The secret of Minecraft (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The secret of Minecraft (2014)

medium.com

220 pointsprawn223 comments

He makes a good point about "secret" knowledge, but I don't think that's the real secret.

I believe almost everyone, including the author here, misunderstands what made Minecraft take off.

It was NOT just the fact that you have creative control (which is what most people mistakenly assume is the main point) or that you need to learn how to craft to advance, or the procedural generation. It was the _combination_ of all of those things _with_ a challenging environment and mechanics that _motivate_ you to explore those features!

Without exploring, crafting and building, you can't survive the dangerous creatures or you starve.

And people stupidly harp on the low-fidelity graphics without realizing how well Persson absolutely nailed the core requirements of game design and execution of his concept. The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned and it was very smart to simplify them, with so much new ground and working mainly alone at first.

Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program all at the same time and it took a strong understanding of game design. Persson wasn't just lucky. He mastered programming and game design and created a novel experience.

Totally agree. You can't reduce an experience like Minecraft to any one thing, it's the formula that makes it so enduring.

re: harping on Minecrafts graphics, there's a lot of people that completely misunderstand the purpose of graphics in games and just think greater fidelity = better. Sure, in AAA games especially, graphics are there to sell the game, and that's certainly one part of the creative ensemble that the medium is known for.

However, graphics also enable game designs. These include creating a sense of grandeur or plausibility (high fidelity), making fast feedback loops easier to see (high contrast effects), allowing for visual challenges (hidden items), freeing resources (low fidelity), and probably most importantly, drawing attention to relevant parts of play.

The best creative decisions are those that tend to check a lot of boxes with a single decision, and Minecraft's lo-fi style really did that. It enabled complexity within performance constraints, drew attention to the resource game and away from the visuals, defined it's own aesthetic reminiscent of older games, and allowed the game to be built with a very small team without a lot of art skill. Basically notch took lemons and made lemonade, and it worked.

My favorite part of the Minecraft aesthetic though is that it implies you can create, making the whole world creatively legible with big blocks. Other creation games in 2d & 3d just don't have this degree of creative suggestiveness, they look too much like other read-only games to make you feel like you're an equal participant in play.

For me pixel graphics is often more appealing than badly done 3d. And 3d pixel art = voxel art = sweet spot

Minecraft is the best building game ever made. It's perfect like Bach - built so simply you can see how it was done, and fits into the constraints of the medium perfectly.

A game that has similar building (albeit less "scriptable" since there's no redstone) is Enshrouded. They use smaller voxels and a different polygonisation algorithm (seems to also differ based on voxel material tool). It's a really fun game, even if there's less variety than Minecraft. Also it's still in early access. I recommend you check it out if you enjoy building in Minecraft

There can also be too many graphics and effects going on. I played the Elden Ring dlc and a few fights there are so many particle effects going I literally have no idea what's going on sometimes.

Notch didn’t nail it all on his own though - Zach Barth nailed a bunch of those crafting and world manipulation and building mechanics in Infiniminer. Notch was screwing around cloning infiniminer in Java and Minecraft is kind of what popped out.

Obviously he wasn’t as interested in the PVP combat mechanics that Zach built, so he ended up leaning into survival, and had some ideas about how to extend the procedural generation ideas to make an infinite world, so… he ran into a slightly different spot in the game design universe.

I certainly agree that Notch was standing on the shoulders of giant, brilliant Barth, and without Infiniminer we would never have gotten Minecraft. Zach's game design is so good that it makes you want to build, or build better games. You can clearly see the inspiration that took hold and the potential that Infiniminer and all Barth's other games absolutely exude. His games are worth playing not to sink time into but to simply breathe in. There's little else quite like it.

But I think even then this unfairly discredits Notch. Regardless of what you think of the man, he certainly did nail it all on his own. He didn't just clone Infiniminer -- there's surprisingly little left in common at this point -- he used it as a springboard to invent what is essentially a new genre. You see the same sort of ingenuity in Fortnite and Roblox, who certainly have Minecraft and by lineage Infiniminer DNA in them, among others.

The difference is that, for a very long time, Minecraft was Notch, and what he did with it is still arguably unparalleled today. It's staggeringly good for a single person. The simple core loop was incredibly ripe for iteration. But the ingenuity the game is absolutely littered with, dozens of little things, tiny decisions made between pre-alpha point releases, is all Notch. In so many ways the game made itself, like a chain reaction of features, but Notch himself is just totally engrained in the whole thing. It's nuts.

To say he didn't nail it all on his own, I simply cannot agree with. Zach Barth and Notch both made something incredible. The shame is that no one ever gave Zach Barth the comically oversized sack full of money he deserves. I will surely never fire up Infiniminer again, but I could fire up Minecraft at any time and instant fall back into the engrossing loop of the game. Though it's been many years since I last played, I inevitably will again.

I've struggled to think of an analogy here... perhaps the closest I can come up with is Quake and Half-Life, which are even more closely related. Did Valve stand on the shoulders of giants? Absolutely. But they definitely nailed it all on their own.

We all build atop the works of others.

But maybe a bit of happy coincidence, or luck? Like, yes he made the final decision to use the music made by C418, but I really think you couldn't have made anything better. So, lucky those two got together? But then again, deciding to only occasionally start playing a song definitely was a great decision by notch.

I'm really someone paying attention to soundtracks. I care and think about the music people put into games. Minecraft definitely has one of the best, most recognizable and iconic soundtracks. And I've been gaming since the 90s.

The music nails it. The first time you play, it is magical. Like, I was swept away. I think the music was really important for the emotional state.

You may enjoy this cover: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gVYjlmB81Hc

When Apple released the iPhone, several smartphones were in existence. But the iPhone created a much more cohesive and simplified experience compared to those. There's merit in that.

It's called the Second-Mover Advantage.

Microsoft would have been totally incapable of coming up with a product like the Iphone.

Even if you gave them a crystal ball in 2006 that sees 8 years into the future and showed them pictures of the smartphones being used in 2014, they still would have botched it, because they're culturally incapable of understanding the end user.

So, I while I do think the second mover advantage contributed to the Iphone's success, the biggest factor was Jobs' user-focused, opinionated vision.

Apple wasn't even the second mover. There were many smartphones and pocket PCs from a myriad of vendors by the time the iPhone appeared.

The concept of second mover advantage doesn't mean you have to go exactly second - your reply is somewhat pedantic - you just get the advantage by not being the very first. Apple absolutely enjoyed some second mover advantages in bringing iPhone to market.

The second mover advantages Apple enjoyed went beyond just the cellphone design too - they completely rearchitected the relationship between a carrier and a cellphone OEM. People forget that pre-iPhone, virtually all cellphones had to carry crappy software insisted on by the cell carrier - the iPhone was one of the first ever handsets that shipped with the OS completely under the control/design of the handset vendor with no network involvement. Just getting AT&T to agree to this alone was massive, and hadn't been figured out by any of the pre-existing smartphone manufacturers on the "first move" either. We take this for granted now across the industry that cellphones can easily arrive this way in carrier stores with little/no carrier interference.

Heck, pre-iPhone, it was close to impossible to buy a phone in an AT&T/"Cingular" store that didn't have AT&T/Cingular's logo custom printed on it, such was the extent of the carrier choke-hold on the OEM handset supply side. This was true of virtually all the carriers in North America at that time. Again today, it's rare a phone is branded with the carrier logos, and smartphones rarely ever now have bundled carrier software/OS changes at the user application level.

You could have shared those insights without the insults.

You could have not been a pedant.

It was also exciting to discover how deep the rabbit hole goes.

There was a stage where crafting recipes seemed logical, almost like you could make anything functional if you just could represent it accurately enough on a 3x3 grid with the limited handful of resources available.

