I have succumbed to Minecraft, which is seemingly taking the internet by storm lately. Even though it's still in alpha and can be pretty buggy and features keep getting added, it's so fucking addictive...

Basically it's a 1st person indie game (virtually a one-man development) that features a procedurally generated world and a crafting system. It has some basic physics, a day-night cycle, animals, monsters, mining (duh) and crafting (duh²). Most of the monsters only come out at night (they burn at dawn) or hang around in underground caves/the shade, so as long as it's day time you're always relatively safe.

You start with nothing. Then you start exploring...you gather some wood, build a workbench and make some sticks out of the wood you have left over. From the sticks and wood you can then make a wooden pickaxe, which is fragile but will allow you to mine stone. With that stone you can make a stone pickaxe (2 sticks + some stone) which is slightly better than a wooden pickaxe, etc.

But there's much more. You can gather stone/sand/precious minerals and craft armor, weapons, new pickaxes/shovels/buckets out of; or use them as base materials for other things like glass (sand + coal in a furnace will make glass). And so on. After a (long-ish) while you'll be building automated doors and powered minecart tracks, opening possibilities for ingenious and/or extravagant structures.

I've been working for a long time on my Fortress of Solitude and it still looks pretty shitty. Basically I built a small "entrance house" on some inland water and from that I built a ridiculously long shaft with a ladder in to just about as high as I could build, and constructed a sort of penthouse at the top with glass walls on the East and West side so I can see the sun rise and fall. You wouldn't believe how often I fell down my tower during construction. There is a small problem though: I originally meant the tower to function as a beacon for my adventures until I can make a compass, but it's so tall that my penthouse and its lighting stick out above the clouds. So I can't see shit on a cloudy day. I'm thinking of making a well-lit platform slightly lower on the tower for that purpose.

Yesterday I did part 2 of my megalomaniac project and extended the ladder shaft down into the sea. Originally the idea was to make just make the walls of the ladder shaft glass so I could see the sea as I climbed down, but that quickly got replaced with the idea of making it drop down into a glass underwater house. Again a few deaths, since my house is in an artic area and I had to dive up and down all the time to build (also, it's harder to mine underwater, takes longer) in openings in the ice that I made, but they sometimes freeze up unexpectedly while you're diving.

Next step should be some sort of decorating the underwater veranda and then I'm gonna make that beacon platform I mentioned. Then I'll go on a deep mining journey for some precious minerals. I actually did happen to find redstone earlier but I got crushed underneat some loose sand and never found my gear again.

The game's website collapsed under its own popularity a few days ago but they're getting it back up. In the meantime, here's the site, the wiki, the texture pack I use (makes it so much better) and some random vids to give you an idea.

http://www.minecraft.net/
http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic ... 25&t=25676

(click to see the aerial view of a part of some community server)




I've seen even cooler ones but can't find them right now.

P.S. there's also a MP mode where you can get on a server and build shit together/near each other. And grief.




P.P.S. the game is currently 10 $ in Alpha, but will get more expensive as it goes in beta and gold (and you only pay once), so if you're thinking of buying, now would be the time

Fan-made trailer

Not that anyone cares probably, but I built an additional level to my tower beneath the cloud cover and managed to put in a pressure-plate system that opens and closes my front door automatically as I enter and exit.


Next project is to make an underwater garden. Since I'm in a snowy area I'd like to have some trees (that arent covered in snow) and flowers to walk between. I think I'll make the passage from my veranda to there on an automated minecart track now that I found so much iron last night.

I've actually read quite a bit about this game, but from my understanding the alpha version requires pay to play. 'Classic' is just about blocks... no crafting or anything else of REAL interest. So did you buy it, or am I wrong?

Yeah I'm playing the Alpha and paid for it. Figured 10 € wasn't the end of the world for a game with this potential. Even in Alpha it's a lot of fun, though I did use a texture pack and the low-res graphics tend to tire my eyes after (quite) a while.

