I’ve been playing minecraft for a long ass time, (At least Alpha 1.2.0) and I’ve done everything from emailing Notch to get beds added in, to host massive servers (anyone remember ImmortalCraft?)

With this, I’ve had a lot of time to think about how I’d change the game, or what mods I’d like to make if I had the ability to stick with one project.

I wrote this post in 2019, and I’ve left it unpublished for years since.
So now, in the end of 2025, I’m just gonna publish it, so please enjoy my half baked ideas.

Global Changes

Better World Progression

Current Progression is overworld ⇒ nether ⇒ end. This is fine, but I’ve got two possibilities.

No Progression at all. Preferred option, not forcing players how to play, but guiding them, fits the sandbox theme of minecraft well. You can do whatever you want in any order, The only thing that’s 100% is that the end dragon is the end of the game.
By default though, players are guided by a difficulty curve to go to in a specific order. In the rawest form, this just removes the need for Blaze Powder to craft Eye of Enders
This can steal some features of the below linear system, where enderman don’t spawn until the space-time is broken with a nether portal, and are slightly more angry after the end dragon is defeated (you did kinda kill their boss/queen).
Complex Progression System Strict linear progression option This proposal is an addition on to the existing system. (the little linear progression that’s there) Each level of ‘progression’ unlocks the next level of technology, enemies, and dimensions/bosses/whatever. Basically, to even see enderman, you need to go into the nether, which, I guess ‘rips a hole in the end’ and allows enderman to teleport into the main world.
This gives a little bit of difficulty progression, and for new players, a new mob that they brought in.
Using tools found in the nether, players are sent to new lands (which now generate ocean temples), and have the ability to defeat the shit there, I can’t specify what because I honestly haven’t been there because they’re useless.
The loot from the ocean temple can send you to jungle temple, or allows you to create eye of enders, which then opens up the end (and end cities and such)
Building upon that, maybe have the player go to multiple temples in multiple biomes, defeating mobs, completing puzzles, doing random stuff, to get stuff that allows the player to find the stronghold and enter the end.
This seems very, anti-minecraft, where you’re locked into doing something. Personally I think this could be a seperate gamemode, maybe called ‘Progression’?

Dynamics / Villager-Illager Improvements

Villagers, Pigman, and Illagers are pretty boring. (however the 1.14 update IS a step in the right direction.)
This dynamics system will improve villager-illager relations, sorta like Civ.

Players will be able to ally with Villagers, Illagers, neither, but not both (sorta) Allying with one will make yourself hostile to the other, attacking on sight, and unwilling to trade. You can be cordial with both, and trade with both, however allying is effectively joining their tribe, and shows you are willing to fight to expand their territory.

Villages should be able to grow and build new areas. Sort of like the Minecolonies mod, but less complicated. Villages will give you quests for materials, or defeat x mobs nearby, or on the fly generate/find a dungeon for you to defeat and clear out.

These will give you more favour with them. Each material requisition quest will add a % to a expansion total, which when hit will tell specifc villagers of a trade to start building an expansion.

Possible Expansions

All the normal villager houses

Custom Villager expansions (none of these will spawn naturally)

Scouting Tower (small tower for bow and arrow villager to sit)
Mine (digs x blocks down, and then towards the closest cave)
not really sure what else.

These building will be nice and cool, where they pick them automatically depending on then # of buildings, and the ratio of the buildings.

Upgrades: As villages get larger, their old buildings become more and more useless, so they’ll ask for materials to upgrade building to the next tier, which is another way of getting to level up the villagers. (and get better trades)

Raids

Raids are cool, but like a lot of the 1.14 update, a small sliver of progression on what could be. I propose proper battles. illagers and villagers battle out for land, each will go and attack nearby villages, the winner keeps the village.

Banners can be used to show the alliance of each village.

These raids, along wit the reputation system I’ve proposed, the player is free to leave the normal inhabitants of the land to battle it out, and stay out of the fight, or can pick a side, and build an empire of villagers.

Taking the Hero of the Village, it seems, a little incomplete, and I would imagine Mojang have plans, or have talked about this. The player now have Reputations, similar to red-dead.

