Because of post size limits, future updates are in the thread proper. Check the last page for episodes after 14.
Episode 14 - Nerves and Nethering
I wanted to trying building something crazy on top of the Savanna Plateau M. I took out the crafting table in my airship and replaced it with a chest so I could carry more there. I puttered around in my base for a while collecting stuff for the trip and farming. I decided to wait until dawn and see if I could score a few mobs.
Come morning at first I don't see anything useful. Then I notice something skittering along the outside of my fence. I don't recognize it at first, and then I realize - it's a witch! I had never encountered a witch in survival, ever, before, if you discount the ones I flew over in my airships. I'm a conservative stay-out-of-trouble type but even so, I'm surprised to took over a year of play to fight one.
She was pretty tough - it took about 12 arrows to kill her. Unfortunately I forgot to take a snapshot. Damage Screenshots got one pic when she got me with a harming potion, but you can't see her in it.
I hop the fence to collect my reward - a bottle and a gunpowder. No biggie, but hey, my first witch kill.
I head around to the door and - whunk! Something hits me!
Dang it, a baby zombie. Good thing I didn't have to fight him and the witch at the same time.
I board my airship and head out.
My plan is to light up the entire plateau and then build something at the top there, where that odd pennant-like rock formation is.
But I get up to the top and - it's awfully small. Plus it's exactly at cloud level and it would certainly be annoying to have clouds coming though my crafting room or whatever.
But the real problem is lighting the plateau. It's much more complicated than I anticipated and often it's hard to tell where the real edge is or where to put torches.
But worst is the vertigo of the edge. Pics like that look great, but it's really unnerving looking at drops like that and constantly realizing one misstep means Game Over: seven weeks work down the tubes.
While I'm up here I'm smelting Red Granite (which I brought from home) and Quartzite (the local rock) planning to use them for the build. I'm kind of short on coal so I take my stairs down to the lignite layer. However, I hear monsters down there, and lignite is *black*, so rather disorienting. After a little while I decide to abort and start farming acacia on the plateau top for charcoal. Not too efficient, but adequate.
I take the airship out one night (rather than sleeping) and am shocked to realize how much more is left to do.
Eventually I decide it's just not worth it in hardcore. But, I'm reluctant to completely give up on this place, so I come up with the wild idea of building a portal large enough to float the airship through. I have a lot of obsidian ..
I make sure I can actually fit the airship through. It's tight, but I can do it. When I try to activate the portal, however, it doesn't work. A little research reveals the portal must be rectangular. A little obsidian moving later -
Impressive.
Next I go through to see if it's safe and if I could bring the airship through.
The terrain is perfect. But the portal isn't - I only have the standard 2x3. I suspect bad things will happen if I try to bring the airship through, and I certainly won't be able to bring it back. So - no dice until I can build a big safe portal on the Nether side, and I'm not up to that right now.
I build a small shelter and then start tunneling though a mountain behind my portal. I dig out the level I'm walking on as well as the ones in front. As I advance, I fill in the level beneath with cobblestone, but I always leave at least one block dug out. If - make that when - I break through to lava while digging it flows into the dug out area and doesn't go on to the cobblestone floor.
i can block it up at my leisure.
Hakuna matata, man
After about a hundred blocks I break through to the other side. Unfortunately I come out on an overhang so I can't head out to look. I forgot to bring glass (what the heck is with my planning skills?) so I can't build a viewing gallery. I can't see any Nether Fortresses although given they are black objects in a dark cave there are times I've practically bumped into them before I saw them. So I decide to go back to the Overworld and smelt some glass before I come back.
Next episode: gathering resources, and securing a village.
Episode 13: Voyaging and Villages
I had a couple of goals on this trip. First was to fill in the two obvious blank maps. Second was to explore the lands south of the ocean and see if they were small islands or connected to something larger. Third was to test out the new Underground Biomes-texture ores, and fourth was to look for and mark some village.
I made duplicates of all my map so I wouldn't have to keep taking them off and putting them back on the wall. I brought 2 extra max-scale blank maps for the two empty areas on my grid. I could have made the maps at the workbench, but I got lazy and let the atlas make them for me. I also made map markers in green, white, yellow, red, blue, and black. I didn't have a plan for color use unfortunately.
I strike out to the WSW, in the direction of the missing maps. I take a route that covered some areas I hadn't yet explored.
Soon after I reach new terrain, occasional jerkiness tells me that I need to speed up the ore replacement process I'd just added. I'd written the replacement process to produce new blocks constantly rather than store them as references, because I figured there wasn't enough ore replacement to make a difference. It only takes about an hour of real world work, and I'm back to exploring, and now I'm once again going as fast as unmoved 1.7
I reach the area for the new map, cross the coast, and head out to sea.
I cross the entire remainder of the map at sea but shortly after crossing to the next map I spot land.
This was almost certainly the ice land I'd crossed coming back at the end of my last exploration trip, without a map to record. I expect it's an island and try a circumnavigation. It does indeed turn out to be an island, about 1800 block long and about 600 wide. It's almost entirely snowy, except for a small forest. It's nice to see Climate Control generating the kind of land variety I was striving for - both large continents (my spawn) and substantive islands, right next to each other.
I reach almost to the edge of the map, and then head south. I take a route next to the one I'd taken on the last trip to expand my explorations. The land I'd found in the very southwest turns out to be the tip of what it's attached to - I basically find only the offshore islands.
At the corner I turn east. My plan now is to run more or less along the south end of my map, to see what my maps have reached. This will complement my earlier explorations, which were largely determining the coast.
The large south land turns out to have a lot of snowy too. The vanilla climate-smoothing algorithms have a bias towards snowy, and that's showing up here. My next modding goal is a revision of Climate Control, and I'm going to fix that bias, among other things.
About halfway across the southern landmass, I need to stop for the night. I've been at sea mostly, so I've been able to explore through the night, but now I'm on land and I don't want to zombify a village by doing a night flight overhead. Conveniently, I find an extreme hills, so I don't have to descend, *and* it has a coal deposit I can use to take a pic of the new UB ores (coal in this case):
In the morning when I try to launch, I discover a problem: I can't launch the airship. After a while I figure out that Archimedes' Ships is trying to add the snow to the airship. After digging up a few blocks of snow, I can launch and resume my trip.
Here's a nice extreme hills formation, actually off to the south of the map.
I finally reach the east coast of the southern landmass. The bottom of my maps has been solid land all the way across, so while I don't know how big it is, I do know I've only seen part of a substantially larger landmass.
Now I decide to head back to the village I'd found on the map 1 south and 1 west of my spawn map. I cross the ocean back to my home continent, trying to fill out the map as I go.
I reach the village and realize I don't have any color that seems good for a village. Actually grey (for stone) seems appealing, and I could have made some, but I didn't. After a while I pick black.
Now I head off to the northeast to fill out my maps and look for more villages. I find no more that day, but when I stop, I'm in a meadow with horses.
In the morning I muse over a good color for horses, decide I don't have one, and use red.
I explore eastward, and then head south to get a little more of the coast. After a while I move back inland. I spot a village, and then realize I've not been paying attention to the clock and that I don't have time to bed down for the night (it takes a while to descend, dismount, and get a bed placed). Annoyed, I float back away from the village and go AFK for the night.
In the morning I head back to the village and mark it.
The village is right next to a swamp and a forest, which makes it seem pretty functional, and less "plopped down" than most villages.
Here you can see the marker on the map for the village.
From the village I follow the curve of the explored area up to the north coast. From there I cross over to my spawn map and work on filling in the last unexplored land areas on my spawn map. Again I find a village near dusk but this time I just barely have enough time to get down, get out, place my bed, and get to sleep.
In the morning I mark this village too. It's very small but it does have both a priest and a librarian.
A nearby mesa makes a nice backdrop for my airship.
I head back home and make copies of my two new maps for my map wall. Here's the big picture of my map wall.
You can see my spawn continent (which extends to the northwest an unknown distance, the southern landmass (which likewise extends to the south), the ice island I found on this trip, and the fringe of something in the southwest. On the whole, an interesting map, with a variety of landmasses and oceans that seem like oceans without being endless.
The markers are hard to see at that scale, so here's a closer view showing the white marker for my base, the green marker where I hunted slimes, the red marker for those horses I just saw on the left, and the black marker for the villages I marked; the first on the bottom, the second southeast of the horses, and the third in the desert in the upper right.
Up next: A mountain aerie.
Episode 12: Swamp Slime Suits Spiral Staircases
Part of the purpose of this expedition was to test the new marker features in ExplorerCraft. I placed a white marker in my base and here it is visible on my map wall.
Actually, kind of redundant here, since there's a icon for the item frame containing the map too.
My plan was to go afk in my airship about 32 blocks above the ground. At that distance slimes don't despawn but other mobs do, so I could get a nice enhancement of slime presence. I bring a lot of dirt for making a spawning floor out of part of the water regions. I plan to spend the days digging clay, as I rather like hardened clay as a building material.
Looking around for a good spot I spot this Swamp M, which is basically swamp hills.
I find a large water area and start putting in a spawning floor. Of course I'll already be getting spawns from the land but I'd like more.
I mark the area for my spawning floor with a green marker (for slime, of course). This will make it easy to find again, and shows where this is for the journal.
I spend three days there chopping slimes in the morning, digging clay in the afternoon, and eating dinner IRL while my character floats in the air at night. After three days I had 41 slime balls, which wasn't enough to get to bedrock. I should have stayed to get another 20 or so but I was really itching to work on the elevator. So I head home to test a sticky piston spiral elevator.
With my first elevator try I'd found that the pistons and redstone for the top few steps intrude into the room and look bad. This is a sort of entrance hall, so that's undesirable, and I decide to have the elevator end in a basement, with a short ladder to reach the main floor.
I connect the ladder from the elevator to the ladder to the upper floors and it's acceptably unobtrusive. This time it works! However, it's a lot of work to build. This design needs a 6x6 column with picky redstone placement so there's a lot of tedium. I eventually get it to a routine but it's still slow going.
Eventually I use up all my slime balls and now regret not having gotten enough on my first trip. I head back at night figuring I'll still get enough slimes in the morning but actually there are none except for one apparently in a cave underneath the water underneath my spawning floor (based on a squelching noise with no surface slimes). So I hang out another night and *still* enough up a bit short.
I do find my first red mushrooms. Not that I need the mushroom stew at this stage but it does sate my completist instincts.
After a third night I finally have enough slime balls but I have some time in the afternoon I use to dig down and find the cave where the squelching had come from. I find and kill the slime, silencing the annoying noise.
The cave has two branches so I elect not to explore (this is hardcore, after all).
Back home I head down to finish the elevator. It works, and it's fun to ride. Here's a video (no sound).
Of course I need a way down to match my way up. I decide to build a dropshaft. The last part of my existing stair down is actually a ladder shaft and I consider just extending that, but when I check the coordinates I find it would come up in a tidal pool outside my secured area so that's a no go. I decide to build a new dropshaft also from my entrance hall. At first I'm going through what had been my first attempt at a piston elevator and it's a bit tricky dealing with the voids I'd left.
After a while, though, I reach virgin rock and it's straightforward from there on.
A view up from the bottom of my dropshaft, still fully laddered.
At the bottom, I adjust my stair entrance a bit. I try a pressure plate activation system, but the piston rips it up. I try putting the piston at head level but then it does me damage. That's not actually a problem, but it seems wrong. So I go back to a button, although I relocate it so when I reach the top I'm facing towards the ladder up.
I try ripping out some of the ladders so I actually drop in my dropshaft, but I quickly find that I can hit ladders if some are missing. That could kill me if the drop is long enough, so I leave a ladder every 10 blocks or so. At the bottom I put a splash landing. If the splash landing proves safe enough, I'll eventually take out all the ladders. For now, though, it still takes only a few seconds even with a couple ladders on the way down.
Next episode: Back to exploring.
Episode 11: Piston Problems and Perilous Passages
My son recently got a book on Redstone in Minecraft (I suspect to build better TNT cannons). Well, he got bored of it pretty quickly but I was inspired. I decided I wanted to try to build a piston elevator down to my mining area. I figured I'd put in a splashlanding dropshaft to get down.
I started with a short spiral staircase about six blocks long, which would put me onto my existing staircase.
The wiring was very complicated due to the need to go around the staircase. I did eventually get it done and it *kind* of seemed to work - sometimes I'd go to the top, but sometimes a piston would miss and I'd get stuck.
I ran out of iron so I decided to go down for some mining. I wanted to try to push further out to the north and west, hoping for more stones to work with.
