Minecraft Update September 2021

Well it's time for a Minecraft update and wow it's been a while, I have updated anything Minecraft since the Sunken Temple rebuild back in Feb 2019. I've decided to make this post for both the Minecraft Adventures and Minecraft Creations section as it encompasses both sections.

So since the last post I hadn't really touched Minecraft apart from seeing different updates on facebook etc but one day I managed to persuade my partner Casty to start a Minecraft world for ourselves, just over LAN. So we did, and as soon as we found a suitable location we hollowed out a hole in a small hill and started homesteading. Before long we had a nice little home hollowed out of the hill with a farm and lots of animals and plants that Casty and grown and bred while I went out hunting for supplies. Our home was not far from a lovely seaside with a coral reef where she found turtles to breed also. I must admit having a shield and wolf pet made dealing with skeletons so much easier. We had many pets including wolves, cats and horses. After awhile I decided to switch to creative mode as cutting enough timber to finish the house was getting way to time-consuming so I quickly finished it off and by the end we had a large two story house with no trace of the original hill.

External Shot of the main house

Afterward Casty suggested the challenge of recreating a house each from a real estate picture. We both agreed mine came out really well but Casty had trouble with the bulky size of the Minecraft blocks. I don't blame her as she plays the same which is much more realistic, When you are dealing with MC blocks you have to really adjust your designs to be large and wider as each block is about the size of a large treasure chest.

A flyby of Casty and I's world with all of our created houses.

After this I joined my friends Stefan and Fraser on their server which was chock full of machines. machines that gave you XP, machines that grew plants, machines that farmed animals, machined that farmed Slimes, even a machine that auto-harvested wood, Stefan was very interested in these things you see. While they were showing me all this they gave me some Elytra and then introduced me to what I think is the best thing ever to do in Minecraft. Apparently if you have firework rockets in your hand and fire them off when gliding with Elytra you are propelled forward (this works without using Elytra too) which basically gives you the ability to fly. And man I had heaps of fun flying all over the place and I even created new worlds to zoom around in, the amplified world was especially fun. After looking around the world a bit more I saw the nether and their huge open cavern that was dug down to bedrock and this gigantic hole which was some kind of sponge farm. I then noticed that the world was messy I mean really messy there was crap everywhere and when I asked them if they had a house they basically pointed to this red building with no windows.

 

Flying with Elytra and Fireworks in Stefan and Fraser's World.

This was apparently their first abode, a windowless shack with no floor, Minecraft tracks going into the ground and a villager for some reason. Well I decided to do what I did best, yep build them a house! I started breaking apart the current house and leveling out the ground. Fraser and Stefan were actually playing in Survival mode so I had to use what materials I had available. As i mentioned before the server was a mess with machines and constructs and chests all over the place, searching through them all I found what materials were in abundance. For example Stone brick, I had looooots of that so I made that the bottom area which would be the basement of the house.

Some shots of the outside of the finished house

So I toiled away listening to the sounds of the cactus machine and the baa'ing of the multicolored sheep. I was going to make the house three levels with three rooms one each for Fraser and Stephan and one for this other guy whose name eludes me, Nathan I think. So after much foraging and building and gathering supplies the giant house was finished, complete with three levels, one made of stone bricks, one made of iron blocks and one made of birch logs. Other materials used were birch planks, oak planks and logs, wool for carpet and glass and iron bars for the windows, and yes the stairwell looked sort of like a jail from the outside but the inside was fine. I was very happy with my contribution to the server, I don't think they ever used it but I was proud of it nonetheless.

Interior shots of the finished house. No furnishings as It would have taken forever in survival mode.

Probably needed a support pillar in there.

At some point I was invited to a friends birthday which was held in Minecraft, which was a great idea I thought. Except I probably would have done it a bit differently, for example he put the difficulty on hard and hard difficulty in survival mode is bloody hard especially when most of the attendees either hadn't played Minecraft or had little knowlege of it. It was a bit of a shemozzle with everyone randomly running around being killed by monsters and supposedly random players coming in to the server killing everyone through apparently he upped the security for his next MC birthday. Two lockdown birthdays? that must have sucked. I would have suggested playing on peaceful mode until everyone was relatively settled and had shelter but it was fun anyway.

Ahh chaotic fun times.

