objective is. But in the meantime, still having a lot of fun with it.

How do you feel about the double jump? I we mentioned that on the show previously in a different discussion. I think it was in reply to someone's email, but does it feel pretty natural to have a double jump in Minecraft? It does. Uh that's maybe because I'm used to some other platforms that have mechanics like that, like other like e even two D platformers that include double jumps, I always like the

versatility of it. The fact that you can just hit jump once and get over a certain gap, or in the case of this bonus level where I was skipping from ice island to island, it was so much more reassuring to know that I didn't have to carefully bridge around everywhere and risk dropping into the void. So I think I would like something like that in Minecraft maybe as I don't know if it would be an enchantment for boots or if it'd be some other kind of item that allowed you to do that, perhaps

Similar to Elytra, you can swap it for boots and it doesn't convey the same amount of protection and feather falling and everything that boots might, but it would give you a bit of an advantage and put a spring in your step. Either that or a complete rework of jump boost. I'd be fine with any of those.

Yeah, I would rather have a double jump than the single jump boost that goes too high. Yeah. Because they've a they've changed something about the jump with the Blade Runners in Satisfactory and I now overshoot everything. Like you can't You can't press a button for jumping in satisfactory and get a little jump or a big jump. Like it you just get the full throttle.

You can go fast if you're running, you'll get a bigger one, but just standing and jumping, it's a little floaty. Yeah. And I find it really hard when I just want to jump up on Something in the game that is in your way. Like for example in Minecraft it would be a single block. And if you want to go up a single block but your jump is clearing three.

It feels like it takes you forever just to jump up one block because you have to go up and then you have to come back down and you only wanted to go up by one. Yeah. And I feel like I would rather have you know, a a block and a half and have to hit this the spacebar twice in Minecraft rather than just once to get like a big boost. I'd rather have like a double a double thing. And I I like the idea of tying it to some boots. I I think that

being able to do it in other places, not just some place that you have a beacon, would be handier. I mean the nether, for example, would be a really good spot. Yeah. I think you'd have to

figure out how it would work in tandem with Elytra because obviously you hit the spacebar twice to activate Elytra and so maybe there'd be some some sort of control conflict there. But yeah. I in this case the skill tree actually builds up so once you've reached the maximum amount of additional jumps it allows you, it unlocks Elytra as a starting item.

Uh so I think i it's it's kinda fun that it leads to that anyway. But yeah, I'm kinda curious how the two would coincide. But I agree it would it would allow for a lot more finesse in movement instead of just overwriting the jump with a higher jump. So yeah, it makes sense.

Let's move on into the news. We got snapshot 25W19A for Java edition this week. Just a couple of minor changes to cover. Projectiles now have a target tolerance margin that changes over time. Previously, all projectiles had a fixed. 0.3 blocks target tolerance margin. Now all projectiles start with no margin for the first two ticks of their flight. After that the target margin expands by zero five blocks per tick until it reaches the previous three blocks margin.

In layman's terms, this allows for better precision when you are closer to the target or when the shooting player or entity is closer to its target. While still allowing for some collision leeway when the projectile is further away. So the further distance, the more likely it is to veer off of centre.

Fog has also now been tweaked for improved atmospheric perspective, a bit more about that in the technical changes. It now becomes foggier when it rains in game, and test frameworks have been using those will no longer try to restart running tests after a server restart.

Technical changes include the data pack now being seventy-six and the resource pack version now being sixty. Shade of fog changes included in this resource pack version include the fog now being split into environmental and render distance based. Elements previously both of those concepts were mixed in the same uniforms. Environmental fog is supposed to represent the fogginess of the environment the player is in, so lava, water, and now also atmosphere.

Render distance fog is supposed to obscure the border of visible terrain, so those can now be edited independently of each other. An environmental fog uses spherical distance to determine its intensity, while render distance fog uses cylindrical distance. So you can still see the full height of a chunk when render distance fog is in play, whereas the environmental fog can limit how tall you can see in a given area.

There are some fixed bugs of course in twenty five W19A. The ones of note that we've included are that TNT forgot the player that ignited it when the world was reloaded. Players would stay on fire for a while after barely touching fire. Players sometimes falling from a happy ghast when reconnecting to a world and the movements of happy ghasts for the non controlling passengers.

being a little jittery. Those have been fixed along with a bunch of other bug fixes. As usual you can find links to the changelog where you can read the full list of bug fixes and tweaks over at thespawnchunks.com where we have our show notes.

We also got Minecraft Bedrock Edition Preview 1.21.90.23. There are a host of bug fixes and technical updates in the latest bedrock preview, but we wanted to highlight a few changes to vibrant visuals. Updated a variety of MERS textures in vibrant visuals, including glass blocks are more reflective, tweaked the emissives on eye blossoms, added emissives to ender crystal blocks. Added MERS textures for happy ghasts and harnesses, adjusted glow like and block admissives.

Fixed Enderman held blocks not being shaded correctly, reflections no longer cut out abruptly when moving the camera, reflections no longer flicker aggressively on water with higher FOV settings, clouds no longer have cracks when viewed up close. and fixed an issue with moving blocks not casting shadows. For the full list of changes and bugs in the latest bedrock preview, follow the Minecraft.net changelog linked in our show notes at the Spawnchunks.com.

I think one of the great things about Vibrant Visuals being worked on in house at Mojang is getting changelogs like this. Because I think for a while with RTX Minecraft on Bedrock Edition You genuinely didn't know what was changing. We didn't really get patch notes for that from my recollections. So it's really nice to understand what they're taking on from player feedback and what things are still being worked on behind the scenes.

ultimately makes for a much better dialogue between players and developers and I think it's really reassuring to see yes we know that these things are wrong about vibrant visuals. We've heard people report these as bugs and now we're getting around to fixing them. It's it's really not

I agree. I'm I'm a little curious though because when they displayed vibrant visuals at Minecraft Live, we we saw really cool screenshots, we saw some interactive things with it wasn't just like panorama, there was characters and boats and stuff in it.

But I would have thought that they would have seen some of these bugs before displaying them at Minecraft Live. Like I'm again I'm not saying that fixing these bugs is bad. I'm just saying that look if the textures were flickering at higher render distances, like that didn't show up in the testing before they did the Minecraft live presentation. I just it's interesting to see like what like

Where the bugs are coming from. I guess that's my question is that what like I want to know where the bugs are coming from. When they say higher render distances, are they talking like you know 32, 64 blocks? The kind of stuff that's kind of ridiculous, but like they know that some players are gonna just like dial it up.

You know, and they wanna kinda squash those or is it like The we didn't notice these because all of our, you know, video renders for Minecraft Live were at like 24 chunks or something reasonable, right?

