The Spawn Chunks 392: Winging It

Welcome to the Spawn Chunks. This is episode number 392, recorded on Monday, March 9th, 2026. This is a podcast all about Minecraft. You can find the audio version on your favorite podcasting app and the video version on YouTube and on Spotify. My name is Joel Duggan, and joining me as always is my friend Johnny, but you may know him better as Pixelriffs on the scary, scary internet.

Hello, yes, the internet is a scary, scary place, and we've been diving into other scary places this week. Uh Joel has been rewatching a bunch of the Predator franchise on Disney Plus, and I've been checking out at a safe distance. Resident Evil Requiem as played by some of my favorite favorite streamers. We've been talking about that in the render distance. That's the extended version of the podcast that our patrons get access to.

So if you're interested in getting a little bit more show each week, head over to patreon.com slash the spawn chunks. We do monthly hangouts with our patrons as well, where you can share what you've been up to in Minecraft this week. And it's also a great community to join if you're just interested in Minecraft discussion in general. So once again, patreon.comslash thespawn.

Coming up this week on the show, small adjustments to tiny mobs. The next drop has a name, and we discuss more things with wings in Minecraft. Well I know one thing that's got wings, and that's your command centre on the mushroom islands. So uh tell me what's been going on on the citadel. So I have been going up. Uh I have decided to expand to level four and frame that out because I'm now at that point where

I could start to copy the designs of the various level of uh one and two of the wings into the other three wings. But before I do that, I want to make sure that I'm working with logistics that Get me to the fourth floor without using a light drip because at the moment I'm flying around this like a construction site. It's got a great big open ceiling, so I can just come and go as I please.

However, I'm putting a roof on this, and so at some point I'm going to have to find a way to enter and exit, and I'm going to have to find a way to get down to the other tiers. And I'm trying to do that also uh without elytra, just for the sake of the challenge. And I've already done a bunch of honey elevators, but I did not have and do not have a lot of room to add more elevators to the fourth floor. So what I've decided to try and do.

is experiment with putting another elevator directly above the elevator from floor one to floor two. You then have to go to the wing to get to floor three, but then you can kinda take another catwalk to get to level four. At and at that point it starts to get narrower. So like the the diameter of the octagon is smaller. So it's not as far as a walk. And I added it in

and used it to get to and from my shulker island of construction and it wasn't so bad. So I was like, okay, well this is a viable solution. It doesn't feel like a long walk just to go up, you know, ten, twelve blocks. So I've added that and I've also framed out the octagonal top to the base, at least the first part of it, and I'm going to add in large

I'm gonna say hanger bays. So like so me with elytra, I can use kind of like the tops of these wings almost like landing strips if I want to, and then come in and land and then enter the base that way.

And at the same time, I'm also thinking about, well, what does the roof look like from the inside? Is it high enough? Does it have a point of interest? And because it's in the middle, I just, for the sake of a quick thing to throw in there, copied the central power core and put that in the top with like a little bit of some lights and stuff in it.

and started to try to loosely construct an arced support that's gonna be on all four sides. So there'll be four, four big arches that support this thing.

and really understanding how much bulk I have to give it. So the first draft was like, well, it's it's you know, you're draw it's like you're drawing a a Minecraft circle. You're drawing like a quarter of a circle. And it's like, oh, that looks okay. But then I was like, well, okay, if I I have to really add in some bulk where it attaches to the side to make it feel like there's enough there to be supporting this giant roof.

And I was thinking about the things that you might see in, say, deck construction or rafter construction in a house where you'll have the joistes, but they're hung up against other supporting beams with hangers, like little metal brackets that

Everything's nailed and screwed together, but it really does help kind of like support the weight of things. And so I added that in and that starts to to look really good. And with other things in this project, I'm also kind of like going thicker and beefier as opposed to just tracing lines. So I'm really trying to like double in on the fact that I'm using full blocks in some cases where I would often default in the medieval area to doing like

stairs or slabs or something that created a little bit more of a gentle arc to or angle to a roof. And here I'm going like more chunky. Like make it it's okay if it looks like it's two big pieces of metal stuck together. Like it's it doesn't have to be smooth, right?

And so I'm trying to do that. And it's it's working out so w so far, so so good. Like it's it's um it's still a frame, it's still very much work in progress. So all the screenshots from this week are kind of like they look kinda half done, but It did kind of spur the idea of what am I gonna have inside the main building. And because I have this mirror of the power core at the top, I thought, well, maybe the energy coming up from the core of this

is like being ejected from the top of the power core and then it kind of could spiral through the main chamber and then be absorbed into the roof. So I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but I whether I'm gonna make it look like cables, whether I'm gonna have like some just kind of like

transferable energy in the air. I've seen a lot of really cool things with like floating glass plane panes and N rods and um different things like that that I've seen other players do. So I might try something like that. But the more I work on this, the more I think like Something central has to be on the top of this thing. And I might end up putting some sort of like giant radar dish or something that looks like

it would make sense that this would be in the middle of the island and it would just survey the surrounding areas. And I'm not sure whether I'm gonna do one dish or two dishes or I don't know. But I've just got something needs to focus in the middle. And I'm not quite there yet, which is fun in a build like this because I'm taking an original concept and now I'm to the point where like my imagination is kind of taking over and I have to come up with new things.

But also I think I have to think about like how am I going to integrate this? Like how am I going to actually make this look like it works with the design? So in a way, I've got some shape language that I'm working with and some palettes, which is great. So that means that I can start with something.

But at the same time, I'm also like, I've never built a giant dish in Minecraft before. So there's a lot to learn. Uh, but so far it's it's been fun. I like the idea of expanding the infrastructure, getting the logistics done. Definitely a lesson that I learned from working in Westdale where I worked on the key

from the inside out as well as some loose structures on the outside. I did not want to make something that looks good on the outside and then be really frustrated with not being able to decorate it ins inside. And so with this, Even though I'm at the stage where I'm kind of doing a lot of unfinished stuff.

I'd much rather know where the elevators are, where the entrances are, how much room I'm playing with, what the height is, and be messing around with that for a while before I start to fill things in because

If I don't do that, I don't want to get stuck with like, well, I've invested all this time. I really don't want to raise this up by a block. So I'm just going to stick with it. And then you end up with that, I don't know about regret, but you end up with being like, frustrated with parts of the build that you accepted as well I'll know better next time. It's like, well, no, if I if I plan carefully, I won't make those mistakes. I don't have to like

stomach them and deal with them and kind of like avert your eyes whenever you walk by that part of the build that you don't like. So so far it's it's coming together. I I it's more about ideas this week than it is about any kind of like really solid progress.

And it you've managed to avoid the shopping mall problem we talked about previously, where you're having to like go around three sides of the build in order to get to like the elevator that takes you up like the only way to get to the fourth floor, so I think obviously designing with that level of like rotational symmetry in mind is obviously like a a

a plus here. Um the wings are even a plus. And that's the the other thing I wanted to say. You mentioned shape language. I think it's it's really fun to see the octagon shape now being a bit more visible from the outside again. Because I remember when you were planning this you had the octagon

as the central area and obviously that's been so prevalent in the interior design. But when you add the wings on it changes the shape of the outside and you've added some stuff even around the base where there's like stairs and and entrances and stuff leading in different ways. So when you look at it from the outside now you've added the

top floor to it, or at least you're framing that out, you start to see that octagon shape from the outside as well, which kind of unifies the interior and the exterior in a fun way. So yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what other design decisions you make here. Since that all of this has sort of been

shooting from the hip and trial and error and that kind of stuff. It'll be interesting to see how much of that is still a big part of it and how much, you know, the centerpiece, this, you know, radar dish or whatever you end up adding to it uh contributes to the overall silhouette of the build.

Thanks. Yeah. I it's getting taller and I'm also hesitant to like, how big do I want to make this? Because it means that anything I'm going to be building next to it is going to be just dwarfed by comparison. So if I don't want it to be something that feels insignificant, then like my smelter building or the other things I want to make in the area are going to have to be

large to compete visually and so I was like, all right, well I I don't want to make it too too large, but like at some point I've kind of already like that ship is sailed. Yeah. Um but yeah, it's thanks, man. It it's a It's nice to have the the octagonal theme because it means that you can

add another layer and immediately know like I'm probably gonna do this in at least some sort of octagonal frame and then I'm gonna be cutting shapes in and out of it. It's not gonna be flat sided, like it's gonna have some depth and

some stuff like that. And I have to figure out how to hide the elevators from the outside. Uh that or at or maybe have grooves that showcase them. You know, like I don't know whether, you know,'cause from the outside, because the elevators are lit with frog lights every other block.

