Minecraft

[Jeff O'Connor]

Well, it's gonna be a bit before I get this game, now. My neighbor got me Fallout 3 the other day and I'm now sucked into the Capital Wasteland...

[Robert Maxwell]

Jeff O'Connor wrote:

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Well, it's gonna be a bit before I get this game, now. My neighbor got me Fallout 3 the other day and I'm now sucked into the Capital Wasteland...

Probably a wise decision. I don't think I'm going to be playing anything else for a while.

[TheGodBen]

I was up late last night working on a base I'm carving out inside a mountain. I spent the (in-game) night working on a ladder connecting the base to my tunnel network, and when I got back to the base, the sun was rising so I decided to put in large windows to take in the view. One of the windows required me to step outside to remove soil that was blocking the view, and even though I didn't hear anything above me, I had a bad feeling there was a creeper on the mountaintop that would jump down on my as soon as I stepped outside. I cautiously stepped outside while looking up, and nothing happened. This game makes me really paranoid for no good reason.

A minute later I was clearing the soil away when I saw the horrible green blob fall right in front of me. I managed to survive, but I shouted "YOU PRICK!" at the top of my lungs at 3am. It's not that he jumped down and destroyed my work, it's that he waited a full minute, allowed me to get into a false sense of security, made me feel silly for being so paranoid... and then he decides to ruin my day.

Still, I'm not as bad as this guy:

[Robert Maxwell]

I built a mob spawner last night: 24x24x2 room, no lights. Working on adding lava and water to it to make it a trap/loot machine. I've looked at some examples and I don't quite get it but I'm working on it.

[Peak]

The Halloween-update is out..

[TheGodBen]

Peak wrote:

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The Halloween-update is out..

I've just given it a go. I've heard there's some errors with the Nether (Hell) realm, so I decided to go looking for new biomes until that is sorted out. I headed south in a boat, and the first plots of new land generated had snow on them! So I walked around, did some exploring and found this:



Lava flowing into an ice-lake. Aww yeah.



A flower and some grass growing under the ice.

I also did something amazingly stupid (surprise, surprise); I broke some of the ice, dived in, got lost in the darkness, couldn't find the hole out, tried to break the ice above me, but slipped away whenever I touched it. Luckily, I got out just in time, but I still can't believe how dumb I was to do that. There's some horrendous chunk errors where the newly generated land meets the old land from my save, but once I got past that transition point, things look much smoother.

I can't wait for biomes to get region-specific attributes, killer snowmen and penguins in snow regions would be awesome, but for now it's nice to just explore lands that aren't all green and brown. For now, I think I'll build a shack on a frozen lake and go ice fishing.

[Peak]

I've just started with this game a few days ago, and decided to take it slowly, so I haven't explored so much yet (building my house and mining at the moment). I will make a bridge of the water to the continent on the other side of the sea at some time, though.

[Reverend]

This game is dangerously time consuming. I've taken to "colonising" a relatively small area by building satellite house/mines within sight of each other. I eventually plan on connecting them all via an underground railway just as soon as I can mine about a million tons of iron...in the mean time I've stated a huge building project that will almost certainly never get finished; a glass dome about 60 blocks in diameter, the intent being to divide the interior between desert, forest, crop and water environments. I've already built a skylight protected arboretum in my main mansion for easy firewood production (coal is way to sparse for the kind of volume I have in mind) and there's no shortage of sand in the vicinity so it'll just be a matter of time.

I've already dug and 8x8 skylighted mineshaft down to the bedrock and will begin to create some horizontal shafts off of it, but right now I'm hurting for coal so badly I'm having to recycle torches like crazy.

[TheGodBen]

Reverend wrote:

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I've already dug and 8x8 skylighted mineshaft down to the bedrock and will begin to create some horizontal shafts off of it, but right now I'm hurting for coal so badly I'm having to recycle torches like crazy.

