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Minecraft

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How badly does it run? Just with vanilla graphics, Minecraft, in all its unoptmized glory, outdoes even 2015 AAA games for its ability to tax my machine, I can only imagine it being twice as bad looking like that.

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Actually with a good graphics card it's not too bad. Minecraft's issue is that A: It's based in Java. Which is bad. And B: It's almost entirely CPU bound, and not in a way that uses multi core CPUs well. But it does mean that the Shaders are free to use the GPU.

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That looks pretty incredible in stills but do the dynamic shadows look like trash as the sun moves, because that's usually what makes me quit.

 

I have everything cranked up to the max and so far the dynamic shadows have looked really nice. I see some slight jagged edges if I look close enough because anti-aliasing isn't compatible with the shader but it's hardly been noticeable for me. The animation on all the grass and trees is really incredible too. It honestly looks a lot better in motion than it does in a screenshot.

 

 

How badly does it run? Just with vanilla graphics, Minecraft, in all its unoptmized glory, outdoes even 2015 AAA games for its ability to tax my machine, I can only imagine it being twice as bad looking like that.

 

Yeah, even with my latest build and a GTX 980 ti this game still dips well below 60 FPS in certain places, even with the default graphics. With the shader mod installed it seems to dip slightly lower than the dips I usually see but the lowest I've seen so far is about 25 FPS which is totally fine given that it regularly dips into the 30's with the default look.

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It was less the jagged edges, which I can deal with, and more the way the shadows would jump as the sun rose and set, rather than move smoothly. The sun would move a pixel, causing the shadows to move a whole hell of a lot more than one pixel.

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It seems like they move pretty naturally to me and I haven't noticed that. It could just be something I'm glossing over though.

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So every day I'm falling further and further back down the Minecraft rabbit hole. My friend and I started up a new world about a month ago since our old world that we inhabited for a couple years was generated on a much earlier version of Minecraft and was missing a lot of stuff that's been added over the years (we didn't want to have to travel super far to find new chunks that hadn't been previously loaded). We had both burnt out on Destiny a couple months back and figured it would be fun to hop back into this game and see if we could re-kindle the old Minecraft obsession. At first we just played a couple hours on the weekend, then started finding time to play a few nights during the week, and now we are on pretty much every day and texting each other throughout the day as we re-read the entire Wiki to get up to speed on all the changes and new items that were introduced since we stopped playing. To my surprise, this game is just as engaging and exciting as it ever was, probably even more so now that we have started fresh with hundreds upon hundreds of hours of prior experience. This is still my number one game of all time by a very large margin. It is pretty much fucking perfect in every conceivable way.

 

I'll probably post some more thoughts at some point but there is one new-ish mechanic that has resulted in a pretty hilarious situation. In the past, villager breeding was just based on the number of valid doors in a village and villagers would breed until the number of adult villagers reached 35% of the number of valid doors. In a subsequent patch, however, they added a layer on top of that to change the mechanic so that they would only breed if they were willing. To raise a villagers willingness to breed you can either trade with them (villager trading was another great addition to this game by the way and adds a surprising amount of depth) or give them certain food items to fill up their inventory (also, villagers now throw food to each other if they detect that another villager doesn't have enough food which is fucking rad).

 

Since we never ended up finding a village, we eventually ended up curing a couple of zombie villagers and shuttled them over to a basic village we had built. It took a bit to get up to speed on the new breeding mechanics but we were able to finally get them to reproduce after doing some trading and setting up the village with enough doors to fulfill the 35% requirement. From there things took a slightly more disturbing turn. Once we had a handful of villagers, we forced pairs of them into houses and fenced everything off so they would be forced to reside in the specific houses we chose (there is still a bug where big villages tend to have all villagers congregating in a corner of the village and leaving the rest of the houses empty). Then, we got about a dozen stacks of 64 raw potatoes and put them in a central village chest. With that setup, we then started making regular visits to the village to make sure our villagers were continuing to breed. This basically involves us running over to the village, grabbing a stack of potatoes out of the chest, and throwing a bunch of potatoes to each of our villagers. They then take the potatoes and a few minutes later they emit hearts above their heads and a baby villager pops out.

 

I didn't think much of this at first but then I did start thinking. And I realized we have enslaved a bunch of people in tiny houses and are forcing them to breed by feeding them a diet of nothing but raw potatoes. I love Minecraft.

