For what it’s worth, downloaded the update just now and played for 10 minutes. I died (several times) upon reaching Hell, and upon respawning, my stuff was all still safe and sound in my storage boxes. I still haven’t figured out how to stay alive for more than 30 seconds in the Hell universe though. Those jellyfish things are pretty tough.
The stuff in your inventory is what you lose…that’s what I meant to say. :smack:
Oh. Well yeah: I lost everything in my inventory, just like I always do when I die. And when I went back to the hell dimension, it was gone. I.e. not floating around in the area where I’d died. I assumed this is because your stuff always disappears if you travel too far from it, and another dimension is altogether too far. Fortunately, I brought almost nothing to the hell dimension on my first trip – just a few stone tools and a couple dozen torches.
Maybe I’ll experiment with dying near my spawn point, and seeing whether my drops are still there…
Confirmed it. You currently do not drop your inventory when you die: it just disappears.
However, on another one of my worlds, I died before the update, downloaded the update, and then signed back on. After respawning, all my items had dropped in the area of my death. So this bug only applies to deaths that occur after the update.
Not sure if it’s a bug or not, but I built a portal, looked around for a bit, then returned–to find myself in a different area of the world–the game constructed a new return portal for me. Either one of my aboveground portals went to the one in the Nether, but taking the one in the Nether back only took me to the second one.
My best guess is that maybe the code to create the Nether portal generated the terrain first, then found that the portal would have been made in an illegal place, so moved it to the nearest legal space, which then would change the overworld destination.
Which is annoying, since it created the new portal smack in the middle of my animal canal farm, not the place I really want a “chance of a ghast spawning.”
I’m a mostly-peaceful player anyway, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to turn mobs on with portals going where I don’t want them and full inventory-loss on death.
It seems like it may be fixed now, I installed a fresh minecraft on my mom’s computer and used an imported save. I died after exploring the Nether for a little and my stuff flied out of my body as normal.
The world generation seems to be semi-random. On two different instances of the same save I got different hells, but with similar features. For instance, in both of them I was on land very far from the ground, and they both had a large pit of lava in a similar place in the distance and further, they both had a lava waterfall almost right next to the gate. However, it was noticeably, definitely different.
Though I had the same gate issue as you, exiting from the Angel Island gate spits me out on some random shore pretty east of my island/base. I was almost completely lost until I climbed the mountains to try and find my island as a “where the hell am I?” beacon and it turned out to be JUST past the mountain across from my main base mountain. On the plus side there seemed to be a rather large supply of clay I happily mined on said shore…
Q: Has anyone noticed a dramatic increase in spawn rates since the update? People on the MC forums are complaining about monsters spawning inside their secure zones, though I haven’t had a problem myself yet.
It seems that way to me, but I haven’t played a lot since the update. I did seem to spend much of the day post-update clearing off monsters from my immediate area.
The new version includes new spawning behaviour. Mobs will spawn in brighter areas the further underground you go now. The numbers are also increased somehow. I believe notch has said he is working to balance the new system.
Personally, I’m only playing offline on the next oldest version until the issue is fixed.
Yeah…right after posting my last message, I got punk’d by a zombie in my basement. Good thing it wasn’t a creeper, or I’d be dead. And it’s plenty bright down there, tons of torches everywhere. I’ve also been reading up on the exact changes made to the spawning system, and it’s appaling…basically, once you’re at level 40 or lower, you need torches no less than 2 spaces apart & off the floor to be safe. That’s not even gold level, let alone diamond/redstone; any sort of mid-depth mining is thoroughly impractical now.
At least Notch is aware of the problem and has promised to fix it – but that does mean re-lighting all the previous safe areas is a waste of time, because it will get patched eventually. (No idea when, though!)
So you haven’t installed the Halloween Update yet? I didn’t either, until the inventory/death bug was fixed…but that’s before I was aware of the spawning problem, and it’s too late to roll back now. 
Think I’ll go on vacation for awhile, to explore the new biomes. I’d rather be in the wilderness where I know it’s dangerous, than inside my supposedly safe house which ATM is anything but safe now.
So I finally managed to make a safe haven in the Nether.
I built a portal room in my house, and built a little “portal shack” at the corresponding nether portal. But that nether portal sent me back to an earth portal that’s about a three-minute walk away from my house. So I did the calculations – by counting exactly how many squares away it sent me – and built a new portal in the nether that corresponds with the portal in my house. I had to dig into the side of a mountain in the nether to do it. And it totally works: once opened, my heart-of-the-mountain portal in the nether is now hooked up with the portal in my house, and each goes both ways.
Next, I dug straight into the mountain in the nether in a very long straight line. I went through four stone pickaxes. Then I built another portal at the end of that tunnel. Unsurprisingly it popped me out in a totally unfamiliar location on Earth. I was hoping I’d be in a different biome, but no such luck. I went back and grabbed a compass and then tried an experiment. I went through my new portal at dawn and then started walking toward my house, following the compass. I made it home right as the sun was setting. That’s a pretty good distance! I think I’m gonna set up an outpost in my new location. I’ll conquer the locals and eventually annex the place into Seltzerland.
So, the portal bug has been fixed? I’m not building a Nether Portal until it’s fixed.
