Minecraft Adventures: Vancraft and the Sunken Temple of Solitude

In the fine month of Autumn I decided between the builds of my Brick mansion that I felt like some more survival classic PvP, and actually do PvP this time, so I trawled the Australian Servers under minecraft-mp.com and settled on one that looked pretty good called Vancraft named after it’s friendly owner Vandorann and it ticked all of the boxes including Bukkit, Factions, PvE, PvP and Survival. Pretty much as soon as I got there, there was a “Drop Party” going on, where the Admins would fly around the spawn room and drop various items while the players below would jump around trying to get them. I managed to score myself quite a haul getting 5 diamond blocks, a Steve head, 4 Iron blocks, lots of coal and iron and redstone, gold nuggets, wheat and various other goodies that allowed me to start off with a bang.

A shot of the Vancraft Spawn Area

The Spawning Chapel where they had the drop party

The Market

And with a bang I did, I walked around for a while exploring the area, there were quite a few things to see as there always is around these servers before finding a jungle biome and digging a small hole in a hill to forge some Diamond armor and a sword to have the best level of protection in the wilds.

Some kind of Mushroom-related house

I then decided to log in to the Teamspeak server and went to the Minecraft channel where Tim0776 came down and asked me how old I was, and in saying I was 28 moved me down to the Admins channel where I met Vandorann and Mstrdonut and they were all quite friendly. Tim0 even invited me to his faction and his odd looking base out in the ocean.

I find it interesting how much I am trusted when joining Minecraft servers once I tell them I’m over 21 I spose it’s just all the griefing, immature and distrustful younger generation that people were suspicious of. It’s happened quite a few times actually so the advice I give is if the server has some of kind Teamspeak/Ventrilo or any type of voice server get on and say hi, you’ll be amazed of how far that goes with trust once people hear you and  if that isn’t available then some random acts of kindness will go far too i.e. giving someone a gift of iron bars or even diamond if you can spare goes a long way too. I’ve learned over the time i’ve played on random factions servers that you need create a reputation of integrity for yourself in the community if you want to remain part of one.

I had came out of my Nether portal and found myself in someone's house once and found this odd setup, I cannot fathom why someone would use Anvils as a bedrest display. You literally looking at 186 iron bars there less the amount of coal that was used to smelt them as well.

  Anyway once I had my temporary hideout sorted I decided instead of a jungle retreat high up in the trees I wanted to build in a swamp and make a sort of sunken-temple-like structure in the middle of a swamp lake (much less picturesque I know) be but in order to do that I was going to need a swamp. So after trying the ‘random location’ command “/rl” a few times I found a few interesting things  and falling in a large hole and going splat and Van very nicely recovering my stuff. I'd made quite a few saved locations with Rei's Minimap it's quite useful when you use the marker options so you can see how far away everything is to you and that's useful when you want to get as far away from spawn as possible.

I called this "the blasted desert"

I did actually find a little swamp near a large lake with towering wooden walls above it, Van said some people had used to it raise there woodcutting skill which I found kind of odd as due to the Decapitator Bukkit mod the trees fall as soon as you cut part of the trunk but still this was much too close to spawn so I figured I was going to have to do some exploring. I went out to tame the horse that was sitting in the trees near my hole, I had bought a saddle with in game money that you recieve from voting for the server which I had done a few times and after a few tries of breaking it in I got the saddle on and was up fine.

Horsey come down!

So off I went on a grand journey across the world in search of a suitable place. This was the first time I’d ridden a horse and man are they fast and they can jump damn high too and I felt like a badass running monsters through on my high horse. After a while I did find a small swamp, fortunately though Tim0776 did some flying around and found me an even bigger swamp where I gratefully travelled to, to build my creation.

The Swamp, as taken from the edge as you can see the green from the forest biome is covering half of the tree. This also happens with the water as you can see from the edges of the swampland the water is murkier.

