Originally posted by paulguy

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Movement in water would have to be made to not suck so bad. But he seems to aim things at difficulty for the sake of annoying. Not that it's overly difficult, but anything that's intended to be a challenge just feels like a chore.

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Minecraft in general is a chore. Compare it to something like Terraria; there, the main focus is on getting a better character and equipment, which is usually done by exploring the (much more vast and open) caves, using the expanded view area to seek out patches of goodies, and engaging in better combat to get stuff needed for better weapons.

In Terraria, your equipment never breaks, so once you upgrade, you're always at that point. Your belongings don't drop when you die, you just revert back to your spawn area and lose half your money; combined with the limited inventory, you tend to make forward bases a lot, and dying could put those out of reach. Digging is also much faster, and things like bombs and dynamite have much more strength while being easier to use and much more potent.


In comparison, Minecraft is tedium given code. Even simple blocks like stone can take forever to break; caves are often fairly small, ores aren't plentiful at the beginning, and your tools break after a fairly small amount of use.

Even a diamond tool will break after a little above 1000 blocks, which, in a 3D game, is not a big number at all; just digging out a simple tunnel for 256 blocks in one direction will eat half of that, so any long-distance movement is difficult.

In addition, you lose everything when you die; enemies are ridiculously powerful, especially with easily-destroyed armor. Enemies also have only two real attacks: running at you for "touch of death" damage and firing a projectile at you. Creepers and Ghasts are really the only exception, and even then the former uses the same AI almost every other mob uses, it just happens to explode if the distance to you is small enough.

Digging is tedious because of the slow speed (why does obsidian take nearly a minute with the best pick in the game!?), the frequency at which picks break, and the rarity of the best materials; it's easy to break a diamond tool before you actually find any more diamonds to replenish it, and hahaha if you think your armor is going to last. (Bonus points for even simple things like a 3-block fall damaging your armor!)

Terraria is arguably better in almost every way; the only downside is that it's in 2D.

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Actually, another thing Minecraft has going for it is, amusingly, the mod community. Terraria is more of a standard adventure-platformer Metroidvania in multiplayer goodness, but you can make Minecraft into a pretty complex building simulation.

My favorite so far was BuildCraft, RedPower, and IndustrialCraft (or whatever), which made it possible to build huge machines that automatically farmed and planted trees, turned those trees into charcoal, and then turned the charcoal into fuel for the huge automatic mining systems. It's sort of like Garry's Mod, except that in this case you can do a lot more with the world instead of just welding props together.

To that end, the default redstone implementation in MC is an absolute joke compared to RedPower. It's sad.

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Speaking of, someone mentioned it earlier, but I think my favorite indication of how ridiculous Minecraft can be at times is that it is often easier to make a boatload of buckets, go to your favorite lava pit, scoop up the steaming globs of molten Fun, and then place the lava with water to build structures of obsidian. As in, it's faster to do that than actually mining the obsidian.

:notch:

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Originally posted by Sukasa

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Speaking of that server, I'll update it once all the binaries have updated as needed.

Though, even vanilla Minecraft has some pretty nice features getting added. The new farming mechanics are starting to shape up (though they unfortunately aren't done yet), and the new terrain generation is actually fun to explore. I've had a lot of fun building a combined fortress / farm, and the fact that passive mobs no longer despawn is a great boon.

But yes, one of the major points of Minecraft is the modding community.

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The problem with farms is that they're basically all the same. Wheat: Punch when brown, plant seeds. Melons: Plant seeds, punch when grown, right click dirt with hoe. Pumpkins: See melons.

The problem with this sort of thing is that there's no way to automate the process, even with "pistons" (which I have still not seen a real use for other than novelty "it's a house that self-repairs!" or "hidden doors"), since there's no way to get drops into a chest automatically.


Though on Kirb's server I did make a self-harvesting "sugar cane" farm, I guess. You flip the switch and the shover robots helpfully break all of the second-level stems for you (though it has about a 30% efficiency rate, the shit regrows so fast it doesn't matter)

Originally posted by Sukasa

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Yeah, that's pretty stupid.

If I had ONE complaint with minecraft, it's this: Every new version, they have tons of bugs, and they never actually fix them.

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Score: &e0

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We were joking last night that it'll be completely and utterly hilarious/awesome if it makes it all the way to 2.0 (whenever that is).

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