North I had long been blocked by a cave. My current entrance was next to lava so I dug a few blocks to the east and tried to go around it. I re-entered the cave but at a safer spot so I took the risk of going in.
It was huge. There was no way I was getting around it.
There were many side passages, but with a lot of light from multiple lava pools and no mob sounds I risked going further in to see if I could find a way past and make a safe mine on the other side.
No dice. The cave complex just went on and on.
Inevitably I did eventually get jumped. I managed to dispatch him after some fumbling around with my hot bar keys but I had no idea where he had come from so I figured discretion was the better part of valor and retreated to my branch mines.
Next I tried going around to the west of the cave but there, also, I hit more of presumably linked caves.
So, I decided to try going to the west. I went to the west cave I'd lit up a while back and mined west from there. Shortly:
*Another* giant multi branching cave with lava pools. *And* this one has a spawner too. Oh joy.
I head back and mine a half-stack of obsidian from one of the pools in the west cave. I'm thinking about trying for the Nether soon and I want to have the materials ready.
Between what I'd collected exploring the cave and a bunch of iron I'd left smelting downstairs I now have a full stack of iron so I headed back up to expand the elevator. Now, though, the elevator doesn't work worth toot. I get 4 to 6 steps up on average before a piston misses and I get stuck. In desperation I give up on doing my own design and pull one from the internet (Ethos')
The wiring is much simpler with his design, thanks to some redstone tricks I hadn't known about. But - it still doesn't work. *Once*, just once, it manages to push me all the way to the top but for dozens and dozens of times I get 0-8 steps up and get stuck. I spend about 2 hours trying to rebuild, adding small objects as guides, adding buttons in the middle to resume, adjusting timings, etc.. Nothing works. I never get the one successful trip again.
I've been hearing some annoying spider noises. Outside, I can't find anything, but I check the enchantment room and -
Aha! More string! I may have to put in a collar beneath the top floor to keep these pests out in the future, though.
More research on the internet showed me some piston designs using sticky pistons to move blocks into the stairs rather than using the pistons themselves to push. I want to give that I try, but first, I need some slime balls. So:
Next episode: Swamp Slime!
Episode 10: Over the Ocean
I decided it was time to explore the oceans to see what ocean crossings were like and what was on the other side. I was hoping for some smaller islands to show Climate Control at work.
I hopped in my airship and set off from my base to the southeast. My plan was to head to the east edge of my south map, head to the bottom, and cross into the map south of that. I'd head to the bottom of that and then head west along the bottom of that map and the maps west of it. I'd make three new maps and then head north to fill in the gap 1 map south and 2 maps west of spawn. Of course, I'd revise my plans to deal with any land I found.
I cross to the south map and find only ocean along the east edge. Although Climate Control can make islands far smaller than the typical continents from vanilla, the smallest it makes rarely fits on a single map. So, it's very unlikely there's any substantive land between here and the continent up on the upper left.
I cross to the next map to the south, and go the entire western edge of that, still at sea. I turn west at the southeast corner and cover most of the south edge as well. But, as I near the east edge:
Land Ho! My total ocean crossing distance has been about 7000 blocks, and would have taken about 15 minutes on a boat. From my experience, this is longer than average for Climate Control, but not unusual. Although I took a turn, that doesn't significantly affect my chance of hitting a new random land, so this is the sort of distance you'd go with the Climate Control defaults if you just barged out in a random direction across the ocean. It's much more forgiving than 1.6, where a somewhat longer-than-usual random crossing might be nearly an hour of travel.
I head roughly northwest along the coast and see the sunrise over this coastal islands. Shortly after this I cross to the next map to the west.
I head inland for a while and encounter this Roofed Forest M. These are pretty cool to look at from the air. However, I decide I want to find the coastline on this trip and head north to the coast. The coast heads roughly to the west, about halfway up the map
Here's a shot as I approach an Extreme Hills biome. You can see the map and the rough shape of this landmass.
I cross to the next map to the west (now two maps south and two maps west of spawn. The coast turns due south.
After a while I encounter my first Mega Taiga in this world. The big disadvantage of accidentally starting with a very high incidence of Roofed Forest is that the incidence of Mega Taiga became very low. Climate Control makes the "uncommon normal" biomes of Mesa, Jungle, and Mega Taiga substantially easier to find by unclustering them and I'd long ago found Mesa and Jungle (both are only about 1000 blocks from spawn). This one is 7000 blocks from my spawn, which is in the range of what you'd see in unmodded 1.7, and on the long end at that.
The coast runs off the south edge of this map so I turn west over the open ocean. By my original plan I was going to turn north here but I forgot I was on my third map and headed west into the next map. I cross that map, turn north and:
I spot a coastal island, here serving the intended function of alerting me land is near. In this case I'd have seen it anyway, but these islands reduce the chance of sailing *past* a nearby landmass. This is one of two reasons I moved the oceanic islands from deep ocean to shallow ocean in Climate Control. (The other reason is that maps look much better.)
This ocean crossing was much shorter, only about 2500 blocks.
I head north and realize my navigational mistake when my atlas can't generate another map (because it's out of blanks). I stop to check my atlas contents and then mentally cuss myself out because now I'm going to waste about 10 minutes of exploration with no map to record it on.
As I head back I encounter some more land, but we'll have to wait until the next sea exploration to see what's going on. As I approach my spawn continent, I hit some more snowy land but I can't currently say whether they're connected.
Finally I reach my spawn continent and head for home, exploring areas I've missed as I go.
I now have a large enough secured lawn to do a night landing but, as it turns out, I don't need it this time.
And here's my map wall with the new discoveries. You can see the large island/small continent I found to the south and the little area of land to the southwest. Missing are multiple land areas between that and my spawn continent which I found when I was out of blank maps. The areas of land are all fairly close to each other; you'd never *have* to make an ocean crossing longer than 2000 blocks on this map if you were smart about it.
You can also see a secondary benefit of Climate Control - it make nice-looking maps. The climate structure is visible and makes contrasts between different areas while the coastline has a nice fractal structure which is accentuated by the coastal islands and the open oceans.
Next episode: more mining and a failed attempt at a piston elevator.
Episode 9: Back to Building:
After a lot of exploration I wanted to do some more building. I decided to try to lay out the 4-towered fort I was thinking about. I start building another screen for the north side and immediately hit a problem:
The end of the north wall is smack against a steep hill. There's no place to put the next tower.
I consider just building the walls for now but where the south wall is supposed to be:
A lot of extra work to put a wall there and even more to make the terrain look good as well. So, I abandon the four-tower idea and decide to just fence in my back yard. I'll put a screen on the north side, similar to the existing one but shorter since the ground is higher there. Elsewhere I'll just put in fences for now.
I connect the two towers with a boardwalk. The screening wall is under the left side. I had been planning for something like this for a while.
The other wall also gets a boardwalk and where it hits the hill I put in some stairs to climb up. I had been thinking about putting a kind of Hanging Gardens up there. The top turns out to be rather small because
It's split by a river.
I still like the idea of having a retreat/garden up there but securing it will be a fair amount of work so I decide to put that off.
I have been having a really serious chicken leakage problem. My chickens are rapidly disappearing out of my chicken coop. I have no idea why; I assume it's a bug. While building the back fence, I find a lot hanging out just outside of my planned yard and lure them back in.
At the very least, now that I've got a full enclosure of my yard chickens that escape the coop will still be in the enclosure. It works from a gaming perspective although having all these clucking chickens wandering about can really disrupt the mood sometimes.
Night falls and I'm ready to test the screen. It works; I can fire through it although the mobs tend not to hang out in front of it so I don't get as many chances as I'd like. I don't get the mobs I'd like to see, though; I get this:
*Two* endermen. Yow. I can *probably* take them but it's hardcore and my ceilings are high - nah.
I do manage to score two spiders.
Here's my finished enclosure, lit up:
The south fence (across) goes up to a slope down. The west fence (to the right) is set back a little because the hill (off to my right in this pic) is not secure and i don't want mobs jumping down into my enclosure. When I secure the hill I'll move the west fence out.
Come dawn I have a skeleton hiding under a tree in the east yard so I run out and kill him.
Here's the walkway going up the hill to my eventual retreat.
I have some vague notions of putting a main building in between the towers. The idea of a large main house with two wings and a broad walkway toward the sea was one of my earliest ideas. However, I haven't any compelling ideas for the central building and, currently, I don't need the space. So, it stays as is for now.
Next episode: Sea exploration.
Episode 8: Airship Aloft!
I have a plan for a basic airship - a zeppelin-shaped ballon with a small gondola beneath. I want to build a model first to get an idea what it will look like. I'll model the balloon with wool as balloon colors are made by the wool they come from and once made can't be changed. So, I need to decide what colors I want before I make the balloons.
I start with a basic gondola. In front is a helm and gauges, Archimedes' Ships items you need for any ship. In back is a crafting table. Archimedes ships convert into entities when moving and you can't use the blocks then; but you can stop the ship and convert it back into blocks. This could be used midair except *sometimes* when I stop an airship I end up standing next to it, not in it, and I haven't yet figured out the rules for that. Obviously I can't risk that kind of fall in hardcore, so i'll only convert the ship back when on the ground.
After a little experimenting, here's the wool balloon model I settle on. This is actually white and light grey wool, which brings up the one aspect of the Halcyon Days resource pack I'm not entirely happy with. It converts the candy colors of wool to heavily greyed neutrals. It's not all bad, because the default minecraft lacks a greyed neutral color set - we have saturated color with wool and brown neutral with stained clay, and I like grey neutral. But, sometimes you want saturated, and I don't have that right now (except for the balloons but they are expensive at one string each).
And here it is with actual balloons. With the wool grey had been too dark but in balloons the light grey is too light. Oh well.
I put away my construction supplies and I'm off. Archimedes' Ships would allow a much larger gondola for this balloon but I think it would look bad. For that kind of arrangement I'd want something steampunk with the implication that it's antigravity rather than balloon.
This is definitely the way to see minecraft worlds! The controls work like old-style boat controls - you can look to the side while still going forward. It does make travel too safe, really, since nothing can hurt you if you're out of bowshot, but I haven't thought of a solution to that. The minimal gondola allows good views, which was part of my plan.
Initially I planned to explore around at night. Then, I realized while *I* was safe, if I overflew a village it could be destroyed. So I stayed away from plains, savanna, and desert at night.
Here's a nice scene - a mixture of Roofed Forest M (which is roofed forest mountains) and Extreme Hills. I'm not sure how this happened - I would have expected at least an Extreme Hills edge. But, good thing it did! I wouldn't want to deal with Roofed Forest M on the ground, though.
I fly over to the Savanna Plateau M to try an airship landing. Obviously airships are the way to go for a region around 120 Y. The plateau is not fully loaded in this pic.
Here's a view of the top, showing that it's small and rugged. I had partially lit it up on my earlier trip.
It was a little hassle landing amidst the trees, but doable.
From the high plateau I fly home over a strip of desert I hadn't yet explored. I was hoping for a village, but I didn't see one.
Home sweet home from above. Looks good, but I need to finish those balconies.
And here's my map wall. You can see the effect of the default Climate Control settings - all the climates occur within 2K of my spawn but they still occur in large enough regions to give areas (and maps) some personality. Part of the point of this journal was to test Climate Control and in that respect it's working well. The continent-ocean aspect is less compelling; I'm on a large continent surrounded by ocean, not too different so far from what you'd have seen in 1.6. I wish I'd been on a large island or small continent and gotten an opportunity to show how that fits in better with typical minecraft play and maps. But, I did design the defaults for a "box of chocolates" effect, where you can spawn in a variety of different areas, so I shouldn't complain that I pulled a coconut. Of course, from a play aspect this world is great; I'm only (partly) disappointed with it as a demo. In a near future episode, I'm going to explore some nearby sea areas - ocean crossings are much shorter than in 1.6, so at least I can showcase that.
Episode 7: Horses and Hearts
After all that building, I was ready for some more exploring. I decided to fill in part the large land area I'd filled in before, and for that I wanted my horsie! I grabbed my saddle and a stack of sugar from my farm on my way out and boated north along the coast to near where the horses were. From there I walked in to the plains where there were. It turns out there were quite a few - I could have gotten almost any appearance I wanted. But I stuck with the white horse I'd liked before.
