Carrying On!

A big change has happened. I've left the Hydrocity Gaming server and now play on the MC^3 server. For me, it's a major step in the right direction. As a PvP, anarchy server, Hydrocity permitted things like griefing and stealing. While that in itself isn't bad, it meant that it was hard to trust anyone, and if you made anything fancy there was the constant danger of someone destroying it. My underground base was many thousands of blocks from spawn, and not once did I get an unintended visitor. The fact you couldn't trust anyone meant that you couldn't show anyone the things you've made, which is unfortunate and counter-productive on a multiplayer server - after all, what good is multiplayer if you can't, you know, play with anyone?

MC^3 has a lot of things that Hydrocity lacked. It's modeled after the Mindcrack server, but not intensely. It has a Nether hub, spawn town, communal mine, Enderman farm, and other things. The few people I've met are mature and kind. I'd encourage any of my readers to submit an application to join.

The first thing I did, as I always do, was pick a direction and head at least 1,000 blocks from spawn. This is to make sure I have plenty of room to build without interfering with others. I didn't run into any oceans this time, which is unusual.

Here is a map of the general area I selected. It's another plains biome, with mountains nearby.

The best thing for me to do was go underground. There was a nice opening and I went under, to find this:

Score! I lit it up and set base.

From here I got some crude supplies and followed the cave to see where it went.

In case you haven't noticed, I love these circular rooms, there's so much I can do with these. Near its roof was another excellent surprise.

So much I could do with these two dungeons! Exploring the caves branching out from this room, I discovered an abandoned mineshaft, a few tunnels, a ravine, and several huge pits like such:

Needing to secure myself, I made a couple doors. The first was to get into this temporary shelter, and the second was to go underground. Both were built so that mobs wouldn't find there way to where I was.

I even made a nice little alcove where I could securely be AFK:

There are cows everywhere. I could have a beef feast anytime. A small farm has been set up to grow wheat. In addition, using Rei's minimap I've laid down markers for some useful places near me, such as a snow biome for pine wood, a forest, and a desert to collect sand. Surprisingly, there's no swamp near me.

My initial plan is to make a sort of extreme hills village that can serve as my home. Bridges will be used to get from one to another, since the terrain is rough. The houses will each serve a purpose, in addition to looking nice. Or at least the first ones I make. Recently I've been moving away from "everything must have a function" toward "things should look good."

Friend's Private Server

I haven't been terribly active on the private server recently. I suppose I was a little burnt out on the project, probably due to the boredom of having to shear sheep then wait for them to regrow wool. I never quite seem to have enough. I logged on last night, though, and started with my interior walls. I didn't initially plan it, but the inner walls have a plank bottom. It actually looks pretty nice.

The entrance to the building from the inside:

Your typical hallway:

Peeking into the reed farm room:

And an overview. It's really great to see how much the house is coming together!

There is still more to be done. I need to somehow get enough wool to finish the floors, then start on the upper floor. Oh, and the basement too.

Single Player

I haven't been on my single player map since last post. Been too busy with school and SMP. However, since I will be returning to my home tomorrow, where SMP is really restricted, I will be on my single player map a lot more.

A Great Many Things

Since my last post, I've done quite a few things in different places. I've made progress on my single player Nether hub, and have also done things on three servers.

Single Player
Just about everything I've done in single player has been about setting up the Nether hub. It's way bigger than I anticipated.

Before doing any of that, I had to find the fortress I'd been using to get my Nether brick from. Let's just leave out the details and say that was about an hours' time traveling in wrong directions, risking my Minecraft life. My laptop just is not a gaming machine, even with Game Booster (which I recommend in addition to Optifine), and the Nether lags something nasty. So I was playing on Peaceful, to no avail. What's worse, toward the end of my tunnel digging, my pickaxe broke! So I had to punch through Netherrack.

Part of my path to the fortress goes right over my former portal!

After that foolishness, I loaded up on XP using my zombie farm and enchanted a new diamond pickaxe. Remember the one I sacrificed a post or two ago? Yeah, that thing's history. But its replacement is pretty nice.

Back to the fortress, where I proceeded to mine out a bunch of Netherrack while listening to a podcast (or was it Internet radio? It's been a while).

Now I've been digging out the area my portal formed in, and laying out the skeleton of the hub. Mostly I've just been using stone pickaxes because as slow as they may be (0.05 seconds slower than anything higher than them) they are essentially infinite in supply for me and better than expending iron or diamond. Here's just a fraction of the hub's location dug out.

A couple shots of the first rail station in place. These will look better eventually.

