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.

Enterprise Has Seen Some Better Days [Pics]

I'm sure many people know that there was a model of the Enterprise-A (which was seen in Star Trek IV-VI) made in Alpha. This is different from the Enterprise-D which was made in Classic. Although definitely not a real-size replica, it still stands at some 70 meters tall by 100 meters long and 40 meters wide at the saucer. It has nine decks, and it takes some experience to get used to understand the layout. Well I'm sure it took a long time to build and was quite fun to complete. You know what else was quite fun, and much quicker?

Destroying it.

Using SSP commands and copious amounts of TNT I set out to destroy the ship to my heart's delight. Ironically, the warp core (according to the movies) should have been the most explosive part. But because the Minecraft model uses lava and obsidian for it, that's the most durable component. Let's view some pics, starting from the back of the ship. I took several images that seemed to be the most interesting and destructive.

This is the port warp nacelle, blown to shards:

The outside of the rear half of the Enterprise, not looking too good.

Formerly the warp core, now a lavafall:

These were the impulse engines...

The saucer section as viewed from above:

Another shot of the saucer. This view is directly below it and meant to reveal more detail of the damage:

As the title implies, the Enterprise has certainly seen better days. Even a couple Klingon birds of prey didn't do as much damage as a bored nerd with a lot of TNT:

I'd like to give shout outs to Mozzie who brought the Enterprise into Minecraft. You can see Mozzie's thread here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=52011 Thanks for letting me play on (and destroy) your ship!

Nippon and Dungeon

Today and yesterday I spent some time conquering dungeons! Granted I only went after two but the second one, found earlier, had a green record! I really should consider crafting a jukebox to hear the music that plays.

But the main news is Nippon Hamlet. Since last time I've added a house or two and a storehouse. I also included a dock and may do a defense tower, although with it being a small hamlet that seems unnecessary. Thus the settlement is nearly done, except that it needs lots more farmland. I have a hoe so all that's really left is to till the dirt, plant seeds, and profit off of it.

As mentioned in a previous post, I want to have something along the lines of electrical wires for in the World. Since currently no towns or villages exist that would feed power to the hamlet, I can't to that with Nippon.

In other news, I've tried out a new mod: the colony mod. It creates various NPCs who do work for you. At the moment I only have a lumberjack chopping down trees and planting saplings in a confined area. This will be useful for me because this is requiring much more wood than I anticipated. I was previously planting large amounts of trees in front of my tiny base then harvesting those, but the AI will simplify my endeavors. I repeatedly feel the need to say "Thank you" to the character but then remember... I'm the only sentient entity on this game.

Here is the seed for the Minecraft World: 1157488901799875748

Now some pictures of Nippon Hamlet! The description of each image immediately precedes it.

The hamlet as seen from the south:

Southern Nippon is quite hilly/mountainous:

The Mayor's residence. The name, Fushira Naruto, is meant to sound Japanese and is a tip of the hat to the manga/anime Naruto:

This bridge is located at the closest points between Nippon and mainland. I've since found it easier to use a boat to get from base to Nippon:

First Hamlet Established!

So, I had free time. Instead of trying to do something productive, I instead went ahead and, prepared with little more than a lot of wood, sought out my first building site. If you go to the world map (http://shawntc.x10hosting.com/world-5.png) and look just east of prospective Yusaria, you will notice that there's an inland circled because it looks strikingly similar to Japan. That was where I went. I cleared off all the trees with some flint and steel, leveled out the north end a bit and built the mayor's small, puny house. Then I made a wee little farm. A small step in a big project. I named it Nippon Hamlet ("Nippon" is one of the names the Japanese use for their country). Here, I even made some kind of role-play background information:

Nippon Hamlet, located on the eastern border of Yusaria, is located on Nippon Island, and is the only Yusarian hamlet that exists only on an island. There are five households including the Mayor's home, with a total population of 32. Although they are informally referred to as Nipponnites, the inhabitants were born and raised on mainland Yusaria. The small economy of Nippon revolves around fishing and farming and most of what they have is imported from nearby hamlets and villages. The Mayor is Fushiara Naruto (which, of course, references the anime/manga Naruto).


The island of Nippon is 147 meters (482.28 feet, which is a little longer than an American football field with the end zones) by 61 meters (200.13 feet)  at its widest. The northern half is relatively flat. It tapers until the middle which has a bulge, then stays relatively thin. The southern half is elevated and hilly with a peninsula that extends to the west and nearly touches mainland Yusaria. That is the location of the small Nippon Bridge. In the middle of the island there is a natural opening to an underground tunnel complex that is not heavily used because they lead to a dungeon.


