Minecraft, or my new virtual crack [Archive] - Debate Policy

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DragonStryk72

09-19-2011, 11:41 PM

Minecraft is a great game, but it's sort of difficult to explain to people who haven't played it previously. Technically, it is classified as a survival RPG, but that doesn't really explain anything. This video here can you a basic idea of the look of minecraft:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/m_yqOoUMHPg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I know, it looks like something built out of legos or drawn with an etch-a-sketch, but all of those terrains are randomly generate with full biomes that classify different types of trees, plants, and even animal/monsters. Minecraft was written by one man, known as Notch, who wrote the original programming for minecraft, and now has a multi-million dollar business off of it... and the game is still in beta. there are no commercials for minecraft, it's all been spread by word of mouths from players, and the reviewers who have come across it.

To explain how Minecraft "works", I guess I'll go over my initial experiences with playing. I start the game getting dumped along a rather nice beach with some forested hills before me, the sun just rising over the ocean behind me, and I figure that the tutorials that almost all games have will pop up any moment. Yeah, that doesn't happen here, there is nothing to explain what all you're supposed to do. I fiddle with the keys and mouse, learning that WASD controls movement, while the mouse controls where you're looking. Pretty simple and straightforward, so I start fiddling about some more, and discover that if you can pick up blocks of dirt by holding the left mouse button down to dig them up, and place them elsewhere.

This forms the most rudimentary part of the gameplay for Minecraft, with the ability to make buildings out of various block combinations as you so desire. Unfortunately, I took too long and fooling around with dirt blocks, and the sun set. At night, the stars came out with the moon rising, and that's not all. I was suddenly assaulted by a skeleton archer who kept shooting arrows at me, and with no weapons or armor, I was forced to run away swiftly, only to have a kamikaze shrub rush up and detonate on me, killing me instantly.

............ "What the fuck was that thing?!" I literally paused blinking at the screen for ten second before the WTF moment. My buddy tells me to check a FAQ, but I'm a little ticked now, and screw the FAQ, I'm not getting my ass beat by a shrub and a skelly, so I respawn, and I go again. Um, yeah, died again, but I took out the skelly first. Problem being that I didn't pay attention to the sounds of a giant spider that was near me, and got eaten. This cycle admittedly goes on for a while, until I have my moment of epiphany: I'm disobeying my basic survival training. Not for video games, but for real life, and the game is beating me like I owe it money because of that. If I were actually in the wild, the first thing I would do is find/make a shelter, not fight everything in the surrounding countryside. So the next go, I use my digging to bore into the side of a hill enough to be able to close all but a single block behind me, and I wait until morning.

When day comes, I watch as skeletons and zombies a like are set on fire by the sun's rays, and I can go out without too much hassle. Now armed with a different manner of thinking, I go after the nearest tree, breaking the blocks to get me wood. I check my inventory (the i button), and I see I have 2x2 crafting square. When I place the wood I've gathered onto it, it turns out that it will make 4 blocks of wood planks, which I can use to build a more secure shelter, and set about it. The tree itself yields a number of saplings that I learn can be planted to make more trees. I manage to get a better shelter built by the time nightfall comes around, and since I know I'm stuck in my little cabin till morning, I start playing with the crafting screen, learning how to use the wood planks to make sticks, and a crafting table, which, once place as my first piece of furniture, gives me access to a 3x3 crafting grid, so that I can now build now advanced tools, such as wooden pick, shovel, ax, hoe, and sword. they wear out somewhat easily, but hey, I'm doing better than I was, but I'm still stuck in the dark, and I worry that creatures might spawn inside the house at night. So in the morning, I make light a priority, remembering seeing torches in the promos for the game.

Walking around for a bit I stop when I see some black mark on stones along a mountainside, and use my pick to mine out not only coal, but discover gravel, which produces flint, and mining stone, which becomes cobblestone. Cobblestone allows me to upgrade to stone tools and weapons. This essential cycle continues on as I play, and its one of the founding principles of Minecraft: It isn't there to tell you how to play it, it's there to let you discover the game as you want it.

From those early days, I've discovered, built and mined, and once you start figuring things out, you take on projects of your own creation, with some truly stunning worlds being created by users, such as this:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/r_M3_uxkdSU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This game delivers on so many levels, and with new expansions and updates coming regularly, the experience will continue to expand as far as your own imagination lets you.

