This week we released a side snapshot for Java containing a work in progress version of the Deep Dark feature set, including the Deep Dark biome, Ancient City structures, Sculk blocks and...THE WARDEN!
As well as your general feedback, the team also prepared some questions that they would love to hear your thoughts on after playing:
- Was the Warden challenging? If so, what did you enjoy / not enjoy about your encounters with the Warden?
- Describe any encounters you had with the Warden - did they feel enjoyable?
- Were you able to figure out how to sneak around the Warden?
- Were you able to loot chests in the Ancient Cities without being killed by the Warden?
- Describe how the darkness effect felt
- In your encounters with the Warden, how scared did you feel?
For more details on in this snapshot and how to access it, check out the blog post over on Minecraft.net.
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I loved the experience of the warden and deep dark. Half of the city for me was in an aquifer but I know that'll be fixed. However, there were some things that I think need to be addressed:
1.) Aside from things like pillaring, digging, lava, and water, it is easy to cheese the warden by just dropping an item onto a sculk sensor. It sends a constant signal to the warden and you can just walk around with no fear.
2.) The darkness effect is a bit too dark. It makes it hard to get away from the warden because you can't see what you are doing. I would place torches, but that would just alert the warden. I would place wool to occlude the torch placing, but I can't see if I am placing it on sculk blocks. I know this tension is something that you want to achieve. But it is unfair and frustrating if you can't see anything at all. So I think the darkness should be a tad brighter.
3.) This might be a bit of a weird one, but the footstep sounds are too loud. The footsteps clash with the deep thumps of the warden's heartbeat and the soft warble of the antenna detecting vibrations, which is what you should be paying attention to. Being with a warden is tense, and the loud, higher-pitched footsteps take away from that tension. Maybe they could be lower pitched like the iron golem's footsteps or just less loud.
4.) More sensors! I found that I could walk around without much care. More sensors in the cities would up the tension if almost each step was accompanied by the clicks of a sensor.After an hour and a half of testing the Warden's mechanics and behaviors, here are some things I found:
1) Whether or not you're stacked with full enchanted Netherite armor with a few golden apples, snowballs, torches, and blocks, you will be able to easily outrun/avoid/defeat the Warden by blocking up or running out of the radius of the Warden if there are a lot of obstacles in the way such as the ancient city(Which is roughly 32 blocks).2) You can avoid any or all kinds of sculk blocks (The most important being the Sculk Shrieker) By destroying the sculk shrieker first with a hoe if none others are nearby. Based on my tests, the sculk sensors only occasionally detect the shrieker being destroyed. (However it may be fixed in the future.)
I would still recommend finding a way for the Warden to continue pursuing you and somehow be able to increase the speed for the Warden by a little bit. The player can still outrun it if given enough obstacles and blocks to do so. As for players who would go underground, block themselves in, or put them inside one block tall holes, it would also be nice to see a new mechanic or small trick for the Warden to chase you. After playing it for a while, the Warden doesn't seem all too scary when you give the player the ability to react and easily counter the Warden and continue to explore the deep dark, or ancient city.Registered User commentedComment actions Permalink- Edited
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I feel like it's way too easy to escape the Warden as often it will get distracted by random bat from a nearby cave that flew into a block instead of going after the player. To solve this, I think the Warden shouldn't get angered by any bats that it hears nearby. This way, the player can't as easily escape the Warden just because a random bat distracted it.
I think a great ability for the warden to have in order to stop the cheesing of it is a ripple attack. Similar to the skulk spreading the particles will travel from block to block out from the warden and hit the player similar to the dragons breath. It will also give you poison, nausea, and slowness, but the warden will only activate this ability when the player is not moving and the warden can't get to them. I is a good choice because no matter if the person builds up or digs into a wall the attack can reach them. The combination of potion effects will make the player want to get away, but it will be difficult to stay coordinated. I also think it makes sense as the warden is part of the skulk, so it acting as a skulk catalyst for an attack makes sense. I would also make the warden seem like a combination of all three blocks; the sensor is its ear things, it can give the darkness effect like the screamer, and it could spread the skulk like the catalyst. I think it would be a good counter to the normal cheesing methods.
The warden is very scary I'd rating him a 8/10 If you dont know how it works.
