OK FINE!

(.... ugh, they've updated photobucket again so that it doesn't work well at all.)



Kitty!

I didn't know Minecraft had updated until I saw Bio's post yesterday, actually. So I made myself a new world and a new friend.



This is a towerish thing I made in my previous world. I should have used more End Stone on it. At the time it was the highest point in the world, just as Akio prefers, but with the new version it could be at least twice as tall.

Making the roof out of netherrack and lighting it on fire seemed like a neat idea at the time, but it's hard to appreciate when you can only view it from below. It's also really noisy.

Yes, MC servers do cost money, but at the moment, with the amount of people that I imagine we'd have... what, maybe 10 of us at a time? Based on pricing I've looked at, renting server space for a group our size would be somewhere in the $10-$20 a month range, depending on the size of the world we end up creating and what if any mods we may want on the server. That's really not a terrible price to me. I mean, it does add up, but... a lot of games have added costs, but I'd bet it's cheaper than something like WoW.

I made my first Nether Portal! 

I like the portal.  Putting together the frame and lighting it on fire is so trivial that you can almost forget the work it represents.  I popped through just to get my bearings (and the achievement).  I was so worried that I was going to end up like the guy in the tutorial, spawning on top of a tall pillar in the middle of a lake of fire.  But no, my portal seems to be in a relatively safe bit of the Nether, situated on Netherrack that is mostly not on fire, with only a modest lava waterfall and river imperiling me and my belongings.  I didn't even see any ghasts, though admittedly I didn't stay around to double-check.  Any exploration tips?

I built a big base, too.  Well, I didn't build it so much as mining it.  I had built my little house on stilts in a beautiful cove that faces the sunset, next to a hill maybe fifteen bricks high where I'd built a lighthouse.  To build my base I just hollowed out the hill, putting big windows wherever the side was flat.





I spawned on a big peninsula that is about half forest and half taiga.  You have to travel a long way to find interesting resources, and I have no clue how I'm going to farm sheep.  But the sunset is a nice benefit of all that ocean. 

I spent a day once in creative playing with redstone and TNT. It was explosively informational.

Also, the server I play on finally updated to 1.2, so I'm working on my epic tree build again. They decided to update the map, because of how cluttered the old one was. I had two above-ground floors and three basements on the last map, but I don't mind. I like building. This tree, it only has a radius of 35 blocks... and I'm working completely in survival... and I need to level the land... and they have mods installed so you can't use TNT... but it's all kinds of fun. Spent a couple hours last night building a glass wall into the lake where the tree meets an ocean biome. That was an interesting experiment.

Last edited by Aine Silveria (03-07-2012 11:46:12 AM)

It's so much messy and in progress, but I can do some when I get on later tonight. Progress shots of the tree as it gets built might be a good idea anyway.

satyreyes wrote:

Your tower is more than a little amazing itself, Rags   The hill it's situated on is so perfectly bell-shaped; you must have had to terraform it endlessly.  Did you use Creative Mode?  It looks like dirt on the right, but what's going on on the left?  Is it just stone, or is it a gaping hole that leads inside the hill itself?

You give me much too much credit! I didn't make myself a nice mountain, I just happend to find one and said to myself "Yes, this is a good place to put a tower." My only addition is the pillar of gravel in the middle which has a ladder scaling up towards the top. The left does have a chunk of open air, with a little bit of a cave in it, if I remember correctly.

I'm proud of it as a first attempt, next time it'll be better! And taller. And whiter.



Have you made any Snow Golems?

So. I started a file today, a Survival file. (I kept it on Peaceful, but baby steps.) And in this file, all I knew was that I wanted to build a nice little house. Nothing ostentatious or massive OMFG COBBLE QUARRY involved, just a nice house that was pretty cozy.

After a wrong step with my original file, I reloaded and got to serious work. When the island I was on couldn't provide any further, I built a boat and set off in search of fun, adventure and tons of resources. Boy howdy did I find resources. While searching for a good cavern, I found that swamp biomes have lots and lots of clay on the bottom of the water. As I like the way my texture pack portrays brick blocks, I decided to harvest some clay and save it for later. Then I switched biomes and got to business.

After my biggest excursion on this file, in which I found an abandoned mineshaft but declined to explore (I was getting lost really badly and really quickly), I finally clawed my way back to the surface after about 20 minutes of desperate searching. (I did mention I was lost, right? ) The resources included 22 gold ores, about three full stacks of iron ores (pay attention to this), a stack and a half of Lapis Lazuli dye, half a stack of Redstone and almost two full stacks of coal. Oddly enough, my cobblestone supplies were woefully low, which probably had more to do with the fact that I was spelunking in natural caverns more than actually doing any true mining.

When I got to the surface, I put together two furnaces and set to cooking what I had. In the meantime, I explored the large pond near the furnaces and found even more clay for the taking. The resulting displacement of water, air and block updates meant that the sand created a whirlpool into a cavern somewhere, but that was fixed later on with some dirt. Once all the clay and gold had cooked, I looked at a strange stack of blocks and hovered to see what it was.

