Minecraft Creations: The Blocktree House

Guten abend everyone, back with some more Minecraft Creations. During my recent activities on the Ozgamerparty Minecraft server I had been planning to make a great new undergound house, but alas with my previous faction Atomic‘s “Psynapse“ not being set to ‘peaceful‘ unfortunately our underground mini island home was ransacked and most of my resources were lost. SO I had to find a new home with a new faction and I did with Rennz‘ “Aniki“ in which I quickly set up as a house in a small crevasse I fondly named the “Slum District“. I had wanted to create a slightly different version of my Jungle Treehouse as this time it would be made of oak and this time it would resemble a normal minecraft oak tree except be giant in size.

I managed to create this right on the edge of our claim, I mean literally the leaf blocks on the edge of the right side were on the edge of the claim, now thats precision craftsmanship.

Wide angle

I also must mention that I am using a new texture pack, namely Faerielight by Develsaa. I recently had to resert to finding a new 256x256 texture pack as my beloved LB Photorealism wasn’t up to date at the time (though I think it is now) Though I think I’m going to stay with Fairielight as I quite like the look of it although the text that  is used with it is kind of difficult to work with and I can’t change it as I can’t get Optifine to work with the new update for some reason. I looked through a few other packs some of which looked terrible though I must admit not all 256x256 packs are made with realism in mind.

Faerielight texture pack

So I set off to cut some wood and man‘o‘man did I get a lot of wood and put it to good use (snigger). I borrowed Rennz‘ efficiency II diamond axe which helped immensely, I must have felled so many trees during that period that the Minecraft Environmental Conservation Society (MECS) almost arrested me for deforestation but of course I’d planted the saplings so they had nuthin, it’s lucky that trees in MC respawn so fast. And so with my huge haul of oak logs I started making the tree trunk, plan was simple, make the trunk wide enough to live in, and have a tall enough trunk so that when I add the leaves it doesn’t appear too short. I finished the trunk pretty quickly having needed to go back for more logs once or twice, but man can I tell you that the new "stack logs sideways" feature brough in by patch 1.3.1 is fucking annoying. For example in order to stack logs upright now you have to be above them, which annoyed the fack out of me to no end since I was only placing logs upright on the tree and the amount of times I accidentally put the log sideways cause I apparently wasn't above it was alot I can tell you.

I Then started on the leaves at the top, and I was going to need quite the shiteload of leaves in that regard. I must have gone through about 15 shears running around that forest slicing foliage off the trees like some kind of crazed farmer who had misplaced his sheep and needed to vent his frustration, after realising that the trees don’t actually grow their leaves back I had to cut all the bare trunks down and plant all the saplings for a second time lest the MECS be on my ass again.

That I do.

I started creating the leaves part of the treehouse and basically did it in 6x5 blocks, it wasn’t any specific size I just wanted it to resemble a giant Minecraft tree which it ended up looking like a sort of sombrero, possibly becaise I had to shave a bit off the bottom of the rim to fit in the balcony.

Hola señor!

I built a ladder all the wall through the tree with a trapdoor up the top with some stairs cut in order to get up to the top of the tree and walk around the edge. I then started on the bottom level where I had to jut the double iron doorway out one block so I could put the stone floor panel out of the way of the work area, I had a fair amount of brown wool from my sheep shearing escapades so I decided to use that for the floor. I arranged my chests and workbench and cut holes in the trunk for windows and put iron bars on them for protection and soon realised that there wasn’t exactly much room inside the trunk so I had to dig out a lower level for my furnaces. The space issue was a bit more evident on the upper floors as I found I really didn’t have much room for my usual bedroom furnishings on the 2nd level such as a bed, bookshelves, flower pots, a chest and juke box and it ended up being quite cramped, though this was remedied by adding glassed windows including a double on one side.

Trapdoor at the top of the ladder

Hole and stairs at the top

Mah door be jutting.

The carpet does look a bit gritty with the texture pack, then again you can get kind of gritty in Minecraft

That'll hold off the Zomabies

Furnace room, not much room but then again I don't need much.

