Sails, fails, and tall tales

Ok, so if there is any testament to how addicting Minecraft is, it is this: I haven't posted another blog about it since I started on the new server a week or so ago. Yes, it's that good.

Back to the action, I completed my tree fort ship. That is, I added one last little touch:

It now has a sail! I thought it turned out pretty good. Once I finished the fort, I turned my eyes back to the desert. I had been working on filling in the big lake with sand, and I've made a dent in it, though there was still a lot left to finish. I also found my favorite technique to use to fill in the lake. While simply dropping the sand in next to adjacent walls and letting it sink, it was a slow and boring process. I found that I enjoy swimming into the water and seeing how many I could place before running out of air. It certainly made it more fun.

There was something else in the area that was bothering me. The surrounding terrain was variable, with different types of materials. For my project, I need a flat, plain desert to work with. So what did I use to help flatten the area?

TNT, of course!

For example, compare the two photos below, as a before and after shot:

The right side of the pictures certainly looks better after some TNT work.

The next time I played, I thought to myself "Boy, I wish people could get here easier to see my stuff once I get it built." So then I learned how to build a teleporter. While teleporters are not a part of the normal, single player experience, they can be used with an add-on called RuneCraft. I had used them once before on another friend's server, and they were pretty easy to use.

So I created my own. Here is the entry to my teleporter from the spawn point:

And here's the teleporter itself:

All I had to do was right-click in the center of the giant pound sign, and viola, I arrived at my house within a matter of seconds:

It was an easy thing to build, once I figured it out. And yes, it was just as easy to get back and it was to get there.

And all was good... for a while.

About a week ago, version 1.2 came out, with some major additions to the game. Now, my friend, the one who owns the server, was unaware that the update would be automatically applied. So, our server did go down for a little while.

So what does someone who plays Minecraft do when their server goes down? They play single player. And when I did, I discovered something.

The newest update did something that was definitely apparent when I walked near a light source. When I did, this is what I would see:

Animals everywhere! This picture is inside my castle in single player. There are 3 sheep in the room, and a suicidal pig in the window. While the ones in my castle weren't that annoying (including the little chicken hiding under my stairs), the ones who ended up on my minecart path were:

A black sheep ended up on my path, preventing me from getting to the castle without getting it off the course.

Thankfully, Notch, the creator of Minecraft, was quick to release an update that fixed this, among other things.

Once the server came back up, I was hard at work at filling in the lake in the desert. After a hard few hours of work, I had it down to this:

This last little bit didn't take more than 30 minutes to finish, so I was really happy to have it done.

Unfortunately, I also noticed that my teleporters weren't all that reliable. The receiver kept breaking on them. I rebuilt them at least 3 different times, and I kept breaking them. So, as of now, I have ditched the teleporter system, and built my own mine cart system. I just finished working on it, and it works great.

Alright, on to the coolest thing I've built so far in Minecraft. I'll just show you the picture. If you don't recognize it, then you can stop reading this blog now :)

It's a me, Mario! And yes, if any of you who read this have played as much, if not more, multiplayer Minecraft than I have, you know you've seen this before. I'm not the first to build one. However, I felt it was justified, considering that I built it out of new materials that were just released with the 1.2 Beta update: colored wool.

That's about it so far, in a nutshell. I hope to blog a little more about this, we'll see how it goes!