Minecraft Adventures: The full release and subsequent patches, plus some server hopping

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).

If I went through all the changes that have been applied I’d be here forever but I can tell you there has been a lot of them, The 1.0 release of Minecraft did introduce a number of things which I have yet to experience fully namely Enchanting and Brewing, both of which use their own table/stand. I’ve briefly looked into these two and realized that though brewing is simple enough with the instructions on Minecraftwiki, Enchanting actually uses your experience levels. And we all should know that when you die, you drop half your experience orbs so keeping this experience up high is kind of a difficult task (especially in multiplayer). I must admit also that the new types of wood colours has made me actually think now about what kind of wood I’m going to be chopping down,  “Hmmm is it going to match the rest of the décor? clashing colours and all that” honestly it gets harder and harder for me to design my houses and structures every patch with all this newfangled content, now I also have to create extra rooms for enchanting and brewing, though the enchanting can go into my ever present “libraries” and who am I to complain about new content I suppose.

A working Enchanting table, the more bookshelves the higher exprience cost the spells

I have recently also been looking into breeding animals which 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 animals wheat and 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 your flint & 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 functional NPC Villiages which are now filled with NPC Villagers I 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 when biomes 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:

My good friend Atomic’s MTM Clan server

Fusionblox

Mikeland Factions (yes again)

My good friend Aday’s private server

My good friend Laver’s new public server

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.

I’ll just leave it at that. Happy Minecraftin’

JD

nature just got more complicated

Minecraft Adventures: Mikeland Factions spawn area re-visited

Just a quick post here regarding the Mikeland Factions server

As some of you may have read from my previous post I wrote about my adventures of the Mikeland Factions minecraft server, but forgot to get photos of the magnificent spawn before it was destroyed due to the unexpected loss of the modifications on the server thus rendering the spawn area unprotected (and those of you who do play Minecraft will know all too well what that means)

Well fortunately the server and the spawn area has been made anew (not sure whether that was the official post though)

So here we are, some shots of the best spawn area I have seen in any Minecraft server as yet

Spawn area on top of the tower with a water fall-stopper down

The spawn tower with cages for naughty players

View of middle courtyard from spawn

The world portals and a pvp arena

Alternate pvp arena

Shop district

Shop district (unfinished)

Admin shop

Admin shop

The playable pvp arena

Awesome huh? too bad I probably won't be playing on Mikeland anytime soon with the rumored return of a new server from the one and only Norc of Neonetwise, and stay tuned for some Battlefield goodness

Signing out.

JD

I am a patron of the arts

Minecraft Adventures: The return to Mikeland, why? I will never know‏

I’d like to sidetrack a bit here before I launch into my gory details, firstly you might have already noticed that these shots were taken in a different texture pack to my usual Misa’s 64x64. Yes the new pack I’m using is LB Photorealism 256x256 yes 256x256 I’ve gone up quite a lot of pixels, I gotta say it looks quite amazing as you can see from the screenshots. When I first viewed this texture with a friend I wasn’t too impressed with the patchy heavily textured feel to it but that was only because we were flying high above the ground so after playing it for a while you just get used to it and it looks amazing when you’re on the ground. Sometimes though It’s hard to determine what’s what, especially in the case of stone, cobblestone and gravel at first glance, probably because everything is so realistic it looks pretty much the same but that’s a minor detail. 

LB PhotoRealism: not for the weak RAM'd

 Another minor detail for that matter is a few of the new object textures (such as melon vines) aren’t quite finished yet but will be. They have finished the Endermen though which is kind of weird now I think about it cause what does a realistic Enderman skin? Compared to Misa’s it does look a bit better obviously with it being 256x256 though I did notice that some of the armor and sword textures weren’t so good or creative (i.e Misa’s swords got prettier and the wooden one was shaped like a club) and also all the mob textures were taken from Misa’s as well. Anyway so that’s the one I’ll be using for awhile at least, I don’t think you could get much better anyway unless there’s some kind of WoW themed one out there.

Also I just wanted to make a comment on my sort of lack of coverage of the Minecraft patches, this is mainly because I’d rather talk about my adventures and creations in Minecraft rather than the Minecraft development on the larger scale which can be found in many other reliable locations most of the time I just notice the new patch notes on the welcome screen when I login. I do refer to patches at times during my posts but usually it’s just a small announcement, patches don’t mean that much to me in the long run unless it’s something absolutely groundbreaking or experience changing for me, texture packs do though as per the paragraph above. By the way we’re currently on 1.8.1 and 1.9 and 1.10 are coming up soon I hear on the grapefruit.

