Belated Update is Belated

I went to bed last night thinking about what projects I had for the next time I played MineCraft in SSP. It helped to have an idea of what I had to do left as to remind me I've got a lot to do. Earlier I had sort of "stalled out" on NameWorld if only because I felt like my only major project was continuing work on the church, which would require mining for the cobblestone I'd need.

Oil Pool Removed

One of those projects was to remove the pool of oil at the corner of the village and store it for later. That went a lot faster than I expected it to, if only because redstone engines take so long to heat up. As you can see in the screenshot, the entire pool was removed just by placing the BuildCraft pump in a central location above it, powered by a pair of redstone engines and shunting all of the liquid into a few glass holding tanks. Eventually I'll build a "liquid storage" warehouse nearby to house all of my oil, as well as potentially water and lava.

Oil Geyser Pump

Seeing how well the pump worked in the oil pool made me rush ahead to build a similar construction in the nearby mountain, where an oil geyser her erupted early on in my time on NameWorld. With how far the geyser is from the village and with it being on the opposite side of the village from where I was considering the liquid storage warehouse, I'll have to transport it over there. I'm thinking of using the "tank carts" from RailCraft, as I can set up a system where the carts stop, are filled with oil, and then sent along their merry way automatically.

Church Work Continues

Of course, while these pumps were running, I did more work on the church. You can see that one length of wall is just about done, complete with the tall glass pane windows. I'm not going to start building the steeple until I finish the peak of the roof, as I'm not sure where to start it or how tall to make it. I've never built a church before, and I really hope that it end sup looking good at the end.

View From the Dais

I had originally planned to have a secret area in the back of the church that led down to a nether portal room. Although that idea is still in the works, I've altered it somewhat: now a staircase will lead down to a level below the church that will act like a catacombs of sorts, with marble bricks and perhaps some caskets. One of those will be the secret entrance down to the nether portal, which will be built far enough away from the surface that you won't be able to hear the portal's ambient "woop woop" sounds from the surface.

Work on the Village Church Begins

Ground Broken for the New Village Church

Sorry for the lack of update yesterday; and for the shortish one for today. I've been worrying over some personal issues lately and haven't been very big into a MineCraft mood.

Anyway, I spent a bit of time last night trying to design both a good idea for the new village church and the village rail station. I've got some ideas for both, but as the church was more "finished" in my notes, I started work on that. It's going to be the biggest building in all of the NameWorld village, and perhaps rightfully so. It's just not so easy to get the proper shape and such of a church without upping the scale a fair bit.

Don't Think I Don't See You There

Of course, given the size of the church, as well as the fact that almost the entire thing is going to be made out of cobblestone, I found my supplies of it dwindling down to nothing quickly. Early one MineCraft morning I decided to return to my branch mine in the hopes of digging out some more branches and noticed a creeper standing on top of the village fountain. Looks like I'll have to put some torches up there.. I don't want a repeat of the last time.

Some Progress Made, but Not Much

Even with a trip down toward bedrock, I didn't gather nearly enough cobblestone to do all that much. The floor is done save for the center isle, the pews are in, and there's some work on where the big windows will be. I haven't added the windows themselves, mostly because I'm not sure how tall I want the church to be.

I don't want to give away too much about the church before I get screenshots, however. I think it's going to look quite nice, and I don't want to spoil it for everyone! Just know that there'll be a reason or two as to why being around the church will seem a bit creepy. Perhaps the villagers know more than they let on~

Final Relocation Work

Second to Last House Relocation Complete

After loading up my world today (and sticking some spare charcoal into my electric furnace to turn into creosote oil), I tried to think of what to do. I wanted to get to work on building rails and the rail station itself, but I wasn't sure of the shape or size, or how to design the interior itself. So instead I got into a project that I was already sure of.

I returned to my village relocation project. There were only three houses left in the entire village that I hadn't had a hand in the movement or removal of. The first screenshot shows the completed relocation of the first.

The Village Priest was Less than Pleased

The second building to go was the town church. Cadloas told me once that he heard the building was actually supposed to be a "guard tower," but given the guy with the purple robes that stared at me searchingly as I tore the building down around him, I like to believe it was a church. I'm going to build a church of my own, though I'm honestly not sure where. I've got a few locations picked out that I can choose from.

Unobstructed View of Awesome

After that came the moving of the last of the houses, this one shaped just like the house I had moved into so many MineCraft days ago. While digging out the sand for the foundation, however, I came across a cramped little cave with a few spiders and a skeleton. There wasn't much to be had as far as ore and gems, so I threw some torches down to prevent future mob spawning and sealed it back up.

After finishing the house moving, I decided to extend one of the cobblestone roads through a mound of sand and toward the river that separates the desert and tundra biomes I live amongst. I'm not sure what I'll do on the other side; I've been meaning to build a bridge over the river, but where this road comes ashore isn't the best place to do so. I may extend the road beyond the town fountain and make the bridge there instead.