I head west to an unexplored area and quickly encounter a roofed forest. As I mentioned before, I'd (accidentally) set up this world with a lot of roofed forest. I moved roofed forest from warm temperate to cool temperate in Climate Control, the mod I'm using for the biome and ocean distributions, because I though too many of the "interesting" and unusual temperate biomes were in warm. Cool had only Mega Taiga, and that's a rarer biome. If climate zones are on, then biomes still only appear in their climate; since I had set roofed forest very high more than half the cool temperate zone is roofed forest.
Initially I try to skirt the roofed forest but eventually I decide I have to go through it. So I head over the tops of the trees, which I'd never tried before. It works OK, but it's a little slow because the "roof" has a lot of holes in it. Also, whenever I get down from the trees for whatever reason I have to build a ramp to get back up.
Sometimes I fall into these "slots" between trees and that's kind of a pain too.
Finally I reach an Ice Plains, which I figure will be much easier to explore. I jump the partly frozen river to cross and -
miss my jump. I - and my horse - go under the ice. I break my way out, but even after I break a lot of ice the horse never comes up and drowns, making that heartrending death sound. I'd had it all of 15 minutes.
Somewhat surprisingly, I don't rage quit (or perhaps I should say despair quit). I mope by the edge of the river a bit and then decide to head south and take a look at a tall mountain a few hundred blocks west of my base, which I'm hoping is Savanna Plateau M.
There's a flower forest that goes right up to the base. Could be a very nice site for a house.
Climbing an overhang is tough so I head around looking for a better way up.
I eventually decide the dirt here provides the best way up. I'll climb the dirt slope as long as I can and then staircase up on the inside. The black strip is lignite, a low-quality coal that Underground Biomes provides. As soon as I start climbing, F3 confirms that I'm a Savanna Plateau M. Yay!
I spend a *long* time stair casing up. I thought I was going to come up in the less-high central area but I missed it and ended going almost to the top of the peak on the left. I also came out uncomfortably close to a very long cliff. I walked around to a place a little lower and closed to the center and cut a less hazardous exit.
The area on top is actually rather small. I'd expected it to be fairly large, but it's not. It's rugged as well and so not the best for a base.
Nice views! Although - unnerving in hardcore.
I climb down and head back to the base. Here's the result of my explorations:
After the depressing horse fiasco, I decided I'm going to give airships a try. Archimedes' Ships needs string to make balloons for flying. The mod allows ships to fly with a low percentage of balloons - only 40% of the ship - but I can't bring myself to build an airship that doesn't at least *kinda* look like it could fly. So I'm going to need some string. I make some glass and head down to the mineshaft which has to have a cave spider spawner. My plan is to put in some viewing window and then figure out a way to trap or trick the spiders.
I quickly find out there's no need. A properly placed window corner lets the spiders get close enough for me to kill them while they still can't get me. Sometime the string and experience fall on the wrong side of the window, but during lulls I manage to get a opening in the wall I use to dash in and grab it. I end up with 38 string, which is enough. I'm ready for my first airship!
Next: Airship Aloft!
Episode 6: Twinning towers
Needing some iron, I headed down to the mines. On the way I tried to make a farm out of my cave spider spawner (I haven't seen it but I know it's there). I put a trapdoor in the wall to see if the AI problems with trapdoors would keep the spiders from moving though.
It didn't work, as you can see by my poisoned health bar. I killed a few spiders, then sealed up the opening and went up for a round of farming.
After some farming, I went down to mine. Part of my goal was to look for accessible underground biomes to expand my stone set. I'd already gone a long way west; now I tried east and south. In both cases I eventually reached a gabbro biome. Gabbro is not my favorite stone because the texture is relatively flat. That's good for modern style buildings but mine are generally quasi-historical so it's not the best. It has a purplish hue and can be good for accents on a grey building but my tower has a red granite base so it will mostly look grey. I thought I'd taken some pics of it, but I didn't. Here's a pic of a large underground lava pool though:
I did find quite a bit of iron and hauled it up for smelting. While it was smelting I started on expanding my base towards a fairly ambitious build. I had developed the idea of a central tower surrounded by four smaller towers. The tower I'd already built would be one of the corner towers. The towers would be connected by a wall and the ground level in the center could serve as a farm.
Like I said, an ambitious plan. I have plans to bail out if it doesn't work or is too hard. I may never build the central dome and have more of a fort. I might even build just one side, essentially making two towers flanking a building.
I had an idea for a screen combining stairs and fenceposts that would stop mobs while still allowing high visibility. On top would be a deck that could serve as a promenade. Initially I was going to build it 3 blocks high but soon I decided to make to go up to the balcony level so I could have consistent levels throughout the complex.
The initial test looked pretty good. I decided to make it 32 blocks long, which could accommodate a dome twice the size of the tower dome, and was large enough to surround my livestock pens. I did lose part of my farm but it was just a starter farm and not valuable. The livestock pens aren't great architecture either but they *are* a pain to move, unlike the farm.
I then started to put up a second tower. A minor problem came up, which is that the ground slopes up on the end of the wall and the floor of the first tower averages about 2 blocks below ground where the new tower was going to be. I couldn't come up with a good plan for having different levels in the complex so I ended up digging out the base of the new tower.
It was substantially faster to build the second tower, partly because I didn't have to stop and think/plan so much, and partly because of practical experiences with the dome (dirt) scaffolding - specifically, use ladders, and put the scaffolding on the outside as far as possible.
I did have several falls, all to the top floor of the tower (so not serious).
The mostly-completed facade looks pretty good. I still need to put in the balconies for the second tower.
Episode 5: Extended Exploration
Back home I put away the flowers and wool I'd collected. I wanted an atlas (ExplorerCraft) for more exploring and for that I needed some leather. I'd killed most of my adult cows so while I waited for the calves to grow up I did some farming, chopped some wood, and swapped out that one block on the top of the dome I'd made a part of the spire.
I made an atlas and put in my four maps, plus three 2Kx2K empty maps, which the atlas will convert into tiled maps when I reach an unmapped area. I wanted four maps but I'd used all my iron. My plan was to cross to the north side of the continent and the try to boat around. If the continent is too big, I'd cross by land to the south side and boat back from there.
Here are my future mounts, peacefully grazing. I didn't tame them yet but they'll be useful when I try to fill in the land areas on my maps.
I crossed to the north side and started boating. I forgot to take pictures, unfortunately. First I boated along the coast on what was still on the map west of my base map. Then I went north off that map and the atlas created another map, now tiling to the northwest of my base map. From there, I crossed into the next map to the west.
The coast turned south and it looked like I had reach the other end of the continent but that turned out to be just a deep bay. Climate Control creates fewer deep bays and peninsulas than 1.6 did (sometimes they got a little ridiculous), but they do show up from time to time. The coast turned due north and headed off into the next map to the north (now 2 maps north and 2 maps west of my spawn). As I was boating along a savanna I saw a really big mountain:
I didn't try to climb it, but it was definitely a Savanna Plateau M. So now I've seen two of the rare destination biomes honestly for the first time in this game (the other being Mushroom Island).
It did have the goofier terrain you often seen in more extreme Minecraft terrain. Supposedly the right settings in the snapshot customizer allow extreme terrain without floating islands and such. If so, I'm definitely tempted to make a 1.7 mod for that.
Heading further north along the coast, I enter a swamp. After a while I find a mountain ahead of me and decide to turn back as I'm obviously not going to be able to circumnavigate the continent. I head back on land, to fill out a little more of the map. I pass off to the south and the atlas activates my last blank map.
Between the more rugged terrain of 1.7 and, apparently, somewhat larger rivers, I'm actually finding river travel somewhat useful. I used to like river travel, but the 1.6 control changes spoiled it. Now they seem useful again, at least until you have horses.
About halfway across the map I encounter a small lake that my map tells me connects to the ocean. It turns out I've crossed at a narrow point on the continent. I hop on my boat and head for home.
The coast heads south and east and eventually heads off the south end of the map. I'm out of blank maps at this point, so the atlas can't make another one. I continue along the coast as I expect I'll move onto my old southwest map before long. After a few minutes, I do.
Night falls but I just continue on the boat, as usual. It turns out I'd get home before dawn, and since I haven't yet got a secure landing, I lawnmower out on the ocean a big to burn time. Once again I arrive home in the rain.
My new maps are all west of my old ones so I relocate my map wall 1 block to the right so it will be roughly centered. Here's the result:
Next episode: mining and maybe some spider hunting!
Episode 4: Enchantment and Exploration
Having built a nice tower, I wanted to start using it. I figured the third floor would be good for an enchantment tower. I butchered the majority of my cows to get enough leather for 15 bookcases. (I did have some saved up.) I placed the enchantment table in the center and surrounded it with bookcases:
Very nice with the texture pack.
Next I made copies of my four maps and used Bibliocraft map frames to put them on the wall. I was pleasantly surprised to see Bibliocraft used the textures from the texture pack. Nice trick, Nunaz!
You can see it looks like I'm near the tip of a continent. I wanted to explore the nearby land areas for resources I needed, and then make a circuit along the edges of my maps to see what the overall situation was. Right now #1 was lily pads for squid hits and #2 was horses for land exploration. I found the lily pads right away:
I'm so close to my base (which is under the interface) you can't see the arrow (also under the interface).
I collect a couple of blue orchid from the swamp. Exploring the swamp I get ambushed by a skeleton which spawned in a lighting glitch under a tree.
His knockback kicks me into a pond but I still get him.
Shortly after this I find the horses I was looking for as well (no pics). I don't saddle one as I don't yet have leads, and I've had horses disappear before.
I cross to the north side of the continent but a roofed forest blocks me from going east along the coast. I head south to skirt it and end up going quite a distance. It turns out I'd forgotten to reset my roofed forest incidence back after some experiments to make sure it showed up. So there's a lot of roofed forest on the map.
Eventually I manage to go east and cross to my west map.
I find an Ice Plains, so I have all the climates within 1000 blocks or so of base. I find my first jungle shortly after that - but with reasonable adjacent biomes. It's nice to see Climate Control work.
By now I realize I'm having inventory problems between 4 maps and a bunch of flowers. I decide to head home, but not directly; I'll head south and then loop around outside of what I already mapped.
I find a Flower Forest with a nice Savanna Plateau backdrop.
When I near the water I find a large plain and decide to explore it looking for a village. I actually walked past one that I saw only in a pic I'd taken afterwards.
But I do eventually find one.
It's small but large enough, although further than I'd like - over 1000 blocks and not near a coast.
From there I head south. The coastal area here seems to be a hot zone - all desert, savanna, and mesa.
A nice view off a Savanna Plateau as I near the coast. It was a little tricky getting down though.
When I reach the coast I get in a boat to head home. Night falls, but I'm on a long boat trip and I don't care.
A good build enhances the coming home effect. In this case the tower helps identify which of several similar bays I want to go to.
And here's the result of my explorations:
Next episode: More exploring, and lots of pretty pictures!
Episode 3: Details on a Dome
Now that I have a bed (2 actually) I can do land exploration. I decide to go back home by land. I strike out north, planning to go just north of the area I explored along the coast. I decide not to try to get these sheep home as I'm a long way from home and I'm hoping I find some closer. I can come back pretty easily if needed.
I try to go inland along a river as I'm low on food and the desert I'm crossing is pretty hilly.
Unfortunately I fall into a hole that wasn't visible on approach, with water pouring in so I can't get out. At first it seems I'm not going to get out and I'm seriously worried I'll drown as I did once in my Thamcraft world in a very similar situation. Whenever I try to dig out a block the water moves me and cancels my dig. After a while, though, I manage to calibrate my swimming so I can dig out some sand and make an escape. But, now, I can't manage to swim and jump at the same time to get out. I dig an adjacent gap and *then* I'm able to climb out. This picture was taken after I got out - I'd been trapped in the water against the sandstone
As I go north I transition onto my west map. I find and butcher some pigs as I'm out of food.
Here I do indeed find some sheep. This is tolerably close to home (which is a few hundred blocks into the map east of this one so I decide to lure them in with the wheat I brought for exactly that purpose.
This actually turns out to be harder than I'd anticipated as I've never travelled this terrain and don't know it, and I can't consult my map with wheat in hand. Plus, 1.7 terrain is more rugged than 1.6, especially around rivers.
But I do eventually get them home and put them in the chicken coop. I can sort them from the chickens later.
Here's my walled stair entrance, along with my wheat farm and cow corral. I decide to start on a real base now, and poke around at some African colonial homes for inspiration. I come up with an idea for two towers connected by a gallery and hall. I don't need it all now, so for now I'm planning a tower covering my mine entrance, with the center on the far side of the entrance from this pic.
