A couple of weeks ago, I’d laid a foundation for a new house, and thought a bit about how I wanted it to look; now it’s time to build! Of the building materials that I had easy access to, I thought wooden planks would look best, so I decided to start with that as the basic material for the walls. And I made some glass as well, so I’d be able to put in windows.

But first: there was a circular area nearby forming a weak center, so I’d planted a sapling in the middle of it. Which has now grown into a tree, and it looks a lot better! Still not great, though: I wish the tree were bigger. So I might chop it down and see if the roll of the dice gives me a better tree next time.

A circular area providing a weak center

The circular area with a tree in the middle

Anyways, on to the house. Along the front, I clearly wanted windows symmetrically arranged on both sides of the door; it wasn’t clear to me how wide they should be. At first, I made them three wide, but then the outside edge was too thick; maybe four wide instead?

Three wide and four wide windows viewed from the outside

Three wide and four wide windows viewed from the inside

Viewed from the inside, though, the four wide really didn’t look right: it was hitting right against the corner. So then I had the happy thought that I might want to treat the corner specially on the outside, too: that would get rid of the wide space. So I tried putting a wood column and a stone column on the corner.

Wood column on the corner

Stone column on the corner

The wood looked better, so I went with that. Thinking about it, though, made me wonder: since the floor of the house is raised, the plank area on the bottom of the house looks uncomfortably thick. Should I replace it as well? I tried out wood and stone there, but neither looked right; dirt ended up working better, however.

Wood and stone on the bottom of the house

Dirt on the bottom of the house

Next, I decided to attack the front door area. I wanted to make some sort of porch there; but maybe an accent above the door first? I tried stone, glass, and wood; wood won.

Stone above the door

Glass above the door

Wood above the door

With that, the front was in place except for the porch; before working on that, I fleshed out the sides a bit.

The side facing the pool, with door

The side facing the sand

The front at night, with torches

A sheep trying to glitch through the door

A chicken trying to glitch through the door

Next, the front porch. Miranda had showed me a trick involving stacking fences that you could use to build a column, so I decided to use that. But what should I put on top? At first, I thought birch might be nice, but when I actually tried it out, it looked ghastly; half-height wooden slabs looked rather nice, however. Though, looking at it, I’m no longer convinced that I need that wood accent above the door; maybe I’ll replace that with planks later.

Birch porch roof

Wooden slab porch roof

After that, I turned to the patio / pool area. Here’s what the view out the side door looked like when I started: I decided to get rid of the grass and thin down the border of the pool.

Facing the unfinished pool

I decided that half-height wooden slabs would work well here: a change in level seemed suitable, and slabs would give it a finished look. Here’s a picture of it in progress, and a picture from inside the house.

Building the patio

Facing the patio and pool from the inside of the house

I also put a fence around the patio, and stairs leading down to the pool. (I still have smooth lighting turned off, so the stairs don’t look right.)

On the patio, looking at the pool

Looking up from the pool

And finally, a picture of the current state of the front of the house, with the patio on the side. It’s probably not the most beautiful house in the world (and I’m sure there are building material that I’d like more if I took the time to make them), but, as is doubtless clear from the above, it could have looked a lot worse!

The front of the house, with the patio on the side

I’m planning to build a second story on top; I’m tentatively planning to make the second story a bit smaller than the first story, to help smooth out the transition to the hill that I’m building against, but we’ll see what looks best in practice. (I like the way the fence around the patio provides a change in height, too, I’ll want to work with that.) Before getting too heavily involved in that, though, I think I’ll dig into the hill first. The plan is for this building to connect up with a train station on the other side of the hill; depending on how that works out, I may turn the inside into one large grand entrance hall instead of having a separate second floor.

I recently ran across a reference to a Minecraft mapping tool called Tectonicus. It sounded interesting, so I thought I’d give it a try.

Actually, to be honest, I was a little nervous about giving it a try: discovery is a huge part part of the fun in Minecraft, so maybe I’d be ruining that? As it turns out, I didn’t have to worry about that, though: the surface view of my map is remarkably bland. Here’s what the area around my spawn point looks like in my map, along with a zoomed in view of the house: both of them are very much missing the character of the world and its buildings.

