Minecraft Adventures: The Underground City

Hi everyone, about a month ago now I and my good friend Richy D got together for another Minecraft lan similar to the last one we had but this time with more creation and building in mind instead of killing and subterfuge, the first thing I did though was Richard asked me if I wanted to make a building in his town in the world of Ralgon which I agreed and will document this in the next Minecraft Creations Post. Ralgon is a pretty Impressive town that Richard has built and added over a large period of time which as you can see has a quite a few interesting sights, including some cool looking towers, an awesome roller coaster and a man-made-mountain. Just a note I’m using Misa’s 64x64 Realism texture pack to take these screenshots rather than my usual Faerielight 256x256 as that’s what we mostly played in.

Here's a few shots of Ralgon's main city.

Richard's man-made mountain.

What I had in mind though was an Underground City, or town really, I’ve had this idea for a while since the underground staircase lair back on Ozgamerparty. Richard though had bigger plans, he went out into the desert through his Nether portal network and tunnelled a hole down to near bedrock, he then proceeded to self-explode carving out a huge cavern underneath the desert and flattening out the floor, all done with SingleplayerCommands as he is a bit more knowledgeable in the mod then I am. So as you will see it looked pretty damn epic.

The current underground "village" viewed from a lower angle

While Richard built the entryway I was already scouting around to find a good location for my dwelling in this dark and desolate land that would be our new home, I soon found a small portion of the cave where the cave roof was only about 14 or so blocks from the floor. I decided to wall the area from the floor to where it touched the roof in brick as I usually do with underground dwellings to make them look more homely, I then cleaned up the stone around the walls and roof and patched up the holes in the roof with wood, I got Richard to cover the floor in purple carpet and added doors. I also cut a few gaps in the top of the wall cause there were a lot of bats flying around and I like the idea of having the floor of my house all lit up and the roof all dark for the bats to hang in, sort of like a bat-house heh.

My brick walled-off corner with the bat grates.

I'd left the interior relatively untouched apart from covering the floor in purple carpet and filling the gaps in the walls and roof with bricks and wood.

Richard has built the entryway to the city with was a small nondescript-looking, lit up square hole in the middle of the desert. The hole was made of iron blocks and quartz and you jumped down into water then came out through main entryway into the city, Richard had made a couple of houses and skull cave entryway and had spawned some villagers who were all gathering around the entrance as they probably angle toward the light and stay out of the underground which was kind of funny and sad in this situation, like they were desperately trying to get away from this desolate place we had made for them.

The entrance hole to the city.

There's currently a way down but no way up, almost like a prison.

The entrance/exit buildings looks a bit more picturesqe

Skull Cave! The Phantom would be proud

Which gave me an idea, I decided to make some accommodation for the villagers, and it would range from 1 to 5 stars, I managed to make the 1, 2 and 3 star house (without furnishings) before we had to stop and Richard made what would probably be the 1^st class accommodation.

The Villager accommodation, from left to right 1, 2, 3 and possibly 5 star (not including my house in the distance of course.

 Richard then showed me what he’d been doing in one of the caves, he’d used the /replace commands from the SingleplayerCommands mod to replace all the blocks in the cave to something more spectacular, blocks of gold, blocks of emerald, blocks of diamond, lapis lzuli blocks, lightstone, redstone lamps you name it and the results were quite intoxicating. He'd also lapis-lzulified a nearby chasm.

The "Crystal Caves" A very plain looking entry

"Ooooooo"

"Aaaaaahhh"

"Eeyeuegeygh!"

LoL, we blasted into an abandoned mineshaft

Elevated view of the current city

So that was it for the moment, we still have the world saved so we may go back and add to it over time, stay tuned for the Minecraft creations post of my Hunter’s Hall in Ralgon.

JD


Spelunking for life

Minecraft Adventures: Adventures with close Friends

I wanted to write a little bit about some experiences I’ve had playing Minecraft with people at LANS and the difference between online and LAN Minecraft.

