Minecraft – Page 2 – Fooyah

June 8 2023

How Things Should Work

I’ve been thinking of having a dedicated Minecraft server for a long time. Prior to recently it has been running on my PC if and when the server is needed. I play on different platforms and while I can use the PC Server anywhere in the world moving my world to a provided external company as a server wasn’t an option as my PlayStations would not join those servers. Currently most platforms, except the PlayStation, allow connection to external servers but Sony haven’t because of reasons to do with safety? So, paying a company for a server isn’t really an option. I needed something that would work at home and independently from the PC.

I quite fancied a Raspberry Pi to do the job and there are plenty of websites out there with instructions. As long as the Pi is reasonably spec’d it should work ok and is relatively cheap to buy and cheap to run. I’ve got experience with the Pi owning two already – both for specific purposes. So I ordered a Pi to see how well it would serve me. A couple of things I noticed I guess. If you use Ubuntu you can’t use the Microsoft Ubuntu server edition because it is designed for a different chip architecture. The are various dedicated Raspbian Minecraft servers and I followed the instructions to create one. I couldn’t transfer over my current world to the Pi server as the file format was different and I’m not sure that I want to start completely again yet. So, the Pi will be used for a different project at some point.

The next option was to get a cheap PC and run Windows or Linux and operate a server compatible with my current world. I searched Amazon and Ebay for mini-PCs and ultimately landed on getting a refurbished Lenovo ThinkCenter. It’s a small box around 15cm square and about three centimetres deep. It has all the things I need. A good-enough processor, reasonable RAM and an SSD. The moving parts are minimal and the count of them is probably two – the fan and the power switch.

I ordered one from an EBay shop with plenty of good feedback. I don’t read the good feedback, I tend to read the one star reviews to see what problems I might encounter. A lot of people out there will leave low reviews for stupid reasons which are nothing to do with the product. i.e. took too long to arrive, didn’t work with my device etc. So the new device arrived promptly and I started the whole boot up, log in procedure. I always find it a little exciting when starting a new device for the first time. I logged into Windows and started to sort out the software and run updates when I got a blue screen of death. I was a little surprised but thought that maybe the update had messed something up. From that point on I would get bsod every few minutes and sometimes I couldn’t even log in to the machine. A number of the error codes suggested the memory was faulty so I got in touch with the company.

They sent me some new RAM immediately. I fitted it and the PC works very now. I have server software running and it’s accessible anywhere in the world. I have remote access to the device and have set it up so it is “locked” after start up. I’ve learnt quite a few things about Windows along the way. I have a better idea of what sort of things are possible. I can also access the files remotely so that I can back up my maps and keep all the work safe. Ultimately I gave the company a five star review on EBay. While the product was initially faulty they sorted it out quickly and it works well now.

It’s a touch annoying when setting up a new server happens to coincide with the day that Mojang release new updates for Minecraft Bedrock. I’d got the server up and running and I went to test it on the PS5 and I was told the server was out of date! Little did I know that the PS5 had updated Minecraft while I was logging in and I then had to update the server software along with updating all my devices that have Minecraft. I think one device still isn’t updated as the roll-out takes some time. I’m looking forward to playing Minecraft in those spare moments and seeing where else I can explore in my world.

There are some other things that need organising. I need to figure out where to put the Server. It’s currently in a temporary place where I can get to it and use it with ease. I’m thinking I might attach it to the underside of my PC desk so that all the nice things are close together. This causes some issues as there will be cables stretching across a currently cable-free area. So, I’ve decided to get another ethernet switch and use that to minimise the cabling required. I think it will all fit nicely and be partially hidden. Also, I can have the server displaying on one of the PC monitors if I need it without moving things around.

November 28 2022November 27 2022

The Cost Per Unit Time Is Low

I was exploring the options within the PS5 menu and I noticed that the games I play get totalled up in terms of time played. I’m not sure if I was shocked or just pleased at the amount of time I have spent playing. I do know that it certainly justifies me spending the money on the hardware and infrastructure to experience these things.

PS5 screen capture showing amount of time played . . .

In case you can’t quite see the numbers in the above graphic let me write them down below. I just want to point out that the game could be a PS4 game that is played on the PS5 and register timewise as a PS4 time. Hence, while I tend to play Minecraft on the PS5 its total comes only from PS4 playtime.

Gran Turismo 7 – 120 hours
Fortnite – 111 hours
Minecraft – 722 hours

Now the Gran Turismo times clearly do not include all the time I have spent playing other versions. Let’s be clear. Gran Turismo is 25 years old this year and I’ve been playing it for that long. In terms of cost/benefit I think I’ve done very well.

November 29 2021November 29 2021

Not Quite Caves And Cliffs

I’ve been busy over the last while playing Minecraft now and then. This video is long overdue as it’s a walk through of the latest base area, which I think was finished a few months ago but I just hadn’t got around to recording the walk-around. Things have been quite busy. This last weekend gave me the opportunity to spend some time setting up the recording software again [it hadn’t been used really since the new screen was purchased]. It took a while to figure out how to create new scenes and get widescreen recording to work nicely. However, this Minecraft video is in standard 16:9. Why? Because I don’t think Minecraft looks good in ultra-widescreen. I’d rather put a decent product onto YouTube than one where I think I’ve compromised in video quality. I’ll be uploading some flight sim stuff soon and that will be in lovely widescreen.

Comms#1993, here are some things from that year.

A 21st birthday party ends in hilarity.
A bomb in a van under the WTC explodes killing 6.
Waco siege, Texas. 76 die.
Jurassic Park is released [first DTS film].
Marine dumping of radioactive waste is banned.
Doom is released.

