I want to enjoy Minecraft again.
I started speedrunning Minecraft since January of 2024. It has been 6 months up until now. For those of y'all that do not know about speedrunning Minecraft, here is a quick video rundown on that: The Minecraft World Record: Over-Explained.
The goal is to basically beat the game as fast as possible. One thing about speedrunning Minecraft especially is that how the world is generated at the very start matters a lot. Usually, speedrunners will take a glance at the world generation screen for no more than a split second, because they have 10+ Minecraft games running at the same time. I on the other hand, speedrun on a laggy laptop, so I sift through every single seed. I may reset for a new seed instantly after spawning into a snow biome or a taiga biome, but most of the time, I wait for the world to fully load, and turn around the camera angle, run out a couple of chunks to see if there actually a village or shipwreck somewhere. I still spend less than 10 seconds in each world even then.
Till now, I have generated 10K+ random seeds and I would say I might have actually finished running through 300+ of them. That is a lot of worlds. A lot of parallel universes. I'd like to think that somewhere out there, there is a taiga village unbothered by my random appearance out of nowhere, destroying all villagers' beds and stealing their life savings. As an open-world block game, I can't help but imagine I am missing out in a lot of these worlds. Some may have beautiful-looking biomes. Some may contain lucky items at spawn. But I am missing out. On all of that.
I am starting to think that speedrunning Minecraft is taking away the enjoyment of the game for me. There is a very specific goal. I know where exactly to go, and what exactly to do, and when exactly to do it. Imagine if you did that with life. You can just reset and load a different seed if you die. Hypothetically, if the stakes of dying is as low as pressing another button to restart and respawn in a brand new world, do you think you will be loving this life and appreciating it as much? I'd imagine no. At some point, you would be respawning over and over again, just like speedrunners do in Minecraft, looking for an almost perfect start.
I downloaded some new mods and tried out the new 1.21 update. To be honest, I still cannot resist the urge to restart for a brand new world whenever I die in game. There is a whole mod built just for that specific purpose: resetting seeds with one click away. But I really want to remind myself how I got started playing Minecraft in the first place. The excitement of exploring new things. There is a Minecraft speedrun category where people try to get all advancements in game as fast as possible. "That could motivate me to get to explore the game." I paused on that thought though. All Advancements speedrunners also look for a very specific spawn into the world, go through a set procedure, just more arduous and repetitive than Random Seed Glitchless.
I don't know, maybe I will try out AA someday if I am feeling competitive again. But for now at least, I want to play the game. And that's it. I just want to play the game. Play it out fully. The game of life, too. Been trying hard not to speedrun life recently.
P.S. I think everyone should at least beat the game once if you have ever played Minecraft. If doing that alone sounds too intimidating, do that with a friend over a server. The reason I am saying this is because the End Poem is just too beautiful for this world. I nearly cried the first time beating the game after 4 hours. Now I can beat the game in around 30 minutes, but I still let the end credit run itself every once in a while. The “End Poem” has been released into the public domain by its creator, Julian Gough. He wrote a blog post talking about the stories behind it. Read the full poem here.