Sounds like the perfect opportunity to have the adult conversation about what constitutes a socially acceptable number of cows to have in your house. It's a very important conversation.
My dad used to live in the country, and a single cow got into a semi-abandoned old ranch hand house. (We assume some one left the door open. It was in there for a day or so.
That cow absolutely wrecked the place. Walls kicked in, windows smashed (frame and all), floors ripped up, table in 2 pieces, just an absolute disaster. Also, the poop.
Lmao this has the same energy as me learning about the concept of loaning money for interest at the same age and deciding to put it in action by lending my brother bells in Animal Crossing and deciding that he needed to pay me back twice what I had lent him, a fact that I only informed him of after I gave him the money. We had a big fight about it and our mom had to get involved. Good times lol.
With fees capped at 14% and interest capped at 35% APR, a doubling could still be legal if they have 2 years to repay, especially with frequent compounding.
Not that children have the patience to wait 2 years for a return on their investment, though.
I hadn't learned about repayment periods or anything I just said he had to pay me back double, I didn't think about interest rates or anything but yeah I definitely was a loan shark.
I remember when alpha 1.8 was released and mobs would drop enchanting XP as multiple orbs worth one point each. It was fine for cows, but killing even a moderately high level player would drop thousands of orbs and basically implode reality in a radius of several chunks. Good times.
That ultra-amplified TINK, I can still hear it echo along with the gut-drop of anxiety wondering if my cheap laptop was going to keep up or crash out... Good times, genuinely.
I mean.. it's little kids so I was just sorta assuming minecraft bedrock over LAN.. if we're doing proper server stuff and you have the resources to throw around that'd also fix the issue.. though they'd still have to clear the cows manually, so depends on what point in the game they are, an enchanted diamond sword is way less of a hassle than a stone one y'know? :3
And then they can enhance that business by turning around getting pedophiles to subscribe and pay for in game credits so that they can interact with a bunch of undersupervised children.
My oldest and his buddies used to dig extensive tunnels under their friends "houses" (more like gigantic palaces of the flashy kind), filled those tunnels to the brim with explosives and just for shit and giggles blew up the estates above.
Medieval war tactics rediscovered by preteens. My inner historian held several celebrations.
I remember selling god gear to a rather small faction, so that they'd fight another. Then as they died and were focused on that, I just claimed their land. Of both.
I also raided an ally's secret area that their youngest leaked, then conviced them to join me by promising to give them shelter and loot - as a kind ally.
I just kept absorbing factions. Only one man made me ask politely, the one who outwitted me by being a pacifist. Hugger of war, lord of conquest completely enthralled by that which he could not have. He had conquered me and in doing so, conquered the server.
My 10-year-old and 8-year-old have been playing Minecraft, both alone and with me, since they were 5 and 7. I don't see a problem with it. As long as they're not on public servers, there's really no harm that can come of it.
It's not Minecraft especially, it's the computer. I never played Minecraft so it may be suitable for a 7 yo (depending on the child), but at 5 no child should in my opinion play video games alone, only for small periods of time and always accompanied by an adult as their brain is not mature enough to grasp the concept of virtuality.
I played some games at 5 years old; mainly Pac-In-Time and Mario Teaches Typing on MacOS, and Super Mario Bros on the NES with my grandpa helping me on the hard parts. My own kids when they were 5 played curated video games like Minecraft, Lego Worlds, and the other various Lego titles. Screen time limits are important until kids learn time management, at one point I had some software I found to give warnings and lock them out once their account time was up.
Once kids are old enough to understand the need to prioritize other aspects of life it's beneficial to have had some base level of computer experience. One example, my now older kid asked me the other day about how to set up an autoclicker and we walked through choosing a keyboard shortcut to trigger an Autohotkey script to spam clicks, and how to add other hotstrings and functions. I truly don't know shit about programming, but functional versus object oriented programming seems both more approachable and more of a practical tool for kids of the next gen who will likely need some understanding of how programs work to sort out good advice from hallucinations in whatever AI tool their employer uses.
For what it's worth I'd agree but just like on Reddit the hive mind opinion on this around here will get you downvoted to oblivion.
Kids that age shouldn't just be able to use a computer unsupervised or have free access to a computer/console like that. Screentime is a thing and its important.
That said, maybe this dude has such regulation and it just doesn't come out in the post.
Kids that age shouldn’t just be able to use a computer unsupervised or have free access to a computer/console like that. Screentime is a thing and its important.
There is no indication that's it's free unlimited access. I don't get how it being unsupervised is related to screen time.
I'd happily throw minecraft on a phone to a kid in the back seat of the car. I can't see what they are doing, but I know that minecraft not on a public server has very little content inappropriate for a 5 year old, and what little there is doesn't come up if you have peaceful mode on.