You said you only wanted to use mods you found to be stable enough. Do you know if the 1.6 version the airship mod is fairly stable or only the 1,7 version? I'm removing Oceancraft from my modpack (having too many issues with it to be able to use it for anything, so it's basically junk at this point) and I'd like to try out this one. That airship look like a fun build.
I've used the airships mod in 1.6 and I didn't have trouble with it. I didn't use it as extensively as here, though. I've only had three issues; none stability related. First, if you convert an airship back to blocks in midair (e.g. to bomb something), sometimes you end up in the airship and sometimes you fall off. I think it has to do with orientation. Second, if the airship is intersecting some block that doesn't fill its space (like snow) you can't convert it back to blocks. Third, the list of blocks not to include in a ship is too short in the 1.7 version, which is why I had problems launching from that snowy mountain. The list is longer in the 1.6 version and I think snow is included in that one.
I also seem to be unable to right-click anything while I'm flying an airship. Arguably that's a good thing; the airships do make the game much easier as it is. But I did end up not doing the tower wildly perched on my Savanna Plateau M biome that I had been planning. That's going to have to wait for a game that isn't hardcore.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Well, it seems the new software won't allow individual posts to get really big, so:
Episode 15: Supplies and Subterranean Surprises
I haven't been playing because I've been busy working on revising Climate Control to prevent chunk boundaries on many types of world changes. There are three effects on this journal. First is this 2-week hiatus. Second, I forgot to switch my texture pack back to Halcyon Days, so the pics in this episode are with the vanilla pac. Third, there's a change in my plans for the world. Since I'll now be able to add in the biome mods without chunk boundaries (which I won't tolerate), I'm not going to retire this world when I'm ready to put in the biome mods. So now "hardcore because I'll move on after a while" has because "it's really hardcore because I don't want to die!" So this is now my hardest-core hardcore world because it's the one I really don't want to lose.
So, at this point I need glass, so sand and charcoal to smelt it (I'm getting a bit low). I need to get some more wood, and I figure I can start securing a village as well with the extra, since I'm not too far from either of two villages. I head to a nearby jungle-desert junction intending to chop some trees (jungle giants are IMO the best way to get wood in a hurry; but I also need a clear area for airship landings).
The bad thing about jungle giant harvesting is that a fall from a tall giant can kill you. I actually don't think the ones I'm going to chop are big enough for that, but just to be sure I make sure there are vines all the way around so I'll be stopped if I fall (and remember to keep my fingers off the move button on the way down).
From my second giant, I see a jungle temple. I'm tough enough to take an arrow trap, so I decide to loot and investigate. The temple seems buried, so I hack an opening -
and as soon as I go in there's a skeleton. Stupidly I'd put away my bow so i run back to switch. I head back and dispatch the skeleton - and there are two more behind him! I didn't think you could have a skeleton spawner in a jungle temple but it seems I must have one. With armor and cover I dispatch all three but I decide discretion is the better part of valor here and leave.
I find melons as well as cocoa beans so it's certainly been worthwhile.
There are two candidate villages to develop. One I'd found way back in Episode 4, on a savanna to the map SW of my main base. That one is nice and large, and on flat ground. The other I'd found on a swamp edge in Episode 13, near the west edge of the map west of my base, which is also the map my Savanna Plateau M base is on. That one is in the direction I'll eventually want to explore (along the length of the continent I'm on) but it's very small and on a slope.
I decide to head down to the larger one to the SW.
On the way, though, I spot another village from my airship, near a desert/savanna junction. It seems large enough, and flat, so I figure it will have the advantages of the savanna village with a slightly better location (closer to my existing bases, and to where I want to explore).
Here's the location on the SW map. The black cross is the marker I set at the other village.
It seems both large and flat, so a good choice. Odd that rooftop seems to be on a below-ground building in a flat area --
Also odd that the road has dropped down. The road is brick because I had turned on the "Convert village gravel to brick" option in Underground Biomes Constructs. I turned it off some time ago because the call to pass metadata was bugged in Minecraft or Forge. This village must have been generated on my first exploration here, even though I didn't see it.
When I get close to the building I find out what's going on -
The village is built atop a huge cave. The partially-underground building must have generated in the cave itself.
Well, I figure, I can do two things at once. I can dig up my sand, and in the process dig a ramp down into the cave so I can cave it with a safe escape route.
I do so, although it turns out to be somewhat further down than I'd though at first. The cave is pretty big. Worse, when I get to the bottom I find the cave continues to the left and the right of my ramp down, so i have landed in the crook of a "Y". That's pretty hazardous, because If I explore in any direction I can have mobs come up behind and cut off my exit. There's a drop into a cave on the other side of the house and the resident is stuck in it - probably fatally as it'll be a while before I can get in there.
While deciding what to do, I start securing the village. I go into each house and make sure it's lit and zombies can't spawn inside, and knock out stairs in front of each house so zombies can't break the doors. This alone makes villages pretty zombie-resistant. Not much point in fences until I've dealt with the cave.
Predictably most of the villagers are crammed into one tiny shack. In the day, even.
I decide to block up the side caves and explore forward at first. While I'm doing this, however, a witch comes up. My reflex when a mob approaches is to run away to get distance while I decide on a plan to take it out.Unfortunately, that doesn't work with witches, as I realize while going up the slope, because of the slow potions. Whoops.
I run into one of the shack to get away. I'm down to 1 1/2 hearts, poisoned, when I shut the door.
I'm under some pressure, because it's almost sunset and I can't sleep with the witch just outside. After I drink my milk and get a little health back, I open the door and snipe her, intending to shut the door if she tries to pitch a potion. I'm fast or lucky, though, and get her in three shots before she ever get a potion off.
With no more milk, and no more cows nearby I can see, I don't want to continue trying to open and clear the cave. So I decide to head back to the plateau base and do a little more Nether exploration, hoping for a fortress and some Nether Wort.
