Friday, August 26, 2011

Minecraft Avdentures

I find myself playing Minecraft for hours on end. Either mindlessly mining for materials, or building large structures high atop mountains. It all started when I succumbed to the curiosity sparked by conversations I head on podcast. I looked up the game on YouTube, and stumbled on a Let’s Player I’ve forgotten the name of, but soon came across Quickshot14, a long time player of Minecraft with a vision and a lack of design, as he confessed to many times. His structures were grand and sophisticated, and his commentary was genuinely entertaining. Watching him play was a joy, but it seems he has taken a hiatus to take care of matters in the real world.


It wasn’t long until I reached Wolv21’s region of YouTube (the actual reason I’m doing voice commentary with my LP’s now), along with Coestar and Etho. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of gameplay videos later, I was finally sold, and purchased the game to play it myself, and have my own adventures.


I’ve been playing Minecraft for a few months now. I started off just randomly wandering around, surveying the landscape with an inventory of smooth and cobblestone, looking for good places to build random structures. Towers, temples and alters littered the landscape, each recorded with a rough sketch of the finished product and the graphical coordinates of each structure through F3, and stone markers leading back to my main spawn.

I became enamored with mapping out the landscape, marking each landmark I left behind. Once I found enough sugar cane, and made a few compasses, I began mapping out the land in detail. I made a few of my own maps on paper to link the in-game maps together. When I came across a new biome, I marked the boarder of a new country, creating a new and unique architecture for each region, utilizing the block types unique to the biomes.




Some countries had older looking structures, taking inspiration from the Forbidden Land from Shadow of the Colossus, using motifs of colonnades and high ceilings. Some countries had technology, where I made contraptions using red stone and buttons. I continued to abide to these design rules until I came to my current base of operations. Now I am less strict and openly build whatever I want.
Using videos from Coestar and Ethoslab as reference, I’ve built more sophisticated contraptions like mob spawners, along with some designs of my own like automatic farms.



Here is my current base, a city that I am still underway building on top of a mountain that I have linked to naturally created floating islands. It’s a crazy place, as one wrong step while building can send you plummeting to the ground hundreds of blocks bellow! In the city I have a multi-storied automatic farm complex featuring an all automatic wheat farm, mushroom farm, tree farm, cactus farm, and sugarcane farm. I plan to add a passive mob spawning floor, but judging from what Etho accomplished, it may be a larger undertaking than I plan to take on.




I plane to link all the floating islands together to create a huge city with all the bare necessities that will allow me to be self sufficient without having to go back to ground level. I plane to do periodical updates on my adventures in Minecraft on this blog, and possibly post some videos on the channel.