It has been a busy few days on the server between Saturday night and the usual Monday run. After a long busy Saturday I decided after I came home that I was going to put my feet up and play MCPE and I might as well do it with extra company, so I put the call out on the subreddit and even put a little announcement in /r/MCPE since it was a special irregular run. Had so many folk show up and hang and start building things that I decided I’d run Sunday night too. And of course, Monday night, because Monday Night. All three nights were great, despite periodic connection problems and spontaneous game crashes… people had a good time tho.
We have two new players late of Worst Sever Ever – Hachi and FatalDeath (or VitalLife depending on their level of humorous nihilism) We’ve also seen quite a bit of Henry10030 and DoublePositive, and of course 576875 and Swarm. At one point during Monday’s Survival/anything goes run (between game crashes) I managed to get the group pic in the last post. You know what I’m going to post it again because it was awesome.
<3
We hit a server milestone on Monday! A good portion of that night’s game was at full five player + host capacity. That was certainly a thing! Never had that many on at once before.
the server… is full… [/strongbad]The 4 Guardians accidentally acquired names in an offhand comment to Hachi. They are now Icky, Stinky, Yucky and Clyde. As to which one is which… does it really matter? lol.
New Things built:
Swarmhut added an advertisement board during Monday’s run, having a forgotten I was intending to wipe and restore after the game. (Oops.) I liked the idea so much I put it back in after I restored the game, and also started to revamp the Pillar of Rules at spawn. I think it’s going to be more of a Fence of Rules eventually.
but was Kilroy here?
Hachi built an awesome house near Mt. Severmore!
Remains awesome despite me forgetting to turn off the GUI.
I love the white umbrella/canopy above it – reminds me of something out of the Super Mario Mushroom Kingdom.
Meanwhile FatalDeath is working on a colossus standing across the road near spawn. So far they’ve gotten the skeleton completed but that by itself looks cool:
Fatal’s Colossal Skeleton.
Meanwhile, Swarmhut and 576875 are working on a minigame tournament space. Parkour! Fishing! Spleef! Chills! Thrills! You’ll pay for a whole seat but you’ll only need the edge!
um, picture when they get further along.
Some of us wanted to go down to the basement of 5’s fishing house after the group picture to clobber zombies. There was a disorganized effort to reset spawns by sleeping, during which I tossed a bed out on one of the patios to sleep outside.
It’s really hard to sleep with a creepy dog staring at you.
After zombie clobbering fun was had, the last two hours of Monday’s game we decided it was all rules off. The free-for-all that resulted was epic, and the area around spawn just became this mess of creeper craters and forts:
Thank goodness for backups and restores. 😉 Even my PvP-disliking self got in on the fun in the last 45 minutes, which is where I found out that I’m a much better long range shot than short range shot. Which is to say both are terrible but I hit things/people more often at ridiculously long distances.
Things are certainly livening up on my little server, that’s for sure. There’s something a little humbling about reading a “hey, anyone know any good servers?” and seeing my name come up in recommendations immediately after Worst Server Ever. That’s a certainly a compliment! Couldn’t do this without my gang – there’s still some debate on whether they’re the ARBFans or the ARBiTors of Justice – They’re really the reason my little one-woman world has become such an awesome place to hang out and play.
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 actual witches have not been added to MCPE (yet).
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.
Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.
Ah, nothing like the first week after a major update drops. It’s like having a picnic next to a frog pond – so many bugs, lol.
My main annoyance is that Plug PE is totally borked after the update. There has been an update this weekend which restored some functionality like coordinates, but due to some incompatibility with 0.11.x they had to remove teleporting. Ah well. Back to taking the long way places. Didn’t much matter anyway as plug repeatedly crashed out while running game to the point where I just gave up and quit trying to run it. I do hope that gets fixed soon.
Two more bugs that are making server runs a right pain is 1) a lot of times other players spawn in what appears to be the void (really just the terrain not loading in right away) with a really jittery, shakey view of the sky. People playing tonight disconnected, reconnected, couldn’t really get on and tried again for most of the night. 😛 Also I’m apparently invisible to some users. Gonna have to ask the Reddit crew what devices they’re using, as I suspect maybe a platform issue or a skin compatibility problem or something.
Aside from those irritating bits, it was a fun and productive run. Two new folk to the server today: welcome Henry10030 and pedro! Please stop by again.
In world development news, I’ve finished as much of the Granite Line of the subway as I’m going to bother doing until I start building stuff out east. As it is, it terminates at Wacker Tower. Also looks like the Brick Line may terminate at Mt. Servermore, which is coming along both in the faces and in the “mountain” I’m terraforming around it. I’ve been taking pictures of stuff, other players, and myself doing things because yay new skin. I’ll post those soon.