If the water were deeper or if some of it wasn't eager to freeze back over if I remove the ice, I'd consider building a small dock down there. I still could, I'd just need to build some kind of archway over the places that easily ice over.

Some Gameplay Clarification

After last night's post, I thought that maybe some people might think me strange for changing the settings of the creosote oil recipe in RailCraft's config file. I figured I'd drop a quick post with my thoughts and reasonings on the matter to help clarify.

The process by which to create creosote oil in the version of RailCraft I have is a sort of long one. I'd have to make a 3x3 cube out of coke oven brick blocks. Then I would have to either cook wood into charcoal or cook coal into coal coke, either way producing creosote oil as a byproduct. Each smelting operation of a coke oven takes three full minutes to complete, however, which would mean a single bottle of creosote oil every three minutes.

Creosote oil is used to turn wood slabs into wooden ties, which are then crafted into a wooden rail bed, and then with metal rails to make actual sections of track that can be placed. This means that for every stack of twenty-four track pieces I would have to use four bottles of creosote oil, which would require twelve full minutes of time.

That already seemed like a long time, but that's not such a huge factor. There's always more to do in a MineCraft world, so it's not like I would have been staring at the coke oven for the entire time. What it ultimately came down to was the fact that I don't really have a need for large quantities of coal coke or charcoal. Both would ultimately have been useful for fueling my generator and thus adding power to my MFE. With my solar panels I haven't had a need to stick a single chunk of charcoal into the generator. And whenever I need torches I'm usually underground anyway, and so it's as easy as finding some coal ore and making some on the fly, since I almost never go out without at least a few logs.

The RailCraft wiki said there was an option to toggle back to the "old style" of creosote oil crafting, which simply involved cooking a chunk of coal or charcoal into a furnace, and so I made the change. For anyone who thinks that might be some form of "cheating," I have a little story to tell.

The other day, while playing on an SMP server with Cadloas, I mentioned to him that I hadn't gone searching for rubber trees on my SSP world (NameWorld) until I had a compass with which to point me in the direction of home. This confused him, because I had originally followed the F3-screen coordinates system in order to find where he had build his home on the SMP world, and so he asked why I didn't just use that to find my way back to my home village.

I told him it sort of felt like cheating. That I held my SSP gameplay to, I guess, a higher standard than my SMP gameplay. Survival itself has features to help you find where you're going like paper maps and compasses, so there's really no need to use the coordinates on the F3 screen, which to me is seen as a sort of "debug screen," and a form of cheating, albeit a very light one. On SMP, especially since at the time we were using Creative Mode powers to build his home, it just doesn't feel like.. it matters as much. I'll explain why.

One of my biggest fears about playing in SMP is the knowledge that nothing I build has any sense of permanence. I don't own the server and so there's all kinds of reasons all of my hard work could just disappear overnight, and I'm not necessarily talking about griefing. The person running the server could stop doing so for any reason. Maybe the general consensus of the players want a brand new map. Maybe the files get corrupt. Maybe someone's nuclear reactor accidentally goes supercritical and I log on to find myself at the bottom of a crater.

Sure, some of those things could happen just as easily in SSP, but they're at least somewhat under my control. I could keep a backup of NameWorld in case the one I'm playing on does get corrupt. I plan to build my reactor a decently far distance from my village just to make sure it doesn't obliterate everything I've been doing. On SMP I don't have nearly as much control.. so there's not as much urge to break my back building fantastic things.

When I play with Cadloas, a good portion of why is because I'm joking around, discussing different aspects of the game or funny things happening to us. I tend to do a lot more "resource gathering" than "building" when I play on SMP with him. Partially because my ideas aren't always the best, but partially because mining is fun and, if something explodes or the server shuts down, it won't feel like I've lost all sorts of work. After I explained all that to him, his response was something along the lines of "I guess that makes sense, but you're still weird." And he's right.

So there you have it. I'm not sure who of you that read this blog will stick around to read all of this, but for those of you that do, you might have a better idea of the kind of mindset I have when playing MineCraft.

Updates with screenshots will return shortly, don't worry.

Completed Warehouses

I've been playing a decent amount on the SMP server my friend Cadloas invited me to a while ago. Tonight was spent doing a lot of resource gathering just to get our initial machine shop running. Being faced with collecting the items required for -another- twenty five solar panels seriously drained my will to play longer than three or so hours, though, if only because sword combat on an SMP server is a lot more dangerous than in SSP.

Warehouse Interior

 But, in the short while I played SSP beforehand, I was able to mostly finish the pair of warehouses. The top floor of each has seven double-chests and a crafting bench each, while the basements will have up to thirteen apiece. I would add more, but then they wouldn't be able to open due to having plank blocks on top of them. I'll leave room in the village for more warehouses if I truly need more room, or perhaps add a second floor to each.

