As many of you know, development of the WesterosBlocks block pack has effectively been on hold for the last 2 years as a result of 1.18.2 migration efforts. But make no mistake: this was more than a mere migration update. Our custom block pack and resource pack has co-evolved organically with our server from (nearly) the very beginning, spanning multiple minecraft versions and new modding paradigms that fundamentally changed the way block development is done. Over the years, the block pack accumulated a lot of cruft that made it difficult to build upon. However, as part of the 1.18.2 efforts, we have essentially gutted out and re-implemented the entire block pack using a cleaner, more sustainable approach. The hope is that this both allows for accelerated development in the short-term, and future-proofs the pack in the long-term.
Now that these efforts are out of the way, I'm looking forward to the future of our block pack, as I know many builders are as well. Block suggestions have laid stagnant for too long, and some additions every now and then seem necessary to keep the creative juices of the community flowing. More broadly, I aim to chart a course that allows our block pack to become something more general -- a reasonably comprehensive medieval block pack that can stand on its own -- while still being ultimately subject to the needs and desires of the WesterosCraft building community, who will always be #1
But to do so, I will need ample input and assistance from the community. The following content should be considered tentative in nature; my interest here is to get a discussion going on the current status and future of our block pack so I can get an idea of how to best proceed.
First, I want to begin with describing the "WesterosBlocks philosophy", as I see it, and how it differentiates us from other popular block packs out there. Many of these are things that have been implicit in the attitudes and decisions we've taken, but have never actually been explicitly written out.
The WesterosBlocks philosophy
1. Tasteful simplicity: A while ago, a builder aptly coined this term to describe the building style that WesterosCraft has always gravitated towards. Put simply, it entails decisions that prioritize simplistic and stylized builds that visually "pop" without getting muddled down by maximalist detailing, while at the same time avoiding blandness. I find this term to be an appropriate descriptor of our textures as well. Our textures are not the most realistic or detailed out there, even relative to other 32x32 packs, but I find that their simplicity, vibrancy, and general cohesion makes for quite a pleasant viewing experience (much like how 2017's Breath of the Wild, despite not being the most realistic of the open world games out there, still had a super pretty and enjoyable art style).
2. Trading off detail on the small scale and detail on the large scale: There is an inherent trade-off between these two levels of detail in any situated building game such as Minecraft. On one extreme, with mods such as chisel-and-bits, a person might spend a month making a single gatehouse; yet, it would be extremely difficult to consistently scale this up to an entire castle design. On the other extreme, people working in vanilla minecraft have created enormous maps in very little time (such as entire 1:1 cities), but typically these are highly underdetailed on the small scale. WesterosCraft's claim to fame has always, as I see it, been our ability to complete massive big-picture projects (e.g., King's Landing) while still ensuring that every individual structure is unique and reasonably detailed. Part of this ability is due to the fact that our block pack aims to strike an appropriate middle-ground between these two extremes, offering enough options to allow a good degree of detail on the small scale, while also allowing builds to be completed at server standards in a reasonable amount of time.
3. Embracing the zen of constrained creativity: Ever been to a restaurant before and been overwhelmed by a massive 10-page menu, and thought that you'd be happier choosing from a smaller selection? There's some limited research out there that suggests that a similar psychological effect tends to occur with creativity -- that people are often more creative and more productive when presented with creative constraints, as opposed to having total creative freedom. This is one of the aspects of building in minecraft that I personally find most satisfying: having to figure out which blocks to put in which locations and how to use things in creative new ways, given the various constraints imposed by the nature of working with blocks. Sometimes it's almost like solving a Sudoku puzzle. While I would still like to expand the creative options of the pack and remove some of the more arbitrary limitations, I see the idea of "working within minecraft's constraints" as something for us to embrace rather than fight against.
4. Maintaining accessibility and forward-compatibility: There are certain fundamental technical constraints that we unfortunately have to work within as well. Every texture resource added contributes towards increasing the memory requirements to load up our modpack. More complex block models will increase the CPU usage of running the client. Moreover, it's important that we restrain ourselves to use reliable approaches rather than hacks that risk breaking in future versions of minecraft. We have always been extremely mindful of accessibility when considering development of our block pack, so as to allow our server to be enjoyable by all rather than merely those with high-end computers. The good news, though, is that I believe we still have ample room to expand before we start reaching memory thresholds -- especially since much of this was optimized in 1.18 -- so I expect we still have a lot of room for growth.
