Hey everyone, welcome to The Withering Effect episode 177. Today's date is January 14th, 2024 and I am duds or duds versus known to the rest of the interwebs. And I'm Karl. You may know me as Karl writes. So what have you been up to recently? Duds, after our quite long break between the like this and the last episode Recording. Coughing. Coughing. Yep, standard duds. You know, the same thing I was doing before we took our break. I've done a couple of things. I did some single player.
I was. I don't want to call it burnout, but I've definitely been suffering some creative drought and it was pretty rough. I didn't want to make videos, I didn't want to build anything. So the way Minecraft works for me is I have to be inspired. I have to be able to visualize something in my head before I can start building.
And that's really good and all. That's what allows me to be able to build in survival mode instead of like a lot of people are building a creative mode and they bring it over to survival mode. I'm not that kind of player. I'm very much a survival player. If I do it that way, I kind of feel like I'm building it twice and that just annoys me. The the ability to envision how I want it to end up before I even start usually helps, except for when it doesn't.
When you can't envision anything, you can't build anything. This is true. This is true. I went through a lot of that, especially right around Christmas time, The Christmas episode, a lot of that is because of Live in Arrington. They really helped out on that. They hadn't stepped up and Lucy hadn't come up with such a great poem. My build would have been pretty bad, just putting it lightly.
So yeah, I did that. I played some single player a lot of just kind of like caring from the homestead and making sure the farms are working correctly, planting stuff and all that. But doing stuff like that helps. Just placing blocks, even if it's kind of meaningless, helps me. Yeah, it helps you get back into the vibe, done it, you know? Right. Yeah. I didn't have any real inspiration, but it got me wanting to play the game.
I didn't dread starting Minecraft anymore, so I went into my creative world and like was looking at some designs. Sometimes it can be just the way I've built a pillar, and that alone is enough for me to design an entire base around. I didn't have anything hitting me except for Ripple Season four, my starter house. Do you remember it? Oh yeah, yeah. I loved that house It. Was a good one. Yeah, it felt like a home, which is something I don't get in a lot of my bases.
Like I, I build bases that I'm very happy with, but not all of them feel like a home. Yeah, they're more sort of industrial. Like this is the same for any like massive base. It's more of a sort of an industrial complex that's got like a bedroom somewhere within it, right? It's it doesn't fit. It's, it's not like it's got like a living room and a kitchen and a bathroom and a bedroom. It's like it's got farms and
storage and stuff. It's more like more like a business premises than an actual house most of the time. My Ripple Season 2 felt like a home to me, even though it was very industrial. Yeah, Ripple season three was just, it was just out there with how I built things. And then Ripple Season four, that house felt like a home and I was like, I just want to build that house again. I loved being in that house and me being me. Obviously I can't just make the same build again.
So I started designing a more grown up version is what I'm calling it. Like if this house was like 8 year old duds, this is what this house would be at 18 year old duds. And I show it in my video. I do have a video coming up tomorrow which will have already come out by the time this airs. But I I show that house in creative mode and then I I show it when I built it in survival on channel 64 and you can see it is the same house just upgraded,
which I'm very happy with. I really like how it came out. It was super exciting to be able to envision something and I show like, hey, when I am in creative and I am designing stuff, I'm not designing the whole thing. I'm just doing a couple walls and figuring out roof lines and then I just, I go, yeah, I feel like a lot of Minecraft videos don't walk you through that
process anymore. They're just kind of like I did a 2 minute time lapse and now we're going to go bug off for like 18 more minutes doing random stuff. I spent 10 hours building this is 20 seconds right? Let's go play mini games or let's go and prank someone or whatever. Yeah, and that's that's totally fine if that's the way you want to do your content stuff. But I'm not that kind of person and I really enjoy watching someone build and hear why they made certain choices.
So I've been gearing my content towards that more so than the normal stuff. Yeah, and I did a lot of that in this episode. Nice. Looking forward to seeing it. Hopefully people enjoy it. You definitely hear how sick I've gotten in that episode. Was it recorded over quite a while then? Yeah, it took two weeks to get the episode out. Right. So it's sort of you getting better over that time as well? Yeah, there were a couple days where I just couldn't stop coughing to save my life.
Like, it'd be every 30 seconds I would cough. So it was really hard to record on those days. Yeah. So I'd be like, well, I'm just going to time lapse in these days. And then I'm watching the footage back and I'm like, it's too much time lapse. We don't need all this. You get the gist in the first time lapse. I shouldn't have three time lapses in here. So I would just cut it out. And then I got really sick Thursday of this week. I drove to work not feeling
right. About 30 minutes into the work job, I got real dizzy and just like, cover your ears if you're squeamish, Like just vomited majorly. I was like, holy cow, what is it, 'cause I don't get sick easily. Other than my allergy cough, that's the only thing that really happens. I was like, what is going on? And I ended up having my dad come to my work and drive me in my car home, 'cause I couldn't drive. I was so dizzy. Turns out I have really bad Vertigo.
OK, that's heights though, isn't it? Well, no, It's just your equilibrium being off, OK? The way I can equate it to people, if you're an adult, it's like being drunk and there's no sleeping it off. So for like 2 days I was very dizzy. Yeah, and nauseous there. There's no playing video games. Can't do that. There's no watching TV, There's no scrolling on your phone, there's no reading a book. I can't do any of that. All that stuff made me nauseous.
Jeez. So I just kind of sat there and I looked out the window listening to the radio and the TV. I've just got this picture of you in my head in like a rocking chair, just staring out the window. You can't do rocking chair because that's dizzying. Oh yeah. True. Yeah. Yeah, it was very sad. The good news is, yeah, I went
to the doctor. They couldn't get me in till 7:00 PM on Thursday. I go in and help me have Vertigo. They give me some medicine, but she goes try these exercises 1st and see how they do. And it turns out the exercises were great. I haven't had to take any medication. That's good. Well, when she told me like, hey, when you take these you get really sleepy, you're going to pass out for a while. It's like I don't want to take anything that does that. Yeah, anything drowsy?
