HOW do you make such hellishly difficult, yet massively addicting and fun maps?
How your maps do that cannot be processed in my brain!
In fact, I don't play normal "minecraft" as much now- your maps have almost become the new "minecraft" to me.
Well, anyways, I am currently playing Ghast ping-pong over at the ghast temple in the black desert.
I have a nice little convenient staircase in my shelter wich leads to the underground- and guess what it hit first when i was building it?
An iron-packed stalagmite! (that's what it's called, right?)!
I must have gotten about 250 iron ore .
Anyways, a little feedback:
I have noticed that your recent maps have a large shortage of quality, and fun materials like clay and pumpkins, and do not have any birch wood at all ( well, i haven't found any, at least, and i also didn't really understand how spalings worked when growing pre- beta 1.5 and after birch trees were implemented. Would they sometimes grow into a birch tree or always grow into a normal one? ).
I do realize these are challenge maps, but a little more resources like those for decoration and other purposes wouldn't hurt, right?
what is the best map to start with?
i tried them al nut i keep dieing.
it would be nice if you helped me.
i know the rating system but its not enough information to know what is the best to start with.
I think Infernal Sky is probably the easiest... Endless Deep is fairly easy too - if you die in Endless Deep, it's because you killed yourself by not paying attention to your air supply, it's not like there are any traps or even monsters you have to deal with right off the bat.
But yeah, Sky doesn't have tons of monsters spawners, unless you intentionally go into a dungeon, which are very obvious, and other than falling blocks there are no traps. So as long as you are careful, there's really no reason you should die in Sky, unless a creeper spawns on top of your house and lands on you when you go outside.
HOW do you make such hellishly difficult, yet massively addicting and fun maps?
How your maps do that cannot be processed in my brain!
In fact, I don't play normal "minecraft" as much now- your maps have almost become the new "minecraft" to me.
I thought about what problems a normal Minecraft map might have, and then I try to make maps that can address those problems. Minecraft is a creativity toy, so criticism relating to goals and objectives make about as much sense as asking why a sandbox doesn't have a way to win. But a lot of people want to call Minecraft a "game", and want to be able to win. So...
1) Normal Minecraft terrain is too easy- so, I make more hostile terrain.
2) Minecraft has no objectives- so, I give the player an objective to work towards.
(Other than just surviving day to day.)
... and that's pretty much it.
Quote from Robotmaniac »
I have noticed that your recent maps have a large shortage of quality, and fun materials like clay and pumpkins, and do not have any birch wood at all ( well, i haven't found any, at least, and i also didn't really understand how spalings worked when growing pre- beta 1.5 and after birch trees were implemented. Would they sometimes grow into a birch tree or always grow into a normal one? ).
I do realize these are challenge maps, but a little more resources like those for decoration and other purposes wouldn't hurt, right?
Shortage of quality? :sad.gif: I really thought I was getting better at map making... well, there's always new stuff to learn I guess!
Well, when I made all of my maps, it was before Beta 1.5... I thought this would be kind of obvious, but birch and pine saplings did not exist - the only way to see birch and pine trees was to have them pre-generated in a Minecraft world. You could never grow a birch or pine tree - only cut down existing ones, and they used to drop normal (oak?) saplings. Let's think in Beta 1.3 and 1.4 terms here-- I could have copied and pasted a birch tree from a normal Minecraft map, but why would I bother doing that when you are just going to cut it down and get a normal sapling, and grow normal trees from that point on? That seems fairly pointless to me...
A few people have reported (on Sea of Flame, for example) logging in after Beta 1.5 and find that their planted oak sapling had somehow turned into a birch sapling... so, I have no idea how that happens, but huzzah! for them. :smile.gif:
(Birch are actually my favorite trees, mostly for practical reasons-- they won't grow into giant trees that are a pain to cut down, and they seem to grow slightly faster than oak.)
