Minecraft - f13 Server is: chugging along... again (Read OP)

[Paelos]

I would be the fastest thing on two legs!

[Mrbloodworth]

I wonder what the time numbers are.

EDIT: Potions!?!

[NiX]

I wonder what the time numbers are.

EDIT: Potions!?!

That's the word. Alchemy baby!

[Sky]

Niiiice.

I've been wanting more crafting for useful stuff that's not related to electrical engineering  Good step in making the game more gamey, which is great!

[Ingmar]

That's just what the xp bar is going to get you - skill points to buy stuff, and I believe the plan is it will all go away when you die.

[Malakili]

I'm fine with potions, but I frankly don't see why this game needs RPG style experience or progression, the natural progression from the materials you have access to seems to do a fine job in my opinion.  Don't feel especially passionate about it either way though.

[koro]

I'm fine with potions, but I frankly don't see why this game needs RPG style experience or progression, the natural progression from the materials you have access to seems to do a fine job in my opinion.  Don't feel especially passionate about it either way though.

Some concrete set-by-the-game-itself goals would be a great addition to the game, especially for the types of folks who really like Minecraft, but for whom the lack of at least a tiny bit of directed experience drastically cuts down on their desire to play once the novelty wears off.

I think the creative builder aspects of the game are pretty well taken care of at this point, so I welcome more "gamey" systems being implemented.

[Malakili]

I'm fine with potions, but I frankly don't see why this game needs RPG style experience or progression, the natural progression from the materials you have access to seems to do a fine job in my opinion.  Don't feel especially passionate about it either way though.

Some concrete set-by-the-game-itself goals would be a great addition to the game, especially for the types of folks who really like Minecraft, but for whom the lack of at least a tiny bit of directed experience drastically cuts down on their desire to play once the novelty wears off.

I think the creative builder aspects of the game are pretty well taken care of at this point, so I welcome more "gamey" systems being implemented.

The moment I feel like I *have* to do anything in Minecraft is probably the moment I never boot it up again.  If I am in the minority, so be it, but I if you don't like the game enough to just play it when its sitting there, I don't see why you'd like it more when suddenly the game wants you to go explore the cave or whatever.

[Sky]

If there's cool stuff to find in the cave! Right now, the treasure chests are pretty lame. Apparently the big reward is finding a monster spawner to build a farm around? Yeah, the game has way more potential than that.

I don't see how it makes you *have* to do anything. Like building? Build! Me, I like exploring and it's really a great platform for exploration that right now is a bit sparse on rewards for doing so.

I'd also like to see it more about alchemy, where rewards come from crafting, rather than an rpg system. Should gut the xp bar and xp orbs imo. Tie it all to crafting.

[Malakili]

If there's cool stuff to find in the cave! Right now, the treasure chests are pretty lame. Apparently the big reward is finding a monster spawner to build a farm around? Yeah, the game has way more potential than that.

I don't see how it makes you *have* to do anything. Like building? Build! Me, I like exploring and it's really a great platform for exploration that right now is a bit sparse on rewards for doing so.

I'd also like to see it more about alchemy, where rewards come from crafting, rather than an rpg system. Should gut the xp bar and xp orbs imo. Tie it all to crafting.

Oh I'm all for adding in more cool stuff to explore.  I love exploring, hell I set up a hut on the current f13 server on top of a labyrinthine abandoned mine shaft and STILL haven't finished exploring it.  My point is that I'd like my exploring and adeventuring to be self motivated, rather than feeling obligated to do some 'quest' because the game attaches a reward to it.

[Mrbloodworth]

If there's cool stuff to find in the cave! Right now, the treasure chests are pretty lame. Apparently the big reward is finding a monster spawner to build a farm around? Yeah, the game has way more potential than that.

Well, yeah, the small updates have been mostly foundational work.

Dungeons: The loot box and the mossey cobblestone are the rewards. Farm is emergent behavior.

Abandoned mines: loot boxes, high amount of materials in the walls and pre-made mine track are the rewards. Again, a farm is secondary.

Strongholds: They dont have NPC's yet nor monsters or chests. So, loot from monsters, chests and again non-craftable block type are the rewards. This also includes exploration and adventure of a standard dungeon crawl.

Neather Strongholds: See above but with nether stuff.

NPC Villages: Potential to trade with them. Or raise the town, loot chests and or taking over the structures or looting the materials they are made from. Some muttering about factions too.

Player land ( Ala Wurm ): is also supposed to be possible, where you lay claim to an area and have management rights.

