Guys, we have a lot of ideas for our next episodes and many, many projects we'd like to complete as well. If you want to see some of the longer projects I may do a building timelapse as I'd like to try that as so far we've done most of the building stuff off-camera. So tell us, next time we play what you'd most like to see!
- more exploration/discoveries!
- building a skeleton xp farm out of the spawner we found
- building a dual gold/zombie farm with the design I teased about
- curing villagers and making a village!
- making a chicken farm!
Very much enjoying making this series and it'll probably be going for a while yet given the scope of the map.
And if you guys are enjoying it or want to comment on the quality of the vids or suggestions how we could do them better let us know! Esp. in the comment section on the videos so future players can see them. This is supposed to be a potential walkthrough so I do want it to be a fun watch!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
Apparently when fighting Pigmen, not only can zombies spawn right next to you, but they can also spawn 50(rough estimation) blocks away, on bedrock, and in the middle of a hand-made village, and then proceed to wipe out almost all of the villagers that are in it, despite having an Iron Golem on guard.
Yeah, they do spawn in pretty high distances and don't care about bedrock. Sucks that it happened right in your village though :/ At least it sounds like some of them survived, so you at least have something to work with and don't have to start with a potion, two apples and lots of time!
Episode 9 is out! At least for me; Dan's point of view will follow once he's had the time for it We explore the fortress that we discovered by the end of last episode, and of course fortress exploration wouldn't be the same without triggering the pigman bug at least once!
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I wrote about my adventures on the Alpha version of the OathBros/Caplex Build Team's map Space Expedition in my blog! (Discontinued)
For my experiences of the Beta versions of that same map, I started a YouTube series, which (due to prior knowledge from the Alpha) ended up being very fast paced and highly focused on showing off as much of the custom stuff as I can.
Pigmen bug once? Try 3 times xD Great loot though and finds. We cover a lot of ground this episode!
that is the most awful luck sm. I usually try not to fight pigmen near my villagers as we had that happen one game as well. And of course the poor villagers have AI so stupid they can't even run away long enough for you to reach them and help. Iron Golems are weird too. Careful with them, they will aggro pigmen and get themselves killed fyi.
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
It was bad, but maybe not as bad as you'd expect it to be. I've already gotten all of the diamond things they could sell, and the Armoror, Cleric, Librarian, and Farmer all lived...They're not the only ones left, but they're the most important. Bonus points for the fact that the Iron Golem was naturally spawned, so I didn't technically lose any iron when he died.
I think I'm probably just going to tear down the compact 120 doors thing and actually build a normal village now, since I can't really think of any other villagers that I'd need to have spawn at this point. Y'know, since that repair thingy exists. If I ever need to repair something, I can just poke some pigs in my suffocation trap.
I just realized that I was doing something wrong. Over the past couple days, I've been trading and farming with the Villagers and scanning through the Forts for clues. As it turns out, I think that was a waste of time. Why do I think that? I asked myself one question: "If I was the mapmaker, how would I set up the final puzzle?"
The first thing that comes to mind is to make all previous puzzles required. That's super easy to do with a setblock toggle, but that method is unfair to the player, seeing as they aren't notified. To make it fair, you'd have to get something from each previous puzzle to use in the final one. If I apply that to this map, it means that all the clues I need should be within the barriers. And the only things there are the symbols and the chandeliers. I see no way to put the symbols on the roof, but the chandeliers have potential. And they're not even chandeliers, they're floating...Things. And they're all 5 blocks tall.
Unfortunately, the air spaces under each roof pillar are only 3 blocks, so I can't just put them there. However, I feel I'm on to something here for once. Rather than asking "Is this going to work?," I'm asking "How do I make this work?"
Anyway, even if I figure it out in the next five minutes, I'm not going to solve it until the person I'm playing with is available for Minecrafting, and they won't be until either Saturday evening or Monday morning, depending on how luck works.
Again, no hints please...To be honest, the first time I said that, I thought I would give it a shot and then cave only a couple tries later and get help. But I feel like I might not need hints here. I feel like there's just one last little detail I need, and then I'll have it...Or I could be on completely the wrong track.
I tried this map out, as I was intrigued and I'm "mediocre at best" on survival maps. Honestly, it's 'neat' but that's all I see for it. It's very unbalanced, map-wise. As far as I have been able to explore (albeit not much because my trees would *not* grow, which y'know, kind of makes it hard to do anything), there isn't much to give you a kick-off. I spent maybe an hour trying to explore and found "a" Nether fortress which, for anyone who hasn't attempted one before, is VERY hard with low-tier equipment. Considering the best I could have gotten at that point would've been a gold sword(which I found an enchanted sword and it didn't really help that much with 3 hits per enemy, and a bow with 3 shots per enemy and about 19 arrows), I pretty much lasted about 5 minutes before having to leave with sort-of-useless loot. I found the magma cube dungeon too but that was just cruel. Having a pit of about 10-or-so cubes ready to swarm you is pretty awful.
