My own personal Minecraft problems

The Game Room
1

I got the XBox 360 version about a couple months ago, and, as is the case with a lot of hot franchises, much of the time playing it I was trying to convince myself that it’s half as good as nearly everyone constantly insists that it is. (This was never a problem for any of the Assassin’s Creed games.) Creative mode is fine if you’re the, well creative type (I’ve seen some of the works of art, and they are gorgeous); Survival, well, that can get…unpleasant. To spare you my usual tedious grumbling, I’ll just list 'em here: Way too easy to die, way too easy to toss something you don’t want to toss, way to easy to lose it forever if you’re around lava, water and lava have bizarre physics and can very easily go a lot of places you don’t want, and did I mention it’s way too easy to die?

Perhaps the thing I find most vexing is that this is one of those games where the programmers deliberately put in astounding BS and you’re supposed to eat it raw and smile. Creepers are the example I’ve seen cited the most (there’s a message that says they’re a “coding error”, meaning they were very deliberately kicking us in the teeth on this one), but the fact that night is so full of endless terrifying death…and arrives astoundingly quickly…is bad enough in itself. Furthermore, most of the monsters stick around after daybreak and do just fine in full sunlight, meaning that you are never truly safe from enemies. And pretty much any of them can kill you within 5 seconds. I’ve reached the point where I flat out refuse to play on anything but Peaceful anymore as the very POSSIBILITY of any enemies anywhere, at all, ever, has become completely unacceptable. (And I put down a total of about 15 Cento Occhi assaults in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood without breaking a sweat.) Let alone how easy it is to fall to your death or burn up in 3 seconds. Oh, did I mention that you lose everything you’re carrying if you die? Frankly, I’m surprised the programmers even bothered to have Peaceful; I mean, if you really are catering to the fanatical, ultra-hardcore, every-mistake-erases-3-days-of-work crowd, they’re going to object to something like that!

Well, anyway…there’s still a few things I need a little help with, so, if anyone could:

Minecart riding. That’s the big one for me. I didn’t have as much frustration with my first car. Okay, wood is ubiquitous and iron is pretty easy to get, so there’s no shortage of raw materials. And once the cart gets going, it’ll keep going so long as its on level ground. The problem is a tiny stumbling block called Newton’s First Law of Motion. And if I try to push-start it, that sends it careening its way and I can’t get into it.

Also, the achievement requires me to travel “500M” in a cart. I have no idea how much “M” one square is, but that’s minor. Each rail production creates 16 rail sections, so I only need to know how many batches. What I really need to know is how I can place a minecart in such a way that it’s not flying all over the place, and get it flippin’ moving while I’m safely seated in it. And if it involves a button (which I can almost guarantee it will), how do I connect the button to what I’m going to need to propel the cart? I’m not trying to make a theme park monorail or build a cross-country freeway or anything, I just want to make one lousy rotten stinking minecart ride. (Sheesh, the tutorial makes it look so easy! :slight_smile: )

The next big thing is to collect enough obsidian to make the Nether Portal. Of course, the way to make obsidian is to dump lava into water. To that end: pick up lava at its source with a bucket, which is the only location it’s possible to fill a bucket (Why? How hardcore does this game have to be?), dump it into a two-space area, expand it into a four-space area so the lava flows in a circle, so it always regenerates no matter how much I take out, do the same with a bucket of water, dump lava into water, mine the block of obsidian that results, and repeat until I have enough for the portal. Did I get that right? I’ve tried various methods in Creative to make obsidian, and I think my very best was something like 5% efficiency.

I’m going to need redstone ore for at least a Dispenser (possibly a rail section as well) and of course diamond to mine the obsidian. From what I’ve heard, 1. These are super-hard to find, and 2. much like Pro Wrestling for the NES, despite years of efort no one has come up with a reliable strategy. And then there are things called “dungeons”, at least one of which has the uncraftable saddle, which is required for the last achievement. Apparently you’re supposed to just know where the dungeons are, because no one has come up with a reliable method for finding them. Frankly, I think the smartest thing here would be a creation seed where these are known to exist.

