Holiday Update

Squidward Villager says this is going to be a long post!

so I took a break from minecraft for a while with the whole server issues and all...

Then I came back and did a whole ton of stuff:

First and formost, I decided to put in a portal... Being scared that a ghast or zombie pigman might come out, I decided to place it at the top of the observatory... And about 10 glass blocks away from the top of the observatory facing away from the castle... (just to be safe!) Frankly the lightning nearly striking me right after I took this screenshot scared me more.

EDIT: Ohh yeah, it turns out that if you put a portal really high in the sky, minecraft decides to update it with a new instance based on wherever it puts you in the nether creating a second portal at a random location in the real world...

So this is the castle up-to-date! That giant building there is going to be a mansion of sorts, and I managed to use wheat to coerce a group of pigs, sheep, and cows to follow me into the castle! (Then I trapped them into a pen and forced them to BREED.)

I also put in a pumpkin farm next to my mines, and an igloo over to the north-east. I didn't feel like taking a picture, but I updated my chicken tube to be a fence tube leading straight down instead of that underground area... Now I just swim under and am greeted with about 50 eggs.

I also put in a destructo-room in the storage area lest I ever get the need to burn something... It's made of netherrack! (ohh and I found a lava-tunnel so my diamond levels have increased significantly)

This is the ground floor for my mansion... If you've played Skyrim you'll likely see how my inspiration for the firepit came from Jorvasker.

I've also decided that I'm a very crappy gardener in minecraft... No this really was a serious attempt at gardening that ended up being a pond with some flowers.

Some of you may have noticed a bunch of lights beyond the walls in that progress picture, they're coming from this!

It's my "countryside" I'm working on. It's going to eventually turn into a pilgrim road leading to the village I found to the north of my castle.

Speaking of which:

It was pretty fricking awesome to find this. It's technically in the North-east corner of my map, so a bit north of my castle. I mean, it had villagers, farming, AND a well that went down like... 20 blocks. I was surprised to say the least.

As can be seen, this is the map. That black blob is a "circle" around my 200x200x20 castle. It's surounded by really sheer cliffs, and that icy spot to the south originally took up the majority of the map before it all melted away somehow.

I would like to point out that about 80% of this was explored via boat so as to avoid being chased by creepers at night, and that yes, I really did navigate that river in the south-east corner... It was a pain in the ass and I had to pull out my trusty shovel on a few occasions to clear up some sand to get through.


directly west of the desert is a very large pine forest, that may or may not contain wolves.North past the mountains of my castle is mostly open plains with huge ravines dotting it and animal herds that (before I got my hands on them) ranged in the hundreds. (and further north is a bunch of swamps and marshlands.)

That huge line of ocean that seems to cut through the land to the west of my castle? Yeah, I'm saying the great and powerful Notch took a giant pickaxe to my map because I kid you not, there are cliffs all along that little line of water that break off at a sheer ninety degree angle directly into 30-block-deep waters. It's scary as heck and makes me hope that water-based enemies never make it to vanilla minecraft...  O.O


So yeah, that's the big holiday update! I'm planning on creating that pilgrim road and finishing the giant house next. (maybe expand the countryside.)

DIAMOND!!!

I'm crying manly tears right now. After the many days and nights of searching, I've finally uncovered the prize. I thought it was a single piece and began to have tears of joy, but when I mined around it to ensure there wasn't any lava, I went from slight tears of joy to flat-out crying manly tears.

Now I'm off to make a pick, shovel, and sword out of diamond.

I Feel Like KFC

Whoever came up with the statement "breeding like rabbits" didn't take into account minecraft and chickens... By the end of this farm I'll have hundreds of virtual chickens stored away in this small fenced in area!!!

So Far

Well, not much ahs changed since my last report. I added in two more towers and finally got the guts to kill some spiders and make a bow! The first tower in the center there is just another guard tower complete with windows and such. The other one though is going to be an observatory that extends outwards in a glass walkway once I decide to go shovel up a ton of sand from the desert island to the north of the fortress. Thinking of building a couple small houses, or spending a portion of today mining in that lava cave connected to my old house. I definetly need to finish up the last three towers though, so I can go and connect them together via the outer-side of the wall to create a platform for shooting enemies.

