They should’ve made them craftable since the beginning. But hey, it isn’t like Minecraft follows any sort of design or logic, more like the developers say “ooohhh shiny” and add new features on a whim.
And this is likely associated with the happy Ghast mob. I’m not directly opposed to the idea of a flying mob that lets you stand on, to build stuff, but… come on, stop wrecking the theme of older mobs dammit.
Yeah I never really understood why they weren’t craftable. It’s not an overpowered item in any way, and a leather-based recipe makes perfect sense. Now if only they’d make horse armor craftable too…
At the start, horses didn’t exist. But saddles did. Why? Because pigs can use saddles too. You couldn’t even direct them, you’d just be on top of them while they wandered on their own.
Saddles weren’t a tool, they were just a fun useless toy. Which makes sense you couldn’t craft them. It was just a silly reward for finding a dungeon.
Then they introduced horses, which used the same saddles, but forgot why they weren’t craftable in the first place.
EDIT: they did have a use. It was for the achievement of falling to death from a pig. Which makes it make extra-sense it being uncraftable. That is, until they introduced horses.
You can also lead pigs around with a carrot on a stick (carrot + fishing rod), but I don’t know if that was always an option or added later
As I said in the comment. You couldn’t direct the pigs back then. There weren’t carrots in a stick. There weren’t even carrots. Saddles are very old items.
It’s basically what calcopiritus said, they were kind of pointless back then. Already a sign of adding fluff for the sake of fluff, instead of integrating it with the rest of the gameplay.
Sounds like a good change. I usually find more than enough in the Nether. My problem is by the time I’ve built a stable and bred a good horse I’m only a few hours away from getting an Elytra.
Yeah. I’ve had a craftable recipe for saddles since a couple days after they came out on my minecraft server. Recipes that make players generate square kilometres of useless terrain chunks searching for items drive me batty.