Figure that all this stuff is random, including stronghold layouts. And its all rather exciting. Close to the "Dream" Sandbox MMO of legend.

[Sky]

Well, the mines, sure. Track, access to wood underground, and increased ore drops. The loot boxes are trivial, in my single-player world with the massive abandoned mine, I've found dozens of chests, nothing worth a damn. Pulled way more out of the mine itself. As a placeholder, I can understand, but I do hope that improves.

The rest needs a lot of content addition, but since I started with 1.8, the unrealized potential in "dungeons", strongholds and villages is palpable.

The player land comment touches on something I was thinking about with pvp: it seems kinda pointless when anyone can just bust up your defenses with an axe, yeah? If you could build a structure with some kinda of ACL, seems like it would lead to a better pvp component.

edit And I'm not necessarily advocated 'directed' gameplay, quests and whatever. Just that I like building and exploring, but would also like some point to it. The exploring is great, but all you find is the same generic landscape filled with the same handful of generic mobs. Building is of course really great, but once you build something, it's just kinda there. Hey, cool tower. Now I can...sit around in my tower. So I guess I'm saying just add more elements, something like a Daggerfall dungeon instead of a one-square room of mossy cobble and a lame box, yeah? A magic sword in the loot box, something with +3dmg to skeletons or something.

[koro]

I think the best loot I've ever found in an abandoned mine chest was two diamonds and some melon seeds.

I was more excited for the seeds. Melons are godly.

And anyway, I think what I'd want is less strictly directed gameplay and more of something to give you a bit of a push in a direction if you are stuck trying to think of something to do.

[NiX]

I think the best loot I've ever found in an abandoned mine chest was two diamonds and some melon seeds.

I was more excited for the seeds. Melons are godly.

And anyway, I think what I'd want is less strictly directed gameplay and more of something to give you a bit of a push in a direction if you are stuck trying to think of something to do.

O rly? I just started farming melons. They are pretty godly in that you never have to replant the stem.

[Mrbloodworth]

something like a Daggerfall dungeon instead of a one-square room of mossy cobble and a lame box, yeah?

That's what a stronghold is. Multi-room/Door/Bars/Hallways randomly generated dungeon.

[Ingmar]

The problem with the strongholds is you currently only get 3 of them per world or whatever, instead of a chance of them in every chunk etc., and they're in a fixed certain radius outside of spawn. I want to say they've fixed that in 1.9.

[koro]

I think the best loot I've ever found in an abandoned mine chest was two diamonds and some melon seeds.

I was more excited for the seeds. Melons are godly.

And anyway, I think what I'd want is less strictly directed gameplay and more of something to give you a bit of a push in a direction if you are stuck trying to think of something to do.

O rly? I just started farming melons. They are pretty godly in that you never have to replant the stem.

They are pretty much the most efficient food in the game. Only one hunger restored per slice, but each melon restores 3-7 hunger compared to 2.5 hunger for 3 wheat, and melons in an even somewhat efficient farm sometimes respawn faster than you can harvest them. It's pretty great.

[Fordel]

Plus when you harvest melons, they cause a melon slice explosion!



I still like bread for space saving.

[Count Nerfedalot]

OK, show and tell time.  The Countess and I started playing about four weeks ago.  In spite of that, we still have our jobs, but it's a close thing.  This may even be more addicting than your first Civ game or your first MMORPG.

We started in peaceful mode, then restarted a new world (all 1.7) with monsters turned on after a week.  The first few evenings were chaotic and brutal.  Our spawn point is on a beach, half the time we landed under water.  It's a forest biome, and extremely hilly, so wood is abundant but visibility was negligible so spotting creepers before they hisssss-BOOM was problematic and the tree jumping leaping spiders of doom were a constant menace. 

We picked the biggest hill in sight to be our base and proceeded to build on top of it, battling creepers and spiders every night as we built a crude keep, cleared trees, built a wall, etc.  When we started the clouds came in at eye level at the top of the hill, but before we finally got a secure perimeter established the creepers had taken so much off the top that we could walk on the roof of our first completed fort with the clouds just skimming our heads.  For a while there I was calling it "crater, sweet crater" rather than "home sweet home" as its oft-blasted top came to resemble a volcano more than the scenic hilltop it started out as.