Um so yeah, I'm I'm not really sure. I l I like the idea of what we learned about uh fog and atmosphere in this snapshot uh combined with looking ahead to vibrant visuals coming to Java Edition because I I find that the combination of those two things in shader packs that I use now.

is really convincing. Like I feel like that kind of stuff really takes it to the next level. So while it's nice to have like cast shadows and reflective surfaces and uh things like that with glass blocks and and and whatnot in the bugs for better up preview, I also just

feel like on the grand scheme, the immersive nature of fog and atmosphere goes farther than whether or not a glass block looks like just right. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I I think that it's it's gonna have a much more important holistic Impact on the game. But I think it's interesting right now, with some of the developments that are happening in the modding scene for the Java community, there are

There's almost an emphasis on the opposite of the render fog stuff. Like people aren't looking to improve fog, they're actually looking to improve render distance overall. And you have mods, I forget what the latest one is, but Bobby mod has been really popular for a little while that caches some chunks that you've loaded of the world before so that you can see up to like sixty four chunks away and it doesn't necessarily have stuff constantly updating for that you have to go and, you know

get within the client side or server side render distance for it to update some of the stuff that you can see in the distance. There are new mods like that coming out that have an even broader cache of like what they can display and have for some fairly innovative ways of doing that.

But the community in general seems to be moving towards like moving in two separate directions really, because there are some people who really like atmospheric fog and like want to be able to do more stuff with that to limit vision and maybe use that as almost like a building technique. Whereas some people just want to be able to see as far as possible as much as possible. And so it's interesting that, you know, we're we're seeing

developments in both directions. We're seeing them changing up the rendering engine and potentially allowing for even broader render distances if possible, but they're also working on the atmosphere of the game and decoupling elements of that that were previously a single package so that they can do more interesting stuff with them. Have the fog draw in a little bit when it rains to kind of simulate lower visual like, you know, l lower

distance that you can see. Um I I think it's it's really interesting to see the the the changes coming in with that. And I like you, I'm I'm interested to see how they will overlap with the uh the vibrant visual.

Um the other thing that jumped out for me is the change to arrow accuracy. Uh that's obviously the main point in the changelog for the latest Java snapshot and I'm sure this breaks all sorts of esoteric redstone contraptions is the first instinct I had, is that, you know, somebody is going to be relying on the variance of arrows for a randomizer or something like that, and suddenly they're going to be really specific and you know

e even just an arrow and a target block it's not gonna hit the bullseye every time if you're firing it directly from like a a dispenser in front of it. But honestly I'm all for it being made more consistent, like if it makes it makes way more sense that I can shoot accuracy at close range. So I I think it it does make a lot more sense for that to be the case and for the curve of, you know, how much the arrow travels to adjust depending on how much further away the target.

I think Minecraft doesn't simulate some things that real life archers have to compensate for, like wind. Uh so I feel like if anything it makes more sense that things are going to be more affected by that natural drift the longer that they travel. So hopefully that starts to feel more intuitive even to the people who are used to the old way of projectiles working in the first place. I don't remember the last time that I used a bow and arrow in Minecraft.

And I don't remember the last time I used a bow and arrow in a video game where wind was a factor. You know? Like I distance to hit points maybe. You know, like the closer you are, the more damage you're gonna do. Uh and might be also harder to hit a moving target from farther away. I'm thinking mostly like maybe Assassin's Creed. I think maybe

the Valhalla one had a bow and arrow. But I like I don't remember ever having to compensate for wind, you know, in any shooting game. I d I just think it comes down to a a lot of game designers looking at that and going like It's super realistic, but it's not fun. Yeah. Right? Like you don't feel overly powerful, you know, when you do it. Um unless it's like a trick shot or something story based.

Uh So and because of that, like I don't have a lot of stuff to say about the projectile adjustments'cause I'm sure there's somebody out there that's really heavy into PvP that this is gonna change the way that they approach things, but That said, they're probably not on this version of Minecraft anyway. If they're if you're that you know hardcore PvP, they tend to w play on older versions that haven't had the changes that they don't like. So um but I

I think it makes sense, you know, in terms of like the closer that you are to something, the more accurate you're going to be. As I think like you and I. I I shot a bow and arrow very briefly in like junior high high school. It's like sporting type stuff. Um, I'm not sure if you've ever used one in real life, but like it is way easier the closer that you are to something compared to farther away. Like just the the the the little minute changes in how you're holding something equate to

like inches off of your target from the farther you you get away from it. And so whenever I see um real bone arrow competitions on like social media, you know, clips and you just realize how accurate some people can be at distance with a bow and arrow. It's just wild to me. Yeah. It's like when you see the Olympics and they do shooting events and like archery and you see from the perspective

Of like the sort of split screen environment that they have. You see somebody like shooting down range and the camera is looking at them. and then you have a little view of the target and maybe even an electronic sensor to show you where they hit on the target. and then it cuts to like a sweeping shot of everything happening and you realise the target is like absolutely miles away and it's tiny and suddenly you recognize how much effort goes into

you know, the training and so forth and the equipment that allows that to be possible for there still to be some accuracy and also some measure of competition. Uh so yeah, I think it it's it's um yeah, kind of interesting that Minecraft is striving to emulate real life a little bit more and maybe make the physics of it more consistent just so players can get consistent results out of the things that they want to. So it does make a lot more sense to me that it works.

But for now we're going to move on into chunk mail for the week. If you'd like to email the show, the listener email address is spawnchunkmail at gmail dot com. As always, keep'em short and sweet and include a subject line that Allows us to identify what you're talking about. It will help us include them in the show a lot more easily. Uh but in his best Disney villain voice, Joel is gonna read this verse.

First email is from Mr. Halian, a landscape artist member of our community, and the subject is locator bar use. Pix and Joel with the locator bar, I think it's important to remember that some of the main users of Minecraft are children, often together with their parents.

As a parent that got into Minecraft because my children wanted to play, and then stumbled upon a certain survival tutorial series that helped me learn it, I can tell you how often it comes up that someone needs to find someone else. The coordinate system isn't always intuitive for adults, much less kids, so though the locator bar will be a great addition to help people find each other in casual games.

Mr. Halian managed to survive because his daughters found him before the zombies did. That's that's what you want to train your daughters to do is defend you from zombies always. Um but yeah, no, I I totally see the point here. Um it

obviously part of the show that Joel and I often don't consider many other cases beyond our own. Like we we tend to default to the way we typically play Minecraft, which is the sort of the survival experience, you know, servers, solo play, and typically independently on our own project.

And so we don't necessarily think about family play as often and like you know, the same w with our watching habits. Like we're typically watching people who play in similar ways to our you know, the Hermitcraft server for example, where they are less likely to want features like this because they're used to communicating where they are or finding different ways or just like going to find somebody's base.

Um my point of view was definitely shaped by the recent Hermitcraft storyline in which some players were very likely to be ambushed at short notice and so they were actively hiding where they were at all times, even when they were live on stream. So I think yeah, it it's it's very easy for

the conversation around a locator bar to be to be biased by some of the stuff that I've been watching recently, in in my point of view. But I I do think that, yeah, it it makes a lot of sense for people who don't want to use the coordinate system

Even I've done that thing of telling somebody positive coordinates when I meant negative coordinates, and then they end up in completely the opposite side of the world to where I want them to be. And yeah, I I can see it definitely being helpful for uh a bit more communication between players when you have a location.

