The Spawn Chunks 390: Depth In Forgotten Features

Welcome to the Spawn Chunks. This is episode 390, recorded on Monday, February 23rd, 2026. This is a podcast all about Minecraft. It's available on all of your favorite podcasting platforms. If you're enjoying the show, please consider subscribing wherever you're listening.

My name is Joel Duggan and joining me as always is a hungry Johnny, or you may know him as Hungrier Pixel Rips Online. Hello. Yes, I am as always pretty hungry. Um but uh having had my breakfast, uh we were able to chat a more about what we eat these days in the render distance, including Joel's pretty impressive sourdough.

If you want some of the uh the the exclusive behind the scenes looks at what Joel has been baking, with photographs included, check out the render distance. It's the extended version of the podcast. We do it every week. Our patrons get a little bit of extra pre and post show. You can find that at patreon.com slash

the Spawn Chunks. Patrons also get to listen to the show live in Discord if they're around, and they also get access to things like our monthly hangouts, the next one of which should be coming up on the last Saturday of this month, which I think is the very end of the month, because we're really close to the end of February at this point. So stay tuned for that and once again if you're interested in supporting the show, patreon.com slash the sport.

Coming up this week on the show, we have more maybe mobs coming to the snapshot. We have changes to the stone cutter and big changes under the rendering hood coming to Minecraft down the line.

Yeah, it's been an interesting week. But first of all, of course, we've got to talk about what's new in our Minecraft lives. And you can kick us off, Joel, what's new on the Citadel? Well, I have been taking a page from your book and I have dug a hole. I Somebody had to. I ended the week last week after finishing up some of the top floor designs. And not really knowing what to do next. Uh, I I could just take the design that I've done in the North Wing and repeat it on all of the other wings.

But I don't have a plan for how to use those functionally. So I'm hesitant to dive in just yet because I'm gonna be working in this area for a while. There are probably gonna be changes to Minecraft that are happening over the next, you know, six months. So I'm gonna see what is gonna come down the line before I make that that call.

There's always something to do in a build this size. And so the main power core that I had mentioned a couple weeks ago, uh, I am still digging out the chamber that that's going to go in. And there's going to be some lighting effects that are happening down in this chamber. I needed to dig it down deeper.

I dug it all the way down to wide zero, so we're at deep slate now. And it's made a big difference. It's not quite as deep as I need to go, but I don't think I have to go a heck of a lot farther. The idea was to just have The bottom look like it is bottomless or at least intimidating from most vantage points within the command center. And unless you go right up to the very edge and look down, you really can't see the bottom from the main level.

From the second level, you can maybe see two or three blocks on the other side of the chamber from where you're standing. So I maybe have to go down. I'm gonna say ten blocks for the sake of a round number. That should probably be pretty safe.

At which point I'm probably going to do some sort of effect, where there's going to be like a black fog effect to make it look like it goes farther. Uh, because I have shaders, if I have any glass down there, they'll reflect any lighting that I have, and that could make it look like it goes farther than it does.

So we'll have to see. I am gonna have some things attached to the side. I'm gonna have some lighting. I have to change or at least figure out what I'm gonna do for the textures. This is not in in any r um way representing how it's gonna look from a color perspective. I don't know whether I'm taking the quartz. And running that down, or whether I'm taking some andesite or a new block and running it down on the outside, and then on the inside, the column that goes up the middle.

It's mostly gonna be lights, like it's mostly gonna be I think copper bulbs are gonna be what I'm using to to have like some observers inside and have like a cascading light pattern that goes up the middle. Uh we'll have to see how that all works out in terms of what other blocks I'm going to use. The whole idea behind it was to have some sort of amethyst crystal in the middle on the top. So I might have to bring in more purple and things to make it all match and look cool, but

I still needed to do all the legwork. So that was just a couple of chill streams at the end of the week. chatting about anything from Predator Badlands to Minecraft updates to Hightail, just kinda hanging out with the the chat room and and digging. Uh and boy did it slow down when I hit the deep slate. I'm used to Insta mine. I'm sure you know all about this. Uh and s actually someone was asking me in in chat if I was gonna switch to moss mining.

for any levels of deep slate and uh probably not because I want to control where it goes. And I don't want it to go up the walls or anything like that. So it's also not a huge space. Like it's it's it's an octagon within octagon in the middle, so it's kinda like an octagon donut that I'm cutting out, not really a giant. If it was a

football field like what you're doing for the David project, I would probably use moss mining. But for this I think I'm just gonna go for the extra layers. But I will I'm sure notice the slowdown in terms of uh how long it takes to to break the block.

Um and other than that, I just worked on the level three north wing, the exterior room where the elevators were. There's nothing really fancy here. All it is is just an extension of the inside design out another ten or twelve blocks into a place where um the

the light you know, like the elevators are. I'm really stumped on how and where I'm gonna put elevators to get up to the fourth floor. Like I really don't know. And that's another reason why I haven't done much more construction this week is because like I I don't want to shoot myself in the foot and have the top level be inaccessible from the inside. So I need to figure out where I'm going to put the next elevator and I don't really have room to put it.

next to these elevators and I don't want to like repurpose one elevator for up and then another one for down. I like I don't want to switch them around because then when you have to go all the way up to the top, it's a lot of running and zigzagging. So we'll have to see. I think I can work it out so that I can hide an elevator in the bulkhead, but then if I do that, it's going to

um come up in the middle of the entryway to the top floor. So like I'm not sure if that's what I want to do either. So we'll have to figure that out.

Yeah, you don't want it to be like a shopping mall where you have to like go around all the f the full length of an area to like reach the up escalator, right? Like you want it to be like convenient enough that it's like a set of stairs stacked directly above the ones that you just uh climbed up or in this case elevators for you, yeah.

Yeah, I I've not decided if I want another small catwalk around that third layer, because that would solve the problem. Because then I could put the elevator to the fourth floor in the corner in the wall and potentially hide it easily and it's not going to affect anything else. So we'll we'll have to see. Um so a couple of things. First of all, um moss mining shouldn't be a problem because moss doesn't spread to anything that doesn't have an air block directly above it.

So it won't climb the walls. What you're thinking of is the way skulk spreads, because skulk will spread to like any blocks that have like an available face. uh with with air next to it. But in Moss's case, not so much. The thing you need to be aware of is if there are any caves below where you're at, then that's when it starts to spread to like the edges of those caves. So I can I can understand wanting control over it and while

It's obviously a pain to dig through deep slate. It's not like a massive area, so you'll you're probably not gonna struggle too much. It's just gonna be like, you know, half an hour to take out a couple of layers where it would normally take you like

three minutes or something, right? Like it takes a yeah a a good while longer. But yeah, I I know the feeling. So so trust me, you're not alone there. I was also wondering on the subject of moss and stuff, like if you're looking for other stuff to put in the wings

of these if you want one to sort of be the observation wing and you want the other ones to have different uses. I've been thinking a lot about space travel just because of running a sci-fi RPG and thinking about what like deep space travel would need. I wonder if like Having something that looks like hydroponics is going on. Like if you've got maybe like some saplings that are placed in such a way that they can't like grow into full size trees.

And then it looks like either they're experimenting on different plant samples or, you know, cloning them or cultivating them for long term uh like, you know, travel through space so that they can seed whatever world they land on with familiar plant life so that they can, you know, have some sort of sustainable setup there. The other option, the sort of like hard sci-fi option, is that that's part of the life support system.

Um there's a movie called Sunshine, the Danny Boyle movie, like really great movie, where they had the life support system that kind of produced and cycled the oxygen was basically like a greenhouse garden that Michelle Yeo's character was kind of working on and I always really loved that idea, regardless of the actual practicalities of the situation.

I think it was really cool that she had like this effectively like garden of plants and like little trees and saplings and stuff that were just all contained in this one room that was where all of the fresh air circulated from. And so I I like the idea if you wanna throw in some stuff that's not all kind of like you've got very clean colours and have like a very specific colour palette and kind of clean lines everywhere and all of the shiny stuff.

If you want to throw in something organic but still make it look like it's part of the sci-fi mission of the whole thing, that might be a fun direction. Thanks. Yeah, I think a greenhouse or or some sort of hydroponics area could be cool, especially because some of these have quite tall ceilings and I've got

room between the floors. So if like I wanted one of the wings to have like a fifteen block ceiling instead of a nine, I would have the room to do that as long as I knew what kind of space I would need for the floor above. So uh I might do that in the same sort of space where like my villager trading hall and my storage room is now. Like that would be a good spot'cause I could potentially grow like a full tree in there or design a custom one uh and and have that be be in there.

Um, I've seen some cool stuff with Minecraft sci fi examples I've seen on YouTube where people have put like saplings inside of little boxes with glass around them and and rods and levers and stuff pointing towards them. And the cool thing about saplings is that they if you can keep them from gl growing, they kind of look like alien plants. Like it depending on on the context. Like a um a sapling for a dark oak tree.

if it looks like it's not a sapling for a tree, but looks like, you know, the top of some sort of root vegetable in context, then like it it it does look a little bit strange. Uh same thing with um Acacia. They're also a little bit weird looking, right? Um, and so and I I have a lot of these floating end rods around, so I was thinking that that could be a cool like grow light.

I could use that as like a like a grow light situation. So that's a cool idea. Yeah, I'll have to I'll have to look at that. Cause right now I still have

Three wings. No, two wings that don't have anything in them. One's a villager trading hall. I was thinking that the villager trading hall works out really well, not only for replenishing the courts that I'm going through like crazy, but also repairing my tools. As I'm going along. You get a lot of XP for trading with villagers.

And I'm trying to think of something else that I would want. Like iron is the easiest way to get emeralds for me. We have an iron farm on the server. I could easily make my own personal iron farm here in in the area, which I'm probably going to do. Uh so having one side as toolsmiths to trade iron with w is a great idea. But then I'm trying to figure out like what do I put on the other side? Like do I want masons to get more stone or terracotta? Do I want

Like what new material do I want? Or is it even a material? Like, do I want to trade with farmers for golden carrots? Like, what is it that I want? I have one farmer that I'm trading with for golden carrots, and that seems to be all I need. Like I I'll hit him up once every two streams, fill up my inventory with golden carrots, and I never have to go back for an you know hours. So I don't think I need a room full of farmers for golden carrots.

