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.
