Minecraft – A Geeky Gulati

When I searched for information about Minecraft, I found a lot of mind-numbing detail.. and a lot of tutorial videos.. but nothing I could use as a roadmap through the overall game (other than the achievements thing inside the game, which I somehow missed for quite a while). So, I’m putting this together. Its what I know so far.. there are many more things which could go on here, but I think this is the basics to get to the advanced stuff.

Image creation notes – used desktop wallpaper from http://minecraftwallpapers.com/blueskys-96.html ; Diagram created with CreateLy

I’ve tried to arrange all the above-ground stuff on the top-right, and the below ground stuff going, well, down.

One Side effect I have noticed: When I first started playing, getting 4 blocks of wood seemed monumental, I had no idea of the scale at which I could grow and harvest things. As a result, I held onto those 4 blocks, the single chest, etc, very tightly .. all resources were scarce.. till I learned how to plant trees and get renewable and efficient. I think the same is true in real life … as I learn the patterns of real life, I go from being scared in the world to being confident and efficient.

Click the image to zoom in on the detail.

A Word on Mining

Each time I do a mine, I seem to pick a different pattern.. I’ve finally found one that I think I like. Its related to Branch Mining Layout #1 in this Wiki article … with these additions:

The center section is 3×3 or 5×5 with a tunnel going straight up. I’m having very good luck with branches every 6 (ie, skip 5 then start a new branch).
Try to keep all the ceilings 2 tall so that Endermen cannot teleport in
Use Wood Panels as markers – this way back to center – and as markers to know where I found something (because I’m filling as I go)
If I break into a cave, patch that enterance with wood paneling – which serves as a reminder to self, don’t open this. (Problem: Mobs will spawn in there. Endermen teleport. Hence the ceiling height)

I suspect after I master lava I might try some creative way of killing all mobs in a cavern

Use Shift-F3 to see real light levels; drop a torch on the ground when RL=3 yields an overall lowest light of 8 between torches which prevents mob spawns. Even better, use the torches at every 6 (branch mine) just as a pattern.
When I go down some levels, leave 3 blocks between levels (ie, go down 5) – and then do the branches the other way (if it was an east/west the first time, do north south the next time).

Bulk Mindset

I am finding that instead of doing things “just barely what I need” (ie, I need 4 wood, get 4 wood), its more efficient to batch up my operations. So If I’m planting wheat, I plant 21 in a row yielding 63 harvest – which gives me a full stack. If I’m creating torches, I create all 64 of them. This way I’m not context switching all the time.

Further Adventures

These are the things I have not yet done (and may not get around to … or I might …)

Travelling in search of another NPC village (the one that my friends found, we didn’t protect the villagers, and now they’re all dead.)

“Villager Farming” .. growing the village (something about Golems?)

Visiting the other Biomes (or starting basic survival in one of them)
Building Railroads and Powered Rails for fast transport
Building above ground (everything I’ve done has been a hobbit-hole dwarven lair type of thing)
Building under water
Playing with Gunpowder and TNT
Playing with Lava
Playing with Circuitry
Pets
Enchantments
Endgame

The last two weeks I’ve been spending every free waking hour (and some I should not have spent) playing Minecraft. A lot of people don’t get it.. and that’s okay. I have a lot of thoughts floating in my head, so here’s my geeky post. #TrueToSelf (image: view of HobbitHole v2.0 – showing tree farm, animal farm, sugar cane and wheat)

What I love about Minecraft – Background

Back in the 90’s, I coded the equivalent of BCL’s on an LPMUD (related: LPC programming language) named Vincent’s Hollow. (Its dead now – the software doesn’t run on any modern O/S). Some of these included: the standard monster model, weapons, armor, statistics/enchantments, talk and chat system, email client, etc. It was the most fun I ever had coding in my life. (In addition to learning OOP and how to build amazing reusable systems, I also learned what it takes to lead (herd) a group of volunteer programmers, teach people to code, and in retrospect, the most important, to love people for who they are.)

I also loved the games NetHack (well, Moria to be exact) and Ultima 5. They had a top-down game play that worked well for me – using my imagination to see what that world looked like. It was seamless, I did not see blocks, I saw beaches and woods and paths and stuff.

As I proceeded in my paid career.. every new technology I learned – and I’m dating myself here — Clipper, SQL, Perl, C#/.Net, Signal/R, Mongo – I dream[ed] of writing a Mud with it. It has never truly left me. (related: when I saw WoW, it raised the bar so high that I could never touch it. The dreams subsided for a while) (related link: my 2004 attempt at a mudding livejournal. Precious.)

While being a Mud “director”, I also spent a lot of time thinking about where gameplay could go. I saw people get up to the level max of 20, and then.. then what? Not everybody wanted to code. So I started designing what I called “Frontier Land”, where you could either gather resources yourself to build castles and civilizations, or rope the locals into labor (if you paid them well enough) to do a lot of that for you, so that the competition could be taken to “who has the coolest most successful city”. It was going to be a randomly generated world, with forests, villagers, mountains, monsters, etc. There was going to be a monster mode where you could “become” a monster (not leaving a certain area) to go and kill players. There was going to be a Karma mode where your actions to help or hurt other people (never liked griefers) changed your “luck” which stayed with your soul.. and to create a character, you had to be born into the world (to parents), when that character died, it was gone, but your soul went back to the lobby.

Enter Minecraft

I look in the game, and what do I see..

A blocky, unlimited, randomly generated world
Where you can build systems and processes and stuff
With a client and server model, multi-player

It definitely taps into several of my core patterns. It is feeding a part of me that’s been hungry for a while. Right now I’m still exploring it as a game, but there’s a part of me that is looking at a bigger picture.

Aside: Minecraft also feeds my love of LEGO which is the predecessor to blocky worlds for me. When I was 12, I used to try to recreate the dioramas of canyons where Wile E. Coyote would chase the Roadrunner using LEGO.

So What Now?

I have a whole other post brewing about a “build” order of adventures in Minecraft. (It was going to be part of this post, but single-responsibility, KISS, so I’m refactoring it out to its own class… err, post.)
My dreams of writing an awesome mud(lib) (again).. now are transformed. I want it to look like Minecraft. I could do it in C#, and Signal/R, and .. and.. and.. oh yeah, only at the opportunity cost of everything else in my life. Darn it. #LotteryNowDangit
I have several adventures left to experience in Minecraft – carts, rails, mapping, lava, villages, and cats is the short list.

So What Now — Second thought – transformed

Why build new when there’s already something that works? What if Minecraft started allowing for Lua scripting .. so people could write behaviors into the world in creative mode… building some amazing worlds, games, adventures.. for adventure mode?

It could inspire a gazillion kids into their first programs.. like Muds did for my generation of tweens.

Not to mention recreate C-Robots – program your monsters to a fight to the death.. arena.. with Lava flows to avoid.

In Conclusion

I’ll put in a link to the adventure build order post when I get that done. I’m pretty sure my wife is going to wake up any moment now, and I have promised this day to making our house better. And… POST!

Tag: Minecraft

Minecraft #2/2: Layers of Adventures