Setting Up Shop

It's been a few days since I've made any significant progress in Minecraft. School lately has been very time consuming and stressful. Here's an update as to what I've done thus far.

To date I've gotten ten diamonds, three of which have gone to a pickaxe. I'm currently at over 30 levels, so it's about time I get some enchanting done. This requires reeds. Tons of reeds. So I went exploring into the swamp northeast of spawn and began picking some out.

Obligatory water glitch:

Returned to my underground dwelling and planted a long line of sugar cane.

As those grew, I set about making an above-ground abode. It is going to be a simple wood and cobble place. There will be a few basic "nodes" connected by tunnels - a bedroom, smelting room, potato farm, and storage. I cleared out the trees in the surrounding area and got to work. The basic design for the entrance to the place:

Birch plank outline the floor.

The roof has cobble stairs (which look like full blocks on the inside), and two types of wooden half slabs.

Meanwhile underground, I discovered that behind a wall of gravel in the main area of my underground residence, there was a tunnel.

Turns out it only had a pair of Creepers and a zombie, and wasn't very long at all.

My plans at this point are to put together the above-ground house so I can have a secure base of operations. From there, I will be heading over to Polis Youssarianis, where I'll accomplish one of my objectives: make a village big enough that it prospers and generates Iron Golems. Ideally, it'll get so populace that I'll need to invent some kind of system, like a cactus wall, to weed out excessive villagers!

The village will have, at its center, a large round building, with the two main roads intersecting through it. This will have rooms on 2-3 floors with stairs to villagers can get into them. It will also be divided into three sections: an urban area containing a library, tavern, and smeltery, and maybe a few other buildings; a rural area, where all the houses will be; and an agricultural area, with fenced-off wheat, carrot, and potato farms and smaller houses. The rules for villager breeding are a bit complex to me, but if I want a successful village, I'll need to spend some time looking them over.

Friend's Private Server

I haven't been on there at all basically. Progress on the roundhouse hasn't changed much. Just digging out a ton of dirt from below the house. I think I'm going to take a break from that and start placing the stone brick walls so I can get an idea of how big an area I'm dealing with.

Other Notes

One of the advantages of writing down your experiences, be it in a journal or a blog, is that you can look back on them and remember so much. I still think it's really great to see how I've developed in the two years I've been playing. I've noticed my style has gone from being totally lacking in circles to almost excessive circles! There's a balance to be found there. I think my next step will be learning how to make multi-floored buildings.

Villages!

Single Player

This is a quick update, but it's something interesting enough to me that I felt like sharing. My temporary cave home has a ravine cutting into it. I have about 56 goals total in my Minecraft Experience challenge, and one of the goals is exploring a ravine. That one can be done easily now. This ravine comes equipped with peek-a-boo Creepers, too.

But what was really sweet was the pair of villages I found while trying to find a plains to settle down in. The first one is located on the shore line, next to a desert. The place is one of the smallest villages I've found so far.

A well, two libraries, and two farms. I call this little place Biblos Village. Biblos is the Greek word for "book," fitting because this place has two libraries, with two librarians. Pleased to have found a village and plains I started walking back to my home. Then I noticed a long gravel road, leading to a fairly large village. It has 12 houses, 10 farms, and plenty of villagers. 

It almost looks like it has an urban downtown part and a rural area. So impressive is the village that I decided to name it Polis Youssarianis. Polis means "city" in Greek, and the village is certainly big enough to be called a city.

Finding these villages accomplished one of my goals: find a village. What I want to do next is develop the village enough that the inhabitants reproduce and Iron Golems start appearing. I might indeed make it into a sort of city.

Friend's Private Server

Work on the roundhouse has slowed down a bit. I'm at the boring part of digging out all the dirt underneath it so I can make a two-level basement. I will probably spend hours doing that.

Shear Survival UK

Shear Survival unexpectedly went offline and was replaced by a group called IceCraft. I've signed up to join another server, but for the time being I don't know how frequently I will be on it.

This is kind of the annoying thing about SMP. Servers do not seem to last very long. Or if they do, the community stagnates and people leave. I don't know how the private server has lasted so long, except perhaps because most of us on there know at least one other person in real life. 

New Map

Look at all that coal! There was probably another chunk that same size underneath it! It'll be really helpful when I get back to my base... wait, where's my base?

