Minecraft Music Discs are Broken!

Music disc 5 is added to the game, but comes in pieces.

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Minecraft is a game with an incredible amount of depth, and whilst most players are aware that it contains a bunch of records known as music discs, I would doubt many players spend much time listening to them.

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Music discs are generally found in loot chests inside of dungeons, bastions and other in game structures, and they can also be found or farmed when skeletons kill creepers. This can happen by accident, or you can even create a setup to turn this into a music disc farm.

Most of the music discs are musical, with the most popular being the relatively recent addition of Pigstep by Lena Raine, which was added in Minecraft Nether Update, also known as 1.16. You can pop them into a jukebox, in game, and listen along to the records whenever you feel like it.

However, not all of the discs contain music.There were two music discs, named just 11 and 13, that actually just contained eerie sounds and noises. Listening to music disc 11 you can hear the sounds of someone running and coughing, with some strange sound effects in the background. Listening to music disc 13, there's less of a “story” being told, and more of an eerie ambience as the track contains spooky tones. There are a few sound effects played towards the end of the track, but it's much more difficult to determine what's happening.

...sounds like a portal being activated...

However, as of Minecraft Bedrock Beta 1.19.0.28 and Minecraft JAVA Snapshot 22w16A, another new music disc has been added, which is also numbered rather than named, and again, contains a selection of creepy sound effects which people are saying sounds like a portal being activated.

Listening to music disc 5, it certainly tells a story. In fact it's very similar to music disc 11 with the familiar coughing sounds, except this time at normal speed rather than slowed down, and it does sound very much like the character transverses some sort of portal and find themselves surrounded by monsters. Sculk sensor noises can be heard, so can the familiar sound of the Warden's heart beat. It's quite scary, very eery and popular opinion of the player base is that this is Mojang's way of confirming that the portal type structure, made of Reinforced Deepslate and found in the Ancient Cities of the Deep Dark, is indeed a portal as we've all suspected.

...enchantment seemed pointless...

Now, for the most part, I think a lot of this is wishful thinking and I believe the sounds of the music disc could be interpreted in a lot of different ways. It's easy to hear things you want to hear in a jumble of overlapping tones and noises and this just might be the case here. Regardless it's a very interesting addition to the game, so late into the development process for the Wild Update (Minecraft 1.19).

What makes it even more interesting is that it's also broken. Not in a buggy sense, but the music disc is actually found in fragments and has to be crafted by the player. The fragments are found scattered in loot chests around the Ancient Cities within the Deep Dark biome and you need nine fragments to make a single disc.

This is the first music disc to be found in this way, and as of writing, it's unknown if this disc will drop like the others do using a creeper farm.

What we do know is why Mojang decided to include the music disc in this way. When the first iterations of the Ancient Cities hit our devices, reception to them was a little lackluster. The community was left scratching their heads and complaining to Mojang that there seemed very little reason to ever go to the Ancient Cities. The loot contained generic treasure loot you can find anywhere else and a new enchanted book called Swift Sneak, which to most people, seemed a little disappointing. 

The Swift Sneak enchantment allows the player to move at walking speed while sneaking, meaning they can travel around the Ancient Cities more quickly without triggering a Warden to spawn. However, considering how easy the Warden was to avoid and even kill at that time, this enchantment seemed pointless and left a bitter taste in the mouths of the player base.

Since then, Mojang have been coming up with new ideas for what loot might be better to add to the Ancient Cities and so far they've included Echo Shards, which are used to craft a Recovery Compass, which will help point you to the last place that you died, and now the Music Disc 5 fragments.

...framing the psychology of player planning...

The main developer of the Warden, Ancient Cities and Deep Dark, with the Twitter handle kingbdogz, reached out to the community via a long Twitter thread to explain why Music Disc 5 was added in this way.

Wanted to give some insight as to why Music Disc 5 is split up into fragments - as in, why have a one-off item that only has one crafting recipe?

The reason is because the city itself encourages stealth gameplay. If we only had the disc itself (unfragmented) in chests, You'd be looking through half the chests or more in the city before you'd find it - and that's if you even KNOW that it exists beforehand. By it being in fragments, the first time you get it you see a new crafting recipe, which gives you a mini-goal/quest to find them all Giving players goals in the city is important, in a similar fashion to the Echo Shards. Once you get one, you now know there's a new thing you can craft and you're now tasked with finding the rest.

A lot of game design is all about framing the psychology of player planning Once you give them a set of rules and tools to move within those constraints, their ability to plan out their intrinsic goals and motivations is what makes Minecraft work. This is especially important in a city in the game where its horrors may often make the player leave. If you give them a task, something they can concentrate on, horror becomes the boundary. The task becomes the distraction from fear, which is a reward itself.

Of course, this is all talking high level. It's neat piece of environmental storytelling to have it in pieces too

So there you go. What do you think of Music Disc 5? Do you think it confirms that there will be a portal to a new dimension within the Ancient Cities?

Article Author: FoxyNoTail

Foxy is a Minecraft player, content creator and official Marketplace Partner. He's been playing the game for over 13 years, delving into the code creating datapacks, add-ons, resource packs and other tools for the Minecraft player base and communities to use and enjoy. He also hosts The Minecraft Update weekly podcast. You can find Foxy on Twitter @foxynotail

Publisher: Minecraft Update News

The Minecraft Update News is produced and published by author FoxyNoTail as part of the foxynotail.com website. Sourced directly from working as a content creator, player and officially partnered producer, FoxyNoTail has the facts and figures at his disposal to ensure news articles are current, relevant and factual. Foxy has 13+ years experience in not just playing Minecraft, but creating content, videos, streams, data packs, servers, add-ons, packs, podcasts, licensed content and now news. Revered by the community as a trust worthy, reliable and honest source of news and opinion, Foxy's data is trusted and acknowledged regularly.