Bedrock - City Living 2

1/9/2024

Let's try another big Bedrock pack, this time City Living 2.  It claimed to have jobs and quests as well as places to explore and new items and foods.  It feels like, in order to add items, these add-ons have to packaged as entirely separate worlds, so there is no way to combine them into one world, the way we can do with Java modpacks.  It would be nice if a resource pack could at least include new items and recipes, but it doesn't feel like that's the case.  It feels like 2/3 of all the stuff in the Marketplace is just skins.  Thousands of skins where you can look like your favorite mob or animal or fruit or vegetable.  I'm not sure why that's so popular.

I guess I was wrong about the limits of Bedrock add-ons.  This pack has so much stuff in the amazing spawn city that it's hard to know where to start.  First, there's a big tutorial area that shows you the range of items you will be seeing.  There are a lot of containers and furniture that you can punch to open/close or turn on/off, including a microwave oven, a shower that sprays water, a radio that playes music, fireplaces you light with a lighter, and more.  I almost got stuck in a portapotty.  I stole a jeep and started driving down the road -- the vehicles are more blocky that the ones in InsaneCraft but they work just as well.

Oddly, in the tutorial area, they give you 7 different tools for moving furniture around and changing their style/color, but the tools take up 7 inventory slots, so that's a lot to ask for.

Wow, there's a diner with a job where you use custom appliances to cook meals the customers ask for, with big illustrations on the wall showing how each appliance works.  Right-click an item onto the cutting board then left-click it to have an animation of a knife actually chopping it up.  Then stick it in the oven for fries.

I really hate the generic crafting interface, which only shows what you can make on a crafting table.  It gave no idea what the icon above the customer's head was or how to make it.  By trial and error I got those fries made.  Likewise, the UI never shows what an item can be used for.  Everyone in the InsaneCraft videos was finding things like fire scales with no idea what they could be used for.  On the Java side, NEI had developed a much better interface over a decade ago.  It boggles the mind that the billion-dollar Microsoft couldn't include that in the core game.  Along with the bare bare bare minimum of a button to sort chests.  Argh.

I finished that job and the chef boss said to go across to the trucker guy with my new coins and buy a truck, which worked as expected.

Okay, so my truck is a rusted piece of junk.  At least it has the little green hulu girl on the dashboard.  I can't find a way to pick it up after I placed it down.  Hmm.

Punch the microwave, r-click a potato into it and punch it closed.  The tray rotates and bakes the potato.  I even found a big fridge full of food, with many new items.  Next to it was a freezer full of meat and fish.  Even the trashbin is functional: punch to open it, put stuff inside, and it vanishes.

There was a box of pizza on the table that I could r-click to pick up a slice.  4 slices per pie.

Haha, there's a golden toilet and a grand piano.  An electric guitar on a stand that you can punch for music.  You can r-click on the toaster with bread (made in the oven), it goes down, waits and pops up again as toast.

Oh, you need to use the Removal Tool to pick up a vehicle.  I stole a teddy bear off a shelf.  And this new blue motorcycle.

There is a store with food vendors and a furniture vendor, with a little airhockey table upstairs that plays a whole game when you punch it.  There's an aquarium with two little fish inside, and with the style tool you can change their colors.

880 33 708 is in downtown.  I wonder if there is any game outside of town...

I wasn't expecting a functional Whack-a-Mole machine at the theater.  I won 30 tokens, no idea where to turn them in, almost exactly like real life arcades.  There's a soccer stadium with people in the audience and a ball you can actually punch, clearly a multiplayer mini-game.

There's a bowling alley and a lot of custom paintings.  There was an apartment that had a funny quest where you need to go in and kill the little spiders and the spawner, though the quest doesn't actually complete in any way.

So there's a huge city here, but a bit too much use of gaudy colors here, and some the textures are pretty dull.  Lots to explore, though!  It looks like the city is on an island, and I'm not sure if there even is a world beyond the island.  Would it make any sense to try and live here and play the normal Minecraft progression?  Just doing the jobs and cashing in for coins and lumping the coins into bills and going out for pizza isn't quite a complete game.