Wednesday, February 21, 2018

How to Survive Your First Day in Minecraft

Since the first day begins, the participant will have to collect timber.  To begin with, the participant must look around then go towards some other trees.  The participant needs to collect at least 5-8 blocks of timber logs out of trees by holding down the left mouse button while their cursor is on the block.  This is enough timber to craft the basic instruments and items the player needs instantly, though you'll certainly want more a little later. 







Once the player opens up their stock (E by default), they will observe the stock window. 

The player's avatar takes up most of the upper part, The stock below is your space for the player's items.  The bottom 9 slots are the slots that are usable, called a hotbar.  Four armor slots are on the left of the player's character (ignore those for now, they don't become useful until much later on), and also a 2x2 square to the right of the character as the player's personal crafting grid, which can be used to craft a few basic items.  By clicking the recipe book (5) the participant could easily craft items in this section.  Place the wood logs into any space from the crafting section, and wooden boards will seem to the right of your timber.  Left-clicking the boards will cause the wood to evaporate and boards to seem as a recently crafted thing.  Once you've the boards in your hand, you can drag them down to your stock, and set using the left click. 

Four wooden boards can consequently make a crafting table (place 4 wooden planks in a 2x2 square) and place the crafting table to use it.  Right click your crafting table to get it, this crafting grid is a 3x3 square, big enough for all of the craftable items in Minecraft.  The first tools that the player must craft are a wooden pickaxe and a wooden sword.  If any stone blocks are exposed close by, the participant can mine them with a wooden pickaxe to get 19 blocks of cobblestone.  This is the amount that the player needs to create every basic tool they'll need for this tutorial: a sword, a pickaxe (you'll need the upgraded pickaxe for iron and other blocks), an axe, a spade, a hoe, and a furnace.  You will require the furnace to cook meat for meals and smelt any ore you mine with your pickaxe.  Once the participant has a stone axe, they ought to try to get more timber as time allows; extra wood is helpful in many ways, from strengthening and strengthening your base to creating charcoal, or just crafting into boards for quadruple the number of building blocks. 

If all goes well, the participant can obtain coal quickly.  Together with the sticks they created from their wooden boards and some coal, they will have the ability to make torches (coal above a pole on the crafting grid).  Together with torches in hand, you can make for the nearest cave, since iron ore is the next goal.  Underground will actually be safer than the outside when night falls, so mining the first night off isn't a bad idea in any way.  On the flip side, if night is falling and you haven't found coal, use to furnace to smelt more timber ("logs"( not boards) to create charcoal, a substitute.  (You also can gather 3 blocks of wool from sheep and combine it with three boards to make a bed.  With this you can sleep through the night without the worry of critters killing you.  The drawback of this is wasting sunlight the next day mining, or working indoors.) 
Night time

For night time, the primary threat will be hostile mobs (monsters) that just spawn in the dark.  These include zombies, skeletons, and spiders.  It is a good idea to stay in a well-lit lit shelter (see below). 
If you are actually seeking adventure you might always arm yourself with a stone sword and go fight some mobs; then you may have the ability to get some stuff for additional crafting and some early experience levels, which will come in handy later on.  But, all of these monsters will either perish (zombies and skeletons) or be less dangerous (spiders) when dawn comes, and it'll be much easier to combat them later once you have better gear.  If you have to fight monsters this early, be especially cautious of skeletons; in the open their branches can kill you at a distance, and if they're in the water or on higher ground, it is unlikely you'll have the ability to reach them until they turn you into a (dead) pincushion.  Should you happen to see any of those more powerful monsters, stay well away from these: At this point an enderman, witch, or possibly a creeper will kill you easily. 






If you're repeatedly getting killed (perhaps you got overly rough, a monster obtained into your own shelter, or you didn't figure out how to make a refuge), one desperate answer would be to go into "peaceful difficulty" (see "changing the rules", below).  But think about this: This being your first day, you aren't actually losing much until the deaths (at least not following what stuff you've gathered is lost), so you can just tough it out until sunrise and begin again.  Keep on practicing killing mobs until you get the hang of it. 

