Note: Feel free to use these ideas in your own server, world, or anything else, no permission from me or credit to me is required. I'd like to think I'm not a butt 🙂

Hello, /r/Minecraft! I have noticed Minecraft seems to get less and less fun the more progress you make. Here's why I think this happens, and how we can fix it.

In this post, I will point out what I think are the flaws that cause this problem, and a bit of a general guideline on how we should go about fixing it.

The flaws

1: Difficulty does not scale with progress, and higher progress does not require an equally higher challenge

This is likely the major flaw with this game. The game gets much easier as time goes on. As the player gets better gear, mobs maintain relatively the same strength. Progress becomes more mundane as time goes on as the challenge to progress in late game is not nearly enough to match the gear the player will have at that point. In more simple terms, the game gets easier the later in the game you get. It becomes less and less fun as time goes on. (I am aware about local difficulty. However, local difficulty only just barely increases difficulty over time. It is also done in a way that is not very fun and does not add much content. Lastly, local difficulty is purely based on the time spent in the area, and does not take into account the actual progress level of the players.) This ties in with my next point.

2: The progress ceiling is hit quickly

Probably the last bit of major progress a player will make in Minecraft will be finding elytra. There might be an enchantment here and there you might be missing on your diamond armor and tools, but that is minor. Honestly, for the time scale that many people play Minecraft with, making progress while building projects and houses and all of that, the progress ceiling will need to be raised to keep things interesting. The game gets significantly less fun once you hit this progress ceiling.

3: There is little interesting content before the progress ceiling is hit

I need only be brief with this point. There is not much content that is interesting to the player on their way to the progress ceiling. At the rate many players progress, this isn't too much of a problem. However, it becomes a major issue when players progress slowly. This ties in with point 2. As point 2 decreases (the time it takes for players to reach the best gear is spread out more and more), point 3 increases (the content becomes more and more spread out, making the game just boring). The ideal situation would be for there to be lots and lots of content, densely placed enough to keep the player entertained but spread out enough to let the experience last.

4: The progress is linear

This point, though it does matter, is the most minor flaw out of these 4. There is one process to get to the best gear in Minecraft. Variations in this process are little. Collect wood tools, craft stone tools, establish a reliable food source, mine for iron, mine for diamond, go to the nether, craft eyes of enders, go to the end, kill the dragon, find elytra. The largest variations in here are just how you get between these phases, the time you spend in each phase, and maybe when and how you build your house. Every single time you know what you are going to do. This problem would be more prominent for players who already know a bit about the game. It would be more fun if there would be multiple paths to get to the top. Maybe even what we call the top could vary, as players could be made to choose a balance between different strengths such as speed and health.

How to fix it

A little warning. When increasing difficulty, one must be very careful to do it in a way that will fix some of these flaws, and in a way that will not negatively affect those still in the early stages. Simply adding big, bad, scary mobs to go along with the regular mobs will not work. If you make them too big and bad, players in the early stages will become very frustrated and will not be able to progress. If you make them not that big, bad and scary, you're not adding much difficulty to those in the later stages. In both cases, the game still becomes easier the more you progress, the progress ceiling is hit just as quickly as before, and the progress is still linear. Sure, it will add more interesting content, but not in a very good way. I am not saying new mobs should not be added. New mobs can spice things up for players, and if executed correctly, can add difficulty to those in later stages without negatively impacting early stages. We just need to put some serious thought into features we think we should add.

I want you to think about the new woodland mansions. Though, in my opinion, they were executed poorly, they can tell us something important in how we should go about things with this. I, personally, have not encountered one of these mansions yet, so I do not know how difficult it is. So let's pretend for a moment that the mansions provide a significant amount of difficulty. The idea behind these mansions is actually quite smart and could be part of our solution. There's a few things about these mansions that make it this way. Notice how it offers a way to progress (the totem), but that progress can only be gained by taking on a difficult challenge. The difficulty could be very, very high to match the gear that players would be expected to have to take on the mansion. Notice how we have just created a challenge for those at a higher stage without making it impossibly difficult for those in lower stages, simply because we are not forcing those in the lower stages to encounter the mansion to proceed. In fact, it is completely up to the player for whether or not they will want to take on this challenge, but we greatly encourage those in the higher stages to take on this challenge by making it so they can make progress if they succeed in the challenge.

Now let's look at how these apply to the flaws we have mentioned.

For flaw 1, we have given ourselves complete control over the difficulty at certain stages, individual of the difficulty for stages below it. We have also given ourselves complete control over the difficulty level of the challenge the player needs to overcome to progress at this certain stage, also individual of stages below it. We can use this to match the difficulty curve with the progress curve, and to require players to go through difficult challenges to progress.

For flaw 2, we have simply added more progression for the player to acquire. We have subsequently increased the playing time and the amount of progress, challenges and fun!

For flaw 3, we have also simply added more content for the player to experience.

For flaw 4, we have given ourselves the opportunity to add multiple "branches" for players to progress. We can make multiple branches that can all lead to some pretty fun, powerful gear at the end. We haven't quite solved flaw 4 yet, but we have opened up many ways to solve it.

From here, we can start developing ideas. These features will have to be on a much larger scale then woodland mansions, however. They can be a part of a chain of new features, where players can fight through challenges like dungeons and other structures/areas to collected better gear suitable for facing new, different, harder challenges to collect even better gear. We could possibly even add entirely new biomes with more difficult mobs and more valuable resources (of course, precautions would need to be made to make sure players don't spawn inside these biomes when they create a world). We could also add many more things to do at each stage, including the ones we have currently (wood phase, stone phase, iron phase etc.), to avoid flaw 3. Perhaps we could add new dungeons. Maybe some dungeons could be for our current stages as an additional fun thing to do while in those stages, and other dungeons could be used to make some progress into completely new, higher stages of progress.

However, the point of this post was not to give exact precise suggestions on what to do. One of its purposes was to give a guideline of sorts I would absolutely love Mojang to follow when they add more features in future updates. To me, it seems as though Mojang are not putting very much thought into the reasoning behind many of the features they add. This post could also serve as a bit of a guideline and food for thought for anybody creating mods, plugins or command block creations for Minecraft. And hey, it could make for some good discussion.