Relatively new player... LF server to see "craft"

[Firebert]

I bought Minecraft a few weeks back, and played it on single player Normal Survival for a few days. Got to the point where I had a medium sized cobblestone house, I was swimming in Cobblestone, and spent my days mining trying to find ore (unsuccessfully) whilst fending off Creepers, Skeletons, Zombies and elusive Endermen. Not hard to work out that the mining got boring and you can only shit yourself so many times when an Enderman come up behind you.

Now I've been to both The End and The Nether in Creative (and have killed the Ender Dragon on Creative), and I've played on Superflat Survival and lasted a fair old whack (if I can find a village), but things got boring very quickly on my own.

I went looking for a Minecraft server to join and googled a list. I'm looking for an SMP server that isn't filled to the brim with houses such that I can't build, doesn't protect everything in a 256-block radius when someone else puts down a block of dirt, doesn't have hundreds of players in diamond armor waiting by the spawn-wilderness line to gank you as soon as you leave, and has a community that actually helps people who've only got to the "Mine" part of Minecraft in Single Player.

Every server I've found has either become a PvP server, has everything protected such that I have to start dying of hunger before I can build, or is dead (i.e. no people connected). Is that normal?

Minecraft currently feels like a waste of £17, and not worth the hype that I've heard it was.

So, anyone have a server suggestion?

[Kharli]

Sadly I think alot of people got hyped up about Minecraft really and well there is a few severs i believe on some of the minecraft community sites(other than MMO-champion) might be worth a look there.
but yeh stuff being protected yeh thats normal, because people can mess up with stuff..ALOT..

[Firebert]

Sadly I think alot of people got hyped up about Minecraft really and well there is a few severs i believe on some of the minecraft community sites(other than MMO-champion) might be worth a look there.
but yeh stuff being protected yeh thats normal, because people can mess up with stuff..ALOT..

I went on VanillaCraft. Looked it up, "helpful to new players" advertised.

Jumped through the obligatory hoops to get outside, and they wouldn't let me join a neutral faction. And then when I spent almost a full day running north, I get instakilled by a diamond-armor-wearing PvPer. So I spend the next day running east, to find a small plot near a massive enemy base to build a dirt house. I couldn't clear my plot properly because someone had placed a 2x2x2 cube of dirt right next to it so every time I tried to clear it I got kicked. As I was tunneling out my house (it was sunken) I got kicked again because some player had placed a dirt block three blocks under what appeared to be ground level. /modreq for help did nothing, and chat was filled with spam. Waste of about half-an-hour.

That was probably the most time I've spent on a multiplayer server, the rest of the time it's either spawn, run through the hoops, get kit, run till you're 100% hungry, die to a spider (because it's dark by the time you've got to anywhere where there's a free plot to build) and get ported right back to spawn, or spawn, run through the hoops, leave the spawn area and instantly die to hordes of people wearing diamond armor. Thought I was getting somewhere, but I couldn't spend my entire time mining dirt that may or may not have been protected.

[Deleted]

I know it's probably not what you want to hear, but have you considered setting up a small server of your own? Maybe grab a few mates and just see where a small 5 man server takes you. I've been playing the game over 2 years and like yourself, found it boring playing singleplayer so me and about 4-5 others got together on a server and sort of basically taught ourselves, went on adventures and generally improved on our building skills. I never really put much thought into joining a random larger server pretty much because of all the problems you have listed and therefore, i probably wouldn't still be playing it today Now i have myself and a couple of friends halfway through making an adventure map, which to me is an evolution from building randomly on a server to a more focused task whilst still getting to keep crafting away!

I am sure there must be a server that suits your demands out there, but it might just take a while to find it. I think in the meantime it may be an idea to play with a few people on roughly the same wavelength and see where it takes you! Nothing like starting a fresh server and seeing all the random buildings work there way together Of course, minecraft is what you make of it and hopefully you can keep going and find a server you enjoy! Best of luck.

[Firebert]

Well, I found something relatively quiet.

Almost-there. Took Kharli's advice and looked up a Vanilla non-PvP SMP server on Reddit, and it was about 5 or 6 pages in.

