Masterpiece

Minecraft is a game that I played back when it was still in beta. I started playing in 2011 probably not long after beta 1.7 was released. This may be my most played game ever. At its core it is a sandbox survival game but its customisability allows it to be so much more than that. People have made custom maps with stories, mods that transform the game in to fantasy rpgs or technical automation games, and there are also many servers all with their own themes and settings. I will use this page to review Minecraft at different times when I revisit it with different versions and mods. It has changed a lot through the years and it is a fundamentally different game from when I first played it now.

Modded Server

So after planning to play some more singleplayer Minecraft I got chatting to some friends and we said we should all play together. After some discussion we decided we should play modded and have made our own Mod Pack it has been a lot of fun so far. We have a nice small set of mods that have been a lot of fun, There is a small group of us and having a proximity chat mod has made this work really well. Give the pack a go if you are interested, there is also a server version if you want to host your own server.

Current Plans 2024+

I found a tool called MCA Selector which can be used to copy or delete chunks. I have copied the biggest survival builds and things I have done from my previous worlds and put them all together. I intend to only play in this world now. My first plan is to travel quite far from my home base and start in an area with new world generation though. Then I want to try and collect all the different items from survival. I won't take my old gear with me and I will avoid certain automatons that feel very powerful like iron farms. Essentially, a fresh start in the same world but I may run into some of my old builds and at some point I can connect back to my main base.

I am having a lot of fun with this so far. I started in version 1.21.4 and I'm really enjoying the new caves/world generation and music some of which is made by Lena Raine the creator of the music for Celeste!

Survival Island Java 1.17-1.18

During the Covid lockdowns I started a new Minecraft world. I couldn't be bothered with going hunting for everything and wanted to keep things simple so I found a world with an island at the spawn, cheated to spawn in a few items, put an end portal deep underground on the island and a skeleton spawner. This was a DIY survival island which used to be a popular survival challenge where you couldn't leave the island.

This challenge meant I interacted a lot with new mechanics but very little with the new world generation. I had a lot of fun and manged to automate farming for a lot of resources. The most annoying thing was the new phantom mobs that had been added since the last time I played but these were not a major issue after I made my large pyramid base. I would highly recommend giving this sort of challenge a go in any version of Minecraft.

When I got bored of the island I used that fact that distance is shorter in the nether to create a quick access to the mainland because I wanted to see things from the new caves update but never really got around to exploring properly.

The Mines of Dwarfia 1.5.2

This was a CTM (complete the monument) map that I made in 2013 which I think was for Minecraft version 1.5.2. Honestly, I have no idea if this is actually any good but I do intend to replay it and when I do I will update this page. I used to like the CTM maps made by Vechs which are maps where you are intended to find and complete a monument. The monument has spots for every colour of wool in the game and the metal blocks. They were supposed to be a hard but fair challenge.

I have a feeling that this may not be the most fair map but it did get a few hundred downloads back in the day and people didn't seem to hate it. There used to be a Minecraft Forum page for it but that seems to have been deleted along with my old account there. Maybe give it a go or your better option if you want to play a CTM map is to play the super hostile maps by Vechs.

If you do download be sure to change your Minecraft to version 1.5.2. You may also notice some links in the readme to my old YouTube channel. Most of the videos there are private because I find them difficult to watch. But for a sample this is the old trailer for The Mines of Dwarfia and here is a playlist with the dev commentary for the map which it looks like I never quite completed.

Other Bits and Bobs

So at my parents I did a bit of hunting for old Minecraft saves and found a few. It looks like I mostly played on Nintendo Switch from 2018-2019, I managed to transfer those world to my computer and convert them to the Java edition of Minecraft. Most of these were pretty simple and short lived. I had two survival worlds both of which are in quite early stages. I also had a creative world where I built some cool stuff and even tried a couple of survival challenges. I did build one really cool pixel art of Corvo from Dishonored on the creative world though.

Other than the Switch worlds, the rest were pretty empty and I unfortunately never found my main world from around 2014/2015 which was probably tied to be my most played with my Survival Island world. There is a short Video of a bug I found in this world though. It looks like it was quite early in the world but is still fun to look back on. The most interesting on is one which has a large wooden tower which it looks like I was intending to make into a tree. The rest had practically nothing.