Warehouse Basement

Since I figure people might be interested, I took some screenshots of the interiors. First is the top floor. Although there's room for another five or six double-chests, they'd be covering the windows and I like some extra hint as to if there are monsters waiting outside for me.

After that is a shot from the basement. There's only eight double-chests in each basement for the moment simply so I have an easier time opening the right one when I need to. I'm not sure how I'll record what each chest holds, yet. Maybe just signs in the walkway?

Secret Tunnel

The final image for tonight hopefully shows that both warehouses are connected by a small tunnel that runs between their basements. This was simple to do, as the buildings were placed right next to each other. What can also be seen is the door and hallway that lead across the street to the basement of the house I live in. This will make late-night crafting sessions much easier as I won't have to worry about being pounced on by any monsters while trying to run between the buildings.

I would have done some work on the warehouse rail station, or at least on the rails leading down to the branch mine, but it seems the RailCraft mod has made that significantly harder on me. I can't just craft a group of rails with six iron ingots and a stick. Now I have to use Creosote to make Rail Ties, and then turn those into a Rail Bed, and turn those into rails with some iron ingots, or maybe something even more diabolical than that.

But how do I make creosote? Well, it involves crafting a large three-by-three Coke Oven, used normally for turning wood to charcoal or turning Coal into Coal Coke. While coal coke would be useful (as it burns for twice the duration of normal coal), it also takes this massive oven three full minutes to perform a single cooking action. The creosote is apparently just a natural byproduct of using the coke oven itself.

While this puts a serious monkey wrench in my plans, it does so in a way that simply makes it take longer to create the same kind of items. From a realism standpoint, it's interesting. From a "I just wanted to lay some damn rails" standpoint, I feel like I'm looking at another long wait like I did back when I was trying to get those solar panels made and in place.

Apparently, though I can also just go into a config file somewhere and change things back to an older style, where I could simply cook coal or charcoal in any normal kind of furnace to get some creosote oil. I may do that.. if I can figure out how. I'm not a very technical person, as I'm sure people who've read this blog can attest to.

Edits: After thinking more on the whole thing, I decided to toggle the config file setting so that I can make creosote oil simply by cooking coal or charcoal in any furnace. The whole creosote oil process seemed unnecessarily complicated. The process of making rails themselves are more complicated but in a way that doesn't feel nearly as bothersome. It also seems to yield more functional track sections for the same or lower cost in iron. If I wasn't saving all of my coal for coaldust and if my solar panels weren't giving me so much energy that I still needed to burn charcoal in my generator, I'd have considered building that coke oven.

Just a Short Update

While reading over some of my older blog entries the other day, I noticed that I had never actually explained what went on between my first "state of the world" post and the subsequent images of my half-destroyed machine shop.

Basically, I had been running things with a generator hooked up to a battery box with little to no problem. But the glamor of an MFE - with fifteen times the energy storage - pulled me toward the prospect of upgrading to it. So I gathered the materials and crafted the MFE, used a spare RE battery to draw the last bits of energy from the battery box, and replaced it. I got the wires hooked up again and stuck the battery into the "input" slot.. and that's when it all blew up in my face. I had completely forgotten the fact that an MFE puts out more energy than can be handled by the insulated copper cables, and perhaps more than could be handled by most of my machines.

Storage Warehouses

Also, I wanted to show you all the main thing I had done with the short amount of time I'd played MineCraft yesterday. I completed the outside of the warehouses as well as digging out their basements. The only thing left to do with them is finishing off the sandstone walls underground and making a boat-load of chests. So far, the one to the right is likely to be the "raw block storage" and the one on the left is likely to be more geared toward storing items. Any tools and food will probably be kept in my house.

The rubber tree farm is mostly grown, now. I came up with a system for keeping track of which trees are producing resin and in what quantities. Each tree that had resin when I went to check (after letting them sit for a MineCraft day or two) got as many torches on the dirt around them as they had resin deposits. Any trees which had no resin at all got a torch placed on the trunk. Any tree that I now find with no torch I'll know I haven't checked at all yet, and any tree that has a trunk-torch that I check again, if they don't have any resin this time, I'll cut it down and plant a new one. I hope that explanation isn't nearly as confusing as it felt like to write it out!

More Work Around the Village

Rubber Tree Farm Planted

Sorry for the lack of early-morning update. My friend Cadloas - the one who sent along the RAR file of mods and mod-loading stuff - wanted some help on the SMP server on an automated melon farm of a scale that drops everyone's framerate due to roughly four to nine thousand melon slices being created with the flip of a single switch.

