Season Finale Season 4: Success.

Months ago, around 6 months ago, I embarked on a journey in my new world. I wanted to see the ocean. I had gotten a glimpse of it over Rose Point, but the mountains were too large and too steep to ever be practical to me. So I set forth following a series of ponds, and between several mountains, and I made it to the ocean.

On the way back to the bay I came across this site.



I thought it remarkably looked like a river bed. There was no water around, so the idea in my head was that this valley was indeed once a course of a river. This idea sparked the thought to trace my way back to The Bay and see if there was a logical course a river once flowed from it to the ocean, and I actually did find a nice course an ancient river could have traveled.

That was when I started my river. I had practical reasons for it, those reasons will be recounted at a future date, for now only one thing was left.



The area in red signifies how close I am to the upper part of the river. I am standing on the last piece of sand of the dry river bed, and about 4 blocks below the red area there is the river.



That last part worried me. I had known that the river was ocean level, but I did not know if the sand went down to ocean level. I suddenly got worried that if I dug the sand to the correct depth that there wouldn't be a river bed anymore... luckily as the screen shot demonstrates, the sand was quite deep.

Perfect.

I cleared some sand to ocean level, and then set on the final tasks.



This is the delta side of the river, the one near Sugarland. If you look at the screenshot you can see that the river is flowing toward a small earthen dam.



Now we have quarry side broken and rushing to the riverbed, the river is so close to living again it can feel it. The waters rush toward each other with only one last hurtle.



But I can't just let them meet yet. There needs to be ceremony. There needs to be opulence. This is the most important event in the history of The Bay.



That's more like it. Just like the East and West of the US was united by a golden railroad spike, a golden shovel shall burst the dams...



Oh what a long time and oh what effort it has taken to get this far. How far?

Here's a sample:



I do not have a map of the original world untouched, so I colored in the areas that had been altered in this map from around November. You can see though, the massive effort this took.

Season 5 to come! We're going back to The Bay!!! Its time to upgrade the facilities, and prepare for colonization of the oceans!!!

March 20, 2011 weekend update

Dogs! Well, the next best thing: Wolves.



I think the main "squee" part of the video is when they shook the water off. This instantly made these creatures the most complex creatures in all of Minecraft. I think, right then, it gave a lot of people hope for a redo of creature behavior in game.

I for one can't wait. I know that it is not going to be the pet that I wish for(I would need a seperate UI and the ability to name them), but it will definitely add something new to the game.

So I am excited. Supposedly they are going in with 1.4 but you never know, we were supposed to get lamps at Holloween till he "forgot" to put them in with the patch, and we still haven't seen those.

Well anyway. That's the update really. There some achievement stuff that doesn't really excite me for this particular blog. Some stats too, telling me how many blocks I've broken. Still, not really interested.

UPCOMING BLOG STUFF

I am really thinking over my exit of this world from the blog. I am sure it will stay my main world while playing, but it really does limit me a bit when it comes to patches and stuff. I still haven't made a portal and they've been in since Holloween. I still have about 3 weeks worth of posts to go from this point on, saved and ready to upload, so I'll at least do that. So my friends, The Bay may be coming to a close, but the Blog would live on in a new world... but its not certain, I am having loads of fun right now in this world, so we'll see if it stays interesting.

S4 E11 Cutting

My sugar cane farm is real simple. When I go along the rows and cut the cane, it all falls into the water. Simple manipulation of the water makes it a sort of conveyor belt bringing all the cane into one spot by flowing on the water.



My first use for sugar cane has nothing to do with sugar. My original intent for propagating cane along the river was to make my homes a bit more classier. Cane can be processed into paper. Paper can be collected into books, and books can be assembled into bookshelves.



Right now they are purely decorative, but they do look nice. I put some along the wall next to my chair at Sugarland. Now I can sit and read with a nice view on either side of me.



