Elven Mansion - Minecraft

Today I present my review of the Elven Mansion build by fretz on planetminecraft.


View Elven Mansion -Now with Download-

I followed the directions on the planetminecraft page to connect to the server where the build exists and view it for myself, but there is also a download available on the planetminecraft page of the world. Since the world comes from the server, I believe it probably contains many other builds and would be hard to find this particular mansion.

The first thing you notice on approach is that the mansion itself is almost entirely made of wood, and raw wood for the most part instead of more refined planks. The other striking feature is that this mansion is gigantic. It's so big that my view distance doesn't allow me to see the back side of it from the front. The other nice external feature is the purple roofs, which I very much enjoy and were what made me want to review this creation in the first place.

When you enter, the internal decorations are a number of different wood types and quite a lot of glowstone. The floor of the main room is a pond with some ice and glowstone at the bottom to illuminate it. There are also a number of flames somehow burning at the bottom of the pond. The ceiling of this main room has a similar glass structure with water and glowstone above it. There are two side exits from the building in the main room that looks exactly like the main entrance.

At the back of the main room, there is a doorway to the tower. The tower is quite tall with no real way up, but there are windows half way up to let some light in to the building. There is also a hold going down that leads to a secret underground tunnel. The tunnel is lined with wooden supports and leads to a dock in a cove. Overall I enjoy this build because of its grandiose scale. I also enjoy the purple roofs and their contrast with the wooden structure.

Luxurious Modern House

Today I am reviewing the "Luxurious Modern House *Version 4*" by pigonge on planetminecraft.


View Luxurious Modern House *Version 4!!*

I downloaded the map, but there's also a mcedit schematic available if you would like to include it in your own map. On the map, you arrive in front of the house, where a small shack rests outside the main building. There are a number of switches and levers around, but I have not been able to figure out if they serve a purpose. Right away, I saw a slime fall off the roof of the house and split into 4 small slimes. On the other side of the wall behind me, I found a 2 way paved road (out of colored wool I believe).

I then wandered past the shack on the path by the water leading to a small door and then up a wide wooden staircase into what I imagine is the main floor of the house. There are a pair of purple couches with a glass coffee table for entertaining guests followed by wooden benches leading to a balcony looking out to the road. There is a small indoor pond followed by a large blue dining table next to the kitchen. The whole time I was exploring this floor, I could hear creepy pounding sounds coming from the floor above me.

On the next floor, there's another purple couch with a good looking house shrub next to it. On the other side of the wall, there are a number of book cases with a small reclining chair for enjoying a good book. The master bedroom is on this floor, complete with yet another purple couch, a double wide bed, and a fairly large tub in the bathroom.

On the next floor there were a couple more bedrooms and a couple small bathrooms. Then on the top floor, there are even more purple couches and another bedroom or two. There is quite a lot of room for entertaining guests. From that top floor, there is an exit to a rooftop garden, complete with benches and tables for parties. From there, you can see an entire extra building as well as an interesting water feature. Overall this house gives you a lot of room to explore and entertain and I recommend checking it out if you are interested.

Good Intentions

When I last posted, I had every intention of following through with my idea to review Minecraft creations regularly. I've ended up being very busy with other things. So for my first review, I choose the following project, which is a palace posted by owner_rekna1 on planetminecraft:
 

View The forgotten palace

I like the look of the palace with nice gold and brown roofs. The center of the palace is an open area, complete with a water feature and what appear to be pink bushes. Since the planetminecraft page does not have a download link, I can't actually explore it myself, but the build does seem interesting from the available pictures. I encourage you to check out the pictures and see if it inspires you to build a similar palace.

Minecraft Creations

I'm considering starting to do a weekly review of some minecraft creation that I find somewhere on the internet. It would include a video looking at the creation as well as a few screenshot highlights. I'm posting this to see if I can get a feeling of what current readers might be interested in seeing, and how frequently I should post these reviews. So if you're reading this and you have an opinion on how many I should do each month, which days I should post them, and what kinds of things you think I should look at, please leave a comment on this post.