So I'm trying to figure out like what other resources I could use because I essentially have access to infinite emeralds. a couple times a day, you know, when I've got my villager trades for iron ingots. So I haven't quite figured out what I want. But if I do, I basically have a template for a villager trading hall. I could just do that again in and have like some main resources available in this command center at that level. So that could be also something I put in those wings.

Yeah, the main stuff I end up buying from villagers is like all the stuff from Stonemasons, which you already know'cause you like you only get a handful of quartz blocks per trade, so that's why you need them in bulk.

But then uh glass from librarians is another one so I don't have to smelt all of the sand and that like I I pretty much exclusively if I'm farming sand it's for T N T or concrete powder and I don't b worry about like smelting sand into glass anymore'cause that's In in the survival guide world at least that's typically what I use.

And then like I'll buy redstone and lapis from clerics so I don't run out of that and have to go mining for it all of the time and like yeah, that that's typically the the stuff that I end up buying for the most part. And then like yeah, food from farmers, but I feel like the farmers most of the time I've got a bulk amount of those just so that I can trade them output from a pumpkin and melon farm to farm more emerald. And then all the blacksmith professions are the ones I trade iron to, so

Yeah, there's uh a minimal amount of stuff that you really need from all of the others. I think in my trading hall I have a few of the professions in larger numbers, maybe like six or eight of them, but then there's a one corner of it is just the like butcher, Fletcher, fisherman, Shepherd, like all of the ones that I don't really buy stuff from in great quantities, because I can farm that stuff much more easily elsewhere.

I can't remember why I decided on Toolsmith. I think it was because of their profession block, which is Like a smithing table. There's a smithing table for one, the weapon smith has a grindstone for the other one. Yeah. Oh it's the I think it's the grindstone, because I could the grindstone I could hide easily. So the grindstone is like

down a block and you you really can't see it because you c the villager blocks the view, but you can see around the villager on both sides. But the grindstone being about the same width as a as a villager is just kind of hidden. Yeah. And so that's what I've used behind them. And so uh I it hides the fact that they're there. I still need to figure out if I want to change the texture on the villagers because it looks kinda strange in the sci-fi area to have these dudes.

And because the grindstone is behind them, I'm looking at the back of their head all the time. Like they only turn around to face me when I come into trade. So it would be kind of fun to have. Some sort of robot that, you know, obviously would turn around, you know, like almost like a kiosk or something. Um, if I could if I could figure it out, it would be fun to turn them into like a vending machine or something, that would be pretty funny. Yeah. Um

There's a couple of designs from from Star Wars that I like for droids. There's one classic droid, I don't remember their name. I think they're called a a a Gronk droid or something like that. Um but they'cause of the noise that they make. But they look they're essentially like a plastic garbage can with legs

with like drier vent legs. Like it's just they're really silly looking. Even w even in the seventies you looked at that and you go, like, I know what that's made of. Yeah, yeah. I've seen one of those at McDonald's. Um so So yeah, I've got some ideas for those, but those are all at like

the the final touches that that will come after I've got more construction. Cause I'm geez, it doesn't even have a roof yet. Like I'm still flying in through the the open ceiling. I did put a roof on on the north wing. That was the other thing that I did was I I adjusted the ceiling and adjusted the roof on the outside. It did increase the roof height by like a block or two, but it's not so much that it sacrifices the

kind of like flat cheese wedge look that I want to maintain. So I was pretty happy with that. Like I it looks good inside and it had had to change outside, but it didn't change by anything too dramatic, which is nice.

Yeah. Well, from one ship to another, in this case I have some stuff to share from Misadventures SMP, where um we're trying to breathe new life into Misadventures SMP after a bunch of people have spent some time away, and we've started a guild system. So uh everyone on the server has been sorted into four different factions.

Uh there are some who are more like uh Greek god inspired kind of things. There are some people who are doing more of like a a dark medieval theme. There are some folks who are more like Faye and mushroom kingdoms and and flower stuff. and in my case I was sorted into the SALT Dogs faction, which means we are very piratical.

And so, uh, I have started on building a guild hall for this pirate faction, um, which we wanted to be like a shipwreck, uh kind of similar to or inspired by uh in the show Lost, they encounter like a galleon from I think like the fifteen or sixteen hundreds.

that's just in the middle of this jungle. Um it's called the Black Rock and it's all overgrown with vines and stuff like that. And we thought if we wanted to have something like that and build up more of like a jungle environment and shanty towns and stuff around it. that was gonna be the plan. Um but the plot size we're working with is relatively small because everyone was given like the same kind of plot to build on. And uh I am not super happy with the way the ship is coming together right

I'm happy with the layout, but I really need to redraft the exterior. So there's there's some stuff about this, even though I'll be sharing screenshots of it, that is probably going to change dramatically by the next time you see it. Mostly because I thought to get the most out of the space It was going to make sense to build things on the diagonal. And building on diagonals is tricky, especially when you want to have stuff that looks kinda detailed, but

I had some success with that when I did my one chunk pirate ship back in the day, which was genuinely a 16 by 16 plot. I built the ship on a diagonal, and it came together pretty well.

In this case, uh it's a larger plot and therefore has more room for detail, but also the side walls look very blocky because they're just going in out, in out, kind of as one block in a on a diagonal. So I'm trying to work on ways I'll probably end up drafting more of it in creative now I have like the the vague idea of what shape we're going with. to try and make it look a little bit more solid and have some sections that are

flatter and and we can sort of work on the details from there. I think the backup plan, if I can't get the design to work out, is to build more around it, because we can have like colourful market stalls and little kind of like pop up taverna kind of bar situations around it, especially'cause it's on a diagonal we have a lot of space on either corner uh that isn't taken up by the ship where we can put some some extra stuff.

Um but the idea is that we have this guild system, this is going to be kind of like our base and where we'll store a bunch of stuff and maybe display trophies if we win certain events and that kind of thing. Because the idea is that we can earn guild points by running dungeons and doing little parkour challenges that people have built around the server.

That allows us to spend those as currency to acquire some of the blocks that are more difficult to get hold of from the resource world on misadventures or that they just aren't available through stuff like villager trading because we don't really have access to that kind of stuff. Um for folks who've forgotten because at this point it's been a while since I talked about it, Misadventures is a shared overworld where we buy plots.

of land using currency that we acquire from running dungeons and things, but there are no pre-generated structures and no mobs spawn in the overworld. If we want to gather mob drops from regular hostile mobs, we can go to the resource world, but there are no s generated structures anywhere there either. Like the only thing that spawns is like I think dungeon uh monster spawners can spawn, but then that world resets every day, so we can't exactly make farms.

So we're trying to find interesting ways of coming up with like ways to get hold of resources in bulk like that. And these guild points allow us to buy stuff that's thematically uh tied into the pirate stuff, so there are little play ahead coconuts that we can buy. and there's a um a banner that's been designed with like a crab with a blue background and so a lot of like blue and orange colours get used in the uh i in in the colour

you know, supply that we have. Uh so we get like cyan concrete and and orange terracotta and like a bit of glaze terracotta and stuff like that that we can buy from like a a specialized trader. There's also talk of like there being a PvP bounty system later on for folks who want to opt into that, so there's a possibility of like a little bit of like faction non faction violence and uh a bit of drama as a result of that for people who like to put that stuff in their videos, but

In my case, uh being back on Misadventures is really fun. I'm teamed up with a bunch of really fun people and I'm mostly just looking to do a little bit more thematic building that's away from my main base project where I committed ages ago to building some sort of sky island situation and then realize that we weren't gonna have access to Elytra and we aren't updating recently enough to have stuff like Happy Ghosts. So building in the sky is a bit of a challenge.

And uh it's nice to have something like this to work on whilst I'm still drafting ideas for how I can make that easy.

I the ship looks good to me, man. I know you wanna change some of the outside bits, but um something I do like about building on an angle for shipfaring vehicles or or vessels like this is that it they do look more

nautical. Like they look more like they could cut through the water when they're on an angle. The the bow of the ship has more of a point to it, or it can, depending on how you design it. Uh whereas The other way around, if it's just on one of the cardinal directions, you end up with like a lot of flat edges on the front part of the ship so it doesn't look like quite as as you know

shapely as as other vessels would. I'm trying to think about what the nautical term for aerodynamic is, but the hydrodynamic, I guess. Hyd hydrodynamic, yeah. Yeah. Maybe Seaworthy. Yeah, seaworthy. Uh but I I also find that like when situations like this, I mean like even with It doesn't matter which way you're building it with

stuff like this, like you kind of want to add details like cannons, but like there's nothing that you can put sideways in Minecraft that really looks like a cannon. But then when you have walls like this, it's also really hard because you don't really have a way to put something straight through the wall. It has to point either to the front or to the back, right? It you can't put it on a on a ninety degree angle to the

side of the ship it has to kind of come out at a forty-five. And I've always thought it would be really cool if we could put things like cauldrons sideways or yeah other things like that sideways to make them look like cannons. Um, but we don't really have anything that that works in that way. But but yeah, I I can see how

Some extra detail on the outside would would help. Are you gonna make it like overgrown like the inspiration from Lost? Like is it gonna have like it's gonna have it have been there a while, I guess, is the whole idea.

That's the idea, yeah. I I wanna make it look at least like good as a baseline before I start doing too much of the extra decoration, but what I think I really need to go in with is a broader palette of blocks so I can do a bit more shading on this rather than like the entire thing currently is made out of a couple of strip logs and then mostly spruce planks.

And I think it's just the sameness of those blocks and the texture just kind of really obviously highlighting where there are blocks Of everything. That's the part that I'm finding difficult to work with right now. But I was really just shaping out the entire thing, making sure we had like a hold where we had storage and everything set up and then there are

several decks, so there's a main deck and like a quarter deck behind that where there's gonna be cabins so that each of us can have like a little room in there. Um, but then there's a a central deck that doesn't have anything else going on in it right now. So we could use that for more storage or we could have like

some other kind of thing in there. And I I like the idea of using it for a variety of stuff and and building out little kind of experiences that bolt onto this being like a hub for our our area. So I think for now I just need to go back to the drawing board a little bit, spend a bit of time in creative working on it and uh and see what I can manage to do to make it not just look like a mess of spruce planks.

