Minecraft

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

Minecraft is a fantasy game created by Swede of renown Markus "Notch" Persson.

The game is first-person LEGO blocks; you walk about in a virtual reality, everything is made of cubes -- including the water, lava, animals and monsters -- and you can rearrange the cubes to suit your needs or desires. The maps are pseudo-random, allowing for a surface area that scales to larger than the surface of the Earth, in fact it is so large that a group of scientist predicted it was the size of Neptune, yes you heard me, size of NEPTUNE! There's no goal; it's a pure sandbox game.

Some have used it to build models of D&D adventure maps, such as Kobold Hall from D&D4E, or the Keep on the Borderlands from old 1st Ed. AD&D.

However, it should be noted that this game will make your computer choke to death. No kidding. Like Dwarf Fortress choke to death, but worse.

Despite being an immensely popular game, more avid video game fans will rage furiously if you call it Game Of The Year. This is because the huge potential for creativity is its only merit. In terms of actual gameplay, combat is complete rubbish, there's little reason to actually explore, it's a grind-fest just to get enough blocks, it can't be played without a guide, it's just generally badly-designed, and absolutely full of bugs. Essentially, it's like a Michael Bay film - highly popular for a particular reason, but absolutely rubbish as a movie. It doesn't help that Notch is largely considered a penis-grubbing ass who promises lots of arousal he doesn't deliver and steals other people's penises without credit (Wolves, pistons, heck even the whole concept behind building with voxels was taken from fans of Infiniminer) and uses them in the real game.

As you can see, not all of /tg/ likes Minecraft. It is a /v/idyagame, after all, and games without rules or objectives don't sit well with everyone.

The full release of Minecraft was uploaded November 18, 2011. It is still receiving regular updates, including new items, new gameplay features, and new mobs. Plans for features that have been in the works since its Alpha test phase are finally getting attention. One of the main additions to the full release was an end-game scenario - getting to the void dimension called The End and defeat the Enderdragon. Crafting was expanded and overhauled in a number of areas as well. Bringing it even closer to its dwarfier cousin is the recent addition of cats, which thankfully only breed when you want them to.

Minecraft vs. Dwarf Fortress

As a sandbox game with retro graphics and fantasy elements, some compare it to Dwarf Fortress, though the two are nothing alike:

Minecraft	Dwarf Fortress
3D look with a first-person perspective. Blocks are textured, and changing texture sets is easy.	Dwarf Fortress uses ANSI graphics, which were good enough for your Dad so shut yer yapper.
Each world is a huge sprawling pastoral setting, where you can happily dig and build and farm. Monsters come out at night, so build fortifications.	A world of strife and pain where you can happily watch your dwarfs go into a tantrum spiral and destroy themselves in riots unless they pass out dead drunk in their own puke. Monsters will siege your home for months at a time, which is not as bad as your own nobledwarfs doing crap like forbidding the use of coal, or sentencing your best axedwarf to death for drinking the wrong booze ale.
Minecraft starts at casual, letting you build a cottage home right away, but you can get deep into it, planning out huge mining operations or constructing castles that cover hundreds or thousands of square meters. Crafting recipes may not be obvious, so reading the wiki is advisable though not necessary.	Dwarf Fortress starts so deep you can't even see casual with a telescope. There are hours of video tutorials on YouTube teaching you how to play the game. The combat system keeps track of the status of each individual finger on both hands for every dwarf, and umpteen internal organs. Look at the wiki, it's a very good wiki that makes this one look like shit. There's hundreds of pages for creatures and stone types.
In Minecraft, logistics are simple enough to work out, seeing as food grows on its own. You do everything yourself, so give yourself food in case you get too far off building your castle's fifth basement.	In Dwarf Fortress, getting your Dwarves to do like you say is not as hard as many people may make it out to be. Everything lives at a dynamic equilibrium, and one wrong click can topple that stability like the Horus Heresy. Nobles exist to ruin the economy, but no one can get rid of them. You may however need nobles for certain reasons. Certain resources are so rare and vital that you need entire economies devoted to making them. Problems compound onto themselves until a starving hoard of Dwarves is running naked across a lake of their own bile, dragging the Nobles along the floor and eating themselves, all the while outrunning the legions of hell.
You can harvest materials to build tools.	Same in df as well. You hopefully have the right materials to build the tools you-- "Craftsdwarf Gregor has stopped task: building granite doors; interrupted by zombie elephant. Craftsdwarf Gregor has been struck down." --oh for CRYING OUT LOUD!
People post screenshots of the pixel art they made with the colored-wool blocks.	People write huge sagas about their colonies, with fortress names like "Boatmurdered" and "Headshoots" spoken in reverent tones.
You can open the Magma Gates, which will bawleet pretty much only you, creatures, flammable things, and thing you drop. Mostly, its just fun to watch, but make sure you can close them again!	You will open the Magma Gates, which will bawleet EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, and is an economic and engineering tragedy from which your fortress and dwarves may never recover. Except if you own dragons, which can swim in magma.

