Happy 250th post

here, have a screenshot from my Minecraft map. Blanca and I finally bought it the other day and it's really incredible. Notch gets a lot of hate but it's a really well put-together videogame.

The game randomly generates the world, so none of the geography you can see above is designed, but generated by the programming. The little glowing thing in the bottom right is my fort, which has lots of lit torches on it so I can see it from a distance. In-game and up close it looks like this:



So you get an idea of the scale of the game. Here's a screenshot of me looking north from that hill:


Here you can see the first of a trail of torches I laid across the land to help me orient myself (it's really easy to get lost). You can see the whole trail on the map, it's that little row of bright dots going diagonally up and to the left from my fort.

The levels are finite but in theory they're infinite because they generate as you run. Your computer will slow down the bigger it gets, but the game is pretty simple so even with a map of this size I mine has no trouble whatsoever. I've seen some truly ridiculously-sized ones.

Finally, here's the night-time view from the top of my tower (those big gray blocks are clouds, by the way):


Play this music and you've got a pretty good indication of what it feels like to play:



You can buy the game here, it's pretty cheap and farily simple to install on mac or PC.