I’d started a mine last time; it was fairly successful, but I certainly wanted more iron. And I actually rather enjoyed the process of mining; yay for repetitive clicking. So I went back and mined some more, this time branching off of the left side of my central passage.

Starting work on the left side of the central corridor

It was uneventful but reasonably successful at the start: here’s some coal, some iron, and some diamond, and I also found quite a bit of redstone.

Coal and iron

Diamond

But then it got more interesting from an environmental point of view. This picture looks innocuous enough,

Light around a bend

except that I didn’t create that bend to the right, and I didn’t put a light source there, either. And, if you go around the bend, here’s what you find:

A small pool of lava

That’s in the direction where I’d be digging my next branch, so I had to deal with that lava pool on a couple of subsequent branches; here’s a view of the same pool from a later branch.

Looking down at that lava pool from a later branch

Also, at some point around here I started to hear water. At first, it wasn’t too loud, but eventually it got loud enough that I felt that I should be sloshing around in it. So I stopped my normal digging and started digging towards the source of the water; it took me a surprisingly long time, but eventually I dug through a block that resulted in this:

Water streaming down through the ceiling

I’d been sensible and set up things so the water wouldn’t flood my mine corridor; still, I had a reasonable little river there.

The bottom of the waterfall, a fair bit further down

And even that wasn’t the end of my excitement: in my next branch, I ran into what I thought was a small bit of lava:

Another bit of lava

but when I started digging my way around it, it just got bigger and bigger. I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you’re digging right above the lava level; it was a pleasant change of pace, I guess.

It's a lava lake

Finally dug a gallery all around the lake

But I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a lake of lava interrupt my plans, so I continued with my branch. Which meant that, of course, I ran into my waterfall again. But it was worth it, I found a good haul of iron soon after making my way around that.

Waterfall, we meet again

Finally a good amount of iron

If it hadn’t been for the last couple of iron lodes, I would have been annoyed at the iron in this session session; as is, I’m fairly sure that I ran into as many redstone blocks as iron blocks this time. Here’s my haul at the end of the mining session:

Loot from this mining session

On my way up, I took a detour to explore all the various chests that I had scattered around; I’m glad I did, because I found quite a bit of iron inside of them. So combining that will all of my previous loot, here’s what I have now:

My current stash

That’s enough for 592 minecart tracks, which should carry me a decent distance. Of course, I’ll have to use some for carts, and, as I discovered in this week’s VGHVI session, I’ll also have to save some for boosters.

I’ll leave you with one last sheep picture:

Sheep on the balcony

We had another one of our more-or-less monthly VGHVI Minecraft sessions last week; here are the pictures.

Roger and Miranda continued their work on the temple from last time. Miranda had some ideas for how to finish off the roof, and it looked great. Here are some views from inside:

Finishing off the roof of the temple

And now the roof of the temple is done

The sheep approve

And here’s the outside of the temple roof:

The outside of the temple at night

A top view of the temple roof

Miranda also built a fire pit near the temple:

Fire pit outside the temple

Don't fall in!

I’d been curious about how mine carts work, so I did some track building, with Jonathan and David Sahlin doing much of the work. Definitely an educational experience, it pointed at some ways in which my naive ideas for track building on my main world won’t work, and I clearly need to look into boosters. (Incidentally, for people who were complaining about lag: apparently circular boosters can cause lag in multiplayer servers, so that might have been what was going on. I’ll replace them with something else the next time we play.)

Near the start of the minecart tracks

Looking back along the minecart tracks

Looking back along the second segment of minecart tracks

The sheep approve of the boosters, too

The tracks end near the temple

Minecarts litter the ground

At some point, Jonathan commented that it had been a few sessions since he’d done something evil; the next thing I knew, he was giving himself lots of fire, and we had a lot fewer trees growing nearby than had been the case.

Trees on fire

A closeup view of one of the many conflagrations

The arsonist in action

He then gave himself a bunch of arrows, and started work on a huge tower, looming over (threatening?) the temple. I’m still not sure what he intended do do there, and eventually he demolished it, but I got some pictures in the mean time.

Jonathan starting work on the tower

The top of the tower, in process of deconstruction

Towards the end of the session, Miranda and Roger built a dirt house near the temple. I also took a picture of a pool at some point around here; I’m not sure of the context, but I like it, so I’ll throw it in.