Anyway, as I mentioned in a previous post, I finally got to work on a new and more realistic-looking rubber tree farm. No longer are they growing out of single dirt blocks in the middle of a desert! What the image to the left doesn't show, however, is the small wooden awning with a chest and crafting bench to use as the rubber farm office, of sorts. I'll keep a stack of wood and any extra tree taps there, though I have to remember to light up the farm itself to keep enemies from spawning.

The New Village Fountain

With the help of a newly-crafted ruby handsaw (which I believe is part of RedPower2), I cut some marble brick blocks apart to help finish the village fountain. It's simple, but I think it looks quite nice, especially with the edging giving the supports a more "pillar" look. This image is actually the second time I completed the fountain as, while walking the streets of the village at night, a fight with a Creeper went worse than expected.

Storage Warehouse Work Begins

Work began on a pair of storage warehouses across the street from my home in the village. Each should hold up to twenty-eight double chests (or a few less if I decide to add a staircase to an upper floor or basement level). Each also has both front and rear doors, because behind these warehouses I plan to build a small rail station for when bringing eventual storage carts. As you can see, I'm trying to build them in the same style as the rest of the village housing.

Losing Your House Hits Some People Hard

While on my way to the tundra for some quick wood gathering for the warehouse flooring, walls and roofs, I came across the village butcher. He had escaped his home back when I rebuilt and relocated it and seems to have found his way into the small pool of oil that appeared at the end of one of the village roads.

After fooling around a bit in SMP last night I was able to create a working BuildCraft pump and storage tanks. I may build such a set-up to take all that oil away and store it for later use, but I'm not entirely sure where to put it.

Space Balls 2: The Search for More Rubber

As I said in the last entry, I made a couple tree taps and brought my bronze armor (30% stronger than iron armor if I'm informed correctly) and compass out to find me some more rubber trees. A friend had lambasted me up and down for not just looking for a swamp biome, but I swore to him that the only biomes nearby were tundra, desert and hills/mountains. Well, apparently I was wrong.

My Emerald Axe Thirsts for Sticky Resin

Right on the other side of the hills to the east was a swamp biome. Within maybe four hundred blocks of my home village. I swept into the marshes like a fat kid hits the buffet table. Every mushroom I found (both brown and a few red), every rubber tree I found, I'd suck any showing resin out of the trunk and fell it with my trusty axe.

Cue Chorus Music

Night began to fall, and I figured I had found a decent crop. Twelve new saplings and a good amount of both rubber logs and resin. I decided to check out a little indentation in a hill and noticed something strange: a one-block tall path leading away under some stone. Out came the drill and I investigated a little further. The tiny channel opened up again into a dish between mountains, at the top of which were five more rubber trees.

Entrance to an Interesting Little Cave

Black Gold. Texas Tea

I spent the next two MineCraft days and nights in that swamp gathering every last thing I could. Eventually I ran out of rubber trees in the nearby area and inventory space to hold anything more, and decided to head home.

While following my compass I came across an interesting-looking cave hollowed out below a mountain. Though there wasn't much to be had as far as ore or monster-fighting, it's still something I may wish to use in the future. Maybe it could be the site of an eventual nuclear reactor?

The trip back home continued, finding a rather large oil geyser as well. As far as I know, oil is part of the BuildCraft mod, of which I haven't really touched beyond the collection of almost a chestful of Nikolite. Some day I'll get to it, though, don't worry.

The Spoils of Operation: Rubber-Find

When I finally got home I set to work putting things away. A new chest specifically for food items (as I had also killed 51 steaks worth of cow, criminy) now holds over a stack of brown mushrooms and the eight meager reds I had found. Then came time to extract some rubber so I could continue work on the solar panels!

That's when I came across an interesting problem. Having replaced my two electric furnaces with induction furnaces as well as replacing my macerator with a rotary version meant that keeping them running took an awful lot more energy. Running a single induction furnace while extracting rubber alone was sucking more energy out of my MFE than burning charcoal could put into it! One of the induction furnaces was removed for a new electric model. I kept one induction furnace in place for when I need to cook a lot of something in a hurry, but otherwise I think I'll stick to electric. Plus, now I have an induction furnace waiting in case something terrible or explosive happens in the future!

I Didn't Built it to Look Phallic, I Swear

And with that I was able to finally build the last of the fifty electronic circuits I needed to craft twenty-five solar panels. I grabbed my wrench and pillared my way up the back of the waiting solar tower being as careful as I could to place them all in the correct formation. Down came a line of copper cables from my original battery box, straight into the MFE.

Solar Tower Maintenance Tunnel: No Admittance!

Now, I was expecting there to be at least a trickle of energy coming in from the panels. The more cable there is between your energy input (the solar panels) and the energy output (to the MFE) the more energy is lost simply from the distance it takes. And there was a good 20-30 cables or so of distance as it went down the tower, underground and across the street.

