In part ye firste I fiddled with Minecraft’s fundamentals. This time it’s the utilities that take the spotlight. I’d only planned on mentioning one or two in passing, but there’s a huge number of handy extra addons that you can use . I’ve used them all at some point before even having to write words and words on Minecraft, so they’re worth recapping, especially if you have a vain streak want to show off your sexy Minecraft worlds.
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Posts Tagged ‘mod news’
a number of options to fiddle with at you leisure
Block By Block: Modding Minecraft, Part 2
By Craig Pearson on April 29th, 2012.
The Other Stuff
Build Your Own Skyrim, Part 3: Let’s Have Fun
By Craig Pearson on March 24th, 2012.
Previously: Part One and Two of our Skyrim modding guide.
My other posts sort of circle-strafe around the crazier ideas that modders have had with Skyrim. Instead we very calmly patched a few holes, and then we respectfully accepted their help to rework the world a bit. It’s taken me a while to have the courage to look at those majestic mountains, curls of cloud hanging off like cotton on the breeze, and say to myself: we need some My Little Pony weapons. I am sorry, Bethesda. Some of the things here are silly, but I can’t help myself. You’ve made such a serious world that, well, there needs to be some fun. Now it’s not going to be a pile of garish nonsense, although one or two will be a bit odd. I’m really just looking at mods that make the world or playing in it a bit more interesting and fun. This collection in a little bit different: fun is not a theme that’s easily quantified, and as such they’re somewhat all over the place and a bit more personalised.
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Sky above, Earth below
Build Your Own Skyrim, Part 2: Remake The World
By Craig Pearson on March 17th, 2012.
Okay, that’s a little bit dramatic, but “making cities a bit more accessible to thieves” is missing the flair that the Dovakhiin deserves, and while I won’t be moving mountains in this second Skyrim mod round-up, I will be shifting cities about a bit. This second shout of mods isn’t really about fixing things or adding to the world: it’s about building on what’s there, making the world nicer. I wouldn’t suggest you use all the mods listed here at the same time, as there’s bound to be come major incompatibilities when you start shifting major urban areas around, but it’s a useful, catch-all guide to bettering the existing game. If the grass isn’t greener on the other side, it soon will be.
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There Are Six Sides To Every: CUBE Mod
By Craig Pearson on March 14th, 2012.
The movie Cube, the TV show Lost and, Portal are all broken down and reassembled in CUBE, a Half-Life 2: Episode Two mod about self-assembling test chambers. Unsurprisingly, I spent a lot of time stuck, but in a good way. CUBE’s an odd one: accomplished and beautifully designed in most respects, but always on the cusp of crashing. Engine errors are as ubiquitous as new puzzles. I’m still working my way through it: there’s hours of content and multiple endings to complete, but it’s worth picking up and persevering if you miss Valve’s elaborately designed roomy puzzles.
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Practical Magic
Build Your Own Skyrim, Part 1: Fixing The World
By Craig Pearson on March 10th, 2012.
Skyrim might not be broken, but it is a bit cracked. There’s never been an open-world that didn’t crumble at the edges of a simulation, and Bethesda’s Nord land is detailed with a fine filigree through its stony butt. Patches will help, and Bethesda have done a lot of good work to keep the game ticking along, but with all those dragons stomping around, sometimes backwards, the mud has been loosened. Thanks to Steam Workshop, the act of modding Skyrim is phenomenally easy: all you need to do is select a mod in the system’s list and it’ll be integrated into the game. There’s also a few from the venerable Skyrim Nexus as well. While we wait for both Bethesda or these guys to pack the mud back in place, there are a few tweaks you can make to the base game, gleaned from the Workshop’s finest fiddlers. They won’t be as fancy as adding monocles and top hats to mudcrabs – I’ll be getting to those in a later article – but they will strengthen Skyrim’s core and fix a few glaring errors and inconsistencies.
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Minecraft Mod Super Pirate Battle Royale Reshapes Ships
By Craig Pearson on March 9th, 2012.
I really tried write like a pirate for the opening of this post, but I started sounding like Snoop Dogg. I’d start with “yarrs” but end up adding “-izzle” to the end of words. It got surreal. So instead of being incredibly clever, I’m just going to give it to you straight: this is a Minecraft map where two battleships set to each other across the briny deep, using those complicated bits of Redstone machinery that I never understand to fire TNT across the briny sea. Er, yarr? The ships are anchored opposite each other, and in a hilarious disregard for human safety they fire blocks of TNT using other blocks of TNT loaded into the cannons. Video below, fo’ shizzle.
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Play With Yourself At The Whoopservatory
By Craig Pearson on March 7th, 2012.
I’ll admit, I only downloaded Whoopservatory because of the silly name. I couldn’t resist. But I’m entirely happy I did, as it’s an excellent way to spend the 20-ish minutes it takes to explore the abandoned laboratory of Dr Magnusson, Half-Life 2 Ep2′s grumpy counter-part to Dr Kleiner. Magnusson has made, ooh, bad things happen at an isolated observatory and Freeman has been sent to show them Crime (left fist) and Punishment (right fist). Fittingly, for someone so inept at human interaction as Magnusson, the central twist of this map is that it’s co-operative, but with yourself.
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Pop A Portal In Minecraft
By Craig Pearson on February 16th, 2012.
We’ll just have to come to terms with rule #89: if it exists, it’s in Minecraft. As proof RPS (RedstonePistonSpawner) readers, here’s a look at the newly updated Portal gun mod that, when combined with the Portal 2 gels mod, manages to drop some Aperture Science all over Blockland, or Blockworld. What the hell is the name of the world that Minecraft creates, anyway? I’m calling it Cubea (pronounced like Cuba) from now on. Amazing video and instructions herein.
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The Elder Wows: Two Million Skyrim Mods Downloaded
By Craig Pearson on February 14th, 2012.
I keep meaning to write about how remarkable the Skyrim Steam Workshop is, but it seems everyone knows: since the launch last week, the workshop has served over two million mods to Steam users. To put that in perspective, that’s a gigaquad of proto-Peggles. I’m still going to write nice things about how you can basically build your own game with it, but only after I’m done watching Bethesda’s multi-part tutorial on how to use their Skyrim Creation Kit to make and bundle mods for the Workshop.
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Skeletonnes: The Great Battle Of Skyrim
By Craig Pearson on February 9th, 2012.
I’m mesmerised by this hefty chunk of Peter Jackson-esque machinima, using Skyrim and some mods. There’s thankfully no story: just a set up of 500 Draugr, 200 skeletons, 500 Dwarven Warriors, and a dragon all lined up to beat the undead hell out of each other, for a movie that’ll go down in history as The Great Battle of Skyrim. It’s well-shot, nicely edited, and has lots and lots of kapwow. Video herein.
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Valve’s Skyrim Mod: Finding Spaaaaaaaace Man
By Craig Pearson on February 8th, 2012.
Alongside the Skyrim Creation Kit and the HD Texture Pack that was officially released last night, Valve added their own little addition to Skyrim: Fall of The Space Corp, Vol. 1 adds Portal 2′s jittery little Space Core to the Nord world, voiced by the man that holds the patent on all gaming voiceovers, Nolan North. It’s both proof that clicking things in Skyrim’s Steam Workshop works just like they said it would, and that Valve’s punmasters are missed a trick by not calling him Nolan Nord. When you add the mod to the game, you need to find him. Here’s a video I made that shows you how.
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