Not good. Yeah, but I'm over that. I'm going back to work tomorrow. Saturday. I felt like 98% fine. It's just if a light hits me in the eye while I'm turning my head and flicking my eyebrow. Not eyebrows, but your eyelids. That kind of still gives me a little woo. Hold up. Yeah, yeah, I'm good to go. Good to hear. What about you? What have you been doing? Looks like lots of stuff. That's not even all of it.
I've been continuing with my James Bond rewatch that I've been doing over the last like year. Hey, I do like 3 or 4 films and then I get bored and take like 6 months and then do three or four more. Yeah, I'm up to License to Kill, which is the last Timothy Dalton one, so I've got Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig to go. So I've been doing those. The the reason I started this was I wanted to get better at like writing and not the best
writer in the world. So writing like film synopsises and reviews is really helping me. Like, also fun to watch the films back from the days where you kind of remember them, sort of bits of them, actually. Like watch them all back and see what you like and don't like about them. So that's really fun. I've got a few to go, but some of the ones that I've really liked to kind of surprised me. They were the ones that I remember being rubbish. So that's really fun.
So I've actually got like the poster with all of the posters on the 25 films, so I'm going to put like the the rankings on there when I finish it. Nice. I'll leave a link in the show notes to anyone who's interested to the link to it. Minecraft wise. I've been playing a little bit of decked out too. Now we wanted to try and put it on our Patreon server, but there's a mirage of technical reasons why we can't.
Yes, that has nothing to do with bisect, it's to do with how the servers set up. There's no real demand from our patrons for it, so we didn't want to completely re architect the server to be able to do it. So I've been playing it in single player with the voice mod and everything so all the audio call outs work and everything. That game is hard. It looks so much easier on video. Yep, just sliding around that first corridor area where
everything's made of ice. Like I have been killed so many times in that area by ravages. I haven't played it OK, but as I'm on a controller I already imagined, I was at a huge disadvantage because I can't turn as quick as other people can. Yeah, I I don't use a mouse either. I use a big trackpad. Yeah, yeah, you're a weird one too. Because I don't like using my siper for using my fingers on a trackpad because I'm used to Macbooks.
So when I got a desktop, I was just like, I'll just get the big trackpad because I'm used to, and that's what I've always used. It's good for like in games where you, like, have to turn quite quickly because you just scrub your finger across it rather than like trying to meet math. But Even so, like keyboard and sort of mouse, like, it's really hard, Just that opening area.
I didn't really kind of realize how difficult that game actually is. So GG to the Hermits, all of them, for how well they did on there. But I played a few games and got Frost Embers and did the whole cards and things, and I played it maybe about 10 or 15 times. But I think the fact that I kind of watched every single stream of them playing and every single video has kind of burnt me out on it before I even played it. Same. So I was wanting to get like a group of people together and do
like a decked out to season. We're actually going to play decked out the way it was meant to be played like the Hermans do, separate from all the all the S and PS and video content thing. If you want to make content, that's fine, but that's not the main focus. But I'm like you. I've watched every stream, every video, and it's like, yeah, I think I'm good. Yeah, it's kind of sad. Well, I think Tango ended exactly when he should have. Yeah, completely agree.
There's not much about decked out two that he missed on down to, like how the games play and everything like that and but including the the start and finish date nailed. Yeah, it's it's an incredible game that he built. I even watched a lot of the streams through the design and the planning and the and the building process as well, with all like the bus lines and Redstone and all that kind of stuff. I understand a lot of how the Redstone works. Really cool, but.
I still remember the stream when he was playing with wardens to see if he could name them and they wouldn't disappear. Yeah, the Warden Stream was awesome. But yeah, I kind of like I say, I was kind of burnt out on it before I even played it. And I played through it a good 10 or 15 times and I'm kind of, you know, I enjoyed it, I really did. But it's not something that's kind of pulling me back to wanting to play it anymore.
Maybe in like 6 months a year, I think, because I do this with games and we'll get on to this in a second. But I'm not like a a massive gamer to start with. So I will pick up and drop games, games that I love, I'll pick up and drop them randomly for like years. That's just how I am. And I think decked out too might be like that. It's still on my computer, it's still in my single player save folder, sat there ready for when
I want to play it again. Well, even Tango's come out and said decked out three, it's probably not gonna happen next season. Yeah, so there's gonna be at least a year before decked out three even gets started. So I very much think there's gonna be a spot where people pick it back up and are planning it again. Yeah, I bet you there will be custom maps with data packs ready to go to streamline how everything works. Yeah, I know. Exuma on his.
I don't know if it's a Patreon server or a public server, I'm not sure, but his server has decked out on it. Kind of like a modified version of it. His team put it together. I'm assuming you can play on that. I haven't looked into it so I don't really know. But yeah, looking forward to decked out three. I think he's right to not jump straight into it for his own kind of sanity and for everyone
else as well. Just play season 10 normally and come back to it. Season 12 even might give it a couple of seasons, maybe, and then come back to it because then everyone's fresh on it. Personally, that's what I'd be doing, and that's the best way to do it. Yeah. Speaking of gaming, I I came to this realization, which is what I just said about me being a casual gamer. And I pick up and drop games
quite a lot, very randomly. And Minecraft was always kind of the game that booked that trend because I played it for eight years straight, Something like that. Age of Empires I used to play back in the day, and I've only picked up recently LA Noire I picked up when it came out and kind of dropped it a few months later. Hitman. I never played until like 2
weeks ago. I realized that these games are sitting on my computer for no reason because they're taking up all this space because these games are like 3050 gig and I have to play them through crossover most of the time. That makes Windows games run on Mac. That's has to be installed. The game has to be installed. I'm taking up so much space on my computer, the games that I
play every now and again. So I started looking into cloud gaming and obviously we had the we had Stadia close late last year. Yeah, GeForce NOW became the sort of default option, but GeForce NOW is sold out in the US, Europe and I believe parts of Asia. Too much demand, not enough capacity. I went to another one, which is called Boosteroid. I don't know if any of you guys at home have heard of it.
