Completion of the Evil Church

Newly-Built Rubber Tree Farm

I'm not sure exactly what sparked it, but I've returned to the world of Minecraft temporarily. I took a good, long look at my world before I actually stepped back into it, and some of the things didn't entirely make sense.

For instance, I didn't much like the automated rubber farm. It just didn't feel like it was as efficient as it seemed like it should be. I decided to take down the tree farm and rebuild it as a large rubber tree farm, which I'll tend to by hand from now on. The tree farm I'll save until I rebuild the sunken village way over by the double-volcano.

Completed Dark Catacombs

When building it, however, I ran out of glowstone. That brought me back to another project I had left unfinished - the desert village's nether portal. As shown in previous updates, underneath the village church was a set of marble-brick catacombs. In the back of this, a particular casket was fake, hiding a passageway to an evil, upside-down version. Spending most of a day, I measured out, carved away and built the dark catacombs, complete with smooth basalt caskets hanging from the ceiling.

The Evil Church is Complete

Of course, below the dark catacombs was where the nether portal would finally have its true home, in an upside-down version of the church itself. The pews are made of partial-block soul sand, as the crosses are similarly made of netherrack. Set beteween them on the ceiling is a golden throne, a sort of egotistical center to the room that opposed a normal church's idea of the building being a center to itself. A nether brick walkway leads you to the nether portal itself, while the windows pour molten lava down the pitch of the roof.

I'm really proud of how nice it looks. I may only see it when I take my rare visits to the nether, but it still feels like an accomplishment. An idea I had long ago that's finally finished, something I can look at and know I built without creative powers or map editors.

The next project is to build a "case" of reinforced stone around the nether side of that portal and set off a few nukes outside. That way I can hopefully open up the mountain that the portal is stuck in. It's still a "maybe" in my head, however. I've got a lot of other things to do around my world, but the dark church is finally done.

Arboreal Work and More Exploration

New Tree Farms

After building the automated rubber tree farm the other day, and with my quarry doing its thing, I found myself quickly running out of charcoal. In the past I would head off to the nearby tundra and chop down a bunch of trees to fix this. The problem with that was that the chunks containing those trees and replanted saplings weren't staying loaded, and thus when I would return, they'd all still be ungrown.

So I spent some time today to build a new tree farm. This one is set up to house up to five saplings of each of the three varieties of trees, from the tundra, temperate and.. whatever biome the white trees come from. So far I've made it look nice with wooden bordering and walkways, and the trees have been growing nicely on their own. What I'd like is to have grass growing beneath them.. and for that I've set up a "grass highway" from the nearest source all the way to the farm. I wish I had a pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment, but every time I tried to make one recently it came out Efficiency.

More Filled-Out Paper Map

Although I haven't yet picked up a new isometric map program to replace Cartograph_G (as the version I was using is now broken due to changes in map creation and storage), I can still get an idea of how the immediate area looks with a paper map. As you can see, I spent some time today exploring to get it filled out more. Sinkhole Mine is all the way to the right side of the map, and the volcano I found can be seen to the north-east corner.

Partially Flooded Village...

When I went south-east, however, I found something interesting. Another village, this time curiously flooded. There was a blacksmith's shop, and inside I found an iron helm, some bread and five obsidian. After investigating the new village a bit more, I turned to make another discovery. Behind it stood a huge, double-volcano whose side had been cut flat by the creation of the village itself.

...Adjacent to Active Volcanoes

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this village, if anything. It doesn't feel right to destroy it, but there wouldn't be much point in rebuilding it to the extent that I have my home village. Maybe I'll run a set of rails out to it and do just that once I've run out of things to do back home. As far as names go, I think I might call it Volcano Wall Village.

The quarry is still churning away and hasn't yet met bedrock. It's found me a few interesting things, such as a small chasm and a pool of lava that the water thankfully turned into obsidian. The pair of silver chests are almost full, though, and I don't yet have a good way to bring any of it back home. I'll have to cut in a set of rails between the home village and the quarry area, as I'm planning on making another eight or so quarry holes once the first is finished.

A Couple Fun Tech Upgrades

Desert Quarry

It's been a few days since my last update, but that's for good reason. I took another break from working on the church to do something I've been meaning to for quite a while: I made a quarry! Run by three steam engines (off-screen to limit quarry damage in the case of an explosion), it happily mines stuff up for me. With the four chunk-loader blocks on each corner, it even does its thing while I'm back at the village, a long distance away.

