Getting into Minecraft again. Advice appreciated.

The Game Room
1

Last one of these I’ll ever make, promise.

So I find out that Minecraft has been released for PS3 as a downloadable game. Per the official wiki, the big thing is that it not only has some things that weren’t in the X-Box 360 version, the trophies, unlike the 360’s achievements, can be done in Creative mode.

Yeah…this is kinda huge for me. Let me recap the horror stories I had going for the 3 most super-impossible achievements (keeping in mind that at least 98% of the time I was in Survival it was on Peaceful, and I never went above Easy).

Into The Nether (make a Nether Portal) - It’s things like this that the word “Sisyphean” was made for. I’ve tried and tried to put lava into water and water into lava in a way that would 1. create obsidian and 2. allow me to collect it without burning to death, and NOTHING worked. Probably just as well, really, since the amount of diamonds I ever found (0) prevented me from collecting it at all.

When Pigs Fly - (ride a pig and take fall damage) Aside from the lack of carrots in this version, Princess Kaguya’s treasures would be easier to find than a chest that actually has a damn saddle. Believe me, I was looking.

Dispense With This (make a dispenser) - Lessee…this requires a bow. So what does a bow require…sticks and string. Lessee, where does string come from…spiders? Oh, crap.

I prepared as best as I could. Iron armor and sword. Use a friendly, very well-lit village as a base. Set difficulty to Easy. Start my spider hunt as early in the day as possible. If I didn’t have enough string by dusk, regress back to the village and hit the sack, then finish up.

The first part went by without much trouble. I had 2 strings, 1 short of the requirement, before it started getting dark. I dutifully headed back to put in for the night.

And then…the skeletons showed up.

See, the thing about a torch is that it creates a perfectly safe, monster-free zone…within a radius of maybe two or three blocks. The lighting in the village, while certainly adequate to see by, wasn’t anywhere near enough to provide any degree of security. (To whoever advised me to make a bazillion torches and pile them all over the place, I’m sorry, I honestly thought you were being facetious.)

And all of a sudden I was losing health at an alarming pace. I briefly tried fighting back, which wasn’t a good idea because 1. there was one of me and a whole lot of them, and 2. they had bows and I didn’t. It didn’t matter if my armor was iron or end stone; taking that many hits in that short a time was going to do some serious damage. I had about one-third health left when I came to my senses and made a dash for a tiny cottage.

Phew! Close one! Now to go to bed and…oh, wait. Can’t sleep if there’s a hostile mob nearby, and at this point the village was crawling with them. Worse, I’d left all my food elsewhere (y’know, because I stupidly assumed that I’d have no trouble walking around a placed that looked pretty dang well lit to me), so I couldn’t heal.

Well, worst comes to worst, I’m safely indoors, so I just gotta wait it…ow! Hey! What the…did that skeleton just shoot me through the window??

Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap…so the remainder of that horrible, horrible night (I was down to about 1 1/2 hearts at this point) was spent quickly sidestepping back and forth across the window, watching for my bony nemeses and striking back at them…yes…through the window, and in a state of absolute paranoia because I still had the 2 strings on me and didn’t know at the time that I could run over and grab them if I died.

Finally, FINALLY, the sun came up, I reached my food supply, and I was finally able to cut down that one last spider and make the flipping Dispenser* and get the flipping achievement and throw this broken stupid game in the trash and preserve what remained of my sanity.

If the PS3 version would allow me to do away with all this, that alone would make it worth the price. The PS3 is by far the least murderously hardcore system of its generation, including the Wii (seriously, ever played Wii Sports Resort or any of the shooting games?) and doesn’t really have that many tortuously difficult trophies. Heck, I’d have completed Project Diva F in two months were it not for a few gallery pics. So if anyone here’s played it yet, I’d appreciate knowing if it really is that simple.

Also, anything else I might need to know…are ocelots vanishingly rare, are there some interesting servers on the Sony network, are there emeralds and trading with villagers, and anything else that didn’t make it into the X-Box 360 edition.

As for the original PC version, I’m almost certainly going to get it at some point (there’s so much, and I’m going to need options once I finally give up arcades for good). I pretty much get how servers and mods work, so just one queston: Is this command list all the commands that there are? In particular, it’d be nice if there a way to PREVENT a certain type of enemy from appearing, and also to set the time permanently to day. Day = good, night = bad in this game, and it’d be convenient to not have to punch in the same command over and over. (The PopularMMO’s page on YouTube has a command to generate a tornado, but I don’t think I’ll be needing that one for a while.)

