Minecraft Adventures: The return to Ozgamerparty, construction, devastation and petty shenanigans continue in the shadow of Patch 1.3

I felt it was that time again to give SWTOR a rest and get back into an alternate online world full of blocks and byoing kazowie it has been reasonably fun. So ventured back on to Ozgamerparty once again and when I’d found out that apparently the VIPA claim had been made public and all of my resources that I had left there had gone to Lupi , I decided that I pretty much had to shack up with my old friend Lupidoo again in his cozy little new claim of Pandaland which was smack bang in the middle of quite a large forest biome, I’m not sure why, I guess he just likes his privacy.

Pandaland in it's original state, with my Birch house there of course

Pandaland is pretty small, just a cobble walled off area in the middle of a forest to the northeast of spawn, Lupidoo seemed to have built an indoor farm, a resource room, an enchanting table and an empty wooden house which I thought was supposed to be his house but I found the only place which had a bed was simple square box with coloured wool around oh well I guess some people are minimalistic. I found that monsters still spawned inside the area so I added a few more torches but they always seem to be there, I know that spiders can climb over the wall but there’s still skeletons and zombies around, what am I supposed to do? put a torch every 3 blocks? ah well.

Lupi's Bedrom, simple but functional, and also striking

Being in a  forest biome gave me an idea, forest biomes have lots of birch trees. And I’d never used birch as a building material before, so I thought, what the hey-ho and made quite a nice looking place, fairly basic, square two story, (I’ve made a larger Minecraft creations post about it) and I did the same sort of room that I did with my Tree Mansion with an actual birch tree at the top so it turned out to be the biggest and tallest building in the claim.

Wide-angle shot of Pandaland

Some notable events that have happened since, I visited Atomic_Sandwich and his friend deadman1’s claim of New Venezia, which they have built in the sky, which seems all the rage now that the building height limit has been raised significantly, there’s also the town of Darkserif which has its platforms in the sky, which look pretty cool I might add, though recently something has happened to it, something to do with lava I bet with the cobble mountain, but anyway.

New Venezia Dynamap view

From the ground

The lower part of DarkSerif by night

Wide shot of Darkserif (on the right) and Sandy, not sure of the whole story of how that cobble mountain got to be there, and it looks like sandy has some kind of lava waterfall thing going on

I logged on one night to find Atomic and deadman1 giving the BOSSES faction the ol’ lava treatment as they were unhappy about where they had set up their base which was obviously too close and BOSSES had apparently just told them to “bring it”. Pouring Lava then garnishing with water seems to be the way to go these days as it makes a healthy dose of destruction and cobble strewn everywhere.

To destroy almost any enemy faction HQ, first add lava...

Then water to leave a healthy dose of cobble

After that Atomic wanted to make some kind of library for NewVenezia, so I offered my reed farm for him to use, which he demolished in about 10 seconds and then said we should set up another one, which we did under the ground near Pandaland.

You can't see the rest of it, but I can assure you it was one big reed farm, sometimes with monsters

It was around this time that deadman decided to set fire to the surrounding forest and made quite a bald patch as you can see below, Atomic wasn’t happy about this but I really don’t see banning people as a problem solver, I’d actually think a more suitable punishment would be to make him re-plant the forest (with the saplings provided by admins of course) though I really have no idea. This is the reason why I don’t make anything I really want to keep forever in multiplayer, course I myself was trying to make a fireplace in my house made of birch which didn’t go too well and I had to rebuild most of my roof.

Our forest of peace! noooo!

That's one unlucky pig up there, don't worry I shot it out of it's misery

Destruction!

Oh really?

If that ain't proof I dunno what is

Area around Pandaland in the aftermath

I returned a couple of times to get some more screenshots and found that the forest appeared to still be on fire and a greater area and been consumed by the flames, but apart from weeping inconsolably about how this reflects on the sorrow and devastation of real-life bushfires similar to the Corrupted Blood incident in WoW and not to mention natural Panda habitat, I really couldn’t care, especially since this world is probably going to be hit by the reset hammer once 1.3 arrives in August.

