My Thoughts on MineCraft 360

A friend of mine from Texas has always wanted to play MineCraft with me. The only problem is that we couldn't seem to get a small, two-person server working between us. My PC simply couldn't handle it, and he wasn't too keen on port-forwarding or using Hamachi to get around that. When MineCraft for the X-Box 360 was announced, I was somewhat skeptical, at least from the standpoint of "I've already got the game on my PC." But he talked me into getting it, as at the very least it would allow us both to play the game together.

And so, I bought and downloaded the game while I listened to him talking about what he was already doing while playing it. I'll admit (and as you can likely tell), my mood for MineCraft had been waning somewhat, and playing it again on the 360 has returned me to it somewhat. There are good and bad points about it, as there are with any game, and anyone reading this should know that these are entirely my opinions on the matter.

For instance, MC360 (as I've taken to calling it with friends) is based on an older version of the MineCraft Beta that many of us have been playing from the past. There are some things of it that I miss already, such as the greater number of biomes. Every map I've made so far has mostly been the "temperate" version of hills and trees, a desert and shorelines. No sign of winter biomes yet, but I may be wrong.

Also, the map is somewhat limited. On the PC, where players theoretically have potentially unlimited resources to spend on making a map larger and larger, the world is effectively infinite. On the 360, the map has mostly-invisible boundaries, walls that you can't bypass, dig through or place blocks against. This boundary is just slightly inside the size of the game's paper maps; as an interesting turn, every time you start a new map, your character has a paper map in their inventory to start. This also helps, as icons show where other players are in relation to yourself.

With a map that small, there isn't as much urge to do certain things. You never need to make giant structures or landmarks. If you get lost, it's as simple as finding one of the corners and heading diagonally inward, as you're likely to find something familiar in that direction. Rails are implemented, but beyond the "On a Rail" achievement (for riding 500 blocks in a single direction via minecart), there isn't as much use in making them.

The version the 360 uses is also before the hunger update, and thus the only ways to regain health are through porkchops, cakes, bread, fishing, and having your difficulty set to Peaceful. The armor is also the "old style," meaning that the more the armor degrades, the less protection it gives you. Once armor is around halfway degraded, it's almost like there's no reason to wear it any longer, and thus feels like a waste. The "skybox" - the highest point at which a player can legally place blocks in the game - seems a fair bit lower in MC360 than normal, and I do most of my playing before the MCPC updates that doubled that height.

There are some good points to the game, however. The graphics are quite nice, and the game is smoother than it is for me on PC. There isn't as much problem with running "fancy graphics" for me, and with a nice draw-distance. Sometimes the controls are hard to remember, of course, and so I've been known to accidentally throw my equipment across the room when I meant to use a crafting bench.

Now, the main reason I bought MC360 was so I could play it with my friend on X-Box Live. The game still has a fair bit of lag to it, but not as much as I have occasionally noticed on the Wickydoo Modded Server I sometimes play on. Monster fighting can be tricky when there's the tiny pause between your sword-swing and the enemy taking damage. Creepers also seem as if they have a larger "fuse radius," meaning you have to jog backward further to not get caught in the explosion.

All in all, it's an interesting purchase. It has its good points and its bad points, and the game seems to straddle the line between hints and promises of further updates to bring the game closer to what we have available for PC. Quite a few people seem to want the world's limits to be a bit larger.. and I'll admit that I share their sentiment. But like I told my friend, I really don't have much urge to play MC360 alone. If I'm going to play alone, I might as well play on PC, have less limitations and more available, even if I only play vanilla.

One final parting thought: When you make a new world in MC360, you are still able to add a custom seed if you wish. The seed and map generation process seems unchanged from the MineCraft Beta, as the old seed used in the "404 Challenge" still works perfectly.

Callin' From the Underground~

Village Fountain Rebuilt

There's been a short lack of updates lately because most of what I've been doing hasn't been terribly interesting. I finished moving the houses and buildings in the village - which I'm still surprised was as easy and painless as it was - and I've been spending a great deal of time working to carve out the village's underground tunnels. So far the only ways in and out are through my house, the storage warehouse and the solar tower.

