User:Asterick6

I joined Minecraft Wiki back in July of 2011, mostly making a few edits here and there, and occasionally some big edits. I later began editing frequently - copy editing and improving descriptions in articles, fixing and adding links, adding a History section to most articles for recording the topic's update history and changes, as well as doing technical edits that few do, such as signing unsigned signatures, fixing disambig links, creating templates, moving/merging/renaming articles, etc. I've slowed my editing in anticipation of a permanent break from editing, which is hard to do since I'm pretty much addicted, but I think I'll leave this wiki to the many other dedicated editors and helpers who will continue improving the Minecraft wiki. - Asterick6

[edit] My Minecraft experience

I think it was around late 2010 that I stumbled across the Minecraft site and a few videos of the gameplay some months before I heard about it from my friends. At that time, I didn't know much about Minecraft, but when I revisited the site a few months later, I remembered that I had thought it was interesting, but didn't try it out. It was around April or May 2011 that I heard classmates talking about Minecraft, and I initially felt reluctant to try it out in person after watching them play around a bit. A few days later, I gave in and downloaded the launcher by AnjoCaido to try it out, wondering if it would even work on my no-video-card computer.The version at that time was Beta 1.3, when beds (I learned a few months later on the wiki) were conveniently added, which probably helped me stay interested in the game by passing night faster. I spawned in a forest biome and roamed about wondering at the landscape and wide oceans. Nighttime caught me by surprise, and as the sun slowly disappeared over the horizon, I walked about, wondering what would happen, and I quickly learned that monsters spawn at night in Minecraft. I ran from the monsters after attacking back with futile attempts, and ended up spending that night in a small underground pit, waiting out the monsters. I did not know when morning would come, so I stayed in that pit until I could no longer hear the monsters making noise and being mysteriously hurt, which I would later learn was the effect of the sun on the zombies and skeletons. In that first world, I had pillar-jumped to a large tree and set up my home on the leaves, placing torches all over it back in 1.3 or 1.4 when torches could still be placed on trees in Fast graphics (I still think that unintended functionality is quite useful; too bad it was removed for being "unrealistic"). I set up the area, improving my home into a sort of treehouse, but still without walls or roofs, and built a one-way mob pen using pressure plates and doors to keeping cows, sheep, and chickens from escaping while still letting them inside. Gradually, I became bored of Minecraft due to the repetition and patience required for crafting structures or new homes or the repetitiveness of mining, or dying and having to re-obtain my items again or build a new home from losing my way to my existing home. After mining down to bedrock and expanding to nearby tree tops with sky walkways of dirt, I grew bored one day, and torched the area, setting my flint and steel all over the area and wandering into a new snow biome (thankfully I still have the backups of my world saves). During that time of boredom, I read the wiki and learned about some of the aspects of Minecraft - some blocks, mobs, biomes.

As for videos, I remember one of the first videos was the old Minecraft trailer and the Portal mod trailer as well as other Minecraft gameplay videos and trailers. I gradually began to watch more gameplay videos, especially ones such as regular Let's Plays, or involving exploration and nomadic adventuring. I watched many mod reviews, and after watching a review and trailer on the Mo' Creatures mod, I searched about it on the wiki and encountered a strange description about Mo' Creatures mod on the wiki page. So I rewrote that description, which became the first wiki edit that I made on an article.

