A Minecraft Village Project

The Village before construction.

One of the many stone brick homes in the area.

It wasn't too long after I found out about how minecraft villages worked that I started making new buildings within the town center. The town flourished as new villagers were born and offered me various tools and weapons for the price of some emeralds. But their small village was soon becoming a large city and I had to find a way to occupy them all in the area they lived in. So decided it was time for some serious renovation.

I first started by clearing old buildings that weren't being used and created new homes for the villagers to live in a small ways away from the main town. The villagers were able to make a swift transition from their old worn out homes to fancy new ones made of finely cut stone brick homes.

Once I had all the villagers moved away from the town I started construction on the pathways that would connect the town to other villages and then created a rail system that would transport goods to and from the village. From there I started working on a few structures that would be the center piece of the town.

The paths that connect the towns together.

This is as far as I have gotten for now but I will have more to share in the following weeks so be sure to check back for the progress of the new town!

The State of Minecraft

It's been a long run for Minecraft and it's still kicking. I had expected the game to have already been long dead after 1.00 yet it keeps getting updates and bug fixes. Some of the newest updates have really added some game changers to Minecraft. First of all, the villages have been given a nice work-over. Villages now come with iron golems that protect the village. Villagers now have children and repopulate the town. They will also move into new buildings as the player makes them, which makes for a great time waster. Second we have new mobs and biomes that make the game more interesting. The jungle biome being the newest addition adds ocelots which can be tamed. When tamed, the ocelots become house cats that will sit on your furniture and be a nuisance.

The villages are one of my favorite things in Minecraft these days. You can build  houses, shops, or anything you can imagine and villagers will occupy the buildings. I have started a project to make a somewhat advanced city for them in hopes to modernize their living situation. I also heard that in the next updates to come we will finally get to trade with villagers! One of the other things I really enjoy in Minecraft these days is multiplayer. Multiplayer has gotten a lot better, whether it be bug fixes, optimization, or just more user friendliness, it has certainly been changed for the best.

Some of the more recent updates include the new height limit, which makes the buildable area of the world twice as high as before. With the new height limit there have been some amazing new buildings made. New chat features such as link sharing also make the multiplayer experience more fun as well. New decoration blocks such as smooth sand-stone blocks and creeper sand-stone blocks have made an appearance as well. All in all Minecraft has improved greatly since official release and continues to get better. With the upcoming mod api I'm excited to see what cool new game experiences awaits us!

You can view all the changes to Minecraft at the following link: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Version_history

Minecraft 1.0.0

With minecraft 1.0.0 out there hasn't been many changes to the game except enchanting and breeding animals it seems. I was really hoping for more from the game but it seems like mojang just wanted to get the game over quickly so they could work on their other project scrolls. Mojang has stated that they plan to continue working on minecraft, but whether they will add new content or not has yet to be confirmed. On the upside of things, because of the official release modders can now work on their mods without worrying about updates all the time so we can finally have some good updated mods for the new version. unfortunately mojang has yet to implement the modding api they promised earlier this year. This makes it hard for modders to make content that could potentially work with the server version of minecraft and instead modders must force the minecraft user to download the mod to use it on a server assuming the server is running the mod. Although there are many useful and fun plugins for bukkit, a modded server version of minecraft, plugin creators are still very limited in what they can make for the game. If a proper api was in-place there would be unlimited potential for minecraft as a sandbox game.

What I always loved about minecraft was the building aspect, when I first tried the game I knew this was the game I would play for a long time, I am a big fan of sandbox games and especially when you can build the content for the game, that is even better. Minecraft started out very simple, a square limited level with small mounds of grass, then it got caves and lakes, then oceans and new items and weapons and tools. then new animals and monsters and new worlds and finally dragons. As fun as minecraft has been to me, it has started to dull very quickly and I feel that minecraft has gone in a bad direction it trys to be an rpg game but it's really just suppose to be a building game. It always was, I don't know what changed it but minecraft is a shadow of what it was before.

Here is what I think of the released version of minecraft:
Gameplay: 7/10
Story: 4/10
Graphics: 3/10
Replay Value: 10/10

Overall: 6/10
Minecraft has quite a way to go before I can consider it a finished game. At least we can play some mods while mojang gets it's act together.

Buildcraft

I recently came across a mod in the forums while looking for some new mods to try out and I stumbled upon a true gem. Buildcraft is a mod that adds pipes, mining wells, quarry's and fillers. You construct the machines using gears and tools to create machines that will dig materials for you! not only that but you can set up pipes to lead materials from the machines directly to a chest which can them be transferred and filtered into furnaces and crafting templates to make any item automated!

The mod adds a lot of fun to the game and its easy to install!

Source - Minecraft Forums

Updates, Minecraft, and Computers.

I haven't done any blogging about minecraft in 4 months ( a long time ) I have pretty much abandoned asian-craft. ( It wasn't that great anyway. ) So instead of blogging or modding I've pretty much just been playing video games and attending college. Now that it is summer break I have so much free time that I wish I didn't. I will most likely be doing some minecraft or video game related stuff on this blog, not sure what exactly I will do... maybe some videos or lets play or even live streams... Oh which reminds me. I got a new computer last month... It's very nice.

hexacore processor @ 3.30GHz
8gb random access memory
Ati 6950 Graphics card
1.5 Terabyte HDD

It's quite enjoyable. the only thing I don't like is how it performs with direct x11. I downloaded the heaven benchmark tool and ran it at highest settings.. it only got 22 fps average the worst was 7fps best was 52
I can't really complain though, that's damn good for a single video card. I imagine my results would double if I got another card. I think it might be a while longer before we see direct x11 used in retail games. I know there are a few games that use it already but they don't use it for every object just sparingly. most games wouldn't be nearly as detailed as the benchmark tool. I'm sure in a few years they will though and it will be really amazing to see that. ( here is a shot of tessellation comparisons )

anyway, on to some of the things I've been doing with my new computer. I downloaded dolphin emultaor ( it allows you to play wii and gamecube games on your pc ) I then got a copy of wind waker, and twilight princess ( both of which I own for my real gamecube ) and tried it out on the emulator. except for the occasional crash, both games run perfectly! so if you're looking to buy a computer to emulate wii / gamecube my computer would be the perfect choice it seems. of course that's not the reason I bought it of course.
( Here is a picture of twilight princess running at enhanced settings )

Aside from video games I've just been attending college being very busy and making rl friends whom are pretty cool guys. I will be doing more blogging ( hopefully ) a bit later when I figure out what I want to work on. until then see ya.

A small tutorial on redstone wires.

There are some people out there that want to make things with redstone and they just don't get it.
I made a video a while back about how to make your redstone wires power further than 15 blocks. But now with the new update there a new way to do so.

New way:

Old way:

AsianCraft update for ver 1.3_01

Just spent a few minutes updating the mod to the latest version, and it was super-easy!
Still has the same stuff as last time, but now it works on the latest version! also the betterlight makes everything pretty!

Heres some screenshots.

Download