Minecraft has been around for quite a long time — over a decade. The best-selling video game of all time has received countless updates over the years across its variety of ports. From the early-access days of alpha to the fully-fledged game we have now, Minecraft lives by its updates. Some patches bring minor changes and some bring massive overhauls to the world and sometimes even the way it’s generated.
While it started as a relatively bare-bones game, Minecraft blossomed into a wealth of features and systems. It could still use some new ones, and more importantly, some more depth to the systems that already exist. And there are even more features the game doesn’t need.
10 Don’t Need: More Ore
Adding more ore to Minecraft is tricky to justify at this point. Updates often bring new blocks and the game is beginning to bloat, leaving some older materials in the dust. It was already difficult to make leather or chainmail useful, for example, and adding new ore might indirectly replace older materials without careful consideration.
What Minecraft needs is more depth and less expansion. Focus on ways to make the existing materials and minerals more exciting to find. Give players more choices on what to turn them into, as well as more ways to keep early game materials valuable a hundred hours into the world.
9 Still Need: Expanded Rivers
Despite several updates to oceans (including the aptly-named Update Aquatic), rivers and other smaller bodies of water are still devoid of features. They don’t need monuments or any of the treasures found in oceans, but they could use a little fleshing out.
Rivers are too often limited to dividing biome boundaries, or relatively flat and shallow channels around the base terrain. There’s a lot of opportunity for rivers that follow slopes or create waterfalls at cliffs. Ravines are awesome but why is each one devoid of the weathering body of water that carved it?
The upcoming Caves and Cliffs update is great and provides a lot of opportunity to create powerful rivers like the one that created our own Grand Canyon millions of years ago.
8 Don’t Need: Guns And More Weapons
A running theme through this part of the list is going to be turning away adding more variables of items the game already has. The gameplay function of guns (even a more Minecraft technology appropriate musket), shooting targets from range, is already accomplished by the bow and crossbow. Not to mention that guns would require answering questions like what item would be used for ammo, potentially new enchants, etc. It’s almost never as easy as adding just one item into the game and being done.
That’s not even mentioning the possible rating and parental concerns that might come from adding guns to the combat. It might be silly to draw the line there when you can cut down enemies with swords and axes, but some do. Minecraft has a kid-friendly image to maintain.
7 Still Need: Biome Updates
Biomes are a great feature of Minecraft. It’s awesome to choose whether or not you’re going to settle in a peaceful plain, a snowy mountaintop or even eke out your living in a treacherous swamp. Unfortunately, most of the gameplay realities end at the aesthetics.
Minecraft doesn’t need to rush to add more isolated systems but some depth here would be nice. Maybe increased hunger in cold environments that could be alleviated with proper warmth in the form of lighting? More mobs and other items that flesh out the ecosystem of each biome? A lot could be done to further the survival aspect of Survival Mode through biomes.
6 Don’t Need: More Armor
For years and years, the armor progression of Minecraft was the same. Seek out the bountiful iron and turn it into iron gear. Hold onto that until you get diamonds and turn that into your new, eventually enchanted gear. For the most part, players skip gold, leather and chainmail. With the Nether update, players can now upgrade their diamond armor into Netherite armor.
Overall, this feels like solving a problem that no one really had. The features that Netherite armor brought, like increased defense and invulnerability to lava are welcomed features, but they could have been solved through the existing enchanting system. Then again, Netherite armor did come from a fleshed-out Nether biome, so it’s not all bad either.
5 Still Need: Expanded Weather
This ties in nicely with the previous item on this list. Update biomes with expanded weather. Minecraft has three types of weather currently: rain, snow and thunderstorms. The latter is the most dangerous. Thunderstorms can cause mobs to spawn as well as bolts of lightning that deal sizable damage to players, ignite fires and upgrade struck enemies.
Other biomes can be fleshed out with biome-specific weather. Give snowy biomes mild, moderate and severe blizzards. Give coastal regions flooding deluges of rain. Deserts can harbor sandstorms that whittle down your health until you find shelter. There are so many possibilities here that would make the existing biome system even deeper.
4 Don’t Need: More Food
Even from a fresh world, it’s easy to outpace and eternally satisfy your need for food with a little bit of work. Ranching and automation can give you an endless supply chickens, and a wall of smokers can put out multiple stacks of food like clockwork. Then you stuff some chests with cooked chicken that never goes bad and you’re set for hours.
It’s difficult to justify the addition of any new food for any reason other than flavor – aesthetic, not culinary. Giving new food items buffs to encourage their use treads into alchemy’s territory. It’s not impossible but why bother? Sometimes less is more.
3 Still Need: The Cave Update
It’s coming, it’s finally, finally coming. The Caves and Cliffs update is on its way. But it still can’t get here soon enough. Minecraft has been in desperate need of a cave update since abandoned mineshafts were added but it’s still missed the massive world-generation-changing update it’s long deserved.
New mobs, new blocks and updated generation are all coming. Not to mention new cave types and structures, like mesh caves and excavation sites. There’s been a dearth of updates for the two things that players probably do the most, mining and exploring, and the Caves and Cliffs update will change that.
2 Don’t Need: Another System
To be a bit more specific here, Minecraft doesn’t need another system like enchanting or alchemy. For people who played during the simpler early days, enchanting and alchemy were already esoteric system that required even more wiki navigation than the base game did. For years updates like these were added, sometimes instead of expanding the core features of the gaming: mining and building.
Now it’s nice to have things like Silk Touch and Efficiency and players would be hard-pressed to let them go. Since they’re here to stay, these systems should continue to be expanded upon instead of adding another system on top of them.
1 Still Need: Better World Protection
Too many people have read the tales of a parent who deleted their kid’s precious Minecraft world as punishment, or even accidentally deleted their own. A Minecraft world is not only evidence of time, it’s also evidence of effort. Brainstorming, gathering materials, building. No one likes to see something they worked so hard on and shared with other people lost to the ether.
Password protection could stop worlds from being deleted from anyone on your account who shouldn’t be. Automatic backups, whether to a cloud or a separate folder on your PC, could document your world in case of disaster. It would also provide a number of versions to go back through for nostalgia or whatever else.
Some people have been playing Minecraft through all the updates for over a decade now. Those lifetime players are likely more comfortable with safeguarding their work than most but features like these are never unwelcome.
NEXT: 10 Craziest Minecraft Worlds
