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.

Minecraft Rave!

This isn't actually part of my projects, however I encountered this video via the Minecraft forums and am simply in awe of how epic it is. Eric Fullerton, the same guy who made the Minecraft song "In Search of Diamonds", has also made a Minecraft rave video using music blocks and colored wool:


And I can't help but find that to be awesome. One of the comments on the video was a person saying they'd make their character's skin to match Daft Punk and then make one of these. I personally can find little else as potentially awesome as that.

I must now reveal a secret of mine: a lot of my ideas - actually, all of my ideas - have actually been inspired by others. You know how I'm building the Elohim? That was hardly an original idea. I was inspired by the Enterprise. I talked about how I wanted to make a world of nations. That's inspired by a thread on the Minecraft forums of someone wanting to make a realistic medieval country (although my world won't be strictly medieval). I do believe that once I get my Minecraft World going, I will somehow integrate this into one of the nations. It's not particularly easy for me to be original when it comes to the first idea, although over time I do add my own spin and add modifications to fit my visions.

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.

Stage 2 of Design and Construction

I've 98% completed designing the Elohim. I have the room layout figured. What I need to do now is draw out the floor plans. Either that, or make models of them in Minecraft. Development has hit a slight road bump: The file which I have the models in has started acting weird and repeatedly become corrupt. Thanks to Windows 7 I can restore it to an earlier version, but it's been 3 times now and I don't want to keep doing that, if it's technologically possible.

In a sort of Star Trek-ish move, I've conjured up some text that would go on a dedication plaque (or in Classic, would appear when you walked by a special message block:

ELOHIM
First of its class - Launched 3 January N.C.E 301
LBC-01X - Mojang III Shipyards
Chief of Fleet Operations: Fleet Admiral Markus Persson
Asst. Chief of Fleet Operations: Admiral Jakob Porser
Project Manager: Admiral Sean Kiron (my online name)
Design Manager: Admiral (friend's name)
Construction Manager: Admiral (friend's name)

There was also the suggestion that I do this on beta. That could happen in the future. That would allow me to replace the water elevator system with ladders, and I could make actual signs. Actually, there would be more types of blocks available that would make it more realistic. The main problem would be that I'd feel compelled to collect everything legitly or else I'd face some heat and maybe lose credibility.

Something I've forgotten to include in the design, which is interesting to me, is the self-destruct system. If the Elohim were to fall in enemy hands, the best way to stop them from getting some advantage from it would be to blow it up. This was seen in two Star Trek movies ("The Search for Spock" and "Generations"). In Classic, I could just put bundles of TNT blocks in the walls at key areas. I could do the same for Beta, but that's where my interest is caught. What if I put a redstone wire and trigger in the engineering sections that would maybe have a delay, then destroy the ship? Part of me is excited by the thought. I would need to place a memory cell at some points so the rest of the ship blows up even when the source is gone. But let's not get too ahead of ourselves.

World 5: A Future World of Nations [Pic]

I haven't done much with this map lately since I've been focusing on the Elohim, but in the mean time I wanted to try and liven up a blog I know is otherwise rather dull. To make up for all the pictures I don't show, here's a really big one! The world map of the Minecraft World (I don't want to call it Minecraftia. Suggest some names!)

ON SECOND THOUGHT... I'm just going to put it on  my website and provide you a link to it: http://shawntc.x10hosting.com/world-5.png

Excuse the typo on the image, there is an "is" where an "it" should be.

That's a Big Ship

I did some planning last night on the room layout for the Elohim. The result of my calculations was the number 169. Yes, that's 13 squared but it also has a certain meaning for Elohim. That's a low-end estimate of how many rooms will be on the ship. 103 of them, largely crew quarters, are on Abel. Cain on the other hand only has about 36, and the remaining 30 are in the middle subhull of the ship.

Realistically speaking, there will be more than 169 rooms. I'm predicting at least 180. When I used the term "room" in my work, there were some areas that I treated as one space when really it would be made of multiple distinct areas. For instance, the main engineering area was counted as one room but there are several components to it, including the area for the reactor core, which is analogous but not identical to the warp core of Star Trek; the chief engineer's office; the duty engineer's office; the main fusion cores room; and whatnot. The medical bays have ICU's, operating rooms, offices, and whatnot.

Having to start planning out the location of rooms actually sort of caused me to start procrastinating. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because it forced me to go from the general idea of a starship to the excruciating detail needed to make it a reality. When I think of the Elohim, I consider it as a whole especially the appearance and major sections like main engineering, meddeck, and other things - not mundane parts such as the probe storage or matter storage tanks. So having to start writing down the tentative deck plans and structures of the rooms may prove to be a rather boring, tedious part. Luckily, I've at least made models of several rooms. And as I've said in a previous post, the ship's design isn't final. Others will be welcomed to state how they think it could be improved. They can go so far as to suggest new designs for rooms and items like the reactor, capacitors, waste recyclers, etc.

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!