Arkady does Minecraft

My side blog for Minecraft witterings and screenshots. (My regular Tumblr is the-arkadian.) Screenshot posts will be queued with no more than 3 a day (posted at 2pm, 4pm & 6pm UK time).

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Finally managed to record and upload video of a flythrough of my massive Kingdom build, up on my Minecraft Realms server. This video isn't even the whole thing - just the main part of it. There's another 4 villages not featured in this flythrough....

I've been building this map for years.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Shaders make Minecraft so pretty!

( OptiFine 1.12.2 HD Ultra D1 with Realistic Adventure texture pack.)

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Minecraft PE - Pocket Realms

Early on in the life of Minecraft Pocket Edition there were plans to launch special Realms servers for PE, but this fell through and Realms were discontinued quite early on in the life of PE. However, on 13th April 2016 Alpha Realms build 1 went live. It was superceded by build 2 only two days later on the 15th. It was released for the Realms phase of Minecraft PE Alpha 0.15.0 which is the first phase of the Friendly Update for PE and Win 10 versions - a major update released on June 10, 2016 for Android, and June 13, 2016 across all platforms.The official name for the update, the Friendly Update, was revealed on June 3, 2016 in a blog post on the Mojang website. With the full release, cross-platform compatibility between the Win 10 and PE versions was introduced as Xbox Live was tied in as well.

To encourage takeup of Pocket Realms, Mojang are currently offering a free 30-day trial of Pocket Realms (thereafter £6.65 a month).

So, with that in mind, what are the changes introduced with the Friendly Update thus far, and what is Pocket Realms like?

Well, first it informs you of the arrival of Xbox Live and invites you to sign in. This is a good idea, as you’ll need to be signed in to Xbox Live in order to access Realms.

If you already have a Microsoft account, just sign in normally, or else create one.

And logged in. Click on “Let’s Play” and it will take you back to the game.

The first thing you’ll notice is the updated Menu GUI, which now resembled the Win 10 version. Note also the version number down in the bottom righthand corner, indicating that it’s now running version 0.15.0.

Clicking on “Play” brings up the World menu. (Yes, I have 29 worlds on the tablet at the moment - my 9-year-old daughter likes to create new worlds when she’s bored on a train journey....)

Clicking on “Realms” brings up this loading screen as it signs in to Pocket Realms using your Xbox Live login.

This is where it will list all the Realms you have access to, including both those you’ve been added to as well as any you own.

Clicking on “New Realm” will bring up this dialogue. At present you can sign up for a free 30-day trial for your first Pocket realm; additional Realms will cost £6.65 which will be the regular monthly cost.

Clicking on the spanner icon beside your new Pocket Realm will call up the options and settings for the new world, allowing you to set the difficulty level and choose between Survival and Creative modes.

Clicking on “Players” brings up the list of players who have access to the world; friends are added by entering their Xbox Live user tag.

Clicking on “Subscription” will bring up the details of your plan.

Clicking on “Play” will bring up a familiar loading screen....

As each player enters the world, a message will come up. This is the starting view of a Survival world.

Creative worlds are much as you’d expect.

The other new thing that’s been added besides Pocket Realms is Achievements, which anyone who’s played the PC or console versions will already be familiar with.

Mojang have further new things planned; the Friendly Update is in Alpha but players on Android devices  who purchased their copy through the Google Play Store can sign up as Beta testers.

[the-arkadian]

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[arkadydoesminecraft]

The Kingdom on Realms

With Minecraft realms, there’s the option to upload a map of your own; so I decided to upload my Kingdom map (I’ve previously posted screenshots of my Kingdom on this Tumblr) so that other people can enjoy exploring it.

Thus far the only other person who’s visited the Kingdom is my daughter Freda. Naturally she wanted her own house, and she wanted it to be next to mine - so here is Freda’s House. :-)

Freda’s house is the one to the right, built from polished granite; my stone house is to the left.

View from the rear of the Arkadian estate.

A view from the rear of Freda’s house across the Arkadian estate.

Side entrance.

Main entrance, reached through the paddock at the side of House Arkadian.

View from the other side, showing the little balcony garden, with the white castle viewable in the distance off to the right.

