Red sheep,blue sheep, purple sheep. Farming in minecraft.

So this weekend I spent so time with S to chill out but also spent some time working on turning my house in minecraft into a farm.

Various coloured sheep in minecraft.

As you can see one of the weird things you can do is dye sheep different colours.  Dyeing sheep also gives you the ability to breed two different coloured sheep together to create a sheep which is a mixture of the two colours.  For example breeding a red sheep and a blue sheep creates a purple sheep.

I’ve also been preparing to go from peaceful mode to easy mode.  As I like the world being relatively peaceful one idea I’m thinking of is having a cron job which changes the difficulty dependant on what time of day/week it is.  For example it could become progressively more difficult as I approach my bedtime :).

I also did some other building over the weekend.  I created a pyramid in the swampland far south of the forest area (I’ll update this post with a picture).  The pyramid hosts a portal to the nether which I’ve created a walkway from to the portal in my house allowing easy travel between the two when it’s running in peaceful mode.

I also have the railway line which goes from a junction just north of my house to a lake east of me.  This isn’t the best picture of it but you can just about see it’s scale.  I’ve done some more work on it since I took this picture and added lights and handrails.

A stone and wood viaduct high above the forest

Minecraft

So I’ve finally succumbed and bought Minecraft.  It’s been fun and I really like the vast procedurally generated world it contains.  This was one of the problems I had with SecondLife back in the day.  If you wanted to create a vast area it would cost far more then I could of ever afforded (the maintenance alone on a 256×256 area was about $300).  A also really like the way it populates the land with animals such as cows which rome around, villagers and if you play survival mode above peaceful level monsters.  Another thing great thing is it is both single player and multiplayer so you can host your own servers.  I’m currently running a server called http://dl.bukkit.org/ so that me and K can play together.

I’ve also been playing around with a mapping application for Minecraft called http://overviewer.org/ this program takes your minecraft save game and creates a isometric map of your creation which you can scroll around using the google map APIs.