Late News From the World of Notch : Notch has left the Building

I’m leaving on a two week vacation tonight, to celebrate my mother turning 60. While I will be bringing a laptop and there will be internet, I will try to not think about work as much as possible while I’m gone.

To keep up with Minecraft development, you can check out our page on Facebook, or follow the following people on twitter:

Carl Manneh (ceo!)
Daniel Kaplan (bizdev!)
Jakob Porser (code!)
Jens Bergensten (code!)
Junkboy (art!)
Markus Persson (code!)
Tobias Mollstam (code!)

When I get back, I’ll finish up the new launcher, then my goal is to get some early sketch of the Modding API out before GDC.

Whoa. I almost forgot

I am a horrible procrastinator once again. I had plans for this blog and I'm not doing them! Dear readers, I am sorry I have temporarily failed you. I had stopped playing Minecraft for a bit to focus on some real life drama and school. Don't fear though. I'm back!

It appears the farmlands will have a halt in development as Amy and I were both inspired to do something different. We both will be making cities, only separately this time. Our little server is about to turn into a huge country!

I've been in a very big Pokemon mood lately. So I decided, why not, let's make a city modeled off a real Pokemon city. Celadon's got a nice mall structure so I've decided to make it based off that.

This will be a pretty big project for me to take on, so I imagine it'll take some time. Readers, I hope I do not disappoint you if it takes long.

I still plan on doing Mod reviews, but SMP is just so much more fun than SSP. It's hard for me to want to go back!

I will say this though. One of my servers uses Bukkit, so I might do reviews on plugins there. Bukkit is basically a server client that allows you to handle server side mods! It's pretty neat-o. I can't tell you how much of a godsend /set home is!

My other server, the one I will be building Celadon City in, is using RuneCraft which is pretty nifty as well. I'm a sucker for the teleporters. I like easy travel!

I guess that's a semi-review for now. Expect more later!

Making a Town!

Yes, that is what I will be doing this week. I am doing the unthinkable, making an entire town by myself. Why? I don't know. I need something to do, I guess! I'm pretty excited about it and have a lot of plans for it. So far I've found the perfect area for it and am clearing the land. I also built a huge fence around the entire thing to keep out the unwanted. Can't wait to finish some things and upload some pics for everyone to see!! By the way, if anyone wants a really cool texture pack, download this one. It's the one Lewis from the Yogscast videos uses!

http://www.mediafire.com/?vg740lbk2c2d7kx

If you don't know who Lewis is or haven't seen the Yogscast videos on Youtube, I highly suggest looking them up. They are absolutely hilarious and definitely sold me on buying this game. Almost daytime, so talk to you all soon!

Is That Sheep Green?

HUGE blog post today! I even wrote a short list of everything I wanted to talk about so that I wouldn't leave anything out. I'll start with the boring parts first.

Building Update

As you know, I've been working on a couple of different buildings. I finally finished both the cafe and the guest house. Here are a couple of pictures to show off the finished products.

The guest house, complete with a stove, crafting table, chest for overnight storage, a bookcase, and a bed! Also some dim lit redstone torches hang on the wall to make sure the guest gets a good night's sleep!

Outside of the cafe. The sign says "Aymi's Cafe - Fresh Bread & Cake." Do you like my window decoration? I thought it looked too..wooden, outside. So I added the colored wool to change it up a little bit.

The view from the kitchen. Booth area with the family size table.

A look at the artwork on the front door. The green patch of grass in front of the door HAS been filled in with another piece of orange wool.

View of the cake bar with the "bar" seats. 

The overall view from the door. I'm not sure why that stove keeps turning that way, but oh well.

That's pretty much it for the building updates. Still trying to find a good spot for my log cabin so I can build it.

Creeper Update

The creepers were MAD yesterday. I don't know what I did, really. Well sure I do, I existed. There were two creepers running around the farm and it just so happens I had my sound turned down enough so that I didn't hear the SSSSS. Joke's on me. The first one took out the back left corner of the newly completed guest house. Luckily I had extra bricks, otherwise I would've cried as clay is a pretty scarce building material. The second one took out our teleport to the spawn point AND our address pad. That was a pain because I've just recently learned how to make these. But Jeff was around so he helped me fix them quickly! 

