Notch released a bunch of new stuff last night. Pressure plates, levers, buttons, and some weird red stuff that acts like a wire when placed on the ground. After starting a new save my first goal was to dig down to the bottom of the map in search of this red stuff. The result was three full stacks of 64. Plus a bunch of iron, gold, and diamond. I think I'll be digging down to the bottom of the map more often.

Has anyone else tried the new stuff yet? I made a land mine by placing TNT in the ground and putting a pressure plate over it. I also made an automatic door by putting pressure plates on both sides. And I discovered that dropped items can activate the pressure plates (I did a lot of experimenting with those pressure plates). Tomorrow I think I might try wiring up some explosives. I haven't tested whether the red stuff "wires" can activate TNT.

I haven't played in so long. It's about time to try it out again. I'm happy to see that there is now a self-updating download so you can play offline. Awesome. Unfortunately, it won't run on my EeePC that I'm using right now. It only achieves at most 7 FPS and when I actually try to interact with it it drops to like 1. Oh well, I'll give it a shot when I get home tonight.

I was actually gonna post this in a separate thread but since a gaming thread is already open:

Go play Fault Line

If I start to think about how this game was possibly coded, my head starts to hurt. In Flash, no less.

You are not using the diamonds to destabilize a country are you?

Looks cool, although the controls are awkward since Im right handed and my arrow keys are on the right side of the key board along with my mouse.

Thats another thing. Why do people put such monumental effort to make a game on such a shit development standard. It could be better with Java, although I prefer allegro or some other engine with C++.

Sweet, that one does run on my Eee! Though the folding is a little difficult with a trackpad (for me especially because I almost never use them).

** EDIT **

I'm currently stuck on room 19.

That problem was solved years ago. It supports WASD so use those instead.

The only thing I don't like about Flash is its non-free licensing. In particular, that you have to pay hundreds of dollars to develop, at least in the feature rich studio. Also, it has poor support under Linux, though with 32-bit Redhat or Debian-based distributions it appears to be pretty easy to install now (as they have software repositories you can add).

Flash has advantages over Java. It's easier to install and update Flash on Windows-based machines. I suppose it's about the same whether Flash or Java on Linux (at best). It is improving though.

I imagine this game was a lot easier to write in Flash/ActionScript than it would have been in C or C++ and Allegro, etc. Probably a lot easier than writing it in Java too. Not to mention, with the C/C++ version, you'd have to worry about cross-compiling and writing platform independent code and installation on various systems, etc. It's a whole lot easier to distribute software over the Web.

I coded a few things in Flex, which is Adobe's Flash with libraries for doing application development. The development environment was free when I did it, and I actually found the whole process to be rather pleasant.

On topic, I started up a new level on Minecraft to test out all the new things. Waterfalls and minecarts are fun. Automated doors are amazing. I'm building a castle on top of a mountain, just a hair above the cloud layer. It'll hopefully have a minecart that runs all the way to the bottom

EDIT:

QFT. Minecraft is a great example.

I found a huge floating island, big enough for a full-sized castle to be built on it. It's about a day of walking south of my starting position.

I'm thinking of mining a bunch of obsidian later and redoing the entire castle in it. I know were a whole bunch is (ran water & lava while mining).

Minecraft is finally Turing complete!
I wonder when the first "computer" will be shown. It can't be far off now.

EDIT:
7 segment display: Youtube video

The developer is working on multiplayer mode this week. It'd be cool to have an allegro server or something

YES! \o/ Is he actually releasing the server software though? Or do you just expect there to be some kind of matching mechanism?

I think he is... He did for the Creative Multiplayer mode. His latest blog post says that he is making the server scriptable so people can create their own plugins and such.

Notch is also a very fast coder, so I would not be surprised if the multiplayer code is 50% done by now.

EDIT:

Maybe not 50%, but he's fast!

I'm having a really hard time finding copper in the newest version. It makes building roller coasters a pain in the butt But my castle in the sky is going well otherwise. Gonna try and make some ladder/stairs/minecart systems to help get to and from my mines.

I also wanna see if minecarts will fly through the air and land ...

I think they do. I'm pretty sure I saw it happen in a YouTube video.

Also, iron is harder to find than it used to be, but I dug down to the bottom of the map and found a cavern with all sorts of resources. I got slightly more than a full stack of iron.

I tried playing for the first time in a long time a couple of days ago. I had trouble building sticks, but that was because the lumber had to go through an in between phase first. I finally noticed this after looking really closely at the crafting guide. A 'how to get started' guide basically was full of advice from experienced players and they all basically said that the first thing you do in the alpha is make torches. This requires coal apparently (it's been so long many beers that I don't remember). So I found some coal, but when I actually dug up the blocks no coal was dropped! I dug through an entire deposit of probably 8 blocks of coal, but got nothing from it. Is this a bug or has this part of the gameplay changed?

You have to use a pic-axe to get coal out of those blocks, otherwise you get nothing. I use this Crafting reference, and it shows explicitly that you need at least a wood pic-axe to mine coal.

Excellent. Thanks! Though I'm not sure about how explicitly it shows the need for a pick-axe. If I'm reading it the way you are then it also suggests that you need an axe for lumber, but I was clearly able to "chop" it by hand.

Good point. It seems to hold true for the pic axe related items, because I was unable to get gold without an Iron pic. But yeah, you can use your manly hands to rip apart trees just fine.

And punch wool off a sheep!

So what do cowpunchers get?

Why is it that I keep making tunnels through mountains?

Everybody knows that cows is a myth... Together with horses. Made up to scare the children!

No, I punch my sheep and I ride my pigs, like god (notch) intended.

Edit:

Because you can?

It'd be rather silly to make a tunnel through a plain or valley.

I do that too, to connect my mountain-tunnels together.

It makes sense, because I have more stone than I know what to do with, and I don't want mobs getting into my tunnels!

Apparently some people have made Mob traps that automatically trap and kill mobs, and then put their loot in a convenient location for collection. Reference

I think I might build one and use it to collect a bunch of the gun powder stuff for making TNT. That way I can blast away mountains quickly

I think I'll incorporate one of those mob traps into my base.

Minecraft (read: Java) crashed hard. Who knows what progress I lost.

** EDIT **

Not bad actually. It seems my inventory was saved, but the state of the cave I was opening up was not. So I got the coal and stone, but it's all back again so I can mine it again! \o/ A gift from the gods!

Ha! Lucky.

I found a butt-load of iron earlier. Dozens of ores in a cave right next to my spawn point.

It would certainly be a lot more fun to play this multiplayer. The nights when you're out of a particular resource (i.e., torches) and have to wait for morning are long and lonely...

Yeah, but then you'll get griefers in survival mode.

I suppose that's what gangs are for.

My anti-griefing measure? Lava buckets. Pour them down on their heads! MUAHAHA!

The minecraft forums have soooo many posts about people's various anti-griefing methods.

As much fun as survival multiplayer sounds, I can't see myself joining a random server and playing with complete strangers. The risk of being griefed/robbed is just too high and I could see myself getting very frustrated very quickly.

I'd definitely join a private allegro server though. Or one where I knew other people didn't have any problems.

Of course, who knows if Notch has already made plans to eliminate griefing/stealing.

Yeah, I was thinking more of playing with friends or acquaintances on a private server, not random people on some public server. Though if the maps are sufficiently large then I would imagine that it should be possible to dig yourselves under ground and try to stay hidden from the griefers. I've never played multiplayer before, but I assume you can still make weapons and battle them. What should happen when you die on a multiplayer server is you are completely disconnected and have to start out all over again on another server.

It would be nice with a "fortification" tool. You use it on a block to make it a lot harder to harvest/destroy.

It would also be cool to have "selected" torches create light (I realize this is probably a performance issue). Traveling at night is a PITA.

I can imagine playing MP with friends on a private server, but never with random strangers.

Obsidian walls. Even with a diamond picaxe, that stuff takes forever to dig through.

According to the Wiki, it's only 15 seconds with a diamond pickaxe... And with TNT, you can blow through a single layer. Besides, that would probably mean you had to spend that time to mine it first. So the griefers would be doing just as much harm taking their time to break it down. Plus, it's apparently not available in generated maps yet so you might as well just call it magic.

With the lava and water springs there's a way you can make a mold and pour obsidian (water on top of lava turns the lava into obsidian). This would let you make a nice, thick wall fairly easily.

/me has never seen a lava spring.

I got tired of mindlessly digging under my base hoping for the occasional iron deposit. No iron means no railroads, which is no fun. With the hopes of finding a cave system full of iron, I loaded up with pic-axes, shovels, food, weapons, torches, and wood. I left my valuables at home, packed my bags, and set out at dawn for a long expedition into unknown lands. I would be travelling far and wide in search of iron, surviving alone in the wilderness with nothing but darkness and hissing explodie guys to comfort me.

After a long day of treking I had seen many mountains, plains, forests, and a few promising but ultimately disappointing caves. Only two or three blocks of iron to show for a full day of exploring. Night was falling quickly and soon all I would have is the light of my torches to help me navigate. Still, I was determined to either come home with trucks of iron, or die in a blaze of molten glory.

About half way through the night I was being chased by a pack of skeletons wielding bows and quite sharp arrows. I saw a dark hole in the ground, and with no other good options, I decided to quickly jump in and hope for the best. Down in the dark I settled down for a bit, and listened for their footsteps. It seemed like I was safe, so I began to explore my newly discovered surroundings. Off in the corner I saw a dim light. Like a moth drawn to fire, I bounced down the rocky ledges to see what was brewing down below. Through a small passage at the base of the cave I found a huge room full of flowing lava. It lit up the whole cavern with a bright red glow, warning visibly of its deadly power.

Reveal spoiler to read the rest ... (so my post isn't huge)

I've found quite a few. You can also make them yourself using buckets.

EDIT:

Youtube uploads are slow. I made a video about making obsidian, it's about a minute long, and it's estimated to take nearly an hour to upload.

Billybob, that is just an awesome story. I tend to avoid confrontation because I can't seem to kill without getting hit (and I never have healing items).

Same here. Although I finally have enough iron to make decent weapons and armor. And then I used half of it making buckets.

Billybob, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Seriously though, you're a great writer.

Making obsidian in a mold:

Minecraft: How to Make Obsidian

Oh yeah, that was some awesome writing!

I just can't wait for multiplayer. I love the features, but they don't make me want to play the game... all I want for Christmas... is some Multiplayer. I will be missing for darn near 3 weeks when that happens.

Further experimentation has shown that an 8x2 area can be turned to obsidian with a single spring of water.

