I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play.
It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They all have their favorite streamers too.
Few games turn into multi generational cultural movements like this.
It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox.
It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.
I can't even imagine what it's like now, but Roblox is how I first learned programming when I was 11. This was well over a decade ago.
Roblox (talking in past tense; not sure how much of this is still true) allowed you to create "Places", which were basically 3D interactive universes that consisted of a few primitive parts (rect. prisms, cylinders, etc.) arranged and connected to each other, as larger solid objects, or with hinges. It was, in other words, a multi-player physics sanbox. Also, the use of the word "place" instead of "game" is interesting to note; as a child, it felt like they could really be anything, with no particular expectations.
I don't remember when Lua scripting was added - I think it was around 2008-2009 or somethng - but it allowed you to perform simple event-based programming, registering clicks/deaths/collisions/etc and manipulating the game world. As a child I saw this as a form of magic. What would otherwise be a physics sandbox with inanimate objects interacting in a strictly mechanistic fashion became one in which anything could happen. You know, magic. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that was my thinking.
So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard. I am still pursuing this goal. Also, RIP Erik Cassel. His tutorials were one of my first - if not my first - introduction to programming ever. He died too soon.
> So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard.
You may have already found it, but Fred Brooks's little essay on why programming is fun has always resonated with me [0]:
> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. [...]
> Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
all your rblx info is still true, by the way. there's a lot more you can script with too, including internal and external API integration, inter-game info transfer, transactions, all kinds of stuff.
Lost? Nothing has been deprecated, Java edition is still supported and kept in feature parity with Bedrock aka MS Edition. Yes, Bedrock is not mod friendly like Java, but the modding community hasn't stopped.
And yes they moved the license server from a Mojang server to the MS login system, but what is the real difference here? You still have to login, you just don't like MS for unrelated reasons.
This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience.
> Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure.
First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way.
Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.)
> It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.
Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security.
I'm not super knowledgeable about it so I should just let someone else answer; but to clarify what I was saying, I'm not talking about the account migration, I'm talking about the fact that the new version ("education" edition, the one most kids use because of the steep discounts to schools) client can't connect to the old ("java edition") servers. The old server is still easy to run and hack on, but none of your friends will be able to connect to it, and while I don't know too much about the new server, all of the how-tos I looked at start with "go sign up for your free $100 worth of Azure student credits".
Maybe a clearer way to say it is, I'm not saying modding itself is harder, but I think that back when this article was written, if a teenager bragged that they run their own server with mods they usually meant they have a shell open on their home computer with "java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M something.jar" in it and a mod directory with downloaded-and-hand-edited-textfiles, and nowadays they mean they pay for a cloud server and selected mods from a list. But again I'm mostly repeating what I hear from my kids' friends, tell me if I'm off base here.
Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything.
I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!). I still occasionally break out an old version of Java Edition and play some of the old mods that I liked back in the day. Many of those aren't maintained any more because the creators have moved on, but many have stuck around (Biomes O' Plenty and Iron Chests have a 1.21 release, and Applied Energistics has one for 1.20 that was last updated today). Plus we still get amazing new mods like Create.
I don't think it's that the old Minecraft has really gone anywhere, it's that, like the internet as a whole, it got so popular that geeks and nerds stopped being the majority. The existence of Minecraft Bedrock brought Minecraft to a bunch of kids who would have never grokked the wild west of Minecraft Java. But its existence hasn't taken away from everything that Minecraft Java still is.
We've indisputably lost whatever Minecraft would be today if notch hadn't sold it. We can't know what that is, maybe it would've sucked. What we got instead feels like just another corporate studio game, a good one, yes, but we already have a lot of those.
At every branching point in history, we have indisputably lost the result of the branch not taken. But... what's your point caller? That fact by itself is pretty meaningless.
