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I fire up MCEdit and am greeted with a pretty self explanatory menu. It has options for opening either world 1-5 of my Alpha worlds, creating a new world, or opening a world in another directory. It also has a brief overview of the keyboard shorcuts that are necessary for performing the basic functions of the editor. I slap N with vigor to fire up a new world and am greeted with a nice giant layer of bedrock, cool. I start randomly trying to move around the game world and start trying to use the various cryptic options on the bottom of the screen. Seriously look at the following screenshot and try to figure out what any of the options actually do.

What the? I don't even.

After a bit of tinkering and frantically clicking around trying to figure out what anything does I decide it's time to go back to the Minecraft forum and decrypt all those options at the bottom of the screen. The most useful option would be the selection tool. This allows you to select areas of blocks to work with and perform various operations with them. For example you can select a structure, clone it, manipulate it, and move it to another location. I said in my previous post that I was worried that MCEdit would not end up being useful since it could only manipulate entities in the game world and not create new ones. Fortunately this means you can modify air blocks and fill them with the block of your choosing. This allows you to create any rectangular structure of pretty much any size. I'm starting to see that MCEdit is going to be able to handle all of my needs for creating my overworld so I get started on my first attempt at creating a flat ground slate to work from.

Using the Legend of Zelda map as a reference I see that the ground looks pretty similar to sand in Minecraft. Easy enough; I'll simply create a large slate of sand at around ground level to work from. I create a block of sand about 200 units wide, 100 units long, and 4 layers deep. I start working on some overworld features to get a hang of MCEdit a little more and after a while I started to get the hang of things. The most useful tool is probably the Nudge tool since it allows you to manually move the selection blocks around the game world instead of trying to position them correctly with your mouse. Mouse selection is somewhat wonky and the ability to move the selection areas manually is an invaluable tool. After I have a little bit of the game world mapped out I fire up Minecraft and am eager to see how my new creation looks in game.

Hmmm... my client seems to be running incredibly slow. I'm getting around 1-5fps when I'm usually at a steady 100. I'm thinking that maybe some flaw in my design has caused the game to suffer a severe performance hit or maybe the map editor is a memory hog and it's causing a slowdown. I quickly shut down Minecraft and close the editor and my other open programs and try again. Still seeing the same performance issues, but I decide to let the game run. Maybe it's doing some world generation or performing some operations on my new world chunks I've created. Soon I realize what has happened. I see the ground collapsing right before my very eyes. I forget a pretty simple concept in Minecraft; sand falls if there is only air beneath it. My new giant sand slate had started to completely collapse as soon as the world loaded. I load the map into MCEdit and see that all I had created was gone. Lesson learned; build on stone.