Minecraft

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Alright. I know I barely post here but this game is too amazing to keep quiet about. Essentially the game is a sandbox MMO where you create structures with big "voxels" or 3D tiles. You can create and destroy them at will and now you can do it with friends in real time. A handful of us over at TIG played together and made a moon, a ship, a huge maze with an observation deck, an impressive house with a vaulted ceiling and other sweet stuff. Link to some screenshots.

http://minecraft.net

It's still free, but probably won't be for long, though right now during the alpha pre-orders are half-off and they allow you to texture your own character. So... that's the end of my "sell".

Yesterday, I loaded it up in earnest for the first time. Then I blinked and seven hours passed. But I made this huge tree...
IMAGE(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3341/3630628329_f77e4475d1.jpg?v=0)

Though, sadly now the server is offline and even worse we had a griefer come in just as we were running climbing races to the top of my tree. There's nothing we could do since the kick/ban features are still pretty limited, and he successfully destroyed most of what we worked on the entire afternoon. Anyway, if someone wants to start up a GWJ server, post it up and we'll create awesome out of thin air!

Thats... a lot like DF plugged into a visualizer. Only without DF. Neato!

Holy moly I can't believe no one here is talking about this. Just discovered this and it is like crack. If you like crafting or exploring in MMOs, or you like building with LEGO bricks, you should check this out. It is crazy. I paid and have been playing the alpha/survival mode all day... Check out this thread over at Qt3 for a little better description of it.

I got hooked on it over the weekend after hearing about it on Qt3. I joined their succession game under the alias Kiloohm (my old crappy screen name ;-)).

Anyway - if you liked DF you're likely to like this althought they really are very different games. There's tons of videos on youtube.

Come on people! I know there's a bunch of you here who would absolutely love this game, and for $12 it's a steal.

Here's a couple screenshots of my latest world in hopes of drumming up some interest. This is about my 5th restart, and everything is going great, except I haven't come across any iron ore yet. I've got a 4 story tower I'm working on, connected to a stone quarry going into the hill below me, with a multi-tiered terrace above it. At the far side of the terrace I built steps over thin air to reach a cliff side with coal and up to the top of the hill side, where I erected a large stone monument and illuminated it with torches. Just to ensure my base doesn't get overrun from the hill side I'm connected to above me, I built a little gatehouse with a door and walls so nothing can get in to my sanctuary. I need ore to build a bucket, though, so I can get some waterfalls going.

IMAGE(http://khoram.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/mine2.jpg)

IMAGE(http://khoram.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/mine1.jpg)

Sunrise:
IMAGE(http://khoram.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/mine3.jpg)

Are there actual goals or is it just try to build whatever you can think of?

I tried this a while ago after seeing it on another forum. Naturally, I'll copy and paste my post from there here.

So I tried it and started building a tower.
http://img26.imageshack.us/i/6556268...
But then got bored of that so I made a staircase going down
http://img27.imageshack.us/i/1129575...
Opened that into a tunnel
http://img268.imageshack.us/i/273860...
Found an open area in the ground and began to expand on that a bit
http://img269.imageshack.us/i/646959...
Made a small chamber with some bookcases
http://img43.imageshack.us/i/2258502...
Started another tunnel
http://img521.imageshack.us/i/918229...
Twisted it a bit, narrowed, and kept going
http://img532.imageshack.us/i/643136...
Decided to get some fresh air
http://img638.imageshack.us/i/447108...
And hid it a bit
http://img514.imageshack.us/i/428555...
The end
http://img28.imageshack.us/i/9613767...

Killed some time but nothing really all that interesting.

Looks like it's grown since I last played it but I'm still not all that interested, but I'm also pretty lazy and can't be bothered to take the time to build cool stuff like that, too much effort. So I WILL say that it would appeal a lot to people who like building stuff, and don't mind taking a lot of time to do it. It's well worth a try.

LeapingGnome wrote:

Are there actual goals or is it just try to build whatever you can think of?

Well currently the goal is to survive in the version I'm playing (the one you have to pay for - you can play the old version Fedora showed above for free where you just build with blocks). There is a day and night cycle, and there are 4 different monster types that can spawn anywhere it is dark (at night or in caves if you don't place torches). You start with nothing but your bare hands, which fortunately are strong enough that you can chop down trees (slowly) with them. Then you need to use the wood to create planks and sticks, with which you can start crafting shovels, pickaxes, axes, and swords. Once you have those tools you can start harvesting sand, gravel, stone, etc.

Your first goal is to build a shelter to protect yourself from the monsters before the first nightfall. After that I try to get a good amount of coal stockpiled (used to make torches, smelt ore, and make glass). Then I start looking for iron ore and making my fortress bigger.

The guy who is writing it (one guy full time) drops builds pretty frequently and according to his blog update today, almost has multiplayer survival mode ready.

