Minecraft Diary - Episode 4 - Skeletons!

I decide that I should go WEST in my journey, not only because that way I'm more likely to go in a straight line, but also because walking towards the sunset sound cool. After climbing over an all-too-familiar hill or two, I get to a big forest. I'm glad those flint and steel maniacs from my server aren't here.

As far the the eye can see (as far as will render)

Yay! Found some mushrooms. I feel like I've got enough food to last me for my whole journey now, as long as nothing jumps on my head (or more likely , me jump on it's head by accident). After walking for a few minutes in the forest, I come across a clearing with cliff face and water oblong waterfall.

Little waterfall

I don't plan on stopping until I notice a little cave next to the waterfall which I just can't resist exploring.

Fullscreen this and it'll make more sense

Inside I see a couple of rather interesting things, a zombie, and.. cobblestone. You guys should know what this means :D After realizing I've only got 1 torch left, killing the zombie, finding the end of the tunnel, and getting some coal, I'm ready to open up the dungeon. It seems strange how quiet it is, I have no idea what could be in there, maybe it's just lava that's touched some water (I doubt that actually). I carefully mine out of one the cobble blocks and..

Stones Skeletons!

*TWANGTWANGTWANGTWANGTWANG* The skeletons go berserk all shooting at each other rather than me.  I run around madly anyway hoping that If they do shoot they won't hit me. I haven't jumped like that whilst playing Minecraft for a while. I can see at least 3 skeletons die, and the one closest to me turns around and start shooting. I run around some more than go up to him and give him a little poke and he dies. Like either someone who is quite brave (or more likely, quite stupid, you'll find out why in a second). I knock out another block and go into the dungeon.

Free bones

I hop over all of the "free" arrows and bones, picking them up and filling my inventory completely. When in a dungeon like this, it's best not to destroy the spawner, but surround it with torches so you can make a trap out of it. OH. I'm going to have to make some more torches before.. too late. One last skeleton spawns but I manage to drop what I'm going and hit him in the face several times before he can put too many arrows inside of me. I then stab I and construct a bunch of new torches in record time and run around the spawner placing them on the ground like I'm doing some sort of weird ritual.

Winnings

I drop some stuff down that I don't need then have a look at what's in the chest. Ohh lots of iron, that will come in handy. Actually, I might as well take the chest too.

Yoink!

I don't know why I was hitting that thing with bacon, it made it taste pretty odd. (The bacon not the chest, I'm not some sort of weird chest-eating-machine. A little nibble might be nice sometimes but anyway...) On my way out I notice something above the entrance, maybe they had been shooting at me after all!

Arrows

Having thought I've spent enough time in here, I walk to the cave entrance and notice it's getting dark, I guess I'll stay here tonight then. I board up the entrance with planks and a door, and also put a door on the dungeon, just in case some skeletons come to rape me in my sleep.

Night already, again.

I hope some people are finding this entertaining =] There still aren't enough pretty scenery or building pictures for me personally, but I'll probably take some soon.

Minecraft Diary - Episode 3 - Animal Encounters

Day 3

Determined to go far, far away, I set off. First off in my journey, I see a creeper. "Hello Mr Creeper" I say kindly. He seems saddened by something.. he seems quite up for the idea of me chopping him into little pieces, so I comply.

Jumpy jumpy creepy creepy

After dealing with the creeper, I get over the hill, over some water onto another little hill. I then look back into the water and see some squids! Yay! I then continue to deal with the squids.

More Squids

I find myself in a "swamp" biome, were all the land is sea height, quite nice to walk on but not very exciting. Ohh piggies, they look tasty.

Swamp pigs and zebra tree

After dealing with those pigs, I found some cows. (Actually like 10 of them)

Cows

I bet you can't guess what I did with those cows.. I'll give you a clue, I'm now wearing them!

Wearing the cows

That picture also shows all the things I've got in my inventory, I'm really going to need to set up a base with a chest to put everything in soon. Time to continue my journey and go as far as possi... argh night time again, already. And whats that noise? AHH the chicken's back! I decide it's probably best to hide somewhere tonight, as I don't know how many hundreds of monsters there will be. I run to the closest heap of dirt and set up a little shelter in it.

Night 3

Cooking time

Day 4

With my little cave full of the delightful smell of cooked bacon - note that I eat bacon, not porkchop because I am a man - and a scented whiff of smelted iron, I head off into the day with my shiny new killing stick, confident that today I'm going to find a cool place to build by castle. I come across a cliff face which looks very tall, "maybe I'll get a good view from up there" I think to myself. I start to go through an archway and see a... what is that? Is it stone?