As for stuff like clay and pumpkins... clay is actually in a lot of my maps, you just have to find it. There is a ton of clay in Kaizo Caverns (Hint - clay is wet.)
I'm actually not sure if it's in The Black Desert or not... if it's not, you'll just have to forgive me. When I make a map from scratch, I sometimes forget about the novelty blocks.
It's like... a giant checklist I have to go through each time.
Hell, I forgot redstone ore in the first version of Infernal Sky... Things like pumpkins, reeds, clay, lapis lazulli, I'll sometimes forget one.
I know. I'm going to have to make a chest schematic for MCedit, called "Novelty Crap" and fill it with pumpkins, lapis, and clay, and always remember to stick it somewhere on every map I make. lol
Seriously though, that's actually not a bad idea... :biggrin.gif:
Oh yeah! And snow balls, saddles, green disc, yellow disc, slime balls, and just to mess with peoples heads, sandstone slabs and leaf blocks.
I was out cutting wood and suddenly I got a thunderstorm out of nowhere.
It lasted about 15 minutes real-time.
Made it dark enough for monsters to spawn (even on my torch-lit island!):
This is freakin' awesome, I love the weather. I really like how the sound effect changes when you get indoors or under cover - chilling out in your castle with the sound of rain and thunder outside is so relaxing.
Niiice man.
I remember working on a realistic-type house, and suddenly hearing what sounded like a million creeper footsteps outside :tongue.gif: (at least at the time). Let it rain.
Shortage of quality? :sad.gif: I really thought I was getting better at map making... well, there's always new stuff to learn I guess!
Nononono! Looks like you misunderstood me. The quality in your maps is very good.
What i MEANT to say was "Quality and fun materials", not that the there is a lack of quality in your maps.
But anyways, you could update your maps to include birch and pine tree spalings in chests, or just do so from now on in your maps.
But i think I'll go back to playing Kaizo now. I still have yet to 100% finish it. That includes the mastery monument. Wich I'll probably never find, like everyone else who has tried.
EDIT: also, i wasn't as lucky as everyone else: instead of birch spalings, my saplings turned into pine saplings :sad.gif:
But i think I'll go back to playing Kaizo now. I still have yet to 100% finish it. That includes the mastery monument. Wich I'll probably never find, like everyone else who has tried.
Actually... I just (okay, ~ an hour ago) found this :3
Growing this back to the Monument will take a pretty long time.
While I don't want to reveal it's exact location quite yet (I'll leave that revelation to Vechs' discretion), I will say that you do get a fairly good look at the room's light from elsewhere in the caverns. You just might be a little bit distracted when you get a chance to see it.
Geepers Vechs you make these maps faster than I can die in them!
Just wondering how you're going to approach fire in Canopy Carnage? I mean obviously if the player decides to burn down the place with lava or a flint & steel then it's their own fault for wrecking the map, but what about lightning? It starts fires...
Rain puts out fires.
From what I could gather from research on the topic, rain is not 100% guaranteed to put out fires. I've read things about lightning striking people's tree forts in a manner that creates a fire covered from the rain, and by the time it breaches the roof of the structure the fire is too out of control for the rain alone to put out.
I haven't done any personal testing on the matter; just want to make sure the map won't be breakable by a freak storm.
Vechs, I need you to convince me that taking the shortcut to planar warp is not a bad idea, and that I'm obviously ready for it.... I mean... I have .... uhhhh.... renewable wood!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Quote from Icksel »
They could make great test subjects for those of us racking our brain about how to thwart the nooby menace. You could call it 'anti-greif research'.
Is it considered cheating to gather wool from sheep and color it using the resources available (cactus, lapis, bones)? Or is every color actually present in the map somewhere as a reward for completing a challenge?
I don't really consider it CHEATING to colour things, but it takes a lot of fun out of exploring for the chests. After all, IMO victory monument is a secondary objective- Objective number one is enjoying yourself!
