Editor's Note by Soarz

We are officially halfway through December, and boy has it flown by! It felt like two weeks ago we just did this, oh wait we did. That's OK though because we have all new information for you and more progress on our usual builds. Not even the cold can slow us down from having fun on MCME as we have our winter events coming up, and this time around we will not be visiting Bree but SNOWY BREE!! Bet you didn't see that coming. Anyways, don't let me keep you! Please enjoy this weeks edition and watch out for the mistletoe out there.




Anorien - Lead: @Oberanio | In Progress
Report by Soarz

The cold weather has taken full effect as the project is on hold till 1.13. Don't worry though, that change is right around the corner!





Misty Mountains – Lead:@Finrod_Amandil | In Progress
Report by Soarz

Unfortunately there is not much progress going on in the beloved Mountains. They still look amazing though, and looking at the Glaciers is a great way to pass the time.


Featuring Jonatanknalle

Lond Daer – Lead: @Ivan1pl | In Progress
Report by Soarz

Like many of our other projects, this one is sadly also on hold and is waiting for the 1.13 update. For now we are sticking to planning and Ivan is making that happen. With that there is also discussion about building style and seeing if we can use a better one. Check it out here Lond Daer Style





Moria: Fellowship's path – Lead: @DoctorDaom | In progress
Report by Soarz

After the discussion from a few weeks ago work is being done to move forward directly through Moria. Outside of this many other small projects are being ran to move things forward here.




Osgiliath – Lead: @ooitsbirdo | In progress
Report by Foolhardyfish

For these past few weeks, Osgiliath hasn't really been at the forefront of my mind (I know, shocking), but both Bart and Ooits have certainly been hard at work. Ooits has, slowly but surely, begun laying out the planning within the main camp, a new structure appearing every time I log in. Bart, on the other hand, continues to work upon the Dome of Stars and, with the excellent help provided by Xmine, fix structural issues in several of the larger buildings within Section 4.




Report by Toti

Due to a pretty ugly cold I fell victim to the past week there has been a considerable decrease in the amount of progress I made since the last times. However there are a couple of pretty important developments I can talk about.

Leaves:
Continuing work from the prior weeks I have managed to put forward a proposal for an improved version of our current leaves to the Team members. This has been discussed for the past week and if I were to summarize the response I would say it is rather in favour of these changes. Here is a Imgur gallery with screenshots of the work I have done this far. This is of course very much a work in progress and there are more improvements to be made (like texture and model variants). The Team also brought up the issue of potential performance decrease that would come with a larger amount of faces being rendered by their computers. While I’m led to believe that this will not influence the greater majority too much I can also assure everyone that is concerned that we will be providing different versions of our packs like “MCME lite” which should make it possible for just about any machine to join the server.

Grass:
One seemingly quick update I wanted to tackle for the past 3 or so days were the different types of grass our RPs are supposed to contain. Right now we have 3 types: dry grass mix (dead_bush), tall grass (grass) and the tall_grass block that is currently being used with its vanilla texture. While I touched up the dead_bush textures months ago turning them to 32p in order to keep our vegetation textures consistent the other two textures were a bigger struggle. I started by trying to implement a proper tall grass texture @Fireinferno did a couple of months ago. This wasn’t as easy as expected however and took me several days of tweaking and revising to get to a satisfying state:







Disclaimer: the grass in the picture only uses 2 texture variants which may result in repetition in some areas. This issue will ideally not be present in the final RP tho. (2-3 more variations should do the job)
Right now I’m tackling the currently referred to as “tall grass” block which in reality is the normal 1 block tall grass. This also turned out to be a bigger challenge than expected as its widely used on the map but the current texture is rather rudimentary. More updates on that in the future.

The biggest holdup right now are the variations as you might be able to tell. I think I wouldn’t be the only one to argue that our vegetation textures and vegetation textures in general would benefit from as many variations as possible. I gave up on trying to make all texture variations needed for every new texture I want to add myself as those turn out to take a ridiculous amount of time. If anyone in the community has some experience with texturing or a basic understanding of Photoshop/GIMP I would be more than happy to give some of that work out in order to get the Vegetation Update over with quickly and move on to more important textures and models for Mordor and beyond.

Report by Eriol

Update MCME to mc 1.13 1.14

So I spend quite some time in converting plotworld to 1.13 and it worked pretty well.
But the latest FAWE snapshots are not working at all and the FAWE developers saying they will probably not fix that any time soon, their priorities are already at 1.14. So after some frustrating attempts I just started the server in 1.14 and, wow, almost everything worked fine! Just FAWE is still not reliable, during testing copy/paste some chunks randomly vanished. So I guess we better wait a bit with updating until there is a stable FAWE version.




