Cobble Generator Room

I recently put up an episode of the let's play which showed me getting most of the work on a new cobblestone generator done.

As promised in the video, I got the rest of the room taken care of. Here are a couple shots of the inside:

The piston in the floor is on top of a jack o'lantern, which seems to sufficiently light up the room.

This is the entrance to the room. It's kind of plain looking and is identical to the reed farm right next to it. I was considering putting an iron door there.

My next SSP project: moving my portal into the stone brick road and building a Nether hub!

SMP Building Ideas

In about two more weeks the server map will be getting reset. When that happens, I will be setting north several thousands of blocks until I find a nice landmass. Once that happens, I'm probably going to live underground again. For some reason, it has a strong appeal to me.

Something I want to do, though, is build a sort of palace for myself. I have the script for a Creative episode ready to go, but I presently lack the opportunity to do it. The palace would have a sort of sea theme to it, using blocks that have bluish hues and blocks which would go well with those. It would be a sort of complex place. Some of the blocks I expect to be in its construction include lapis lazuli, blue wools, stone brick, stairs, half slabs, and a bunch of other things. Definitely one of the more interesting things I've ever built in Survival.

A few weeks ago I saw "The Avengers." Iron Man's suit gave me an idea. I want the palace to have a sort of  "AI" that runs it. Called Neptune, after the Roman god of the seas, it's a bunch of redstone that automates certain processes for me, such as harvesting farms, opening/closing doors, and other things. I would communicate with Neptune using buttons, switches, and so on. Throughout the palace there will be signs which are what Neptune says to me, with redstone lamps to indicate Neptune saying them.

Another idea taken from Iron Man is a kind of suit-up room. Located in the back of the palace, when I step into the room I'll walk on a pressure plate. Dispensers will send me a top-notch armor and tool set. I need to set it up so that when I return through the same way, it doesn't try to send me the equipment again. When it comes time for me to battle, I can simply rush through here, suit up, and engage in any battle as needed.

The palace itself will hopefully be a demonstration of the design skills I have learned over recent time. After long last my builds are moving away from being nasty rectangles and cubes made of maybe three blocks, and more like organically shaped constructs with pleasant block selections. Although yes, the exterior will probably be symmetrical for the most part, I'm going to make up for that by including curves and other variations in shape that keep straight lines to a minimum.

I want the building to have some defense mechanisms. Hydrocity Gaming, my home server, is an anarchy server. This means stealing and griefing are permissible. As such, I only want people I trust to get in the place. Also from the looks of it, enchantments and potions will be disabled on the server because PvP is horribly imbalanced on the server with them.

SMP Silliness and Stuff

Well, my friend's private server has been strangely inaccessible for me lately, so I decided it was time to move on from that. I spent a couple days browsing through random severs I found on the Minecraft forums and elsewhere, but the server I chose wasn't on any of those sites that I knew of.

About April of last year, I was having my first experiences with SMP. I went onto a server that apparently was just getting underway itself, Hydrocity Gaming. It seemed like I would be staying with that group indefinitely, but then real life happened and I was unable to play SMP.

With SMP again available due to moving on campus, I went to look at the place. Before I unexpectedly quit they had redesigned the spawn to have a nice hangout area and glass ceiling. It's changed since then, by a lot.  I can tell they've reset the map at least once, and the immediate area outside of the spawn zone seems to be wrecked. As you move away from there it gets much nicer.

The place is now my new home server. The staff has almost completely changed but since I'm a relatively new face it's alright. I haven't come up with many plans for what I want to do there. Hopefully I can start up a new let's play series recording my events on the server. An impromptu series called Minecraft Uncut was recently spawned and has two episodes, available on my YouTube channel.

Because the server allows things like PvP, stealing, and griefing - it is an anarchy server - the prudent person will move far, far away from spawn. One person told me he had a place 75k from spawn! As I left I ran into ocean. And ocean. And ocean. So much ocean! A horrible design idea, if you ask me. There was just a splattering of islands here and there, many of the larger ones already with buildings of some sort on them. The occasional sky base, as well. Then it occurred to me, this could be my niche in the server! With that epiphany I styled myself Sea Emperor and proclaimed the endless oceans of the southeast and all its little islands would be my territory.

A few people have teamed up with me and become my "subjects." Still, I wasn't content to live on crappy little islands and devoted probably a few hours to boating around, looking for a big, uninhabited landmass. Do you know I encountered TWO mushroom biomes before finally getting a continent? I've set up a dinky little house in a plains located well over 10,000 blocks from spawn. That's where I intend to set up my imperial mansion.

Having developed a slight penchant for troublemaking in the past couple of years, I stopped by the place where people spawn when logging in or after dying. I had melon slices on hand and would randomly throw them at people who appeared. It was amusing to watch them look around for the source. I also took a swim in the water fountain, trying to see how far and high I could jump out of it.

Normally, I don't interact much with others besides chat. I should consider getting more involved with community things.

