So, Minecraft.

[DeeBye]

The efficiency of my underground tree farm is amazing.

http://i.imgur.com/AT9tx.jpg

[Lissa]

The efficiency of my underground tree farm is amazing.

http://i.imgur.com/AT9tx.jpg

Trees...or something else...

[DeeBye]

Trees...or something else...

Try as I might, I cannot understand what you are implying. My underground tree farm grows trees very well.

[kandrathe]

In Single Player, I used a cool mod called Toggle Block. It allows you to better create automated farms. With the flip of a switch water would flow onto my farm washing the wheat and seeds to the collection point. With the press of a button, the Toggle Blocks would till and replant the ground.

My son and I are playing together on a server I created on my PC. One of my first rules is that we play with no mods. There is no way that I can use that Toggle Blocks mod. Thanks anyways.

That's one of the reasons I never got into Minecraft; my sons love to download Mods and experiment with the game, but I feel that diminishes the actual play experience; this from my own experience with Diablo 1. Having said that, there are also quite a few good total conversion Mods (i.e. The Dark is to D1, Median XL is to D2) I've seen my sons play such as Adventure craft. I also wanted to comment that some small Mods can really enhance the flavor of the game, like texture pack Mods (the flashlight Mod for Doom 3, Trent Reznor gun sound for Doom 3, etc.). Anyways, all in all, I'm in agreement with you that Mods can diminish the fun, but they can also add to it if used properly, all of which I suppose is irrelevant because I don't play Minecraft .

In general, I agree. Most of the good ones are balanced such that in order to construct the OMGMegaCoolItem, you need to have mined a sufficient amount of ore only accessible by someone whose been to either the nether, or below level 19. The ultimately well balanced mod is called "Better than wolves", which creates an integrated construction path requiring end game prerequisites, and adds additional items to acquire such as farming hemp to make ropes. I also found Industrialcraft, Buildcraft and Equivalent Exchange pretty well balanced.

The requirement for toggle blocks of any size would be quantities of gold or iron. Another utility one I like in this vein is wireless redstone. I like having complicated circuits, but I hate spending hours figuring out how to get three or four wires to not intersect.

One way to handle it is to not install the mod on a world until you've gotten to the end. For single player I installed "Portable Minecraft", so we can have multiple versions of minecraft.jar somewhere other than appdata. One of them is always vanilla. This way, when the boys clamour for "Halloween Mod" I can accomodate without compromising every other world in progress.

[DeeBye]

Thread necromancy!

My son and I are still totally hooked on this wonderful game. We seem to have a theme going. We love making brand new worlds and starting from scratch over and over again. We are both pretty proud of what we've done in our latest world, so I'm going to show it here.

I made an Imgur album link

Here's an overview of our house. We found a pretty nice patch of land beside an ocean, right on the border of a forest and desert biome. We spent a long time flattening the land and terraforming the coastline so it was just right. At this point I should mention that we play totally in Survival with no mods at all. Everything was done the hard way. Right now it's made up of wood and cobblestone, but eventually we want to switch it to red bricks and stone bricks because we like the way that looks.


Inside the front door we have our furnace/crafting area. Our experiences in other worlds was that we sometimes need a lot of furnaces for doing things like turning a vast amount of cobblestone to regular stone for nicer looking building blocks. Torches on walls alone wasn't enough to prevent monsters from spawning within the house, so we placed torches under glass blocks in the floor to light it up better. We might switch that out for glowstone later when we make enough trips to the nether for supplies.


We made sure to make a big-ass storage room and label everything very clearly. In our last build we had a huge storage room with tons of chests, but we neglected to do any sort of labeling system so we always forgot what chest was for what. This time we set up a system with wooden signs pointing to each chest (is there a better way to do this?). We also allowed for the expansion of this room if the need arises.


Enchanting room. Nothing too fancy here.


Here is our sugar cane farm. It's 2x25 and supplies us with more than we need. Eventually I want to put in a piston system to harvest it all in one shot, but we don't have enough resources for that yet. I've left enough room on each side to make that easy enough to do.


