tl;dr — Be a miner, fisher, rancher, or farmer; or, hire someone else to be one for you, and then become a railroad tycoon.

I apologize if the following idea already exists in some type of mod–I don't know much about Minecraft modding, although I think it's cool–but I've thought recently about what it would be like if vanilla Minecraft had a labor market / employment system.

For example, while sometimes gathering resources is fun and relaxing, it can get quite tedious if one wants to build something really impressive in Survival mode. What if we could hire villagers or other players to mine, fish, ranch, or farm for us, paying them in emeralds a piecemeal wage?

Surplus resources could be sold to other villagers or players to gain more emeralds, or, instead of being the employer, you could be the employee, working as a farmer, fisher, rancher, or miner for a villager or other player. Then you could buy resources you need (or buy rare items from shops) by selling those you don't.

Or, if you prefer, you can continue gathering resources by yourself, as you do now (the amount of resources gained by doing it yourself versus using the labor market would be comparable, so that it wouldn't incentivize one over the other but merely provide a change of pace / a way to mix things up).

This would open up all sorts of potential socioeconomic dynamics, as it would make villages more central to the game, creating possibilities like railroad tycoons who can connect places of residence (villages) with places of work (farms, mines, ranches, etc.), and railroad owners could charge fees for commuter and commercial transportation.

My 11-yr old daughter comes to my office in tears:

"Dad, I was playing Hunger Games on a server and having a good time, when everyone started accusing me of hacking!"

I say, "Huh…so, were you cheating?"

"Of course not, I don't even know how!"

Stroking my chin and trying to stifle a chuckle, I ask "Why do you think they would say that?"

At this point, she gets a bit defensive: "Because I won the game with an iron sword and some crappy armor, and the other players were noobs?"

I laugh, give her a big hug, and say "Welcome to the world of elite PVP my child. Congratulations, you are so good they think you're cheating!"

She stopped crying, and I gave her a hearty fist-bump.

You go, girlfriend.

So this was when I was 11, I was in school and there was this kid everyone in the class seemed to like, of which every class basically has at least one.

And he was talking about, well, Minecraft. I haven't seen nor heard anything about it before. And all he told it was awesome and the name was "Minecraft" he never told anything about the game itself (graphics, gameplay, etc)

So I only had the name to work off, I had no PC at the time.

Now with just the name, this might sound weird, but it was legitemately what I thought off. I thought…that it was a space-themed shooter.

That was strangly enough what I first thought.

After about two years, I got a PC for about six months now, I remember it again and I searched it up. And well, here I am another 3 years later, still loving the game as much and still enjoying it everyday.

I thank you for taking your time to read this, and hope you enjoyed it 😀

And if you didn't, well, I'm sorry for wasting your time

I've heard of mineplex but there have been many reports of mishandling of administrative power and censorship in the forums. My little cousins want to play minecraft and I usually scour the forums and such to see the community and it's people, they seem a bit toxic. ELI5 Why I should allow my cousins to play on there or suggest another server that has mini games.