4581

The wiki has a “your first day” page that points out some necessary survival skills. Beyond that, the exploration and discovery is a ton of fun.

4582

I installed ComputerCraft on my Minecraft server this weekend and one of my kids (14 year old) has been totally taken by it.

He’s learning about programming, variables, instructions, API’s, function calls, …

I’ve been enjoying spending time with him and teaching him those things. Suddenly, coding is cool. :)

That mod is a hoot. It lets you make crafted computers connected to crafted monitors and disk drives (or even printers). And you can write mini games, password locks, …

They also messed around with the turtles, but those proved both glitchy and dangerous ( for instance, digging a dark mine where you are likely to get killed by all the spawning monsters when you go to collect your stuff).

Edit: 2 screenshots:

The code editor

8 advanced monitors forming a big colour screen

Wendelius

4583

Program the turtles to return with the stuff! Turtles are great for mining in dangerous places, where you don’t want to go yourself.

I agree that it is most fun to make your own programs, but there are also lots of programs available for download or inspiration. There are some very impressive programs out there. Such as nPaintPro, which is a graphical menu controlled image editing program, that allows you to “print” the images to the world with a wi-fi turtle. In 2D or 3D.

4584

Thanks a lot for the code link. I’m sure my son will find that very useful to learn by example.

Fair point. At the moment, the turtles start near a chest and deposit th stuff back in there. Is that what you mean?

If so, the glitchy part that hit us is that the turtles just stop (and swallow their fuel) when we leave the chunk (or the biome. Not sure which). Which means you have a relatively shallow pit full of monsters near the chest and a stuck turtle in the middle of it all.

Wendelius

4585

Chunk unloading is kind of a problem. There are a couple of possible solutions, that I know of. One is to use a chunk loader, such as the railcraft world anchor, to keep the chunk loaded. Another is to use the computercraft gps api. It’s a bit tricky to setup, but once it’s done, all wi-fi enabled computers and turtles can get their current position. Using that and having the turtle check at startup, enables you to have turtles resuming work when the chunk gets loaded again. This is all really geeky stuff :-)

4586

There is also the MC Peripherals mod which add chunkloading turtles, among other things.

4587

My 8-year-old twins love Minecraft, but modding is such a headache. As a result, I can’t live without Magic Launcher. Being able to pick and choose your mods to dynamically load at launch is great, especially since the boys’ current interest is destroying everything with Explosives Plus while I want that stuff far away from my creations.

I was thinking about installing Tekkit, since they’re looking for something new to do. Is it easy to install? Is it compatible with Magic Launcher?

p.s. I don’t know how anyone plays Minecraft without graphical improvements. My current favorite is this texture pack with these shaders.

4588

I was excited about those shaders until I saw that it was for v1.2.5. Uhhh, yeah. And hence why everyone says modding is such a pain.

Magic Launcher is nice, and a big step up from doing it all manually, but Feed The Beast is just one-click goodness with no hassle. My kids have a FTB install for doing their own thing with mods out their ears, and then they have a clean install for joining friends’ servers. Works great, and so much less annoying to set up.

4589

The shaders are nice in theory but the implementation was pretty intensive and taxing for everything but the best systems. And yes, an absolute nightmare to install, get working, bugfix, and then attempt to make compatible with nearly anything else.

4590

The shaders work fine with the current build. They do require these though. PM me if you have questions about installing.

Thanks for the tip on Feed the Beast, I’ll check it out…

4591

Either I am doing something wrong or FtB is buggy as hell.

4592

I installed it a couple of weeks ago on my server and on the clients and it worked fine. I just used Youtube videos to guide me through the basics. No bugs.

We didn’t stick with it because the kids and I honestly thought it took us too far from the vanilla experience which we still love. So, rather than have to run FTB and disable most mods, we simply ended up installing Computercraft on its own for now. We like the relatively pure experience.

Wendelius

4593

Apparently FtB is picky about where it’s installed. I changed the installation directory to the root of the drive and now I’m having no problems. I even got shaders working with it.

Now I just need to read up on what these crazy mods all do…does anyone have any good suggestions for starting? I suspect my kids will get into Railcraft in creative mode, as they are roller coaster junkies, but for someone starting from scratch on survival mode, what’s the best mod to get started with?

4594

To double your ore yield, you’ll want a Pulverizer (and Powered Furnace) from Thermal Expansion. After that, you might want Forestry for better energy generation, farms, etc.

For starting power, I’d use a Steam Engine or Stirling Engine (cheapest), then upgrade to Forestry or Magmatic engines later.

All of the above use BuildCraft energy (MJ), so you don’t have to worry about converting between energy types at first.

Keep in mind that GregTech makes many recipes more difficult but adds some interesting machines as well. For the first time, you may want to disable it or set it to easy.

Some of the basic quality of life items to aim for:
[ul]
[li]Sickle - Better harvest yields (RedPower)[/li][li]Barrels - For storing 1 type of item (Factorization)[/li][li]Iron/Gold/Diamond chest upgrades[/li][li]Canvas Bags - Portable chests (grow Flax for string) (RedPower)[/li][li]Mining/etc. Backpacks - Bags for specific items (Forestry)[/li][li]Electric Jetpack - Flight (needs IC energy source) (IndustrialCraft)[/li][li]Long Fall Boots - When your jetpacks runs out in midair[/li][li]Pneumatic Tubes - For moving items (upgrade from Transport Pipes) (RedPower)[/li][li]Redstone Conduits and Energy Cells - For moving and storing BC energy (upgrade from Conductive Pipes) (Thermal Expansion)[/li][li]Liquiducts - For moving liquids (upgrade from Waterproof Pipes) (Thermal Expansion)[/li][li]Omniwrench - If you don’t want to carry a lot of mod-specific wrenches (Thermal Expansion)[/li][/ul]

If you haven’t used NEI before, it’s the list of items on the right when you open your inventory. Mouse over and hit R for recipes, U for usage.

Links to some of the mod wikis

4595

Damn. Crazy. Thanks.

Automated quarry building is already blowing my mind, I don’t even want to think about ComputerCraft.

The direwolf20 let’s play videos look like they might be helpful also.

4596

Quick question. Just installed FTB, started a survival map - not creative and I didn’t toggle any settings… Why do I have a menu to spawn every single block in the game? How do I disable that?

4597

That’s Not Enough Items, and it’s useful as a recipe guide even if you don’t want to cheat. Just click the Options button in the lower-left corner when your inventory is up, and toggle it from ‘Cheat Mode’ to ‘Recipe Mode’, and then when you click on an item it’ll just display its recipe, not give you one. You can also right-click to see what recipes an item is an ingredient in.

4598

I just bought Xbox and i want to buy Minecraft. But i can’t find it at any store’s offer. I saw Microsoft Points for Xbox Live http://www.go2arena.com/xbox.html but i don’t know how it works. How many points do i have to buy to play Minecraft?

4599

I just bought Xbox and i want to buy Minecraft. But i can’t find it at any store’s offer. I saw Microsoft Points for Xbox Live http://www.go2arena.com/xbox.html but i don’t know how it works. How many points do i have to buy to play Minecraft?

4600

FtB is killing my frame rate. I would have thought that my system (i7-930 2.8ghz, 9GB RAM, Radeon 7850) would be beefy enough to handle it but I am fluctuating between 30-40 fps, which, while playable, is just stuttery enough to be annoying.

Anyone have any tips? I’ve tried the usual suspects (updating java and drivers, screwing around with the video settings, allocating more RAM to the game) but not much luck. I’m using OptiFine. Should I disable it? Is there a way to run it at a lower resolution? I don’t see that option anywhere, which is weird.