Minecraft Boredom

Last time I mentioned anything about Minecraft, I had started a new world for the sake of experiencing updates, and I never uploaded any pictures.

Here's the update:

Here's my tree farm. the efficiency of the torches to the seedlings aren't perfect, but it gets the job done. The amount of wood and charcoal I have now is insane. 

In one of the updates, they made it so that you could turn wood into charcoal at a forge. So there's really no point in running around trying to find coal anymore. Also, I personally found that wooden houses had a certain charm to them, so that gave me all the more reason to make a tree farm. In fact, in just about every world I start, I plan to make a tree farm. It's just that essential.

At Home

At 2nd base

I realized that my booster cart systems kept stopping an I couldn't figure out why. After some quick google searches, I found out that when you step outside of a certain chunk range, the chunk that the minecarts were in get reset and stop moving. So I did some more google searching and came across someone's minecart booster system that worked best with a lever. I tried implementing it the same system with a button, but since the button stops giving power after a split second, I never achieved satisfactory results. And so, back to google again I discovered the Door Booster after some time and it was perfect. It was a little time consuming, but i really like how it works and I plan to use door boosters for all of my minecart systems in future worlds. I found the tutorial here:

Fail river

 Okay so, I discovered in this world some pretty sweet cliffs. I had envisioned a world full of tall cliffs with waterfalls and a river beneath. And then I wanted the cliffs to have wooden houses, and then canals/caves inside the cliffs to connect the house. Like a city inside the cliffs. Then with the world covered in water, I wanted to set up some nice wooden walkways threading around the base of the cliffs hovering just above the water. Unfortunately this project failed miserably. In the above picture you can see that I tried flooding the ground with water, but it was extremely time consuming and the uneven ground made the water look rough and aggressive. Not quite the calm soothing river I expected.. You can also see part of the bridge I started to build, but it was a lost cause. In the below picture you can see I tried blindly building a house on the nearest cliff, but that didn't quite work out the way I expected it to. To make the houses decently big enough to fit furniture and decorations it would have to be like twice the size of the little wooden box I've got going on the cliff up there. Plus I had no idea how tall I wanted the house to be as opposed to the size of its base. Obviously it would've been much better if I had planned everything out on a piece of graph paper first. Architects always gotta make them blue prints! It's amazing what kinds of real life skills one can put into Minecraft. Architecture, engineering, and a few other things I can't think of right now.  

Fail house

But anywho.. I a few weeks after abandoning my initial project, I discovered a video on youtube, where this guy built a portal to the Nether, then built a portal within his Nether to emerge somewhere totally random on his main world again. Where he emerged he discovered a half built house and a few other random projects along with torches he didn't place, and a bunch of boxes and items. It looked like a world somebody started and then never finished, except within some other dude's world! I thought the video was absolutely fascinating and wanted to experience something like that for myself. An sooo-

I built a portal..

..which came to this side.

Here's what the Nether looks like

I kept coming close to dying in the Nether so I had to set the difficulty to peaceful mode in order to safely explore the Nether. I kinda felt like I was cheating the game on the inside, but oh well at least I got to explore the Nether. I made the above picture larger so you can see. On the left half of the picture you can sort of see a long bridge I built. You might no be able to tell, but it forks out so that one side goes left and the other goes right. The bridge was originally designed to have a railroad placed there, but I didn't have enough iron to cover both bridges completely. It just wasn't worth it. Okay quick fact: a step in the Nether is the equivalent to 8 steps in the normal world. So I went really far off into the Nether, made a portal somewhere to the left and another somewhere to the right. They both took me to boring places in the middle of nowhere. It's not even worth putting pictures of them up.

After I finished exploring the Nether and not finding anything exciting I thought, now what? The week after, my crave for Minecraft dwindled to almost nothing. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because Minecraft is so addicting, it consumes all my time, but it's terribly fun.

Unfortunately, it is now yet another week later and I have a couple new project ideas in mind, in a brand new world. I'll save all that for another blog post.

(Minecraft) Making a Train Station!

