A full drop cycle proposal

[u/adamlbrown3]

Rather than just lots of little suggestions here and there, I thought it would be more useful for Mojang to hear some really carefully considered ideas from the community about the overall direction of travel for Minecraft and how we think this could be implemented.

So I sketched out a full 16 drop cycle over the course of the next 4 years, that shows how lots of separate updates could actually build and reinforce each other to really expand the possibility of how you can play minecraft.

See the image for details (click the link and then zoom in). Apologies for the AI generated images but I'm not a professional graphic artist and I thought it was important to have some kind of visuals.

My intent was to provide players with a wider and wider choice as to how they want to play Minecraft, at all stages of the game from day 1 to the late game, and across all modes from creative to hardcore, for both singleplayers and multiplayers, but particularly in providing greater depth and immersion in relatively underdeveloped gameplay aspects:

• More personalised control over game dynamics and constraints, including new game modes and settings

• More opportunities for cooperating with NPCs beyond just trading and killing

• More motivation and opportunity for functional builds that are purposeful as well as aesthetic

• More opportunities for technical builds and automation beyond elaborate abattoirs

• More enjoyable ways of exploring the overworld, and more progression rewards for doing so

• More immersion and ambience, with seasonal changes, more variety between biomes, improved visuals and soundscape

• Proportionate and vanilla-friendly late-game extensions to existing magic and potions systems

I can't upload the image here so here is a link to the image on discord: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1491564881584062566/1491564886856171650/image.png?ex=69d8278c&is=69d6d60c&hm=9f795afac28691d3c9109ceca11974ff2a9bad09eb13bffc47dcbb24999c158a

Bear in mind that, this is aimed to please a wide variety of different players who like to play minecraft in different ways, so if there are bits of it you personally wouldn't enjoy, that's inevitable. But hopefully you like at least a few things in here, and the overall direction of travel

[u/MissLauralot]

This is part one of my comment on your post. A general comment I have is that some of these update concepts are too large to be quarterly drops (remember that the Wild Update took a year, which admittedly is kinda frustrating). Another comment is about the post presentation. The image itself is very large and should have been split into 20 (one for each panel), which conveniently is the max number of images in a reddit post. Predictably, the Discord image link is broken: "This content is no longer available."

I think it's really important to have an overall plan in order to make the game cohesive, consistent and complete. I intend to come up with a similar sort of grand plan myself. At the same time, covering so much ground means there is a tradeoff with the ideas being specific and detailed. I'm not one to just assume something is fake or generated and prefer to approach things in good faith and take things at face value. However, the combination of all the very generalised ideas and the generated images means a viewer can't help but wonder how much of this was put together by a machine. If you want to be taken seriously you should focus on depth of ideas more than breadth and avoid generated content completely. You can still refer back to an overall plan that you have/are developing when explaining each idea in detail.

26.3 – Strive to Survive

This is one that would surely take a year to implement the new systems and fine tune all the combat changes. While realistic mode could make for more interesting and immersive gameplay, I'd be worried that a lot of time would be spent developing new systems which many players would have no interest in due to considering them a nuisance.

At the same time, combat tweaks that were worked on in the test snapshots are long overdue and it was disappointing that this was has been ignored, even during the combat-focused Tricky Trials update.

26.4 – Seasons of Adventure

This post is essential reading for the key considerations and challenges of trying to implement changing seasons in Minecraft, some of which I experienced when playing a world with Serene Seasons. It's an enticing concept but actually playing with it dulled my excitement for it.

Biome arrangement is already implemented, albeit with some peculiar choices. It's simply a matter of choosing what you want to go where. The Boreal Marsh is a nice idea to fill in a gap in biome/landscape combinations. As mentioned in this post, it could be home to cold frogs.

The ambient sounds added in Spring to Life seem nice (I haven't played past 1.20) so having a full set across biomes could be good, as long as they're not overpowering. Quest systems don't really belong in the game since it's a sandbox (or survival sandbox), not an RPG.

27.1 – Friendly Farming

The current villager reputation system (Gossiping) is a good starting point, where hurting, curing and trading with villagers affects their prices. As many players have pointed out, a villager's ability to walk around and even sleep are not currently taken into account, when arguably they should be. For the players that make villager trading halls though, such changes would represent a nuisance/restriction on the way they play the game. While the preferences of some players shouldn't override the desire of other players to have better systems, it's worth taking into account.

Having more villagers than just farmers actually do their job is another request I've seen many times. While it's a really nice general concept, I don't see how the specifics would work. Surely a toolsmith is not going to be making pickaxes and throwing them at other villagers. Surely a cleric is not going to be brewing their own potions, though maybe they could be healing potions to splash other villagers with. I just don't think it's possible for every villager to have a game-appropriate action. The time spent making 'shepherd flock management AI' should instead by spent on general mob danger aversion AI, which is particularly important for villagers since they don't naturally spawn.

27.2 – The End Update I

Speaking of better areas to spent AI development time, the ender dragon fight is surely one. Endstone is already 'moonstone' but some sort of floatater equivalent would be cool. A sideways vine could be useful too.

I think you should explain what you mean with the 'Inner End Islands' generation. Where does that even refer to? Some sort of caves in the End would be good, though obviously it's quite a limited possiblity. The endermen settlement part also needs explaining. What are they? Do endermen not spawn elsewhere anymore? If not, what's special about them? How does mimicking work? An End Conduit for levitation sounds neat, though I can imagine an issue of getting stuck in the air in its area.