Usual Minecraft bedroom amenities

 The third level would be my alchemy/enchanting room although I eventually had to split them into two, the alchemy room led out to the outer full-cricle balcony which I had created with logs and leaves which goes against the “big Minecraft tree“ idea but looks quite nice anyway. The enchanting room on the 4th level was kind of a challenge as there wasn’t enough room to do the usual enchanting setup, not to mention that books now need leather to be created which is a major pain in the rear and has led to a major growth in cow poaching and farming for everyone to supply their enchanting addictions. Anyway so there wasn’t enough room so I had to put the enchanting table right next to the ladder so the bookshelves had space to work their magic which wasn’t exactly preferable from an interior design perspective but is manageable. After that all I had to do was arrange windows (that showed basically nothing but foliage) and it seemed to be complete though because of the multiple levels and the height of the roofs in the enchanting and alchemy rooms only had wood floors and I preferred to always have a layer of wood or something else under the wool carpet.

Alchemy Room with door to ringed balcony

Enchanting room

I’d be lying if I said this will be last treehouse I make whether it‘s house-in-a-tree or house-that-is-a-tree but next time I really think I will try to do something different although it probably will still be a wacky style of house, cause you know that’s how I roll. Though maybe I should try something different, Da_Seano of our server has made a pretty nice looking tavern, maybe I could trump him with a luxury restaurant ,anyway full details of the recent Ozgamerparty MC server will follow, lebewohl for now.

JD

I like this shot

And thy nature be consumed

My Usual Spiel: Diablo 3, Nothing more or less expected

 

Release Date: May 15, 2012

Genre: Third-Person Action

Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment

Developer: Blizzard Entertainment

Diablo, possibly the only one of Blizzard’s three greatest game franchises that I had yet to fully experience, I remember delving into a bit of Diablo 2 in the past but it really wasn’t much at all. I was far too busy with Warcraft 2 & 3 and also Starcraft when the Diablo games came out so I paid little attention to them as I was much more RTS focused in those days. That said though Diablo has a lot in common with those games so much so that it almost seems like an offshoot of some of the single player campaign missions, the ones where you have no building units for the entire period and you usually have one unit who is the “hero” or named unit which is usually a different colour to the rest and you play through a semi-linear tunnel or landscape triggering events. To be honest the style of gameplay I found it most likely to be akin was none other than the Warcraft 3: The Founding of Durotar campaign featuring the famous Rexxar which I managed to finish for the first time awhile ago and do a quick review. In this campaign you predominately played as Rexxar and a few other companions while both completing quests, levelling up, obtaining new abilities and collecting items in basically the same way as Diablo. Of course this style of gameplay was also said to be introducing players to the WoW style of gameplay which was to come out after it. 

Diablo 2, never played it, but apparently it's still better than this one

 I must admit I fell in to peer pressure to get Diablo 3, but now that I do have it, it is a great game to play with friends. So far in my singleplayer experience of the game I have had sufficient fun, yes sufficient fun I may sound like I'm going into this with a lot of negativity though I think I’m just trying to resist becoming a fan of how awesome Diablo is which is kind of hypocritical since I went from not fancying World of Warcraft then trying it and realising it was the best thing ever in the space of 48 hours. So of course I decided to get Diablo 3 and try it out in the end I had made the right decision to wait since during the initial launch the game went through quite a few problems with its long list of servers errors some of which getting famous by their own accord. But still I wouldn’t have tied to play it on launch night or even day for that matter, I think the rule of thumb is to just not play the game until at least a  couple of days after it came out, I personally wait a week or more cause frankly I can wait. I don’t think there is any game I’d be so excited to play that I’d stay up late into the night to play, maybe if it was with friends and we were drinking but we’d still be just adding more people to the number by all trying to log on at the same time with the same Internet connection.

