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.

Restocking and Rebuilding

After tearing down the storage warehouse and starting to rebuild it, I realized that I was going to need a bit more in the way of supplies. I had begun to rely pretty heavily on sapphire, ruby and emerald gems to make my swords and axes, but after the mod disappearance I was very low on all three. I grabbed the last remaining redstone engine, made a bunch of pipes, and set out to the swamp biome sinkhole I had found long, long ago.

Sinkhole Mine Storage Box

The reason I did this was because the sinkhole itself was just the place a ravine broke through to the surface. I had hit upon a plan in which I would have a chest set up at the bottom of the ravine that I could dump all my full stacks of cobblestone and all the ores and gems I had found and the BuildCraft pipes and engine would send it all to a bigger chest on the surface automatically. Then I could grab all of the better loot from the chest on the surface and head for home, as the sinkhole was a fair distance from my home village.

Sinkhole Mine Surface Box

 I did spend what little silver I had at the time to make a silver chest, because (as shown before) silver chests are actually larger than a standard double-chest. Even then, after the mining I did the silver chest was almost entirely full. Sure, most of that was in redstone, coal and nikolite, but I was still pleased with my plunder - and there's plenty more waiting underground! As chance would have it, the ravine meets a second ravine, and the second one breaks into an abandoned mine.

Storage Warehouse's New Form

After bringing all of the most valuable things back to the village, I set up the three machines that had survived and the battery box. I made an electric wrench to make sure I don't lose any of them in the future, and then went on to make a new mining drill and battery backpack, and a full set of bronze armor. For the most part, all I have left to do is continue working on reshaping the village.

As you can see, I finished the outside of the new storage warehouse. All I have to do now is put the rest of the chests inside, finish out the basement and figure out how best to set up the staircases leading to the different floors. I think it looks quite nice and seems to command a sort of better respect than the pair of smaller ones I had built last time. It looks a lot better than my liquid storage warehouse ended up looking.

Rebuilding Once Again - NameWorld Lives On

Collecting Oil for Moltar

While trying to think of what I wanted to do with NameWorld (and this blog as well), I did some more stuff on Wickydoo's server. On SMP I feel like I'm better suited to be a "helper" rather than making anything of my own, and so I've been trying to help out another friend from there by the name of Moltar. He was the first (perhaps only?) person on the server to work heavily in what BuildCraft had to offer, namely in quarries, oil and fuel.

A week or so ago, while bored, I ran around exploring the area around where we all live in Wickydoo's server and wrote down the F3-coordinates of several pools and geysers of oil. With the help of teleportation pipes, I hung around while a pump would suck up oil and send it off to one of Moltar's holding tanks. Though normally there would be chunk load/unload problems to stop the oil from flowing, Moltar was doing a lot of work around his house, and so those chunks were always loaded to allow the transfer.

Remains of the Village Fountain

Of the two choices I had been considering the most (either continuing on with NameWorld or starting a new world whose seed happened to include another NPC village right by spawn), I decided to do the former. This was mostly due to finding out that, in chunks that hadn't loaded while I was walking around modless, there were still new ores, marble and other mod-given things to be found. I decided to keep NameWorld and the village, but to abandon my current branch-mine, as most of the interesting things to be found underground were now missing.

I also took another look around the village itself to take stock of exactly what I'd lost. The tanks of oil and the oil pump up on the mountain were both gone. The blocks that made up the village fountain were gone (though the water and torches still behaved as if they hadn't). All of my rubber trees and rubber tree saplings were gone, as well as the mining drill, battery backpack and bronze armor I had come to rely on so heavily. Strangely enough, a few pipes, a redstone engine and the "liquid tank cart dropoff" device were still in place in the village, though by all accounts they should have disappeared as well.

The Ruined Underground

It was curious to see just how much of the underground was really effected by the temporary loss of mods. As you can see from the picture, I didn't just lose special ores and gemstones. Huge sections of stone and dirt were torn out.

After taking a short trip to mine some of the minerals and gems in that ocean sinkhole in the swamp biome, I rebuilt some of my machines. Already I began to miss my rotary macerator and the induction furnace for their speed, and the solar panels for the effectively limitless, free energy. But soon after rebuilding some of my machine shop, I remembered the task I had prepared myself for before all of this had happened: spreading out my village so I could add lamp posts along the cobblestone streets.

Storage Warehouse Under Reconstruction

And so I once again tore up everything I had. I moved every last thing I had saved into some chests in the church, as it was one of the few buildings I had decided was better left right where it was standing. Then I started sketching out the design of some of the buildings in a pad of graph paper I had before striking on a different idea: I could make a second copy of NameWorld and use it for physical, walk-through plans of the buildings whenever I needed them.

