Minecraft

Hi all, I have just gotten into minecraft after playing with my boys. It’s amazing and I can’t believe I have slept on it for so long. Are there any must have expansions on the console version as I am on PS4? The array of dlc is a bit bewildering for a newbie. Also I think I am being dumb but orienting stairs is really tricky is there a technique or way to rotate them I am missing? Thanks for the help, I’ll be spending a few hours of Hogmanay polishing up granite for my house!

Stair placement depends on where you are placing it - ie are you clicking on the back of the block above it, the block below it, which half of the block etc.

That threw me for a bit when I first started playing. The best way I found to think about it is that you want to get your cross hair closest to the edge that you want opposite of the indent of the stairs. So if you want to put stairs going up, aim toward the bottom edge of the block you're placing them against. If you want to make an overhang, aim toward the top edge. Does that make sense?

ClockworkHouse wrote:

That threw me for a bit when I first started playing. The best way I found to think about it is that you want to get your cross hair closest to the edge that you want opposite of the indent of the stairs. So if you want to put stairs going up, aim toward the bottom edge of the block you're placing them against. If you want to make an overhang, aim toward the top edge. Does that make sense?

That’s great thanks I’m going to start work today in some of the upper levels this should help! It’s the only wrinkle I have encountered.

You know what's worse than needing to get your back up gear and go back to get your best gear that dropped when you died? Needing to get into your junk gear, to go back and try and get your best gear AND your back up gear after you died a second time.

I FINALLY found a Piglin Bastion in my world. I resorted to exploring the overworld, and popping into ruined portals to see what's there in hopes of getting a good neither entrance, and finally found one that leads to a Bastion less than 20 blocks where I entered. I was going very carefully, trying to take out Piglin Brutes from afar, but I broke one block above me and instantly two Piglin Brutes and two Piglins dropped down on top of me. I was dead before I knew it.

Lucky for me, I've got a few elytra and some back up gear. I fly back to the portal and block the Brutes and Piglins into the room they're in and start attacking from range. There must have been one entrance to where I was that I didn't account for, because I got attacked from behind by some random Piglin and died again.

On my last elytra, I fly back, store it in a chest at the portal, in case everything goes wrong again, and enter the neither with my best junk gear. I block off my area better and takeout the Brutes and Piglins and enter the room in time before all my stuff despawned.

It's such a relief to have all my best stuff back, including a couple shulker boxes of loot, and all my elytra. I think I only lost some gold ore, as the Piglins picked it up and tossed down stuff like string and gravel in its place.

I plan to go back and raid the rest of the Bastion soon. I'm hoping it goes better than the first time I entered it.

I cleared my first bastion yesterday. I died the first try (brutes hit HARD), then found it very challenging, and only cleared it when I went back again. Knockback is essential for those brutes. I killed every piglin and brute as soon as I saw it, leaving only the zombified piglin's alone. In planning my approach, I reasoned it was better coming in at the bottom so I could shore up the structure as I climbed to avoid falling (potentially into lava!), and it worked like a charm. I used a heavily enchanted bow as well.

Been playing Java with my brother a bit lately, but he added more ram to his extremely dated server and it won't play the game. He tried to allocate the ram, but something went wrong, and now I don't have my distraction to play on in long boring meetings.

Anyone know what might have gone wrong? Not seeing any google friendly error codes. (Literally didn't come back with a result.)

Bad RAM? Update Java? Fresh MC Server install?

I've not seen your problem before, but I've only run a few servers. Merphle, Masher, Arovin, Mantis, LouZiffer, and others might have more wisdom.

Ram seems fine. Will try the other 2.

Adding RAM should almost never cause a problem like that. Any program that currently runs should keep running. There are a few weird corner cases where that could happen (32-bit Linux being expanded above 32 gigs, for instance, tends to run out of tracking structures in low memory), but by and large, if a program was running and you add RAM, that program should keep running at least as well, and probably better.

I would definitely test the heck out of that RAM. Also, verifying that the machine still works if you pull the new RAM out would be educational.