Next up is that giant block of about 90% dirt that is next for clearing. It is a very nice shape, so I took this time to really think about my explosives usage here. I studied up on how deep and far an explosive can go in dirt, and how it generally acts around normal stone. I a few holes down and set the explosives...



Two should get the job done enough. The outsides should stay intact, keeping any of the explosion from damaging the surroundings. The floor also should be fine, leaving almost no fill in work for me to do. That is my guess anyway.



The explosion was a little smaller than I planned between them, but the sides do look very very nice. From up here I think I did fine on the floor as well. I went down to get a better view.



What is left is really not that bad to clean up, and I think I saved myself considerable time and annoyance as compared to going line to line, row to row clearing this out.



I am absolutely proud of my job on what will be the river bottom. There was a couple of stones I had to clear, but NONE of the explosion went below the river level. You can see, that is all natural stone, no dirt or cobblestone filler for any accidental holes.

Up ahead is the final stretch. The inspiration for the route I took with this river, and a large part of what inspired this project in the first place. The ancient riverbed.

S4 E10 Moooving

That's pretty much my main trip from the tower to the new house. I've been living in the new house for about a week, but did not feel it had been "finished" enough. I moved over whatever I thought may be essential for working in this area. Finally this felt like a home.



To celebrate I had all my neighbors over for a housewarming cookout. Cow took to the grill and cooked us up some nice vitals. He is lucky Notch hasn't put hamburgers in game...



This is what I named my little cottage at the mouth of the river. Sugarland at Bearded Trees sounded all fancy. I liked it better than what I had named my tower. Tartarus doesn't really roll off the tongue, nor does it really inspire fear, but come on... Cheron's Tower or Cerebus Tower or any other widely known mythical names pertaining to the gateway of hell just sounds cheesy. Anyway, yea, time for more work.



I actually cut this area here out while I was doing all the sugar cane farming. It did not take long as it was only about 4 blocks deep. I kind of regret doing it this way as you can see the hill I was tearing in to on that side, it looks like a flat picture now or something. I'll work on "naturalizing" that later.



This is my next plateau and this time I am going to save me some wasted time by cutting it out in a way that will not look so unnatural.



That will be a ton better looking as you can see I graduated the edges upward on the side where the river will flow. Now I just have to get rid of this giant block of land that is cut all the way around, but still a pain in the neck to remove. I need a shove, a BIG shovel, and luckily I know the recipe for the big shovel.

Oh you don't know? Here's a screenshot of the BIG shovel.

S4 E9 Sugarland

I feel so behind when it comes to content in Minecraft. The Nether was 1/2 a year ago... music blocks was a few months... I don't know. I just come to things as I get time and it makes sense. Why would I go to the Nether? Why would I know it exists? Well I have a plan for that, but its still a very long time away.

Anyways. I'm topical. To prove so here is Topical Black Sheep.



The real big thing last patch was beds and 1/2 blocks.... oh wish I had 1/2 blocks when I was making the roof on this house. Speaking of this house, I need a reason for it to exist. Not just to work on while I make the river. So the backyard isn't very amazing, see?



Kinda just a hill back there. No real pretty distinctions. My front view is nice, its a river delta. To the right of me is an ocean and some bearded trees. Behind me is BLEH. So I cleared it out.



After the amount of dirt I've cleared in my Minecraft career, this was nothing. A feature I see in real backyards that I quite like is retaining walls. I don't want to flatten out this entire mountain, so I collect some flowers, I make some cobble stone, and voila: nice



Nice but not quite enough. I started digging some ditches back there. I decided I didn't want mud in my ditches, so I put cobblestone all along the bottom of the ditches.



Waterproof cobblestone



Ok. Ditches. 3 of them. Now what are they for? Ah ha! I've thought about that... waaaaay back at Tartarus Tower(the tower). While I was there I transplanted what looked to be really rare plants that The Bay only seemed to have about 3 of. I grew them at the Tower in anticipation of using them later. Now is the time.



