Editorial: Are the boss battles getting too easy?

Recently, I had a playdate with my best friend, and I asked him how we would defeat the Wither boss on our LAN world.

“Simple” he said.”We first use the Soul Cages mod to make a Wither Skeleton farm. Then I’ll make a forcefield, plonk the wither in it and BZZAP, 9,000 volts and an instant Nether Star for us!”

 

Then I asked him how we would kill the Ender Dragon.

“That’s harder” he said.”We’ll go to the End, and make a forcefield that things can come out of but can’t come in. Then we just arrow the Ender Dragon to death without him laying a wing on us.”

See what I mean?

This conversation was talking about defeating the vanilla bosses with FTB Ultimate installed. With some other mods out there, killing the bosses just needs redstone, machinery and mods. 

I’m thinking the boss battles are getting too easy with all these mods.

Maybe it’s because everyone has killed the Ender Dragon that they’re making more OP stuff. It’s even getting easier in Vanilla. Some Minecraft experts - Paul Soares Jr, for example - can defeat the Wither boss in under a minute without taking all that much damage. 

 

Also, there isn’t that much pride anymore in killing the Ender Dragon or the Wither. A dragon egg is pretty much just something to prove you killed the Ender Dragon without being called a liar.

 

A Beacon only gives its effects when you are really near it, and with all that light you won’t need to kill any monsters near it. Once again its only other use is to prove you killed the Wither without being called a liar.

Maybe Notch should add more reward in killing the bosses, because the problem is that there is not much pride in it any more.

 

Everyone’s done it-where’s the pride?

It's not just PC...

While the PC version of Minecraft is awesome, there are other versions of Minecraft out there that quite a few people have never played.

Are they as good as PC edition?

Pocket Edition

 

Pocket Edition is a version of Minecraft for iPads, iPhones and suchlike.

It isn’t as good as PC by far, but there is one thing that looks really good - the fact that the sun's position and not the light level determines the way that mobs look. It can sometimes appear that you have a shaders mod even if you don't.

Then there’s the invisible bedrock wall at the world limit. It looks really mysterious, but it means that worlds are finite. Bummer.

 

MyTip: Mine to the invisible bedrock wall in your mine. You can have an indication of the time of day underground.

Grass doesn’t spawn natrually, leading me to think that you couldn’t make a farm. But you can grow grass with bone meal, and later on I found that you can hoe grass blocks to get seeds. 

 

There is no End nor is there a Nether, but the Nether Reactor does exist.

In one world that I spawned in in creative mode, I decided to do in Survival mode, but I didn’t find out until too late that the world had no water. Yep-the entire world had not one block of water. Also, there don’t seem to be many biomes. The only ones I found were Forest, Taiga, and Desert. Forests have far less trees, and the same for Taiga.

There are some things in Pocket Edition that really should be implemented into PC:

1.     The Stonecutter. It really makes sense that some things just can’t be made in a crafting table, like walls and stairs.

2.     When you shear a sheep, the colour of the sheep is the same as the dots of leftover wool, which makes sense.

Star rating:***

XBox 360 Edition

Xbox 360 Edition is pretty good compared to Pocket Edition.

The worlds are still finite, but instead of  256x256 blocks, it’s 862x862 blocks. 

Curiously, there is no bedrock wall but an infinite, inaccessible ocean. Also, the player starts with a map in hand.

Cave Spiders and Endermen still exist, and there is an End and a Nether. The fight with the Ender Dragon is a little different. An unfinished End Portal is present, with no portal nor dragon egg. The dragon will attack Endermen as well as you. The portal acts as a ‘nest’ for the dragon, and the dragon also spews out ‘Ender Acid’, a Ghastball-like projectile that cannot be deflected.

Helpfully for first-time players, there is a tutorial in Xbox 360 Edition.

There are ravines, NPC Villages, Abandoned Mineshafts, and Strongholds.

Star rating:****

So are these editions worth it? That’s entirely up to you!