I explore a little more of the map on the way back.
With nearly two stacks of glass, I headed back into the Nether. In Episode 12, my Nether portal had come out on the south side of a hill and I had tunnelled through the hill to the north side. Now that I had some glass, I installed a small viewing gallery on the north side where I'd broken through but saw little of interest. There was a large open area ahead so it would be hard to continue.
Now I went to about the spot in the tunnel that was on the "latitude" for my main base and tunneled east, in the direction of my base. After a substantial distance, I broke through to open space and installed a view gallery.
My tunnel had come out at the level of a shelf that extended some distance and then appeared to slope down. North of me was another hill, very near, and I built a short above-ground glass-walled passage to reach it.
Looking west from this passage, you can see the north side of the hill I originally tunneled into. My first tunnel probably come out a little past the big glowstone chandelier. At least I know I can probably continue that passage by tunneling up. I'm relatively high in the Nether, about 87; I was hoping for that when I built my first portal at cloud level because it's easier for a tunneler to get around near the top of the Nether.
I tunneled through that hill to the north until I came out the north side and installed a partially hanging view gallery.
At this point I ran out of glass and went back to the plateau to get some more. Once back in the nether I spotted a small magma cube outside the big viewing gallery and installed a door to go out and swat it. No drops. However, after I went back inside, a ghost potshotted me.
I wasn't really sure how it spotted me to shoot. I thought my glass walls were solid. I pulled back down the corridor a bit so it could no longer shoot at me and repaired the damage.
I went back to the hanging view gallery and improved it a bit.
The Nether can be a very attractive place.
At this point I decided to put in a Nether connection between my bases. My plan was to build the portal at my main base, come through (which would put me out at the existing portal in the Nether since the bases are close enough) and then head back to where I needed to build a portal in the Nether to get to my main base.
I head back to my Savanna Plateau base and come out at night. I can't sleep because there's a zombie pigman at the portal. I don't want to fight him on top of a mountain because I'm concerned about knockback. I shove him off the top so he won't get in the way.
But, I seem to have lit the place up well enough, and nothing bothers me. It's almost dawn, so I hop in my airship and head for home. At home, I take the dropshaft down to mining level.
Whee!
I mine a half-stack of obsidian from a lava pool. It's been so long in real time since I've been down here that I've forgotten which is the passage I want but I find it on the third try.
Back to the top on the elevator.
Whee! You can't see action in the pic, but the red granite block to my left has just shoved me onto the stair step I'm on. The rhyolite spiral staircase goes all the way down when the pistons aren't activated.
At this point, I'm almost to level thirty. I do a little ranching and then muse about what to enchant. I decide to try armor. I enchant an iron breastplate and get - Unbreaking III. Great. Yeah, in the distant future I can combine it with another enchantment, but for now basically useless.
i console myself watching the dusk from the enchantment room.
I decided to build the portal in the north tower top floor. The racket will probably make the tower semi-uninhabitable but it's far enough from the south tower and I don't really need the space.
When I go up there I find a spider to trash and discover Bane of Arthropods isn't completely useless after all - I get the Overkill achievement!
Here's a big benefit of the variable portal sizes of 1.7. A 1.6 portal would have had to be off center and wouldn't look as good.
I'm close enough to my other Nether portal that if I go through I'll come out at the portal I already have in the Nether. So record my coordinates, (x - 2687; Climate Control moved me a long way to get me out of the ocean when I started) I head through, and then head down to the big viewing gallery to put in the portal home.
Well, my z coordinate guestimate was great - the corridor to the east is almost exactly right for my home base. But my x coordinate is way off - the gallery is only halfway there. Well, I'll just tunnel down through the shelf in front of the gallery. But -
I keep breaking through into large voids. The shelf is apparently just a tongue and only goes about half of the distance I have left - I'm still short about 30 blocks.
Whoops.
My only exit from the Nether will take me to my Savanna Plateau landing - and my airship is at home. I *could* walk home, but it seems ignominious. So I try to figure another way there. I'm mildly concerned I may have a situation like I had with my Thaumcraft world, where I ended up having to climb down to lava level and build a platform out in a lava ocean to get to my basilica base (it took days of play to get it all done)
Looking out of the gallery it seems that south of me the shelf connects to a pillar that goes up into the roof. If I can reach that I should be fine. So I start tunneling south.
I hit two lava pockets but I just use a bucket to pick them up and dispose of each in a furnace, smelting two stacks of nether brick in the process.
My first crossing attempt comes out in the void again; I underestimated the distance. My second comes out in the void too but close enough I can see the bridge across. I'd love to have put in some windows but I'm out of glass. I didn't take pics because Ghast shots would damage the terrain so I blocked up openings as fast as I could.
When I finally go through the bridge I find it's pretty thin - only 4 blocks thick, with some dents I have to patch as I go through. Eventually I break out into another void, but I'm near the desired x coordinate and turn back north. I staircase up some since I know the underside of the pillar slants up and I have to climb some. After a while I breach the roof and continue straight. I do get to the needed z coordinate and turn back east for the last few blocks.
At the very end I run out of cobblestone and have to resort to Nether Brick for my flooring. It works fine, of course; I'd just prefer the corridors to have the same look everywhere.
I build a portal into a wall for convenience (so there's only one way to come out) and head through.
Back home. FINALLY!
I build a little ring of stairs out of Nether Brick around the portal so I don't have to hop up, but it doesn't look very good - it ruins the symmetry. Oh well. I'll keep my eyes open for black granite and try some black granite half-slabs when I find some.
I have a lot of netherrack but not much coal so I head down to the lava pool I've been using for obsidian (whee on the dropshaft again) and set up some furnaces using lava.
Probably should have done more, but I only brought four stacks of netherrack down.
