Usually I have steady articles being streamed out on my blog, but this time I got quite a bit of catching up to do since November!
The only thing I posted last time was BZStocks, since then quite a bit has been happening.
My brothers and I have started up a Minecraft server for ourselves to play on. I have been reading about Minecraft, hearing about it from friends, and being begged to play it. Unfortunately, I was quite busy during any time I was asked and everyone just said “You have to try it!” No one ever gave me good reason to. But I guess my brothers are a good enough reason because sure enough, after they said it, I immediately agreed. I bought three Minecraft licenses so we can all play simultaneously and we began our wonderful journey of Minecraft.
(Click more to begin reading!)
Minecraft
So Minecraft is actually a very fun game. I think the game incorporates a little something for everyone. Even with the little Achievements, doing whatever you want is the main goal and you can have fun in many ways. In fact, the game encourages you to find your own fun, because the game itself is boring. Only through crafting your world will you find some joy in playing.
My youngest brother (Age 8) finds joy in the pleasant aspects of Minecraft such as growing trees, farming, and harvesting. He also enjoys herding animals and raising them.
My younger brother (Age 10) finds the underground world to be the exciting place to be. Along with the Netherworld. He enjoys adventure and Minecraft provides such with many different underground passages, diamonds to find, lava to avoid or extinguish, and dangerous enemies hiding in the depths of the Nether.
I find the most fun aspect of Minecraft to be the building and development of Minecraft game systems. I seem to want to “innovate” the world as I would say. I will explain a little of what I have done in our Minecraft world through screenshots.
These first four screenshots are part of our bridge system. I found myself liking the mountain region of the world and I found it very hard to navigate around the mountains, and getting back down to my brothers and them finding me was such a pain. I came up the idea of a large bridge. The bridge is 6 blocks wide, with the end 2 blocks being barriers to prevent others from falling off. Torches are also placed every 4th block when applicable.
Our bridges now extend to various important locations of our world. We have:
-My first house (A Tree House)
-My younger brother’s first house / mine
-My youngest brother’s first house
-Joshua’s Mountain Abode (My Second House)
-New House (A house located far off from my Abode, yet at around the same height level in the mountains.)
-New World 1 (Our first attempt at building a bridge across the sea to a new world.)
Our bridge extends for about 2100 blocks in our Minecraft world currently, that’s 12,600 blocks of bridge so far, and also 1050 torches. Heh, quite a lot of resources. But it makes our life easier.
We soon figured out that building bridges was not enough. Sure it made our trips faster, but holding down a “W” key for 5 minutes was not very appealing or fun. I found the solution:
Minecarts. When I made this bridge, I knew Minecarts existed, but I had no clue how we would use them to navigate quickly in our world. My brothers and I first developed Minecarts and tracks and found out we couldn’t just get them to go. I learned how to craft powered rails, and by then, I was becoming a pretty skilled restone user. So now we had the power of redstone and minecarts. I made our bridges completely covered in Minecart tracks!
Here is how it works. Each Minecart is setup like the above picture at the point you want to go. Then you get in the Minecart and you’ll find a button on the block. The button is right next to the powered rail, which means it will activate it once you press that button.
And then you get shot off, since gravity forces you down!
We place 3 powered rail every 64 normal rail to keep the minecart going at full speed and also to provide ways to get going again if you accidently stop or wish to stop at some point in the middle.
During uphill rides on the bridge, we have 1 powered rail every 3 stairs to provide enough power to climb up.
Going downhill is plenty of fun.
I was pretty proud of myself for doing that. Here are some more things I did:
Herded animals from 800(!!) blocks away from our home all the way to a barn. That took 4 Minecraft days. And we lost quite a few animals on the way.
We built a barn to provide a natural habitat for our new animals. Animals get bred here and released into the wild when they are fully developed and have learned to cope with the world.
Busy busy busy! Please don't eat me animals!
We expanded our barn to 2 sections once we got enough animals. Animals go through this underground tunnel which connects both sides, allowing them free movement between the two sections.
A chicken enjoys the new artificial tree/water setup.
I wish to familiarize you with my houses I built real quick. I have built 4 houses at this point, one in each various landmark of our Minecraft world. They are all accessible via our bridges too.
