minecraft Archives - Page 4 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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

Tunnel Works

July 12, 2014 by Belghast

Hurry Up and Blog

This mornings blog post is likely going to be a quick and abbreviated one as we need to get on the road soon. The wife and I are going off to Oklahoma City today in search of the illusive Half Priced Books store and my mission for the day… lots and lots of Cash America pawn shops. Last weekend I managed to pick up some amazing deals on used PS3 games at that chain, and there are far more of them in OKC than here in Tulsa. Basically I am cheap, and I would love to pick up more PS3 and Xbox 360 games… but I only really want to pay $5-$10 for them. I had a blast playing Fallout 3 on the PS3 even though I had played it countless times on the PC, so I would be interested in visiting lots of titles I had played on the PC as well.

In part because playing on a console is so easy… you pop the disc in and go. The negative however is that you can never really improve the experience. Example here is a modded up version of Fallout 3 that greatly improves the look and feel. Seeing this yesterday pretty much guarantees that I will play through the game at least one more time on the PC as well. Another prime example of better living through software is the whole Skywind project, where they are completely redoing Morrowind using the Skyrim engine. These things will never be able to function on a console, but I have to admit there is something nice about the simplicity of just pressing play. My only complaint right now is that I wish the modern generation of consoles would allow me to install the disc to the hard drive and then not have to worry about having the disc any longer. That is the thing I like the most about my PlayStation Plus titles, the ability to have lots of them “on tap”.

Tunnel Works

Most of last night was spent working on my extensive tunnel network… or what will soon BE an extensive tunnel network. Across a bridge from my main building is the first area I started out that I am using as some what of a stone quarry. At base floor I started a tunnel to see just what I might intercept digging in a straight line. Generally speaking I dig 3×3 tunnels because they feel about right, not too closed in and not too open. After quite a ways of torching every 7 blocks I came out on the other side in what appears to be a riverside valley. There is a cobblestone wall there so I am not sure who has been building in the area. Hopefully I am not impeding on someone else’s land too badly, but I like as many entrances and exits from my area as possible.

I built up a really simple fenced in area so that hopefully I won’t end up with too many creepers lurking there. One of the interesting things about the lockette mod we are using is that supposedly if you lock a wooden door it makes it so that zombies cannot beat it down. Traditionally I have used fence gates to bar entrance into my areas, because villagers cannot open them and zombies cannot break them. However I have started trying out the whole locked door thing to see if it works. I am not purposefully really trying to keep people out of my stuff, but more that I don’t want to come home and find everything full of mob spawns.

Cactus Shield

The other thing that I worked on last night was redoing the approach to my house. I ended up extending the path to make it far less likely for me to kill myself trying to leave it by hitting lots of cactus. This almost happened a few times as I seem to be unable to walk a straight line. Essentially I started the dual tier row of cactus a block further out so I have a 3 block walkway to get in and out of my area. I might add a third row of cactus because I actually managed to have a creeper make it through earlier. Granted the creeper only took a single hit to kill after being chewed up pretty badly by the cactus to get to me… but this in part was because some of the cactus has not fully grown to 3 block height yet. The creeper was able to hop up onto a single block height one and use it to make his way in.

Now that I feel like my base is fairly defensible, it is just about time for me to start back working on the “mine to bedrock” project. Essentially in every build I have done in Minecraft I eventually create a tunnel network that goes all the way to bedrock and start branch mining for diamonds. It is my hope that I picked a decent spot to mine, because so often you get down to bedrock and struggle with lava. Right now the project has been derailed in that I hit a fully enclosed cave system, but I need to build my way through it and continue digging. So far I am finding playing on the Alliance of Awesome server to be fun and refreshing, since more or less I am having to play legitimately again. If you are interested ping Zelibeli and she can get you white listed… but of note this is open to existing members of the AofA community and its requisite groups.

Base Building and Wormholes

July 11, 2014 by Belghast

Zombie Shamble

This morning I am shambling around the house in a zombie like state. For whatever reason I seem to have not slept well last night. I remember waking up at many moments to either kick the covers off or freezing and cover back up. My wife has wondered if she is coming down with something, and I am honestly starting to wonder if this is something more than just allergies. All I know for certain is that I could not seem to regulate my body temperature last night, and the constant pile of cats didn’t really help with the ability to get comfortable. I generally had one pinning my legs down and another stopping me from rolling over, while a third fought for control of my pillow.

I enjoy the hell out of my wife. She can fall asleep without any preparation and tends to sleep all the night through. She can fall asleep at like 8 pm and then transfer to the bed and continue sleeping the rest of the night through. I wish I could do that, but if I take a nap it completely destroys my ability to sleep that night entirely. Additionally I never can seem to functionally get more than four to six hours of sleep in any given night. The result of too much sleep is pretty much the same as not enough sleep for me, resulting in a morning much like this one where I have trouble stringing contiguous thoughts together in my head.