I have never heard of that. If you follow like the cloud gaming channels on YouTube, they talk about Boosteroid quite a lot. It came out of sort of Eastern Europe and kind of came to the West, where GeForce Now is sort of the other way around. Both GeForce Now and Boosteroid use your Steam library for the games. So you buy the games on Steam and then they basically host them on their servers. So that's what I've been doing instead and it's like £9 a month but it's like cancel at any
time. So I can. So I've paid for January and I probably won't pay February and I might pay for March and then I probably won't do it till August. Or because like I say, I'm the kind of person who like plays games kind of sporadically. It allowed me to play games that I that don't work through crossover, like Hitman for example, which I really got into. Cool. I'd heard of it and it seemed like it was sort of like a first
person shooter at the time. But now I've realized that it's more sort of like espionage space, kind of intelligence base and stuff like Bond. So I've really been enjoying it. Nice. I've been wanting to play City Skylines too. Doesn't have a Mac version, doesn't work on Crossover. Really having problems with performance on PC anyway. Yup, that's all I've heard about that game. Yeah, so I'm kind of waiting on that one to buy it because it's quite expensive and I don't want
a rubbish experience. And even Boosteroid have got a big message on it that says not optimize for cloud gaming. So yeah, I'm not going to be doing that quite yet, but that is a game that I want to play. They've got Age of Empires on there, which is was already in my Steam library, so I don't have to buy that. I've actually had a controller for a long time, a steel series controller.
Yeah yeah, yeah. It works with like my Apple TV and stuff, my iPhone, and it works with Boost Roid as well, but it doesn't have as many buttons on it that you need for these kind of games. So I got a cheap second hand Stadia controller because obviously people are selling them off dirt cheap because Stadia doesn't exist anymore. Google released a sort of Bluetooth upgrade to them.
It was like a free download that you could do to turn them into just a Bluetooth controller, and that works really, really well. Don't know if you've ever, like, tried any cloud gaming services at all. I have not. No, because I know you you're looking for a new GPU and I thought that might be something you might have looked at as an alternative until GPU prices come down. Technically the ones I'm looking at I can afford now, right? It just comes with my monitors or older monitors.
I never got into the. I need 144 Hertz and 5000 pixels on the. I'm very much in the realm of my eyes can see 60 Hertz no problem. That's where I'm at. So my monitors are actually an older monitor. One of them still uses the white DVI component. If I upgrade, I then have to upgrade my monitors. Yeah. Or buy an adapter for them. Either way, it requires me to take apart my computer and reassemble everything. And Carl knows every time I do that I have to go through sound
checks for about 3 days. Oh God. Because there's some kind of grounding problem every single time I do that, and I it's honestly, I just play Minecraft for the most part, so it's not worth it for me. Yeah, every time he quote UN quote upgrades his computer, it affects my life. It does. Well. I've determined the next time I do something like that, I'm I'm going to buy a rug for my room because right now where my chair sits, there's no rug.
My chair very much just rolls out from underneath me half the time when I go to sit down and I know that's going to break my tailbone one day. Yeah. I want to put some better paint on the walls and stuff. The next time I go to upgrade, the computer will be a big kind of like final. I'm doing a lot of projects at once kind of thing, and I'm not going to do that till I I take a work a week off work that way. I'm not trying to do this in the evenings and fight through that and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, you need to take time and like, plan what you want to do with it and make sure you get all the right your ducks in a row and all that kind of. Yeah, I'm sure there's going to be a AAA game at some point. That kind of pushes me to do that. But yeah, cloud gaming is actually like, surprisingly good with, like, latency and video performance. And it's it's surprising how well it actually works. I'm happy with that for now.
If you're someone who like games constantly and has the the latest titles and plays you know, every day and stuff, it's probably not for you. But if you're like a casual gamer that, like, picks up and drops games all the time, right, right out cuz works surprisingly well. Should we move on to the news? Let's do it. The first thing I have is, well, actually really the only thing I
have. No more Legends. The the game has one update it's putting out, and then that's kind of it. They're not going to update it anymore. It's no DLCS, none of that. Yeah, it's not going very well considering there was a lot of hype around it originally. Yeah, I'm not going to be like really pessimistic or anything, but I could definitely tell when I saw the first trailer for this game. It was not going to be a huge hit, and I can't tell tell what
exactly made me feel that way. All the videos I'm watching, most people say it's the repetitive gameplay that really turned them off. Yeah, for me personally, I thought the game looked ugly, like that cell shading. It hurt my eyes. It did not. I did not want to play that game. I didn't want to watch anyone play that game. But everyone who does video say it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. I was like, huh, Maybe I'm in the minority. I didn't mind how it looked
personally. It was a bit sort of in your face. I think that's just kind of the style, yeah, of like those kind of games and where they've gone. But the fact it, you know it, it sold 3 million copies in the first two weeks and then sort of by the end of like the next month it was down to like 17 players or something like that. It was, it was like. After one month, 99% of players left to never come back. Yeah, that's based on Steam
data. So we don't know about like this is true Xbox Game Pass or PlayStation or whatever. But I feel like the same issues that the PC version had would also apply to those. Which why he say is the repetitiveness of go to a village, protect them from the piglins, build up the defenses, go to a village, protect it from the piglets. Even like the online stuff, like there was no text chat, voice chat, there was no support for
local multiplayer. You know, you pay like $30.00 for Minecraft and you get this kind of info, infinite world, this sort of ultimate replayability. And for $10 more you get a game that has at best 15 hours of gameplay. So you know, it's not the best. I I just don't think it was the kind of game that Minecraft players wanted. Yeah, I did see that. Like someone say, like Mojang's. Oh, for three on side projects. Whatever. I still stand by Dungeons was a hit. Oh yeah, it's nowhere near hit.
That Minecraft obviously is the biggest game of the world is kind of hard to beat. None of them were ever going to be, though. People are still playing dungeons. It's all 25,000,000 copies. Yeah, like that is amazing. I've bought DLC for Dungeons. I think it's a pretty fun game. It's a shame, kind of I I just think that Microsoft decided that they were going to use the Minecraft name to try and sell other types of games.
