the black bits? chunks don't exist until someone goes there

Yes and no. :S

That yellow 8px square in the center is the size of a 1x1 block... but it's actually representing a torch (which is much thinner than a block).

I guess you can say, every coloured square on the map is a single block, but it's colour may be different to it's actual colour based on having something on-top of it which is actually smaller than one block (torches, signs, doors, ladders, flowers, etc).

Oh, and also in-game the blocks are not solid colours, or sometimes not even close to those colours.

Still it looks like the new darker map images are improving things - if you head north from the Citadel until you reach another shaded area - the dark green in there is grass, which used to be coloured purple as you'll see if you look at the surrounding areas.

To be slightly more accurate, chunks don't exist until somebody goes nearby (at which point they are generated from the game's current algorithms).

However, the black areas on the map might exist as chunks, but haven't been rendered because they've not yet been visited/modified by players.

Oh, and sometimes a black area is just your browser/connection not loading the image for some reason - can generally be solved with a force-reload.

Chrome (here at least) gives different results to IE and Firefox (when zoomed in), the blocks are blurred instead of square so some scaling/blending thing going on.

Bloody browsers! :@

We've lost the /time ability!

Firefox has a CSS property you can use to affect the rendering of scaled images (something like image-rendering: mozOptimizeSpeed), which obviously isn't supported in Chrome. I think IE does nearest-neighbour interpolation by default. It caused me a lot of grief when making piXY :C

I want to connect a few places I have built/am building with railways, possibly connecting them to the network if that's possible. How is the best way to go about that, and how many of each kind of rail should I start stockpiling?

How long of each piece of string should you start stockpiling?

It depends how far you want to go! :P

Without major hills, two powered rail per 64 normal is probably enough, but with hills then you'll need power just before the hill and I think every other piece going up it.


If you want to build it yourself, just gather as much gold and iron as you can.
six gold + one redstone + one stick = one powered rail.
six iron + one stick = sixteen normal rails.

Oh, and powered rails are only powered when they're receiving power, so you'll need redstone torches or levers to turn them on (or pressure plate rails, but I find them a bit buggy).

Of course, you can probably just ask Xen or Kev and they'll give you as many rails as you want. :)

What PB said, and ask Kev (HardWork) he seems to be the railway expert.

Is each large square section of the map 128 blocks? I tried to count them on the screen but my eyes started bleeding halfway through. Assuming they are, it looks like about 10 squares of land to cover, which means 1280 pieces of rail. :| I have plenty of iron so I could probably do it, this is going to be a nice big project.

 

So I should be going: Powered Rail > 32 (31?) Rail > Powered > 32 > Powered > etc? What's the best way of laying it over water, just on top of a line of blocks sticking out from the shore?

Cripes, you went even further away than I did! :P

You'd probably be best of splitting away from the top left corner of the evil line... that's still about 1100 pieces (so 17 stacks of 64 regular rails, and about 32 pieces of powered rail)

That's 408 bars of iron and 192 bars of gold you need - more if you want to go straight to the main circuit.

(btw if you zoom out the map as far as it goes, it's one pixel to one block, which can then be shoved into an image editor for measuring things.)

My body is ready. :-Y

I'd be interested in knowing where the places named on Xen's lovely rail map are on the dynamic map. Is Jon's Evil Base the very large circular thing, with a big ship in the bay to the east?

Ok, quick and dirty, but here you go...


( the arrows point roughly at stations, not at the actual things the stations are named after, excluding the arrows that missed slightly and I couldn't be bothered to fix :P )

I made a really long line of dirt, tomorrow I shall cover it with a layer of stone and then cover that with tracks. If you see the line on the map and follow it from east to west you can even see where I started off in the wrong direction, heading south from what is now the west end of the line.

Every time I stare too long at any dark or blueish website, I keep thinking I'm underwater and have to go up for air.

:S

This is what I've been working on...

 

Need a lot more powered tracks for it to be 2-way, though.

Hmm, my Lair isn't too far from the spawn, so maybe I'll make a rail link. It'll have to be a badass-looking one, though.

/Powered/ tracks? In my day we made complex perpetual motion propulsion systems and auto runaway cart removers. :Y