They don't look like elevators from the outside. I mean, I know what they are, but they do look like some sort of again, power cable or energy source or something. Right. And so to expose more light from the outside, even if I just take them as inspiration, and change the color to purple and just like put something that's lit as a as a uh like a light well from the outside, then Like y having that inspiration outside reflect what's inside. Kind of like we'll just make

You won't necessarily draw the connection as a player walking through for the first time, but it'll make sense without you really knowing why it makes sense. So I'm hoping to try to use that kind of logic in the builds. I'm big on that kind of stuff. Like all of the stuff in West Hill, I not only did I want it to look cool from the outside, but I wanted it to function. Like if it was a tower, I wanted you to be able to go up the tower on the inside somehow.

And so I'm trying to kind of have that same logic here. Yeah. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It helps to think of it as a video game environment as well as like both a real environment and a simulation of a real environment that's sort of there for artistic merit but also for a sense of

usability, utility in there, especially since you're using this as a storage place that's going to probably house a lot of the resources you want to take elsewhere on the island and build like the next thing beyond this command center. So Good to see that that stuff is still kind of top of mind as you're uh you're building this.

Um, from one ship to another, although of a very different level of technology. I've been back on Misadventures SMP this weekend. to continue work on the Pirates Guild Hall. Um the the faction, the SALT Dogs is the uh the faction that I belong to as we've now split up into these different guilds to do a bit of thematic building and collaborate on some projects.

And while I wasn't super happy with the shape of this ship originally, I think that was largely down to the fact that I'd sketched it out of a very repetitive looking material. The whole ship was made out of spruce planks before. And now I've swapped out a couple of the lower logs for For stripped logs, and I've used mangrove wood, the six sided bark blocks, for the rest of it. And so now the spruce.

planks feel like a layer of these different types of material instead of the bulk of the ship, I'm a lot happier with how it looks. At the scale that we're working with, I don't think I can do it m a whole lot better. without seriously like going into creative and and and drafting a lot of this. But this was all kind of uh shooting for the hip in survival, which is something that I've not done for a little while on a a build of this kind of scale.

Um, so this week I did the mangrove swap out, which turned out really well. I've added a bunch of detail to the outside with uh mangrove leaves, which I think make really good substitute for something like seaweed, where you'd imagine it kind of dangling off of a ship as though it's kind of been attached for a while.

Um we even added some uh dead coral blocks to the bow of the ship at the front where there's um there's like a uh a a patch of it that is I forget which type of coral it is, it's the blue one. Um, but I think that really looks like barnacles and limpets and stuff that would be stuck to the underside of a ship after, you know, so much time at sea. Um, and then I've I've added a bit of greenery around the outside, a bit of bamboo and stuff and some

some rocks to kind of ground it in the sense of this is a beached ship now. It's been either wrecked at some point or hauled up on land and has been sort of left to rest in this

cradle of of rocks around it. So I I I designed like a larger rock at the back just to kinda give it some stability back there and also make it obvious that I wasn't gonna detail a ton more of the the back half of the ship because you're really meant to look at it from the the side that's got the hole in the front where you can walk into the cargo hole.

Um and then my server mates have also been at work on some interior detail as well. I know Infinite Drift has been doing a lot of this and she's put together a few sort of areas where there's like loot and stuff in the cargo hold towards the front and There's a map room further up on the deck where I left some scaffold in there as almost like portholes.

uh she built some cannons in there with um polished deep slate where it's a block and then two walls but then the wall at the front sort of terminates in like a larger piece because it it has like the wall um kind of structure to it. So it's not when it's not connected to anything, it sort of widens out slightly and looks like the barrel of some sort of cannon.

And so that turned out really well. I was really happy with with some of the additions there and there's like little bits and pieces of detail we need to add. I worked on a um a flag to go above the crow's nest, which is um actually a a design that I found on just a quick Google image search, but there's a YouTube tutorial for it so I'll try and find that so I can credit them in the uh in the show notes this week.

Um and I just doubled up on the style of that flag um with the colours that we had picked out already for our faction, which is cyan and orange. Um but we have like a little guild companion who can sell us additional material that's in that cyan orange and um the orange terracotta that has bit elements of cyan sort of mixed in.

as well. So yeah, now we're we're actually starting to work out how our our guild colours can be incorporated into this when the boat was largely just gonna be made out of wood. And we didn't have a great access to warped and acacia.

Um and I didn't really feel like building a big blue and orange boat. So yeah, we're we're we're starting to uh work on that and having banners up here and there. I want to go with a skull hunting so we can get the actual skull and crossbones on a banner at some stage, but

At this point we're now onto the set dressing side of this where previously I was worried was I gonna have to scrap this entire design and come back to it. I think I'm it's at a stage where I'm pretty happy with it now. This looks really cool, man. Uh definitely an improvement.

from last week. I mean, obvious week was like a stopgap. Like I know that that's kinda like the the start of the build, but I really like the the layering of the woods and I really like the uh grindstones. Like they are really effective in providing that kind of structural detail on the sides of the ship that are on the angle, right? That that c often look like a a cubert game board in Minecraft if you don't

carefully design them and and add the detail and and the in that light the the mangrove for seaweed is also a great great idea. It's so flexible. It's really cool when Minecraft adds a texture to the game that can really work in a d bunch of different ways.'Cause mangrove also works as like weeping willow stuff, you know, as like a swamp side tree and then you works as seaweed here and um I I really like the way that that

That adds like some green and some contrast to the side. And uh that that uh uh flag at the top of the crow's nest, uh the addition of trapdoor. for torn flag parts is really clever. Like that's a really cool way to do that. I'm not always a big fan of

uh using blocks as flags in in Minecraft. I find them I just my brain just says like this is too thick. Like I really wish that we had access to something thin like that that we could make into flags and banners that was not like a full meter wide, but but as far as flags go in that style, like having those trapdoors really helped.

sell it. And I think that in combined uh I guess decor with your eventual skull and crossbones is really gonna solidify like what this is and like what the theme is and stuff and I uh yeah. Are you gonna do uh is there plans for more landscaping around it in terms of uh like Debris or rocks or skid marks or anything that might show like how it got there or anything like that.

I think maybe once we have access to more building rights in the area, because this is a plot that we have specifically marked out for us to build in right now, but once we've done that there is a chance for us to claim more of the territory around the outside and

Uh Lizzie, LD Shadow Lady, who's the the admin on this server, is uh also fairly generous when it comes to like, oh, we need a couple of extra blocks either side to make this design work. So maybe we could do some stuff like that. But for now I've left space around the front where I want like a little Shantytown market, a couple of huts and things to spring up, and that's something for the uh the other folks in the guild to do as they decorate their quarters on the ship.

Um I can briefly update you on the uh the flag actually. Um the design is by a YouTuber called Pyota, uh who I will have a link to their tutorial post it in the show. But yeah, that's that's one I found just for a for a quick Google search. It was one of the more detailed flag designs that I saw and full credit to them for the use of the trapdoors,'cause I think, yeah, like streaming in the wind like that, it makes a lot of sense. Especially with the warped wood as well, because of the um

the kind of wavy pattern in the the transparency in the trapdoor actually sort of works in its favour even when you're seeing it from a lower angle and it's obvious that it's a trapdoor. Um but I think from the side it's so effective and I think it's a really, really cool design so So shout out to them for for innovating in the the flag design space.

I also really like what uh what I guess would be like the captain's quarters, like the the stern of the ship with the glass blocks showing through the it looks like maybe spruce or jungle where it's created this like decorative

window frame with the window frame with the windows inside, of course, and everything's on a forty-five degree angle, which is challenging in in itself. Uh, but then the combination of like stairs and slabs and then the non connected texture in vanilla of the glass uh blocks having additional like detail in there and it just the layering really works. Like you you see it and you immediately go, Oh, I know where that is in the boat in the boat. Like I've seen that in movies, you know.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's always like a gallery window sort of at the back and that's uh that's sort of what I was going for. I do need to fix up some of the details to make them symmetrical on either side,'cause there were some areas where I wanted to do like more grooves in the wood and change up the planks for stairs and stuff.

