Mojang are in my opinion steering the ship in the right direction, I’m honestly impressed at the balancing and updates that have been coming through the pipeline. But lets talk about encouraging exploration, which they have helped along with the upcoming straw beds that will allow "players to skip the night without having to set their spawn point," that is put simply huge. Inhibiting or maybe I should say not encouraging exploration to it’s maximum potential in a game this vast and beautiful, with exploration being so rewarding in and of itself is one of the most perplexing things about this game. Thankfully they understand this but I would argue it's taken them a long ass time to come around to it and that they can and should do more.
Things could potentially work:
- early game access to faster traversal, things like accessing the glider sooner and/or the swiftness potion being more accessible through a food buff.
- increasing the stamina of regular sprinting preferably through a food buff but sprinting itself might help or even sleep, there is potential for a new mechanic here but it should be a buff with no negative affects.
- a common technique used to not get lost is to plant torches for a trail as you explore, making torches much more efficient to make: you could double the current recipe from 4x to 8x from 1 piece of coal. Maybe even something like having different light intensity torches to make more accurate if you're concerned about balance.
- lets also just throw caution to the wind and say something like mounts for (large, obviously) moths for flying mounts :D
So as any avid minecraft player can probably see I don't like going to the nether, but none the less I would prefer traversal was made much more accessible and actively encouraged. I know we have compasses and maps but they feel clunky. My hope is that Mojang realise the potential of enhancing exploration will literally open up the world for a much neglected type of minecraft player: the explorers.