kjorteo | (no subject)

Imagine, if you will, crumpling a piece of paper into as tight and compressed a ball as possible.

Now imagine shrinking yourself, Fantastic Voyage style, until this tightly-compressed crumpled paper ball is a massive, cavernous expanse.

Now imagine having to go inside and make an accurate map of the actual layout of the twists and turns and passages and such within.

Congratulations, you now have a fairly accurate mental image of what it's like to work with this impossible non-Euclidean mess of a cavern network I somehow pierced into in Minecraft.

Logically, I know that Minecraft works on a very rigid X/Y/Z coordinate system and that every position of every block (or absence thereof) has to make physical sense--in other words, that this game is not a 3D version of Metroid II. However, if you had told me that there was some sort of crazy magical nonsense going on, I probably would have believed you after about the fifth or sixth time I finally got around to checking out one of the unexplored shafts only to loop around and wind up in one of the other unexplored shafts. Clearly what has happened is that this game accidentally confused itself with SimCity 2000 and put me in a Darco.

As the player in Minecraft, I have the absolute power and authority over the lay of the land. I can terraform to my heart's content completely at will (the only limitation being that I don't run out of blocks when making walls or something, but shhh.) If there is a wall here and I do not wish there to be, or if there is not a wall here and I do wish there to be, I can freely alter anything I decide to freely alter. When it comes to trying to figure out the layout of this natural cavern, though, I am amazed how little my omnipotence helps.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Congratulations: you now know what it feels like for me to drive around ordinary city streets. :D

Even reading those descriptions of the arcologies (a word which I'd forgotten about until now) made me feel quite nostalgic! I remember the sample map with SCURK that was filled with Launch arcologies, which instantly blasted off - well, it took about 40 minutes on the 386 - and displayed... some congratulation message that I think is about as near as you can get to completing the game. Speaking of which, what's your eventual purpose in Minecraft - just to keep building and exploring?

The DARCO description now reminds me of the corner down the road from my work, which looks like the lineup for the hotly contested Award for Stupidest Building.

I remember playing around with a map full of Launch Arcos because I wanted to see the Exodus event, but for whatever reason, they never did. Maybe it was the wrong version (I'm told they only do that on certain platforms?) or maybe I was doing something wrong, I don't know... I do remember being frustrated and curious about this thing I could never see, though.

Minecraft's purpose is whatever you make of it--build, explore, whatever. There's no actual goal, but my own self-set one (dig deep enough to gather materials to build awesome castle, then go back up to the surface and construct awesome castle) got derailed once my mineshaft pierced into a natural cavern network. My new goal is to explore and, if not literally than at least mentally map this place out, but that has thus far proven to be surprisingly impossible.

And... um... goodness.

This is sounding much like my own Etrian Odyssey 3 experience of going into the labyrinth with one purpose in mind - say, to collect the hive of bees on the third floor - and then getting totally distracted and coming back with several levels up, some palm branches and a curtain rod.

And I was also suspicious of the Exodus event, because it was at that... strange era where you were sort of allowed to lie about what was in your games, because you didn't have the Internet to disprove you. Rise of the Robots 2 had a feature that was hinted at in the manual where you could allegedly rip off another robot's extremities and then beat them with them, but as far as I'm aware, this was completely made up out of thin air. So I didn't even trust my own memory when I mentioned the Launch arcos... fortunately, Youtube can confirm this one, at least.

I have another picture of that building on my computer. It's in "motivational poster" format and says "Step One: Unfold the blueprints"...

Hah, I love that :) And it really does sound like it could have been the reason behind the... design of that street.

I love that last line! Even though I haven't been as addicted to Minecraft lately (I blame having started a really epic construction project and having fallen off of it one too many times), reading your Minecraft tales is almost as enjoyable as playing the game. You should post the bit you sent me about order versus chaos- it's brilliant!

Haha, thanks, I'm glad you liked that! :D

I wasn't kidding when I said I fully intended to summarize the entire murder hole saga on Teogames at some point (including a few of the screenshots) but, you know, busy D:

...and when you do, I'm linking it to Notch! (With your permission, of course. Or I'll just bug you into linking it to him.)