I am desensitised to the topic due to work, but man. that doesn't make it better.

guude, I hope you rot in a prison cell. I hope you never get to see your daughter ever again. never.

Ultimately I gave up on Mindcrack Season 1 in spite of loving Minecraft Alpha, and finished the Iron Man season of Beta 1.8 interest because I thought of it as notable. That was a seed that was previously going to be the Mindcrack S3 seed after all, and there were so many hints I didn't pick up that were alluding to it. Those earliest videos of Guude - the Alpha 1.2 ones - were just too full of annoying voice control/audio problems for me to suffer through this time around. Anyway, I spent some time not looking at Guude again, but one day when I looked at his video page again (I'm not subscribed, but Guude Boulder Fist is one of many channels that I visit and go straight into the videos page of to see what they're up to, much like Raocow) I found that he had a new thing called Mindcrack Solo.

This was interesting, as the most recent Minecraft video series of his up until that point was a 2-player 404 seed video with Jsano. Look up the 404 seed Beta challenge if you don't know what that is. I also gave up on that one like I did on my second viewing of Mindcrack Season 1, for similar reasons. At this point there was no Mindcrack Rebirth, and I didn't know there was going to be. Naturally I had to investigate Mindcrack Solo, and it was just kind of a mundane singleplayer modern Minecraft let's play. The notable thing for me is that I heard Guude talk in a present-day video for the first time in a MINUTE, and was dumbfounded by "the weird sound of his voice" as it sounded insanely changed. Nowadays this effect of impossible Guude Voice no longer affects me.

Before I caught up to the last episode of Mindcrack Solo, I had already watched a couple, but suddenly an actual multiplayer form of Mindcrack had returned. This spoiled for me the reveal of how Guude went through a portal in singleplayer and came out the other end in a multiplayer world. Which was also in Minecraft 1.21 and beyond. I decided to finish Mindcrack Solo and then start Mindcrack Rebirth on Guude, in order.

Sadly, Guude is the only video perspective in Mindcrack Rebirth I'm remotely willing to involve myself with that I'm aware of. I haven't even tried Pakratt, even though I've known him for half as long and named many episodes of his Obscurity and loved his Spelunky HD series. So far, I've watched exactly 14 episodes of Guude playing Mindcrack Rebirth.

Even with my familiarity and experience with Guude, watching Mindcrack Rebirth for me can be hard. But I should talk about the good parts of this franchise.

The best thing about Mindcrack in 2025 is that it's not Hermitcraft. It's a bunch of adults mostly talking in adult ways as far as I can tell, not suppressing their own personalities or being emotionally boring because they want to aim their videos at kids. Not only that, there's actual adult humour in there that has something for adult enjoyment, which is how Mindcrack started and how it still should be. There's a point in Mindcrack Rebirth where Guude has a base built around a ravine and he keeps saying things like "Hey, this is Guude's crack. It's a bit of a wet crack right now."

I could tell that there would be actual humour and genuine personalities in this series, even in 2025, as soon as characters interacted with each other during the UHC opening event they had. It's also not clickbaity if you're watching Guude, though I can't confirm this for other players.

I still don't know exactly what the ultra hardcore deathmatch in episode 1 actually is. I know how UHC works - Mindcrack basically pioneered the original UHC deathmatch video formula I'm pretty sure - and I remember the border was shrinking during it, but what I don't know is why it's part of the sandbox season, what the prize was exactly, and how it affected the sandbox metagame.

I think there were one or two pretty funny player interactions during the deathmatch segment, which was enabled by a plugin that was installed - seemingly with no announcement - which allows people to talk to other players through their microphones if their player characters were close in the Minecraft server. It was pretty novel at first, but as the episodes went on I found more and more that the conversations with other players were annoying. And this will be partly due to Mindcrack having audio neo-issues, very similar to the reason I can't exactly rewatch 2013 Mindcrack, having become more aware of the existence of lishing. I also still find myself calling out "shut up Arkas" from time to time. (I have a grudge against him for being an operation millstone in modded Pakratt videos.)

So, I am very happy for Guude, happy for him that he got past all the stupid shit that plagued his life last decade and ruined Mindcrack, and made it through to bring his server dream back on, but I can't really enjoy Mindcrack Rebirth as a viewer now, even if the lishing wasn't there. I find myself tuning out faster and having to postpone watches for later for it, but if the audio was perfect I'd still do that frequently.

The potential biggest issue for me - and I wouldn't box this gripe onto other people - is simply that he's playing the most recent 2025 version of Minecraft. That is a personal misfortune. If this server was in modded Minecraft Beta, I'd probably be all over it every week. But that's not what Guude and the others voted for, so instead of the hot pants that are Minecraft scenic terrain mastery and steady exciting progression gameplay with effortless beautiful buildings, and caving where every operation is a kind of adventure, we get... 2025 Minecraft.

What that looks like is a fat, eye noisy world where every building has about 7 types of building block just for one hue and shade of colour, plus many more for the rest of the palette they were working in, ugly base textures, the only reason for night to do anything being Phantoms (I don't know why they weren't voted off the gamerules) and no sense of adventure through the development of a player's tech, people already having all the equipment they need for anything since last Tuesday, and buildings appearing all the time very suddenly. Also did you want me to mention the new music? Because when I hear non-C418 modern MC music I feel like I'm drowning.