Concerning the Ultimate City: my level of free time has increased the past couple of days, but I've not been sure what else to do. I think there is a little bit more planning for me to take care of, but otherwise I think it's actually close to ready to move into the building phase. The owner of the server, probably due to its inactivity, turned off the map which would explain why nobody can log into it.

When I first opened the Ultimate City as a team project, I was just hoping for a group of people who could do the stuff that I couldn't - design buildings, make clever ideas, build multiple things at a time - but I've realized that some of the people I'm working with are pretty motivated and smart themselves. Some haven't even shown up to do anything, which is unfortunate, but there remain a couple who are interested in seeing this through. One person made a picture for the project a few days ago, and I think it's going to be the official image for it. I really dig the caption.

Planning Phase Near Completion

I haven't had much time recently to do a lot of single player or multiplayer stuff, much less record anything. However in the fleeting instances of free time my schoolwork has allotted me, I've been putting together the specifications for the Ultimate City's buildings.

There are about 37 specialized buildings ranging from wheat farms to archery ranges, and that doesn't include the houses which Villagers will reside in. Then there is a road system used for moving about, a minecart subway system, and an underground water network to name a few. I still need to figure out how many Villager houses there should be, and this depends on what the estimated population of Villagers could be expected to "run" the city.

If you would like to see the plans as they are now, you may check the project's website at http://ultimatecity.wikia.com.

Still left for me is to decide on a spot on the project's server where the building will take place, as well as come up with a rough idea of the city's overall shape. This will be important for laying out the path of the subway system, amongst other things. The server's spawn point is located on a huge continent, and there is an impressive, relatively flat area to the west which would hold the city nicely.

I am thinking that if I do get the chance to record, and I can get on the Ultimate City's server, it'll be a different series than my current one.

My desire for the city, once it's completed, is for people on other servers to copy it and use it on their servers as well. Maybe they'll make their own version of the city, fitting to their ideas of an Ultimate City. Or perhaps they'll do a literal file copying so they have the city as it's built. The city is intended to be a place where you can be secure and well-stocked, making for an awesome stronghold to dominate on a PvP server.

Seeking Builders for The Ultimate City

Greetings, Internets! The Ultimate City has returned, this time as an SMP project. And now, I'm looking for builders. Please read the link provided below, and if you'd like it, sign up! You don't have to have a Minecraft account, you can sign up here.

Looking for Builders for Project: The Ultimate City

Fancy Designs

Frustration

Recently, my Minecraft adventures have come to a standstill. In addition to university taking up a lot of my time, I've gotten frustrated over something.

Put simply, the stuff I build looks like crap. Seriously, it's pretty hard for me to come up with a block combination of my own design that looks half decent. On the private server, my house is quite squarish and composed mostly of planks with a sandstone base. Granted, it's still in the early phases and I was planning to make it look better once the basic shape was build, but still... ew.

In my singleplayer world, I haven't touched the Slime farms in days. I'm not sure what I want to do with those. Do I want to sort them by size? I don't think so. Do I want to be able to kill them manually, or should I let gravity do the work? The questions go on. I want to move on to playing with villagers, making a nice settlement for them using the first village generated in my map, but that only brings me to my key problem: I can't make anything look good!

Over the past couple of days, I've been researching ways to make stuff look better. Reading threads and watching YouTube videos. It will take a lot of practice but I think I might be able to do a better job with my builds. I really want to get into more complicated constructions - the starship is still a possibility - but first I need to learn how to not make trashy stuff. It's possible that future episodes of my let's play will involve me just building random stuff in Creative mode. Perhaps it could be a spin-off to my main series! Who knows?

If you want an idea of just how bored I've been with Minecraft recently, a few days ago I packed up my stuff on the server, went into the Nether, and built a random portal. It took me to a forest a kilometer from spawn. During an attempt to return to my first base via Nether, I ended up in a hopeless situation. I put my stuff in a double chest and accepted my fate. Probably five times now, I have tried to retrieve it but I can never find the junk! Yes I could just start over and find it in the future, but I'm discouraged.

Here is a picture of my SMP base so far. You can't see them here, but there's quite the herd of cows by where the portal is resting. Bread doesn't quell the hidden hunger bar so I've been free range breeding cows a lot.

The Ultimate City

I'm really wanting to start the Ultimate City again. Not so much as a project I would be building myself, but rather overseeing a team of others build it. Let's face it; until I can make stuff fancy, there's not much I can do outside of planning and doing the grunt work of building. All that I would really need is for someone to host a server for it. I know what buildings to have and where they would go, as well as some of the infrastructure that pulls the city together.

I'm Still Alive

Heyo just wanted to let everyone know I have not forgotten this blog. I moved onto my college campus three days ago and have been busy getting things taken care of. I wrote about it in my personal blog, if you're interested in reading. During my spare time I've mostly been working on my house on my friend's private server.

Once I get more warmed up to the concept of doing voiced episodes in my dorm (I'm a bit of a private person and would rather not be heard talking to a computer by those outside the room) I'll try to get them into motion. I may do livestreams, which will be mostly music as I build. They are not often scheduled, so it's a good idea to have the Facebook page like'd if you have an account on that site, since I'll at least try to announce the streams on there.