Penny Arcade: Condensation

 I wasn’t expecting much personalisation in the character creation and there wasn’t, this isn’t a Bioware RPG after all, there’s not much in the way of character storyline as you just simply create your character, view the initial opening movie, then you view your very generic character classes opening movie I started out as a Monk as I thought they looked pretty cool and I liked the idea of using my fists and feet martial arts style. I soon found that Diablo 3 has a limited number of abilities that you can use at any one time, two abilities are bound to the left and right mouse buttons and 4 other abilities are on your action bar, which pale in comparison to MMORPG’s where sometimes you have enough abilities displaying to make an on-screen keyboard. For example for my right mouse button I started with “Fists of thunder” then got “Lashing tail kick” for my right mouse button, then a level after that I received “Deadly Reach” as an alternate ability for my left mouse button and in turn you acquire different ‘runes’ over time to make deadly reach more powerful this is how the mouse button abilities work basically one is straightforward hitting a single direction (most of the time) then the other is more AOE based. The action bar abilities like “Blinding Flash” and the Demon Hunter’s “Entangling Shot” are basically all round utilities to use at the right time. It’s not overly complicated to play but does require a bit of general rpg type common sense in choosing your items (which to keep and which to use) and which abilities to use at the correct time but of course that just comes with learning the game.

Character screen and my Monk

The auction house is one thing I myself could possibly do without, I’ve only dealt with auction houses in MMO’s where they are obviously needed, but with a mostly singleplayer game such as this, I don’t need the auction house whatsoever. I just think it’s an unnecessary feature for people to wheel and deal, especially the ‘real money’ auction house which is basically a post similar to this waiting to happen. I did feel a bit taken aback when my friends said that “you buy most of your stuff from the auction house especially in the higher levels as it’s so much better”  I’d digress on the higher levels but I really don’t think a primarily singleplayer game should have to rely on an auction house to have the best gear and/or to compete with other players.

Penny Arcade: Absolutely Not

I’m now up to the 3^rd act and to be honest I can’t really be bothered anymore, I’m sorry to say the game was only really mildly fun, the story was the only thing that kept me going. The first two acts were good enough and pretty suspenseful but now it’s all action just defending some damn castle and it’s the same old mass killing of monsters and demons and I just can’t bring myself to play it again so I don’t know how this review is going to turn out. For the most part the controls were fine, I didn’t really mind having fewer buttons to press. the graphics were good, especially the effects, . I enjoyed the storyline for as far as I played it, the difficulty curve... well it was easy enough, I didn’t really get very far but to be honest I really wouldn’t have bothered trying it on the higher level, I enjoyed  having followers and decking them out with the best items I could and I enjoyed killing hordes enemies with super kicks and punches and special abilities. I’d hate to say this though but the whole thing just felt a bit too linear and repetitive, and I know your all going to scream at me “Well that’s what Diablo’s about and this is the first time I’ve played it and I haven’t even finished it on normal difficulty and how can I say that when I play MMO’s like WoW and SWTOR”.

Your followers are quite useful, not to mention good company

The fact that I haven’t finished it on normal is because I couldn’t be bothered and have gotten bored and it wouldn’t be any better at higher levels anyway cause it’d just be too hard and also I’m not bored because of the easy difficulty, just running from one area to the next killing demons getting loot, going back to drop off the loot etc. The loot was also kind of a problem too, there was SO much loot and not just white and grey crap there was heaps of magic blue stuff you had to sort through, true it just meant a quick portal trip back to home but still I was doing that about once every 20 minutes, maybe I just pick up too much I dunno. I’m really trying to see the difference in my experience with this game compared to The Old Republic, I mean they are MMO’s whereas Diablo is a Hack’n’Slash but you do really the same thing in both of them. In both of the games you have a large continuous storyline with multiple smaller storylines running through them, you fight and kill enemies and bosses, you do quests, you get new spells and abilities, you have followers/companions with you, you pick up new armor/weapons and upgrade and enchant them or sell them, you have seemingly similar crafting skills and interface’s and you level up throughout the game. Maybe what makes me prefer MMO’s to this is the linearity and freedom of character. In Diablo you get to choose what kind of fighting style/image your player is but you’re pretty much stuck to going through semi-linear landscapes and caverns which really not much choice of how you go about it, whereas in MMO’s you have a lot more freedom of where you go and how you get there, you have more of a feel of being your own character. 

Penny Arcade: Recycling

 I think the main reason is that Diablo as I said before isn’t an RPG it’s a Hack’n’Slash I mean it’s got nothing in immersiveness, large gaming world, character detail and AI compared to Skyrim, and it hasn’t got quite the multiplayer element of MMO’s, that’s probably why it doesn’t tick all the boxes in my list. It does somehow remind me of why I didn’t like Magicka except that was even smaller still and plus everyone was wizards, EVERYONE can’t all be wizards it’s just not right, agh it’s worse than those games where everyone’s a Sniper, actually that’s not too much different from the modern EA Battlefield games I guess ahah.. People tell me now that the game isn’t as good as the 2^nd one and I don’t doubt them. Maybe I should have made the effort to play the second one more, I suppose I’ve never played Sacred, Titan quest or even something like Dark Souls, maybe If I did I would have known I didn’t like the genre, ah well I needed to find out some way.

