The other main game that I’m playing now, is Rock Band 3. (Which, like Minecraft, is never-ending…) I won’t be able to capture pictures of it, but I will keep a diary of my progress in the game. (For all my groupies out there, I’m davidcarlton at rockband.com.)

I’ll leave pro keys to a separate post, but, that aside: I’ve gone through all the songs on guitar, including the hall of fame induction setlist. I did them on expert except for three songs at nightmare difficulty level and all but three of the songs at impossible difficulty level. I may go back and try to do more of the songs on expert, and I may try to finish off some of the other goals (e.g. 5-star all the songs, or get a 100% score on one of the songs), but it’s not a particularly high priority right now.

I’ve started going through the songs on bass; I haven’t made it very far (just the warmup and apprentice songs), but I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying it. So clearly I should play bass more; though probably mostly in solo mode, since Liesl is our resident family bassist.

We’ve been playing some as a family, generally doing the road challenges; Liesl and I have made it through most of the bus road challenges, and Miranda has joined us for the subway challenges. Our typical lineup has Liesl on bass, me on guitar, and Miranda on keys, but sometimes we switch it up. Miranda is very fond of Werewolves of London. (And she rather likes I Love Rock N’ Roll, too.)

I imagine that eventually I’ll try going through all the songs on drums and vocals, but no guarantees; right now, I just want to finish the songs on bass and refine my pro keys skills.

Actually, I lied: this blog isn’t just going to be pictures of my Minecraft house. No, it’s going to be much more interesting than that: I’ll also include pictures of my Minecraft spawn point!

Spawn Point - East

Spawn Point - South

Spawn Point - West

Spawn Point - North

I decided to go north; in retrospect, south seems pretty interesting, too, but at the time I was playing on an underpowered computer with a low draw distance, so I probably couldn’t see the trees there. (But I’m looking forward to exploring it in the future!) There may have been a tree up north that I could see and immediately chopped down, I don’t remember.

I walked up that hill, wandered around, and then got nervous: what if I did something interesting, then died, then couldn’t find my way back? So I went back to as close to my spawn point as I remembered, and created a clear sign as to where I’d gone:

Trench from my Spawn Point

A big unnatural trench should do the trick, no? And, at the top of the hill, I turned the trench to the right:

Trench turning at top of hill

This looks really different now from when I first saw it: for one thing, I’ve planted a bunch of trees, and for another thing, you can see a window that obviously didn’t exist back then! At any rate, that hill looked promising, so I walked towards it. I’m assuming that it must have had a coal deposit visible on the surface, because that’s where I started digging my first cave.

The entrance to my house

Like I said in my first post, “this blog is intended to be pictures of my Minecraft house”. In fact, that’s where the idea for this blog came from: Jonathan was complaining on Buzz that

You know what we don’t need any more of? Stupid Minecraft posts. I don’t want to see another fucking Minecraft house. Everybody has a Minecraft house. There’s nothing special about your house. I don’t care.

And my reaction was, “That’s a great idea! I should write about my Minecraft house!” So I’m going to, Jonathan is going to be bored, and the rest of you are going to be bored, too. I suspect something more interesting will come out of it eventually, but that more interesting something won’t be here, it will be on my main blog. But here you will find too many pictures of my house, an entire travelogue of my experiences in the game. (Plus similarly boring chatter / pictures of other games.)

I’m playing in peaceful mode; this is my second world, because I took too long a break after creating my first world and lost track of where I was. Unfortunately, I didn’t start taking pictures until recently in my second world, so you’ll see a lot of future construction (e.g. windows) in the early pictures; ignore them.

And many thanks to Matthew Gallant for his Beginner’s Guide to Minecraft.

This blog is intended to be a record of gaming experiences. I expect entries here to be brief and relatively free from analysis. Material here may end up feeding into my main blog, but I imagine most of the time it won’t; fine with me, either way.

Alternatively: this blog is intended to be pictures of my Minecraft house.