Minecraft Adventures: The full release and subsequent patches, plus some server hopping

Hello all, well it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, I managed to get a bit of Minecrafting happening in the weeks that led up to the official Australia release of Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) which is what’s eating up most of my time atm and dabbled in a few different servers but unfortunately not quite getting settled on the one. There has also been major updates as I suppose you’re all already aware that Minecraft has been officially released as of November last year and as Notch said it’s quite difficult to release a game when it’s already been out for a long period of time and is constantly being updated. But for most of us the release was of minimal excitement, as we’d already been playing the damn thing for about a year now, I for one wasn’t really playing during this time and have missed quite a lot that has happened in the past month (or two).

If I went through all the changes that have been applied I’d be here forever but I can tell you there has been a lot of them, The 1.0 release of Minecraft did introduce a number of things which I have yet to experience fully namely Enchanting and Brewing, both of which use their own table/stand. I’ve briefly looked into these two and realized that though brewing is simple enough with the instructions on Minecraftwiki, Enchanting actually uses your experience levels. And we all should know that when you die, you drop half your experience orbs so keeping this experience up high is kind of a difficult task (especially in multiplayer). I must admit also that the new types of wood colours has made me actually think now about what kind of wood I’m going to be chopping down,  “Hmmm is it going to match the rest of the décor? clashing colours and all that” honestly it gets harder and harder for me to design my houses and structures every patch with all this newfangled content, now I also have to create extra rooms for enchanting and brewing, though the enchanting can go into my ever present “libraries” and who am I to complain about new content I suppose.

A working Enchanting table, the more bookshelves the higher exprience cost the spells

I have recently also been looking into breeding animals which I am told is a better way to produce food rather than going out hunting or harvesting wheat for bread apparently you can feed a number of animals wheat and they enter “love mode” not with you of course but the problem is then they have to go near another animals of the same kind in order to reproduce and in case you haven’t noticed it’s sometimes quite hard to get two animals to go at it, with Minecraft being no exception, anyway after they do the stuff (stare at each other) they make a baby animal who in turn with their parents will be burned alive by you with your flint & steel, being the obvious choice here since it automatically cooks the meat. So anyway kids that’s a tip for mass breeding and genocide of innocent animals which means more food for you and your town’s population and I’m looking forward to creating some breeding/slaughter yards like the heartless monster I am. 1.0 Also introduced fully functional NPC Villiages which are now filled with NPC Villagers I haven’t really encountered much of them yet but apparently the mechanics have gotten quite extensive with villages having things like churches, libraries, forges and farms and npcs which take on the role of priest, librarian, blacksmith or farmer which pretty cool when you think about it, they also now have the ability to make children, wowzers.

A Fan made trailer of The Minecraft 1.0 release

An overhead view of a large NPC villiage, hard to believe their randomly generated.

Patch 1.21 was probably the most recent major patch which introduced a few new features including Jungle biomes, Cats & Ocelots, Iron Golems, Zombie sieges for villages and probably most importantly being able to build twice as high then you could before. I’ll just say some quick things about this, one being that the new Jungle biomes look quite awesome with the very tall trees and the vines you can climb and new ferns and overall foliage placement making it very bushy indeed to get around, though it is a bit distracting when biomes are relatively small when in one place you have a lush steamy jungle then in the next you have a frozen tundra. Beware ya’ll zombies can now break through wooden doors on hard or hardcore mode so you are no longer safe with that plain wooden door unfortunately if you’re playing on those modes, which to be honest most servers and players aren’t due to the fact of Creepers being trigger happy and doing a whole lot more damage and explosioness. And villages are a flurry of activity now as zombies attack in droves and are fought off by the village golems which you can make yourself apparently. I mean really, cats yes but Ocelots, Iron golems, Endermen, Squids? the choices for npc’s in the came just can’t get any more diverse.

The Official Minecraft 1.2 update made by Hatfilms

A common Jungle Biome

The recent 1.2.4 release has brought forth a couple of things that I’m excited about especially the chat history and upgraded chat editing and also the way that wooden planks now (rightly) come in the colour of the tree they were chopped from, but unfortunately this does not reflect onto the other products that are created with wood i.e. doors, stairs, signs

The Minecraft 1.2.4 release as narrated by Chimneyswift11

All the variations of wood with their saplings

So that’s a lot of shit that’s happened since I’ve been away. As for servers I’ve only played briefly on a number of server’s namely:

My good friend Atomic’s MTM Clan server

Fusionblox

Mikeland Factions (yes again)

My good friend Aday’s private server

My good friend Laver’s new public server

I had a brief run on my friend from Tribalfield Atomic_Sandwich’s server where we experimented with Assassin’s Craft and making TNT catapults as you can see below.

TNT Awaaaaay!

The aftermath.

