Minecraft Adventures: Vancraft and the Sunken Temple of Solitude

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

A shot of the Vancraft Spawn Area

The Spawning Chapel where they had the drop party

The Market

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

Some kind of Mushroom-related house

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

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

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

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

I called this "the blasted desert"

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

Horsey come down!

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

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

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

The main resource room of my underground base

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

The incinerator and Anvil room

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

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

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

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

That's a looooong way down.

The finished outer temple.

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

Dredging out the lower temple.

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

The door and some shots of the inside of the Temple

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

Higher view of the temple.

The temple using Rei's Minimaps large surface map

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

JD

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

 

Only the lonely

The Past and Times of Yore: Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's island, a sublime prequel

Release Date: 26/10/1995
Genre: 2D Platformer
Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo EAD
Platform: Super Nintendo (SNES)
Players: 1 (2 Player Mini battles)
Classification: E (Everyone)

I have always been and always will be a fan of the original Nintendo and Super Nintendo consoles and games and as I discussed in the first ever Past and Times of Yore post the graphics just seem to be timeless as I would much prefer to see the crisp 2D image of Super Mario World rather the next-gen but pixelated 3D mess of some of the games on the PS1 inc Driver 2 which did look good at the time but have not aged well at all. There are some games I could play over and over again in the Super Mario Bros series on the Super Nintendo and the one I’m about to “review” is no exception. I say review in inverted commas as it’s not really a real review, you can’t review any Mario game this good and make it serious but here goes anyway.

Before Mario and Luigi’s romp over the Mushroom Kingdom in Super Mario Bros. 3 before the whole gang set off in the dreamland of Subcon before Mario and Luigi set out to save the Princess in Super Mario Bros and even before Mario (then known as “Jumpman”) defeated Donkey Kong to save, well the Princess the first time possibly.

Anyway before all of that there was.......

Yoshi

Yes indeed everyone loves a prequel and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island was no exception. It does seem odd when you think about it, we first encountered Yoshi in Super Mario World where Mario and Luigi apparently meet him for the first time on Yoshi’s Island in Dinosaur Land though it seems they have met before, a long time before.

Mario on Yoshi in Super Mario World

In starting Yoshi’s Island (which is what I will refer to the game as) the opening cinematic is a joy to watch right from the start. With a tune that sounds like it’s playing from a child’s toy it tells the story of baby Mario and Luigi in a storybook style of moving pictures that seemed so damn advanced back then. They are being carried by a stork (in the classic tale spun by parents who were too embarrassed to tell their children where they really come from) when Kamek the evil Magikoopa foresees a great threat in the two brothers in the future of a Koopa Kingdom he does a fly-by on the stork but only manages to steal Luigi while Mario falls to the ground below and lands on Yoshi or more specifically green Yoshi as I guess we’ve known since Super Mario World that Yoshi is technically both a name for character and the species. Green Yoshi then takes Mario back to the other Yoshi’s and they find that Mario knows where to find Luigi by some kind of link between the twins and they all agree to carry baby Mario there by a relay system.

All the coloured Yoshi's in the opening cinematic.

The entire game takes place on Yoshi’s Island which was just the starting area of the previous game, the game opens with a clear view of the whole island which is now much bigger then before though technically the Super Mario World map was never to scale. I was kind of disappointed to see that the world maps was now completely linear where you did one level after the other (not that I had any problem with that) but I did enjoy the variety of the paths and getting the keys to the secret areas you could take on the main map of SMW (Super Mario World) but I guess it makes it simple enough also it . After the initial opening scene the game start with a “practice” level where you learn how to play the game and this does help quite a bit as there are some big changes here compared to previous Mario games.

Map of World 5: The Iceworld

When playing as whichever Yoshi you are you carry Mario on your back and you can run and jump on enemies as usual but this time it’s not your main attack. When Yoshi eats things he can either spit them out or swallow them to create an egg where you can have up to 6 bouncing along behind you, you use the eggs to aim and throw at almost anything with some things specifically requiring you to hit them with an egg to proceed. Yoshi can can perform a very useful “hover” to stay in the air a bit longer and you can also do a ground pound to pound different things inc enemies/poles etc. The controls are fairly easy to manage, I noticed their a bit easier now that you don’t need to hold the Y button to run, you just run all the time. If you get hit by an enemy Mario suddenly becomes encased in a bubble and floats around while a timer counts down and Yoshi has to quickly recover touch the bubble to break it before the timer runs out otherwise Kamek’s toadies come and carry baby Mario away. The amount of seconds on the timer can be added to by collecting Stars which are most often found by throwing an egg at a question mark cloud which burst and they spring all over the place unless your clever and collect them all as soon as they pop out. As well as the “timer” stars there are various other collectibles including Red Coins, and Flowers.

Quick Yoshi! get Mario back!, notice the flower there too.

This time around the “goal” is a spinning ring that you jump into and Mario flies through the air onto the next Yoshi in the relay, attaining five flowers in the level results in you being able to play a Bonus Challenge and your score is tallied at the end of the level depending on how many red coins, flowers and stars you collected. Apparently if you got 100% on every level in a world you got to play the bonus level of that world but unfortunately I just wasn’t good enough to get any of them. There are two different kinds of bonus challenges, the ones that are inside the levels themselves and the ones that are won when the flower circle lands on the correct spot, There is a house inside some levels which requires a key to open and in there you fight a Bandit by doing things such as Throwing Balloons or Watermelon Seed Spitting which is lots of fun and uses the new Watermelon item, I also liked the new function of the Super Star that turns Mario into Superstar Mario and he runs around and up walls, glides, floats and is generally invincible. Another new addition to the series is that Yoshi can morph into various forms including things like helicopters and cars using the Morph Bubble, he can also transform into a submarine which unfortunately are the only underwater parts of the game, I found these bits really fun as it changes the gameplay style immensely.