Yep, just another evening in the world of Minecraft.
While I work on subway tunnels, get caught up on documenting previous builds, and chomp at the bit waiting for 0.11.0 to appear in my update list, I figured I’d post something small, and noticed I haven’t used the Minecraftspiration tag yet. Clearly that needs to be fixed.
At some point – not super soon cause OMG busy and stuff, and also because I am still burnt out on using sandstone after GCT – I think I’d like to build a ziggurat, probably based on Ur. I mean, look at that picture. It is screaming to be recreated in cubes. I already have a pyramid build, and its not bad for something constructed when this world was still strictly vanilla survival, but I’d like to build something ridiculously huge. Why not a giant Mesopotamian temple?
what it probably looked like from the air.
I’d have to find a desert biome big enough to build it in, but this could probably happen.
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.
Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.
I kinda fell off the face of the earth in terms of updating various blogs and journals. Sometimes real life (and chronic illness, unfortunately) catches up with me. I want to post on Monday’s server run (it was quiet due to problems with new settings in the updated Plug PE) and take pics of the various things 576875 and Swarmhut have been building. I’ll get around to those posts at some point, but here’s the big exciting news – aside from retail spaces and the food court 576875 is building on the mezzanine, Grand Central is finished!
It’s going to be a very very VERY long time until I work with any kind of sandstone again, lol. Several weeks of a big build using nothing but and I am thoroughly sick of looking at it. Still, I’m really proud of this build, it came out awesome and even though I have a few problems with the final build (mostly aesthetic stuff)… yeah.
But enough blather. PICTURES. There are many.
The Terminal from the road.Looking northwest.a view from the top.
So in preparation for boats, I dug some small canals around the station so that it wouldn’t entirely block off the river surrounding it on three sides. I honestly should have built one straight across on the north side. Might still.
Looking at the station from the North.Northeast CornerPeeking in from the North windows.South entrance.window illumination outside
I took lots of pictures inside the Grand Concourse. Mostly from similar angles, oops.
Dim and empty.Sunrise.View from the floor.Information needed?I sort of made Orion and then put more “stars” around him.Looking south.MoonriseLooking East from the roof.I like the pattern of light here.One of the corner antechambers.
I’m not sure what to do with these rooms in the corners. Maybe additional reading/waiting space?
I haven’t managed to do much in terms of retail space (the real Grand Central is packed with shops), but there are at least four spaces under the grand staircases that I’ve managed to do things with.
some delicious cake for sale.No one seems to be here.A book for your journey perhaps?Flower shop.
A quick peek downstairs to see what 576875 has been up to.
Staircase down.Food court in progress.
Looks good so far!
Finally my favorite thing – stand on the roof of whatever I’ve built, batman style, and enjoy the view around it.
The road rambles on in the distance.The road stretching east.The river and flatlands to the northeast
So yeah, there you have it. And now I have a tiny chunk of home in my minecraft world. 🙂 I suppose I ought to get cracking on expanding the subway in its various directions, lol. Soon.
World: Main Location: -1665 65 -3 Creation Mode: Creative Build completed: Post date
Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.
Made a fair amount of progress in the past few days on GCT. It’s starting to actually resemble its inspiration now…
Chunk error.
…well okay, when there aren’t huge holes in the floor/wall. Also there is apparently a HUGE cave system under the south tracks. Going to have to investigate that later.
track level from the corner.
Track level is done, lit, and has a ceiling. One of the challenges of this build was how to keep the various levels lit without having a mess of torches, something that proved challenging as GCT has >6 block high ceilings. This became much easier once I realized that light passes through stairs and I could hide glowstone behind “moldings.”
Mezzanine floor
Time to do the next story! I’ve since finished up the mezzanine level.
The center column of the mezzanine level.Mezzanine staircases going both up and down.Mezzanine lights
It’s currently a big empty room bracketed by the two staircases on either side. I may put in some vendor booths and cafe tables later. The real station has a fancy food court and a branch of the NYC transit museum on this level.
I’m still working on the main level but so far it looks awesome.
View from East Staircase.Info BoothTicket office.The West Grand Staircase.
The grand staircases were annoying to design and build, and I ended up trying three different things before settling on this, and then I had to build it from scratch an extra time since I had a game crash and none of the work I’d done that afternoon saved. D’oh!
Honestly I should have known the game was a little screwy – I cam up to work on one of the starcases to find that all of the stairs I’d put down had oriented themselves facing north.
Thats a weird looking glitch.
I didn’t get a picture but some of the stairs I’d placed upside down in places had also turned themselves around. It was a little creepy looking I won’t lie. But then the game crashed and I had to start over, but the nice thing about having to build a thing twice is that you’ve already worked out the kinks so it goes a lot faster the second time around.
