64
So... there are some significant changes coming in the 1.8 update. They're changes that I don't really like, but they're not the end of the world, though I can't understand why a lot of people seem to be welcoming them regardless.
The changes I refer to are, of course, the nerfing of Iron and Gold farms. We thought it was just going to be harder to breed villagers and that would be it, but what's also going to happen is that handfuls of iron ingots and gold nuggets will be considered rare drops by the game code. That means if you want the drops, you need to kill the mob that holds them yourself. This doesn't technically break any iron and gold farms; it just means you need to install workarounds into them that you should be able to easily fashion if you were smart enough to build said farms in the first place. Iron farms though... I'm pretty sure I really don't like their change because Iron Golems waiting around to be killed will lag out a world very easily, seeing as they never despawn on their own. That's the kind of farm I wanna talk about the most.
Why is Mojang doing this? Well, you know how in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik is always looking for ways to imprison the natives of a world just to power his machinery? Guess what: us players are essentially doing the same thing when we build our iron farms. We're absolute bastards, we are.
That said though, I have a difficult time understanding people who say that the nerfs are a good idea on any other grounds. I've seen a number of arguments for them, and the ones I've cataloged so far are...
- Iron farms are just wrong. To which I have to respond, "Are you insinuating that there's actually a wrong way to play Minecraft, the game that's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?" Seriously, remember those commercials about how "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's"? Well, there's no wrong way to play Minecraft either. People are inventing new ways to play it all the time, via adventure maps, Project Aries, Vampire Z, The Survival Games, and even fleeing through a parkour course from Douglas the Dragon. To be fair though, what people really tend be talking about here is what makes for a sufficiently balanced and challenging vanilla survival game, which is something we should all be able to appreciate and have a civilized discourse about without getting snippy at each other.
- Iron farms break the game because they allow you to kick back, let the chests fill up, and never have to mine for iron again. This is actually incorrect. Normal iron farms actually don't produce that much iron on their own. They supplement your mining expeditions instead of replacing them entirely, taking the edge off the dullness and slog that goes with grinding in any video game. Only insane farms like the Iron Trench or Iron Foundry are the sort where you actually can sit back, let the chests fill up, and never mine for iron again, and you'd have to be insane to build one of those because the former requires ridiculously complex redstone and the later requires meticulous placement of blocks and doors. If you're even one block off, you have to start all over from the beginning.
If you've gone through the ridiculous amount of trouble it takes to build one of those though, I daresay you deserve the infinite iron you get from it.
- Iron is such a useful resource that having too much of it is OP. I'm afraid I have a hard time agreeing with that because iron is actually kind of a weak material. Iron tools don't even have twice the durability of stone tools, so if you're doing a lot of mining, you're going to burn through that iron pretty fast, meaning you'll always have to get more and more from somewhere, and all it takes is a bad streak of luck (which has happened to me before) to get you stuck with crummy stone tools again. Iron armor is useful, sure, but hardly OP, so having an infinite source of it doesn't axe the game's difficulty either. A lot of us redstoners like to use lots of hoppers too, which means we need lots of iron, so we like to set up iron farms right away so we have less boring busywork to slog through and can get to building our contraptions, cities, and monuments sooner. If I wanted to grind in a game, I'd go play Harvest Moon or World of Warcraft instead.
Now diamond... DIAMOND is what's OP, and deliberately so because it's so rare. Not iron though, no matter how much of it you have.
- Iron is way too common to be farmed. If that's the case, then what's the harm in farming something that you admit to being very mundane? It's not like diamonds are being duplicated or something.
- An iron farm just encourages you to vegetate in the overworld and never go exploring. It's not like there isn't other stuff worth going mining for, you know. There's the ever elusive emerald, diamond, and lapis, plus gold and redstone is still worth collecting because Witch and Zombie Pigman farms can be especially difficult to get running efficiently even after they're built. Actually, if iron is more of a neat bonus than a necessity, then that leaves my inventory space much more open for amassing all those rarer ores, meaning I won't have to make so many long treks back to my house to unload my inventory, so I'll be able to stay underground longer and explore even more! Everyone wins that way!
- Iron farms are only able to exist due to game exploits, so they should have been nerfed long ago. Uh... I'm not sure you know what an "exploit" is there. An exploit is something that takes advantage of bugs and glitches that were never meant to be in the game for one reason or another. An exploit is an Engineer in Team Fortress 2 using no-clipping tricks and map oversights to place turrets inside scenery and outside the arena boundaries where no one can destroy them. An exploit is taking advantage of Minecraft's limited rendering engine by sticking your head in a block of glowstone so you can get an x-ray view of all the caverns below you. The village and nether portal mechanics in the game, however, were deliberately programmed in and their respective farms don't take advantage of anything that was put in the game due to mistakes or constraints. It's more like science than exploitation, especially considering that Minecraft's unique and robust building mechanics encourage you to use every rule in the game to your advantage. Mojang doesn't seem to mind other kinds of mob farms, after all, and in fact gave us Hoppers in The Redstone Update just because item transport pipes were so popular in Tekkit and Feed The Beast. They've pretty much invited us to make our farms more efficient with previous updates.