I start with a circle for the ground floor. I've used rhyolite for the floor in 3 of my 4 last substantive builds and I don't like falling into a rut but it is nice and with only two stones to work with my options are limited. (There are chalk and limestone layers in the mine but they're too soft for ground level stuff or floors.) I decide to combine smooth stone and brick for a patterned look, as either by itself is a bit monolithic. I really like the effect.
Here's the entrance, a jump up so the zombies can't break the door. I'm mixing brick and smoothstone here too, using the "brick column support" idea. The walls are kind of plain, but I can gussy them up later.
Generally I like to have floor, walls, and ceiling all make of different materials. I try making the ceiling of a mix of oak and acacia woods, using the same "wheel with four spokes" design I used for the floor. In this texture pack, however, they are very similar colors and differ mostly in pattern, so the effect is subtle.
I like views without glass, but big glass-free windows, at least on lower floor, disrupt the look of the building by showing too much of the often-cluttery insides. A solution I've grown fond of is viewing balconies, so doors can hide the inside. I tried a semicircular balcony but that doesn't work with the wood fencepost railings, because you can slip through the corners. So I put in a square one with the slanted support.
I had been considering a domed roof and decided to try limestone. So I go back to where the spider popped out and quarry some more. But very soon
His friend wants vengeance. But I'm ready for this one, kill it, and drink my milk.
I can tell by the noises that there's a spider spawner in those mineshafts.
I suspend the roof on a colonnade with blocks on top of the columns to look like supports. This was my pic checking how that worked. I improved it some later by changing the side blocks to half-slabs.
I build a surmounted dome (less than half a sphere) mostly to save on materials and time. In the process of building it I decided to go for an Ogee dome (pointed top). Pretty ambitious for a 13 block diameter dome, although using half-slabs helped.
Complicated roofs need lots of scaffolding! Time and time again I say my next roof will be simple and easy and then - I go for yet another complicated design.
I view test the balconies and they work great.
It turns out I don't have enough limestone. I go down and try to expand my quarry but I break into mineshafts THREE times. Eventually I switch to the other side of the stairs and dig around the zombie spawner dungeon. This appears to be away from the mess of mineshafts and I can finally quarry in peace.
I head back up and finish the dome with a lot of dome crawling. I put a lapis lazuli spire on top and plenty of torches.
Sunset under the finished dome. I like the way the supports look although the cobble is a little loud close up. But -
I'm delighted with the result.
Next episode: Enchantments and Exploration!
Episode 2: Breaking Bed
In my last update, I said I was planning to start buiding a more substantial base. On thinking about it, I realized I needed a bed first. Little did I realize how much of an adventure it would be!
I went down and mined for the evening. In the morning I brought up some iron I'd been roasting downstairs and finished my armor set. Next day I go upstairs, build a pen, lure 2 cows in, and start breeding. I also collect enough paper for my first level-4 map. But, since it's almost dark, I decide to wait until the next day to set out. I went through a limestone layer and I decide to mine some of that for building, as two stone is not quite enough variety. Unfortunately as I start to mine this charming fellow pops out of a 1x1 hole the moment I cut it:
Now I have buckets, and I've corralled some cows. But did I think to carry around a bucket of milk? Of course not. I manage to kill it, but I was down to 2 and 1/2 hearts and ran upstairs to recuperate. When I was back to full health, I dashed back down to seal the hole so I wouldn't get any of his friends showing up.
Fortunately, the cave spider dropped a string and with the 2 from the chest I can make a bow! I feel much better now.
Now I'm ready to go look for sheep. With my map I make a couple of boats and set out. I plan to just stay at sea if it gets dark. I set out to the south along the coast. As soon as I round the first cape I see -
Chunk boundaries.
I had shut off Climate Control for some debugging and forgotten to turn it back on. And I don't have a backup as that seems at odds with hardcore. I quit, turn Climate Control back on, and continue exploring. As it turn out, I've had a strip of land abut 200 blocks wide converted to sea. It looks ugly, but it's not that consequential.
Unfortunately the coast turns to the west and goes off my map. I can't make another yet, so I turn east and run along the south edge of the map. The sun sets as I'm out there but I don't really care - nothing will attack me on the sea. It's ocean all the way to the east edge, and I then turn and head north. About a quarter of the way up --
A mushroom island! In almost a year of heavy play, I have never before found a mushroom island "honestly" - I've seen them in creative, with AMIDST, and with seeds. It's mostly off the map, though, and is not going to have sheep, so I continue north and plan to come back later.
Well, it's all ocean to the northeast corner, and then all ocean to the northwest corner. At this point it looks like the whole map is an ocean and I'm on a tiny little bit of land in the corner. I head south along the west edge and *finally* I find land. But, it's a roofed forest with overhangs and so not safe to explore even in the day (for hardcore). I try going up a river but my boat breaks due to the location bug. I have to come ashore to launch a boat.
The Halcyon days pack certainly makes the roofed forest foreboding. A much better look than vanilla IMO.
I continue northeast along the coast and find there's a substantial peninsula in the middle of the map which I have gone completely around, well out to sea.
It's actually a pretty interesting coast - but no sheep.
I almost get home by dark - but not quite. So I'm stuck out on the boat for another night. It doesn't bother me too much as I hate blank spots in my maps and I would eventually have sailed around like a lawnmower in a golf course to fill it all in. I just have to do it now. Everything's fine until suddenly about 2/3 through the night I hit a squid and end up swimming in the middle of the ocean. I don't have a lily pad, so there's nothing to do but swim for shore.
I do so and make it in the middle of the morning. I launch one more boat and head for home - and hit yet another squid. Fortunately by now I'm close and I still make it back by dark.
Back home I mine and farm for a bit. Armed with milk, I investigate the spider area and find it has passageway both in front of and underneath where I was attacked. I also build a chicken coop next to the cow corral and lure in a few chickens.
Once I can make another map I use the ExplorerCraft tiling feature to make one to the west of where I am to follow the coast. Unfortunately the coast turns south and heads off that map too. I try to get home but don't make it and spend the night on a sandbar island as one long swim is enough for the day.
Back home I do more farming and mining until I have paper for two more tiled maps. I head to the south map and then cut west to the southwest map where I can follow the coast. The coast stays on the map this time and after a few minutes
Finally! Sheep!
Not a very safe grazing area though.
Finally though, I can sleep!
Next episode - some land exploration and more ranching.
Chapter 1, Episode 1: Savanna Start
A very promising start. Visible trees for wood and a large body of water, which will probably help with exploration early on. Attractive flat beach too. At first I wonder if I've started on one of the coastal islands Climate Control puts in to let you know you're near land, because I seem to be on a narrow strip of land. However, I turn around and see:
Savanna! That doesn't occur on the little coastal islands so I'm on, or connected to, a significant landmass. Savanna is one of my favorite biomes, and the Halcyon days has a really nice texture for acacia wood.
The spot in the last picture turns out to be a good place for a base. It's near ocean or lake in two directions, and is kind of a promontory giving good views of the ocean a beach. There's plenty of cows and wood, although no sheep. I chop some acacias and make a pickaxe.
I start with the starter base approach I developed in my previous journal. Not much to look at, but very simple and practical. I dig a staircase down into the ground and surround it with 2 block high walls. Only spiders can climb the wall, and they can't get down the 1 wide stair. By putting functional blocks (workbench, furnace, chest) in the walls I can use them from inside or outside. I can pillar up at first and put in a trap door jump plate later.
I have wheat to plant by whacking grass as I walk and debate putting them down by the water or next to the stairs. I decide for next to the stairs as I'd have to put some dirt by the water to use it.
Night comes and once again I haven't gotten my walls finished. I throw them up in a hurry and unfortunately have to use some of the wood I've collected. I spend the night stair casing down and it's very slow because the rock is red granite, which is very hard, and I've only got stone tools. I build stairs as I go so I won't get hungry going up and down.
Dawn comes and I head to the top.
Creepers. Dang. Playing hardcore with no iron, I can't deal with that. I head downstairs and wait for them to despawn.
I have to wait most of the day for them all to despawn. Finally at dusk I dash out to chop a tree. I haven't yet found any coal and I need wood for torches at this point.
Continuing down, I'm hearing zombie pretty loud moans at this point. I break through the top of a mineshaft and figure that's the source. I turn back to avoid the mineshaft and keep my farm growing and -
So that's where the moaning is coming from. Well, a zombie spawner will be useful eventually although it's certainly annoying. I go to the other side of my stairs and start back from there.
When I estimate it's dawn I'm still not to diamond level. I head upstairs and it is dawn, and this time the coast is clear. I chop a bunch of trees, butcher some cows, and find one reed down by the sea, which I replant as three.
At dusk I head back down into the mine. I have wood for ladders now so I can build a shaft down and get to diamond level pretty quickly. In addition to the red granite, I find some rhyolite, which is excellent, as that's my favorite decorative stone. I have no problem finding iron, coal, gold, and redstone, but diamonds? Just not finding them. I do find quite a number of caves, like this:
Let's see: large branching area, multiple exposed lava pools, a visible creeper, no enchantments or armor, and playing hardcore. Nope, not going there.
After literally almost two hours branch mining, I was starting to wonder if one of my mods had a bug. I checked a creative game I'd used for a test game and diamond ore was at least present in the creative menu. Going back, I *finally* find a diamond deposit:
Which has - *four* diamonds. Still not enough for an enchantment table. Sigh.
I take a break to check the farms upstairs. Not much wheat but the reeds had grown, so I replant to 9 reeds. Next I knock some viewing holes into the zombie spawner dungeon and then a foot-level hole for a poor man's XP farm. I can access a chest from there and get two string, which is very valuable in the zombie horde world of current minecraft. Unfortunately:
A baby zombie pops out of the hole and I have to seal it.
I do another round on the surface, and then head back to the branch mine. I make a diamond pick and then make and mine some obsidian from one of the lava pools. After another 15 minutes branch mining I *finally* find another diamond deposit. I already have reeds and leather, so I can make an enchantment table. I head upstairs, bringing some stones to roast for a house materials.
I make the table and place it into the wall. Eventually I'll move it to an enchanting room, of course, but for now I'm only doing level 1 enchants. I enchant an iron sword and 3 iron picks, leaving enough iron for a helm and some boots, which I also enchant (all that mining chewed up a lot of picks). And here I am at the top of my stairs.
Next episode: starting a ranch, completing my basic gear set, and maybe some building.
Preplanning:
After a hiatus while I updated my existing mods and wrote a new one (Climate Control) I've gotten all the mods I've got to have updated to 1.7.2 and I am ready to play! This is not my perfect set, because Highlands is still rough for 1.7 and I will need to modify Climate Control to support the Highlands biomes. So, I'll probably want to move on from this world after a while. So....
I'm playing it hardcore!
Hardcore is bad in that you eventually lose your world - but really good because how you deal with the sniper skeleton or zombie horde matters. This way I get the excitement of hardcore without giving up builds I want to keep.
I couldn't find any of the functional mods I wanted to use (Thaumcraft, metallurgy, etc.) in a stable enough version to use. So I'm sticking with a fairly simple mod set:
Archimedes's Ships - Large water ships - and airships! Need I say more?
Bibliocraft - allows the player to create a large variety of functional storage spaces and furniture, along with some building and printing tools. Plus, it looks great!
Climate Control - allows the player to set frequencies of large and small continents and large islands; have climate zones normal, half-size, quarter-size, or gone, and to adjust the frequencies of climates and individual biomes. I'll be using the defaults of universal ocean, a mix of land sizes, half-size climate zones, and default frequencies.
Damage Screenshots - takes screenshots shortly after the player takes damage. For journal purposes - you don't have to fiddle with screenshots during a fight or fall.
ExplorerCraft - allows the player to easily create tiled maps and to automatically carry, view, and update large numbers of maps.
Underground Biomes Constructs - replaces vanilla stone with 24 different kinds of stone, with a complete set of stone products - slabs, stairs, walls, and buttons.
I'll be using Halcyon Days, a 32 x 32 resource pack, because I can't stand that hideous orange wood in Savannas, one of my favorite biomes. It does look good.
As the name implies, this is mostly going to be about exploring an interesting world. I'll be doing some building, because I'm me. Since it's hardcore, fighting, caving, and Nether trips will be minimized.
Nice architecture, man. What stone are your towers built out of? I forgot.
The walls are Red Granite smoothstone. The columns and arches holding up the roof are Red Granite cobble, and the brick columns embedded in the tower walls are Red Granite brick. The dome is Limestone and the 1st and 3rd floors are a mix of Rhyolite smoothstone and brick.
