Well it’s here, it’s been here for a while now I just
decided to obtain it when the timing was right,
as I had enough things to do and play already if you hadn’t noticed the lack of
posts in February and March I indeed have started playing Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR). In case
you didn’t know it’s been out since December 23rd 2011 in the US but we down
this part of the world had to wait till March 3 before it was officially
released in AU but the part I’d been waiting for was the Australian based
servers, yes you read that correctly and I’m going to say it up front, Star
Wars the old Republic has Australian based servers, there’s currently only 3 of
them but that’s better than most MMO who have “Oceanic” servers with the
correct time zone but located in the US still. In this field Bioware has
already stood out above the rest.
A Jedi Shadow on Belsavis
So as you’ve probably guessed it’s time for another post
title: Yes, Hustlin’ through the Old Republic, it may sound cheesy but
it’s the best I could come up with I was thinking of Fresh Prince of the Old
Republic asI like to think of it as World of Warcraft being West
Philadelphia but of course WoW wasn’t a bad place at all as I’m sure Will Smith
would agree, and also my mother didn’t make me leave there in order to live
with my rich cousins in SWTOR as the song goes. But hustlin’ has that kind of
ring to it, the term “hustle”
basically means to make money in any way possible, a lot of the time illegally
and that’s what you’re doing in SWTOR, well mostly and as it only has one type
or layer of currency your dealin’ with big money. I suppose this name would
suit more if you were playing as a Smuggler or Bounty Hunter who happened to be
doing the ‘underworld
trading’ mission skill but as with all MMO’s currency is a very big part of
the game especially since you have to pay people to train you for new abilities but anyway. As with my
WoW related posts this topic will be my adventures through SWTOR and anything
interesting that happens during the time, of course I’d have to remember to
record it but I always have a few things to show, I will try to feature as much
as I can any updates, announcements and special events that happen as well,
though there are more than enough sites that do this already.
I was meandering over the fact that should I make this first
post a review of SWTOR itself, but of course as Zero
Punctuation had put it, it’s very hard to “review” an MMO even after a
couple of weeks playing, So I decided that I would treat this first post on the
new topic as an introduction to the game. I never did one for my WoW
posts but if you’re reading this blog there’s quite a big chance you
already know what WoW is, I
did one for Minecraft thanks to Dave a bit after I had made my
original posts and I suppose I did do a “teaser”
post for SWTOR earlier on in 2011. But I’m happy for this to be just an
introductory post but I will also give you the basic info which you don’t need
to hear it from me, take it away Wikipedia:
The original "Deceived' trailer
Star Wars: The Old Republic, abbreviated as TOR or SWTOR,
is a massively multiplayer
online role-playing game based in the Star Warsuniverse. Developed by BioWare Austin
and a supplemental team at BioWare Edmonton, the game was first announced on
October 21, 2008, at an invitation-only press event. The video game was
released for the Microsoft Windows platform on December 20, 2011
in North America and part of Europe. Early access to the game began one week
before release, on December 13, 2011, for those who had pre-ordered the game
online; access opened in "waves" based on pre-order date. Although BioWare has not
disclosed development costs, industry leaders and financial analysts have
estimated it to be between $150 million and $200 million. If accurate, this
would make it the most expensive video game ever developed. The game had 1
million subscribers within three days of its launch, making it the world's
'Fastest-Growing MMO Ever', compared with rivals such as World
of Warcraft. *taken from Wikipedia
I was recently looking for a printed strategy guide for the
game but was unable to find one as yet apart from some crap “atlas” from Prima
games that’s trying to be passed off as a strategy guide. Now of course you
might be thinking who the hell would buy a printed strategy guide to an MMO
when all the information you need is freely available online? Well I’ll tell
you why, it’s because I like to read about a game I’m currently playing and
reading about it makes me want to play it more, also reading a book is both
easier and better on your eyes than staring at a screen the whole time, and
also I like to read while eating and the guides have a wealth of information
that can keep me entertained for weeks. I now have four different WoW Strategy
guides, an original guide plus one for each expansion and reading them all and
seeing how World of Warcraft has evolved is good fun to read and reminisce of
how the game used to be and I look forward to doing this with The Old Republic.