New Minecraft Server

Earlier this week, I built a new computer with parts purchased from newegg (and an SSD and HDD I had sitting around). The parts I got include the following:

• CPU: AMD FX-4100 4 Core (3.6 GHz) $109.99
• MOBO: MSI 760GM-E51 $69.99
• MEM: Patriot 1333 DDR3 4x4GB $69.98
• CASE: Antec Three Hundred + 430W PSU $69.99
• HDD: 1TB (not sure of the details)
• SSD: Intel 160GB
• DVD+RW stolen from my old Compaq

The total cost including shipping but not the drives came to $327.28. I installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the SSD and I use the HDD for minecraft server backups (daily at 3am). One of the first things I did after putting everything together was to overclock the CPU to 4.0 GHz by increasing the multiplier from 18x to 20x. There's something satisfying about having a computer running at 4 GHz. I haven't had a chance to play on the Minecraft server much, but it appears to be a bit better than my old machine which only had 2GB of DDR2 and an old Athlon X2 5000.

Running a Terraria server on my linux machine is a new thing for me, so I don't have all the scripts in place yet. However, I found it relatively simple to get TShock to work by just installing the new version of the mono runtime. Once I get my scripts in place to make it easier for me to start and stop my two terraria worlds remotely, I'll consider posting a version of the script for other people to use if they are interested.

Simple Lighthouse Build

Using the new creative mode on our current server, I found an interesting island a little ways into the ocean. I decided to build a fairly simple lighthouse that uses 4 pieces of lava to generate light. I really had fun doing this since it was a simple project that I could build in a small amount of free time. The project including schematic are up on PlanetMinecraft for anyone interested.

View Lighthouse

Parkour Park Project

If you've followed my blog for a while you might remember my previous post with the video of Tharesan running our Parkour course. Well, I got around to posting it and uploading the schematic to PlanetMinecraft for anyone that is interested. Keep in mind that it was built for an old version of the game and the ladders might not quite work the same any more.

View Parkour Park

Rubik's Roller Coaster

Lilei and I made this great roller coaster a while ago based on a Rubik's Cube theme. She came up with the idea for the Rubik's Cube and I ended up building most of it. Then I came up with the idea to make it into a ride and she made most of the ride. If you like it, check it out on the project page from PlanetMinecraft:

View Rubik's Rollercoaster

Sad World Texture Pack

I made a texture pack a while back and I thought it would be a fun thing to share here. You can find it on the PlanetMinecraft page with a lot more screenshots. Here is one of them so you can get an idea of what it looks like. Basically it is a modification of the default texture pack to make everything more "realistic" like many other modern video games.


View Sad World

Making a Minecraft Texture Pack on a Mac

I'm working on a texture pack for Minecraft. It's not going to be anything super amazing, but it will be made by me and using my Mac laptop. I've had a few issues that I was able to solve, so I figured I should spread the knowledge by making a post here.

First of all, it's helpful to have the basic images to start from (for image sizing if nothing else). On a mac, those are located in /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/minecraft/bin in the file called "minecraft.jar". To get at them you need to extract the contents of the minecraft.jar file. Probably the easiest way is to copy it and rename it minecraft.zip (click use zip in the popup) and then double click it. This should give you a folder called "minecraft" that has pretty much all of the data you'll be interested in using for your texture pack and a lot of other files you won't care about.

The method I use is to create a new working folder for my texture pack and only copy the images I'm interested in changing as I work on the pack. The first most interesting file is "terrain.png" and it has pretty much all of the terrain images that are used in rendering the world. Others of the textures, such as the skins for creatures and the player, are found in inside directories and should be placed in directories with the same names in your texture pack.

The final step for your texture pack to work is to compress it. On the mac, this is most easily done by selecting all the files inside your texture pack directory (the one with terrain.png at the top level) and right clicking then selecting "compress" from the dropdown menu. This will create a file called, "Archive.zip" that you should rename to be whatever you want your texture pack to be called.

I hope this post will be useful for other people trying to make texture packs on their Macs. I'll share some of the image editing software that I've found useful once I get a little more time to try it all out.

Tharesan's Shinobi Texture Pack

My friend Tharesan made a new Texture Pack. Here's my video showing off some of the blocks and a link to the planetminecraft download. If you like it support his pack by upvoting it.



