I have built myself a monument... or two

Since my last post I have been doing odds and ends and screwing around in minecraft. I realized that since all my digging is now connected I don't really want to go off on a wild tangent tunnel and loose my sense of closure and accomplishment from having all my bases attached. Naturally I decided to improve my already totally awesome bases.

One way I could do that is to dig out my sun shaft a bit more. Actually a lot more.

The cathartic digging forever was interrupted by that my inventory concerns. About five minutes after anyone starts minecraft they realize they fill up their inventory with annoying rock they've dug. Since there is no real use to the rock it plagues every player and burdens their useful slottage. Your first instinct is to build with it because after all why not you have all this useless material might as well find a use for it. Soon you realize it just makes everything ugly and you want to replace it with something cooler any way. Cooking your stone makes a delightful looking hard smooth block that is much much better than icky cobblestone but unless you have the patience of a saint you get bored of waiting for it too cook in about 17 seconds.

So why not just throw it on the ground and leave it there you ask? Well that shit hangs around for an annoyingly long time waiting for you to accidently walk over it where it will be picked up automatically and the whole problem just started over.

I have to credit Mike with the cleanest solution. You make a little square pool of lava and throw all your wast in there since the lava will destroy it. This option is by far the best and unless your an idiot you wont accidentally fall in the lava and kill your self loosing all your good items you wanted to keep.... Ok maybe you will do that about 43 times but just consider it a learning curve. You didn't need that near indestructible diamond pick anyway. You can always get a new one. I mean you find new ones almost NEVER. Enough of my clumsy minecraft accideaths back to the matter at hand which is my giant bagfull of rocks.

So I was preparing to go back to base to destroy all my hard earned uselessness when it dawned on me. Why not go back to your first instinct. Why not go old school. Why not get in touch with your inner child. Why not try to consciously tap into hive mind. I guess that last idea has nothing to do with my rocks,or the idea before it for that matter.

Why don't I build with these rocks.

Build something just to use all the rocks. Something GIANT. Something where the sheer enormity of it will counteract the ugliness of the blocks. Why doesn't this Pharaoh just go build himself something worth of his magnificence.

I'M THAT PHARAOH AND I DEMAND A PYRAMID.

It's just too bad that for me to actually demand a pyramid I would be talking to myself alone at 2am. I did build it though I started with a base of 40x40 and dug a trench 2 blocks deep around it so those fucking zombies wouldn't run up the side and bum rush me when I wasn't paying attention.

I'm a genius I would dig untill i filled up my inventory then just warp to the pyramid and lay the bricks down and repeat. For five hours straight. In the end I had a fancy dancy new giant sun shaft and a sweet new pyramid good enough for a king.

Sad thing is a king isn't the same as a pharaoh. It's pretty damn great but not as great. Just like my pyramid. I mean its awesome and it's pretty big. It's just not stupid big.

So i started a new pyramid beside the old one. My new pyramid would be bigger, much bigger and floating because floating pyramids are bad ass.

My second pyramid started on a 70x70 base which if you do the math is a fuck of a lot bigger and taller and much more magnificent. I can barely see from one end to the other, PERFECT.

Although it is so big that I got fed up with trying to build a floor and opted for an open design.

Minecraft a big, big BIG FUCKING CIRCLE

Since i got back into minecraft about three weeks ago I have been doing mostly one thing digging and adding onto my main tunnel and bases. Actually bases which are now all connected because I went in one giant magnificent glorious circle.

You might remember I started a floating base when I got back into the minecraft three weeks ago. Shortly there after I got bored of transporting back and forth between there and the ground for raw materials so I started of on a digging journey.

I basically went below my floating base dug down then went ever deeper at a forty five degree angle. I hit the bottom unbreakable blocks without ever punching through a natural cave. If you don't know what I mean by unbreakable blocks and punching through a cave then you've probably never played minecraft and are probably not even reading this anymore sooooo never mind.

In my frustration with not hitting a natural cave I developed that bad OCD trait of digging dirt I mentioned in a previous post. Basically if I find dirt or gravel while I'm mining I feel compelled to dig it all out. This is actually how I made my main underground base.

There were pockets of said dirt and gravel touching and when i dug them out there was a giant room left over. I cleaned it up made it square fashioned a swimming pool threw a thousand torches on the wall and viola mi casa.

