It’s the worst world ever. Vast expanses of treeless plains. Awesome. I finally found a swamp, and a seaside. It’s HUGELY different from 1.9 and RC2… in that it says “1.0.0″ on the title screen.

Enjoy!

Also, I have discovered that some physics does work in Minecraft Pocket Edition: Water, Lava, and Fire!

Water works like usual. Lava flows like usual, but if you catch on fire, you just get a few orange bars until you get into water. Lava that flows into water makes cobblestone, so presumably you could redirect and make obsidian.

Fires can be started by lava. Burning wood puffs up smoke particles, and then vanishes. Once it gets going, like on trees and leaves, it runs pretty fast.

The fantasy: I get in a minecart headed to the Sea-Tac Nether Portal. Then just a couple hops through the Nether, and I’ll be on Vegas server, baby!

The reality: I am a bad traveller. I am the worst traveller. I don’t prepare, I pack almost nothing at the last minute, relying on shopping when I get somewhere. And I hate travelling among the dreaded humans. They’re always walking erratically, not paying attention to the giant hairy dude trying to make his way directly somewhere, so I either crush them underfoot or have to dodge, and I’m slow at dodging. And they shout and whine and have crying children and watch Fox News. They MOVE, which causes my “motion = shoot it” reflex to go off a hundred times an hour. But there is a cure: Booze.

Normally I fly Virgin America, and they’re calm and cool and professional and get shit done right. They bring me great drinks and entertain me with the Red video screens until I get where I’m going. I love those people. But I couldn’t fly Virgin this time, because their reservation system was broken. I had to go with Alaska, which is strictly amateur hour, and has no video screens, like it’s the dark ages.

So I get an unsatisfying bagel and a drink before boarding. Then they make us sit on the tarmac, with no drinks, for 45 minutes before taking off. FINALLY, I’m able to get a double scotch (Glenfiddich? Not the kind of peaty Islay scotches I like, but it’ll do). Then another, and I start to mellow out.

We land at the Hellmouth International Airport (LAX), and no joke, you have to ride a BUS driven by a surly Armenian(?) to make a PLANE connection. The bus circles all of LAXative, and I’m totally expecting Allen Funt when we stop. But no, eventually they disgorge me into a Delta bomber. To describe Delta as third-world is insulting to third world airlines where chickens ride coach. But the steward is ready with some cheap scotch, and I guess I can cope.

FINALLY, land, baggage, cab, hotel. A shower and a room service steak sammich and everything’s OK again.

Minecraft Pocket Edition:

Oh, and Minecraft Pocket Edition is out!

So the good part: It’s Minecraft, or part of it, on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. It looks like Alpha Creative, it’s fun to run around and build simple things. The classic “ugly” cobblestone is back! And non-smooth lighting!

The controls are hard at first, but can be learned: You hold down forward, and you’ll jump up 1 block or keep swimming at the surface. You can hit the center button to jump. No shift, but you can’t be hurt by falls. Dragging on the rest of the view is like moving the mouse. It took me maybe 10 minutes to really get the controls wired in my head.

I haven’t made much yet, just a little observation post, and the start of a big treehouse. I dug into the ground, and found (useless) iron and redstone, but no caves. If there are caves, they’re rare.

The weak parts: It’s just creative mode right now. There is a multiplayer wifi mode, but I don’t know what you’d do in it. I’ll try that out this week. You are Steve?, you don’t have your Minecraft.net skin in third-person view. But also, you don’t need a Minecraft.net account.

The world is VERY small, maybe 256 or 512 square? Which in some ways is good, you don’t have the expectation of wandering forever in creative, you can’t get lost, and a world won’t fill all of the limited storage space.

There’s not even a full set of blocks.

The draw distance is Short (maybe Tiny), the fog is everywhere, there is no sky. There are no mobs. Physics isn’t on; sand and gravel don’t fall.

As a building block toy, Minecraft PE is awesome. As “Minecraft”, it’s only the very first tiny step towards real Minecraft.

Nostalgia:

But Minecraft Pocket Edition makes me nostalgic.

I’ve been watching Blast to the Past YouTubes with ChimneySwift11, Minecraftwb, & Paulsoaresjr, and it’s making me heartsick with nostalgia for the older versions.

