Minecraft III

    This time around, I'll try to explain it from the bottom up. I looked back at the last two and it looks like trying explaining TCP-IP to someone who doesn't know what the Internet is.
    At the very bottom of what Minecraft is there is a three-dimensional grid of effectively infinite size. This grid is filled with possibly the most basic three-dimensional object save a sphere: the cube. These cubes are one meter on a side and are lined up to one another to infinity. These cubes come in four basic variaties - air, dirt, stone, and sand. All blocks a first-time player will have to deal with in their first playing hour are either one of these four, or easily definable as a sub-block of one of them.
    The grid is 128 meters from top to bottom, and the surface area of the world is approximately eight times the surface of the Earth - although your computer would have run out of memory long before you got anywhere near that!
    The Player can break any block with the left button of the mouse and can place a block with the right button. However, there is one exception - Bedrock cannot be broken and is therefore unobtainable and unplaceable. These blocks are used to create structures of the player's designation.
    The first structure will be a very basic house created by the Player in a frantic hurry to get into safety before the first night falls and may be nothing more than a mud-hut dug into the ground. The largest first-day house I've ever successfully completed was fairly large for one day's work. (It helps to spawn in a forest.)

    Chances are the Player won't be able to put windows into his house on the first day, which makes the GURRRs and UUUGHs of the zombies outside even more terrifying. What's worse is that it means the player has basically no way of knowing whether a creeper is sneaking around the house (which they love to do!) waiting for the Player to re-emerge. The Creeper makes sounds very similar to the Spider, but to an inexperienced player they may sound effectively the same. The Zombie sounds like someone moaning the word "brains..." and the zombie sounds like a windchime, but the spider and creeper both sound effectively the same - an unnerving hiss. The only real difference is that the Spider's hissing is longer and tends to change pitch halfway through, while the Creeper's is shorter and generally stays roughly the same pitch. (Note: pitch does not mean volume!)
    The unexperienced Player may also find it unnecessary to hide in a hole while the night passes. They won't make that mistake a second time... unless they do in which case they won't have a house any more.

    There also exists the capability to craft objects from other objects. One block of wood will turn into four plank blocks, which can be placed in a two by two square to make a workbench, essential for all tool-making...
    ...such as the pickaxe. Most of the objects one can craft in Minecraft are made by simply making it 'look right', as one Minecrafter puts it. For example, an axe looks like an axe on the crafting grid, as does a workbench or a pickaxe. Some things are borderline - a furnace is a cobblestone chest - but only so much detail can fit into a 3x3 area.


    The furnace is another basic necessity - one needs it to get ores into a utilizable state. Some people have a room of 8000 furnaces, but I've found that to be a sign of lack of management abilities rather than a sign of wealth or progress. Personally I rarely have more than four furnaces in a single dwelling, although Last Stand - the oldest save I still have and one of my pinnacle achievements in Minecraft - probably has 8000 furnaces, seeing as there are more dwellings in it than I care to admit.



    Minecraft IV, two posts from now, will take you through a small area of Last Stand. Until then, may your swords stay sharp and your creepers stay away!