Quarry Aerial View

The waterfall in one corner is for good reason: when a quarry comes across lava, it stops digging that area. With water flowing down into the pit at all times, the lava will turn into obsidian and be mined away and brought up into the silver chests set above the machine itself. So far I've gotten a whole lot of cobblestone, some sand and dirt, and a few minerals. Right now the best part are the ruby, sapphire and emerald gems it's finding, as a combination of eight of those will turn into a single diamond on the transmutation table.
 

New Rubber Tree Farm

 I also did some work at figuring out some things from the Forestry mod. This mod lets you set up different automated farms that will grow things like wood, reeds, cactus, wheat, and for people using IndustrialCraft2, it lets you make rubber tree farms. I built everything necessary for one of those and cut down my old farm so I could place this one.

Rubber Tree Farm Underground

It's an interesting system, as it collects all the sticky resin, cuts down each tree and replants any saplings that fall. It's supposed to also collect the rubber tree logs so I can reduce them to rubber as well, but for some reason those never quite make it out of the logger. If I break the logger to check, most of the time a stack of logs will fall out of it.

The other bad news is that I'm out of charcoal. Natural coal is far too valuable to use in the steam engines as it can be saved for things like solar panels and diamonds. Charcoal is cheap and easily renewable. In the near future I'll build another Forestry-mod farm, this one for normal trees. I've got loads of tundra-biome saplings from my trips to cut wood there.

For some reason, the Forestry mod doesn't seem to like the TerrariaTrees mod I use. Any tree that automatically drops all of its logs when you cut the lowest one won't have its logs automatically collected by a logger. Also, no matter what kind of sapling you put into this version of Forestry's arboretum block will turn them into normal, alpha-Minecraft trees. Disappointing, but maybe things like that will help push me to try and update my mods.

To the Nether and Back

Nether Fortress Sighted!

After turning most of my solar tower's panels into three low-voltage solar arrays, and putting an MFSU storage device at the top, I decided to take a short break from technical stuff. My church was still unfinished both in the normal and the inverse versions.

I took another trip to the Nether and did some exploring. Digging in one direction nearly dropped me into the lava ocean, and I was just about to give up on the other when I broke into a field of soul sand and the surface. Exploring a bit, I found exactly what I was looking for: a Nether fortress. The reason for this is that, while the normal church's catacombs are made of marble brick blocks, I decided to make the inverse catacombs out of Nether bricks. I needed at least one Nether brick in order to make more with my transmutation tablet.

The Spoils of War

While I was there, though, I had to explore the fortress a little. Sadly, it seems to be made almost entirely out of the bridge I first saw, leading to a small set of rooms that had a Blaze spawner. I'm not a big fan of Blazes if only because of how tough they can be to fight with you don't have snowballs. I was able to kill enough to bring a single blaze rod back home with me, though, and added it to the chest filled with the rest of the mob drops I've collected since I started this world.

Construction on the Inverse Catacombs Begins

When I got back home, I turned a few stacks of sand into Nether bricks at a four-to-one ratio. Thankfully, the inverse church itself will be made out of basalt cobblestone, which is a fair bit less expensive to create. Interestingly enough, soul sand is worth 49 transmutation energy apiece!

I know it's a small update, but I had gone a few days without taking screenshots for the blog and I wanted to put something up. It can sometimes be tough to find things interesting enough to take screenshots of, but I'll do my best for the few of you who still read this.

Love, Thy Name is Transmutation Tablet

Church Catacombs - Mostly Finished

I spent a moment of lull at work today brainstorming about the church, the catacombs, and the hidden nether portal. Struck by a moment of inspiration, I have an amazing plan in the works to make the secret nether portal area even more grand.

Secret Passage - Closed

But for that, I knew I'd need a lot of basalt, and so I went to the volcano to collect some. Even with another volcano close-by, I was still struck by a feeling of remorse as I began to peel away layers of the dark stone. These were the first volcanoes I had ever seen in this world, and I was starting to ruin them.

Secret Passage - Opened

I sat a while and thought about an easy way to get material. My original plan was to make a quarry to collect cobblestone for me, but even that was prohibitively expensive at the moment. That's when I remembered the transmutation tablet.


The Transmutation Tablet is part of the Equivalent Exchange mod. This mod is all about alchemy, and a major facet of it is this very tablet. Things you put into it are "learned" by it. Each item you place also has an "EMC" value. For instance, mossy cobblestone has an EMC of 128, whereas sand has a value of 1. With this tablet you can easily turn any vanilla Minecraft item (and quite a few mod-based items) into other things, as long as you can meet the requirements.

