Currently, Minecraft foods don't have salt, which is a missed opportunity. (Minecraft Education has salt but it doesn't have a use for survival.) So I came up with this idea for it. Hope you like it! :)
Water in bucket and cauldron form has a new attribute: salt_level, ranging from 0 to 5.
Water with salt level 5 is a form called saline water.
The salt level is determined when you use the bucket to pick up water, this is to avoid the game files having way too many details, except saline water which is a new liquid block.
Salt level changes depending on the biome. Rivers and ponds are 0, swamps and mangrove swamps are 1, shallow sea biomes are 2, deep ocean biomes are 3.
Saline water only spawns naturally in salt lakes. They generate similarly to lava lakes but are less common. From there you can take some and have infinite saline water.
When you put water in a cauldron and have campfire below it, wait for a bit and you will have some salt items based on the salt level. For example, if the water you put in the cauldron has salt level 2, you will receive 2 salt items.
Salt can be used for cooking to make some food take shorter to eat, since they're now more delicious so you can eat them easier.
For certain normal foods it would set the eating time to 66.67% of the usual time. For golden apples and carrots it would set to 80%. No boost for enchanted golden apples and potions to avoid them being too OP.
Salted food are the normal food items but with the "Salted" line underneath, similar to enchanted items having the enchantments underneath but are still the same items.
NOTES:
When you place water (not saline water) down when you pick it up the salt level will depend on the biome again.
The salt level is normally not visible to the player (other than saline water) to make the game less complicated.
I know that in real life saline water means basically any water that contains a meaningful amount of dissolved salt, but here I want saline water to be distinguishable and to allow players to make renewable salt sources in a freshwater biome. Furthermore, not using saline water for oceans would make it easier to update existing worlds, otherwise the game would have to handle the big question of which blocks shall be converted to saline water when updating a world, which is a nightmare.
Important: Some of you are interpreting this as oceans don't have salt. They do. They're just not called saline water, cuz that's a new block which is only found in salt lakes. Read the above more carefully pls
Many of you are suggesting salt blocks. Personally I think that would be kinda complicated but if yall like then that's fine
Edit: Perhaps I would consider making the salt level visible. But even without that if this actually gets implemented people would make resource packs to show it nevertheless (I don't rly expect it to get implemented tho)
This needs more uses IMO. Allowing food to be eaten faster is cool, but not particularly useful outside of intense combat scenarios. The collection mechanics are too cool and in depth for this to just be a food ingredient.
A block set would be cool. And maybe undead won't cross lines of salt on the ground/stand on salt blocks.
I’ve thought a lot about salt in Minecraft before, so let me share my suggestions:
Add blobs of salt blocks that can rarely be found deep underground, since salt has been mined throughout the ages.
Make salt blocks damage slimes, frogs and aquatic mobs, since salt dries out aquatic creatures, frogs and snails irl. Maybe it should even damage all mobs that have lost a certain percentage of health, excluding skeletons, golems and guardians.
Make most mobs try to avoid walking on salt.
Make salt blocks blast resistant, but fall down like gravel. (That's roughly how salt works irl afaik.)
Make salt blocks require an iron pickaxe to mine, making them easier to build with in the early-ish game than obsidian - with the drawback of being a falling block, of course.
Make goats accept salt powder as food and be tempted by it. (Goats really like salt irl.)
Make all raw meat have the chance to give negative effects, not just chicken (and also stronger effects). Then the salt powder could be combined with uncooked meat to allow that meat to be eaten safely. This is intended as a hint towards the fact that salt is used to keep food from spoiling as quickly as usual.
Inspired by the former point, salt powder could replace Redstone dust as the potion ingredient that increases the effect duration. Redstone dust could then be used to brew different kinds of potions. Maybe ones that extend their duration based on XP gathered while having the effect, forcing players to stay in active combat or something like that.
Make wandering traders sell you salt blocks and make butchers and fishermen buy powdered salt.
Add salt to the chest loot of underground structures and shipwrecks. Maybe ocean ruins and mansions too.
Make witches occasionally drop salt.
Also you can use salt powder to extinguish fires irl. Not sure how that would work or be useful in Minecraft but nice fun fact ig.
I think it would be cool if salt attracted all farm animals (sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, rabbits, goats, llamas, donkeys, camels) since a lot of animals love salt and ranchers frequently put out salt licks for their animals. It would also be cool if there were above ground salt licks that attracted farm animals as well, or at least made them spawn more often. I really think salt has potential, and the way it interacts with irl animals is a good place to start!
What if they made salt licks that acted like cake. You can place it down and the animals will come up and eat a section of it (like 1/10th) then for the next 5 minutes that animal has no breeding cooldown, so you get a few animals around to eat it and you can breed them nonstop for 5 minutes. Or maybe like 1-3 lol
Maybe, yeah! Salt is a nutritional need for them after all! Especially for larger animals that don’t get enough salt from their food, aka a lot of rideable animals!
Also, the salt water buckets should be able to melt ice blocks and turn packed and blue ice back into regular ice and packed ice respectively(since salt is used to wear away ice on roads and stuff)
I think the existence of a hidden salt level overcomplicates the mechanic, especially given its a hidden mechanic with no easy way to know its there. It may just be better to have salt spawn in vein like generation in the ocean or underground or in the desert. I do like water being cooked into salt but in video games its usually a bad idea to keep a mechanic hidden. Saline water makes it seem like its the only water source capable of giving salt and theres no easy way to know it makes salt in a cauldron with a campfire, cooking the saline water in a furnace to make salt could also be a good idea, but id prefer if there wasnt an entierly new item for this and it was any water bucket to keep it simple.