Okay so as I was trying to build my castle as I was last month, I eventually ran out of rocks. I figured okay, well I could just go down into my dungeon and start digging up random rocks clearing up massive amounts of space while collecting a ton of cobblestone, but then I figured that would be boring. So instead I decided to go out into the big world and explore a little. Too be honest I haven't explored much of my world at ALL. It's far to dangerous to walk around on the surface at any time of the day. It's too easy to get lost and once the sun goes down you're screwed.. Anyways, I tried not to stray too far from my castle. Found a couple minor dungeons, but not much, so I decided to walk a little further, but this time along the beach. I figured, okay as long as I follow the water, I could always follow it back. Venturing a little further into some woods chasing after some pigs I happened to come across a nice little cave. It consisted of a fairly large amount of coal and a few blocks of iron but not much else. As I was picking at all the coal I kept hearing the sounds of spiders and zombies. During the day time? I saw in a youtube video once that some guy was following the sounds of mobs by digging towards their growls and discovered dungeons that way, so I decided to do just that. After a couple minutes of digging I managed to find a hole with like 2 zombies, 2 spiders, and a 2 skeletons. GEEZ. After killing them I hopped in and discovered a MASSIVE dungeon. It took me days to get a decent amount of torches in. It was scary because it was SOOO deep!

It's probably hard to tell here, but imagine looking down a deep hole that's super dark. Falling down (and potentially dying) would be no joke! As you can see here, I took this picture after I torched up the entire upper area of the dungeon. I have yet to finish torching the deepest parts of it. The amount of ore to mine down there is amazing! 

I figured this would be a good way to collect some extra ore while picking up large amounts of rock at the same time. So that way, once I've collected a lot I can go back to building my castle. Unfortunately for me, The sun went down and I couldn't find my way home. The number of times I died between this dungeon and my castle was ridiculous! So I torched myself a pathway from the castle to the dungeon and then built a little home at the entrance to the dungeon.

Ah shoot I just realized I forgot to save the picture I took of my new little home, oh well. Too late to go back now, I've already made a ton of changes to it.

Walking back and forth between my castle to the dungeon started to become tedious so I came up with an idea one day while I was taking a shower. I do all my thinking when I take my showers. I decided to dig an underground cave from my castle to my dungeon and then put a railroad so I could travel back and forth with ease. It was a great idea, but not an easy task! I took just about all of the iron ingots I had saved up in my chest to make the railroad tracks. I wasn't too concerned about it though because it was a worthy investment for a good project. There's a ton more iron laying around inside the dungeon! 

Here's a little sample picture (above) of the deep narrow cave leading from my castle to my newly discovered dungeon.

At first I tried using Coal-powered Minecarts just like the old school trains! I figured, okay I want to be able to transport myself and items back and forth between the dungeon and my castle, so I decided to make a ghetto train. It consisted of a coal powered cart on each end with one storage cart and one empty cart in between. The reason why I had the power minecarts on the end was to push the train in both directions. The minecarts are only capable of pushing not pulling, so technically it's not actually a train because the carts aren't attached to eachother. Unfortunately it was extremely difficult to work the train because the coal carts only went in the direction you were facing when you put in a piece of coal so I was constantly receiving strange results. Also, pushing me, the storage cart, AND a second coal cart was an extremely heavy load, so the carts actually moved literally a fraction of how fast I could walk on my own two feet. After some internet research and youtube searches, I happened to come across Bob's Minecraft Tutorials which are specifically on the mine carts. After a lot of trial and error I was able to create a back and forth system using one railroad and the help of booster carts.

Bob's helpful tutorials can be found here.

Ok so the cart on the right is my main cart (referring to the picture above). When the button on the wooden plank in front of it is pressed, the electric wiring I set up switches the direction of of the railroad to the left causing the middle cart to come around and push the main cart. Ignoring the laws of physics, in Minecraft, when two adjacent carts ride along a railroad, they instantly reach maximum speed and travel for an extremely long distance (enough to get me all the way to my dungeon), regardless of upward slopes. So taking advantage of that, Minecraft users set two carts on adjacent looping tracks causing them to constantly ride in circles resetting to maxium speed whenever the two carts pass side by side. With the help of the electronics in Minecraft, I can change the direction of of railroads, so I set an additional track next to the center loop, so whenever I push the button, the middle cart moves over to that extra track causing it to ride adjacent to my main cart which then pushes me to my dungeon. Since that extra track leads back the middle track again, the cart just goes back to continuously looping forever and ever until I push the button again. The thing about the buttons is that they only stay pressed for about one second. The after that one second, the altered direction of the track returns to its normal state allowing the middle cart (aka booster cart) to loop again.

Here's what it looks like without the booster set up revealed.

Here's the interior of the booster area where the two carts constantly loop. The red dirt on the ground to the left is the wiring I was talking about. It leads to the back of the button on the wooden plank to the left (not shown). When the the button is pressed, the wire lights up (showing that power is being put into it) and that corner track the wire is touching switches to face the other direction so the cart rides onto that extra little track to the left to push my main cart on the track to the far left.

