My cousin and I, along with my brothers and mom, all play on a family vanilla server of ours. We started it in late 1.8, and we enjoyed it a lot, but it still felt kinda off.

For me and my cousin, we started playing in beta 1.8, way back in 2011. The game was so new to us both, and we were both very young at the time and it was our first real delve into the world of PC gaming. We played on so many various servers, built great houses and buildings and structures of all sorts (but in retrospect weren't that great :P), to the point where a certain thing will get us feeling nostalgic.

The sounds of the beta game, the textures, and especially the music. Oh god, the music, it all brings back so many memories. We spent so long trying to chase that feeling for years later, and it never came. We stopped playing for probably 10 months during late 2013 and late 2014, being salty about how the game "didn't feel like Minecraft anymore" with the newer updates. We came back in the summer of 2015 after almost a year or two of very sparse playing, and we created our server.

And that brings us to now. Minecraft 1.9. We enjoyed everything about our last server, but something just hadn't felt the same as the old days in which we played. None of us could really put our finger on it, but, for the sake of surprise and adventuring and exploration, we stayed away from the snapshots, pre-releases, and update notes that have come out in the past few months.

We updated our server to 1.9 finally, and we immediately loved it. Our whole family began to play, and we faced many of the new challenges. We had to run from monsters. We had to craft shields to stay alive. We had to think strategically to actually live and kill mobs. The new combat system made us… noobs! We were new to the game again.

It's incredible. It feels like a whole new game! We are new to Minecraft again! We don't know all the machines, contraptions, mechanics and everything behind the game. We are scared to go out at night. We have to survive without mindlessly slaying monsters. It feels like the golden days again.

This is what Minecraft should always be and always feel like. A game of exploration and surviving, adventuring and creating. It's incredible. Mojang did such a solid job with this update, including all of the new sounds which makes it feel new again. Developers always receive flak for the work they put into things, it's such a thankless job, and they really do deserve their praise.

Thank you to Mojang, the community, and everyone for making it such a fantastic world to be playing in. 😀