So I wasn't prepared for just how much energy cranked into my MFE while I was busy trying to make trap doors and compress sand into sandstone. Before I was having trouble keeping over 10k energy in the MFE's 600k reserves. While my back was turned cleaning up the tunnel and making it look professional the energy rocketed up to 230k and climbing. I shouldn't have to collect logs to burn as charcoal any more outside of some sort of disaster or late-night crafting spree. An unforeseen bonus is that I can tell what time of day it is while working in the basement simply by checking the MFE - if the numbers are climbing, that means it's daylight.

I'm not sure what my next project will be. Maybe I'll clear some land out to set up a more realistic-looking rubber tree farm. I still have a few buildings to shift or rebuild in the village as well as plans to make that rail yard and storage warehouse. I'm not sure I like all of my valuables kept so close to machines that may explode if I screw something up!

Post-Mining Expedition Work

I've descended into the depths of my branch mine twice, now. The first time was simply to work the mine itself down by the bedrock layer, and although I found a fair bit of ores I also encountered a decent amount of lava. Instead, I decided to explore more of the underground ravine I had found while building the slanting shaft of the mine itself, and once again collected a nice collection of ores and such.

Fifty Electronic Circuits Away from Solar Goodness

The second time I entered the mines and to explore was because I had used all but six ingots of refined iron (which is made by smelting normal iron ingots a second time). I did this because I felt that my macerator was the slowest of my machines and decided I wanted to upgrade to a Rotary Macerator. It works much faster but has to "wind up" in order to take advantage of all that speed.

Delicious New Machinery~

And while I was upgrading my macerator I decided to upgrade my electric furnaces to Induction Furnaces! Though watching so much of the energy in my MFE drain away while using just one of them made me think I should only have upgraded the one. The world is full of material, though, and I can always make a new electric furnace, keeping the second induction furnace as a replacement in case the first one breaks. Or in case I cause another cable detonation due to too high of voltage.

"That'ssssss a Nice Rubber Farm you Have There..."

Electronic circuits require refined iron, redstone dust and insulated copper cables. I have a good amount of the first two items on the list, but I only have as many cables as I can make with rubber collected from my rubber tree farm. I hadn't had a problem where I needed more rubber than I could get with occasional visits until now, and I decided to try and remove and replant any trees who just weren't producing. Plus, I could extract rubber from the logs of the deadbeat trees!

It was nearing sunset as I began chopping down the rubberless trees after having punched most of their leaves away in the hopes of finding extra saplings. At this time a Creeper - from who the hell knows where - decided to punish me for not paying enough attention to the area around me while outside. As you can see, the farm went from three producing trees and three that weren't down to three producing and.. one sapling.

Now, Ain't That Somthin'?

On the way back to the house, I decided to stop and take a quick shot of the village from the desert side. Of the buildings you can see, the only one I haven't personally had a hand in moving was the cobblestone church in the back corner. You might be able to see a bit of one of the last two other untouched houses somewhere behind the butcher shop's deck, too. It was a lot of work, but I like the results so far.

It's Tree-Huntin' Time.

With a few pieces of iron and some redstone dust, I made a compass. And given my surplus of rubies, sapphires and emeralds - who make tools and swords as useful as diamonds but about half as durable - I made myself a second axe. I'll make another tree tap or two, and tomorrow I pick a direction and go looking for rubber trees.

I'm thinking east: the mountains are to the north, tundra to the west and what seems to be ocean to the south.

More Rebuilding and Relocation

Although I don't have much in the way of iron right now (and it's the only thing really keeping me from making the twenty-five solar panels to build my dinky little array), I decided to spend another chunk of time altering the village to look more neat and organized. I'm not sure why.. I just like the way it looks afterward.

Machine Shop: Rebuilt

First order of business, of course, was rebuilding the machine shop. Here's what it looks like now that it's back in working order and such. The chest hides extra charcoal for the generator and the bits-and-pieces of whatever project I'm working on. Right now it's got everything I've collected for the solar panels as well as some progress toward another home-made compressed diamond.

Domicile: Relocated

I continued working on the slight shift to another of the larger houses. It was kind of a bitch to do because I wasn't used to the shape of the roof and so had to try and be careful not to tear down too much of the original house that I wouldn't be able to use it as a template. In the end, though, I think I got it just right; as with most of the relocation jobs I've been doing around the village, I haven't yet replaced any of the glass panes that I broke.

Blacksmith: Twisted

My changes to the blacksmith's house (shop? hut? building?) were as complicated as the house-movement. That's because not only was I shifting the building slightly but I was also turning it ninety degrees toward the east. The road heading toward the left of the screenshot wasn't there, either. I think I'll extend the cobblestone a bit so it looks like people are invited to just walk right into the shop off the street.

