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Today’s post is about dice. I have friends who’ve gotten aluminum Gravity Dice, and they are very cool. I’ve also been following Artisan Dice for several years, slavering over all the interesting and unique dice they make—ancient bog oak burl, mammoth tusk, red jasper, and the like. And I’ve finally taken the plunge. For my birthday, I got a pu...

One of my goals with Primalcraft is to add true survival foods to the game—food you can find out in the wild that aboriginal cultures or our ancestors might have eaten to avoid starvation, and that you can still eat today if you’re in a survival situation. The big barrier to this has been that almost all survival foods are seasonal in nature. No...

I’ve been researching Minecraft mods that add realistic, or at least improved, world generation. There aren’t that many. Because Minecraft world gen is difficult to mod, to say the least. I’m particularly interested in mods that offer more than just new biomes. I’m looking for mods that change the way terrain is generated, add significant blocks...

Primalcraft Seasons From the very beginning, I always wanted Primalcraft to have seasons. I love Minecraft’s open world concept—a world that I can change and reshape as desired. But there’s also something special about a world that changes on its own. Seasons provide a perfect sense of added realism and vitality to the world, and give the p...

I haven’t been entirely idle during the past month or so. From day one, I’ve been coding Primalcraft using Eclipse as my IDE (integrated development environment). The main reason is that every single tutorial I found used Eclipse. As a novice, I decided to use what all the tutorials were using. It was much easier to get off the ground that way. ...

I took a few weeks off from modding to build some shelves in our basement storage room, and then the holidays got all crazy, with lots of sickness in the house. After more than a month away, I’m back at it again. This time I bring you a feature I’m really excited about: Stone Age spears. I had been pretty intimidated at the prospect of tackl...

In vanilla Minecraft, it’s never completely dark. Although the default brightness is set to “Moody,” the lowest available, in practice virtually everybody manually sets their brightness to 100%. I do it, myself. Not because I hate the darkness, but because if I can make it easier on myself, I will. Setting the brightness to 100% makes it so eve...

Today I bring you yet another small but fun feature in Primalcraft: throwing rocks. The overriding theme of Primalcraft is extreme survival in the stone age. So your earliest tools will always be the simplest of objects: sticks and rocks. Given the difficulty of getting stone tools in Primalcraft, and how fragile they are once acquired, I wa...