minecraft Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Better Minecraft

September 25, 2015 by Belghast

Ash is Awesome

I have a really huge wishlist on steam, in part because it is a nice way of tracking all of those games that I see every now and then that interest me. Steam will remind me through their UI when they go on sale, and sometimes this is extremely handy. However occasionally it has unintended consequences, like for example… during Pax Prime my friend Ashgar somehow acquired a copy of the sandbox building game Creativerse. The other night he handed me a key for it, and over the last few days I have been playing a significant amount of it. I remember looking at the game and thinking “Pretty Minecraft” and honestly… after playing a lot of it that title still largely applies. Minecraft is a charming game, but it is also a fairly primative game. The magic of Minecraft comes from the fact that it has been so easy to extend and create new types of experiences out of. So in the meantime there have been lots of games that have come out providing a much more aesthetically pleasing experience. Until recently I would have crowned SkySaga the king of this new breed of “pretty minecraft” games, but after playing Creativerse… I think maybe it is more fitting the title.

When you enter the game you are asked to create a name for your character and choose a simple boy or girl avatar. The game loses some points with me right out of the gate because these avatars really are not customized in any fashion. From there you can set up your own private world or join someone elses, and similar to a minecraft server you can toggle different variables. My world for example has PVP disabled, and I set a password… but for the life of me I cannot seem to remember what password I set which will probably come back to bite me in the ass at a later date. You are plunked into this pretty world with a power glove that allows you to pull blocks up from the ground, and a stick that serves as your default weapon. The first thing I noticed was how generally difficult combat is because I died quite a bit trying to sort out which types of creatures I could kill and which I could not. The other item that I finally noticed I had in my inventory allowed me to change my spawn point and plunk down a teleporter allowing me to pop around the world freely and teleport back to my spawn point later.

The Struggle is Enjoyable

With Minecraft, from almost the first moment I set foot in game… I had resources that I could draw on. There are wikis of every sort that contain detailed information about what every block does and how you can best use it in the game world. So far I have not found anything similar for Creativerse, or at the very least when I google for anything… all that returns is a series of YouTube videos. Since I don’t want to have to wade through a YouTube video to find the one nugget of information I need… I just started falling back on the things I know as true in Minecraft. The basic logic of how the world works is very similar, but the primary difference comes in the actual creating of things. Recipes in Creativerse are significantly more complicated than they are in Minecraft. For example to create stone flooring, you need raw stone which is a given, but also stone rods and melted wax. You get the melted wax by taking honey comb that you can only find way up high in the leaves of trees… and melting it in a forge. The end result is this complicated sequence of chicken and egg scenarios where you never actually reach a point of equilibrium where resources no longer are a problem. Coal for example is one of the basic resources needed in both Minecraft and Creativerse… but the primary difference is very early on in Minecraft I reach a point where I no longer care about getting Coal, however here since I have to use special expendable extractor items to harvest it… I am constantly searching for a new supply of both the resources to build more extractors and more coal nodes to extract.

The problem with Minecraft is ultimately that we know that game too well. Within thirty minutes of a new game I can go find every resource I need to do pretty much everything I would want to do. In Creativerse I feel more at the whim of spawn dynamics and hoping to find the right needle in the haystack to keep moving forward. I’ve learned several things, like how to find Diamond, but I still cannot for the life of me figure out a way to get a reasonable supply of obsidian… which is needed for most of the Diamond item crafting. One of the nice things about this game is that as you collect an item it starts opening up your recipes for said resource. Then by crafting sub components it will unlock further things that you can create with it. Occasionally while out in the field you can find books or pages of paper that contain special “fancy” versions of existing items that you already know how to create. As you go through the game you upgrade your weapon and powercells for your glove, that allow you to do progressively more advanced things. However at no point even though I am swinging a magitek looking sword… do I feel like I have made combat any easier. When I see a creature especially while delving deep into the earth… there is still a high likelihood that I am going to get faced rolled and add another “death statue” to my collection. The game keeps giving you these rock idols each time you die… and I’ve started surrounding my base in them as a bit of a sign of honor.

