Oak growing behavior is starting to feel off, when compared with other trees. Possible exploit: since it grows side-to-side, unlike birch and pine, it's possible to skip building a decent wall by just planting some oak saplings in a row, and due to the leaves, it's effective even against spiders. I...

I don't understand why everyone is running out of torches. You should easily get surface coal with minimal exploration and enough coal while branch mining to smelt everything you find, light your tunnels and have some left over.

Now that I've turned off hardcore spawn, no complaints at all about early game balance, though i think it would be nice to somehow lower the iron cost of the hoe or the shears a little bit so you can get farming going a little earlier.

Wouldn't that exponentially increase the output of mobtraps?

What's the best low-tech mob farm design?

an animated summer fields would be amazing, in case anyone wants to work on that :)

I basically only have time to play for a few hours on the weekends, and I'm basically on my 4th time starting over from scratch again, but I'm getting better each time. Last time I made it to having a diamond pick and sword, a few chickens, a mushroom farm, pumpkin farm and hemp farm, and I was abou...

When I originally started playing minecraft there were all these notions of what it could be. Unfortunately development went askew down the path of fan service and it is now but a shell of game with no real focus, continuity or balance. It does not help either when you have millions of pre pubescen...

new update adds name tags-- you can name mobs, including hostile mobs.

Try again without optifine.

Yeah I found out the hard way that mobs were getting into my fenced off area (and presumably trampling my crops) when two zombies busted down my front door and killed me :(

As funny as that is, they should probably just make the tether break if the animal hangs.

BTW is a different kind of game than vanilla minecraft, now. It's not a game about building, it's a game about not dying . It's alternatively frustrating and exhilarating. I hate it half the time and love it the other half. If you're having problems in the early game: 1) Turnoff hardcore spawn, and ...

oh weeds can only grow on tilled soil -- derp..

Yeah, this is very early game, right next to water.

This is from a few updates back, but can someone explain to me how weeds work? My plants keep dying, and I'm not really sure why. I've been killing tall grass as it comes up, but how can i prevent tall grass from happening to begin with?

Thanks.

i really dig the carpet.

are you keeping anything from 1.5 at all?

After this weekend, I think I am turning hardcore spawn off. It's just too frustrating to have to essentially start over again when you die. I managed to make my way back to my spawn camp after several hours only to die from starvation because all the animals near my base had died. (well, from runni...

I think it would only be a good idea if it allows an interesting systems challenge. I can think of one way to do it, which would be somewhat difficult to do with binary redstone -- a system where you have to perform different actions in the same place, based on certain conditions-- for example the t...

I had initially thought that surviving required finding wheat as soon as possible because breeding cows seemed so essential to the btw tech tree, and because animals disappear quickly for a variety of reasons, but it seems now that you can get a reasonable, if hard-scrabble existence going with very...

Okay, so yeah, after I realized you can raise chickens using only hemp seeds, I realized I could settle without wheat for cows, and I'm actually enjoying the slow pace a lot more. I've got a pair of chickens and the beginnings of a hemp farm after a few hours of play. And I'm fairly sure this is the...

*reads hardcore chicken*
*realizes you can get eggs from hemp seeds*
*smacks forehead*

Okay, off to start a new world with a spawn settlement.

I hadn't gotten past the nomadic stage as I hadn't gotten any crops yet, so roads were completely out of the picture, but I do get your point.

just a couple of observations after about 3 hours playing. I was wandering around looking for a village, found two temples, went caving, explored a ravine, the usual stuff, and there was so much tension I was practically jumping out of my chair. I died when I was exploring my first huge cage system ...