Now you might be thinking, “isn’t this a survival PvP server” why would you want to think about building a large structure when it might get destroyed, and unfortunately I really didn’t think that all I could focus on was creating a brand new funky creation that I always do. I don’t know what gets into me maybe I just don’t like PvP but I don’t know why I keep joining servers that have it, maybe for that extra element of danger I guess? So anyway, I picked the lake, made myself another hole and got building. One thing I found during my extended period in the swamps is that they were one of the hardest biomes to build things in, their dark in texture, there’s water everywhere and they seem to spawn the most amount of monsters out of any biome I’ve seen including Slimes which can see you wherever you are and their splotchy moving noise is hella annoying. I also found that I would have to deal with a Zombie horde every night, I even tried creating pits and traps to kill them all but unfortunately since their AI upgrade they don’t just walk blindly towards you and fall down the hole in between you and them anymore so you have to be a bit more creative and unfortunately I wasn’t.

The main resource room of my underground base

Over the course of building I had to add a few extra rooms to my underground base inc. a bedroom, a room for the, anvil, incinerator and nether portal and I also covered up my pit trap and started digging downwards to gather enough cobblestone to cook to smooth stone to then turn into stone brick. Basically not much happened after that, I just started building and kept building with amazingly no interference from any players, the main problem was the monsters that made life difficult but that’s what it’s like building on a survival PvP server.

The incinerator and Anvil room

The Nether portal, I had to create a gate around it as at one point I had a zombie pigman walking around.

 This was one of the more difficult builds that I’ve done as it required a lot of underwater work which was a major pain especially when you don’t have access to any kind of underwater breathing potion, as I forgot to go up for air quite a few times and ended up dying on occasion. Basically what I wanted to build was a temple that was half underwater so I started at the lowest point of the pool and built in a  supposed square around the bottom with stone brick and putting in glowstone on the rows every so often to be able to see what I was doing. And then basically I just kept building up and up and mining down and down heh. I voted for the server any time I could and used the money to purchase more stone brick.

Underwater building be a pain, also doesn't quite look very good with the stairs, hopefully they will fix that at some point.

When I’d almost finished the temple and was mining the last bits of stone I looked up and it was quite a damn long way up there, like I was some kind of miner looking around the huge cave of other miners, except it was just me but anyway. I built in a pyramid style right up to the waterline using stone bricks and steps though when I was directly on the waterline I noticed that the steps make that weird gap in the water so I had to leave that part without the stairs and then continued to the top which I filled in and made a roof across it with the glowstone in the middle of the poles supporting it.

That's a looooong way down.

The finished outer temple.

The next stage was to make a stairway down into the temple itself which didn’t take very long as there was only a few levels till I hit the sand island in the middle of the water inside the temple. Having become bored with building this creation I was just going to leave it as a quiet temple of solitude then Vandorann kindly helped me rid the water from inside the temple, so then me and another very helpful member of my faction whose name I unfortunately cannot remember started digging out the inside and removing the excess water left behind until we’d got down to the level that I started the temple.

Dredging out the lower temple.

 While we were doing this so many zombies and monsters appeared that we decided to wall off the entrance to the temple and add an iron door just to make things easier. I cleared out the floor and used the sand I had left over as a base for the downstairs level, I wanted sand down there as there’s something tranquil about cool sand in an underground place though I suppose it would be more suited to a beach or desert, there was also a section in the corner where I left a pool of the excess water which added to the tranquillity.

The door and some shots of the inside of the Temple

I didn’t do much else to the temple as I’d kinda had enough, I added a few torches and christened it “JDman’s sunken Temple of Solitude” and that was it really. I may re-create it in creative mode in the future thought. I’ve now shut off my home base to the world and will log in from time to time to see if anyone has found it since that Lockette has been removed but my Temple of Solitude will always be there.

Higher view of the temple.

The temple using Rei's Minimaps large surface map

So that’s that really, I’ve gone off to play some Star Wars the Old Republic and of course Battlefield, I’d just like to thank everyonething on Vancraft for an awesome time and hope to see you guys again.

JD

Probably my favorite shot of the Vancraft server, the lonely path to the red pyramid house, the texture pack really makes it quite picturesque.

 

Only the lonely

Minecraft Adventures: The Underground City, Progress and Hellish Prisons

Well a few weeks ago I was back at Richy D’s place for another round of Minecraft creation fun, we decided to continue working on the underground city we had previously started building. I apologise for the lack of screenshots as I was kinda busy at the time and forgot to take enough and I also forgot to take a copy of the world so I could take more screenshots.