Darkness is Dangerous

Much like Minecraft there is a day night cycle and during the night things spawn that do not appear during the day. For lack of a better term I am going to call these things “corrupted” versions of the normal monsters that you can find during the day. When the sun raises they disappear just like they do in Minecraft. One thing that is different however is during the night treasure chests also appear to spawn, and wandering around the countryside looking for them is much easier because they give off a glow that you can see for a large distance. However to do this you also have to survive the onslaught of aggressive critters that are generally slightly tougher than their day time counterparts. These treasure chests also often give you access to materials that you cannot find yet on your own and give you a bit of a jump start. The problem being however… if you find an item in a treasure chest you have no clue where it actually came from. There has been a lot of trial and error and me taking on things just to see what sorts of materials they might drop. Funny enough it took me a really long time to figure out how to get a reliable source of sinew which is used by so many crafts.

While the game does not have the sort of food and water survival system that Minecraft eventually adopted and so many addons provided, it does have something interesting. When you are exposed to dangerous conditions you start to see an exposure bar appear. For example if you are roaming through the solidified Magma area, you will start see a flame gauge begin to creep up. I am not sure what happens when the gauge reaches the top, but I am guessing you catch on fire and die. Similarly in the above image you can see a purple biohazard gauge which is when I broke through into the “corrupted” zone. Deep under ground I found an area that had a slight purple glow, and featured corrupted trees and all sorts of nasty creatures. It has been extremely difficult to explore because I broke through into the cavern way the hell up into the air, and I can only spend so much time in there before my corruption creeps too high and I have to retreat. I need to figure out how exactly you can fight these influences and see if there is a way to counteract the exposure gauge. Similarly I went out exploring and found a tundra biome and the entire time I was there a cold exposure gauge kept creeping up. With no real way to counteract it I finally had to teleport back to base. The tunnel to the corrupted zone is deep under my base so I figure at some point over the next few days I will explore it further.

Speaking of Bases

Almost all of my time so far has been spent underground, but towards the end of the night I started working on an above ground dwelling I can be more proud of. For a long time I had a simple stone shack plunked out in the middle of the Savannah. Last night I started raising walls for a courtyard and building a proper stone floor. I am not sure exactly where I am going with it, but I just wanted something more noticeable while I am out roaming around. I want to build some sort of a tower and place a beacon at the top of that now that I finally have all of the components to build one. I am certain that once I build a white beacon it will start unlocking the patterns for different colors. The building system is pretty intuitive, but it reminds me more of Trove than it does of Minecraft in that you toggle back and forth between building and combat modes. Trove would honestly be my ultimate “minecraft-like” game if it weren’t for the simple blocks and insanely garish color palette. I love the combat though, and that along keeps me coming back… I am just not that big of a fan of the building aspect. Creativerse however seems to have that side of the equation for me, and if you also really like Minecraft, but are getting tired of its primitive client… you might check this game out. Right now it is $19.99 on Steam Early access, but supposedly if it ever launches it will be free to play. They originally planned on being in early access for 4-6 months… but now it has been a little over a year so who knows how long it will last.

Of Geekdom

September 23, 2015 by Belghast

You’re A Gamer

Yesterday I saw the above video pop into my subscription feed on YouTube, and since Pixel is awesome and was a Blaugust participant I of course watched it. In the video she talks about a problem of shunning going on in the “girl gamer” circles, and it prompted me to write yet another one of these pieces. While I absolutely see the issue happening in that community, I also think the issue is inherent in all “geek” communities, and it becomes pretty damned frustrating. For awhile now I thought I could blame it on my generation. As far as video games go, we are essentially patient zero. My folks had a pong system, then I graduated to Atari… then to Nintendo… and pretty much every gaming fad in between. So for awhile now I have felt this strange sense of responsibility for apparently being part of the generation that created this broken model. I thought maybe the gatekeeping came from the fact that for many of us we have experienced a bit of shame over our hobbies, or at least being treated to those “you are not normal” type of looks on a regular basis.

I wear my “geekdom” on my sleeve but once you leave the development row at work… I am absolutely “not like the other kids”. I have Lego MiniFigures instead of pictures of kids, and I have to explain so many of the assorted items of kitch on my desk. Weirdly enough pretty much everyone knows what a Creeper from Minecraft is however, but I guess if folks have kids… that makes sense. The odd thing is… I remember a time when it wasn’t like this really. I remember when you went to someones house and saw an Atari… you were essentially instant friends because you had a fast point of reference. Same thing happened for Nintendo, and everyone would huddle around the lunch room to talk about this game or that. It wasn’t just a geek thing, it was an every kid thing. Hell my wife does not consider herself a gamer at all… but she had an Atari and a Nintendo and played both. Her favorite game growing up was Snoopy and the Red Baron, and at some point I am going to find one for her for no reason other than sheer nostalgia. So I guess the question is… what happened?

