Minecraft.

found gold!

finally saw some snow. and lightning.

been venturring out a bit further from my main base and building wee outposts.

saw lava for the first time pouiring out the side of a mountain.

caught some fish.

built a boat but i didnt know how to sail it and accdently thru it out too far.

got bored goin to base evry night so stayed out and fought monsters. wasted my armour a bit tho. usin bows and arrows is fun

I like the changes made to the John Smith texture pack and the texture pack installer which makes switching between texture packs much easier. The glass is harder to see out of which kinda sucks but it looks much better. Glass was one of the things I didn't like before and now I'm happy with it, they still have the same breaking animation but I can live with that. I think I might build some high towers to look out over the land. I think I'll build the open looking out point at the same level as cloud so that it doesn't look wrong when the cloud goes through the tower.

Anyone tried the 404 Challenge yet? I might give it a go. If you don't know what it is, you put 404 into the world generator and then you have till nightfall to gather everything you can but at sundown you have to find the gravel and hit it which causes a cave in and you have to go underground and survive, you aren't allowed to come back up and you aren't allowed to make torches, you are allowed to make red stone torches though and use lava to create light.

Using glow stone as the light source in my house now, just got to be very careful what I do with it as if I put it in the wrong place I loss that glow stone altogether, and it ain't exactly easy to get more. I want to get rid of all the torches in the house because while they look nice enough they make the place look a bit messy.

Almost made a really stupid mistake earlier, I was going to set fire to a pig to test the cooked ham thing, and the pig was only a few blocks away from my nearly completely wooden house... I stopped myself just before I sparked the flame.

I don’t like the johnsmith windows ether, My tower has glass floors so you could look up and se the torches spiralling all the way to the top, it doesn’t have the same affect now.
Because of that and the bland jacko lantines I've stuck with the “Photo Realism Pack” though the glass affect dosn't have a frame so it dosn't look so good as a window but at least it doesn’t have anything obscuring it.

Vis there is a tool you can use which lets you go back to the older type of windows and other older textures, and I think change the colours of texture's (I'm sure I saw something about picking the colours of beds). I saw it on the John Smith's forum post with the downloads.

On page one of the JS thread theres a tool called the customiser which lets you select different styles for all objects in the .png file pretty easily and create a custom JS pack.I`m going to try it later because I dont like the new glass either and the window frame is one item you can roll back to the earlier "border" only frame.

Very happy with how my house is going at the moment, I've been adding more details like a fire place which is looking nice but didn't go exactly to plan, I wanted smoke coming out of the chimney but from the ground you can't see the smoke, and window box's which well first I couldn't make the windows as big as I wanted and also there's not much of a view but the plants look very nice outside of the windows, I'll take screens later. I'm going to put a jukebox under the window and bookcases around it and the other walls of that room.

Not sure what I'm going to do with the rest of the house yet.

I hope in a later update they add usable chairs, the mock chairs look fine but it annoys me that I can't actually use them.

Just had a closer look at the customiser for JS,it all looks pretty straight forward and easy to use.Theres a couple of things I`m going to change...the current glass to the frame only glass...darken the ore and stone a bit and change the brickwork to mortarless.I`ll let you know what happens

Job done and sorted..all seems to be okay and all changes have taken effect

Here's some screens of the living room of my house, this is my favourite room, ingore the torches they will go when I've worked out where I want to put the glowstone and I need more of it.



With the plants in the window boxes they kept popping out of the ground at first and I found out it was because they weren't getting enough light, so I put two glowstones in above them and they stay put now.



I've spent all morning working on this tower, the first part was fun but after the open area it got fiddly and just a pain to put together, very happy with it though.



The first open area of the tower is the same size as the clouds so they can move through without it looking buggy. Just above the open area is a small living space before you go upto the beacon on the very top of the tower.



Here's the tower from my house I think the view of it from this distance is the best, just seeing this massive thing while you are walking around is really nice. Also from this distance it looks like a massive mage's staff that's stuck in the ground.