Thanks to all, and especially everyone who was so patient in my last thread. I know this is a landmark game and I really look forward to getting a version I can enjoy.

  • To this day I still don’t know what you’re actually supposed to do with this. I once read something about a novelty “refrigerator”, but that sounds like it could get old pretty quickly.
2

Okay, so I got the PS3 version. This is a definite improvement over the Xbox 360 in a number of ways. The one which stood out most obviously right away is that you can *move a minecart while you’re in it. I can even BEGIN to tell you how much pain and frustration this takes out of cart riding (much less getting On A Rail). Also, it’s a little clearer about how lava and water work and what part of lava you can collect. I’ve reached the point, in fact, that I know exactly how to create obsidian (1 lava bucket = 1 lava source block = 1 block of obsidian; as soon as I accepted this harsh fact it made the rest a lot easier.)

I’m getting settled in and should be tackling Survival for real pretty soon, so just a couple of minor questions:

  • The wiki says that farm animals “spawn with the landscape”. Is there some type of environment where they will not go (I’m thinking sand). That’s pretty much the best way to ensure that they don’t mess up my cart trips.
  • Do all seeds produce at least one lava pool somewhere? This is by far the BEST way of getting enough lava for the End Portal. The one I normally go with is “1” (yeah, real creative, me :wink: ) and it seems like it should have one.

Thanks for any responses. I have a pretty good feeling about this one.

3

I’ve only played the PC version:

I think I’ve seen chickens and sheep (as well as zombie/skele/spider/creepers) spawning in desert biomes. So, no, sand does not prevent spawns.

I put up fences or walls to try to keep mobs from walking onto tracks, although that is not a perfect solution.

4

If you don’t put in a seed, it will randomly generate one. In the xbox version, I only used seeds to recreate the world I was playing in Creative so I could easily find the stronghold. On the PC I never use seeds because /gamemode c.

Passive mods will not spawn in water biomes or desert biomes.

Hostile mobs won’t spawn on leaf blocks so if things are really really bad, place a block to get you up into a tree and then hop from tree to tree until you’re far enough away from your initial block to screw up hostile mobs’ pathfinding. Also go up because if mobs can jump down from a hill or something onto a treetop, they can find you.

Mine down to about 12 or 10 and then just 1x2 it horizontally. If you don’t almost immediately run into lava somewhere, I’ll eat my hat. Otherwise lava is everywhere in the nether.

Dispensers dispense things. You can load them up with arrows and use pressure plates to create a defense against mobs. You can hook them up to farms so that clicking a button gives you a stack of melon and so on.

5

I think the most important advice I can give you on the game is stop worrying about dying so much. There is pretty much no death penalty at all in this game, except for two situations: you’re trying to save up enough XP for a really boss enchantment, or you don’t know where you are when you die, and can’t get back to pick up your stuff. Neither of those are things you need to particularly worry about early in the game. In fact, a little creative suicide makes dealing with hunger in the early game a lot easier. When you run out of food and start starving, drop all your gear in a trunk and go hold your head underwater until you drown. You’ll respawn at the last bed you slept in, with full health and a full stomach, and can grab all of your gear right out of the chest by your bed.

Also, seriously: just get the PC version. If nothing else, it’s pretty easy to save scum in the PC version. In the install directory for the game, there’s a folder called saves, and each world you spawn creates a folder in there with the name of the world you created. Just copy and paste the folder of the world you’re currently playing every thirty minutes or so (I like to watch TV while I’m playing, and breaks between episodes are a good reminder to back up your world.) If you die, or a creeper shows up and blows up a bunch of your carefully laid plans, just go into the save folder, delete the folder that has the name of your world on it, and replace it with the copy you made.

It’s more work than pressing F5 to quick save, like you’d do in a sane game, but it still beats laying out a bunch of redstone circuits again because you didn’t notice the Creeper spawn behind you.

Oh, and one more thing about monsters and torches. A torch prevents a monster from spawning in it’s light radius, but it doesn’t prevent a monster from spawning in the darkness, and walking up to the torch. You could have that village lit up like Yankee Stadium, it won’t do any good if you don’t build a fence around the place first. Monsters will just spawn in the dark and then walk into town.

