For me it's a combination of things because I don't like to do the same too thing too much - I get bored easily, so if for example I have spent a lot of time on a redstone project, I'll move onto exploring and do that for a while (finish filling in some maps, find structures, etc.). But it all comes down to storytelling for me. Minecraft is a great canvas for that, and I tend to tie everything together with some kind of lore (I have a library in my world with just tons of lore I would write in my spare time - this is another avenue I do if I get bored of other stuff, but that boredom is always temporary; I find that more often than not I just get burned out rather than bored of a certain project).
Well, your incessant hostility is quite unwarranted - in any case, I wasn't going to respond, but you completely missed the point of my post by instead just highlighting stuff that triggered you. So for the sake of others, let's explore the important part as it's worth exploring:
If I updated from 1.12 to 1.15 (which is what I did), then nothing in-between really matters - just the result of the game being played and what I decide to do with it.
Most things added since [1.5] have been welcome in my eyes, but some of the things changed have not (the redstone behavioral change in 1.16 being one of them, and then another change that disrupted comparator detection in hoppers sending a single item vertically).
Even though the 1.16 update was very positively received by most, it contains an unwarranted and annoying change to redstone behavior which breaks a lot of things in my world - this means that despite all the good things that 1.16 introduced, my subjective experience would not be focused on this but on the redstone change that directly impacts me. If that change happened to be in any other update, then regardless of anything else in that update, I would not be thrilled about it. As such, it is not enough to simply discuss the update itself - so yes, it is completely arbitrary because your question inquires our subjective opinions about what's in the update itself (as evidenced by your incredibly biased poll). I never played in 1.13, or 1.14, so I cannot offer any opinion about those versions directly, except that I like most of the stuff they introduced which I only explored in 1.15. For me to have updated three versions - I focus on the things I like and the things I do not. This lends to a far more nuanced discussion that has nothing to do with, for example, claiming that pistons were added in 1.9? I'm not sure the argument you're driving at there.
Likewise, 1.5 introduced very important blocks for me - but that doesn't mean I would prefer to play in 1.5 versus 1.12 for example, because I also really like the concrete blocks and observers, and plenty of other things added since 1.5. However, the redstone change in 1.16 is enough to keep me away from it, so despite the fact that I really like the new blackstone (and the update as a whole without this change is fine) - it will not be an enjoyable experience for me right now as I'd first have to deal with that pointless change. Mojang's pattern of consistently changing details that don't warrant changing is annoying, but it is this premise which makes it important to dissect the features of the game itself. FWIW I don't know exactly when they changed hopper comparator detection behavior, but it was somewhere between 1.12 and 1.15, and that breaks a lot of my things, too - so, this is another example of a detail that I guess went under the radar, but it's incredibly annoying because I only found out about it by troubleshooting my contraptions which required this mechanic, that were now broken.
My world is on the brink of collapse in terms of its lore and story...
Enderquin is haunting villagers with hallucinations. Nobody knows what's real and what isn't, but that doesn't stop the villagers from being driven to madness when they see dragons appearing by the swarm to kill them, burning their houses, etc. It's exactly what happened to my character not too long ago. And we now know it's what happened to Violet (who was a long-time regular in the world - she warned us of this many years ago, but I thought she was insane... then she died right before my first visit to the End, in which I seemingly defeated Enderquin. Now we know that by killing the ender dragon, we have actually freed him from the End).
How far does it go? What exactly is Enderquin's plan? The prison of your mind is the blue screen of death which cannot be so easily reset.
All we know... is that the gauntlet thrives with infinite lives. And as Enderquin would say: "no soul becomes one with me."
In either case it's not really a question I can answer because the whole idea of updates is arbitrary. 1.14 is 1.13 with additions and changes. 1.15 is 1.14 with additions and changes. If I updated from 1.12 to 1.15 (which is what I did), then nothing in-between really matters - just the result of the game being played and what I decide to do with it.
If the question is what Minecraft features have been my favorite across the updates, then for me it's comparators, hoppers, and the other redstone stuff added in 1.5. Without those basic blocks and mechanics, so much of what I do in this game wouldn't be possible. Most things added since then have been welcome in my eyes, but some of the things changed have not (the redstone behavioral change in 1.16 being one of them, and then another change that disrupted comparator detection in hoppers sending a single item vertically).
Today's session marks the arrival of Day 6,000 in Quintropolis - and we've got a lot of stuff to check out as we turn our attention to the Inner Circle's development... and getting some necessary build permits from Mayor Sensha.
Does it all go well? That's a complicated answer...
Session 282 - "Build Permits"
Utopia is becoming an essential resource outpost for Quintropolis, and I’m realizing that if I decide to erect another major base in this world, then this is exactly where it needs to be. Sand, terracotta, plus reasonable proximity to the coral reefs that line the coastal desert village which has been designated as “downtown” – these are important resources for our bigger projects, especially today.
I’m visiting the Inner Circle to develop the neighborhood into a full ecosystem. This is what we need to sustain the production of resources here, not to mention provide a good security system for our council.
“Joey, welcome!” Drexel greets me on my arrival. “What brings you by today? Aren’t you busy as always?” A slight sarcasm is always welcome.
“It’s time to bring more life to the Circle,” I reply. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
“Good thing we were able to secure some build permits for you,” says Drexel to my surprise. “Mayor Sensha seemed adamant on providing these.”
“Interesting, did he say why?” He seemed very against that during our last meeting in Session 276.
“All he said was that these would keep the other villages off your tail…”
Well, he isn’t wrong about that. But for him to change his mindset so soon after telling me that I broke a bunch of laws… it’s out of the ordinary, like most things nowadays. We’ll address that later. Right now, we have work to do.
First, gray concrete to complete the road surrounding the central moat. I have mentioned previously that I plan to construct a large golden monument in the center – this will be the last thing we do when I acquire enough gold to do so.
Additionally, I’ve built the base for our gold center out of polished diorite.
Next, I am completing the road to the Council Clubhouse, lighting everything up as much as possible because zombies are a real danger here.
^ This ugly wall that digs into the mountain will become the setting for our downtown shops here in the Inner Circle.
Off the main road, I’ll build a stone brick pathway which will connect all the different shops. This is where many of our resources and farms will be located.
First, we will start with the building that connects Starlight Station to the Inner Circle.
Concrete and stone materials will be the basis for our constructions here. I’ll also try to incorporate bricks where they make sense.
Moving on down, the next focus is on agriculture. Crops and cows are arguably the most important resources in early development, so that’s our first order of business.
Thinking about what will go inside, I’m going with a basic wheat farm and cow farm. This will be a source of leather, which we can use for books to trade for Mending with Boshtok.
Guys… stop being so curious about the outside. It’s not safe out there!
…Or up top for that matter! I’m lighting up the roof of the clubhouse to prevent any unwanted visitors.
Let’s also provide some golems to the clubhouse to protect the council.
A nice sunset view of the Council Clubhouse, with Emerald Hills emerging in the background:
A lot of attention to detail and lighting is a big focus in the development of the Circle – I’m adding little touches like mossy/cracked stone brick nuances to the walls and floor.
…and a little welcome sign for the clubhouse!
You’ll also notice that I’ve begun surrounding the circle… with a BIGGER circle of hedges. This will fully protect and isolate the circle from the rest of the island.
Part of the challenge in this is dealing with trees – I need to remove most of the trees around the borders of the circle to prevent mobs from being able to climb up and invade the circle.
Aww, look at the golems playing games with the council!
I didn’t think any cows were left on Quintropolis Island, but I am mistaken! This is a huge relief.
Completing the agricultural shop, I managed to purify a zombie villager and give him the shop.
Welcome to Jacque’s Agricultural Shop! I’ve unlocked all his trades, posting them on the wall so you can get an idea what you want to trade.
Next on down the line is going to be the circle’s sugar cane farm – an important resource for paper and books to trade with the council!
I am doing a simple piston/observer-based design, but I plan to stack a few of these.
Get out of here, wanderer! No, we don’t want your childish trades.
The top of the sugar cane emerges from the mountain top, but I think this is a good opportunity to introduce a cool roof and give some depth to the Circle’s skyline. We’ll approach that later.
Nice – we’ve got some good resources going here! Leather, wheat, beef, sugar, and paper so far. Let’s see what else we can do! I’m having a lot of fun with this.
Get those phantoms!! Get them!!
How about a crop farm in front of the clubhouse??
Welcome Shadrack, our primary crop farmer – a child from two of our council members rather than a purified villager.
Boshtok tends to spend a lot of time trading out here during the day. It makes sense since he is practically the leader of the council.
Shadrack and his new friend now tend to the farms, and I have built a little house for them to sleep at night.
Unlocking all Shadrack’s trades, I note that he is now the only source of Blindness stew so far. He also trades Weakness stew, but I’m not sure why we would want that.
Another purified villager has been brought into the circle – welcome Michelle, who will be our librarian governing the sugar cane shop!
And just in time… we’ve reached Day 6,000 in Quintropolis!! The celebration is perfectly suited to our work at the Inner Circle, and I’m happy to be spending it with our new friends.