The first building(s) to be torn down were the storage warehouses. I liked the design, but where I had built them was a bit iffy, and so I gave it a bit of a revamp. It should store a fair bit more while also having more room to get between the floors. All of the blocks and items will be held in the one single warehouse, however, instead of secluded in one of their own.

Damn It, Creeper...

Of course, while taking down the warehouses, that meant some of the torches I had stuck on the sides were removed and thus there was more darkness around for monsters to spawn in. And so a creeper took it upon itself to blast a hole in one of the partially-build church's walls.

I'm currently using the church as a sort of house, as well. My bed is now on the floor of the church basement, where all the marble bricks had once been. I'm not sure if it's going to be safe to use on a regular basis, however, given that it's not actually in an enclosed space any longer.

And Just Like That...

Magic Loader is an amazing program. It lets you select mods and such in a simple-to-use interface and it helps you load them into your game. The only problem is with how it does this. When you select a mod for it, it doesn't move the mod. It assumes you're selecting a mod that's staying where it is. And that fact led to the downfall of NameWorld.

I had unRAR'd the folder Wickydoo had given us with the mods onto my desktop. I selected them from there, did as the instructions had said, and never realized what I had done wrong. The game worked fine! Times were good. NameWorld was made and prospered, and this blog did the same. I've gotten more pageviews on this blog than I ever had on any other blog I've done.

The way I switched between the "old mods" that I used for NameWorld and the set of "new mods" that I needed for when Wickydoo updated the server and mods package was pretty simple. I had folders for Wickydoo's Server and for NameWorld on my desktop. I'd move everything in the .minecraft folder into whichever folder was appropriate and move the other folder's contents in. Deciding to stop procrastinating and get to the work of shifting the village's houses around again, I switched over to the NameWorld folder and started playing.

The first thing I noticed odd was that the game's achievements had reset themselves. When I opened my inventory I saw that it felt oddly empty. I realized that many of my items - the mining drill, battery pack, my axe and my bronze armor - were all gone. That's when the first wave of panic hit me.

I ran to the church. I could see straight down through the floor into the empty pit of the "undercroft." The marble bricks were gone. I ran back to my house, barely dodging a creeper. The machines in the basement were gone, too.

I quit the world and sat to think of how it had happened, striking upon the idea of having screwed myself over by deleting the old folder of mods and such. I realized that there was no way I could get that particular set of mods back again, as Wickydoo had likely deleted the old RAR file when he put the new one up for us all to download.

When I moved the NameWorld save into the Wickydoo's Server folder and tried it, I was hopeful that some areas I hadn't looked at - such as inside the chests holding all my ore dust and along the walls underground - wouldn't have reverted back to vanilla Minecraft. They had. The area of marble I had carved down into to make that slanting mineshaft was extensively hollowed out, including large areas of underground. Adding to the list of things I've lost are the 30-odd tanks of oil I had gathered. At sixteen buckets per tank, that's a considerable amount.

I'm honestly at a loss as to what to do now. I feel like I can't just continue playing this map, or at least in this area, because I've lost so much. The machines and tools aren't such a big loss, it's the underground; the fact that no chunk in the nearby area - maybe even in every chunk I've explored - has any of the special ore any longer is what hits the hardest.

I love my little village, but it really does feel like a ghost town. The villagers are gone, the buildings are empty.. part of my house is even gone because of that damn creeper that had chased me down the street in my frenzy to find what I'd lost. If I keep playing on this map, my only real recourse would be to pick a direction and travel for a long time, rebuilding my life in a new area. But without a village to help keep track of, a little town to take some sort of stewardship over.. I just don't know what I'll do.

Suggestions are welcome. Just post a comment below and I'll give it some thought. For now, though, I think I've lost a good deal of the urge to play Minecraft that I'd woken up with today.

A Monumental Undertaking

I've been doing more work on NameWorld recently; mostly it's just been pushing the tank carts up the mountain during the daytime, filling them with oil and bringing them back to the liquid storage warehouse to empty again. And during the night I was in my branch mine carving out every last block of marble I could find for the church's basement (which I keep flipflopping between calling an "undercroft" and a "crypt" and "catacombs"). Other than that, not a whole lot of work is being done there.

Updated Cartograph_G Isometric

Here's an updated isometric rendering of my map. You can see the progress I've made toward the church so far as well as the general village itself. Keep in mind that the version of Cartograph_G that I use was made before the vanilla update that gave us things like dark wood trees for the tundra or stone bricks. And, naturally, anything that the mods I'm using ads has similarly been omitted, like the rubber trees in the tree farm.

