Arboreal Work and More Exploration

New Tree Farms

After building the automated rubber tree farm the other day, and with my quarry doing its thing, I found myself quickly running out of charcoal. In the past I would head off to the nearby tundra and chop down a bunch of trees to fix this. The problem with that was that the chunks containing those trees and replanted saplings weren't staying loaded, and thus when I would return, they'd all still be ungrown.

So I spent some time today to build a new tree farm. This one is set up to house up to five saplings of each of the three varieties of trees, from the tundra, temperate and.. whatever biome the white trees come from. So far I've made it look nice with wooden bordering and walkways, and the trees have been growing nicely on their own. What I'd like is to have grass growing beneath them.. and for that I've set up a "grass highway" from the nearest source all the way to the farm. I wish I had a pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment, but every time I tried to make one recently it came out Efficiency.

More Filled-Out Paper Map

Although I haven't yet picked up a new isometric map program to replace Cartograph_G (as the version I was using is now broken due to changes in map creation and storage), I can still get an idea of how the immediate area looks with a paper map. As you can see, I spent some time today exploring to get it filled out more. Sinkhole Mine is all the way to the right side of the map, and the volcano I found can be seen to the north-east corner.

Partially Flooded Village...

When I went south-east, however, I found something interesting. Another village, this time curiously flooded. There was a blacksmith's shop, and inside I found an iron helm, some bread and five obsidian. After investigating the new village a bit more, I turned to make another discovery. Behind it stood a huge, double-volcano whose side had been cut flat by the creation of the village itself.

...Adjacent to Active Volcanoes

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this village, if anything. It doesn't feel right to destroy it, but there wouldn't be much point in rebuilding it to the extent that I have my home village. Maybe I'll run a set of rails out to it and do just that once I've run out of things to do back home. As far as names go, I think I might call it Volcano Wall Village.

The quarry is still churning away and hasn't yet met bedrock. It's found me a few interesting things, such as a small chasm and a pool of lava that the water thankfully turned into obsidian. The pair of silver chests are almost full, though, and I don't yet have a good way to bring any of it back home. I'll have to cut in a set of rails between the home village and the quarry area, as I'm planning on making another eight or so quarry holes once the first is finished.

A Couple Fun Tech Upgrades

Desert Quarry

It's been a few days since my last update, but that's for good reason. I took another break from working on the church to do something I've been meaning to for quite a while: I made a quarry! Run by three steam engines (off-screen to limit quarry damage in the case of an explosion), it happily mines stuff up for me. With the four chunk-loader blocks on each corner, it even does its thing while I'm back at the village, a long distance away.

Quarry Aerial View

The waterfall in one corner is for good reason: when a quarry comes across lava, it stops digging that area. With water flowing down into the pit at all times, the lava will turn into obsidian and be mined away and brought up into the silver chests set above the machine itself. So far I've gotten a whole lot of cobblestone, some sand and dirt, and a few minerals. Right now the best part are the ruby, sapphire and emerald gems it's finding, as a combination of eight of those will turn into a single diamond on the transmutation table.
 

New Rubber Tree Farm

 I also did some work at figuring out some things from the Forestry mod. This mod lets you set up different automated farms that will grow things like wood, reeds, cactus, wheat, and for people using IndustrialCraft2, it lets you make rubber tree farms. I built everything necessary for one of those and cut down my old farm so I could place this one.

Rubber Tree Farm Underground

It's an interesting system, as it collects all the sticky resin, cuts down each tree and replants any saplings that fall. It's supposed to also collect the rubber tree logs so I can reduce them to rubber as well, but for some reason those never quite make it out of the logger. If I break the logger to check, most of the time a stack of logs will fall out of it.

The other bad news is that I'm out of charcoal. Natural coal is far too valuable to use in the steam engines as it can be saved for things like solar panels and diamonds. Charcoal is cheap and easily renewable. In the near future I'll build another Forestry-mod farm, this one for normal trees. I've got loads of tundra-biome saplings from my trips to cut wood there.

For some reason, the Forestry mod doesn't seem to like the TerrariaTrees mod I use. Any tree that automatically drops all of its logs when you cut the lowest one won't have its logs automatically collected by a logger. Also, no matter what kind of sapling you put into this version of Forestry's arboretum block will turn them into normal, alpha-Minecraft trees. Disappointing, but maybe things like that will help push me to try and update my mods.

To the Nether and Back

Nether Fortress Sighted!