The most insidious thing about Minecraft is the endless freedom without specific goals. Since minecraft is just so fucking fun to play you invent for yourself goals. IE you make a base and then you make your base bigger and then you make it bigger still and then you dig a tunnel to find special materials to help make your base awesome. then you realize your tunnel is too long so you make another base. Then you need more wood but you get sick of going to the surface and getting shot by skeletons and blown up by creepers so you wisely decide on making underground trees. Then you need natural light so you dig a pillar tunnel straight up to the surface so sunshine makes it's way all the way down to your base to grow trees. Then you really start fucking around.

You start to mess around with lava and water and if your mike you burn the world down and then make a whole new one. If your me you just accidentally fall in your own pit of lava and loose all your good shit so you have to go digging again. Then you get in a digging mode. You abandon your base for a while then you just dig for diggings sake.

Then you keep getting lost in your your random directional digs. Then if your like me you need to make your main tunnel distinguished from all the twisting tentacle off shoots of that main tunnel. This is where I developed a sort of bread crumb based path system. I make my tunnels at least three blocks wide and the middle of the floor i put a dirt path. I used to use sand so you would know it was not a natural dirt patch but going over water and lava nixed that system because your path just falls and burns or gets in the water and screws up the flow.

I'm getting close to the circle thing don't worry.

In all this digging I found a natural waterfall with 3 separate water falls in a large cavern. Being a nerdy minecraft player with a non-exist ant social life I got really excited and realized this would make a perfect centerpiece for yet another new base. This base is just a basic way station though I don't want to put all the effort into another super base and feel guilty for abandoning yet another one in my wake. We can discuss my frightening need to personify holes in the ground as having feelings some other time.

I decided to make my glorious find more accessible I would dig a spiral staircase around the edge of the cavern and in behind the water falls so you could travel up the cavern and take in the view. I made a glass floor every so often so you could go out and really enjoy the ball tingling height of the cavern. Once I got to the top I was satisfied with my accomplishment and set to go fuck around some more.

After a while of experimenting with dynamite, and by experimenting I mostly mean blowing myself up, I decided to go back to waterfalls.

I thought to myself that since there was glass floors all the way down why not dig up to the surface so light could travel all the way down the cavern. So I did I was surprisingly close to the surface which was handy because making a sun shaft is a real douche and takes forever.

Low and behold I was UNDERNEATH MY FLOATING BASE. Yeah remember that guy from three weeks ago that I abandoned and felt bad about WELL HERE IT WAS just like an ex-girlfriend you've forgotten about how crazy she was but remember how good the sex was. Not to say I was going to have sex with my old base. Even if it was possible... OK maybe but it's impossible so lets move on.

I just want to re-establish how much distance I had covered underground to magically end up in the same place. 2.5 weeks of fucking around digging this way then that. There's literally miles of cave down there.

So after I broke through the surface I decided to continue the spiral staircase upwards to floating base. Now everything is attached in a giant circle now all my abandonment guilt is gone. Most excitingly though now i get to go fuck around and figure what else to do.

Minecraft scary moon

If you'll remember I was bragging about how awesome I was for skinning my mine craft with a zelda pack. Everything looks rad I'm the smartest man alive because I can now live a sandbox zelda fantasy.

That is untill I saw that scary ass moon from Majora's mask peering down my sun hole.

I didn't mean to sound dirty with sun hole there. What a sunhole basically is is dale slang. In Minecraft if you want to grow trees in you sweet cave you need sunlight so you have to dig a pillar straight up to the surface and top it off with glass so no baddies get in. This is also a great way to tell if its day or night outside. Hence why I was looking up to check where the moon was to see how long night lasted so I could go outside and get some supplies without worring about exploding zombies or human sized spiders.

When the moon isn't this scary monster

it's basically a white dot

Minecraft fever dreams

I always know I'm obsessed with something when it shows up in my dreams. Sometimes it's work, often it's sexy ladies but 90% of the time its either video games or something to do with Sci-Fi or, as my horrendous stomach flu treated me to, a mixture to both.

A couple of days ago I had a torturous night riddled with dreams which mixed Minecraft and the BBC One TV show Outcasts. If your not familiar with Outcasts, well shame on you it's really quite exquisite but for the plot of this blog it doesn't matter to heavily. Basically all you need to know about Outcasts is a bunch of people abandoned earth and settled on another planet where some of them do shitty things to each other.