This is all with 32x32 textures from the Order. With the 16x16 textures, Red Granite is pretty similar, but Limestone is light brown rather than off-white and Rhyolite is a greenish-brown rather than a dark multicolor patten. If I'd been working with the 16x16 textures I'd have used Chalk rather than Limestone for the roof (Chalk is also present in my mine.) I don't know what I would have done for the floors.
A side comment: In some ways it seems odd that different textures sometimes differ a lot in packs, but it's actually pretty realistic in a sense. Many of these stones come in a very wide variety of colors and patterns in the real world.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Ah, nice. I could never survive with Underground Biomes - I would never be able to find anything!
To me, one of the best parts of UB is figuring out how to use what I have. I rarely go looking for specific stones. For example, with my Byzantine Basilica build, I was originally planning to have a blue roof. But, I hadn't yet found any blue schist, so I ended up with a green roof instead. And I learned how nice Red Granite smoothstone walls can look in my Highlands/UB world when I decided the Andesite I had on-site wasn't quite what I wanted and was thinking about what stones I'd seen nearby.
Generally I find once I have three different kinds of stones I can always do something cool.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
There were quite a few going for a while, and there are still some going. Zbakkar has commented on a lot of them and you could use find posts on his profile to find some that have fallen back into the archives (including his own extensive one.)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
You said you only wanted to use mods you found to be stable enough. Do you know if the 1.6 version the airship mod is fairly stable or only the 1,7 version? I'm removing Oceancraft from my modpack (having too many issues with it to be able to use it for anything, so it's basically junk at this point) and I'd like to try out this one. That airship look like a fun build.
Episode 14 - Nerves and Nethering
I wanted to trying building something crazy on top of the Savanna Plateau M. I took out the crafting table in my airship and replaced it with a chest so I could carry more there. I puttered around in my base for a while collecting stuff for the trip and farming. I decided to wait until dawn and see if I could score a few mobs.
Come morning at first I don't see anything useful. Then I notice something skittering along the outside of my fence. I don't recognize it at first, and then I realize - it's a witch! I had never encountered a witch in survival, ever, before, if you discount the ones I flew over in my airships. I'm a conservative stay-out-of-trouble type but even so, I'm surprised to took over a year of play to fight one.
She was pretty tough - it took about 12 arrows to kill her. Unfortunately I forgot to take a snapshot. Damage Screenshots got one pic when she got me with a harming potion, but you can't see her in it.
I hop the fence to collect my reward - a bottle and a gunpowder. No biggie, but hey, my first witch kill.
I head around to the door and - whunk! Something hits me!
Dang it, a baby zombie. Good thing I didn't have to fight him and the witch at the same time.
I board my airship and head out.
My plan is to light up the entire plateau and then build something at the top there, where that odd pennant-like rock formation is.
But I get up to the top and - it's awfully small. Plus it's exactly at cloud level and it would certainly be annoying to have clouds coming though my crafting room or whatever.
But the real problem is lighting the plateau. It's much more complicated than I anticipated and often it's hard to tell where the real edge is or where to put torches.
But worst is the vertigo of the edge. Pics like that look great, but it's really unnerving looking at drops like that and constantly realizing one misstep means Game Over: seven weeks work down the tubes.
While I'm up here I'm smelting Red Granite (which I brought from home) and Quartzite (the local rock) planning to use them for the build. I'm kind of short on coal so I take my stairs down to the lignite layer. However, I hear monsters down there, and lignite is *black*, so rather disorienting. After a little while I decide to abort and start farming acacia on the plateau top for charcoal. Not too efficient, but adequate.
I take the airship out one night (rather than sleeping) and am shocked to realize how much more is left to do.
Eventually I decide it's just not worth it in hardcore. But, I'm reluctant to completely give up on this place, so I come up with the wild idea of building a portal large enough to float the airship through. I have a lot of obsidian ..
I make sure I can actually fit the airship through. It's tight, but I can do it. When I try to activate the portal, however, it doesn't work. A little research reveals the portal must be rectangular. A little obsidian moving later -
Impressive.
Next I go through to see if it's safe and if I could bring the airship through.
The terrain is perfect. But the portal isn't - I only have the standard 2x3. I suspect bad things will happen if I try to bring the airship through, and I certainly won't be able to bring it back. So - no dice until I can build a big safe portal on the Nether side, and I'm not up to that right now.
I build a small shelter and then start tunneling though a mountain behind my portal. I dig out the level I'm walking on as well as the ones in front. As I advance, I fill in the level beneath with cobblestone, but I always leave at least one block dug out. If - make that when - I break through to lava while digging it flows into the dug out area and doesn't go on to the cobblestone floor.
i can block it up at my leisure.
Hakuna matata, man
After about a hundred blocks I break through to the other side. Unfortunately I come out on an overhang so I can't head out to look. I forgot to bring glass (what the heck is with my planning skills?) so I can't build a viewing gallery. I can't see any Nether Fortresses although given they are black objects in a dark cave there are times I've practically bumped into them before I saw them. So I decide to go back to the Overworld and smelt some glass before I come back.
Next episode: gathering resources, and securing a village.
Episode 13: Voyaging and Villages
I made duplicates of all my map so I wouldn't have to keep taking them off and putting them back on the wall. I brought 2 extra max-scale blank maps for the two empty areas on my grid. I could have made the maps at the workbench, but I got lazy and let the atlas make them for me. I also made map markers in green, white, yellow, red, blue, and black. I didn't have a plan for color use unfortunately.
I strike out to the WSW, in the direction of the missing maps. I take a route that covered some areas I hadn't yet explored.
Soon after I reach new terrain, occasional jerkiness tells me that I need to speed up the ore replacement process I'd just added. I'd written the replacement process to produce new blocks constantly rather than store them as references, because I figured there wasn't enough ore replacement to make a difference. It only takes about an hour of real world work, and I'm back to exploring, and now I'm once again going as fast as unmoved 1.7
I reach the area for the new map, cross the coast, and head out to sea.
I cross the entire remainder of the map at sea but shortly after crossing to the next map I spot land.
This was almost certainly the ice land I'd crossed coming back at the end of my last exploration trip, without a map to record. I expect it's an island and try a circumnavigation. It does indeed turn out to be an island, about 1800 block long and about 600 wide. It's almost entirely snowy, except for a small forest. It's nice to see Climate Control generating the kind of land variety I was striving for - both large continents (my spawn) and substantive islands, right next to each other.
I reach almost to the edge of the map, and then head south. I take a route next to the one I'd taken on the last trip to expand my explorations. The land I'd found in the very southwest turns out to be the tip of what it's attached to - I basically find only the offshore islands.
At the corner I turn east. My plan now is to run more or less along the south end of my map, to see what my maps have reached. This will complement my earlier explorations, which were largely determining the coast.
The large south land turns out to have a lot of snowy too. The vanilla climate-smoothing algorithms have a bias towards snowy, and that's showing up here. My next modding goal is a revision of Climate Control, and I'm going to fix that bias, among other things.
About halfway across the southern landmass, I need to stop for the night. I've been at sea mostly, so I've been able to explore through the night, but now I'm on land and I don't want to zombify a village by doing a night flight overhead. Conveniently, I find an extreme hills, so I don't have to descend, *and* it has a coal deposit I can use to take a pic of the new UB ores (coal in this case):
In the morning when I try to launch, I discover a problem: I can't launch the airship. After a while I figure out that Archimedes' Ships is trying to add the snow to the airship. After digging up a few blocks of snow, I can launch and resume my trip.
Here's a nice extreme hills formation, actually off to the south of the map.
I finally reach the east coast of the southern landmass. The bottom of my maps has been solid land all the way across, so while I don't know how big it is, I do know I've only seen part of a substantially larger landmass.
Now I decide to head back to the village I'd found on the map 1 south and 1 west of my spawn map. I cross the ocean back to my home continent, trying to fill out the map as I go.
I reach the village and realize I don't have any color that seems good for a village. Actually grey (for stone) seems appealing, and I could have made some, but I didn't. After a while I pick black.
Now I head off to the northeast to fill out my maps and look for more villages. I find no more that day, but when I stop, I'm in a meadow with horses.
In the morning I muse over a good color for horses, decide I don't have one, and use red.
I explore eastward, and then head south to get a little more of the coast. After a while I move back inland. I spot a village, and then realize I've not been paying attention to the clock and that I don't have time to bed down for the night (it takes a while to descend, dismount, and get a bed placed). Annoyed, I float back away from the village and go AFK for the night.
In the morning I head back to the village and mark it.
The village is right next to a swamp and a forest, which makes it seem pretty functional, and less "plopped down" than most villages.
Here you can see the marker on the map for the village.
From the village I follow the curve of the explored area up to the north coast. From there I cross over to my spawn map and work on filling in the last unexplored land areas on my spawn map. Again I find a village near dusk but this time I just barely have enough time to get down, get out, place my bed, and get to sleep.
In the morning I mark this village too. It's very small but it does have both a priest and a librarian.
A nearby mesa makes a nice backdrop for my airship.
I head back home and make copies of my two new maps for my map wall. Here's the big picture of my map wall.
You can see my spawn continent (which extends to the northwest an unknown distance, the southern landmass (which likewise extends to the south), the ice island I found on this trip, and the fringe of something in the southwest. On the whole, an interesting map, with a variety of landmasses and oceans that seem like oceans without being endless.
The markers are hard to see at that scale, so here's a closer view showing the white marker for my base, the green marker where I hunted slimes, the red marker for those horses I just saw on the left, and the black marker for the villages I marked; the first on the bottom, the second southeast of the horses, and the third in the desert in the upper right.
Up next: A mountain aerie.
Episode 12: Swamp Slime Suits Spiral Staircases
Actually, kind of redundant here, since there's a icon for the item frame containing the map too.
My plan was to go afk in my airship about 32 blocks above the ground. At that distance slimes don't despawn but other mobs do, so I could get a nice enhancement of slime presence. I bring a lot of dirt for making a spawning floor out of part of the water regions. I plan to spend the days digging clay, as I rather like hardened clay as a building material.
Looking around for a good spot I spot this Swamp M, which is basically swamp hills.
I find a large water area and start putting in a spawning floor. Of course I'll already be getting spawns from the land but I'd like more.
I mark the area for my spawning floor with a green marker (for slime, of course). This will make it easy to find again, and shows where this is for the journal.
I spend three days there chopping slimes in the morning, digging clay in the afternoon, and eating dinner IRL while my character floats in the air at night. After three days I had 41 slime balls, which wasn't enough to get to bedrock. I should have stayed to get another 20 or so but I was really itching to work on the elevator. So I head home to test a sticky piston spiral elevator.
With my first elevator try I'd found that the pistons and redstone for the top few steps intrude into the room and look bad. This is a sort of entrance hall, so that's undesirable, and I decide to have the elevator end in a basement, with a short ladder to reach the main floor.
I connect the ladder from the elevator to the ladder to the upper floors and it's acceptably unobtrusive. This time it works! However, it's a lot of work to build. This design needs a 6x6 column with picky redstone placement so there's a lot of tedium. I eventually get it to a routine but it's still slow going.
Eventually I use up all my slime balls and now regret not having gotten enough on my first trip. I head back at night figuring I'll still get enough slimes in the morning but actually there are none except for one apparently in a cave underneath the water underneath my spawning floor (based on a squelching noise with no surface slimes). So I hang out another night and *still* enough up a bit short.
I do find my first red mushrooms. Not that I need the mushroom stew at this stage but it does sate my completist instincts.
After a third night I finally have enough slime balls but I have some time in the afternoon I use to dig down and find the cave where the squelching had come from. I find and kill the slime, silencing the annoying noise.
The cave has two branches so I elect not to explore (this is hardcore, after all).
Back home I head down to finish the elevator. It works, and it's fun to ride. Here's a video (no sound).
Of course I need a way down to match my way up. I decide to build a dropshaft. The last part of my existing stair down is actually a ladder shaft and I consider just extending that, but when I check the coordinates I find it would come up in a tidal pool outside my secured area so that's a no go. I decide to build a new dropshaft also from my entrance hall. At first I'm going through what had been my first attempt at a piston elevator and it's a bit tricky dealing with the voids I'd left.
After a while, though, I reach virgin rock and it's straightforward from there on.
A view up from the bottom of my dropshaft, still fully laddered.