Continuing on with black desert, having an absolute blast still. Preparing to move underground after I set up a reciprocating boat elevator back to the surface. I'm absolutely loving the huge underground as well as the constantly- treacherous above ground.
One thing I'm not a fan of, however, is the huge clumps of monster spawners in single areas. The reason I don't like these isn't actually difficulty related. On the contrary it's quite a simple fix to either tunnel around or under them and take them out, or to go from above and lava surround them, torching them off as the lava recedes.
There are 2 reasons I feel these massive clump of spawners are poorer design.
1. They severely limit you in your tactics. If you come across, say, a single skeleton spawner you can always battle it with sword or bow in hand and light it up as you go through. This works with around 1 - 2 spawners, maybe 3 depending on equipment. Anything more than that, especially with either skeletons or creepers in the mix, means a frontal assault is literally suicide. You pretty much have to either make a path above and rain lava down, or dig under and take the spawners out from beneath, then pick off stragglers from a safe bunker-ish position.
Now, that may actually be your intent, for whatever reason. Thinking outside the box is good, but it does bring me to my second point.
2. It completely butchers the pacing, imho. It seems like they're intended to be a massive climactic moment in exploration. However, what happens in reality is this. You're exploring the underground, all tense and you see a skeleton or two. You start to fight then realize that they're spawning much, much faster than you can actually handle. So instead of having an epic and difficult battle that would have put your collected supplies to the test, you merely go back, make a staircase and a catwalk over it, dump lava down, losing what, half a stack of cobble?
If these massive balls of spawners were replaced by, say, one or two spawners, or even more spawners spread much more evenly throughout the land, it'd be much better for the pacing as you wouldn't constantly hit these roadblocks where you can't really continue forward, you just kinda have to wait till the lava kicks in. There's no feeling of accomplishment for destroying the spawners, and there's a lot of waiting around that, i feel, doesn't add PROPER difficulty.
---
That's just my opinion, however. They DO add difficulty, in the sense that if you manage to travel into an area with one, you're gonna be hard pressed to get out of it, but they're pretty easy to spot and, at my point of progress in black desert, feel less like a challenge and more like an annoyance.
The compilation DL where it is all maps in one file is in ZIP format :smile.gif:
(You should read the original post!)
Quote from smurfton »
Vechs, I need you to convince me that taking the shortcut to planar warp is not a bad idea, and that I'm obviously ready for it.... I mean... I have .... uhhhh.... renewable wood!
People tell me that the Planar Warp makes them want to murder kittens.
. In here, you are walking down a hill, and suddenly five mobs appear out of nowhere and want to kill you. You have to think fast to be able to get out alive (and not back away right into a cactus!)
One thing I would change about them is give them more variety. All of those I have seen so far had the same number of each mob.
That is my favorite part about the Fun Boxes. (Yes, that's what the schematic is saved as, a "Fun Box 4z 2sp 2cr 1sk").
Consider it my prototype... this was kinda the test run for how these work. I love how when you get close enough, a large group will spawn all at once, which is something I wish would happen more often in Minecraft. It gives you that "Oh **** I just got ambushed!" feeling.
Consider it my prototype... this was kinda the test run for how these work. I love how when you get close enough, a large group will spawn all at once, which is something I wish would happen more often in Minecraft. It gives you that "Oh **** I just got ambushed!" feeling.
When you get close to it?
Just wait when a creeper blows open the stone or when you start trying to get rid of it.
If that happens, let's just say that saying that you are screwed is an underexageration.
It's more like "you have just unleashed an army upon the world in a certain part of the world". THAT'S what it is.
I swear, i cannot even get close to the "fun box" after that without dieing.
And that's why I have developed "suicidal trips" hat involve me rushing with nothing but one or two tnt blocks to those places to end their mob-spawning reign.
Yes, I'm a coward. But at least i don't waste my tools/food/armor.