And this just might be my bias of being someone that lives in the northern hemisphere, but when I first got into Minecraft, I found it very difficult to remember that negative Z was north. Yeah. Because to me, when I when I think about like math integers and stuff like that and graphs, I think about positive Z as like up, not down. Yeah. Anyway, it took me a long time to wrap my head around this.

Uh I still even confuse sometimes east and west in terms of which way is which for for Minecraft. Although it does make sense if you're thinking about it like a clock that, you know, um That East is positive for for the X value. I've often wondered why the locator bar isn't a map, like a mini map with dot. You know, that you can follow around. And my best guess is that maps already have a different purpose in Minecraft, like they don't serve the same function.

Yeah uh in that way. And it would be a lot more difficult to implement a mini map as part of the HUD, but then also like well, okay, well if I have a minimap in the HUD, why do I have maps in game? Outside of like locating structures and things like that. So I can understand maybe why they did it this way. And I think that the it makes a lot of sense in terms of like what uh Mr Halian is is saying.

But remember that the locator bar. can be turned off in some situations. I I think it's at the server level. I don't know if you can turn it off at the client level. If the server has it enabled, then you might be having to choose between a server that has it or a server that does not have it.

uh rather than you being able to turn it off on your own. And I'm thinking here mostly in terms of online safe practices. Like I mean, it's great when you're having a family server and your, you know, daughters cannot find you and you need to tell them where you are to self help, you know, save you from the zombies. But it's entirely different if you are a kid playing on a server and maybe you don't want to be fighting.

You know, in terms of like uh servers that might have griefing and stuff happening or just, you know, online bullying. I'm just trying to put my parent hat on and and not that I have kids, but like I do have friends that have kids. and the number of concerns that would come up with a locator bar on a server where like, all right, well this person is having some trouble in the server and now whenever they log in.

everyone knows where they are, unless they're doing something to hide themselves in game, which then affects how they play the game. So like I I feel like there's um definitely some choices that are gonna have to be made uh for kids online, parents online that are looking at the locator bar. Uh and I think that it's um It'll be interesting to see how it unfolds in terms of what controls are available. Um And a sidebar.

I have to work really hard to continue to call it a locator bar as opposed to a location bar. I don't know why. Yeah. I do I do find a locator bar is just a little bit of a stranger name than I was anticipating. Yeah, yeah. I I think it it might A loose sort of sense from what I've seen in terms of terminology in other games though. Like I think there's there's enough like

The i it's either like a compass, but then obviously a compass is an item that already exists in Minecraft. So like yeah, like call it something else. Yeah, yeah. I think I think locator bar makes the most sense. And like going back to the minimap idea, like I I genuinely think we are not going to see a formalised

minimap feature in Minecraft unless they significantly rework how maps work. I think it's potentially just for parity purposes, like it would be fairly intrusive to the UI on bedrock edition if you're playing on a smaller device like a phone. Um and I think maybe it's also to a certain extent intrusive to player immersion. Not that the locator bar is especially different, but it's at least smaller.

Whereas like it's it's more easy to ignore than something like a minimap that doesn't really feel like it would be an item that you had in your hands as you were, you know, running around the world. It's not it it's like wearing a set of like, you know, AR glasses where there's gonna be information displayed or something like that and that doesn't feel as minecrafty as some of the other

Uh but then it's all about what we can overlook really, isn't it? Like I don't think the the inventory bar is necessarily something you would see in real life either. So yeah, it's all about all about immersion and so forth.

Um players would also want a bit more control over minimap functionality, whereas the locator bar feels like a more kind of elegant it's on or it's off kind of solution to it and means that it we don't need a whole new settings menu just to figure out what the map is gonna do when you're in caves or you know, you know how large you want it on the screen or whether you want it toggled on or off and you have a few other settings that are inherent to minimap mods for player quality of life.

Um so yeah, there's there's a few different reasons I think why a locator bar does make sense as a solution if they wanted a solution for this. It's just been interesting to see it develop out of what we saw as very little player demand. And I'd be really interested at some point if we can talk to the developers about that, uh what the impetus was for developing that as a feature at this specific time.

Moving on though, we're gonna cover our second email which comes in from White Bush, who is another landscape artist member of our Discord, and wanted to write in about a helpful happy guard. Hello again, Joel and Picks. While listening to episode 346, you strayed a little talking about the ghast's tentacles making noise while close to the ground. It made me think the tentacles could actually be a useful mechanic. Standing on the happy ghast is supposed to be a useful way of building high up.

What if, while standing on the happy ghast, you could feed it something that would make it stick its tentacles straight out in the left, right, or rear directions, perpendicular to its body, and you were able to place a starter block on any tentacle to start a midair build?

Mounting the Happy Ghost again could lower its limbs and allow you to fly elsewhere to continue building. Whitebush fell to his death while standing on his helpfully placed gravel block, and his friend rode in and absconded on his Happy Ghost. I liked the concept of using a ghast, a happy ghast, pardon me, to start building high in the sky. And

I don't think I like the idea of feeding it something. I feel like you'd want to do something like interact with it or pet it to kind of get it to reach out as a function. I just don't want one more thing I have to carry in my inventory. If I'm going up to build high in the sky, I'm probably laden down with all the different blocks I want to use on whatever underside decoration I'm doing.

you know, and to have one more thing that I have to put in there, food for me, food for the gas, whenever I want to place a block, like that kind of thing, could be a little tedious. So I do like the idea of Scratching or tickling a ghast or something. I'm not sure what

key or how how you would interact in that way. I'm sure how that gameplay would pan out. But I d I don't know why we'd limit the directions either. Like I think just like have the tentacles go out in all directions. Like forward, back, front, left, like all of them. And I I do find it funny that the image in my head

sort of reminds me of what happens when like bees try to pathfind and they can't find something and they just kind of spin. I feel like like imagine like tickling your gas and it just kind of like sticks its feelers out in the same way that like a dog rolls over on its back when you rub its tummy and it just starts to slowly spin around and then you can just start placing blocks in the air at at random.

Um, it's an interesting way to kind of start the the a build high in the air'cause like really the only way to do it is to pillar up. And yeah, I was thinking in my head like I'm the kind of builder that I wanna know where that first block goes. Like I'm the kind of person that not only pillars up to where it's gonna go, I kinda wanna know how many blocks it is in the sky. Like I got is it sixty seven? Is it sixty-nine? Is it, you know, uh forty-five? Like what like what is it? Like

How am I dividing the space underneath it? Like I I'm technical like that. But then I thought, well, we've got the coordinate system. So like you could also just place a block in the sky and then stand on it and go like, oh, I put this at Y sixty two and I wanted at fifty eight. I'll just drop it by four blocks. So it's possible. I mean, really what people need

in the sky is just the ability to place a single block to get going. And after that you can do all the measurements that you want, right? So I don't know. I think it's a neat idea. I don't have any idea how it will be implemented. Like I don't know how you do it, but I think it's a neat neat thought.

Yeah, I think I saw a lot of people who are hoping that the flat platform of the top of a happy ghast, if players could walk around on it, you could also place blocks against that. And unfortunately you can't. I think building without supporting blocks is definitely a sought-after mechanic. I've seen it done in the Sky Factory mod pack. I think they had a mod called Angel Block.