View Tharesan's Shinobi Pack

ryAnime Texture Pack

My friend Tharesan recently made a texture pack for Minecraft that I thought I should show off. The pack can be downloaded from his page on planet minecraft. The change that you notice most immediately is that fires from furnaces and torches are blue instead of red, giving the lighting a cooler feel. The major changes are with the items and the skins for some of the mobs. Bows and arrows instead show up as shurikens. Swords have different blades and handles depending on the material, and all of the armor feels much more like it's out of some anime, with holes in places that reduce the practicality of the armor but make it just that much more awesome.

In terms of the changes to mobs, wolves have different skins, and tamed wolves look like huskies, but I wasn't able to find any wild wolfs in my short test to see what they look like. Skeletons look like bandits or ninjas wielding shurikens and are definitely fearsome. All in all, it's an enjoyable texture pack that leaves most of the terrain untouched for people like me that enjoy the look of terrain, while changing the feel of the items to keep the game fresh and engaging. Good job Tharesan! Check below for my video review.

Bukkit Server Tutorial on Windows

How we use TNT in Minecraft

UPDATE 4 Aug 2011: People might be coming here to find out how to activate TNT. A patch since this video was made requires the use of redstone to activate TNT blocks. I hope that helps.



azmyth gives us an explanation of how to use TNT in Minecraft. Very educational and fun to watch.

Easy Sphere Tutorial for Minecraft

I just want to emphasize that spheres made with this technique are not the most high quality, but they should be easy for anyone to make without downloading an extra program. I hope you find this tutorial useful. Here are the links relative to this video:

• Circle Chart
• High Quality Sphere Tool

Parkour Parkour!

Tharesan spent a long time building this city environment in which he could do parkour. I helped a little bit and Lilei also helped with decorating the interiors of the apartments. Here's a short video of Tharesan doing a quick lap around the city.

Minecraft's Appeal

I've been playing a lot of Minecraft lately and there are reasons for it. A big part of why I play video games is for the social interaction. While the social tools in Minecraft aren't nearly as good as they could be, playing on a server is very much a social activity. I made a server so that I can hang out and play with all my friends that are interested in exploring, gathering materials, and building awesome stuff. And before you ask, no you cannot have access to my server unless you actually know me.

I have heard some complaints that Minecraft has bad graphics and just doesn't have enough of a point to make it an interesting game. Those complaints come from a lack of understanding of what Minecraft is. You, as the player, can come up with the point of the game for yourself, or you can depend on the other players if you have a multiplayer server to inspire your actions. And if you think about it, the collection of parts and construction of objects is very much like playing with Legos. The blocks in Minecraft are restricted to cubes (and occasionally half cubes), which is slightly different than the Lego restrictions, but similar enough to the basic building blocks from a set of Legos. Of course there are custom blocks made for specific types of building projects, such as light sabers for Lego men to hold in the Star Wars sets. I argue that those pieces are similar to a player holding a sword.

It is also for this reason that I do not want to install the iConomy server mod to my minecraft server. I think that adding a currency to the game is perhaps a little bit of overkill. There are already tons of resources to collect and use for various things. Depending which projects you are working on, you might want to trade the cobblestone you've collected to someone else that has surplus iron. On my server, however, the barter system has almost entirely been done away with in favor of community drive building projects. A couple people get an idea, and everyone that hears about it wants to contribute. It's really a good feeling to have a game that is almost entirely cooperative to contrast with all of the other popular games that tend to thrive on being competitive.

Tutorial video for Spawner Trap

Thanks to Salamislacks and his incredible research and engineering efforts we have this wonderful monster spawner building with a trap floor to kill the monsters. We get lots of monster drops from it. Here's a video explaining how the trap floor works.

Minecraft Lava Pyramid

We just made a lava pyramid on our minecraft server live on the stream. Here is the recording of that event.

What does Spleef mean?

Spleefing is a game inside minecraft where you try to dig out the ground underneath your opponent to make him or her fall. When you do this in a controlled environment then no one gets hurt and it can turn out to be a lot of fun. Here's a video I recorded last night of Azmyth and Tharesan spleefing in the spleef arena I built.