I trekked back down to the tower and I harvested the middles and tops of these reeds. Oh wait, I'm not topical enough... they aren't reeds anymore they are SUGAR CANE now. I grabbed the sugar cane and I planted them in the newly saturated and rich land I cleared in my back yard.



Now as you can see my river delta house near the bearded trees is a full fledges sugar farm. A sugar farm with a nice view.

Series update

I've got 2 seasons of stuff saved and easily 4 seasons of ideas ready to go. I've hit that point where I am open to lots more stuff lately and so I have lots of interesting things I can do in this series.

TOPICAL INFO
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Well, I am a little late on talking about the 1.3 patch. The patch before this did not have much that I deal with. I am not a redstone user and I will not be composing music. 1.3 though has several 1/2 blocks available now. This will really help with making buildings more smooth and allowing new home additions(they're coming to my world, stay tuned!).

Beds. Beds are sort of splitting the community in a few ways. I love anything that allows me to make a room more "dedicated" to something, so giving me bedrooms to make is wonderful. If you have not played with beds, they allow you to skip the night. I am split on this too. I do not use beds often, but I do use them. I use them usually when I first log in. I used to wait out a night while the game was windowed so that the next time I log in, its daylight and I can get right to it. Now I can log out at night and come back, sleep in a bed, and get right to Minecrafting. So they have their uses, but can also be abused much like peaceful mode.

THE FUTURE
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Notch says he promised an idol that he would put in pet dogs. I can only assume it was Peter Molyneux, someone I have followed the career of for about a decade now. He made a big deal about EVERYTHING in his Fable games, and one of those EVERYTHING was dogs.

I know that Notch has worked on Wurm online, so I know that game has some advanced concepts. I had given up on Minecraft being this advanced, but the idea of dogs as pets has given me renewed enthusiasm that we are not even almost at the beginning of what Minecraft will be.

Oh and I hope we get DOGS, not wolves.

UPCOMING ON SKYPPCRAFT
-----------------------

A historic moment is coming. The most important moment to this blog. A big project will be completed and will open the world up to me and my readers. Before the big expanse we will be visiting an old friend, and improving on one of my first projects. Afterwards starts a grand Age of Discovery and a stockpiling for a grand phase of building wonders... and maybe a mystical journey.

So stick with me!

Thanks for reading!

Season 4 Episode 8: Paintings

Well I saw a huge drop in readership a little while ago and thought no one was reading my page. Turns out I got de-listed somehow from Minecraft's forums. So I'll give it another go.

Season 4 Episode 8: Paintings

Well, where to begin. I went into my screenshots to see what I had been up to. I keep screenshots for myself because I do this for my own enjoyment.

I just finished my new home at where I plan the mouth of the river to be. At first I was not going to do the whole railway thing of connecting from 2 different ends, but I kind of feel like living in my new home.

So I started by cleaning out the delta.



This is very close to the front of my house, but I kind of wanted a view of the water from my porch. So after clearing just 1 layers(cakewalk compared to what I had been doing), I let the water through.



I sat there at my porch and realized that something was missing. It didn't feel like the mouth of a river. It didn't feel like a delta. What was it that deltas have that this river doesn't... oh! Multiple exit streams!




So now that feels good. Good and easy... now I have to get back to doing the grunt work of clearing real land.



But not yet. I went into my home that night and felt like it was missing something. I recently had tons of wool since the new patch added some stuff I could do with it. So I decided to make the dump look a little better.



That's how you make a painting, which is something I had not done yet. I fiddled around with placing pictures. There isn't a 3 space wide picture, so I had to put a small one over the couch. I recently bought myself a new big screen, so I thought it a shame that my TV in my new home wasn't even turned on. So I put something special on it. Here's a look at the new place with some paintings.



Tomorrow is the weekend, so I'll have a weekend post. I have a TON of new episodes coming, and a TON of new episodes worth of content to actually DO in game, so I'll be around :D

As always, your comments inspire me.