Unfortunately, the celebration immediately came to a sudden end on this day…
“Joey, Joey! Come quick!”
Huh?
“What’s wrong, Staz?” I ask the worried villager.
“It’s Drexel. He’s DEAD!”
“What? How is that possible??” Drexel being dead? That’s not possible! The house is secured with the very best protection. There is no way any mobs could have gotten to him! Especially not with me RIGHT HERE – did he die while I was working??
“Boshtok! Ibram! What’s going on?? What happened to Drexel??!” I ask in a raging fury. Drexel was the first member of the new council – a member with whom I had developed good relations, even if we disagreed on some things.
“Oh Joey, it was terrible. I wish we could have saved him… But there was nothing we could do but watch in utter dismay,” Boshtok is in shambles. I have never seen a villager so scared. They have dealt with zombies before, but I don’t think that is what killed him.
“What do you mean? Could the golems not defend or something?” I mean, they were built specifically to protect them.
“Joey, Drexel lost his mind. We woke up this morning, and he was speaking in riddles outside on the porch. We didn’t understand them,” Staz noted.
“We could not reason with him. It’s as if we were talking to a wall. The man we knew was completely gone. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ibram followed.
“We came back inside to prepare a weakness potion so that we could calm him down, but things got tense by the time we went back outside…” Boshtok continued.
Then the villagers were silent. Staz tried to hold back tears, but he failed miserably.
“I’m so sorry… Drexel had become a dear friend… I’ll be sure to prepare a proper gravestone for him. Can you tell me exactly what led to his… demise?” I’m trying to be considerate and not outlandish regarding the word “death.” But I need to know what happened.
“Joey, he lost his freaking mind. He was standing outside on the porch, with a sword drawn to his chest…” Staz started but couldn’t finish.
“It’s okay, Staz. He can extrapolate the rest…” Ibram tried to comfort Staz the best he could, but it was pointless. These people who had become my friends (with some boundaries) were completely destroyed. I had never seen this before, and it worried me greatly.
“What did he say? What was the last thing Drexel said?” I asked Boshtok.
“I couldn’t put it together exactly. Something about a gauntlet.”
“Yes,” Ibram knew. “He said that the gauntlet thrives with infinite lives. No soul becomes one with me… whatever that means.”
Mojang is against adding dynamic lighting, so any "glowing" effect on players would have to solely be a visual effect, much like glow squid or item frames:
Also, it would be impractical to make non-tile entity blocks, such as wool, "glow" (regardless of whether it just affects the texture or they actually emit light), as they would have to add an insane amount of new block variants (IMO, the "flattening" in 1.13 hurt the game by adding thousands of new blocks as each "variant" is now its own distinct block object; this even includes previously "render-only" states, such as snowy grass or fence connections, which were previously determined at render time).
Maybe a little off-topic here, but... Would this - "code bloating" I suppose - be a reason why the performance of the game seems to suffer beyond 1.13? I've noticed that in older versions like 1.8, even if I have more entities present such as mobs, item frames, etc., I experience far less lag than I do now in 1.15. It's one reason I even started a new world playing in 1.7, because the simplicity of the game even then allowed for far greater performance (though, I imagine it improves more in versions prior 1.7, but I haven't tested it that much). Can Mojang even optimize the game enough now to match those performance levels, especially with the terrain changes in 1.18? It seems to be less likely.
Using the launcher we would have the ability to block further fiddling of the mechanics that Mojang causes, as they seem to just add in nerfs to your gear at a whim just as they did with the combat update in Java edition, forcing players to keep adapting or rethinking their strategies.
There is something very wrong with a game when a developer keeps changing their mind on how they want to design their game, just because a minority complained. Good games don't usually need this amount of tampering to get the mechanics right, once a rule has been set it's set in stone and players can either like it or lump it, their choice, as they knew what they were in for when they paid for a copy of said game.
The combat update was just... rough. I mean, never mind the attack cooldown (doesn't matter too much to me since I don't do PvP), but why do stone axes do more damagethan diamond swords? How does Mojang not view that as being broken? Even with a Sharpness V diamond sword, it still takes on average two critical hits to kill a spider - one of the weakest mobs. It also takes two critical hits average with a stone sword, and only three with a wooden. I get that maybe they want to give Bane of Arthropods some use but... overhauling the damage system to do so? I'd rather just have the useless enchantment that I still won't carry with me. In fact, wooden axes do the same damage as diamond swords, and you can make that within ten seconds of starting a world. That's not balanced at all.
One could argue that diamond swords remain superior because of their durability... but if you put Unbreaking III and Mending on a stone axe with Smite V to deal with zombies and skeletons, then you are getting better benefits at a far cheaper price. I don't really know how Mojang can fix that without completely altering combat again. IMO they should have left that part alone - it didn't seem broken enough to require such an overhaul especially when the old mechanics had been there since the beginning. I think part of the problem is that there are too many tiers and mobs have set health points that still require a certain number of hits, which means that the infinitesimal differences between the tiers and tools don't mean much in the wider scope of PvE combat. So the only way that I see to reduce the number of hits required to kill mobs is either to significantly reduce the damage dealt by certain weapons by half, or increase the damage benefits of enchantments.
Axes dealing more damage than swords but with the drawback of longer attack cooldown - OKAY, sure, that's fine to an extent. But everything else was a slight mess, especially with how much damage they do. (I think it's fine that a Smite V axe can kill zombies and skeletons in one hit, but prior to 1.9 you could do this to most mobs with a Sharpness V sword, which seemed appropriate given it's the highest weapon you can wield - now, there is no way to one-hit kill creepers even with Strength II).
Before they touch Mending, they need to deal with that and the combat tests.
How about a potion that keeps you, the player, lit up during the night?
If you're riding around at night, or even sprinting, it would be great to have a light source that moves with you to keep the path lit, so to speak. Perhaps using glow ink sacs for such a light - either via a potion you can drink or an item you can hold in your off-hand - could be very helpful to that end.
I do believe AFK farms should be nerfed or taken out of the game entirely, except for ones that involve auto harvesting of crops if it uses an advanced redstone contraption so players still have some kind of automation in the game and have an incentive to learn how to use redstone late game.
and I did agree with your suggestion that Mojang should rework the villager trade system so that enchantments are no longer obtainable through level 1 trades, but players need to go beyond the novice level of trading by leveling the Villagers up first before they can get vast quantities of mending books, raising the price of the best trades to 100 emeralds each wouldn't hurt either.
however it's as you say, it's a sandbox, so all I ask here is Mojang show a little restraint on their nerfing and cut people some slack. The ore distribution nerf should've applied to a different game mode of some kind in my opinion, or at least in hardcore mode so that players who wanted the challenge had that option. It just feels too much like a modded game with the way they just recklessly force their ideas in without any thought about how it affects average players, either because they are not very good at the game or some people just don't care for ultra lengthy game design and just want to get on with building and collecting resources.
There are some people who come to play Minecraft after work so they can relax and socialize with friends, and the game except hardcore mode was never intended to be a hardcore game, and I don't believe it should become a hardcore game, game developers need to realize not everybody likes a game that is extremely unforgiving or punishing for the slightest human error. Also if tasks became too time consuming how would players ever get their builds done? then it would defeat the purpose of it being called a sandbox, since players are then penalized for taking the time to mine or farm resources so they can build their cities or castles. A feature like this shouldn't be limited to creative mode or peaceful, and imo it is condescending, to expect survival players to go onto a cheat mode just so they can finish their 3D models. But that's what some elitists in the community seem to be doing, nerf, after nerf, until it becomes non feasible to collect that much, which by the way mending is also required for as it cuts out the tedium of crafting new tools all the time.
Yeah, auto-harvesting farms are great (I use villager-run farms for crops which take a little effort to setup, and then for other crops I use observer-based designs), but some farms like AFK gold XP farms are definitely OP. Why am I getting hundreds of levels by leaving my player sit overnight at a farm? That doesn't make sense, and gold farms are not particularly hard to build. Sure, they can be AFK gold farms, but I support Mojang removing the ability to farm XP from them by doing literally nothing at all (they did mention that this mechanic would be amended, but we don't know when). Current other XP farms like guardian and enderman farms are fine because they still require the player to be actively killing the mobs - I just wish they weren't as easy to build now compared to back in 1.8 for example.
I only just read about the changes in ore distribution and... it seems a bit wacky, though I'd have to try it myself to get a feel for what it's like (I have no plans on doing this, however).
It's definitely a tricky conundrum, in a sandbox game like Minecraft, when you have people with wildly differently playstyles all trying to enjoy the same game. The problem is when players impose that playstyle on others by insisting on changes that take away more than they offer (such as significantly changing automatic farms in every single update because the devs can't decide what is OP and what is not - apparently they think guardian farms are better now, even though back in 1.8 they were a true challenge to construct, as they absolutely should be because of the reward they provide). Not everyone uses automatic farms which is totally fine - but there's no reason to insist that Minecraft can't allow this playstyle, and that any kind of automation is "cheating" - this type of argument annoys me.
