That would be pretty neat! 
Holy cow! Minecraft is getting too much attention! 
Can I ask what plan you’re using for your webserver, and dedicated machine? :
I want to be sure my own vendor is safe from drowning in connections.
Ok, I had tried Minecraft in the past, but didn’t really get into it. I just tried it again. I spawn. I punch a cactus. Ow. I punch some sheep and some flowers and some boxes shaped vaguely like chickens, picking up the items. I wander around. I play with the inventory, but the items I had don’t seem to do anything or combine. I find out right click puts down blocks. I climb a mountain. Fall a little ways. Ow. I try to swim up a waterfall, get about half way and drown.
I feel like I’m missing something. Is there a game here somewhere?? How does this have mass appeal if a software engineer slash indie game developer can’t figure out how to play?!
well think of it as lego, there are no real rules, you just use your imagination and creativity and stuff just happens.
for example this video that just went viral on the internets, rather sad ending (for the player)
Figuring out the basic item creation ‘recipies’ is a bit awkward. IMHO you’re better off going to the minecraft wiki and just browsing them - the difficult bit is finding the resources to make things (I love my diamond pickaxe ;D ).
Also, multiplayer survival is a lot more fun than singleplayer right now - if possible get a small group of friends together and host your own server for everyone to play in.
I just tried the “real” version of Minecraft for the first time. After trying out the free versions a few times and thinking it was okay I finally had the chance to try the alpha build.
I started digging into mountains and looking around but it didn’t make much sense I then went off to watch a 1h and 50 minutes YouTube series about how to play the game. It now makes much more sense and I really enjoyed playing it for a few hours the second time. (I guess this means that the learning curve is really high and that the tutorial definately is needed)
I still can’t keep the focus for more than a few hours though, After having made the first couple of houses that no zombie can get close to, explored a cave or two and made a small farm and so on it just feels like there isn’t a whole lot to do yet. Maybe it is just not a game for me yet, but I really hope it will be when it is more challenging after the first night.
Oh, and the game crashed when I was in a cave and I can’t load the save file anymore so that kinda bummed me out as well… But it is an Alpha so it makes sense that there still are several bugs.
Sounds like you’re about ready to embark on a mega-project. ;D I’m currently in the middle of building a giant lava waterfall/beacon next to my house on a flying island so I can find my way home.
Just thought I’d point out that the instructions to run minecraft on linux have a small typo, instead of
java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp MinecraftLauncher.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame
it should be
java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp Minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame
I showed this to my nefyou (spelling is way off on that word.) and he loved it. said it was awesome, though he couldn’t figure out how to build things. Maybe have a tutorial the first time you run it?
Also I fell in love with the graphics and colors. You should do a doomlike FPS in that style. I would LOVE to see that.
I can’t believe it takes so much effort to get into Minecraft. How can this be possible with the number of sales it is making? People in general have very short attention spans. What are we missing?
It beats me Markus, what’s the secret? 
I think people are curious about this new kind of play, so they have a stronger motivation not to give up… It’s kind of a logical step after lego, your persistence remains, they have a feeling, they can learn something or extend their visual capabilities, like children do. So they are not giving up so fast…
If they see games they already know or whose playing mechanics are very familar to them, they seek for another stimuli inside of this games and by finding none they leave. Minecraft manages to combine two things: build what you love (as its a long process to build something great) and defend what you love (creeper’s tssss…BOOOM, etc.)
But building alone is a big motivator, as it allows people to create third dimensional things from their mind easily (easier than with 3D modeling tools, but not as accurate)…
cheers, kulpae
Right, kulpae. I get that, and that is what i expected. However, when I play, that doesn’t happen. For example, I tried it again. I punched the crap out of some sheep. This allowed me to put down some concrete blocks (likely they are actually wool). I explored until nightfall, finding only the usual farm animals and flowers. When it got dark I repeatedly jumped and put concrete blocks under me, so that when the bad men come they would not kill me. I watched a spider, some zombies, and a green creeper thing for a while from my woolen perch. Eventually I got restless and accidentally fell off. I ran and some jerk shot arrows at me. I rounded a corner and, weakened from my fall, a zombie killed me. Where is this gameplay depth you speak of?
You know you can dig into the ground right?
Here are some nice links where you can find a lot of info about Minecraft:
http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page
Brasklapp:
Well, at daytime I enjoy building my empire and when night breaks in I defend it (or when I can’t, I hide)… .
I must admit, that minecraft alpha makes much more fun, than classic… well with classic I tried building some houses or towers, that’s all… nothing more… but with MC-Alpha I have much more fun extending my buildings, looking for rare ores, be off to the sea and explore new places… I’ll make a youtube video of my “work”, so I can show off a bit
If I can put this world (MC says its 20MB huge, but on my hdd its > 120MB) to a minecraft server, so others can join, colonize islands and we could trade and so on… that would be cool
So as you can see, the fun lies not in the goal of the game (like in real life, nobody gives you objectives, when you come into this world…), but in the process of achieving something, that the player choose for himself.
If you don’t set your own goals, you won’t achieve anything and thus it won’t be fun. Use your imagination and build something (tower, house, cave,…), then try to expand it or look for better materials and enhance your building … or look for redstone and build complex logic circuits…
Now that people have gotten skillful at creating large cities and such, maybe the next area to expand into would be outer space?
Next version: Minecraft Galactic?
I actually saw some pretty active discussions on the suggestions forum about this. Somebody wanted to make it so you could go to the moon or some BS (and subsequently the moon would render your world as it flew over the sky). This seems like it would be far too much work. Instead just having teleporters to go between worlds (each one having some special materials) would be cool.
The problem with space is that it is ‘fully 3d’, our earthly environment is ‘mostly 2d’.
=> ‘fully 3d’ is vast, boring, and incomprehensible.