Yes, yes I concede I'm treehouse crazy no wonder the infamous Jason1211 called me a "tree hugging hippy" These two creations were done on two different servers, well one mostly in singleplayer, the Green Hill Sanctuary on FusionBlox and the Jungle Treehouse on the new Ozgamerparty Minecraft Server
Green Hill Sanctuary and Tree Mansion
Ahh a sanctuary, I’m becoming increasingly fond of creating sanctuaries for myself in Minecraft, whether it be on a cloud made of wool in the sky or a house dug into the ground I sometimes feel the need to shield myself off from monsters and sometimes even other players unless I’m in a town community as I am currently. However the setting for this creation was rather a lonesome one as I had mentioned in my previous post I had come from a brief stay in the Mikeland Factions server I had returned to Fusionblox and was still having a lot of trouble finding a group of people to build with, it did seem a friendly server but very group-oriented so much so that I couldn’t even find the group of new guys to play with, also I have to mention that there were a few restrictions on this server so unless you paid a fee you couldn’t get access to certain features such as teleporting and chest protection. So I was wandering alone by myself and finally decided to just go back to what I had done in the beginning and build one my own, while watching the conversations go past and listening to Skype and thus began to build my ingenious creation.
From the Front
From the back
The bottom entrance to the Sanctuary
Stairs up to the main Sanctuary area from the entrance
An early shot of when I was setting out the base
I had been wandering through a forest when I came across a small raised hill, which gave me a good idea for a wall, but a very environmental wall, well as environmental as chopping down trees then making them into wooden plants then building a wall, can be so I built the wall about 5 or 6 blocks high around the entire hill, this was basically just to keep out the monsters as I decided to create an entrance at the front and dig out an entryway with some steps to the top of the hill which was covered in trees. I called it my “Green Hill Sanctuary” sanctuary from monsters that is (well technically spiders could climb the walls) you can’t get sanctuary from other players not matter how hard you try, unless you’re an admin but of course if you’re an admin you already have to deal with moaning players on a daily basis.
Main House Entrance
The raised foyer entrance area with boxed plants
The Main Foyer area
I then started work on what would be humble abode, and you guessed it, it would be a treehouse. This treehouse was actually a variation on my first major treehouse that was created back in March/April 2011, I basically used the same design structure I had used in the past which is basically making large square (or rectangle) wooden platforms on top of the surrounding trees, then joining them together using stairs and more wooden planks. This time I decided to focus on more interior than exterior and made the rooms quite large, of course I had to factor in rooms for both Enchanting and Alchemy, so this made the whole structure a bit bigger (though the library can double as an enchantment room). I made roof access and fences around but it was really just for convenience as most of the features were inside the house.
My throne or viewing/reading room
The Library and Enchanting Table
The Alchemy Room, yes it's quite big I know
The Pool room with what's supposed to be a fish tank
In the past I was finding it hard to fill some of my larger houses or creations especially with so many floors or open spaces. I used quite a few inspirations from a website I found that detailed various ingenious and well designed Minecraft Furniture, most of the designs you see here come from what I've seen both on the website and on their server, even though things like a Minecraft gym or pinball machine might seem bizarre I urge everyone to take a look if they are ever stuck on how to properly furnish a house or building.
The entertainment room big-screen TV and couch
The Pinball, Popcorn and Fairy Floss Machines (The creator of the texture pack I use must have been kind of religious)
The master bedroom
As I mentioned previously I had to get a mod to do some pretty tricky things for me to get this into a singleplayer map for me to be able to work on but of course in doing this he had to take the rather large chunk of land and dump it into another so the whole hill didn’t exactly match up, I decided to just fill in the gaps with dirt and make a staircase up to the entrance from the lower ground, this didn’t exactly work as I’d hoped, and the funny thing was a short time after it had been completely finished I went into the FusionBlox server and found that the survival map hadn’t even been wiped for the new patch yet but ahh if I hadn’t of had it moved I would have lost it and had to rebuild in singleplayer anyway. I think that it came out pretty well I had a rooms for just about everything and I also made a small farm inside the sanctuary I named it the Tree mansion though it really wasn’t that big, tree house wise it was quite a mansion indeed.
