I have a mild cake obsession; I can resist or just not care about a lot of things, but if free cake is offered I have to get a slice. Most people that I communicate with regularly have realized and this fact by now. To my personal delight, Cake was added into Minecraft beta 1.2. It seems to function a lot like Lightwell in World of Warcraft: It is a multiple hit healing item. You place it on the ground and it is good for 1.5 hearts x6. Most importantly though, it is a fucking cake and naturally, the first thing (well, maybe no the first) that I wanted to do once establishing myself on the new SMP server was to bake a cake.

Cooking one of these delicious treats requires: 3 buckets of milk, 2 sugar, 3 wheat and 1 egg. The milk isn't a big deal, any one cow yields an unlimited supply; Neither is the sugar and wheat (yay indoor farming). Eggs however, I have no eggs and have not seen any all week. So thus began my egg quest. Sadly, it took a good portion of Sunday morning (and two cups of coffee) to gather all of one egg. After about an hour of wandering around the known world, searching the ground for eggs, it had occurred to me that trapping a chicken and waiting a couple of minutes was probably a more efficient gathering method.

However, one egg isn't good enough. Nothing short of an elaborate egg farming mechanism was good enough for the sake of future cake baking. So that started the next project: An egg farm. The plan is to load the eggs into a switch operated dispenser that would shoot them into a glassed off pool. Chickens would pop out of some of those eggs and lay more eggs. The water currents within the glassed off area would carry the eggs to a safe gathering point. Today I learned two things about constructing dispensers. Both should have been obvious, but I haven't delved into Minecraft in a while. If I recall correctly, pre-Beta was when I set the game aside to fixate on Cataclysm.

1. You need to use a pickaxe to destroy a dispenser if you want any hope of reclaiming it. If you punch it, it is gone. The dispensers are a little bit finicky to place, it randomly turned the other direction twice. In the process of repositioning them, I had accidentally punched one to death. I had used my only bow to construct it was out of string. So I had to go wandering around in the middle of the night searching for spiders. When I accidentally destroyed the second dispenser, I rage spawned another bow on the server console.
2. The dispensers don't autofire by default; I thought they did. Press the button once and one item pops out. If you want the dispenser to function as a rapid fire turret, you need to connect a series of rapid pulsers. Ugly wiring.

The completed egg farm:

This is a screenshot of us, enjoying floor cake together.

Here's a nice map of the server thus far. Tertiary Base is coming along nicely, despite minor creeper setbacks. I'll post about it once the library and tree farm are complete.

My latest "project" has been a dedicated SMP Minecraft server. For the time being, the server is running off of a 512 Linode slice. If I recall correctly, general internet consensus pins the minimum memory requirement for a Minecraft server at around 1024MB; For two people however, 512MB should really be fine. In theory. My stupid map generator seems to increase my CPU usage by quite a bit, but nothing too bad. I will see how the server holds up. Not that it matters, seeing as how there's probably only going to ever be two people online at a time max >_<. If I find a cheaper game server host I may switch service but I've been very happy with Linode and enjoy having full control over the server.

Oh, Mr. You Know Who (If you are reading this): I have a tertiary base not too far from Base Site Beta. It used to be fairly hidden, but should be fairly obvious now, with the outdoor reed farm, glass exterior and all. There are a couple of goodies inside of it as well. PS: Please don't blow it up with a creeper. I did that already earlier because I was watching TV. The glass is a pain in the ass to redo.

I went on a Minecraft binge the other weekend and spent all Saturday morning searching for a dungeon spawner (or something interesting) because honestly, I haven't really found anything noteworthy in the game for quite some time.  I was unable to find one through standard means so I started using the half-in sand/gravel x-ray vision cheat to scope out areas beneath me. No such luck. So then I generated two Cartograph maps: A normal render and a render displaying only mossy cobblestone (code 46 by the way). I overlayed the mossy image over the normal image in Photoshop and used that as a rough adventure map.

That map showed that there was a dungeon roughly between the island observation tower and the mountainside base. After searching for it for about an hour I gave up and resorted to running a standalone 3d visualizer to search for certain block types. It turns out that the dungeon was way deep and that I probably would never have found it unless I had dug a hole straight down to the baserock. I also found out that there was a dungeon literally 20 paces East of my spawn point. It was one block below the surface, go figure.

I played around with the portals more later that day. I wish that they were a bit more precise, I'll explain: Portal A is located on the second floor of my base and leads to Point A within the Nexus. I had created another portal at Point B within the nexus, approximately 30 or so paces from Point A. Point B opens up to Portal B in the normal world. Every single top side portal that I have created leads to Point B, no matter how far out I am. I've tried destroying Portal B to see if that made a difference, but not so much. Portals C, D and E all link to Point B.