My spawn point and surrounding areas

Zooming in near my house

Part of what is missing is, of course, the caves. Which you could see some of on the edge of the map that it generated: here’s a picture of one edge of the VGHVI map.

Caves on the side of the VGHVI map

That picture does a great job conveying the romance of Minecraft to me: huge networks waiting to be found underneath, complete with lava! So I poked around and discovered that Tectonicus has a view that only shows the caves. Here’s what it looks like on the same portion of my map as the first picture:

Caves near my spawn point

Which is interesting in its own way: you can see my branch mine, you can see some of the stairs I built (especially if you zoom in: the tool presents a great Google Maps interface), and you can see that there’s a huge clump of caverns there, some of which I’ve explored but some of which I almost certainly haven’t, and which seem to reach all the way down to where my second house will be.

Still, the excitement really isn’t there: I need to be able to look inside buildings and to view the scenery from different angles and perspectives. I guess what I really want is a flying mod of some sort; though how much I really want that is debatable, I like walking from place to place and I like discovering.

After playing around with my own map, I switched over to the VGHVI map. That turned out a good deal better: after the first session, we’ve been doing most of our building above ground. Here’s a view of all of our major structures: it turns out that my minecart tracks actually make a nice ring around that area. (And I’m glad to learn where the bathhouse is!) Below that is a more zoomed in view near the temple, including some of the ivory towers and the train station and underwater tunnel that we’re building.

The major structures in the VGHVI world

The area near the temple

And, finally, here’s a view of almost all of the VGHVI map. Which raises some interesting questions: what’s that strange bit off to the north? Who put a pool of lava on top of a mountain there? It looks like we’ll have to build our underwater tunnel quite a ways before it reaches land, but that will be a glorious accomplishment in its own way: that actually makes me rather excited about continuing it.

Almost all of the VGHVI map

After last week, I was really frustrated at my guitar’s flaking out. I did have one hypothesis that was easy to test, however, namely that I had a bad MIDI cable. So I went out yesterday, bought a new one, plugged it in, and held my breath.

And it worked! The guitar performed flawlessly yesterday; today there was one instance where it thought that the lower strings were still strumming, but that went away the next time I actually strummed. And I’d seen that happen occasionally even before my old MIDI cable went south, so I’m not worried about that symptom.

And when the guitar works, it really works well: I was messing up fairly often, and it was doing a very nice job of informing me! But I had a great time going through songs this weekend; yesterday, I felt that I was making real progress, and in particular my right hand is noticeably better at finding strings than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Today, I finished off the last few Solid songs and moved on to the Moderate songs: they were quite a bit harder than yesterday’s songs, with faster movements between chords on different strings and with more unusual chords thrown into the mix. (And, alas, I was less disciplined today than I had been about not looking at my hands: too many large leaps for me to make.) When I was playing on Easy, the songs leveled off in difficulty part of the way through, and I was curious if the same thing would happen on Medium; maybe it will, but it hasn’t happened yet.

My fingers felt a little odd yesterday: they weren’t hurting, but my calluses felt strangely soft, to the extent that the strings almost got stuck in them at times. I’m choosing to interpret that as meaning that I haven’t been playing Rock Band enough; I was certainly glad to get in practice both days this weekend. Especially because it’s taking a lot longer to go through each song on Medium than it did on Easy: if I put in enough time, I can barely make it through through a tier over a weekend, but often recently I haven’t managed that. Admittedly, that had as much to do with hardware problems as anything, but still: I need to focus if I’m going to make it to Hard in the first half of the summer. (Which is where, I assume, I’m going to start feeling like I’m really playing music; I’m planning to buy an amp when I get to that level to hear what I sound like.)

Good times.

After last time, I’d figured out where I wanted to build a house: now, it’s time to start building. But first, some pictures from last time. (I did a lousy job of taking pictures this time as well, unfortunately.)

In the first one, you can (barely) see the outlines of the area where I want to build. It’s the back right side of that picture: there are hills to the left of and behind that area, with a pool and some greenery in front, and more greenery off to the right. The second picture is taken from fairly close to the sand hill in the back, looking in the other direction towards the green area in the front.