A while ago I and my Minecrafty friends Brok and Richard attended the Bluewire Lan with the intention of doing a bit of LAN multiplayer Minecraft which went quite well. We were playing the 1.3.1 snapshot which introduced the ability to search for LAN games. We started off exploring Richard’s singleplayer world he had created as well as some other worlds he had found online and I must say his work was fairly impressive, I didn’t get many good shots but here’s a quick look.

In these screenshots I was using Misa's 64x64 Realistic Texture pack

The Railyway through Richard's very impressive man-made mountain.

The mountain at sunset

Richard's "Wolf Den"

A Cruise ship map he had downloaded, that is one freakin huge mutha

We then went on to create a new map that was all to ourselves and our objective was to simply survive as it obviously was survival mode, I must say it was pretty fun, we chopped trees, we mined coal and iron (and various other things) and we built, pretty soon we had a pretty cool looking house made of spruce wood with a basement and everything. We continued to build mine and farm until we basically ran out of time and ended up with this:

Our villiage by night, got quite a bit built

Ah what a lovely sunset, or rise... actually I think that's a sunrise

I enjoyed the experience though, it was great fun playing with people next to you and makes it so much easier to organize what you are doing. I can’t really seem to play singleplayer without mods anymore as I did for a while and keep making these grandiose plans that would take months to do if done in survival mode, but with multiplayer you remember to keep things simple and practical, and not spend too much time on intricate details and large scale plans unless you’re able to backup frequently. One of my favorite things to do in Minecraft (and most other games) is to start out again with nothing and get to the top once more, you know starting out by punching trees and gathering wood, hastily making some shelter before the first night, that sort of thing.

I did a similar exercise with a fellow enthusiast named Alex at the Lanslide League of Legends Tournament (we did play some LoL but aren’t very good at it) we basically did the same thing, exploring the different worlds and servers we had, Alex briefly showed me his multiplayer world where due to a botched server command he had dumped a layer of sand on 1/3^rd of the map, I didn’t manage to get some good screenshots but it looks interesting to say the least especially the jungle biome with sand covering it.

We decided to start a Minecraft map up and get surviving in between rounds of LoL, which we did, from what I can remember we spawned in a Jungle biome where we decided to make our home which was basically just a hole dug in the ground, I then went off to find a mine to get some coal and iron and we did find a particularly large one and also cleaned out a ravine in a swamp biome. Didn’t see any Witches or Witch Huts but we did see a slime  which as of the 1.4.2 patch can now spawn above ground in swamps which we were quick to hit off the edge of the ravine.

Speaking of the 1.4.2 patch here are a few things of note that were added, more detail in the link.

Command blocks

Beacons

Anvils

Wooden logs (thank god for this change, as a treehouse builder it was driving me crazy)

Changed placement: Instead of facing the player, it will face the surface it is placed on

Place it on the side of a block to get a sideways log.

Place it on the top or bottom of a block to get a topside log.

Item Frames

Wither

Wither Skeletons

Witch and Witch Huts in swamps

Bats

Carrot on a Stick

Anyway back to the story, so me and Alex took all our loot home and went to work on our underground Jungle home, I carved out a bit of the cave and we decided that jungle wood planks would be the quickest and most environmentally friendly blocks for the wall as jungle logs would be quite time consuming to obtain and would require us to level 2 or 3 large jungle trees. That said, I’ve always found jungle trees to be the quickest source of wood for three reasons.

The trunks are 4x4 instead of 1x1

You can climb to the top of them easily using the vines

They are up to 20 to 30 blocks tall

But anyway we weren’t in the business of deforestation, we had the supplies, we had the wood, now to get to work. So we walled up our home in jungle wood planks, I built a doorway to the cave and decorated the entrance and the inside with vines.With these screenshots I was using Faerielight 256x256 texture pack

We decided to cobblestone for the floor as we couldn’t think of anything else at the time as it would have been too much wood if we did the floor in that.

After some brief fixing up and adding some stairs, I started carving out a room for myself, Alex wanted to know how good I could make my room look so we switched to creative mode to make things easier. Making bookshelves, carpet and other things I needed would take a significant amount of time, as you all know that sheep and cows can never be found when you need them. It wasn’t my best work unfortunately but it still looked reasonable with the water feature though maybe a bit bare.

