THE QUESTION (YOU MIGHT RECALL MY MENTIONING IT A MOMENT AGO)
A little while ago (relative to me writing this), Markus "Notch" Persson put forth a strangely self-fulfilling question:
As you will soon see, I gave this way too much thought.
Loaded questions have a funny way of guiding us in our thinking. If someone were to ask, "Do you hate it when creepers barge in and blow up your house, which you spent hours working on?", most of us would nod in agreement. Now, what if we took that question, and changed up the wording a little bit? "Don't you hate it when you forget to put down enough torches for lighting, and a monster spawns in your house?" is a very different choice of words for what is essentially the same situation. You still have a creeper-sized hole in the ground where your house used to be, but the tone is completely different. The first question aggressively blames the creeper, and the second one places mild fault on the builder instead. So, I suppose there is some benefit in being able to identify loaded questions to avoid entire articles being extracted from a simple yes or no after all.
Of course, we're not done here. Let's do some science, courtesy of MinecraftTeachr, Dan200, E-Line Media, the California Institute of Technology, and last but not least, some avid supporters at Google!
No, I'm not putting a link for Google here. We all know where it is already.
QUANTUM MINECRAFT OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE SCIENCE
If you haven't heard recently, Google is seriously considering the current generation of Minecraft players for tomorrow's quantum computer scientists. "How is that even possible," I ask myself, noticing no one else in the room? It goes a little something like this:
SCIENCE. This stuff isn't for the faint of heart, so skip to the next section if you aren't ready to have your MIND BLOWN. I'm not even kidding here.
qCraft is, in short, a mod that brings the principles of quantum physics to the world of Minecraft. One example might include a block that changes what type of block it is, depending on whether you're looking at it or not, whether you're looking at it from a specific angle, or based on seemingly random and arbitrary criteria you have zero control over. MinecraftTeachr gives us a pretty good summary of the mod:
We’ve done our best to create something that we hope will be fun to experiment, build and play with while also introducing players to the fascinating and (in the context of the macro-world we inhabit) counter intuitive way that quantum entities interact.
qCraft is not a simulation of quantum physics ... but it does provide ‘analogies’ that attempt to show how quantum behaviors are different from everyday experience.
In addition to individual players, we hope that parents and educators who want to introduce quantum physics concepts to curious kids will find it useful.
Honestly, all the stuff this mod does cannot possibly be summarized here. If you like exploring new and largely untapped areas of quantum physics, this mod will keep you busy for months, if not more. I've had a chance to mess around in it a bit for the last few days (mostly making really cruel creeper-filled traps that activate when my friends looked at them), and it seems like I trip over new discoveries with increasing frequency, often when I'm not looking for them. (Yes yes, I know...bad joke.)
If you want to know more about the mod, you can check out qCraft on their site, and play it yourself. It can be played either stand-alone, through the FTB Unleashed modpack, through Tekkit, or through Hexxit. Keep in mind, if you want to play it as a stand-alone mod, you will need Forge 1.5.2 installed.
Good luck, and don't break the universe!
THIS WEEK IS ABOUT YOU
It seems like no two people can agree on this; we all love Minecraft, but we don't all love it for the same reasons. Some of us play it heavily modded, treating the game like a foundation for other mediums. Others use it to create vast works of art - architectural, pixelated, and otherwise - and still others dive into the game exactly as Survival gives it to us, with all the First Nights and creeper ambushes that come with that. Even in this respect, not everyone agrees on whether the game is best played alone, with a small group of friends, or with a massive group of players.
There ultimately is no "right" way to play the game, and that is part of the beauty of it. I know how I like to play Minecraft, but what about you? What are your favorite game modes? Do you play alone, or with friends? Vanilla, or modded? Maybe you play in a completely unexpected way that no one considered, coming up with challenges and entertainment that no one else has thought up yet?
Let's hear about how you play the game!
Guess what? If infinite height were to be added to the game, then one side effect of this is that lag will immensely decrease. Like, you'll more than double your FPS on average.
Cubic Chunks will allow you to go up to 30 million blocks into the air.
If you support adding endless height to the game, click my signature.
Happy Sachurday!
Seeing what used to be one of my first Minecraft experiences grow into something playable even today warms my heart in ways.