Contrary to the point of view that somehow Microsoft changed everything, what surprising is how much they didn't change or might not be different at all... Jens Bergensten is today's Chief Create Officer at Mojang... but he's not a Microsoft plant, he's been there since 2010 and, moreover... " After the full release of Minecraft (1.0.0), Persson transferred creative authority of the game's development to Jens Bergensten, afterwards continuing to help out with Minecraft while also working on new projects." (https://minecraft.wiki/w/Markus_Persson) That happened in 2011 a few years before the Microsoft acquisition. As far as I can tell, there is a significant representation of pre-Microsoft Mojang staff that still exists within the company; sure there are many more people that have only been there since the Microsoft acquisition, but that seems to be a function of growth and resource availability more than some imposed change of direction.
So actually, I'm not sure what we've lost here. Pocket Edition, later to become Bedrock and upon which Minecraft Education is based, was well underway prior to the Microsoft acquisition. That ship sailed while Notch still owned the company. Outside of the Microsoft account and chat reporting requirements, which clearly were Microsoft driven, it's difficult to really see how different things would be. Arguable Jens might have been reeled in more by Notch, but my bet is that Notch was paying more attention to his 0x10c by 2012 and Jens would have had pretty substantial creative discretion by that time.
> Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything.
If enough people are pushed onto a new system, then yes we do lose the ease of the old system.
That may be true in the abstract but has not been really demonstrated in this thread.
I spent the rest of my comment detailing the ways in which everything I ever liked about Minecraft is still available—do you have anything to add in support of the idea that something has been lost, or just this abstract observation?
You're still talking abstractly, though. What was actually lost, in concrete terms?
As I noted in my comment, I'm still subscribed to YouTube channels of people who are still playing on the same server with the same group (with some changes over the years, of course). I don't play Minecraft as often as I did in 2012, but that's because I have a career and a family, not because I can't. I'm now introducing my son to Minecraft Java and he's loved it every time we've played it.
I'm just not seeing the loss, and those who are bemoaning it here haven't actually pinned down what's now missing from Minecraft as a result of Bedrock (or even Microsoft in general).
It's easy enough for an adult to follow setup instructions, but the ability ability for a kid to come home and set up their own minecraft server and bring in friends is cut down a lot when you go from "just about everyone has minecraft (java)" to "just about everyone has minecraft (bedrock)". Java is still there but it's not the thing everyone already has ready to go. That's especially true for vanilla but it also increases the amount of hurdles you have to go through to set up and use a modded java install.
And before they merged ownership, the gap between casual play and a custom java server went from "some setup time" in the earlier days to to "more setup time, also more than a hundred dollars purchasing copies of java version even though everyone in the group already owns minecraft". Surely you can see the lost opportunities there.
As someone that’s hosted many servers over the years and made a few mods, it’s easier than ever. Getting started with modding is so much easier with the excellent IDE support and mature modding APIs compared to class monkey patching and struggling to load up a decompiled version of the game in Eclipse was.
> I remember people proclaiming the death of Minecraft.
To be fair, it's on a long slow Yahoo!-style death path - Microsoft have not been good stewards of the game. They've owned it for 10 years and we're still having to rely on 3rd party mods monkey-patching the game for basic optimisations and QOL improvements. The bug tracker is awash with things that should be fixed but are ignored in favour of "mob vote of the year" and forcing in things they can tie to merch / media and IAPs.
Microsoft bought Minecraft to milk it dry for money - and they are doing that amazingly effectively - but they did not buy it to make the game better or their users happier.
Minetest, which has been around nearly as long and is a FOSS game with more or less feature parity, covers all these bases. Super easy to script in Lua. Simple to set up servers.
I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.
Same here! Got a server on an old Rpi 2 and as client an old Samsung tablet. All works great and we have a lot of fun! The only thing is to setup the game as you like, with mods etc. it takes some trial and error, but it's also fun.
I dislike the auth changes as well, but it hasn’t had any impact on server hosting in my experience. It’s still just as easy as getting the right JVM and running the jar. The only thing new is the EULA you have to accept on first launch
The auth changes locked me out of my minecraft alpha account. Apparently I had a period of time to link my minecraft account with my microsoft account and that is gone now. I just use a pirated launcher now since they made it so I can't play the game I bought anymore otherwise. I miss playing on servers though.
You can even still disable user authentication. That’s a pretty sweet deal for a game owned by Microsoft. There’s legit support in the game for pirated copies.
