Contest: Find the Ultimate Unicorns!

Are you a master breeder? Can you discover one of the mutant Ultimate Unicorn breeds?

If you can, and can prove it, I'll give you not one, but two FREE decked-out custom unicorns! (As seen, here.) And by decked out, I mean you get to name it, choose the color scheme, get two new magic powers, and get a special winner title "the Highbred" (or one from the list if you prefer).

Give your extra to a friend or use it yourself, it's up to you!

How to Win

Take a screenshot when you discover one of the 5 secret breeds (One breed is not technically an Ultimate Unicorn, but it's a mutant, so I'll award a prize for it). Then, post your screenshot in a comment on the Minecraft Forum, by following this this link.

I will award the prize to each person who is the first to post a picture of a given breed. Also, you can only win once. There will be five different winners. I will congratulate each winner after he or she posts a winning picture, and announce the 5 winners at the end of the contest.

If I feel someone is not following the spirit of the contest (i.e. cheating), I may ask a question to verify if you actually found the Ultimate Unicorn breed using proper horse mating technique. Believe me, there are ways for me to verify if you've cut corners.

Good luck and have fun!

The Unicorn Battle Royale

I needed to fix my mod (Wings, Horns, and Hooves, the Ultimate Unicorn Mod) to work on the Forge Standalone Server. I worked all that out last night, and to test it, I started up a Forge Server and jumped on to play with my son. What happened next was pretty awesome.

Battle Royale

We needed to test out the different magical horse abilities, as well as the magical items that I introduced into the game. The most important things to test included flying, wing buffet attacks, horn charge attacks, and the two wands. In particular, I wanted to test the Wand of Call Lightning, because I'd had to make some non-trivial changes to how it worked.

It wasn't long until we were shooting each other with magic wands, and blowing up horses that happened to be in the blast zone.

Getting hit with my fifth fireball, I decided to take to the air. I hastily equipped my newly-bred alicorn (pegasus with a unicorn horn) with a Diamond Slotted Horse Helm and a Wand of Call Lightning, jumped on, and flew into the sky.

He did the same, and soon we were dogfighting, whirling through the air and calling lightning down in vicious forks.

Flying in from above, I targeted him and called down a mighty lightning bolt on his head. Unfortunately for me, I crossed overhead a half-second later and was struck by the same bolt!

Wheeling, I got him in my sights again, and made the first airborn kill. I watched as his horse flopped lifelessly in the air, dropping him.

But we were in Creative Mode, so he didn't die ... and was soon back in the air, calling lightning down on my head.

It didn't take long until we ran out of mounts. Poor dead horses, you served us well. *sniff*

But this was no time to cease the battle! And that's when I got creative.

Cheat Codes

Using my calculator and my knowledge of my mod, I devised some cheat codes. I wasn't sure they would work, but I tried one out, and it did! Before long, my son and I had spawned 20 to 30 new zebra-skinned flying unicorns, and the battle was back on!

Eventually, the battle wound down and we had to turn in for the night. However, I thought that I should advertise the cheat codes. I've started posting them on their own page, but decided to leave discovering how to make the cheat codes work be an exercise for the player for now. Don't worry. I plan to explain it all in the near future.

Player-Versus-Player (PVP)

Our battle solidified an idea I'd had while creating my mod. Halfway through development of version 1.0, I'd thought, "Hey, this would probably be great for PVP minigames." Having played out our battle royale, it reinforces to me just how fun the mod is when playing in a PVP fashion.

I'm going ahead with future development with this in mind. Expect cool stuff to fight your friends with (and maybe play other cool minigames).

Edit: I realize our battle wasn't technically a "Battle Royale" - you need 3+ contestants for that. Just consider all the dead horses as contestants that didn't win.

Wings, Horns, and Hooves, the Ultimate Unicorn Mod (for Minecraft)

My latest project has been to create a Minecraft mod using the handy Minecraft Forge mod toolkit and loader. I sort of started with a scattershot approach, making items, some new block types, and a new dimension.

Then my kid said, "Hey Dad, can you make a Unicorn mod?"

And I said, "You bet I can."

After going for a few weeks, I thought to myself, "Erg, I should check to see if there are unicorn mods out there already." Sure enough, there were.

So I differentiated mine.

Two months later, I have released my mod, and I admit to being proud of it. It's called Wings, Horns, and Hooves, the Ultimate Unicorn Mod and you can get it at CurseForge.

The mod features four new magical horse types (Unicorn, Pegasus, Nightmare, and Destrier) and a bunch of new specialized equipment for them. They have their own behaviors, they can interbreed, and there are a bunch of secrets you can discover. The secrets include one secret magic item, five secret special horse types you can find through the breeding process, and an easter egg or two. Over the next few weeks I'll document all of these secrets, but until then I'll leave them for others to find!

Oh yeah, there is also a cool magical horse customization option.

I haven't quite finished the documentation part of the project, but I'm getting there. You can find out a lot more at the following links:

Overview
Magic Items
Crafting Recipes
Breeding Guide
Cheats
Make your Own custom Horse
Custom Horse Hall of Fame