User talk:Auldrick

Hi, can we talk?
Hey, i want to know why you deleted my edit, The Better Together Update... –Preceding unsigned comment was added by Piporgames (talk • contribs) at 21:06, 31 August 2017 (UTC). Please sign your posts with
 * Generally, articles are supposed to have a consistent layout. For more information, see MCW:LAYOUT. The BlobsPaper.png 14:02, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
 * Welcome to the wiki, ! To answer your question more specifically,


 * 1) Articles should not start with a heading. The initial paragraph, called the "lede", should be a brief (1-3 sentences) summary of the topic, and the article title is its heading.
 * 2) Although it's common knowledge that Sony has not accepted the BTU, they have not publicly given the reason you stated as far as I know, so this is speculation. Speculation in main articles is not allowed.
 * 3) The 7/31/2017 update section had potentially useful content, but included your personal commentary ("sadly", "Obsolete") and "" tags that look like HTML but aren't valid. Articles should take a neutral, impersonal point of view per the style guide. I couldn't tell what you intended with the tags, and you didn't cite a source for me to research, so I didn't know how to fix it. If you had cited a valid source, I might have tried to work the information into the article. However...
 * 4) Some of what you said is simply wrong: The Xbox 360 and PS3 are not "Obsolete" as long as they can still play their disc versions. I'm sure there are many people who are only interested in playing the minigames, and to them the BTU is irrelevant. They are not being "forced to migrate to newer consoles in order to continue playing Minecraft". They will have to migrate if they want new features, but that's simply a fact of life. When you buy a game, you're entitled to that game as it is; you can usually expect updates for a period of time, but not in perpetuity because technology becomes (i.e. it is not "made") obsolete. What you were doing was complaining about that fact, which you're free to do on many other forums, but it doesn't belong in an article.
 * With all that said, though, I encourage you to continue editing the wiki, after becoming more familiar with the Layout guide Blobs2 linked above. You might also find the "Editing Help" section on my user page helpful. --– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 15:08, 1 September 2017 (UTC)

Template:Exclusive
Hey Auldrick, could you point me to a page or two where  wasn't being recognized by the  ? There's a couple things I'd like to try to see if the problem can be easily fixed (since it makes absolutely no sense to me why a  would work, but an exactly equivalent   wouldn't), and not having to re-break the template and then hunt down such cases myself would probably be the ideal way to go about it. =) 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 17:30, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I noticed it on Skin/Skin pack, then checked another but I've forgotten which. I think the warning about replacements with a unique string (strip marker) in the #ifeq documentation is causing it. It seems to be saying that because of how MediaWiki works, during the template expansion the #ifeq gets processed at a point in time when its parameters have been temporarily replaced by unique strings, like variable names, and the result is that the #ifeq is comparing the unique strings instead of what they refer to. --– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 17:40, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
 * : I've been investigating myself using a copy of your revision in my sandbox, and I think I might have reverted in panic, though I could swear I saw just "Console Edition" in the Categories: list at the bottom of the pages I checked. I can't seem to reproduce the problem now, though. In part, I got confused because "Console Edition" still appears in the logo and the text beneath it. The logo shouldn't be changed, but the text should, but it hasn't and I didn't think to change it when Goandgoo asked me to change the category. I'm going to try to fix the text now in my sandbox, and I'll restore your #ifeq code when I do (assuming the problem I thought I saw doesn't come back, of course). --– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 18:26, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
 * How did this go, by the way? It doesn't make sense that #ifeq would have problems with strip markers; I've used it for years with no concern whatsoever over when in the parse it gets handled, and have never run into a problem like this. 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 17:06, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I have implemented the completely rewritten Exclusive, using #ifeq where appropriate, and it seems to be working perfectly. I must have been confused by the logo and erroneous (because I neglected to change it) text. The commenting-out-newlines technique works beautifully, letting me format templates much more readably, and I plan to use it from now on. The only concern I have is that people with a programming background might copy the style without realizing that parser functions aren't control-flow keywords. I guess like me they'll learn, though. Thanks again! --– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 17:22, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