Having said that, I do think some things are overpowered, such as villager trading and how easy it is to get Mending books, for example. With a large enough crop farm (or series of crop farms), you can get mass amounts of emeralds very quickly, even with the cooldown (to get around the cooldown, I just use multiple villagers offering the same trades). I also found AFK fishing farms to be broken, but I think they dealt with that. My main gripe is that personally I find Minecraft to be too easy from a survival standpoint, and not because of auto-farming. However, this is a sandbox game, which means that difficulty all comes down to your objectives. I'm not going to insist that Mojang make everything harder - however, I certainly would welcome some changes like the upcoming Deep Dark which appear to provide a real challenge to the survival experience. It would be great if the Deep Dark is at a difficulty catered to players who are pretty well experienced with the game (you know, the players who can beat the ender dragon in a day, since you can do that pretty quickly in this game). I think it should be an area that new players should be afraid of exploring - this makes it a good goal to work towards, as long as it provides a pretty good reward inside.
I'll be interested to follow the Wild Update announcements, even if I won't update right away (since I still have to deal with all the annoying changes from 1.16-1.18 that break a lot of my stuff). One suggestion I have put out (that I may make a new post about) is introducing illusioners into survival by way of woodland mansions, upgrading them into boss mobs. These mobs have so much potential to be pretty difficult challenges, and they would make woodland mansions worth finding if they provide a pretty cool rare drop or reward (since raids were added, there is literally no reason to find a mansion as they offer nothing unique, and as such I have not done so).
But we're not focusing on that today. That's probably just paranoia. This is a huge session focused on the new Starlight City Planning Center, wherein we make some improvements to the bamboo farm, install several new modes for the villager-run crop farms like the bonemeal farm, potato smelter, and modular buffers - and, we begin the laborious process of building the overdrive farms for Starlight Overdrive - a copy of all the base's main farms, eight times. Can we get it all done?
Session 281 - "The Labors of Luxury"
It amazes me how much stuff I still want to add to Starlight HQ. Seriously – for those of you who may be new and unfamiliar to this base, I basically have everything I could want at my fingertips… except that I don’t. And the truth is that I never will, because the more the base expands, the greedier I get. It’s the very simple innate human behavior that is the reason people say “money is the root of all evil.” Perhaps this is what Mayor Sensha was referring to when he said that I would be responsible for Quintropolis’s impending doom.
Regardless, I’ve put in a lot of work to get to this point, and I’ll be putting in even more work, especially today. The project we’re about to undergo is one of Starlight HQ’s biggest overhauls, not because of its physical size (even though it will be quite large), but because of how quickly it will upgrade the base’s resource production. Starlight Overdrive, a plugin we began mapping out back in Session 272, is the single modular plugin that will be responsible for overdriving the base’s resource production up to nine-fold. The only way to integrate this possibility is to physically build every modular farm eight more times, and then attach eight separate wires to each individual farm, such that a single item frame determines whether production is multiplied by two, three, four – all the way up to nine.
This is an incredibly laborious task that usually is split across several sessions, which I would never attempt to construct altogether. But this development has been waiting to become part of HQ for such a long time (it’s one of the last plugins v3.0 is waiting for), and I have been planning to knock out the entire project in a single play session. Now that we have Haste II in the base, and practically unlimited resources, let’s see how quickly we can get it done…
Before tackling this, we’re going to start with some optimization projects which are significant in their own right. First, the bamboo farm – the minecarts are always running, and that causes lag. Since the farm itself is not always running, I’m going to construct a clock system that only keeps the minecarts active when the farm is active.
The redstone here is quite simple. When the farm is toggled, either manually or via observers, then a second redstone output is sent to an RS (NOR) latch that activates a hopper clock. The clock is timed so that it resets the latch (and therefore stopping the minecarts) after the flying machine has returned to the station. This ensures that the minecarts have ample time to collect all the bamboo drops from the farm.
That’s great – now we need to move onto this problem:
Ever since these crop farms were first built, all the way back in Session 259 now, storage was an issue. Time and time again, I have had to completely empty the chests just to reset them after they overload the storage and flood the sorters.
The solution to this has a few parts. Let’s take a look at the new OPTIONS menu:
From left to right, here are the new features we will be adding to the crop farms:
Activate bonemeal farm – Using composters, we can actually turn all the crop drops into bonemeal. I’ll be installing a new bonemeal farm that lets us do this, which is ideal for when the crop storage is full.
Activate potato smelter – Yes, I also want a way to automatically bake the potatoes, should we have crop collection enabled. This is a long overdue part of the farm that we’ll be adding today, too.
Enable modular buffers – Right now, any and all activity from the crop farms toggles the MISC. But, with these new additions, we can break down each of the modes as being separate MISC triggers. The next two options, which only take effect if this lever is turned on, describe how:
Modulate bonemeal farm – This will only toggle modular activity if the bonemeal farm is active.
Modulate crop collection – This will only toggle modular activity if crop collection mode is active (which is the current behavior).
Modulate potato smelter only – This option only takes effect if ‘Modulate crop collection’ is toggled, further breaking it down such that only baked potatoes activate the MISC links.
These new features give us many new options not only for how to use the farm, but how we can use the farm’s modular capabilities. It slows down the rates significantly if we only want the crop farm links to toggle in bonemeal mode, for instance. I don’t necessarily like how all the SRF farms go off every single time a crop is received by the storage. This fixes that problem.
First, here is our bonemeal storage, right inside the SCPC:
This is a fully automated system – bonemeal will eventually fill all the chests if we leave it long enough.
But, only one composter is doing the work here – so even that would take a while.
The potatoes in bonemeal collection mode will automatically smelt anyway, because this increases production of bonemeal more than regular potatoes would.
To change modes, we need to keep hopper lines on different y-coordinates, with the “corner” hopper being the intersection that we can power or de-power to choose where items are sent.
One thing I learned this session is that comparators, for some reason, no longer detect single items moving through hoppers unless the mode of transmission is horizontal. So, items apparently move too fast through vertical hopper chains for them to detect – this is very annoying and raises some issues with certain other farms that I’ll need to fix later.
^ Here, you can see the sorter that pulls out potatoes and moves them into a smoker. Smokers cook food more quickly than a traditional furnace.
I have needed to change the orientation of this system several times, because both smokers and composters only accept items through the top and remove items from the bottom. I cannot hook up hoppers to the sides (only for fuel for the smoker). As such, this smelter needs to be high enough such that I can feed it back into the storage area with the rest of the crops.
Here is the resulting network:
From here, I can use comparators to detect output from the composter on the horizontal hoppers, which I’ll run towards the MISC crop farm lines to use as modular input.
The final chest in the storage area will be changed to baked potatoes – next we’ll install the regular smoker for those when the farm is in ‘crop collection’ mode.
It’s pretty much the same setup, again keeping in mind that I want the option to enable/disable this path. To do this, I need to move the chain for baked potatoes to be vertically lower than the rest.
This forces me to move the entire hopper chain for the crops lower, so that the two can meet up perfectly.
Finally, we have some chests up top here to insert fuel for the smelters. If I have the bonemeal farm running all the time, which is the plan now, then it’s going to burn through fuel. I’ll just use coal for now since I have ridiculous amounts of it.
The modular options are just a network of gates here at the crop farm input line towards the MISC. If the ‘Enable modular buffers’ option is selected, then the line which separates the buffers is enabled (so not blocked by a piston).
Then, I am just using pistons to decide whether the bonemeal or crop collection modes allow modular input – pretty simple, and thankfully this is not far from the options panel.
^ In this configuration, the bonemeal farm is toggled, but I have set the modular buffers such that only crop collection will toggle the MISC. This means that if I set any links that utilize the crop farms (for example, using the crop farms to brew potions), then these will only toggle if crop collection mode is enabled. Since I am using the bonemeal farm instead, that effectively means this link is inactive right now.
^ Here, I further specify that the input link is toggled only when the potato smelter is working. This is another way I can turn off the link temporarily, if I switch it to crop collection mode and then don’t turn on the potato smelter. (Of course, I could also just reset the link in the MISC itself).
Wondrous – there are certainly some complex wires at play here, but it’s all done and clean. I don’t know why I waited so long to install this panel of features; we needed it a long time ago the moment my carrot/potato chests filled up (again and again, requiring me to break the chests and empty them).
Ugh, this is a new problem… all the mob drop storage is flooded! The item sorters all broke as a result.
Until I find a fix for this, I’ll just be doing things the same way I “fixed” the flooding crop storage problem.
Regardless, we have fixed one problem, and I can marvel at the increased customization I’ve now given the MISC in terms of modular options. Speaking of which…
Ever since Session 278 when I installed Starlight Limiter, I’ve had it plugged into the MISC while using the crop farms as a modular input for the potion brewer. The above screenshot shows the haul from then until now – a much more balanced rate of production! Now that I can choose to limit the crop farms’ modular abilities even further, I could slow it down even more should I wish to do so. Prior to Starlight Limiter, these chests would fill up way too quickly. While that’s a good problem to have, it’s certainly a problem, but the Limiter has enabled me to have so much more control over the base’s modular automation. It feels so much more balanced, so much more efficient, and so much more complete.
