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?

Beginning Deck 4

With the finishing touches of the docking port an decontamination room for deck 3, I finished that one. Next up is deck 4. My main challenge with this is to make it at least the width and height of the previous deck. I laid down the outlines for the crew quarters on the left side and the total length brings it to about 20 blocks short. What hasn't been added to that are the grasers which have their bottom halves on this deck. Also include the upper half of the impulse engine/fusion reactors, which should add around ten blocks. Length should not be a problem. My other concern is width. Again, the placement of grasers (and the hydrogen collector, aka "Bussard ramscoop") will sort of dictate a minimum width. I shouldn't have a problem with that, though.

This is also the deck where the warp coils appear. I wonder how long those should be. My original plan did not call for very many but given the size of the ship already, it doesn't seem like a small group of coils could envelop an entire ship into a pocket of warped space and propel it forward. I may need to increase the count of those.

In related news, I've already briefly considered a successor project to this, probably done in Beta: the Ruah class fighter carrier. It's like Battlestar Galactica meets Nimitz-class aircraft carrier meets my imagination. I want to throw in like TNT cannons and lava arrow dispensers. Maybe even redstone-wired TNT blocks for a self-destruct mechanism? It would possibly also be kind of more comfortable a place to live in for the thousands of people on it. The Ruah would be more like a flagship that the builders put a lot of money into.

Of Servers and Starships

When I last mentioned the Elohim, I believe I was discussing making the model for the third deck of the ship. Originally it was going to be a wide deck:

But I discovered that the top two decks would not fit on it. In addition I had no room laid out for the computer core. So my solution was to rotate the officers' quarters so that the deck would be much longer than wider:

That looked much better. I added the officers' lounge at the rear after I took this picture. Then I began calculating where to put decks 1-2. Originally I wanted to have them centered on top of the deck but due to turbolift shaft placement, I had to offset it by a few blocks so that it would go into the hallway and not an officer's bedroom. I added some roofing for deck 3 and made a rough outline of deck 2 on top of the model. I made an error and miscalculated the size of deck 2 when checking to see if it'll all fit but it's minor enough that I can correct it and not have it hanging off the side:

Observe how the ship now has a sort of nose at the front. I wanted to add the ship's name in all capitals using 5x3 size characters but the total amount of space needed for the name was more than the nose's width so now it's there, just behind the nose. In the next post hopefully I'll have that in a screenshot. I also want to make a post about this project on the Minecraft forum since it's clear I have some level of dedication to this going on.

 In non-Classic news, I have found a SMP server which I can call my home away from home in Minecraft. It's an RPG server and my role there is theologian/astronomer (which basically sounds like an astrologer but there's a big difference). I currently live in a little hole in the side of a mountain. Iron is proving itself to be quite difficult to procure. It has room for 10 people and has about 15 regulars from what I count.

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.

Enterprise and Elohim

I spent this morning and part of this afternoon on the server that the Enterprise project is hosted on. Actually, I tried getting on it last night but none of the Classic servers would function, even when I tried using World of Minecraft (which is also being quite uncooperative). I did some studying up on the Enterprise schematics and got in the ship itself. It really is quite astounding.

They have a wiki for the project and one of the things I noticed was that, in the list of decks they have completed, they include deck 7, which as 220 rooms. There's also an invitation in parenthesis to choose one as your own. I don't know if that's sarcasm or not, but it gave me an idea. If/when the Elohim is completed and put on servers, people will be allowed to pick one out for themselves. Their own little chunk of the ship. The Elohim has twenty relatively large officer room, 25 two-man crew rooms, and 20 four-man rooms. Officer rooms are more complex in design and larger, whereas the other two types of rooms are smaller and more like what you'd find on a modern naval craft. Although designing the smaller rooms would be less feasible, getting an officer's room would mean you can design it however you want.

Along with that, each ship would have a roster of crew positions ranging from the obvious like commanding officer to the obscure like computer specialist. A person could pick one of those for themselves, preferably one that coincides with their housing. It would be a little strange for the chief surgeon to be in a bunk designed for enlisted crew, no? For each copy of the ship out there, I would initially serve as the commanding officer until someone took that position. I would have the ceremonial rank of Admiral and, although I wouldn't have much control over the ships except perhaps requesting server owners to ban certain people or do things with the ship itself, it's still kinda cool to have that level of recognition.

Currently, the ship is still well in the prototyping stage. I've barely put together the main engineering section and there are many other areas left to design. Integrating them all will be a heck of a time, but I'm sure I can do it!

Elohim's Internal Arrangements

Although I haven't laid down any final plans, I do know a little about what will go where. Rooms related to ship command and control will be placed together. Living quarters will be near that. Environmental control will be near the quarters, perhaps by the science department. Medical will be somewhere between the crew quarters and the engineering section. The security section will be near the meddeck but not as close to crew quarters (for good reason - would you feel comfortable knowing a criminal is on the opposite side of the wall you're laying by?).

As said before, Elohim is composed of three subhulls. This means that some things will need to be seen in all three of them, while some things will only appear in one. The shuttlebay will be in the back of Cain, like you'd find on Star Trek starships. Cain will also sport the main engineering room with the matter/antimatter reactor. The other two subhulls will have fusion reactors and banks of massive capacitors which are used as batteries. The primary meddeck will be in either Abel or Babel, but the other two will have smaller areas for medical purposes. A rather tricky part is going to be with their computer cores. I want to see if they can be lined up to form one core when connected, and not three scattered somewhere in the ship.

