The Spawn Chunks 243: A Grove-y New Soundtrack

Login

Minecraft News

FROM: PrinceBlue33
DISCORD MEMBER: Landscape Artist
SUBJECT: Fuller Flowers

Hello Johnny and Joel!

I’ve been a huge fan of the show for a long time now, and was happy to join the Discord recently as a Landscape Artist.

I wanted to write in today to talk about flowers in Minecraft.  When it comes to using them for decorating, and landscaping they tend to fall a bit flat, due to their nature of being very simple, and singular.  I’ve seen numerous content creators find creative solutions to this- Scar used coral instead of flowers to decorate the centerpiece of Scarland, and Fwhip made his own texture pack to make the flowers fuller on the block. I think it’s safe to say this needs improvement, and I’m curious how you think Mojang might be able to fix this. I have two ideas.

First, the new cherry blossom petals give the player the ability to add 1 to 4 petals to a block, and it makes me think the same could apply to other flowers. If you place one down, the flower appears as it does now, but if you place multiple on the same block, it becomes a little cluster of flowers.  

Second, and this is a bit more of a stretch, but I’d love to have a sort of flower bush. Maybe, if you right click any leaf block while holding a flower, that block becomes a flowery bush with little buds in that color.  This would add so many possibilities for landscaping with colorful bushes, as well as having other colored blocks similar to flowering azalea leaves that we could use in custom trees.

Do you agree that we could use improved flowers, and what solutions would you like to see to make flowers more substantial?

Princeblue33 drowned while trying to collect enough coral fans for their landscaping.

• PumpkateFlowers (PlanetMinecraft.com)

FROM: Darchalus
SUBJECT: Micro-Builds Concept

Hey guys, 

My Minecraft name is Darchalus, I’m a Bedrock player, and I’ve just recently subscribed to the podcast. I also just recently started watching Minecraft youtubers like the Hermits, and have been taking inspiration from the builds that folks are doing. I’ve slowly been increasing the ambition of the types of builds I’ve been doing but have sometimes found the pile of pickup sticks that doing a big build represents to be daunting. 

In listening to the recent back-catalog, I heard a discussion where Joel mentioned the idea of micro-builds where you’re adding a small piece to a larger/more complex build. That has really helped me to reinvigorate my approach, because I can see the project of renovating a spawn-generated village into a more coherent town as a more discrete set of smaller projects, house by house or city-block by city-block. I just recently went through and put in little personal vegetable gardens and flower plots around some houses, and it really improved things! 

Also having a book where I keep a to-do list of these micro-builds was a helpful idea to not only keep distractions at bay but also keep basically a rolling change-log of what I’ve done that over time just blends into the environment of my build.

I really appreciate the conversations you’ve been having and look forward to each new episode.

Darchalus died by falling off a roof because he broke the block under his own feet.

• Andy Is Yoda (YouTube.com)
• ZloyXP (YouTube.com)

Minecraft: Trails & Tales Original Game Soundtrack