What needs “fixed” in Minecraft: Day/Night, Water
Continuing to discuss "broken" bits of Minecraft and what might be done about it.
Day/Night cycle
My first inclination is to say that the day/night cycle is too short. Ten minutes is not a lot of time to rush outside, scan for creepers, then run to your building location. I'm building an arched bridge across a bay channel (between the spawn point and my fortress; the closest mountain was across the bay, darn it), and I spend nearly 10% of my day avoiding creepers and swimming out to the work site before I even get to work. (Creepers swim, darn it again!) I could have built a shelter closer to the build site, but then all the monsters would congregate around the build site, making it harder to get started. As it is now, at least I can dash across the courtyard and jump into the bay and no more than one or two creepers follow me. But then I have to take time to repair the fortress where I missed a creeper hiding around the corner and it blew up part of the wall. Sometimes, I think I get maybe five minutes to build out of a 20-minute day cycle.
Now, here's why I think maybe the cycle isn't too short. It creates pressure, and causes me to think about things other than "how does my bridge look?" Maybe what I need to do is mine a tunnel under the bay to the work site. Yet, if I had a tunnel from the fortress to the spawn point, I wouldn't be building a bridge across the bay! But that's an example of the kind of thinking the pressure creates. And conflict is what makes Survival mode work... it just has to be the right balance of conflict.
I would at least like the day/night duration be an adjustable setting. I don't want to use Peaceful mode... I want the challenge of working around the monsters and the dark. I just don't want to spend more time dealing with the challenges than I get actually building my bridge.
Water, water everywhere?
While I think water behavior is improved from Classic (a single block of water is an infinite source that will fill every open space it can reach up to sea level), it's gone too far the other way. If I'm digging a shaft under a massive body of water (the "ocean") and accidentally breach the ocean floor, the water only flows in for seven blocks, petering out and apparently soaking into the ground. My entire tunnel isn't flooded… it isn't sudden death or a mad swim for the surface for our adventurer. It's just a short struggle against the current to drop a block into the flow, then carry on as before.
If I dig a level trench below sea level from the bay to my moat, I expect it to fill my moat. But it won't even fill the trench. I see that this is a difficult problem programmatically. A clearly finite source of water should not increase in volume. But it's not possible to calculate the volume of the "infinite ocean"... how do you efficiently determine if the water in question is attached to the infinite ocean or not?
I really miss Classic's water mechanic when it comes to intentionally flooding an area. It's just so cool to open a dam and watch the water flow and fill everything. To fill a cave with water in the current game takes a lot of deliberate and difficult work. (You basically can't... my swimming pool looks still on top, but below the top layer, water is continuously falling down to the bottom of the pool. Jump in and you have to swim up a waterfall to get out.)
I wonder if there is a compromise to be found, but I can't figure out how it ought to work. And I do like finding waterfalls and small streams in caves that haven't filled up the entire cave. Maybe if flowing water found no place to go after three or so blocks it would start filling the space. This would still create new water blocks, but it wouldn't create an unlimited amount of water if you poured it down the side of a mountain.