And yes, they use, they use the IP and stuff, they use the piglins and stuff like that, and they use the the kind of broad style of, you know, characters and things. But at the end of the day, they're totally different games. They just try to use the Minecraft branding, in my opinion. Dungeons I think was a big success. Like it it looked awesome though. Even the gameplay was like really good and kind of fitted the Minecraft style a bit more
than Legends did. And I think Minecraft Earth, which is the other one that quote UN quote failed, came out in 2019. I want to say, yeah, obviously that got hit by the Pandemic. It's a game where you go outside and you meet people and you build together using augmented reality, and then everyone was told to stay inside for 12 to 18 months. And I think also at that point AR wasn't as mainstream. I would even say today it's not
very mainstream. The the phones that were most able to take advantage of it was iPhones. The Android phones that were around at that time, although they could do some of this, it wasn't as well optimized as it was on iOS. And I think that kind of limited the market because Android is still a big part of the mobile ecosystem. Yeah, take that apple for you.
Stop yourself, boy. Well, I have a Samsung S20 and I basically got this one because this is the one they offered for free when I when I upgraded and it it's definitely aged and stuff. But at the time, it was like, hey, this is a flagship phone. This is the comparable to the iPhone. And it really was, but it it didn't take advantage of AR. So Minecraft Earth came around. I couldn't do that. And it's like, well, this is
still a pretty brand new phone. And granted, like I think the very next model had a bunch of AR features on it, but by that time AR had gone out of fad. Apple were definitely the 1st to it and their implementation of it was really good. Like, I played a few AR games and they were very well, you know, optimize and they work really well. But it was just a handful of iPhone. So at that point that had the ability to do it.
Yeah, I just, I just think Minecraft suffered from an adoption issue with AR and obviously the social issue of the pandemic. And I don't think that game was fundamentally a bad idea. It was just the timing was way off, which was unfortunate because I think on the kind of like back of the success that was Pokémon Go and they had a real chance to make it a big success. Like I said, those factors ended up with it being cancelled two years later. I'm surprised it took that long
to be honest. I'm surprised it was only discontinued in 2021. Maybe they thought they could fight through the the closures and stuff. But yeah, I don't know. They they don't seem to be able to keep these side games going long term. It always seems to be like a two or three-year cycle on them. Maybe they're fine with that. It depends whether it makes money. If they put a certain amount of money into it and it makes double that in profit, then maybe they're OK with that. They know that.
Well, I hope that they know that they're never going to be able to make a game as successful as Minecraft ever again. Correct. Maybe ever's a bit too much, but like those kind of games that do those numbers and sell those amount don't come along every day. Maybe they're fine with it. We don't. We don't know because they've never said to say Dungeons was a failure is not, is not true, had its own issues, and I think Legends is just the wrong kind of game for the audience.
And I think the repetitiveness of it was a big turn off for people. Yeah, talking of Google killing things as we were talking about with Stadia earlier, this is something I kind of missed. Yeah. Because this was announced late last year, kind of it kind of didn't end up on my radar. Google Podcast is closing in April. Which is crazy. I use Google Podcast. They want to migrate everyone over to YouTube Music. Yeah, I did see my YouTube Music get updated to include Podcast now.
I also use Podcast Addict. Yeah. Because a couple of the ones I listened to, it was the easiest one to set up the withering effect RSS. Feed We have listings on every platform that we can. You guys who use Google Podcasts. I'll leave a link in the show notes to Google's migration instructions of how to like take your library out of Google Podcast and into at least YouTube Music. I don't know if there's other options on there. I hope that there is like Spotify or Stitcher or whatever.
Is Stitcher closed now? I don't remember. I think so. Yeah, the the the closing left, right and centre, so it's hard to keep up with, but we've set the YouTube version of the show as a podcast, so it will show up on YouTube Music. You guys who want to transfer from Google Podcast to YouTube Music, you can you can do that and it will be there for you. I will say you can sign up for YouTube Premium for like $13 and you get YouTube Music for free.
Yeah, YouTube Music by itself is like $10.00. So for like an extra $3 you can sign up for premium. I just did that in December. I had YouTube Music and I was paying for it and then I realized Premium was like 2-3 dollars more. Yeah, so I switched over to YouTube Premium. But I think the the podcast section of it's free anyway. Yes, yeah. But I think you might have ads. I don't know. No idea. I just literally found out about this an hour before we started recording.
Wow. This was the news to me. So you guys who use that pick where you want to go next and hopefully your library can be moved there pretty easily. I think Google Podcast is like our third biggest. I know that was a good bit. Yeah, because it goes Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and then I think it's Google Podcasts and then Audible and Amazon after that, there's options out there. Should we move into our polls? Well, let's do it.
I was super excited when I saw the results of these polls this these polls were asking what kind of Minecraft player you are. We had stuff like Adventure Zookeeper, Hoarder, PvP or Redstone or Home Buddy base Builder and the majority of everyone is a Home buddy slash base builder just like me. Yeah, I was kind of surprised. I was too, because everything Mojang puts out is Explorer
adventure, Explorer adventure. They like, shove that down your throat and I'm like, but I just want to stay at home and build. And we will say that came second in both our Spotify and YouTube poles, however. It wasn't close. It was a distant second. Yeah, no, I I think because we have an older audience, and by that I don't mean our audience is old. I mean, they are not younger and they're not kids or whatever. They're very mature when it
comes to the games and stuff. You don't look for adventure in exploring other stuff. You like the aspect of design and building and stuff like that. I even would put Redstoner in with Home Buddy Base Builder, because when you're building a base, you put Redstone in the base, but I think there's a lot more of that. 52% of our audience are between 35 and 44 on Spotify.
Now whether that kids using the parents accounts or whatever skewing that data, I don't know, but that's the that's the data I've got. Kind of surprised I'd thought more people. I thought it'd be more spread than it was. I thought they'd be more PvP mini games. Everyone likes to say that PvP is dead important and the combat changes were awful. And you know, Redstone are being that low 7% on Spotify, free percent on YouTube. It's kind of.
There's a lot of people who still like, they don't touch Redstone. Yeah, just like there's a ton of people who have never been to the end. It's like 50% of all Minecraft players haven't been to the end. Yeah, it was crazy. It's an insane stat, I. Can't remember who told us that. It was a Mojang dev. I think it was Oroff. Could have been.
