yknow i never thought abt this until now but it is fuckig wild that the nether portal , something that is Required to beat minecraft , Purely relied on you already knowing how to build it for YEARS . like they added ruined portals which sorta fixes this but . ppl who had never played the game or seen minecraft content online would have geniunley No in game way of finding out how to access a dimension neccasary for completing the game that is fucking terrible game design holy shit

@ellie@yearning.gay when i started playing minecraft i had no idea other dimensions even existed
my friend (who introduced me to minecraft in the first place) mentioned to me that you can build a black portal of some kind. so we started trying to build vertical squares from different black materials, but we couldn't get it to work.
one day he just sent me an email saying "i managed to teleport"
i would have never figured it out without him

@ellie i feel like a lot of the steps necessary for beating the ender dragon rely on the player knowing what to do already beyond just the nether portal. like how is someone supposed to know that eyes of ender point to the dungeon?
i guess the entire point of the game is exploring and making your own story but at a certain point exploring isn't worth the pain of trying to figure out how the game works all on ur own

@ellie or the end being entirely dedicated to one gimmick?

@meow @ellie that sounds awesome though

@ellie omg, fr, i've never thought about that... it is a wild design choice. ooo and it's nice to think that this could have fostered community around the game bc players needed to get that knowledge from other players

@ellie if minecraft wasnt as popular as it was and the majority of players had to figure out stuff on their own i dont think any update since like 2010 would be received well

@ellie TBF the recipe book didn't exist until 1.12. Minecraft is/was a very weird/bad game when you don't include all the history and community around it

@ellie to an extent i agree but i actually think that learning of huge chunks of the game through word of mouth or trial and error is... kinda cool and my bigger problem is that they added a defined goal to begin with instead of an infinite set of intertwined systems for you to explore

idk, i think minecraft fencesitting on this is the real problem, its neither "i cant possibly memorise this i need to check the wiki/ask a friend" nor "this is perfectly intuitive" and instead falls into the "how didnt you know this already, you fucking dumbass" valley that i find considerably more annoying than either extreme

@keilajec come to think of it , pre recipe book there was absolutely No way of knowing that combing ender pearls and blaze powder even Does something

@fizzyday @ellie it wasn't that wild originally because the nether was added in the update before the end, and was just another cool side thing that you could discover or be told of by a friend

then they rushed out release 1.0 like 3 months later and it honestly wasn't that good in any aspect, whats more frustrating is that it took the better part of a decade to address this with ruined portals

@ellie @keilajec every recipie . how do i make a door

@ellie @keilajec like. damn it just has NO indication of ANYTHING . good thing it became as much of an explosive sensation as it did otherwise there would only be super obscure internet guides and they wouldn't be everwhere and basically gaming common knowledge

@stupidpuppy @ellie for like most of the updates in the alpha period the whole gimmick was literally not knowing what was added

@eris @keilajec lowkey fawning for the reality minecraft dide due to lack of player direction and some shit like cry of fear became the global phenomenon the world would be so different

@ellie @keilajec minecraft could've died so many times, there were so so many lulls

@ellie @keilajec like, so many versions could've been the last one and there'd be video essays talking about the dev process and the potential the game had and what it could look like now and

@ellie minecraft should rly have a built in guide

@ellie Good design tbh If you know you know

Minecraft is one of those games you play with the wiki open

@ellie@yearning.gay nah