Pictures from the January VGHVI Minecraft session. First, some general photos:

Cows hiding behind the ice

A strange spire in the distance

A pig is riding the rails

No more mountain? Sad.

Sunset behind the mandala

Next, we played hide and seek; Miranda got annoyed at me at some point and started throwing lots of eggs, which turned into chickens.

Jonathan examines the chickens

Chickens by the door

Chickens outside

After that, I strolled around a bit more, and came across a warm, welcoming bed:

That looks comfortable!

Whoops

That was a mistake

Wreckage

Pat built a glass tower out in the sea:

Glass tower

Tower at sunset

The top of the tower

Inside the tower

Looking down at the water

And Miranda started work on a platform nearby, though I don’t think she’s done with it yet:

Purple platform under construction

Closer view of platform

Bottom view of platform and tower

This month’s VGHVI Minecraft session was a quiet but pleasant one, with only Miranda, Roger, and myself present. (Largely talking about genealogy, as it turned out.) I thought I might build something out of my swamp house from last time, but I ended up just wandering around the swamp in fascination.

Swamp house in the rain

Sunset over the swamp

The main thing that caught my eye was that the swamp house was nestled in a corner of walls that were formed by a chunk transition caused my a Minecraft version update: swamp on one side, older style terrain on the other side, looking for all the world like a fortress. So I followed those walls for as far as I could see the chunk transitions. First, one direction:

One corner of the wall

Further along the wall

A watery transition

The transition continues

Another corner

The transition peters out at that corner in that direction. Next, the other direction, starting from a swamp tree hanging over the wall:

Hanging swamp gardens

Going in the other direction along the wall

Water emerging from a transition cliff

Really, the swamps in Minecraft are just beautiful. I love the different water colors; and, in the darkness, the trees look to me like strange shaggy beasts congregating in the countryside.

Swamp waters

More swamp waters, this time with some blue and some trees

Sunset over the swamp

Moonrise over the swamp

Shaggy tree beasts in the mist

And, finally, some non-swamp pictures; that squid seemed to have flashing lights or something.

A vicious attack squid

Patterns in the ice

The city looks as wonderful as ever

While I was wandering around, Miranda was putting a few more touches on the ice castle from last time:

Ice castle lattice (front)

Ice castle lattice (back)

And then one of us (not me, probably Miranda but maybe Roger) had the idea that next time we should play hide-and-seek. So Miranda started to build a suitable playground for that, with a library theme:

Beginning work on the hide and seek area

Miranda's first few buildings

Roof with arrow

This moving water strongly offended Miranda's sense of aesthetics

Enchantment!

I’d never seen an enchantment table before. I built a couple of buildings as well; the first was a tall, narrow tower:

Looking down the book tower

Book vertigo

The outside of the tower

Library duck approves

And then I built a floating library. (Well, mostly floating, there’s a ladder on one corner.)

Starting work on the floating library

Inside the floating library

Let's add some enchantment tables

The top of the floating library

The floating library at sunrise

Floating library and tower

During this time, Miranda was working on a labyrinth, which I was sadly remiss in taking pictures of:

Entrance to library labyrinth

We’ll give it a try next time. (Which will be January 26th, Minecraft nights are the last Thursday of the month.) Come join us!

Pictures from this month’s Minecraft session (which really is the November one, we just pushed it back a week).

As has been the case in recent sessions, I mostly spent the time flying around, seeing what the new terrain is like. But first, some miscellaneous pictures:

Cow on the beach at night

Digging through to the nether roof

Lava arrow

I think that lava arrow is natural rather than constructed, but it actually does a pretty good job of pointing back at the portal.

Roger found a nice cliffside with jack o’lanterns:

Faces on the pumpkins

Better view of the waterfall

And Mattie was amused by the chicken that had wandered into a cave that Jonathan had explosively excavated several months back:

Chicken in cave

Looking up from the bottom of the cave

Now a bunch of pictures from my wandering. There were some quite sudden chunk transitions as old rendering algorithms and new rendering algorithms clashed, here’s one of my favorites:

Cliff glitch

Side view of cliff glitch

This was the first time I’d seen swamps, I think, and they’re rather lovely.

