Road to Minecraft 1.0, Day 4: Infdev 2010-03-30

Tuesday.
Real date: 2 September 2025
Time machine: 30 March 2010
Recorded playtime: 8 hours, 27 minutes

Back at it again. I haven't played since the last update, as I've been busy watching anime and playing... other Minecraft.

This is a very minor update. Notch basically pitched it as a bugfix update, but if you want to get technical, he kind of added a feature: the IsPopulated NBT tag. Now, when chunks are loaded, the world generator checks if they are populated even if they are already generated. I'm not entirely sure why it is done this way, but I assume it separates the terrain and feature sections of the generation algorithms in such a way that it speeds up the generation process. 

This feature has the side effect of making wood a non-renewable resource in this version, as trees you cut down no longer magically reappear when the world is reloaded. Saplings don't grow yet, so that was the only way to replenish the world's wood supply. Now, we must simply commit deforestation...

One very noticeable bugfix is that slabs no longer turn surrounding surfaces fully dark: 

My staircase is considerably less ugly now.

I think this is a purely cosmetic fix, though. It might even be hard-coded... Single slabs still block light when they really shouldn't. I think it was a very long time before this was fixed. 

Onto gameplay. Since this is a relatively minor update, it's just business as usual for us. I started by lighting up the areas surrounding my small base, even though mobs aren't in the game yet:

Old-fashioned torch spam. Don't mind the useless saplings.

I usually place torches with 4 blocks between them in these old versions. The mob spawning code worked very differently back in these days, and it was important that you keep things as bright as possible. Some people prefer to put them even closer together.

As the sun began to rise over the blocky horizon, I decided I should start figuring out my next move. There's still not a lot to be doing, of course, but I did remember that farming works correctly now, meaning I can get food and return to normal difficulty as I originally intended. In the previous version, farming technically worked, but blockstates wouldn't get cleared correctly. Sometimes, if you harvested a crop and then planted another, it would be instantly ready to harvest again. There were several block update-related bugs that got fixed in this version including that farming bug and a bug causing chests and furnaces not to save properly unless you updated their chunk after modifying them (which I did by placing a torch directly above or below them).

Anyway, since I decided to make a farm, I went to make a bucket... and was reminded that buckets don't exist yet. Okay, no big deal, my base is next to water...

Oh. Oh right, water doesn't have physics yet. That means I have to be extra careful not to destroy source blocks I intend to use...

Well alright then. I can work with that. Time to gather some seeds.

Nothing like tilling random spots to get seeds.

Until tall grass was added in Beta 1.6, the only way to get seeds was to hoe grass blocks and occasionally get seeds. I used an entire iron hoe and only managed to get 19 seeds. Additionally, unlike modern (Java) versions, you aren't guaranteed to get seeds when you harvest wheat. (Yes, apparently Bedrock still uses the old chances for that.)

Another major mechanical difference with farms is that it is ridiculously easy to trample farmland. Just walking normally is enough, and there is no sneaking yet. My solution to minimize this was... not really the best one, but eh. I'll fix it later.

My "finished" farm.

I placed slabs over water next to the farmland. The problem is that the slabs are really too tall for me to easily pick up the items dropped by the crops, so ultimately I'm still pretty frequently trampling the farmland. I should've just used dirt in between, but ehhhh... I'm only going to use this farm until I can make a bucket. 

I went mining again, got like 19 diamonds from one vein or something, plus a bunch more coal and iron. 

Add one more stack of iron that I forgot was in a furnace, in fact.

I made myself another diamond pickaxe just for utility while I build my house, which I got started on soon after.

Dirt roof. I'll fix it later, but as previously mentioned, saplings don't grow...

I'm going for a simply 3-level house, with a main level, an attic, and a basement. I'm sure I'll expand upon it as things get more interesting.

One annoying thing is that sand is not currently legitimately obtainable, meaning I can't make glass. I suppose I could just cut holes in the wall since there are no mobs. I can't make doors yet, either, of course.

Iron porch.

I have so much iron that I decided to use 3 iron blocks as the second step on my porch. It's hard to see in this picture, but iron, gold, and diamond blocks have unique two-tone textures that were removed in some much later version. 

As for the roof... yeah.

More direct view of dirt roof.

I wanted to use logs for the slanted part of the roof and planks for the sides, but again, wood isn't currently renewable. It's past my bedtime, so I don't have time to go cut down an entire forest yet. :P

By my math, I will need 280 logs for the slanted part alone. That's 4 full stacks of 64, plus 24 more. That's a lot of trees.

That's everything I did today, so I will leave you with a couple of dark screenshots I took while I was planning the build:

Thank you, and have a very safe and productive day.
--Sidney