The Minecraft Thread

Pentium T4200 dual core, 2.0 gigs. Chugs quite a bit on Win7 (and runs with both cores above 40 °C at all times, even with a cooling pad), but the sound card is wired together in a way that I need Win7 to be able to record stereo mix and microphone at the same time for gameplay videos because XP makes the two mutually exclusive. Thought about upgrading to Win8 to ease up on the performance hit, but I play a lot of old games and am worried about losing compatibility; running XP in a virtual machine is an option (and I did it before for an installer that didn't run on Win7), but I'm not sure if the hardware can handle it at this age.

This laptop can run the likes of Crysis, Fallout 3 and Company of Heroes with decent FPS on medium settings, but that's about the upper end of what it can do; Assassin's Creed is almost completely unplayable regardless of settings, EndWar runs in constant slow motion and even Age of Mythology HD Edition needs minimum settings to reach double-digit FPS. Hardware-wise, the DVD drive sometimes stops working with a controller error until a cold reboot; one keyboard, two batteries and one battery charger died so far, with the charger socket having bad contacts due to a small nut that randomly fell out two years ago. So yeah, it's really showing its age - and I find myself praying that it'll hold together until I get a new one because if it doesn't, I'm royally screwed.

Anyway, back to Minecraft. One thing I sorely miss and have seen requested on forums several times is an artificial sun. What I want it for, you wonder?

In the first world I ever played, I started building (in Survival, not Creative) an airborne fortress over the world's default spawn point. I still have the savegame, I just haven't finished it because the next game version was the one that changed the map generation, so if I travel outside the already explored area, the transition to the newly-generated parts is going to be jarring as fuck (especially since the world spawn point is on an ocean coast).

Anyway, building this fortress is what showed me an unwelcome truth: whatever airborne structure I build will perma-shade the ground below it, regardless of altitude. So what I want some kind of artificial sun for is to make the fortress not turn the ground under it into creeper territory because, again, the fortress was built in Survival mode. I had to completely hollow out the hill next to my house, stripmine multiple lakes and disfigure a lakeshore in order to obtain the materials for it (and fell off to my death dozens of times while building), yet it's not even a fifth way done.

edited 14th Jul '16 3:24:21 PM by amitakartok

The closest that exists is that a number of mods have some variation on a floodlight. The only one I can think of that's been updated for 1.9 so far is Extra Utilities.

Several building mods also let you craft blocks with glowstone to get a light block with the texture of the original.

edited 14th Jul '16 3:33:25 PM by Elle

I know a bit of Java, but nowhere near enough to mod the game myself. If I could, I'd make it so that when the game tries to spawn a mob and the destination point has a solid block above it, an extra check is made whether the point in question has a direct, uninterrupted line of sight to the sky^note due to the 'solid block above' restriction, it won't make the extra check directly under the sky since that point obviously fulfills the condition; further optimization can be made by not running the extra check if the point is below the biome's default terrain height because caves would cause a load of unnecessary checks. If it does, the mob spawning routine considers that point's light level as being under direct sunlight regardless of its actual light level (ie. if it's the middle of the day, no hostile mobs will spawn there).

Shader mods add realistic shadows, but can cause lag or not work at all on computers that aren't Fancy Super-Graphics-Card Gaming PCs, and afaik they're completely cosmetic

Modding is how a lot of people who "know a bit of Java" develop their skill if you wanted to try. You'd want to use Forge and they have tutorials.

There have been various mods to control mob spawning but I don't know of any that are up to date. For my modded 1.9.4 world where I'm trying new mods and building I'm running mostly in Peaceful but would like a Peaceful Lite...mobs don't spawn on the overworld surface but the neither/end and spawners still work.

Is there a reason you can't just use torches/glowstone/etc.? They do the same thing the sun would do. As long as they're properly spaced you'll have no mob spawns.

And you can put carpets over floor glowstone and still have them light it up if you're worried about the aesthetic

edited 15th Jul '16 1:09:36 AM by SmartGirl333

After playing Fortresscraft Evolved and coming back to Minecraft I get salty about how sparse ore is. Too used to ore veins being harvestable for mad stacks of ore.