In conclusion, if you keep trying to press this point, aren't you essentially saying that you're... *gasp* ...anti-science? Why, next thing you know, you'll be claiming that the Sun revolves around the Earth!
If you want infinite iron, play in Creative Mode! OK, this demand that players segregate themselves is really condescending, especially after everything else I've just explained and established. More to the point, a lot of farms and machines become useless and pointless in Creative Mode, and a lot of builders and redstoners enjoy the challenge of trying to erect their structures in a survival world after they've designed them in a Creative test world. They just don't want to get stuck doing a lot of chores in-game as if they're working a second job they're not even getting paid for, which is why they build things like iron and gold farms in the first place.
Most players actually don't want so much challenge that they have to spend a good portion of the game doing lots of manual labor while running and hiding from mobs as they're stuck with wimpy weapons and tools. In fact, a lot of Minecraft playthroughs are kind of magical and inspirational because of how they mimic the growth of human civilization. Throughout history, mankind has never been able to start building civilizations until it has found easy and consistent ways to generate resources, like food and building material, so people are naturally going to farm everything they can and, again, I don't see why that should be considered a bad thing where iron is concerned after all of the other points I've made. Some people in Minecraft simply want to move from the survival phase to the civilization phase sooner rather than later so they don't have to spend the whole game running from Creepers, so why not let them play that way? Are they really making things worse for everyone else or something?
I gotta be honest; I really hope Mojang reverses the changes to iron and gold farms during the course of the 1.8 snapshots. The modification to villagers I can stand, but these extra nerfs are going too far for my tastes.
If they still get implemented in the end though? Well, I sure as hell am not going to quit the game over them, and neither should you. Like I keep saying, one of the reasons Minecraft is such a brilliant game is because there's no wrong way to play it, and in fact people are inventing new and diverse ways to play it all the time. If, like me, you don't like how 1.8 is going to nerf several staples of the game, you have a couple options:
1.) Don't update to 1.8. This is probably what I'm going to do at first. So far 1.8 doesn't look like it'll have much interesting stuff in it anyway. Apart from Slime Blocks, there's three new types of stone and a lot of rebalancing, some good, some bad. That's it.
2.) Wait for a fix to come out. Even when an update looks like it's going to split the fandom down the middle, Minecraft remains a game that heavily encourages modding, so it's a sure bet that someone will immediately make a mod to undo 1.8's controversial changes. If that mod becomes really popular, Mojang will probably go, "Well, guess we screwed up this time, just like we did when we took away ladders' hitboxes" and change things back to how they were. Democracy will prevail one way or the other.
Personally though, if a change like this absolutely has to happen at all, I'd prefer if Iron Golems dropped iron nuggets instead while Zombie Pigmen were left alone entirely. It's hard enough to get a decent gold harvest as-is even with a top-of-the-line Gold Farm, so Iron Farms could be brought down to a similar level. Or add a vanilla version of Tekkit's grindstone and pulverizer to the game, so if we're forced to rely mainly on mining for our iron supply, we'll at least be able to double our loot when we return to the surface. Or if the problem is people cruelly locking up villagers, then introduce a new hostile mob that's some kind of ancient automation that drops iron nuggets and ingots and perhaps various kinds of circuitry components.
What are your thoughts? What are some alternate ways that the iron and gold farm problems could be handled, assuming they even are problems in the first place?
The changes I refer to are, of course, the nerfing of Iron and Gold farms. We thought it was just going to be harder to breed villagers and that would be it, but what's also going to happen is that handfuls of iron ingots and gold nuggets will be considered rare drops by the game code. That means if you want the drops, you need to kill the mob that holds them yourself. This doesn't technically break any iron and gold farms; it just means you need to install workarounds into them that you should be able to easily fashion if you were smart enough to build said farms in the first place. Iron farms though... I'm pretty sure I really don't like their change because Iron Golems waiting around to be killed will lag out a world very easily, seeing as they never despawn on their own. That's the kind of farm I wanna talk about the most.
Why is Mojang doing this? Well, you know how in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik is always looking for ways to imprison the natives of a world just to power his machinery? Guess what: us players are essentially doing the same thing when we build our iron farms. We're absolute bastards, we are.
That said though, I have a difficult time understanding people who say that the nerfs are a good idea on any other grounds. I've seen a number of arguments for them, and the ones I've cataloged so far are...
