efaardvark

This ^^^ some people will gladly pay hundreds of dollars for the boxart and collectable items included in a nice "exclusive" package. Often they can even be a good investment in a dollars and cents sense if they're good quality and the series turns out well. There's also - believe it or not - people who look for ways to make sure that the artists get paid for their work, including buying official DVDs, even overpriced ones.

Started a new hardcore game in the latest minecraft snapshot but died almost immediately. I should know better.

"Wattles" just started a RLCraft youtube series. Wattles who doesn't mod and has never tried the RLcraft modpack. I'm sure this will be gruesome.

Is minecraft pixelart still a thing? Now that's clunky!

Started a new "hardcore" for 19w38b snapshot. Finished my starter hut and found that it has a wonderful nighttime view of the nearby coral ocean from its observation tower..

A full response to "how to play minecraft" would take forever. Of the two basic modes, "creative" and "survival", creative is the least stress. Nothing is hostile, you have unlimited access to all resources, no health or food to worry about, breaking blocks is instantaneous, etc. You can even fly around. You can do whatever you like, with the corollary that you kind of have to come up with your own activities since most of the structure of the game is missing. Unless you're the kind that likes to jump right in at the deep end I'd recommend that your first experience be in creative mode, at least until you get the hang of things. Beyond that, I've been playing for years now so if you have any specific questions feel free to ask. It also helps a lot to be able to find an experienced someone who can play with you online for a few "days". In "survival" mode you have to build, grow, or find everything for yourself. You have to worry about food and health, and hostile mobs ("mobiles", aka monsters) spawn in the dark places like caves and at night. The first day is therefore kind of important, as you'll want to find a safe place to be before your first nightfall. If you don't then you'll have to be dodging skeletons, zombies, and spiders all night. That can be either fun or traumatizing, depending.. My "first day checklist"... 1.. punch a tree. Literally within 10 seconds, find the nearest tree trunk and start breaking it for wood. 2.. take the logs you get from the tree and make some planks. 3.. make some of the planks into sticks 4.. make a crafting table 5.. place the crafting table down next to you and use it to craft some wooden tools from the sticks and planks. You'll want at least an axe, a pick, and probably a shovel. Use the axe to get more wood. The pick is for (cobble)stone, and the shovel is for dirt. 6.. build a tiny hut. The roof can be open (for the first night), but It should be about 4x4 blocks lengthxwidth, and 2 blocks tall. you can use dirt, planks, stone, sand, or anything else you like. Mine are usually dirt or planks, but anything that's handy where you spawn is fine. 7.. knock a hole in one wall of the hut that is 1 block wide and two blocks tall. 8.. use some planks to craft a door, and put the door in the gap you just made. You might also want to break the crafting table down at this point and place it back down in the hut. At this point you've got a little protected area that you can hide in during the first night. Don't worry about anything fancy to start. Keep a minimal mindset for the first few days. If you have time on your first day after doing the above, or the next day if not, then the next things you'll need are light and a bed. Look around for some stone. You'll need to mine 9 blocks to make into a furnace on the crafting table. Put it next to the crafting table. Put a log or two in the top part of the furnace, and a couple sticks or something wood in the bottom for fuel. pretty much anything can be used as fuel.. doors, wooden tools, sticks, logs, tree saplings, etc. There's an optimal way to do things, but I'm not going to spoil the fun by getting into it here. if you put enough fuel in the bottom part you'll turn the log into charcoal. a stick and coal or charcoal will make a torch. Torches make light. Monsters don't spawn where there's light. Torches are thus handy for making places like caves or the inside of structures you build safe places where monsters don' surprise you. Beds are kind of like save-game markers. When you die (note that I did not say "if" ) you will respawn either at the world spawn point where you started the game or near the last bed you slept in. You also need to sleep every three days or so in recent minecraft versions. If you don't then if you go outside (exposed to sky above) you will be attacked by phantoms. To make a bed will take "wool" and wooden planks. Wool you can create from spider silk or from sheep. There is a shear tool, but it requires iron to make, which you'll have to find as iron ore and refine in the furnace. You'll have to kill spiders for the silk, so that's also problematic for newbies. Sheep will also drop their wool when killed, as well as food (which you'll also be needing). Sheep are non-hostile mobs, so killing sheep is probably the best way for a newbie to get wool. Mkae the wool into a bed, and cook the meat in the furnace. At this point you should be relatively safe. You can make a sword and go off to fight mobs. You can make a hoe and start a farm for growing seeds/wheat, carrots, potatoes, and beetroot. You can build pens and farm pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep. (Cows can be milked, and produce meat and leather when killed. Sheep for wool and meat, like I mentioned. Pigs are just for meat. Chickens produce feathers, which are necessary for arrows, and also meat.) You can make a pick and start mining for iron, gold, emeralds, redstone, and diamonds. You can build a huge castle. Or you can just go off and explore the world.. find villages, avoid raiders and other hostile mobs, etc. There are horses, donkeys, and llamas for pack animals and riding, if you can tame them. If you get bored with all that there's a portal you can build, which lets you get to the Nether. Mostly lava and nasty mobs, but the Nether also is the only source for key ingredients for potions. There's underwater temples, abandoned mines, the End and the End Dragon and End cities. Lots of stuff to work for. Here's the minecraft wiki, and like I said, just ask.. For the extreme MC survival players...