Many state that the game is over after the first night, in a way they are correct. If you can survive one night, the game lacks a strong over arching motivation to do much more than simply live.

The rest of minecraft’s wonder is the creativity of the player.

Zero punctuation got it right and I don’t think Microsoft has meaningfully improved the game’s purpose.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xk5qbk

The Video Reviewer Zero Punctuation summed this sentiment roughly as "it's a game which'll let you build a giant penis of gold if you wanted, but it'll make you do a lot of work and adventuring to do it".

Graphics are always secondary, no matter what. Graphics are a tool in videogames. You have impressive light management like in DayZ with graphics from 10 years ago, and you have one of the most expected games and one of the best games in the last decade which is elden ring (or zelda for the same purpose) that have normal graphics (or even cartoonish in zelda's case) and does not matter a lot.

And youtube. The rise of youtube gaming channels made minecraft, and vice versa.

Minecraft was immensely popular before you could starve, but I agree.

Surviving in the game isn't challenging, and while the game was getting popular early-on (say around beta 1.3), there weren't many optional challenges either. The most dangerous monster was a spider, you didn't need food, and the only dungeons were those original mob spawner cubes.

It was more about creativity, though in "survival" mode you were limited by collecting resources, which unintuitively made it better by forcing players to think about how to use them. And of course it was way more fun in multiplayer.

> The graphics were secondary to all of the other things I mentioned

IMO, not exactly. At the time of the creation of Minecraft, "ugly" voxel graphics were a necessary technical evil in order to allow the world to be fully editable.

And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right.

> Pulling off the procedural generation and motivating the creativity is what made this masterful. Those were difficult features to program

I don't think they are; it's a matter of knowing that algorithms for noise generation that are both suitable for landscapes/caves and computationally efficient (perlin/simplex noise) do exist. The procgen trick itself exited for a long time before MC; Elite is famously known to have taken advantage of it, and roguelikes were using it before that.

> It was the _combination_ of all of those things with a challenging environment and mechanics that motivate you to explore those features!

To me the holy grail in not-goal-oriented true-open-world sandbox games such as MC is to ascend to the infinite game (which remembers that one source of inspiration for MC was Infiniminer). A low-hanging fruit are the "creative" players, that is players that are satisfied with building huge cities (as one of the screenshots in TFA shows) or replicas of the Enterprise, Star Destroyers etc. Those tasks can in practice be infinite. If that's not enough, you can add other infinite axis, like "red stone".

It's more difficult to achieve it with RPG-oriented players, because traditional MMORPG have a leveling mechanic that necessary has a maximum; lore and stories are also finite by default (this could change with generative AIs). Unless you let players create them. But you have to move to "true" role-playing to achieve that, like you see in also decades-old MUD games - MUD games that somewhat share with MC the property of being easily extendable because text is a much cheaper asset than audio/video/3d models. But role-playing somewhat assumes multi-player.

In single-player, a possible way out is to horizontal progression - that is, rather than having a higher and higher level up path, you have players to choose between mutually-exclusive options (the choice between tank/mage/dps in MOBAs is an example of this). In a game like MC you can have players choose between attributes that helps with farming/fighting/mining/building. If you pile up those attributes, you can get a lot of player character diversity for cheap thanks to combination explosion - much like you get a lot of different-looking characters with a relatively small amount of textures for clothing. With this device players are encouraged to play multiple characters specialized in various tasks. It at least should create some form of trade between them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-user_dungeon and https://www.mudconnect.com/

> And then, when you start from that, the only aesthetically consistent choice for textures is to stick to retro-style low resolution. photo-realistic high-res textures don't feel entirely right.

Not to mention that once you could add your own texture packs it became a user choice as to which graphical style they wanted.

I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play.

It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too.

Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.

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 of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

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, or with hinges. It was, in other words, a multi-player physics sanbox. Also, the use of the word "place" instead of "game" is interesting to note; as a child, it felt like they could really be anything, with no particular expectations.

I don't remember when Lua scripting was added - I think it was around 2008-2009 or somethng - but it allowed you to perform simple event-based programming, registering clicks/deaths/collisions/etc and manipulating the game world. As a child I saw this as a form of magic. What would otherwise be a physics sandbox with inanimate objects interacting in a strictly mechanistic fashion became one in which anything could happen. You know, magic. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that was my thinking.

So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard. I am still pursuing this goal. Also, RIP Erik Cassel. His tutorials were one of my first - if not my first - introduction to programming ever. He died too soon.

> 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.

[0] http://www.grok2.com/progfun.html

Not the OP, but that was a wonderful read, thanks for sharing.

It follows that, maybe we programmers should see ourselves as working class poets or writers.

Weaving our magic words like wizards casting their spells, with every line written, we watch as our work of fantasy hardens into reality.

Our faithful computer always does our will.

With infinite patience, it takes our every instruction until each one has been precisely executed, down to the last word.

A bit idyllic, true, because there is always the dark side, the bugs. But otherwise, pure magic.

And, nothing wrong with other professions, but, more that 20 years after starting out, I can still remember why I wanted to be a programmer.

>You know, magic

>So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard

that's a classic MIT AI lab idea.

"We'll actually see that Computer so-called-Science actually has a lot in common with magic."[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY 0:40, and a lot in the SICP textbook

all your rblx info is still true, by the way. there's a lot more you can script with too, including internal and external API integration, inter-game info transfer, transactions, all kinds of stuff.

Lost? Nothing has been deprecated, Java edition is still supported and kept in feature parity with Bedrock aka MS Edition. Yes, Bedrock is not mod friendly like Java, but the modding community hasn't stopped.

And yes they moved the license server from a Mojang server to the MS login system, but what is the real difference here? You still have to login, you just don't like MS for unrelated reasons.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server

https://hub.docker.com/search?q=minecraft

https://old.reddit.com/r/admincraft/

> Yes, Bedrock is not mod friendly like Java

It's getting there, though. They recently introduced the framework for more advanced mods. Heck, Create Mod is even available on Bedrock now.

One of the devs on the Bedrock scripting team here :)

I started programming with Bukkit and hMod in Minecraft, so I am so happy to help others learn to program with Minecraft!

Do you have any resources to help someone get started? I've done a bit, but always looking for more info.

This is a good starting point!

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document...

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 your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way.

Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.)

> It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security.

[0] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/

[1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-Ho...

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.

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.

We've indisputably lost whatever Minecraft would be today if notch hadn't sold it. We can't know what that is, maybe it would've sucked. What we got instead feels like just another corporate studio game, a good one, yes, but we already have a lot of those.

At every branching point in history, we have indisputably lost the result of the branch not taken. But... what's your point caller? That fact by itself is pretty meaningless.

Contrary to the point of view that somehow Microsoft changed everything, what surprising is how much they didn't change or might not be different at all... Jens Bergensten is today's Chief Create Officer at Mojang... but he's not a Microsoft plant, he's been there since 2010 and, moreover... " After the full release of Minecraft (1.0.0), Persson transferred creative authority of the game's development to Jens Bergensten, afterwards continuing to help out with Minecraft while also working on new projects." (https://minecraft.wiki/w/Markus_Persson) That happened in 2011 a few years before the Microsoft acquisition. As far as I can tell, there is a significant representation of pre-Microsoft Mojang staff that still exists within the company; sure there are many more people that have only been there since the Microsoft acquisition, but that seems to be a function of growth and resource availability more than some imposed change of direction.

So actually, I'm not sure what we've lost here. Pocket Edition, later to become Bedrock and upon which Minecraft Education is based, was well underway prior to the Microsoft acquisition. That ship sailed while Notch still owned the company. Outside of the Microsoft account and chat reporting requirements, which clearly were Microsoft driven, it's difficult to really see how different things would be. Arguable Jens might have been reeled in more by Notch, but my bet is that Notch was paying more attention to his 0x10c by 2012 and Jens would have had pretty substantial creative discretion by that time.