Just started back into Minecraft both vanilla, modded, and feed the beast infinity.

FTB is an odd mod it sometimes tanks without eating up all the allotted RAM and sometimes runs almost as smoothly as lightly modded or vanilla.

I was actually going to buy FortressCraft Evolved, but then I saw the achievements.

FTB Infinity is for mods on the more recent versions of Minecraft, right? I've honestly stopped caring about the new versions and have been sticking with modded 1.6.4/1.7.2 (and maybe 1.2.5 FTB Retro and Tekkit Classic occasionally) for some time.

edited 15th Jul '16 8:53:06 PM by valozzy

Meanwhile, I'm excited for the Pixelmon mod finally going into 1.9.

valozzy: I am not entirely sure if they have step back mod packs but if you use the current launcher I am certain I saw a few mod packs that were not recent mine craft.

@Val: the references are only in the achievements. Might as well make them memeworthy :P

Me in FCE: Okay, now way for the research assembler to finish my pods for the lab so I can get Advanced Hydrocarbons done and unlock the jetpack, let's go harvest that liquid resin and check the depleting Nickel ore vein so I can move the extractor...

Me in Minecraft: Hurry up and finishing growing, wheat, so I can make the bread for my next mine dive for diamonds.

edited 16th Jul '16 6:06:28 PM by AceOfScarabs

Ace: Oh the joy of watching paint dry wheat plants grow.

Ah yes, the reason why the Watering Can is one of the best modded tools to exist.

edited 16th Jul '16 6:36:31 PM by valozzy

So, I've played some Thaumcraft 4 and some Thaumcraft 5... While the latter is fine, and even interesting, the earlier version is too... Uh, tedious? Not for me, that is to say.

Anyway, I tried some Resonant Rise (the newer version), and bamboo is so cool! Also, how do I protect myself from those bloody Blood Moons? I've started on a small island, and decided to stick with it, so there's little building space... And the first time Blood Moon happened, there were creepers everywhere. Mainly in my chicken coop, so now I need to lure in chicken from the neighboring isles again. Any tips? Or should I just fiddle with the settings?

Holy crap, the green generic "nitwit" villager is spawnable in Minecraft again. Do you realize what this means? We might actually get a new type of villager! (I hope it's a guy who sells building supplies.) Why else would they re-add a previously removed feature that was unused to begin with?

Is it me or does Minecraft run insanely fast on the Wii U? I used to play with mid-high details on my desktop (Haswell i5 CPU with 8gib of RAM and a meaty GTX 850 graphics card, running off a Crucial brand SSD for the boot drive) and it still has chunk load lag when I run around at high speed on horseback, but so far the console version has virtually zero chunk lag.

Maybe the console version has optimized memory handling or something.

I may not know a lot about tech stuff, but I guess it has something to do with the fact that worlds aren't infinite and pretty small.

Hmmm, you might be right, they do throttle the graphical settings for the console version a little, less intense draw distance, more strictly controlled chunk activity and loading, and suchlike.

Seriously the console version rarely if ever framedrops unless some ridiculously intense activity is going on.

edited 27th Aug '16 7:55:04 AM by AceOfScarabs

Minecraft depends on CPU power more than anything else. You could be running it on whatever beast Nvidia has released this month and still lag to death if your cpu can't handle the chunk loading.

edited 27th Aug '16 9:46:07 AM by carbon-mantis

Then how does the Wii U do so smoothly? It's only got a modified PowerPC CPU and a Radeon Mobility GPU with 1 GB of RAM allocated for games.

Since it's based on the PC build's 1.8 stylings I don't think it's a straight upscaling of the mobile version.

Great, now I'm tempted to get Minecraft on the Wii U even fucking more.

For 1.11 there is a new game rule called "maxEntityCramming" with the default set to 24 (i.e. 25+ entities at the same spot will suffocate)

Since this affects grinders, chicken machines, elytra launchers, and so on, it will be included in the next snapshot.

No more chicken black holes then.