Showcase - Castle Avaris

I actually built this a few months ago on my servers Minecraft 1.0/1.1 map, but only got around to taking pictures of it the other day. It was raining on Minecraft at the time so I cut the empty sky out and put in a nice background by ~nighthawk101stock.

I've never named my creations before so this is a bit new for me - it's called Castle Avaris, after an ancient Egyptian city. The name means "Great House" and denotes the "capital of an administrative division of the land", basically a place where a lot of important stuff happens, which is particularly suitable as I'm the single server owner. The inhabitants of the ancient city were known to worship the god Set, who was god of the desert and thunderstorms (along with a lot of other things depending on whether or not he was liked at the time and place), which is relevant because the castle takes up half a desert, and while it was being built there were an extortionate amount of thunderstorms.

The whole structure, including flattening a large section of desert, was completed single handedly on mod-free Minecraft survival hard mode with no cheats - I sold a lot of enchanted tools, arrows and sand for diamonds, slime balls, etc. to fellow players on the server.

If anyone want's to know what the buildings are: (In the top, front view picture) In the bottom left is an underground passageway to a skeleton spawner XP/bonemeal/arrow farm, and to my old house. The bottom right structure is a 96-piece wheat farm which is harvested with water at the flick of a switch. The top right building is an animal barn which contains many edible animals, including mooshrooms thanks to Immortalium walking for hours and hours to find some and heard them all the way back. Finally, the huge structure at the top in the middle is my "house", complete with several floors, secret rooms, roof access, and other such fun (but perhaps slightly pointless) attributes.

I will not be giving a map download for this, as the map was over 780mb and I can't be arsed. I hope you like the castle!

New Minecraft 1.2.5 Server Map

We've started a new map! There are plains, jungles, deserts, swamps, and mountains all near the (now moved for no reason but still okay) spawn point - it's looking like a great one for scenery. This picture was taken just after starting with Hatty and Scotty. Yes I do play the game like that, using Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders and optifine with loads of tweaks to keep me over 50 FPS. I usually use a seperate low-FPS .jar for screenshots so the shadows are a bit iffy on this one.

Still mining and crafting.

I haven't posted on this blog in a very long time, so this post is to say I'm still alive and playing Minecraft. I just updated the texture pack page on here, so if anyone reading this still hasn't tried out my cartoon texture pack now would be a great time to do so!

I haven't been on my server much recently, but hopefully that will change when my exams are over and the next Minecraft update is out :)

Here's a picture of one of my old houses I still haven't showed off here yet. Im hoping to build a new castle soon so that should be up here too sometime. That may not sound interesting but remember that my last castle (well, last that I put on the interwebs) is still number 3 for google searching "minecraft castle".

Updated Server to 1.2

A new map will be started sometime, somewhen between one and three weeks away probably.

I highly recommend using optifine as it's been updated too. I'm using the Multi-Core version and Minecraft is now flying. I also recommend not using a toaster to play Minecraft on, but that's for another post. - If anyone wants tips on building computers mostly for Minecraft, mention it, I sort of want to write a massive post about it.

Now the bukkit team is working with Mojang (well, is part of Mojang), I'm sure bukkit will get even more awesome and make multiplayer mods even easier to use. I'm not yet open to suggestions for mods on the server (i.e no mods), BUT in the future I will look into it. Personally I'm hoping for a fire/ice/explosive arrow mod that doesn't require client installs. Oh and that paint mod..

I want sea creatures too. Like this one (from the fossil/archeology mod):

Sneaky Map Change

The new blogger layout is.. very different. 'Tis one of the reasons nothing has been going on here.. that and Cobalt wooo.. and college.

Anyway, I started a new map on the server uhh day before yesterday. It's "half-temporary", because I'll start a new one a short while after Minecraft 1.2 is released (In a few weeks I assume). Just because it's temporary, doesn't mean you shouldn't be nice still.. no stealing, messing up scenery etc etc etc.

EDIT: As the latest Minecraft snapshot is so buggy, I am doubtful that Minecraft 1.2 will be out any time soon. It's a very substantial update, so I suspect it will also take a while before optifine and bukkit are updated for it. Because of those things, the server will not be updated to Minecraft 1.2 as soon as it is released and current map is actually quite permanent.

Me Tatty and Anina made a house and it's awesome:

Iced apple.. Sorry about your house, Tatty burned it down because she wants to do some "filming" around our house, showing off the scenery. I see you've re-built it, you should have asked before making it so close to our in the first place (you might have asked Anina though *shrug*), but everythings fine. Try to make it super-good looking and I'll try to steal Tatty's flint & steel lol.