Outside of dirt house

Inside of dirt house

Pool

Another first-time participant was Pat Holleman. He helped with a lot of this, but then he went off and built some sort of super tree structure. (I forget the term he used: basically, you use wood blocks to build a huge trunk, and then plant trees high up along it.) Here are some pictures:

Super tree from a distance

Inside the trunk of the super tree

One of the platforms on the outside of the super tree

A great time; we do this about once a month (though with the GDC interruption, the next session might not be until the first half of April), anybody is welcome to join us!

I think I want to build some minecart tracks at some point, which means that I need a lot more iron. So far, I’d been haphazardly gathering resources while exploring caverns; I had access to vast amounts of coal, of course, and I also had more redstone and gold than I knew what to do with (I really should come up with a plan to use that redstone), but not nearly as much iron as I wanted. (Is coal really only twice as common as iron on lower levels? It sure seems a lot more common to me…)

Miranda had been talking about branch mining, so I decided to investigate that. This stackexchange thread led to this explanation of mining strategies; after reading them through, I decided to go with tunnels with the following cross-section. starting right above the lava layer:

The cross-section of the mine that I'm using

Basically, first you dig a long tunnel that’s the central core of your mine. (That’s not shown in the picture.) Then, you dig another long tunnel going off of it at right angles. (Two high, that’s the hole in the picture on the bottom slightly to the right. Go back to your original tunnel, move three to the left and dig up two squares, and dig another tunnel. (That’s the hole in the upper left.) Go back to the original tunnel, move three more to the left and back down to the original level, dig another tunnel. Repeat until you’re bored. You’ll dig out the holes in the picture directly, and you’ll see most of the yellow squares in that picture (all of them if you tile the region completely, continuing to go up); also, if there is ore in the blue squares, then hopefully it’s part of a cluster that will stick out into one of the yellow squares. That might not be the case, so you might miss a bit of ore, but you’ll get quite a lot of ore for your effort, more so than if you compulsively made sure you could see every single ore block.

So, with that in mind, I needed to start digging! But where? I wanted to be close to home, but also far down; fortunately, my ravine nicely satisfied both of those criteria. I could get there quickly, I already had steep steps down in place, so all I had to do was go down there and find a low point that I could quickly access from the entrance, and that’s where I’d start digging down to my new mine.

Going down to the ravine entrance and making a couple of turns gave me an obvious location to start digging my new stairs down. But, as soon as I did that, I found another cave system: this whole area is riddled with caves! Fortunately, the sides of the cave were fairly steep, so they actually worked very well as stairs down, saving me the time it would take to carve them out myself. Before going too far down, I explored the new set of caves, where I found my second monster spawner, this time complete with a music disc in one of the chests.

There was a record in one of those chests

After exploring half of the new caves, I wanted to head back to the main stairs out of the ravine, so I could find a good location for continuing to dig down. And I got completely lost while doing so: I got to familiar areas of the ravine, but I kept on going in circles, missing the key turn back up. After a few minutes, I finally found the main stairs, but clearly I needed to add some signs; so I decided to go back up to my house and build some.

Armed with the signs, I descended down into the ravine, and put the signs at various turns, giving directions both to home and to where I wanted to put my new mine. I also put in stairs in a few locations, to give another clue as to the main route.

Sign pointing to the main stairs out of the ravine

More signs marking the route between home and mine

I didn’t actually have to do much digging during this point: the cavern system did a good job of going down at an appropriate slope for quick traversal of vertical distances. Eventually, I hit a lava pool; based on my reading, this probably meant that I was at level 10, and at a good level for mining.

Lava pool near bottom of mine

I dug a bit into one of the walls there (either to get at minerals or because I thought I might start a mine there, I can’t remember: to my surprise, after digging just one or two blocks in I ran into the following:

That's one of my old lava galleries!

It was one of the galleries around the lava that I’d dug out the last time I was down here! I had no idea that I was so close to that region; that also served to confirm that I was on the lava level (it was at the same height as the other pool), and it also suggested that I should build my mine in a different direction, because I knew there was more lava where that came from.

So I went over to a wall away from that lava, and started digging. First, I dug down to bedrock, just to confirm that I was at about the height I thought I was, then went back up until I was just above the lava level and started digging the central corridor of my mine.