I rebuilt the village fountain, as you can see; it took a short trip to the sinkhole mine in the swampland to collect a bunch of marble to do so. The holes in the sand are just so I can be sure of where the boundaries of the fountain are for when I was digging underneath it.

Village Fountain - Secret Entrance!

There's nothing really beyond the fountain as far as housing goes, and soon after there desert slopes down to the shore of the river, so there's not much room to build anything there. But I extended the village tunnel system that way, and used a trapdoor at the bottom of the fountain's basin for a quick entry point. Using some of the microblocks - the carved-down sections made from full blocks with the RedPower2 mod - I was able to make a hanging ladder that I think looks quite nice.

Lamp-Post Prototype

Finally, I took a short moment to throw together something so I could get an idea on how the village's lamp-posts would look. I don't want them to be too tall or the light radius might not cover as much of the ground as I'd like for it to - also, the sandstone block will be replaced by a glowstone block. I haven't visited the nether in NameWorld yet, as I had wanted to build the nether portal in a secret area below the church. Speaking of the church, the marble I had left after rebuilding the fountain went straight into rebuilding the small catacombs beneath it.

I know it's a short update, but as I said, I hadn't been doing much in the way of interesting things beyond what I've shown. Just a lot of marble harvesting and digging out the underground tunnels.

Delicious Solar Energy

Solar Tower Rebuilt

After a lot of work and using up almost all of my copper ore, I finally have my solar tower back up and running. All twenty-five panels are in place with a battery box and cables running down underground, into a new MFE in my basement workshop. As of this moment I've pretty much regained all of the machinery and power resources that I had lost when I accidentally borked my mods.

Rebuilt Basement Workshop

The way I placed the machines in the basement is a bit odd, but there's a reason. Before they were placed right up against the wall with the insulated cables hidden from view in an attempt to look more smooth. I still may do that, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I don't really -need- a bunch of room down there, as I'm keeping all of my ores and valuables in the storage warehouse basement which is just a short walk through the village underground.

My Bedroom and Study

I haven't taken many pictures of my new house's interior, so I thought I'd share another, this time of the second floor bedroom/study. The enchantment table is only there temporarily, as I think I'll eventually put it somewhere in the church; perhaps I'll use one as the pulpit at the front?

My attempt at using some of the experience I'd gained through so much monster fighting to give myself some nice perks. The diamond sword got Knockback I, which is pretty good, all things considered. I'd have maybe liked a damage enchant, but it's all right. My diamond pickaxe (as I had needed to make one to get the obsidian I needed for the enchantment table itself) ended up only getting Efficiency I, though I had really been hoping for Silk Touch, especially in case I need to move any of those bookshelves later on. Since I had some extra XP left, I enchanted my bronze chestpiece.. and got Fire Resistance II. Given that I try to stay away from all sources of fire and tend to hit any lava I find with a bucket of water, it kind of feels like a waste.

New Village Wheat Farm

I also moved the rubber tree farm and the wheat farm over as needed. These two were a lot easier than expected, given that I only had to move each one or two blocks. I'd had nightmares about having to move multiple streets and buildings around. The wheat farm is now fully planted and the fences were pushed out one block to give me a little room to walk around the edge of the plots when I had to harvest or replant. The rubber farm is still missing five or so trees, but most of the ones that have grown so far seem to have a nice number of resin spots on their trunks.

There's really only a few things left to do before my "village relocation, part two" is finished. Just two buildings to move and two to add, one of which being the rail station. After that I can focus on fixing the fountain, building a set of rails off to the sinkhole mine and getting back to work on the church.

More Work Around the Village

Villagers Hanging Around the Riverside

While doing work around the village, I happened to glance down at the river that runs between the desert and the tundra to the west. Apparently all of my villagers decided to hang out on the west banks. Without ever upgrading my MineCraft's main JAR file, they likely won't ever return to their houses. I've considered someday popping into Creative mode and using spawn eggs to place some villagers around, but I haven't decided yet.

Blacksmith and Partially-Built Diner

The blacksmith was easier to move than I had thought it would. I made a copy of my NameWorld save folder so I could refer back to the design in a more three-dimensional way. Beforehand I had tried to sketch out the designs with graph paper, but this is much easier. Across the street from the church was a butcher's shop, and diagonally across from the church was a home. I removed the home completely and moved the butcher's shop into its place, but instead I built it as a diner.