6

First off, thank you, Miller, for resolving the one incredibly nagging question I had about the game, how everyone kept insisting that torches kept you safe and yet I KNOW I saw monsters walking right past them. (Thanks also for mentioning fences; they really do work!) I think that just goes to show you the astounding measures it takes to create any kind of safe area in this game. And frankly, I’m dumbfounded as to why anyone bothers to create any kind of elaborate dwelling in Survival. Why bother putting in all those stairwells and paintings and hallways and decorations and carpets and fireplaces etc. when two days later it’s all going to get blasted to chunks by creepers? Or trap you when the zombies come crashing through the door? Drop a bunch of torches on the ground and surround it with fences; there’s my damn house.

Glad that you mentioned “save scumming”, too. I don’t remember if the XBox 360 allows you to save anywhere with all items, enemies, and effects intact, but the PS3 definitely does, and it’s served me very well so far. In fact, this was how I was able to accomplish two tasks that otherwise would have been nearly impossible…spoilers for those who prefer not to play it quick 'n dirty:

[spoiler]Return to Sender (kill a Ghast with its own fireball) and Sniper Duel (kill a Skeleton from over 50 meters away). Here’s the thing about RtS: the Tutorial has a Nether Portal right there, and a brewing station with everything needed to make potions of fire resistance! So once in the Nether, all I had to do was gulp down a potion, save, ready my trusty stone sword, and swing away. The timing for knocking back the fireballs isn’t too hard once you get used to it, it’s just that if you mess up, those fireballs do a lot of damage, which is why having the potion is so handy. Other than that, it was a just a matter of keeping at it and reloading until I finally got that one lucky shot. The Tutorial also has a chest with a powerful bow and 20 arrows, so all SD required was some preparation. I measured out 50 blocks from the entrance, then created a fenced-in area near the front steps. Once night fell and I got a skeleton to appear, I lured it into the fenced-in area, retreated to my remote post, and saved. (Another skeleton somehow made it past my defenses, so I took it out and saved again.) I took a couple potshots at the helpless skeleton before getting a hit; a second finished it off. The achievement didn’t show up, so I simply loaded, backed up a couple steps, and felled it again, and this time it did show up.

I have no idea if you’re “supposed to” use the Tutorial to get these highly advanced achievements, but if you ask me, the fact that it provided my with the perfect setup couldn’t have been a coincidence.[/spoiler]

And make no mistake, saving is going take a COLOSSAL amount of anxiety out of tackling Blazes, which is needed for the End Portal. Make no mistake, the Nether wants to kill you. That’s its purpose. And since dying there boots you back to the real world, you can forget about getting your stuff back. Loading the game takes away that risks, allows me to try things, experiment, find what works and what doesn’t. For example, it’s easy enough to knock Ghast fireballs back with a arrow but next to impossible to hit the Ghast this way.

Hey, you know what, I’m really enjoying this. A lot. I’m getting achievements, and I’m learning lots of the ins and outs of the game so I’m not getting caught off guard all the damn time. I’ll be honest, when I learned that trophies have to be earned in Survival, it hit me like a thunderbolt. I couldn’t believe it. But now I’ve figured out to get a couple trophies I thought would be brutal, I have a much better gameplan for On a Rail and Dispense With This, and I can’t honestly say that there’s an impossible trophy here. Oh yeah, being able to trade for a saddle (it’s a lot of steps, but still easier than searching the whole world and flippin’ hoping it shows up)? Huge improvement. It’s as if not having to live up to the 360’s super-ultra hardcore reputation allowed the enjoyment to get back into the game.

Oh, just one more thing. I’ll try to work out tactics for fighting Endermen and Blazes in Creative. For now, the ways I’ve read to defeat Blazes are “Throw snowballs at them”, “Dig one block down and slash their legs”, and “make a Golden Apple, like you have a damn choice here”. Anybody?

7

It could be different on the ps3 but on the PC, items don’t despawn until the chunk is loaded.

8

Wow. It’s taken me a while to get back here since I’ve been spending so much time playing. I cannot stress how much more I’m enjoying this than the XBox 360 version. The biggest part, obviously, is the trading. Honest to god, I don’t know where I’d be if I couldn’t buy a saddle or diamond pickaxe. (Yes, I was able to find diamonds…nice trophy, too!..but it’s still a vanishingly rare resource and I’m not about to blow in on frivolities.)