I want to smelt Iron Bars, but I need fire for that. In order to make Fire I need a Flint and Steel, and in order to make a Flint and Steel I need an Iron Bar... Surely you see where I'm going with this. What am I missing? Or do I have to go find some lava for this?

Make a furnace (on a crafting table put stone blocks everywhere except the center). It can be fueled with coal or wood, and maybe a couple of other materials, and will smelt stuff for you.

Awesome! Thanks! It looks like you can even set it and walk away and it'll continue to work and leave the loot there for you to collect!

Does armor/clothing do anything practical yet? Me is now wearing an iron helmet, vest, and pants!

I think armor does some damage reduction, but I'm not sure. Some sources say it prevents all damage, but I know that to be untrue (at least with fall damage).

To expand:

One piece of coal yields 8 iron bars
One piece of wood yields 2 iron bars

What I usually do is make 4 furnaces and stack them 2x2 in a room near my mine shaft (or at the start of a large tunnel network) and wait until I have at least 32 iron ore before returning (on a set of 4 metal pickaxes I can usually take in more than 64). Then I divide my haul so that each furnace will have a multiple of 8 ore with the remainder staying in my inventory. While the ore is being smelted I take bars from a chest and make 4 more pickaxes and 8 more metal shovels (which are incredibly usefull for clearing out sand pockets in shafts and caves).

I have underground farms for trees, wheat, and pigs (thanks to the pig spawner I picked up in a dungeon) so I never need to venture up to the surface.

That happened to me on a map a while back. It seemed like I was only to find one or two blocks of iron per cave. I think it was actually a bug where the caves & tunnels were being generated after the ore, so large chunks of the vein were missing... I haven't run into that problem in recent updates though.

You can use Cartographer to make a top down view (or isometric view) of your explored world. You can then use cartographer to generate an ore map showing all coal,iron,gold, and diamond deposits and combine the two to show you exactly where everything is.

say what?

{"name":"makin-bacon.png","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/5\/05f5e076972856c8e91e87816d4d199a.png","w":280,"h":280,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/0\/5\/05f5e076972856c8e91e87816d4d199a"}

I am just starting out and I'm always disorganized when I do that. I don't even have a mine. Just a "camp" whose surface is littered with torches. I've been just finding surface-showing ores to mine for now and barely venturing underground. It's working out so far, but again it's very disorganized. I'll probably want to venture away from this camp and forget all about it eventually.

I was thinking the same thing was happening to me. I'd find a couple of blocks of iron, for example, but there'd nothing else around it. I'm not saying that's unrealistic or that every deposit should be huge, but it gave me the impression that the caves were carved out after the ore was mapped, and it just so happened to take most of the ore with it... Of course, I haven't gone deep yet (I've basically only been digging into "moutains") so there's always a chance that I'll find more later on. I've actually had no trouble finding lots of coal, but that's not very rare, I don't think. I did end up finding a decent stash of iron, but that's all so far. I used it to build armor.

That would be super useful, though I think it would also ruin the game somewhat... It would make it a lot easier to mess around with tracks and minecarts though. Perhaps Notch should introduce some way to detect certain ores. Maybe with sticks or something.

A while back Notch added dungeons, square-ish cobblestone rooms with mossy cobblestone floors that contain a monster spawner. (skeleton, spider, etc) and a chest with goodies. The monster spawner is a blue cage with a miniature monster spinning around inside. Every so often a full sized monster will pop out of the cage. After killing all the monsters you can mine the spawner with a pickaxe, except it turns into a pig spawner. Pigs randomly pop out of it. I have room with such a spawner as well as furnace

Indeed. I only used the trick a handful of times to locate dungeons, just to experience the content. All new maps I only use Cartographer for making nice Overhead maps. Notch also made an isometric preview generator <a href="http://www.minecraft.net/infdev/preview.jsp>here</a>

Thank you! That made me smile

That's a shame Luckily new areas are generated on the fly so I guess if I wander off, like I did on my adventure, I'll find the normal amount of iron.

The cartography program was useful for finding a dungeon, but since it's top down the ore map was fairly useless. It needs a density mode of some kind, so I know what areas have the most iron.

Funny you mention that...

When Cartographer was first released and I did my first ore map I got to thinking that since Cartographer can make a slice map (ie. a slice of the world 1 block thick) it would definitely possible to go layer by layer and parse out the x,y,z locations of all ore veins. Once one has the 3D coordinates of all the veins, they could import said coordinates into a GIS application (such as Esri's ArcMap) and use the spatial tools to pinpoint on the map the precise best spot to start digging (ie, most concentrated pockets where all types of ore are relatively close to each other).

We actually use GIS to accomplish similar tasks where I work (except we use it for stuff like watermain breaks, crime maps, vulnerable persons locations etc).

Billybob: Damn it, now I want to buy this game.

Hmm actually, GRASS GIS could probably accomplish that for free... (ArcMap is very expensive $$$).

Cartographer is open source, to the best of my knowledge, so you could take part of its code to rip the coords directly, instead of parsing generated images.

I'd enjoy some kind of hack/app that would give a "hot/cold" kind of indication when moving around Minecraft looking for ore. A map or compass seems too much like cheating, but having a detector would allow me to still adventure and explore with less of the mindless digging.

I wonder if you can hot-load code into a Java program ...

Oh no, I've just found a never ending cave maze... Goodbye surface, forever.

Haha, I love those. I get stacks of ores. Iron, gold, Redstone, and even some diamond.

I would love it more if I had space in my inventory... Plus, I'm now completely lost...

Just dig up. Or die and respawn outside, but that would cost you everything you're carrying.

I hate it when that happens. Now that signs are can be placed on walls, I hope to remedy the problem by walling off cave branches with a dirt door (since the fancy wooden doors don't stack) and placing a signs detailing how explored the branch is and which direction the exit is in...

Using signs for that would be a good idea, but usually what catches me is that it's dark deeper into the cave so I'm afraid of getting ambushed so instead I rush in and pepper the walls with torches... Then I find more dark ahead and just keep going... Before I know it, I've gone in tons of circles, deeper and deeper, in all directions, and I have no idea how to get out... Following the torches only kind of helps because there are some big rooms and paths that circle back on themselves. Tunnelling up is a possibility, but there's always the possibility too that I dig up into water and drown (not to mention, flood my very ore rich cave).

With the infinite levels, does that count for up and down as well (into the sky and into the ground?

It doesn't count up and down.

Infinite does not count up and down, though, Notch may expand the depths at a later date.

Build a natural air lock. Dig up, and every so often while still digging forward, dig down and then sharply back up. If water breaks in, it will stop at the dam.

Given Clonk Planet as an example, and the green being acid, note the left red circle on this picture.

Dig up, down for a moment, then continue up. In Minecraft, you'd only have to dig down two steps or so, go forward a few then up again.

You can do that?! Awesome!

Correct. Water won't flow upward. There are no pressure physics. Personally, though, I just risk it and dig straight up

Apparently he just added a new splash screen and snow.

I've actually found some dry caves under water. On the map I'm currently playing, I saw something dark under water. Investigation revealed a cave. I was curious if I'd have time to see if there were any precious metals inside before my oxygen supply was expended. Instead, I discovered that the water didn't flow into it at all. I fell into the cave and could see the water flowing at the entrance, but never coming inside. It was actually kind of cool. It would be a cool place to make a "base", actually, albeit unstable and you'd have to be careful not to touch the outer wall.

How are you coming on finding your way out?

Once you get out, go back in and place signs all over to guide you next time you go mining down there.

EDIT:

Snow maps! A random chance when generating a new map to get a snowy wonderland! It's awesome.

I cheated and hacked my level.dat file to have

SnowCovered:1

I'm kinda getting tired of constantly starting new worlds to get all the new content>:(

You can take an empty bucket with you under water ... fill it when you are running out of air/health which will make temporarily make one block void of water just long enough to refill your air meter. Supposedly (according to the forum post I got that from) you can then dump the bucket and refill when you are running low again...

Just curious how "online" this game is. Can I play it from home and work and develop the same world, or would it be two separate games on two separate hard drives?

It used to have online saving, from what I understand. I think it got to be too much, what with thousands of people making multiple maps each. So now it's saved locally.

Can I buy it once and use it on multiple computers, then?

Yes. There's an in-browser version and a downloadable client. You can use either on any computer. If you want to play on your saved maps, though, you'll need to carry them in a flash drive. And currently the infinite map saves have a huge number of files, so that's kind of unwieldy.

Yes. You login using your credentials (sort of like Steam) and can play. Even the local version (you can download an auto-updating copy now for offline play) works that way. As for playing the same world on multiple computers, it should [theoretically] work fine if you make backups of your configuration and share it between machines (though no guarantees that the save format is platform independent). On Windows, this is %APPDATA%\.minecraft. On *nix systems, I'm guessing it would instead be $HOME/.minecraft. I'm not 100% sure that it works still, but months ago it worked fine to share save files to explore each others' maps. At that time, it was a single file. Now there seems to be a directory full instead.

Pigs spawn like crazy inside my mine. I have so much ham I'm having to make extra chest just for holding it.

At least I'll never have to worry about food.

I can confirm that under Windows it's just a matter of copying the world directory (from your APPDATA directory like bamccaig said) from one machine to another. The World file sizes are usually pretty small and grow larger depending on the area you explore.

You're playing a public alpha of a game. Choose your battles man.

I'm aware of that I didn't mean to sound like I was complaining, although I'm not sure why I stuck an angry smiley at the end (it should have been a winky smiley).

I'll happily generate a new world when I absolutely cannot fudge the new feature/content in easily. In the case of the snow, it was just a matter of changing one number in the data file.

You can now throw snowballs, and craft snow into blocks and build with it!

Also, Notch is apparently making good progress on survival multiplayer.

I save and quit and then execute this every 10 - 15 minutes.

<cough>Which number?</cough>

In the root of the world save, there's a file called level.dat

Use NBTEdit to change it.

Minecraft Time Travel!!

You want me to download and execute a binary-only program? Somebody binary-diff it to get the offset and number.

If you play minecraft you already did I guess (yes, even if it's a jave aplet it actually gets downloaded, and yes there are viruses written in java, and also yes there are viruses that work inside java applets that exploit java vulnerabilities).

Yeah, but Minecraft is different. It's a successful video game project that is paid for. There's no reason to be malicious with it. There's also decent reason to not open source it (at least, not right away). However, a tool that merely opens the level file and modifies its values is of little use in binary-only form and is a very good candidate for malicious code (the developer could be unknown to the community, etc.). It turns out that the library apparently is open source, which makes it even more baffling (and perhaps alarming) that the program isn't. I ran it anyway though (after being sufficiently confident that it's probably maybe safe).