But uh yeah, those were really just placeholder until I could figure out the design of things. So uh from here I think I need to either get somebody to help me with the sales or spend a lot of time, maybe even in like something like Axiom, trying to w model out how like sales are going to look on this thing because Even though it is completely landlocked, it's not going to be like the illusion is not going to be that it is out on the water and and sailing anywhere.

I do want there to be some sails on it because it always looks much more impressive when you don't have the sails just like furled and it's like one wool block attached to a spa. You know, I kind of I I want it to look like there's something going on there and I think frankly it will give us an opportunity to do something with the diagonal shape of it, which um you could maybe do easier on a diagonal with the wind kind of filling up a sail than you could uh on like a flat.

plain. Um so yeah, I'll I'll see what I can manage. But y expect to see this a couple more times in upcoming uh upcoming quick logins because I will I will probably end up uh revising this design a little bit when I can. So I was thinking that if you had the sales on an angle

then they would be flat. Like they would be on a cardinal direction. Like if you had them at a forty five degree angle to the actual masts. And that might be easier or allow you to have a little bit more detail or have like a graphic or something that could be clearly visible, like a symbol or a a a guild. emblem or something like that on one of the the sails, uh if you had them on a on an angle.

Um and the other question I had was, are you set on this being brown or would you be open to something else? Cause I did some work in West Hill in the valley on an old abandoned farmstead that was like Polished basalt, uh pale oak. pale moss and it was all that grey dead weathered wood and it it actually worked out pretty well and it was a decent palette to kind of mess around with and you also then have like stairs and slabs and deep slate that you can mess with depending on

on how you wanna go. So that that might be kind of fun for maybe even just part of it, like maybe a a decrepit part of it that's fallen into the soil or something. I like the idea of doing stuff like that with like um dead coral barnacles and things like that. Like I'm pretty sure um it's brain coral or horn coral, one of the two of them always looks kind of like a little bit barnacle y. So

Yeah, like I'll I'll play around with a couple of things. Like I plan on drafting it and then uh messing around with it in a creative copy just so I can so so I can try out a few different things and we'll we'll see what works out the best. But no, I appreciate the suggestion, especially since

I think to the shape of something diagonal like this, stairs and slabs are a pretty crucial element of the materials. So I didn't want to do the entire thing as strip logs. Also because when you're placing strip logs on a diagonal, you can't really keep the um the sideways texture of the logs, they always end up looking like they're uh like up down texture rather than left right textures. So that stuff gets a little bit tricky.

Moving on into the news for this week, we have two new snapshots to talk about. Minecraft Java Edition 26.1 Snapshot 8 was published on Tuesday, February 17th. Get ready to meet the last baby mobs waddling into testing. This week's snapshot brings you the final gameplay features of our upcoming drop. Changes in 26.1, snapshot eight. Updated the visuals of more baby mobs, the panda, oglin, zoglin, strider, and snifflet.

Hitboxes for the baby zombie, husk, drowned, piglin, zombified pigland, villager, and zombie villager have been readjusted to be able to fit in spaces one block high and point five blocks wide. Deep slate can now be directly crafted into cobbled, polished, brick, and tile variants in the stone cutter. Stone can now be directly crafted into cobblestone variants in the stone cutter. Adult horses black dot markings have been updated visually closer to the new baby horse markings.

Updated some of the sound assets for the adult sound variants, fixed a bug where some cat variant sounds weren't played. Some technical changes in Snapshot 8. The data pack version is now 99.2, changes to the Minecraft NBT text component format, additional changes to the slash fetch profile command and the selector text component. The resource pack version is now 81.1, and this adds entity textures for baby mods that received updates in this snapshot. Some fixed bugs of note in snapshot eight.

The highlights of shields in first person are different depending on what hand you have them held in. Bone meal can now be used in certain plants at build height, but they don't grow. Golden dandelions do not stop baby brown mushrooms from aging. and age locked baby bees age while in hives. For the full list of bug fixes and technical changes, check out the Minecraft.net changelog, linked in our show notes at thespawnchunks.com.

The second snapshot came out on February 18th, and that just has a couple of quick bug fixes in it. This is snapshot nine. Kittens repeatedly meow when snuggled up in bed, the game crashes when the entity is outside the world height limit, and entity shadows are elevated when a below underscore name scoreboard objective is active.

There is also an article discussing another step towards vibrant visuals for Java Edition. If you want the full details, check out the article. Once again we'll have that linked in our show notes. But long story short, Java Edition currently uses rendering technology called OpenGL, but OpenGL stopped updating nine years ago and is now being deprecated on Mac OS. In addition, Minecraft has been using an even older version of OpenGL for the sake of compatibility.

So to allow for further improvements to the rendering engine, Java Edition is aiming to switch to another graphics API called Vulcan, which is directly supported on Windows and Linux, and can be supported on Mac through a transition layer, basically a software adapter. To quote the article, we're aiming to bring Vulcan into snapshot testing to start collating feedback sometime over the summer.

Players will be able to toggle between OpenGL and Vulcan while we're in the testing period, and we will stay in the testing period until we're confident that the Vulcan implementation is stable, performant, and ready. Once we're happy with the performance and stability of Vulcan across devices, we will remove the OpenGL implementation. Players will be notified in advance before this happens, and we'll make updates as needed to our minimum requirements specifications. End quote.

The article also highlights that mods which currently rely on OpenGL will be most affected by this change, so the team recommends modders start looking into moving away from OpenGL usage and look at Mojang's internal uh rendering API to help make the transition as easy as possible for visual mods especially.

They have also suggested that modders with feedback on this change can have input on the Discord channel they set up for mod creators to have technical discussions related to vibrant visuals. That channel is linked in the Minecraft.net article too. The article concludes by emphasizing that modernizing the renderer is another important step on the Rose to Vibrant Visuals for Java Edition. Once again, we'll have the linked article in this week's show notes at thespawnchunks.com.

So I'm sure we'll have a few things to say about the changes to OpenGL and Vulcan, but to quickly get through the changes in the snapshot, uh I mean update to baby mobs, I guess, sure, like that seems to be what's happening. Uh I don't really have any thoughts other than th they're cute, great. Uh the real news for me here is the changes to quality of life in dealing with Deep Slate and the Stone Cutter. Same. Yeah. Yeah. Um man.

Uh, as someone that even just this week I actually said, like, hey, you know what? Before I go down in this hole, let me just check to see what my cobblestone storage is like there right now. And I had like three stacks of cobblestone. And as I have redstone components that I needed to build, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna take my

uh fortune pickaxe down into the last couple levels of this stone that I'm digging out to get some extra cobblestone. So I filled up the shulker box with that. But Um, one of the other things that I often run into, especially because I did some digging underneath the Mushroom Island, is trying to craft

the polished deep slate that I'm using everywhere in the build from regular deep slate. And I'm constantly having to lay down three or four stacks of of deep slate in the world, use my fortune pickaxe to break it all back down again, and then create the cobalt. Uh because I just never seem to carry a fortune pickaxe with me all the time. So when I'm down getting deep slate, I just I always just end up with a soap touch pit.

And I don't find the texture of deep slate all that useful. I find it a pain in the butt to place because it's directional. It doesn't look significantly different enough from deep slate for it to be worth getting. And it's just it seems to be just a giant pain. So I had a data pack on the server which is currently not updated.

But uh I no longer have to use it because the data pack was any piece of deep slate, cobbled or otherwise, that you put in the stone cutter gets you the same building options. And that's what they've done. What I did not expect them to do was allow you to do that with stone as well.

And so that's really cool because again, I often have more stone. Once you have silk touch, you're gonna have a lot more stone than you do cobblestone. And to be able to make cobblestone stairs out of a stone block that you put in the in the stone cutter is great quality.

Yeah, no, I fully agree. Like as somebody who's done a lot of digging lately, has a lot of deep slate and I'm on the fence about like whether or not I want to stockpile regular deep slate because yeah, it's a pain to build with, but having vertical texture, again, we were talking about like the way the strip log texture works, like

There are some cases in which that works for transitions to something like smooth basalt and you having a bit more control over that stuff is good, but it is really a pain to place. So I'm always in two minds about whether I want to commit to doing that, and I try and work it into builds where I have an adjacent block that I can just build it up the side and not have to worry about like putting temporary blocks in just to scaffold so that I can have the deep slate facing the right way.

But either way, I definitely harvest more Silk Touch Deep Slate just because Silk Touch feels like my default pickaxe. Like I'm gathering ore blocks instead of the products of ores because I just don't need those and the ore blocks are more interesting to me.

And so I've always got a silk touch pickaxe on me. I've usually got the fortune on me as well, but just not having to switch is really nice because now you can just throw the the result in a stone cutter. And it's always slightly baffled me, although I can understand it for the purposes of Diversifying gameplay and making it more interesting. But natural stone is the one that makes all of the brick variants and the chiseled stone brick and everything. Whereas

like natural deep slate doesn't get you anything at all, and you have to have the cobbled deep slate to even make a start on the different crafting trees. So that having been not necessarily solved in the crafting interface, but solved in the stone cut. is absolutely fine by me. Like I think it's nice that we have the option to do that.

And while I don't think we can switch it back from cobbled deep slate to deep slate using the stone carter, you do have the option of smelting it. So if it turns out you actually didn't need all of that cobbled deep slate and you wanted the regular stuff, you can still transform it back. And it can be done sort of off screen. It's the kind of thing that doesn't have to be done through just sheer effort of placing the blocks and breaking them again. Like

Being able to do that stuff a stack at a time, it's like being able to wax copper blocks in the crafting interface instead of having to wax them individually by right clicking on them in the world. It just saves a little bit of time doing something tedious and gives that time back to the player to

continue working on a build or whatever you happen to be doing. So yeah, I agree. I think that's that's the main thing that interests me about this snapshot because yeah, frankly, I the baby mobs are cute and that's all I have to say about them either.

Um I've seen the community had something to say about the black dot horse markings. Uh there's a Reddit thread that I will have linked in the show notes. Um just people saying, was this really necessary? And it's a side by side of the old horse markings with the newer ones. And the adult's markings now feel like a much more high contrast. Set of spots.

less less natural than they used to, although maybe that's just people being used to the the old versions and like it's a change and and changes are often like jarring for people. Um but it matches the new baby horse texture rather than the baby horse being modified to match the adult horse texture. One commenter even compared it to a QR code, which I thought was quite funny. They were joking about how if if you scanned it it probably took you to uh a Rick Astley video.

