What you need to know
- The latest Ask Mojang episode is here, but it's a little different this time.
- Two Mojang team members answer fan questions about Minecraft from their comfort of their home.
- The video tackles questions about parity between mobs in different games, origins of other mobs, and a lot more.
- The team also talks about their favorite features, and if they still play at home.
Mojang lets members of its vast community ask questions of the Minecraft team, then compiles the answers into a video series called Ask Mojang. The series hasn't been around for a long time, but it has already provided new information about Minecraft from the perspective of the people who work on it.
The latest episode is a bit different, since it's the first Ask Mojang when all of the employees are working from home due to the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent quarantine. The episode answers quite a few questions about Minecraft and Minecraft Dungeons, including the origin of a popular purple mob, the development of different features, and others.
Some of the more interesting information in the new episode includes:
- It's not out of the question for Minecraft Dungeons mobs to come to vanilla Minecraft. While nothing was confirmed, if a mob built specifically for Minecraft Dungeons makes sense in vanilla Minecraft, we could see them implemented in the future.
- The origin of the shulker mob. The shulker is a hostile mob found in the End, and fires levitating projectiles at you from the safety of its shell. Apparently the idea was for the mob to camouflage itself on any surface and fire ranged projectiles, but technology at the time simply didn't allow it. Instead, the mob hides in a box to disguise itself. The name combines 'shell' and 'lurker' to create the name.
- Figuring out villagers in the Village & Pillage update was tough. Villagers are complicated, and the Village & Pillage update made a ton of changes and improvements to them. Apparently this was quite the challenge, figuring out how to set schedules for the villagers, and make sure they knew where to go and when. This is where the idea of settings beds as "home" and creating different job tables came to be.
- A little more insight into the development process. Developing new features for Minecraft requires a lot of work and planning, and goes deeper than people might think. New features start as an idea, are in a prototyping phase for ages, goes into a design phase where art, music and sound is figured out, and then can be tested by the community. Once the feature is polished, it can go out into the public. But work is never done, and the team is constantly maintaining existing features.
- Mojang team members still play Minecraft at home for fun. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since I'm still playing Minecraft at home too, but what's more interesting is how inspiration for new features or story ideas can come from Minecraft too.
- Some of their favorite features from the upcoming update. The Nether Update looks like it's going to be massive, and the team answered some questions about their favorite features in the future release. One talked about striders, the new passive rideable mob, and the other mentioned netherite, the new ultra-impressive ore.
Some of this may not be interesting to you, or even new information, but the Ask Mojang series is still a great way for the team behind Minecraft to communicate and connect with players and fans, and does give us some insight into the whole process behind the game. I look forward to the next one.
Are there any questions you want the Mojang team to answer? Have you learned anything cool so far from the Ask Mojang series? Let us know in the comments below!
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