(no subject)

[sophie]

As a follow-up to my last post, if anybody's interested, I made a video about the first day in Minecraft. Yeah, I know there are tons of videos out like this already but I wanted to try my own hand at it, with the intention of possibly turning it into a Let's Play-like series if people are interested.

The video itself is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJtXSIgeKvw . I apologise for the bad voice recording here; at some point I'll probably use a proper recording setup, once I can actually do so.

The video is public, which makes me kinda nervous; although I'm more confident that my voice sounds good, I'm still not really sure. And of course, we're talking about YouTube comments here, so there are going to be harsh comments, I'm sure. I... really don't know how I'll take that, but we'll see.

Anyway, let me know what you think. :)

(also, if you're curious, I have other Minecraft videos on my channel, but they're all short and demonstrate various peculiarities of multiplayer, for the most part, and don't have my voice on. Go check them out if you want to. :))

Comments

[sophie]

Creepers are annoying as heck, yes. There are a few things you can do.

Mobs can be killed using weapons, and there are basically two different weapons you'll want to use. One is a sword, and one is a bow (for which you'll need arrows). I'll give the crafting recipe for the sword and if you want to look up the bow, you can. (I'm doing it this way to avoid too many spoilers.)

The crafting recipe for a sword is like the one for the shovel, except that you replace the middle stick with another of the materials you used for the head. (In your case, probably wood or stone.) With that you'll be able to kill various mobs, although you'll need to take particular care around creepers. They *can* be killed in melee battle (they don't explode when they die), but it's difficult to do so without having them explode because they were too close to you.

I'd suggest that if possible, when you leave your base, you don't hang around near the entrance at first; go away from it and then look back to make sure there were no creepers behind you. If there was one, then I'd suggest trying to see if you can trap it into a corner that's too high for it to jump past, at which point you might be able to pick it off relatively easily. If you have a bow and arrows, things are much easier as you don't need the corner; you can shoot the arrows at the creeper while it comes towards you.

There's also the possibility of building traps around your base - or having one in a central location so that when you exit your base, if a mob starts following you, you can lead them into the trap. Traps generally involve the mobs walking into things which do damage to them in some way, but I'll leave it to you to work out the details. (Unless, of course, you want me to give you details! But it's much more fun to work things out and build stuff yourself in Minecraft, I think.)

Of course, even with a weapon, nothing can prevent this sort of accident except being on your toes and looking around. Creepers are kinda insidious like that; they're very good at sneaking up when you don't expect them. Until recently, creepers didn't even make idle noises, so you couldn't even rely on sound to tell if there was one about like you could with the other mobs. They do now, though, so I'd suggest listening out for them, too. (You'll soon get to learn which sounds correspond to which mobs.)

BTW, a free tip in case you didn't already know - with doors, you should place them while you're on the dangerous side. (In other words, outside your base.) The way doors work, doing it that way means that you get to attack mobs outside your house, but they don't get to attack you. If you do it the other way, of course, it's the other way round...