Which basically lets you place a block against whatever air blocks are around you. So usually you're putting it like dead center in front of you, uh and it would just hover there, basically. So it would allow you to build from that point. Um and it was a specialized block for that purpose because there aren't really any other another any other blocks in Minecraft that you can do that with. You know, th there are no solutions for that. And

I'm not certain if happy ghosts are the solution that I want for vanilla Minecraft. Um, especially with the sort of tentacle acrobatics that White Bush is suggesting. It's it's a bit of a silly image, and obviously Minecraft can have license to be a little silly every so often, but I think it's it's not quite what I would imagine as a a solution. I think it would also make happy ghosts way more powerful even than they already are as far as a building tool goes.

um which maybe paints a target on them as far as people who wanna like grief people or whatever. But um I think the problem with the tentacle placement idea is that it creates a lot of edge cases of They have to figure out what happens if you place a certain type of Like solid blocks are fair enough. We can all imagine, you know, putting a

a stone block or something up there and then being able to build from there. But can you place non full blocks on the Ghast Tentacle? What happens with blocks that have specific support requirements, like

Could you put a cactus flower up there, since they only require like the centre of a block to be present to put them on something? Uh what about buttons and levers or redstone dust or something like that, right? Or fluids even. Like there are a bunch of ways in which that can be incredibly beneficial, but it could also be a little bit game breaking.

and could potentially be used for all sorts of stuff. Like imagining Starting like a um like a lava cast where you kinda pour simultaneously lava and

water back to back so that you end up with this giant kind of cobblestone or obsidian kind of patch over somebody's build. I feel like that is so easy to start from a high up position if you just like fly a happy ghast up there and then place something as opposed to Otherwise you've kind of gotta peel her up and like at least leave yourself with something to start the the griefing process from so it gives people time to respond.

So I I think there are a few other considerations, a few fringe cases like that where this sort of functionality might be a little bit difficult to implement in the vanilla game long term, or perhaps there's a significant reason why they haven't done something

I mean the other argument is like now that we've got scaffolding and you've got two stacks of scaffolding in your inventory, if you just hold down a button, like you can just Yeah, absolutely. Way faster than you used to. Like I w I remember when I first started playing Minecraft and I was building that Snake Mountain.

I had to pill her up with dirt. Like it took forever to get to the right position underneath the snake's chin or like wherever I was going to start doing the sculpting. And so to have scaffolding now, I mean, as much as I I don't like it for horizontal access, to get up high Or in my case, in West Hill, a good use case was using scaffolding to very quickly frame out a tower, like to build it.

up from the ground without having to pillar up each individual time and then backing up and just figuring out like w which scaffolding stack feels like the right height. I'm gonna go with the one in the left. So that's roughly whatever the number of blocks is and I'll I'll c I'll cap the other one.

And so that kind of stuff could be could be cool, you know, in terms of being able to access it with a happy cast. But I I tend to agree, like I I feel like placing a a block in the sky, there are enough other ways in Minecraft to do it that it doesn't necessarily need.

a happy ghast, but I do still like the silly idea of the tentacles moving for different functions. Like think about like an F-14 from Top Gun. You know, like the w the wings are out for maneuverability and they're back for speed. Like how cool would it be? Not that you really want to gasp for speed, but if it got like twenty five percent faster and it kind of like back as if it was if as if it thought it was going super fast, you know, for for it. You know? Det kan vara komikalt.

You and I going on a ride on a happy ghast and be something like why are the tentacles out, Johnny? Like why what are you doing? You w you want to lock the foils in attack position or whatever, right? Like that's the that's the the the happy gas equivalent thereof with the tentacles.

Yeah, well we'll see. There is still time for Happy Ghast to have a couple of things added to them and like even though they're being developed for this snapshot and I think we're not seeing too many tweaks come through in the snapshots right now, so they're they're being developed for the next sort of uh like gameplay drop, there is still maybe a chance that their behaviour will change in future. So uh watch this space, White Bush. We will see.

Uh moving on to our main topic, this is actually inspired by another email that came in from the Almighty Duck regarding block pallets and building methods. So we'll read this first and then we'll get into our main discussion.

Hiya Pixin Joel. I'm a big fan of the show and I love hearing about what you guys are doing in your worlds while I'm chilling at work. So much so that you keep me inspired to work on what will eventually become a massive campaign map, one with custom mods, many settlements, and a fully original questline. The main problem I have, however, is with the building side. In my brain, I find it difficult to disassociate the block texture with what it actually is in game.

For example, if I see a prismarine block surrounded by spruce trapdoors, I'll always see exactly that rather than a barrel of fish like some mappers intend for it to be. Since you two are active builders, adding details to your builds, I was wondering if you'd be able to share a little of your wisdom on how you use block textures to create new details, or even how you began to disassociate blocks with their texture.

The Almighty Duck died from full damage, not realizing the pool of water was actually a layer of lapis lazuli black. I thought this was a really interesting conversation and we get, you know, questions about builds and details and techniques and ta stuff a lot, but I don't know if it's come up as a full discussion yet about the idea of Separating a block texture from what we use it for. We've talked about mosaics in some of the broader sense, but in terms of like

player level stuff. I'm not sure how often we've actually talked about that before. But one of the things I did want to to mention in terms of kicking off the conversation about adding detail, since that's what I've been doing a lot of recently on uh uh the West Hill build. Um I've talked about this a fair bit in the past in terms of the 7030 rule that I try to follow. Uh but I'll mention it again for anybody that's new to the show or maybe you just you know hey you haven't heard it.

And in in design and in art in general, uh and this is, you know, a rule that's meant to be broken in some cases, but in general Seventy percent of a design space is meant to be relatively restful for your eye. Uh and then 30% of the design space is meant to be a little bit more busy with details and things that are more interesting to look at. You can look at painting compositions, you can look at websites.

And generally get a feel for about seventy five percent rest space and thirty percent, you know, activity things to do, buttons to click on, that kind of stuff. And the same is true for me with my Minecraft builds. Like I tend to put more detail in

say like the bottom thirty percent of a house compared to the roof. You know, because most of what you're looking at or most of where you want to draw the player's attention to is what they're gonna be interacting with at the ground level. Um, vice versa, if you're doing a big wall Uh and you don't want to be doing like

noodling on little textures for thousands of blocks on a big curtain wall that maybe goes around a town, you want to keep the details fairly simple. So you only want to do a little like 30% detail here and there and then the vast majority of it at 70% stone block.

At that scale, it doesn't matter. Like it just your your brain just kind of reads, oh, this is a wall that has some detail, but I don't have to go up and look at every single block to see that detail. So I feel like that's a a good thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about adding detail to your build. It's not about adding detail everywhere. It's about adding detail in a spot that helps the build and helps

um you communicate what you're trying to to convey, right? Yeah, makes perfect sense. And this is something that I try to implement in my own builds and sometimes I I don't know. I try and break away from convention quite often and so a lot of the time when I'm Building something like let's say my storage building on the Minecraft survival guide, there are lots of different layers of wood in that building. There are walls that are made out of stripes of the different wood types.