The guy is making sick money though. A few weeks back he had trouble with Paypal because he'd accumulated about 600.000 $ on a week's sales and they flagged it as suspicious. :O And that's just one week, before the big explosion in popularity happened. He's probably raking in into the millions right now. Not bad for a one-man operation!

I should quit my day job and learn how to make a game and distribute it digitally. Even a pretty average indie game that goes for few monies on steam brings in lots of dough on the sheer power of internet numbers. (5 dollar game) * (50.000 sales) = $$$

(I'm mostly kidding - I'm aware of how success gets advertised and failure falls into obscurity. Prtety sure thousands and thousands have failed at making any sort of decent game or getting a sale)

Yea, I knew about the paypal thing, which is how I learned about the game in the first place. Good for him. I hope to some day become ludicrously rich in as well.

Also: computer built in minecraft

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGkkyKZV ... _embedded#!

Thread necro!

Mole bought me a copy of this yesterday and I'm loving it. Trying not to read anything about how to make x item or find y component, just enjoying exploring (and dying. A lot). I might try to keep a mini-blog of what goes on, depending how interesting it is. It's actually a ton of fun just to watch; Mole found some awesome stuff whilst I was watching him play.

So far I've found rather boring stuff (coal, iron, tons of rock) but I'm building a huge mine plus I'm starting to make a big castle under some floating land that randomly started out on my world. It's gonna take some time though!

Finally! Someone else who plays Minecraft!

I won't talk too much about my stuff then in order to not spoil anything for you, but if you want I can post a vid of my megalomaniac fortress(es) a little bit later.

Dying happens a lot yeah...always bring plenty of torches to keep stuff lit and enemies from spawning, and don't be afraid to wall off a tunnel if you are being chased in a tunnel and can't fight the enemy. Also, try building a sort of "base station" in every big cave complex that you can return to - with chests to store stuff you find and don't want to lose, a furnace, etc. Maybe even a bed to respawn from if you get killed.

Some of my most epic game moments was mining with a friend sitting next to me (who plays MC as well) and becoming too greedy and going too deep for more and MOAR diamonds, but then...falling into a pit and getting ganked by a zombie and losing everything.

Enjoy!

Yeah tell me about it! I bought the game (And then Pev a copy) and I was happy happy mining away and found the my little tunnel opened up in to a HUGE cave. I was like OMG EXPLORZ. Things went pretty well, I didn't die and got pretty far in, when I made the decision to turn around to drop of my goods and regroup my thoughts before venturing further. As I made this decesion, and was making myself a fresh way out - an exploding dude had spawned behind me and killed me in on.

I lost it alllll

Currently, I'm building the courtyard to what will eventually become my keep; which will also have a small yield of crops (once I figure out the crop system, tools, etc). Man this game is AWESOME.

Creepers! Gotta love em.

Lol love that. My main annoying death was of course to Creepers. I was basically stood on the roof of my mining entrance, it was full daylight and I'd just emerged from underground to go wood gathering when BOOM from behind, creeper blows up. I was like OMG I'm alive. A second later BOOM from behind yet again. I look down, amazed I'm still alive but find the roof of my hideout has been blown away. So I run forward to gather up stuff and BOOM a third time which utterly destroys two of my chests, half my stuff and me. Not impressed.

I am however impressed I managed to dig a tunnel from my hideout to halfway back to the respawn point so it's slightly easier for me to get back to my place. Time to go play in a moment in fact, last I played I was digging down and found a huge underground waterfall so I'm on my way back out right now to go get more mining supplies sorted.

Vids of your fortress(es) would be awesome Ox

I've been nose-poking around the forums for this game - and you know what? I'm blown away.

People are actually using the electricity system in the game to build functioning computers. Primitive ones, yes - but still it's amazing what people can do with such a simplistic project.

Haha, yeah, that's nothing man, you should see the shit people can do with pistons now. I quit the game for a while because I waited for pistons, and now...now I MINE!

(video will follow later)

Let's just say that I built a metro system to minimize walking to my fortress in the Nether.