Um so yeah, that that was um A a little bit of like uh push back against the redesign of the black dot horse markings, but Generally speaking, as somebody who doesn't interact with horses much, I think that's something that we would probably just get used to, and if they're consistent texturally between the adult and the baby, that seems to be make more sense than it sort of changing significantly as the baby grows into an adult and suddenly looks very different to how they start.

It's been months since I've looked at a horse in Minecraft. Like I think the last time was when I was flying around getting like grass clippings or something for decorating in in West Hill and I had to go into a field where there's a couple of natural horses walking around. That was a year ago probably.

Yeah. And you're on a mushroom island now. Yeah. Like it's it's a monoculture. Yeah, it's all just mushrooms. That's all I see everywhere. Uh and th and they are everywhere. Like they really do populate the island quite quite

Um steadily. And because I don't have to sleep, I'm constantly just like letting the nights roll through, sometimes letting weather roll through if I if I have to,'cause I can't sleep yet. And so there's a lot of brown mushrooms around too because they've been hit by lightning. So there's a fair amount

uh moving round. I've not run into any babies as far as I can tell. But I've also I've loaded the entire island, so any babies that were naturally there upon generation have grown up into adults and I'm not doing anything with the the mushrooms to breed them, so I'm not seeing any any babies. I mean and I'm still on an older version of Minecraft, obviously I'm not running on the snapshot, so I wouldn't see the new the new mushroom babies anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, once you uh once you do roll forward into the this snapshot uh or or into the the full release version of what we're seeing in snapshots now. You could always like Golden dandelions, some of those baby mushrooms if you wanted to keep them around, but

That's you know, the it it it depends whether or not that's something that you feel like is consistent with what you're trying to build there. And if you don't want these little like alien cows running around then like I suppose well like there's there's not really much point in doing it.

If I had more experience with making animation for Minecraft, it would be very cool if I could create a new model and a new animation for the mushrooms and the brown mushrooms because then I could add like an alien animal to my landscape. and not have it affect anybody else on the server and probably w and wouldn't affect me flying back to West Hill for something, the cows there would just look like reg regular cows for a medieval build. Like it wouldn't affect them.

So there there are some unique opportunities in a Mushroom Island that I've I've thought about, but I they require a lot of back end for not a lot of really on screen reward because I'm not even sure if I'm gonna pave paradise. Like I don't think there's gonna be any mushroom island left by the time I'm done. I think it's more I'm keep I keep on coming back to more of like a Tron vibe.

when I think about the outside of this place. So I don't know exactly how I'm going to to move forward. But there'd be a talking about um moving material like deep slate and stone, there's a lot of mycelium that has to go somewhere too. So I don't know what's happening there.

Yeah. Um as somebody who's I know you're a PC gamer now, but you definitely started playing Minecraft on Mac OS. Uh so the the switch to Vulcan probably sounds like good news to you just from somebody who's had the experience of playing on Mac OS and you you're probably fairly happy that that can continue.

I meant to reach out to my friend Alistair before I started the show because uh on newer Macs I'm wondering whether this is gonna be something advantageous where it'll take advantage of like new capabilities and and better processing and stuff like that. But yeah, I started off on a MacBook the thirteen inch MacBook Pro probably from twenty ten is the machine that I had at the time.

when I was messing with with Minecraft. I quickly moved to an I Mac. I bought the i Mac in twenty seventeen. So I wasn't on the old MacBook for very long. Uh I then also tried on an older PC laptop, but um I would say like I I'm looking forward to the

transition, especially if it helps performance. I I it will affect me in terms of how it affects the mods that I use because currently even with a decent gaming PC and I don't remember my specs, but people can go to my Twitch page and see them in the about section. Um, but I do have like a new AMD video card as of Christmas.

uh and it's a forty sixty I think and I still don't get like top performance out of Minecraft a fifteen plus year old game and so I'm wondering if this switch to Vulcan while a small pain period will happen with mods not working and possibly them getting the settings and the efficiency for it correct from Mojang uh on the other side of that if It runs faster and better for everyone.

Uh, and then the people that have good PCs, not the beefy ones, but like if someone has like a decent gaming PC, if they get a lot of performance output out of Minecraft at the after that, I mean that's a win. Uh so I'm curious to see. I don't know enough about the back end to know like what the real restrictions are with OpenGL and what the differences with Vulcan and other than just like an old system versus a new system and new being more flexible, obviously rolling forward.

Um because I think the article said that Mac no longer supports OpenGL or it w or it won't in the future? That's that's the the main reason I ask is that yeah, it's being deprecated on Mac and it just won't be supported because it's already nine years since it was last updated.

So, you know, we haven't seen changes to OpenGL since like twenty seventeen and apparently yeah Minecraft is using an even older version of that that's still compatible with a lot of Mac OS stuff, but in the not too distant future probably won't be. um just with OS moving forward on on the Mac and everything. So yeah, I th I think it's it's very good news that they're looking at switching to something that is

supported cross platform and uh on Mac at least is is uh a able to be adapted with minimal performance impact. Like it seems to be like near lossless what they're able to do with it. Um I took a quick look, like a cursory Wikipedia search. uh at rendering APIs and Vulcan in particular. And what I got from that was that it seems to be better at using the resources of multi core CPUs. That's one of the reasons it was developed in the first place was to address that deficiency in OpenGL.

and it seems to have a a a a better like performance rating on systems like that that have multiple cores and just generally speaking like lower performance overhead for CPUs.

And that's good news for vibrant visuals because it means that's, you know, a lower performing um rendering setup in the first place means that they have more room to build on top of that with graphical enhancements, whether that's vibrant visuals or, you know, other atmospheric effects, particles, that kind of stuff should hopefully end up having like, you know, being o adding up to a um a performance impact that is not going to be as bad for even lower end systems potentially than it was.

Um provided that they're all compatible with Vulcan and once again uh I should draw everyone's attention to the point in the article where they said we may need to update the minimum system requirements for Minecraft after that change because Some older GPUs or CPUs may not be able to handle Vulcan the same way that modern equipment would.

This is, on the other hand, another instance in which I count myself fortunate to not be a mod developer because obviously you'll have a lot of people going, Okay, it's business time again because like instead of just doing the sort of rolling updates to deal with new features that Minecraft adds and and account for a couple of the other rendering changes they've made. This is like an entire API that needs to change. Um and it would be great again to hear from anybody in the community who has

direct experience with rendering mods and this kind of stuff. Like if if you're coding some of this stuff yourself, what does the change from OpenGL to Vulcan mean to you? And does this feel like you've got enough notice that you can start making those changes next? Because I hear on the grapevine that some of the folks involved with sodium and iris are already talking about like

This is how this is gonna change for us. We're already working on a version. There are hypothetical versions of sodium that work with Vulcan already. I did a quick Google search for that and there are some mods that effectively inject a Vulcan rendering engine into Minecraft instead of relying on the open GL1. And that's community-made stuff. So hopefully once the developers are able to codify this and set it out as their own own internal rendering API.

with all of the code no longer being obfuscated, that's something that modders can hopefully work with long term and hopefully that will make life a little easier for everybody as this transition happened. Yeah, sodium is one of the mods that I use to improve performance but also give me some more granular control over the game and how it performs on my PC, so Uh when that gets updated, I mean that'll be essential to to rolling forward with with things on the Citadel anyway.

Uh I use Iris as well, but I I think it was Wormbo in our in our Discord that was sharing that the iris mod is just gonna go away and there's gonna be replaced by a new one called Aperture, I think was the name of it. That's what I've heard.

Yeah, and that's directly from the the person developing the the mods. And I mean tip of the hat to the folks that are doing these because like that's not it's not a job. It's not like they get paid, you know, to necessarily develop these mods is full time because I don't think you can under the Minecraft license.

Um, so it's uh it's cool that people are putting in the efforts to keep these mods going. Um I think at most people can have like a Patreon or something like that as they're doing like open source coding. So but it's uh it's uh above my pay grade is is what I will have to say. Hold that.'Cause yeah, that's very cool stuff that that the community is able to do, uh, but complicated for for me to wrap my head around.

For sure, yeah. But good that Mojang is keeping open lines of communication about this stuff and not just springing a change like this on us when they're ready to make it happen, right? They've said this isn't gonna be until summer. And so obviously to a certain extent that gives us a bit more of a timeline on vibrant visuals going like okay it's gonna be pushed

far beyond like summer as a potential like launch date. Like they're they're just looking at changing the rendering engine at that stage. So Vibrant Visuals is again gonna be potentially months, if not a year or more out from that. So Um at least we have some communication on that topic and so I think it's good that we we keep those lines of communication open moving forward.

Speaking of moving forward, we're going to jump into the email for this week. If you'd like to email the show, the address is spawnchunkmail at gmail.com. Keep the emails short and concise if you can. It does help us include them in the episode. And if you're a patron, let us know in the subject line because we file those differently because sometimes we'll read a patron email in the post show so that we know that the patron is going to have access to hearing their email read.

Johnny's got the first one. Yes, this one comes in from BimDroid with the subject of more mob variants. Hey Pix'Joel, I've been a Minecraft fan and player for a long time, and have only recently tried Minecraft Dungeons and Minecraft Legends.

Now with the addition of animal retextures and the baby mobs which are technically variants, do you think it will be a good idea for Mojang to adapt more variants and even add biome-specific variants to mobs, just like how Dungeons has such a diverse mob pool? We already have zombie and skeleton variants, but how about the untouched mobs like creepers, slimes, or illegers?