Next episode: back to the village to rescue a town!
Back at the Savanna/Desert village one of the villagers has fallen into the well and can't get out. No Lassie to do the rescue so I mine out part of the well walls to let him out.
I set up a fairly standard base in one of the many unused cottages.
The village looks pretty nice in the Halcyon days/ UB32 textures. The Dacite cobblestone in this region has a blue hue, making a nice contrast with the dark brown wood. Martha Stewart would approve.
I snipe a spider and while recovering the string and experience drop a few more torches in the big cave. This actually lights up the central cave enough that I can start dealing with the branches. For some reason, I encounter no resistance as I light up or block off four branches.
This one is definitely staying blocked off for now.
There's a Siltstone stratum around the bottom of the cave and in one of the passages I completely light up. This is good, because Siltstone is a good decorative stone and even goes well with the local Dacite.
I excavate out the caves on the other side of the buried library. The inhabitant is indeed long dead.I had consider making the library into a kind of tongue-in-cheek gift shop for the cavern complex, but the door is 6 blocks in the air. So, instead I rip off everything above ground and everything valuable (mostly the books) and bury the complex instead.
That's a thick roof!
I cover most of the roof of the cave with a layer of Dacite for blast resistance in case a creeper comes by and a layer of sand above that for looks.
I figure the villagers should have calmed down some but they're still panicky. While I'm trying to get them to stand still enough that I can see what their trades are I hear a burning zombie in the middle of the day! There's a zombie walking down the main street! I kill it and look for the source. Just outside the village:
I head in and light it up until I hit a vertical fork (one passage sloping down and another right above it going level. This is more than I care to deal with for now so I block it at that point and go back to the village.
At this point I'm ready to start fencing the village but I left my wood at the savanna landing. So I head out to chop some acacia and some stray oaks.
I find pumpkins and bring them in. As I start fencing, I realize it's a pretty big village and end up having to make another lumberjack run. I leave the cave entrance outside the enclosure on general safety and so the villagers won't fall in like the idiot librarian.
Sunset over my new fenced enclosure.
The next morning I spot a zombie under a tree next to the fence. I head over to swat him.
Annoyingly he gets in a blow and lights me. Not a serious risk under the circumstances, though.
I harvest the village's crops for trading. It has a lot of farms! Eleven in all - it takes a whole day to harvest. I get carrots and potatoes along with all the wheat.
Every village I ever develop I want to leave "natural" with the villagers free to move around. And every time -
they are so annoying and idiotic I end up having to lock most of them in. I couldn't get the villager with the wheat deal to stand still long enough to trade until I locked him in a cottage. I even swatted another villager once by accident when his interface dropped. I then manage some trading and open up some trades to buy chicken and wool.
Some piggies had wandered into the complex while it was being built. Since I have carrots I set up a pigpen for them. Since my base is secure I can operate through the night without trouble.
At this point some of the villagers finally leave panic mode and start wandering around and setting up in the other houses. So things are starting to look pretty good around here.
Next episode: fetching supplies, a decent enchantment, and maps of all three of my bases!
Halycon Days is quite a nice texture pack, isn't it? Its bed texture is one of my favorite beds--I often will replace the bed texture in faithful texture packs with it. I just like the rusty red color and the pillow.
Looking forward to the maps! Also you might want to start putting your images in spoiler tags--this page is starting to load a tad slowly.
At this point I decided to pick up some of the supplies from my starter base (I guess I should start naming my bases now, so I'll call it Seaside). I decided I'd also make maps of all three of my bases. As you'll se, that actually didn't work out too well because Minecraft only starts maps on multipliers for 64 or 128 to make tiled sets more doable, and all three bases ended up partly off the map. I don't need that, because Explorercraft can tile my maps for me, so on my next revision I'll set it so Explorercraft maps can start at any coordinate.
I hopped on my airship and headed to Seaside. I had to go to Seaside to make any more maps because my paper was all there.
Here's the map of Seaside (until I do the ExplorerCraft revision). The gray circle near the center was my original tower - you can see the lapis lazuli spire as a dot in the center and the balconies on three of the sides. The wide brown line above it is the walkway going to the other tower, which is partly on the map to the top. The thinner brown lines are fences for my pens; the big pen is for cows and the smaller one for sheep. Fences don't hold chickens, so they are everywhere. The green fringes along some beaches to the right are my sugarcane plantings.
I decided to slaughter some of my chickens and discovered my leaky chicken ranch isn't working too well. It *looks* like a lot of chickens, but they're scattered enough that I can spend all day butchering and not get even half a stack. I think I'm going to build my standard semi-automated chicken ranch at Obercavern, the recently secured village and eventually dispose of the chickens here for peace and quiet.
At one point I was butchering some chickens that had fallen into a pond just outside my north wall and I heard a creeper explosion! I hadn't even heard the SSSSSS. I'd even searched for creepers out here and sniped one, but I missed it. It could have been game over, because I have no explosion resistance enchantments, but for some reason (perhaps that I was in the water) I took almost no damage.
Here's the hole after I patched it up a bit. This reinforced my intent to give up on ranching chickens at Seaside, since they can get through the exterior fencing and screens and I have to go out into the surrounding area.
I get to level 30 and head up for an enchantment. I decide to get boots and I get Prot 3, Feather Falling 4. Excellent! This means I can do taller buildings and survive a fall up to 36 blocks. No pic because screenshots aren't working in GUI screens - a 1.7.2 bug, I assume.
I went to Savanna Landing, the Savanna Plateau M top, arriving at night so I could check out the lighting safely.
And here's the map for Savanna Landing:
This map is hard to interpret, because although higher regions are supposed to be lighter colors, you can't really see the relief and it's not clear where the drops are. The black line on the right is the Nether Gate. The usable areas are ROUGHLY the brightest-green and brightest-orange regions at the top, to the right, plus some of the more mottled regions they enclose. For example, the region between me, the airship, and the Nether Gate is usable, but the dark brown regions below the two trees there is the slope down. I'll have to put in safety fencing to make the boundaries clear on any map - actually a good idea, now that I think about it.
