I keep building amazing houses and losing them. Has anybody ever found redstone dust? Where? I need a compass.

You are most definitely not the only one addicted! Work is almost completed on my unnecessary arboretum; meanwhile, Excavation Site Charlie has been yielding interesting results. MAN I love exploring caves.

Anyway, redstone tends to be deep in caves, near lava pools and that. It seems to spit out a few piles of powder per block, though, so if you can find even a few blocks you should get a good amount. I have no inclination to figure out all the crazy logic gate stuff that people are doing, so I have a lot of redstone and nothing to do with it.

And I tend not to leave the house without lots and lots of torches, and then just drop one every few steps. This might get a bit confusing if you branch off of your path, but that's what signposts are for!

(This really can be a terrifying game, though, can't it)

What's the point? I played what must have been an early demo of it a while back. Have they added more than just building blocks and stuff? What's the big appeal?

There are monsters. You fight them. I always hit a "what am I doing this for" wal like an hour in, but during that hour I'm hooked. Plus I made an underground greenhouse!

Redstone dust is found way down in the bowels of the earth, just a few blocks above the unbreakable adminium core. You'll need at least an iron pickaxe to harvest the dust. It's found in blocks with red flecks. There's not a lot of it, but each block drops generous amounts. What I can't find is gold! Oh well.

I flooded my fortress figuring out how water works, but was able to backfill with dirt and stem the tide. My new project is to build a minecart track to the nearby Great Gaping Hole in the Ground to facilitate transport of iron ore. I also started a second world on peaceful so I can just build. I'm constructing an enormous glass pyramid that will hold within it a farm and and a mine. Then I'm going to ring it with a defensive perimeter of granite blocks and water traps, ascend to the apex, change the settings to "hard", and see if creepers can take it down.

The appeal of this game to me is that it perfectly combines the two things I like most in games: pure exploration and world-building. I like the open-endedness of it. I can jump in and fiddle for a few minutes, or devote hours to an ambitious project. I like the way the game keeps surprising me. Hey, you can saddle the pigs! And ride them. But....wait...where's this pig going? No, pig, my home is way over there! Don't...oh shit. I'm lost. And it's dark. Uh-oh. Or cheerfully mining out an iron- and redstone-rich area only to have a huge avalanche of gravel blocks fall through the ceiling and trap me miles below ground.

I'm thinking of starting yet another world in which I shall build a boat and simply explore the surface, making temporary caves for shelter at night, moving fast and light, never staying put for too long in one place. Just to see how BIG these worlds really are. Guess I'll need a compass, too. And a shit-ton of torches. So first I hafta build a mine....

This game has hooked me like no game since the original Civilization. The fact that it's still an alpha build and that Notch, the developer, is now doing nothing but working on it full-time has me chortling with glee. Imagine what will be possible in this game in three to five years!

BOP the world size is effectively infinite. The world-generator can go up to 240,640 terabytes in size when stored in memory ..or in another way ...several times the surface area of the Earth.

Oh. That's a bit more ambitious a trek than I had planned.

Hmm.

It is The. Most. Addictive. Game. EVER. I have basically done nothing else for the last ten days. My great discovery was making glass blocks out of sand. Once I figured that out, it was like Legos only better.

I've been doing a lot of the ride around in a boat exploring thing. You can stay in a boat overnight without the monsters getting you - at least so far - and it's nice and quiet out there. I keep building mansions on islands and I had the perfect one going but then something somehow got inside and killed me before I even knew what was happening. I've been trying to get back to my dream house ever since but it's hopeless. I did find an old monster infested mansion that I had abandoned in disgust a while back - hint: never build a narrow moat because then they just get stuck in it and if they're stuck in water, they don't burst into flames in the morning because the water just keeps putting them out. Highly annoying.

I have no idea what I'm set on or how to set it, either - peaceful? Hard? How do you figure that out? There are lots of monsters in mine. I get too paranoid deep in monster caves to go too deep; that must be why I can't find any redstone & then I died before I completed my strip mining a whole island project. Does anyone know if cacti keep monsters away?

