On Saturday morning I bought and installed Minecraft, mainly to see what all the fuss was about.
I finished about 11pm...seriously dangerous game (and apparently there is another update up yesterday). The basic premise is that you are in a fully exploitable world formed of blocks, and initially need to build a shelter at night, to keep the nocturnal creatures away. You start with nothing, and you'll probably need a little bit of background reading to find your feet. I quickly attacked some trees, fashioned a workbench, and then a wooden pickaxe, before hacking out a small cave to live in, and a door to keep the beasts out... After that you'll start hunting some of the various ores, and before you know it you have a 4-storey castle (complete with crenellations, and in my case a glass-bottomed balcony, to allow me to check the door from safety), with a fully functioning mine complex in the basement. You'll start channelling rivers into your domain, and stream lava from nearby mountains.
I sort of forgot there were zombies outside for a few hours, and went about lighting my main storage areas with glass lava-filled pipes. I'm now on a hunt for volumes of iron, as I want to build a mine cart track between my main digging pit and the enormous tower I'm building with the residue. The zombies turn from a threat into a resource, as they drop various items that are of use (string, feathers, meat, and one particuarly nasty breed drops gunpowder).
So yeah, playing it is bad for you...it'll be worse once the developer (a single guy) gets multiplayer working properly, then a bunch of people could attack a world, and probably hollow it out. I did have an attempt at setting up a server, however the PC kept dying once someone connected for too long (might be the PC, it's the one I picked up off Fish, but with an old install of XP from ages ago...)
Comments
@EMW - Skylight, nice! Great idea. You must have started from the bottom and worked up! Did you find anything cool en route? I knew about the wood, I was more worried about losing the ore in a lag-bug-blip.
@Pete - I think we should wait to turn the monsters on because there a loads of multiplayer bug outstanding on those. Other people who have given it a try have had poor server stability.
Sitting at work thinking about mining out more of the cavern, like a sad, sad git I am.
Pete, can you upload a piccy of 'big cave'? Ash at work would like to have a butchers.
A thought - we might need to be a bit careful with our building because when we turn on survival mode, our complex needs to be safe. We don't want zombies spawning in our Big Cave.
I have an evening to burn, and just having lost a load of ore and my diamond pick in a lava flow, I am in the mood to try somewhere new.
Any chance of getting access?
GOD YEAH! Details coming on MSN now.
Big Cave (now with added tree!)
...and here is a map of the deep-level mine layout to date...
To get access;
1) install Hamachi LogMeIn
https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi2/download.aspx
(unmanaged mode)
2) Join the lack-of network (I'll PM you the details)
3) Join the Multiplayer server IP from the subtly named PC :-)
Great! Thanks for posting those, Pete. Having serious withdrawal symptoms now.
Hang on - is there a tree growing in a GLASS CAGE? LOL, who put that in? Classic!
Cracked on Saturday evening and purchased, suffice to say Sunday was entiely lost to MineCraft.
So far I have partially hollowed out a mountain and died to a skeleton, will probs check out the multi later tonight - someone will need to ping me the LO dets over steam.
Also being imminently redundant aside I have completed approximately nothing today since finding a stash of graph paper (I knew it would have a use one day).
Seem to be having trouble connecting to Hamachi, it says the network appears to be full :(
While still working on getting access to the server, I thought I would add a few pics of my current front garden; featuring such highlights, as the flaming nether portal, the levitating arena of DEATH (nothing has died there yet though) and few other fun things if you can spot them.
By night:
By day:
[edit ... sorry, increased size]
WAY more impressive than anything i've managed so far.
Yet to find enough iron for water/lava transportation, probs my own fault for attempting to pull down a mountain rather than dig downwards.
Also I appear to have spawned in a desert area as there is tons of sand around and barely any water, biodome imminent.
You must have already spotted my tree-growing habit...after all, there over 60 of the blighters on the top floor! We shall never be short of wood!
I had to expand the sun-light slightly, as I couldn't plant the tree dead centre due to bedrock.
I've just done a new deep-shaft on an island, and then put a vertical river in (behind glass) , and then built a funky bridge over to it. Very tasteful, I think...
Looking at the Hamachi group, there are a lot of duplicates, so perhaps they need to be removed? There is a limit of 16 clients per network...
Does someone have the admin to Hamachi? Is there such a thing?
Re: Hamachi - I don't think there is an admin thing but I will try and remove my duplicates later. They might be keyed on some sort of MAC address or something?
To remove a client from the network, the client machine that originally created the network is the only one that can evict machines. The problem is that I don't know who that client machine is and if that person has done a reinstall then the creator is lost! The thread I just linked mentioned the web interface but that's in a managed mode only and I think we're unmanaged mode.
The only solution people suggest is a new LogMeIn network. Perhaps call it "lack-of2"? Pete, as a lack-of admin (and at home and with the minecraft server) would you look into making a new 'Managed' network (free also). Then we can remove clients in the future and do everything through the web interface.
I have created a new un-managed network for now, called "lack-of-minecraft"
Currently on there we have me (babychaos) and the server (MINECRAFT!). The creation machine is mine.
Password is cock.
Good man! We will need a new Lack-Of general purpose net. Can you be logged into two at once?
Great, can't wait ... ... ... Damn work getting in the way of things that are truly important.
For the skylight I just dug upwards and stood on a pile of mud on the way I encounted a few pockets of redstone and the odd iron or coal pocket.
