I had played Minecraft Classic with my son on a multiplayer server ("multiplayer" = the two of us), and while it was pretty fun for awhile, I tired of it after only a couple of weeks. It was pure exploration and building. After awhile, the exploration got dull… it's a neat, randomly generated world, but it's all scenery. There's nothing to do but break up the scenery and build stuff. Once you've dug down to the bedrock (the lower boundary of the world), built a tower to the cloud ceiling with your infinite supply of blocks, found (and swam in) lava, and flooded a cave with infinitely-multiplying water, there's not much else to explore. You can find some neat "natural" caves, but those tire after awhile because they're just scenery. If you don't like building structures with a digital form of LEGO bricks (except you never run out or have trouble finding that one brick you need), there's not much else to do.

So I didn't have much interest in the newer, pay-for version. It had minecarts and track, and apparently had monsters, but that didn't sound like it was worth spending $15 to get more of what I'd already grown bored with. But my son insisted that he needed to try the new version (confusingly known as Minecraft Alpha, but now it's Minecraft Beta, etc… I guess the names are properly "Minecraft Classic" and "Minecraft") and spent nearly three weeks allowance on it after Christmas. And since he was playing it, I bought it and set up a multiplayer server to play with him again.

Wow… what a difference a few little changes make. First, you have no infinite supply of building material. You start the game on a beach, empty handed. It's just past dawn, and there's a day/night cycle that lasts only twenty minutes. That means you have only ten minutes before the sun starts to set… and when it gets dark, monsters come out. And it gets really dark. And empty-handed, you're no match for all the monsters that are going to come pouring down on your head. (They aren't called "mobs" for nothing.)

So the first order of business is to build a monster-proof shelter, and ideally get a light-source so you don't have to wait out the ten minutes of night in idle darkness. That means chopping down a tree and forming it into planks with your bare hands! Then you just need to build yourself a workbench, craft a wooden pickaxe, and go mine some coal to make torches. All before it gets dark.

The fruitless search for coal has led to many an adventurer's early demise. But that's okay, you'll be reborn on the beach where you started. In the dark. Surrounded by monsters. You're not going to do anything useful until morning, and you might as well get used to dying now.

Fortunately, when the sun comes out, half the monster types catch fire in the rays of the sun. The other half are a pain in the butt. One sneaks up on you and explodes. Took me a week of play to learn to recognize the sounds it makes when approaching… it sounds a lot like the player walking on dirt, and I thought those noises were me, or were noises the spider made while walking around. Nope, that's the Creeper, and he is my bane and nemesis. Especially because he likes to explode near my shelter and blow up the cool stuff I've built and make me waste time filling in holes in my defensive wall. Bah.

So there I've covered all the changes that turned a ho-hum "not quite a game" into something I can't tear myself away from. Day/night cycle, with night being dangerous, means you can't just build, build, build outdoors for hours. If you want to build an impressive stone bridge across the bay, you're doing it ten minutes at a time, keeping one eye on the sun and one eye watching for Creepers that have managed to survive. Forced to retreat to the safety of shelter for the night, you mine for limited resources… coal, iron, gold, diamonds. But you have to keep an eye out for the natural caves… monsters spawn in darkness, so it's likely that any caves you find will be full of monsters. So you craft weapons and armor out of the resources you've collected, including a bow and arrows made from the silk of giant spiders you've slain, in close combat I might add.

The game still doesn't quite have a goal yet… it's not finished. (Nearly a million sales and multiple awards and it's not even finished.) But even so, I find creating simple shelter and then turning it into a fortress, then a "livable home" (mine has a sun room, a sheltered patio with fire pits, and I'm working on building a swimming pool with underwater lighting), while searching for limited resources, exploring caves and fighting off monsters rather compelling.

It's fun in multi-player. You deal with supply shortages, have to coordinate activities ("We're short on pickaxes, you go chop some wood while I mine this iron ore."), explore caves ("Wow, check this out, I think it goes down forever. Hey, don't push me!"), and fight monsters together ("Lookout, Zombie!"). Or my son runs away from monsters while I fight them. Except Creepers. We both run from Creepers and fill them full of arrows from a distance.