Peeking down the stairs.
This is just the top of the staircases down to Mezzanine level.
So, yeah, it’s coming along. Maybe a little slower than I’d like, but I’d been busy this week with other stuff.
I realized earlier that I hadn’t made my post-open-server post this week, so I’ll just take this moment to thank The_Swarm_Hut, Mathguy40, 576875, and Brandonthekid-don’t-remember-your-reddit-handle-lol for coming. 5’s underwater surprise seems to be coming along, while The_Swarm_Hut built a bunch of neat stuff by spawn. I’ll probably make a separate post about this tomorrow, but I’ma need folks to start ranging a bit away from spawn for building stuff – the area by Spawn House is filling up quite a bit. 🙂 But yeah, it was a good open server night, and being able to play with friendly company was nice after a long and unfortunately crappy day beforehand. I will be running tomorrow night at 6, hope to see folks there.
Busy busy busy, working on stuff. GCT is coming along and I will hopefully be able to post a batch of new pictures by the end of the weekend, after I’ve had a few hours to really go nuts with working on it.
I know I’ve mentioned that one of the main reasons I’m looking forward to 0.11.0 is that finally, FINALLY we will get to have skins.
I am a black cisfemale gamer and any game that gives me the option of being a black woman in-universe is an extra bit of win. Its interesting because I feel like the first question anyone is going to ask me is why I would want to play as myself when games are fantasy and I could escape into being not-me. I see the point, but really it comes down to representation – I think I would be more inclined to want to escape playing myself if I had more opportunities to actually play myself, if that makes any sense.
I guess long story short? Dear lord, I’m tired of being Steve, lol.
One of the things I’ve been working in in anticipation of Yay! Skins! is, in fact a skin. I’d been playing with a bunch of skin editors on my phone and found Skinseed seems to work best for me. (The app itself is buggy and riddled with ads.) Anyway since I kinda such at pixel art type stuff I found a skin I liked as a base and spent about a week tinkering with until I had something that I both really really liked and that looked like, well, me. Only, you know, boxy and pixelated. Big wide world, meet ARBT:
Gold sword sold separately.
For comparison’s sake, this is what I actually look like. On a good day anyway.
Aside from it being red yarn instead of purple and, well, glasses, I think it’s a reasonably good likeness. 🙂 I’m really happy with how the skin came out, and I can’t wait to actually play as her. Me. Whatever! I mean, sure I’ll still sound like a burly dude with a goatee when I get hit, but hey I’ll look awesome doing it. Even better, I’ll look like me doing it.
Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.
I feel a little bad starting a completely new build when I’m still technically not finished with Bad Joke Prison (I’ll explain it when I post about it), or a lot of the last little fiddly details of Wilshire castle or Sand Baori, though they look awesome as is and I shouldn’t stress about it. I mean when you really get down to it there some detail work I haven’t finished on the Crystal Palace. and that was months ago. I’m really excited about this build though, and after my nerdrage of last week, plus some real life Stuff Happening, things to get excited about = win.
I’d considered teasing what it’s going to be, but I’m terrible with that sort of thing, so in case you couldn’t figure it out from the title:
Grand Central Terminal, New York, NYThis is a multi-layered challenge for me. One, this is the first time I’m building something based on a place I’ve actually been, as opposed to seeing a picture of somewhere and thinking “ooh, that looks cool” and building something with a LOT of imagination and creative license filling the gaps. Not only that, this is one of my favorite places on earth. To a native New Yorker who is also mad for all things having to do with railed transport, Grand Central is like… you know what, there aren’t even words. I guess the closest I would come up with is a devout Catholic getting to visit the Vatican. So there’s an emotional component in this build. This isn’t to say there won’t be creative license taken with it – it’s not going to be a dead accurate model by a long shot – but I hope to capture the feel, the grandness, if you will, of this train station by the time I’m done.
But before I get into how I’m doing with that so far, a common question from people visiting my open runs is “how the heck did you build this subway and how long did it take you?” I usually answer something along the lines of “in sections, and for-freaking-ever,” but since I had to expand the tract from its former northern terminus at Wilshire Castle on up to the GCT site, I figured I’d try documenting the process a little.
I will note that building said subway expansion is a crapton easier now that Plug gives me coordinates. Now that I know the extant subway runs at (x, 42, -3), all I have to do is line up x.