I'm planning to build on the back right side of this picture

A closer view of green area, looking back

I walked around that area a lot, trying to figure out where a house should be. Eventually, I homed in on the hill to the left: it’s next to a green area, with a cute little pond close to it. And that wall is uncomfortably steep; maybe if I build a house there, it can provide an intermediate step between the two, increasing their relation? (Levels of Scale) Also, there’s a bit jutting out of the hill, which you can imagine is a ruined wall to a house.

Hillside with a spur jutting out of it

So I decided to build there; and, taking that jutting out bit as a cue, I actually decided to build right next to the hill. Which goes a little against my plan of having an outdoor house, but only a little: think of it instead as being a transitional phase between my earlier cave-dwelling habits and my new desire to be out in the open. Also, if I built away from the hill, then I’d want to build pretty far away, otherwise any windows would be looking straight at a bunch of rock, which is no fun. And, finally, I’m planning to build a train station just on the other side of that hill, and perhaps also connect to some caves on the other side as well: so actually the new house can be the other side of the train station, part of an entrance gateway into a town I’ll build!

With that in mind, I needed to clear out space for the foundation. I decided to work with the dominant ground level; but of course I had to clear out some irregularities coming out of the wall.

Clearing out space for the foundation

A tentative foundation is in place

Like I said above: I spent a lot of time walking around. Was the foundation the correct shape? If not, which side should be longer? Eventually I decided that the shape I had was more or less correct, and that I’d have the main entrance be on the long side, parallel to the side of the hill. (Or you can think of that as the main exit, if this ends up boring through the hill and connecting to a train station on the other side.) If you’re facing the hill, a pond is on the left; I’ll put a second exit there, perhaps leading to a fenced off area between the house and the pond? I’m not completely sure. At any rate, I put a porch with some steps in the front, though I ran into a strange graphics glitch while doing so.

Front steps, with strange graphics glitch

I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do next with the house—I don’t even know what building material I want to use for the walls! (Hopefully Miranda will give me some suggestions once she reads this.) So I spent more time pacing around the area, thinking about the rest of the surroundings instead. Look at that second picture at the top of the post: the foundation would be on its right side, did I like the rest of that area?

My answer was: not really. The mixture of sand and grass is inelegant; also, there’s a grassy circular depression further back that is a center but not a very strong one. Here’s a closer picture of that:

A circular area providing a weak center

So I replaced some of the sand with dirt (which should be colonized by grass soon): my guess is that I’ll eventually replace more of the sand, but I was sure that I didn’t want any sand on the lower level there. And I planted a single tree in the middle of the circular area: my hope is that, once the tree grows, that will turn the circular area into a Strong Center.

The lower sand has been replaced with dirt

I've planted a tree in the circular area

With that, the area near the house is starting to take shape. First, a view of the front of the house (with smooth lighting turned on, which cures the graphics glitch).

The front of the house

Then, over on the left, will be a patio and a pool.

The patio and pool will go over here

A closer view of the pool

And I’m fairly sure that I’ll put more buildings to the right, though I haven’t worked out the details.

More buildings will go back here

Finally, here’s the view out the front of the house. I imagine I’ll take out more of the sand, probably removing all the sand on the level right in front of the house.

The view out the front of the house

That seems like a plausible story. What about the areas further from the house? There are trees there now; do I want to leave the trees in place, do I want to build more houses, do I want to make a farm? I’m not sure; I wandered over and looked around a bit, and I didn’t find any answers, though I did find a couple of small caves.

I'm not sure how to use this area with trees

A tiny cave beneath the grass

Another nearby cave

I’m pretty excited about this: it’s nice to have a new project to work on, and I feel good about how it’s gone so far. I’m definitely looking forward to next weekend: I’ll want to build the house up, though I do need to decide first what to make the walls out of…

I’ve been meandering around the last month or two trying to figure out what my next Minecraft project should be, but now I think I have a pretty clear plan. I want to turn the back of my home mountain into a railroad station; I’ll build tracks out of that leading to another settlement, and I’ll use that settlement as an opportunity to build an outdoor house or houses, in a way that teaches me more about Christopher Alexander.

So, this weekend, off I went! But first, a gratuitous sheep picture:

Hello, sheep

After saying hello to the sheep, I went south from the back of my home mountain. Here’s where the entrance to the train station will be, and where the tracks would most naturally go:

Trains will come out of here ...

