Minecraft Adventures: The return to Ozgamerparty, construction, devastation and petty shenanigans continue in the shadow of Patch 1.3

I felt it was that time again to give SWTOR a rest and get back into an alternate online world full of blocks and byoing kazowie it has been reasonably fun. So ventured back on to Ozgamerparty once again and when I’d found out that apparently the VIPA claim had been made public and all of my resources that I had left there had gone to Lupi , I decided that I pretty much had to shack up with my old friend Lupidoo again in his cozy little new claim of Pandaland which was smack bang in the middle of quite a large forest biome, I’m not sure why, I guess he just likes his privacy.

Pandaland in it's original state, with my Birch house there of course

Pandaland is pretty small, just a cobble walled off area in the middle of a forest to the northeast of spawn, Lupidoo seemed to have built an indoor farm, a resource room, an enchanting table and an empty wooden house which I thought was supposed to be his house but I found the only place which had a bed was simple square box with coloured wool around oh well I guess some people are minimalistic. I found that monsters still spawned inside the area so I added a few more torches but they always seem to be there, I know that spiders can climb over the wall but there’s still skeletons and zombies around, what am I supposed to do? put a torch every 3 blocks? ah well.

Lupi's Bedrom, simple but functional, and also striking

Being in a  forest biome gave me an idea, forest biomes have lots of birch trees. And I’d never used birch as a building material before, so I thought, what the hey-ho and made quite a nice looking place, fairly basic, square two story, (I’ve made a larger Minecraft creations post about it) and I did the same sort of room that I did with my Tree Mansion with an actual birch tree at the top so it turned out to be the biggest and tallest building in the claim.

Wide-angle shot of Pandaland

Some notable events that have happened since, I visited Atomic_Sandwich and his friend deadman1’s claim of New Venezia, which they have built in the sky, which seems all the rage now that the building height limit has been raised significantly, there’s also the town of Darkserif which has its platforms in the sky, which look pretty cool I might add, though recently something has happened to it, something to do with lava I bet with the cobble mountain, but anyway.

New Venezia Dynamap view

From the ground

The lower part of DarkSerif by night

Wide shot of Darkserif (on the right) and Sandy, not sure of the whole story of how that cobble mountain got to be there, and it looks like sandy has some kind of lava waterfall thing going on

I logged on one night to find Atomic and deadman1 giving the BOSSES faction the ol’ lava treatment as they were unhappy about where they had set up their base which was obviously too close and BOSSES had apparently just told them to “bring it”. Pouring Lava then garnishing with water seems to be the way to go these days as it makes a healthy dose of destruction and cobble strewn everywhere.

To destroy almost any enemy faction HQ, first add lava...

Then water to leave a healthy dose of cobble

After that Atomic wanted to make some kind of library for NewVenezia, so I offered my reed farm for him to use, which he demolished in about 10 seconds and then said we should set up another one, which we did under the ground near Pandaland.

You can't see the rest of it, but I can assure you it was one big reed farm, sometimes with monsters

It was around this time that deadman decided to set fire to the surrounding forest and made quite a bald patch as you can see below, Atomic wasn’t happy about this but I really don’t see banning people as a problem solver, I’d actually think a more suitable punishment would be to make him re-plant the forest (with the saplings provided by admins of course) though I really have no idea. This is the reason why I don’t make anything I really want to keep forever in multiplayer, course I myself was trying to make a fireplace in my house made of birch which didn’t go too well and I had to rebuild most of my roof.

Our forest of peace! noooo!

That's one unlucky pig up there, don't worry I shot it out of it's misery

Destruction!

Oh really?

If that ain't proof I dunno what is

Area around Pandaland in the aftermath

I returned a couple of times to get some more screenshots and found that the forest appeared to still be on fire and a greater area and been consumed by the flames, but apart from weeping inconsolably about how this reflects on the sorrow and devastation of real-life bushfires similar to the Corrupted Blood incident in WoW and not to mention natural Panda habitat, I really couldn’t care, especially since this world is probably going to be hit by the reset hammer once 1.3 arrives in August.

