Minecraft is often just a fun place to poke around. But the call for adventure is ringing loudly in my square ears, and now that the Tricky Trials update has littered the underground with action-packed, loot-filled Trial Chambers, I’m simply powerless to resist.
I love almost everything about them, including how well they fit conceptually. Minecraft’s strength as a survival game has always been that it turns collecting the rarer rewards into a mini-adventure in itself: I never bothered with crafting a shotgun in Nightingale, because the shopping list of required unlocks and schedules seemed like several evenings of boredom. But a diamond sword here in old MC? Conquer a cave, kill the monsters inside, rip the gems from the earth and it’s yours – just like the fun you had doing it.
Trial Chambers, while focusing more on combat, concentrates the quest, combat, and loot loop on specific locations, while adding traps and a lock-and-key system to make them feel new and distinctive. As a result, these rooms occupy a middle ground in challenge and scope between mundane resource-gathering missions and much more dangerous Woodland Mansion or Ocean Monument raids, delivering a perfectly measured dose of adventurous fun without hours of prep work.
For starters, tracking down Trial Chambers basically starts with the same process as a Woodland Mansion quest – by covering a cartographer villager with several hundred sheets of paper until he agrees to sell you a map – but the nearest one is always just a map . few minutes walk. There is no four-day trek through tens of thousands of blocks just to get to the door. Yet there’s still a satisfying “Aha, found ya” moment when your pickaxe hits the metal wall, as if their discovery is a prize in itself.
The real goods are, of course, kept in locked safes, decorated with Warhammer 40K-quality skulls and only openable with keys dropped from various indestructible mob spawners. Herein lies the “trial” part: just by depleting each spawner’s supply of mobs will he drop a key, and the room has absolutely no trouble pumping out enemies from several at once.
Battles in Minecraft are rarely this chaotic, partly because the rooms themselves are lousy with traps and riddled with buttons that can flood the room (or set off a fireball) as easily as turning on a lamp. It’s a pretty dangerous arena, which becomes even more disorderly when the new Breeze crowd invades. These bouncy little rascals may not do much damage, but their aerial attacks can and will send you flying off ledges or into skeleton arrows as you go. the traps of the room in the middle of the duel.
They’re obviously assholes, but the potential for slapstick makes fighting Breezes a real laugh. They, and Trial Chambers in general, provide a level of combat challenge that feels right to me juuuust Right – there’s nothing as oppressive as the wall-nineting, HP-consuming fairy things that can quickly end a mansion run, but you can’t mindlessly attack mobs without getting surrounded and beaten to death. Likewise, I wouldn’t take on a room with equipment consisting of nothing but broken trees, but simple iron weapons and armor will do the job, making the whole endeavor easier to tackle early on.
However, for the ideal Trial Chamber experience, I highly recommend making it Ominous. Entering a room with the Bad Omen status effect will upgrade all spawners to ominous variants, making the baddies stronger in exchange for the chance to receive an ominous key that unlocks even better rewards. Brilliantly, it also fills the room with even more magical hazards, with potion bottles thrown at you from out of nowhere and arrows falling on your head if you camp in one spot for too long. Standard trial rooms can be quite risky, but my first foreboding room was the most fun I’ve had with Minecraft battles in years, despite ultimately falling to an undead child riding a chicken.
The loot is decent too, but if you’re grumbling about Trial Chambers it’s that the lockbox mechanics really play into how to effectively play a cashless gacha. In reality, I was crossing all ten fingers that those Ominous vaults would pull out the components for a mace – another addition to Tricky Trials – so my inaugural Ominous raid ended on a disappointing note when it coughed up only a few emeralds and some poison arrows . Rigged, I say. Granted, that was in addition to all the other rarities I’d picked up from other vaults and destroyed urns, but the chance of being caught specifically prices are not great. Minecraft’s wiki suggests that the part I need only has a 7.5% spawn chance on each pull – sorry, vault – and sugar is certainly not a pity system there.
I guess you could call that motivation to keep hunting for new rooms, but I was going to do that anyway because beating up skeletons while a dungeon explodes around you is a hoot. All you have to do is whip up a few hundred more sheets of paper and the adventure begins again.