Once our first wall was secure, we cleared another layer around it and built another wall (in sections) around that.  And then did it again.  And again.  With one major realignment to center it better on the now-consumed hill, our keep is now a quite large stepped pyramid with the base at water level (one one side) and the top floor at cloud level, plus a fiery beacon/cap on top of that.  The walls and floors are all two blocks thick stone, and each floor above ground level has spider-proof crenelations with murder holes for dumping molten lead gravel on the heads of attackers to conserve arrows.

We played almost a week before finding any iron.  I finally dug a shaft to bedrock and thrashed around in the diamond zone a while before we got our third iron ore.  Then I hit paydirt and came back up from that dig with half a stack of iron and all the redstone, gold, lapis and diamonds I had uncovered but couldn't mine until I'd found enough iron to make a pick. 

The spider-proof curtain wall around the keep encloses what was once a large "parade ground" or three soccer fields plus a hillside down to the lake.  Now the parade ground is basically a fully lit and protected tree farm and animal spawning zone, and the lakeside area includes a large patch of reeds, pools for harvesting squid, and a small boat dock.

I've built somewhat automated wheat and mushroom farms inside the keep, as well as an indoor cactus stand. I say somewhat automated because while you can harvest either ~100 wheat or ~40 each red and brown mushrooms with a single flick of a switch, you still have to replant the wheat farm after each harvest and the mushroom farm requires you to move to a couple spots separated by all of about 8 squares to pick up the harvested shrooms.  I was building in a confined space and didn't want to mess with the room below to make a collection system that would bring it all to you in one spot.  A day or two after the mushroom farm was functional we noticed mushrooms growing outside the end of the farm on the floor of the room and had a flash realization that 90+% of our interior floor space was above the max light level for monster spawning but below the max for mushroom growing.  The countess tossed a couple mushrooms on two of the floors and left her character logged in.  Within 24 hours we had several hundred mushrooms growing in the keep.  And then we found two different cave systems that also had hundreds of mushrooms each.  Good thing we both like mushroom soup!  I don't think either farm has been harvested since, and we still have two double chests full of pork chops on ice.  We literally have thousands of mushrooms growing now, and I'm worried about the lag it might cause my machine since it's acting as both the server and my client, but so far no noticeable problems (once I figured out how to install 64-bit Java on my Win7-64 machine in spite of Oracle's idiotic refusal to let me pick it due to running a 32-bit browser).

Our son has built two mob grinders in a hill just beyond our walls and brought over three double boxes worth of arrows, feathers, string, bones and gunpowder.  So now it's open bow hunting season on creepers!

We've stayed with 1.7 as we didn't like some of the half-assed changes they pushed in 1.8 (like the urgent early need for food but animals never/rarely respawn and still no breeding).  I suspect we will upgrade with 1.9 once it's stable, but we are a bit worried that Mojang may break some of the magic as they try to finish the game they originally set out to make.  Adding adventure elements is OK so long as they are truly optional (and not merely optional as in creative vs survival mode), but a lot of people have already done better/prettier adventure hack&slash games and it would be a shame to see them ruin this truly new and different game experience that they discovered for the sake of some blindered developer Vision.  I get the feeling Jeb is way more interested in adventure than exploring/building, and Notch is just plain burned out on trying to finish everything and wants to work on something new, but hopefully they wont cook the goose that laid the golden egg.

It's late for me now, so I'll try to get some pics up tomorrow.

[Lantyssa]

While building a bridge through a large cavern under the sea, I noticed waterfalls from the ocean above... that had carried giant squid down through the holes... that were now beached on piles of rock and minerals far below.

You should do the right thing and build them an underground ocean.

[Count Nerfedalot]

While building a bridge through a large cavern under the sea, I noticed waterfalls from the ocean above... that had carried giant squid down through the holes... that were now beached on piles of rock and minerals far below.

You should do the right thing and build them an underground ocean.

I have a small underwater base I built just for the heck of it with reeds for airlock/doors and I came up from the tunnels below it once to find half a dozen squid thrashing about on the floor just inside the air lock.  I've also.occasionally been blocked from getting in or out through one or another of the doors by a squid stuck in them.

Underwater building pro tip: keep your interior lighting off the floor unless it's waterproof, especially if your f oor is sloped such that water can travel very far.  Scurrying around resetting torches in the dark after the inevitable accidental glass breakage gets old fast!

[Hutch]

The humane thing to do with the squid, clearly, is to put them out of their misery, and harvest their ink glands. 

The scarcity of livestock in 1.8 has definitely changed the way I regard them. Now that cattle drop steaks, I don't ignore them anymore. And, now that chickens drop, well, chicken, and are also the only source of feathers, I chase them down too.

