Blog Stuff – Page 2

August 26, 2015October 6, 2017

General server news

So things have been a little slow around ARBTland, mostly because I haven’t been online much in the past few weeks. (Stupid real life.) That said, over the past couple of weeks there have been a few changes of note.

First of all we got another visitor from WSE – Rudie! Always glad for the cross pollination between the two servers.

In terms of build news, the monument behind spawn keeps on expanding as new people come in. Rate we’re going that things going to extend into the sea. In addition to adding Rudie, FatalDeath and Billybob decided to silly up their statues by giving them tongues.

FatalDeath has been working on a wizard tower, and Rudie has also been building a very fairy-appropriate home in a large artificially created stump.

I’ve been busy too. Started working on a new skyscraper not far from Wacker Tower, loosely based on a building from SimCity BuildIt, which I’ve been also playing some on the side.

Lastly 5 has been working on a secret project under the Rainbow Balloon. Did I post pictures of that since I refinished it?

One thing I’ve been irked by since a few game updates ago – when they changed all the lighting, the ocean lost its translucency. It’s now REALLY hard to see underwater, which is a pain if you’re building something really deep under, and impossible if you’re trying to take pictures of said something, so the best I can do is sorta present a vague blob under the water taken from the surface.

In server improvement news, I’ve been waffling on transferring the game to an external server for a bit, weighing pros and cons of each platform. I’ve all but decided that I want to move the game to Pocketmine, as I have some experience with running it and it offers the most flexibility and customizability right now. But on the downside, it’s lagtastic, and mobs don’t work yet, which is a bummer; I like having random creatures roaming the world. It gives what can often be a lonely game a little bit of life. I supppose I could treat the missing mobs as a temporary problem, as the goal of PM will be to eventually replicate the full experience of the game, and its main programmer now works for Minecraft proper. The other major problem is that transferring/ MCPE worlds to PM is still an ordeal thanks to the leveldb storage format being a pain in the butt to work with/translate. I and others have put so much time and love and work into this world, so its pretty important that we continue to be able to play with it.

“And that’s Numberwang.”

July 26, 2015October 6, 2017

Featured Build of the Month: Hachi’s Base

As July is coming to a close, with it comes exciting news from Minecon, a redesign of the subreddit and many of fun server runs. FBoM is in its 2nd month and is here to highlight Hachi’s base. The first thing I like about this build is the bottom floor with the checkered pattern used on the bottom floor.

The diorite fountains are a nice touch, because they contrast well with the blue stained clay.

Going up the large staircase we enter the main room that houses the bedroom, a living room and a small bathroom. A nice detail that is present is the small canopy above the master bed.

Going up to the top floor opens up into a rooftop balcony great for watching the sun rise/set.

If you want to check out Hachi’s base for yourself, it is located near spawn, behide the farm. You will need to go past my base to locate it.

July 21, 2015October 5, 2017

Fixing and Protecting a Village: Part 3

With a somewhat secret sunday run, I decided to continue pecking away with my village project. Unfortunately while preparing for 0.12 in my own world I forgot about making some buildings for the village. So I asked ARBT for some suggestions and she replied with a suggestion for a tavern. So I took the idea and see what I could do with it. This is what I have come up with.

Entering the tavern leads us into the main seating area with a bar and grill in opposite corners.

But now by now you are wondering what those doors are on the back. Well go up those stairs and see. They are guest rooms. The middle room is a bit tricky to get into. The top floor has a balcony offer a nice view of the village as whole.

wp_ss_20150719_89 — one of the guest rooms

Something I noticed while flying over the village as a whole is that someone, maybe ARBT’s stepkid, fixed the steps to the villager houses. Beforehand they were in the way of the path. Additionally I added a small villager style pumpkin farm for future building of iron golems to help protect the villagers. In the end, I am happy to say that I am finished with fixing up this village.

July 18, 2015October 5, 2017

Making a Mob Loot and XP farm in MCPE

Note from ARBT (October, 2017): This was an unfinished post on 51 Trillion Squares, but all it’s missing is pictures. Since the mob grinder was a pretty important build, I decided to publish/include it here.

Recently, a post was made to the MCPE subreddit by someone showing off their XP mob grinder. When I saw it, I thought “Well, I’ve had one of these in my survival world since 0.9.”

Mine is very different, though. It runs off of 2 spawners close enough together that I can activate them both at the same time. It also has a switch (using a fence gate) to choose if I want to kill the mobs or get them to half a heart so I can punch them for quick XP. Here’s a tutorial (which I’ll edit if you guys say it’s not clear enough).

Watch out for lava while building. It can burn signs even through blocks. Get rid of lava.

Also, this is only for zombies and skeletons, which are also the two spawner types in the double spawner.

Sorry for the lack of pictures. I’m on mobile and putting all the images in in mobile would take way too long. I’ll add an imgur link later.

Step 1: The Spawner Room

To make any spawner grinder, you need a spawning room. Dig out a 9x9x5 room centered around the spawner. Put a water source block in one corner and slope the floor (by digging down a little more) until the entire floor is covered in water streams heading from one corner to the opposite corner. Fro that corner, dig 2 blocks out of the room in either direction.

