Minecraft - Minecraft Bi-Weekly Build Challenge #25: Sports Stadium

Minecraft Bi-Weekly Build Challenge #25: Sports Stadium
For a game called Minecraft, we sure haven't had a lot of underground updates.
My updated village
My view on how Charcoal Block could look.
My new granite-busting robot!
A picture of my current Minecraft build (Java) vs my first (on Xbox 360).
I was just trying to get some wither skeleton skulls when..
Minecraft fish :D
Isn't this cute? I didn't know iron golems could do this. :3
My son and I got bored and decided to make a statue... I give you "Villager #34 The Redeemer".
I'm working on building a village. Here is what I've built so far.
Spotting Divinity
I'm liking Windows 10 Edition, and I hope you like the castle just as much
My son wanted a Minecraft-themed cake. My friend made this edible cake top
Ender Dragon fanart by Ashley Atkins
A GIF of my new shader for MCPE
I made BiomesOPlenty work with WorldPainter.
Ok world Generation, you do you
My attempts at building an airship before and after getting high off an edible.
Spotting the cameraman
Tired of going in the water to get to the other mountain so I built a bridge.
Simple Apartment Building, opinions?
Sunset on Minecraft Beta
Medieval Rural Huts (Modular village) (Album in comments)
Is there an option that removes the weird black streaks on distant blocks?

Minecraft Bi-Weekly Build Challenge #25: Sports Stadium

Posted: 06 Aug 2017 04:56 AM PDT

LAST WEEK'S THEME: TRAIN STATION

Gold

A really cool and interesting take on a train station! Also, loved the use of the new 1.12 blocks, something that many people seem to still be cautious in using. I found that using the glass to cover up another part of the build made it look cool but I also loved the look beneath the glass, with the towers with gradients of blue beneath. Small criticism is that I found the the letters you made blended in a bit too much with colours behind it (more the blue) and they were just a bit too wide and made it a little hard to read. Excellent build though, really enjoyed it!

Silver

OskarUpNorth

This just is a really elegant build I find. Great use of bricks, another block many people seem nervous to use and great depth in the building. Really liked how the build worked with the terrain and that you included paths and the trains and train tracks were really well made. The interior just seemed a bit too small for a train station and in some parts it felt more like a home. Also, in some instances there seemed to be too much colour, with wood, concrete, sandstone, terracotta and stone all being in the same shot. Great build though!

Bronze

ShadowOfDawn

First off for this one, really loved the cliffs you made and the fact that it's on a cliff. As for the rest of the location, I'm still not sure whether it worked or not. For one, I like how it seems to be in the middle of nowhere, just on a cliff but on the other hand, part of it seems out of place because of that, maybe because there's only one way the tracks go so without there being anything else around, my brain is trying to decide whether it'd be logical or not for people to even go there! But that's just me and as I said, part of me still likes it like that. Really liked the buildings and the insides, the colour choice worked really well. The train tracks seemed pretty simple but liked the trains and the use of purple/blue for them! Good build!

Honourable mentions

abrightmoore

Introduction

Time to turn of your tv and watch sports!

Oh well maybe not the tv, but you can turn on your computer and open minecraft cause we're gonna be building sports stadiums! We'll have four different types of stadiums to choose: Hockey, Soccer, baseball and football and you'll have to impress us with the grand field (or rink!).

Inspiration

Image1

Image2

Challenge

Easy Mode:

Build a stadium (choose one of the four stadiums). For easy mode, you only need the field and the stands where the spectators sit. There must also be an exterior and entrance.

Hard Mode:

Same as easy but now, you need a canteen area, a section under the seats where equipment is stored and there are locker rooms, a fitness centre and finally a parking area outside the stadium.

Rules

Submitting an entry To submit an entry, you must comment on this post and format your comment like this:

Title of submission

Easy or hard mode

Link to submission photos or video (preferably youtube or Imgur)

Comments

2. Vanilla only No mods that add new blocks or items are allowed. No resource packs are allowed. Any minecraft version is allowed and you may build with custom terrain, creative mode, world edit or etc as long as it doesn't add any new blocks to the game.

3. Any version of minecraft i.e. PS3, Xbox 360, Pocket Edition.

4. No preexisting builds We're going with the honour system here but if anything had already been built before the start of the contest, don't submit it.

5. Build teams are allowed There may be more that one person building for a challenge but only one person may submit their entry with their account

Points and leaderboards

Link to sheet. The leaderboards are on the 2nd page

For points and judging:

There is only 3 winners each week. Each participant will get 1 point for submitting their entry if in easy mode. In hard mode, they will get 2. There are honourable mentions but they do not get any extra points.

Anybody that places Bronze with an easy submission gets 3 points and if they do a hard challenge, they get 4 points

Anybody that places Silver with an easy submission gets 5 points and if they do a hard challenge, they get 6 points

Anybody that places Gold with an easy submission gets 7 points and if they do a hard challenge, they get 8 points

Schedule (AST)

Sunday, August 6th 2017: Challenge begins!

Saturday morning, August 19th 2017: Contest is closed. No other submissions will be allowed.