... and head in this direction

My memory was that, if I go south a bit, I’ll run into terrain that is more interesting than desert but not super fascinating. Which is actually perfect for me: I want the terrain to give me something to try to harmonize with, but also to have enough problems that the presence of my buildings will have a chance at helping it instead of hurting it. And, after not too far, this is what I came across: that area to the right looks at least somewhat promising.

The first interesting terrain past the desert

So I tentatively thought I might build over there. But, assuming the train tracks didn’t turn, I would end up going to the left of that land hill instead of the right: maybe that’s where the train station will go? I decided to explore that way a little more.

A little further on on the left side

Two caves in the side of the sand cliff

The upper cave is moderately deep

The lower water cave is small but pretty

And I liked what I saw. There are two caves, one of which is small and pretty and the other of which is rather deep. So I can imagine connecting the buildings I build on the other side of that hill to one or both of those caves, and having some interesting mining as a result. I decided to press on still further south, just to remind myself what was there:

Several sheep splashing in some ponds

Lots of trees further back

Whoa, that's a long way down

There was some nice stuff, but nothing crying out to have me build a settlement there. I did chop down a bunch of trees for building material, though. So then I turned back and looked at the other side of that sand hill, to see if it looked like a suitable building location.

A circular area providing a weak center

A slightly wider view of the surroundings

I didn’t take great pictures, unfortunately: in particular, I didn’t take any pictures looking south at that time, though I’ll put some up in that post. But, basically, there’s a cute pond (not in any of these pictures), a circular depression that is somewhat interesting but could use some strengthening, some sand leading to a sand mountain, and some trees off to the side. So there were features that I could work off of, but also features that I could see improving.

So: it’s a plan! Build a train station, run tracks south, have a second train station to the left of the hill, and build a few houses on the right side of the hill. I’ll start with the houses, though, the train tracks can wait. But, first, a stake in the ground:

The future location of my second train station

Last week, I started running into some very annoying controller problems. I thought the issue was at least partly due to battery problems, but the guitar flaked out again a few songs later. Right as I was giving up in frustration, I noticed the MIDI reset command, so I tried that, but I was too frazzled to see what effect it had had.

And when I started playing this week, the guitar worked great! I finished off the Apprentice-level songs at Medium difficulty; I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this, but this mode in this game is the most fascinating thing I’ve ever played. My main accomplishment this week is that my right hand seems to have gotten a lot better at selecting the correct strings: a couple of the songs had be alternating between strings that were two apart, and that went quite well, and even when there were less regular patterns, my right hand was doing surprisingly well at jumping to the correct string, even for the middle strings.

Unfortunately, when I started on the Solid songs, the guitar started flaking out again. It would claim frets were perpetually held down, or it wouldn’t register frets that I was pressing down, or it would refuse to register any strums at all. The MIDI adapter was flashing an SOS pattern, so clearly it was also pretty confused as to what was going on, but doing a MIDI reset on the guitar didn’t work.

So I’m pretty frustrated. Up until now, I’d been really impressed by the Squier: what it’s doing seems to me to be quite complicated, but it works amazingly well. And much of the time this weekend, it was also working amazingly well! But when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work.

I had been assuming this meant that my guitar is a lemon. And that may well be the case; a few forum posts suggest that I might have a bad MIDI cable, however. (Which does seem consistent with my symptoms.) Fortunately, I have a spare one of those around, so I’ll try that next weekend. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to figure out where my nearest Fender repair center is? Which I’m not looking forward to, because of the intermittent nature of the problem: that kind of thing can easily lead to multiple rounds of guitars being returned as allegedly fixed with the problem continuing to crop up at home…

Our April VGHVI Minecraft session was on April 28. Eric Swain decided to work on the towers that had been started last time: he finished the sky bridges, and also created a rectangle of glass that was floating unsupported in the air above the temple. Some pictures:

Finishing off the skybridge: because of a graphics glitch due to the height, I couldn't see Eric, so the glass was appearing out of nowhere!

The glass platform hanging above the temple

Looking down at the temple at night

The moon rising above one of the towers

The sun setting past another tower

A strange, perilous diagonal skybridge

I decided to experiment with power rails: they’re not as powerful as the boosters I’d been using, but they’re a good deal more straightforward and less prone to chaos created by cows. Miranda helped, and we ended up looping the rails around to the other side of the temple, so now they make an almost complete circle.