I entered the Mod scene with Zombe's mod, naturally because of my desire to fly in the game and make the gameplay more interesting and less tedious by prevent myself from falling to my death ever again and having to re-acquire my items. Because it also included teleportation, zombe's mod was greatly helpful in many difficult situations that I encountered. I used the fly mod in a friend's servers, and funny enough, pretty much everyone was flying around like a boss. I experimented with Weather control including long times spent summoning lightning onto things, as well as other useful tools such as pathfinder, which would allow me to go on long treks and never get lost again. Soon after trying zombe's mod, I also installed TooManyItems by Marglyph, which allowed me to go creative mode in the survival only mode at that time. I initially stayed with zombes and TMI, but I watched many interesting mod reviews and trailers such as the Zeppelin mod by blakmajik, the Portal gun mod by iChun, as well as Mo' Creatures by DrZhark and SDK's gun mod. Watching the trailer and reviews on the Zeppelin mod led me to experiment with it due to its airtime experience that was greatly different and more enjoyable than regular flying. After watching a review of the portal mod, I read more about the mod and thought it was awesome that iChun and Leggos_My_Eggos had collaborated to make the Portalcraft project with the portal maps and texture pack. I installed the Portal gun mod and played around with the map using the Portal texture pack, and installing the mod led me to install Risugami's mods since his mod included a dependency (the Audio Mod) that Portal required in order to produce the portal sounds. One of the mods in the pack that caught my eye was an interesting one called Biosphere, which generates spheres of biomes connected in mid-air by walkways. I intended to experiment with Biosphere, but never quite created a world because I didn't completely understand how to generate it (I never read the guide closely until now). The Elemental Arrows mod was included in the pack, which I also experimented with, and I ended up destroying large tracts of land with a combination of arrows (mostly TNT and lightning) by the end of my experimentation with that mod. After these initial bouts of mod experimentation, I never re-installed them as the monthly updates came. Then in October of 2011, I tried Millenaire by Kinniken after searching for a similar experience to the upcoming Villages in Minecraft, and experimented with the villagers and village building. The mod featured an economy system, which I tried obtaining money the vanilla way, but I found it tedious and re-installed TMI to obtain the coins and build everything I could build in order to see the villagers in constant action. Unfortunately, I lost patience as usual and ended up griefing the whole village by Flint&Steeling it to see what would happen afterwards; most of the village had burned down, but I watched with interest as the villagers built the village back up again (the buildings that were still in construction). As the frequent game updates came before the official release of Minecraft 1.0, I didn't take the time to re-install them after experimenting with the features. The game became increasingly laggier for me as more and more updates came. It got to the point where I could no longer play realistically in survival mode; after some googling and searching around the forums, I found advice and recommendations on using the Optifine mod by sp614x, which greatly increased the playability of the game. Optifine and later, Gen7's launcher, made it much more playable by optimizing and reducing the amount of memory needed to run the game, which was causing annoying lag spikes and jerky screen movement. I wasn't even able to activate flying mode or sprint because of the major lag, and these issues caused me to die quite a few times, further causing me to become bored and annoyed (of the repetitiveness) of the game.

I first encountered custom texture packs with the 1n5aN1aCPack texture pack by 1n5aN1aC that was bundled with my download of the AnjoCaido launcher, but I never used it aside from testing it once (although I still have it). After playing with a couple of new friends I met on SMP and asking them which texture pack they used, as well as watching some videos using custom texture packs, I decided to try out the Painterly Pack that my friend was using. It was a beautiful and well-drawn texture pack, which I used for the remainder of my gameplay experience (until Beta 1.8, from which I didn't update due to the frequent releases and my gameplay inactivity). I had also tried the Portal texture pack while experimenting with the mod, as well as Glimmar's Steampunk texture pack, which was very well drawn and an overall great texture pack.

In the summer, I played with my cousin and experimented with the Portal mod again, this time being serious about completing the portal levels. Later, we attempted to destroy bedrock by clearing a cube of blocks to bedrock with MCEdit and constructing a 5x5 tower of TNT, which we then activated and escaped to safety using a portal from the Portal mod that I had previously applied to a tower a safe distance from the blast radius. We teleported through it and viewed the TNT explosion from the far-away distance with the TNT tower exploding and disappearing in the jerky, slowly-updated render frames that occur when viewing huge explosions from a distance. At that time, I thought the TNT tower really had destroyed the bedrock, and updated the bedrock article with an entry of our accomplishment, adding details about the 5x5 tower all the way to bedrock, and thinking that it had actually destroyed the bedrock either due to an actual destruction from all the explosions, or data chunk errors in the game. (I later read in the Talk page that the bedrock had probably disappeared because we had inadvertently replaced the bedrock with TNT when we created the tower with MCEdit, thus causing the 5x5 hole; this made more sense).

I later received a nice gift from him - a Minecraft gift code. Now, I finally had a premium, legal account to call my own, and I could finally join vanilla servers and abandon Hamachi. I played periodically and experimented with things, attempting to create redstone structures I saw on videos or traps I thought were clever, and joined servers where I started a new experience from scratch, building, obtaining items/ores/gems, making structures, and improving my home.

Between Beta 1.9 to 1.2.4, I played Minecraft less often, except to test out the many new features which Mojang added (Endermen, Villages, Snow Golems, Strongholds, the End, Ender Dragon) that kept me interested in Minecraft up to now. I began to increase my activity on the wiki, accumulating 100s of edits per day at a time, and actively read the wealth of information while improving the descriptions, phrasing, grammar, or other small issues. I went to MinecraftForum a few times every day at the peak of my activity on Minecraft topics online, while rarely opening a world to play. Now I've slowed down in editing, but still check the forums for updates and news. I only opened one of my first worlds in late 1.2.5 release and played for a significant more amount of time and finally found my way out of a cave system that I had wandered into in the beginning, inventory stocked full of ores and gems. I've been pretty addicted to Minecraft and the experience, and I expect I'll still be visiting quite often or at least periodically. - Asterick6