Good times, man. Good times.

Boy, lots to catch up on here…

There's the hat I knit on the loom to match Nathan's scarf. It came out pretty nice, though it's a little small. That the variegation in the yarn lined up to make a rainbow stripe around most of the hat was a bonus. The loom knitting is really fast, and you can do a lot of fancy stuff with it, but the fancy stuff is more time-consuming. Making a simple purl stitch (say, for ribbing the edge of a hat so it doesn't roll up like this one) is a very different operation than a knit stitch. I prefer knitting on needles.

Nate's getting bored with row after row of knit stitches. He knit an infant hat (he wanted a toddler hat, but I couldn't convince him he'd chosen too small a loom), and not having someone to give it to took the wind out of his sails. I'm not sure if introducing him something like cables or Fair Isle color patterns would help that or not. It requires more concentration and provides more chances of mistakes.

After that, I knit a hair band for my wife for Christmas at the last minute (and finished it a few days after Christmas). I'll talk about that project in the next post.

And then I got back to the hat that started all of this. I finally got into a rhythm, knit 2, purl 2 ribbing… but I discovered I'd made a major mistake. The pattern calls for K1P1 ribbing, and I'd started out that way… and somewhere in between projects, I'd misremembered and started K2P2. No wonder it didn't look right at all. So I frogged the whole thing on Sunday, and last night I cast on, more loosely this time since the tight cast-on gave me fits, and with ten extra stitches 'cause I think the original was going to be a tad small. Fortunately, the decrease counts on groups of ten stitches, because I didn't think to check the math before I'd cast on and knit an entire row. So I feel better about that one.

And before that's done, I looks like I'm going to start a Felted Indoor Boot as part of a men's Knit-Along (KAL). I bought pretty wool, and someone at Twist has offered to teach me to spin. I bought way too much expensive yarn at Twist's recent sale, but it was buy-3-get-1-free, and it's darned pretty. I needed some of it for a new hair band, and I think I'll make some fingerless gloves for myself. Plenty more unaccounted for, though.

Spending time down at Twist more, but not quite as much as I'd like, and it's slow getting to know people because I'm not the "walk up and introduce myself" type.

Maybe going to the Wamego Winter Woolfest this weekend. But it looks like everyone I know is bailing, and I might be going alone. I'd invite my mom (she crochets), but she's recovering from pnemonia.

Whew.

On the way out of Twist a week ago, Nathan (our 9-year-old) saw some bright orange yarn… orange and blue are his school colors (their mascot is a tiger), and he wanted to make a scarf for a teacher.

So last Saturday, we dropped by Twist to knit and I bought him a couple skeins of Cascade wool yarn in bright orange and a darkish blue. Borrowed the round "hat" weaving looms out of the library and Mona, one of the Twist regulars, taught him how to knit on the loom. We abandoned that little bit of work and left the looms behind, and Sunday I bought a set of "long" ("double-rake") looms at Michael's, since he wanted to knit a scarf, and the Knifty Knitter double-rakes are set to a smaller gauge than the round "hat" looms, which is more appropriate for the worsted weight yarn he picked. I also ordered the Knitting Loom Primer from Amazon Sunday afternoon, and thanks to Amazon Prime's two-day shipping and the book shipping from the Oklahoma warehouse, it arrived yesterday.

So when I got home from work yesterday, Nathan had the book out and had started the scarf by himself. He wasn't far in and was having trouble with getting the wrapping right, so I helped him set it straight and he knit three rows before deciding to play a board game. But he enjoyed it, and likes how quickly it goes, and he's making big plans to make all kinds of things and to learn to knit on needles. I'm just hoping he finishes this project.

While we played the board game, I started a hat with the other skein of yarn that matches his scarf. There are a lot of neat patterns and techniques in the book (dang, you can purl, increase/decrease, cable knit and even do Fair Isle patterns… the makers of knitting looms are under-marketing them) and I figured it was a good idea to get ahead of Nathan a bit, so I could help him when he tried something more advanced and had trouble. And he's more likely to finish his work if he sees me finishing something similar. So I'm making a hat, and I've got another small Christmas project I want to knock out, so my own hat is on-hold for awhile. Which is cool.