I don't recognize this forest. It's near a desert, swamp, and snow biome. There's no place on my main map that has all that so close together. Maybe I wandered a bit too much and got lost. But even if I use Minutor, I can't find my base! What happened?

I'll tell you what happened. This is a new map. Today I decided that Main 1.0.0 has run its course, and it's time to begin the adventure again with a new world, appropriately called Main 1.5.0. Why? As I mentioned in an older post, I have been growing dissatisfied with the world I had held for over a year. I had hundreds of diamonds, gold, and iron. More coal than I knew what to do with. But I remained unhappy with it. I wanted to start over. I had not played Minecraft with the challenge and excitement of mobs on the prowl, looking to slay me. The diamonds were cheap. Frankly, the map was boring and even if I tried to start over with that world, it wouldn't have felt right. Plus, my building skills have changed greatly over time, and the map just couldn't sustain the changes adequately.

So I have begun a new world. Main 1.0.0 isn't going to be erased. I'll keep it on my hard drive, but probably won't add much more to it. Instead, my creative energies will be on this new map, which I hope to keep around for a long time, a worthy successor to Main 1.0.0. I'll be adding a unique spin to my gameplay as well, to make things fresh for me:

• Once I find a jungle, jungle wood will be the stuff I use to make wooden items. The other woods are better reserved for other things.
• Birch logs are sacred. No using that to craft.
• I'm challenging myself for this. In the past I alternated between Peaceful and Easy. For this map, I will be on Normal mode. I've been a Minecrafter for two years, I think I can handle it. There is only one exception for me to use Peaceful, and that is when my computer is lagging out during mob attack. You see, my laptop has a hard time with sound files when I first start playing and the game will stall and stutter horribly. It takes a couple minutes for it to calm down. So if I'm about to be killed due to Minecraft freezing, I will take Peaceful mode to prevent a pointless death. But it will only be Peaceful briefly, just enough for me to recover. Then back to Normal. No exceptions.

In addition, there are a lot of things that I didn't experience because I was playing on Peaceful all the time. I've made a sort of challenge for myself that I call the Minecraft Experience, which has over 40 different tasks for me to accomplish ranging from completing all the Achievement to making a Blaze XP farm to defeating the Enderdragon and Wither. The goals are just big enough that they can be done without being tedious. So for instance, one of my goals won't be making an Iron Golem farm that constantly outputs hundreds of iron at a time, because that would be boring and take too long. 

So on to the adventure in Main 1.5.0! I found a cave and started mining what I could. Got in a fight with a skeleton.

As I did on the Shear Survival server, I cobbled up all the surface entrances to the cave for security. Here's my front door.

At one point I got in a fight with a skeleton and almost lagged to death, so I briefly invoked the Peaceful mode while I cooked up iron to make an iron armor set and iron sword. Then it was back to Normal difficulty. This stinkin' bat, now deceased, watched me the whole time.

I set up a small farm and basic living quarters. This is just about where I stopped for the day.

I am going to continue stocking up on resources and keep adventuring in the area. I hope to find a jungle biome next to a plain or swamp. From there I will start building to my heart's desire, as well as completing the Minecraft Experience challenge. Since I enjoy sharing my creations with others, I will try to make more frequent uploads of my map. I'm thinking once every 2-4 weeks. We will have to see how things unfold!

Updated Map Now Available

After long last, I have now uploaded a more recent version of my Main 1.0.0 world. You can find it on the sidebar, or using the link below. This new version has many more things such as the Nether portal room, a potato farm, Nether hub, and 1.4.x terrain. I haven't been on this map very much, kind of getting bored with it. I might end up starting a new one.

January 2013 Map: http://www.mediafire.com/?4s67sa7h5pecldu

Roundhouse Continued

I haven't been playing much Minecraft simply for the fun of it recently. My last couple posts have been more toward being tutorials. Which, don't get me wrong, I enjoy doing those as well.

Most of my progress has been on the roundhouse on my friend's private server. It is getting much closer to completion now that I have started on the roof. I still need to finish the iron bars, flooring, and the basement -  first level will be chests and an enchanting table, second level will be a Nether portal.

Things on the server kicked off with me getting a visitor...

You should be able to see the Creeper near the center of the picture. Fortunately, there is a plugin on the server where Creeper explosions won't break anything if you have a block called a totem in place. For this server, the totem is a diamond block, and it will prevent Creeper damage for a radius (or is it diameter?) of 40 blocks. So when I went down to fight the mob, it exploded but didn't break anything.