Right now I feel that the warden is very easy cheeseable, and if you find a city you just can mark down the coordinates go to your base, get rid of all your inventory and explore the underground city naked, without any risk as mobs dont spawn in that biome.
I have got a hardcore world that i have played for 3 years and I feel that the risk is way to high for the trash loot that you can find even though the warden is very easy to cheese. Right now piglin bastions are easier, way more fun and they have way better loot than the underground cities.
To solve all this problems I would make things spawn so you have to go equiped if you want to loot the underground city, i would put better loot and solve the cheeseness of the warden.
The concept is amazing and trying to conquer an underground city with your friends is an incredible expirence but digging 3 blocks down and negate all danger is an strange mechanic
(Sorry for bad english)
the warden should be able to crawl or go through the ground if there are blocks in the way of you and the warden. he sould aslo be able to merge with the ground and grow roots or temticals that can get higher than 3 blocks and attack you, but only if your in a specific range.
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Let's see what I noticed
1. The function key shortcuts were going haywire, sometimes the shortcut wouldn't work and I'd have to click it a bunch of times. Plus it only occured in the snapshot.
2. The darkness effect didn't go away even after drinking milk(just wondering if it's supposed to be that way). Also if I got the darkness effect in survival and changed to creative, the effect still persisted. This would really become a pain for creative play.
3. I summoned a bunch of wardens and pillared up and waited but they didn't despawn. Maybe it was because they kept hearing each other's sounds. Also I noticed it was possible to summon 2 wardens simultaneously in survival. If that happens then God save Steve/Alex. Would be good if warden had some other cooldown mech to improve stealth play.
4. You guys did great with the city, the buff warden, the ambience.... (Applaud)1. The Warden in its current stage is not challenging enough. It has a 1-block attack range and it is easy to avoid getting attacked by pillaring by at least 2 blocks high. I am still hopeful of future developments to avoid cheesing the Warden.
2. Trying to run away from the Warden is intense because it is so fast and you have no time to eat food if it is tailing you. It makes a very good atmosphere of blindly running through dark caves hoping you encounter a good nook or cavern where you can stop the Warden in its tracks.
3. Make the Warden deflect projectiles.
4. Make the Warden immune to lava, fire and blast damage.
5. Doing test fights against the Warden was fun; but fighting it in survival is nonetheless very difficult
6. Yes, it is possible to sneak around the Warden as long as it is not aggressive yet.
7. Yes, I was able to loot chests without being killed. The abundant naturally-generating wool makes for some good bridges and removing shriekers is a fair strategy
8. The Darkness effect is alright as it is right now. It creates a feeling of helplessness in the presence of the Warden. With enough distance, it also makes the Warden just out of sight but within earshot which adds suspense to the encounter
9. Encounters with the Warden are intense. With all the ambience, the Darkness effect and sound-effects all put together. .
The features so far are all great, and i'm looking forward to using them in my world.
The warden is legitimately terrifying, and its initial spawning out of the ground in front of me made me jump. I would recommend a way for wardens to phase through walls in a similar way that they spawn through the ground, if they can't find a path to a player. I think pillaring away is fine though.Looting chests was a challenge, but i feel like the chest loot could be improved.
I like that the reinforced deepslate is pushable with pistons. that is such a good game mechanic for a block with no dropped item. It allows for a huge range of uses.
I like the mechanic of the skulk, but i do wish that it could be blown up with tnt and drop experience, like regular ores. That would be a rewarding feature for players and incentivize building a way to automate collection.
In all, great work ya'll. this update is brilliant, and i'd say it's headed in the right direction!
The attack animation for the warden is a bit weak in my opinion. Would be cool to see a bit more of an arm swing.
It would be cool if in spectator mode when you spectate a Warden you just have a black screen (because he’s blind)
Cheesing the Warden: What if you could only hurt the Warden from behind? I'm thinking of something similar to the Halo Hunters. I think it would make pillaring useless and force you to keep moving around.
-Walking_Dad_Joke
I feel the overall atmosphere and design is fantastic!
