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Welcome to the RedstoneLabs Wiki

Welcome! This wiki supports work by crafters and builders of the Minecraft Challenge League: da Vinci Schools, Brentwood School, Campbell School, Pepperdine University EDLT program and ACM student chapter members.

The wiki is intended for your use as both a reader and a contributor. Sure, there are plenty of resources available on the web: videos, blogs, web pages, and even other wikis. The official Mojang Minecraft wiki is especially detailed. However content created by and for you and your buddies will be more useful to you and probably easier for to understand.

What's with the Redstone Labs moniker?

Glad you asked. As some of you know and all of you will come to know, Minecraft has some pretty cool tools and capabilities buried inside it. Redstone is one such tool. It can be used as wiring to carry electical charges to other tools, such as pistons, trapdoors, minecarts, buttons, levers, and more. We hope to get everyone up to Redstone construction with our challenges. Besides, doesn't Redstone Labs just sound kinda cool and edgy? All leagues fighting for common good and social justice need a laboratory for their creative work! And of course the Minecraft Challenge League is one such league. I think we need a logo. Someone should get on that.

Getting Involved

You will find there are already a few pages with content on our wiki, but also a few pages that are just placeholders, waiting for someone to help fill in the information, waiting for someone like you! Remember that a wiki is a group writing space. Someone might edit or extend or otherwise modify what you write. Don't be offended; be happy they liked it enough to engage with it. You should also feel willing to engage with other pages/authors you encounter here.

The Minecraft Challenge League

The League

The Minecraft Challenge League is currently comprised of three middle schools. We anticipate growing the league, but for now keeping it a middle school experience. Middle school means different things in different places. For the league, this mean no lower than fifth grade and no higher than eighth. Some teams operate in conjunction with a school science or elective class; others are after school clubs. (See Member Schools, below.)

Currenlty we provide a hosted, private server running Minecraft with minimal mods. Some schools also have their own server, and have it set up however they wish it to be. All construction challenges must be able to run on our server, however. The idea here is to maintain a level playing field for challenge work.

This is the first year of an exciting league and clearly this is the beta version, the shake down cruise, the test rocket. We look forward to your help in improving the quality of the experience, what happens and how it feels. Our goal, as always, is "hard fun."

The Challenges

Challenges are devised by the Pepperdine Minecraft team and intended to require some thinking beyond simply applying knowledge about Minecraft tools and techniques. Challenges are structured to let you improve on your own constructions over time, toward the twin goals of efficiency and sophistication. Unless we call for a Rube Goldberg construction, and someday we might actually do that, your team's solutions should be simple and elegant as well as effective.

Generally, challenges will be released to the teams at the start of a month, giving the teams an entire month to hack and build, think and revise, master and share. We expect people with experience will guide people without experience. The goal is always that everyone should be able to understand and produce the solution. Be sure you whole team "gets it."

Presentation of solutions/constructions will also require documentation. In some cases that might be a video; in others it might mean to take a judge on a "ride along" or tour, in others it might just be an illustrated document, e.g., a school challenge page with screen shots.

Season 1, Challenge 1 - Underwater Mine Rescue

In brief: Use the designated Commons teleport to jump with your team to a location somewhere in the abandoned mine, which is now partially flooded with water from above and around it. Salvage what you can from the abandonned mine operation to create a rail-based escape route that can carry a disaster survivor to safety. Teams are scored on three criteria:

· Speed of final route;

· Quantity of salvaged material; and

· Improvement in cart run time from first to final constructed solution.

See the link for the full challenge text.

The Server

Pepperdine hosts a private Minecraft server running version 1.3.2 of Minecraft .

Member Schools

As of Fall, 2012, there are three middle schools in the league: from the Los Angeles area we have Brentwood Middle School and da Vinci Innovation Academy . From Missouri, we have Campbell Middle School. The League is sponsored by the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology and the Pepperdine GSEP student chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery ) . These schools should make a page for themselves in here and link it up, ahem ahem.

Campbell Middle School

Getting Around in Minecraft

Some of these pages are well developed, though still able to benefit from a good additon or edit. Others are merely 'stubs,' that is, they are placeholders waiting for some loving souls to step up and complete them.

Getting Home Again

Also known as debugging your "lost" status...

The Teleportation Waystations

standard teleporter building

Campbell's cool mod

Every region has a teleportation building. They used to look fairly uniform but some school regions have customized theirs. For instance, there's the checkerboard patter at Campbell. Each building has a button that will take you from your school region to the shared Commons area. In the Commons the teleporter building has buttons for each school region.

These buttons are actually using Command Blocks to carry out a set of commands that will move you to a specific X, Y, Z location. Unfortunately, as of this version of MC, only OPs can make Command Blocks. Hopefully that will change or we'll get the CommandBook updates that allow us to give regular players some of the OP commands. Stay tuned!

Monsters

Monsters are on. They come out at night or will self-spawn in dark places, such as mines (use torches, young grasshoppers, use torches!). Your Village Golems will defend you and your villagers from danger. They are pretty fearsome. So here's what we have going bump in the night, and what you can get from them if you manage to get one down.

A side note: if a monster gets the better of you and you die (or if you die for any number of other reasons), remember that you can retrieve the stuff you were carrying in your inventory if you quickly go back to the place of your demise. The stuff actually hangs around floating for about five minutes post-mortem. This only works if you die near your spawn site and can get back there before your stash disappears or is retrieved up by another player.

Me on a 64 block stack of dirt, waiting for morning. No tree limbs nearby. Safe from monsters.

What to do when you're out alone and it's getting dark, and you don't have a sword and you hear the monsters coming... Well, barehanded you can easily get a quick stack of 64 blocks of dirt. Then just point your head to the ground and jump stack up 64 blocks of dirt right up into the sky, and wait out the morning light (20mins). You're safe. Nothing can get you (be sure to chop away any overhanging tree leaves. Here I am on a dirt stack waiting for the sun.

