MITE: Minecraft is too Easy, but Should it Really be this Hard?

Hundreds of thousands of children have played Minecraft, even more have heard of it and seen their favorite YouTubers streaming the childhood game. Gamers who don’t fill their time with building and exploring the cubic terrain often grow tired of the lack of challenge. They find the game too easy but love the mechanics. Thousands of mods have been created since Minecraft’s first release in 2009. These Mods can do anything from introducing common boss-level mobs, to giving the player superpowers and suits of powerful armor, to letting you go to the moon. The Mod I played was developed in China, the name translating to “Minecraft is too Easy,” or MITE for short. The mod has experienced a recent pickup in interest due to a somewhat famous Minecraft YouTuber, Mud Flaps, releasing a video where he beat the game in hardcore, something that no one else has ever been able to accomplish.

MITE is an interesting take on making Minecraft harder. Instead of adding creatures and features that try to kill you–like dragons, hypothermia, or thirst–they make it harder by taking things away. You start with your health and hunger reduced from 10 each to three, but you still maintain the ability to sprint. The developers made quite a few changes to the early-game. Killing passive mobs such as sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens don’t drop experience points, which you need to gain more hearts and hunger; every five levels gained will give you another of each. In MITE, it takes a total of 12 seconds to break a single block of dirt, which is 16 times longer than the .75 seconds it takes in Vanilla Minecraft.

 Like a lot of other “making Minecraft harder mods,” you can’t just punch a tree for logs and progress from there. The entire process begins with gravel. The first day decides how the rest of the playthrough goes. The first thing I did was hunt animals for food. The best target is cows, yielding the most nutritious meat as well as leather which becomes useful a little later in the playthrough. From there, based on my many playthroughs, the two best blocks—and only blocks—to go for were either dirt or gravel. Gravel is the best overall option because it can be used to build shelter as well as to yield important materials such as flint chips and nuggets of various metals. Although gravel can be harder to find than dirt and will slow progress slightly, if the cards are dealt right, the time is negligible. Since it takes so much longer to break blocks, the strategy for early-game in MITE is drastically different from the norm. There is no first dirt hut, the developers aimed to give the opening phase a more nomadic style, an interesting take on a mod that I haven’t really seen before.

Like regular Minecraft, the days and nights each last 10 minutes, resulting in a 20 minute day cycle. I have 10 minutes to gather food and materials, but I also have to survive the full 10 minutes at night. A few minutes past noon, the goal becomes finding a suitable tree to shelter on top of. Once I manage to get on top of the tree, I have to break the top leaves to stand on the very top log, protecting myself from attacks below. From there, I have to wall myself in with either dirt or gravel or face the consequences of an arrow to the face. In this mod, skeletons can shoot through leaves, so leaving yourself uncovered is certain death, a death which has befalled me more than I would like to admit. Once I have fully established a base (a hole in a tree), for the next few Minecraft days, the task is repetitive: hunt for food and find gravel. Be careful not to lose track of your base, because if you get caught outside in the middle of the night, you’re dead.

After many nights, I have made a few full flints out of flint chips, four chips for one flint. From there, with two sticks, a leather string crafter from one leather, and one full flint, I can make a rudimentary hatchet. This hatchet has a durability of three. Three logs to restart the process. Nothing can be done with these logs until the next flint is secured. From there, a flint knife is crafted with one stick, one flint, and one leather string. This knife placed in the square above a log in the inventory’s crafting grid will result in the first of many tiers of crafting tables. With two logs left, four wooden shovels can be made, speeding up the gravel gathering process; without luck though, it may end with more bare-handed gravel breaking. In playthroughs on MITE, making it as far as getting multiple shovels and having a solid base is a great sign, and is very rewarding.

In the MITE mod all wooden tools, besides shovels and clubs (which are made using the sword crafting recipe), have been removed. The first tools you can make besides wooden shovels are metal tools, completely skipping stone. Each time a piece of gravel is broken it has a small chance to drop a copper or silver nugget. Once 27 nuggets of either metal is collected, it can be crafted into a pickaxe. From here, the game progresses much like regular minecraft: mining, trying not to die, but also slowly gaining experience from smelting ore and killing hostile mobs, giving you more hearts. 

MITE is a painstaking, but rewarding mod. It has caused me much grief over the past few weeks.  Is it a game for everyone? Definitely not. Would I still recommend any and everyone to try it? Of course. The repetitive and slow process of early-game makes you slow down. It wears on your patience, something that my generation lacks. Once the game gets going though, it is a really fun challenge; grinding for xp and facing the dangers in the mines creates a fresh challenge for those who love Minecraft but need something beyond the standard hardships. I think most people who enjoy first-person sandbox games would have a good time. At least in the first few minutes.