It’s been a while coming since my original
post on the subject, and I think SWTOR has lived up to my expectations and
of course as you’d expect as a previous WoW player I did have a lot of
expectations but I didn’t really want to, I didn’t want to view this game as
just another WoW rival that will fail like some others in the past. But it didn’t, it
hasn’t it has cost Bioware an incredulous
amount of money and resources but it’s held firm as far as I can see. I
went into SWTOR with a lighthearted attitude intending to have some fun and
play the game the way the designers intended and not try to change things
around so much because of the quintessential fact that it would be “more like
WoW so it’s better” I’m trying my hardest to keep away from this but with the
release of the newest
major patch which includes the simple, functional and very useful user
Interface editor it was one hell of an effort not to try and re-arrange
everything wow-style. But to be honest the whole experience has been rather
good and possibly getting better as I go further into it.
A good explanation of the SWTOR gameplay mechanics in a group flashpoint (dungeon/instance)
Before I purchased the game I had decided long ago that I
wanted to be on the Republic side and I wanted to be a Jedi Knight. The reasons
for this were that at the start I guess I just wanted to be the good guys, I
played Horde most of the time which
I were (almost) convinced that the Horde had more morality and was more of an
Alliance than the Alliance itself
but this is open to debate amongst WoW lore junkies everywhere. But with
the Galactic Republic I never necessarily saw them as evil, though if I could
nerd out for a bit and imagine myself there to be honest I would be kind of hesitant
to pick the way of the Jedi. I knew that since there was technically only 4
main classes and two of them were Jedi/Sith that it was going to be lightsabre
mania right from the start and that I probably should pick another class, but I
knew couldn’t the “lure of the lightsabre” as I like to call it was too
much. My brother who plays as a smuggler and was always going to play as
a smuggler did say to me in a conversation some quite obvious traits with
players that were:
Not many Smugglers or Troopers around at all i.e. not many non-Jedi,
but of course an MMO with only 4
main classes per side two of them being force-swinging lightsabre wielders
and the other two being supposedly boring ol Shooty Mcgunguns (with the
possible exception of the Bounty Hunter which is probably the most popular non
Jedi/Sith class) you could probably guess that was going to happen. But anyway,
that’s that I guess, at least the two separate Jedi/Sith classes on each side
can heal/tank respectively.
The majority of players were human and sure enough I looked
around and they were, and I was, of course I could come up with a few of
reasons for this. One being that when you select a character you select the
race then you get the option of selecting the bodytype, and the reason you are
able to do this is because the only difference between the different races is
their heads, everything else is pretty much humanlike unlike WoW in which each
races body is significantly different. The second reason is that humans are
usually the base to get chosen as that’s what we are and can identify with, the
majority of major Jedi characters in the Star Wars movie series were human as
well. The last reason is that in SWTOR your initial surroundings and main
storyline are governed by your class not your race, so class in all respects is
the biggest decision whereas races in WoW determine what your character looks
like and how they will move/talk/dance/etc, their starting area and home city
and also what mounts you will be able to (easily) acquire.
Republic side character select screen
Most of this is true but it’s not exactly a dire blemish on
the game, every main class has an advanced class that specializes in either
healing or tanking so a whole group full of Jedi can do an flashpoint (aka
instance or dungeon for all you WoW people out there) without any trouble as
long as they have the appropriately capable advanced classes.Frankly though I do miss the way WoW handles the
races, It’s one of the main reasons I really enjoyed creating a new character.
For example as an Undead (or Forsaken)
character, you woke up in a tomb and your starting area was the dreary
and gloomy but somewhat hauntingly beautiful Tirisfal Glades where you can
get your Skeletal
Warhorse with whole area being of undead-style as well as your home city
which was the massive Underhalls of a ruined human city. Now you don’t quite
get any of this for races in SWTOR the only relative difference is their social abilities
and non-body shape related looks, you don’t get a unique starting area for your
race, this is done through classes as I mentioned before but I suppose this
really doesn’t bother me as the class starting areas are involved and exciting
enough though having no home city apart from a allegiance wide space station.
In regards to the vehicles
available I’m fairly unimpressed, I would rather a certain build of each
vehicle be assigned to each major class for example Jedi Consulars would have
the Rendill line of speeders, I enjoyed the variety and character of the mounts
in WoW, the SWTOR mechanical mounts, are fun to skim along with, one way which
you (usually) wouldn’t be able
to travel like in WoW but they don’t come very close to the fun and
companionship (even the mechanical ones) of the WoW mounts.