A swamp

Swamp at nightfall

Moon rising over swamp

Some more random pictures from the wandering:

Lava in a cave trench

I just took this one because of the message on screen

Sunrise way up high in the sky

A village I ran into

Now, back to glitches: here’s one that led to a cave being connected directly to the ocean.

Inside the cave

Closeup view of the water

View into the cave from the outside

And more glitches, include a rather charming old-fashioned floating island, followed by some non-glitch environmental pictures:

Square island corner

Cows next to glitch cliff

Floating ark

Island in mist

Strange moon

I’m still mostly blocked on construction projects, but when I found that swamp area again, I thought I’d make a little house in it. Miranda made fun of the small size of the house, but I think it’s kind of cute; I’ll have to come back again during the day to see how well it fits into the surroundings.

Green patch in the swamp

Swamp house

Looking out from the house

The house is lit up

As is usual, however, Patrick and Miranda were not at all blocked on construction! They decided to build a rather amazing Ice Palace on top of the ocean ice near the spawn point, right above the underwater train tunnel.

My first view of the ice palace

A decoration on top

There's a chicken coop in the back; here's the top view

And here's the side view

When I came back in the day, I found that the palace had turned into a meditation on the nature of captivity:

Distant view during the day

Closer view during the day

Imprisoned snowman

Please, let me out!

The chickens are happy with their prison, however

The middle of the palace, including a squid swimming between the palace and the tracks

When I came back the next night, Miranda had decided to expand the imprisonment theme with some pigs (with the flames from the spawners adding to the gruesomeness!); first, though, some pictures of other additions:

View of the front at night

A tree grows in the middle of the palace

Building a pigpen

Roast pork!

Side view of pigs

Eggs to go with the bacon

(I’m not sure that Miranda has the same interpretation of the imprisonment theme as I do; she’ll doubtless chime in below. I think it works rather well, though.) And some last pictures as dawn breaks:

Sunrise over the palace

Sun and the palace tree

Shapes in the distance

During the October VGHVI Minecraft session, I was still mostly flying around, but other people did a better job of getting back to work. The theme this time seemed to be building stuff in the middle of the sky, though I do have a couple of pictures of a house on the ground that, presumably, Miranda built. (The second picture certainly strongly suggests that!)

A house in the rain

The green room

Pat kicked off the aerial construction with a castle that he built on the temple outskirts:

Flying castle under construction in the rain

Castle in the sky

Next, Pat started work on a mandala on another edge of the temple area:

At first, I thought it was a target!

Closer view of the beginning of the mandala

The mandala has another layer now

Miranda got into the “build stuff in the sky” theme at this point, working on a sign saying “The City”.

The City sign takes shape

Adding a backdrop to the city sign

It's double-sided, here's the view from the other direction

Now it lights up at night

The city sign at sunrise

I took that as an invitation to do an Arthur C. Clarke homage, and build a “The Stars” sign. For better or for worse, though, I didn’t light it up, which meant that, when the stars were out, you couldn’t actually see the sign. Hmm.

The stars at night

During the day, no actual stars

As dawn approaches, stars and stars

As Miranda and I were working on those, Pat finished his mandala:

Starting work on a ring around the mandala

The mandala ring is mostly finished

Side view of mandala and moon

The completed mandala!

The mandala at nightfall

It was a little bit of a strange session for me: in the two sessions since 1.8 hit, I’ve been finding it difficult to come up with building projects. I’m not sure how much of that is the disconnect from the ground that flying gives you, how much is creative mode, how much is ennui, and how much is the luck of the draw.

The last Thursday in November is Thanksgiving, so we’re pushing the schedule back a week, and the next VGHVI Minecraft night will be December 1st.