Malor wrote:

Adding RAM should almost never cause a problem like that. Any program that currently runs should keep running. There are a few weird corner cases where that could happen (32-bit Linux being expanded above 32 gigs, for instance, tends to run out of tracking structures in low memory), but by and large, if a program was running and you add RAM, that program should keep running at least as well, and probably better.

I would definitely test the heck out of that RAM. Also, verifying that the machine still works if you pull the new RAM out would be educational.

That all works... the issue came when he changed the ram allocation I believe. (dedicating a certain percentage to windows and the rest to Minecraft).

manta173 wrote:
Malor wrote:

Adding RAM should almost never cause a problem like that. Any program that currently runs should keep running. There are a few weird corner cases where that could happen (32-bit Linux being expanded above 32 gigs, for instance, tends to run out of tracking structures in low memory), but by and large, if a program was running and you add RAM, that program should keep running at least as well, and probably better.

I would definitely test the heck out of that RAM. Also, verifying that the machine still works if you pull the new RAM out would be educational.

That all works... the issue came when he changed the ram allocation I believe. (dedicating a certain percentage to windows and the rest to Minecraft).

I would guess, then, that it's not the RAM, but what he did to the launch options. Finding more online examples might help troubleshoot.

Also being sure that he has a 64-bit version of Minecraft would be good. 32-bit programs can typically only use 2 gigs (3 if they're altered a little), and I'm pretty sure that program has a 32-bit version.

edit: more specifically, making sure he has a 64-bit version of Java is what would fix that problem. If Minecraft comes with a 32-bit runtime, replacing that would make much larger memory sizes possible.

I don't know if anyone else has followed the excellent "Minecraft manhunt" video series, but I just found out the other day that the speedrunner who makes them (Dream) was apparently at the center of a big cheating scandal a few months back.

Apparently, he submitted a speedrun of 1.16 and people noticed that he was getting suspiciously lucky drops, and then there was a huge debate in the MC speedrun community over how to analyze whether drops are too lucky. Dream maintains that the runs were legit, and apparently even hired some stats person to write a paper pleading his case.

Anyway the long and the short of it is that his drops were waaay too lucky to happen by chance, though one could argue that it was a bug or whatever rather than intentional cheating.

A (perhaps overly long) explainer on the whole thing:

Makes me think of The King of Kong.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Makes me think of The King of Kong.

The guy I linked (Karl Jobst) has a ton of videos on cheating (or mistaken cheating) scandals, the King of Kong, how Guinness records are involved, all kinds of stuff. Great way to lose an afternoon..

Hey folks,

I need some help understanding Minecraft accounts, versions, and purchases and so forth. My kids are hitting the right age, and they have Amazon Fire tablets. Minecraft seems to be available through the Amazon Appstore for Android.

So, I understand that if they are to play together, I need to buy each of them their own account, in addition to either hosting a server or paying for Realms. They may not do this just yet, but it's on my radar because I'm sure they eventually will.

The app, through Amazon, is listed at $8 Canadian. Is this the same as an account? And if so, do I need to buy it twice? Or once through Amazon and then register a separate account through the Mojang interface? And if not, do I buy the accounts through Mojang?

I feel like Microsoft has not done a fantastic job of organizing the information needed to get a family playing together. I must be getting old.

You would buy the Minecraft app for each of them (unless you can get some sort of family app purchase sharing, like iOS has?). They would each have to create a free Microsoft ("Xbox Live") account and log into it from within the Minecraft app. Then they'd be able to join their friend's world, if their friend is playing, or join a Realms server.

If you buy from Mojang, you get the Java edition, which is only usable on PC/Mac, and can't join the same kinds of servers.

With the amazon kindle app I don’t believe you need a separate account at all, though it’s been awhile so my memory might be mistaken. They can then play together locally, without needing a separate server or Realms, though I think there are remote options as well.

(posted in the completely wrong thread)

I dipped out of this game many months ago. Last I heard they were going to do the Caves and Cliffs update in two parts- one coming out in the summer, and the second coming out in the winter. My plan was come back to the game after both updates were done and start a new world with all the new content.