But the problem is one of those is right on the edge of the plot and I just can't place any scaffolding outside of that to get up to the point where I can modify any of the stairs and slabs. So I was coming up with all kinds of odd ways of like climbing the side of this thing and eventually I just gave up and I got too frustrated with it. So again, that might be something where I I asked the admins to just nudge our plot out to one side slightly so that I can

get up there and complete the detail on that side. But Overall, yeah, really happy with how this is going. This is the main thing I've made building progress on that I can really share with screenshots because in survival guide I'm still working on the beacon mine, I'm still moss mining, it's slow and steady, but we're about to finish up the

fourth area that I will have dug out and we'll move moving on to the fifth and that's the last one I have to actually dig. So beyond that I should be getting back into building some redstone stuff in that space. But uh it's nice to have other projects to work on.

Speaking of moving on nicely, we have some news to share with everybody. The Minecraft drop has a name. In an article published on Tuesday, March third, Mojang confirmed the upcoming twenty six dot one drop will be officially named Tiny Takeover. The article also recaps the features of the update, which will include Three dozen baby mobs given new textures and some given new hitboxes and new sounds.

The Bedrock Edition spawn eggs now have the ability to spawn baby mobs when used on an adult mob like they do in Java edition. The golden dandelion will be added. Crafting name tags is also going to be in the game, and of course a new noteblock instrument, the trumpet. In addition to that, there was also Snapshot eleven for twenty six dot one, which was also published on Tuesday, march third.

If you're minimizing the game while in full screen mode by pressing Alt Tab, for example, you cannot maximize the game again. That is a known issue, and they are going to fix that. Fixed adult and baby rabbit textures to be consistent with the other new textures.

Pig sound variants now have sounds for eating. Baby goats now rotate their head when ramming, the baby hoglin's mane now appears on both sides of the body texture, fixed texture on the back of the baby panda's head, and updated trumpet noteblock sound asset. The master librarian no longer offers name tags. Instead, they will now offer red candles and yellow candles for the price of three emeralds. The wandering trader will offer name tags for the price of one emerald.

Some technical changes in Snapshot eleven, the data pack version is now one hundred. Brings support for pig eating sounds customization, removes the name tags from ancient city and woodlawn mansions, chest loot, and brings minor changes to the game test environments, block states, world generation, and block tags. Resource pack version is 83 and adds support for the new pig sounds. New item models format now supports transformation for individual sub-models.

This affects things like bells, enchanting tables, and banners, which have different components, i.e. the animated swinging part of the bell or the book that appears on the top of the enchantment table. Some changes have been made to the way block states render in places like Enderman held blocks, block display entities, etc., but not falling blocks or pistons. Some bug fixes in 26.1 snapshot 11. Enderman holding bells and bell block display entities only render the bell frame.

Dragon eggs do not check whether there is a block under their destination when teleporting. Wandering traders don't spawn in single biome snowy plains worlds. Golden dandelions do not prevent baby trader llamas from despawning, and glow item frames now resemble regular item frames. The rest of the bug fixes include several texture and model fixes related to the new baby mobs. As always, you can find the snapshot article on Minecraft.net or linked in our show notes at thespawnchunks.com

So twenty six dot one is officially Tiny Takeover, which is a cute name. I'm not certain I agree with the takeover part. I definitely agree with the tiny part, and you can interpret that how you will, as far as my opinion on this goes, but um Like, while I I will freely admit that my current survival project is just a big grind and like the only thing that would really affect me in terms of new features would be new ways to mine stuff.

The baby mobs aren't exactly gonna lure me out from the beacon mine anytime soon. So I think I'm gonna be more affected by some of the minor changes in this snapshot. I hope people who are excited about the baby mobs are of course going to have a field day with this.

Um and I think the the other things that I'm looking at in terms of stuff I might want to consider, maybe I'll integrate some more noteblocks into my copper aging machine so it can sound like a brass band as it works. But uh yeah, I I think as far as this drop is concerned.

I'm happy to see the end of this development cycle so that we can move on to whatever is next,'cause the the baby mob stuff has been really neat as a general overhaul for the game itself, but there's not a whole lot for me to get. I mean I I agree. Uh I think the tiny takeover feels a bit forced as far as a name. Uh but it continues with the Mojang marsh marketing and narrative to push this to be, in my opinion, more exciting than it actually is.

But I mean that's their job. They have to treat, you know, these things as if like it's the next best thing happening to Minecraft when it's like baby animals, which again is cute and I don't want to d you know, uh tell anyone that is excited about it that they shouldn't be. Um but it's

changing the game. It's not game changing, if that makes any sense. Sure, yeah. Some something like the Stone Cutter on steroids would not really be a good name for this drop either. But that's the only thing that I'm really excited about, which is the changes to the Stonecutter, which is gonna make my life as a builder a lot more convenient. So

Uh those are the things that I'm looking forward to. Uh I I feel like the changes with the the snapshot though this week, the candles for me as a librarian trainer are underwhelming. Yeah, yeah, I think th I agree with that, but I I do think it's difficult at this point to find anything they could trade you that wouldn't just be forcing a book trade for the that final like master trade and it being like a specific book. Like like sort of like they were going with the uh

the villager trading rebalance where you'd be guaranteed to get a certain type of book from master levels of the different biomes. Like I think they've seen that that approach didn't really work out for people. So I think on paper most villager trades are a little bit underwhelming anyway, and name tag trades would have become underwhelming retroactively after we could craft them now, so it's really difficult for them to find

Stuff to put in that slot. The candles themselves may even be temporary until we end up with something else that it makes sense for librarians to trade. It could always if if they're considering changing li villager trades at this point, they could always be changed again. And I believe the way villager trades work, I'm not certain if this is still the case, but at least it was when Village and Pillage came around, is that villager trades will not change retroactively if you've already

like fully unlocked a villager's trades. So anybody who currently has name tag trades from their librarians, you should see those stick around unless they have changed something on the back end about villager trades updating dynamically.

So if you want a librarian who still trades you name tags for twenty emeralds or whatever it is, you can keep librarians around now and just when you update to the drop any librarians that you uh fully unlock after that are going to be the ones who trade you can. I thought that the price of the candles was odd too. Like currently with the masons that I have, I can trade one block of quartz for one emerald.

Whereas I can trade in this situation three emeralds for one candle. Is it just one candle? I imagine it's being sold in like clusters sort of like. No, it's just it's just one candle. I looked it up before the show and I was like, that is weird. 'Cause considering how easy a candle is to make, like you don't even have to have a bee farm. Like you can as long as you've got shears and a campfire, like you can make three candles very, very easily.

So I I I don't know. I I feel like I I think you're right. I think it could be a placeholder. Uh because I've seen a number of people in the community kind of like give this feedback, which is like this does not feel balanced for a top level trade. Uh something that I just thought about as you were speaking though was And correct me if I'm wrong. Swift Sneak is only available in the Deep Dark. And that's is that a book that you bring back? It is, yeah. Right.

So having a top-tier librarian trade, maybe not every librarian, but having a chance to get a top-tier librarian trade as Swift Sneak would uh give that to players that maybe don't want to engage or find it very difficult to engage with the the the deep dark and the warden. Um

I don't have Swift Sneak. I've never used it because I've just not bothered to go and find a deep dark. I I could probably get it easy enough, but like it's not it's a chore. I look at it like, well that level of time, commitment, and dedication is not something I'm interested for just another like I don't see it yet as something that is gonna be worth going to get.

I'm sure I might change my tune later and it is on my list of like when I need a a break from the command center to go get some Swift Sneak because I spend a lot of time high on top of things in that command center holding shift and trying not to fall off, right? Yeah. And and to sort of mu move faster would be advantageous.

Um, but I feel like that could be a an interesting thing to put in on the library in top tiers. But again, if they're not sure about it, you wouldn't want to put that as a temporary one, because once you put it there, taking it away from the Minecraft players would not go well. Whereas removing candles and replacing them with something else.

