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There has never been a game that got me more invested as Minecraft did back in the day. I think it was 2013 when I found out that there was an Android version of the game. Sure, it was very limited, often didn’t run that well at all, and everything else, but it was still Minecraft. You can build literally anything you wanted on there, and make a little house that looked awesome. My first real building in MCPE was a desert house near a river, which had a sky roof and was made out of either brick or some other material that I forgot, probably sandstone. I remember back then that the game didn’t have a working day/night cycle, so I had to download another app that allow me to modify the game save’s time of day, and once I did that, the house at night looked awesome, with the torches finally being able to show off their warm glow into the darkness of the night.
I remember my favorite activity to do in-game was just to use these
“building placing” apps1,
which were just apps that allow you
to place whole buildings inside a Minecraft world, and then with these
tools I would build cities out of them. I would imagine a fictional
country, and made up my fictional city, placing buildings, building
roads, making plazas, highways, train stations, and all that. Inside
those placed buildings, I would build out the interior, furnishing them
out, all that awesome stuff. I probably spent hundreds of hours on this.
Sometimes, when I was bored as fuck, I would download a world save (or
just make a new world with the steve seed and get a village
to spawn) and just blow it up. Or just open a creative world and start
spawning villagers, and then spawn a bunch of zombies just to see what
would happen, or spawn a bunch of mobs inside a 1x1 space and see how
many mobs I could spawn until the game died, since back then the game
didn’t had a hard limit on how many mobs can exist in a 1x1 block. I
would build long ass rail tracks that would go for miles and miles, and
at the end, I would sometimes just ride in a minecart and see the
passing scenery. There was also me trying to run mods on MCPE, which was
a small niche that not a lot of people really cared about, since like,
these mods often didn’t work for one reason or another. I remember
watching PopularMMOs as a kid and wanting to use one of these Too Many
TNT mods so bad, but there wasn’t anything for MCPE, and I also didn’t
had any computer powerful enough to run Minecraft, much less run mods. I
remember the sand contraptions that people used to build as a sorta door
mechanism, since redstone wasn’t in this version of the game. There also
was no nether dimension back then, so the way to get nether specific
items and get zombie piglin to spawn in is with the nether reactor. A
very interesting block, which when placed in a very specific structure,
it will activate itself, and start creating these big ass nether rack
spirals, as well as spawning zombie piglin and a bunch of nether
specific resources.
MCPE used to be awesome back in the day. It could run on most phones (even the most shittiest of phones could run it at 20 FPS), and you had local multiplayer in LAN. And because at this time there was no sort of anti-piracy protection (like in modern Minecraft Bedrock), you can grab yourself a copy of MCPE from your local cracked APK hosting site, share it with your friends, and just play together on the same network. It was really fucking fun.
Yet MCPE was very limited on what it could do. I remember fondly one of the updates was called “the fence update” because it added a bunch of fences to the game. Another update, if I am remembering correctly, was all about signs, and as phones became more powerful, Mojang would work on adding all the things that was missing from MCPE, like the nether and the end, but by that time, MCPE was starting to lose its charm. Sure, it was still Pocket Edition, but it didn’t felt anymore special compared to just regular Minecraft on the PC. And with Microsoft finally tightening shit down to block those who pirate from running the game, my MCPE days were essentially over, and with me finally getting hardware that can actually run the Java version of Minecraft, I really never looked back to MCPE, now called Bedrock. And while I sometimes have dabbled in playing the Android or Windows version of Minecraft Bedrock (since I now own copies for both platforms), there always is this uncanny feeling on these specific versions of Minecraft. Like the game looks like Minecraft, and certainly works like you’d expect like Minecraft does, but it doesn’t really feel like it. Like something is off, something is wrong, and I just can’t point out what is even wrong. Like the movement is slightly different, alongside the lighting and the fact that you can’t fucking hold anything else that isn’t a shield or a torch on your offhand. And the funny thing is that, I played Minecraft on the Xbox 360 (aka the legacy console editions), and that too had a noticeable shift in feeling and looking different to regular Minecraft, yet these versions of the game feel proper, because I suppose, at least, these console editions do not market themselves as the ultimate Minecraft edition compared to how Mojang treats Bedrock to be.
Unfortunately, I would start feeling the same feeling for regular, Java-based Minecraft. Minecraft is a game that really doesn’t feel fun anymore, and it feels different in a way, without any explanation towards to why.
Like I been thinking a lot about this recently, on how I rarely even enjoy Minecraft nowadays. Sure, I have it installed on my PC, but it often stays dormant, until an update arrives, and everyone that I know of starts playing Minecraft nonstop (and I usually start joining them as well), which lasts for a week, at most two weeks, until everyone gets bored and eventually stop playing.
I suppose there is also the fact that I really never had a long lived server with friends where we just, spend time, instead of speed running full diamond in a day, killing the ender dragon in 3 days, and getting full netherite in a week. Most servers barely last a week, and then they often get forgotten about, just fading away after the week of Minecraft obsession ends. Maybe another reason is that I played Minecraft so much that I pretty much go ahead and speed run the game, often skipping the process of building my base. Instead, I go into the mines first and get iron, and by the end of the day, I probably got diamond tools, and if I’m lucky, a diamond set of armor. However aside from that, I never end up playing the game for longer. I end up losing interest because some parts of the Minecraft loop are pretty grindy, like hunting endermen for their pearls. Or hunting for strongholds, getting a full set of netherite armor or whatever. And unlike kid me, adult me would rather not deal with the annoyances of doing all this tedious work. Now playing Minecraft feels like a chore, and I have to be in a very specific mood to actually be down to go though the game loop again.
