Minecraft Ordeal 4

For my Minecraft Ordeal of late there's so much to tell... I've been renovating my home base, expanding and linking places with rail, I've been in the nether and finally found netherwart so started to brew potions, I've also found a village and turned it into a fortified position and also caved...

I've caved so much that the skeleton spawner has more than quadrupled the number of skeletons it generates, but my caving duties are still not done through my hole base chunk.

 

I've done the base out in a combination of yellow and orange colours, notably a lot of sandstone, for which I like the texture I have loaded...

My rail links come into a new arena like area I've opened up off the side of the base

Where rail links slice at a set level I've kept them below ground and capped them with glass causeways

And of course this new rail infrastructure has been pushed down into my dep mines

I've kept the inside pond in the base, for night fishing... Though I'm yet to find any wolves or cats to tame...

My next projects will be a highrise rail link to the fortified village, villager breeding and then I have a stables to build with the many mules I've acquired.

Minecraft Ordeal #7

Whilst doing a little mining....

I found a skeleton spawner...

So having noted down its coordinates I went to the above ground coordinates and decided to make a water trap, leading to a mob elevator to bring them up to ground level...

 I cleared the forest, and began to build...

Once it was working, I then made it a tad taller, to put the skeletons onto 1 hit kills, and made this an Arrow/Bone/XP farm, my first serious farm... But it got a little taller...

But, the view from the top is ace...

Minecraft Ordeal #6

In this update to our Minecraft world, I've pretty much been fleshing out that project I mentioned, firstly I needed glass, so I set about cutting a hunk of desert out...

This made a nice area to set up a small garden...

Not optimised, this is just a grid of pumpkins because I needed lots of lanterns...

So, this is why I needed them... Just a bit of bed rock?...

Well, no, because above is this...

It is a strip mine, straight down, with a large stair case, and fully lit with lanterns, there are regular landings at the higher levels, but from here I'm going to set up four main corridors, for each point of the compass and off of them slowly dig out a huge grid of tunnels, branch mining.

Minecraft - Ordeal #5

Today I've not been to work, when I came in last night I had a terrible, and I mean agonizing, pain under my right rib towards the front... I thought it was trapped wind, so ignored it... Big mistake, its kept me up most of the night, and when I woke up this morning I just could not move.

I'm moving now, but it is agony, I don't want to eat and I'm in such pain... But hey ho.

Before this took over me, I did play some Minecraft, so I drafted this post for you guys last night...

I didn't do anything too interesting, I started a project behind my base, out in the desert, I'm making out a square I'm going to sink as a vertical open cast/strip mine.  But before that I needed to expand and finish the storage.

So there are ranks for 9 more double chests, and then either side, I'm adding two annex's, one for an anvil, and the other for potion brewing.

Also, from above on my base ground level, I'm definitely able to just dump my inventory into the water stream and it come into my junk chest...

 

Minecraft - Ordeal #4

I spent a lot of time painting the man lab today, yes those plastered walls had aired enough in their gleaming white, so there's now a feature all in a chocolate sort of colour.  And with pay-day being Thursday, I'm going to get some nice finishing touches.

I also fitted a new light in here, so that's lovely too.

Game wise I spent the day painting and not playing, but I did have Youtube playing, and from my list of "watch later" items I found a load of Minecraft items, so tonight with an hour to spare I fired up the old minecraft, and set about a new storage area, with a simple water feed bringing items from the surface down to it for me...

Deep below I also spent the last of the prepared glass shoring up the lava pool I'm undermining for diamonds.

And that was that.

One thing I did programming wise was find a bunch of my old DirectX 9 interface books... Now, I do wonder whether leveraging DirectX9 is a good option in a game today, to get all those low powered notebooks and older PC's out there all jogging along.

I'm still fascinated by OpenGL of course, for its cross platform ability, but I do wonder whether the likes of SDL or Ogre3D using interfaces should be what I look at.  Though of course one doesn't want to reinvent the wheel...

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 2

I have still not had time to venture out into the Desert to that Temple, however, I will be maybe tonight... Depends....

For now however, I've been trying to gather resources, this means expansing my mining... But I've had this lava pool blocking me... I've been supporting it with glass, and its getting bigger and bigger

So, I took myself a big of time to dig up and around it... Lighting my path up...

And this is what I found...

The trouble is, the lava seems to go off under the walls to the sides, its wide, very much more wide than this shot makes it look and its just as deep.... its around 8 blocks deep, at least 80 blocks long and at least 50 blocks deep...

I don't want to turn it into obsidian as I don't have efficient diamond pick axes to deal with it...