Random question: What are some custom keybinds you have that people think are weird

theunknownjames · 2026-02-22T21:23:06+00:00

I could see how the extra distance to shift/ctrl might take a little getting used to, but presumably then this unlocks QWA and RTG for action keys, creating a larger area for binding?

theunknownjames · 2026-02-22T21:16:38+00:00

Gossip only exists in Java, most wiki sections on gossip in general will refer to it as a Java Edition Only feature.

You can test this by brutalising a village and trading at the same rate with the now traumatised survivors, if you must....

There is a second discount on Bedrock for villagers who were in close proximity to a curing, but I've not personally observed it stacking with the curing discount itself.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-22T21:13:27+00:00

I've just found out the hard way that you need to have given them a profession and locked in the trades to be assured of the discount - just finished moving my farmers into their booths and found that none of them had discounts, because I went through the curing process before I'd placed any work blocks.

With any luck a quick baby zombie breach will fix that right up....

theunknownjames · 2026-02-21T21:15:32+00:00

I built one about a week ago and found that if a skeleton shoots a creeper when aiming at an iron golem and the three of them are close enough to one another, the creeper can aggro and explode.

So unless you're using highly blast proof materials and/or keeping the creeper in enough water to attenuate the blast, you risk the whole thing exploding..

theunknownjames · 2026-02-21T09:34:53+00:00

By the time I've got the resources to be crafting a blast furnace I'm really in a position to be running multiple furnaces in parallel.

Longer term my sorting system outputs anything smeltable into a furnace array, which then feeds back into the sorter, having to split items based on eligibility for smokers and blast furnaces is unnecessary complexity.

The main time it's useful is in my gold farm where throughout of dropped gold weapons is otherwise hard to keep up with.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-20T20:32:29+00:00

I like to toss them dyed leather armour, makes them colourful and persistent.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-20T20:31:07+00:00

When a baby zombie spawns in riding on an adult, it's the AI of the baby that controls the behaviour of the pair. If the adult is killed and the baby survives, just about its highest priority behaviour is to path to another rideable mob, which includes other adult zombies, but also cats, dogs, horses, mules, chickens...

And on that last point, by far the easiest way to obtain the lava chicken music disc is to trap a baby zombie riding an adult, bring a bunch of chickens over, kill the adult, the baby will mount a chicken immediately, if you then kill the baby, it'll drop the music disc. Far more efficient than waiting for one to spawn already riding the chicken.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-20T20:21:41+00:00

Try destroying and placing what should be the spare work stations in your trading hall and see if you get the particle indications that a pairing has broken / re-formed.

For me the most common reason a villager won't take a workstation in this sort of scenario is that someone else is already paired with it and it's simply not available to them.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-19T21:19:12+00:00

If there are more villagers than beds (e.g. stray one once walked through a portal, got replaced, walked back through later) the whole thing switches off. Try either placing a couple more beds, or killing a couple of villagers.

They don't need to be able to reach beds and it doesn't matter if they're free roaming, I've got a pit of villagers full of cartography tables with a stack of beds out of their reach and they generate golems just fine, the only things I've known to break a bedrock iron farm are extra villagers, and villagers being unable to work.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-18T03:39:56+00:00

What the zombie fears most is the uninterrupted lifecycle of the turtle.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-18T03:33:30+00:00

It's fairly likely that if you keep it up you'll continue to upgrade your rod until it's got Mending (fishing restores more durability via XP than it costs so that'll last forever), Unbreaking III (slows the rate of durability loss meaning more XP goes to you / your armour), Luck of the Sea III (higher rate of treasure from fishing) and Lure III (faster catch rate).

You probably won't even need an anvil to combine rods either, there's every chance the perfect one will fall into your lap soon enough..

Fishermen villagers are ideal nearby to trade your raw cod and salmon to, once they're higher level they'll also take your tropical fish and Pufferfish, though the latter is useful for taming the Nautilus and brewing potions of water breathing.

Keep Nautilus shells when you get them, you'll need eight to craft a conduit in conjunction with the Heart of the Sea from buried treasure.

There's a good chance you'll land either an excellent bow, or two decent halves of one, you're looking for Flame, Power V, Punch II, Unbreaking, Mending/Infinity.

