Minecraft Adventures: Ozgamerparty and the Tribalfield reunion

Some say that if people have lost interest in something they enjoyed it doesn’t take much to get them interested again, you just basically have to show them. It’s like the way you see someone playing this old game that you used to play and having heaps of fun, it makes you want to go home and play it too, or it could just be the lure of a fresh start in a new playing field from an old friend, in our case the old friend was Norc, the new playing field was Ozgamerparty and the fresh start was (yet another) brand new map.

In the aftermath of the last big tirade on the server we all just basically left ourselves to our own devices. I did stuff, some of it Minecraft stuff though I always did want to go back, and after hearing that our previous Lord and Master NoRC had announced his new gaming community Ozgamerparty complete with fully loaded Minecraft server was all it took for us to jump at the chance I was only a month into playing SWTOR before I stopped to start building again, and build we did. Most people from the old tribalfield were back on, factions were back, pretty much nothing had changed apart from the changes to Minecraft itself,a nd there had been a lot which I went into detail with in my last minecrafty post. I went in wanting to be part of a faction community and help build stuff that it needed and that’s exactly what I did.

An early shot of the Inquisition village

Another shot (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

I logged on and did everything I needed to on the forums and pretty soon I was back with my usual partners in crime, Kieran_Cahill and WarpageHD and before long we had built a nice gazebo for the centre of our claim. I of course started doing what I usually do when I see a whole lot of chests filled with random crap, yes I go and organize the shit out of it,  before long I had dug out an area underneath the gazebo and laid out chests and signs to organize the resources as well as some workbenches and torches cause you need that stuff don’t you. We then started to set up farms and houses and I created a mushrooms farm (which sort of worked) and after being harangued by monsters we decided to make a fence and doors around the Gazebo.  We christened the town "Inquisition" I also suggested that our faction be named TCF (The Chosen Few)  we also even had a secret base going in the desert.

TCF storage room

Alchemy Room

Around this time Angrathar and Lupidoo briefly joined our faction as Joro and Norc were still working out the faction system they had to reset all claims and you could probably guess what happened after that featuring what I remember a raiding party consisting of Mr_Cyanide, Mr_Azurite and Peanut who successfully managed to claim over our entire base and storage area and raid the chests. Once we alerted Joro and Norc about this certain thing started happening, namely TNT started falling from the sky, then the server getting appropriately reset, Most of which I have included in the video below. Most of them ended up leaving anyway with us taken the opportunity to raid Cyanide's lair.

Yerp that's TNT

A video of the TNT raining chaos that ended the debacle plus a few strong words from NorC

Nuff' said

After all that was taken care of soon we had created a pretty neat looking storage room with a carpet/wood floor brick walls and wooden roof, which included an enchanting table with sticky piston powered bookshelves, furnace wall and an alchemy room. We constructed stone paths around the town area and I decided to start making my Jungle TreeHouse which was made out of jungle logs and leaves, I soon found that jungle trees were the fastest way of getting wood, as they are very tall, 4 blocks thick and are surrounded by vines which you can use to climb to the top. You can actually still see a bald patch in the nearby jungle where I went crazy with the shears. I had a lot of fun making the brown carpet for my room as I had to raid about 7 or 8 dungeons before I had enough cocoa beans to make enough brown dye. Of course this was before I was told that you could dye a living sheeps wool and then get them to breed so instead of going around raiding so many freakin dungeons I could have just dyed two sheep brown then got them to breed and they would have made a brown lamb and I could have just done that over and over again in our sheep pen, remind me to do that too when I run out of lapis lzuli.

Later image of Inquisition

Pretty soon we had the arrival of the infamous Jason1211 who we included in our faction being the friendly people we are, he then basically did a whole bunch of crap including somehow getting items from creative mode and moving them into Survival making a new claim within our claim and making this gigantic pillar shaped base in the sky to store his mass amount of goodies. Some time after this resulted in Norc warping us up to the complex and giving us superpowers so we could burn the items and demolish the whole thing making one hell of an interesting waterfall. And thus ended the terror of Jason, he basically said that everything he makes just gets destroyed and he’s leaving for good. In some ways I think we miss him as annoying sometimes as he was he was most often entertaining. I mean I don’t pvp myself but even Warpage, Kieran and Cyanide’s little skirmishes together had a certain charm to it as long as there’s no base defecation involved.

Jason's Tower exterior on the OZgamerparty real-time map

Me and Kakashi inside the tower

oops, must have been water underneath there

Here's a video of us riding the waterfall all the way down after we've destroyed pretty much all the tower. Music is: Ohio Players - Love Rollercoaster and Barrington Levi - Here I Come (yes it is a kind of odd selection)

Below are some photos and video of the event created by Joro, it was basically just us armed with whatever we were given fighting off hordes of spawned zombies and giants, not to mention all the monsters that had spawned there already, pretty soon we had bows and arrows and we’re taking on a group of Ghasts which got quite intense indeed. The finale was a battle with a spawned Nether Dragon who we noticed actually destroyed things where it flew as it demolished half the Jungle before we eventually killed it.

