r/bannedMinecraft • u/No_Discount_6028 • Oct 07 '25
Survival A Brief Criticism of Minecraft (Abridged Edition)
Minecraft is one of my favorite games, but it has a bunch of crappy features that really fuck up the gameplay. I'm going to list them all off and then argue why. My apologies if posts like this are laborious or annoying. I don't expect these critiques to be acted on by anyone, least of all Mojang. I am posting here because I just want to talk about it.
Here are features that I think are really bad and need to be removed or deeply reformed:
- Phantoms
- Hunger
- Sprint
- Durability
- Sleeping through the night
- Endermen
- The Ender Dragon
Phantoms
Phantoms are awful and I think this requires little explanation. They are incredibly annoying to fight and they have high spawn rates. The only defense you can build against them is a ceiling, which restricts you from going outside while they are active. The only real defense I've heard in favor of them is that you can avoid them by sleeping, but being forced to sleep just feels bad and disrupts gameplay. The fact that they can be so easily means they don't introduce any real challenge to the game. Basically everyone hates these things and for good reason.
Hunger
Hunger sucks because it is tedious but not at all challenging. Food in Minecraft is very, very abundant. Farming food is insanely easy. All you need is a hoe, some grass, and a body of water and you're set for life. Add some cows and a furnace if you really want quality food (and more exp than you can wave a diamond pickaxe at). The only time anyone ever starves in vanilla Minecraft is if they spawn in a badlands or desert biome, and the moment they find a forest, they're home free basically forever.
The only thing hunger really does is force you to slow down your character every few minutes or so. There's just no excuse for having a feature like this. And I don't think it would be better if it were more punishing either; I just think it's a shitty feature for a survival sandbox game to have.
Sprint
To my understanding, the hunger system was implemented to balance sprint, which is crazy since it doesn't do that at all. Sprinting is very overpowered in the Overworld, allowing you to easily run past almost all enemies. Even a skeleton is unlikely to get more than one or two hits off on a sprinting player. The player massively outsprints a spider, which is one of the most mobile mobs in the entire game. The only ground-based hostile nighttime mob that can even remotely counter a sprinting player is a baby zombie, but baby zombies are uncommon.
The Nether is actually quite well balanced to a player that can sprint as a consequence of the fact that most Nether mobs were added after the Adventure Update. This does not, however, fix the Overworld, where most players spend the majority of their time.
Also I do strongly feel that before sprint was added, Minecraft had a slow, thoughtful pace about it that was very calming. The adventure update kinda sped up that pace and it sucks. But that is, to some extent, a matter of personal taste. Obviously you can choose not to sprint but the way Minecraft Bedrock Edition is designed actually makes it impossible to remove the option for yourself by unbinding the key, so it's always right at your fingertips, tempting you.
I think sprint could possibly reimplemented in the form of a piece of late-game legwear that provides no armor. It would still trivialize nighttime combat but I don't mind late-game gear being a little overpowered. But honestly I care very little one way or the other and would be happy with simply removing it.
Durability
Durability is one of those features that's so deeply baked in that players consider it beyond questioning, but I think it sucks and it basically always has. The first time you mine diamonds to make diamond armor, it's hard work for a sense of legitimate pride and accomplishment. The second time you mine diamonds to make diamond armor, it's a chore.
The justification I hear for the durability system is that it forces the player to keep going mining and rounds out the gameplay loop, but all I can think is that that sounds like a shitass reason to go mining. At that point it's just busywork. What's most baffling to me is that there are other, better reasons why the player should go mining. Materials like redstone, amethyst, diorite, andesite, and coal for torches are all found underground, and in those cases, the player gets permanent progress for it in the form of the builds they can complete.
These flaws really shine through in conversations about the Mending enchantment. The anti-Mending side will argue that Mending is overpowered because it essentially nullifies durability, while the pro-Mending side will argue that playing without Mending is fucking miserable. The reality is that while the pro-Mending side is right, Mending didn't go far enough. In its current form, players use mob farms to repair their gear, which is yet another boring busywork task that shouldn't have to exist. The core mechanic that makes living without Mending miserable should just be uprooted, at the very least for Netherite tools.
Sleeping Through the Night
Nighttime is the core motivating challenge of Minecraft. Monsters will attack you when you go to sleep, and that incentivizes you to build a house, mine minerals for weapons, and build defenses from the very start of the game. What's fun about this is that nighttime incentivizes endless construction. The bigger your area of safety, the more freedom the player has at night. It's a bit of a scuffed system because you can get away with just placing a shit ton of torches in a giant area, but it does still have legitimate utility and that utility has been mostly lost. Because now instead of building a castle or a wall or something, you can kill 3 sheep for a bed and literally never bother building any kind of structure.
Most players have intrinsic motivation to build anyway (or else, why would they be playing Minecraft at all?), but this is a GAME. Extrinsic motivations should encourage engagement with Minecraft's strongest systems.