Vehicles, fun but still just machines
When I started my character I suppose the hardest thing I
had to work out was what to name myself as I said in my WoW posts I discovered
the name “hbui” from mashing the keyboard which was a surprisingly more
suitable for an mmo then my usual FPS “JDman”, so when I had to come up with a
name that I was going to use for SWTOR it was kind of a weird experience
deciding how to choose but eventually I just decided to use the same parameters
as before, 4 letters, grammatically incorrect and no special characters. So my
first character would be named: “Jxan” nothing special I know but MMO names
aren’t supposed to be, I actually realised now that I could have made a second
name but meh, it’s less to type in as was my argument before spaces in names.
Jedi Knightin' it up
As a Jedi it’s pretty basic, use the right abilities at the
right time, manage your attacking enemies, choose the right companion for the job. Things get
a bit more complicated when it comes to classes in the game. The Republic side
has 4 main classes that being
Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Smuggler and Trooper, with each having its own advanced class which
basically slightly change your style of play, for example my Jedi Knight is a
Guardian, so he uses only one Lightsabre, further to that the advanced classes
have 3 different skill trees
for the Jedi Guardian there is defense, vigilance and focus which are basically
the tank tree, the damage over time dps tree and the pvp style burst damage dps
tree that is shared over both the Jedi Knight advanced classes. Now this is all
well and good but my main problem (and probably a lot of other people’s
problem) is that there is currently no dual-spec
option so my dilemma is that I want to be able to tank in instances, so I
am tank specced, but most of the time I’m not tanking just dpsing and the times
I am able to tank for instances usually someone picks up the role anyway, I’ve
also been mulling over if I should be keeping a separate set of gear for DPS as
because I’m supposed to be a tank I’ve favoured endurance (which increases
health, similar to stamina) over strength with most of my gear but then again
whenever I did that in WoW I always had to keep checking whether the dps gear I
was getting was better than my tank gear, but I spose the stats are a little
bit different and it’s vice-versa in this case.I
must make a point here to mention the Datacrons
which add a marvellous element of treasure hunting and platforming which is
pretty much unheard of in an MMO and I’ve had lots of fun laughing at less
agile players falling to their doom.
My current Jedi Knight Skill Tree many say the skill tree system should be scrapped in favour of Blizzard's new system
The next points I need to make is that of your companions yes you now have these
npc characters that follow you around and help you, and you don’t just have
one, by the time you reach level 50 you will have a whole posse of different
characters well that’s if you could have them all out at the same time which of
course you can’t. Your companions serve a lot of uses, they can tank, heal or
do damage in battle, they make comments about random things and can serve as a
love interest for your character and they can also perform Crew Skills. Which as you would
have probably guessed are similar to the crafting skills in WoW, main
difference being that you yourself do not make the stuff and you do not gather
the stuff either (well most of the time) it’s your companions that do this. So
there is the usual gathering skills where you collecting crystal or hacking
systems for valuable data and crafting skills where your making new Jedi colour
crystals or droid parts but there is also a mission skill, where for
example you send your companion away for a set period of time to go pick up
some illegal goods or do some diplomatic shizz yo in which they come back with
rare items for use with your crafting skills. The thing that gets me though is
that crafting things take much longer than it does in WoW and I’ve found that
kind of hard to get used to, as my usual way of things is to go ok I need 3 of
these, then wait up to a minute while I make them, in SWTOR each thing takes
about 2 minutes minimum, with semi-rare items taking about 8, I’ve just had to
keep remembering to get my companions making them while I’m running around doin
other stuff, the mission skills are easy enough as they take thing longest (up
to 15 minutes!) but all you need to do is use a non-active companion to do the
work. When you request your companions to go on these missions or make these
items they simply just disappear, apparently either back to the ship to get
crafting or wherever else their going.
Kira Carsen, a Jedi Knight Companion
Bowdaar, a smuggler companion
One of the biggest differences between WoW and SWTOR is the
storytelling inside the game, in SWTOR your have you own classes main storyline
which basically leads you from planet to planet each with its own storyline and
mini storyline inside it and coupled with the fully voiced players and NPCs and authentic Star Wars sounds and music it’s a very immersive experience, much more then some MMO's which have little or no specific storyline for your character. we all know the whole Bioware conversation
mechanic that you’ve seen in the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series as well as
many others. Where if someone asks you a question then you have 2 or more
answers or actions depending on what they have said and you have the option to
pick the polite, controversial or downright offensive reply. SWTOR’s spin on
this is sometimes your actions can have Light or Dark side consequences so you
could probably guess what that would be: “kill the slaver and free the people”
or “accept bribe from the slaver and commit the people to their doom” they
aren’t always about money of course though being a Jedi I really couldn’t do
anything bad like the good natured sap that I am.
