Learning Minecraft style

Update 0000D3r: added screenies.

Yesterday, I made a rather irriated G+ post about wasting the entirety of yesterday fighting with Minecraft.  I only call it a "waste" because Minecraft is a game I enjoy with other people, or more specifically with my kids.  I have yet to play it with adults as I'm not into it enough to go finding a server.

I am one for hare-brained schemes (it's how my best and most idiotic ideas develop), and after acceding to constant begging to play in Tao's creative world (my usual answer was "Nah...I don't really like creative mode...kinda boring...") and hooning around being bored for a while, I found myself a nice little sandy hill (he'd settled down to build megatructures in a desert biome) and after flattening the very top of it, dug out a 6x6x2 area and filled it with water.

Then started building up.

And made a "dragon eyrie".

Incomplete "dragon eyrie" with Tao's helicopter (I have no idea why he decided to build that thing there as I was building the eyrie) and three of his four Ender Dragons

First floor of dragon eyrie with fourth Ender Dragon in a stall, and dragonrider rooms above.  I didn't have the Ender Dragon models to size the stalls when I first built the thing

Dining hall directly above the dragon eyrie.  Ru decided we were going to have a cake dinner party

Room that Ruan claimed.  There are three the same size, one slightly bigger (master bedroom) and one smaller and quite long which are similarly appointed, Ru added the picture of the dagger

View from Ru's balcony looking towards the front of the eyrie (where the runway is).  Ru likes to build herself houses and shops, Tao's more into seemingly pointless and impressive megastructures

Affter we'd pretended to be dragons flying around and practising landings on the runway for a little while, I got tired of the kids fighting over who was having which bedroom (I'd made five plus four downstairs in the actual bit that was supposed to house the dragons for the dragon riders) and then arguing over who I was going to bunk in with (see previous) and went to see who had made a dragon mod (there's that many people playing Minecraft, statistically someone had to have done one).

There were three that I found.  Mystic Dragons is the oldest and appears to be dead, Dragon Mod seems to have taken off from it and is now no longer active while the developer works on another project, and Dragon Mounts which appears to be still active, and required the least amount of other mods (only wanted ModLoader with Minecraft Forge being optional though I ended up patching it in as well as it seemed to make things easier for some reason).  I had to downgrade the clients as the mod hasn't been updated yet, quickie instructions just on the off-chance anyone wants them:

1. grab the 1.4.7 minecraft.jar (link goes directly to the actual .jar file so if you click it will attempt to download)
2. throw the 1.4.7 minecraft.jar into ./minecraft/bin
3. fire up the client to make sure it works (after logging in check the version number in the bottom left corner, then quit
4. follow the ModLoader instructions
5. repeat 2
6. follow the Modloader instructions again but this time copy in the Minecraft Forge stuff
7. fire up the client to make sure it works, wait for Forge to do its thing, quit
8. drag the Dragon Mounts zip into /.minecraft/mods

The folder is apparently in a folder called %appdata% on Windows systems and in ~/Library/Application Support on OSX.  On the linux box here it was a dot folder in the home directory but I'm not sure if that's where it goes all the time or if it only generated there because I ran the launcher from there.  Also with a linux system, the launcher is called the same thing as the program (minecraft.jar) so if you're doing what I did and copying a patched minecraft.jar into the ./minecraft/bin across computers, make sure you replace the right one (don't laugh).

My efforts were rewarded by a pair of very happy children hooning around on Ender Dragons.

So then of course the next thing to do was develop a map and a storyline to go with it and give them missions.  I'll be in creative mode while the kids will be in adventure mode.  I'm working on a few keeps and towns and things at the moment, and the missions are restricted to "defend this village from this zombie apocalypse" and "defeat the Enderman and get the Ender Pearl", possibly a few trips to the Nether and also various "build/fix this thing with the materials you have/can get".  I'm sure I'll be able to work something out, I'm a half-decent storyteller and apparently was a decent GM at one stage.  Once I have a few things going I'm intending on sending them out on missions on their own while I quickly build up more.

The games will be conducted mostly in text (they will have to read what's being typed on the screens and also participate in text even though we're all in the same room, which I always considered lame when it was adults).  I'll also be getting them to write up sessions (with a pen/cil) in character journals, so guess I'm buying some more interesting looking notebooks from somewhere.

Will update with screenies later, I was able to do some of my own 3d plus a bit of blogging while the kids were watching Rise of the Guardians (link to Wikipedia so there will be spoilers for those who haven't seen it), then Tao walked in, glanced at what I was doing and quite indignantly cried "You're not working on the map!" so better get hacking, it's going to take a few days.

Bonus material that has exactly nothing to do with this post:

Tao's model of Voltron that I spotted as I was headed back to the last structure he was building before I hijacked his avatar so I could take the screenies