Mod of the Week: RikMuld’s Camping Mod, for Minecraft

This is the review of Mod of the week and this time its RikMuld’s Camping Mod for Minecraft. I really love this mod because it allows you to make incredible camps and have a feeling like you are alone in the wild with only your cunning as resource. Take a look at the whole article with ingame images.

The days in Minecraft seem so short, the nights so very long. Who hasn’t been out exploring, lost their bearings, and realized, as the sky grows dark, that they’ll have to dig a hasty hole and spend the night in it? RikMuld’s Camping Mod is here to make those long nights bearable, by adding recipes to craft tents,  sleeping bags, camping tools, roaring campfires, and even marshmallows for toasting, to make the groaning zombies, hissing spiders, and exploding creepers a bit easier to bear.

I’m doubly excited to try this mod. First, I love when open world games (like Skyrim or S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) get portable bedrolls or sleeping bags modded in. There’s just something nice about not having to return to town to get some shut-eye. Second, I haven’t played Minecraft in ages, having given up because while everyone else was building exact replicas of Vatican City or the Death Star, my crowning accomplishment was building a small, ugly house entirely out of pumpkins. I’m eager to see how the game has changed since I last played it.

I’ve just arrived and I’ve already made dinner plans.

I start a new world in Survival Mode, and I spawn on a snowy slope with a chicken and a pig staring down at me from a nearby tree. Okay then. I climb to the top of the nearest hill, and looking out to sea, I spot what looks like a tiny island in the distance. I decide that will be my goal: to craft my camping supplies, take a boat over to the island, and camp on it. I take the normal first steps of a new game of Minecraft: I punch a tree into cubes, build a workbench, fashion a wood pickaxe, and start digging. Once I’ve collected some coal and stone, I head back to the surface just as night begins to fall. I throw together an ugly cobblestone house just before the monsters begin to appear, and spend the evening hunting for iron deep underground.

Brace yourself, pristine island. I am coming to camp on you, and then probably dig you up.

The new item I want to craft first is the camper’s tool, which looks like a swiss army knife. After mining what little iron I can find (this chunk of land appears to be sponsored by Lava Pools Backwards-N Gravel Co.), I head back upstairs, killing a spider that was hanging around on my roof. That’s good, I’ll need some string later to make canvas for my tent. As the sun rises I explore the outdoors, collecting a few roses. Voila, my camping tool is complete.

Flowers + Iron = Swiss Army Knife. Video games.

The upgraded camping tool (which requires more roses and iron) is one of those things that’s so useful it almost feels like a cheat. If you’re holding it, you can press R and it opens an instant three-by-three crafting pane without the need to carry around and drop a crafting table all the time. It’s also used in the creation of new camping gear, allows you to rotate your tent after you’ve placed it, and lets you pack up your tent and campfire without damaging them.

Onto my next item: a tent. The tent is decorative until you either stick a chest in it, which gives you additional storage slots, or combine it with a sleeping bag, which lets you sleep safely and quickly through the night. To build my tent I need tent pegs, which are made using the camping tool with an iron ingot. Easy enough. To craft canvas, I’ll need more string, which means finding more spiders. Since there’s no cavern under my house, I stroll around, hoping to find one.

I come across a small settlement of NPC farmers, which is a nice surprise, as they weren’t part of the game the last time I played. They are under siege by mobs of monsters, which is also nice, because while the zombies are busy terrorizing the villages, I’m free to run around outside and kill all the spiders I can find. Eventually, I’ve got enough string to make canvas, and after combining the canvas with my pegs, I’ve got my new tent. Booyah!

Cooking multiple things at once is handy, though my chicken will taste like stone and my stone will smell like fish.

To create my campfire, I need torches (got ‘em), stone blocks (I’ve got some cobble currently cooking) and flint (now I’m thankful there was so much gravel in the basement). That gives me a basic, decorative campfire, but I want to roast marshmallows, so I upgrade it by combining it with four furnaces. Done! Now I can cook food and even use it as a smelting furnace at the same time. There are several more camprife upgrades available, including a one that cooks food faster and one that cooks slowly but produces more from each recipe. Campfires can also be used to convert sticks into torches if you’re low on coal.

There’s no tetrasodium pyrophosphate, but it’ll have to do.

Speaking of which, I need to craft something to cook. There are two choices for camping food in the mod, marshmallows or radishes, which really means there’s only one choice. For marshmallows, I need sugar, and luckily I find several sugarcane plants growing along the waterline. I also need an egg, so I follow some chickens around, staring at their butts until an egg finally appears. I also need a bowl, which is easy enough to make. Finally, I need a blue bottle of some sort, which I don’t recall being in the game the last time I played it, but the Minecraft Wiki tells me it’s a bottle of water. I heat up some sand in my furnace, remove the resulting glass, fashion a bottle, and dunk it in the ocean. Voila! Marshmallows, ready to be held over a fire and melted into a wad of sticky, charred sugar that I suddenly can’t believe we actually eat in real life. What the hell are we thinking?

The mod adds random campers as well. You can even use their tents. Finally, a camper we’re happy to play with.

All that remains is my sleeping bag, which requires three blocks of wool and will allow me to sleep outdoors, keeping me safe from monsters as it fast-forwards through the night. I walk for hours without seeing a single sheep, but finally, off in the distance, I spy something that looks like a desert temple. Neat, another addition to the game since I last played it! The temple is sporting some orange blocks I’ve never seen before, and after I hack one out, I’m pleased to discover it’s orange wool. Perfect! My sleeping bag is complete, and all I had to do was deface an ancient temple!

