Benie's Games Blog

I’ve said how awesome Enderdragons are in Minecraft. The best mob added ever. But to be able to RIDE one?! Holy fucking shit between two epic buns!

AnimalBikes makes it happen. Not only you being able to be the master of the skies on your very own Enderdragon, you can also ride Creepers, Pigs, Chickens.. pretty much every mob in Minecraft.
To install this wonderful mod, takes time and previous knowledge of how to work with minecraft.jar and .class files. Fortunately I have both. You need only three mods to get it working. The main mod (of course), ModLoader, and ModLoaderMp Client (you can also use this in SMP, but Bukkit isn’t updated yet so that’s a no go).

Once everything’s done, you have to craft these wheels, which are called “Bikes”. Think of them as your control over the beast. To craft the Dragon Bike, you need eight End Stones, and put a Saddle in the middle. Like this;
XXX
X0X
XXX
X = End Stone
0 = Saddle

And boom, you got a Dragon Bike.
Then you right click the ground with it and hello.. an Enderdragon!! Right click to hop on. Then use Space to fly up, and Left Shift to fly down. This isn’t actually easy for left-handers like myself.

If you have a Flint and Steel with you, right click on the dragon (while riding it) and it will actually breath fire! Super epic. Don’t worry about your house burning down or torching the map, as there’s an option to disable damage done by the dragon’s firebreath (if only there was an option to turn off the Enderdragon mob’s firebreath. then I wouldn’t have holes in my mountains and rivers).

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Anyway, I mentioned also in the title that the map is disappointing me. This is true. I decided to fly south from the first station for the INNER LOOP LINE to see what else is past it. Except for vast oceans, there is really nothing but generic, uninteresting landscape. No islands. No nothing. It makes me want to move the Stone Towers I found over to this map, just for the hell of it. But to find a good location for them is another story.
That, + the Dragon Bike? Ohh god so much fun…

Finding those towers in my previous map was a freak accident. There’s no other map out there with floating towers like that. But since I know how the map terrain generator did it, it should be easy to re-create this phenomenon in MCEdit. The towers were pretty much, chunks ripped out of the ground and suspended in the air, with what’s left a giant, deep pool of water that can go right down to the bedrock. But they have to have more of a shape than a giant floating block in the sky.

I’ve been in Minecraft today, making the 4th station in the new map next to an NPC Village I found south of the Main Hub.
There’s three lines. RED LINE (designed like the WAYWARD LINE), BLUE LINE (designed like the BENIE LINE), and INNER LOOP LINE (of course designed like the OUTER LINE).

I then went past the new 4th station, using MCEdit to throw in the station I used in the W2TS for when the WAYWARD LINE ends as the first station of the INNER LOOP LINE, a line that will basically hug around the boundary of the ingame map.
So I got the Eastbound side of it extended to make its first station (and the first ever station I made with that type of line) to what I’ve called “Great Swamp”, due to the fact there’s a large swamp biome (one of the new biomes added) in the Southeast corner of the ingame map.
Before I could, it became 4:50pm (when my RP friend comes on WoW), so I got out of Minecraft and fired up WoW.

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On the launcher, I noticed it had the patch thing going on, and was taking a bit longer than a hotfix. I thought “Is this Patch 4.3?”. It took nearly ten minutes to download the entire thing (including the non-critical updates).
It also appears they changed the official name of the patch to “Hour of Twilight” instead of “Dragon Soul”. I would rather call it “Azeroth’s Retribution” for what Deathwing did.

So yeah, Patch 4.3 is live! Unbelievable. Feels like just last week is when I came into the PCR. Now with the testing over, I can play around with the new content. And it looks like it went in smoothly like the previous patch. All of my addons are still working (they’re actually out of date, but with the Curse Client, updates for them will be soon. Hopefully).

What stings like a bee is the Raid Finder. It says I’m not eligible to queue for ANY raid in it. In the drop down of the Raid Finder, it shows the instanced raid of when Deathwing attacks Wyrmrest, and the Dragon Soul raid; nicknamed “Fall of Deathwing”. The minimum ilevel is 372 for both, and I’m nowhere near that. But do I really give a shit? For it to say that feels like it’s saying “U SUK LOL!!”. But I don’t care that much. I’m not a raider.
What’s strange is the Firelands raid is missing from the drop down, and I know in the PCR it showed I could queue for it (but barely. The ilevel requirement is right at mine, 355).