At the bottom, I adjust my stair entrance a bit. I try a pressure plate activation system, but the piston rips it up. I try putting the piston at head level but then it does me damage. That's not actually a problem, but it seems wrong. So I go back to a button, although I relocate it so when I reach the top I'm facing towards the ladder up.
I try ripping out some of the ladders so I actually drop in my dropshaft, but I quickly find that I can hit ladders if some are missing. That could kill me if the drop is long enough, so I leave a ladder every 10 blocks or so. At the bottom I put a splash landing. If the splash landing proves safe enough, I'll eventually take out all the ladders. For now, though, it still takes only a few seconds even with a couple ladders on the way down.
Next episode: Back to exploring.
Episode 11: Piston Problems and Perilous Passages
I started with a short spiral staircase about six blocks long, which would put me onto my existing staircase.
The wiring was very complicated due to the need to go around the staircase. I did eventually get it done and it *kind* of seemed to work - sometimes I'd go to the top, but sometimes a piston would miss and I'd get stuck.
I ran out of iron so I decided to go down for some mining. I wanted to try to push further out to the north and west, hoping for more stones to work with.
North I had long been blocked by a cave. My current entrance was next to lava so I dug a few blocks to the east and tried to go around it. I re-entered the cave but at a safer spot so I took the risk of going in.
It was huge. There was no way I was getting around it.
There were many side passages, but with a lot of light from multiple lava pools and no mob sounds I risked going further in to see if I could find a way past and make a safe mine on the other side.
No dice. The cave complex just went on and on.
Inevitably I did eventually get jumped. I managed to dispatch him after some fumbling around with my hot bar keys but I had no idea where he had come from so I figured discretion was the better part of valor and retreated to my branch mines.
Next I tried going around to the west of the cave but there, also, I hit more of presumably linked caves.
So, I decided to try going to the west. I went to the west cave I'd lit up a while back and mined west from there. Shortly:
*Another* giant multi branching cave with lava pools. *And* this one has a spawner too. Oh joy.
I head back and mine a half-stack of obsidian from one of the pools in the west cave. I'm thinking about trying for the Nether soon and I want to have the materials ready.
Between what I'd collected exploring the cave and a bunch of iron I'd left smelting downstairs I now have a full stack of iron so I headed back up to expand the elevator. Now, though, the elevator doesn't work worth toot. I get 4 to 6 steps up on average before a piston misses and I get stuck. In desperation I give up on doing my own design and pull one from the internet (Ethos')
The wiring is much simpler with his design, thanks to some redstone tricks I hadn't known about. But - it still doesn't work. *Once*, just once, it manages to push me all the way to the top but for dozens and dozens of times I get 0-8 steps up and get stuck. I spend about 2 hours trying to rebuild, adding small objects as guides, adding buttons in the middle to resume, adjusting timings, etc.. Nothing works. I never get the one successful trip again.
I've been hearing some annoying spider noises. Outside, I can't find anything, but I check the enchantment room and -
Aha! More string! I may have to put in a collar beneath the top floor to keep these pests out in the future, though.
More research on the internet showed me some piston designs using sticky pistons to move blocks into the stairs rather than using the pistons themselves to push. I want to give that I try, but first, I need some slime balls. So:
Next episode: Swamp Slime!
Episode 10: Over the Ocean
I hopped in my airship and set off from my base to the southeast. My plan was to head to the east edge of my south map, head to the bottom, and cross into the map south of that. I'd head to the bottom of that and then head west along the bottom of that map and the maps west of it. I'd make three new maps and then head north to fill in the gap 1 map south and 2 maps west of spawn. Of course, I'd revise my plans to deal with any land I found.
I cross to the south map and find only ocean along the east edge. Although Climate Control can make islands far smaller than the typical continents from vanilla, the smallest it makes rarely fits on a single map. So, it's very unlikely there's any substantive land between here and the continent up on the upper left.
I cross to the next map to the south, and go the entire western edge of that, still at sea. I turn west at the southeast corner and cover most of the south edge as well. But, as I near the east edge:
Land Ho! My total ocean crossing distance has been about 7000 blocks, and would have taken about 15 minutes on a boat. From my experience, this is longer than average for Climate Control, but not unusual. Although I took a turn, that doesn't significantly affect my chance of hitting a new random land, so this is the sort of distance you'd go with the Climate Control defaults if you just barged out in a random direction across the ocean. It's much more forgiving than 1.6, where a somewhat longer-than-usual random crossing might be nearly an hour of travel.
I head roughly northwest along the coast and see the sunrise over this coastal islands. Shortly after this I cross to the next map to the west.
I head inland for a while and encounter this Roofed Forest M. These are pretty cool to look at from the air. However, I decide I want to find the coastline on this trip and head north to the coast. The coast heads roughly to the west, about halfway up the map
Here's a shot as I approach an Extreme Hills biome. You can see the map and the rough shape of this landmass.
I cross to the next map to the west (now two maps south and two maps west of spawn. The coast turns due south.
After a while I encounter my first Mega Taiga in this world. The big disadvantage of accidentally starting with a very high incidence of Roofed Forest is that the incidence of Mega Taiga became very low. Climate Control makes the "uncommon normal" biomes of Mesa, Jungle, and Mega Taiga substantially easier to find by unclustering them and I'd long ago found Mesa and Jungle (both are only about 1000 blocks from spawn). This one is 7000 blocks from my spawn, which is in the range of what you'd see in unmodded 1.7, and on the long end at that.
The coast runs off the south edge of this map so I turn west over the open ocean. By my original plan I was going to turn north here but I forgot I was on my third map and headed west into the next map. I cross that map, turn north and:
I spot a coastal island, here serving the intended function of alerting me land is near. In this case I'd have seen it anyway, but these islands reduce the chance of sailing *past* a nearby landmass. This is one of two reasons I moved the oceanic islands from deep ocean to shallow ocean in Climate Control. (The other reason is that maps look much better.)
This ocean crossing was much shorter, only about 2500 blocks.
I head north and realize my navigational mistake when my atlas can't generate another map (because it's out of blanks). I stop to check my atlas contents and then mentally cuss myself out because now I'm going to waste about 10 minutes of exploration with no map to record it on.
As I head back I encounter some more land, but we'll have to wait until the next sea exploration to see what's going on. As I approach my spawn continent, I hit some more snowy land but I can't currently say whether they're connected.
Finally I reach my spawn continent and head for home, exploring areas I've missed as I go.
I now have a large enough secured lawn to do a night landing but, as it turns out, I don't need it this time.
And here's my map wall with the new discoveries. You can see the large island/small continent I found to the south and the little area of land to the southwest. Missing are multiple land areas between that and my spawn continent which I found when I was out of blank maps. The areas of land are all fairly close to each other; you'd never *have* to make an ocean crossing longer than 2000 blocks on this map if you were smart about it.
You can also see a secondary benefit of Climate Control - it make nice-looking maps. The climate structure is visible and makes contrasts between different areas while the coastline has a nice fractal structure which is accentuated by the coastal islands and the open oceans.
Next episode: more mining and a failed attempt at a piston elevator.
Episode 9: Back to Building:
The end of the north wall is smack against a steep hill. There's no place to put the next tower.
I consider just building the walls for now but where the south wall is supposed to be:
A lot of extra work to put a wall there and even more to make the terrain look good as well. So, I abandon the four-tower idea and decide to just fence in my back yard. I'll put a screen on the north side, similar to the existing one but shorter since the ground is higher there. Elsewhere I'll just put in fences for now.
I connect the two towers with a boardwalk. The screening wall is under the left side. I had been planning for something like this for a while.
The other wall also gets a boardwalk and where it hits the hill I put in some stairs to climb up. I had been thinking about putting a kind of Hanging Gardens up there. The top turns out to be rather small because
It's split by a river.
I still like the idea of having a retreat/garden up there but securing it will be a fair amount of work so I decide to put that off.
I have been having a really serious chicken leakage problem. My chickens are rapidly disappearing out of my chicken coop. I have no idea why; I assume it's a bug. While building the back fence, I find a lot hanging out just outside of my planned yard and lure them back in.
At the very least, now that I've got a full enclosure of my yard chickens that escape the coop will still be in the enclosure. It works from a gaming perspective although having all these clucking chickens wandering about can really disrupt the mood sometimes.
Night falls and I'm ready to test the screen. It works; I can fire through it although the mobs tend not to hang out in front of it so I don't get as many chances as I'd like. I don't get the mobs I'd like to see, though; I get this:
*Two* endermen. Yow. I can *probably* take them but it's hardcore and my ceilings are high - nah.
I do manage to score two spiders.
Here's my finished enclosure, lit up:
The south fence (across) goes up to a slope down. The west fence (to the right) is set back a little because the hill (off to my right in this pic) is not secure and i don't want mobs jumping down into my enclosure. When I secure the hill I'll move the west fence out.
Come dawn I have a skeleton hiding under a tree in the east yard so I run out and kill him.
Here's the walkway going up the hill to my eventual retreat.
I have some vague notions of putting a main building in between the towers. The idea of a large main house with two wings and a broad walkway toward the sea was one of my earliest ideas. However, I haven't any compelling ideas for the central building and, currently, I don't need the space. So, it stays as is for now.
Next episode: Sea exploration.
Episode 8: Airship Aloft!
I start with a basic gondola. In front is a helm and gauges, Archimedes' Ships items you need for any ship. In back is a crafting table. Archimedes ships convert into entities when moving and you can't use the blocks then; but you can stop the ship and convert it back into blocks. This could be used midair except *sometimes* when I stop an airship I end up standing next to it, not in it, and I haven't yet figured out the rules for that. Obviously I can't risk that kind of fall in hardcore, so i'll only convert the ship back when on the ground.
After a little experimenting, here's the wool balloon model I settle on. This is actually white and light grey wool, which brings up the one aspect of the Halcyon Days resource pack I'm not entirely happy with. It converts the candy colors of wool to heavily greyed neutrals. It's not all bad, because the default minecraft lacks a greyed neutral color set - we have saturated color with wool and brown neutral with stained clay, and I like grey neutral. But, sometimes you want saturated, and I don't have that right now (except for the balloons but they are expensive at one string each).
And here it is with actual balloons. With the wool grey had been too dark but in balloons the light grey is too light. Oh well.
I put away my construction supplies and I'm off. Archimedes' Ships would allow a much larger gondola for this balloon but I think it would look bad. For that kind of arrangement I'd want something steampunk with the implication that it's antigravity rather than balloon.
This is definitely the way to see minecraft worlds! The controls work like old-style boat controls - you can look to the side while still going forward. It does make travel too safe, really, since nothing can hurt you if you're out of bowshot, but I haven't thought of a solution to that. The minimal gondola allows good views, which was part of my plan.
Initially I planned to explore around at night. Then, I realized while *I* was safe, if I overflew a village it could be destroyed. So I stayed away from plains, savanna, and desert at night.
Here's a nice scene - a mixture of Roofed Forest M (which is roofed forest mountains) and Extreme Hills. I'm not sure how this happened - I would have expected at least an Extreme Hills edge. But, good thing it did! I wouldn't want to deal with Roofed Forest M on the ground, though.
I fly over to the Savanna Plateau M to try an airship landing. Obviously airships are the way to go for a region around 120 Y. The plateau is not fully loaded in this pic.
Here's a view of the top, showing that it's small and rugged. I had partially lit it up on my earlier trip.
It was a little hassle landing amidst the trees, but doable.
From the high plateau I fly home over a strip of desert I hadn't yet explored. I was hoping for a village, but I didn't see one.
Home sweet home from above. Looks good, but I need to finish those balconies.
And here's my map wall. You can see the effect of the default Climate Control settings - all the climates occur within 2K of my spawn but they still occur in large enough regions to give areas (and maps) some personality. Part of the point of this journal was to test Climate Control and in that respect it's working well. The continent-ocean aspect is less compelling; I'm on a large continent surrounded by ocean, not too different so far from what you'd have seen in 1.6. I wish I'd been on a large island or small continent and gotten an opportunity to show how that fits in better with typical minecraft play and maps. But, I did design the defaults for a "box of chocolates" effect, where you can spawn in a variety of different areas, so I shouldn't complain that I pulled a coconut. Of course, from a play aspect this world is great; I'm only (partly) disappointed with it as a demo. In a near future episode, I'm going to explore some nearby sea areas - ocean crossings are much shorter than in 1.6, so at least I can showcase that.