This is awalkthrough I made of the whole Sanctuary, sorry it's not the best quality it's the first time I've tried soemthing like this before.
Jungle Treehouse
After the whole debacle with making the huge tree mansion in multiplayer. I decided that my first house on the Ozgamerparty Minecraft Server was going to be simple but still effective and worthy of my talents (insert ego-related remark here) though I have long since realised that it's not easy to change nature to your own designs (unless of course you are these people) I have tried time and time again to make a good looking tree house, but due to spacing requirements you just end up with a big fat trunk and one hell of a job if you're going to make it look like the rest of the trees in Minecraft.
Front view
View from the top, there is a trapdoor at the very top leading to the leafy roof
The bottom level
So I decided to just build a reasonably small trunk nothing too big with a sort of leafy roof, I used all logs and wood from jungle biomes and planted ferns around to keep the jungle theme.I also made one hell of an effort to get enough cocoa beans to carpet my bedroom in brown wool, all I can say is that it took a lot of dungeon searching and infiltration. The whole thing has 3 levels and a balcony on two and also an underground basement, nothing too fancy just simple and functional.
The basement with underwater pond
My Bedroom in the middle level with brown wool floor
The top level with enchanting table, brewing stand and cauldren, I glassed up the roof to avoid falling leaves.
Thats it for now, stay tuned for the full report on the new Ozgamerparty server and the Tribalfieldies return.
Hello all, well it’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these, I managed to get a bit of Minecrafting happening in the weeks that led up to the official Australia release of Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) which is what’s eating up most of my time atm and dabbled in a few different servers but unfortunately not quite getting settled on the one. There has also been major updates as I suppose you’re all already aware that Minecraft has been officially released as of November last year and as Notch said it’s quite difficult to release a game when it’s already been out for a long period of time and is constantly being updated. But for most of us the release was of minimal excitement, as we’d already been playing the damn thing for about a year now, I for one wasn’t really playing during this time and have missed quite a lot that has happened in the past month (or two).
A working Enchanting table, the more bookshelves the higher exprience cost the spells
I have recently also been looking intobreeding animalswhich I am told is a better way to produce food rather than going out hunting or harvesting wheat for bread apparently you can feed a number of animalswheatand they enter “love mode” not with you of course but the problem is then they have to go near another animals of the same kind in order to reproduce and in case you haven’t noticed it’s sometimes quite hard to get two animals to go at it, with Minecraft being no exception, anyway after they do the stuff (stare at each other) they make a baby animal who in turn with their parents will be burned alive by you with yourflint & steel, being the obvious choice here since it automatically cooks the meat. So anyway kids that’s a tip for mass breeding and genocide of innocent animals which means more food for you and your town’s population and I’m looking forward to creating some breeding/slaughter yards like the heartless monster I am. 1.0 Also introduced fully functionalNPC Villiageswhich are now filled withNPC VillagersI haven’t really encountered much of them yet but apparently the mechanics have gotten quite extensive with villages having things like churches, libraries, forges and farms and npcs which take on the role of priest, librarian, blacksmith or farmer which pretty cool when you think about it, they also now have the ability to make children, wowzers.
A Fan made trailer of The Minecraft 1.0 release
An overhead view of a large NPC villiage, hard to believe their randomly generated.