Here's what it looks like over on the dungeon side of the track. The booster carts are on the other side of the wall.

Here's what it looks like behind the wall, as you can see the layout for the booster carts is identical to that of the ones back at my castle.

This is the best angle I could get. The wooden plank at the back is where the button is. This one was a little trickier due to the direction the track was facing. I needed it to switch to the opposite direction this time so the redstone torch (right) constantly lights that path of wiring right there on the left. Since the wiring is constantly lit, it constantly forces the track to face in that direction. You can barely see the unlit wiring behind the wooden plank. Once the button is pressed, it lights that wire which then leads to the redstone torch. When power is put into a redstone, it turns it off, thus preventing any power going into the wiring adjacent to the redstone torches. And since no more power is going into the wire, it turns off, causing the track to switch back in the opposite direction momentarily (until the button becomes unpressed). That's when the booster cart goes onto the extra track giving my main cart a nice push back home to my castle. That's the magic of redstone torches, since they constantly provide power, unique results can be obtained with multiple setups of torches.

It was a little stressful, but I had a lot of fun making these basic railroad systems. I wanted to do something similar to that of what someone on youtube did. He put a pressure plate underneath where the main cart goes and set up what he called an "NAND Gate" where the booster cart would only come when both the pressure plate AND the button was pressed. But his NAND gate went to an RS NOR Latch which was even more complicated. I tried to make it, but it was too complicated for me. I don't know anything about circuits yet. Maybe after some engineering classes? Haha, maybe I can figure it out in the future. My next goal is to mine out some nice ore from deep in the dungeon while collecting plenty of cobblestone and then continuing on my castle!

(Minecraft) Updated Castle

I finally cleared every thing and decided to put a roof!

Now it's super dark inside my castle. Once I start putting stairs and rooms, I'll add more light to each section.

After I placed the roof I decided to make my castle even taller but with a slightly smaller building on top. As you can see in the below picture. I actually finished the second portion of my castle already. I'm now currently working on a third, even smaller portion which is practically going up into the clouds.

When the time comes, I'll punch holes into my castle to add windows.

Addicted to Minecraft

It has been quite a while since I've been craving the free time to sit down and play a single game for numerous hours a day. Periodically, I surf the internet for any interesting new games that might have released recently, and one day I happened to come across Minecraft. I saw pictures and it didn't look like much, but for something with such shitty graphics to be receiving such popularity in this day n' age, I had to look into it further. A game is never defined by its graphics, but a lot of contemporary gamers don't seem to understand that. After a few articles and several youtube videos, I was absolutely certain. I HAD to have this game.

You're basically a little block dude spawned into a randomly generated world of water, trees, grass, dirt, rock, sand, etc etc etc. No two worlds are the same, they're all unique.

Figure 1

Figure 1:

All you can see is your hand. You have 10 hearts that represent your life and empty squares on the bottom of the screen that represents your inventory. As you can see here, I already mined the wood off the tree.

The first thing you have to do is make shelter. The game runs on a 20 minute clock: 10 minutes in the day and 10 minutes of the night. But here's the thing: monsters come out at night! Zombies, spiders, skeletons (with bows and arrows), and exploding creepers. If they kill you, all of your items drop at the place where you died. Then you respawn at the same spot where you spawned when you first started the game, and if you want your items, you have to walk all the way back to where you died. So when you start the game, you have 10 minutes to find and create shelter. It's not too hard to build up a ghetto house. Almost every block you destroy drops on the ground for you to pick back up. Then you can place it on the ground again. Gravity doesn't apply to most of the blocks either, so if you mine the bottom portion of a tree, the rest will still be floating. In the beginning of the game you can pretty much build a small hut made out of dirt, but you want to leave a tiny crack open so you can still see when the sun comes back up because it would otherwise be pitch black inside the hut.

When the game starts, the best thing to do is find wood. There's usually trees all over the place, so finding wood isn't so hard. With the wood you get you can create a crafting box where you can create just about everything in the game. With that you want to make wooden pickaxes and mine rocks so you can create rock pickaxes. You can also make hatchets to chop down trees faster. You then want to get more wood, and then find coal. With sticks and coal you can make torches, which will light the inside of your house. Coal isn't too hard to find, but it will still take a little searching to locate. Then you want to make a better house with rocks or dirt and light it up. After that, you're pretty much set, and whatever you do for the rest of the game is up to you! People usually decided to search dungeons for better ore like iron and diamond, and more materials to make the house look nicer. But other people like to make crazy pictures/sculptures and other crazy stuff like castles, roller coasters, and water slides.

