Hey everybody, on my latest SMP run I finally managed to get myself Elytra-wings and started using them in my minecraft-everyday-life. I came across some things that are still bugged and can affect survival experience. We all know that taking your Elytra for a ride is awesome – but what about landing? The basic problem is that once you got into 'flying-mode', you will experience it until you land on a block with hitbox (as far as I have tested it), or taking off that item manually.

Elytra vs ladder

• example

When going down a ladder and pressing spacebar, your character bugs out into the wall and you cannot control your movement on the ladder anymore (besides left and right) until you reach the block below that ladder – game tries to fly into the fall. Landing on ladders mid-air is impossible aswell, as you would only glide down.

Elytra vs water

• landing, 3rd person

• landing, 1st person

So when you land in water, you are technically still flying. This leads to an offset pov and camera shaking in first person aswell as weird behavior fo your character in thrid person view. Sure, the movement of your legs and the horizontal position looks cool and a lot like real swimming (something I would love to have!), but it is clearly not intended to be that. However the problem here is, that it forces to use precious durability of your elytra when you would not expect it. Elytra are the rarest item ingame, accidentally breaking them can be bad.

• getting out of water, 3rd person

Notice the small moment of flight when getting out of water! In first person, this really feels unnatural, as you would expect the smooth and fast movement you normally have. Even Jeb said at Minecon, that they care about the way the game feels like when you play it

Elytra vs sneaking?

• sneaking mid-air
• sneaking in water

Have you ever pressed SHIFT mid-flight, just to see what happens? Well it looks like your player model moves down a bit. In water, you see that the camera just moves a bit, which is all there is to it, somehow. The camera and/or player model movement when you press SHIFT might be a left-over from normal sneaking behaviour, but for me this seems to be something without use!

So, here is my suggestion: Let us close our Elytra by pressing sneak-key!

Why? It would give you a way to stop Elytra behaving weird plus lets you land on more terrain than before! The transition from flying into sneaking helps to land on ladders aswell as any other platform that is just a couple of blocks big!

So what are your thoughts about it? Please leave a comment below and share this idea, I am open to anything! And sorry for any grammatical errors 🙂