Butcher's Shop: Unburied

The butcher's shop was in worse shape than the home I had moved. It was right across the street, but that just meant that it was almost entirely buried in sand. While moving this building and lifting it up I also changed the dirt "deck" on the back of the building into one made of wood with fence-post supports. I may replace those with carved-down plank blocks once I've decided to start getting fancy with a handsaw.

Wooden Deck: Beautiful

Here's a little screenshot of the deck. It doesn't have the best view (I mean, it's just the back of the blacksmith's shop), but it's at least a lot less cramped than it originally was. Don't worry, I made sure to add a torch under the deck to make sure nothing tall, green and explosive decided to camp out there.

Solar Tower: Prepared

Since I hadn't shown it yet, I decided to take a screenshot of the tower I had built to hold the solar panels up. I wanted a more industrial look than "just a pyramid of panels out in the desert," and I added the fence to make it look like an honest-to-goodness power station you might see in your neighborhood with signs warning unauthorized personnel to stay away.

Cartograph_G Rendering: Updated

Here's an update of the earlier isometric map that I made with the version of Cartograph_G I've got. It doesn't look -that- different from how it started, and you can't even see the solar tower due to stone bricks not having been around when this version of the program was coded. But I think it looks a little neater and a little less like a bunch of hovels half-buried in sand.

 Of course, with all my rebuilding and relocating work, all of the villagers have been "escaping" their houses. The good news is that this means no more incessant clicking as they wander into the "pressure plate on a fencepost" that they use for a table. The bad news is that eventually the village is going to be very pretty.. but very abandoned. And with my worry over not being able to get updated versions of all the mods I'm using, NameWorld may never see the official update that tells the villagers to get themselves indoors at night.

Tomorrow I'm going mining again. With all the roadwork, I'm running low on cobblestone and I'm entirely out of iron. I want those solar panels built and in place! I don't necessarily need them for energy, but it would be nice to be able to harvest wood for something other than burning in my generator as charcoal.

Rebuilding and Relocating

After talking to a few friends (Ferret and new friend Jaffa), I've found out that the way to fix my energy-born detonation problem is with a low-voltage transfer box, and so with the help of NotEnoughItems, I have made one. Don't worry, I didn't cheat; turns out there's a handy little recipe feature that shows you what turns into what to make what in-game. That will be -invaluable- in the days to come.

Last Night's Devastation

Turns out the damage was slightly different from what I had thought. One of the two electric furnaces escaped the blast but almost all of the copper cable was gone, as well as a bit of my basement's back wall.

Some more information from Ferret and Jaffa explained that I had basically wasted half of every single ore I had turned into an ingot. How? By not macerating the ore and smelting the resulting ore dust! If I had known that earlier, I'd have enough refined iron to finish off my solar panels. I currently have enough supplies to make 22 of them, and I'm planning on a nice little 25-panel pyramid array like I've seen in several fancy screenshots.

Rebuilding the Machine Shop Begins

I began rebuilding the machine shop. I decided I wanted to streamline the cables as well as hiding them as someone would when actually building and wiring their own house. The bad news to this setup is that I placed the multi-functional electric storage unit (also known as an MFE; it's basically the next step up from a battery box) in a place that made it a little unwieldy to get at when I wanted to recharge any of my electric tools.

I also shifted things around a bit. Now from left-to-right is a pair of electric furnaces, the extractor, a new macerator and then compressor. There's two spots left at the far end that I'm sure I'll fill with something-or-other before too long. Every time I worry that I've gotten close to the end of IC2's technological options someone mentions something I've never even heard of. Another tidbit I had guessed at was the notion that when you see which logs of a rubber tree give resin, you've seen the ONLY logs of that tree that will give resin. I had three deadbeat trees in my rubber tree farm stringing me along every time I went out to tap them.

Cue the "The Incredible Hulk" End Credits Theme

While the logs and resin were reducing to rubber, the cobblestone was cooking for more stone bricks and logs were turning to charcoal to fuel my hungry little MFE, I decided to continue fixing the village. You'd be amazed how judgemental the stare of the villagers can be when you've just released them from the confines of their tiny two-by-three hut by demolishing it around them. That's right, guy. You walk off into the desert. Don't think I don't know your game.

Possible Guard Shack?

The final screenshot of this entry is the work-in-progress of relocating the hut across the street from the ungrateful villager I helped escape his tiny closet-abode. As this was one of the nicer looking huts (the kind with the three-by-three interior and the ladders leading up to a small rooftop patio), I decided to move this one down the street to possibly act as some kind of guard shack for the village. Before getting into IC2 and the rest of these mods I had considered building a wooden fence all the way around the village, and I still might.

