So i decided to play Minecraft

The Game Room
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I’m not sure if it’s an “advantage” or more of an amusement, but you can fire rockets from a crossbow. The more fire charges you use in the rocket, the more damage it does. With a multishot crossbow, you can shoot several rockets at once. I have not done this yet, but I want to see what happens when I shoot a mob at close range with that combo, so it gets hit with three overcharged rockets at the same time. Would I survive the inevitable kablooey?

Also, I started a new single-player world so I could play with the new version 1.19 stuff. I always get anxious dealing with the End. Doing anything near the Void makes me tense up and become increasingly uncomfortable. So, I broke down and turned on the cheat that lets you keep your inventory when you die, so I would not repeatedly lose all my stuff in my inevitable multiple deaths to the dragon, the Void, and the shulkers.

In the process, I made a discovery. With immunity to the fear of loss from the terrors of the End, I didn’t get nervous. My confidence went up and my hesitation went away. I then proceeded to kill the dragon with the simple strategy of scattering three stacks of torches around the center of the main End island to chase away the Endermen, destroying the dragon’s regeneration thingies, and then using my bow to whittle away at the dragon. I just kept moving and dodging, and never died. My cheat never came into play. I then wandered the outer islands, built bridges across the Void, found a boat with an Elytra, found a city and killed enough shulkers to make two shulker chests, and continued to not die! Simply removing my anxiety let me use my skills and bring my A-game. It was awesome.

Then I went to an ancient city and the warden sonic blasted me to smithereens like twenty times… :grin:

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Lol

Because i have backups of my files, i can restore my inventory to whatever was in it last time i backed up if i really want to. I’m still afraid of being killed. Even though the last two times it happened, i got all my stuff back. (One of those times i just drowned making a bubble elevator. There wasn’t anything else especially dangerous around, and i knew i could collect my stuff easily if i died. So maybe that time doesn’t count. But the other time i was in the middle of the ocean.)

I’m still looking for company if you want to check out my (theoretically) multiplayer world.

I may have to try shooting rockets, though. That sounds like fun. And i have paper and gunpowder farms.

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I’ve updated my server to 1.19, but haven’t had time to play.

The reporting rules don’t take effect until 1.19.1. I’m not sure what their business plan for that is. Good moderation is expensive in either time or money. And I certainly don’t want other people moderating my server.

It’s not cheating to set the rules of your own server. Just saying. :smiley:

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I have not read too much about how their moderation and banning mechanism is supposed to work. If someone sets up a private server, and I log directly into it using an IP address, at what point does Microjang (my preferred Microsoft/Mojang portmanteau) have the opportunity to block me from that server? Wouldn’t they be out of the loop? I could see how they would be able to moderate worlds that are hosted through Minecraft Realms, where Microjang actually controls the server, but I don’t get how they would be able to intercede on a privately hosted server, unless it amounts to them turning off the ability for my copy of the software to function in multiplayer mode rather than them doing anything to the server I want to join? :shrug:

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That seems to be what they’ve done in the bedrock version, that has had this sort of moderation for a while. Of course, there aren’t really private servers there, but they don’t just kick you off one server, they kick you off altogether.

It seems like a horrible design. The social rules are so different on different servers. And that’s GOOD. The right thing to do would have been to skip the corporate moderators, and enhance the power of server owners to moderate.

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My server requires players to authenticate through Microjang (I love that name) before they’re allowed to connect. I can switch off the functionality, but it opens the server to all sorts of nasty exploits.

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Oh that’s freaking sick. Tonight I’m going to use this to kill a bunch of 12-year-old boys.

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Here’s a YouTube walkthrough on fireworks construction depending on whether you want greater range (use more gunpowder), more damage (use more firework charges), or blast radius (add fire charges).

The highest damage for a rocket is achieved with seven fireworks charges, one gunpowder, and one paper. That will create low-radius short-range high-damage rockets. By lowering the number of firework charges, you free up room in the crafting grid for gunpowder (range) and/or fire charges (blast radius) at the expense of extreme damage.