Don't quote us on that. It's kind of crazy Adventure Explorer being like 17% to 65% for homebody and 27% to 50% on YouTube. That's not close on either of them. Yeah, like you say, all the updates seem to be. Yeah, they they push a gameplay experience that at least the majority of our listeners don't care about. Yeah, I don't know what data they've got. I'm assuming they have. I don't know whether there is any analytics built into
Minecraft actually. Even if you're just watching YouTube videos, like, I think the data there still leans our way. I don't know. Yeah, you don't really have. At least I haven't seen many videos with people just exploring. You get the the initial exploration in a new world, and then you start building a base, and then you get a little bit of exploration when you have to go to an ancient city or when you're looking for the end portal and stuff like that. But this is just traveling to me.
Yeah, There's no real adventure happening along the way. You're just traveling. I mean, an ancient city. It's to the point now where you just look for a tall mountain. There's an ancient city underneath it, Like 90% of the time there's an ancient city under there. It's it literally made me not build in mountain biomes. Yeah. Way to go. Way to go. Should we get into listener
comments? The first question comes from Jesse W They ask if there's a combat update, do you think the fletching table would get updated? Short answer, yes, hope so. And do you think some of the mobs will act differently? Maybe zombies having a horde mindset? Zombies already have a horde mindset. If you attack a zombie, other zombies start spawning. Yeah. Or, you know, if your base is on a mushroom island and you turn around and there's like 20 zombies coming at you, that's
scary. Especially at night. I know because this happened to me. This was a few days into, yeah, Ripple season three. It was a few days into that server. So I didn't. I wasn't exactly packing. You know, diamond. Yeah, swords and stuff at that point. And also, if I'm right, zombies can see players from a further distance than other mobs. Yeah, I believe so. Which gives them that horde mindset. Already creepers can flank you as a small group. I think that's true, Opie.
Yeah, Creepers. Exploding is already extremely dangerous, but having multiple creepers that can explode and destroy items really sets the player back into a position where they may not want to come replay the game, which I think Mojang would really want to avoid. Yeah, I don't think multiple creepers is a good idea. And finally, this was a question from Jesse W The Dino fanatic finally had a peaceful afternoon, I tell you. The slain by an anvil with legs. Sassy anvil with legs.
Yeah, there's an emphasis on sassy. Very sassy. And your question, Carl, is by Warrior Queen Caitlin. Yeah, the crafter gives off a very steampunk vibe. Whatever steampunk like contraptions do you want to see in 1.21? See, I think the Create mod does a very good job with steampunk. So my first initial thought is none, because I think the Create MoD's a very good thing on its own and I don't want moeing copying it, I'd like it to be more original.
I think it's because the way the door opens and spits out the item and then closes back. Yeah. Is what gives off that vibe. Yeah, just trying to think if there's any kind of steampunk locations they could add, you know, like you've got like the bastions and stuff like that. Like, is there anything like that they could add to the world? But would it look out of place though? Right.
Like if you add first thing I think of when I think of steampunk, it's like a hot air balloon or an airship that would look really out of place in a Minecraft world, just spotting in. Yeah, I'm just looking at some pictures of some different steampunk things and it just feels like a totally different game. If that was and it looks so out of place, I think big kind of things wouldn't work, but I'm sure that there could be a few little things. Yeah, like maybe a chimney
block. Yeah, so people wouldn't have to keep using campfires surrounded by trapdoors and stuff. Oh yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. I guess you could kind of make the Cauldron a bit more steam punky. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you do that. I just think it's a totally different style, and I think you can add bits of it in here and there, like subtly. But I don't think anything big would work at all in Minecraft. Shall we move on? Yeah, I don't have anything else on there.
Before we move to Creator Clash, here's Jimbo with a reminder of how you can get a discount on your own Minecraft server from Bisect Hosting. You can get a discount on your own Minecraft server through our partnership with Bisect Hosting, offering our community 25% off any game server for their first month. This is for new clients only. Visit bisecthosting.com TWE and use the code TWE Checkout to receive the discount. Thanks Jimbo, we're going to do Creator Clash a little differently.
So normally this is when I would be like hey here's three data packs or three resource packs to have everyone vote on. This time I would like to hear from you guys what is what is something you would like us to check out instead of me guessing. It feels like Creator Clash isn't getting as much interaction as maybe Block of the Week did and stuff like that. So I would like to kind of turn it on its head for a vote and see what everyone else would like.
So if you would like to be a part of that, post a link in the Discord or reply to our Spotify Q&A with a data pack or resource pack you want us to try out. Definitely. We'll never be able to recreate the success of mending Minecraft that was. No. That was a wonderful thing on its own, and maybe Mojang had some more stuff we could do. Some more mending Minecraft. Yeah, which? Would be nice because there was
good stuff there. But last month you guys voted and the winner was Piglins in Balloons and I believe you did take a look at that. That's not on stream, but in your own time. What did you think of it? So yeah, I got it to work. It was an easy Optifine resource pack. It does exactly what you think it does. It puts a a piglin in a hot air balloon, shoots a cannon at you. The sounds were very disconcerning. They're very scary. But The thing is, it wasn't very big.
It actually felt smaller than aghast. Really. Right, Yeah. The picture looked really big. It wasn't as intimidating, exactly. That's what I expected. Yeah, that's interesting. Right, there's that. Theme wise, I feel it fits better than the Gas does. Now people will argue with me over that because the Gas is classic. But it's only classic because it's been there for so long. Exactly. It doesn't mean that it's like the right thing for it to be.
It's just it feels right because that's all we've ever had, correct. But thematically, this does feel like it fits better. You'd obviously have to rework the AI because it still moves around like a ghast. Yeah. Which is strange, but. Hey, we were talking about steampunk. There's your hot air balloon. This this is true. This would fit in there. Yeah, I haven't checked it out, but it seemed like a really cool idea.
It fits in the never because like, you've got piglings already and it's not too far of a stretch to think that they could hop in a hot air balloon. You know they're running after you, you haven't got your gold on, They see you run off in the distance and they go, right, I'll go get my hot air balloon and I'll follow them across the lava. That makes a lot of sense. So I think it fits really well within the kind of law of the never.
Obviously they're not going to take the gas down now, right? Never going to happen. And I wouldn't ask them to, but if they wanted to dress the gas into this in certain biomes. Yeah. Kind of like how they do with strays and husks and stuff. I wouldn't be against it. It would work. I I'd have no fault. Maybe just in the Crimson Biome they do that or because they they spawning never wastes gas, don't they? More so, you could keep the gas there and then have these maybe
around the bastions even. Yeah, you know, within like 50 blocks of the bastions, there's always a hot air balloon up there as sort of security. Yeah, that could work really well. But yeah, I'd love to see it in the game, I think. I think it's a great idea and props to the developer of that resource, but it really fits the game. Is it time for our main topic? Yes, an hour into the show. So expect it in April.