The damage. To the right you can kind of see the teleporter creeper hole too. Thank goodness dirt isn't hard to find, right?

Wheat Alert

I'm not sure if everyone knows this yet, I know I didn't, but if you don't watch your wheat fields carefully, they will eventually disappear if you don't harvest them. I found this out the hard way when Sammy and I were taking our minibreak from Minecraft. When we left, there were 3 double rows of wheat full, and some extra seeds. Yesterday, there was enough to make one double row. Biiig difference, especially when you supply a lot of the wheat to newcomers to the server!! Only got to make 6 loaves of bread with that, which doesn't last very long.

What was left of the wheat field..sad, sad day. Remember to harvest wheat in a timely manner!

Trish's House

Yesterday and this morning, I got the privilege of being able to play at Trish's house. Yes, play. Trish's house has a huge waterfall going down the side of it. It makes for some excellent entertainment when you're tired of..oh..getting hit by creepers, losing your wheat fields, etc! I'm glad Trish decided to relocate. Her new house is pretty awesome. She made it out of stone slabs, which gives it a really unique look compared to the rest of the houses in our server. I had never even seen stacked slabs until yesterday! Here are a couple of pictures so you can witness the awesome.

The front view of her house. She is our main supplier of sugarcane now if you can't tell.

The top of the waterfall/slide. I love the lit pumpkins, it gives it sort of a creepy/cool feel.

The water slide in all it's glory. Trish asked me to come over and "jump off her roof." I didn't realize it was going to be this much fun!

I ended up making a teleport behind my other ones to come directly to Trish's when I need sugarcane or some stress relief! It's being used a lot.

Google Map?

Vapor figured out a really cool "thing" yesterday. A google map of Minecraft worlds!! So Jeff set us up one, you can check it out here. 

http://www.internetfightclub.info:1337/minecraft/

If you look in the very middle of our little land, you can see my red barn! I was very excited about that! Check it out any time to see our progress. I also took a sky view picture of the farm to compare it, and I'm going to show you guys just because I think it looks neat.

Our farm! It's really coming together nicely.

How to Dye Sheep

So apparently, I'm the last one in on this little tip. But hopefully some of you can benefit from it also! Jake told me a little bit ago that you can throw dye at sheep and have a better chance at getting more colored wool!! I had no idea and never even THOUGHT to try it. As you guys can probably see from some of our house pictures, I'm all about some colored wool. That barn was made 1 dye per block, afterall. So this definitely excited me. I had a little competition between 4 colors: pink, blue, green, and orange. Here is the ranking!

Tied for 3rd were orange and pink, still giving me one wool each.

Hi to you too!

Second place was Mr. Green sheep, who gave me two pieces! I thought he looked the coolest, and almost felt bad for punching him.

The blue sheep wins! He gave me three pieces of light blue wool, which I absolutely will use.

That's it for now. Hope you guys enjoyed this update, and hopefully some of the advice will help you out. Have fun in Minecraft!! Until next time!

Yay Update!

Well, it's been a busy couple of days. Sammy and I tried out Rift so we took a mini break from Minecraft. I didn't like it as much as everyone else, so I have been doing a lot on Minecraft. I finished up my cafe, and it's looking pretty nice. As soon as I get it decorated I'll post pictures. I also went on a long journey in search of snow to build a log cabin in. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did find about 30 pumpkins! That was the highlight of my day, finding pumpkins. Psh.

Here's my first set of pumpkins, which excited me to no end. This was my first time actually seeing pumpkins.

I'm still hoping to build that log cabin sometime soon. I'm planning on making it out of the natural wood instead of turning it into the processed wood? I guess that's what you'd call it. Anyway, I think it'll be pretty neat when it's done.

Right now I'm making sort of a window treatment at the cafe. It's pretty much a big cluster of colored wool, but I think it brightens it up a little bit considering it's just plain wood. Like I said before, pictures to come. Also better blog posts to come now that I'm back in the game. Until tomorrow!

Facebook Games?