Shelter


As noted above, you truly want to find or make some kind of shelter before your first night, since you won't want to get killed.  The "Shelters" article above provides a great deal of crisis shelters and then more advanced ideas, but it just takes a little thinking ahead to manage a decent shelter for the first night.  As you proceed around collecting wood and so on, look at the landscape for potential houses.  Easiest (if you're able to find it) is a little cave with one entry that you could wall or fence away. 

When it is not quite perfect, think about whether you're able to repair it immediately -- state, fencing off a back doorway to deeper caves.  If you don't have a cave, you could have the ability to make one, simply by digging into a mountainside or even roof over a little valley.  If instead you've got wide, flat space, then go right ahead and build a little house.  In all instances:

Don't be overly ambitious the first night, since you want it safe before dark, and you also want to light up the space you maintain.  You can always expand and decorate your house afterwards, or even rearrange the landscape around it. 

When picking your place, it is fantastic to have a view of the landscape so you can see whether any critters are waiting for you in the morning. 

Learn about the great forces of timber: Fences can be utilized not just in the obvious way, but as windows or translucent walls, with fence gates to get in and out.  Doors provide a full-height option, but you'll want to surround them with solid blocks (planks, stone, even dirt, but not fences).  A couple properly-placed ladders can make it a great deal simpler to get up to your roof or up a hill.  A chest are also helpful -- stash anything you are not likely to use soon, so you don't need to be concerned about it if you happen to get killed. 

If you're able to manage to generate a bed early on, then place that in your shelter and use it the first night you've got it.  Getting killed is much less painful once you respawn into a safe location!  Following the first night, you may well want to spend the nights mining and crafting. 

Light


Monsters can not spawn within 24 blocks of you personally, however huddling in the dark isn't a pleasure -- and if you do leave your house, you don't want to return to find a monster has moved in.  So, you need to light up your space, and at this time, the light you've got is torches.  A single torch provides enough light to prevent monster spawns entirely in just a 7 block range (barring obstructions), and reduce them for about the exact same distance past that.  Including horizontal and vertical measures, so the safe zone just runs 3 spaces or so diagonally.  Even outside the safe zone, having some light will sharply reduce the chance of critters spawning (based on how much light), however it is better to use enough torches to maintain your entire home well-lit.  When you've got extra torches after that, try to light some space outside your house (or at least the entry) too, to push back the area where monsters are likely to spawn. 

Food and appetite


Once you have tools and shelter, your next priority will be food.  Hunger will take a while to hit, so it shouldn't be a problem in your first day, but you need to try to pick up some food for when it does.  But when you've been moving around for a while, your meals bar will begin rippling and begin to decrease.  If your meals bar drops below 90%, you won't regenerate health, and whether or not it gets to 30%, you can not sprint.  If the hunger bar goes down to empty, then you will begin losing health.  Unless you are in Hard mode (and a start player shouldn't be), you can not actually starve to death, however you will return to 1 health point in Normal style or half of your health in Easy mode, and that leaves you rather vulnerable.  You don't lose appetite in Peaceful manner, so you don't need to be concerned about that. 

In late variations of Minecraft, the primary drain on your hunger is from recovery harm.  You'll have a small grace period (see "saturation" on the Hunger webpage) when starting the match and after eating, but if that is exhausted, recovery one point of damage (Half Heart.svg) costs the equivalent of 1.5 hunger points (that is 3/4 of a visible "shank").  Avoid taking falls of over 3 blocks, burning or drowning yourself, or otherwise taking damage that you will have to heal. 

A few other actions also induce appetite, however more gradually:Struggling: Both attacking mobs and receiving damage cost appetite, even before you begin attempting to heal damage.  (60 blows either way, matches healing Half Heart.svg.)  You'll have to slaughter a few animals but choose your battles carefully.  Taking damage in other manners counts for this too, but each time you take damage it counts as you "blow off" no matter how much damage you chose. 

Sprinting

Should you double-tap the forward movement key (W by default), or press your sprint key (Left Ctrl by default), you will sprint.  This moves marginally faster, but in addition, it uses up food.  (60 meters games recovery Half Heart.svg.)  But if you happen to have a sufficient amount of food in your inventory, you could always get it done your own way. 

