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.

What's to Be Said?

Over the past few days, I haven't really done much. College and church-related activities have kept me preoccupied, and in any case I haven't been motivated to play.

I'm getting better with designing buildings. It's actually pretty cool to see how I've improved in that respect. I went from building cube, mundane things to the beginnings of varied colors and complex shapes. In my main save, if I ever get back to it, I can see my base having a cylindrical main room with little cube rooms branching off over and behind it. I practiced making a better looking house in a Classic world and I didn't do too bad for how much of it I got done. I've realized that planks and furnaces would be good approximations for kitchen counters and stoves. And cabinets too, although chests may be better suited there.

The latest update hasn't been overly exciting for me although to be fair I haven't look much into it. Notch's blog, http://notch.tumblr.com, shows what's been added. I like the squids. I closing one in and getting it out of water but I killed it. I sort of question the system for dyes. I can see sheep having white, gray, and black fur. However, outside of that, the dye system is rather illogical. Sixteen dyes possible and they come from so many sources: cacti, flowers, an ore found deep underground, etc. Some of them require bone meal, which is gained from crafting bones dropped by skeletons. Someone mentioned a simpler system and I agree.

Why not start with the three basic colors - red, blue, and yellow - and go from there? Red and yellow can be gained from flowers while lapis lazuli can give blue. I guess you can use bone meal to generate dyes when crafted with them, although since bone meal is also a fertilizer ink sacs may be smarter. Then mix them to get green, purple and orange. Although, there are still ten other colors this system doesn't account for. Maybe that's where the hodgepodge of crafting recipes come in.

I haven't made any music boxes or dispensers yet, but I can see some practical use for both of those. Dispensers seemed a little overpowered to me at first but I've warmed up to them.

Anyway, back to the Minecraft World. I've done more exploring and I must say, a world of nations would fit nicely on it. Some day, I'll have to post a map of it on here. Something that bugs me, though, is this: Why? Why do I want to make a world of nations? For the fun of it? Making houses over and over would get boring eventually. For the fame? This idea probably won't generate that much interest, and would eventually be forgotten. I wish I could do this in multiplayer, but I wouldn't be able to connect to most servers. Although I could use my computer as a server, Minecraft would need me to port forward, and I don't want to mess with my parents' router.

Also, I never got started on another project I wanted to do: the Elohim class battleship. That's a Classic project which I briefly had a team set up to carry out but we never got started and the host server looks like it's doomed to be shut down. So I have three projects: the Elohim, the Minecraft World, and my main save base. I need to decide which I will do and how I will do them.

Brave New World

What can I say? World 5 (I haven't come up with a more creative name besides the Minecraft World) is pretty darn impressive. I've yet to find any mega-continents but what does exist is quite impressive in size.

Although I've yet to start planning out what the world will be like, I'm already collecting needed resources for eventual construction. I'm going to start with Yusaria but I don't know what it will look like. I want to emulate how nations naturally evolve. In order to best make the world, I was going to use as a reference a thread on the forum showing a proposed project to make a kingdom. As it stands, I don't know how to design any of the buildings, although I may go ahead and make up designs, perhaps borrowing ideas from other cultures.

The Minecraft World isn't meant to be medieval, modern or ancient. It's actually going to be a mix of them all. I mean, this society can dig to the bottom of its world and shape diamond into pickaxes, and is capable of using TNT, but lacks anything like guns. The people of the Minecraft World has advanced differently than humanity. I have a page on a personal wiki of mine devoted to this project.

In the meantime, I'm working on a prototype wooden bridge with fences along the sides, which could be used to get across bodies of water. Right now my home base is really puny but it's probably going to be greatly expanded if I ever get rolling with this project. And I still need to work on the house project in my main save... oh my.

A New World (No, Really!)

Yesterday, I went a whole 24 hours without playing Minecraft. I felt several urges to play during the day but I wouldn't have done anything worthwhile so I resisted.

Today, I'm sort of making up for it. I opened up a new world which I may be able to use for that world I want to construct. After a couple hours of exploring, I've discovered a truly amazing place. It is currently over 151 kilometers squared in size and around half the size of my main world. My favorite part of it is the land. I literally spawned on a section of a continent that looks like the outline of Russia, Mongolia, China, Japan and the Koreas. This piece of land is a kilometer long and part of at least seven major regions constituting this continent. It it also a part of the longest mass of continual land I've ever generated. I haven't even found all of the coastline and already it's over 2.4 squared km in length. I will probably keep going. I stopped just now because the game glitched and became jumpy and faster than it should. Which isn't too bad for me except the map generator also started making errors in generating biome borders. Actually, there are plenty of errors already - holes in the ground, extensive gravel beaches, etc. but I like these. They add a sort of flavor to the map, imperfect yet just right for the sort of RPG atmosphere I'm building for the map.

