Minecraft is an incredible game and it has sucked in a whole generation of kids, and a slew of adults too. The latest Console Edition update makes the game the best it has ever been, on console anyway, and adds a huge range of new features and improvements. The PC version is even farther ahead and the new Combat Update has brought big changes. But even one of the coolest games ever isn’t perfect. A bunch of underlying mechanics in Minecraft could still use improvement. Like these.

Minecraft Features: What Still Needs Improvement

Villagers

Villagers in Minecraft have improved many times over the years, and they’re still a giant pain. The basic mechanics of villagers and villages are fine (Except when they inexplicably don’t breed). It’s the details, like pathfinding. Villagers tend to cluster and swarm, rather than wander through a whole village. In game terms, Village centers tend to shift in a big village, leaving big parts of it derelict. Heaven forbid you’re trying to build a metropolis or something. Villagers should congregate better, spread out more, and be more willing to breed—or give better indications of what’s wrong when they don’t.

Plus we should be able to slip them into the Nether or the End, you know?

Persistent Servers On Consoles

Here’s the biggest problem with the Console Editions of Minecraft: There are no persistent servers. PC has Minecraft Realms, which isn’t free, but does provide that much-needed persistence. Persistent servers would let your friends hop into your world, even when you aren’t playing, or when your PlayStation or Xbox or Wii U isn’t even on. The world would be hosted remotely. In practice, it’s the difference between a world that your friends come visit sometimes, and a world that you all share.

In-Game Progression

Minecraft has probably the most robust online community of any game since World of Warcraft, so it’s easy to discover just about anything you need to know. Just spend loads of time on the Minecraft wiki or on YouTube, and you’ll learn it all. But the truth is, that’s what you have to do. Because Minecraft does a bad job of teaching you more than the basics on its own.

Minecraft never gives you any indication of how to enter the Nether, or of how to find the End Portal, or of what to do with it. It doesn’t teach you how to convert zombie villagers into villagers, although the new Combat update fixes this with the addition of igloos. It certainly never explains redstone—nor even railways.

Minecraft leaves you to discover everything beyond the very basics… at least in theory. In practice, it leaves you to look up everything online. And that works well enough, but the game should do that stuff on its own. It’s fine to have secrets and Minecraft will never lack for those, but some in-game way to drive progression would be most welcome for newer players. Even LEGO sets come with instructions.

Food

This one’s more of a personal quibble. Minecraft has tons and tons of different kinds of foods, from bread to pumpkin pie to watermelon. However, most of this food is—in practice—utterly useless. There’s no reason to ever eat cookies or rabbit stew or pumpkin pie once you have a basic farm going. Melons are useless outside of potion-brewing. All food does the same thing: It restores your health and satiation. Some foods do that better than others. Any reasonably experienced Minecraft player will pick one kind of food, and grow that (or raise that kind of livestock) and pretty much nothing else. Do my farms have endless fields of sugarcane? Yes, of course they do. Do I ever use it? Never.

Different food should have different effects—or, at least, consuming a variety of food should offer some kind of benefit. Players should be able to survive on bread alone, but should enjoy bonuses if enjoying a well-balanced diet.

Console Mod Support

Ah, console mod support—nearly as much of a holy grail as persistent servers, and as unlikely to be attained. The largest portion of the Minecraft fanbase is on consoles, believe it or not, and they’re cut off from the game’s incredible mod support. These range hugely, from simple things like extra textures and added blocks to tools that can analyze the world you’re in before you explore it. Then, there are full-fledged mod packs that totally transform the game. These are the most interesting, the packs like Feed The Beast and Galacticraft that make Minecraft far more complex than it already is. These mods aren’t for everybody, they’re a little shaky in terms of balance, and they aren’t always finished. But it would be incredible if Mojang and 4J Studios could enable some of the best of them to come to console Minecraft.

Better Graphics

Minecraft just looks like a bunch of blocks, man! That’s totally lame. Get some HD graphics up in here, am I right?

Totally kidding, Minecraft looks perfect.

Any other big changes you want to see?