Short Post with Exploration Findings

Fire Mountain

After harvesting two-thirds of my inventory worth of full stacks of marble from Sinkhole Mine the other day, I decided to do some exploring. I wandered through the non-tundra woods near the village, into a forest including redwood trees and fruit trees, and wrapped around to part of the desert between the village and the mine. At this point, in the distance, I saw a very tall, pointed mountain in the distance, and went to investigate.

Now, I'd seen a few volcanoes on the version of Wickydoo's server that I first obtained these mods to play on. None of them were nearly as big as this one; there may be more basalt here than I'll ever actually need to use. Then again, it's only ever really used for decorative purposes anyway.

Oil Geyser

Around the back side of the volcano, I found something that I hadn't seen since before the time I had temporarily set myself back to "vanilla" Minecraft by screwing up where my mods had been placed. Another oil geyser! I get enough energy from the sun so that I'll never really need to use oil for fuel, but it's still nice to see, and will definitely be collected in the future.

While doing work around the village underground at night, I recently heard the warehouse macerator wind to a stop due to lack of energy. It took me a moment to realize why; the wires powering it draw energy directly from the battery box at the top of the solar tower, which also drains into my basement's MFE, and powers the furnace in the rail station.

I recently upgraded to an induction furnace in the basement workshop. These work like a normal electric furnace, except that they can smelt two stacks of things at once, and they have a "heat" gauge. When the heat is higher, the furnace smelts faster. By placing a redstone torch beneath the induction furnace (or by placing a redstone switch on the top, like I have), you cause the heat to build to 100% without actually smelting anything, and stay maxed and ready for when you need it. The downside is that this constantly draws a trickle charge from whatever is powering the furnace.

Because of that, I realized that the solar tower's battery box was being fully drained before each night was over, or that more was being drawn out than was being replaced by the solar panels. Sometime in the future I'll have to set up that "power station" idea of mine below the ground-level entrance of the solar tower, and then have power lines running out to the different buildings that need it. This way the main storage will be the MFE itself, rather than it simply being energy storage for the workshop.