This is my first house I ever built (And our bridge as you can see above it). I used wood, wooden planks, and trees to make it. It has two levels, and very little room to move around in. It has stood the test of creepers, but just barely (Evidence: Dirt blocks to replace broken down sections). Here is the interior:
I was playing Minecraft on a sleepless night when my brothers were sleeping and decided to wander…I wandered far enough away to move away from our Forest Biome to a Mountain Biome. I climbed and climbed, there were lots of cows, and I wanted to see the world from up high! Well lo and behold, I established a mountain abode up there! I built it and made sure all was good and then…Died. I spent the next day telling my brothers about the adventure and made the commitment to find that abode again! It took a day, but I did find it. I would walk halfway to it, walk back, walk 3/4 of the way, walk back. I had to familiarize myself with the path completely! Finally, I could get back and forth between the two houses. I started placing sand blocks on dirt as a way for my brothers to follow and find my mountain abode.
My Mountain abode was pretty neat to see. It was made out of wooden planks, and it was three stories tall. The top floor is one block shorter in roof height because we reached the 128 block height limit of our world. Luckily there are no such boundaries in the X and Z directions.
Viewing the interior space a little:
This became my brothers’ and my own home for quite awhile. As you can see, we had 4 glass blocks in the center to allow light through our whole house from the sun! Our next house is located in a taiga/mountain biome (I guess they clash) where we stayed there for awhile. We ended up building a barn there too, which is where I sent all the animals I rounded up to.
The outside is pretty traditional, and the blue room is mine ( Lots of sheep around this area are now sheared :> ). On the inside we have our three rooms (Mine goes upstairs), and we stored our beds and our items in it. I also got some chickens in there, 4 to be exact. They are still there.
We stayed here for a rather long time, as you can tell by our chests and furnaces and crafting table. The chests outside are usually our resources we gathered. From the abode, we adopted the idea of a resource chest that we can all use, so long as we gathered new ones. This was called the “New House”.
The 4th house is the one where I managed to experiment with redstone a lot. It is directly opposite of the “New House” from the Abode, so you had to travel past the Abode to reach it. It was also about 3 times as far away, and took about 6 minutes to walk it. We even have a stairway in the middle because sometimes we fell off the bridge while making it and did not wish to swim / boat all the way back.
We were such hardy construction workers, as we even set up a bed and our chests full of dirt and shovels! Eventually we would reach the end where we can finally set up the 4th house. For my brothers, they decided to build their own houses this time around.
I recently blocked off the starting areas of our bridge/minecart tracks with obsidian to prevent creepers from destroying them. It’s effective, but obsidian takes forever to mine! I believe I mined 5 stacks of it.
I also am working on a giga-tree near my house, which will have many many trees on trees. Here is the start of it:
I’m trying to make it look natural by making trees around it, but to get to the last tree up top it will have to grow a ton.
Back at my place, I’ll talk a bit about my redstone experiments. First off, I set up a system that requires you to place an item on a pressure plate to open the door. It really has no use, but it was fun to experiment, and I have kept it since then. You have to grab the item on the inside once you get in.
This is the interior of my house real quick, one thing to note is the redstone torch which is a notifier (The “You got mail!” notifier as I call it.
I was getting tired of wandering around my house and only resorting to killing enemies to get rid of them. And I was tired of lurking enemies around my house. Sure, a bunch of torches surrounding my house will work, but I want to be able to work outside with little to no hassle in getting rid of such creatures. I started building a moat around my house. I spent a lot of time crafting out bits to make sure the water flowed to a collection point.
Once I established the moat, I set up a trap for enemies. The streaming water leads to an underground passage I built where enemies have no escape, and as a result, drown.
You may notice in the last image there are pistons at the bottom. Underground water that is that deep cannot flow, so at that point I have pistons to push items they drop into flowing water I dug below. That is powered by a perpetual Minecart timer.
As you can see, it used to be powered by a bunch of repeaters and a looping circuit, but the circuit would freeze when the chunk got unloaded. Minecarts seem to be preserved.
Moving on, I managed to build a collection point where items flow to a pressure plate.
This is where that redstone notifier comes in. I live quite a ways above this underground point, and I want to know when I can come to collect items. I wired redstone all the way back to my house (And the entrance to the underground point) to light up when items are on it.