I next headed off to Obercavern.
There are actually *two* desert temples on the route between Obercavern and Seaside. I haven't gone after them because I've had accidents clearing out temples before. Once when I was opening the chests I accidentally clicked on the pressure plate instead (which was right next to it at the angle I was standing). This is hardcore, I don't really need a bit of gold or iron, blahblahblah. If I ever need something hard-to-get like a name tag maybe I'll give them a go.
And here's the map for Obercavern where ONCE AGAIN the base doesn't completely fit, here extending just a bit off the bottom. You can see the large number of farms (11) scattered about. The entrance to the big cave is the gray area adjacent to the left side of the enclosure. The gray strips are roads. My little house is the second from the top. The villagers are mostly crammed into the shack two behind me.
I'm considering building a church in the region encompassing me, the farm in front of me, and the airship -partly for looks, and partly as an excuse for breeding doors. It's actually pretty empty, although that's not clear from this map. I had a similar plan on a village in my first long-term hardcore world - right before a creeper fell out of a hole in a cavern and killed me. Grrr.
That night a mob shows up in the village! I'm wondering how it could have gotten in and I think - maybe it's spawning on the roof. I pillar up and -
Yep, that's the problem. I wonder why I haven't had trouble with this before. I think, just by luck, I haven't had many of these flat-topped roofs before. And at least once I *did* think to light the roofs; I just forgot this time. I snipe this bad boy and pillar up to light all the flat roofs.
As I'm doing this I get into a bit of a fight with two spiders that come over the walls and a skeleton giving them arrow support. But I'm geared up pretty well, so I manage.
Next episode: a mining shaft at Obercavern, and a semi-automated chicken ranch.
For the church I want to build I'd like to use at least similar materials to the village, and that means a fair amount of quarrying Dacite. I'd rather get diamonds as I quarry so I want to do it by my standard level 11 branch mining. I've actually got nearly a full stack of ladders, so I decide to dig a laddered dropshaft right next to my cottage.
Down I go, with 2 block platforms every 3 blocks, so I don't have to dig straight down. It's very uneventful until just before the bottom I cut into two successive mineshafts.
I have no desire to go caving right now so I just block them off.
After I finish the shaft I head back to the surface for a round of farming. I do it at night, hoping to collect some monsters in the morning, but I hadn't thought about the fact that so many of the farms are right next to the fencing. I'm having to watch my back as I farm that and it's pretty annoying.
In the morning as I swat some monsters I get lit by a burning zombie *again*. Grrr.
I want to build a chicken farm here as the fenced one isn't working and I'd like the chicken where I can sell it. My plan is a fairly basic one: an automated egg farm dispensing eggs into a pen. I also want to build the farm *before * I build the church so the chickens will breed as I build.
I carve the farm underground, right off the dropshaft, so I get to quarry as I build it. For the egg farm, I'll use water to push the eggs into the hoppers.
After I carve out the egg farm area, I go to my next platform down and start carving out a big room.
I knew this was the level of the cave but I thought I had enough space.
I was wrong.
I seal off the breach and build the room mostly away from the center of the village rather than towards it.
At this point I need to go back to Seaside to pick up some eggs, feathers, and sugarcane, which I'd forgotten to bring. It's kind of a waste going back and forth but to be honest I rather enjoy looking at the scenery on the flights.
Although the off-centered base maps don't look as good as they could, they're very useful for landing the airship. I can see almost exactly where I am even when I'm high enough I can barely see the base by eye. It's like flying by instruments!
I head back to Obercavern and make another night instrument landing. I head over to feed the pigs and get ambushed by a spider
And then a skeleton.
I get greedy and drop a dirt block to get out and grab the bones. I get swarmed by zombies and have to pillar up to get back in.
But I forgot the dirt block would let the pigs out too and while I'm fixing that *another* skeleton shows up and things get completely out of hand with escaping pigs, sniping skeletons, a zombie mob at the fence, and some more spiders getting in.
With dawn I manage to get things under control, lure some of the piggies back in and butcher some stragglers, and collect some drops.
I finish the egg farm pen with glass blocks to seal it off and use the dispenser to dump in my eggs.
Unfortunately the water is pushing the chickens in front of the dispenser so I'm killing them as I dispense. Four stacks of eggs gives only 6 chickens. Oops.
I put in an intermediate floor to access a hopper and dispenser underneath the chest for the hoppers. That dispenser I put on the third level so the chicks will drop down and not remain targets in front of it.
A basic redstone clock with off-switch completes the setup.
As soon as the chickens start dropping eggs I realize how hopelessly inadequate my breeding population is. I relocate the dispenser in the egg farm section to the other end so I can breed more egg-layers. One chicken escapes during the process, which is frankly better than I expected.
Now, though, I have a decision: do I make another trip to Seaside to get more eggs or do i do other stuff here and let the eggs collect?
Next Episode: - um - actually I haven't decided yet - later!
Episode 20a, 20b, 20c, 20d, 20e: Groundhog Day comes to Minecraft
My bridge mod from the old version of Climate Control to the new version was ready for testing. The new version allows changes to world configs and adding biome mods to existing worlds without chunk boundaries and I was VERY eager to test it on this journal world. I really wanted to add Highlands biomes to this world, and I wanted to fix my earlier mistake of a really high Roofed Forest incidence, which has been crowding out the other biomes in its climate.
I needed maps, of course, and most of my paper was back at Seaside, plus I didn't have enough iron. I could have gone back, but instead I chose to plant a sugarcane farm here and mine for iron under Obercavern. I got lucky and found a lot of iron right away, but the sugarcane took time. While waiting for the sugarcane to grow, I busied myself with routine activities like wheat farming, lumberjacking, pig ranching, and the occasional overnight mob hunt.