Dynamap view after the first fire

After I got back the second time

And speaking of 1.3 it seems to have a fairly large amount of changes coming with some catching my eye more than others

·         Removed the downwards knockback while drowning.
     Can you remember how many times you were diving for clay then started to lose health due to no breath but could not return to the surface fast enough as you were being knocked back down?

·         Cocoa plants

Finally theres an easy way to get Cocoa beans

·         Sandstone Stairs and new slabs and stairs that correspond to the appropriate wood colour types.

Finally, though can’t they just make all the wood items be the right colour as well?

·         Empty buckets and signs are now stackable up to 16

Also finally, now if only doors would too

·         Jungle Temples

Yay Jungle temple , now we don’t just go there to get that golden head and run away from that rolling rock, we take as well all the chiseled stone bricks we can find. I'm actually quite surprised that the entirety of the temple isn't made out of this stuff, I spose if it was, Jungle Temples would be hunted down and demolished on every survival multiplayer server.

Also I finally got round to actually taming a wolf as you can see below which was quite fun, and I can definitely say their much better than cats, more obedient at least.

I call him Blueberry

So just a small update for now. I’ll keep these things in mind for the coming month and wait with anticipation, lately there's been talk of a world reset, a few are for it and a few are against it but in the end it's NoRC's call. For now it’s back to Diablo throi and SWTOR for me.

JD

Home base of the "Kirby" faction, ahh gotta give em credit

But where will all the Pandas go?

Minecraft Adventures: Mikeland Factions Spawn, another winner

Hello again just a quick post on the newest design of the Mikeland Factions spawn.For whatever reason you didn't know Mikeland Factions is a Minecraft server I visit from time to time, sometimes to play other times to just have a look at what's been made, most prominently the spawn area which is remade from time to time after certain patches, similar to other SMP servers.

The first time I featured one of their spawn areas it was a giant roman/medieval coliseum style walls and architecture with a bit of Chinese thrown in. This time they've done the "simple large structure" design and made one hell of a neat looking tree.It reminds me of our attempt to make something similar and I think we did a pretty good job. This of course is rather a pro job as they have obviously made the tree to look like an actual tree not a Minecraft tree and it seems to work quite well.

These were taken with the basic Minecraft texture pack.

Here's a couple of shots with my LB Photorealism texture pack

I took some shots of the area around the base and found some interesting sights apparently now there's someway to put play models in the world that move by themselves, it's really weird, kind of like a Herobrine thing.. There were models of Notch and Mike Sheen himself too, and no I don't know what that guy in the cage had done or why you should not let him out.

This is the gate to the Nether, work in progress apparently

 I really should have taken some pics of the previous ones though they may not have been that spectacular. I didn't get around to playing on the server again as I just couldn't talk smooth enough to get into a faction this time, I think it just gets harder each time I come back, and I really wouldn't blame people. The amount of  betraying and backstabbing that goes on is horrendous, especially on servers where PvP is allowed.You sort of need to play for a bit by yourself then with others until they trust you enough to take you in and I really couldn't be bothered doing that again not when I have my so awesome "unmodded" singleplayer experience..

JD

Minecraft Adventures: Ozgamerparty and the Tribalfield reunion

Some say that if people have lost interest in something they enjoyed it doesn’t take much to get them interested again, you just basically have to show them. It’s like the way you see someone playing this old game that you used to play and having heaps of fun, it makes you want to go home and play it too, or it could just be the lure of a fresh start in a new playing field from an old friend, in our case the old friend was Norc, the new playing field was Ozgamerparty and the fresh start was (yet another) brand new map.

In the aftermath of the last big tirade on the server we all just basically left ourselves to our own devices. I did stuff, some of it Minecraft stuff though I always did want to go back, and after hearing that our previous Lord and Master NoRC had announced his new gaming community Ozgamerparty complete with fully loaded Minecraft server was all it took for us to jump at the chance I was only a month into playing SWTOR before I stopped to start building again, and build we did. Most people from the old tribalfield were back on, factions were back, pretty much nothing had changed apart from the changes to Minecraft itself,a nd there had been a lot which I went into detail with in my last minecrafty post. I went in wanting to be part of a faction community and help build stuff that it needed and that’s exactly what I did.

