Speaking of Minecraft

Lego has an entire set. So you can play minecraft among your minecraft stuff. Big supply of papercraft stuff too.

C’mon, I’ve been clean for a month now. Don’t drag me back in.

(Actually, I’m burned out on Minecraft. I’m hoping Starbound (a 2-d Minecraft-esque game with spaceships) will be coll on release: it’s pretty rough right now. My minecraft burnour is in part because it gets very boring after a while, as a server becomes a overly-tamed civilization consisting of dream palaces connected by rail lines and such. I kind of want a game that’s not quite DayZ, but where traveling from safe place to safe place requires forethought and effort.

There’s a mod for that.

And that’s one of the things I like about living on the edge of town, and why I haven’t impregnated the woods totally with torches. A) it looks weird, and B) I like pretending what I’m doing is kind of dangerous, and I’ve died enough times that it holds up.

Isn’t Starbound Terraria reskinned, again?

It’s similar-ish. Different systems once you get to a certain point, of course.

Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of mass torches within the forest. Perhaps a lit pathway, but not much else. In fact, just the other day, I was doing some night gardening and apparently, a creeper spawned on top of my house, hopped down, and before I could react to that all too familiar hissing, I was blown off the island into the drink. I’ve patched up the yard, but until I’m able to get some daylight sensor lights going, I’m gonna have to torch up the roof a bit better. Thank 1.8 for the inverted daylight sensor. Now I don’t have to use more space just to have it work at night.

Ok, I showed you my chicken farm, you have to show me how to do lights.

Easy-peezy, let me take my first dive into the nether to gather some quartz. Should be fairly quick to do.

There are literally a dozen entrances to the nether within easy walking distance. Though I screwed up and used all my quartz to make pillars with.

It’s been really quiet on there the last few times I’ve been on.

I had to take a bit of a hiatus during a work trip. I was on not too long ago and saw 5 other folks on, so they are active. SynapticFire has been on fairly often, but I think time zones come into play here. I’m thinking of dropping into the Nether this afternoon via the portal near the Spawntown map. Haven’t seen if there’s any sophisticated setups on that side, so I’m looking forward to what it looks like.

That’s partly my fault, too, I got sidetracked by Wasteland 2 and have pretty much been neglecting the server entirely.

So I tried to go to the Nether. That was a baaaaad, idea. Not long after spawning into the Nether, I was swarmed at the door by 5 zombie pigmen and 3 of their smaller midget forms. I made it inside of a tower safely and they ignored me soon after. I decided to venture out again as they ā€œdisappearedā€ and I only had to deal with 2 or 3 of them, which is much more manageable. I found some quartz, mined about 4 of them to be found by more zombie pigmen. I scrambled for the fort, made it inside and found that another 5 or so had started spawning inside the tower as well. The horde of pigmen minced me to pieces and, needless to say, my stuff is on the 2nd or 3rd story, somewhere. Though, I believe it eventually disappears.

In my single player experience, I’d never had that many form in one spot. Certainly not that many at the portal. Am I just that lucky?

Did you try just not attacking them? They should be neutral unless you attack first.

Ok, just built a semi automatic melon farmer. Awesomesauce.

They instantly raged on me. I even had some follow me through the portal and I had to take them out with a gold sword they had dropped.

Yeah, I’m reading this and I’m not understanding it. I didn’t hit any of them initially. They just swarmed me the second I warped in. Heck, I had wandered around to gather nether quartz and they found me from across the map and started attacking me. No idea what’s going on…

Pardon me, but I am pretty clueless at Minecraft. But is it possible to build a spawn point for these creatures? If they go immediately into rage, I would suspect some kind of artificial aggro going on.

Or maybe somebody laid a taunt curse or a ā€œfire at Will(iam)ā€ on you.

They spawn pretty much everywhere in the Nether. So, you can’t really change that.

I’m wondering if someone pissed them off before they left the Nether last. The chunk stays unloaded and they stay pissed, apparently.

Bizarre. I don’t think I have ever seen a game that had that mechanic. Hell, in some MMOs a player can’t even see the mobs another player is fighting.

The Pigmen also work on a zone/chunk basis as far as agro goes. And ones that spawn after the others are agroed aren’t agro’d either. Of course, at that point you are beating the shit out of the others, so they get agroed pretty quick.

Keep in mind Minecrack isn’t really an MMO, it’s a regular multiplayer game. So more like an FPS than a traditional MMO as far as aggro and spawning goes. The game only keeps active and worries about the area within X blocks of the person/people playing, so the aggro could in theory stick around forever if no one comes by, but critters also despawn when you leave them alone long enough, so it’s possible the mad ones will go away eventually. But it’s also possible just one could be wandering around, and if you attack it they all get pissed.

Of course that’s probably it. I forgot they didn’t aggro on just the person who attacked them.

Well, it’s weird, I got back into the Nether, and all my stuff was there (huzzah!). They stopped being aggressive for all of 2 minutes, so I thought, what the hey, I’ll just look for some quartz while I’m down here. Then another came from across the field to find me. There’s gotta be a ghast or something else hurting one of them that’s making it happen. That said, I’ve found the appropriate portal to enter from as it’s got a somewhat better chance of not having 5 angry pigmen sitting next to it.