Eventually I ran out of routine activities and started on the church for Obercavern, building most of the front facade. I'm going to hold back on the pics from that until the next episode, because this episode is pretty long and complicated.
First, I backed up my world because I expected some degree of problems. It's a hardcore world, but I have to make allowances for the fact that I'm constantly testing my own mods. If I really die (other than to a bug), I'll follow the honor system.
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
I get about 1 map away and:
Chunk walls.
WTF? I had tested on starter worlds literally more than a dozen times. Well, I set up some logs and after a couple hours figured out I needed to use world coordinates, not chunk coordinates, for recording existing worlds. I hadn't seen the problem before because when you're close to (0,0) world and chunk coordinates were close enough for everything to work.
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
I reach the boundary where I've explored before and push on. After about 800 blocks, I expect to see new stuff and I see - same vanilla terrain. So I go another 1000 blocks and - same vanilla terrain. Another 1000 - same.
Sigh. Something else to fix.
After some code review, I realize I'm calling GenLayerRiverMix, not GenLayerVoronoiZoom, so I need to adjust my multipliers. (Again, with the tests everything was close enough to 0,0 to make no difference.) Well, that's easily fixed...
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
This time I pass into new terrain and spot an Extreme Hills. No big deal -except -
It's not Extreme Hills, it's Highland Cliffs! It works!
(And, BTW, the Cliffs look really good - better than in 1.6.4)
No chunk walls between old and new! Perfect!
I take a triumphant selfie at the cliff edge.
At this point, Minecraft crashes.
Well, that's pretty routine even in vanilla. Out of heap space. But, after increasing my heap space, when I restart my airship is gone. And all the supplies in it. That's NOT routine. Minecraft is pretty good about crashing gracefully. I consider just lumping it but I realize I'd forgotten to change my Roofed Forest incidence…
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
The first night I set the airship down in a forest on top of some trees, as I've done before. In the morning, I can't take off. It turns out Archimedes' Ships has attached about a dozen trees to the airship. I check the configs and discover Minecraft:leaves isn't on the exclusion list (which I fix). But, no matter what I do, I can't get the airship to move, or to disassemble back to blocks. I consider lumping it, as before. But i don't want a possible corrupted airship sitting around my world...
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
I get to where the cliffs had been before, and they generated in the same place.
Still look great!
I am getting some odd juxtapositions that at first look like chunk walls. On closer inspection, they're not; rather they seem to be odd sub-biome juxtapositions. I suspect sub-biome locking is generating these oddities. So, it seems the choice is biome locking (for smoother transitions) or sub-biome locking (for faster transitions) but no benefit from the combination.
I am, however, having trouble with my airship. It turns out Highlands is very demanding on my machine.To me, it's tolerable - 1/10 to 1/2 second pauses. But, Archimedes' ships makes a lot of assumptions and calculations to generate an illusion of smooth motion and it can't cope with these delays. I'm having a lot of trouble controlling it in the more complex terrains. So…
No. I'm lumping it this time. I get out and explore on foot. I can explore on foot and use the airship for fast travel where I've already explored. Sometimes Highlands terrain makes it hard to get around, but I'm a big boy.
And for all the frustrations with performance, Highlands is very seductive…
A bog I'm forced into by sheer cliffs.
Deliciously disgusting!
A copse of Autumn Woods in a Pinelands, next to a Forest. Highland smartly includes a lot of open forests, which are much more attractive to walk through than the closed forests than dominate vanilla, especially in 1.7
The spectacular Flying Mountains. These need airships to truly do them justice - I'll come back for some pics later after I've explored them more thoroughly and don't have to deal with so much lag.
Highlands Tundra pokes above adjacent normal-height terrain, and creates an imposing and ominous effect Ice Plains just can't do.
I have to do a long detour around this daunting glacier.
I'm repeatedly reminded exactly how much easier the airship makes getting around. I have to pay attention to holes in the ground again. Rivers and lakes are proving surprisingly useful.
I'm not sure how this bridge formed. But I like it.
Eventually I head back toward terrain I've explored before. As I get close, my old terrain settings come back into effect, and it's back to all vanilla biomes. But no chunk boundaries. I'm not even exactly sure when I transition back. Climate Control is splicing two totally different world generations together, almost flawlessly.
Jungles also look great in Halcyon Days. I've been avoiding them with the airship, but I pretty much have to go through this one to get back to my airship.
Mind the gap!
Finally I get back to the hill I left the airship on.
This show most of the ground exploration I've done. The path going NW was my outbound leg and above me is the vanilla Roofed Forest and Jungle I explored to get back. The Flying Mountains and most of the snowy region are on the map to the west (not shown here.) I was struck by how much more slowly I explored on foot. I'd gotten pretty used to overflights.
I board my airship and head home, exploring on the north coast of my continent. The unexplored areas are not large enough for any Highlands terrain to generate, so the lag is manageable in an airship.
I discover and overfly a village at night. Oops. Hope they survive.
I probably should head back to Overcavern game wise, but I make for Seaside for a pic of my map wall.
I've gotten this section of the continent mostly explored. The new Highlands terrain doesn't look distinctive on the map, but you can see than the climate smoothing is working - no weird climate junctions. Yay! Success!
But, just in case, no triumphant selfie this time
Next episode - working on the Church at Obercavern.
Zeno I'm really liking this. Your climate control mod is starting to look very useful. And UB looks great. I'm having a hard time finding Damage Screenshots, though. Is that one of your mods that you made for this? Or ..could you maybe link me, please? Many thanks
You couldn't find Damage Screenshots because it hadn't been released. Here it is, cleaned up and ready to go. And thanks for prodding me, because I fixed a chronic problem of skipped screenshots while I was at it.