Base Building and Wormholes

Last night I spent most of the evening plugging away on building my base on the Alliance of Awesome server while watching season four of Farscape. I had a simple mission last night, to figure out a way to protect my base from invaders that all too easily could drop down from the cliff above or jump across from the trees nearby. As a result I harvested copious amounts of wood surrounding the cliff to remove the ability for them to perch on top of the trees and drop down from above. The main mission of the night was to find some cactus. The area the spawn is near is a mixture of heavy forestation and to a lesser extent swamp land. While we have an ample supply of cows and horses there was no readily available desert biome.

As a result I started going on these daytrips out as far away from my base as I could before eventually teleporting back using the /home command at the last possible moment before nightfall. While the majority of these were mostly futile it did allow me to stockpile the various things you can get from killing animals and I have a 50 stack of steaks that should hold me for some time as well as a lot of chicken and ham. In fact I brought home so much of it that I had to break down and build several more furnaces so that I could cook each meat at the same time. During my evenings in game I would work on harvesting out the hillside quarry that links up to my fort out on the water.

Cactus Finally

On the four trip out I was getting to the point where I thought maybe just maybe there was not a convenient desert adjoining the biomes in any direction. I had crossed every other imaginable biome, except maybe deep jungle when I started to stumble into what looked like a savannah. Then on the far side of that I started to see some sand dunes. I was starting to get a little edgy however as the sun was extremely low in the sky, which mean I did not have very long at all to harvest any cactus I happened to find. So as night fell I wandered around the desert gathering up whatever I could get. A warning for anyone who heads to that desert… it seems to almost entirely be spawned with endermen.

I gathered up around 30 blocks of cactus and ported out of there with the /home command. I wish I had taken more screenshots but I was in a rush to get the resources I needed and get out of there. In the Savannah region there was what looked like an abandoned safari hut. I would think it was a player creation, but there were absolutely no torches anywhere and it was completely open up on one end. I am wondering if this is a new type of prefab since I last played the game. There were no resources in it other than a crafting table that had been embedded into the floor. That is one of the things that I find most interesting is that since I have not played much minecraft in a long time, there will likely be a ton of things that are new to me.

Defensive Position

2014-07-11_06.19.32

As you can see in the above photo I installed a row of cactus as a defensive barrier to stop things from either being able to scale the sides of my base or drop down from the cliff above. It doesn’t stop the spiders from trying, because every night there is at least one that suicides down on the cactus dying well before they make it into the base. Right now I have a pier or sorts that connects the door into my base to the landmass and I am thinking about putting a line of cactus there as well. It does an amazing job of blocking bad stuff from getting to your base. Right now I am also trying to tunnel towards the spawn so that I can hopefully have a route to get back there if needed.

I’ve started my mine down to try and harvest some diamonds, but that plan fell apart completely when I broke into a rather shallow cave complex. There is still a ton of iron and coal that I need to harvest out of that at some point and sure up the stairs so I can continue to go down past it. Like any Minecraft session I have more projects that I have focus to complete them. At some point I want to expand the main tower structure to go up into a lighthouse of sorts. In order to carry that off I am going to need either some lightstone or some netherrack… which both mean a trip into the nether. Which also means that I need to find plenty of diamond, and use it to harvest obsidian. There is quite a large amount of surface spawn lava nearby so that shouldn’t be a huge ordeal to safely harvest obsidian. In any case… I seem to be obsessing about Minecraft again.

#Minecraft

Return to Minecraft

July 10, 2014 by Belghast

When it Rains…

The old euphemism “when it rains it pours” is fitting today because it is absolutely drenched outside… and additionally we have been dealing with all sorts of issues this week. Over the weekend we had to deal with my wife’s vehicle and the tensioner going out in a rather dramatic way. For those that don’t remember we were driving Sunday and the bolt essentially sheared causing pretty much every light on the dash to come on at once and us to barely make it home before the engine overheated to the point of no return. Monday during the day we got that issue fixed and it was a rather simple mistake that lead to it. I thought we were done with our auto troubles for the time being, but reality seemed to have other ideas.