There’s a lot I like in the newer Minecraft. But I miss how hard Alpha & Beta were. I miss some of the look; I mostly use Eldpack, which is gorgeous, but it is a little muddy. Alpha textures were BRIGHT. And jet-black in darkness. Man, dark was scary back then, no gamma slider, no dim light. At night or in a cave with no torches, you had a black screen full of monsters. Spiders were welcome, because at least you could see their red eyes coming for you. EEYAGH.

Food is much too easy now. Yes, you don’t heal directly from it, but as long as you stay fed (and that’s easy with melons and wheat, even if meat is harder to come by), you’re in no danger unless you get swarmed. Worst case, you can eat rotten zombie flesh, and you’ll heal up and be fed long enough to find something else. In the old days, you’d get hurt, and need food, and food didn’t stack, except raw wheat and mushrooms; and mushrooms were RARE, and hard to grow more. So you’d carry a stack of wheat and a few porkchops for quick recovery, and then you’d be out, and doomed.

Minerals and coal are super common now. Back in the day, coal was uncommon, and there was no charcoal, so if you didn’t find coal before night you died. And when mining, you had to be cautious with torches, because you might not find enough coal to replace them. Iron was rare. You used stone tools for digging, because you needed your precious iron tools for redstone and diamond. Diamond tools were elite. In my first world, I had a diamond pick and sword after months of play, and maybe one spare diamond. Now I have full diamond gear and almost a full stack left.

I could revert to old version like Blast to the Past, or use a mod with modern Minecraft (or make my own if I can’t find one that does what I want).

There’s a couple of mods I haven’t tried yet, but they look promising:

• Nero’s Alpha Mod
• InsanityBringer’s Nostalgia Project/No Biomes X

The two layers of fences at the bottom, then glass and windows above, prevent the chickens from suiciding into the walls. Chickens can’t climb ladders, so that’s an escape-proof way in and out.

And after hurling down a few eggs, I have a good flock, which produce more eggs:

When I make more than 8 chickens, I kill the excess and get some meat and feathers, at long last, FEATHERS! With two stacks of arrows again, I feel ready for some real action.

Just in case of emergency, I keep another stack of eggs for backup.

If you ladder up the stalk of a brown, cut away just the block above you, and place dirt in the 4 corners of a brown, you can grow 4 red cap mushrooms; cut down the reds and redo them if they’re really tall, you want the lower ones to fit together.

Cut the inner parts of the caps away, light it up, and block off the edges with whatever you have that looks appropriate: I like netherrack, but red and white wool, and dirt around the brown mushrooms, would look great, too.

One of these makes a good house. Two makes a house with workshop. And if you branch them upwards and out, you get a crazy mushroom kingdom inverted castle thing.

A brown mushroom with a border wall is just big enough for a functional one-water wheat or melon farm, or a grid of 9 tree pots, and if you make your infinite water pit from dirt, you can plant reeds around it.

So all you need to start building a base in any location is two types of mushroom, bone meal, some ladders, and dirt.

The things remind me of Teledahn from Myst Online, I bet once we have the Mooshroom islands from 1.9 a pretty good imitation of Teledahn could be made.

Up in the sky is a terrible portal to the Nether, kept isolated from the rest of the village, but possibly spreading its taint through those vines:

Rl’yeh Rail runs East to Rock Jock Tower, then on to Zero Zero Station, just over 1km so far!

I’m using Eldpack texture pack, now that 3.7 supports 1.8. SO much warmer and smoother than the default textures.

Mostly this is awesome. The chasms are manageable with someone to watch your back. You can all spread out and find loot, then converge on bad guys. We’re using teamspeak, and that works well enough.

Two hardships have emerged.

First, peaceful mobs don’t respawn (or not often). So once you deplete all the chickens in your vicinity, you will have no more feathers, and no more arrows. Zombies don’t drop feathers anymore, so you’re screwed. We’ve tried ChickenQuest(TM), where we spread out to find chickens, and kill all other mobs. Doesn’t work. I tried starting a chicken farm from a pile of eggs, but they all died on me! In 1.8, chickens will take damage if you put them in a pit with solid walls. Fences for walls seem to keep them alive. So I’ll collect more eggs and try again.

Second, experience kills. If you’re in survival multiplayer, and you die, all your experience orbs drop to the ground. And when you return, or when someone else comes near, they stream in and fill you back up. Even if there’s hundreds or thousands of the little buggers. Suddenly there’s a swarm of wil’o'wisps attacking you with lag, bringing the server down!