You want to be a Linux zealot just as bad as you want to be American, don't you? They're the only ones who think binaries are useless and that everything should be free source code on a silver platter.

@bamccaig: You could've just used Sandboxie if you were concerned about malicious code.

EDIT: nevermind, you're probably not running it under Windows.

He has tons of stuff right on his hard disk to check for malicious code.

[EDIT]

Of course since Linux file permissions actually work properly, that's a big help.

I tolerate binaries if they're coming from a trusted source. Bonus points if the author is willing to take accountability to any damages that may result from the execution of the binary. Funny though that even Microsoft with its billions requires you to agree to relieve them of any accountability for what the software may do to your system or data.

A random screen name on the Internet isn't trusted in my book. Especially on a platform famous for vulnerabilities and security holes. If you're not trying to sell it then there's little value in withholding the source code. Unless of course you're a horrible programmer afraid of getting torn to pieces by the Internet for your horrible code. Or I guess if it is malicious and you hope to sniff personal information, like passwords or credit card numbers.

I am in Windows right now actually. I've been running Seven at home pretty exclusively since I got it. Mostly because of games though. I never know when I want to jump into Counter-Strike or other Steam games and it's a pain to have to reboot for it.

I do non-graphical programming on my VPS (Debian-based) and Cygwin allows me to pretend I'm using a decent OS most of the time. There are still the occasional hiccups, etc., which still make it annoying.

VirusTotal for future reference.

I took a whole truckload of TNT, set it all up in one place, and let it blow. MANNNN was that a big hole.

That's a cool concept, but it still requires trusting a third party that has nothing to gain by being honest with me.

I'm still waiting to see if TNT ever becomes really feasible as a mining technique. The most I've ever had at a time is one block, IIRC. It's hard collecting the powder.

Really? That's not surprising though, Linux file permissions are so limited that even a monkey could code them to work properly. Windows permissions work too, and they are much much more flexible.

That's standard practice. Can you should me anybody who actually does take responsibility for damages?

Agreed. Not only that, but even when you do have TNT it isn't that much faster than using a diamond pic-axe. You have to dig in a few blocks, place, activate, and run away. Then you have to go back, cleanup, place new torches, and repeat. You can't blow up a whole bunch at one time because a lot of the material gets lost. So, end result is that it's useless.

It'd be cool to build some sort of mining machine that used TNT automatically But I can't think of any way to do it with the current mechanics.

I don't know how people get so much TNT. I'm like bamccaig, I hardly ever have more than one block at a time.

InvEdit. I just wanted to see what all that TNT would do, so I hacked it into my inventory.

I just don't use it. This is an instinct that I've learned from most games. Anytime you give me a rare "nuclear" device I just sit on it, never sure if I'll need or want it later. In shooters, this usually means that the best weapons are never used, unless I have the ability to save/load on a whim. If I'm having trouble with a particular spot, I'll try the "nuclear" device to get through, knowing I can always backtrack to a previous savegame if that backfires. By "nuclear" I just mean the best, rare or expensive weapons in the game. For example, the rocket launcher in GTA IV, though that's a relatively poor example because it's actually pretty cheap once you start to amass a lot of money.

With Minecraft, I don't know. I've got 1 TNT block so far, quite a ways back, IIRC. I might have enough powder for one more, but I think it's distributed among various treasure chests at unknown locations, so the work involved in tracking it down isn't really worthwhile. I think the gun powder should be a mine-able resource too.

Notch hasn't said anything, but I'd guess that it could end up that way.

Trying to set permissions recursively in Vista invariably resulted in several errors that were mangling it enough that nothing could be done to correct them. Administrator mode is also too limited to do much. I wound up moving files I wanted to be protected onto another hard disk and enabling/disabling the entire drive via BIOS.

[EDIT]

http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/600030/807755#target

Although it is sometimes in the treasure chests, it is also dropped by creepers (the hiss-y explod-y monsters). I never seem to find any of them though. Same with spiders...

I think I've only ever made 1 block of TNT simply because I can never find enough powder.

I think (although I have yet to try/experiment) that the red powder/wire can be used to set off the TNT. If that is the case then it should be feasible to string TNT together and detonate it all at once no? I don't see that being very applicable to mining, but for removing large amounts of rock/dirt/sand/gravel it could save time... Although placing & wiring the charges would still be tedious I suppose.

I'm referring to the treasure tests that you make yourself. I don't know if they're really treasure chests. Just storage chests. What are you referring to?

That is the only way I get it. I see a few of them. Not lots. It helps if you roam around outside at night, or if you discover deep dark caves and venture into them quickly, dropping fewer torches than you would perhaps like. I've discovered that you can actually survive outside at night relatively easily with a little preparation and awareness. However, if you get surprised in a cave, that can mean the end pretty fast. I particularly hate those skeletons with bow and arrow because they're hard to escape, especially with unlevel ground all around you.

I would hope it's useful for mining. The only question is would it destroy ore or would the ore eventually be destroyed if not collected in time?

In my big cave that I've been lost in exploring, I found a ton of red-colored ore. I guess that must be what you're referring to. I managed to dig my self out and get oriented again. I can't, however, find the entrace to that cave. I did leave a trail of torches to the exit, fortunately.

There are random rooms hidden underground all across the world. You usually find them as part of large cave systems. Inside are treasure chests with random materials and saddles; a bucket-load of monsters; and a "spawner." A spawner is a block that looks like a blue cage with flames and it spawns a monster every so often. You used to be able to pick them up and relocate them, but Notch removed that functionality for now.

EDIT:

It seems to destroy most ore for me, at least when using large amounts of TNT. I think 1 TNT will simply blast the rock/ore and leave it behind like you expect, but a second TNT will then blow away the ore

I was experimenting the other day still getting used to playing again. I remember that months ago I would smelt ore by starting a fire and dropping the ore into it. I tried that same thing this time and it disappeared. I was pissed. It's reasons like this that I make routine backups every 10 or 15 minutes.

That stopped working in March (possibly even February).

This page seems to be very useful for keeping up with the changes giving a nice summary of is added/fixed/broken ... http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Update

Yeah, smelting only works in furnaces now.

Also, with the Redstone dust I think it's possible to set up logic gates. I'm waiting for someone to make a programmable computer with it.

Oh man. Minecraft is almost too scary to play now that Notch added the monster noises...

I'm expanding my tunnel system deep underground and I'm constantly hearing zombie groaning & spider gurgling as well as the sound of an as yet undiscovered waterfall. With every block removed it seems like the monsters are getting louder, like they be behind the next piece of stone, waiting to pounce...

I have to say I am seriously debating muting my sound right now... (Doesn't help that I am tired and in a dimly lit room as I play)

ssssssssssssSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, there also appears to be some suspenseful music played at the most opportunistic times. It's quite pleasantly frightening. The monster sounds don't really scare me too much, but that's mostly because I've already determined that unless they can see me they're usually not a threat. It does still lead to the occasional shiver up my spine, though.

On a side note, I've discovered that you can indeed pepper the land outside your "bases" or whatever with trees. They seem to in fact grow, even if planted really close together, which can easily result in a thick forest shield. And if you don't care about the wood, you can light it on fire to kill off the monsters at night!

What does it say about me that the monster noises fill me with delight? They are merely signals indicating nearby caves for exploration, plus mobs that will drop nice supplies!

A tree barrier sounds like a good idea. Each tree I cut down leaves me with a good handful of saplings, so even replanting everything I cut down leads to increase inventory usage. A fire-line at night is a great way to waste some trees.

And again, I need an evil smiley.

I usually pursue monster noises in the walls or underground, but I have actually never located them as a result... I just dig fruitlessly until I give up.

I zero in on them an commit atrocities against their various species.

Seriously, if there are baby skeleton archers out there, they're being scared into behaving via threats of me lurking under their bed.

Which is why they train themselves to attack us with arrows. Thanks alot jerk!

Hey, they attacked me with arrows long before I killed any of them! It was self defense, I say!

That is why I keep digging in the direction of the sounds and not in some other part of my tunnel complex. There is always the chance that the monsters are in a dungeon room!

It still makes me jump a little though, especially when that dramatic whooshing noise happens.

I feel a little better now that I am full health and have a full suit of metal armor... At least I am not likely to die by breaking through a wall and getting mobbed by monsters.

I'm also now carrying a bucket of water... If I dig through to a lava stream and lava lights me on fire, drop the water and run into it. Works every time!

I think getting a bow and arrows is my next goal. I fell into a cavern full of mobs! Mostly it was the skeletons that cut me down from afar while I tried to fend off a zombie. I had no chance. IIRC, I started with near full health and armor too.

That is my next goal. I find the best way to get the string for the bow is run around the surface at night... unfortunately I'm usually busy digging underground for days (Minecraft Days) at a time and everytime I head near the surface it happens to be day. Notch did adjust the day/night cycles so day lasts longer than night though.

I learned early on that it's always better to remove the block on the ground next to you than to remove the one directly under you .

This has happened to me too. Especially in the dungeon rooms. I can take out monsters one at a time (sometimes even two at a time) with no damage when I am above ground. Once you get underground and in confined quarters more than one monster quickly becomes a problem... (I find anyways)

Yeah, that didn't used to be a problem, but I've learned that it is now. Still, in this particular instance that isn't what happened. This was a surface facing cavern. I had climbed down to one level and explored and mined its walls. Then I noticed a waterfall from my level that dropped deeper. I decided to see what was down there, but missed my step and fell the whole way into darkness. It was then that I was ambushed.

Mining under you is a great way to take a lava bath as well

You should also avoid standing directly underneath the block that you are mining, unless you know that there is rock above it... Getting a face full of sand/gravel can hurt quite a bit :/

Waterfalls can make handy elevators until you get a chance to add stairs / ladders

They can also be quite handy for moving/disposing large amounts of materials. Got a metric crap ton of dirt? Drop the stacks in a waterfall and watch it carry them beneath your base to oblivion! Out of sight, out of mind

Of course I don't destroy anything. I keep it in chests in a store room. You never know when you might need it...

I have the same mentality. Of course, I doubt I'll ever meed multiple stacks of saplings. Or two large chests full of dirt.

I've decided that my next base will include a lava spring for garbage disposal.

I usually just dig a 2x2x3 pit to throw junk in. The items seem to get removed after some time and/or distance traveled.

