Pictures from the February Minecraft session:

Somebody built a tall pole next to my swamp house

Oh, so that’s where that tower is

But then Dan asked us if any of us had seen a procedurally-generated temple before, so I teleported to him:

New to me, too!

Entering the temple

Alcoves on the side

Another door on the outside

And then, when I looked up, there was a path overhead; it turns out that he’d been building that for a few month. So I decided to follow it back.

A path in the sky

Ocean and sand

Ocean peaks

Horses

An island at dusk

Lava at night

A village in the distance

Passing over another village

Cutting through a mountain

I have more pictures; it was a long trip back! Eventually, I reached the end of the path; it was somewhere familiar, though I don’t think I could get there from the main city without guidance. So I wandered back from there.

The end of the road

A river canyon

An arch over water

While I was doing this, Miranda was continuing her renovation of a village we’d discovered several months back. I only took a few pictures near the end, but I think she was working on houses on the dock:

A house next to water

The other side of the dock

And eventually I made it home:

Back at last

Pictures from the January Minecraft session:

First, the standard flying around, looking at random stuff:

A cave under some tracks

A glass spike I hadn’t noticed before

The top of the spike, in snow

The spike is attached to Dan’s glass structure in the lagoon

The cows and chickens are still there

A lit corner created by changes in terrain algorithms. (The corner, that is: the lights I added a year or two ago.)

A building somebody built years ago.

Glitch #1

Glitch #2

Glitch #3

A curtain of rain

Patrick was continuing work on the spire he’d started last time:

Extending the spire

A closeup view of the top

Patrick on a platform

And Miranda continued improving the decor in the village we’d discovered a few months back:

Miranda reworking the village

Colored glass windows

A top view of the church

A villager poses for a picture

A villager inspects the inside

Looking up through the inside

Different textures on the building next door

Inside a house

An aerial view of the house

Reworking a column

Out by the water

Pictures from the last Minecraft session of the year:

It was rainy when I started up the server; I ended up wandering around for a while taking pictures in the rain.

Skull mountain in the rain

A lonely figure floating in the rain

Yellow sky

Evening turns to night, part 1

Evening turns to night, part 2

Evening turns to night, part 3

Behind the house

An open field behind town

Rainy mossy tracks

But eventually the rain ended:

Stars at night

The town at night

A gold horse wandering around

Looking into the greenhouse

A cat in a house

The other main focus of my environmental photos was glitches: they seem more frequent in the current version, of which I approve.

Underwater tunnels

A glitch cutting through town

Glitch hills

Massive glitch at sunset

Roger worked a bit more on his cathedral:

Starting to add pews

More construction

Hills behind the cathedral

And Pat starting building a new tower:

Starting work on a tower

The base of the tower

A second pillar

Fleshing out a wall

More wall

Almost done with the bottom walls

Building a spire on top

More spire

The textures on top

It looks like there’s another spire going up?

And Miranda decided to make improvements to the village we found the previous month; I didn’t get pictures of most of her work, unfortunately, but I did stop by for a visit:

Working on the village

A villager observes me

In fact, two villagers observe me

Some villagers are stuck in water. (Miranda added railing to help them, but it was too late…)

Underwater villagers

Building some stairs

Walking up the stairs

A successful rescue

A top-down view of that area

Pictures from the November Minecraft session:

This was a pretty major upgrade; right from the start, I could see the rendering engine changed, and while it was generally an improvement (I think I got longer view distances), sometimes it looked a bit odd:

Strange stripes on the water

And the new graphics engine did seem to be a little more prone to temporary glitches, here’s an example:

A glitch near the city

I also saw some filters when playing around with the options; maybe they’d been there for a while and I only just now noticed them, I’m not sure.

Filter one

Filter two

Filter three

Filter four

While wandering around, I saw a tower that I didn’t remember ever seeing before; surprising, given how close it was to town:

A tower with tracks

The bottom of the track

Riding down the tracks

Runaway cart!

That’s gotta hurt

It took ages to take the picture riding down: I normally use the left shift key when grabbing screenshots, but that caused me to exit from the cart. Half the time I forgot and used it anyways, half the time I tried and failed to contort my hand with the right shift key.