An early shot of the Inquisition village

Another shot (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

I logged on and did everything I needed to on the forums and pretty soon I was back with my usual partners in crime, Kieran_Cahill and WarpageHD and before long we had built a nice gazebo for the centre of our claim. I of course started doing what I usually do when I see a whole lot of chests filled with random crap, yes I go and organize the shit out of it,  before long I had dug out an area underneath the gazebo and laid out chests and signs to organize the resources as well as some workbenches and torches cause you need that stuff don’t you. We then started to set up farms and houses and I created a mushrooms farm (which sort of worked) and after being harangued by monsters we decided to make a fence and doors around the Gazebo.  We christened the town "Inquisition" I also suggested that our faction be named TCF (The Chosen Few)  we also even had a secret base going in the desert.

TCF storage room

Alchemy Room

Around this time Angrathar and Lupidoo briefly joined our faction as Joro and Norc were still working out the faction system they had to reset all claims and you could probably guess what happened after that featuring what I remember a raiding party consisting of Mr_Cyanide, Mr_Azurite and Peanut who successfully managed to claim over our entire base and storage area and raid the chests. Once we alerted Joro and Norc about this certain thing started happening, namely TNT started falling from the sky, then the server getting appropriately reset, Most of which I have included in the video below. Most of them ended up leaving anyway with us taken the opportunity to raid Cyanide's lair.

Yerp that's TNT

A video of the TNT raining chaos that ended the debacle plus a few strong words from NorC

Nuff' said

After all that was taken care of soon we had created a pretty neat looking storage room with a carpet/wood floor brick walls and wooden roof, which included an enchanting table with sticky piston powered bookshelves, furnace wall and an alchemy room. We constructed stone paths around the town area and I decided to start making my Jungle TreeHouse which was made out of jungle logs and leaves, I soon found that jungle trees were the fastest way of getting wood, as they are very tall, 4 blocks thick and are surrounded by vines which you can use to climb to the top. You can actually still see a bald patch in the nearby jungle where I went crazy with the shears. I had a lot of fun making the brown carpet for my room as I had to raid about 7 or 8 dungeons before I had enough cocoa beans to make enough brown dye. Of course this was before I was told that you could dye a living sheeps wool and then get them to breed so instead of going around raiding so many freakin dungeons I could have just dyed two sheep brown then got them to breed and they would have made a brown lamb and I could have just done that over and over again in our sheep pen, remind me to do that too when I run out of lapis lzuli.

Later image of Inquisition

Pretty soon we had the arrival of the infamous Jason1211 who we included in our faction being the friendly people we are, he then basically did a whole bunch of crap including somehow getting items from creative mode and moving them into Survival making a new claim within our claim and making this gigantic pillar shaped base in the sky to store his mass amount of goodies. Some time after this resulted in Norc warping us up to the complex and giving us superpowers so we could burn the items and demolish the whole thing making one hell of an interesting waterfall. And thus ended the terror of Jason, he basically said that everything he makes just gets destroyed and he’s leaving for good. In some ways I think we miss him as annoying sometimes as he was he was most often entertaining. I mean I don’t pvp myself but even Warpage, Kieran and Cyanide’s little skirmishes together had a certain charm to it as long as there’s no base defecation involved.

Jason's Tower exterior on the OZgamerparty real-time map

Me and Kakashi inside the tower

oops, must have been water underneath there

Here's a video of us riding the waterfall all the way down after we've destroyed pretty much all the tower. Music is: Ohio Players - Love Rollercoaster and Barrington Levi - Here I Come (yes it is a kind of odd selection)

Below are some photos and video of the event created by Joro, it was basically just us armed with whatever we were given fighting off hordes of spawned zombies and giants, not to mention all the monsters that had spawned there already, pretty soon we had bows and arrows and we’re taking on a group of Ghasts which got quite intense indeed. The finale was a battle with a spawned Nether Dragon who we noticed actually destroyed things where it flew as it demolished half the Jungle before we eventually killed it.

The dudes!

Giants!

Ghasts!

Enderdragon! (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

Here's a video of the encounter

Amongst the other things which got built were Warpage’s “Creeper Head” house complete with a sticky piston powered collapsing mouth entrance and also Lupidoo had built a house, which was full of traps as he was trap crazy for awhile, I couldn’t walk anywhere without running into (or onto) a working or not working supposed trap of his, I thought he was supposed to be a Panda who lived in the Jungle? Anyway he also made us a faction flag which I swear is already the flag for some country.