Much thanks for any help. Seriously, this is one of those games that has me totally absorbed and wanting to throw it against the wall at the same time.

2

Dude, Youtube is your friend.

this guy has a pile of how to vids related to minecraft.

and your idea of infinite lava is probably wrong, water works that way but lava hasnt done that for a long time (at least the pc version hasnt)

3

Hmm. I haven’t played Minecraft 360 in a long time and I don’t know where it compares to the PC version in updates anymore.

A block is a cubic meter so you need 500 sections of track. I don’t ever mess around with minecarts. The usual process I see is regular track for 7 or 8 blocks, then a powered rail with a redstone torch and then 7 or 8 regular rail and so on.

Obsidian can be mined with a diamond pickaxe from the lower levels of the world, or you can create obsidian by having flowing water touch a lava source block. I don’t believe there is any way to make infinite lava. If you want a nether portal, you need 10 buckets of lava or 10 mined obsidian blocks.

Redstone ore is everywhere. I can’t mine for tripping over it. Diamonds are hard to find. Everyone has their preferred technique. I usually dig until I hit an underground cave system and then explore. Other people prefer digging a 1x2 or 2x2 tunnel and then every 5 blocks digging out sideways one block for five blocks worth of distance on either side. The idea is to maximize the amount of blocks you make visible with the least amount of mining. If all else fails, mining out a 20x20x20 room is guaranteed to get you some diamonds but it will take for fucking ever.

Part of the point of the game is having to explore. You can’t reliably find things like ore deposits or dungeons without using thirdparty tools that compare the seed against uploaded maps or whatever because that’s not how they intended the game to be played. However, a great way to find the surfacelevel stronghold is to make a copy of your world’s seed in Creative and then just use ender pearls to find the stronghold, mark the coordinates and go there in your survival world.

Monsters are monsters. Creepers don’t burn in the day but Skeletons and Zombies do. Spiders are peaceful during the day and endermen won’t spawn if the light level is too high or you’re in water. If you’re having monster issues, double or triple your torches. Also, the more you light up things like caves the more concentrated you make your monster spawning. I sometimes dig a chamber that I block up and just let mobs spawn in there so they don’t bother me as much on the surface.

4

I’ve never played minecraft but even I know that bringing up how many dudes you can kill in assassins creed while complaining about mine craft means you’re doing it wrong

5

The only real way to get obsidian is to get a bucket of water or two, cart it down to the depths, and pour it next to a standing pool of lava. Obsidian still takes ages to mine, but it’s a lot less tedious than whatever you’re doing.

6

One thing to keep in mind with Minecraft is that the start of the game is effectively as hard as it’s ever going to get. There are no “levels” in the RPG sense, the creepers and skeletons you see your first night are going to the the same creepers and skeletons you’ll see when you’re in full enchanted diamond gear (I assume the Xbox version has enchantments at this point).

And honestly, unless the Xbox version is already at the point of having carrots and such, I wouldn’t even bother with the pigs fly achievement–yeah, you can saddle a pig, but you can’t really steer or direct it without a carrot on a stick. So if that’s not in the game, to get the achievement you have to find a pig next to a cliff, saddle it, and hope it walks off. (the achievement system was something of a joke when it was put in)

7

Yeah. xbox has enchants.

8

Critical - I couldn’t find anything about cart riding or finding a dungeon. Regardless, I think it says something that I was even trying to look up such basic stuff on YouTube in the first place. (Was finally able to figure out cart riding on my own…hint, you NEED redstone, accept no substitutes.)

Innards Snacker - Glad to hear that redstone is plentiful. Little disheartening about diamond, but I’ve already blown so much time on this game, what’s another 5 hours? Thanks for the advice on dungeon-finding. Honest, I don’t give a pinch of bonemeal about fighting the Ender Dragon in Survival (did it once in Creative…it was fairly cool), I just want to fine one lousy stinking saddle so I can pig-dive and be done with it.

