Minecraft Mechanics

meetings

2019-7-9

Mechanics

• Mining
  • Crops
  • Bedrock
• Building
  • Crops
  • Sky limit
  • Signs
• Advancements (achievements)
• Visibility
  • Lighting
  • Draw limit
  • Day/night cycle
• Navigation
  • Walking/running
  • Jumping
  • Climbing
  • Swimming
  • Portals
  • Doors
  • Vehicles
    • Boats
    • Minecarts
• Block Interactions
  • Machinery
  • Portal creation
  • Lava
  • Fire
  • Beacons & Conduits
• Agriculture
  • Pets + Livestock
    • Riding
    • Taming
    • Breeding
      • Genetics
  • Fishing
  • Farming
    • Planting/harvesting crops
    • Tilling/irrigating soil
• Items + Collection
  • Picking up items
  • Inventory
    • Management and stacking
  • Equipment
  • Consumption
    • Food
    • Potions/etc.
  • Special Item Mechanics
    • Flint + steel
    • Fishing rod
    • Potions
  • Storage (chests)
    • Ender chests
  • Maps
    • Exploration
  • Books
  • Enchanting
• Crafting
  • Cooking/smelting
  • Crafting blocks
  • Crafting items
  • Dyeing
• Difficulty settings and modes
  • Creative
  • Survival
  • Adventure
• Water
  • Transporting things
  • Swimming/sailing
  • Drowning
  • Source vs. flow blocks; propagation
• Experience
  • Drops from mobs
  • Drops from smelting
  • Used for enchantment
• Weather
• Geography
  • Terrain generation
  • Structure generation
• Mobs
  • Spawning
    • Based on light levels/terrain
    • Spawners
    • Spawn eggs
  • Drop loot + XP
  • Take damage
  • AI/behavior
    • Neutral Mob AI (flee when attacked)
      • Special Mob AI (dolphins/pandas)
    • Villager AI (flee/gossip)
    • Hostile mob AI (attack on sight/explode)
    • Reactive mob AI (zombie pigmen and wolves)
    • Friendly mob AI (Iron/snow golems)
  • Interactions with environment (eating grass, damaged by cacti, etc.)
  • Interactions with other mobs
  • Villagers
    • Trading
    • Gossip
    • Farming
    • Jobs
    • Raids
• Health
  • Suffocation
  • Drowning
• Satiation
  • Raw vs. cooked foods
  • Food poisoning
  • Healing/damage from being full/starving
• Death
  • Drop items
  • Lose + drop XP
  • Respawn (at bed or global spawn point)
• Beds
  • Sleeping
  • Exploding
• Generation
  • Biomes
  • Terrain
  • Structures

Dynamics/Operational Logics

• Renewable/non-renewable resources
• Item value & rarity
• Collection/accumulation
• Reshaping the world
• Marking the world
• Water
• 3D terrain
• Climates/ecosystems
• Day/night cycle
• Architecture + aesthetics
• Crafting requires no skill, usually no time, and almost no equipment.
• Innate abilities cannot be improved.
• [META] Death does not reset anything.
• Exploration

Interest Areas

• Hannah: Mobs
• Ohana: Collection/accumulation and reshaping
• Christine: Advancements
• Peter: Mapping/exploration

TODO

• Write 1--3 paragraph summaries of your interest area's relationship to colonialism by Thursday at 1:00 p.m.

Followup

2019-7-11

Hannah:

• Mobs, aggro, and AI
  • Us/them mindset
  • Power imbalance
  • Imaginative geography
    • No way to claim land
    • Emotional attachment to things you build
    • Creepers

Ohana:

• Why collect if the upgrade loop is short?
• Place things in the world in a way you recognize even if the game doesn't.
• Access to infinite resources not because they're renewable but because the world is infinite.
• No concept of world belonging to anyone but players.
  • This is complicated because we don't want to assume land is always owned.
• Emotionally there's a sense of claiming stuff in Minecraft
• Things like chests lead to claiming territory
  • Playing "as intended" leads to claiming territory
  • There's no push-back
  • You collect resources from other places too
• Amount of hours spent is far in excess of complexity of tech tree/campaign
• You're really the only one that moves blocks around significantly.

Christine:

• Categorized achievements
• Killing things
• Exploration
• Crafting
• Animal interactions (?)
  • Ones that involve killing and ones that don't?
• Acquisition of goods/collection
• Miscellaneous
• Actions (eat/wear/spawn/dye/play music/wear)
• Xbox has numerical values (% numeric / % value):
  • Killing -> 14% / 15%
  • Exploration -> 9% / 10%
  • Crafting -> 17% / 13%
  • Animal interactions -> 15% / 13%
  • Acquisition -> 7% / 8%
  • Actions -> 24% / 22%