For TCF!

Me and Lupi experimenting with some Redstone work, song is 'Internet Friends' by Knife Party

In regards to what was happening around us, Mystic Duck’s town of DPRS was in fairly full form to the east of us in which we created a large underground railway to connect the two towns in which Lupidoo and I dug out the stairway and I made the station on the top but apart from that we were fairly oblivious to others around us apart from random people who pop out of our nether portal cause of some flaw with nether portals that pushes you out the nearest one in the overworld. Other things that happened included Keiran created a pretty huge office building which I decided I’ve be responsible for decorating two floors of, and I reckon it turned out pretty well, one floor was the reception, the other was a club I called “The Creeper Club” (yes I’ll admit I didn’t put too much thought into the name) I got most of my design from the Minecraft Furniture site and server which is a great resource in which I found designs for things including, couches, pool tables, a piano and of course the bar design.

The Democratic Republic of Sandwich

The Lobby

The 'Creeper Club'

The bottom two levels of the building

Round about this time Bioware had announced that there would be a free week of SWTOR available for returning players, and since I had cancelled my account for Minecraftin  purposes this was the ideal time to play. I came back a couple of times to find that not much had happened apart from Kieran making one freakin huge express railway which went all the way to our not so secret base in the desert (well one of the deserts) I had been away for a while but decided to come back at one point, and the whole faction base seemed fine, then the next night I come back in and everything Is royally f’ed up griefed looted and whatnot.

Inquisition after the reckoning, it's been pretty much cleaned out now though the larger buildings are still standing

Kieran's Minecraft Interstate (photo by Kieran_Cahill)

Now I’m beyond caring about this kind of stuff bit it is a bit of a shame, I don’t really know what I’d rather, for them too not touch anything at all except loot the chests or for them to grief everything we’ve made and leave our stuff. Well life goes on I suppose I’ve recently taken up with Lupidoo and his VIPA Theme park making faction which quite fun as they had a maze, an obstacle course and a rollercoaster going. But due to the arrival of the third installment of Diablo we’ve got other things on our minds now not to mention I just can't get away from SWTOR.

Lupidoo's VIPA Amusement Park

It’s a lot of fun to play and build with people but it is hard if for example you’re like me and don’t appreciate raiding and griefing, I’m just wondering why I bother making anything significant in multiplayer at all, sometimes I do think of going on Fusionblox again, as I’ve been back there numerous times in order to fix connection issues and have found that my tree mansion was pretty much intact and untouched for about a month before the survival map got reset in order to makes use of the new updated features. I’ve never really thought of us as a raiding/griefing server but I guess we are, it just strikes me as odd how claimed land can still get affected but I’m not going to get into all that.

I am thinking to myself of actually doing an experiment where I create a new singleplayer map and just play the game, and play it without mods like singleplayercommands and toomanyitems especially since Minecraft now has an ending (well sortof) . I probably felt this way the most after watching the gameplay for the XBOX360 Edition of Minecraft which I noticed features such as in game tutorials inc helpful windows that come up telling you about the particular item you have selected.

Minecraft Xbox Gameplay Review by BobLob

The PC version could really do with this too, as whenever I play multiplayer now it seems that some people are just pro at it and are either pooping out diamonds already or have built a giant redstone powered base that can give you any item you can  think of, I reckon it’s best when you start off with nothing, but of course you always get to the point where you have a good base and a stable food and resource income, so what next?

I will get round to doing that sooner or later, singleplayer in itself is a sanctuary for friendly builders and creators like me who just happen to like doing it in survival mode and I always like going back to basics. I’ll be on the Ozgamerparty server for the time being, though I’d hate to say it but Minecraft after all this time seems to have run it’s end for me, it’s this harrowing experience when you could do anything but end up just jumping around and exploring which is fun I guess but needs more meaning, and that’s always been the problem of Minecraft, the tutorials and information from the xbox version would help but I guess you just have to create your own fun in the end. But the Minecraft adventures don’t end there of course.

JD

I'd rather be lonely than live in fear