My Odd Relationship with Minecraft
Mon 25 November 2024
Unlike most young people, and not unlike many of my GenX peers, I haven't played much Minecraft.
I got into it a little bit with my cousin's kids when they were young around 2010, and I even played it a little bit on my own at the time, but the game didn't really grab me. I think the mild danger element of the game (creepers, zombies, and skeletons, oh my!) coupled with the nearly infinite exploration and creativity afforded by the game was addictive to GenZ minds. To me, the creepy aspects were a bit over the top, and I spent most of my time in Peaceful mode (or just getting blown up by creepers — and freaked out a bit).
I didn't keep MC on my computer for very long, but I did have Minecraft Pocket on my phone for a little while, and did a bit of exploring there, but it never rose to the level of near-addiction that it did with some of my friends (particularly the younger ones).
What's funny is that I've spent at least ten times more time on Minecraft clones and derivatives than on MC proper:
Eden
A year before Minecraft PE was released for iOS, there was an adorkable Minecraft clone called Eden. It was roughly comparable to earlier MC versions in terms of features, but had much prettier textures. I spent a lot of time in Eden in the early 2010s, and designed what was at the time my ultimate dream house: swimming pool, several bedrooms, and enormous communal spaces: a large downstairs kitchen and dining room, an office, upstairs was a library with observation deck, a large sound-isolated TV room with a huge TV screen, and lots of room to sit around the table and have interesting conversations with family and friends.
When I went back to university, I added on an elevated all-glass study room above my bedroom like a glass chimney, and at one point, my cousin's oldest kid (who knew a lot of the quirks and hacks of the game) built me an ice-based launcher that would catapult the player way up into the sky and thousands of blocks away.
Eden didn't get a lot of updates after the first year, but suddenly got a couple updates in 2015 that kind of nerfed the game for me: aggressive mobs (never wanted them) and an all-new terrain generation engine that looked flat-out ugly to me.
I saw just now that the app got a lot of updates in 2023, so I'm wondering if it's good again, or just completely nerfed with ads or who knows what. This game came out in the golden era of iOS (circa 2010-2015) when you paid for games, and got them for life, with no ads.
I'll have to charge up my old iPhone 5c and see if the new version is worth trying. While the game didn't have multi-player, it did have the ability to save and share your world in its own kind of leaderboard-style feature (or maybe I should all it a "single player 'server'-picker"), so I have mine saved out there somewhere, assuming that the data from original servers is still extant.
Then again, I might not upgrade it, knowing that there's no way to downgrade apps on that odious* mobile OS.
* There are a lot of ways in which iOS is far better than Android (low bar, but whatever), but in the chief areas where iOS sucks (privacy, lack of users' agency), it really sucks. You can say anything you like about Android's ham-fisted UI/UX or anything else. But iOS feels like (a very pretty and nicely designed) toy when you consider the multitude of ways that Apple ties its users' hands behind their backs for its own myopic and mercenary ends. That is not ok. (Of course, the way that most Android OSes spy on their users is even less ok, but at least there's something of a choice: using a privacy-centric FOSS Android build.
Minetest (now Luanti)
I vaguely recall trying Minetest on my Android phone a couple years back, and not getting very far with it. I think the mobile app wasn't very polished or usable, but I don't recall it clearly.
I tried it again a couple months back, and I enjoyed playing around with it during my downtime. After a couple of false starts, I finally found a seed (1726359828011149378) that worked pretty well for me, and I started to really enjoy goofing around in that world. I built a cobblestone-and-wood house on top of a mountain, and gave it a gorgeous cantilevered wooden deck hanging out in thin air, then I built a very tall treehouse (by building a single tree on top of a tree on top of a tree and then finally enclosing the top layer of leaves), and joined it to the deck by means of a glass walkway in the sky. I then built the most insane tree farm where it's trees growing on top of trees (and branching out like crazy). The tree farm / Tree of Life is so huge and thick that it goes up above cloud height and is so dark inside because of the dense forestation that I needed to light up torches to see my way around when in the middle of it.
I've mined straight down (I have damage turned off, sue me, lol) over 200 meters in search of ore (primarily iron), and have been able to keep all of the essentials stocked, even with a small cotton farm so I could have a bed — no need for Creative Mode!
I then built a glass walkway going in the opposite direction from the house (away from the treehouse) to the top of a thin mountain, which I then started to hollow out into an apartment-like structure. So far, I've built eight stories (each four meters tall) by hollowing out the mountain, and I still haven't reached the bottom. (So, that's 40 vertical meters of hollowed out mountain so far — the steel pickaxe definitely helps!)
Luanti's been a good "dopamine farming" activity to have on my phone, although I'm definitely trying to rely on it less and less as I seek dopamine among the banal activities of the real world. No time for gaming addiction!
Category: Entertainment Tagged: ADHD Computing Entertainment FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Gaming Hobbies Life Non-religious post Non-technical post WritingMonth