But with 4.3 now live, this gives me something else to do if I get bored with Minecraft (which seems a bit unlikely but there’s always the chance) while waiting for my friend to get on.

There is something I have overlooked, and forgotten. There IS an alternative to Minecart Mania, and it was right under my nose. It just only worked in Single Player, or what I’d like to call; CSS (Creative Single Player).

Before I mention said alternative, everyone’s heard of SSP (Survival Single Player), but never Creative Single Player. The name pretty much explains it, single player in Creative Mode (didn’t know it was possible).
Creative mode now, basically allows you to do what you’ve done in the past. Have a bunch of unlimited blocks to place anywhere. The inventory is now a block selection menu (but there’s physics blocks like Water and Lava not there). The crafting inventory can still be accessed by using a chest or something. You place blocks like normal, and delete them (but they don’t turn into a small spinning block that can be picked up). That’s only for objects (things like flowers/redstone/minecart tracks) if you delete the block it’s sitting on.
You don’t die, which is always good. Plus, you can battle monsters if you wish (again, no player dying) by setting the Difficulty from Casual to Easy/Normal/Hard.

So anyway, I mentioned before how I miss MM. Well, there is an alternative, but it only works in Single Player. Zombe’s Modpack’s “cart” mod. I’ve used it before when Autocart wasn’t being updated anymore. But it never really hit me to use it until I happened to see my old friend, Single Player Commands, updated for 1.0.0.

So, I grabbed the auto installer, and moved the new SMP map over to SSP. Each time I ran it and ran the game, it froze when I loaded any map. So I tried it manually, and it worked. Apparently the auto installer wasn’t deleting the META-INF folder as told by every modder, to delete.

So anyway, everything’s working out. I’m finally able to ride the rails of the new W2TS, which allows me to focus more on expanding it, and less on complaining about how I can’t live without MM. Finally I can move on and work on stations.

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With SPC, I can spawn the new creatures that were added in 1.0.0, from the “The End” thing, Endermen, and EnderDragons. One time I had gotten bored, and spawned an EnderDragon (apparently they can show up in Casual). Before I knew it, I was under attack by its fire breath, destroying EVERY block its breath touches. Unfortunately nearly torching the forest I was in.

To make things interesting, I spawned four more, and had five EnderDragons in the sky. I wanted to see how they flew, and they seem to fly like dragons from WoW (but more realistic turning of their bodies). Notch was dead-on with the animations, and it was a pretty fun boss fight. What’s awesome is how they tried to flank me from all directions, spinning themselves around in the air and try to directly fly into me.

When one finally dies, it starts to glow, then parts of it break off, then a portal shows up. Going through it puts you in the The End level, where you battle another EnderDragon to the death. It too will eventually drop a portal. But this one shows this screen, about you, the player, are the universe and other intriguing shit, then credits roll. Hitting Esc ports you back to your spawn point.

You aren’t given a weapon like a super pickaxe that can break a block in a split second or something like that. But why would you need one in Creative mode, when you can break Stone blocks with your hand? But anyway, the The End thing is pretty awesome. It’s like an arena of you VS the Enderdragon, who can fly through the black pillars and still get to you.

Life has not been easy without Minecart Mania. I thought I could use Notch’s blocks as an alternative, but as I said before, they don’t even come close to the simplicity of MM.
There’s not even a fucking alternative! If there is, it’s either for SSP or not 1.0.0 compatible.

I have gone through alot of tutorials. Most of the “latest” ones involve making an ugly, unneeded ramp for a minecart to stop at stations (that often cause them to bug), and not one of them is complaining about it to Notch. If they are, they sure aren’t saying it in their videos.
I have seen other people complaining about the blocks, but nothing about how Minecart Mania was better.

Angry, being the way he is and having an even worse sleep schedule than my RP friend, I was forced to ask bukkit, minecraft.net, and Youtube for help. For example, I needed help with an idea I mentioned in my earlier post; a four-track station. But I couldn’t figure out how to get the switching to stay where I wanted it to.
Turns out the answer was right under my nose, that I needed an RS NOR Latch. Looked in Youtube and found a somewhat helpful tutorial on how to set one up for a switch.