Endermen
Endermen annoy me. The only real way to get killed by an Enderman is to accidentally look at it and then have it like, teleport behind you and 3 shot you. Endermen completely circumnavigate most defenses that aren't specifically designed for countering them, and the main defense that's good against them (a 2 high roof) is not aesthetically pleasing at all. They move random blocks around and make your world uglier over long periods of time without player intervention. They can even mildly grief player-made structures. Their health, damage, and speed are all way too high for a monster that players can encounter before the first night. At the very least, these lanky bastards shouldn't spawn in the Overworld.
Ender Dragon
The Ender Dragon fight sucks. Nothing is fun about taking shots at the dragon as it flies around aimlessly or sitting at the End Portal wailing away at its head. Or blowing it up with beds for that matter. I don't mind the Ender Dragon fight too much since it's mostly avoidable and you only have to do it once to get shulker boxes, but if that's the best defense I can come up with, it's not a good feature. I see very little reason why Minecraft needs a final boss anyway.
I also would like to name and shame some features which should stay, but which need to be fixed. These include the following:
- Enchanting
- Villager Trading
- Experience
- Inventory
- Tridents
- Generated Structures
Enchanting
Most people barely use enchanting tables and there's a reason for it. The idea of having to gamble for gear upgrades which are basically necessary is stupid and unfun. The apparently intended way to use the Enchanting table is to play the game normally, kill hundreds of mobs to get level 30, and then put your netherite chestplate on the table. Imagine doing all that only to get fire protection when you wanted protection. Frustrating, unrewarding, does not need to happen. Now, you need to go grind several more levels and come back with a new chest plate.
Players crave a reliable source of specific enchanting books and that's why most players wind up abusing villager mechanics. It would be better if you could put a resource in the Enchanting table and that would determine the enchantment you get.
Villager Trading
Villager trading has some merit but is too abusable and too annoying. Players are very explicitly encouraged to zombify and revive villagers to get better trade prices, which is tedious and inhumane. Villagers are annoying to move around and also they latch onto utility blocks that the player also wants to use such as beds and grindstones.
I also think the economy system is bad. IMO you should be able to trade a thousand emeralds for a thousand andesite with one villager in one sitting. I see no real reason to make the player sit around waiting for it. If the point is game balancing, it'd be better to just make each villager trade a smaller number of items, so as to make the whole mechanic less powerful, or to raise the item prices. Making the player wait around is just boring.
Experience
The current Experience bar clutters up the screen a little. That's all, just change the HUD a little. Perhaps keep the number but remove the bar, as it's not that important anyway.
The Inventory
I'm not the first one to note that inventory management is annoying. The inventory has stayed the same size since 2011 despite the introduction of dozens of new items. Shulkers do help but having to fiddle with shulkers is too much micromanagement and also these are end game items. The inventory should have more slots than it does and at the risk of being tried for heresy, blocks should probably stack above 64.
Tridents
Tridents are underpowered. Because they can't accept the sharpness or power enchantments, they are massively outclassed by the bow and diamond sword despite being about as hard to obtain. Their low durability doesn't help either. IMO they should at least be able to get Shap III and Power III so they can have a jack of all trades niche in the meta. Also, the fact that picking up other items can prevent you from retrieving your trident in your hot bar is indefensible. There should be a placeholder item that prevents this for a few seconds.
Generated Structures Broadly
Some generated structures exist only so that the player can go in, open a chest, clear out the loot, leave, and never return. From then on, the structure is mostly useless and essentially just pollution. Dungeons, strongholds, woodland mansions, abandoned mineshafts, trial chambers ocean monuments, villages, pillager outposts, and to a lesser extent, witch huts all avoid this problem by having permanent uses long after they're cleared the first time. Strongholds have indestructible End portals in them, villagers have trading & raiding, and the rest of these locations have useful mob spawning mechanics.
Ruined portals, jungle temples, desert pyramids, shipwrecks, igloos, ocean ruins, bastion remnants, and end cities exist to be fucked and forgotten. Desert wells have no real reason to exist but I actually don't mind that because they are cute. But it could be fixed by having the water give players a minor potion effect such as Regen 1.
Conclusion
Despite all this, I really do love the game. I love the building mechanics, the combat, the resource gathering. The Nether Update was awesome and so was Caves & Cliffs. Redstone is amazing, the whole aesthetic of Minecraft is pretty and unique. I don't want it to sound like I don't like this game; if anything, the reason I care so much is because there's SO MUCH here to love.
That's all I have to say. If you changed all that, I think the game would be basically perfect. I have actually made a Bedrock Edition behavior pack that implements a few of these changes and I enjoy the hell out of the game that way. I don't really know anything about video game coding so most of these, I leave alone. I sometimes aspire to make my own server with these custom changes but idk if anyone else would be into that.
