1981

You’ll need to craft a minecart with an oscillation overthruster for that.

1982

I just hope that it doesn’t make the maps gigantic.

1983

Hrm… yeah that should hit 43 blocks per second.

1984

Yeah, disagree. Mine carts are for going into mines and retrieving ores via systems of powered carts and switchbacks and whatnot, not for transport. I am looking forward to this hell dimension so I can actually shift my focus from transport to more meaningful things. Traps, deep mining ops, defenses, etc. So far every single nugget of ore that I got went into mine tracks; I’m looking forward to doing something else with it.

1985

Of course the cart system still needs work. It takes too many materials to setup and it’s too slow. Its efficacy as a transport system should still be worked on.

1986

I am guessing current texture packs will break with the new patch on account of all the new stuff being added. I hope he hires a real artist to make some very nice default textures.

1987

I wonder if it will be possible to built a mine cart track leading into the portal and continuing in hell world. Whos going to bet that as dangerous as creepers are that hellworld will be much worse?

1988

Well, Notch has just posted this on twitter.

The bastard.

I just made the most unfair mob ever [the creeper] even more unfair. You will hate the Ghast.

1989

He also mentioned that the Ghast is four blocks tall which makes it the tallest mob so far. (Unless he meant four blocks wide when someone asked him how big it would be.)

1990

Hopefully this is something you’ll only encounter inside the oblivion gates.

1991

Not that they appear in game (but they should), but Giants are a bit taller than 4 blocks. Awesome to spawn around in multi, it’ll be even better when damage works.

1992

Yeah, I probably should have qualified my statement a little better. We’re going to have to raise our walls when giants get added (video). The wiki has decent “possible future mob” coverage, although the relevant section is kind of broken right now.

1993

You sure we can assume he means the creeper? He was also talking about cliff racers earlier.

1994

Yeah, I think he just means the new enemy he’s working on was difficult, and then he made a change that made it even more difficult.

1995

I hit a new area of caverns last night on my current map and as soon as I broke through the wall a creeper was in my face. I actually tumbled off my desk chair. Twas very embarrassing especially when my wife yelled out from downstairs “are you ok?!”

This game … LOL

1996

Haha! The visual of that cracked me up.

Even in DocLazy’s survival map a creeper explosion will cause me to jump.

And that map looks like THIS every night:

1997

So I’m new to this and only read the last five pages of this thread.

I’ve got a fairly methodical mining pattern of just tunneling downward in a large squarish area, one “floor” at a time. It gives me big chunks of time of clearing an area without having to think too hard about torch placement, or how crooked my stairs are or something. Clear an area (27x7x3, somewhat arbitrarily but there’s a pattern to my torches to be consistent), make some stairs at the end of the room, and clear the next 27x7x3 area directly beneath a 1-block floor it, repeat.

How does water work underground? I’ve heard of stuff getting flooded, so I never work more than two floors down without sealing off completely with a wall and a door behind me, assuming that if I manage to flood things, the damage will be contained and not rush all the way back up into other parts of my tunnel infrastructure. I’m also hoping that by moving in a basically downward direction (instead of laterally or diagonally down in one direction) I’m more likely to come across an underground river/spring/lake safely from above than to bump into the side of a lake and flood the whole place, but I don’t know if that logic is actually sound in Minecraft.

Next up, I’ve just hit my first (apparently) large existing cavern. Scared! How do you guys safely explore something like this? I’m throwing torches out left and right, but I’ve already run into four or five different branches, and I feel like every unlit corridor I turn my back on to light another is leaving me exposed to all sorts of nasty things coming up behind me before I can get back to it. I thought of walling up all but one path as I come across branches, continuing till a dead end, then going back and repeating the process with the next area I walled off (depth first vs. breadth first, if my comp sci 102 is to be trusted), but I feel like I’m going to waste a lot of time walling things up, and likely forgetting which areas I closed off myself to boot. I try to use dirt for my walls to stand out against the natural rock walls, but then I run into an area that’s already dirt, and well, there we go. Plus I’ve got to work on some system to remember how to get back out.

So far I just ran into two creepers, but I’ve only just poked my head into a bit of this cavern. It’s kinda paralyzing!

So, tips? Strategies?

1998

Build yourself totems or markers to show which way is which.

Water is not volumetric. It does not “fill” an area below it based on how water works in real life. Actually dying by breaking through the bottom of an underground stream is pretty hard to do. The worst that happens is you get pushed back by the incoming water.

Water will fall until it hits a block, and then it spreads outward 6 or 7 squares. It will not continue onward unless it drops down another block within that 6 or 7 squares.

1999

I really hope Notch eventually fixes the way water works in this game. I hate ending up accidentally breaking a lake or ocean during underwater construction and ending up with an area in the middle of the water that’s inexplicably 2-3 blocks lower than the surrounding surface.

2000

That happens if you create a square area and remove the ability for adjacent water springs to create more springs. Break a block on the inside, fill it with water, then break the next block, and so on.