User subpages link
In case you're not aware, there's a simpler way to link to your user subpages: Special:PrefixIndex/User:Auldrick/. This page doesn't have the prev/next listings links that Special:AllPages does, and can also be transcluded to include the list directly on another page, which is the method I use to generate the list on my own userpage. 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 17:09, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Or subpages, which uses Special:PrefixIndex too . Use Auldrick :D – Dentedharp90041tce 17:24, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Thank you, both of you. (And I'm flattered that anybody is watching my user talk page!)--– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 18:17, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * Aah, Subpages uses DPL... Given that, if all you want is a straight list, and don't care about the formatting, I'd still recommend transcluding the specialpage instead, since that comes with less overhead (and isn't reliant on DPL, which theoretically could end up temporarily disabled or otherwise broken without warning). 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 18:37, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
 * I already decided to keep the SpecialPages link, assuming it had less overhead, but I'm planning to start a personal project that will involve a number of pages which I'll put in my sandbox. I was thinking subpages could be a better way to index those. I couldn't find any information about #dpl, however.--– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 18:43, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

NOT Speculation
I would like to point out that my contributions to the enchantments page are not speculation all thre enchantments Impaler, Loyalty, and Slipstream Dash are referenced on the official minecraft page and Loyalty's effect was revealed on MineCon Earth and Impaler was revealed on another livestream. The only one not given specific details is Slipstream Dash which is stillconfirmed on the officialpage, we just don't know what the one does or the values for the enchantments. –Preceding unsigned comment was added by ThatManderin (talk • contribs) at 16:10, 27 November 2017 (UTC). Please sign your posts with
 * Please see your talk page. We do not add information about features that have no been added to the game yet, either in a development version or a release. Also, what "official minecraft page" are you talking about (not that it matters in this case). If you're going to cite an official source, give a link to it. Otherwise it's just your say-so. --– Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 17:58, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Splash Potion Duration
According to your undo of my change: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/index.php?title=Brewing&oldid=prev&diff=1223830

I just checked the duration of potions in Minecraft. And since the splash and normal ones have now the same duration, I searched for more information and found this: https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-85891

So the same duration works as intended.

Anything else you need to know? –Preceding unsigned comment was added by Adversarius13293 (talk • contribs) at 16:43, 18 June 2018 (UTC). Please sign your posts with
 * Interesting, and surprising that it's gone two years without being corrected. I admit your edit was correct for Java Edition. However, in Bedrock the splash potion's duration is still 3/4 of the drinkable potion's; I tested it before I reverted your edit. I invite you to restore your previous update with the differences noted, so you can get credit for the edit. Please also specify which duration applies to Legacy Console Edition, if you know. Otherwise, I guess just leave it unspecified. – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 14:59, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
 * I also find it very suprising, since nearly every information I could find still used the 3/4 effect duration. Would be nice if you could correct it? I am only using the Java edition, and don't know how to correctly edit the differences between each edition in the wiki. I don't want to mess up Bedrock information, just to correct the Java ones. Adversarius13293 (talk) 15:14, 18 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Edit has been done; see here. We have an only template to mark differences between versions, but it doesn't fit well in situations like this. We're getting ready to look at a more versatile way to do it, but for now I just wrote it in as prose. – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 15:41, 18 June 2018 (UTC)

Patroller right
Hi! Dinoguy1000 has put you in the patroller user group, which allows you to mark other edits as patrolled and rollback edits. It's strongly recommended to take a look at MCW:Patrollers for an explanation of the role, as well as a quick guide. Here's a brief overview of both of the permissions the user right provides:
 * Marking edits as patrolled. This basically tells other patrollers and administrators that the edit has been reviewed and any problems both content-wise and formatting-wise, have been fixed - e.g., open HTML tags or incorrect information. Since you're a new patroller, if you're unsure about something, it's better to leave it to a more experienced patroller or administrator. Additionally, you can take a look at Special:log/patrol, to get an idea of when other patrollers mark edits as patrolled.
 * Rolling back edits. Clicking "rollback" will instantly rollback all of the last contributions to the page by the user without leaving an edit summary, while clicking the pencil button will allow the summary to be edited. The most important thing here, is if there's any chance that the user was trying to be helpful to the wiki or the information might be correct but you haven't tested it, make sure to leave an explanatory edit summary.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask! Additionally, if you don't want this user right, feel free to ask for it to be removed here, and I can ping Dinoguy.-- Madminecrafter12 Orange Glazed Terracotta.png to meLight Blue Glazed Terracotta.png 13:18, 2 August 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for contributions
I'd like to say, thank you for your contributions to my attempt to document bedrock NBT data, I hope you keep helping out there so it at one point becomes complete. FVbico (talk) 15:15, 6 November 2018 (UTC)