With this, I can stay in my house and collect items whenever I felt like it. There is just one final part to this equation, the lure/trap. When I am out farming or doing things right outside my house and an enemy comes, how do I get rid of it? If it’s a spider, those things are so floaty I have no choice but to kill them, but for everyone else…
A wired trapdoor area. The idea is simple. Run like a chicken into here when being chased by an enemy. A pressure plate activates all panels, and boom, the enemy will walk right up to you like a dummy and fall through.
For archers that walk sideways, they will fall into the side of the moat:
Simple, effective, get mob drops, and funny to watch enemies drown!
To finish things off, we have MOOOOOO.
How would you like to wake up to the sound of cows every morning? This is my breeding farm, and I raise these cows. Sometimes I release some and they wander into my death trap. Free meat, without the slaughtering. They die peacefully by drowning. Isn’t that great?
My brothers and I have had some good times. Presently, my brothers have moved away from me. They are currently living in a village. I visited them, but I was rather disappointed that they have stooped to such primitive levels. Haha, just kidding, but still, it is quite lonely where I live now. I have developed a doorbell, which sounds like this:
http://sigonasr2.servegame.org/uploader/multi-file-uploader/uploads/doorbell.wav
It’s supposed to be the Super Mario World level one song very slowly (Like the underwater levels in Super Mario World.) It turned out a little strange because I could only go up to a certain pitch, but it worked.
We’ve also got a nifty little library:
Makes a "Ding ding" sound.Our library is in stock!Nice quiet place to read and relax.
Finally, does anyone else use creeper holes as great places to plant new trees?
Sure looks funny.
What’s next? More bridge building (Going to connect to my brother’s village they are now located at), mapping some of the areas we explore, and perhaps more redstone wizardry!
Alright, so that is all for our Minecraft experiences. Gosh, such a long post, and not even through with everything!
By the way, we have only played vanilla Minecraft, and we want to keep it that way as long as possible. I believe that modding should only be used if the game gets old, and with three brothers playing together, nothing ever gets old, haha. We only adjusted the texture packs as you may have saw to make our glass clear (And our beds different colors). By the way, we also figured out every recipe so far except for the pistons. Those just completely puzzled us. We still have a lot of combinations to try and a lot to learn about Minecraft, but we do not plan on looking them up, and it is more fun to figure it out ourselves!
TWRPGE
The Weirdest RPG Ever was a game concept I developed when I was 13 years old. It was supposed to be my 6th game I made with Game Maker, but I found out the ideas and stories I wanted to implement required too many extra skills I just did not have, so I abandoned it. Now I am back to attempt and revive the project, as I have a fully backed storyline for it, and hopefully it turns into a fun little project for me to develop. In addition, I will be recording screenshots of it every 30 seconds to create a timelapse. I see many programmers do it, and I think watching timelapses of programmers is fun. However, many quicker ones usually screenshot every 5-10 seconds, but since this project is very large, I don’t think that many frames is necessary. Hopefully in the next few months something can come out of it. That will be developed in Python using Pygame. Most of the basic game engine is already developed, I just have to add in a ton of content. Then again, that’s what most RPGs are made of.
Server
Once again, I have moved back to this old blog location (And will probably just leave it here) since I got another new server. I believe hosting my blog on WordPress is just fine, it’s been here since 2008 and should stay that way! Anyhow, a new server for me to use and it’s even faster than ever, haha. I still do not plan to do too much with it, but at least I have it available to me. BZFlag, Websites, BZStocks, even our Minecraft server is now hosted on there. Hope I can keep finding even more uses for it. I am highly experienced with Linux servers after dealing with different kinds of hardware and distros, so it’s pretty neat that I can just use one so personally.
iPod
Haha, I usually do not talk about the random things I get. For Christmas I did get my first ever iPod. I actually have never had one before, so having one is kind of neat. I was given a sixth generation iPod Nano, which if you do not know, looks like this (If you have a 96 dpi screen, this will be life-size):
Basically, very small, compact, carried around easily, with a nice touchscreen to go with it. I do like it, and it lets me listen to my tunes anywhere I go. And funny thing, the first time I synced, I managed to end up with 256 songs on the thing. 256 is a pretty neat number!
That is all for now, pretty long post, but who doesn’t get sucked into Minecraft the first time playing around? See you later!