Forming Camps

The very first time I can really remember any tension forming, came from the early Sega versus Nintendo rivalry. I mean during the Atari era there were other console systems like the Colecovision or Intellivision, but ultimately it didn’t really matter that much. At the end of the day we were all playing the same ports of arcade games, which seemed to be universally offered on all platforms. The first party title thing didn’t seem to really matter… that is until Mario and Sonic. The advertising was constantly and obnoxious and full of partial truths. I grew up in a small town, and quite literally no one that I knew could actually afford both a Super Nintendo AND a Genesis, so it ultimately meant you had to place all of your hope in one console or the other. I don’t remember any fights breaking out but it was really the first time I can remember such a thing as someone owning the “wrong console”. I had a friend with a Sega Master System, and I remember one birthday party where everyone was disappointed that he didn’t have a Nintendo to play. No one really wanted to try this “other” thing, because everyone wanted to play Super Mario Brothers.

I could drive myself insane trying to trace the roots, but regardless of how we ended up in this situation… it isn’t a great one. Any system where we claim that Gamer A is not as much of a gamer as Gamer B because they like this thing or that thing… is a really bad system. I guess the part about it that I don’t really get is when did we start competing with each other on everything. Can’t it be enough that you like a thing, and want to do a thing… without having to feel the need to shit on everyone who is doing something else? I mentioned Minecraft earlier, and that game honestly gives me a lot of hope. A friend of mine was telling a story the other day, about how their kid bumped into some other kids while on vacation. Somehow the topic of Minecraft came up, and suddenly all of these random strangers were instant friends. Games have the power to bring people with no other shared interests together, and honestly most of the people I know on the internet… I know thanks to gaming. So I see the potential that this shared interest has to unite us all… and it just makes me even the more depressed when I see people fighting over this game or that game. Does it really matter if you prefer Call of Duty to Battlefield, or if you happen to like a PS4 over an Xbox One? Can’t we all just be okay with saying “these are things I like” and be equally okay when someone else happens to like different things?

I Have No Answers

I have no real answers at the end of the day. Lately I have seen a lot of angst in the World of Warcraft community as people disappear from that game. I was absolutely part of the problem during the first great exodus to Rift, and I feel bad for it. Ultimately what I want is for people to do whatever makes them happy, and play whatever game they are passionate about. Similarly when they stop being passionate about it… it is perfectly okay to walk away with zero shame. Just because I am in a down cycle where I am not all that interested in World of Warcraft it doesn’t mean that I wish the game harm. Sure there is a bit of schadenfreude occasionally over the earning reports, simply because I have felt for awhile that the staff doesn’t really get what players actually want. I keep hoping that they will right the ship and turn us back to a game that I would be happy to play again. At no point however do I want the game to go away or am I willing to actively rail against people for playing it. I guess what happened to change my opinion… is that I started to see the alternative.

During that first parting of ways… we had not seen the consequences of when a game stops being supported. Ask the folks who played Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes or Vanguard how they feel about having a game world disappear. After watching several worlds just simply vanish… it has made me quite a bit more respectful of whatever game anyone happens to be playing. We invest so much of ourselves in the games that we play, and whatever it is that you happen to be passionate about is awesome. The gatekeeping and the “you must be this tall to ride this ride” signs that we seem to constantly be willing to tack up all over our landscape are counter productive. I original thought it was my generation that broke the system, but now I am just not certain any more. Maybe tribalism is just something that is naturally going to happen in any system when it gets too large. Maybe “gamer” isn’t even really a thing anymore… and video games are just something that everyone does. We don’t have a title for folks who watch TV, because that distinction is utterly meaningless. Just because we both own a TV does not mean we are likely going to be watching the same shows… but by the same token no one is expecting us to. Maybe we need to shed the notion that we all have this common point of reference, and maybe we just need to accept the fact that we are all going to like different things. Maybe in another generation this question just simply won’t exist any more because gaming has become so mainstream that nobody even thinks about it as an identity. Whatever the case… for the time being… I just wish we could treat each other better.

