1641

If you do this, stand astride two blocks and dig them out one at a time. Otherwise, you may have the happy experience of digging your way straight into a deep cave and plummeting to your death.

1642

Sound issue fix:

  1. Start Minecraft and load a world.
  2. Hold F3 and press S.
  3. Sound could come back.
    You must have the sounds downloaded in your resource folder already. This is found (on Windows) in %appdata%.minecraft\resources. You can download the files from this link (originally posted by pulione in this thread).

Note: for some reason, my volume slider keeps going down to around 13%, so I need to keep adjusting that as well. However, the sound is back! Do let me know if it works for you.

1643

I made a map for people who want more of a survival challenge:

There are so many monsters at night, it’s impossible to go outside. A small taste (there is no way I am poking my head over that wall when it is dark):

Optional rules:

  1. No taking of supplies from the surface, with the exception of sand and clay, maybe flowers if you really need them. Everything else you can get from underground and the garden.

  2. You must play on hard.

The goal is to build a tower to the sky or similar impressive type of structure.

The garden has the only grass and tree in the pit, use it wisely.

Unfortunately I couldn’t set the spawn point to the middle of the pit. It always resets to the outer walls, no matter what I do.

1644

ALWAYS DO THIS. Never dig out the block below your feet. Ever. The one fucking time you do it you will go into the lava.

Also: I’ve really come around to using diamond tools. For the longest time my supply of diamonds was so limited that I didn’t dare waste them on tools; I’d take like 3-4 each of picks and shovels (iron) with me when I went caving. That of course meant I’d run out after a while, so I’d have to bring wood to make more and…

The diamond pick and shovel last so long that my caving trips are far more efficient. I get deeper faster, which means more diamonds… I’m actually sitting on a full stack of them now; which is awesome.

1645

No no. Plummeting is fun. One at a time is dull.

1646

I just saw this too, and was going to link it. It works for me on OS X, even though people in that thread are complaining about it not working on Mac. I have to hit F3+S every time I launch the game, however.

1647

Very cool, DocLazy… I think anyone who even attempts to do this ought to post a picture of their progress at the end, whether they finish the tower or give up in despair.

1648

Ok, so with PA going all nuts over this, I decided to look into it… but I’m confused.

So, the game is currently in an alpha state, right? I had assumed this meant it was free to play. Is this true? I tried to play it, but it seemed to want me to pay to play it through the browser, and then when I tried to play it offline, it said I had to play it online first?

What am I missing about this?

1649

There is a free to play version but it is much older, the current Alpha build cost $12. It was free recently for some time, but simply because the authentication servers were down not because it’s suddenly free ;)

1650

Alpha is indeed 9.95 EUR but in my experience/opinion it is more stable and feature rich than many betas. It’s mostly just about where he’s going with the features, multiplayer in particular.

1651

Gotcha, thanks.

1652

The old, classic version is offline now due to the same server issues. So yeah, 12 bucks is your admission fee to endless hours of fun. :)

1653

200k sold.

1654

[center]The Bottom 20[/center]
Let me share some images I’ve been making in studying the ore patterns at the bottom of a newly generated world. First, here’s a 2mb image with each slice. There’s actually supposed to be one more layer of adminium so the numbers are off from the true data values, but I’ll still use those in reference since I don’t want to edit it now.

It’s a bit hard to do comparisons with so let’s take a look at a few composites. Iron is green but the rest are logical colors. This is a look at 0-19:

There’s a lot going on down there. With this many levels at once it’s mostly an even random distribution with a few pockets light on resources. Still hard to make good comparisons so lets look at a practical amount at once. Beginning with the first level of bedrock, 3 and going to level 8, the reach of a pick of someone standing on 3:

There does seem to be a little bit of clustering. Redstone and iron veins like to clump together whereas gold and diamond almost never do. I can’t say much for the idea of looking near lava. While it means already exposed surface there’s no sign of clustering near lava and since nothing can exist in the lava, chances might even be lower perhaps.

Looking at the surface of lava pools at 9 up to 14, I’m not sure there’s much of a drop off in resources. Without the lava, it’s safer and may even be a bit more beneficial. I took a look at only diamond on levels 8 and 16 and made this side by side.

Can you tell the difference?

1655

Nice!

So what I’ve gotten out of this and the Miner thread from the minecraft forums is that a staggered, branching mine about 6-12 levels above bedrock (levels 10-16) yields the most reward for the least effort and risk.

Now to put that to the test…

1656

18 hrs after you posted: 762126 registered users, of which 206772 (27.13%) have bought the game.

Guy’s making around $200k a day right now…that’s not too shabby

1657

I appreciate the effort but I wouldn’t call it that much more challenging. Frustrating or time consuming is what I’d say. Once you manage to get a little bit more wood (you probably can even grow it down there) it’s just regular Minecraft again. In some ways it is even easier since you can see many mineral deposits and even rarer ones such as diamond.

1658

I accept your challenge, with the optional rules.

I am currently sitting in the “base” huddled in a corner behind a 2-block high wall, as I didn’t have enough material to build a whole wall. I planted some saplings as the one tree you provided provides barely what I need, though you’ve provided more than enough torches (which are USELESS right now!)

Tomorrow, I plan on slaying the spiders and creepers with my FPS skills, collecting enough iron to make armor and a pick, diamond to make a sword, and grabbing some more dirt to increase the area (clarifications, am I allowed to bring dirt back from the underground to create a farm and plant more trees? Also, are we allowed to build “outside” of this little fort?)

edit: It is now daytime and the wooden wind chime sounds of burning skeletons are music to my ears.

1659

I’ve added an additional objective of challenge… I must spend the night in the little fort you provided.

edit: And… I indavertantly destroyed my furnace while my iron was still smelting… a minor setback.

1660

Have you tried it or are you making assumptions?

I suppose it’s subjective, but I’m definitely finding this map more challenging. I feel like I need to plan ahead much more, and try to figure out how best to use the limited resources. Plus, the amount of monsters that spawn is much higher than what I’ve seen in a typical game.

I’m at a point where I’ve walled off the garden so that I don’t get pelted with arrows constantly. I’ve placed a perimeter wall around it, as well, to keep the nasties farther away, though it is not yet tall enough, and sometimes creepers will explode when they jump up and see me. I am growing trees and wheat in the garden, which I’ve expanded a bit, but it’s still a very limited space (with only 1 square of water), so I feel like I need to conserve wood as much as I can.

The biggest challenge has been recovering after a death. I sometimes get into an endless cycle where I try to get from the spawn point back to the building, in the daytime after the undead have burned, only to be severely wounded by the gang of creepers waiting at my door. Since I haven’t found food yet, I end up doing most of my work with 2 hearts left.

I could see where some might find that frustrating, but personally I’m having a blast. My tower isn’t too impressive yet, though.

edit: oooh! This is my 50th post! I can post links and images now!

Here’s a common view at night. The monsters are this dense in every direction (I tried to brighten the image but it’s still pretty dark. sorry).

This is what I’m dealing with every morning.