Chapter 2 Spoilers! Weird quirk about the new area.

[Bomboclaat]

Huge spoilers below you have been warned!

If you're interested in story content haven't made it that far in don't bother with this thread until you've at least done so.

Spoiler

I find disabling building and breaking blocks in a block game outright antithetical to the entire experience, it restricts your freedom and and opposes the genre of the game, I wish it wasn't so especially when there are insanely cool blocks here that I would love to loot and a temporary shelter would be wonderful as well, maybe some players could build their own safer ways to get to the Tower or fight the boss of the area. I don't mind not being able to build in specific story dungeon areas like the Tower but this is one whole entire biome were talking about, imagine playing Minecraft but not being able to build in The End. But the weirdest part about the Devastation. Which must have been some kind of oversight in development? Is that there are quite a bit of floating islands around the place and they all have chests filled with loot but are all inaccessible in survival mode unless you switch to creative and fly to them (I tried getting up one of those before I posted this thread and I absolutely could not, neither could I build a way up to there in survival, glider doesn't work either because the area seems to have extra gravity). Why are these chests with tons of loot even there if we can't reach them unless being able to build there is planned for later? I checked the most recent Devlong and that doesn't seem to be the case. If building here isn't planned for the future I'd suggest at least making these islands able to be climbed up on somehow so we can loot them, or just remove those chests entirely and leave the island as aesthetic set pieces.

 

[AnniPicto]

There seems to be some kind of generation glitch here. When we visited this location, all the buildings were at ground level (and the chests had nothing useful - only decorative junk, completely useless in our cozy home). I'm not sure where it is better to add a spoiler, so I'll put it here.

Spoiler

And there is no time to rest there. Any stop brought too many monsters that we did not have time to deal with. Steel plate armor turned out to be useless - the monsters bit too hard, and there is no way to escape in heavy plate armor. The idea of taking items from this zone contradicts the logic of the lore. There was a catastrophe there, and everything can be dangerous.

I understand the desire to take blocks for your creative ideas. Perhaps we will be allowed to do this later. There are many cases where blocks were only available for creative mode after several versions of the game became available for crafting.

[LadyWYT]

As far as block breaking and other similar actions being restricted in story locations, the reason for that I believe is two-fold. First, it stops the player from just stripping the location bare, or otherwise robbing NPCs blind, which happens frequently in the other block game. Likewise, the restrictions also ensure that the player needs to complete the puzzles and/or fight certain monsters at the locations in order to get the rewards, instead of just tunneling through the structure and bypassing all the challenge. Yes, one could argue that building defenses or tunneling through specific parts of the structure to avoid something is smart...but it's very low-effort. As it currently stands, the boss fights are fairly difficult, and some of the puzzles will make you think carefully in order to solve them.

On the floating islands in a certain location:

Spoiler

Much like the main puzzle of the Devastation Tower, you'll need to solve the jumping puzzle for this islands in order to loot the chests, although this puzzle should be a little easier since it doesn't require the use of time-jumping. I would wait until after you complete the Tower though, as otherwise the Mad Crow can interfere with your investigation attempts.

As for the monster spawns in the Devastation, they're supposed to have been decreased for 1.21, and from what I've seen of 1.21 it's a better experience than previous.

For building in the story locations though, I think there is at least one mod that removes protections from at least some of the locations. Otherwise, you can probably just remove the protections yourself, either by finding the governing command blocks in creative and tampering with it, or via making your own mod. If it's just the decorations you're after though, all of those can be obtained through creative, or perhaps a mod since I think there's a couple that make various clutter craftable(Better Ruins does this, I think). I do know that restoration of clutter to a usable/less ruined appearance is requested fairly often, so it's possible that more attractive, less ruined clutter that can be obtained outside of creative might be added in the future.