4701

Heh. It IS a little humbling to know this game is enjoyed by millions of kids, and they must be doing this themselves! Which in part explains the often poorly written ‘guides’ etc. I was completely stuffed with Life in the Woods without the help of a decent youtube tutorial (and then it turns out one of the component parts (maybe forge) would NOT work like they said it would on the Forge forum, so i worked out a work around via trial and error).

Modding Morrowind is 100 times easier than doing slightly complex stuff in Minecraft (imho). I blame java (mostly).

4702

It’s been a couple of years since I last played Minecraft, and I just tried all three of the above. ATLauncher is by far the best IMO. Extremely intuitive interface and perfect for noobs. Especially love the Instances feature.

4703

So last weekend I fired up Minecraft again and fell in love with ATLauncher, which makes it super, super easy to roll up new instances of Minecraft – any MC version, bunch of preselected combinations of mods and such. Takes all the hassle out of the user’s hands, for the most part.

After experimenting a bit, I decided to invest time in a modpack called Utopia - The Age of Adventure. Nice balance of a pretty large assortment of mods, but doesn’t stick them in your face. In fact, you can almost play the game without realizing you have all the mods installed, if you want to.

Some resources are more challenging to acquire. Iron ore is readily available, but you can’t mine it with a stone pick and have to find other resources first.

The creatures are my favorite. There’s a HUGE amount of diversity compared to Vanilla, some of it very amusing and some if it downright frightening. Wandering around at night is much, much riskier for lower level players.

There is apparently a quest system – you get a book at the beginning of the game that has quests in it – but I have yet to figure out how to start those.

In my first roll, I built out a pretty substantial base, and then one day while surveying and mapping the surrounding area I found a giant sandstone tower out in the middle of the dessert. Each of its seven stories contained a single chest and two monster generator boxes. I began systematically destroying the boxes and grabbing loot – mostly advanced magic and tech stuff – one level at a time. It took me a while, because I wasn’t all armored up yet. Finally I got to the top floor and when I destroyed one of the boxes there, there was the loudest roar I’ve ever heard in Minecraft directly behind me, and something threw a ball of fire and decimated a nearby wall, singing me in the process. I took off running and made it to the stairs. As I ran down them, whatever it was was right on my tail, roaring and throwing fire at me and by the time I got to the bottom I realized it was also destroying the tower in the process. Only one half a heart of health left, I took off running across the desert toward a little elevated safehouse I’d set up nearby. But the creature continued pursuing me, roaring and flinging fireballs, and I realized – too late – that by running toward my safehouse I was actually exposing it to the creature’s wrath as well. So I ended up having to run all the way to my main base instead, and eventually the creature abandoned pursuit.

Hours (in the game) later, I crept back and the tower was totally decimated:

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Every time I got close to the tower the creature, who remained lurking nearby, would come to alert and chase me again. I even experimented by playing for an hour or two at a different location far away, and when I came back the thing was still there. It’s some sort of giant stone golem or something.

Unfortunately, earlier today my duplex neighbors blew the circuit breaker, and when my PC came back online and I loaded up MC again, my game was corrupted. So I reluctantly rolled a new world, but ended up with a cooler (but potentially riskier) spot for my home base.

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On the left is an airship I’m building. She’s almost ready for her maiden voyage.

Edit: Honor’s interior:

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Edit2: Maiden voyage, approaching the tower. This time it’s made of stone, and there’s another stone golem standing at the top.

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Closeup of the golem:

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4704

Nice pics :) I might post some from my game at some point (or just watch the Life in the Woods trailer to get the idea!).

===================

I’ve just discovered a mod that has transformed Minecraft for me, in a good way. Here was my main issue with Minecraft, the time passes too fast, especially so as i’m playing the awesome modpack Life in the Woods by Phedrun, and that is so good looking (using Silders Shaders etc) and just lovely to relax in doing minecraft stuff, that the default 10min long day time just gets in the way. I had to stop playing. But after quite a bit of searching and looking around i found a mod that works in my Life in the Woods build, and also a few other options for those that might be interested.

Hmm maybe i’ll do a reprise of all the info i found handy to build this specific version of Minecraft, as there were a few things that just did not go as planned and i had to work my own solution to get it all running.

