So I finally FINALLY had a few minutes of uninterrupted downtime today to play Super Mario Odyssey on the Switch. I hadn’t gotten out of the Sand Kingdom yet and both the Beasts are WAY ahead of me so putting in some catch up time was overdue. So I finished up with the boss (That is an awesome boss battle, btw!) and played a couple of the little minigames that unlock when you do… and then I ran into The Puppy.
So there’s a dog wearing a little pork-pie hat in the town just wandering around. If you follow him and try to play with him (translation, bonk him with Cappy a few times) he’ll lead you a little ways into the desert to a beam of light emitting from the sand. If you ground pound the beam, you get a Moon. Standard side quest stuff. What I was not ready for was for the dog to become your BFF for the rest of the time you stay in the Sand Kingdom, loyally trotting around after you wherever you go. You can even play fetch with him if you toss Cappy for him to chase, and it is the Cutest. Thing. EVER.
Go get it, boy!Who’s the best boy in all the Kingdoms? It’s you.
And then this happens.
Noooooo, puppy. 🙁
He can’t get on the Odyssey with you. He’ll look distressed and then do this thing where he’ll stand up to follow you, and then sit, and then stand up again. And you’re like… nooo new puppy friend, I want to take you with me! But the game won’t let me!
Not gonna lie, I was a little bit heartbroken to have to take off for the Lake Kingdom without my hat wearing buddy. I guess in this game there can only be one faithful companion on this adventure. Damn you, Cappy!
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:
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.
Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.
A fairly low key evening was had tonight, with a concentration on finishing up builds people had started earlier.
5 and Swarm finished the minigame arena they’ve been working on.
you’ll pay full price for your seat BUT YOU’LL ONLY NEED THE EEEEEEEEEEDGE!Step right up and take a shot.
There is spleef, archery, King of the hill, fishing and parkour to compete in. May the best person win!
One of these things is not like the others…
Henry10030 meanwhile finished up his base and topped it off with a giant statue of themselves. Obviously so we don’t forget what they look like, lol.
Hachi’s (question mark?)
Hachi has been working on… well, I still haven’t figured out what this is supposed to be. I just know that it is awesome.
and it looks like a clock from the top!
To the south, Double Positive worked on several mob grinders of various sizes/mobs farms. Hence “SPAWNER LAND” written large friendly quartz letters.
A day view of Spawaner Land.
We are still plagued with connection issues around 7:30 pm evey server run. I’ve tried prioritizing udp requests, periodically dumping the phone cache , closing all background app, etc and nothing really seems to help. Fortunately it seems to only be a thing in the earlier parts of the evening. More incentive to make this a Proper Server, though I did have a conversation with Hachi today weighing the pros an cons of running an Android mobile emulator (more stable, working mobs, not glitchy gameplay / max 5 players, lag) vs pocketmine (more people on at once, better computer resource management, no lag, php programmable / mobs and game behavior glitchy as all get out). All of that are problems for Future ARBT to tackle at some later point; Present ARBT needs to log off and get some sleep!
Most of this weekend’s build work included laying a ~1115 block segment of road running from a brick house* I’d mostly finished a few weeks ago (just had to add the roof) to the mostly unexplored northwestern shoreline. This was slightly more of a pain in the neck than usual (literally at some points throughout Sunday even) because after last Monday’s server session I’d left my game set on survival for Reasons.** After having my game mostly creative for the past little while, I’d kinda forgotten how arduous building a Large Thing in Survival mode is, even if you’re using Plug to cheat a little with regard to tools and inventory. Arduous, but somehow satisfying.
Anyway, I did finish the road (and the house, which I’m calling Rose House, not Brick… hoooooooooouse***), and since Survival mode did slow me up a little it meant I had time to stop and appreciate the scenery along the way.
Rose House from the road.
I was experimenting with a different roof shape on this house. Very unsure if like.
Back of Rose House
We’re getting ready for boats, hence the dock in the back. Also if you look carefully through the water you can see the double basement.
Off in the distance…
I really love having my view distance hacked to 255 blocks. it doesn’t seem to slow up my gameplay much, aside from an uptick in chunk errors. Still, a view like that… worth it.
Tiptoe… through the tulips… with me…Another stunning view!Sunset over the cliffs
I have a horrific compulsion to take pictures at sunset. Minecraft sunsets are just so PRETTY now.
Shore Cave
I decided it would be really cool to have the road end emerging through this cave. I wanted to take a before picture first through.