Surprise skeleton!

Strangely, it doesn't shoot me, maybe it actually thinks it's some stone? Anyway, on I go exploring in this wonderful new pla..

Bugger.

Going to continue the story next episode, hopefully I'm not going to manage being so stupid again.

Minecraft Diary - Episode 2 - Hostage sheep

Night 1

I run back to the beach as quick as my little squarish legs will carry me, to a nice flat spot I want to build my shelter. I haven't got that many materials so I'm forced to build quite a small, building, made up of an assortment of blocks. I'm determined to get it to look better that a square box.

Pretty moon

For some reason I don't take a picture of the completed shelter *shrugs*. Just after finishing it off, I hear a startling growl, up to this point I hadn't seen any monsters in this world, I had absolutely no idea where it was coming from. I got out of my shelter to have a quick look and..

What scares me most about this is the chicken and sheep.

Well this is.. actually not that bad, the zombie isn't running at me or anything, he looks angry though, I would be too if I'd made that much of a mess of my top. The zombie starts to chase me and I run around the shelter a bit before going inside. "I wonder where that chicken has gone" I think to myself, looking through the back window. I turn around and AHH!

Another zombie!

Obviously the chicken has called for backup! I knew I should have killed it. That sheep is still scaring me, it looks kind of sad, maybe the zombies are holding it hostage. I decide to open my door, cautiously poking the zombies with my crappy sword. I saved the sheep yay! It's starting to get light now, that was a pretty uneventful night to be honest, barely any monsters.

Day 2

Sheep and his friends go for a swim.

The sheep and his cow friends go for a swim when I get out of my house. They all look pretty grumpy. Now I needed something to do, some sort of objective. I decide upon getting lots of sandstone, because I want to build a sandstone castle. That sounds cool, and what could possibly be more fun that collecting heaps of sand?..

Collecting sand

I start out quite positive with this, but it gets really quite boring after a while.. I keep going anyway. Bored of collecting sand, I start to take down my shelter, I don't think it's really necessary due to the apparent lack of danger around here.

Night 2

I dig some more, through the night, then all of a sudden I turn round and there are a couple of zombies chasing me again, and they've already killed the sheep.

More zombies!

Whilst running, I notice I've uncovered some iron, yay! I have no idea what I'm going to use it on, but I'm sure it will be helpful. After running around a bit and killing the zombies, I get back to sand collecting.

BOOM!

WTF?! I didn't see that coming, how on earth did I only lose half a heart? Ah well, free sand. Time to dig some more.

Hole

As the sun starts to rise, I look back on what I've done during the night. I'm still surprised by the lack of monsters, but obviously I don't mind it. Four stacks (64) of sandstone, that should be enough. Now I just need somewhere to build my sand castle.. Time to go exploring!

Episode 3 coming soon, there will be a lot more pretty pictures in it I promise.

Minecraft Diary - Episode 1

I've been inspired by Tom Francis' "Minecraft Experiment" on PC Gamer and my new texture pack, to do a sort of "lets play" with pictures. This will be much more pretty than PC Gamers version (especially if you view the pictures full screen), and I'm hoping the commentary will be just as interesting.

I'm a lot more experienced than Tom Francis was when he did his Minecraft Experiment (so will act like less of an idiot, lol), and will be playing the same "hardcore mode" that if you die, you delete that map. I am not planning on dying. I don't have an overall objective yet, maybe someone could suggest one? Oh also, each "episode" will be about one day and night, depending on how many pictures I take.

Everybody knows by now that default Minecraft isn't particularly stunning to look at, although a lot of people enjoy the "style" and/or get used to it. Somehow after a while your brain adapts and you think it is "normal" for the world to be made out of blocks (or maybe I've just been playing for too long). With my new texture pack/mods, my 1920x1200 screen and a tiny bit of image editing, I'll be persuading you that really, Minecraft can look awesome.

Day 1

Although I could keep generating new ones until I get some great scenery, I'm just going to stick with the first one I get, turns out it doesn't look too bad.

Spawn

As you can see, I've got a custom sun, sand, cacti, water, and health bar. These things aren't in the usual squarish Minecraft style, but I think they fit together with everything quite well. "This place looks quite nice" I think to myself as I look around, then I catch something in the corner of my eye. Now any Minecraft survival player with a big screen will tell you how exciting and/or important seeing something out of the corner of your eye can be, this was no exception. I'm pretty sure that pig has seen whatever it is too.

Something in the sea

I run towards the water, hoping to get a better look.. but nothing. Quite disappointed, I think about leaving it, but I was sure I saw something. Time for a swim! *Splosh*

Squids!