Lava is just so much more fulfilling.

they don't want to clog memory with all your litter.

If I ever find the time to play this game in more depth to build a new base (Had to abandon my last base as it was made before the cave update.) I need to remember about the lava trash pit.

I started a map not long after I made this post, and as I was walking, trying to find a good place to set up a base, some part of the ground fell. Didn't know it was sand as the world happened to be snow based.

A Minecraft thread without screenies? Shame on you, I thought a lot of you must've kicked up some cool bases since the last thread.

EDIT: Or maybe a quick video tour. Here's a good one I found.

I've restarted a few times. I seem to get to a point where I've got a lot of supplies and ideas for grand constructions, and then I decide to start over again.

I've been doing some neat stuff on the multiplayer servers, though. I made a cool pyramid that is supported by four other pyramids. And a neat maze made out of leaves. And a huge tower with tunnels leading into it.

I do most of my multiplayer on [SZ] Multimap (I don't remember the rest of the name).

I don't personally have that much of a creative side. At least, creating fancy "bases" doesn't interest me too much. What interests me more is the doing. My bases usually end up being pretty boring. Just dug out holes in the ground, etc.

I have a basic structure for building my bases (now that I have a map I want to play on, I'll try to build on the mini building I have). Maybe once I built something up, I'll do a little video tour of it.

That's how most of mine end up. With a tower or something on top. I posted a video tour of a big castle I made (it's still on my Youtube), that's pretty much the biggest base I've ever built.

For some reason I have a thing for floating island bases and hidden underground bases. Am I secretly an evil genius?

How do you make trees grow?

I have tried a variety of methods based on Tree (structure), but I have not had any luck.

Any pointers would be helpful.

In Infdev mode tree leaves occasionally drop saplings when they're destroyed. Simply place these saplings in a well-lit, grassy area and over time a tree will grow.

I generally just pepper them all over the ground to get rid of them (even right next to each other) and when I come back there's more trees than I started with! \o/

Edit:

Wow... I messed that up... I thought it was 6 blocks in either direction, turns out it is now only two! Bonus! I think it still needs a minimum height of 6 though. So the minimum space for a tree would be 5x5x6. Also, only 1 torch is required.

Edit 2:
Haha that's kind of funny, last night I carved out this epic undergound treefarm room 57x57x6 thinking I would only be able to get 16 trees in there... Turns out I'll be having much more wood than I expected!

Edit 3:
This is for underground tree farming of course, so you still need to place your sapling on a dirt block. It does not need to be grassy.

Edit 4:
Notch added boats! And bigger better trees! And cacti!

Animals (pigs and sheep) can no longer spawn on rock! YAY! I had two chests full of pork and had to go on a rampage once or twice a minecraft day, because of those darn animals.

Also, apparently there's now a bug that makes the game unplayable after dying. Be careful.

It would be kind of convenient if he would fix the "bug" that causes animals to spawn on trees. I see more sheep in trees than I see on the ground.

I just started playing Red Dead Redemption so it will probably be a while before I get back to Minecraft (though I may play if I'm too lazy to wait for RDR to load).

Apparently animals can now only spawn on grass blocks. So if they're in trees now they jumped down from a cliff. Which isn't all that unlikely.

Well, at least them bastards won't appear in my base now. I had entered my base one time (on my new map) and saw like 5 sheep in there, and the door was closed!

Is this real?

Apples

I've only come across two dungeons, neither one recently, so I don't know if this is real or another fake page that just hasn't been cleaned out yet.

Speaking of dungeons, I have trouble finding them. Which sucks, because I would totally make a trap under the spawner found in them.

This game appeals to me on so many levels, but from what I can manage to Google up, the only payment option seems to be PayPal (requiring you to sign up before even giving information on how to buy the thing? Seriously? Does the guy have a deep aversion to money or something?). So no Minecraft for me!

PayPal allows you to use a credit card without actually creating an account, AFAIK.

Up to the point where they, mid-transaction, for no reason whatsoever, suddenly drop you to a shittily machine-translated page^[1] where none of the buttons make any sense anymore. And that is the point at which I go "WTF PayPal? I knew you were evil, but not that you were this goddamned incompetent!" and decide never to do business with them again.

Installed; now I just need to figure out wtf I'm doing.

EDIT: Ewww. Nighttime completely destroys my framerate. O_o And how I make pickaxe?

EDIT2: Made the pickaxe. Took like 30 tries but it wouldn't show.

Well, today I dug deep, reaching the bottom of the map via a vertical shaft with ladders.

It netted me three stacks of iron! And several stacks of redstone dust, a good bit of coal, some gold, and eight diamond. It was an epic cave.

I might just dig down at another random spot to find a second cave system. The caves near the bottom of the map are full of resources!

Ok, I'll show off the last thing I made in this game. An underwater glass tunnel.^[1]

It was very fun to do the construction in the first place. I did a whole cave of dirt with one extra block on its sides, then filled with glass the interior. Remove the extra dirt, and let the water flow. It's very cool to see it on the night lit underwater.

Yeah, underwater's been done. Still cool though. But I'm waiting for an underlava base.

By the way, what was the glitch you mentioned in the video's description?

I figure the only way you can do something like that is using buckets? Working with lava seems so hard.

It's kind of easy actually. Dive and put dirt(or any other block) above you(try to search for small pits underwater). An air lock magically appears instead of filling with water. I'll probably use it for clearing more dirt from the walls. It's also very useful for breathing when doing an underwater palace.

EDIT: I've been working on a water slide today that goes around my main tower. It's kind of slow though.

Do you mean like this?

{"name":"601820","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/c\/1cb13c3e4d0f92dca8e0cc35d3a5acb8.png","w":256,"h":256,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/c\/1cb13c3e4d0f92dca8e0cc35d3a5acb8"}

Blue is water, green and brown are dirt, gray is rock.

I played the free multiplayer for my first time, and now I'm addicted.

I think you can spare the dirt block there. Let me check back.

EDIT: Yep, you can.
{"name":"601821","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/8\/f8c7e2b275b22490fcada07159f6a944.jpg","w":1280,"h":802,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/f\/8\/f8c7e2b275b22490fcada07159f6a944"}
If you do that, there's a tiny bit of airspace which you can just go up and breathe. To make a full block of air, just put some dirt, and destroy it. Then done, you've got a little cave space set up.

Ah, that's a consequence of the new finite water system (I think).

It's kind of immersion breaking that stuff never fills up no matter how much water flows into it, but it's better than a single water block flooding the entire map.

Since he seems to be averaging 500 sales every 24 hours, I'd say it's more like an aversion to configuring alternative payment methods.

Yeah, this guy is my indie hero.

Yes, it is real. I found a golden apple in a chest in the first dungeon I encountered. I haven't seen any since (been in about 3 or 4 dungeons since).

Dungeons are pretty sparse. I used Cartographer to show me where all the mossy cobblestone (used exclusively for dungeon floors) was in my map. Using Cartographer shows that there is usually only 2 to 4 dungeons in a newly generated map... and two of the dungeons I came across had absolutely no connection to the tunnel / cave system.

I've since stopped using Cartographer to find dungeons though, so I don't know if more dungeons are generated with the recent level generator enhancements...

Cartographer? What is that? Time to run off to Google!

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=13134 A very useful tool I find for quickly locating the new features in maps. Plus it can make some damn cool isometric renderings of your current map.

In the new update, Notch has added cattle, milk and leather. I can't wait to get a chance to check it out.

Be careful though. Cartographer has the ability to show only particular blocks. That means, if you put the diamond block #, you'll see the lil' dots. It's kind of hard to find diamond normally when you know that you can just use Cartographer.

Anyway, I've been lurking the Minecraft forums for some days, and it's so fun to read them. They're just a great creative community. That "Thomas the Sheep" meme was so... inspiring.

I think my next ambitious project will be a small Obsidian House. I'd like to see the griefers on the future multiplayer trying to break that. ^[1]

Oh yeah, I've used that tool a bit. I don't know if I did it wrong or what, but I didn't find it useful for anything but surface views. I wasn't even aware of the ability to show specific block types like you did to find the dungeons.

I killed a few cows and got some leather last night. Haven't done anything with it yet. But I like that he's added them in. I can't wait for chickens that drop feathers so I can mass produce arrows.

That's cool. Chickens are definitely needed. Hunting zombies for feathers not only does not make a lot of sense, but it can turn dangerous. Especially when you toss in another mob like a spider or skeleton.

I'm assuming that cows will follow the same rules as the pigs and sheep when it comes to spawning, which means that there will be no way to have a naturally occurring underground cattle farm Notch could always add a way to lead animals where you want them I suppose.

I do believe the block ID was 48.

What I used to do was generate a normal surface map, then an ore map. I'd add the ore map to the surface map as a layer in something like Paint.Net or GIMP. I'd select each of the colors for the different ores across the whole image and past that color selection into a new layer. Wash rinse & repeat until every ore has it's own layer. Then I can get rid of the conglomerate ore map layer and just turn the others on and off as I choose. I usually make the background layer (surface map) black and white to make it easier to see the different ores. This takes some of the fun out of the game however, which is why I stopped.

Sorry Samuel, I worded it wrong. What I meant was what you said at the end.

Because now that I have Cartographer and looking for Diamond, it's hard to not use it.

I've decided to stop caring much about materials though, all I do in this game is build a lot with the stone I get after my long mining expeditions. I enjoy a lot using different methods for building difficult structures.

No, my bad, I see what you were saying there (after rereading). I'm tired, at work, and a little hung-over so my attention and comprehension right now is pretty crappy.

Yeah, I only use Cartographer to make isometric maps of my world and even then usually only at the start of each new game so I can get my bearings.

I actually find cobblestone to be in constant short supply simply because I am always using it. I'll usually lay a foundation for a hugely impressive building on the surface, and run out of cobblestone. When I dig tunnels to get more stone, I always wind up coming across a natural cave / tunnel system and I usually spend most of the stone I got from digging making the natural tunnel into a 4 block wide 4 block tall hallway. Not to mention, I still haven't found enough iron that I feel comfortable making the switch from stone to iron tools.

Even with three stacks of iron, I'm afraid to use it for mining mere stone. Because usually I'm lucky to get twenty iron, which I use for swords.

I make metal armor and that is about it at the moment. I really want to build up a few stacks of iron and make a rail line between the various segments of my base. The problem is that it never seems feasible with the amount of iron I get... Plus, as the base expands, so too would the rail line...

