i think i can finally put into words the thoughts ive been having about whats wrong with beds in minecraft.
overall, the way i think about it is that minecraft first started as a game in the sandbox category. just building things and expressing yourself.
during alpha and especially early beta too, it completely changed into a different direction: survival. you had to gather resources to build with, make it through the pitch-black nights, fight monsters, etc. and there were many horror elements to it. the eerie emptiness, creepy sounds, dark ambience...
you can argue that this sort of clashes with the sandbox part of minecraft though. building is a lot more tedious if you can't see, and will also be attacked by monsters. among which are creepers, which are pretty quiet, can kill you in one hit, and will also either create ugly holes you have to patch up, or worse yet blow up part of your building.
for this reason i have HATED creepers too, i think the overall concept is nice but the execution just takes away from the sandbox part of the game.
and then, in beta 1.3, they added beds. i LOVE that they can set your spawn point, that is just a good feature all around.
but then comes the part where they skip the night. and the idea itself is maybe not awful, but the issue is that beds are cheap, and you can pick them up and take them with you anywhere you go.
yes, back in the day there was mechanics that would kinda stop you from sleeping out in the open, but its not that hard to make a hole in the ground.
and now im kind of conflicted, because i do think that the sandbox part is where minecraft is best at - and yet, in my brain beds made minecraft worse. and i kept not being sure why and what i really want instead.
and now i figured it out. it's the same reason why people hated the hunger system in beta 1.8: The Adventure Update. Let me explain:
This new update added some beloved features to the game. Stone Bricks are a must have for builders. Villages, mineshafts, ravines, and strongholds which made minecraft so much more lively and fun to explore. The XP system was added which was foundation for the enchantment system. Status effects like Regeneration and Poison, which were the foundation for potions and brewing. Sprinting was added, which was accompanied by the aforementioned hunger system.
It also overhauled the terrain generation in a major way. Instead of all biomes using the same terrain generator, they would now all have different styles which would liven up the game and just like the other features, really favor the adventure and RPG elements.
The issue is that this is now a THIRD standalone genre that minecraft is trying to balance. And while I think the idea is great, it is quite obvious to me that to this day they have not managed to properly implement and balance it.
The new terrain generation was a great idea, but it also led to much smoother and less random terrain overall, which takes away from the sandbox experience. Potions, Enchantments, and running all made survival much easier. The loot found in the new structures also made survival easier. The many new item-additions were not properly balanced with the size of the inventory, making exploring slightly tedious.
Enchantments are also a feature that still relies either on randomness or exploiting the trading system. Grinding XP is also tedious. The potion system is arbitrary, if it was added today it would be accused of being designed by an AI.
So yeah, the game is at this point clearly pulling in three different directions. The survival/horror aspect is more or less gone. But the adventure/RPG aspect still relies on it, because for some reason they needed RPG-like progression and an end with credits. And both these things take away from what made minecraft famous: The eery, weird looking world that you can shape to your will in a sandbox fashion.
All that is to say that, people disliked the hunger system back then. Why? Because all it really did is make the game more tedious. Having to eat regularly is just not really fun or interesting, especially as it neither enhanced the sandbox nor the survival aspect (the latter of which was even made easier through sprinting).
And thinking about that made me realize why I disliked beds, too. In the same way, it was just sort of tedious. If you want to build something, the darkness and the monsters are in the way, so you have to skip the night. And if your bed was something stationary and hard to obtain then having to get back to your bed as fast as possible would maybe at least still be interesting in the aspect of survival. But with sprinting, the higher brightness, elytras, enchantments, etc, even that is kind of hard to implement.
And so on one hand hunger (which is tedious) was added to balance out sprinting (which makes survival too easy), and on the other sleeping (which is tedious) was added to balance out the harsh nights (which make sandboxing less fun)
So I kept looking for some way to make beds harder, but in the end, making something tedious harder is not the solution. The solution is realizing that in the way that minecraft is currently working, neither of the three genres can work together. So if the goal is to play a sandbox game, we not only remove sleeping, we remove nights altogether.
Although, I do think this is only one part of the answer. In the end though, i think it entirely depends on what each person wants minecraft to be. I think minecraft should accomodate different people who want to put more or less focus on the different aspects.
And I think there might be a way to mend the sandbox and survival aspects of minecraft. But the way it is done right now is just not doing that. The features that add to the adventure genre take away from the survival genre. The features that add to the survival genre take away from the sandbox genre. And to some degree, the sandbox genre is also taking away from the adventure genre - which is why they added a structure that is underwater and gives you a mining fatigue effect, so you can't even think about cheesing it.
When I think of old survival in minecraft, I am reminded of Don't Starve. I think Minecraft could be a great Don't Starve. And in fact, Better Than Wolves is the perfect example of that.
But I would never play the Better Than Wolves mod if I wanted to play a sandbox game. Not only do you need hundreds if not thousands of hours to have the resources to properly build something, you need thousands more hours in attempts until you even get there due to the difficulty. And then dying still sends you tens of thousands of blocks away, unless there is some sort of late game feature that prevents that that I forgot about.
And I think if I had to pick between playing Vanilla Beta 1.2 and the Better Than Wolves Mod, I think Better Than Wolves is the better experience.
But if I want to make a world with a focus on building? Right now I have a world that is in 1.21.11, but it uses a mod that changes the terrain to Beta 1.7.3. I'm using the Better Days Texture Pack, and both of these make me less scared of building something unpolished. I'm having so much fun building. And I think disabling day-night-cycle does not take away from that experience. It doesn't get rid of hostile mobs, it just completely disables the part that interrupts my flow. If I want to fight mobs, I can go to the nether or explore a cave.
In my opinion, a perfect minecraft would go this direction. When you start a world, there should be way more game modes than Survival or Creative. Why not have something like Better Than Wolves as a gamemode? Why not have one that is Semi-Peaceful like the one I'm suggesting? Why not have a story mode that can incorporate the adventure aspect more deeply? Maybe even disable block-breaking entirely, like the LITERAL adventure game mode that already exists? Why not make actual game modes that change world generation and have different features enabled or disabled depending on the needs of the genre?
Hytale really understands this about minecraft. Minecraft is not just a sandbox in the sense that you can build anything. But in the sense that it can BE anything. It can be a minigame, an RPG, a story game, a horror game, a survival game, a building game, it can be literally anything that you make of it. So Hytale is working towards making a game that consists of different experiences that are all tailored towards their goals, as well as giving players the tools to create mods and worlds and anything that can alter the genre of the game itself. It's kind of like Roblox in that sense.
So in conclusion, I finally figured out why I don't like beds in minecraft. They are a band-aid for the a fundamental issue with Minecraft: It wants to be all the genres at once, rather than any genre the player chooses.
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
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