12:31 AM
@AndreasmovedtoCodidact Not an option if you find it just boring to do creative. Also, block removal for, for example, flattening an area is slower in creative, at least without worldedit
@AndreasmovedtoCodidact Still gets boring real fast
@AndreasmovedtoCodidact If you make a skeleton farm for some of the other loot or something, and also want to convert those bones to bonemeal, you still need to manually craft them right now
@AndreasmovedtoCodidact You can't get everything with farms. Hell, on some servers, you can't even make certain machines. TNT dupers aren't possible on paper servers, for example, which means no automining
And without TNT duping, the only other alternative is to... manually craft a bunch of TNT with gunpowder from a creeper farm and manually gathered sand
These aren't even the most complicated types of farms. Ever tried making a wither farm? Because I have
And I gave up, because the amount of blocks that either have to be blown up (TNT constraints prevent this at a scale) or covered with slabs is insane
And if you have to cover everything in slabs, you need a bunch of materials, and if you need a bunch of materials, you either need machines that may or may not work, or to mine for several hours and still not have enough
But even if you disregard paper servers, there's only so much you can do without inevitably resorting to manual labour, at least shy of building megamachinery, which usually requires a lot of manually placed redstone, and that's only if you decide to copy it from somewhere else
And as many redstone youtubers have plenty of experience with, one singular misplaced block can fuck over a machine so hard that you have to start over if you run it without noticing. I tried to make a flying machine door once, and it took me several tries to not break it after starting it. It was 3x4 IIRC, so not exactly that complex machinery. But because flying machines, if it breaks, you have to redo large parts of it, if not the entire thing
If you then do it on a multiplayer server, so no backups, and screw up something far larger than a 3x4 door, you're screwed
@AndreasmovedtoCodidact To an extent, sure. But the gameplay is so thin that if you don't sprinke in something else to actually make each save unique-ish, all you do is grind out materials for a new set of buildings that may or may not be different. Of my playtime, the vast majority gets spent grinding out materials, and not actually doing anything fun. There's lots of people who enjoy that, but I'm not one of them
Whenever the game ends up being a chore, what's the point? Looking for diamonds is fine in the early game, but when you've done 10-20 hours on a save, spending 4 hours looking for diamonds is just boring. There's no actual progression in the game - and before you mention "it doesn't need to, it's a sandbox", even sandboxes have some form of progression
Some way to unlock better ways to do the basic tasks so you don't have to. Factorio, while not directly comparable, has blueprints and bots. You can automate every single resource, so you can automate drills, belts, and power poles, and plonk down a blueprint all over an ore patch. Wait for the bots to arrive, and poof, more resources without needing to manually place stuff
Starmade, a now dead voxel-based space game, gives you miners and factories as well. In later version, there's an AI system that, in theory, allows you to automate resource acquisition. But it doesn't even matter
I made a planet eater in one of my playthroughs. You shoot the core until the planet explodes, and have a miner with two sides distanced far enough to take each of the plates that break off the planet after the explosion. You can mine an entire planet in minutes, and get a ton of resources for shipbuilding that get processed via automatic factories
You don't get that in the early game, but you unlock it as you gather more resources, and can build bigger and more efficient miners as you go - also a progression mechanic
In Minecraft, you get pickaxe upgrades, but even at the peak, you can only get 2.5 blocks per second. The planet eater I made in starmade many years ago can get thousands or tens of thousands per second (I forget what scale the game operates with), and gets enough resources to fuel really big projects. You don't get anything similar in minecraft - nothing to improve the efficiency of either mining or building.
The only thing you get is hours and hours of time sunk into holding the left mouse button, and holding w. The closest thing to progression improvements over the past few years is the elytra, which kills off the need for most transport infrastructure while drastically increasing transport speed. But that's only useful while travelling large distances, and when the majority of my time is spent mining, transport speed is irrelevant
disregarding PVP multiplayer, there's also no other alternatives. Villager trading is one of the worst mechanics in the game, largely because it's overpriced and just generally bad for most resources, and the setup of a villager trading thing is infuriatingly annoying due to the villagers' tendency to walk away or get themselves killed. There's also nothing you can really loot to make it better, and you can't go out to loot the stuff you need, because you usually need it in enormous quantities
Imo, minecraft is one of those games that started off fine, but got all the wrong features. Many of the early features were correctly aimed at small-scale survival stuff - y'know, with small bases and exploration. After that, the caves and cliffs update should've happened, preferably along with something else to make the world, y'know, not be completely devoid of any interesting life. Instead, they added the worst mob that's just a pain in the ass to deal with (phantoms), botched several
wildlife updates, and called it a day