I've now spent entire in-game days just foraging around, looking for livestock to slaughter. The closest I ever came to that in pre-1.8 was to occasionally range around, looking for a herd of pigs. And then cook and stash the pork in case of emergencies.

Last night, I gathered seeds and farmed wheat for the first time ever, in any version of MC. I wanted to be able to just bake bread when I need food. So I have to respect the devs' implementation of the current food/health model.

[Bzalthek]

Feathers are only used for arrows right?  A good monster trap will yield up arrows from skeletons.  I afk'd in front of mnie for a couple hours and put the results in the community chest.  SHould be a couple stacks.

[Rendakor]

The new mob system makes farming wool (without using a spider grinder) very difficult. I like using colored wool for carpets, so I used to farm up whatever dye I need and run around dying/shearing sheep. Now, the only sheep in the area are stuck permanently sheared. I'll either have to finally build a monster farm and make it out of string (which greatly increases the amount of dye needed) or just stop using it. Bleh.

[Hutch]

Feathers are only used for arrows right?  A good monster trap will yield up arrows from skeletons.  I afk'd in front of mnie for a couple hours and put the results in the community chest.  SHould be a couple stacks.

As far as I know, feathers are only used to craft arrows, yes. In the little time I've spent on the MP world so far, I've found, looted, and crafted enough arrows so that I'm not really worried about running out. I prefer to kill things with a sword, anyway. That, or a bucket of lava 

[koro]

I mainly use arrows for creepers on MP servers, since I've found that even a little bit of lag ends up with them exploding even when they appear to be out of range. So I pack a bow and as many arrows as I can find and do them in that way.

[NiX]

Yeah, I try to horde arrows, so if there's anyone who doesn't use theirs, feel free to leave them in the Communist Chest or drop them off at my house.

[Sky]

Now, the only sheep in the area are stuck permanently sheared.

Be nice if that bug gets squarshed. I think my fiancee wants me to kill Baldy, the one I tried shearing. Hey, I pulled him out of the well he was stuck in, and I like having the one naked sheep running around the npc village. At least it gives it some kind of character.

Feathers are only used for arrows right?  A good monster trap will yield up arrows from skeletons.  I afk'd in front of mnie for a couple hours and put the results in the community chest.  SHould be a couple stacks.

This still seems like exploitation to me, really turns me off for some reason (probably because it makes no logical sense and is afk 'gameplay'). I'd rather have it set up so that you can get a reasonable amount of feathers to make arrows from.

[Ingmar]

Now, the only sheep in the area are stuck permanently sheared.

Be nice if that bug gets squarshed. I think my fiancee wants me to kill Baldy, the one I tried shearing. Hey, I pulled him out of the well he was stuck in, and I like having the one naked sheep running around the npc village. At least it gives it some kind of character.

Feathers are only used for arrows right?  A good monster trap will yield up arrows from skeletons.  I afk'd in front of mnie for a couple hours and put the results in the community chest.  SHould be a couple stacks.

This still seems like exploitation to me, really turns me off for some reason (probably because it makes no logical sense and is afk 'gameplay'). I'd rather have it set up so that you can get a reasonable amount of feathers to make arrows from.

Set up a zombie trap then.  

Or build one of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK8-ed1Y9PQ

[Xanthippe]

Zombies no longer drop feathers.

[Fordel]

This still seems like exploitation to me, really turns me off for some reason (probably because it makes no logical sense and is afk 'gameplay'). I'd rather have it set up so that you can get a reasonable amount of feathers to make arrows from.

Pfft, the evil wizard burgmund left those spawners as a way to attack the good townsfolk of mincraftia, using our ingenuity we've turned them into a valuable resource instead!



Making Rube Goldberg Machines is half the fun of the game in my mind.

[Bzalthek]

As far as I'm concerned, the game is all about creativity and ingenuity?  Exploitative?  Fuck right it is.  I'm exploiting the fuck out of the existing rules of the game!

[Vaiti]

I just learned how to make two entirely new and unlisted block-types today.

[Quinton]

I just learned how to make two entirely new and unlisted block-types today.

Share!

[Vaiti]

It's a piston bug basically. The blocks aren't mineable, but are part of the world once created, just destroyed if you break them.

Basically the two blocks are a 4 sided normal piston and 4 sided sticky piston. The normal one looks cool for wood structures due to it looks like it has nails in it.