Dear no please no. I came up with this topic while scrolling through Twitter. So the Minecraft oh I'm sorry, X The Minecraft page itself posted a caption that says What Minecraft opinion will have you like this? And it's Steve leaning up against the wall with a bunch of swords pointed at him. So basically, it's your version of a hot tank. It's time for hot tanks. I took a couple of them. I was giving credit to them, and then there were like several. What are they?
They're not tweets now. The posts now. There were several posts that were basically the exact same thing. I stopped doing credit for every single one of them, but some of them I agreed with, some of them I didn't agree with, and I wanted to make sure to kind of get both in there. The first one was the new cave system sucks. This was for ramp mania, and I agree. I don't like the new cave system at all. I definitely think it sucks. Shocking, now I agree. It cuts to the terrain too much.
There are holes in the ground everywhere which is super annoying. The spaghetti caves give so many areas for mobs to spawn, so it's extremely hard to get underneath there and light everything up. It's just not good. I still go down and cave like I've been caving since 1/8, so it really didn't bring anything new other than some new blocks. Yeah, the blocks were really good, but. Moss is awesome. I like how easy it is to get clay now. Glow berries is a sweet generation. Sucks.
I'm not sugar coating that one. Sorry. Yeah, it's not the best and they they spent so long on it as well, right when they could have been doing other things in my opinion, but. This next one's a tweet by Toxic Plays. I'm sorry, post by Toxic Plays and they say the progression to get Netherrite tools in armor was good before the addition of the upgrade template. The upgrade template just adds another layer of difficulty to obtaining Netherrite Tools in armor that is unnecessary.
Agreed. I get why they added it. Yeah. It's a continuation thing with the Smithing Templates and all that stuff, but the fact that you now have to travel to a Bastion. Moyang's very much in this mood lately where they're forcing you to go places to progress in the game, and to me that's not real progression. You're hiding progression behind a travel wall. I'm not getting better at the game, I'm just traveling further. You're turning an open world game into an objectives game.
Yes, that's exactly it. You're this is kind of takes me back to Hitman. It's like you've got these objectives that you've got to hit before you can leave the mission, but you've got to take this person out. You've got to collect this flash drive, you know, you've got to make it look like an accident or you've got to poison them or whatever, and to progress within the level, and that's what it
feels like Minecraft's doing. To be able to upgrade this armour, your first objective, you've got to go to this place, Your second objective, you've got to acquire this. It's an open world game. It's not supposed to have objectives. It's supposed to lay everything out and go. You play this game how you wish, where I feel like they're trying to structure a path through the game more and more with these things.
Well, I definitely feel players have lost the abilities to structure themselves and they really need stuff spoon fed to them to enjoy the content. And I'm not trying to be like disrespectful in that way. I'm thinking a lot of games have been made where it's a linear story progression and everyone's just gotten so used to that when they go back to a Minecraft, which again has been out for forever and is very free and open world, it it takes you back a little bit like, oh hold on,
what do I do here? What do I do now? Yeah, but that's the kind of thing. It's like there's you go on YouTube and there's loads of videos that say, what do I do next in Minecraft? What's the top 10 things you should do when you're bored in Minecraft? You know, all those kind of videos. So it's kind of like, in a way, like you say, because of the way games have been structured, a lot of them anyway. We've kind of lost the ability to think for ourselves in a way, when it comes to games.
I mean I've, I've had it where I've been playing mine craft and I kind of log in one day onto Ripple or whatever and think I don't actually know what to do today. Maybe they had an objective, maybe that would help. I don't know. It's kind of a double, double edged kind of thing. Like you you kind of want a little bit of structure just to sort of give you a push in the right direction. But at the same time it's it's not really what the game is about. Yeah, it's kind of kind of strange.
I get why they're doing it, but there should be multiple ways of doing things. You should be able to even put resources into something that you can do at home. Or you can go out and get something which saves your resources. Maybe. Maybe something like that? Yeah, for me, as a player, my game doesn't start until most players game have ended. By the time they beat the dragon and they get nether and stuff, like their game's over. They're done with Minecraft at
that point. For me, my game's just now beginning, like I'm just now getting to work. Yeah, the fact that I'm now hiding more useful items for myself behind more work does not make me enjoy the game anymore, Does not make me like going exploring even more. It hates me. Regret having to go out and do this stuff. I think we're kind of used to the way Minecraft has been, though, correct? We're looking at this from the point where the game was a lot
simpler. I feel like people coming to the game now or in the last five years would probably have a different opinion on it all. For sure, yeah. Yeah, I think we're kind of we. We kind of log for the days when it was simpler to do everything and there wasn't, you know, Take the villager update, for example, with the biomes being locked books. That is a hot take that we will have later. I bet. I bet it is, but. Here, here's one that works with
that. A lot of people do not like the way how Elitra has changed the game. They prefer Elitra to be removed from the game. Whereas someone who joined the game just as the Elitra was added. I completely disagree. Correct. Same here. I remember what it was like moving around the world without Elitra. Yeah, I remember what it was like building without Elitra. Everyone had a jump pad, so when you fell off your tall structure you would land safely.
Yeah, I remember having an Elitra and having to use the. The punch bow. The punch bow technique. Yeah, you look like a porcupine every time. Yeah. And then when they added the firework rockets to it, I was like, yes, come on. And you could actually like properly fly places, I remember, but having to like go through deserts and forests and that to find a particular type of wood and get some saplings or yeah, doing that in the very early days of me playing the game.
There were minecart rails everywhere. Yeah, every plains by home just had this big Minecraft minecart track all the way across it, yeah. My next one is from Flip. They're saying survival Minecraft wouldn't be as popular without mending and netherite tools not breaking as fast. Agreed. This comes back to the grind. A lot of players begin their gameplay when a lot of other players are ending their gameplay and the grind does not count as gameplay.