Alex then changed the main entrance to have a less-than-respectable name for our home as well as adding a dispensor so anyone coming or going would get dirt spat at them, charming

A riggeed welcome mat that triggers a machanism that shoots thing at people on the doorstep, this could be huge

I went over to my friend Richard's house recently do have a bit of a lan as they were very much into playing Age of Empires 2, which as well as Minecraft we did try to play but unfortunately weren't able to get it working so we played Starcraft instead which I was inevitably able to win.

But on to the Minecraft and after Richard and I were unable connect to each other in Lan mode we were forced to go online where I suggested we should delve into one of my old favorites Mikeland Survival. So we did and ended up having a pretty fun adventure. We jumped off the spawn area and ran and ran until we got to a ransacked NPC village where we found there was a chasm and a cave system nearby, we decided to venture into the chasm harvesting whatever resources we could find and made a hideout out of a circular cave. After much foraging for coal and iron and creating some much needed iron tools we eventually found an underground chasm below the one on the surface that had a mineshaft running through it. And man did we find a lot of diamond in there, all up we got about 15 or 16 diamonds between us which was a pretty good haul, I did some dangerous obsidian farming with lava right underneath but we soon had enough for a nether portal, some fancy iron armor and more importantly some diamond tools.

The bridge across the chasm to our hideout

So inconspicous I know

Boyz 'n' the Hood

We then went up to the surface and while Richard went did some sheep dye mixing resulting in coloured sheep all over the place, I went out to the taiga biome woods to find some animals to kill for food when I spotted a diamond armor clad other player in which I decided to run very fast away from and told Richard who came over as well, at this point supposedly seeing both of us the other player ran off. We then continued and I went off to gather some clay for bricks in large lake in the nearby swamp and unsuccessfully tried to make a chicken farm. While I was doing this Richard told me that there was two players coming towards him one of which could have possibly been the player we saw before. I ran back with my Diamond sword in hand to see them chasing Richard, they killed Richard and but I managed to take one of them down but couldn’t catch up to the other, while I waited for Richard to come back to get what was left of his items they both came back and amazingly I managed to kill both of them this time. One of them did say they were “Coming back for me” though we didn’t see them again, they possibly didn’t actually see where we were hiding. We got some supplies and some pretty cool enchanted iron armor from the experience though.

Our hideout before partial brick makeover

After partial brick makeover.

Well after that we prettied up our home a bit more with wool carpet, brick walls, pot plants and glass and we made a basement for the nether portal which we were quick to venture into. We did a quick run of the nether gathering supplies such as lightstone, soul sand and netherrack where Richard got a bit too enthusiastic with his Zombie Pigman killing.Afterwards we continued with the house and Richard planted trees around our chasm.

Our basement with the nether portal

Huge lava lake I saw in the Nether

Trees Richard planted outside our chasm to fend off prying eyes.

Shortly after that we had to finish up as it was time for a bit of Age of Empires, or technically Starcraft as we couldn’t get AOE to work. Haven’t been back to see if it’s still there yet, might have to take some more photos.

Throughout all of those experiences, I had fun, we had fun and that’s the main thing, I’ve found playing games with friends close by is getting harder and harder these days as developers don’t want to make games that you can play with people right next to you, they always seem to want you to “play with your friends” with all of you in different locations forcing you to use headphones and mics, I would rather be right near a person and be able to speak to them without having to much around with .

My brother did point out that there is only about 10 PS3 games made that have a co-op campaign or story mode whereas within out group of 15 or so PS2 games we have 3 of which have a similar feature. It seems that split screen is becoming something of the past with the net being so available nowadays. Though that is consoles and I’m mostly a PC gamer and it doesn’t seem to stop us that we have to cart our entire desktops around screen and all to various places in order to be able to play together, that’s absolutely fine.

My best creations have come out of playing by myself, but the most fun comes out of playing with others, and if their right beside me, it’s even better.

JD

With a lot of help from my friends.

Minecraft Adventures: Ozgamerparty, The Underground hall hideout and Admin tomfoolery in the 1.3.1 update

Well here we go again, I said I’d do it and I did, Ozgamerparty Minecraft is back in proverbial full swing and things have certainly started out swingingly. The 1.3.1 patch had come out along with the changes that I had detailed in the previous MC Adventures which I won't go into them again but most are good.

