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?

Down Time

Not much to report recently. With Minecraft World repaired, I've taken a break from Elohim to get more resources for future expansion in the World. I've begun the third "node" (my term for a major branch) and in that same node mined two veins of 7 diamond. I've also accumulated plenty of iron, so much that I have somewhere around 200 of them. 153 of them have been lumped together in 17 iron blocks.

Concerning Elohim, I did some modeling for decks three and four. The third deck will be maybe 100 blocks long and maybe wide enough to fit the ship name on the outer hull. Deck four, on the other hand, it going to simply be enormous, unless I rotate the crew quarters. This would possibly widen the deck a little while greatly reducing its length. Still, it's packed with rooms and features including a few missile launchers, matter storage tank, and part of the sublight impulse engines. I can't work on it right now, because minecraft.net is down again.

Projects Progressing

The original save file I was putting models in has become no more. I deleted it because after every time I saved it in World of Minecraft, it would become corrupted. For now I'm using the in-browser applet. Instead I'm doing it mostly by memory. I've made rough floorplans on paper for decks 1-4 and 20-21. I may simply merge 4 and 5 into a single deck because they are composed mostly of multilevel rooms like matter storage tanks, impulse reactors and weaponry. I also decided to remove one crew quarters for the sake of symmetry. Originally I would have 65 quarters: 20 are officer quarters and placed on deck 3, while the remaining 45 were crew quarters on deck 4. However, there's not really an easy way to symmetrically divide that up. Remove one room and you're down to 44 rooms. That can easily be split into four groups of 11, which is what will be done here. Between groups of 11 there will be a small walkway for quicker access.

In a new save file, which I'm going to keep away from WoM except for purely viewing purposes, I've made a model of the top two decks. I personally don't think it's very pretty, but hey, it's just an early model. The floors are made of gray wool while the hull and walls are smoothstone. I've yet to integrate the computer cores anywhere into the plans and I also realized that certain parts are larger than I had anticipated. There won't be any self-destruct systems present in this model.

Deck 1: the elliptical-shaped command center and the more rectangular main briefing room.
Deck 2: briefing room, CO's office, XO's office, yeoman's office, two guest quarters. The total size is 20 wide by 41 long. I've decided to keep the guest quarters empty for the time being.

Part of my dream with the Elohim is not only will it be built, but it'll undergo changes and variations as outsiders suggest modifications. There'll be a "fleet" of them spread across several servers, and not each needs to be named Elohim. I don't really mind what they call them as long as the names aren't silly. So for instance I would be hesitant to accept a ship name of Jim Bob's Toenail however if they want to call it something from TV/video games like Enterprise, Pillar of Autumn, etc., name it after the server admin, or whatever, it's cool with me. Each one of them could sport some modification like an extra few warp coils or enlarged shuttlebay.

In some non-Elohim news, I returned to a couple of my Beta worlds. I briefly spent some time in my Main Save, adding some wool to the interior of the model for the new house I wanted to build. I had desire to do something with redstone but couldn't come up with what I wanted to do. So I moved to the save which will eventually be the Minecraft World. After goofing around for a few minutes I attempted to generate some missing chunks south of my spawn point that were making a gap in what seemed to be a massive landmass. It was a long distance and I wanted to get down there fast so I began using the /fly command.

Wondering if it were possible to increase my moving speed I went through the command list and noticed something called /setspeed. I tried getting in-game help but it wouldn't work so I went online and found I could use that command to move around faster. I set my speed to 10 and started moving. I raced across the sky so fast that chunks would not load fast enough. I landed safely in my desired area and started walking at normal speed. It got too slow for me so I doubled, then later tripled my speed. My main concern was that I'd move so fast it would trip up the terrain generator and give me land that's already weirder than what I have. I fleshed out what needed to be made and enjoyed how I was halving and eventually cutting by a third the time needed to explore.

Beginning my return trip, I set myself to fly at 10x normal speed and went going. Even at level 90, which you'd think is mostly air, there were many hills and mountains that made me go higher. Zipping along at such a high speed and elevation made the game slow so I took a risk about halfway and set the fog to max and kept going. I didn't want to risk losing health by driving myself into a mountain so I used the minimap to plot my course, staying over as much water as I could while approaching my spawn. I got there with no problem and slowly spiraled my way down to a good falling distance, my speed reset to normal.

Then when I disabled flying, I fell to my death! I calculated my height properly - the drop would have not hurt at all. The game simply did not approve of what I was doing and killed me. Yet I was already at my spawn point so it was just a short walk around the scene of my demise to collect my stuff and return home.

Out of the Cave System

For the past two or three real life days, I've been stuck deep down in a massive cave system spanning most of the 64 underground levels. Literally each turn I took seemed to lead me to another tunnel which ended with more tunnels and/or a lava pool or waterfall. I originally came down here to raid dungeons I had located with Minutor, the software I  use to map and explore, however I got massively sidetracked.

While exploring another cavern I look up and see that the limit of the fog is inside a cave overhead. I am able to get up there using mostly the blocks, which form a rough path, as well as a couple lucky jumps where I turn in the middle of the air. I've done that before aboveground while ascending mountains. This time it was a little more risky because there were no blocks for me to land on for several levels.

At the top, I notice the ceiling is made completely of sand! There are some iron blocks which I collect, as well as coal blocks but I ignore those. I've been trying to get out of this cave system since yesterday but at this point I was hopelessly lost. During my walking yesterday I somehow fell a couple levels and couldn't get back up. This would be my escape!

Yet, I stop to think. If there's one thing I do, it's think. There's no guarantee that this sand ceiling will be my way out of here. For all I know this could be underground sand, if such a thing exists. Or, as I don't know where I am, it could be the bottom of a body of water. Water flows seven blocks from its source, but if it goes down a block it resets that number. The path I went up was pretty steep so opening up an ocean floor would turn the place into a huge waterfall.

I didn't want to at first, but I bring up Minutor. Minutor is a niftly little program. It generates a map of my world quickly and also has a slider which lets me look at whatever of the 128 levels I want. I don't use it to find ores or whatnot, just dungeons and my location. I jump the map to my location and pull the slider until I see yellow squares, which are torches. I'm just a few levels from the surface!

This knowledge acquired, I create my plan. If you destroy one - just ONE - sand block of a sand ceiling, the entire thing comes down. If I'm underneath that ceiling when it falls, it will probably kill me - not something I want to happen when I'm holding 70+ iron ore and 10+ gold ore, not to mention 8 diamond. I step a couple blocks away from under the sand, pillar up, and hack at the dirt and stone under the nearest sand block to me. After a few uses of my diamond axe, I've loosened up the sand.

It all comes down, and I'm safely out of the way. I walk out of the cave system and onto a small desert. I'm in the middle of my home island, which I haven't named. It's a fairly large island similar in shape to Australia. My home is west, so I go in that direction. There I find the cobblestone building known as my base and begin processing what I've collected.

There are three floors in my house. The bottom is the original part, now with a floor of wood planks. It has two large chests and a workbench. I've outfitted it with two windows and a nice painting. The latest addition to the house, directly past the chests, is the lava room. Here I keep a two-block-wide lava pool to dump useless blocks like cobblestone, dirt, and sand. On the opposite end of that small room is an infinite water pool. If I get set on fire by the lava, I can just break that open and I'll be good.

The second floor is the Tool/Armory Level, which has excess tools, weapons, armor, and items needed to craft those in chests. There's not much. The third floor is the Pantry Level, where I keep foodstuffs. Since I play on peaceful, I've yet to need any of this.