I pit Minecraft

Yes, I hate Minecraft. I hate it because every 5-year old kid on the planet can intuitively play it and I struggle with it.

The only reason I’m trying to play it is so that when me and my friends get together, I don’t have to sit the conversation out when they whack off about the goddamned game.

In the first place, I couldn’t even buy it online. I kept getting error messages every time I entered my card info. I searched the web. Other people had problems too, and nobody had a solution. I emailed help. They said to try buying it from Wal-Mart. WAL-MART! What is this, the Stone Age? When does anybody have to go to an actual STORE to buy a computer game?

My friend hosts a MC server and sent me the address. I kept getting error messages. Oh, the address changed. Here’s the new one. Still couldn’t get in. I sent him screenshots of every goddamned step I was taking to log in. I never had this much trouble logging in to ANY game before. He sends me back a movie capture of him logging in. The only thing he did that I didn’t do was hit Refresh first. REFRESH? Do I have to do this every time? Why can’t I just click and go? Why do I keep having to do these goddamned multipart rituals to play a game that barely looks a couple of years more advanced than Pong?

I finally get on and have no idea what to do. I go to the Minecraft site and they have introduction videos. Jesus, can’t I just go ahead and play without having to take notes? This is just legos online. 5-year olds build the fucking Sistene Chapel and I can’t even figure out how to build the MC equivalent of a hobo’s refrigerator box.

Now’s the part where I have to *unlearn *to use the controls, because my mentality is already configured to use movement keys like I did in WoW and many other MMORPGs. Then, I could just hold down both mouse keys to move forward and turn with the mouse. Not here. I have to use the stupid ASDW keys, which I never got used to in the first place. I have to train both hands for movement instead of just one. WHY DO I HAVE TO DO THIS? SHIT!

I finally get the notion that I position the cross hairs and hold down the 1 key to collect stuff. I do that, then build a worktable. I look at the recipe page to see how to build sand blocks, which I guess I use to make my structure. The page shows 4 sand in the bottom left corner, one per square. I find that I can’t single-select from a stack. I have to use the right mouse key to DIVIDE the stack. So now I have two stacks of 20 when I want just one. Do I have to keep dividing the stacks? Why can’t I just hold down the control key and single-click like I could in WoW? Or was it EQ? DAOC?

I read the online guides, and they say nothing about single-selecting. Actually, it turns out I don’t have to. I can just spread the stack along the squares and mass produce. But see, it never occurs to me to do it that way because I’m so used to doing it another way. I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO UNLEARN AND RELEARN! I’m 54. That shit gives me a headache. I want to use the vast bank of knowledge it took me a lifetime to accumulate and wing it from there. But 5-year old kids can do this no problem because they grow up using computer interactions. It’s as natural to them as breathing. This makes me feel stupid and cripples me with low self-esteem. Fuck all those goddamned kids for growing up in a more stellar time than me.

Wait, I have to make food too? What happens if I don’t have food? I don’t want to die because I don’t have food. How long till I need food? I have to build an oven or something first, and I don’t know where to find the materials. Will I starve before I build a goddamned oven? Will I repeatedly die if I don’t figure out how to make food? Why are you piling all this shit on me when I can’t even make a refrigerator box yet? Am I really going to have to beg the other players on the server? Self-esteem meter plunges even lower.

So I start plowing through the beach to collect sand blocks so I can make something. Then I get attacked by the lamest monster possible, a lego zombie. I die immediately. How do I fight it? Can I fight it? I look up Minecraft Combat. It tells me everything EXCEPT which keys to push to fight. It tells me all the weapons I can make with materials I don’t have. It tells me all the fighting styles available, when I just want to know “use weapon.” It gives me a big long list of Minecraft monsters and says Zombies are the easiest to kill. WHAT? I’M BEING REPEATEDLY SLAUGHTERED BY THE EASIEST TO KILL MONSTER? WHY CANT I KILL IT? Nowhere can I find how to actually DO combat, because it’s such an easy thing to pick up, nobody bothers to document it, since it’s such a minor issue and those fucking 5-year olds already instinctively know how to do it. FUCK THIS GODDAMNED GAME!

What I especially do not want to hear is “Oh, how can you be having problems? It’s so easy” or “There’s a much better way of doing it than that” or “My 5-year old kid had no problems playing this and you do?” GO TO HELL MINECRAPPERS!!!

I respawn and find myself at the base of a massive complex railroad structure that somebody else built, with signs, blinking lights and signals, like some archaeological wonder out of Dubai. I realize I’m THAT FAR behind everybody else. They’re going to look out their Penthouse windows and see my crappy refrigerator box made out of sand. It’s going to take me years to catch up with them, and I hate being the one who has to catch up. They’re going to dump all their unused crap on me and treat me like they’re visiting me in a nursing home. FUCKERS!

OK, rant over. Guess I’ll try this stupid game again.

Moved to The Game Room.

To fight a zombie, equip a sword. Click the mouse button and you swing the sword. Do that in a zombie’s face and you’ll kill him.

