I don’t like change. When I first heard that Mojang decided to end the yearly summer Minecraft updates and do away with the controversial mob vote, my initial reaction was to deny it was even happening. Then, when my friends told me that this was our new lived reality, I got angry. I tried bargaining with some unseen force to undo what I saw before me, and in my lowest moment, I decided I’d never touch Minecraft again. Hours later, my friend told me to stop being such a baby and to jump on Realms, which I did, albeit reluctantly.
But almost a year on from this monumental change in how Minecraft is managed, I can finally admit to myself that the world didn’t stop spinning on September 8, 2024, and that the game is actually in the best shape I’ve seen for a while.
Since then, we’ve had a shed-load of new content for Minecraft. Almost immediately after the announcement that there’d be no more major updates, we got the Pale Garden Biome accompanied by a new sinister mob, the Creaking, which everyone started shipping with the Warden (they tore each other apart like pulled pork).
There’s also been a major aesthetic upgrade thanks to Vibrant Visuals, which introduced shaders into vanilla Minecraft, Chase the Skies, which brought the Happy Ghast to our doorstep, and the Spring to Life update, which gave us biome variants for pigs and cows. But there’s much more embedded in these smaller updates than what I just mentioned; usually, they’ll also bring small quality-of-life changes and cool new features like finally being able to craft saddles or bringing back the Copper Golem.
The last major update done in the old style was the Tricky Trails update in 2024, which brought trail chambers, automatic crafters, and even more dastardly skeletons, the Bogged. I’m always up for a new mob, but other than the Bogged, this update felt slightly lacklustre.
Minecraft reached a point where the annual updates were hit or miss. Having to encapsulate every new feature under one theme was predictably difficult. A good theme could produce any number of wonderful ideas.
I’ll never forget how wonderful the Caves and Cliffs updates, both part one and two, were. Both were released during 2021, a time when I seriously rediscovered my love for Minecraft, and it brought a complete overhaul to Minecraft’s landscape, adding more spectacular mountains and incredibly complex caverns, which saw to my undying need to mine for coal and create vast underground cities.
But an iffy theme that didn’t lend itself well to what Minecraft needed could be quite dull. Those were the constraints that Mojang had to work within, and it was pretty restrictive. The Buzzy Bees update, for example, revolved around bees. Now I adore these fluffy little guys, but the entire update just added bees and bee-related items—it was pretty minuscule compared to some previous updates.
There was also a good amount of unrest from the community thanks to these yearly updates. Some players could grow frustrated about how infrequently we all got new features. I remember seeing a good deal of irritated players in the comments every Minecraft Live, saying that the devs aren’t working hard enough. I never agreed with that, but at times it was easy to forget that things were changing in Minecraft at all.
Now players get bombarded with new content for Minecraft, and it’s fantastic. As I mentioned before, there have been five major updates for Minecraft over the last year, each giving players so much more than they’d previously have gotten.
The updates also feel more holistic now. Mojang no longer needs to squash everything into one mould; the devs can just add new features to Minecraft when and where they see fit, as there’s no overarching theme anymore.
The Spring to Life update added tons of new features pertaining to animals like pig and cow variants and craftable saddles, but that’s not all. We also got several new maps that cartographers can sell, each one pointing towards a different structure or village, which will greatly help players quickly explore the terrain.
Thanks to all of this, Minecraft feels vibrant again, the creative space that I always knew it to be. It’s really nice getting loads of announcements periodically about all the new great things coming up. I do still miss the excitement and grandeur of waiting for the big update to be announced at Minecraft Live, but it’s something I’ve easily been able to get over once I realised how great the alternative is.
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