Minecraft Adventures - Return to the Underground City with Richy D and other shenanigans

Well it has indeed been awhile since my last Minecraft post, would you believe that the last one was from 18^th of January 2016! though I guess I have not been doing much Minecrafting anymore, there has been a few updates since last I spoke about them which was in my last post about my Brick Mansion back in November 2014 which I believe was the release of the Bountiful Update. Since then there has been the Combat Update, the Frostburn Update, the Exploration Update and the World of Color Update. I’m not going to go through all the new things in detail like I usually do as it’s just all too much and you can click the links and read yourself if you want too. I will say there were some things that I really want to see and some point just haven’t had a chance to see them. There were come major updates to the End in the Combat update including End Cities and ships and new loot such as Dragon heads and the rare Elytra which are basically insect-like wings which allow you to glide.

An End City Building with Ship

There was also the Exploration update which brought in a while new host of mobs, including a sort of evil version of villagers called “llagers” (I swear who makes up these names?) which spawn in Woodland Mansions in Roofed Forests and do all sorts of crazy things like spawning teeth from the floor and flying ghosts that attack you. These mobs also drop the mysterious Totem of Undying. Man it’s getting more like CubeWorld all the time with all the new hostile mobs and combat stuff. They seem to have also finally added shields though they are made of a mixture of wood and iron so you can’t make a full iron shield like you can with a sword for example.

An Evoker and Vindicator villager with a skeletal horse

Well it was LAN time again with my good friend Richy D aka DickDatsun, and it was back to his world of Rralgon with the intention of continuing our ongoing underground city project. After seeing Richard’s shaders at work I decided to try them out myself, and man I never realised they were so easy to do using the Optifine mod, I’d used optifine before but never got the shaders working, If I had known all I needed to do was go into the options menu and activate them well really I would have years ago. I tried a few out and love the way some of them make the grass and trees move and sway and the shadows that are created just make the game look amazing. Not to mention the glowing of the torches, the incredible sunsets and of course the silky smooth water, it just looks fabulous and I wish I had done it before.

Beautiful

Saying that though it may look beautiful but Minecraft was not optimized for those kind of graphics and therefore gives a decent whack on your cpu and graphics card, I found that many of the user-made shaders that came with Optifine had different levels of graphical intensity so I had to go for medium most often to save my FPS from going down the toilet. From the testing I found that different shaders had different features for example some had grass, tree and flower movement, like they swayed in the wind which was really cool. Some were darker or more atmospheric, others had much more lightglow and varying degrees of shadows from the original. Though the most prominent effect was the water, oh man the water looked spectacular it was different for every shader pack of course it was either flowing slightly all the time or nice and smooth and still and made ripples when you dipped in.

A quick video I made showing off Chocapic's Ultra shader from the Optifine mod

Before we started more work on the Underground city we decided to have a bit of a faff around first on an Amplified world, as I thought this would be the best for trying out the Elytra. The ‘Amplified’ world setting turns the terrain generation to extreme levels, creating skyscraper-height hills, giant valleys and huge cave systems using the full extent of the 250 block height limit which I thought would be perfect for jumping off mountains and gliding through canyons, which it was except the terrain needs to be generated first and amplified worlds take a huge whack on your PC when just playing normally so there was quite a bit of slowdown when trying to fly through them. Often we had to move around slowly and let the terrain generate and then just fly around the general area so save the terrain loading, I also tried out the new Shield from the combat update and it’s interesting to use, reminded me a lot of Chivalry Medieval Warfare. After the amplified world we jumped back into Rralgon to work on our Underground City which you may remember from a previous post and yes we’re still working on it hah though at some point we decided to go summon and fight some Withers as I’d never encountered them in the game and they were pretty damn scary.


Fighting dem scary Withers, in creative mode though so it's not that scary

We then decided to fly across Richard’s world of Rralgon to the underground city entrance using our Elytra and man that was trippy with the shaders on as my computer couldn’t keep up and the terrain literally disappeared so all we could see was the glowing sunset under the landmass and wow it’s difficult to explain you’ll just have to watch the video.

Man I'm trippin, this is amazing though, I was using a very dark shader pack where the light had a brilliant warm glow to it.

So we eventually got back to the city and started work on a variety of new buildings, I’m currently using the KOP Photo Realism x128 Texture pack as it’s the one realism texture pack that is updated the most, it’s not the best but it’s ok, it has some interesting textures and is better than default. I had intended to create a town hall near the entrance and I made a sort of squat-diamond shaped building all in white marble. I then decided to looked more like a church so decided to make it one, then I had a devilish idea, since the prison of the “Underegg” (as we had dubbed our city) had a sinister side why not the church? So I created a “Church of the Damned” complete with an upside-down cross, flaming pyres and a back room where a Wither summoning was taking place, wooyeh now that’s something else.

A few shots of the church

Man it looks really good with this shader pack

I built a new orange clay house and a visitors centre near the entrance on the other side and then totally re-did the pond area with grass, trees and flowers and Richard made another house there too making the whole part of the city look nice with some much needed flora as all there really is stone otherwise, now we just need more fauna (apart from bats)

My Acacia wood house

Richard's 'Tree' house

The redeveloped 'pond' area

I unfortunately didn't get a good shot of the visitor's centre but it's the one with the red roof in the middle.

We then started toward the back of the cave near the skull entrance (which leads to nothing at the moment) I made this house out of the new Purpur blocks complete with purple carpet as I had never used that type of material before. I then created a sort of town-hall/multipurpose room out of all the different types of wood which took quite a while though I’ll have to update it at some point as there’s nothing in there currently.

The Purpur house

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The Town hall near the skull entrance

 

Richard built a couple of new houses, a shop and some kind of flame monument which looked pretty cool, the place is starting to come together but it needs a bit more work, we definitely need to make a new entrance as at the moment it's just this random hole with lamps out in the middle of the desert and you have to jump down into a body of water to get down there. Well at least the entrance hall in the city itself looks fine, or was it meant to be a secret city? I don't know, I don't think we thought much about it at the time.

Richard's shop

The monument of flame complete with skeletal horse

The inner and outer entrances

We also may need clean the edges of the cave  and start bordering off places as at the moment it’s just a street in a cave with nothing else around. If we’re not going to use all of the cave then we might need to start building walls to keep the undesirables out, I’m even thinking of coating the whole area in something nicer then stone but grass would seem too normal underground, maybe sand as the city is under a desert, or even mycelium and have an underground mushroom forest. I also gotta complete my house in there for fack's sake in face I may switch my house to my proper one that I made with two levels though I got the heights all mixed up so I gotta fix that too.

My 'normal' house in the middle there

Yes I have to redo the roof because there is no roof just the upstairs floor and also that texture doesn't look too good for floorboards, the bricks look nice though.

So that’s it for now, I don’t know how much more adventures I will have in Minecraft but if so I will certainly tell the tales right here.

JD

Now that's warm and glowy

 Everything needs a sinister side.