Now I'm seeing stuff about "The Wild" update? Did the first part of Caves and Cliffs come out? Is the second part still coming? What's the current state of Minecraft? And when would it be best to return and start a new world to check out all the new stuff?

The Wild update is supposed to be the next update after Caves and Cliffs 2, and the first update of 2022. I think Caves and Cliffs 2 is still expected at sometime by the end of this year, but I don't think they've said much about it recently. It sounds like a bunch of stuff originally expected in C&C 2 has been pushed off to the 2022 update though.

The last questions seems hard to answer. There always seems to be new stuff in the pipeline right now so for now it seems like the answer is 'whenever you feel like playing', otherwise you'll never end up playing while waiting for all of the new stuff to be available.

Caves and Cliffs 2 is a major upgrade to generation and redstone to the point I'm thinking it's taking a lot of man hours to sort through all the issues it causes. Adding a frog is simple, completely changing world generation, less simple. I honestly think this is as close to a Minecraft 2 feature as we've seen in a long time.

So, yeah, they're hyping the next release while still finalizing the upcoming release. I'd probably shelve Minecraft until early 2022 if you're mostly interested in the part 2 of Caves and Cliffs.

On November 2, Minecraft is coming to PC Game Pass, and includes the Bedrock AND Java editions.

garion333 wrote:

Caves and Cliffs 2 is a major upgrade to generation and redstone to the point I'm thinking it's taking a lot of man hours to sort through all the issues it causes. Adding a frog is simple, completely changing world generation, less simple. I honestly think this is as close to a Minecraft 2 feature as we've seen in a long time.

So, yeah, they're hyping the next release while still finalizing the upcoming release. I'd probably shelve Minecraft until early 2022 if you're mostly interested in the part 2 of Caves and Cliffs.

Yeah, my plan was to come back to the game after all the new world generation stuff was in- so I didn’t have stuff around spawn generated the old way, and have to go thousands of blocks away to find the new cave types, etc.

I was getting confused because it sounded to me like the wild update might be instead of part 2 of caves and cliffs, but I guess they’re just hyping up features two updates away. I guess that’s more exciting to announce rather than say “yeah, we’re still working on caves and cliffs…”

Tscott wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Caves and Cliffs 2 is a major upgrade to generation and redstone to the point I'm thinking it's taking a lot of man hours to sort through all the issues it causes. Adding a frog is simple, completely changing world generation, less simple. I honestly think this is as close to a Minecraft 2 feature as we've seen in a long time.

So, yeah, they're hyping the next release while still finalizing the upcoming release. I'd probably shelve Minecraft until early 2022 if you're mostly interested in the part 2 of Caves and Cliffs.

Yeah, my plan was to come back to the game after all the new world generation stuff was in- so I didn’t have stuff around spawn generated the old way, and have to go thousands of blocks away to find the new cave types, etc.

I was getting confused because it sounded to me like the wild update might be instead of part 2 of caves and cliffs, but I guess they’re just hyping up features two updates away. I guess that’s more exciting to announce rather than say “yeah, we’re still working on caves and cliffs…”

Well, to be fair to Mojang, they did discuss the issues inherent in Caves and Cliffs 2 while also thanking the community because they've been helping with it. World generation changes everything. The "announcement" portion of the video was 20 mins of an hour and a half video. Of course there's a lot of fluff in there too.

That's really interesting, I'd missed all this. I don't suppose mojang published any big explainer articles on specifically what they're doing, or how?

I'm working on world generation in my own voxel game at the moment

I don't, sorry. They're probably pretty cagey about that.

This is the only thing that comes to mind: https://www.gridsagegames.com/blog/2...

Ah that's a classic article. But unfortunately infinite world and 3d make everything that much more complicated...

Will be interesting to see what Mojang does with the problem. I guess Minecraft worldgen has always been haphazard - the last time I played I remember encountering the occasional floating mountain and whatnot.

Well, it's out. Shall we reset the server and start afresh?