Minecraft

[TheGodBen]

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]

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]

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.

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..

 

[TheGodBen]

Awesome!

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.

I've read stories on the forum that mobs can spawn near bedrock level even if there's torches on every wall, but I haven't ventured down into my mine or Hades Station since the update so I have no experience with it. Notch has said that the new system needs better balancing, so I'm hoping that the patches make it possible for me to venture back down my well-lit mining shaft without fearing a Creeper sneaking up behind me.

For now though, I'm focusing on my Nether realm. I now have two functioning portals, one at my base and another in a snow biome. I'm going to try to build a safe tunnel between them, but I currently have no idea where they are in relation to one another. Plus, one of them is out in the open with several Ghasts overhead.

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

I fell down my mineshaft the other day, from 30m above sea level all the way down to bedrock. Luckily, I was able to make it back in time to collect my items.

 

[froot]

For now though, I'm focusing on my Nether realm. I now have two functioning portals, one at my base and another in a snow biome. I'm going to try to build a safe tunnel between them, but I currently have no idea where they are in relation to one another. Plus, one of them is out in the open with several Ghasts overhead.

Yeah, I'mma stay out of my basement too, I think. The Nether seems pretty cool. Are you going to build in the Nether realm itself, too? Apparently blocks like lightstone don't stick around when taken out to the normal world.

Maybe you could do a really tall 1x1 tower at one of the portals and light it to see where it's at?

Also, Painterly Pack updated all their stuff for the update - they even have a biome-compliant grass option! Although you guys probably knew that already

http://painterlypack.net/

 

[TheGodBen]

Yeah, I'mma stay out of my basement too, I think. The Nether seems pretty cool. Are you going to build in the Nether realm itself, too? Apparently blocks like lightstone don't stick around when taken out to the normal world.

Maybe you could do a really tall 1x1 tower at one of the portals and light it to see where it's at?

A tower wouldn't have worked because the Nether is a system of caves and caverns, and even though I knew the general direction of the portal, I had no idea how far it was or what its elevation was. After an hour of blindly searching, I checked the distance between those two portals in the main world with Cartograph, divided that by 8, and dug a tunnel to that point. From there, I knew the portal was either going to be above or below me, so I decided to check below first, I dug out one block, and there was the portal in the middle of the cavern. I went down there, threw some cobblestone around it, and connected it to my other portal with a 2x2 tunnel (too small for ghasts to spawn in it). Now I have quick, safe transport to a snow biome should I ever want to relax with some ice fishing.

Since then, I've connected up two more portals, so I can now quickly access my monster trap (which used to require a 2-minute boat-ride), and I've connected my mountain base/mining hub. I only need one more portal at my holiday home on the other side of my island and I'll be set. I've also cleared out a small space in the Nether as a sort of base, but I don't spend much time there because of the horrible noise the ghasts make. I also made a small observation room that allows me to see into the nearby cavern:

Thank Notch they can't see me through the glass!


As for the new spawning system for monsters deep underground, Notch said he doesn't like it. He's entertaining the idea of changing it so that torches give out less light the further down you are, which I think is a much better system. I agree with him that there should be a greater risk lower you are, as that's where the most valuable minerals are, but the current system doesn't give enough indication of when you're safe or not.

 

[Iasius]

This is a bugfixes only update:
...
* Reverted mob spawning back to the old code, it was far to annoying. I have plans on what to do with this.
...

Yay!

Forgot to say, thanks for the nice comments.

I've been thinking about what to do next and I've thought about a better looking solution to "supporting" my greenhouse, but it would require changing the minecart tracks and walkway on the ground and I'd hate to just tear down hundreds of stone blocks that took so much coal to get in the first place.

 

[Trekker4747]

I got linked this on Facebook by a friend. I see someone linked to it above but didn't really seen any comments on it.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn2-d5a3r94&feature=related[/yt]

Impressive! The guy's voice will make you want to murder kittens but you've got to admit him building a 1:1 scale of the ship is pretty darn dedicated!

 

[Reverend]

It's certainly interesting to get a "real" sense of scale with that thing, but I don't think (assuming he ever finishes it) it'd be as interesting to walk around inside it. 99% of it would have to be miles and miles of identical corridors with only a handful of interesting areas to visit....still I would like to see in inside on the main shuttle bay...

 

[Trekker4747]

Given the limitations of the program, the guy has another video of what his plans are for the interior, I don't think making the interior will result in anything impressive. You're basically stacking 1m^3 blocks on top of one another and the blocks can only be one color on all sides. So it'll be very limited on what he can do for the interior. The video does give a very, very nice presentation of scale of the sucker, however.

I'm assuming some of the unidentifiable "greebles' sticking out of the edge near the deflector/secondary hull is some-kind-of scaffolding or something.

But, God. My friend and I were talking about this and I was just said that the video does give you an idea of how really fucking huge the ship is. I always knew it was like half-a-mile long and, figuring in the thickness of the hull and the space between decks, pretty much as tall as almost a 50-story building. But seeing it 1:1 scale like that really is humbling.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I was on vacation last week so I didn't really get to play around much with the Halloween Update until now. I started a new world and it put me smack in the middle of a valley between several really tall mountains--the kind with big holes in them and some tiny, floating islands. If I go in one direction, there's snow. If I go the other way, it leads to a beach and an ocean. So, I've started building up a small fortress into the mountainside and am underway with mining. I've got a lot of coal and a small amount of iron but no gold, diamond, or redstone. I did find an underground cavern last night--damn thing almost killed me because I was digging and all of a sudden lava came pouring out of the wall in front of me. Yikes! So I started chipping away very carefully to find the source of the lava, and sure enough it led into a small underground cave. There's a fair amount of redstone there so I just need to make some iron pickaxes and get to work.

There's one area in the cave with a waterfall and it's the only thing holding back a skeleton that's gunning for me. Little fucker.

I do have a question for any of the more "expert" players, though: if I want to totally enclose my spawn point, what dimensions does the room have to be? I enclosed my spawn point with a room that's 6 wide by 3 long by 2 high, and that ended up moving my spawn point above the room. So now I spawn on my roof.

 

[TheGodBen]

I got a little bored with my world, I'm waiting now for Notch to fix the biomes so that snow and ice return in the snow biome. Right now I want to build a giant igloo base in the large tundra area to my south, but if I dig the snow up it becomes a regular area.

So I decided to give multiplayer a try, and I found a good server at game.minerealm.com that suits me fine. It's open to all (no registering) it's large, the mods come down hard on griefing, and you're not allowed to use hacks, you have to gather all your resources. I spent the last day building a replica of my house in singleplayer for some reason. It's pretty empty at the moment because my singleplayer house is filled with chests, I have yet to find papyrus to make some bookcases, there's no sheep on multiplayer to make paintings or a bed, and fire is disabled so my fireplaces are pointless... but it's okay. Some of the other stuff on that server is amazing, I was especially impressed with the blinking tower as I walked past it at night.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Last night I had a bit of fun torching some forests. I took the wood from all the trees then broke out my flint and steel and lit the remaining brush on fire. Sure lit up the night.

Is multiplayer worthwhile? What about the Nether realm? I haven't mined any obsidian yet--just now got my hands on some diamond.