For years,Minecraftdeveloper Mojang has been sharing mob concepts – official designs for possible new creatures – and asking fans to vote on which should be added to the game. What was once a fun little process has gradually devolved into toxic discourse as people split into camps and rally against each other. But this year, voters put aside their differences, banding together to decry the mob vote and demand that Mojang add all three.It didn’t work, but even if it had, all of these arguments ignore the real problem - Minecraft should’ve stopped adding content years ago.
Back in my day (i.e. seven years ago, when I started sixth form), none of my friends could be convinced to play modded Minecraft. There was one of us who was insistent - it has pipes! There’s fleshed-out magic! Caves are huge and sprawling! - but the rest weren’t fussed because it sounded so busy, the peaceful bliss of Minecraft pushed aside for complexity that leaves no room for creative solutions that come naturally from the limited vanilla toolset.
Take hoppers, which transport items from container to container. Unlike the pipes popular in most modding packs, they have limitations baked into their design. They only move things in one direction, so using them for contraptions like automatic storage sorters is more like solving a puzzle than mindlessly placing a line of blocks. It perfectly encapsulates the game’s ethos, staying creative and experimental even when you’re comfortably well-off, but the more that gets added in updates, the less room for unique solutions there is.
The lines between modded and vanilla playthroughs are beginning to blur. Mods are much more complex and rip away a lot of the puzzle-solving, with automatic quarries and industrial revolutions, and vanilla isn’t far off from straying down the same path. Take mining: it’s far less fun than it used to be, even with new ores and fleshed-out caverns. Copper is abundant, but useless, the new textures are harder to read than the old ones, and reaching minerals 30 blocks high at the ceiling of huge grottos has made once engaging underground trips into tedious spectacles.
Above ground, things are spread so far and wide that exploration has become a must to progress in any meaningful fashion, so hunkering down and building a base you can expand into a sprawling home is less viable. There have been many improvements, such as the crafting book and more detailed Nether, but the more that gets added, the more that the once quiet simplicity of Minecraft stumbles into busywork.
I’m not sure what good adding three mobs a year would do,which is what fans seem to want. In three years, we’ll have worlds populated by nine more creatures, while I still can’t figure out what bees are useful for. The game is busy enough with pigs and sheep popping out of thin air, never mind their six blocky cousins. And yet Minecraft is chugging along, adding huge amounts of content every single year, making it unrecognisable from its former self.
On PC, you can roll back to previous updates and play the Minecraft of years past, which has helped me fall back in love with the game after half a decade of burnout. But this locks you out of Realms and limits your multiplayer options, so it’s not ideal. Minecraft is best experienced with others, but that means sticking around to watch everything you know fade into obscurity as the waters get muddier and muddier with new additions.
Minecraft is more elaborate than ever, but Mojang won’t stop the updates anytime soon. It’s one of the most successful games of all time by a wide margin. Fans have come to expect huge, free, DLC-sized expansions each year, and the backlash to smaller updates says it all. But there’s such a thing as too much fine-tuning, never knowing when enough is enough.
Minecraft hit ‘enough’ a long time ago. Just imagine baking the perfect cake only to add every single topping under the sun, splattering it with seven flavours of icing, ten different chocolate toppings, and a smattering of crispy bacon for good measure. It’d be sickeningly sweet, and half of that stuff doesn’t even belong on there. That’s where Minecraft is right now, about to add another layer of jam and another handful of smarties.