Anyway, so on to my main topic:

As you’ve probably guessed in my questioning title I have briefly gone for another foray into the Mikeland Factions server, I did a short introduction to the Mikeland Survival server a while ago detailing the environment there and what I had built, my short previous run on the factions server roughly came out the same way as the last one did so here an introduction to life on the server.You login and are immediately presented with a spawn area of incredible size and grandeur, it had pretty much everything, giant walls, high towers, elegant gardens, farms, pvp battle arenas, stores, giant monuments, most of which were only there for show, but it’s a grand sight indeed, much better than the last spawn they had and I was quite annoyed to find I had not taken any screenshots of it where I thought I did, apart from the ones at the end of the post. A long walk to the outer gates then a short walk enters the war zone a zone which is pretty much rife with faction pvp where no land claims can be made, a short walk further out leads to the mainland, where most of the clans have laid their claim (har!) You are then presented with a difficult situation.

Factions!

In order protect your chests and items and buildings in Mikeland factions you need to make a land claim and to do that you surprise, surprise need a faction, the times of the LWC mod are gone as I had earlier detailed that there was an epidemic of people making houses out of furnaces etc, which were also protected. The strength of the land claim depends on how many members and claims a faction has, for example if faction A has 4 members and one claim and gets attacked by faction B with 8 members, if faction B manages to kill all of the faction A players it can claim over their land because they have the greater number of members. At least that’s what I could work out for the short time I was on there, it’s a very cutthroat kind of culture that makes you feel unsafe pretty much everywhere you go and making you take precautions such as living underground, hiding your chests and being wary whenever you’re on the surface.

So here's my story, and I do apologise for the lack of screenies, I'm not exactly the best photojournalist

When I first logged in the spawn area was nice and safe and very grand looking but once I left it’s protective haven I had to first traverse through the‘war’ zone filled with people warrin’ it up and just hoped I didn’t attract any attention, but of course then I got to the‘wilderness and had to make a choice about who I was going to join. This is a very delicate situation as I had to contact someone who is already in a faction and just hope I spoke nice enough that they will allow me in. But to be honest I could be anyone, they don’t know me, I’ve just recently arrived on the server and now they’re going to accept some random person into their secret hideout and I automatically have access to all the shared resources, trust is a crucial matter unless you personally know the player.

Eventually I did get accepted firstly with a small faction called ‘Genesis’(previously Exodus) who had just taken over an enemy base, this of course didn’t last for long until we were attacked by another faction and had to retreat to an underground base where I took it upon myself to organize all of the faction’s resources, I liked doing this, along with building farms and expanding the base I was much more of a builder and resource organizer and collector then a PvPer which gave me a lot of rapport from fellow faction members. I had just finished a small but high wall around the entrance to our underground lair when I logged out and logged back in to find things in a bit of disarray, this happened a few times actually I seemed to keep missing the moment when the shit hits the fan and always come bumbling back in oblivious to what’s happened until I see the previous signs of carnage around me and take an educated guess, I then do a quick warp to the faction home and find a completely new “fallback” base. I always liked the idea of fallback bases, basically in case you got raided by another faction, you set your own personal /home teleport to the fallback base where there was a backup supply of food, tools, weapons and other resources ahh just like in a real war.

Quite an interesting place to set up camp, in the shadow of another factions lava-walled fortress

Especially in the night...

I believe my poor timing was due to the fact of me being a bit older than most of the playerbase on the server, this has been common in my Minecraft servers and communities especially Tribalfield where apart from the server owner and his friends I was probably the oldest by about 10 years and at one point I was in a partnership with someone who was 13 years my junior, but it’s a game it doesn’t make much difference although most older players do try to avoid collaborating with much younger players, this is especially true with WoW, as most of the playerbase is over 25. Saying that I don’t mind playing with younger players as long as they are not complete assheads i.e. talk shit in chat, grief others creations or go around killing (the latter two apart from servers which allow it). But because I am working at full time and they are all school students, I sometimes don’t get on till about 8 or 9:00 where about %80 of the MC playerbase gets on a lot earlier in the afternoon so most of the stuff during the week goes down then.

