Getting Serious

For a while now I've been goofing around. Learning some new things but not really being productive. Today I decided to break that pattern and start progressing toward my Minecraft goals. First up, establishing farms.

My wheat farm was completed a couple days ago. One water block is all that's needed to make all this farmland viable.

Being by a swamp biome, there are reeds everywhere! I decided to set up a simple farm, where I plant a long line of them on the coastline my house faces towards. It only takes a day for reeds to fully grow, so this will be easy to harvest and have tons of wheat, sugar cane, paper, and eventually books and bookshelves.

In the upper left corner of the previous image you see a desert. That is the location of my new cactus farm. Cacti need not water or specific light levels to grow. Just plop it on sand (or, from what the wiki says, even clay) and they grow-albeit a much slower rate.

Last but not least, my first stab at breeding animals. As it stands, I find cows to be some of the more useful animals. They drop beef which can be cooked or eaten, as well as leather for armor. This simple pen is 10x10 on the inside and located a little distance from my house, in order to make things less cramped. I took a row of wheat from my farm and went into the desert/grass area above. Only two of the cows there were wooed by me, but that's all I needed. Passing through a river, I enclosed them in the pen and gave them wheat. After a moment they saw each other and... poof! Babby cow!

Storare Room and Automatic Seed/Flower Harvester

I have been doing a lot of mining under my base over the past couple days. There have been huge amounts of iron that I'm continually smelting in a furnace near the entrance to the mineshafts. Thanks to Millenaire, I have an incentive to keep the huge supply of cobblestone that accrued. When I'm filled up I just teleport or run to the village and trade it for money.

In that same legit world, I also began making an underground storage room like my 1.7.3 map did. The two double chests in my base were getting very full and very disorganized. Below ground, where I began hallowing out the area for my storage room, there was mostly dirt and I decided to keep the theme by making the walls out of dirt. The problem was, there were small caves on either side of me:

My solution was simply to place dirt where these problem spots existed. Eventually I got a nicely organized set of chests, signs, and workbenches established. I moved the vast majority of the junk upstairs to these things. I didn't realize just how many iron ingots I had until this was done!

Of course, one block had to be different. Somehow, I had an actual grass block form.

Not to mention the neighborhood spiders, poking their noses where they ought not.

Now, I have a creative world that is non-legit. One of the things I'm wanting to do, as practice toward the automated city, is make a system that uses water currents to harvest seeds and flowers. It utilizes a piston, redstone, and bone meal. Here's an overhead glory shot:

On the bottom right you see a dispenser atop a wood block which has a button. When you press that button, the dispenser will shoot bone meal to you. When you right-click a grass block with bone meal it will generate wild grass and flowers. On the bottom left you see a button connected to restone wiring. That will activate the piston, causing it to retract its arm. When that happens, water will briefly flow from the source block above the arm. The water, confined by the Netherrack fence (which could easily be any other type of block, even pressure plates), will flow and cause all the wild grass and flowers to break. This will drop flowers and seeds. Then, once the signal from the button dies, the piston arm will extend and cut off the supply of water. This leaves the loot in the area to be collected.

I wanted to use another couple water streams so that items will flow right toward me instead of requiring me to walk around and collect. Unfortunately, water mechanics are strange and the harvesting water will not flood the entire area. Here's the wiring:

This is only a model and could be optimized greatly. The wire wraps around and the signal is inverted at the plank and redstone. The repeater was originally meant to extend the signal but, given the inverter, is not actually required. That wire charges the wood it runs into, turning off the torch on top of it. That torch actually activates another torch, which is hiding behind the wood above it. This activated torch powers the piston, keeping the arm extended.  When you turn on the circuit, everything reverses: the first half is on, the inverter turns the normally powered section off, and the pair of torches reverse states. With the top torch off, nothing is powering the piston and it retracts, letting water out. Because a button is used, the signal lasts just a few moments before reverting to normal. Here's a picture of the harvester in action. Don't mind the pumpkins on sticks - those are part of an ad hoc archery range.

If I ever include this in my legit map, I want to utilize water currents so that the seeds and flowers flow into a collection point somewhere in my house. Manual usage of bone meal will always be necessary, of course; but with pistons and restone, harvesting could be much simpler.

