Arghriculture

I could have just counted, but I decided not to.

My mother always told me, someday I'd be good at something. I don't think she would have guessed that was repeatedly dying in a game about exploration and construction.

Nice weather we're having, too bad the clouds are going THE WRONG WAY.

A nice open field, some trees in a nearby swamp, not much of note. Some sheep catch my interest and I steal their wool. Beds are a precious commodity you know. Especially when I don't ever actually survive more than one night.

Suddenly, I found a chasm.

Well, THAT was unexpected.

We have all seen these before, there deep, and have water, and some lava. Nothing too new. Wish I had something interesting to show you.

Unfortunately, most of the new 1.9.4 stuff is all end tier and not very accessible. So I start building my house into a cliff face I found at the end of the chasm.

For safety's sake.

There are so many things that can go wrong with this plan I'm not even going to bother making a quip here.

After some chicken killing and tree gathering it was night time, and yes.

It's round, I am disappoint.

One of the new features I can show you however is the cinematic player cam.

By hitting F5 twice you can enter third pony centered in front of your character rather than the usual behind.

Look how proud he is of his door in a wall.

It just occurred to me that this is the first time you've gotten a really good look at my skin.

TOO BAD, SLEEPING NOW.

Oh, well that's new. This is a lillypad, but they don't actually do anything useful yet. They aren't even given a proper name in game, and still use a dummy icon in inventory.

Dear Diary,

Jackpot.

However, it's getting dark, and as the new moon had made itself clear by popping up and having phases and being ROUND (I know I'm harping on this point a lot, but it's just unnatural).

It's time to retreat into my house.

Isn't it a lovely house? Small, simple, efficient, elegant.

And there's a bowling alley in the back.

Why is there a bowling alley in the back

And now it's made of dirt instead.

This had better be important, because so far all I see is just some... OH.

I then walked outside to get some water with the iron I had found while excavating the new garden, and was immediately attacked by three creepers.

Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb.

My final garden, nearly fully planted. It currently only has sugar cane and wheat, but I'll expand it to mushroom rooms after I get more cane and something to eat.

Growing crops in a well lit room in the middle of nowhere underground. This blog is now followed by the FBI..

There aren't any edible animals nearby, so I'm at a bit of a loss of what to do, but I found a bone!

Salvation at the hoof of a careless skeleton.

With the bone I can make three bonemeal, which I can use to instantly grow my crops, giving me enough wheat to make a loaf of bread!

However, I don't quite remember if I CAN die from starvation. I know I take a half a point of damage every couple of seconds while at 0 food, but I don't think it kills me.

Time to go gather some more canes!

I lied.

So, you CAN die from starvation. I think we all learned something important today.

BYE.

Closing Time

Now powered by 1.9.4 technology!

Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end. And yes, I was listening to Semisonic the entire time I was playing this save, sue me. (Please don't sue me)

Anyway, after a week of intermissions followed by a week of not updating due to abject laziness, I downloaded the newest prerelease and got it installed. If you want 1.9.4 as well, just copy and paste "assets.minecraft.net/1_9-pre4/minecraft.jar" into your favorite browser, and the download straight from the Mojang servers will start. This is the only official source I know of, so get it directly from them to be safe.

To update to 1.9.4, (on windows) hit the windows button on your taskbar, and search for "%appdata%" there should only be one folder (Roaming). The first folder in there is ".minecraft" open it and then open the bin folder. Simply copy and paste over the minecraft.jar you just downloaded and overwrite. Start minecraft like normal and BAM, prerelease.

Just like magic.

Minecraft, now with 100% more magic.

Today's goal is simple, get an enchanting table!

They aren't easy to get, and require at least 5 diamonds (2 for crafting, 3 for a pick), 4 obsidian blocks, and a book.

Where the frig am I going to get a book?

After much soul searching, I found out that not only is the sun now roundish.

Bevels, in MY minecraft?

I found out that the bit where I wander around and gather materials is really, really boring to talk about and I didn't take any good pictures anyway. So I'll skip straight to the good stuff, when I dug into an old mine while descending towards diamond level.

Free minecart tracks as far as the eye can see.

The strong holds themselves are pretty dangerous, but these mines aren't nearly as bad, although they tend to be quite extensive and one can easily get lost. So I should set up some sort of system to find my way back out.

Or I could run around in random directions and get completely lost beyond imagination.

I also found a chest, and it had goodies!

Now with some delicious, delicious iron bars in hand, I should head back up and start a staircase from my original one to actually get some dia-

MUSHROOMS

Like a cat with a bit of string.

So after some more hilARIOUS high jinks throughout the mine, gathering tracks, killing monsters and the whatnot, have a lovely little gallery.

What a lovely little gallery.

As pictured above, I found some gold ore, and a skeleton guarding it.

It was a truly epic battle, that ended in defeat of both participants.

Oh well.

ONWARDS, TO NEXT WEEK!

The Nether! and intermission.

The nether. The final frontier, the last great realm of exploration.

Let's go break stuff.

The nether is... surprisingly small.

So, thru the portal, and I pop out in...  A 4x4x4 cube with my portal.

Not to worry, I brought three stone picks and an iron pick for resource gathering and terraforming for just such an occasion! I'm sure it can't be THAT far to the surface.

I was wrong.

Okay, so I managed to dig all the way up to the TOP of the nether, and found no exit. I'll try digging horizontally.

I found a couple caverns that lead nowhere, more netherrack, some mushrooms and...

Did, did I make it?

Lava! Sweet delicious, nutritious lava! Now part of this balanced breakfast.

Look at it in all of its glory! A perfect representation of hell, ripe for the destroying.

There are new mobs in here with the 1.9 update, let's go make some friends!

Friends?

Another new addition to 1.9 are gold ingots dropped by Zombie Pigmen (pictured). They can be crafted into gold ingots.

Let's see if I can find a ghast, I've heard those guys are fun!

I leap, I climb, I cut down more pigmen and gather mushrooms, maybe I'll find one of the new fortresses and get some netherbrick, that stuff is cool!

Then Minecraft crashed.

Straight to desktop.

I... can still work with this, I'm sure of it. This isn't a problem, just load up the world and-

NO.

NO.

It reset the world.

It. Reset. The. World.

Don't care.

And good riddance!

I'm counting that as a death.

Now, I could start a new world now, and make a stupid long post, but instead I think I'll dabble about in creative mode.

The following is a video made chronicling about three hours of gameplay in creative mode. It also marks the first appearance of Glimmar's Steampunk texture pack! Which you will see a lot of.

Buh-bye!