When a bug exists in a game for over a decade without being fixed, you can pretty safely call it a feature at that point. Minecraft is a game with no shortage of long-standing bugs that players enjoy taking advantage of, but recently the team at Mojang has set about fixing a lot of them. Some of these are welcome changes, but the most recent snapshot for Minecraft fixed two bugs that have made the game a lot worse for a lot of people.
In case you missed it, last week the first Minecraft snapshot of the year was released, showing off two new variants of pigs, interactable foliage, and some lodestone changes. These are all cool things, but I’ve got hung up on these two decade-old bug fixes that are driving me insane.
The first is something that only veterans and PvPers will notice, but it’s a huge problem for them, as for over a decade in Minecraft, you could move 40% faster when walking and crouching by moving diagonally. It may not sound like a big deal, but it made tactics like bridging (where you quickly place blocks in mid-air to navigate over pits and escape pursuers) quick and efficient in PvP, but now it’s so much slower, which is a big problem for some of the game’s most popular multiplayer modes.
The second one is so much worse and even the most casual player will notice it. Since the earliest versions of Minecraft, you’d normally have to fall a distance of three blocks before you began taking fall damage. It’s been a fact of the game for as long as people have been playing it, but all this time, it’s technically been a bug. It has now been “fixed” so that players will take fall damage after a two-block drop, which is infuriating.
When running around worlds or building structures, players will drop two blocks all the time and it makes doing even the most basic stuff so much more annoying. Given the damage is only half a heart it’s not much of a problem there, but taking fall damage halts your forward momentum, meaning even the most basic movement becomes a stop-start pain, not to mention that it’s forcing veteran players to undo years of muscle memory.
Petitions are already out there on the Minecraft forums to “unfix” these bugs in future updates as they actively hinder the player experience, and it was frankly a weird decision on Mojang’s part to think they needed fixing in the first place. It makes me wonder if the team there needs to go through the big list of bugs that have been reported over the years and reconsider how many of them have stuck around long enough that players actually consider them to be features and slap a big “Do not fix” label over them. If not, then we’ll have to rely on the best Minecraft mods to fix the problem.