I'll give you props for trying but there's not much going on here for anyone who isn't "hardcore" aka willing to delve into the 1337 5ki11z guidebook for quick-survival. Maybe I'll try it again but unbalanced =/= hard. It equals unbalanced, which no matter what requires unnecessary headaches to figure out how to cheat the map / take advantage of it. There's no need to try hard to be unique and complicated. Take a queue from Dunes or something. That was hard but fair and unique.
Also, they really need to fix trees/crops not growing when you are in the nether / vice versa.
EDIT: You may think I'm complaining but it's just criticism if you care at all for balancing it out in 'levels'. For example, people like me who aren't going to plan out how I'm going to play the map. I play these maps to wing it. It's more fun that way.
Awesome!!! So glad to hear sm! What did you think of the secret ending and backstory revelations? we put a lot of work into the ending parts! PM me your reaction if you don't mind along with any other ideas you may have for improvements or bugs you may have seen! I plan to release an update tweaking some things now that a few players have beaten the map and puzzles finally. Excellent job! I knew you'd work it out! What did you think of the final puzzle? Was it too hard or ok for what came after?
Necronus, thanks so much for giving the map a try man!
You are actually supposed to start confused, near-helpless, and in a tight spot. So your response is actually pretty normal. We actually wanted the beginning to feel a bit discouraging as we really wanted the reality and difficulty of your Exile to be felt here. And yes it's hard. whether or not "hard" = "fun" depends on the player and this was targeted more at the hardcore crowd. Feel free to drop the difficulty level if you need too to enjoy the map.
More detailed comments if you care to read, and I'll keep your comments in mind for the next update:
Can you clarify what you mean by unbalanced exactly? Most of what you discussed seemed to me to more be comments about the way the nether is. The couple months we worked designing this map I tried very hard to complement the natural vanilla nether. You won't find much that couldn't conceivably be built by a nether-based civilization. I didn't want to break the feel or make a nether-based survival challenge easier then it would be. If you exiled yourself to a vanilla nether it'd be almost the same minus sweet custom ruins to discover and explore. So that's a bigger picture of the map idea for you.
Here is my vision for this map:
As a survival map it provides a new kind of framework to attempt survival within, and for those that really dedicate themselves to playing, they will find there is much more behind it, an interesting story, some lost history, some old puzzles waiting to be solved by those that like that sort of thing opening up some unique worlds and a lot of secret content. You don't need me to give you too many critical things in the beginning as the tools are there using natural minecraft mechanics and the hardcore survival fans would feel cheated if I gave them too good of a starter kit so it's hard to please everyone. It's fun having to relearn survival on this map. I'm one of those, personally I love the feel of this map and the idea that so much is possible solely from the nether which is usually considered completely inhospitable. It really makes you feel good about yourself and appreciate the small things when you accomplish stuff on this map!
Regardless I appreciate your feedback and thank you for trying the map. I will be releasing an update with some balancing and I'll keep your comments in mind but honestly it probably won't affect the items I give you, it will be some polishing to command block mechanics and effects revolving around the puzzles found in the ruins of this map and some more directional hints for the exploring part of the game as it is a bit too open world at the moment. By the way, the thing about crops: trees grow just as fast in the nether as anywhere else. I'm guessing you didn't put glowstone or torches near them? They will not grow well without light nearby as the nether is pretty much like the underground from a lighting perspective. That slow growing will not last with a little work.
A snapshot of what we've accomplished to let you know that life gets better:
We have massive gardens with several types of foods, a cobblestone generator and fish farm, a forest growing in the nether, a gold farm for replenishing our armor, cured some villagers for trading, tamed chickens from jockeys, and gotten potions. We're working on some bigger projects now. Don't be discouraged by death. I've died a lot. That's why there is keepInventory as it's basically inevitable even for good players--at least your stuff isn't burning in lava or fire.
sorry about the magma cubes. That area turned out way harder then we expected. I'm just happy we only put one spawner in! Those things are crazy. Makes a fun farm later though for fire resistance potions! I'm playing through the map in a video series myself and I've died many times already, it's part of the experience tbh. Check out the series if you feel like returning and need a bit of inspiration as we will demo the techniques needed to survive and show off some of the unique builds, ruins, and puzzles that are built into the map.
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
First off, didn't mean to come off as rude or just plain whiny albeit it's easy to be whiny if you just constantly lose, especially in survival games. In a non-hipster-sounding way, I played Vechs' maps back when they were just out and classic-y and yes, they was hard. His first map, IIRC, the lava-surrounded-island was very hard. It was closing in on unbalanced in a 'You could've put in more' way but it was do-able. It still holds up today and I think it's because he balanced it perfectly where you weren't in danger of being hit by enemies constantly but you had to go through enemy-filled areas to 'edge' closer to resources and rewards and etc. That being said, having a map that is very difficult to encourage the feeling of survival is great because not a lot of games do it.
I actually never spent a lot of time in the Nether myself when I played Vanilla Minecraft so I'm slightly ignorant. The ghasts are, of course, very annoying. I think I recall when you could get cooked meat from the zombie pigmen if you burned them/ghasts killed them. I played when there were only ghasts, zombie pigmen, pits of lava, ceiling-glowstone-stalactites, as well as the slowsand, so all-in-all I'm at a disadvantage but that's irrelevant.