Patch 1.21 was probably the most recent major patch which introduced a few new features including Jungle biomes, Cats & Ocelots, Iron Golems,Zombie sieges for villages and probably most importantly being able to build twice as high then you could before. I’ll just say some quick things about this, one being that the new Jungle biomes look quite awesome with the very tall trees and the vines you can climb and new ferns and overall foliage placement making it very bushy indeed to get around, though it is a bit distracting whenbiomes are relatively small when in one place you have a lush steamy jungle then in the next you have a frozen tundra. Beware ya’ll zombies can now break through wooden doors on hard or hardcore mode so you are no longer safe with that plain wooden door unfortunately if you’re playing on those modes, which to be honest most servers and players aren’t due to the fact of Creepers being trigger happy and doing a whole lot more damage and explosioness. And villages are a flurry of activity now as zombies attack in droves and are fought off by the village golems which you can make yourself apparently. I mean really, cats yes but Ocelots, Iron golems, Endermen, Squids? the choices for npc’s in the came just can’t get any more diverse.
The Official Minecraft 1.2 update made by Hatfilms
A common Jungle Biome
The recent 1.2.4 release has brought forth a couple of things that I’m excited about especially the chat history and upgraded chat editing and also the way that wooden planks now (rightly) come in the colour of the tree they were chopped from, but unfortunately this does not reflect onto the other products that are created with wood i.e. doors, stairs, signs
The Minecraft 1.2.4 release as narrated by Chimneyswift11
All the variations of wood with their saplings
So that’s a lot of shit that’s happened since I’ve been away. As for servers I’ve only played briefly on a number of server’s namely:
I had a brief run on my friend from Tribalfield Atomic_Sandwich’s server where we experimented with Assassin’s Craft and making TNT catapults as you can see below.
TNT Awaaaaay!
The aftermath.
Fusionblox was the new most prominent one I had tried out in the days leading up to the release of SWTOR, I had tried numerous different servers and had found this one to be quite pleasant, it had a nice Australian playerbase and very friendly and organised Admins, had all the correct mods (well not all unless you paid) and was survival creative just like Tribalfield. While it was fun to play in/on I found it hard to find people to build with which is a crucial point in having fun in multiplayer I assure you, if you all have a common goal for example i.e. building a giant castle you can all work toward that goal even if you’re the only person online at the time but strangely in such a friendly server it was kind of hard to find people who wanted to accept you, of course in multiplayer and when there are coveted resources and creations around trust is always a tricky subject.
One of the Community updates created by the Fusionblox admins, they are remarkably well done if you ask me.
The very colourful FusionBlox Spawn Area
Sometime during my Fusionblox stay I decided that it wasn’t working out and I couldn’t find anyone to build with so I had yet another brief foray into Mikeland factions. The point being that in factions it’s a lot of fun and a good idea to co-operate with all the cutthroat factions around just waiting to take lives and steal supplies which also rhymes (sortof). The process in order to do this is still quite daunting though but this time I managed to easily gain the trust of a very nice chap who I talked with on Teamspeak who ran quite a good friendly faction with only two other members. As with the norm of factions the base was right underground near bedrock and quite small and cramped, so I decided to cut a nice open space border around the original room with a single row of stairs to give it a bit of flair and a step up to get away from those dark fumes coming from the bedrock. With this extra room I created as per usual a nicely arranged row of chests organized and signposted with the appropriate resources. After this I decided to make a room for myself in our underground abode and I suppose you all already know carving out room and dwellings whilst underground is hard work which unlike building on the surface means you have a few things you have to deal with:
You have to carve all the space you want out of solid stone.
You end up with a shit-ton of stone/dirt/gravel
You go through 3x as much tools as you usually would.
You have to go all the way to the surface in order to get to trees/animals/water/sand most of the time.
There is no daylight underground so monsters are plentiful.
There’s the ever-present issue of digging into a lava pool, especially when your deep underground.
It takes a hell of a lot longer to build things.
