When it's done will we get to fire rockets at it while blue primitives scatter about?

Notch will make it so!
Or we could alternatively play it out, half the server skinned as blue people with bows and arrows and the other half humans with tnt canons :D

Woah. Will that even work? Don't saplings need more free space to grow?

I made a large tree once, with a 9x9 trunk that I manually constructed, then planted various trees around it and built branches etc. Then some bastard burned it down. The inferno rages in my memory forever. :'(

I'm experimenting :D I hope it works, but I'm not sure at all if it doesn't work I'll have to build one manually :D

I've gone ahead and bought the game. Now let's see if it keeps me interested long enough :)

The most rewarding part of it is in the sculpture, I find. In conceiving something, and seeing it to realisation. If this is not your style, then the gameplay elements probably aren't robust enough to keep you really engaged. The logic elements, redstone, are neat to play around with, but slow and difficult enough to build that it's annoying to build complicated circuits. There is also a limitation in input/output which inhibits it somewhat.

Nonetheless, there is always entertainment to be had - and satisfaction in seeing a structure work/turn out as designed.

See, I held out for so long because I'm not a big fan of free world games but this one managed to become quite a phenomenon online so I had to give it a look.

On other news, there's a Minecraft podcast out there made by the guys at the Dead Workers Party Network (who also did the Control Point TF2 podcast and Nation of Gamers). It's called The Shaft and you can find it here.

The sapling clearance requirement doesn't apply to trunks and leaves; you can plant trees really close together like this and they will simply share the available space (merging their leaves together into a solid canopy). Any gaps can be filled with trunk blocks later.

Fire is currently disabled on this server, so trees have a far greater chance of survival.

Just read a bit in PC Gamer about the Hell update:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/10/22/minecraft-halloween-update-preview-meet-the-ghasts/

Looks nasty!

It also looks like a HUGE update, so we may need a new server... which would mean our current world being lost... (or at least mothballed).

Not really, as there are no new materials in Normal world, all new materials are in hell, so what could be done, if wanted, is to use a map trimmer and cut out most of the unused terrain from random explorations, and we could get new biome terrain on the new explored areas.

Notch should make it so that if you manage to dig through the bottom of the world (as in black hole cave), you fall down into hell...

I thought that was already possible?

I just need to buy the game myself already. I've been putting it off for too long.

Yeah, but at the moment, you just all down into a void and die.

Oh... that doesn't sound as fun as I imagined.

Am I the only one who just lost connection and can't log in anymore?