Minecraft (LATEST: Weeping Angels Doctor Who Mod!)

Acacius Blade · Sep 7th, 2010, 10:38:18 PM

Click here to see the latest update with a video featuring the Weeping Angels mod!

http://www.minecraft.net/

EDIT: A link to My Youtube channel if you're interested in checking out my own Minecraft videos

A work colleague told me to check out this crazy-addictive game he's been playing called Minecraft. It's a really simple block-based 3D world where you destroy different types of blocks and then redistribute them around the world to create walls, floors, ceilings, houses, caves, towers, forts, anything you can think of.

Certain block are resources such as wood, coal, iron, gold etc, and you can combine them to make tools, armor, food, doors, ladders, fences, TNT. You can grow wheat to make bread to heal yourself - there's pigs, cattle, chickens running around for food. And at night, the monsters come out to play. You'll be lucky to survive your first night out in the open, so dig yourself a hole and wall it up, or build a high-up tower and wait it out. Or build a proper safehouse with stone walls, a door, torches for light, a workbench and a furnace. Then when the sun comes up, get out there and gather resources.

The world's huge and it's all yours. Check out the free browser version. The full game, although only in alpha-stage, has more features than the free one, and slightly better visuals. It's currently on offer for 9.95 Euro's to encourage people to buy it to help develop it, then the price goes up for Beta and later. But there's no more fee after that and multiplayer is in the works. Alpha-stage is testing multiplayer but to be honest I'm having a blast in single-player.

If you check it out, this guide might help. http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewto...p?f=35&t=19065 - but it only applies to the paid-for Alpha, not the free one. The free one really is just a taster of how it works.

Also, some good images of the game: http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewto...p?f=35&t=10517

**Alexander Bane** · Sep 8th, 2010, 11:36:42 AM

Looks like a lot of fun, but for reasons unknown to me it will not accept my credit card, so I cannot purchase the alpha. The free version is pretty fun by itself, seeing as I instantly started building a huge wall to put a castle behind, but it any real gameplay other than just, you know, building stuff.

Acacius Blade · Sep 8th, 2010, 04:51:44 PM

Yeah, the free 'classic' version is limited. I started by digging a square room into the side of some rock, and I'm just now tunneling upwards to add more floors. And I now have glass windows (thanks to some sand, coal and a furnace) so I have a better view of all those nasties lurking outside at night.

**Darth Turbogeek** · Sep 22nd, 2010, 06:34:22 PM

Dear Lord this game is Minecrack. It's so silly and yet so addictive!

Acacius Blade · Sep 23rd, 2010, 01:28:50 PM

The first section of my bridge is complete, I've started work on a new castle at the foot of a large mountain that overhangs awesomely. I'm going to tunnel into it from the castle and build a fortress Ironforge-style. Then have more bridges branching off to other areas of the world.

I've got a nice tree garden for wood-farming, with a mine below it for gathering stone, as well as coal and ore when I find it. Gonna make wooden stairs as I dig down too.

**Darth Turbogeek** · Sep 23rd, 2010, 07:13:10 PM

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSBOOM

Holy shit that scared me and now I have to rebuild my shelter -_-

This game is exactly what I've been wantign for ages - somethign easy to get into, yu dont have pointless grinding, it's free form and it continually surprises you

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS shit gotta run!

Acacius Blade · Sep 24th, 2010, 10:46:25 AM

The first night is the worst. After that it's not so bad. I just hope Notch adds more content to keep it challenging.

***Dasquian Belargic*** · Sep 24th, 2010, 10:47:43 AM

Can you combine stuff in the free version?

Acacius Blade · Sep 25th, 2010, 09:48:46 AM

I think crafting is only available in the full version. All you can do in the free version is place and destroy blocks, and you have unlimited blocks and destroying blocks is instant. It the full game, different blocks take longer to break down, eg stone takes ages to break by hand and gives nothing, but it takes a few hits with a pick-axe and gives you some stone to use in crafting/building.

**Alexander Bane** · Sep 30th, 2010, 11:21:34 AM

I dug down to the bedrock and was hoping for something akin to running into a balrog. Nothing very scary down there it turns out. Building a tower on a cliff edge. Wooo.

***Dasquian Belargic*** · Sep 30th, 2010, 02:36:46 PM

I built a safe room inside this secluded overhang, went away to chop wood and then couldn't find my way back to my safe room. Had to restart my game.