I guess one can say that the reason why I feel that Minecraft has changed is because that it actually has changed. Minecraft now has a different design and goals compared to classic Minecraft (and MCPE). The Minecraft palette now has more colors to play with (think terracotta), more things to do (think getting the Happy Ghast or like, the archeology thing, trial chambers), more complex enemy designs (for example, the Creaking), among other things. But it doesn’t really feel like it belongs to the game, right? Like there is this uncanny valley-ness when older and newer elements clash together and feel out of place, like, shits too detailed, the new mechanics feel out of place and feel like they are straight out of a mod pack (especially that archeology brush animation, dear god). But there is also something else that I felt has changed. Maybe it is the fact that Minecraft is not a indie game anymore, instead, it is a multimillion dollar business that forms part of the giant that is Microsoft, and by extension, has to deal with the bullshit that entails. Any large changes that they suggest are most likely shot down by the higherups at MS, and that limits Mojang on what they can actually do. And those on Bedrock suffer the most, with Microsoft constantly pushing for microtransactions for skins and maps and other shit that you can pretty much get for free on the Java edition of the game.
And sure, you can still downgrade the game to an earlier version and pretend it is 2014, but like, I tried playing an older version of the game, and I just end up missing the modern features that modern Minecraft has (ever tried crossing an ocean in old Minecraft? yeah…). Then I play modern Minecraft and I yearn for the mystery and the possibilities and the wonder that I felt the game once had in its earlier versions. Like I remember exploring in MCPE and finding cool ass buildings, or villages that spawned awkwardly, or something else entirely. I still remember the first time I found a Badlands biome, a very unique biome that just looks awesome. Or the time I found mineshafts for the first time. I kinda want to experience stuff like this for the first time again, ngl. And sure, ancient cities and trial chambers are cool additions, but these are often too hard to find and are underground. I think it would’ve been awesome to see maybe a variant of the trial chambers spawning above ground, maybe it is some long abandoned ago pyramid where you can enter, and go underground to solve the trial chambers or something.
Maybe this is a sign I need to delve into modded Minecraft more. Maybe install a mod that spawns a lot of abandoned buildings around in the world to be able to scratch that exploration itch. Or maybe some mod that adds a lot more biomes to the game, which you can explore if you so choose. But I don’t know where to even start, and from the little experience I have from modding the game, it is a miserable experience. I once had a mod crash on launch because MSI Afterburner was running. Yes, really.2 And mods themselves are often very obtuse to get into. The experience of playing with more technical mods is just keeping the mod wiki open on a second screen, while you try to do stuff that is supposedly easy to do. And then you end up with an issue that you cannot fix anymore. So you proceed to give up on the modded game, eventually going back to boring vanilla Minecraft. Oh well.
Or maybe this is just a sign that I am just done with Minecraft for now. Like, I played it for years, it would be expected for me to be sick of it eventually. Which kinda makes me sad, to be honest. It is a great game, but ruined somewhat of years of playing and replaying and optimizing the game to the point that I inadvertently sucked out all the fun out of the game. And while I guess mods can put some fun back in the game, I am not really looking forward to dealing with the many annoyances that can be found while using mods. Or trying to find mods that have the things I want to do. Also, I got to admit, I kinda wish that Mojang would add an update that adds abandoned structures, abandoned cities, that sort of stuff.
tangent 1: the most ungrateful fandom of all time
While on the topic of Minecraft, I always felt the fact that so many fans of the game hate the game itself and the various updates that they have released over the years. Sure, there are cringeworthy updates that deserve to be mocked and criticized (such as the chat scanning update), but I feel that in every update, there is always a group of people complaining about how the game has x, y, or z feature that they don’t like, or a, b or c feature is missing from the game and needs to be added to the game ASAP. No matter how large or how small the update is, there is always someone there ready to complain about it. Like, I remember Mojang was gonna add fireflies to the game, and then didn’t add them to the game since something about “fireflies are poisonous to frogs”, and then the fandom went apeshit, angry because of like, a two pixel light effect not being added to the game? Like is the addition of something this small worth this much reaction? Fucking hell.
Like, it is really funny how annoying Minecraft fans are regarding the game. They complained so much about the Caves and Cliffs update being split up into three updates, and now that Mojang is making smaller updates they are now complaining about how little these updates are adding to the game. Mojang dares to change something that is part of the base game and the hardcore fans will complain. Add a new feature? Someone will be yapping somewhere about it. It is so fucking tiring man. Like I do understand it, criticizing Mojang and Microsoft for the stranglehold they have over what updates get greenlit and which updates don’t is something that deserves to be mentioned, but like, there is some point where they don’t even seem to enjoy the game and actually genuinely hate the game.
Also don’t get me started on people despising Bedrock. Like sure it isn’t the “““good version”” (like Java), and it can be considerably more buggier, but my fucking god do people hate it so much, and by extension, the players that actually like playing Bedrock, for whatever reason. Be it because it is easier to get multiplayer working, or they like to play on console, it always seems that in the Minecraft community, Bedrock players are seen as second class citizens, disliked because they happen to play the version of the game that everyone else hates.
I guess the best solution for this is to not fucking interact with the Minecraft fandom, lmao. It kinda helps a lot with the feeling of not having fun in the game.
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- 2025-11-30: page was created.