Minecraft Experimentation – Creative Mode Building Height

If you saw my recent post, you would see that I purchased an XBox One for my family as part of our ‘shared’ Christmas toys. Given that my kids have friends who have access to Minecraft and that they have played it with their friends, it only makes sense that it would be one of the first games that we purchased. We did purchase it and my two oldest kids have created their own worlds to build in. Given that I am a former LEGO master builder, I find playing the game to be very interesting and relaxing.

In both my oldest child’s world and in my middle oldest child’s world on the game, I attempted to create a house (building a house is one of the first things people do in that game it seems). I quickly found that it was very easy to build a house in Creative mode and then completely forget where it is as I was wandering the world. So, when I started my own Minecraft world, I wanted to build a house that I would have a REALLY hard time losing sight of on the map. So, I began to build a huge tower from the ground up and following a very OCD color scheme as I went.

As I built, I never thought much about the physics of the game but they were unimportant at the time. By the time that I had built a house about 45 stories above the world, I had started to make all walls out of glass so I could enjoy the view of my brick-like kingdom. It was here that I had a sudden thought – how tall will Minecraft allow me to build my house in Creative mode? I decided I wanted to build my own ‘tower to the heavens’ and see if I could somehow build above the heavens in the game. Luckily, the actual width of my first building is not that wide (I tried to squeeze it into a valley near the center of the map) so building it was not a herculean project but required about a week’s worth of time (in small, 1 to 2 hour blips).

By the time my house reached about 70 stories (with each story being about three bricks high), I was starting to get slightly fatigued and slightly frustrated that I couldn’t figure out where the limit was. I decided to take to the interwebs and found a few posts that indicated that the maximum height of a building in the game was approximately Y: 256 (256 bricks from the ground up). This would make my building about 85 stories high. I let my hand rest briefly and then continued building.

Unfortunately, I lost two dogs on the way (I had domesticated three). I had domesticated three dogs and a horse and let the dogs stay set to “Follow Me.” The game will do everything in its power to make the dogs follow you but I don’t think the logic was designed for people who use the “Free Fly” or “God Mode” in Creative. You see… my building was already about 80 stories up when I had my three dogs follow me up from the ground. I had taken a brief ‘fall’ to the surface and walked around a bit to make sure that my mammoth tower was visible clearly even in the highly forested area in which I built it. The dogs followed me back up, all 79+ flights of stairs. I would usually build the first level of a story while standing on the floor inside the tower and often would continue to use a floating stance to build the second level of the floor. By the time I got to the third level, I discovered that it was much easier to build this level by hovering outside of the building. My dogs would often “teleport” to the block area I was working on. Usually I could handle this by leashing them and then having them “sit” somewhere near me. But on a few occasions, they would teleport RIGHT when I dropped a block, this caused them to be forced outside of the wall. Dogs don’t enjoy free floating powers like humans and my dogs hit the ground with a loud “Splat”… eww. I lost Pooch 1 about floor 81 and I ultimately lost Pooch 2 at about floor 83. Yet I KEPT building.

It turns out that the game gives you a bit higher limit on the XBox than on the computer version of the game (which most of the players who announced the 256 limit used). The end result? You can evidently build to Y:260 before the game cuts you off. I wondered if I would get some weird glitch but that never happened. Basically, once I got to Y:260, I tried to place a block on what would have been Y:261 and I simply did not have a “place” option. I tried at least 15 different angles and zoom levels but the game simply will not let you do any building beyond that level. So that’s the level where my massive tower ended.

What next? Well, I had a vision that I wanted to create a sort of “Sky City” where I could build various towers at different locations around the map and connect them all with a ‘sky sidewalk’. So once I built the core tower in the virtual center of the world, I began building a skyway southward. I plan to build a tower as close to the “South Pole” of the game map that I can. I will then go back to my center tower and build out North followed by the other cardinal directions. I am not sure what I will do after that, but I want to try and build some “sky pastures” and see if I can convince any animals to be lead up there and take up a residency in a pasture that is very high up. Of course, I will try to build some good restraining walls so that they can’t just fall off the map and die as my dogs did. I also talked about building a mine cart ride between a few of the areas as something like a roller-coaster but I have not practiced much in building these yet. We’ll see how far I get.

Unfortunately, I lost Pooch 3 yesterday. I started building a 4×4 sidewalk southward. I would then come back after building the ‘floor’ of the sidewalk and then build the retaining rails to the end of the floor and then start adding another batch of sidewalk. Pooch 3 followed me but had (wisely) stayed back about 10 squares from my current ‘dead air’ zone. Unfortunately, as I built the last block of the retaining rail, the game decided to teleport him RIGHT as I placed the block. He made a whimpering noise and then a splat. Man… my character may have a hard time agreeing to have any dogs for a while. Luckily there is a huge world below with lots of wolves hanging around. I may eventually wander my sky city surrounded by a wall of dogs. LOL.

I see why people like this game so much!

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