Noir

09-20-2011, 07:10 AM

Nukeman

09-20-2011, 07:36 AM

DragonStryk72

09-20-2011, 10:05 AM

omg dude it's not even comprehensible how amazing this game is. The only game I've enjoyed more in the past 5 years is portal, no question.

And to say virtual crack is no undeestament, I got home from work at 2am last night, and ended up on minecraft til well past sunrise >>

My moment of realization of how far it had gone was when I realized I was literally watching grass grow. I was terraforming some desert squares over to dirt squares, so I had to run a bunch of dirt blocks over to where there were grasslands and wait for the grass to grow across to the field.

DragonStryk72

09-20-2011, 10:07 AM

My 14 year old and 9 year old LOVE this game. Me personally I get annoyed with it. It eats up a lot of cpu when in use, and I dont have a gaming computer. I keep trying to tell the kids that,,..

You guys ever go to the ether world (sp) Through a portal and get the always burning stuff??? what ever it is.....

I went into the Nether fairly early.... and I wasn't suitably armed for the assault that came down on me. Gonna go back once I've got my full diamond armor and sword, and enough obsidian to make a basic structure.

DragonStryk72

09-20-2011, 10:46 AM

My 14 year old and 9 year old LOVE this game. Me personally I get annoyed with it. It eats up a lot of cpu when in use, and I dont have a gaming computer. I keep trying to tell the kids that,,..

You guys ever go to the ether world (sp) Through a portal and get the always burning stuff??? what ever it is.....

actually, it isn't really about the video card you have in this case. It eats a lot of RAM as it runs, so if you have a way of freeing up processes on your cpu, or if you upgrade your RAM (which I reccommend in any case), it should do a lot better.

Noir

09-20-2011, 11:15 AM

My moment of realization of how far it had gone was when I realized I was literally watching grass grow. I was terraforming some desert squares over to dirt squares, so I had to run a bunch of dirt blocks over to where there were grasslands and wait for the grass to grow across to the field.

Yep, terraforming is a good way to while away a depressingly sunny day xD

Mine came when i realised i was looking up fort designs purely for the purposes of recreating it loll

My 14 year old and 9 year old LOVE this game. Me personally I get annoyed with it. It eats up a lot of cpu when in use, and I dont have a gaming computer. I keep trying to tell the kids that,,..

You guys ever go to the ether world (sp) Through a portal and get the always burning stuff??? what ever it is.....

Yar its RAM you need ta look at, my comp is awful graphics processing but has 4GB 1067MHz RAM, which isn't too decent but its plenty to run MC simultaneously with other programs

DragonStryk72

09-20-2011, 11:51 AM

24702471

The town I'm working on currently. I just finish surrounding the outer walls with a moat of lava. Those fucking Endermen kept taking blocks out of my walls, and a creeper (kamikaze shrub monster) got through the line. Had to repair a whole chunk of ground and walls, so I finally got a bunch of buckets and start hauling lava up from the ravine under the town.

DragonStryk72

09-20-2011, 11:54 AM

I should also include that youcan try out minecraft for free in classic mode online through http://www.minecraft.net/, and selecting it on the right side of the page for singelplayer or multiplayer modes.

Noir

09-20-2011, 04:07 PM

Out of curiosity did an activity monitor while MC was running along with a few common apps, Safari, Skype and iTunes.

It was averaging over 500 MBs and between 50-70% CPU. So really anything under 4 Gigs RAM is gonna
struggle

.http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/CPU.png

Trinity

09-21-2011, 05:51 AM

DragonStryk72

09-21-2011, 05:34 PM

haha my 13 year old loves this game he's been playing for about a year now, I think....along with Runescape and Terrairia (sp)......He's mad at me now though, cause I switched his OS to Linux and now he's trying to learn how to install his mods to use in the game.....:coffee:

just go hit youtube ,and he'll be fine. I came in on 1.4, and it's now up to 1.8 which is just a ton of fun, though several of friends keeping dying because they forget that they need to carry food now.

Trinity

09-22-2011, 07:56 AM

just go hit youtube ,and he'll be fine. I came in on 1.4, and it's now up to 1.8 which is just a ton of fun, though several of friends keeping dying because they forget that they need to carry food now.

That's what I told him...You learned how to do it on Windows with youtube, so why can't you learn Linux the same way.

