SL Steampunks Set Up New Colony on a Minecraft Server

A brave new frontier for SL users has just opened up, but it's not in Second Life -- it's a Minecraft server recently launched by steampunk land baron Desmond Shang, and it looks like this:

Note the air kraken (oh yes.) The server is a clever new offering by Desmond, who's letting steampunks who rent land from him in SL join his Minecraft server for free:

"Inspiration had purely to do with easily adding a ton of value to the Caledon SL community," Mr. Shang tells me. "It's dirt cheap, great entertainment, sets my estate apart as one that 'has cool stuff' and most of all? Isn't boring. If anything it makes my Caledon SL stronger, not weaker." Right now he's throttling invites, but anyone who rents land from him (along with select bloggers) can join. He's looking to migrate his server to the cloud, so the entire Caledon community can go there. "I could handle all of Caledon SL's concurrency, typically 50 people or so, for maybe 50 bucks a month depending on how much I was worried about lag. And land is effectively infinite.

"Imagine if Linden Research could offer a free Minecraft server to all their paying customers," Desmond muses, grinning. "They can't, really... but I can."

As for the Caledonian colonists, they have an untrammeled frontier they can dynamically create in, but which also comes with the added excitement of beasts to defend against (see: air kraken) and resources to harvest and shape into buildable material. Emilly Orr is among them:

"[S]ome of the Caledonians are definitely exploring a new frontier," Ms. Orr says. "Right now there's not a ton of folks that play in Caledon, but it's been fascinating watching the world evolve as we go. Des wants a train system (of course); the strongly steampunk contingent is automating everything (so far we have two skeleton spawners rigged for XP generation, and one blaze spawner rigged for XP generation in the Nether."

See more of Emilly's first-hand reports from Caledon's Minecraft colony after the break:

"Within the first week, the villagers had already put up basic walls, planted a mushroom forest, and were laying down roads through the desert...

"A week after, the village was starting to (mostly) be a safe place for Caledonians. We'd put up a sign and cultivated wheat. Des decided, after more of the area around the village was brought under the kindly but firm Victorian thumb, to invest his time in a sheep-dyeing project. There are now something like nine or twelve pens, with sheep of various colors scattered through them. His next big project: a minecart 'railway' linking all discovered cities so far (and so far, that's been five, and two strongholds.)

"The first appearance of the Minecraft version of the Caledon flag. Des (of course) came up with this. I'm actually impressed: it's recognizable in only four blocks!"

Emilly Orr (in rainbow fishnets and a garter belt) with Desmond Shang ("Apparently he looks like that in EVERY virtual world", says Emilly.)

Minecraft photos courtesy Ms. Orr.

 

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Comments

[Kim Anubis]

Good going, Des!

[Zarkinfrood Miami]

This is brilliant. And with bukkit add-ons, a more complete role-play experience can be achieved by anyone logging in. A few I would recommend would be:
Heroes - http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/heroes/
Allows for specific classes to be set up, weapon and armor restrictions, leveling up + more.

Dynmap -http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/misc-dynmap-v0-36-3-real-time-minecraft-maps-1-1-r4-1-2-4-r1-0.489/
We use this on our own server to map the world as it is explored. allows for top down and isometric views of the server and player tracking if you enable it. a lot of other options I haven't played with, but by far the most worthwhile plug-in I have found.

there are a ton of others, and if you haven't looked into Bukkit yet,Bukkit is where it's at.

http://bukkit.org/

[Metacam Oh]

Nice squid flying in mid air in the first screen shot :)

I love Minecraft

[jo yardley]

It sounds interesting but I never really got Minecraft and am such a visual person that the graphics don't appeal to me at all.
Love the idea of wild animals, using the land for goods, etc.
But the way minecraft looks today, I'm not that keen.

[Emilly Orr]

*cackles*

Well, the fishnets and garter look came after, when I went back to my "normal" Minecraft skin; that was more just a fluorite avatar I threw together to be closer to Victorian.

At this point, CrystalShard Foo runs around on the server mostly naked, so I went back to the fishnets. :D

[Desmond Shang]

It's been fun, certainly ~ nothing quite like a little bit of offbeat fun once in a while.

If there's any truly disastrous thing that an online business can do, it's probably "take yourself too seriously."

We prefer good times, to all that stuff.

[foneco zuzu]

:)

[Neuro]

Sorry but I wouldn't play under a bunch of prudes for minecraft.

Minecraft is meant for young/youthful people, not a bunch of old worn-down buzzards looking for cash.

[Alexandra Rucker]

@Neuro

'scuse me while I smack you with my geritol. Retirees don't want to sit around staring at the walls discussing who's liver is failing all day. :P

[Desmond Shang]

A quick update on this: Caledon Minecraft has proved successful enough to move to a hosted server, and has steady daily traffic and a *lot* of new content. It's been a bit of a smash hit, really.

In a world without permissions, however, we found that a 100% open world means it will be destroyed by griefers in less than 24 hours.

This was safely discovered by test ~ we set out some 'bait' in the form of a world backup, before actually moving over. In any case, especially due to that, it's Caledon residents and their invited friends only.

RE: comments above: yes we've tested dynmap and some other things, however since this has to hold up across what may possibly be dozens of updates... I'm going slow before taking the mod plunge.

We have a test server where I have dynmap running right now, for instance, but Minecraft has its bugs and I'm a firm believer in not constantly breaking content ~ we've had to fix the Caledon National Rail in Second Life many times over the years, as parcel prim limits and server handoff methods change, and break things. Hence the extreme caution with regard to adding yet more breakables such as mods. But they will come in time.

And to Neuro above: all assumptions made are dead wrong. But hey, keep on believing :)