As with all Realms worlds, the Kingdom is a private server that players have to be invited to. Thus far the only players are my daughter, a couple of my friends and their daughter, and the son of another couple of friends. It’s a nice safe place where the kids can play with each other without fear of griefers.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Windows 10 Minecraft Beta

Windows 10 came out at the end of last month; Windows 7 and 8 users were offered free upgrades automatically. After humming and hahing over it for a bit and checking reviews to see how well my various games and programs would work under Win10 I opted to go for the upgrade and thus far I’ve had no problems - everything runs just fine.

Minecraft PC/Mac players will have noticed that Minecraft updated to 1.8.8 this week - and Minecraft for Win10 also came out about the same time. It’s still in Beta at the moment, but owners of Minecraft can install it for free (it’s otherwise £7.49/$10 during the Beta period). So I figured I’d give it a spin.

The first thing to note is that when you install it, the app description states that your existing PC/Mac saves/worlds won’t be compatible with Win10 Minecraft Beta; that’s because it doesn’t use Java. The second thing is that before you can play you have to have an Xbox Live ID. If you don’t already have one, it’ll prompt you to create one for free.

Once you load it up, it quickly becomes obvious that it’s based off the code for the Minecraft Pocket Edition:

The description in the Win10 app store says it has in-app purchases - these are the optional skin packs. There are a handful of free skins, but most of them are locked unless you want to pay for them.

When you click on play, the world selection page is a little different from Minecraft PE:

You have the option to add friends by entering their Xbox Live ID. You can play multiplayer with up to 7 other friends locally or via Xbox Live; there will be a patch released shortly that will allow you also to play with Pocket Edition players on LAN as well.

There’s also an option for Realms:

Presumably these will be Win10-specific Realms?

World creation will be very familiar to anyone who’s played the Pocket Edition:

They’ve used the PE graphics as well - and obviously if you’re playing on a PC or Win10 tablet then it takes advantage of the greater processing power to turn all the graphics options up to maximum:

Buildings options in Creative mode:

Movement on a PC is the same as the PC version - W,A,S,D for movement and mouse to look around. To row a boat you have to hold down both A and D simultaneously.

Survival mode is a little different from the Pocket Edition - it introduces Hunger.

And crafting etc is an amalgamation of regular PC/Mac and PE versions:

Storage is the same as PE:

Here’s the house I’ve been building. :-)

It’s very early days yet; it’s very much a Beta - albeit a very playable one. If you’ve played the Pocket Edition you’ll find it very familiar and easy to get to grips with (and if you haven’t, I’d recommend checking out my review of Pocket Edition [Part 1] [Part 2] to get some idea of the differences).

Mojang and Microsoft seem to be going for maximum cross-platform multiplayer,enabling you to craft, create, and explore online with up to seven friends playing Windows 10 Edition Beta, through local multiplayer or with your Xbox Live friends online - and once the free update goes live that will be explanded to allow you to play online and in local multiplayer with other Pocket Edition players as well. I have no idea when that update will go live - Pocket Edition on my Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet picked up on my Win10 Beta world but couldn’t join to it yet.

The Beta will feature support for multiple inputs – switch between controller, touch, and keyboard controls with little to no effort - and offer the ability to record and share gameplay highlights with built-in GameDVR. It has built-in player feedback mechanisms to help with bug report and game improvement through the lifetime of the Beta.

It’s not known yet how long the Beta will run for, but if you’ve made the upgrade to Win10 and you’re already a Minecraft player then I recommend giving it a try. There’s been a lot of discussion and debate about which direction Microsoft would take Minecraft after its acquisition of Mojang last year, and I think in the Win 10 Minecraft Beta we can see a clear sign of just what’s coming next for what is arguably the most popular and successful building sim ever.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Inside Arkadia Castle

So here we are outside Arkadia Castle. Let’s go take a look inside.

Inside the main entrance:

The Crafting Hall:

The well:

Doors to the Armoury, leading off from the Crafting Hall:

The Armoury:

Doors to my tower:

Bottom floor:

My bedroom:

Door onto the battlements:

The upper floor of the central keep:

The guest quarters:

View from the battlements:

And there you have it - Arkadia Castle. 10 hours’ total build time solo.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Building Arkadia Castle part 2

In the last post we looked at the process of building the castle itself; now let’s move on to the front grounds.

