The "Golden Age" of Minecraft

     Minecraft has been a part of my life since 2011. I remember watching the earliest iterations of Minecraft content and begging my mom for Minecraft on our family computer. That Christmas, my mom got my brother and I two cheap tablets to get Minecraft: Pocket Edition on. Ever since, Minecraft has been a huge part of my life; but recently I've found myself disinterested with modern versions. I've realized I have no more intrinsic motivation to play Minecraft. I'd start new survival worlds and then abandon them merely hours later. I've known for awhile that there's this community online of people who exclusively play pre-release Minecraft who call it the "Golden Age of Minecraft." As someone who grew up watching/playing some of the earliest iterations of the game, I decided to play Beta 1.7.3 to see if it would motivate me once more, or if it was just me looking back with nostalgia-tinted glasses.                                                                               I used Mongster's tutorial to download a bug-free version of Beta 1.7.3 which also included quality of life mods. I used his instance on MultiMC, which he talks about in the latter half of his video. After downloading everything and getting the instance working, I noticed a few things I had completely forgotten about. First off, I had completely removed from my memory that the "over layer" on skins was only available on the head of the skin until recently. I had also completely forgotten that the main-title screen had a complete dirt background instead of what we have today. The world options were also lesser. There's no creative or hardcore mode (creative was added in Beta 1.8, but hardcore was added in Minecraft Release 1.0).                                         One of the first things I liked when I first loaded in was the terrain generation. While the beta versions of Minecraft don't have a lot biome-wise, that is instantly forgotten about because of the the nonsensical and almost fantasy-like terrain generation. Insanely high cliff sides, floating islands, and just the overall uniqueness of every world is incredible. I know in the most modern Minecraft updates (caves and cliffs+) we have some incredible terrain generation now, but for the majority of Minecraft's post-release life, the terrain was flat or the biomes had muted colors that weren't interesting to look at. It felt too real and wasn't anything like the Minecraft people had already been playing for years. The terrain of beta Minecraft immediately made me want to explore.                                                           Exploration has always been one of those things that is encouraged by Minecraft. In modern versions you get achievements for going to every biome (in the overworld and nether). One thing I've noticed in recent years though is that it takes a lot more effort to go exploring. One of those reasons is the hunger bar, actually. While I do like the addition of sprinting in Minecraft, the hunger bar drags you down when it comes to exploration. If you want to go out far, you have to bring massive amounts of food with you. In my experience I'll bring a stack of food with me and even if I use it conservatively, I'll run out before I even find anything worthwhile (although that just might be me). In beta, if you're a careful player (like me) you really only need to bring one or two porkchops with you when you go out into the world, and if you run out, passive mobs spawn constantly and you're easily able to get more. In my experience the no sprinting hasn't really bothered me as well. After the first few minutes of gameplay you honestly forget about it entirely. I also want to talk about the inventory bloat a lot of players like to complain about in modern Minecraft. I personally struggle with the problem in modern Minecraft where I can't really explore the greater part of my world without my inventory filling up within the first few minutes. You run into so many structures in modern Minecraft, like villages, shipwrecks, abandoned portals, etc. to the point where every time you run into these you have to find stuff you don't want in your inventory to put in the chests you run into. If you're looking for something specific, by the time you get there, there's no space for the items you were looking for, or you dropped all your building block in favor of the "rare" items you found in this structure.                       On the topic of inventory bloat, one thing I see a lot of people complain about when it comes to older versions of Minecraft is the lack of blocks to build with. While I do understand peoples frustration, personally I prefer this. It leaves no block to being unused, and with such a small amount of selection you see every block being used at least once in a world. In modern Minecraft there's so many woods, stones, etc. and because of that I feel a lot of modern builds feel very "industrial". In older worlds, you see so much creativity put into builds more than I feel you do with most modern builds (excluding those made by YouTubers who have to put an extreme amount of effort to compete with the algorithm) mostly because you are so limited in what you're able to do. You cant put top slabs without bottom slabs, you can't have corner stairs, etc. and I feel like that really causes the beta players to get creative with what they're doing. How often do you see someone use sandstone in modern Minecraft? I can assume not often, if ever. In beta it's one of the easiest blocks to collect, and contrasts well with a lot of the other blocks in the game at the time. The limited amount of building materials has always fleshed out more creativity in my opinion.                                                                     This is where I would write my conclusion and attach pictures of my current world, but last time I tried that SpaceHey deleted my ENTIRE blog entry and I had to re-write it. That's probably something I'll share in another blog post related to this once my world becomes more. If anyone has any differing opinions to me, I'd love to hear it so feel free to sharing that in the comments! :D