Sacred

Titan's Quest

All in all, despite my ranting and whining about why I can’t enjoy it, Diablo 3 is still a solid game, it has most of the things that good hack’n’slash game should for example:

• Fast-paced combat, lots of enemies of varying difficulties to plough though.

• Rapidly draining, rapidly regenerating stamina bar. Button mash and you get exhausted and leave yourself vulnerable, but pull out for even a few seconds and you can regain enough stamina to keep going. This further emphasises picking your spots well, planning your attacks, and backing up or dodging when things get rough.

• High stakes. Attacks are extremely damaging relative to health, which means if you screw up it WILL hurt. But unfortunately death doesn’t exactly have that much punishment to it really you just spawn back at the last save point and most of the time you don’t even have to defeat the enemies again.

• 3rd person view, with well defined hitboxes, so that different weapon ranges are important. This makes awareness of the battlefield, how close you are to your enemy and how rapidly you or they can close the distance, very important. 

Man did you feel that?

So for any fans of the genre I would heartily recommend it, but unfortunately even playing with friends it’s just not for me that’s all I can say.

JD

Now I know for the future

Hustlin' through the Old Republic: Update 1.3, up to level 40 and down with the Sith style

You heard it from me last folks, update 1.3 “Allies” is indeed here, bringing with it the much needed “Group finder” to us and I must say from the small amount of time I’ve used it, it’s worked quite well. Also the legacy system with its new character and legacy “perks” that are basically rewards for use with your main or lower characters for having achieved certain milestones, which could be very useful indeed, especially the ones that change levelling xp and speeder access. Apart from that there was the usual small things like class changes, adaptive social gear and some changes to crew skills which bring in the new option to add augment slots to items. Augmentation is basically a sort of different version of the ‘enchanting’ or ‘jewelcrafting’ used in other games you have an augment slot and you can put different augments in the slot in there to better the item. This is similar to modifications though modifications change the base stats of orange modifiable items while augments add to all other items. Though since they just introduced it I don’t have any augments and I never did anyway their apparently obtained through slicing so I’ve never gotten any and never seen them apart from the freakishly expensive high level ones on the trade network.

The Group finder, makes things much easier, especially with a declining population.

Well where was I when we left off?, oh yes quite happily wearing my hood with my headband thingy and then for some reason I could not, and now I can again it looks like except that on my Sith Inquisitor. What I’m babbling about is that you may have heard me mention before that while I was questing on Nar Shadaa I for some reason could no longer wear both my helm and my hood on at the same time this annoyed me cause I liked that look, the other reason is I’d rather have my hood on when wearing those thing as they look pretty silly when you don’t, their some sort of dorky looking headband/tiara thing. But I suppose now I'm wearing some kind of star wars version of shades yes shades or goggles, the game calls them "Rampage Assault Headgear" which makes them sound infinitely cooler than they actually are and absolutely ridiculous for what they actually look like. What's also interesting is when I look them up on ToRHead they actually look completely different, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

Don't mess with the "'Rampage Assault" shades yo

So anyway I was level 31 and was one Tatooine indeed yes, so how do I sum up what’s happened?, well after finishing Tatooine and saving Kira’s master Bela Kiwiik from that big vibrating thingo then heading to Alderaan to do all the quests there and there’s some kind of family wars going on there and I have to save my master whats-his-name from the ridiculous death mark machine seriously whoever came up with that idea needed to think it through more. During Alderaan I found one of the coolest methods of transport ever, in remote places Alderaan has these things called Thranta’s which a big flying Manta-ray like creatures  which look awesome and make cool sounds, Alderaan is definitely one of the best looking planets I’ve seen along with Dromund Kass but I’ll get into that later.

 
The very Majestic Thranta through a whole new wyurld.

