Minecraft is Witch Hunting

If you were ever worried that the normal mobs in Minecraft just weren’t enough, never fear because as of the “Very Scary” update Minecraft now has witches. These mobs look very much like the standard villager but with witch themed attire paler greenish skin and a stereotypical wart on the already oversized villager nose. The reasons to go after these ladies of the night however are less about their appearance and more about what goodies they carry with them.

Why Hunt Witches?

I’m sure if I looked back in history a bit I could find a couple good reasons to hunt witches, but none so good as the loot drops of witches in Minecraft. A witch has the potential to drop up to 6 items ranging from sticks, glass bottles, gunpowder, redstone dust, and even glowstone dust not to mention the occasional rare drop of a potion or two. With all these resources becoming available in a farmable format it’s not surprising that many people would choose to set up a witch farm. Like any kind of non-spawner block farm it’s a big project that involves lighting up the areas around, above, and below your spawning area to get maximum effect. This is the easy part however, while finding a witch hut is going to be the challenge. These structures will spawn randomly in swamps upon world creation and if your world was created before the introduction of these new lucrative mobs you’ll have to go a ways out to find an area you’ve never seen in order for the huts to spawn.

How to Hunt Witches

Once you’ve found one of these huts you’ll have to do a little deconstruction to make it a more valid spawning platform for a farm, When witches were first released this included the entire area of the hut (inside floor level and two layers below the floor with a boarder marked by the roof’s overhang. However based on my own recent testing it seems that the valid spawning area for witches has been curtailed as of 1.5.2 to include only the inside of the hut which means farming them is now much more difficult (though not impossible). Unfortunately my testing also revealed that if you made your world without generated structures you will not be able to set up a witch farm even if you were to build an exact replica of a hut where one would normally spawn (used same seed with generated structures on to find exact location. Spawning area it seems is generated with the structure). Still, if this is the case for you, you can always trade villagers for both redstone dust and glowstone (and villages can be set up without generated structures, though it’s difficult) and I’m sure you’ll find some way to get the other things (I know sticks are hard to come by, but you’ll just have to soldier on). For those who can set up their farm however it’s as simple as making the spawning floor (which will end up being quite small) and set it up with a drop or some sort of lava blade if you prefer to kill your witches in the traditional fashion. Be aware however that witches can heal themselves with potions so they’re quite difficult to kill for experience or through drowning and as such you’ll want to make sure your trap is lethal.

Conclusion

Even with recent nerfs a well-built witch farm will supply you with all kinds of resources that you might otherwise have a fairly limited supply of in your N3rd C0rn3r.

Star Wars Edge of the Empire Review

As most of you will already know yesterday was June 15, however what many of you may not know is that yesterday was also free RPG day. Free RPG day is essentially an open beta test for new role playing game modules that are in their final development process and I was just lucky enough to get in on the playtest for Fantasy Flight Games new upcoming product Star Wars Edge of the Empire Roleplaying Game. Now going into the experience I was a little wary because I’d done some research on the new system and it is quite different from the now discontinued Saga edition that I’d grown most accustomed to. Of course I had my misgivings about Saga as well having come from the even older d20 system from before so I felt like I had to give this version a chance.

The Experience

The adventure we were started with was called Shadows of Black Sun and takes place largely in the underbelly of Coruscant. I was a little frustrated that particular day because of some errands I’d had to run before and so I picked the character Tray’Essek, a Trandoshan Hired Gun with the Marauder specialization (basically a brawler) so that I could focus almost exclusively on cracking heads. Joining me were a couple other players who picked the premade smuggler though they changed the species to Twi’lek and altered the gender to be female and the premade Rodian trader with no adjustments except taking on extra obligation for more equipment. Having read about the obligation system already and how it could have unpleasant consequences I opted to stick with the base level of obligation. Once we’d made our character selections the GM (game master) wasted no time and we found ourselves running from security guards after an alarm was tripped during a data heist. The only escape seemed to be a droid piloted speeder taxi and we all piled in and took off, but a lucky shot from the guards took out our pilot droid and our Rodian made a leap for the controls. I pulled out my antiquated slug thrower (basically a gun) and covered our escape while our Twi’lek smuggler shot out a nearby advertisement sign showering the area around us with sparks blinding both us and our pursuers. As our sight recovered we managed to pilot into a tunnel leading to the under-city only to find it blocked by a massive duracrete slug. Some fancy flying maneuvered us through a tight gap allowing us to pass, but damaging our engines severely. Only the combined efforts of two of our party members were able to keep the speeder in the air long enough to land the smoking hulk out front of the chop shop where we were to drop off the stolen data. From there we’re sent on a mission to recover stolen spice from the Black Sun Organization and bring the bounty hunter culprit behind the theft back for punishment (if we don’t do the punishing ourselves). The story evolved from there and found each of us growing more comfortable with our character’s niche and how we were going to play them. In the end we were successful, tricking the bounty hunter into an ambush where we stunned him and bound him to be delivered along with the spice back to our employers.

