5punk

Seeeecreeeet friiiiiiday updaaaaaate

according to the minecraft blog comments

Higher clouds

Reeds grow on grass near water
3 reeds in a horizontal line = 3 paper
Book recipe unknown, thought to involve leather and string

Slimes appear underground, they may grow very large
Slime ball obtained from slimes?

Bluish-white stone
Bluish-white powder

Ooh, interesting. Makes me wonder what direction this is all going in. Shame I won't be able to play until next weekend.

Dog Pants wrote:Makes me wonder what direction this is all going in.

Notch and some inner circle Minecraft nerds did an audio stream a couple of days ago. Discussing suggested ideas and what the plans are for the future. From what I paid attention to it sounds like Notch doesn't have any real concrete plans. But he mentioned Diablo as an influence on the item crafting side of things, if I heard correctly. Mostly it sounds like he's adding stuff and seeing what works.

Unfortunately it's unlikely we'll see proper seasons due to the way the infinite map is handled. Apparently it's not practical to attempt to propagate the change of a season across infinity. Excuses, excuses.

If you fancy a listen it's here: http://www.livestream.com/mojang/video? ... 13a41fe246
Skip the first 7 minutes.

I know he's mentioned that he wants magic in the game, so paper could be used for that. Maybe that's what the blue-white dust is too. Seasons might not be practical for infinite maps, but he's already mentioned limiting MP games to a set size. Otherwise you could get players fucking off in every direction and crashing the server. He's really got his development screwed down though - he's working pretty fast, listening to reasonable criticism and suggestions, ignoring the idiots.

Dog Pants wrote:Seasons might not be practical for infinite maps, but he's already mentioned limiting MP games to a set size. Otherwise you could get players fucking off in every direction and crashing the server.

I could be totally wrong but I got the impression from the chat that this limitation doesn't apply. Only the local area around the players is handled, what's within view I'd guess. So two players could be miles apart, the engine would maintain the local areas and coordinates of where the players are relative to the spawn point, or some other fixed point. All the rest of the map is static data.

Yeah but it's static data that takes up hard drive space. It'd take quite an effort, but feasibly a lot of players could suck up a lot of drive space. I was a bit disappointed when I read it (I think he put it on his blog), but I can understand why, and with the amount of area it'd take to generate hundreds of GB wirth of terrain I'd say the set areas would be huge too. However, he might have changed his mind since I read that.

MP got an accidental public test last night when the server password was leaked to "a couple of large communities". Judging by the type of comments on his blog I'd guess that one was 4Chan. And apparently it went really well! Yay!

The server is still up now apparently. The password is "!!Thomas!!" but you're unlikely to get on as it's full.

I had an idea for a pocket watch, so you can tell the time underground or if you don't have a good view of the sky. Made from gold and red stuff or diamond. Like this:

With this in your possession you get a time display on your HUD. A simple sun and moon dial would probably be appropriate. You could also have a sundial one made of stone and a stick in the middle, which isn't very useful. And perhaps one in between made of iron and something which can only show if it's night or day, a binary dial. What do you think? I was going to suggest it on the Minecraft forum.

/edit
Never mind, I remembered the Google Moderator thing and it's already been thought of.

Well I like it anyway, and hadn't seen it before. It would be nice to know if it's day or night outside so you can go up and get wood (arf) during the day. A compass would also be useful for not losing where your home is.

Dog Pants wrote:A compass would also be useful for not losing where your home is.

I like that idea and I was going to say it could be used in conjunction with a "north stone": A solid block on iron placed in your base so the compass always points to where you live. But then Ilooked at Moderator again. The Internet proves there are no original ideas.

I like that idea. Also, a thing (bed?) that'll set your spawn point.

Notch's blog wrote:In more concrete news, I noticed that BIGJam starts next week. I will release the SMP server before I leave for that. It might be buggy, but I promise to fix it when I get back. It will be missing mobs. Mobs will come later on, and when they’re in, the game will officially be in beta, and the price will go up to 14.95 euro.

Someone made the video I couldn't be bothered to:

Minecraft Alpha Tutorial - How to Survive your First Night

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VWnQHS-ffs[/media]
It explains everything so it'll be of use even if you've not touched any of the Minecraft game modes. As before this is not for the free version.

I just bought this yesterday and I got pwned by a spider my first night. I then built a little hole in the wall and put a door in but a skeleton managed to survive the daylight and I had to dig out another way.

The video's better at explaining stuff to a newb like me than anything else I've seen. I bought it a while back, but after punching a few sheep got bored before it was night time.

Yeah there's a mountainous learning curve to begin with, but once you "get it" the game is a lot more fun. Even though there's no real point yet.

Today I found an additional method to survive the first night, apart from digging a hidey-hole or finding a tall plateau, is to find a small island just offshore. Put down some torches so the enemy mobs can't spawn and that's all you need, so long as there's no bridge to the shore and you don't bait the mobs to cross shallow water.

deject wrote:but a skeleton managed to survive the daylight

If they're in shade they wont burn, under a tree for instance. Or if the Sun is not high enough yet.

It took me a while to find any coal for torches. Hopefully now that I made some I'll be fine. I made a sign to help me locate my hole in the side of the cliff because it's impossible to find where I am in relation to it unless I pay very close attention to it.

Think I'll have to watch it again, couldn't work out how to take my workbench with me and couldn't make torches - I think I'd misidentified oil/rock as coal.

FatherJack wrote:Think I'll have to watch it again, couldn't work out how to take my workbench with me and couldn't make torches - I think I'd misidentified oil/rock as coal.

To pick it up just hit it until it turns into a small block then you'll automatically pick it up.

punch your workbench a bit to pick it up.

flint and coal look pretty similar, coal is unmistakably black.