Minecraft Archives - Page 8 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Lego Worlds Impressions

June 2, 2015 by Belghast

Lego Open World

On an absolute whim yesterday I popped onto the steam website to check out what had been released, or was impending release this morning. One of the titles listed was something I quite literally knew nothing about called Lego Worlds. After some research, the consensus seemed to be Lego meets Minecraft. It has the same pedigree of the other Lego games out there as it is also created by Traveler’s Tales. Right now the game is on Steam Early Access for $14.99 and I figured for that price it was worth the risk. I was seemingly one of the few people who actually through Lego Universe was a pretty cool game. Similarly I have really enjoyed my time spent in Lego Minifigures Online, and will more than likely pick up the Lego portal based game as well. I may or may not be a Lego Maniac to borrow the 80s commercial catch phrase. As I sit here typing up my blog post I am sitting in an office surrounded by a mountain of Lego sets.

If you have ever played any of the Lego franchise titles like Lego Harry Potter or Lego Star Wars, this game will feel extremely familiar to you at least as far as movement and gameplay goes. Ultimately this is a game about destroying everything in sight, because when you destroy an object it erupts in a shower of “coins” which are represented by the 1×1 round plate pieces in various colors to denote denominations. Essentially as you roam around the world every new object you encounter, you collect its appearance. You can spend your coins to unlock the ability to build with these prefabs. This means that if you are running through an area and there is a neat lamp post along the trail, you can bump into it and collect its appearance and then build with these lamps from that point on. There is a truly overwhelming number of these prefab objects out in the world and in the three hours I spent yesterday playing I collected what seems like hundreds of them.

Custom Minifigures

When you start the game you are given a very limited choice of appearances in the form of either a Male or a Female explorer. As you roam around the world however you encounter lots of other minifigures. Some of them are friendly and simply walking up to them allows you to collect their appearance, and others are more aggressive and you have to defeat them to collect theirs. In either case these minifigures that you have met go into the same “coin store” as the prefabs you encounter, and from there you can spend your coins to unlock their appearance items. At any point while playing you can swap around your look by changing out the various parts that make up a minifigure including head, body, arms, hands, legs, hat, cape, and assorted hair slot options. So far while roaming around I have managed to run into twenty one different figures, ranging from Yeti to a Surfer Girl. Each of them gave me various unique bits to add to my assortment of appearance items allowing me to assemble some fairly strange looks.

LEGO_Worlds_DX11 2015-06-01 23-00-03-30

This for example is the caveman beard and hair combination, with the wizard cape, skull head and outlaw body parts. I got tired of this look pretty quickly but the beauty of the system is that you can swap things out on the fly and incorporate new pieces you might find as you are roaming around. I feel like that is this games strong point is that it really rewards exploration. While roaming around you encounter all sorts of vehicles and animals that you can ride on. Like everything else once you encounter it, you can purchase it in the coin store to permanently unlock it’s appearance. Once you have paid for an vehicle or mount like this, you can then summon it to your location at any point. This means if I want to ride around on a polar bear I can on a whim, or summon a racing bike, or even an airplane. The more you explore the easier exploration gets as you have all sorts of modes of transportations to get you where you need to go. Also while you explore there are special large chests that have items that you can collect like weapons and other items to help you in your adventures. Since I favor melee I am right now using a big club to bash things, but there is also a rifle and a bow that I have managed to find as well to allow you to attack things at range.

Interesting Exploration

One of the most interesting vehicles that I encountered was this Ninjago inspired drill car vehicle. With it comes the special ability to hold A while driving it to drill the terrain. There are a few pitfalls with this vehicle, namely that it always seems to want to drill directly down. That said I had quite a bit of fun tearing up the terrain and drilling under a mountain. Now getting back OUT of that area was more of a challenge. This vehicle from what I can tell only appears in the similarly “ninjago” themed Biome, meaning the one with the cherry blossom trees and the huge pagoda like buildings. Other vehicles similarly spawn in unique biomes, like the Airplane appears to only be in the snowy biome, and the “Monster Fighters” style Roadster only appears in the desert/Egyptian biome with the free roaming Mummies. Essentially each biome seems to be based on a popular family of Lego sets and generally contains creatures that you might also find in that set. The only one that seems to make zero sense so far is that Cavemen and Cavewomen seem to spawn damned near everywhere.