Village Diner

When I realized that the town had two butcher's shops, I had decided to just get rid of one. I thought I would keep all of my prepared food in a chest in whichever one I kept to use as a central storage. Somehow the design changed to become a diner with a sort of patio seating area out front. Inside are four cobblestone furnaces, a couple crafting benches and a standard double-chest. I'll probably upgrade this in the future; I may even send some cables over from the solar tower to power some electric furnaces. It's always been one of my dreams to have a village or city in MineCraft with powered lamps and such.

Diner Interior and Kitchen

Speaking of the solar tower, I am almost ready to create my twenty five solar panels so I can rebuild it. All I have to do is shift over the cobblestone pavement at its base, build the stone brick tower, place the panels and run some cable down to a battery box. Then I can move my IC2 machinery back into the basement of my house and use the limitless solar energy to help try and finish off the village-shifting efforts.

I even had some ideas toward how to make a good rail system, but I'll leave that for another day, when I've got some screenshots to help explain.

Even More Village Shifting

Storage Warehouse Basement

I finished the interior of the new storage warehouse recently. I even carved out the basement level, giving it quite a bit of storage room. I think I may keep the ores and dusts on the lowest level because, as you can see in the screenshot, there's a tunnel leading underground. That tunnel will follow the major roads of my village and have exits in every major house. Think of it like a sewer system or safe travel tunnel. Any wires or pipes I'll need I will try to hide down in these tunnels, though naturally with room for me to walk around.

Rebuild Village Home

I also shifted and rebuilt my home in the village, though went back to the original oak logs on either side of the windows in order to better mix with the village's normal look. Before I was finished, however, I added a second story to the house. Upstairs will be the bed and a study, perhaps with a jukebox or enchanting table. Downstairs will be a small kitchen and seating area, and in the basement will be the machine shop and access to the village tunnel system.

That'sssss a nice... forget it. Creepers suck.

One of the dangers of having an open-air construction area like I do with my IC2 machines and all is that the nightly-spawned monsters have free reign to come bother me. I had just hopped onto the crafting table to slap something together when I heard a hiss and a flash of green bumping against me. I'm glad I was wearing my bronze armor or he would have done more than blow a hole in the new warehouse.

Watching the Trees Grow

Every time I need wood, I'll sprint off to the tundra on the western and southern borders of the desert my village rests in. Some time ago I realized that it was far enough away that some of the trees I had been cutting down weren't regrowing while I was away, and so for the past while (as I write this, in fact) I've been standing atop a cobblestone tower, alt-tabbed while in my inventory screen so that the trees can grow.

As you can see, life in NameWorld's village is kind of boring right now. I'll try to finish up the building movement soon, and work to finish up some of my older projects like the church and the train station. I've been thinking to work on the latter soon, as then I could send a railway off to the swamplands where the Sinkhole Mine is, as I'm sure to need a lot of resources if I'm going to rebuild that damned solar tower.

Restocking and Rebuilding

After tearing down the storage warehouse and starting to rebuild it, I realized that I was going to need a bit more in the way of supplies. I had begun to rely pretty heavily on sapphire, ruby and emerald gems to make my swords and axes, but after the mod disappearance I was very low on all three. I grabbed the last remaining redstone engine, made a bunch of pipes, and set out to the swamp biome sinkhole I had found long, long ago.

Sinkhole Mine Storage Box

The reason I did this was because the sinkhole itself was just the place a ravine broke through to the surface. I had hit upon a plan in which I would have a chest set up at the bottom of the ravine that I could dump all my full stacks of cobblestone and all the ores and gems I had found and the BuildCraft pipes and engine would send it all to a bigger chest on the surface automatically. Then I could grab all of the better loot from the chest on the surface and head for home, as the sinkhole was a fair distance from my home village.

Sinkhole Mine Surface Box

 I did spend what little silver I had at the time to make a silver chest, because (as shown before) silver chests are actually larger than a standard double-chest. Even then, after the mining I did the silver chest was almost entirely full. Sure, most of that was in redstone, coal and nikolite, but I was still pleased with my plunder - and there's plenty more waiting underground! As chance would have it, the ravine meets a second ravine, and the second one breaks into an abandoned mine.