Halloween update was really just so good

I enjoyed Minecraft with less RPG mechanics overall

I feel you. Modern minecraft updates feel immensely tone deaf

> 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.

If enough people are pushed onto a new system, then yes we do lose the ease of the old system.

That may be true in the abstract but has not been really demonstrated in this thread.

I spent the rest of my comment detailing the ways in which everything I ever liked about Minecraft is still available—do you have anything to add in support of the idea that something has been lost, or just this abstract observation?

Available isn't the same if it's not what people are using. Especially since you had to buy them separately for so long. This is not an abstract loss.

You're still talking abstractly, though. What was actually lost, in concrete terms?

As I noted in my comment, I'm still subscribed to YouTube channels of people who are still playing on the same server with the same group (with some changes over the years, of course). I don't play Minecraft as often as I did in 2012, but that's because I have a career and a family, not because I can't. I'm now introducing my son to Minecraft Java and he's loved it every time we've played it.

I'm just not seeing the loss, and those who are bemoaning it here haven't actually pinned down what's now missing from Minecraft as a result of Bedrock (or even Microsoft in general).

It's easy enough for an adult to follow setup instructions, but the ability ability for a kid to come home and set up their own minecraft server and bring in friends is cut down a lot when you go from "just about everyone has minecraft (java)" to "just about everyone has minecraft (bedrock)". Java is still there but it's not the thing everyone already has ready to go. That's especially true for vanilla but it also increases the amount of hurdles you have to go through to set up and use a modded java install.

And before they merged ownership, the gap between casual play and a custom java server went from "some setup time" in the earlier days to to "more setup time, also more than a hundred dollars purchasing copies of java version even though everyone in the group already owns minecraft". Surely you can see the lost opportunities there.

As someone that’s hosted many servers over the years and made a few mods, it’s easier than ever. Getting started with modding is so much easier with the excellent IDE support and mature modding APIs compared to class monkey patching and struggling to load up a decompiled version of the game in Eclipse was.

> Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014

That was such a long time ago... I remember people proclaiming the death of Minecraft.

> I remember people proclaiming the death of Minecraft.

To be fair, it's on a long slow Yahoo!-style death path - Microsoft have not been good stewards of the game. They've owned it for 10 years and we're still having to rely on 3rd party mods monkey-patching the game for basic optimisations and QOL improvements. The bug tracker is awash with things that should be fixed but are ignored in favour of "mob vote of the year" and forcing in things they can tie to merch / media and IAPs.

Microsoft bought Minecraft to milk it dry for money - and they are doing that amazingly effectively - but they did not buy it to make the game better or their users happier.

Minetest, which has been around nearly as long and is a FOSS game with more or less feature parity, covers all these bases. Super easy to script in Lua. Simple to set up servers.

I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.

Same here! Got a server on an old Rpi 2 and as client an old Samsung tablet. All works great and we have a lot of fun! The only thing is to setup the game as you like, with mods etc. it takes some trial and error, but it's also fun.

> Runs great on lower end hardware too.

Our first server box was a late gen P4 running headless Ubuntu. The CPU had strong single thread performance and handled dozens of players.

I dislike the auth changes as well, but it hasn’t had any impact on server hosting in my experience. It’s still just as easy as getting the right JVM and running the jar. The only thing new is the EULA you have to accept on first launch

The auth changes locked me out of my minecraft alpha account. Apparently I had a period of time to link my minecraft account with my microsoft account and that is gone now. I just use a pirated launcher now since they made it so I can't play the game I bought anymore otherwise. I miss playing on servers though.

You can even still disable user authentication. That’s a pretty sweet deal for a game owned by Microsoft. There’s legit support in the game for pirated copies.

For a while I hosted a server for some friends that used TLauncher, turning off the "online mode" was indeed super simple! Then they also got the proper copies from Microsoft and I could just change the configuration setting, and we could all play with the proper accounts, although if I recall correctly they lost their old items and such, because those were considered different player IDs and whatnot.

Not condoning it per se, but the game could be way more draconian in its implementation of auth.

There are still entire ecosystems of minecraft mods. Launchers are popular that hook into these systems and essentially give you specific minecraft package environments for each just like software environments to manage multiple conflicting sets of dependencies on a single machine.

https://www.curseforge.com/

You can try minetest, an open source clone. It's fun!

consider minetest, which makes it trivial to get started with your own server and can be scripted in lua like roblox

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 villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.

Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode.

Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation:

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25...

So maybe I'm just playing the game in 2024 after all :)

And my kid loves creative.

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.

> Removed supernatural or fantastical minecraft mobs: no zombies, skeletons, creepers, endermen, etc.

No zombies? That is mind-blowing. I love the vision you outline at 13:40-15:40, will play when I get a beefy enough computer for Minecraft mods ;-)

> No lava buckets

But that was available since InDev :'(. Cheers though, I appreciate the points you make and I agree with them. The mod adds too much realism for my taste, but most of the removals are very nice.

I can recommend checking out Vintage Story if you want the refined Minecraft survival experience. Just finished playing it with my wife a few weeks ago — great fun.

Was just about to promote VS here, seems like the parent poster would really enjoy it. More people need to know about it! I just wish development were a little less glacial.

I can only play on hardcore mode now, doing that puts the survival back in. Unfortunately I have no friends willing to join me in that :’)

Hardcore may strain a friendship when one of you die. Better single-player. There are other ways to up the stakes with a friend, e.g. all of these:

1. Hard difficulty

2. No armor or shields

3. Don't stockpile any ore or equipment beyond what you want to carry, so when you respawn you have literally zero iron, diamonds, tools

> 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 villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.

Yeah, it really kinda surprised me that Minecraft went in that direction. What got me hooked was 100% the need for shelter and some landscaping to make sure you wouldn't have eg. a bunch of skeletons standing under each tree on your front lawn every morning, a creeper waiting around the corner of your house, etc. Being able to skip night completely means there's basically never monsters on the surface unless you want there to be, and without that sort of ever-present threat, there's just that much less pressure that the game can put on you towards cautious gameplay and 'functional' protective structures and so on. Of course people keep themselves entertained with amazingly extravagant builds and ridiculously complicated redstone machinery anyway, so I'm not saying it's a bad direction for the game, it obviously worked out well for them etc. I just really wish there was more gameplay directly motivated by basic survival, instead of progressing past survival in the first five minutes.

Conversely I think flying is entirely fine. Unless you're, like, speedrunning, flight is only available once you've progressed through basically the entire game, and I think at that point it's reasonable that there's a more convenient way to explore distant areas.

Now, shields, those are just too powerful for how early they're available!

> Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter

You can make a shelter in less than a minute, so eh.

> you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you

Just?? They don't have that much variety and it's a lot of work, more work than collecting most resources on your own.

> you can get a bed

Beds, from beta 1.3? You're really pining for a specific couple months there.

Yeah I know people who started playing with me and other buddies when they were still in college and now they play on the same server and map with their kids. What other game would that even make sense in? That's weird and awesome. It already makes me feel old seeing stuff I built a decade ago; I guess it must hit even harder if you have these moments with kids.

Never played. No idea. We're big lego fans. Where should I start? Anything to avoid?

You could be tempted to start in Creative mode. Don’t do it if you can.

I say this as someone who loves playing in Creative mode : it’s not the same game at all. Survival mode is pretty easy and it’s not the same mood. There’s a strange feeling in this game when you just start to build a wooden shelter with not even a door to survive the first night and somehow, after some hours, your shelter is now a cosy house with some underground cave that gives you an access to your own mine.

That’s really a cosy feeling that you can’t feel in creative mode.

Survival is pretty easy : there are monsters at night but surviving is nothing more than hiding in a dirt house.

