Theory Crafting: Should Minecraft have an Icebox Block? Minecraft

I was starting to craft this comment on a different post, but it got to be a pretty cool idea that I felt I should share with other people so they could bounce off my ideas and contribute new ones to make something pretty cool. Basically someone said that a refrigerator block would be useless because food doesn't decay. They're right of course - it doesn't. But what if it did?

Where other people see refrigeration as useless, I see an idea. Maybe it would be a cool addition to the harder difficulty modes to make food decay, and thus require you to create something like an icebox if you want to keep more than simple produce. Maybe something like after 2 minecraft weeks, things like Melon/Carrots/etc. "go bad" and no longer provide you any benefit - something similar to the poison potato now, except inevitable. Things that give you more benefit (cooked chicken, steak, pork) would go bad even faster perhaps after only one or two minecraft days, just like in real life. Really hard to get things things like golden apples/cake would never go bad because of preservatives. If you want to extend the shelf life of your food, you have to put it into an icebox.

Here are some reasons why it is a cool idea:

1. People like realism in survival mods. I have lots of friends who will add Hunger and Thirst mods to Skyrim and other games because they make them more difficult. Minecraft already has hunger as a mechanic, but right now it's not very realistic and you don't really have to worry about it much after day 6 or so once you have a sizable farm. Adding a food spoiling mechanic would require people to actually pay attention to their farming rather than it being just a once-a-week clean up kind of ordeal when you run out of bread.

2. It encourages exploration, because if people want their food to last longer, they need to go find a Taiga biome/Tundra/Extreme Hills where they can collect some snow and ice, much like how they need to look for coal or lava if they want to power their furnaces without using up all of their wood.

3. It brings usefulness and mechanics to otherwise rarely used items. Aside from building an igloo or using it as decoration on certain builds, most people don't use ice or snow for much. There are a couple cool traps that use it too (slippery floor traps where mobs are pushed by snow golems) but their usefulness is very limited. If this was instituted, suddenly snow becomes a useful resource.

4. Snow biomes have been historically unloved by the minecraft community. They are boring and annoying, because aside from getting some spruce wood there's really no reason to ever be in one other than aesthetics. Now, suddenly, everyone is going to want a Taiga biome so they can keep their food cold.

5. Ice boxes, rather than fridges, stay fairly true to minecraft's theme, especially if you make them aesthetically similar to some of the older style ones, which are literally just boxes with ice and food inside.

6. It would also bring usefulness to the food items people don't care about. When was the last time you ate a carrot? It's probably been awhile since after awhile all people ever eat is steak. But if you need ice/snow to keep them from spoiling, suddenly those other foods have a use. Haven't found an snowy biome yet? You'll probably be eating a lot more bread and veggies.

 

So here's a tl;dr of what I've got so far; feel free to add ideas onto this and maybe we'll end up with something really cool:

 

• Food on harder difficulties (Hard / Hardcore / Maybe normal as well) will spoil after a certain time.
• Different foods will have different spoiling rates based on their usefulness / similar spoiling rate in real life
• Carrots/Potatoes/Beetroot/Melon will spoil after 1 - 2 minecraft weeks
• Meats/Fish will spoil after 1 - 3 minecraft days, perhaps randomly, or based on their stamina refill.
• Golden Carrots/Golden Apples/Cake don't spoil.
• There will be a new block called an Icebox.
• It will be crafted with 8 iron ingots around a block of snow.
• It will have a 9 block square of inventory space, much like a dispenser would.
• It will have a block of inventory space for fuel, which will be of the form of different types of snow or ice, much like a furnace.
• I'm thinking something like one snowball would give you 1/32 of a minecraft day of refrigeration, a snow block would give you 1/8, and an ice block would give you 1/2 day, but those might be too big or too small (hard to know until it's playtested).

Submitted September 30, 2016 at 10:19PM by oth_radar http://ift.tt/2cR3t1B Minecraft