Ok first you need Minecraft (v 1.6.4), an older version still available. And then you’ll need the Life in the woods modpack by Phedrun which you can get from here:

http://phedran.com/LifeInTheWoods

And this is the best instruction video on how to get it all installed properly (including the Shaders etc):

The only caveat i’ll add is the stage where you install Forge (a very important part of modded Minecraft) did not work for me using the normal method described in that video, and even a trip to the Forge forums with the devs did not solve my issue (clicking the forge installer for 1.6.4 did not do anything, a common complaint if you search for that).

However the solution i used on Windows 7 64bit was simply to place that installer inside my \Java\jre7\bin folder on my PC then clicking the file ran it. Don’t ask me why the normal method did not work, nor pointing the file at that same Java directory and all the stuff suggested at the Forge forums. But once that file was inside my Java directory it did run when clicked, and i could then get the rest of the mod working. Thread on that Fix here, just in case others have the problem:

http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php/topic,23525.msg119376.html#msg119376

The next links are for mods that allow you to adjust the speed at which the day/night passes, and this is what got me back into playing Minecraft. I found three such mods, so see which works best for your particular build, but for simply using with Life in the Woods i found this one worked when the others did not:

TimeScaler by w00tguy123:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/1291771-timescaler

I’ve used this format to give different lengths to day and night, in the TimeScaler.cfg file (inside your C:\Users*‘user profile name’\AppData\Roaming.minecraft\config folder) i set it as:

timescale = 0.1666,0.5

to give roughly 1 actual hour of daytime and about 20 mins of night. * your user profile name will vary.

The other mods you might prefer for your build are:

TooMuchTime by dmillerw: (this caused a crash error for me ontop of the Life in the Woods modpack)

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/2145092-forge-toomuchtime-v2-3-2-control-over-minecrafts

TimeSpeedMod by Sedridor (this one is in Russian, so that put me off trying it as my Russian is poor!):

http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/1289314-1-4-7-1-7-10-vrashenie-zemli-majnkraftskaya

But it seems all three of these mods will be of interest for those Minecraft gamers that always feel the days pass too quickly by default, and hopefully at least one of the above will work in your Minecraft game. It has completely got me back into it, as i can relax a bit more while playing and enjoy the beauty and wonder of Life in the Woods.

And to help even more in that, this is the book the Life in the Woods mod is based on, a fun extra bit of info to inform oneself about i found:

Good luck and happy Minecrafting. Love Nature.

4705

Ok so here are some pics from my first proper game of Life In The Woods:

First Base

Cherry Blossom & Cow(with First Base in the background on right)

Improved Base at Night, view from Redwood Tree

Waning Moon (it flits between the regular Minecraft moon when high in the sky, and this rounder one near sunrise)

Sunrise

View From the top of a Redwood Tree, and a bit of detail on First Bases layout

I’m under no illusions on what Microsoft will do with Minecraft, but with the current versions you can still have the freedom to play Offline (apart from setup) and also to run your own servers. And with some of the truly awesome mods around, you get one of the best creative games ever made. I can see myself becoming a huge fan.

4706

Nice!

I invested some time in trying to get Life in the Woods up and running under a launcher, (most recently, AT Launcher which is my current favorite) but I could never get it to run. I’ll give it another go because that mod sounds like my speed. Too bad it’s 1.6x – kind of trying to switch over to 1.7.x.

I also like certain, limited technologies and I also like a bit of magic, and I also like a bit of adventure. So I’ve been focusing on Karma and Utopia, which offer a nice blend of these.

However there’s one huge requirement that I value: that of being able to survey and inspect huge tracts of land (ahem) without cheating and within relatively short periods of time. This allows me to venture out and, within an in-game day cycle or two, quickly identify interesting areas that I want to explore. The only good solution to this that I’m aware of is Archimedes Ships, which is a great mod but which has a few annoying quirks that can occasionally kill a game. For instance, I recently had a wonderful air ship that I took out to a distant location that suddenly, for no discernable reason, stopped wanting to be an airship, and the mod stopped letting me craft air balloon blocks, even though I’d made no changes to the game installation whatsoever. Even crafting a brand new ship didn’t fix the problem.