The challenges
For a long time, we have struggled to weigh the advantages of adding certain block suggestions against the disadvantages of outdating recently completed projects on the server, and the second-order effects that this might have on builder morale. This is further confounded by some disagreement within the community about whether the goal is to progress towards completion of the map, or to just allow people to build freely and have fun; as well as occasional murmurs about an eventual RP or survival server...
As I see it, the fundamental issue is captured by the following trilemma -- meaning that, of the following three options, you can only choose any two together without contradiction:
1. Maintain consistent progress towards completion of the map.
2. Maintain a cohesive standard and style across the server through redoing/updating builds that have fallen behind.
3. Continually expand generic block options.
In the past, we've sort of inconsistently tried to balance all three of these... but in general tended to prioritize #1 and #2 at the expense of #3.
Following some discussions that happened in the course of the 1.18 update -- as well as the suggestion of a new potential project management system by geeberry (of which I will leave discussion to another time and place) -- my own attitude has shifted somewhat. I've become more amenable to expanding the generic block options of the pack, while being less strict on ensuring consistency between newer and older builds; that is, options #1 and #3 above at the expense of #2.
My reasoning is that, of all the motives for people who build on the server, #2 is probably the least compelling: many of us, especially long-time builders, want our efforts to count towards a tangible goal; at the same time, we're also fundamentally a community of builders and artists who like to experiment with new things and get bored otherwise. These are, in my view, the main factors that motivate people to create. We're not a professional world development studio, and I've come to view inconsistencies in styles over time as both inevitable and acceptable for a volunteer-based creative community. IMO, we can still have both #1 and #3, but it will require a shift in the community's attitude towards embracing forward progress and creativity while decreasing the amount of backtracking that we do on the basis of outdated projects.
That said, I would still want to avoid any major breaks in consistency or additions which otherwise radically change our building style -- this would preclude, for instance, things like vertical slabs or other new fundamental model variants.
I'm particularly interested in hearing other builders' perspectives here.
The path forward
Here are my suggestions for what I see as the most pressing future steps for WesterosBlocks, in rough order of priority. These are all broad goals that I aim to pursue in conjunction with considering specific block suggestions.
Note that I see these proposals as being implemented over the long term. I would want to avoid trying to do too much at once and overwhelming the building community with changes.
Filling gaps in block sets
One of the most pressing issues that I see in WesterosBlocks at the moment is the inconsistency in the options that are available within various block sets. For example, many blocks such as plasters lack stairs, slabs, walls, and other standard block variants. Some stone bricks have variants that others lack. Many of our wood-based blocks exist for only oak or spruce palettes. Only a small handful of stone brick sets have mossy variants, etc. Moreover, there are gaps between different sets that make it difficult to create effective gradients between them. See this thread as well for a good overview of the issue, and a proposal on how to address it.
As a first step, I aim to do a systematic review of the different structural block sets to identify which variants are missing, and bring the different sets to parity. As a second step, I would like to investigate which potential block sets are still lacking, either in terms of alternates within the sets (e.g. cracked/mossy versions), or entire sets that are necessary to form gradients between other sets.
This, of course, also includes any specialized building blocks that have been requested for specific server builds.
Immersive details and interior blocks
It's no secret that our pack is sorely lacking on options for interior design and other immersive details. This is something I'd really like to improve in the future; while I was afraid of the issue of outdating existing builds, I think ultimately there is a lot of room for adding new options without necessarily making existing interiors seem inferior.
The additions I have in mind are custom blocks/models for things like food, storage, industry, furniture, etc. I'd like to further brainstorm categories within these so the effort can be relatively systematic. For instance, "food" might include crops, raw harvested ingredients, and prepared foods. "Industry" might include raw resources, tools for different types of professions, representations of final products, etc.
However: I would not want to deviate too much from a block-based paradigm, as I feel that this runs against the WesterosBlocks philosophy described above. So I would likely exclude overly complicated custom models (especially those that use non-cubical surfaces), entity-based hacks, etc. from consideration.
Improved textures & CTMs
WesterosBlocks has a number of dated textures -- including a couple that have been practically unchanged since we branched off from Dokucraft -- that would be great to update in the future. Additionally, many of our basic textures tile poorly due to lacking CTM entirely. There's a ton of room for improvement here, with relatively little effort. The main difficulty here would be ensuring that existing builds are not negatively impacted by any changes to existing textures.
