The MineTrek 2 server was created to bring the USS Enterprise D project into the latest Minecraft releases and open up all of the wonderful creative possibilities that offers. See the wiki for more information! http://wiki.minetrek.net
Sometimes you see these wonderful structures in videos, taken from a creative server. They'll be all shapes and sizes. What I have noticed is it is pretty common to see things that are not all that creative architecturally and instead have amazing texture packs applied so they look amazing despite the lackluster craftsmanship.
Often a creative server will judge players based on the size of their creations, the time spent working on it, rather than the skill applied in creating it. But what always seems to remain true, no matter the quality, is that a good texture pack always makes things look several factors better.
That isn't the current goal of the server's texture pack.
Yep!
But What About Us?
Right now, the goal of the textures is to make use of every block and item available to us, to decide their final form regardless of quality. I certainly don't mind re-working a few textures to make them prettier, but at the same time I don't intend to re-work a texture 20 times to get the ultimate iteration.
Each texture should be refined only in structure - adjusting the shape, perhaps widening or thinning the edges a bit. Working on what each LCARS display will hold in general (such as simply buttons or a specific interface like one found in engineering) or refining the actual purpose of the pieces.
I suppose it is no surprise then that my favorite texture is the hand held phaser, which has had only 3-4 stages of refinement put into it, and yet is probably the best looking texture of the bunch! It's also just plain entertaining to fire a phaser in Minecraft... even if it's still technically just a painted bow.
I'd really love feedback or design ideas for those textures though anything will do. Don't like a certain texture? Let me know! Think there is a better way to get the same effect? Try adjusting it yourself, post your results, or just share the idea.
I'm especially happy if you simply explore the ship and find need of something we do not yet have. Those are most important, because those ideas are what I need to use up the rest of the blocks available to us.
Some examples of unused items:
Netherrack
Caulderon
Minecarts
Boats
Lapis Lazuli Ore
Powered/Unpowered Rails (note: unpowered rails are different from standard rails)
Detector Rail
Iron Bars
Mycelium
Redstone Repeater
And Then What?
Once blocks are established its great to fine tune the texture pack. My goal is to have 100% unique textures, hand made not based on images taken from google or texture websites. This will be especially true with the HD texture packs we'll inevitably make in the future, where you will be able to tell without much trouble that the image has been "borrowed". Acquiring permission to use detailed textures would also be acceptable, of course.
If you'd like to help right now, as you're reading this, brainstorm some weapons or tools that crew members aboard the Enterprise might use - we've got TONS of hand held items which can be made into just about anything, similar to how the swords and bow have already been made into more Star Trek like weapons. As an example: I plan on making a tricorder using the stick texture.
Thanks for reading, can't wait for 1.2 release! Make it so!
The current terrain.png (note that there are more textures than just this, but it covers the majority):
The primary goal of this branch of the MineTrek project is to bring the Enterprise into the latest Minecraft.
All else bows to that goal. By that I mean, once the server is up and running with all its necessary protections, the necessary rank structure, the imported ship... all of it ready to be pushed forward as the project had been in the past, only then can other goals be attacked head on.
However there ARE other goals for the ship. Some great examples and ideas that have already been hatched (even tested on the test server):
Lighting the whole ship - after all, beta and beyond Minecraft has lighting in it, and without it you cannot see within the ship.
Redecorate the ship with the massive amount of new block options.
Build a really great texture pack for the server.
Add gameplay options such as PVP battles (Crew vs Borg!)
Add a tourism hub to help guide people through the ships many awesome locations.
Improve the holodecks to allow for massive amounts of cool content.
Multi-world to allow for away missions to battle enemies.
A spacedock (possibly to be used as the tourism hub and PVP staging areas).
Other starships to expand the project (1:1 scale of course).
As you can see, with a little imagination there is so much that can happen here! I see no reason why everything we can think of can't happen at some point.
When the 2.0 ship is ready to be released, the server is setup up with plugins and the ship is imported, I'll zip it up and post it for people to hold onto. That way it can't die without someone being able to pick it up and start going again. That's the most important thing.
After that, we're going all out.
I want to do some work on the major areas of the ship, light all of the important rooms and any rooms with windows to the exterior (ensuring the exterior is fully lit). The ship will have basic tourism systems in place (such as transporter locations) and will have many WorldGuard regions set up for protecting what we want built or not and by whom. Some adjustments will be welcome to the overall design here, but with the goal of accuracy always maintained. Within a few days, perhaps weeks at most, I want to have the ship ready to be further released to the Minecraft world.
I want to post a thread on Minecraftforum.net about her and invite people to join the server and take a firsthand look, maybe record some video, and share the ship with the world once more!
At that point, assuming I'm right about how the community will react - my little server will probably get crushed. But it will be worth it.
Here I will try to periodically show the current status and goals of the project MineTrek 2.0 (MineTrek in Minecraft Release 1.2 and above)! To get started, I'd like to talk about the history of the project a little and give some insight into how I've become involved with it.