Upgraded Machine Shop

While playing on Wickydoo's SMP server in the past, this mod had a way of allowing people to grief, either on purpose or by accident. And with the tablet, it removed most urge for people to go out and actually search for things. They'd just borrow one from a friend, pop it in so the tablet would learn it, and then create it their own way. Me and Cadloas had a massive read farm that allowed us to quickly meet the EMC requirement of anything we needed to make, even things as expensive as diamonds.

I came to the decision to use a transmutation tablet grudgingly. I don't want to ruin the game for myself, so instead I'm going to use it for one thing and one thing only: turning decorative blocks into other decorative blocks. I have a silver chest nearly full with stacks of sand, totaling almost four thousand. Now I can turn that sand into things like cobblestone and basalt cobblestone, which I can then use to finish work on the church.

In order to make the tablet, though, I needed glowstone. After reading a bit about how nether portals work on the Minecraft wiki, I learned that if a second portal is placed within roughly one thousand blocks from the first one, they should lead to the same portal in the nether. Because of that, I built a temporary portal under the catacombs and collected a stack and a half of glowstone dust. Now I can finally build the MFSU I had originally planned to, and start collecting some serious energy.

Transmutation Tablet Interface

As some of you may be wondering, I decided against using the Technic Pack of mods. There were several reasons; for instance, there was no real way to select which mods I wanted to use and which I didn't. I was forced to use all of the mods that came with the Technic Pack if I wanted to use the provided launcher. The biggest reason, however, was just how system-intensive the mod pack was. While playing Minecraft with the Technic Pack, my Firefox browser lagged heavily and my instant messenger program slowed to a complete crawl.

This doesn't mean that I dislike the Technic Pack, it simply means that I'm unable to use it for various reasons. For now I'll continue playing my dated version of Minecraft and the mods I've been using.

Considering the Technic Mod Pack

Firstly, some talk about what I've been doing in NameWorld today.

A) I started playing with the goal to make a refinery and later a quarry, but I don't seem to have enough coal to make diamonds for both. Right now my plan is to collect what oil I can, bring it back to the village and refine it into fuel for later use in a quarry.

B) The amount of power being drawn from the three advanced machines as well as the tool recharge station is more than the solar panels can generate during the day. I'm looking into replacing my solar panels with "low voltage solar arrays," which effectively combine the usefulness of eight solar panels into a single square. With enough resources, I'll be able to upgrade further to medium-voltage solar arrays, which will hopefully draw in enough energy each day to keep things running overnight, regardless of how much stuff I'm doing.

C) The machine shop is still noisy as hell. This made me think of the machine shop me and Cadloas had on one of Wickydoo's SMP servers. On SMP, for some reason, advanced machines like the rotary macerator and the singularity compressor would explode if allowed to reach full speed. Because of this, we couldn't keep them running full-blast all the time like I do. With some help, Cadloas came up with the idea to instead use multiple "overclocker upgrades" in each machine, making them as effective as the advanced versions wihle being safe to use. I plan to use this same tactic to combat the noise the machines make while left idling, but I'll have to adjust how I wire things; my extractor with four overclockers seems to require more energy than the copper cables can supply. I may have to upgrade to at least gold cables, while using "energy storage upgrades" to allow the standard machines to accept current higher than 32 energy per tick.

Now onto the meat of this post.

I've been using the Technic Pack wikipedia for help on a lot of things involved in each of these mods. I've been seeing that the Technic mods seem to largely be mods that I've been using, with a very few exceptions. For instance, the Forestry mod is no longer being supported by the later versions of Technic. I never really used that mod much to begin with, and after skimming the list of things in that mod, I don't know if losing any of them would be any great loss.

If it works, what this means it that I may be able to play a more current version of Minecraft along with more current versions of all the mods I've been running. There are a few mods in the pack that I won't use, but I've been informed that the loader program that the mods use allows you to select which of the mods included that you want to use.

I think I may take some time tonight to see if I can get things running. I'll make some extra copies of the latest save of NameWorld just to make sure I don't entirely bork any of it beyond acceptable losses.

Advanced Machines are Noisy

When I started playing Minecraft today, my first order of business was to see how many diamonds I could make. Each home-made diamond requires a full stack of coal to make, and luckily I had enough. I started making the beginnings of an MFSU - an energy storage box that holds up to ten million energy units - when I realized I had completely overlooked one major factor. In order to make an MFSU, you need glowstone dust. I was holding off on making a nether portal until after I had finished the church itself.. but I can't very well do that without a crap-ton of cobblestone.

