by Stone Marshall | Nov 1, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
A new live action trailer for Fallout 76 aired during the “Saints vs. Vikings” game earlier today which, for the benefit of anyone living outside of the United States, was some kind of football match. The official Fallout Twitter account tweeted as much, and you can see the trailer itself above.
There's a woman standing in a lush green field, slowly and blissfully rotating as she fires off indiscriminate rounds from dual-wielded pistols. Later, two heavily-armed fellows in Power Armor are also enjoying the shooting of their weapons. The only time people look serious – ie, the only time they are not smiling – is when they're not shooting their weapons (though being in the presence of a reason to shoot their weapons – such as the arrival of a deathclaw – seems to make them happy too).
Fallout 76 releases November 14. Chris played the recent Xbox-exclusive beta, but there's a PC equivalent coming soon.
by Stone Marshall | Nov 1, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Welcome to our roundup of Minecraft commands. Whether it’s to copy an existing build, change the gamemode, or flat out cheat your way to glory, Minecraft console commands are an important part of playing the game day-to-day. While there are a lot of different commands out there, all varying in complexity, we’ve got a run down of the ones you need to know, and, of course, the ones you can use to troll your friends. Because what’s Minecraft without a bit of friendly griefing?
If you're wondering how to enter the Minecraft console commands listed below, all you need to do is hit the forward-slash key (/) and that’ll bring up a small window. Input the code and hit enter and your command will activate.
If you need more Minecraft advice from us, check out our best Minecraft seeds and best Minecraft mods.
Shorthand Codes
Below are the shorthand codes to save you from typing in different player names. These are worth memorising so you don’t have to type in names like “Sniper_Kitty_Bruv_91” every time some jobber joins your game.
@p – the player nearest to you
@r – a random player
@a – all players
@e – all entities in the world.
@s – yourself
The clone command
/clone
Clones a selection of blocks to another location. Very helpful if you’re building a city space and want to duplicate multiple buildings to different areas. “ ” is your start point. “ ” is the end point. And “ ” is where you want the cloned blocks to spawn.
Example: /clone 100 234 -10 200 100 0 300 200 100
How to change the difficulty
/difficulty
Changes the in-game difficulty. Replace the latter section of the code with one of the following:
peaceful
easy
normal
hard
Example: /difficulty peaceful
Add an effect to yourself or someone else
/effect [seconds] [amplifier] [hideParticles]
Adds a status effect to the targeted player. “[seconds]”, “[amplifier]”, and “[hideParticles]” are all optional conditions, so feel free to ignore them unless you want to change the length, how strong the effect is, or whether the effect shows as particles or not. If you want to remove an effect from a player, type “/effect clear”.
Example: /effect PCGamer water_breathing 30
Enchant an item
/enchant [level]
Adds an enchantment to the item the player is holding. So that’s smite, bane of the arthropods, sharpness—any enchantment you’d pull from a book or enchant table. Here's a list of Enchantment IDs.
Example: /enchant PCGamer minecraft:smite 1
Exp modifier
/xp [player]
Gives the targeted player an amount of experience points. If you just want to add levels instead, which is easier for enchanting, try “/xp L [player]”.
Example: /xp 100L PCGamer
Change the gamemode
/gamemode
Changes the gamemode for everyone in the session. Add a player’s name to the end of the code to alter the mode for different players. Replace “” with one of the following options:
Survival
Creative
Adventure
Spectator
Example: /gamemode Survival
Give an item or items
/give - [amount]
Drops an item into the player’s inventory. Perfect for if you want to start a run with a full set of diamond gear. Just keep in mind the amount section only works for stackable items. You can’t give yourself 100 diamond swords in one go, as cool as that’d be. For a full list of item IDs, head here.
Example: /give PCGamer diamond_sword 1
Help if a command isn’t working
/help [command name]
Offers additional information about any console command. If you’re trying a command and it isn’t working as it should, type the above command before the name of the command that isn’t working and you’ll be treated to more details about how it works.
Example: /help kill
Turn keep inventory on
/gamerule keepInventory true
Changes the game rules so should you die, you keep all the items in your inventory. Replace “true” with “false” to turn it off again.
Kill everyone or everything
/kill
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Kills everything, including the player. But should you want to kill another player, use “/kill ”. And to kill a certain type of mob, “/kill @e[type=mobType]”.
The play sound command
/playsound Plays a specific sound file. Great for if you want to use a command block to play a sound when someone opens a door. Who doesn’t love a good doorbell? Take a look at all the sound file names here.