Yeah, making me work more and harder to get back to doing what I like just should not equal gameplay. And making me constantly repair a tool or constantly grind for material so I can repair a tool is not fun. Mending is an amazing enchantment and allows me to be able to play the game how I like. I I said many times in my last episode, I only get like an hour and a half, two hours, three if I'm pushing it after work to play. And that's not every day after
work. So that's a little bit of time, and if I had to spend an entire night repairing tools, it's not worth it anymore. I wouldn't play Minecraft anymore. And plus, mending gave a reason for the levels, because the levels aren't really that useful unless you're enchanting mending or like renaming something.
So it gave them a big purpose to get levels, which meant you would come up with Redstone contraptions to take mobs, crush them and then take them down to half a heart and then installed them and you get the resources from them and the XP to repair your picks and tools and everything like that. So it kind of led to more gameplay, Mending Mean added. Right, Rather than just I've now got to go and mine for diamonds
again. Well, you remember there was only ever an Ender Ender. There really weren't spawner grinders as often. Yeah, you had one early game, but the second the Ender Ender got made, everyone used the Ender Ender. Yeah, there was no need to go anywhere else. The second you got mending, the grinders became just as important as the Ender Ender 'cause if you had a grinder at your base, you didn't have to travel all the way to the end to repair a tool or enchant a new
one. You could spend 5 minutes at home repairing something quick. Heck, if you had villagers, you can just trade with villagers and usually repair tool at that point. Yeah, but I remember many times having to go build a new pickaxe, go to the end render, get 30 levels, enchant it, realize it's not the enchantments I want unenchanted. Or actually we did have one enchanting at that time, so you had to build a new pickaxe and enchant it again. No, it's not fun.
No, I think that's just a lot of nostalgia getting to people. Definitely. In other ways, we're kind of guilty of that as well. This is this is true. I I'm not afraid to admit that that that's 100% next hot take. Lego Fortnite is better than Minecraft. I'm going to disagree. I've never played Fortnite, so I have no idea. Well, Lego. Fortnite isn't really Fortnite. It's Fortnite brand, but it's Lego. A bit like Minecraft Dungeons. It's not really the same game, it's just branded that way.
Kind of, yeah. Yeah. Lego. Fortnite is not as integrated with certain mechanics as Minecraft is, but Lego Fortnite puts out updates like that. They don't have to wait an entire year for an update, They don't wait weeks for an update. They notice something's wrong with the game fix the next day. Players are asking for certain things next day. So it's like, yeah, these changes can be made fast. And that's where Lego Fortnite demolishes Minecraft.
Not even close, but Minecraft is still the better game, at least in my person opinion. Here's a hot take. OK, coming in hot. If it would, if it would improve updates dramatically, I would be prepared to pay for them. Yeah, I've already said that I'd be willing to pay for DLCS if we got more content and they came out quicker. I'm not going to pay $40.00 for ADLC every two months. No. So there there is that. We always hear that, like the updates are getting smaller.
I don't think anyone could deny that, including Mojo. And a lot of people go, well, they are free. OK, then charge for them. Yeah, I I hate that argument too. Well, it's free. And it's like, well, it's always been free. So I get it. But that's not saying I'm not willing. I'm willing to pay $15.00 for a very good DLC. If you want to bring out a a Nether overhaul DLC style for $15, I'm going to buy it. Yeah, that's where your money is, Microsoft.
But The thing is, if you're going to charge me $15.00 for 121, I'm not buying it. Yeah, definitely not. 121 is not a very good update right now. I know that might get a lot of backlash, whatever, but the the whole trial chambers does not interest me at all. The Deep Dark did not interest me at all. No. And see, those are the kinds of things that like, well, now where are we at? Some people are buying updates
and DLCS, some people aren't. Yeah, it gets to the point where you kind of like talking about stuff that a percentage of people haven't got access to. I kind of think that's how we are anyway, because there is a lot of servers that are still on older versions of Minecraft. There's there's people that still play older versions of Minecraft, right?
I I don't actually know. I don't think Mojang has ever, like, disclosed this information, but I would love to know what percentage of active players are on the latest version. Right, Channel 64 isn't. What percentage of people are on 1.8 still? Yeah, right. Yeah. Because I bet it's a lot higher than we'd imagine. That argument kind of works and doesn't saying, well, if you charge for it, it's a barrier to entry. And yes, maybe it is, but what we're getting is not that great.
You know, I would have stopped paying for updates. AVEs and Cliffs Part One. After that, I wouldn't have paid for any of them. That's where I'd still be. Now if they went, you know what, it takes money to develop these updates, and we've only got a certain budget. If we charge for them and we get, you know, 5% of the player base to pay for it, then we'll earn this amount of money.
And that allows us to put more time and effort, more wow, into these updates because we've actually got to sell it. They're making these updates knowing that they're free. If they treated it more like they've got to sell this update to people, they've got to convince people that this is worth $15 or $10 or whatever it ends up being, then I think you would see a lot more in them than there is right now. I think you would see a lot more feature updates instead of
things update. Yep, let's keep going. I've got three more left. This one. Locking trade items on villager location is a good thing. No it is not. No, it's not. That adds a lot of unnecessary grind to the game and would be a deterrent and I think that's that's the whole point is they want it to be a deterrent. They want enchanting to be the main thing, not villager trading. Let me just say, playing on Channel 64, there are players who are not afraid of that grind at all.
Like that grind would be over within a day or two, no problem. Me personally, I do not look forward to that kind of grind in my single player world. I still have a fortune to pick. That's my biggest, best enchantment pick because it's not worth going for the crime. I don't want to have to go to every Biome and build a village of Rita. And then transport villagers to the villager breeder. Oh. Just to breed them, please. Especially when some of them don't have villages.
Right. You're going to do this. You better make swamp villages. Period. Yeah, it does seem like they want it to be a deterrent. Yes, it's a deterrent. You want that enchantment? You got to travel all this way to get it now. It's a deterrent. It's not a fix. I personally don't think there's anything wrong with the villager system, like I think the enchantment table needs work. Right, yes. But I don't actually think since they made the changes with the POI.
