#paradise-lost Friday 14 March 2025

Hello again, it's 5AM and I cannot sleep

Hit me

Based on some earlier paradise lost work... Perhaps a Phoenix? 🐦‍🔥 It'd be a non-hostile mob that spawns in the paradise dimension. You can tame it with oranges or cooked meat, or leave it be. Phoenixes will very slowly grow fluffy with vibrant orange feathers. These can be sheared for one Phoenix Feather, which could be combined with gold (blocks?) and emeralds to make totems of undying. Since you'll need to somehow get up to a flying phoenix to actually tame it, requiring significant time investment or an elytra, I would argue that this is well-enough balanced. If a tamed Phoenix were to die, it'd drop a special ash material that, if placed on the ground, creates a baby Phoenix that remains tamed and holds any nametag data it inherited from its "parent"(edited)

it'd drop a special ash material that, if placed on the ground, creates a baby Phoenix

I love that

I thought of a slightly more advanced project at first seeing you bring a ghast into paradise, which would transform it into a phoenix, being a metaphor for redemption and rebirth tying in to ghasts being semi-canonical 'tormented souls,' but that'd be a difficult interaction and also outside the scope of the idea

I do like the idea absolutely

thats a cool idea spawning a new baby from the ashes

now that I have managed some amount of rest

- Perhaps in spite of their fiery nature, phoenixes always struck me as having some connection to the almost heaven-like nature of the aether/paradise lost. We use the phrase "rising from the ashes" in reference to the creatures, describing coming back from death or despair! at risk of diving too deep into theological discussion where it is not warranted, i'd argue then that phoenixes very easily embody the relationship seen between death and heaven in abrahamic religions, and this is further compounded by minecraft's duality between the nether and the aether/paradise. This line is thinking is also where the ghast amendment came from in the first place, being a more literal and direct interpretation of this relationship between minecraft, heaven and hell, and the phoenix. - Even beyond my attempts to tie the phoenix into a paradise-appropriate symbology, I do think a functionally immortal pet is warranted. So many players have shared tragic stories of when their wolves, cats, or parrots die, and even in Paradise Lost I have lost many a poor moa to random minecraft events. A phoenix is immortal, due to it's rebirth, so it'd solve a very real problem very nicely- perhaps you can even use phoenix feathers to give other mobs a similar, one-time-use ability? - Lastly, the more practical purpose. the original thing that first brought me to this idea was the linked post here- there was precedent already established for such a mob, even if that precedent got removed at some point. Perhaps this'd be a good time to bring it back? The totem crafting was an example of the utility behind a 'phoenix feather' shear drop, and one I would argue would connect the mob very nicely to vanilla. Even still, I was envisioning more of a tamable pet mob, but there's certainly room for all sorts of utility.

Maybe putting Phoenix feathers on a Brewing stand as an ingridient that can be used on totems of immortality could be used on a passive mob to make them immortal or at the very least able to respawn after a certain while

Now that I think of this, it would be cool to think what different campfires could do if you were to add them the phoenix feather-