Castle with a mario twist

 

This week I have been very busy since I didn't have anything to do all weekend. I decided to put all of the wool that I have collected from hitting sheep to good use. So at first I tried enclosing the main room of my castle with it but I had white, gray, and black wool in varying amounts so it started to look dumb. So instead I decided to put some "mario style" into my castle and I made I bunch of different colored landing by dyeing the white wool different colors. You can get red and yellow dyes by putting flowers into your crafting box. Black, blue, green and white dyes our obtained respectfully by killing squid, mining blue blocks,smelting cacti, and crushing bone. If you mix certain combination of these you can get different colors like pink or light blue. I thought the hardest of the dyes to get was black because I found it hard to find squid but I found out that if you press "f" repeatedly while looking into the water it will change the fog settings rapidly and that makes the squid visible from land. I think you can also hit "f3"and it will put a number above every mobs head that you can see from land.

I also downloaded a "texture package" which makes all of the blocks look different. The above pictures shows the work that I did on the outside of my castle and you can kind of see the difference in the look of the blocks. All I had to do was google "minecraft texture pack", find one I liked on the first site, then save it under the folder that comes up when you click open texture pack folder in the menu of you minecraft window. I think you also need winrar to unzip it or something like that. Then the last thing I have to mention is that I heard that the new update is going to include wolves that you can tame and they will follow you around and protect you from evil mobs... so we got that to look forward to.

Castle in the sky

So this week was a whole lot of busy work. I spent some time digging out my mine a little more, but that got really tedious. So I decided to put all of the stone that i have collected to use and i started construction of a castle. It goes all the way up to the top of the map and in the center sit my gateway to the nether. Pretty nerdy sounding stuff right? I'm not to sure why this game is so fun sometimes... especially this week. You get hooked on a project and then halfway through you wonder if its really worth it. So right now my castle's exterior wall is about half complete but i can always just finish it up next week. I was thinking about making it look like Hogwarts but to go through with that would involve a TON of work; possibly including but not limited to making the lake which would be an enormous task. My friend posted a video on my facebook wall and somehow the minecraft community never fails to impress me with how much time they have on their hands. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c83y8ubU0M that's the link to the video. Check it out... its absolutely insane. This guy is playing on a different mode with infinite building materials so its a little more understandable. I may switch over to that mode to construct Hogwarts cause I think that would be fun. Who knows? Catch ya next week.

Trip to the Nether

So i found out this week Notch, the creator of minecraft, included a region in minecraft that he called the Nether. This was part of his Halloween update. So i watched a video of someone going into the nether to find out how you get there. Turns out all you need to do is to mine 14 blocks of obsidian, the most durable block in the game, and make a 3x5 doorway and then light that on fire with some flint. To get obsidian you need a diamond pick ax which can be kinda difficult to obtain, but obsidian is a lot easier to find. All you need to do is pour water on some lava and it will turn it into obsidian. Once I made the doorway I got some supplies: torches, stone, an iron sword, and the flint i used to light the gateway, and headed on through. The picture above is what I came out into. The purple thing is my doorway. When I went though I had the game set on peacful which means that no harmful mobs will spawn, so I didnt see anything living. When I turned that setting to easy some white floating jelly fish looking things spawned and started shooting fire out of their mouths at me. Then I came across what seemed like some peaceful zombies but once i attacked then they came after me. Needless to say I soon died and spawned back in the real world.

Done with Shelter

Okay so the first thing I did was created a crafting box to make tools, and then I made my shelter. Any crafting recipes that I refer to can be found the the minecraft wiki page (http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting). In my last world I made the mistake of not making a shelter. That works until nightime and then you are killed by a mob (anything esle that moves, could be good like a pig or evil like a spider) and lose all the stuff that you collected. So I built my shelter right next to my spawn point which is usually a smart thing to do in case you are killed in which case you will spawn right next to your shelter. So after I got my shelter all set up I went out and got a crap load of wood for crafting. The main thing that I wanted to make with it was ladder parts. After I crafted like 60 ladder pieces I dug a whole all the way to the bottom of the map, digging out some coal and iron that I saw along the way. After that I built a tower all the way to the top of the level to I could see other valuable places on my map, such as a lava pit or just a sick looking place to built something. Also having a super tall tower right by your shelter keeps you from getting lost if you venture away from it and don't want to just die. Now that a had a good base for a shelter I thought I would build a fire in the corner of my shelter to dispose of some of the more useless items a had picked up, mainly wool and twigs. Well I built the fire in a part of my shelter that I left without a roof because the tree was protecting it from things getting in and I could also tell if it was day or night by looking through the leaves. Long story short I set every tree around my shelter on fire >:( good thing I had gotten the wood from most of them already.

Starting Back Up

Hey guys, so I downloaded minecraft about four months ago while it was still in its alpha version. For those of who who are unfamiliar with minecraft you can watch the videos above and that will pretty much sum it up. I haven not really played the game much since the beta version was released because that meant I had to start a whole new map. But I have decided to start a new one now for the purpose of this blog so you, my audience, can track my progress and hopefully get some good tips to make your own map. Lets get started then...