View this fullscreen and stand up if you can't see them. I was tempted to punch the swimming tarantulas in the face to get some poo ink, but they were too deep, I'd drown before half killing one. Maybe I'll come back when I've got a sword. And besides, their eyes were beginning to creep me out.

Scenery

After nearly hurting myself staring at the squids, getting out then walking around for a minute on the beach, I come across this. Pretty cool cliff right? Having the view distance on full is nice.. I figure out that I'm spending too long prating around and decide I need to get myself some tools.

Supplies - Wood

As any experienced Minecraftian knows, you gotta punch trees first. Now I've got wood, I'm going to make a wooden pickaxe, get some stone, then make stone tools. Although you can now make charcoal out of wood, It would still be nice to find some coal before night time too.

Supplies - Coal

Found loads of coal. Thats good. Made two stone axes by accident. Not really bad, but considerably frustrating for somebody as OCD as me. Click the picture to see the incredibly helpful advise the cow gave me, seriously I know, I was going to get it anyway. Obnoxious cow. You can see in the picture the comparison between the shiny 128x128 "painted" textures, and the default 16x16 workbench. I personally think it all looks nice. *Squeezes in another picture here - this one would make a good desktop background*

Scenery 2

I get some more wood and start thinking about where I can plonk down a little cabin, but then realise I can't see the sun. "Do I have enough time to make a cabin"? I scramble over a hill to figure out where that white blob in the sky is, and then:

Sunset

Well that's quite pretty, I do love how the sun goes orange when it sets. This isn't the best looking Minecraft world I've ever seen, but I think its close. Obviously I've only seen one billionth (or something) of the world so far, so I hope I see some more awesome things again tomorrow... wait a second.. tomorrow! It's nearly night time! No house! No food! I haven't even made any torches yet! I refuse to sit in a hole at night and cry like a petrified worm hiding from the outside world, tonight will be fun.

More coming soon!

My Texture Pack

I've decided to share my Minecraft texture pack/mods. It requires a half decent computer to pull off, so hold down F3 in Minecraft and if your not getting 60+FPS then this isn't for you.

*Updates*

 - New tree (beta-snowy) leaves now work.
 - Snow matches sides without snow on much better.
 - Snow "tiles" much better.
 - Little fixes around the edges of some blocks.

This pack contains:

- The pack is mostly the BroPaint texture pack made by Rofrere. It also contains the HD texture fix by xau, and the awesome MrMMods (BetterLight/BetterGrass) by MrMessiah. Full credits are included in the pack.

 - Full set of lovely new textures, or the option to keep most of the defaults so only the scenery (and a few other things) look nice, whilst the blocks you craft keep the original "feel" of Minecraft

 - New Sun and Moon from the BroPaint pack, these look great when rising/setting.
 - New hearts/health meter from the BroPaint pack.
 - Scarier spiders, zombies and ghasts. Also less clean looking sheep.
 - New water, unfortunately it's not animated when still, but I think it still looks good.
 - Lovely sand and sandstone from Dante80s ALBION 64x Texture pack.

Does all that sound good? Well it looks even better! Get the pack here.

Screenshots (will update with more soon, also pigs don't look this crazy anymore. Click for full screen. Actually click. Especially if you have a 1920x1080 monitor so you can view full size.)

Installation Instructions:

 - Extract the archive into C:\Users\(your user name)\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft This may be slightly different depending on your operating system. "AppData" is a hidden file, so you will have to enable seeing them if you haven't already.

 - Run mcpatcher (the HD texture fix).
 - Set the Original file to \bin\minecraft-1.2_02.jar(correct at time of writing) & Output file to \bin\minecraft.jar
 - Set the Texture pack to a .zip file & check the Tile Size has changed to 128x128
 - Press Patch and after completion, close the Minecraft Patcher.
 - Run MrMPatcher.
 - Set Original and Output files like in the other patcher.
 - Highlight the Better Light and Better Grass boxes and press Patch.
 - After completion, close the patcher and play Minecraft!

 - To switch to the other texture pack included, do exactly the same again but select the other texture pack, it's really that simple!

 - To uninstall everything, delete your C:\Users\(user)\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\bin folder, then start up Minecraft and it will re-download it for you. You will not lose your save files. As you can see these are very safe mods to install.

I would like to update the pack with a few more things sometime, comments and suggestions are appreciated.

Showcase - My Log house and Stone house

As you can probably tell by those lower pictures, I've started using a new texture pack. If anybody wants details on it then just ask, it's a bit complicated to install and requires a bit more computing power to run.