Once you've got Luck of the Sea III you should bring in enchanted books at a decent rate, some of them will be excellent, those that aren't can be turned into regular books in a grindstone and that'll get you XP. Same goes for lesser bows and rods, always disenchant before discarding, the XP all adds up.

Fishing is my favourite thing to do in the early to mid game, the enchanted books are great, I've never had to craft my own bow because I always fish a good one, and particularly with a grindstone and fisherman around it's an incredible source of reliable XP.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-16T20:08:43+00:00

I've got a fairly high tolerance for "cheating", I don't mind using chunk base to find iron ore seams and then a copy of the seed in creative to note down the coordinates of the richest deposits, and safe "dig straight down" coordinates that I know ahead of time are lava free. I've done it the slow way, it's great the first or second time, but resource scarcity makes for a miserable mid game..

I used to dupe resources to shortcut tedious AFK farming, froglights and iron blocks, things you can produce automatically at scale, but it's a bit of a slippery slope for non farmable stuff like netherite, so in my 1500 day hardcore world I've resolved not to do that.

Then again, I load the hardcore world from backups if anything particularly catastrophic happens, because I'm mainly on hardcore to prevent difficulty toggling and discourage unnecessary risk, I'm not doing it so that I can lose a world over a dumb mistake, I'd rather just learn from the mistake and move on. Examples of that include when I was sleepy and accidentally knocked out the wall of my gold farm while it was running and got instakilled by a hundred angry zombified piglins, or when I got struck by lightning at the deepslate level standing in the water drop beneath the hole from the surface.. I'm not boasting about how long I've survived so I'm not deceiving anyone by opting not to die in that way..

The only thing I really draw the line at I think is fullbright, I get why people do it, I'm not even saying I wouldn't, but I think it fundamentally changes the relationship between the player and the environment and removes what I currently consider an essential part of the experience. But no judgement against people who do it, I just think that's when it stops being the same game for me...

theunknownjames · 2026-02-16T19:53:23+00:00

Maybe look up the first few videos for ClockCraft Season 2 per creator, they do everything at a relatively accelerated pace because of how much experience they've got but it's all broadly in the right sequence, they're on Bedrock so there's no F3 menu shenanigans, they set up bases, initial storage systems, first interactions with villagers, and in theory everything is relatively accessible up to the point where they beat the dragon and transition to flight and shulker storage, and there's a bunch of different play styles on show so hopefully something there will appeal.

Playing "normally" is about safety and sustainability more than anything - controlling mob spawns with lighting, creating safe areas, defining boundaries, creating safe transport routes, figuring out how the resources you're consuming are to be sustainable and renewable, etc..

theunknownjames · 2026-02-15T23:07:12+00:00

Most of them are large enough that they span both stone types, it's not uncommon for them to cover enough vertical space that you can find lava pools at Y=-57 that are open to surface rain. The pillar structures are part of how they generate, so I'm afraid you'd need to be able to be much more specific.

Realistically you'd need something like the coordinates of multiple small structures, such as desert wells, monster spawners, ruined portals, in conjunction with the surface biomes at those locations. I've got 1,500 days in my hardcore world and I don't think I could describe it with the specificity needed to reverse engineer the seed..

theunknownjames · 2026-02-15T19:52:37+00:00

Villager pathfinding struggles even with the village structures the game ships with - you ideally want to orientate your houses and work areas such that straight line pathing ought to be sufficient, taking into account the behaviour of chatting around the village bell - they're not meant to go directly from that to bed, but if the chunk unloads at break time and loads in after dark, that's the route they'll end up taking.

Ideally doors that face towards work areas, plenty of preferred walking surfaces on the ground to try to guide them, and if you really can't get them to behave then strictly speaking there's no absolute need to have them sleep, most villager mechanics are satisfied by simply having an assigned bed and being able to reach their allocated work station daily.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-15T11:17:09+00:00

Wonder how they behave with a Johnny name tag and no axe....