The dudes!

Giants!

Ghasts!

Enderdragon! (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

Here's a video of the encounter

Amongst the other things which got built were Warpage’s “Creeper Head” house complete with a sticky piston powered collapsing mouth entrance and also Lupidoo had built a house, which was full of traps as he was trap crazy for awhile, I couldn’t walk anywhere without running into (or onto) a working or not working supposed trap of his, I thought he was supposed to be a Panda who lived in the Jungle? Anyway he also made us a faction flag which I swear is already the flag for some country.

For TCF!

Me and Lupi experimenting with some Redstone work, song is 'Internet Friends' by Knife Party

In regards to what was happening around us, Mystic Duck’s town of DPRS was in fairly full form to the east of us in which we created a large underground railway to connect the two towns in which Lupidoo and I dug out the stairway and I made the station on the top but apart from that we were fairly oblivious to others around us apart from random people who pop out of our nether portal cause of some flaw with nether portals that pushes you out the nearest one in the overworld. Other things that happened included Keiran created a pretty huge office building which I decided I’ve be responsible for decorating two floors of, and I reckon it turned out pretty well, one floor was the reception, the other was a club I called “The Creeper Club” (yes I’ll admit I didn’t put too much thought into the name) I got most of my design from the Minecraft Furniture site and server which is a great resource in which I found designs for things including, couches, pool tables, a piano and of course the bar design.

The Democratic Republic of Sandwich

The Lobby

The 'Creeper Club'

The bottom two levels of the building

Round about this time Bioware had announced that there would be a free week of SWTOR available for returning players, and since I had cancelled my account for Minecraftin  purposes this was the ideal time to play. I came back a couple of times to find that not much had happened apart from Kieran making one freakin huge express railway which went all the way to our not so secret base in the desert (well one of the deserts) I had been away for a while but decided to come back at one point, and the whole faction base seemed fine, then the next night I come back in and everything Is royally f’ed up griefed looted and whatnot.

Inquisition after the reckoning, it's been pretty much cleaned out now though the larger buildings are still standing

Kieran's Minecraft Interstate (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

Now I’m beyond caring about this kind of stuff bit it is a bit of a shame, I don’t really know what I’d rather, for them too not touch anything at all except loot the chests or for them to grief everything we’ve made and leave our stuff. Well life goes on I suppose I’ve recently taken up with Lupidoo and his VIPA Theme park making faction which quite fun as they had a maze, an obstacle course and a rollercoaster going. But due to the arrival of the third installment of Diablo we’ve got other things on our minds now not to mention I just can't get away from SWTOR.

Lupidoo's VIPA Amusement Park

It’s a lot of fun to play and build with people but it is hard if for example you’re like me and don’t appreciate raiding and griefing, I’m just wondering why I bother making anything significant in multiplayer at all, sometimes I do think of going on Fusionblox again, as I’ve been back there numerous times in order to fix connection issues and have found that my tree mansion was pretty much intact and untouched for about a month before the survival map got reset in order to makes use of the new updated features. I’ve never really thought of us as a raiding/griefing server but I guess we are, it just strikes me as odd how claimed land can still get affected but I’m not going to get into all that.

I am thinking to myself of actually doing an experiment where I create a new singleplayer map and just play the game, and play it without mods like singleplayercommands and toomanyitems especially since Minecraft now has an ending (well sortof) . I probably felt this way the most after watching the gameplay for the XBOX360 Edition of Minecraft which I noticed features such as in game tutorials inc helpful windows that come up telling you about the particular item you have selected.

Minecraft Xbox Gameplay Review by BobLob

The PC version could really do with this too, as whenever I play multiplayer now it seems that some people are just pro at it and are either pooping out diamonds already or have built a giant redstone powered base that can give you any item you can  think of, I reckon it’s best when you start off with nothing, but of course you always get to the point where you have a good base and a stable food and resource income, so what next?

I will get round to doing that sooner or later, singleplayer in itself is a sanctuary for friendly builders and creators like me who just happen to like doing it in survival mode and I always like going back to basics. I’ll be on the Ozgamerparty server for the time being, though I’d hate to say it but Minecraft after all this time seems to have run it’s end for me, it’s this harrowing experience when you could do anything but end up just jumping around and exploring which is fun I guess but needs more meaning, and that’s always been the problem of Minecraft, the tutorials and information from the xbox version would help but I guess you just have to create your own fun in the end. But the Minecraft adventures don’t end there of course.

JD

I'd rather be lonely than live in fear