I really can't wait until survival multiplayer. It will be fun having railways that Maybe with multiple people it will be feasible for everyone to chip in and make a transit system between bases...

Usually, having as much iron as I do now, I'd make tracks all the way to my mine at the bottom of the map. But this time I got down with ladders instead of stairs, so I have nowhere to place the tracks.

I was pondering the same thing. I think what I will ultimately do is have the tracks spiral downward around the shaft as tightly as possible... Although that would probably require tremendous amounts of iron.

Something like this:

X=Rock/Wall
.=Empty space & ladder
T=Track
TTTTTT
TXXXXT
TX..XT
TXXXXT
TTTTTT

And every so often I would knock out a wall so I can have tunnels coming off the main shaft and still be able to access the railway.

I like how original some people have gotten with it. One that I liked made a bunch of floating islands in a vertical formation, with ladders and waterfalls. Reminded me of the Kingdom of Zeal in Chrono Trigger.

Me, I'm totally making an airship.

Iron seems easier to find now. I went around exploring a few surface caves. In one Minecraft day, much of which was spent walking a bit away from my base, I found twenty-seven iron right near the surface.

I started up a new world, and yeah, lots more iron this time around. I like the huge trees too, those look great when viewed from a distance.

Lots more mobs spawning now, too. I have to fight off a dozen every morning (not counting the ones that burn up from sunlight). Of course, I build a drowning trap and nothing spawn nears it.

Invite-only multiplayer testing has been done. They were streaming. It looked awesome!
Wish I had an invite. :/

I wonder if multiplayer will be in tomorrow's Secret Friday Update. I'm trying to not get my hopes up, because I know it's unlikely.

That wouldn't be very secret.

I'm guessing that one of the secrets will be that Milk is now collectible and usable...

Indeed it is. Any a few other things which I haven't found any specific info on yet ...

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Patch_History#July_23nd.2C_2010_-_Seecret_Friday_6.21_OooooOOOoo.21

We now have slimes!

I'm worried, from the videos and pictures I've seen, they seem to spawn even in light.

Too bad there still is no use for milk

Apparently it is a bug that they spawn in peaceful mode, perhaps it is also a bug that they spawn in light? I hope so or else ... no where is safe!

Whoa, whoa, whoa, the multiplayer option in Minecraft is enabled!!!111

** EDIT **

Oh, that's what was meant by invite only. You need a code to get in. False alarm.

I read the blog first, so that one didn't catch me off-guard. But I'm dancing in anticipation for survival multiplayer!

Same here!

I broke my favorite world by hacking the level.dat file to add snow. At first I loved the snow, but then it got kind of irritating (having to clear the snow off blocks to see whats underneath them mainly). So I went and edited the .dat file again and turned snow off thinking for some reason that the snow covering everything would slowly disappear. It did not.

I was fully prepared (and actually excited) to generate a new world when I realized that SMP would be out before too long, which would likely cause me to abandon whatever new world I made, so I started playing Alien Swarm instead. Although, I probably will start up a new world anyways and just sacrifice another world for SMP.

Now you too can be a creeper with a creeper face t-shirt. Creepy!

[edit] The TF2 team seemed to be addicted as well.

Odd, seeing I read that AFTER a round of Minecraft. I wonder how much work will be done on TF2 (or any Valve game) now that the team found Minecraft

That is a good question. I'm guessing they may lose a day or two tops before either getting back into work mode...

With survivor multiplayer coming out pretty soon, I'm going to need to purchase another copy for my fiancé. I do not want to get stuck paying the beta price (or even worse, retail price) when I can still get it for alpha price.

1000 sales in the last 24 hours.

Blizzard is starting to get jealous.

I wonder if the carts would move on track under water. Also, I wonder if there's any mechanism to power them, or at least raise them up, so that you could create an infinite loop.

I believe that water still breaks the tracks (similar to torches). The original behaviour was that when water (or lava) came into contact with a rail tile the rail was destroyed and a spring block of whatever liquid touched the rail was formed in it's place. I don't know if it still makes the spring block or not though. (Still fairly sure that the rail is destroyed though)

Speaking of torches, has anyone else used torches to destroy a column of sand (and gravel)?

Unintentionally, I think I have.

I have. I did so unintentionally the first time and thought to myself it was a pretty good way of removing unwanted gravel / sand without damaging shovels.

Considering most of my map where I'm building a base at (and not using any sort of cheats, outside of playing on peaceful anyway) is made of sand, it makes it hard to dig up without being buried, and once I found that, I use that trick/exploit when there's a chance of sand falling on me.

And yet, there's snow...

Apparently survival multiplayer will be officially released next week. I've been trying to get on the test server, but it's always full.

Powered Mine carts! I gotta go finish my crazy forest tower and build a train system.

Powered minecarts are still a bit buggy. If the collisions happen just right, the cart you're sitting in can end up going faster than the engine. I found myself catching up to the engine from behind on the lopping track I made!

This happened with a chest cart between my rideable cart and my powered cart.

EDIT:

SMP is due to be released in less than twelve hours. A buggy, incomplete SMP, but SMP nonetheless.

We should totally set up an A.cc server.

I'll set up a server for the allegro.cc community on Linode once Notch releases it.

Awesome. I can't wait!

EDIT:

YAY!

The Survival Multiplayer Server is available for download.

I theoretically have a (temporary) server running on my desktop at home. The IP is 67.204.14.212 and I left it on the default port.

I was able to connect to it from within my LAN but when I tried to connect to it using the external (non LAN IP) address it failed to connect. I checked canyouseeme.org which said the port was in fact open.

So I dunno. If someone here could try connecting and post their results it would be much appreciated.

I would, but I'm working on building stuff with random people already. I don't want to abandon them.

That's cool. Is it fun? How buggy is it?

Your server works. Seems as though the chunk where the spawn is is fixed. Place something down in the area, and it will disappear, try to break something, and it reappears.

It's pretty buggy. Chests and furnaces eat your stuff. Blocks have a tendency to reappear after being mined, possibly suffocating you. Also, someone just got stuck in a minecart, only escaping by right-clicking wildly.

But it's totally awesome in every conceivable way.

Yeah, it's pretty buggy. Got connected to your server, but the client crashed before I could figure out how to talk to miquel. But mr. Black got it right; this is pure awesome!

To talk, you need to hit T. I thought that was you.

Yeah, but it crashed when I went into he options menu to check the controls. I'll give it another shot when I get home tonight.

People are already trading. One guy is growing cactus, I did some wheat, and the guys I'm building with have made a huge wall of bamboo dozens of blocks long.

Sweet. I was going batty this morning trying to determine why I was unable to connect. I even (temporarily) put the server in the DMZ and turned off all the firewalls and was still unable to connect by using my external IP.

I can't wait to play this! How did you get carts and tracks without smelting iron ore? I'm guessing there are server commands to give items?

If you're behind your own router, your router may not support using your public IP address to connect.

Also, there is a give command.

/iron is the only one I know. Someone else mentioned /wood for saplings, but I haven't tried it.

I assume the server runs in Linux. Maybe I could set one up on dev.castopulence.org.

Yeah, it's a .jar file. I think I remember Notch saying that it would probably need at least a gig of ram in order to operate smoothly with a decent amount of players.

My server is currently set to use 1GB, but I could probably push it to 1.5 or 2 if needed.

That was easy. :) Done. Server is running on dev.castopulence.org. Feel free to play on it, but please nobody exploit it (if there are vulnerabilities in the server, for example). :) There is a console where I can issue commands! I can totally kick you or grant you stuff!

Ah, no, wait... There isn't enough RAM on the server. Stopped. Thomas Fjellstrom and Elias would kill me.

I'll put up the server once I get home today. It should be up around 7pm MST.

That's like 6pm EST... w00t!

I did not sleep at all last night.

What's the server address?

decepto, where's that server?

EDIT:

Weirdest greifing ever. Someone encased a guy's iron stockpile in obsidian. No telling how long it took just to find the diamond to mine the obsidian.

Inventory management is still client-side, so that could have been a hack (should be pretty trivial to memory hack the client).

Yeah, I wasn't thinking about that when I posted.

Its fine to run it on your VM. All it'll do is use up your dedicated chunk of memory.

Notch stopped by the server I was on. Well, he was named Notch. And he acted like I imagine Notch would act. But, this being the internet, and me being the paranoid person that I am, I'm pretty skeptical that it was actually Notch, and will remain so unless Notch himself (on his blog or whatever) mentions hopping onto that SMP server.

Still, if it was him, it was totally awesome.

So what is the server address of decepto's server?

I did some experimenting last night and joined a couple of servers listed in the minecraft forums. It was really laggy, and everything was burning...

I also messed around on my own server (which is now down). As a server admin you have the ability to give any player any item/block you want, but it only seems to give them 1 of that item/block.

Also, I was surprised to see that when I tried digging/manipulating blocks in the spawn area, the server started logging error messages about some kind of mismatch... I thought it was just a rule that blocks near the spawn point could not be moved, but it may be more of a bug for now...

That would be awesome. I think he is in Germany at Big Jam so I kind of doubt it was really him. Doesn't his name show up in a different colour as well?

It was right before the time his blog said he was leaving. I don't know about the name color thing. But if it was an impostor (more likely, I know), he was really dedicated. He spent about an hour listening to ideas and taking bug reports.

Anyway, a greifer decided to shop up and start setting fire to the wooden floors of my castle. So now I have stone floors. Then he went and started playing like a normal person.

It could very well have been him, which is turbo neat!

I think it's really cool that the developer is so in touch with the community.

They guy that griefed me earlier built a big wall. When he asked people to help him gather stone for it, they started gathering from the wall he was building. When he told them to use the mine, they asked, "why? There's all this stone just lying around out here!"

Now, I don't believe in karma. But sometimes I have to wonder...

I suppose you're right. I started with -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M, which to the best of my knowledge tells the VM to allocate 1 GiB of memory, but perhaps Linux fakes it until it's actually needed. I know that the console log was warning of impending doom, which probably means that it won't run sufficiently anyway. Which is sad. I always wanted a game server.

Serves him right.

One of the servers I logged into had people collaborating to build a giant floating castle. It was pretty impressive. Too bad the wood parts were on fire

Maybe. But I still spent 20 minutes gathering stone to help him rebuild.

Yeah, that would tell the VM to make the initial heap size 1GB, and also make the maximum heap size 1GB.

Actually, 256MB might be fine for a few players... Some images on the forums show screenshots of servers that have 3 or so players connected and the server is only consuming like 53MB.

When I get home I'll do some more testing and see how it does with 2 or 3 people connected.

