Minecraft: A Beginning

A short time ago I did a short tutorial conerning how to make your own custom Steam library grid icons. One of the icons I made for myself was for Minecraft, an indie game that if you'd told me a year ago I'd be nearly obsessing about I'd have probably laughed at you, and made insinuations about your parentage behind your back.

Kind of like this guy that I didn't notice while making the icon is doing to the creeper here... I'm so lame

I'd have made myself look pretty damn stu... well I can't really make myself out to be that a whole lot more right? RIGHT?

Dammit

Anyway, thanks to the generosity of a friend, I recieved a gift copy of the game and started tinkering with it. After my constant playing of TF2, and before that Runes of Magic, it was a nice change of pace to play a game where the objectives are set by the player, and the tools to accomplish those objectives are all there in the game. (Granted the limitations of the game won't allow it to accomplish everything, but if you ever played with Legos as a kid you'll know what it's like to create in Minecraft. The fact that your creations can be functional as well as impressive aesthetically is just icing on the cake.

I've added a texture pack here, but this still looks cool with the default texture :)

I'll be honest, graphically the game put me off a bit at first. But the game really has a depth to it that is surprisingly complex, to the point that players are still figuring out some of the game. Doesn't hurt that further depth is being added with regular updates to the game. I still found that I enjoyed it, either playing by myself in my own world or creating a TBT Tower in a world shared with my friends on Steam.

The area we chose for our tower (keep in mind the following was created using creative mode)

The addition I really wanted to make, which I think turned out pretty well.

On the left here you can see the base level of the main tower

View of the bridge and Mattyb's creeper face on the wall (to the right)

The main tower building

Most of the main structures can be seen here

One of my favorite pics

 I've also been following a fellow on Youtube by the name of TheKalmier who's done a number of Minecraft videos explaining how to do various things, I even incorporated a hidden staircase the he made into our TBT tower (not pictured). Following his example I've made some things for my own world:

What I call THE FARM, up top is a wheat farm with a water harvest feature that I'm still working on getting right.

The mobovator/grinder (he didn't invent it, but I did follow his video pretty closely)

And these buildings are clear steps up from where I started from:

The building in those pics still exists, and I'm going to use it later, but for now it's unoccupied until I can get back to it and make it prettier and stuff.

But as should be pretty obvious, I've spent hours building the things you've seen. And somehow even the time spent just collecting the resources for some of it doesn't feel like a chore, as every brick taken out feels like a step toward a subtle yet powerful goal, the ones you set for yourself.

And I'm nowhere close to done with my world yet, I've still yet to (1) sort out my semi-automatic wheat farm (I'm having issues with the ground drying up), (2) create a perimeter, (3) revitalize my starter home and so on and so forth.

I get the feeling I'm going to be playing this one for awhile.