I propose the follow rep levels (from lowest to highest)

Enemy: Attacked on sight, no trade.
Distrusted: Similar to when you attack villagers now, high trade costs.
Neutral: Like a new spawned village now, normal trade costs.
Friend: Lower Trade costs, allowed to really (more on that later) build stuff
Ally: You basically own the village, trades still cost stuff, but it’s cheap. Villagers can complete custom tasks

Reputation can be a scale from -1000 to 1000, this doesn’t have to be shown to the player, and can be completely unknown to them.

Reputation Changing Actions

Action	Net Change
Damage Villager	-10 (per villager seen action[1])
Kill Villager	-20 (per villager seen action[1])
Defend Village (kill enemy)	+5 (per kill)
Trade with Villager	+2 (per trade)
Protect against raid	+25

[1] Caps at 3 villagers, if 0, no change.

Exploration Update

tools and weapons obtained only from exploration, with random lore that effects how it works
pseudo-generated ‘unique’ tools. (mythicmobs)

Better Caves

Caves should be more rare
Sides of mountains from rivers - proper geology shit
ALWAYS Connects to a river

Natural Enviroment

Seasons
Better Weather
Tree regeneration
plant regeneration
dynamic biomes (almost impossible, having biomes change depending on changing weather sim)
better biomes
all the fucking biome updates thanks
underground biomes
Terrain Generation improvements

Seasons

Seasons shouldn’t be a ‘defined’ start and end, clean phase through the seasons as each day progresses. (90days per season?)

Seasons should effect what types of mobs spawn Mobs should change to suit their environment - Creepers change colour depending on the season ‘camo’ - Zombies slow down but are more ‘hungry’ during winter - Villagers stop farming and hoard their harvest, trades are more expensive during winter - Winter specialised/spruce villages should be the opposite.

Crop’s don’t grow during winter unless inside?
- or at all
Spring
- Default starting season - soft tutorial
- Lots of passive mobs
- Flowers & Long Grass spawn
- Crops grow quick
Summer
- Normal amount of passive mobs
Autumn
- Normal amount of passive mobs
- Slightly more hostile mobs
- Crops grow slightly slower than normal
- Tree’s slowly lose their leaves
- Flowers & Long Grass die off
Winter
- Less passive, more hostile mobs
- Crops don’t grow in snowy biomes (based on biome temperature?)
  - Could just grow slower?

Cave Update was a massive wonderful step in the right direction!

Terrain Generation Improvements

Continents should generate, with massive oceans that separate them.

These should be massive, 25-50k blocks large.

Strongholds shouldn’t generate on the initial continent. Increase difficulty slowly the further out you are.

Rivers should always try to flow to the ocean, sometimes to lakes. More realistic stone generation. Either remove all the other types of stone or make them spawn in layers

Volcano’s should exist, but are incredibly rare.

Farms are more efficient
Large Village should spawn, almost a city.
- Sometimes you’ll see ruined cities, destroyed by volcano.
Eruptions are rare.
Sometimes you’ll see underwater volcanos

Enchantments

Ability to remove single enchantments Ability to move enchantment/s to books (specifically move one enchant from a object with multiple)

Fighting Overhaul (thanks jordan!)

Additional Difficulties (would be a cool mod)

