the adventures of lowkey birthday special oc and pals

So far, the most fun I've had with Minecraft is with character creation. newbie and I both designed our own characters. His is a cross between a vtuber and his FFXIV character; mine is loosely based on Kaeya. HGR was clearly not about to design anything, so I went online and found him a skin titled "lowkey birthday special oc" and he's using it. It's a long-haired girl in a red-and-white outfit, very much HGR's aesthetic.

Now that we finished Terraria, newbie got us playing Minecraft. Dante joined, so that makes four of us. We've been playing for three nights now. I've been trying hard to give the game a chance, but it feels like a jank Early Access beta in a bad way.

The progression is exceedingly barebones, both in terms of movement and combat. For movement, you can walk, crouch, or sprint. That's it until endgame, according to newbie. (Contrast with Terraria's progression: grappling hook! speed boots! double jump! wings in midgame, and flying mounts in endgame! I would give so much just for a basic grappling hook.) Combat is equally poor; you have a tiny sword, and you can upgrade to a tiny sword with better stats. zzzz

Additionally, there's no minimap and no map function. (newbie says you can create maps later, but we're not there yet.) This destroys me lmao. I 100% rely on maps for navigation in games. Without them, I get lost constantly. I've been trying to draw my own game maps in my sketchbook (old school), and it helps somewhat, but being bad at directions also means I'm bad at drawing accurate maps so their usefulness is limited. It absolutely kills my drive to explore and find cool stuff if I'm probably going to get lost and die on the way home and lose it all anyway.

There are also a host of minor irritants, which I'm not going to catalog because I'm already sounding like Nanis, but here's an amusing one: There are half-height blocks, but if you place a block on top of them, it hovers half a block in the air. I just wanted my bed in my room to be on a half-block raised platform. NOPE, HOVERING BED. This feels like an early access bug that should get fixed in the next patch, but it's been this way for years.

So yeah, I've spent the bulk of our game sessions being annoyed, despite the fact that "explore and build cool houses" is basically everything I could ask for in a game. Hopefully things improve once I get more used to everything and we get maps.