Machine Shop Surface Entrance

So instead I decided to move my machine shop. When looking into making diamonds, I upgraded my compressor to the advanced version, a "singularity compressor." Along with the rotary macerator, I realized it had made my basement machine shop extremely noisy. Plus, it was such a hassle to run down the one underground hallway to get to the basement, and that's the original reason I had stuck an extra macerator in the storage warehouse.

So instead, I moved it all to a more centralized location. The machine shop is now part of the main underground intersection, sharing it with the storage warehouse, my basement, and the underground part of the solar tower. And since I was moving the machine shop, I decided to go through with at least part of the "centralized power system" idea.

Underground Machine Shop

The bottom of the solar tower now has an MFE storing power directly from the panels above. The energy is then routed along wires below the wooden panels to the nearby machine shop, including another MFE specifically for tool recharging while I build things.

You'll notice a pair of extra blocks on either side. Those are automatic crafting benches. Normally they're used in conjunction with BuildCraft pipes to take a bunch of ingredients and automatically make a finished product. The reason I made them is because they also work exactly like a normal crafting bench with the added bonus that items placed in it won't be thrown out if you close the crafting window.

I'm still planning on making that quarry, it's just going to take a little longer than expected. The quarry itself will take four diamonds, and if I plan on using BuildCraft's combustion engines to power it, I'll need to gather some of the oil I found the other day, and maybe refine it into fuel, which will require another few diamonds and engines.

I remember a time when I had trouble thinking of projects to do around NameWorld. Now I've got more ideas than I seem to have time for, and all of them seem as important as the others.

I Like Trains

So I had been thinking about the different things I could do with rails while at work the other day. Something had occurred to me - I could use the same sort of system I had used for moving all of the oil from the nearby mountain to move items from Sinkhole Mine.

Cargo Unloading Room, View 1

After a few hours of finagling, I came up with what you see in the first two screenshots from this update. When a cart comes toward the village station, the brown box on the left determines whether it's a cargo cart or not. Cargo carts are shunted off into the little room, where they stop to be quickly unloaded into a half-buried chest. Then they're moved to a "boarding rail," where they wait to be launched again.

Cargo Unloading Room, View 2

Non-cargo carts, on the other hand, will continue down the normal path until they make it to the boarding rail on the right. Both sets of boarding rails are activated using the same button set into a wall between them. This allows me and a newly-emptied cargo cart to launch back toward Sinkhole Mine for more delicious item collection.

The trap-door leads to a small underground maintenance tunnel that lets me make sure the BuildCraft tubes are running smoothly from the half-buried wooden chest off to the silver chest placed in the main station. I also spent some time prettying up the railway, at least for a few blocks just outside of the station here. I've got plenty more of that work to do, let me tell you.

D'awwwwwww

Finally, while off collecting wood in the nearby tundra, I found a small oil geyser that I could have tapped long ago. I also met a new addition to the dwindling village populous. He now lives in the first floor room of my house, hanging out where I've been meaning to build some semblance of a kitchen. I will someday, I promise.

I know this update doesn't seem like much, but for a guy who gets easily confused with automated cart systems, it really feels like an accomplishment.

Short Post with Exploration Findings

Fire Mountain

After harvesting two-thirds of my inventory worth of full stacks of marble from Sinkhole Mine the other day, I decided to do some exploring. I wandered through the non-tundra woods near the village, into a forest including redwood trees and fruit trees, and wrapped around to part of the desert between the village and the mine. At this point, in the distance, I saw a very tall, pointed mountain in the distance, and went to investigate.

Now, I'd seen a few volcanoes on the version of Wickydoo's server that I first obtained these mods to play on. None of them were nearly as big as this one; there may be more basalt here than I'll ever actually need to use. Then again, it's only ever really used for decorative purposes anyway.

Oil Geyser

Around the back side of the volcano, I found something that I hadn't seen since before the time I had temporarily set myself back to "vanilla" Minecraft by screwing up where my mods had been placed. Another oil geyser! I get enough energy from the sun so that I'll never really need to use oil for fuel, but it's still nice to see, and will definitely be collected in the future.

While doing work around the village underground at night, I recently heard the warehouse macerator wind to a stop due to lack of energy. It took me a moment to realize why; the wires powering it draw energy directly from the battery box at the top of the solar tower, which also drains into my basement's MFE, and powers the furnace in the rail station.

