Anyone playing Minecraft anymore?

The Game Room
1

We just got Minecraft the other day. I can see that this will be a humongous time suck. There have been several threads, such as this one, but not much activity in the last few months.

I just had a pretty intense mining experience. I made it down to right around the bedrock layer, and found an area where water and lava meet, that was ridiculously rich in ores - from one point, I could see, within 8 blocks, coal, iron, lapis lazuli, redstone, gold, and obsidian. The problem was that the block DIRECTLY below the gold seemed to be a spawning point for the lava. I was able to dam up the water, and let it turn the lava into obsidian with controlled releases, but no matter how much underneath tunneling, I just couldn’t mine squat without the ore either falling into the lava and being destroyed, or opening up a fresh lava channel. Eventually, I got careless and died.

I’m having a LOT of fun - anyone have any cool, recent stories to share?

Joe

2

I’ve been playing a fair bit recently. I picked up a sweet mod, IndustrialCraft, that adds a few new ore types, a much more in-depth power/electricity system, and a bunch of awesome tools. It’s pretty well balanced, and all of the really cool stuff takes a significant investment of time/resources.

I’ve also been playing in hardcore mode, where there is no respawn; when you die, it deletes your world. For some reason I find this significantly less frustrating than dying with an inventory full of cool stuff and respawning and having to either try to hunt it down or just write off the loss.

3

I don’t play in my regular map too much anymore. I mostly play adventure maps, like Vechs’ Super Hostile series. I’ve been thinking about trying out a few mods, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

4

I haven’t actually played the game in six months, but I’m thoroughly addicted to a particular YouTube LP’er, and watch every one of his minecraft videos within a day or two of the moment he posts it. They’re a ton of fun to watch, and his specialty is inventing complicated systems using only vanilla (i.e. no mods, no cheating, all resources collected by hand, etc.). The guy’s handle is “Etho,” and his channel is “EthosLab.”

I quit playing myself sometime around beta 1.5. Before I quit, I had built a couple of fairly efficient mob systems, both hostile and passive, and both modeled after Etho’s, though not nearly as advanced as his. In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, a mob system is a method of forcing monsters to spawn in controlled areas, then automatically moving them to where you want them, and then (usually) killing them and depositing their loot somewhere useful. Etho’s mob system creates hundreds of monsters every minute, carefully separates them by type, deals a precise amount of damage to them, and allows you to one-hit kill them yourself. With a flick of a lever, the system kills them for you. With the flick of another lever, they stop spawning altogether. With the push of a button, a minecart comes whizzing by containing the mob of your choice. With the push of another button, a pack of skeletons are made to shoot arrows at a flock of pre-damaged creepers, causing a cloud of records to drop.

Really amazing stuff, and all done using the standard-issue game and a great deal of ingenuity. The whole LP series is worth watching, but since each episode is 20-30 minutes, and there are about 150 of them right now, it might be a bit daunting. If you’re interested but don’t want the whole commitment, Etho did restart a new world in episode #102.

5

This game is going to be the end of me.

Joe

6

I still play, although not very often.

My problem is that I started a world a while back and survived easily, allowing me to work on projects. Then I started a new world for the full release, but now I’m having so much trouble surviving I can’t find the time to do cool stuff.

7

You can actually use a metal bucket to pick up liquid source blocks, including lava. You can then place that source block wherever you want. With lava, you can also fuel a furnace (but this uses up the bucket).

Protip: Don’t try to “use” a crafting bench when you’re holding the bucket o’lava. Especially if you’re in your house. *Especially *if that house is made of wood.

8

I’m playing MMOs again, so I’m not playing minecraft these days, but I still watch Etho and a few others as well. One of the others I watched (who hasn’t posted anything new in a while) had a world with Industrialcraft/Buildcraft/Millionare installed that looked interesting, but I’m not sure I want to bother with mods until true mod support makes it in. Jeb just posted details about this week’s pre-1.2 snapshot, and it sounds like it completely restructures pretty much all the game internals–stuff that will probably make it easier long-term, but seems likely to completely break pretty much all mods.

9

Got into Terraria and lost interest in Minecraft but have been meaning to start playing again.

10

I just picked up the game after a long while off (maybe a year)? Lots of changes and new stuff, so the thrill is back.

A couple of tips for lava. I always carry a bucket of water with me, if you can manage to jump away from lava quick enough and douse yourself it can save your bacon. It’s also handy for solidifying lava but because of the pain involved in actually removing obsidian I tend not to do this. Instead, I carry dirt and gravel with me. With plenty of gravel, you can make walkways in the lava from above – drop in plenty, if it’s more than 1 brick deep. Move over a square, drop more. You can make a little landing pad in case of accidental fall or just to get around. For the dirt, you can place it over lava source squares if you do it just right – try placing it via the adjacent tile, if possible (as if placing the brick side by side – hard to explain, but imagine building a bridge, you’re building via the adjacent tiles horizontally instead of vertically). If all else fails, carry spare buckets to scoop up lava source tiles in inconvenient places.

Recently I’ve been enjoying the new structures and features in the full release. Breeding is interesting, now there’s a reason to “collect” animals.

Mostly though I like that there are more options in finding things deep underground. I’ll spoiler this in case you don’t want to know, but this is stuff you’ll find pretty early, it’s nothing gamebreaking.

[spoiler]While I’m quite accustomed to caverns and dungeons underground, there are now some interesting new features – specifically abandoned mine shafts and ravines. Ravines especially are a bit fun – you can run into them at the surface as great canyons, but also deep underground. My usual habit is to burrow a straight pit with ladder to bedrock ASAP since you can find iron and coal down there anyway, plus you have chances to find much better ores and especially diamonds. I did that as usual and started strip-mining until I found a cave system to explore, which quickly broke into a MASSIVE ravine. Because of the way light works at depth, past a point you get a sort of eerie glow in the pitch-darkness (past the point of rendering blocks), but the massive amount of dark space meant tons and tons of monster spawns. So all you see is the shuffling silhouettes of bad things rustling around in the dark.