The best thing about fever dreams is they make no sense. Just like the movie Lost Highway your treated to some startling imagery and intense story fragments that ultimately don't connect. Instead of playing the Saxophone and transforming into a younger self I laid black explosive blocks and could peer through walls and the ground. I know, no sense at all, awesome huh?

As far as my cognitive normal thinking mind can place together of my dreams this is what I get. I was on a planet with some other refugees from a dying planet earth. We had taken some technology with us and since I was in the future the tech was awesome. Since I am not from the future I don't really know what it was. Since we were new settlers we had to mine for resources. My mind instantly went to mine craft and the whole scenario was fashioned after the game.

Since I had the ability to see through the ground I was the miner leader. To set the scene there is a giant storm. (Since it's a new planet just take the cop out of most sci-fi and just think of a variation of a Sandstorm. The Darude kind is most preferable.) Since my mind was not being especially creative on all fronts there was a trapped family, a mom, dad, brother and sister deal. They are in a cave under the ground and I have to free them with my miner awesomeness.

Since I am still Dale in this dream I choose explosives as my tool. I get black smoking blocks and lay them down and when I want to I trip these remote mines and they explode. Every time I accidentally frappe the family the scene starts over. This triggers another constant of my fever dreams and that is a short loop. So in reality I rock back and forth clutching my stomach in a cold sweat while dream me Ground Hog Day style repeatedly blows up an innocent and tragic family. In the dream I realize the error of selecting explosives to get a family out of a cave but to my horror I don't care and continue to blow them up.

Finally a hot girl comes and tempts me with her wonderful tidbits if I basically get my shit in order and save the family. Since it's a dream the family is instantaneously saved and I am warped a bubble in the middle of space. Like in the movie the fountain except I'm not tattooing my fingers, I'm inserting them... In that hot chick.

Minecraft getting back in

So I'm playing Minecraft again. Which also means I am playing nothing else. I really really get obsessed with minecraft and making my base.

before I talk about my base and how awesome it is and how awesome that makes me I just want to touch on minecraft skinning. I finally skinned minecraft with a custom design found online. It took 15 minutes and i would urge everyone to do this. You can google one pretty easily because apparently theres a hundred million Minecraft nerds who want to make your life better.

Theres a pretty extensive list found here http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?t=12352 with a very easy to follow tutorial on how to install the skin. I would also suggest to make a back up of the default one becuase you never know what could happen or if you get sick of a skin you chose.

I choose the Legend of zelda theme because well lets face it Zelda is the shit. Heres what it looks like.

Finally now onto building my base.

I am on my third iteration of said base. First there was a vertical mine room design where there were about 10 rooms on top of one another and were not that large. Then Mike decided that he wanted to try a new server and thus create another world for us to inhabit. I mostly think he did this because he set half of our old world on fire screwing around with lava.

It was a good decision because I had also screwed around and toyed with landscaping halfhazardly. I did learn how to make sweet water and lava pillars which I put to good use in my second floating lair.

With the addition of the Magic Carpet in minecraft you can basically walk around in mid air. I took advantage of this and built a three room single level floating platform base. Problem was theres no where to go mine and piss around in mid air and using the Magic Carpet is actually a giant pain in the ass.

I needed resources so I would teleport from my base to a mine. Until Mike suggested I build a way station in my mine so I didn't have to go back to base to craft anything. This was the inception of my third base.

I admit it sometimes when it comes to video games I get obsessive compulsive disorder. I have to cut down all the grass in a Zelda game or I have to kill only one type of bad guy for a while. In minecraft I have to dig the dirt out of a tunnel... ALL the dirt. This means that if I am digging a mining tunel and I come up on dirt I switch to a shovel and get rid of all the dirt I can see. If i see uncover more I get rid of that dirt too. Ends up there was a catacombs of tunnels left over after one infuriatingly long clearing spree.

Third Base ended up being me digging out these catacombs in to one giant room thats something like 30 block by 20 blocks with tow floors. I have been adding to this base over the last couple of days and now there is a pool a verticle sunlight tunnel to let the trees grow and even a lava disposal area.