In a Classic file that I have on my hard drive, I've been making models of the ship's various rooms. It will indeed be a big ship, and maybe a little ugly at first. Deck 1, which has the main control center and briefing room, is 20x25 in size. Deck 2, which currently has the captain's and executive officer's offices along with another briefing room, currently doesn't look like it'll have to be quite as big. However, I've just barely begun making tentative deck layout plans, and that doesn't include larger constructs such as sublight engines, graser turrets, warp coils, etc. This ship will indeed be something when it's finished.

Elohim Gets More Details

I worked on plans for the Elohim a lot today. I've concluded the ship has a crew of 180, with several decks amongst the three subhulls (Abel, Babel, and Cain). I've yet to organize them into what will be found where. I am drawing inspiration from schematics I saw for the Sovereign class starship and the Enterprise-A model that I have as one of my world saves. The Elohim itself will likely be shaped somewhere between the saucer section of the Sovereign class and the sideways-pyramid shape of the Prometheus class's forward part. (Just Google those if you don't understand.)

The design of the starship is not going to be finalized as soon as I complete it. Instead, I'm going to build the prototype and call it version 0.1. As people walk through it and come to understand it, I will be open to any suggestions they have. If it seems good enough and practical enough, it will be included. The revisions may be minor or major, and the final version of the Elohim may look quite differently than what it started off as.

Now that I have made a good list of what rooms and components will be on the ship, I need to figure out what goes where. I'm going to borrow from the Enterprise-A model and stick things like crew quarters and command section near each other, while the engineering section and the shuttlebay will be toward the bottom of the ship.

There is another challenge that doesn't exist with the Sovereign and Enterprise-A ships. Remember, Elohim splits into three subhulls. This means that some things will appear more than once while others won't. Like, each subhull is going to need its own computer core (and I may try to find a way so, when the ship is in one piece, they all connect into one big core but are modular for when separated) but in likelihood only Cain will sport a shuttlebay.

I'm not new to designing starships. When I was younger and had the free time to unleash my nerdy creativeness I fashioned several fictional races and types of ships they had. I once even managed to identify certain parts of a ship according to what section they belonged to. But never until now have I ever plotted out a ship specifically... much less construct one!

Slimes, Starships, and Other Stuff that Starts with "S"

Last night, I had done some prototyping of various parts of the Elohim class battleship. The Elohim class battleship is one of the first large-scale project ideas I've had since I began playing Minecraft. It's designed to be able to split into three subsections so it can hit targets from multiple angles. I tried not to copy Star Trek's designs but the influence is clearly there. The control room (aka the "bridge") has a command chair in the middle surrounded by stations and a forward screen. It has a briefing room connected to it. I also make mockups of the enlisted crew's quarters, the mess hall (dining area), computer core and map room. The map room, or stellar cartography room, is quite a treat. You walk into this large room and see the far wall almost completely occupied by the star map which is two decks in height. There's a balcony on the second deck. It's one of my finder constructs.

I briefly had a team to make it and a server to host it on, but the team was never really mobilized and the server looks like it's going to be shut down. I wanted this to be a team effort because, frankly, I'm terrible at designing things. Actually I've improved greatly in the past couple months but I'm no great architect. Since last night I've had renewed interest in making it.

There are two things that a suitable server could do for me that I can't really do in singleplayer, and they're rather important to completing the ship. First of all, I want to have channels used as turbolifts that run vertically though key parts of the ship, and they're filled with water. Placeable water doesn't seem to exist in Classic. So I would either need to learn how to edit the code myself (and I may just have found something on the Minecraft wiki) or build the ship and then ask someone who can add water to do so in the requested place. Second of all there are things called "message blocks" in SMP where you can walk by an area and the chat has a message pop up. With this, navigation could be made easier. Like, if you enter the control room the game can say "Control Center". Or if you are going up and down a turbolift conduit and are lost, you can step out and it'll say "Deck 4 Section 9" which would indicate you're near the back end of the ship.

Of course, one can also consider portals. This would definitely be useful but I don't know if I would want to add those. It's be a bit too much like transporters. On the other hand, having dedicated portal rooms would make it easier for visitors and builders to travel around faster.

If I did make the Elohim, I would like for it to be on multiple servers. I guess it's a desire for fame. :D

I was watching Qubetubers a little earlier (http://www.livestream.com/minecraftgirledition) and they mentioned a mod that makes text-based commands for SSP. One of the commands spawns creatures, including Slimes. I love Slimes. They're oh so cute. I installed the mod and ran Minecraft. I spawned a Slime. It began hopping around making its plick! plick! plick! sound. I killed it, pillared a little with gravel, and spawned 10 Slimes. And 10 Slimes I got. Then I decided to spawn 10 more.

That's when things went wrong. One of the Slimes spawned and knocked me off my pillar as it fell to the ground and I ended up in the middle of 20 Slimes. These Slimes were doing damage to me so I started running. Then I desperately tried pillaring. One knocked me off of my pillar but I kept trying, and eventually got high enough to escape them. At that point my iron armor was at half strength. I made a plan to get over to my house and get in by making a hole in the wall.

I carefully began sneaking to the edge of the gravel and making a cobblestone bridge. The Slimes were huddled underneath me as I went. As I approached my house, I realized that they were able to jump on top of my ceiling. I changed my plan. Since I can move faster than Slimes, I decided I would run as far from them as I needed so they would hopefully despawn. I jumped and started running. I got into water and kept going. The slapping sound grew fainter until they went silent. I kept going. I turned around some distance off and saw they were gone, so returned. Actually I expected that they would still be there. However only one remained, and it was sitting in the water, not able to attack me. I killed it and chopped down the gravel/cobblestone towers and bridges, then spawned another Slime. It was a smaller one and was loitering outside my house's door when I ended the game for the day.