For a while I hosted a server for some friends that used TLauncher, turning off the "online mode" was indeed super simple! Then they also got the proper copies from Microsoft and I could just change the configuration setting, and we could all play with the proper accounts, although if I recall correctly they lost their old items and such, because those were considered different player IDs and whatnot.
Not condoning it per se, but the game could be way more draconian in its implementation of auth.
There are still entire ecosystems of minecraft mods. Launchers are popular that hook into these systems and essentially give you specific minecraft package environments for each just like software environments to manage multiple conflicting sets of dependencies on a single machine.
I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more.
Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.
Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode.
Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation:
I didn't see an Elytra until I'd been playing with various mods that give you creative flight or at least jet packs, so I was used to at least being able to fly†, and in many cases being able to move arbitrarily in 3D space at a whim.
In fact I think the first Elytra I saw for myself was in a world where I had killed the Dragon with an old-school massively overpowered Tinker's crossbow, while wearing full hover capable power armour. Later I'm like "Ooh, End City, these are new", I find the boat, I see the Elytra and it's just flight again, nothing cool? I think I was more impressed to find a decent EnderIO capacitor or some other new gizmo from a mod in a chest nearby.
† I think this is before Slime Boots and the Slingshot were a thing, these days you might give players zero damage on falling + fling yourself long distances and put off actual flight for the first hours of play.
But that was available since InDev :'(. Cheers though, I appreciate the points you make and I agree with them. The mod adds too much realism for my taste, but most of the removals are very nice.
I can recommend checking out Vintage Story if you want the refined Minecraft survival experience. Just finished playing it with my wife a few weeks ago — great fun.
Was just about to promote VS here, seems like the parent poster would really enjoy it. More people need to know about it! I just wish development were a little less glacial.
> Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.
Yeah, it really kinda surprised me that Minecraft went in that direction. What got me hooked was 100% the need for shelter and some landscaping to make sure you wouldn't have eg. a bunch of skeletons standing under each tree on your front lawn every morning, a creeper waiting around the corner of your house, etc. Being able to skip night completely means there's basically never monsters on the surface unless you want there to be, and without that sort of ever-present threat, there's just that much less pressure that the game can put on you towards cautious gameplay and 'functional' protective structures and so on. Of course people keep themselves entertained with amazingly extravagant builds and ridiculously complicated redstone machinery anyway, so I'm not saying it's a bad direction for the game, it obviously worked out well for them etc. I just really wish there was more gameplay directly motivated by basic survival, instead of progressing past survival in the first five minutes.
Conversely I think flying is entirely fine. Unless you're, like, speedrunning, flight is only available once you've progressed through basically the entire game, and I think at that point it's reasonable that there's a more convenient way to explore distant areas.
Now, shields, those are just too powerful for how early they're available!
Yeah I know people who started playing with me and other buddies when they were still in college and now they play on the same server and map with their kids. What other game would that even make sense in? That's weird and awesome. It already makes me feel old seeing stuff I built a decade ago; I guess it must hit even harder if you have these moments with kids.
You could be tempted to start in Creative mode. Don’t do it if you can.
I say this as someone who loves playing in Creative mode : it’s not the same game at all. Survival mode is pretty easy and it’s not the same mood. There’s a strange feeling in this game when you just start to build a wooden shelter with not even a door to survive the first night and somehow, after some hours, your shelter is now a cosy house with some underground cave that gives you an access to your own mine.
That’s really a cosy feeling that you can’t feel in creative mode.
Survival is pretty easy : there are monsters at night but surviving is nothing more than hiding in a dirt house.
And then after hundreds of hours, your start to be bored and it’s time to go Creative and to build gigantic castles.
Also you said "we" : if you can play the game in multiplayer, it just doubles the fun.
There is only hardcore. No other mode exists. Large biomes... sometimes it drops you in a desert where there is no wood, and the only obtainable block is sand. You can't build a roof with sand. There is no way to obtain coal or charcoal, so you can't make torches to light the night sky and keep monsters at bay. No trees for kilometers. You see the beach, do you dare try swimming for it? The drowned zombies come out of nowhere, you swim too slow to dodge tridents. Maybe wood out there in some sunken ship, but wooden blocks are difficult to discern from slabs or stairs down deep. Iron, if you can figure out the correct way to get to the chest. If that chest is even there in a broken ship.
