Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

There is a Minecraft craze going on among the nerdier boys at my 10 year old daughters junior school.  Apparently most of the girls are oblivious to this but my little angel is an old hand at the game thanks to her daddy.

I haven't disappeared but what with Christmas and family activities it has been pretty quiet on the gaming front. Minecraft proved a big hit with my daughters. I even set up a home server to allow them play together in multi-player. I made this harder fro myself than it should have been by starting out on patch day so I had to fight with version incompatibility as well as new patch bugs. Once I got everything sorted out however it worked a treat. As an unexpected bonus I managed to set things up so you can log in single player or multiplayer and still edit the same world. The trick to doing this is to store the multiplayer server in the Saves directory of the single player game and to change the level-name in the "server.properties" file. to be the name of your single player world.  This sounds bizarre but it does work. It means that when I am not around to set up a server the girls can still log in with single player and work on their world. The only game I have been p...

Minecraft's world building has proven such a hit with my kids that I bought a second license with the intention of setting up our own private server for a bit of multi-player world building. Both my licenses are alpha licenses which cost €10 each. Sometime today the beta starts and the price goes up to €15. If you have any interest in Minecraft but  haven't gotten around to buying it yet I strongly recommend buying before the price goes up. It isn't just a matter of the extra €5. Alpha purchasers also get "all future versions of the game for free" while beta purchases will only up to the first release free. Given the success of the game this makes the alpha purchase an incredible bargain for the few hours that remain at that price.

I'm not really into building / crafting games so I had given Minecraft a miss until yesterday when I realised that the price goes up by €5 with the release of the Beta version on the 20th December. A game that sells over 800,000 (and rising ) copies at a tenner a piece despite being laughably ugly and still in alpha must have something going for it, mustn't it? I reckoned it was worth a punt for a tenner and anyway it might be something to amuse the kids who are a bit more craft minded than I am. I logged in and paid my money before launching the browse version of the game.  I sat down with my daughter to play it for a bit. Gosh it is ugly isn't it? Single player "peaceful" mode seemed like a good place to start getting familiar with the game and thanks to paulsoaresjr's helpful video's we were soon chopping down trees and crafting basic items like torches and picks. My daughter was intrigued by the crafting interface so we started experimenting to see ...