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!

Minecraft Diary - Episode 3 - Animal Encounters

Day 3

Determined to go far, far away, I set off. First off in my journey, I see a creeper. "Hello Mr Creeper" I say kindly. He seems saddened by something.. he seems quite up for the idea of me chopping him into little pieces, so I comply.

Jumpy jumpy creepy creepy

After dealing with the creeper, I get over the hill, over some water onto another little hill. I then look back into the water and see some squids! Yay! I then continue to deal with the squids.

More Squids

I find myself in a "swamp" biome, were all the land is sea height, quite nice to walk on but not very exciting. Ohh piggies, they look tasty.

Swamp pigs and zebra tree

After dealing with those pigs, I found some cows. (Actually like 10 of them)

Cows

I bet you can't guess what I did with those cows.. I'll give you a clue, I'm now wearing them!

Wearing the cows

That picture also shows all the things I've got in my inventory, I'm really going to need to set up a base with a chest to put everything in soon. Time to continue my journey and go as far as possi... argh night time again, already. And whats that noise? AHH the chicken's back! I decide it's probably best to hide somewhere tonight, as I don't know how many hundreds of monsters there will be. I run to the closest heap of dirt and set up a little shelter in it.

Night 3

Cooking time

Day 4

With my little cave full of the delightful smell of cooked bacon - note that I eat bacon, not porkchop because I am a man - and a scented whiff of smelted iron, I head off into the day with my shiny new killing stick, confident that today I'm going to find a cool place to build by castle. I come across a cliff face which looks very tall, "maybe I'll get a good view from up there" I think to myself. I start to go through an archway and see a... what is that? Is it stone?

Surprise skeleton!

Strangely, it doesn't shoot me, maybe it actually thinks it's some stone? Anyway, on I go exploring in this wonderful new pla..

Bugger.

Going to continue the story next episode, hopefully I'm not going to manage being so stupid again.

Minecraft Diary - Episode 2 - Hostage sheep

Night 1

I run back to the beach as quick as my little squarish legs will carry me, to a nice flat spot I want to build my shelter. I haven't got that many materials so I'm forced to build quite a small, building, made up of an assortment of blocks. I'm determined to get it to look better that a square box.

Pretty moon

For some reason I don't take a picture of the completed shelter *shrugs*. Just after finishing it off, I hear a startling growl, up to this point I hadn't seen any monsters in this world, I had absolutely no idea where it was coming from. I got out of my shelter to have a quick look and..

What scares me most about this is the chicken and sheep.

Well this is.. actually not that bad, the zombie isn't running at me or anything, he looks angry though, I would be too if I'd made that much of a mess of my top. The zombie starts to chase me and I run around the shelter a bit before going inside. "I wonder where that chicken has gone" I think to myself, looking through the back window. I turn around and AHH!

Another zombie!

Obviously the chicken has called for backup! I knew I should have killed it. That sheep is still scaring me, it looks kind of sad, maybe the zombies are holding it hostage. I decide to open my door, cautiously poking the zombies with my crappy sword. I saved the sheep yay! It's starting to get light now, that was a pretty uneventful night to be honest, barely any monsters.

Day 2

Sheep and his friends go for a swim.

The sheep and his cow friends go for a swim when I get out of my house. They all look pretty grumpy. Now I needed something to do, some sort of objective. I decide upon getting lots of sandstone, because I want to build a sandstone castle. That sounds cool, and what could possibly be more fun that collecting heaps of sand?..

Collecting sand

I start out quite positive with this, but it gets really quite boring after a while.. I keep going anyway. Bored of collecting sand, I start to take down my shelter, I don't think it's really necessary due to the apparent lack of danger around here.

Night 2

I dig some more, through the night, then all of a sudden I turn round and there are a couple of zombies chasing me again, and they've already killed the sheep.

More zombies!

Whilst running, I notice I've uncovered some iron, yay! I have no idea what I'm going to use it on, but I'm sure it will be helpful. After running around a bit and killing the zombies, I get back to sand collecting.

BOOM!