Appreciate you trying to help me with the enemies, but seriously, if you have to go through that much trouble just to not worry about getting swarmed every second, I say forget it. Figured Peaceful was there for a reason. (I can’t the be the only person who uses it, can I?)

bldysabba - Okay, different example. Remember Final Fight? Capcom, arcade, 1989, one of the first really huge beat-'em-ups? I kicked heavy butt in that one. The downside was that the enemies kicked back, and some of then could do things like leap 40 feet with knives extended or go from a standstill to Usain Bolt instantly. So my heroes died pretty regularly. The last time I played the coin-op, it took me like 26 deaths to reach the end.

Then there was Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune 2, which had by far the hardest Story Mode of the whole series. Strictly match races, one opponent at a time, and a lot of them would put a champion F1 driver to shame. I lost. Frequently. Frustratingly. And so did nearly everyone else. A win percentage of 60% was astoundingly good.

But it wasn’t a problem. Why? Because losing wasn’t a giant colossal setback. Final fight started the new life right where the last one ended (they sure learned their lesson from Ghosts 'n Goblins, didn’t they?). WGMT2 made the opponents easier whenever you lost, so it was actually necessary to get through Story Mode. Dying in Minecraft makes you lose everything you’re carrying. This hurts. So unless you’re willing to run around carrying nothing at all (which itself makes it far easier for you to get killed), dying simply isn’t an option.

Jragon - See, the problems I have with this are 1. Usually it makes stone instead of obsidian and 2. As often as not it ends up spilling all over the place, and now I have a fiery death zone and a raging river zone. I’ve decided to go the “acid into water, not water into acid” route (where acid=lava) and take however long it’s going. Not elegant, but it works.

everyone - Seriously, and this is what has me baffled, has there ever been a gain where players have been asked to submissively accept tons of BS…and nearly every single one fell in line?
“Oh, I can’t find diamond to save my life. Well, duh, it shouldn’t be easy to find, it’s diamond!”
“Oh, I got killed lost all my stuff. Well, it was completely my fault for not having enough torches or making my shelter secure enough or not making strong enough armor.”
"Oh, that creeper just blew up and erased three weeks of effort. Boy, they’re real jerks, aren’t they? Ha ha. Coding error! Brain connected to TNT! Let’s all get masks and figurines! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
“Oh, I moved 1/10 of an inch too far and burned to death in the lava in 3 seconds. Hey, what am I doing, that’s lava, not water! Duh! I’m so stupid, I dig straight down!* Ha ha ha ha!”

Modern programmers don’t dare do this. It has “certain failure” written all over it. And yet Minecraft is like the hugest sandbox game ever.

  • About this “never dig straight down” thing…if it’s so horrible and awful and deadly, why allow it at all? At least have an option to disable vertical digging.
9

Monsters obey certain spawn rules. They can’t spawn if the light is above a certain level, they can’t spawn within 16 blocks of the player and they can’t spawn more than I think 24 blocks away. They can’t spawn on stairs, or leaves or slabs put on the bottom half of the block. I don’t usually go past normal but in general monsters are not a huge deal unless there’s a swarm of them. And your stuff all gets dropped where you die so once you respawn if you take less than 3 minutes to return to where you died, you don’t lose anything.

I do recommend you don’t play on hardcore, though.

Forgive me if you know all this already but lava and water work similarly but slightly differently. A block of water between two source blocks becomes a sourceblock itself. Lava does not. A block of lava or water placed on a surface will flow in all 4 directions unless blocked by something, water flowing slightly faster. If the flow from a water block touches the flow from a lava block, it creates a cobblestone block. If the flow from a water block touches the flow from a lava block from above, it creates a stone block. If the flow from a water block touches a lava source block, it creates obsidian.

I also dig straight down all the time. It’s not a huge issue until you get to about y=20 or so because that’s when lava starts showing up.