Anyone ever played Pokemon Red... in Minecraft?

I've been watching too many let's plays and not doing enough actual playing. It is too easy to become a couch 'tuber! I have gotten into the odd habit of starting a new survival game every time a new minecraft snapshot comes out. Those don't last too long though since I usually play them on "hardcore", then die within a couple hours. Or at most a few days.

Did some small tweaks to Sonic Ether's shader mod on Minecraft but I'm afraid I'm at the limits of my GPU. I'm actually amazed it works this well. I can see how this would look awesome with a nice hi-res texture pack, but my poor GPU is about to melt as it is just with the shader. I'm only getting in the low 20s (at best) in terms of frame rates too. I'm sure that trying to push more pixels would just turn it into a slideshow. Isn't that how it has always been with Minecraft though? Feels just like old times.

My sister-in-law just got that for Xbox. I haven't played it but it looks pretty interesting from an over-the-shoulder perspective.

Spent a couple hours this evening after work playing with shader mods in minecraft. Of course I tried SEUS first.. not with any real hope that my "old" radeon rx480 might be able to do anything even approaching what the latest-and-greatest GPUs can. I just wanted to see how much it actually could do. No ray tracing I'm afraid. On the plus side the project did entice me to install a couple performance mods, including optifine, which I hadn't bothered with yet on my new system since the CPU/GPU could already do far more FPS than my "monitor" (an old TV) can handle. It does have a few enhancements however, so I'm glad it is there now. Almost feels like I didn't waste my evening. Now I just have to wait a few years until those $600 gfx cards come down to a price I consider reasonable.

Reading up on Apple's gaming service. Guess it was only a matter of time some people I know, all they do on their "phone" anyway is game.

I just found out that Pippi was almost done by Miyazaki/Ghibli! I loved reading about Pippi when I was a kid. I think it would have made good anime material, especially if it had been done by Miyazaki! Too bad the project never happened.

Yeah, it is still a thing. My brother and I have a game on it and play it often. I think they limit you to 10 players maximum at any one time for personal accounts. There's also 3rd-party servers with higher limits. (And generally higher fees, but you can also usually add your own mods as well.) Realms is simple and fairly cheap though, and Mojang/MSFT probably isn't going away any time soon.

Somebody looking for things to do in minecraft?

Also (after looking at your profile) I might suggest Hiiro no Kakera , Kamisama hajimemashita, Shigatsu Kimi no Uso, and Log Horizon. Maybe also Mahoutsukai no Yome.

You'll also sometimes see "kouhai", which would be the situation in reverse. If I'm your senpai (senior) then you're my kouhai (junior). Misaki in Sakurasou is always calling Sorata "Kouhai-kun" for instance. And since I mentioned it, names often have suffixes attached which give a clue to relationships. -san = shows respect, kind of like using "mr" or "sir" in English. -sama = shows great respect or reverence, like "your honor" or "lord/lady" in English. -kun = respectful, but usually to juniors. You'll often see this when some adult is speaking of/to children in older age groups such as high school or college. That's pretty much it for "official" honorifics, at least in current usage, but there's also -chin, -chan, -tan, and -bou, which are kind of "baby speak" and usually used to refer to cute or very young people, or to people who are very familiar or close. There's a lot of nuance in the above by the way. It is often hard to sort out, especially for non-native speakers, but usually worth it because it gives you an idea of how characters relate to and think of each other without a lot of tedious expository dialog. A girlfriend referred to as -chan by her boyfriend is different than a -san. A person referring to his/her grandmother "ba-chan" shows a different regard than "oba-sama". It can also be key to letting you know exactly when these relationships change, and why. If someone suddenly starts referring to someone else as -sama instead of -san - or vice versa - for instance then that's a subtle but usually important change. Also, dropping the honorific entirely usually shows familiarity and/or a more comfortable informality, which can be similarly informative to the anime listener/viewer. (All this is one of the reasons I like listening to the Japanese audio when I'm watching anime btw, since it is something that translations and dubs often get wrong or ignore entirely.)