Instant Minecraft Designs – Review Day 2 – Making Progress

As previously mentioned, I was asked and volunteered to review an eBook from Packt Publishing titled, “Instant Minecraft Designs How To” by Mephisto Waltz.

This was day 2 and I want to start off by sharing something I learned years ago when working with computers. If you find yourself confused or getting frustrated it is often better to just step away from a day or two so your mind can clear and comeback later. Following that advice I had much better success on Day 2.

Beginning where I left off I was able to finishing the Tudor Style structure and just below are a few images of the finished work.

The book was created to teach someone how to use VoxelSniper and WorldEdit. I can tell you WorldEdit seemed to be the most useful in my opinion. VoxelSniper, at least for the first couple of designs, seemed to have little value and quite honestly was a pain to get installed and working correctly due to the recent upgrades from Minecraft 1.4.7 to 1.5.1

The book was originally written with 1.4.7 as the example and as with any software that is constantly evolving (which is a good thing for all of us) there can be problems when new versions come out and either the plugin upgrades are not available yet or in this particular case there was three different instructions and possibilities to install VoxelSniper on the server, but only one actually worked (see my other blog here on the right way to do it).

But I digress. So coming from a total noob to the admin, craftbukkit, and plugins world I will say that after I got everything sorted out I was able to get the structure built with a lot less frustration. The word “Instant” in the title could be a bit deceiving, because honestly I didn’t find anything very instant, but this was just a starting place to learn how to use plugins such as WorldEdit to assist people in making builds.

On my first try while learning how to use the plugins, I found that I could have built the structures in creative almost as fast as trying to learn how to do it using WorldEdit, however once I went through the steps a few times I realized how valuable WorldEdit could be especially if you are creating a multiplayer server and you want to create a spawnpoint city.

On a rating system I would probably give the book a 4 out of 5 stars mainly because the timing of the book being published after Minecraft 1.4.7 had been replaced by 1.5.1. Also, I wished and thought based on the title that there would be more great designs to follow along with in the book, but again, I have only finsihed 1-1/2 projects (there are 4 projects total in the book).

The last two projects which include building a Pagoda and a Futuristic City both look awesome and are quite complex. If you want a great spawnpoint for a new multiplayer server world then the Futuristic City design might do nicely.

There is still a lot to explore in the book and trust me it does take time especially for someone who has never used these tools before, but if you want to learn how to build these designs and use WorldEdit and VoxelSniper to speed up the process then this book will be right for you. For my money though I would purchase the less expensive eBook or PDF rather than the more expensive print book.

Now I will just leave you with a quick video of my final creation.