And as such, there's a lot of colour. And so it's more trying to blend together the colours that work best. And that still sort of allows some room for the eye to rest because you're not seeing a lot of high contrasts with each other, right? You're not seeing like

stripes of red and green and then blue and then magenta or something like that. You're seeing all of the natural wood colours working together in unison and all of the sort of slightly more bizarre wood colours like the warped and crimson woods. end up getting paired with things that are slightly closer to them in terms of

the colour palette. So you end up Even if you have a variety of blocks in play, you end up arranging them in patterns that feel like they're slightly easier on the eye than creating such a direct contrast, unless that contrast is really what you're going for, unless there is a point to making it stand out as clearly as it does.

Um my other like major example I come to whenever it comes to Blocks that stand out versus blocks that blend in is a very simple one because they're the first two wood types you typically encounter in a Minecraft world. It's oak and burst. I find it so much easier to build a frame for a timber frame building out of oak wood, out of oak logs specifically, than I do with birch logs.

And it's because of the natural look to them. The even though like browns, whites, blacks and greys are all fairly con they're considered neutral colours and they go quite well with other colours often. I find that a timber frame building looks more natural and a bit more easy on the eye when you're using oak wood than you are when you're using birch. And it's the fact that Birchwood contains a contrast between black and white.

That makes it stand out a lot more. The white in Birchwood is also quite a clear, pure white, so there's a bit less of a like a natural grain to it. And generally as I'm, you know, walking around the world, even though there are a lot of timber frame buildings in the UK, like there's a lot of kind of mock Tudor style stuff.

you tend to see those made more with like brown timbers or like, you know, stained brown timbers than you do out of like silver birch logs, for example. So um building efforts may vary throughout the world, but you tend to be imitating a little bit more of what you see around you in life. But in Minecraft terms, there is really very little difference between what a

They still break down into the same components. They still break down into planks and you can make all kinds of stuff with them. They're effectively the same material in terms of, you know, hardness and the time it takes to mine them and how you harvest them and all of that kind of stuff. You don't have to worry as much about the real world construction potential of them. They are just a block to be placed in a space.

So why do we default so often to oak or spruce woods when it comes to creating frames for that stuff? Then we we we tend to use those a lot more than we do with birch. And it's really just because of the contrast birch presents and how it doesn't feel as natural and as easily tiled into a structure as something like a natural oak or spruce.

Well I think that it also ties into something that we may or may not think about when we playing Mac Minecraft, which is tone and weight. And I find that darker blocks tend to read as heavier physically than right lighter blocks. Right. So you a really good example would be like your spruce wood or your dark oak wood wood versus the cherry wood, you know, planks. Like the cherry planks look like they weigh less, even though they're exactly the same.

And it's the same thing with your, you know, your birch logs uh for um framing a house. They look lighter than the planks that you're framing the house with. So they don't look like they could hold the weight of it. Whereas if you get your dark oak log or your spruce log, they look a lot sturdier. Uh I find that anything that's stone, uh black stone, deep slate,

Obsidian, uh a lot of this is also backed up by the game mechanics where like those things take more effort to mine. You can't mine them right away early in the game. Uh you um need Um stir your pickaxes to last longer late in the game. Some things like Obsidian take a lot longer to drop. So you already have like this idea of like these things are heavier and in your mind sturdier, so they make more sense to frame a build with them.

than they do um other things. And not that you can't reverse it like I've done plenty of builds where a log framed building has got stone for the the wall. And it still makes sense because it all still feels sturdy. It doesn't feel like one is holding up the other. It does they feel like they're working in tandem. Um, but I feel like the combination of like context but also the way that our brains are wired to receive uh lightness and darkness in terms of uh light in terms of heavy

And not. It's the same thing with like even though wool in Minecraft in your brain is a light material, if you put wool and quartz next to each other, you don't necessarily look at them and go like, well, one is way heavier than the other.

It would be in real life, but like that's not how you really perceive it. Whereas if you put again obsidian and wool next to each other, like your brain immediately goes, Well, one of those is a lot heavier than the other, right? Yeah. So, um, you know, and it's and and it's not always the case. Like it it's it does go kind of like

Uh step by step, like a black wool, it's gonna work in a dark build, but if I stick black wool and white wool next to each other. I my brain doesn't necessarily think that the w black wool is lighter because like my literal brain still thinks it's wool. You know what I mean? Like it's it's it's funny how like

block names can also get in there and mess with your head in terms of like what you perceive something to be. And I get hung up on that as well. Like I do find that sometimes I'm just like, nope, I just whatever for whatever reason this block just never seems to look good when I put it in a ceiling. I'm blanking on, you know, a a block example right now. But like there's a few things where like no matter what I do, they look heavy and I just can't seem to put them in like light situations.

And so I tend to find like um well you might find this like A combination of both the shape that you've made Say it's like a roof or a ceiling that looks like it needs to be held up. But then also the block choices that you've made. Maybe you've made like a lapis. uh decoration in the ceiling, but your brain says, I really want to put like log and trapdoors and stairs underneath this to look like it's being held up because it looks heavy. Yeah. Right?

And that's just instinctive. Like I'm not really making that decision on purpose. That's just kinda like a gut feeling. And that could be where I live in the world. It could be the kind of structures that you mentioned that you see, you know, in your daily life. Uh, but I do feel like there are certain things that feel heavier in Minecraft that you want to then hold up by making structures.

Yeah, definitely. And and like you're saying, the the knowledge of what a material is, I think, is one of the hardest things to get around. Like there are some f fantastic builders out there who will build natural landscapes using blocks like wood. and they'll put, you know, grey and dark grey wool into their like boulders and stuff and like and green wool can be used, you know, was used a lot more frequently before moss carpet, but still is.

despite the fact that moss blocks exist, there's just a tone of green that the builder wants that either, you know, provides a bit more variety when seen from a distance or you know is just the right sort of green for the biome where like grass or moss might feel a little bit too bright or something like that.

And there is some subtlety to be had from changing that up and subverting players' expectations about m what they might see. It's gonna stand out more if it doesn't look exactly like a generated Minecraft landscape and it's gonna draw your eye in because you're curious about how it's been done.

And then some people when you see them uh we some people when they see people building with wool, they get upset about that because they think, well it's it should be stone. Like th there is no hardness inherent to building with a wool block. And for a practical perspective, maybe lightning strikes, it catches fire. If you have fire spread turned on, half of your boulder burns away and that doesn't feel correct to them. And

I think that's getting a a little bit closer to what we're uh what we're trying to focus on here is the the notion that a block can represent something other than what it is and detaching yourself from that. And that A difficult thing when you're up close, you're looking at the block directly, and so it's a difficult thing to get into the habit of doing while you're the one building.

I think what really helps is to consider it from the perspective of an outside observer who has no prior knowledge of what it is that's being built. And you've also got to consider the scale at which they're viewing it, the distance from which it's being observed, whether it's meant to be something that's up close or whether it's meant to be something visible from further away.

