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.
Monday night your intrepid heroine and host of the server came home with a horrid stomachache, so I canceled server time for that night. To make up for it I ran Wednesday night instead.
It was a fairly low key evening with a bit less lag and voidspawning than usual and people mostly worked on their own stuff. DoublePositive, anticipating 0.12, built a nether portal behind spawn and finished up stuff in Spawner Land.
Opening who knows when?
Also in the spirit of preparing for 0.12, 576875 went out to the Troll village and started shoring it up against Things to Come. Hachi finished his water temple and made it super creepy by filling the fort part of it with spiders.
Fort and water templeLooking through the water and doorsEeep.
Dyaaagh Minecraft spiders will never not creep me out. And I like spiders in real life! Anyway I hope Hachi posts about it at some point, there was a whole backstory and mythology that went with this build. Maybe when he finishes the companion structures he’s planning.
We were also joined by Batman3054 from Worst Server Ever, who set up shop near DoublePositive’s. And Swarmhut did something adorable besides flit around dressed in a bee suit.
Aww!
There was also a fair bit of players getting bored with stuff between building and trying to reel each other in with fishing lines. I don’t know why hooking other players works (bug? feature?) but it does mean that if you go AFK (which I did a fair bit last night owing to some real life things demanding my attention) you could come back to find yourself sowmwhere completely different, or, what happened most often to me, up a tree with weird structures built around me, lol. Not so sure I like being fished as it always seems to happen when I’m in the chat window and can’t really see whats going on, but it’s a thing, and the gang is trying to brainstorm possible games to make up around it.
At the end of the evening Hachi took off due east from spawn and stumbled into a huge desert waste bordered by jungle and savannah, and across the sandstone village pictured above seated at the edge of it. (We looked. No stronghold, but hey, mineshaft!) Guess I know where I’m running some road this week. Interestingly enough this was a part of the map that I had explored briefly before when I first started playing in it a year ago. Well, “explored” is a generous word, got completely lost is more like it. This was in the very beginning when the world was still Survival, I didn’t know the cobblestone trick yet and hadn’t put together a compass. So I started marking my trail with torches on blocks and swam when I came to the edge. I got lucky and ended up very close to spawn on the other side. I’d meant to go back sometime, but never got around to it until last week when I blundered into the jungle biome on the desert’s other side.
Hachi continued flying far out past where I explored and the new terrain generating made for interesting errors on the rest of our parts – namely have terrain disappear out from under out feet. Note to self, the game does not like it when players get too separated.
Meanwhile in other news, I’m in the middle of three build posts (sigh) and I really must make some posts about my adventures on Worst Server Ever and musings about possible hosting solutions for the game. I’m also working on an out of game but still Minecraft related project for the Wee Beast’s birthday. There are not enough hours in my day, I swear.
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.
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!
Well, after getting the domain and port forwarding right and figuring out FINALLY how to switch the main world back to Survival (I’ll post a tutorial on both later), I posted a “hey my world’s open, come visit!” notice on /r/MCPE this evening. I wasn’t expecting too many visitors – hell, I would have been happy if one person showed up. Happily I had four, and to those four, especially /u/Palcto and /u/EclipseSun, I say thank you for making my first MCPE server run pretty epic.
Sadly the allotted 3h of game was cut a little short by an incoming call from the husband (note to self, Plug PE does NOT play nice with phone calls). Such is the hazard of running a server on one’s iPhone. But still I’d say a pretty successful first run and I’ll definitely be doing it again.
Good Stuff:
I am frankly flabbergasted that it took two hours into a 2.5ish hour run for the game to crash. Between the general bugginess of MCPE especially with Plug PE going, and the unreliability of my net connection lately (sigh *COMCAST*) I was expecting the game to be yo-yoing way more than it did. Nope. Pretty smooth and stable. We only seemed to have problems when teleporting players with laggier connections around, making them fall through a not-loaded-yet world. Oops.
Bad Stuff:
Plug PE’s give command is borked. I can .g stuff to myself fine, not so much to other people. Also had a frustrating problem with amazing disappearing/reappearing chests. >_< Also the .in command does NOT hide you from mobs. I spent most of the game invisible near spawn (mostly so people didn’t spawn into oncoming zombies) and would get knocked about by spiders and skeleton arrows constantly. Yay diamond armor I guess. 😛
Interesting Stuff:
It apparently takes about 2.5 hours to see almost everything in the main world. Palcto found just about everything (I suspect the Hellfire Library was missed, as it’s a little off the beaten path and possibly the maze under the castle). Something for next time then.
Stuff to fix/think about for next time:
It’s been so long since I’ve run/played this world in survival that I’ve not only forgotten what’s in all the chests everywhere (answer: lots of good stuff still) but I’d forgotten to do things like leave minecarts in the subway stations for folks to use. Whoops.
Player Pictures!
EclipseSun has a different shader pack, so I asked him to post the screenshots he took, and holy crap, some of the builds look amazing in it. Palcto also took screenshots of his adventures.
Palcto finds the Crystal Palace
Another view of the Crystal Palace
too many chickens!
“Is this a death arena!?”
EclipseSun finds some giant zombies.
A pretty sunset and a glimpse of the subway running underwater.
The subway looks really cool in EclipseSun’s shader/texture pack.
Looking back toward Spawn House. EclipseSun needs an apple.