This is exactly the benefit of having a modular base now – I have full control over literally everything, including rate of resource production to suit whatever playstyle I am currently exercising. While I am playing passively, developing technical features as I am now, there is no need for ridiculous rates of production. If I plan to build some huge skyscraper project (in Starlight City), maybe I’ll start multiplying the production of slow falling potions. Should I intend to engage in more Nether highway construction, I can also choose to increase the rate of fire resistance potion production using only the bamboo farm as a catalyst (for example). This type of limitless, customizable freedom does not exist in any other type of base, making it a unique Starlight experience – one you will be able to experience very soon.
Starlight Overdrive is going to add even more flexibility to production rates, and it will do exactly the opposite of Starlight Limiter… sort of. You could still, for instance, apply both Overdrive and Limiter to the MISC. By doing so, you’ll still only activate the modular outputs every three pulses (rather than every pulse); however once activated, the production output will be multiplied by whatever amount you specify with Overdrive. The goal of this plugin is to enable industrial-scale production rates. By default, what I have is currently fine. But when we begin building Starlight City, the current rates will not sustain the construction scale. Overdrive will allow me to “unlock” these higher rates which will truly make Starlight’s resources practically infinite.
The first challenge is actually deciding where to construct Starlight Overdrive. The initial spot I chose here in the SRF control floor is absolutely not going to work.
Not only do I need an incredible amount of space to build all the overdrive farms, but I need the item frame to have a clear path from which I can branch off the eight individual wires. Additionally, the location of the overdrive farms must allow the MISC’s modular outputs to reach them and allow them to channel through Starlight Overdrive itself. Finally, the overdrive farms must be designed in such a way that they need never be accessed (i.e. they will be hidden), yet their storage systems will fully be able to contact their “parent” farms. The whole idea is that Starlight Overdrive’s very small and simple UI is the only interaction you will need to unlock the overdrive farms.
In case you were wondering, figuring out this part of the puzzle was a session in and of itself, and was the extent of my first continuous play session!! But thanks to spectator mode in a backup, I managed to find a location for everything we need to build, albeit barely.
Starlight Overdrive’s UI will be constructed in the Starlight City Planning Center, and all the overdrive farms will be grouped together in this square area bordering STAS to the north and the potion brewer to the west. This is close enough to the modular mixer such that all current MISC links will be able to get here quite easily, but far enough away that there are no builds beyond here. Finally, the storage systems for the overdrive farms will not be linked to their respective storage cellars in the SRF – this is completely arbitrary. I’m just going to build a huge new storage room right here in the SCPC – I mean, the point of this expansion is to foster industrial-scale farms, right? Why not start with Starlight Overdrive? It just makes the most sense to keep the plugin out of the way from primary base operations, instead placing it in a new area that is already going to be massively expanded later anyway. I am effectively just building industrial-scale versions of the farms I already have.
The first part of the project will be to organize the design of the farms. Note that I will not be recreating every farm in the base – that is not realistic or even possible given space limitations. I’m recreating the basic modular farms that are part of the MISC’s modular outputs. This includes the following farms:
Sugar cane
Cactus
Carrot/potato/beetroot
Mushroom
Pumpkin/melon
Kelp
Note that several useful farms, such as the iron farm, are not being added to this list. There are two reasons for this: (1) I cannot realistically build eight additional iron farms in Starlight HQ (the entity count and subsequent lag would be far too great anyway), and (2) the iron farm already produces more iron than I can keep up with, even though I now use it as a principal building block. Having eight more farms would be too much for me to handle, even with an expanded storage system (this is already the case with my bamboo farm, which is also why it’s not being added). These two farms in particular are also just too large – any industrial-scale versions I choose to build of them can be done somewhere other than Starlight (we have an entire world to work with – I’ll most likely build an industrial iron farm within Enderquin HQ at some point anyway, but not this season).
Okay, so I’m going to start with the easy stuff: sugar cane and cactus. These are simple designs, and they just need to be stacked, effectively, eight times. Here is the design for both:
Before building anything, I’m outlining all the farms just so I can be sure there will be no conflicting builds that would otherwise halt the project. Sugar cane and cactus down – let’s move to mushroom – a slightly more complex situation than I initially planned:
It’s based on the same design as my very first mushroom farm in Season 1 – one which has yet to be fully linked to the MISC so that I can automate it using other farms.
The tricky bit is moving the mushrooms with water – I need separate redstone lines to keep the pistons extended, holding the water back. Then, to maintain the height, I’ll use signs + packed ice, which will push the mushrooms forward to the next water stream.
Next, the kelp farm, which is also relatively small, but again I am matching its size and style to the version already in the Aqua Lounge:
The pumpkin and melon farms will be a bit larger because these will be incredibly useful resources for trading. Here they are:
Perfect, now for the harder stuff: carrot, beetroot, and potato, which are based on their villager-run counterparts. This means I need to find 32 new villagers and add them to the base…
Yeah, I’m not doing those farms today, haha. Maybe I’ll get to them before the season ends – but likely not. The ones we have are good for now, and when they’re not – I’ll probably already have these done.
Outlines complete – let’s BUILD!!
The sugar cane and cactus farms specifically are getting designs similar to their original counterparts – this is because we are not interested in keeping the farms active all the time. This means we cannot use observers, which of course means we need to use slightly more piston movement than I would like…
^ Above, you can see first the AND gate, which requires two inputs: one from Starlight Overdrive, and one from any MISC crop farm links. There will be a total of eight such AND gates – one for each layer of the farms. Starlight Overdrive’s comparator output increases with each item frame rotation, allowing us to activate each layer separately.
Aesthetics are not important, which is a blessing as that would add so much unnecessary time to the builds. You will never see these farms, so there is no need to decorate them. This makes constructing them a much faster process.
I’m trying to keep everything as simple as possible, which means that all the items will be funneled into one water stream.
The items will ascend through a bubble column, so that I can keep the storage area in line with the others in the SCPC.
^ Here is the crop storage room, with everything sorted nicely and plenty of storage space (for now…).
I am starting on the second layer of the sugar cane and cactus farms, realizing very quickly just how laborious this task really is, and how it could potentially beget another world hiatus.
In an effort to not get burned out, I’ll be taking a gradual approach, and do something like adding one layer of farms with each session or something. There’s no rush to add them all today – if I try to do that before moving onto the next project, I will get burned out, which means you would be waiting months for the next session. Big projects like this are always the bane of my otherwise decent pace throughout Quintropolis. It happened with the guardian farm, then with the iron farm (not the gold farm surprisingly), then with STAS, then again with the Nether highways which were probably the biggest ‘grindy’ project to date. This is exactly how my hiatuses from the world usually start, so it’s a mistake I won’t be making again.
There’s a lot to do here, but we’ll leave the remaining layers for another day. I probably won’t mention them again beyond this.
In a huge session, we unpack some of the final major features for Starlight HQ 3.0, getting the base even closer to its final form. Can we get it done in time for whatever is coming??
For a villager farm, I think it's best just to have a "trading hall" or just a village with specific villagers you want, for example a librarian with a Mending book. The thing is that villager mechanics are still somewhat "broken" because you can just place and reset the job site block until you get offered the trade you want - this I do expect Mojang to amend in the future, so better take advantage of it now I guess. Just breed two villagers and when the baby grows up, place a lectern. If it doesn't offer you Mending books (or whatever book you're after), destroy the lectern and replace it (you only really need one villager). As long as you haven't traded with the villager, the trades will be reset. By introducing job site blocks, Mojang inadvertently made it much easier to get good trades (at least at the novice level - you can't know the higher level trades right away). If they amend this (see what I did there?), I expect they will make it so that you can't get enchanted books at the novice level (which would be more balanced, because... I have sooooo many Mending librarians now).
I just keep a few Mending librarians in my clubhouse, and a couple other villagers like farmers (easy for emeralds if you have a pumpkin/melon farm), clerics (pretty much the only use for zombie flesh in late-game), and some masons (SUPER easy emeralds because you just trade stone for them, and they offer quartz blocks at master level). Make sure to zombify and then purify the villagers for cheaper trades (or just purify a zombie villager).
I haven't gone the "trading hall" route - instead I just prefer to have a village that houses all the villagers I want to trade with. But you could do it either way.
But yeah most of my farms are broken now, so maybe just stick to potatoes. They can't break that, right??
It makes sense for bowled food items to restore the most hunger points per item if you ask my opinion.
A meal usually consist of different food items to maximize nutritional value.
Why has this system not been implemented well in Minecraft? it would make the food system much more balanced,
and it would put an end to the absurdity of bowled food items sucking.
How much sense does it make for a baked potato, to have about as much nutritional value as a stew?
potato is high in carbs, but it fails in the protein department, so it definitely isn't healthy to just rely on potato to keep a person fed, you need other things like fruit and nuts. I know in Minecraft we can't expect total realism, but my point is why is baked potato, per item, as powerful as a stew in the game? it makes even more sense that a soup with a mixed food recipe would restore 4 drumsticks, or 8 hunger points, not 3 drumsticks or 6 hunger points.
The more complex or harder to obtain the food recipe is, the better it should be in the game.
Edit: I know baked potato restores 3 drumsticks, I'm just pointing out that soup should be more nutritionally dense.
