If I have to name my all-time favorite games or game series, it would be The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Unreal, but also Minecraft. Rarely ever had a game captivated me as much as this one and while I haven't played it in some years, it still has a very special place in my heart, where I have many fond memories of playing Minecraft both alone and with friends.
And by now the game is already ten years old, celebrating an entire decade of existence. Well, I haven't played the game before 2011, where I first tried the Beta and was already fascinated by its atmosphere. However, at the time the game didn't run as well on my computer, so I hadn't played it for long at the time. But with version 1.1 in the following year things changed, where Minecraft became my biggest gaming addiction for two years, until Hyrule Warriors came in 2014 and stole my attention.
While I've played on some multiplayer servers, for the most part I was dedicated to my own world, building a second home there, where you can find some glimpses of this in the screenshots of this post. And this is part of why Minecraft was so fascinating for me: it's your own world.
I love playing Zelda games for the exploration, but Minecraft takes things further by randomly generating a world and letting you change it piece by piece. While there are some templates of how the worlds are created and you have certain repeating constructs like villages, mine shafts and so on, it's all always unique and exploring in Minecraft never gets old. And it never stops, because the worlds are potentially infinite. You can spend a lifetime exploring everything in one world and still won't be able to see it all.
For me it was the first real open world game that I've played, several years before Breath of the Wild, and it was so good because it just puts you in the middle of the world and lets your own curiosity take over. The early Survival game is quite exciting, where at night monsters come out and you want to create a shelter to stay safe. Slowly, but surely you get better gear and are ready to explore more, fight stronger foes and so on.
But once you've found a place that you like, you can settle and build a house, a farm, a village, an underground facility and whatever you like. I've dedicated my main area to farming everything possible, where I have a mob, sugar cane and slime farm under my house, a villager trading center, collections of all animals, fields for all plants, flower farms, an Iron Golem farm and so much more. You could say that I've overdone it, but that was part of the fun and Minecraft really lives from your own goals.
This special combination of exploring, fighting monsters and building your own world is even something that I've wanted since the GameBoy Color games, where I liked playing Link's Awakening, Oracle of Ages & Seasons, but also Harvest Moon. At the time I've imagined how nice it would be to build my own farm around Mabe Village on Koholint. And Minecraft kind of gave me this in a very ambitious way.
Simply reminiscing about the game makes me feel really nostalgic, where I even went back to the game after all those years for the 10th Anniversary. But I've stopped playing when version 1.8 came out, where by now we have version 1.14 and lots of things have happened since then. It's amazing how they keep adding to the game, still developing it after all this time, improving it on all ends.
But it also feels quite overwhelming, if you haven't kept up with it... Some of my aforementioned farms and creations don't work anymore due to the (recent) changes to villages and other elements, where I really need to study all the changes in detail to make decisions on how to go on here.
Sometimes it feels like it would be the best to simply start over, enjoy a fresh game in a new world without all the weight of all what was done before. But at the same time I've achieved so much in my old world, like an Enderman farm in the End for near endless Ender Pearls supplies, where I would have to do so many (sophisticated) things a second time, instead of focusing the new things.
And there are so many new things to discover. I really like the additions from the "Update Aquatic" for example, especially the new Trident weapon - it's so good that I hope that it will be part of the moveset for Steve in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, if he really makes it into the DLC... And it already inspires new projects, where I want to build a Drowned farm using a Zombie spawner.
Village & Pillage
Last month the "Village & Pillage" update just got released and I've tried some of its additions in a New World, where chance had it that I spawned right next to one of the new Pillager Outposts, not far from a village, so I could try the new Raid mechanics:
It's really crazy and the village gets swarmed with all sorts of hostile "Illager" mobs. It's nothing you could survive early in the game, but a fun idea nonetheless.
For my old game world, however, I had to go back to version 1.3.2 to complete my villager trading center project for Enchanted Books - something that wouldn't work the same way in version 1.4 and beyond, at least not way I intended it to. I even will have to figure out how to keep trades going in 1.4...
But overall I like how you can now directly influence the profession of new villagers now by placing the profession blocks and how villagers are now looking for beds instead of many, many doors. It just feels like they completely overdid things here and some of the profession blocks seem somewhat unnecessary or weird. Like, why would we need a "Smithing Table" without any functions for a Toolsmith, if there already is the Anvil in the game?
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