After turning most of my solar tower's panels into three low-voltage solar arrays, and putting an MFSU storage device at the top, I decided to take a short break from technical stuff. My church was still unfinished both in the normal and the inverse versions.

I took another trip to the Nether and did some exploring. Digging in one direction nearly dropped me into the lava ocean, and I was just about to give up on the other when I broke into a field of soul sand and the surface. Exploring a bit, I found exactly what I was looking for: a Nether fortress. The reason for this is that, while the normal church's catacombs are made of marble brick blocks, I decided to make the inverse catacombs out of Nether bricks. I needed at least one Nether brick in order to make more with my transmutation tablet.

The Spoils of War

While I was there, though, I had to explore the fortress a little. Sadly, it seems to be made almost entirely out of the bridge I first saw, leading to a small set of rooms that had a Blaze spawner. I'm not a big fan of Blazes if only because of how tough they can be to fight with you don't have snowballs. I was able to kill enough to bring a single blaze rod back home with me, though, and added it to the chest filled with the rest of the mob drops I've collected since I started this world.

Construction on the Inverse Catacombs Begins

When I got back home, I turned a few stacks of sand into Nether bricks at a four-to-one ratio. Thankfully, the inverse church itself will be made out of basalt cobblestone, which is a fair bit less expensive to create. Interestingly enough, soul sand is worth 49 transmutation energy apiece!

I know it's a small update, but I had gone a few days without taking screenshots for the blog and I wanted to put something up. It can sometimes be tough to find things interesting enough to take screenshots of, but I'll do my best for the few of you who still read this.

Love, Thy Name is Transmutation Tablet

Church Catacombs - Mostly Finished

I spent a moment of lull at work today brainstorming about the church, the catacombs, and the hidden nether portal. Struck by a moment of inspiration, I have an amazing plan in the works to make the secret nether portal area even more grand.

Secret Passage - Closed

But for that, I knew I'd need a lot of basalt, and so I went to the volcano to collect some. Even with another volcano close-by, I was still struck by a feeling of remorse as I began to peel away layers of the dark stone. These were the first volcanoes I had ever seen in this world, and I was starting to ruin them.

Secret Passage - Opened

I sat a while and thought about an easy way to get material. My original plan was to make a quarry to collect cobblestone for me, but even that was prohibitively expensive at the moment. That's when I remembered the transmutation tablet.


The Transmutation Tablet is part of the Equivalent Exchange mod. This mod is all about alchemy, and a major facet of it is this very tablet. Things you put into it are "learned" by it. Each item you place also has an "EMC" value. For instance, mossy cobblestone has an EMC of 128, whereas sand has a value of 1. With this tablet you can easily turn any vanilla Minecraft item (and quite a few mod-based items) into other things, as long as you can meet the requirements.

Upgraded Machine Shop

While playing on Wickydoo's SMP server in the past, this mod had a way of allowing people to grief, either on purpose or by accident. And with the tablet, it removed most urge for people to go out and actually search for things. They'd just borrow one from a friend, pop it in so the tablet would learn it, and then create it their own way. Me and Cadloas had a massive read farm that allowed us to quickly meet the EMC requirement of anything we needed to make, even things as expensive as diamonds.

I came to the decision to use a transmutation tablet grudgingly. I don't want to ruin the game for myself, so instead I'm going to use it for one thing and one thing only: turning decorative blocks into other decorative blocks. I have a silver chest nearly full with stacks of sand, totaling almost four thousand. Now I can turn that sand into things like cobblestone and basalt cobblestone, which I can then use to finish work on the church.

In order to make the tablet, though, I needed glowstone. After reading a bit about how nether portals work on the Minecraft wiki, I learned that if a second portal is placed within roughly one thousand blocks from the first one, they should lead to the same portal in the nether. Because of that, I built a temporary portal under the catacombs and collected a stack and a half of glowstone dust. Now I can finally build the MFSU I had originally planned to, and start collecting some serious energy.

Transmutation Tablet Interface

As some of you may be wondering, I decided against using the Technic Pack of mods. There were several reasons; for instance, there was no real way to select which mods I wanted to use and which I didn't. I was forced to use all of the mods that came with the Technic Pack if I wanted to use the provided launcher. The biggest reason, however, was just how system-intensive the mod pack was. While playing Minecraft with the Technic Pack, my Firefox browser lagged heavily and my instant messenger program slowed to a complete crawl.