Dynamap view after the first fire

After I got back the second time

And speaking of 1.3 it seems to have a fairly large amount of changes coming with some catching my eye more than others

·         Removed the downwards knockback while drowning.
     Can you remember how many times you were diving for clay then started to lose health due to no breath but could not return to the surface fast enough as you were being knocked back down?

·         Cocoa plants

Finally theres an easy way to get Cocoa beans

·         Sandstone Stairs and new slabs and stairs that correspond to the appropriate wood colour types.

Finally, though can’t they just make all the wood items be the right colour as well?

·         Empty buckets and signs are now stackable up to 16

Also finally, now if only doors would too

·         Jungle Temples

Yay Jungle temple , now we don’t just go there to get that golden head and run away from that rolling rock, we take as well all the chiseled stone bricks we can find. I'm actually quite surprised that the entirety of the temple isn't made out of this stuff, I spose if it was, Jungle Temples would be hunted down and demolished on every survival multiplayer server.

Also I finally got round to actually taming a wolf as you can see below which was quite fun, and I can definitely say their much better than cats, more obedient at least.

I call him Blueberry

So just a small update for now. I’ll keep these things in mind for the coming month and wait with anticipation, lately there's been talk of a world reset, a few are for it and a few are against it but in the end it's NoRC's call. For now it’s back to Diablo throi and SWTOR for me.

JD

Home base of the "Kirby" faction, ahh gotta give em credit

But where will all the Pandas go?

Minecraft Creations: The Birchwood House

Once I returned to the Ozgamerparty server, I shacked up with my friend Lupidoo as I had before in his miniature little claim of Pandaland in a middle of some big forest northeast of spawn, his place really wasn’t that big but he managed to make a small space for me to build my house in. Basically I just wanted to make a basic two story house, because as you know I don’t try to pull off big crazy schemes in multiplayer anymore, I didn’t take too long to come up with the material for building either, I saw that we were in a forest and there usually is a large amount of birch in forest biomes, and there was in this one. So after hacking down (and replanting of course) a large number of birch trees I started making the house.

An aerial (well in a tree) shot of the house and Pandaland, as you can see, it is quite small (the claim not the house).

I made a basic square design and used wooden slabs for stairs leading up to the 2^nd level. I did the windows sparingly on the lower level as two sides of the house we facing the stone wall. For the roof I decided to go with design I had used for my Tree Mansion except without the wooden slabs on the top course just the birch wood and the glass panes, for the top I out a dirt block down and grew an actual birch tree, this coupled with the width of the roof and the many layers of the ‘pyramid’ style I use made it quite tall and rose above the treetops.

I used a mixture of birch logs and wood for the window frames, my friend Atomic mentioned that my house “looked like a cow” which I suppose it would using the default texture pack.

The Birch House rises!

 I sort of did the lower level interior twice, as I basically just had two chests, 4 furnaces, a workbench, a wooden couch and a pool table yes a pool table, I always now have pool tables, they might be small with cue sticks looking strangely like fence posts and apparently have no pockets or balls but yeh it’s a pool table. After I was overloaded with a generous amount of new items from Atomic so I had to re-arrange the furniture in order to put in another two double chests to store it all, but there was still enough room for everything apart from the “pool cues”.

Lower level before the change

Lower level after the change

Top floor

The top floor I basically decorated the usual way, though I made a new and more interesting looking bookshelf with some empty shelves. I made my usual bed with wool carpet surrounded by a half-bookshelf wall, some iron bars to guard the edge of the stairway and a wooden couch, some indoor plants and a water feature coming from the roof. I had an ill-fated attempt to create a fireplace (in my house made of wood no less) and ended up burning down half the upper floor walls and roof as I had inconveniently forgotten that fire spreads vertically as well as horizontally.

I thought I'd include this shot with the now half-demolished forest in the background, that wasn't me by the way though I did burn down half my roof at one point.