There were also new items in the update; Miranda added some of the new flowers to the house we’d been working on:

Planting flowers

More flowers

Flowers around the back

Taller flowers in the stable

Final design of the stable flowers

Dan was building some abstract geometric shapes:

Red and black

A closer view, showing a glass/lava cube underneath

There’s another cube in the sky

He built that far away, so it took me a while to get back home from there. Along the way, I ran into a forest with large, flat treetops:

Approaching the forest

Giant mushrooms next to the tree

A lava pool

Flowers under the canopy

Tree-dwelling sheep

Another rendering glitch a bit later

And then I ran into a village; it was pretty impressive.

Approaching the village

Meeting the villagers

Inside a building

Looking out to sea

Bidding farewell

I can’t remember the context of this photo, but I have no memory of ever seeing this object before:

A strange midair object

And one last photo; somebody must have been here before and left a candle.

Desert glow

Pictures from the October VGHVI Minecraft session:

At first, I decided to wander around the house and the cave beneath it.

A bat decided to visit our house

Some stairs I’d forgotten about in the cave

The bottom of the stairs

I guess I dug a bit too deep…

Then I wandered around the city; it turns out that there were some pillars stretching up above it that I wasn’t aware of.

A mysterious glass pillar

The top of the pillar

Looking down at the city

There’s a brick pillar, too

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the temple

Hello, golden donkey

After that, Miranda called me over to the eagle tower that Pat had built a while ago, and we played hide-and-seek there.

The top of the eagle tower

The lower part of the eagle tower

Inside the tower

Hiding place 1

Hiding place 2

While we were doing that, Dan was building a big tower out of lava, way in the middle of nowhere:

The top of the lava tower

Looking down into a pool of lava

Hello, lava

Miranda bathing in lava

The base of the tower

Looking up from the base

The view from under the base

And then I started wandering back; I had no idea where I was, so I had to turn on debug info to find my way.

A sheepy cave

A strange corner

Pictures from the September VGHVI Minecraft session:

Miranda decided to turn the upstairs room that wasn’t a stable into a greenhouse. We didn’t want to put glass everywhere, but we put glass at the end:

Replacing the wall at the end with glass

Outside view of the glass

Then she started planting:

Starting work on the bed for the plants

The first version of the plant bed is complete

The first plants are added

That was a single-row version, but she expanded it to two rows with water between:

Adding water for the plants

Two rows of plants

Flowers at the end

It took a while for the pumpkin and melon to grow

Roger, meanwhile, was hard at work at his cathedral; that thing is going to be massive.

Roger working in the snow

An arch of the cathedral

Chipping excess blocks away from the arch

And Dan was working on his huge glass structure in a bay:

The glass continues to grow

Inside the glass

Miranda and I thought it would be a good place play hide and seek, at least at night

Closeup view of lava

Daytime view

I mostly just wandered around; the only building I did was helping with getting the glass front of the greenhouse in place.

Staying out of the snow

A loading error

Saying hello to my horse

Dan wandered by our house and Miranda made a stable for him, so he tamed a horse as well:

Dan taming a horse

Success!

Horse armor

I spent most of the August Minecraft session wandering around the cavern underneath the house. I was lost a fair amount of that time, but I did at least find a path from the stairs to the closest exit:

At the bottom of the stairs

Step 1 of the path

Step 2 of the path

Step 3 of the path

Step 4 of the path

Step 5 of the path

At the exit

And some random pictures from my other wandering:

Signs that we’d explored the cavern before

A bat flying around

Some cows near another exit

A random city picture

Watching the sunset from the alcove

Roger was working on his cathedral; I took my horse on a trip to visit him.

Roger contemplates the cathedral

My horse contemplates the cathedral

Roger decided the cathedral was too short, so he extended its base:

Extending the cathedral

A closer view of the extension

The wall between the pillars has been torn down

That cathedral is really large, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’ll be putting on the finishing touches a year from now.

While I was out with my horse, Miranda was making improvements in the stable:

More stalls, and some hay bales

She also put in a sofa in the alcove for better viewing:

Sofa in the alcove

Watching the sunset from the alcove

She wasn’t there for the first half of the session, though, so she didn’t get as much done as she normally does; I think next she wants to work on the other upstairs room, but she hasn’t worked out the details yet.

Contemplating her next steps

I didn’t do any building this time: I was exploring the caverns under the new house. Which were huge, and which had been explored before, it was just years ago! I immediately got lost this time; eventually I found my way out, and later I found an exit near the stairs to the house, but I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I understand the whole system.