I began on the roof. Originally, I was going to try a conical shape, but as I put on the first couple layers I realized that would look weird. The cone-shaped roof would be way bigger than the rest of the visible building. So instead, I'm going to do three or four layers of stairs, then top it off with half-slabs. For lighting inside the building I will use pumpkins.

Here are some pictures from different angles showing the building so far. At first I thought it looked kind of odd, but after giving it some time to sink in, I'm quite proud of what it's become.

I'm going to be heading back to university in two days. This blog probably won't be very active until I get things figured out on campus. Luckily, that does mean I will have greater access to SMP so projects like the roundhouse and Nether hub will likely be worked on more often. I also have a tutorial on roofs that I want to publish. Roofs are one of the design features that still give me trouble, so it'll be just as informative for me as for you all. Happy Minecrafting.

Minecraft Science: Food

You have probably noticed that some foods seem more able to restore your hunger and health than others. You've doubtlessly also seen how zombie flesh, and sometimes raw chicken, may end up making you sick. But believe it or not, the food system in Minecraft is a bit more complicated than meets the eye. Here I'll give you a rundown of what the various foods do, and some tips on what you should use for different situations.

My information is largely gotten from the Food article on the Minecraft Wiki.

Introduction
There are 23 food items in the game as of Minecraft 1.4.7:

• Apple
• Baked potato
• Bread
• Cake
• Carrot
• Cooked chicken
• Cooked fish
• Cooked porkchop
• Cookie
• Golden apple
• Golden carrot
• Melon slice
• Mushroom stew
• Poisonous potato
• Potato
• Pumpkin pie
• Raw beef
• Raw chicken
• Raw fish
• Raw porkchop
• Rotten flesh
• Spider eye
• Steak

Each one of these, when eaten, restore both some hunger and some saturation. The hunger can be seen on the lower right side of your screen when you play Minecraft. Its maximum value is 20 points, where 2 hunger points are represented by 1 chicken drumstick icon or "shank" as the wiki calls it. As you play the game, your hunger will slowly decrease, and you need to eat food to get it back. Then there is saturation, a "hidden" hunger bar. Saturation used to determine whether or not you have eaten enough food to heal. The maximum size of your saturation is equal to the current amount of hunger you have. If your health is at 20, your saturation will be at most 20. There are a couple things that saturation does:

• If your saturation is above 17, your health will heal. That means you need to have 17 or more hunger in order to heal.
• If your saturation is at 0, which means your hunger is empty, you will lose health.

Something to look out for is filling up your hunger bar too fast without filling your saturation. Once you're at full hunger, you can't eat anymore. Even if your saturation is low, you still won't be able to eat and increase it. 

I have done some reading, and there are four tiers of food, based up on the ratio of how much hunger they restore to how much saturation they restore. Mojang seems to have intentionally done this in such a way that the food falls into these four categories. I will simply go from tier to tier giving advice for what foods to use or avoid in each group.

Tier 1

The only food you find in tier 1 are golden apples and golden carrots. Golden carrots are made using regular carrots and gold nuggets, and seem to be the most efficient food to eat. They don't restore much hunger - 6 - but take care of a bunch of saturation. Golden apples are a little less effective in both hunger and saturation, but have the extra effect of regenerating health for 4 seconds. This potentially makes them more powerful than the golden carrots, since they restore health regardless of what your hunger is.

Tier 2

In this category you get cooked porkchops, cooked beef, and spider eyes. I would stay away from spider eyes because they restore 2 hunger points (1 shank) then poison you for 30 seconds, which is annoying. The other two food items do exactly the same thing, which includes restoring 8 hunger. Unless you have huge supplies of gold, these are the best food to have with you.

Tier 3

Here you find baked potatoes, bread, carrots, cooked chicken, cooked fish, and mushroom stew. For each hunger they restore, they also restore 1.2 saturation. For this group, baked potatoes probably do the most good and are likely the easiest and quickest to get. Baked potatoes, cooked chicken, and mushroom stew all do the exact same amount of good for the payer, but breeding chickens or searching for mushrooms may very well be more time-consuming than growing and cooking potatoes.

In this category, bread and cooked fish do the same amount of good as well. Bread is a common, reliable food source.