Become a Donor
Sadly the world is not free and with that MCME isn't either, every month we have to pay $235 to keep up all our work. Donations help us keep doing what we love and providing you with amazing builds to look at. Donations are not required but greatly accepted, if you want to help us in our feat of rebuilding Middle Earth in Minecraft you can donate here.

Viewing Donation Drive: Community Costs

Our Donors

• 133mc
• Dahlfc2

Thank you very much for your contribution to making MCME possible.
#MCMEdoesnotrunitself

#NEWS

Winter Events:
Yup, you read this right! It's the snowy version this time around. Furthermore there are many new events hitting the table that everyone can take a stab at. For more information check out the post by @Raffyyy where he goes in-depth with better explanations then i could ever think to do.



Snowy Bree:
Many people took part in the building of Snowy Bree and i would like to give a big shout out to Raffyyy who has been the front runner for this build.

(http://imgur.com/a/8xCtlLu)

Sorry for the bad graphics i don't have good shaders
by: Soarz


Bilbo's favorite bath-song
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day
that washes the weary mud away!
A loon is he that will not sing:
O! Water Hot is a noble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain,
and the brook that leaps from hill to plain;
but better than rain or rippling streams
is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need
down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed;
but better is Beer, if drink we lack,
and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high
in a fountain white beneath the sky;
but never did fountain sound so sweet
as splashing Hot Water with my feet!


by: Eriol_Eandur



Report by Didi45


Sam_Of_Seagull
Congrats to Mr. Seagull on his promotion to Guide! After a great tour it was quite clear that Sam would be a great fit for the Guide Crew… Make sure to wish him good luck in his new job! Make us proud Sam! Do tours, games, quizzes and “Keep making MCME great.”
Promotion



Regular Interview
Interview with @TyGl20

Question 1. How did you find MCME?
I found MCME through inspiration when I was building Hobbiton back on my XBOX. I was blown away and kept looking through the builds and in early 2019 I bought Java Edition and the first thing I did was get on the server. I don’t think I’ve played over 10 hours on normal Minecraft because I’m on MCME so much.

Question 2. What is the most impressive MCME build in your opinion?
Obviously Moria. While its not even close to being finished, the detail and size of the lost Dwarven kingdom is crazt. I haven’t even explored it all and I don’t think I ever will. I’ve helped build some of Moria and it's been really fun to see where it's going to go.

Question 3. What’s your favorite place on MCME?
I really like Gondor because it feels so real. The trees in Ithilien are fantastic and Osgiliath is stunningly realistic. Either that or Moria.

Question 4. Who did you first interact with as an Adventurer?
I’m not too sure. I don’t know who greeted me when I first joined (It might have been Darki, but I highly doubt he can do that!). My real guess would be Squid who quickly invited me into the MCME family.

Question 5. How were your first few days on MCME?
My first few days I was going back and forth between theme builds (I know right?), DA sewers, and exploring. Other than that I don’t remember too much, I do remember the first thing I saw in the chat was that Arkengarde resigned.

Question 6. What is the funniest thing that's happened to you while on MCME?
Uhh…. I don’t know if I can say exactly what happened so I’ll summarize: Hanging out with Ober, Dav3ck, and Ooitsbirdo. I’m sure you can understand what I mean.

Interviewer: wazowskithewhite





This week we have another round of amazing builds and Media posts. We only choose from the best every time, so hard work does pay off. Sometimes it can get competitive and that is what will win a place here. Please give a warm welcome to this Times, winners of this week.

MEDIA Winners:

This weeks Media winner goes to Xmine01 who made an amazing shot of the Gondorian forest, It has an incredible view of golden rays that pierced the eastern skyline. Unlike many photos we have had this one is the embodiment of pure happiness and joy. It's nothing less then a piece of art capturing what MCME is meant to look like.

(http://imgur.com/a/jkTQPzO)



”Of Cats & Dogs”:
The name can be misleading so let’s first make it clearer. The known “Dogs” which the term refers to is not something that Tolkien talks about much. Therefore we will be focusing on “Hounds” which take a role during the First Age.

Firstly, you may be asking yourself, “Wait, Tolkien doesn't mention cats anywhere, there are no cats in Middle Earth! Does Tolkien dislike cats?!”
Well that statement is partially true. I was wondering the same thing myself and I decided to do some digging and found an answer. However, before we find out why Tolkien disliked cats, I will ease your mind from the first statement.
In Tolkien’s works, dogs are portrayed in a positive way, while cats are portrayed in a dark and evil way.