We found an abandoned mineshaft, and within it we found 2 spawners - one was a cave spider spawner and the other was a zombie spawner. We opted to use the zombie spawner to make this XP farm. We used this design, which I've used in the past and I really like. The design itself is very reliable, but digging it out and assembling it took me the better part of 2 afternoons. It's tricky dealing with spawner farms in survival mode. I wish we had found a skeleton spawner because they drop arrows and bones, which are infinitely more useful than what zombies drop. This is okay for now though.


Here is our source of food. It's a 7x8 wheat farm (those dimensions were very intentional - more on that later) and it was the first thing we built after the building the "main" part of our home.


Before we had access to redstone we harvested the wheat all by hand, but when we had enough supplies to build pistons the first thing we did was make this into something easier to harvest. A row of pistons holds back a row of water source blocks, and when we flip a level they all open and a water stream harvests the wheat from back to front. The 7x8 dimensions were important, because we had water sources on each side making the entire area tillable (tilled land must be within 4 blocks of water). The water drop required the 7 block length, because water travels 8 blocks and we needed the extra block to perform the drop. You can't drop water onto wheat without destroying the wheat and possiblly making the dirt block un-tilled, so 7 is the maximum length we could go. It definitely produces enough wheat for us to easily rely on bread as our number 1 food source.


Things we plan on doing:

• We need a proper infinite water supply and lava disposal system within our house. No idea why I haven't made these yet because they are super easy to do. I guess it's because I haven't decided on the proper spot for them.
  
• Animal farms! We don't really have a spot for them now, or an idea of where they might go. I think I might want to build them underground though.
  
• Find a skeleton spawner to replace our zombie XP farm.
  
• Slime farm. We dug out an area we think is a slime chunk, but it doesn't seem to be spawning slimes. I'll have to do more research on this.
  

[LochnarITB]

I know almost nothing about Minecraft but what I've seen here. Even so, I can recognize the thought and effort put into your project. Amazing! What a great thing to share with your son. Very cool!

[DeeBye]

I know almost nothing about Minecraft but what I've seen here. Even so, I can recognize the thought and effort put into your project. Amazing! What a great thing to share with your son. Very cool!

You really should try it. The best way to describe it is "multiplayer Lego", but with way more depth. You really can do whatever you want to do. It's as easy or as hard as you want to make it. You can try earlier versions for free on Minecraft.net.

Tonight I started working with that cave spider spawner. I was originally just planning on making a straight "kill spider" farm for the item drops, but then I saw this interesting cave spider XP farm design. I've used a different design on my other XP farms so this design is totally new to me, so I decided to try it out.

I started digging out the spawn area around the cave spider spawner. This is always tricky work because if you don't have the working area lit enough, you can be overwhelmed with spawning enemies. Never be stingy with torches while working around a spawner. I'm about 2/3rds of the way done here.


In this picture I'm done with carving out the spawn area itself. A stream of water will funnel the spiders towards that opening in the back. I carved out a tunnel on the outside of the spawn area so I can knock out those dirt blocks holding the torches from safety to allow spiders to spawn. This won't be until I am 100% done with the "business end" of the XP farm. I think I'm ready to add the water streams when I get a chance to work on it some more.

[DeeBye]

So I finished the cave spider spawner XP grinder. I don't have any pictures right now, but it's laid out the same way as this.

I figured I needed to add some meat to my diet. I've been relying purely on bread as a form of sustenance, and us guys gotta eat meat once in awhile. I had a few eggs stashed away from my forays into the woods to chop down trees, so I started on a chicken farm.

The first thing I did was extend my "farm hallway" as long as I could. Chickens make a lot of noise and I wanted them to be as far away from the main part of my house as possible. The chicken farm will be at the end of this hallway.


The farm design itself is pretty neat. I copied this one from the Minecraft wiki. It's very compact and as far as I can tell it's idiot-proof. It's a 8x8 room, with flowing water all along the bottom part to funnel eggs/chicken meat to the entrance. Signs support an entire "floor" of water, where the chickens reside. The eggs fall through the water/signs and the flowing water on the bottom funnels them to a pickup area.