So regardless me and another of my faction started carving out our living spaces, I had previously gone hunting on the surface for clay, wood, sand and wool and made a nice room for myself with a brick entrance and walls , red wool flooring and a wooden roof to make it look more inviting. As the rooms were built adjacent to the large main room, I also added some windows and made a balcony with a surrounding fence, wool floor (I wanted to use grass but unfortunately this was impossible this far underground) and a ladder down to the main hallway where our rooms were all of which helped so that the whole thing didn’t just look like a jail cell block. Though unfortunately before I was completely finished with the interior I logged in one night to find myself knee deep in lava then subsequently burned to death. It appeared that our underground village had been infiltrated, ransacked then covered with a nice layer of lava as is the usual way of the griefing party. Somehow I knew this was going to happen so unfortunately I have no nice pictures of the area as the faction home warp had been taken over and I couldn’t find any of my 3 other factionmates who also I did not get any screenshots of and can’t quite remember their names, so just decided to “call it” so to speak.
This is the only picture I got of our underground village, you can onloy really see part of my room here though. I think I'm taking a screenie of someone who's drunk.
So I decided to just do what I have done in the past and go back to Fusionblox and begin building by myself while taking in the server atmosphere, and I had created quite a base called “JDman’s Green Hill Sanctuary” which contained my new “Tree Mansion” which I will feature in a later post. The problem with doing this kind of thing yourself on a multiplayer server is that the game itself is constantly being updated as I’ve said before and this usually includes some kind of landscape change which requires the previous game map to be scrapped and a new one with the new features needs to be generated, some servers (like my previous Tribalfield) offered the previous maps for free download, but the problem is when these maps are quite large, the Fusionblox survival map was said to be about 4gig in size. So you could probably guess that building anything that you’d want frolic around in forever would not be a good idea. When faced with this issue having almost finished my structure I asked one of the very friendly admins if they could physically copy my whole compound (using Worldedit) and dump it into a newly created map, which would be small enough to download and to be honest it worked well if I do say so myself and thanks to prizna for his efforts in doing that for me.
I also took a quick look at my friend Aday’s server which had some very impressive pixelart as well as quite an extensive castle which unfortunately was not lit well enough so was filled with monsters, but a very nice place to look at nonetheless with lots of detail put in.
The Courtyard and Castle which was huge and also full of monsters
Pixel Art!
Flying Ship
I was also playing around on my friend from Tribalfield Laver’s new public server which he has nicely made me a moderator on the server, unfortunately it was around this time that I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic so I really didn’t have as much of a go as I possibly should have, though had a bit of fun making the “jail” in a jungle ravine.
Well that about sums up the adventures since the last post, I’ll soon be back with my Tree Mansion and a happy reunion on a brand new playground.
Also Known As: Saints Row 3, Saint's Row 3 [common misspelling], Saints Row: The 3rd Also on: X360, PS3 Genre: Action Publisher: THQ Developer: Volition
Unlike most of my gaming compatriots, I am one of those people who enjoy the first couple of levels of a game, you know the ones, you’ve gone through all that intro stuff and have just started out on your own (or not, depending on the game) and the area (and even enemies) usually seems somewhat friendly compared to the rest of the game at least. My absolute favorite kind of game is when you’re an aspirant of some kind, be it soldier, gangster or Jedi as long as it’s something to do with starting off from not much at all (maybe even from the gutter) and slowly rising up to greatness, but to be honest sometimes I’m just happy as a normal pleb of a fighter with only has access to basic weapons and abilities, it’s just so much more simple when you’re starting out, then when you’ve turned into this unstoppable hero who morning consists of saving the United States of America from a foreign power and afternoon consists of saving your home planet from alien invaders . I have this feeling a lot more particularly when I start a game for the second time or more, it’s just the fact that you know what to do and have a plan about how you’re going to play the game differently this time, this is especially true with MMORPG’s where once I know what I’m doing I can work out exactly what to do with the next character I make and of course there’s a hell of a lot of things to learn when you start a new MMORPG and even more so if it’s your first one.
Aw hell it's in flames already? mah country and also planet need me mo then ever!