I don't think people are gonna really get you know, their their underwear in a bunch over it, right? Yeah. I I think the problem with putting Swift Sneak or any of the treasure enchantments there is it just immediately devalues anything that you could get from risking going to ancient cities, right? Like it sort of removes

Like th the the easiest way of doing something sort of becomes the default and at that stage nobody's gonna go looking for ancient cities. You're just gonna end up re rolling librarians over and over again, which is sort of back to the position we were in before Village and Pillage where like ninety percent of villagers just end up going in lava. Um so yeah, I I think the candle thing is is odd but

I mean maybe for some players it will signal that candles exist if they didn't have access to them previously or didn't know about them. I think in some situations, some gameplay styles like Skyblock or Stone Block where you can cure zombie villagers but you don't necessarily have access to bees in the environment that you're in very easily. There could be ways of getting candles that way. Like there are little fringe cases always when it comes to that stuff.

Even with yeah, like super flat. I I always think of our good friend Mog Swamp when I'm thinking about like some of these features changing and I think that might be the first time super flat players can get access to uh candles because I don't think many forests will spawn that have bees. So like, yeah, the honeycomb isn't gonna be as as easily accessible either. Um, there might be a bit of it in um

Trial chambers, if if you're able to generate trial chambers in Super Flat. But yeah, there's there's a few elements like that that I think maybe it's uh of of benefit, especially now that name tags are going to be craftable. Um we still have no announcement for Minecraft Live is my other consideration here, and I assume we're probably gonna hear about it a couple of weeks to a week before it happens because

It's not the huge build up that we used to have for previous Minecraft lives when it was just once a year, but I am kind of surprised that they haven't mentioned anything yet. Um, but I would assume that with it being, you know, potentially a couple of weeks away. It's probably gonna be on a Saturday as they have been previously. Um yeah, I can see it being towards the end of March at this point or even the beginning of April. Yeah, last year in twenty twenty five it was March twenty second.

Uh, and they're usually on a Saturday. Uh that's a twenty first this year, which is less than two weeks from today. So unless they're announcing it tomorrow, which could be very uh then I would expect either March twenty eighth or April fourth would be my two guesses for the upcoming Minecraft live. But I they announced the name of this drop

on Tuesday last week, right after we published our episode. So I'd imagine that if Minecraft Live is going to share some news, it'll be immediately after this episode goes out tomorrow. Yeah, yeah. Probably, probably.

So moving on to email this week, uh our chunk mail section is a way that you can write in and share your thoughts about Minecraft with us. You can send an email to spawnchunkmail at gmail.com. Keep them short and sweet if you can, and uh topical. Sometimes uh we get emails that are responding to things that we talked about recently on the podcast, like this next one that Pix has got. Yes, this one comes in from the Piano Man eighty nine, who is gonna sing us a song about a deep biome update.

Hey Johnny and Joel. Your conversation about bugs in Minecraft did bring up an idea I had a while ago because of how bugs and arthropods also exist in the sea, and there's plenty of opportunity there for another update to Minecraft's ocean. Ever since Caves and Cliffs Part 2 deepened the world, the oceans have felt a bit shallow to me most of the time. Oceans rarely ever go even as deep as Y level 0, but there's still another 60 blocks deep they could venture.

What do you think about an ocean trench biome that could implement underwater arthropods, as well as other new threats or structures? Maybe something made out of dark prismarine and polished deep slate. There could even be a boss mob entity to fight. Also, the breath of the Nautilus does give players more incentive to venture down into ocean depths unreachable with a normal breath.

I could go on for a long time with other ideas, but as a basic concept, what would you think about a trench update to the oceans? The Piano Man eighty nine didn't drown thanks to the breath of the Nautilus, but he did fear for his life after waking Cthulhu in the ocean trench. I've not played, but this email is giving me Subnautica vibes. Yeah, uh-huh.

Yes. A friend of mine just finished it and he said there was a lot of jump scares and a lot of like deep exploration and like if you weren't were into sandbox stuff, like you can go off the rails and take as long as you want to to finish Subdonica. And so I've had other people recommend Sub Donica to me as well.

I think adding arthropods to oceans would be a good pairing to or even a good follow up to adding insects to a drop that we talked about last week on the show. I think that would make a lot of sense. Um, adding deep open or ocean s trenches as a specific biome seems like a larger undertaking than adding mobs to ocean. with regards to world generation. And we do sort of get that already when you have an underwater ravine that happens in Minecraft or I can't remember what they're called, but

They have these deep fissures that were part of the caves and cliffs update that like carved down into both land but also you can see them happening in oceans as well. Uh and that kind of have that ocean trench vibe, but They're meant to like give you access to caving and minerals. They don't really have a specific biome or specific um things that you might run into down there outside of maybe glow squid. Um, but I I like the idea of adding deep ocean life. Uh because

That stuff is scary looking in the real world. So any Minecraft version of like deep ocean fish or Even if they're like a hostile mob, like I mean, it's gonna be really interesting to see what that could come up with. I mean bioluminescence is just a really cool thing to play with as well. So you could do that. And I I find that those deep ocean creatures they're easy evil

They're evil looking because they either have no eyes or they ha they're trying to see in the dark. So their eyes are ginormous, like they're mostly eyes. And just and you're kind of wondering like where's the rest of them? So I I think that could be fun to play with in Minecraft, especially because of like the blocky design. Um I could see a fish or a a mob in Minecraft that would be Really broad and wide from the side with like a big eye.

But when it turns to face towards you, maybe it's really skinny. Like it's really kind of hard to see straight on. Flatfish kind of thing, but more that kind of yeah. Yeah, more vertical. Like that could be a really interesting way to to play that. Um

I could also see Minecraft taking some liberty with something and creating something that only has one eye. You know, something that looks a little bit more alien like or l d you know, some sort of fantasy mob as opposed to just like inspired by a real life deep sea, but doesn't have to be real deep sea. Now I know that they played around with something.

In one of the first mob votes there was like a deep sea creature or something that would attack you from below. Yes. I don't remember what it was called. I think it ended up ended up being called the Barnacle in the sort of drafts of what their names would have been. Um but I think it was the yeah, the first mob that got announced.

And I think they were surprised it didn't win because then they ended up going on to announce the update aquatic, but that was back in 2017, so that was a uh a a far cry ago at the Structures would be interesting. I don't know if they'd be tied to ocean monuments, but I feel like something like that could be cool to to explore. Probably kind of claustrophobic that deep underground. You know, we were talking in the render distance about like submarine type.

horror experiences in space and I feel like g getting into structures that are underwater and require a nautilus or some sort of uh breathing potion uh or strategy to consider would be a lot, I think, especially if you're down that far and you know that the surface is is quite a ways away. I feel like that could play into some interesting gameplay, but I I don't know what they would put down there. I I know that I would not want the

same experience as the warden. Like I wouldn't want what th um the piano man was describing in their sign off message about like a after waking Cthulhu. Like I wouldn't want sub mob that you have to sneak around and avoid. Cause I feel like you move so slow in Minecraft Water that I I just I don't I feel like once you wake it you'd be kinda done. I I feel like it would be better to have a straight on fight. It's similar to what you have to deal with with the guardians in the ocean monuments. Mm.

Yeah, something that emphasizes maneuverability because you can't really sneak underwater. Like you swim or you're just kind of floating. If you're on some sort of ridable creature like the Nautilus, then that's fine. Or like a skeleton horse if you wanna just mix it up a little bit, I guess.

