Minecraft – Our World

I have been playing around with one of the utilities that was brought up in the comments of a previous Minecraft post.  Called Minecraft Overviewer, it is a command line utility that lets you render your current world into a Google Maps format so you can get a satellite view of your domain.  Here is a screen shot of our world so far.

Strange World – Sep. 7, 2015

The compass rose indicates north with the red pointer on the map.

At the longest points we have explored about 6,000 blocks on the east/west axis and about 5,000 along the north/south axis.  As a block in Minecraft is approximately a meter in that world, we end up with less than 30 square kilometers, or about 11.5 square miles, explored.  Look at all the gaps in out coverage.  Not really a rectangle at all.  We have seen a land about the size of Nauru so far… or maybe, on the optimistic side of things, the size of Tuvalu.  Small islands.

Xyd and I seem to be the explorers so far, though we cheat a bit and use the nether and put up portals in order to take advantage of the 8:1 distance boost you get moving through the nether.  I am pretty sure that all of the most distant points on the map are from portals, though there have been times when I have wondered if it was worth the effort.

For example, to get to that square chunk on the east end of the map, which isn’t even connected to the rest, I spent a couple of hours digging a tunnel through netherrack in the nether, having to stop every so often as lava flooded in… and lava moves fast in the nether… until I could work my way around and plug up the flow.  I could have run there from my next nearest portal, in the desert just to the west of there, in much less time.

That map of the world has actually been trimmed a bit.  There were some bad chunks in the world that were causing errors to the south of Skonk’s estate.  I tried to fix them via a couple of utilities, but the corruption was bad enough that it crashed the programs as they tried to fix the chunks.  In the end I brought the server down and deleted the region files that contained the bad chunks.  Fortunately, one of the things that Minecraft Overview shows on the map when you mouse over it is which region file an area belongs to, so figuring out which files was fairly straight forward., and that seemed to do the trick.  Corruption be gone.

Where we actually live and build is a much more constrained.  The yellow marker is the spawn point for the world and you can just barely see, if you open the screen capture up to full size, some of the roads we have built across the lands.  I would post the full render, but it comes out to more than 4GB when done at high quality, so it a bit bigger than I would want to try get online.  And it changes every day.

My first build site was close to the spawn point as was Xyd’s.  Since then we have branched out a bit.  Here are the locations of current sites.

Local neighborhood

Xyd moved to a mountain top where he built a castle in the clouds… which is kind of annoying him as clouds are rather indifferent to what you may or may not want from your view.

Skronk’s mountain and farm is spreading out to the south, while he built a long road to the desert in order to collect sand in order to produce a large quantity of glass blocks.  He is also relatively close to the village that I built a rail line to previously.

And another friend, Aaron, joined us and has planted his own camp in the middle there.  Initially he started close to my near base and ended up running into my mining tunnels down at level 12 in the world, so he shifted over a ways in order to be able to mine freely.

And there is a rumor that Earl will join us at well at some point.

Meanwhile, my daughter has been building little houses as she travels around the map, when she actually joins us.  She is a bit bored with vanilla Minecraft and keeps asking me about mods.  But the rest of us are fine with this for now, so here it will likely stay.

It has been interesting to see how everybody approaching building things.  I will have to highlight some of these locations at some point.  I actually started a second base in a mountain range after seeing some of the things Xyd had done with his base.

Of course, I ended up with very different results.

Still, our world keeps on changing.