Immediately to your left as you pass through the gatehouse is the stables:

And here’s the castle completed, with banners and flags:

In the next post we’ll take a look inside.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Building Arkadia Castle part 1

Arkadia Castle is build on a swamp island quite close to the spawn point on Arkadia. It’s my personal home on Arkadia, shared with my daughter Freda; there is also a guest tower with room for visitors. It’s a fairly large structure; each tower is 8x8 blocks, and the long walls are 20 blocks long.

This is the basic layout.

Ground floor almost complete:

Putting in the first floor of what will be my tower:

Battlements nearly complete - hey, what’s that spider doing there??

Three towers almost done:

Beginning to look like a castle:

Central building done, all roofing finished, putting up the battlements on the towers:

Central building completed with a glass roof and crenellations.

It’s a castle!

At this point, it has taken about 6 hours of building, working entirely on my own. In the next post, we’ll work on the front grounds and entrance.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Arkadia

So, when you log into my Minecraft Realms world of Arkadia, this is where you spawn:

Yes, Arkadia is PVP-free. I’m not the only person playing here; my 8-year-old daughter also plays, and we’ll be inviting a few friends and their kids too - and the last thing anyone wants is griefing!

Don’t forget to close the gate behind you! We don’t want any creepers in the spawn zone!

You can tell Freda’s been here already - there’s a Nether Cave.

Freda likes to be neat and tidy - and practical too. Don’t leave your discarded rubbish lying around - we have somewhere to put it!

Let’s go visit that castle....

In the next post, I’ll show you the progress shots of how I built the castle, and then we’ll take a look inside.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Minecraft Realms

Mojang launched Realms in 2013, as an official subscription-based server hosting service that allows players to create and manage their own private Minecraft servers. It provides an easy and faster way to create servers and allows the owner to manage them from inside the game, without prior knowledge of the concepts for hosting on the Internet. Minecraft Realms aren’t intended as large-scale public servers - they are small-scale, ideal for a group of friends & families who want to play in a communal world without the limitations of playing on a LAN. Up to 20 people can belong to a Realm, with up to 10 players online at any one time.

The standard subscription for Realms is £8 a month, though periodically there is a special 20% discount for new subscribers. You can also purchase a one-off manual subscription for 1, 3 or 6 months which can be manually extended (at present, there is a 10% discount on 3 months and 20% on 6 months at the time of writing this). Only one person (the owner) need pay the subscription (though if there’s a group of you all chipping in, it becomes a very cheap way of having your own server).

What do you get when you subscribe? You get a basic server running the latest version of Minecraft (currently 1.8.4) but you can’t use mods or plugins.

Let’s take a closer look.

Once you’ve bought your Realms subscription, just click on Minecraft Realms on the menu screen. This will bring up the Realms screen, listing all the Realms subscriptions you own or have access to. From here you can configure your Realm.

Configuring is quite straightforward. You have a choice of three worlds and one Minigame world. Only one world can be active at a time. You also have the choice to load a template or upload a map of your own (maximum upload size 500MB - to give you some idea of how big that is, the whole of my Kingdom map is only 40.8MB even though it covers such a large area).

Clicking on “Players” will bring up a list of all current members of the server. You can invite players, and give existing members ops by clicking on the dot beside the red cross next to their name (clicking on the cross removes that member). Without ops, players are limited to basically being spectators.

Clicking on “Options” allows you to configure your world.

Clicking on “Backups” brings up a list of all the latest backups of your game, allowing you to roll back to an earlier version if you need to. It also gives you the option of downloading the latest version of your map.

To enter your Realms world, just double-click on that world:

And in we go....

[arkadydoesminecraft]

I’ve been working some more on the Kingdom; there’s a new path leading from the most recently-built village (which still hasn’t got a name yet):

Where does it lead?

Another village - but this one’s rather different and colourful!

The villagers are very industrious, growing crops in their front gardens.

And in their back gardens too.

It’s quite a small village, but quite pretty.

The Kingdom is getting pretty huge!

I’ve recently subscribed to Minecraft Realms, and I’m now working on a copy of the Kingdom without the CustomNPCs mod so I can upload the map to my Realms server at some point. It’ll take a while though, because the Kingdom is now a rather large map and there are a LOT of villages to edit!