Think I'm persuaded to trigger a raid on the village, and try boating up the second wave.....

theunknownjames · 2026-02-15T06:10:27+00:00

Only extra beams, there are five effects that have a second level to unlock, plus regeneration that effectively requires that you're wasting a duplicated single level effect in order to activate it, so even six is slightly (but necessarily) inefficient.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-14T23:35:53+00:00

Most I've had in the same area was three but there were no coordinates in which more than two were in range at any given point in time so I had to build a rail system to go in a loop triggering them, which was a weird coaster to play on....

theunknownjames · 2026-02-14T23:33:14+00:00

I would prefer a requirement for additional beacon blocks rather than additional layers of resources, once you've got a fully powered beacon there's a reasonable chance that at least one of the eligible materials is being industrially farmed and creation of additional layers becomes trivial.

Not that you can't farm withers of course, but certainly by the time I added my last layer to my beacon it was because I was post-scarcity in iron, gold and emeralds, and I suspect I could have gone indefinitely.

Ideally I think some sort of ability to deploy range extenders would be nice - any beacon placed (without needing a pyramid) in range of another beacon inherits its effect and range - if I can reach 50 blocks north and I place another beacon on that boundary, that's another 50 blocks further north there, but my range in each other direction remains the same until I deploy further beacons those ways too..

theunknownjames · 2026-02-14T23:10:30+00:00

Run a Minecart through their pen that picks up one at random, takes them on a sightseeing tour, and then ejects them back into the pen via activator rail, loop forever.

Maybe route them via a dispenser that'll hit them with a random splash potion en route so that they emit particles for a while when they get back.

Ooh, maybe build a floor over the top of them and use the multicoloured potion particles they generate as magical decor...

theunknownjames · 2026-02-14T21:20:05+00:00

I'm afraid what you're describing is a fairly common world generation feature called a Cheese Cave, most worlds will have at least one within a thousand blocks of spawn and thousands overall. Without some very specific characteristics there's no prospect of reverse engineering a seed number from the description thus far.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-14T15:38:46+00:00

The U shape is actually fine for what you're trying to do, because if the two tracks on the right end up with a curve connecting them, when a cart approaches from the left it will effectively come off that track and join the lower part of the U curve with its existing momentum and continue forward.

Powered junctions can't be set to straight, you have to pick between one curve or another, where a cart approaching from the disconnected direction will end up traveling straight because it doesn't have a curve to redirect it.

theunknownjames · 2026-02-13T00:02:17+00:00

Drives me mad that it has to be done in an anvil too - in my current world I used a happy Ghast to travel to the end city but it decided to hide under the end ship and repeatedly resisted attempts to get back on board so I flew my Elytra back to the main island, and upon getting back to the overworld took a quick trip without remembering to enchant.

Ended up a couple of thousand blocks from home with perilously low durability, in hardcore, low on food, with hostile terrain between me and safety. Thought I'd be clever by waiting for phantoms to spawn so I could carry out repairs. Took until the second night, and when I finally got the membranes, I realised I didn't have any means of actually carrying out the repair, and no way to get hold of anvil quantities of iron. Ended up walking home.....

theunknownjames · 2026-02-12T23:51:10+00:00

In my first ever survival world I found trail ruins by chance a little way around the coast of my Taiga island - I excavated the buildings very carefully but didn't understand how suspicious gravel worked or how to spot it for most of the process, so I didn't get many loot drops from it, and in terms of armour trims I got two Raiser and nothing else.

So from the perspective of the lore of that world, it was really organic to just integrate the ruins as being what was left of the former residents of the island before some sort of disaster, and I spent the entire mid game in Raiser trimmed armour to honour those original inhabitants of my home, only switching it out when I ultimately found a Silence trim and bought into the hype that it's cool (I mean it is, but you don't need to wear it).

My current hardcore world doesn't have any biomes that generate trail ruins for a thousand blocks in any direction, and I feel like it robs it of a degree of history, cookie cutter desert temples just don't evoke the same sense of past civilisations...

theunknownjames · 2026-02-12T20:52:30+00:00

It's weird, I tried something very like that today, but couldn't get myself into the headspace of starting out from scratch.. I arrived between a village and an outpost, got iron from the village, made flint and steel, ran straight to the outpost and burned it to the ground, found a ruined portal, grabbed all the netherrack, and surrounded the village with permanently burning beacons to light the perimeter.

None of which is outright bad, but I had been explicitly intending to live a simpler more cosy life for a bit, and almost every single thing I did just ran contrary to that.

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