One thing I am never fond of thought. are the short “tastes” that they force on you at the start of a game, whether their flashbacks or prequels or important backstory I may begin to sound like a grumpy old gamer but I don’t want to act these things out, I don’t want to be thrust onto the top of a speeding train with no explanation of what I’m doing there and have some random weapon thrust into my hands with no other explanation of what it is or how to use it properly other the screen prompts or to be also thrust (it seems like the perfect word for this situation) into some supercar where I have to race another opponent and very high speeds while being chased by the Po-Leece when I’ve just started then game. Of course many could argue that there’s nothing wrong with that and as an experienced gamer I should know what to do (which I do) and also that I should be grateful that the game gives me such an experience early on. Even so, I am absolutely fine in showing me these things in a cutscene, I like to start off slow and I don’t like to be shoved into some out-of-control scenario where I have to dash around like a madman guns blazing in order to survive to be able to get the “real” starting area.
But strangely enough, in this particular instance I didn’t mind it at all…..
In Saints Row the third you do start with a brief cutscene which shows your gang don their ‘disguises’ which happen to giant mascot heads of one of the gang members and attempt a bank holdup which doesn’t go too good right from the start, then immediately your shooting down throngs of fashionably dressed guards, then SWAT teams before your buddy in a crane helicopter comes to heave out the actual vault itself with you on top of it all the while you’re fighting off SWAT teams and attack choppers one handed with a machine gun. I’m not going to tell you what happens after that as I’d otherwise spoil the brilliant first mission but I will tell you it involves an aeroplane and can assure you it gets crazier, whatever chaffe I had against throwing me in the deep end was obliterated by a number of things mainly the overall feel of the game even when you first start is both wacky and chaotic which suits the graphical style and both the gameplay and also because I was having so much fun. This isn’t a game where you worry about doing it right (all the time) you just aim to have as much fun as possible while getting the job done, you’re not a rookie or a basic soldier pleb you’re the (semi) invincible ass kickin supremo gangsta and what makes things better in my view is that you technically one of the bad guys, the leader of the bad guys in fact so this makes what you do more justified in a sense, but obviously there are guys badder then you which you are required to eliminate, after all you can’t go around killing people who don’t deserve it all the time can you?
Who wouldn't want to be Johnny Gat?
The story (yes there is a story) to Saints Row is relatively easy to get your head around, basically you are the Leader of the 3rd street saints, the bankjob goes wrong and pretty soon you’re in the hands of giant crime syndicate, called The Syndicate… when is split into 3 separate gangs who control certain parts of the City of Steelport. So basically the game revolves around a giant free-roam city main story missions involve you escaping the Syndicate and doing certain key missions and eliminating the three gang leaders along with your gangster buddies and everyone you come in contact with along the way, but really that’s just the driving force behind the chaos oh so, much chaos. Along with the story missions there is a multitude of other activities you can do which include your usual side missions like causing as much damage as possible in the time limit either by yourself or with a tank but it gets crazier when you start purposefully throwing yourself into traffic to claim insurance money and driving a high profile client and escort around the neighborhood while trying to evade TV vans hoping to get a “scoop” and even more bizarre when you have to escort a tiger, yes tiger in your car.
Sit in a chopper shoot enemies, protect friends, simple enough?
As well as that there are the usual assassination missions, car theft missions and gang ‘operations’ that you have to “interrupt”. There are of course various shop in the game that get wackier each one you find, from the Saints Row gear outlets to the “Let’s Pretend” costume store, there are gun stores and car garages scattered across the city and what makes these better is that you can modify almost any gun or vehicle in the game, this is especially great if you want to turn your favorite vehicle into a Saints coloured cruiser. Over the course of the game you ‘acquire’ various gang hideouts (though you’re doing anything but ‘hiding’ in them) which can store cars and sometimes water vehicles and aircraft.
Gangstas in Spaaaaaaace!