Fortunately, I broke in on a narrow ledge slightly above the bottom, so I wasn’t really in too much danger. Carefully exploring (and carefully mining out passages when the cliff became impassable) while constantly barraged by the howling of the dead below me was quite memorable! Since ravines expose a great amount of blocks at once, but are dangerous, they’re worthy of exploring.[/spoiler]

I need to get my buddy who I used to play multiplayer back on, we had a grand time just gathering resources, exploring the tunnels and building our base. We had more grandiose plans but were waiting for the Nether to be available in multiplayer, and eventually wandered off.

11

I’ve also recently started playing minecraft. It is strangely addictive. :slight_smile: I don’t know if this is a *cool *story, as it’s more of a ‘what not to do’.

Like so much in life, my last adventure started with a creeper. I was using my elite minecraft skills on an important project (positioning my chests to be aesthetically pleasing.), when I noticed someone was standing behind my shoulder, peering at my skillful chest placement greedily. Creeper. In my house. In full day light.

I had the time to say “What th-” before I died. He also destroyed my nice big window, part of my wall and most of my chests. My fat loot was now lying around waiting to fade from existence, my diamonds and obsidian and the pretty blue pick axe I’d just enchanted twinkling away.

No big deal, I had a bed and would respawn there. Except my bed was apparently ‘blocked’ (by my fat loot I can only assume, or maybe my dead body counted as blockage), and I was sent back to my original spawn point in the middle of nowehere-forest-near-pigs. This was before I’d figured out how to read maps, and also before I figured out the F3 giving location thing.

I tried many suicide runs to find my way home, and failed. It had been so long since I’d been at my original spawn point. No big deal. My lovely home wasn’t lost; I had an obsidian gate to the nether right next to it! I just needed obsidian to make another gate
.
After a real time weekend of working several mines, making various safe houses, learning how to read maps and location points: I had a plethora of stuff. Iron and gold and lapuz and shrooms and red ore and then, I finally mined three diamonds. I trotted down to get me some obsidian from the handy square I’d set aside for later.

I mine one block, and promptly slipped into the lava underneath. The lava ate me and my diamond pick axe.

Angry and still singed, I set off in a huff in a random direction.

And…found my house. The loot was still there waiting to be picked up!

It ended well, I now have extra materials, coordinates, maps, and have created a big wall with pressure plate rigged double doors at various places to quickly and easily explore the outside world.

Did you know mobs can use pressure plates?

I’m thinking I’m just going to move everything underground, and remove all my doors. It’s the only way to be safe. It’ll be just me and my shrooms in the endless dark…

I’ll have to chekc out Etho’s stuff!

12

Try 87901 for a challenge. Very deep ocean with lots of tiny islands!

13

Ignore that. That was the file, not the seed; didn’t notice it had moved. :smack:

14

:smack:
Ignore the “ignore that.” I had it right after all! :smack:

15

First rule of minecraft: never dig straight down.

Your bed will be considered “blocked” if you have placed it in such a way (or placed a block in such a way) that there’s a block at eye level next to the right side of the headboard. Loose items on the ground won’t block a bed.

That’s odd: items on the ground will disappear after exactly 300 seconds. (Etho exploits this to create long timer systems.) If you worked a whole weekend away from those items, they should have despawned. Do you mean your items were still in the chests?

Did you know that players and mobs can both use either type of pressure plate, but only wooden pressure plates will be activated by items (like a loose wooden stick or a feather)? If you drop an item on a stone pressure plate, nothing happens.

16

This is not strictly true. The 300 second timer is only active if the chunk containing the items is held in memory and thus being simulated. If you go far enough away from where the items are, ie: respawning far away, then the timer and items are in limbo until you get close enough to load the area into memory again. Once you start to see the house on the horizon, the 300 seconds starts ticking away and you better hurry then!

17

I did not, this is good information!

I believe the pop up before transporting me back to my original spawn said it was either missing or blocked.

I’ll try destroying/placing it again. It was quite an odd thing. It was quite a shock that I wasn’t re-spawning at my bed. :slight_smile:

I think this may have been what happened with me, I had been quite surprised that my items were floating about after spending so much time trying to work my way back to them. I then hurried when I realized I still had a chance. :slight_smile:

18

A while back I built a huge mob trap in the middle of a swamp. Based loosely on an Ethos design, it went from the top of the sky to bedrock, and while it didn’t spew mob goods at an incredible rate, it did give a pretty reasonable amount of stuff for the effort.

I then planned on using all the materials I’d collected to build a version of my hometown. I never got that far, as after a couple houses it got boring.

I still go back to the game from time to time, and when I do I get immersed as much as I did the first time, but I find that it takes less and less time to get bored with it.

Now, if there was a way to combine Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program, I’d probably wind up starving to death.

19

I abandoned my first mine. In my second, I found, among other things, a very small treasure room, total area of all branches probably no more than 10x10x10 in space, but not as an actual cube. There was a skeleton spawner and two sparse chests. I thought rooms like that were only found in larger dungeons, but this is a small, self-contained room.

Meanwhile, I have a small wheat and beef farm going nicely…

Joe

20

No, that’s a classic “dungeon” room. Mossy blocks, spawner, one or more chests was the basic formula. There are also larger underground structures that are multi-room, but those were added to the game more recently.

Dungeons are useful for creating monster-killing machines for farming items. I always note the location carefully (usually I put up signs to find it again, if difficult).