Minecraft

Ssssssshhhh... you can't ssssssssssssseeeee me.

(continued from yesterday evening...)

So I was exploring my world and found this...
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/QV88G.png)
And on the other side of the mountain was this!
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/Kxrhc.png)

......
IMAGE(http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y185/ferretypie/sssMinecraft.png)

I dunno, made me laugh anyway.

I had a similar thing, only it was a creepy spider on the other side of a single-block wall, and it's foot kept coming out and waving at me. It took me a while to figure out what was flailing around over there. Then I took out the block and shot him to death through the small gap. They're less scary when you see 'em coming.

I've started my first ever spelunking expedition. I've found a lot of cool stuff, and only got lost twice. Found the spider-spawner and blocked it off. That room's going to be a solid spider-object when I get up the courage to go into it.

I just bought this, fired it up, excited to see what all the hype is about. But something's not right. I'm hoping I'm just doing something wrong, but I can't mine/get anything. I run up to trees and swing my stubby little fist and the blocks never break down. I've watched youtube videos where people have wood after a few swings. That's definitely not happening. I was able to kill a pig and get the cloth from a sheep though. But I can click the mouse button over and over like a fool watching bits of whatever I'm swinging at fly off, but never actually break down so that I can get some of it. I can pick up flowers though. So, thus far, my Minecraft adventure has been me running around with a flower in my hand, finding a cave, and dying.

Please tell me I'm doing something wrong...

If you would LiquidMantis, could I get GWJ status? I haven't been registered for more than six months, but this looks like so much fun.

Sheazy wrote:

I just bought this, fired it up, excited to see what all the hype is about. But something's not right. I'm hoping I'm just doing something wrong, but I can't mine/get anything. I run up to trees and swing my stubby little fist and the blocks never break down. I've watched youtube videos where people have wood after a few swings. That's definitely not happening. I was able to kill a pig and get the cloth from a sheep though. But I can click the mouse button over and over like a fool watching bits of whatever I'm swinging at fly off, but never actually break down so that I can get some of it. I can pick up flowers though. So, thus far, my Minecraft adventure has been me running around with a flower in my hand, finding a cave, and dying.

Please tell me I'm doing something wrong...

You need to hold down the mouse button for several seconds while pointing at the block to get it to break.

4xis.black wrote:

You need to hold down the mouse button for several seconds while pointing at the block to get it to break.

This. If you staccato click the block heals between strikes.

opsirus wrote:

If you would LiquidMantis, could I get GWJ status? I haven't been registered for more than six months, but this looks like so much fun.

Done!

LiquidMantis wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

You need to hold down the mouse button for several seconds while pointing at the block to get it to break.

This. If you staccato click the block heals between strikes.

I'll third their advice. The dying thing is fairly standard, though. You don't lose anything but the stuff you're carrying when you die.

Have you read through the wiki and the "how to survive your first night" tutorials up-thread? They can really help.

4xis.black wrote:

You need to hold down the mouse button for several seconds while pointing at the block to get it to break.

Thanks everyone! I'm glad it was something easy. I'll try not to feel too dumb I did see the tutorials and watched just the beginning of them to try to figure out what I was doing wrong. I'll spend some time with them later tonight or tomorrow.

Yeah I did the same thing when I got the game. Spent an hour before I posted somewhere and asked.

Only reason it didn't happen to me was because I saw someone ask the question much earlier in the thread before I bought the game. So yeah, easy mistake to make.

momgamer wrote:
LiquidMantis wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

You need to hold down the mouse button for several seconds while pointing at the block to get it to break.

This. If you staccato click the block heals between strikes.

I'll third their advice. The dying thing is fairly standard, though. You don't lose anything but the stuff you're carrying when you die.

This is not strictly true: if you know where you were when you died and you can get there in time (within 5 minutes is what I have seen posted, but I am not certain it is that long), you can get all your stuff that yopu were carrying back after you re-spawn.

Notch's Tweet wrote:

Minecraft just passed 7000 sales in 24 hours!

This is amazing watching this alpha game explode like this!