Night is rapidly falling, and while I’d like to get to my little island and start camping, I decide to spend the evening here first. Inside the temple, I notice another design in the floor made of orange wool blocks, with a blue block in the center. Well, I’ll be having that. I chip out the blue block, which plummets through the hole before I can grab it. As I try to peer down through the hole, I also fall through, landing with a thud in a tiny chamber. There are four chests in the chamber, along with a pressure plate. Which I’ve fallen onto. I have just enough time to register that I’ve fallen into a trap, and that every single piece of camping gear I’ve been working on all morning is in my pockets, and that something is probably about to explode. Something explodes. I die instantly.

NOOOOOOOOOOO *breath* OOOOOOOOOOO

I’ve lost everything. EVERYTHING. I run back to the temple after I respawn, but my inventory was either destroyed in the blast or simply vanished. I briefly consider the logical course of action, namely, to start a game in Creative Mode, quickly slap together everything I spent all morning making, find an island that roughly looks like the one I was planning to camp on, and not mention that I was stupid enough to get blown up in an Indiana Jones trap. Instead, I grouchily spend my afternoon repeating everything I did all morning. This time, at least, I stumble into a cavern with a ton of iron, so I can quickly rebuild my camping tool, some armor, and a sword. A couple hours later, I’ve rebuilt everything: the tent, the sleeping bag, the marshmallows, everything. I even found some gunpowder, which is great, because after this column is written I’m going to craft some TNT and blow that stupid temple into a pile of sand cubes.

As the sun comes up, I ride my boat over to the tiny island, plunk down my tent, stick a sleeping bag in it, plant my campfire and get a stick of marshmallows out. Of course, I step too close to my roaring campfire and it sets me ablaze. Then it proceeds to rain for two solid days, but hey, that’s what happens when you go camping.

Only YOU can prevent YOU-FIRES

The mod also adds recipes for several backpacks that provide extra storage, achievements for completing various camping goals, and a few guidebooks to provide recipes and information (though only two of the five books have been completed as of my playing the mod).

Originally posted on :

http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/05/19/mod-of-the-week-rikmulds-camping-mod-for-minecraft/

If you liked this review make sure you check some of other reviews by Topminecraftmods.net

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A Minecraft Mod To Admeier: CivCraft

There’s not a lot of structure to vanilla Minecraft’s multiplayer. You build, you admire, you take a giant isometric screenshot and admire some more, then you discover creative mode and TNT. Then you restart the server and promise to never do that again (unless you’re 2b2t, then you just keep on going). Then someone mentions mods, and you get lost looking for something to give the game scope. There’s nothing wrong with vanilla, but if you’re looking for a server that turns the world into a more interesting place to explore, and eventually claim bits of your own, take a look at the CivCraft server.

It’s a bit Honey I Shrunk The Kids, sticking you down on the ground of a vast game of blocky Civilization: you and some friends will join together to build a town. It’s hugely involved, with you mining the ground to gain resources to trade for coins to claim your land. Like a proper game of Civ, major construction involves clicking on the ground and watching the buildings extruding upwards. They’re functional buildings, allowing you to enter and use them, and enhancing them to provide the bonuses to the land.

With your town hall in place, you can then start to create your town as you’d like, including Cultural and Defensive buildings. The more you grow, the more influence you’ll have. Grow crops, advance along the tech trees, build more towns. All the while a vast game of diplomacy is taking place server-wide. You can take part in the more Civ-like metagame, except it’s not meta: you’re actually on the ground. Spies, for example, can sneak into enemy towns and destroy their Wonders.

It’s currently offline, because of a huge surge in popularity over the weekend, but it’ll be back up in a few days. I don’t have the time to oversee an RPS invasion when it comes back online, but you guys should totally be in there, building an empire on puns.

This is certainly one of my favorite mods for Minecraft. Creating town is really fun and it feels like you are the Major of the town controlling the progress and everything regarding it. Check it out , its certainly one of the top minecraft mods.

Original article source:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/05/20/a-minecraft-mod-to-admeier-civcraft/

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My Favorite Minecraft Mods for May 2013

Top Minecraft Mods Currently Available- May 2013

Minecraft is one of the greatest indie game sensations of the last view years and is highly revered for its sandbox style that puts importance on gameplay over state of the art visuals. The customization it offers in building constructs of virtually any kind has been one of its main draws, and a myriad of player generated mods have been created to enhance the personalized gameplay even further. There are many to choose from, so let’s go over some of the top Minecraft mods out there.

First up is “Too Many Items”, which is as close to a Minecraft God Mode as we’ve seen! With this mod you will have access to virtually every type of block, item, and food in the game, as well as the ability to instantly change the weather and time of day amongst many other features. The user interface has been updated brilliantly to make all of the new options easy to manage and filter through. There are a lot of nice keyboard shortcuts introduced as well, such as a button that allows health restoration. This mod is great for anyone that wants to jump right in and experience everything the game offers completely at their whim.

Another of the most useful top Minecraft mods is the “World Downloader”, which lets you save every block that you’re currently viewing in a multiplayer server. Every save file is then made available to you in single player mode, meaning any build you come across can be all yours instantly! This is a really amazing mod that saves time while also opening up a lot of fun customization possibilities.

If you enjoy more intensive building sessions however, another great template based mod is the “Instant House Mod”. This will give you access to a set of blocks that can be used to generate a basic customizable house instantly. This cuts down the time that basic foundations generally take dramatically. Anyone that wants to build quickly without feeling they’ve “cheated” too much should definitely try this one out.

These really only scratch the surface. You might also want to check out Death Chest, Rei’s Mini Map, Defensive Villagers, Matmos Sound Mod, and Dragon Mounts to name a few. With these top Minecraft mods you will be well on your way to enjoying the unique beauty and fun of Minecraft in fantastic new ways. Be sure to let us know which one is your favorite!

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