Dare you join us for another journey
into the minds that make Minecraft?
[CRICKETS]
Undeniably fascinating.
Welcome to How We Make Minecraft!
When Minecraft launched in early access
in 2009,
it actually launched without crafting.
Luckily, modern Minecraft is all about the crafting.
Here's a variety of buildings I've crafted over the years from my impressive portfolio.
But why is crafting so satisfying?
Imagine it as the difference between
buying a table and crafting your own table.
Buying a table is quick, easy, maybe even a little exciting,
but ultimately an impersonal, fleeting transaction.
But the act of building that table can give your life purpose and meaning.
Hopefully not for the first time.
Sure, your homemade table may not have the correct amount of legs,
and this keeps happening when you put plates on it.
Nevertheless, it's not just any table -  it's your table.
Everything is more satisfying when you
do it yourself.
That's why I never go to the hospital
and instead do all my open-heart surgery
on myself at home. It's just more rewarding - spiritually, if not physically.
But what makes our crafting work?
One of the first things you see in
Minecraft is the crafting grid.
This is too small to build a lot of the
stuff in the game.
So we should change it to a bigger grid,
right?
Argh! My eyes! Get this blasphemy away from them!
Ah, that's better. The 2x2 grid is
designed to encourage you to
experimentally place things in it,
but not be too intimidating.
It's the first step of progression
in the tech tree of the game, and
hopefully it won't be long until you
discover the second step -
one of Minecraft's most basic recipes,
the crafting table.
It'll give you access to a new crafting
grid that's a gigantic,
gargantuan, mega huge size of
Three by three!
I know, I'm scared too.
What do you think is the most unintuitive crafting recipe in Minecraft?
Let us know in the comments, and we'll try not to cry ...when we read them alone at 3am.
[SOBBING]
Here, we're telling the player that five
wooden materials
will give you a wooden pickaxe. If,
however, we made it so you needed five
feathers to craft a wooden pickaxe - 
well, that logic doesn't really track.
Not only is it bad news for the local
chicken population,
it's going to annoy players and make
them lose faith in the logic of our crafting system.
We'll end up with millions of angry unwilling feather collectors protesting our offices,
and nobody wants that, least of all me.
I'm very ticklish. Please leave me alone.
Let's say we finally answered fan demand,
and added the keyboard to Minecraft.
So, what would the crafting recipe look
like?
I've gone with three note blocks in the
middle, a u-shape formation
a bit like the shape of a keyboard, and
two obsidian blocks for legs.
Hopefully that's enough visual hints to help the player figure the recipe out for themselves.
If the keyboard just used a common block,
like wood, then it becomes one of the
easiest
and therefore most commonly constructed items in Minecraft.
This doesn't just make it less special,
it also breaks the structure of the game.
Good luck surviving your first night, if
our stupid design choices
have misled you into building a bunch of
keyboards to defend yourself with.
[STEVE FRANTICALLY PLAYING KEYBOARD]
[CREEPER HISSING]
[MASSIVE EXPLOSION]
When it comes to item durability,
Minecraft can be a bit of a bully.
It feels like you've barely dug up
anything before we snap your shovel
or pick apart your pickaxe. But we're not
doing this solely to be mean,
we're incentivizing you to seek out rarer, more powerful materials, that you can use  to build
stronger, more durable equipment. Smashing
all your wooden toys
is how we've decided to do it. Heh heh heh heh.
I'm sorry.
The structure of crafting hasn't really changed much in Minecraft,
and that isn't just because we're lazy.
We know other crafting games give you a
lot more options.
But in Minecraft, we only let you place
one block at a time,
and we lock you into a first person
perspective,
even though it'd be easier to press a
Mobbo button that makes Mobbo craft for you.
[KAZOO SOUNDS] No Mobbo, no!
It may seem like we've made a massive
oversight, by not giving our players
massive oversight,
but that's by design. This way makes it
more immersive, and we think more fun. If we had you just
clicking through menus to place blocks
en masse,
then Minecraft could quickly stop
feeling like a game
and more like filling out a tedious
spreadsheet.
Hands-on crafting is the core gameplay
loop that we think
makes Minecraft special. When you finish
a build like,
say, this epic castle,
we want you to look upon your
masterpiece knowing you placed every
block and crafted every tool.
We're not saying this approach is the
correct way to do a crafting system,
otherwise all the other cooler crafting
games might stop talking to us,
but it's our approach
and we think it's a crucial part of Minecraft's success.
And there you have it! What would you like us to cover in the next episode? Let us know in the comments.
Oh, but make sure you write "how much shampoo do the developers use",
because that's what the next episode is about.
See you next time.