Yesterday over lunch I ran to Target to pick up cat food and while I was out something to eat. When I started up the jeep there was a very loud mechanical whirring noise that I didn’t recognize, but otherwise the vehicle seemed to perform fine so I tried my best not to think about it. As I was heading back from lunch and entering the edge of downtown I noticed that the red battery light had come on. At this point I am not really sure what to do… I’ve had a few alternators go out, and generally speaking that light combined with the whirring noise I heard earlier probably meant mine was dying. I parked in the garage and went into the building calling the shop to see if they could work me in. Sure enough they could, so I thought I would try and make my way there, hoping I did not get stranded along the side of the road. I mean we have AAA so in theory there was never really the chance that I would truly get stranded… but I crossed all my things in hope that I made it through successfully.

When I got out into the jeep I turned everything off that could possibly be drawing power. So by the time I made it to the shop I had a rather sweaty windblown hairdo that I am sure was extremely attractive. Thankfully the shop we use is around the corner from my house so I could drop the vehicle off and walk home. Just about the time I walked in the front door my phone was ringing. They had been able to assess the issues and said it was in fact the Alternator, that the bearings were bad and it would need to be replaced. About three thirty they called back letting me know the vehicle was ready for pickup. It is probably a bad thing that the girl behind the desk addressed me by name when I walked through the door. That means we have been in there entirely too often lately. Good news is that my Jeep appears to be fine now, and since both of our vehicles are paid off… I guess paying a car payment a piece worth of repairs is not too bad in the long run.

Return to Minecraft

A few days ago Zeli mentioned that she would be setting up an Alliance of Awesome Minecraft server so that her child could have a safe place to play the game. It is a whitelist based server, and since my Minecraft name is pretty easy to remember I asked her to go ahead and set me up. Last night I finally got around to logging in and playing. For some time House Stalwart has had a Minecraft server run by a member, and at this point we have conquered pretty much all of the land surrounding the spawn point for a few days worth of travel. While this huge sprawling city is awesome to behold, it doesn’t leave much room for you to go out and tame the wilds. So I opted to start fresh on a brand new server, since really the “taming the wilderness” phase of a new server is the most enjoyable for me.

Zeli started us off with a stack of steaks, a steel pick and steel sword, which is a pretty good toolset to gain a foothold in the wilderness. I however squandered this horribly. Having been so long since I played on a server, I forgot about all of the controls like /sethome and wandered around at night for awhile and down into a cave managing to get myself killed… and as such losing all of the nifty baubles that I started with. I really had no clue where I was in relation to the spawn point, so I pretty much set out to start fresh. We have a village near the spawner, and I managed to find it… which means that we also have the village trackstar zombies at night spawning near us. It took me a lot of deaths to finally get to a place where I had enough tools to defend myself.

I did not get terribly far, but right now I have the start of a mine dug into the side of a hill, with a bridge extending from it out into the water where I am slowly building a tower of sorts. I figure the mine will feed my need for resources and the tower out in the middle of a pond will give me plenty of defense. Just going to have to come up with a clever way to get in and out of said tower. The area I am in for some reason has a couple of golems spawned near me, which do a fair job of keeping the baddies away at night. I am guessing someone spawned the golems at the spawner and they just wandered off. Additionally there are mass amounts of horses and cows where I am set up at, meaning I have eventual transportation and a ready source of meat and leather. This time I did remember to type /sethome. Right now I am very much in the “locking things down” phase, trying to create something that will protect me entirely during the nights.

Farscape

While playing Minecraft last night I opted to hang out downstairs and watch Farscape. This is one of my favorite television shows, but I have not actually made it all the way through the series. I was at the very tail end of season three when Netflix lost the license to the show the first time. For awhile I was having them ship me individual DVDs but that process got rather frustrating. I could have of course gone out and found the episodes otherwise, but I got sidetracked. At some point in the last few years they managed to get the licensing set up again and all of the episodes are now ready for streaming in all their glory.

The thing I love the most about this show is that it actually has some pretty diverse aliens that are both a member of the crew and ones that you encounter along the way. The claim to fame of the show that it was done by the Jim Henson creature shop, and because of this the aliens that are brought to life by master puppeteers just have a realness to them that you cannot get with CGI. Dominaar Rigel feels like a real character and not a small puppet, and because of this the show has held its production value, whereas most science fiction feels cheesy a few years after it is made as our graphical standards keep increasing.

At this point I have just finished season three and am ready to start the fourth and final season. If minecraft continues to hold my interests, I will probably spend a few more nights watching Farscape and building away in the Alliance of Awesome server. In fact I think that is what I did last time I watched Farscape… build away on the House Stalwart server. Minecraft and watching television seem to go hand in hand for me. If you’ve never seen Farscape I highly suggest you check it out, as it has this whole Buck Rogers meets Star Wars feel to it. I pretty much like all of the characters except for a late addition to the crew … Jool. It is not that I mind her character, it is that I mind the sonic assault that is having her in any sort of action situation. When she gets freaked out she emits this high pitched scream that drives me up a wall.