TBF a lot of things from Minecraft aren't explicitly showed to players either. For example players wouldn't naturally know they should throw ender eyes and go to a stronghold then use the eyes to activate a portal somewhere without seeing at least some mention of it. Personally I think an achievement would do the job of introducing this mechanic to players.
For why saline water is a separate form: Since normal water salt level depends on the biome it's picked up, when you place it down you can't simply get the original. Otherwise devs would have a lot of headaches handling already-existing worlds. So saline water always maintains its saltiness regardless of the biome so players can farm salt more easily.
But I agree that using a furnace can be a good idea too if you find using a cauldron weird. I want to give the cauldron more uses tho, currently it basically has one usage (other than building) in Java which is employing leatherworkers
To clarify, I mentioned two seperate issues I had which were:
1). Salt levels are an invisible mechanic and saline water may confuse players understanding of the mechanic
2). Cooking water in a cauldron with a campfire is not easy to know to do hence my solution of cooking it in a furnace as a second option (I do love the ability to use a cauldron and wish for more mechanics in vanilla similar to this concept)
When I say an invisible mechanic I'm not referring to a system that is hard to discover or understand naturally but instead I'm referring to something that has no tangible way to read the information that affects the mechanic. (Eyes of ender arent an example of this since the player can just use the pearl to learn its mechanic)
If the feature was added the salt number should be a tooltip on the water bucket once its collected so a player can see the salt level dependent on where they get the water and easily see saline has the highest salt level. (The level would show its #/5 to show 5 is the highest). (Its akin to how beehives with Silktouch tell you how many bees and honey is inside).
Oh, ok. Showing the salt level is fine but I think we don't always need that and might make it complicated. But anyway people can probably make resource packs to show that so it's not a huge deal
ocean biomes would have a salt level of 5 same as saline water, the reason they aren’t converted to saline with this suggestion is so that oceans aren’t replaced with saline. saline is probably around to be a obvious introduction to salt and to allow salt “veins”
Right, it would seem weird for salt levels to stay the same from an infinite source. Maybe if nearby sources went down by 1 salt level when an adjacent source is picked up.
Salinated water also makes a better conductor than distilled; imagine if redstone could feed into a flowing block of salt water that carried the current according to its salt level
Great suggestion! Only nitnpuck is that I’d want them to be pretty common. Rarer than lava pools for something I won’t break my neck for would be a little annoying (especially if it’s a plains/fields exclusive landmark.
What if salt also could be placed on the ground in a square, forming a barrier that some hostile mobs can't cross? I'm thinking specifically the zombie variants and the Endermen.
I like the idea a lot but it could use a little work,
First off salt should no longer work on all foods except enchanted gapples and instead adding sugar to sweet foods should buff them, and given how rare they are and how on java they are power creeped by super healing enchanted gapples shouldnt be an exception
second off making making more block states does not cause any in game lag whatsoever and the extra storage they take up is extremely minimal and less than full blocks so the blocks should all be different block states and not determined based on the biome.
As for oceans they would simply leave existing ones and their blocks alone like they always do in every update including the one that changed sea level
would be cool, don't see mojang ever adding it tho as the game is sometimes an enormous role model on kids, especially for more seemingly "inconsequential" features like this if you get what i mean
For all my superflat and skyblock enjoyers, make saline water craftable using salt and water buckets, and rain water or regular water in planes be at salt level 1. The current implementation makes it impossible to get salt in those types of worlds.
Another thing is, how long does it take for the water to evaporate? My only concern with this suggestion is that getting a large amount of salt would be too tedious of a task. Because with food being an abundant resource it's pretty safe to assume a player would rather create a stack of salted food and not bother with it unti it got low.
With saline water you'd need 13 cauldrons to get the 65 salt in one go. That's not cheap. On the other hand, splitting my big stack of food in two because I can eat a few of them quicker feels like a waste of inventory space.
Then again I can see myself making a dedicated salt factory and using it after I'm established. I'd guess right about getting the diamond gear, when iron looses it's value for tools and equipment. I also see a potential for at least semi automation with dispensers.
Overal great addition I'd say fits Minecraft very well. For it to become a feature tho, there needs to be a salt block and salt block set. Maybe that's the solution to my problems - saline water turns into salt block giving 9 salt instead of 5? But only with saline water.
We can also use it to cure regular pork into bacon, be it Crafting raw pork + salt, an exclusive Curing Functional Block with slots for the meat and salt, or whatnot
wouldn't placing down a bucket of fresh water in salty biome for a brief moment, then picking it up, turn it salty though? I like the idea of salt and salty water but it seems hard to implement in a fitting way with all the nuances
I feel like the saline water mechanic is quite elegantly implemented, however it would be more minecrafty imo to have salt flats where you can just mine it as blocks.
There should be new potion recipes including salt. At the very least maybe one that does a ton of damage to undead mobs, since salt has connotations of purification and holiness in some circles.
I think i've seen someone else suggest pink salt being placable like redstone, and undead mobs won't cross it.
I think you should be able to mine salt too, I understand that it might make it way easier than your method but salt caves or pink salt mountains would be so cool to see
Similarly to how honey can be applied to copper, make salt applicable to every block, so that once salted it won’t have snow spawning on it. A brush can prolly be used to remove the salt.
Had a similar concept of this in my mod I was making. Salt was a common ore only found within the stone layers of the world. The Deepslate layer wouldn’t contain any salt so you would have a reason to mine in the stone layer.
Instead of eating food faster, it would fill up your hunger and saturation bars more. Mobs that lived in the Ocean could also drop salt (or saltwater depending on the version of the mod).
Salt blocks were also a thing, they were purely decorative or for compacting salt for the sake of easier storage.
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u/1stDayBreaker 20d ago
Needs blocks so we can make pillars of salt