SO YOU THOUGHT I WAS GONE! Minecraft 1.8 and more

Yep, I'm here again. Not that anyone was reading in the first place, but I haven't posted anything in a while. I really don't know why, I just didn't feel like it.  Now, I have returned with stuff. Plenty of stuff. To start off:

The Adventure Update of Minecraft: 1.8 added new structures and landforms. Until 1.8, I had played on Peaceful all the time because I wanted to make stuff and mine without monsters in my face. The "Adventure" theme of the new set of updates (some unreleased) triggered my change in play. Exploration and combat are becoming more rewarding, thus my not disabling monsters.

The 1.9 prerelease is out as well, but I prefer to wait until the game breaking bugs are fixed.

Adventure Update's Advantages:
New landforms: Canyon's/ravines, rivers, swamps, mushroom biome
New structures: Villages (villagers coming in 1.9), Nether Fortress (coming 1.9) Abandoned Mine Shafts, Strongholds
New Features: Experience (actual experience bonuses aren't here until 1.9 or 1.10), Food meter

More specifically:
The Villagers are planned to converse with the player and give quests eventually, but as of the 1.9 prerelease (further referred to as 1.9pre), they meander without purpose (sometimes away from town to never return). You can kill them too if you want.
The food system was overhauled. Now, food replenishes the new food meter, and once it is filled it restores your health until it drops to a lower point (exact statistics on food are here.
The Swamp is a lot of flat land with plenty of water pools. As of 1.9pre it has a different grass texture. Vines grow on the trees. And the mushroom biome, a 1.9pre feature, features mushroom cows and a very different grass texture.

So while I was playing the crap out of that, I was also playing Civilization 5, which was only about 12 bucks on Steam. I saw it and automatically decided to buy it (I had wanted Civ 5 anyway, but the one time deal was what made me get it). Enjoyable; it was a definite buy for that price tag, and good for full price, currently at 29.99.

And at last, I returned to my 3DS with Dead or Alive Dimensions, a good fighting game. I got it because of the battle environments; all of them (except the general training one) have some sort of interaction, such as kicking your opponent through a glass pane to the hall below or down a snowy slope to an ice covered arena. And the ninja. The big boobs were just a bonus...


So that's it for my return post. See you again!

Terraria: Copying?

So I began playing Terraria recently, and it's as good or better than the oft-compared Minecraft. But how original is it when you look at it and Minecraft?

I think the answer lies in other gaming realms, with the many genres they contain. Both games use a unique concept of being able to edit and control as much of the environment as you wish, and are capable of doing. So when you look at two WWII first-person shooters, they can be very similar, but people aren't eager to call them "copies." If they were copies, or copies of copies, etc., so would Terraria be to Minecraft. And hell, Minecraft is basically an improvement upon another game, titled Infiniminer.  But nobody considers (WWII themed) Call of Duty games copies of other WWII games. This applies to other game concepts too. Influencing does not equal copying.

With that, Terraria obviously has roots in Minecraft, and would not be what it is, or maybe even exist, without that which influenced it. Furthermore, the games that Minecraft and Terraria are could be even a new genre, title unspecified.

Disagree? Is Terraria a complete copy of Minecraft to you? Is Terraria completely original? Well, what's the comments for? Sound off there. Skydra out.

Minecraft: Screenshots of My Areas, Part 1

We all have our Minecraft buildings that we might want to show off. Here's where you find mine, which are way better than yours. Lets begin...

The Sky Hall and Railway Station, from one of the tracks. The rectangular upper area, the Sky Hall, is still under construction. If you notice that tower of dirt on top of the construction area, that's a measurement of how much building area is left before the Void is reached. The waterfall is used as an elevator.

The inner compound, titled the Sky Hall Entry and Railway Station (as said on the sign). The East Entrance titled comes from my log house.

 The roof of the Entry/Station, with my Nether portal and a waterfall elevator. Nothing much otherwise.

 The Sky Hall Landing, the room that you enter by waterfall in which you enter the Sky Hall. Simply a rest stop to the main attraction.

 Here's the construction area. You can see the dirt measurement tower mentioned before, as well as some clouds that show the height of the Sky Hall. It might be time to mention that the whole building I'm showing right now is built on a large hill, so the building isn't all of the height.