Storage Warehouse's New Form

After bringing all of the most valuable things back to the village, I set up the three machines that had survived and the battery box. I made an electric wrench to make sure I don't lose any of them in the future, and then went on to make a new mining drill and battery backpack, and a full set of bronze armor. For the most part, all I have left to do is continue working on reshaping the village.

As you can see, I finished the outside of the new storage warehouse. All I have to do now is put the rest of the chests inside, finish out the basement and figure out how best to set up the staircases leading to the different floors. I think it looks quite nice and seems to command a sort of better respect than the pair of smaller ones I had built last time. It looks a lot better than my liquid storage warehouse ended up looking.

Rebuilding Once Again - NameWorld Lives On

Collecting Oil for Moltar

While trying to think of what I wanted to do with NameWorld (and this blog as well), I did some more stuff on Wickydoo's server. On SMP I feel like I'm better suited to be a "helper" rather than making anything of my own, and so I've been trying to help out another friend from there by the name of Moltar. He was the first (perhaps only?) person on the server to work heavily in what BuildCraft had to offer, namely in quarries, oil and fuel.

A week or so ago, while bored, I ran around exploring the area around where we all live in Wickydoo's server and wrote down the F3-coordinates of several pools and geysers of oil. With the help of teleportation pipes, I hung around while a pump would suck up oil and send it off to one of Moltar's holding tanks. Though normally there would be chunk load/unload problems to stop the oil from flowing, Moltar was doing a lot of work around his house, and so those chunks were always loaded to allow the transfer.

Remains of the Village Fountain

Of the two choices I had been considering the most (either continuing on with NameWorld or starting a new world whose seed happened to include another NPC village right by spawn), I decided to do the former. This was mostly due to finding out that, in chunks that hadn't loaded while I was walking around modless, there were still new ores, marble and other mod-given things to be found. I decided to keep NameWorld and the village, but to abandon my current branch-mine, as most of the interesting things to be found underground were now missing.

I also took another look around the village itself to take stock of exactly what I'd lost. The tanks of oil and the oil pump up on the mountain were both gone. The blocks that made up the village fountain were gone (though the water and torches still behaved as if they hadn't). All of my rubber trees and rubber tree saplings were gone, as well as the mining drill, battery backpack and bronze armor I had come to rely on so heavily. Strangely enough, a few pipes, a redstone engine and the "liquid tank cart dropoff" device were still in place in the village, though by all accounts they should have disappeared as well.

The Ruined Underground

It was curious to see just how much of the underground was really effected by the temporary loss of mods. As you can see from the picture, I didn't just lose special ores and gemstones. Huge sections of stone and dirt were torn out.

After taking a short trip to mine some of the minerals and gems in that ocean sinkhole in the swamp biome, I rebuilt some of my machines. Already I began to miss my rotary macerator and the induction furnace for their speed, and the solar panels for the effectively limitless, free energy. But soon after rebuilding some of my machine shop, I remembered the task I had prepared myself for before all of this had happened: spreading out my village so I could add lamp posts along the cobblestone streets.

Storage Warehouse Under Reconstruction

And so I once again tore up everything I had. I moved every last thing I had saved into some chests in the church, as it was one of the few buildings I had decided was better left right where it was standing. Then I started sketching out the design of some of the buildings in a pad of graph paper I had before striking on a different idea: I could make a second copy of NameWorld and use it for physical, walk-through plans of the buildings whenever I needed them.

The first building(s) to be torn down were the storage warehouses. I liked the design, but where I had built them was a bit iffy, and so I gave it a bit of a revamp. It should store a fair bit more while also having more room to get between the floors. All of the blocks and items will be held in the one single warehouse, however, instead of secluded in one of their own.

Damn It, Creeper...

Of course, while taking down the warehouses, that meant some of the torches I had stuck on the sides were removed and thus there was more darkness around for monsters to spawn in. And so a creeper took it upon itself to blast a hole in one of the partially-build church's walls.

I'm currently using the church as a sort of house, as well. My bed is now on the floor of the church basement, where all the marble bricks had once been. I'm not sure if it's going to be safe to use on a regular basis, however, given that it's not actually in an enclosed space any longer.