Fighter Carrier Fleet List (Rough Idea)

Update: I have a new post that shows you more pics as well as how to build this ship. Check it out here!

While checking out Minecraft airships I encountered a really fascinating image. Someone made a floating aircraft carrier!:

This, of course, makes me want to construct my own fleet of fighter carriers. Will this happen? Maybe. Here is a list of possible ships I spent today thinking up. They are named for the Yogscast's Minecraft series. I tried to make it sound realistic and serious, but with how the Yogscast works that's not totally possible.

Shadow of Israphel class:
USS Shadow of Israphel (CVX-01)
USS Xephos (CV-02)
USS Honeydew (CV-03)
USS Knight Peculier (CV-04)
USS Reverend John (CV-05)
USS Duke (CV-06)
USS Granny Bacon (CV-07)
USS Mistral City (CV-08)
USS Fumblemore (Fumblemore sublclass, extra TNT cannons and Creeper-class fighters, CVA-09)
USS Astley (Fumblemore subclass, CVA-10)
USS Lysander (Lysander subclass, stronger balloons allowing for further range, CVB-11)
USS Jasper (Lysander subclass, CVB-12)

Verigan class:
USS Verigan (CVX-13)
USS Karpath (CV-14)
USS Adaephon (CV-15)
USS Grizwold (CV-16)
USS Nubescu (CV-17)
USS Braeburn (CV-18)
USS Isabel Peculier (CV-19)
USS Fireblast (CV-20)
USS Angus Eyeless (CV-21)
USS Grimjaw Slugface (CV-22)
USS Spacker LeChuck (CV-23)
USS Tinman (CV-24)

All 24 ships carry complements of Creeper class bombers and Skeleton class fighters. Creepers are heavier and thus less populous than Skeletons. I wanted to as a joke include a USS Honeydew II as a Verigan class carrier, saying that (perhaps as no surprise) recklessness led to the original's destruction.

Fleet of Airships Concept, and, Missing the Old Minecraft Feel

While viewing this thread, I was struck with inspiration. The person was wanting advice on how to improve the design of an airship. I made a reply saying that the person should build not just one ship, but a whole fleet of them. This idea got my creative cogs turning.

I am curious about naval craft, mostly due to my status as a Star Trek fan. There are various types of naval warships: destroyers, which are fast, maneuverable and well-armed; cruisers, which are a step up and noted for the ability to go further without needing to be refueled; submarines which can be used to evade detection; and my favorites, the aircraft carriers. So when I design fleets of sea ships, starships, or airships, I am quick to build various categories - that is, destroyers, cruisers, fighter carriers, stealth craft, etc. I could, theoretically, design one or more classes for each type of ship and build airborne fleets over the skies of the land headed toward combat or just patrolling. Maybe each nation has some sort of fleet in the sky. For real life nations I was thinking of building fleets analogous to what they really have. For instance, America with its 11 aircraft carriers, there would be 11 fighter carriers over the coastline or at sea. (And of course, the flagship would be called the Enterprise.) There are various other destroyers and cruisers so those would be made as well.

I hope someone out there is keeping track of all the ideas I've posted on here, because so far there are a great plethora and I'm barely done with my first one, which is to complete my home base. I've also thought of making a sort of Heaven, possibly stationed over Jerusalem, Israel. However, the Tower of Babel isn't too far... perhaps the building would accomplish what it was built for: to reach Heaven!

To be honest, I've noticed that I don't have the same feel I did when I was playing legitly. I've looked at the way the Earth map is shaped. It's relatively... flat. Especially in the areas where I am working. There are mountains however they don't so much gradually appear as much as jut from out of nowhere. The sand and grass intermittently mesh together. I sort of miss the often surreal but beautiful terrain the vanilla Minecraft code would generate, where you would have deserts right next to rainforests, mountains standing besides oceans. In the Earth map, there's nothing like pockets of coal ore or diamond. Heck, there aren't even caves on this map. The exploration of the caves, the mining of resources, stuff that seems so drab... I kinda miss it and wish that were present on the Earth map. As it stands resources are randomly placed at all levels meaning you can find diamond five units down. There's no clay or lava above ground nor is there gravel. Even the trees are odd... and all identical. I hack in unlimited supplies of each block or item I need and have /instantmine from singleplayer commands enabled so everything breaks with one hit. It's all so... artificial, different from what Minecraft was really meant to be.

So I think these things and consider moving to my MinecraftWorldDemo file, or at least playing in both. There are semi-developed nations in those so the floating fleets could be stationed at the nations. Although I like the feel of playing in a newly generated map instead of resurrecting one that's been sitting there, already explored and developed.

Rave Room, Sub, and Portal Idea

My latest project is making a rave room. The design is like this: at the bottom there's a specific setup of redstone wire and torches which causes them to blink and burn out erratically. There's a different design for redstone and torches along the walls which, again, makes them blink and burn out randomly. The setup is used from this video. I want to make it so that the torches and wiring below the glass floor aren't perfect rows but are somewhat erratically turned so that there are random rows and columns. The whole place is made with black wool and a glass staircase leads up to it. It's going to be something like 18x18, which is plenty of space for me to jump around like a maniac whenever I want to. In addition I would also like to have a sort of DJ station perhaps with only a redstone torch for lighting where I could turn on or off various note sequences...

