Now that the first challenge has been finished for a while, I thought I might document the do's and don'ts of the Underwater Mineshaft Challenge.
DO make sure that you watch where you put down your tracks. We had our track going in one giant loop multiple times.
DON'T forget to communicate with your fellow team members.
DO use the natural resources in the mine. The wood is essential for getting stone and to pick up incorrectly placed tracks with a pickaxe.
DON'T take valuable resources like iron into any operations involving lava, as once they're in the lava, they're gone.
If your team is having problems with the challenge, try giving tips. Act like a coach to the students.
Also, regarding updates, updates are going to be the biggest problem. With our challenge, we had 3 updates, each of them postponing the challenge by two weeks. This made it so we didn't have our "Challenge Week", or the period in which we supposed to compete officially, until the second week of December. The challenge was planned to end in October! Tip for future challenge makers, if you have a challenge coming up, and there is an update on the horizon, decide how long you think the server will require to get it running back at full throttle, and postpone the challenge for at least that long. And If it's something like the Secret Friday update, quickly save face and postpone the challenge until the necessary plug-ins for the new update are working.
DO make sure that you watch where you put down your tracks. We had our track going in one giant loop multiple times.
DON'T forget to communicate with your fellow team members.
DO use the natural resources in the mine. The wood is essential for getting stone and to pick up incorrectly placed tracks with a pickaxe.
DON'T take valuable resources like iron into any operations involving lava, as once they're in the lava, they're gone.
If your team is having problems with the challenge, try giving tips. Act like a coach to the students.
Also, regarding updates, updates are going to be the biggest problem. With our challenge, we had 3 updates, each of them postponing the challenge by two weeks. This made it so we didn't have our "Challenge Week", or the period in which we supposed to compete officially, until the second week of December. The challenge was planned to end in October! Tip for future challenge makers, if you have a challenge coming up, and there is an update on the horizon, decide how long you think the server will require to get it running back at full throttle, and postpone the challenge for at least that long. And If it's something like the Secret Friday update, quickly save face and postpone the challenge until the necessary plug-ins for the new update are working.