A Bridge
I built a little bridge out from our new house in the direction of our original base.
Well it started out small. Pretty soon we had a huge wooden walkway that we began laying minecart rail on.
The wooden bridge lead into a nice tunnel where the land rose up to meet the it at the other end.
Of course a bridge hovering in the air would look silly so we added cobblestone supports. Purely decorative but it makes the whole thing look a lot cooler.
Mining for all the iron for the minecart tracks took quite a long time.
A pretty neat ride …
with some cool views of the landscape and forests around our new home.
Initially we used the Minecart booster technique to power the carts. This involved placing a spare cart on another track adjacent to the main one. When two carts touch they kind of lock together and speed each other up. This was of course taking advantage of a bug in Minecraft. As soon as Minecraft 1.6 came out with powered rails (the red things in the picture above) we switched to using them. When a cart rolls over them it speeds up in the direction it was travelling in. In this case it helped us get up the hill back to the house.
A New Home
Once we had a lighthouse to guide us back we felt more comfortable venturing out away from home (crafting a compass also helped). We wanted to start over and build a new place so we decided to head in one direction (south) for a whole Minecraft day (about ten minutes) and to pitch camp as soon as it got dark.
Heading south …
It’s not quite dark yet but this will do.
Once again we start off with a pretty basic hole in the ground.
Pretty soon we at least have a more substantial entrance, albeit completely made of dirt.
A lot of felled trees and smelting of sand later and we have a nice cliffside retreat.
It’s pretty homely inside. Did I mention we now have pet wolves? You can tame them by feeding them bones and they’ll follow you around. They look cool and will help you fight mobs (they’ll attack anything you punch/stab) but they’re also super annoying. They don’t understand doors, they’ll run around constantly pushing you off the edge of whatever you’re building or into lava and they’re pretty stupid too. They’ll will usually die pretty quickly usually by dropping off edges or into lava themselves. A wolf can be healed by feeding them meat but it’s a bit wasted on him as you’re just prolonging their eventual lame death. After a while you get tired of their shenanigans and you just make them sit (by right clicking) but then you have to put up with constant whining.
No minecraft home is complete without a mine to bedrock.
We found the one thing more annoying than wolves, an infestation of slimes. Slimes are quite rare and, since the Minecraft update that gave us sticky pistons, are now quite a fortuitous find. At the time though they were just irritating, we had dozens of them and, like wolves they constantly nudge you or get in the way of your pick.
We added a roof garden and a kind of balcony in the middle.
The balcony.
Nice view.
Up the dirt stairs to …
The roof garden/farm. Sugar and wheat.
Another good view.
Lighthouse
We were pretty happy with the state of our mountainside house and its little farm courtyard so we decided it was time to embark on a new building project. We decided to build a kind of lighthouse on the last sandy outcrop of the little desert that stretched from our house. We wanted to build something fun but it should also serve as a kind of beacon as we explore our world.
We decided to build it out of sandstone.
Building with sandstone meant digging for a lot of sand. Crafting one sandstone block requires four blocks of sand. Happily there was plenty of it in the desert around us.
Building required a good head for heights. Holding the shift key to sneak is useful here as it will stop you from accidentally walking off any edges and tumbling to your death.
A wooden spiral staircase was a nice addition.
And some nice glass windows with some log frames. This was looking less like a lighthouse and more like a kind of look out tower but that’s cool.
Of course Minecraft building safety codes say that spiral staircases must have banisters. Fences placed with the cunning but ultimately tiresome stacking technique worked quite nicely.
We stopped just short of cloud level so that the top wouldn’t be obscured. We went with a wooden floor and some massive windows to look out from.
Nearly finished.
It looks great from our courtyard walls at night.
I made a timelapse, for as long as I dared stay out in the desert at night.
To make it more “lighthousey” we added some torchlight in the windows, hung from the ceiling using more fence hacking/stacking.
There are some great views from the top.
You can certainly see it from a distance (providing your computer can run with a long draw distance setting).
Valentines Day
I snuck onto the server on February the 13th and built an (entirely unoriginal) massive woollen heart as a surprise for Caragh on Valentines day.
Not bad for the first days work.
Nearly done …
I ran out of pink blocks with one to go!
Time to hunt for more roses. I discovered that you can make your dye go further if you dye the wool while it’s still on the sheep. That way you only use one piece of dye for up to three blocks (sheep also seem to drop more wool if they’re dyed first). Also you get to see pink sheep wandering around.