That's about the version my youngest started on and he loves the 1.8 version....I just asked him about the food...he said yep if you don't carry it with you and you get hungry, you die. :laugh:

DragonStryk72

09-22-2011, 03:54 PM

That's what I told him...You learned how to do it on Windows with youtube, so why can't you learn Linux the same way.

That's about the version my youngest started on and he loves the 1.8 version....I just asked him about the food...he said yep if you don't carry it with you and you get hungry, you die. :laugh:

Yeah, I load up whenever I head down into a dungeon. I usually carry a full stack of pork chops. Mushroom stew is better, but isn't stackable, and you're left with a wooden bowl taking space in your inventory. I had to burn through most my stores, though, when my friend eli ran low, and was typing like mad because he had nothing at all on him, and a full inventory load.

And this is a picture of my town at night:

2478

It's not my best one, honestly. My best was an obsidian fortress I built. total pain in the ass though

Trinity

09-22-2011, 09:41 PM

Yeah, I load up whenever I head down into a dungeon. I usually carry a full stack of pork chops. Mushroom stew is better, but isn't stackable, and you're left with a wooden bowl taking space in your inventory. I had to burn through most my stores, though, when my friend eli ran low, and was typing like mad because he had nothing at all on him, and a full inventory load.

And this is a picture of my town at night:

2478

It's not my best one, honestly. My best was an obsidian fortress I built. total pain in the ass though

Pretty sweet....is that on a server or your comp???

DragonStryk72

09-22-2011, 11:20 PM

Pretty sweet....is that on a server or your comp???

Yup was a bitch to build it though. First I had to quarry all the stone for that, then fire the cobblestone to return it to regular stone, then use 4 stone to make each block of stone brick for the walls. I had to level out the ground for the walls, and make sure the entire battlement going around the top was at the same level. then there's the torches and lighting. I also made a lava moat for the whole thing, so I had a bucket brigade going to get enough lava to completely encase it. But hey, I now have a town that is completely safe from spawning monsters, and it looks cool

DragonStryk72

10-05-2011, 01:30 PM

Okay, so Minecraft brought out the 1.9 update in pre-release, so I of course jumped on that. The newest feature I'm playing with currently is Hardcore mode. In this mode, the difficulty is locked on its highest setting, and you do not respawn on death. In fact, if you die in the game by any means, your world gets deleted entirely. I lost my first world, but now I have built a new facility that is capable of sustaining me for quite some time to come, so we'll see how that goes.

Noir

10-05-2011, 01:45 PM

DragonStryk72

10-05-2011, 04:42 PM

Omg I would cry, cry like the little girl I am.

I know, I'm so damned paranoid now. Secure shelter became such a huge priority for me, and then of course I was tracking down cows and sheep, since you can apparently breed them now by catching two of them, and feeding them wheat. They'll then come together and a new sheep, cow, pig, or chicken will be born. It's really pretty hand, and now I'm encasing my ranch area in glass so that I don't surprised by a spider or some such as I'm milking the cows or sheep. I actually have an underground hydroponics area where I'm growing wheat, sugar cane, and mushrooms.

All the sudden I'm back to square one, building a fast shelter and building off of it, as opposed to any long term building strategy.

Trinity

10-07-2011, 05:02 PM

I was reading this thread to my son, he wanted me to tell you to check out "too many items" mod.

He says it gives you infinite items..... :dunno:

http://www.minecraftdl.com/too-many-items-1-6-5/

DragonStryk72

10-07-2011, 10:11 PM

I was reading this thread to my son, he wanted me to tell you to check out "too many items" mod.

He says it gives you infinite items..... :dunno:

http://www.minecraftdl.com/too-many-items-1-6-5/

Yeah, that just makes it too easy. When I want to do stuff like that, I can just use creative mode, where I get infinite items, and can access all of them immediately. Hardcore mode is better without the safety net.

Noir

11-10-2011, 02:44 PM

http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/tumblr_luc4bu5u0l1qeuppxo1_500.jpg

Noir

11-10-2011, 04:52 PM

and one of mine -

http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/creepdp.jpg

DragonStryk72

11-10-2011, 05:15 PM

I'm eagerly awaiting the release next week of 1.9, and I'm playing with the pre-releases now as I run around in hardcore mode. I have the most recent one, so I now have access to potions and the enchantment table. Currently, I'm going nuts building a mushroom-top city by making super huge mushrooms with the bone meal I've been getting off the plethora of skeleton archers I've been tangling with. With my initial shelter completed atop the mushrooms, I no longer have anything to fear from the resident creeper population (I think Imust be near one of their spawn areas, because there's a herd of them on the nearby plains), and now I can survey my domain.

