It would appear Gamemastr isn't ready for the Share at the moment. Let's give him another couple hours to claim it, otherwise it's Webster's turn. Ready, Webster?

Yes!

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/4955141617/the-plan-for-mods

After some internal discussion and general anxiety, we’ve arrived at a
plan for supporting mods. It’s still a bit vague and the details might
change after we’ve run it by our lawyers, but here’s what we want to
do:

* Let players sign up as “mod developers”. This will cost money (edit: no longer costs money!), and
will require you agreeing to a license deal (you only need one per
mod team).
* Mod developers can download the source code from our SVN repository.
As soon as we commit a change, it will be available to all mod
developers, unobfuscated and uncensored.
* Mod developers get a unique certificate for signing their mods. This
means players can see who made what mod and choose to trust individual
developers. The cost of signing up makes sure only serious developers
have access to this certificate.

The rules of the license deal will contain:

* Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft
* You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a
separate license deal with us
* The mods must not be malicious (obviously)
* We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves
in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid
adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does
something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided
by the community.

In the long term, we hope this means people will do awesome new things
with the Minecraft engine and play around with it. We want to buy
and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them
ourselves. It’s possible we might have a mod marketplace for selling
and buying mods that fans have written, or we might purchase and
integrate nice mods that fit the main theme of Minecraft.

i'd rather he just go with Bukkit. the code is already there and we wouldn't have to wait 6 months to ∞. Not to mention, mod developers love Bukkit.

I like the idea of being able to sell mods. I also hate the idea of having to buy mods. It's... a conundrum.

So in short, Mod makers get the short end of the stick? They can do all the work, and if a mass of users love it, Mojang can pretty much just take it and the credit for it? Sounds like Mojangs getting a swollen head.

It's ass covering. BGS has some similar fineprint for mods made for their games.

Yeah that was a very bad voice decision.

The siege was awesome too. And Old_Peculier rules.

Ready as I'll ever be, I suppose. My turn came up much quicker than anticipated... I was hoping people would come before me to help me with the insane amount of Obsidian I'm gonna need. Eh, no matter. I'll just have to farm up a lot of the stuff in the Nether.

I said I'd help - for your next turn, anyway

Must...play...Minecraft....Considering....downgrading...to...1.4....

Bleh.

If I can make a suggestion, I think it'd be good if you spent this turn making the Obsidian farm, before worrying about actually mining the Obsidian. You could make a big tower full of molds to pour the lava into, or make an underground collection of them, but you should at the very least make that first so that even if you only finish that, you'll have laid the groundwork for the rest of us to make Obsidian for you.

Uh oh...my night is gone. Or at least 90 minutes of it.

I thought your failed obsidian tower experiment taught you that only the source block turns to obsidian - anything flowing will turn to cobblestone. The best way I know of to actually generate obsidian is with a pair of portals (destroy one, go through one, light one, then repeat), assuming they don't wind up just connecting to a single Nether portal. I'd sooner just create a small form in the Nether somewhere and do a bucket brigade to keep it safe.

The Internet has spoken.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/4955682775/the-cost-of-the-mod-api

Oh, I guess I never explained exactly how that tower happened did I. It wasn't an attempt to make an Obsidian tower. I was trying to install lava lights inside the cliff-tower-thing (I really should name that...), in lieu of using torches. I put some lava behind glass and saw that it looked... kind of ugly. So when it came time to remove the lava, I broke the glass and it poured out. When I (thought) I had removed the source blocks, to my surprise it was still flowing, and I had no idea how to get rid of it other than pouring water on it. When I did, it turned into cobble. I then wondered if I could make a quick cobble tower with that method. As I added more and more lava blocks to the initial cobble column, and more and more cobble trying to make the tower wider, I wound up with the big mess that you saw when my turn was done.

So, yeah, long story short, it wasn't an attempt to make an Obsidian tower. That said, what I was just talking about in my previous post is making molds for the source blocks to go into. Imagine a rectangle of cobble, surrounded by a 1 block high wall and filled with dirt. The player removes one dirt block where they want to pour the lava, another for another bucket, another for another bucket, and so on until the entire mold is full of lava blocks. Then they pour water on it and create Obsidian. Mine it, fill it back up with dirt and repeat. That seems to be the most commonly used method of farming Obsidian, as far as I'm aware. There are tutorial videos on Youtube showing it too if you want to see it for yourself.

Mmmkay, I've done it that way before. Works just fine. I'm usually careful enough that I just do it at the source now. One bucket of water's all you need!

And so Mojang has found another way to rely on the players for actual development of Minecraft while doing bugger-all themselves.All that will happen is that the popular mods will be incorporated into the game, be called "development" and Mojang will continue to spend their time otherwise working on balloon animals.

I understand the logic behind his plan, but at the same time modding isn't meant to be exclusive to professionals. Sifting through crap mods to get to the good stuff is just the nature of the beast. In the end charging for the modding tools would only decrease the amount of quality mods.

Wow http://notch.tumblr.com/post/4955682775/the-cost-of-the-mod-api that's rough.

Well I found something out. Apparently water carried into the Nether, if placed down, will immediately evaporate. No matter where you put it. So, my obsidian runs are forcing me to run into the Nether, fill up a few buckets of lava, and run back out to pour it one block at a time into a dirt mold. Why one block at a time? because a 3x3 square, which I was going to use, stubbornly refuses to work. You'd think a source block of lava into each square would make a full pit, right? Nope! Cursed lava physics. D:

That being said... I'm wasting a lot of hours here. I haven't even managed to get a single block down in my intended tower location. And, since I'm making the tower 15x15, with an expansion to 19x19 at the top - for a little paraqet - several blocks high... Well, just one level of my tower - the shell alone - constitutes 60 blocks of obsidian. WITHOUT flooring. Or an internal staircase. Or individual tower rooms. Or the bridge I'm going to build out to the tower, since it's gonna be in the sea.

Even if I make it only 20 blocks high, that's 1200 blocks of obsidian. For the SHELL. I want to cry.

However, I am making steady progress. I've got somewhere in the vicinity of 400 blocks of obsidian now, all stored away in the main tower... Nowhere near enough, but damn good for a few hours of work. This is gonna be a long project.

EDIT: Also, chunks of this cursed minecart track keep disappearing on me. I'll be riding along, humming a jaunty little tune, and suddenly BAM. One of the downward slope tracks is missing, causing my cart to derail. Damn thing. No idea what's causing it. =/

That's a lot of obsidian. You're lucky I have no particular desire for any . You might want to put a sign over that chest to let people know you've got it earmarked.

Very strange about the minecart tracks. Do they reappear?

Well I am in a server with one other person while I wait for our server to be updated. The thing is we found a very BIG cave and there is one major problem , even though I keep 95% of the cave is now lighted with torches mobs still spawn. We just lost 8 diamond in 10 minutes , we recovered our stuff before but this was bs. I was running away from a zombie and run into a skeleton and then I turned into a spider and a zombie and they pushed me into lava. How are they spawning? Oh god , we are soon to stop digging in this cave , it is practically a mob spawner.

Is there a dungeon in the cave somewhere?

How well lit is the cave? Everything close to the highest light level?

Is the mouth of the cave open?

I have a large chest placed on the third floor of the tower. You're welcome to dip into it if you need a few Obsidian for anything... But please replace it. This is hell, just farming a single obsidian block over and over again. D:

And no, the minecart tracks don't reappear. I actually have to go and make more minecart tracks, then place them down in the missing tracks' place just to keep the carts up and running. Maybe they got struck by lightning or something, I dunno.