In fact I probably won’t visit the Nether until I’ve exhausted all possibilities that the pre-update game has to offer. (Sheesh, I haven’t even found a dungeon spawner yet…)
Which “portal bug” do you mean? There are several buggy things about the portals at the moment. If you mean that the nether portal doesn’t necessarily take you back to your original earth portal… no, that isn’t fixed, and I’m not sure it ever will be. You’ve apparently got to build the “correct” nether portal yourself, as I did.
The theory I’ve heard (and it makes sense to me), is that when you enter the nether for the first time, its landscape is generated irrespective of where you placed your earth portal. If the corresponding nether position to your earth portal is inaccessible (e.g. deep inside a mountain, or floating way in the air), then the game will place your exit portal in the nearest possible spot in the nether. Of course, when you go through that game-created portal in the nether, it won’t correspond to your original earth portal, and a new one will be created somewhere on earth that corresponds with the nether portal. So to make your original earth portal link BOTH ways to a nether portal, you’ve got to find that inaccessible spot in the nether and build a portal there. For me, it was deep inside a mountain.
Honest question from someone who’s only vaguely aware of this game and how it works. I picked on this post because it was handy, but there are plenty more examples of what I’m talking about in this thread.
My question is this: Is this kind of thing not incredibly tedious and boring? A lot of the things I’ve read about how great this game is seem to involve (presumably) hours and hours and hours of the sort of mindnumbing grinding that people hate so passionately in other games. What am I missing here? I get that the game is huge, and there’s tons to do, and no limit to creativity - so far so good. But does this sort of thing not detract from the fun at all?
Good question, I think there’s a key difference in sandbox and not sandbox. In, say, WoW, grinding is hated because it’s for a specific goal that’s imposed by THE GAME ITSELF. That is, you have to spend hours killing boars for a quest, or you have to do the same quest 1600 times to get reputation so your character can gear/level and you can conquer new content, help your guild, etc. It’s the sense that you HAVE to get that gold and there’s this mind numbing obstacle in your way.
In Minecraft the only goals are really what you set for yourself. Do you really care if you break into a cave and get diamond so you can make a portal to the nether? Do you care if you ever find gold? Do you just want to make a sky island or a fortress and just clear-cut mountains to get the materials? None of this is a “goal” of them game. You can, literally, do whatever you want. There’s no reason you must get any material except for convenience or to mine more rare materials. If you just want a bunch of dirt filling your inventory with stone shovels is fine, cheap, and easy. It won’t be as fast as a diamond shovel, but we’re talking barely not as fast.
It’s sort of like being bored in class. You tap your pencil on your desk because you’re bored. It amuses you because you’re bored and that’s how you chose to alleviate your boredom. But now imagine a hypothetical class on the proper pencil tapping technique. Suddenly it becomes a means to getting an A in the class. It’s no longer something you choose to do when you want to to alleviate boredom, it’s something that’s boring if you don’t want to do it that’s an obstacle to something greater (your A) and I think it’s that feeling that makes something a “grind.” It has nothing to do with the task is repetitive, but rather whether the repetitive task is a forced obstacle or something the user chooses to do.
Well, a little bit. That particular stunt (i.e. digging a straight line deep into a mountain) probably took me less than ten minutes – digging in minecraft is extremely quick. But those ten minutes of repetitive digging are pretty boring.
However, episodes where you’re spending ten minutes doing something boring and repetitive are pretty rare. There’s just not much reason to do anything where you’re not exploring or building or problem solving.
If you’re asking whether my little trek from my new portal to my base is tedious and repetitive, the answer is no. While it did last almost ten minutes, I was climbing over new terrain, swimming across miniature seas, seeing new vistas, and, a couple of times, stopping briefly to gather uncommon resources I spotted along the way.
Check out a couple of videos from this series which show one guy’s game with his running commentary, starting from his opening screen where he knows almost nothing about the game, until some 50 videos later, where he’s built himself a gigantic empire. They’re surprisingly addicting. There are occasions where you watch him do something boring and repetitive, but they’re pretty rare.
On preview, I see Jragon has a good perspective as well.
Yes, that’s the bug – it’s not so much not returning to your portal, but I’ve heard that the new portal sometimes appears in a very inconvenient place, such as right in the middle of your safe zone or on top of a bridge you spent hours working on. I’d rather not take that risk.
It can get a little tedious, especially if you dig in a branch mine for several hours and can’t find a single diamond…the end result is almost always worth it, though.
To expand on what Jragon said, it’s not exactly comparable to grinding in WoW or Oblivion. In those games, which are combat and quest oriented, grinding for resources and/or experience distracts from game’s main goal, which is killing stuff. 
Minecraft allows you to kill stuff too, but the core game is more like SimCity; sure, the individual details may seem boring, but it’s all towards achieving a goal. There’s also something serene about the experience itself – like gardening, or fishing, or knitting in real life.
So what? If it spawns there, knock it down. It’s 14 blocks of easy, risk-free obsidian. And if you build the “correct” portal in the nether, the “incorrect” one on Earth won’t come back.
Hmm, good point.
It does seem like you’ve figured out a good workaround to the problem. I’ll have to try it out, once I finally visit the Nether.
I was making a scale model of the Washington Monument, but I hit the ceiling about halfway up. I could’ve sworn I read it was way higher.