For anyone wanting to re-experience the beta-like nature of the original Minecraft, I suggest minetest. There are quite a few game modes, but the one that I tend to like the most is called MineClonia, since it fairly closely follows the general shape of Minecraft gameplay (as one might expect). The devs are very responsive and it's very easy to hack on and mod (as it uses Lua).
The secret of Minecraft (2014)
81–90 of 230 posts
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more. Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all…
Villagers have been in the game since Beta 1.9, the last beta release before 1.0.0 in 2011... So maybe not the best example. Elytras have been around for a long time too, but they really are OP
I didn't see an Elytra until I'd been playing with various mods that give you creative flight or at least jet packs, so I was used to at least being able to fly†, and in many cases being able to move arbitrarily in 3D space at a whim.
In fact I think the first Elytra I saw for myself was in a world where I had killed the Dragon with an old-school massively overpowered Tinker's crossbow, while wearing full hover capable power armour. Later I'm like "Ooh, End City, these are new", I find the boat, I see the Elytra and it's just flight again, nothing cool? I think I was more impressed to find a decent EnderIO capacitor or some other new gizmo from a mod in a chest nearby.
† I think this is before Slime Boots and the Slingshot were a thing, these days you might give players zero damage on falling + fling yourself long distances and put off actual flight for the first hours of play.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#83I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011.
To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe it is, at least on Hacker News). If people enjoy newer versions I'm not going to stop them.
For me, though, the main disadvantage of modern Minecraft is its complexity. I enjoyed beta 1.7.3 because I had pretty much a complete encyclopedic knowledge of it. This is much harder for modern Minecraft. I get the feeling that most people don't enjoy that game for the same reasons I did.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#84I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011. To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe…
See, I was very much the opposite. Even after Minecraft's full release I was huge into the mods because I never felt like the vanilla Minecraft experience had enough content.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#85Call me a hater but I think Microsoft ruined Minecraft. The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes. There are way too many blocks now so there's not as much need for creativity in building. Simplicity made Minecraft a true sandbox. There was no real objective, just blocks and ways to arrange them. Now there's always an objective to get the next magic/powe…
Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo. I thought they were out of their mind paying that much money for something that I didn't think had many opportunities left to grow. But now I think it was the perfect time for Persson and his team to give it to someone with the resources and the reach to make those opportunities. Yes, Microsoft changed some things about Minecraft the game, but overall they didn't…
Microsoft sure has grown a lot of merch. And yes, children love it. Including my own.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#86Microsoft didn't ruin Minecraft -- all they did was graciously allow the Java version (moddable) to continue to exist and improve while making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform (way more important than you may realize, so many kids are introduced via phones and tablets) and be the place where branded IP / predictable content goes. My 12 year old son has been playing since he was 6 I think, and is an unbelievable builder now, thanks mostly to YouTube, Curseforge, mods like Create and Axiom, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. He also builds on Roblox (which requires a bit of my input to get a lot of the actual code functioning) but modeling and world-building in Studio is 100% him.
I think back to my 12 year old days of making DOOM and Hexen WADs before I really learned to code -- what the kids have nowadays is light years beyond what we had, and I love it lol
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#87I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011. To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe…
See, I was very much the opposite. Even after Minecraft's full release I was huge into the mods because I never felt like the vanilla Minecraft experience had enough content.
I'm the other way. I hosted a cracked 1.5.2b server for 4 years and it has a block shaped place in my soul.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox. It's nice that they've added a bunch o…
I can't even imagine what it's like now, but Roblox is how I first learned programming when I was 11. This was well over a decade ago. Roblox (talking in past tense; not sure how much of this is still true) allowed you to create "Places", which were basically 3D interactive universes that consisted of a few primitive parts (rect. prisms, cylinders, etc.) arranged and connected to each other, as larger solid objects,…
> So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard.
You may have already found it, but Fred Brooks's little essay on why programming is fun has always resonated with me [0]:
> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. [...]
> Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox. It's nice that they've added a bunch o…
This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience. > Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how…
I'm not super knowledgeable about it so I should just let someone else answer; but to clarify what I was saying, I'm not talking about the account migration, I'm talking about the fact that the new version ("education" edition, the one most kids use because of the steep discounts to schools) client can't connect to the old ("java edition") servers. The old server is still easy to run and hack on, but none of your friends will be able to connect to it, and while I don't know too much about the new server, all of the how-tos I looked at start with "go sign up for your free $100 worth of Azure student credits".
Maybe a clearer way to say it is, I'm not saying modding itself is harder, but I think that back when this article was written, if a teenager bragged that they run their own server with mods they usually meant they have a shell open on their home computer with "java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M something.jar" in it and a mod directory with downloaded-and-hand-edited-textfiles, and nowadays they mean they pay for a cloud server and selected mods from a list. But again I'm mostly repeating what I hear from my kids' friends, tell me if I'm off base here.
Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience. > Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how…
I'm not super knowledgeable about it so I should just let someone else answer; but to clarify what I was saying, I'm not talking about the account migration, I'm talking about the fact that the new version ("education" edition, the one most kids use because of the steep discounts to schools) client can't connect to the old ("java edition") servers. The old server is still easy to run and hack on, but none of your fri…
Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything.
I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!). I still occasionally break out an old version of Java Edition and play some of the old mods that I liked back in the day. Many of those aren't maintained any more because the creators have moved on, but many have stuck around (Biomes O' Plenty and Iron Chests have a 1.21 release, and Applied Energistics has one for 1.20 that was last updated today). Plus we still get amazing new mods like Create.
I don't think it's that the old Minecraft has really gone anywhere, it's that, like the internet as a whole, it got so popular that geeks and nerds stopped being the majority. The existence of Minecraft Bedrock brought Minecraft to a bunch of kids who would have never grokked the wild west of Minecraft Java. But its existence hasn't taken away from everything that Minecraft Java still is.