Also with the addition of the Golden Dandelion, which is quote unquote magical, I feel like Lapis Lazarus is being left out as the OG magical item and needs to be more involved similar to how it's used in Minecraft Legends. Let me know what you think. BimDroid was blown up by a retextured creeper camouflaged in the snow. I think Bim Droid sounds like a really good Star Wars character. I feel like Bim would be something that you'd hear someone shout down a ship

You know, alleyway, just like BIM, fix the hyperdrive, something like that. And it's like B one M five C or something like that. Like it's got some kind of designation and it's just like, I'll call you BIM. Welcome to the crew, Bim. Yeah. Exactly. Um Unless some sort of animation update

player engagement change or game plan change is added to new mob variants. I don't think spending the design time and resources from the art department on new hostile mob variants is really all that exciting. Like I you know If a slime That's orange or blue or green or or purple just

drops more slime balls that are also green and do the exact same thing, uh, that the other slime balls do and they don't create more building blocks or different colored sticky pistons, then like I that's not something that I find all that exciting. Um I would hope that

If they're going to make those changes, they would make those changes more with a reason behind them. Uh also, I don't know that people necessarily want creepers to be Chameleons and turn into sand or snow or I feel like that's that's a mod or a data pack that I've seen around in

one of the things that I've heard as feedback from that is like it's a lot harder because like you're just you're so trained to see this green bean hobbling around the landscape and they stand out like a sore thumb in a snow or a or a desert biome. But if they're start the the camouflage, then it becomes a lot more difficult to spot them.

Yeah. Yeah, like I think there's There's a time and a place for it, and I think that time and that place was Minecraft Dungeons, maybe a little bit of Minecraft Legends, also in Minecraft Earth. Where it was kind of like more of a collect'em up kind of thing and you could make little dioramas with them, but There are some mobs in that list, especially for thinking back to the stuff that's in Minecraft Dungeons, that I kind of go, where would you put it?

There were tropical slimes were a great example of this where they were blue, kind of ocean blue colour and they had tropical fish swimming around inside the body of the slime. Right. Like really cool, compelling design. Where do you put that in Minecraft? Because there are like three places where slimes can

spawn and none of them are oceans. So it sort of feels c incongruous with what you typically get. Like maybe you could get them in mangrove swamps where you get tropical fish in the pools of water there. But slimes spawn so infrequently there because the terrain is so dense and the trees are filling up any spaces where slimes can spawn that you see them so infrequently and there'd really be no point in doing that when it was a version of a mob that nobody was really ever gonna see.

We already have that argument being pitched at stuff like the parched or the bogged, where, you know, at least the bogged are in trial chambers, so you see those occasionally, but you don't tend to spend enough time in swamps that you really see them naturally unless you're doing really specific gameplay. And the same goes for the parch. Like I haven't seen a parch just because I haven't been to a desert since the update rolled.

And so yeah, there are some elements of that that I just think it's a cool idea to have these variants in the game, but you've sort of gotta place them tactically and Like in terms of the practicality of how frequently people are going to run into them, it seems like you get diminishing returns from the amount of effort the team is.

Putting in on that. At least with these baby mobs, they're all breedable animals. There are advancements that require you to breed the animals, so you're gonna see all of them at least once if you're advancement hunters. And Yeah, I I feel like this is while I I don't necessarily think this is an update that we need.

I am fully prepared for Mojang to queue this up for the twenty seven dot one drop. It's gonna be the spring drop next year as they work on the sort of how do we refresh something at the beginning of every year for spring? And we've already had plants, we've already had baby mobs and now it's gonna be like You know, mob variants or something like that potentially next time.

I'd rather them come up with something new. Like rather than just a variation of say like a slime. I'd rather if they ever get around to updating the end, I'd rather them put something in the end that is slime like, slime inspired. Maybe it's magenta or purple, maybe it's more like the gelatinous cube from D and D, you're like maybe it's more of a more hostile or hostile in a different way. Maybe it's

slow. Maybe it's fast. I don't know. Maybe it's like the snail from Neverending Story. And even though it's le it's gross and gloopy, it moves faster than baby zombies. I don't know. Like it's just whatever like whatever would be the weirdest thing that you could do. Uh I would rather see something like that in a new space.

Where, especially if it's in a new dimension or a dimension that's not linked to the overworld, that would give them some freedom for like, okay, it doesn't have to act like existing slimes. We can have it be different spawning rules, different gameplay mechanics, different model, different everything. And I think that that would be a a good way to go. But I I'd I'd rather see them attack something new because I do feel like when they try to update older mobs.

They feel very tied to the way they exist in the model and the way that they move in the world currently, which is old. And then you get something that's new, like a frog or a sniffer, and their movement and model feel way more modern as far as Minecraft is concerned. Uh, and I'd rather them come up with something new rather than a variant of something old.

I would agree with that for sure. Uh what do you think of the second half of this email with the uh lapis lazuli being potentially used in more magical ways? So off the top of my head I've always thought it was a little bit strange that Lapis was used for the magical stuff, but then really not much.

else and that changed obviously with armor trim because I think you can use it in armor trim. Yeah. Um and I guess they do separate the ores into like the building tool weapon ores like Copper and iron and diamond and then the other uses like uh redstone and lapis. Gold obviously breaks that mold because you can use it in a couple of different ways. Uh, but then

Redstone is also not just a single use. You can use that in brewing as well. So maybe lapis could be used in brewing somehow, but maybe that's get convoluted. I I don't know, because you have to You have to s know like w where to put it and I I feel like the brewing thing is not as intuitive as as Players that have been playing for a while were all used to it because either we were told or we looked it up online.

Or watched a YouTube video about it. I I don't know that new players really grasp brewing quite so quickly. Um whereas in the Enchanting table, I believe there's like a little silhouette outline of lapis. So there's like there's a visual there's a visual hint that you should put it there. And

in the brewing stand, they've got that for blaze powder, but I don't think they have that for anything other than the bottles. The the ingredient section is like a wide open, you have to try everything sort of situation. So so yeah, I don't know. I la I feel like some things like that could be more useful, but then Magic in the game seems to have like a couple different systems. There's not just one.

And so I don't know where it fits in. Other than enchant like I guess having it only be involved in enchanting keeps it simple and then you don't have to worry about trying it in other things. But I don't know. This actually took me down a bit of a wiki deep dive because of calling Lapis the OG magical item and I was like, I don't think that's actually true because I remember playing on the Xbox three sixty edition

back when Lapis wasn't even required for enchanting. You just put your tool in an enchantment table and you see what you get. Um and Lapis was only added to enchanting from Java Edition 1.8 onward. And before that it was just a die item and a building block. And so as far as the OG magical item, golden apples were in beta. Like they were I think they were in versions before beta as well, but they officially got codified and with like regeneration effects and stuff from beta 1.8.

Whereas Lapis was full release one point. That's about the time I started playing on PC. Um Enchanted Golden Apples ended up getting added in one point three point one and that's when they had like a bunch more effects added in when like potion brewing was more of a system at that stage. So Lapis actually hasn't been magical for all that long in the grand scheme of what Minecraft magic is.

And in Minecraft Legends it's mostly used as a resource to spawn mobs. You tend to collect it almost like to bump up the number of units that you can spawn in and y they're like a cost for generating stuff at mob spawners, which is what you build to create like your army in Minecraft Legends.

I'm not sure what the equivalent of that is in vanilla Minecraft. Like maybe Something that you could pay Lapis to reduce trial spawner cooldown or something if you wanted to tie the two together more mechanically. But I don't really feel like there's a lot else that Lapis can apply to without an overhaul of the magic system in general and splitting it away from just being um like i an enchanting fuel and more being like related to magical stuff in general.

But yeah, since Minecraft doesn't seem to want to commit heavily to there being like spells you can cast and the sort of magic system that way, I I struggle to see what else you could really use Lapis for. I think potion brewing is a possibility, but It feels like i the intensification of potions is already covered by glowstone. The duration is already increased by

Redstone, what does Lapis do at that stage? Like I I can't think of anything other than maybe diluting a potion, which doesn't really feel like a system anybody wants to use. Yeah, I could see if they added spells to Minecraft as some sort of ranged weapon or ranged ability. I could see lapis emerald and maybe amethyst crystals being used as like the tip of a wand to cast different types of spells, you know, like arcane or

earth spells or I guess lapis is blue, so maybe like ice or winter frozen spells or something. That could be kind of fun. Um I can't see it really being used in in much more. I there's always part of me that wants more building blocks out of those materials because like iron and lapis and gold are some pretty cool looking blocks.

And at end game you can get a lot of them. In the early game not so much, but uh it would be fun to be able to create certain designs, you know, inlay, you know, lapis stairs into a build so that it looks like it's gilded in this in this nice blue

stone that would look really cool with like a sandstone build or maybe move in some glazed terracotta to match the blue, like that kind of stuff. But it would probably require a retexture of the lapis block for it to be more homogeneous with other blocks in the game that have the same color blue'cause the other thing I find is that sometimes the

the m or blocks don't really line up with other blocks in the game that kinda stand out. And so it's difficult to to figure out a b the good way to to do it. And also, um Lapis is not something that that has like that dual ore state. Like copper and gold have like the raw copper and gold. Uh and iron has raw.

raw iron. Whereas lapis and redstone you still just get like the drop from the block as opposed to any kind of raw thing that you then have to smelt. I guess'cause it's more of a gemstone or a mineral than it is a an ore thing. Yeah. Kind of g smelting down. So Um, yeah, so there's no there's no application in the furnace. I mean maybe that can change. Like maybe that's something that they could use, like add heat to lapis, like smelt it into something else.

could make it more um more interesting. And and that could also keep it as something separate. Like it's magical until you bake it and then it's a building block or it comes in it's something else entirely. So that could be kind of fun too. This seems like one to turn over to the listeners. If you have any ideas for how else lapis could be used in Minecraft, write in. Continue the discussion. We'd love to hear from you.

Our next email comes from Recember, Locking Crop Ages. Hiya Pixin Joel. This doesn't feel like a particularly unique idea, but I figured I'd throw it out there in case you haven't heard it from anyone else. What if golden dandelions could be crafted into some kind of crushed golden dandelion, the same way that other flowers can be crafted into dyes? You could use the crushed golden dandelion on crops to lock their growth state.

The concept keeps the internal logic of the golden dandelion stopping things from aging while avoiding the whole plants don't have mouths thing. Let me know what you think. Risinber tried eating a golden dandelion and discovered eternal use.

