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...)
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Nope...it won't lie on glass, I was using natural stone down in my workshop.
Have you tried it in Single player?
(Not saying I know the answer to this, just offering debug ideas)
Bah damn internet swallowed my carefully crafted reply now i have to type it all again!
anyway I think I said something like this ...
As someone who spent hours wrestling with the vagueries of redstone wire to achieve the flashing neon sign of evil I feel I can help in this matter.
With redstone torches and wires the level the wire is at and the orientation of the torch is important. Torches are essentially power sources in their own right and if you have them set up incorrectly then they act to power the circuit you wanted to used to switch them. This can lead to alsorts of weird effects I was getting extra oscillators cropping up spontaneously in the flashing sign because of the number of torches I was using and a few wired incorrectly were powering elements independently.
The first key thing to be aware of is how the power output works. Torches that are vertical ie sat pointing up from a block power every square on a level with them in all four directions as well as the square directly above them (this fact can be used to achieve vertical wiring where you stack torches one on top of the other to transmit a signal vertically without meandering wireing) the accept power only from one level bellow. These torches are also fussy about whether a wire is straight or not. It must be a straight line to the block not a corner or a multiway piece or it won't work. The other torches are more forgiving.
So if you have a pressure plate on the ground and a wire leading off from it your torch must them be on top of a block 1 block up from the wire. Or you can dig a hole just before the torch and have it at ground level as the wire will go in the pit.
Torches on the side of blocks power the squares left right and front of them and they will accept power to the block the sit on exactly like the vertical torch but also from a wore on the top of the block as well. They are usually a bit more forgiving about wire directions.
So for a side torch and the pressure plate you could run the wire along the ground and have the torch on a block or in a pit.
There are all sorts of little tricks to getting wiring to work by placing a block directly above a wire you can stop it forming sideways attachements and force it into a straight line a trick I used several times when wiring up the letters.
Anyway hope this helps
Thanks to Matt's notes I got them working last night in my laboratory.
I now need to work on relays etc (as the power only goes 15 blocks, and the road is a tad longer than that), and also how I'm going to have them on/near the walkway. I was thinking of pressure pads setting off an area of lights, however now I think I may just have light-switches each end, as it's cleaner, and more impressive thowing a switch and getting the entire thing to light up.
I like the idea of switching on the lights at each end. However, what about leaving them on? Think of the carbon footprint! Nice mate, please use as much of the redstone as you need from Big Cave, I don't think anyone will mind and there's silly amounts of it.
I found a load more redstone while extending big cave. It just wasn't big enough for the n of us
where n is the number of people playing on the server ...
I put it in the usually place. I also found gold up to 2 blocks of the stuff now my scheme to convert ingots to blocks is paying off.
Doen a bit of work with Redstoen, but server lag was causing issues. Come up with a Power repeater for long lines of lights...don't know if there is a neater/smaller way of doing it...
S is a swtich, and the 6 R's in a row are the main lights, linked by wire (with the pre-requisite level changes to get it working. To do a power repeat off the last light (upto 15 blocks away from the switch) you run a new wire being powered from that back to _another_ torch, and that one acts as your new switch (so when the main light is off, the repeater light is on, and that suppresses the next 15 blocks down the line.
I need to get it as clean as possible before lighting up the skyway with it. As it stands I'll need a row of blocks 2-high...1 to run the wire, the other for the lights...then repeater sections every 15 blocks.
Oh when we're sealing up the base we need to remember the railway that runs right to big cave. By it's nature it's an open tunnel enemies could wander down or potentially spawn it tho I think it's pretty well lit.
I have turned off monster spawning and PvP for the time being (as they were turned on by default).
This is partly because the general agreement was that we would take a few days and shore up our defences; but mostly because monster spawning hammers the processor (probably causing the lag).
For the time being I will probably have to switch the server over to my desktop if we want monsters wandering around (i.e. short bursts while I am at my desktop).
I'll try and set the share up tomorrow (with the files from just before the upgrade) and start pondering setting up a faster server.
So I've been converting a mountain to a glass shell most of the top is done. After that I've been thinking of filling it with water or maybe boring down to big cave.
EMW - Oh, it's a mountain! Pete and I were wondering what was going on up there! Looked like you'd had a bit of a spazout.
I spent most of the time tidying up Big Cave and some of the tunnels that lead from it. Where possible, I've put in steps so that if you need to run around like a headless chicken, you can. I also repaired the Sky Tower ladders and tidied up the Big Cave end of it. I lit all the air shafts that didn't have light and clearly marked the 'Twisty Staircase' exit from Big Cave to The Village.
We still need some doors on a few tunnels on the way from Big Cave to Atlantis/Spawn Fortress because there is a sodding huge cave network (the one we were playing in last night, Pete) out there that might still have dark spots.
I started work on an 'Underground' style map of the area but had a better idea and will start remaking it in Google Docs so we can all edit it.
I've basically replaced the original mountain topography with glass so it's the same blocks but a hollow glass shell rather than mud and stone. I think when they finish adding fish I'll fill it with water and fishes.
After that I plan to build a monster grinder but I might need to do some test runs in single player first where I can mitigate failure and am not so resource constrained.
I've installed a mob killer which is further back from the arboretum building. Works quite well you can attract the mobs in the fall in and can't get out then get roasted by the integrated lava system they drop their loot and a water way moves it to a secure room at the back.
Still needs some current tweaking but it does work and probablhy a few more conveyors.
Be careful not to fall in thio I ran out of wood to build an escape lader and to prevent spiders juming out the wall is two blocks high. it's realtively easy to fight the current and avoid the lava so if you do fall in punch down the sand walls so you can climb out then put them back.
Everyone has minecraft now right? If there are any hold outs it's worth noting that when the game goes beta on the 20th not only does the price go up (to a whopping 14-15 euros :D) but more importantly you won't get the free updates that alpha users get so it's worth getting now as you get free updates forever.
I have a cave on my own MC. And a flatter bit of land where a hill used to be. And a hole as far down as I could do. And an observatory for watching skeletons at night.
Now what?
And doors. I have doors too. Wooden ones.
Armour is useful for wandering about dangerous areas, and it also reduces falling damage which is handy.
Upgrading to iron tools lets you mine more exotic ore (redstone and diamond).
And feel free to join the rabble on the server ;)
Build something fucking huge.