The Spawn Chunks 148: Hard To Find, Easy To Farm

Jul 5, 2021 | podcast

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Joel and Jonny hit the major bug fixes in the latest Pre-release and Release Candidates for Minecraft 1.17.1 before donning their farming hats and discussing the balance of hard to find, and easy to farm in The Caves & Cliffs Update: Part 1.

Joel Duggan

Twitter | YouTube | Twitch JoelDuggan.com The Citadel Cafe Forge Publishing

Pixlriffs

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  • Joel
    • Spent the entire week – in a good way – working on the moss farm infrastructure.
      • Storage with unnecessary but cool filtered, honey wall delivery.
      • Loop back water way with a bone meal siphon.
    • Unlocked glow berries and amethyst geodes with some smart, and lucky finds near the modern city build of Southport on The Citadel.
      • Used moss, azalea leaves, glow berries, and cave vines to decorate the moss storage area like a lush cave.
  • Jonny
    • Gearing up to take on an Ocean Monument in the Hardcore Survival Guide.
    • Farming honey, and using candles to represent player deaths on the Empire SMP in a vigil build in the desert kingdom.

Minecraft News

Chunk Mail

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FROM: SolidRockKarter
SUBJECT: The Colorblind Community

Hello Pixlriffs and Joel Duggan!

I have been listening to your podcast for about a year now, and have really enjoyed it. While I was playing Minecraft recently, I upgraded to enchanted Netherite gear. As I am blue-purple color blind, I was disappointed that I could not tell it was a Netherite Pickaxe (as an example). The purple blocked out the black, and it just looked like a purple pickaxe. I was happy about the ore texture change, but I think they could do something more.  However, there are a few benefits such as Diamond armor looks grayer, so the ability to change it (like the Monochrome logo) would be nice.

Also, has Mojang released any information about updating 1.17 worlds to 1.18? You couldn’t update snapshot worlds to extended build limit, so I was wondering.

Sorry for the long email, but keep chunking along!

Solidrockkarter was rammed by a goat…but he had a water bucket.

FROM: Rancher
SUBJECT: Farming in 1.17

Good day Jonny and Joel,

I recently stumbled onto your podcast thanks to finding Pixlriffs on Youtube, and I’m already hooked.

I work in agricultural and ecological research in real life, so the intersection of farming and renewable resources in Minecraft has always fascinated me. Before listening to this week’s podcast I had already been thinking about the latest update and what it portends for the game as a whole. It seems like there’s a shift from the easily-renewable resources of prior versions of the game to more of a do-it-by-hand approach–unless one has the technical skills of gnembon, for example, it’s really just not worthwhile to farm copper, it seems. Similarly, the amethyst’s immovable characteristics and slow shard growth make that more of a hand-farming situation, and the lava in a cauldron can only be hand-harvested as of now (fingers crossed for a dispenser/cauldron interaction in 1.18). Do you think this reflects a slight shift in the paradigm of the developers from making everything pretty easy to farm once a resource is found to making things much more exploration or travel-dependent?

On an unrelated note (apologies for the long email), I was nodding in agreement with your discussion of neutral or friendly mobs in recent updates. As someone whose work is tied to grazing animals ranging from horses to cows, sheep, and goats, it’s disappointing that we have so many animals in Minecraft who manage to be so useless past early game! But I suppose that’s a topic I could prattle on about for far too long. Suffice it to say, I think developers could easily check both the cuteness and utility boxes for most of these mobs rather than opting for cuteness alone. Beeswax was a good start in that direction, but the goats and axolotls were two steps back for that one step forward.

May your copper be waxed and your shards plentiful,

Rancher

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Hard To Find vs. Easy To Farm

Joel and Jonny take Rancher’s email into a full discussion on the delicate balance that Minecraft resources walk between being plentiful, renewable, and easy to accumulate, and scarce, non-renewable and hard to find. Where is the balance between abundance in the world, farmable resources, and the massive windfalls orchestrated by the Minecraft technical community.

Render Distance Post Show Bonus Podcast Recommendation

BlackMinecraft: The Podcast is all about using our voices to reach many on the initiative that will bridge the gap for a more diversified space within Minecraft (both in-game and content creator-wise), focusing on BLACK and POC representation. Often, these conversations and thoughts are only limited to tweets and live broadcasts, which can still be limiting. But due to technology, the voices and ideas shall be heard across multiple platforms.

Currently, the podcast will be distributed on Anchor and Spotify, with future episodes to be recorded for Youtube as well. Since we want full accessibility as much as possible, the Youtube channel will provide a closed captioning service!