Also, some more information on one of the "nations" to be in the map: The Christus Kingdom. It is not per se a nation in itself but rather a confederation of several countries working together for a common good. It's sort of like the German Empire of the late 1800s, where the many small and not so small German states came together. In this Kingdom, each constituent nation retains sovereignty over itself and willingly submits to the Kingdom's authority. It was founded by King Shaddobi and now is ruled by his son, King Hanarzi. It is centered in the nation Yusaria, which is also the largest and most influential nation in the Kingdom.

Model Work

Not much to report for the past couple of days. A visitor to this blog directed me to the software I was wanting and it sort of works as I expected. The 3D model display it has is one of the things I wanted to use. However, how well I can view the structure is rather limited, so I have to place my building in just the right place that the angle and zoom is just right.

Until I've mastered that, I've worked on it in-game. The outer structure is smoothstone and the inside is wool. I realized a day or so ago that the inside of my house is going to be highly flammable, being made of wool and wood mostly. Therefore I need to include an extinguishing system. I already have an idea how to do this. I would like to have a cobblestone generator that spans several floors. It would be composed of a stream of water and a stream of lava falling parallel to each other. This setup would be surrounded by smoothstone and perhaps glass. I could tap into the waterfall and create some channels along the roof that are closed off by a wool block. If one wool is set on fire, chances are it'll spread. When the wool blocking the water is gone, the water will fall and (hopefully) spread, or at the very least stop the fire from spreading.

One problem, though: I'm very short on building material. I didn't realize how much stone and wool this project would require! So for the time being, the project is really on hold until I get all that I need. Watch out sheep, I'm coming to punch you.

Some Sorta New Stuff

I need a new homebase. The one I currently have was originally just wide enough for me to comfortably fit myself along with two chests and a workbench. Now it has four floors, a massive pillar on top and a room which has a lava pit, for getting rid of excess dirt, cobblestone, and others. Although it serves me well, and has an excellent location (right by the cliff of a plateau of sorts) it is neither aesthetically pleasing nor will it really be able to handle much more expansion. And it's almost all cobblestone, with just a few glass windows.

My new design calls for a placed with revamped style and organization. I don't have it clearly visualized in my head, although I do have many specifics picked out. The exterior walls and roof will be made out of smoothstone, which is nonflammable. Just about everything indoors - floors, walls, and ceilings - will be made of wool, which should make the place brighter. The front end of my main work room will have a semicircle shape for at least it front half. There are to be at least twelve rooms, including four farms. Mines will be located underneath my house.

There is a program out there on the Minecraft forum that would allow me to make models of what I want to build. But I don't know what it is! There is a screenshot of it in action. It shows a grid that I can place blocks on with some options on the left. One of them shows how many blocks would be needed if the structure were hollow or filled. People are suggesting programs such as MCEdit or Binvox, and those are similar to what I'm thinking of, but not quite it. I downloaded MCEdit to see how well I can work with it and I'm a little clumsy with it still. If I can't find that program, and MCEdit doesn't learn to get along with me, then I'll just make mock-ups in game.

In other news, I finally conformed to the latest trend: mods! After hearing so much about people making and downloading mods, I figured I'd try one. I had read about the Aether, a sort of anti-Nether, and it appealed to me. I went the smart route and began by installing Risugami's mod loader. When I finished that I started up Minecraft to ensure all was well. Oh no! Black screen of death. This happened over the next three starts. Then I realized the noob mistake I made. I didn't delete META-INF, which apparently contains information regarding the game files. Once I deleted that, all was well. The Aether turned out to be a suggestion, not a mod (for which someone in the thread has chided me) but I have installed several others. None of them alter gameplay significantly. The oh-so-popular Mo' Creatures mod now partially exists on my computer. I've been watching streams of people playing, mostly QubeTubers (http://www.livestream.com/minecraftgirledition) and they have things like ogres, werewolves and wraiths.

Yeah... no. I don't have the disposition for those. I downloaded bunnies, birds, horses and other wildlife, not everything.

Also I have a mod that enables me to set waypoints and has a minimap in the upper right corner. I need this, really, because my sense of game direction is terrible. I recently got lost for the THIRD TIME in the Caves of Eternity (a massive cave system under my home island). Waypoints and knowing what direction I'm coming from should help me in the future. When it comes to caves and the wonderful things that show up in them, I try to preserve them as best as I can. The only things I'll do underground are harvest resources, lay torches, and build cobble bridges to get around. Otherwise, waterfalls and lava pools aren't touched.

The final mod is awesome. It technically allows unlimited amounts of maps, but its lack of a scrolling feature means I can really fit no more than 10 worlds on the Singleplayer screen. It also lets me give the saves custom names, so I can remember what they are without having to go in them. So far I have: Calculator, Main Save,  UndergroundCity, USS Enterprise A, and World5. World5, if it gives me enough land, may end up being the one I do my multinational project on.

Shout out to my two followers who seem to have popped up in the last 24 hours. I didn't expect any! Thanks guys, I'll try to be entertaining. :D