Category: MCPE News

Posted on

Starting all over

screenshot from the game Minecraft, depicting forested terrain with a house and a tower in the distance.

Typical Andee syndrome – I have so many things going on and projects in the fire that often things get neglected. Like my games for one thing. I’ve barely had time to deal with real life let alone play games!

A friend of mine was raving about the Minecraft Update Aquatic this week (it’s been out for at least three weeks now, shows you how out of the loop I’ve been) and so I decided to check it out, and oh my, is it pretty. This got me back into wanting to build things and tinker around with the new stuff I hadn’t really played around with, and I got to thinking about the main ARBTServer map and how I’ve exposed so much of it in the last few years that I’d have to hike quite a ways through the Nether to find any new ground to generate new stuff on. That and we have only occasional outside traffic these days… So I made the difficult decision to archive it. That map, which I’ll probably forever think of as the Main Map, I’m renaming V.2. The old survival map will be version 3, and the newly rebooted map, which is now live, is v.4.

Speaking of which, yes, the server’s back up, and I’ve completely rebooted the map. I played around with Mineatlas for a little while after deciding I wanted to start fresh, looking at other seeds to try, and after awhile I was just like… you know what… same seed. Just start from scratch. What with all the new stuff since the last time I’ve generated a new map with this seed I figured there’d be a few slight differences in the terrain, and there are, but it still looks familiar, if not quite the same. I’ve already put in a new Spawn House, and there’s a beacon tower already at World Center (0,0) that will eventually become the center of a new rail system, because you can take the woman out of the subway but you can’t take the subway out of the woman apparently.

I’ll miss the old map, but the beauty of archives is that there isn’t anything preventing me from bringing it back one day.

In other game news, I am not sure when I’ll be back to Twitch or just regular game playing, as again… too many irons in the fire. Hopefully sometime soon.

Posted on

A map! Finally!

Hey ARBiTors!

The blog’s been kinda neglected lately, I apologize. Too many irons in the fire lately, and too intimidating of a backlog of server pictures and posts to do. A quick update before I get to the big news.

We’ve been 24 hours for a little less than a month! Well, I say 24 hours, lol. I will admit the time has certainly had its share of wonkyness between my internet doing its best impression of a yo-yo and the occasional crash. For the most part though, the happy little tablet has played happy host to the world and seems to be working out well aside from a few hiccups.

I’m a little disappointed that I couldn’t get mods really working on it, as apparently blocklauncher doesn’t work on Intel tablets at all, so right now we’re strictly vanilla MCPE. I’m kinda of dimply amused that right now the best tool I’d found for running the game like a server was Plug for PE (once they’d bug fixed it anyway – and you still can’t TP grrr) for iThing, which considering the Android mod and customizability hype was a little disappointing, but live and learn.

We also have another world! (ohh, gotta add it to the world page…) well, sorta. I started Survival Sunday, where I rebooted the server from seed and build in survival move with no mode switch cheating. That seems to be working quite well also, and certainly gave me a chance to dig out another one of my famously labyrinthine underground bases. Pictures sometime! (Maybe…)

So the big news today:

Map of ARBTServer

This is a composite of three overhead views generated by MCPE Viz. I strongly suggest checking this out if you want a visualization tool for your world, it is pretty freaking awesome.

MCPE Viz also generates a browser visualization tool, and I may upload that to the site at some point (it also maps the Nether!) but first I have to go through and crop/rotate all the generated images because… um, they are huge. Like 18208px x 16208px, 10MB a pop huge. Yeah, you thought that map above was huge, yeah that’s the center section, lol. I apparently did a lot of flying around and exposing the map.

GTG, off to finally find me some strongholds. I’ll probably post a few more map shots and talk about them in the coming week. And yeah, I’m going to try to post more often.

Posted on

The Back-From-Hiatus Runs

OMG y’all I am SO behind on posting LOL. So a quick recap on what is New, Improved and Different on the ARBTserver:

  • We had a new face from WSE visit on Monday: welcome Kyster!

  • There is now a road extension from the Pyramid, through the huge desert biome and ending at the village Hachi discovered a few runs back.

  • The ARBTServer monument has been extended, with two more spaces added for statues. May shove it out two more spaces just so ARBT lines up in the middle evenly again, haven’t decided.

  • I’ve finished reskinning the hot air balloon. It is now a riotous rainbow. And the inside jungle has been growing nicely.

  • While scouting coastline for a Mystery Build, I stumbled across Village #4 southwest of spawn. More roadbuilding in my future, no doubt.

  • I have also started a Mystery Build a ways from Spawn. Lets just say last weeks’ trip to Martha’s Vineyard left me rather… inspired.

Speaking of which, the downside of the Nether coming in the next update is no more nether reactor. 🙁 I’m going to have to find a few spots for random netherrack spires just for the hell of it before it disappears entirely.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Server Time, and MCPE 0.11.0 news!

Monday night server time was had tonight! I only had two guests tonight: 576875 and Team Heath Bar, but a good time was had arrowing mobs, adopting wee cows (one of whom THB has dubbed Mr. Moo) and 5 has started a farm at the Spawn House so folk coming in don’t have to scrounge around for food, initially. I’m starting to quite look foward to my weekly visitors. 🙂

In belated OMG! News, turns out the rumors swirling about the MCPE 0.11.0 beta were legit, and y’all lucky folks with Android devices do indeed get to beta test it. Some of the pictures released are massively exciting. While I’m envious of my Android compadres as a non-jailbroken iOS user, I am still excited because beta test now = update SOON.

So what am I excited for in MCPE 0.11.0? Lots.

  • Boats! Cause swimming/flying across oceans is a pain.
  • Skins! Steve I love you, but you and i need to see different people and as a black lady gamer I’m tired of playing as a goateed white guy. Sorry not sorry. I made a new skin that’s all ready to go even.
  • “new” mobs! Bats, Squids, fish and cave spiders may be old news to all y’all PC Minecraft players but they will be entirely new to me. Doesn’t seem to be ocelots yet, so I’ma have to be patient for a while longer before I can have a creeper scaring kitty cat in game.
  • Dyeable doggie collars! Cause being about to tell which dogs are who would be nice, lol.
  • Gamemode Switch! For real, not just hacking the level.dat! that’d be real nice because creative mode with no flying and still getting hurt? Not fun. Might as well be playing in survival with Plug on spamming the give command. 😛

I am cautiously excited about the option to make old worlds infinite. I don’t know if I’d be up for going back to either the Hunt world or the Dreamscape world and expanding them that way. Honestly, if I could find some way of dropping both worlds and their accompanying projects somewhere in my current infinite map I’d do that instead, seeing as I’ve sunk so much time into the current map. I am glad to finally be able to rename my main world though – not that I’ve thought up a good enough name for it yet.

So yeah – SOON.

There doesn’t seem to be a WBC up on Reddit this week, as the sticky post has been hijacked by the MCPE 0.11.0 bug reports posts. Which is good, in a way – In among the other stuff I want/need to do this week, I need to seriously sit down and actually finish the prison dungeon build I’ve been working on for awhile, and then start sketching up the next couple of builds I’ve had percolating in the meantime, not to mention do some exploring in uncharted territory. Still on the lookout for a PC mapping tool that will work with the MCPE leveldb. And I need to make posts about my other builds too. So much to do, so little time!