The track that goes down to my Sandcastle (building to the right on the sand), a house of sandstone. You can see from the track incline that the Railway Station is built on a considerably sized hill.

 The inside of the Sandcastle. It's not really in use for much right now. You can see the doorway that leads outside and the sign to the right along with the doorway to the track

 The roof of the Sandcastle. Another building is in the building process, but the project has been suspended for now.

 The Sandcastle from the outside, as well as the cliffs nearby and the cobblestone minecart entrance that I'm attempting to make animal proof so I don't have to worry about leaving a cart there and having an animal perform a train heist.

The railway to my log farmhouse, again coming from the Sky Hall. You can kind of see the house through the trees (upper right, the brown thing).

The inside, with all the necessities. Otherwise uninteresting. This is the building nearest to my original spawn point.

 Now the farm, with wheat ready to be harvested. Just around the corner from my original spawn point.

 Finally, we have another shot of the Rail Station. You can see the two rails, the one to the left leading to the farmhouse and the one to the right leading to the Sandcastle.

Minecraft goes on forever, so there's more screenies coming. In the meantime, happy Minecrafting (Crafting? Mining? Both of those just describe actions in the game... oh well. We'll stick to Minecrafting until something better comes up.).

Minecraft: What I Want in the Full Version, Part 1

Continuing my Minecraft theme, this time were on to how it could be improved in the final game. 


1. Notch has said that instead of torches being a permanent light source, they would need fuel in the final version. He said that Lanterns would be added as a permanent light source. The Minecraft wiki says: "Glowstone could potentially be an item requirement to craft a lantern, as it also provides an infinite source of light. This would also make lanterns relatively inaccessible and a risky item to get, as has been hinted at by Notch." So are lanterns to be difficult to get and large numbers of them difficult to obtain? Hopefully not, which is what I say for #1- Lanterns should be easy enough to find that it isn't a chore to get a large amount for mining. Luckily, all existing torches will be replaced with lanterns when they are introduced.


2. Vehicle variety. The current boat seems to act as a speedboat, but without a noticeable method of propulsion, so there should be a different way to craft a boat with a motor. I'd suggest the same crafting formation as the current boat, but with iron replacing the lower right bit of wood and some redstone in between the upper wood planks. The nonmotorized boat would have oars or something, faster than swimming but slower than the motor (if that wasn't obvious to you. Then maybe a metal boat and a wooden minecart. Another method of travel over land would help too. Possibly an animal, but to make minecart travel still viable, it would be slower (although still faster than the player) and would have an endurance bar, similar to the durability bars. 


3. This one is more random, but how about mixed ore blocks for realism? This means gold and iron could be contained in one block. The furnace could then have two output boxes for when the ore is mined for the two ingots that would emerge. I'm not thinking this idea is likely, but it's not as if it's stupid. To me. Then again, lots of things that are stupid to you probably aren't stupid to me... 


That's that for Part 1. There may never be a Part 2, but even without that this is still the first part. First of one.

Minecraft: Some First Impressions

It's a pretty great thing, this game. It's not exactly an original creation (look up "Infiniminer" on the MC wiki, or Google) but that doesn't change the fact it's great. Anything wrong with it?

For one thing, you could start out with some basic tools. I'd say a Compass is one of those; someone without the redstone to make one could easily get lost. Not to mention that the compass only points to your original spawn point, regardless of how many times you take a snooze. Most of the other stuff can be made pretty quickly, so I don't have much else to ask in that regard.

Furthermore... Uhhh... Water physics? Taking a spring block (water block that produces water which can spill out to other areas) out of a pool or ocean should technically cause the water level to go down, but instead the other spring blocks fill it in, but not to the top. So taking a couple spring blocks out would result in a very strange looking pool/lake/ocean/pond/river/random-other-names-for-water-formations. The lava physics, basically the same, make a little more sense because of the medium, but they still aren't the cream of the crop.

The last of the list is to make dungeons a bit more common. The only good way to find some is to use a good seed (I played two that both spawned next to two dungeons. The one I'm on now spawned me near two dungeons as well , but one was only because I knew the coordinates since I found the seed on the net). I'm not complaining about the loot, though; free redstone? Yes please.

But it's so frickin' addicting that the problems don't matter much.