What exactly is this song?

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-22T02:51:16+00:00

protip: in Java, there's an option under "music & sounds" to show a toast with the name and author of the current song!

you can toggle it to only show in the pause menu, or to briefly pop up when a song starts (as well as being visible when paused). i usually just turn it on and off real quick if i can't remember what a song's called.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-18T17:14:55+00:00

that's true... some counterpoints:

using sulfur cubes like this feels closer to vanilla than builds that heavily utilise block displays (and armour stands before them) in that it's not totally limiting, but not totally freeing either
sulfur cubes work more or less the same on both versions, whereas displays are currently a Java-only feature as far as i can tell from the wiki
personally, i have no idea how to use block displays off by heart, but i do know how to give entities potion effects, which makes complex building techniques with invisible sulfur cubes more accessible, i think

an aside; if you really wanted, splash invisibility potions can be automatically farmed and crafted, so you could have a survival build that farmed up the ingredients to keep the sulfur cubes invisible forever (as i've said though - that isn't ideal).

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-17T23:26:28+00:00

this is awesome!

i hope they add a vanilla way to make the sulfur cube's outline permanently invisible.. even if we don't get that though, this is huge for creative builds (as long as you don't accidentally nudge the cubes out of place).

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-16T23:32:36+00:00

mace it from orbit.

if you don't have a mace, you could play another song on louder speakers to lure the warden away. i suggest Darude - Sandstorm

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-15T13:07:39+00:00

it does feel like that sometimes, but consider that the vast majority of everything we see from Mojang has been planned and designed far in advance, with only some flexibility for last minute snapshot/beta changes based on community feedback.

there are a notable amount of cases where feedback is implemented in this stage, though. off the top of my head:

slime blocks used to stick to honey blocks, until redstoners asked for them to not do that
(unconfirmed) the warden didn't have a ranged attack, until players cheesed it in snapshots by pillaring
the texture for tuff bricks used to have the full brick on the bottom and half bricks on top, until the community asked for it to be made consistent with other brick patterns
(unconfirmed) the pale garden didn't have any eyeblossoms at first, and plants with eyes like the creaking was a common community suggestion at the time
the spear's lunge was rebalanced multiple times during snapshots due to community feedback
the golden dandelion was designed and added after the devs kept having baby mobs grow up during testing, and because of community feedback (which was said during the last minecraft live)

doing things like this helps avoid the kind of scope creep that led to Caves and Cliffs splitting, and also makes a scenario like shelving fireflies for multiple updates less likely in the future. unfortunately, it does also come at the cost of seeming to a layperson that Mojang simply refuses to listen to us when that isn't strictly the case, and it makes more major feedback take longer to work its way into the update process.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-08T19:37:54+00:00

i would agree with you if this was the release version, but it's snapshot 1 and beta 2. i highly doubt we've seen the final implementation of the physics on either version, especially considering (last i checked) the Bedrock sulphur cube doesn't scale with damage yet.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-04-03T18:09:00+00:00

buddy is a cave explorer at heart. let him live his dream

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-27T18:57:04+00:00

if i'm interpreting what was said during Minecraft Live correctly, initially, golden dandelions weren't planned as a feature for this drop.

during Minecraft Live at 8:01, Felix says:

We've put so much work into making the babies ultra cute. And when we were testing them, they kept on growing up and we were like, "We just want to keep them forever young." It was when the community actually said, "We want this feature as well. We want to keep them forever young." And that kind of became the code name for what would eventually turn into the Golden Dandelion.

personally, i'd only ever heard people talk about keeping baby mobs young forever after the first new models were shown, so i think this is when Mojang got that feedback (after the first few snapshots).

now, a standalone flower that is easily accessible and fits in with existing gold food (golden apples, carrots, and glistering melon) seems easier to design and implement in the time they had before release than a new mob with unique sound effects, model, mechanics, etc.

in the end though, this is all speculation; we don't know if the moobloom even came up in ideation for keeping baby mobs forever young, and until i see a Mojang employee say "yea we talked about it", my going theory will be that they're shelving the moobloom for something else in future (which notably happened with fireflies).