Does anyone have other alternatives to that mod for convenient air travel? Sure, I could turn on Creative Mode and float around for that, but I like to respect Immersion whenever I can.

4707

You want the Morph mod which lets you morph into any mob that you’ve killed at least one time. (SPOILER: Bat) :)

4708

I’ve got Minecraft for Android and on the PC. I’ve never played it, but my son has taken an interest and prefers to play on my Android tablet due to the touchscreen. I have no idea what he’s supposed to do. There is Creative Mode and some other mode. Apparently there isn’t any danger in creative mode, which he likes. Does anyone have a favorite source of info on the web that explains what you can do in the 2 modes? Thanks

4709

The minecraft wiki (http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki) is pretty good in general but I don’t know about that issue specifically. You can also turn down the difficulty in survival mode, iirc.

If you end up getting into it I recommend the Lord of the Rings mod.

4710

Thanks for the info. I probably need to learn how to play it myself so I can get him going.

4711

I’d encourage you to try to get past the opinion that it’s a children’s game (if in fact you have that opinion, which you may not, but which I would totally understand) and just play it to enjoy it. If you get into the creativity/lego mindset, it really is quite fun, and then you can actually “use” your creations to fend off zombies, mine for minerals, etc etc.

Also, all of the information for it is online–the wiki should basically have you covered, but if you want to learn how to build advanced things (automated farms, fancy redstone circuits, TNT cannons…) then you’ll have to resign yourself to youtube videos (which I generally detest).

4712

There are some beginner videos on the minecraft site I’m going to watch. I think they just cover the basics. Do you need to experiment to learn the recipes? For most games I just try and find info on how to play, but I don’t like seeing strategy hints or reveals of things I’m supposed to discover.

I didn’t really think of it as a kids game, although a lot of kids are into it. I’m not a creative type who will build things just because I can. I kind of need a reason from a gameplay perspective.

4713

I don’t know if you are “supposed” to experiment to learn the recipes, but I can’t imagine it would be a fun way to play–there’s no way you’d ever figure out all the cool stuff in there. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I watched a video on “how to survive your first night”, and I definitely recommend that. But all the recipes–just look them up.

I’d try out the in-game achievements (hit esc, then one of the menus somewhere has them) to give you stuff to do to get started. After that, I’d recommend building up enough of a supply that you can go caving, find diamonds, find a village, go to the nether, etc.

If you just play in creative, then I’m not sure you’d have fun, as it takes away a lot of the gameplay reasons and really just encourages freeform creativity.

4714

What the…? No updates?

Minecon 2015 happened, and Mojang and Microsoft dropped some bombs.

Minecraft on PC is getting dual-wielding, shields, a revamped endgame, beefed up end boss, and a bunch of other stuff. Minecraft Pocket is getting some attention too, but not as much as the main version.

Here’s the meaty stuff: The Windows 10 beta version was announced. Current owners of the PC Java build will get it for free. New players will be able to buy it for $10. Starts on the 29th, the same day Windows 10 drops.

They’re starting with the Pocket Edition as the core, but building outwards. The PC Java version will continue to get support, but the plan is to eventually make all versions the same and cross-platform MP compatible per the whole Windows 10 vision. How long until Microsoft stops actively working on the PC Java version? What about mods? So many questions!

4715

I can’t even imagine how much has changed since I’ve played this, back in the days when we had a ‘pass the file around’ game here on Qt3.

4716

I’m puzzled. Why would someone want the Win10 edition, and not the highly moddable Java version?

4717

The main reasons would be to play multiplayer with others who have the Pocket Edition (i.e., your kids), and for better performance (even without mods, vanilla Minecraft is getting a bit sluggish for people on older hardware, or with weaker video cards). But yeah, if you want mods or new features first, the Java version will be what you want for a long time yet. This Win10 edition seems to exist mainly just to give them a major title (and new revenue stream) for the Windows App Store.

4718

Because Java is really bad and broken.

4719

I guess it never gets old to post something like this to try and start a flamewar… :)

4720

Someone would have to feel passionately to the contrary to start a flame war. I don’t see that happening.