Dayshot: Boats in Minecraft, due to their durability (or lack thereof), have been nigh impossible (or at least highly aggravating) to use on anything but the open sea for years now. One player took to Reddit to vent a bit on the matter. And thank goodness he did.
Redditor AllPurposeNerd wrote down his thoughts in a highly entertaining and to the point r/minecraft post, titled “Why are boats still so godawful?”. Here’s what he said:
You can’t just get in a boat and go somewhere. You have to bring two or three spare boats just in case a squid pops up in front of you and explodes your boat. ‘Cause that happens in real life.
You can’t just stop your boat and get out because it flies off at top speed in a random direction. ‘Cause that happens in real life too; people all the time step off boats with enough force to rocket them out to sea. I’m building an offshore tower right now, and the amount of time I lose trying to get my boat to stay where I put it, I might as well just swim. It’s absurd.
Navigating a river? Forget it. The amount of care and practice it takes to not clip any of the corners, it’s faster and easier to just walk along it. I’ve been whitewater rafting. That’s a boat made out of latex, air, and fear, and it slams into huge rocks and doesn’t even care. Here, you consume five cubic meters of solid wood building a boat that can be irreparably destroyed by a glancing blow from wayward chicken.
And there’s no alternatives. There’s no ‘reinforced boat’ that you can make, no such thing as a ‘damaged boat’ that can still be repaired, just fragile wooden rectangles and explosive rage.
All this great stuff coming out in 1.9, are they even looking at boats? Seriously, just scrap the existing boat code and write something that’s not so atrocious. Boats don’t need to explode on contact with anything. That’s not realism, that’s trolling.
tl:dr; Boats are buggy and stupid, they need to be redone from scratch, and everybody knows it but nobody cares.
Incidentally, as several commenters pointed out, boats in Minecraft: Pocket Edition are much better off. They don’t explode when you steer them into a block, have room for an additional passenger, and actual paddles you can paddle with. They can even be ridden by mobs. Plus, they come in different colours depending on the wood you used to make them:
So yeah, some of that would be nice to have in the other versions.
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Comments
10 responses to “A Spectacular Minecraft Rant About Boats”
Mojang are the worst developers on the planet, In several years they have added barely anything to the game and it still runs on Java, they released a crappy port for windows 10 that doesn’t even have the same content as the full game.
Random modders on the internet can add more content to minecraft in a month than Mojang can manage in 2 years.
Its been a year since 1.8 and still no release date for 1.9 and I will wager they will only add like 3 new blocks and a gerbil.
Of course it still runs in Java, it’s a good choice for multiplatform development. There’s a lot of myths and misconceptions about Java that are largely unfounded, like claims about performance and security. It’s also worth noting that the major modding systems for Minecraft only exist because of Java’s reflection API. If the game were written in something else, modding would be considerably more difficult.
Modding for Minecraft is great and it’s awesome what modders can do with it, but you have to keep in mind the game is in a released state. It was pretty much where Mojang wanted it to be when 1.0 hit. Anything they’ve added since then have been bonuses, there should be no expectation that they would continue adding features at the same rate they did while the game was still in beta. You wouldn’t criticise most other games for only occasionally adding new features after release, why would you treat this one any differently?
It doesn’t feel like they use java for easy multiplatform development when all the different versions of minecraft have different features.
Its not new features that I want so much as a complete rewrite of the game in a new language with a very easy to use modding system. Minecraft is by far the most resource intensive game I have ever played when its modded and when you look at how garbage it looks I really don’t think that should be the case.
I can have 200+ mods in skyrim and the game doesnt skip a beat but if I add 50 mods to minecraft it will use up all my ram and run at 30fps.
The key thing you mentioned there is when it’s modded. When it isn’t, its memory usage is fairly modest. That tends to point the finger at the mods being badly written, not necessarily the base game. For example, the biggest thing that takes up memory when you’re running mods is the textures. Some mods go crazy overboard with generating raw textures and that easily takes up 60%+ of Minecraft’s memory usage.
LWJGL is a limitation unfortunately, and some inefficient coding by Mojang since they didn’t expect the engine to need to support modding through most of its development. It’s not a Java problem though.
Minecraft is still a thing? I’m not sure I’ve installed/opened it since 2010 😮
Starcraft 2 is still a thing?
The boats do suck, they’re kind of pointless. I think I only ever used them a couple of times then gave up. I should really fire up my world again and see what the latest updates have brought with them. Borderlands 2, MGSV, Rocket League etc are keeping me away.
I’m not sure, I got sick of being rolled in that and stopped playing five years ago too :p
Every single Minecraft article anywhere other than a dedicated forum has that one guy.
Mr. I’m-Going-To-Look-Like-A-Dick-For-Asking-If-Anyone-Still-Plays-The-Most-Popular-Game-On-The-Planet-In-The-Last-Ten-Years.
You’re that guy.
I’m not sure if realism is Minecraft’s top priority. In my experience, in real life if you whack the ground with a shovel a few times, a perfect cube of earth doesn’t pop up ready to be pocketed. Also, real skeleton archers don’t have unlimited arrows.
pete. give the devs a brake. if you want to play 1.9 go and play the snapshots, as for the windows 10 port, it was meant for having different devices to play the same game.
Interesting that there are noticeable differences in mechanics between various versions.