My first powered rail

Rails crossing a waterfall

The new end of the line

After that, we decided to build a train station near the other end of the line (right where the tracks had gone plunging into the lava, though we blocked that off).

Building a railroad station

On top of the railroad station

The cows really like that booster

More progress on the railroad station

Finally, Pat and Jonathan decided to build an underwater tunnel. They did that by building a wood core surrounded by glass, and then burning out the wood, which worked really well.

Burning out the underwater tunnel

A view of the burning tunnel from the surface of the water

The fire is dying down and the tunnel is appearing

Extending rails into the tunnel

The entrance to the tunnel

We do this every month, so feel free to come join us on May 26!

After I finished mining on Sunday, I did go exploring as planned. I’d already headed north, south, and west, so that left going east as the obvious next step! First, the requisite departure pictures, looking east from inside the house, the roof, and through the gateway arch.

Looking east from inside the house

Looking east from the roof

Setting out through the gateway arch

Of course, I knew the first landmark on my journey east: that’s where the ravine is. Here’s one of the views down, as well as a view up into a bridge I built in the trees when I first exited the ravine.

Peering down into the ravine

Trees with stone bridge above the ravine

But I was in unfamiliar territory soon after that. It was quite charming, with a lovely little pool, and my first wolf sighting! Too bad I’m in peaceful mode and hence don’t have easy access to bones; hopefully I’ll find some in a dungeon eventually…

Pond a little further east

My first wolf sighting!

The first real landmark was a mountain: here’s a view of it barely visible in the distance, and a closer view.

Is that a mountain in the haze?

Approaching the mountain

As I got closer, it turned out to be impressively large and to come with a waterfall. And with steep sides: I managed to climb up part way, but eventually I dug a spiral staircase into the walls.

The waterfall at the base of the mountain

A view of the spiral stairs from ground level

The stairs up close

You could see a long way from the top: here are the views west (towards home) and east.

Looking back towards home from the mountain top

The view east

After that, I continued east. First, some tree pictures: a strange tree with mixed branches, a view of my inventory after chopping down my first birch tree, and a view of some trees high up whose branches extended out impressively far from the trunk. Do trees that you plant not grow that well, or have I just not been patient enough with my tree farm?

A tree with a strange mixture of leaves

Birch saplings and blocks

Looking up at a tree with spreading branches

And some non-tree scenery: a bay with pigs swimming in it, a watery cave, and a pool of lava right in the middle of the desert!

A pig swimming in the bay

Looking into a watery cave

A lava pool out in the open in the desert

Note the water in all of those pictures: in general, I ran into rather more water in this direction than in some of my recent journeys. And eventually, I hit some water that I couldn’t see across at all. At least not with the normal graphics settings: when I bumped it up to high, trees slowly popped into view. In retrospect, I’m actually kind of sad that I bumped it up to high, I kind of preferred the mystery…

Is there land across the ocean?

A couple of trees pop into view

More trees appear, with the moon behind them

That seemed like a good place to stop, so I turned around. I took a slightly different, more coastal route back, and didn’t take as many pictures. Here’s another tree with huge branches and a strange partial skybridge.

A tree with huge branches

A strange partial skybridge

I also ran into the only large cave on this journey: not nearly as impressive as the cave I’d run into on my western trip, but not bad.

Looking down into the cave

It's a pretty deep cave

I approached the lava sands area from the water side: here’s a view of the bay next to it and one of the lava sands at night. Incidentally, I brought a bed with me on this trip so I didn’t have to wait out the nights.

A spit of land in the bay next to the lava sands

The lava sands at night

And two final pictures: a rather impressive waterfall snaking down a sand mountain, and the beginnings of my birch tree farm!

Long waterfall flowing down from sand mountain

Starting a birch tree farm

That’s enough exploring for now, I think. Minecraft being what it is, there’s doubtless quite a lot more exploring to be done near my home base (in particular I’m planning to get to know the waterfall area a little better), but I don’t see any urgency in doing that. (Probably the eventual release of maps will give me a nudge in that direction.) Instead, I think I need to do some more domestic tasks: I want to set up an above ground house somewhere (trying to so so in a way that teaches me a bit more about Christopher Alexander), and I want to begin a rail system. The natural direction for rails would be south of my home base, so I’ll see if I can find a nice place to build across that desert.

