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.