Superstar Mario! notice the eggs are still following him although Yoshi isn't there.

The level design is brilliant as always and possibly even better then SMW, I remember coming across the area where you meet Poochy there is an information box that says something along the lines of “At Nintendo we poured our heart and souls into this game, it is full of secrets, Enjoy!” and that really warmed my heart. They weren’t wrong either the levels are packed full of secrets and tricks and really get you thinking especially with your egg-throwing tactics. It seems that this Mario game has the most number of enemies yet and the special thing is it seems to include a large number of enemies from previous games most prominently the Shy Guys from Super Mario Brothers 2.  I love the 3^rd world in the jungle with all the pestering Monkeys, I also like the new big scary enemies inc. Nep-Enut and Chomp Sharks which add that element of fear to the game.

The giant Nep-Enut, they make quite a scary sound when rising from the water, there's also a Lava-welling version of these creatures called Gargantua Blarggs

The graphics are nothing short of awesome, you can tell by the opening sequence that these graphics were going to be something else and they did indeed push the SNES to its limits. The graphics have a cartoony pastel coloured feel with most backgrounds, text and features drawn from crayon or made out of patches though some features made the game look more than two dimensional. I can remember back then watching the bridges go up and down, running out of the way of the falling doors and jumping along the rolling logs that looked like they were 3D, I remember the crazy drug-fuelled effects of Fuzzy when you touched one of them and the moving platforms in the castle levels and balancing precariously in a log while riding through a lake of lava.

Yoshi touched a Fuzzy and got dizzy. Though the signs are all there that you aren't just dizzy

Unfortunately I do not own the game on SNES and also with my SNES controls being fairly uncooperative I had to use an emulator though this did have an effect on the graphics making them choppy in the parts with the advanced moving 2D graphics (like the intro) but I do remember playing them on SNES in the past and can appreciate what they looked like. Though the good thing about the emulator was I could manipulate the layers of the game and remove backgrounds etc and I noticed that foregrounds had been used to a large extent this time around i.e. flowers in the ground levels and mists in the cave levels.

The flowers in the foreground are a great touch.

It seems old Koji Kondo did it again as the music is his best work as usual, the music is instantly likable all bippy and boppy with that unique sound. I especially like the castle and boss themes and I love how the music is so appropriate to the area, bouncy and happy in the overworld, low and composed in the cave levels, and fast and upbeat in the athletic platform jumping levels which has that excellent ragtime theme. I also love the end level music and the way that the scores dance around to the music once they’ve been completed, the music just seems to work. The sound effects are up to standard for the Mario games all bouncy and poppy, as with the main theme of the game they do seem fairly cartoony but there’s nothing wrong with that, the music and the suit the game perfectly, there’s not much more to say.

The castle levels are a lot of fun and have a great soundtrack.

This game was underrated in my view and I don’t know why as it has all the best things that the Mario games of the time had, great gameplay, variety, music and sound, graphics, and also replayability, you will and would have played this game at least 2 or 3 times as it’s not the kind of game you can just play once. If. Yoshi’s Island is a great game though quite a deviation away from the standard Mario formula, not that that’s a bad thing, and not that I have anything against Yoshi, Yoshi is awesome, it just stops it from being my no.1 game of all time and you can probably guess what that is. If you haven’t played this before, get an emulator (I recommend ZSNES) and goddamn play it and it won’t matter whether you’re a fan of Mario games or not you’ll have a ball, or maybe an egg...

JD

Dancing numbers!

Minecraft Creations: The Lan Slide V5.0 Melbourne PC Minecraft Competition

I’ve been attending Lanslide since its second iteration and have a had a great time in the events I’ve been to. The last time I went I managed to win the Minecraft competition with my Jungle Greenhouse though at that time I only had one opponent and this most recently I had no competition which makes it kind of easy to win. Saying I really don’t have a problem with winning by default and I’m no stranger to it, especially with Minecraft. I went to 3 Minecraft competitions at the now closed Melbourne Mana Bar in which the first was a big turnout with my Tribalfield buddies and us having some quite serious competition, then the second and third times I was the only person who showed up for the competition.

Anyway, at Lanslide 5 the admins made a theme for this events Minecraft Competition and that was Melbourne PC yes the business that hosts the landslide events and I immediately wondered what the hell I was going to make and the only two things I could think of was a giant computer or the building itself so I decided to create the latter and ducked out to take some photos of the front of the building. I think it came out pretty well apart from the meddling with the Pokeball and the explosions from my interfering colleagues, I also had to stop-and-go with the tournaments I was in but I had enough time to make something decent.

Early shot, I did this in the default texture pack as that would be what everyone would see it as.

I added the Melb PC test up the top for extra effect

Was taking screenshots every minute with fear that those idiots blowing up their Pokeball that they had built right near my building.

Some night shots

Google Maps view of the actual Melbourne PC building

So that was that I won a creeper headrest hat and a set of coke glasses which is as good a prize as any I guess. I played in the League of Legends, Flatout2 and Armagetronad comps, was going to go in Starcraft II but that didn't end up happening. Anyway, fun times and looking forward to the next and possibly having some competition for the next Minecraft competition.

JD

Creeper Hood!

The unchallenged will always conquer

Minecraft Adventures: The Underground City, Progress and Hellish Prisons

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

A cool looking cave Richard had blasted out

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

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

Back view of the new house I made.

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

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

Main hallway of the prison

Additional cells

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

Cells and Villager prisoners

 

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

Richard's underground dungeon

The "humane" bodily disposal room

Alternate view

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

Oh well, the Underground city continues

My mother would be proud