Annoying place of bark blocks
Oak, birch, spruce, jungle, dark oak, acacia wood blocks - which I am going to refer to as bark blocks - are very annoying to place. This is caused by the bark blocks being able to be rotated. Rotation refers to being be placed on the x, y or z axis. While I was building my custom tree, I have experienced it is really hard to place this blocks in a way so they would all face the same direction. Being able to place them in all the same direction is important, so the build is built consistently. (For OCD people this can be annoying too.)
Rotation of bark blocks, and the (il)logical thought behind them
Being able to place them on all axis' makes sense for consistency, but ruins the purpose of bark blocks. The bark blocks' purpose is to provide a block that is regardless of the way placed, will have the same texture on all sides. Because the wood texture looks like it has a direction, this became hard. I imagine this is why the developers chose to use an alternative texture for the bark block's "top" and "bottom" part. Being able to rotate the block does not solve this though. While making a structure, you can't have all textures on the bark block face the right direction, because of how Minecraft is made out of cubes only and not other shapes.
Being able to place bark blocks in one way only would make more sense. However, I suggest you keep the ability to rotate these blocks with the debug stick, or with commands, but by hand, you should only be able to place them where the texture on the sides is "pointing" upwards, and the texture on the top and bottom is "pointing" to South. If during the development of Minecraft in the future you add a survival friendly block rotation tool, it should be able to rotate these blocks as well.
Custom trees, and what they should drop
The main reason for the existence of bark blocks is custom trees. People like to build custom trees for decoration, or for custom world generation on servers.
Let's imagine there is a server with custom tree generation. These trees are made out of bark blocks. When chopped down, what should the bark blocks drop? Think a little bit. I would definitely say normal wood blocks, just like any other trees do.
Hand placed bark blocks on the other hand (LTT ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ) should drop bark blocks when mined.
What I suggest doing is adding a tag to the bark blocks similar to what leaves have: "placed by player". If the bark block is placed by player, it should drop itself, but if not, it should drop a normal log. Or, even a better idea, there should be instead a tag "drop normal log". This could solve custom trees on servers.
The alternative bark texture
Remember me talking about the alternative bark block being added by the developers for one snapshot only? That should a block itself, separate from the bark block. It had a nice texture, and I'm sure people would love to see it again, just not it replacing the bark block.
This block could have it's own block similar to the bark block as well, which has only the top texture on all sides. There is no need to being able to rotate this block with a debug stick or commands.
Thank you
I hope you will like my suggestion and consider adding these changes to the game. It would really help out me, and I imagine others as well. Thank you for the readers as well for upvoting, if they do.
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