I haven't been able to craft a lot of mines the past few days because I went to my parent's house for the weekend and spent some quality time with my family and some of my friends back home. My project that I'm working on right now is a cafe that is located behind our main farm house. My boyfriend has been kind enough to point out that every building I've crafted is based on a Facebook game. Farmville, Frontierville, and now Cafe World. I didn't do it on purpose, I swear!! It got me thinking, what inspires you on Minecraft? Apparently my subconscious is thinking about Facebook!

I'm really looking forward to the completion of the cafe though. I think it will be really cute, and I hope you guys like it too. I'll be posting pictures, of course.

Until next time!

And remember, the SSSSSSSS sound means RUN.

Mining Checklist

Note to self :

Bring the following before you go mining next time. They are essential.

• 2 Buckets of Water
• Several Cooked Porkchops
• A Few Loaves of Bread
• A 64 Stack of Unprocessed Wood
• A 64 Stack of Cobblestone or Dirt or Both
• Sword of Stone or Above Quality
• 3 Pickaxes of Stone or Above Quality
• At Least 2 Signs
• Shovel of Stone or Above Quality
• Clock
• Compass
• As Much Armor As Possible Equipped

That's all I can think of for right now, taking suggestions always.

Oh, screw you.

Adventures of Aymi and Asterly!

Today was a pretty good day in Minecraft. I finished off my brick house and built a barn. But that's not the best part. The best part was my adventure today with my friend Aster.

It all started when Aster told me she made a gate to the Nether. I was curious so I came to check it out. It was beautiful! A pretty obsidian rectangle with swirly purple designs, with what looked to be purple snowflakes coming out of it. But that wasn't all that was coming out..it was also making some extremely creepy noises. To our dismay, the gate doesn't work yet on Multiplayer mode, but she left it as a pretty entrance to her house, so it wasn't a waste!

Then I explored her house for the first time, and man it's cool! It had a huge waterslide in it, but after my fail attempt to exit it (yes, I drowned) she took it down. My mistake. The best part of Aster's house is the top, which has red flowers in the shape of a heart that Jeff made for her (AWW!!!). She also has a really neat indoor garden that I'm happy to say I helped supply sugarcane for.

After exploring the house, we went on an adventure and found snow! The snowballs are such fun. It took us a little over a day to reach snow from our part of the world, but it was well worth it. We got to sail across the ocean, and that was fun. I accidentally punched my boat to death, but Aster fixed it. It seems that I'm clumsy even on Minecraft. Anyway, after stocking up on snow we made a plan to launch them at Anderson for setting the place on fire (no, I have NOT forgiven that yet!!) and headed for home. I was losing a bit of health by then so Aster gave me some cake. It was delicious! We also went to a secret location, but I told her I'd keep that between us, so everyone will just have to wonder about that one!

I'm beginning to see that the best part of Minecraft is playing with friends. Oh yes, and I also have the screenshots I've been promising of my finished work so far:

The brick house completed! Next to it is a guest house which will be in my next screenshot post! Also, say hello to Bessie the cow, main provider of milk at our farm!

The inside left side of the house.

The inside right view (my first redstone torch!!)

The basement with the food supply and building material chests.

The barn, made out of red wool..it took awhile to make this one!

Inside view of the barn, with the feeding stalls and "hay", which is really just yellow wool. It's just for appearance, obviously. Out back is a fenced in pasture. Aster caught a pig which roams in there!

That's it for today! Hope you guys enjoyed the pictures of our growing farm. Until next time!

Screenshot Saturday

Apparently, Worth1000.com held a minecraft structure contest. I decided to check out the winners and was thoroughly impressed by what I saw.

Here are the top 6.

6. Epic Lego Man

5. Project Parliament - The Hungarian Parliament

4. A Pair of Eastern Dragons

3. Kumamoto Castle

2. Nostalgia Gaming Corner

1. Le n'gociant, 'The Trader' (Sea Galleon)

Contest was posted here. More entries can be seen here. They're hosting another contest here.

Recruiting Animals!

I'm glad Sammy took the time to explain about that..event..that happened last night. I was kind of speechless for awhile. All I could say over vent was OMG, OMG, OMG. I was so scared we were going to lose the farm..that's what we get for trying to adopt a hobo! Can't trust 'em! Just kidding, Anderson. It was one of the most entertaining nights I've ever had on there!! With the fire finally abolished, it's time for me to move on to my next project: a barn.