Digging down to bedrock

Central corridor of the mine

After which, I started branch corridors off to the side at various appropriate distances and heights. Which was very successful: here’s a picture of the only diamond lode I found, but I found several iron supplies (not as much as I’d like, but better than I’d been doing before), a couple of bits of gold, and more redstone than I know what to do with.

Diamond and iron blocks in the mine

I also found something that I didn’t want, namely water: one of my corridors flooded as I dug into it.

Flooded mine corridor

I ran back, but the water followed me; eventually, it petered out, so while I did place a block to stop it, the block really wasn’t necessary at that point. That was quite startling, but at least it was only water: if it had been lava, I probably would have died and lost all of my stuff. (Which I had a lot of by then!)

I need a better plan for dealing with that (anybody have good suggestions?), but in the meantime I decided that I should build a workroom at my mine entrance. That way, I could leave my valuables in a chest there, so if I got incinerated by lava, I would’t loose too much stuff.

This is how much I was carrying when I ran into that water

The storage room off the entrance of the mine

That was enough excitement for one time: rather than use the storage room, I decided to head back up to my house and deposit goods there. So I went up there, started the iron smelting, and went out and harvested trees so that I could make more charcoal, torches, and signs. (At this point, actually, it’s not so clear that I should be making charcoal out of wood: I have access to enough coal that maybe I should do all my smelting using coal instead. Though I’ve got a pretty good tree farm nearby, too.)

My main storage chest

Here’s all the loot I have collected so far. (Or at least most of it: I should look through other chests to make sure I don’t have anything valuable in them.) 184 pieces of redstone that are crying out for me to come up with a plan to use them; 105 iron ingots, which should be enough to make 272 segments of minecart tracks. (Is that a lot? I should count off that distance above ground: my hope is that it will make it comfortably over the desert to the south, but I’m not convinced that it will go much beyond that. Though, looking at those pictures, I think I won’t quite need 100 tracks to cross that desert, so maybe it actually is a good start.) I should build a jukebox, too, to use that record!

But I’ll probably stick with mining for a little while: it’s strangely soothing, and I actually really like traveling through the ravine to get there.

Now that I’m done exploring the ravine, I decided to explore slightly further afield. I’d already gone north; when I bumped up the draw distance after getting the new computer, I saw some interesting scenery south from my spawn point, so I decided to go in that direction this time.

The view south from my home mountain

The view south from ground level, near the spawn point

Actually, I had another reason why I was curious: if I’m going to turn my home mountain into a train station, then the natural direction for the first line would be south, so I’d like to see what I’ll reach if I do that. When I stand on top of my home mountain, it looks like there’s ocean not very far in the distance, but I was hoping that’s an artifact of how the drawing algorithm handles distance rather than a sign of what’s actually happening with the terrain. And indeed, once I made it down from the mountain, I could already see terrain features that were in that blue area, so that guess seems to have been correct.

So, I walked south. Through desert initially, but I reached grass soon enough. (With a cute little cave tucked away.)

A cave hiding under the grass

And then mountains, built of both dirt and sand; I climbed up on the grassy side.

The mountains at the edge of the desert

Mountains with grass, trees, flowers

That wasn’t the last of the sand, though; here’s another big bowl of sand, and a view of the tree-covered valley (complete with odd overhang) next to it.

Bowl of sand, with water and trees on edge

Tree-covered valley next to sand

Closer view of that odd overhang

I can’t remember how densely I took photographs; the next one after that is what I assume is a lake. (I don’t know if that’s an island in the distance or the shore jutting out.) I also ran into a lovely little meadow dotted with red flowers.

Lake ringed by beaches and trees

Meadow with red flowers

Eventually, I ran into my first region of snow. And not too far beyond that, a large body of water; I don’t know if it’s the ocean or not, but if it’s a lake, it’s a big one.

My first snow

Is this ocean?

At that point, I turned back: I wasn’t planning to go on a huge expedition, I just wanted to get a sense for what the terrain was like to the south. And the answer was: interesting and pleasantly varied, I’d certainly be happy to expand further in that direction.

But first some mining, I think: I need more iron. And I should explore east and west as well: I’ve gone some amount east underground, but I should go farther aboveground. It looks like I’ll hit ocean fairly soon if I go west, but I could be wrong about that.