The New Mechanics

There are three major changes from the older roleplaying games that are worth noting in a review of Edge of the Empire which while a little awkward at first really serve to speed up the gameplay and make it a lot easier to determine the outcome of an action.

Narrative Dice System – instead of using numbers, adding the roll with all the bonuses and comparing that to DC (difficulty class) as with an older system, this version of the game uses a unique narrative dice system that has symbols on each face of several types of dies that quickly tell you whether or not an action succeeds. There are four main symbols to worry about. The first two are successes and failures. When you make a roll you count the success symbols and subtract the failure symbols. If you have at least one success symbol left the action succeeds, otherwise it fails. The other two symbols are advantage and disadvantage symbols. These modify the outcome with unintended side effects. For example a successful role with a predominance of disadvantage might cause you to successfully pop out of cover and shoot your foe, but leave you off balance till the start of your next turn making you easier to hit. The mechanics, once you have the hang of it are pretty easy and describing what happens and why becomes the harder part. Don’t worry too much if you haven’t been able to get a set of the special dice just yet, the adventure includes a conversion chart in the very front so you can use your standard d20 dice if need be.

Obligation – one of the key elements of the new system is called obligation and it’s simply a measure of how much history your character has that may one day come back to haunt them. Every character has some sort of obligation as part of their back story (like Han Solo’s debt to Jabba the Hutt). On your first mission your character has the option to increase their obligation to get extra talents or equipment to make the mission easier, but this means there’s a better chance that that character’s obligation is going to somehow cause an extra complication during the story. This is a great campaign element as it creates side stories as you go, and your actions can even cause you to gain further obligation as the story continues. The easiest way to explain this is to think about the way Bio Ware makes its games. All your supporting characters have some sort of history which creates a problem that they need your help with in the form of a side quest. The obligation system is essentially the same concept.

Simplified Measurements – the method for determining distance and difficulty is now significantly simpler than it once was. There are five different difficulties represented by dice. Simple is one difficulty die (8 sided), medium is 2, hard is 3, etc. Range is done in the same fashion with short being 1, medium 2, and so forth. To move to a different range category is no longer a matter of squares but rather one or two maneuvers (the equivalent of move actions from the old system) and viola, you’re closer and the shot is easier or vice versa.

Conclusion

Based on my experience with the game so far I have to say that I’m very impressed with what Fantasy Flight is doing with it. As a GM for the old saga system I can easily see how much simpler writing a campaign for Edge of the Empire will be in comparison to writing one for Saga was. The idea of a role playing game is for everyone to have fun, and I think Fantasy of Flight is on the right track for that with Edge of the Empire. I look forward to my next few experiences with the game as I pick up the starter box and play through the included adventures (including the free downloadable one from their website) and eagerly anticipate the release of the core rulebook once beta testing is complete. My only hope is that they’ll offer some sort of conversion system so the old resources are still useful in some way so that they’re not just sitting on the selves gathering dust in my N3rd C0rn3r.

Minecraft is Hunting

While it’s true that sustainable living in Minecraft is going to require farming and ranching, hunting is also an activity you’ll find yourself doing from time to time. Whether you’re looking for rare loot drops from mobs or just grabbing a bite to go when traveling far from home hunting is going to play a role in your Minecraft world.

Why Hunt?

There are a couple reasons to go hunting in Minecraft. Foremost of course is to get some food. This is an option best used early in the game before you have farms set up or when far from home with food reserves running dangerously low. In such a case you can hunt chickens for raw chicken, cows for raw beef, or pigs for raw porkchops. If you kill these creatures by lighting them on fire the food will actually drop cooked saving you the need to cook it yourself. You can set them on fire with a flint and steel or with a sword that has the fire aspect enchantment or a bow with the flame enchantment. You could also hunt zombies for their rotten flesh and the rare drop of carrots and potatoes though this is more dangerous and ultimately less rewarding. The other purpose of hunting is to get at items that mobs drop but only when physically killed by the player. Things like spider’s eyes (which can be eaten but will likely cause a poison effect) and the coveted ender pearl. This type of hunting is often far more dangerous and is something you’ll want to do only when properly equipped. While it may be dangerous, the rewards are often well worth it.

How to Hunt

The actual process of hunting is much like it is in the real world. You go out at the appropriate time, either day or night depending on what kind of prey you’re after and when you’ve located your prey, you attack. Swords and bows are the main implements for hunting. Which you choose to use will depend on what you’re after. For chickens, cows, and pigs, since you can hunt them in broad daylight and they won’t attack you back it just makes sense to use your sword. For zombies and spiders the bow makes more sense as these mobs can attack you back. In fact since these mobs are hunted at night you may want to create a sort of blind to shoot them from and go down for the loot in the morning when it’s safer. Finally we have the endermen. Because it’s impossible to hit an enderman with an arrow, you’re going to have to get up close and personal with them using your sword. It’s extremely dangerous so make sure you’ve got some good armor on and you’re equipped for a difficult fight.