Anyone who has read The Silmarillion knows of “Huan - The Hound of Valinor”, for those who do not know who Huan is, here is a summary of who he is.
Huan was one of the hunting dogs of Oromë the Hunter. In the Silmarillion it is said that Huan was given special powers by the Valar, he was (Approximately) the size of an adult male, tireless, sleepless and immortal. In the published version of the Silmarillion it is said that Huan was able to speak only 3 times during his lifetime. In a prophecy, it says that Huan would be killed only by the greatest wolf that ever lived (Which in our case was a werewolf) Huan who was of course from Valinor was given by Oromë to Celegorm (One of the sons of Fëanor) who followed Oromë and assisted him with hunting in Valinor. When the Noldor left Valinor, Huan went with his master (Celegorm) to Middle-Earth.

In the published version of the Silmarillion, Huan only spoke three times and he fought Sauron and later Carcharoth.
However, in the Lay of Leithian (The Tale of Tinúviel) the story is quite different. Huan was able to talk more than three times, and there were cats involved.
In the Lay of Leithian, it is told that Beren was taken to “Tevildo” - The Prince of cats.
Tevildo was Melkor’s right hand man (As you will call it) and he was a large (The size of Huan) black cat with a golden collar. In this Tale, Huan fights Tevildo and later Karkaras (Later his named was changed to Carcharoth)
Huan beat Tevildo after fighting him and slaying two other cats. And Tinúviel forced Tevildo to give them the spell which unbinded all the cats to the power of Melkor. When Tevildo’s collar was removed, all the cats shrunk.

Tevildo later became Sauron in Tolkien’s work.

In the Lay of Leithian the theme of “Cats VS. Dogs” was very noticeable, but the cats were not seen much after the tale was scrapped and replaced with the version of the story we know today.

Cats played a role in another tale of Tolkien, “the story of Beruthiel”. Beruthiel was the queen of Gondor and she kept ten cats, one white cat and nine black cats. Beruthiel used cats to spy on those who she suspected and she used the white cat to spy on the other cats. It is said that she could talk to cats and read their minds.

Now the question is pretty much speaks for itself, what happened to cats? Why does Tolkien depict cats in a negative way? And why did he not use them much?

I did some searching on that matter and found some interesting things, in a word, Tolkien disliked cats.
Probably the best example of Tolkien's dislike for cats was in a letter written to Allen & Unwin in reply to a cat breeder who wanted to use names from The Lord of the Rings for her felines. Tolkien said, "I fear that to me Siamese cats belong to the fauna of Mordor, but you need not tell the cat breeder that." (Letters no. 219)

Therefore we can understand why In many of his stories dogs play an important part and, while not perfect, are almost universally "good". Cats, on the other hand, are associated with the opposite (evil, torment, fear, deceit, etc.).
Tolkien’s feelings toward cats are not rare, cats are usually depicted in negative ways - for example, the black cat in many cultures signifies bad luck.








This Week's Question:
What gem was placed in the Nauglamír that was so precious?

Spoiler: Last Week's Question

Question: {Question}
Who is Girion?

Correct Answer: {Answer}
The last Lord of Dale

Congratulations to @Thr33way for successfully answering this week's question first

Presented by: Arothir Alamáreo





You know us, we love sharing our progress and Twitter is the perfect place. Give us a good follow and always have something to look forward to on your daily scroll. Just to spice it up, comment your favorite parts of our builds at
MinecraftMiddleEarth (@MCMiddleEarth) | Twitter . You won't be disappointed!

Sometimes you just want to enjoy some quality pictures, we got you covered. Head on over to our Facebook account, try following us there too Minecraft Middle-Earth

But of course, the most important and obviously most used social network is of course Planet Minecraft! Be sure to give us a diamond there. It costs nothing! Minecraft Middle Earth Minecraft Server



Artist
Ahh yes. We all know the question. “How can I build?", As well as the responses “You can try a theme build” and “You can take part in jobs." The other answer is “Apply for Artist”, and the last option is by far the most exciting. Being able to build in your favourite places all the time. Sounds awesome. We can never have enough Artists, and with a wide range of current projects, there’s plenty for you to do!
Are you inspired to join MCME’s main build rank? You can apply for Artist/ today on the forums! The Managers, Designers and current Artists will work with you and help you on your journey.

Guide
Or perhaps, you’re not a builder. Well. That’s not a problem! Becoming A guide is obviously the better option anyway. As a Guide, you’re the forefront of MCME, and there’s no greater feeling than when someone says your tour was awesome. You don’t actually have to be a lore nerd either, you’ll pick up on lots really quickly.
When you join the Guides, you’ll be giving tours, running minigames and testing players in lore quizzes, or if you prefer less “on the spot” stuff, Guidebooks are obviously your zen, or helping to tell MCME about MCME by writing up articles in the times. You’ll also plan help plan events such as The Summer Events and The Anniversary Events. We hope you join us soon, because us Guides really would love some more of us. What’re you waiting for?
Just click Guide and apply today!