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.
tl ; dr
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