Wait, you need a sword. OK, you can make a stone sword. Collect two stone blocks and a stick and arrange them in a line with the stick at the bottom for a handle. Sword.

Wait, you need stone. OK, you gotta mine that shit. OK, you need a pick. You don’t have a pick? OK, make a pick. Outta what? Wood.

Start punching trees. Collect some wood blocks. Turn it into wood planks. Turn the wood planks into sticks. Put two sticks to make the handle, and three wood planks to make the pick-y thing.

Oh, you’ll need a crafting table.

You know what? Don’t go out at night. You need a shelter. So…make a shelter out of dirt. You can punch dirt. Zombies only come out at night. And underground. Unless there’s light. So your house will need a torch. So you need stick and charcoal.

Wait, you know what? Do what all the five year olds do. Go to youtube and watch minecraft tutorials.

There you go.

Minecraft Wiki

The first time I ever died in Minecraft was by drowning. In a small pond.

Pretty embarrassing in hindsight.

Anyway, Minecraft has an easy learning curve, as games go. We’re not talking about Eve Online here.

Get ready to have trouble keeping up with everything else in the world.

When I first started Minecraft I felt like you. I kept dying repeatedly. I thought the game was stupid. I just didn’t understand why it was becoming so popular. Then I watched a youtube tutorial, only it wasn’t just a tutorial, it was a Let’s Play. From there, the entire concept of entertainment was completely changed for me. Minecraft was a life-altering event, I’m not sure any other game will ever have that effect on me again.

But if you don’t know what you’re doing, the first day or two can be a real bitch.

If you’re near a mountain or big hill, just dig out a room to shelter in. Find wood (to make a bed, tools and torches), wool (to make a bed) and coal (torches). Once you have a safe place, the game gets a lot easier).

Why the heck would you start on a multiplayer server rather than playing standalone and with MOBs turned off until you’ve learned the controls?

Also, ignore the sand, you need wood first. Lots of wood, first, then some stone.

There are certain classes of games that just don’t grab me. Minecraft is one of them. I just don’t have the drive or desire or, more importantly, the capacity to create in such a freeform space. For this reason, I was very surprised when Fallout 4’s settlement building grabbed me. I built two buildings!

I’m a little bit better at “survival” games like don’t starve, but not by much. I need a certain amount of structure to really enjoy a game.

In a very real way, I envy people who play Minecraft.

I’m guessing because (a) he has friends who kept saying “Play with us!” so he wanted to jump right in and (b) he underestimated the initial complexity until you learn the controls.

I’m a lot like you in that I like having a structure to play with. I know people who are happy as a clam to spend 2 hours with graph paper drafting the perfect house and that’s just not for me. I can have a cool idea but about halfway through building the second story, I get bored out of my mind and go off to do other crap.

There are two ways to make minecraft more fun for people like us. The first is puzzle and adventure maps. People have figured out how to create worlds you can download from the internet that have a series of puzzles to figure out or an adventure you can go on which gives you the necessary structure.

The other option is modded minecraft. If you have an even moderately capable gaming computer, you can add all sorts of mods to your game to give you things to work toward. Like you could add Thaumcraft and try to get to being able to craft boots of the traveler*, or Mekanism and try to quintuple your ore output, or Galacticraft and try to survive on the moon.
*Which are amazing and will slightly ruin you for any minecraft without them. They improve your movement through water, speed up your walking pace and allow you to treat a one block height difference as if it were a halfblock.

Re the OP:

I don’t know why you had issues with getting the game online. I bought my copy a long time ago and I don’t remember what I did and they could have changed it since then.

I don’t know why you have to hit refresh when joining multiplayer but I often have to as well. If you saved the address as a server, at least it will already be in the list though so the process shouldn’t be any more difficult than logging in, selecting multiplayer, hitting refresh and joining the server which is not any more complex than most other computer games.

Right-clicking while holding some number of items will only place one.

In any mode but creative and any difficulty but peaceful, you will need to eat regularly. If you don’t care about dying and you are not on the hardcore difficulty (which is only relevant if you are playing on a singleplayer world as the gimmick of hardcore is that it deletes your worldsave if you die and obviously a random player dying isn’t going to delete a server world) then you can ignore eating, die, respawn, go where you died and pick up all your stuff and then keep playing as dying resets your hunger and health.

Easiest sources of food are probably breaking oak tree leaves for apples, killing cows, sheep and chickens which you can eat raw for a little benefit or cook in a furnace for a bigger boost. Most people end up growing wheat fields for bread using seeds gotten from breaking grass.

Left-clicking with an empty hand counts as punching and it’s how you’ll break many of the blocks in the game until you have the materials to craft tools, but you can also inflict damage. I think it takes 20 punches to kill a zombie. It is possible to hold one zombie at bay with punching but usually where there’s one zombie, there’s multiple zombies and someone will get you from behind. Torches are your friend.

I thought this was going to be a rant about all the stupid changes they’ve made to the game recently.