Updating block models
Similarly, most of our blocks were developed before the idea of a "model' was even introduced into minecraft, so we have a lot of clunky full blocks for different types of crops, furniture, interior details, etc. It would be great to design custom models to either replace some of the existing options, or to augment them. This also includes some of the custom plant blocks, which may be able to benefit from having a model more complex than the current web shape (we have experimented with this in the past, but haven't implemented it just yet due to some issues around interior uses of plant blocks).
How you can help
My ability to implement all of the above proposals all by myself is greatly limited for two reasons:
1. I am rather busy in real life, and only have relatively limited capacity to work on block development at the moment.
2. I am not a texture artist myself. For the most part, I have either outsourced work to other people who are better at texture development, or have done simple tasks that involved stitching together, blending, or recoloring existing textures.
If anybody is interested in helping, here are two tasks where I could use an apprentice or two:
Texture development
Having a couple dedicated texture artists would be enormously helpful. If anybody wants to take a stab at practicing some textures (e.g., for any of the pending block suggestions, or for an existing texture that could use an update), I'd be happy to provide some tips (to the best of my knowledge) and provide some feedback. Once you get more experienced with creating textures in the style of the pack, I can start delegating some tasks.
Note: it's very important that the textures you create are consistent with the overall style of the WesterosBlocks pack; take care to closely study the way that things like shading, dithering, detailing, etc. are applied in existing textures. This will be a strict requirement for me to approve a new texture getting added to the pack.
Please feel free to contact me if you're interested!
Here's a quick guide for how to test a new texture:
1. Unzip WesterosBlocks.jar, go inside, and copy the "assets" folder.
2. Go to your resource packs folder, create a new folder, and paste the assets folder inside.
3. Create a text file called pack.mcmeta, and paste the following contents:
5. Now you can go into "assets/westerosblocks/textures/block" and edit any of the textures there with your own. It's recommended to find an existing block that has the same CTM and model type as the one you want to create, unless you know how to work with CTM.
Typically I use Photoshop to create textures, but any program that can do pixel-level editing should be sufficient.
Model development
For some of the tasks above involving custom models, it would also be helpful to have someone familiar with creating block models in BlockBench. I haven't used it myself, so you would want to get in contact with Thamus_Knoward for tips. It is possible for me to create custom cuboid models internally in the WesterosBlocks mod, but the capabilities are relatively limited.
Custom models can be tested in a similar manner as textures, except you additionally want to replace the models in "assets/westerosblocks/models/block/generated" with your custom ones.
Thanks to everyone who read up to this point! Looking forward to some lively discussion.
Now that these efforts are out of the way, I'm looking forward to the future of our block pack, as I know many builders are as well. Block suggestions have laid stagnant for too long, and some additions every now and then seem necessary to keep the creative juices of the community flowing. More broadly, I aim to chart a course that allows our block pack to become something more general -- a reasonably comprehensive medieval block pack that can stand on its own -- while still being ultimately subject to the needs and desires of the WesterosCraft building community, who will always be #1
But to do so, I will need ample input and assistance from the community. The following content should be considered tentative in nature; my interest here is to get a discussion going on the current status and future of our block pack so I can get an idea of how to best proceed.
First, I want to begin with describing the "WesterosBlocks philosophy", as I see it, and how it differentiates us from other popular block packs out there. Many of these are things that have been implicit in the attitudes and decisions we've taken, but have never actually been explicitly written out.
The WesterosBlocks philosophy
1. Tasteful simplicity: A while ago, a builder aptly coined this term to describe the building style that WesterosCraft has always gravitated towards. Put simply, it entails decisions that prioritize simplistic and stylized builds that visually "pop" without getting muddled down by maximalist detailing, while at the same time avoiding blandness. I find this term to be an appropriate descriptor of our textures as well. Our textures are not the most realistic or detailed out there, even relative to other 32x32 packs, but I find that their simplicity, vibrancy, and general cohesion makes for quite a pleasant viewing experience (much like how 2017's Breath of the Wild, despite not being the most realistic of the open world games out there, still had a super pretty and enjoyable art style).