After some time I joined my friend Moofs on the Auscraft server, this had been the first time on a public server in awhile and I reminded myself how much I loved looking at game spawn areas. We settled in a Savanna biome and began building a home in a mountain. Before long Moofs had quite a big base going as he always does and I'm of course always just small time and simple.After playing for a while on that server we moved to a different one where we settled in a Taiga biome. I'd always wanted to make. I'm not sure where I thought of the idea though I could guess it was from the Woodland Mansions that were added in the Exploration Update. 

Explorin' the Nether in Auscraft server

 To be perfectly honest I could create a fortress in any type of biome, I have created many fortresses and temples over the years. This one was a simple design made of cobble and spruce wood which matched Moofs village, except this time I stripped some of the logs for a different aesthetic. I designed the fortress into the land as I usually do but it was a sort of plus symbol with extra corners instead of being square. The finished fortress had a top and bottom level with a balcony of course. One of my favourite bits was the window at the top of the front door which you could climb up and look out of.

The finished Forest Fortress! you'll notice I didn't furnish fully, wasn't too bothered about the furnishings.

So finally the most recent adventure was on my friend Tewdric's MC realms server. When I joined this server Tewdric and Moofs had already established themselves and had flattened out and built on what looked to be a plains biome. In the centre there was some sort of large purple building which I had no idea what it was for or what it was made out of, it also seemed to be full of eels. It was surrounded by fields of farms and a large barn. Speaking of farms, Moofs had been busy making his farming creations again, I'm not sure if these are like standard for maximum efficiency nowadays but what I can say is they would be incredibly inhumane and almost impossible to do in real life. There was a building where a builder of each speciality was stuck in a 1 block space in front of a lectern, chicken and beef 'vending machines' where dozens of chickens and cows were jammed into small space and bred then slaughtered and dropped into a chest. Though I suppose this is all done for efficiencies sake and not like I hadn't seen anything like it before in Fraser and Stefan's Server.

Some of the farms created on the server.

There was also the usual xp and monster farms and some nice looking houses, I noticed a chimney of one of the houses had smoke coming out of the top of the chimney which I hadn't ever managed before as the smoke from fire usually goes away before it get to the top of the chimney then I found Tewdric had put iron bars inside the chimney and a campfire on top of that allowing lots of smoke to come out form the top, this was an ingenious idea I thought and decided to try it with my next house. I noticed there was a Dark Forest biome near the main town and thought to myself "Well I haven't made a house in a mushroom biome before" so I did. Now this time I had really run out of ideas, I had previously tried to build a house around a mushroom and on top of one too but neither worked. This time the plan was to do a partially hidden house that was semi-underground nestled away in a ditch. So I immediately got to work chopping down dark oak to use to blend in. 

My hovel with the separated bedroom, at this point I was using Chocopic's shaders from Optifine

Now you would think I'd use dark oak logs but I wasn't going to make the whole thing out of logs it would be made out of wood with dark green and brown carpet and a nice brick finish for the walls. So I walled off the ditch with wood and started digging, there were actually a number of trees and tall mushrooms in the house area but that was ok I'd build around them it was supposed to be hidden anyway.After a lot of building and resource gathering I had a nice little cozy house with a bedroom and fireplace, bookshelves and work area. There was more room to add other things too like an enchanting table or alchemy lab.The house was square and I put dirt to grow grass on top to make it a little less conspicuous though I did make a skylight for more light. Another note when looking around the Dark Forest biome I found another very picturesque house and garden. I loved the design and architecture and I will use it for my creations in the future.

  

Walkthrough of Tewdric's Realms server and my Mushroom Hovel

So that's basically an update of what's been happening in Minecraft for the last maybe 2 years hah. Hope you all enjoyed seeing the creations.

JD

Forever building...

GTA Online - Cars, Bikes, Boats, Planes, Friends and a Sense of Purpose

Hello! well it has been a while, probably the longest ever time between posts, 8 months that's more than half a year. I was just thinking of doing another post and then checked how long it had been and wow that was a looong time. Well, a lot has happened since the last post. I now have NBN, and I've started streaming! FYI I now have my Twitch and Youtube channel link in the top right of my blog. When I finally decided to get NBN it took a very long time to get it installed in my apartment and since then I have been doing a lot of work streaming and building my youtube channel. Hopefully, I get more chances to update soon.