I built a 5x5 sky-lighted mineshaft down to bedrock in my mountain fortress, which was a mistake because I was already 35 blocks above sea-level. I spent a day mining down there, only completed around 1/5 of the bottom layer (of a planned 16) and found twice as much diamond as I found in 3 weeks of cave-searching. I'm scared to go back down there now due to the new monster-spawning rules which allows them to spawn in bright locations that far down.


Last night I ventured into the Nether for the first time, which is something I had put off until someone figured out what was causing the portal bug. It seems that when you create a portal in the main world, if the corresponding location in the Nether isn't "safe" (is in the wall or over a lava lake) then the portal will be created in the nearest available space in the Nether. But when you try to exit that portal, rather than linking back to your original portal in the main world, it will create a new portal in the corresponding location in the main world. Since 1 block in the Nether is equal to 8 blocks in the main world, you can exit the Nether in a location hundreds of blocks away, or in a dark cave some place. I've even heard horror stories of people exiting the Nether and ending up in a skeleton dungeon.

So last night I tested this out on peaceful, I created a portal in my base, entered the Nether, exited the Nether... and I was in a new portal in a random dark cave. I dug up to see where I was, and water flooded the area. It turns out I was in a small cave under the sea around 100 blocks south of my portal room. I went back to the Nether, and I could see that there was a wall to the north, so I dug into that for a couple of blocks, made a new portal, went through it, and I was on a beach around 30 blocks south of my portal room. I went back to the Nether, dug in another few blocks, created a third Nether portal, tested it, and it linked up to my portal room! I destroyed the four extra portals (two in the main world and two in the Nether), and the result is that after building a portal, I now have more obsidian than I started out with.

[Iasius]

Iasius wrote:

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This leads to my present cave system. I first explored many of the natural mines there, but lately I needed a whole lot of cobblestone (to refine again to placeable smooth stone) and I've started on a methodical underground quarry. At some point I got a bit careless with my torch placing and had a skeleton spawn behind me.

My quarry is now basically finished. It has a horizontal area of 1200 blocks and is 60 blocks high. That took a while, especially since I used stone pickaxes almost exclusively.



So now I have 44 diamond, 109 gold and 529 iron stockpiled. I only have about 300 coal remaining though because I used up a lot to smelt cobblestone.

Part of what I used that for can be seen here:



I tried to make the sky structures a bit more "realistic". I'm not really satisfied with the support for my greenhouse though. It looks a bit massive now, but the four single columns I had previously looked bad as well.

It's really nice to have a minecart link from my spawn to my house though. I just need to figure out switches since I currently need to change tracks once.


Since the update my quarry has become a dangerous place though. Lots of creepers and the like spawning there now and due to the layout, you can often not see them until it's (almost) too late.

I've started a new quarry which will be much smaller vertically, but more spread out horizontally. It seems that placing torches every five blocks or so is sufficient to prevent spawning even ten blocks above adminium. I don't know if that's the maximum, but it works for now.

[froot]

OMG yes a Minecraft thread!

I love this game as if it was my own child. I am, however, worried to open it after the Halloween update - most of my base is underground and I hear tell that mobs spawn underground, even in lighted areas :\ Will placing a torch every five blocks really work? It wouldn't be so bad if my quarry/base wasn't pretty much the same thing.

My fault for building underground, I suppose, but I'm still a bit disappointed.

[Iasius]

As far as I know, the deeper underground you are, the more light you need to prevent mobs from spawning. I don't know precisely how much light you need though. There's likely a thread on the official forums about it, but I haven't checked yet.

[froot]

Ah, well, might as well check out the MC forums myself. I took a cursory look last night, but everyone was so busy talking about issues with the Nether area that I couldn't dig up a whole lot on mob spawns.

Iasius wrote:

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I forgot to mention that your sky structures are quite sexy. A lesser miner would have simply made the tracks float. I am inspired!

[Peak]

I fell from a mountain and lost all my stuff..

[Peak]

I fell from a mountain and lost all my stuff..