I recently upgraded to an induction furnace in the basement workshop. These work like a normal electric furnace, except that they can smelt two stacks of things at once, and they have a "heat" gauge. When the heat is higher, the furnace smelts faster. By placing a redstone torch beneath the induction furnace (or by placing a redstone switch on the top, like I have), you cause the heat to build to 100% without actually smelting anything, and stay maxed and ready for when you need it. The downside is that this constantly draws a trickle charge from whatever is powering the furnace.

Because of that, I realized that the solar tower's battery box was being fully drained before each night was over, or that more was being drawn out than was being replaced by the solar panels. Sometime in the future I'll have to set up that "power station" idea of mine below the ground-level entrance of the solar tower, and then have power lines running out to the different buildings that need it. This way the main storage will be the MFE itself, rather than it simply being energy storage for the workshop.

Work on Sinkhole Mine and Some Upgrades

Village Station - New Back Office

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I had recently made some upgrades to a couple of the buildings in town. For instance, I made a small office in the "behind the stairs" area of the village rail station. As you can see, there's a crafting bench, but with that is an electric furnace, battery box and rolling machine. These allow me to build things I might need for the railway and recharge my equipment without having to run all the way back to the basement of my home.

Maceration Station

Likewise, I also moved some of the "valuables" storage in the warehouse. Where I originally had placed the redstone dust chest, I instead put a macerator. This way I won't have to run off to my basement to macerate any ore blocks I bring back to the village. Both the warehouse macerator and the rail station equipment are powered by copper cables connected to the main line feeding my MFE from the solar tower in town. I may end up building a central "power station" in the underground below the solar tower itself, and then have power lines running out along the roadways, heading to different buildings or powering street lamps.

Sinkhole Mine Surface Office

The majority of what I did today, though, was to work on shifting things around over at Sinkhole Mine. I moved the system I had in place to bring material from the bottom of the mine up to the surface into a building, making it much more safe. There's also a lot more surface storage, allowing for longer mining trips down below. Then I only have to fill storage carts and bring them back to the village for sorting.

Sinkhole Mine Subterranean Office

I also built a small office down at the bottom of the mine to make filling the bottom part of the automatic movement system much easier. There's also a ladder leading up into the surface office, so I no longer have to rely on swimming up the water pouring in from the ocean. I'm considering trying to remove that water to make it less troublesome to move around at the bottom of the chasm.

To one side of that underground chasm, I had found a second one, this one having a floor made of a lava lake. I turned most of the surface lava into obsidian, and had also found the entrance to an abandoned mine. I stripped quite a few valuables from the walls of the mine, but I know there's plenty more to be had. If you look closely in the final picture above, you'll see a hole in the wall with a fence gate. Eventually, I'll set up a system where I can send a storage cart from the abandoned mine, have it empty directly into the chest, and then have the contents shunted straight up into the surface office.

I've Been Workin' on the Railroad...

Railway to Sinkhole Mine

I've been doing more work on NameWorld lately. This time I dug a straight path from the village rail station all the way to Sinkhole Mine, bridged some streams, laid gravel and rails. It's now possible to push a cargo cart between the two, but there aren't any powered rails in place yet.

Sinkhole Mine Station (Under Construction)

I also built a bit of the station over on the Sinkhole Mine side of the tracks. It's got the right shape, now, but I still have to throw some signs around, replace stone with cobblestone, and get those powered rails in place.

Sinkhole Mine Station (Entrance)

I really like how the entrance came out. With the swamp tree and vines nearby, it almost looks like it's been there for quite some time. I'm planning on building a little "mine office" nearby, right by the sinkhole. In there will be storage, the top half of the system that brings material from the bottom of the sinkhole up to the top, and a safe way to ascend and descend into the mine that doesn't rely on swimming up a waterfall. I also plan to put fences around the edge of the sinkhole itself, just to be sure.

Sinkhole Mine Station (Entrance Detail)

The doors to the station are a variation on the design I use in the village itself. In the village, behind each door is a pressure plate. All I have to do is open a door and walk through, and it will automatically close behind me. Or, if I'm inside, all I have to do is walk towards the door and it'll open for me.

At the station, I built the same set-up, but twice. One set is facing the other direction from the other, so stepping on either pressure plate causes both doors to open at once. Although I know some people don't like the way offset doors like this look, I've always thought it was a really neat way to make an automatic door. The only downside is that any monsters chasing me into the station will be able to get past the doors as well.


Just a small update for today, I suppose. I only had a few hours of time to play before work, and most of that was taken up by digging the path between stations. I also made some small upgrades to some of the buildings in the village, but I'll save that for the next update.