Lastly are carrots. These are less effective than the others, thus probably isn't recommended as a main food source.

Tier 4

In this group you find food that restore more hunger than saturation. As I will mention in a moment, these may actually have their uses when your hunger bar is low. Melon slices, potatoes, poisonous potatoes, pumpkin pie, the raw foods (beef, chicken, fish, and porkchops), and regular apples are in this group.

Although maybe not the easiest to craft, pumpkin pie stands out for restoring 8 hunger (4 shanks). That's the same amount of hunger as cooked beef and porkshops, but it restores much less saturation - about a third as much.

Apples are the second-most effective in the group. Raw beef and porkchops are slightly less useful.

Raw chicken, raw fish, melon slices, and poisonous potatoes restore small amounts of food and saturation. Raw chicken has a 30% chance of giving you food poisoning, which reduces its efficiency, so avoid it if possible. Poisonous potatoes guarantee food poisoning, so they should also be kept away from.

Regular potatoes are half as effective as the ones in the previous paragraph. They do very little good.

Tier 5

These are the least effective foods. Three are in this group: cake, cookies, and rotten flesh.

Cake is the oddball among foods. You place it like a block and can eat up to 6 slices of it. Each restores 2 hunger, for a total of 12 hunger per cake. Once a cake is placed, you can't pick it back up. It's a good food for sharing among a group, and might be best utilized as a public item for people to restore health on the fly, but it's not very effective. Cookies come in stacks of 8. A full stack is able to restore 16 hunger, but won't do much for your saturation. Rotten flesh, while more potent than its counterparts, will usually poison you, making it less useful than cake or cookies.

Applying this Knowledge

With all of this in mind, here's some tips for using food properly:

• As much as possible, eat cooked porkchops or cooked beef. These give the typical player the most bang for your buck.
• If you have no passive mob farms, baked potatoes are the next best thing. You can farm potatoes then cook them in the furnace. Its counterpart that doesn't rely on  mobs, mushroom stew, can be quicker to make but only if you've already got a decent supply of mushrooms, but that's slower.
• Bread is very easy to make in large quantities. Although not the best thing in the game, the fact it's so common and simple to make balances out the lack of restoring power it has compared to baked potatoes or cooked chicken.
• Rotten flesh isn't good as a main food source. Instead, use it to heal your dogs. Alternatively, if you're in a spot where your health is low and all you really need is to restore health a bit without worrying about hunger, you can chow down on a lot of flesh.
• Is your hunger at or near zero? Eat something from tier 3. For every 1 hunger these foods restore, they restore 1.2 saturation. This is the most balanced group you'll find. Baked potatoes shine once again here. Eating anything from tier 1 or 2 to get your health back up will waste saturation points once you're nearly filled.
• If your hunger is low, don't eat pumpkin pie. It will fill your hunger much faster than your saturation, which is not desirable since you will end up getting hungry again sooner than if you had eaten something more balanced.
• Some of the easier to get foods, such as carrots, potatoes, apples, and melon slices don't do a whole lot of good. I suppose you might want to eat those while you still have plenty of hunger bars left, since they will fill those up while also filling your saturation, saving more powerful foods for other uses.

Conclusion

This was a brief examination of the Minecraft food system. It was certainly educational for me to come to a better understanding of how these things works. With this information, perhaps you too can learn how to more effectively handle hunger and food.

Nether Hub Tutorial

What's a Nether Hub?
A Nether hub is a building in the Nether that combines rail lines or walkways through the Nether, each leading to a single base. Perhaps the most well-known Nether hub is the one on the Mindcrack server. It's elegantly designed in a sort of circular shape, and each slot is customized by the player who owns it.

Why Have a Nether Hub?
Bases on the main world, especially on servers, can be spaced very far apart. Walking hundreds or thousands of blocks from place to place can be time consuming and difficult. Even if you have a rail line in place, you could possibly shave off some travel time using a Nether hub.

That's the main selling point of having a hub. For every 1 block you move in the Nether, you walk the equivalent of 8 blocks in the main world (the overworld, as I call it). If two bases are 1,000 blocks apart, by using the Nether you only need to travel 125 blocks. It's even faster if you ride a minecart.

The other advantage of a Nether hub is that it's easier to find the bases of your friends and server mates. Instead of needing to wander around looking for the right Nether portal, you just need to check the slots in the hub for their name. Travel is streamlined.

