How to propose to your fiance on Minecraft in five [easy] steps

1. Find a mountain.
2. Sheer half of it off so that you get a cliff.
3. Flatten and block-swap the land below the cliff as necessary, so that it is completely flat grassland (you will need to wait for grass to grow on any placed earth blocks)
4. Spell "Will you marry me, X/Y (name of woman/man) in torches and wait for a starry night.
5. Find a girl. Hit it off. Have a date that goes well. Have a fight - OK, have a lot of fights. Actually it's a million times better to fight a lot this early on than saving it for later, this will also help you two see if you are on the same page in terms of your VALUES and TRAJECTORY which are crucial in any long-term relationship. Be faithful and considerate to your partner. Try not only to make sure and put his/her needs before your own, but also that you've found a person with values similar to your own so that this isn't too much of a stretch for you, and also a similar life trajectory so that you reduce the possibility of running into big problems down the road. Make sure she thinks Minecraft is the sexiest thing ever. If she does not think Minecraft is the sexiest thing ever, see step 1 and repeat as necessary. Have her start playing your world a short distance from the cliff and "find her way" to the top - also make sure she doesn't actually FALL off the cliff to her death, as this will leave everyone with an ominous sense of foreboding.

Congratulations! You've proposed to your fiance in Minecraft in five easy steps!!

So no, I haven't done this yet, but I HAVE been playing a lot of Minecraft since DCB bought it for me - YESTERDAY. Did I mention that I am waiting to hear back on a really important interview and ought to be continuing my rigorous job search as per usual in case it doesn't pan out? Yah.

Rather than do that I think I'll build a series of interconnected sand colonies with defensively sealed sand tubes providing a monster-free pathway from colony to colony and glass viewports, preferibly surrounded by fast flowing water that snags monsters and drags them into the lava or into electric plates or fire surrounding the tubes. Safety and entertainment - all in one! Oh and I'd like it if you had periodic hatches (ok, doors) in the tube where you could accidentally let the lava in and destroy the entire network. It lends a sense of fragility and ephemeral je ne sais quois to the whole enterprise - very very artsy.

It's the future Watson.

Oh, and on the music of course - Minecraft has some decent tunes. I will admit that a great deal of the calmness and sweet, distant feel of it is achieved by passing the instruments through a low-pass filter so it sounds like they're being playing underwater. This in itself is extremely easy to do, but I admire the soundtrack for it's NON-INTRUSIVENESS and its SIMPLICITY. These are difficult things to pull off in a game soundtrack, where we as composers more often than not want to pull out all the stops and showcase everything we are capable of. So hats off to C418, and I look forward to hearing all of the game's music in the completed version.

Oh and now that I know about it, I want to get to the nether as soon as possible. My netbook STRUGGLES to run minecraft at anything resembling a smooth framerate, with framerate locked, fast graphics, and tiny rendering, so I have no idea how that would work in the hardware realm...but we'll see.

-R