Minecraft Forums

I think they should stay as they are. They are really only useful for compact storage of ingots or gems (except for lightstone and gold) and not as building materials.

Gold blocks are high priced when it comes to making golden apples, and I have not yet found a red apple to make one with. And besides, porkchops are a much more easily obtained source of food.

Lightstone definitely has a high cost to make one block that can be placed - you need 9 blocks of the dust, and breaking one only yields a single item of dust back again. Plus it involves going to the Nether and risking life with ghasts, lava and other hazards around, and much of it is out of easy reach, or in spots where it would fall into lava or some other inaccessible place.

Jumping into lava. I didn't mean to - I was trying to jump onto an adjacent cobblestone block to collect some of it in a bucket when I went too far. Then I seemed to be stuck as I backed out the wrong direction. The water did not help, as it landed behind me.

The closest thing to ragequitting I've ever done involved the chunk reversion glitch and a trip to the Nether.

After building the portal, I decided to venture into the Nether twice (on Peaceful, so there were no ghasts or zombie pigmen) to see if there was an easy way to get to one of the lava lakes to harvest some of it in buckets to make obsidian. I didn't see much that was nearby or easily reachable, so after getting some netherstone and some lightstone that was only a few blocks above me, I went back to the portal. I then went back into the Nether one more time to explore it a bit.

When I came back, the entire SW corner of my house (about 6x8 blocks) had completely disappeared, as well as major sections of two of my minecart lines. In disgust, I quit the game, though I didn't delete the world. I then ran NBT Forge and rebuilt everything that the chunk reversion glitch had destroyed during my trip to the Nether (which it seems the game treats as one enormous cave). I went back into the game, destroyed and dismantled the portal, and put all the obsidian back in my ore vault never intending to return to the Nether again.

I hope boosters are kept in the game, or at least some equivalent if they are removed.

On my first three minecart lines, I built them to use powered minecarts. I have found them to be slow and a waste of valuable coal vs. boosters, so I converted them to booster-driven only. I have since built a fourth minecart line and am building a fifth right now. Both are also booster-driven only.

I used to keep one minecart on the tracks, but would find sometimes that it would have moved by itself and gotten boosted some 20 - 30 blocks or so. So I put chests in every minecart station, and store the minecart that is to run on the main tracks until I need to use it.

Making a boat can be really helpful in reaching clay that may be fairly distant from where you are at. I did this and set off at the edge of a body of water beyond a desert biome to the west of my house. I had to go a good 300 - 400 blocks to the west to find some clay, and after 4 game days, I had enough to completely redo the outer wall around my house, which had originally been done as a fence with 2 rows of cobblestones on top. And I still have 132 bricks left to spare;

I have a 3 block high wall around my entire house, except on the north side where there's a mountain. I have a 2nd floor back porch there, and a 4 block high wall at the back to keep aggressive mobs out. In additiion, the whole area is well lit so they can't spawn anywhere near there.

The wall was 2 blocks high until a creeper got on the inside. I shot it before it could hiss and detonate, however. The only mobs that get in from time to time now are chickens.

I also have more than one way to exit my house. I can climb to the top of the mob drowning trap and jump down as there is a hole in the center leading to ladders. There is also a door nearby and another one at my wheat farm. And the obsidian farm also has a door (but no windows so I usually don't use it as I cannot tell what might be nearby).

Then of course I shoot any on sight. And often if they approach the front door, I can get them from the front balcony.

Creeper-proof the front of your house with it.

Obsidian also makes an excellent base material for a TNT trap. It resists explosions quite well.

I must count myself among the lucky ones. I haven't had my account hacked yet. I only play single player, and I have a relatively strong password, 8 characters, but letters and numbers, randomly generated. There are 2,821,109,907,456 combinations for a password that length. I doubt something like that is going to get brute forced. Plus, it is only used for Minecraft.net, and only locally through the game.

The primary reason this might be happening is due to poor password security.

1) Don't respond to phishing emails or bogus webpages that ask for your user name and password. An example of the latter I seem to recall was posted here in one of the forums several days ago.

2) Choose a strong (at least 6 characters), preferably randomly generated password. Even with that, there are 2,176,782,336 combinations, and brute forcing it is going to be nearly impossible.

3) Don't use the same password on more than one site. This not only applies to Minecraft.net, SMP servers and the forums, but any site. You're just asking for trouble if you do so.

I have a few creeper stories. After spending some time mining on Peaceful, I come back to my house just before sunset and set the difficulty on Easy. There were almost no passive mobs around, which meant that more of the aggressive ones could spawn. The following morning I went out creeper hunting with my bow. I encountered a total of 8 of them. One fell into my drowning trap, while 6 I got sulphur from (a total of 13 pieces including the one that drowned). I tried killing the 8th with my sword, but he hissed at me and detonated. I only lost half a heart and one shirt, but he blew a hole in the ground. Fortunately, this was nowhere near my house.

A second creeper encounter was at the front door of the outer wall around my house. It blew out some bricks as well as a switch and an iron door.

There was another one that hissed and detonated not too far from the 2nd one. It didn't do any damage to my outer wall, but it did take out the bottom two logs of a tree in my front yard. I chopped it down, removed the leaves and planted a sapling there.

I had another creeper encounter that did surprisingly little damage. This one was at the door to the shaft up to the top of the floating island on the east side of the house. It blew off the door, which I was able to recover as a resource, and destroyed the cobblestone block below it, but did no other damage, not even to the tree that was right behind it.

I have seen this several times on my map. While they aren't very common, they occur often enough that you'll find at least one while playing.

It's 8 in a single vein, unless you edit the map to make more, or by some rare chance more than one vein intersects.

Gold and Redstone also have a maximum of 8 blocks to a vein, and I think Iron is that way as well.

Diamonds are often found near lava, so bring a water bucket whenever you are mining for them. They are also associated with lava IRL. Diamonds are most commonly found in Kimberlite pipes, which are the remains of ancient volcanoes.

Peaceful mode is useful when you are trying to get started. Then once you get established, you can change it back to one of the other modes.

I use it when exploring, mining or doing any major constructon so I won't be bothered by these guys or slimes . Then I don't have to carry any weapons, leaving more room for ore or whatever I'm building with.

When I'm staying around the house, then I will change it, usually to Easy (more mobs, but weaker).

On the few times I'm exploring in Easy mode, and I happen to get caught far away from any shelter, or get lost, I will switch back to peaceful for a while.

Playing on Peaceful does have some drawbacks. First of all, you'll need to find mob spawner dungeons to get string and gunpowder, and you won't get as much of the latter. And since your hearts regenerate, you'll accumulate food. I have two double chests full of cooked porkchops, fish and bread. One is completely full, the other has about 6 slots left.

I wonder if this is the chunk reversion glitch at work? I have had that bug occur numerous times, most recently after a trip to the Nether and back. I found 6x8 block area on the SW corner of my house gone, and the original terrain that was there restored. This was worse damage than any could have ever done.

I hadn't been backing up my saves at that point, and said to hell with it and opened NBTForge and rebuilt the missing part.

I have also had this bug erase parts of minecart lines I had built, as well as filling in areas I've mined.

In looking for a backup utility, I came upon Minecraft Save Manager. On the same Sourceforge page is a related project called MineTime. It also backs up save files, but allows you to in effect go back in time by reverting to a previous save.