Why a barn? Well, because ANDERSON SCARED ALL THE PIGS AWAY!! We're running out of porkchops because of the fire. I am going to seduce the pigs with my architecture and make them flourish again. It could be either epic or a big mess. Either way, it's going to be fun.

Now to decide if I want a red barn or a wooden barn...I think I'ma go all out and make it red. Pictures to come!

P.S. The brick house is finished and furnished. :) The guest house is a work in progress, but it'll have to wait until we have a better food supply. I'll post pictures of the brick house later, too.

The Great Fire of 2011

We decided to let my fellow goat friend Anderson make his home near ours. I didn't think much about it. He seemed enamored by the goat house I had built and wanted to build near our growing farm. It was a really nice area. It had a wheat and sugar cane farm. It had a sugar cane farm. It had a large forest next to it. I could understand why he would want to make our home his own as well.

The main farmhouse

The brick houses in progress

I was in the middle of mining for diamond and Amy was probably making final touches to the brick houses when something similar to the following conversation happened over ventrilo.

Anderson : "I think I'm going to burn these trees to clear out some space."

Sammy : "Please if you do, keep the fire under control."

Anderson : "Yeah, I will."

Amy : "He's already been doing it to a few places."

Anderson : "Yeah, I'm going to do it."

I continued with my mining, nearly mining a diamond pickaxe down to it's nub. Amy went afk and Anderson saved her by from nightfall by burying her into a hole.

Suddenly...

Anderson : "Oh sh**. Oh sh**!"

Sammy : "What's going on?"

Anderson : "Oh sh**. You better check this out!"

I came out of my mine, not expecting to see what I saw next.

Fire. Fire everywhere.

What the flying hell? There was fire. Fire everywhere. Miles and miles of trees catching on fire. Nighttime but not enough darkness for anything to spawn.

Farm animals were being burned to death as their natural habitat was destroyed.

I asked what had happened. Apparently, he had set the corner of a tree on fire and it spread into this. I looked around and then I saw it. The fire was going to spread to the farmhouse!!! I yelled into Ventrilo and Anderson noticed it too. Luckily, we had enough time to chop down the trees and leaves near the farmhouse.

Amy came back and announced that she had been ordering pizza. She then proceeded to ask why she was in a hole. We told her why, but also added don't come up. "Too late," she proclaimed her southern country twang. She went on about going to do something in game. And then she turned around.

"WWWHHHHHHHHATTTTTTT?"

We explained to her what happened. Somehow we managed to recruit the help of the other people in the server to put out the fire. We spent about 3-4 whole Minecraft days and some nights fixing this mess. So much for getting my history assignment out of the way.

We finally got rid of most of the fires. We holed ourselves up into the farmhouse that night and tried to store all our newly received wood and recover lost items. Suddenly, we heard the noise of an angry spider.

All three of us peered out the window.

The monsters were angry! They wanted revenge for their lost homes! Down below us were about 4 creepers, 3 spiders and a cow. That's when our dear friend, Aster, stepped in and saved the day. She managed to lure the creepers away from us and when day came, all was well.

TLDR version : I spent most of tonight laughing my arse off and putting out a forest fire.

ULTIMATE GG!

Okay, so you know yesterday how I said it took me four days to find clay? Well, of course I ran out today. Hmm..house wasn't looking the way I wanted...NEEDS MORE BRICKS!!! So, I set off on another journey, hoping I had enough wood to make myself a couple of makeshift homes where needed. First, I took some mossy cobblestone that I had found with Jake yesterday over to my boyfriend John's huge castle, so he could make whatever with it. His castle is located a bit near a sandy area, so I decided to look around a bit after leaving. What did I find about 20 seconds away? CLAY. Not just clay...but claaaaay. Way more than I found yesterday on my long journey!! Why me?! Maybe it's karma for giving a buddy of mine who just started playing on our server last night some tools. Who knows? All I know is the brick house will soon be completed, as soon as I can get back on! The load balancer with Amazon is being sketchy at the moment, so we've been kicked off.

