Minecraft Ordeal 3

I've been back in my Minecraft world, and I'm a little disappointed by a couple of things, first of all, that lava pool, I've breached it above and below with glass, it's even bigger than I previously thought, it goes under other rock in a circle now over 100 squares around.

This is a major problem, you can see my lower mining hall below, were I've propped the lava pool up on glass, and you can now see above where I've made a passage directly through for my higher mining shafts, but it is a lot of dangerous work, I was at one point down to 1 heart and burning before I had my water out to quench myself.

And that only then resulted in more damn problems...

Then the temple... What a let down... There was basically just a shaft down the middle, and TNT below a pressure plate... No adventure there at all, not what I expected.  I dunno, I expected something like CubeWorld, I assumed CubeWorld had copied Minecraft, but now it seems not.

Here's my expedition and you can see I expose the trap after digging down parallel with the shaft, in the chests was gold, bones, iron and one saddle as well as a lot of rotten flesh.

I had all the sandstone I could away with me, filling my inventory... But still no adventure, no fulfillment.

CubeWorld lacks any depth, Minecraft lacks any adventure... I don't know what to do... I'm tempted to sub to Eve to make sure my name gets on the statue... And I'm even tempted to download WoW again.

I would love to have the time to sit down and write my own new game, a mix of D&D with Lort of Ultima, with I dunno, something else... But I really don't have the time when I'm in a programming mood... Work is taking over, I worked a 6 day week, where I should have done 37 hours I've done 54; and the project is still not done.

I need something I can put on and zone out with...

So Wow is the perfect place for me, I find other games, like D&D online, LOTRO and the like to look terrible... I like the cartoony world of WoW... It's just not the same as the old days... And I've been out of it for 2 years... and really for the amount of time I'll get to play it, would £9 a month be worth it?... I doubt it.

But, take a look at my Battle.NET account and it says there's "Wow Starter", which is free to play?

It's a whole other account?

Minecraft Ordeal 1

Lets take a tour of my new Survival world in Minecraft.  I started this world so that I might actually play the game, but also to experiment with some of the items in it.

For you see, I'm interested in volume rendering, I've been enjoying both Minecraft and CubeWorld, the latter I enjoy the visuals the former I enjoy the details, and though I can't do better than either I'd like to explore GLSL programming and do it with something interesting, so all this play has been about teaching myself about a world, a structure and thinking how I'd like to emulate it myself.

They say this is a form of flattery, and I sincerely hope Notch & Wollay take my efforts (if I ever get properly motivated) as they are intended - sincere and honest flattery to their excellent work.

The first thing I did was open a branch mine.  Luckily I spawned by a river, neighbouring a desert and with chickens a plenty, so after gathering wood and penning up the chickens I dur a stair case down....

Down to bed rock and then I stripped it all out and filled it back in to level with cobble stone, many players and articles say not to bother stripping this out that diamonds won't be found within the bedrock layer, or some other such myths.  In fact, as you can see, stripping down the bedrock and then building it back up does yield diamonds.

And I have found them in significant numbers in both this, and my previous worlds... Where many wiki entries and other such guides actually discourage looking for them.

So the branch mine itself, has two halves, the main hall and then the layered hall...

From this the initial tunnels run out around 500 blocks on both sides, and on two layers, they meet one cave system to the West and an underground river is present there, with the walls of the cave as yet un-tapped for resources.

However, on the lower levels to the East there is a large, deep, magma/lava pocket.  I've hemmed this in with glass to try and build around it, but so far its around 60 blocks wide with no end in sight.

The secondary halls were cut with a landing between them, but they're otherwise the same as the main branch mine hall.

Aside from branch mining, I have been setting up all the comforts of home, I've the start of a storage area.

An enchanting room... with a full library... More about the leather for the books in a moment.

Outside I then have the chickens mentioned earlier, along with a pumpkin and wheat growing area.  There are also sugar cane ranks beyond, but all this is manual farming, nothing is yet automated.

Following from home, before I could build the library, I needed leather, so I set off creating beacon towers to let me find my way home...

My towers went from short squat things, to taller more elegant things as resources became available...

And with each tower spaced to see another, I could track my route across the deserts which seem to envelope my corner of green.

From the last tower in the desert however, I created a small path to a specific area, which I cleared...

For within the area I found, and could breed cows...

This was my first source of leather, however, being open and in the middle of a forest, I had to start clearing and I started to sculpt the land and open up the area, then added lighting to stop the overwhelming mobs spawning.

Finally being able to create a second cow shed, with a roof and proper lighting to support breeding and leather harvesting...

After mile upon mile of desert however I built another tower to the East... And though the views were bleak....

My next challenge soon was spotted....

Let the adventure continue.... I'm hoping this is where Minecraft get to feel like CubeWorld... Lets see.