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 Scandinavian 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 psuedo-random, allowing for a surface area that scales to larger than the surface of the Earth. 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.

Many people compare the game to Terraria, a similar side-scroller with 16-bit graphics and a much more diverse world. Despite the diversity, it is important to remind Terrariafaqs that Minecraft is still in Beta, and gets better all the time. Be sure to ask them how they like Super Mario World: Minecraft Edition.

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.

As of 1.9 pre-release 6, this game contains DRAGONS!

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 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	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.
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 a nightmare within a nightmare. 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. 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.	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 died." oh for CRYING OUT LOUD!
People post screenshots of the pixel art they made with the coloured-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, flamable things, and thing you drop. Mostly, its just fun to watch, but make sure you can close them again!	Your will open the Magma Gates, which will bawleet EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, and is an economic and engineering tragedy from which your fortress and dwarves will not recover.

/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.

This is all going to be remedied, Notch says, with the v1.9 release (Nov 2011). THIS release will turn Minecraft into that adventure game that we here at /tg/ have been drooling after like maniacs. We can only hope this siren's call of hopeful temptations leads somewhere. Then /tg/ will rejoice.

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 does have a bit more dungeon crawling to it, so adventuregamers prefer it). But, while Dwarf Fortress is more diverse 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.

On Terraria

For some reason, there's ongoing arguments over which game ripped off the other for a lot of the games' content, resulting in a hilarious sort of divide going on with the communities of both games.... Even though Notch and Re-Logic openly acknowledge and respect one another, and frequently bounce ideas off one another for in-game content. In truth, they are trolling both communities.

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If you want to get serious about Minecraft, /tg/ isn't the place to do it. You're better off going to /v/ and talking to the /v/idiots there about it.

fa/tg/uy Servers

Current Servers

Name	/tg/ Minecrafters
Descr	bukkit server, minecraft version 1.8 stable. Custom worldgen, switches every two weeks. The flavours available are: islands, primordial desert, rainforest basin, post-apocalypse cities, vanilla.
Where	mondego.ptsites.com [173.236.6.198] . Forums at ProBoards Group on Steam
Admin	Giam
Mods	Custom worldgen, Bukkit server (plugins: WorldGuard, MyHome, BorderGuard, bPermissions, Permissions)
Notes	Newcomers can build only in a 1km square area around spawn; this is to reduce LOLRANDUMB griefing. Role-playing is encouraged, but really laid-back; the RP players tend to gravitate towards towns, and raid other towns. Creatures are on hardmode, so fighting off a horde of zombis is not recomended without a friend or substantial preparation beforehand.

Old Servers

• /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, maintained by Giam. Moved to 69.175.32.244 Sept 2011. Moved to 173.236.6.198 Oct 2011.
• Little Chiron, (IP Secure), Private Server maintained by a Seggellion. (see livestream/pink08 for details)