MY MINECRAFT BLOG
Thoughts on the new pale oak wood setǃ
Posted: Thursday, December, 5, 2024
The new Minecraft update is hereǃǃǃ It's kinda small but omfg I'm excited even for literally just the new pale oak wood planks and stripped logs. Y'all have no idea how long I've been waiting for a white wooden plank in Minecraft, I remember I even made an old collection of houses using acacia wood retextured to match the temperature of white used in the quartz blocks so that it would match the bone block and quartz brick textures. Now, I don't have to mess around with that at allǃ
About the textures themselves, the plank texture is nice but also pretty run-of-the-mill, as it just keeps the same design philosophy as the rest of the wooden plank textures made since "The Flattening" and complete game texture overhaul in 1.14. However, it's a nice-looking block. My only hang-up with it is that it uses a slightly warm white with a very slight pinkish tint. This makes it a bit texturally incompatible with the more grayish tones of the bone block or with the slightly bluish tones found in the quartz block family, but when used along with its stripped log variant for support beams, or used with a purposefully contrasting color such as the unstripped log or polished basalt column, the block works really well. You just have to work within its range of tint.
Building some better houses/first post!
Posted Friday, November 29, 2024
I'm very glad to finally get around to having a little Minecraft blog! I've been wanting to make one of these for a really long time, and now that I have this website, I finally actually knew how to make that happen.
I also finally got started on another singleplayer survival world in Minecraft. I had a long-running one in version 1.5.2 before, but I soon got bored of it since I like playing on the same world seed and it had just gotten bland fast. So, to make this next world a little more interesting but still feel like home, I still used the same world seed. However this time, I changed the world type to "Large Biomes" so that travelling around the world and amassing all the resources I would need would take more effort. And this decision was by design because for how I see it, a bigger world means more effort, and more effort means more playtime, and more playtime means more time spent enjoying Minecraft as a game again! :D
Pictured above are some of the houses that I designed over the course of a week or two. I had a backlog of designs using the same block palette (birch wooden plank walls, stone brick and cobblestone foundation and ground floor, oak wooden plank upper flooring and balconies, oak log supports, and spruce wooden plank roof), but all of them were for really tiny houses, as in, the interiors were usually no more than 3x3 blocks. So for this time around, I wanted to design some floorplans that had enough room to actually move around and expand with my progression, having a decent amount of room for storage and whatnot. So, I began with a 7x7 block base this time (that means a 5x5 block interior) and tacked on smaller or equal-size extensions on varying sides. I also made sure to give every house a porch of some sort and at least two floors. This way, there would actually be enough room inside to think and also enough room to give myself a chance to distance myself from monsters if they somehow made it inside the house.
I have a lot of plans with this world, and I'm enjoying taking the early game slow. In fact, I haven't even bothered going to the nether yet! I finally found enough diamonds for a couple diamond pickaxes and an enchanting table, so I was finally able to pick up some obsidian for my first nether portal and the table, but I haven't yet hashed out a good spot for the portal yet, so I'm just enjoying taking my time with the houses until I decide to construct a proper place for the portal. Eventually, I'd like to make this first little settlement a first base, and then I might start work on a megastructure like an actual castle at some point. I haven't found some elevated-enough platteau terrain yet, so I plan to bury the castle deep in the middle of either the oak forest I'm in or inside the snowy tiaga to the south. Whatever I do, I want it be player-scale but also tall and imposing. Something accessible but also hostile-seeming. Anyway, that's my update for now! I can't wait to make more posts on here, this is so fun! :D