Hah. The guy's very serious :-)

Minecraft |OT| - IT'S A BLOCK PARTY!



Minecraft Official Sites:

Minecraft Official Homepage: http://www.minecraft.net/
Minecraft Official Forums: http://www.minecraftforum.net/
Minecraft Official Wiki: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page

Minecraft Official Wiki Patch History: http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Patch_history


Mojang (Dev Company) Official Site: http://mojang.com/


Notch's (Main Developer) Official Twitter Page: http://twitter.com/notch
Notch's Official Blog, Titled "The Word Of Notch": http://notch.tumblr.com/

Jens' (Assistant Developer) Official Twitter Page: http://twitter.com/jeb_




What Is Minecraft?

Basically, Minecraft is a sandbox game where you dig, farm, and/or mine materials to craft tools and other materials which thereby allow you to make even more powerful tools and materials. The game spawns a random and infinite world for the player so do what you wish with what is placed in front of you. Many players like to adventure and explore. Others like to build dream houses and gigantic forts and castle towns. Others like to build a bunch of weapons and go mob hunting at night (after sunset the mobs spawn, and most burn up at sunrise). You can pretty much do whatever you want in this game. Just have fun.


Minecraft really is one of the most addicting games out there right now. Trust me, if you like games where you build and/or create stuff, this is the perfect game for you. I've already gotten a few people in our guild hooked on it. I actually force myself to play it in moderation due to how long I have been known to play it in one sitting. I literally log in and end up losing 6-8 hours of my life, just like that. I have a gigantic fear that, as this game gets even more feature-packed via the constant updates, that it will steal me away from playing Guild Wars 1 full-time. I haven't been in love with a game this much since I first bought GW: Prophecies back in 2005.




Did Minecraft Come Out Of Nowhere?

No, it didn't. It originally started out as an open sandbox game with infinite materials. You were at your whim to design anything you wanted. Earlier this year, Notch decided to restart development on it and started turning his builder demo into a real game. One of ECTOs' oldest members who doesn't play GW anymore, Matt (aka, Canadian #1), actually pointed me in the direction of the old demo over a year ago, but it didn't catch my interest much and I forgot all about it.


If you go to the Official Minecraft homepage - http://www.minecraft.net/ - you can still play the older demo for free but trust me when I say it is nowhere near the current Minecraft product.




Is The Current Minecraft Free?

No, it isn't. It only costs 15 Euros (around 20 U.S. dollars) for lifetime upgrades, however. When the game leaves Alpha and goes into Beta the pricetag is supposedly going to double, so...

The price is WELL worth it, IMO. I am going to be playing this game for YEARS.




Lots Of Minecraft Love Out There On The Internet!

Many major internet forums have threads dedicated to this game, including Something Awful, 4Chan, etc. Everyone is in love with this game.

Here are the Official Minecraft Threads from the NeoGAF Forums, the first of which is what initially got me hooked on the game:
OT1: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=401027
OT2: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=422726





YouTube Users Show The Love As Well!

X's Adventures In Minecraft (link)
If you want to watch some gameplay videos of the game itself and learn more about why it is taking the gaming world by storm right now, I urge you to check out the YouTube Minecraft series, "X's Adventures In Minecraft", starting with this opening episode, and continuing on for about 40+ 10-15 minutes videos (still ongoing). This series is made by a YouTube user named davidr64yt, and he does a fantastic job of narration and explaining the game's ins and outs. He basically starts a newly-generated world from scratch and learns the game himself throughout the course of this series, and explains his findings to you, both in narrative and through example.


In addition to the "X's Adventures In Minecraft'" series, there are TONS of other Minecraft videos on YouTube. There are narrative play vids, there are building tour videos, there are tutorials for building functional structures, etc. Take a look on YouTube and see what you can find. Minecraft is one of those games where watching videos of someone else playing it or explaining something about it is almost as fun as playing it yourself. (No joke.) Read the comments for pretty much any of the Minecraft videos on YouTube. Constant praise and love.

Lol I'll buy it soon. They have Paypal right ?

About The TNT vs. Videos...

As for the TNT videos, the guy, HuskyMUDKIPZ, has made a bunch of them now...