Also can I just say I love that Plug gives you access to coordinates? It makes road planning way easier.
All roads have an end.
But this road ends emerging triumphantly through a cave!
Night and day
The other thing I like to do is if I found something super pretty, I like to stand in one spot and take a lot of pictures. This is the first time I’ve spliced those time-lapsed screenshots into one picture though, and I like how it came out. Might print and frame it even.
So yeah, now we have come… to the ENNNNNND OF THE ROOOOOOOOAD.****
behold, a Boyz II Men song.
Meanwhile in B plot land, 576875 showed up for a bit on Sunday afternoon to work on the farm they’re building across from Spawn House so players don’t have to go ranging far and wide for food. It’s coming along nicely. As of last night it did not have a roof, 5 put that in tonight.
576875’s farmCrops and lights
By the way, holy cats, it’s actually really hard and frustrating trying to lead livestock into a confined area. I’d only done it with sheep before, and they’re dumb enough to follow you relentlessly anywhere so long as you’re holding wheat. Cows, pigs and chickens aren’t nearly so cooperative.
Moooooooooooo
They will however get RIGHT up in your grill though.
While fishing the above pictured cow out of the river and trying to lead it back to the farm, I stumbled across a house built by mathguy04 a few sessions back.
mathguy04’s house.
One of the reasons I’m really enjoying having guest players is that they bring some fresh ideas and building styles into my world. For example 5’s farm system of placing down a square of water for the crops, placing a slab one block over it, and then having a floating glowstone block above that as a crop light. I also really liked how mathguy framed the giant bay window of his house entirely with doubled slabs, which gives it a neat look. So yeah, live and learn. Reminds me, his house is missing a bed, I may go back and leave one and a houseplant for him as a housewarming present.
Hopefully I’ll have more news from the open server front soon. I’m open all week but haven’t been advertising it much. Hopefully I’ll get a few more folks in later in the week or over the weekend. Also I’m so behind on the build posts front. I’ll tackle that project this week I think.
* she’s mighty mighty… letting it all hang out ayyyy she’s a brick… HOOOOOOOOOUUUUSE… sorry, couldn’t help myself.
** Reasons being I wanted to hack in iron doors for the prison build, which is coming along. Hopefully done this week.
I mentioned I liked browsing Brutalism tumblrs and other images for inspiration for Minecraft builds. One day I happened across a pictures of the Blue Cross Blue Shield building in Chicago, IL.
Apparently Hertz has been around a while.
The building still stands, although it’s been given a bit of a facelift and the more generic moniker of “55 West Wacker.” (It nevertheless has made several “Chicago’s ugliest buildings” lists, which seems a little unfair – I’ve seen way uglier examples of Brutalism.) It also now has very tall neighbors on all sides but the front, rendering all those pretty windows useless and making the building itself look a little squat by comparison. Nevertheless something about this building held my attention. Maybe it was all those pretty windows.
Oh hey look, I figured out how to make WordPress galleries work, go me.
View from the road.
Sunset
Every floor has different colored carpet, or a different (often purposefully hideous) checked pattern
Side corner view, showing the pools.
Door to the lobby.
Lobby
Third floor. The rest of them are pretty identical.
Looking down the stairs.
The one bed at this build.
The Basement!
There was a natural cave here when I started building the tower. It was mostly walled off by the pools but I carved out this stairwell down to it so I could continue to mine for materials.
View of the southwest roads.
The southeast roads. You can see the sheep farm I built to supply all the carpet. Also 3 houses.
Another view of the sheep farm.
Looking off across the swamp to Baori.
The road north, looping back on itself.
Another look at Baori from the top level (which isn’t the roof!)
This building was my last big MCPE build in cheat-less Survival and as such it was a pain in the butt. It’s the reason why there are five nether reactor tower corpses across the samd biome (for all the glowstone and quartz) and spruce trees in an oak biome. And the poor rainbow sheep in the farm. Even with the Shear button I still accidentally punched all of them at least once getting carpet. And I still haven’t cleaned up all the supply trunks from in front either – figured their content’s’ll be useful for when I get bored and switch back into Survival. Still, oddly enough, for all the time and frustration in building it, it’s probably second only to Seuss Library in my list of favorite builds so far.
World: Main Location: -120, 71,-427) Build Mode: Survival Build completed: Early October, 2014
As part of a weekly challenge about subways on the MCPE subreddit I made a video of my subway. The video’s a little long, boring and dorky, but it does improve about halfway through when Beastie shows up and wants to know what I’m doing.