A cool looking cave Richard had blasted out

 I started finishing off the houses that I had previously built and Richard fixed up the quartz paths and made a street light. We built two ‘luxury’ houses along the path and I say luxury because they were fairly luxurious compared to the other houses that had been built, Richard made a single level L-shaped house while I made a two-level large rectangular. Mine was supposed to be the 5-star house if I was still working off that initial idea that I had for the villager accommodation so it was properly made of bricks, wood and wool for carpet unlike the others which were made of a mixture of wood and stone or just stone. After I finished building I realised it was too low and the windows touched the ground (and I like them to be one block up so hence why it’s got a sort of sandpit around it. I didn’t know what else to do as you wouldn’t be able to get grass down here, it’ll probably look pretty good with some cacti around though I still dunno what we’re going to do for plant life around here, mushrooms maybe? We could use mushrooms of all sizes and mycelium as the basis of the underground ecosystem, especially since they are technically the only plant life underground apart from moss, anyway it’s an idea. 

My main house on the top and Richard's on the left

Back view of the new house I made.

 The underground city was starting to form pretty well, Richard made a cool looking lighthouse tower thing with lava then after that we were deciding what to build next, and for some reason we decided we wanted to build a jail, right in between two of our houses (including mine) no less. So we started building this jail and right away I knew it was doing something different then the norm something more disturbing than the normal happy Minecraft building. I didn’t really have to think much about what block I was going to make the structure out of: stone brick of course, I think I love it a bit too much though it’s the most fitting for an underground jail, plus stone slabs for the floor rounded it off quite well. For the design we decided on two levels, the top level would be predominately for villagers while the bottom basement level would house all kinds of nasties, such as blazes, zombies and skeletons. 

Far view of the underground city inc Richard's 'Light Tower'

Main hallway of the prison

Additional cells

I designed the top level in a sort of L shape with a long hallway at the front which has the stairway to the basement on the right and leading to another room and more cells on the left, I also did my usual heightened roof with iron bars all around. The cells were narrow but reasonably long, I liked the way when you put villagers in there as prisoners they stood on their beds near the window trying to get towards the light outside. I didn’t put much in the cells just a bed, chest and desk with chair, I used iron doors obviously with switches outside to control them. I went downstairs to see that Richard had made a hellish monster ridden dungeon with skulls and a torture rack, which gave me an very sinister idea. 

Cells and Villager prisoners

 

I decided to the main room upstairs into a sort of Hostel-esque room where unfortunate prisoners deemed are tortured then chopped up on the table then the body parts disposed into the nearby lava chamber, I made the room complete with a victim cage so they could watch prisoners before them being killed and adorned the rest of the room with other benches furnaces and dispensers. I also got the idea to light up the building with redstone torches instead of normal torches as it created a darker gloomier effect which suited the prison much better. Only after finishing this place did I realise that this was pretty f’ed up though I took value in the situation that we may have been the first people to make something like this in Minecraft. 

Richard's underground dungeon

The "humane" bodily disposal room

Alternate view

Throughout our building Richard had decided to turn monsters on so there were monsters all over the place on the houses etc, though because it was on creative they did not attack us they only attacked the villagers so it got pretty funny when we were building and testing out the cells. Because of the zombie hordes mechanics we sometimes had 10 zombies outside a cell that a villager was in and because they come from up to 16 blocks away I had zombies coming in from every direction, they’d literally walk right past me looking at me and continued down the stairs to find the villagers and I had to sue fire to clear them out occasionally. Weirdest time I’ve had building ever.

Oh well, the Underground city continues

My mother would be proud

Minecraft Adventures: Patch 1.6.1 The Horse Update & Angrathar's Amarthine Minecraft server, the admirable attempted rebirth

If you’ve ever read my Minecraft Adventure posts before you’d know about the Tribalfield community which was the original server the group of us who make up the Tribalfield group on facebook were active on run by our good friend NoRC, this of course was before it turned into Ozgamerparty and eventually died out when we went on to other (greater or lesser) things. Awhile ago one of the longer standing members: Angrathar along with his friend Orik decided to start a new Minecraft server and host it on a server hosting account that Ang signed up for on Hypernia which was very generous of him I might add, it was probably spurred on by another member crashbaby’s comments on the destroyed but much-loved ‘Tree of Life’ from August 2011.

Boy I did not know the tree was loved that much, when we started playing on the server the original idealist and designer Lupidoo even suggested he wanted to make a new one which would be bigger and better and named “Albert”. I mentioned that this was quite ambitious but if he’s going to make it he may as well use his own server and limit the people who work on it and if he ever does I myself should take part.