Our last VGHVI Minecraft session was our first session since the 1.8 release, and in fact the first time I’d played Minecraft since 1.8 came out. And it was really amazing flying around, getting a different perspective on everything that we’d built; the only downside was that the screen capture key sequence involves hitting shift, which meant that I started falling every time I took a picture.

We all started flying above the temple

Looking down at the underwater train tunnel

Looking down at the shipwreck

The roof of the apartment building

Train running along the cliff

A hearth under glass

As you might guess from those last few pictures, it was raining a lot! Flying above, I saw structures I’d never seen before; that last is an example.

While fiddling with the server settings, I realized that I’d never entered the nether: we’d constructed a portal half a year back, but at that point nether didn’t work properly in multiplayer. That had since been fixed, though, so I entered it and flew around a bit.

Entering the nether

A lake of lava

Looking down at the portal

Next, I decided to travel to new areas, in hopes of finding a mine. So I flew east, across the ocean:

Lines in water - a chunk boundary where the algorithm changed?

Light under the ocean

An underwater lavafall

Eventually, I found a mine, and spent quite a while flying around in it.

Lava in the mine

The lighting in 1.8 seems to be noticeably more yellowish

Minecart tracks

Chest behind lava

Looking down into a pit

Flying through a chasm

Added torches to ravine walls

Hello, Mr. Zombie!

Lots of spiderwebs

Hello, Mr. Spider! (Or Ms. Spider, I suppose.)

I see you brought some friends with you

Bedrock and lava

A lit cave in the distance

The contents of one of the chests

After this, Patrick showed us a project that he’d been working on for the last couple months. The pictures don’t do it justice: you fall down through a long passage and are left in a huge, dark cavern with glowstone torches. He was going for a sort of Japanese teahouse effect.

Teahouse entrance behind train tracks

Inside the teahouse

Looking up at the teahouse roof

After that, I flew around a bit more, looking again at our older structures:

Mega-tree and acropolis at night

Mega-tree from above

Skull mountain and amphitheater

Then I flew to another new area, experimenting with taking pictures through the haze. (If you fly up high enough, the haze becomes overwhelming, it turns out.)

Sunrise through the haze

Sunrise over green ridge

Mountain in the haze

Protuberance on the mountain

Looking down from way up

Strange shapes in the ocean

Miranda decided to build a house in the nether, so I ended up visiting it:

The portal in the normal world

Entrance to the nether house

The architect is flying around

The upstairs room

The library

Another library picture

The music room

This week’s VGHVI game was Shenmue II. Which I hadn’t replayed since I finished it almost six years ago; Roger never played either it or the original.

It was very interesting listening to Roger run into the warts in the game; there was a lot of stuff that didn’t bother me but that bothered him, from bad (default) movement controls (I’d completely forgotten the Dreamcast didn’t have a right thumbstick) to strange game mechanics (wandering around trying to talk to people to trigger the next event) to quicktime events to a hard-to-control job minigame. I wondered (and still wonder) how different it would have been if we’d played the original Shenmue instead, because my (perhaps flawed) memory is that that game did a better job of ramping you up; but it’s very interesting to reread my notes and see me complaining about the start of Shenmue II despite my having played (and loved!) the previous game.

That was Roger’s experience; mine was rather more positive. Things I noticed:

• I love the lighting and coloring in the game. It uses sunlight in an unabashed way that I’m not used to in video games, and the coloring is bright without quite slipping into garishness.
• I love the game’s embrace of mundanity: lots of unhelpful people to talk to, lots of stores that don’t serve a game purpose, the fact that you have to get a job, the fact that you have to buy maps (shades of Majora’s Mask…), the divorcing of martial arts training from the traditional RPG combat grind.
• The controls are odd, but get quite a bit better once you realize you can reassign the thumbstick to movement; even so, there are some interesting quirks, like the ability to follow people, the “look around in a room you’re standing in” controls.
• Ryo is rather a jerk to Joy, isn’t he?
• Appropriate that a game set in Hong Kong is so devoted to commerce.

But, most of all: it felt like coming home. I haven’t touched the game in six years, but every street was familiar, every face was familiar. Yet another sign that I should fix my Dreamcast: several games that I should replay, and Shenmue is top of the list.

