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.