Episode 7: Horses and Hearts
I head west to an unexplored area and quickly encounter a roofed forest. As I mentioned before, I'd (accidentally) set up this world with a lot of roofed forest. I moved roofed forest from warm temperate to cool temperate in Climate Control, the mod I'm using for the biome and ocean distributions, because I though too many of the "interesting" and unusual temperate biomes were in warm. Cool had only Mega Taiga, and that's a rarer biome. If climate zones are on, then biomes still only appear in their climate; since I had set roofed forest very high more than half the cool temperate zone is roofed forest.
Initially I try to skirt the roofed forest but eventually I decide I have to go through it. So I head over the tops of the trees, which I'd never tried before. It works OK, but it's a little slow because the "roof" has a lot of holes in it. Also, whenever I get down from the trees for whatever reason I have to build a ramp to get back up.
Sometimes I fall into these "slots" between trees and that's kind of a pain too.
Finally I reach an Ice Plains, which I figure will be much easier to explore. I jump the partly frozen river to cross and -
miss my jump. I - and my horse - go under the ice. I break my way out, but even after I break a lot of ice the horse never comes up and drowns, making that heartrending death sound. I'd had it all of 15 minutes.
Somewhat surprisingly, I don't rage quit (or perhaps I should say despair quit). I mope by the edge of the river a bit and then decide to head south and take a look at a tall mountain a few hundred blocks west of my base, which I'm hoping is Savanna Plateau M.
There's a flower forest that goes right up to the base. Could be a very nice site for a house.
Climbing an overhang is tough so I head around looking for a better way up.
I eventually decide the dirt here provides the best way up. I'll climb the dirt slope as long as I can and then staircase up on the inside. The black strip is lignite, a low-quality coal that Underground Biomes provides. As soon as I start climbing, F3 confirms that I'm a Savanna Plateau M. Yay!
I spend a *long* time stair casing up. I thought I was going to come up in the less-high central area but I missed it and ended going almost to the top of the peak on the left. I also came out uncomfortably close to a very long cliff. I walked around to a place a little lower and closed to the center and cut a less hazardous exit.
The area on top is actually rather small. I'd expected it to be fairly large, but it's not. It's rugged as well and so not the best for a base.
Nice views! Although - unnerving in hardcore.
I climb down and head back to the base. Here's the result of my explorations:
After the depressing horse fiasco, I decided I'm going to give airships a try. Archimedes' Ships needs string to make balloons for flying. The mod allows ships to fly with a low percentage of balloons - only 40% of the ship - but I can't bring myself to build an airship that doesn't at least *kinda* look like it could fly. So I'm going to need some string. I make some glass and head down to the mineshaft which has to have a cave spider spawner. My plan is to put in some viewing window and then figure out a way to trap or trick the spiders.
I quickly find out there's no need. A properly placed window corner lets the spiders get close enough for me to kill them while they still can't get me. Sometime the string and experience fall on the wrong side of the window, but during lulls I manage to get a opening in the wall I use to dash in and grab it. I end up with 38 string, which is enough. I'm ready for my first airship!
Next: Airship Aloft!
Episode 6: Twinning towers
It didn't work, as you can see by my poisoned health bar. I killed a few spiders, then sealed up the opening and went up for a round of farming.
After some farming, I went down to mine. Part of my goal was to look for accessible underground biomes to expand my stone set. I'd already gone a long way west; now I tried east and south. In both cases I eventually reached a gabbro biome. Gabbro is not my favorite stone because the texture is relatively flat. That's good for modern style buildings but mine are generally quasi-historical so it's not the best. It has a purplish hue and can be good for accents on a grey building but my tower has a red granite base so it will mostly look grey. I thought I'd taken some pics of it, but I didn't. Here's a pic of a large underground lava pool though:
I did find quite a bit of iron and hauled it up for smelting. While it was smelting I started on expanding my base towards a fairly ambitious build. I had developed the idea of a central tower surrounded by four smaller towers. The tower I'd already built would be one of the corner towers. The towers would be connected by a wall and the ground level in the center could serve as a farm.
Like I said, an ambitious plan. I have plans to bail out if it doesn't work or is too hard. I may never build the central dome and have more of a fort. I might even build just one side, essentially making two towers flanking a building.
I had an idea for a screen combining stairs and fenceposts that would stop mobs while still allowing high visibility. On top would be a deck that could serve as a promenade. Initially I was going to build it 3 blocks high but soon I decided to make to go up to the balcony level so I could have consistent levels throughout the complex.
The initial test looked pretty good. I decided to make it 32 blocks long, which could accommodate a dome twice the size of the tower dome, and was large enough to surround my livestock pens. I did lose part of my farm but it was just a starter farm and not valuable. The livestock pens aren't great architecture either but they *are* a pain to move, unlike the farm.
I then started to put up a second tower. A minor problem came up, which is that the ground slopes up on the end of the wall and the floor of the first tower averages about 2 blocks below ground where the new tower was going to be. I couldn't come up with a good plan for having different levels in the complex so I ended up digging out the base of the new tower.
It was substantially faster to build the second tower, partly because I didn't have to stop and think/plan so much, and partly because of practical experiences with the dome (dirt) scaffolding - specifically, use ladders, and put the scaffolding on the outside as far as possible.
I did have several falls, all to the top floor of the tower (so not serious).
The mostly-completed facade looks pretty good. I still need to put in the balconies for the second tower.
Episode 5: Extended Exploration
I made an atlas and put in my four maps, plus three 2Kx2K empty maps, which the atlas will convert into tiled maps when I reach an unmapped area. I wanted four maps but I'd used all my iron. My plan was to cross to the north side of the continent and the try to boat around. If the continent is too big, I'd cross by land to the south side and boat back from there.
Here are my future mounts, peacefully grazing. I didn't tame them yet but they'll be useful when I try to fill in the land areas on my maps.
I crossed to the north side and started boating. I forgot to take pictures, unfortunately. First I boated along the coast on what was still on the map west of my base map. Then I went north off that map and the atlas created another map, now tiling to the northwest of my base map. From there, I crossed into the next map to the west.
The coast turned south and it looked like I had reach the other end of the continent but that turned out to be just a deep bay. Climate Control creates fewer deep bays and peninsulas than 1.6 did (sometimes they got a little ridiculous), but they do show up from time to time. The coast turned due north and headed off into the next map to the north (now 2 maps north and 2 maps west of my spawn). As I was boating along a savanna I saw a really big mountain:
I didn't try to climb it, but it was definitely a Savanna Plateau M. So now I've seen two of the rare destination biomes honestly for the first time in this game (the other being Mushroom Island).
It did have the goofier terrain you often seen in more extreme Minecraft terrain. Supposedly the right settings in the snapshot customizer allow extreme terrain without floating islands and such. If so, I'm definitely tempted to make a 1.7 mod for that.
Heading further north along the coast, I enter a swamp. After a while I find a mountain ahead of me and decide to turn back as I'm obviously not going to be able to circumnavigate the continent. I head back on land, to fill out a little more of the map. I pass off to the south and the atlas activates my last blank map.
Between the more rugged terrain of 1.7 and, apparently, somewhat larger rivers, I'm actually finding river travel somewhat useful. I used to like river travel, but the 1.6 control changes spoiled it. Now they seem useful again, at least until you have horses.
About halfway across the map I encounter a small lake that my map tells me connects to the ocean. It turns out I've crossed at a narrow point on the continent. I hop on my boat and head for home.
The coast heads south and east and eventually heads off the south end of the map. I'm out of blank maps at this point, so the atlas can't make another one. I continue along the coast as I expect I'll move onto my old southwest map before long. After a few minutes, I do.
Night falls but I just continue on the boat, as usual. It turns out I'd get home before dawn, and since I haven't yet got a secure landing, I lawnmower out on the ocean a big to burn time. Once again I arrive home in the rain.
My new maps are all west of my old ones so I relocate my map wall 1 block to the right so it will be roughly centered. Here's the result:
Next episode: mining and maybe some spider hunting!
Episode 4: Enchantment and Exploration
Very nice with the texture pack.
Next I made copies of my four maps and used Bibliocraft map frames to put them on the wall. I was pleasantly surprised to see Bibliocraft used the textures from the texture pack. Nice trick, Nunaz!
You can see it looks like I'm near the tip of a continent. I wanted to explore the nearby land areas for resources I needed, and then make a circuit along the edges of my maps to see what the overall situation was. Right now #1 was lily pads for squid hits and #2 was horses for land exploration. I found the lily pads right away:
I'm so close to my base (which is under the interface) you can't see the arrow (also under the interface).
I collect a couple of blue orchid from the swamp. Exploring the swamp I get ambushed by a skeleton which spawned in a lighting glitch under a tree.
His knockback kicks me into a pond but I still get him.
Shortly after this I find the horses I was looking for as well (no pics). I don't saddle one as I don't yet have leads, and I've had horses disappear before.
I cross to the north side of the continent but a roofed forest blocks me from going east along the coast. I head south to skirt it and end up going quite a distance. It turns out I'd forgotten to reset my roofed forest incidence back after some experiments to make sure it showed up. So there's a lot of roofed forest on the map.
Eventually I manage to go east and cross to my west map.
I find an Ice Plains, so I have all the climates within 1000 blocks or so of base. I find my first jungle shortly after that - but with reasonable adjacent biomes. It's nice to see Climate Control work.
By now I realize I'm having inventory problems between 4 maps and a bunch of flowers. I decide to head home, but not directly; I'll head south and then loop around outside of what I already mapped.
I find a Flower Forest with a nice Savanna Plateau backdrop.
When I near the water I find a large plain and decide to explore it looking for a village. I actually walked past one that I saw only in a pic I'd taken afterwards.
But I do eventually find one.
It's small but large enough, although further than I'd like - over 1000 blocks and not near a coast.
From there I head south. The coastal area here seems to be a hot zone - all desert, savanna, and mesa.
A nice view off a Savanna Plateau as I near the coast. It was a little tricky getting down though.
When I reach the coast I get in a boat to head home. Night falls, but I'm on a long boat trip and I don't care.
A good build enhances the coming home effect. In this case the tower helps identify which of several similar bays I want to go to.
And here's the result of my explorations:
Next episode: More exploring, and lots of pretty pictures!
Episode 3: Details on a Dome
I try to go inland along a river as I'm low on food and the desert I'm crossing is pretty hilly.
Unfortunately I fall into a hole that wasn't visible on approach, with water pouring in so I can't get out. At first it seems I'm not going to get out and I'm seriously worried I'll drown as I did once in my Thamcraft world in a very similar situation. Whenever I try to dig out a block the water moves me and cancels my dig. After a while, though, I manage to calibrate my swimming so I can dig out some sand and make an escape. But, now, I can't manage to swim and jump at the same time to get out. I dig an adjacent gap and *then* I'm able to climb out. This picture was taken after I got out - I'd been trapped in the water against the sandstone
As I go north I transition onto my west map. I find and butcher some pigs as I'm out of food.
Here I do indeed find some sheep. This is tolerably close to home (which is a few hundred blocks into the map east of this one so I decide to lure them in with the wheat I brought for exactly that purpose.
This actually turns out to be harder than I'd anticipated as I've never travelled this terrain and don't know it, and I can't consult my map with wheat in hand. Plus, 1.7 terrain is more rugged than 1.6, especially around rivers.
But I do eventually get them home and put them in the chicken coop. I can sort them from the chickens later.
Here's my walled stair entrance, along with my wheat farm and cow corral. I decide to start on a real base now, and poke around at some African colonial homes for inspiration. I come up with an idea for two towers connected by a gallery and hall. I don't need it all now, so for now I'm planning a tower covering my mine entrance, with the center on the far side of the entrance from this pic.
I start with a circle for the ground floor. I've used rhyolite for the floor in 3 of my 4 last substantive builds and I don't like falling into a rut but it is nice and with only two stones to work with my options are limited. (There are chalk and limestone layers in the mine but they're too soft for ground level stuff or floors.) I decide to combine smooth stone and brick for a patterned look, as either by itself is a bit monolithic. I really like the effect.
Here's the entrance, a jump up so the zombies can't break the door. I'm mixing brick and smoothstone here too, using the "brick column support" idea. The walls are kind of plain, but I can gussy them up later.
Generally I like to have floor, walls, and ceiling all make of different materials. I try making the ceiling of a mix of oak and acacia woods, using the same "wheel with four spokes" design I used for the floor. In this texture pack, however, they are very similar colors and differ mostly in pattern, so the effect is subtle.