Bel’s Big Adventure

August 2, 2015 by Belghast

Posting Late

Today I am getting an extremely late starting in getting my “morning” blog post out there. At this point it is almost 2pm as I sit down to write this. There are a lot of reasons behind that, in part because video takes a really long time to render. Not to mention the fact that somewhere between streaming and now we also went out and ran errands. Blaugust is alive and kicking and I am still shocked and amazed at the turnout. My wife has even spawned her own version of it within the Math blogosphere without really meaning to. I think it is pretty awesome when the spirit of Blaugust spreads to communities that were not a part of the first year. As of this morning I had eighty four bloggers signed up and tracked on the list I am keeping. I am still trying to catch up on day one honestly because that many blog posts… is an awful lot of reading. This is absolutely an amazing problem to have.

If everyone managed to make it through the entire month with a post for every day… that would mean 2604 posts pending we don’t keep picking up more people along the way. This is really the idea is to get out there and get started on creating more content for our community. One of the things that keeps coming up from time to time is how blogging is dead, and I love it when we can prove every single one of those naysayers wrong. There is something magical about putting your thoughts on the page and sharing it with the world. For me personally it is deeply cathartic to share my thoughts and feelings. Over the years I have learned to open up more and share more of myself, and as a result my bonds with my fellow bloggers has gotten stronger. In many ways this community that you are part of is a big support group, because every time I have struggled there has been someone out there to help pull me back to my feet.

Bel’s Big Adventure

There has been a thing I have wanted to do for awhile. Some of my favorite Minecraft video series have been adventures with a very simple premise around them. When I play Minecraft however I tend to be a base builder. I craft these extremely intricate underground structures, and never tend to move around much as a result. As a way of combating my instincts, I am going in a completely different direction and starting a series of videos called “Bel’s Big Adventure”. The idea is simple… only keep what I can carry in my inventory and keep moving North. Each time I make camp and reset my spawn point by dragging along a bed, workbench and a furnace. Each day I have to find the resources I will need to make it through to the next day. Today I streamed for roughly two hours, and I am editing these into smaller videos, the first of which is about thirty minutes in length and involves my hitting the first major obstacle… a big ocean.

The Minecraft version I am using is 1.8 and I am using the GLSL Shader Mod 1.8 combined with SEUS v10.1 to produce the nifty more realistic appearance. As for the Texture pack I am running Chroma Hills which is known to work fairly well with shader packs. Finally I have the Mapwriter mod running largely to keep me pointed northward, because it shows an Arrow in that direction. Other than these largely cosmetic mods I am using the stock Minecraft 1.8.3 that I freshly installed this morning. It has been well over a year since I last played Minecraft, and as a result there is a lot of stuff in the game that I have not seen yet. For example… I had no clue that there were Bunnies in the game until I came across a black colored one. Similarly in what will likely be in episode two I encountered something bizarre that cursed me so that I couldn’t mine anymore. Most of today has been spent either recording, editing or rendering the video so that I could embed it in today’s post. Hopefully someone will enjoy it, but if not I at least enjoyed the adventure. If I find something really interesting in my journey I might stop and set up a more permanent camp in order to explore better. Since I spent the bulk of my day so far working on this side project, and will likely spend a good chunk more I plan on cutting this post a bit short. Let me know what you think of this idea, and I am also open to other objectives for me to look out for along the way.

E3 2015 Day Zero

June 16, 2015 by Belghast

Microsoft E3 2015

Yesterday was a huge day of E3 shows with Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft and Sony all strutting their stuff with big press conferences. While I still stand by my statement yesterday, that Bethesda software is winning this E3, everyone involved had some interesting things to show off. Mainly for me this is the year that Microsoft figured out how to do a relevant press conference. The past two years since the announcement of the Xbox One have provided extremely awkward and disconnected moments, but for the most part Microsoft nailed it this time around. They provided a wide scope of games to appeal to all genres, and while I don’t believe in their exclusivity after seeing titles appear on steam months later, I do feel like they are trying really hard to wrap up a large stable of winners as far as software goes. The big title that I am interested in is the new Tomb Raider game, which makes me realize that I really need to finish the last Tomb Raider game.