10

Oh, by the way, do you know how to crouch? I think it’s clicking the left joystick down on the xbox but it will keep you from falling into lava if you move too far.

11

If a game sells 12 million copies, and from what you can tell, everyone other than you is fine with it, do you think the problem might be you, rather than the other 11,999,999 people?

The mode you are in is called “Survival” for a reason. Survival-style games do, quite frequently, have rather harsh death penalties. (I would definitely suggest you stay away from something like DayZ for example).

Really, if you’re having problems with mobs on the surface, that’s what beds are for. Underground, you’d still have to deal with them, and while I’m still not the biggest fan of the way mob spawning algorithms can sometimes over-concentrate things (though it’s obviously useful for mob traps), it’s hardly horribly broken.

Diamond isn’t that hard or dangerous to find if you branch mine. It’s not nearly as interesting or exciting as caving, but if you’re just trying to get started that’s probably the way to go.

Uh, you do realize that when you die, your stuff just drops, right? Stuff on the ground will despawn in 5 minutes, but that timer only applies if the chunk is loaded (that is, if you’re somewhat close to it).

What kind of death penalty do you think would be appropriate for a game that has no explicit goals or objectives?

Errr, because it’s a guideline , and even then it’s just shorthand for “never dig straight down when you do not know what’s below you.” It’s a purely common-sense “rule” that is funny because everyone has gotten distracted/greedy/in a hurry to a bad end at least once.

12

Minecraft definitely can be frustrating to start out in. I got so frustrated with trying to play a survival/easy game that I started out with peaceful until I could figure out how the whole thing was put together, what the various ores were for, what happened when I fell into lava :mad:, and so on. Even now I sometimes get tired of dealing with the mobs and play a game on peaceful just for giggles.

The Minecraft wiki has been a huge help to me while I’ve been learning my way through the game. There are a number of useful tutorials listed there, including one on farming obsidian and a bunch on mining to optimize diamond finds. I usually get both obsidian and diamonds just by digging down to bedrock and then creating branch mines, or using ladders or a waterfall to get to the bottom of a deep ravine.

You can use the bizarre physics of water and lava to your advantage. For instance, always carry a bucket of water with you, and when you come across a lava pit you can dump the bucket over the lava (just put it adjacent to an existing block, like stone hanging over the pit), and once the water puts the lava out you can pick up the water source block in your bucket and then mine the resulting obsidian. You can also use the water in your bucket to put yourself out if you come in contact with lava, then pick it up again.

The mobs are a pain in the ass, but when I play on peaceful I find myself missing them. Besides, they drop some items that are otherwise difficult to find. They’re pretty easy to handle when you get to know them, with the possible exception of the creepers because of their sneakiness. If I run into a creeper in the wild I take an aggressive stance. It’s pretty easy to hit them with your sword and then back quickly away—but not too far away that they reset their explosions. I’ve discovered that always putting windows in your house helps; I can look out in the morning and watch until the zombies burn up and the creepers unspawn. I go very slowly through cave systems and try to do most of my mining in mineshafts that I create so I can control access. Always wear a full suit of the best armor you can create, follow good light hygiene precautions, and don’t look at Endermen and you shouldn’t have all that much trouble with mobs.

I started out feeling a lot like you do, but now I think Minecraft is one of the most interesting games I’ve ever played, and I haven’t even touched some parts of it yet. It appears so simple, but the gameplay is incredibly deep.

As far as digging down, it does come in handy once in a while, like when you’ve built yourself a pillar into the sky or up to reach a high ledge using the block jump technique. The instruction should actually be, “Don’t dig straight down unless you are absolutely sure what’s beneath you.”

13

It’s been a while since I played the XBox version - can you no longer save your game in it?

I don’t really see most of these as bullshit. They’re all pretty standard elements in video game design, really. Some examples:

Pretty much every MMO out there bases a significant amount of its game design around farming for rare drops. Plus, resource collecting is about 50% of the point of the game in the first place - how else can you scale the difficulty of a resource-collecting game, other than by making some resources rarer?

