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Total Members Voted: 34

[Ziiro]

[Mothra]

Minecraft - The World of Evangelion

Skip to 3:30 to see the finished work, plus a slew of other sweet-ass eva projects.

Jeeeesus

[Beat Bandit]

Lords Of Uberdark (Pre Alpha - 6/28/2011)

Someone figured out how to unlock from grid.

[Misha]

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/495374-173-aether-collaboration-mod-v101-bug-fixes/page__gopid__6524241 Aether mod is live. Played it for a little while, got killed 3 times by 3 different enemies in this supposedly peaceful world. Still, pretty awesome.

[Lottel]

Minecraft singleplayer mods Ep 5: Jurrasic Craft!

[Zaratustra]

I made a mod because I was tired of making wood houses with the roof of also wood

http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/506956-173-stylish-mod-01/

I only got accused of stealing once so that's good I guess

[Mongrel]

Minecraft: Pooping Butt

This is a thing people have made.

[Niku]

Minecraft Diarrhea Butt #3: Running This Shit Into the Ground

[Mongrel]

This is what my wife does when she's bored.

Slimes - their natural history and husbandry



Part 1. What are slimes?

Briefly, slimes are complex organisms somewhere between algae and sponges. They also have qualities shared with bacteria and with fungi, namely phagocytosis and asexual reproduction. Unlike these kingdoms however, slimes are eukaryotes with behaviour-driven motility and lack a cell wall.

ANATOMY OF A SLIME



A slime has a top or lid, face, sides or sidewalls, rear wall, and a base. Living slimes are always oriented thus, and instantly re-orient themselves base down whenever they are tilted or fall at an angle. This is due to the statocyst or positional sensor organ in the slime's lid. It functions like a primitive inner ear to orient the slime in space.

Other important anatomical landmarks of the slime include:

• Chiton - the thick outer slime coat that serves as a protective coating for the slime, and a primitive gut. The chiton is secreted by the capsule, the elastic true skin of the slime.
• Macula(e) - the sensory apparatus of the slime. They have been called "eyes" and "mouth" because of their shape. They are relatively insensitive to light, but detect exquisitely small movements and magnetic fields.
• Inclusions - These are mostly debris picked up and embedded in the thick chiton. Some inclusions are products of digestion from items the slime has engulfed.
• Gonad - A region of the slime that seems to be more metabolically active in the company of other slimes of the same size.
• Zoochlorellae - These are symbiotic algae and cyanobacteria that live inside the slime and provide it with oxygen and starches. In turn the slime protects the algae from heat and desiccation and provides trace minerals and reduced nitrogen compounds. These organisms are what give the slime its green color.

Internal Structure of the Slime

The capsule of the slime is tough and elastic, like a tendon or a thick sheet of rubber. Inside the capsule, the slime consists of three specialized areas, arranged roughly from front to rear.

• The pyxosome is the area right behind the maculae and is a heavily pigmented mass of dense but friable gelatinous material. Microscopically, it is composed of myriads of nests and coils of sarcoplasm surrounding larger canals filled with serum. The serum component has a high content of soluble heavy metals including redstone, iron, gold, and adminium. It is possible that as much as 70% of a world's elemental adminium is bound up in slimes, the rest occurring as the dark bars in common bedrock. The pyxosome may be responsible for slime's sensory functions.
• The opisthosome occupies the rear of the slime and contains the gonad. In truth the gonad is acellular but rather is made up of a few large, pale inclusions with high organic nutrient content. Bergensten et al. propose that the structure actually is where undigestible materials are stored so as not to damage the slime's internal chemistry.
• The elasmosome makes up the majority of the slime and is a colorless to light green, translucent material the consistency of Guk (TM). This is composed almost entirely of matted lattices of microtubules. This is the locomotive engine of the slime and surrounds the other two internal portions, anchoring them to the capsule and to one another. It also provides extensions through the capsule to anchor the chiton in place and stimulate additional chiton secretion in regions of high shear stress.

The commercial slimeball is actually made up of the elasmosomes of freshly killed slimes.

Habitat of Slimes


This herd of slimes occupied the lava pool shown here for several minecraft days.

Slimes are found deep underground, in areas where constant high temperature and humidity prevail. Since slimes are facultatively photosynthetic, they thrive in and around caverns lit up by magma flows, volcanic vents, and even the high energy lamps used in deep shaft mining. Due to their thick chiton, they are notoriously resistant to fire and burns.

Since slimes require oxygen to live, they rely on their symbiotic zoochlorellae to provide a small amount. Transplanting a slime into a totally dark oxygen-poor volcanic flue or sulfur vent can suffocate it. However, if a light source is provided, the slime may survive indefinitely (although it will not grow or reproduce).


The small slime in the center foreground is drowning.

Slimes are limited to areas where water and ambient moisture are high. Although they can desiccate if stranded or trapped in dry air, they can retain a lot of water and this allows them to migrate long distances to new caverns.

