4.65 Balance Observations and Discussion (SPOILERS)

[FlowerChild]

Light. For me the scarcity of light has bottle-necked my activities. I feel too uncomfortable doing any but the most timid caving knowing that a creeper can appear out of nowhere and kill me. That my ability to mark my territory and create a safe haven from the infinite mobs is so limited is not fun. As we all know, MC caves can be batshit huge... and ultimately I play MC to carve out a niche in an infinite world, so the prospect of this as a permanent feature- as it stands now- really deflates me. Torch spam is not ideal... but is it simply a failing of the MC engine rather of the game design?

Look...if you're determined to be a nomad and not settle down, lighting will definitely be a problem.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: that's your choice. There's no real limit on lighting, anymore than there was before, the difference is that you have to work your way up to it. If, on the other hand, you choose to run around the world because you feel that you absolutely must have wheat before everything else, well then: no shit, you're not working your way up the tech tree.

You have an in-game problem. Work towards resolving it, instead of lamenting not being able to do it *yet* for pete's sake.

[Six]

After an unfortunate lava accident in my base, I had a chance to try out how the early game is with the new tools. I have to say I really liked how it felt to get that iron pick. The slower furnaces also worked well with the iron nugget thing, meaning that even once I had enough ore for a few tools, I still had to make a choice of what to get first while the rest smelted. Gathering the things required for a compass after a hardcore respawn seemed perfectly reasonable, and with the little meat I'd grabbed from animals I returned to the surface with the compass, an iron pick, sword, shovel and 32 nuggets to spare. (However, just after emerging I had a flaming daytime zombie with a sword drop down behind me and kill me in two hits, but that mostly comes from the server being on hard).

Back at my base, the fist taking longer to break things caught me off guard when I was making some pottery. I went to break it using the timing that I've learnt in the past and the slowdown meant I ended up missing the piece I was after. It then felt kind of strange to break pottery off the turntable by digging it with a shovel. The other two things which felt odd in terms of their specific tool, were ladders and pistons. Neither of these seemed to have a specific good tool to break them down with and I would have expected an axe for the ladder and a pick for the piston.

[Charzy]

Though I feel this might be more of a problem with vanilla Minecraft, it definitely feels weird to me.
On my second day of a new play-through, I came across a desert temple while trying to find a village.
In the temple, I looted 6 powder kegs, a pressure plate, 23 bones. That was all fine.
Then there was one chest. It contained three diamonds and seven iron bars. Because desert temples are made of obsidian and I had gravel from the previous night of digging out a hobbit hole to sleep in, I now had everything I needed to go to the nether, along with an iron sword and a diamond pickaxe, all in my second night of playing, before finding a village.

Two other things were that chopping my first tree to get the wood for a wood pick/stone axe was slow enough to motivate me to actually make an axe for once, and that my first night, because I couldn't get enough food in the day (couldn't find any pigs/sheep/cows the first day), I could do nothing but sit there. Twenty minutes of waiting in the dark, bored, with nothing to do at all, because mining or fighting both meant starving to death.

Also, I've started making a point of just burning those fucking jungles. I hated them in vanilla because I couldn't see anything and they annoyed me, but now they slow me down too. I just set up camp for the night, set a nice big jungle fire, and get to cooking the rest of my meat (I found a massive herd of sheep on the second day).

[Itamarcu]

I definitely liked how it felt when I finally got an iron pick. I also had to make a tough decision - make an iron pick or make an iron hoe. Eventually I made the pick and used some gold to make a hoe, which turned out to be a complete waste :)

The mobs are certainly a problem, but the hardest part for me was finding food. And a question - did you make fishing stop working once the "fish supply" in a water body has been exhausted, or is it just a longer wait-for-fish time that made me think that way?

[FlowerChild]

Back at my base, the fist taking longer to break things caught me off guard when I was making some pottery. I went to break it using the timing that I've learnt in the past and the slowdown meant I ended up missing the piece I was after. It then felt kind of strange to break pottery off the turntable by digging it with a shovel. The other two things which felt odd in terms of their specific tool, were ladders and pistons. Neither of these seemed to have a specific good tool to break them down with and I would have expected an axe for the ladder and a pick for the piston.

Good points on all counts man. Thanks.

Twenty minutes of waiting in the dark, bored, with nothing to do at all, because mining or fighting both meant starving to death.

Considering an MC night is only ten minutes, I'll be sure to take the rest of your post seriously.

[FlowerChild]

The mobs are certainly a problem, but the hardest part for me was finding food. And a question - did you make fishing stop working once the "fish supply" in a water body has been exhausted, or is it just a longer wait-for-fish time that made me think that way?

Lol! Man, that reminds me of when I first started playing MC. I remember playing those exact kind of head-games like "maybe I have to move to another spot...maybe I can only fish during the day...maybe the water isn't deep enough".

Nah, I just reduced the frequency ;)

[Wibbles]

I find the bow is far too durable compared to the rest of the early game tools, considering it's made from 3 sticks and some string. It never breaks; I find I have enough dropped bows from skeletons to repair it so I never have to craft another one. I am actually using it more than I do the iron sword now, unless the mobs get too close.

[FlowerChild]

Going to lock this down. I'm rapidly realizing I don't have another one of these left in me :)

<pours one on the curb for the old turtle forum>