I think it's fine. Yeah, I don't see what the the issue is. So many people are like it's two OP and don't use it. I remember for the longest time people were giving that complaint or whatever, like don't use it then and then now that it's come to villager trading, no one's saying that everyone's like no, it needs to be fixed. It's like if you think villager trading is too easy, then don't do villager trading like this comes back to the players sometimes find it hard to
regulate themselves. Yeah, it's like I know players who don't ever get out of iron armor just because it it makes it harder for themselves which makes the game more enjoyable for themselves. It's like, yeah, it's not the best stuff, but that's how they like to play the game. I think a lot of players see the higher tier stuff as a target rather than a choice, right? Exactly. That's the wrong mindset to have. It's like when everyone on your server has never right armour
and you're the guy in diamond. I wear diamond. I don't wear never right because I don't see the value in it. Yeah, and they go, boy, you've got diamond. It's like 3 years ago this was the top tier mate. It's like. All of last season on Channel 64, I used an iron sword. I died so many times because I used an iron stupid sword and I needed to get in an extra hit and I didn't. But it makes combat fun. Not for me. Not for. You, but it was very much a different.
Makes combat different. Exactly. You know, if you have a sword that's all singing, all dancing, and you can take out any mob with one swipe, you're just taking the fun away from the game for yourself, right? I hate to take it back to Hitman once again, but I've been watching a lot of videos on Hitman recently and the kind of correlations between what we're talking about here and that kind
of work. Yeah, I could just snipe them right now, but then I admit, out on all the story behind it, I'd miss out on finding a a staircase where they're coming down and I can drop a chandelier on them, or I can put poison in their drink and make them go to a toilet and then drown them. Like every single mission you could just snipe someone and
walk out. That's the easy way to do stuff where what we're talking about here is making the game more fun for yourself by not taking the easy option right, And those games can correlate together in that kind of respect. Well, and this goes back to what we said earlier, that there should also be the easier option like getting that nether right Smithing template. I shouldn't be forced to go somewhere, just like players shouldn't be forced to play a certain way like the choices are there.
You can either do villagers opie wise or make a little bit harder yourself and only use the enchantment table. I've done that. I think this season on Channel 64, we're all enchanting table till about a month ago. I finally started adding books to things like just get like mending and stuff. You kind of see where you walk into people's bases and they have the same thing. Yes. The same farms, the same village of trading halls, the same everything.
I was noticing this when I was doing the gallery for Ripple Season four. And you go into certain members bases and like I said, the same village of trading halls, the same farms, the same this, the same that. And I will say if that's the way a person wants to play, they should be allowed to play that way. 100% But I feel like the game is designed to push you in a certain direction these days. There should be options. Everything should have two ways
of doing it right. An easy way where you pay a little more for it or. Game knowledge helps you get to the easy way. Yeah, if I could stop using Lapis in the Enchanting table by going and finding a Lapis Shard in this faraway place, I'd probably do it. Because I I don't collect a lot of Lapis. Like, I've never had big stockpiles of Lapis, so when I'm trying to use the enchantment table, it's like going to spend
lapis again. But that's what I'm saying two different ways of doing it. The easy way is shoving some lapis and it'll eat through it. Or you go on this mission to get a special key to not have to use lapis anymore. Two different ways of doing it. That's what everything should have because it's an open world game.
I get there has to be a progression kind of tier system, but the way you go about implementing that, you can either do it in a way that they seem to be going down, which is a this is the path through the game. Or you give people options to kind of split out in different directions, and then from those they split out in other directions and everything's got a choice to it.
Rather than feeling forced to do something, you have the choice of A or B. Which one do I want to do based on where I am within the game, what level I'm at, how much time I've got to invest in it, and all those kind of things? Next one, Mojang should stop with spinoffs. I kind of agree with this and I kind of don't. It's not Mojang that's doing the spinoffs. It's usually another company and Mojang just assists with the spinoffs in like when it comes to design aspects and things
like that. Like we we know the piglins were introduced from a game. Produce them together. Yep. So like stuff like, that's very cool and I do not want that to stop. The only reason I would want the spin offs to stop is if Mojang's doing more than just helping with a design aspect. If they're pulling resources to help with spin offs and that's the reason we're getting such lackluster updates, then yes, please stop the spin offs. Yeah, I don't think that's
what's going. On. Doesn't seem to be gins was made. By Blackbird Interactive, right alongside Mojang. I don't want Mojang to stop swinging. Because we got dungeons, which was a hit. Yeah, I love dungeons. So there might be another game right around the corner that's another hit. So they should definitely keep swinging. Unless it's taking more resources than we think away from the Minecraft game, then yes, please, for dear Lord,
stop. But I don't. I don't think it is. So keep swinging last one. The final one is vanilla. Cannot beat modded. Under any circumstance. True. I've never played any modded Minecraft. So I haven't either, but I've watched a good bit of. Modded in itself, Modded is just an add on to the vanilla game so therefore it will always have more and allow you to do more than the vanilla game so therefore it can't beat modded. That being said, if you really want to get down to it, it's a
personal opinion. I prefer vanilla over modded. That being said, I've been really wanting to play Create mod. I have the create mod set up on my system, I just have to get around to like hey do I want to make a video out of this or do I just want to play? I like that modded is an option, yes. I like games that support modded. Prison Architect has a great modding system. They can add things in that a little developer like
Introversion Software can't. Like there was one where they turned the delivery trucks into helipads and they had like military helicopters landing with supplies and stuff. That's the fun things you kind of get with Modern. There was another one where someone had made an entire basketball game with counters and everything and proper ball physics and put that in prison. Architect Modern's really cool. I'm glad it's supported, at least in Java.
But yeah, the the vanilla game is your king and modern is the sprinkles on top of the cake for people who want to go in a in a different direction, either because they're bored or and they want something different or you know, they they see something they that they really want to play with someone else and that's the way to do it. I think moderns great, totally support it in as many games as possible. But yeah, vanilla is king. But I think that's going to do
it for today's show. Before I have Carl read us out, I want to say a huge thank you to all of our patrons who are supporting the show. Our milk level patrons are Arrington, Omni, Fragile Rock J Men, Loki, and The Meme Bug. If you two would like to get access to extra content and exclusive benefits, including our brand new Minecraft server powered by bisect hosting, please consider joining at patreon.com/the Worthing Effect. If you like this show, you can
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