Sunday morning, August 20th 2017 A new challenge and winners are announced in that post!

submitted by /u/kidmania01
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For a game called Minecraft, we sure haven't had a lot of underground updates.

Posted: 05 Aug 2017 10:09 PM PDT

Minecraft has historically been advertised as a game all about mining resources to build structures. Heck, it's in the name itself. And yet, while Mojang has given huge amounts of love to building and aboveground exploring, the "Mine" part has stayed more or less stagnant since the game was first made available in Beta back in 2010.

To show what I mean, let's take a look at some of the past updates. I started playing in Beta 1.2, so we'll go from there.

-Beta 1.2: Added coloured wool and Lapis Lazuli. This update gave us a new ore to find underground for the purposes of getting blue-related colours. Even though the ore was mainly added to support the dye system, it had a lot of potential for future updates.

-Beta 1.3: Beds and RS Repeaters. No underground changes.

-Beta 1.4: Wolves. No underground changes unless you count Cocoa Beans in dungeon chests.

-Beta 1.5: Minecart boosters. This gave gold a much needed use and made it actually worth looking for.

-Beta 1.6: Trapdoors and some other stuff I can't remember. No underground changes.

-Beta 1.7: Pistons and Shears. No direct underground changes, but it did give players more incentive to go mining for iron.

-Beta 1.8: The Adventure Update, adding a new biome system, new (boring) terrain generation, and all sorts of generated structures. Most notably, it added ravines and mine shafts, exciting new underground structures to explore. Even though it didn't technically add anything new to dig up, it made mining quite a bit more fun.

-Release 1.0: Potions, Enchanting, Strongholds, and The End. Even though Strongholds were technically added in 1.8, finding them before this point was near-impossible. But really, exploring them was unnecessary since the loot was extremely lackluster and we all dug directly to the portal room anyway.

-Release 1.1: Enchantable bows. No underground changes.

-Release 1.2: Jungles. No underground changes.

-Release 1.3: The client/server merge and Villager trading. This is the first update since Beta 1.2 to add a new resource underground, this time being Emerald. However, the ore only spawned in X-Hills biomes, was even rarer than diamond, and was much more easily obtained from Villagers in the first place.

-Release 1.4: Pretty Scary Update. No underground changes.

-Release 1.5: The Redstone Update. This one added an ore to the Nether, something that had been missing for a long time. Nether Quartz is used in Comparators, Daylight Sensors, and decorative blocks, and is admittedly pretty versatile. The only thing is that you don't actually need to mine for it; you just have to run around the Nether and dig up the exposed veins.

-Release 1.6: Horses. No underground changes, unless you count Coal Blocks.

-Release 1.7: New biomes. Despite the aboveground getting a huge facelift, no underground changes.

-Release 1.8: Underground changes! Release 1.8 brought diorite, granite, and andesite, three decorative blocks. And... that's it. They're awesome for building, but they're purely decorative.

-Release 1.9: Overhauls to the combat system and The End, but no underground changes.

-Release 1.10: A few new mobs and building blocks, ~~but no underground changes.~~ /u/Preguisa pointed out that 1.10 added fossils underground, made of bone blocks and coal ore. I have no idea how I never knew about these, but they're pretty cool. However, because of their extreme rarity (1 per 64 chunks), relative closeness to the surface (15-24 blocks down) and lack of unique resources, they're more of a fun surprise than anything else.

-Release 1.11: The Exploration Update (wait, didn't we already have two of those?). Anyway, more big additions to the surface world, but nothing underground.

-Release 1.12: World of Color. Lots of things in 16 colours, and a new crafting guide to more closely match other editions, but once again nothing underground.

-Release 1.13 (Predicted): Lots of internal rewrites to improve performance, and a block texture overhaul. We haven't gotten any indication of new underground content.

Whew, that was a bit long-winded. So what's my point? Minecraft has had a huge amount of updates. I would argue that all of them improved the game in one way or another. We've seen an update dedicated to combat (1.9), one dedicated to Redstone (1.5), new building options added in practically every single one, and a full THREE updates (B1.8, 1.7, and 1.11) dedicated to aboveground content... but not a single one centered on mining.

So what can be done?

Yes, this is the part where this turns into a suggestions post. I don't like complaining about a problem without offering a solution or two, so here are some things I think Mojang could add to "The Mining Update":

-Let's get the obvious out of the way immediately: More ores. To be clearer, more ores that have a wide variety of uses. As just one example, practically every tech or industry mod already adds copper, so why not add it to Vanilla? Beyond being a "new tools and armour" ore, it could be used to make some mechanical blocks to give us more ways than the hopper and dropper to process items. Furthermore, /u/mtbaga had the excellent idea of making copper alloyable with Redstone to make wire that can be placed on walls and ceilings. As another idea, what if Creepers, instead of dropping Gunpowder, dropped saltpeter, which would have to be combined with sulphur (obtained deep underground)? Here's another idea: a wide variety of gems that spawn underground, that can be combined with tools on an Anvil to give the tool an enchantment. Ruby is Fire Aspect, Sapphire is Unbreaking, Topaz is Efficiency/Sharpness, the list goes on.