Edit: I initially uploaded a version that takes too many pics. That's been fixed. Two people downloaded it before I fixed it and you'll probably want to re-download.
I had to give up on Highlands--it wasn't just lags, but crashes..Even with BoP I had to disable a lot of the tall biomes. Nothing frustrates me quite like trying to get home after a long exploration trip and finding myself stuck in ridiculously hard-to-traverse terrain with tons of lag.
I haven't made an airship yet but I did make the boat with the Archimedes helm. I did experience some weirdness with it, especially when it hit some ice--It popped up one block above the water, making it hard to get back into but it eventually righted itself. But since the ocean by my homestead isn't very big, I'm going to build an airship to explore further beyond where the ocean ends. Since I tweaked what the BoP biomes that can gen in my world, a lot of the landlocked areas near my homestead were easily explored on horseback (well, donkeyback--donkeys' slowness makes it easier for me to avoid holes, pits and ravines in unfamiliar areas, plus I don't speed past resources I'm looking for). It's just the reaches beyond the ocean that might require the airship.
Episode 21: Church Choices and Challenging Charges
The first part of this episode actually happened before the previous episode, but I'm segregating them for thematic reasons. Episode 20 is more a meta-episode about modding while this is a more conventional episode.
There's a large open space in the middle of the village with only one farm in the middle. I decide to build a large church here and tear out the farm.
I'm going to leave 3-wide roads on either side (for iron golems) and that leaves enough room for a building 13 blocks wide. I want to make the church fit in with the village so I'm not going to try to make it look super-good. I'm going to use the village palette of dacite cobble, oak logs, and oak furnishings, plus I'm going to add dacite brick and siltstone. I was really iffy about using the dacite cobble, because cobble is generally not a great-looking construction material, but eventually I decided to go with consistency and just not use too much cobble.
My overall plan is a nave with an entrance facing that path, with a quire at the far end. I'm not sure I'll have room for much of a quire so for now I'm just building the nave.
This is how I build the entrance. Unfortunately since the church is an odd number of blocks across I can't have centered double doors. I'm using brick as a framing element and oak logs as the primary structural element, with cobble being the filler. I have the oak log supports out one block to provide some relief.
I'm going to have double doors all around the building. Above them will be large glass windows. I'm going to have a large round window over the entrance and tall rectangular windows on the sides.
Originally I'd been planning a larger window but I decided to keep with the brick framing in a cobble wall, and that forced me down to this 7 across circle. I haven't decided what to put in the window but I'm thinking about a crescent or half moon.
Obercavern certainly looks different from 20 blocks up.
At this point I embarked on the adventures and meta-adventures of Episode 20. I ended up back at Seaside and while I was there I wanted to pick up some supplies, pick off some chickens (now that I'm farming them at Obercavern) and enchant something, since I'm near level 30.
I get rid of most of the chickens but I'm still not to level 30 so I butcher some cows as well. By then it's night. As I head up to my enchantment room a skelly snipes me but I ignore it as it's outside the walls and it's not yet midnight, so if I kill it the drops will decay before I can pick them up. But as I step into the tower --
BOOM!
There was a creeper. INSIDE MY TOWER! I have no idea how it got there. I've spent hours of night wandering about this enclosure and I've never had anything inside except spiders, which it's not designed to keep out. I'm guessing that somewhere in the 3D maze underneath the tower that I created while building the piston elevator, there's a spot with block light 7. Looking at the damage, it seems to have been coming up the stairs from the mine, which is consistent with that. I'm also close enough to it while in the tower or even the cow pen that I'm suppressing spawns there, so maybe that's why it happened before. But why did it have to be a creeper? Couldn't I have gotten a zombie or skelly first? Sigh.
The real problem is that it blew a hole in the screen and the monsters can now come through. I get a skelly
And then an armed zombie
Before I manage to plug the breach with dirt. There was a spider outside too and honestly I think if the creeper had blown a hole 2 wide as well as 2 tall I wouldn't have made it and that would have been the end of this journal.
After getting things under control, I head up to the enchantment room and enchant a bow, getting Power 3/Punch 1. Decent, nothing special. I plan to use up my current Power 1 bow before switching.
Still shaken by my near-death experience, I grab the stuff I wanted (eggs, leather, and trade goods) and head for Obercavern. Rather than a straight line, I take a route along the coast to fill in some blank spots on my map.
I discover and overfly another village. Oops! Sorry guys!
I arrive at Obercavern at dawn.
I dump half the eggs into the breeder pen and the other half into the redstone egg hatcher. I'm short of fuel so I go down to the mine to look for coal.
I immediately find *3* veins. Well, that worked out!
I head upstairs to farm and ranch. That night I run around trading, getting a half-stack of emeralds. A lot of zombies are hanging around the fence so near dawn I head over to knock some heads.
A creeper wanders up to the fence so I pull back to snipe him.
But not far enough.
So, it's night, and there's about a dozen zombies that can get into town now. Great.
Fortunately my security measures - lighting inside and a jump up to all doors - suffice to save the squidwards. The zombies can't get inside and, since the villagers are around, don't even bother me, so I can dispose of them one at a time.
This zombie villager came in that way; he wasn't converted.
After killing a LOT of zombies I patch up the fence. I leave the hole - one less place for mobs to hang out by the fence.
I head back into the mine to collect more siltstone for the floor.
I start building one of the walls. I build two bays on the side, each consisting of a door framed like the once on the entrance flanked by the protruding oak support columns.
Here's the first bay, completed.
After finishing those two bays I'm running low on brick. While some is roasting, I head down to mine. When I come back up I get sniped. I move into the center of the complex so I won't get shot while I figure out where it is and - I still get shot!
A spider jockey! On the roof - of MY house, which is almost insulting.
