Yaddy, I love your sig, and it is now stuck in my head.
I made both a terrible discovery and a wonderful discovery last night. But first, I need to provide some back story.
I started playing MC three days ago. The first night I played, I didn't know how to craft. I had vague ideas (hit trees for wood, use wood for sticks, etc.), but nothing concrete. For the life of me, I couldn't harvest anything - I was tapping on the tree rather than holding the button down. So, left with no other recourse, I went exploring for a bit before calling it a night. At that point, I was totally unaware of the day/night cycle and the monsters accompanying the dark. The next day, I watched a few youtube videos at work and realized what I had been doing wrong. So I logged back in to my world that night, and started to harvest some wood.
That's when things went bad.
You see, I had neglected to remember that I had spent a fair amount of time exploring the night before, so after I harvested maybe 8 wood, night began to fall. From the same youtube video that taught me how to craft, I learned of the deadly nature of the night, so I began to freak out. I didn't have time to make anything, let alone find coal. I figured I was toast, and in fear began digging straight down with my hands. I wound up making myself a little 2x1x2 space, and quickly made and threw down a workshop. I made a wooden pick, and continued to dig a little in the dark. Through some miracle, one of the first tiles I dug led me to coal. Not a lot, maybe 3 pieces, but enough to make me torches. I put one on the wall, and sealed myself in. And thus, that's where I built my home. It's actually in a really nice area, with caves, cliffs, sand, water (well, Ice. It's always snowing), and tons of trees. I wound up building myself a nice little home there, and all was good. I even built myself a little beacon on top of the entrance so that I could explore and still find it! It was essentially a small (5-tile tall) + sign with torches on the arms and a tree on top.
It was dawn as I was digging out some space for what would eventually be my greenhouse (i have a great design for it, btw - I'll explain later). I don't have sound, so I'm not entirely sure what happened at this point, but there was a cave-in. I was left with half a heart, and no recovery items. But hey - shortcut to open air
I climbed out of the wreckage up to the surface, only to be faced with a flaming zombie. I promptly died. Not from the zombie, mind you, but I panicked and fell back down into my house.
Now as you may recall, I had done a fair amount of exploration before creating my emergency home. What this means is that when I respawned I had absolutely NO IDEA where my house was. None. I proceeded to spend the next two full in-game days wandering the map, looking for my house marker. As it turns out, when your marker isn't that big and is topped by a tree, it looks distinctly like every other tall tree on the map, even when it's on a mountaintop - this was the terrible discovery. Finally, on the second night of searching, I saw an odd tree that seemed to be lit from below! I had found my house! I turtled in there for two more days. First I put up some high walls around my now-exposed greenhouse, then did some digging for replacement coal, as the coal I had on my person had decayed due to my long absence. Once day broke, I proceeded to build what I consider a gigantic beacon to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. Here is a rough schematic (# = 1 stone block):
Front view:
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Side view:
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Top view:
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It's essentially a giant candellabra with 5 "candles" - one on each limb, and one in the center that the diagram doesn't show too well. On the 4 outer pillars, each outward-facing side has a torch - one for each stone. That's 12 torches for EACH pillar, along with 12 for the center pillar, and 4 at the halfway point of the base. 64 torches. I may have gone a little overboard.
As for the wonderful discovery, that involves my greenhouse. On the main level of my base, the greenhouse is just a large, vacant room with some windows. There is a staircase along the wall that leads up to the actual 'field', as it were. The field is surrounded by 4 tile-high walls (dirt topped with stone), with a glass ceiling on the stone layer. The wonderful discovery is what I did below this. The room below the greenhouse - the room with the windows I mentioned before - is my "pretty" room. I didn't want there to be a dirt ceiling in my pretty room, so I did a pretend 'drop ceiling' using half-steps. Along the edges I used stone so that I didn't have an ugly gap visible from the stairs. This leaves a half-tile gap under most of the farming layer. When I did this, I was unaware of the water requirement for farming. Once I found out, I made a bucket, mined out one of the dirt tiles, and replaced it with water. Virtually every farm tile went 'hydrated'. I assume that the empty half-step gap between dirt and ceiling got filled with water, providing hydration to the entire farm. The only sure way to find out would be to destroy one of the ceiling tiles and see if water pours out, but that seems a little destructive. Either way, I'm happy with it.
Oh, and speaking of my windows, there's a funny story about one of them. I had misjudged the distance between inner wall and the outside, so I wound up digging quite a bit before hitting the outside. It was nighttime when I broke through, so I went ahead and put the glass up, figuring I'd clean up the outside once day came around. When I came back to see if it was light out, there was a creeper trying to get in through the window, just hopping there like an idiot. I decided to tempt fate and come up to the glass, but he iddn't blow up. But nor could he get out of the little window excavation I had done. So I went out the front door, came over to the exterior of the window, and walled him in with a glass ceiling. Voila! I had the beginnings of a zoo.
Unfortunately, he eventually despawned. Still, it was great while it lasted
Sorry for the thread derail, Midget!
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Topic: Explorer - A Minecraft Alpha LP(tons of images!) (Read 33976 times)