Starting up My Base

Wanting to get going with my adventures and constructions, I left the village I was holed up in and sought out a relatively flat area. About 250 meters away, there is a ravine in an area of flat land with low hills around it. Wild grass everywhere. The spot is nice, since the mineshaft system is right below it. After a couple in-game days' worth of punching grass, I have made a nice flat area for building.

In my Creative world, I've been working on developing an aesthetic style for myself. It's kind of unrefined however one is starting to appear. Mine is more systematic than most. I begin with an 8x13x4 cobblestone shack. As odd as it seems I find myself constantly needing to get into the ravine and dig more cobble out of the side of it. Once it's made, I add a door in the middle of the front and place a torch on either side of it. For windows, I use two sets of four glass panes on the front and more on other parts.

Next, I put log blocks above the glass to break up the monotony. Doesn't quite turn out like I would want. Almost looks like it has eyebrows. For the corners of my home I use stone slabs.

Looks... good enough. I get to work inside. First off, I set up a crafting table, furnace, and bed. Then in the corner goes a double chest. I don't want a grass floor so I dig it up and replace it with wooden planks. I could use wool in the future once I have more dyes.

My first useful addition is an infinite water pool neatly tucked under the corner of my house. I also add a small side room with a ladder straight down to my mining system.

Now for a second floor. My first base eventually grew three levels high, basically a big cube. This second floor will instead be smaller and have a patio. Here's how it looks at first:

At first inspection I don't care much for it and consider tearing it down. Some time later, though, I work on it and make it look a little nicer. After replacing the bottom level of the upper floor with smoothstone, adding fences and an arched ceiling, I think it's better looking.

This ladder to my mining system goes straight down. When you hold left control you get the "drunk mode" formerly activated by F8. It also zooms in. When looking straight down I can see the bottom of this shaft quite nicely.

My final touch to the upper floor is adding a pattern along the bottom to make it less bland. I opt for a simple stone ring, which was cooked while I elsewhere.

That's it for this time. I've begun mining, using a new torch system to minimize how many I need. You can safely have a distance of 12 blocks between two torches without mobs spawning. I'm taking advantage of that to make 26-block-long shafts with only two torches keeping them safe!

This is a somewhat new format for me. Usually I just do all text, however I believe people like to see more pictures. If this works it may become a new style for this blog. Feedback, as always, is appreciated. :D

Happy digging!

Going on, Going down

Finals week at college. A good way to lose valuable blogging time. :3

I haven't been very active the past couple days in Minecraft. Mainly just walking around the immediate area of the village I live in. About a third of a day's run from the village is a Testificate village, a pretty nice one too. Plenty of cobblestone buildings. Or at least, according to Minutor it's north. There's a discrepancy of directions between Minutor and Rei's Minimap, which I use in-game. A nice grassland island is up that direction as well. To Minutor-east (which I believe is Rei-north) is a Mayan (?) village.

Whenever I get bored with Minecraft, it's usually because I'm not doing anything. I observed this happening with me recently and recalled a nugget of wisdom I have seen and applied a couple times before. Just find somewhere half decent, dig down, and start mining. If nothing else, you will collect more resources and get yourself back into the Minecraft groove.

My experience went way better than that. There is a large ravine right in the middle of this village which I've gone through, collecting exposed coal and iron ore. In order to get to the floor I made a staircase. Since the ravine is already there and takes me down about 25 levels, that would be an ideal place to do some mining. Equipped with an iron sword and pickaxe I begin building a staircase down to level 12 or thereabouts. But I don't quite make it. After a minute I break a block and adrenaline surges through me. I have opened the entrance to a cavern! And below me is a spider! It stares at me as I ponder what to do. There is a zombie nearby and another spider. I see cobblestone in the upper left corner of my field of vision.

Since the spider is directly below me I attempt to suffocate it in gravel. I equip gravel on my hotbar and sneak to the edge of the stone block I'm standing on. As soon as I place the first gravel, I begin falling with it! The spiders jump on me immediately! This is too much for me so I switch to Peaceful. Not too far on my left is a spider dungeon. Who knows how many other spiders were just waiting to dig into me. The spawner still generates spiders but they exist only as flashes before the game's code removes them. I spend a minute or two swinging my sword at these ghostly arachnids, hoping to damage them and see how the game reacts.

At some point in the future I am going to attempt to conquer this dungeon. This would prove a great challenge for me. I don't take the contents of the chests, as useful as they may be. The rewards and the mossy cobblestone will be won in battle one day.