Figure 2

Figure 2:

When I first started my home, I had nothing to do at night, so I decided to dig around inside my house and go as deep as I could. As you can see here, I didn't dig very deep.. I was mainly looking for coal, so I could make those torches to light up my home.

And then I spent my day time doing daytime stuff like exploring and getting wood, and sand. You can't get those underground. The sand was for making glass in the future and I used sand to place around the ground outside so that way I could trace myself back to home. You have no idea how many times I died from the sun going down and me being lost in pure darkness being unable to find the location of my home.

As time passed by I started to do something with that fat ditch I dug into my house and made the interior actually look like something.

Figure 3

Figure 3:

Those stairs actually go down to the lower parts of my house where I do all my dungeon digging. I kept falling through though, so I put the glass there so I would stop falling down, but still be able to look through.

Figure 4

Figure 4:

This is my little stairway system beneath all that glass. The cobblestone in between the glass was a bridge, so there's actually two sides to my home. Then down here it splits into two separate dungeons.

Figure 5

Figure 5:

Looking to the left of Figure 3, I dug out this little room for myself to place all of the important stuff. I call it the Workstation. The left chest holds all my random stuff, and the right chest holds the building stuff. I don't know why I put two furnaces, and a permanent crafting box lies next to them. There's another in my inventory. As you can see here, there's a little sand in the corner. That's because this area is RIGHT next to the ocean. If I poke a hole in the wall, water will flood the room.

Figure 6

Figure 6:

I found some naturally formed dungeons beneath my house. They have these diagonally carved patterns that steadily go downwards as you can see here. You can find a lot of good stuff inside dungeons. They scare the life out of me though! I have like 50 bajillion torches down there. Getting attacked by enemies in the dungeons is no joke..

Figure 7

Figure 7:

As for the non-dungeon parts of my house, I dug my own holes, as deep as I could. The deeper you go, the better the stuff you will find. I placed the three torches at the top to remind me where I entered. Then I built circular stairs on the opposite side of the wall in order to climb back out.

Figure 8

Figure 8:

Before, I had a little hole on the top of my house to look up and see when the sun would come up, but it was hella ghetto... So I decided to chop off my ceiling and add a layer of glass, so I could look at the sky from inside my house. The exterior of my house looked like this at this point.

Figure 9

Figure 9:

Throughout my experience playing Minecraft, I realized that I die a lot. Especially at night. So I would be thrown into absolute darkness ready to be killed again. So I decided to mine a cave leading from my house to my spawning point and throw a door there. So that way, whenever I die I can walk straight to my house. It was never that long of a walk in the first place, but I felt safer doing this. You can see my initial house in the background on the left.

Figure 10

Figure 10:

Not too long ago I found out that you can add these cool things called Texture Packs to change the way the game looks. I didn't want to make any drastic change so I downloaded this texture pack that makes all the initial blocks look nicer. Comparing this image to Figure 3, you can see that the quality of the cobblestone and glass looks a lot nicer. I also mined out a huge portion of my house in the background for more space. 

Figure 11

Figure 11:

So I realized I wasn't getting anywhere with my dungeon house, so I decided to build a castle!!! Right here I started by standing on top of the doorway of my spawning point (see Figure 9), and laying out cobblestone to draw lines where the outer edges of my castle would be. This definitely wasn't final. A lot of changes have been made. I wanted to make everything symmetrical too. 

Figure 12

Figure 12:

So first I laid out the entire outline of my castle, then I took whatever cobblestone I had laying inside my chest and made my castle as high as I could. As you can see here, I already mined all the dirt off of the mountain on the left and my original house is on the right. The doorway to my spawning point is directly across from here. All of this rock within these walls needs to go! I need a flat land before I start the interior of my castle. Plus I need all the rock to increase the height of my castle. I want to be able to look over my randomly generated world from a really high location. It's going to be super high, and the inside of my castle is going to be awesome. I can't wait to get working on it! Right now I'm doing the tedious work of clearing out all this stuff in the middle...

Figure 13

Figure 13:

Here's the outside of my castle at the entrance. I'll improve the way it looks later. All the mountain on the right needs to go too, so the exterior of my castle looks half decent. Unless I can come up with a creative way to blend the side of my castle with nature. I've demolished so much stuff that I think it's too late already..

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Some day I want to be able to make things like the above pictures. Some people are fricken AMAZING!