WHERE DID THIS STACK OF IRON ORE COME FROM OH GOD OH GOD. Turns out I hadn't paid enough attention in my mining to realize I had way more iron than I expected. Once that stack was cooked, I squished all the iron into blocks. In the meantime, I made a clock with some of my gold and Redstone, then set to cooking all the extra clay I'd taken from the pond. I then formed everything into clay bricks and crafted brick blocks. A stack of sand was also harvested and cooked into glass, which I then crafted into glass panes.

That's when I set to work on my house. I used raw wood for the walls and created a sort of cube frame using bricks. Once the frame was made and the walls put up, I laid down the plank flooring and ceiling. Some of the glass panes went into a corner of my house, so I have a nice corner bay window; more glass went on the far side of the house, for extra neatness and security. A small hole was left in the ceiling to allow me to crawl up to the roof using ladders, and the roof perimeter surrounded with fencing. I placed a trapdoor to guard against rain and possible spiders, then set to work decorating the house. The crafting table I used throughout my adventure was placed to the side, alongside the two furnaces I'd used near the pond. A pair of chests were placed to make a large chest; I'd obtained them in a dungeon very early into the file. A bed that had been made a while back was placed and then slept in as soon as the game would allow.

The next step was to, as Aine and I put it, create a way to supply myself with noms. A small wheat/sugar cane farm was built, and most of my remaining torches used to cover the area around my house with enough light to deter as many hostile mobs as I could. Once this was done, all there was to do was wait and plan my next move. I'll have to now set the difficulty to Easy, since I saw at least two wolves around and I'd love to tame them for extra fighting bodies and, of course, because they're cute.

I'll see what I can do about pics, as I don't have any right now.

Last edited by BioKraze (03-12-2012 12:21:54 PM)

I had about 12 + wolves, but when Minecraft updated half of them disappeared.

D:

I played Classic once, a year or more ago   It's quite different from modern Minecraft -- and fundamentally different from Survival mode.  Classic doesn't have scarcity, nor much in the way of constraints on your creativity, so you can go to town! 

As far as advice, there's not much to give!  You can't die, you can't run out of stuff to build with -- really, the only hazard is getting lost.  Above ground, build yourself a nice tall tower on some high ground; as long as you can see that tower, you won't get lost.  As you explore more and more, you may need to build some secondary towers on high ground that you can see the first tower from, and so on.  That way you'll always be able to find your way back home eventually.  You can build roads, too, though it takes a while.  One good thing to know about building tall things is that you can place a block directly underneath you while you're in midair -- so you can build a tall 1x1 tower quickly by jumping and placing a block underneath you until it's tall enough for your satisfaction.

Below ground, it's easier to get lost.  Never tunnel straight down; you don't know what's directly below you, and if it turns out to be an enormous cavern you might have trouble finding your way out again.  Tunnel down at an angle instead.  (In an emergency, if you fall through a deep hole, you can use the tower-building technique above to go straight up again.)  When you run into cavern complexes, leave a trail.  One incredibly helpful technique that I owe to the tutorial videos OITL linked to a bit ago is the idea of marking your trail on the RIGHT, using some special block that stands out; I think Classic has funky purple blocks that stick out like a sore thumb.  That way, when you want to go back to the surface, you just turn around and follow the trail on your LEFT.  If you're consistent about this, you won't easily get confused even at crossroads.

Have fun! 

Aine, I love the texture pack! 

Aine Silveria wrote:

http://i1130.photobucket.com/albums/m52 … 9_0139.png

I have no sense of scale.    When I saw this picture I thought for a moment that you had excavated a deep hole, and then filled it in with an enormous square that you had painstakingly designed to look exactly like a gigantic dirt block.  That would be pretty amazing, but eventually I figured it out. 

Epic indeed.  Where is the glass wall?  Somewhere in the base of the big tree?

Edit: Never mind, figured it out.  Wow, that is beautiful.

Last edited by satyreyes (03-09-2012 10:28:39 PM)

I am getting really frustrated.    I have combed the Nether looking for fortresses.  I have dug up, down, and sideways.  I've made a Creative Mode instance of the same seed so I could fly around looking for them.  I've installed a texture pack that has better contrast between Netherrack and fortress tiles.  I've turned up my screen brightness and turned down my screen brightness.  I've installed AMIDST and built portals where it says I should have fortresses, and found nothing.  I've searched the Minecraft forums, which are full of people with the same problem, and all I see is variations on "lol there is always 1 near ur spawn, u need to look harder."  Well, I have looked harder, and there is no fortress near my spawn.

Is there anything I can do short of restarting with a new seed? 

(If anyone is in a terribly charitable mood and wants to help me verify whether I'm crazy, my seed is -2251266908816575195, and the overworld coordinates of my portal are x=-110, y=55, z=150.  But I certainly don't expect this level of help!!  Any advice would be appreciated.)

Last edited by satyreyes (03-10-2012 07:15:57 PM)

Ragnarok wrote:

I have no idea, the new release might have messed them up though.

Other than the possibility that structures were disabled when you generated your world, but I'm sure that's not the case.

Nope, structures are enabled, and I've found NPC villages, so the game's generating them properly.  Thank you for the thought, though!

I'm actually still on 1.1, since 1.2 still looks buggy.  I guess it's possible I should patch up to 1.2, delete my Nether folder, and regenerate it and see what happens?

Last edited by satyreyes (03-10-2012 07:58:17 PM)