/tg/ and Minecraft

The previous release (Sept 2011) was v1.8 "the Adventure Update," which promised to have new map generating methods, "villager" NPCs and NPC/monsters that will also construct their own buildings. Once it rolled out, Minecraft was supposed to have become a full-fledged adventure game, and /tg/ would have rejoiced.

Except that isn't how things went. Most of 1.8 was adding in world-enriching things, like a new mob (Endermen), ravines and rivers, new biomes, hunger and starvation, a useless experience system, and randomly generated ruins/dungeons. But, the new Endermen "construct" about as much as a 2 year old piling blocks, the NPCs were nowhere to be found, and the cool dungeons only spawn about 2-3 times per map.

If you want your adventuring fix, you're best off downloading "Adventure Map" world saves meant to be played in adventure mode; it disables block destruction/placement in most circumstances, but oftentimes come with various puzzle-filled dungeons and prizes, depending on how well-designed these maps are. Sure these maps are probably only entertaining for a single play-through, but the fact that people make new ones all the time tends to make up for that. Thanks to the in-game's robust programming tools, it's possible to have a fairly complex and nuanced experience if you're clever enough to design it.

Well, sort of rejoice, because it is nowhere near as popular with fa/tg/uys as Dwarf Fortress; or, god forbid, Touhou. It's still a bit more popular than Terraria though, mostly because Terraria is 2D and just doesn't offer the same level of design capability that Minecraft does (though Terraria does have a more dungeon crawling to it, so adventuregamers prefer it). But, while Dwarf Fortress is more diverse than either by several magnitudes, Minecraft doesn't require a graduate degree in civic engineering, and feels more familiar to people who were raised on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, and so forth.

Notch did include an interesting mechanic to the game right before he passed the project on to Jeb: Enchanting. This gives a reason for the experience system to exist, although a non-essential reason. A player who has more experience has access to a wider variety of enchantments, which are randomly offered to you in an incomprehensible code from a book which lays on a table you had to craft. It can give your weapon many varying effects, not all of which are good. If you have the time, you can decode the book, but few actually care to. This, combined with the potions system, has given the RPG-loving fa/tg/uy more to enjoy once the mining has lost its fun, but the vidiots reacted to these new systems as if they were covered in skub. Which is always fun to watch.

As stated, further additions and corrections have been made with Minecraft 1.0, the unintuitively-named first release after many previous releases with version numbers higher than 1.0. Mojang waves it off as "oh that was version 1.8 BETA, this is version 1.0 for REALS", despite the fact that Minecraft is still technically in beta phase of releases. This means it is still driven by live user testing to discover bugs and gamebreakers, but some staff-shuffling at Mojang and new hires means they're finally doing in-house debugging before passing it on to the player base. Also Jeb is the kind of crazy that puts giant metal robots in a town full of caveman squidwards.

fa/tg/uy Servers

Current Servers

Name	/tg/Minecrafters Thunder Server
Description	Thunder is a modpack based off of /tg/'s original modded servers with magic, technology and a whole variety of mods to make minecraft that little bit more interesting.
Where	https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tgminecrafters/discussions/0/616189106523636871/
Admin	Brick
Mods	The mods and a short summary of what they do can be found here https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tgminecrafters/discussions/0/616189106523636871/
Other Links	The actual steam group https://steamcommunity.com/groups/tgminecrafters/

Old Servers

• /tg/Minecrafters Tekkit Server, 99.198.122.119, maintained by Chocoboo. 2012. Group on Steam
• /tg/Minecrafters (Vanilla Server), 199.195.158.240, maintained by Giam. 2012. Group on Steam
• /tg/entoo, location URL broken, maintained by TomCo (tgminecraft@gmail.com). 2010.
• Sanderson Ur, 65.173.176.15, maintained by Zemus. June-August 2011
• SkyRome, (173.236.6.202 then 69.175.32.244 then 173.236.6.198) a skylands world, maintained by Giam.
• Little Chiron, (IP Secure), Private Server maintained by a Seggellion. (see livestream/pink08 for details)

See Also

• Video games
• Terraria
• Recommended Video Games

External Links

• Now you can be the miniature in Minecraft

Gallery

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  /co/ and /tv/ got to Minecraft first.

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  Not that we care.

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  We're gonna need more blast templates.