I'll guess it depends on how the game is used in education.
If the teacher can work around the game mechanics that doesn't fit, then Minecraft could be a good teaching tool. If you are teaching geometry then Minecraft would be great as it's really easy to show things like how many cubes you need to build a 3x3x3 block, or something like that.
But if you try to use Minecraft as a way to teach kids about structural strength, then the kids will more likely than not be playing more than they are learning since Minecraft is not a good simulation of those things.
My fear is that a lot of teachers use Minecraft just like a gimmick, just because it's fun to use a popular video-game in school. But if it's done right, and the teacher use a different game when teaching other things, then Minecraft could just as well be a learning tool.
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Seems like it.
It's a shame as I was hoping for some fun survival desert challenge with desert villages and desert temples.
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I find that very hard to believe. Both the players in the screenshot have full iron armor on. So they have been mining for a while, do you really suggest that after getting enough iron to make a full sett of armor they would not have mined deep enough to find redstone?
That is one thing, but the one taking the screenshot also have a full sett of iron armor on (I can tell by the 7,5 armor icons). In addition that player have a diamond sword (so that player have been below level 16 and thus deep enough to find redstone).
The player also have an enchanted bow. To do this you need an enchantment table. To craft that you either need to find lava and have a diamond pickaxe (once again proving that the player have been mining deep), or the player have been raiding a lot of village chest in order to find obsidian blocks. The mining of obsidian with an diamond pickaxe is the most likely alternative.
So your claim that none of you have been able to obtain the single piece of redstone that is required to craft a normal piston is very hard to believe. It's a lot easier to find redstone than it is to find diamonds.
And even in the very unlikely case that none of you for some strange reason have not found even a single ore of redstone to craft the piston, the piston is still easily acquired by scavenging it from a jungle temple.
Bottom line is that even if the logs are un-edited and it is true that no one have spawned in the diamond ore blocks, there are multiple other ways to place the diamond ore blocks there by only using legit features that the game provides.
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Personally I would solve this by making dungeons spawn without chest. Then by breaking the monster spawner it would turn into a normal chest containing the normal goodies that can be found in dungeon chests.
This way the player would need to make the choice between making a XP farm for unlimited XP, or to destroy the spawner in order to have a chance to acquire the rare items that can only be found in dungeon chests (at this point I think those items would be the saddle and/or records).
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You would only need one single piston.
All you would have to do is to find a diamond ore, place a piston below it and activate it with a redstone torch, remove the piston and move it up one block and repeat. After the ore is moved to the surface you can simply fill up the shaft with smooth stone.
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Just because no one have cheated their way to diamond ore blocks doesn't mean this isn't man made. There are two ways to move the ores, either with silk touch that would be the simplest way, or by using pistons to push the ore block upwards.
Using pistons is time consuming but very easy to do.
How do you know no one had silk touch? It's not that hard to get.
If this is a fake then surely the person who did this would lie about not having a silk touch pickaxe.
That being said, I do like the idea of having a word where the odd diamond or gold ore could spawn in rivers and such. Much like how clay generates with the sand and water combination, but of course the diamond and ore spawn should be much rarer that the clay generation.
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If you make the base underground make sure you don't build it too deep. Diamond miners will strip mine from level 15 and down. You don't want anyone finding your base because they are strip mining so build it a bit higher up.
You should also make the base tall, not wide. People will mostly be digging/mining downwards, they rarely mine horizontally unless they are strip mining. So by making your base more like a tower with multiple floors instead of a huge room you should be harder to find.
You also need to have a good way to enter/exit the base. Most bases are found because people figure out where your entrance is.
It's often very handy to smelt cobblestone into smoothstone and keep a stack of that in your inventory. It's nice to use for sealing of entrances without them sticking out. Dirt and gravel will also work, but not as well.
Another alternative would be to make your base easy to defend instead. Skybases is perfect for this. If you make the entrance in the form of a water pillar you can block of the entrance with a furnace. Furnaces is very hard to break and very cheap to build. They are especially hard to break if the player will need to break it while swimming in the water pillar.
The furnace trick can be used in ordinary underground bases as well, just line the inside of the base with furnaces to make it harder for the enemy to break in. Having a stack of furnaces in your inventory is also very effective to loose anyone chasing you as they are a pain to break if you block of the attacker with them.
The enemy might pillar their way up, but if you are online you should be able to spot them early so that you can stop them. The simplest way is to knock them of the pillar with an arrow, but dropping sand/gravel, TNT, lava or even water will work as well.
