Oh, hm. I used your seed to generate a world, but I did so in 1.2.3 which means it may not have generated the same one. But I made a portal at your coordinates and I couldn't find any fortresses either. I went back into the overworld and used ender eyes to see if I could find a stronghold, which I did. So I don't know what's going on.

Thank you both, so much. 

I actually did you one better, OITL.  In your previous advice you suggested I should look more closely, and every time I see that advice I go back and do it, because the difference is hard to spot, and I want to be wrong.  But this time, for whatever reason, I found one too.  It's in the opposite direction from yours, but closer, at 359,61,153, maybe 400 to 500 blocks from my spawn point.  That's far, but totally doable.  Sometimes the twentieth time is the charm.

The two of you are awesome (as is everyone else on this thread).  Let me know if I can return the favor sometime.

Bah, you do plenty of other stuff anyway, so I felt like ascribing more credit to you? I don't know. It seemed like you did a lot more than half.

And, satyr, the texture pack is a customized 32x version of Dokucraft High. It does make me mod my Minecraft just that eeensy bit so it can accept textures bigger than 16x... but it's the one sort of mod I'm willing to accept, since it doesn't have the risk of breaking my save files or my game like most other mods. I also use Steelfeather's Enchanted pack, which is also 32x. It was the pack that made me want to patch my MC so I could use higher rez texture packs. I love the glowstone. Any pack that makes the glowstone look not like lumpy ickyness has my love.



So. Here I am, building the birch animal farm tree (you can see it in this screenshot... it's at least twice, if not three times as tall as that screenshot) late at night (MC night), walking along the one block wide path of the edge of the circle, placing stacks of birch blocks I'd just cut down from inside the tree in our temporary birch tree grove, and I make the mistake of looking into the water. I'm Skyping with Dragon, and just muse aloud that there's something odd in the ocean, that there's light where there shouldn't be. I grab one of my doors for emergency air, wait for him since he decided to come with, and then head on down.

It turns out to be a good thing I brought the door, as I get to a single air bubble once I hit the anomaly. I set it down right quick and step in the air pocket to look a round... only to get rudely shoved on out into the water flow by Dragon as he jockeys to get in the door for air. I manage to regain control right quick, and end up on top of a wooden platform. Huh. This looks like... yeah, it sure is... a ravine crossing an abandoned mineshaft. Only instead of the ravine breaking to air, it broke to water. I see two extremely cobwebby areas right nearby and end up teleporting home as soon as my suspicions are confirmed... cave spider spawners.

Just today, we decided to go tackle the two spawners to make it safe so we could explore. We each die a couple times, and narrowly escape a death by half a heart a couple times, but we manage to light them up well. ... only there's still a steady trickle of cave spiders. So we explore a bit. And find a third spawner right around a corner. A few more deaths, and it's submissive to our will as well... hey, why are we still getting poisoned? More exploring. A fourth spawner is found, up above. More deaths, more lighting, more cele... dammit are you kidding me. Stop biting me. A fifth spawner is found, and more deaths are racked up, and finally... finally they all are... oh fuck it all, I still hear spiders.

We called it quits for the night at that point, having gained ground and a safe landing spot in from the ocean. All these cave spider spawners, nicely arrayed in an approximately 30 block area. Let me tell you, if we can wrangle all these poisonous bastards into one xp farm... ohhhhh, will we ever have all the experience we can handle. But let me also tell you... I may not want to help out on that one. I've had enough of the creatures for a while.

I'm back, baby!



What do you do when your closest Nether Fortress is several hundred blocks from your portal, over massive swaths of magma haunted by fire-spewing monsters?  Not to worry!  With the Nether Highway, a small fraction of which is shown above, traversing those distances is a snap!  Solid cobblestone construction means those pesky Ghasts can't knock it down -- and now, with new double-height shield action (not shown), they also can't knock you off! 

I finally hooked the Nether Highway up to the fortress today, and found Blazes almost immediately.  They are tough! -- but I killed a couple, and now I have crucial endgame ingredients.  Still to do:

- Build plazas on the Nether Highway so that I can walk around stray Pigmen
- Upgrade to the Nether Superhighway by laying minecart rails?!
- Explore the Nether Fortress
- Find and acquire Nether Wart
- Figure out how to balance survivability (iron weapons and armor) with risk management (no iron weapons or armor) in the Nether

Ragnarok wrote:

I recommend the railtracks if you put a roof over the highway. (That's what I did anyway, and it works quite well.)

The ceiling is a good idea.  How did you deal with Zombie Pigmen blocking the tracks?

Also -- and this is for everyone -- what's the best way to farm Ender Pearls?  Seems I'll need a bunch of them, but I've only run across four Endermen so far.

Ragnarok wrote:

I have no idea how to farm endermen. When I need pearls I tend to go out at night in full armor and a few swords and run around looking for them. It's not the best strategy, so hopefully someone else knows a better way.

Partial success.  I discovered that Endermen spawn quite a bit more often than I thought they did -- not as often as the other nighttime mobs, certainly, but still pretty often.  But because they aren't hostile, they don't find you the way, say, creepers do.  What I was doing wrong was trying to farm them in the dense forest near my home, with limited visibility.  Once I relocated my farming operation to the plains, I found six in three nights.  You can't farm Endermen unless you can see them! 

I also found a fun hole in the ground that turned out to contain tons of creepers and a skeleton.  I came out with my first two music discs. 

BioKraze wrote:

[color=#A04080]satyr, was this hole made of cobblestone with some of the blocks spattered with green? Was there a bluish grid block spitting out fire particles and constantly spawning mobs?

Because if it was and this is your first time seeing it, congrats on finding your first dungeon!

