Brian Plays Vanilla Minecraft

I discovered the game, Minecraft, late last Fall, although it has been out for a while. It is a first person survival game, in which the world around you is made out of various kinds of blocks that you can mine and then build into whatever you want. It is quite a different kind of game, that I am really enjoying. It's like the Sims with zombies, or World of Warcraft but you can decide to rebuild Orgrimmar. The graphics and many of the game elements are simplistic, but they come together in a really nice way (emergent gameplay). You can really decide to do whatever you want to do (a sandbox game).

So I played single player, vanilla minecraft to "the End", when you are treated to a new age conversation with the universe. By "vanilla" I mean the base game, without any of the fan contributed modifications that are available. I'll describe my experience with some of those in later posts. Near the end, I started spending more time on design than play, which you'll see in the later screenshots below. You'll see many more elaborate minecraft designs posted online but when you play in survival mode (there is an alterative creative mode for just building) you appreciate where every block comes from and the dangers you faced to get it.

Minecraft is a great game. I recommend it highly. It will be the 2012 Golden Geek game winner for sure, whenever I get around to making that post.

Below are some screenshots of my main base, near where my character first spawned. It was kind of a showcase of blocks and trees from different places I went. It was not very practical and took me forever to level that big an area. I was plagued with dark spots for days, where mobs (hostile creatures in the game) could spawn.

While developing my main base, I set up a few other bases near resources I was looking for. One was a larger ranch, with wheat to breed cattle and seeds for chickens. This was to generate meat to feed my dogs, which I relied on heavily for combat. Dogs tend to kill themselves easily, jumping into lava, etc., so I needed an energetic breeding program which required a lot of dog food. I discovered that under the ranch were a whole network of caves, including two abandoned mine shafts (features generated by the game). 

I developed a desert area with flat open areas to hunt Endermen for their pearls and for experience in general to power enchantments. Later, I built a castle for fun. I think this is where my mindcraft character will retire to, eating bread and chickens and shooting mobs until the arrows run out and I am too tired to fend off the spiders.

In jungle biomes there are huge trees and I built a treehouse in one. 

And the last place I worked on was a base in the Nether, which I built with stone brick with decoration from the Stronghold special brick blocks. I was pretty happy with this one.

Through all of this, I had never come across an NPC (non-player character) village, which is another feature randomly generated on the landscape. I did find a zombie spawner in a cave, and read online that you could transform zombies back to villagers, so I built a system to do that which is pictured below along with the underground village I made for the villagers I "created" and their descendants. 

If you have played the game, you may find the last two pictures amusing. The first is of an Enderman escaping a rainstorm in my chicken coop and the other is of a creeper in the distance in my main mining tunnel near bedrock.

Nobody here but us chickens.

I think you have a lighting issue.