Didn’t do much around the area surrounding the house as there wasn’t much room, just added some birch saplings for decoration, I’ll have to get Lupi to extend the claim so I can make an extension, maybe a spa or something, I really have to make him do a proper house at some point maybe refurbish that barn of his.

JD

(catchy renovation show music)

Minecraft Creations: The Brick Mansion Chapter 1, Frontier Ho!

Well as I mentioned in my previous post, I had decided that I had had enough of multiplayer and wanted to do a sort of role playing back-to-basics adventure in singleplayer with little or no mods. I love starting from scratch in every game it just makes things more simple and fun, and getting back to basics with Minecraft is no different. I was pondering on going back to my old Domo-kun skin that I got from The Skindex which is a great place for Minecraft Skin inspiration I might add) and slightly edited by me. It was a skin I had for quite a while with first having a Gordon Freeman skin then changing to the Domo-kun skin which I kept for a long time possibly because it was humorous yet created the image that I wasn’t human I was some sort of mythical creature similar to the actual Domo-kun which is the mascot of Japan’s NHK television station. After that I decided to just be myself, I created a skin that roughly looked like me, well as much as you can with Minecraft, I even made a few different skins to match what I was wearing at the time. I’m currently deciding which skin to use but at the moment I’ll stick with my human skin, I suppose it makes more sense since the basic Minecraft player is human anyway.

That's me! believe it or not, I do look kind of silly though when I use the high-res texture packs

What i'm wearing here is similar to what I'm actually wearing at home in real life

I never really had any story in mind, just the usual one about you waking up in a strange world with rapidly changing environments (see biomes for that) and having find a place to live etc as you usually would, similar to the storyline in Nerd Cubed. I had a vision of making a huge house and property with farms and supplies to sustain myself through blood sweat and tears in survival multiplayer but I must admit it’s kind of hard sometimes especially without the use of mods to make things much faster, but of course that’s why I’m doing this in the first place though to be honest I think I’m going to have to have a strong will to make what I want to make without mods as I’m guessing it’s going to take quite a long time with all the resource gathering and such. I decided to do a slight variation on my usual Minecraft adventures post title and have this one called the “Minecraft Adventures of JD” mainly because the adventures have largely been multiplayer adventures and this time it’s singleplayer so I thought I’d make the distinction.

So anyway, here’s how it’s going so far…

I woke (yes I woke up that's how all Minecraft stories start) up in a Taiga biome, and decided to just have a walk and see what was around, I had decided that I wanted to set up my home in a grassy biome as I was kind of sick of trees and tree houses as you have probably guessed and this time wanted to make a proper brick house, I still might keep a few features from my previous brick house though, especially the lava feature. After searching around for a while I found a decent sized natural cave in the middle of a grassy biome with a forest in the centre and set about doing a bit of mining and woodcutting. I was thinking of using either birch or pine wood as the decorative other element to my new brick house, but depending on the colour difference between the logs and the wood I’m not sure, I’m definitely not going treehouse style and making the entire thing out of wood this time though, just the corners and around the windows and possibly some of the floor and well the whole roof, but that’s all! XD. The mining went ok I got a lot of coal and iron as usual as well as some gold, but unfortunately after running around searching various caves was unable to find much diamond. 

The hole I found

And the mine

 I then went searching for a better spot as I needed a bigger place for my grandiose house. So I walked and walked going through a huge desert (unfortunately I wasn’t riding on a horse with no name) and eventually came across an NPC village, which was pretty cool as I’ve never really come across one before, at least not when the villagers were actually in them. There was a large grassy biome nearby that seemed to suit my intentions and plus it was relatively close to the NPC village in which I could have at least some form of human interaction not like before where you basically seemed to be the only human around in a land filled with animals and monsters.

