As mentioned in my earlier post, here is a screenshot of that Minecraft fish I built on the multiplayer server I roam.

It’s a big bugger and I spent a fair while hunting down, dyeing and then shearing sheep to get all the wool to craft it. It might not look it but in total it needed about 500 pieces of wool for the whole structure and remember, this thing is hollow. Oh yes, there’s a ‘secret’ base inside, accessible by an underwater tunnel and a ‘hidden’ door. ‘Secret’ and ‘hidden’ in the sense that you didn’t know but the rest of the server guessed as much straight off the bat. My fish comes from the Blinky school of design, though with fewer eyes and the torches dotted all over him ensure he’s well-lit, day and night, free of pesky zombies and skeletons.

One of the first things I constructed on the server was a bridge leading from the main town to my little landmass. Swimming is such a pain so its construction was pretty much a no-brainer. I cooked up a whole batch of smooth stone (well, cobblestone looks a bit tacky) and set to work. Once that was done, I built a small dock just to the side of the bridge. There’s a chest on the dock full of boats and even a fishing rod, should the mood take you.

As you can see in the image to the left, the town is progressing quite nicely and yes, that is a gigantic sheep in the top-right, keeping vigil over everyone.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten around to revamping the cube I was at the time calling my home. I’ve now built a much more sprawling structure, an off-kilter keep with jutting towers. It’s still the cap on my to-the-bedrock mineshaft but now it looks a little more impressive than the dirt shack I built to save me from the roaming nasties at night.

At the bottom of the image, down near the little cove with the paddling sheep, you can just about make out my sugar cane farm, busily producing sugar and paper. I also have a mushroom farm and a cactus farm (none of them automated – I don’t really need that kind of quantity) built into my mineshaft.

The cactus farm sure came in handy when dyeing all that wool for my fish. Remember folks, dye the sheep, not the wool. You get more coloured wool and save dye shearing a dyed sheep than you would get colouring plain wool that you’ve just sheared. When you’re dealing with 500+ pieces of wool, that’s a big saving on dye.

Minecraft is a lot of fun and playing on a server with others is the icing on the cake. If you haven’t bought the game, go grab it, you won’t be disappointed.

I’ve been messing around in Minecraft for almost exactly a year now and it really is great fun. Generated countless worlds and had pretty much all of them kick my ass in varying degrees. Swimming in lava, failing to swim in water, very brief flirtations with terminal velocities, punctured by the undead, bludgeoned by the undead, nudged off cliffs by passing sheep and of course, the ever faithful bowel-loosening ‘hug’ by over-friendly creepers. Yep, I’ve experienced almost ever death Minecraft has to offer over the past year.

These were all during single player games though. Minecraft also allows you to explore and build with friends, all together on one server and that too is also a real blast. Marvel at the structures others create and show off your own creative side. Or even your industrious side as you riddle the entire server with far too many tunnels, hoarding every resource available within the surrounding five square miles. There’s also many more opportunities to die but now through no fault of your own!

A slight issue on most multi-player servers is that everyone looks like ‘Steve‘. Thankfully, each player can replace their avatar’s texture with a new skin, either downloaded from the countless on offer from the interwebs or create their own using the existing template. As you might have guessed already from the image up there, I decided to go with a skin based on Skoardy. Hey, I never claimed to be very original!

So I have my own residence just off the beaten track – a rather modest abode not much more than a cap on the mineshaft that leads to a rather labyrinthine mass of tunnels, dead-ends and lava pools. I’ve built a bridge back to the town hub and a pleasant little dock, complete with boats for resource gathering expeditions. As a construction project, I’d been shearing huge quantities of wool (and dyeing sheep!) and that resulted a large lime-green fish appearing in the nearby river.

I’ll try to get some screenshots done, if… I’m not… um… too… busy… uh… building…