Let's take the barrel of fish example from the email. A prismarine block surrounded by spruce trapdoors is going to look like exactly that if you're up close it's standing it you're standing in front of it and it is one of the only things you can see in your field of view.

But if you step back from that and it's just a barrel at the end of a dock, you know, if it's just there amidst a few other crates and barrels and some of the things like Minecraft naturally has textures for, like barrels and logs and things like that.

if they're all cluttered at the end of a jetty that's sticking out into a body of water you might be more naturally inclined to see that at a distance and not knowing what the block is, just think, oh, that's meant to be a barrel of something blue. And as long as you're not going up and inspecting it to find out what it is and identifying it as Prismarine, your brain can kind of paper over the fact that it's not actually going to be a barrel of like dead fish.

or something like that. And I think that's the consideration you have to take is that not everything is meant to be viewed up close. It's meant to be part of a bigger picture, or it's meant to be peripheral detail. If you're exploring a dockland area

you're not necessarily meant to be going up and personally inspecting every piece of furniture that a builder has placed there. It's all meant to be passive background detail that occurs in the thirds of your screen, either side of the central part that you're using to Navigate through the space.

And so I think if it's happening to your left or to your right as you're walking along the dock headed towards whatever the destination is there, then that stuff can have license to feel a little bit more creative in its block choice. without the player scrutinizing it too closely.

And I think that's the type of building that a lot of people who build more creatively and more painterly tend to strive for, is stuff that happens in the peripherals that you're not meant to pay as close attention to, can get away with. using a variety of blocks and using blocks for anything that isn't their intended purpose, the symbolic purpose in the game.

Yeah, I think it's about context and it's about immersion. Yeah. You know, like think about the last immr immersive video game that you played where there's

three or four different paths off of this main, you know, RPG path that you're going down. You very clearly have to go this way. You can see the enemies at the end of this path, but there's an offshoot dead end. And it's like, do you walk down the dead end and look at what's at the end of the pier, or do you just kinda go, Oh, there's a pier over there and you keep on going.

Yeah, the idea is just to kind of uh give you the impression that a world exists around you. And I agree with you. I think that, you know, it's meant to be um seen in relation to what's around it. In in the same way that if you're building a stone wall You don't necessarily want to build a blimp out of stone.

in visual distance of that wall because it you're the people that are visiting are gonna be like, well wait a minute. Like the wall is made out of an airlight material or the blimp is made out of really heavy sturdy material? Like how does that work? And I feel like you can go as far as as drilling that down into even the context of blocks within a build. I've certainly run into situations where I've used um say like andesite and some stone bricks in the wall of a building.

And then decided, you know what, I'm gonna make the roof gray too, but then I have to find a different set of materials because the idea of building the roof out of the same thing I built the walls out of just doesn't seem all that practical or Well, one, not visually interesting, but two just doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. Like I've

in the context of this build, these blocks are meant to be on the bottom, which meant they're probably heavy. And like even if it's wool, like even if it's something in the game that you think is completely different than than a stone block. putting that again in the ceiling has this weird kind of like you're sending mixed messages visually to people that are viewing the build, whether that's in a screenshot online, a video you're sharing, or even just servermates that are walking around.

And I think that that's kind of the idea behind helping to suspend your disbelief on something like, um uh a prismarine block that's in a barrel or like surrounded by trapdoors meant to be something in a barrel. I just used an example earlier where I put a block of sand uh behind some trapdoors and wanted to use it as a block of grain. Um I have a custom texture for wheat uh uh hay bales on my on my server, so I could have just as easily put a hay bale in there, but I like the lighter sandblock.

If you're playing vanilla Minecraft, the end of a hay bale is kind of y greenish. Like it's not really the nicest texture. So using a smooth sandstone or a sandblock or even like a w a wool block that has the right kind of texture. I've used a black concrete powder to look like gunpowder before as well. Uh so you can do stuff like that. Now those I mean that's not really too far a a stretch, right? So I think one of the ideas that you could start with is

using some things that are really not a stretch of the imagination. You know, like get if you need like a speckly texture. to replace something, find something really similar. Maybe it's a different color. Um I've used concrete powder in my spice shop. You know, orange concrete powder, red concrete powder looks like paprika. You know, it looks like curry powder, that kind of stuff.

I you know, but it's it's something that concrete powder and spice powder, you're you're dealing with a very similar uh texture there. And so you can sort of start small and work your way up to larger leaves. Um I like the idea of prismerine in a in a barrel. My trick is because I I agree, I don't tend to like that texture. I put a prismerine slab at the bottom. water log it and then put up the trapdoors so that you actually have water inside the the area. And that wasn't possible

until waterlogging was a thing, right? So like you didn't have that capability until more recent years. So there are a few things like that that I think is is more interesting in terms of pushing your suspension of of disbelief. But you know the other thing is I find it important to set up a imaginary set of rules. So take something like a light blue glazed terracotta. It has that kind of white and and navy fractal design to it. It's a really difficult block to build with, but if you have that.

Hovering above uh nodes and things that look like they might be pulling energy from it. And that is the only time that you use that block in your entire build is to as a fake, you know, light or a fake energy source in your imaginary world, then every time a player sees that, they're gonna go, oh, that's special. Like that is something really, really cool because of like where you've placed it and how you've decorated around it.

But in the same light, if you use the same block again as as like a decorative block and like a carpet, people's like, why is there energy in the floor? Right. So like if you can stick to the rules, then you can really kind of make them up as you go along. Like you could take anything.

And and turn it into something special in Minecraft. You could do uh, you know, I keep on coming back to energy sources, but like you can do a bunch of different things that could make magic or light or technical blocks or like I don't know maybe the people in your world worship

you know, uh I don't know, bone blocks or maybe the redstone contraptions are are uh like little idols. Like there's a bunch of different things that you could do that I think could help Take something that's got a purpose in Minecraft and you could repurpose it because of story or imaginary rules that you've set.

It also helps that Minecraft itself has a lot of fictional materials. Like Prismarine is not a real life material from what I understand, you know? Like it's it's something that they've invented for a certain purpose in the game. And likewise redstone components could very easily simulate something like computer panels or equipment or like, you know, analog radio stuff because there isn't anything that looks like a meter by meter square

flat thing that just does one electrical component's worth of work. Like it's it's uh you know very analogue equipment to the Minecraft player, but You know, you can use it to simulate other things without just going, Well, that's a redstone comparator, it can't possibly be anything else. Like there's a little bit of imagination there.

Uh, going back to what we were talking about in the render distance as well, you're currently building the Lego radio set that's using parts from other Lego sets recolored in order to just fulfill the same parts. And I think Lego does this really well where they don't want to create original Lego pieces for every single set when they already have something else that will fit the bill, right? Can you talk a little bit about what's going into the uh the radio set right now?

So there are minifig roller skates that are being used because they're just the right height for something for like a contraption inside. Uh there is the um the needle that goes back and forth to simulate where you would dial in the old retro radio for AM FM receiving is a recolored wand from like the Harry Potter Lego sets where they would be brown or black, you know, to suit the wizards.