After Alderaan there’s fairly big Jedi Knight plot section which I won’t go into in order not to spoil the story as of course this is apparently the end of act 1 of you storyline (yes there are different acts) but I will say that after what happens now it goes pretty full scale and gets kind of boring, though I suppose there’s going to be more than two acts as the game goes on. The story on Balmorra is reasonable I suppose, the sort of struggling resistance (Balmorrans) resentfully accepting help from a major power (Republic) in order to fight off their oppressors (Empire), but it’s a rather dull mucky toxic waste ridden planet plagued by insect-like aliens.

Balmorra, not exactly the most serene place to visit

After the first act I sort of feel like I’m starting again except I’m higher level and the storyline seems more boring now. The stories on each planet don’t seem to be too engaging but what can you do? It’s something else to occupy yourself with while you’re doing your main quest.

One a better note though I got a new hoverbike, the Gurian Hammer to be precise which looks pretty awesome sort of like riding a jet engine with my cape flowing behind. I was glad I moved away from the Ubrikkian style of hoverbike as I was going to use them for the whole game, though to be honest despite their cost the vehicle don’t really go much faster than each other, the first one at level 20 goes 90% faster than running yes running not sprinting and then it’s 100% then 110% so really not that much of a dramatic change each time.

Yeehaw!

This isn't me but this guy probably does a better job at explaining it

Probably almost to the end of Balmorra for some reason I decided to create an Empire alt, yes I know I’m only 40 on my Jedi Knight and yes I know I’m making an alt before I even get to 50 on one character but I was eager to try out the Sith side. I went a Sith Inquisitor which is the Sith equivalent of the Jedi Consular, with the advanced class I chose to go Sith Assassin, the shadowy double-bladed-lightsabre wielding ninja style Sith (similar to the Jedi Shadow) as I wanted to be a Jedi Consular Sage and throw around force waves and telekinetic abilities rather than force Lightning as the Sith Sorcerer does. I also picked Sith pureblood as I didn’t really want to make another human and didn’t really fancy any of the other races, plus the Sith purebloods look pretty cool though they have this “punish companion” social ability in which you give your companion a pretty intense smack in the face which is kind of sad if you ask me.

I have been told by reliable sources that this thing on my Sith Inquisitor's head is indeed a "circlet" which is at least more manly then 'tiara'

That explains why I went the Sith Inquisitor class but the other reason I wanted to make a Sith alt was that I wanted to be a “Good” Sith so to speak I wanted to see what it was like when you chose the good options even though you’re technically supposed to be evil aren’t you? I was finding it fun at the start on Korriban picking all the “good” and “Light Side” options that a Sith wouldn’t usually pick and feeling good. Starting out was great, you start facing a gruff traditionalist Overseer who does not hesitate to show their dissatisfaction that you have risen from slavery to achieve entry to the Sith order, pitting you and you fellow hopefuls against each other with one being particularly powerful. The whole storyline was pretty fun and somewhat challenging especially the quest to seek out Khem Val who will be your first companion, he is a huge monstrous Dashade who has reluctantly agreed to serve me since his former master had died long ago.

You lookin at me, puny Sith?

Unfortunately once I had Khem Val with me I noticed that I was going to have to change around my “nicey” responses. I should explain that to gain “affection” (heh) with your companion you can both give them gifts and interact with NPC’s during missions the way they prefer, for example some companions may frown upon killing innocents while other companions may approve as to them you are disposing of the weak and useless. I soon found that Khem Val’s likes and dislikes weren’t exactly in sync with my “friendly and compassionate Sith” character I had going for example he likes making foolish people unhappy, of which I really don’t do I tend to take pity on them and dislikes: Weakness in any form and not killing Force users, so technically most of the responses I would usually take would mean I would lose rapport with him (-1, 15 or even 30  affection for example), so I am forced to be a mean and somewhat cocky bastard most of the time and I’m constantly losing affection points for him because I always choose the light side options, cause I’m a good guy, you know? even if I am Sith. This will change though once I get the next companion Ashara Zavros on Taris who by the looks of her likes/dislikes will be much easier to please, plus she’s a DPS character with strength+endurance as primary stats so should be a-ok to quest with, speaking of which, who doesn’t have endurance listed as their primary stat? seems like every class does. I suppose I'll at least have to try being bad with another character.