OH yeah, I forgot to put my experience getting back on our server finally in yesterday's blog entry.

I was starting to feel like some kind of drug addict. I've never done drugs or anything, but I think that must be how it feels to want something so badly that you're willing to do whatever for it. Either that, or drive yourself crazy til it comes to you naturally. Unfortunately, I had to drive myself crazy because there's nothing I can do in the Minecraft situation. When the servers are down, they're down! I was starting to shake, and freak out a little bit (okay, over exaggeration) when FINALLY the server came back up!! Hooray! Joyful, joyful! First thing I did was message Anderson and flip out about it. I think I scared him a little, but maybe not. He may be used to the way I get excited by now. I almost cried I was so happy. Addiction? Yes.

Jeff, our server host, kind of feels like a crack dealer because of it. My bad, Jeff.

Straight from The World of Notch - Minecraft Beta 1.2_02

This update is a tiny one just to make the client download skins directly from Amazon S3instead of from minecraft.net.

Much of this week was lost migrating the server to the cloud, something that Tobias did an amazing job working on. Most of the site has been moved now, and seems to be running much faster than before. We’ve got five servers behind a load balancer, and a dedicated server for payment processing, and another for ingame authentication and login, although that won’t be in use until we update the game launcher.

Speaking of the Launcher, I spent the start of the week working on it, and here’s what it currently looks like:

That news area is loaded from the interwebs and will contain release notes so you know what’s changed. When you start the game, the launcher will ask you if you want to download the new update or not. Eventually there will also be an option in the launcher to choose where to load/save maps from.

Minecraft is getting pretty cute. The launcher could look better, but its a start. The ability to chose where to load/save maps is awesome. I hope they do it with screen shots as well as I hate going to a hidden folder just to post pictures of my amazing house. Also, with the server migration being done, hopefully I won't have to deal with Cannot Connect to Minecraft.net anymore.

Thank god.

I Found CLAY!!!

It's night time in game right now, and I should be patching up the inside of our poor log cabin. Yes, another creeper has struck. Fortunately, it was an easy fix. Minor damage, just a few broken windows and doors, and a new front wall. It gave me an idea to redo the whole look of the front bottom floor, and gave me an excuse to finally even out the pond in front of our house. Thanks, creeper, you made me design a better house!!

Before I get off track, let me tell you about my discovery of clay today on our server! This is why I'm blogging instead of patching up our house. I made a brick house on Sammy's boyfriend's server, since ours was down all day yesterday. Sammy found the clay for me, so I was thinking it'd be easy to make a little brick house near our cabin in my main server. HA!!! Let me tell you, I ran for FOUR DAYS south of our cabin in search of this mythic material. Four days!! That's a lot of 1x1 holes to hide from zombies, let me tell you. After many broken boats, I finally found some of the amazing stuff. Brick house, HERE I COME!

Sort of. Clay is a lot different than the other building materials. Not only is it hard to find, but you have to cook it. One clay makes one clay brick. After you've cooked all your bricks (I had five furnaces going cooking all my stacks! Insane, right? I'm surprised the house didn't catch on fire.) you have to go to the crafting table. From there, put a block of four, doesn't matter where on the table, and each four bricks equal one building brick. That means four stacks of clay (64 pieces) makes ONE stack of building bricks! Crazy!! But the outcome is so pretty. I love the bricks in this game, so it was totally worth the epic journey. Only problem is going to be finding more to finish my project..hmm..that's for another day.

Why I am grateful for the night time

Now, I am a very irresponsible person. I failed out of college once because I decided video games were more important than classes. I decided to take a break from school after that too enjoy my life a bit. In November, I decided that I had taken a long enough break and I needed to do something with my life. So I enrolled in classes. I figured it'd be okay, there were no games I was obsessed with. I was losing interest in hardcore gaming anyway and was slowly becoming a true casual.

Then my boyfriend told me those faithful words that one day, "Let's buy minecraft."

I had heard of the game before. I had messed around on the free creative mode they have on the website and decided it wasn't for me. It was a nice concept and all, but the graphics were really bad for this day and age. The game could have been great with a graphics update. I brushed it off for quite a long time, while Jon and his brothers obsessed over the creative mode.