That took time but I figured it out and got it working for the idea. But not everything wanted to work in my favor. The launcher didn’t, and I was told the fucking launcher has to be ANGLED for it to work.

Angry came back earlier than expected, and tried to help me. But told me that Booster blocks have to be angled to work when it comes to incoming carts. I know he’s getting tired of me continuously whining about how I need Minecart Mania back.

And I think to the point he got bored and did his own things while I struggled to deal with what I had. Before I knew it, he started to grief up the new map without even apologizing. First, by spawning a shitload of minecarts on a ramp and see how far they’ll go, lagging the server. Then using TNT on the ground. There’s four holes near where I had my eye on for another station idea (one on the side of the river). On top of it, he put his house directly in the path of the route.
Thanks to MCEdit, I was able to repair the damage he caused for the most part. Got rid of all.. 1,257 Minecart entities, “patched” the holes he made with grass (love the new Brush Size options), and fixed the hole on the river.

I’m not really mad at him. Well, I guess a bit. But I’m … I just want Minecart Mania back! So much that I’m sick of this shit and going back to WoW. I’ll wait ’till Afforess gets off his ass and works on getting MM 1.0.0 compatible.

Minecart Mania was the reason that kept me in that game. Without it, there’s really no reason to be in here.

Angry got me back to Minecraft, late Wednesday night after showing me a video he made for me (had to ask him) of the “new” Booster and Detector blocks for minecarts.
What I mean by “new” is I haven’t played since.. late March / early April? According to the folders, they haven’t been updated since late March. And alot has happened since I’ve been away. But there was a reason I was. Frustrated with the fact I couldn’t think of anything for the W2TS. But, I needed some.. time away from WoW after my RPing friend dissed me with his annoying excuses of having to leave.

I know we got tamable Wolves now. Heard about them. And I heard about this “Enderman” thing from someone. But there’s alot more shit I had no idea existed. Such as Pistons, more biomes, Villages (with NPC Villagers), Abandoned Mines, Snow and Rain, New Sounds, New Animations, a new area called “The End”, and… a top-down ingame map. And that’s just some of the new shit I missed. There’s so much more I didn’t mention.

For one thing, Minecraft has gone Gold with its 1.0.0 release. But CraftBukkit is another story; confusing the hell out of me of which build to download so I can get the ole server back up.
Seriously, it says the “latest” recommended build is for Minecraft 1.8. 1.8 is old. What happened to 1.0.0?

There’s one thing I had a feeling of, and I was unfortunately right. Somehow for some reason Afforess stopped work on Minecart Mania. The thread hasn’t been updated since September 3rd. There’s no word if he’s planning to retire the plugin (I pray he doesn’t). It’s kinda pathetic to think I NEED him to continue my work.
He seems to be helping a dev with another plugin, called “SpoutCraft”. Some kind of thing that improves SP and SMP gameplay, and the way plugins work. Sounds nice. He mentions he’s trying to get it 1.0.0 compatible. Maybe when he does, he’ll come back to MM.

Anyway, I managed to hop on angry’s server that night, and he tried to show me how to make the Booster and the Detector to be automated. He failed, proving that I need Minecart Mania updated bad. It just doesn’t have the features I fell inlove with. Like the Spawners and the Cart Kill blocks, Station blocks, and signs that control intersections and all sorts of shit.

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The next day (Thanksgiving), I spent 1/4 of the day trying to get my server up. From starting with a “Outdated Server!” message, to trying to figure out why in the fuck the sun/moon are rising in the South and setting in the North.
I still couldn’t find the reason for the second problem, but I “discovered” how old my gigantic map of the W2TS really is, and it really pains me. I believe the sun/moon issue is IN the map. I’m having biome failures (especially noticeable in and around the WAYWARD LINE’s southbound stations, like Residential station).
Ice freezing the lakes and Snow covering the ground around Plains and Stone Tower, thanks to it being in a Snow Biome.
The entire area of Residential is a big mess. I got a Snow and a Rain biome in one area. Months ago, this wasn’t a problem as biomes were new, but all they did was change grass and tree leaves. Now.. unfortunately it is.