Disclaimer: This information is provided solely for the enjoyment of Minecraft fireworks. I disavow any knowledge of plots to blow up young’uns. :grin:

(Oh, and scatter dispensers around the area aimed parallel to the ground, load them with fireworks, and connect them to tripwires. As your victims “young friends” flee your crossbow, the dispensers can fire off more of your “celebratory display”.

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I was watching a series of several Minecraft players doing a modified last man standing game. (Double Life) and you have to hold and load the rockets onto a crossbow buy holding them in your off hand it seemed from that series, but since you can have them pre-loaded it’s not too hard to have a ready supply of crossbows on your bar.

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I’ve made some progress. I dug my way into a dripstone cave. I was both disappointed and relieved that a lot of the biome is solid rock, and i had to look around for an actual cavern. And when i found some caves, they were small. But i did collect enough dripstone and pointy dripstone to build a little dripstone farm and a small lava farm. I was running low on obsidian to make new portals, and felt bad about either strip-mining my accessible lava pools or ripping up ruined portals.

I lost a few lava source blocks by pouring them into lava. Wtf? Lava even destroys lava? But it made a fun little puzzle to solve, and i ended up filling a 4x4 glass basin with lava sources. It looks pretty when it suddenly goes still and smooth. Maybe today I’ll run it long enough to test it, and make sure all the cauldrons fill.

I actually found the cave by listening. When i heard zombies, i knew there must be open space nearby. And then i heard water dripping and thought, “bingo”.

Rather to my surprise, the zombies were coming from a zombie spawner. Overworld monster spawners have really been nerfed by the “need zero light to spawn” rule, and i actually disabled it before i found it, just by placing a torch around the corner from where i was standing. Then i had run to a defensible position to kill the zombies attacking me, and after i did that, i was honestly shocked to continue down the corridor and see a spawner, spinning harmlessly.

But, umm looking for advice again. I’ve found a fortress. There are blazes in it. (Er, on it, i guess.) Also wither skeletons and zombified piglins. And i see some magma cubes (? The lava version of slimes) hopping around nearby. So I’m terrified. Yeah, the whole nether still scares me. And yeah, i have pretty kickass armor. (All diamond except the helmet, which is gold. All with protection 4 except the helmet, which has fire protection 4. All with thorns, mending, and durability.) But monsters are scary. And there are a lot of monsters here. And I’m not very good at killing monsters. I’m embarrassed to admit that on a couple of encounters, monsters impaled themselves on my thorny armor as i uselessly flailed at them with a steak or a block of dirt.

So, um. I need to kill me some blazes. Really, i want to build a blaze farm, which I’m told can work exactly like a skeleton farm, only with lava instead of water to flush them to the abattoir. But i need to find the spawner, and do a lot of construction, without killing myself.

Or maybe i should just be resigned to killing myself several times during construction. I dunno.

I’m resource rich, with farms or villagers for most major resources other than gold, blaze rods, and potions. So assume i can get as much food, iron, diamond stuff, glass, tinted glass, lava, redstone, etc. as i need. What should i do here?

(Aside: the skeleton experience farm has been surprising useful for other stuff. My gold helmet came from a skeleton. I’ve killed so many skeletons enchanting stuff that their drops have provided a nontrivial amount of gold for powered rails, too.)

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I’ve become obsessed with constructing a vast network of scaffolding paths and bridges to everywhere. I have a huge bamboo farm but the only ways I know to gather string are to find it in mines or fashion a spider farm and I’m too lazy to create a spider farm and remember where it is and don’t know how to build one near my base.

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One of the first things i did was to build a spider farm. It’s basically an enormous pit around and under the spawner. I planted bamboo near it, and also built an iron farm above it, and a portal near the iron farm.

I have a ton of portals on the roof of the nether, so that’s mostly how i get around.

But … The spider farm is kinda off the beaten path. I recently came upon a couple of spiders near my “home”, on the mushroom island. And now I’m excited to think there might be a spider spawner there, which would be super convenient.