So, when Jon asked me to buy the game for him, I agreed, thinking it would be fun to maybe mess around with, but that it wouldn't keep my interest. And it certainly wouldn't interfere with my decision to start school in January.

I decided to play the game first in exchange for paying for it. I log on to an SSP game in a new world. Jon tells me it's my duty to punch a tree. From the first moment I punched a tree and got that first piece of wood. From the first night I spent holed up in the side of a mountain. From the first zombie I killed. From the first creeper who blew me up and caused me to lose everything, I was addicted. I think I played that first time for 4 hours straight before finally letting Jon on.

School started last week. I take online classes so it doesn't really interefere with any of my gaming time. However, I do have to set aside time to do it. This is why I'm grateful that it was minecraft and not some other MMO or Xbox 360 game that caught my interest. Nighttimes in Minecraft are perfect for me. Those times when I have nothing better to do but stare out the window waiting for the zombies to catch on fire are perfect. I crack out the textbooks, read, and do assignments.

Minecraft nights, you are my hero.

Oh Great, Another Creeper.

Normally, this blog will be about my daily adventures in Minecraft. Unfortunately, our server is down at the moment so this first post will have to be a rant about the most deadly creature, the creeper.

Picture yourself in your own home, let's just say a log cabin. A beautiful two story log cabin with nice lanterns outside and a lovely little garden for a backyard. The sky is blue, the clouds are fluffy, and you can hear cows mooing in the distance, ready to give you some milk. All of a sudden, you hear a loud TNT explosion, you turn around, and half your wheat field is gone. Not only that, but your water irrigation system is a bit deeper than usual. Oh, not only THAT, but half your house has been demolished.

THAT, readers, is the work of a creeper in Minecraft. They are hateful green blobs of creatures that I swear are out to get me. I know, I know, they do the same thing to everyone. It just seems like with my lag issues they do it to me a lot more! I've heard of people being able to outrun them and keep their health, but I always seem to get blown up by them. I've ruined mine and Sammy's house at least 5 times in the past few days because of the little creepers. Right now, I'm working on rebuilding our wheat field that I ruined last night via creeper encounter.

I think the creepers are the hardest part of Minecraft. Once they get eye contact there is no escape. They will hunt you down and blow up everything around you if they want. And they want, trust me, they WANT. The best tactic I've found for dealing with these awful creatures is praying that there is a porkchop or two in my inventory, running the opposite way of anything important to my Minecrafting, and hoping that if I do happen to die, I can respawn and run to where my stuff is fast enough.

Anyone have any better advice? Please?

From The World of Notch : The web server is struggling, we’re migrating

Once again, minecraft.net is more popular than the poor old server can keep up with, so we’re upgrading. I’m not quite sure how long it will take to get done as it’s mostly Tobias doing the work (thank you, sir!). We’ve got a huge amazon cloud server which we’re moving the main server to. We’ll be able to replicate this as demand grows, and we’ll have a load balancer set up in front of it all. Skin downloads will almost certainly be migrated to S3 downloads instead of going through resin as it does now, and we’ll have a separate server just to handle game logins and auth requests.

In other news, we spent the day today out of the office in various cafés, as the floor was getting fixed. And we got the Machinima.com IGA awards! They’re pretty!

If you want to see some pics from the office and Mojang in general, Carl has a photo album here. It gets updated every now and then.

For Minecraft development, we’re working on the new file format, and a new game launcher. The file format is still in early testing, but it’s looking somewhat promising, except for it taking up a bit too much space. It’s faster, though.
The new Launcher will be a bit prettier, will show release notes and other news, will send login requests over https (finally), and will ask if the user wants to update to the latest version or not. In the future, we’ll add support for playing the previous installed version (after warning the player that there might be unexpected bugs) and the ability to choose what work directly to save the level files, but that’s not coming in this version.

We’ve got a meeting planned for tomorrow with some community members to discuss how to best implement the modding

.TLDR version :

Notch is moving the Minecraft servers to a more reliable server that won't crash every other day. He's also working on a new file format and launcher. As a fan of all things pretty, I look forward to seeing the new launcher. I do not, however, look forward to torches that don't glow forever.