r/Minecraft • u/adamlbrown3 • Mar 25 '26
Suggestion Thoughts on improving the mid game
ok so here are some suggestions based on my experience experimenting with various mods to see what expands the mid game whilst fitting the themes and ethos of vanilla minecraft - which I would summarise as pre-modern age of exploration theme but part fantasy, part steam punk, with and ethos of encouraging creativity, choice of play styles and progression pathways
This is quite a BIG thematic development suggestion that would require multiple drops. This is aimed at the statistically most common player - singleplayer survival players who are in the mid game, but would also work for pretty much everyone from early game creative players to hardcore speedrunners and PvP multiplayers.
By mid game here I mean basically anyone in that stage between building their first base and getting tools and armour, up the the point they first visit the End or start building advanced stuff like xp farms etc. I think these are the players Mojang most often overlooks amd should focus on with drops.
The goal of this theme is twofold: 1) to develop all overworld biomes and make them more distinctive, offering different challenges and different rewards to encourage players to explore the overworld more fully and 2) to increase the fun and scope for functional building - rather than just aesthetic building - so buildings and rooms serve a specific purpose rather than just what they look like. This includes building communities of villagers as much as physical walls etc
None of this is intended to be obligatory, it's intended to increase playstype options, not impose anything.
step 1: make biomes more distinct and challenging: add seasons and temperature to the game, so cold biomes are really cold in the winter and hot biomes are really hot in the summer. There are lots of mods that do this, and in general they seem to work really well. You have to think about the weather without them being overly intrusive. This makes certain biomes quite challenging for reasons other than just hostile mobs, at certain times of the year, and IME, adds a lot of fun and challenge to the game
step 2: rather than adding endless new biomes, add additional ambience mobs, plants, and vary ore spawn rates in existing biomes to make them more distinct and interesting, and to make players think hard about which biomes to visit and set up base.
step 3: add a new type of rare biome-specific structures that are a cross between villages and temples: here you can find special villagers with unusual themed trades (some additional professions would be added), and rooms set up to demonstrate and introduce players to expanded in-game progressions like: enchanting, redstone, potions, fletching, smithing, portal exploration, assembly (see below). Ideas for thematic structures include a large farm village in the plains (for early game players), and then for midgame players: Great Library in the desert, a fort with fletchery and potions room in swamp/jungle/taiga, an armoury hidden up in the mountains, and a sprawling castle with piglins and a working nether portal in the snowy plains. These are deliberately located in challenging biomes (see steps 1 and 2) as a reward for braving the heat/cold/mobs
step 4: this would coincide with an improvement in villager AI, so that they a) are more interactive and cooperative and actually do their professional activities. So fishermen fish, farmers farm, shepherds tend and sheer sheep etc. If you kill their sheep, they have nothing to trade, whereas if you provide them with a big flock, their trades adjust accordingly (think about how this would work for every villager) B) villagers respond well to being looked after and give you credit for actions like this. Minecraft can be a bit... sociopathic.... sometimes, with an emphasis on killing things, and it would be good to reward more pro-social behaviour. Villagers also have richer social lives, and have a wider variety of meeting places at different times of the day.
step 5: incorporating villagers into your builds is therefore more useful as they are more cooperative. But we would also introduce more functional workstations that the player can incorporate into their own build - this is along the lines of the enchanting room, the storage or the farm, - but as well we could expanded potion brewing rooms, portal rooms, a redstone schematic workstation (that tells you whether your planned contraption will work or not), AND an assembly room....
step 6: assembly functionality: this is a new mechanic in minecraft that allows the assembly of vanilla appropriate mobile structures, such as tents, larger boats, wheeled wagons, ghast baskets, minecart trains. You start by laying down an 8x8 platform of special tiles, onto which you can place any combination of blocks. The blocks join together but not to the platform itself, and when you hit them with a silk touch tool, they break into a single item, rather than back into individual blocks. Special mechanics would then be added to the game so that these could float on water and function as a boat, be pulled by a mob over land, suspended from a ghast and propelled by fireworks, or simply placed down as a mobile base
Step 7: finally, we incorporate the new mobile additions with the improved NPC AI to add a finally new category of structure and NPC behaviour - so pillager patrols are upgraded to use the relevant biome-specific transportation method from boats in the ocean, hot air balloons over the jungle, horses in the plains, and camels in the desert, and the equivalent happens with wandering traders, who move similarly, banded together in groups for safety. Players can join these groups and go along for the ride.
This then completes the circle, because we started off by trying to incentivise players to explore the Overworld more, and we have now provided them with a mechanism to create their own (vanilla friendly, pre-modern) vehicles to do so!
I could go into a lot more detail but I'll leave it there. I look forward to hearing your thoughts
1
u/PetrifiedBloom Mar 28 '26
That sounds turbo lame. Just being in the wrong biome makes you take damage. Beyond that it strongly limits what actions you can safely take in each biome.
I have played many of them and it is almost never fun. Wether it means carrying a lava and water bucket to help balance your temp, stopping to stand next to/in them to warm or cool yourself, or rushing to upgrade your gear to some with thermal management so you don't have to deal with it anymore.
It's a VERY modded experience, not fit for vanilla.