2. Trading off detail on the small scale and detail on the large scale: There is an inherent trade-off between these two levels of detail in any situated building game such as Minecraft. On one extreme, with mods such as chisel-and-bits, a person might spend a month making a single gatehouse; yet, it would be extremely difficult to consistently scale this up to an entire castle design. On the other extreme, people working in vanilla minecraft have created enormous maps in very little time (such as entire 1:1 cities), but typically these are highly underdetailed on the small scale. WesterosCraft's claim to fame has always, as I see it, been our ability to complete massive big-picture projects (e.g., King's Landing) while still ensuring that every individual structure is unique and reasonably detailed. Part of this ability is due to the fact that our block pack aims to strike an appropriate middle-ground between these two extremes, offering enough options to allow a good degree of detail on the small scale, while also allowing builds to be completed at server standards in a reasonable amount of time.
3. Embracing the zen of constrained creativity: Ever been to a restaurant before and been overwhelmed by a massive 10-page menu, and thought that you'd be happier choosing from a smaller selection? There's some limited research out there that suggests that a similar psychological effect tends to occur with creativity -- that people are often more creative and more productive when presented with creative constraints, as opposed to having total creative freedom. This is one of the aspects of building in minecraft that I personally find most satisfying: having to figure out which blocks to put in which locations and how to use things in creative new ways, given the various constraints imposed by the nature of working with blocks. Sometimes it's almost like solving a Sudoku puzzle. While I would still like to expand the creative options of the pack and remove some of the more arbitrary limitations, I see the idea of "working within minecraft's constraints" as something for us to embrace rather than fight against.
4. Maintaining accessibility and forward-compatibility: There are certain fundamental technical constraints that we unfortunately have to work within as well. Every texture resource added contributes towards increasing the memory requirements to load up our modpack. More complex block models will increase the CPU usage of running the client. Moreover, it's important that we restrain ourselves to use reliable approaches rather than hacks that risk breaking in future versions of minecraft. We have always been extremely mindful of accessibility when considering development of our block pack, so as to allow our server to be enjoyable by all rather than merely those with high-end computers. The good news, though, is that I believe we still have ample room to expand before we start reaching memory thresholds -- especially since much of this was optimized in 1.18 -- so I expect we still have a lot of room for growth.
The challenges
For a long time, we have struggled to weigh the advantages of adding certain block suggestions against the disadvantages of outdating recently completed projects on the server, and the second-order effects that this might have on builder morale. This is further confounded by some disagreement within the community about whether the goal is to progress towards completion of the map, or to just allow people to build freely and have fun; as well as occasional murmurs about an eventual RP or survival server...
As I see it, the fundamental issue is captured by the following trilemma -- meaning that, of the following three options, you can only choose any two together without contradiction:
1. Maintain consistent progress towards completion of the map.
2. Maintain a cohesive standard and style across the server through redoing/updating builds that have fallen behind.
3. Continually expand generic block options.
In the past, we've sort of inconsistently tried to balance all three of these... but in general tended to prioritize #1 and #2 at the expense of #3.
Following some discussions that happened in the course of the 1.18 update -- as well as the suggestion of a new potential project management system by geeberry (of which I will leave discussion to another time and place) -- my own attitude has shifted somewhat. I've become more amenable to expanding the generic block options of the pack, while being less strict on ensuring consistency between newer and older builds; that is, options #1 and #3 above at the expense of #2.
My reasoning is that, of all the motives for people who build on the server, #2 is probably the least compelling: many of us, especially long-time builders, want our efforts to count towards a tangible goal; at the same time, we're also fundamentally a community of builders and artists who like to experiment with new things and get bored otherwise. These are, in my view, the main factors that motivate people to create. We're not a professional world development studio, and I've come to view inconsistencies in styles over time as both inevitable and acceptable for a volunteer-based creative community. IMO, we can still have both #1 and #3, but it will require a shift in the community's attitude towards embracing forward progress and creativity while decreasing the amount of backtracking that we do on the basis of outdated projects.
That said, I would still want to avoid any major breaks in consistency or additions which otherwise radically change our building style -- this would preclude, for instance, things like vertical slabs or other new fundamental model variants.
I'm particularly interested in hearing other builders' perspectives here.
The path forward
Here are my suggestions for what I see as the most pressing future steps for WesterosBlocks, in rough order of priority. These are all broad goals that I aim to pursue in conjunction with considering specific block suggestions.
Note that I see these proposals as being implemented over the long term. I would want to avoid trying to do too much at once and overwhelming the building community with changes.
Filling gaps in block sets
One of the most pressing issues that I see in WesterosBlocks at the moment is the inconsistency in the options that are available within various block sets. For example, many blocks such as plasters lack stairs, slabs, walls, and other standard block variants. Some stone bricks have variants that others lack. Many of our wood-based blocks exist for only oak or spruce palettes. Only a small handful of stone brick sets have mossy variants, etc. Moreover, there are gaps between different sets that make it difficult to create effective gradients between them. See this thread as well for a good overview of the issue, and a proposal on how to address it.
