I recently started watching Grian’s hermit craft season playlists and watching them back to back, it feels like Grian is burning himself out as he repeats the same mistake.
TLDR; he keeps getting stuck planning huge mega builds that require so much grinding he gets stuck in procrastination cycles. He needs to break things down into small pieces (a building, tunnel, etc…) and learn to iterate towards a vision.
In each season he will quickly jump to mega scale for any project (the Tower, The Mansion, The Ally & The Entity). The issue with each project is any significant progress requires a huge amount of grinding and you see his avoidance of the main base gets worse with each season.
We do see large scale projects and the Entity and Barge actually shows the problem.
The barge started small and iteratively enlarged as the number of items increased, he then created ‘big plans’ schemed to get extra space and never fulfilled them. The next iteration became too much of a grind and he was clearly working hard to keep the current shop stocked.
Simialy the Entity went through quick iterations a rock, a Rock with a tree, a wheel, then it walked and he talks of his big plans at the end of the episode but he clearly started avoiding the entity because the plans became too much of a grind.
I thought he had gotten it at the end of Season 9, as he moved towards so many ‘small’ projects which results in a huge affect in the area.
In Season 10 he talks about taking it slow, but I really don’t think he understands.
The dock was a perfect example, he was doing a lot of fishing and building a hut around the spot was a great idea and I found really interesting to watching. Building a secret vault would have been a great episode, similarly the Salmon tunnel was fantastic. Building each aspect for an episode would have been taking it slow.
You can see he is already avoiding his ‘mega’ build and yet again the opportunity to break stuff down was there. The bone meal farm being built and boxed in would have been a great episode, but you already know he has built a stucture and its going to hang around for months as he gets twisted up trying to design/plan a huge series of fronts and increasingly wants to avoid
I feel like they should try a few different themes/formats per season to try and breakup the burnout that seems rather evident.
Unique worlds via data packs (technically still vanilla) challenges that inspire creative builds. Or just other unique aesthetics.
Maybe limiting things like the nether roof access to have more nether themed builds
Creativity either through restrictions or getting a new lense via shaders/resource packs (bare bones).
Idk but at this point I feel like the formula has ran its course with a lot of the hermits. Minecraft content in general has kind of bottomed out with long term series too on an algorithmic level.
One idea I kinda had was limiting the world size to something rather small and encouraging people to live in a “communal” way and less of their solo ways. That way real estate is less and the bases are forced to be close together which would encourage some potentially cool collaborations with each other.
I think they used to do things like that, especially back when customized worlds were a thing, but yeah maybe a special world would help. It’s also worth mentioning that they have been running the series for 12 years, so burnout is seemingly inevitable.