The Spawn Chunks 135: A Light Snapshot

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FROM: SoMuchLag
SUBJECT: Caves And Ores After Modded Minecraft

Hello Jonnny and Joel!

I would like to start by saying thank you for the podcast – I always look forward to a new episode!

I have only ever played Vanilla Minecraft, but I recently tried a modpack to change things up. While I wasn’t a fan of everything, one aspect that really stood out to me was the caves and the mining experience. Obviously caves are getting a huge upgrade in 1.17, but what I want to focus on more is mining for ores.

Within the modpack, there were next to no ores outside of caves – the only way to find resources was spelunking. This meant that strip mining, which everyone can agree is very boring, was useless. This encouraged me to actually explore caves and take risks. This was a fun way to gather resources, and very different from boring old strip mines. 

However, Mojang seems to be doing the opposite with 1.17: many ores have reduced air exposure. In my opinion, this makes caving far less enticing, as simply strip mining would be much faster – even if it is boring. To me, it seems more logical to have increased ore visibility in caves, as this means players will have more reason to spelunking in large caverns that may be dangerous and filled with mobs, but are quite rewarding. 

As a final thought, it seems plausible that one of the reasons for players and content creators thinking diamonds are too common is because they are exploring with night vision and spectator mode, which makes everything much easier. Players in survival won’t be able to instantly see everything in a cave.

Thanks for reading!

SoMuchLag fell out of the world.

• “When ore distribution is tweaked for the new cave generation, the progression in early game could really change. It makes me wonder if we made diamond much lower down, it could take longer to get diamond and feel like a longer journey. That sounds like an exciting shakeup to me.” – @kingbdogz (Twitter)

FROM:Torder66
SUBJECT: The Dazzling Glow Squid

Hey Johnny and Joel,

I was thinking recently about some of the new features coming in the Caves and Cliffs update and noticed that the glow squid already feels like an overlooked feature, even before it has been fully released. I have a couple ideas to share with you about how this mob could become a bit more interesting. During the mine-con live stream, the animation of the glow squid showed it hypnotizing the player, but that feature has not been implemented into the actual game. An actual hypnotic effect would be very difficult to implement but perhaps it could be simulated by having a dazzling effect if you looked at it, similar to how endermen become aggressive when you look at them. I would imagine that it would be similar to the nausea effect, except it would show bursts of light as if you had just been dazzled by a bright light, lasting for around 30 seconds in which you would be vulnerable to some kind of attack or the glow squid gets away. Of course it would need to be considered how to make it accessible, as I would imagine that bright flashing lights would not be entirely safe for the entire playerbase.

Another feature that has been discussed on the show before is the implementation of some kind of flare. What if the glow inc sac could be crafted into some kind of flare that could be thrown or launched, creating some kind of light emitting goo on contact, which could be temporary or permanent?

Either way, I think these features would add to the value of the glow squid and encourage players to seek them out. What are your thoughts on how the glow squid could be improved to become more than an ambient mob with a fairly niche use.

Thanks again for the outstanding podcast,

Happy mining and crafting,

Torder66

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