IRL Stuff

My brother mentioned a new science fiction convention that's starting this year in Atlanta. Unfortunately, it starts tomorrow, so I won't be attending. But it did put an idea in my head of promoting my Youtube channel IRL at regional cons.
I go to Dragoncon every year (What? You've never heard of it?) and I used to go to a lot more, but haven't lately. Once I've moved and get my budget set I'm going to put aside more money to go to other conventions in the area.
And with that came my idea for a way to promote my Let's Plays. A business card with a creeper's face on one side with the text "It's dangerous to go alone!" and on the other a picture of a diamond sword and the text "Take one of these!" with my Youtube channel address on it.
Of course, it'll be a while before I need anything like that, but it's still an idea for shameless self-promotion.

What a disaster!

Do, today I got a new video up, Meandering. I actually had it up yesterday, but stupid me, I forgot to watch the video or anything before going through the process of encoding and uploading it. There was no audio! I had game sounds, but for some reason, my mic didn't pick up. Not sure if I accidentally muted it, or what, but I had the video up at the usual time, but it was unwatchable.
So, instead of recording a whole new video, I just decided to dub it. I watched the video and recorded commentary. Then I took that audio track and overlaid it with the video and Viola! you have the newest Meandering.
To be honest, I was kinda scared to do it. I thought I'd have a hard time making it feel real. But in the end I think it turned out ok. There are some points in the video when I was watching it that I almost forgot the voice-over wasn't recorded with the video.
Don't worry, this won't become a regular thing, unless you guys really like it, then I might start doing the series this way. Not having the commentate (is that a word?) would make it easier to survive, but who wants to see that?
Of course, I recorded some footage for Mining with Munchmo that same day and had to completely re-record that portion. Luckily there wasn't anything major that went down.
Course, then later as I was doing some work on the rail station, I found a cave and went exploring. Found another zombie dungeon, and got eaten alive by them. Then, within moments, the guy that was tagging along got killed by a creeper and Poof, there goes enchanted diamond sword, pick, and shovel. . . /sadface

Last chance to vote!

Going to record the another episode of Meandering in a few hours, and there's been no more new votes, so unless there is, it's time to explore that mineshaft! I've been busy building and digging and playing recently.
A friend that I introduced to Minecraft just started his own server, running 1.2.3 on his home internet connection, and I've been playing on that some. I've got myself a treehouse in a jungle. Found a TON of diamonds in a mineshaft that's really close to bedrock.
Got the spider farm just about the way I want it on my server. Next project is going to be a mine cart station, I'll be starting that soon.
I also plan on recording more hardcore in the next day or two, so you can look forward to that.
I'm pretty close to "beating" skyblock too, so I'll show you guys around there when the time comes. It's not too impressive though, I'm not all that good at making things pretty.

Finishing touches

In today's thrilling conclusion we find out hero in the depths of his branch mine in search of diamonds, in the harrowing desert digging for sand and waiting patiently for zombies to spawn.
I eventually got sick of digging for diamonds so ended up going topside for the first time in ages, and realized that what looked like it should have been a snow biome actually was one. This world was first started in 1.8, which if I remember correctly didn't have any snow.
Stay tuned for my next episode where I have fun with my zombie farm and venture into the nether.
Video behind the cut.

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.

Meandering E03

The third video in this series is up. Unfortunately, it turns out I somehow played for over an hour during the livestream without actually recording any video locally. To cover what you might have missed between Episode 2 and 3, read on. During that time, I had a couple people join the livestream, who eventually joined me on the server, Kschwizzle and Pawbuttox. I found a nice little village with some interesting things nearby! If you want, you can see the entirety of the broadcast on my twitch.tv channel. You might notice a distinct difference between the first and second segments of my video here. Remember that I was playing for about 3 hours straight, so my excitement and energy were kinda wearing down. After the cut you can see what's happened with the world. My son and his cousin decided they wanted to play creative, so they built a whole bunch of stuff around the spawn.

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.