And then after hundreds of hours, your start to be bored and it’s time to go Creative and to build gigantic castles.

Also you said "we" : if you can play the game in multiplayer, it just doubles the fun.

What were all of those survival hours for if you weren’t gathering resources for the eventual castle?

There is only hardcore. No other mode exists. Large biomes... sometimes it drops you in a desert where there is no wood, and the only obtainable block is sand. You can't build a roof with sand. There is no way to obtain coal or charcoal, so you can't make torches to light the night sky and keep monsters at bay. No trees for kilometers. You see the beach, do you dare try swimming for it? The drowned zombies come out of nowhere, you swim too slow to dodge tridents. Maybe wood out there in some sunken ship, but wooden blocks are difficult to discern from slabs or stairs down deep. Iron, if you can figure out the correct way to get to the chest. If that chest is even there in a broken ship.

"Survival" isn't about surviving, because if you die you just respawn and go grab your stuff. There is only hardcore. "Creative" isn't about creating, because you're just wishing stuff into existence effortlessly. There is only hardcore.

A child taught me the game, my child picked it up when she was old enough and at this point I’ve played a lot of Minecraft.

I’m a big fan of starting in creative mode with the difficulty set at peaceful. Mobs won’t attack you and you don’t have to deal with hunger. It’s a good way to figure out crafting, mining and finding resources without having to deal with the combat and hunger systems. While you’re in peaceful mode, learn how to grow crops (I like wheat and melons) and raise livestock (I like sheep and cows).

My kid and I play a lot of survival together. I’m great at mining and find it very relaxing so I’ll fill chests with materials and flatten out spaces so she has near endless materials and a lot of space to build whatever she is interested in.

As you keep going, you’ll figure out your style. There are no rules and you can play however you like.

There are several streamers I would avoid but I’ll let you figure that out according to your family’s standards. We restrict multiplayer to friends my kid knows in person and whose parents I know. We’ll change that as the years go by but for now it works.

But have fun, enjoy and prepare yourself for some really interesting experiences.

If you like lego then you would probably want to start off in a basic survival world on peaceful or easy mode. That will give you a feel for the core mood of the game, build a house, tame a wolf, etc.

If you really want to build elaborate structures then try creative mode.

Some multiplayer servers have good support for creative, but I'd recommend avoiding the pvp minigames which are the standard fare on servers.

Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored.

Avoid mods at first.

Family friendly streamers are:

- [Jax and Wild](https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiJmKXWW7dOAVOrnHFviqhw)

- [Grian](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU2851hDb3SEesCjVCmseu6...)

- [Mumbo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK_u3Hsd4U)

-[Stinarose](https://m.youtube.com/@StinaRose)

> Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored.

When I invited adult gamers onto our server, I found they spent a long time trying to figure out basic stuff - like picking up a block. It was really frustrating for them.

That was years ago and IDK if basic gameplay changed. If not, they may want to have an 8yo on hand.

Required South Park clip

https://youtu.be/M7fduwvvV5g?t=59

Start with vanilla if you want the OG experience, creative if you want to be artistic

Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game.

https://www.youtube.com/@wattlesplays

HermitCraft and Vault Hunters are some SMPs to check out

https://hermitcraft.com | https://vaulthunters.gg

The Dream Manhunt series is pretty epic too

I wouldn't recommend it unless you think you could enjoy a game without a goal or a score. I had the same questions as you but after 100s of hours I've concluded it's kind of a boring game. It's basically about figuring out thousands of undocumented details. About half of your playing time will be spent outside the game trawling through fan wikis.

I'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.

I've played a lot of Minecraft and I still remember beta 1.7.3 very fondly -- albeit for different reasons -- but I want to offer a differing perspective.

I have always struggled with balancing my desire to create with my capability to create, in and out of Minecraft. I would get so inspired by all the awesome things people built, that I could never graduate from my barebones cave-with-chests because my desire to make something great made any attempt feel crummy in comparison. The most I would accomplish was making redstone contraptions because -- to be a little reductionist -- those either work or they don't.

I hope you will pardon my digression, but the point I'm getting to is that in beta 1.7.3, the goals you set for yourself, and therefore the reasons for you to keep playing, were largely creative in nature, like building a cool house. Updates past this point gave players the opportunity to make simpler, game-directed goals. It used to be that you reach resource satiation quickly, but now it will take hours to obtain a fully enchanted set of diamond armor, kill the ender dragon, explore all the new generated structures, etc. In later years they've codified these goals in achievements, including crazy ones like getting every positive and negative effect at the same time or exploring every biome. With these updates, the people who enjoy building cool things also got more cool things to build with, but this has in my opinion been a little more secondary.

I understand why people might be disappointed, or at least confused, by Minecraft's updates now pushing it toward "pesudo-RPG" status, but I have at least welcomed these changes because they gave me and my friends a reason to reboot our server every few years to try out the new stuff.

Although I will add that if your gripe is regarding combat/pvp changes (e.g. shields) then yeah I have nothing to add to that discussion.

EDIT: I also agree with sibling comments about more content = more enjoyment, at least for me. I enjoy playing games where there are just a lot of things to learn and know.

I don't remember the specific version (s) I played. I remember being kinda depressed and burned out.

Although I didn't discover them, water ladders and cart boosters were so much fun. That feeling of almost cheating, using the bugs in the system to do magic things was so much fun.

I'd definitely credit Minecraft for rekindling some love for hacking, in the classic, non crack sense, but, matrix like, bending the rules to do NEAT stuff.

Then mods, pipes and auto crafting, bigger stuff.

I remember when tool damage was introduced. I was annoyed, but it was ok. I think around the time of food/hunger it started losing its luster. grow potatoes or butcher cows and pigs. it was ok. But that's the time I started drifting away.

Just an amazing game that brought me joy. good stuff.

I agree, it's crazy to think how much content has been added to the game since beta 1.7.3 because I remember thinking at that time that there already was so much. Like you imply, there were all sorts of unintentional tricks to add to your bag: cart boosters, all manner of BUDs, placing a water source beneath your feet to prevent fall damage. But I think part of that feeling of wonder is nostalgia, since playing now I am not really bothered by powered rails, observers, and feather falling -- nor do I think I would be if they had been introduced from the get-go.

And of course redstone. What a lovely idea in retrospect.

Thank you for helping me revisit these memories.

Well put.

> It used to be that you reach resource satiation quickly, but now it will take hours to [do so...]

I think this may actually be the most important point. It is also not true, but also is at the same time, I feel.

If "resource satiation" refers to the ability of the player to build/do whatever they want, then it is true. If "resource satiation" means "having enough resources", then for some people it is impossible by nature. There's always a temptation to do more and build more.

For me, I think this temptation was independent of the game itself. Looking back at my childhood, I don't feel like there was any sharp distinction between my creations in Minecraft and any of my other creative pursuits, including programming; it all sort of blended together. The game was less a game, more like yet another creative medium.

> If "resource satiation" refers to the ability of the player to build/do whatever they want, then it is true. If "resource satiation" means "having enough resources", then for some people it is impossible by nature. There's always a temptation to do more and build more.

Just to clarify my point, when I refer to satiation I mean it in the same way one might feel about MMOs. OK, let me be honest here, I don't play any MMOs but my understanding is that after you "beat" the game and max your level, one thing that might bring you back outside of new content is obtaining all the best gear, different skins, whatever you might want to collect. In the same vein, in Minecraft you could imagine wanting to obtain the best armor, weapons, food, etc. In some of the servers I played on, there were players who lived in a ramshackle hut and spent most of their time mining to get enough diamonds for gear -- and after a certain point they ran out of things to improve upon for their player character so they started looking for rare items in dungeons (remember when mossy cobble was a rare item?). At some point, they had gotten enough, and saw no further reason to keep playing. An extreme case, but not completely dissimilar to my own.

