minecraft Archives - Page 9 of 10 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Rebooting Minecraft

May 16, 2014 by Belghast

Guild Meeting

I have an exciting evening planned that I have been looking forward to for a few weeks. One of my long time House Stalwart guild members is here in town, and tonight we plan on having a board game night. Dallian/Doctor Hannah appeared on Episode 5 of AggroChat, and we mentioned the upcoming visit there. He lives in the Little Rock area which makes him a neighbor of ours as far as the internet is concerned. I always think its cool when I get to meet someone in the flesh that I have gamed with for ages. I think the plan tonight is to play loads of Munchkin and eat pizza at Rae’s house. We’ve tried to invite several of the locals to meet up, so it should be really fun. I am contemplating bringing some magic starter decks, but that might be a little too involved. We’ve been talking with a co-worker about maybe trying to play some magic over lunch soon. Apparently his wife is super into the game and would probably even come up over lunch to play it.

I don’t really do this sort of thing that often. I guess the last guild member that I met up with was Lummox who happened to be about fifteen minutes away from where I happened to be staying in Albany. It is always interesting to see how someone is in real life verses their in game persona. For the most part, a lot of the people I have met have been fairly similar. I have to say the closest was probably Urcasio and Ravener, who were pretty much exactly the people I would have expected based on in game interactions. Since I generally find it easier to meet over food, Dal and I are meeting up before this evening for lunch. For years I have been talking about how amazing Ron’s Hamburgers are, and more importantly their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. So we are meeting up at my favorite location today around 11ish. I would love to somehow steal him to town like I managed to do with Rae. I feel like I am trying to build this little gamer community, one person at a time.

Rebooting Minecraft

Last week one of my new friends Missysmojo decided to try her hand at playing Minecraft. I joked with her that she would end up losing the next three months of her life. She opted to stream a little bit, and it got me thinking. It has been years since I have played Minecraft with any regularity. There have been a few times I patched up my client and connected to the guild server just to see what folks were doing, but I had felt like I had “beaten” Minecraft for some time. In this last year there have been significant changes in the game, and probably even more before that I really never noticed. So I thought I would start a brand new game and play completely legit. No mods, no helpful minimap… just the vanilla client and a texture pack (because yeah that is necessary). The above video is the results of that process last night. I am not really sure yet how often I will be streaming Minecraft, but I expect to continue where I left off each time.

For starters… I am really not used to the game any longer. I kept trying to “suck in” blocks and drops like you do in Trove. The low performance of the game frustrated me, because I am not used to it “chunking” and loading in parts of the game slowly freezing my client momentarily when it does. I am sure this is something I can tweak, because I probably just don’t have enough memory flowing to the default client. There used to be a tool called Magic Launcher that handled a lot of the memory allocation for me, so I might look into that. Another dumbass move is I totally thought I was on “survival” mode for the first little bit, running scared from potential monsters… only to find out that I actually was in peaceful mode on the client. Once I noticed that and changed it things started to get interesting.

For starters, it seems like the creeper spawn rate is insane. I maybe saw one or two zombies and skeletons the first night after flipping it to a normal mode, but I saw what felt like half a dozen creepers. I managed to trap four chickens inside my base and I dug a pit like I often do and have them down there for a constant source of eggs, feathers and meat. At some point I want to try and drag a couple of cows and pigs in there as well so I have all of my livestock needs handy. Most of the video involves me setting up “base” as I hollow out a mountain, search for coal and finally start digging down into the earth in search of steel. I encounter a cave with a skeleton spawner in it… and have a pretty epic battle trying to break the cave and torch it off. I had quite a bit of fun, or at least more fun with Minecraft than I have had in ages.

Bunny Doom

I love everything there is to love about the Shin’hare, and the fact that they exist makes Hex so much more enjoyable than Magic the Gathering ever could be. It’s an entire race of adorable evil samurai bunnies… you could slap that into ANY game and I would play it. As a kid one of my favorite comic book characters was Usagi Yojimbo… so everything about this deck feeds my enjoyment. Not to mention that my favorite deck combination in Magic the Gathering was Green and Black… and the Shin’hare are exactly that… Life and Blood aka Green and Black. In some ways it reminds me of playing my thalid deck circa Fallen Empires. I would constantly use that deck to feed my black “sacrifice or I feed” cards. While I am lacking some of the cards in Hex to make this work really well, the starter deck mixed with a few cards I got from my packs seems to be working okay.

Last night I got in and played a few hands against the AI, mostly because it was getting late and I didn’t want to deal with people. I am anxious for when trading comes into play, because of my group of friends I think I am really the only hardcore bunny player. I should be able to help some of them out with cards they are looking for and bolster my bunny army. My all time favorite card is still the Uzume, Grand Concubunny. Not only is the artwork adorable, but the card is insane when you get it out into play.

