**The Design of Spawning**

asanetargoss, 2025-03-30

## The Nostalgia and Strengths of Alpha

I was recently pondering a couple (way too long[^essays]) video essays on why the essayists preferred Alpha's survival, notwithstanding its general lack of content.

Lots of game design arguments boiled down to, "Minecraft is too easy now," and I take issue with the conflation of difficulty with fun [^difficulty]. Although, I'll admit, nostalgia for the good ol' days is still a powerful source of inspiration. And, while not exclusive to Alpha, C418's music was higher quality than the new music by other artists for the most part [^music]. But the feature that kept coming up was beds.

## Modern Beds Suck

I remember a debate on the Minecraft Forum many years ago about why beds should not be added, and the general rebuttal was that if you didn't like the new feature, then you should just ignore it. But then, years later, Mojang added phantoms, punishing you for not using a bed. So, that's issue No. 1.

The essayists also said that beds reduce incentives for basebuilding, because you can prevent mobs from spawning in the first place. I agree that this is a big change, because building is core to the game. Expanding your area of influence and safety is a core gameplay loop.

The Blood Moon[^bloodmoon] mod is a nice solution to this. It can prevent you from skipping the night, encouraging base building, while still letting you skip most nights if you want. It ramps up the difficulty by default, but it is configurable.

I use it in the Hardcore Alchemy modpack. I will admit also that I increased the difficulty of combat in that modpack, which also encourages basebuilding, but that's not necessary. Incentives are illusions to encourage player behavior, and the actual gameplay impact need not be large, unless your target audience is minmaxers.

The Hardcore Alchemy modpack is stuck on an older version without phantoms, so that solves that problem for now. However, believe it or not, I do play on versions other than 1.10.2. For newer versions, I would like phantoms to still spawn in the overworld somehow, but make using a bed feel optional like before.

## But Controlling Your Spawn Point is a Good Thing, Actually

While I agree with the essayists that beds discourage basebuilding in vanilla, I don't understand why they think the ability of beds to reset your spawn point is so OP. Encouraging people to backtrack thousands of blocks to recover from a death, potentially multiple times, is neither fun nor interesting, and having a cheap item that prevents that is a good thing.

By contrast, the Hardcore Alchemy modpack has a mod called Iberia, which resets your spawn on death[^betterthanwolves]. On its own, this is very bad game design. However, Iberia also disables F3 coordinates, which disincentivizes corpse rushing. I abstain from adding a minimap mod to the pack for the same reason. The intent is to encourage a fresh start on each death, while still incorporating some persistent progression long-term, and allowing the ability to randomly rediscover sentimental old bases.

## Random Respawn Sucks in Multiplayer

However, there is one situation which encourages corpse rushing which I cannot fix, and that is multiplayer. If you are playing cooperatively with a group of friends, and one of your friends dies, your friend will have a strong incentive to corpse rush to try to meet back up with the rest of the group. However, with no maps or coordinates to guide them, this could quickly become a futile endeavor, especially if the lost friend dies repeatedly, causing them to drift further and further from their original death point. This is one of the various reasons I discourage playing the Hardcore Alchemy modpack in multiplayer.

Interestingly, the vanilla team is developing a new feature called the player locator bar, which allows you to locate the direction of other players relative to you without the use of F3 or a map[^compass]. I like this idea. If the max detection distance was bumped up to infinite, this could make random respawn more viable for cooperative multiplayer. It allows a lost player to rejoin the group[^still_backtracking]; or if the player is not as skilled, the group can launch a search expedition for them; without revealing too much information about the world. If all the players in the group die, the players can reconvene and start over in a different spot, just like random respawn would work in singleplayer. To be clear, I have no interest in improving multiplayer, and I avoid backports when I can help it, but it is fun to think about.




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[^essays]: It took too much time to watch these videos. However, if you want to watch them anyway, I recommend you first check out [Dialko's bed video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=netOt6_D-W4). Dialko then recommends two more general video essays on survival. [One video is by Whitelight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KqeLT-EOe0). You should only watch [Jay Exci's video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4A1w-Y_Wv5U) if you are willing to put up with the unnecessary lewdness.

[^difficulty]: Entering a "flow" state (the right balance of challenge and/or difficulty curve for a given person), is a valid way to have fun. However, the essayists conflate difficulty with fun, which I take issue with for two reasons: 1. The optimal difficulty level varies between players, and is therefore not a sign of good design on its own, and 2. It is possible to have fun in a game in ways other than difficulty/flow.

[^music]: Most of the background music is not as good, and some even hurts my ears. The only non-C418 background music that is both of comparable quality and feels like it fits in Minecraft is "A Familiar Room" by Aaron Cherof. "One More Day" by Lena Raine is also good, but it feels more like it belongs in a Medieval RPG like Skyrim rather than Minecraft. Some of the new record songs are also good, but that's a much lower bar to hit. It's also a shame Microsoft isn't letting the new musicians keep the rights to their music like Notch did with C418.

[^bloodmoon]: The name, "Blood Moon" is inspired by a Terraria feature by the same name. Terraria has an opposite problem to Minecraft: the mobs never leave you alone,  whether they be a horde of monsters knocking down your doors, or villagers invading your personal space. I personally find this tedious, and feel it takes away opportunities for diving deeper into basebuilding.

[^betterthanwolves]: The first mod to implement a random respawn feature, as far as I'm aware, is Better than Wolves. Better with Mods is a spiritual successor for later versions. Better than Wolves was also open sourced, so there is a chance we may also see that for later versions.

[^compass]: I guess a compass also works if you know what you're doing, however this doesn't work in all modpacks. In particular, if you have the Iberia 2 mod, compasses work differently.

[^still_backtracking]: This is still backtracking, sadly, but it is an improvement. However, I wouldn't want to make it too easy for a player to rejoin the group, because it would defeat the purpose of random respawn. A fixed cost to allow the lost player to rejoin the group after death could be a nice middle ground.