The Hiatus and Ground Both Broken

Rail Station - Old Concept

After a long time away from NameWorld - and the game itself - a friend asked me to play some Minecraft on the X-Box 360. We only played for a short while before I suggested he try to set up a multiplayer server just for the two of us on the PC. We enjoyed that for a while, and it seems to have gotten me back into the mood to play the game itself.

I hadn't been sure what I would do when I came back to NameWorld. I had a few projects I had meant to continue work on, like the church or the continuing work digging out Sinkhole Mine, but it was the railway that brought me back. I first got into Minecraft itself because I saw some YouTube videos online showing off the newly-added mine carts and rails. I've always loved trains, but I'm never terribly good at designing systems of moving carts from one track to another, or building automated stations with redstone circuitry.

Rail Station - New Concept

I had built a rail station before, as shown in the above image. I liked the idea, that there was a small station on the first floor, and that the tracks would be elevated. The only problem is that making ninety-degree turns with suspended track just doesn't sit well with me. So I gave it some thought and came up with this new design, as shown to the left.

Rail Station - Interior

This way, the station itself is slightly above the street level, and the rails are below ground to an extent. They still poke out a bit most of the time, allowing the light from the track to help serve as a landmark if I were to ever get lost. All I'd need to do is find some of the half-buried railway and follow it to a station. Given that the village I live in is a bit above sea-level, this also means that the rails will occasionally spend time as suspended lengths of track, or bridges across bodies of water.

Construction of Departing Railways Begins

I'm going with my old idea of how to make the rails work, despite having all the interesting signalling systems that come with RailCraft. Each rail line will lead to one particular destination. The one on the left will go between this station and Sinkhole Mine. The one on the right will go between this station and a "secret facility" project I'm thinking of building off in the desert.

Anyway, that's what I've built so far. Another idea I've had is to build sort of.. auxiliary power stations throughout the village. All connected by IndustrialCraft wires, they'd be a way of quickly recharging my equipment without having to go all the way back into the basement of my home. I haven't done any work on that yet, but if I decide to go ahead with it I'll be sure to take some screenshots.

My Thoughts on MineCraft 360

A friend of mine from Texas has always wanted to play MineCraft with me. The only problem is that we couldn't seem to get a small, two-person server working between us. My PC simply couldn't handle it, and he wasn't too keen on port-forwarding or using Hamachi to get around that. When MineCraft for the X-Box 360 was announced, I was somewhat skeptical, at least from the standpoint of "I've already got the game on my PC." But he talked me into getting it, as at the very least it would allow us both to play the game together.

And so, I bought and downloaded the game while I listened to him talking about what he was already doing while playing it. I'll admit (and as you can likely tell), my mood for MineCraft had been waning somewhat, and playing it again on the 360 has returned me to it somewhat. There are good and bad points about it, as there are with any game, and anyone reading this should know that these are entirely my opinions on the matter.

For instance, MC360 (as I've taken to calling it with friends) is based on an older version of the MineCraft Beta that many of us have been playing from the past. There are some things of it that I miss already, such as the greater number of biomes. Every map I've made so far has mostly been the "temperate" version of hills and trees, a desert and shorelines. No sign of winter biomes yet, but I may be wrong.

Also, the map is somewhat limited. On the PC, where players theoretically have potentially unlimited resources to spend on making a map larger and larger, the world is effectively infinite. On the 360, the map has mostly-invisible boundaries, walls that you can't bypass, dig through or place blocks against. This boundary is just slightly inside the size of the game's paper maps; as an interesting turn, every time you start a new map, your character has a paper map in their inventory to start. This also helps, as icons show where other players are in relation to yourself.

With a map that small, there isn't as much urge to do certain things. You never need to make giant structures or landmarks. If you get lost, it's as simple as finding one of the corners and heading diagonally inward, as you're likely to find something familiar in that direction. Rails are implemented, but beyond the "On a Rail" achievement (for riding 500 blocks in a single direction via minecart), there isn't as much use in making them.

The version the 360 uses is also before the hunger update, and thus the only ways to regain health are through porkchops, cakes, bread, fishing, and having your difficulty set to Peaceful. The armor is also the "old style," meaning that the more the armor degrades, the less protection it gives you. Once armor is around halfway degraded, it's almost like there's no reason to wear it any longer, and thus feels like a waste. The "skybox" - the highest point at which a player can legally place blocks in the game - seems a fair bit lower in MC360 than normal, and I do most of my playing before the MCPC updates that doubled that height.