Edit:

I don't know if I would have helped him rebuild. I don't think I would sabotage his work, but I don't think I would help him without an apology.

What those guys did to him wasn't right. They tore down an hour of work in thirty seconds.

Griefing is going to be terrible in SMP. There's like five guys on now that are clogging the chat with hate speech. Calling people words I'd get shot for saying whenever someone logs in. It's really getting annoying.

At least they got bored of tearing stuff down.

And that's why an online multiplayer game can be brilliantly designed, masterfully produced, perfectly balanced and still be crap on a stick.

It might help to make it harder to mine, therefore requiring more effort to grief, and leaving them vulnerable to attack for longer. Of course, that would slow the entire game down. Could always orchestrate the server into an ant colony, with worker ants to gather, farm, mine and build, and soldier ants to hunt down and kill griefers.

You basically just need administrators. Giving the players voting privileges helps too. It's no fun to abuse people if they can get you kicked and banned with a 30 second effort a minute after you start.

Minecraft servers will need mature admins and possibly a votekick/voteban feature for when the admins aren't around. Even more fun than getting them kicked or banned though is abusing them. For example, freezing them in one spot, or setting them on fire, or throwing them across the map. These are the things that generally work in Counter-Strike, so long as you have a mature admin around to use them properly.

If decepto doesn't come through today then I'll try to set up a temporary server and see if it performs well enough for a few people to join...

Should we keep the server private? Maybe give out the IP through PM? Or will we let anyone who finds this thread join in?

I was going to say just post it in this thread, but I changed my mind. I think for now it should be left private. In the future when the server software has more management features (passwords, banlists, etc) then we can make it public (if we decide). All it takes is one griefer to ruin things...

So, do we have a server? If so, feel free to send me a PM with the IP

Aye, me too!

Add me to the list as well.

PM me the IP as well.

Me too!

How hard is it to run a server? And how good of a computer and internet connection do you need? I wouldn't mind running one myself if it didn't require buying a better computer or dedicating the one I have to the task.

I'm no expert but I know that ram is one issue. On chip cpu cache is useful in terms of data transfers and xeon chips are made for that. I think its easy to make windows into a server though and you can google that part but the hardware is somewhat dependent on a lot of factors but mostly on the game itself (its really trial and error and you should try doing it).

BZflag can be setup very easily just by choosing the server option in the game and you're off, although I've never tried it myself.

I've heard that the biggest problem with game servers is actually the bandwidth. Hardware is relatively cheap nowadays, but bandwidth is still a little pricey. I was going to try to run a Counter-Strike server on my makeshift server a year or so ago, but when I asked the owner of a Counter-Strike server whether it would be sufficient hardware-wise he said that it probably was more than sufficient (after all, quad-core with 8 GB RAM), but the actual limiting factor is usually bandwidth. Obviously, with my crappy DSL residential connection (and those always have really low upload speeds), there was no way I could handle the throughput required.

The only Minecraft server that I currently know about is running a dedicated server at a presumably professional hosting company, so the bandwidth is quite high compared to the average home connection (at least, here in North America...). It also has a pretty decent processor and to my knowledge is text-based all around (so no GUIs to power), but it's sharing that processing power with numerous virtual machines, and inside each, many service daemons. It also doesn't have that much memory. It was running sufficiently with 256 MB of RAM, but it now has closer to 400 MB.

The only hiccup that I'm aware of is when the gods gifted you 70000 stones at once. I'm told that it looked like a scene from the exorcist before the frame rate dropped to <1 FPS...

You have nothing to lose by trying (except loyalty ). I imagine it will probably perform better in Linux, as Java tends to do, but that's not to say that it won't suffice in Windows.

Geez! I already told you... I set up a local server for just myself and my fianceé...

And framerates of <1 fps as the gods gift thousands of items at once.

EDIT:

But really, I was just wanting to fool around with the admin abilities.

Sadly, there isn't much to fool around with yet:

help
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO] To run the server without a gui, start it like this:
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO] Console commands:
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    help  or  ?          shows this message
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    kick <player>        removes a player from the server
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    give <player> <id>   gives a player a resource
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    stop                 gracefully stops the server
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    list                 lists all currently connected players
2010-08-06 17:32:13 [INFO]    say <message>        broadcasts a message to all players

I've gotta ask you guys, what do you think about griefing?

Over the last hour or so (in between doing other stuff), I've been arguing with a guy on the Minecraft forums. His claim is that griefers add extra challenge to survival multiplayer, making it a more exciting and rewarding experience. Do you agree? Disagree? Why or why not?

I suddenly feel like I'm writing homework assignments for high-schoolers. "Agree-disagree? Why or why not?" was a common trend in my high school.

The punks think they can hide behind a few hundred miles of wire. Once every few years, somebody brags to me how they can (and sometimes do) "crash" peoples computers. I enjoy making them sweat, as they wonder if I'm actually going to beat their ass or not while I rant, obviously angry enough to be unpredictable.

[EDIT]

I was going to play a bit of Quake Live single player yesterday, but the page said Doing Maintainance for many hours. I just tried it again now, and there seems to be some major overhaul with some sort of new Punkbuster EULA. I may have to try playing Sevalcpp again.

[EDIT2]

And it just crashed FF 4 times in a row. Maybe next week....

Server is up:

97.107.134.80

Failed to connect to server.

It should be working now. Everyone hop on. Lets do a stress test!

97.107.134.80

Still failed to connect.

Sorry, it's back on now.

edit: I'm running it with screen for the time being. The problem is that java was existing everytime I logged off my ssh connection.

It ran pretty good with just the two of us. Also, I managed to find the path between those epic cliffs and the spawn point.

Check out mah castle!

Didn't find much on there, do you have a settlement or similar a bit away from the spawn point?

EDIT: I really like this map! There's so much variety in the terrain. And my castle is now even more awesome. I'm really satisfied with how it turned out. But it's a bit lonely in here.

We managed to play perfectly fine on my development VM with 4 players, blowing the fuck out of the map with all the TNT you could ask for (we're talking like single explosions with 500-700 TNT blocks), and building huge towers and landmarks and such.

Neil Black made a nice castle and an awesome stone wall. He later remade much of the wall when he was supplied with obsidian for it instead. It looks awesome with the obsidian. Samuel Henderson made a...stack of stone with stairs on top!

I began clearing out an area to build a diamond palace on, but I couldn't seem to dig deep enough to find a solid stone base (for aesthetic reasons only). I began digging with TNT and Neil Black joined me and things got kind of out of control. I blew a large crater into the ground before venturing away and packing a small crater in the ground with upwards of 50 TNT blocks. That was satisfying enough, but I later found myself packing a natural cave with 256! Neil Black came to witness the explosion and shortly thereafter Samuel Henderson joined us for some pyrotechnics. That section of map is pretty much obliterated.

Samuel Henderson began digging a hole near spawn so I began working on my diamond palace just across the way. By evening, MiquelFire had joined me in building it. All in all, it only took us about 12 hours of work, perhaps 6+ of that with MiquelFire's help, to build a tower in the middle of a small lagoon that stretches from the bedrock to the ceiling! I noticed as we were digging out the bottom that Sam had begun building up really high so I took it upon my self to build to the ceiling while he was AFK.

Seems all that is gone now... Oh well, I think we learned some things. Not least of all, that I have trouble being legit when there's a console at my finger tips. Still, I think we had fun testing the engine and server out. It will be more legit when the bugs are fixed.

Just an FYI, the server seems to have a memory leak. I left it running all weekend and around noon Sunday it encountered an OutOfMemoryException and seemingly nobody could connect until I restarted it (which required root SIGKILL'ing it).

(My VM only has 500 MB RAM, but you can obviously up it if you have more available... Notch recommends 1024 MB, but we didn't seem to have any problems with up to 4 people at a time...)

This way, you can just execute minecraft from a shell and automatically start the server when it's not running or reattach to the screen if it is. ^a d to detach, of course. I'm planning to write a Perl interface over it to make the console more friendly (libreadline, and parsing user messages for custom commands, etc.). I have to finish reading through perlipc first though.

The most interesting bug is that when you set off TNT, it disappears for the other players, and they are not harmed by the explosion, they'll just fall when their client gets the changes made by the TNT.

I thought up a an interesting video to make before Notch patches this up however.

That's a silly bug. A far more interesting one is where blocks that you've dug up or blow up respawn, killing anyone standing in their way! This has bitten me a few times as I was mining.

Also, there are some void spots at the bottom of the map between the bedrock. It looks like sky and I think Sam tested the waters and the result was invariably death.

Most of the bugs are the result of client-side work not being transferred to the server yet.

The void at the bottom exists for single player.

Pretty much.

Everything still seems to be running smoothly (almost). As bamccaig suggested, I think there is a memory leak somewhere. Here are some interesting stats from the server I'm running.

root@li64-80:~# free -m                                                                             
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached                           
Mem:           498        305        193          0         48         93                           
-/+ buffers/cache:        162        336                                                            
Swap:          255          0        255

{"name":"601921","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/f\/1fcd0d2a228830247e8b3a8f373696f3.png","w":697,"h":288,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/f\/1fcd0d2a228830247e8b3a8f373696f3"}

{"name":"601922","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/e\/5e626a9a0636107ef3fb0c973e7259f6.png","w":697,"h":288,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/5\/e\/5e626a9a0636107ef3fb0c973e7259f6"}

{"name":"601923","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/2\/723b924db8ac2e467c2ccd88684fda7d.png","w":697,"h":316,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/7\/2\/723b924db8ac2e467c2ccd88684fda7d"}

I've seen some suspicions of memory leaks on the minecraft forums, too. Hopefully Notch will track it down soon.

Server down? I can't connect anymore... :/

I wonder if we should try to orchestrate a voluntary group project; where we design some kind of massive building or structure and all work towards completing it: gathering materials, digging the land out, building up the walls, etc. I'd be a little afraid of it becoming a chore though, but so long as we remain free to do as we please and try to resolve arguments peacefully it shouldn't.

Neil, Sam, and MiquelFire helped me out on my server and someone972 helped me with my waterfall on decepto's server. I think the game is more fun when you're working towards a common goal together as opposed to disappearing for three days and then reemerging to show each other what each has accomplished on their own. With a well coordinated effort, I think a rather epic project could be completed in relatively little time with enough people contributing.

Perhaps the memory leak got too bad. The server seems fine with shutting down and starting back up again so perhaps my vaporware wrapper script should wait for the server to be empty and restart it automatically every ~12 hours.

