Minecraft's Design Problems

Minecraft

Minecraft is a game I love.
I love building, I love crafting, I love surviving, I love creativity.
Unfortunately there's some core problems I've had with it over the years, night-time isn't scary, hunger is a harmful mechanic to engagement, sprinting is a pointless mechanic, the phantom is it's own hour long rant and you can obtain diamonds 3 minutes after starting a new world because they appear in shipwrecks.
Jesus christ.

I love minecraft but that's also why I hate it's modern iterations, I'm passionate about it and anger is an expression of passion.
So here's my rant on what I love, hate and wish was different in minecraft that hopefully a successor to the game can pick up on.

Sprinting

First I want to start with sprinting, I will never not see it as the single most useless feature in minecraft.
When you sprint, you make a conscious choice to burn through your hunger in order to gain extra movement speed.
Food is such an easy resource to obtain large quantities of however, that the player never needs to make the conscious consideration if it's worth sacrificing their food supplies to move faster, resulting in the player having to make the choice of "Would you like to move faster or not?"
In other words, "Would you like to gain a benefit or not?", the answer would always be yes since there's no downside attached.

There's no reason not to sprint.
This brings in the question, what's the point of walking?
If you wanted the player to move faster, why not just increase the base movement speed?
Sprinting is one of the main changes which made night time significantly easier to avoid as it lets you outrun monsters rather than have monsters outrun you.

Sprinting is a choice in which there is no choice to be made, you always sprint.

Hunger

The ability to ignore almost every monster you encounter at night makes night time a joke, the near-infinite amount of food is backbone of that problem, let's dig into that next.
In ancient versions of the game hunger wasn't a mechanic, you weren't punished for walking, mining, exploring or playing the game overall. The only time you had to eat food was when you made a mistake by taking damage and had to heal your health.
I feel the modern implementation of hunger punishes the player for experiencing the game, makes combat a black or white outcome of winning or loosing as it's very easy to regenerate lost health afterwards and keeps the player locked to their base by fear of running out of hunger.
This design punishes players for enjoying the game, a trend I find that appears in other areas of gameplay, you don't want to adventure because you might run out of hunger.
Food from animals isn't always guaranteed due to animals either not spawning in every biome or spawning very rarely in some biomes, rotten flesh from zombies at night is not sustainable or desirable and the only reliable food source in the game is from farming which requires the player to remain in a static location.
The player is discouraged from exploring by having their only reliable food sources be in a static location while they need a reliable food source because they have a hunger bar which decreases everytime they begin taking an action.

What about combat?
In previous versions of the game any damage you took was permanent, there was no natural health regeneration, this lead to the outcome of combat being a constant greyzone.
I defeated the mobs I was fighting but it cost me 3 hearts off my healthbar? Do I want to do another encounter or wait until daytime before I try to walk home?
Do I want to play it safe and burn one of my porkchop to heal or wait until I take more damage to get full value from it?
You're left to ponder with a variety of options after each combat encounter that can make the difference between you making it home alive or ending up as a slurry of items on the floor.
"Just Carry a lot of food" wasn't an option either since food only stacked up to 1 instead of 64, if you wanted to bring 10 porkchops with you that was 10 inventory slots you had to sacrifice.
It offered an interesting choice in inventory management where you could bring more food for a safer journey, or leave more slots options to bring more resources home with you.

Compare this to modern versions where hunger provides health regeneration if you've eaten, leaving you without anything to consider after combat as you'll be at full health;
Food items stack up to 64 allowing you to bring more than you would ever need on each journey in a single item slot and instead of healing on demand when you say it's healing time, you instead need to wait for the game to allow you to heal.
Combat no longer provides a post-mortum decision to make after each encounter where you need to evaluate your remaining resources and if it's worth continuing the battle or time to turn back.
If you have food just hold down your mouse buttons and go kill everything as long as you like! You'll be fully healed afterwards anyways.

Hunger discourages exploration by lowering every time the player takes action.
Hunger takes decision making away from combat by fully healing the player after every engagement.
And 64 food stacking takes decision making away from exploration by not forcing the player to choose between bringing a lot of food or a small amount of food.

Sprinting and Hunger are both redundant mechanics which punish the player for playing the game and cause redundancy in other mechanics respectably.

Phantoms

Speaking of punishing the player for playing the game, let's cover phantoms next.
Phantoms are a mob which spawn at night and attack the player only if the haven't slept for 5 days.
Sleeping causes the player to skip the night-time mechanic entirely and resume day. Why?
Why are you punishing players for refusing to remove a mechanic?
If there's one addition to the game with was an absolute failure, the developers had full foresight to prevent and objectively makes the game worse, it's fucking phantoms.
The items they drop as a reward (phantom membranes) are useless since by the time you'd have a use for them (repairing an elytra) you would already have access to mending;
They struggle to actually kill the player due to their low damage output and restriction to attacking from the surface.
If they were somehow meant to act as a mining deterrent then only god knows why they only appear when you aren't mining.
They have no incentive to be hunted, they're more akin to an annoyance than an actual threat and they punish players for trying to experience the day night cycle.
This design punishes players for enjoying the game.

Phantoms should never have been implemented but do you want to know the worst part?
Through some herculean leap in logic, Phantom's spawning mechanic exists because Jeb didn't want turtle eggs to be too easy to hatch.

Is this some kind of sick joke? Turtle eggs? Phantoms are dangerous? You added a mechanic which affects the entirety of the game because you didn't want people to hatch turtle eggs too easily?
When's the last time you've seen someone use turtle eggs? When's the last time you've seen a turtle? Did you even know turtle eggs were in minecraft before I brought it up in the previous sentence?
The single most hated mob in minecraft exists they way they do now because the developers didn't want a mechanic nobody has ever engaged with, or would have a reason to engage with, to happen too quickly;
but iron farms, mob farms, gold farms and every other farm in the game that makes 100,000+items per hour is perfectly acceptable.
Do the developers play their own game? Genuinely. Do they play minecraft?
I feel like asking if a developer plays their own game is one of the cruelest things you can ask, but in this case I can't think of anything else to wonder.
I want to give them the benefit of the doubt, I want to think maybe they thought something would be too strong or too weak or something else, but they still behave exactly the same 5 years later.
I don't see the minecraft developers as people who care about the game they work on because if they had even an ounce of care, phantoms would never have existed in their current form.

I believe the moment iron golems were added was the same update minecraft took it's final turn for the worst since it signified the moment Jeb took over as the lead developer for Minecraft.
Yes, I do not like Jeb's development style, think what you will of Notch as a person but he understood minecraft as a designer.