Redstone seems amazingly common which is nice we'll have loads for control circuitry once we start mucking about with that.
You can be on multiple networks at once...I have taken the server off the general lack-of server for now, so it pretty much as it's own network now.
I got rid of some of the spare rock lying around...
Depressingly all you'll see is the big sign :-(
OMG, that's absolutely fabulous, Pete! Can't wait to see it in-game. Just waiting for dinner, will check it later. Did you use most of the stone? There was a silly amount of it.
I suspect even with that massive structure there is still stone lying around we did have some f5 or 6 big chests full of the stuff.
BTW who found all those saddles? As far as I know you can't make those they can only be found in secret caves. We can go pig riding :D
Oh you can see both of the skylights I did the large useful one and the small pointless one that nearly flooded the cave :D
This took no time at all, and didn't involve me accidentally burning down about 30 trees at all...
I put in a small tower
I wanted to do a water elevator up to it but unfortunately water is broken for non admin people on multiplayer.
Oh and I expanded the skylight a little
Last night Pete used Lava and Trees to light his lovely house thing:
We also had a server crash, which lost a load of stuff but it's only to be expected as the whole thing is Alpha. A very good Alpha, I may add.
Matt, why do I get the feeling "small tower" and "expanded a little" are vast understatements?
I shall put some water in a chest for general usage. Lava is by request only, after Bigger Rob's escapades last night. I was quite chuffed that all my water only uses 4 sources, right on the top level. I might see if I can do it all from a single central source.
May I request a stack of 64 lava please.
You certainly can request a stack of 64 lava!
Watched some videos at lunch on the topic of mine carts and switches/electrics. OMFG.
notch said he was working on minecarts and boats in MP on twitter...fingers crossed Friday's update has them working! I already have plans for a railway into and up my botanical fortress!
The tower did go till it hit the ceiling so tall but very thin hence small :D
And I only expanded the skylight by two squares ... all the way around :D
I've been experimenting a lot with boosters and wired up auto mine cart systems in single player so it'd be nice to try some of that out in multiplayer.
I notice someone put in a portal to the nether but I didn't have any luck going through it guess that's another bug that needs ironing out.
Fingers crossed Notch gets some of the stuff going more smoothly in multiplayer.
His blog is a good way of seeing what fixes are coming in...one benefit of the Alpha status is that it's fast from code writing to live
http://notch.tumblr.com/
Found what we think is a corrupted data chunk...a rather surreal error make physical. Worth a wander next time you're on the server. A map is provided!
All hail the TOWER OF EVIL!
(yes, I made a big arrow and wrote "tower" on the beach so I could find it in Cartograph).
There is a streak of obvious map generation error over there, resulting in sudden cliffs.
Popped in to do some sightseeing and fellout the bottom of the tower of evil. Here's some pics of the Tower of Evil:
wow it looks like that's got blocks of bedrock as part of it which is odd so high up in the air an interesting glitch to say the least.
Had a quick lunch session of minecraft as I had to go to frys to look for some cables for work. Did some more work on the sky tower am working on the elevator shaft now I have some water blocks (course notch may well fix that issue in the next update but still :D
whiles digging the shaft for the skytower water flume of fun found an extensive cave system which contained a moss cave complete with non active spawner. Plenty of iron ore down there but I ran out of torches so had to turn back.
If someone wants to take a look I've still got ladders down the shaft while I'm building it and pre flood so feel free think it was the top most opening in the shaft.
Did a bit more work on the sky tower the water lift nearly works thing it needs some more fine tuning for repeated trips and comfort you can sort of ride it now with a boat but you tend to end up in the sea.
Also installed a staircase in the tower of evil that goes to the top. Mind the lava.
Once minecarts are working I think we need to set up a trainline to the Tower Of Evil! I believe our ultimate goal should be to subvert this malign monstrosity into a tourist attraction, with a water slide.
People will visit it at the weekend, and buy tacky mementos of the fun time they had at the Tower Of Evil!
As a tourist attraction there should probably be at least a "mini tower of evil" replica nearby.
Do we plan on excavating it down to it's base too?
At home today and can't see the minecraft server. NOOOOO!
(There's no connection to babyc but I can see everyone else!)
Just in case someone goes on before I do, I was halfway through extending the arboretum so it was symmetrical with the new entrance and putting in nice new steps down to the trees when Felix woke up. Not been able to get back in since to finish it off. Hope you like the new entrance.
It's probably crashed (server or hardware). I shall reboot it once I get home (about 4:30-5pm)
OK, my landline is down...bit of an issue.
Currently seeing if I can get the server saved and emailed to Rob initially, then it can be re-hosted...
The Tower of Evil was somewhat interesting to work with it seemed those pockets of lava that make up it's structure were dormant such that only by mining near them it triggured them to activate and flow like normal. This flooded most of the stairs with Lava but I went back throught and sorted that out with some mud.
BT have confirmed a fault on my landline, upto 3 working days before a fix is progressed probably.
I have a copy of the server (~8 meg zipped), but GMail won't let me send it, so I'll do it from work tomorrow, when it won't take an hour to get past the Lead Curtain of Burghfield...
...so I've spent the evening sticking magnets into little plastic men!
while we wait for the server to come back maybe a little Minecraft Larp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl36SsszqpY&feature=player_embedded#!
:D
Big Rob is sorting out the server today. Huzzah for Big Rob!