But these are my main points of feedback:
The reinforced deepslate is a fantastic edition, especially with the unintentional feature of being able to be moved with pistons. Please keep this unintended feature! If players are smart, creative, and determined, they could piston these witherproof blocks to the surface, which could be used in piston doors, flex decorations, and most importantly a means of containing the wither! You may say the wither part is not good, but if you don't keep this feature then we'll just continue to cheese it in bedrock patches, which is less effort and is a reward with no challenge.For the deep dark biome/skulk patches itself.. Its cool but i feel its lacking in variety to feel like an actual biome. If perhaps some skulk vines could hang from nearby ceilings. Its purpose is to slightly counter sneaking(like the warden sniff). These vines will hang low, and if any mob passes through, it'll slightly illuminate and signal to the other skulk blocks of your presence. (Some extra skulk dwellers would spice it up too)
Lastly i found the warden too easy to cheese, but i have a couple ideas to fix that. First: a special wall climbing animation to counter players that pillar. Second: a special ground slam if falling from heights. Third: dig through walls via animation for those that block themselves in a hole. Fourth: a large leap for those that retreat to higher ground. Cement fear into cheesers :)
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The snowballs you find inside the chests in the Ancient City should be throwable rocks instead of snowballs. It's just kind of weird to have random snowballs laying in the chests without them "melting" if we think it lore wise.
-lageri
The Warden can be quite challenging, but I did find a bug where it got really focused on killing a bat, and walked into a corner (and the bat was gone), and it was still just standing there and not even trying to attack me (I was in survival mode). After about a minute, it all of the sudden got aggressive toward me after a few tries of making noise to lure it to me. I do really love the digging mechanic, where after a minute it will despawn, but I feel that to make the warden more challenging and to prevent cheesing (making the fight unfairly easy), the warden should be able to "dig" toward the player, similar to silverfish. I also had a hard time to place torches, and combined with the darkness effect, it made it a bit annoying. I do love the Warden and the way it is implemented though, those are just my few criticisms.
Also, a suggestion: I know the purpose of the Warden is to avoid it, but I think that having a bit of an incentive to go defeat the warden as an optional challenge would be cool. A concept I thought of is that the Warden, when first killed, drops "the warden's heart," and, like the dragon egg, there can only be one naturally obtained in a world. This way players wouldn't try to farm the warden, and after that first time, there would be no reason to summon it. The heart would act like a trophy and a placeable block, with maybe a slight benefit like a beacon effect. It could have cool particles around it, and it will occasionally make warden whines.
You should add new dimension
The Warden color is a sort of dark blue and it may be confused with the old end color. The enderpearl is said to be this blue/greenish color because of the old eye texture od the enderman but now that he has purple/pink eyes I think it would be more fiting to change it. Same for the ender eye, the end portal gate and the end portal.
The shriekers sometimes generate under lava
As of now, the Warden is just another useless mob in the game. Now, I don't mind the challenge but if the Warden is supposed to be that hard to kill/avoid, it should guard something extremely valuable. The Swift Sneak and the XP storage in blocks are hardly worth the challenge. Basically, you don't get much of a reward for successfully avoiding/killing it since it doesn't drop anything either.
The warden is strong, but I feel as though if we're going for a natural disaster type mob here, we need to make it way harder to avoid. I also was able to kill the warden by pillaring up which seems a little like cheesing it
Was the Warden challenging? If so, what did you enjoy / not enjoy about your encounters with the Warden? I felt like it was really easy to pillar up and I noticed he has a very tiny hit radius, may be fun for the shriekers to have a chance to spawn a phantom so that I can't just hide on a pole.
Describe any encounters you had with the Warden - did they feel enjoyable? They were very enjoyable
Were you able to figure out how to sneak around the Warden? Nope
Were you able to loot chests in the Ancient Cities without being killed by the Warden? I was with the use of cobwebs, an extra, and visiting submerges segments
Describe how the darkness effect felt
In your encounters with the Warden, how scared did you feel? The warden was adequately scaryRegistered User commentedComment actions Permalink- Edited
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I had a lot of fun with it and got thoroughly scared with the features; however, I noticed the pathfinding of the Warden is quite odd, since it willingly went into deep water even though it can't swim out. I did like the darkness effect, although I suggest that instead of making night vision completely eliminate it, it would detract from it and make your vision almost normal. I also love the cities, and I found it was nearly impossible getting the chests without summoning the warden (that's a good thing). I would love to see some better loot in the chests though, considering how difficult it is to get them, and how rare the cities are.