So anyway it obviously looked like our base had been raided and I checked the faction had been disbanded so I set off in search of another faction, where I came across ‘Vrykul’ (previously Whicolony) if you do happen to be a WoW player you’d know that the Vrykul were an enemy race in the “Wrath of the Lich King” expansion. So I gained their trust by organizing the base properly inc the layout, the resources, I also created a huge underground farm (which my brother claimed looked like a underground drug farm, and I kind of agree) which is a more prominent feature in your usual town or collaboration, underground or otherwise since the introduction of hunger in 1.8 All this took quite a while as when your underground you have to cut out the space yourself which is a lengthy process.

The farm grows..

and grows...

and grows!

The Vrykul resource room, I like being organised

The Meeting Room

So anyway this went well I even had made my own room and was even given the illustrious‘Head builder’ title. Then of course the inevitable happened and our underground base was raided (which I only logged in to see the aftermath of) luckily we had also created a ‘fallback base’ as I had mentioned earlier, this one was in the desert and had a wall and all the amenities needed for a retreat so I went through my room (and a lot of others) and grabbed anything of value even tearing up the wooden floor and ported to the new base. I had only created my temporary dwelling aptly named the“dirty den” outside the main base and hidden my resources when I logged back in after a day or two and yet again found the base in ruins , just previously I had hastily demolished huge sand and stone towers where I was told players were using to try and jump over the wall in our claim which was a bad omen. I wasn’t sure whether our faction was still together, I didn’t bother checking, I noticed my den was demolished and all my items taken, I also remember thinking that hiding your chest under one block of obviously placed wooden floor wasn’t exactly a good idea.

My Room in the Vrykul Faction lair

The Vrykul Fallback Base

My hastily made abode

After that things went from bad to worse, I didn’t really have any intention of starting over again though when I happened to log back in this time I was back at the spawn area which had been almost utterly demolished (I think I was beginning to get a knack for this) I wondered who the hell could cause this type of destruction but this post on the Mikeland forums soon explained a lot , so it turned out that all the faction and land claim data was lost, including the spawn area protection, so basically anyone could tear apart every facet of the spawn area, and boy would it have been quite a haul, I saw quite a few untouched diamond blocks on my brief survey of the wreckage. So that was that, Mikeland factions is factions no more at least for awhile, and with a server message like this I don’t think it will be given any love any time soon. And that was my second time on the Mikeland factions server and frankly it ended a bit more spectacularly then the last, and I digress if the whole server has not gone halfway kaput then it was just going to be joining faction after faction as each one gets destroyed .

The ruined spawn area

The server message reads: "Attention! as a change of pace, the management has decided to remove all faction-based commands and features, and doesn't care about the server anymore, have a nice day!" :S

So I didn’t have much of a run on factions but I would like to say thanks to a few people who made my time there all the more fun:

From Exodus there was only B1SH0 that I knew fairly well who also managed to revive the ‘Genesis’ faction for awhile, and from Vrykul I’d like to thank: Skyguy2424, Dekanmai and xiaphexxi

Epilogue: Afterwards I took up residence on the original Mikeland survival server with my good friend WarpageHD and his friend ConcreteBanana who have quite set up indeed at their underground lair at almost bedrock level (which was the norm) it features a network of tunnels and quite a big mob spawner farm with an automatic drop shaft where they could be picked up, I wasn’t allowed to live in their secret underground base so I found a small pond on the surface and decided to make it into a house, with glass as the roof two blocks under the water, where I could possibly extend to other patches of water or even the outright ocean via underground tunneling. But I may have to leave this development for later due to other recent developments.

So in conclusion as I might have said before the Mikeland former factions survival server and the original survivor server are both fun and scary places, Warpage and I have met the main man Mike (on Teamspeak) at one point and I do congratulate him for managing not 1 but 3 servers (including 1 creative) even if one has partially lost a lot of its data and mods. These servers are not places for the semi survival/creative hybrid style that we used to play on Tribalfield as both griefing and raiding are allowed here which gives quite a dangerous, exciting and edgy feel when you know you could lose everything in a space of 5 minutes, but that’s half the fun. 

You’ve been warned.

JD

It can get as bad as it can but at least here it can’t get worse.