But also, yeah, you you don't really have that many options as regards sneaking around underwater. So it would certainly make sense to have it be something that you could actually have a decent toe to toe fight. But yeah, it's interesting because we are now like a decent distance past Caves and Cliffs. And I think before Caves and Cliffs, ravines were a more codified

feature of Minecraft generation, but a lot of them ended up feeling quite similar. You'd find them on land and you'd find them in oceans and they all had the same sort of shape, typically the same sort of length as well. And post caves and cliffs I think those have been replaced after a fashion with cave carvers and that sort of system that generates the sort of noodle caves and spaghetti caves and stuff that they talked about back when that was being discussed. And now

I think those intersect with the ocean floor in ways that still generate looking like those ravines, but aren't necessarily the same thing,'cause they won't always generate the same way. And in some cases in oceans you get cave systems generating that just because they're directly under an ocean

The game fills them up with water anyway, and they are a larger cave system that you can swim down into in a similar way that you'd be able to explore it from land. You know, you find these little kind of winding passages and stuff. Sometimes that even opens out into a more cavernous space. But none of them are fixed structures. And I think that might be one of the reasons why we don't see anything spawning with like any kind of fixed structure.

pattern there. It's all just generic ocean life rather than them treating it as its own biome that might spawn its own type of creature or a structure that spawns stuff on world generation. So it'd be interesting to see some of that start to get mixed back in. And I agree, it seems like a good opportunity to have a more diversified ocean life. be emphasized in a future update. Like if they wanted to go back to oceans and add more creepy crawly type of things and

If they wanted to add something a bit more threatening, it would be ideal to do that in lower depths. Right now, I think ocean floors, even in deep ocean biomes, only go down to about Y thirty. So there is definitely a lot of depth for them to play with if they wanted to go that far.

And I think one of the reasons they don't is because of structure generation below certain points. Like I think below Y thirty certain structures like geodes are more common. You start getting trial chambers below a certain stage. And then below that obviously things like ancient cities, dungeon spawners become more common, that kind of thing.

So there are some things that are just part of the strata of the Minecraft world that would become obviously exposed at the bottom of the ocean, in the same way that occasionally you used to find those like floating stronghold portal rooms when a stronghold had generated at a height where It couldn't help but intersect with an ocean.

And so some of that stuff might have been phased out just for the sake of a bit more, you know, realism and and immersion in exploring the world and not running across these odd things that were clearly quirks of Minecraft's terrain generation. I think the other aspect of it is the caving experience.

And as somebody who's been clearing out a massive area of underground, I have found like closer to Y0, a lot of aquifers under there, which are a pain in the butt to clear all of the water out of, even with a decent amount of sponges on my side.

And so if you end up with more ocean trenches that lead down further into deep slate layers, what you're gonna find is that some players who are digging around there for resources are going to find a lot more flooded areas than they typically would if they were just encountering naturally generated aquifer.

And so you gotta wonder how that's gonna affect the balance and how that's going to make gameplay more challenging or is it going to actually bring fun to the game and is the fun that, you know, is brought by it being a new ocean environment to explore, especially with the Nautilus? Is that going to balance out with the frustration some players are going to feel that their mining patterns have been interrupted by these deeper ocean trends?

So a lot to consider of course. But I don't think that many people go mining around oceans to begin with. I think a lot of people mine through oceans when they're strip mining and they just keep going in like one direction if they're branch mining.

So I do think there's um maybe a little bit of of wiggle room there where Mojang could implement something in the deeper oceans that goes even deeper than what we already As you were speaking I was thinking that these deep ocean trenches that PNMN is talking about would have to be in the middle of a Minecraft ocean, which are not really oceans anyway, they're more like giant lakes, but If you can get a big enough one, the chances of

a Minecraft player digging down on land and hitting it if it's far enough away from most land masses, then you'll probably be okay. Like sure somebody will run into it eventually. But but I think that uh You'd have to they'd have to be pretty rare. Like I think the the size of the Minecraft ocean in terms of what the le nearest land mass is gonna be Would have to be pretty big.

And if they had those parameters, then these would also be pretty rare because very often Uh depending on your world settings like Minecraft Oceans, you don't uh often see a really big one. You see large ones sometimes, but there's usually an island like the ocean space that I'm in right now is really big, but there's also this seven hundred by seven hundred mushroom island in the middle of it. And the caves underneath the mushroom island go for miles. So I'm sure they go under the ocean.

I'm sure at some point I've been digging around and exploring and lighting up caves and had to stop myself to be like, Oh well I'm really well outside the mushroom island light. I'm just under I'm lighting up the ocean caves right now, so I don't need to do this. So yeah, it's uh definitely something to to consider would be like the distance from from land.

Our next email is from Darth TaterTot, and this is going to lead us into the main discussion. More ambience, more depth. Hi, Pix and Joel. In your most recent podcast, you discussed adding more bugs to Minecraft. I recently played with a realistic texture pack that included butterflies, and it really brought a whole new level of real realism to the game.

Personally, I think butterflies should be added to Minecraft. I also think birds would be a really cool addition. Maybe early in the morning as sun rises, birds could chirp. I think added ambience. of birdsong to Minecraft would help it be more immersive. Honestly, it's crazy to me they have not added it yet. Also, if they added more bug life, maybe being able to equip a saddle on a huge beetle would be really cool. What do you guys think? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Darth Tater Tot sixteen accidentally left clicked while trying to put a saddle on a beetle, and they were spiked to death. I can't remember if I mentioned Dim from a Bug's Life. on the main episode or the render distance last week, but I definitely mentioned like a big writable beetle. I just don't know at what point I did. But uh I'm with you there. I think that would be cool. And I think that would be very Minecrafty. Uh they're big, they're boxy. Like I think that you could make that work.

uh in in Minecraft. And either someone in our chat or something that you mentioned last week is that uh the elytra is like the plural for Beetle wings? Yeah, the the casing specifically on beetles wings. So that the protective casing rather than the actual wings themselves, which is interesting. Yeah, it kind of raises some suspicions about what might have dropped them in the first place.

Um before we move on from that the uh the riding a beetle around reminds me of having played Hollow Knight fairly recently. There's like a stag beetle who basically becomes your fast travel courier from like location to location, so Um yeah, definitely a uh a a popular idea in in games that involve insects heavily.

Hollow Knight is of course full of them. So definitely a uh a rideable beetle seems like a uh a a n a nice cartoony idea that kind of brings brings these worlds to life a little bit. So what do you think about Minecraft birds?

Birds are an interesting one because right now we have two. We have the chicken and we have the parrot. And there have been more birds suggested through previous like biome votes and mob votes at Minecraft Live than have ever been fully implemented into the game, as long as you don't count the variants of chickens.

Um, I think the team could absolutely add birds. Um, as far as the morning bird song idea goes, as an ambient sound, while I like the idea, I think Mojang takes the philosophy of something has to be making this sound. for it to be present. Like we don't have any kind of buzzing insect noise until you put firefly bushes down, right? So

I think that's generally the case. Like I think they would be expecting players, if they heard bird song, to go out looking for birds and maybe get disappointed when they couldn't find them. So I think if they're adding bird song into the game, they're probably adding birds along with it.

And having done a little bit of research, obviously there are a lot of species of birds out there. There are I think an estimated twenty thousand species of birds in the world. That's way fewer than insects. Insects are like maybe six times

Um there's twenty four thousand species of insects identified in the UK alone. Um but, you know, I think birds are obviously still iconic and probably easier to model in Minecraft just on account of their relative size. So I think the avian kingdom is just vastly underrepresented in Minecraft already and there's definitely room for them to bring some of that stuff to the table. Yeah, I was thinking about this as well and and

and tried mods that add that kind of ambience to Minecraft. And it's it's really nice. But when you know that you've added it as a mod, you're also not going to look for those animals because you know you didn't also add the the physical representation of them. Uh So I can see that being confusing to new players or to players that, you know, would would want to go and experience that. Uh, but it it did add a lot. Uh birds tripping in the morning.

uh squirrels chirping and we go through a forest, that kind of stuff. Uh hearing owls hoot in the background in like a taiga was really cool. Stuff like that is is fun. But uh I would agree that that that's that's an easy way to do uh to to address it. Like you're not gonna deal with the models and you don't have to deal with like Does it even add any gameplay?

Uh is it just for show, that kind of stuff? But I don't know, at the same time, like they've just spent an entire drop cycle talking about and adding things that do not add a lot of gameplay. They're basically aesthetic. You know, they're meant the baby animals are meant to look cute.

And in a way I feel like they've kind of opened up a door with how they handled the baby chicks for the chickens. Uh I think that some of the sm'cause that's the other thing that I think about in terms of of a challenge with adding birds to Minecraft is that Birds are tiny.