Contrary to popular belief, slimes can't swim and they do drown when submerged in water. Commercial elastics harvesting relies on large deep pools or moving conveyors to drown young slimes.



These slimes are migrating from a dry underground tunnel system to a freshly opened mineshaft, which is still damp.

Slime Life Cycle


Slimes of all sizes and life stages in a stampede, a rare and dangerous phenomenon associated with strip mining or flood mining.

Slimes reproduce either sexually (details unknown) or asexually (fission) to produce daughter slimes. The daughter slime or calf is less than 1 m cubed and has little or no enzymatic activity. It contains relatively more nutrients in the form of inclusions. These sustain the small slime until its own enzymes mature.

As the slime grows, it becomes capable of engulfing items for food. These digestive properties of the chiton may cause damage on contact with the slime. When it is roughly 8x the weight of a new calf slime, it can reproduce by fission. This often happens when the slime is damaged - the slime divides along a defect in the capsule, healing the defect and producing up to four daughter slimes.

A mature slime is quite large, slow-moving, and heavy. It has a relatively low moisture content compared to the youngest slimes. To compensate, it produces more concentrated digestive enzymes and acids which are toxic to nearby lifeforms. As a slime ages, its elasmosome loses elasticity and tends to calcify. This can result in large, old slimes getting trapped in corridors or narrow spots and suffocating.


Slimes have a remarkable elasticity. This image shows the range of slime compressibility in normal locomotion. Slimes may fit through doors and in stairwells that appear to be much too small.

Slime Ecology


A matriarch slime protecting a daughter.

Slimes are found in herds throughout the world, always in geothermally favourable chunks. Although slimes do not exhibit nesting behavior or any other advanced social system, they do have a primitive herd behavior wherein the larger slimes may protect the smaller ones. Small slimes in a herd may collectively push invaders away from resources or off precipices. Slime intelligence is otherwise rather low.

Slimes - unicellular or multicellular?


Are these slimes identical, or fraternal, twins?

Scientists are not sure how to classify slimes. So far no one element of slime anatomy or microanatomy definitely places them in either class. The slime has features of both:

Features in favor of unicellular organism

• Body plan consistent across all slime populations and ages/sizes
• Asexual reproduction is the norm and produces slimes of roughly equal sizes
• Never reconstitute into a single large slime after dividing into four smaller slimes

Features in favor of multicellular organism

• Sexual reproduction possible
• Discrete and differentiated regions of the slime, i.e. organs and tissues
• Appear multi-layered, similar to other algal colonies or syncytia
• Cannot be divided without killing the original slime

Perhaps the strongest evidence for slimes being multicellular is the macula, which doesn't appear to have a direct physical communication to any other part of the slime, but activates locomotion and storage of trace metals in other parts of the slime.

Slimes and the Future


Slimes in a slime game park enjoying a brief moment in full sun.

Slimes have been transformed by popular culture over the past 5 expansions. The slime is a strong symbolic figure in the human psyche as a rare, elusive, dangerous, alien, even droll and endearing creature. Modern technology relies heavily on slimeballs as a commercial product, from slimes grown in artificial labs in great numbers under ideal conditions. One disturbing development is the breeding of slimes for populating slime parks and safaris. Slimes are bred and brought to the surface and exposed to sunlight. This causes them to take on an intense green color and become agitated. They are then released into well-tended parkland and hunted from the air or the roadside. Some parks let hunters use packs of hunting dogs. This last is exceedingly cruel for both the slimes and the dogs.


Hunting slimes with dogs is illegal in several countries.

Slime petting zoos are common children's roadside attractions in mining towns. Because the smallest slimes are innocuous, they can be held and petted. Sadly, they are force spawned by slimepunching, wherein adult slimes are placed in a machine and pummeled with pistons or even a handler's gloved hands. The slimes accumulate damage and eventually split off daughter slimes. Once tourist season is over, the baby slimes are frequently drowned or dropped off a ledge. The resulting slimeballs are then sold to elastics firms.

The Slime Protection Agency was founded in 2010 to protect slimes from exploitation and promote humane industrial and commercial slimeball harvesting.

Since then Dupont has developed the first artificial elastic material for making sticky pistons. Slimes remain a curiosity and are still subject to abuses as pets and trophy game mobs.

Addendum: Slime Genetics

Although the slime has a gonad, sexual reproduction has never been directly observed. The main supporting evidence for sexual reproduction is genetic:

Multiple studies of slimes from widely separated chunks show that certain adaptive traits are inherited in Mendelian fashion.

Slimes tagged with dyes or radiotracers produce a mixture of tagged, subthreshold-tagged, and untagged offspring.

A single large slime heterozygous for the spontaneous despawning syndrome allele does not in fact generate two groups of homozygous offspring, but rather after a few ticks some heterozygous daughter slimes are found, suggesting inbreeding by sexual reproduction.