If MCEdit has been updated for 1.0.0 (and thank god it is..), I can use it to salvage what I can of the map and throw everything into a newly generated map. I can make a new W2TS.
The map that loaded is a perfect attempt at doing that. Hills in the middle, forests (actual pines too, that aren’t restricted to snow biomes) to the West and North, a river, and a large swamp. And using the new ingame map, I can make it 5x smaller than it was for starters. Have a central hub, with two lines. One going North/South, and the other going East/West. And having a line similar to the LOOP LINE on the ingame map’s boundary.

I still need MCEdit to get the houses and shit I placed in the map. Those would be pains in the asses if I had to rebuild them. But this will definitely keep me off of WoW for awhile.

As for dealing with the “new” booster and detector, right now I know very little of how to properly power them my way (the wiki doesn’t help at all to me), or how they work. I’m going to be forced to go back to the days of pushing a button to grab a cart, throw it on the track, and launch it, instead of pushing a button that causes a minecart to be summoned to the station, then auto-launching after five seconds. Hopefully, Afforess will get back to work on Minecart Mania soon, and get it updated to 1.0.0.

Besides, my stations could use a redesign. Like another set of tracks that welcome departures and arrivals, which will allow the main line to be free for carts just passing through the station to the next one, and so on.

From MAD to my own Kroger store, it seems Angry Bird mania is sweeping the nation. But what caused this fad? I seriously wanted to know.
According to the wiki, Angry Birds started as an App for Apple back in 2009. It’s a Puzzle and an Indie game, featuring shooting these flightless birds using a slingshot at green pigs. The reason? They took their eggs and want them to die for it. Talk about anger management issues.
The game is 2D, and features not only killing pigs, but their pathetic use in construction materials for their houses and stuff. The birds are ready to tear them apart, with five birds. All having their own special moves that are triggered with the left mouse button (or your finger if you’re playing on a smart phone).

There is two other Angry Bird games. Angry Birds Rio, which I believe has parts from the movie Rio in it. And Angry Birds Seasons, which has all major holiday-themed levels like Easter, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, and Christmas.

It grew in popularity and levels, and it was made into a PC game in 2010.
There’s also a way to play the game for free, thanks to Google Chrome, called “Angry Birds Chrome”. Game looks awesome. Pretty fun.

Yet, how come I’ve never heard about this thing ’till now? Beats me. But I bought the PC version and I haven’t put it down since.

Now if you would excuse me, I got to get three stars in this level…

I just got done completing my first Well of Eternity run. The dungeon is very fun, especially the retrieving the Dragon Soul part. It claimed Thrall would be in it, but he wasn’t. Did see (and hear) a younger Alexstrasza.

Both the Well of Eternity and End Time are really short dungeons. But they’re both very fun, and will definitely give me something to do in the future.
Both dungeons were DOABLE! 😀 Yes, my gear is good enough, and no one bitched about my DPS. It was awesome. Finally I now know I have a chance. Then again, it could be the “Modified Gear Level (PTR Only)” buff that Blizzard warned about in BlizzCon of making sure everyone had the same ilevel.
Still, I have a 355 ilevel on live. And in End Time, it got throttled back to 353.
Only problem is I died.. alot. But, what do you expect? This is my first time on both.

Nozdormu now has a new quest (and a non-male Night Elf voice). He tells you if you’re going to kill Deathwing, you’ll need the Dragon Soul’s power, and the only way to do that is to take you back to the Sundering which is 10,000 years ago, but mentions a creature blocking him from doing that, who is Murozond (nothing about he’s his time-warped evil twin).

The twisted versions of once-heroes think you are responsible for the destruction of Azeroth, thinking you are working for Deathwing. The only way to convince them you’re not is to kill them.

Of trying to obtain the Dragon Soul in the Well of Eternity, is when you see a younger Alexstrasza and her sister, Ysera. Then Deathwing, aka Neltharion (before he became The Destroyer) tries to take the Dragon Soul, obsessed with trying to reclaim it. But.. something is inside the Dragon Soul that pushes him away. The Old Gods. Tell me.. what the fuck happened? I thought Deathwing was WITH the Old Gods. Were the Old Gods… good back then?
Still, that was pretty epic. How the Dragon Soul was tearing his body apart. Nozdormu retrieves the Dragon Soul for you after defeating the final boss, in his dragon form (who my friend would think he’s sexy).

