Started digging.

As I had said in my last post, I planned to make a lot of progress on the new map this weekend. Here are screenshots from the digging I got done on Saturday. At this point the mineshaft is completed and I’ve started work on the hub building at the top, so the next update will include some screens from that.

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As I had mentioned in my last Minecraft post, the map on my private server was corrupted during the conversion process in Beta 1.3. After mentioning it to the friends I play with, it was decided that we would simply start up a new map. And so as promised, here is my first post on the new world.

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Minecraft Beta 1.3 : The Word of Notch.

This update is awesome. I haven’t gotten to try the new blocks yet, or the bed, but the new lighting is great. It is apparently the “better light” mod just integrated into the official release. It’s kind of great to know that Notch isn’t afraid to integrate a modder’s code if it already does something he wants to include, with credit to the original author of course. The other major back-end change is the map format. And the format is way more reasonable. I’ve never seen any program use as many files to store a game as the old Minecraft save format.

Speaking of saving, finally the single-player worlds are limited to 5 static slots! You can have as many worlds as you like, and you can actually name them so you can keep them straight! This is great, since I enjoy going back to old worlds and seeing how I was building and doing back then.

Now, some slightly bad news on my own Minecraft front. It seem the map conversion process from the old format to the new format isn’t exactly rock solid. The world that my “tour – part 1” is taken from was converted, but it appears that numerous chunks were somehow lost in the conversion. When the world was loaded, those chunks were regenerated as new, replacing existing portions of the map with new (blank) chunks with sheer cliffs going up 30 blocks higher than the surrounding terrain. A few constructions were partially lost in this event.  So I don’t know if I’ll be playing that world anymore, kind of depends on how the other people who play on the server feel. This means I likely wont get to finish the tour of that world, but if a new map is started I shall do my best to keep regular updates about it, so you’d get to see a much more “from the beginning” look at construction.

As always, thanks for reading, enjoy your crafting!