I honestly had no idea this was also a thing in bedrock edition until now. I really don’t expect that this could be a big issue in the game since most players probably don’t know about it. I’ve never had any match where a player using the rainbow apples caused me to loose a fight. In a similar way to how trapped chests are overpowered but rarely used, the instant health effect here seems rather the same.
So here are my thoughts how to rebalance it:
- Make the apples stackable in about 16 or 8 apple per stack and its only limited to 16 or 8 apples per player so the others can have it. OR give all of the apples to the player who broke it the rainbow lucky block first.
- All of the effects must be fairly good.
- Restore at least the same hunger points as bread or a normal apple.
- Remove the Instant Health effect for making players immortal
- I think making it so players can only pick up a certain number of rainbow apples wouldn’t be a good design. Many players would probably be confused because it doesn’t make a lot of sense for one particular item in the game to have a limit for how much of it you can obtain. Giving all the apples to the player who broke the block would also be a strange mechanic that I don’t see necessary. I don’t think making the apples stackable is such a bad idea, but I’ll discuss this more later.
- I somewhat agree with this. I personally never use the rainbow apples because I’m an aggressive player and it isn’t worth it to slow myself down in a fight to get effects that are either pointless or defensive. I think that at a minimum, effects like night vision or water breathing should be removed because they might as well not do anything at all. However, I think effects that aren’t necessarily good but still do something significant, such as levitation or slow falling, would be fun and interesting.
- I don’t really see why this would be necessary, I think lucky islands already has plenty of food and think the focus and justification for using the rainbow apples should be the effects they give you, not the hunger
- As mentioned previously, this effect does sound a little broken but I’ve never had any issues facing it. I would probably get rid of this effect since it doesn’t feel that fitting to me, but there are several other aspects of the rainbow apples I would also adjust.
I also think that rainbow apples need a rebalance, what I proposed in one of my threads is to put a time limit on the effect that the apples give so as not to have people with immortality for 35 seconds, but to me the instant health effect doesn't seem "bad/unbalanced", keep in mind that you can get a sword that kills in one hit with the rainbow lucky block, having something that makes you immortal for a short period of time doesn't seem bad to me, and on top of that the effect doesn't come out when you want it to.
Having a time limit seems alright, and if the instant health effect is more well known on Java lucky islands, 35 seconds does seem like an excessive amount of time. I believe completely redoing the rainbow apples effects would be better, so many of them just seem really uninteresting and repetitive to me. I’m not entirely sure on every possible effect, but getting regeneration, resistance, or instant health all do basically the same thing, and getting water breathing, fire resistance, or night vision all do basically nothing. There are a few outlier effects that stand out, but not enough in my opinion. I don’t think the instant health is particularly a problem but that the entire design of the rainbow apples could be made a lot more complex and dynamic.
-I don't think that's the solution, if they could be stacked even if only 8 per player it would be quite op, the biggest drawback of apples is that they take up a lot of space in the inventory and that you can't choose the effect that will come out which is a very good way to balance this item
In my opinion, the biggest drawback is that you are required to slow down in order to consume the apples in an addition to not being able to fight back while you are eating. Having the items not stackable only makes you eat the apples slightly slower at a time and acts more as an inconvenience. It also requires you to sacrifice inventory, but you usually get this inventory space back right away once you use the rainbow apples. I agree that having stacks of 8 is a bit excessive, but I think having stacks of 2 or 3 would be fine. Alternatively, increasing the effects of the apples but decreasing the amount you get would also work. I just think having your inventory get completely filled with the apples becomes more of a nuisance than a tactical drawback.
I think the rainbow apples could be greatly improved upon by redesigning the completely to make them more unique and have more significant effects. This is how I would design the rainbow apples:
One idea I really liked was from VisoredTrack in
this thread (message #2):
I think it would be better if a tree spawns and then it drops the rainbow apples every now and then just like the golden apples trees work in giga blockwars and the tree could stay for the entire match (in op it would disappear when a new rainbow lucky blocks spawns)
This helps fix a problem with the rainbow lucky blocks which I mentioned in this thread; the rainbow lucky blocks aren’t very effective at incentivizing players to leave spawn islands and head to middle because all of the loot can be taken by the first player to get to there, which is usually a rusher. If the rainbow apples were generated over time, it would give players a reason to go to middle even if all the lucky blocks had already been opened. This would make the rainbow apple drop even weaker compared to the other rainbow lucky block drops as well, but I also think those other rainbow lucky block drops should also receive certain rebalancing.
In addition, I would keep the rainbow apples non-stackable, but players would receive less rainbow apples in total while receiving stronger effects. Here are some examples of these effects:
- 1 heart of health boost for 90 seconds (does not stack)
- 3 hearts of absorption for 1 minute (does not stack)
- Instant health for 3 seconds
- Regeneration 1 for 40 seconds
- slowness 2 and resistance 2 for 20 seconds
- speed 1 and resistance 1 for 10 seconds
- Speed 3 for 20 seconds
- Jump boost 6 for 25 seconds
- speed 1, jump boost 2, and slow falling 1 for 40 seconds
- Fire resistance and haste 1 for 3 minutes
- Haste 3 for 12 seconds
- Strength 1 for 15 seconds
- Levitation and speed for 20 seconds, resistance 5 for 25 seconds
I think having effects like these would make it more worth using the rainbow apples and cause more interesting outcomes than they do right now. Reducing the quantity of apples given and having them be generated by the tree over a long period of time will prevent them from being too overpowered.