Planning the Hub
To make a Nether hub, you first need to decide on what kind of shape it will have, if any. Your hub may be nothing more than a portal to the spawn area with paths leading to the other portals. This is the simplest way, although probably not the prettiest.

You are free to design the hub in any way you want. For it to be effective and useful, there are a few things that are needed:

• Slots that people can hook up walkways or minecart rail lines to.
• A main portal going to the spawn area.
• It should be built out of something that isn't flammable and can withstand Ghast fireballs. Stone brick does this well.

A very basic hub could be square-shaped with slots along the walls. For instance, this hub design could handle up to 9 people:

It's not the prettiest thing to look at, but it would do the job.

Some things you might want to pay particular attention to:

• Placement of the spawn portal: you want this to be in a location that is quick and easy to reach. In my mind this means either in the center of the hub, or along one of the walls. Also, it might be elevated a few blocks to make it stand out.
• Dedicated rail lines: there are some things that probably are not going to move, such as lines to an End portal, or Blaze farm, etc. A designer could put a line to one of these, and design it to be slightly different (such as wider or taller, or decorated differently) from users' slots.
• Overall shape: many options here. Keep in mind that rail lines might end up getting in the way of others. A suggestion I read on Reddit was a pinwheel design, where the hub was made of four "arms" with several slots facing the same way. This design made it less likely for lines to interrupt each other.
• Customizable slots: as you see in the Mindcrack Nether hub, each slot has blocks around it which the slot's owner can change to make it distinct. Not only does it look nice, it makes it easier to distinguish who owns which slot.
• Expandability: this is an important thing to consider. As a server matures and more players build more things, it's quite likely the hub will run out of open slots. How will players add slots? One idea would be to keep one wall in the hub empty or used as some kind of bulletin board. When it's time to expand, tear it down and build some stairs to the new part of the hub.
• Door to the Nether: suppose a player doesn't want to build a slot, just step out into the Nether? A good thing to do here would have some kind of door that they can walk out of. The best thing I can come up with is a door leading to an exit chamber. Through that you get to an iron door that leads to the wild untamed Nether. 
• Extra things: who says hubs are just for transportation? You can do a lot of other stuff, too. Consider farms, enchanting rooms, shops, breweries, integrated experience farms, and whatnot.

A Word on Placing Portals

Nether portals can be a bit tricky to link together properly. They don't always work the way you want to them to, and may end up linking with someone else's portal altogether, if on the overworld two portals are within 1,000 blocks of each other, or 128 blocks in the Nether. In order to prevent this from happening, there's a series of steps you can take:

First, go to where on the main world you want to place the portal. Press F3 and write down the x, y, and z coordinates. 

Second, divide the x and z coordinates by 8. 

Third, take the floor of these numbers. For a positive number, the floor is just the part of the number to the left of the decimal point, so the floor of 300.14 would be 300. For a negative number, the floor is the part to the left of the decimal point plus -1. So the floor of -300.14 would be -301. The floor of x, the original y, and the floor of z are where you want to put the Nether-side portal. If your y happens to be above 128, just try to get as high in the Nether as you can.

Fourth, make the portal for the overworld and light it - but don't step through it, otherwise you may mess things up.

Fifth, go to where the Nether-side portal should be in the Nether. Build it and light it. 

Now test it a couple times to make sure you go where you want. Using this system, you really shouldn't have a problem. It's easy to remember once you've done it a couple times.

Building the Hub

Building a Nether hub isn't much different from building anything else in the Nether. Be on the lookout for Ghasts and lava. It's recommended you drink potions of fire resistance if you're building near lava or fires. The potion will stop you from taking damage due to fire.

Using the Hub

Nether hubs are pretty self-explanatory. Every slot can be used to take you to another base, farm, or dimension. Some common places for a hub to take you include strongholds to go to the End, Mooshroom biomes, and Blaze spawners. As more people settle down on the server and pick slots, you will find the hub being used more and more.

Conclusion

A simple Nether hub is easy to build and can reduce travel time easily. For a large server with many people spread far apart, this is especially helpful for getting to the bases of others. You can design the hub as plainly or as elegantly as you wish. The trickiest part of it all might be getting portals linked together properly, but once you've done that, your server (or map) will have a fully functional, very useful hub for linking the world together!