Honestly, most of my comment is about how you start the player off. Starting off in the Nether is do-able, it's just not easy and the way it's done is sort of one-sided. The point being that it's very hard, as your initial supplies for relevant tools is... 13 stone, I think? That's not a lot, assuming you use it to get a stone sword and pick and then just farm your wood for lowest-tier back-up supplies and of course bowls and the like. When I got to the nether fortress, I had no source of food or weapons(I don't recall being able to get any wheat or anything similar, other than mushrooms...?) so I got lucky to find even gold weapons / armour. It's just tough to see what you *can* do when you don't have anything to go off of.
For the crops, I'm not sure. I had glowstone in between the trees but they refused to grow. I think at some point half of my stuff I had planted down got blown up by ghasts so I suppose I gave up at that point.
I understand the whole 'the map is literally vanilla but with custom aspects to it' and that's amazing. I wasn't implying that I *need* a starter kit, I was just implying that how the game starts off, 'dead-end' in the nether so-to-speak, I'm not even sure how I'm going to 'advance' from a tiny little base right outside of the nether because even resources-wise I didn't find anything significant. Might have just been me.
I'm going to start it up again but I'm probably not going to do so well. Building an initial base is tough enough for me, assuming I get ghasts spawning at the portal whenever I enter the nether which happens a lot. Great map, either way.
What I can say is that I don't think the Keep Inventory is working for me but I'll try it again.
P.S. I played your "Caved-In" a while back and that was great. I lost my save because I got bored after a while of getting lost and having no idea where to go or what to do but it was very fun.
A lot of players are unfamiliar with the nether and don't realize how much you can get done with the 1.8 mechanics there. Part of my vision for the map was to change that view and challenge/stretch players a bit as it is such an alien environment to survive in for most players. Following the challenge list should give you some direction though and let you know what's possible. Our video series has even more spoilers. And the map is on hard, if you drop it down to normal even you'll see only half of the mobs spawning in fortresses and far less Ghasts so feel free to do that, difficulty is variable and up to players as long as you don't play on peaceful and you can adjust it to whatever best fits your style. One note though: I can't confirm that the pigmen summoning zombies thing works below hard difficulty and that is a critical mechanic if you want to get carrots, potatoes, and zombie villagers to cure.
By the way, many of the mechanics and processes you use to expand and improve your survival as you go may be nonintuitive like the zombie summoning thing. It's a bit of a puzzle. Zombies don't spawn naturally in the nether but if you kill a lot of pigmen some do. You can take advantage of this if you figure out how the process works. Our gold farm can produce waves of 30 zombies at a time on hard and is great for getting us rare armors and supplies we couldn't get anywhere else. That's also how we cured villagers. Up to you if you wanna try to work out how getting stuff works on this map but here's some tips if you want them:
Nether fortress loot is what provides the prizes you want in the beginning. The first thing you want to work on is growing trees and hollowing out a safe place in the netherrack somewhere. Ghasts will try to burn down your tree farm so you should make a sheltered spot for the trees. Then you would probably want to get a bit of gold armor and a stone sword and raid a fortress. If you want to do this quick there is a barracks nearby that has supplies. From your comments I think you found it? That'll give you food, armor, and a bow, though not many arrows. Those you'll need to earn and arrows will be short for a while until you figure out how to get nether chickens or make an efficient skeleton farm.
The thing you really need in the beginning is 3 iron so you can make a bucket, bring lava back to your cell, and start manufacturing cobble through a generator. Then you'll be in much better shape to build and expand your base and have a solid tool tier and a great material that resists ghast shocks. Don't forget you can smelt the netherrack, mine the fortress materials, and mine quartz to have other blocks that Ghasts can't penetrate. This allows you to build safe areas for your gardens and expand your base over time, safe from the hostile world outside. Many games like skyblock start you with generator supplies, but I found it a fun challenge to deal with only having about 16 cobble in the beginning to work with having to plan on how you'll take on that closest fortress to secure your generator. Much of the map is like that.
If you want wheat, use the bones from skellies in the fortresses to bonemeal the grass in your starter prison to get seeds. You can grow crops slowly in the nether as long as you light them well.
You can get spider string via a "trick" with getting them to spawn your prison. If you can't figure it out we show it in episode 3 or 4 of our series.
You can use that string to fish in the spring in your cell. This water is extremely multipurpose allowing you to grow cane, make a cobble generator, fish, etc. That little flow of water is critical to your survival. As of 1.7 fishing has a chance to pull up many great supplies that you may find useful but unfortunately it's random so we didn't make it required for the map to progress. However, anything you fish up is bonus and often helpful. Some of the more useful you can get are leather and filled water bottles. There's a lot more as you progress and even making sustainable iron farms is possible with the villagers cured from zombies. It's a process but many players find it fun.
