I got back into Minecraft recently, got a RPi4 and made a small home server for me and my boys to dabble around with.

After some tinkering with permissions we've got it working the way we want - the boys have made their own bases, predictably right next to each other where they can easily wander through and mess up (or in their case flood the others base, resulting in far too many arguments).

The best bit was when my eldest told me not to come into his underwater room because he was 'killing salmon'. Further inspection revealed him beating the hell out of 3 captured fish in an indoor pool in the centre of a bedroom.  :-&

I've been messing around with some pixel art - this site produces the clevers from an uploaded image, a few blocks and some redstone plus a small time investment and the results are suprisingly impressive.

I've been converting well known works of art to see how well the conversion works and the abstract patterns produced when viewing blocks close up are art worthy within themselves in a Chuck Close sort of way. I'd post some results, but the efforts we've done so far are beyond the draw distance in game, so would have to be scrolling around to view them.

I know some of us have kids around the same ages(-ish) as mine, 7 and 10. Have any of you gone through discovering Minecraft again, or maybe the interest never waned? It's certainly changed a lot since we got involved in the team effort of digging Patch's massive hole (NJ).

Edits - 'cos I've suddenly lost the ability to spell and include links.  :-$

Notch is a fucking sellout. :@

Sold his soul for the Microsoft shinies.

And as a result we get Microsoft embracing the cow for every last drop, whilst the ridiculous "Minetest" is so shit they can't even be bothered to name it.

Has that affected the core game though? There's more content, but the mechanics seem identical to how it was years ago. Even if it's been taken over by MS, does it make the game any worse, or any less enjoyable? Judgement may be clouded and biases will no doubt occur for any future purchases, but the feeling of walking into a world (on creative mode anyway) which is a blank canvas and you can do whatever you want is as powerful as it was the first time I fired the game up. Only now I've got more of a handle on what everything does. :j

my boy's about to turn 7 and we've had a bit of messing about in creative mode on the Switch. He's not massively into it yet but I think it'll come sooner rather than later.

Annoyingly my old PC licence seems to have disappeared without trace (support do not reply, I've got an email confirming my switch over from the old Java client to Mojang or something but that's about it) so I'll have to buy it again if we do that. I've just got a 3080 (Nvidia FE version) so I'm kinda keen to try out RTX in it.

Notch is a sad story. And a cunt.

Totally forgot about Notch and his "views". Had a little read of the Controversies section of his Wikipedia page for memory job. Yep, cunt.

> Has that affected the core game though?

Yes

> There's more content, but the mechanics seem identical to how it was years ago.

No

> does it make the game any worse, or any less enjoyable?

Both


Notch could have followed up on his promise to open source the game when he got bored of it and still struck a licensing deal with Microsoft for the brand/etc. Microsoft could then go ahead with everything they're doing, but there'd also be a Open Source fork that'd maintain Linux support and make the shit changes optional.