Almost fell into this damn thing

The NPC village on the edge of the desert and the plains

I got there and decided to dig out a cave in the side of a hill as a temporary residence and set up, I always seem to make the mistake of making a square cave then arranging all my chests, workbenches and furnaces all around the edges and end up having nowhere to make a bedroom or expand but I managed to work around it. I did a bit of looking around then found another natural cave and had quite an adventure, I hardly found any diamond but did manage to find an abandoned mine which always seem to have the cave spider spawners which are some scary sons of bitches I can tell you, they seem to be much faster and more aggressive than regular spiders and are a hell of a pain to deal with especially when there are other monsters around, oh and also monsters don't just blindly shamble towards you and fall in the lava pit yuor standing in front of anymore they actually walk around meaning that most of the time you have to kill them yourself. I just got as much iron as coal as I could then got the feck outta there the fast way, which basically consists of digging straight up and filling in stone and dirt blocks under you as you go.

The grassy valley in which I chose to set up, part of a plains biome

Entrance to my hidey hole (I have to use iron doors now that zombies can break them)

My temporary abode

 

Cave Spiders!

I started creating a wall roughly using the natural embankment edges as a guide, I soon realised that it may not have been such a good idea as when you make a wall at the bottom of a hill you have to make it pretty damn high otherwise the enemies can just jump onto to it from the ledge, but I guess if you made it on the top of the hill you wouldn’t be able to see much over it from the ground anyway and when I make the fences they shouldn’t be able to get over.

The beginning of the wall

After mapping out the wall I mined out a large room to the side of my living hole for some more cobble I started on the wall, after doing about 2 levels all round I used my Rei’s Minimap mod to illuminate the area inside the wall  to make building at night a bit easier, it’s pretty cool the way to can see a top down view of the dynamic lighting to make sure no spots are missed and to be honest it looks pretty great when all lit up, monsters still spawn in there occasionally, but unless you turn the ground into a sea of fire it’s unavoidable.

Everyday I'm minerin'

Luminicious, makes it both easier to see and keeps monsters at reasonable levels

Knowing full well that I was going to need some more diamond to make this whole process easier, and thus I decided to start Branch mining, I’d never done this before though on the first “branch” I managed to find a diamond cluster, which was quite exciting though after that nothing happened for quite a while and mining like this isn’t the most fun thing to do in Minecraft I can assure you, it’s almost like playing the pokies which I have done a few times with limited enthusiasm.

                           X = Tunnel "Trunk" 
                           B = Branch
                           S = Staircase
                           Y = Outpost (for supplies etc.)
                           
                           
          B       B                 B       B
          B       B                 B       B
          B       B                 B       B
          B       B                 B       B
          B       B                 B       B
          B       B                 B       B
          B       B       YYY       B       B
X X X X X X X X X X X X X YYY X X X X X X X X X X X X
          B       B       YYY       B       B
          B       B        S        B       B
          B       B        S        B       B
          B       B        S        B       B
          B       B        S        B       B
          B       B        S        B       B

Branch Mining Diagram, simple and (supposedly) effective

So I decided to just take the diamonds I had and keep building, and build I did as I mentioned before I had to make the wall higher in some parts and even dig away at the hills that were too close to the edge. Once I had finished, I made a wooden walkway with stairs (because of the changing levels) around the top of the inner wall and then started lining the top of the wall with fences to give it that extra bit of height, as fences are 1.5 blocks high for monsters and players. I then picked certain points to put both ladders up to the walkway and create iron doors for exit and entry, the doors were controlled by pressure plates on the inside and buttons on the outside which monsters can’t (or just don’t) press. This was not by any means a player proof wall (which is actually impossible to do without server commands) but it would keep out at least most of the monsters and provide a nice little enclosure for my house.