The game right now is very “early access” and I do not mean necessarily that the game feels “beta” and buggy, but more so that the game feels like it is missing a lot of features that will be in what I hope is the final version. Right now there does not seem to be much purpose to the exploration other than to unlock items to build with. The problem there is that there seems to be little to no reason to really build anything. There are certain biomes where skeletons spawn infinitely during the night cycles, but building a structure does not really seem to present you with much shelter against the endless waves of them. For the time being the game is strictly single player, but I know multiplayer is in the works. Right now the list of things planned from the Steam page includes…

Like/Dislike system for tailoring World Generation
Procedurally Generated Underground Cave Networks
LEGO ID integration to allow for sharing and uploading of in-game builds
Additional Biomes
Painting Themes
Pre-Generated Towns/Villages/Settlements relevant to the Biome
Updated AI Behaviors to provide organic feeling to free-roaming creatures and characters
Red Brick Extras
Full liquid behaviors
Additional Minifigure Characters and Creatures
Additional Vehicles and Pre-Built Models
Additional Weapons
Cut/Copy/Paste chunks of landscape
Underwater Gameplay (including Vehicles, Creatures and additional sea life)
Character Customizer
Online Multiplayer”

So as you can see they pretty much intend to flesh this game out to be competitive with the Minecraft genre. For $14.99 it was more than enjoyable enough roaming around and interacting with things. However if you are looking for a complete game, keep moving on. There really is not much “game” to be had here and in that aspect you are far better off for the time being playing Trove because it offers a lot of the same fun and exploration gameplay, while also offering an actual game that creates reasons for your exploration and combat. This is planned to stay in Early Access throughout 2015, and by the time it launches next year it is probably going to be an awesome experience. The biggest suggestion I have if you plan on giving it a try is to hook up a controller, because the keyboard and mouse control options are pretty frustrating. The user interface has been designed for a controller and that experience seems to be the most enjoyable.

Minecraft and Microsoft

September 17, 2014 by Belghast

Of Minecraft and Microsoft

Monday the news broke that Microsoft would be buying Mojang, the company behind Minecraft for 2.5 billion dollars. Since then I’ve seen a lot of varied reactions on this, but I had not quite formulated my own thoughts yesterday morning so I didn’t mention it. I admit I am a bit scared for Minecraft as a game to be in the often ham fisted hands of Microsoft. The thing is this is my own personal biases showing through. While I make my living supporting Microsoft products, in truth I have not been a huge fan of the company since Bill Gates ejected himself from the picture. I’ve felt that they’ve made a significant number of missteps on a many fronts, more importantly to the topic of this conversation on the gaming front. In a way I feel like this makes Microsoft look like they are making a desperate grab at relevance by purchasing the juggernaut that “all the kids are playing”.

From the standpoint of Notch I completely understand why he did this, and I support his decision. Notch has always been one of those figures for which the spotlight has burned a little too much. He blew up his own blog Notch.net when he posted this statement, so it made its way over to Paste Bin. In the statement he explains how he feels like he had become this symbol, and not a person and for those of you who haven’t not watched the This is Phil Fish video Notch mentions you should really check it out. It talks about the weird relationship we have to developers, especially in the indie world. I honestly feel like Notch has always wanted to be this guy who worked on interesting projects, and just had the fortune or misfortune depending on your point of view of one of those projects going viral behind his wildest fevered imaginings.

So we have this odd marriage. Microsoft desperately needs to claw its way to relevance, and Notch needs a company with the infrastructure to support his creation. The Minecraft community can be extremely awesome, but they can also turn on a dime into an unruly mob as they did over supposed terms of service changes. I highly suggest you check out Notch’s “Literally Worse than EA” post to see the point at which I think he decided he was getting out. As an avid player of Minecraft since the early days of beta, my only hope in all of this is that Microsoft can keep from fucking it up. They have this golden opportunity to prove to the world that they are not these clumsy and confused overlords. Do right by this game and you might have just won yourself a lifetime of supporters. Do wrong by this game and you likely caused the next few generations to hate you. Ultimately this is not about me or my generation, but the children growing up with Minecraft as their generations Lego.

