Topic: Minecraft

[ThePerm]

Minecraft is awesome. This game is crack. If you like Animal Crossing, Cubivore, Zelda, any game with a level editor than you'll probably like this. Who else has it? We must build a world together!

[SixthAngel]

I picked up Minecraft during Alpha and I played the crap out of it for awhile but the sparse updates recently and my non-interest in things like achievements has stopped me from playing for awhile.  Recently I've been trying Ace of Spades, which is free now and is what I've wanted from Minecraft since day 1: a CTF multiplayer game with Minecraft style building and digging.

I don't have much interest in building online but I wouldn't mind playing Minecraft sometime, especially if you are using some of those awesome game altering mods I've heard about.  Do you use inventory editors? Spelunking and avoiding monsters with another person is what I'd be most interested in doing in multiplayer but the servers I've been to tend to have free materials and only building.  If you have a regular server send me the name.

[ThePerm]

honestly i started last friday or so....but ive built what looks like helms deep. As crazy as ive been playing it nonstop lately there is still a lot i haven't even done yet.
And this ace of spades sounds interesting.

[SixthAngel]

The Minecraft concept is really cool.  If you are just starting download a program that will back up your Minecraft save.  Trust me when I tell you that Minecraft will crash sometime and most likely delete your save which will delete your entire world.  There are a few different programs to back up saves out there but it is essential.
Tell me which backup program you download and I'll use it to send you the save of my world if you want to check it out.  I've built all kinds of cool stuff and I like checking out other people's worlds.

Find a good server before you play multiplayer.  Half of them are full of people that are OCD and will kick you from the server if you even build something too close to another person's buildings.

Ace of Spades.  The link tells you about it and has the link to the site that can download it.

[Ceric]

I hear a lot about Minecraft but I just can't get into the whole build a world games.  Just not a sandbox guy.

[Morari]

I've been running a small server for my friends and I since the early Alpha versions. We've all kind of grew disinterested in the game over the last month or so, but I think it's just because we burnt ourselves out with our marathon building nights. We'll go back to it once we cleanse our pallets a bit.

Make sure you get a good texture pack! I 'm not too fond of the full on hi-def ones, but just about anything is better than the defaults. I use a modified version of the "JohnSmith" texture pack.

[ShyGuy]

A friend of mine runs a minecraft server that is somewhat popular: http://twitter.com/#!/MinecraftServer http://minecraft-server.tumblr.com/

[KDR_11k]

Since my main style of playing is to grab a sword (I've gotten pretty proficient at killing creepers in close combat) and go explore caves I would appreciate more variety down there. Most recent improvements were to the above-ground and decoration mechanisms. I've never used mine carts as I'm mostly digging near the bottom of the map to find diamond, moving mine carts vertically is fairly difficult/expensive for slim benefits so I can't be bothered. There really needs to be some sort of elevator for those things. I've visited a 16th century silver mine and they already had an elevator for the ore. Mining shafts are vertical with ladders for people and elevators for ore in real life, in Minecraft you have to stick that ore in your pocket to get it up through the shaft.

[Morari]

Thankfully the last update added powered mine cart tracks.

[KDR_11k]

Yeah but they can't go vertical like a lift would, plus it's quite expensive to lay the 64 tracks necessary to go from ground level to the bedrock.

[NWR_insanolord]

Mining shafts are vertical with ladders for people and elevators for ore in real life, in Minecraft you have to stick that ore in your pocket to get it up through the shaft.

The most effective way to mine is to go straight down in a 1x3 trench to about level 13-15 (so you're in diamond territory, but too high to hit lava). You then fill in the middle column with dirt or something else cheap, dig 3 more blocks down below one of the empty columns and fill those in with buckets of water, and place ladders up the other empty column. That way, to get to mining level you just jump down the shaft and let the water break your fall, branch out from the initial site in some pattern to mine, and then climb up the ladder to get out.

[KDR_11k]

Yeah, makes mine carts kinda useless though.

[NWR_insanolord]

Mine carts were never really meant to be used for mining in this game.

[KDR_11k]

They're a major part in Clonk which I see as a competitor to Minecraft.

[Morari]

I've never really used the mine carts for actual mining myself. I have a pretty massive transit system set up above ground though, going from town to town. For mining, I have shafts with cushy pools of water at the bottom at ladders going up the sides. I actually waste a lot of time decorating my mines though, putting in reinforcements and such... I like my Minecraft world to look semi-plausible.

[SixthAngel]

Boosters would be so unnecessary if he actually made powered mine carts worthwhile.

[ThePerm]

thanks shyguy, i got into that server and they set me up with a place to live

[KDR_11k]

I mine for the adventure, decorating the mine would be time spent not adventuring. Needs more monsters.

[SixthAngel]

This thread got me excited for Minecraft again but I checked his blog and all my excitement immediately drained.  The guy that has done nearly all the work recently has been moved to another project.  This leaves the creator as the only person in his company actually working on Minecraft and he has barely done any work on the game for a while.  It's so disappointing that this game makes him so much money that he sets up a company to make the game faster and then puts absolutely every person on another game while Minecraft development flounders.  A miracle could happen and he could start working like he did at the beginning and release regular updates but I sincerely doubt it.  At this rate all the features that he promised (lanterns) and talked about won't be close to being in by the "release date".  He even just talked about his plan to charge modders for the right to mod Minecraft then quickly retracted it when absolutely everyone hated it.  I guess I'll check back with the game in a month or two to see if there are any new updates I want to try.

[Silenced]

I'll pick up Minecraft sooner or later.

Right now I play classic on the website.

[blackfootsteps]

I was getting quite heavily into this just recently. I really enjoyed messing around with redstone and making (primitive) powered doors to my base. Then I got modded Morrowind running on my Mac...now Minecraft's on hiatus. Still, I look forward to getting back into it soon, the latest updates should freshen it up.

[ThePerm]

yeah, for what minecraft is...you'd think it would run on less system resources than it does. As popular as it is, you get the downside of it being an indy game too. I've ran the Unity engine on my computer and it does some really efficient memory loading/de-loading. Runs smoothly and amazingly without taxing my resources. Minecraft uses like 500mb of ram always, and thinking about it...it really shouldn't be that much ram.

[KDR_11k]

Perm, think about the amount of power necessary to handle the gigantic dynamic terrain. Just because the graphics don't look like HD games that doesn't mean they don't need a lot of computing power. There are 128 blocks per square meter in that game world (vertical limits of the game world). You can easily see hundreds of meters into the distance which puts it at millions of blocks within the visible scene.


Also 500MB of RAM is chump change these days.

At this rate all the features that he promised (lanterns)

IIRC those were talked about as an addition to torches once they have a limited lifetime but that idea was nixed so lanterns seem unlikely.

[Dirk Temporo]

To be fair, it's also coded in a pants-on-head retarded language by people who aren't exactly at the top of their craft as far as optimization goes.

[ThePerm]

To be fair, it's also coded in a pants-on-head retarded language by people who aren't exactly at the top of their craft as far as optimization goes.

Thats kinda how i figured it, not to mention i played a few other voxel based games that ran much more efficiently. They were all written in another language other than Java. They also handled millions of points like they were nothing. I'm sure there could be some coding tweaks to minecraft that could make it run much more efficiently.