There are some insane things people are doing with the game mechanics. He recently added in copper wire that lets you make circuits, so the game allows the creation of Turing-complete computation devices. You can also make traps, minecarts and tracks, waterfalls, lavafalls, etc.

I picked this up and so far I've made basic tools http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting Some of the things listed here.

The developer of minecraft was once a lead on another project which is now Wurm Online a mmo with many similarities to minecraft here. Apparently there was a falling out between the 2 leads on Wurm, and Notch left and has now created Minecraft. If it really is somewhat similar to Wurm, I could see myself becoming hopelessly addicted. I have a subscription to play on Wurm's premium server through August right now. The feature list for Minecraft is looking more robust, and the ability to create even less restrained than Wurm.

I foresee another addiction.

Once I figured out I needed to make a wooden pick axe to get cobblestone from stone and then make better tools from cobblestone I'm really getting somewhere now.

Exactly I mined down all the way to the bedrock at the bottom of the world last night and found the red copper wire stuff - could only be mined with a pickaxe made of iron. I started grid mining once I got down that far and have found a lot more coal and iron. Still haven't found gold or diamond yet.

Update today added

Spoiler:

boats

and cacti

My friends and I dabble in Minecraft (free mode) and love it. Each of us simultaneously creating secret underground lairs and finding surprises left by another. Highly recommended!

I really think there are a lot of GWJers who would love this game if they would just give it a try. I guess my pics above didn't do it justice. Here's a video of a guy starting a game from scratch and showing how you go about crafting, getting torches and tools, and cave spelunking.

I actually picked it up today during lunch. Looks like it could be some fun. Personally I'd be up for some sort of succession game if people wanted to do that.

Khoram wrote:

I really think there are a lot of GWJers who would love this game if they would just give it a try. I guess my pics above didn't do it justice. Here's a video of a guy starting a game from scratch and showing how you go about crafting, getting torches and tools, and cave spelunking.

NEEEERRRRDDDD!

I bought it on Friday and basically haven't put it down since.
I'm not up to building grand structures, but I found a nice cliff and am working my down through it.
I love exploration aspect of it, that building is so easy and the potential for a full on coop type survival building experience.

This game looks really cool though.. once I have some time I'm going to check it out.

I haven't played anything else since discovering this last Wed or so. This game is amazing, and really good for playing with your kids (if the few monsters are too scary you can set it to not spawn any monsters when playing with them). I've got a multi-story castle going that's floating in mid air over a pool, the ultimate in safe lairs! Built an above-ground road (again floating in mid air) system to connect to me a large mountain nearby where I built a fortified gatehouse into the side, and have begun mining a shaft down into the bowels of the earth in search of more coal, iron, and hopefully eventually gold and diamonds

There are enough people recommending it that I gave it a try. An embarrassing amount of time later (several hrs), I figured out how to get coal out and was able to make torches (you need a pick). Now, I'm golden. The digging is just ok. The creation of structures, however, is just plain fun. Liberal use of torches makes it look even better and as an added bonus, keeps the nasty night creatures away.

I'm loving it. I didn't think I would, but it is quite an addictive time-waster.

I'm really looking forward to multiplayer Survival. The terrain generation procedure is fancy enough that I can see getting a lot of enjoyment out of Lewis and Clarking it for a bit.

I picked this up, and it is pretty addictive. I'm digging the art style.

Just found this elsewhere. You can change your char's skin and of coarse there is already a website with numerous skins your you to download.

I chose the TF2 soldier skin.

Danjo Olivaw wrote:

I'm really looking forward to multiplayer Survival. The terrain generation procedure is fancy enough that I can see getting a lot of enjoyment out of Lewis and Clarking it for a bit.

Yeah, I'll pick it up when there's Multiplayer Survival.

I played around with it the other day and it's really fun and interesting, but I need some impetus to build... just lazy, I guess.

Stats from the website.

Statistics
896 players online, in 510 servers.
279070 registered users, of which 32186 (11.53%) have bought the game.

In the last 24 hours, 1848 people registered, and 660 people bought the game.

Games started in the last 24 hours:
Minecraft Alpha: 44090
Minecraft Classic: 71037 (77.1% multiplayer, 73.85% free players)

Phased out versions:
Survival mode test: 2444
Indev: 953
Infdev: 1132

About $10 a pop. Seems like enough fuel to continue development for a while yet, and it's not even Beta yet.

I could not find system requirements anywhere on their website. I assume this is Windows only for the download version?

There's linux and Mac as well.

IMAGE(http://img175.imageshack.us/img175/2757/minecraftt.jpg)

Cool. Sad you have to actually buy the game before you can even see if it available for your platform.

Druidpeak wrote:

About $10 a pop. Seems like enough fuel to continue development for a while yet, and it's not even Beta yet.

It's ten euros a pop, which comes out to be about $13.

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