Is Minecraft too open and too big?

Look, given that sense of scale and infinite possibilities in Minecraft has made it the best-selling video game in human history, this headline might feel a little silly right off the bat. But it does open up an interesting line of inquiry, as in the fifteen-plus years since its first public release, the block-building artist just keeps getting bigger – more biomes, more mobs, more blocks, more everything. That question has less to do with how big Minecrafts world is and more to do with what that world actually does to itself.

If Minecraft always justifies its open world, whether the things it adds to that world make it feel deeper or simply wider is probably a bit more obviously up for debate. For fans like myself, who have grown up with the game and have watched Minecrafts update design evolves, that's probably what comes to mind the most. As such, I would argue that what Minecraft really missing, more than any new biome or new mob type, is a sense of ecological depth to match its extraordinary breadth.

Why Minecraft is growing the way it is

For starters, it helps to understand the update philosophy to run Minecrafts expansion, because this is indeed a specific type of depth, despite its sweeping consistency. For years, Mojang approached the game's world development in a pattern that can generously be called “horizontal”: a new biome is announced, a handful of new blocks are introduced, or a new mob is voted on, and the world expands outward. While the game has incredible depth in other ways, and the content delivery has changed in the years since, much of the same additive logic still applies in this arena: something new appears and the old world expands to absorb it.

This is not in itself a bad thing, as Minecraft thrives on opportunity, and keeping its updates widely available ensures that players across all playstyles and age groups can find something to love in each new drop. The level here is that its growth is often disconnected, so for everyone Minecrafts enormous surface, the experience of exploring it often feels less like navigating a living ecosystem and more like moving through a series of attractive but largely inert dioramas. The world is wide; what it sometimes lacks is depth.

What ecological depth really means

Image via Mojang

Implementing ecological depth is one of the more obvious ways to expand Minecraftdespite the fact that on paper it is already an amazingly versatile game. The thing is, not all of this diversity interacts in a meaningful way; mobs such as cows, chickens, bats and foxes roam their respective environments and sometimes drop or interact with objects. But they don't affect those environments in any notable way, and if it were otherwise—if mobs left real marks on the ground they occupied, shaping it in a way that players could observe and respond to—the game would have what might be called vertical depth to complement its horizontal scale.

How greater ecological depth could look like in Minecraft

A compelling illustration of what this might look like in practice comes from YouTuber Klei_Wright, whose video Why Mojang Struggles to Design Ecologies makes a pointed, conservation-oriented case study of the bat. In real life, bats are keystone species: they pollinate plants, spread seeds and control insect populations on a large scale, but in Minecraftthe bat is essentially decorative. Giving that mob a gameplay feature that interacts with the world—like speeding up overall crop growth at the cost of some portion of that crop—would be a double-edged success as an educational addition that's also simply more interesting as a piece of game design.

Such examples illustrate the gap between what Minecrafts mobs currently do and what they could reasonably do without fundamentally changing what the game is. Bees are the closest existing example of Mojang threading this needle: they pollinate flowers, produce honey, and will aggressively defend their hive. That kind of self-contained ecological loop makes the meadow biome feel meaningfully different from regular grasslands, so it's hard to argue against more such systems on a larger scale.

A conversation about Minecraft's untapped potential

Image via Mojang

It's worth noting that this line of thinking is part of a broader creative conversation that has been going on around the world Minecraft community for years, about the extraordinary untapped potential of what's already in the game. Biome-cetric Minecraft Mod projects like Ecologics add more interdependence to the environment and show in playable form that this kind of depth is not only possible, but also quite fun.

Why Minecraft Will Probably Stay This Way

Despite all this, anything too deep is unlikely to come to another vanilla update Minecraft anytime soon — and the reasons for that are twofold. First, truly dynamic ecological systems are difficult to build and maintain Minecrafts scale. The computational and design costs required to model population-level feedback loops over an almost infinite procedural world are not trivial.

Find all 10 pairs

Start

Restart
Back

Find all 10 pairs

Start

RestartBack

But more fundamentally, that's not what Mojang actually wants, and Jens “Jeb” Bergensten, Minecrafts chief creative officer, produced an internal design document titled Minecraft game design principlesthat made it clear. The booklet is candid about why Minecraft resists the kinds of time-dependent, self-perpetuating systems that ecological depth would require:

Continuous ecological change presupposes a world with memory beyond the player – one where actions are joined over time, and that continuity is exactly what Mojang has chosen to avoid in its core game. The player, not the world, is meant to be the driver of change. Jeb also expresses that principle in the document:

“When we added the villages to the Minecraft beta, we made a conscious decision that they wouldn't auto-evolve. The villagers wouldn't build houses, and there would be no mechanics to add more template-based buildings. If the village needs a protective wall, the players will have to build it for them. Minecraft offers an environment for the players to decide what, when, and where the players will be able to interact with, but when the player will interact with, but when the players will interact with it.”

A wide world, with room to go deeper

These are legitimate reasons, and it would be remiss to dismiss them, as even the existing examples of mobs that meaningfully alter the environment—sheep eating grass, Endermen displacing natural blocks—have proven annoying enough in practice that society regularly debates whether to nerf them. However, Sheep and Enderman operate in the world without giving the player much to work with in return. Other potential ecological systems could allow players to engage, redirect or leverage interactions to their advantage.

And to that end, Jeb also specifically reserved the right to break his own rules from time to time in that document. Since then, the game has added ecological texture in more subtle ways, such as the bee's pollination loop, the caretaker's response to sound, and the skull's ability to reproduce. The Chaos Cubed the drop and its brimstone caverns, with noxious gas pools and a mob that physically reshapes itself based on what blocks it consumes, look likely to add even more of the layered structure.

In the end, like Minecraft continues to age and grow, ensuring that growth in the world's depth—not just its width—seems less like something that should happen, but something that likely must happen. That said, it would be hard not to see that as a good thing anyway. After all, the sense of infinite vertical possibility is what made it a phenomenon in the first place.

Released

November 18, 2011

ESRB

E10+ for all 10+ due to fantasy violence