Have you tried Better than Adventure[0]? It's a fork of Beta 1.7.3 for exactly this reason!

[0] https://www.betterthanadventure.net/

For people that would prefer the vanilla experience, I recommend the Betacraft client. I have been using for some time since I had some issues with sound being missing when playing older versions on the official client.

[0] https://betacraft.uk/

Thank you for sharing, all this talk of beta 1.7.3 (which is over 10 years old, my goodness how time flies) has made me nostalgic to try it, and this might be what convinces me to, since without anything new I probably would set up in a cave and then quickly quit.

I think Minetest is in a similar vein, and for similar reasons. And it's F/LOSS.

The thing is, you don't have to play the rpg aspect of it at all. You can still play the same game you played in beta 1.7.3 and get benefits like more variety of blocks for building and better automated farm setups leveraging the newer items like unmeltable ice. No one is forcing you to slay the end dragon.

For real, I play this game for hundreds of hours and not even bother to beat end dragon in vanilla survival even once. I mostly play around redstones/command blocks/mods. The game don't really force you to play survival mode at all. No "unlock creative mode after beat this game" sh*t exists in this game. If you really don't like it, just ignore this part as a whole.

  And Metallica ended at kill'em all

Tbh everyone has some favourite version and un-favourite changes. But the game evolves and you can still play old and new simultaneously

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.

Hmm. I wonder if this is the distinction between people who prefer old Minecraft and new Minecraft.

How do you feel about modern Minecraft?

> I wonder if this is the distinction between people who prefer old Minecraft and new Minecraft.

I'm old. But to be fair, I got into Minecraft by helping my kid set up a server - and then he moved on and it became my server. At least it wasn't a puppy.

Unmodded Minecraft has been steadily getting worse and worse.

Mods had a peak at 1.7.10, then Mojang effed it all up but the community seems to be getting really impressive lately, especially with Distant Horizons.

I honestly haven't had much time for Minecraft in the last 5+ years, but when I have it's mostly been with old versions and mods I liked back in the old days. I doubt that's because I wouldn't like the modern game so much as that when I turn to Minecraft it's for the nostalgia.

I liked the simplicity of 1.7.3 beta, but the addition of hunger made pvp more interesting. Enchantments also made XP farming a thing, which brought in creativity. Mobs got needed buffs so caving was actually a challenge. Overall I liked most of the changes until MSFT bought it and did the bad combat update, which online arcade modes rejected. They just could've done without The End.

> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, under the covers, studying, studying) new and exciting powers in a vivid, malleable world.

This so vividly captures my childhood experience with Minecraft Beta.

Something I think the article could have clarified; it's not the quantity of content, but the lack of it, that (IMO) made it such a joy to play. It offered just enough, and not a speck more.

They've added so much more content since then (not a bad thing), but I think kids are naturally curious, volume-filling creatures. I didn't need a tutorial to tell me to start exploring caves. But it gave me torches and dark, mysterious entrances just asking to be dived into.

My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.

> My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.

Yup, absolutely. It's very easy to get carried away with just adding more.... stuff, but more stuff isn't necessarily better if it doesn't improve the gameplay.

The game doesn't become better by adding another type of tree or new random building blocks or whatever, only if they actually offer something unique and cool.

Current Minecraft really suffers from this. Do we really need like 30 types of copper blocks?

It has a lot of parallels with Lego and not just the fact that they're both a bunch of boxes that you can attach together. I think the fundamental mechanics of Minecraft lends itself to a type of creativity that other games find it hard to recreate. By being so little, it manages to be so much more than the sum of its parts. Minecraft didn't have a proper ending for the first few years of its life.

One of the other innovations of Minecraft is that they didn't worry too much about rendering chunks in a timely manner. When you're on multiplayer and moving fast its not uncommon for the landscape to get rendered right infront of your eyes. Some games go to great lengths to avoid that (e.g. slow the player down or have distance fog so that they never notice areas being loaded). But if the game is fun, no-one cares about hiding the loading.

I don't know that it's an "innovation" as much as a lucky break.

I would say it's one of Minecraft's systemic flaws, actually. It greatly constrains how smooth exploration can be in what is otherwise an interesting world to explore.

I believe they solved (to a large degree) it in their C++ rendering engine that they use for Bedrock

Yeah, Minetest which was C++ from the start manages well these days. It still offers distance fog, which I think is something you want anyway for aesthetic reasons - being able to see clearly 5 km away feels wrong, especially if your game does have a weather system. OP sounds a bit like "sour grapes" to me, especially in this case. Other games deal with the issue with level-of-detail (LoD) tricks, or make it a proper part of the game (e.g. the "popping" of objects like trees is animated).

If you're playing over a network you still get chunks loaded infront of your eyes sometimes because it depends on the network/speed of the host

Not even network speed. If you're just playing multiplayer on 1 console, that creates a client-server setup behind the scenes. On the Nintendo Switch, boat travel is hell because every 20 seconds you'll hit the invisble wall at the edge of the sea that makes you wait 20 more seconds before you can continue rowing.

Sheesh I don’t play bedrock but that sounds infuriating

Microsoft 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

> making Bedrock work consistently cross-platform

Pray tell, where are the Mac and Linux versions of Bedrock?

Have they removed the limitations on world and redstone updates in Bedrock yet, or is it still only updating right around you in the name of rendering distance?

Both fair points / complaints.

I guess my original thought was really that Bedrock is a great Trojan horse for kids who would otherwise not discover the game because it runs on Windows, iOS, Android, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch etc (and by extension, possibly get into computers, coding, game design, etc as a result)

Mac / Linux really ought to be supported too, but the vast majority of kids are elsewhere.

> but the vast majority of kids are elsewhere.

Yes, one of the things that ticks me off :) See my other downmodded comment on this thread.

Don't restrict this only to kids, people...

I believe they also changed their policy so that if you buy Minecraft, you can access both Java and Bedrock

(I only play Java)

Can confirm that you can buy it from the Microsoft Store as a bundle, so for $30-$40 you get both Bedrock and Java edition.

Maybe they would have been better off by simply trying to make it run on mobiles as is? It’s java, there is no reason why it couldn’t just work - some people do play the java version on ipads even.

iPads and lots of other systems can't run Java, that's why they made Bedrock. Also maybe cause Java is slow.

Microsoft ruined Minecraft by permanently locking a ton of existing users out of their accounts.

* Mostly the long-time players who bought the game in alpha or beta

I was not aware of this, that sucks!

It's just the feeling, but I think Microsoft is itching to kill the Java edition

For other "wiki games", I would recommend Terraria and Stardew Valley. Both have very rich wikis you can read for hours that will give you a much better understanding of game mechanics. I've also gotten into the habit of keeping a txt file for a game open in vim with notes on what I'm working on or what to work on next time I play. For Stardew it's stuff like "Kent's birthday is coming up, give him x item", or "catch/grow this before season ends". A lot of it gets deleted as I finish it, but I've also been thinking I should maybe flesh out a basic skeleton of important things to do on a new run so that I can get a refresher if I don't play for a long time.

I think I plan less with Terraria than Stardew since the passing of time doesn't matter much at all comparatively, but I still consult the wiki constantly to see where to get an item or what a monster drops and so on. I've got over 1000 hours in Terraria, but some of this stuff is just a bit much to remember, plus it can change slightly from game updates.

Both games have a lot of informational YouTube videos as well. All the videos of beginner tips are what finally got Stardew to click for me after owning it for years but failing to get into it. I went from taking months or years away from the game within the first Spring to finally getting sucked in enough to finish the rest of my first year within a few weeks IRL time.

While some people probably think it's a chore to do all this work outside the game, I see it similarly to the author in the article, I think it enriches the experience. It also gives you a way to think about the game and get better at it while it's not even open. I don't like to open Stardew unless I'm prepared to play multiple hours in a row, but I can read the wiki and jot down some notes for a few minutes at any time.

