Lime Monster

I’ve completed the Marathon Mode on Hexic HD on the Xbox this weekend. It has been bugging me for ages 😉

You have to make flowers by making rings of the same coloured hexagons and then make the flowers into a ring to get black pearls – you win by making a cluster of three black pearls.

I’d been getting up to two black pearls for the last fortnight but then a bomb would get me.

This time I actually ended up using the existing black pearls to help create more flowers – sadly there is no achievement or special effect with this.

This leaves me with Expert to do and the timed section!

So my husband has started a new world up and because lots of updates have happened there is now whole new terrains to be found in the Xbox Minecraft universe. One such thing is temples 🙂

We found a desert village made of sandstone and a temple.

The temple is made out of sandstone and wool with a butt load of TNT hidden under a pressure plate – it was kind of obvious where it was and he navigated around it and found himself a nice lot of treasure. He also too the TNT to help him with other projects 🙂

I have decided that if there is not a temple in the little bit of my map I have not explored (it depends on how the world generation is done) then I will build one of my own – just because!

I’m still sticking to my one world at the moment 🙂

My husband found a skeleton spawner and has built a harvesting machine/mechanism.

It basically works because if you put signs on the sides of a tunnel the skeletons (or any mob, villager etc…) can walk through it but the lava will not flow down through it – it is a bit of a bug/quirk which means you can do interesting things with the minecraft fluids (lava and water).

Alaric then put water along the bottom of his little corridor of death so the skeletons get washed down into the lava and their bones and arrows come out of the other end for him to collect.

Glass walls mean the skeletons see you and start coming over to try and kill you ad thus end up in the water.

I’ve unlocked the Hexic Addict achievement on the Xbox – this means I’ve played over 100 games now!

Hexic is part of a group of games I call shape movers, these are games like tetris and slide block puzzels, I think candy crush would probably come under this heading too, what you do is move pieces around to fit or lock together or interact in some way. They tend to rely on you being able to look at the small picture and the large at the same time as well as seeing how the shapes or colours are related to one and other.

In hexic you have hexagons of different colours that you can rotate in groups of three around a point. If during the rotation they create a cluster of three pieces the same colour – they disappear and the blocks all move down to fill the gap, sometimes making more clusters. Some hexagons have stars in and those you make clusters of without worrying about the colour and they blast an area clear. Others have bombs in and these you have to get with their own colour before the explode – bombs going off = end of game.

To win the game you have to make rings of the same coloured tiles or panels, the tile at the middle of these rings turns into a flower. The flowers are really special as you can use them to move all the hexagons around them. You can rotate the flowers. This makes making more flowers alot easier.

If you make a ring of flowers you get a black pearl. This can jump three of the adjacent tiles over the others but you don’t get to choose which.

A cluster of three black pearls wins the game!

Two flowers together can be used to walk themselves into position but it is really easy to accidently make a cluster of flowers – if you do this they disappear – it does give you points etc…

Other tricks are… making a ring of tiles with a star in the middle makes two rows of tiles disappear around where the flower appears. Using stars to get rid of bombs makes all the tiles of that colour disappear (I think I’m still not quiet sure what happens but lots of tiles through out the board disappear – this can destroy the flowers you were arranging etc..).

There is a survival mode as well where uncleared tiles lock in place and a timed version which is nuts as you lose time if you don’t make clusters and stuff.

In short – yep I am a hexic addict!

I have been playing a game called Hexic since Christmas, on and off and not everyday. At first I didn’t get it at all but soon worked out what was going on with arranging clusters of the three or more of the same colour.

I’ve been playing on survival mode where you start with a full screen of coloured hexagonal tiles and you have to clear as many of them as possible, once you are out of combinations that you can get rid of the tiles that remain lock in place. If you manage to make a ring of the same coloured tiles then it gets rid of all the locking. There are other things you can do too like destroying the locked in place tiles with free cells with stars in will unlock a few around it.

I have now beaten all three levels 🙂

I am stupidly happy about this!

Found this lovely example of Minecraft being used to teach. Children are far too young to know why the graphics of mincraft are made up of squares, they see it as just the style and do not get the reference to pixels. But pixels are still an important concept for image and game design and for many other applications.

So what the artist did here, was to get the children to paint wooden minecraft swords and pix axes whilst explaining the stuff too them. Fantastic idea 🙂

We’ve only done cardboard swords and little squares of colours card and though we have used the game to spark conversations about geology and used the red stone to build basic circuits with kids, we hadn’t actually thought about the pixel aspect as of course we grew up with it!

So as a family we love scifi and fantasy and stuff and especially Dr Who, we are also obsessed with Minecraft so when Youtube suggested this video we were all giddy with delight at the concept of Dr Who Minecraft – only issue is obviously we are playing on the xbox 🙁 But I live in hope! My daughter wants me to get it on my laptop but I can’t do that as it is for working and if I was to put Minecraft on there… I wouldn’t get any work done!

We finally got the update for our minecraft on the xbox and one of the features is snow golums so my husband made one! It is basically just two blocks of snow (which you make with snow balls which you get by hitting snow) and placing them one on top of the other and then adding a pumpkin head! It then turns into a scary snow man thing with stick arms which will throw snowballs at monsters.

The fun thing is they leave a trail of snow behind themselves 🙂

I have made glass in my minecraft world by mining sand and putting it in a furnace, I then have glass blocks which I was using for everything from windows to roofing. But I then discovered that I could turn each block into four panes of glass.

Glass is a bit tricky to work with for a couple of reasons in Minecraft. The first is that without an enchanted pick axe you can not pick glass up one you’ve placed it. It just brakes and is lost.

The second is that as I discovered whilst building the tower, there are several ways in which creep mode (used to stop your avatar from plunging to their doom) wont work. The first is that glass panes if put down with nothing around them, make a little cross shape with four arms sticking out from the centre, if you are standing on the pane when you put another pane or block next to it, it sort of stretches out and looses two of the little arms. And so you can fall. You can also end up floating on the outside of the structure you are building which if not noticed will plunge you to death when you uncreep. The last one I found was that if you accidently brake the pane you are standing on you may not land on the one beneath and this is quite easy to do as the glass is hard to see – especially the boundaries between panes etc…

But it makes lovely structures and I only died once making the tower – I’d built a safety mote around the base but it was not wide enough nor deep enough to have been effective sadly.

I have made a wall clock in Minecraft as I was fed up of thinking it was night but then being unable to go to sleep. I went on a mining expedition to try and find diamonds but came back with gold. The clock took four bars of gold and one pile of red stone powder. I then made a box for it using sticks and leather. I placed the box on the wall and then the clock inside it.

The sun and moon in blue and black skies tick round, when you get up in the morning it panics and whizzes round 🙂 I like it and have put it in my bedroom.