The finished outer (guard) wall, I made a small wheat and reed farm as well as fencing off the chasm

Unfortunately while doing this though I found I was going to need quite a large amount of wood that was  and I also was sick of going back and forth from my main storage house in order to get more supplies, this coupled with the amount of items I was going to need and the long process of trying to find diamonds led to me eventually succumbing to using mods again, it’s not that I didn’t still want to have the authentic Minecraft experience, I still wanted to it was just that doing things the classic way you have to really draw the line between what you want to build and what you have the patience to gather all the resources for to be able to build. It all comes back to the point made by Zero Punctuation’s Minecraft review is what you get out of Minecraft depends on what you put into it, so if you want to put in the hours and find enough gold to make a golden statue of yourself or whoever else, you’ll love it all the more because you put in the hard yards to get the resources to make it,  though I spose you can still be proud of what you’ve done even if you’ve used mods to give yourself items, I mean you still have to think up and create the damn thing don’t you. I suppose I just like being creative in the Survival environment, I know I can get all of the resources the real way if I wanted to, it’s just that when I’m try to build something I don’t want to slow myself down with the actual collecting of the resources again. And there’s the other fact of using more resources, what if I wanted a room with a floor made of golden blocks? It’d take weeks to get that much gold and I’m not even going to mention doing it with diamond blocks.

I wouldn't think this guy farmed all those resources himself (From Minecraft Gallery)

So basically that’s what I’ve decided, I’ll try to play the game as straight as possible while still having fun, I’ll I still have health and hunger on and will try and limit my flying to just taking pictures, with my existing resources I’m not really sure what I’m going to do, I don’t know whether do use them as I go or keep them there just for show, but I’ll work something out.I still have to do all the achievements as well, I’ve never actually been to the end as yet and It will be exciting to finally finish Minecraft properly.

JD

My power has returned

Minecraft Adventures: Mikeland Factions Spawn, another winner

Hello again just a quick post on the newest design of the Mikeland Factions spawn.For whatever reason you didn't know Mikeland Factions is a Minecraft server I visit from time to time, sometimes to play other times to just have a look at what's been made, most prominently the spawn area which is remade from time to time after certain patches, similar to other SMP servers.

The first time I featured one of their spawn areas it was a giant roman/medieval coliseum style walls and architecture with a bit of Chinese thrown in. This time they've done the "simple large structure" design and made one hell of a neat looking tree.It reminds me of our attempt to make something similar and I think we did a pretty good job. This of course is rather a pro job as they have obviously made the tree to look like an actual tree not a Minecraft tree and it seems to work quite well.

These were taken with the basic Minecraft texture pack.

Here's a couple of shots with my LB Photorealism texture pack

I took some shots of the area around the base and found some interesting sights apparently now there's someway to put play models in the world that move by themselves, it's really weird, kind of like a Herobrine thing.. There were models of Notch and Mike Sheen himself too, and no I don't know what that guy in the cage had done or why you should not let him out.

This is the gate to the Nether, work in progress apparently

 I really should have taken some pics of the previous ones though they may not have been that spectacular. I didn't get around to playing on the server again as I just couldn't talk smooth enough to get into a faction this time, I think it just gets harder each time I come back, and I really wouldn't blame people. The amount of  betraying and backstabbing that goes on is horrendous, especially on servers where PvP is allowed.You sort of need to play for a bit by yourself then with others until they trust you enough to take you in and I really couldn't be bothered doing that again not when I have my so awesome "unmodded" singleplayer experience..

JD

The Past and Times of Yore: GTA4, The Lost and the Damned, blacktop rollin'

Also Known As: Grand Theft Auto: The Lost and Damned, Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes from Liberty City
Also on: PS3, X360
Genre: Compilation
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar North

I may have mentioned this ”expansion” in a previous post but only very briefly, The Lost and the Damned does deserve more recognition then just a few lines in a post mainly about the other one. I had never really bothered purchasing any of the previous GTA ‘Episode’ i.e. the previous Liberty City stories or the Vice City stories but because they were given such high praises by both my friends and the critics and also because GTA4 has been one of my favourite games ever, so I had to comply. GTA4 had a lot of intertwining storylines in fact it could have made 2 or 3 more ‘spinoff’ games based on just that game world alone as they are a great way of getting more play out of a game rather than just doing the main storyline again and again.