I decided to take a break from MineCraft due to hunger, but not before I had done a bit of work shifting one of the other, larger houses, the ones shaped like the one I use as my home. I'm moving it over a bit and closer to the path that went along where the guard shack originally was. Not only will this take up some of the empty spot left there, but as it was one of the homes buried in the sand, it will definitely make the place seem more realistic.

Oh, and before I forget, I finally removed the cobblestone safety-cap on the town well and filled it in with sand. After adding in the cobblestone crossroads above it, it's like it was never there to begin with. If I play more tonight I'll try to remember to take pictures of the house I'm moving, and maybe a new, cropped Cartograph_G render map.

The State of the World

So, let's get things stated, shall we?

I named the world "NameWorld" because I used one of my names as the seed. This makes the world feel kind of like it belongs only to me. Other people may have random worlds or use whatever seed they want, but this seed is all mine. Who would want to use my name as a seed other than me, anyway? Given that MineCraft turns any text seed input into numbers, I'd consider putting a link up so others could download my world someday, but without all of the mods I'm using, it might be a bit of a let-down.

Cartograph_G Rendering of NameWorld

Anyway, when I started this world, I was on the border between tundra and desert biomes. Several of my previous worlds had involved mostly just snow (and I was kind of getting sick of it) so I wasn't very impressed until I went to explore the desert. Sitting maybe a hundred blocks from spawn was an NPC village. As luck would have it the village contained a blacksmith, and in the chest hidden inside I found an iron sword, pickaxe and helmet, and four apples.

Outside View of my House

Cannibalizing the two cobblestone furnaces from the blacksmith and the chest itself, I went to set up shop. I chose one of the larger houses in the village, one with a slight bend to it. I was eventually able to kick the two villagers out.

Where I'm standing in the nearby image is actually where a small wheat farm originally was; part of this farm was destroyed when a Creeper exploded, and I took the lighter log blocks from around the glass panes to replace some that had been lost. Given how much extra tundra-biome wood I had on hand, I decided to use it to make my house a little distinctive from the others.

The New Large Farm

One of the projects I've made for myself in NameWorld is to "fix" the village I live in. The MineCraft village-making algorithm is all well and good, and I enjoy that any village you find is randomly generated. But some of the decisions it makes are pretty bizarre. For instance, the village had about eight farms, which I consolidated into a single large farm, fencing it in to try and keep monsters out. There's a few houses in this village whose doors were completely covered by sand and gravel, too.

And so I decided to upgrade the village if I could. Adjusting buildings to make them all somewhat more uniform compared to the gravel paths, which I'm replacing with cobblestone. I have plans in the works to move some of the other large buildings, turn the blacksmith ninety degrees, add another street and rebuild the church in a slightly larger form a short distance outside of town complete with a creepy little graveyard. Also, I'm going to replace the town well with a larger fountain made with marble blocks and bricks, some of the new mod additions.

Interior of my House, Ground Floor

In the background of the screenshot of the farm you can see another mod addition, this one being rubber trees from the IndustrialCraft2 mod. Given that the local biomes were tundra, desert and mountains I was lucky to find a single rubber tree in the more mountainous area of the tundra. I brought that home and set up a small rubber tree farm which helps me build almost all of the other projects IndustrialCraft2 puts forth for me.

Interior of my House, Basement

I started building my first IC2-based machines when I realized that I may not have enough room inside my small home for all of them plus the cables. Not to mention potentially sending cables out to a solar panel farm. So I decided to carve out a basement for myself.

Usually I make the same kind of small basement with cobblestone walls, floors and stairs. Given that the village I live in resides in a desert, I decided to go along with that sort of motif. Wood planks for the floor and sandstone walls give the place a very nice look, or at least one that I quite enjoy.

For those of you familiar with IndustrialCraft2, there's little more you need to be told about the picture of the basement. For anyone else, the stuff beyond the chest and crafting bench are a little foreign.

Firstly is the generator next to the chest. It works like a cobblestone furnace but instead of smelting things, you burn things in it to generate energy (known in the community as EU). This energy is then fed through a copper cable up into the brown cube above it, known as a battery box. A battery box will store much more energy than a generator alone.

From the battery box, a whole mess of cables lead to the bank of machines. Listed from left to right, starting off is a macerator. This can turn coal and ores into their respective kinds of dust and can also reduce cobblestone to sand. Next is an extractor, which turns the sticky resin collected from the rubber trees into usable rubber, which is a vital component in most of the cables in IC2. Then are a pair of electric furnaces: they work just like cobblestone furnaces but run on energy, and I'm pretty sure they smelt much faster. Finally, on the far right, is my compressor. It can do such neat things as turn sand into sandstone at a 1:1 ratio (instead of 4:1 with standard crafting) and is an integral part of turning creating home-made diamonds.

