What is Minecraft about, anyway?

[Mathew_Freeman]

I'm enjoying it on XBOX.

Having a few different people playing together but building separate "homes" is a really fun trick, by the way. You end up emerging from your house only to find that someone else has built something astonishing, or brought you some ore or tools that you didn't have.

I reallly want to get together, build a portal, and go exploring in the other dimension.

 

[Janx]

I found that folks building seperate but compatible projects tended to work well. You do your own thing, but it fits i. The theme of the world, without having to coordinate and explain building preferences

 

[Dornam]

To answer some of your questions:

Minecraft is really what you make it.

The almost total freedom in reshaping the world as you see fit is what drives this game. The mobs are really just to spice things up a bit now and then and give you a sense of accomplishment early on.

After you secured your position mobs are a non-factor 99% of all times (unless a creeper happens to explode somewhere important).

Only when you start to mine to aquire important resources like iron, gold and most of all diamonds mobs can get rather pesky if you are too greedy (one more block, one more block, one more block before despositing at my save house *boom*.... crap, I am like half an hour away from my bed and that was a almost full stack of diamonds).

 

[Janx]

We been playing now for about a month or so. I've got a few other friends hooked on it, and we play together when we can on late night build-a-thons.

We built an inn last night in about 3 hours on Normal difficulty.

On this arctic world, we're creating our version of our city in a D&D campaign, Port Remington (named after a PC of course). So the whole thing is built with monsters turned on.

But, as you say, once you've secured the perimiter, the threat level goes down. We've managed to wall off our portion of the map such that we can build our city unaccosted all through the night.

I have noticed a difference in how adults play versus kids, due to playing with some of my friends' kids.

Kids are crazy nut jobs. They run all over, have less concept of the paths you've made and the constructs you've built (I'll mine here, on this rectangular thing made of cobblestone). and thus die a zillion times against monsters or attract creepers in and get themselve's killed while blowing up part of your walls.

Adults tend to take a more military mind. Secure the perimiter, then advance, etc. Some burn up scarce resources quick, making iron everything before finding out there's only 10 blocks of Iron in their world. But most tend to go exploring with torches, and some preparedness for trouble.

My wife says "they're just kids", but how one approaches the game shows intelligence and impulsiveness. Bear in mind, I was a builder kid with above average intelligence. So my tactics now aren't too different from how I'd do it as a kid, because I was freakin smart back then and not too impulsive.

I suspect impulsiveness looks like stupidity from my perspective. However, the ten year old kid appears to be more tactically aware (and a griefer) than the 12 year old kid. There;s running around and being stupid (aka, a kid), and then there's being clever about it.

Either way, MC360 seems to be fun, even if some people play it oddly(they're having fun). though, like RPGs, there is a sense that not all play styles mesh. If you're a builder, crazy nut jobs can be annoying.

 

[frankthedm]

Played a little on 360. Hooked.

Now playing on PC. Might skip going to the Hobbit today.

 

[Relique du Madde]

I picked it up again on my Android... I had a house I dug out of the side of a hill. It was destriyed by a creeper, so I build a small home within a dungeon complex I built into my stripmine. Occasionally I have to fight the skelitons who wander through my open door, but at least it is safe from the creepers.

 

[Nytmare]

I ran into Minecraft about three years ago, and have honestly not been interested in playing another video game since.

I play multi-player on a PC and my personal goal set is exploration, contraption engineering, and making giant structures/playsets/puzzles for my son, and our friends to play in.

I think that what makes the game so spectacular is the fact that it almost perfectly encapsulates, or at least offers the building blocks you need for almost every play style, and makes it so that you can pick and choose exactly what game it is that you want to play. It can be an exploration game, or a fighting game, it can be competitive, it's a collection game, it's a creative building game where you show off your collection and achievements by creating things that people can wander in and around. There's resource management, it has aspects of being a first person shooter, there's hack and slash. It can be a platformer, or a maze game. It can be a survival game, or PvP, or a sim...

To answer a couple of Janx's questions:

I'm assuming that you're playing the X-box version. I'm guessing that it will eventually give you the ability to download other people's maps, like you can on the PC version. A lot of those maps are "adventure" maps, basically self contained RPGs built using Minecraft as the framework. You can occasionally find multiplayer servers that will run those downloadable maps as one shot games.

How to capture AND contain animals so they don't spawn out?

Eventually, your version will let you use things like wheat and seeds to get different animals to follow you. In addition they'll eventually catch up to the PC version and stop animals from accidentally spawning through walls and fences.

How to stop monsters from spawning inside my lighted house with multiple closed doors despite being lit every 12 blocks?

That just means that there's some corner or hallway that's too dark.

How to dispose of a creeper that is trapped on the top floor of my fort without blowing him up? There's a sanded off stairwell above and below him so he can't escape, but it makes getting to him more complicated.

I would assume that the X-box version mobs work basically the same way as they did in the same build of the PC version. You should be able to just walk a good bit away from the tower and come back and have him be gone. Does anyone know if they're persistent on the X-box?

What is Normal or Hard difficulty like (We're playing on Easy because that's what the tutorial started at). Our method of building keeps us indoors at night, so we seldom deal with monsters.

At least in the PC version, the difficulties change monster damage, hit points, and behavior, and affect player hunger and starvation.

Besides the terrors of the NetherWorld (never been), do the dangers in the OverWorld ever increase? Creepers are currently the most dangerous enemy. They are out 24/7 and the explode, destroying structures and thus letting in more enemies.

Eventually you guys will have Endermen, Spiderjockeys, Withers, and whatever other future monsters are in the pipeline.

It would be interesting if things escalated, to further justify all the fortifications we built. Otherwise, it's all rather siller over-engineering.

This is why some people prefer PvP.

 

[frankthedm]

I picked it up again on my Android... I had a house I dug out of the side of a hill. It was destroyed by a creeper,

I've still got a bad habit of having my beds and storage boxes way too near the outer walls and ceilings of my dirt hovels.

so I build a small home within a dungeon complex I built into my stripmine. Occasionally I have to fight the skeletons who wander through my open door, but at least it is safe from the creepers.

Leave a marker of some type, like an arch of torches, and just dirt wall it closed and mine it open. On the full version, I've seen creepers below ground.

 

[Janx]

ah yes, this old thread. Now it's been 6 months or so since I started playing MC on the 360.

I still stick to the xbox. I don't play games on PC. It's a religious thing.


By now, I've mastered defensive building such that I rarely see monsters on my land. There's still a few intermittent spawnings, where it appears the game ignores the light level rules. It's more likely it applies a reduced chance of spawning.

 

[Kris]

I have to admit that I've put some serious hours into minecraft (PC version), and despite its rather basic graphics it can still be quite beautiful at times.