User blog:Scooter8pie/Transparency Bug

Mooncraft has an odd little rendering bug. Occasionally something will happen that causes blocks not to render. The blocks are still there, the surfaces are just transparent. In a comment I made, on the blue crystal page, I wrote about how to force the transparency bug to occur and how to exploit it to locate and collect blue crystals underground.

Another variation of the bug will occur “naturally.” I have no idea how to predict when it will happen, but sometimes when I’m mining I’ll run into a block that I can see through. I’ve found that if I don’t drill through the transparent block, but instead go up against it, turn 90 degrees in any direction and mine parallel to the transparent face I will soon have a wall of transparent blocks on one side. Once, I ran into a second transparent block, so I had windows on two sides. A corner office in my little mine, with black blobs of blue crystal as far as the eye could see. The moon’s innards are best viewed by day and chronoboost helps fast forward through the long lunar nights.

Sadly, as soon as I broke one of those see-through blocks the shutters slammed shut on the rest of the window as the blocks once again began to render properly. But, new clear blocks could be exposed simply by mining along the same plane as the old window. Try it out, it’s kind of cool in a nerdy kind of way.

I’m not sure why I find the transparency bug so fascinating, I’m pretty sure no one else does. Maybe it’s because I feel like I’m seeing something I wasn’t meant to see. Maybe it’s because I’m sure they’ll fix it in a future update and I won’t be able to see through the moon anymore. Maybe it is because it let me see that The Chaser (brown mob) has four little black “feet” on its underbelly. In any case I would like to hear what other Mooncrafters have learned about the bug; like whether its occurrence can be predicted or if it can be used to accomplish anything.