And I mean, yes, insects are tiny too, and the bees in Minecraft are the size of footballs, but does that mean that your sparrows are also going to be the size of footballs? Like what about chickadees? Are they going to be the size of softballs? Like how do you add something that's just a little tiny animal with little stick legs into a game that's like really chunky? And I mean e the legs for the the chicken, they're not my favorite way to display

those kind of things in Minecraft. They're they're a pixel plane, they they disappear from a certain angle. Um from one angle they still have to be a whole pixel wide, which depending on the size of the mob, might look too big. Uh, but I feel like you could probably go down the road of having some

like a chickadee or uh a robin or something as like a little puffball with legs.'Cause that's cute. You can add a beak to it, like a single pixel beak, little dot eyes. Like I think that could work. I think that could that could really be something fun.

um and having it fly around if it's round I say round. If it's a cube if it's cube ish then How it flies and lands, you don't necessarily have to worry about the bird's body changing orientation, but with larger birds like birds of prey, like owls and eagles and stuff, they look very different when they land versus when they're flying.

And that creates a bit of a problem with with Minecraft, uh, with wanting to have the bird fly horizontal but then land and the wings would have to rotate it. I can see the challenges of trying to make a blocky model like that work. And that's the thing that I feel like Minecraft has kind of pigeonholed themselves into the style of design that they're using. in Minecraft is so simplified.

Birds have really complex shapes and complex animations, and I can see that being really tricky depending on the kind of bird that you add. So the little songbirds, little puffballs with wings and legs, that might actually be pretty, pretty fun. Uh uh but again, like it's gonna be another aesthetic update that doesn't really add a lot of gameplay. I don't want to run around and kill chickadees for feathers. Like that's not what I want. Uh so I don't know what you could add.

And then other than that. birds like that. I'm thinking about mostly birds that I see in my backyard. I don't know that I would necessarily want in the game. Like a blue jay is really nice to look at. Have you heard one? Because they're really, really noisy and they're not pretty sounding at all. Uh and then same with crows. Crows are cool birds. I think they're, you know, really interesting animals, but they're

Not something that I want to walk outside my, you know, beautiful farmstead in Minecraft and just hear a crow cawing at me constantly. You know. So I feel like there's definitely that balance of like, well, what do you add? How do you choose the ones to add? And that's just talking about like the North American birds. As you said, like there's so many different areas of birds that you could add to Minecraft.

Yeah. There's there's a lot of regional stuff and it's gonna be interesting if they end up adding birds in future, whether they are biome specific or more global. Like they have a lot of options there, they have a lot of choice. I think getting bird's behaviour right is probably the biggest challenge. Like making sure a bird in game looks like a bird kind of hops around, moves kind of more suddenly. you know, wants to fly from trees to the ground and back and forth and like I think there's

Some stuff there in terms of challenge. I think the other challenges are making them either mechanically useful, whether it comes to drops or behavior or something like that. Something that makes them other than just a an ambient mob. But I think if they wanted to go the full ambient mob route maybe with a little bit of distance from what they're doing right now with all of the baby mobs, sort of like, you know, leave a bit of room between these purely aesthetic.

Updates, I do genuinely think they'd be a pretty decent addition. Um I wonder if they've steered away from additions like this in the past because of the backlash against new editions not having a use. Um but we have come a long way since the addition of the polar bear in the frostburn update, which was one point ten. Um so that that was almost a decade ago at this point. Bizarre though that is to to think about. Um yeah, I I think there's definitely room for

smaller additions like that to creep in with some of these gameplay drops. And thinking about how we domesticate some birds. There are a few options there as well. You could craft the new copper bars into a birdcage if you wanted to, or maybe, you know, have a a way of putting a pet bird inside of a copper grate block somehow. So it looks like they are contained.

Or alternatively you could build a birdcage just out of copper bars placed in the world, but I think there's there's a few different options for stuff like that. Thinking about some of the other birds that we as people have domesticated in the past, pigeons could be a possibility.

I think they're slightly larger than the average songbird, so you're obviously not going to run into the issue of having, you know, three pixels worth of model. And pigeons were domesticated as message carriers. I think one of the things people have struggled with with mobs like the Alay and the Copper Golem is the limited range that they have when they're searching for their objectives. And I wonder if we could do something with pigeons and the ability to send messages to other players.

There is an element to which that might conflict with people's render distance and simulation distance issues, settings, that kind of thing. But I I wonder if that could be treated in a similar way to how enderpearls work, where they will load chunks if they are in flight.

And if you set a pigeon off to deliver a message to another player, if they will load the area between you and that player Mm might be some technical issues with that, but I I do wonder if that's something they would consider doing now that we have stuff like chunk loading enderpearls as their throne.

Um I suppose the other issues there is like how fast does the pigeon fly? You know, does it catch up with a player if the player is constantly in motion? What if the player is flying themselves? Like there's all kinds of wacky stuff that could get in the way, but I do really like the idea of

You know, i i i if nothing else, it's an opportunity to educate players about why there are so many pigeons around, because they were used as like carrier pigeons, as as messenger birds for a really, really long time until more effective means of communication became available. I I see the testing of that going hilariously wrong in so many ways in a fun learning environment. You know, like, I mean, how

How does the pigeon slow down before it gets to the player? Like imagine you've got an incoming message and this pigeon is just like barreling at you. Yeah. Yeah. At a lighter speed. You know, like how fast do they come in? Where do they land? Do they hit you? Like

What's the thing that's recreating the real life behavior where they unfortunately fly into windows occasionally. Yeah. Right. You know, if they hit the player, they headbite you and then they're just like they shake their head and like, Oh, by the way, here's a letter from Pixelrests.

collides at you going full speed and uh in in some places when when players are a little bit less cautious or maybe playing in some sort of challenge mode, uh half a heart of damage could be, you know, you just get speared and killed by a pigeon. Yeah. I think it would be funny. It would create some fun moments in in in terms of Minecraft gameplay.

Um I I think I've been thinking about smaller birds typically because a lot of smaller birds feed on seeds, right? And you anyone who's built a large scale crop field knows you have an abundance of seeds in this game. You either have too few or too many, and it's usually too many. Um they're also pretty easy to farm and get hold of. having birds like magpies, even ducks, things like that, like they they are all reasonable additions.

Um magpies are known to hoard shiny objects and so maybe if you want some functionality out of a small bird like that you could have them help you find oars in like you know, above ground situations like mountains, they could kind of hover around where some of the iron ore is, they could help you find dropped items. Which is kind of similar to the Vulture. The Vulture was a um a mob that was part of the twenty nineteen Badlands Biome Vote uh entry, which was beaten out by mountains and ghosts.

Um but the proposed functionality for vultures was for them to circle around a spot where players had died.

Um which obviously seems a little bit morbid, they're carrying birds, you know, but um it was effectively a signal for players to hey, come back here and find your drops, this is where all of your equipment And I think there was this misunderstanding that they were supposed to be, you know, picking up your drops and moving them kinda like dolphins do, but it seems like uh that was clarified later to be something that was more like a signal to players that this is where you die.

Um that niche has obviously been filled since by the recovery compass. But uh that's specifically for your last death as opposed to items that you dropped on the ground, and maybe there could be some nuance to find there.

Um the recovery compass is all pretty also pretty tricky to obtain if you don't like the deep dark as we were discussing earlier. If you don't want to go to the deep dark and you don't really see the point in the recovery compass, there's still a chance if you die out in the bad land somewhere that having a vulture signal where you died could be kind of helpful. Th I guess the other side of that is

Do they only appear in Badlands biomes? If so, how often do you actually end up dying in a Badlands situation that you're gonna need that to be a a a a hard and fast feature? Maybe you could train them to exist elsewhere, domesticate them, bring them somewhere else, I don't know. But it's uh yeah, kind of kind of an odd proposition at that stage, which is why I think magpies, because they're a bit more common. They're known throughout the world.

Um I've I've seen some videos of Australian magpies swooping cyclists and like attacking their helmets and stuff. So I feel like the Australians might be keeping a slightly closer eye than those of us in the Northern Hemisphere with our relatively tame magpies. But even then, I see plenty of them in my backyard all the time. So there's every chance that a magpie would be a a pretty common sight and a a decent fit for Minecraft.

One of the things that springs to mind for me and probably for you as well, living on the coast, is um seabirds. Things like Yes, yes. Gulls, pelicans, penguins, although there's no penguins around here, but like I d very rarely do I go to the waterfront and not see a gull at some point.