This is a huge project and to be honest I'm getting a little bored of it. I may take a break with it and move on to something else, coming back to it in little periods of time.

Hydrocity Gaming
A couple weeks ago I tried doing a let's play episode, but things just haven't been working in my favor. I've hardly had enough time and motivation to do anything. All I've really done is work on a wheat farm room inside my underground base. I like to stand there and let it run.

From another angle, a few days later:

Shear Survival UK
I was getting irritated with the immaturity that I kept seeing in Hydrocity's chat ("can i live with you?", "can i join ur faction?", and a whole ton of grammatically incorrect swearing) so I went on the Minecraft forums and browsed the servers section. This one caught my eye. It's styled after the Mindcrack server and the people on it are pretty mature. Being a let's player, that's an excellent environment. I hopped on and found they were working on the Nether hub. They'd already established an Enderman farm in the End. Server had potential.

The next morning I hopped on and started off for a place to call my own. Given my loner habits, I decided to go a fair distance from spawn. I ran across a ton of trees.

Also experienced a bit of misfortune.

Not to mention a bit of terrain generator silliness (that's a floating wildgrass over the water.)

Initially I found a spot in the forest to settle in, which had some nice hills not too far from it. But I grew discontent with it and instead moved on until I found a nice plains. I knew that if I stayed with the server I would be a strange combination of Etho, Pakratt0013, and Kurtjmac. But presently I have two servers I play on, a third isn't something I need. Hopefully I'll stay on the whitelist in case I ever decide to become a regular member.

Friend's Private Server
When I went home for Thanksgiving Break, I was able to meet up with some friends and the owner of the private server I was playing on a few months back. The server IP had been changed and I didn't know what it had become. This is part of what got me back at Hydrocity Gaming. Now I know what the IP address is, and I spent some time working on it.

My first house, a bulky, incomplete wooden structure was alright but frankly I found it unappealing. Thus I decided I wanted to find another place and start something new. I tried going in east (I think) to find a relatively uninhabited place, but I came across building after building, including a friend's sand village. So that wasn't going to work. I returned home and started heading in the direction that I originally went to settle in this home (north, I believe) and about 500 meters later ran into a swamp biome. There's just something about those biomes, I constantly find myself settling down in either those or plains. It was nice and spacious, with some hills not too far. I investigated the place and fell in love with it! That was going to be my new home.

I was thinking of what I would build there, and an idea came to mind: ditch the practical builds. What I mean is, almost everything I build has some functionality - they revolve around doing something, be it farms, enchanting tables, and so on. This time was going to be different. I figured I would make a circular building. I have a basic design in my head, which fits the following requirements:

• The building itself will be circular at its base. I used a circle generator site to figure out how to place blocks.
• The walls would  be made of sandstone, with pine wood at key points acting as "supports."
• There will be plenty of windows at eye-level in the walls.
• There will be three iron doors to get in and out of the building: one at the front of the house, and one on each side. To get out I just need a pressure plate, to get in I need a stone button.
• The main floor will have five rooms. The center room is my bedroom, which is decorated to look nice. At the center of the room, and thus the center of the house, is a simple ichthys (I've been rather obsessed with using that symbol lately) embedded in the floor.
• The other four rooms are five blocks wide and each take up about a quarter of a circle around the bedroom. The rooms are a wheat farm, reed farm, furnace room (smeltery) and brewery.
• At the back of the building is a ladder that takes you to the basement and upper floor.
• The basement is round, like the main floor. It will probably be made with stone bricks and has a bunch of chests to store things. In the center, a block into the floor, is an enchanting table surrounded by a full set of bookshelves. There is a stair, perhaps stone brick or Nether brick, to get down to its level. I'll also put an Ender chest and anvil down there when I can make those.
• The main floor won't have an actual ceiling. The rooms will be four blocks tall. Instead of a ceiling, there will be iron bars overhead.
• The upper floor won't really have a floor, except a ring of pine slabs along the circumference. Then a sandstone wall, and at eye level the entire circle will be glass.
• The roof will be conical in shape, made of stairs.

That's insanely precise. For the time being, I'm living in a little hole in the ground, which just so happened to be under my building. At night the Slimes and spiders are all able to track me, despite being underground.

Some early outlining work. The wood has been replaced with stone bricks.

You can tell in the last picture where the wheat farm is intended to be. I didn't realize it at the moment but that farm land was actually a block lower than where I needed it to be. I rectified the situation and secured more materials to continue building.

