Oh look, another gaming blog.

This last week has seen the release of version 1.8 of Minecraft after much anticipation: the Adventure update!



Villages, NPCs, mines, levels, proper dungeons and food playing a bigger role have been promised and so I set out to see how it actually holds up.


It begins

The first hurdle I encounter is a lack of a craftbukkit update (it's apparently tricky to code). Never mind, thinks I, I'll just run a vanilla solo map. If I can remember how one of those goes, and cope without a teleport to home function. And so after generating a new world I was thrust into the thick of it. Immediately there's UI changes to note: an XP bar and a food bar (that jiggles now and then which I find to be fairly distracting actually). I spy a cow and after punching some trees to make a sword, I get my psycho on with some leather armour in mind. First thing I notice, animals panic and run away when you start to attack. Second thing I notice, sometimes I one-shot them. Critical hits are now here.

Killing animals drops little greenish yellow bead thingers that's actually your XP, and other animals besides pigs drop raw meat too, all of which can be cooked ot increase the food value. Food means your HP regenerates. After killing everything that moves for a bit, I have absolutely no idea what level I am and I can't seem to find anything in the UI that tells me, though I understand that at the moment it's irrelevant.

Time to build a boat and cross the oceans. I also notice that clay is now more readily found in watery areas such as lakes and seas. No more cheating for that brick fireplace! I spy what look like Vines hanging off trees but I suppose I need some shears before I can do anything with them, like leaves. I noticed another little change: water now has little dots of stuff floating in it so it looks like there's actually something there.

Finally I spy what looks like it could be a cave system and head on in hoping for a mine. Another discovery is that torch light giving things a slightly yellow hue as opposed to daylight which lends a slightly bluish cast. Sadly I find nothign else new in the sprawling mass of dead ends and tunnels filled with lava tubes and running water. At this point, I've spent over an hour exploring this ocean planet biome with mountains for islands and found absolutely nothing of interest. None of these mines or villages or dungeons. Perhaps I picked a rubbish seed word so I gave it another go. Another oceanic biome with mountainous islands popped up. A large cave system was all of interest I could find here too. Bah!


If at first you don't succeed, cheat like a bastard

At this point I cheated and asked some friends for seed words for the biomes that'd given them the new fancy stuff in the hopes that the third time's the charm. Well whaddya know? It works. I spawn in an NPC village right next to a smithy. There's a well there too, a guard tower, houses with tables and chairs and windows, irrigated crops, lampposts and a workshop with what looks like a library. There's even a small cave out back to explore. This is more like it!

Some experimentation revealed brick stairs, glass panes and iron grills now existed, so after claiming a spacious pad as my own in this eerily uninhabited village and installing some chests (now with opening animations) I set off to find myself a mine. After stumbling on a second village, very similar to the first in terms of building design and contents and how many of each are present, I continue onwards and fall down a chasm into what looks like an underground building with a new kind of stone brick and iron doors. Sadly it looks like this one was malformed as the walls are more like hanging pillars, there's no flooring to separate it from the caves below and there's nothing else there. Still, it's all progress and it looks to me like it's a proper dungeon but I'm told it's called a Stronghold, and thus I can tick that off the discovery list.

With only Mines left to find for the meat of the additions, it was time to set off once more. Following a tip I find a hole in the bottom of a lake and riding the waterfall down I land squarely inside what I assume must be a mine: wooden supports lining a tunnel, cobwbs that give string, random sections of minecart track, torches here and there and so on. Something else new to play with are melon seeds found in one of the chests in said mine, but I don't appear to have much in the way of a green thumb when it comes to growing any. Ah well.


Fin

So with all the major additions checked out and a bunch of smaller tweaks noted, I'm all minecrafted out for the day and I shall now await the coming of the Craft Bukkit update so I can fire up my usual server maps and see about wedging in some of this new stuff.

Minecraft is a bit of an indie phenomenon in the PC Gaming world. Conceived and primarily written by Markus "Notch" Persson, it's technically still in beta and is a first-person game with a purposefully retro blocky style that revolves around doing whatever you please. The game is based around the concepts of acquiring resources in the game world (mining, punching trees, killing stuff etc) and building things (castles, piston-driven TVs, reproduction works of art etc). There's also dark-loving monsters that like the taste of your blocky pixel self such as zombies, archer skeletons, giant spiders and creepers (which are best described as suicide bomber ninjas).


