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.

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.