Minecraft

According to TA I got my first achievement in Minecraft (Bedrock) on the 30th September 2017. Yesterday I entered the end and killed the dragon for the first time.

Oof, I never saw that anyone responded to this.

They’ve added a new preview of the upcoming Caves and Cliffs land generation to the “Bedrock” version of the game, which you can check out by toggling the Caves and Cliffs “experimental” option when creating a world. It’s not complete and hopefully there’s more balancing to be done, I’m not sure I really like it. Rivers seem heaps better. Mountains are kind of ludicrous and dominating. Other biome types seem to have suffered, though maybe I just looked at bad seeds.

I’ve been playing on a legit version seed with a really great mountain generation and I’m madly exploring out a large consistent area of it so that the new update doesn’t make a mess of it.

I’ve also been considering looking at at least trialling Realms. If we can transfer a save game to it that would be a good incentive.

I really want to get back into Minecraft but I can only play it modded and because there's been more frequent full fat releases mod development has slowed down so it's always several versions behind. The issue I have with vanilla is the lack of end game goals besides just building and the vanilla building is pretty underwhelming. I want to build a factory and like go to space and whatever.

Some of the best mod packs in the past:
TerraFirmaPunk - TerraFirmCraft entirely redid the survival aspects and resource crafting and the TFPunk modpack expanded it with steam and low tech industry.
Twilight Forest + Thaumcraft - Turned the game into a magical fantasy exploration.
InfiTech - Built around the nails hard technological progression of GregTech it really takes dedication but has oodles of depth.

As standalone mods I personally can't play without Dynamic Lights (a torch will light a radius around you when you hold it in your hand, like, how is this not in vanilla?), Smart Moving (grab ledges, crawl in low places!) and some kind of tree felling mod (my immersion cannot accept a tree staying floating when I chop the bottom block).

Optifine does dynamic lights which is great. Trees staying afloat is strange, but not stranger than any other block staying afloat. There's a datapack that gives axes the ability to break an entire tree, including leaves, in one go, but I'd have to look it up to know what it's called.

Anyway, I'm also going to take this opportunity to shill for the texture pack I've worked on, the Dokucraft continuation project. It's a community-supported update of the old Dokucraft texture pack, which gives Minecraft a classic-Zelda-inspired look. After using it for years, vanilla Minecraft textures just make me sick, so I help keep it up-to-date for the latest version. Chances are that the mods you're using will have matching Dokucraft textures too, so I highly recommend giving it a shot. You can even add your own customizations from the Dokustash texture repository!

It also has a ton of features enabled by Optifine, such as connected textures (like seamless glass and logs), item stack textures, custom mob models, and a really cool skybox. Optifine is another thing that I've become too spoiled by to do without. It started life as a performance optimizer but the developer added tons of features over the years, so it makes the game look vastly richer and more interesting. 

This is basically how I play. Although I tend to just end up with a series of increasingly large linked hovels and farmsteads.

Played the Beta donkey's years ago and somehow lost all trace of my old account and didn't sign up again until last year.
I tend to just go exploring and build up a ton of inventory in chests along my way and then get pushed into lava by a drop-zombie or skeleton in a ravine just as i decide to go back. One day i'll do a proper search for all my little stashes of chests/crafting tables and furnaces i have strewn about my world.

I've just upgraded my world to 1.17 as i've grown quite attached to it even though there's not much there aside from my Home farm, my XP Trap-Tower and what i call "Chicken Lag Hill". Pretty much every egg i've collected from around my Home/Farm area was fired into a wooded hill behind the hole in the ground i call home. Now after months of this and going from 1.15 to 1.17 i have a shit-ton of chickens behind my farm.

I recently started to use Xaero's Minimap and the hill is just a mess of yellow blobs, EDF Radar Stylie and due to all the cows, sheep, chickens and wild chickens i have in my home area near spawn my framerate goes from 140+ down to and fluctuates around 28-45 fps. The noise also makes you want to just go lie down after a while too. I don't go back very often.

I started messing about with huge Pixel-Art structures using commandblock imports but they made the lag so bad i deleted them.
Currently using Forge, Optifine, Xaero's Minimap, a gravestone mod and some Command Geek datapacks for a couple of items i like to use. Switching between TeaShader, Complementary and MakeUp UltraFast shaders and trying out a couple of others to see if i like them.

Tried some mods like a StarWars one that got way too complicated for me way too quickly, Terra Swoop force which is great and an Adventure on i forget the name of which kept me entertained for a week or so. Which was nice.

For me Minecraft is a good podcast/stream game so i just pootle around exploring and things in Survival.

Quite fancy a couple of days playing Cube World now though, ha.

I finally buckled after zenloss one too many times in a session while exploring. There's a couple of Gravestone mods but this is the one i use. It requires Forge and if you use Optifine with 1.17 world then you need one of the latest Optifine Preview builds and the latest Forge.

Gravestone Mod - CurseForge - HenkelMax

Minecraft Forge Home

Optifine Home

GDLauncher Home
I install the mods i want ( Optifine, Forge etc ) then just create a new installation of that version of MC using the Launcher and point it to a new folder, run it up so the file structure is created then copy my existing world into it, then copy whatever mods are required for that version. I'm quite basic so i only really needed to do this for 1.16 & 1.17 until i found a website that converts datapacks which meant i could use my old 1.16 datapack. I'm now fully 1.17.

The big mods tend to keep using specific older versions of MC as it's too much work to change them to the new API/SDKs especially those that use hundreds of mods as their base.

I'm a basic bitch so Optifine and some datapacks were the only things i'd changed until the other week when i had to use Forge to run a Gravestone mod.

Wouldn't it be an option to simply use no mods at all?

+1 Aside from I usually hit lava or get over run by zombies or water long before I emerge from the hill to do anything. I don't think I've looked at the game in years, but keep thinking I should. 

I was hoping that there might be something like MCMMO available for the console Minecraft now, but it doesn’t look like it. I really enjoyed a server I found on Java years ago, where I could set up a shop and sell materials, enchanted goods etc. The server doesn’t exist anymore. Bit tempted to get Minecraft on my PC again but I generally prefer all gaming on console.

I thought I’d try Realms out via the free trial and, well shit. The draw distance is halved over normal play, it’s terrible. I’m not sure it wasn’t better on x-box 360.

When I played it through with my daughter I thought it was more like Minecraft:Diablo.

This is, of course, exactly what I meant.