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...

Some Projects on Hold

Due to recent events, there are a couple projects I've mentioned on here that will be on hold...

1. Elohim: not really so much as lack of planning or time. The problem is, there is a whole lot of grunt work and repetition. For example, I have completed the outline for deck four. Deck five is going to have an almost identical outline... but it would waste lots of time and counting to make a copy of it right next to deck four's outline. In addition, I would also like to try and get the ceiling and walls completed which would again be monotonous.

I did have a team of volunteers as well as a server that was hosting the project. However, the team never did actually get together and the host decided he couldn't manage the Classic server needed for the ship. So that was basically that.

2. Apartment complex/multiplayer in general: school lets out in a little over two weeks so it's going to be at least that long before I can get onto any kind of multiplayer server. By the time I finish, though, my adopted home server will have very likely moved on. A person on there has already began making a hotel/resort of some kind and having two similar projects in competition would not end very well. Due to having a sort of teleport command available to players I would generate basically no profit.

3. Minecraft World: this is a mind-bogglingly huge project. How am I supposed to turn a map into nations? The sizes of land masses don't permit much more than perhaps really big city-states. Which is not what my idea was.


But! Not all is over with. I recently downloaded a to-scale map of the Earth (I cannot make this up, look at the thread here) and I have plenty of ideas with what I want to do with that. Now that's another blog entry all it's own. Fortunately, with it being, oh, over 21,000 blocks wide, I'm pretty sure that would be sufficient area for some fairly expansive projects. Of course I have the same creative road block I faced with the Minecraft World... how does one build a civilization?

About that Starship... (And Other Thoughs from My Fatigued Mind)

According to the Properties window of the file you can find Elohim's model in, I haven't done any work on that ship since April 4. The file itself has existed since February 11. After I finished the fusion reactor mock-ups and warp coil models I just sort of lost interest in doing the project. I can think of numerous reasons why I've so abruptly ceased work on it:

1. No support. This has been a one-man project for me, and I do prefer that. I can work in teams but for hobbies I like to do things alone. That sort of has a drawback, however. I don't know if my ramblings about the Elohim has really generated interest in it. Maybe it's just taking up electronic space and I'm talking to electronic air, I wouldn't know otherwise. Also, because I haven't been able to secure a stable server where others could help, I've been doing the grunt work of laying block after block down. It does get boring after a while, especially when I have to remove huge amount of blocks that were incorrectly placed. I don't know, maybe if I had a team that I could give design commands to and perhaps join in, then it'd be quicker.

2. Incomplete plans. Of the twenty-one planned decks on the ship, I have seven of them actually designed on paper. Other things, even crucial ones - like medical facilities, engine rooms, etc. - are all undesigned and unplaced. This is generally a demotivator for me. I like having things planned out ahead of time which gives me a concrete, visible goal I can work to. Lack of completed plans doesn't provide me that goal.

3. Lack of time. It's crunch time in college, work is starting to take up more time, etc. By the time everything else is done I'm too tired to desire focusing on anything, including the ship.

4. Lack of commitment to the project. As a result of no plans, time, or support, what is there to make me stick to the Elohim? I don't want to continue on an aimless venture, as I have a desire to do productive, meaningful things with my time.

5. I'm swept from one idea to another and am incredibly prone to give up at the first sign of trouble. Minecraft World has been on hold because I couldn't figure out how the heck to design Yusaria City. For the reasons stated above I've paused on Elohim. I was occupied by the SMP server (now not so much). This is a general pattern in how I operate.

I may return to the project some day if conditions are right.

On another note, I was just walking around a Classic map randomly generated and set to Huge. I noticed there were cave systems underground and I explored some of them. I can tell that Notch had already did some nice work in making these things, but there definitely has been major improvements in the terrain generation algorithm because the kind of world and caves I see in Classic are not at all nearly identical to what Beta's stuff is.

Also, one of my hobbies which has fallen aside in the past year or so is programming for the TI-83+/84+ calculators. Well, some time ago I was helping someone who also programmed for those with some coding and it got my creative juices flowing. He had made a very simple copy of Minecraft (check it out here) and I did some browsing of the code. There was a significant bottleneck in the code which I succeeded in remedying with a single line of code. He updated the game and I earned a special thanks in the readme :D.

It made me think: what if I wrote a Minecraft for the TI? This other person's game is intended to be more storyline-based. I could write a sort of counterpart game which would try to emulate Beta. I've already done some significant brainstorming on how it would work. I have plenty of programming experience under my belt (two shells and two games at least) so I would find that maybe 70% of the code wouldn't be a hassle but the remaining 30% would be a challenge to implement. It would be very unlikely for me to make it in 3D given the limited processing power of these devices and the sort of mathematical gymnastics that would be required. Let's not forget the small screen sizes.

Terrorcraft, or, Being a Noob Again

Today, I was bored. So for the fun of it, I decided to load up a new world and start from scratch. No hacks, no mods, just make a shelter by the end of the day. Even though I've always played on Peaceful, I still felt that urgency. The world planted me on a mountainside where snow met sand. I immediately began chopping logs and made a workbench which I used to craft a wooden pickaxe.

Tool secured I went for a brief hunt for coal. The way the terrain seems to be generated, coal is normally exposed on tall mountains. I grabbed that, made torches and decided to make my home in the valley. Couldn't have been more than a 5x8 shack but I needed to down some trees nearby to complete the roof. A trick I've always used has been to find a spot where there's a slope and build there. Since my first home in a world always emphasizes compactness I only need two blocks of height and working on a slope means I already have the bottom of half of a wall made.

Once it was completed, I looked outside. There were still two minutes of daylight left. Noting the "Mine" in "Minecraft" I began making a 2-block-wide staircase downward, placing torches every few levels. I stumbled upon iron probably within the first five layers! I kept going and encountered another iron vein and plenty of coal which I allocated to my furnace.

Perhaps because the SMP server I've been on has mobs enabled, when I broke into a cave I got nervous. I began exploring, putting torches on my right to keep track. There was iron and coal everywhere! I mainly explored, enjoying the feel of adventuring someplace dark and mysterious with relative levels of security. I had no idea what level I was at until I noticed a lapiz lazuli block. Then things started getting weird. I was having lag and it was rather intense. I wondered if there was a dungeon nearby.

Something in me said "This lag is an omen. Let's get back to the house." So up I went and something walked into view! Adrenaline rushed through my body. I observed the rectangular black body then saw its face. A cow. I laughed it off a little then killed it with cobblestone.

My first experiences with Minecraft were nothing like this. I felt reasonably secure since I've always been in Peaceful mode. Dungeons have always made me a little leery since technically the mob does spawn - although it's removed immediately after. The puffs of smoke when it does form for that brief instant make me uncomfortable. Yet there was something different about the game's mood this time. It just wasn't safe. I think that's why Minecraft sells so well - you don't feel safe. It's a risk and millions are willing to take it.