Very few indie games have achieved the level of recognition similar to Minecraft. There’s a specific charm that resonates with most players as they play with no overall goal, but to be creative. As a sandbox game, the community surrounding the game has many different ways of enjoying the simplistic gameplay.

One of the fundamental aspects of the game that is due for change is mining, which is important in order to gather resources or progress to finish the main course of the game. Players are often split whenever deciding if mining is boring and is a burden to do, or if it’s an opportunity to relax and zen out.

“I would say it’s fairly boring right now because the cave generation isn’t overly impressive; there’s really not a whole lot to do,” sophomore Kalin Hicswa said. “You run down a cave, but a lot of the time it just ends and either you have to dig to find another one or just go down another one until you find something you like.”

The most recent updates to the game have all changed a large aspect of the game, like last year’s Nether Update, which renovated a previously disliked area of the game into a challenging oasis full of revolutionary game-changing aspects that might have surprised many players.

The annual Minecraft centered livestream Minecraft Live, which was broadcast in October 2020, was the first time players got a look at the long requested and awaited update for caves in the aptly named Caves and Cliffs update. The show included slightly mundane additions like copper decoration blocks and amethyst geodes, while also showing off strange but intriguing features like an alien fungus that metamorphosizes into a horrifying blue cryptid.

Another interesting item shown was the new random terrain generation which now included a vastly larger and more realistic cave system similar to Lewis and Clark Caverns in Whitehall, MT. These changes to the world generation are the biggest change to the game in a long time, and the playerbase is somewhat approving of the update to the previously mundane area of the game.

“I think it will be pretty impactful for the older players because I feel like it will change how people play the game overall,” sophomore Grace Coombs said. “People might just have backlash on it because it’s not going to be the same with the new generation and terrain.”

Another major change that might startle regular players is the more recent designs of the ore blocks, which were changed to accommodate for colorblind players, making the game more accessible to a smaller group of players. Nearly all of the textures for the blocks were tweaked, except for the Diamond block, which is arguably the most iconic of the bunch and is the staple for most Minecraft merchandising.

The developers of the game consistently make the changes clear to the community that they aren’t final since the semi-weekly updates are a beta for the community to test out and give feedback, but nearly every feature that is added will be introduced to the game in the full release, but they will experience heavy changes until the final release.