Finished!
I think she liked it :)
New floor and a better farm
We added a nice pink and white chequered floor. Coloured blocks like these are made of wool which can be sheared from sheep. The wool can be dyed by various materials to achieve the colour. We got the pink by mixing the red dye you can craft from roses with bone meal.
This meant trekking a long way from home looking for red roses. At one point I got so far away from our base that I couldn’t find my way home. I wandered around for three Minecraft days, digging makeshift shelters at night before succumbing to creeper attack. When I respawned I couldn’t get any of my stuff back as I had no idea where it was that I died. I immediately built a compass to avoid that happening again. Compasses are made from iron and red stone and always point to wherever your spawn is in relation to your position. You can see one in my sixth slot in the screenshot above.
You’ll notice we dug around our mineshaft to give it more room. The glass floor and a trench going all the way up to the surface enables us to get more light in to the mineshaft and you can see when the sun comes up if you’ve been mining at night (or you could just build a clock :) ).
Our wheat and sugar farm sprang up well although we found that sheep, cows and chickens would often spawn within our castle walls and trample our wheat so we put up a fence around it and added some doors.
The nice white, speckled door frames are made from birch logs. Building with pure logs rather than planks may seem wasteful as you can make four planks from one log, but it does add a bit more variety to your buildings. We put down a nice sandstone path and some wooden decking as well. You need to make sure that there is no grass in an area you’re fencing off from animals as they will spawn wherever there is grass.
We also played around with using redstone circuits to build an automatic double door in the front of our house (you can see the wooden pressure pads in the first screenshot above). This worked quite nicely but took ages to work out. Redstone circuits can be quite tricky. Tutorials like this one help out a lot.
Getting Started
I’ve been playing Minecraft single player for a while now and it’s great. Everything you’ve heard about the game is true. The whole mechanic hinges around the simple rules that govern the physics of the world and the unique experiences that emerge from them (apparently this is called emergent gameplay). The adventures you can have battling monsters, exploring caves and going off on hikes and sea voyages can be exhilarating, scary and challenging. The simple graphics are charming and sometimes quite awe inspiring once you reach a mountain peak and get a good view of the impressive terrains that get generated. There’s nothing like building your own world to really get you invested in what goes on in it and that’s exactly what you do as you stack tons of cobblestones into towering battlements around your castle keep, dig endlessly downwards into your labyrinth mines and caves and carefully landscape grassy forests and deserts into the perfect back garden.
Singleplayer was great but what has been even more fun is setting up a server and convincing Caragh to join me in a multiplayer world. Here are some screenshots of the action we’ve encountered so far.
This is the spawn location in our world, every time you die you’re yanked back here and all your stuff stays where you were so you have to run back and collect it before it disappears.
Caragh’s cutting down logs while I head off to find coal. It’s important to gather coal and wood on your first day so you can craft torches to get through that long first night.
The sun’s going down which means the monsters will be coming out. Time to start to build a shelter so we can hide away
We’ve got a little hole to hide away in now, with a door, a furnace, crafting bench, a chest and most importantly, torch light.
At first the only thing to do at night is to start digging a mineshaft so you can mine out some raw materials like coal, iron and maybe even diamond.
Whilst mining you’ll often breakthrough into huge natural caverns or tight twisting passages with zombies and skeletons hiding around every corner. It’s up to you whether to hastily brick them up or to grab a torch and a sword and venture in.
Caragh standing in a creeper crater. Creepers will sneak up on you soundlessly before making a hissing noise and exploding. Creeper death was our number two cause of death starting out, after falling down our mineshaft.
Eventually we get a nice set of castle walls up outside our shelter so we can come out at night in relative safety. The plants down there are the start of a wheat farm and a sugar cane crop.
We built a porch out the front because we kept opening our front door to find a creeper or a spider waiting for us. The elevated porch is harder for the creepers to get as near to and the glass allows us to look out and see where they are.
We expanded the inside around our mine a little bit and made cake. The cake replenishes health and is made from the crops we farmed outside (and some eggs and milk). We found the pumpkin outside and put a torch inside to make a Jack-O-Lantern.
I climbed a tall tree on the hillside to get a better view of our castle/shelter. You can see the skylight that lights our mineshaft from here.
Venturing even further from home.
In the other direction is a huge island. I can’t wait to take a boat over there and explore.