Case in point: the upcoming Combat Update (1.9) makes drastic changes to the combat system. Now you will need to “charge up” your attacks by holding down the mouse button; spam-clicking to attack no longer works, which is gonna suck the first time you get cornered by a zombie horde. They’re also adding an off-hand slot which means blocking with your sword will no longer work – you’ll need to equip a shield for that.

This isn’t the first time they’ve mucked with game, either. Most of the new “boss” monsters – the Ender Dragon, the Wither, that thing in the Ocean Temple – have no purpose being in a game which earned its fortune as a free-form sandbox builder. Many “new” blocks (diorite, granite, etc.) only serve to clutter up your inventory with useless junk. Trading with NPC villagers has been broken, and re-broken, several times over. And then there’s the hunger system, which as you discovered requires you to eat food constantly to stay alive. Which means you need to spend most of your time creating and maintaining farms, since domesticated animals don’t respawn, and most food doesn’t grow naturally. How much fun is that, really???

The change which finally drove me away from the game was changing how anvils work. When you enchant weapons, tools or armor, the only way to repair them is by using an anvil. You can also improve enchantments with an anvil, which can create pretty powerful stuff. Well, the game designers decided people were getting too much powerful gear, so they limited anvil usage by making each repair cost TWICE as much each time, until it costs 40 experience points just to buff out the dings in your diamond boots – and beyond that you can’t repair anything at all, since anvil levels are capped. That…is total bullshit.

So, you may ask, why not install a mod to fix it? Because, for all its hype, Minecraft is the most mod-unfriendly game EVER. Installing any mod requires a software engineering degree to get working properly – perhaps I’m being hyperbolic, but in an age where nearly all games install mods merely by dragging files into a simple folder, it really is asking too much to require the user to tinker with a whole bunch of internal game files (and don’t forget to make backups!) The only mod I could find that fixed anvil mechanics, without adding a bunch of other pointless crap, didn’t work – it works with 1.8.3, but not 1.8.4 or beyond, because every tiny little update the game designers make has the side effect of randomly busting mods that have nothing to do with the update. So, if your game becomes mod-dependent, and the mod-maker decides not to make updates to keep up with the game, you’re screwed. The game designers have been talking about added a Mod API for years, ever since the early beta days, but so far NOTHING has ever come of it; and now that Notch has retired to his Beverly Hills mansion, it’s unlikely to ever happen.

So yeah, fuck Minecraft. Fuck Minecraft, and the horse you can’t even ride in on before checking a wiki first to figure out how to ride a goddamn horse.

Well, with that, I would like to suggest taking a look at “feed-the-beast” dot com.

The site contains a minecraft launcher that allows you to pick from quite a few different mod packs, (and texture packs) with, IIRC, very little to no coding by the user. FTB will create a separate minecraft folder for each modpack you try, so your vanilla minecraft is untouched. They also have several modpacks that are running a couple older versions of minecraft, if you don’t like the latest.

I could never get mods to run on my own (despite carefully following youtube install instructions), but Feed the Beast works fine for me.

P.S.: I am using the PC version. I don’t know what to recommend for console users.

I have heard about MineCraft, but I am similar to the OP in that I am not very good at learning video games in today’s environment, and worse, I don’t have the desire (or time, really) to put the effort in to learn. I guess it is like everything. If you are interested in it, spending hours playing is fun, not work.

I have nephews who are really into the game, so I tried to learn something about it. I took a look and couldn’t believe how primative the graphics are. Literally, it looked like legos on a screen to me and yet… It is amazingly popular.

But what truly amazed me is that someone can damage someone else’s work. Apparently, one kid built a rollercoaster out of wood. Worked for weeks on it. Someone else went to look at the rollercoaster while holding a torch, and since the coaster was made from wood, he accidentally burned it down. I couldn’t believe it.

Does this game not permit people to save their work? Or, if you are playing in a multi-player environment, are you at the mercy of anyone else who finds your world?

Screw that. If I would ever play this game, I would want to play in my own sandbox. I would hope that if I built something I wanted to show the world that I could preserve it, so someone else couldn’t (either by accident or on purpose) destroy a week’s worth of work.

I’ve seen a few videos on youtube, showing what people have created, and it is amazing.

There are some things you can do in a server environment to protect things. The spawn point is protected so that a malicious player can’t drop everyone spawning in into lava or the void and OPs can control how far that protection extends. A lot of servers will have methods of protecting villages or bases so only the players who ‘own’ that area can modify anything. I don’t play very often on public servers but a well-run server will have mods who are responsive to griefing as it’s called.

And unless this is some weird modded version of MC, torches won’t set anything on fire. He must have placed a bucket of lava or had some flint and steel or something of that nature. It’s rather difficult to ‘accidentally’ set things on fire in MC. By far the greatest number of accidental fires I’ve seen are caused by people trying to add a fireplace into their wooden house.

I tried again. I fell in water and couldn’t swim out. Fuck this game.

Space bar.

In your defense, I know another player who died this way and was at least as upset. But then, she was five.

:wink:

Gee, thanks.

It’s like the game doesn’t want me to play it.