One of the biggest changes to Minecraft was recently announced by Mojang, which will greatly impact how developers create updates. There’s another shift in direction too, the removal of mob votes. Instead of one large version being dropped a year, there will now be smaller ones full of content. These are called ‘game drops’, having both upsides and downsides to it. What does this exactly mean? Will this negatively impact Minecraft servers? We’ll answer these questions, along with addressing the fall of mob votes in this article – let’s begin!
What is a Minecraft ‘Game Drop’?
In the official announcement, Mojang stated they listened to the community and will be providing regular small updates to Minecraft, known as ‘game drops’. In a quote, “These game drops will vary in size and will bring you features to explore more frequently.” This means that you can expect an update with new content every 1-4 months. However, they also mentioned some ‘game drops’ will be in quick succession or have longer gaps between releases.
In other words, Minecraft may receive rapid updates in shorter time spans never seen before. You can think of these as snapshots, but official releases of the game that aren’t in any experimental stage. This could have massive benefits for the community, as almost everyone agrees that more frequent updates are best. However, this could have negative effects!
Will This Impact Servers?
Yes, absolutely. With each ‘game drop’, Minecraft servers will need to constantly stay up-to-date. This becomes even more of an issue on Spigot or Paper, as each plugin will need to be updated. Although, it should be noted that certain addons or versions may be cross compatible. For instance, Minecraft 1.21.1 allows 1.21 players to join without issues. If this support remains true for future game versions, then hopefully not too many issues will arise.
Regardless of compatibility or not, constantly updating your Minecraft server can be a hassle. If each version releases new blocks, items, structures, or mobs, then world generation may also be impacted. We strongly recommend backing up your world before updating to newer versions.
Would This Affect Mods?
Yup! Mod developers will need to update their projects with every newly released Minecraft ‘game drop’. Depending on the rate of drops, this could quickly become overwhelming. Modpacks will suffer the most, as they are large collections of mods – sometimes totalling over 300+ mods in a single pack. Unless some type of compatibility is implemented to act as a safeguard, you can expect lots of outdated mods.
On the other hand, this may not be a huge issue. It depends on how Mojang implements these ‘game drops’ since they don’t necessarily have to change the entire game version to release extra features. This was always the case, but now we’re in uncharted territory.
The End of Mob Votes
In addition to all these massive changes to Minecraft, there’s an extra one – mob votes. Mojang decided to listen to the community and completely shut down voting for mobs at Minecraft Live. Although, this wouldn’t even be possible with ‘game drops’ being implemented. Remember, they’re moving away from one large update in the summer.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to see new animals, monsters, and sealife added to Minecraft without some being held up. This concept also applies for biomes or anything else that players could have voted for to be in the game.
The Future of Minecraft Development
Many are skeptical about these ‘game drops’ coming to Minecraft, but this wasn’t the first time it happened. Mojang released Bats, Pots, & Competitions, and Shy Friends & Armored Paws, respectively. These were the first iterations of ‘game drops’ since they wanted to test it out before officially announcing these newer kinds of releases. Throughout this article, we’ve discussed several possibilities that may impact servers and modding.
However, it could be that everything will turn out okay for the future of Minecraft. The only 100% confirmed hassle players and developers will need to tackle is constantly updating. Besides this, we can only guess at what the true impact of ‘game drops’ will do. With all of this in mind, we hope you learned more about Minecraft ‘game drops’ and the end of mob votes!
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