Our conversation on a new tree, I can't say I was too surprised I guess.

I spose though I should quickly go over the latest (major) patch for Minecraft. 1.6 The Horse Update brought with it many things, one of the biggest changes I found was that the dramatic change to the Minecraft launcher. The launcher now support different versions of the game and you can create different profiles which are attached to different version of the game. This new interface is a first step towards the planned Plugin API or “Workbench” which will allow modders to easily add more content to the game. In other words it means that in order to install mods we may never need to touch the minecraft.jar file again and therefore save ourselves from screwing up our games.

The new Minecraft Launcher

Though this does come with a few problems, the new launcher automatically updates the game for you, so in order to install mods currently you need to create a new profile with a new version which is not synced with the main server in order to install your mods on. Also at the time when the patch came out, all texture packs were unusable as they needed to be converted to Resource packs which now encompassed music, sounds, language files, end credits, splashes and fonts as well as textures. This created a bit of a pain but was necessary and I do look forward to the new plugin system where I can just push a button to update my mods (if they are available) though there technically already is something like this by the name of Magic Launcher though I was never able to get this working properly and ended up doing things the manual way.

Speaking of mods I feel I might try and get some Shader mods going or even try out the Twilight Forest mod of course these do need the Minecraft Forge Mod in order to run which is another thing I need to get working next time I start playing Minecraft again though if I do I can finally use that Painting selection GUI that I’ve ben wanting to use and the randomized paintings in Minecraft do get a bit annoying after a while.

A good example of Sonic Ether GLSL shaders in this video for the Biomes ‘O’ Plenty Mod which is another I might think about trying out.

Another major change was of course the Horses (inc. Donkeys and Mules) which were inspired by DrZhark of the Mo' Creatures mod. Horses can be tamed, ridden, bred and came with a variety of new items including horse armor, hay bales, leads and name tags.

Horses are most commonly found in Meadowbiomes

Amongst the other changes were some additional status effects for potions, console commands, riding and mob difficulty mechanics. New blocks including Hardened Clay, Stained Clay, Block of Coal and Carpet which is sure to make things different when decorating houses . Mobs were changed slightly including Zombie mobbing and additional Villager sounds and Deserts now do not contain lakes which was pretty silly in the first place and you can now find Normal chests in the Nether.

A good overview of the 1.6.1 changes by AntVenom

So now that we’ve got all the sorted let’s get into what happened on the server, well not quite yet as I have to explain the new texture pack which I suppose you’ve noticed. This one is the KoP Photo Realism ‘resource’ pack I should say now which I had to trade for my much loved Faerielight which had not been updated as yet. Yes I know it’s another realism one but that’s what I like isn’t it? Nice and realistic cubes lol. So when I finally worked out how to get all of my mods working and actually started playing on the server I was greeted with a snow covered spawn area, something I had not seen before with any spawn area I’d ever been in, though Ang’s server had basically no mods, it was as vanilla as they come, which kinda a good thing and a bad thing but worked out fine.

I travelled through the taiga biome cutting some logs and hunting animals for food until I found a meadow with a decent sized quarry (i.e. interconnected shallow patches of stone among the grass) which led to quite a large mine with an underground crevasse. I made a rudimentary shelter cave in one of the corners of the quarry under the ground and hunted for some coal and iron to cook my food and upgrade my tools and armaments before conversing with my longtime tribalfield Minecraft buddy Lupidoo and decided to join him.

The snow covered spawn area

It turns out Lupidoo was only roughly 300m away from where I was so it took no time at all to get to him, he had also made a rudimentary hole-in-the-wall style home with a small farm next to it, and the inside was his signature style of a room which is smaller than a jail cell. I didn’t waste any time and started widening up his place until it looked acceptable, I even managed to change the entrance of the mine to go from the corner of the room instead of the middle, pretty soon I had something respectable, including a room for myself. I named the place the cave of cake, and made a sign above the iron door for at the time that’s what I felt like putting in there.

Some shots of the cave with the KoP Photo Realism resource pack

 We then set about gathering resources and mining of which I found lots of coal and iron and even some diamond. I made myself some sweet iron armor and we started buildings farms inc bamboo for books and wheat and carrots for food, I also did a bit of lumberjacking and hunting on the side cause we all need meat and wood yo. We didn’t quite get round to the taming and riding of horses but good ol’ Admin Angrathar came flying down with him and his horse decorated with golden armor and sword, twas a sight to behold.

