Trying out Minecraft again after 10 years

Dolphin who followed me to my base, jumped onto the sand, and died tragically.

Some time later its buddy made the same bad life choice.

Like everyone else, I played Minecraft really long time ago. I recently discovered that the game is still receiving regular updates after all those years. Thanks to corona, I have a bit more free time than usual, so I decided to give it another go!

Here's my thoughts. Little of this will be new to you if you played recently.

My favourite changes

I really like the new villager system. This is possibly the biggest change - trading with villagers at first seems pointless, as they don't sell anything useful, but it turns out they level up, and offer more and more interesting items - while stuff they buy you can build semi-automated system to collect.

It's also possible to train villagers to choose new profession, breed villagers, and they have some protection with iron golems they summon, and some enemies with pillagers.

Treasure ships and treasure maps found in them are great. You'll randomly run into them as you explore, and they have nice stuff inside, and map where to get even more nice stuff. I really didn't love how I got two copies of same treasure map once, but such small side quests are great fun.

Boats no longer take damage when sailing around! Looks like they changed that back in 2012, that makes boats a great transportation system, and canals for them are quite easy to build.

The game now shows you recipes when you open crafting table, and that's a great change! No need to alt tab for rarely used things.

The game needs a damn map!

The game now has maps, and I thought that's great until I tried actually using them, and omg they're truly terrible.

This was one thing that finally convinced me to go through the hassle of installing Forge modding system (make sure you get one that matches your Minecraft's version), and then both Xaero's map mods (world map, minimap). It seems like such a small thing, but honestly it makes bigger difference for player enjoyment than everything they changed in Minecraft over last 10 years put together.

Game still hates the player sometimes

The game has its share of "fuck you player" moments. Falling into lava and losing all you stuff is a classic, but the game has more.

Like when you get hit by a Wither Skeleton, that not only damages you when hit, and poisons you so you keep losing your health (which is far enough so far...), but it also hides your health bar, which is just Minecraft devs being assholes.

For another "fuck you player moment", I was just wandering around exploring, setting up temporary bed whenever night fell and then taking it with me afterwards. I was in the boat during daytime, and somehow tridents started flying my way from the water, and I died out of nowhere. I lost all my stuff as usual, but most annoyingly game decided to spawn me at 0, 0 instead of my base or last sleeping place since last bed I slept in was no longer there.

The problem was that in my seed, there were no villages within over a 1000 blocks from my spawn point, and the closest one I finally found was abandoned, so I finally setup my base at about -2000, -1000 or so next to the first inhabited village I found. So by spawning at 0, 0 I wasted like 15 minutes of my life walking there. Just because the devs hate me.

And then there's all the other stuff, like all the sand updating because I placed a torch, resulting in sudden fall into a ravine.

There are games where mechanics like that make sense, but Minecraft is mainly about exploring and building, and last thing it should do is punishing exploration.

Other things that suck

Inexplicably there's still no builtin modding system, and you need to install third party mod manager to even download and install mods. That is truly baffling.

Combat in Minecraft was always bad, and it's still bad. Turning it on Easy doesn't seem to do anything. At some point they changed combat system, and before I watched some youtube tutorials explaining how it really works, it seemed just ridiculous.

Placing item when building a bridge is really obnoxious. And it looks like other versions of Minecraft fixed it, but somehow Java version still uses the old and really tedious system.

With single exception of crafting table recipes, the game is really bad at explaining anything. There's so many things that are completely unintuitive, and which are not explained, and not realistically discoverable. It's as if the game expects players to watch youtube tutorials for half of its mechanics. And sometimes I watched a tutorial, tried something, and it absolutely didn't work, because Bedrock and Java are subtly different, or they updated things at some point, and it no longer works.

I always felt like player's inventory was too small, and it wanted me to keep running back to base too often. It makes sense that I can only carry so much, but why can't my boat or minecart have some extra inventory space, that I'd then bring home with me? Big Boat With Extra Chest - as well as Big Boat With Space For An Extra Animal would be great additions to the game.

Things I didn't care much for

I really didn't care for the Nether and End changes - they're far too combat oriented, and combat in Minecraft is just not very fun, before or after the big combat update.

It feels like there's far too many blocks that just don't do anything different. There's naturally occurring stone in like 10 colors now, and a lot of cosmetic variation that feels largely pointless.

There's a lot of new mobs too, which seem to do nothing interesting.

I don't hate such changes, and I guess they add some extra flavour.

Is it worth playing again?

To be honest compared with other games that had 10+ years of updates, Minecraft changed surprisingly little. Something like Factorio or Crusader Kings II are such drastically different games than they were at release, but Minecraft now and 10 years ago, pretty much the same thing.

I might be worth giving it a go. Then again, if you never played Factorio, you should try that first instead. There, your buildings actually do things.