Happy Birthday, Minecraft…

Minecraft Birthday Creeper

Reading Time: 2 minutesDear Minecraft, I hear its your 11th Birthday today! Let me start by wishing you a very, very, “Happy Birthday!” When I first heard about you, well I don’t really remember when or where that was. It was probably from some gaming website somewhere and I probably thought “oh, that’s curious.” I didn’t mark my …

Continue reading…

Official Minecraft Texture Packs – Our Mojang Top 5

Reading Time: 6 minutesI like to change Minecraft texture packs and will change them on a whim depending on what I am feeling like at the time. I enjoy seeing what I have built through a different lens, and discovering how they chose to represent all of the different items within the game while keeping true to the …

Continue reading…

Minecraft Quality of Life Upgrades

Minecraft Bees Update

Reading Time: 2 minutesMinecraft. A game that many love and many don’t understand. At the surface the game looks ridiculous when you compare its graphics to top tier games on current generations. Once you dig deeper into it, it sucks you in and never lets you go. The game is deep, yet simplistic. Minecraft has come along way …

Continue reading…

Minecraft Dungeons coming Spring 2020

Minecraft Dungeons cross-platform play coming

Reading Time: 2 minutesYesterday during Microsoft’s E3 2019 Briefing, the Minecraft Dungeons trailer was shown giving us some more insight to what the upcoming Minecraft dungeon crawler is going to be like. Imagine an isometric view of Minecraft and now merge that with a dungeon crawler like Diablo III and you have Minecraft Dungeons! This rendition of Minecraft …

Continue reading…

Pokémon-Go Style Minecraft Earth Announced + Beta!

Reading Time: 2 minutesTo start off – Happy 10th Anniversary Minecraft!!! Microsoft announced a new version of Minecraft called Minecraft Earth which will be an AR (Augmented Reality) version of Minecraft that will be a free-to-play mobile game. Your iOS or Android device becomes a lens of the game where “you’ll be able to build creations with friends …

Continue reading…

New Video – Nether Transit Authority

Reading Time: < 1 minuteAnyone who has played Minecraft knows how large a realm can be. Some biomes are so far from each other they are almost unreachable or maybe even be a one way trip. That’s why StarDoggedMoon and I have created the Nether Transit Authority, or the NTA for short, to let us travel throughout the realm …

Continue reading…

Building a World: Take a glimpse into our Minecraft Realm

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Just about 3 years ago GlutenMifflin and I started building a world on a Minecraft realm. For us, Minecraft is one of those tried and true games that you can pick up and simply play any time. Sometimes we will spend months fixated on our projects within that game and then, when a break is needed leave it for a couple of months to play something else, knowing full well that at some point we will return and pick up where we left off.

At the time, we were in a sort of dry spell with gaming. Having mastered all of our favorite characters in Garden Warfare 2 we didn’t really know what we wanted to play and we were kind of done with the horrors of battle in the never ending war between the virtuous plants and evil zombies. We still loved the game, but after hours upon hours of play time and the prospect of going through the grind, leveling those leftover characters that we didn’t really want to play left us bored with the idea so we decided to return to Minecraft and the release of realms was perfect timing.

We had always endeavored to create a world on an epic scale. A world that would have its own separate but functional areas and a transit system to connect them. This was problematic before realms came along as only the host of the world would be able to add anything when we weren’t playing together. And, While we did manage to build some very nice things within our own Minecraft worlds, we would have to take turns hosting or visiting and as a result the interconnectivity we sought was never able to truly manifest.

That was until, Minecraft Realms was released. With the introduction of realms we were able to have a perpetual world where we would be able to drop in and out anytime we wanted to. We would be able to work on our own projects solo or team up and work on a group effort all with a common goal of expanding this ever prevalent world.

Currently our world has 6 functional areas which are basically towns. They are Gondor, Erebor, Endor, Mordor, Laketown, and Pandora. Some are closer to each other and some are pretty far. They are all connected through a transit system so travel from town to town is quick, safe, and easy. We finally have that massive epic world and are constantly looking to expand it. Unexpectedly, it has even taken on its own life in the form of lore. As we were building these awesome structure I started to notice that there was a story behind these places. The stories are heavily borrowed and amalgamated versions of the pop culture fiction that we watch and grew up with so much of it may seem very familiar. Even the names of the towns have significance. They weren’t named simply because we wanted to name them after some movie, no, there was some element in the game that gave rise to that reference and thus the name of the town.

The video below will hopefully be the first of many in which we showcase some of the parts of our Minecraft realm. This is my very first video so please don’t take it too seriously, it’s all simply for fun. In this video I showcase my baby, Endor. In it I simply take you on a journey to several points of interest and try to explain to you the story, the lore, behind the place.

Here is the text from the book I show in the video if you care to read more…

Continue reading…

Minecraft – Bedrock – 1.9.0 Update 2/5/19

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Nice little update to Minecraft Bedrock edition that hit yesterday bringing some new flowers, new slabs, new signage and new fences. The changelog is below which details all the new items.

After the jump I also included the new Experimental Features after the jump.

New Features:

  • Added new flowers: Lily of the Valley and Cornflower 
  • Added new signs for spruce, birch, jungle, acacia, and dark oak 
  • Added new stair, slab, and wall variants: 
    • Stone stairs and slabs
    • Granite stairs, slabs, and walls
    • Polished Granite stairs and slabs
    • Diorite stairs, slabs, and walls
    • Polished Diorite stairs and slabs
    • Andesite stairs, slabs, and walls
    • Polished Andesite stairs and slabs
    • Sandstone walls
    • Smooth Red Sandstone stairs and slabs
    • Smooth Quartz stairs and slabs
    • Brick walls
    • Stone Brick walls
    • Mossy Stone Brick stairs, slabs, and walls
    • Nether Brick walls
    • End Stone Brick stairs, slabs, and walls
    • Prismarine walls
    • Red Sandstone walls
    • Red Nether Brick stairs, slabs, and walls
    • Smooth Sandstone stairs and slabs
    • Mossy Cobblestone stairs and slabs
  • Added a new option to the /gamerule commands called ‘showDeathMessages’ which allows players to select whether a message appears in chat when a player or tamed mob dies 
  • Added new “Immediate Respawn” option with associated /gamerule 
  • New feedback button in the pause menu – shows links to the Minecraft feedback site, MoJira bug tracker, and Mojang support

Changes:

  • Added several new loading screen tips and trivia suggested by the community! 
  • Added several new splash texts to the main menu 
  • Added the ability to delete expired Realms from your worlds list
  • Cauldrons can now hold Lava
  • Tripwires are now activated when broken, unless broken with shears 
  • A notification is now sent to chat when a tamed animal dies (MCPE-35138)
  • How to Play button is now visible from the in-game settings menu.

Continue reading…

Fighting the Wither – Minecraft – a Co-Op moment

Reading Time: 2 minutesToday StarDoggedMoon and I decided to take a break from exploring and building on our Minecraft Realm and take on the Wither, which we have never done. I am not even sure whose idea it really was but we immediately agreed and got started planning right away. We obviously knew what the Wither was and …

Continue reading…

Weekend Gaming – What we’re playing…

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI hope that everyone has recovered from engorging on their stuffed fowl and all the trimmings. It’s Friday and that means it’s time for some gaming! Here is what we’re playing this weekend: Sea of Thieves Clash of Clans Minecraft We’ve added a new member of our crew in Sea of Thieves and have improved …

Continue reading…