Exactly - I don't know that I've ever even crafted a bowled food item, which says a lot considering my main world is over eight years old. In that amount of time, I have never found a need to craft a bowled food item. Maybe now I will do so just to get the advancement for eating all food items in the game, but that means nothing.
We need some way to keep all the food items relevant even in late game. Melons do this by being useful for trading. Even cookies are somewhat useful for composting, because you get a much higher yield of bonemeal than the sum of its parts (using cookies is better than using wheat + cocoa beans, because you get eight cookies per 2 wheat and 1 cocoa bean). Why is this logic not applied to bowled foods regarding hunger? It seems that these foods are being left behind, which is a shame because they could add a lot more use in the food world.
Looks like you're a master builder, I love builds like these, it shows that despite the limitations of Minecraft people manage to improvise and at least try to make a somewhat realistic looking village. Builds like this also showcase why in survival mode some people do need a lot of resources, and it makes people understand why sometimes nerfs can go too far and discourage people from starting or finishing a project like this. I've seen far bigger builds, but your village is about the size of the one I built on the Shockbyte server, I was planning on expanding on it, until an update screwed up the properties file and defaulted the difficulty mode to easy, now I have a new world with lizking10152011, a friend of mine, which I plan on hosting from a home PC.
Thanks a lot for the compliment! It's true that my motivation for farming is so that I can try to replicate the 'Creative mode' approach in survival (since most big farms give me practically unlimited resources anyway). This allows me to build villages, which in the future I plan to upgrade into cities (think on the scale of Amsterdam or Toronto, maybe some places like New York City or Tokyo, but I don't yet have the farms to sustain that level of resource production even though it's definitely possible to get there. That is, until Mojang brings the hammer down on that too, which they seem to do every time somebody finds a way to massively farm things like iron. This is very important to me as you can see here; I use iron as a building block on top of the things you can craft with it, so I would not like that to be nerfed again - iron is far too useful, probably the most useful resource in Minecraft, that I can never have too much of it).
Any update that impacts production rates has the potential to be very detrimental as a result, as you've mentioned. I'm tired of rebuilding farms and stuff after each update. I just want to build villages and cities - the farms help sustain these projects, so for now I'll just stay in 1.15. Without the farms, building this village would have taken an absurd amount of time, but I did almost everything you see there in just a few days.
They changed the Drowned from gold to copper? What the hell for? If it's so that they can make copper renewable, I can think of about a hundred better ways to do that which don't involve changing a significant mob drop (trading being one of them, or they can add it as a drop to one of the new mobs they keep adding).
I was planning to make a Drowned farm to have another source of gold, but using it for copper is far less useful (well, if I never update, then I could just use it for gold as planned).
1
For me it's a combination of things because I don't like to do the same too thing too much - I get bored easily, so if for example I have spent a lot of time on a redstone project, I'll move onto exploring and do that for a while (finish filling in some maps, find structures, etc.). But it all comes down to storytelling for me. Minecraft is a great canvas for that, and I tend to tie everything together with some kind of lore (I have a library in my world with just tons of lore I would write in my spare time - this is another avenue I do if I get bored of other stuff, but that boredom is always temporary; I find that more often than not I just get burned out rather than bored of a certain project).
0
Well, your incessant hostility is quite unwarranted - in any case, I wasn't going to respond, but you completely missed the point of my post by instead just highlighting stuff that triggered you. So for the sake of others, let's explore the important part as it's worth exploring:
Even though the 1.16 update was very positively received by most, it contains an unwarranted and annoying change to redstone behavior which breaks a lot of things in my world - this means that despite all the good things that 1.16 introduced, my subjective experience would not be focused on this but on the redstone change that directly impacts me. If that change happened to be in any other update, then regardless of anything else in that update, I would not be thrilled about it. As such, it is not enough to simply discuss the update itself - so yes, it is completely arbitrary because your question inquires our subjective opinions about what's in the update itself (as evidenced by your incredibly biased poll). I never played in 1.13, or 1.14, so I cannot offer any opinion about those versions directly, except that I like most of the stuff they introduced which I only explored in 1.15. For me to have updated three versions - I focus on the things I like and the things I do not. This lends to a far more nuanced discussion that has nothing to do with, for example, claiming that pistons were added in 1.9? I'm not sure the argument you're driving at there.
Likewise, 1.5 introduced very important blocks for me - but that doesn't mean I would prefer to play in 1.5 versus 1.12 for example, because I also really like the concrete blocks and observers, and plenty of other things added since 1.5. However, the redstone change in 1.16 is enough to keep me away from it, so despite the fact that I really like the new blackstone (and the update as a whole without this change is fine) - it will not be an enjoyable experience for me right now as I'd first have to deal with that pointless change. Mojang's pattern of consistently changing details that don't warrant changing is annoying, but it is this premise which makes it important to dissect the features of the game itself. FWIW I don't know exactly when they changed hopper comparator detection behavior, but it was somewhere between 1.12 and 1.15, and that breaks a lot of my things, too - so, this is another example of a detail that I guess went under the radar, but it's incredibly annoying because I only found out about it by troubleshooting my contraptions which required this mechanic, that were now broken.
0
My world is on the brink of collapse in terms of its lore and story...
Enderquin is haunting villagers with hallucinations. Nobody knows what's real and what isn't, but that doesn't stop the villagers from being driven to madness when they see dragons appearing by the swarm to kill them, burning their houses, etc. It's exactly what happened to my character not too long ago. And we now know it's what happened to Violet (who was a long-time regular in the world - she warned us of this many years ago, but I thought she was insane... then she died right before my first visit to the End, in which I seemingly defeated Enderquin. Now we know that by killing the ender dragon, we have actually freed him from the End).
How far does it go? What exactly is Enderquin's plan? The prison of your mind is the blue screen of death which cannot be so easily reset.
All we know... is that the gauntlet thrives with infinite lives. And as Enderquin would say: "no soul becomes one with me."
2
LMAO what is that poll?
In either case it's not really a question I can answer because the whole idea of updates is arbitrary. 1.14 is 1.13 with additions and changes. 1.15 is 1.14 with additions and changes. If I updated from 1.12 to 1.15 (which is what I did), then nothing in-between really matters - just the result of the game being played and what I decide to do with it.
If the question is what Minecraft features have been my favorite across the updates, then for me it's comparators, hoppers, and the other redstone stuff added in 1.5. Without those basic blocks and mechanics, so much of what I do in this game wouldn't be possible. Most things added since then have been welcome in my eyes, but some of the things changed have not (the redstone behavioral change in 1.16 being one of them, and then another change that disrupted comparator detection in hoppers sending a single item vertically).
0
Today's session marks the arrival of Day 6,000 in Quintropolis - and we've got a lot of stuff to check out as we turn our attention to the Inner Circle's development... and getting some necessary build permits from Mayor Sensha.
Does it all go well? That's a complicated answer...
Utopia is becoming an essential resource outpost for Quintropolis, and I’m realizing that if I decide to erect another major base in this world, then this is exactly where it needs to be. Sand, terracotta, plus reasonable proximity to the coral reefs that line the coastal desert village which has been designated as “downtown” – these are important resources for our bigger projects, especially today.
I’m visiting the Inner Circle to develop the neighborhood into a full ecosystem. This is what we need to sustain the production of resources here, not to mention provide a good security system for our council.
“Joey, welcome!” Drexel greets me on my arrival. “What brings you by today? Aren’t you busy as always?” A slight sarcasm is always welcome.
“It’s time to bring more life to the Circle,” I reply. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
“Good thing we were able to secure some build permits for you,” says Drexel to my surprise. “Mayor Sensha seemed adamant on providing these.”
“Interesting, did he say why?” He seemed very against that during our last meeting in Session 276.
“All he said was that these would keep the other villages off your tail…”
Well, he isn’t wrong about that. But for him to change his mindset so soon after telling me that I broke a bunch of laws… it’s out of the ordinary, like most things nowadays. We’ll address that later. Right now, we have work to do.
First, gray concrete to complete the road surrounding the central moat. I have mentioned previously that I plan to construct a large golden monument in the center – this will be the last thing we do when I acquire enough gold to do so.
Additionally, I’ve built the base for our gold center out of polished diorite.
Next, I am completing the road to the Council Clubhouse, lighting everything up as much as possible because zombies are a real danger here.
^ This ugly wall that digs into the mountain will become the setting for our downtown shops here in the Inner Circle.
Off the main road, I’ll build a stone brick pathway which will connect all the different shops. This is where many of our resources and farms will be located.
First, we will start with the building that connects Starlight Station to the Inner Circle.
Concrete and stone materials will be the basis for our constructions here. I’ll also try to incorporate bricks where they make sense.
Moving on down, the next focus is on agriculture. Crops and cows are arguably the most important resources in early development, so that’s our first order of business.
Thinking about what will go inside, I’m going with a basic wheat farm and cow farm. This will be a source of leather, which we can use for books to trade for Mending with Boshtok.
Guys… stop being so curious about the outside. It’s not safe out there!
…Or up top for that matter! I’m lighting up the roof of the clubhouse to prevent any unwanted visitors.
