Pipe Dreams
Max: So let’s abandon all pretense of sense and just go nuts with ideas. Minecraft is all about creativity, and I’ve got lots of ideas for things that would completely break the game or would just be more cool than useful.
James: Lead the way, good sir and established gentleman.
Max: Two words: Moon Landing. I want to build a tower to the moon, or go through a special portal and ride around on the pale floating blocky ball. I imagine it as a small area, with a very low building ceiling. But certainly mineable, and maybe even destructable. And it would be great to have all your moon-based creations be visible from ground level.
James: Moonstone blocks with different gravity properties when walking above them, and can be mined and planted back on regular Earth? The further above a moonstone block the player gets, the more gravity beings to adhere to the regular rules? Could be a cheapish way to mimic the moon-walking bounce affect.
Max: Sounds like a recipe for floating vehicles maybe? Who knows! The possibilities are endless when you ignore game balance and good design!
James: I’d be pretty happy with atmosphere “blocks.” For example, craft a purple fog block (purple dye + whatever materials would be crafted to make fog), require the inclusion of a bucket, then spill the bucket out into an area and have the purple fog seep across an area of X length by X width by X height. It’d mainly be for decorative purposes, or possibly to disguise traps from other Minecraft players on PVP servers. Maybe more blocks dropped in the same location would create a denser fog, and more torches would remove some fog.
Max: It would also just be awesome. We talked earlier about how whole sections of the game are underutilized. I think this is true of The Nether in its current form. I’d like to see it more closely connected to the above-ground world. Maybe have things built in the real world be reflected somehow in The Nether. Like, you build a castle, and a horrible dark version of it, or part of it, appears in the Nether full of terrible Ghasts and amazing loot.
James: Did your section just get hijacked by a Nintendo representative?
Max: I-I-I-I-I’d also like to see a part of the g-g-g-game where you play asssssssssssss a wolf and this weird little thing sits on you and bosses you around a lot… (head explodes, revealing him to be a robot!)
(Max enters through side door)
Max: Hey, did I miss anything? Oh, we’re doing the Minecraft thing?
James: Something I feel needs an overhaul, but am unsure of exactly how, would be the current animal farming system. Yes, it makes the world a less scary place if the player can just farm pigs for heals within the safety of their own base, but players can do that anyway just by looking up a two minute YouTube tutorial on how to set up the farm. Might as well embrace it and make it a well-implemented system. Maybe if actual, coded mechanics embraced the farming mechanics, infinite-heal farms could be balanced, and there would be a whole new animal farming system available for players in which to get lost.
Max: In general, there should be more interaction between mobs and players. If not farming, than a lasso or something to move them around. Though I would love to farm me some spiders, leading to spider domestication. Imagine it! Lap spiders! Seeing-eye spiders! Herding spiders to protect my sheep! And what about cross breeding? I haven’t gotten over having to breed Chocobos, and would never want to go through that again, but I think there’s a lot that could be done with it in Minecraft.
James: Granted, breeding a pig with a cow would only yield freakish–though tasty–results. At the very least, I can envision sheep breeding; breed a grey sheep with a black sheep and get polka-dotted or striped wool.
Max: Animal husbandry kind of brings the idea of Alchemy to mind. Instead of mixing and matching animals, you could affect the properties of blocks. Create floating water, burning rock, or transmute block types. It could open up whole new crafting recipes, and change the balance of the game, maybe opening up some hard to find elements like diamond ore.
James: Which is what charcoal was all about, and was a good idea, but didn’t really take easily-renewable, greenhouse lumber into account. It’d be absolutely wonderful if Notch would allow players to change their character names somehow. Many people I know created their Minecraft account with the tried-and-true method of using the silly, embarrassing AIM screen name that they made in sixth grade and have used for everything ever since. It’d be really great if we could all have an option to fix that and stop running around the world as xXMansonGirlXx.
Max: Oh, that’s you? Man, this is, uh, awkward. I kind of want to jump off a cliff now.
James: Wouldn’t it be great if Notch added parachutes and zip-lines so you could actually jump off that cliff, but live to talk about it instead of exploding in a confetti of your own inventory? A humongous aspect to Minecraft is simply viewing the beautiful world and traveling to amazing natural structures somewhat visible off in the distance. Parachutes and zip-lines would actually be a great, balanced-for-the-most-part way of providing new view perspectives, and also add fun ways to travel.
Max: And though I love toiling endlessly underground to build a 64-block tall lighthouse that may, to some, bear a passing resemblance to a part of the male anatomy, it would be nice to have something like a God Mode where you had access to all the blocks in the game in infinite qualities. Creative, or “classic,” mode has been online-only for a while, but having a space to try out new ideas consequence free might be useful. Maybe balance it by not allowing you to save, or reducing the size of the world in which to build.
James: Though we all have our own ideas for Notch’s blocky baby, as is, Minecraft is a pretty balanced, amazing game.
Max: Absolutely. Minecraft has its own look and feel to it, one that has been maintained remarkably well as the game has grown. Sure, there are things I want to see changed, but I don’t want to see the core of the game become corrupted. This game is about work and building, mining and crafting, and it’s worked really well. It’s ignored much of what dominates games today (stories, skill trees, etc.) and made something that is beautiful, and above all, simple.
James: But that doesn’t mean it can’t be better.
Head on over to the last page for a handy synopsis of the suggests our brains wrought.
Next Page: Handy Synopsis of Ideas