Oddly enough my private server was running all weekend (and was still up last night when I checked) and it hasn't run into the dreaded Out of memory exception... Of course, I was able to give it the recommended 1GB of memory, which may have something to do with it... (And also my fiancee and I were the only people to connect to it)

Around 7am this morning, this lovely peak happened to my server. I wonder what exception was thrown.

{"name":"601928","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/4\/84da29bf75fc94ebe2f041b5541ce742.png","w":697,"h":288,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/4\/84da29bf75fc94ebe2f041b5541ce742"}

I restarted the server. It's back up.

I was gonna migrate the temple of bacon that I had build in a session with my brother and sister to your server but after 30m of building I find that the pig spawner dosen't want to work at that place.. why does it only work sometimes? :S..

Sorry about the mess, it's just outside the cool castle too, in obsidian no less .

What a fuck up.

Make sure it has grass next to it for the pigs to spawn on.

I visited bam's server for a bit. Quite impressive towers you have there :-) But I died a lot from bugs and in the end I think my internet connection right now is kinda shaky so everything didn't work as smooth as I had hoped. I will be more active once I move and get a better internet connection in a few weeks. And hopefully by then notch has done further improvement to multiplayer and reduced its bugs. This will be fun!

I've been waiting until he gets most of the singleplayer features working before trying something major (mainly chests and furnaces). Just dropping all your items in a safe place works for a while (probably was over an hour when I tried), but they may disappear.

EDIT: Its too bad you all cant see the massive, several thousand block castle wall I built in singleplayer. I think it was 70 blocks wide, not sure how many in length, and has six towers the height of the wall. It also has 3 levels I think, with a two block space to walk in (4 wide total). And I built it all without cheating .

Perhaps a town? Just lay out basic pathways and land plots, and then anyone can come in and build a house/castle/art store. Though I'd wait until smelting works, and inventories are saved.

Personally, I don't much enjoy working in multi-player knowing anyone can come in and destroy my work. If Notch adds something to prevent that, I'll be more inclined to play. Otherwise it feels quite futile.

Now back to making my TNT cannon. Die castle, die!

I was thinking of making a sprawling city, though I'd be more inclined to do so if there were more kinds of blocks to work with. Maybe I just haven't seen it all (likely) but all I know of is a few kinds of rocks, and wood, and glass. Is there straw for roofs? Different textures of rocks for roads and walls and brick trim? etc.

Straw for roofs? Nope. Different textures of rocks for roads? Perhaps; You can have red brick blocks now (crafted from clay bars, crafted from clay), not to mention obsidian, smooth stone, cobblestone, and even mossy cobblestone (which is currently rare because it is only found in dungeons). Oh also, wood could perhaps be used to make pathways.

If you've seen all that then you can consider yourself a veteran

I'm totally making a bookstore!

When I made a town awhile back I just did different styles for each house using the same basic materials. Wood, cobblestone, half-blocks, and glass.

There are also tree trunks, half-blocks stacked into a single block, gold blocks, diamond blocks, and cotton blocks. I might have missed a few more, but as far as I'm concerned there are more than enough types to make an interesting and dynamic town.

Heck yeah!

I call Mayor!

I got tired of navigating the mess that I made near the bottom of my tower so I TNT'd the fuck out of it... Now it's pretty bad and still not completely clean. And now the walls have to be redone.

On what server is this city going to get built? And I hope you are careful with the IP because I don't want a bunch of griefers "raiders" nuking it to smithereens with hacked in TNT and paint the world black with obsidian. :/

If we do it on bamccaig's server, then I've already got a head start on painting the world black with obsidian.

Until the new map is generated, which will probably happen when all the issues are worked out

Once I finish reading about IPC in Perl I will begin implementing my wrapper. A possible feature could be a whitelist (or blacklist) of players, those disallowed being automatically kicked when they join (though hopefully they don't attempt to DoS attack the server in retaliation). Could also blacklist (or whitelist) IPs (perhaps on a temporary basis to account for dynamic IPs). votekick and voteban are good features of any online game. In practice though, I find most players only vote when something directly affects them, and it usually only affects a small percentage of the server at a time. My implementation could always log the name/IP of the offender and take a reason string from the voter so that it could be reviewed later by administrators. Whether or not decepto wants to run my script is another question. There are also other scripts already implemented, but I prefer writing my own.

decepto, your server went down shortly after you left for work... :/

It's back up for the time being.

It looks like 512mb of memory is not enough. Or the issue may be that I'm running on a VPS rather than a dedicated box. Either way, I'm going to make the world data available after I get home from work. I'm then going to shut down the server until I can find a decent dedicated box to host from.

If bamccaig wants to host the game more permanently, he has more memory available to him. Should he need it, that is.

That is true, but I do intend to have a separate VM for production. If I go ahead with server-side Java then I'm sure having some RAM to spare is a good thing. Besides, the only problems we're experiencing on my server that might be related to the memory is the pickup bug and the respawning blocks bug. They're inconvenient, but I don't have that much RAM available.

I guess we could leave 200 MB for the production VM on a test basis and allocate the rest to development, whatever that is. If that proves insufficient for production in the future then we can make the necessary adjustments.

If someone buys the game for me I can host a server on my laptop, I'm out all day anyway

Yes, I'm lurking the Minecraft thread even though I don't have the game. I do it because it seems like a really cool game :X

My server should now have about 700 MB allocated for minecraft! \o/

Where is this extra memory coming from???

We did the upgrade.

You! Muahahaha! With you coming onboard we were able to upgrade the RAM (I thought you knew this). Which means we all get a bigger share of memory, or at least I think we do.

/beaten

Yup. Lots more.

Me? Muahahaha! Excellent <wrings hands>

Notch is adding banning support!

New server software is released. Is it time to start a new map and build a kickass city now?

I'd say wait until most of the bugs are fixed, inventory is server-side, and mobs are in.

In other news, I'll be gone for the next four days, so I won't be able to log on. No massive city building without me! (Unless you really want to )

Updated my server. The admin console is quite a bit enhanced now. Apparently you can make players operators! Thank god I didn't actually write my wrapper yet as it seems Notch will make much of its intended functionality obsolete before I finish. Another sweet enhancement is the ability to teleport players to each other. Only one of us ever has to walk again! The give command has also been enhanced with a count parameter, so hopefully no more bash for loops for me.

Can someone PM me bam's server IP? Thanks!

Sent you the address via PM, you can ping it to get the IP (or remove http and you can enter the hostname).

Unfortunately, the give command seems to max. the give count parameter at 64 (one full slot). That's still substantially more than you could get the honest way, but when you're used to distributing 256 or 512 items at a time it's a real slow down.

** EDIT **

The server isn't configured specially (JVM wise). What I posted above is basically what is running now, except that the memory has increased from 400 MB to 700 MB (and for cleanliness the launcher script now changes to a hidden directory to control the current working directory). Note that I'm running OpenJDK (IcedTea on Gentoo), not the Sun JRE as Notch recommends, and at least with the Gentoo configuration it defaults to running with the -server option, which is allegedly faster.

I still experience the same pickup bug though (even alone on the server) so I'm not sure that anything has really improved with the extra memory. I'm also not convinced that it's a memory deficiency. Even with the server freshly started I seem to experience the bug. It's possible that it's a side effect of the existing world. I also experience toggling blocks now when laying them, but the server seems to get it right after a second has passed. It just resets your position relatively regularly, slowing down your progress slightly.

I suppose the server might last longer now with the extra memory. It might be a good exercise for me to add a restart mechanism to cron, but the hard part is figuring out how to do a "safe" restart. I think currently it will require a buffer program between stdio and the server. I'm not even aware of whether or not the latest version still suffers from what we believed to be a (slow) memory leak. It's certainly playable though. I am using quite a lot more CPU time than the other server members, but until they use it I guess it's free to use.

You can build stuff without any serious problems. That part is stored fine server-side. Though, as indicated, the existing world will likely be replaced by me when the inventory bugs are fixed (I can publish it if anyone wants it), so in that sense current progress is somewhat futile (though experimenting now is a lot cheaper than later). Inventories are what is lost. Until next week, when those bugs are presumably going to be fixed, I'm happy to give any respected members operator privileges which basically lets you execute console commands. That will let you grant yourself inventory on a whim (I can publish my current name => id map if anyone is interested). Someone helped me determine that operators do not get feedback with server-side commands so you'll need to just have faith that they worked.

help
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO] To run the server without a gui, start it like this:
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO] Console commands:
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    help  or  ?               shows this message
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    kick <player>             removes a player from the server
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    ban <player>              bans a player from the server
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    pardon <player>           pardons a banned player so that they can connect again
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    ban-ip <ip>               bans an IP address from the server
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    pardon-ip <ip>            pardons a banned IP address so that they can connect again
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    op <player>               turns a player into an op
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    deop <player>             removes op status from a player
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    tp <player1> <player2>    moves one player to the same location as another player
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    give <player> <id> [num]  gives a player a resource
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    stop                      gracefully stops the server
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    save-all                  forces a server-wide level save
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    save-off                  disables terrain saving (useful for backup scripts)
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    save-on                   re-enables terrain saving
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    list                      lists all currently connected players
2010-08-13 01:36:01 [INFO]    say <message>             broadcasts a message to all players

As hinted above, when operators currently execute commands (in the form /command args...), the output is displayed on the server console, not to the operators/clients. With that in mind, I have a log of everything you do.

I read a great idea on the Minecraft forums today, which I am stealing and proposing here.

Basically, someone starts a single player game in Alpha. They play for seven minecraft days, building and exploring normally, and then they pass the save file along to someone else. Then that person plays for seven minecraft days and then passes the save file along.

The community has done something similar with Dwarf Fortress in the past: here

It seems to have stopped being updated, but it still seems like a fun idea. Anyone else interested?

Can someone PM the server's IP to me? Thank you

I'm up for it, Neil.

My only issue with that plan is keeping track of time in the caves. It's possible to spend days in a cave and not know it.

The two servers known to me:

Yeah, that would be tricky. I think it could be remedied by knowing how many minutes a full day & night cycle last and then multiply it by seven. That way when it's your turn you know that you can play for x minutes, which equates to 7 in game days.

I imagine that's how Something Awful did it...

No, it's down. It will stay down until a decently playable server is released. Once that happens, I'll buy a budget dedicated server with at least 2 gigs of ram.

As for passing around a saved game, I'm down for that. I don't think we should really be worried about playing "X number of days". I say, just play for how you want for one or two "real" days, then pass the save file onto someone else.