It started with 780 Blocks of TNT vs. Mountain:






Moved up to 3000 TNT vs. Mountain:






Then moved onto 3524 TNT vs. Earth (ie. a large chunk of his world):






And finally moved onto Lots Of TNT vs. Island:






His next project, which he says will be up in a day or two, is 9,000 (!) TNT vs. something. Insane.

You can expect me to post a shit-ton more Minecraft videos and info here in this thread.



To start off, here is Notch's September 13th post in his blog, The Word Of Notch:

Quote:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121492466/the-going-ons-of-starting-up-a-company#disqus_thread The going-ons of starting up a company Turns out there’s a lot of paperwork and business deals and contracts and actual thinking involved with this, so from now on I’m going to have to actually properly assign some time to actual Minecraft development until this company gets formed. As in actually turning down meetings to get some development done. We’re speaking to a lot of interesting people, and we WILL go through the emails sent to jobs@mojang.com and reply to as many as we can! If you’re not living in sweden currently though, it’s unlikely we’re going to hire you, as we’re very much a startup and don’t really have the resources to help out with working visas or whatever else might be needed. There will be a Friday update, though, at the very least. I didn’t get to add a lot of single player stuff last Friday because I added the first version of the server-side inventory, so I’ll get some of that stuff added. Will it be better carts? The first version of alchemy? More random content in caves? A new monster? A flyable mount? Biomes? Animal husbandry? Fishing? Diving? Who knows!? OoooOOoo!

To go with Notch's Friday Update tease, a thread was started by fans on the Official Minecraft Forums asking,

Which One Of These Would You Like To Have On Friday?

I spent way too long in Minecraft Classic today. WAY too long.

I'll give this game a try.

I have to say that I envy you guys... You have way too much time on your hand :-)

Nice logo, Link.

P.S.: A similar game to this is Garry's Mod. It's based on Half Life Source: http://www.garrysmod.com/ If you liked MineCraft, you might like Garry's Mod as well.

I Love this Dude and his TnT Fetish.. lol

HOLY JESUS CHRIST ON A CRIPPLE!!!

That was just NUTS.

HuskyMUDKIPS has inspired me to explosively terraform some of my own mountains.

Can you terra-tank the exploding TNTs without dying?

Oh wait, that's a different game..

Secret Friday Update will happen around midnight Swedish time, according to Notch on his blog. Among other things, there will be volume and mouse sensitivity slider bars in the options.



Penny Arcade Comic about Minecraft! (Part One):

Secret Friday Update is running a bit behind, so it's now scheduled for Saturday:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1138010174/seecret-saturday-update-also-tutorials#disqus_thread

Quote:

Seecret Saturday update!? Also, tutorials. I need rest! (technically food and beer) I’ll finish the update tomorrow instead. I’ll add crouching, which will prevent you from walking over an edge, to make up for the late release. I had an interesting idea on how to teach people the crafting in Minecraft. The first thing that’s needed in any case is something that tells the player to press “I” to access the inventory. Once that is up, there could be a small “recipy” icon in the upper right corner. Pressing that opens up a tech tree with everything except wood planks grayed out into mysterious question marks. Hovering the wood planks shows the recipy (tree trunk -> wood planks!), and if the player completes that recipy he unlocks the next recipes in the tech tree thing. The recipes link into each other in somewhat logical ways, and can be non-crafting things like showing that a better pickaxe is requires to get ore, or that ore in a furnace produces ingots. Note that you don’t actually HAVE to unlock anything in the tech tree to be able to craft those things, it’s just meant as a way to show people what can be made, and add some kind of exploration to it. Once we have achievements, one of them can be for completing the entire crafting tech tree.

Crouching confirmed! (Among other things) Here's hoping he maps the crouching key to 'c' by default.

Achievements in the future? I wonder if this is pretty much a positive indicator that the game will eventually make its way to Steam.

I hope he spells recipe right in the game.
Can't wait to be able to crouch, could be useful.

Also OH DEAR GOD NO, ACHIEVEMENTS. As if this game weren't addictive enough..

What Notch means by "crouching will prevent you from walking over an edge" is when building something in the air where it gets kind of tricky to find a spot on the block you're standing on to place a new block in front of it. If you do it wrong, you will plummet to the ground (and take fall damage in the process). I've gotten the hang of how to do it so there's no problem with me. I guess crouching will make that trivial.