 * You're very welcome. I hope so too. It takes a lot of work to tease out a lot of this stuff, and having it all in one place is a major benefit. Thanks for curating it! – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 15:18, 6 November 2018 (UTC)

About Special:Diff/1314690
The video is removed on YouTube, my puropse to add it back is for showing the direct quote from Mojang and the link rot. -- HaydenBobMutthew ( talk, contribs ) 12:20, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

Seed picker
Hi. I started an article about the Bedrock Edition seed picker, and then I noticed you had already started one for Pocket Edition at User:Auldrick/Seed picker.

My intent for the article is to expand it with brief descriptions of what features and resources the user can expect to find in the vicinity (say, a daytime walk in any direction from the spawm point).

Good idea to add thumbnails like you did. I'll get to that later. ~ Amatulic (talk) 07:32, 20 April 2019 (UTC)


 * I've forgotten now why I never completed my version. I'm glad you're picking it up. If there's anything you find useful in my version, feel free to just incorporate it, no attribution needed and no limitations on my part. Mind you, though, that I think (based on things said in livestreams) that the seeds and picker descriptions are going to change in 1.11 or soon thereafter. The changes in world generation have made some of them not very good. – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 19:41, 20 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Thanks! Yes, the picker will be reduced to 6 choices in 1.11 and then another 10 will be added in 1.12.
 * I'm kinda disappointed that Stronghold Village is gone. I was playing that at one time. But with 1.11 the strongholds are more rare, so that seed probably doesn't generate a stronghold under the nearby village anymore. ~ Amatulic (talk) 20:20, 20 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, for this new seed picker article, I created Template:Distdir to show range and bearing to interesting features, feeling that listing actual coordinates would be too much of a spoiler. Now that 1.11 is out, I've brought the seeds and thumbnails up to date. I used your graphics for some of the discontinued seeds; thanks!

My next objective is to continue filling in interesting details. The things I have put in come from using the /locate command at the spawn point... but I discovered that /locate doesn't actually locate the nearest structures (I filed on this). So I pretty much have to go exploring each world in creative mode to flesh out the true details.

Example of the /locate bug: in "Coastal Village" I found a stronghold closer than the one identified by /locate. The seed picker article lists two strongholds for Coastal Village; /locate found the furthest one, I found the nearer one myself. I suspect that /locate uses taxicab distance rather than direct distance measurement, which feels like a bug to me, because the whole point of /locate is to find nearby things. So given two structures, one 100 blocks directly north of you and another only 80 blocks northeast (113 blocks taxicab distance), /locate will show you the farther one. I think that's what it's doing. ~ Amatulic (talk) 18:24, 1 May 2019 (UTC)


 * I think there have always been problems with /locate's accuracy. There are lots of times that there's simply nothing anywhere near where it points you, and I imagine it's only gotten worse since the recent changes in world generation (for example, villages can be generated a nontrivial distance from their seed-derived positions when the terrain is unsuitable). I never thought about some of its flaws being explained as taxicab distance versus straight line distance; you may well be correct! Taxicab distance is simply the sum of the differences in integer X and Z coordinates, whereas straight line distance is the square root of the sums of the squares of X, Y, and Z differences, a more processor-intensive floating point calculation that for performance reasons is avoided when possible. – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 22:24, 1 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Just now I verified, using the /locate command with two known strongholds correctly located by the command, that it correctly uses Euclidean distance. It turns out that /locate can completely miss a structure even when you're on it. When I positioned myself directly overhead the nearer stronghold, /locate still identified the farther one as nearest. I also discovered two ocean monuments in the "Ocean Monument Ahead" seed that /locate fails to find at all. The bug is also reported for Java Edition so I suspect there's some common code that needs fixing. ~ Amatulic (talk) 06:58, 12 June 2019 (UTC)