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Minecraft PE - Crafting

So, let’s take a look first at Inventory. You select this by touching the square with three dots at the far right of your hot slots bar.

If you click on a Crafting table, it will show you all the things you can make. Highlighted items are the ones you can make with what you have in your inventory, with numbers to tell you how many of that item you can make. Dark items are the ones you don’t have all the components for. It means you don’t have to try and remember countless recipes for all the things you want to build, and if you click on one of the dark items then you can see at a glance what components you need to find.

If you click on a furnace, you get the following. There are three boxes; the bottom one on the left is for your fuel source, and the top one is where you put your raw material. The finished item appears in the right-hand box.

The stonecutter works the same as the crafting table:

If you open a chest, you’ll see your inventory on the left and the chest contents on the right. To transfer a single item from one to the other, just tap on it - or to transfer more, hold your finger on that item. A green bar will start filling to indicate how much of the stack you’re transferring.

To exit the game, tap your device’s “back” key. You’ll get the following screen:

And there you have it! There’s more you can do - if you tap on the little speech bubble in the top left corner you can then tap on the keyboard symbol in the bottom right-hand corner, which then brings up a dialogue box and keyboard so you can talk to others in multiplayer mode or enter commands, though as I’ve not played multiplayer myself I’ve not used it. 

And there you have it: Minecraft Pocket Edition. As of January 2015 it has sold over 30 million copies (PC had only sold 18 million) which makes it the most popular version of Minecraft, though the least developed. You can find out far more (including a list of all the mobs and how they differ from the PC and console versions) on the Minecraft Wiki.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

Minecraft Pocket Edition

For our 12th anniversary, my partner got me a Samsung Galaxy Tab - the 8″ one. So of course the first thing I put on it was Minecraft Pocket Edition! I already had it on my S4 mini phone, but to be honest trying to play it wasn’t easy - the small screen meant the controls were often tricky even with my small fingers, although my 7-year-old daughter had no problems with it.

It’s much better on a tablet though, and the 8″ Galaxy Tab has a screen resolution of 1280x800 with a quad core 1.2GHz CPU - so a much faster, smoother experience.

Minecraft PE was first released on Android in 2011, and it’s currently on version 0.10.5. It’s $6.99 on the Google Play store (£4.99 for us Brits) and on iTunes. The Android version is 12.9MB.

Minecraft PE is much the same as the PC and console versions, but there are a few differences - world creation is far more limited, for example, with options only for Survival or Creative mode (no cheats available!) and in Survival mode you don’t get the option for a starter chest. It also lacks certain survival elements present in other versions of the game such as brewing and hunger, and lacks bosses and dimensions. The multiplayer mode is cross-platform compatible between all touch-screen devices capable of running Pocket Edition - so you can play with your friends. You could also play multiplayer through Minecraft Realms as of version 0.7.1, but Minecraft Realms was closed in version 0.7.6 (although an option for Minecraft Realms Alpha still shows on the Options screen).

So, let’s take a look:

The first thing you’re presented with is the splash screen. Down in the bottom right corner is the button for Options. There are four screens of options:

When you select Play on the splash screen, you’re shown a list of all the worlds available; you can also select to create a new world or delete an existing world:

As you can see, your options are far more limited for world creation than in the PC or console versions:

So, let’s take a trip into my survival world and have a look.

As youyou can see, the graphics are very familiar to anyone who’s played the other versions!

This is my house. I picked an island to build it on, because the mobs in Pocket Edition are every bit as nasty as the other versions!

The graphics are arguably more vibrant in Pocket Edition, possibly to make up for the smaller screen size.

Let’s takle a look inside my house:

It’s small - but it’s home!

In the next post, we’ll have a look at Crafting.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

SkyBlock Island part 4

In addition to the Rank islands, you can also buy special island types. These all cost $5 USD each (apart from the Herobrine Head which is $6.66, and the End and Nether islands which are $7.50 each). You can choose from various biome types, and for SkyBlock2 I decided to opt for a Village island.

This is what the show island looks like:

As you can see, you get quite a lot to start with. It’s a large island (yes, mobs will spawn at night) with irrigated crops, plenty of trees, and several buildings. You also start with a chest that has a few beginner basics in, including four spawn eggs - cow, sheep, chicken and villager.

