Nicolaj Østerby Jensen - 2021-05-06
I have been playing Valheim lately and as opposed to Minecraft, Valheim is a survival game and has a interesting progression through the tiers. One thing that has always bothered me about Minecraft is how "easy" it is to go from nothing to diamond gear and Valheim made me think about it again. In this post I will discuss the main differences between progression in Minecraft and Valheim. Then I will present a data pack + resource pack that I made, that improve Minecraft's progression with some very small but impactful changes.
Initially, I stated that Minecraft's progression is easy, but to be more specific, the problem is that it is boring. And the reason it is boring is because it is very linear. When you spawn, just get some wood, maybe some food (just a few pigs/cows will do), then go in a cave, mine some stone, coal, and iron. If you find a good cave, you should have iron gear before the second night. Maybe even some diamond gear. That's the first four tiers done.
After getting diamonds, things get a bit more interesting due to enchanting, which requires cows for leather and sugar cane for paper, which allows you to make books. You will actually need a lot of books, if you want to get the best enchantments. Additionally, it requires lapis lazuli and experience points. Notice how long this list of requirements for enchanting is? Now think about how that affects the gameplay. Finding each of these things becomes a little adventure, that you have to complete, and you will have to go explore the world and interact with both the farming and breeding mechanics. This is fun.
So the problem is mainly the progression from wood to stone to iron to diamond. Four tiers, that only requires you to visit one place, caves, and where the only interesting things you have to do, is mining and maybe fight with mobs.
Let me give another example. It is actually easier to get a full set of iron armor than a full set of leather armor. Leather is obtained by killing cows, which you can usually find in plains biomes. Plains are quite common but you need 25 leather for full armor, so you need to find a lot of cows - or start breeding them. To breed them you need wheat, for which you need seeds and a body of water like a pond, lake, or ocean. Assuming you are going for a leather before armor, then you don't have a bucket yet either, so you can't move water yet. Growing the wheat and breeding the cows takes quite some time. There are no waiting if you just go into a cave a get iron.
Now let's compare it to Valheim.
To get a pickaxe in Valheim you first need to kill the first boss. This means, you most likely want to get leather armor first and upgrade your wooden/flint/stone weapons as much as possible first. So even if you are an experience player and knows how to handle the boss, you still need to spend some time gathering, hunting, building a shelter first. The boss drops hard bone and you can now make a pickaxe to mine stone, copper and tin. Copper and tin can be combined to bronze, and then you can make bronze gear. However, copper and tin is found in the Black Forrest, a different biome with more hostile mobs. In other words, mining copper and tin is dangerous initially. You can also kill Trolls at make troll armor, which gives less armor than bronze armor, but more sneak and less speed penalty.
You want better armor and weapons because getting to the next tier also requires killing a boss. In fact, all tiers requires killing a boss. But not only do you have to kill it, you have to find the summoning locations first, which you do by exploring dungeons and ruined structures guarded by mobs, and you have to explore a new and more hostile biome. As you can hear, there is a lot fighting in Valheim, and to make the fights easier, you have to interact with the other systems of Valheim. This includes building a better shelter with better furniture to get a better resting buff, farming and hunting to make better food which gives more max health.
In short, Valheim encourages you to get everything out of each tier with its scaling difficulty and makes sure every system is interacted with in the process.
Minecraft is not meant to be a hardcore or realistic survival game like Valheim. It's mostly a sandbox game. Building and exploration is very important. Just look at the rich world generation with many different biomes that has no particular order (except overworld vs Nether). In Valheim, you experience the biomes in a fixed order. As the name suggest, mining and crafting are of course also very important in Minecraft. So if we were to to change Minecraft's progression and don't intend to completely remake the Minecraft experience, then we need to preserve these aspects. With that said, here are some ideas to make more distance between Minecraft's tiers, without changing Minecraft too much.
To create more distance between tiers we need to insert other objectives in between them. So first, I want to **remove stone pickaxes**. This might seem odd at first, but stone being able to break stone is also weird. Stone pickaxes are then replaced with a different tool, that can break iron and gold ore. I suggest, **adding the Bone Pickaxe crafted from Bone Blocks**. This is very similar to Velheim's hard antlers, dropped by the first boss. Acquiring Bone Blocks is non-trivial challenge, which means the player either has to kill skeletons or create Bone Meal with composting. This solution is cool because:
Bone pickaxes allows players to mine iron and gold ore. But here comes the next challenge: Stopping players from immediately proceeding to diamonds. My best idea here, is to make **Diamond Ore drop Raw Diamonds** - so Diamond Ore they can be mined using iron pickaxes, but Diamonds can't be used until the player has the right tool/stuff to process/polish the diamonds. This tool/stuff needs to be challenging to get too, and preferable only obtainable after getting the iron tools. I suggest putting it in the Nether. "But wait," you might say, "how does the player get to the Nether without diamonds?" That's a good question, either they use one of the randomly ruined portals which generate everywhere anyway, or we have to make iron pickaxes able to mine obsidian - and it should take awfully long of course. The latter a safe and easy solution and I would have done that if it was possible to do with data packs. Instead I took the chance and **adjusted some of the loot tables**, which needed to be done anyway. If we want to make iron and diamond harder to get, it should not appear in so many dungeon/mineshaft/blacksmith/ruined portal/jungle temple/dessert temple chests.
Now what is the tool/stuff that can process/polish Raw Diamonds? This was a tough one to figure out. In the end, I decided to use Magma Cream in the data pack. **One Magma Cream can turn one Raw Diamond into a normal Diamond**. Normally only the Nether Fortress is require to visit in the Nether, but Magma Cream can be found almost everywhere. One reliable source is Blaze Powder and Slimes, sure, but there are alternatives. Magma Cubes spawn in abundance in Basalt Delta, a biome which is typically hated for its difficult terrain. A third option is the Magma Cube spawner in Treasure Bastions. This incorporates Bastions into the progression, but also makes gold armor more attractive - especially for technical players who are going to make Magma Cream farms. Bastions and their Piglin Brutes will provide a good challenge for those players.
And that's actually it:
This is a very small list of changes, that I believe will have a very big impact on Minecraft and the feel of survival. And the best of all of this is, that these changes can be made already using a resource pack and a data pack. So I went ahead and made it. You can download them below.
Let me know what you think of these changes. There are definitely other systems that could be adjusted to make Minecraft's survival more... survival. However, the changes discussed above are the most impactful ones, and also, I don't want to steal too many ideas from Valheim. Minecraft needs to preserve it's simplicity and core.