Early on when the new 1.3.1 map had been opened on the server I quickly joined up with my friend Atomic and his friends Brendan and that forest-burning, mass-furnace-obsessed wacko deadman47. I found they had travelled a short way across the sea to a tiny island in the middle of a huge ocean biome which wasn’t actually too far from the spawn area, and made a fairly cramped underground base and stairwell which obviously (as you know me) wasn’t going to work. 

That was our island, out in that huge mutha of an ocean, notice the Mushroom island on the lower left

It was fairly inconspicuous, apart from the torches as I got sick of the fackin spiders spawning above ground and making noise, I mean I went out one time and there was 4 of em up there.

We quickly widened out the resource room and we decided that there will be a large main stairwell as a centre for our underground base as this would allow us to have rooms jutting out from this stairwell as well as being able to have underground houses with windows to look out on to something rather than having ‘jail-cell’ like rooms. So we made the stairwell with included a nether portal, a large farm and a mine (full of slimes, no less) at the bottom. I also properly organised the chests but found when I logged in one night they were all re-organised to deadman’s liking but whatever, I don’t really care, though I had to change all the signs around cause of his lack of spelling skills  for example “caol” and “coblestone” I also really don’t understand his fascination with making large rooms with walls full of furnaces.

My design of the the Psynapse resource room. I think is pretty neat, if you ask me, yeh it takes more space then say putting the chests in rows, but I reckon it looks better..

So anyway we got our rooms underway and I went out looking for supplies, most notably wool (which I amassed quite a large amount of) flowers, possibly some coal and clay, the clay being the hardest to find for some reason. Ever since a certain patch (not sure which one probably the one which introduced swamps) clay has been in abundance, though in this map even in swamps I was finding it hard to locate for some odd reason. Though it did seem like someone had gone through the area already cause I found the clay in some out-of-the-way areas. Once I had gotten all of the resources I was eager to get started as I enjoy making underground rooms look more homely.


I done sheared dem sheep

I started by smelting all my clay into brick and making a brick wall with windows and doorway as an entrance to my house, inside I made a small work area with furnaces, a crafting table and a small open lava feature which acts as an incinerator. I also started to make a sitting area with wooden couches and a netherack fire in the centre with some iron bars around it. I’d planned to continue the brick wall all around the edges of the room (though it was kind of hard because I’d actually broken through the bottom of the ocean floor) with a combination of yellow/red/orange carpet and the roof of wooden oak just to make things look more homely and have little sign of stone.

The brick wall of my room in the underground base

My half-finished underground house

 Unfortunately  my plans and dreams were shattered as I logged in one night to find our underground home ransacked and all of my hard earned brick pilfered, not to mention pretty much everything else in our homes and all the valuable items from our storage. I was kind of annoyed about the brick, but there was really not much I could do, though I really did want to finish of that home, but oh well, it can wait for another time I was lucky enough to have made a full set of diamond armor previously so I at least had that and all of my tools.

Our post-grief-and-theft underground stairway

SO with that behind me I decided to see what other factions would take me, and right off the bat my old friend Rennz (WarpageHD) invited me to his faction of Aniki (not sure what that means). He also mentioned that his faction was “peaceful” which basically meant that they could not get griefed and could not attack others, so in other words perfect for me and I don’t know why I didn’t get my previous faction set to peaceful in the first place though you have to get admins to do it I think.

Aniki Town Centre

Fletcher's cobble castle-thing

Rennz had a pretty good faction area going already, including a town hall, several jungle trees inc one built into some kind of house, a waterfall, a large wheat farm and lake with bamboo surrounding and what looked like a villager ‘tenement’.

The resource room

I checked that egg at the wall and a chicken with a normal sized head and smaller body came out

Fletcher's Jungle tree hotel.

The Egg farm

Wheat Farm

Villager tenement (no we're not slavers)

Reed Farm

Alternate Shot of Aniki

 I didn’t waste much time deciding on what I was going to do for a house as it certainly wasn’t going to be made of brick this time. I first needed a place to set up before I could start making my house and I found this small crevasse inside the faction claim which I lovingly named the "Slum district" and made a dirty hole in the side to live in for the time being.