Tonight, I died, and had to log out, wait a few minutes, and log in, and it was still pretty laggy. Later, Axly died, and the server came to a complete halt. Half an hour later, I was able to log in, found his death spot and all his stuff was still there… And got attacked by experience again. Fortunately the mobs are helpless statues during this time, but it’s crippling.

Hopefully Notch will fix both these problems soon, it’s a little tough to say “don’t ever die or your server is screwed” and “don’t use arrows”.

The Minecraft 1.8 Beta Pre-Release is out, and the greatest improvement in the game since 1.0. It’s almost an entirely new game.

You have three choices with your current world:

1. Load your old world and stay in previously explored chunks, and you’ll get some new stuff but not new terrain.
2. Load your old world and go explore new chunks, and you’ll find new terrain, but not strongholds or villages unless you set MapFeatures to 1 in level.dat (not for novices).
3. Create a new world.

I made a new world, name and seed “Eighteen” (aka 1.8).

1.8 generates much steeper terrain, deeper oceans, and taller mountains up to 120 or more; the clouds are now at the skylimit instead of running through your hill house. Biomes are HUGE, they go on forever. While filling in my map, I’ve only found scrubland, pine forest, swamp, a river, and maybe the edge of a desert or a sandy island; the rest must be much further out.

I’m seeing a lot more Mario blocks, flying islands, and, um, other things in the sky:

The mineshafts are cool, you’ll get long tunnels with minecart tracks (free tracks!) through wood shorings (free wood!) covered with cobwebs (free string!) and run through with horrible tiny spiders who I hate and fear oh, great Notch, protect us. There’s usually a tiny spider spawner, and somewhere near that but NOT in the same room, one or more chests. The caverns are larger, and the ravines are huge and ominous.

Adventuring in the new areas is incredibly dangerous, until you’re geared up and safely equipped. I may need to switch to SMP, and play with a partner, this is way too dangerous solo. Tamed wolves might help, but they’re hard to control. Oh, and forget about cheater radar mode. F3 no longer shows mob ids. Sprinting in melee combat is interesting, and bow powerup is awesome, you can kill a mob in a couple of full-power shots.

The new Enderman mobs are terrifying, but I haven’t fought one yet, only saw it at a distance. Thankfully they seem to be rare. I came close to focusing on this one, and it moved out of sight, and I nearly panicked.

The NPC villages are cute, but kind of creepy (and maybe dangerous, in dark houses) without NPCs. However, they’re great for quick food supplies, since the farms are already set up for you. The village near me was flooded out, they need FEMA assistance!

I couldn’t stay in the village, it didn’t seem safe, so I built a little island fort, the only way up is parkour along the sides. And note the brick step and half-block chimney; clay seems much more common now, and is more useful.

The farm animals do seem much more persistent, for instance this sheep I sheared several gamedays ago:

Food is hugely important now. You should ALWAYS carry a stack of food, which happily stacks up. If your hunger bar drops, you don’t recover health, and can start losing health. Also, do not eat raw meat. Especially if it’s been in your inventory a while.

After a few gamedays running around, here’s the map:

Minecraft 1.5 is up, and weather and achievements are so far pretty interesting. Some of the achievements are more like dares: Now that I’ve killed a cow, it wants me to ride a pig off a cliff. Does that mean you can now craft saddles? I will experiment!

I’m not noticing great performance upgrades yet. Turning on Normal draw distance and Fancy graphics is 15-20 FPS on my MacBook Air; Far is still painful. There’s a new “Advanced OpenGL”, which I don’t see any perf gain or visual improvement from, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place yet. One HUGE improvement is UI scaling. Now you can change it to small, normal, or the usual huge. Normal looks good with MC nearly maxed out on my desktop.

A few of the textures need a texture pack upgrade, so I’m using the built-in Minecraft textures again, and they’re SO UGLY. I’ve been spoiled by Pixeludi. Mojang should do something about their awful textures, especially the cobblestone and glass.

The thing is, the server has a mod to make portals work, even though they don’t normally in SMP. I stepped in as a lark, and GAAAH! SURROUNDED BY NETHER! And stepped back in and was back home, then ran inside and disconnected.

When I have time and a secure place to stash my goods, and maybe a party of like-minded heroes, I will explore the Nether and report back.