Let’s also provide some golems to the clubhouse to protect the council.
A nice sunset view of the Council Clubhouse, with Emerald Hills emerging in the background:
A lot of attention to detail and lighting is a big focus in the development of the Circle – I’m adding little touches like mossy/cracked stone brick nuances to the walls and floor.
…and a little welcome sign for the clubhouse!
You’ll also notice that I’ve begun surrounding the circle… with a BIGGER circle of hedges. This will fully protect and isolate the circle from the rest of the island.
Part of the challenge in this is dealing with trees – I need to remove most of the trees around the borders of the circle to prevent mobs from being able to climb up and invade the circle.
Aww, look at the golems playing games with the council!
I didn’t think any cows were left on Quintropolis Island, but I am mistaken! This is a huge relief.
Completing the agricultural shop, I managed to purify a zombie villager and give him the shop.
Welcome to Jacque’s Agricultural Shop! I’ve unlocked all his trades, posting them on the wall so you can get an idea what you want to trade.
Next on down the line is going to be the circle’s sugar cane farm – an important resource for paper and books to trade with the council!
I am doing a simple piston/observer-based design, but I plan to stack a few of these.
Get out of here, wanderer! No, we don’t want your childish trades.
The top of the sugar cane emerges from the mountain top, but I think this is a good opportunity to introduce a cool roof and give some depth to the Circle’s skyline. We’ll approach that later.
Nice – we’ve got some good resources going here! Leather, wheat, beef, sugar, and paper so far. Let’s see what else we can do! I’m having a lot of fun with this.
Get those phantoms!! Get them!!
How about a crop farm in front of the clubhouse??
Welcome Shadrack, our primary crop farmer – a child from two of our council members rather than a purified villager.
Boshtok tends to spend a lot of time trading out here during the day. It makes sense since he is practically the leader of the council.
Shadrack and his new friend now tend to the farms, and I have built a little house for them to sleep at night.
Unlocking all Shadrack’s trades, I note that he is now the only source of Blindness stew so far. He also trades Weakness stew, but I’m not sure why we would want that.
Another purified villager has been brought into the circle – welcome Michelle, who will be our librarian governing the sugar cane shop!
And just in time… we’ve reached Day 6,000 in Quintropolis!! The celebration is perfectly suited to our work at the Inner Circle, and I’m happy to be spending it with our new friends.
Unfortunately, the celebration immediately came to a sudden end on this day…
“Joey, Joey! Come quick!”
Huh?
“What’s wrong, Staz?” I ask the worried villager.
“It’s Drexel. He’s DEAD!”
“What? How is that possible??” Drexel being dead? That’s not possible! The house is secured with the very best protection. There is no way any mobs could have gotten to him! Especially not with me RIGHT HERE – did he die while I was working??
“Boshtok! Ibram! What’s going on?? What happened to Drexel??!” I ask in a raging fury. Drexel was the first member of the new council – a member with whom I had developed good relations, even if we disagreed on some things.
“Oh Joey, it was terrible. I wish we could have saved him… But there was nothing we could do but watch in utter dismay,” Boshtok is in shambles. I have never seen a villager so scared. They have dealt with zombies before, but I don’t think that is what killed him.
“What do you mean? Could the golems not defend or something?” I mean, they were built specifically to protect them.
“Joey, Drexel lost his mind. We woke up this morning, and he was speaking in riddles outside on the porch. We didn’t understand them,” Staz noted.
“We could not reason with him. It’s as if we were talking to a wall. The man we knew was completely gone. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Ibram followed.
“We came back inside to prepare a weakness potion so that we could calm him down, but things got tense by the time we went back outside…” Boshtok continued.
Then the villagers were silent. Staz tried to hold back tears, but he failed miserably.
“I’m so sorry… Drexel had become a dear friend… I’ll be sure to prepare a proper gravestone for him. Can you tell me exactly what led to his… demise?” I’m trying to be considerate and not outlandish regarding the word “death.” But I need to know what happened.
“Joey, he lost his freaking mind. He was standing outside on the porch, with a sword drawn to his chest…” Staz started but couldn’t finish.
“It’s okay, Staz. He can extrapolate the rest…” Ibram tried to comfort Staz the best he could, but it was pointless. These people who had become my friends (with some boundaries) were completely destroyed. I had never seen this before, and it worried me greatly.
“What did he say? What was the last thing Drexel said?” I asked Boshtok.
“I couldn’t put it together exactly. Something about a gauntlet.”
“Yes,” Ibram knew. “He said that the gauntlet thrives with infinite lives. No soul becomes one with me… whatever that means.”
Oh my God.
Next up... Session 283 - "The Community"
1
Maybe a little off-topic here, but... Would this - "code bloating" I suppose - be a reason why the performance of the game seems to suffer beyond 1.13? I've noticed that in older versions like 1.8, even if I have more entities present such as mobs, item frames, etc., I experience far less lag than I do now in 1.15. It's one reason I even started a new world playing in 1.7, because the simplicity of the game even then allowed for far greater performance (though, I imagine it improves more in versions prior 1.7, but I haven't tested it that much). Can Mojang even optimize the game enough now to match those performance levels, especially with the terrain changes in 1.18? It seems to be less likely.
1
The combat update was just... rough. I mean, never mind the attack cooldown (doesn't matter too much to me since I don't do PvP), but why do stone axes do more damage than diamond swords? How does Mojang not view that as being broken? Even with a Sharpness V diamond sword, it still takes on average two critical hits to kill a spider - one of the weakest mobs. It also takes two critical hits average with a stone sword, and only three with a wooden. I get that maybe they want to give Bane of Arthropods some use but... overhauling the damage system to do so? I'd rather just have the useless enchantment that I still won't carry with me. In fact, wooden axes do the same damage as diamond swords, and you can make that within ten seconds of starting a world. That's not balanced at all.
One could argue that diamond swords remain superior because of their durability... but if you put Unbreaking III and Mending on a stone axe with Smite V to deal with zombies and skeletons, then you are getting better benefits at a far cheaper price. I don't really know how Mojang can fix that without completely altering combat again. IMO they should have left that part alone - it didn't seem broken enough to require such an overhaul especially when the old mechanics had been there since the beginning. I think part of the problem is that there are too many tiers and mobs have set health points that still require a certain number of hits, which means that the infinitesimal differences between the tiers and tools don't mean much in the wider scope of PvE combat. So the only way that I see to reduce the number of hits required to kill mobs is either to significantly reduce the damage dealt by certain weapons by half, or increase the damage benefits of enchantments.
Axes dealing more damage than swords but with the drawback of longer attack cooldown - OKAY, sure, that's fine to an extent. But everything else was a slight mess, especially with how much damage they do. (I think it's fine that a Smite V axe can kill zombies and skeletons in one hit, but prior to 1.9 you could do this to most mobs with a Sharpness V sword, which seemed appropriate given it's the highest weapon you can wield - now, there is no way to one-hit kill creepers even with Strength II).
Before they touch Mending, they need to deal with that and the combat tests.
0
How about a potion that keeps you, the player, lit up during the night?
If you're riding around at night, or even sprinting, it would be great to have a light source that moves with you to keep the path lit, so to speak. Perhaps using glow ink sacs for such a light - either via a potion you can drink or an item you can hold in your off-hand - could be very helpful to that end.
1
Yeah, auto-harvesting farms are great (I use villager-run farms for crops which take a little effort to setup, and then for other crops I use observer-based designs), but some farms like AFK gold XP farms are definitely OP. Why am I getting hundreds of levels by leaving my player sit overnight at a farm? That doesn't make sense, and gold farms are not particularly hard to build. Sure, they can be AFK gold farms, but I support Mojang removing the ability to farm XP from them by doing literally nothing at all (they did mention that this mechanic would be amended, but we don't know when). Current other XP farms like guardian and enderman farms are fine because they still require the player to be actively killing the mobs - I just wish they weren't as easy to build now compared to back in 1.8 for example.
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I only just read about the changes in ore distribution and... it seems a bit wacky, though I'd have to try it myself to get a feel for what it's like (I have no plans on doing this, however).
It's definitely a tricky conundrum, in a sandbox game like Minecraft, when you have people with wildly differently playstyles all trying to enjoy the same game. The problem is when players impose that playstyle on others by insisting on changes that take away more than they offer (such as significantly changing automatic farms in every single update because the devs can't decide what is OP and what is not - apparently they think guardian farms are better now, even though back in 1.8 they were a true challenge to construct, as they absolutely should be because of the reward they provide). Not everyone uses automatic farms which is totally fine - but there's no reason to insist that Minecraft can't allow this playstyle, and that any kind of automation is "cheating" - this type of argument annoys me.