That is actually really interesting. Sometimes, even when the place is completely lit up (and I mean a torch every other block or so), and I break a stone block on top of one of the spawners, one mob still manages to spawn there. I am guessing it spawns before lighting is recalculated in that block, but I could be wrong.
The spider dungeon will actually never work at full efficiency, as there simply isn't enough space around it for all the spiders to physically fit into. Even if there was, the mob limit for spawners (5 mobs of the spawned type in the nearby area) will be reached way before all the spawners get a turn. Still, seeing it was quite impressive. :-)
Yeah, I know - mostly it's intended to keep as many spiders in the world as possible (and it does do that quite well.) And also to freak the player out a bit (which it also does quite well.)
Yeah, I know - mostly it's intended to keep as many spiders in the world as possible (and it does do that quite well.) And also to freak the player out a bit (which it also does quite well.)
Check out this video (Skip to 4:37):
To say how effective, and annoying, it was: I had 127 string by the time I finished with those spawners. I didn't die though, just made columns of sand to keep them at bay.
Just how TALL are those things?
and... How much wood is in any given one?
- I'm still speechless.
But..um...there is one problem-
Are all the leaf blocks close enough to a wood block so that there isn't a chain reaction that would kill off most leaf blocks in that tree if one leaf block were destroyed?
And you just also made me realize something- the forest's ground will be plain dirt, won't it :/?
Because it certainly won't be grass.
quick edit:
wait a second.... Ohhhh Vechs you evil *******, monsters will be able to spawn under those trees won't they?
- Rhetorical question
HOW do you make such hellishly difficult, yet massively addicting and fun maps?
How your maps do that cannot be processed in my brain!
In fact, I don't play normal "minecraft" as much now- your maps have almost become the new "minecraft" to me.
Well, anyways, I am currently playing Ghast ping-pong over at the ghast temple in the black desert.
I have a nice little convenient staircase in my shelter wich leads to the underground- and guess what it hit first when i was building it?
An iron-packed stalagmite! (that's what it's called, right?)!
I must have gotten about 250 iron ore .
Anyways, a little feedback:
I have noticed that your recent maps have a large shortage of quality, and fun materials like clay and pumpkins, and do not have any birch wood at all ( well, i haven't found any, at least, and i also didn't really understand how spalings worked when growing pre- beta 1.5 and after birch trees were implemented. Would they sometimes grow into a birch tree or always grow into a normal one? ).
I do realize these are challenge maps, but a little more resources like those for decoration and other purposes wouldn't hurt, right?
I think Infernal Sky is probably the easiest... Endless Deep is fairly easy too - if you die in Endless Deep, it's because you killed yourself by not paying attention to your air supply, it's not like there are any traps or even monsters you have to deal with right off the bat.
But yeah, Sky doesn't have tons of monsters spawners, unless you intentionally go into a dungeon, which are very obvious, and other than falling blocks there are no traps. So as long as you are careful, there's really no reason you should die in Sky, unless a creeper spawns on top of your house and lands on you when you go outside.
I thought about what problems a normal Minecraft map might have, and then I try to make maps that can address those problems. Minecraft is a creativity toy, so criticism relating to goals and objectives make about as much sense as asking why a sandbox doesn't have a way to win. But a lot of people want to call Minecraft a "game", and want to be able to win. So...
1) Normal Minecraft terrain is too easy- so, I make more hostile terrain.
2) Minecraft has no objectives- so, I give the player an objective to work towards.
(Other than just surviving day to day.)
... and that's pretty much it.
Shortage of quality? :sad.gif: I really thought I was getting better at map making... well, there's always new stuff to learn I guess!
Well, when I made all of my maps, it was before Beta 1.5... I thought this would be kind of obvious, but birch and pine saplings did not exist - the only way to see birch and pine trees was to have them pre-generated in a Minecraft world. You could never grow a birch or pine tree - only cut down existing ones, and they used to drop normal (oak?) saplings. Let's think in Beta 1.3 and 1.4 terms here-- I could have copied and pasted a birch tree from a normal Minecraft map, but why would I bother doing that when you are just going to cut it down and get a normal sapling, and grow normal trees from that point on? That seems fairly pointless to me...