I finished off the moderate songs yesterday, and did the first three challenging songs. I didn’t manage to 100% any of the moderate songs; some of them I’m fairly confident that I could get 100% on if I tried hard enough, but on many of them that’s not the case. In general, I’m finding songs at this level to be a lot of fun to play and learn: it’s hitting the sweet spot of being complex enough that I enjoy the music and enjoy the learning process while not overwhelming me.

I'm at rank 77 with 8,282,866 points

I’m up to rank 77 now, with a little over 8 million points; that’s up 19 positions and about 550,000 points compared to last week. That’s an average improvement of almost 70,000 points per song; if I can keep that up, I’ll end up somewhere in the mid 30’s. Which isn’t completely crazy—I’m in that area for a fair number of individual songs—but of course other people are improving as well. Still, hitting 50th place doesn’t seem as unachievable as it once did. If things go well, I could even conceivably get a score of ten million; we’ll see how close I end up, and if the answer is “very close” I’ll probably go for it.

When we were playing through London Calling a week and a half ago, Jonathan asked if I’d been paying attention to my fan count. I hadn’t been paying attention too closely at the time, but I quickly figured out why he was asking; Jonathan, I’m paying attention to my fan count now:

malvasia bianca 281,323,808; Academy of Dr X 277,149,520

My apologies for the crappy screenshot: I don’t see a way to get that leaderboard on the Rock Band website. Which is too bad, because that screen shot is out of date: I’m actually at 289,672,432 fans now. Though I imagine that Jonathan will pass me again soon: the main reason for my recent climb is that Liesl and I finished off the road challenges over the last two weekends (we still have gold medals to earn on some of them, but at least now we’ve completed everything), and that’s given me a nice bump. It looks like he’s going through songs on guitar and keys now; that should give him a convincing lead over me.

When we last left our intrepid ravine explorer, he’d discovered a waterfall with lava visible way down at the bottom. So I gingerly picked my way around the waterfall and started building stairs down to the lower level.

Going around the back of the waterfall

Partway down - there's lava on both sides!

And the bottom was even more exciting than I’d hoped. There was a decent sized rock area for me to land in, but the waterfall had lava on not just one but two sides.

Lava on one side of the waterfall

Lava on the other side of the waterfall

Even more exciting than that, though, was my first diamond!

My first diamond!

And in the fourth direction from the waterfall, the cave went further back, leading to (surprise surprise) more lava.

Lava at end of cavern

Not just lava there, too: there’s redstone, iron, and coal.

Redstone, iron, and coal

In fact, when I got closer to the lava, I saw redstone in lots of places: here’s another example, and an example of gold for good measure.

Closer to the lava, with more redstone

There's gold here, too

I wanted to explore more, but how? I ended up with a scheme that I’m quite happy about: I dug a passage in the walls one block away from the lava, and also removed the block at chest height right next to the lava so I could see what I was doing. I did this initially for pragmatic reasons, so I could make sure I was staying near the lava without putting myself at risk of falling in (and, as a bonus, it meant that I didn’t need torches), but I ended up really liking it for aesthetic reasons: it created a quite nice viewing gallery all around the lava.

Here are a few examples, which also show more of the redstone that was waiting to be found. In one of them, you’ll also see a chest: Miranda had recently had a bad experience with lava in her game, so she convinced me that I should build a chest to store the goodies that I’d been collecting.

Digging a gallery around the lava

At the end of one branch of the lava

Gallery on the far side of the lava

On the far side of the lava from where I started, there was another cave; I explored it, finding more lava, more redstone, and more gold. It wasn’t too big, though.

Another cave, with more gold

More lava, redstone, and coal

With that, I was finally done exploring the ravine: I’d expected it to be large, but not that large! Great to have so much redstone, too: in fact, right now what I really want is more iron ore, because I’m thinking that at some point I’m going to want to go on a minecart track building frenzy. (One of the ideas I’m toying with for the rest of my home mountain is hollowing out most of it to build a huge train station.)

I’m not entirely sure what my next project will be: if I do do the train station, it will be a while before it comes to fruition. I’ll definitely do some exploring above the surface, maybe that will inspire me further? (A pity that there’s no way to skip the night part – any way to get the game to keep going when I’m using another program?) Maybe I’ll spend time just grinding for iron ore, too.