Fusionblox was the new most prominent one I had tried out in the days leading up to the release of SWTOR, I had tried numerous different servers and had found this one to be quite pleasant, it had a nice Australian playerbase and very friendly and organised Admins, had all the correct mods (well not all unless you paid) and was survival creative just like Tribalfield. While it was fun to play in/on I found it hard to find people to build with which is a crucial point in having fun in multiplayer I assure you, if you all have a common goal for example i.e. building a giant castle you can all work toward that goal even if you’re the only person online at the time but strangely in such a friendly server it was kind of hard to find people who wanted to accept you, of course in multiplayer and when there are coveted resources and creations around trust is always a tricky subject.

One of the Community updates created by the Fusionblox admins, they are remarkably well done if you ask me.

The very colourful FusionBlox Spawn Area

Sometime during my Fusionblox stay I decided that it wasn’t working out and I couldn’t find anyone to build with so I had yet another brief foray into Mikeland factions. The point being that in factions it’s a lot of fun and a good idea to co-operate with all the cutthroat factions around just waiting to take lives and steal supplies which also rhymes (sortof). The process in order to do this is still quite daunting though but this time I managed to easily gain the trust of a very nice chap who I talked with on Teamspeak who ran quite a good friendly faction with only two other members. As with the norm of factions the base was right underground near bedrock and quite small and cramped, so I decided to cut a nice open space border around the original room with a single row of stairs to give it a bit of flair and a step up to get away from those dark fumes coming from the bedrock. With this extra room I created as per usual a nicely arranged row of chests organized and signposted with the appropriate resources. After this I decided to make a room for myself in our underground abode and I suppose you all already know carving out room and dwellings whilst underground is hard work which unlike building on the surface means you have a few things you have to deal with:

• You have to carve all the space you want out of solid stone.
• You end up with a shit-ton of stone/dirt/gravel
• You go through 3x as much tools as you usually would.
• You have to go all the way to the surface in order to get to trees/animals/water/sand most of the time.
• There is no daylight underground so monsters are plentiful.
• There’s the ever-present issue of digging into a lava pool, especially when your deep underground.
• It takes a hell of a lot longer to build things. 

So regardless me and another of my faction started carving out our living spaces, I had previously gone hunting on the surface for clay, wood, sand and wool and made a nice room for myself with a brick entrance and walls , red wool flooring and a wooden roof to make it look more inviting. As the rooms were built adjacent to the large main room, I also added some windows and made a balcony with a surrounding fence, wool floor (I wanted to use grass but unfortunately this was impossible this far underground) and a ladder down to the main hallway where our rooms were  all of which helped so that the whole thing didn’t just look like a jail cell block. Though unfortunately before I was completely finished with the interior I logged in one night to find myself knee deep in lava then subsequently burned to death. It appeared that our underground village had been infiltrated, ransacked then covered with a nice layer of lava as is the usual way of the griefing party. Somehow I knew this was going to happen so unfortunately I have no nice pictures of the area as the faction home warp had been taken over and I couldn’t find any of my 3 other factionmates who also I did not get any screenshots of and can’t quite remember their names, so just decided to “call it” so to speak.

This is the only picture I got of our underground village, you can onloy really see part of my room here though. I think I'm taking a screenie of someone who's drunk.

So I decided to just do what I have done in the past and go back to Fusionblox and begin building by myself while taking in the server atmosphere, and I had created quite a base called “JDman’s Green Hill Sanctuary” which contained my new “Tree Mansion” which I will feature in a later post. The problem with doing this kind of thing yourself on a multiplayer server is that the game itself is constantly being updated as I’ve said before and this usually includes some kind of landscape change which requires the previous game map to be scrapped and a new one with the new features needs to be generated, some servers (like my previous Tribalfield) offered the previous maps for free download, but the problem is when these maps are quite large, the Fusionblox survival map was said to be about 4gig in size. So you could probably guess that building anything that you’d want frolic around in forever would not be a good idea. When faced with this issue having almost finished my structure I asked one of the very friendly admins if they could physically copy my whole compound (using Worldedit) and dump it into a newly created map, which would be small enough to download and to be honest it worked well if I do say so myself and thanks to prizna for his efforts in doing that for me.

I also took a quick look at my friend Aday’s server which had some very impressive pixelart as well as quite an extensive castle which unfortunately was not lit well enough so was filled with monsters, but a very nice place to look at nonetheless with lots of detail put in.

The Courtyard and Castle which was huge and also full of monsters

Pixel Art!

Flying Ship

I was also playing around on my friend from Tribalfield Laver’s new public server which he has nicely made me a moderator on the server, unfortunately it was around this time that I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic so I really didn’t have as much of a go as I possibly should have, though had a bit of fun making the “jail” in a jungle ravine.

Well that about sums up the adventures since the last post, I’ll soon be back with my Tree Mansion and a happy reunion on a brand new playground.

I’ll just leave it at that. Happy Minecraftin’

JD

nature just got more complicated