What did you like the most about old minecraft?

Not being owned by Microsoft.

Notch not yet being known as an alt-right nutcase.

No chat filter.

Seeecret updates.

The genuine excitement of discovering new the features as they emerged and seeing them for yourself for the first time, rather than having them trumpeted in your face by corporate social media.

Occasionally generating an entire world that was snowy.

Yeah, all Microsoft cares about is bedrock.
- *money
  
  Ftfy. Bedrock is a cashgrab par excellence. It’s literally so hard to navigate the menus compared to java. I hate bedrock.
Notch was actually kinda based, but then he became the very thing he hated.

Really sad
- Yeah was weird seeing his progression over time from his tumblr blog to his Twitter page
I didn't really get into Minecraft until after the Microsoft acquisition. Aside from things like Minecraft Dungeons and the story mode, were there other drastic game overhauls that "ruined" what Mojang had built before?

A lot of the newer updates seem to be pretty awesome but I'm curious what the OGs think
- Microsoft immediately started focusing hard on the "Bedrock" edition and downplaying the Java edition. Bedrock didn't and as far as I know never has actually reached feature parity with the Java edition, but most of all also does not support mods. Mods were and are very, very popular and extremely important to the Minecraft community. There's a strong feeling among OG's that the Java edition is the "real" Minecraft and whatever Microsoft is doing with Bedrock is just faffing around. Bedrock supports data packs which have become somewhat powerful, but do not match the ability for Java mods to completely interact with every aspect of the game.
  
  (The Java ed. is also cross-platform, whereas Bedrock isn't. This can't be a coincidence, coming from the company who makes a certain closed-source desktop operating system you can probably name offhand.)
  
  Microsoft also fairly recently started demanding that you get a Microsoft account just to play, even for the Java edition, which obviously rubs every Linux player the wrong way plus all of us who don't need or want a Microsoft account because we don't need to be tracked, profiled, or advertised at. The cutoff for getting a Microsoft account is 2023-09-19, by the way, and I'm already committed to not doing it. For perspective, I was an alpha backer of Minecraft. I've already moved on to Minetest and other games.
  
  Dungeons and Story Mode were their own separate things. I don't particularly care about them, but I don't hate them either. They can do whatever they want with the IP, and these don't affect the core game any. They weren't even made by Mojang, so it's not even like they diverted development resources away from the core game or anything.
- For me the biggest problem update was 1.14 - villagers and villages really sit in a bad headspace for me. The old game was deeply lonely. I mean it felt like you were alone in the aftermath of a world, because all survival Sims were like this at the time - a dystopian point about how society would end and the future would be primitive again. Minecraft does this in such a subtle way it's almost been written out. On the other hand, even extremely recent updates harken back to things the community has wanted forever. 1.16, 1.18 and the like are genuine to what mojang was trying to build 10 years ago. I think very few updates detract from this - polar bears, pandas, and a few other mobs. While other features that need it badly have gone without change. Dungeons, railroads / minecarts. The efficiency metagame is really a lot less enjoyable than it used to be. Bamboo farms? Villager iron farms? Its all junk that we've come to be used to. And not liking it, I feel left without options. Do it or don't, there's no second way or a less efficient method. And it all requires reading the wiki to understand these esoteric engine quirks and game knowledge... Which means I'm no longer learning and exploring for myself.

For me it was the mystery of the whole game and all that was unknown at the time. Back then, you had to watch others explain the game and lookup crafting recipes to know what you were doing. I remember being absolutely scared of mobs (mind you, I was like 27/28 at the time) and making tunnels for protection. At that time, the only naturally generated structure was a dungeon and the first time I came across those, it freaked me the hell out since I know that I didn't put that cobble there and then I got struck by an arrow (skeleton spawner) and ran tf back out of that cave. You have to imagine, at that point, all I saw was nature and no signs of any other civilization or anything and to see that shocked me.

I was hooked, notch definitely created a goldmine.

Beds really changed the whole game.

Building a base didn't just mean a place to put your chests, it also had to be a place worth spending the whole night in. I cared a lot about making the interior a nice place to be. And the exterior of the base had to be a good fort too because you couldnt skip all the monster spawns at night.

Back then I took minecraft to be like a fort building game. Explore by day and craft by night. The first night I spent huddled in a small dark grave i dug for myself in a wall. It taught me that a good base was important.

I think beds were added in the halloween update if i remember right. I was blown away how they skipped monster spawning. That's when I felt the game changed direction the hardest, because you no longer needed a base to survive.

