swarmhut – ARBTServer

July 9, 2015October 5, 2017

Server time!

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.

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.

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.

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.

ARBT out!

June 30, 2015October 5, 2017

Open server, 6/29/2015

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! — you’ll pay full price for your seat BUT YOU’LL ONLY NEED THE EEEEEEEEEEDGE!

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... — 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 has been working on… well, I still haven’t figured out what this is supposed to be. I just know that it is awesome.

To the south, Double Positive worked on several mob grinders of various sizes/mobs farms. Hence “SPAWNER LAND” written large friendly quartz letters.

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!

June 28, 2015October 5, 2017

Subway done! (For now, anyway.)

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

I am pleased and relieved to report that the 2 additional lines of the subway (Granite and Brick) are done. Obviously if there is world expansion to the east or west, the lines will also extend accordingly, but this is as good as they’re going to get for a while. I love when I get these tunnels finished, but boy howdy is building them tedious. If anyone knows of an Android mod that’ll let me dig out 5×5 squares, let me know. >_< Being a lover of random miscellaneous information, I spent a little time after completion riding the lines and timing roughly how long it takes to ride them end to end. (All times are traveling south from Grand Central Terminal.)

Swarmhut and 5 at Crystal Palace (back when Swarm didn’t have a face, lol)

Netherrack Line

Grand Central → Wilshire Castle	1:09
Wilshire Castle → Crystal Palace	1:33
Crystal Palace → Sand Baori	0:33
Sand Baori → Spawn	0:51
Spawn → 4 Guardians	0:52
4 Guardians → Southern Continent	1:29
Total	6:27

Granite Line

Grand Central → Wilshire Castle	1:13
Wilshire Castle → Crystal Palace	1:35
Crystal Palace → Sand Baori	0:46
Sand Baori → Wacker Tower	0:44
Total	4:18

Brick Line

Grand Central → Wilshire Castle	1:13
Wilshire Castle → Crystal Palace	1:35
Crystal Palace → Mt. Servermore	0:46
Total	3:34

I look forward to working on something above ground for a while. I seem to remember I still have a zombie pigman prison I haven’t quite finished…

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 25, 2015October 5, 2017

Not one, not two, not four, but THREE evening runs!

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.

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... — 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.

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. — 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. — 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.

Thanks, y’all. 🙂

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.

May 14, 2015October 5, 2017

GCT is done!

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.

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.

I took lots of pictures inside the Grand Concourse. Mostly from similar angles, oops.

I sort of made Orion and then put more "stars" around him. — I sort of made Orion and then put more “stars” around him.

Grand Concourse, looking East — Looking East from the roof.

I’m not sure what to do with these rooms in the corners. Maybe additional reading/waiting space?

Think that sign needs to come down a block.

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.

A quick peek downstairs to see what 576875 has been up to.

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 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

May 3, 2015October 5, 2017

GCT, part 2 and some notes on last week’s open server

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…

…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 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.