Mygothlaundry - if you hit escape while playing, you'll see an Options button, and in the lower left of that window you'll find Difficulty. Peaceful sends all the monsters away so you can relaaaax. I don't know if other difficulty levels change the number of monsters around, but I do believe things like damage are affected.

Gaaaah! I found the redstone dust but now I can't get out of the mine. Monsters! Floods! Gravel! Yikes! Oh man Monster_Zero you may have just eponysterically saved my blocky little soul.

I'm addicted a the game but I SUCK at keeping my bearings, so yeah, I don't build elaborate houses because I'll just lose 'em. In future versions, you need to be able to set your re-spawn point, maybe by building something to mark the new spot.

I have a snowy world that I LOVE. It's so quiet at night.

I have the most powerful desire to built a glass house.

Peaceful doesn't stop monsters from spawning in caves, but it does turn them down to almost nothing.

Hard makes them spawn a lot ...and tip. Spiders and Creepers aren't killed by the sun.

I can't the website to load. *sigh*

Oh, found this on the tumblr blog. That helps. Looks fun, but does everything have to be in blocks? Or is that the point?

So.

Who wants to host the MeCha Minecraft server?

I'll chip in.

Is that even a thing we can do? Multiplayer Minecraft with Mechazens would be TEH OSSUM.

It's fun. I haven't done anything too awesome yet but I do like making a nice base and exploring. I tend to get bored about the time I should start forging the iron.

I'm not one for useless megaprojects, but they only have to be slightly useful. Glass dome? Not so fascinated. Glass dome under which storage chests laid out in a clever, organized fashion? Fuckin' A. And I don't care much about anything not done in Survival mode. Multiplayer Survival can't come quick enough.

I do have a gripe that's very nearly a deal-breaker. I sort of hate the way it pauses when you alt-tab away from it. The first 2-3 nights it basically locks up the computer because you don't have torches (unless you get really lucky finding coal). It's also not so good when you're trying to go out and explore the overland world. I don't want night-time nerfed, just let me $#@!ing browse the web during it.

And I'm surprised that no one has made a free, open-source, authentication-less copy yet.

Yeah, I agree with you fleacircus. I get bored sitting around looking at the stars go by; I want to check my email or something. Although I have found that one night lasts pretty much exactly the same length as one cigarette, so there's that. ;-)

I made a glass house, whelk. Creepers are bad for glass houses though, that's why my next glass house is going to be surrounded by cacti, if that keeps them off. I also want to make an undersea glass house but I haven't quite figured out how to do it yet. But I will. Oh yes I will.

It's super fun deborah but watch this video first. I couldn't figure it out at all at first- just kept dying and was all, like, fuck this, but then I watched the video and it really helped. Now, of course, I need a 12 step program or something.

Hehe, with my compass I found my spawning point. Built a little hidey hole with some basic supplies in a chest and a sign that says Welcome Home, Future Self, Sorry You Died.

Well. I amuse myself, anyway.

Third night in blackness.
Where's the coal? Guess I'll -- Oh shit!
Did I shut the door?

I finally tried making a boat, which was fun! Realizing how easy it is to get lost in a boat was not fun. Spent one night on top of a tree, staying very still, to hide from the monsters, then quickly made a compass and got back home the next day. This game is eating my life.

RE: glass houses- I made a home in the base of a rock formation, and tunneled up into it and made a glass room up there where I can spend the night making pickaxes and weapons, while watching the moon set over the ocean and laughing as the monsters get tangled up in all the cacti I grew around the base of the formation. It's awesome. Getting in and out the front door without snagging myself on a cactus is proving a little tricky, though. I may have to give up and widen the pathway a bit.

Can anyone tell me how to light a torch? I thought it took flint and iron. But you need fire to smelt iron, right? Aaack!

Nevermind. I figured it out. I am an idiot.