"Survival" isn't about surviving, because if you die you just respawn and go grab your stuff. There is only hardcore. "Creative" isn't about creating, because you're just wishing stuff into existence effortlessly. There is only hardcore.
A child taught me the game, my child picked it up when she was old enough and at this point I’ve played a lot of Minecraft.
I’m a big fan of starting in creative mode with the difficulty set at peaceful. Mobs won’t attack you and you don’t have to deal with hunger. It’s a good way to figure out crafting, mining and finding resources without having to deal with the combat and hunger systems. While you’re in peaceful mode, learn how to grow crops (I like wheat and melons) and raise livestock (I like sheep and cows).
My kid and I play a lot of survival together. I’m great at mining and find it very relaxing so I’ll fill chests with materials and flatten out spaces so she has near endless materials and a lot of space to build whatever she is interested in.
As you keep going, you’ll figure out your style. There are no rules and you can play however you like.
There are several streamers I would avoid but I’ll let you figure that out according to your family’s standards. We restrict multiplayer to friends my kid knows in person and whose parents I know. We’ll change that as the years go by but for now it works.
But have fun, enjoy and prepare yourself for some really interesting experiences.
If you like lego then you would probably want to start off in a basic survival world on peaceful or easy mode. That will give you a feel for the core mood of the game, build a house, tame a wolf, etc.
If you really want to build elaborate structures then try creative mode.
Some multiplayer servers have good support for creative, but I'd recommend avoiding the pvp minigames which are the standard fare on servers.
> Start at the beginning, survival. Try not looking anything up till you get stuck or bored.
When I invited adult gamers onto our server, I found they spent a long time trying to figure out basic stuff - like picking up a block. It was really frustrating for them.
That was years ago and IDK if basic gameplay changed. If not, they may want to have an 8yo on hand.
Start with vanilla if you want the OG experience, creative if you want to be artistic
Wattles is a good YT creator that does play alongs in vanilla. His Skyblock series introduced me to farming (not just planting crops) and got me back into the game.
I wouldn't recommend it unless you think you could enjoy a game without a goal or a score. I had the same questions as you but after 100s of hours I've concluded it's kind of a boring game. It's basically about figuring out thousands of undocumented details. About half of your playing time will be spent outside the game trawling through fan wikis.
"First, in some cases, a reboot of the instance may allow for the CrowdStrike Falcon agent to be updated to a previously healthy version, resolving the issue.
Second, the following steps can be followed to delete the CrowdStrike Falcon agent file on the affected instance:
1. Create a snapshot of the EBS root volume of the affected instance
2. Create a new EBS volume from the snapshot in the same Availability Zone
3. Launch a new instance in that Availability Zone using a different version of Windows
4. Attach the EBS volume from step (2) to the new instance as a data volume
5. Navigate to the \windows\system32\drivers\CrowdStrike\ folder on the attached volume and delete "C-00000291*.sys"
6. Detach the EBS volume from the new instance
7. Create a snapshot of the detached EBS volume
8. Create an AMI from the snapshot by selecting the same volume type as the affected instance
9. Call replace root volume on the original EC2 Instance specifying the AMI just created"
Yes it can, that's what I ended up writing at 4am this morning, lol. We manage way more instances then is feasible to do anything by hand. This is probably too late to help anyone, but you can also just stop instance, detach root, attach it to another instance, delete file(s), offline drive, detach, reattach to original instance, and then start instance. You need a "fixer" machine in the same AZ.
FWIW, I find the high-level overview more useful, because then I can write a script tailored to my situation. Between `bash`, `aws` CLI tool, and Powershell, it would be straightforward to programmatically apply this remedy.
I use AWS Copilot and find it to be really easy to use and helpful. It is still a pretty young project and as such doesn't really handle all the edge cases, but for the things it supports, it makes using ECS even easier than it already is.
If you use CF at all (even behind serverless transform, CDK, or some other translation layer), this would be useful, since it's a chart of what actually gets executed.
