Minecraft Monday: Rain N’ Thunderstorm Tips N’ Tricks

Was going to start off with a bit of a News Update in terms of Minecraft via Notch’s tumblr, but nadda!  Hasn’t updated it in nearly a week! … Not like I can throw any stones from my glass house for that very reason or anything XD

I do have some random tips for you guys today, though!  Figured this out recently and thought you’d might like to know in case you did not already.

Rain

Rain is a trickster, through and through.  It hampers a lot in minor ways and really is darned mischievous!  For example, you are working off in the distance, maybe collecting wood or snow or flowers or wolves, something far away that is keeping you busy.  As you are well aware, nightfall is not the best time to be wondering, so you want to get back before then.  You glance up at the sky, and there is no sun to gauge when to head back.

No sun!  No pixely pad o’ butter in the sky to be found at all!  While this makes a watch more convenient, it makes everything else more inconvenient haha  This also can have some surprising consequences…

Say you are hiding underground because Mr. Watch told you it was the dead of night, so you are toiling away mining or organising, etc.  The clock shows it is just about daybreak so you head topside for a gander.  Tis rainin’!  Oh wells, no big deal!  At least the mobs stopped spawning and pretty soon they will start burning…

…anytime now…

Mobs do not burn during the day when it is raining >.<  Either due to the darker skies or being pelted with drops of water, the end result is that those buggers are there to stay.  And rain can last a long time in Minecraft, sometimes pausing for a day, then going right back on for another long stretch of time.

Thunderstorms

So rain not only blocks out the sun, making navigation and time-guesstimation difficult, but it also prevents mobs from dying off in the morning.  Thunderstorms up the ante a notch.  Thunderstorms are the same as rain, except lighting starts to go off and the skies get a lot darker.  While this might not seem too bad, as it gets far darker during the night, it seems that Mr. Notch added the ability for mobs to SPAWN within the clouded areas affected by said thunderstorm.

Well isn’t that just peachy?!  And those suckers can form with no warning at ALL.  You could be back in the example above, far stretch away from your base collecting stuffs when *poof*.  Thunderstorm.  Rain, lightning, and now twenty mobs dropping on you, apparently riding the massive droplets falling down from above.  And those zombies do not appear to be Vegan in the slightest.

Solution

VIOLENCE!

I keed’, I keed’.  There are a few ways around rain, which I wish registered in my brain sooner than it did.  For starters, as soon as night falls jump in that bed of yours!  (Thunderstorms are dark enough to allow you to sleep no matter what time of day it is, by the way!) Not only will it clock over to day, but it will also wipe out any bit of weather you were having.  That’s one mighty creation of wooden planks an wool ya got thar’!

Heed the scrallings from the wallings. The Bed speaks with wisdom beyond its years.

If you play more defensively, or build on your land more than you explore, sleeping through it will likely be your best option.  In fact, tighten up those defenses (just in case) and it should hardly affect you at all.  But for you adventurin’ types out there, ya need to plan ahead!  Bring a bed along with you, possibly a watch, and preferably at least one wolf at your side (I like three, myself). 

The bed allows you to sleep through the nasty, the watch will let you know how long you have to get back to base should the sun be blocked out, and the wolves will guard you.  Unless you let them fall off high surfaces.  Then they can’t.  ‘Cuz they’d be dead.  Undead wolves for the Halloween Update this year?  I got my fingers crossed!

Rain supposedly makes things grow a lot faster as well, but I can’t say I’ve noticed as my timing on growing things and rain hasn’t been in sync thus far.  It does put out fires and causes lava blocks to sizzle, but not turn to cobble.  Just sizzle a lot.  To the point Indiana Jones would probably start to freak out.

Some Minecraft here-say is that if lightning strikes a pig it turns into a pig man a la Nether mob, and if it strikes a Creeper its explosion will be much more massive than normal.  Does this mean a bigger TNT may be added in the future (as some mods have done already)?  Time will tell.

Enjoy the weather, me hearties!  Wonder if some leather and sticks could make an umbrella…

Minecraft Monday: Linoleum Tile Guide

Hey there guys and gals, sorry this is so late.  Planned on typing this up in the morning as usual, but had a case of the Real Life and got majorly sidetracked.  I got about 18 minutes to post, edit, upload and describe pictures.  Let’s make it happen!