How I mine 4 fish?




The game can be played in several ways and there is no end goal as such. There is no story or setting, no protagonist (though your character is a regular bloke called Steve) and no evil villain (Creepers don't count). It's a sandbox world where you are given potential and it's up to you what you want to do with it. If you like, you can turn off monsters, spawn all the materials you want out of thin air, break the game's own laws of physics (which are like the real world's laws of physics, except when they aren't) - in other words you can God Mode if you like and the game becomes a creative building simulator; like Lego without so many of the gravity worries. Or you can play on a player-made custom map where resources are scarce and the goal is to survive as long as you can in a bleak world with a lot of hungry monsters. Or perhaps an adventure map with quests and objectives. Or gather some friends together and compete to see who can do the best. Or you can load up one of innumerable custom-made mods that add everything from new materials to new rules and functionality to completely new realms.

The game is written in java and as such is incredibly customisation-friendly. The modding community for Minecraft is huge and the ability to easily re-write core chunks of the game has surely contributed to its incredible success. Examples of these can be seen in the Yogscast clips that showcase the more elaborate mods with humorous commentary on YouTube.

Yes, the graphics are blocks with texture maps 16x16 pixels big. That's the idea. There's mods about which will reskin the game if your eyes start bleeding but I think it'd lose a lot of its charm that way. Sound effects are amusingly basic with rough 'n' ready sound clips pinched from the Freesound project for cows mooing, thunder etc. Music is the complete opposite with a mixture of simple ditties and very high quality ambient tracks that play at seemingly random intervals. Notch even stuck some achievements into it, whose poor grammar has spawned the low-flying meme of  "Achievement Get!"



The game is often compared to Terraria because the themes are almost exactly the same: start with diddley squat, mine/harvest yourself stuff to make better stuff including shelter, weapons and armour. Watch out for zombies, slimes and other foul creatures lurking where it's dark. However Terraria is a 2d affair with more monsters including bosses and less focus on building creativity; it appeals more to those that prefer their games with some action.

I've noticed that most people who start with Minecraft then try Terraria find the lack of creative freedom in Terraria to be annoying for a minecraft clone. Folks that start with Terraria find Minecraft to be lacking the action and adventure of Terraria and contains too much pointless building.

My own experiences with Mojang's merry little Minecraft world have been mixed. Initially I didn't get what the fuss was about and the mad frenzy of seemingly everyone I knew in the world ever had passed me by. It looked eyebleeding and boring and almost a year went by with me ignoring all these stupid videos of blocky things making more blocky things that were popping up everywhere I ventured online. It wasn't until I was gifted a copy of the game and one evening ended up bored to death because my mother was visiting and hogging my room, that I finally caved in to a friend's nagging and hopped onto his minecraft map to see what all the fuss was about. Initially I was wandering about just doing random stuff, poking random things, seeing what I could make out of what. The open-ended world tugged at my inquisitive and exploratory nature, and I was full of questions about what you could and couldn't do, what did and didn't exist. A couple more outings onto my friend's map later and I decided that actually this was a right barrel of monkeys.

After picking some brains I found the best way of going about playing was to load up on CraftBukkit tools to host my own map servers and after an evening of trying to get the damn thing working, then talking to the router, then figuring out how to let others on, I had my own world to play with. A beach house, sauna, cavern of doom, netherworld holiday camp, armed and armoured airship, sekrit underwater observatory, railroad, giant tree house, floating lookout, lava tank, lots of dead zombies, custom skins for Steve and an invasion of friends later I realised that yes, this game was worth the hype I'd ignored previously.

I did give Terraria a try, incidentally. My knowledge of Minecraft served me well enough but I have to say I got bored of it fairly quickly ended up going back to Minecraft.

News in the intertubes is that there's XBox 360, Android, iPad and iPhone versions on the way - the XBox version allegedly using Kinect. This will either be freaking hilarious, or a total failure.

Anyhow I shall leave you all with this: evidence that it's like lego with zombies...