Diagonally up-right from the village you can follow the path of torches up to where the oil pump currently is, on top of the mountain overlooking that lake. To the bottom-left is a small group or torches marking off a surface dungeon I had found, and toward the bottom-right is a small pool of surface lava that I plan to siphon out in the future. I'm not sure what I'll use it for, but it'll still be nice to have.

You can basically follow the direction I took when looking for rubber trees in a straight line diagonally down-right from the village. Also, in the swamp area, there's a sort of water sinkhole that I seem to remember drops right into an underground ravine. I didn't explore it much when I first found it as my inventory was full of rubber tree logs, saplings and resin. The way that river twists and turns makes me want to build some kind of boat dock to the up-right from the village. And, dotted around the edges of the explored map are the huge, 3x3 trees from the RedPower2 mod that I've taken to calling "redwood trees," mostly due to their size and the color. I've heard you can use them to make rubber in an extractor or a furnace, but you only get one rubber per log rather than a few.

Wickydoo's SMP Server - Marn's Lamp Design

Finally there's a screenshot of a very nice-looking lamp that my friend Marn built on the SMP server I occasionally play on. It's simple and works well, using the block-sections and a single glowstone block. Thinking of these made me remember my plans to later "upgrade" the lighting in the village streets to something other than torches strewn about. And that brought up a bit of a problem.

When I first entered the village and decided to start moving things around I went with the simple approach. All the roads would be three blocks wide, and there should be at the very least one block between the edge of the road and the walls of a building to make it look more "neat." What I didn't think of at the time was that this didn't leave much room to later place things like lamps along the sides of the roads.

And so, while looking at the village in the isometric image from the start of this update, I came to a realization. If I'm going to build lamp-posts in my village, I'm going to have to move the buildings. Again. Potentially every single one of them. I've been putting some thought into that already. The church shouldn't need to be moved.. and my house would only have to be moved one block to the side if I move the nearby street away a block.

I had been worried that I had run out of projects to write about in my blog, and then I find out I'd accidentally given myself an entirely new one. It won't be nearly as enjoyable as the first time, but this time I think I'll try to use some graph paper to record the designs of each building as I go. That way I won't have to work slice by slice but instead will be able to entirely demolish one building and then use its resources to place it again. Hopefully that will make things go faster.

New Projects Taking Shape

Church Catacombs

I spent a good chunk of last night playing NameWorld, since the community of people I talk/listen to was playing Killing Floor instead of the SMP server.

I carved out the rest of the section under the church that will become the catacombs. The floor, walls and ceiling will be paved with marble bricks with little cubbyholes in the walls for caskets, or some sort of thing to look vaguely like them. I want the church to feel a little creepy.

Silver Chest Capacity

After seeing the effects on the SMP server, I decided to upgrade some of my standard MineCraft chests to Silver Chests, which may be part of the RedPower2 mod. The upgraded chests (of varying metal types) only take up one block of space while having upgraded capacity. The screenshot to the left shows the interior of a single silver chest and the huge amount of sand I've collected from various projects around the village.

Liquid Storage Warehouse, Interior

When I went back to check on the pump sucking oil out of the geyser in the mountains near the village, I saw that it had already filled eleven tanks worth of it, at sixteen buckets of oil per tank. Taking a break from my work on the church, I built a two-story liquid storage warehouse. Lining the walls will be rows of stacked tanks, seven tall each.

Liquid Storage Warehouse, Roof View of Village

From there, I set up a length of rails from the mountains to a spot in front of the new warehouse. Using Liquid Loaders and Liquid Unloaders from the RailCraft mod, as well as some redstone engines and pipes from BuildCraft, I was able to send tank carts - standard rail carts with liquid tanks inside - around. At one end they'd be filled and launched toward town, where I could then direct them to a place to have them drained and the oil automatically pumped into the tanks.

I did make one, almost costly mistake. The pipes that the BuildCraft pump sends down into the oil aren't a solid object. When moving too close to the hole, I fell in.. all the way down. When BuildCraft creates oil in the world, it seems to either come in surface pools like your standard surface lava or surface water pools, and in underground geysers. These geysers form semi-spherical "bubbles" full of oil underground with a single tall hole leadin to the surface.

When I fell into the hole, I had no idea how much oil was left underground. I also had quickly flashed to when I fell into a hole left by a Mining Well on the SMP server and so I expected to die when I hit the ground. Instead I was lucky to find the oil bubble half-empty from my pumping project. As luck would have it, I'd found this same oil bubble while digging out the slope for my branch mine, and so I was able to quickly find my way back to the surface.