Branch Mine, Surface Entrance

Of course, to make all of those wonderful things, I needed to get underground and get myself mining. To this end I started digging a gently-sloping branch mine using cobblestone slabs. Along one side of the slope I plan to install rails so that I can send storage carts full of mining spoils directly to the surface, to some sort of rail yard / storage warehouse area.

Branch Mine, View Down the Slope

It took a fair bit of time, but eventually I was also able to dig my way to the bedrock level. What helped is crafting a mining drill and battery backpack. These allow me to dig through anything I come across outside of obsidian with at an amazing speed.

The only downside that I can see is that there's simply so much stuff I find while mining that I want to save and bring back to the surface. The chests in my village home are nearly bursting and still I need more iron and coal to fuel my IC2 needs.

Branch Mine, Bedrock Level

Across the street from my home I made a cobblestone platform and ringed it with wooden fences. A small stone brick tower in the center will lead precariously up to a platform that will hold my initial solar array. There isn't a screenshot of that yet, but you can already see the start of it in the isometric image at the top of this entry.

And so there you have it. You're now pretty much caught up on the major doings in NameWorld. The only things I haven't yet made screenshots for are the changes I've made to the village beyond the farm and my home, and some of my other projects in town.

Stay tuned!

It is The Year 2012 and it is time... for MineCraft!

I am an avid MineCraft fan, though given that I started this blog at all means you probably already knew that. Seeing YouTube videos of mine carts, storage carts and powered carts in action basically sold me on the game as I love trains. It may have started out as a sort of giant, three-dimensional train set, but it's since grown to encompass the whole of the game. Even without mods the game is one of my all-time favorites.

One of my favorite things to do is show off the stuff I've created in-game. Sometimes I'd do this by sending my world save to friends, and other times I'd use a program like Cartograph (now Cartograph_G) to take an overhead image of the world so I could point out different geographical aspects. With the addition of mods I'm generally unable to do this as not everyone I'm friends with uses the same mods as me and most mapping programs don't include the blocks and world features that mods add.

So I hit upon a new idea to show off my game. Screenshots! That way I could take little pictures of different parts of my MineCraft world and show them off with little text blurbs that explain things they're seeing, what made me build a thing in such a way or what a project is going to be when it's finished.

And so I made this blog.

I considered restarting my current world when I decided I wanted to make a screenshot blog to go along with it, but I've spent a decent amount of time on it already and wouldn't like to redo everything I've done. The first few entries into this blog will be some screenshots taken of my world as it currently is and some explanation as to what I've got planned.

But first, I'll explain some of the mods I'm using. Links to their respective wikis are on the right.

• IndustrialCraft2 - Probably the mod I've fallen in love with the most. It adds a bunch of extra ores and several devices such as electric furnaces, extractors, macerators and compressors, generators you can fuel with normal coals and woods and even one that works with lava. It also adds amazing items like mining drills, battery backpacks and powered armor that allows you to run faster, jump higher and breathe underwater.
• BuildCraft - I don't know all that much about this one yet. There's several kinds of engines used to power things like liquid pumps, liquid storage tanks, item sorting machines and automated quarries. This might also be the mod that includes the ability to carve normal blocks into smaller components to be used in decorations.
• RailCraft - Although the few rails that vanilla MineCraft has are more than enough for most anything I needed them to do, this mod adds a bunch of extra kinds. Switches, signals, rails that move carts vertically up the side of blocks and even high-speed rails that cause explosions if the cart comes to a sudden stop!
• Integrated Redstone Power - I honestly have no idea what this mod does! I think it has to do with condensing certain redstone power functions such as and/or gates and whatnot into single-block plates for ease of use. Not that I fully understand even the most basic of redstone widgits.
• Forestry Mod - This one is small but sweet. You can craft a rake to hope and find apple, lemon, cocoa and orange seeds that can be used to plant trees that will occasionally drop fruit on their own. These fruit can be used to craft drinks and things like chocolate bars. Also, mint leaves and plants.
• TerrariaTrees - A mod that I could honestly take or leave, but I very much enjoy how quickly it speeds up my wood gathering. In the game Terraria (also a great game, and I hope any comments here won't devolve into "X is better than X" arguments), whenever you chop away the bottom log of a tree, the whole tree falls. This mod makes the vanilla trees in MineCraft act the same way.
• Agricultural Mod - I'm not even sure of the name of this one, but I'm pretty sure it's in there too. This one adds stuff like beekeeping and crop fertilizer. I don't have a link to a wiki about it, so for the most part I'm ignoring this stuff until later.

And that's about it. At least, those are the ones I've investigated into a bit. A friend of mine named Cadloas invited me to play MineCraft at his friend's server and sent me an RAR full of mods with a handy little loader program called Magic Loader. It made installing it all amazingly easy.. but that's about where my technical know-how concerning mods ends. As I learn more, you'll be sure to hear it.

Hope you enjoy!