Minecraft - New Construction

Been a quiet stretch here, but I'm not dead yet. Here's a new screenshot of my mega-tower Minecraft. I had to clip the top off to get everything in view, but that's OK, the top hasn't changed much. I've been focused on clearing around the base and starting the new, smaller towers that are going up around the main spire. Here you go!

I still have quite a bit of clearing to do -- there's also a cave to explore and clear that's been exposed by this excavation. One of the problems with clearing ground like this is... it just isn't all that interesting to post about. This progress has taken a few days of off and on play to accomplish, and I've filled about 4 chests with stacks of dirt from the destroyed hills. Yawn.

Ah well, so goes the mining.

Minecraft - Towering Tower

I've been putting work into my mega tower off and on over the last week or so. I now have the bottom level of the top of the spire complete. It's a glass bowl-shaped room, sort of an observation level.

Homicide - Pursuit of Justice

After a bit of clean up last session, it's time to move forward. When we left, we had pretty strong suspicions that Gabe Babbett is our murderer. His prints are on the gun, he knew both victims, and he's apparently on the run. We've issued a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of murder, and alerted the State Police in Delaware and surrounding jurisdictions. Since we can't just run off to Delaware, let's chase some leads here.

Homicide - Loose Ends

I'm starting to feel like this game has gotten a bit sloppy, so I'm going to do some bookkeeping and clean up and organize things a bit. There are a bunch of open threads, some of which may be irrelevant or easily closed off, and I want to be sure the main summary page is up to date.

Homicide - Long Time, No Body

It's been a while since we've checked in on our detectives. I blame Diablo 3. Let's dive back in and get things moving!

When we left, Detectives Stacy and Long had just found Michelle Allen dead in her own apartment; an unexpected twist, since the pair were beginning to suspect she was was Scott Marin's murderer. The fact that she's dead doesn't mean she isn't, but a dead murderer isn't very satisfying. We'll press on.

Minecraft - Work in Progress

Lest you think I've forgotten about my Minecraft let's play build, here's an update. There's not a ton of visible progress, because my giant tower project has been consuming huge piles of blocks. Since I've decided to emphasize glass on the top floors, this means digging sand, then cutting wood, and then melting sand to glass.  Did I mention it was a lot of blocks?

Homicide - Search Warrant

When we left our detectives, Evan and Jeff, they'd just gotten a preliminary report from the on-site forensics. I had planned to leave the scene and pursue one of the many leads floating around out there, but now I've decided to push ahead with the last bit of physical evidence here, searching the apartment of one of our suspects, Michelle Allen. We've already done the work to get a warrant for this, so in the interests of speeding the plot, I'm going to declare we've gotten it and are ready to go in, with Mike Lewis, the property manager, providing access.

Minecraft - Jungle Tree Farm

Done.

Minecraft - Jungle Trees

How big a room does it take to grow full-sized jungle trees in Minecraft? A pretty big one actually.

This is the partially completed rebuild of the jungle tree farm from the bottom looking up toward the main entrance tunnel. It's big enough that I needed to stretch multiple levels of walkways across it to light the space, and it still probably has a few dark spots I'll need to fix. On the good side, hollowing this out has produced quite a bit of stone for the giant tower I'm building...

Minecraft - Minor Problem

I've discovered a problem in my current build. In doing some research on sapling growth I've discovered that jungle trees have half the chance of producing saplings per leaf block as other trees (1 in 40 vs. 1 in 20). This means my mundane jungle tree farm isn't going to produce a viable number of saplings to maintain growth.

Homicide - Where Were We?

Last session our planned scene, checking in with the forensics teams to find out what they'd discovered, was interrupted by a little scuffle when the suspected rental office thief fled the scene. He'd been hiding in the crawl space beneath the offices, and a uniformed officer flushed him out. Let's go back to our main scene and see how things go.

Minecraft - Build the Things!

I've made some progress on my new Minecraft build, I thought I'd share a few tidbits and images showing current progress.