You make many dark or light side decisions with a few consequences
The bottom line though isn’t
about the morality of you or your character, there are many items in the game
that you need a certain amount of light/dark side points to be able to use it,
so as Zero Punctuation mentioned you may as well just pick your allegiance from
the start as to get some of the best items at the end of the game you need to
have selected the light side option most of the time. The only other difference
I can think of is that is you select dark side all the time it visibly shows on
your character as I saw with a level 50 Jedi who looked very evil indeed. One
thing I really do want to try is play as a Sith and pick all the Light side
options, which I really want to see how it works because aren’t Sith supposed
to be evil? Well I suppose Jedi are supposed to be good.
Dark side corruption changes
Not too long into your main characters storyline you receive
your very own Starship which
serves as a mini home base for you and your crew. It’s basically how you get
from planet to planet and also how you access your space combat missions, but
to be honest there’s not really much else you do there, just mission briefing
and access to your Cargo Hold, you’ll probably spend a lot more time on the
main Republic or Imperial space stations which sit near their respective fleets
and basically act as the home cities for each allegiance.Apart from getting from planet to planet the
space combat missions are probably the main thing you will be using your ship
for and I must admit they are good fun I was always wondering how Bioware could
pull off space battles in an MMO. Basically it’s like an arcade game, when you
start, your ship is at the bottom of your screen and you can move it around
quite quickly with the mouse in order to dodge incoming fire and you aim your
lasers and missiles using the mouse as well. There’s a few different kinds of
missions including destroying an enemy battlestation, destroying an enemy
ship or series of fighters or protecting an allied ship which is possibly the
hardest as the upgrades to your own ship make little difference when you’re not
the one being shot at. I could possibly argue with my brother forever on this
but I can’t help not feeling that this was put in just because it was a
Starwars game and it had to have space battles so this is what they chucked in.
I suppose it wouldn’t been a semi-large hole in the game without it and
the arcadiness suits because we don’t want to bother ourselves with X-Wing vs
Tie Fighter levels of complicatedness in an MMO.
Space Combat, you have to see it to believe it (or understand it)
The graphics in SWTOR are what you’d expect them to be, for
an MMO cannot have the fancy graphics of other games for the reasons
enclosed in that conversation of course, I never expected the graphics to be
anything more than acceptable, there is a bit of popup in the scenery though,
especially around the foresty worlds such as Taris or Alderaan, I’ve recently travelled to the desert planet of
Tatooine which is very good looking for a desert. What sometimes takes me by
surprise is the size of some of the rooms/caves/buildings in the game, whether
it’s huge storehouses giant caves or just massive ships or space stations the
sheer size of some places is sure grand to look at. One very interesting feature
with the characters models is that you have the option of “Unifying the
Colours” of your gear so for example remember all those times in WoW where your
armor looked kind of like this
well Blizzard had their own way
of fixing that and so do Bioware. The armor and robes that you get in SWTOR
aren’t quite bulky or outstanding as of those in WoW, this allows the unify
colours button to basically turn every other piece of gear that you have to
blend in with the base colours of your chestpiece, which makes you look pretty
cool and is a great feature.
Smuggler Sharpshooter on Alderaan
Overall my experience with SWTOR has been a good one, I’ve
played my first character to level 30, I’ve joined a guild, I’ve learned a lot
about the game so far and am mostly happy with the experience, there’s so much
more class and spec combinations that I want to try for example Jedi
Consular Sage with Telekinetic spec I’d also really like to try the Sith side
an be and be a “Good Sith” who always takes the light side option. Whether or
not I go back to WoW at some point though remains to be seen, though before I
was switching between WoW and Minecraft, now I’m switching between the three of
them, and trying to watch the whole 3 Kingdoms
TV series as well, sigh I spose I’ll always have too much to do or play.
My current interface setup with Tatooine in the backdrop
Stay tuned for more SWTOR posts as they come, I can assure
you I’ll be playing for a while yet.
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.
