I’ve been playing Minecraft long enough that I’ve gotten pretty used to using torches for light. They were never the best-looking option, and they could really wreak havoc on an otherwise perfectly designed structure, but they were our only option for lighting for a long time.
These days, there are more light sources, including campfires and the oh-so-lovely lantern. But there’s a problem: Ever since copper was added to the game, iron feels a bit rarer than it used to be. And considering the sheer volume of lanterns that it takes to light a Minecraft town, this can be a massive drain in the iron economy.
However, copper is both relatively useless (I know there are a couple cool things you can do with it, but not much) and plentiful. Whenever I go spelunking for ore, I typically come back with stacks of copper that I melt into ingots and then just fill chests with. It would be really lovely to be able to break those ingots into nuggets, and then create copper lanterns.
I know there have been other folks who have requested this feature, but they seem to have a more grandiose vision for them. All I really want is a copper variant of the basic iron lantern. That seems easy enough to implement, and it would actually make copper worth mining.
Come on, Mojang, throw a copper-rich miner a bone here!