I was a bit concerned about stocking my new chicken farm with actual chickens, because I only had 4 eggs to throw against the wall. Each egg only has a 1/8 chance to spawn a chicken. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.


Yay! I got 2 chickens! From up above I can kill any excess chickens for meat. The raw chicken drops will funnel down the same way eggs do and I can collect them below.

[LavCat]

Is that sanitary?

[DeeBye]

Is that sanitary?

I would never think about eating a raw chicken without cooking it first.

[LennyLen]

Nice farm.

When I get the chance, I'll take a series of screenshots (or make a video) of my farm, which I built entirely underground. But for now, Here's a video tour of the Fortress I'm currently constructing: Nordvang WIP tour

And a picture of it from a distance:

[RiotInferno]

That looks awesome (both of you!)
Here's a link to something I found useful when playing MC
Voxel Spheres or how to make sphere-like objects out of squares.

[DeeBye]

That looks awesome (both of you!)

Thanks! I think that's what I love most about Minecraft - the immediate sense of accomplishment you get when you make something cool. You can spend hours making something, stand back, and say "hell yeah i made that!"

Here's a link to something I found useful when playing MC
Voxel Spheres or how to make sphere-like objects out of squares.

I don't often make spherical stuff, but I have Plotz bookmarked in case I feel the need.

My new chicken farm seems to be a success.

[DeeBye]

But for now, Here's a video tour of the Fortress I'm currently constructing: Nordvang WIP tour

That's a kickass tower right there. I have a couple of questions though. Do you actually like that texture pack? I've seen it a lot, but when I tried it out I didn't really care for it. What's the appeal? I only ever use the default texture pack, or OCD when I'm building something precise and I need to count blocks easily.

Is that tower build totally in vanilla survival? If so, awesome job. It's one thing to build something cool in Minecraft, but it's quite another to build something cool while also having to gather all the resources by yourself and guard against enemies. So many times I've had to rebuild stuff because a creeper silently snuck up on me from behind and blew up half my build.

I finally got around to automating my Sugar Cane farm with pistons.


Here's the redstone wiring on the outside. I thought it was going to be more resource-intensive than it actually was. I had to add a few repeaters to get the whole row of pistons to fire because the farm is 25 blocks long. Here's an outside shot of the wiring. Looking at the screenshot just now makes me realize I could have made the repeater loop a bit smaller with another repeater.

[LennyLen]

Do you actually like that texture pack? I've seen it a lot, but when I tried it out I didn't really care for it. What's the appeal?

I do like that texture pack. I tried pretty much every single HD pack, and it's the one that appealed to me most, visually.

Is that tower build totally in vanilla survival?

It is. I play on a Survival MP server hosted by an acquaintance of mine. I can PM you the address if you like; it's hosted in Canada, and most of the people who play on it are Canadian.

I know how you feel about Creepers. One of the reasons I chose the location I did for the Fortress was that it was inaccessible without ladders/stairs, so once I had lit up the top fully, and removed the ladders I placed to get to the top, the build site was completely safe.

[RiotInferno]

When I was heavily playing MC, I built a giant floating pyramid, that was hollow inside. Turns out, it was big enough and dark enough to spawn mobs inside of it. That was a bit of a scare the first time I found that out.

That and I was obsessed with trying to build the perfect Bat-Signal.

[kandrathe]

My sons have recruited about 30 to 40 third to sixth graders to join them on our white-list server. I've rebuilt it recently to Bukkit 1.2.5 -- with a few plugins for fun (disguise themselves as any creature). They can choose a job (lumberjack, hunter, miner, carpenter, etc.) and the game rewards them (in a balanced way) if they do their job with some experience and money. I've implemented Multiverse, which allows us to sew together multiple worlds with different parameters and experiences (like bSpace; having planetoids with no gravity). One of the worlds I've included is the "Minecraftia" world, famous from the Yogcast videos. Also, many individual survival challenge maps (survival island type), which I've scripted to refresh to their default setup every night. On the old server we had, I had built my own world, called "Utah", where I could escape from the boys and do my own thing without their "help". But, now... It seems having a regal castle in Utah is somewhat a prestige thing, and I think they know that if they mess up Utah, I will revoke their travel privileges (permissions are world based). We've been very careful to avoid including anything that would require a client side plugin (not knowing how well the boys would be at successfully adding mods to their clients).