Here's another view of the tower, you can see some of the details better in this one. The main stem of the tower has a very tight stair case and from the open area up it's ladders.

There are 3 purposes for the tower, the first being to be able to look at my house and everything around it which is does and when I build more it will be really nice to look down on. The second is for it to be a beacon so that if I get lost or loss my sense of direction I can look around and see the tower (If I'm in the render distance), this tower doesn't work that well as a beacon but it's still visible at night. The third is just something nice to look at from my house, there isn't much to look at from it, it's not the most beautiful part of the map or the most practical (I've had to dig away a small by wide hill for a very long time).

The next tower I build will be like a giant red stone torch, it will be a lot simpler than this one was, it will just be a tower with a long ladder in the middle and on the top will be just a load of lava running down inside of a glass box, maybe with a look out tower on the top so I can see the next beacon.


It might have been a mistake to make a fireplace in my house, I can hear the sound of fire burning something all the time and my house is made nearly completely out of wood and wool, only the foundations are made out of stone.

Very nice Fen,puts my world to shame

very nice

The house is coming together now but it's was and still is ugly from certain angles, well nearly every angle from outside.





The only angle from outside that I like is of the back of the house.



That one room is at it's best at sunset, I made my bedroom with a large window that all the way over the top of the house and I discovered later that the sun didn't rise infront of that window, the sun only comes through the window at noon. I didn't build the window for that but it would have been nice.




The tower looks nice and I like walking under it and looking up and looking at it when I'm wandering around, but actually going up it is such a pain, you have to constantly turn and move forward for what seems like an endless ascent.




Edit: Also the only reason my house is looking better is because I've seen whats possible with the Yogscast's Minecraft world.

Ooooooo Notch is adding Maps to the next update, they work differently to normal maps in games.

The Word of Notch


Added an incinerator to my wooden house, something you have to be very careful of as lava spits and can catch things on fire that it's not directly touching. I dug down quite far, no fire that ruins everything so far. They are fun things to have you can just chuck things you don't want down the shoot and listen to them burning up.

I tried to make that red stone torch tower just now, and well it was getting dark and I wanted to see what it would look like so I put some lava into a very unfinished container for it and it spilled out over the sides. I panicked because I was in the middle of a large dense forest so I rushed down, thankfully lava is slow and I made a ditch for the lava to land in. This time it was all contained and I rested easy... However like I said in my last post lava spits... a few tree's caught fire and then a few more and then all of them. The fire spread from tree to tree, I tried to cut back as many leaf's as I could but it was dark and I could only see when the fire was already near me. I gave up trying to cut down leaf's and went to my tower to see how bad it was, and then morning came so I decided to get some water and try to stop the still burning fire's, water was no help at all. So I just gave up and hoped the fire's would burn out on their own.

They kept burning till nightfall. I now have a giant waste land where a beautiful forest was... I'm going to be planting tree's for a long time...

I took screen's but I can't be assed to upload them today, I've uploaded too many already.

I was going to post screens of mine, bit I don't think I'll bother now.

Looks very very nice fen, if it was a sheared server I'd be squatting there.

Visage wrote:I was going to post screens of mine, bit I don't think I'll bother now.

Looks very very nice fen, if it was a sheared server I'd be squatting there.

Don't have to squat in there Vis I have a spare room (Made it incase I setup a server with my Nephew and used that save file) which I actually like more than my big main bedroom because my room is too big and just doesn't look quite right yet.

The rooms in my house are:

Kitchen, living room, 2 bed rooms, a work shop and an out house.


Things I'm going to add:

A green house for growing wheat, a garden just to make the house look better and an underground mass storage area for all the crap that fills up the boxes I keep interesting stuff in.


I'd like to see what you guys are doing in your worlds. I don't know about you but a funny thing I've found is that I think that I have too much cobble stone and that I'll never be able to use that much, but it's never that long till I'm running low on the stuff, no matter how many boxes I fill with the stuff.

