Thursday, March 31, 2011

Minecraft World Expands

Today I spent some time exploring the Minecraft world, generating some new chunks and expanding its borders. I want the infant civilizations I'm making to be at least somewhat spread apart to simulate how things were in real life. I added maybe 6 megabytes of terrain, though, and it was spent mainly in the southwestern side of the map. Here's a link to an updated version of the map. You will notice a new nation's borders have appeared: Sunodomei. This is a play on Japanese words that mean Sand Nation. I got the idea from Sunogakure, from Naruto. I really should find other influences.

Part of me feels I need to take a small break from Minecraft, even if just for a few days. I seem to get on it so much in a day and do nothing except idle and fly around that I wonder if I'm wasting time. Then there's the sites related to it that I have got to be on once a day or more. And this blog. In any case, my posting rate on here seems to be about once every 5 days so a small break wouldn't affect this site too long.

Today was the release of Beta 1.4. I can't say anything about it yet because, well, I haven't updated to it yet. More info as it comes!

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Slower Pace

The outline of deck 4 has continued to develop. I've plotted out the shapes of the crew quarters, library, grasers and Bussard ramscoop from deck 3, and the computer core. What I have left are: fusion reactors/impulse engines, matter/antimatter reaction missile (M/ARM) launchers, and the warp coils. This deck is definitely going to be big enough to fit deck 3.

As for the Minecraft World, not too much has been done. I placed torches strategically on Nippon so that aggressive mobs wouldn't spawn on it at night and I've got it almost perfect. Using a fly command I hovered over it to watch and saw a nice pattern of blocks growing dimmer then becoming brighter and repeating. I have torches placed roughly every 12 blocks, trying not to let any block be at or below light level 7. I cleared out some trees at the site that will eventually become Yusaria City.

In a desire to stop wasting time making unnecessary travel, I've used one of the more convenient commands in the SSP commands mod where I can set a point and then use /goto such that I'm teleported to the location. I have around six designated points now. Some may say it's sort of cheating, but I would beg to differ on two points: 1) This is my copy of Minecraft, and as such I feel I can do whatever I wish with it, be it play completely legit or hack to my heart's desire. If it were to hurt anyone, it would be myself. 2) There are rules I'm holding myself to, namely that I won't spawn blocks. How fast I get from place to place won't really affect how I construct things, so this rule is preserved.

In other news, I "met" Notch on a Classic server last night. Supposedly Notch himself entered and proceeded to chat with us. Indeed this person did have some powers that the typical person doesn't generally display, however I made a deal with this person. I would tweet him about this appearance and if it were really him, he would reply to the tweet confirming the visit. It's been 21 hours and no reply... was it a fake?