Example: /playsound minecraft:entity.elder_guardian.ambient voice @a
How to check the world seed
/Seed
Displays the seed for their current world should you wish to replay the seed again from scratch or pass it along to a mate.
Set the world spawn
/setworldspawn
Changes the world spawn to wherever the player is standing. If you don’t want to do that, you can also set it to a predetermined location with “/setworldspawn ”
Stop time from changing
/gamerule doDaylightCycle false
This completely turns the daylight cycle off so it’ll always be the current time of day. To reenable the cycle, replace “false” with “true.”
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Spawn a mob
/summon [x] [y] [z]
Summons a mob to a specific location. Remove the “[x] [y] [z]” section at the end to have the mob spawn right on top of you. Just remember if you’re spawning the Wither you’ll need to leg it as fast as possible.
Example: /summon creeper
Teleport
/tp [target player]
Teleports the targeted player to a designated location. And yes, you can indeed teleport a friend into the sky and laugh as their body flails back down to earth.
Example: /tp PCGamer 100 0 10
Alter the in-game time
/time set
Sets the in-game time. Add one of the following numbers onto the end to change the time of day to something else:
0 – Dawn
1000 – Morning
6000 – Midday
12000 – Dusk
18000 – Nightist
Change the weather to something nicer, or worse
/weather
Changes the in-game weather to a different type. I.e. “/weather thunder” would start a thunderstorm. This one’s a must if you’re going after charged creepers. Nobody's got time to sit around waiting for it to thunder.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 31, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
When I first walked through the double doors of Great Ormond Street Hospital, it was a little before midnight. The cavernous reception stood before me, with people bustling back and forth. There was a bizarre ambiance: sombre yet fuelled with adrenaline. Parents and guardians shuffled from foot to foot outside, chain-smoking or making calls. My daughter had been rushed in after a car accident and standing within the famous hospital for kids was daunting for me at the age of 24. Even during the day, the hospital can look imposing: a blue-and-white NHS awning sandwiched between monumental architecture, ambulances coming and going, dropping off precious cargo.
My daughter never recovered, but we were there for five days before she died. I watched as kids came and went through inpatient and outpatient wards, being treated for everything from broken bones to life-threatening cancers. Beyond the reception, the wards are decorated with colourful murals to relax the children, and a trip to the roof reveals a wonderful 3D diorama of Pixar's Finding Nemo for kids to explore between treatments. For a child, the idea of going to hospital for any reason is scary, and companies across the world are doing all they can to help children in this situation.
Teams at GOSH are constantly attempting to break down the fear that can overcome children who will be receiving treatment on-site. After recently introducing an inflatable MRI scanner to help kids adjust to the cramped conditions of the real thing, they've gone a step further and built the entire hospital within Minecraft. Now children and parents can tour the hospital virtually, exploring the wards and the different departments they may have to attend. This sounds at first like another story of a vast DIY building project within the Mojang game, but in this case the hospital struck a partnership with Minecraft owner Microsoft to ensure high-quality work and parity with the building.
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The walkway to the main entrance of Great Ormond Street Hospital, in Minecraft.
“The project took around two months to complete,” says Lee Stott, senior software engineer for Microsoft UK. “As you'd expect, lots of research went into building Great Ormond Street Hospital in Minecraft.” But it wasn't an easy project to manage. Minecraft blocks are one meter thick, which skews the dimensions of the hospital. “To work around this, each floor is separate and the buttons at the elevators simply teleport the player from the elevator on one floor to another.” Microsoft and a crew from professional Minecraft build team Shapescape were provided with hundreds of images and video clips – and, crucially, they were able to study floor plans which have been constantly updated since before the turn of the 20th century.
“Throughout the project, we worked with Shapescape, a company steeped in heritage amongst Minecraft Content Creators, who have previously recreated places such as Trafalgar Square, Chicago and Florence. We trusted them to build the most realistic experience possible using their team of more than 30 people from 11 different countries,” explains Stott. The project will allow children to explore the hospital on computers and soon also in VR. No section of the hospital is off limits, from Paediatric Intensive Care to the café or the golden chapel. The possibilities this generates are seemingly endless; community staff on-site could set challenges for the kids within the game, or use it as a tool for them to meet others their age in similar situations.
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The hospital's main reception.
Academic studies are increasingly showing the benefits that video games and the supporting technology can bring to the healing process. Away from Minecraft, companies are using emerging technology in exciting ways. “Today, hospitals are using games to encourage socialising, create a distraction and even aid in therapy. We've seen cases where gaming or virtual reality have enabled patients to focus on those activities while nurses have swapped out bandages covering a severe burn or taken a blood sample,” explains Stott.