Since I'm down here, I look around. Some water to my right and... light? I walk toward it expecting lava but instead see a chest! And wood! An abandoned mineshaft! There are two chests on either side of the entrance. A third chest is nearby. It has diamonds in it which I quickly take. Exploring the mineshaft I notice an odd density of cobwebs. Then I see it, the cave spider spawner. This is too awesome. A cave spider glitches in and out of existence. Curious all the more I wander around a bit and find an underground ravine intersecting the mineshaft system.

This all plays in very well with what I am wanting to do in the future of my Minecraft adventures. One of Etho's trademarks is his underground "Man Cave," which is basically a hollowed out intersection of tunnels that he has remodeled to act as his base. I would like to emulate this. His base is also by a mineshaft an two cave spider spawners.

A few posts ago I mentioned making an automated city. I think I will take up this endeavor. Using Testificates and villagers I will be able to populate it somewhat.

I'm also going to attempt to accomplish all of the game's achievements. And lastly, but most difficult of all, I'm going to face down the Enderdragon, in Survival mode, and attempt to defeat it.

This will all be recorded in this blog. Please do tell others about it, and provide me some feedback as well. Happy digging!

Thoughts on Being in 1.0.0

As of right now, I have all but four of the mods I wanted installed in my Minecraft. The only ones I have yet to add are MineColony, the Zeppelin mod, wireless redstone, and the colored glass mod. Everything seems to be working well. I rather enjoy how, in a way, there are two humanoid races inhabiting the Minecraft world: the Testificates and the Millenaire villagers. Of course, the villagers are a lot more sophisticated. It's also interesting how now there are two types of villages that appear, one for each race.

The problem I am currently facing is this: what is to be said of all the progress I made in 1.7.3? In all likelihood I am going to end up abandoning that world altogether because plenty of what is in it won't work with 1.0.0. It does bother me that all that work is going to come to naught. However, I do expect that with it being in full release, things are going to be more stable and breakings of compatibility like this will become infrequent.

After fooling around on one map, I decided to enter the seed I've been using for 1.5.1 and explore around until I found some kind of settlement. In a previous map I found a Millenaire village and a Testificate village within maybe 150 meters of each other. But in my personal seed, I spent just over a day looking for the Millenaire village I would inhabit for the starting period.

Once again I am finding myself without an aim. Remember the Earth project? I have not gotten much luck on continuing that. Perhaps it is because designing Cush is such a large task for me to undertake. Or because the MineColony mod doesn't behave in a way I can manage it with. Or, as is more likely, it just takes too dang long to collect all that sandstone! I level large areas of desert and all too quickly, run out of sandstone. I have been contemplating hacking in the sandstone. It's not an entirely legit method as I desire for the Earth map, but if it will keep the game fun then there's no point in stopping myself. Unrelated, but getting sticky pistons could also be a problem since Slimes are such rare creatures. If I ever needed those, I may just hack in the slimeballs and continue with my constructions.

Also, I'm having something of an Etho rush. He has an underground base which is basically a dug out patch of grass with tunnels leading to tunnel systems. That is something I would like to try. Getting grass down there would be a pain, but doable.

Now, I would like to as you, the reader, a couple questions. What would you like me to do in Minecraft? Is there something you would stick around to read me explore? Is there any challenge you'd like me to try? What about this blog itself, its design and content. How would you like it to be? Would you be interested in a message board where you and I could interact on a more individual level? Please feel very free to answer in the comment section below. Thank you!

The Automatic City, a Concept Challenge

In real life, I'm a programmer. I like putting a series of commands into a computer then watching as it carries them out. In Minecraft this translates as being interested in automation, getting the game mechanics to do stuff for me. It makes things faster and easier and allows me to move on with what I want to do. That's another reason why I like mods such as MineColony and Millenaire; the NPCs do things that would otherwise be required of myself.

Recently I thought of a new goal for myself: to make an automated, self-sufficient city sporting various contraptions to work for me. This includes: mob traps, harvesters, self-repairing walls, cobblestone generators, TNT cannons, sewage system, light sensor-operated lightstone streetlights, and so on. This kind of thing would demonstrate a mastery over the game and also make it more convenient for me.