There are some good points to the game, however. The graphics are quite nice, and the game is smoother than it is for me on PC. There isn't as much problem with running "fancy graphics" for me, and with a nice draw-distance. Sometimes the controls are hard to remember, of course, and so I've been known to accidentally throw my equipment across the room when I meant to use a crafting bench.

Now, the main reason I bought MC360 was so I could play it with my friend on X-Box Live. The game still has a fair bit of lag to it, but not as much as I have occasionally noticed on the Wickydoo Modded Server I sometimes play on. Monster fighting can be tricky when there's the tiny pause between your sword-swing and the enemy taking damage. Creepers also seem as if they have a larger "fuse radius," meaning you have to jog backward further to not get caught in the explosion.

All in all, it's an interesting purchase. It has its good points and its bad points, and the game seems to straddle the line between hints and promises of further updates to bring the game closer to what we have available for PC. Quite a few people seem to want the world's limits to be a bit larger.. and I'll admit that I share their sentiment. But like I told my friend, I really don't have much urge to play MC360 alone. If I'm going to play alone, I might as well play on PC, have less limitations and more available, even if I only play vanilla.

One final parting thought: When you make a new world in MC360, you are still able to add a custom seed if you wish. The seed and map generation process seems unchanged from the MineCraft Beta, as the old seed used in the "404 Challenge" still works perfectly.

Callin' From the Underground~

Village Fountain Rebuilt

There's been a short lack of updates lately because most of what I've been doing hasn't been terribly interesting. I finished moving the houses and buildings in the village - which I'm still surprised was as easy and painless as it was - and I've been spending a great deal of time working to carve out the village's underground tunnels. So far the only ways in and out are through my house, the storage warehouse and the solar tower.

I rebuilt the village fountain, as you can see; it took a short trip to the sinkhole mine in the swampland to collect a bunch of marble to do so. The holes in the sand are just so I can be sure of where the boundaries of the fountain are for when I was digging underneath it.

Village Fountain - Secret Entrance!

There's nothing really beyond the fountain as far as housing goes, and soon after there desert slopes down to the shore of the river, so there's not much room to build anything there. But I extended the village tunnel system that way, and used a trapdoor at the bottom of the fountain's basin for a quick entry point. Using some of the microblocks - the carved-down sections made from full blocks with the RedPower2 mod - I was able to make a hanging ladder that I think looks quite nice.

Lamp-Post Prototype

Finally, I took a short moment to throw together something so I could get an idea on how the village's lamp-posts would look. I don't want them to be too tall or the light radius might not cover as much of the ground as I'd like for it to - also, the sandstone block will be replaced by a glowstone block. I haven't visited the nether in NameWorld yet, as I had wanted to build the nether portal in a secret area below the church. Speaking of the church, the marble I had left after rebuilding the fountain went straight into rebuilding the small catacombs beneath it.

I know it's a short update, but as I said, I hadn't been doing much in the way of interesting things beyond what I've shown. Just a lot of marble harvesting and digging out the underground tunnels.

Delicious Solar Energy

Solar Tower Rebuilt

After a lot of work and using up almost all of my copper ore, I finally have my solar tower back up and running. All twenty-five panels are in place with a battery box and cables running down underground, into a new MFE in my basement workshop. As of this moment I've pretty much regained all of the machinery and power resources that I had lost when I accidentally borked my mods.

Rebuilt Basement Workshop

The way I placed the machines in the basement is a bit odd, but there's a reason. Before they were placed right up against the wall with the insulated cables hidden from view in an attempt to look more smooth. I still may do that, but I'm not entirely sure yet. I don't really -need- a bunch of room down there, as I'm keeping all of my ores and valuables in the storage warehouse basement which is just a short walk through the village underground.

My Bedroom and Study

I haven't taken many pictures of my new house's interior, so I thought I'd share another, this time of the second floor bedroom/study. The enchantment table is only there temporarily, as I think I'll eventually put it somewhere in the church; perhaps I'll use one as the pulpit at the front?

My attempt at using some of the experience I'd gained through so much monster fighting to give myself some nice perks. The diamond sword got Knockback I, which is pretty good, all things considered. I'd have maybe liked a damage enchant, but it's all right. My diamond pickaxe (as I had needed to make one to get the obsidian I needed for the enchantment table itself) ended up only getting Efficiency I, though I had really been hoping for Silk Touch, especially in case I need to move any of those bookshelves later on. Since I had some extra XP left, I enchanted my bronze chestpiece.. and got Fire Resistance II. Given that I try to stay away from all sources of fire and tend to hit any lava I find with a bucket of water, it kind of feels like a waste.

