To bonemeal or not to bonemeal

At the heart of our FTT modpack is the Minecraft tree. I have been fascinated by this cubically organic feature of the game ever since I can remember. In a world of blocks, the trees (which are nevertheless composed of blocks) intimate an actual nature more than any other aspect of the game.

In our modpack you are meant to be re-foresting the gameworld and re-imagining traditional Minecraft base building as forest building.  We want to explore a tension in the game between the idea of a player curated bespoke forest, orchard or arboretum and the idea of rewilding – the creation of forests that exist and thrive beyond the needy agencies of a human mediation (for better or for worse).

Minecraft’s vanilla mechanics allow us to reflect on this a bit. In the vanilla game trees (and forests) are placed by the world generation algorithm before players even enter the game and while trees can’t reproduce without player intervention (you can get saplings when you chop down a tree or break leaves) it’s an interesting design choice to have saplings grow into trees at unpredictable rates.  In a game that is about resource extraction (the main interaction with trees is for logging) this little procedurally driven wait time for trees to grow is intriguing. The average wait time is around 15 in-game minutes and can stretch for much longer than that.

In the normal play of the game, the wait is perceived as a challenge or problem to be overcome.  This can be done by mass planting saplings in huge industrial farms (increasing the chance that at any given moment you will have access to wood) or through the collection of bonemeal (made by using composter or killing skeleton mobs for bones).  Clicking a sapling with bonemeal will give a flat 45% chance of increasing the sapling’s growth stage (there are two stages) and can reduce tree growth times to seconds depending on how much bonemeal one has on hand.

The point of this in terms of Minecraft’s modernism is for players to intervene in the “natural” procedural growth of trees and speed them up (though bonemeal is certainly organic fertilizer 😊). The fastest, most productive and efficient tree farms become objects of fascination on YouTube.

What if we don’t allow the bonemeal mechanic to work?  What if the players must wait 15, 20, 40 minutes for a tree that in a game about forests become essential to progression.  The trees are not an option – they are part of the “win” condition of our game.

The first thing we notice is that quest line progression grinds to a relative snail’s pace as the wait time becomes a gate to progression. Since our game leans heavily into the tradition of skyblock modpacks where one is pressed to always be busy and multi-tasking different operations to get different materials to get to the next level the player is faced with a contradiction.  On the one hand you are being told to get busy and on the other you are being told to wait for the trees. 

This can and is experienced as frustration by our playtesting team, but I am loath to restore bonemealing because of this allegorical potential.  It’s trite to say to players “stop and smell the roses” while the trees grow at their own pace because we are also demanding that they overcome this problem and get to the next level of the progression.  But is this not an allegory for late modern urban life?

By the same token because FTT will be running on SunBlock (our solar server) there is already another form of built-in waiting.  The players are often stuck waiting for the actual sun in Montreal to charge the battery that runs the server.  This too can be a source of frustration, but what we are investigating is if it can also be a space within the game for reflection, interaction and indeed, play.

Yet how can you play when YOU cannot play – you are waiting for the actual sun, or the procedural trees?  What kind of play is it when it’s not your move, your desire, your goals that are front and centre?  Its interesting I think that we have less of an issue deferring to other humans… like in chess. We must wait for the opposing player to make a move and chess etiquette demands patience, but I don’t think we feel the same about an AI chess player for instance. If its slow, we wonder if its broken.

Similarly, I think our players can get used to the idea of waiting for the sun. Afterall there is not much that can be done about the weather.  But waiting for the trees is fixable, so why not fix it?  Why would we give ourselves this frustration when we don’t have to?

The answer for me is so that we can think about this very thing.  What is play when you have to wait for the trees?