MrHoatzin

Me, me!

Fraps has been the defacto go to thing for ever. I don't think it allows you to narrate realtime, tho. Besides, I don't feel like paying 40 bucks for the full version. Something free would be nice. Also, I don't know if the fire traveled three blocks, I think the dude made the floor of the fireplace out of wood.

You know, I was thinking about that. I don't think it would catch. Not enough wood. My permanent fire moment happened with the lava buckets. It was fairly permanent. I wish I had a wooden castle to burn. Maybe I will make one of those, just so that I can build a good fireplace. Oh, actually, wood would be a great material to build scaffolding out of. I've been using mud, but mud you have to dig out. Wood you can just light on fire. What software are these dudes using for the screencasting, does anyone have any idea?

It is some hodge podge of that one and the painterly pack that some dude on some message board made. I am not too excited about it. I think I will try making some of my own.

Yes and no, respectively. You make arrows out of the little flint rocks that live in gravel blocks.

Well, good luck!

Wait, speaking of shoddy infrastructure, isn't there a nuclear power plant in Krško?

Holy shit, dude, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing wipes out a lot of villages on the Sava, all the way to Belgrade.

If you bake cobblestone, it gives you regular stone.

Really, the only reason for the tall structures is being able to find your way home. With the introduction of the compass, it is a lot easier to go exploring. I think that next thing I build will have a canyon dug into the countryside that connects my spawn point with wherever I decide to build my home. I've done it, as the screen captures above plainly show.

This is the view from one end of the room towards the dirt tower... ... and this is from the other end of the room towards the garden. The bookshelves all burned out, but none of the chests went up in flames, so that is good. The obsidian stone in the floor is the place from which one can access all the furnaces and chests and the workbench. The grass has almost grown back from all that lava. The fabled dug-in workbench and the starting point of the rollercoaster. The mud chunks in the ceiling are the spots I broke to douse the lava. When I started to get lost in the caves, I fancied up the primary access arteries so that I know I am on the correct path back up. This was also the first attempt at spreading out the grass away from the sun. Wildlife spawns underground as well. It seems all it needs is grass. FUN FACT: Waterfalls are also useful as elevators. If you hold space while in one, your dude will climb slowly upwards. These waterfalls all lead to useful mine access points. Now let's check out the underwater garden. The tracks go down the hill and around the room. FUN FACT: Observe how the tracks butt against each other stupidly on the top left-ish. The cart, having plenty of momentum once it gets here, will actually continue, but it will turn to the LEFT, because the last turn it made before it got to that end was to the left. It will get about two or three blocks back up the big ramp, then roll back the hill and make a whole other rotation around the garden. Before I made the little bend that goes around the tree, the cart used to just continue in the circle (because the last bend was to the right), but would quickly lose momentum. Somehow I hoped this view would be more interesting. Occasionally you can see bobbing farm animals or spiders or creepers up there. Sometimes farm animals spawn in the garden too, but the mine cart doesn't actually run them over. It just hits them and bounces back as if it hit a wall. A view back up. You can see the dirt staircase that brought the grass all the way down to the garden.

BEHOLD AS I POST A SELF-INDULGENCE (in two parts)! So I went back to my lava-ravaged savegame and I fixed the lava, then fired up the fraps to show you guys what I've been up to. Let's start this off from the platform high above my home. That pillar over there is another marker. FUN FACT: you can jump and build underneath your avatar. Moonrise. You can see my underwater garden right under the encroaching clouds. So as I was inching around to get a better look through the clouds, I fell off the tower and respawned a little ways away. Ah, there's home! I knocked out every other block in the tower and put torches in the holes. Another look at the garden. The inventory I lost while taking screenshots. The littler dirt tower is the original marker I built, before I realized you could hop and build. FUN FACT: The ladder doesn't actually need to be continuous, you can skip a block. Frank Lloyd Wright would've been so proud. The spiraly stairs that go up and around before they go down ensure nothing can accidentally enter. The grass finally made it to the top of that thing. One more screenshot of that thing from the little terrace.

In the very first map I started, I found no caves and only very little coal. The second one was better. It is just the luck of the draw methinks.

Listening for the disgusting sounds is a good way to figure out in which direction the more expansive cave systems lie.

The most efficient way to heal yourself is to make bread. Plow some grass to find seeds, then plant them into plowed land a couple of tiles away from water. Build some fences around because a lot of stomping by animals and things will kill your wheat. Torches make the wheat grow faster. Forget about your patch for a little while. Come back later and plow it all, you will get a fair amount of wheat and more seeds than you planted. Continue the process ad infinitum. Three horizontal wheats make a bread. Breads don't stack, but wheat does. That makes it an efficient food. A little bit of work goes into it, but before you know it you will have a lot of healing capability and no guilt over the pigs holocaust.

They can go up and down too. If two adjacent track pieces are on different levels, the lower one will automatically become an incline. I haven't actually used the carts for anything but joyriding down to my glass-domed undersea garden.

You don't have to remember them. They are mostly intuitive little alchemical pictograms of whatever it is you're trying to put together.

The free version is kindof stupid and pointless: you have infinite bricks and nothing will attack you. The version you paid paypal for is the one you should be playing, that is the one with monsters and mining that has a point. The multiplayer server has to be hosted somewhere by someone and is currently kindof buggy and unreliable. The single player version is the fun one, so far. I am looking forward to the funner multiplayer. Just get into it and start digging.

Hey, you're alive! Welcome back.

Interesting.

I think if you douse the bottom-dwelling lava you get obsidian, if you take it elsewhere it will turn into regular cobblestone when wet.

That is just the bottom of the world, I think. You can douse the lava down there and mine the obsidian if you have a diamond pick.

What saddens me are all the moronic, kneejerk reactions from the people in the comments, most of which amount to, KEEP YOUR DAMN DIRTY POLITICS/CRITICISM TO YOURSELF, WHORE. WE WANT YOU TO COUNT POLYGONS AND TELL US HOW MANY LEVELS THE GAME HAS, NOT INTERPRET THINGS AND RUMINATE ON IMPLICATIONS OF CREATIVE DECISIONS. _ _________ Fucking video gamers, how do they work? I can't even comment on shit like this any more. It makes me so fucking livid. There is nothing constructive worth saying on the matter. Fuck G4 and their fucking readers, fuckerly fuckering fuck. ;(

Flailing and not knowing what you're doing is half the fun at the beginning. For example, after I beat my first zombie to death with my bare hands, it dropped something. I assumed it was a stupidly drawn dagger, so for many hours I proceeded to shiv other nightly creturs with this thing that the zombie dropped. Only much later did I realize that it wasn't a stupidly drawn dagger, but a stupidly drawn feather. Why do zombies drop feathers? I don't know. It is a bit weird that nothing is labeled in the game.

When they release this in the west (if?), will the use the nerfed/rushed version of ICO that was released on the PS2 (as a launch title or shortly thereafter I think), or will they give us the finished, fancier Asian/European version? The presence of the fancier box art for ICO is reassuring (maybe?).