I'm rank 96 with 7,735,307 points as of February 13, 2011

I had a lot of free time this weekend, a fair amount of which I spent working on Rock Band pro keys songs, and it’s paid off: I’ve reached my goal much faster than I expected! Specifically, as of today I’m rank 96, with a score of 7,735,307 points.

Which I am super excited about. And I’m nowhere near done: I’m only four songs into Moderate difficulty, which means that I have a full three and a half tiers of songs to improve my performance on. Which is just as well, I’m sure that by next weekend I’ll be under 100 again if I don’t do anything; but clearly I can do a lot better.

Right now I’d need about 9,100,000 points to reach 50th place; that would mean I’d need to improve my score by about 50,000 points on each of the remaining songs, which seems (barely) doable. Of course, by then the bar for 50th place will be higher, so I probably won’t ever reach it, but I should be able to put quite a bit of room between myself and 100th place. It’s certainly not uncommon for me to be somewhere in the 30s on individual song rank, though it’s also not uncommon for me to be quite a bit lower than that.

I’ve given up on the idea of getting 100% on most of the songs. I only managed it on two of the Apprentice songs and one of the Solid songs; I could get 100% on many more if I tried, but not all of them (there’s one Apprentice song (Humanoid) that I haven’t even gotten five stars on yet), and so far I’m not convinced that I’ll be able to get 100% on any of the Moderate songs even if I put in quite a bit more work than I have.

Judging by my ranks on individual songs, my skill set seems quite a bit different from many of my competitors’. I’m still not particularly good on songs that are fast and repetitive, so even when I feel like I’m doing well on those my rank is in the three-digit range. Conversely, with songs that are more melodic or that have what seem to me to be completely natural chord progressions, I’ll find myself in the mid 30’s after not very many attempts, even though I miss a few notes that I know I’m capable of hitting. It makes me feel better about my guitar scores – I feel that I’m a pretty decent Rock Band guitarist, but I’m not nearly as good at the really hard fast songs as many people seem to be, so I’m happy that, while their skills seem to transfer to some extent to pro keys, having a solid piano/harpsichord background is more helpful.

After finishing my house (at least for the time being), I decided to head back to the bottom of the ravine, and see how big the cave system is there.

Here we go!

There’s a river right at the bottom; in the other direction is darkness plus some coal.

A river over here

I wonder what's on this side?

And that dark area is quite big, it turns out. Here are some sample pictures, there are a lot more where they came from.

More cave

Still more cave

Yup, you guessed it: more cave

If you look up in this direction, you can barely see light from a torch from an upper part of the ravine

I wish iron were a bit more abundant...

In one direction, there’s what looks like a gravel wall: there is a gap in the wall, however, and behind it, you guessed it, more cave.

Gravel wall

More cave behind the gravel

Hidden cave behind coal seam

That last section was one of the few places where I had to dig to uncover the next bit of cave: I mined a bit of coal, and found an opening behind it. (Though I think that I eventually found a place where it connected back to the rest of the cave system.) With that possible exception aside, this is all one huge natural cave system, connecting back to the surface through natural passageways; now that I’ve put in torches, I wouldn’t be surprised if I run into sheep and cows down here the next time I visit.

I can still find my way around the cave system, but only just barely. At some point, I should put up signs to help me navigate the key points, because without that it’s very easy to go in circles.

Cave behind coal seam

A long, steep waterfall, with lava visible through it down at the bottom

I’d been amazed at the size of the caves so far, but the geography hadn’t been particularly striking until that last bit. That’s when I found a waterfall going down a hole in the side of a cave; looking through the water, it went quite a way further down, and ran into lava beneath. Exciting! But how am I going to get down there to explore it?

After my interludes of mining and exploring, I decided it was time to finish off my house. I’d left space for a fourth floor, so I just had to figure out what to put there.

It was noticeably smaller than the previous floors, and I decided to just put it as one big room. It mostly fit fairly naturally into a rectangle; one corner didn’t quite work that way, and if I extended the floor there, then it made the third floor balcony too dark, so I put an indentation on that corner. (But, unlike the second and third floors, the indentation was square instead of jagged.)