Well, Shenmue or Jet Grind Radio…

Last month’s VGHVI Minecraft session had us complete a pretty epic building project, so I was curious what we would feel like doing this month. And the answer is: not so much building.

At least I didn’t feel like so much building! At first, I wandered around, looking at some of the old sights.

Clearly our fences need some work

Midair ice

Skull mountain in snow

But then, once I’d reached the end of the familiar territory, I decided to just keep on going north, taking pictures along the way.

A beach with a squid-filled lake-

Close-up view of squid

Torches on ice

Clearly that last one was a previously-explored area of the world, but that was the last familiar sight I saw.

Looking down into a deep cave

Looking up from the bottom of that cave

Steep cliffs

Overhang, river, and cave

Hazy ocean view

A bizarrely bumpy valley

Bright ocean sun

Ocean stripes

Anybody know what’s going on with the strips in that last one? I assume it’s some sort of chunk-related territory-generation artifact, but I don’t really know.

Sheep in the rain

Sunset and island in the rain

Eventually, the scenery started taking a while to load, so I decided to mark the end of my journey by dropping off my torches and teleport back home:

Chunks are now taking a while to load

The end of my journey

I wasn’t the only person who spent much of the time traveling north; here are some of the pictures that Eric took:

Field with animals

Rain at night

Ridge, trees, and water

Lake with sandy beaches

Lagoon and ocean

Tree-filled valley

Here’s what the world map looked like once we were done exploring: pretty obvious which way we went!

World map

Anyways, enough travelogue pictures, now for some construction. Miranda started off by building another house, though I didn’t manage to get a picture of its completed state:

Building another house

Working inside the house

The beach near the house

Somebody (I don’t know who) also built a diving pool on the Acropolis. If you aimed right, you could go down into it from the skybridge, but if you were a little off, doom awaited:

Diving pool

Roger's remains

I took the dive myself, with a happier outcome:

That's a long way down...

Geronimo!

Sploosh

Miranda decided to build a smaller, less user-hostile pool, with its own diving tower:

Smaller pool

The diving tower

The view from the top of the tower

And Adam decided to smooth out the underwater train tunnel: the floor had been pretty bumpy from all the flood barriers I put in, but it looks a lot nicer now.

Smoothed out underwater tracks

The middle of the tunnel

Finally, a few last bits of scenery:

Tracks near the mega tree

The acropolis at night

After last month’s VGHVI Minecraft session, our underwater tunnel had finally made landfall! Which was great, but I decided that I wanted to justify that landfall a bit. So I started off by extending the tracks to go across the island, and off of the stone bridge that Eric had built at its end:

Tracks heading across the bridge off the island

Riding the train back onto the island

Once I got off of the island, I put a temporary stopping place, and started to extend the tracks further; Pat took over soon after that, and found a nearby cave to dive into.

Tracks enter a cave

Looking back out of the cave

Inside the cave

We made it out of that cave after not too long (David Sahlin had joined the fun by this point, I believe), at which point we dived into a second cave. And that cave was very deep indeed: it took a few tries to get enough booster rail to successfully navigate several of the sections. But eventually we succeeded and made it out.

Tracks going down

And down and down

Now we're heading up again

At about this point, I took some pictures of Jonathan blowing things up; I think it was in the second of those caves, but I could be wrong.

Preparing for an explosion

Boom!

Once we got out of the second cave, we were starting to get close to our inhabited area; the tracks went past the super tree, and ended up near the temple.

View of the super tree from the tracks

The end of the new tracks near the acropolis

The track had a couple of interruptions; we decided to turn it into a continuous run. But it was a long run (I think Pat timed it at over three minutes), so we needed to fence it off to avoid interruptions from livestock; we did that via a mixture of fences and glass.