Nippon is rather precariously located. It lies between mainland Yusaria to the west and the nation of Inuizhmo (a comination of "Inuit" and "Eskimo"), making the relatively unarmed hamlet prone to attack. The nearby mainland is tall and hilly which makes protecting it difficult. Fortunately, the relatively small population and the presence of a dungeon makes the hamlet an uninteresting target.

Update... No Really, an Update!

To be honest, I've seen Notch's track record for meeting deadlines that he's placed for himself, and I've noticed that lately he hasn't been very good at it. Thus whenever there's talk for an update I don't pay much attention to it. On the Minecraft forum there's always some group of people who are whining that there is no update when he said there would be one. Then once he does make the update, one third of the forum is silent, another third rejoices, and another third whines that new features have ruined the game... by the way, if you don't like a certain aspect of the game, then TURN IT OFF or DON'T USE IT. Let others who like it use said feature(s) in peace. Anyway, I'm in the neutral group. I don't whine when there is no update, and I don't whine about what updates add. I'm too busy doing stuff to really care. I take advantage of what I have with me and if something new comes along I'll integrate it.

Beta 1.3 is a fine update for me. It does offer new half-blocks and the redstone repeater, but it also adds unlimited worlds, the ability to choose your own seed (the code which the game uses to generate worlds), and nicer graphics. I prefer this over the previous update which brought in colored wool, charcoal, lapiz lazuli and other stuff. This new update was sort of a utility update. It lets the player have more power over the game. I like trying out random seeds to see what stuff comes up. I'm still needing to read up on what the various states of the redstone repeater do, but it's good to know that the older repeater system will be simplified and hopefully cheaper. Seeds and the new save format also have a technical aspect to them, something that's right up my alley.

As part of the new stuff I decided to try out texture packs. There is a Tron-styled one called Rezcraft that I like, but it has inherent problems which makes it hard to handle. I also use the pack used for the Enterprise-A model.

Due to real life hassles, Elohim and Minecraft World have both been on hold. I intend on resuming both of them at some point in the future once I have more free time. I still believe Elohim is going to be seriously big. In a brief blast of inspiration I have decided to make some mock-ups for the World. Although I won't strictly go by it in the end result, there is a thread on the MC forum (http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=89031) of a person who has a project to make a realistic Medieval kingdom. My World will hardly be medieval or realistic but this is a good base for me to start with and modify to suit my individual visions. I've looked at a couple villages made in both Classic and Alpha/Beta on YouTube and it looks pretty cool. In order to make the demo as close to what it'll eventually look like, I copied the files of the World into a new save folder, so I was able to keep what I had mined and chopped.

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.

Nearly Lost the Minecraft World!

So with me flying around at three times the normal speed of a player in new areas, the Minecraft World grew in size. It briefly stood at 41 megabytes in size, which is bigger than what I've labeled my Main Save. The terrain is sort of weird looking but nonetheless pretty awesome. There are a couple of prominent places on the map: The Mighty Divide, which is a valley between two huge mountains; Deity's Haven, a resource-rich couple of mountains as well as a very tall natural bridge; and a surface mob spawner. The land masses are nothing short of huge, the forests are dense, and generally I have enough space to do just about anything.

It all nearly disappeared. For the past couple of days the map would crash whenever I tried to load it because it had gotten so big through mods and I was so far from spawn. I have MCEdit on my computer so I loaded that up and moved the location where my character would spawn on start back to the house. Then I looked on Minutor and noticed something strange about the area. A chunk of forest land north of my spawn had disappeared, leaving an empty square of ungenerated land. That patch of land had instead moved into the water just east of home base. The chunk adjacent to it to the south was missing, although when I opened the save it became water.

But the map was sloooowwww! None of the other saves were having this problem. Running MCEdit and Minutor at the same time on the world seemed to have a negative effect. Thus I decided I would restore it. Fortunately I had made a backup so I opened the restoration program and began restoring. With such a large world, it takes a few minutes. Once it completed, I go into Minecraft and find that the restored map isn't on the list of saves. I go to where the saves are located and see that World5 is there. Inside it... an empty folder called "t". The backup had gone horribly wrong somehow.

Still, I don't give up just yet. I try to restore it again, since the backup file is still on my hard drive. I was going to write a blog entry about how I've lost the Minecraft World, but I held off. This time the restore went smoothly and now, it's back to normal! Everything is where it should be. The map lost about 5 megabytes but that's of little consequence. It even undid a chunk error that popped up a few days ago. Under my base is a fairly extensive strip mine. I had a new branch stemming off of the first one, and a wacky error replaced the connecting tunnel with a new chunk which had coal and iron in it. I never got to it though, because this restore put the tunnel back in place.

Hopefully, the map still looks about the same as it did before. I may have lost the outskirts but I can regenerate those at a future point in time. I should stay put though, until I've begun developing plans for what the nations will look like.