In the meantime if you get bored consider making a map and exploring the surrounding nether. There are many custom-built ruins, many with rewards. Some are only mildly useful (like the ones you saw in your last brief play), and others are extremely useful. Things like silk-touch tools, customized unique items that make your life a bit easier, excess gold and iron for tools and armor, etc. There's even better secrets out there but I'll stop. I don't wanna give the map away.
Anyway, I'll reiterate if you really struggled with the mobs last time simply drop the difficulty a few levels. If you aren't used to playing on hard all the time it'll be a shock on this map. nether fortresses are insane on hard with extremely high mob spawn rates, especially blazes. You'll find the map much more manageable on normal or easy if you choose. Only one I don't recommend is peaceful just cause it kinda removes the whole challenge. KeepInventory should be working in the latest download. If it isn't let me know but it's been on for the past couple version.
Thanks again, I admire the old map-makers like Vechs a lot. A may check out the map you mentioned if you say it has similarities.
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
I think trees need a light level of at least 11 to grow. Either 10 or 11, I never remember for sure, so I just go for 11 whenever I want to grow trees underground or in the nether to make 100% sure that they'll grow just fine And grow they do - sometimes, I just plopped down a sapling next to the portal in the nether, went to the overworld to mine a bit more cobble, went back into the nether, went into my little "hut" to sort stuff into chests, and when I was done, the tree had already grown. So if the trees refuse to grow for you, maybe check what their light level is, and if it's below 11, get some light sources closer to the tree. If they're already 11 or higher, I guess you're just really unlucky...
Ah, getting lost in caves... After my first successful playthrough of Cave-In, I decided that I didn't get lost often enough due to my habit of using torches to mark my way home, so I set up a rule for myself to never put a single torch anywhere outside of my base After that, I never complained again about not getting lost often enough.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I wrote about my adventures on the Alpha version of the OathBros/Caplex Build Team's map Space Expedition in my blog! (Discontinued)
For my experiences of the Beta versions of that same map, I started a YouTube series, which (due to prior knowledge from the Alpha) ended up being very fast paced and highly focused on showing off as much of the custom stuff as I can.
Yeah, the zombie-spawning is only on hard. I don't think I can do a lot of the fortress on hard, so eh. I did pretty good my first try since I found the mushroom soup but wow, those wither skeletons and blazes. Always hated them.
I guess you could always play on normal and switch to hard for a bit when you're out to get some zombies if you want the best of both worlds
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I wrote about my adventures on the Alpha version of the OathBros/Caplex Build Team's map Space Expedition in my blog! (Discontinued)
For my experiences of the Beta versions of that same map, I started a YouTube series, which (due to prior knowledge from the Alpha) ended up being very fast paced and highly focused on showing off as much of the custom stuff as I can.
Yeah, the zombie-spawning is only on hard. I don't think I can do a lot of the fortress on hard, so eh. I did pretty good my first try since I found the mushroom soup but wow, those wither skeletons and blazes. Always hated them.
Alright, I thought that might be the case. I'll put a note on the post that if you want to play on lower difficulties zombies won't come and you might need to toggle to hard when you are trying to get them to be summoned.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
New Episode Today! The first in a series of 3 or so where we do some major building and improving to the base areas! It's time life finally became a little bit easier for our troubled group. Here's part 1 where we build a basic farm for the skele spawner which proves challenging given the location but we need those arrows!
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Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
thank you. Looks like the level.dat file accidentally got replaced on my last bugfix which would affect singleplayers. Why oh why did I edit it in singleplayer lol?
Not sure why no other single players haven't mentioned the issue though as there's been several hundred downloads since then. :/ I hope all their games started ok and they weren't just quitting xD. Necronus, did you not have this game-start bug then? Sounds like you are doing singleplayer. I've updated game just in case anyway and reset the game to keepInventory rule. That was supposed to be on as well and it was messed up by the bad level.dat file in the latest version.
In any case thank you very much. Killing yourself does put you in the proper spot so you should be good to go after doing a "clear" and "gamemode 0". Download is now fixed only thing you missed was the game title and intro effects by doing it that way sorry about that. the gamerule keepInventory was disabled too so you may need to reenable it for your game or get the new download when it uploads within the hour. Sorry for this, wish someone had mentioned it earlier, it's been a while since that bugfix.
Space Expedition to EPIC 204:Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
thank you. Looks like the level.dat file accidentally got replaced on my last bugfix which would affect singleplayers. Why oh why did I edit it in singleplayer lol?
Not sure why no other single players haven't mentioned the issue though as there's been several hundred downloads since then. :/ I hope all their games started ok and they weren't just quitting xD. Necronus, did you not have this game-start bug then? Sounds like you are doing singleplayer. I've updated game just in case anyway and reset the game to keepInventory rule. That was supposed to be on as well and it was messed up by the bad level.dat file in the latest version.
In any case thank you very much. Killing yourself does put you in the proper spot so you should be good to go after doing a "clear" and "gamemode 0". Download is now fixed only thing you missed was the game title and intro effects by doing it that way sorry about that. the gamerule keepInventory was disabled too so you may need to reenable it for your game or get the new download when it uploads within the hour. Sorry for this, wish someone had mentioned it earlier, it's been a while since that bugfix.