Conclusion

While hunting may not be the kind of thing that you find yourself doing every day, it can in fact prove quite beneficial when done right in the correct circumstances. If you find yourself low on food far from home or need to get at some of those ender pearls why not try hunting in your N3rd C0rn3r.

Minecraft is Writing

Yes, I know Minecraft is a sandbox style game which means that official lore is non-existent and story outside what players make for their own worlds is just unheard of. However there is the option for players to do some writing in game to add lore and character to their own world, whether that’s just so you can have some fun or for something to share with friends is up to you.

Why Write?

There are a few different reasons to do some writing in Minecraft some are practical and some less so. First and foremost would be to communicate information. You see this on multiplayer and PvP servers all the time. When you spawn in there are signs everywhere telling you how to set a home, teleport back to spawn, and buy items as well as what the rules for the community are. Many adventure maps will also use writing to give players valuable information or move the story forward. If you’re on a single player map or maybe a small multiplayer map however, you probably won’t need to communicate so much information and so writing becomes more of a free form because you want to sort of thing. You can write poems, stories, or even basic how-to guides that you can trade with your friends or just keep in a library of sorts. However there’s another good reason to write. Villagers will sometimes trade you 1 emerald for 1 written book meaning that those books you’ve been writing can become profitable. However if you intend to trade them, you may wish to make sure you have a copy outside Minecraft (to copy paste back in later) or make them shorter works as there’s no way to get them back and you wouldn’t want to trade Moby Dick for 1 emerald after having spent several hours transcribing it into your Minecraft world (not that anyone would ever do that, but still).

How to Write

There are a couple different methods for doing some writing in Minecraft and the ones you choose will depend largely upon what you wish to do. First we have the humble sign which can be used to convey basic information in a brief and concise format. If you needed to you could place two signs next to each other and continue on the next sign making ancient ruins with the story of their former occupants a possibility, though this method I can imagine would become irritating rather quickly. Alternatively if you’ve got a great deal to say or are planning on writing a story of some sort you could instead use a book and quill (made by combining a book, ink, and a feather). This will allow you to write up to 50 pages of text and up to 256 characters per page, so while longer books may need to be a series, you can still get a pretty good length story into one of these. As an added bonus you can even copy and paste into a book from an outside text editor, but only if it’s 256 or fewer characters. If you wanted to make a larger message, you could always build each letter out of blocks, but this seems like it might be a bit excessive.

Conclusion

If you’re ready to add some character and lore to your Minecraft world there’s a system for you to do just that and for any who enjoy writing the odd story or two I highly recommend you give it a go in your N3rd C0rn3r.

Minecraft is Persistence

If you’ve been playing for any length of time you’ve likely already encountered some obstacles to the dreams you cook up. Minecraft is all about overcoming those obstacles and accomplishing what others deem to be impossible.

What are potential obstacles?

Still 45 Layers to Bedrock

Maybe you’ve decided to build a new base, something absolutely huge and it’s going to take weeks of hard work to even get the building site ready, let alone actually build the structure itself. Perhaps you set up a cool new redstone device only to be killed by a stray creeper and your device destroyed or perhaps you’re playing on a PvP server and your impenetrable base was thoroughly raided. Whatever the situation you have to remember that these are the breaks of Minecraft and they just come with playing the game. It may take some time but the new epic base is totally worth it. What creepers destroy you can rebuild with better defenses, and though your base was raided you can always find a new home, rebuild, and get revenge.

How to overcome

When the unthinkable has happened and you’re stuck starting from scratch or your project is just dragging on with no end in sight, the only thing to do is either give up or press on. Obviously only one of those is going to help the situation, but sometimes it can be good to work on something else for a little bit. Maybe you’re major project has some things that need to be worked out for later, you can take a break and work those things out on a creative server and then come back to what you were doing fresh from your break. Maybe working on improving your overall defenses will get your mind off the creeper attack for a while and help prevent it from happening again, and of course with the need to build a new base comes the opportunity to test new concepts, come up with new designs, and find new ways to prevent the same thing from happening again.

The rewards of persistence

When all is said and done, if you’ve kept the course and finished what you began, if you’ve rebuilt and better defended, and redesigned and made truly impenetrable than you know the rewards and they’re quite amazing. For those of you, who, like me, are still struggling through the difficult times, know that what you’re working toward is worthwhile and that while challenging it is potentially amazing. If you put your mind to it you can accomplish it and I challenge you to do so.