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So every day I'm falling further and further back down the Minecraft rabbit hole. My friend and I started up a new world about a month ago since our old world that we inhabited for a couple years was generated on a much earlier version of Minecraft and was missing a lot of stuff that's been added over the years (we didn't want to have to travel super far to find new chunks that hadn't been previously loaded). We had both burnt out on Destiny a couple months back and figured it would be fun to hop back into this game and see if we could re-kindle the old Minecraft obsession. At first we just played a couple hours on the weekend, then started finding time to play a few nights during the week, and now we are on pretty much every day and texting each other throughout the day as we re-read the entire Wiki to get up to speed on all the changes and new items that were introduced since we stopped playing. To my surprise, this game is just as engaging and exciting as it ever was, probably even more so now that we have started fresh with hundreds upon hundreds of hours of prior experience. This is still my number one game of all time by a very large margin. It is pretty much fucking perfect in every conceivable way.

 

I'll probably post some more thoughts at some point but there is one new-ish mechanic that has resulted in a pretty hilarious situation. In the past, villager breeding was just based on the number of valid doors in a village and villagers would breed until the number of adult villagers reached 35% of the number of valid doors. In a subsequent patch, however, they added a layer on top of that to change the mechanic so that they would only breed if they were willing. To raise a villagers willingness to breed you can either trade with them (villager trading was another great addition to this game by the way and adds a surprising amount of depth) or give them certain food items to fill up their inventory (also, villagers now throw food to each other if they detect that another villager doesn't have enough food which is fucking rad).

 

Since we never ended up finding a village, we eventually ended up curing a couple of zombie villagers and shuttled them over to a basic village we had built. It took a bit to get up to speed on the new breeding mechanics but we were able to finally get them to reproduce after doing some trading and setting up the village with enough doors to fulfill the 35% requirement. From there things took a slightly more disturbing turn. Once we had a handful of villagers, we forced pairs of them into houses and fenced everything off so they would be forced to reside in the specific houses we chose (there is still a bug where big villages tend to have all villagers congregating in a corner of the village and leaving the rest of the houses empty). Then, we got about a dozen stacks of 64 raw potatoes and put them in a central village chest. With that setup, we then started making regular visits to the village to make sure our villagers were continuing to breed. This basically involves us running over to the village, grabbing a stack of potatoes out of the chest, and throwing a bunch of potatoes to each of our villagers. They then take the potatoes and a few minutes later they emit hearts above their heads and a baby villager pops out.

 

I didn't think much of this at first but then I did start thinking. And I realized we have enslaved a bunch of people in tiny houses and are forcing them to breed by feeding them a diet of nothing but raw potatoes. I love Minecraft.

Villager breeding almost always turns me into a slum lord.

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Minecraft version 1.9 (Combat Update) hits next week!

 

There are some fairly significant changes coming that I am super excited for:

  • Addition of shields, dual wielding, multiple types of arrows, and other combat changes including an attack strength mechanic.
  • Up to 128 strongholds per world instead of 3.
  • Introduction of End cities, structures, and ships on infinitely generated End islands, End specific plants (chorus trees/fruit), End rods (new type of light source), several new End blocks, and a new End mob.
  • Ability to respawn the Ender dragon.
  • New item, Elytra that the user can equip in the chestplate slot to allow flight.

My friend and I have continued to play this on an almost daily basis and have made some significant progress in our world. We've purposely avoided trying to get to The End though until 1.9 hit so we could experience it for the first time with all the cool new shit they are adding. In the meantime, we've continued building and preparing ourselves for some of this tougher content (not to mention the insanely difficult water temples that were added in 1.8).

 

Last weekend, we finally got around to building a basic mob grinder using a canal system to funnel the mobs into a central point and a lava blade to kill them. By just AFK'ing near the collection point whenever we're busy doing other things, we've managed to collect dozens of stacks of arrows, bones, gunpowder, and other materials that we need to beef up our armory. I'm not entirely sure what we'll need to take down the Ender Dragon so we're just making sure we have all the TNT, arrows, and enchanted weapons and armor that we would need to take on a small army.

 

We've also advanced our nether operations and have constructed a cobblestone tunnel from our portal area down to one of the two nether fortresses we found. Then we enclosed all the nether fortress walkways with cobblestone to give us some fairly safe corridors to run around and farm Wither Skeletons without having Ghasts and Blazes raining hell on us the whole time. And luckily, that fortress happened to have two Blaze spawners in close proximity to each other so we walled those off and now have an easy, endless supply of Blaze rods we can farm which are usually difficult to come by.

 

Our villager breeding operation has continued to expand and we've been relying on the trading economy a great deal to get some fantastic items. By trading massive amounts of wheat, pumpkin, carrots, and potatoes to one of our farmer villagers, we've been able to keep a steady balance of emeralds that we've been using to get enchanted tools, armor and weapons from the tool smith and armor smith villagers. And we finally bred a leatherworker, giving us a way to finally obtain saddles to use with our horses.