I think we need a uh little shop of horrors answer to the whole plants don't have mouths thing, but uh yes, now we've uh We we we have a I I think we've seen variants of this idea, but I think this idea is expressed very succinctly in Risimba's emails, so this is definitely a good one to uh to bring for the discussion. Yeah, I

was wondering if the golden dandelion would just end up being something that you can craft into dye. Like would they just have it not craft into anything or would they say, Well, it looks just like a dandelion, it's just a different color. Uh I doubted they were gonna give us a gold die. So I thought maybe it's just gonna be yellow die. Uh but I think it's a solid concept. I like the idea of of it being crushed down into something, especially because

It's gonna be intuitive for players, I think, to try to put it in the crafting interface and see what comes out. Because all of the other flowers that you collect basically do the same thing. Uh not the new ones from the sniffer, but like the like the basic flowers that you get for dying. And so I guess you could just communicate that to a player with

a new recipe unlock when they pick up a golden dandelion and or an achievement to say like, Oh hey, you should try using golden dandelion dust to adjust your crops or something like that and see what happens. And that would kind of entice players to try that out. Um I was wondering about brewing golden dandelion itself or this dust. into a potion or splash potion in the brewing stand because

uh redstone dust and glowstone dust are both used in brewing. And if the golden dandelion dust had the same shape, the same silhouette, but a different color, as those, then I think that also might hint to players, hey, try this in other places where you've also used those things. And that could be useful as well. And now just right then as I said that, I wonder if Golden Dandelion Dust could be used to

augment redstone in any way. Like you know, make it waterproof or stick to walls or I don't know. I feel like that could be an interesting interesting thing. Uh golden dandelion dust as like a vertical wire for Minecraft could be fun. Um I don't have The same sort of like

reservations that you might have, I think, on the golden dandelion dust on crops. I think there it would be useful to be able to stop the crops from from growing. I feel like the only way I could think about doing it was like I said a splash potion and that would end up with Accuracy issue. Uh I, as someone that spent a lot of time landscaping the um croplands in West Hill, would want to be able to go block by block to say, you grow, you grow, you don't grow.

and all throughout my crop lands to make sure that they looked the way that I wanted to. And I think that that would mean specifically just holding the dust in my hand and sprinkling it on the thing in front of me. I guess in the same way that you wax or unwax copper, right? Like you don't want to throw a splash potion of wax or unwax at blocks because like some of those blocks you're going to want to keep

a certain way and I don't find that the splash potions are all that accurate. I mean they do what they say on the tin, but like hitting a specific four blocks with one is di more difficult than I think it should Yeah, yeah, like I like the idea more generally. I definitely think it's a a good idea to discuss this now while we're looking at like mob growth and everything. Um I think while ideas like this feel good on paper, there are some issues applying.

And I think in the individual dust model of this.

I think it's easy to accidentally break crops, whether it's like a player misclicking or players or mobs trampling the farmland, it's much easier to do that than to accidentally kill a baby pig that you've given the golden dandelion to, right? So I think Like while while there are some crops that you would want to apply this to, like a lot of people like to have sugarcane that only grows too high for like a little kind of garden diorama or something.

Um like the same would go for multi block plants like that as well. Like you can break sugarcane just by accidentally errant left click and it's you know, the whole plant's broken, which means you've just wasted the resource that you've spent on trying to freeze it at a certain age.

Um and the same goes for stuff like cactus and whatnot to a certain extent. So I think that's part of the problem is the potential for waste if you end up like clicking on these crops and then breaking them by mistake. the solution to that would be, well, we can make them harder to break or make them unbreakable, but that leads to other gameplay problems, like what if a baby zombie starts coming at you through those crops and you need to break them so you can retaliate by hitting it?

Well now you can't break the crop anymore and the baby zombie is just gonna be able to hit you through it. So there's there's like a a few little issues like that. Um and uh I I expect that the typical use case for golden dandelions is going to be players just want to freeze one or two mobs in small scenes, like you've got a couple of like baby sheep running around a barnyard or something like that.

Um, in terms of crops, there are potentially fields that players might want to freeze at a certain age. And that's where I think the splash potion idea makes a certain amount of sense, but already has some of the pros and cons that you've discussed and I think that might be a case in which if you want one or two to stay like if you want one or two to still grow while the ones around them are all frozen from the splash potion effect, then maybe you break and replace a couple of those crops.

Um but even then you still have the problem that like Spreading it around that way is less accurate. Um and compared to the way that we use like we can currently use shears on kelp or cave vines to stop them from growing, and that consumes one durability on a very cheap tool to craft. Whereas when you've got golden dandelions in the mix, they currently use eight gold nuggets to craft.

So I think even like a one to four crafting ratio for crushed golden dandelion and then turning it into splash potions, it still feels a little resource intensive for the output of the effect.

And it doesn't necessarily line up with the other mechanics we have in the game for preventing plants of a certain age from from growing. Um Even if we wanted to take this idea like a step further, the video game mechanics part of my brain could imagine a similar effect if you plant a golden dandelion and bees pollinate from. And then if they dust the crops with pollen the same way they do when they've been to regular flowers,

this golden pollen could have the opposite effect. It could freeze the crops at their current aging stage as the bee kind of drifts over them. And in that sense you can spread it infinitely because you're not having to worry about the resources consumed'cause the bee is doing it for you. But even that is sort of an esoteric mechanic. It has the inverse effect of the normal bee crop pollination relationship, which might not be very intuitive.

Um golden dandelions don't currently attract bees, uh so we'd have to, you know, implement something like that. And probably requires a very different pollinated texture for the bees, so you could tell when they've been to this flower versus that flower. And then mechanically you might expect it to change honey too. So I feel like each one of the ideas we could bring to the table about this has several like

pros and cons columns that fill up with potential hazards of implementing something like that Yeah, I think that the the confusion and I appreciate the whole clicking and and breaking something'cause I did that a lot when I was just m mulling around the different fields and I would put something down, get the way that I would look and then misclick and you know, um remove it or

Uh again using endgame tools, click through something where you're mining a block or it with a shovel or you're trying to remove some grass with shears and then you end up sh removing the shears

the the they remove the grass, the bush, the thing that was on the bush, like I mean everything kind of goes, right? And so I I could see that being a potential problem. Um I I guess you could go go with the opposite process for like the splash potion where rather than trying to splash only the things that you want to keep

uh from growing, splash everything and then go back through and remove the the ones that you want to grow and then just have those be um the part that you decorate. Just like reverse the the process there. Yeah, I just I feel I feel like players would want More precise control overall.

uh on this and I don't know, maybe the solution is just waxing plants. You know, like maybe that's what we need to do. Yeah, yeah. Or like um some sort of yeah, some sort of ice thing or something. Like I I think about the way um in

frozen biomes you end up with a lot of crops not growing because the water sources are frozen and that kind of thing. And so like the the ground hardening and it being harder for them to to grow any further like I think about some of the plants in my garden even, like they will grow to a certain point and then we have like a cold snap of weather and they're like, Oh we're we're holding on for a moment so yeah, maybe there's there's some way that Mojang could implement like ice.

slowing stuff down if it's placed underneath the soil or something like that. There's there's a few potential implementations, but yeah, it's it's it's really about like how practical they are in any given situation. I think there's gonna be pros and cons. It's not gonna work for everybody whichever way they slice it.

Moving on to the main discussion this week, which is actually from another email sent in by Bali684, a landscape artist member in our community, and the subject of the main discussion is forgotten Minecraft features. Hi Johnny and Joel, longtime listener, first time emailer.

Over the last couple of years, Mojang has introduced several features that seemed ripe for expansion. One standout is Armor Trim. Since their introduction, nearly every new update has added fresh trim templates and color options. But other features like archaeology and sniffers weren't quite so lucky.

Personally, I'd love to see additions to these underdeveloped features. Imagine archaeology expanding to the nether with suspicious soul sand and deeper nether lore, or maybe sniffers could discover new types of ancient flowers to dega. Which quote unquote forgotten Minecraft feature would you love to see Mojang revisit to expand in an upcoming update? Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Valley six hundred eighty four was blown up by a gas while attempting to brush every soul sand block in the soul sand valley. It'll happen, it'll happen. And I think at the time when archaeology was being implemented, a lot of people had that sort of scope creep thought of what if this gets added to the nether and what if we can have like archaeology that takes place in other other biomes and it's an overworld thing for now, but I I definitely think there's potential for stuff like that to

advance in future. I think it's something that they could they could add if they had bigger ideas for the nether biomes, I think, because if you just added that as a single block to the nether. I feel like dried gas. sort of work they kind of crept in slightly, but there didn't need to be an entire experience around using Happy Ghosts in the Nether because their main I feel like their main home now is the overworld.

So um yeah, it it'd have to I think come along with like a a biome expansion or some sort of overhaul of the nether that just introduced like archaeology as a like a little feature of things instead of it just being like, and now there are suspicious blocks everywhere. I don't think that would necessarily go down as well with players, right?

Yeah, I think one of the hesitations that I have or two of the ex uh hesitations I have on expanding archaeology is that if it creates or expands on the lore in otherwise vague areas that kind of reduces the imaginary gap that players are left to fill. You know, like maybe you have to come up with a new build in the nether because you're just you don't know how the nether got there. You don't know where gass are from. You don't know

um where wither skeletons are from or blazes. And if you ended up with archaeological digs that kind of uncovered that or hinted at that, which is what something that Bally mentioned in their email, um, I think that that might step on some of the build ideas or just lore that people build up in their head. Um and and the thing is like if you're Starting new worlds or joining new servers, and you're like, well, the last time I built the Nether, I had this idea for Laura, but

This this time I'm gonna use a different backstory for my build. But if the game tells you what the backstory is, then you don't have that flexibility. So I can see them maybe being hesitant there. And I don't mean any shade to any archaeologists out there. But my guess is that as a Minecraft feature. most average players it was novel at the time, but it doesn't hold engagement.

all that well compared to other things in Minecraft. Uh especially with new players. Uh and I say that not so much new players to the game, but like just Players in twenty twenty six. Like if you're a young video game player, if you're a young Minecraft player, I don't know if archaeology is going to be as enticing or as engaging for the general public as other features in the game like trial chambers uh or building or doing other things that are are are more um expressive.

What we need is a new Indiana Jones movie to get people excited about archaeology again. Wait, wait, bad idea, bad idea. Back up on that one. Um

Yeah, like I I kind of agree. I th I think archaeology, while it's a good system to expand in future, you risk maybe alienating people who aren't all that keen on it as a mechanic and so I think it's good if Mojang looks a little further afield to establish new mechanics that might potentially get the attention of people like speed running is so popular and has been for a while now that I wonder if something like timed challenges might be possible in a world that could be

a more viable way of getting people interested in that thing. But obviously that's going to alienate people whose, you know, motor reflexes and dexterity aren't quite up to speed. So it it's gonna be interesting to see how that kind of stuff ties in to everything.