You should have a veteran cape.

Dont mind me or my lemmy instance.

First, no phantoms. Next, mining. It used to be nice and relaxing, and they seem to be trying to suck the fun out of it with all the new blocks and longer times to break a block. Also not a fan of the new caves and such. They are just too common in my opinion. They disrupt my mining. At least they haven't fucked with fishing.

You can always play the older versions if you prefer.
- Yeah, I have some older versions on my pc. I have a virtual machine running mine-os that I keep around. But lately I just like to pick up my Switch and play. A friend has a realm we work on that he can download when we decide to swap it out and start fresh. Speaking of older minecraft, they have really screwed up the Switch version. You used to be able to pop out of minecraft and go to your saved images on your switch, or go look at your profile and see your friends and what they were playing. Now, when you hit the home button and it pops out of mc, you immediately get disconnected from a realm. If you leave mc running and sleep the Switch, when you come back in I manually have to reconnect to my microsoft id, and when I do that most of the time it just forces me to re-login. So I always just stop mc now and restart it when I bring my Switch back up. And since I am on a rant, how about the load time for the game. Not sure how kids with no attention span manage. It takes 2 goddamn minutes it seems to bring the game up with everything loaded and ready to go, and even then sometimes I get this "Loading Resources" popup that can sit there for another min. Really shitty code that they don't want to look at I guess because they are too busy adding in crap that isn't needed. It's like they don't even own or test on any Switches.
  
  Sorry for the rant, but as an old guy I feel it's my duty.

The creativity of the builds.

With thousands of pieces and ways to customize them, the Minecraft builds have sort of lost their.. charm?

I remember having pretty much only grass, dirt, stone, cobble, sand, water, lava, planks, logs, slabs, glass, doors, and different coloured wool. And everything was super bright and saturated, and the lighting made everything washed out.

Everything looked like a complete aberration and we loved it
I get what you mean, It was super cool how much people could build with so few blocks in the pallet.

Can't talk about alpha, but beta world generation was perfect before 1.8.

I played the kyoto seed and it was so fun to tame the world that looked kinda like Hunan Zhangjiajie National Forest Park.

Playing with my friends when we were younger 🥲

The novelty. Sadly, you can’t get this back. Once something is demystified, you can’t remystify it

I know he wasn't technically in the game, but I really miss the on-edge feeling of Herobrine possibly lurking around any corner of my world, waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. My fear brought me to deleting my first ever PC world in 2015 when I started having pumpkins mysteriously appear on the roof of my house; random wood blocks from my roof disappearing, and the front door opening without explanation: The pumpkins can be explained by Endermen, but I do admit that it's strange that it kept happening every night; but the door part... that was just plain creepy, because not only did I make sure that I didn't leave it open, but I actually heard the door-opening sound effect once or twice on a couple of nights when I hopped into my bed... no mob in the game can open doors (Zombies can break doors in hard mode, but not open them; I wasn't playing on hard.

I know Herobrine never existed, but that part I've truly never understood. It was on the world seed 426 on version 1.8.1. The reason I know the seed is because I found a screenshot of the world select screen years later, and in it was a world named '426'; which reminded me that the world was named after the seed.

World Gen is incredible, and the colors are not the same either, I wonder what old world gen would look like with the biomes we have nowadays

There's a mod called Modern Beta that uses the old terrain generation but with newer versions of the game.
- Hmm, might try it.
- Thanks, will definitly try it!
I'm sure people could make resource packs.

Getting lost in caves and not even thinking about digging straight up to get out again. Back when survival first came out. I remember when the game was just dirt and flowers.

Simple, micro transactions and just building the day away without internet and no worries.

definitely this sort of "lonely" feel that the old versions have because structures used to be rare and isolated

i also like how beta minecraft feels a whole lot more relaxing and laid back compared to modern minecraft, where i feel constantly rushed to enslave villagers and kill the ender dragon and get the elytra and get all the sharpness 357 fortune 77348 netherite tools in only 100 dAyS hArDcOrE as if i was another one of those dumb minecraft youtubers with mrbeast editing that are everywhere nowadays or a wealthy capitalist that only cares about exploiting the everliving fuck out of everyone and everything

oh yeah,and nights used to be an actual threat before sprinting was added, that was cool too

Logging onto my web browser and building in a server full of friendly people.

And then in solo survival, the feeling that the game was something so brand new and revolutionary. Once in a generation opportunity. I felt so lucky.

I believe your talking about https://classic.minecraft.net/.

It still works, but without multiplayer.