I realized that at some point in the construction of the outer ring, I was off by one block. I don't know exactly where, so most of it's been torn down. You can also see that the three paths leading outdoors have been widened to three blocks. I'm using wood from the swamp right now; if I ever find a snow biome, I'll use the darker pine wood instead.

A couple (real life) days later, I've fixed the incorrect placement of segments and am now ready to work on the inside, but first I needed a design for the main entrance. This took about a half hour of experimenting, but I think I'm happy with the result.

I don't know when my next blog post or let's play episode will come out. Finals week is coming up and after that I'm heading home, where SMP won't be an easy option. Recording will be a challenge too.

Hodgepodge

Things have been rather slow lately. Not much desire to really play Minecraft. My laptop just can't handle any of the intensive stuff, which is a real pain.

I've begun a new project on the Hydrocity Gaming server, which I consider my home server. I call it the Palace Youssarian, and I'm going to apply the skills in redstone and design I've accumulated recently to make it at least a little nice. The main building materials for it will be stone brick and lapis lazuli, along with whatever else is appropriate. Since I can't access SMP at the moment I figured I'd spend a little time getting a rough idea of what the place might look like. Here's a shot of the wheat farm.

I don't think I'm going to have the ceiling remain so flat and tall. I might make it bend down so that the ceiling height remains 4 blocks everywhere. The redstone wiring is underneath the farm, which makes it a bit more compact. I want to do a little bit of rough draft work on Creative mode before taking it onto the survival server.

For my singleplayer world, I've scrapped the idea of having a complex rail system. I will use a design based off the MindCrack Nether hub, although modified.

• The Nether brick overheard corner thingy for each track's alcove will be upside-down Nether brick stairs facing outward. The stair at the corner where they meet will change to make it look nice.
• Behind the blocks that distinguish each rail (one user on the MindCrack server has redstone lamps, the other has wool, and so on) will be two blocks of empty space. That's so I can add things like water, redstone, or other things to customize them further.
• I will keep the sandstone half-slab flooring. This will stop mobs from spawning. The upper floor, which is all I will build for now, will feature an ichthys made of stone half-slabs. The roof will be Nether brick with a sandstone outline and probably some kind of pattern with redstone lamps.
• Lighting will be done with redstone lamps.
• This Nether hub is intended to be well-stocked. As such it will have all the kinds of farms you can put in the Nether. 
• I want to detail the outside of it in some fashion. Since it's currently encased in Netherrack I may not get that opportunity.
• Lastly, there will be a double door system to get outside, probably using pistons. Just in case I want to do some local moving around.

Nether Hub Minecart Idea

This is a bit of the idea I've had for my Nether hub (constructed in a Creative map):

I was going to do something like that, but I wasn't completely happy with it. Though inspired by the Mindcrack server's Nether hub, I wanted something more original. And earlier, I do believe I got an idea. When I was wayyy younger I watched a show called Thomas the Train Engine. The main character was a sentient steam-powered train and a bunch of his coal-fueled comrades. They all lived in a roundhouse, a circular building which would be spun to connect with train tracks coming out of it. Here's a real example:

My idea is thus this: In each cardinal direction there will be one main rail line. Each line will service up to four destinations. Using things like buttons, detector rails, redstone, T flip flops (which I've recently learned about in university) and whatnot, a system will be set up where pressing a button will have me go onto one of the four lines. Each one of the lines will be able to be uniquely designed. I might go even further and have all four main lines connect to a central launch point... so much redstone would go into that. I also need to think about how it would all look, but at least it wouldn't be a Mindcrack rip-off.

Portal Room, Completed

 With Hydrocity Gaming not working for me, and having zero desire to do schoolwork, I hopped into my single player world and continued progress with my portal room. The first order of business was to create the piston door. The entrance is set in one block from the hallway, so that the pressure plates to open it from the outside don't accidentally get stepped on.

Putting the redstone wiring in place required ripping up a lot of the existing blogs. The design itself was easy enough to implement, and any YouTube search for "2x2 piston door" or the like should tell you what you need to know. As per my personal rules, the redstone wires were put on wooden planks. In the picture below, it helps you see where the redstone stuff is. Perhaps the only thing I may not like about this setup is how pistons make noise. Zombie Pigmen sometimes come through portals and if I hear them set off the pistons by stepping on pressure plates, it could really freak me out.

I accidentally used glowstone for the door when I actually wanted glass. I replaced that, and the result gave it the kind of technological look I wanted. I actually did the design of the outside toward the end of the project. Instead of it being bland stone brick, I made some stone brick stairs and half slabs. On either side of the doorway is one normal stair and one upside-down stair. Above is a pair of half slabs, which explains why you can see the bottom half of the glowstone blocks.