Homicide: Forensics

When we left our detectives, Jeff was checking in with the forensics teams doing their thing at the apartment and the car while Evan was getting the ball rolling on some administrative leads. The net results were:

• A warrant for Michell Allen's apartment is in the works.
• Albert Burns has been picked up by the Indiana State Police at a traffic stop.
• Wanted bulletins are out for Michelle Allen, Gabe Babbett, and Rose Marie Orr as persons of interest in a homicide investigation.
• Babbett's truck has been flagged as a suspicious vehicle.
• Records that will confirm Mom and Dad Marin and Mike Lewis's alibis are being pulled.
• The anonymous call that lead to the body was from a distant pay phone, and the call was recorded. We'll pull that recording too.
• Jeff reports the forensics teams have both pulled important information.

I've also boosted our Chaos level to 7, since things seem to be sprawling a bit.

Homicide: Probable Cause

This is another turn of my ongoing Mythic GM solo game. I've made a couple changes to how I'm tracking this let's play, mostly to keep the turns focused on action rather than filling them with the game context. I've created a single page I'll be using to track the details of the game from the Mythic perspective. You can find the context right here. Note you can also see the posts in this series, in order, on the index page. I update that about once a week, depending on post frequency. Right enough about administration, on to the game.

Minecraft - The Tower

Just a short one today. I've set up the core of the ground to sky tower I set as a goal for my current let's play Minecraft. Standing atop this thing really gives you a new sense of the phrase 'reach for the sky'.

The Tower

• The next post in the series.

Minecraft - Infrastructure

Digging a lot of holes in the ground, that's what it's been. I've been working on getting Minecraft infrastructure in place to support building operations, and things are proceeding nicely. If you recall I set some rules for building and goals to achieve when I started this build. I've made some progress on this and refined rule three, here are the results.

Homicide: Mommy Knows

The next turn in my ongoing Mythic GM solo game begins as Evan and Jeff wrap up their interview with Mike Lewis, property manager at College Place Apartments (yeah I just made that up, who's going to argue in a solo game?) We were left with two likely courses of action:

• Find out more about the mystery person in the rental office, who popped up as an altered scene element in the last turn.
• With Lewis's permission, look around Michelle Allen's apartment, since she is the owner of the actual murder scene (her car).

The current context looks like this (after a few tweaks post-session):

Minecraft: Build Again!

So it begins, my second Minecraft let's play build. I've done a bit of work on this in the background, and have a few pictures to show off where things are headed:

Minecraft: A New Beginning

I've been figuring out what to do with my next Minecraft project. My last build started pretty solid, but I lost steam before I was really done, and ended up walking away from the project before it was really complete. For the next project, I'm putting together some rules and goals, both to provide an increased challenge, and to give me a bit more focus. I'm also going to go for a more modern build, something I haven't really done before.

Homicide: Fill the Blanks

This is another in the series of ongoing posts of my solo RPG using the Mythic GM Emulator, starring Evan Stacy as a police detective investigating a murder. I've started adding the pages to the site index here. I'll try to update each post in the series with links to previous and next posts as I go.

When we left our investigator, he and his partner had just discovered signs of hasty flight in Michelle Allen's apartment. She owns the car that appears to have been the actual murder scene, so her fleeing seems suspicious at best. Here's the current game context, per Mythic GM rules. Things are getting a little more complex so I've added some notes to help track things. I've also split out our detective's personal characters / threads from the main list so we can keep things moving on the investigation when choosing characters at random. Focus!



Chaos: 6
Evan's Personal Characters
Jeff Long, Evan's partner on the force
Evan's Rabbi on the force
Evan's family
Evan's estranged wife
Evan's professional contact

Jeff's Personal Characters
Jeff's relative in trouble

Characters
The victim, an adult male
- Found in a very clean garden apartment
- Dead approximately two days
- The apartment was not the crime scene
The anonymous tipster
The forensics team
The shooter
The rental office staff
Michelle Allen, a person of interest in the murder investigation
- Owner of the damaged SUV found near the crime scene
- Car has blood and a gun in the passenger compartment
- Appears to have been the scene of the actual murder
- Allen's apartment shows signs of a hasty departure

Personal Threads
Jeff has a relative in trouble
Evan is on the road to divorce

Threads
Who killed the victim
Rental records for the murder scene are missing
Who owns the murder weapon
Where is Michelle Allen