In fact, Hermes Pardini Labs in Brazil has been using VR to distract children while being vaccinated. The nurse will fit a VR headset onto the child and follow along with a story on a second monitor, ensuring that their movements and actions mirror those of the magical fairy the child can see. When the time comes to inject the vaccine, the child is being given a ‘powerful shield stone' which will protect them in life. The study accompanying this form of treatment has seen great success and a decrease in upset children.
Back in the UK, Microsoft is hoping that it will see a similar effect from its work at GOSH, thanks to the accessibility of Minecraft. “Kids at different levels of experience and ability can play together in the same world, and whole families can join each other on adventures or work on collaborative projects,” says Stott.
The possibilities don't end with recreating Great Ormond Street Hospital, as Naomi Owen, PR for the hospital's charity, explains: “We see this as a big project and one that can be explored with other hospitals across the world and bring new ways to interact.” Another way Microsoft is helping GOSH is with the Cystic Fibrosis team. Cystic Fibrosis is a progressive, genetic disease that causes persistent lung infections and limits the ability to breathe over time. A defective gene causes mucus to build up within the lungs and other organs, meaning the child has to engage in a ‘clearance exercise' for 40 minutes per day.
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An exterior view of GOSH.
Stott talks about how the Microsoft team is helping to alleviate the boredom and mundanity of this daily routine with Minecraft. “In order to help with this aspect of the disease we have been working on a project that we call project Fizzyo, which gamifies the Cystic Fibrosis exercise through custom hardware that turns standard airway clearance devices into a game controller. To further boost participation, we have created a Minecraft mod with custom blocks that allows children to construct their own Fizzyo games inside of Minecraft itself. To do this we've introduced two new types of block to Minecraft. The Fizzyo block glows and emits red stone power as the participant carries out their airway clearance exercise.” There is also an ‘exercise tracker block' which provides an interface to configure and track the exercise's needs into the game.
“This is all about helping patients and their families at the most challenging time of their lives,” says Owen, “and we hope that this technology leads to more ground-breaking uses to be rolled out across the NHS.”
So how does it feel to walk through this version of Great Ormond Street Hospital? I decided I would walk the route that is burned into my brain from my time there. While many years have passed, and the hospital has evolved, I was able to begin from the entrance, next to the statue of Peter Pan, wander through the brightly lit foyer and ‘ride the elevator' up to the Seahorse ward. I walked the corridors to PICU, saw the beds lined up under the windows, passed the room where my daughter spent her final moments. And even in the blocky, pixelated view before me, my memories unravelled. I'm not a child who needs treatment, but I am a bereaved parent who finds comfort in those hallways and sees how special this project can be for those who need it.
by Stone Marshall | Oct 31, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Theatre Replacement is exploring mothers and sons through the lens of Minecraft.
MINE, the theatre company’s new production, is onstage at Shadbolt Centre for the Arts Nov. 17 through 20.
Using the computer construction game Minecraft as a kind of theatre, a group of gamer-performers from ages 10 to 45 enact different narratives live.
In a rocky and mountainous landscape they tell the story of Grendel’s mother’s brutal act of revenge from the Beowulf saga. They travel to a clearing in the woods to reveal the brief but powerful lessons that Bambi’s mother taught him before that horrible day in the meadow. Somewhere in a nearby city, a cyborg assassin travels back from the year 2029 to 1984 to destroy a woman named Sarah Connor and her son John Connor, who hasn’t been born yet but who will one day save the human race from machines.
“As the performance unfolds, personal stories begin to emerge from the landscape and weave themselves into the narrative,” a press release notes. “Grendel becomes a tweenage kid who just wants to stay in his room and play videogames; Bambi’s mother’s instinct to protect her son becomes a metaphor for a failed family trip to the Grand Canyon; the Terminator story evolves to reveal all the misplaced prophecies a mother places on her son – it’s a lot of pressure, and Mom worries way too much.”
The press release notes that the stories mingle and mash up as MINE both interrogates and recognizes the role technology plays in modern parent-child relationships.
MINE is created and performed by Maiko Yamamoto and her son Hokuto MacDuff, with Conor Wylie, Remy Siu and a group of four local gamer-performers aged 10 to 14.
Dramaturgy is by Carmen Aguirre and design by Leah Weinstein.
(The company also notes that MINE is not an official Minecraft product, nor is it affiliated with Mojang.)
Showtimes are 8 p.m. Tickets range from $15 to $36, available through tickets.shadboltcentre.com or 604-205-3000.