The Story Barrier

Last night we had the intention to go do the next few parts of the Coil of Bahamut raid. We did not however have the necessary well geared bodies to pull this off, so instead we opted to do the two instances that come at the end of the main story of the game. Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are both 8 man dungeons that are extremely story and cut scene heavy. They often act as the bottle neck for players who have just finished leveling to 50, since so much of the end game content cannot be completed until you have finished this step in the main story quest. This is one of my biggest complaints about the flow of the game, is that you have this massive gulf to cross when you think you are nearing the end. You can of course queue for these two through the Duty system, but there is a significant problem with that.

Folks have figured out tricks to run these dungeons extremely quickly, and if you do so they are worth are lot of Tomestones of Mythology for limited work. As such folks tend to power pull these dungeons and anyone who stops to watch the story gets lost in the mix, often times missing entire boss fights because they are locked in a cut scene. This is extremely frustrating since so much of the final act of the story gets played out in these two dungeons. As such we try and wait until we have several 50s that need these before running them, since to run the two dungeons while watching waiting on cut scenes is around a two hour long Endeavour. Last night we had a block of time when we had a bunch of individuals online at the same time so we knocked them out for Thalen.

It had been a long while since I had watched all of the cut scenes and I have to say I am still impressed with the events at the end of this game. I don’t want to go into spoilers but the conclusion of the main story sequence is so satisfyingly “Final Fantasy”. It has all of the elements that make a game like this feel epic. Big boss fights, orchestral music with the requisite choral requirement, huge spell effects and large scale devastation. You cannot come out of The Praetorium without feeling like the big effing hero of the day. This is the way the ending of every video game should feel. The awesome thing here is that the story just keeps going, and in fact I feel like we are building to just as big and exciting of a conclusion somewhere down the line. I find myself actually waiting with baited breath on the next segment of the storyline coming with 2.4.

Recruitment and Games

I had a situation happen last night when two of my friends officially declared that Final Fantasy XIV was the worse. In truth I think they were referring to the hassle that is the Square Enix account management process, and in that I absolute agree with them. Square seriously needs to rethink the number of hoops you have to jump through to be able to play their game. Someone has to be pretty damned committed to giving them money to suffer through that bullshit. That said it did bring up a slightly different point, that I thought I would talk a bit this morning. I get super excited about video games, and in my enthusiasm I feel like I need to share that experience with others. As such through a series of posts on my blog I gush about various features of a game, and some of my friends have taken to calling me the “games pusher”. At its core, I want to share the enjoyment I am having with my friends… because I want them to feel awesome about things too.

The thing is this doesn’t always work, and that is completely okay if it doesn’t. People enjoy games differently, and as such the things that might be perfect for me are not going to be perfect for everyone. So if you see me gushing about a game, it does not mean that I expect you to like it just as much as I do. Hell I find it awesome that people have even tried to play whatever it is that I am playing. Of the folks who have taken the “FFXIV challenge”, a few of them have tried and decided they loved it. Still others have decided this game is not for them at all and walked away from it. I still love both camps equally, and for the folks who fought through the struggle that is account management to try it… I am especially appreciative that they push so much effort into it. Ultimately not every game has to be just right for everyone. We can play different games and still be awesome friends. That said I don’t think I will ever stop trying to get folks playing the game I am playing and on the same server I am playing. That is just too deeply ingrained in my nature.

#FFXIV #Minecraft

Shaders in Minecraft

July 16, 2014 by Belghast

Modding State of Mind

The other day I decided to try and mod Fallout 3 to look like a series of images that I had seen… and it seems to have opened up a rabbit hole that I am still falling down. Yesterday I decided to try and get shaders working in Minecraft. For some time I have seen videos of minecraft that just look insanely detailed for what is essentially the blockiest of games. I would do a small bit of research and pretty much halt when I heard that it involved a modification to the game. Granted I have applied a ton of mods to minecraft, primarily adding in a minimap to make connecting tunnels up easier. Ultimately this involved me configuring something called the “Magic Launcher” to mod my game JAR file on the fly.