Going Viral
Back in 2010 a guy named Halkun was working on a project in Sketchup. He wanted to map out the entire Enterprise D, but somewhere along the way he decided to try something similar in Minecraft. Tumblr
A video was born.
Of course, I'm guessing a vast majority of you (if not everyone) has seen that video - it's most likely the starting point of your adventures into the world of MineTrek. In fact I'd be surprised if anyone who's decided to build a Star Trek ship in Minecraft has NOT seen it!
From this, Halkun was driven to start up a server for his project and allow others to get involved. Many did, and the ship began to take shape (relatively quickly actually).
But Halkun has his own life to live and while he certainly has provided the beginnings of the project he's also not even close to the only person to put a lot of love into this ship.
Swax's Server
I'm sure the specifics are out there and probably even easy to find on the Shipyards Forums, but I have not bothered to look it all up. Suffice it to say, Halkun had other things to deal with and someone needed to take over the server management of the project.
It is my understanding that Swax took that part of the project over and helped propel it forward. A lot of very dedicated people were involved and the ship really took shape rapidly, though it was certainly no small amount of work.
A few searches for MineTrek or just the Enterprise in Minecraft on youtube will show you a number of videos by various people detailing the life and growth of the project during this time. Watching those and reading the forums will give you a much clearer picture of the process.
Mothball
The ship was definitely in a pretty late stage of completion around the time I discovered it and decided to become involved. The hull was shaped, not to mention being updated and decorated, finely tuned. The walls were, of course, all in. Many major parts of the ship had been filled in, built lovingly by hand by the builders. Rooms were being filled in, newbs like myself were decorating crew and civilian quarters left and right.
I really loved the way I would get lost in the ship. Even staring at BLUEPRINTS of the ship, it was easy to get lost. It is just that massive, even with a good amount of variation between rooms and hallways there are just so many that end up looking alike.
I found myself mostly interested in making the ship more accessible to those who just wanted to see the thing, not necessarily build on it. With this in mind and having been promoted to a builder rank (which to me meant they had accepted me as a part of the project officially) I started to do my part.
DNAV was born, and with Roosters help it made some good progress, adding to the tools available for navigating the ship. I also tried to put together a "tour guide" thread which is still found in the state I left it on the forums.
And then I found other ways to spend my time for a while. I'll admit I just wasn't as into it as I needed to be to stick around. Among other things, I ran a survival server for some friends with the latest build and using bukkit plugins.
Minecraft release 1.2 - Anvil
Around the same time as I found the post notifying everyone that the ship was homeless I learned that Minecraft was going to have its skies raised in the next update. Actually, I don't remember exactly, but it might have been this information that caused me to jump on over to the forums again and see what was up. The MineTrek project had always desired to be moved into "beta" Minecraft and above rather than remain it its classic server format.
Knowing that the latest Minecraft would have the ability to hold the ship, I knew that it HAD to be done. You see, the classic Minecraft clients are free, or even usable in a browser (though viewing the ship that way was not recommended). Yet despite this, there were many millions more players using the latest releases of the game.
The use of the World of Minecraft client and required texture packs to fully enjoy the ship which required editing your game files just made it a bit obscure for any but the more dedicated Trek / Minecraft fans. The question in my mind was which would really get more attention? Would a current release MineTrek server be a better home for the ship?
And so I took it upon myself to start the process: I was going to get the ball rolling on a 1.1 server made to "test" everything beforehand that we would need for the upcoming 1.2 release where we would bring the ship to a new home.
Testing 1, 2, 3...
The test server is up and running and myself and a few others have already identified a number of ways to improve the ship. We've found some requirements needed for the running of the server, ways to facilitate navigating the ship, and even improvements on the way we can handle promoting new builders. We've explored multiple ways to light the ship, worked on texture packs, even made adjustments to the build experimentally (which was previously not ideal as there was only one ship to work on at a given moment and changing things also meant possibly screwing them up). So far, the goals of my test server are absolutely being met!
And other good news has come up: MCEdit is definitely being updated for Minecraft 1.2, so we'll be able to import the ship right in with no major hassle!
There are many, many challenges to face in the next few weeks and months. There may end up being a need for new hardware (the test server is running on a PC in my home with only a semi-decent internet connection). There may be a great deal of frustration caused by griefers unless I can find a plugin solution to defeat them (we've already been attacked and my security precautions overrun somewhat). But, that is why I have the test server, to find and stop these things before they actually do any harm. Some will have to be tackled when they happen though.
In the meantime feel free to drop in and play around on the ship in 1.1! There are dozens of new blocks and a lot of things different in 1.1 that mean big changes for our NCC-1701-D.
A Note About the Classic Server
Right now other dedicated fans of the ship are running the classic server again (multiple iterations actually from what I gather). You can still check the ship out, in its full glory, by locating the USS Enterprise in the classic server lists. You can keep track of what is happening for at least one of those servers on the forums as well.