A few people have reported (on Sea of Flame, for example) logging in after Beta 1.5 and find that their planted oak sapling had somehow turned into a birch sapling... so, I have no idea how that happens, but huzzah! for them. :smile.gif:
(Birch are actually my favorite trees, mostly for practical reasons-- they won't grow into giant trees that are a pain to cut down, and they seem to grow slightly faster than oak.)
As for stuff like clay and pumpkins... clay is actually in a lot of my maps, you just have to find it. There is a ton of clay in Kaizo Caverns (Hint - clay is wet.)
I'm actually not sure if it's in The Black Desert or not... if it's not, you'll just have to forgive me. When I make a map from scratch, I sometimes forget about the novelty blocks.
It's like... a giant checklist I have to go through each time.
Stone? Duh.
Iron? Check.
Coal? Check.
Gravel? Check.
Sand? Check.
Gold? Check.
Diamond? Check.
Umm...
Did I hide the grass, dirt, and water? Yes, check.
Let's see now...
Lava? Check.
Sandstone? Check.
Cactus? Check.
etc...
Hell, I forgot redstone ore in the first version of Infernal Sky... Things like pumpkins, reeds, clay, lapis lazulli, I'll sometimes forget one.
I know. I'm going to have to make a chest schematic for MCedit, called "Novelty Crap" and fill it with pumpkins, lapis, and clay, and always remember to stick it somewhere on every map I make. lol
Seriously though, that's actually not a bad idea... :biggrin.gif:
Oh yeah! And snow balls, saddles, green disc, yellow disc, slime balls, and just to mess with peoples heads, sandstone slabs and leaf blocks.
Yes, LEAF BLOCKS, where is your god now?
Niiice man.
I remember working on a realistic-type house, and suddenly hearing what sounded like a million creeper footsteps outside :tongue.gif: (at least at the time). Let it rain.
Nononono! Looks like you misunderstood me. The quality in your maps is very good.
What i MEANT to say was "Quality and fun materials", not that the there is a lack of quality in your maps.
But anyways, you could update your maps to include birch and pine tree spalings in chests, or just do so from now on in your maps.
But i think I'll go back to playing Kaizo now. I still have yet to 100% finish it. That includes the mastery monument. Wich I'll probably never find, like everyone else who has tried.
EDIT: also, i wasn't as lucky as everyone else: instead of birch spalings, my saplings turned into pine saplings :sad.gif:
Actually... I just (okay, ~ an hour ago) found this :3
http://twitpic.com/4om8hr/full
Growing this back to the Monument will take a pretty long time.
While I don't want to reveal it's exact location quite yet (I'll leave that revelation to Vechs' discretion), I will say that you do get a fairly good look at the room's light from elsewhere in the caverns. You just might be a little bit distracted when you get a chance to see it.
From what I could gather from research on the topic, rain is not 100% guaranteed to put out fires. I've read things about lightning striking people's tree forts in a manner that creates a fire covered from the rain, and by the time it breaches the roof of the structure the fire is too out of control for the rain alone to put out.
I haven't done any personal testing on the matter; just want to make sure the map won't be breakable by a freak storm.
I don't really consider it CHEATING to colour things, but it takes a lot of fun out of exploring for the chests. After all, IMO victory monument is a secondary objective- Objective number one is enjoying yourself!
Continuing on with black desert, having an absolute blast still. Preparing to move underground after I set up a reciprocating boat elevator back to the surface. I'm absolutely loving the huge underground as well as the constantly- treacherous above ground.