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I do really love the cooking function, most other cow cookers I have seen require some complicated lava blade build that is often quite tricky to get just right.
The only thing I see that you might want to change if you are to make a new version of this farm is to add water.
You could use pistons that release two water source blocks inside the pen (one water block creating a current flushing the cows down the slaughter shaft and the other one pushing the cows to a safe corner so that you can continue to breed them).
In the same way you can have a water current that flushes the meat and leather to a another pick up location, although this might be unnecessary.
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Zombies are just like human players, they are curious to see if you have built anything neat inside your house.
But that being said, I too find it a bit strange that zombies are drawn towards wooden doors.
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You are mixing your cards here a bit.
To not craft wooden tools is not a survival tips, it's just a tips to use your time a bit more effective on day 1.
The same goes for the tip about diamonds. If your goal is to survive then your first priority should always be a diamond sword and full set of diamond armor. You don't need the ability to mine obsidian in order to survive, but you will need to be able to protect yourself effectively against hostile mobs if you want to survive.
Your survival tips are a mix of actual survival tips (making a shelter and securing food early on) and gameplay tips that might be useful for a player that want to quickly get a lot of resources.
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Yes feather falling is really nice when fighting the ender dragon, it's not all of the ender crystals that can easily be knocked off with an arrow due to some very high pillars that sometimes appears.
But then again if you have feather falling boots then you are well prepared. If you prepare before going into the ender then the fight against the ender dragon is really easy.
I would prefer if there where fewer ender crystals on pillars that are only half of the current hight and instead have a much more powerful enderdragon.
Right now I'm much more afraid of looking at an enderman (without a pumpkin helmet) than I am afraid of a charge from the ender dragon.
That is just not right.
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It's not easy to get on top of the pillars to destroy the thingy before the enderdragon comes to knock you down. Pretty much all the damage I have taken during the enderdragon fight is from falldamage.
Water helps, but I often find myself being knocked out of the water stream as well.
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Right now it doesn't take much preparation to prevent you from dying. In my experience most deaths happens during the first day/night cycle. After you have your dirt house and a few torches you are pretty much safe from harm as you never need to expose yourself to any harm again.
Sure, cave exploration might still get you killed by a creeping falling down on you from a unlit cave above you, but if you play it careful you can avoid that.
I'm thinking that it might be more fun if you would get attacked by a more coordinated hostile force? Maybe if you had a small army of creepers attacking you every few nights this would force the player to build thick walls that the creepers can not blast their way through. Living in a simple dirt hut would get you killed as the creepers would have no problem blasting their way into your house. The next morning the player would have to repair and/or improve the wall before the next attack.
A gameplay like this would be devastating for anyone playing minecraft to build pretty things as much of your work would be destroyed on a regular basis, but it would make the survival challenge quite a bit harder.
What I'm missing in minecraft is a reason to build better things, why upgrade the dirt house to a wood house if nothing can destroy the dirt? Why bother with a stone or brick house? Why would you need to end up with a huge castle made out of obsidian?
The zombies ability to break wood doors have given a reason to use iron doors, the only problem is that you can just as easily use the wooden door trick to make it unbreakable, or you can use a fence gate instead of the door to reach the same degree of protection but at a lower price.
Just a simple thing like having the endermen needing to mine the blocks they move like the player would improve the gameplay a lot. An enderman could then easily re-arrange your whole dirt house in one night. To prevent this you could use more sturdy blocks so that the enderman would use a much longer time for each block he moves.
So to sum it up, what if the enemies had become smarter and smarter as time goes on in minecraft?
The timeline might look something like this:
Day 3: zombies starts breaking wood doors
Day 7: Skeletons will shot flaming arrows at you so you better be careful about using flammable materials
Day 14: Creepers starts exploding as close to you as possible if they can find a path towards you, time for the player to start building thicker walls of blast resisting materials
Day 30: Endermen starts to try to tear your walls down block by block
Day 60: Silverfish will start breaking into your chests stealing a random piece of the inventory
and so on
This way the player would need to constantly work on building defenses and possible traps in order to survive.
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The glitch here is that you can close the trapdoor while the player occupy the same space, not that you are moved to the highest spot with enough room to not suffocate.
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This method will both give you a quick start since you will have plenty of wood and it will make your tree quite different from all the surrounding trees ensuring you never use any part of the wrong tree.