The first thing I did was to set up initial camp in the tower you can see in the last picture above. I built a door to keep mobs out, and then used that as my base of operations, setting it as my initial home point with the /sethome command. This meant I could return from anywhere else (including the shop or after dying and respawning) with the /home command.

The next thing I did was to start demolishing the two smaller houses either side of the main central house, before enlarging the main house. Once it was ready to move into, I set my home point to the large house.

As you can see, both of the smaller buildings are gone:

There’s an enclosed area on the side of the house for my livestock. (The hole in the ground in front of the enclosure is the entrance to my mine. Haven’t found any ore yet, but I’m still looking!)

This is the downstairs room of the house:

Stairs to the upper floor:

Upper floor. There are two bedrooms up here, because my daughter likes to come hang out with me on the island and help me build sometimes. To the left you can see the ladder up to the roof.

One of the bedrooms:

Views from the roof:

Looking from the downstairs room into the animal enclosure:

And looking towards the front door:

Now, I must get back to mining - I’m sure there must be some iron ore down there somewhere...!

[arkadydoesminecraft]

SkyBlock Island part 3

There are several different types of island available. The starter island for free accounts is pretty minimal - a square of grass a few blocks across, with one oak tree and one chest with a few basics in. You start with $2000 with which to buy basic blocks such as dirt, cobblestone, different types of wood, sand, iron etc. You can’t buy everything - but you can certainly buy the basics to get started. If you start with one of the larger islands - and if you’re lucky - you may be able to mine for some resources (carefully - if you dig out the bottom of your island beneath you, it’s a long way down and you’ll die); some larger islands start with more resources to begin with such as a larger tree to mine wood from, a pond for water with sand you can mine to make glass and sugar cane already growing round it. Some islands start with a few spawn eggs to get you started with livestock as well.

Purchasing Rank on the Jerry and Harry servers entitles you to create a larger island with more resources (though you can only have one island per server, and you can’t transfer inventory from one server to another - you can delete an island to create a new one however). There are seven ranks in total, and you can only buy them with actual real cash via Paypal. Upgrading from one rank to a higher one costs the difference between ranks. Donator (the bottom tier) is $10, VIP is $20, Premium $30, Legend $50, Hero $85, Herobrine $100 and God $200. These are one-off payments however; there’s no ongoing subscription.

At Donator level, you get this:

As you can see, you start with a small house, a mature oak tree, and there’s quite a bit of stone under the top layers of dirt that you can (carefully!) mine.

At VIP rank, it gets a little fancier:

The VIP island comes with a larger brick-and-wood house, a large mature oak tree, a small pond with sand and is a little larger than the Donator island.

The Legend island is even larger still:

As you can see, having Legend rank entitles you to quite a sizeable chunk of land! Be warned: with an island this size you will get mobs spawning at night - including witches and Endermen. But you do get a nice big house to hide away from them in! You also get a huge mature oak tree and a large pond, and there’s plenty of stone down beneath the dirt for you to mine (with a good chance of iron ore and possibly other goodies - I don’t have Legend status myself so I don’t know what else you might find; I’ve found iron on my VIP island on the SkyBlock1 server however so iron is pretty much a given on a Legend island).

Of course, if you go for Herobrine rank then you could get this:

All these island types and more are available for you to explore in the Show Islands section of each SkyBlock server. In addition to the various Rank islands, there are additional types you can purchase separately in the itsjerryandharry.com webstore (log in with your Minecraft name). In the next post I’ll show you which island type I’ve opted for in SkyBlock2 and show you around my island a little.

[arkadydoesminecraft]

SkyBlock Island part 2

On passing through the SKyBlock2 server portal, this is what you see:

Notice that the things I had in my inventory on the main server have disappeared and instead I have what was in my inventory the last time I logged in.

This is the central meeting area on the SkyBlock 2 server:

If you move straight ahead, there’s a message board with some helpful commands to get you started:

To the right of the sign is the shop, where you can buy different types of block. You get to the shop from your island (more about that in a minute) using the command /warp shop.

If you turn to your right, opposite the shop is the archway leading to the show islands, where you can see examples of all the different SkyBlock islands available:

In the next post, we’ll go have a look at a few of them.