STM V

Some friends have been asking how my work is going. Guys, I just want to share my thoughts and let you know that work on the texture pack is temporarily on hold. The small indie studio Microsoft decided that compiling all the tweaks and popular texture pack ideas into a new update would be a great way to spend a year of development. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing—after all, tweaks exist to fix what the developers didn’t do before. However, it’s still a bit demotivating when all the work I and other creators have done turns out to be unnecessary, and we have to delete everything we’ve already fixed.

The first horses appeared in mods for version 1.4 before being officially added in 1.6. Random entity support has existed since 1.1, just so that in 1.22, pigs and chickens could finally get more textures. Texture packs with modified spawn eggs have been around for over five years, and now many of the changes I’ve made will have to be deleted. And how many years have texture packs existed that change grass color based on biome? All that, just for them to add the exact same feature—but as a new block of desert grass? What’s next? An animated brush? Visual enchantment book icons? A "Restore Opaque Dirt Texture" button in the settings menu?

Every time I watch a new snapshot video, I think: "Damn, they literally added the same thing I made six months ago."
I can’t fight progress, and I fully support it. But the nagging feeling that 99% of their effort goes into April Fools’ updates and Bedrock paywalled features won’t leave me. 1.22 is coming, but what do we get? One new mob, a biome retexture, grass, chickens, pigs, spawn eggs, and just a set of cosmetic updates—things I spent way less time on than a studio with a revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Again, I support progress, but at the same time, I feel like my work is losing its meaning. I’ll wait for 1.22 to release, see what’s changed, and rebuild the texture pack again, removing everything that has already been "fixed" (like white heads on colored sheep).

I really wish the developers would stop adding things that the community could handle on its own and instead focus on truly exciting new features. Sandstorms that leave sand layers (like in snowy biomes), tumbleweeds, better-looking fog, fallen leaves reappearing on the ground after rain—that’s what I think the devs should be working on, while the community takes care of the visuals