Now that my son and I have our own computers, we've don't have to share one to play Minecraft. He still watches a lot of YouTube gaming videos and plays other games, like Spore. However, until recently, we never played Minecraft together. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be, with some simple clicks. If a world was opened to the LAN, the other computer wouldn't detect it. There were other minor difficulties, I say they're minor now because I got around them easily enough by setting up a Minecraft server. However, setting up a Minecraft server wasn't as easy as instructions made it out as they contained an error. Luckily, I understood what I needed to do and what I was doing. Plus, I had Google to search for issue troubleshooting. Really, it wasn't that difficult to do.
I knew my son would be happy once he got home from school that we had a server that we could connect to. While he was at school I set it up and made sure that we both could connect and spawn in a safe place, which I built. We played for a long time. He died more often and needed my help too often.
The one visual difference between us is that he has a custom skin. I don't know how or why as I haven't researched skins, so my character, "GregoPeck," looks like Steve. I've learned some very basic commands, since I enabled Cheats, such as healing and teleporting characters to each other. I often use it to heal myself or teleport him to me as we get separated. That's something else we do, is get separated. I often go wander, looking for something, and he ends up going on way ahead or in another direction. This is also due to how often I mine things I see, like coal. However, by wandering off, he came into a pack of wolves. He tamed two and bred for another.
Today he wanted me to create a new world for the server, so we could start out and build together. I didn't know how to do this, but my habit is to get on Google when I want to know how to do something. While I read a simple solution, I found my own. I created a backup folder in the server folder and moved the world folder to it. This I did after closing down the server. Then I restarted the server and we were on a new world together starting out. Luckily we spawned near a few caves and didn't have much trouble getting iron and coal. So, for now, we've set up camp just inside a cave in a hill. The cave ended up leading to a ravine in which we found red stone, waterfalls, and lava. He found a diamond, but lost it by dying in lava.
What's next? Oh can't you see it?! Terraria. Yes, sometime in the future we'll look into that.
I knew my son would be happy once he got home from school that we had a server that we could connect to. While he was at school I set it up and made sure that we both could connect and spawn in a safe place, which I built. We played for a long time. He died more often and needed my help too often.
The one visual difference between us is that he has a custom skin. I don't know how or why as I haven't researched skins, so my character, "GregoPeck," looks like Steve. I've learned some very basic commands, since I enabled Cheats, such as healing and teleporting characters to each other. I often use it to heal myself or teleport him to me as we get separated. That's something else we do, is get separated. I often go wander, looking for something, and he ends up going on way ahead or in another direction. This is also due to how often I mine things I see, like coal. However, by wandering off, he came into a pack of wolves. He tamed two and bred for another.
Today he wanted me to create a new world for the server, so we could start out and build together. I didn't know how to do this, but my habit is to get on Google when I want to know how to do something. While I read a simple solution, I found my own. I created a backup folder in the server folder and moved the world folder to it. This I did after closing down the server. Then I restarted the server and we were on a new world together starting out. Luckily we spawned near a few caves and didn't have much trouble getting iron and coal. So, for now, we've set up camp just inside a cave in a hill. The cave ended up leading to a ravine in which we found red stone, waterfalls, and lava. He found a diamond, but lost it by dying in lava.
What's next? Oh can't you see it?! Terraria. Yes, sometime in the future we'll look into that.
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This has definitely been a learning experience, I mean that in a good way. Since this original posting, my son and I have been playing Minecraft on the server. I've learned some configurations and also feel like I'm getting some basics on Java, at least Java usage, as I have been working with .jar files (for the game and server). I've also been playing with the commands (in game and on the server) as well. The commands in the game are also knows as cheats, so I've done some cheating, which has made the game much easier.
Along with healing, I've been using saturation (restore hunger bars) and enchanting. I've created fully enchanted gear for both me and Vinny. This has helped us both survive. I've also changed game settings such as making it so that we don't lose our inventory upon dying. I also turned PVP off. So, the game is less challenging, but less frustrating in most regards. Still, after a few hours of exploring the server world, I get a little bored as I often find myself running in circles or spending countless hours exploring and looking for particular things (like wolves to tame or cows to pen).
Both of us have our own Minecraft identities. Sure, I've payed for the game twice, but in total I spent less than $60, which is what games typically go for these days and aren't as fun. By getting this accomplished, I found an old email address by trying to access a different one, so I have two extra email addresses to use. I plan to take advantage of this soon by creating a Steam account for Vinny using one of those email addresses. This will allow us to play Steam games together (*cough* Terraria).
So far, I've still neglected Mods, that will be another learning experience.
I think vanilla Minecraft is a good way to play the game. If as you play you want to try something else, mods are great. I had some fun playing with Travis and his wife a few years ago. Ultimately when I got Terraria my Minecraft play died out entirely.
I like Minecraft, but with Terraria at least the progression feels more... I don't know, like it means more I guess.
=) Well I briefly looked into mods, which my son keeps asking for, and it looked a little more complicated than I wanted to get into at the time. One mod I've thought of, that would be cool, would be to remove Creepers. Although lately with my overly enchanted gear, they're not as much of a problem anymore.
That's great that you got to play with Travis and Katie. I understand what you say about Terraria and Minecraft, yet for some reason I keep coming back to Minecraft. Don't get me wrong, I love Terraria, but since I've already done almost everything, I'm not sure what else to do. The last thing I was trying to accomplish was finishing the Pumpkin Moon event, which I think I need to use a better strategy for (in other words I need to use potions for the PumpKing battle)..
Yeah, I had to get better gear and such to take PumpKing and even now it's much simpler with Travis or WhiteboySlim around.