Having said that, I do think some things are overpowered, such as villager trading and how easy it is to get Mending books, for example. With a large enough crop farm (or series of crop farms), you can get mass amounts of emeralds very quickly, even with the cooldown (to get around the cooldown, I just use multiple villagers offering the same trades). I also found AFK fishing farms to be broken, but I think they dealt with that. My main gripe is that personally I find Minecraft to be too easy from a survival standpoint, and not because of auto-farming. However, this is a sandbox game, which means that difficulty all comes down to your objectives. I'm not going to insist that Mojang make everything harder - however, I certainly would welcome some changes like the upcoming Deep Dark which appear to provide a real challenge to the survival experience. It would be great if the Deep Dark is at a difficulty catered to players who are pretty well experienced with the game (you know, the players who can beat the ender dragon in a day, since you can do that pretty quickly in this game). I think it should be an area that new players should be afraid of exploring - this makes it a good goal to work towards, as long as it provides a pretty good reward inside.
I'll be interested to follow the Wild Update announcements, even if I won't update right away (since I still have to deal with all the annoying changes from 1.16-1.18 that break a lot of my stuff). One suggestion I have put out (that I may make a new post about) is introducing illusioners into survival by way of woodland mansions, upgrading them into boss mobs. These mobs have so much potential to be pretty difficult challenges, and they would make woodland mansions worth finding if they provide a pretty cool rare drop or reward (since raids were added, there is literally no reason to find a mansion as they offer nothing unique, and as such I have not done so).
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Enderquin's presence is being felt. Everywhere.
But we're not focusing on that today. That's probably just paranoia. This is a huge session focused on the new Starlight City Planning Center, wherein we make some improvements to the bamboo farm, install several new modes for the villager-run crop farms like the bonemeal farm, potato smelter, and modular buffers - and, we begin the laborious process of building the overdrive farms for Starlight Overdrive - a copy of all the base's main farms, eight times. Can we get it all done?
It amazes me how much stuff I still want to add to Starlight HQ. Seriously – for those of you who may be new and unfamiliar to this base, I basically have everything I could want at my fingertips… except that I don’t. And the truth is that I never will, because the more the base expands, the greedier I get. It’s the very simple innate human behavior that is the reason people say “money is the root of all evil.” Perhaps this is what Mayor Sensha was referring to when he said that I would be responsible for Quintropolis’s impending doom.
Regardless, I’ve put in a lot of work to get to this point, and I’ll be putting in even more work, especially today. The project we’re about to undergo is one of Starlight HQ’s biggest overhauls, not because of its physical size (even though it will be quite large), but because of how quickly it will upgrade the base’s resource production. Starlight Overdrive, a plugin we began mapping out back in Session 272, is the single modular plugin that will be responsible for overdriving the base’s resource production up to nine-fold. The only way to integrate this possibility is to physically build every modular farm eight more times, and then attach eight separate wires to each individual farm, such that a single item frame determines whether production is multiplied by two, three, four – all the way up to nine.
This is an incredibly laborious task that usually is split across several sessions, which I would never attempt to construct altogether. But this development has been waiting to become part of HQ for such a long time (it’s one of the last plugins v3.0 is waiting for), and I have been planning to knock out the entire project in a single play session. Now that we have Haste II in the base, and practically unlimited resources, let’s see how quickly we can get it done…
Before tackling this, we’re going to start with some optimization projects which are significant in their own right. First, the bamboo farm – the minecarts are always running, and that causes lag. Since the farm itself is not always running, I’m going to construct a clock system that only keeps the minecarts active when the farm is active.
The redstone here is quite simple. When the farm is toggled, either manually or via observers, then a second redstone output is sent to an RS (NOR) latch that activates a hopper clock. The clock is timed so that it resets the latch (and therefore stopping the minecarts) after the flying machine has returned to the station. This ensures that the minecarts have ample time to collect all the bamboo drops from the farm.
That’s great – now we need to move onto this problem:
Ever since these crop farms were first built, all the way back in Session 259 now, storage was an issue. Time and time again, I have had to completely empty the chests just to reset them after they overload the storage and flood the sorters.
The solution to this has a few parts. Let’s take a look at the new OPTIONS menu:
From left to right, here are the new features we will be adding to the crop farms:
These new features give us many new options not only for how to use the farm, but how we can use the farm’s modular capabilities. It slows down the rates significantly if we only want the crop farm links to toggle in bonemeal mode, for instance. I don’t necessarily like how all the SRF farms go off every single time a crop is received by the storage. This fixes that problem.
First, here is our bonemeal storage, right inside the SCPC:
This is a fully automated system – bonemeal will eventually fill all the chests if we leave it long enough.
But, only one composter is doing the work here – so even that would take a while.
The potatoes in bonemeal collection mode will automatically smelt anyway, because this increases production of bonemeal more than regular potatoes would.
To change modes, we need to keep hopper lines on different y-coordinates, with the “corner” hopper being the intersection that we can power or de-power to choose where items are sent.
One thing I learned this session is that comparators, for some reason, no longer detect single items moving through hoppers unless the mode of transmission is horizontal. So, items apparently move too fast through vertical hopper chains for them to detect – this is very annoying and raises some issues with certain other farms that I’ll need to fix later.
^ Here, you can see the sorter that pulls out potatoes and moves them into a smoker. Smokers cook food more quickly than a traditional furnace.
I have needed to change the orientation of this system several times, because both smokers and composters only accept items through the top and remove items from the bottom. I cannot hook up hoppers to the sides (only for fuel for the smoker). As such, this smelter needs to be high enough such that I can feed it back into the storage area with the rest of the crops.
Here is the resulting network:
From here, I can use comparators to detect output from the composter on the horizontal hoppers, which I’ll run towards the MISC crop farm lines to use as modular input.
The final chest in the storage area will be changed to baked potatoes – next we’ll install the regular smoker for those when the farm is in ‘crop collection’ mode.
It’s pretty much the same setup, again keeping in mind that I want the option to enable/disable this path. To do this, I need to move the chain for baked potatoes to be vertically lower than the rest.
This forces me to move the entire hopper chain for the crops lower, so that the two can meet up perfectly.
Finally, we have some chests up top here to insert fuel for the smelters. If I have the bonemeal farm running all the time, which is the plan now, then it’s going to burn through fuel. I’ll just use coal for now since I have ridiculous amounts of it.
The modular options are just a network of gates here at the crop farm input line towards the MISC. If the ‘Enable modular buffers’ option is selected, then the line which separates the buffers is enabled (so not blocked by a piston).
Then, I am just using pistons to decide whether the bonemeal or crop collection modes allow modular input – pretty simple, and thankfully this is not far from the options panel.
^ In this configuration, the bonemeal farm is toggled, but I have set the modular buffers such that only crop collection will toggle the MISC. This means that if I set any links that utilize the crop farms (for example, using the crop farms to brew potions), then these will only toggle if crop collection mode is enabled. Since I am using the bonemeal farm instead, that effectively means this link is inactive right now.
^ Here, I further specify that the input link is toggled only when the potato smelter is working. This is another way I can turn off the link temporarily, if I switch it to crop collection mode and then don’t turn on the potato smelter. (Of course, I could also just reset the link in the MISC itself).
Wondrous – there are certainly some complex wires at play here, but it’s all done and clean. I don’t know why I waited so long to install this panel of features; we needed it a long time ago the moment my carrot/potato chests filled up (again and again, requiring me to break the chests and empty them).
Ugh, this is a new problem… all the mob drop storage is flooded! The item sorters all broke as a result.
Until I find a fix for this, I’ll just be doing things the same way I “fixed” the flooding crop storage problem.
Regardless, we have fixed one problem, and I can marvel at the increased customization I’ve now given the MISC in terms of modular options. Speaking of which…
Ever since Session 278 when I installed Starlight Limiter, I’ve had it plugged into the MISC while using the crop farms as a modular input for the potion brewer. The above screenshot shows the haul from then until now – a much more balanced rate of production! Now that I can choose to limit the crop farms’ modular abilities even further, I could slow it down even more should I wish to do so. Prior to Starlight Limiter, these chests would fill up way too quickly. While that’s a good problem to have, it’s certainly a problem, but the Limiter has enabled me to have so much more control over the base’s modular automation. It feels so much more balanced, so much more efficient, and so much more complete.
This is exactly the benefit of having a modular base now – I have full control over literally everything, including rate of resource production to suit whatever playstyle I am currently exercising. While I am playing passively, developing technical features as I am now, there is no need for ridiculous rates of production. If I plan to build some huge skyscraper project (in Starlight City), maybe I’ll start multiplying the production of slow falling potions. Should I intend to engage in more Nether highway construction, I can also choose to increase the rate of fire resistance potion production using only the bamboo farm as a catalyst (for example). This type of limitless, customizable freedom does not exist in any other type of base, making it a unique Starlight experience – one you will be able to experience very soon.
Starlight Overdrive is going to add even more flexibility to production rates, and it will do exactly the opposite of Starlight Limiter… sort of. You could still, for instance, apply both Overdrive and Limiter to the MISC. By doing so, you’ll still only activate the modular outputs every three pulses (rather than every pulse); however once activated, the production output will be multiplied by whatever amount you specify with Overdrive. The goal of this plugin is to enable industrial-scale production rates. By default, what I have is currently fine. But when we begin building Starlight City, the current rates will not sustain the construction scale. Overdrive will allow me to “unlock” these higher rates which will truly make Starlight’s resources practically infinite.