I've been playing around with lighting since I don't want to use my glowstone unless I really have to. Under floor lighting I think is my favourite thing right now, just dig a hole deep enough to put a torch under glass and then add finishing touches. It doesn't make nearly as much light as just dropping torches around but it looks a lot nicer. I also tried putting torches under water, (torch, glass, water, glass) it looks very nice but gives next to no light off, you do have a nice bright cool blue path you can follow in the night though. What I'm going to use that for is to light the water in my green house, I was hoping I could use the light it gave off to continue growing the crops at night but I don't think it will be enough light. I don't know if I'll bother growing wheat at night, I doubt I'll need much bread, I have plenty of pork, I'm more interested in it looking nice. I could use glowstone as hanging lights in the green house but thats a bit of a waste of glowstone.

Sweet, I've been testing my green house, anyway I wasn't happy with the underwater torches when there are a lot of them because it spoils it a bit seeing them all as you walk along, but if you bury them just one block deeper you can't see them unless you look directly down as you walk over but you still get beautiful bright crystal water.

So far the green house is looking great but is a lot of work and I've no idea what I'm going to do with the walls and roof. If a Creeper gets into the thing or blows up out side it will be serious damage, most of the floor is floating above water (Didn't have to do that but I though hey why not) and a lot of the floor is glass, I'm going to keep it in peaceful mode while I build I think. I can't put any other kind of lighting in there now or it will take away from the light in the water. The green house is quite large but I'm only going to be getting 4 rows of 21 wheat from it everytime I harvest, I could have had maybe double that, so it's really not productive.

This weather update has really screwed up my house, half my house is in a snow area and the other half is normal so it ends up looking stupid, I don't know if it's because of the blue screen crash that messed up my map, my house wasn't on a snow area before. I have the choice of either leaving it looking stupid or digging up the snow everytime weather happens.

I love the weather but it really needs some changes, like it not snowing and raining together all the time, it should be independent of each other, snow should melt when it's on the ground and the weather shouldn't just be everywhere it should move maybe with the clouds, be nice actually if you had different types of cloud for each type of weather.

My gaff dug out of from the first hill I hid in on my first night, Still using “LB Photo Realism” pack






Similar shot using “john smiths” pack


View from the top of the tower.
To the left by the water is the boat house that allows me to set sail at night without attack, and in the distance just of centre right is tower 2 built this weekend, Tower 1 and the port are all connected to main building without the need to go outside.


Looking back from tower 2


Boat House


Inside tower 1 still work to do here.




And this is a shot from my Lads World and his pack of pet wolfs!! he takes them with him hunting.
I didn’t even know you could befriend the wolfs, they are a bit stupid ie fall to death in mines and walking in to cactus etc, but if you attack anything or it attacks you they fight for you.

This is growing like wild fire amongst my Sons friends, I know of at least 4 that have started playing this last weekend. and I‘ve had a few phone calls asking how to set up the texture packs and a dad asking me how I got a controller working, (I use controller for big telly it makes crafting a bit slower but perfectly functional)

And there is some talk of setting a server up, I was asked if my Son would be allowed to join a server as we have strict online rules for him, I said yes so long a myself and my friends were allowed. It will probably come to nothing but you never know.



BTW, still yet to find snow in my world

blimey you guys worlds are awesome. lovin that boathouse vis. what agreat idea. i thought stoneys was cool. fens stuff is great. yous all design stuff really well, the stuff iv built is really shamefully poor

fen iv actually got awee wheat farm under my first base's extensoion and you really dont need much before you have far too much bread. my first was surrounded buy water on three sides with an extension into the land bit. and amine under that.

my second base started as one of my wee outposts on top of a hill.

im nowonto buildin athird base next to that out of the side of ahill.



vis i get a lot of snow lieing and im forver getting bloody blizzards in my world