 

Once we were finally able to trade emeralds for saddles, we built a couple of maps and decided to go out exploring on our horses, which we've never done before since they were introduced after we had stopped playing way back when. It turns out, horses are the fucking best. They can go faster than a minecart at full speed and automatically walk up single block inclines. So we quickly found that we were able to get from one side of a fully zoomed out map to the other in a single day where it used to take us several days travelling by foot. We brought a couple of leashes with us as well so we could ferry our horses across rivers whenever they blocked our path and so we could tie them up to a fence post in whatever makeshift shelter we made each evening. In just a few Minecraft days we managed to cover every inch of our maps and made note of several interesting places, including another village, that we will eventually go back to. And through further research, we found that each horse has unique equine stats and as you breed them, you can breed better running and jumping stats to eventually get a horse that can clear up to 5 blocks in a single jump and run way faster than the apparently shitty horses we have now.

 

I also started doing some fishing and was surprised to see just how much better that has gotten since its initial implementation. There are now several types of fish that you can catch as well as random rare treasures that you can only otherwise find in dungeon chests. And when you cast your rod, you see little splashes in the water and a little stream of bubbles that approaches your lure right before a fish bites. I somehow got lucky on one of my casts and fished out a nametag which I used on my horse to name it Skittles. So now, it's clear which horse is mine and which is his (which was already obvious because he appropriated the one set of horse armor we managed to find in a chest). I'll eventually need to do a bunch more fishing so I can catch a bunch of puffer fish to use in water breathing potions, which we'll need to eventually tackle a water temple.

 

Up next, I'm thinking of making an automatic lava moat that is hooked up to a daylight sensor and appears out of the ground each night. Not that we necessarily need the extra protection at this point, it just seems like it would be cool.

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Wow that update sounds pretty rad.

 

I wish it wasn't too late for me. ):

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I might set up a new realms server soon. If I do I will share the info with thumbs so it can be more bumpin. and so i can TNT more peoples houses.

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Another option if anyone is looking for a server is Gamers With Jobs forum posters host both modded and unmodded servers running and are pretty coold with adding new people. The unmodded one has a limit of ten users at once but the modded one is more of an "Everything goes until something melts" kind of deal.

 

You will need to sign up and ask to be added to the whitelist though.

 

Go here for modded: https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1298849

 

And here for unmodded:https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1287531

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One year later... we are still going strong in our new world. We took a break for a few months for a crazy Overwatch binge but have recently gotten back into the swing of things since that Minecraft itch needed to be scratched again. We spent a few nights roaming around and filling out maps in search of a jungle biome and after coming up dry, we decided to put a halt on our various operations, strip ourselves down to the bare necessities, and travel through the nether with materials for a nether portal so we could seek out a new land to start fresh. We could have just started a new world but I think this is a much more interesting and exciting way to start over and we don't lose all of the history that we have woven into our world over the last year.

 

We are also trying to stream the whole thing moving forward which has been a lot of fun. I hadn't streamed in a couple years and it was cool to see a follower or two from back then pop back in to say hello and watch for awhile.

 

I managed to catch a highlight of a particularly good sequence of events that happened as we finally found our end point in the nether and built our portal to come out into a new area. It's a little bit on the longer side at 20 minutes so I'll put it in a spoiler tag so as not to be too bothersome. Also, apologies for me constantly looking over at my laptop. I'm hoping to get a second monitor hooked up to my PC to make it less distracting to interact with Twitch chat.

 

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I've finally gotten around to investigating the wonderful world of Minecraft mods and I'm kicking myself for not doing so earlier.  I'm currently engrossed by Sky Factory 3.  Sky Factory is a skyblock mod, which is a type of mod that places you on a tree floating over the void and little to no other resources and you have to create the world from scratch.  Sky Factory adds a ton of other mods together to create a more complete package.  I'm strangely replicating my day job by building complex power generators to automate my processes and it's far more satisfying than I would have predicted.

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That actually sounds pretty cool.

 

 

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It's really intimidating at first and the guidance is almost nonexistent but once you get going its kind of amazing.  Melting down cobblestone in a crucible to turn it into lava that I pipe into a magmatic generator to produce power for machines that automatically hammer, compress, and sift gravel to produce the ores I need to make capacitors which increase the efficiency of my generator is way more fun than it sounds.  I wish my job were half this interesting and I work at a damn nuclear plant.

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I'm glad your job at the nuclear plant isn't interesting, but I know what you mean.