I’ve never been a huge Halo fan , but even I have to admit that the Halo Guardians demo looked pretty amazing. The title I was most amped about seeing again however was The Division, since we had not really seen much since the last E3. It seems like now we have a pseudo release date and a beta beginning towards the end of this year. My big concern was with the lackluster showing of Destiny so far, that this title might have simply quietly been cancelled. Thankfully that is not the case, and we will be exploring a new action role-playing game setting early next year. The video that takes the cake however for Microsoft is the Hololens demo showing off a special Hololens version of Minecraft. The more I see of Hololens the more I think it is going to be a real force in gaming, and not just another gimmick hoping to find a Market. Virtual Reality headsets extract you from the world, and Augmented Reality keeps you interactive with the world… I think that is going to make a big difference. The little I have played with the Occulus Rift was cool, but I suffered a pretty massive headache and was dizzy as hell as my mind tried to readjust to the “real world” after being in the unit for only around fifteen minutes. I cannot imagine what it would be like after some of my marathon gaming sessions.

EA and UbiSoft E3 2015

As good as Microsoft did with their press conference, EA doubled that effort in the opposite direction. The entire thing was this awkward and disjointed mess trying to play towards too many different demographics and just coming off as frustrating to I believe all of them. The biggest frustration for me personally was the fact that this press conference was about one thing for me… getting to see the new Mass Effect game. We got a minute and a half trailer… and that was quite literally all we saw of Mass Effect. Similarly with Mirrors Edge Catalyst… the game so many people have been amped to hear more news about… we got a two minute trailer. It seems that all EA actually cares about is peddling the new years edition of the same damned sports titles they have been selling for decades. From what I can tell roughly an hour of the presentation was tied up in these sports titles with blips at the beginning and the end about something interesting. I do have to say though that Star Wars Battlefront still looks amazing, however I have had that on preorder from the Playstation network since the Fan Fest announcement. They didn’t really need to sell me on that title, but I am looking forward to it all the same.

UbiSoft on the other hand unleashed a whole bunch of interesting stuff. We are apparently going to colonize the moon in Anno 2205, which looked amazing. They are releasing a version of Trials Fusion where you apparently play a cat that rides a flame breathing unicorn. We got to see even more staged footage of The Division, this time centering around the “Dark Zone”PVP area. The game I never thought I would be interested in however was Ghost Recon Wildlands, which for all intents and purposes seems to be their answer to the Just Cause franchise. Big open world game where you take on drug lords in whatever fashion you see fit. It looks like it is going to be extremely fun in the same way that I lost serious amounts of time to Just Cause 2. The real triumph of the show however is that Aisha Tyler is amazing, and I want her to host every press conference from this point on. Additionally they brought out Angela Basset at one point, who is the absolute badass mocapped leader of the new Rainbow Six. While there was not a whole lot that I was extremely interested in, it was nonetheless a good show or at least looked amazing as compared to the train wreck that was EA.

Sony E3 2015

Finally we wrapped up the night of E3 events last night with the Sony Press conference, and honestly even hours afterwards I am not 100% sure how well it went. They dropped some massive bomb shells on the crowd, but it only really plays to the folks who were already PS4 fans. Ultimately the goal of an E3 press conference for both Microsoft and Sony is to sell hardware, and at the end of the day I end up with the same equation. Most Xbox One exclusives also come out on the PC, and I own a fairly solid gaming PC. Most PS4 exclusives don’t, and as a result that is the hardware I chose to buy. This years game conference only serves to give me more reasons to be happy with my decision. The show lead off with finally giving a date to a game many had just expected got cancelled… The Last Guardian. This game was originally slotted for the PS3, and it was questionable if it had survived the generation hop. The big reveal of the night however is that Final Fantasy 7 is in fact getting a Remake. It was glorious to see at least glimpses of Cloud and Barret as they moved past the camera in all their ps4 glory.

The title that both came from out of nowhere and stole the show for me however was Horizon Zero Dawn from Guerilla games. This apparently ushers in a brand new breed of post apocalyptic storytelling, that manages to do so without weaving in a zombie premise. We live in what seems like a Clan of the Cave Bear like setting, until we see the first giant robot roaming the landscape. This is Turok the Dinosaur hunter, meets Last of Us, meets Zoids. We get to see the female bow hunter protagonist take down a giant robot t-rex like creature. As Tam commented during the stream, we have apparently gotten really good at making fighting giant monsters seem awesome. Had I not already purchased a PS4, this would have been the title that sold me the console. I am really hoping this ends up being a vast open world landscape that lets us wander around and explore, hunting the big game and unfolding what happened during “the darkness” that lead to the machines roaming the earth. There were of course other titles announced that looked great, and that I will likely play, however at six in the morning… the day after the show… the Sony conference was all about FF7 and Horizon for me. You can check out the full show trailer below.