I realized that Keep inventory was off once I got a bit lost and I got hungry so I just fell off a high place on purpose but then I lost all my Items...
Luckily I happened to jump off and die very close to my portal.
I found a nether fortress that naturally spawned if you want me to tell you the cords so you can "customize" it...
Edit: never mind you already have, I just explored a bit more of it....
Guys, we have a lot of ideas for our next episodes and many, many projects we'd like to complete as well. If you want to see some of the longer projects I may do a building timelapse as I'd like to try that as so far we've done most of the building stuff off-camera. So tell us, next time we play what you'd most like to see!
- more exploration/discoveries!
- building a skeleton xp farm out of the spawner we found
- building a dual gold/zombie farm with the design I teased about
- curing villagers and making a village!
- making a chicken farm!
Very much enjoying making this series and it'll probably be going for a while yet given the scope of the map.
And if you guys are enjoying it or want to comment on the quality of the vids or suggestions how we could do them better let us know! Esp. in the comment section on the videos so future players can see them. This is supposed to be a potential walkthrough so I do want it to be a fun watch!
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
Apparently when fighting Pigmen, not only can zombies spawn right next to you, but they can also spawn 50(rough estimation) blocks away, on bedrock, and in the middle of a hand-made village, and then proceed to wipe out almost all of the villagers that are in it, despite having an Iron Golem on guard.
Wonderful.
Yeah, they do spawn in pretty high distances and don't care about bedrock. Sucks that it happened right in your village though :/ At least it sounds like some of them survived, so you at least have something to work with and don't have to start with a potion, two apples and lots of time!
Episode 9 is out! At least for me; Dan's point of view will follow once he's had the time for it We explore the fortress that we discovered by the end of last episode, and of course fortress exploration wouldn't be the same without triggering the pigman bug at least once!
I wrote about my adventures on the Alpha version of the OathBros/Caplex Build Team's map Space Expedition in my blog! (Discontinued)
For my experiences of the Beta versions of that same map, I started a YouTube series, which (due to prior knowledge from the Alpha) ended up being very fast paced and highly focused on showing off as much of the custom stuff as I can.
Pigmen bug once? Try 3 times xD Great loot though and finds. We cover a lot of ground this episode!
that is the most awful luck sm. I usually try not to fight pigmen near my villagers as we had that happen one game as well. And of course the poor villagers have AI so stupid they can't even run away long enough for you to reach them and help. Iron Golems are weird too. Careful with them, they will aggro pigmen and get themselves killed fyi.
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
It was bad, but maybe not as bad as you'd expect it to be. I've already gotten all of the diamond things they could sell, and the Armoror, Cleric, Librarian, and Farmer all lived...They're not the only ones left, but they're the most important. Bonus points for the fact that the Iron Golem was naturally spawned, so I didn't technically lose any iron when he died.
I think I'm probably just going to tear down the compact 120 doors thing and actually build a normal village now, since I can't really think of any other villagers that I'd need to have spawn at this point. Y'know, since that repair thingy exists. If I ever need to repair something, I can just poke some pigs in my suffocation trap.
R.I.P. Bob.
Puzzle Progress!
The first thing that comes to mind is to make all previous puzzles required. That's super easy to do with a setblock toggle, but that method is unfair to the player, seeing as they aren't notified. To make it fair, you'd have to get something from each previous puzzle to use in the final one. If I apply that to this map, it means that all the clues I need should be within the barriers. And the only things there are the symbols and the chandeliers. I see no way to put the symbols on the roof, but the chandeliers have potential. And they're not even chandeliers, they're floating...Things. And they're all 5 blocks tall.
Unfortunately, the air spaces under each roof pillar are only 3 blocks, so I can't just put them there. However, I feel I'm on to something here for once. Rather than asking "Is this going to work?," I'm asking "How do I make this work?"
Anyway, even if I figure it out in the next five minutes, I'm not going to solve it until the person I'm playing with is available for Minecrafting, and they won't be until either Saturday evening or Monday morning, depending on how luck works.
Again, no hints please...To be honest, the first time I said that, I thought I would give it a shot and then cave only a couple tries later and get help. But I feel like I might not need hints here. I feel like there's just one last little detail I need, and then I'll have it...Or I could be on completely the wrong track.
I tried this map out, as I was intrigued and I'm "mediocre at best" on survival maps. Honestly, it's 'neat' but that's all I see for it. It's very unbalanced, map-wise. As far as I have been able to explore (albeit not much because my trees would *not* grow, which y'know, kind of makes it hard to do anything), there isn't much to give you a kick-off. I spent maybe an hour trying to explore and found "a" Nether fortress which, for anyone who hasn't attempted one before, is VERY hard with low-tier equipment. Considering the best I could have gotten at that point would've been a gold sword(which I found an enchanted sword and it didn't really help that much with 3 hits per enemy, and a bow with 3 shots per enemy and about 19 arrows), I pretty much lasted about 5 minutes before having to leave with sort-of-useless loot. I found the magma cube dungeon too but that was just cruel. Having a pit of about 10-or-so cubes ready to swarm you is pretty awful.