As a first step, I aim to do a systematic review of the different structural block sets to identify which variants are missing, and bring the different sets to parity. As a second step, I would like to investigate which potential block sets are still lacking, either in terms of alternates within the sets (e.g. cracked/mossy versions), or entire sets that are necessary to form gradients between other sets.
This, of course, also includes any specialized building blocks that have been requested for specific server builds.
Immersive details and interior blocks
It's no secret that our pack is sorely lacking on options for interior design and other immersive details. This is something I'd really like to improve in the future; while I was afraid of the issue of outdating existing builds, I think ultimately there is a lot of room for adding new options without necessarily making existing interiors seem inferior.
The additions I have in mind are custom blocks/models for things like food, storage, industry, furniture, etc. I'd like to further brainstorm categories within these so the effort can be relatively systematic. For instance, "food" might include crops, raw harvested ingredients, and prepared foods. "Industry" might include raw resources, tools for different types of professions, representations of final products, etc.
However: I would not want to deviate too much from a block-based paradigm, as I feel that this runs against the WesterosBlocks philosophy described above. So I would likely exclude overly complicated custom models (especially those that use non-cubical surfaces), entity-based hacks, etc. from consideration.
Improved textures & CTMs
WesterosBlocks has a number of dated textures -- including a couple that have been practically unchanged since we branched off from Dokucraft -- that would be great to update in the future. Additionally, many of our basic textures tile poorly due to lacking CTM entirely. There's a ton of room for improvement here, with relatively little effort. The main difficulty here would be ensuring that existing builds are not negatively impacted by any changes to existing textures.
Updating block models
Similarly, most of our blocks were developed before the idea of a "model' was even introduced into minecraft, so we have a lot of clunky full blocks for different types of crops, furniture, interior details, etc. It would be great to design custom models to either replace some of the existing options, or to augment them. This also includes some of the custom plant blocks, which may be able to benefit from having a model more complex than the current web shape (we have experimented with this in the past, but haven't implemented it just yet due to some issues around interior uses of plant blocks).
How you can help
My ability to implement all of the above proposals all by myself is greatly limited for two reasons:
1. I am rather busy in real life, and only have relatively limited capacity to work on block development at the moment.
2. I am not a texture artist myself. For the most part, I have either outsourced work to other people who are better at texture development, or have done simple tasks that involved stitching together, blending, or recoloring existing textures.
If anybody is interested in helping, here are two tasks where I could use an apprentice or two:
Texture development
Having a couple dedicated texture artists would be enormously helpful. If anybody wants to take a stab at practicing some textures (e.g., for any of the pending block suggestions, or for an existing texture that could use an update), I'd be happy to provide some tips (to the best of my knowledge) and provide some feedback. Once you get more experienced with creating textures in the style of the pack, I can start delegating some tasks.
Note: it's very important that the textures you create are consistent with the overall style of the WesterosBlocks pack; take care to closely study the way that things like shading, dithering, detailing, etc. are applied in existing textures. This will be a strict requirement for me to approve a new texture getting added to the pack.
Please feel free to contact me if you're interested!
Here's a quick guide for how to test a new texture:
1. Unzip WesterosBlocks.jar, go inside, and copy the "assets" folder.
2. Go to your resource packs folder, create a new folder, and paste the assets folder inside.
3. Create a text file called pack.mcmeta, and paste the following contents:
4. Load the resource pack you just created above mod assets in the resource pack options.
5. Now you can go into "assets/westerosblocks/textures/block" and edit any of the textures there with your own. It's recommended to find an existing block that has the same CTM and model type as the one you want to create, unless you know how to work with CTM.
Typically I use Photoshop to create textures, but any program that can do pixel-level editing should be sufficient.
Model development
For some of the tasks above involving custom models, it would also be helpful to have someone familiar with creating block models in BlockBench. I haven't used it myself, so you would want to get in contact with Thamus_Knoward for tips. It is possible for me to create custom cuboid models internally in the WesterosBlocks mod, but the capabilities are relatively limited.
Custom models can be tested in a similar manner as textures, except you additionally want to replace the models in "assets/westerosblocks/models/block/generated" with your custom ones.
Thanks to everyone who read up to this point! Looking forward to some lively discussion.
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