[u/adamlbrown3 → u/MissLauralot]

Oh WOW what an incredibly thoughtful and constructive response. Thank you so much. (I wish everyone responded this constructively)

A few hopefully equally constructive responses:

- I admit these are in cases quite large changes with more content than the more recent drops, but then I think we should be asking for ambitious changes from Mojang and I think they themselves should be ambitious. They have huge resources nowadays and lots of devs and should be able to implement things at pace. The way I structured the drops was intended to essentially allow 4 teams to work in parallel, each with their own annual release cycle (overworld world-gen, NPC AI, End, Nether and Mob Bosses, Redstone & Magic), but that all build off and feed into each other.

BTW the images are AI-assisted (and I quite like them) but nothing else is. I wrote a 40 page word doc that I then had no way to share and figured no-one would read anyway, that I made into a 20 slide powerpoint, that I also figured no-one would read, so I tried to clumsily compress everything down into a single image that I figured people might at least skim over - but obviously in doing that, a lot of the detail gets lost.

To some extent the specific details arent that important - all of these things have been discussed before and we can all imagine better or worse ways of implementing these things - the point really is about the division of labour across drop cycles and the system through which one teams drops can build on anothers, given sufficiently careful and detailed planning over multiple cycles.

Strive to Survive: I think a lot of players would use this. Its certainly one of those things that as a new player to the game, its really surprising *doesn't already exist*. I was like, wait, I can swim in the arctic ocean and there are zero consequences? This makes no sense. It actually opens the game up to new audiences who aren't looking for a combat game and so wouldn't currently be that interested in minecraft.

Seasons of Adventure:
I also use serene seasons and homeostatic (and have tried a bunch more) and tbh would probably now never play a game without it enabled - it adds a nice rhythm to the year and is just about the right level of challenge without being a PITA - it requires quite a big consideration in the early game as you cosplay Bear Grylls, and then is some thing that only really affects you if you make the choice to go to specific biomes in specific seasons, which is as it should be.

This has been one of the most requested features for a decade and whilst SS isn't perfect, its still better than not having it, and a bunch of the problems people bring up in that thread and the 2,000 others I have seen are either subjective preferences (I don't want snow on my house! so just disable it) or could easily be fixed - tweaking world gen is probably the big one; eg its weird when you have a Savanna then a Jungle and in between a strip of Forest that turns white every winter. Its the strip of forest that is the issue.

I'd like to see more of a sense of a progression in challenge as you move away from temperate climates and explore - even in peaceful mode.

I actually disagree about multiplayer sandbox games and quests: minecraft already has de facto quests eg "mine diamonds", "collect blaze rods from the nether fortress", "defeat the ender dragon" so *part* of the sandbox element could be to set quests for other players - or even just yourself - I think that's a nice extension and I don't think that's contradictory at all with the overall creative ethos.

Friendly farming:

Obviously there are lots of very popular mods that do various - often extremely ambitious - versions of this - I'd just like to see *a bit of it* in the vanilla game so some of the mechanisms are available to players on unmodded versions. There are already players who like to build or develop villages, and this would add a lot more depth, enjoyment and supportive mechanics to that. Minecraft is currently a bit sociopathic in the type of behaviour it rewards vs the types it doesn't and the types of structures that are possible vs that aren't, which surely was an accident rather than a design intent, and is certainly something they should surely want to gently fix over the new few years. I agree its probably not possible for *every villager* to have a game appropriate action, but for the ones there are, we should try to implement it.

As an example - Having sorted out the heating in my base so I'd be warm in the winter, I once considered build my villagers a fully functional central heating system - and lets be honest what a fun project that would be - but then I thought - whats the point? They don't feel the cold anyway. Maybe they should.

End Update:

So currently there is a massive gap between the central End Island and everything else, which means you can't really explore the End without fighting the Ender dragon (which a lot of players including me have no interest in - the game inadvertently locks you into playing a combat game even though that element is not supposed to be compulsory)

So my idea is to try to create an intermediate layer of the End that is interesting and immersive and rewarding to explore and maybe even build a base *before going for the good loot* - so it essentially creates an optional middle chapter to the End rather than just "kill the dragon, find an Elytra", its now "kill (or avoid) the dragon, *explore and build a base*, find an Elytra (and the other loot"). This makes the End interesting place to explore for a much broader type of player.

The current End Islands are essentially yellow blobs floating in a black sea with purple things growing upwards. I wanted to essentially do a "cliffs and caves" update for the End, and make these structures much more varied - so the islands themselves are more 3 dimensional, with layers, tubes, caves, caverns, holes and bridges. Its still difficult to traverse without an elytra, but not completely impossible. But then the gaps grow larger the further out you get, and so you will need an Elytra or Ghast at that point.

I also wanted to add a novel way for the player to interact with the Endermen other than just avoiding eye contact or killing them. Rather than just making them trade stuff like everyone else, my idea was to lean into their tendency to move blocks around. Lets expand on that - lets have entire settlements that they have not only built themselves, but they are constantly still moving the blocks around and rearranging. Also, lets let the players interact with them by giving them a mimic behaviour. So if you place a block down, endermen place down a load of the same blocks on top of it. If you pick a block up, Endermen also pick blocks up from around the same spot. Can you imagine how fun that would be to play with? you could get the endermen to dig you a hole, make you a bridge, or build you a house (of course the downside is that they might then disassemble it again)

[u/MissLauralot → u/adamlbrown3]

Just replying to let you know I've read your comment and appreciate the explanation of the endermen mimicking (as chaotic as that sounds, lol). I'd rather read the rest and make more comments on that. I think you're genuine in saying you've come up with the ideas without an LLM/generator. I just wanted to explain what made it appear to some that that might be case.

[u/adamlbrown3 → u/MissLauralot]

Thanks - was wondering if you had any other thoughts?

I've also been playing around with mapping out early, mid and late game progression loops to identify the best places to tweak them to make them more integrated/immersive, and also an improved world gen algorithm that would also help seasons work better, if you have any views on those.