As possibly the biggest PC indie hit in years (despite still being in Alpha), MineCraft demands your attention. What kind of game is it? What makes it special? Maybe you dont know, and you expect us to tell you. Well, okay.MineCraft is a building game, essentially. Every day this week Ill be playing a game of MineCraft on the hardest setting and reporting on my progress, giving you not so much a taste of the game but a juicy banquet. Its probably worth mentioning that I havent actually played MineCraft before, either. Dig into the first course right after the jump. It features sheep, flowers, a burial and a dreadful boating accident.There she is! My virgin territory, freshly generated, overflowing with life. Look! It has square clouds and a square sun, and square sheep and square pigs, and square trees. The brown, cuboid thing in the foreground is my characters stubby appendage, my bare hand, with which you can quite rapidly tear apart wood and stone, because thats the kin d of game MineCraft is.Now, onto the important question: What shall I build? I shall build it all, clearly. All of it.Download latest version of minecraft and texture packs here #link# , latest version currently availabke is 1.4 BetaI've talked to a number of people who don't like Minecraft. They say it's too directionless. There's no end goal, no story, and no NPCs or explosions of flashy text to massage the ego and offer congratulations on every task done well. There's also no tutorial, meaning websites need to be scoured to figure out how most of the game works. I think all these reasons are legitimate complaints, but from time to time, I still log in to collect and construct because Minecraft is the best Lego game I've ever played. And it's better with mods.Despite how much I enjoy transferring shapes from imagination into virtual reality, parts of Minecraft do tend to become tedious. Mining can take a long, long time. It's easy to get lost. Your character's default walk ing speed is pitifully slow, which makes it especially annoying when you unexpectedly stumble into an exploding creeper. Thankfully, this is a PC game, which means it can be modded.If you've never looked, there are a wide variety of Minecraft mods, some offering simple fixes and some adding in suites of new craftable items like guns and biplanes. With the following recommendations, I've tried to stay away from the crazier stuff. Instead, I made a list of five mods that don't necessarily add the most insane features, but do significantly cut down on the inconvenience of stumbling around Minecraft's vast, blocky world.In case you're totally new to applying user mods to PC games, it can often be a finicky business. There's no official oversight, so after a developer (like Mojang) updates its game, all your installed mods may cease to function. Basically, proceed at your own risk, and know that if you're willing to put in the time it takes to comb through forums for download lin ks, navigate file directories and backup critical files just in case something goes nuts, there's a nice payoff waiting for you. #link#
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