Oh, and I got survived my first night out in the dark and slugged it out with Blazes! The former really isn’t a big deal; get iron armor and a good weapon and watch your back. The biggest threats are the spiders because they can pounce all over you if you’re not careful, and even they’re not too painful. Skeletons can be annoying, but they don’t do much damage if you’re in good armor (I guess I wasn’t actually armored during that awful night in the village…it’s been a while, I know I’m missing some details.). Creepers, honestly, are only a pain if they catch you off guard; as long as you avoid places with alcoves or deep pits or tunnels or whatnot, you’re safe.

As for the Blazes…they’re…tricky. See, the thing about the “trench” method is that they can’t see anything directly below them, allowing you to get a free hit. Problem is, even with an enchanted weapon it takes a lot more than one hit to put them down. Snowballs are effective against them, but it takes quite a few to take one down (be prepared to go though a lot of shovels getting the necessary quantity), and if two attack at once, you’re still in a bind. The worst part is that they can hurl fireballs in nearly any direction, same as ghasts, and they pack a heavy punch even with quality armor. Worse, they set you on fire, which eats up two more hearts. I’ve suffered more casualties to those flaming fiends than anything else (even lava), but I kept at it and was able to salvage enough blaze rods for the End Portal. I don’t say this often, but it was fun charging in headfirst, seeing the elephant, screwing up and learning, working out a kinda-workable attack plan, and gradually getting what I wanted. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else, though. Just score some magma cream and nether warts from somewhere, gulp down a fire resistance potion, and kick butt. Much more enjoyable.

So that leaves Ender Pearls. I managed to leave one Priest alive (long story), but now he wants gold ingots, and thaaaaat’s gonna take a while. The only other option is to slay Endermen. After my baptism of fire, I have nothing to fear from these aliens, but slaying them is another story. Well, for one thing, they hardly show up, and contrary to popular belief, they don’t always teleport behind you; sometimes they just make a break for it. Anyone got a reliable method for putting them down? I have a brewing stand and a bow, if those are any help.

Also, seeds. I’ve been going with “1” all this time, as I think I already mentioned. It’s a nice place, actually; four villages along the western edges, large swaths of sand and snow, two relatively small, densely forested areas, and, oh yeah, a whole lot of lava free for the taking. (I’ve had so much fun harvesting obsidian that I now actually have about 80 blocks I don’t have any use for.) I’ve been considering other easy-to-remember seeds, but they tend to be either be the same thing all throughtout or tiny islands separated by water (which I have no interest in ever playing, thank you.). Just throwing this out there, anyone know a seed that has one of the following:

  • The villages close together
  • Gold in readily accessible locations
  • Plenty of diversity in the trees (1 has no jungle trees)
  • A jungle temple

Thanks for any replies. Back to mining, I guess!

9

Endermen are three blocks high. You are two blocks high. Dig a two-block high notch into a hill (or build a small platform just above your head) and look at them to aggro. You should be able to build it in such a way that they can’t get to you, but you’re still able to hit them.

10

Well, I figures this was a game that deserved a second chance, and it didn’t disappoint. I almost can’t believe how much more I enjoyed this than on the XBox 360. And trophies, what I thought would be troublesome, are no problem at all. (In retrospect, I didn’t even have to get The Lie, Return To Sender, or Sniper Duel in the tutorial; they’re plenty simple enough.)

Just a few observations, and then if anyone has answers to my other questions, fine, otherwise I’ll just let this rest:

