Yesterday was not a good day for me to play Minecraft.  I’d blame the cough medicine I was on…  But I suspect the stupidity was all my own.

The Minecraft.net server was up and running, so I was able to log in and play just fine.  Which was awesome.  I’d come up with all sorts of great ideas yesterday and I was dying to implement them.

First off, I wanted to rebuild my lighthouse.  I was not very happy with how it’d turned out…  It was short, and square, and grey…  It didn’t look much like a lighthouse.  So I ripped it all apart and started over.  Used sandstone instead of cobble, built it in a vaguely circular shape, and took it up to about 30 blocks high, instead of the 15 or so I had before.  I also re-structured a good chunk of the underwater portion, made it look like a continuation of the lighthouse.  And instead of lots of torches, I lit the thing with a pillar of lava down the center.

The end result was very impressive…  But I flooded the bottom section about three times as I was trying to remodel it.  I kept forgetting that a single block of water can act as a spring.  I kept thinking that if I just walled it off from the outside, I could break a block inside and I’d only have to deal with a single block’s worth of water…  And then I’d flood the bottom level of my lighthouse until I could swim up against the current and plug that gushing block of water.  Very annoying.

Then I wanted to build a cobble factory.  Not because I really needed more cobblestone…  But because it sounded cool.  So I made a couple glass columns in my basement, and surrounded them with obsidian just to make it look cool.  I filled one column with water, and the other column with lava, and then poked a small hole at the bottom.  It worked!  Well, mostly…  The water flowed faster than the lava, so the block of cobble wasn’t created where I wanted it to be…  But I was getting blocks of cobble, so that was nice.

Then, while I pondered how to tweak things to make the cobble pop out right in the middle…  The wooden roof of my basement (also the floor of my first story) caught on fire…  And that fire spread up to the second story…  And the third…  And the fourth…  And my roof…  The whole thing was gutted, leaving only the stone shell and the chests/tables/furnaces I’d built.  Even my nice bookshelves went up in flames.

I quickly dismantled my cobble machine and then went looking for trees to chop down, so that I could re-build all my floors.  Next time I do anything with lava I’ll make damn sure I’m nowhere near anything flamable.

The last thing I tried to do yesterday is build a minecart track down into my new mining base.  I thought I could put a couple storage carts on the track, and a powered cart, and use all that to haul my goodies back up top.  Figured it’d be easier (and more fun) than climbing up and down an insanely long ladder all the time.

I carved out a simple little tunnel from the basement of my house…  Laid down a long track angled down into the ground…  Carved out a deep tunnel into the ground…  Made tons and tons of minecart track, and laid it all down…  Was doing very well.  It worked.  But the powered cart didn’t like to push things through this one section of track…  So I started tweaking things.

I dug a little too deep, and wound up falling into lava.  Roasted myself alive.  Lost my diamond pick and diamond axe, as well as a bunch of minecart track and other miscellaneous junk.

I respawned, grabbed the spare diamond pick I kept at the house, and went back down to fix my track…  And I saw that most of my stuff wasn’t quite gone.  It was floating on the surface of the lava, burning slowly.  Including my diamond pick and axe.  So, I tried to inch over and grab them…  And fell in the lava again.  And I couldn’t get out.  And I roasted again.  And I lost my second diamond pick.

I respawned again, and went straight back to the site of my death, but there was nothing left.  It had all burned away completely.  And I was in a hole, surrounded with magma, with no tools at all, and stone on all sides.  I tried tearing holes in the stone with my bare hands, but that didn’t work too well.  Eventually I gave up and leapt into the lava again.  But at least this time I didn’t have anything to lose.

I respawned yet again, threw together a wooden pick and some more minecart track, and fixed the problems in my tunnel.  And then I logged off for the day.

Still, despite all the frustration, I’ve got an awesome new lighthouse and a very cool minecart track down into my mining base.  So I’m pretty happy with that.

One of the problems with Minecraft is the central authentication server.  You can run your own world server…  But you still have to authenticate against Minecraft.net before connecting.

Well, that’s not strictly true…  You can “play offline” and do single player just fine.  And you can connect to a multiplayer server that allows anonymous connections.  But it won’t track your personal inventory at all.

But, basically, you need to log in if you want to play multiplayer.  And Minecraft.net has been down all day long.

We’re officially hooked on Minecraft.  There is no hope for either of us.  It’s only a matter of time before I try to punch a tree for wood, or slap some random sheep for wool.

I spent a good chunk of time on Monday night looking around for mods and texture packs.  Fun as the game is, it doesn’t look like much.  I eventually found the GERUDOKU texture pack, which I first saw featured in the Minecraft proposal video…  It makes Minecraft look like something out of a SNES-era RPG.  Very awesome.

Then I went looking for a mod to freeze time.

We were already playing with “passive” turned on…  But it still got dark at night, and that was inconvenient.  I wanted to be able to work on my epic projects throughout the night, without having to lay out dozens of torches.

To that end, I found the Daylight Savings mod.  It doesn’t actually freeze time…  But you can position the sun where you want it, and set it to move at whatever speed you like.  Which easily gives the constant daylight we were looking for.

We had a lot of fun playing around in Minecraft on Monday night…  Terri was taken enough with Minecraft that she bought her own copy of the game on Tuesday, so that we could play multi-player.  I was looking forward to throwing together my own server and crafting a whole world with her.