Uh and the other thing that I think would be challenging about adding birds to Minecraft, depending on the type of birds, uh usually in the backyard for a songbird like a chickadee, you'll see one, maybe two. But when you see uh seagulls, It's more than it's usually a dozen or more. Oh yeah. Like they're usually in flocks, you know. Uh sometimes uh starlings around here will fly in huge

uh s I guess schools much flocks of birds. I think it's called a murmuration when they fly in that sort of formation and there's like a ton of them moving like a school of fish. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing where like

I might not need to see that in Minecraft up close, but that could be something that they could add to Minecraft in the same way that they have clouds. Like just seeing a flock of birds travel across the landscape far away, never really rendering close enough to the player for you to actually go up and touch them, but like they're just like a wisp of cloud to get into Lord of the Rings.

Trivia. Yeah, yeah. But that would be cool. Like that would add some ambience, but I again like not Not necessarily gameplay. Right. So but I I like the idea of adding things that are big enough to add some quirkiness to Minecraft that they could probably play with, like pelicans, for example. You know, like maybe they have fish, maybe they give you fish, or like they fish for you, or you can train them to fish, or

Uh th I mean they would look big and silly. Like I I'm thinking about the giant pelicans that you see in like Disney animation where they've always got something in their in their beak in their the the throat pocket that they have. Uh that could be really, really fun. Penguins are an obvious shout. I mean they I think do they ever I think they

Proposition though is one of the potential mob drops. Right. Yeah, they were going to be native to stony shore biomes, they'd be more graceful in the water than they were on land and The functionality proposed for them was increasing players both.

But they were like the rock hopper penguins, the ones with the big like yellow eyebrows. Yeah. Yeah, which is co they're cool looking and I mean and the body of a penguin is like a bowling pin. So like it's not the hardest thing to model in Minecraft. You don't have to worry about it uh flying, it swims, but like that's an easy enough thing to do, I think, compared to the logistics of flying birds in Minecraft, I think is more challenging than something that that swims.

Um which is uh something else. This is not a seabird. Well I mean around here they can be, but uh duck. are are something that I see a lot of in my in my city. Uh Dartmouth is the city of lakes, so there's lots of ducks, there's lots of ponds and and fowl and everywhere.

And um we already kind of have one. Like the duck chicken kind of already exists in Minecraft. So adding a a duck uh to Minecraft, I mean the challenge there would be does the chicken have to change? Because if you add a duck, you'd have to add something really distinct like a mallard duck. Or a brown duck. Adding a white duck to Minecraft just would create a huge amount of confusion, I think, between that and a chicken. So you might have to go with.

uh with more of the the wild looking what looking ducks. But that again is m just more about my experience as a person in my neck of the woods. seeing ducks around and would want, you know, to see those in Minecraft. And I don't know what kind of function they could use. I mean, like ducks are I mean, their food, they're the some people ha you know, eat their eggs. Um people keep them as pets sometimes. They're certainly the kind of bird that you could add to

we'll say like the roster of farm animals in Minecraft, right? You know, your cow, chicken, pig, that kind of stuff. So I like that could be fun to to add in as well. Uh and colorful. I think that's one of the things that I also think about when I think about adding birds to Minecraft is not just adding your like your typical brown sparrow, but like something more distinct, you know, like a white and black chickadee or a blue blue jay. or a cardinal, something like that.

But when you get into the larger birds, the shape starts to be more challenging. Uh I've seen a couple of successful mods. I was watching some videos about render engines the other day in Minecraft and one of the mods that the guy had on had pigeons, but something very distinct about pigeons is how they walk.

And you can't do without a a complicated enough model, you can't really convey that. It has to have a separate head, body, and tail for it to have that kind of like w m n like neck movement when it walks. So there'd be some challenges there for certain birds. But this particular mod looked good. Like it it looked sellable, but the m the model was akin to more of what you'd see in something like Hightail right now, as opposed to what you see in Minecraft right now.

So there are those challenges as well. Um, I also think about birds of prey. And I would lump owls in there. I wouldn't necessarily want them to have some sort of prey cycle in Minecraft, but raptors are really cool looking birds. They're also big. And so if you want to get away from having the problem of the birds being really small, something like eagles, hawks,

Uh you mentioned vultures, condors, uh anything that would add that kind of cool um bird of prey aesthetic. And then you don't have to worry about them being in flocks, because typically you see those things by themselves. in in the air. Uh, but again, I don't know how you do that.

with a Minecraft model? Like how do you create something like an eagle that then has to land, fold its wings up and like so it would have to change, you know, because birds look so different in flight when they're that large. uh compared to when they're on the ground. So I yeah, I don't know how you might handle that. And again What like what does that bring to the player? Is it a bird that has that you have to defend yourself against? Because you don't want that, because you don't want

Players then killing birds that are potentially endangered species. And um, I mean, maybe Minecraft adds their own version of a raptor, like maybe they add something completely imaginary, but it has some characteristics of eagles and hawks and stuff like that. But I think of that list. Owls would be the more

adaptable to Minecraft. You know, like they're kind of boxy looking, they've got big eyes, they've got this funny thing that they do with their heads, very similar to the copper gollum where the head kind of spins. Yeah. So that could have some silly moments in Minecraft. Uh if If the model is big enough, having big pixel eyes on the owl could be very sellable and cute if they wanted to go that way. Uh and I feel like maybe they could have something to do or some function to do with night.

Like maybe they could hoot when something comes by. Like if you don't hear the skeleton zombie or creeper coming, maybe the owl could hoot. in the same way that I think the parrot will mimic nearby mobs. Maybe the owl could be like an alarm system. And that could potentially, depending on how they put that in the sound system or the vibration system in Minecraft.

You could use that to then trigger a skulk sensor. So there could be a really interesting way to add something that's technical to the game that is very Flintstone inspired. So instead of having some sort of motion sensor or some sort of tripwire in your redstone contraption, you're using an owl.

Right. That's just kind of permanently sitting somewhere and will just hoot whenever a certain mob or certain events happen. And that then triggers your redstone system. I like that could be really interesting. Yeah, really cool idea. I think owls are definitely the more iconic in terms of The birds that I think would fit Minecraft. aesthetic style a lot easier and

they make good noises. They are very silent flyers as well, so you wouldn't need to worry too much about doing like wing noises and having that disrupt gameplay. Like they can be pretty quiet. I just wonder if Um, there's an element where an ecosystem could be present for them because they're hunters, they typically like go after small animals like mice or whatever, and right we don't have anything like that in Minecraft yet, so is an owl just sort gonna

swoop down occasionally, like I I don't know what the um the supporting elements are that would really justify owls being part of the game. But I'd I'd love to see it. I think it'd be great.

Uh going back to the duck idea for a second, um I I did like the notion that you could add ducks in, they could take the old chicken model and then you could remodel chickens to look a bit more like chickens.

Um I'm not certain if th they'd necessarily confer like th if they'd approve of that switcheroo, but um I like the idea of a chicken that has slightly different behavior in water. Like right now they just kind of flap their wings and stay stationary, but if a chicken like creature then took to the water, There could be a lot to you know, to to differentiate it from a chicken that way. Also, like have you ever seen Mandarin ducks? Like they're really colourful. They've got a lot of different like

feather patterns and like overlapping almost like a um like a patchwork quilt level of colour and shape. So those could be really interesting as a as another uh unusual duck to throw into the pot, as it were. But yeah, I I'm imagining the typical mallard duck with like the green head and everything whenever I think of a duck, that's just what I end up thinking.

Um, Scaling up a little bit though, going even larger, the other one we've talked about that was an unhatched idea uh from Mojang is the ostrich, which was part of the twenty eighteen Savannah Biome vote entry, which got beaten out by tiger biomes, foxes, campfires, berry biomes. Um I have always maintained that I find ostriches hilarious. I just find the way they act and the way they move very funny.

Um you could also consider emus, uh, for the folks in in Australia who are familiar with those and have occasionally gone to war with them. Um but I'm thinking about what ostriches could provide in Minecraft though, because there are actually real life practices of cultivating and farming ostriches, which include eggs and meat, um, which have been eaten apparently for millennia, according to Wikipedia.