You never get to kill Azshara. After that boss battle, she manages to fly away. But killing her isn’t what you were sent in for; it’s to acquire the Dragon Soul to stop Deathwing.

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That’s not the only thing that was tested by me. Went to the new Darkmoon Island area. The place is massive, but it looks like it’s not finished yet.
The “Whack-a-Gnoll” game was pretty strange. You’re given a hammer and you gotta run over to these barrels and try to whack the gnolls. But every so often, a baby gnoll (or something) appears. If you whack it, you’ll trip and land on your back.

There’s also this new “Darkmoon Field Guide” you can get and take with you into dungeons, raids, and BG’s to get 250 “Grisly Trophies” for ten Darkmoon Prize Tickets.

Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftains (as they said they leveled up on BlizzCon) looks like they made a permanent home here, playing on the top of every hour, with the same “Power of The Horde” song they sung before. You’d think they would have better material, like they did at BlizzCon’s closing ceremonies. It’s funny how they still couldn’t get their “Storm! Earth! Fire!” thing synced with the music. I wonder if it was because of server lag.
And as usual, asshole players got on stage before they did and started dancing and yelling.

I saw the new PvP area. It’s an arena of sorts. A Free-For-All, Horde VS Horde, and Alliance VS Alliance. A 24/7 Deathmatch. There was a shitload of bodies littering the arena floor that causes lag. This could be bad when 4.3 goes live (hope Blizzard thinks of something). It reminds me of DOOM 1 Deathmatch, that the corpses don’t despawn.

I did manage to walk around the island. No hostiles. Just a few 85 wolves but they’re neutral. What kicks me is it’s always night there (maybe because of the name “Darkmoon”).

So that basically covers it all. In a week, I’ll come back to finish the quests at the Well of Eternity to unlock access to do Hour of Twilight. You see, I got the quest to kill the final boss, but due to dungeon locks, I cannot. But now I sort of know how boss fights work, so hopefully the death count will be less next time.
Won’t be able to say the same for Hour of Twilight.

Another late post. The new area went testable on November 6th. This is what RPing with your friend does to you; makes you forget to check Wowhead for the latest PTR news.

Although it’s late, it gives me another reason to get back into the PTR after checking out End Time and that part of Hour of Twilight (which I plan to do a full run of End Time to see if my gear is good enough). Wowhead’s guide is full of features and pictures. Pictures I won’t have to take.

I’m definitely planning to head there when I can. I can’t wait to try out the new games, and new ways to get the Prize Tickets. For it to act like a REAL Fair with REAL carnival games, instead of a Circus where you’re working for them instead of them entertaining you, I want this.

If it’s good enough, I might throw this into my “little” RP thing with my friend.

Apparently Steam got hacked, yet says they were hacked just over a week ago, on the 6th.

This is what they have on the forum;
Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users:

Gabe.
Sounds serious. I’ll be checking my bank account ’till they get this fixed, and will probably be changing my passwords.
I don’t know if my account and/or my Forum account got compromised, but I’m not taking any chances.

My prayers go to the ones that were affected by this.

Here I was getting used to this quick maintenance they’ve been doing for the past month, and now they pull this old shit again. Making us wait ’till 2pm to play.

Well, it has been awhile since they did maintenance like this. Maybe it’s to remove the HH or something. Whatever’s the reason, we’re paying for it.

I would play Amnesia again, if it wasn’t for that issue of falling through the ground.

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Besides that, I now have every gear piece/gem/ and reforge that Mr. Robot suggests I get, and has congratulated me by saying “Wow, your gear is optimal!! Mr. Robot is impressed!”. I’m not really over yet. My Belt, Shoulder, Necklace, Gun, and Main Hand all need to be upgraded further with Crafted items.
Still, with this setup, I can copy this guy to the PTR and use him to see if I can do the new Heroic dungeons of 4.3 to get to Deathwing. If not, then I’ll know I need to save up and get the crafted items.