I'll give you props for trying but there's not much going on here for anyone who isn't "hardcore" aka willing to delve into the 1337 5ki11z guidebook for quick-survival. Maybe I'll try it again but unbalanced =/= hard. It equals unbalanced, which no matter what requires unnecessary headaches to figure out how to cheat the map / take advantage of it. There's no need to try hard to be unique and complicated. Take a queue from Dunes or something. That was hard but fair and unique.
Also, they really need to fix trees/crops not growing when you are in the nether / vice versa.
EDIT: You may think I'm complaining but it's just criticism if you care at all for balancing it out in 'levels'. For example, people like me who aren't going to plan out how I'm going to play the map. I play these maps to wing it. It's more fun that way.
Steam: RobotDeathParty
Thank you for providing such a fun map! You can tell you did at least something right because I didn't just give up halfway through.
Awesome!!! So glad to hear sm! What did you think of the secret ending and backstory revelations? we put a lot of work into the ending parts! PM me your reaction if you don't mind along with any other ideas you may have for improvements or bugs you may have seen! I plan to release an update tweaking some things now that a few players have beaten the map and puzzles finally. Excellent job! I knew you'd work it out! What did you think of the final puzzle? Was it too hard or ok for what came after?
Necronus, thanks so much for giving the map a try man!
You are actually supposed to start confused, near-helpless, and in a tight spot. So your response is actually pretty normal. We actually wanted the beginning to feel a bit discouraging as we really wanted the reality and difficulty of your Exile to be felt here. And yes it's hard. whether or not "hard" = "fun" depends on the player and this was targeted more at the hardcore crowd. Feel free to drop the difficulty level if you need too to enjoy the map.
More detailed comments if you care to read, and I'll keep your comments in mind for the next update:
Here is my vision for this map:
As a survival map it provides a new kind of framework to attempt survival within, and for those that really dedicate themselves to playing, they will find there is much more behind it, an interesting story, some lost history, some old puzzles waiting to be solved by those that like that sort of thing opening up some unique worlds and a lot of secret content. You don't need me to give you too many critical things in the beginning as the tools are there using natural minecraft mechanics and the hardcore survival fans would feel cheated if I gave them too good of a starter kit so it's hard to please everyone. It's fun having to relearn survival on this map. I'm one of those, personally I love the feel of this map and the idea that so much is possible solely from the nether which is usually considered completely inhospitable. It really makes you feel good about yourself and appreciate the small things when you accomplish stuff on this map!
Regardless I appreciate your feedback and thank you for trying the map. I will be releasing an update with some balancing and I'll keep your comments in mind but honestly it probably won't affect the items I give you, it will be some polishing to command block mechanics and effects revolving around the puzzles found in the ruins of this map and some more directional hints for the exploring part of the game as it is a bit too open world at the moment. By the way, the thing about crops: trees grow just as fast in the nether as anywhere else. I'm guessing you didn't put glowstone or torches near them? They will not grow well without light nearby as the nether is pretty much like the underground from a lighting perspective. That slow growing will not last with a little work.
A snapshot of what we've accomplished to let you know that life gets better:
We have massive gardens with several types of foods, a cobblestone generator and fish farm, a forest growing in the nether, a gold farm for replenishing our armor, cured some villagers for trading, tamed chickens from jockeys, and gotten potions. We're working on some bigger projects now. Don't be discouraged by death. I've died a lot. That's why there is keepInventory as it's basically inevitable even for good players--at least your stuff isn't burning in lava or fire.
sorry about the magma cubes. That area turned out way harder then we expected. I'm just happy we only put one spawner in! Those things are crazy. Makes a fun farm later though for fire resistance potions! I'm playing through the map in a video series myself and I've died many times already, it's part of the experience tbh. Check out the series if you feel like returning and need a bit of inspiration as we will demo the techniques needed to survive and show off some of the unique builds, ruins, and puzzles that are built into the map.
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
First off, didn't mean to come off as rude or just plain whiny albeit it's easy to be whiny if you just constantly lose, especially in survival games. In a non-hipster-sounding way, I played Vechs' maps back when they were just out and classic-y and yes, they was hard. His first map, IIRC, the lava-surrounded-island was very hard. It was closing in on unbalanced in a 'You could've put in more' way but it was do-able. It still holds up today and I think it's because he balanced it perfectly where you weren't in danger of being hit by enemies constantly but you had to go through enemy-filled areas to 'edge' closer to resources and rewards and etc. That being said, having a map that is very difficult to encourage the feeling of survival is great because not a lot of games do it.
I actually never spent a lot of time in the Nether myself when I played Vanilla Minecraft so I'm slightly ignorant. The ghasts are, of course, very annoying. I think I recall when you could get cooked meat from the zombie pigmen if you burned them/ghasts killed them. I played when there were only ghasts, zombie pigmen, pits of lava, ceiling-glowstone-stalactites, as well as the slowsand, so all-in-all I'm at a disadvantage but that's irrelevant.