Creepers are very useful for mining and finding crevices, and I learned how to make Glass and Brick today. :3

[Kharli]

Glad you found servers i'm basicly waiting on replay from Curse and trying to knock my friend from Nordrasil about his server <,< xD

[wartywarlock]

People play on public servers? o.O I don't want to imagine the horror!

It doesn't take too much PC or bandwidth to host a decent world for friends, you'll find a lot of snobbery if you ask for help and list a 2ghz 1gb ram laptop as the host but the truth is, it can be done. As long as there is enough bandwidth (25kbps upload is fine) you and about 5 friends will be able to play "fine". Not LAN speed, but nothing bad. Especially if you use spout or one of the bandwidth reducing mods/world preloaders

If you want people to see your stuff video it or find the right show off thread easy! If wanted there are plenty of mods to help export/import buildings from and to other worlds if people really want to see your creations.

That said, cursecraft and SKCraft are the only 2 public servers I would ever play on.

[Hunterpower]

I just bought the game recently too, if you want a mate that doesn't ruin your fun to play with.

[Vargur]

Yeah, small private servers are the way to go imo.

[PizzaSHARK]

I went looking for a Minecraft server to join and googled a list. I'm looking for an SMP server that isn't filled to the brim with houses such that I can't build, doesn't protect everything in a 256-block radius when someone else puts down a block of dirt, doesn't have hundreds of players in diamond armor waiting by the spawn-wilderness line to gank you as soon as you leave, and has a community that actually helps people who've only got to the "Mine" part of Minecraft in Single Player.

Every server I've found has either become a PvP server, has everything protected such that I have to start dying of hunger before I can build, or is dead (i.e. no people connected). Is that normal?

Minecraft currently feels like a waste of £17, and not worth the hype that I've heard it was.

So, anyone have a server suggestion?

This is pretty much how every public server is; even if it's not a server where admins are giving themselves Creative powers or using "world printer" plugins to build massive billion-block structures or cities, things will still fill up fast because few servers really want to be hosting 35000x35000 worlds because it'll cause problems and lag. As for PvP... Minecraft PvP is about the dumbest and most pointless thing I've ever seen in gaming and I'll refrain from speculating on the mental capabilities of people who really get into it.

If you can't get onto a private server (you'll usually hear them call "whitelist" servers, since you must be on the server's whitelist in order to connect to begin with), your best bet is to get into modding. Vanilla Minecraft is pretty awful, but there are a LOT of pretty fantastic mods out there that can really add a lot of content to the game, and there's at least one mod on the horizon that, when finished, will pretty much qualify as a total conversion mod.

If you want to get into modding, the first mod I'd recommend is Better Than Wolves. It's a very simple mod to install and adds a pretty sizable amount of content that fits perfectly with Minecraft's general aesthetics and "feel," and focuses heavily on using existing resources (pretty much the only "naturally" found new content is are hemp seeds, used to grow hemp, which is then used to create ropes and fabrics for other things) rather than adding a ton of new ores and stuff. It also focuses heavily on eventually being able to use the added content combined with vanilla content to automate many things - you can use new dispenser and detector blocks added by the mod, combined with a source of mechanical power (mechanical power is a new concept added by the mod, which is exactly what it sounds like - power generated by things like windmills, waterwheels, or simple hand cranks that's then used to power new devices) to create things like automatic wheat farms, automatic tree farms, automatic monster farms, and so on. It also adds moulding and other blocks which, in addition to being used for crafting, can also be used for decoration, allowing you to add additional detail to structures and whatnot.

It's also worth nothing that, like many of the best mods, Better Than Wolves isn't multiplayer compatible (though, like many mod authors, BTW's author says that he'd eventually like to add multiplayer support... but it's not a priority.)

Also, the best method of finding ore in vanilla Minecraft is to simply go looking for caves and ravines naturally generated by the engine. You shouldn't have any issues finding plenty of iron and coal, and gold is usually pretty easy to find just laying around in caves. Diamonds and redstone are a little harder to find just lying around, but branch mining is quick and efficient: go to the correct depth (16), dig a simple 2x1 (two high by one wide) tunnel in one direction, and every four steps, dig a 2x1 tunnel off to either side. Then go on down to a depth of 14 and repeat the process. It's called branch mining (this is a simplified variation of it), and it's the most efficient way to dig up diamonds and redstone in vanilla.