Step 2: The First Lift (and Drop)

Standing at the end of the short hall, put a sign at where your feet are, then another 1 block over at head level. Then dig up about 10 blocks, filling up this gap with water source blocks, except for the top one. Then dig over (same direction as before) 2 blocks. Put a sign at your feet at where the water pushes you to. Then dig down 10 blocks. The bottom 5 blocks of this is where the switch will be.

Step 3: The Switch

At the bottom, dig about 5 blocks over, perpendicular to the direction you were digging before. Then pillar up 3 blocks and dig over 2 blocks in the same direction. Break the top block of the pillar and place a fence gate where it was.

Step 4: The Second Lift (and Drop)

Put a water source block on top of the fence gate and place 2 signs to hold in water like before. Then dig up 20 blocks, putting in waer source blocks like before (put a sign in about halfway through to prevent drowning). At the top, turn opposite what you picked in Step 3 (left if you picked right, right if you picked left), and dig 2 blocks. Put a sign at your feet where the water pushes you, and dig down [17 if skeleton, 23 if zombie*] blocks. Make a small room around this spot. Then go back to the switch.

Step 5: The Drown System

Remove the pillar from step 3. Put a water source block where the bottom was, and then dig up 3 blocks from where the end of the hallway is. Place the standard 2-sign water holder from before (this is the last time) and fill up all the way to the top with water. The mobs will drown here. Dig 1 block down and make a water stream to the small room from here. Use signs to keep water from spilling into the room if necessary. Then fill in this lower tunnel so the water stream fills the whole tunnel.

Step 6: Putting it All Together

Put a half slab where the mobs land for XP, and make sure you can only see half a block above the slab. Dig a small tunnel from the room to the switch that won’t obstruct anything else. You want a 1 block window that lets you see the fence gate.

At this point, the grinder is fully functional. Keep the fence gate closed if you want XP and open if you just want them to be killed. Digging up from the room to make a ladder should be ok if the rest was built correctly.

*This should be 24, but a fall damage bug in 0.11 causes 23 to be the number needed here. Once this bug is fixed, you’ll need to go up and increase the fall by one block at the top.

July 15, 2015October 5, 2017

Fixing and Protecting a Village: Part 2

The wall the main defense against (zombie) sieges. Any good village needs one. So when there was a secret sunday run, that’s what I decided to do. Thanks to ARBT for helping me with a part of the wall. Also Hachi for the suggestion of the iron bars for the gate. I am planning on redesigning the gate because it is uneven, but I will try to keep the use iron bars.

a close up of the wall — A closer view of the wall

See that big open area on the right? I decided to continue the path to from the stone brick stairs. I added a villager house and a proper blacksmith. I redesigned the blacksmith to prevent it from catching fire and to make it look like more like a actual blacksmith. Maybe I’ll add a anvil or two when 0.12 drops.

wp_ss_20150713_0002 — Please do not burn down my village

I’ll try and think of some buildings to add to the village. Any suggestions? Let me know in the comments.

July 11, 2015October 5, 2017

Fixing and Protecting a Village: Part 1

With the news of 0.12, zombies are becoming a greater threat to the servers population of villagers. I have always wanted to fix a village up, so with this I decided to start with the Troll Village. When I arrived to the village, I was greeted by the troll and a villager spawner that I could not break. The first task I started on was fixing up the roads. I replaced the gravel paths with the new grass path block.

I left the original wooden paths alone, because I wanted to keep some of the original parts of the village intact.

With one of the larger villager homes, I decided to decorate a little bit. The rest of the time I spent lighting the surrounding area and building a little hut for myself. Next run I plan to build a wall around the village. Got any designs for a wall I should take a look at? Let me know in the comments down below

June 27, 2015October 5, 2017

Mt. Servermore is now complete

A little over a month a ago I suggested a Mt.Rushmore style pixel art construction. As of today Mt.Servermore is finally complete. At first I was hesitant of my skills as a builder doing pixel art. But with some practice, I felt a bit more confident going into this project. If you are not well familiar with who is on Mt.Servermore they are from left to right: ARBT, 576875, Swarmhut, and ARBT’S Oldest Kid (who has yet to make an appearance on the server). The viewing platform is a great place to view Mt.Servermore and is accessible via a side pathway.

To find Mt.Servermore keep going down the main road from spawn and take the last left road. Huge thanks to ARBT for terraforming the hill into a proper mountain (with a secret bat cave).

June 18, 2015October 5, 2017

Featured Build of the Month: A Witch hut in the Swamps

Hello my name is 576875 and I am a regular to ARBT Server. You can call me 5 for short. I am going to start Featured Build of the Month (FBoM) series. Where I show off new and exciting builds on the server. Today I am going to feature a Witch Hut set up in a swamp.I assume this was built by ARBT. What I like about this build is that it adds a small detail, to an ordinary swamp biome. Additionally, I like the use of the oak leaves as the roof of the hut. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the interior. I will try to remember for next month’s FBoM. Until then, keep on building folks.