Honestly, most of my comment is about how you start the player off. Starting off in the Nether is do-able, it's just not easy and the way it's done is sort of one-sided. The point being that it's very hard, as your initial supplies for relevant tools is... 13 stone, I think? That's not a lot, assuming you use it to get a stone sword and pick and then just farm your wood for lowest-tier back-up supplies and of course bowls and the like. When I got to the nether fortress, I had no source of food or weapons(I don't recall being able to get any wheat or anything similar, other than mushrooms...?) so I got lucky to find even gold weapons / armour. It's just tough to see what you *can* do when you don't have anything to go off of.
For the crops, I'm not sure. I had glowstone in between the trees but they refused to grow. I think at some point half of my stuff I had planted down got blown up by ghasts so I suppose I gave up at that point.
I understand the whole 'the map is literally vanilla but with custom aspects to it' and that's amazing. I wasn't implying that I *need* a starter kit, I was just implying that how the game starts off, 'dead-end' in the nether so-to-speak, I'm not even sure how I'm going to 'advance' from a tiny little base right outside of the nether because even resources-wise I didn't find anything significant. Might have just been me.
I'm going to start it up again but I'm probably not going to do so well. Building an initial base is tough enough for me, assuming I get ghasts spawning at the portal whenever I enter the nether which happens a lot. Great map, either way.
What I can say is that I don't think the Keep Inventory is working for me but I'll try it again.
P.S. I played your "Caved-In" a while back and that was great. I lost my save because I got bored after a while of getting lost and having no idea where to go or what to do but it was very fun.
Steam: RobotDeathParty
Ah, I didn't take it as rude no worries.
A lot of players are unfamiliar with the nether and don't realize how much you can get done with the 1.8 mechanics there. Part of my vision for the map was to change that view and challenge/stretch players a bit as it is such an alien environment to survive in for most players. Following the challenge list should give you some direction though and let you know what's possible. Our video series has even more spoilers. And the map is on hard, if you drop it down to normal even you'll see only half of the mobs spawning in fortresses and far less Ghasts so feel free to do that, difficulty is variable and up to players as long as you don't play on peaceful and you can adjust it to whatever best fits your style. One note though: I can't confirm that the pigmen summoning zombies thing works below hard difficulty and that is a critical mechanic if you want to get carrots, potatoes, and zombie villagers to cure.
By the way, many of the mechanics and processes you use to expand and improve your survival as you go may be nonintuitive like the zombie summoning thing. It's a bit of a puzzle. Zombies don't spawn naturally in the nether but if you kill a lot of pigmen some do. You can take advantage of this if you figure out how the process works. Our gold farm can produce waves of 30 zombies at a time on hard and is great for getting us rare armors and supplies we couldn't get anywhere else. That's also how we cured villagers. Up to you if you wanna try to work out how getting stuff works on this map but here's some tips if you want them:
Nether fortress loot is what provides the prizes you want in the beginning. The first thing you want to work on is growing trees and hollowing out a safe place in the netherrack somewhere. Ghasts will try to burn down your tree farm so you should make a sheltered spot for the trees. Then you would probably want to get a bit of gold armor and a stone sword and raid a fortress. If you want to do this quick there is a barracks nearby that has supplies. From your comments I think you found it? That'll give you food, armor, and a bow, though not many arrows. Those you'll need to earn and arrows will be short for a while until you figure out how to get nether chickens or make an efficient skeleton farm.
The thing you really need in the beginning is 3 iron so you can make a bucket, bring lava back to your cell, and start manufacturing cobble through a generator. Then you'll be in much better shape to build and expand your base and have a solid tool tier and a great material that resists ghast shocks. Don't forget you can smelt the netherrack, mine the fortress materials, and mine quartz to have other blocks that Ghasts can't penetrate. This allows you to build safe areas for your gardens and expand your base over time, safe from the hostile world outside. Many games like skyblock start you with generator supplies, but I found it a fun challenge to deal with only having about 16 cobble in the beginning to work with having to plan on how you'll take on that closest fortress to secure your generator. Much of the map is like that.
If you want wheat, use the bones from skellies in the fortresses to bonemeal the grass in your starter prison to get seeds. You can grow crops slowly in the nether as long as you light them well.
You can get spider string via a "trick" with getting them to spawn your prison. If you can't figure it out we show it in episode 3 or 4 of our series.
You can use that string to fish in the spring in your cell. This water is extremely multipurpose allowing you to grow cane, make a cobble generator, fish, etc. That little flow of water is critical to your survival. As of 1.7 fishing has a chance to pull up many great supplies that you may find useful but unfortunately it's random so we didn't make it required for the map to progress. However, anything you fish up is bonus and often helpful. Some of the more useful you can get are leather and filled water bottles. There's a lot more as you progress and even making sustainable iron farms is possible with the villagers cured from zombies. It's a process but many players find it fun.
