Hooooow do you make an exp grinder?  I've been waiting for Sparklez to show me, but you're all, "lol, done" and I'm all "Teach me your waaaays."  :C

Alright, partially because of Evilpoptart's ambition in our Minecraft server, I started work on my first mega project.


I've always wanted to make a dodecahedron in Minecraft. The shape has a lot of symmetry being a platonic solid, and it would let me show my love for geometry.

Given Minecraft's voxel nature, I need to create the shape large enough that it can be identified as a dodecahedron easily. Also, since I want to use it as a part of my house, I should build it large enough to fit my needs.

First off, there's absolutely no way I could "eyeball" the creation of the dodecahedron. I could create a cube or an octahedron by "eyeballing", but I cannot do this for a dodecahedron. Therefore, I need to create a list of vertices that can be used to construct a dodecahedron.

Now, if you had a model dodecahedron in your hands, you could lay it on one of the pentagonal faces. Doing this places one face on the ground, one on the top, and ten others all facing different sides. The dodecahedron has twenty vertices, and placing a dodecahedron in this orientation allows one to easily identify the position of ten of those vertices. Five of them are on the ground, and the other five are sitting on the top, two inscribed radii above the ground pentagon (and rotated 180 degrees.)

As for the other ten vertices, I'll save the math and just link this article if you want to learn more. (You better remember your geometry if you want to understand): http://www.kjmaclean.com/Geometry/dodecahedron.html

From there, I created an excel spreadsheet that would give me all twenty vertices of a dodecahedron laying on one of its faces on the ground, given it's center and side-length:


I choose a side length of 26. It makes the dodecahedron large enough to be recognizable as a dodecahedron. I also choose the coordinates I did, as it would place the dodecahedron's bottom base on-level with the ground level in Minecraft, and the top within the normal limits of Minecraft maps. I also rounded off the coordinates for my own sanity.

Now, it takes more than the knowledge of where the vertices are to create the dodecahedron. Otherwise, all I would have are twenty floating blocks in the ground and sky showing me the vertices of a dodecahedron. I need to create the side lengths as well to create something that is recognizable. I could eyeball the lines from vertex to vertex, but that is not the best possible way.

Instead, I'm going to use what it called Bresenham's Line algorith It's an algorithm made to create a line given a raster space. In other words, the algorithm will allow me to create straight lines in Minecraft.

A dodecahedron has thirty sides (more specifically, edges.) I created a simple program that ran Bresenham's algorithm on every edge, and outputted each line into different text files. Here's an example of one of those files:
29,86,21
29,87,20
30,87,19
30,88,18
30,89,17
31,89,16
31,90,15
31,91,14
32,91,13
32,92,12
32,93,11
33,93,10
33,94,9
33,95,8
34,95,7
34,96,6
34,97,5
35,97,4
35,98,3
35,99,2
36,99,1
36,100,0

As you can see, doing this gives me where to place the blocks in Minecraft to create every edge.

On the next post, I will detail gathering the blocks to create the structure, pictures during its creation, and finally I will have a video with Evilpoptart showing both of our houses. Evilpoptart has other mega-plans, and believe me they will show his true character. (However, you guys will probably not see any development pictures of his house, as seeing one picture would spoil the thing he did.)

Alright. So I knew I needed a lot of materials to build a dodecahedron with a side length of 26. There are 30 sides to a dodecahedron, so some basic math would state that I would need 26*30 of something, or 780 of something.

I decided to collect Obsidian. I made this choice before Jeb changed the time it took to mine Obsidian, so I was calculating it would take two/three good days in Minecraft to collect what I need.

Turns out, I only needed five hours with an Efficiency IV pickaxe.

Next, I had to find a spot. I needed something somewhat flat with nice scenery nearby. This is what I found:


This needed to be flattened a little. I first cut down all of the trees.


After that, it was time to run all the way back to base to make another diamond shovel and diamond pick. It was time to flatten some land.
 
I had some help from Brit_Brit. The diamond equipment did die, so we had to use stone equipment to finish. However, when we were done:

Just before I started, I created a little shelter for myself beside the location for the dodecahedron. I also knew that I wanted wool, so I baited two sheep into my shelter.


Now, it was time to build! I took all of that obsidian I collected, and a little dirt to help me place the obsidian, and got started.


I worked day and night


And now time for an image dump:


Mobs could spawn on the top of the structure, but I didn't bother to light it up yet. I had fun sniping zombies and creepers off of the edges.


At some point I installed the Mine Little Pony mod. The mod will give your character a generic pony skin if you don't have one installed. In my case, both Evilpoptart and I look like the Mayor.


After I created the wireframe, I began to ponder how I wanted to layout a house inside. After making up my mind, I've decided I need to create surfaces on my shape. As of this post, I only have two surfaces done.




Finally, yours truly has a proper pony skin now (note to self, take picture without armor:

I'm going to wait for 1.3 to actually release. It's my understanding that mobs will only spawn on top-positioned slabs, not the bottom position ones. If they spawn on both top and bottom slabs, I'll have to create an addendum video saying to only use stairs and glass. And I have a **** ton of nether to renovate.

Thank you for the heads-up though.

For those of you wondering, Evilpoptart and I will record Minecraft videos sometime soon in a similar vein to the Brutal Doom videos. We plan on starting up a new world and killing the Enderdragon. Along the way, we'll both build some cool things to show off; I also plan on getting back to work on the Dodecahedron. We also plan on doing some custom maps, but that'll be a little bit off.

It's my goal to make this an actually entertaining LP, and by golly, even if I fall flat on my face, I will try damn hard to reach that goal.

I foresee this thread's future will probably start to show more "behind the scenes" of what's going on. Wish I had more to say, but I'm contemplating what pony's name should be our LP world seed.

I have multiworld installed on the Minecraft server. When the time comes, I'll make world lp, world lpnether, and world lpend. Each should be obvious; no need to delete old worlds.