On the food front, I've gotten some cows, chickens, sheep, and pigs together in an internal ranching area, so that I breed them together easily. With that and the underground hydroponics lab, I'm pretty much set for the basics means of survival for the forseeable future.

my underground explorations have turned up the necessity to build a series of doors as I go, so that I can cut off pursuit by mobs of spiders, archers, slimes, creepers, endermen, and zombies in an emergency. My initial diamond ore that I found went immediately to use in crafting armor, so now I'm all set on that, and have been able to focus enough to make a diamond sword, and a pick. Next will be the shovel, followed by the hoe and finally, the axe. I'm still exploring a place underground I call "The Cleft of Doom". It's a mile-deep trench cutting through the underground that has lava falls as well as waterfalls, as well as a massive abandoned mine complex that has a massive invasion of cave spiders. Oh yeah, Cave spiders are different than normal spiders. See, a cave spider can actually poison you, which can kill you even if you're armored, since it takes off your life just like you were drowning for a time. Oh yeah, fun times.

I can't believe I've survived this long in Hardcore. I mean, I'm a good player and all, but there were some pretty close calls at times, and now that I'm so very fortified, I feel even more paranoid than when I started, because now that I've come so very far, the idea of being struck down and losing this whole world I've built is really disturbing to me.

DragonStryk72

11-10-2011, 06:36 PM

I also stumbled across my own world seed the other day, which is really kick ass.The seed name is: The Dragon's Reach

I got this from the title of the novel I'm writing. Turns out it also makes a fun world to play in.

DragonStryk72

12-02-2011, 09:58 PM

Okay, so I figured I would go ahead and do a run at Hardcore mode now that the full 1.0.0, and I'm gonna try and keep a chronicle with pics and such. No god moding, this is vanilla minecraft. Should be pretty fun and interesting, and let y'all know when I get dead and the world erases, with my final score.

DragonStryk72

12-03-2011, 08:38 AM

Alright, so I had some rough going at first. I used the seed: Minecraft AWESOME!

Starting off along a lakeside, I had a few distinct advantages starting off, a large surrounding forest, along with large hills containing caves on all sides. Also, across the water were some sugar cane, so I got right to work, taking down trees for use in tools and charcoal, as well as taking the tops off the sugar cane and replanting them so that I can establish the beginnings of a sugar farm around the coast. I used the cave entrance to build my first temp shelter into the rock:

28102811

Then night came, and I ran into a huge problem: Creeper spawning ground on one of the local hills, so I'm getting random Creeper assaults, and any one of them can kill me without a freaking thought, so yeah, much fun to be had by all, but I managed to avoid them for the night. The next day I began my run about in earnest, going down into the caves next to my new home, and stripping it quickly of coal and iron, and taking down the skeleton archers that held it, using corners to draw them out alone. The cavern has a massive central area, with a smaller offshoot, and once I fortify up, I should be good to start rolling it over into my main hydroponics. I'm leaving the entrance wide so I can lead Cow, Pigs, Sheep, and Chicken down for point of breeding my cattle.

Thanks to the bounty of the Skelly archers, I was able to get myself some bones for bonemeal, so I laid down some wheat, and voila, no more rotten flesh meals for me! I did save a couple of bones however, and used two of them to get myself a wolf. I'm gonna call him Tanka:

2812

So the next main thing was to get my main house finished up. Thanks to the constant Creeper attacks, I've been able to put enough gunpowder together to make some stacks of TNT... and may have ever so slightly underestimated the blast radius. Thankfully, I didn't die, but I did blow the whole top of the hill off. Thankfully, that was sort of my plan anyhow, so it all worked out quite well. The house is the same little cave I used before, but cut around, with gaps replaced with forged stone.

2813

jimnyc

12-03-2011, 08:43 AM

DragonStryk72

12-03-2011, 10:46 AM

Great, now you bastards got my son hooked on this game! Morning, noon, night, plays till he gets in trouble. I don't get what little I see of this game looking over his shoulder. With all of the great games out there today, why play a game that looks like a bunch of pixels? When they released a new version last week or the week before, the forums for minecraft went berzerk with people wondering when and why they weren't upgraded yet! I haven't played it, so I can't say much in particular, but why is this game so addicting compared to other games out today that look more realistic than real life?