I'm glad real Witches are not in MCPE (yet). — I’m glad actual witches have not been added to MCPE (yet).

June 17, 2015October 5, 2017

Server and blog news!

Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.

I ran twice this week on both Monday and Tuesday nights. There have been some in-world developments. Mt. Servermore is now done (now with four faces and seekrit bat cave!), as is the Granite line of the subway – well. “Done.” It runs to Wacker Tower and stops there pending expansion. Also during Monday’s game DoublePositive (the artist formerly known as Mathguy04) first showed me and 576875 how to build mostly waterless boat launchers (two exist high in the sky above spawn) and built a steak/leather grinder near spawn house, which is weirdly fascinating. And hey, free leather and meat, right? 576875 also has built a community mineshaft around the corner from Spawn, so people should feel free to dig around in there during survival games.

The area around Spawn is about as full as I’d like it to be (more so, but nvm), so I made an official rule calling for a moratorium on building any new structures within 64 blocks of spawn in any direction. I want people to build stuff! JUST NOT NEAR SPAWN, OKAY. It’s a big world, spread out. 🙂 I made some minor updates to the rule list; please check them out before playing.

Other world news: Now that I’m hosting in Survival more often, I’m trying to keep various chests around stocked with various supplies. I’ve also taken a liking to fishing (unsurprising, I loved fishing in World of Warcraft too) and the lake base that 576875 built a while back is fantastic for it aside from occasional attacks from baby zombies. I’m also digging out the Brick line, which will terminate not far from Mt. Servermore when it’s done. (again, “done” until westward expansion.)

Just for a change of pace, I went down to the southern terminus of the Netherrack line, where there is absolutely nothing aside from a “budder” house Beastie built at some point, took a hard left onto an adjacent landmass, and switched the game into survival. Aside from the flights to and from the main continent, I’ve been playing pure survival at max difficulty in this area. I’d been stuck in Creative mode for so long that I’d forgotten what a challenge resource management and staying alive is, especially as my little island home seems to be absolutely plagued with creepers. >_< It’s a nice break from everything else though.

Post slightly edited September 2017

May 29, 2015October 5, 2017

News!

Ugh Fell out of the habit of posting here regularly. Going to try to fix that over the weekend.

Not too much new to report on the world front other than “Hey! I built some subway tunnels!” Because that’s what I’ve been working on: the two side south tracks, aka the Granite and Brick lines. They run about 12 blocks below the original subway line (mostly to get around some logistical problems – unsure whether I’ll be keeping that double deck idea in the other three directions). So far there are new platforms below the Wilshire Castle and Crystal palace lines, but the tunnels connecting the castle and the palace are nowhere near done yet.

I’d post pictures but sandhogging, much as in real life, is pretty monotonous and grueling. Of course real sandhogs get tunnel boring machines… I’d murder a score of innocent villager children for a way to dig out 5 x 5 blocks at a time. or at least copy/paste sections of tunnel considering they’re all uniform. But… pipe dreams. Anyway the one picture I’ll post is of the section of abandoned mineshaft running parallel to the Brick Line tunnel; it looked so cool I opted to glass that part of the tunnel so it would be visible to passing riders.

In OMG FLAIL SO EXCITED news, Mojang submitted 0.11.0 to the Apple app store last night, so the update will hopefully drop either this weekend while the kidlets are visiting (whoooo) or next week sometime. Depending on whether its been made available to Android/windows/kindle by Monday I may hold off on that week’s open server until everyone’s versions get caught up, since due to Apple’s approval process iOS is doomed to get it last. But yes so excited! It will no longer be a bunch of Steve clones running around! I can look like me! And since 0.11.0 will have file sharing and gamemode switch i can finally back up and run survival games again, though I’ve been enjoying the collective building on creative a lot in the meantime. Cannot. Wait.

I also started a subreddit for this last Monday because I felt a little guilty junking up the MCPE subreddit with my “please come play” announcements. So far The_Swarm_Hut and 576875 have been doing a great job so far keeping it lively in there. Hoping I can pull in a few other reddit people who have visited as well. Link is on the sidebar.

Lastly I’m looking into ways to get this game off my phone and onto either a dedicated Android device or resurrecting my main desktop and emulating Android there via Andy or Bluestacks. Several reasons for this – despite a desperately needed battery transplant last weekend, this game is murdering my poor old iPhone. 😛 More than that though, there is clearly interest in a laid back griefer-free server, and people like tooling around my builds, so i want to find a way to leave it running more than Monday nights. I would also like more server controls (and less lag) that Plug PE offers, hence looking into jumping platforms. Ideally I’d love to run it on Pocketmine since php is my jam and I enjoyed running a server for me and the kids before 0.9.0, and the customizability of the gameplay experience was really appealling, but development on it seems to have stalled and there’s still no way to port LevelDB worlds into it as yet, so boo to that. Also it does look like someone’s developed a map tool for Android that works and y’all know how I’ve been wanting one of THOSE. So… hopefully I can get something more permanent set up by end of summer. More on that as it develops.