Not to ick anyone's yum, but when games begin to approach the same parts of my brain that I use for work, I question why I'm not just using them to make more money instead.

But said as an ex-EVE player, so color comment to taste.

I've heard it said that there are two kinds of Software Engineers when it comes to Factorio.

There's one category who say "this is just like work, but I'm not getting paid to do it; why would I do this?"

Then there's the other who say "this is all the bits I enjoy of work, with a faster and more direct feedback loop and without all the admin/management/other-people bullshit; I want to do this for the rest of my life"

I am very much in the latter camp, but I can absolutely understand the former.

Option 3: "Solving these problems would be fun except they are too reminiscent of all the broken buggy real-world products that I came here to temporarily forget."

(Speaking from the Option 2 camp) Exactly! You finally get to fix them - doesn't that feel good!? :D (Yes, I understand your actual point :) )

I cannot think of any game that could approximate a full-time job as much as EVE (I am currently obsessed with factorio, which I play after working for 8 hours on production line automation systems)

Oh boy. Do many of your colleagues play, or at least understand your obsession? this reminds me of truckers playing trucking games in their rigs during downtime.

Oh yeah, i'm playing in a server with a colleague. The sane ones give us the look™ when mentioning it though.

With games there less negative repercussions if you fail. Like none.

Taken to an extreme, this would exclude any game with any element of problem solving, leaving just... cookie-clicker- and twitch-reflex-FPS-style games.

Since we are onto game recommendations I recommend Pokemon without any irony. The wiki is vast. Honestly I don't know how people are supposed to learn about all the deeper game mechanics without a wiki, and RNG manipulation can be quite fun.

I almost added on Pokemon to my comment! Agreed. Though I will say it's depressing to see the party you spent the whole game with is genetically inferior (low IVs) and you have to breed a whole new set to play competitively (or cheat, or use Pokemon Showdown instead of a real game), and that the breeding process has a lot of luck involved and takes ages. I think they improved this in more recent games with ways to raise your IVs, but it made me burn out on the series and stop playing at least once. I haven't played the Switch ones yet. When I was last playing through a Pokemon game, I think it was Sun, I planned out my final party and movesets for them in advance so I knew what TMs I had to find and which 'mons to catch on which routes.

In a similar vein, I'd recommend Factorio and The Binding of Isaac.

I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment.

There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map.

Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation.

And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game.

To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.

Something else vital is that it ran on almost everything. Even before it expanded to every smartphone and console available, you could get it to run on a cheap and old laptop. Even 10fps was serviceable if you played on peaceful :)

I actually got into Minecraft during classic, and I chased performance optimizations all the way to Linux. Even with all the feature additions, by the time it hit beta, it ran better on my laptop than it did in infinidev / alpha.

When it entered beta and Jeb took over in 2011, it felt like an inflection point. Minecraft just _kept_ _getting_ _bigger_. Every time I come back, there's something new that I discover.

I think that's part of the secret. Even with a wiki up at all time, there's still the delight and horror of discovery. I went got back into the game recently, went strip mining 5 blocks above bedrock, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole process :)

My brother played on an iMac G5, while hosting a server on it too.

Fun fact, ever since 1.3.1 (twelve years ago!) Minecraft used client-server architecture, even in singleplayer mode :)

Yeah, which is why playing on a separate server was less resource-intensive than singleplayer. But my brother's server was public and had multiple players, so I'm surprised it could handle it.

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).

This secret knowledge is common to older competitive games like Counter Strike. The game does not explicitly tell you about recoil control, or economy, or any of the other aspects that are crucial to surviving even entry-level ranked play.

I've mixed feelings about it - deploying secret knowledge almost feels like cheating (a staggering amount of casual players don't do basic recoil control like 'pull mouse down', so when you play against them you have a clear edge) but I also don't like having to Google the right way to play a game.

Minecraft breaks all my usual expectations of this, because it's fun no matter what you do.

Competitive video games shouldn't have secret knowledge imo. Counter-Strike gets a pass because the game is simple enough to begin with. Like obviously since you feel the gun walking up, you'll try pulling down.

The "king" of knowledge-based gameplay is AoE2:DE (modern remake of Age of Empires 2). The old game was complex, but people learned it once. Now they keep adding or modifying civs to add in gimmicky mechanics.

> Like obviously since you feel the gun walking up, you'll try pulling down.

It seems more common behaviour today, but remember CS came out in the era of zero-recoil arena shooters.

I once made my friends play UT after several rounds of CS and then they struggled to play CS again due to UT's friendlier recoil (complete lack thereof)

Or some shooters have a random spray around a fixed aim point, so pulling down doesn't help. I get that it's different, but it doesn't take long to figure out the rules.

The "secret" knowledge isn't necessary if you're persistent enough. Japanese Youtuber PiroPito has an ongoing series of videos (with English subtitles) of an almost entirely unspoilered playthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqkLu2V1bJJUQ2aLZjFd...

Only things he used external information for were nether portals (which were made more difficult by poor Japanese translation) and summoning the wither. The devs added ruined portals in response to this series as an in-game hint for nether portals.

If you are looking for a more customisable and open source version of a "minecraft engine" there is https://www.minetest.net/ with lots of mods, where the most Minecraft'ish is https://content.minetest.net/packages/ryvnf/mineclonia/.

I've never played Minecraft as such but have great memories of spending time with my nephews while they built things with this digital Lego.

We also built loads of cool things with [my old] Lego too :-)

The article says that there is no built in tutorial or guide, but that isn't true. For as long as I have played the game, there has been the basic prompts that tell you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table. Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found. That's all the guide you need, as the rest is sandbox. All the progression can be discovered and needs no guide, though people usually use guides anyways.

If memory serves, those things were added shortly after this was written, sometime after Microsoft purchased Minecraft.

Before it was “put you in a world, give you no instructions, and you have to figure out which items to place in specific position in a 2x2 or 3x3 grid to craft something (or read it online).”

> Accessible from the inventory or crafting table are recipes for every single item you can craft with the materials you have found.

That wasn't there at first. I'm not sure when it was added, but this article is from 10 years ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been added yet.

I only remember Minecraft from when it had no built in tutorials what so ever. Seems that has changed now at least, for better or worse.

well the recipe book was only added in 2017, almost 8 years after the game was released.. so you haven't been playing that long

hints like chopping wood were also added later in 2017

You would be right about that lol, I missed the article date

Besides the lack of an ingame manual, a few things about Minecraft that might seem bad actually made it successful since the alpha:

- time-consuming resource collection

- lack of objectives

- low-res graphics, even though the engine is capable of high-res

- one-click sword combat mechanics

- no official multiplayer server

- Java (not common for games at the time)

- glitches that don't completely break the game

The most interesting one is resource collection. It actually encourages building by forcing players to think about what resources to use and making it more impressive in multiplayer to see large/expensive structures.

> The genius of Minecraft is that the game does not specify how this is done.

Is this still true? Long time ago I last played Minecraft, but it's terrible common for games to change to be more mass-market friendly when bought by larger companies (Microsoft in this case), so it would surprise me if its still like that.

It tells you to cut down a tree and make a crafting table, beyond that there isn't anything (bedrock edition may be different I haven't touched it in a while)

Even in Java there is a built in recipe book that tells you how to craft items that you have the resources for.

The recipes are such a small amount of the secret knowledge now. There are so many quirks to the game to discover, even people playing 10+ years still find joy in discovering them (or being taught).