- Iron farms are just wrong. To which I have to respond, "Are you insinuating that there's actually a wrong way to play Minecraft, the game that's like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup?" Seriously, remember those commercials about how "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's"? Well, there's no wrong way to play Minecraft either. People are inventing new ways to play it all the time, via adventure maps, Project Aries, Vampire Z, The Survival Games, and even fleeing through a parkour course from Douglas the Dragon. To be fair though, what people really tend be talking about here is what makes for a sufficiently balanced and challenging vanilla survival game, which is something we should all be able to appreciate and have a civilized discourse about without getting snippy at each other.
- Iron farms break the game because they allow you to kick back, let the chests fill up, and never have to mine for iron again. This is actually incorrect. Normal iron farms actually don't produce that much iron on their own. They supplement your mining expeditions instead of replacing them entirely, taking the edge off the dullness and slog that goes with grinding in any video game. Only insane farms like the Iron Trench or Iron Foundry are the sort where you actually can sit back, let the chests fill up, and never mine for iron again, and you'd have to be insane to build one of those because the former requires ridiculously complex redstone and the later requires meticulous placement of blocks and doors. If you're even one block off, you have to start all over from the beginning.
If you've gone through the ridiculous amount of trouble it takes to build one of those though, I daresay you deserve the infinite iron you get from it.
- Iron is such a useful resource that having too much of it is OP. I'm afraid I have a hard time agreeing with that because iron is actually kind of a weak material. Iron tools don't even have twice the durability of stone tools, so if you're doing a lot of mining, you're going to burn through that iron pretty fast, meaning you'll always have to get more and more from somewhere, and all it takes is a bad streak of luck (which has happened to me before) to get you stuck with crummy stone tools again. Iron armor is useful, sure, but hardly OP, so having an infinite source of it doesn't axe the game's difficulty either. A lot of us redstoners like to use lots of hoppers too, which means we need lots of iron, so we like to set up iron farms right away so we have less boring busywork to slog through and can get to building our contraptions, cities, and monuments sooner. If I wanted to grind in a game, I'd go play Harvest Moon or World of Warcraft instead.
Now diamond... DIAMOND is what's OP, and deliberately so because it's so rare. Not iron though, no matter how much of it you have.
- Iron is way too common to be farmed. If that's the case, then what's the harm in farming something that you admit to being very mundane? It's not like diamonds are being duplicated or something.
- An iron farm just encourages you to vegetate in the overworld and never go exploring. It's not like there isn't other stuff worth going mining for, you know. There's the ever elusive emerald, diamond, and lapis, plus gold and redstone is still worth collecting because Witch and Zombie Pigman farms can be especially difficult to get running efficiently even after they're built. Actually, if iron is more of a neat bonus than a necessity, then that leaves my inventory space much more open for amassing all those rarer ores, meaning I won't have to make so many long treks back to my house to unload my inventory, so I'll be able to stay underground longer and explore even more! Everyone wins that way!
- Iron farms are only able to exist due to game exploits, so they should have been nerfed long ago. Uh... I'm not sure you know what an "exploit" is there. An exploit is something that takes advantage of bugs and glitches that were never meant to be in the game for one reason or another. An exploit is an Engineer in Team Fortress 2 using no-clipping tricks and map oversights to place turrets inside scenery and outside the arena boundaries where no one can destroy them. An exploit is taking advantage of Minecraft's limited rendering engine by sticking your head in a block of glowstone so you can get an x-ray view of all the caverns below you. The village and nether portal mechanics in the game, however, were deliberately programmed in and their respective farms don't take advantage of anything that was put in the game due to mistakes or constraints. It's more like science than exploitation, especially considering that Minecraft's unique and robust building mechanics encourage you to use every rule in the game to your advantage. Mojang doesn't seem to mind other kinds of mob farms, after all, and in fact gave us Hoppers in The Redstone Update just because item transport pipes were so popular in Tekkit and Feed The Beast. They've pretty much invited us to make our farms more efficient with previous updates.
In conclusion, if you keep trying to press this point, aren't you essentially saying that you're... *gasp* ...anti-science? Why, next thing you know, you'll be claiming that the Sun revolves around the Earth!
If you want infinite iron, play in Creative Mode! OK, this demand that players segregate themselves is really condescending, especially after everything else I've just explained and established. More to the point, a lot of farms and machines become useless and pointless in Creative Mode, and a lot of builders and redstoners enjoy the challenge of trying to erect their structures in a survival world after they've designed them in a Creative test world. They just don't want to get stuck doing a lot of chores in-game as if they're working a second job they're not even getting paid for, which is why they build things like iron and gold farms in the first place.