In the meantime if you get bored consider making a map and exploring the surrounding nether. There are many custom-built ruins, many with rewards. Some are only mildly useful (like the ones you saw in your last brief play), and others are extremely useful. Things like silk-touch tools, customized unique items that make your life a bit easier, excess gold and iron for tools and armor, etc. There's even better secrets out there but I'll stop. I don't wanna give the map away.
Anyway, I'll reiterate if you really struggled with the mobs last time simply drop the difficulty a few levels. If you aren't used to playing on hard all the time it'll be a shock on this map. nether fortresses are insane on hard with extremely high mob spawn rates, especially blazes. You'll find the map much more manageable on normal or easy if you choose. Only one I don't recommend is peaceful just cause it kinda removes the whole challenge. KeepInventory should be working in the latest download. If it isn't let me know but it's been on for the past couple version.
Thanks again, I admire the old map-makers like Vechs a lot. A may check out the map you mentioned if you say it has similarities.
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
I think trees need a light level of at least 11 to grow. Either 10 or 11, I never remember for sure, so I just go for 11 whenever I want to grow trees underground or in the nether to make 100% sure that they'll grow just fine And grow they do - sometimes, I just plopped down a sapling next to the portal in the nether, went to the overworld to mine a bit more cobble, went back into the nether, went into my little "hut" to sort stuff into chests, and when I was done, the tree had already grown. So if the trees refuse to grow for you, maybe check what their light level is, and if it's below 11, get some light sources closer to the tree. If they're already 11 or higher, I guess you're just really unlucky...
Ah, getting lost in caves... After my first successful playthrough of Cave-In, I decided that I didn't get lost often enough due to my habit of using torches to mark my way home, so I set up a rule for myself to never put a single torch anywhere outside of my base After that, I never complained again about not getting lost often enough.
I wrote about my adventures on the Alpha version of the OathBros/Caplex Build Team's map Space Expedition in my blog! (Discontinued)
For my experiences of the Beta versions of that same map, I started a YouTube series, which (due to prior knowledge from the Alpha) ended up being very fast paced and highly focused on showing off as much of the custom stuff as I can.
Yeah, the zombie-spawning is only on hard. I don't think I can do a lot of the fortress on hard, so eh. I did pretty good my first try since I found the mushroom soup but wow, those wither skeletons and blazes. Always hated them.
Steam: RobotDeathParty
I guess you could always play on normal and switch to hard for a bit when you're out to get some zombies if you want the best of both worlds
I wrote about my adventures on the Alpha version of the OathBros/Caplex Build Team's map Space Expedition in my blog! (Discontinued)
For my experiences of the Beta versions of that same map, I started a YouTube series, which (due to prior knowledge from the Alpha) ended up being very fast paced and highly focused on showing off as much of the custom stuff as I can.
Alright, I thought that might be the case. I'll put a note on the post that if you want to play on lower difficulties zombies won't come and you might need to toggle to hard when you are trying to get them to be summoned.
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
New Episode Today! The first in a series of 3 or so where we do some major building and improving to the base areas! It's time life finally became a little bit easier for our troubled group. Here's part 1 where we build a basic farm for the skele spawner which proves challenging given the location but we need those arrows!
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
Not sure if anyone has found this bug or not but...
This is where I spawned...
I had to kill myself to get back to where I think I was supposed to be.
Note: this is in single player with optifine
thank you. Looks like the level.dat file accidentally got replaced on my last bugfix which would affect singleplayers. Why oh why did I edit it in singleplayer lol?
Not sure why no other single players haven't mentioned the issue though as there's been several hundred downloads since then. :/ I hope all their games started ok and they weren't just quitting xD. Necronus, did you not have this game-start bug then? Sounds like you are doing singleplayer. I've updated game just in case anyway and reset the game to keepInventory rule. That was supposed to be on as well and it was messed up by the bad level.dat file in the latest version.
In any case thank you very much. Killing yourself does put you in the proper spot so you should be good to go after doing a "clear" and "gamemode 0". Download is now fixed only thing you missed was the game title and intro effects by doing it that way sorry about that. the gamerule keepInventory was disabled too so you may need to reenable it for your game or get the new download when it uploads within the hour. Sorry for this, wish someone had mentioned it earlier, it's been a while since that bugfix.
Download and play my new Survival Map!
Space Expedition to EPIC 204: Go on a Space-Age Adventure to visit and explore EPIC 204, a wacky world of dense asteroids and full of alien life! Experience Custom Seasons, Weather, Over 50 new creatures, Beautiful Biomes, Alien Ruins, Dungeons, and new space age tech crafting recipes!
I knew I should have reported that issue. I fixed it by killing myself so I didn't think anything of it. Sorry!
Steam: RobotDeathParty
I realized that Keep inventory was off once I got a bit lost and I got hungry so I just fell off a high place on purpose but then I lost all my Items...
Luckily I happened to jump off and die very close to my portal.
I found a nether fortress that naturally spawned if you want me to tell you the cords so you can "customize" it...Edit: never mind you already have, I just explored a bit more of it....