Some time ago I played on a minecraft server with one of my friends. This server was mostly just a vanilla server, but I found it far more engaging than most small friend servers. Because we installed Blaze & Caves. This post aims to explain what Blaze & Caves is, my experience playing it, and why I think it succeeds at things I find minecraft servers usually fail at.

First off, what is Blaze & Caves? Blaze & Caves (or BAC, as I will call it from now on) is an advancement pack, it adds to minecraft’s base achievement system by adding a boatload more of them. Nothing about the actual gameplay changes, you just have a vast list of tasks you can do. And when I say vast, I mean it, in the version we played1 there were 1183 advancements to get. These cover a large range of time commitment, difficulty and “out of the way”-ness. Some are so easy you’ll get them by accident. (Mine a piece of coal). Some are easy but out of the way. (Look at two villagers sitting in a boat together.) Some just take a long time. (Get a stack of netherite ingots.) And some are genuinely just quite hard (Kill the ender dragon without touching the ground.)

I think this mix of types is mostly very good for the mod, especially in multiplayer. People can often decide what to focus on depending on their skill, the amount of time they have, or just vibes. One downside is that the advancements that take a while can end up becoming tedious, although you could also say it gives you long-term goals to work towards. As with everything, they are nuanced. What I consider the “final” two advancements, stack of all items and stack of all blocks, end up being goals that you slowly work through throughout the whole playthrough.

I think that is a sufficient primer on the pack to talk about my experience. I will say up front, we did not finish BAC, we got to 1039/1183 advancements. This was mostly due to getting to the point where the grindy advancements were becoming more tedious than fun, and with just two people, the motivation just ended up running out. However, I do look at my experience with the pack quite favorably. The pack made me engage with all the content new versions add, which is something I appreciate. I’ve grown to appreciate features from newer versions a lot through it2. I also appreciate the way it forces exploration a lot. We played around 90% of the world without having access to the world seed, so finding things was often a case of flying around, taking in the scenes. And you know what? Post 1.18 world generation is really pretty. Looking at it is just fun.

One other thing I found very interesting in this world is that with the goal of completing the pack, we didn’t build for aesthetics much. In my experience multiplayer minecraft worlds almost always ultimately come down to everyone building pretty things, and only making practical things to facilitate making the pretty things.3 This world is very much the opposite of that, things were constructed for their practical purpose. Our base was just a village we found, and our chests are in a hole dug into a hill.

Picture of our Base Our storage system

With all that out of the way, we get to the best (or worst) part of my articles, philosophizing about random stuff. What I want to talk about is how this pack has the chance to help stop the “2 week minecraft phase” phenomenon.4 I believe a large part of why this happens is a lack of goals in the main game. Players join servers with some self-directed goals, but as those get completed or abandoned, players stop having ideas for what to do and stop logging in. There is also no terminal goal for the server, which means the excitement to play will only ever decrease over time. In the early game of minecraft often a big moment for a server is killing the ender dragon. This often leads to the biggest spike in players online, but nothing else has the same effect.

I believe BAC solves both of these problems. The former is obvious, a player will always have some task they can perform that makes meaningful progress towards completing the pack. But the second problem I find more interesting, but am less confident that BAC solves. That problem applies far more to big servers than the 2-player world I played. I do believe BAC having this final end goal could be a strong motivator to keep playing as completing the entire pack gets closer and closer. I also believe there are certain midpoints that could, if advertised right5, lead to players trying to all come online to finish them together. (Mainly things like completing specific tabs or some of the super challenges.) But this theory I would need to test to be sure of.

Overall I think BAC is a very interesting experience, and I would be interested in playing it again with the goal to fully complete it, if a group of 3+ other people would join me.

  1. 1.21.8 specifically ↩

  2. Except Trail Ruins, fuck those things omg. ↩

  3. Sometimes this is indirect, but I’d argue making farms to not have to engage with central mechanics of the game, like food, is ultimately just to focus on doing the part of the game you want to do. Which is usually making pretty things. ↩

  4. For people who are unaware, this is a common joke online. It comes down to the very common experience where a group of friends are very excited to start a minecraft server together. The server starts very active, but starts to lose hype quickly and fades into being abandoned after 1-3 weeks. ↩

  5. I use the term “advertise” here in the sense of motivating people to take specific actions, not the traditional “spam them with popups” sense. ↩