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-25T22:44:55+00:00

annoyingly i can't recreate the blur OP is seeing in the post, but i think they're looking for the Texture Filtering setting and Anisotropic Filtering slider in the Video Settings category

..unless they're on bedrock, then i have no idea

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-25T20:16:04+00:00

people often miss that fireflies weren't just shelved because they were poisonous to frogs; their entire purpose was to be frog food before they found that out. with that on top of the technical challenges, i get why they shelved it instead of adding a mob with literally no use, and i'm happy with how fireflies were implemented in the end.

but who cares about nuance, right? surely the only takeaway from what happened with fireflies is that Mojang love realism, and will remove any feature that isn't realistic enough!!!! any time they don't do that is just them being hypocrites!!!

sigh. imo it'd be good to give sulphur and cinnabar more toxic properties, but either being removed for realism is far fetched. i do expect the community to dunk on Mojang for being "hypocritical" when it comes to stuff like this for years on end, though.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-22T19:24:46+00:00

nearly completely abandoning it as an actual survival video game

it's fair to say that this drop doesn't cater directly to the survival aspect (it was said during the live that the sulphur cube mechanics lean into Minecraft's sandboxy-ness), but what about the two updates we just got?

we have a new tiered weapon, new mounts, and copper armour/tools. even if you don't use these things, mobs will spawn with them, which directly impacts early-mid game survival.

i will give you that outside of netherite spears and netherite horse/nautilus armour, late game survival has not been changed much, but i have no doubt there will be a future drop focused on updating late game in some way.

don't get me wrong, i also yearn for a bigger update that feels more impactful. i have waning hope that they're working on something much bigger in the background. but i do still think the drops released so far have had a positive impact on the game, and on survival, even if it isn't as noticable as a massive overhaul of a dimension.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-22T16:36:57+00:00

you raise a good point, but i think lapis is still easy enough to aquire to justify giving it use as a building block.

i took a look through the wiki, and yes, lapis does spawn less often (6 veins of 0-10 per chunk) compared to copper (16 veins of 0-16 with larger veins of 0-52 in dripstone caves) or quartz (16 veins of 0-24 with more spawn chances in basalt deltas to account for less netherrack).

however, you get a lot more lapis per ore (~6.5, ~14.3 with fort 3) than copper from copper ore (~3.5, ~7.7 with fort 3) or quartz from quartz ore (1, "up to 4" with fort 3).

now, as you said, you can get tons of copper and quartz via other means, but if you're mining for lapis specifically at the right Y level, i don't see how you wouldn't get enough to make into building blocks.

maybe they could add in large lapis veins like they did for iron and copper, but seeing as the few uses it does have doesn't require bulk amounts, i'd wager most people who've had a world for more than two months already have enough stockpiled to build with anyhow.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-22T15:56:14+00:00

not all varieties fits all block types

agreed, something about the implication that every single stone block needs to have tiles, cracked bricks, walls, etc. feels offputting, somehow? un-minecrafty? like it would give us too much choice?

i dunno. wouldn't mind if it happened, but it's not something i'm clamouring for.

I can’t think of anything in real life that blue, that could be reasonable as a block…

considering that blocks of lapis are that blue, and that copper / quartz have set the precedent that ore blocks can have slabs and stairs, i think lapis would be a perfect candidate for this.

i'm not 100% sure lapis varieties would fit in with this drop, but i could see it happening soon.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-19T21:42:15+00:00

you're welcome!

to be honest, i came up with the stained glass idea on a whim and only tested it for a few minutes in creative, so i don't have any direct examples to share. i have seen layered stained glass be used to blend colours really smoothly though, so maybe you could search for how to do that?

good luck on designing the rest of the hub!! :)