Seems that being able to change your spawn point is one of the features coming soon, if not with this upcoming update. From Notch's twitter:

Quote:

I'm considering beds! There are some interesting economics with spawn locations I'm playing around with.

Keep in mind that last week Notch said in a tweet that he was tinkering with how a compass points back to a player's spawn and then it got added with that update. Many people have been suggesting that a bed could be one way to implement a real-world philosophy behind changing your spawn point. It would also enable the creation of functional inns on multiplayer servers. (OMG! I want to make an inn!)

Rock Paper Shotgun is doing a feature on Minecraft titled "Mine The Gap". It's more or less another Let's Play Minecraft-style blog narrative, with play-by-play pictures.


Here is a link to it for anyone who is interested in checking it out:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/mine-the-gap/

When Fireplaces Attack...







Fubar'ed Update! Minecraft Is (Temporarily) FREE TO PLAY!

Notch originally planned to make biomes for his weekly update but couldn't get them to work properly. They will most likely be put on the back burner for the time being:

Quote:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1144331509/seecret-saturday-1-but-i-failed-biomes-again#disqus_thread Seecret Saturday 1! But I failed Biomes AGAIN! The update is out, and I guess the biggest feature is Sneaking. Press (and hold, for now) shift to move slower. You won’t make sounds, and you won’t crush plants, and you won’t fall off ledges. The big feature was supposed to be biomes. Again. And again I had to abort and rollback the code to get a release out. Again. I must stop trying to do it in a single sitting. Now I’ve spent almost two full days on it! I won’t work on it again until I can dedicate an entire week towards it. The main problem is that the transition between different biomes looks horrible. It’s either a chaotic wasteland of random blocks, or a sharp border of sudden ice. Actually generating the biomes themselves is interesting, and I can reuse a lot of the ideas from indev with the different level types. The floating island biome is kind of slow to generate, because it adds a second pass to fix waterfalls along all the edges. The hell biome will be used for an alternate fast travel dimension. Have you read Wheel of Time? That. There are a couple of other new things hidden in this release, but nothing game changing.

Since the big feature of the update didn't come to pass, the update turned out to be fairly minimal in nature.


What the update did accomplish, however, was completely hammering the Minecraft update/login servers to the point of crashing. The game has risen in popularity so much over the past few weeks that the hordes of players scrambling to grab the update were more than the servers could handle. There were other major problems too, such as a grey screen game-breaking bug which made the rounds earlier (fixed now though). As such, for the rest of the weekend or until Notch can get the servers up and functional once again, he has allowed Minecraft to be played for FREE! as a token of regret for all the problems today. Not the older, classic, infinite building-blocks demo, but the actual paid version!


Go to the official Minecraft page (temp site, as the original site was hosted on the master server which is fubar'ed) to grab the latest version and try it out for yourself for a limited time! Whether you are on the fence or it's something that simply doesn't appeal to you, you at least owe it to yourself to give it a shot and find out for sure. In the long run, I have no doubt this added free publicity will increase sales of the game even further (which, after the Penny Arcade comic was published, hit over 7,000 sales in just the 24 hours alone leading up to the update's unveiling).


NOTE: Sounds are bugged in the free download. For some reason the downloader doesn't download the actual sounds from the game. In his rush Notch forgot to copy those specific files over to the new download spot. It might get fixed before the game goes pay again in a couple of days, but at least for now you'll have to experience the game without sound if you don't already have an older version installed with the sound files. Sucks too, as the sounds help add to the beauty of the atmosphere whilst playing. Oh well.

Notch posted this on his blog. It's a fan-made trailer for Minecraft:





Pretty freakin' awesome fan-made trailer. It should be the real one.

Never heard of this game till I read this thread so here's my questions: (playing for free atm)

What's the difference of Free and Pay version? (Can't really tell since site is down)

Is it worth it to pay?

I got stick with the snow map while everyone else has bright and sunny maps and it sucks. Half time can't tell what I'm digging cause snow covers the blocks. So anyway here is what I've done so far: (I have 4 other bases but died before realizing there was a peaceful mode and don't know where they are. Made bases and dug them out during night and next day, then take a step out to be killed by creepers and whatever else there is.)

By omnithief at 2010-09-20