Cave Bats

As of Halloween's there's bats in the caves. As far as I can tell they aren't aggressive and won't hurt you. You can kill them easily but they don't seem to drop anything. The coolest thing is that they can be seen sometimes hanging upside down from ceiling blocks. They squeak, which is annoying, but fear not. I haven't seen them harm anyone yet.

Creepers

These motley green walking sticks are the iconic monsters of Minecraft. You can find lots of tshirts and jokes about creepers, especially about the creepy hisssssss noise they make right before they explode. That's right; they explode. If you attack them you'd better get them down fast or the explosion will damage the immediate surroundings. So if one has you in its sights, lead it away from your house or your stash or your mine, unless you plan on using the explosion to your advantage to dig out a larger area. They drop gun powder, which is useful for making TNT, but I'm pretty sure we have disabled TNT in the world. But wait, there's some good news: they are afraid of ocelots and cats.

Zombies

If Steve were bitten by a zombie and became a zombie or walking dead guy, this is what he'd look like. In classic horror movie style, he walks with arms outstretched and he moans. In fact, his moaning is way scarier than he actually is. When injured they make a nasty gurgling sound that must be what a "death rattle" sounds like. LOL. So their bark is worse than their bite. They don't have a ranged attack like the skeletons and they don't leap at you like spiders or Endermen. You often find them in a movie-like pose trying to reach you or NPCs through a closed door. Don't get close. They can damage you through the door. They can drop really good stuff like iron armor or bars, but most of the time they just drop rotten flesh, which will make you sick if you eat it. But wait, there's some good news: they burn up in sunlight.

Skeletons

Skeletons are a real pain in the neck because they can shoot you with an arrow from pretty far away. There you are mining, and suddenly -- thwang! -- from above. You have to get close to take them down... unless, of course, you've managed to create a bow and arrow set for yourself! They drop arrows and bone, the latter can be made into bonemeal that will make your plants grow instantly. But wait, there's some good news: they burn up in sunlight.

Spiders

Spiders are as nasty as skeletons, maybe worse. They aren't just on the ground. They can be up in the tree tops. And, they can leap at you! They also make a hisssing sound. They drop string (for bows! and fishing line) and spider eyes. Oh yes, there's a use for those. There are cave spiders , which are worse than regular spiders. They do NOT burn up in the sunlight, but they become passive. In the daylight they will not attack you unless you attack them first. Yeah, that was the only good news.

Elements

Minecraft - Tutorial Water

Everything you wanted to know about water... by Etho

Water

Learning about water is the heart and soul of the first challenge.

Lava

Besides kiling you, what's it good for? How does it work?

Passive or Friendly Mobs

Cats , Ocelots , Wolves

Find out about their behaviors, where to find them, or in some cases how to tame them, what they can do for and to you.

Vllages and Villagers

Cows , Chickens , Pigs , Sheep , and Squid

Hey, did you know you can make baby cows, chickens, pigs, and sheep? Get some wheat in your hand to show them. Right click and adult (you'll see hearts show up around the adult). Right click another adult nearby (again, hearts). The two animals face each other and, voila, a baby appears. There is a 5 min. cool down before you can spawn another baby from the same adults.

Extinction! Don't run out of livestock. Slaughtering everything around is not going to be a good strategy for sustainability. So how do you get kills for food but still leave a viable population? You have to know the spawning algorithm If you want the mathematical modeling version, watch this . But here's some easy to understand info.

Village Golems

( more to come; had to stop for now )

Technical Information

These pages are not explcitly about Minecraft, the game. They should be edited by the people involved with them.

The Hosted Server

We are currently running version 1.4.2 with a CraftBukkit overlay. We usually have the following mods: Lockette , bPermissions , bChatManager , WorldEdit , and WorldGuard , of course now we're waiting for those to update so they can work successfully on the new 1.4.2 server. We actively discourage client-side mods, and if we catch with client cheats you will be warned and then banned if you continue to use them.

The Minecraft Launcher or "Client"

Either the Minecraft client you bought at Minecraft.net or the one you bought at Minecraftedu.com will work with our sever. Please never update beyond the version we are running on the hosted server.

Helpful People

Each school team (Brentwood, da Vinci, and Campbell) has a Pepperdine team of adult doctoral students who will be working with you to support you with Minecraft or with the challenges. There is also a League oversight team made up of teachers from Brentwood, da Vinci, or Campbell school, as well as three folks from Pepperdine. We mostly support server issues and the creation and judging of the challenge activities.

Brentwood

Bob Kahn

Scott Perloff

da Vinci

Chris Miko

Travis

Campbell

The Pepperdine group assigned to the Campbell School includes: Angela Larson (aka larsonious) also serves as part of the oversight team, Christine (aka phortay), Andy (aka bestintexas80), Kevin (aka Sir_Amadas), Anna (annagrig13), and Jeff (jeffmehring). Go MustangNation!

Pepperdine

Linda Polin is a Davidson professor of education and technology at the Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology. She teaches in the Learning Technologies doctoral program. She's also an ardent game player, as you can see on her personal webpage . My i.d. sometimes shows up as Profpolin.

James Rhoads

Andrea Shea

Helpful Other Sites

Minecraft Official Wiki

This wiki is built and maintained by the world wide Minecraft community.

Minecraft League Guild Page

This site is maintained by all of us together. Here you will find forums to chat about topics with others, a gallery where you can upload and view pictures from Minecraft teams, and more. You will need to become a member to add to the website. Just submit an application from the application page.

Redstone Labs Wikia

This is our wiki. We make it useful to what we want to know and do. You are the editors. You are the contributors.