The entire Rogue-like genre is based on this idea, and tends to be much more vicious about it. The thing about death in Minecraft is that it really is pretty much meaningless, even if you lose all your gear. Unless you’re regularly tooling around in full diamond gear, you can usually replace your entire set of equipment in about fifteen minutes. And that’s assuming you died somewhere where it’s impossible to retrieve your gear, like the bottom of a lava pool. Hell, when I’m starting a new game, I usually prefer to suicide periodically rather than dick around with trying to keep myself fed. It’s easier to pack everything in a chest and throw myself off a cliff when my hunger meter empties out, rather than go hunting or try to start a farm.

Dying can be a bummer if you’ve been saving up experience for a big enchantment, but even then, it’s not that huge of a setback.

If you’re going to have a game whose central selling feature is that every part of the terrain is destructible, you’re going to have a monster in it that’s attack is based around destroying terrain. Also, the explosion is only about five squares across, so “three weeks of effort” seems a bit hyperbolic.

That said, Creepers do suck ass.

That’s pretty typical, too. How many games are there where water has the same effect on you that lava does in this game?

There’s a lot of situations where you want to dig straight down. Generally, it’s when you know what’s underneath the block you’re standing on. For example, an easy way to get to something high up is to take a stack of dirt, look straight down, jump, and put a block of dirt under you. Repeat until you’re as high up as necessary. To get back down, dig straight down. Perfectly safe, because, of course, you’re the one who placed each block that you’re now removing. It’s when you’re out in the wilds that it becomes a bad idea, because you never know if the next block under you is going to be lava. Or fifty blocks below you. Changing the game to make it impossible to dig straight down is a bit like chaning Call of Duty so you can’t cook grenades, just to prevent players from accidentally blowing yourself up. There’s a certain level of hand-holding from the game designers that starts to just get patronizing.

14

Have you played skyblock? Mob control is critical for obtaining things like iron. If you enjoy playing with mobs, I highly recommend it.

15

The truth is, Minecraft isn’t really a good game. It just isn’t. It’s actually more of an activity. The reason it’s so popular is that it’s basically a completely new genre. If you view it as “World of Legos”, it makes a lot more sense. Notch was a programmer, not a game developer.

I’d love to see what a *good *game designer could come up with using the Minecraft paradigm.

16

Check out Minecraft Wiki – The Ultimate Resource for Minecraft

Lots of info and a link to a map generator, or at least there used to be.

Also, google Minecraft Cartographer.

If you install that tool, you can make both overland and underground maps of various types (flat, isometric etc) This will help find dungeons and abandoned mines etc

17

How is Minecraft not a game?

18

I’m curious as well. I’d like to hear more about what Lightnin’ sees as failings within the game.

19

It is not a game, it is a sandbox to play your own games in.

Btw the easiest way to build a portal is with buckets and some dirt.
(Mining obsidian takes forever and wears out your pickaxe)

20

He didn’t say that it wasn’t a game, he said it wasn’t a good game.

I mean, at a certain level, a game’s success is defined as how many people have fun with it, so Minecraft hasn’t failed on that level. But at the same time, a lot of the game design choices are questionable at best. I haven’t played Minecraft in a very long time, but I’ll see if I can find my game design notepad from around then. A lot of it is centered around Minecraft’s borked sense of progression and the very uneven risk/reward setup. A lot of things that are difficult to get or rare don’t reflect that risk in their value. A disproportionate number of things, obviously there’s always a few bragging rights items, but for Minecraft there’s a habit of burying cosmetic stuff in rare or difficult categories, but making the actual things that help you relatively easy or common. That’s the broad overview of one of the main issues, I’d have to look up the better stuff.

Of course, those notes were during late alpha, my friends say it still has many of the same issues I noted back then, but things may well have changed for the better.

Again, Minecraft is fun for a lot of people, and that’s fine. Things can be fun and still have strange choices that would likely make it better if they were fixed.