This doesn't mean that I dislike the Technic Pack, it simply means that I'm unable to use it for various reasons. For now I'll continue playing my dated version of Minecraft and the mods I've been using.

Considering the Technic Mod Pack

Firstly, some talk about what I've been doing in NameWorld today.

A) I started playing with the goal to make a refinery and later a quarry, but I don't seem to have enough coal to make diamonds for both. Right now my plan is to collect what oil I can, bring it back to the village and refine it into fuel for later use in a quarry.

B) The amount of power being drawn from the three advanced machines as well as the tool recharge station is more than the solar panels can generate during the day. I'm looking into replacing my solar panels with "low voltage solar arrays," which effectively combine the usefulness of eight solar panels into a single square. With enough resources, I'll be able to upgrade further to medium-voltage solar arrays, which will hopefully draw in enough energy each day to keep things running overnight, regardless of how much stuff I'm doing.

C) The machine shop is still noisy as hell. This made me think of the machine shop me and Cadloas had on one of Wickydoo's SMP servers. On SMP, for some reason, advanced machines like the rotary macerator and the singularity compressor would explode if allowed to reach full speed. Because of this, we couldn't keep them running full-blast all the time like I do. With some help, Cadloas came up with the idea to instead use multiple "overclocker upgrades" in each machine, making them as effective as the advanced versions wihle being safe to use. I plan to use this same tactic to combat the noise the machines make while left idling, but I'll have to adjust how I wire things; my extractor with four overclockers seems to require more energy than the copper cables can supply. I may have to upgrade to at least gold cables, while using "energy storage upgrades" to allow the standard machines to accept current higher than 32 energy per tick.

Now onto the meat of this post.

I've been using the Technic Pack wikipedia for help on a lot of things involved in each of these mods. I've been seeing that the Technic mods seem to largely be mods that I've been using, with a very few exceptions. For instance, the Forestry mod is no longer being supported by the later versions of Technic. I never really used that mod much to begin with, and after skimming the list of things in that mod, I don't know if losing any of them would be any great loss.

If it works, what this means it that I may be able to play a more current version of Minecraft along with more current versions of all the mods I've been running. There are a few mods in the pack that I won't use, but I've been informed that the loader program that the mods use allows you to select which of the mods included that you want to use.

I think I may take some time tonight to see if I can get things running. I'll make some extra copies of the latest save of NameWorld just to make sure I don't entirely bork any of it beyond acceptable losses.

Advanced Machines are Noisy

When I started playing Minecraft today, my first order of business was to see how many diamonds I could make. Each home-made diamond requires a full stack of coal to make, and luckily I had enough. I started making the beginnings of an MFSU - an energy storage box that holds up to ten million energy units - when I realized I had completely overlooked one major factor. In order to make an MFSU, you need glowstone dust. I was holding off on making a nether portal until after I had finished the church itself.. but I can't very well do that without a crap-ton of cobblestone.

Machine Shop Surface Entrance

So instead I decided to move my machine shop. When looking into making diamonds, I upgraded my compressor to the advanced version, a "singularity compressor." Along with the rotary macerator, I realized it had made my basement machine shop extremely noisy. Plus, it was such a hassle to run down the one underground hallway to get to the basement, and that's the original reason I had stuck an extra macerator in the storage warehouse.

So instead, I moved it all to a more centralized location. The machine shop is now part of the main underground intersection, sharing it with the storage warehouse, my basement, and the underground part of the solar tower. And since I was moving the machine shop, I decided to go through with at least part of the "centralized power system" idea.

Underground Machine Shop

The bottom of the solar tower now has an MFE storing power directly from the panels above. The energy is then routed along wires below the wooden panels to the nearby machine shop, including another MFE specifically for tool recharging while I build things.

You'll notice a pair of extra blocks on either side. Those are automatic crafting benches. Normally they're used in conjunction with BuildCraft pipes to take a bunch of ingredients and automatically make a finished product. The reason I made them is because they also work exactly like a normal crafting bench with the added bonus that items placed in it won't be thrown out if you close the crafting window.

I'm still planning on making that quarry, it's just going to take a little longer than expected. The quarry itself will take four diamonds, and if I plan on using BuildCraft's combustion engines to power it, I'll need to gather some of the oil I found the other day, and maybe refine it into fuel, which will require another few diamonds and engines.

I remember a time when I had trouble thinking of projects to do around NameWorld. Now I've got more ideas than I seem to have time for, and all of them seem as important as the others.