They've just made it red and it's just it's the perfect height, it's the perfect shape. It looks just like the thing that they would have uh used, you know, i the piece of plastic that would have been in a in a transistor radio from the seventies. But It meant that Lego doesn't have to make a new die cast for a new piece, right? They could just use an existing piece.

Um, this happens a lot with say like the Ninjaga sets. I don't have any, but you can see the models and go like, okay, well, that's obviously A claw or a tooth, and then that stuff starts to show up in other builds. Like uh I I can't tell you the n uh number of times in a Star Wars spaceship.

Where all that greebling, like all the little guts that you see from the side of an X Wing and the exposed like engine parts, it's like droid arms or levers or two little two little pieces that are like pyramided together to make it look like a wire even though it's not connected.

And those kind of things are really fun. It's one of the joys of putting Lego Lego together. And you can do the same thing in in Minecraft. Like you can take some of the profession blocks that have a lot of detail in them. You can use uh d blocks that have um either specific purposes or textures and and start to layer them to get busier textures. Like if you take something like um a

mangrove trapdoor that has like the the circular hole in it. Like we don't really have circular dots in Minecraft or colored dots in Minecraft. But if you put different colors of terracotta behind a mangrove trapdoor, provided the mangrove texture is something you want to work with, you can have a bunch of different colored circles in your build. Like that's the kind of thing that, you know, you by layering things you can sort of get

Different blocks or change the purpose of something. Something that I like to do when I have textures that I find are too high contrast. If the build allows it, I'll put a layer of uh stained glass. or a layer of trapdoors in front of it to mute the texture, dull the color, whatever it is. It just it gives you the ability to kind of like add those layers. And it's the same thing that Lego does when they this they take pieces from other sets.

that in the context of that set it's like an arm and a minifigure, but in the context of this set it's a lever on a spaceship. But it's the same shape. Like you can see it. And I think it's wild that, you know, the designers of those things at Lego kind of like can look at the library of pieces that they have and Provided that, you know, they have the license or uh the permission to make a different color of it, uh, then it's like, all right, well.

This is, you know, a yellow arm, but like if I made it blue, then it would really work in uh this flower, you know? That's another good example of of those ninjaga things. Like you'll see claws and teeth. pieces in a ninjaga set for like a dinosaur or a or some sort of mount being repurposed as flower petals because of the same shape.

Just different context, right? Yeah. And I think that's the great thing about Lego as well, is because the pieces are so small, you're mostly looking at it from a distance. And so you might know that there are pieces in there from a different set and there are like little things that have just been

thrown together because they worked in the right combination. But you're not necessarily gonna see that when you're looking at it from a distance. You see it as the s more than the sum of its parts effectively.

And that's like the whole the whole thing that makes Lego work. I think the same philosophy can be applied to Minecraft very easily. in that if you're looking at the bigger picture of something, you don't always notice the oh, behind that fence gate I've put a weird block that was just the right colour so it looked like it cast a shadow against this or that. And like there are there are elements like that that can very easily Escape the eye when you're looking at the bigger picture.

I think as an impartial observer, you're not gonna know what that stuff is until you're close up. And then does knowing what block that is really stay with you when you're looking at it again from a distance? I don't think it necessarily ruins your understanding of a build. when looking at it from far enough away to know what everything is up close. Because yeah, I I th I think it the the mind already sort of tricks you into that stuff.

Take a um a texturing technique, for example, like dithering, where you effectively checkerboard two different colours together in order to at a distance create something that looks a little bit more like a gradient. You know, even if those two colors aren't necessarily blending together via mixture of other blocks, the mind is still tricked into thinking that they blend together quite well because of the ratio of them changing as you go from one to the other.

And that's not necessarily some magical mixture of the two happening in between. The alchemy is purely visual. It's not something that's happening as a as an in-game technique. And so I think it it's it's interesting that Some people have a hard time getting their eyes around that when it's the kind of thing that you would you would easily hand wave.

if you saw it in like a piece of pop art, for example. Like that's the kind of techniques that you see in in pop art from like the early sort of twentieth century print kind of artists. And so I think that there's a lot to that that is worth exploring if you're Stuck with building.

Um working with gradients in general is I think a really great way to dissociate blocks from their textures because so often it does not matter if something has a let's say a tile texture like Prismarine brick. If those prismarine bricks are the right shade of greenish blue to bridge from, let's say, warped wood into something a lot lighter, like you know a a a a light blue concrete or even a whiter block.

if it's the right go-between, you throw them in regardless of how conflicting the textures are, because more often than not, you're going to be seeing that wall or roof gradient from a remove that you're not going to see the textures so much. So it's not going to be so obvious to you that

the warped wooden prismarine have strikingly different angles that they're textured at. I think you're just gonna overlook that in favor of the gradient looking really nice. And I think once you've started to do that, you can start to use them in other ways as well. I think you and I have both done this with uh bees nests in terms of putting a crediant in a roof. Right.

Whereas, you know, you do that and y your brain just stops thinking about them as bees nests when you've got twelve of them in a row or in speckled, you know, decoration in in a in a gradient, then your brain just starts to think about them as like whatever material that happens to be in the roof. I don't need to have a name for it. But uh one of my favorite things to do, you know, talking about your example of being

far away from something and looking at it. I love the idea of looking at something and going like How did they do that? Yeah. And then when I get up close and I realize how they did it, whether it's in person or whether it's a video, like with someone showing off a a technique, you just feel like, oh, that's really cool. Yeah. It doesn't break the immersion for me. I think it's really neat. Like I like the idea of

of seeing stuff. Like I I you know, uh B dubs is a really good example of uh someone that does a lot of color and block choices meant to be viewed from a distance. And then when you go up i close to it and he explains what he's done, you're like, That is really wild and looks really out of place like right here when it's close to you. But when you back up, it looks fantastic. You know, it has just just the right kind of

mesh to it. And I think some of the changes that they're making in Minecraft in terms of the atmospheric perf perspective and and the renders and stuff is going to help people with that too. So like if you're looking at something that's farther away, if you're gonna have this general fade to it, like if everything is gonna be a little bit less contrasty when you're farther away from something, then your builds that are relying on being a little bit farther away to work are going to be

better. Like they're gonna look even cooler. They're gonna look more homogenized as you know the the overall block palettes are desaturated with the farther away you are. Yeah. I think if it difficult for you to work on individual details like that, then it might be worth Getting the scale figured out first.

and trying to build a lot of the stuff that you will add more detail to later because then you already have the context of going back to the barrel of fish example. If you just place a bunch of trapdoors on a grass block in a field somewhere and you put a Prismarine block on there, it's gonna be much harder for you to look at it and say, That's a barrel of fish, and that's where I'm starting my Docklands build.

versus getting all of the waterways and stuff and all of the kind of infrastructure, maybe a little bit of stuff piled up, maybe just some houses nearby or something, and then adding in the details of something in a barrel, I think that's going to be a an order that works a lot better as well.