Community is a huge aspect, shared learning, collaboration, cooperation

Imagination also plays a big role. You have to create your own story and see things not as they are, but as what they are to the story. It's reminiscent of childhood and play. HermitCraft is the most notable example of this, but it's pervasive, especially among builders. (i.e. put a railroad on a smoker to make a grill, flower pot as a cup, extended piston as a table, or a fence post with a pressure plate as a table)

Call 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/powerful item.

I never understood the appeal of having game knowledge on a separate websites.

I can understand this situation happening because of lack of development resources. Like - yeah, it's easier to just let the community to write the documentation and concentrate on the game, if you're small company.

But why would it appeal to the actual players? It's not really secret knowledge, there are wiki websites with all the recipes.

You know, for younger kids I can see the appeal. They might not have a device they can easily use to go on the internet, so you’d be able to do things your friends can’t and vice versa.

I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.

Reminds me of the fatalities in Mortal Kombat growing up. All the regular moves were in the manual, but IIRC the fatalities were not. It was a form of secret knowledge, and it was really cool if you knew one. Granted, this was right before the Internet-connected home computer became ubiquitous.

GameFAQs very quickly democratized game knowledge the way Wikipedia did for general knowledge a handful of years later. I learned the infinite 1up stair trick in Mario[0] from a sibling before that, but had the most fun with stuff I could look up.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQCSEcyGQH4

Those are rouge-likes. They still have wikis. See Spleunky and Hades.

I've had the same idea as them, they mean something beyond a rogue like.

Like here Hades has a wiki list of all "Keepsake" items and their bonuses and abilities [0]. So you can always know the Old Spiked Collar always gives 25/38/50 HP bonus. What if instead of 25 at the first tier, it was a random range from 15-35. What if there was a chance it gave a damage boost instead? Or resistance against physical damage. Or it gave lightning a 30% bonus, or....

Basically everything shuffled and procedurally generated to the degree that 2 players discussing the game would barely have an overlapping experience aside from the general genre being the same.

It would be really hard to make it so every playthrough has some semblance of balance though, and for things to narratively make sense, e.g. Iron items should always be stronger than copper items etc.

[0] https://hades.fandom.com/wiki/Keepsakes#List_of_keepsakes

If the game is significantly interesting to a sizeable population they will unwind any amount of complexity and randomness. If you think about it, that's what happened to our actual world.

If it's a "random range from 15-35" that's what the Wiki will say. Worse, if you've coded this slightly wrong and it's actually 15, 18, or 20 to 35 with no chance of 16 or 19, that will be on the Wiki. If you have much better shot at 30+ if you were holding the "jump" button as you picked the collar, that too finds its way to the Wiki if there are enough players.

The exact same thing which drives humans to find out how the hell it's possible for some atoms of the same element to be heavier than others (more neutrons) will also drive players of a very popular game to figure out the fine details of how it works.

Don't add balance by the way. In single player games it's probably futile (players will break it anyway) and you may destroy the fun elements in the game in a quest to "balance" it properly, like taking a delicious tart and turning it into mush fit for a baby. Even in a multi-player game, prefer to make everybody unbalanced rather than trying to homogenize them. If rock smashes scissors, but paper wraps rock, and scissors cut paper we've got a game, it's not a very good game, but it's at least a game.

Roguelikes still often have a mechanic like you describe: nethack, for example, randomises the descriptions of items, and that can affect how the game plays (because, for example, what material a ring or a wand is made of can affect how it reacts to effects). It's not quite as significant as you are suggesting, but you will find that it is still heavily documented in the game's wiki.

Nah, I was more envisioning something like a multiplayer game where each player has spells they can learn by doing certain joystick/mouse/vr controller movements (or whatever), and both those movements and the spells themselves are uniquely randomized as much as they can be. You’d need to discover what you can do, and at least with a group of friends those spells would be pretty unique to you, along with which ones are easier or harder to do.

It probably wouldn’t be balanced but it’d be fun.

It's bad design and it was annoying already back when Minecraft was still young. The article author gets this hilariously wrong. He claims that he is "obsessed" with Minecraft, but later admits that they haven't played the game much. I knew that before I even got to that paragraph...

I think maybe the author means they are obsessed with something about Minecraft, the success story, the cultural impact, something like that. Not necessarily obsessed with playing it

You know how Nintendo released Pokémon Red and Blue? The final goal of the game was to catch all the Pokémon, but depending on which version you’ve bought, some of them were missing. The only way to actually collect all was to trade with other players, which created a community around the game.

Similarly with Minecraft, an online community got built around these wikis, figuring out stuff much beyond simple crafting recipes. We’d never get the cart boosters, water elevator or optimal mining techniques if everyone just played off the tutorial.

Especially when the goto gaming wiki site host is straight-up internet cancer.

https://minecraft.wiki/ replaced the fandom wiki some time ago.

The appeal of having it on a wiki is that you can browse to related items and topics that can inform how you play the game. Serendipitous discovery of information, something the internet used to enable.

I like it because you don’t have to consult those resources. If you like, you can figure out the game completely as you go.

How else would you find the knowledge if not through separate websites, when using the Web Displays Mod [1] in game? /s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bK-m2dH4LEw

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 touch the core gameplay loop. Instead they focused on expanding the minecraft universe with genre crossing spinoff games and cooperations that the old Mojang could've never done. And kids loved most of it. Stuff like Minecraft: Story Mode added a richness to the franchise that you could completely ignore if you wanted to, or dive into if it appealed to you.

Microsoft grew Minecraft because it still had a lot of growth in it. It might clash with your nostalgia, but it evolved such that it still broadly appealed to its growing core audience. And that is and always has been children. And children still love Minecraft.

  Nah. Microsoft did a great job handling Minecraft imo.

I am still peeved that my lifetime license "mysteriously" broke during Microsoft's account transitions. Trillion dollar company lacks the manpower and technical capability to handle it? Or someone cannot be arsed to maintain "freeloader" customers.

Same here. Had one of the first few thousand accounts. Since Microsoft took over:

- it got hacked. Got it back but name was changed, history not perfect anymore

- much later somehow lost my account due to me trying to keep my old account I guess. Whatever I wasnt noticed that my account is going to die. It just did. Microsoft support also never answered to my request getting it back

- Never played Minecraft again

Microsoft’s bean counters immediately set about milking as much profit from Minecraft as they can right after the purchase, be through Minecoin, premium skins, or by collecting PII via requiring phone numbers from everyone for “SMS verification” due to “security alert” blackmail (total joke—the attacker could just as well provide their own phone number and lock me out—except, of course, there is no actual suspicious activity: my account was never hacked, and I was not playing for years).

It was the first game I bought in my life, and 30 EUR was quite a chunk of change. Since the acquisition, it stopped being a game I have; it is now a game that Microsoft may or may not let me play. As a result, I don’t bother.

They did provide several notices regarding that years in advance to shutting down the old auth servers and also had a long migration period during which you could log in with both accounts (assuming you have migrated the old account to Xbox/Microsoft).

The whole reason they did it is that you can now easily switch between Java and Bedrock, and that it's not as laughably easy to hack accounts as it used to be.

Their notices required you to re-verify your original email address, which so far has never been required. So lots of people (myself included) had their passwords and could play fine, never mind the 10-year-old @aol.com account tied to it, and could do nothing but watch that deadline approach before being locked out.

Oh man, I guess I was so angry about that at some point I blocked it out. My dumb ass actually bought a 2nd account because I couldn't convince my friends to play with me until it was free. After MSFT purchased Minecraft I could never recover either of those accounts!

Yeah, that's fair. That was just a shitty thing to do. I was more focusing on the creative development that Minecraft saw under Microsoft.

Fandoms are often extremely nervous when a large corporation buys the rights to a beloved media ip, largely because this has gone wrong so many times, with poor adaptions or obvious cashgrabs milking a property until the fanbase turns away.