The first challenge is actually deciding where to construct Starlight Overdrive. The initial spot I chose here in the SRF control floor is absolutely not going to work.
Not only do I need an incredible amount of space to build all the overdrive farms, but I need the item frame to have a clear path from which I can branch off the eight individual wires. Additionally, the location of the overdrive farms must allow the MISC’s modular outputs to reach them and allow them to channel through Starlight Overdrive itself. Finally, the overdrive farms must be designed in such a way that they need never be accessed (i.e. they will be hidden), yet their storage systems will fully be able to contact their “parent” farms. The whole idea is that Starlight Overdrive’s very small and simple UI is the only interaction you will need to unlock the overdrive farms.
In case you were wondering, figuring out this part of the puzzle was a session in and of itself, and was the extent of my first continuous play session!! But thanks to spectator mode in a backup, I managed to find a location for everything we need to build, albeit barely.
Starlight Overdrive’s UI will be constructed in the Starlight City Planning Center, and all the overdrive farms will be grouped together in this square area bordering STAS to the north and the potion brewer to the west. This is close enough to the modular mixer such that all current MISC links will be able to get here quite easily, but far enough away that there are no builds beyond here. Finally, the storage systems for the overdrive farms will not be linked to their respective storage cellars in the SRF – this is completely arbitrary. I’m just going to build a huge new storage room right here in the SCPC – I mean, the point of this expansion is to foster industrial-scale farms, right? Why not start with Starlight Overdrive? It just makes the most sense to keep the plugin out of the way from primary base operations, instead placing it in a new area that is already going to be massively expanded later anyway. I am effectively just building industrial-scale versions of the farms I already have.
The first part of the project will be to organize the design of the farms. Note that I will not be recreating every farm in the base – that is not realistic or even possible given space limitations. I’m recreating the basic modular farms that are part of the MISC’s modular outputs. This includes the following farms:
Note that several useful farms, such as the iron farm, are not being added to this list. There are two reasons for this: (1) I cannot realistically build eight additional iron farms in Starlight HQ (the entity count and subsequent lag would be far too great anyway), and (2) the iron farm already produces more iron than I can keep up with, even though I now use it as a principal building block. Having eight more farms would be too much for me to handle, even with an expanded storage system (this is already the case with my bamboo farm, which is also why it’s not being added). These two farms in particular are also just too large – any industrial-scale versions I choose to build of them can be done somewhere other than Starlight (we have an entire world to work with – I’ll most likely build an industrial iron farm within Enderquin HQ at some point anyway, but not this season).
Okay, so I’m going to start with the easy stuff: sugar cane and cactus. These are simple designs, and they just need to be stacked, effectively, eight times. Here is the design for both:
Before building anything, I’m outlining all the farms just so I can be sure there will be no conflicting builds that would otherwise halt the project. Sugar cane and cactus down – let’s move to mushroom – a slightly more complex situation than I initially planned:
It’s based on the same design as my very first mushroom farm in Season 1 – one which has yet to be fully linked to the MISC so that I can automate it using other farms.
The tricky bit is moving the mushrooms with water – I need separate redstone lines to keep the pistons extended, holding the water back. Then, to maintain the height, I’ll use signs + packed ice, which will push the mushrooms forward to the next water stream.
Next, the kelp farm, which is also relatively small, but again I am matching its size and style to the version already in the Aqua Lounge:
The pumpkin and melon farms will be a bit larger because these will be incredibly useful resources for trading. Here they are:
Perfect, now for the harder stuff: carrot, beetroot, and potato, which are based on their villager-run counterparts. This means I need to find 32 new villagers and add them to the base…
Yeah, I’m not doing those farms today, haha. Maybe I’ll get to them before the season ends – but likely not. The ones we have are good for now, and when they’re not – I’ll probably already have these done.
Outlines complete – let’s BUILD!!
The sugar cane and cactus farms specifically are getting designs similar to their original counterparts – this is because we are not interested in keeping the farms active all the time. This means we cannot use observers, which of course means we need to use slightly more piston movement than I would like…
^ Above, you can see first the AND gate, which requires two inputs: one from Starlight Overdrive, and one from any MISC crop farm links. There will be a total of eight such AND gates – one for each layer of the farms. Starlight Overdrive’s comparator output increases with each item frame rotation, allowing us to activate each layer separately.
Aesthetics are not important, which is a blessing as that would add so much unnecessary time to the builds. You will never see these farms, so there is no need to decorate them. This makes constructing them a much faster process.
I’m trying to keep everything as simple as possible, which means that all the items will be funneled into one water stream.
The items will ascend through a bubble column, so that I can keep the storage area in line with the others in the SCPC.
^ Here is the crop storage room, with everything sorted nicely and plenty of storage space (for now…).
I am starting on the second layer of the sugar cane and cactus farms, realizing very quickly just how laborious this task really is, and how it could potentially beget another world hiatus.
In an effort to not get burned out, I’ll be taking a gradual approach, and do something like adding one layer of farms with each session or something. There’s no rush to add them all today – if I try to do that before moving onto the next project, I will get burned out, which means you would be waiting months for the next session. Big projects like this are always the bane of my otherwise decent pace throughout Quintropolis. It happened with the guardian farm, then with the iron farm (not the gold farm surprisingly), then with STAS, then again with the Nether highways which were probably the biggest ‘grindy’ project to date. This is exactly how my hiatuses from the world usually start, so it’s a mistake I won’t be making again.
There’s a lot to do here, but we’ll leave the remaining layers for another day. I probably won’t mention them again beyond this.
In a huge session, we unpack some of the final major features for Starlight HQ 3.0, getting the base even closer to its final form. Can we get it done in time for whatever is coming??
Only time is on our side, until it isn't.
Next up... Session 282 - "Build Permits"
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For a villager farm, I think it's best just to have a "trading hall" or just a village with specific villagers you want, for example a librarian with a Mending book. The thing is that villager mechanics are still somewhat "broken" because you can just place and reset the job site block until you get offered the trade you want - this I do expect Mojang to amend in the future, so better take advantage of it now I guess. Just breed two villagers and when the baby grows up, place a lectern. If it doesn't offer you Mending books (or whatever book you're after), destroy the lectern and replace it (you only really need one villager). As long as you haven't traded with the villager, the trades will be reset. By introducing job site blocks, Mojang inadvertently made it much easier to get good trades (at least at the novice level - you can't know the higher level trades right away). If they amend this (see what I did there?), I expect they will make it so that you can't get enchanted books at the novice level (which would be more balanced, because... I have sooooo many Mending librarians now).
I just keep a few Mending librarians in my clubhouse, and a couple other villagers like farmers (easy for emeralds if you have a pumpkin/melon farm), clerics (pretty much the only use for zombie flesh in late-game), and some masons (SUPER easy emeralds because you just trade stone for them, and they offer quartz blocks at master level). Make sure to zombify and then purify the villagers for cheaper trades (or just purify a zombie villager).
I haven't gone the "trading hall" route - instead I just prefer to have a village that houses all the villagers I want to trade with. But you could do it either way.
But yeah most of my farms are broken now, so maybe just stick to potatoes. They can't break that, right??
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Exactly - I don't know that I've ever even crafted a bowled food item, which says a lot considering my main world is over eight years old. In that amount of time, I have never found a need to craft a bowled food item. Maybe now I will do so just to get the advancement for eating all food items in the game, but that means nothing.
We need some way to keep all the food items relevant even in late game. Melons do this by being useful for trading. Even cookies are somewhat useful for composting, because you get a much higher yield of bonemeal than the sum of its parts (using cookies is better than using wheat + cocoa beans, because you get eight cookies per 2 wheat and 1 cocoa bean). Why is this logic not applied to bowled foods regarding hunger? It seems that these foods are being left behind, which is a shame because they could add a lot more use in the food world.
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Thanks a lot for the compliment! It's true that my motivation for farming is so that I can try to replicate the 'Creative mode' approach in survival (since most big farms give me practically unlimited resources anyway). This allows me to build villages, which in the future I plan to upgrade into cities (think on the scale of Amsterdam or Toronto, maybe some places like New York City or Tokyo, but I don't yet have the farms to sustain that level of resource production even though it's definitely possible to get there. That is, until Mojang brings the hammer down on that too, which they seem to do every time somebody finds a way to massively farm things like iron. This is very important to me as you can see here; I use iron as a building block on top of the things you can craft with it, so I would not like that to be nerfed again - iron is far too useful, probably the most useful resource in Minecraft, that I can never have too much of it).
Any update that impacts production rates has the potential to be very detrimental as a result, as you've mentioned. I'm tired of rebuilding farms and stuff after each update. I just want to build villages and cities - the farms help sustain these projects, so for now I'll just stay in 1.15. Without the farms, building this village would have taken an absurd amount of time, but I did almost everything you see there in just a few days.
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They changed the Drowned from gold to copper? What the hell for? If it's so that they can make copper renewable, I can think of about a hundred better ways to do that which don't involve changing a significant mob drop (trading being one of them, or they can add it as a drop to one of the new mobs they keep adding).
I was planning to make a Drowned farm to have another source of gold, but using it for copper is far less useful (well, if I never update, then I could just use it for gold as planned).