Server is up again, I also added a new gadget to the right side of the screen that I update with the server status and IP.

Houston, We Have Liftoff!

Right! I finally got the server to run (though I'm not sure how stable it is at the moment...)

Anyways, it would have been up about an hour ago, but I had some... issues with setting up the server. Also I went on a short hunting trip beforehand and well... I've decided I'll never have an iron shortage and that I should tell myself I can't find something if I want something on minecraft...

I found a giant grazing area filled with deep hidden ravines that I think had mineshafts at the bottom. It also had about 60, 70 cows grazing in it so I went on a rampage. Overkill to say they least!

Anyways the server is up, IP is 192.168.1.111

Houston, we are server ready!

Well, I'm officially ready to set up the server! (though it may not be up till monday night/tuesday) I've been living off the scarce pork in the region (the cows/pigs don't spawn within the castle walls very often so I have to go on hunting trips) so I put in a farm. I managed to shear some sheep to put together some beds, and put them in the barracks (that building in the right corner there).

The farm is big enough that once I get some more seeds from harvesting, it'll be able to host a number of players with bread for their hunger bars. I've also made a pumpkin farm to put together some snow golems. I have two at each entrance and I plan to eventually surround that middle-level dirt patch around the wall with a fence so I can put in some snow golems around it.

This one I named Mr. Wubbable, he's my baby maker... Well, he produces the snow to form his comrades anyways. It's been raining instead of snowing since the update, so this little guy is my emergency snow maker in case too many snow golems get killed/dissapear.

Anyways, with this guy made, I'm heading off to study since I have a crap-ton of tests to do tommorrow since I was sick Friday...

But yeah, server should be ready tommorrow night. Send me your usernames to add to the opperator list and I should make a post and get the IP on the blog. Now I just need to remember how to connect a local world to a server... *heads off to wiki*

Needs

Good news! The area is officially "ready" enough to send server-side for 1-5 people or so...

Bad news! While building the dungeon at the bottom of the barracks, I came accross a really big cave...

Really big.

Like I've been working on it for the past two hours and barely made a dent in it...

Frankly I decided to incorporate this giant-ass cave into the dungeon for prisoners, an attempt to escape if they can get past the monsters and trenches filling this cave... Kinda like the prison in the Shivering Isles.

In this needs vs. needs system, I've given the player a chest and furnace. The chest has 4 torches, 1 stick, 1 piece of coal, 1 uncooked pork chop, and 2 stone swords. The player falls a good distance when getting into the dungeon.

If faced with a challenge of luxury vs. needs, the player will always take needs, but in a game like minecraft, sources of light -are- a need. It forces the player to decide which is more important. Hunger/Health, or the illusion of safety in the dark dungeon?


EDIT: But until I get this dungeon finished, I don't want to send server-side.

I Live In a Pirate Cave Now!

So I was in the middle of terraforming the upper right corner of the building area when I got an awesome idea to use cobblestone-why not build a swimming pool?

So I did, and then I got to thinking about Oblivion. In Oblivion there was a quest or two where you had to go through underwater caverns to get to a certain area. Typically they were very dangerous and full of mazes. They were also typically found in the old pirate movies where the guy would go underwater and come out on the other side with treasure.

100 trips to the ocean and a couple hours later, I have an underwater cavern that leads to a little cave I made. I got to thinking about it, and decided to make said underwater cave/emergency exit my secret resting place! It's semi-dark (I placed torches in a special manner to slightly illuminate it) and really hard to navigate, so if Notch ever makes underwater monsters... I'm screwed! (plus the water can be used in case of fires)

I also started on a small mini-platform halfway up the wall so that if something does manage to get in here, than there's a place to run to!

Right, back to strictly terraforming tommorrow, and placing in some extra beds in the storage area.

Terraforming Is Magic!

So I've been working on terraforming the land a little bit more, but I ran into a small (easily fixable) problem; I forgot that hills aren't made completely of dirt. It's actually useful since it lets me get rid of some of the dirt, but now instead of just flattening stuff out, I'm quite litterally terraforming this small patch of 200 by 200 or so blocks.