In the process of creating Portal C (or D), I had destroyed Portal B without bringing a compass. Instead of rebuilding and hopping back into the portal I wandered and got hopelessly lost, eventually burning down a large Forest and starting a small base in the middle of the destruction for the sake of mining enough obsidian to complete a portal that would lead me home (I didn't want to die and lose my inventory). I turns out that the new base was located over a huge network of caves (seriously huge, I think I found Moria...). I mined enough iron to complete a lengthy cart track linking my spawn, the island tower and the mountain base. I want to link Portal C and the new base in the middle of burning forest but I ran out of iron. Here's a video of it:

Happy Halloween. By the way, most of my WoW gametime has been more or less pushed to the backburner until Cataclysm comes out. This is usually about the time that I take an extended pre-release WoW break anyways, but to be honest, there's just not a whole lot to do at the moment. I guess I can PvP or run dungeons, but the two big things that I really wanted to complete before the expansion (Loremaster and Kingslayer) have been finished. Besides, it's gaming season and all of the new shit is starting to come out. Come early December it's not like I'm going to do anything else on my computer for X months other than play WoW.

I posted a series of Minecraft videos on YouTube. The original idea was to narrate them, something that I still might do. I was going to do a Keiya's adventures sort of continuous story bit but, eh. The problem with that is Minecraft is one of those games that I am usually playing while either half-watching or half-doing something else. It's relaxing (when not in dark areas at least lol) and I like it that way. These videos are ultra crap-ass but I had fun recording them and hope that at least at least one person enjoys them.

I haven't had much of a chance to play the Minecraft update in depth, just in small spurts; Partially because I was busy this past weekend and partially because a new Sims 3 expansion (Late Night) pack came out. I caved in and bought it after work on Friday; Obsessively playing it for a good portion of the weekend, which means that it probably warrants a review post. It's a fairly standard expansion pack for better or for worse. I'd say that it's probably my favorite out of the three that have been released, but much of it seems half-assed compared to the corresponding Sims 2 expansion features. The implementation of apartments in particular are pretty lame.

Wow is it really November already? Hey, CoD and AC:B are coming out soon...

Note: If anyone cares, there are forums on this site; Mostly for me to play around with, but guest posting is now enabled. If anyone has a question or concern about any topic I post about or any game that I play, I would be happy to respond.

I played around with the new talents and mechanics in the latest WoW patch last week. The verdict on the new retribution changes is still out in the open, but that is for another post. So in Minecraft World #1, Base Beta has a spiral staircase that winds all the way down to the bedrock layer, where there are a series of tunnel mines extended off in various directions. One of these tunnels goes on for quite a bit but surfaces up against the edge of a lake. Base Gamma was built a short distance away from that tunnel in a small valley surrounded by mountains and a neat waterfall flowing into a small lake.

There's a small cave entrance off in the far corner of the lake. I explored it and unearthed a huge huge series of underground caverns (which was later connected to a tunnel dug from inside of Gamma ). In the process of exploring, I came across a section of the cave that just infinitely spawned mobs of every single type. Had I been wiser, I totally could have setup a bad ass mob farming trap. I mean, I sat there and whacked on them until I ran out of weapons and arrows and they still came.

Later on, I had explored the area in peaceful to see if there was a mob spawner nearby, but could not find any. What I did find was an even larger series of caves right above me in the same chunk. I am assuming that they were spawning in the darkness and falling down some hole in the ceiling. I didn't realize that they could spawn in that quantity that fast. That cave was also nowhere near my origin chunk. I checked that too.

Anyway, being a dumbass, I kept dying in that same area, losing 2 diamond picks and a small stash of diamond ore in the process because I had not bothered dropping them off at Gamma. It was then and there that I had pretty much ragequit that game and started a new world with the intention of being more build centric. So Minecraft World #2 is what I have been up to lately. I made a video today detailing what I had built last week over the 3 day weekend (and some change. The dock, underwater tunnel and tower were built this week). It was supposed to be narrated, the YouTube annotations will have to suffice for the time being.

Also: Is there a better way or program to use to re-encode Fraps videos? Is there? Or at least, is there some way to get Fraps to encode differently so that 1 minute videos aren't 500+ MB in size? Handbrake doesn't seem to ffmpeg very well and would encode videos without errr the video part, so I had to decompress the file in virtual dub (couldn't get the proper codec working in that program either, but didn't really bother trying. It was late), then encode it in handbrake. Bah. Nevermind. The issue was fixed in Handbrake's nightly builds.

So here's a Cartograph render of my World #2 map (posted below this paragraph). The generated map was about twice the size of the cropped image that I uploaded. Out of everything rendered there were 43812115 blocks of stone, 390598 blocks of grass, 23159 gold ore, 9505 diamond or and a whopping 410 blocks of clay. CLAY. Why is it so damn hard to find clay? I can't possibly build my brick empire with 410 blocks of clay. More exploring is necessary.