The guy organizing it on the Minecraft forums said that seven in-game days is one hundred forty minutes. This would mean that each cycle is twenty minutes, a figure the wiki agrees with.

I found seven days to be too long for me (I joined the guys on the Minecraft forums), but that might have been because it was so late and I was tired. I made it through five days.

Why do you hide such things in spoiler tags? Does not compute....

Oh! I just had a great idea!

From my understanding, the world data is pretty well distributed among files and folders. I'm not sure exactly how world data is laid out, but if chucks are separated well enough, we might be able to do a Git repository. That way we could all play simultaneously and just check in our changes.

What if two people try to update the same chunk?

I'm suddenly imagining a giant cobblestone tower being melded with a wooden temple because two people built in the same place.

...Or we could just play network multi-player

Using source control to distribute a world would work if there was a set turn list and each person updated their local copy before playing. I suppose it would be more streamlined than manually zipping a world, sending it to the next player on the turn list, having that player extract & replace the world, and so on and so forth.

But, as Neil pointed out... if I decided to work on the world after my turn (or before my turn) all bets are off that something terrible doesn't happen.

Well, the repository's owner would need to approve commits. Also, I don't think we'd troll each other like that.
܁
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...or would we?

Meh, seems like it may be more trouble than it's worth. Unless it was turn based there wouldn't be much point to building anything worthwhile for fear of overwriting/corrupting it. Plus it looks like Notch is fixing up the chests, so a usable multi-player probably isn't too far away. Just my 2¢.

EDIT: Oh, and someone PM the server address, I've been looking forward to seeing whats going on .

someone792: see bam's hidden spoiler.

Perhaps you could use a marking system. Each player gets a way of marking an area he wants to work with so others know where not to play around.

I leave the details to you.

I would prefer a zip we mail/upload/whatever between players.
Git would work, if only one posts and it's moderated. Do everyone have/know git?

Let's get this show on the road! I have only a few, and short, shifts at work for the next 7 days.
(But I might be unavailable this weekend. LD48 takes priority!)

Is anybody familiar with the world format(s)? Text is often automatically merge-able because of it's nature. Typically, it suffices to base the merges on line-based differences. With a binary file, you no longer know of a given boundary to merge on. All that you know is that the file was A and now it's B. I highly doubt Notch is storing the world data as text. At least, not all text. It would be considerably more wasteful and really the worlds are probably too large and complex to edit by hand anyway. I see no real value in text worlds. Assuming Notch is using binary for the things that matter, Git will be unable to merge worlds. It will also be impossible for a human to review changesets to make sure that somebody played by the rules. You might as well just use a simple "stick" mechanism. Whoever has the stick, or latest zip, gets to play. Come up with a schedule, like was done for the translation exercise, and only pass the zip on to the next player. Or just post them to the forum and use the honor system.

The world data is stored as binary data (across a bajillion files). There is a guide somewhere on the wiki for parsing out & manipulating the data. That being said, the scm (whether it be git, svn, etc) would still work but it would have to be done in an orderly fashion (aka "passing the stick", aka what I said before). I think the original idea was that it would be easier for everyone to simply checkout->play->commit/push then download a zip file->extract the zip file->play->zip everything up->send to next person in the turn order. It would be like passing the stick using SCM if you will. Of course as deps points out this assumes that everyone has access to whatever method of SVN we use.

There is always this too. I'd imagine that Notch is going to release many bugfixes soon (if he hasn't already).

Edit: Secret Friday Update

Updated the server. Not sure what happened, but it wasn't even running... My personal stdio log isn't very reliable so there's no real indication of what happened... Let me know if you try to connect and can't.

I connected fine just now. I didn't even realize there had been a problem. I was just testing the new multiplayer stuff.

The new fences annoy me. They're the height of one block, but I can't jump up on them.

Isn't it that behavior that makes it a fence...?

It is annoying because normally you can jump over things that are one block high. The fences should be 1.5 blocks tall in order for the player to not be able to jump them.

Exactly. It's the same height as everything else I can jump over, so naturally it annoys me that I can't jump over it.

Anyone still playing on bamccaig's server? I've been on a couple times but haven't seen anyone . I'll be on for a little while longer, in case anyone wants to hop on.

I go on once in a while, but no one is there at the time, and I just go to one of my personal worlds instead.

Same here.

Well, did you give us ops? If not, then I can't help repair your diamond wall.

Yes, I just gave everybody ops (every username I could remember, anyway; I don't recall Jonatan's). You can say "/help" for a list of commands (which need to be prefixed with /). Some of them are cut off due to the small screen size.

Wait, I have ops? Time to finish that obsidian wall.

The server may need to be reset, or something. The spawn is full of entities and even when I pick them up they don't seem to go away. Someone tried to destroy a minetrack with tnt.

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I wish I had made it closer to the spawn point. It's on bamccaig's server to the north west along the coast.

relpats_eth: That is awesome.

What you need to do is create an illustration of a stapler.

So, who's still playing Minecraft? I've been off for about a week, I'm kind of waiting for more bugfixes to SMP right now.

I been on and off as well. Basically, whenever I have time to put into it.

I have been busy with work, ludum dare and waiting for bugfixes.
Another week to wait until notch is truly back home again and can continue to work on it.

Notch's sales have surely been increasing a LOT over the past months. One of my Minecraft videos on YT shows in the graph a fast growth in viewers; looks like the popularity of this game is going through a snowball effect.

Sadly, I just grew tired of it for the moment. Waiting for the next patch to come out, only to have some new item or a new resource which sometimes requires you to generate a new map. I understand it's normal since it is in Alpha State. I guess I'll just wait a month or two and create a new world, checking out all the new stuff at once.

_{And maybe multiplayer will work fine. :P}

The only real problem is that there's no point to the game yet. You can build lots of stuff, but they ultimately have no real purpose, so for me it gets old fast. It's fun to experiment with things when they come out, but ultimately Notch will need to figure out a purpose for the game. We'll all need some goal to work towards.

In theory, it would be fun to play with minecarts and/or the circuit building stuff, but it's so much work to figure out how that I just don't have the energy right now. It's easier and more satisfying to play CS:S and pwn n00bs.

*cough*Open-ended gameplay*cough*

I'm waiting for inventory and storage to made server side. I've been playing single player off and on, although recently I've been caught up in the seemingly endless pursuit of Starcraft II achievements...

IIRC, it was several months before anybody twigged to the fact that Myst was anything more than that.

He just met Bungie and Valve.

WHAT THE CRAP.

I know, he's living the dream! I'm still waiting, patiently, on more updates.

Apparently he is getting a proper office and hiring some staff... Hopefully this means he can work on Minecraft with less interruptions...

Apparently his Web site can only handle one registration at a time. It's pretty cool that he's turning his venture into a company. Also, if you have real game developer skills you might want to read his recent blog posts, as he might not have filled all positions yet. I wonder if I'd have sufficient skills for the Web developer position, but then I suppose not. Not to mention, I'd have to move to Sweden. Hopefully the company is successful while remaining true to the community.

** EDIT **

Is anybody still playing on the server? I haven't seen much activity for days, if not over a week. The server seems to be somewhat unstable still and even with 700 MB it still seems to run out of memory, etc. I was noticing lag on the VM all day today and though there doesn't seem to be any concrete proof that minecraft is the culprit, it's a pretty good candidate.

If nobody is using the server anymore then I'll just publish the existing world and stop it.

Yeah, I'm not using the server right now. I'm waiting for inventory and mobs.

If anybody is interested:

http://www.castopulence.org/tmp/minecraft-world.tgz

In unices, you can extract with gunzip and tar (or probably just tar):

wget http://www.castopulence.org/tmp/minecraft-world.tgz -O- | \
        gunzip | tar -xv
# OR
wget http://www.castopulence.org/tmp/minecraft-world.tgz -O- | \
        tar -xvz

In Windows, your best bet is 7-Zip, which I find extracts all archive formats faster than others anyway.

Ditto

I just haven't been playing at all. Too many other games to play.

Survival Multiplayer has server-side inventory and such now. YAY!

Huzzah! Now I have something to do this weekend!

Paypal is refusing to forward payments over to him because of "suspicious activity". If they decide it's not on the level, they're going to keep the €600,000 for themselves . Of course a new blockbuster game is suspicious.

http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/09/10/1713217/PayPal-Withholding-Indie-Game-Devs-euro600000-Account

I'm not surprised by gnolam's attitude towards PayPal anymore.

You can make a compass using red powder and iron bars now! That should make navigating a bit easier.

When Paypal says they will keep the money if turns out to be illegally gained... what do they mean by 'keep'? Wouldn't they return it to the original Paypal account holders who sent Notch the money?

If they actually keep it (i.e not giving it to Notch and not refunding the customers) ... wouldn't that be illegal on Paypal's part?

I would say that this is covered in their terms of use. The problem is, if I'm not mistaken, that they aren't a bank institution so they can do virtually whatever they want with your money.

Well it sounds like he's making a lot of money so I can't really say I'm too surprised that they'd consider it suspicious (though it would depend on which type of PayPal account that he has). In any case, I think Notch has enough of a following and enough friends in relatively high places now that it won't be an issue. His update on his blog suggests that this is only a week (or less) worth of payments, but that doesn't add up at all...

My laptop's charger is currently dead, so I can't load any of the worlds I had. My roommate might (might) let me install it on his computer, but his touchpad is sucky.

EDIT:

My roommate's computer doesn't like Minecraft for some reason. I might try the public computer lab later.

I think Notch's sales are about to spike ...

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EDIT: Lawl, from the following Saturday ...

I found this and can't resist posting

I wish fire really spread that fast

Fire really does spread that quickly now. I had did some wood harvest from my tree farm, and wanted the leaves to go away quickly (found my house is a bit too close, need to work on that issue later) so I set them on fire, and that fire spread just as quick as that video.

I done did.

Wow. The awesomeness of that cool little cottage was equaled only by the awesomeness of its utter annihilation. Best MineCraft video ever.

Yeah, I had some cottage envy there

Edit: nevermind, read MiquelFire's post

Is anyone else having problems accessing the Minecraft forums?

Also, all the server IPs I know of are down. I can't get into SMP

The forums and wiki are currently down due to high traffic loads. I think Notch has also temporarily suspended the name checking for SMP (which may be why you are having issues connecting)

I've only been playing single player so I don't know about the multiplayer problems...

I haven't been able to log into either the URL or IP mentioned above either ... not sure if that's related.

I'm having issues connecting because I don't have any active server IPs.

Both of the "A.cc" servers have gone offline.