I'm not sure how my buildings got grass on them... But I like it, so I won't get rid of the grass.

Today I worked mostly on a few important things, cleaning up, and moving.

I removed the trees from the surrounding area (woodcutting pine takes forever when you collect saplings) and filled in a lot of gaps I found in the wall. I also traded out stone portions of the wall with dirt so it doesn't look sunken into the ground (even though it kinda is.)


The other thing I worked on was moving. Needless to say, even though I didn't take a screenshot, that old mining house I had originally-made of wood, is completely empty now. I'm leaving it up as an emergency shelter, but I'm hoping not to use it other than as a waypoint between the mineshaft and the castle. Before I emptied it out, it was quite litterally filled to the brim with chests- a labrynth of sorts if I do say so myself.


Anyways I spent a good portion of time moving stuff into that new smaller building. It doesn't look like much because it isn't much. It's my temporary shelter, but really its a storage room for me. What that house encompases is the stairwell down to the real room. An underground storage space I made, 15x15x4 blocks. It's completely filled with chests, but I'm only currently using about 1/3 of them for storage. (mostly cause I'm keeping everything organized by what it is for ease of access.) EDIT: Oh, forgot to mention, the storage room is currently my bedroom!

Well, have a happy turkey day tommorrow, I'm probably not going to work on it too much tommorrow, but if I do, the focus is going to be on terraforming and blueprinting important structures in case I ever send it online. (Such as a barracks full of beds)

Progress 11/22/11

So I'm calling it a night. I realized the floor tiling was a different item from the pressure plate, so I have half a dozen pressure plates in my workshop right now... I cleared out a considerable chunk of land in about an hour or so. The rest of the time was spent on what you can see before you-aesthetics.

People don't always realize it, but aesthetics can be a rather important part to creativity. If I had worked solely on cleaning up my building space, than the aesthetics might have gotten so dull that I would have given up and gone off to mine minerals or some such.

So after clearing up enough space, I decided to design a bit and experiment. I put in a large chunk of walkways and used at elast 100+ torches in the design, heh. The exit in the right corner of the screenshot would have been utterly useless beforehand as it led to a large carving into the face of a mountain to keep monsters from jumping the wall. Instead now is a little dirt shaft I made that leads to the upper level of the mountain, where a rather beautiful valley can be seen.

In the left corner I have my old mineshaft and house. I'm thinking of using it for storage space for all this dirt (there's a ton of it). There's also signs at all the exits and buildings markign what they are such as "guard's Post 1," and "Workshop."

I built my first building. Looks like a big dirt blob, but the inside is about 3 or 4 blocks below the "floor" level, which makes it really nice when its raining since the "deepness" muffles up the rain, allowing me to work on building and such in peace. I'm thinking of building myself a temporary house inside the castle walls so I don't have to keep running back and fourth every time something is needed/goes wrong.

So I'm debating now... The space furthest "north" is going to be used as my headquarters (where that giant stack of dirt blocks is) I'm unsure if I want to make it a "governmental office" a "mead hall" or a traditional "castle."

Also, feel free to shoot up a comment and I can set up a time to try and send the world into a server state for viewing!

Unsure...

So I just picked up my copy of the "Dungeons and Dragons Anthology; The Master Collection" and I'm debating between playing some of my old favorites or going back to work on my castle town. I definetly suggest getting it if you like the old DnD classics. It comes with basically Atari's best DnD games ever created all in one package with expansions for 20 bucks. TWENTY DOLLARS for over 100 hours of amazing gameplay *eye twitch*

Anyways, yeah, go buy yourself a copy if you like DnD, I found out about it through the Escapist-I know gamestop and target sells it, maybe other places...

I think I'll play minecraft a bit and play around with this later.

My New (slightly old) Project!

So I've been working on building a miniature castle town out of recycled materials. I.E. the majority of it is going to be Gravel, Dirt, and Cobblestone (as can be seen by my 10 foot high wall/20 foot high tower) I put one of my exits near a waterfall so I could build a farm, and my goal is to have the basic skin for it done by the end of the week. In the left corner there is my old mineshaft which is connected to the house I had before starting on this project. When I finish it, I'm thinking of conencting it to a server so other people can hop on and add/remove from it as they want.