-Tool progression overhaul. Right now, the tool progression system can be summed up as: Obtain resource, craft tool, use tool to obtain resource for the next level tool. Thus, if you're lucky, you can obtain the best tools in the game within half an hour of starting a new world. The mods TerraFirmaCraft and Tinker's Construct both address this beautifully - TFC requires the player to forge complex alloys and then work the metal on an anvil like an actual blacksmith, while TiCo adds a wide variety of alloys that can be melted down and poured into casts to make tools. If Vanilla did something similar - not as in-depth of course, but similar - I'd imagine the player would feel a much greater sense of accomplishment upon reaching the next tier of equipment.

-Underground biomes. Right now, caving is kind of a necessary evil. It's by far the most efficient way to get ores, but it's kind of... boring. What if portions of caves were completely flooded, or encrusted in ice, or overgrown with moss and vines?

-More exciting dungeons. As it stands, the standard dungeon-looting procedure is: 1) Find dungeon; 2) Place a few torches; 3) Loot chests and possibly Moss Stone. If the dungeons were more difficult (think Vechs's Super Hostile maps on a smaller scale) and had more interesting loot such as named tools and weapons, players would have a lot more fun exploring and conquering them.

-Better fossils. The fossils in the game now are good, but there's untapped potential. What if you could find ancient bones deep underground? These new fossils would spawn like any other ore, but in solitary blocks with a rarity between gold and diamond. They would drop a random part of a long-extinct beast. You wouldn't be able to use them for bonemeal (when a creature fossilizes IRL, its bones are actually replaced with mineral), but you could take them back to your base and re-assemble the bones to make a really, really cool decoration. If you've ever played Pokemon Black/White, think something like the Dragonite fossil in Nacrene Museum.

-Harder stone underground. This one will be a bit out there, but bear with me. I think the Better than Wolves mod does this: mining Stone requires better pickaxes the further underground you go. For example, what if you needed an iron pick to dig below Y-level 32? It would force using the most advanced gear you have available, instead of digging out a cavern with an inventory full of stone picks.

-Courtesy of /u/vonHindenburg: Uneven ore distribution. Instead of ores being uniformly scattered everywhere, there could be occasional areas where one type of ore is very concentrated; for example, a specific 64x64 (or whatever size) area having loads of diamonds, while other areas have vanishingly small amounts. This would be more realistic, would encourage building dedicated coal, iron, redstone, etc. mines, and would make proper minecart systems even more viable. It wouldn't even have to be a forced change; it could just be a toggleable option during world creation.

Minecraft is an amazing game. It's easily the best $20 I've ever spent, and even now, six years later, I'm having a great time with it. But lately I feel like mining has become an increasingly smaller part of the game - the amount of mining-related content and the number of things that require it has largely stayed the same, while the amount of things that don't involve mining has grown steadily with the past few updates. And since we've been getting a lot of themed updates lately, I think it's time we got one to put the "Mine" back in Minecraft.

EDIT: Seems a lot of people share my opinion that mining needs some love! Thought I'd address some of the more common concerns with my suggestions.

On the functionality of new ores: Adding one or two, maybe even three, new types of ore to the game would certainly make mining more enjoyable, especially if the ores had unique spawning conditions. But things get tricky when we ask a necessary question: what would the new materials be used for? Just making new sets of tools and armour would make them, frankly, quite boring. In order to make the ores worthwhile, you would have to do one of two things: either integrate them into the existing game by replacing and updating recipes, or add new content that uses them. The first option would be somewhat clumsy, especially since we would basically be changing recipes for the sake of changing recipes. However, the second option of making the ores used for new content has its own problem: it would require, well, new content. In an update primarily centered around mining, adding new stuff to use the ores for risks overshadowing the ores themselves. I believe the solution would be to add a couple new ores to a "mining" update. As a pure example for the purpose of explanation, let's say copper, sulphur, and ruby, which would each have a few basic uses immediately. Copper would be integrated into making some mechanical things like the compass, dropper, and piston; sulphur would be used for making gunpowder (assuming Creepers started dropping saltpeter); ruby would be used for a bunch of decorative blocks. Then, future updates that add hopefully-not-superfluous content would suddenly have more materials available to choose from when deciding how to make the cool new toys.

On tool progression: This is where things get really murky, and here's the reason: the same feature that Alice has been begging to be added for years, would make Bob quit the game on the spot. And while I personally love starting with nothing in a new world and then slowly working my way up to get better and better items, I have to remember the people who just want to build an awesome castle without the feeling of pointlessness that Creative mode brings. HOWEVER, at the same time, I still think the current progression system is a little ridiculous. What I think could be done is that iron tools could be buffed, but made more difficult to obtain in some way, maybe by doing what BTW does and forcing the player to craft them on an Anvil which requires a lot of iron to make in the first place. Then, tools of a new type (bronze?) could fill the gap that the iron ones left behind.

submitted by /u/lucariomaster2
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My updated village

Posted: 06 Aug 2017 02:05 PM PDT