Monday, June 24, 2013

Moar Minecraft

So I started playing Minecraft again. A friend from work decided to get a server so we could do multiplayer. So myself and a few work friends and a few of their friends are fucking around on a multiplayer server building insane shit. I haven't played Minecraft in quite a while, so I was like five or six updates behind and they've added a few interesting mechanisms and features and such. I'm pretty excited to play again. I've never played on a multiplayer server before though, and it is a survival mode server. So there are monsters that spawn and you have to worry about hunger and health in addition to the monsters ruining things for you. Plus, other players can trash your buildings or steal your shit. For instance, I logged on before work a few days ago and found the whole side of my stone hut blown apart as if a creeper had exploded next to it. Nothing was stolen or anything, but its still irritating that someone was wandering around and not paying attention and destroyed my stuff.  

Like I said, I've no experience with multiplayer servers and the guy running the thing, Kyle, is basically a narcissistic sociopath. So yeah, there's that. Anyway, I've played survival mode for hours and hours and constructed fantastic things like underwater fortresses of glass, glass mountains with small castles inside them, etc etc etc. I much prefer creative mode and just flying around and building whatever the fuck I want without having to worry about death or an exploding creeper leveling my building. Plus, other players can just open your chests of shit and steal all your valuables. 

I'm really paranoid about other players, I have issues with paranoia. Kyle has said this is a trust server, so he does not have anti-griefing enabled and has no intention of doing so. I assume this means that if a player places something, it becomes indestructible to other players. 

Anyway. I've never played on a multiplayer server, so I had no idea what to expect. I expected it to be a lot like WoW with players killing and looting each other and just wandering into buildings stealing stuff. That hasn't happened, aside from my partner Ryan, who is a noob, stealing a bunch of higher end shit and promptly starved to death and lost it all. Talking with Kyle, I've learned there are these things called plugins you can install to modify the game. So we can enter a command and teleport back to where we died and pick our shit up off the ground. Which is handy. He also installed a plugin that ties your chests and smelters and doors to you when you place a sign on them and no one else can open them and it makes them invulnerable so an exploding creeper can't blow up next to it and destroy all your shit. Other players can destroy the sign that ties you to the chest or door, but that pings the admins with who is breaking what chest. There's also this plugin he installed where you fight waves of mobs after choosing a class (just determines what gear you start the fight with, nothing else) and gain rewards based on how many waves you survive. It's kinda fun.

So I've been playing around and digging and generally just fucking around and I've come up with a building project I want to work on. It's kind of involved and time consuming, but it isn't something I've done before and building it in survival mode presents some challenges. So it should be pretty rewarding to finally get the thing. 

The project is a flying castle over a lake with a moat around it that looks like it has been ripped up out of the middle of a lake. So there will be this big lake with a castle above it and a bunch of water streaming off of the castle down into the lake below. Should look kind of cool, hopefully. My goal is to also surround it with aerial islands with like crops and farm animals and that sort of thing on them, all kind of interconnected by wooden walkways and that sort of thing. I'd like to kind of scatter dirt chunks in the air around the islands as well to kind of like debris that fell off of the island as it was raised and that sort of thing. If I can end up building it in a non-boring, somewhat decorative way, it should end up looking fairly neat. If I make any progress on it, I'll of course post pictures and that sort of thing. 

I'd also like to create a sort of involved way of accessing the place. No, with the essentials plugins, we can set warp points that you can warp to, so all I really need is a warp point command like /warp clintscastle. Boom. However, I don't want people I don't know swarming all over this place doing whatever they want, because it's kind of my base. So what I'm going to do is set up like a little ground level fort inside of it with a portal to the nether. The nether is a lightless place full of lava and powerful bad guys. Dangerous as fuck. However, every step you travel in the nether is equivalent to eight steps in the surface world. So what I want to do is build another portal to the nether in my castle and then connect the two portals via a tunnel (probably of obsidian, maybe) so there is a sort of neat little way of accessing my castle from the ground. Additionally, I'd probably set up locking mechanisms around my castle entrance, like build something like a Stargate iris around the nether portal using pistons and such so it is secure and people can't surprise me through it. 

That's another thing I'd like to play with, traps and mechanisms. I've got an idea for something like a portcullis trap that locks someone in place and then unloads arrows on them. I've also got an idea for trapping a tunnel where you pull a lever and four dispensers pop out of the walls and block off a tunnel and fire arrows down it. Dispensers are tricky though, I think they need a charge every time they fire, so you can't just give them power and have them fire until they hit empty. 

I dunno, like I said, I'm having fun getting back into Minecraft. As stuff develops, I'll post more and probably add some pictures once everything is completed. 

No comments:

Post a Comment