Lets say Point A is where the existing subway ends and point B is where the new station/end/next build will be. The first thing I do is dig a 1×2 tunnel all the way end to end.
what the initial tunnel looks like from point B.Honestly this part can be the most tedious, especially when either a) you don’t know where precisely you’re going because you don’t have access to coords and are therefore counting off every time you move forward a square or b) you DO know where you’re going and you’re all like “what, I’ve only gone 100 blocks? and I have 500 more to go?”
also bad if 2 block high spaces trigger claustrophobia.Then once you have your teeny Steve-sized tunnel you get to go back through it, laying down TNT in intervals. You can also just keep digging it out by hand/tool. Either way this process involves running back and forth through your tunnel a LOT.)
Pro-tip: do not place TNT on cobble fences.Tedious as it is the fun part is if you do this correctly, you light the TNT at one end and then it just keeps going off in thin this lovely chain of explodey all the way to the other end. It’s kind of hilarious because it only goes so far as the couple of chunks you can see, and then you walk forward a few minutes later and OH NO MORE SPLODE. It’s pretty glorious.
But then the funs over and you have detritus to clean up. Ugh.
we’re gonna need a few more pickaxes.If you’re in creative mode, this is where “bulldozing” comes in handy, especially if a) you’re flying b) you have blocks above you to clear. Get your face level with the line of blocks you want to clean out, then tap and hold. You’ll dig out the six blocks in front of you and then stop. Keep holding, but hit the forward arrow at the same time. Watch the blocks in front zip apart as fast as you can fly at them. Makes things a lot less tedious. It does also work with blocks directly in front of you on the ground, but you do run the risk of jumping if you don’t time it right. Still – practice! Anything that makes clearing a large number of block faster = win.
It’s getting better…I dig out a five block high by five across square for my subway, and then line it with cobblestone on the top and sides. The bottom gets gravel in a 3×2 U formation, with the track running in the groove in the middle. But before I start slinging cobble around I end up with these cavernous long square holes that call to mind the giant water tunnels running waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay below Manhattan. Go look em up sometime.
Clear tunnel. a long cuboid to nowhere.Well now I have a tunnel, now what? Dig out a line of holes on either side? Why would I do that?
Wait no actually I AM doing that.No real practical reason besides aesthetics. I put netherrack in those spots so that the tunnel walls have a little color. It makes more sense in the next shot.
From the former terminus.And here.
beginning of tunnel liningAlso about every 64 blocks or so, there’s a shaft with a ladder up to the surface.
hey there is sky up there!I used to need to dig these up so I could figure out where the hell I was. Also it proved handy sometimes to have a periodic access point to the train tunnel below from the surface. Slightly less handy from the tunnels, but still possible if you have a couple of blocks and a couple of extension ladders with you.
an end section waiting…Most of the rest of the tunnel construction is just more running back and forth laying down cobblestone, gravel, rail, alternating patterns of torches and netherrack, and it’s all very tedious grunt work at this point.
Almost done, just gotta do the ceiling.one thing that does liven things up is that digging out subway tunnels you will inevitably cross paths with a wandering cave or three. I don’t seal these intersections usually, it’s more fun to leave access to caves open for later exploration. If the cave is mostly above the tunnel, I glass in the ceiling instead of using cobblestone so you can see up as you pass. Occasionally this leads to random discoveries, like hey, I’ve never been in this cave before why is that wall randomly cobblestone?
There is nothing suspicious about this wall, nor about the moaning behind it. Murrrrr. Growl. Gurrrrr. Totally a dungeon.We’ll have to come back and investigate that at some point.
Meanwhile above ground…
Outline in gravelThis pretty much looks like a glorified crop circle (crop square?) but it’s actually me translating a graph paper outline to the actual terrain. (Terribly; I had to lay down that gravel three times before I got it right. D:)
And then you pull out the explosive stuff.clearing out that sizable of a space requires quite a bit of both controlled detonation and “lets pack a 7×7 space full of TNT and see what happens” sort of detonation.
still clearing out the rock.And occasionally putting up single walls.
One wall up to the surface and 3 bellmouths of subways future.So there are going to be 12 tracks feeding into here altogether. I highly doubt I’ll build out ALL of them, but I’ve always been more ambitious than practical.
Clear crater. Or hole? Or something. Looking at the cleared space from above.The obsidian is just for me to keep track of where the middle is.
More bellmouths for additional lines.Thinking since the primary subway line had Netherrack embedded in the wall I may change that up for the other ones. I think I want some sort of green block for the line that will eventually go east/west. Or hell, I always end up with more lapis than I ever know what to do with, maybe I’ll just make it the blue line. We’ll see.
Finished the floor, bellmouths and track stubs.Makes an interesting light pattern.
Floor notches, for later Finished bellmouths with walls.I’m pretty happy with how the wall patterning came out here.
That’s all I’ve done so far, but it’s going really well and I remain really psyched about this. There will be more work in progress updates to come… can’t wait to get the mezzanine done so I can get cracking on the grand hall.