This is another first for me - I've never had to fight a spider jockey. But, after reading all these posts about how dangerous they are I don't find it much of a problem. I feather the spider and then the jockey and climb up to collect my loot.
Come morning I have to deal with a skelly in gold armor. He's actually more of a problem than the jockey was.
I'm also running low on oak, so I spend the day chopping acacia outside the walls so I can plant oak. I'm getting a little low on space for trees inside the walls, since if a tree grows up against a log in one of the houses the leaves won't auto decay and I have to chop then manually, which is a pain.
I finish the two bays and take a shot from the inside to see if it works.
Hmm. Didn't think about this. I made my windows and walls in symmetrical groups from the outside, but since the outside is 1 block further out it's not symmetrical on the inside. This is problematic because the sides are on alleys, essentially, and these walls will probably get seen mostly from the inside. I consider rebuilding, but it's a fair amount of work and the church isn't *supposed* to be a masterpiece; it's supposed to be a village church.
I head outside of town to see how the church looks from a distance. From this it looks pretty good. It does look like it belongs in the village. Actually it might blend in too well, but not to the point that I have to change it (although, next time, I'll have less overlap with the village palette). So I'll stick with the current plan and not do any rebuilding.
I had to give up on Highlands--it wasn't just lags, but crashes..Even with BoP I had to disable a lot of the tall biomes. Nothing frustrates me quite like trying to get home after a long exploration trip and finding myself stuck in ridiculously hard-to-traverse terrain with tons of lag.
Your problems with Highlands scare me, because it would be quite a project to strip Highlands out at this point. When were you playing with it? I notice in the logs there's a fair number of crashes that Highlands is intercepting and ignoring, and I suspect that's at least part of the lag. From my own modding experience I can tell he's having trouble with multi-block decorations, which Minecraft handles incorrectly. I'm hoping you were playing before he put in the try-catch blocks to keep that from crashing the game. I seem to have developed a workable set of solutions for the problem; maybe i should pass them along.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
I had intended it for the Life in the wood modpack for 1.6 to replace BoP, but I was testing it out first with a clean re-install with only that mod in Forge 1.6.4 . What was particularly worrying was that once it started crashing, I couldn't get that world to open again--it's just immediately crash and so that world would be lost. So that's why I gave up on it.
I know they made some fixes with the 1.7 version, but I've read here and there with other people putting together private SSP modpacks that they couldn't include Highlands because of it crashing. Pity because I think it's a very good-looking mod.
I duplicated the bays on the other side. This went a little faster as I figured out how to build the bays up from the ground without scaffolding and ladders (basically place blocks on the other side of the window by reaching across - it's a stretch, but doable.) That saved a moderate amount of time going up and down and reduced the times I fell off my access ladders (although I still have a couple of screenshots Damage Screenshots took when I did.) It's annoyingly easy to fall off a long ladder on the outside. Maybe when I'm done I'll figure a way to put an access ladder on the inside of one of the support columns, where I'll at least have walls to the left and right.
I actually managed to keep to my self-commitments to build a simpler roof for once. I built a pitched roof with oak slabs rather than the domes or elaborate staircase roofs I usually build. So, no elaborate dome scaffolding and no finicky stair placement. Yay!
After I was done I headed out to take a shot.
I was a little disappointed you could barely see the roof. Between the height of the building and the low pitch you have to be a long way off. In the village you can't see it at all.
From the inside, though, there's a nice patterning effect due to lighting oddities on the underside of slabs. With half-slab domes this has been a detriment but here it's an asset.
The views convince me the building needs to be longer than my originally plan. Originally I was aiming for 4 bays and that last pic in particular makes me think that's too short. In addition my original idea included a really high quire but I now think that will look ridiculous. I decide for a cruciform plan, with the two bays I've already built as the nave, the next two bays protruding out as the arms, and then the last bay as an (unremarkable) quire. This will make the arms about as wide as the nave, but shorter, which is the ideal proportions.
I start laying out the plan on the ground to make sure it works. I immediately discover some problems. The fifth bay goes beyond the fence - that's no big deal, since I can move the fence. But the arms are on top of two houses, including one that already has trading villagers locked in. I consider ripping down the houses but eventually decide to keep them and make the 3rd bay part of the nave and only the 4th protrude for the arms. That will make the arms pretty narrow, but I figure that will only be an issue from an aerial view. On the ground they'll still break up the church so it's not one long repetitive corridor.
I try putting a moon up in the round window. This is my first attempt at pixel art, and I'm not too happy with it. For now I'll leave it (the glass would be lost on a replacement anyway) and maybe somebody here will have some bright ideas.
I put up the third bay and check the looks. Coming along; I think 5 bays will be about right. The height-length ratio will be about the golden mean (1.6something) and that's good.
As I've been doing this I've been doing routine stuff like farming, sniping, mining supplies, and raising chickens. I'm getting chickens both from the egg farm and from breeding with surplus seeds.
The population is getting up there!
I hit level 30 and head back to Seaside for an enchant. I don't have diamonds at Obercavern for another enchant table; they're all at Seaside.
There's a skeleton in the piston elevator! I also get a zombie coming up the old stairs. Clearly I'm having a spawn problem. I look around in the diggings under the tower and can't find any spawn spots. I decide for starters I'll block up those areas, but I put that off for later.
I enchant a helmet and get Respiration 3. Bah, just a specialty helmet,.
Back to Obercavern, arriving at dawn again. I bring some diamonds so I can make an enchantment table here, if I want. I also bring some dyes for the stained glass.
My doors have (contrary to my expectations) enabled an Iron Golem to spawn. But he's pretty useless inside the church so I push him outside.
The villagers have discovered the church and seem to like it. Which is kind of a bad thing, because they make quite a racket.
I start on the windows. 7 pixels by 2 isn't much for representational art, but I have a go at it. Can anybody figure out what this is supposed to be? Hint: it's related to my start. In this pack, brown glass is just 2x2 glass panes, which would be good for some things but isn't right for my plans.