When I first read this card, I assumed it would start dropping the 0/1 battle hopper tokens that the other Shin’hare cards do on the table. While that would have been good enough, considering the normal concubunnies you have to expend resources and tap them to get this effect. The real effect however is so much better, in that it summons a random non-unique bunny card into play. This can be ANY card, even ones you don’t currently have in your deck. It is literally generating cards for you, but the problem is this makes the card and insane aggro magnet.

I need to formulate some ways to protect the card, because really it is too damned valuable to not have it on the board for more than a few turns. Hopefully soonish I can get together with my other friends currently in the closed beta and play some actual matches. I feel like Kodra is in a completely different league with me, and like to play a style of magic that I do not… but this will not stop me from attempting to beat him. He royally kicked my ass in hearthstone, but it didn’t stop me from coming back for more. These type of games for me are about the moment to moment play and not whether or not I win. In fact that can pretty much be said with any game I play, I am just not that competitive. It is about the journey not the win conditions.

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Hot Coffee and LFR

December 6, 2013 by Belghast

Snowed In

Good morning everyone, hopefully you are staying warm out there. Here in the central part of the country we had a mass of ice and snow dropped on us. Generally my point of reference is when two school districts on opposite corners of town call schools the next day, I decide I am going to stay home. Since this happened I put in a day of vacation for today and slept in. Apparently my absence was noticed, since I have already received tweets saying that a snowstorm was no excuse for not posting.

I think we probably got an inch or two of ice last night and then over night that got covered up by three to four inches of snow. Which to the northerners probably doesn’t sound like much, but here in Oklahoma we get glaze ice that is nearly impossible to drive on. Additionally we really do not have the infrastructure to remove large volumes of ice and snow… since we only go through this at most once a year. Over the last three years we have had really mild winters that never really produced much in the way of an ice storm. While this is nothing like the 2007 or 2011 storms, it is far more significant than anything we have seen in years.

Hot Coffee and LFR

As a result I am snuggled up on the sofa with my fuzzy pants and my fuzzy blanket and a thermal shirt blogging away on my laptop. I just finished off hot oatmeal and some hot coffee, and the only thing of any substance I really have planned today is to play some World of Warcraft. I have five 90s in various states of gear and the easiest way to get upgrades for them is through the LFR system. As much as I have railed against pugging in the past, something odd happens if I pug as DPS. I simply stop caring much about the success or failure of the group. As a DPS I can compartmentalize things and focus only on what I am doing and stop caring that the group is burning down around my shoulders.

As a Tank or a Healer… I simply cannot do this. I have to care about the group and how stupid they might be acting. My job relies on them doing their jobs. When playing one of those group roles I simply cannot stomach pugging or lfr, it ends up stressing me out way too much. However apparently as a DPS I have the patience of a saint. I keep plugging forward towards the goal and right click reporting anyone who is too abusive. It all seems simple and pure, and in an odd sense relaxing. It’s like I have reached into my brain and flipping me into DPS empties me of “fucks to give”. That is not to say that I don’t care about me keeping up my end of the bargain, but I simply don’t care as much about others not doing so.

So my intent today is to run as many LFR instances as I can this week to try and get my tribe of alts gear. The hardest thing seems to be weapons, and as a nice side benefit from these runs my blacksmith seems to be getting quite a few motes which will help him upgrade the weapons of those who have not gotten their turn at the LFR treadmill. That is still one of my biggest frustrations that I hope they will address in WoD. Crafting resources like Spirits of Harmory should be bind on account. I like the feeling of all of my characters working towards a bigger goal, its like I have my own little imaginary guild. Anything that adds to this feeling is a positive for me, since you have earned the item on one character already.

Trove Patch

I am sure at some point today I will be hopping into trove. Yesterday they seem to have had another patch. I am really impressed at the speed at which they do updates. This one seems to be mostly a patch full of tweaks but one of the more interesting points is that the block destroyer is no longer an item and no longer works in adventure mode. This could have some odd ramifications since I know I used it in adventure mode quite a lot. Another needed note is that they reduced the quantity of treasure chest spawns in the desert and frost biomes. Normally nerfs like this meet a groan, but this one was really needed. There were times I could see 6 treasure chests on screen at a single time.

I wasted so much time chasing these down because seriously… you cannot bypass a treasure chest. I figure at some point over the next few days I will be making a new video as I am sure the server has reset again and I will have to collect more weapons and gear. If there is anything you would like to see me cover let me know. I am not above having a purpose for my videos even though they are mostly just me roaming aimlessly around the wasteland. I hope you all are safe and happy and warm, and that if you did get the snow and ice I did, you also had the presence of mind to take a vacation day.