Entirely Optional - each setting is toggleable

Difficulty Scaling
- Chunk based difficulty, where the longer you spend in a chunk, the higher the difficulty.
- Increased difficulty will up spawn rates, up mutation rates, and up their damage (to a limit)
- Also increases the ‘smartness’ of AI
- Also increases the chances of a raid
- Also increases the chances of Infestation (explained below)
Mutant Mobs - rarely spawn, essentially minibosses
Effects given depending on events
- Fall damage == Slowness (length and intensity depending on how far you falled)
- Explosion == Confusion (depends on how close you were from the explosion)
- Suffocation = hmmmm idk, there should be something though, maybe a vignette effect leading to blindness
- Drowning == same as above?
- Burning == who knows
Punching fire Lights you on fire (kinda makes sense hey) (maybe have an enchant for it, or use a tool)
Fire Arrows? - Are these not a thing in minecraft????
Small chance for enderman to teleport you too
No drops/xp from grinders
- Either Limited amount of xp/drops from mobs in the same area per hour or something?
I thought this was an actual feature, but mobs spawn progressively more and more bright areas at night
Rare zombie variant that breaks torches (up to a certain limit?) (Cave zombie?)
Zombies slow you down (more zombies the more slowness stacks)
Skeletons (almost) always immune to arrows
Ghasts should be scary (either up projectile speed or up health)
Infestations
- Mobs can take over abandoned areas, coming together to create a spawner in a dark area
Ender dragon
- Can’t place water in end
Plants/Farming (you’re no professional farmer,)
- Needs direct sunlight?
- Need to build a greenhouse, or scarecrow to avoid birds destroying crops
- No way to craft Melon/pumpkin seeds (birds can sometimes drop them though) (as in literally drop, not on death)
- Stacked Animals die off
Creeper explosions slowly recover grass/dirt (NO human placed blocks)
Rebalance food stacks based on total number of hunger points it recovers (all stacks of food are equal)
Healing rework
- Sleeping regenerates health - provided you have the required hunger
- No natural regeneration (aside from regeneration potions)
Sleeping
- If you haven’t properly secured your bed, there is a chance mobs will ‘break in’ and attack you in your sleep (you’ll have some nasty confusion effects too!)
- Those fucked no-sleep things should be there to punish sleeping (or find a new mechanic for sleeping)
Respawning
- Not a brand new start, you keep 15% of your items (stacks count as one)
- random spawn point, in-between 500 and 4000 blocks away.
- Compass pointing below helps players coordinate for old bases.
Navigation
- No coordinates in f3
- Each compass points to the last spawn point of the user that created them (beds or such)
  - in multiplayer they will have the players name, and when it was created (x days ago) using in game time
Heavy Armour
- Plate armour will trample crops no matter what
- Plate armour will alert mobs further away
- Plate armour will cause more burning damage (unless enchanted)
- uuh need a positive, maybe almost complete immunity to arrows? (although the ones that do make it through cause full damage, no armour helps an arrow that got through)
- Additional Chainmail materials, but still uncraftable. However, very rare loot from dungeons and bosses

Light System Rework (would be a cool mod)

Torches: Go out after x Minecraft Days, can be relit with flint/tinder, are unlit in rain. More dim the further down they’re placed in the world due to oxygen/magic/whatever. Lanterns: Goes out after x*y Minecraft Days, can be relit with flint/tinder, are immune to rain. Does not dim when placed further down in the world. Glowstone Torches: Lasts forever, however is less bright (due to not burning), not effected by dimming. End Torches: REALLLY lategame, adds new end-loot item, glow slime?/bug/something - Brighter than normal torches, no dimming, and lasts forever.

These settings will be controversial, so there will be individual settings for each:

Disabling the entire system, stock vanilla
Sliders to change the dimming algorithm, and torch/lamp lifetime.
Basically settings for every single thing in the lighting system.
Torch Arrows (plants a torch randomly)

Additionally:

Torches placed near leaves/cloth/other burnables can catch them on fire (only directly touching leaves, rare-ish)
ripoff optifine feature, held torches/light entities generate light, potentially stops mob spawning (might be hard for server-side light calcs, but players are nearby anyway and mobs don’t spawn that close)

Gamemodes

Survival (Normal MC as it is now)
- Some changes, but nothing that changes the main ‘direction’ of the game
Creative (Current creative mode)
Adventure (New gamemode, more ‘full on’ than survival)
- ‘soft’ classes, like Terraria.

Changes

Pocket ‘Universes’
- Bascially, dragon eggs, or something else, idk, allows you to create portals to other players worlds, if they’ve done the same.
- Doesn’t quite replace realms, but introduces a shared ‘multiverse’

general format

backstory on my experience with mc
my views on what the good and bad is with mc
the big revert/rebase
small changes that bring life back to ~~music~~ minecraft
larger changes that would be used in new game type
new game-type

Sources

This is where I’ve been saving a big list of all the stuff I’ve read in relation to this post.

volkor.me

Explorer

Recent Changes

Volkor's Site

Inline Skating (in broadcast media)

Houseki no Kuni World

How I'd Improve Minecraft