Left side of fourth floor

Middle of fourth floor

Right side of fourth floor

The big difference between the three floors is how they interact with the arch: the second floor is just barely below the arch, the third floor is right up against the bulk of the arch, and the fourth floor is mostly above the arch. I put a door on the fourth floor leading out to the top of the arch: if you look through it, you have a lovely view of the waterfall spire that I’d recently explored.

View of waterfall through the fourth floor arch door

I put a very small balcony outside the indented area on the left.

Small fourth floor balcony

You’ll notice a gap in the railing there. Originally, there was railing on all the edges; but then, at one point, I entered the fourth floor and noticed that a guest had somehow dropped down onto the balcony.

Cow on balcony

Because of the railing, it was stuck. So I removed the railing, hoping that the cow would jump down through that (I didn’t want to lead it through my house); it was reluctant, so I gave it a shove. Unfortunately, when I went down to the ground, I found that there was a reason why it was reluctant to make that leap:

Cow, R.I.P.

I still don’t have a solution to this; I’m hoping that not too many other animals will drop down onto the balcony.

On a lark, I also put some stairs going up from the back of the room. They lead to the top of the mountain, with a view of the desert containing my spawn point below.

Stairs leading up from back of fourth floor

View of desert and spawn point from top of stairs

That’s all the work I’m planning to do on the house for now. (With the possible exception of doing something with the pantry area; also, once I’ve grown more sugarcane, I’ll probably put in some bookshelves.) It makes a coherent chunk; there is quite a bit more mountain behind it to hollow out, but I want to think for a bit before putting something there. So, for now, I’ll get back to my mining and do some more exploration. (And possibly combine the two, while coming to terms with the ravine!)

After my last round of mining, I thought it was time to explore above ground a bit more. (Especially since I now had a compass, so I knew I wouldn’t get lost!) When working on the rooftop, I’d gotten curious about what was north of the house, past the arch and body of water that I’m on the edge of.

First, though, a picture of the outside of the house: you can see the arch I keep talking about, the second and third floor windows, the third floor balcony:

Looking up at my house from outside.

And here’s the bay that I wanted to travel across:

View north, across the bay

After going a bit further, I could see the spire with a waterfall streaming down from it that had caught my eye earlier: here’s a dim view of it. I love the spit of land in the foreground, too, with the hill and the single tree on top of it.

Dim view of waterfall with spit of land in foreground

Here’s a somewhat closer view of the waterfall: this was taken from the right side of the spit of land in the previous question. Notice also the dirt/grass block floating in midair: that’s the world’s fault, I didn’t put it there.

Closer view of waterfall, complete with floating dirt block

Here’s a look back at the spit of land (which turns out to have a second tree growing on the end). What I really like about this one, though, is the water to the right of the spit of land: it looks like ruins from a former city there underwater.

Underwater ruins next to the spit of land

Here are two more views of the waterfall; the sheep surveillance police are here as well, keeping tabs on me.

The waterfall really is majestic up close

Hello, sheep

Looking on, we have another spire, and a more substantial floating island; not sure where those floating islands are coming from, but I find them rather charming somehow.

Another spire further down, complete with floating island

Floating island, from below

Really, every picture at this point is beautiful. Here’s a view back at the waterfall spire:

Looking back at the waterfall spire

and two views of how the game generates trees, one a valley filled with trees and the other a single tree standing proudly alone.

A tree-filled valley

A single, proud tree

I turned around at this point, and headed back on the other side of the waterfall spire. I ran into a lake surrounded by mountains which, when I investigated, turned out to contain the first sugarcane that I’ve seen. (Which I grabbed the top parts of for farming purposes back home.)

A lake surrounded by mountains

Sugarcane!

I ran into a single square of water around here; Miranda encouraged me to pick it up to create a spring from, but for now I’ve left it alone.

A single square of water

Here’s a view of an expanse of water on the way back, dotted with tree islands:

Water with tree islands

And finally, I reached familiar territory. At this point, I was on the other side of my arch, near the ravine. I’d sort of forgotten that, when I initially exited that ravine, I climbed up a hill and built walkways to cross over to some nearby trees; but they’re still there, floating in midair.

These floating walkways were my fault

And here’s the back of my home arch, with the second and third floor windows visible.

The back of my home arch

A neat trip, with some lovely scenery: it makes me want to explore the area more but not actually build anything there, because I’m afraid that whatever I build would mar what is there now.