  • You are going to take damage in fights. You hit them, they hit back. That’s how it is. Expect to take a pounding and be ready for it. At least on Easy, as long as you’re fully armored, you needn’t fear any normal opponent. Even Endermen don’t require any elaborate strategy; let 'em come to you and then hack their legs off. The one thing you really need to avoid are multiple foes; you can REALLY take a pounding from them. Never be too proud to run for it. Oh, and keep that food bar high so you can recover as much as you need to.
  • Speaking of which…I don’t really see the point in taking the time to cook lots of big food items, or even potatoes, because either you need health recovery or you don’t, and if you do, a cookie is a good as a steak for topping out the bar. The only benefit to steaks and the like is the high saturation, and even then it doesn’t take that long to scarf down another carrot or melon slice. Carrots are far more plentiful than any kind of meat, anyway.
  • I cannot overemphasize the importance of saving. Not only for obvious things like not losing your stuff, but for smoothing out the most critical and the most random part of the game, trading. The deals range from great to horrible, and there’s no way to tell what will come up next, so you need that save file. This is especially critical for blacksmiths, who sell the absolutely vital diamond tools, and priests, who eventually offer up Eyes of Ender.
  • The guidebooks are insane. Completely, absolutely insane. They invariably suggest that your start should be a completely random seed in Survival. On Normal. The very first thing you should do for any seed is to load it on Creative and explore it. Very, very thoroughly. Taking special care to note lava pools, temples and other places of interest, and what’s in those mineshafts. Not to mention the End Portal and where exactly you have to place a Nether Portal so that you’re reasonably close to a Nether Fortress. Oh, and to explore as much of levels 1-30 as possible (preferably all of it) and find out just where those gold and diamond deposits are. I swear, I’m going to go completely nuts if I try to find gold or diamonds on Survival.
  • In a word: LOGISTICS. There’s just so much stuff that it’s easy to become overloaded, and it’s also easy to lose or not take something that you’re going to need. Having the right layout for the villages, for the mineshafts, for entering the Nether, etc. is crucial. I haven’t experimented with Ender Chests yet, but they can be a huge godsend, especially for moving things between villages. Oh, and keep those chests organized. Can’t stress this enough. It’s actually preferable to waste space in chests than to be disorganized and not have that emerald or flint and steel when you need it.
  • Other than that, the only thing I still don’t really like about Survival is that it’s limiting. It’s the Too Precious To Use trope, except here using something frivolously can be detrimental, even deadly. How can I think of squandering iron on rails when there’s armor and tools to be made? Ender Chests? Hey, I need those Eyes for the portal! Diamond sword? Um, give how vanishingly few diamonds I have, I think a pickaxe would be a better use. I just can’t consider any of the “fun” stuff with necessities constantly looming. It’s pretty simple as far as I’m concerned: Let your imagination run wild in Creative, do what you have to in Survival.
  • Yes, I’m definitely getting the computer version someday. I’ve seen the YouTube videos, and there’s just way too much fun stuff to pass it up. Just a question though: Are things like 100X TNT and mystery boxes and novelty creepers available to all, or do I have to go to a certain channel or download anything in particular? I’d imagine a Creative menu with every mod added would be pretty gargantuan, to say the least.
11

I don’t know which youtube you watched. Most likely it was modded.

“planetminecraft dot com” has a ton of stuff you can download (mods, textures, adventure maps).

Or, if you’re not computer savy, and you need something a little more click and play, check out “feed the beast dot com” or “technicpack dot net” where you can download launchers that give you access to mod packages.

12

wee bump for this as I’ve recently gotten into the game* and played it a lot (on survival) - reached the End and hit a bit of a can’t-be-arsed activation barrier with respect to taking on the Ender dragon.
Anyone else experience this? Was putting the time in to kill this beast worthwhile? [it looks difficult, so can appreciate that it might be an accomplishment]

Up to now I’ve felt a really nice balance with the sand box character of the game, doing whatever you want, and a sort of progressive structure of getting further into the game. Killing a dragon, though, is sort of banal in the context of this fantastic game, so just wondering what others felt.

*I’ve crawled out from under a rock with computer games - not played for 20 years. My kid has just turned 6, though, and minecraft is really popular with him and his mates. It’s been a lot of fun playing it with him.

13

I’ve never bothered to kill the dragon for the same reasons you list – no real bonus, except for 200 xp levels and an ugly trinket which you can’t even collect if you don’t know the trick. However I’ve recently started playing the game again and will probably take down “Glydia” (as the dragon is called by some players) just to be done with it. Doesn’t seem too hard if your bow skills are good and you have potions.

Now, the Wither boss – that fight’s gonna be a nightmare!!! :eek:

14

Once you kill the dragon you get a portal out of The End, to your spawn point in the overworld. So that means you can make an Enderman farm to gather tons of Ender Pearls and XP.

Ender Pearls are a terrific way to navigate around the world. Just be sure to get Feather Falling IV enchanted on your boots!

15

Yeah, the cheap access to ender pearls is what makes the dragon a worthwhile fight.

(Of course, if you really want, /gamemode c will make it much less of a trial to defeat the dragon…)

16

Thanks for the replies - hadn’t thought about the ender pearls. Done my fair share of trudging round the place so anything to enhance travel sounds good. If you die in the End does your stuff stay there for ages as with the Nether?

Anyhow, I passed over an ocean monument in a boat earlier, which sounds like a good thing to investigate. Think I’ll park the ender dragon temporarily and see what’s what underwater.

17

Have you tried taming a horse?

Yep, unless you fall into the void. I think the Ender Dragon can also destroy your items if she flies through them.