Which leads me to the world of note block music loops. The main problem I have is that I cannot get them to repeatedly loop over the same notes simply by turning the circuit on with a switch. Instead I have to power it with a redstone torch, break the torch, then before the power has gone through the redstone repeaters place a piece of redstone where the torch was so that the circuit remains powered. Only then will it make a loop. I would like to know if it's even possible for it to loop repeatedly just with the flick of a switch.

I've spent some time working on a rendition of a submarine I was able to tour the inside of when I was younger. The sub was the USS Croaker, stationed in western New York. Near where my dock is on my Earth map I tried to recreate it. The submarine is 144 meters long, 6 meters wide and 6 meters tall. It looks like a really long stick. I called it the El Shaddai. Now that the prototype is sufficiently completed I'm starting on the second version of the prototype, the ESX-01A, El Shaddai. It will be 13 blocks wide, quite a bit shorter, and probably taller as there was a lot of other stuff I didn't build the first time as I didn't even know the stuff was part of the submarine I toured until I saw a cutaway plan of it on the Internet.

Courtesy of the Yogscast, I've seen Let's Plays of Portal 2 and the Portal 2 mod for Minecraft. In addition I've watched a Let's Play by someone else of the original Portal game. So I've been thinking... what if I were to make a course that is sort of a mix between Portal and an obstacle course? Since I don't have the Portal mod and don't intend on downloading it any time soon, I can't quite integrate it into this idea.

Instead I will use various blocks and their abilities. I expect that gravel or sand will be used to make pillars and build staircases, while dirt blocks will be used like cubes and also for making stairs that aren't supported by other blocks. Perhaps it will also have aspects of obstacle courses like difficult jumps and using ladders. The MC Portal used water for elevators between chambers so I  may go ahead and use that as well.

Progress Report

It's been ten days since my last post. In that time I haven't done anything exceptionally huge. In-game, anyway.

• I added a library as a left wing to my base. It has two floors totaling seven rows of books. I used wooden steps as chairs and workbenches as tables. Being the romantic sort I am, I named it after my girlfriend of four months. It also sports three paintings: a Creeper, a pleasant sunset, and a statue of a man surrounded by pixelated fire (called "Bust").
• The right wing became a dog kennel. There is sufficient space for a whole lot of them. I currently have ten, including four I just now brought up from my dock south of base.
• In the main room of my base I added a 1-block lava pit surrounded by stone. This was added because the fencing around the lava fountain outside would make items bounce back at me. I hope my doggies are smart enough to stay away from it. They probably aren't.
• I did more experimenting with making underwater glass bases. There's plenty of potential there.
• I began a rough outline of the Tower of Babel at the location of Baghdad, Iraq. That's the most likely general area of where it would be. The guide I'm using will only go as far as a diameter of 39 blocks, and despite how I want to design it, that still will not reach the sky! Perhaps if I make the ceilings higher...

Earlier this week, my mom was interested in knowing more about Minecraft, so I gave her a copy. Now she is hooked on it. She added a garage to the base. I found out that my wolves will not respond to her. Currently she is mining nearby, after having dug up the Rocky Mountains a little bit. I keep trying to get her to use the Minecraft Wiki and she's getting more comfortable with it, however she'll ask me for help quite a bit. She is also a lover of Peaceful mode, like me.

The people at Craffy have been working at their site and now have the redesigned site up at http://www.craffy.net. I would advise people to join there. However the beta site at http://craffy.gdscei.com is still functional.

Also, they've made the final release of the Earth map! It's been fixed and improved so that the Netherlands aren't submerged. And they've added rivers! I don't think I'll be downloading it, due to limits imposed by my ISP.

I have had a few more ideas of what I want to do with this map. Here are what I can recall:

• City in the sky!
• Build a cobblestone castle with its own little town in Ireland. Shoot, conformity isn't always bad. :D
• I was also going to do a village or town on Cuba, however if I go with the Ireland choice this may be dropped. 

Earth Map. Home Base.

I have been spending some time on the Earth map. Remember how a long time ago, on my first main save, I wanted to make a new home base? Well now I'm doing that. I am using smoothstone, stone slabs, and wool as the main construction materials. Here are some pictures, using an older version of Chant778's FutureCraft pack.

The front:

Left side:

Back side:

Entrance. There is that ceiling in order to detect possible spiders overhead in case I switch off of Peaceful:

Main room, facing inward:

Main room, facing the front:

That iron door in the main room leads to the Miscellaneous Items room where all the otherwise uncategorized stuff will go:

Down those ladders to the incomplete underground area:

The tree farm:

Those ladders in the main room? They go to three rooms upstairs. Here is the hallway:

To my right in this hallway is yet another room, which is sunk down 2 blocks because it rests upon the Miscellaneous Items room and I didn't think of perhaps making it float.