I prefer to play solo so I don't have to worry about other people possibly destroying my buildings or the server going down permanently which results in me loosing all the hours of work I spent on the various projects I do there. With the ability to do LAN servers I will sometimes play with my friends when they come on over if they want to, building together is quite a bit of fun. I usually just pass along my 'mods' folder to them since they all at least partially mod their games and have Forge already.
As far as the style of play, I think it's pretty average. I go survival and try to build, to make the land my own and build giant cities that take me hundreds of hours to build. Each city is in its own style from modern to Victorian to medieval. I also keep a creative world where I build the things first so I don't screw up, and toggle between the two but the creative is strictly for experimenting and making sure I know how to build something before I go at it in survival.
That's nothing. I play with 40, and that's about a third of what i consider fun.
Thats like me, except my noob days where ultra accelerated compared, i started in beta 1.7.3, just kept and kept learned until i was basically out of the noob stage, when i hit beta 1.8 (i was still kinda noob with potions and enchanting(added in 1.8 adventure update) , but i had read about them before and knew enough to not be a noob) i finally got my stuff together to mod when i saw IC^2/buildcraft, failed a couple of times, until i installed the zeppelin mod as "proof of concept that i can mod". After i was able to finally install IC^2, and this was with out forge, when you had to install 4 things in the right order and THEN install IC^2, i played that (spawned in the newly redone swamp) and eventually installed buildcraft. I remember just being so happy when i went into a cave and i was like "ITS A RAINBOW OF ORES" , good times......good times........ i still play some vanilla and like to do plugins, mod packs, and other stuff. speaking of which, how do you get so many mod working? i have one and i can only get 40ish mods before it crashes. i have i hi end computer too (can run a server and play FTB on the same computer) , maybe the mods are just really resource intensive? (build craft, biomes o plenty, hi lands, aether, ext)
-Hawks
I play Minecraft in what is likely a weird way to most people. I play single player, as a lone gamer working on my own skills. I start off with the typical survival method, and I always have it on hard for the thrill of the challenge. I continue as most survivalists would by building temporary shelters and obtaining the first materials and building up. However, The end to which I play the game is a much farther and less definite one than what Mojang has directly supplied us with. I try to make houses with comfy looking rooms and inviting atmospheres inside, and working traps and item harvesters around the outside, in addition to farms, including tree farms and crops. I play the game to master all aspects of survival in said game, which in this case, is mobs, blocks and designs. I try to have traps and harvesters to master mobs, which means I need to prove my ability of physically and mentally outsmarting them so they are incapable of attacking me while I collect their loot and spoils. I master the blocks by exploring the farthest reaches of the Minecraft universe in search of the most illusive materials with which I make decorations and legacy pieces to prove to myself I have "mastered" the exploration and mining aspect of the game. I do this in the same way other people would generally play the game, with a small mine as a start, then a larger mine, then a final mine that I begin under my house for ease of access. Once I have "mastered" the overworld by obtaining the rarest minerals, I move on to the Nether, and collect Netherrack, Quartz and Nether Brick with which I make more decoration in my house as more proof of my mastery of Minecraft's survival mode. I master the design, the most creative aspect of Minecraft, by trying to make the best houses possible. This connects to the blocks and exploration aspect, as I need materials of all kinds to make such a build, but this poses it's own challenge as it is something requiring completely different skills from the other two. I try to make the most amazing builds I possibly can to prove to myself that I can master the art of creativity. This is what always keeps the game interesting in the end because it can always be built upon, and anything I build can always be improved, and better things can always be made.
For me, I see Minecraft as three aspects given to us be Mojang. I play Minecraft as a challenge to master all three aspects to prove my abilities to myself, as a sense of achievement. And the better I get at each, the more I accomplish and the more I prove to myself, thus the better I think of myself as a gamer.
Lol taters
Yep!
Minecraft isn't for implementing super-realistic scientific features into the game itself. There will certainly be other scientific mods that Google will support, though, especially after seeing qCraft's potential. I imagine some super-advanced TerraFirmaCraft iteration might catch their eye someday (depending on how realistic it is). Mods that change animal behavior, and mods that add realistic blocks that do what they would do in real life are ones that I certainly look forwaard to (despite my computer, which is not really suitable for vanilla in some cases).