 * They're probably still tweaking world generation, including structure generation, with every release. The structure generation logic is highly complex, and at least for some structures it can move the generation origin to better terrain or even abort generating the structure at all. I suspect  isn't being kept up to date as they experiment with these tweaks, because the command isn't important for survival gameplay and therefore is treated as low priority for fixes, and also because they're not done tweaking yet. In addition, structure generation can change from one release to the next. If you load a world in multiple releases, a structure that was generated in the earlier release could be generated again (in different chunks that weren't generated yet) in a later release, giving you multiple physical copies of a single logical structure. Even if   were being kept up to date, it would only be able to find the latest one. And finally, structure generation can be aborted entirely if the terrain requirements aren't met, so   can point you to where a structure should be but isn't. As far as the Seed picker article goes, it's probably best to keep its generated structure descriptions very generic, at least for the present time. – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 13:08, 13 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Interesting. My tests have all been done in freshly-generated worlds, though. I haven't encountered an instance where /locate points to a wrong location; I've only seen it occasionally miss nearby structures and identify a farther-away one instead. The "Ocean Monument Ahead" seed in the seed picker was the worst case I've seen: several ocean monuments within a few hundred blocks of one another, and a couple of them aren't seen by /locate at all. ~ Amatulic (talk) 15:10, 13 June 2019 (UTC)


 * Somehow I didn't realize that the bug report you mentioned was one you'd created. I thought you were referring to another report with a similar description (there are many). Your bug hadn't been confirmed yet, so I went ahead and confirmed it so that it can be reported to the developers. I'm sorry it was overlooked for so long. – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 18:29, 14 June 2019 (UTC)


 * I didn't realize you were a moderator on the Mojang bugs jira. Thanks. Looking back now at my other tickets, I notice that you were conversing with me in the first bug I ever reported, 1.5 years ago.


 * A recent one of mine can be closed: . I believe I figured out what's going on with iron golem spawning in that case. The new Bedrock village mechanics are strange and unpredictable with respect to spawning cats and golems. I've been slowly updating Tutorials/Iron golem farming as I learn new things but with that tutorial, I find I often have to delete and replace something I wrote earlier. ~ Amatulic (talk) 20:49, 14 June 2019 (UTC)

A question on modes & tense / Also, how am I doing with this?
I need a learned linguist's help in understanding this, so I'm hoping you'll correct me where I'm wrong here. First: I've got a big appreciation for your didactic corrections towards me, because second: the only formal education I've had on grammar was in the eighth grade, and I've a feeling that was only because I was lucky enough to have a strict grammarian for a teacher. The rest of grade school and college so far has been literally only critical reading and essay structure, and nobody ever taught me what a "mode" is, so I'm doing all this learning on my own after the fact. I have recently heard of modes, looked into them a bit, and gotten a vague understanding of them, but since our discussion I've been delving as deep as I can into the subject.

This here is regarding a particular thing you said in our discussion on the Minecraft Wiki talk:Style guide: "[T]ense is not an issue here. [. . .] The difference is a subtle one of a kind that linguists lump into a category called 'mode', which is distinct from the category they call 'tense' [. . .] Unfortunately, both mode and future tense are represented in modern English by auxiliary + infinitive constructions, which has led English speakers to no longer distinguish between them clearly - – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 03:10, 18 June 2019 (UTC)" "[T]he usages of 'will' + infinitive at issue are not future tense and are not errors – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 04:15, 18 June 2019 (UTC)"

If I'm not mistaken, you're implying the conditional mode does not have tense, simply being constructed in a way similar to the future tense: auxiliary + infinitive. My understanding, however, is that mode and tense are different and irremovable descriptions of a sentence's structure&mdash;Graphically, they might be represented on separate axes&mdash;and all modes employ a verb phrase with tense. Obviously modes can conflict with each other (e.g. A phrase can't be both indicative and imperative). I'm thinking all verb phrases must have tense, so that's why we can't really say a sentence "has so-and-so tense."