Would it be too much to add like a phantom spawner or something to get you off noob poles and also a spawner could be really fun!
The loot definitely needs to be buffed, and majorly. The swift sneak enchantment is the only thing really worth going down there for, and that is only really useful for looting more cities. This is an extremely difficult structure to loot, and the items aren't that great, or worth it (especially on hardcore). If they don't change the loot, I wouldn't have any incentive to go down there in survival.
Sculk patches should be more likely to have shriekers. Its not uncommon for you to wander the city for several minutes, tripling several sensors, without any danger of the warden arriving.
I'll be saying some stuff that needs to be changed about the wardens.
• First i believe that wardens needs more Health, for example from 500 × 250 to 800 x 400 health points. Reason?, to make it a non-fightible mob and more to avoid it rathen than just straight fighting it.
• Wardens is easily winnible, you can cheese him in many different ways, especially with building up, or Blocking hes way with a sideways line or building iron golems while fighting or placing water etc.
• When the wardens emerge, and you get the "Darkness Effect", you shouldnt be capable on placing any block or Specific blocks, like iron block etc, to avoid players from building iron golems and building up.
• Wardens Must jump higher if needed to catch a player
• Bats must get Canceled from spawning in the deep dark, or wardens and sculk sensors shouldnt get vibrations from them.
• Wardens can emerge from any block including lanterns.
I believe this is how you make wardens more Scarier and harder to kill!
I love swift sneak but it being mutually exclusive with depth strider in particular really hurts its usefulness because depth strider is just so good that it’s hard to give up. I think it would be better if it was still mutually exclusive with soul speed but not depth strider and frost walker to improve its usability.
I feel that the swift sneak enchant should go on the leggings, it makes sense for what it does but it also gives an enchanting goal for leggings behind the 3 standard ones and there's already so many enchants for boots. On the other hand I like the idea of having multiple armour sets, with there being 4 main types and the norm get netherite, put it on and forget about it, It'd be cool to see more conflicting enchants in future forcing is to consider what armour we have on and making is be more prepared or less equipped or different things. I will say, I'm very excited and I'm enjoying it so far, thank you!
I think the warden should be able to swim in lava and breathe in water, as without that he’s very easy to cheese.
Also, I feel like the (possibly) bug of the reinforced deep slate being pushable should be left in. It’s not practical to live in an ancient city anyway and transporting this block would be very difficult, but it does give a very cool mechanic for those who are willing to put in the effort. Yes it does make cheesing the wither possible, but that can already be done much easier using the nether roof or end portal. You could make the block transparent (in redstone terms, I.e. non solid) to avoid that.
I’d put the swift sneak enchantment on the leggings because it’s the piece of armour without anything interesting about it and the boots already have tons of enchantments (allowing mixing Swift Sneak with other boots enchantments wouldn’t really do anything bad).
Also, no mobs spawning in the ancient cities is a cool mechanic, though it might be abused by some players that clean the area out so something to discourage them would be nice. The Warden is there but it can be removed by removing the skulk shriekers.
1 First off the warden was terrifying and the ambiance was amazing. However with the amount of wool around it was incredibly easy to rn back to the structure and run off away from it to safety before it even has a chance to spawn
2 The heart beat sound was probably a be of the things that makes it more intense. However I feel like darkness could be stronger and I feel like the whole place should be lit exclusively by candles or lower levels of light source, maybe that means any light splurge placed in that biome gets a debuff in brightness almost like that biome swallows up light and I think it would be fitting since it is called the deep dark
3 Again as mentioned before avoiding the warden was quite easy, I did test going toe to toe with it using snowballs and trying to get around it and it’s not super hard but it is intense maybe his sniffing mechanic should be more frequent? I’m not sure but I wouldn’t mind it be much harder.
4 I was able to loot chests especially since some didn’t have a shirker nearby so I didn’t have to worry about being sneaky I did like the chest loot though, that new enchantment felt a little too infrequent but that’s probably intentional.
5 I touched on this earlier and I feel like it could be better it looks great but it’s still pretty bright around light and the space around the player that they can see is a bit to much I think. Again I would love for the deep dark to passively make it have a moody brightness
6 Warden made my heart pound
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