 

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I've actually gotten into Sky Factory myself recently and it is amazing. The things I really appreciate about this mod are:

  • You get back the feeling of discovery that Minecraft had when you played it for the very first time, when you start out you have no idea how to do anything and puzzling it all together feels incredibly because each new thing you figure out multiplies your possibility space in terms of what materials you have for building your sky base.
  • The fact that the world is completely empty when you start out forces you to think about the design of functional spaces in a way Minecraft usually doesn't. Like, you can't just plop a crafting table and some furnaces down in a field, you have to actually build a bit of floor where you want them to be, and that leads you to think about what you want the smelting and crafting part of your base to look like and how it should fit into the rest of your base. I love creative games like Minecraft, but most of them take this "build whatever you want" approach. Not only can this be overwhelming for players, it also pushes you in the direction of thinking about pure aesthetics and building something grandiose but empty. Sky Factory opens the game up to much more of a "form follows function" design approach, which gets you thinking about interesting ways to achieve a particular goal with some sort of contraption, like the automated mob crusher/loot collector I built. In standard Minecraft, the sort of considerations that go into shaping the houses I inevitably build are relatively minor: they have to have enough space for a crafting and smelting corner, and enchanting corner, an enchanting corner and some storage space. In Sky Factory, there's so many different functional spaces you need to take into account that it's really interesting to me how you can organize all of them.

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Totally agree.  There's so much stuff in Sky Factory I'm constantly browsing the catalog and discovering some amazing thing that I can't build yet which gives me a new goal.  I appreciate the freedom and openness that exists in vanilla Minecraft but without some minimal guidance I often found myself not wanting to do anything (and doing stuff like questing to fight the Ender Dragon doesn't really interest me because so many other games do that better).  Sky Factory doesn't exactly have a specific path to follow either, but the individual parts are really good at pointing you in enough of a direction that you can develop a goal and constantly find interesting and varied ways of doing it.  My biggest complaint is the documentation is very scattered and often poor.  It's so many mods packed together that a single comprehensive guide is unrealistic but often I find myself having to put my works on pause to watch a tutorial or read a wiki for even basic stuff.

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I've been playing Project Ozone 2 which has a start somewhat similar to Skyblock, but there's actually land out there, just no actual ores. Getting a lot of the necessary metals is done either by sifting as in Sky Factory, or by traveling to the nether, a couple of other alternate realities, generating new worlds through a Stargate-type mod, or flying to other planets.

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That sounds nicer in a way.  At first not having ground is intimidating and you worry constantly about falling, but after a while it just becomes a nuisance, especially once you have tons of materials and the only thing keeping you from expanding is the need to build the floor first.

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I've been venturing into the Nether recently to obtain additional materials to build the next tier of machinery I want.  Last night I had a stupid death that ultimately won't cost me anything I can't replace relatively easily but I'm super irritated at the lost time investment in all that equipment.  On the plus side I figured out how to craft a lot of great gear and had the foresight to stock up on the materials so I can replicate it again with only marginal loss.  Still, grrrrrrrrrrr.

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Following up on my last post, I realized that jetpacks were a thing and crafted my way up to the top tier one.  After properly arming myself I returned to the Nether and wreaked a terrible vengeance upon the denizens there and retrieved all my gear (dying in Sky Factory places all your carried items into a tombstone where you died that you can break open to reclaim everything).  It was amazing and awesome and I'm super tempted to rent a server for it.

 

It's been a while since the last Thumbs Minecraft server ran.  Is there any interest in doing so again with something like this?

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Oh, timing. Yes there is at least a deep burning desire for a modded server in me at least.

So we've been thinking about and half-planning to reboot the IdleMC server as a modded minecraft server for a couple months now, and there seems to at least a little interest in it now. Evilskillet just took down the old server and archived it and last we talked would be very much down with hosting a modded IdleMC.

There's a number of different mod set-ups I think people would like. Skyblock can work multiplayer, but it's not ideal. There are modpacks like Regrowth and Crash Landing that replicate a lot of the slow build-up of sky block packs with having a generated world and more hostile enemies. There are much more guided modpacks with quest books and rewards and instructions that help people learn mods which I think could be neat for the community, and there are my favorite modpacks, the fuck-it kitchen sink packs that just include everything that fits.

Depending on people's computers and interests, there are a ton of options for running a community modded minecraft server and we've talked about it enough that it should happen. I'll post in the slack and the other forum and everyone should talk about it. I've always wanted to play that way.

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Any impressions on the Switch version? Is it worth digging into if I haven't played Minecraft proper in like...4 years?

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