Minecraft Thread

That dirt block reminds me! Has anybody managed to Enchant a Pickaxe or Shovel of Smooth Touch yet?

No, but thanks to the Bottles O'Enchanting I tinkered with for a short while from the snapshot update, I eventually got this enchantment in Creative mode. On a Wooden Shovel. After at least 30 levels of exp. And even when I was spamming the bottles on myself, it took quite a while. Like, two to five entire concentrated minutes of holding down my right mouse button.
So yeah, the exp needed for this enchantment is heinous.

But some folks need a more specific analysis, so I'll refer everyone interested in enchanting to here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Enchanting

It's all quite confusing, but I think as long as you work with weak tools like Stone Shovels and Wood Axes - and really, the only items worth collecting with Silk Touch are Grass, Mycelium, and Giant Mushroom blocks (but we can't get Ice, Spawners, or even Glass Panes! D:) - 30 levels of experience is a pretty good target. Maybe more if you're paranoid, and really, who wouldn't be? Maybe I should get that mod that un-cryptifies the enchantments so that I can tell what I'm getting before downing my hard-earned experience on them.

EDIT: Is it possible to incorporate Redstone Ore blocks into some kind of weird exotic light fixture? Actually, I think such a thing would be pretty welcome in my Flower generator. The flowers only drop instantly if the light level is exactly 0, so you can drop a dozen units of bonemeal and beat the walls until you get light from the Redstone and muscle your way back out.
But it's probably more trouble than it's worth to get a Silk Touch Iron/Diamond Pickaxe.

Material is important for enchantments. Each material has its own level-bonus for enchantments. The level bonus is fully random, but it still matters.

=Sword/Tool Bonuses by Material=
Gold = 0 to 22 bonus
Wood = 0 to 15 bonus
Iron = 0 to 14 bonus
Diamond = 0 to 10 bonus
Stone = 0 to 5 bonus


So gold is definitely the best, and wood is pretty good too. Stone is wasting your time.

However, diamond is still the best in the long run, because it will last so very much longer than other tools. Other tools with a strong Unbreaking enchantment can last longer than Diamond, but your chances of getting a really good Unbreaking enchantment along with any other really good enchantment are low enough that you shouldn't expect it to happen.

I'm surprised you attempted to figure out what those bonuses mean! For some reason that list didn't register with me at all, mostly because the materials corresponding with the bonuses don't make much sense.
I'll have to try that on our server. Maybe I can get a Gold Shovel with Silk Touch at a much earlier level than I'd expected.

If I am reading the formulas correctly, a gold pickaxe should have roughly a 1% chance of Silk touch when enchanted at level 1

A gold pickaxe should have slightly more than a 25% chance of silk touch if enchanted at level 25. Every time I get that much experience I always spend it on sword enchantments, which I guess is why I have never seen Silk Touch myself.

For a 100% chance of Silk touch on a gold pickaxe, it looks like you need to be at like level 80 or something, which I think would be what you would earn from single-handedly slaying 3 or 4 Enderdragons :)

I used server commands to acquire some Villager Spawn Eggs, and I used them to populate Creeperton, Spawnerton, and Skellington with villagers. As far as I know those are the only villages we spawned before villagers were implemented. In the upcoming 1.2 release, the villagers are supposed to have better AI, and be smart enough to hide indoors at night.

I've been testing the Testificates' behavior in a Snapshot version recently! Here's what I've noticed:
-Villagers tend to stay relatively close to a village, but if they get sent a few meters away from it for whatever reason (due to the player or a zombie), they may never find their way back
-Villagers stay indoors at night and during rain/snow/thunder storms
-Villagers run away from zombies, which now pursue them and kill them if given a chance
-Villagers are pretty fast! Zombies can't catch them unless they get cornered
-Villagers automatically open and close doors as they pass through them
-Villagers enjoy having conversations staring contests with each other and other passive mobs
-Villagers consider any closed-off structure with a door to be a house, even if it's player-made
-Villagers can't trample crops just by walking over them

-On Hard difficulty, villagers are almost guaranteed to die at the hands of any zombies that break down their doors

I started a new game on singleplayer and moved into a village, left to gather some resources, and when I came back, everyone was dead and zombies were everywhere. And the sound zombies make when breaking down doors is terrifying if you're not expecting it.

Fortunately the server is set to normal difficulty, so Zombies will not be able to smash our doors. But I am pretty sure they will still try, so we will get to hear the noise :)

http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/405-minecraft-snapshot-12w07a-is-ready-for-testing/

Another snapshot release? These are coming faster than I can count them! I wouldn't recommend trying this one haphazardly, and definitely don't open any of your old maps in the new system yet. There's a new world format that, among other things, has extended the build height up to 256y. Which is above the clouds! Hell yes, sky cities, here we come!

Too bad we don't have much of an efficient way to travel upward yet. In creative mode, I made a structure with the bottom face made of one layer of water and one layer of signposts. I then constructed a TNT cannon that was capable of launching me from bedrock level all the way up to the sky structure, which I can climb into by swimming into the water layer. But that much TNT would kill someone several times over in SMP, so it won't work. Except with maybe a full set of enchanted diamond armor. Wow, that would be quite an exclusive entry fee!
Maybe in the future we can get some form of TNT that doesn't do damage or destroy blocks so that we can launch ourselves willy-nilly.

Oh, also, there's this.

Redstone Lamps! Awesome! I guess James and I will have to update our old-fashioned Piston Lamps later.

I am excited about the higher sky!
Fenrir's Space Needle is impressive, so the idea that it can be more than doubled in height is pretty cool!

As for vertical travel, I think simple ladders are good enough, but I agree that it would be nice to have something better.

I am glad to see the lantern blocks. Piston-based light switches are too much work.

http://youtu.be/uLvNBB5kyY8

Well, never mind! Apparently it's possible to make a "Zipper" elevator that elevates you at about the same speed as straight-up flying in creative mode. I'm most impressed!

And as much as I'd like to install one on the OHR server, it'd take a heinous amount of slimeballs to craft that many sticky pistons.

So it takes 2x height of sticky pistons to build a zipper? So sea-level to sky will be 192 blocks. So that would be 6 stacks of 64 slimeballs. I think I have already collected just over 2 stacks of 64 slimeballs, so although it is a lot, it is doable. The cavern I hollowed out under Mt. James is fantastic for slime-hunting. Last time I went down there I had about 7 or 8 Giant slimes waiting for me :)

One thing I was thinking would be fun to do is to create a Land Of Eternal Night by making a 1 kibimeter square ceiling one cobblestone thick at the top of the map over some unlucky section of the world. However, that would take 16384 stacks of 64 cobblestones, and even if I could place them at a rate of 1 block per second, it would take more than 12 days with no sleep and no food or bathroom breaks...

So yeah, I gave up on that idea :)

I am super excited about this. Megastructures ahoy!

It took me a while to realize this, but there's an absolute plethora of fantasy floating cities and continents that beg to be recreated in Minecraft.


And I can guarantee that someone's going to recreate Skyloft

Hell, Jeb might as well make floating continents another type generated structure, along with gigantic mountains.

Also James, I'm certain there's a mod or world editing tool out there that will let you generate miles-long cuboids at will. Also I didn't know kibi- was a prefix until today.

Quite unrelated, but I've just discovered this mod:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/892282-11-computercraft-121/

I haven't tried it (or any mod for that matter!), but it looks very interesting. I could imagine it being an excellent pedagogical tool for basic programming concepts.