Minecraft - April Fools 2023

The team at Mojang has put out some very elaborate April Fools snapshots in the past.  About 2 years back, they had that crazy update where you could throw written books into portals to generate new dimensions built from almost any block, so you could have a world of end ships floating over mountains of trapdoors.  That's still fun to revisit every now and then.

This year they put out the "A or B" snapshot, jokingly called the Voting Update.  I suppose it's a spoof of their own annual vote events, where players get to vote for a biome or a mob to be developed.  Each time, we wonder, why not just put all 3 of those mobs in the game?  Seems like they would have the people power to do it.

Anyway, in this snapshot, you are bugged every few minutes by a chat message saying some vote just started, then you hit the V key to open the vote window, which gives a few weird options.  Vote for one, done.  These options change just about everything in the game.  The first one I notice was after I voted "Don't allow floating trees" and was expecting some kind of fast leaf decay, but instead, whenever I broke a log, it turned into an end rod holding up the logs above it.  And those end rods would break and reform endlessly, so I had stacks of light sources for my early-gane cave expedition.  After breaking the top log, the end rod could be broken.  It was clearly a wise-guy answer to the thing I voted on.

Other vote options were very wordy, like "change the stack size of X and the cooldown time of Y and big head mode."  There were a lot of typos in there, but some seemed deliberate.  I think "cape" was spelled "caep" every time.  Big Head mode makes the player and certain mobs have big heads.  Funny but harmless.

I watched xisumavoid run through some of the hundreds of gags, including size potions, windmilling arms, color swapping, a portal to an Aether dimension that isn't there (I still hope they add that amazing dimension someday, seeing how they hired the modder who originally created it), and more.  A lot of tiny gags is plenty of fun, and 3 or 4 big gags would have been plenty for an April Fools release.  But the list goes on and on, over 100 options, all with command line options.  

What's the biggest gag of this release?  Apparently you can jump high enough (on hyped-up slime blocks) or inflate a cow or grab 3 bee balloons and ride all the way up to ... the Moon.  And from the Moon you can see the Earth, and since the gags are endless, you can change the shape of the Earth, including a teapot Earth.  It looks like there's no air on the Moon, but you can craft air blocks and packed air blocks to bring air with you.  Another option lets you make the Moon appear huge in the sky but it has a warning about scientists not recommending it, and if you vote yet, the big Moon will pull everything into it, including you.  You were warned.

Xisuma was saying that there was some backlash to this April Fools snapshot, that some users felt that Mojang was making fun of us by taking tons of things that were asked for online and only giving them to us in this temporary fashion.  But he made a good point that these are uncompleted ideas that are going to be glitchy, not ready for the full release across all platforms.  So we get to play around for a while. That's fine.  It looks to me like they asked a ton of people in-house for wacky ideas and put together as many as they could to entertain us.  And if they're mocking anyone, they're mocking themselves and all the heck they go through with suggestions, votes and endless complaints.

Whatever is going on here, it reminds us that it's okay to just be creative and have fun.  You can also vote no to things, or even repeal previous votes later on, so it gives you an ever-changing world.  I look forward to getting back in there later in the week and seeing what else turns up.