IMAGE(http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/2231/100316k.jpg)

Sheazy wrote:
4xis.black wrote:

You need to hold down the mouse button for several seconds while pointing at the block to get it to break.

Thanks everyone! I'm glad it was something easy. I'll try not to feel too dumb I did see the tutorials and watched just the beginning of them to try to figure out what I was doing wrong. I'll spend some time with them later tonight or tomorrow.

Yep, I did the same. I bet this happens so much that Notch ought to put it on the game's splash screen.

Okay. I got to playing around with fences last night and have to say I love them. Except for skeletons, pretty much every hostile mob now is pretty unfrightening now that you can literally just sit behind a fence and stab him through the slats until he's dead. Just for giggles, I beat a pair of creepers to death with a tulip. This got Robear's son laughing to the point of a near asthma attack.

Paleocon wrote:

Okay. I got to playing around with fences last night and have to say I love them. Except for skeletons, pretty much every hostile mob now is pretty unfrightening now that you can literally just sit behind a fence and stab him through the slats until he's dead. Just for giggles, I beat a pair of creepers to death with a tulip. This got Robear's son laughing to the point of a near asthma attack.

Love 'em, too. I created my base by digging into an existing cave system and used fences to "wall off" the entrance. I've never had a mob get in and have a nice little fenced in space that I grow an emergency supply of trees.

OG_slinger wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Okay. I got to playing around with fences last night and have to say I love them. Except for skeletons, pretty much every hostile mob now is pretty unfrightening now that you can literally just sit behind a fence and stab him through the slats until he's dead. Just for giggles, I beat a pair of creepers to death with a tulip. This got Robear's son laughing to the point of a near asthma attack.

Love 'em, too. I created my base by digging into an existing cave system and used fences to "wall off" the entrance. I've never had a mob get in and have a nice little fenced in space that I grow an emergency supply of trees.

Wood is clearly the most useful resource in the game so it is always good to have a ready supply of trees on hand. I always make sure to plant two for every one I chop down and have leveled off two large expanses to use as tree farms. This has given me a glut of surplus lumber. Even still, I don't have the heart to actually build with it when stone and dirt as such ready industrial by products.

I've taken to building roads with gravel since I have scads and scads of it and it is pretty worthless as a building material. It is quite useful for use in caves (to wall off areas from above, fill in lava pits, and use as elevators), but it really doesn't take more than one stack to do all of that. Since I tend to dig out all the gravel in caves to reveal coal and iron seams, I usually end up with loads and loads of the stuff left over. Plus, running on it makes that satisfying crunch crunch sound. Likewise, when you run on it and you have a creeper giving chase, you can hear his footsteps as well.

I'm loving this game, but it strikes me that "survival" is a bit mis-named, since you can survive indefinitely, even on the hardest setting, by building a tiny fence and then sitting there. I love putting my stamp on a part of the world by building a fortress, and the exploring is fantastic, but I do wish the game gave you a compelling reason to do these things.

I'm thinking there could be a version where you're scored by the amount of gold and diamonds you manage to collect, except that the more you have, the more frequently you're raided by monsters. These monsters could climb walls and fences and (over time) break down doors, so there'd be a reason to build a huge awesome castle with guard towers and a moat and iron doors. Maybe that would give the game the urgency that Dwarf Fortress has, but Minecraft seems (to me) to lack?

IjonTichy wrote:

I'm loving this game, but it strikes me that "survival" is a bit mis-named, since you can survive indefinitely, even on the hardest setting, by building a tiny fence and then sitting there.

If you call that "surviving".

Plus one creeper can fix your fence right up.

Paleocon wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

Okay. I got to playing around with fences last night and have to say I love them. Except for skeletons, pretty much every hostile mob now is pretty unfrightening now that you can literally just sit behind a fence and stab him through the slats until he's dead. Just for giggles, I beat a pair of creepers to death with a tulip. This got Robear's son laughing to the point of a near asthma attack.