Jumping

Obviously, you'll need to jump some just to get around, but don't bounce around randomly or unnecessarily.  (120 jumps matches healing Half Heart.svg.)  Sprinting jumps are especially expensive, 4 times as much as a regular jump, though they are the fastest mode of transportation early in the sport.  Swimming and mining blocks cost a small hunger, but those are minimal when compared with the items above. 

Note that if you are (staying) at full health, and not fighting/exercising and/or jumping, or mining blocks, then you will use no food.  Thus, if your character has a safe place to stay, you can just stay put to conserve food while waiting out the night, a storm, or even crop/animal growth. 
Consider making a basic crop farm immediately when you've settled in a place.  Wheat is where you'll begin:

You can use harvested wheat to generate bread.  You can obtain it easily with seeds collected by dividing bud.  When harvesting wheat, you can use the wheat/seeds to breed cows and cows, thus using a better food source.  

Sunday, September 3, 2017

Minecraft Resources

I've been expanding my Minecraft game a lot in recent weeks. I'm trying to make the move from casual player to map creator. I have been absorbing the work of many others you create YouTube channels and have started to assemble a collection of Minecraft links and resources on my Google+ page. Please check out the collection and let me know what you think.

I'll add more to it as I can. Minecraft is a great game with lots of resources on the Web to help you.

Some of the best ones for beginners are:

Minecraft Seed List
Minecraft Server List
Minecraft Maps List
 

The New York Times even ran an article last year on how popular the game has become.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-minecraft-generation.html

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Quick Explanation of the Scientific Method

I was trying to explain the Scientific Method to a friend, who had heard the term but didn't understand what it meant. Here is my incredibly brief explanation.

First, it was developed in the early 17th Century by the philosopher Francis Bacon. He in turn built on some early work in this regard from the Arab scientist Alhazen, who had come up with similar concepts about 600 years before.

Bacon's scientific method essentially has the following steps for a scientist.

  1. Make observations.
  2. Form a theory to explain what you have observed.
  3. Conduct an experiment to see whether your theory works.
  4. If it works as expected (essentially proving your theory), share it with other scientists to establish a peer review of your work.
 All too often, we forget about the importance of step 4. It's really critical to open up your observations, experiments, and theory to others. This allows them to "poke holes" in your work and highlight mistakes you might have made.

Saturday, July 22, 2017

Anniversary of the Allies Re-Taking Palermo

Today is the anniversary of the re-taking of Palermo, Italy by allied forces on July 22, 1943 - 74 years ago.

The Allied invasion of Sicily took place nearly two weeks before, on July 10. Palermo, the principal city on the island, was in the North. American forces had cut off nearly 50,000 Italian troops and drove many of the German forces to a remote corner of the island.

Within about a month, the entire island of Sicily was under Allied control, and Sicily became an important staging point for the upcoming takeover of Italy from Axis forces.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Yoga Beauty

I've been taking yoga classes across the street at the local gym. I kind of have to admit I was inspired by some of the cute girls already taking the class (I have a thing for yoga beauties), but since I've been going a few weeks I've started to really enjoy the classes.

I'm good at all the basic poses, like Downward Facing Dog (Adho mukha śvānāsana in Sanskrit) and of course Child's Pose, lol. Still struggling with some of the tougher poses but working on it.


Friday, December 30, 2016

Goodbye, 2016


A hearty goodbye to 2016. It wasn't a terrible year for me. A lot of celebrities died, but for most people it really wasn't all that bad. But that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to 2017.

What's in store for me next year? The best part is I don't really know and maybe that's why I'm looking forward to it. I will keep on spending a lot of time playing Minecraft and Roblox. Although less time than I used to because you know, job.

Well no matter what happens, I'm still looking forward to a new year and fresh start. Happy New Year!

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Rest in Peace, Carrie Fisher

By now most Star Wars fans know the news: beloved actress Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia Organa) passed away at the age of 60 yesterday. She had a heart attack on Friday and never fully recovered. We'll miss you, Carrie!