:B

Acacius Blade · Oct 16th, 2010, 07:08:51 AM

Just reinstalled it last night after formatting the other week (new motherboard required reinstalling Windows). I managed to locate the location of the save data so backed up before I formatted - only just decided to get back onto it.

I downloaded a texture upgrade package that it quite good. There's a patch needed to make it work with the game. You can find the texture pack (and link to the patch) here:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewto...p?f=25&t=21302

My castle is built - just need to complete the top floor of the tower. I'm building a sort of 'keep' entrance at the top, and thats gonna have a bridge going into the mountain where I'm gonna just go crazy with tunnels and stairwells and halls and stuff. Then a fortress on top of the mountain perhaps, and a mineshaft with tunnels going beneath the ocean.

Acacius Blade · Nov 2nd, 2010, 09:27:26 AM

I need to get some screenshots up of my world. It's looking pretty cool!

I've built a boathouse near to my manor, with a bridge going over to it for night-time access. There's two wooden piers for boats to come in to. And a little ways out is a sandy island that I've semi-hollowed out and built a crafting bench, furnace and storage chest. Beneath the sand I uncovered stone so I've been mining in a sort of square/circular staircase. I know that mining straight down and using ladders would seem easier, but this looks cooler even if you can't see all the way down. I may eventually mine out the middle so it's a stone staircase going around the sides of the mine shaft.

And further out again from the manor in the same direction (sort of) I've built a tower as high as it can go - around 10-15 blocka bove the cloudline. Need to finish the roof and wooden walkway at the top of it. The base of the tower is slightly larger with three doorways, one of which leads to a garden/backyard with a two-block high wall with a 1-block high wooden fence along the top of it. Inside there's the usual storage chests, crafting bench and furnace. Since this is quite some distance away, it'd be awesome to link it to my other sites with a tunnel but that'd take an extreme amount of luck or indeed an extreme amount of planning and measuring to ensure I link the sites correctly. If I tunnel from one to the other there's a danger of tunneling up into the ocean and flooding yhe tunnel. LOL!

Acacius Blade · Nov 14th, 2010, 11:56:19 AM

***Dasquian Belargic*** · Nov 14th, 2010, 01:24:56 PM

Sweet digs, Peter - and I like the Dark Portal!

Though I did have a little trouble hearing your narration over the in-game music.

Acacius Blade · Nov 14th, 2010, 01:33:57 PM

Yeah Jenny, I know. I need to play with the sound settings for next time. A tutorial said that I don't need to lower the game sound, but rather the capture sound. I'll give it another try tonight perhaps. Took about an hour to compile the video into MPEG-4 and convert from 1080p to 720p. Then about 40 minutes-ish to upload to Youtube - so along with making the video it's about a 2 hour job for 10 minutes footage. Pretty good.

I've become addicted to X's minecraft video's and it's made me want to do my own. So I wanna start a Youtube channel, which will feature a lot of Minecraft stuff, as well as other games. Might even record some of our L4D sessions - if it picks up out vent chatter that'd be awesome!

Acacius Blade · Nov 24th, 2010, 03:59:05 AM

http://www.youtube.com/user/superego...ECAFD0D7BBD044

A 3-video playlist I did yesterday. Audio commentary is much better on this one as I borrowed a friends USB microphone to record my voice. I've been looking at some stuff online and am considering a podcasting kit from Behringer, on Amazon for around £55. Gonna check out my local Maplins as well since they have a lot of audio stuff. At least I know it was the mic and not my PC that was making it sound crap.

Let me know what you think of the video, as well as the sound of the commentary. I know there's a constant noise even when I'm not speaking - I assume thats just the microphone picking up noise such as my PC's fans/HD, ambient noise in the room such as the boiler etc. The podcasting kit I'm looking at includes a microphone that only picks up audio if it's quite close - a review on Amazon says the mic needs to be 10-15cm away from your mouth to pick it up. As negative as that review is, I suppose it's a good thing as well depending on how you look at it - no extraneous noise would be recorded.

**Yog** · Nov 24th, 2010, 11:27:51 AM

hahaha, you got lost in your own dungeon..

***Lilaena De'Ville*** · Nov 24th, 2010, 11:59:48 AM

That is very impressive, Peter. I played Minecraft for a day and I think I dug a hole, lol.

Acacius Blade · Nov 24th, 2010, 12:29:28 PM

Heh, thanks Holly. I'm loving it. I've seen a video of a guy who built the Enterprise to scale. While I have a more active social life than that, I'd be up for trying something Star Wars-oriented - but it wouldn't be to scale. I might try an AT-AT walker.