Minecraft Thread

Now addition to Oxford: A lovely little garden! It's a bit hard to see in the picture, but I made the big shrubbery into an O-shape.


Also, the user Wozzeck is constructing a new college and needs Clay and Bricks! He'll trade diamonds for them, so this could be an opportunity for newbies to the server to get a jump start!

Durring the last betas right before version 1.0 was released, Jeb said on his twitter that he had raised the number of Strongholds from 3 per map to infinite. However, Mod authors who have reverse-engineered the 1.0 and 1.1 source code have concluded that he never actually made that change, and strongholds are still actually limited to 3 per map, and that they are still located in a ring around the origin, just like they were in the betas.

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Stronghold

There is also speculation that "Ruins" of similar design to the strongholds are generated infinitely through the world, but I haven't heard of any confirmation from the source code about whether that is true.

Wozzek (Jabbercat) has already located one of the Strongholds. It is accessible deep under the basement of Oxford. It is fairly small, and contains no Library, but it does have Iron Bar windows, and silverfish.

Based on that location, we can estimate the location of the other two Strongholds. Neither of them is in a well-explored location, but they are both very close to well explored locations.

We can test this theory pretty quickly with a few careful tosses of Eyes of Ender. I have about 12 or 14 Eyes of Ender, but no Blaze rods. if anybody has a stash of Blaze Rods they want to share with me, let me know.



It is possible that when we find the other strongholds, they might have already been generated before 1.0, in which case our Portal To The End will be missing. If that happens, I will cheat with server commands and give us enough Ender Portal Blocks to build our own-- but I don't want to resort to that until we have found and explored all three Strongholds.

It does have silverfish? I've never seen them before! I think ruins was the 'code name' for strongholds before they were fully implemented, so rumours of those might be confusion. People have also been talking about 'forts', which I can only assume is the same thing.

I hope we are able to find the other two strongholds. I intend (if no one objects) to connect them all via an underground rail when they are discovered.

On a different note:

Thanks to James and 'Labs for the trades, you guys are awesome!

Yes, I actually was attacked by and killed a silverfish when you were giving us the tour of the stronghold right after the Quest for the Holy Mooshrooms.

There is no silverfish spawner in there, but some of the stone blocks have silverfish hiding in them. I woke it up because I was mining through the walls to explore.

And you are welcome regarding the clay. I happened to have an enchanted Helmet of Aqua Afinity + Respiration II so mining the clay underwater was a pleasure :)

I've discovered something interesting: there will be at least one new biome in the next release (sometime next month), bu they will only generate on new maps. This leaves us in a situation!

If we want new biomes, a possible solution is to use a map editor, and try and edit in our favourite landmarks (Mt. James, Creeperton, etc), in roughly equivalent places on a new map. There might even be ways to delete biomes from maps, and generate new ones - we will have to see. I suppose even someone could be switched to creative mode and make a new biome.

If people don't want them, then I guess it doesn't matter. At this point, I don't really care either way.

I was furious when I heard that Jeb had decided that people would have to start a new world to get new features. I am sure he didn't think that decision out. I hope he will reverse himself before the 1.2 release.

The good news is that clever people have already discovered a workaround!

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/onlrz/if_you_really_want_12_terrain_in_11_worlds_for/

I am planning to do this when the next stable release is on the server. It will mean some abrupt edges to biomes at the edges of our explored areas, but I think that is an extremely small price to pay in comparison to starting the world over.

Odd, I seem to recall digging a tunnel of some sort near the desert near the (potential) Western Stronghold. I'm going to make an expedition out there and see what I can find. I'll let you know what I discover.

I've got plenty of blaze rods to donate to the cause. Heck, I've even got a few eyes already made. I'll drop it off at the sodhouse.

I've been observing the landscape of this server with an X-ray texture pack, and I can confirm there is NO stronghold on the far left [?] box on James's map.

EDIT: With Wozzeck's dig of the desert, I'd say there's no stronghold on the other area either.
I'm going to check the lead you picked up on in Spamstone Desert.

EDIT 2: The lead led me back to Skellington, surprisingly. However I have not found any strongholds, and I continued in about the same direction for well on 2,000 meters. I did find a lovely extreme mountain region, but when I portaled out of it, I ended up with someone else's portal. I don't know if I should bother making my way back to those mountains or not.

EDIT 3: Couldn't find the mountains, but I did make it back to an outpost near Skellington. I do want to get back to those mountains since I left some goodies there, including my map and a stack of 64 lily pads.
If anyone else wants to look, the extremely vague coordinates are
X: 2,000-2,500
Y: Way up high, like 120 or something
Z: -350 to -400

Here is another thought about the stronghold areas.

I could try downloading a backup copy of the map, open it in a map editor, and then delete the region around one of those zones. I think the north-east one of the three has nothing built over it.

Deleting that region should cause it to be regenerated when it is re-explored, so that might bring the stronghold back.

It should also be possible to test that theory by playing the world in single-player, so make sure it works before uploading it back to the server.

Or you never know, maybe we are barking up the wrong tree entirely. Maybe the stronghold that Wozzek found under Oxford is a vestige of an old Beta stronghold, and the real strongholds will be at some other location (which should still be findable with Eyes of Ender)

You might also try using the same seed you used to spawn the multiplayer world to spawn a single player world. This would let you see which of the three strongholds is the best candidate for transplant, And give us the exact coords to confirm that it's missing from our MP world.

I must say, I do hold out hope that there are some other scattered bits of Stronghold in our world. As close as Oxford is to the spawn, it's a miracle that one small area remained unexplored. Perhaps if we dig we might find a few other non-connected bits of stronghold in the area?

Using the same seed in simple player is a great idea! Anybody who wants to could test that, since the seed is easy to get from the F3 debug screen.

Be aware that probably almost everything will look different because all of the terrain near the origin was generated in 1.8beta -- but the expected coordinates of the Strongholds should be the same.

I downloaded and installed MCedit, but I don't know when I will get a chance to play with it.

I was thinking I should also look into making a backup file easily downloadable, so people other than me can get a copy of it.

So far I've only been able to find one stronghold in my single player server (Hereafter called Slime Jr.) It's a full stronghold with a portal, However it does not exist in Slime Prime.

I've been able to confirm though, that newly generated terrain online will perfectly match offline. I did this by finding a chest in an abandoned mine way out in the server and then found it in Slime JR. They are identically positioned and even include the same contents.

I couldn't find my way back to the stronghold under Oxford, so I couldn't get the exact coords, but my offline search of the general area turned up nothing. I think this confirms the idea that it's a beta version stronghold.

Also, Even using creative mode with unlimited eyes, It's very difficult to find strongholds. It seems they only want to seek one stronghold and will ignore the other two completely.

What is the position of the one stronghold that you did find? I can try to learn how to delete chunks with MCEdit and see if I can get the stronghold to spawn in a copy of the server's world

coords of the dungeon is -807, 35.7, 324 . It's beneath a lake, but if you dig straight down it'll put you right into the portal chamber.