Ah the BFC is nearly complete. All that is missing is some minor aesthetically touches, such as another row of marble and some clay patches. Due to school starting up again and the fact that the BFC is nearly done, server activity seems to have gone down a bit as well as logging into the server has proved difficult this week, therefore this week feels a bit more like a pause in the flow of development and research.  I make it a point to log in at least every other day to see any progress and make the necessary additions. After many trial and error situations, including lava escaping the cooker and burning a bit of the BFC (scary), the chicken cooker is finally operational. Already I’m noticing possibilities come into play that I previously suggested. At first the BFC was cooking unbearably slow, I think we got around 4 cooked chickens in 4 hours give or take. I’m not sure if there was server lag or there was something wrong but after coming back the next day we had jumped to 64 and last I checked we had around 140. At this rate our little barrels of cooked chickens and feathers will eventually fill up. This begs the question I brought up before, who will be eating all these chickens? Before long the BFC will be making too much chicken and we’ll have to shut the lava cooker off to prevent overflowing.

The idea of making a copy for the vanilla server sounds like a good idea though as the online population once a class re-inhabits makes more sense as they’ll have a steady stream of resources given to them, allowing more time to focus on their builds. Is this a bit more “holding hand” for the experience. Sure, a bit. But that’s part of Minecraft, having something there as an optional resource No one is making anyone use the BFC but for those who do want to use it may do so. It’d also be interesting to establish a few of them on the BFC for future classes, to create that industry chain we’ve talked about. For example, one near TAG and another way off near the swamp and treehouse. All of a sudden, the distribution of wealth has a wide reaching influence and drastically changes the perimeters of the experience. It’ll be interesting if possible to observe a class of builders operating with a few BFC’s around, would they all build near it or would they find a way to monopolize the food source? At least this time it won’t half burn down. On a side note, I find this whole situation rather ironic in a dark way when I think about the BFC in relation to the real world. Here we are in this Lego styled survival game making excess food while there are places in the real world that are extremely short on food. True that we can manufacture food like Gods by throwing eggs at the ground but the concept of food and wealth is certainly present.

Having free prepared food ready for the players changes the conditions for any player in the Minecraft world. No longer would players have to stop what they are doing after realize all their food rations are empty resulting in the player hunting or heading back to their farm/base for more food. Now, the option of having scattered resources, constantly cooking is close to becoming a reality. The player can now devote more time to building as oppose to worrying about their own well being. I remember playing Minecraft singleplayer to learn the fundamentals before I opted for multiplayer and did not realize all the rules regarding food and animals, mainly how animals didn’t respawn. Made life harder when I had killed all the livestock around my base and in that experience I wasted a lot of time worrying about my hunger bar as well as what to do about the lack of animals. Now with the BFC, the safety net is established and the naturally living food supplies can server different purposes aside from food, such as exclusively leather and wool. The rules and perimeters change when something like this is made available to the player.