Now that's a good line of cool cars

What made me want to make a new blog post is that recently I have finally found a crew in GTA Online that does car meets on PC, which I had been looking for for a long time. I had made a post in the GTA Online Facebook group I was in and received a message from a member of the 'Killer Clowns' crew whose I will refer to by his GTA name "Mr Miyagi". He was also an Aussie but the guild itself was mostly European. So I went on to their Discord and signed up and saw that there was a car meet coming up soon and it was for offroad! This was awesome so I immediately started planning the time and what vehicle I would take. I found that the meets were scheduled at night British Summer Time (BST) which meant it was going to be pretty damn early, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. So at 5:40am on a Sunday I arose and logged into GTA to take part. We met at the car lot out in Sandy Shores and I rolled  in and lined up with my orange Injection Dune Buggy, which I will admit looked pretty damn small compared to the other cars and trucks which were a mixture of big 4x4 trucks, one person even had the Scarab from Arena War which did pretty well with its tracks. So we set off down the road and met up at the lighthouse on the western coast and lined up again. 

The lineup on the cliff near the lighthouse. Some of those wheels aren't suitable for offroad lol.

I learned pretty quickly how these meets worked. We met up in one arena, then traveled to the next area and stopped for more photos, this time we stopped on the edge of a cliff! By the time Miyagi rolled in and everyone was present we started off down a first road and then, of course, my GTA crashed. When I got back the group had finished the route around Mount Gordo and were on their way to Mount Chiliad. I decided that I might go a bit bigger in my vehicle choices so I decided to use my Australian-themed Marshal which worked really well as it has an Australian flag on the back. The monster was powerful and had lots of grip which made short work of the steep hills and ravines we were climbing up, in fact the only downside for Marshal is that's it's quite slow compared to other off-road vehicles but speed was not an issue at all for this run.

Convoy!

So we drove up and down the mountain and then along the beach and the swamp before finishing at Stab City. Apart from getting flooded a few times I went really well, the Monster truck made things really easy. The next part of the meet was motorcycles and I picked my favorite bike, the Nightblade. The bike meet was ok but the offroad one was far superior as we all moved slow and we all moved together. In any case I had a great time and took lots of photos and recorded the whole session. This was great this was what I had been looking for for a while. Playing with my friends Moofs and Tewdric and others is fun but the problem I always had is that I'd pretty much played until I'd done almost everything the game had to offer and bought all these cool things but most of the time whatever we did didn't give us a chance to use our custom vehicles. Yes when doing missions you could often drive to the location with your own vehicle or when doing things like doing CEO crate missions you could use your own car too but most of the time you were driving around in what was required for the mission like trucks or post-op vans or helicopters or your Oppressor Mk2

My edited music video of the Water Meet

Most of the time to use my custom cars I did classic land races but were hard to get going unless it was the weeks where they were 3x money where I found that lots of people started them. I did try to do the occasional car meet but impromptu car meets never really work, especially in a random lobby. Even the meets I did with other friends were small and short-lived and also were prone to people wrecking them. The best car meets are well organised and most importantly in private invite-only lobbies.

We're the self-Preservation Society!

Over time I have attended another 5 meets with two of them being organised by your truly. I ran a small vehicle offroad meet and roam where we used Dirtbikes, Quad Bikes, and Buggies and we raced haphazardly through mountain passes. And a water meet and roam where we bombed the rivers and sailed the seas with Jet Ski's, Speedboats and Yachts. Other meets that were organised were Movie-themed, Air Land and Sea, James Bond, and a second offroad meet where I used my APC. Using the APC was great fun as it was amphibious so I had no worries of being flooded. I even had to do two rescue missions where crew members were stuck at the bottom of cliffs and I had to ferry them out of there.

Full video of the second meet.

I am so glad I have found this community and that I have a chance to show off my custom vehicles, Grand Theft Auto is the best game to do this due to the variety of vehicles and customisation you can do. I have spent a lot of time recording and editing videos of the meets out of a passion for these events since I saw the very cool video by Atomic. I've been trying to record using the Rockstar Editor but it can only save to your C Drive where I don't have very much space but I'll see what I can do. I need to work on editing mine down a bit and getting them more precise.You can see all of these videos on my Youtube channel.

Atomic's excellently edited video of the first meet. You can see me!

I just wish now that I could find the same thing in the Crew 2 :) 

JD

We got ourselves a Convoy!