But you're right, like s seeing the The e even out of context, seeing builds on Instagram where people have made really interesting block choices, so often with those, they look better as an Instagram thumbnail because it's the the painting almost of a house.

versus when you open it up and you really examine what they've done and it's like a magician revealing how the trick was done. For some people it cheapens it, for other people you just get really excited about what you've seen and the technique that went into it and like how effectively that was achieved. Uh the thing I keep coming back to with the philosophy of this stuff is the Rene Magrik painting The Treachery of Images, which is the Cessine Pa'n Peep, this is not a pipe uh image and

It's the i the whole point of the the painting is that it's the image of a pipe. It's not itself the object a pipe. Likewise I think a Minecraft build is not a building, it's the image of a building. And you're never going to be able to reproduce exactly the same technique that you would create a building with in real life. And that's part of the joy of Minecraft. It's part of the ability to take some of the stuff that we have in game and

Use it for our own purposes. You can build the roof of a building before you build the underneath of it because blocks will float and you can play around with the physics of that. You can also play around with the block choice. I think to a certain extent that requires some people to break their immersion in Minecraft as a world.

And so when you start thinking of Minecraft blocks as painting materials rather than real materials that you're holding and sculpting with your hands, it can feel a little bit immersion breaking for people who really want to feel like they're in the world and manipulating that stuff.

And I think maybe that's part of the reason people find it difficult, is because the immersion is broken for them. They're being asked to see something from this sort of secondary perspective that they're not used to. And maybe that sh doesn't jive with what they want out of Minecraft as a game.

Which I think honestly to look at this from the flip side is completely fine. It's entirely possible to play Minecraft building with the materials that I used for building in real life. Like if you work on shape, if you work on like reproducing certain types of architecture and you study that

I think it's perfectly reasonable for you to make a building out of bricks and wood and concrete and still have it look fantastic. The painterly build style we're talking about is just one approach to the game. It is not the quote unquote best way to build. And you can put fish in a water block in a barrel and have fish in a barrel if you don't want it to be a block of prismery.

And it would still work pretty similarly in terms of the overall effect you have, but like it really depends, I think, what scale you're working at if you're seeing stuff up close versus further away, how much of a difference that's going to make. I'm wondering what vibrant visuals are gonna do for that perception of textures in Minecraft. A really good example would be something that's material.

metal, you know, something that's a a shiny material that's gonna be given some reflectiveness and some sheen from vibrant visuals. And if you wanted to use that metallic block in another context, but like it's always going to be shiny with vibrant visuals on. Whereas if it wasn't shiny before, you could maybe sell it as something.

You know? Yeah. Um lapis is probably like a block of lapis is probably a really good example of like something you could use for one thing and then use for another. But if it becomes shiny, then all of a sudden you're not like you're not really gonna be able to Um to use it, even if it's something as simple as like, well, it's always going to be a stone, but previously it was a matte stone, and now that it's shiny, it feels fancy. So if I'm putting this in a

in like if I wanted a kitchen to have like a blue and white floor, but all of a sudden this makes it look like a rich person's kitchen as opposed to like just the average kitchen that I wanted, that affects your block choice. So I'm wondering what vibrant visuals are gonna do in terms of like that kind of perception and context and material, I think is the big thing. Cause when you get into

the um the sh the shading and what they're gonna do with vibrant visuals and things like reflections. I think it's gonna be really interesting to see what that context is gonna be.

And shadows are gonna change a lot of that as well, because like if you if you look at the typical lighting in vanilla default visuals Minecraft, it's got a little bit of shading happening on the top and side faces of the block. So what kind of the brightness that you see on the top face of a block where it is presumed light is coming from at all times are gonna be slightly different to the east-west faces and the north south.

And that effect is always there, but people don't tend to worry that much about which direction they're building when they're building something because it's that And often we have, you know, at our disposal means of lighting stuff from different angles if we want light to shine on it in a different way. And you're much more concerned about the light level than you are the individual block texture.

But then with shadows being thrown into the mix and having even those uh pixelated shadows that Vibrant Visuals is working with. you have the potential for that to radically change what the texture of a block looks like if there are occasional pixels highlighted by specks of light that are coming through like from a light source that's hidden behind a um a semi-transparent block like leaves or something like that where there are going to be gaps in the texture for the light to shine through

That's gonna be something that people can take into account when they're texturing something and it's gonna make things feel very, very different. Well I mean take the example of my um my secret tunnel that I made this weekend. Like I spent an hour on stream texturing it was cobblestone, tuff and andesite. All f like all walls, did the floor. And then in the second hour I lit it with candles and you can see none of the texture work that I did. Maybe the first block or two.

Right, out outside of the candles. But like once I made it a dark tunnel, like you really couldn't tell. And so with vibrant visuals, like that's the kind of thing that you're gonna be able to see all the time. You know, like the dark side of your house, like Are you really gonna wanna want to bother to texture it if it's always in shadow in the game? Probably not. And

And that's fine. Like that's okay. I in anything it's it's a it's a economy of of detail. Like you wanna put the detail where people are going to see it. You know, decorate your front door Not the backdoor that nobody uses. You know, that kind of stuff is is gonna be interesting to see how vibrant visuals affect choices. Not just block choices, but also like you said, direction, um, light and dark, like uh how your build looks at night versus how it looks during the day, that kind of thing.

For sure. Well, looking ahead to Bry Vibrant Visuals is where we're gonna leave this episode of the Spawn Chunks. But I've really enjoyed this discussion, hopefully you have as well. If you're looking for more information about our show and links to some of the stuff that we've talked about today, you can find those at thespawnchunks.com.

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Do check out the video version on Spotify or on YouTube. You can email the show at spawnchunkmail at gmail dot com. The RSS feed is linked on the spawnchunks.com and the patron only RSS feed is on the Patreon page. That's where you can listen to the render distance, the extended version of the podcast. My name is Johnny, but on Latega by PixelRoof, you can find most of what I do at youtube.com slash Pixarous, where I'm currently exploring the Craft Mine April Fool's update from this year and

Occasionally I'll have videos out from misadventures when I'm not just grinding the skeleton dog over and over again. Uh speaking of that, you can find me doing that three days a week on Twitch where I'm also currently playing Expedition thirty three Claire Obscure, really interesting game.

I do behind the scenes work for my YouTube series the rest of the time. 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 Pixel Riffs on both Blue Sky and Instagram. Joel, where can people find you online? You can listen to the Citadel Cafe, my other podcast about sci fi and fantasy entertainment. Uh we were supposed to record last week, but obviously I was out with the flu, so

Uh we're coming up on a a new recording soon and it's probably going to be Star Wars focused. There was a lot of news coming out of Star Wars celebration. May 4th has happened. Uh may the fourth we be with you.

Uh and also Lego has released some new Star Wars sets. And both Steven and I are into Star Wars and Lego. So you can expect a lot of that chat on the next episode of the Citadel Cafe. I'm Joel Duggan on social media. Very easy to find. Joel Duggan on Twitch, where I stream Tuesday through Saturday at one o'clock Atlantic.

Right now it's a lot of satisfactory, obviously a lot of Minecraft, and now the retro radio set from Lego. Thanks for visiting the Spawn Chunks. The world outside is infinite, but this is not a world.