Conclusion

While I recognize full well that the challenges we face in Minecraft can be great, I know that overcoming them will not only improve our world, but ourselves in the process. So my fellow Minecrafters I urge you to press on and truly accomplish what you set out to do in your N3rd C0rn3r.

Minecraft is Explosive

In Minecraft there are a few different types of explosives and as you can imagine all of them involve the use of gunpowder. Each thing of course has a different effect, but all can be worthwhile.

Types of Explosives

There are actually four different types of explosives in Minecraft, splash potions, fireworks, TNT, and creepers and each has its different uses. Creepers are of course the source for your gun powder, but you can if armored up allow them to explode near you just to clear some blocks out of an area. This of course will work better if you do it on relatively fragile blocks like grass or sand as a regular creeper’s explosion won’t do much damage to stone. A charged creeper (one that’s been struck by lightning) will do a great deal more damage obviously, though unless you’re in some boss armor, I’m not sure I’d let that get anywhere near me, and probably not even then. Of course if you’re looking for a decent sized explosion without being blown up by creepers you can always go with TNT which causes a good deal of damage and doesn’t require that you be in the blast radius. TNT can be crafted with 5 gunpowder arranged in an “x” pattern on the crafting window with 4 sand blocks filling in the empty spaces. TNT can be set off using a number of methods including redstone wiring, flaming arrows, and of course flint and steel. Next up we have fireworks which at first may seem a bit useless, but they can have their advantages. Fireworks come in a variety of shapes and colors and can even be made to go different height meaning you can use them to establish a code with friends on a multiplayer server and send messages to one another without using chat. Of course you could always use them as a means of celebration as well as they do provide a pretty cool effect. Finally we have splash potions which are regular potions that have had gunpowder distilled into them. These don’t do explosion damage but rather make the potion throwable and give it an area effect (like a grenade). This is most useful for poisons, potions of weakness, or potions of harming, though splash potions of healing and regeneration give a player a unique option to play a healer role in a party of several members.

Why Use Explosives?

Well some of the reasons are obvious like coded firework messages and splash potion uses, however some are less so. TNT for instance can be used to quickly take a digging project from the surface level down to bedrock, however the TNT might land on valuable resources and destroy them so be careful where you place it. Interestingly it can also be used to create a cannon for use in PvP which normally won’t allow you to change the blocks of an enemy base directly, so you blast your way in with TNT or for the slightly more insane, TNT can be used to create a launch pad to shoot you high into the sky (possibly to quickly get out of a mine). Still, when it comes right down to it, playing with explosives in Minecraft is just good fun.

Conclusion

While explosives may seem to have few practical uses, they do in fact provide a unique experience in the game of Minecraft that’s well worth trying out. If you’ve got gunpowder just lying around and are ready for something new, give explosives a try in your N3rd C0rn3r.

Minecraft is Trapping

In the game of Minecraft there will on occasion be reason for you to try and trap a mob rather than outright kill it. There are many, many ways to do this and several different reasons that I’ll try and explain here.

Why Trap a Mob?

The most notable reason I can think of to try and trap a mob is to get special things from doing so; for instance if you can get a skeleton to shoot and kill a creeper it will drop a music disc. As you might imagine, this would be insanely difficult outside of controlled circumstances and getting all 12 music discs in the game would be nearly impossible (they’re dropped at random so you can bet you’ll be doing this more than 12 times). However you can trap a skeleton and a creeper in certain spots and then situate things so that the skeleton kills the creeper. The other main reason I can think of is to cure a zombie villager which is not an instant process. This is most easily accomplished by first trapping the zombie villager so you can protect him from other zombies and sunlight while also keeping other villagers safe and then cure him using a splash potion of weakness and a golden apple.

How to Trap a Mob

As I said there are countless ways to trap mobs that range from as simple as digging a 2 block deep hole to the super complex redstone piston contraptions that will literally pull the ground out from under them. By far my favorite trap though is something I learned about from Haydz which is super simple and very effective for any 2 block tall mobs. You place a block of soul sand level with the ground and surround it by a ring of any type of regular block 2 blocks up off the ground. This allows mobs to walk into the trap freely, but prevents them from getting out. This is a result of the coding for the soul sand block being just a little different than other blocks. It’s actually just a little shorter in the coding than a normal block would be which forces a mob or player to take a step up when they try to step off the block. This causes them to be just a little too tall to pass under another block that’s 2 high preventing them from moving from the one block of soul sand. This type of trap can even be extended so it’s a long line, or even a ring around something preventing mobs from ever getting too close.

Conclusion

While it’s probably not going to be the kind of thing you’ll do every day, trapping does have its uses in the world of Minecraft. So if you’re after those music discs or even just want to screw with the mobs a little bit give trapping a try in your N3rd C0rn3r.