Second, I've been absorbed in the released documentation of the SCP Foundation for half a week. I know it's not reflective of a real project (obviously), but it's in turns unnerving, disturbing, horrifying, and mysterious. Also, occasionally, it's funny, depending on which object of deep mystery is under discussion. If you like creeping yourself out, I highly recommend it, but be warned, it's like TV Tropes--nearly everything leads to something else, which can lead in turn to other things.
Some of those things have videos and images attached.
Some of those videos and images you really don't want to see.
And we move on to CaleCraft part IV!
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
And yes, more baby cows. I had to. Also, note the door on the cow pen--that was added a couple of days in to keep the cows from clogging the small area where the ladder was.
Back to the first week of CaleCraft. This is how it went for new users for a while: rez in, find oneself in a patch of desert next to plains, run for cover (if at night); usually die, because there were no tools and no supplies.
Several of us undertook to do several things. Some rebuilt the little emergency hovel that was next to the spawn point; others started filling chests with bits of coal, arrows, foodstuffs, and tools. This was of course made more problematic by two things: first, someone had decided to outline the little shack with cacti. Good for defense, bad for people moving around the enclosure building things.
Second, creepers seemed inordinately attracted to construction in that part of the desert. I lost count of how many times we had to rebuild the little hovel before we gave up.
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
This is an image, of course, of after we all gave up and several residents banded together to fully enclose the spawn point in solid stone. In the left of this image, you can see both the near wall of that enclosure, and the original wooden shack. (Just look for the tall jungle tree seemingly growing from the roof of the smaller wooden structure; you'll find it.)
To the right of that, near the center of the picture, is the initial mushroom tree farm; and to the right of that is the village itself, becoming suitably reinforced after a week or so of construction.
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
One of the things I've really liked about the CaleCraft server is within days of setting up the main village, on the widest side of the building declared the community center, was declared the announcement board for the community. Announcements stay up as long as they're needed; a sign can go up for an event happening over a couple hours, or for an ongoing build development (like the skeleton spawner build mentioned here).
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
I wish I'd had a better picture for this...there is no picture I have, of the six I took, that conveys the utter majesty of the vine growth here. To the west of the village is the first skeleton spawner, and just south of that building is a patch of intense jungle that hides, at its center, a cave system and a partial ravine. Which gives a thin earthen cover over stone, with growing jungle trees, and vines that have grown from that height. And they go alllll the way down to the stone floor. It's sweepingly beautiful.
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
By the second week, things had started falling into pattern. The village was being widened to take over part of the desert; there were two active skeleton spawners to harvest XP, and a third in the making; we'd established a mountain base; roads were being laid down, fences were going up.
But I kept hearing of people dying on their way to the western spawner. One night, I decided to fix that, but by the end of the project I ended up spending about three days, start to finish (RL, not Minecraft time). Between baking off the glass, harvesting more sand, baking off cobble for clean stone, and making stone bricks, building the tunnel turned out to be the easy part.
The fact that I was being nearly constantly watched while I built was more unnerving. Remember, monsters in Minecraft can't attack you through glass, but they do react to you. And to set up and maintain this project, I'd pretty much started blocking in either side with sand so I could build through the nights. What did I end up creating on these nights? Monster TV.
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
There are now two skeletons and a creeper pacing me as I build. How this went: since I was partially carving through a sand dune on one side, I piled sand on the other side to carve through, then spent the ten minutes of each day creating the roof of stone bricks. When the sun began going down, I'd hurriedly block myself in with sand, and then fill in stone bricks and glass panes as I moved down the corridor.
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
At this point, I was being stalked by three skeleton archers and two creepers. Unnerving? Yeah. Really unnerving. And it never stopped--if I was visible through glass, at night, I had monsters around me (because there was glass on both sides) watching my every move.
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| (from the Minecrafting album) |
And now the Doubledead Twins are dogging me. I think after the first night, all the monsters figured out that being unnerved would lead to mistakes. And when I make a mistake when a skeleton is watching, that means he shoots me, and mass hysteria ensues. I was highly entertaining Monster TV for several Minecraft nights.
More to come (gods, so much more...I'm editing severely, but seriously, at this point I've still got 1,520 pictures to sort through)!
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