What few pictures I did take:

An alcove full of mushrooms

Looking up in one of the huge caverns

A waterfall in another of the huge caverns

The first exit I found

Another exit. (I think this is the one closer to the house.)

Dan continued to work on his glass platform above the bay; I’m not sure how much he added, I didn’t get a lot of pictures of that, either.

This is actually a picture I took a month earlier but then lost in iCloud, but it’s pretty so I’ll stick it in here

Glass covering most of the bay

A closeup of the lava under the glass

As is frequently the case, Miranda was the most active of us, but she wasn’t building much: instead, she was exploring the fact that the latest Minecraft update added horses!

A horse!

Horses need a wider door

I get a horse, too. 🙂

Gold horse armor

I’m trying to tame my horse

It is not going so well

Success!

Riding across the snow

A donkey attached to a hitching post

Anvilania…

Miranda still has dogs, too

The June VGHVI Minecraft session was a continuation of our large ongoing projects. Miranda and I moved on to the next area of the large house we’re building; she built some bedrooms on the other side of the hallway on the main floor.

Bedroom doors on the right side of the hallway

Starting work on one of the bedrooms

A finished bedroom interior

A hot tub in back of the room

I decided to see how much space there was for a floor above the main floor. (While keeping to my restriction of basically leaving the shape of the mountain intact.) It turns out that there was, so I hollowed out some rooms; I’m not sure what will go in them, Miranda does better at that than I do.

A long room upstairs

The upper window is the same one from the previous picture

A large upstairs back room, on the opposite side of the stairs

The outside door to that back room

An entrance area in the middle of upstairs

That upstairs entrance door, viewed from the outside

The outside view of the original entrance and the upstairs entrance area above it

A pillar above the stair area in the middle of the upstairs floor

Dan kept on working on the structure he was building in a bay:

Lots of glass above the bay

And lots of chickens in one area of that glass

Dawn breaks over the bay

A nice view of the pit under the train tracks, seen when flying back from the bay

Roger, meanwhile, kept on working on his cathedral; it’s going to be pretty amazing when it’s done.

The back edge of the cathedral

Inside the cathedral

One of the side windows

Underneath the cathedral

The front doors

Roger contemplates what to do next

Our May 2013 VGHVI Minecraft session had rather more going on than normal, with three large construction projects (and two literary projects!) going on at once.

First, Miranda finished off the library that we’d started work on last time, starting with the floor:

Starting work on the library floor

Most of the floor is completed

Breaking through to the outside

A view of the completed floor from the outside

Once the floor was done, she added bookshelves:

Bookshelves are in place

Miranda, the bookshelves, and a sunrise

Finally, she added a central seating area, along with some final touches.

Central seating

The door, windows, and artworks

While she was doing this, I poked around the outside and noticed a fairly large cavern underneath the house. So I tried building stairs down to the cavern; if I’m remembering correctly, the stairs actually exited in a different cavern? (A much much larger one, which Jonathan had started exploring years back?) I’ll take another look this month.

A cavern under the house

Stairs down to the cavern

The bottom of the stairs

While Miranda worked on the library, Roger was continuing the work on his church:

A side view of the front edge of the church

Filling out the foundation

Partway through filling out the foundation, Roger ran into a glitch which meant that, for a while, he had gold but not stone; he took advantage of that.

The gold front

Gold pillars and floor

The view from above

Dan, meanwhile, was busy extending a tower he’d worked on a few months back, in both directions:

That is a very tall tower

But after completing that he moved on to building a platform in the middle of an inlet:

Building a platform

Pillar with decoration

The view of the bay from above

I poked around the bay a bit, and noticed a cave on the left; it forked, and the left side was standard but pleasant, while the right side was a little more interesting:

A spooky cave on the left side of the bay

Zombies in the cave

Zombies approaching the platform

Dan was unfazed by this, and instead spent his time building fishtanks around the platform. He did, however, memorialize the zombies’ presence in prose.

The zombies watch Dan build a fishtank

Filling the tank with water

A record of a glorious victory

More fishtanks

If I’m remembering correctly, Miranda was actually the first person who suggested adding books; she (naturally enough) put one in the library. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure book, with many more branches to come:

There’s a storage area next to the library seating

GOLD! I need gold!