Anywho, what else could have taken up my time? Well, I finally had a job opportunity come my way. Went in for an 'interview' and everything. Now, why the quotes? Because it was a mass interview, with 7 other people. The company is Banker's Life an Casualty. They wanted any number of people to become Insurance Professionals ... AKA: Insurance Salesperson. The offer is great, except for one small thing... that of needing to be certified in the state of Florida to sell insurance. To get certified, you have to take a 40 hour course on the insurance business, then pass the state exam, and also get fingerprinted (as you'll be going into people's houses). I've started the whole study for the exam, and things were going great for a while...
Then I got distracted again ... I got sick as shit...and studying has been hard at best. Granted, some of the material is easy to remember, but some is like ... wow! Also... well, in my daily browsing of comic sites, and game-news sites, I found a new game...
Wha? Well, it's a simple game. Think of good old fashioned DOOM graphics ... highly pixelated. Now, imagine LEGOs the size of people almost. Now imagine a large open world to build whatever you like. Got it in your head? Well, that's Minecraft, to a point. See, there's a few different 'modes' of gameplay. One being just creative, wherein you've got access to most blocks, and have unlimited supply to craft whatever you like. Another being that of the single-player game, of Survival. In Survival you start with NOTHING but your fists. You have to go chop down trees (yes with your bare hands LOL) to get wood, so you can make a workbench, to then turn even more wood into your first crude tool of a pickaxe, axe, sword, or scythe. More on this later.
In creative / online mode, there's a bunch of servers you can go to and build things. I happen to have taken an affinity to Vapid Flats. Inside which, I helped design some aspects of a game arena of sorts called Sleef. What's Spleef? well, I've not played myself, but apparently you and another person try to walk around and destroy bricks on the ground, and mostly attempting to break the ground underfoot of the other player so they then fall into the lava below.
I also decided to try my hand at other buildings, and on one of the guest flats, I had built a nice size tree house. Of course, I didn't get to take a picture of it before the guest flat was wiped, but meh. I had a bedroom with a nice bed in it, a pool table, and everything. Then I took my building stuff to a normal builder's flat (flat14)(as I was given builder rank while helping with spleef). In there, I found a nice empty spot, and built:
Yes, that's a mock Scrooge McDuck bank vault from back in the days ... it's got a glass roof I know .. but that's to let the light in and full-light the pixel art I did on the inside 2 days later ...(Yea you can see black and red mage in the background that was made by someone else, but still)
There ya go... scrooge in all the pixelated glory ^^. Behind the counter I'm standing at there, is a hole, that leads to a basement I dug out, it's quite large. Wherein I've built and destroyed a few things, but left a couple up. One of which is a waterfall of sorts, and a lava fountain. Neither of them are flowing, as I don't have the rights to create flowing water/lava (yet).
So, off on the left is the lava fountain, and waterfall. In the center is my water elevator of sorts to get back up to the vault. And off to the right of that, is a giant head. Why? ... well, there's someone on the server that wants to build a giant person, being drug down by some demons of sorts, into hell ... or at least a large pit of lava. I had made a hand so he could see what I thought the hands should look like that were digging into the ground, but he decided on something different. I just built the head to see if he liked it, and if he wanted to take it for the project, which will be multiple builders helping on it due to it's large size. I also created a small demon of sorts...
So yea, not sure if that's what he was goin for in the demon thing, but I thought it looked nice either way for a simple little thing.
On to the survival mode. Granted, you can make a survival mode type of thing within the online construction mode, but it's not the same. With the alpha version that you can purchase and download, you can connect to other servers as long as you know their ip/host name, or you can go and do it solo offline. As I stated earlier, you start off with nothing. You begin by breaking down trees (that don't fall down when you take their base LOL) then you take that raw wood and create refined wood, then you can create a work bench, and then make sticks and make up other tools as mentioned before. The goal of this? .. survive! There's a time passing bit in this mode normally (unless you're connected online with a server that has it set to be permanently night/day of course), at night, baddies will come out depending on the difficulty. Peaceful difficulty means no monsters, easy means a few come, normal is of course normal, and hard means a ton come.
Your wooden sword will only defend against so much and do so little damage. You'll need better gear! Well, how do you get better gear? By MINING! ... with that wooden pickax, you can now take out stone, and of course, then make stone gear, including a furnace to refine some ore that you may get down below, or cook meat with, or make glass out of sand... you can also make a stone pickax, which can take and mine iron ore that you can melt in the furnace to get iron bars, to then make your first metallic weaponry. This entire time you could have been killing cows that wander around, gotten enough hides from them, and made a set of armor as well. Gradually as you delve deeper and deeper into the world (or higher and higher if there's mountains around you and you wanted to explore upwards), you may run into dungeons where monsters spawn at, or vast caverns with lava, or water spouts, or both.
You can make all sorts of fun stuff too. How about a boat? A mine cart? any number of things you can do, really, it's all up to your willingness to dig deeper/wider. In the alpha version of the game, the world can be HUGE, almost endless...something like 3x the surface of the world I think the developer said? So, reaching out and finding things is super easy. You could limit yourself to a small area, or you could branch out and try to find new lands to explore and delve into. So far I've just stuck with the area I have spawned in, and dug down to as far as I could. I've not gone and made enough mine tracks and mine carts to then start making a large 'train' to take me to a different place to start digging there, but I may eventually. Granted, there's not much mineral veins throughout, so finding enough materials to make, say ... diamond armor, and equipment ... at least not in the area I limit myself to.
That's it for now, I'll get a map editor and fool around with the possibilities of diamond gear, and maybe even building a roller-coaster of sorts to have fun with. I think the world I'm in currently has a HUGE mountain beside me I could find a way to climb up on top of, and make a nice long track. maybe I'll even make a glass roof and have a lava-lighting system so it's more evenly lit rather than the current torches I've got going on. If I'm going to cheat, I might as well do it with style LOL. Anywhos.. back to studying for me for now though, really wanna get this certification and get this job...the opportunity to make buku bucks is high ... I just have to stick to my guns and keep working at it.
