National Margarita Day Fail

Boy, that was a mistake. I Just can't believe how it went from bad to worse! I guess I just got a bit cocky and it totally bottomed me out. I lost all the stuff I had, diamonds, iron, bookcases, obsidian, everything! Even if I was able to get back to where I died, there was no way I'd have made it in time. So, look forward to next episode where I go cave diving in the hopes of replacing even a fraction of what I lost.
This has taught me a valuable lesson though. I think from now on, I will place a chest at each place I sleep so that if I do die, I will at least have something to start over with. Put one of each tool, the best I can currently afford to lose.

Marooned, E04

So, the next episode of Marooned in Minecraft is ready to upload! I ended up having to split it up into two episodes again because I just couldn't fit it all into a length I felt good about. The episode starts off fairly slow until I find a nice little surprise waiting for me! I was completely taken aback when I saw the opening of an abandoned mineshaft right down there in that ravine. And it shocked me even more to realize that I have found such easy access to a cave spider spawner! And, because of that, a new project is underway. One that has already taken me nearly 10 minecraft days, and will take many more before I'm done with it. The worst part is, after all that work I put into it, I nearly died a couple times, which would have totally destroyed the world I was working in. Below the cut you'll find a current map of my world and the video.

Putting it all together

So, I'm in the process of editing the fourth episode of Meandering together. I start by taking a look around the world that's already been explored and finish filling in the map that I created previously. After that I take a nice long boat ride to a whole new area of the world. You'll get a quick look at some of the stuff that the children have built on the server. This is the first video of this series that I recorded outside of the initial livestream I did when 1.0 was released. The video turned out to be a bit longer than I would have liked, compared to the other three in the series. Turns out I got so much footage I ended up splitting it into two episodes. Unfortunately that means you'll not get a new world map from me in this post, but you'll get one next time.

Minecraft is released!

So, in honor of the Minecraft release, I posted a quick video showing off my BC/IC world. I had that one uploaded as the livestream of the Minecon opening ceremonies were going. Then, just as the game was released, I updated to Minecraft 1.0 and started up a new vanilla server with a fresh world and livestreamed for like 3 hours! The livestream is available in my archives at twitch.tv and I've also begun cutting up the footage into more interesting little videos as part of the new series I'm doing for youtube. As I write this blog post I'm uploading the first video. I'm going to try to make these a bit shorter than my other videos too, but we'll see how that goes. After the cut, you can see find the first part of my new youtube series and also a map of the world as I left it after the livestream.

E05 - Slime Time

My first large project is complete! I'm in the process of putting the video together as I type this (final check of the recording to make sure it's not completely horrible). I spent many hours over the last few days digging out tens of thousands of blocks to make a slime farm. The process went through scores of pickaxes and shovels and was a lot of work. I ended up gathering multiple stacks of iron, gold, and coal, plus a ton of redstone, and about 20 diamonds. Overall, I ended up with a lot more materials than what I started with. I didn't use as much glass as I was expecting, but I decided to not create a complete floor for the viewing chamber. The most interesting thing to note is the shadowing. If you watch carefully you can see how things keep getting darker as I got closer to the bedrock. I'm not sure what caused it, but the area where I first hit the lowest level (where I dropped the ladder) I could get a full view (as you can see from the viewing room) of the area. However, if I were to step about 5-10 blocks in any direction the darkness would close in. Once I got down to about level 12, I started having to contend with the slime spawns and fought them off as they spawned. I ended up with about 25 slimeballs from that. Once I got into digging out the trench I had some lighting issues and had a few endermen, zombies, and creepers spawn, which is why I ended up putting torches around the edge. After I put the water in, there really wasn't any worry about them, but decided to leave the torches there.
In case you're interested in doing something similar and want to know how to figure out where to dig, I used the Minecraft Slime Finder to pick the best place to find slimes. All you have to do is put in your seed (found by pressing F3) and then your coordinates, and it'll draw you a map of the surrounding area with the slime chunks highlighted in green.
ETA: Even though I cleared 9 chunks for this slime farm, only 5 of them are actually slime generating chunks.
After editing the video together and watching it, I see that I am going to have to be careful in the future to watch the things I say. Seemed that every time I started recording I said "Alright minecrafters." I'm still pretty new to this whole video thing, so I'm hoping you guys will stick with me while I get better at this.