Fencing off the track

We used glass to fence off this section

A sheep surveys the glassed off track

Taking a ride through a glassed-off section

A rather amusing chunk loading error during this process

Miranda’s main project this month was a shipwreck:

The island that the ship would run aground against

Half the hull is in place

Working on the sunken part

Now both halves are in place

The finished shipwreck

Inside the hull of the shipwreck

Eric worked on a project that was at least partly a Myst recreation; he’ll need to explain it more, because I don’t understand all of it. In particular, I don’t remember what was going on with this huge hole (maybe Jonathan did that? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong):

A huge hole, formed by TNT

The explosion site from a distance

Some mysterious square platforms

A library with a switch

And finally, a couple of pictures of the apartments from last month lit up at night:

Apartments at night

The other side of the apartments, from a distance

My favorite part of last week’s VGHVI Minecraft session was that we (Pat, mostly) finally finished the underwater tunnel! It goes to a fairly large snowy island in the middle of the sea; maybe we’ll push on beyond that to greener climates?

The ocean tunnel through the snow

These bumps were originally intended to prevent water from flooding the tunnel if we accidentally broke a wall

The tunnel has reached land

Chicken-proofing the tracks through the tunnel

A strange stone bridge leading off of the island where the tunnel lands

Eric decided to build a fortress next to last month’s Skull Mountain project:

Looking down from the top of the fortress

A side view of the fortress, looking towards Skull Mountain

A better view of the skull

Looking up from inside the fortress

The walls of the fortress are tall!

Speaking of tall things, Jonathan used his TNT to produce a truly stunning pit under one of the corners of the train track loops:

Looking down from the middle of the pit

Looking up from that same location

Looking up from the bottom. (Though he blasted more after this)

I died right after taking this photo

Finally, Miranda (with help from Pat and, I believe, Jonathan) built an apartment building near the temple.

Starting work on the apartments

The bottom floor is mostly complete

Working on the upper floors

The entrance to the building

Inside one of the apartments

The view out of one of the windows

Ovens, a workbench, and a garbage disposal

The door to Jonathan's apartment

My apartment door

Pat's apartment door

Inside Pat's apartment

A lamp in Pat's apartment

And I returned to the cave from our first session in this world (from which I sadly don’t have any pictures). And it turns out that our tree farm has finally grown its first tree! (Still not much of a farm, though…)

A tree grows underground

Lava and bedrock

Finally, I got a request for an updated world picture, so here it is. (I used Tectonicus to create it.)

The (almost) full world map

The parts where we've built stuff

The area around the temple

The underwater tunnel

As always, we do this on the last Thursday of every month, please follow the VGHVI blog and come join us!

I wasn’t as good as I sometimes am in taking pictures during the May VGHVI Minecraft session, but here are a few:

Pat continued work on the underwater tunnel; we still have quite a ways to go to cross the ocean, and the part of the ocean where we were working now was rather deep. So he had to do a lot of diving; I helped some with the glass placement. It didn’t help that the ocean above it was frozen over; eventually he placed some burning netherrack to melt the ice, so we didn’t suffocate while diving.

Towards the start of the ocean tunnel

The current end of construction; the hills outside are the ocean floor

Burning netherrack to melt the ice

Eric had been working on a secret project in the last session, as it turned out, and he finished it this time: a Skull Mountain, complete with lava flowing down from the eyes.

Skull Mountain

The base of the mountain, complete with burning sheep

There was a rather nice cavern inside, with a pool at the bottom.

Inside the bottom of the skull

Inside the top of the skull

I’m still not sure exactly where the skull is in relation to the rest of our landmarks. I started wandering back, and came across a cavern with a huge waterfall that somebody had clearly explored before, but I ended up just teleporting myself back.

A huge waterfall in a cavern

Miranda and Roger had been working on the area near the temple: Roger had been carving out land (for an acropolis, if I’m remembering correctly), and Miranda put up some rather nice lamps there.

Lamps outside the temple

Miranda working on a lamp

Temple and lamps during the day

Somebody added a bed to the altar

Miranda also finished off the train station, adding a rather nice roof with skylight.

Inside the train station

The roof of the train station