Base Minecraft gets boring quick, it sounds like you just want to play modpacks instead of the base game. There’s nothing wrong with that but it should have been the first thought to you when you felt the game was stale. I have spent way more time on modded servers than vanilla ones, even with all the updates that have rolled out that merged good mod mechanics into the base game.

Stop playing for a bit. I’ve played since early beta, I take breaks that usually go from a few months to a few years when I get bored of the game, and it makes me really enjoy and appreciate it when I do finally start playing again.

Honestly I changed over to Vintage Story. I feel like it’s more what I originally envisioned that Minecraft would eventually become.

Meaningful exploration, detailed crafting systems, and loads of other features to set it apart. Plus, it has an actual proper modding API, so it’s much easier to make/find mods.

Minecraft died when Microsoft tried to force me into their ecosystem and kept ‘threatening’ me if I didn’t migrate.

Like others, I highly recommend modpacks. My friends and I were playing on a server with one of the more recent Direwolf packs and it really reignited my interest in the game. They add content that rewards you for progression and adds ways to earn quality of life improvements.

For example, you can make a series of machines that break down and refine raw ores to multiply the yield from raw ingots but require power. Power can be harnessed in the same ways as real life, but I used a method that used fuel made from organic food mixed with hydrogen, which was gathered from electrolysis. The oxygen I used for scuba tanks to explore the oceans, and excess hydrogen became fuel for a jetpack that made navigation much more fun. And there’s things like freeriders that prevent fall damage (at the cost of durability) and allow auto-stepping over one block elevations, which doesn’t sound like much but is so nice that I find I can no longer play Minecraft without it.

You could make mining lasers that use power to break down blocks quickly and can be upgraded to target more blocks at once, be more efficient, auto-collect blocks, have silk touch, etc. Upgradable portable storage and backpacks also let you keep anything that might be useful on hand, and could do other things like play music or auto-feed you from stored food. There were other simple quality of life things like graves that kept your inventory stored where you died (and marked it on the map, and even put the items back in your inventory in their original places), a craftable experience bank, saws to cut down trees quickly, waystones that let you fast-travel, etc.

There were also several magic systems that let you do things like cast magic bolts, heal yourself, repair durability, tame supernatural creatures, transmute materials, create portals between locations, and lots of other things. I made a custom spell that let me super-jump so I could catapult across continents and was mostly limited by the speed that chunks could render. This of course had its own progression system to prevent trivializing other parts of the game.

There’s a lot more that I didn’t get into, like plenty of new mobs (that usually also had lore), bosses, storylines, frankly amazing structures that spawned radomly, new dimensions, equippabled artifacts, and new planets accessible by creating rockets. One of my friends made a colony of villagers to handle resource gathering and even base-expanding, while another created a nuclear power plant that at one point leaked and irradiated essentially the whole continent for days, excluding people who had rad suits. It was much more fun than I’ve ever had in vanilla, and there’s plenty we didn’t even explore.

My biggest gripe is the world generation. I rode a horse in the over world for 10k blocks, and it just all felt like the same - extremely gradual and basically realistic gradients.
Where are those weird anomalies? Chunk borders? Floating little bits of dirt? I used to have these epic little landmarks. I can still remember many of them to this day. In contrast, anomalies like Ravines have become incredibly common.

That’s goal 1: Tweak the world gen to be less realistic again and more cartoony. With menu or with mods. Maybe Large Biomes, too.

I hate villages and villagers. I haven’t found a way to make this gameplay fun, and I seriously think my next world I am just going to turn them off entirely. No villages whatsoever.

But really, I don’t want to try again, because: Minecraft used to be eerily, painfully isolating. And when I was a highly extroverted pre-teen that felt amazing. But now I’m a cynical lonely adult. I don’t need experiences that challenge me, but rather comfort and reassure me. Where I’m going from here is RPGs. I am lonely and I want a world to explore. This sounds like the new genre for me. I’ve started into Path of Exile, and soon I’ll try one of the many amazing single player RPGs that have released in the last few years.

I have no confidence in Minecraft because of that isolation. I could tweak the world gen and the progression expectations to my heart’s content, but Minecraft has the wrong emotional experiences and lessons for who I am right now. I guess in an ideal world I wouldn’t even need to look to games the way I do, but I don’t know when or if this is going to change.

Ive started playing minecraft create (astral) and it has really given the game new life.

I play on my Switch mostly, and it’s gotten a little frustrating. It’s like they don’t even test the Switch anymore. For instance, I get notifications that say “Blah blah has invited you to play. Press the - button.” And no matter what you do, you cannot reply to an invite. It you are out of the game, the - button does nothing, and ingame they mapped it to emoticons and there’s no way to remap either. So they literally stuck another function over the same keypress without even giving a shit, nor do they care, since it’s been like that for a while. Don’t get me started on startup times. Why does it take 2 mins to even get the game up an going? It didn’t take that long versions ago, but again, they don’t even seem to test anything on the Switch. If you are on a realm, or any online game and you press the home button, say to check your friends online status, it logs you out of the realm or online game. You used to be able to pop out to the system menu, even check screenshots, and then when you popped back into minecraft you were right there where you were when you popped out, but now, nope, just logs you right the fuck off instantly. It’s shit like that that is causing me to sour on it. Stop adding in new shit, and spend a cycle or two putting things back to like they were, and working properly. They forced us to move to Bedrock, and are now just crapping on it, thinking that we want more and more shit. Hey microsoft, we don’t. We would just like the shit we have to work properly.

I agree. Every update makes it feel more and more like one of those giga mod packs my friend forced me to try. If I wanted to play with those things I would, now I hate them so I don’t play with them. That dose however make the game less and less appealing by the update, as that seems to be the way they want to head.

I was always playing Vanilla until a friend spun up a really smooth All of Fabric server, the mods make the game feel super fresh and I’m always discovering something new and exciting

Vanilla minecraft has been stale for a very, very long time.

If it wasnt for mod packs minecrafts popularity would have fallen off a cliff a while ago.

I dont know what people are expecting from a game thats 30$ (and lower of you bought it early) game.