Miranda tour 2
It's pretty surreal having whole game worlds archived on a hard drive, lost in limbo. Continuing on with my tour of my Miranda world, here are some neat highlights:
Episode M3: Mega-tree fun house
Yes I covered this in my treeweaving tutorial, but this is more of a fun run through the scenery.
Episode M4: Alphanova village
This was our main hub of operations for a long time. This should be a real retro memory for current gamers. Way back when Minecraft announced they were going to generate villages in the world, this is the first one we found. Before there were villagers. And even after we moved in and took over we left most of the original town intact. The name is funny: fermius discovered the town, and I was the admin ... and in the real world, we both used to edit small press sci-fi magazines: his was Stellanova and mine was Alpha Adventures (later Alphadrive CD-Rom zine). We often talked about doing a new zine, merged, with a name like Alphanova. So now as a kind of gag, we name the first town in our world Alphanova. Works even from pure semantics: "Alpha" = first, "nova" = new.
One thing about settlements in Minecraft: a few players think they can do everything in one giant room with a gazillion chests. To me that's just living in a box. I like to setup towns (or underground series of workshops) where there are series of work areas each producing different goods. So when I need armor I can walk around the block to the armory. Yes, it's a little more walking, but it feels more like a game world that way. I usually don't need chickens and redstone at the same moment.
With mods like Buildcraft it gets a lot trickier. Technically you can sort items and pipe items to where they're needed. But there are now so many different items in the game this whole concept just seems to have imploded. Any complete pipe network would be so enormous, probably thousands of pipes to distribute the few hundred game goods to a few dozen work places. And it would make the area laggy with all those calculations of what's in every pipe 20 times per second. So ... sometimes I end up playing mailman ... walk through town, drop off goods. Anyway, Miranda was a vanilla world, no automation.
On the other hand, large chunks of play time seem to involve running errands and doing chores. Hmm. Minecraft is an odd beast.
Episode M3: Mega-tree fun house
Yes I covered this in my treeweaving tutorial, but this is more of a fun run through the scenery.
Episode M4: Alphanova village
This was our main hub of operations for a long time. This should be a real retro memory for current gamers. Way back when Minecraft announced they were going to generate villages in the world, this is the first one we found. Before there were villagers. And even after we moved in and took over we left most of the original town intact. The name is funny: fermius discovered the town, and I was the admin ... and in the real world, we both used to edit small press sci-fi magazines: his was Stellanova and mine was Alpha Adventures (later Alphadrive CD-Rom zine). We often talked about doing a new zine, merged, with a name like Alphanova. So now as a kind of gag, we name the first town in our world Alphanova. Works even from pure semantics: "Alpha" = first, "nova" = new.
One thing about settlements in Minecraft: a few players think they can do everything in one giant room with a gazillion chests. To me that's just living in a box. I like to setup towns (or underground series of workshops) where there are series of work areas each producing different goods. So when I need armor I can walk around the block to the armory. Yes, it's a little more walking, but it feels more like a game world that way. I usually don't need chickens and redstone at the same moment.
With mods like Buildcraft it gets a lot trickier. Technically you can sort items and pipe items to where they're needed. But there are now so many different items in the game this whole concept just seems to have imploded. Any complete pipe network would be so enormous, probably thousands of pipes to distribute the few hundred game goods to a few dozen work places. And it would make the area laggy with all those calculations of what's in every pipe 20 times per second. So ... sometimes I end up playing mailman ... walk through town, drop off goods. Anyway, Miranda was a vanilla world, no automation.
On the other hand, large chunks of play time seem to involve running errands and doing chores. Hmm. Minecraft is an odd beast.
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