He probably does too (note: you can change his skin colour with appearance modifications)

Also I (or I got my companion to rather) started doing the Crafting skill Artifice (Artification, Artificing however you say it) which is the creation of Jedi and Sith artifacts which include things like lightsabre and armor upgrades and new shields, offhand items and colour crystals. It was during this time that I found that you could send mail and resources between the two allegiances. So for example I could use my Republic side characters to aid my Empire alts with items and crafting skills and vice-versa. This was one of the biggest if not the biggest difference from WoW that SWTOR has, it seems now that I no longer have the problem of having one crafting skill but not the other on either side, could you imagine this in WoW? I’d be going crazy organising resources. Though this leads to a different issue which I swear I don’t know what I’m going to do about because without an Altoholic style mod for the game, I might even go crazier trying to work out what each friggin character has , I don’t know it’s just going to be difficult unless Bioware miraculously allow modding and someone makes an Altoholic clone for SWTOR in enough time but I doubt it. I’ve been ok so far recently I had to take screenshots of every piece of armor me and my companion had in order for me to view on my Jedi Knight and make appropriate armor replacements and managed to juggle the resources fine, so it’s works relatively ok for now.

The Artification screen

So anyway I’ve now finished the Imperial home planet of Dromund Kass  and had quite a good time upgrading all my gear using my commendations,it turns out that the stuff is still better then what I make unless I happen to be lucky enough to be able to make a blue item. My main storyline there ended with me obtaining yet another artifact and having a pleasant conversation with a ghost of a Sith Lord who said we were related at some point, I really don’t know what all of that meant but having the artifact meant a lot to my master Darth Zash. She gave me my own starship and instructed me to go to either Balmorra or Nar Shadaa to get more artifacts for this Sith thingemajigg, honestly I don’t really pay much attention to names anymore as there’s areas of the many storylines in SWTOR that are pretty much just “something, something Sith artifact/lord…” I guess I’m just going to do the same thing and do both planets even if I’m too low for them and I end up getting grey quests, I suppose I could skip the bonus serious but I wouldn’t want to do that unless I’d already done it for a planet before.  My first instance of space combat on this character was fine, compared to the first time. I’m getting more comfortable now as I actually worked out that in order to complete the escort missions easily you just shot whatever was shooting the transport ship with no regard for your own safety as you don’t need to cause there’s no-one shooting you.

I like this picture of me looking at the Holocron at the top of the hill on Dromund kass

Inside the Sith Temple on Dromund Kass

Once I got my Inquisitor to level 20 I decided I’d stop there as the next planet I was up to is Balmorra and that was the same one I was currently playing on my Jedi Knight, funnily enough when I stopped my Jedi I’d just done a large group quest in Sobrik, the Imperial HQ of Balmorra. I then found out that it’s the same place where you start out as an Imperial, on a kind of lower level too so in theory there would have been Empire players around. That’s if there were enough players around at all, SWTOR has unfortunately been losing population ever since its release and only with the brilliant initiative by Bioware to allow newcomers to play for free up to level 15 that the servers have come back up to healthy level again though as you can see this hasn’t had the same effect with Asia-Pacific but the servers do remain at a standard level playerbase remains. I do admit I sometimes find it hard to find groups of people to do heroic-level missions with that require 4 people, but usually there is enough people around to help and the new group finder makes doing flashpoints less of a hassle for finding the right classes.

The US server stats have been in a steady decline since the release but have shot back up to record numbers due to the new free to play up to 15 feature.

The Asia/Pacific servers haven't got that particular feature yet but are sill going steady, mainly do to the fact that there is only 3 of them while the US has about 40

I’m now back on my guardian and kicking ass, I need to finish Balmorra and get on to the next part of the story though I’ve got to take the supplies to Kira’s people on Nar Shadaa first, I must admit I’m a bit too friendly towards other players often helping them and not getting my own stuff done, oh well there’s always next time to let them down heh.

I’ve been unable to hold back the urge and have started playing Skyrim again, this time as a Thief so basically I’m immersed again and can’t really stop I’ve got to at least to try and play a bit of SWTOR for the remainder of the pay period as the end of this month heralds a new Minecraft patch.

Till next planet or universe…

JD


 I don't want to be bad, yet