Your main point of focus, is none other than your phone (wow, how true to the era), through your phone you can pretty much do everything inside the game, call your gang homies for backup or vehicle delivery, checking your bank account to transfer more laundered city money, and the usual things like accessing the various side missions and the city map. One thing Saints Row does introduce is the upgrades section in your phone, which allow you to spend money to upgrade just about everything, inc personal upgrades such as more health or sprint time, weapon upgrades such as faster reload or blast damage or gang member upgrades such as better weapons or even have them fly in valkyrie style in an attack chopper. Speaking of the weapons and upgrades your arsenal is about as crazy as it can get you not only have a range of oversize and modified pistols, shotguns and machineguns from almost the very start you have access to sky launching missile system which you can eliminate tanks in one hit and not to mention the homing rocket launcher and airstike marker which are in the “special” weapon category. The melee weapons as you could probably guess include a giant rubber dildo called the “penetrator” and various other objects including a giant electrified shock hammer.
Your phone, it's useful, just like in real life
Gameplay and controls in Saints Row is pretty basic if you’ve ever played Grand Theft Auto, or most other Third person games for that matter, you run you shoot, you drive cars etc, what you do and what controls you have vary greatly depending on what you are doing, especially in the story missions when you can be doing anything from flying a futuristic attack jet to shooting enemies with a lazer hand cannon in a virtual reality tron-like world. There’s this kind of slapstick way your character moves and jumps around especially the “Fred Flintstone” way of entering and stealing cars which is kind of hilarious. I found with the vehicle handling it’s almost impossible to drive things slowly and carefully though technically I was using the keyboard so I had the whole foot to the floor full lock or nothing thing with the keys going on, which is one of the things that really irks me about playing games where your half driving/walking. The graphics are as you’d expect though slightly more cartoony to preserve the feel of the game rather than having the dark gritty faces of GTA, I did notice that even under lenient settings the graphics did still seem to chug a bit when out in the open city but that didn’t matter much, I suspect that the graphics could have been mildly worse and it still wouldn’t have mattered we’d all be still having so much fun, or maybe there’s a barometer these days, but anyway…
I like this shot cause it epitomizes how you move around in Saints Row the Third, you don't really seem to have much control of your body (or vehicle) you just flail through the air
So at this point you might be thinking: “So yeh, this is basically just like GTA” well you wouldn’t be wrong, it has pretty much all the usual nuances that we’ve come to expect from a game that this similar but the key factor that Saints Row the Third has is craziness, lunacy, chaos, ludicrisoty if that’s even a word, whichever you use Saint Row embraces the silly and does it very well, this is coming from someone who hasn’t played the first two games, but could probably imagine what they were like. Another thing that Saints Row embraces is senseless violence and sleaze, whether it’s stealing shipping crates full of illegal immigrant hookers or smashing pedestrians bodies to pieces with giant pressure powered fists. This of course isn’t new to GTA but it never takes it as un-seriously and in spades as Saints Row, there was so much comical violence and death and so many lurid sights, images and references that it’s a wonder this game ever got released, but with kids these days (who probably play it as young as 8) you can never know.
They need some lamposts like that down Melbourne CBD
When people ask me what the game is like, I like to say that it’s ”GTA on drugs”, and I think that’s pretty true it embraces the silly rather than trying to be serious and have the player have to make their own fun. I never had a problem with GTA ‘becoming’ serious with the release of GTA4 I just found my own fun along the way, but in Saints Row you just simply cannot play with a either play straight or with a straight face and I can happily say I did laugh out loud, not to something unexpected and funny I did myself, but to a scripted event in the game. I found it thrilling just waiting to see how my character and his friends were going to get out of their current situation and can be honest to say that unlike some missions from GTA in the past, there wasn’t a moment in the story missions where I felt it was getting boring or repetitive (note: murdering people in the most comical way possible apparently never gets boring).
This was the first ever game where I chose to wear a parachute at all times, not out of style, you just never knew what you were going to fall from next. That said it sure beats the lift
SO, if you happen to like the Grand Theft Auto series but though it needed a bit more craziness, lunacy, chaos, senseless violence, sleaze and debauchery, objectification of women, public servant and political mockery, gang warfare, mass egotism, bad taste and general disregard for human life of any kind, then this is the game for you…. which is basically what? all of us.