Once upon a time you used to have to open the JAR file in 7zip and manually replace individual files inside of the archive. This was tedious and also involved a lot of trial and error as you were ever quite certain what order you had to load the files in with. When I started down the path of trying to figure out shaders a long while back… this was still the method of getting them to work. However a wonderful invention seems to have sprung up in the Minecraft world called Forge. Once installed it essentially allows you to fiddle with mods on the fly from within the game itself, and gives you a “Mods” directory to dump things in.

Shaders in Minecraft

So while this process is a bit of a pain still… as you can see from the above photo the end result is very worth it. It feels like a bit of an understatement, but this completely changes the feel of the minecraft experience. So many things just feel better from the way fire reacts, to the way spider eyes glow out in the instance of the night… to the fact that the day night cycle actually feels like something that is more predictable. When you get close to evening it starts to feel like maybe you better duck in for the night as the light begins to significantly dim as the sun nears the horizon. Granted you can install shaders without the use of a custom resource pack, but I decided to take the advice of SonicEther the creator of the shader preset I am using and go with the ChromaHills texture pack.

I mean everything about Minecraft is still very much a blocky game, but for some reason adding realistic lighting makes everything immediately feel that more real. There are little touches that I think are adorable like the fact that at this moment I had just gotten into a fight with a skeleton. You can see the shadow of all of the arrows sticking out of my head as I prepare to fight a zombie that has caught fire and is still lumbering towards me. But I have to say the place where it gets most impressive is underground, giving an entirely different feel to moving about in the long tunnels I am prone to build. When you are down there it feels like you are playing some updated version of Doom or Wolfenstein 3D and not really a building game. I would imagine that bow sniping in this mode would be extremely fun.

Faffing about with Blocks

Last night I streamed some Minecraft for roughly an hour mostly to show off the shaders in action. The true effect really only hits you when you see it in motion, with the depth of field and the way the shadows and lights work. My primary project of the night was to work on my tunnel system and try and burrow out far enough to get somewhere interesting. Legdur one of the other users on the server at some point during the night came over and gifted me an insane silk touch diamond pick and thats when the construction really kicked into overdrive. I go over this in the video but basically I started out in a small cave and then built out from there over top of the water forming my first “base”. Instead of abandoning the cave I opted to simply connect it to the tower.

One of the things I have learned about myself thanks to Minecraft, is that I am most comfortable when underground. As a result instead of building pathways on the surface or roads… I end up building deep tunnel systems that get me where I want to be. Primarily I think it is that when I am underground I have more control and am ultimately safer because I can control my surroundings. As a result I have three main tunnels that lead out of my initial base. One of which leads back to the spawn point and I have crafted a little hut of sorts to mark the entrance to my territory. Think of it almost like a subway terminal or the Dragon Age deeproads. Another tunnel I simply dug until I broke ground in what is a nice secluded valley. I have not actually done anything with this path but I intend to have it be another intended place of expansion.

The tunnel that I built last night, or completed last night connects up to this building that I am currently working on. Ultimately it will be significantly larger than the island tower I initially built primarily because I have a hell of a lot more resources stockpiled right now. It is nothing terribly special yet but I am working on it slowly. Essentially right now it is spider proof and generally monster proof and hopefully I can use it as a way to lure some chickens down into my complex. Animal husbandry is one of the things I dig about Minecraft and sooner or later I always develop an underground farm that allows me to harvest and breed animals for food. I try to generally place said farm as far away from my main area as humanly possible… because the looped sounds of chickens, cows and sheep will drive you to drinking.

Installing the Shaders

At this point you may want to follow me down the rabbithole that is modding Minecraft and installing these spiffy shaderpacks. Like I said yesterday one of the things that has always frustrated me about the modding community is how arcane the directions can be, and how it is generally a fairly exclusionary group by nature. You have to have a certain level of knowledge of the inner workings of a game before anything that folks are saying on the forums will make any sense at all. Here goes my attempt to explain how the installation process works so that my readers can follow along in this journey.