Um as far as forgotten mechanics and and forgotten features, there is obviously low hanging fruit here and it's the stuff that we hear about quite frequently via email already, like the fletching table and echo shards and you know, updates to the end dimension and that kind of thing.

So I'm gonna steer clear of that and I am going to pitch weather as a system that I think needs expansion. And we've we've danced around this topic in the past, so I'll try and keep this relatively brief. But Especially if we're having more opportunities to develop the way rendering can work in the game as the game transitions to Vulcan, this seems like a neat idea to explore once we get there.

C so we currently have three weather patterns, uh which are clear, rain slash snow, depending on which biome you're in, and thunderstorm. And these are all global, and I think with the world now being divided after caves and cliffs into different regions of heat and humidity, I think there is potential for weather to be more localized. To a certain extent there is already precedent for this because deserts and um Badlands biomes don't get rain when the rest of the world is getting rain.

Um, you fly through a river biome that's going through a desert and you get rained on for a small patch and then it goes away again as soon as you're in like the sand dunes on the other side. So that always feels a little bit strange. And I kind of wonder if maybe

that can be adapted a little bit more. Um, one of the praise uh that I heard regularly from uh people playing Hytale was how the atmosphere of that game really contributed to the experience of exploring different biomes. And so The obvious stuff here is like mist and fog would be great for creating atmosphere and you could control the player experience.

uh without needing to manually adjust render distance, which is what some people now do in order to get a feeling of like the mist kind of creeps in around the edges of things and It feels a bit like playing Minecraft back in 2010 when there was a very limited render distance just because of the hardware restrictions on things. And I think fog wouldn't need to obscure vision entirely because we already have a bit of render fog for distant objects.

I kind of like the idea of it pulling in a little bit, but still being able to see some of the landscape around you in silhouettes and just like reducing maybe even like toning down like the saturation of stuff at a distance so that you saw a bit more like a a monochrome sort of view as you looked out towards distant built and then you know the colour sort of creeps back in as you approach.

Um I can see this conflicting with some players' desire, especially right now where a lot of people are using s mods like Voxy or Distant Horizons to extend their render distance. Some people want to see four miles around. But I can also see those players just opting to remove weather altogether, the same way people texture out stuff like rain or uh try and limit the amount that that weather has any effect on their world to begin with.

I think from there you also go to things like it being cloudy every so often. This is the dominant weather pattern in the UK. I am kind of used to it. Uh so Having it be cloudy but with no rain at least adds a little bit of diversity. And right now, whenever it rains in Minecraft, you don't see the sun, and so that It like makes it kind of a guessing game when it's going to be late enough in the game for you to sleep and, you know, typically reset the weather.

as a result. So I would maybe not block the sun entirely, but it could be a way of having cloudy weather that's still visible to players that have the in-game clouds turned off. Like I typically do because I don't always want stuff that I'm building at higher elevations to be punctured by large sort of sections that I

can't see. And while I j did just advocate for mist and fog being a way of not seeing in Minecraft, I feel like clouds are so sudden because they are in these big blocky shapes and they really do filter everything that you can see. stuff that's like further away from you. So I think there are subtleties to the way that kind of stuff could be implemented that would would really, really help.

Definitely think that's a great idea. And thinking back to some of my time in Hytale, I think sometimes even the weather effects are time of day. related. So like misty mornings in a meadow, right? Where you can see the mist kind of obscuring your view, but only obscuring your view on the ground. If something is high up like a treetop or a mountain in the distance, it doesn't affect it at all.

And you could do the opposite with some fog. Like you could have some fog traveling through the mountains and only really affecting the top of the mountains in the same way that a cloud, you know, like you just complained about would go through that, but maybe that's only for part of the day. So if you're building something cool in the mountains, you don't have to deal with this constant

It's just like, oh, in the mornings or in the evenings, the mountains get foggy. Uh or the fog is only happening immediately after it rains. And then when it's a sunny day, the fog goes away completely. And I think that that's a really cool way to to have some different environmental effects. Either inspire builds, like maybe this section of mountain uh that you know gets foggy.

A lot in Minecraft is where you want to build a spooky castle. And then you have these really cool moments where the castle is shrouded in fog at nighttime and you have some cool screenshots, but then it's not there all the time. So you don't get sick of it. It feels more like an event.

Uh in the same way that weather feels like an event in real life, right? Yeah. Um I like that idea a lot. You could even get into some challenges too, because uh one of the things that I experienced, unfortunately not on stream. I went in to take some screenshots uh after exploring the desert in Hightail, and there was a sandstorm and I couldn't see two feet in front of my face, and it was Cool, but also like really disorienting.

uh when you don't know the area and you're trying to figure where which way to go back. Now thankfully Hightail has a map so like you can orient yourself and and get there. But it was very dense and really cool to see that combined with like the sound and the wind and like it really felt Intrusive.

And you wouldn't want to um be dealing with like fighting a bad guy in this, uh, especially if it was a dangerous one, or one that could fly where you couldn't see them, uh, because it was really intense. It didn't last very long. But it was cool. And that kind of thing in Minecraft could be could be really, really interesting. And I kind of wonder whether you could even do something like that as

Mob effects. So in the same way that the warden reduces visibility, there's like everything goes black and there's these flashes and stuff. I'm wondering if there could be... an effect in the nether during the Ender Dragon fight, or effect in or not the Nether, the the End during the Ender Dragon fight, or an effect uh in um

the overworld or wherever you're fighting the wither, uh, if there's something that the wither could bring in. Like maybe the wither brings in a sandstone storm. Like it sort of feels like a a

bad guy. Like there's stuff like that that could be kind of cool. Or a lightning, like having a lightning storm or a tornado kind of like happen around the wither to try to encourage the players to stay close and engage as opposed to run away and hide. Like there's different things like that could be really, really fun.

There is already a kind of fog effect that happens in the end when you fight the dragon, but it's more like a vignette in the way that it's applied, and you don't typically see much of it, depending on your rendering settings as well. It's the kind of thing that's really noticeable if you go to the end

in a creative world and then you just type slash kill for the ender dragon to get it out of the way to experiment with something and then you realise, oh wait, that just cleared up the view around me. Like wow the what the heck? But then you don't notice it as much if you're focused on the dragon fight in survival.

Um and yeah, like other dimensions are something that kind of came into my ideas as well. Like I can imagine the nether having some weather patterns of its own. Th some biomes already have specific particles, but like there's like kind of flakes of ash or whatever that kind of

extend outside of the boundaries of those biomes occasionally as you can imagine just like a hot wind moving through the nether and kind of whistling through the cavern instead of it being like obviously you can't have rain if there's a roof, but there's some stuff like that that could happen. Uh likewise with the end now having these end flashes, I think I think those should be a weather pattern instead of something that happens constantly.

Um, because they are they're like they're not exactly kind of on a timer, but they happen all the time, like on a broader sense. Like you wait like a few seconds after one happens and then you're usually gonna get another one.

So I think maybe that's something that could happen in a similar way to how some shader packs add like an Aurora to the void of the end. Like I like the idea of there being Stuff like that that occurs in the void that gives a little bit more of a if not weather, because it's not strictly speaking a world, it's like the sort of system of

space islands. I still like the idea of there occasionally being like the flashes in the distance being like maybe a shooting star kind of thing or something like that to to lend some character to the skybox outside of just the raw static that we have right now. Um, back in the overworld, uh like the Blizzard and Sandstorm kind of idea, like it was something that I I thought of as well. And I think

Going back to something else you said about the density of the sandstorms, I think weather density could be a system that would work really well. Because right now I think part of the reason players want to get rid of rain is the sheer density of like the particles

And the same goes for snow. Like if you're building in a snowy area and it starts snowing, it becomes really difficult to see the stuff that's in front of you, much less the stuff that is further away. And I think if there are like fewer flakes falling in one of those early snowstorms, it might be nicer to be out in than

the current snow situation and likewise with rain, if it's if it felt more like drizzle or it felt like occasional raindrops were happening, I think players would be much more amenable to that than like the heavy rain that it feels like we're out in right now. And people already modify that with resource packs and stuff, so I kind of wonder if there could be some sort of slider behind the scenes where heavy rain occurs about as often as like a thunderstorm does.

but the rest of the time the rain is lighter, or like you get occasional flakes of snow so that it's nice and feels a bit more like you're out for a snowball fight after all of the heavy snow has happened the night before. Um and there's there's stuff like that that could could occur.

Likewise, while we have some aspect to which the wind is evident in Minecraft, you got banners blowing in the wind already and like particles falling from trees, I think windy as a weather pattern could be an interesting Like there could be more banner movement, there could be more leaf particles, there could even be stuff like pollen particles drifting through the air, and while you might have

an inverse of this in something like frost, in the same way that we're talking about like limiting crop growth. Maybe like if we get frost and things uh like water sources on the surface could freeze up with like frosty ice even if they're not in a snowy biome. But it's like frostwalker where it thaws and cracks and disappears again so that like water based builds aren't super affected. Um it's a way to simulate winter for people who want seasons but don't want to shovel snow.

And I I like the idea of that and then also maybe wind being the inverse of that where because pollen is circulating, crops could grow faster without the need for like bee intervention or players bone mealing them and that kind of thing. And that might even lend some more interest to the notion of preventing crops from growing at all, because then the difference would be really noticeable if

Uh like a windy weather pattern increases the random tick speed to maybe like double what it is and you suddenly have stuff growing twice as fast. It could be uh kind of a neat visual. So That that's a just a handful of ideas really, but I think that covers a lot of the basic weather patterns we're used to that aren't like natural disaster.

Because they've said in the past that they don't want anything as intense that could be You know, causing damage to players' builds and Um there are obviously some things I imagine that people in the real world would rather not experience in a video game, so I can see it getting a little bit too extreme in certain areas, but I like the notion of them revisiting weather, especially if they have access to more rendering options, because

It's a system that has been in the game forever, more or less. Like I don't know when Rain was implemented, but I imagine it was very early in the game's development. And at that stage It hasn't really adapted since in fifteen years of the game being around. So I'm kind of curious if that's something that they're thinking about doing, but not necessarily linked to seasons, and maybe detaching it from the notion of weather being global at all.