Tiles and Ewe

That bad sheep pun makes me giggle. Hee hee hee ^_^  But no time for teh funniez! (Serious face v-v)  You’ll need a good deal of wool and wood for this project.  I didn’t even finish the room I was doing this in as it was just a proof of concept, but it could easily take quite a lot of mats to finish this depending on how much room you need to fill.  Behold!

Ain’t it a beaut’?  Know what they are?  Thems all beds!  Arranged certain ways, but beds all the same.

Getting Wool

Wool is harder to get than wood, in my opinion, so I’d start hunting that if you wanna do something like this.  It takes three wool and wood per bed, so start punching those sheep!  (They had it coming.  They’ll just get cloned anyway, right Dolly?) 

Hints that might help:  Animals spawn so much during the day because of the grass and it’s so bright.  Toss torches down around your base to keep spawns high at night, kill animals once they drop their wool or if they aren’t sheep in the first place, or kill spiders and turn their silk into wool. 

Getting Wood

Stop blushing you gutter-minded weirdos.  Beat some trees, replant their saplings.  Use bone meal from skeletons to speed up the process.

Preparing the Ground

Beds are fancy halfstones that are so tall that you have to jump onto them if you want to get over the blocks they make up.  You cannot place torches on them as you’ll try to sleep in the bed by right clicking, and having blocks lit up above them for this floor will look kinda tacky, so I prefer the opposite method: Lighting the beds from below!

You can do this with torches, pictured above, or lava (pictured below).  Because of this extra finagling you’ll need to plan accordingly.  You’ll need a dirt floor to place the beds on, then you’ll need to destroy the dirt floor in a way to place torches around blocks to light them up decently.  If you plan on having a floor of a building below this tiled floor you will need to seal that off, effectively taking up three rows of blocks.  (Bed, floating torches on blocks, ceiling of bottom floor)  Luckily the Lava method works the same way, but you’ll have to make sure that bottom floor’s ceiling is not flammable.  Don’t worry about the beds, currently they cannot go up in flames.  Maybe in an upcoming patch, so be wary, lava lovers.

After you got the dirt floor in place, begin your pattern however you wish.  Here’s how I got the pattern in the first shot.

Place a bed down and then smash one against it at a 90 degree angle so the pillow portions touch.  Then repeat going the same direction.  Do this until you fill or run out of room.  After you are done with that step, go back and add on one bed facing the opposite direction of the first to extend the pattern, like so.

As you can see, by extending it out you can easily put the perpendicular pillow piece in the open slot this creates, keeping the pattern alive.  You can tweak this further by editing the texture files and changing the look of the bed, and again by changing paintings to match the new bed spread of your choosing.

Note:  Unless you like holes in your floor, keep tiling until you cover an area 2 – 4 tiles wider than the room you wish to have tiled.  Just seal off the extra beds with the walls and it’ll look seamless, provides a nifty black border too.  I went back to the big tiled area and made a quick 5×5 ‘room’ to show you what I mean.

Whuddya think?

Minecraft Online Tip: Are You *Really* Alone?

The server me and the Misses have been playing on recently turned off it’s hmod (warp home, spawn, see who’s online, etc.) probably due to the 1.3 patch going live and from what I read, hmod has not been updated for some time.  But we figured out semi-accidentally a nifty little test to see if people are online even without the ability to check with a mod.

You’re working on say a super secret lava cave full of TNT and plan on taking over the world.  Your friend JBondDubbleBubbleOh7 has been skulking around your base but you didn’t want him to see it until it was done.  You login and decide to head to “Opensesame Entrance”, but again, you don’t want to lead your bud there accidentally revealing its location!

Simply twiddle your thumbs for a little bit until night fall, then place a bed on the ground and hop in!  If you are the only evil scientist online, the screen will get all blurry and poof, daytime again.  If someone is lurking in the shadows somewhere on the server, it won’t turn to day!

Just a note for all you closet Dr.Evlulz out there.