New Village Wheat Farm

I also moved the rubber tree farm and the wheat farm over as needed. These two were a lot easier than expected, given that I only had to move each one or two blocks. I'd had nightmares about having to move multiple streets and buildings around. The wheat farm is now fully planted and the fences were pushed out one block to give me a little room to walk around the edge of the plots when I had to harvest or replant. The rubber farm is still missing five or so trees, but most of the ones that have grown so far seem to have a nice number of resin spots on their trunks.

There's really only a few things left to do before my "village relocation, part two" is finished. Just two buildings to move and two to add, one of which being the rail station. After that I can focus on fixing the fountain, building a set of rails off to the sinkhole mine and getting back to work on the church.

More Work Around the Village

Villagers Hanging Around the Riverside

While doing work around the village, I happened to glance down at the river that runs between the desert and the tundra to the west. Apparently all of my villagers decided to hang out on the west banks. Without ever upgrading my MineCraft's main JAR file, they likely won't ever return to their houses. I've considered someday popping into Creative mode and using spawn eggs to place some villagers around, but I haven't decided yet.

Blacksmith and Partially-Built Diner

The blacksmith was easier to move than I had thought it would. I made a copy of my NameWorld save folder so I could refer back to the design in a more three-dimensional way. Beforehand I had tried to sketch out the designs with graph paper, but this is much easier. Across the street from the church was a butcher's shop, and diagonally across from the church was a home. I removed the home completely and moved the butcher's shop into its place, but instead I built it as a diner.

Village Diner

When I realized that the town had two butcher's shops, I had decided to just get rid of one. I thought I would keep all of my prepared food in a chest in whichever one I kept to use as a central storage. Somehow the design changed to become a diner with a sort of patio seating area out front. Inside are four cobblestone furnaces, a couple crafting benches and a standard double-chest. I'll probably upgrade this in the future; I may even send some cables over from the solar tower to power some electric furnaces. It's always been one of my dreams to have a village or city in MineCraft with powered lamps and such.

Diner Interior and Kitchen

Speaking of the solar tower, I am almost ready to create my twenty five solar panels so I can rebuild it. All I have to do is shift over the cobblestone pavement at its base, build the stone brick tower, place the panels and run some cable down to a battery box. Then I can move my IC2 machinery back into the basement of my house and use the limitless solar energy to help try and finish off the village-shifting efforts.

I even had some ideas toward how to make a good rail system, but I'll leave that for another day, when I've got some screenshots to help explain.

Even More Village Shifting

Storage Warehouse Basement

I finished the interior of the new storage warehouse recently. I even carved out the basement level, giving it quite a bit of storage room. I think I may keep the ores and dusts on the lowest level because, as you can see in the screenshot, there's a tunnel leading underground. That tunnel will follow the major roads of my village and have exits in every major house. Think of it like a sewer system or safe travel tunnel. Any wires or pipes I'll need I will try to hide down in these tunnels, though naturally with room for me to walk around.

Rebuild Village Home

I also shifted and rebuilt my home in the village, though went back to the original oak logs on either side of the windows in order to better mix with the village's normal look. Before I was finished, however, I added a second story to the house. Upstairs will be the bed and a study, perhaps with a jukebox or enchanting table. Downstairs will be a small kitchen and seating area, and in the basement will be the machine shop and access to the village tunnel system.

That'sssss a nice... forget it. Creepers suck.

One of the dangers of having an open-air construction area like I do with my IC2 machines and all is that the nightly-spawned monsters have free reign to come bother me. I had just hopped onto the crafting table to slap something together when I heard a hiss and a flash of green bumping against me. I'm glad I was wearing my bronze armor or he would have done more than blow a hole in the new warehouse.

Watching the Trees Grow

Every time I need wood, I'll sprint off to the tundra on the western and southern borders of the desert my village rests in. Some time ago I realized that it was far enough away that some of the trees I had been cutting down weren't regrowing while I was away, and so for the past while (as I write this, in fact) I've been standing atop a cobblestone tower, alt-tabbed while in my inventory screen so that the trees can grow.

As you can see, life in NameWorld's village is kind of boring right now. I'll try to finish up the building movement soon, and work to finish up some of my older projects like the church and the train station. I've been thinking to work on the latter soon, as then I could send a railway off to the swamplands where the Sinkhole Mine is, as I'm sure to need a lot of resources if I'm going to rebuild that damned solar tower.