25 replies to this topic

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs Progresscast The Eighth One

Join us, readers, as we descend into the dark bowels of Minecraft servers and secret holes, only to find the quietest place in the world. (That place is absolutely guaranteed not to be the Idle Thumbs office in its current state.)

It has been over a week since the last Progresscast, and so in an attempt to secure your forgiveness we have cast an extra-long pod. We hope it pleases you, with a depth that might surprise you.

You would do well to read this fascinating article on a particularly silent room before listening to this cast, as we entirely neglected to explain what it's actually about before launching into a related discussion.

Finally, thanks for your patience! We're starting to get increasingly exciting evidence of progress on rewards, and we can't wait to show you. Vincent's painting is essentially complete, and we got some early test samples of the gold foil The Wizard shirt, both of which have exceeded our expectations. Things are happening!

Also, this is a public Progresscast. So go ahead and share it with your friends! They love a cast pod, surely, just as they love a video game.

DIRECT DOWNLOAD MP3 AUDIO FILE

[subbes]

Sean's elk hunting anecdote confirmed to me that he is the Manliest Thumb.

[grumbeld]

I want to be in that room! That sounds amazing, and it's on the list of things that I'd want in a house.

[Urthman]

I loved hearing about Jake getting lost in Minecraft (even if it did shatter his non-video-game-playing rep). Getting lost in Minecraft is one of my favorite video game things. I love the way it makes my brain feel when I'm trying to keep track of where I am in some huge system of caverns.

One of my favorite Minecraft experiences ever was when I was lost deep in a cavern and had mined a handful of diamonds and got myself killed, dropping a whole bunch of other valuable stuff as well - diamond pick, gold watch, compass, armor, etc.

I respawned at my start point, naked and empty-handed, a long way from where I'd been exploring. Stuff you drop disappears about five minutes after you drop it, so I had five minutes to rush back to that general area (including a dangerous shortcut through the Nether), hunt for the spot I'd entered the caverns, and try to retrace my steps to a place that was surrounded by the monsters that had killed me when I was wearing armor and carrying weapons.

I grabbed a few supplies, crafted a quick sword, and made the trip. Somehow I was able to retrace my steps down deep into the caverns (trying to follow the most recent path of the branching trail of torches I'd been placing), find the place I'd died, dodge the monsters, scoop up all my stuff, and get out of there. Very seldom have I had such a feeling of triumph in a video game.

[BigJKO]

Yes, hearing about Jake's crazy prospector stories was great!

I love how Minecraft makes you set your own crazy goals. For no reason at all, perhaps just mineral greed, I started digging down on some friend's server. After several hours I reach the bottom of the earth. That triggers my next goal: My Underground Lair.

Finished with my lair, complete with volcanic hot tub, I start getting home sick. I miss my tiny little castle. I miss seeing the moon. The sun. Clouds.

That's when I realized I had built such an elaborate underground cavern that there was no way to actually find the hole from where I came. So I had to spend the next couple of hours digging stairs all the way up to the surface.

At the time, I didn't know this, but I was only a couple of levels away from the surface, when I dug my way up into a river. So I got flushed all the way back to the bottom of the world. In the end, I got up by building a second stairway on top of the flow of water.

I wouldn't have done this in any other game.

[jennoa]

As someone who worked on that subway system on the Minecraft server. That was indeed the best. God I love that game.

[tabacco]

As someone who worked on that subway system on the Minecraft server. That was indeed the best. God I love that game.

The 'lost' subway station in the fourth epoch was one of my favorite things ever.

[Henroid]

That subject of that article kinda freaks me out. I'm curious to experience it first hand, but I worry that it is actually that disorienting.

[elmuerte]

yay minecraft \o/


ps, Can you please increase the volume? With everything on max it's still quite low, which is really annoying during my average commute (I keep missing parts).

[Cleinhun]

I've played many hours of Minecraft, but I've still only been lost once. I don't even have any sort of system, I just explore the tunnel that looks the most interesting and place torches mostly at random. The one time I did get lost was because I had come in through a tiny crack into a more open area, and even then, I managed to figure out what happened after 20 minutes or so.

[a purple future]

The 'lost' subway station in the fourth epoch was one of my favorite things ever.

yeah there was one morning i rolled in and it was just you and jake so i /tp'd over there to find this amazing thing that jake had just gone bananas on for some ridiculous amount of time.

and you would NEVER find it unless you knew what you were looking for. and now it's on a podcast.

[Jake]

The 'lost' subway station in the fourth epoch was one of my favorite things ever.

The famed Lazuli Line!

Fourth Epoch was my favorite of the servers by a lot I think. That's also the one which lasted the longest. It had a lot of the sense of implied/created history that comes with any virtual space, but it ended up living long enough to have a feeling of real history, too. The abandoned projects, peoples long-forgotten tiny cities way off in corners of the map. It was cool. My eventual plan with that lost subway station and sealed off cross-line transfer was to build out the sealed up tunnel filled with archives to make it way deeper, and eventually build that whole thing out as a fully explorable connecting line, but instead we re-rolled, which is fine too.

Was the Fifth Epoch the one with the Fuck Nick Depot? That one had a lot going for it that I liked as well, but it was when I was running out of time to play MC so I never got to finish my Lord of the Rings Cross-Mountain Flaming Signal Tower Network Converted To Commuter Train that I was working on.

Minecraft: Takes Too Much Time, Worth It.

[tabacco]

Was the Fifth Epoch the one with the Fuck Nick Depot? That one had a lot going for it that I liked as well, but it was when I was running out of time to play MC so I never got to finish my Lord of the Rings Cross-Mountain Flaming Signal Tower Network Converted To Commuter Train that I was working on.

Minecraft: Takes Too Much Time, Worth It.

Yeah, Fucknick Depot was the 5th epoch. That was a great building, and some cool stuff happened on that server, but it came about at the time where everyone was pretty much sick of the game, so after an initial rush to get the depot itself built, not a lot happened. I built a cool giant pyramid though.

[Patters]

This seems like an appropriate place to repost these

Sign V2
IuRiKTwWPVc

Sign V5?
VXFbxPrZuRY

xEsSrNsQNew

[tabacco]

V1 and V3 for those two. V3 had the grandest of the Fuck Nick signs. V2 never made it far enough to get one.

[Patters]

V1 and V3 for those two. V3 had the grandest of the Fuck Nick signs. V2 never made it far enough to get one.

Nope, V1 was destroyed by someone about an hour after it was built, so I remade it to spite them!

[elmuerte]

I'm a bit fuzzy. Was Epoch 1 the one with the enormous "Idle :tup:" sign and the huge Moai?

[ysbreker]

I believe so, yeah.

[tabacco]

I'm a bit fuzzy. Was Epoch 1 the one with the enormous "Idle :tup:" sign and the huge Moai?

Yep. First was "Idle :tup:". Second was the beachside one that was very short-lived (a day, tops, due to tech problems). Third was the one with the big arcade cabinet and the Guggenheim (also my favorite one). Fourth was the first one where survival SMP worked, so it had the elaborate skybridge network. Fifth was Fucknick Depot, and Sixth was the swampy spawn area with the star destroyer over it.

[elmuerte]

Ah yes, now I remember. In the third one I build a haunted mansion and a maze with twisty passages all alike.