http://pc.ign.com/articles/113/1139798p1.html

So I've got about 10 days to decide if I want to pick it up for 14 bucks and get all future versions for free.

Should I do it, or should I not waste my time?

Yes obviously. Buy it now, if you even remotely like tinkering and making stuff.

I'd certainly do it. I bought my little cousin an account after we had a blast playing together. It's fun deciding together how to build or add on to our base, and when it's worth venturing out for resources. Running from a pack of creepers with someone else really changes the experience.

I really haven't played since tree leaves stopped decaying, and haven't even visited the nether yet. I like woods but the time it takes to make a felled tree's leaves go away reduces the incentive to harvest trees.

I bought it

The Beta version of Minecraft will also see a price increase, being raised to 14.95 Euro ($19 USD) from the previous 9.99 Euro ($14 USD) for the Alpha version. Persson says he is also changing the game's license to remove the line that all future versions of the game will be free.

"Please note that this change only affects people who buy the game after December 20, so if you got the game for during alpha, you will still get all future updates for free, despite this change. A promise is a promise," he explained.

That should be enough to push anyone to do it now.

I guess that's pretty much why I did it.

I bought it a while ago and fumbled through about an hour before I gave up in frustration because I didn't know what the ****

I'm using youtube tutorials to get started.

I'm still waiting for SMP to work better. Just can't get into SP

It's fun until you realize that farming resources is boring as hell, and building anything remotely unique requires massive amounts of them. InvEdit ameliorates this somewhat, until you realize how pointless the game is with infinite resources.

That's probably why notch is trying to add more stuff to explore. I hope he adds random event/locations soon. Creeper Village!

Are you obsessive compulsive?

Yes?

Buy it.

I've certainly gotten 14 dollars worth of entertainment out of the game.

It's also neat to find SMP servers, and just explore and see what other people have built. On the Penny-Arcade server, they have replicas of Rapture and Columbia from Bioshock and Bioshock: Infiinte that are pretty spectacular.

Red stone circuits are fun to play with too, if you're at all computer/circuitry nerd, even just a little bit. Wiring switches together to do things like open and close doors, and running the currents through circuitry gates, and trying to hide the circuitry beneath the floor all involves a fair amount of problem solving, and it's great when you get it all to work. Simply trying to make a door into my fortress that I can open via a switch on the outside, and then close via another switch on the inside, was harder that I would've expected, but in a way that kept me engaged in figuring out how to make it work.

I haven't even gotten started on mine craft transportation yet, but again, it looks interesting and will also require a fair amount of problem solving.

InvEdit (editing your inventory to give you equipment and tools that you haven't earned the hard way) does take something away from the game, but it sure is fun to load up your inventory with dynamite and just raise hell across the map. I have 2 maps that I work on, on one my fortress was built the hard way, finding minerals, smelting them, making tools, collecting rock to build, etc. The other I cheat on, simply trying to build the best and most awesome fortress I can. Both are fun in their own way.

There's also lots of skins and cool mods you can install. I have yet to try the Biome Mod, but I've seen lots of pictures of amazing terrain people have generated with it.

So yes, I recommend getting Minecraft before your purchase is no longer good for all future versions. From what I've read, the change to the license is something that the lawyers insisted on for Mojang (the company that makes the game).

I made somethin last night and it was destroyed by what people on the server called "griefers." I assume such is life on the public minecraft servers?

Yeah, go get an SA account so you can join us in paradise.
Or, someone can start a Massassi server.

Sometimes, yeah. You'd have to find a server that is regularly staffed with admins, who can ban griefers or run one of those spawn gates (basically blocking the spawn so you can't leave until the admin moves you out, to ensure you're not going to grief).

I wouldn't know any good ones though as I only play single player.

What's an SA Account?

Tibby's just advertising for SomethingAwful again.

Tibby, next time you suggest it, you're buying them an account.

Some servers have special zones where only certain people can build. If you contact an admin on that server, you can get a zone for yourself (and whomever else you want to allow to build there). This helps cut down on Griefing, but still allows for lawless areas where "anything goes."

I just found an underground river. I am trying to get to "the very bottom" where all the good minerals and stuff are.

I was too scared to go into thecavern so i went up to the surface to resupply. Going in now.

If you bring a good supply of wood with you, you can stay underground almost indefinitely. Carry a crafting table and lots logs (logs are better than boards or sticks because you can use them to make boards and sticks, and logs will last longer than if you just carried boards/sticks). You can use coal that you find along the way to make torches, and stop and smelt minerals along the way as well to continue replenishing your tools.

Diamond is the best mineral for tools/weapons/armor, but it's also one of the hardest to find. Diamond picks last a long time, though. Gold is also hard to find, but it's worthless for tools/weapons/armor (degrades really fast). It just looks really fancy.

Look for Diamond deep. If you hit bedrock (you'll know, because you can't dig through it), tunnel back up about 10-16 blocks, and then spread out horizontally from there.

Protip:

Diamond only spawns in the 16 lowest levels of the world. When you reach bedrock as DSettahr said, note that there are 5 levels of bedrock (sometimes there are spots where you can go a few levels deeper, basically, because it won't be entirely bedrock except for the very bottom layer).

****, im watching a 'lets play' of minecraft right now, this looks wicked fun. this is way easier than, say, working on nar

The only thing I ever did in the minecraft demo was try to flood the whole thing.

I've come a long way in 24 hours.
I've got multiple cave systems I am trying to find to explore near my spawn point in the game.

So that underwater river I was talking about? Led to a HUGE cave system, I got my very first Redstone, Gold, and Diamond. Discovered Lava for the first time, and had to fight a few enemies along the way.

Fun story: I heard some zombies and decided "instead of searching the tunnels, I'm going to dig to find them." I did just that and found an isolated room with a chest and lots and lots of respawning zombies (and lava).

My biggest issue with digging deep was finding enough iron, so I could A: use the iron pick to get the good minerals, B: get armor to protect myself from enemies. I found a cave elsewhere in the game and found a motherload and started making iron armor. Now I'm fairly set.

Dsetthar: What about food? What if you get injured? you still need to go to the surface to kill pigs?

Make an underground farm in the middle of your cave system. You'll need a torch, dirt and water from a bucket made of iron.

Veger: save iron as much as you can. It's used for about 50 billion different useful things. Buckets, minecarts, mine tracks, flint & steel (firestarter), compass, in addition to the usual stuff.

I want notch to implement some sort of "Hardcore Mode" A la New Vegas; you need to sleep, eat, and death is permanent/spawns you back in randomly a few thousand miles away.

What Minecraft really needs is the following:

1. More rock types, tree types, flora and fauna, larger biomes and more variation between them. There needs to be more reason to explore and travel. As it is, you won't find anything new beyond ten minutes of exploration.
2. Increasing challenge. As it is, survival is not difficult once you survive the first night and arm yourself to explore underground.
3. Larger iron veins. The sparsity of iron alone almost makes the game unplayable. Mining repeatedly through grey rock is boring.

(In other words, it needs to be more like Dwarf Fortress.)

There are mods that do all these things.

As for mining and finding ore, I've found that cave exploration is the way to go. It sure beats digging parallel tunnels through the rock, it's more interesting, and the returns are much greater.

Wow, I hadn't looked at all the mods until just now... Notch is slow in comparison to these guys, why doesn't he just hire the top 3 modders and retire?

Yeah, it's pretty much common knowledge by now that Notch isn't the most talented programmer.

Unfortunately, once you're equipped well enough to explore caves, there isn't much reason to continue exploring caves.


From what I've seen, there are only mods for some of these things.