Slummin' it up

(chuckle)

I decided to create what I had been meaning to for a while, a giant version of a normal Minecraft tree which I have detailed in a previous post, I think it worked out pretty well though.

Aniki with my Treehouse visible

Dynamap view

I'm wearing a full set of Diamond Armor here, along with a steel sword which is for some reason shaped like a pirate sword. I went back to my old Domo-kun skin but I think I may bring back the human one if this is what i'm going to look like with texture pack armor on, even if other can't see me.

 We’ve got 4 people in our faction, Rennz, FletcherHD, Ninjasport, Blacklabelskata and me. I haven’t really interacted with Ninjasport as yet, she (or he, Rennz thinks it’s a girl due to the female skin but I have my doubts) has set up a base across the way from ours and Rennz built quite a large platform complete with powered minecart tracks all the way to Ninja’s base which was off-claim, we did actually decide to make Ninja’s claim part of ours in order for hers to be peaceful as well for protection though being fairly new to the game she was kind of reluctant as it may have sounded like we were taking over her base, but of course not we’re just ‘assimilating’ your property, said the Corporation to the homeowner.

Dynamap view of the bridge, the Dynamap for the server has had an update and is now at a high camera angle

 Due to books now needing 1 leather to create and the difficulty of finding cows when you need them we decided to create a cow farm in this open cave we mined out, funnily enough it wasn’t too hard to find cows nearby and we basically just started breeding. Which is a very surreal process as you can see below, The 5 minute time limit does make things a bit arduous though it’s ok if you make the paddock near the faction home and you can zip right back to there.

The Cow farm.

 Pigs, Sheep, Chickens, Cows and Mooshrooms enter "love mode" if fed one wheat. Wolves enter love mode when they are fed any type of meat. Cats enter love mode when they are fed a raw fish. Tamed wolves and cats must be at full health before being fed to enter "love mode". Animals in "love mode" emit hearts constantly and will path towards nearby animals of the same species that are also in love mode.^[3] The two animals will "kiss" for about two and a half seconds, and then a baby animal of the same species spawns either in between the parents or on the same blocks as the parent that was spawned first, which ends love mode for the parents. They will not be able to enter love mode again for 5 minutes. However, they can be herded with the appropriate material, regardless of age. After the baby animal has spawned, it will follow its parents for 20 minutes before growing to full size.

-Courtesy of Minecraftwiki

So there you go, you can make cows fall in love and have sex in 5 minutes, pop out a baby in two and a half seconds which reaches adulthood in 20 minutes, amazing, though this is a world where trees grow to full size in under 30 minutes.

For those who don’t know our resident shenanigan Moderator Jason1211. Recently I was warped to the spawn area to see a giant hole where the ocean should be, no doubt it was Jason doing some destructive worldediting, he then reverted the ocean floor back then the ocean itself right on top of a group of us who were watching, which made quite a cool effect while the server lag caught up.

Mod POWERR!

What a mess.

Thats the top layer of the ocean just coming down, was quite scary actually until we could swim up.

 A short time after that we apparently had all four faction members online at the same time and since we were the only players on our always responsible mod decided to have some fun with us, this started with spawning mass amounts of Silverfish in the town hall then spawning cows and sheep everywhere then pigs and punting them off Fletcher’s tower, then adding a massive amount of extra cows including Mooshrooms to our cow farm, needless to say it was an experience not to be forgotten.

Spot the Rennz

 
This was quite fun and also scary I can assure you.

Lupi was fairly antisocial this time around. also check out my sword, oh yeh

Well that's all for now, I may update the post with more pictures and happenings, don't know how much longer I'm going to be playing Minecraft for the time being. Playing F1 2011 by request from a friend, also playing GTA4: The Ballad of Gay Tony again as well as watching the first series of the simply magnificent Game of Thrones series.

Penny Arcade Expo may be coming to Australia! this is very exciting and we eagerly await which city it will be held in. Also have a look at this interview with Notch during one of the US Paxs's's's, it's quite an interesting read.

JD


Peace is underrated.