I was thinking tonight we would change things up a little bit and play some Minecraft together. This might actually be a nice way to mix things up – on patch weeks we play Minecraft on Monday nights, and the week after a patch we play LoL and get to show off our amazing skills with the new champion.
For tonight, I invite you to join me in some building and mining. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get to do a little destroying along the way. I’m currently playing on a server called DarkTide, which you can find on Minestatus.net. Drop a quick application in their Minecraftforum.net thread to get whitelisted and find me in game. I’ll be playing as “TheWuggler.”
Depending how many people play MC, we might be able to fire up a city on this server, though we should probably wait a week or two to do so.
I’ve been a devoted Minecraft fan from the moment I made my first dirt hut to wait out the night. There’s something amazing about the simplicity of the game, and it continues to deliver months after I would have been bored with so many other games.
I recently joined a hardcore-themed PvP server, which is my first real experience with any kind of PvP in Minecraft. For all its limitations, Minecraft PvP is surprisingly fun, offering a threat of danger that creepers just can’t provide. As an example, a friend and I were doing some tunneling and randomly popped through the wall of another player’s underground tower. During our climb to the top, we noticed movement overhead. Another player! His nameplate was showing through the blocks, which meant ours were showing to him as well. We started digging furiously, trying to get up to the surface and find him. He made his escape, but we were able to loot a few valuables before running off to the safety of our own base.
Granted, this doesn’t sound particularly thrilling, but when you’re in a simple of world of blocks and almost anything is possible, the game feels alive in a way no MMO has ever felt. I’m continually amazed by how good Minecraft is on its own, but also the level of community development that goes into expanding the game’s possibilities. Big developers could learn so much about what makes a game fun from just a few hours with Minecraft. Let’s hope they give it a chance.
I don’t know how much you guys follow the gaming conference circuit. Despite the fact that I write for a gaming blog, its pretty rare that I’m shocked by anything coming out of the various conferences throughout the year. Most of the larger developers like to save their major announcements for a day that they will be the only developer making noise. Still, the annual development competition at GDC caught my eye this year, mostly because it involves Minecraft.
Every year at GDC, a pool of developers is asked to design a game for a specific challenge. This year’s theme was “Bigger Than Jesus,” tasking designers with creating a religion/religious experience within a game. The winner, Jason Rohrer, came up with something truly awesome. His game is called Chain World and it’s designed to mimic the way we experience powerful people and ideas that we have no carnal attachment to.
As an example, Rohrer cited his own family, which had built up a sort of mythos around Jason’s grandfather. Though Jason didn’t really know him, he still retold his grandfather’s stories, traveled to places his grandfather had lived and so on, all because of his devotion to this idea of a person. Chain World recreates that devotion by giving the player a world populated with structures and places without a real explanation of where their origins.
The twist is that only one person is playing Chain World anywhere in the world at a time. Chain World is a Minecraft world on a thumb drive. When you die, you take the thumb drive and give it to someone new, who then goes and plays the game until he dies, and so on. It’s an interesting concept, one I can hardly give due justice. The video above is long, but it’s worth a watch. I’d stop after Rohrer’s presentation. The other contestant’s weren’t nearly as good.
If someone walks up to you some day in the near future and hands you a USB drive, you better take it, and when you die, ship that bad boy my direction.
I’ve enjoyed just about everything in the Minecraft 1.3 update. The new lighting looks awesome, beds work fantastically, even in multiplayer, and I’ve even used the new half blocks on a couple structures. There is one thing that has plagued me to no end: slimes.
Slimes used to be fairly uncommon creatures. They got removed. They got put back in the game but were super rare. The 1.3 update, though, made them extraordinarily common. I had to decommission one of my mob spawners because the design was getting horribly clogged with slimes. The former mob spawner seems to now be a slime spawner. I snapped the image above last night after I noticed my new mob spawner upstairs had slowed. Gee, I wonder why?
I’ve read in several forum threads that slimes are buggy in multiplayer, but I’m hoping we see some sort of hotfix soon. Unfortunately, the entire Mojang team is at GDC right now, so we’ll be waiting at least a couple weeks before any kind of fix can be issued. Are you seeing slimes everywhere or are they a rare sight?
As promised, Mojang released the Minecraft beta 1.3 update to the masses today. So far, things seem pretty good. There were some save folder issues for about a half hour after the launch, but Notch quickly patched and things have been running fairly smoothly since. The authentication server does seem to be under some load, but enough about that. Let’s talk changes.
First, lighting. I know you probably thought I would talk about beds first, but that addition pales in comparison to the new lighting engine. Yes, it was available as a mod prior to the release, but it’s really nice to have it built in to the game. Basically, light doesn’t render in blocks now, so surfaces look much smoother. The world looks much, much better. It does seem to have reduced the effectiveness of torches by a little bit. I’ve had mobs spawn in places I’ve not had problems before. Maybe we’re getting close to the lantern update?
Next, of course, is beds. Yes, beds are now in the game, allowing players to “sleep” through the night. I didn’t think beds would work in SMP, but they do, so long as every player gets to a bed. I’m glad to see that SMP is a development priority as I think that’s where the real beauty of Minecraft exists. Come March, beds should also set a players spawn point, which should be another nice addition.
We also got three new half blocks – cobblestone, wood, and sandstone. The update also added a redstone delayer/repeater for those of you redstone geeks.
Overall, it’s a very cool update. I can’t wait to see what the March update brings.