Minecraft is a bit hard to explain if you don't play it. Basically, most games lead you along a path, or are a form of sandbox game in which you have a certain degree of capability to make your own way, such as in Red Dead Redemption. In Minecraft, there's no one telling you how to play, or what that next mission is. There's no quest log, and not even a tutorial, you have to learn how to play minecraft.

For instance, if you start off in an area and immediate kill every pig in the area for pork chops, the pig population runs out. what you learn to do is grow wheat, and build an animal pen from fence and gate parts, then use the wheat to lure a pair of pigs in, and breed them, so that you have a sustainable food supply.

You want wool? you need sheep for that, but killing them doesn't help nearly as much as building a pair of shears and shearing the sheep, so that the sheered sheep can be breed to produce new offspring. Believe it or not, it's actually an educational game, it's just fun as hell to play, and very immersive despite the graphics, which I've had described as being like legos, but the better description of it came from a site called Zero Punctuation: "It's like an Etch-a-Sketch, but every so often Space Invaders drop down, and lefty knob and righty knob must put aside their differences to live to twiddle another day."

The point of the game is not to kill monsters, although that is something you'll end up doing if you aren't constantly on Peaceful all the time, and some monsters carry unique resources that can't be mined another way, that's far from the point of the game. The game never bothers to tell you a point, it lets you figure out your own victory goals, and when you complete them (i.e. build your first shelter), you immediately discover that you have a new goal as you look at a nearby mountain and say to yourself, "You know what that's crying out for? A skull fortress with lava coming out of the eyes, cause he's depressed about all the kamikaze shrubs."

My advice, though, is to open up your own world on the game, and give it a whirl.

DragonStryk72

12-03-2011, 06:21 PM

Well, that sucked/ was the most awesome death ever. I got jumped by a pack of creepers, and I did survive the explosions, but unfortunately, the third detonation blew a hole in the floor, dropped me into an underground ravine, where I fell into a pool of lava.

Right, so take 2 then

Noir

06-29-2012, 09:21 AM

Westros Sever on minecraft, er ma gat!

Castle black
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/tumblr_m57p2fhont1qzq4mdo1_1280.jpg

Winterfell
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/tumblr_m57p2fhont1qzq4mdo2_1280.jpg

Pyke
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/tumblr_m57p2fhont1qzq4mdo3_1280.jpg

DragonStone
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j176/jonathan-mcc/tumblr_m57p2fhont1qzq4mdo4_1280.jpg

jimnyc

06-29-2012, 09:23 AM

How come when my son plays it looks like Lego blocks, but when Noir posts a picture it looks like straight from a movie?

CSM

06-29-2012, 09:33 AM

How come when my son plays it looks like Lego blocks, but when Noir posts a picture it looks like straight from a movie?

Yeah ... if it looked like that I would be addicted really quick

Noir

06-29-2012, 10:10 AM

How come when my son plays it looks like Lego blocks, but when Noir posts a picture it looks like straight from a movie?

Because if you were down beside it in game view mode it would look like blocks, its only cus they've zoomed out so far (though ofcouse they have to, to show the whole city)

jimnyc

06-29-2012, 10:11 AM

Because if you were down beside it in game view mode it would look like blocks, its only cus they've zoomed out so far (though ofcouse they have to, to show the whole city)

So if my soon zooms out, I too will be able to see some cool city like that? Too complicated for me. I like Tetris, or Pac Man or trivia games!

Noir

06-29-2012, 10:13 AM

So if my soon zooms out, I too will be able to see some cool city like that? Too complicated for me. I like Tetris, or Pac Man or trivia games!

If you build it, yes, but the building will take a dedicated team a damn long time.

Here are some close-ups of Kings landing, being closer it looks allot more blocky, though even so the sheer level of detail thats gone into it makes it look awesome.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VLUrMIdJduo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

DragonStryk72

06-29-2012, 01:11 PM

How come when my son plays it looks like Lego blocks, but when Noir posts a picture it looks like straight from a movie?

It's an HD (high definition) texturepack, sort of like a reskin for the gameblocks. The one Notch originally created for the game is what your son is probably playing with. He actually planned to get rid of those textures in favor of better ones, but the fans love the old graphics, and objected, so they were left in, but he decided to leave it open for players to create and share their own textures.

Jackson0

12-29-2012, 02:45 AM

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Marcus Aurelius

12-31-2012, 03:04 PM