This really hasn't happened to Minecraft. It grew further in popularity, even though it was already massively popular at the time and it did it mostly without driving away the existing fans. That in itself is quite unusual (I think) and definitely not what I would have expected. At the time I really thought that the sale would mark the beginning of Minecraft's slow descent into irrelevancy and I definitely remember that being a fairly common sentiment.

But I fully understand people being mad at the license issues you mention. They should be. Might not have been illegal, but that was essentially theft.

I was at least ambivalent about a lot of the changes, but the combat update did ruin things.

They just added the autocrafter and trial chambers, enhancements for redstoners, adventures, and builders

They need to get a handle on inventory management, probably the most complained about thing. 100s of new blocks but inventory is still largely the same

Underrated thing Microsoft have done is allow Bedrock to cross-play between Windows, IOS, Playstation, Switch and XBox

Minecraft STILL doesn't have a lot of stuff Notch was planning on adding. Instead of becoming an actual living breathing world you want to explore more they focus on premium skins and an occasional update with mostly bewildering content. Usually big projects like movies and games have a director(s) with a grand vision. Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money. Microsoft's only vision for Minecraft has ever been sponsorship deals and merch. Honestly, I feel more betrayed by Notch than by Microsoft.

> Notch had a vision but he gave up on it for money.

That's certainly one way to see it, but I don't think Notch was ever really in a position to turn some of his more grand ideas for the game into a reality. Not because he couldn't afford it, but because he didn't have the skill (or interest) in leading a Studio that's much bigger than ~20 people. From everything I've read about him it seems like he never liked any of the additional responsibilities that came with Minecrafts growing success and there are some accounts from some early members of the team that seem to corroborate this.

So I really don't think he sold out. I think he realized that he couldn't be the person to manage Minecrafts generational success and that he'd rather have 2 billion dollars in exchange for giving another company a shot at that, versus not having that money and then seeing himself fail to bring his ideas to fruition.

In the end that's of course just speculation. It could just as well be that he never had any of those thoughts and just fucked off, laughing all the way to the bank and then to the biggest hollywood mansion that money can buy. In that case I'm still glad that he got the bag from Microsoft, because I can imagine much worse ways that this could've gone.

Microsoft sure has grown a lot of merch. And yes, children love it. Including my own.

Hardly anyone interacted with the crafting system via "discovery mode". Almost everyone consulted a wiki, or I guess had a friend tell you what to do. Stumbling upon how to make an axe without looking it up has got to be the least enjoyable part of Minecraft (note: not saying it's NOT enjoyable, it's just not high up on the list for most).

For me, I just don't really care about needing to discover everything myself. Discovering things like that takes time. If I play a game, I want to get the maximum intended experience from it without dragging things out while being confused. Does that "ruin" the experience? I don't really care if it does

In the early days of NES (8-bit console) a lot of discovery about the games came from community, looking things up in various magazines, or just talking with your peers.

There is value ot be had in sticking to that stance: It encourages social interaction, but more importantly for the bottom line, people are talking about your game. That Minecraft is now a multi-generation thing, there's a lot of people to talk to about it!

> Hardly anyone interacted with the crafting system via "discovery mode"

Don't know what you mean. People use new single click automatic crafting all the time, including professional streamers on twitch. Do you enjoy brute forcing bow or fishing rod for the 100th time? Just click it to fill it in.

All hail microsoft for making it easier for us.

I bet next they will disable mob spawning unless it is exactly zero light level lol. Oh wait...

Microsoft's stewardship of Minecraft has been fantastic.

Simplicity has never been a key element of Minecraft - redstone circuits were added years before the acquisition.

The sheer quantity of weird and delightful stuff they've added has kept Minecraft new and interesting for over a decade.

Tbh Microsoft hasn't done anything near as impressive as the modding community. It's nice that they are still developing the Java edition so the modding community can continue though

Check out the Create mod

If Microsoft ever adds anything as cool as that to Minecraft, I may agree with you that they are keeping it new and interesting

I don't think it would ever "work" for Minecraft to attempt something like one of the big mods. Even "Better Than Wolves" which most people have been exposed to via packs with a later, richer "Better With Mods" is sort of giving the game away. Yes, the things "Better Than Wolves" did are better than what Minecraft itself delivered in that timeframe (Wolves, duh) but often what Minecraft's devs are doing is fundamental, infrastructure work. Mojang and then Microsoft make two kinds of ore, and then add a third, boring - but modders couldn't have added six hundred more kinds of ore without that. The built-in biomes are fine but they're not as radical as anything modders have done - but modders couldn't have added new biomes without that infrastructure.

I think Mojang and Microsoft have been very good at sketching in new ideas, enriching the concept rather than refining all the details.

They've also been good, because it's easier for a corporation, at completion. Anybody still waiting for Jaded's Agrarian Skies 2 ? How about for a meaningful end to Twilight Forest ? Modern packs tend to play the non-ending of Twilight Forest as if that's normal - gating further progress on the Magic Lamp for example, or just putting everything after the Trolls as optional - but wandering around the final castle it's obvious this just isn't finished.

I play almost exclusively modded, mostly ascend-to-godhood type packs, and it's still very noticeable how different a modern pack is (based on modern Minecraft) than the 1.7 era packs we started out playing, because the base game is significantly better.

The Vault Hunters mod(pack) is pretty great too (includes create, but adds good RPG elements without being an RPG)

Create is the most Minecrafty mod for sure

> The sheer quantity of weird and delightful stuff they've added has kept Minecraft new and interesting for over a decade.

Yeah, you can only say that if you've never ran across Java edition mods :)

Incidentally, a good chunk of stuff that has been added across the years was present in mods first.

Redstone was simple. You had dust, torches, and repeaters. If Microsoft did it, it'd look like Tekkit.

Agreed. I could write a 10 page essay about all the subtle ways minecraft has lost a lot of its original appeal since I first played it 14 years ago, but a few people have already done it for me in video format:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KqeLT-EOe0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbFUK3r8GGU

I first played it when SMP was released and server side inventory was not a thing yet. It was pure anarchy and so much fun.

1.8.9 is the best version. It's the calm before the storm.

Yeah, 1.9 added shields.

And that awful PvP upgrade. Although that's probably an unpopular opinion.

I was playing a lot of UHC at the time and everyone universally hated the 1.9 update.

All those pvp arcade servers are either on 1.8r or used mods to undo the 1.9r changes.

The end game thing was added years before Microsoft bought them. But I agree, the simplicity is no longer there.

>The "secret knowledge" that the author describes is no longer a thing. The game shows you all the recipes.

It does show the recipes you have unlocked (e.g. by mining a particular one that makes them), I'm glad they did that, it's much less painful for a new player and for the viewers of that new player (I like watching people play a game they've never played before).

It is interesting that despite the overwhelming success of Minecraft, Microsoft/the team building it still felt that it needed to have a full tutorial system and overarching story objectives tacked on it to further encourage players to get hooked on it if the open-ended aspect of it didn't appeal.

After you've already attracted all of your primary audience, all you have left for growth are non-primary audiences.

See also: bands pivoting from niche to mass market genres

Just play an old version like 1.12 - IMO it’s the version that has most of the quality of life stuff like elytra but not too many new blocks

> Where do you learn them? Not in Minecraft.

As of 1.12, click the green book in the crafting screen to be shown a list of recipes, which you can filter by what you can actually craft

i remember when the first demo of minecraft was released on a forum thread. the handfull of people who tried it didnt think very highly of it. one would imagine they all would have been excited that the most popular game in history had been released… they were too stupid to see what was right in front of them.

I have used the chat function, to steer children with very serious problems, into therapy.

The secret of Minecraft is that it's the Lego game without Lego corporate involvement.

Or at least it was before MS bought it.

These days you have to find servers that disable the chat censorship if you're an adult that plays with adults.

And no, it's not kids only, as 90% of the other comments probably say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com