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My next project is building an enormous statue of myself. It’s gonna come out looking terrible but I don’t care. It’ll be built in granite mostly, but with scary eyes and a huge iron sword.

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:laughing:

That’s awesome.

I’ve been collecting granite when i dig for other reasons. I think it’s a very pretty stone. Both my slime farm and my creeper farm are made largely of granite.

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But if i ever make this blaze farm, it’s going to be mostly made of tinted glass.

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My crystal palace looks good too - more or less entirely made of tinted glass, with glowstone framing - but I never use it for anything.

If I had a wish for future fixes, I wish the world was higher and lower. As I am sure you all know, the world’s lateral dimensions are ludicrously enormous, much larger than the surface of Earth. Most of that is of course unusable; I could never in my life explore it all. But the height and depth limits are fairly modest. You could not build a scale model of, say, the CN Tower or Burj Khalifa; those edifices are WAY higher than the Minecraft height limit. You couldn’t quite construct an Empire State Building unless you dynamited a huge hole and built it from there.

I would be totally fine with a Minecraft world that was a quarter the surface area but three times higher. I mean, you’re still never gonna use the whole surface.

My favourite thing is building big things. My primary “house” is a tower reaching to the height limit and I was kinda disappointed when I hit it.

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Huh. One of the first things i did was build a tower over my home, mostly so I could find my home. I have a lousy sense of direction, in the real world and also in Minecraft. And of course it has a ladder, because i do enjoy climbing up high and looking at the scenery. But if i go too high, i lose scenery into the render distance, so my observation towers don’t come close to the height limit.

I haven’t gotten into high things. The only really tall things i have are platforms to isolate the creeper and slime farms, so they are the only places monsters can spawn. And… They are just giant piles of scaffolding, with a slab roof and a glass enclosure at the top, so i don’t need to worry about falling off or getting killed by phantoms when i hang out there.

But i agree that the world is needlessly huge side to side, and surprisingly limited up and down. I take it you loved the caves and cliffs update. :grinning:

I may actually be running out of scaffolding, and maybe i should afk at my string farm sometime soon. I lost a lot of it to blazes. :laughing: The tunnel i was digging in the nether turned out to be well above the fortress, and i ended up jumping down and building scaffolding back up. That wasn’t very stable. But now i have a scaffolding tower surrounded by glass. I suppose stone would be safer, but i haven’t seen any ghasts around, and it’s much nicer being able to see out. And all this is probably temporary. If i succeed in building a blaze farm, i will be building a new portal right next to it, for easy access

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I am really loving the dynmap mod, by the way. It gives you a block-level map of the known world, that you can view in a browser. (Obviously, you can scroll out to get less detail and more scope.) It allows you to place dyn-map readable signs, too. So all my portals have signs that i can hover over on the map, and read.

Before i loaded it, i used most of my iron to make in-world maps, and i relied on them extensively. And i really didn’t think I’d be able to deal with the nether at all, because i get lost so easily. Dynmap still isn’t great with the nether, since it’s so 3-D, and the map only shows the highest block (mostly… It skips the nether roof, of course) but it shows me where i am, and where my nearest portal is, and whether i am moving towards or away from that portal.

Yeah, you can, in theory, do that by looking at your coordinates. My son can. Maybe you can. I can’t, at least, not without a lot of extra work on my part. This makes it so much more fun to play. I’ve stopped getting lost, and can enjoy exploring.

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I just use a compass and I create landmarks. I go old school.

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While constructing a blaze farm, my cowardly method is to leave the interior of the spawning box temporarily divided up into multiple floors of half-slabs spaced 1.5 blocks apart. I can crouch and walk around in those spaces, but it is too short for a blaze to spawn. I don’t have to fight the blazes while getting everything configured for the farm. Once it is all done, with lava in place, I knock the half-slab floors out, starting with the bottom one. I stay above the blazes and they dip into the lava and go down the hole.