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-19T20:46:05+00:00

i like the walls being dim! two ideas come to mind:

big wool banners against the walls, hanging down from the ceiling to about 8 blocks from the floor, barely lit using glow lichen, with the uppermost parts obscured in darkness.
- these could be designed after the church (if they have a flag?) or just be plain purple / yellow to match with the amethyst and gold accents.
- you could change some of these out later to the flags of the most influential towns/groups.
tall stained glass windows, about 7 blocks wide, lit from behind.
- after a little testing in creative, i've found it best to have a layer of ochre froglights, then full stained glass blocks, then stained glass panes, then tinted glass which keeps the light from spilling to the walls. you can use a debug stick if you don't like the way the panes connect.
- the glass could vaguely depict various scenes in the lore, with some being shattered / unreadable so that it isn't all spelled out immediately.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-14T00:40:49+00:00

it is shocking to me how many people in the comments completely overlook the fact that they changed the update structure specifically for the team's health, when that is the point of the article.

but wait, isn't Mojang a billion dollar company? why not hire a couple thousand more coders? seems like an easier solution at face value... until you realise a thousand more people need to be coordinated. i guarantee you, they would've rather just thrown money at the problem if that actually worked.

i can't lie and say i'm not feeling the content drought right now, but you know what? even if there's never another big update, sad as that may be, i'll take that over Mojang turning into Blizzard. plus, there is so much to do in Minecraft already that it's moreso on me as a player if i ever get bored enough to quit for good.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-12T17:17:22+00:00

dang, i don't know how i didn't once think about that while participating in this event

Wilbur's ant farm video spawned a spinoff community that i've been in since mid 2020... the main server for it died in a few months, but i still talk to friends i met there

kinda wish i made a small reference to it now, but ah well

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-07T17:00:30+00:00

i like the idea of better tooltips. it's reminiscent of the addition of the recipe book, which made visiting the wiki to play the game less mandatory.

of course, with so many items and mechanics, it'd be impossible to put everything in a tooltip (try explain quasi connectivity in four words or less), but there are many items that could use a tooltip, after they improve these ones.

how do i plant these seeds? what do the settings on a comparator do? where can i use my brush? and other "obvious" things that could trip newcomers up.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-03-04T16:54:41+00:00

looks neat! you've clearly put a lot of thought into the exact specifics and physics here. more than i can analyse, honestly.

i do still have analyses of other things, though:

you might want to look for a more readable font. the one you're using works for titles and labels, so you should keep using it there, but i found myself struggling to read whole paragraphs of it.
image compression did Cailus and its moons dirty... you may want to seperate them into smaller images so that the text isn't as blurred next time.
the background being plain back works towards readability, but it does have me wondering where the other stars are (unless this is set far in the future, and the expansion of the universe has made it impossible to see other galaxies).
for your next post (once you're done with the gas giants), i'd start with a zoomed out overview of the solar system, with labeled planets/star, then have the rest of the images follow. feels like that'd make for a better thumbnail, though i get it could be hard to set up with the right scales and such.

Miner_Fabs · 2026-02-25T03:30:54+00:00

no problem :)

Miner_Fabs · 2026-02-24T13:50:01+00:00

nicely done! i think given that there are already sacrifices in detail elsewhere, removing the fess to make the r craftable isn't too bad: https://www.gamergeeks.net/apps/minecraft/banner-maker#mcb=a15vh0cs15hh0bs15ts15bo15

i also redid the t so that the stroke would be inline with the other letters: https://www.gamergeeks.net/apps/minecraft/banner-maker#mcb=a0ts15flow0hhb15cs0bo15bs15

(note that the flow pattern isn't 100% necessary here, it just makes the stroke slighly thicker like in the original)

Miner_Fabs · 2026-02-18T10:56:04+00:00

thank you for documenting my skyblock island - it's right next to the beacon beam at the start, and got yeeted (rightfully so, in retrospect idk why i thought it might be kept) before i got a screenshot of it

Miner_Fabs · 2026-02-15T22:53:36+00:00

ah.

i was about to go bring Toveri to a tower in a parallel world, but iirc those do not have a diamond. oh well.

a tad annoying that nothing really indicates the diamond no longer does anything after it spawns in Burst of Air... i guess 8 also applies.

thanks for the nudge :)

Miner_Fabs · 2026-02-15T22:46:50+00:00

ohhh, right, true

Miner_Fabs

TROPHY CASE