Johnny Klebitz and his custom "Hexer" bike which is new to GTA I might add as well as a whole heap more

Anyway, the Lost and the Damned is the story behind a Motorcycle gang who featured in GTA4, the protagonist is Johnny, a veteran member of the gang and it’s Vice President the story basically tells of the returning of Billy, the reckless and volatile club president and the violence and chaos that ensues both inside the club and with the clubs main rivals: The Angels of Death. You may remember Johnny from such GTA4 missions as ‘Blow your Cover’ and ‘Museum Piece’ and yes you do go through those missions again from Johnny’s point of view. I must admit though, the times you briefly see Johnny in those scenes he seems quite a bit different from what he is in the instance it’s almost like Johnny was just another crazy friend-of-a-friend that Niko meets but now he’s the protagonist and therefore one of the only calm and collected characters in the game. Apart from the members of the lost motorcycle club there is a few new faces but most of the characters that Johnny interacts with outside the club are characters that you have seen before.

From left to right some of "The Lost MC" members: Terry, Angus, Brian, Jimmy and Johnny

You start in the Alderney Island this time around largely based around the Lost Clubhouse situated there. The main difference that The Lost and the Damned (TLAD) has to GTA4 is that throughout most of the game you will be riding a motorcycle. This is possibly the main reason I enjoy this game as I loved the motorcycles you had in GTA4 and this one gives the same and much more, motorcycles give a different feel than cars and apparently you could even notice that when you drove cars with Johnny that he didn’t handle them as well as Niko did and vice-versa with the bikes. Almost every mission involved bikes in some way including gang wars while riding with your crew and motorcycle thefts for profit even the racing missions where you have a baseball bat and could knock other opponents off their bikes (which was immense fun I can assure you). One of the problems though is that sometimes the slightest thing on the road, for example a piece of wood can have odd results, sometimes you just run over it but other times it launches you 5m in the air in a full on frontflip often resulting in you crashing and losing the race, but I guess it’s all the more spectacular. The episodes games are obviously fairly short (only a third of the missions available in GTA4) but there’s still a decent amount of fun to be had, there’s the usual line of side missions and random encounters throughout the story, Congressman Thomas Stubbs who you didn’t see in the previous game makes an appearance and provides some comic relief from the otherwise dark and gritty storyline.

Being on a motorcycle and riding with others on motorcycles, I just can't get enough

Checkpoints are a new feature in the game which allow you to continue a mission from different points rather than starting again. This time around you can call on your biker buddies Terry and Clay to come help you on certain missions in which the way they help you changes each time, sometimes giving you in instructions for tactics or to set up ambushes (who would have thought?) also your ‘The Lost’ gang members will gain experience and be better at fighting. You can also use your fellow gang members for delivery of guns and bikes if you may happen to lose your motorcycle in some way and god forbid you don’t want to be seen driving a car. As well as the new motorcycles (and some cars) that were included in the game there are a few new types of guns including a very useful automatic pistol, a very powerful but short range sawed off shotgun, an even more powerful rapid fire assault shotgun a grenade launcher, pipe bombs and pool cues (of course).There is thankfully new music around this time to give a more biker feel to things, I especially love listening to “You’re going to Hell” by Alice Cooper. 

The Sawn-off Shotgun, very powerful, as long as you're only two metres away or less

As I said before I loved riding bikes in GTA4 and that’s what makes this one so good for me, it’s nothing complicated just good old gang wars, in fact it’s probably even less action packed then GTA4, not to mention TBOGT which is a veritable orgy of explosions. There’s something to be said about cruising down the highway on your chopper with the sunset in the background and music on your, er stereo, it’s something I really want to do if I ever have enough money for it. The Lost and the Damned is essential if you’ve played and liked Grand Theft Auto 4 as it’s the same city just a different story and cast and if you happen to like Motorcycles it’s even better.

JD

I can apparently backflip a motorcycle without trying, or meaning to in the first place