Lupi and I's farms

I like this shot of us staring into the blackness

There was a few of us in the same meadow with an interconnecting mine. Cashman had originally set up a small house with a farm on a hill not too far away from me and Lupi, Orik and Angrathar had set up close by, also Frewer had his mountain more to the north of there. After we had gathered sufficient resources I started properly scoping out the interior of the cave and organising the resources, I made an inner wall and put the resources chests along the hall on the right and put the furnaces and our bedroom on the left hand wall and properly signed everything up, we also found some cows and started a cow farm for leather.

From left to right: Ang's Hydro-Hole, Orik's farm, Cashman's house and me and Lupi's cave, all in the same meadow.

Our cow farm

Newly organized resource room

Side area, with bedroom furnaces and mine entrance

Bedroom, yes I know it looks like a jail cell

 Following Angrathar’s invitation to go to the Nether we ventured through to Ang’s nether portal and explored it up, I saw lots and lots of quartz which I collected for building I guess, or just because I saw it. I got some lightstone too and we even found a fortress where I managed to relieve some blazes of their rods which funnily enough wasn’t too hard though I did have full iron armor and weaponry and a trusty bow and arrers.

Quartz!

 Unfortunately while in there either I or someone else managed to anger the zombie pigmen and man I don’t know whether the server was set on hard or what all I know is they do a lot of freakin damage, even with iron armor on was killed and annoyingly I couldn’t go back and get my stuff as every time we would go through the portal there were a bunch of zombie pigmen and a wither skeleton charging at us so I lost all my stuff and everything I had with me which was a major pain in the bummo.

Following that disaster I decided to continue working on the interior of the cave, I properly cleared and walled up with cobblestone the two tunnels leading into our main base and walled them up on the opposite side with iron doors which made an interesting upper and lower feel to it, I also widened up the back room on the side of the resource hall.

Oh yeh two back entrances that'll keep em thinking

More room!

Of course the interior of the cave was still all stone and cobble so of course I did what I love to do was make the cave look more homely and that required a multitude of things inc wood for the roof, brick for the walls, and wool and dye for carpet, yes carpet I was going to try out carpet where I could get more carpet for my buck. It was actually quite an adventure first Lupi and I ran through the forest grabbing flowers and roses and chopping down trees then I ran to the swamp and dived in for clay then we decided to pay Orik’s farm a visit (his farm not him, he was away at the time) to shear away at the sheer amount of sheep and chickens he and Ang had amassed.

Orik's Sheep and Chicken farm, efficient but man how cruel

Soon as we finished we came back and Lupi decided that our cave entrance needed a bit of protection so I went inside to organize the interior while he worked on the entry. I lined the roof with oak wood planks and the walls with all the brick I could make which still obviously wasn’t enough but it looked better. I noticed though that my roof near the door was on fire due to Lupi “defences” so I had to remove some near the door. I went out to have a lok at what he’d done and it was pretty hot to say the least though it worked, it worked it was kind of scary and hazardous to get in and out but we flamed and melted almost 30 monsters that night, it was like a bug zapper.

Wow now that's frightening, note that I'm back to my old fairielight texture pack

cOlLabOrAtIoN!

I then tried out the carpet with some interesting results. I made orange carpet for the resource room and red for the area to the left where Ang had put the enchanting table, I kinda ran out though and couldn't do our sad looking bedroom. The carpet work well in the way that it only goes on top of the floor so you don’t have to remember to put an extra floor layer to hide it and you get 3 carpet blocks from two wool blocks. However there were some problems, for example you can’t stack objects like chests on top of carpet so I had to use wool blocks as normal this makes an uneven effect on the floor both around the chests and wherever the carpet ends and it doesn’t look very good so I don’t think I’ll be using carpet in the future.

The newly furnished cave

So that was that really, we spent a bit more time on the server but after a while we got a bit bored as is what usually happens. I think unless you're playing a mod like Twilight forest, Feed the Beast, Tekkit etc there's not much more to do in Vanilla Minecraft apart from building projects and getting to the end. Still, it’s not going to make me stop continuously delving back in to the fray for more.

Mine on,

JD

Last light after a hard days mining

Together again, though shortly