User:Miner Bob

=Week One=

Fiddled in creative mode for a bit to get the hang of the interface and world mechanics. Crappy FPS on my machine [Atom with Intel int. GPU, XP SP3, 2GB RAM] Turned all the options to fast, and it's jittery but playable at normal render distance, 10-12 fps. Tried Optifine, both the vanilla and MT packages; No improvement.

A peaceful world
Seeded pi to the 22nd. Spawned in a river valley in extreme hills biome; Sheep abundant, trees not so much. Dug a tunnel by hand for a lair, the hill I chose was thin enough to dig clear through into a small valley on the other side with a few trees and some flat space for growing more. Harvested the trees and planted the seedlings. Crafted a wooden pickaxe or three and started tunneling down 1:2 to the east from the midpoint of my first tunnel, which will now serve as front [the valley] and back [the river] entrances. Found a nice coal seam about level 56; Excavated it, and squared off the resulting pocket for a work/bedroom. Secured it with a cobblestone wall and wooden door, also put doors at the tunnel mouths. No mobs to worry about, but best to avoid bad habits. Continued to tunnel down and east, taking any ore pockets along the way, until I hit bedrock. According to the debug screen, I'm under ocean at level 4. Put out side shafts at level 12 to seek diamonds and redstone. By this point, I have iron tools to work with, and an extra furnace and crafting table up on level 16 or so. The south exploration drift hit a small cavern almost immediately; got more iron, coal, and a bit of gold. The north drift went for quite a ways before opening into a veritable cathedral; Lava- and waterfalls everywhere, obsidian floors where the water has frozen the lava, and little pockets of all ore types peeking out everywhere.

Mine! Mine! All mine!
This cavern is massive, and that's not counting all the side-chambers and tunnels into it. There are about a dozen lava- and waterfalls, and I've done some experimenting with diverting them and plugging them. I now have more cobblestone and obsidian than I know what to do with. I've found something of everything, including about a dozen diamonds. Haven't bothered mining the obsidian yet; Not much use for it, and except for the blocks I made from lava, there's more lava directly underneath, so mining the floor is pointless. Having learned to control fluids, I then proceeded to kill off all the water and lava sources so I don't have to worry about getting swept off and/or killed. It's a lot easier and quicker, in the long run, to mine 'upstream' to find & kill the source itself, rather than muck about trying to dam things lower down. Dug a spiral staircase emergency exit straight up from this level; It comes to the surface on a separate island with quite a few sugar-cane plants. With the redstone and iron I've mined, I'll make a map and start charting the world around me. I'll have to build a boat.

Sailing on a Sunday afternoon.
To the north and east there are small islands, southwest seems to be the edge of a larger land mass. All the biomes are represented except jungle. I've filled in my first map and learned firsthand how stupidly fragile boats are. I can understand sinking after hitting a squid full speed [He jumped out in front of me, and then left the scene of the accident, so I didn't get his plate number or insurance details], but sinking from hitting a lily pad? That's just ludicrous. Good thing I had some spare boats with me. As it is, I spent a night on a tiny island to cut more wood, make a crafting table and a few more boats. Have continued mining my cathedral, in between taking day trips into the surrounding area and spelunking any caves I come across. It's peaceful. . . maybe too peaceful.

=A digression= Created a superflat creative world to start fiddling with redstone circuits. [Tried "0" as a seed, but the debug screen indicates some huge random digit, so I guess zero is not a valid option.] Built a seven segment display, with switching logic to generate 0-9. Have it hooked up to some detector tracks on a minecart loop for testing, so it counts from 0-9 and repeats. I think I want to make one with bigger segments, and set up 3 or four in cascade with shift registers and a day-clock to act as a sort of calendar. I have no idea how many "days" go by while I'm here. ..

A digression, continued
Built a larger 7S display, with 4 torches per segment, rather than 2, like the first one. Used black wool for the face and "pins", and switched to red when wiring the 0-9 matrix. Made the inputs non-inverting this time: The first one formed a character by turning off the unused segments, while this one works by turning on the desired segments; When no input is given, it's blank instead of an "8". Wired up 0-4 on the matrix, and I'll finish it later, but already I can tell it's much more legible than the rock-coloured, 2 segment version. I experimented with putting white wool behind the torches, but it doesn't reflect the torchlight, just the environment, so the black is more legible.

The same, yet later
I now have a complete and functional 0-9 counter, driven by a 10 bit shift register, currently running off of an 8-clock. I had hoped to put the shift register directly behind the logic towers, [which I rebuilt in a uniform manner, which also shortened the circuits and eliminated several repeaters] but there are only 8 spaces between the pins for the "ones" digit and the "tens" digit, and the SR needs about 15, including the daisy-chain connections, so I had to put it outboard of the "ones" area, the SR for the tens will have to fit laterally behind all three digits, and the "hundreds" will have to go outboard of the other side of the display. Unless I start over with an even bigger display which leaves more room behind it. ..