The Spawn Chunks 203: The Craft of Preservation

Login

Minecraft News

FROM: Uncomfy Mattress
DISCORD MEMBER: Landscape Artist
SUBJECT: Renewable Echo Shards

Hey Jonny and Joel! 

There have been a lot of wonderful ideas about additional uses for echo shards presented by viewers of this show! However, I realized that some of these uses may even warrant the shard to become renewable, even if it’s at a slow rate. How would we do that? My idea involves sculk having a unique interaction with amethyst!

We know that sculk catalysts create sculk charges that can convert most natural blocks into sculk. Amethyst shards and echo shards both generate as ancient city loot, so it’s plausible that there’s a correlation between the two items. Combining sculk and amethyst together could create echo shards, but not by simply putting them on a crafting table. What if sculk charges could convert amethyst clusters into echo clusters? This is how I imagine echo shards were created to begin with. These new echo clusters could behave similarly to their amethyst counterpart, but they drop echo shards instead.

I really like this idea because it expands off of observations that can already be made in-game, and it allows the echo shard to have more uses without worrying about scarcity. Maybe this concept can be applied to converting other blocks with sculk charges to make other unique blocks or items?!

Of course, making echo shards renewable would make exploring ancient cities less enticing, so may warrant coming up with more unique loot for the cities in order to compensate. What that would be, I unfortunately don’t have any ideas for.

What do you guys think? 

Thank you so much for the wonderful discussions!

FROM: Ceol117
SUBJECT: Echoing Amethyst

Hey guys,

In the days leading up to the 1.19 update, there was a lot of discussion in your community emails about possible uses for echo shards aside from recovery compasses. The main problem most of those ideas ran into was that echo shards aren’t renewable, or even especially plentiful. 

The idea of an echo shard reminded me of an amethyst shard, what with the ringing sound connection and the shape of the item. So I had the idea that, by converting budding amethyst into some sort of budding sculk, (Ew) rather than growing amethyst crystals, it could grow echo shards.

This would open up a lot of opportunities for cool new uses for echo shards, but the one that sprung to my mind was using echo shards to replicate allays, creating an allay with super-hearing, maybe allowing it to hear note blocks from farther away, or remember them longer, or even be the only kind of allay to hear a specific note block sound.

Ceol117 fell victim to his own sorting system, and was overeagerly stuffed into a chest by a sculk-allay.

Preserving Your Minecraft World