WTF?! I didn't see that coming, how on earth did I only lose half a heart? Ah well, free sand. Time to dig some more.

Hole

As the sun starts to rise, I look back on what I've done during the night. I'm still surprised by the lack of monsters, but obviously I don't mind it. Four stacks (64) of sandstone, that should be enough. Now I just need somewhere to build my sand castle.. Time to go exploring!

Episode 3 coming soon, there will be a lot more pretty pictures in it I promise.

Minecraft Diary - Episode 1

I've been inspired by Tom Francis' "Minecraft Experiment" on PC Gamer and my new texture pack, to do a sort of "lets play" with pictures. This will be much more pretty than PC Gamers version (especially if you view the pictures full screen), and I'm hoping the commentary will be just as interesting.

I'm a lot more experienced than Tom Francis was when he did his Minecraft Experiment (so will act like less of an idiot, lol), and will be playing the same "hardcore mode" that if you die, you delete that map. I am not planning on dying. I don't have an overall objective yet, maybe someone could suggest one? Oh also, each "episode" will be about one day and night, depending on how many pictures I take.

Everybody knows by now that default Minecraft isn't particularly stunning to look at, although a lot of people enjoy the "style" and/or get used to it. Somehow after a while your brain adapts and you think it is "normal" for the world to be made out of blocks (or maybe I've just been playing for too long). With my new texture pack/mods, my 1920x1200 screen and a tiny bit of image editing, I'll be persuading you that really, Minecraft can look awesome.

Day 1

Although I could keep generating new ones until I get some great scenery, I'm just going to stick with the first one I get, turns out it doesn't look too bad.

Spawn

As you can see, I've got a custom sun, sand, cacti, water, and health bar. These things aren't in the usual squarish Minecraft style, but I think they fit together with everything quite well. "This place looks quite nice" I think to myself as I look around, then I catch something in the corner of my eye. Now any Minecraft survival player with a big screen will tell you how exciting and/or important seeing something out of the corner of your eye can be, this was no exception. I'm pretty sure that pig has seen whatever it is too.

Something in the sea

I run towards the water, hoping to get a better look.. but nothing. Quite disappointed, I think about leaving it, but I was sure I saw something. Time for a swim! *Splosh*

Squids!

View this fullscreen and stand up if you can't see them. I was tempted to punch the swimming tarantulas in the face to get some poo ink, but they were too deep, I'd drown before half killing one. Maybe I'll come back when I've got a sword. And besides, their eyes were beginning to creep me out.

Scenery

After nearly hurting myself staring at the squids, getting out then walking around for a minute on the beach, I come across this. Pretty cool cliff right? Having the view distance on full is nice.. I figure out that I'm spending too long prating around and decide I need to get myself some tools.

Supplies - Wood

As any experienced Minecraftian knows, you gotta punch trees first. Now I've got wood, I'm going to make a wooden pickaxe, get some stone, then make stone tools. Although you can now make charcoal out of wood, It would still be nice to find some coal before night time too.

Supplies - Coal

Found loads of coal. Thats good. Made two stone axes by accident. Not really bad, but considerably frustrating for somebody as OCD as me. Click the picture to see the incredibly helpful advise the cow gave me, seriously I know, I was going to get it anyway. Obnoxious cow. You can see in the picture the comparison between the shiny 128x128 "painted" textures, and the default 16x16 workbench. I personally think it all looks nice. *Squeezes in another picture here - this one would make a good desktop background*

Scenery 2

I get some more wood and start thinking about where I can plonk down a little cabin, but then realise I can't see the sun. "Do I have enough time to make a cabin"? I scramble over a hill to figure out where that white blob in the sky is, and then:

Sunset

Well that's quite pretty, I do love how the sun goes orange when it sets. This isn't the best looking Minecraft world I've ever seen, but I think its close. Obviously I've only seen one billionth (or something) of the world so far, so I hope I see some more awesome things again tomorrow... wait a second.. tomorrow! It's nearly night time! No house! No food! I haven't even made any torches yet! I refuse to sit in a hole at night and cry like a petrified worm hiding from the outside world, tonight will be fun.

More coming soon!