I didn't see a spawner, no   There might've been one -- the geography of the cave was pretty complicated -- but it didn't look like the kind of environment where I found the other spawner I've seen in the overworld.  I think it was just that I was in a large, dark space, and the RNG decided to throw creepers at me for a while.

My chicken farm has been built, while my plant farm has expanded. I still don't want to go fighting mobs until I have a good stock of cooked chicken on hand, or at least some bread to supplement the chicken.

For me, it's enough to have about six or eight chicken in hand, plenty more on the farm, and a field of wheat (or a bunch of hoarded surplus wheat) so I know I can make more.  I don't want to be farming all day

The closest thing I ever came to an Enderman "farm" was to build a large, spider-proof fenced area with a small safe-house in the center and ceilings two blocks high at places.  Murder holes around the ring of the area were for killing other mobs, and I would keep a pool of water nearby just in case and the inside of the area lit.  I would goof off around the fence, and if I spotted an Enderman make sexy eye contact.  When it would attack it would teleport itself into my little arena, where I could attack it without worrying much about other hostile mobs, have ceilings to hide under and protect myself (while allowing me to attack it) and pools of water as a failsafe to help injure or nuetralize them. 


But I'm not sure where it's at on my map.  I built it forever (in minecraft time, in real world time like, a month) ago and have abandoned it since.  I like to wander.

I dunno, Sat.

It already has ocelots.

satyreyes wrote:

But... they sit on your chests and make them impossible to use! 

That is the cutest thing I have ever heard.

satthemindtaker wrote:

You know what else turns out to be fun?  Taking one of Vechs' super-hostile maps, which are designed to be played by people who are actually good at this game, and playing it on Peaceful.  Vechs is a master builder, and on Peaceful mode I get to admire his awesome craftsmanship without being set on fire every fifteen seconds.  Some, of course, would say that that's part of the fun, but they can keep it.  Today I had nothing to do, or at least nothing I felt like doing, so I played Sunburn Islands front-to-back on Peaceful.  It was just... brilliant work.  I climbed a gigantic tree made of Netherrack and Soul Sand, I desecrated an Egyptian tomb, I raided a pirate ship, and I catburgled an art museum in an underwater glass dome.  Vechs makes things that I don't even know how to make, quite apart from the patience or creativity.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who does this.  Eh heh.  When I do try to play for realsies, I have to do it SUPER SLOWLY, and only after cheating by checking out areas on peaceful first.  That's how much I suck.  I have no idea how Paulsoaresjr plays them on hardcore so near effortlessly.  If he wasn't an adorable minecraft dad with adorable-sounding kids he would be such a butthole.

How do you make an underwater glass dome?  Do you build the dome first, then fill the space with a solid from the top down, then mine out the solid again?

You can.  Be a good idea to build one wall first and line the side that will be inside your dome with signs so you can have some air to work with down der. 




Did we ever get around to setting up an IRG minecraft multiplayer server?  If we haven't, I vote that we give it a pretentious name like I give all of my minecraft worlds (Example:  The Waters and the Wild) so that strangers in class watching me play will think I'm cool and educated.   Like, the Sunlit Garden or Azure Blocks Paler than the Sky.

I'm not sure if it costs anything if you use your own PC, other than the host's willingness to set up the server, play or assign mods and dedicate some RAM to the server.  The minecraft site gives out the files necessary for creating servers, the minecraft wiki has more information on setting them up, and Hamachi is a program that helps create router ports and other words I don't actually understand.   Someone else can host it (besides not having to dedicate a PC's RAM and whatnot to the server, this also helps protect your PC from any security weakness that running a server can cause) but you have control of the server for what seems to be anywhere from 10 to 30 dollars a month.


Some people on the minecraft forums offer their services as a host -and will set up the server for you.  Like dis person:  http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/122 … er-setup/.   Thirty dollars for the first month, and 20 per month after.  I hear some are cheaper, but I'm not really brushed up on this.


Organizing payment will be the hardest part.  If hosts accept paypal that makes it easier.  One trustworthy person would be in charge of making the payment, and we would individually send them our portions of the payment through paypal.  Maybe we can have IRGers promise to contribute so much each month?  For example, we get 8 people to promise to help pay.   We can then have one group of  four people each pay 5 dollars to cover one month, and then have the next month covered by the other four.  I may not make much money but I would be happy to put in five or ten dollars each month when I can to help out. 


I just fear someone getting stuck with the bill if some aren't able to pay.

Last edited by OnlyInThisLight (03-29-2012 04:46:15 AM)

Last I heard from Aine, she and I were kicking around the idea of an IRG-exclusive server, with her and her boyfriend being primary admin/sysops and myself most likely paying exclusively for the server fees for everybody. Before anybody goes mouthing off, shut the hell up; I draw a form of disability, and I can ultra-reliably cover anything that doesn't go over $25-30 monthly. There's a trick, of course, but if it's all set up via Paypal (or if somebody else wants to handle the funds) then I should be able to get away with it scot-free.

If all y'alls are interested in this particular setup, have one of the group's reps shoot me a PM and I'll discuss it in private with Aine. If you has Facebook and friended me, shoot a message there; I check that waaaaay more often than my forum inbox or even my own Email.

However, if youse guys ain't that interested in that given arrangement, let me know and I'll leave the planning and funding of our evil scheme to those with cooler ideas.

Wow, Bio with the white-knight kicks out of nowhere!    Naturally, that would be fantastic!  But whether that works out or not, I'm certainly willing to pay my own share.  As far as game mode, I think I feel inclined towards creative mode.  Multiplayer is great for showing off massive public works projects and such, and SMP can be time-consuming for that sort of application.  But either way is fine with me -- and Bio, if you end up paying, I think this is a case of "he who pays the piper calls the tune."