If slimes sexually reproduce, it is not know what happens to the gametes or the zygote. The gonad as was stated before, appears acellular. Furthermore, daughter slimes have a very characteristic and uniform size. Lastly, there does not appear to be any gestational sac or organ in the slime or deposited anywhere outside the slime. Yogscast et al. dismantled the Persson theory of slimes laying eggs in lava. Slimes deprived of lava for over 3 minecraft days still produced heterozygotes for yellow inclusions; and lava from 11 different slime colonies was congealed, pulverized, dissolved, and subjected to Western blot for slime tubulin, a heat stable slime protein. No sample was found positive for any slime proteins.

It's thought that slimes may exchange plasmids on contact, so that recombination can occur without sexual reproduction. However, no plasmid has been identified in slimes.

The sex life of slimes remains a mystery.

More slime facts and trivia

The diet of slimes is highly varied and depends on the underlying terrain. Slimes prefer diets rich in protein and will corner and engulf miners and dogs. They devastate wheat farms haplessly grown in slime chunks by dropping on them from above. Captured slimes containing embedded swords, pickaxes, armor, buckets, and leather boots in various states of digestion are not uncommon. Unlike the gelatinous cube, however, corpses are not persistent inside the slime and are usually digested and absorbed very quickly.

Slimes are some of the longest-lived mobs known to science. The slime has no natural predators and survives many natural disasters and environmental extremes. It lives in a forbidding niche habitat hostile to other underground denizens and is omnivorous. Therefore it is common to find slimes that are as old as Beta and not unheard of to find slimes that were born sometime during Alpha. The oldest known slime is a great calcified behemoth known as "116" or "Gus" who was born on Seecret Friday in a singleplayer save in a student library hard drive at Stanford University. Gus'
world has been updated to Beta 1.7.3, and Gus spent a brief time invisible on login during Beta 1.4. A quick peek in MCEdit confirmed that Gus was still present as an entity and soon revealed himself again.

Venerable ancient slimes like Gus are rare, however. Aging-related diseases of slimes include calcification of the elasmosome, mineral deficiencies, suffocation due to wedging, red tide (algal colony death syndrome), macular degeneration, and malabsorption. But most slimes do not die of these chronic ailments, rather they actually die of accidents, falls, drownings, suffocations, and opportunistic predation by spelunkers.

Slime tissue is highly sought after for cancer research because slimes do not despawn when left unattended. In the past, researchers described strains of immortal slimes known as "Clientside slimes" after their discoverer, H. P. Clientside. The Clientside slime is now confirmed to be extinct. (See Clientside Pig and Clientside Leaf Decay for more descriptions of Dr. Clientside's work with longevity genes and tumor suppression.)

Slimes appear periodically in history as important figures in the background of human affairs. At least one major fantasy monster was designed based on slimes, and they appear in popular books, magazines, websites, and popular indie games. Before slimes became a household image, they were a common subject of miners' folktales. Historically slimes were also important in traditional Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, as people coveted their longevity. Sadly, slime tissues and secretions have a very disagreeable and acrid taste. Some slime extracts contain enough heavy trace metals to slowly poison the patient. That said, some surgical device companies are testing slimeballs as a tissue adhesive for wound repair. And the unique longevity of slimes is of immediate and significant interest to cancer research (see above).

In the middle ages the slime was both revered and reviled as a symbol of eternity and as a denizen of Hell. In truth, slimes are not found in Hell but instead are limited to the mundane world. As a symbol of eternity, stability, and loyalty, slimes and slimeballs appeared in various heraldic coats of arms. The bloque vert of the Contessa Mucosa is the most famous example. The symbol persists in the modern era as the logo for the tax prep company H&R Block.

In 1941 the founding president of H&R Block, Redston Block, removed the maculae from the logo to increase its appeal in mining and construction communities.

[Norondor]

holy shit

[Mongrel]

That's what I said!

[Beat Bandit]

Brentai is etc. etc.

[Beat Bandit]

Silly idea? Or WORST idea?

[Norondor]

what would you even do at a minecraft con

[Norondor]

hey guys huge fan of minecraft here one time i played minecraft and it was cool true story

[Beat Bandit]

Also apparently the official minecraft launch will be happening there. SO HOW 'BOUT THAT ADVENTURE PACK?

[Ziiro]

what would you even do at a minecraft con

it's an excuse for notch to take another vacation.

I figure it's going to be terrible. It's going to be a bunch of people walking around with printed out pictures of their superstructures/carrying around USB sticks with their worlds of them saying LOOK WHAT I MADE all while notch is surrounded by people shouting ideas at him.

so like reddit.com/r/minecraft, but in person.

the only real question of course is if it will devolve into an actual circlejerk.

[A²]

"This place is so awesome I came bricks."

[Brentai]

The real question is what percentage of attendees will cosplay as a creeper.

[Zaratustra]

you know what would be awesome
if each congoer had to bring a block of some material