Welcome to the Sporn Chunks, episode number 395 for Monday, March 30th, 2026.

This is a podcast all about Minecraft, available across all major podcast platforms,

including a video version on YouTube and Spotify.

If you enjoy the show, consider subscribing

wherever you're listening to this. My name is Johnny, but the incident knows me as pixel riffs,

and is joining me, not science fiction, but real life. It's Joel Duggan. Hi, Joel.

Hello, and if you would like to hear a little bit more about science fiction,

Picks went to go see Project Hail Mary over the weekend, as did a couple of friends of mine. I planned to seeing it soon. I also spent the weekend making pizza dough, which is not at all sci-fi related. So you get a little bit of a mixed bag if you're going to check out the render distance, which is the extended version of the podcast. We record that every single week, and our patrons get access to that. You can go to patreon.com slash the sponge chunks, support the show at any

level, get access to the Discord, get access to the bonus shows, the extended podcast. And speaking of

bonus shows, we recorded the Minecraft hangout this weekend that was published on Sunday, recorded on

Saturday. And that's where we hang out with our patrons and talk about what they've been doing in

Minecraft with screenshots and cool little conversations with everybody live in a little Discord chat. So you can always have access to that when you're a patron as well. You can go back and listen to the archives. We also do a patron hangout every quarter where we talk about the podcast and the YouTube channel and how things are going and plans for the future. That's coming up in May. And so, again, if you want to support the Spon Chunks, it's patreon.com slash the Sponchunks and you get all kinds of cool goodies behind the scenes. On this episode, we've got a chunk mail dispenser for you. We're going to be responding to a couple of emails. Listeners have sent into the show, including a couple of responses to previous discussions we've

had in recent episodes, and also a reaction to the block sets that were shown off at Minecraft Live

recently. So if you haven't caught up on Minecraft Live, you'll be getting a little sneak peek into

what's been announced and what we should hopefully be getting hold of in snapshots very soon.

Speaking of listener email, though, episode 400 is coming up on the calendar, and we are planning to do an all email episode in a similar fashion to what we did for episode 300, which was kind of a Q&A about anything and everything. Doesn't have to be Minecraft related, but we can answer a bit about Minecraft and a bit about just what else we're into, that kind of thing. The type of stuff that we typically talk about on the render distance and that sort of stuff. So if you would like to email into the show and potentially get your email read for episode 400, we're going to try and get through as many of them as we can, really. So send a message, a question on anything that you'd like over to spawn chunkmail at gmail.com. Please put 400 in the subject line and indicate if you're a patron of the show,

because we'd like to prioritize some patron email as well. And if you can keep your messages

short, just a sentence or two, ideally, so that way we can include as many of them as possible

into the episode. So what have you been up to in the survival guide this week, man?

In the survival guide, I've honestly not been doing very much.

The Beacon Mine continues, but that certainly wasn't the most important landmark of my week.

Instead, yesterday, as of this recording, I went on a tour of Hermitcraft Season 11 in tandem with the announcement that I'm going to be participating in the MCC Hermitcraft takeover that is

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