Love 'em, too. I created my base by digging into an existing cave system and used fences to "wall off" the entrance. I've never had a mob get in and have a nice little fenced in space that I grow an emergency supply of trees.

Wood is clearly the most useful resource in the game so it is always good to have a ready supply of trees on hand. I always make sure to plant two for every one I chop down and have leveled off two large expanses to use as tree farms. This has given me a glut of surplus lumber. Even still, I don't have the heart to actually build with it when stone and dirt as such ready industrial by products.

I've taken to building roads with gravel since I have scads and scads of it and it is pretty worthless as a building material. It is quite useful for use in caves (to wall off areas from above, fill in lava pits, and use as elevators), but it really doesn't take more than one stack to do all of that. Since I tend to dig out all the gravel in caves to reveal coal and iron seams, I usually end up with loads and loads of the stuff left over. Plus, running on it makes that satisfying crunch crunch sound. Likewise, when you run on it and you have a creeper giving chase, you can hear his footsteps as well.

Ha. I do the same thing. The space immediately around my base is a virtual forest. I take the extra minute to remove all the leaves from a tree I cut down to make sure that the sapling I plant in its place can immediately grow. Oddly, I've found the hoe is the best tool for quickly removing the leaves.

I agree with you about the value of wood. I use it exclusively to fire my furnaces as I've suffered through a couple of coal shortages on my map (nothing slows down exploration than a lack of torches!). I'll use pavers for my roads since it's a great way to use up the excess cobblestone from excavations. Dirt and gravel pretty much go straight into my waste pit unless I need to grade a swath of land.

BadMojo wrote:
IjonTichy wrote:

I'm loving this game, but it strikes me that "survival" is a bit mis-named, since you can survive indefinitely, even on the hardest setting, by building a tiny fence and then sitting there.

If you call that "surviving".

Exactly this. Sure you can sit in a cave and do nothing, but exploring is fun for its own sake and it becomes a challenge. I've started a few games and there's nothing like the thrill of finding coal. One map I had had nothing.

There is talk of the game eventually having an RPG system and quests, again we need to bear in mind this is an alpha.

In my new game I've just focused on building a nice sized house out of dirt, a road from my spawn to the house and a tree farm. One all that is set up I'm going exploring.

Notch wrote:

The idea was to do Biomes, but I failed again! :-\ But the update is out now, with sneaking and fixed furnaces.

Good luck connecting...

Yeah, doesn't look like I'll be playing Minecraft for a few hours.

Yes, yes that is "surviving". It's not "living", but then, that's a different word. (And yes, a creeper could blow up your fence, so just replace "hide behind a fence" with "make a tiny tunnel straight into a mountain, then put a door at the entrance.) A real survival game makes you *do* something to survive. In Dwarf Fortress, for example, if you just build a tiny room and wall your dwarves up there, they'll starve. If you don't build fortifications, your fortress will be destroyed by armies. You're driven to build and explore by necessity.

All I'm saying is that I love building and exploring in this game, but I think it'd be even more fun if there were a mode where building and exploring were things you needed to do for gamey reasons.

IjonTichy wrote:

All I'm saying is that I love building and exploring in this game, but I think it'd be even more fun if there were a mode where building and exploring were things you needed to do for gamey reasons.

Fair enough, right now it's more toy box than game. More 'game' is coming Notch just needs time. The game is still at the prototyping stage.

IjonTichy wrote:

All I'm saying is that I love building and exploring in this game, but I think it'd be even more fun if there were a mode where building and exploring were things you needed to do for gamey reasons.

While I see what you're saying, I just do the quest giving in my head or develop a loose story that gives me a goal. Personally, I don't really see why I need a game to give me the reason to go hunt diamonds or kill cows. But, that's just me.

Another thing we could try to do is implement a GWJ scavenger hunt. Something like 20 string, a stack of wool, some redstone or obsidian and something else and maybe a picture of lava, or something like that. A mix of adventure items and exploring items and maybe a few geographic features. Then just get the necessary screen caps. Just a thought. OR maybe a Photo contest? All nerdy ideas but maybe that might give some people the drive IjonTichy is talking about?