August 18 2021August 18 2021

Base Progress

I spent a few hours yesterday gathering resources to start the landscaping project on my base area in the Caves and Cliffs part one section of my world. I expect to move to a new base area once the next part of the update is released.

In the above image you can see railways over the sea connecting the main components of the base. Sitting in a minecart allows me to eat and get my inventory sorted while also travelling from one place to another. I am going to keep the railways but I wanted to make it look a little prettier. So, I decided to claim back some land and build an artificial island.

The above picture shows the start of the landscaping works. My first thought was to try and make it look natural but I’m actually now keen to make it obviously man-made. Let’s see what I can be bothered to do. It turns out I’ve also made a secret harbour area and so I need to add in railways to that somehow. The pond in the middle is going to be for the axolotls I gather. I also need to light up quite a bit of the work so to avoid mobs spawning. I don’t want all of it to look the same so I have some other ideas for joining to New Holland. Look out for a walk around video on my YouTube channel at some point.

This is communication number 1929 and so here are some things that happened in that year:

Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu moves to India. This woman is horrible.
The gulag system is created in Russia.
A rocket powered aircraft is demonstrated.
The Afghan civil war ends.

August 14 2021August 14 2021

Mapping My World

I play a lot of Minecraft. I’ve been into it since the start of the first pandemic lockdown when my kids talked a lot about it and I decided it’d be nice to know what they are talking about. So I gave it a go. I have loved it every since. I mean, I made a YouTube series on my megabuild in one of our worlds.

It was an interesting experience doing the recordings once the build was complete. I had to learn how to play the game, or at least wander around, while also talking about what I have done and I found that quite tricky at first and so there were plenty of recordings that I deleted for quality purposes. I am also not going to edit the videos once recorded because that’s a level of caring I don’t have.

For a long time I have used some software t create maps of my world. I know this is cheating to a certain extent but I have decided that it’s ok to do somethings but not others. I think it’s ok to have a map and I think it’s ok to have coordinates turned on. Other than that I don’t employ any other “cheats”. I have played in some worlds with teleporting and keep inventory turned on but to be quite frank that makes it too easy. There should be an element of death and destruction within the game. The random things are what make it interesting for me. So, I don’t really play in creating mode, in fact I’ve only ever been in creative mode once, and I don’t have many “cheats” turned on. Everything I have done is in survival mode, because it’s more interesting to me.

The above map shows the area of my current base. Once the Caves And Cliffs Part One update was released I went a long way in the nether and popped out wherever it was in the overworld. The aim was to generated new areas of the world using the latest version of Minecraft. I suspect that I’ll do this again once the Part 2 update comes out and start a new-new base there.

Things to note in the map of my world are the mob-spawner just SE of the centre of the map along with an island, called New Holland, just SW of the spawner. The island is around 70% man-made in terms of area and houses my slave villagers and farm animals. There are two iron-golems there to protect the villagers which is nice I guess. It is my trading area. From the villagers I have easy access to mending and silk touch enchantments for tools. Over the next while I think I need to look more into potions and learn how they work.

Just left of centre in the map is my portal to the nether where I popped out originally when finding a new area for the latest update. There are three railways that connect this hub with the island, the spawner and my crop farm and storage area. Just NE of centre is my crop farm – currently wheat and potatoes – along with a subterranean storage area and my bed on top of a hill nearby. I’ll see if I can get some screenshots or do a video walk around of this new base area. I should probably do a video of the old base area in this world although I think I wrote about it here.

For information, the mapping software I use is called bedrock-viz for Minecraft Bedrock Visualiser. It works on the server map files and turns them into a webpage that works similar to google maps. So, if you are running your Minecraft world on a PC and you know where the database files are and you are comfortable taking copies of those then you can probably use the software. I also FTP the files to a webspace so I can see the map on a laptop screen while I’m playing, it’s a little small on my phone. I like it and I find it really helpful just for getting around the place. It’s just enough of a help that it’s worth it and not a silly amount of cheating that I think it’s ok to use. To give you an idea of what it does here is what it looks like at level 13 under my base:

In the real version of the map you are able to zoom in and hover over blocks to see the coordinates so that’s really helpful. In the picture above you can see water and bubble columns – blue and light blue – along with geodes. The yellow bits are gold and the dull yellow is iron. Bright blue is diamond and red is redstone, green squares are emeralds but once you’ve got a trading farm going with villagers who cares about mining for emeralds?

Communication number 1924 and here’s a selection of stuff that happened then:

A radio time signal is broadcast for the first time.
An explosion in a mine in West Virginia kills 119.
400 indigenous people of Toba are massacred.
Belgium introduces an eight hour work day.

July 19 2021July 18 2021

A Mess At The Moment

This is my current base in this latest world. I’ve written about things recently but this is a whole new era of my Minecraft skills. I have a simple base at the moment, I have a villager breeding area as I try to get the mending enchantment and I have a kelp XP farm. Things are going OK at the moment. The island in the bottom is mostly reclaimed and so I’ll be calling it New Holland.

I’ve got railways joining these places over the sea. This land is in a new chunk since the caves and cliffs update part one and therefore there are geodes and glowing squid all over the place. I’m not sure how to make a proper base yet, but part of me wants to build up a massive volcano and go completely Bond-villain.

May 30 2021May 31 2021

Bayside Villa – Adjusted

I spent a little while adjusting some of the decoration on the villa. The idea what to make it still look textured but less “busy”. I’m not sure it’s complete yet but it’s better that it was in the previous communication.

RTX and the Villa - back view — RTX and the Villa – back view