The same door, looking from inside the room. Red carpet leads to it. I again employed stairs to break up what would otherwise be a nearly flat wall. It's nothing fancy, but I like it.

Next was the issue of creating a new portal. I've gone through a lot of hassle with this trying to set up a new portal pair prematurely. The portal in the Nether was linked to the portal at my first base. I destroyed the portal at the first base and returned home. I went through the portal of this base then came back. The game generated a new portal by my first base! Every trip to and from the two bases was about 200 blocks of walking and boating. At one point I even tried breaking the Nether-side portal using a wooden pickaxe, and later lava!

After going through several blunders, I finally had a half-decent plan. Going through the portals I arrived at the accidental portal at my first base and broke it. Then returning to my cave base I crafted a new diamond pickaxe and unloaded everything else except the pair of boats I had made for the trip from the destroyed portal to my cave. I then proceeded to break the portal.

The despawn timer doesn't run if a chunk is unloaded, so I figured I would have time to reacquire the diamond pickaxe if I really wanted to. There was only one way for me to get back to the overworld this time. I dropped the pickaxe into a safe spot away from the lava, then took a nice warm bath.

I respawned back at my cave base, as expected. From there, with another diamond pickaxe, I broke the portal I had been using there, and lit the one in my portal room. Now it was time to make sure this crazy plan was going to work.

It worked, but in the most unusual way. The game put me right inside the Netherrack! I'm literally encased in the stuff. Looking at the surrounding area via Minutor, there's no conveniently located openings within a stone's throw of me. That just means that my Nether base is going to be embedded in the Netherrack. Either that, or I'll have a lot of digging to do if I want to be able to see it. This new portal isn't terribly far from the old one, which means I'll have a good shot at reclaiming the pickaxe.

My next concern was whether the two portals had successfully linked. Going back through the portal I was happy to find I had indeed returned to my portal room! The plan worked!

Basically the last thing I wanted to do with the room before calling it completed was add what looked like spillage around the portal. To give the sense that the Nether was spilling into the overworld, I came up with a little design of Netherrack surrounding the portal. It's asymmetrical, and I like it.

I'm probably going to start working on the Nether base next. It's probably going to be styled after the MindCrack server's Nether hub, with rail lines leading through the Nether to various things. I will probably use it for strongholds, Blaze farms, Mooshroom biomes, villages, and other things.

Settling Down

So after something like a week of just derping around spawn on the Hydrocity Gaming server, I finally decided it was time for me to start actually playing on there. My intention was to not really build anywhere until the faction I applied for accepted me, but due to the recent Hurricane Sandy events hitting the eastern coast of America, those in charge of the faction couldn't quite make it on. Hopefully the faction will still be able to defend my base somehow.

I've modified the skin that Magazine2 from the Minecraft forums made me. I opted to get rid of the face mask and change up the some of the colors to better fit what I had in mind. I'm pleased with the result.

With it being an anarchy server, it's of the utmost importance that your base is hard to find; otherwise, griefing and stealing are virtually guaranteed to happen. A recommended way to reduce the changes of being robbed is to get away from spawn. Far from spawn. Such is the tactic I took, spending probably a half hour going in one direction. There was a certain distance I wanted to go before settling down on a landmass. I reached this limit, but not without having to relog many times due to chunks not loading - and the fire alarm for my dorm building going off. Most of the adventure was spent on boat, going through the endless oceans that seem to be trademark of Minecraft these days. I also spent most of the trip low on health. It's amazing I survived.

I did find something interesting along the way:

This was the first time I'd ever encountered a sand village. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that someone had already been there. The houses had blocks missing and there were a bunch of Villagers huddled together in a fenced area.

The trip's end found me in an extreme hills biome, my personal favorite.

Also nice was the swamp connecting directly to the hills. In 1.4.2, Slimes spawn in swamps at night. I can't say I really like this, because it gets rid of how special Slimes are as a mob. Starting off as rare underground monsters, now they're just going to build up in swamp areas. It does allow for better collection of slimeballs, which I suppose is a good trade-off.

I have two plans for what I want to do on this new server map. First, I want to make the underground ring-shaped base I had begun two maps ago, before the reset. I sort of messed up on that one, so hopefully it'll be better the second time around. Secondly, there is still the matter of the palace. I don't really like the design I have in mind right now. Has too much of an enclosed, cramped, box-like feel to it. I would like to try and make it larger, perhaps give it a more organic feel.