This map is being treated differently than how I've normally played. I'm not doing it in the legit fashion, but rather using single player commands to give me what I need. That's primarily because ores are randomly scattered instead of being layered. I don't want to dig up too much of the Earth trying to find these things. I would rather just build. I'm also utilizing the /instantmine command so I can destroy even the strongest blocks with just one hit of my hand, sort of like how Classic works.

Also, while I normally enjoy planning things in advance for this world I am totally ad-libbing it. I don't want my house to be any more symmetrical than it already is - that looks so boring on a world map. Upon looking at the wool pattern in the walls of the underground chamber, I'm now thinking I may want to add that to most or all of the walls in my base. I don't want to stick to simply blue and white, though; rather I hope to make it so the colors transition as one goes along the waves.

You may notice random signs with torches in front of them. This map is a to-scale one so I can easily find the equivalent locations of my own city as well as nearby ones. That's what I've been doing: finding where they are and placing the sign at their location. I have six nearby cities and towns marked off, as well as another 5 or so which are outside the immediate rendering range. Then there are a couple ways off, such as my city of birth (which is roughly a kilometer away from my home base, or a thousand miles away in real life).

I have lots of plans for the Earth map. Whether or not I do them totally depends on free time and ambition. Some things I am doing/want to do:

• Complete my home base. There are all sorts of farms and rooms I still need to complete, as well as a cobble generator which doubles as an anti-fire system.
• Mark off the extent of the Roman Empire and maybe rebuild it, and then expand it to how it may seem today.
• Rebuild Hadrian's Wall (idea borrowed from someone else).
• Build a railroad spanning continental US.
• Perhaps colonize Antarctica (also borrowed).
• Create several self-sufficient cities around the world demonstrating signs of technological advancement. They sport huge walls which use lava and water to automatically reconstruct themselves. Could be combined via underground railroad tracks.
• Build Atlantis.
•  I invented a nation, several years ago, called Buenia. It's an island nation made of an artificial island in the vicinity of England, Ireland, and Iceland.
• Create an underwater city that uses glass as a ceiling and is self-sufficient.
• Create an underground city.
• Make a Nether portal and explore "Hell," perhaps doing things in there as well.
• Garden of Eden
• Tower of Babel 
• Moon or several moons 
• Several other ideas have entered my head in the past; however, my personal wiki where I store all these ideas is giving me a hard time so I can't list all of them...

Craffy!

Craffy is a sort of Twitter exclusively for Minecraft. You should join it and see what I'm up to closer to real-time. It's still in beta and doesn't have things like the ability to follow someone and I don't think if you mention someone it'll appear on their profiles.

The address is http://craffy.gdscei.com/. Observe my craffies (their equivalent of a tweet) at http://craffy.gdscei.com/profile.php?id=231. If you're a Minecraft player, I encourage you to join... and if you'd be kind enough to do so, tell them that shawntc mentioned it on his blog? If nothing else, it'd be a nice little ego booster for me. :3

A Brief Look at My Worlds: A Boring History Post

This is just a little recollection of the various worlds I have played with and how I progressed.

I started some time in Alpha, a couple months before beginning this blog. In that time there were many worlds that I generated, browsed for a few minutes, then got rid of. The majority of these were after custom seeds were introduced so I've seen ones like 404.

Very first world: This one was the first map that I generated after getting Minecraft. I built a cobblestone shelter shaped like a rectangular prism that had little more than a chest, workbench, and furnace. There was also a painting - I've had an unspoken tradition to include a painting in any base I build. Near that was an elevated post that I used to watch monsters in the few instances that I switched to anything except Peaceful. It was in this world that I found diamond first and encountered my first dungeon. It also marked the first time I died, by lava. My mining skills were terribly inefficient.

Shortly before moving on to a new world for good, I constructed near my base a small storehouse with several double chests.

First main, "World1": This lasted the longest of any world. I crossed a small ocean and built another cobblestone shelter at the top of a mountain overlooking said mountain. Below me was one of a few places that I established a mine but it wasn't too big at first. That cobble shelter was eventually expanded to three floors in height and went from a one-room building to four rooms and a tower on top. Some distance away from my base, on the same island (it looked rather similar to Australia although I never managed to name it) was the location of my first deep mines and mob trap. It barely worked and after a long time I patched it up. In addition there were a couple lava lakes at the surface.

I explored that map like crazy. My expedition southward, which led to a huge snow biome (which I find annoying) was three times the length of my northward expedition. I also flirted with the idea of a more advanced home base as well as trying to make a world of nations. This was the world that I started using mappers with. As I moved on to other things this one became increasingly less used and was deleted not too long ago.

USS Enterprise-A: I downloaded the map of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A and spent many hours exploring the ship. Although I have yet to delete it I have not been giving it much attention recently.

Second main, "World5": this is what usurped World1. I was going to make a world of nations and explored it for a while. Then I decided I would save this for when I have more experience in nation building. So came...

"Minecraft World Demo": This is the one where Nippon Hamlet is located. This blog has plenty of recording about my experiences on it.

That huge Earth map is looking like it will become my third main save. It's more likely that I could make a world of nations on it or at least it offers gratuitous space to build things. We shall have to see...