I like views without glass, but big glass-free windows, at least on lower floor, disrupt the look of the building by showing too much of the often-cluttery insides. A solution I've grown fond of is viewing balconies, so doors can hide the inside. I tried a semicircular balcony but that doesn't work with the wood fencepost railings, because you can slip through the corners. So I put in a square one with the slanted support.
I had been considering a domed roof and decided to try limestone. So I go back to where the spider popped out and quarry some more. But very soon
His friend wants vengeance. But I'm ready for this one, kill it, and drink my milk.
I can tell by the noises that there's a spider spawner in those mineshafts.
I suspend the roof on a colonnade with blocks on top of the columns to look like supports. This was my pic checking how that worked. I improved it some later by changing the side blocks to half-slabs.
I build a surmounted dome (less than half a sphere) mostly to save on materials and time. In the process of building it I decided to go for an Ogee dome (pointed top). Pretty ambitious for a 13 block diameter dome, although using half-slabs helped.
Complicated roofs need lots of scaffolding! Time and time again I say my next roof will be simple and easy and then - I go for yet another complicated design.
I view test the balconies and they work great.
It turns out I don't have enough limestone. I go down and try to expand my quarry but I break into mineshafts THREE times. Eventually I switch to the other side of the stairs and dig around the zombie spawner dungeon. This appears to be away from the mess of mineshafts and I can finally quarry in peace.
I head back up and finish the dome with a lot of dome crawling. I put a lapis lazuli spire on top and plenty of torches.
Sunset under the finished dome. I like the way the supports look although the cobble is a little loud close up. But -
I'm delighted with the result.
Next episode: Enchantments and Exploration!
Episode 2: Breaking Bed
I went down and mined for the evening. In the morning I brought up some iron I'd been roasting downstairs and finished my armor set. Next day I go upstairs, build a pen, lure 2 cows in, and start breeding. I also collect enough paper for my first level-4 map. But, since it's almost dark, I decide to wait until the next day to set out. I went through a limestone layer and I decide to mine some of that for building, as two stone is not quite enough variety. Unfortunately as I start to mine this charming fellow pops out of a 1x1 hole the moment I cut it:
Now I have buckets, and I've corralled some cows. But did I think to carry around a bucket of milk? Of course not. I manage to kill it, but I was down to 2 and 1/2 hearts and ran upstairs to recuperate. When I was back to full health, I dashed back down to seal the hole so I wouldn't get any of his friends showing up.
Fortunately, the cave spider dropped a string and with the 2 from the chest I can make a bow! I feel much better now.
Now I'm ready to go look for sheep. With my map I make a couple of boats and set out. I plan to just stay at sea if it gets dark. I set out to the south along the coast. As soon as I round the first cape I see -
Chunk boundaries.
I had shut off Climate Control for some debugging and forgotten to turn it back on. And I don't have a backup as that seems at odds with hardcore. I quit, turn Climate Control back on, and continue exploring. As it turn out, I've had a strip of land abut 200 blocks wide converted to sea. It looks ugly, but it's not that consequential.
Unfortunately the coast turns to the west and goes off my map. I can't make another yet, so I turn east and run along the south edge of the map. The sun sets as I'm out there but I don't really care - nothing will attack me on the sea. It's ocean all the way to the east edge, and I then turn and head north. About a quarter of the way up --
A mushroom island! In almost a year of heavy play, I have never before found a mushroom island "honestly" - I've seen them in creative, with AMIDST, and with seeds. It's mostly off the map, though, and is not going to have sheep, so I continue north and plan to come back later.
Well, it's all ocean to the northeast corner, and then all ocean to the northwest corner. At this point it looks like the whole map is an ocean and I'm on a tiny little bit of land in the corner. I head south along the west edge and *finally* I find land. But, it's a roofed forest with overhangs and so not safe to explore even in the day (for hardcore). I try going up a river but my boat breaks due to the location bug. I have to come ashore to launch a boat.
The Halcyon days pack certainly makes the roofed forest foreboding. A much better look than vanilla IMO.
I continue northeast along the coast and find there's a substantial peninsula in the middle of the map which I have gone completely around, well out to sea.
It's actually a pretty interesting coast - but no sheep.
I almost get home by dark - but not quite. So I'm stuck out on the boat for another night. It doesn't bother me too much as I hate blank spots in my maps and I would eventually have sailed around like a lawnmower in a golf course to fill it all in. I just have to do it now. Everything's fine until suddenly about 2/3 through the night I hit a squid and end up swimming in the middle of the ocean. I don't have a lily pad, so there's nothing to do but swim for shore.
I do so and make it in the middle of the morning. I launch one more boat and head for home - and hit yet another squid. Fortunately by now I'm close and I still make it back by dark.
Back home I mine and farm for a bit. Armed with milk, I investigate the spider area and find it has passageway both in front of and underneath where I was attacked. I also build a chicken coop next to the cow corral and lure in a few chickens.
Once I can make another map I use the ExplorerCraft tiling feature to make one to the west of where I am to follow the coast. Unfortunately the coast turns south and heads off that map too. I try to get home but don't make it and spend the night on a sandbar island as one long swim is enough for the day.
Back home I do more farming and mining until I have paper for two more tiled maps. I head to the south map and then cut west to the southwest map where I can follow the coast. The coast stays on the map this time and after a few minutes
Finally! Sheep!
Not a very safe grazing area though.
Finally though, I can sleep!
Next episode - some land exploration and more ranching.
Chapter 1, Episode 1: Savanna Start
A very promising start. Visible trees for wood and a large body of water, which will probably help with exploration early on. Attractive flat beach too. At first I wonder if I've started on one of the coastal islands Climate Control puts in to let you know you're near land, because I seem to be on a narrow strip of land. However, I turn around and see:
Savanna! That doesn't occur on the little coastal islands so I'm on, or connected to, a significant landmass. Savanna is one of my favorite biomes, and the Halcyon days has a really nice texture for acacia wood.
The spot in the last picture turns out to be a good place for a base. It's near ocean or lake in two directions, and is kind of a promontory giving good views of the ocean a beach. There's plenty of cows and wood, although no sheep. I chop some acacias and make a pickaxe.
I start with the starter base approach I developed in my previous journal. Not much to look at, but very simple and practical. I dig a staircase down into the ground and surround it with 2 block high walls. Only spiders can climb the wall, and they can't get down the 1 wide stair. By putting functional blocks (workbench, furnace, chest) in the walls I can use them from inside or outside. I can pillar up at first and put in a trap door jump plate later.
I have wheat to plant by whacking grass as I walk and debate putting them down by the water or next to the stairs. I decide for next to the stairs as I'd have to put some dirt by the water to use it.
Night comes and once again I haven't gotten my walls finished. I throw them up in a hurry and unfortunately have to use some of the wood I've collected. I spend the night stair casing down and it's very slow because the rock is red granite, which is very hard, and I've only got stone tools. I build stairs as I go so I won't get hungry going up and down.
Dawn comes and I head to the top.
Creepers. Dang. Playing hardcore with no iron, I can't deal with that. I head downstairs and wait for them to despawn.
I have to wait most of the day for them all to despawn. Finally at dusk I dash out to chop a tree. I haven't yet found any coal and I need wood for torches at this point.
Continuing down, I'm hearing zombie pretty loud moans at this point. I break through the top of a mineshaft and figure that's the source. I turn back to avoid the mineshaft and keep my farm growing and -
So that's where the moaning is coming from. Well, a zombie spawner will be useful eventually although it's certainly annoying. I go to the other side of my stairs and start back from there.
When I estimate it's dawn I'm still not to diamond level. I head upstairs and it is dawn, and this time the coast is clear. I chop a bunch of trees, butcher some cows, and find one reed down by the sea, which I replant as three.
At dusk I head back down into the mine. I have wood for ladders now so I can build a shaft down and get to diamond level pretty quickly. In addition to the red granite, I find some rhyolite, which is excellent, as that's my favorite decorative stone. I have no problem finding iron, coal, gold, and redstone, but diamonds? Just not finding them. I do find quite a number of caves, like this:
Let's see: large branching area, multiple exposed lava pools, a visible creeper, no enchantments or armor, and playing hardcore. Nope, not going there.
After literally almost two hours branch mining, I was starting to wonder if one of my mods had a bug. I checked a creative game I'd used for a test game and diamond ore was at least present in the creative menu. Going back, I *finally* find a diamond deposit:
Which has - *four* diamonds. Still not enough for an enchantment table. Sigh.
I take a break to check the farms upstairs. Not much wheat but the reeds had grown, so I replant to 9 reeds. Next I knock some viewing holes into the zombie spawner dungeon and then a foot-level hole for a poor man's XP farm. I can access a chest from there and get two string, which is very valuable in the zombie horde world of current minecraft. Unfortunately:
A baby zombie pops out of the hole and I have to seal it.
I do another round on the surface, and then head back to the branch mine. I make a diamond pick and then make and mine some obsidian from one of the lava pools. After another 15 minutes branch mining I *finally* find another diamond deposit. I already have reeds and leather, so I can make an enchantment table. I head upstairs, bringing some stones to roast for a house materials.
I make the table and place it into the wall. Eventually I'll move it to an enchanting room, of course, but for now I'm only doing level 1 enchants. I enchant an iron sword and 3 iron picks, leaving enough iron for a helm and some boots, which I also enchant (all that mining chewed up a lot of picks). And here I am at the top of my stairs.
Next episode: starting a ranch, completing my basic gear set, and maybe some building.
Preplanning:
I'm playing it hardcore!
Hardcore is bad in that you eventually lose your world - but really good because how you deal with the sniper skeleton or zombie horde matters. This way I get the excitement of hardcore without giving up builds I want to keep.
I couldn't find any of the functional mods I wanted to use (Thaumcraft, metallurgy, etc.) in a stable enough version to use. So I'm sticking with a fairly simple mod set:
Archimedes's Ships - Large water ships - and airships! Need I say more?
Bibliocraft - allows the player to create a large variety of functional storage spaces and furniture, along with some building and printing tools. Plus, it looks great!
Climate Control - allows the player to set frequencies of large and small continents and large islands; have climate zones normal, half-size, quarter-size, or gone, and to adjust the frequencies of climates and individual biomes. I'll be using the defaults of universal ocean, a mix of land sizes, half-size climate zones, and default frequencies.
Damage Screenshots - takes screenshots shortly after the player takes damage. For journal purposes - you don't have to fiddle with screenshots during a fight or fall.
ExplorerCraft - allows the player to easily create tiled maps and to automatically carry, view, and update large numbers of maps.
Underground Biomes Constructs - replaces vanilla stone with 24 different kinds of stone, with a complete set of stone products - slabs, stairs, walls, and buttons.
I'll be using Halcyon Days, a 32 x 32 resource pack, because I can't stand that hideous orange wood in Savannas, one of my favorite biomes. It does look good.
As the name implies, this is mostly going to be about exploring an interesting world. I'll be doing some building, because I'm me. Since it's hardcore, fighting, caving, and Nether trips will be minimized.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
That "hideous orange wood" is amazing though, tbh
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Did anybody else get locked out of Minecraftforum? I originally planned to post this last night but I couldn't log in until the last hour or so.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
This is a great journal, I love the format. Keep it up.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
It's weird, but I get a sense of motion from the airship pics. Probably because I *was* moving when I took them. But it's a strange optical illusion.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
The walls are Red Granite smoothstone. The columns and arches holding up the roof are Red Granite cobble, and the brick columns embedded in the tower walls are Red Granite brick. The dome is Limestone and the 1st and 3rd floors are a mix of Rhyolite smoothstone and brick.
This is all with 32x32 textures from the Order. With the 16x16 textures, Red Granite is pretty similar, but Limestone is light brown rather than off-white and Rhyolite is a greenish-brown rather than a dark multicolor patten. If I'd been working with the 16x16 textures I'd have used Chalk rather than Limestone for the roof (Chalk is also present in my mine.) I don't know what I would have done for the floors.
A side comment: In some ways it seems odd that different textures sometimes differ a lot in packs, but it's actually pretty realistic in a sense. Many of these stones come in a very wide variety of colors and patterns in the real world.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
To me, one of the best parts of UB is figuring out how to use what I have. I rarely go looking for specific stones. For example, with my Byzantine Basilica build, I was originally planning to have a blue roof. But, I hadn't yet found any blue schist, so I ended up with a green roof instead. And I learned how nice Red Granite smoothstone walls can look in my Highlands/UB world when I decided the Andesite I had on-site wasn't quite what I wanted and was thinking about what stones I'd seen nearby.
Generally I find once I have three different kinds of stones I can always do something cool.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.