The main plugins I use for players are Essentials, Jobs, Multi-verse (Portals, Inventory, etc) and WorldGuard to create protected (owned) zones, only alterable by the owner and to the people for which the owner delegates rights. For Admins (me) I've installed WorldEdit. In order to experience the alternate worlds the clients need to use Spoutcraft.

The hardest part has been getting the group permissions adjusted to give these boys just enough power to be fun and not dangerous. On an earlier server, I had limited the effects of fire, lava, explosives, etc. But this time I figure they are going to have to learn to play well with each other eventually. I made a backup script that saves the world data every evening so we can rollback a world if needed. I also don't have a fixed IP address, so if the router goes down (its on my telecom UPS) they need to recommunicate the new IP address.

[DeeBye]

I can PM you the address if you like; it's hosted in Canada, and most of the people who play on it are Canadian.

I've never played on any kind of multiplayer server, so I really don't know the etiquette. You can PM me the address, as long as it's cool that my son can try it too.

*snip*

I have no idea what much of that means, but you are an awesome dad for setting all of that up for your sons and their friends. I'd really like a truly persistent minecraft server so I can have other people join, but I don't have the spare machine for it (nor do I think my wife would allow me to have a computer running 24/7 solely to host a persistent minecraft world).

[kandrathe]

I have no idea what much of that means, but you are an awesome dad for setting all of that up for your sons and their friends. I'd really like a truly persistent minecraft server so I can have other people join, but I don't have the spare machine for it (nor do I think my wife would allow me to have a computer running 24/7 solely to host a persistent minecraft world).

I don't really have a dedicated machine for it. The Minecraft server is light weight enough to allow us to have it running while we play other games (Wow, SC2, DIII). I guess you wouldn't need to have it on all the time, just during your normal hours. Around here, if the server is down when someone wants to play, my sons friends call him to bring it up. I'm not too keen on having an open server -- then I'd need to worry about having things buttoned down security wise. Having a friends server is hard enough.

[DeeBye]

I had a pretty constructive day. I *think* I found an actual Slime chunk. I found two 3x3 Slimes in one of my mining tunnels (I'm glad I make them that big). I'll have to play around with that at a later date.

I've been exploring a HUGE abandoned mineshaft lately. I've never seen one so big. I've found at least 8 spawners (no Skeleton Archers sadly - all Cave Spider and Zombie spawners), and I found a bunch of chests. Amongst those chests I found a decent amount of melon and pumpkin seeds, so it was time to build a melon/pumpkin farm.

I worked out a design awhile ago for a piston-powered semi-automatic melon/pumpkin farm that was fairly simple and low on resources, so actually building it in my survival world didn't take too long - maybe an hour at most. It uses 30 sticky pistons, and it hurt to use 30 of my precious Slime Balls.


The length is 15 blocks - which is the maximum that a redstone signal carries - but I could extend it if I had to with some repeater trickery. I don't think I have to.

The melons/pumpkins grow on dirt blocks, which are connected to sticky pistons underneath that fire upwards. When I flip a lever, they all break and I just have to walk through them to harvest.


I've been wanting a sheep farm for awhile. I want to have separate pens for the 16 different colours of sheep, so my son and I built a fairly large room to accommodate it (I was using the OCD texture pack for this screenshot because it allows me to easily count blocks).


Here's the finished Sheep Room™. There are 8 pens on each side for a total of 16 pens. I added signs to label each Wool colour, and slapped some chests in each pen. I haven't lured any sheep in yet, but I'm a bit worried about them escaping due to SMP lag like my chickens have been doing. The next 1.3 update is supposed to be fixing this, but we shall see.


Here's an overview of my ever-expanding Minecraft home. It's getting really huge.
http://i.imgur.com/t3PNs.jpg