Then Notch updated Minecraft to 1.3 and broke everything I’d just gotten working.  No GERUDOKU, No Daylight Savings.

Got home last night and set up a little Minecraft server on our home network.  Nothing fancy – just running the vanilla server software.  Unfortunately, that computer is about 10 years old and being overworked anyway…  The server’s performance was less than spectacular.

We were both able to log in and play…  But we kept getting periods of lag.  Something I’d just built would disappear.  Or a block I’d just destroyed would reappear.  Once or twice I found myself trapped inside a block that shouldn’t exist.  Then I got disconnected, and couldn’t log in to the authentication server, and connected to our local server as a generic player…  Then the same thing happened to Terri…  Very annoying.

I’m going to see if running the server on my personal machine tonight works any better.  There’ll be additional load from running both the server and the client…  But my machine is a beast in comparison to that poor old server we were using.

And the GERUDOKU pack has been updated to work with 1.3 now, so we’ll have our nice graphics back.

Of course, playing multi-player precludes the use of the Daylight Savings mod…  But that isn’t a big deal now that we’ve got beds in Minecraft.  Which actually works very well.  You just have to get everyone on the server to hop into bed, and it’s suddenly daylight.  Very nice.

It may surprise you to hear that, until very recently, I had not played Minecraft.  Especially since I’m such a big fan of Dwarf Fortress.  But, it’s true.

I’d seen plenty of videos…  Heard folks raving about how awesome it is…  Seen an assortment of Minecraft-themed memes on the net…  Seen plenty of discussions about Minecraft on the Bay 12 forums…  But I just never got around to playing it.

Even more surprising is the fact that Terri had never even heard of the game.

Both of those things were remedied over the weekend.

Terri and I were talking about gaming in general.  I suggested that we ought to be playing Minecraft together.  She’d never heard of it, so I gave her a brief description.  And I’d never played it, so I gave the alpha a spin.  She was intrigued.  I was immediately taken with the gameplay.

In some ways, Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress are polar opposites.

Dwarf Fortress has an intimidating pseudo-ASCII interface, while Minecraft has friendly 3D graphics.  In Dwarf Fortress you’re directing swarms of dwarves to do your bidding, while you’re pretty much on your own in Minecraft.  Dwarf Fortress gives you a distant view of the action – directing things from afar, while Minecraft gets you right down in the dirt.

But, at the core, they’re both about building amazing things out of very simple components.  And I think that’s what appeals to me about both of them.

The alpha didn’t keep me satisfied for long.  It was certainly fun being able to build pretty much anything I wanted.  The lack of resource scarcity was very nice.  It was also nice not having to worry about mobs wandering in and killing me.  I could just build whatever I wanted.

But, at the same time, that lack of pressure leads to a lack of direction.  Without a need to shelter from the mobs at night, I didn’t need to build a house quickly.  Without the need to gather resources, I really had no need for exploration.

So, before too long, I bought a copy of the game itself.

And then I spent all weekend delving deep into the Earth…  Building a castle to weather the night in…  Distributing torches throughout my mine…  Running in fear from spiders and creepers…  Smacking pigs and chopping down trees…

Time just flew by.

And now, I can’t wait to get home and fire it up again.

Got another email inviting me back for 5 days of free EVE.  I accepted, of course.

I won’t really play…  It takes more than 5 days to get my feet under me.  And even at the best of times EVE demands more attention than I feel I can give.  Which is why I keep un-subscribing.

But, hell, that’s 5 days of training I can get under my belt in case I ever do get a chance to really play EVE again.  And that’s always a good thing.

Plus, they’ve got their new “carbon based” character creator going…

It’s basically one hell of a character modelling system.

Obviously, a lot of that detail is going to be wasted in EVE.  You can’t get out and walk around.  You can’t emote.  You can’t change your clothes.  All you do is make a nice portrait which then gets displayed next to your name in the chat window.  At those sizes you can barely tell what you’re looking at.

But the carbon system allows you all sorts of options when you’re making your character.  You can dramatically change the shape of your character’s face and body.  The hair is actually modeled like hair, instead of some kind of hair-shaped helmet on their head.  You add your clothing in multiple layers.  The end result is rather unique.  Which is very cool.

Except, of course, it’s pretty much wasted on EVE…

The idea is that they’ve developed this carbon technology for use with some of their other games.  The upcoming World of Darkness MMOG, and DUST-514, for example.  It probably  makes sense to build as many reusable components as possible…  Rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.  And I’m sure they can do some very nice stuff with carbon in the WoD game.

But, really, it feels useless in EVE.  I spent about an hour building my character…  Playing with options…  Tweaking things until I was happy…  And all I got out of it was that little portrait.  You can’t even see what kind of pants and boots I picked out because the portrait ends at my shoulders.

I suppose, if they ever get the whole Incarna/WiS/ambulation thing going it’ll be put to better use…  But that’s been under development for years now.

I feel like a chump today.

This morning, in the shower, I was lamenting how quickly the weekend goes by.  I was thinking how nice it would be just to have another day off.  One more day to sleep in and relax.

I didn’t see a single car on the drive in.  45 minutes on the highway, and I was the only one on the road.

I got down to the hospital to find the parking lot more than half empty.

It’s Presidents’ Day, obviously.  Not normally a holiday that I really keep track of.  One of those things that shows up on a calendar, and banks close, but that’s about it.  But I probably could have gotten away with taking the day off today.

At least with this many people out it should be relatively quiet…  I hope…