So there's records there that indicate ostriches were farmed in that sense, but they are also farmed for feathers and for leather. So there's already drops in Minecraft that could maybe correspond with something ostriches could give us as a as a drop. Um their planned functionality was about them digging their heads in the ground. It was never really qual uh like clarified what that did.

It could maybe be sort of loosely connected to archaeology, just sort of digging up items from the dirt or something, but this was originally sort of based on a common misconception about ostriches to begin with, the sort of sticking your head in the sand kind of thing. people cartoonishly believe that ostriches do. Um in more real life applications, they're also the fastest land bird.

Um, I think they can go like ridiculous speeds, like forty miles an hour kind of thing. So like the temptation is to allow the player to ride one, but I don't think an adult person could feasibly ride an ostrich in real life, so It kind of balances out a little bit there of how much realism do you want to apply to it versus how much do you just want like fun gameplay with this sort of oversized bird creature if they added it to Savannah. They're also omnivores.

So they will eat small lizards and mice and insects along with things like fruit and leaves and grass and that kind of thing so the potential food options there, you can go any number of directions with it, whether it's them eating something that already exists in the game or if they go after like if if they eat spider eyes the same way that armadillos do, like you can go in a a a variety of directions with it that allows for ostriches to be fairly versatile.

And I think with the scale of them you could do something that felt boxy but still Minecrafty. You could do enough with like the the scale of them that you could texture in stuff like leaves as a flat texture and it would still look kind of realistic. Uh

uh like wings for them, you know. So yeah, I I think there's um there's room for ostriches to be part of the game. I still think they're one of the stronger ideas that they've had as far as previously suggested, but I'd have to look up the pixel art that they used in that little promo cartoon for ostriches at the time, but I feel like in order to do ostriches in Minecraft they would have to give them knees.

I I don't see an ostrich working as big and as tall and as skinny as they are in terms of their legs. I don't think it would work if it was just like an Enderman with like stick legs that kind of like flutter back and forth. I think that would be really difficult to convince um, people that it's a giant bird. Oh, it w they were straight in the in the

cartoon were they? Yeah, it looks like the the legs were straight and they look do look like just the legs of a tall person, which is quite funny. But then the the necks were in the pixel art at least a very unique shape. They sort of bend backwards on themselves. So you can imagine the neck actually being a more complex model than the rest of the ostrich combined, and you're pretty much on the money.

Um yeah, I'm not certain how much of the design elements of that they would iterate on because they obviously did that with the armadillo as well. So there are some bits of that that feel like they'd be very different from concept to execution, but Yeah, ostriches still feel like they got potential to me, man. I still feel like we could see those in.

Yeah, I mean I was thinking about big birds as well, uh not from Sesame Street, but I was thinking uh tropical birds, or I guess you can call them tropical. Uh Flamingo would be one very colorful bird that you could add to Minecraft and could be fun to to pull off. Still have that difficult thing to to do with the S curve of the neck. Uh but they do have a pretty big head compared to their body. So like you could have that I think be sold in Minecraft big boxy beak.

Uh difficult again to do the the classic flamingo stance without knees, like the way that they stand on one leg all the time in cartoons. Like that you kinda have to see if you can pull that off, which would be interesting. Uh and then this is a a deep cut, but I saw this on social media. Uh I knew that these have existed for a while. I'm sure I saw them in a nature documentary, but have you seen a shoe bill? Do you know what a shoe bill is? Yeah.

Yeah, they they make horrendous noises. They they make noises like machine gun fire, which is a hundred percent. Yeah. Always wild to watch. Yeah, the the bills in these things is the size of a sneaker. Like it's just huge. And they're and they're also like four foot tall. Like they're not a small animal.

And they like they they walk around and have these really big eyes as well. They look like dinosaurs. Like they really feel like the the modern dinosaur. And uh, but yeah, that would be an interesting thing to have with the noises, you know. Like imagine adding shoe bills to like Minecraft Swamp.

you know, and and having them be do something that eats frogs or I like I don't know what you could do in terms of their environment and what you could do for interacting with the player, but like I could see that being something that you could add

to the game. But maybe like maybe that's a thing. I don't think they're aggressive in the real world world towards people, but I feel like that would be a thing in game where like maybe they would be. Like maybe they're territorial, maybe they're the kind of mob that you want to fight against because they're scary looking, they make noises and and maybe you get something the maybe their bill is something that we can craft into something. I don't know. Um, but it it does kind of

have a a look that I think fits with Minecraft because it's j it's just that odd one of those experiences in a nature documentary like that lives on this planet really? And okay. So I I feel like that could be something that would that would work. I was also thinking about like Tropical birds. And I know that we already have the parrot, but something that I again think Or looks like it could be a Minecraft type bird is like a toucan.

the the giant giant beaks on them. Uh again, very colorful. So it fits with like the cartoony vibe of Minecraft. And I don't know what their use could be. Like again, I think about the beaks making chattering noises or using them for alert. Or for something. It's one of those things that would work in something like a jungle, would stand out very well, but then

I I have a hard time with a lot of these birds as I think like, oh, that would be really cool to add visually to Minecraft. I really have a hard time coming up with like, well, what would a player do with them or how would a player interact with them? That would be meaningful, other than just like seeing them in trees. And the problem there is that like we don't have branches in my Like there's leaf blocks.

And sometimes you might be able to see something sitting on a leaf block, but very often that's going to be hard to see from the ground. So I like even owls that usually perch on branches and you just don't see that that often in in Minecraft. Like even when I'm thinking about the songbirds we mentioned at the top of the discussion, I'm thinking about those landing on Fence post

or your roof as opposed to seeing them in the wild in a tree, because they're gonna if there's any place to land in a tree, it's gonna be the top of the tree. Well you're not gonna see them if you're walking alo al along on the ground, right? So Uh and I don't see birds on the ground all that often. Maybe first thing in the morning if they're looking for food, but most of the time they're in the tree.

That's why I think owls would make a good addition because they'd probably be in like tiger biomes and those have the most sort of in and out sections of the spruce trees that maybe you could fit a fit a bird on a leaf block without having to add branches. But yeah, it's it's an interesting conundrum.

Um to move outside of the real world bird examples though, there are still obviously like there's boundless creativity that could be brought to this from the Mojang team's own imagination and original creatures, but there are fantasy birds like the Phoenix, for example, like could be another thing that Maybe if we wanna go mythological, maybe if we wanna go to the nether instead of the overworld even, like there could be

sightings of that sort of emerging from the lava and flying off into the distance. You know, th there are elements that I think could lend themselves really well to a more fantastical approach. in dimensions where, you know, stuff like that is uncommon. You could even, if you want to stretch it to that, have some kind of weird end burst.

Um, especially since that's where we get wings from, admittedly, not the wings of a bird strictly speaking, but like if they wanted to have something that was more adaptable to an environment where there's a lot of open air to fly around in, like seeing some kind of odd bird flying through the end islands would be

kind of a special experience. So I think there is definitely room for fantasy birds to make an appearance as well. Either way, I think we have uh we have come to the end of the birds that we can imagine. Let us know what birds you could imagine by writing into the show and continuing the it would be really fun.

to uh get more people involved in this one. But that's gonna wrap up our episode of the Spawn Chunks for today. You can find more information about the show and links to some of the stuff that we've talked about today over at thespawnchunks.com.

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My name is Johnny, but on Line of Guide by Pixel Riffs, 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 a mix of Minecraft survival guide, misadventures, and now campaign prep for Gigs, Dungeons and Dragons, the next episode of which should be coming up this Friday.

I'm also the voice of the unofficial Hermitcraft recap, which you can find through a quick YouTube search, and aside from that, I'm at Pixaurifs on both Blue Sky and Instagram. Joel, where can people find you online?

I will point you towards the Citadel Cafe, my other podcast about sci-fi and fantasy entertainment. New episode is recording this Thursday, the twelfth, so you can expect a new episode coming soon. Previously we have episode 502 out right now talking about the Muppet Show and Predator Badlands.

I stream on Twitch five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, mornings during the week and afternoons on Saturday. Most of the time I've been focusing on the command center in Minecraft. Thanks for visiting the Spawn Chunks. The world outside is infinite, so you'll have to look real close to see the tiny takeover.