Most players actually don't want so much challenge that they have to spend a good portion of the game doing lots of manual labor while running and hiding from mobs as they're stuck with wimpy weapons and tools. In fact, a lot of Minecraft playthroughs are kind of magical and inspirational because of how they mimic the growth of human civilization. Throughout history, mankind has never been able to start building civilizations until it has found easy and consistent ways to generate resources, like food and building material, so people are naturally going to farm everything they can and, again, I don't see why that should be considered a bad thing where iron is concerned after all of the other points I've made. Some people in Minecraft simply want to move from the survival phase to the civilization phase sooner rather than later so they don't have to spend the whole game running from Creepers, so why not let them play that way? Are they really making things worse for everyone else or something?
I gotta be honest; I really hope Mojang reverses the changes to iron and gold farms during the course of the 1.8 snapshots. The modification to villagers I can stand, but these extra nerfs are going too far for my tastes.
If they still get implemented in the end though? Well, I sure as hell am not going to quit the game over them, and neither should you. Like I keep saying, one of the reasons Minecraft is such a brilliant game is because there's no wrong way to play it, and in fact people are inventing new and diverse ways to play it all the time. If, like me, you don't like how 1.8 is going to nerf several staples of the game, you have a couple options:
1.) Don't update to 1.8. This is probably what I'm going to do at first. So far 1.8 doesn't look like it'll have much interesting stuff in it anyway. Apart from Slime Blocks, there's three new types of stone and a lot of rebalancing, some good, some bad. That's it.
2.) Wait for a fix to come out. Even when an update looks like it's going to split the fandom down the middle, Minecraft remains a game that heavily encourages modding, so it's a sure bet that someone will immediately make a mod to undo 1.8's controversial changes. If that mod becomes really popular, Mojang will probably go, "Well, guess we screwed up this time, just like we did when we took away ladders' hitboxes" and change things back to how they were. Democracy will prevail one way or the other.
Personally though, if a change like this absolutely has to happen at all, I'd prefer if Iron Golems dropped iron nuggets instead while Zombie Pigmen were left alone entirely. It's hard enough to get a decent gold harvest as-is even with a top-of-the-line Gold Farm, so Iron Farms could be brought down to a similar level. Or add a vanilla version of Tekkit's grindstone and pulverizer to the game, so if we're forced to rely mainly on mining for our iron supply, we'll at least be able to double our loot when we return to the surface. Or if the problem is people cruelly locking up villagers, then introduce a new hostile mob that's some kind of ancient automation that drops iron nuggets and ingots and perhaps various kinds of circuitry components.
What are your thoughts? What are some alternate ways that the iron and gold farm problems could be handled, assuming they even are problems in the first place?
| Tags |
tools/tracking
2695911
6
in-defense-of-iron-and-gold-farms-in-18
sniffercraft34
ScotsMiser
PythPale
ConcreteMan
ItzOrangey
Anime Gril![Confirmed kiruna campus locatoins [BENT] Minecraft Blog](https://static.planetminecraft.com/images/layout/missing_image.png)
GoldenScientist
PegasusAlliance
Ender Sparkle
Escapazition
ShellyD
Create an account or sign in to comment.
People seem to be too obsessive with the idea of nerfing everything that it is borderline retarded, we need to focus less on nerfing items and more on making the game fun for most people. Not all of us are into playing hardcore mode or one chunk challenge maps, some of us want the full sized worlds and without the penalty of losing all our work for the occasional accident.
in fact if iron golems were removed or if their ability to drop iron was removed from the game, it'll ruin a lot of peoples factory builds and some may even stop playing Minecraft because of it.
and why should we give up our builds we put some work into putting together in the game? just because some rejects thought "hey, let's have authoritarian Mojang remove this feature in an update"?
if a minority think iron golem factories are overpowered, don't use them, they're entitled to that much, but they shouldn't go around forcing their ideas on other people just because they dislike or disagree with a certain feature other people like and wish to use. They don't get respect that way and they end up making the user base look bad.
and a sandbox game should allow for options with certain things, and it isn't cheating to set up a factory to gather resources, it's part of the game, was intended that way and will probably remain this way. Even RPG games have the option to farm resources, and people are moaning about iron being infinitely farmable because they believe it's overpowered? it's not even the most powerful armour material in the game, diamonds are, get over it.
as I said on another thread, it's a slippery slope to go down, if people start making justifications to remove one type of renewable they'll start doing it for other items in the game too. While some kinds of nerfs do make sense, this one doesn't, because there's no way to recycle iron in Minecraft after your tool or armour breaks
and repairing something by anvil actually costs more iron in the long run because of the fact you need 31 ingots to craft 1 anvil in the first place, plus the ingots required for repair, and it's limited by XP, and because anvils eventually break. These things are nowhere near efficient enough to make removing iron golem farms worth a consideration.