Review Minecraft 1.9-1 12: Setups For What Came After

MisterBobbyPin

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1.9 to 1.12 are a weird era for Minecraft. For the entire year of 2015, there were no new updates. And then from 2016-2017 there were four updates. Two of which are pretty small and kind of boring to talk about.

Let's start with 1.9 first, which had a huge controversy around it due to the combat changes it made to the game.

I'll be honest, I'm fine with the combat changes. I haven't really done PVP granted, but for single-player it is pretty good for what it was.

As for the other parts of this update, I think 1.9 added much needed content to The End and improved the dimension immensely.

End cities and end islands are legitimately interesting places with a fun mob to find in them. But I can't act like The End only having like three things inside of it is pretty stupid and I do wish that we'd get a bit more content for The End. Maybe just throw in a structure or two and we can call it even.

That aside, Elytras are a pretty excellent late game feature and I do like them quite a lot. Sure, they become the best form of travel, but that's why they're late game. They only break the game after you complete it which is fair in my opinion. The rest of features added to The End are cool but they're kind of boring so I'm not as interested to talk about them.

Alongside the content for The End, we also have splash potions, beetroots, and shields. Shields are a great tool, but everything else is just kind of there.

This update is good just for what it added to The End but I can't really say that's in the top ten honestly, maybe it's at number eleven.

What's certainly not at the top ten is 1.10, because 1.10 is legitimately almost as useless as 1.1 was.

1.10 added husks, strays, polar bears, magma blocks, bone blocks, and nether warts blocks. That's literally it.

They call it The Frostburn Update only because there's nothing else to call it. What can I truly say about this update? It's boring, it's almost entirely useless outside of husks and strays. Even then, husks and strays are not good enough to carry this update.

Now that we're done with the very bad update, let's talk about 1.11.

1.11 is pretty good, it added woodland mansions, Illagers, shulker boxes, and totems of undying. All of these features, while kind of small, do help add interesting enemies and items to the game.

Illagers especially have become a massive piece of Minecraft lore, which does help make the game more interesting simply because having an actual hostile faction is pretty neat.

Totems of undying are also kind of broken but I'm kind of okay with that. I think they offer enough of a challenge to get but I do recognize that totem farms are kind of east to set up.

That's not really a part of 1.11 though so for now I'll just finish by saying that 1.11 is a perfectly fine update that adds some interesting ideas to the game.

I forgot illama were added in this update but that alone should explain how I fell about them.

1.12 is pretty boring though.

Sure it adds a lot of colorful blocks, and also adds parrots but that's kind of it.

Especially with this being the only update in 2017, I do question why this update lacks anything that interesting in it. Like sure, adding new beds is cool but that can't really carry an update. Most of this is just the least interesting additions possible.

It's not 1.1 or 1.10 bad, but that's only because this felt like an actual update, albeit a small and unimpressive one.

Overall, these four updates do feel like the start of a different era. This was when the game started introducing some of its most important aspects like the Illagers, elytras, totems of undying and shulker boxes.

This batch isn't all that big, but it does set up what's to come in updates like 1.14 and 1.16.
 
After awhile, you have to wonder how they keep so many updates coming for a simple looking game.
 
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