Perhaps the first conditional mode usually uses a future tense verb phrase, as if a sentence in this mode is actually an attempt to describe the possible future of some hypothetical event, hence its usual use of "will" + infinitive. There cases of (what I think still is) the first conditional whose verb phrases are constructed distinctly differently than auxiliary + infinitive and sometimes even in different (apparent) tenses. For example: &mdash; JavaRogers (talk) 01:49, 30 June 2019 (UTC)
 * 1) If he got on the wrong plane, then he is in France now.
 * EDIT: In retrospect, perhaps this one is better phrased with either would be, should be, or has to be.
 * 1) If my mum had any gluten, then that explains her current abdominal cramps.
 * EDIT: Also perhaps better phrased with would explain.
 * 1) If it's that he's been mad at me, then he needed to say something about it a long time ago.
 * EDIT: I'd like to rephrase this: If the problem is that he's been mad at me, then he needed help a long time ago.


 * First I think I should explain that I'm definitely not a learned linguist, just an amateur interested in various aspects of language study. Like you, my formal training in grammar ended after eighth grade English. Since then I've learned on my own and by reading various blogs (I recommend Language Log and Separated by a Common Language). I've also gotten insights from comparing the similarities and differences between how English and German use modal auxiliaries, and between how modern English and Spanish express hypothetical or counterfactual meaning.
 * I think you probably read the same description of conditional mode that I read when I was researching for my first comments about this. To be honest, I thought it was erratic and incomplete, so I disregarded it, but perhaps you understood it better than I did and can translate the comments that follow into those terms.
 * The problem I have with the original proposal is that people are seeing the "will + infinitive", which they know only as "future tense", and objecting that future tense isn't appropriate because the wiki should only be describing what is, not what will be. The mistake they're making is in relating the time frame of the conditional to real world time, when in reality it's in its own hypothetical time line. You could say that there is a sense of "future" there (and I've probably been insisting too stringently that there isn't one), but it's only because in a hypothetical world, just like in the real one, a cause precedes its effect in time. But this time relationship of cause and effect is only internal to the hypothetical time line; it's not meant to correspond to any specific time or event in the real world. (That's what it means to be hypothetical.)
 * Let's use another example to help drive this idea home. Suppose, for a counterfactual condition, we say "If I were [or was] rich, I would buy you a house". Here, "were" or "was" is (in form) the 1st person simple past tense of "be" ("were" is subjunctive mood, "was" is indicative), and "would" is the 1st person simple past of "will". But I don't mean "If I were rich in the past", I mean "If I were rich right now", so should this be in the present tense, "If I am rich, I am buying you a house"? Absurd! This isn't at all what experienced English speakers would write! We intuitively use the past tense forms for counterfactual conditionals, and it never even occurs to us that we could be talking about something in the past.
 * (Notice something here: Both "were" and "was" are past tense in form, but we don't think of them as having a past tense meaning in counterfactual conditionals. My argument was that it's the same for "will" in other conditionals; it's not talking about the future, except within its own timeline. Hence, it's not a tense marker, but a mode marker in these cases. But I might be wrong about that.)
 * Unfortunately, when it comes to other kinds of conditionals, it gets muddier because although we're still describing a hypothetical situation, it can be something that also occurs in the real world, at any time, with predictable results. We can conventionally describe such phenomena in two different ways: We can present it as a hypothetical occurrence and predict the result: "If you build it, they will come". Or, we can present it as a repeatable occurrence that has an inevitable result: "When you build it, they come". Whichever you use, the meaning is essentially the same, it's just a question of style. You'd probably want to use the one that's consistent with the surrounding text, (that's what motivated your suggested guideline in the first place). But my argument is that it could be either one; the "future tense" version is not an error, it's just an alternate style choice. (And it's not really future tense in the sense you were saying it was.)
 * It's been argued that the present tense might be easier for ESL speakers to read, and I can see that, so I'm not opposed to such edits. I'm only opposed to codifying it in the style guide, because native English writers use the hypothetical device intuitively. It would be hard for them to unlearn it for the wiki only.
 * To clarify about mode vs. tense, I think you're right, they're on different axes. If it's true that tense is irremovable, then I'm wrong, because I haven't been thinking of it that way. But on the other hand, it might depend on who you ask. Linguistics isn't a fully settled science (if it were, there wouldn't be any controversy about English's future tense). I don't remember all the details of how I've come to understand what tense is, but it could be that we're just listening to different experts' opinions. (Or, I could just be wrong.) – Auldrick (talk &middot; contribs) 08:42, 30 June 2019 (UTC)