As if I needed any more reason to jump back into Minecraft, a Hello Kitty and Friends DLC has been released

As much as I love throwing myself into the depths of ravines on a desperate hunt for diamonds, or trekking to the Nether and immediately plunging into lava, sometimes I think Minecraft needs to chill out a bit. There are only so many times a creeper can blow up your house before you go into your settings, switch from hard to peaceful, and start a new life as a surface-level farmer. Yes, I might be projecting, but there’s a limit to how often I can lose my inventory before I lose my mind. 

Fortunately, Minecraft has launched a brand new expansion that focuses on the game’s more laid-back side. The Hello Kitty and Friends DLC changes Minecraft’s standard survival crafting gameplay into a farming simulator while bundling in some adorable characters to accompany you. Rather than being thrust into a gigantic world as you would with a standard Minecraft game, you’re limited to a town in which you need to build and manage a farm instead. 

There are new crops to grow, alongside new animals to tend to which is pretty refreshing given Minecraft’s passive mobs have changed very little over the years. You’ll also get to decorate the entire thing with brand-new Hello Kitty and Sanrio-inspired decor. Gone are the days of sticking a pressure plate on top of a fence post to make a table, we finally have actual furniture to decorate with.

On top of that, the DLC comes with four seasons that rotate while you play which affects your farm in different ways. This is bound to keep you on your toes and stop the daily to-do list of water crops and care for animals from becoming boring, and as someone who’s poured an ungodly amount of time into farming simulators, this is something I appreciate a lot. When summer rolls around the risk of a heatwave rolling in and wilting your crops is more likely. Or in the later seasons, you might have to prepare for a typhoon to hit. There’s nothing quite like a rainy day in a farming sim to take away the pressure of remembering to water your crops, but it’s nice to have an extra layer of challenge to consider as well.

Though for any Sanrio lover, the main appeal of this DLC is the charming, blocky characters you’ll get to complete quests for while you go about your farm life. Rather than the DLC only featuring Hello Kitty, lesser-known characters like Tuxedo Sam, PomPomPurin, and Bad Badtz Maru are also ready to hang out. Even Hangyodon has a place in the DLC, and I frankly never thought I’d see the day he starts getting the attention he deserves. These characters act a lot like Animal Crossing villagers in the sense that they wander around and occasionally give you tasks to complete in return for rewards like furniture. You’ll also unlock them as you go, so if you don’t immediately find your favourite character they’re likely to join later down the line.

Even though everything still has the traditional blocky Minecraft look, it’s easy to forget that you’re playing the same game. As a huge farming sim fanatic and a lover of all things cute, I can’t even try and hide my excitement for this DLC. With that said I guarantee there’s still something that will inevitably frustrate me to the point where I have to take a breather and ponder how I can still do something wrong in arguably one of the easiest genres, but at least I’ll have an array of cute characters to offer a shoulder to cry on when that day comes.