Downloads Needed

Minecraft Forge [webpage][download you need]
GLSL Shaders Mod [webpage][download you need]
Sonic Ether’s Unbelievable Shaders [webpage][download you need]
ChromaHills Resource Pack [webpage][download you need]

So after collecting all these bits you should have a handful of files…

forge-1.7.10-10.13.0.1180-installer.jar
ShadersModCore-v2.3.18-mc1.7.10-f1179.jar
SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF.rar
ChromaHills-64×1.7_1.0.8.rar

Creating the File System

So for this part of the tutorial… I will admit I am a windows user. I realize that Minecraft can run on a Macintosh, but I have no clue how that works. I have a Macbook 1440 sitting in the closet, and that is the last time I have used anything vaguely resembling the Mac operating system. So if you are not a windows user you are pretty much shit out of luck. My steps might make sense to you, and if so hopefully you can follow along enough to make sense of what you actually have to do in your file system.

First we need to make sure we have the directories that we are going to need for this to work. We have to navigate to our minecraft directory, and to get there the easiest way is to use the hotkey [Windows Button] and [r key] at the same time. This should bring up the run prompt. I pretty much do all filesystem navigation by typing in directories that I want to go to in the run prompt. As my friend points out regularly I am a “power user” but quite honestly I have no clue how to get to this directory through the file system without typing it in. Basically in the run prompt you want to type “%appdata%” without the quotes. This is a windows shortcut that gets you to the application data roaming directory. Inside of there you should see a “.minecraft” directory. This is where your system actually has minecraft installed.

We will need to make sure your folder has three directories. If they are not there then you need to create them. All of these directories are lowercase names, and I am not sure if that matters but since Java is a language capable of case sensitivity… I would suggest you just save yourself some hassle and name them lowercase as well. Create/verify that you have the following directories…

resourcepacks
shaderpacks
mods

Setting Things Up

Now we get to the point where we actually have to do some things. First you need to install forge-1.7.10-10.13.0.1180-installer.jar and if Java is configured correctly on your system… you should just need to double click this file to install it. Accept the defaults and this will install forge and create a profile called Forge under your Minecraft installation. Next we are going to need to copy the appropriate files into the right directories.

Copy “ShadersModCore-v2.3.18-mc1.7.10-f1179.jar” to the “mods” directory
Copy “ChromaHills-64×1.7_1.0.8.rar” to the “resourcepacks” directory
Unzip “SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF.rar” to the “shaderpacks” directory

If you do not have a way of unzipping a RAR file, then I highly suggest you check out 7zip for all your archiving needs.

If you open the Minecraft launcher you should now have a profile in the drop down called “Forge” go ahead and log into Minecraft and hit the play button for that profile. If everything went correctly with the installation of Forge, you should now see a [Mods] button on the front menu for Minecraft that looks a little something like this.

Now we need to turn on the shader which should be possible if the Mods button is showing up. To get there you click [Options] and you should see a new option called [Shaders] appearing there in Options Menu.

When you click shaders you get a menu system that looks a little something like this. Make sure you have selected the SEUS-v10.1-Ultra-DOF option. I have a few more things in my menu than you will have if you have followed this guide. There are lots of different shader packs out there that you can play with, but that is for another day.

Finally we want to turn on our resource pack. At this point your menus will look a little different because I have the ChromaHills pack already turned on when I am recording these screenshots. But to get there you want to back out to the Options menu and select [Resource Packs].

Again I have another resourcepack in my list that you will not have if you are following the guide to the letter, but the important thing here is that you want to make sure ChromaHills is on the right hand side of the screen meaning that it will be used. When you hit done, your system might freeze for a bit but this is completely normal. The game is essentially unloading all of the textures and reloading the ones from the resource pack which includes the various menu textures as well.

If Everything Went Right

Then BAM! You’ve got shaders. If you have any pointed questions about the process let me know, but I tried to make this as straight forward as possible. If you have specific questions about the various items, I posted both the webpage link and the actual download link. It is possible that at a later date some of the download links I posted may not work. If that is the case refer back to the webpage link because they have probably iterated the version of whatever the item is. So far I am loving Minecraft with more realistic lighting, and hopefully you will too. Happy digging!

#Minecraft