What needs “fixed” in Minecraft: Mob drops
Still playing a lot of Minecraft (though I've been distracted by Katamari Damacy on the PS2 recently... very addictive game).
Over the next few posts, I'm going talk about things I'd like to see "fixed"... not new things I'd like to see in the game, but existing game mechanics that affect game play as a whole. Having played the game for awhile, I'm looking at what keeps my interest, what starts to be boring, and what I think would make the existing elements create a more compelling game.
Mob drops
There has to be more of a reason to fight monsters (hostile mobs, apparently "mob" is short for "mobile") other than "they're in the way". The peaceful mobs (cows, pigs and chickens) drop more useful items than the monsters do. Cows give me leather for armor, pigs give me pork-chops for healing, and chickens give me feathers to make more precious, precious arrows.
Spiders drop "string", and while string is extremely important to us bow-toting, shoot-monsters-from-a-safe-distance rangers, once I have a bow (and a backup bow) and a fishing pole, I don't need more string. (The new "Dispenser", which can fire arrows as part of a trap, requires a bow, so string's long-term demand just went up some, if the dispenser proves useful as a "survival mode" tool... though I suspect the dispenser is more of a novelty item for pure "survival".)
Creepers drop sulfur, which I can use to make my own explosives (TNT). Dropping sulfur is logical, but TNT isn't all that useful to me. (Maybe I just haven't found the right use. It can be used to make clever traps, but enough TNT to kill a mob destroys the landscape, which lowers its value for me a lot. It's not often I want to make huge gaping craters just to injure a few monsters.) Again, coming up with a more useful recipe for sulfur would make it more valuable. Something like a grenade, though don't call it that; a small, explosive "fire bomb" made of sulfur and coal that you can throw at monsters would be useful and not replicate an existing weapon.
Skeletons drop arrows and bones... that's nice, but I can kill a chicken and get two feathers from which I make eight arrows, which beats the two arrows a skeleton might drop. Bone is logical, and useful for survival, since it can be converted to bone meal and used as an instant-grow fertilizer on wheat (used to make bread, which heals).
And zombies drop... feathers!? Yeah, chickens may be harder to hit, but they don't hit back. It costs more arrows to kill a zombie than the feathers it will drop, and if I want to fight zombies with a sword, I wouldn't be looking for feathers. (I know others don't play this way, but I look at my sword as a last-resort weapon, for those rare times I run out of arrows and I am forced to fight hand-to-hand.)
For the most part, I don't find any reason to fight most of the monsters in the game. Only spider works well in that regard... early in the game, I realized that I was going to have to go out with my wooden sword and hunt down some spiders if I wanted to make a bow to better defend my home with. (At the time, I didn't know how to make leather armor, didn't know I could make a stone sword, and didn't know I could eat raw pork for healing and didn't know how to cook it, so some of that was the thrill of playing the game for the first time and not knowing how to play "right". Now days, by the time I attack a spider, I've got leather armor, a stone sword, and cooked pork in my pocket.)
Maybe if the bow wore out like all the other tools and weapons, then I'd have a reason to gather more string. But zombies and skeletons not only drop resources I can get elsewhere, there are safer ways to get those resources. (Killing a pig is much simpler than killing a skeleton for fertilizer, and provides more healing for less effort than bread does anyway.) The creeper is the only source of sulfur, but I really don't find TNT to be in great demand. And it's not like I have to hunt creepers to get sulfur... they willingly run up and explode next to me nearly every time I set foot out my front door, in order that I might have a plentiful supply of sulfur. And holes in the ground.
I think this is the key. Monster drops that are both useful and not duplicated by another item or source in the game. If zombies were the only source of feathers, that would change things a lot. (Not that they should drop feathers in the first place, and that would probably make arrows much scarcer.) I keep coming back to the spider/string example in my head... it made the game really fun, knowing that I was going to have to meet two or more spiders face-to-face in order to make a bow.
One thing complicating the monster drops is that skeletons and zombies drop stuff when they die from exposure to the sun. Wait in your house for the monsters to burn up, then run out and collect arrows and feathers for free. Just watch out for the creepers. If the monsters are going to drop more valuable stuff, this automatic drop may need to be eliminated. Make the mobs a little smarter so they avoid the more obvious "mob grinders"… they shouldn't be stupid enough to keep running into cactus that damages them until they die, and maybe they should be smart enough to get out of running water.
So the monsters need to drop more valuable stuff. I shouldn't spend, on the average, more resources killing monsters than what the monsters drop, or the monsters should be dropping something I can't get any other way. The risk-versus-reward needs to have a much higher potential payoff.