Planning the future: The Netherite dilemma

[FishSandwich]

Hey all, welcome back to this graveyard of a forum. In the discord, we've had many discussions about alternative means of getting shulker shells and we've finally landed on a semi-acceptable solution. Shulkers now always drop 2 shells, and Chester went through the end and respawned all the shulkers killed so far. Of course, next update, we're going to get another, rare, non-renewable resource that is going to be severely limited by the world border; Netherite (or specifically, ancient debris, which is the primary ingredient for Netherite). Worse, this resource is in the nether, which means it'll be limited to the 2.5k by 2.5k nether dimension.



For those unfamiliar with the recent snapshots and coming nether update: Ancient Debris are a new ore-like type block found in the lower levels of the nether. It's extremely rare and never generates exposed to air, so you'll need to do a lot of digging to get it. Ancient debris can be smelted into a single piece of Netherite Scrap, and combining 4 pieces of Netherite Scrap with 4 gold ingots will give you a single Netherite Ingot - You can upgrade your diamond gear and tools with netherite ingots in the Smithing Table (only one ingot required per item), largely increasing their durability as well as increasing their mining speed and armor toughness a bit. All around it's a pretty valuable material that's basically an upgrade to diamond. If we're going to make exceptions and changes for shulker shells, we definitely should for netherite as well. There's a couple approaches we can take here:

1) Make a crafting recipe.
On paper, this seems like the easiest solution to implement and make it widely available. In practice, crafting recipes are a fucking disaster. Everyone has their own line for what is too cheap and what is too expensive and I don't think there's any crafting recipe for a material as valuable as netherite that more than 50% of the players could get behind.



2) Make ancient debris/netherite scrap/netherite be obtainable through bartering with piglins.
For those who haven't been looking into the snapshots, piglins are a new mob that spawn in the nether - they're basically the non-zombie versions of zombie pigmen. If you throw them a gold ingot, they will pick it up, look at it for 6 seconds, then give you an item in return. This process is known as 'Bartering' and can be automated by simply having a dispenser shoot gold ingots at a trapped piglin. For more information on this mechanic as well as the drops you can normally get from it, check the wiki page.
A possible way of making netherite obtainable is by adding either netherite ingots or netherite scrap/ancient debris to the piglin trading table (with the same rarity as netherite hoes, most likely). This would make it so you'd need over 8 stacks of gold and a good amount of time depending on how many piglins you have trapped to get a netherite ingot (or 4 times as much if you were to make them trade netherite scrap/ancient debris instead). I think this would be a nice little trade off - it'd take a lot more time than just mining for it, but significantly less effort (if you have a gold farm, that is).



3) Make ancient debris/netherite scrap/netherite drop from the wither.
The validity of this option largely depends on if someone makes a wither skull farm again once we reset the nether. Similar to the piglin option, this would require the initial effort of making a farm, but then just takes mostly time. However, it's not fully automatable, unlike with the piglins, but might require significantly less time depending on the rates of this wither skull farm. As a trade off to taking significantly less time, I thought it might be balanced to include a little bit of randomness into the mechanic, and have the wither drop a random amount of netherite scrap - somewhere between 0 and 4, maybe? Just so you don't know exactly how many skulls you'll need to acquire the amount of netherite ingots you want.

If you made it to the end of this post, congrats! Please vote on the option you like best, or suggest your own in the comments if you have a better idea (but you don't, I'm way smarter). Thanks for reading!

[Little_Billy17]

For the record, I do plan on making a new wither skeleton farm and a really good gold farm when the update hits. I think netherite should be renewable in some way, but am not too particular about the way in which we go about it. Crafting recipes I agree seem to run into disagreements over everything, so either or both of the other choices are acceptable to me.