And it doesn't always have to be visual either, even something simple like the sound of rain, especially if it's a light sprinkle, like you don't have to have visuals if it just sounds good. Wind if you're up high in a mountain or if you're on the coast of the

you know, you're near a a beach biome or you're near an ocean biome and they have like the sound of waves and wind. I mean, we're getting more into like I guess environmental stuff than we are strictly weather in terms of an effect. But but the idea of having that sort of stuff happen to you. From an audio perspective, I think is really cool because I remember one of the sound packs that I downloaded.

Uh I don't use it anymore. It was the one of the ones that kind of added echoes to caves and footsteps and things like that, but something else it added was wind whistling when you were up high. And so being on top of the castle in Must Hill or being up on the mountain or flying with Elytra. When you when your whoosh of Elytra wore off from the rocket, there was still like wind rush happening and it was like, Oh, this is more immersive than I thought it was going to be.

And that I think is is a cool way to to do it too. There are even biomes in the game that are called windswept hills. And to that I say, What wind? Your move, Mojang. Yeah.

Uh I was thinking more underground for my my idea. I was thinking that uh In terms of a for I wouldn't say forgotten, because it did get an update when they did the Caves and Cliffs, because it kinda had to, but I think changing the way that abandoned mineshafts render and generate in the world. to be more engaging to players would be good for both new players and veteran players because when you find one

It's really cool as a new player because you're like, well, who built this? Where does it come from? Like what like what how do I find my way around this? That can be pretty confusing. But then once you have encountered one or two of them as as a veteran player, they're really all not that interesting. Like you you it's the same drops, you probably have the things that are in the chest.

Uh they are not as engaging. And recently, because of the discovery of a large trial chamber underneath the mushroom island that I went through to try to clear just to kind of measure how big it was, I found that experience.

really, really engaging. I really had to pay attention to where I was going or I was gonna get lost. There was a lot more mobs to fight. There was a lot more going on. I'm not saying make abandoned mine shafts harder. I think that they're abandoned and I think that I like that about the

But the way that they are laid out seems to be really basic. They're they're really all that interesting to walk through. There's a lot more to look at in something like a trial chamber or a bastion, even though I don't have much experience in bastion. Uh, and I think about the abandoned mineshafts that I run into in Hightail. Now, granted, Hightail has a lot more set decor in terms of the blocks that are available to them. But

these mineshafts would come in and out of caves. There'd be like a trickle of stuff. So like your decorated this is obviously a man made mineshaft would kind of end. But then there'd be like a couple of planks and a couple of

blogs and some some supports and then it would pick back up again. And Minecraft abandoned mine shafts are not so decorated in that you can see that when it happens.'Cause it's usually a smooth stone or a stone wall and then Just the supports, the fences and the and the planks just kind of But there's nothing to indicate like a slower degradation or a switching biome or anything like that. I think it would be more fun to have.

more rooms, use that kind of like jigsaw method that they have now of putting together certain things. And I think it would be better to have those to be able to explore them as a player because then even as a veteran player, like you tell us, Oh, this could be interesting. This is gonna be visually cool to explore and look at, uh, inspire players to maybe live in them and s inspire players to

um explore them for content. I don't know what you could add to them that would be more interesting. Like you don't want to put too much end game stuff in there because then you're gonna if you find one early game, it kind of springboards you to the end without really earning your way there. So like I I don't want them to necessarily get harder or more rewarding from a loot perspective, but it would be cool if they had you know, guaranteed um dungeon spawners or if If you knew that

from the look of a certain tunnel. Like maybe the tunnel leading up to a skeleton spawner would have like certain aspects of it, decorated in bone, or where more things around like, oh, this is all pale oak. This means that there's a skeleton spawner nearby somewhere. And then you have to kind of look around for like anything to kind of increase the engagement of them because right now they don't really

stand up to, I think, things like trial chambers and even the way that Caves and Cliffs does. Like I I think it's more interesting to discover a lush cave than it is to discover an abandoned mineshaft. And I kind of feel like it should be

equal. Like it should be just as fun as engaging to discover an abandoned mineshaft as it is any of the other underground cave systems. Yeah, I I would agree. I think abandoned mineshafts are if not due for an overhaul, then at least like they they deserve a little bit of love. In the same way that like

I feel like trial chambers have come in to basically be the new monster room, the new dungeon spawner room. Yeah. And it feels like maybe mineshafts could uh overdo a little bit of seasoning. And I think one of the things that really Like, it it wasn't necessarily intentional as a change to abandoned mineshafts, but one of the things that really picks up the experience for me is when I find an abandoned mineshaft that happens to have coincidentally crossed paths with a geo.

Because so often then it feels like, oh, that's what they were looking for, you know, like this feels like a a landmark of the abandoned mineshaft. And so if more of them were made to intersect more intentionally,

than if you have the possibility of like, oh, if I explore this abandoned mineshaft, I'll actually get to an amethyst geode, which might be something you're still looking for, especially in the early stages of the game. At the very least it gives you a a little bit of the mineshaft infrastructure going into the geode.

Where sometimes it's cut a c cut a path through the wall of one and you go, Okay, I have kind of a raised platform here from which I can reach some of the crystals that are in the ceiling. And it sort of feels like you can add your own infrastructure onto that. It sparks the imagination a little bit more than just having a winding series of tunnels with no seemingly no objective other than let

get all of the minerals out of the walls. Or let's like let's just build the tunnels because all the minerals are still there for the player to collect. But yeah, I think there's Little things like that that feel like landmarks almost in an abandoned mineshaft that are Purely coincidental, but I like the notion that of them occurring more frequently near other terrain features, whether they are structures or interesting caves or features like geodes.

So that it feels like the abandoned mineschaft really had an objective for being there in the first place. And even that, using them as a guide rather than having them a a structure in themselves, makes them more interesting to me. Yeah, even the central room, I think is what I've heard it called in my abandoned mind. Where it's just like a d a dirt square. Dirtly. Yeah, like it's a dirt square. Like it just that that could be so much cooler. Uh

Same thing with the the rails. Like there's a lot of places for rails. I don't think I crafted many rails. We happened to find an abandoned mineshaft under Dartmouth Meadows when we first started the server. And because I knew I wanted to do so a lot of red lot of redstone stuff, I went around and just like completely stripped this mineshaft of all of its rails.

And it would be cool if in that process there were minecarts that were set up or moving or there were anything to indicate that these things could be used for something, right? Like it just it it was all just obviously abandoned, but it it didn't feel like it had any life ever. It like is it abandoned or is it just kind of there. You know, and I think that that's something that that central room could have like

crates and barrels built up and you could have some minecarts in the corner. Like there could be some stuff there that could be beneficial to new players to see like, oh cool, this is how you might decorate something like this or

Um, here's a bunch of resources that I didn't know that I had TNT piled up in the corner. Like I didn't know that was a thing until you discover this room. That could be really kind of fun. I think that when you have something like a trial chamber or a abandoned mineshaft.

or an ocean monument that you want the player to ask questions like what is this? What do I do with this? Can I explore this? How dangerous And I think that the first time you go through an abandoned mind shaft where it's pretty dark and it's winding around, you're exploring, but you're also kind of wondering like, what am I going to run into now?

And that could be a cool way to also increase like the um the excitement of of exploring one is like leaving hints or um anything that kind of show like well maybe you're gonna run into something or like uh it is an abandoned mind shaft so maybe the remnants of a battle or I don't know something like anything that kind of indicate that it had a history.

Yeah. I love the TNT idea to be honest. Having like a piled up section of TNT at the end of a tunnel with an obvious like redstone wire fuse and a pressure plate nearby or a lever or something. It kind of feels like the way people would be using dynamite in mineshafts anyway, and having a a an idea like that both to demonstrate that TNT can be linked to redstone, that, you know, players are gonna find out by themselves probably, but it's it's neat to have

in game demonstrations of stuff like that. And also just feels like it improves the the mineshaft experience, maybe telegraphs that there's like a hidden section behind here that they were waiting to blast through, and that opens out into a geode or another cave, or just another tunnel of the mineshaft that might have been cut off from

the rest of the structure. Like I think there's there's little interest, there's like set pieces that c they can add to some of that stuff that while they might get a little bit repetitive over time, they do just make the experience a bit more exciting.

Well, that's where we're going to leave this discussion for today. But if you have any more ideas as to how these things can be made more exciting or any other forgotten aspects of Minecraft that you feel like writing in about, once again that email address is spawn chunk mail. at gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the show. You can find more information about the Spawn Chunks and links to some of the stuff that we've talked about today over at thespawnchunks.com.

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You can listen to the show live when we record it in Discord every week. We also have our monthly hangouts where our patrons can let us know what they've been up to in Minecraft this month. We currently have two hundred and sixty-three patrons, which is up one from last week. There is always room for more.

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Email at spawnchunkmail at gmail.com. That's how you get an email into the show. You can go to the RSS feed on thespawnchunks.com or the patron RSS feed is on the Patreon page, and that is where you can find the render distance, the extended version of the podcast. My name is Johnny, but unlearnergo by Pixelriffs, you can find most of what I do at youtube.com slash Pixoriffs where the Minecraft survival guide is currently in its third season.

I also stream three days a week on Twitch where I do behind the scenes work for my YouTube series and also for the upcoming Gigs Dungeons and Dragons show which is going to be returning. On February 27th. That's Friday, probably 8 p.m. UK time. So if you're a DD fan, look in. It's going to be a continuing adventure with our four players.

I'm also the voice of the unofficial Hermitcraft recap on the weekends. You can find that through a quick YouTube search. And aside from that, I'm at Pixel Rifts on both Blue Sky and Instagram. Joel, where can people find you online? I will point you towards the Citadel Cafe, which is my other podcast about sci fi and fantasy entertainment. Recorded a new episode this past week, which should be edited and out soon.

And uh we talked about the new Muppet Show on Disney Plus as well as Predator Badlands. So that was a fun conversation. You can of course follow me on social media at Joel Duggan and Joel Duggan on Twitch, where I stream Tuesday through Friday at 9 a.m., Saturdays at 1 right now, focusing mostly on Minecraft and the giant command center that I'm built. Thanks for visiting the Spawn Chunks. The world outside is infinite, but at least it stopped growing.