Then I thought, "This could be a good challenge." On the Minecraft forums, people have made plenty of challenges and my idea seems somewhat interesting, I think. There are several types of mobs that could be used as citizens of the city - the Testificates, Snow Golems, mod-added entities, etc. How about designing a city that features automation of all sorts that has the look and feel of an actual, inhabited settlement? It would feature things like a section devoted to homes, farming area, a downtown market, and whatnot. Encasing it would be a self-repairing defense wall with TNT cannons and arrow dispensers. In a user-chosen location would be a victory monument that symbolizes the player's mastery of Minecraft. The various aspects would be assigned numbered scores so people could compete to make the best, most automatic and sophisticated city they can. I think "The Genius" would be a good name for the challenge.

What say you all?

Opinion Time.

Each time Minecraft has ever had an update, there were scores of people who whined about how the new stuff supposedly ruined the game. Consider beds. On the Minecraft forum, there were many people who complained that the survival aspect of Minecraft was somehow damaged because of the fact night time could be skipped and how one's spawn point would be changed. Or wolves. Mobs that could become hostile and kill a player even on Peaceful, but be tamed and become "game-breakers" with how a player could amass a wolf army and obliterate mobs. Or the villages and the accompanying villagers. There are those who have griped because they don't want villages in the game, and others disliked how the villagers (a.k.a. Testificates) looked. We were originally promised Pigmen but instead got what look like Squidwards with unibrows.

I am not one of those people. Has Mojang ever added something that I didn't like? Not really, no. It's always been my opinion that it's Notch's game and he can add whatever he wishes. I just adapt to what comes. If I don't like something, then I don't use it. Or I find a mod that adds/removes that issue. For instance, Millenaire and MineColony were chosen to accomodate for the emptiness of the worlds.

Now, I say all that to say this. In my opinion, I think the last rush of additions were just that... rushed. Specifically, the things that were related to the Endermen, and some stuff that followed. This is just an opinion and I could be wrong in my observations, but here's my two cents.

The Enderman was made out of a moment of frustration on Notch's part. It's not entirely creative; rather, it was based upon the Internet creepypasta called Slenderman. It was made to be creepy. To be honest, I find them a little creepy. They're quite a peculiar addition to Minecraft but I don't have a problem integrating them into the experience.

Yet out of this random idea came an entire dimension of Minecraft - literally. Notch combined the Sky Dimension with Endermen to make the End. This name comes from how it's intended to be part of the endgame scenario of Minecraft. Two quips I have with this: first of all, Minecraft is at its core a sandbox game. This means it has no discernible storyline or end. Secondly, calling it the End to mark how it's one of the last things a player does is a play on words that only works in the English language. And then there is the Enderdragon. It is designed to be difficult to beat, the culmination of all efforts in Minecraft. Again, this tries to place an artificial ending to Minecraft. But also, a dragon? That is already heavily used in fantasy MMOs and RPGs. It heals itself using crystals. The End system seems lacking in creativity. Surely Mojang could have done better with this.

Let us turn our attention to the Blaze and Magma Cube, two hostile mobs added to the Nether. Before the start of the overhaul in 1.8, Minecraft had a simplistic, 8-bit feel to it. But these two mobs, and also the Silverfish to a lesser extent, seem to ruin this feel. The two Nether mobs in particular seem overly complex in design for Minecraft. Consider the Blaze. It has no real body, just smoke particles with a head and several rods. It just looks and behaves in a way I would expect a console mob, not a Minecraft one. The Magma Cube has a lava core and moves around like a spring. Compared to Ghasts and Zombie Pigmen, they simply feel out of place.

My last critique will be the potion brewing system. Several items such as spider eyes, Blaze rods, Magma cream, and Nether warts were added for no reason except for brewing. This seems a little off, as I've noticed how in the past items were typically given multiple uses (or at least, attempts were made). What really gets me is how redstone and glowstone dust are both agents in brewing. This does accomplish the task of giving at least glowstone dust another use. Still, it seems awkward.

With all of this I would like to conclude by saying that I do not look poorly upon Mojang for adding these things. Nor do I believe they have done bad to the game. It seems that after 1.7.3, they began losing creativity and started pushing it toward more of an RPG direction. Although this probably did appease many people, I am not one of them. It seems rather half-baked. Nonetheless, Minecraft is still an incredible and inspiring game. I will continue to play as long as I find it amusing. If I don't like something I will not use it. And if I do like something that I've never used before, I will integrate that in my gameplay.