One thing I'm not a fan of, however, is the huge clumps of monster spawners in single areas. The reason I don't like these isn't actually difficulty related. On the contrary it's quite a simple fix to either tunnel around or under them and take them out, or to go from above and lava surround them, torching them off as the lava recedes.
There are 2 reasons I feel these massive clump of spawners are poorer design.
1. They severely limit you in your tactics. If you come across, say, a single skeleton spawner you can always battle it with sword or bow in hand and light it up as you go through. This works with around 1 - 2 spawners, maybe 3 depending on equipment. Anything more than that, especially with either skeletons or creepers in the mix, means a frontal assault is literally suicide. You pretty much have to either make a path above and rain lava down, or dig under and take the spawners out from beneath, then pick off stragglers from a safe bunker-ish position.
Now, that may actually be your intent, for whatever reason. Thinking outside the box is good, but it does bring me to my second point.
2. It completely butchers the pacing, imho. It seems like they're intended to be a massive climactic moment in exploration. However, what happens in reality is this. You're exploring the underground, all tense and you see a skeleton or two. You start to fight then realize that they're spawning much, much faster than you can actually handle. So instead of having an epic and difficult battle that would have put your collected supplies to the test, you merely go back, make a staircase and a catwalk over it, dump lava down, losing what, half a stack of cobble?
If these massive balls of spawners were replaced by, say, one or two spawners, or even more spawners spread much more evenly throughout the land, it'd be much better for the pacing as you wouldn't constantly hit these roadblocks where you can't really continue forward, you just kinda have to wait till the lava kicks in. There's no feeling of accomplishment for destroying the spawners, and there's a lot of waiting around that, i feel, doesn't add PROPER difficulty.
---
That's just my opinion, however. They DO add difficulty, in the sense that if you manage to travel into an area with one, you're gonna be hard pressed to get out of it, but they're pretty easy to spot and, at my point of progress in black desert, feel less like a challenge and more like an annoyance.
I think i just know where it is.
CRAP FK@!#!@%!$! CREEPER!
O_o i did not know that, now i do :smile.gif:
The compilation DL where it is all maps in one file is in ZIP format :smile.gif:
(You should read the original post!)
People tell me that the Planar Warp makes them want to murder kittens.
That is my favorite part about the Fun Boxes. (Yes, that's what the schematic is saved as, a "Fun Box 4z 2sp 2cr 1sk").
Consider it my prototype... this was kinda the test run for how these work. I love how when you get close enough, a large group will spawn all at once, which is something I wish would happen more often in Minecraft. It gives you that "Oh **** I just got ambushed!" feeling.
More variety is coming. :smile.gif:
When you get close to it?
Just wait when a creeper blows open the stone or when you start trying to get rid of it.
If that happens, let's just say that saying that you are screwed is an underexageration.
It's more like "you have just unleashed an army upon the world in a certain part of the world". THAT'S what it is.
I swear, i cannot even get close to the "fun box" after that without dieing.
And that's why I have developed "suicidal trips" hat involve me rushing with nothing but one or two tnt blocks to those places to end their mob-spawning reign.
Yes, I'm a coward. But at least i don't waste my tools/food/armor.
Yeah, I know - mostly it's intended to keep as many spiders in the world as possible (and it does do that quite well.) And also to freak the player out a bit (which it also does quite well.)
Check out this video (Skip to 4:37):
To say how effective, and annoying, it was: I had 127 string by the time I finished with those spawners. I didn't die though, just made columns of sand to keep them at bay.
Just how TALL are those things?
and... How much wood is in any given one?
- I'm still speechless.
But..um...there is one problem-
Are all the leaf blocks close enough to a wood block so that there isn't a chain reaction that would kill off most leaf blocks in that tree if one leaf block were destroyed?
And you just also made me realize something- the forest's ground will be plain dirt, won't it :/?
Because it certainly won't be grass.
quick edit:
wait a second.... Ohhhh Vechs you evil *******, monsters will be able to spawn under those trees won't they?
- Rhetorical question