Minecraft and Materialism part 3

Not a whole lot of time has passed since the last update, but I have made some major progress in the planning stages and resource collection. Both tasks have been tedious and frustrating endeavors. The planning involved drawing lines till I was cross eyed and the collection hunting down sheep and punching them with ruthless efficiency.

I got started on the planning by placing a grid on my original picture. Let it be known that I am not a graphics person; my Photoshop experience has been limited to making animated gifs. I started off by loading my Mandala picture into Photoshop and then promptly looking online for guides. Now let’s cut the next few hours of cursing and crying out. As I became more and more frustrated I started to lash out at even the most minor things in real life. Why is the sink full of dishes? It’s too noisy outside! etc.

I am not one who is able to ask for help well. I have always believed that I have the capacity and the ability to understand and learn on my own. It has almost always worked out for me in the past. But photoshop wasn’t working. I ended up swallowing my pride and asking a friend to help me out. I rationalized this with As long as I learn how to do it for my self and do better next time then getting help this time is OK. Within a few hours he had whipped up a very nice image that I will be using as my template. Thank you Shadowstep. I owe you one.

To see what I will be doing, you need to zoom in until it becomes highly pixelated. See how each grid square is divided up into a 4×4 set of colored blocks? Each one of those is a block I will have to place in game. It is amazing how every new step I take reminds me just how HUGE this undertaking is.

While my friend was working on that I went to the task of murdering sheep. On my last article someone was kind enough to provide me with a suggestion on how to get colored wool easier. They said that if I dyed the sheep and then punched them I would get 1-3 blocks of colored wool. That I knew. However they went on to say that eventually the sheep would regrow their wool in the color that they were dyed as long as you stayed close enough that they wouldn’t despawn since there is a 150 animal limit in Minecraft. That surprised me, as it meant that I could harvest the same color of wool endless from only one dye! My red flower issue was solved! I immediately put their suggestion to the test. I dyed a sheep, punched it, and proceeded to wait. 5 minutes no extra wool. 10 still nothing. After 20 minutes I decided to look it up. Much to my dismay this was an old feature that Notch had taken out.

On the plus side, I found a good method of collecting white wool. My frame is so large that as I walk around it, the other side despawns animals. So all I had to do was make a lap around my frame punching the sheep crowded around my torches at night. I did this until Shadowstep had finished making the grid for me. This managed to net me a good haul of wool. Dyes, however, are still an issue.

Now I have my template done and scads of wool, I can begin actual construction. So much planning and preparation has led to this point. My next update will have the first blocks placed, and a little on the words and teachings of the Buddha and the Dalai Lama. But for now I leave you with this.

“Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist;

use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.”

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Part one can be found here

Part two can be found here