I had planned to continue my exploring from last week when I played Minecraft this weekend, but it was dark out, so I decided to work on my mine for a bit first. Which started off as normal: a decent ore haul, but not enough iron, despite the following:

Several blocks of iron ore

But then, as I was digging one of my branches, I found an opening beneath me, and saw water beneath. Heading down, there was a quite lovely little pool down there, with a surprising amount of ore in its ceilings!

Water beneath me

The inside of the pool cavern

So I went down and mined out the ore that I could find, and then went back up the entrance that I came in. The thing was, though, it felt like I should be pretty much at the end of that branch, about to rejoin the central corridor; and that part of the corridor was interrupted by a lava pit! (This underwater cavern was actually beneath the lava layer, only four or five blocks above bedrock.) So I was afraid that, if I kept going, I’d accidentally set off a lava flow: in fact, I wasn’t completely convinced that I wasn’t already under lava. So I dug over into an adjacent branch, and carefully counted off the squares: it turns out that no, I wasn’t underneath the lava, but I was right underneath a corridor wall. I carefully dug down there, creating a second entrance into the pool.

Looking out the second entrance to the pool: those low walls are protecting me from lava

After that, I extended my main mine corridor, and ran into some ore and a couple of diamond blocks. And, when I dug the bottom of those out, I ran into another suprise: more water!

Water coming from behind diamond blocks

I’m not used to that much water right at or beneath the lava layer. I swam up in there, and there was another quite nice pool; here’s a view from inside the pool, looking back at the main mine corridor, along with a view of some of the redstone that was in the pool walls.

Looking at the mine corridor from the second pool

Redstone in the walls of the second pool

I did a bit more mining after that, but nothing else as spectacular; here’s another ore picture, and a picture of my final loot for the day. (Tons of redstone, but mediocre iron.)

Blocks of iron and gold

Today's mining haul

After that, I went back up to my house to smelt the ore. Here’s a picture of my current stash, along with a view of a cow in the distance through the window and the achievements that I took the time to earn. Surprising how many achievements I haven’t earned, given their small number (and it’s not that I haven’t earned them since 1.5 was released, I’ve never done them): I’d been consciously avoiding combat, but I really should give farming a try at some point.

My current loot stash

Achievements are here

A cow far off in the distance

This weekend was pretty busy, so I didn’t get to play Rock Band as much as I would have liked, but I did have time to make it through most of the Apprentice songs on Medium Pro Guitar. Which would have been awesome—Medium Pro Guitar continues to be fascinating—except that I had some quite annoying hardware problems.

It started on Saturday: Liesl decided to give Pro Guitar a try, and was getting (justifiably!) really frustrated because the game wasn’t picking up her strums. The high strings were a particular problem, and I’d had problems earlier with upstrums on those, so I looked up the instructions for adjusting the pickup to make that more sensitive. That helped, but not enough when she was plucking by hand; switching to the pick seems to have mostly fixed it, though.

Today, the game was acting funny for me, too, and Liesl suggested the batteries. I replaced those, and it started behaving better. In retrospect, then, that was probably much of the problem yesterday as well. (I probably accidentally left the guitar turned on last week: easy to forget that it needs to be turned off.) So most of the session today went well; but, towards the end of the session, I started getting really weird behavior, where the guitar would sporadically refuse to detect any strums or insist that a fret was held down when I wasn’t touching the fingerboard at all.

Eventually, the controller became almost completely unresponsive; also, the MIDI box was blinking in a strange way, which I didn’t remember seeing. Looking in the manual for the guitar, it looked like that was probably a sign that the guitar needed to be reset (I don’t remember if the box was actually blinking in an SOS pattern, but it might have been); I held down start and back on the guitar, and in the little bit of experimentation I did right then, it seemed to be behaving better. At the very least, it was no longer completely broken; I had to stop fairly soon anyways, and I was frustrated enough that it was hard to get back into the flow of things, so I didn’t test it out thoroughly.

I really hope that was the problem: if so, it’s annoying, but now I know what the signs are, and it’s easy to fix. I’m a little worried that I may have gotten the sensitivity wrong when fiddling around with it yesterday, and I’m also worried that the hardware may just not be working well at a more fundamental level; we’ll see what happens next week, I guess.