I try a simple pattern on another window. As so often, I build different parts of a building different ways to see what works best. Usually I tear down and rebuild the choices I like less, but sometimes I leave them.
Even though the representational pattern isn't very representational, I like it better than the simple pattern so I use a similar idea for the rest of the nave windows.
Individual windows aren't spectacular but the overall effect is acceptable, at least for a first try.
These two probably let you know what I'm trying to do.
I add some pews and it's looking like a pretty respectable village church.
The outside is working too. Any stained glass is good just for eliminating the see-through affect that plagues Minecraft buildings with big windows (like most of mine.) It also reduces the problem of the church being *too* similar to the other village buildings.
If you look carefully there's a burning zombie in the pic. Like in Seaside, I'm seeing spawns in places that have been safe for a while - in this case the lit-up cavern. A change in Forge? An effect from Highlands? A bug in one of my mods? Just plain luck? No answer for now.
Next episode: a break from building; off for exploration, and testing Climate Control.
"Remember to not stop at the Middle"
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I've used the airships mod in 1.6 and I didn't have trouble with it. I didn't use it as extensively as here, though. I've only had three issues; none stability related. First, if you convert an airship back to blocks in midair (e.g. to bomb something), sometimes you end up in the airship and sometimes you fall off. I think it has to do with orientation. Second, if the airship is intersecting some block that doesn't fill its space (like snow) you can't convert it back to blocks. Third, the list of blocks not to include in a ship is too short in the 1.7 version, which is why I had problems launching from that snowy mountain. The list is longer in the 1.6 version and I think snow is included in that one.
I also seem to be unable to right-click anything while I'm flying an airship. Arguably that's a good thing; the airships do make the game much easier as it is. But I did end up not doing the tower wildly perched on my Savanna Plateau M biome that I had been planning. That's going to have to wait for a game that isn't hardcore.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Episode 15: Supplies and Subterranean Surprises
I haven't been playing because I've been busy working on revising Climate Control to prevent chunk boundaries on many types of world changes. There are three effects on this journal. First is this 2-week hiatus. Second, I forgot to switch my texture pack back to Halcyon Days, so the pics in this episode are with the vanilla pac. Third, there's a change in my plans for the world. Since I'll now be able to add in the biome mods without chunk boundaries (which I won't tolerate), I'm not going to retire this world when I'm ready to put in the biome mods. So now "hardcore because I'll move on after a while" has because "it's really hardcore because I don't want to die!" So this is now my hardest-core hardcore world because it's the one I really don't want to lose.
So, at this point I need glass, so sand and charcoal to smelt it (I'm getting a bit low). I need to get some more wood, and I figure I can start securing a village as well with the extra, since I'm not too far from either of two villages. I head to a nearby jungle-desert junction intending to chop some trees (jungle giants are IMO the best way to get wood in a hurry; but I also need a clear area for airship landings).
The bad thing about jungle giant harvesting is that a fall from a tall giant can kill you. I actually don't think the ones I'm going to chop are big enough for that, but just to be sure I make sure there are vines all the way around so I'll be stopped if I fall (and remember to keep my fingers off the move button on the way down).
From my second giant, I see a jungle temple. I'm tough enough to take an arrow trap, so I decide to loot and investigate. The temple seems buried, so I hack an opening -
and as soon as I go in there's a skeleton. Stupidly I'd put away my bow so i run back to switch. I head back and dispatch the skeleton - and there are two more behind him! I didn't think you could have a skeleton spawner in a jungle temple but it seems I must have one. With armor and cover I dispatch all three but I decide discretion is the better part of valor here and leave.
I find melons as well as cocoa beans so it's certainly been worthwhile.
There are two candidate villages to develop. One I'd found way back in Episode 4, on a savanna to the map SW of my main base. That one is nice and large, and on flat ground. The other I'd found on a swamp edge in Episode 13, near the west edge of the map west of my base, which is also the map my Savanna Plateau M base is on. That one is in the direction I'll eventually want to explore (along the length of the continent I'm on) but it's very small and on a slope.
I decide to head down to the larger one to the SW.
On the way, though, I spot another village from my airship, near a desert/savanna junction. It seems large enough, and flat, so I figure it will have the advantages of the savanna village with a slightly better location (closer to my existing bases, and to where I want to explore).
Here's the location on the SW map. The black cross is the marker I set at the other village.
It seems both large and flat, so a good choice. Odd that rooftop seems to be on a below-ground building in a flat area --
Also odd that the road has dropped down. The road is brick because I had turned on the "Convert village gravel to brick" option in Underground Biomes Constructs. I turned it off some time ago because the call to pass metadata was bugged in Minecraft or Forge. This village must have been generated on my first exploration here, even though I didn't see it.
When I get close to the building I find out what's going on -
The village is built atop a huge cave. The partially-underground building must have generated in the cave itself.
Well, I figure, I can do two things at once. I can dig up my sand, and in the process dig a ramp down into the cave so I can cave it with a safe escape route.
I do so, although it turns out to be somewhat further down than I'd though at first. The cave is pretty big. Worse, when I get to the bottom I find the cave continues to the left and the right of my ramp down, so i have landed in the crook of a "Y". That's pretty hazardous, because If I explore in any direction I can have mobs come up behind and cut off my exit. There's a drop into a cave on the other side of the house and the resident is stuck in it - probably fatally as it'll be a while before I can get in there.
While deciding what to do, I start securing the village. I go into each house and make sure it's lit and zombies can't spawn inside, and knock out stairs in front of each house so zombies can't break the doors. This alone makes villages pretty zombie-resistant. Not much point in fences until I've dealt with the cave.
Predictably most of the villagers are crammed into one tiny shack. In the day, even.
I decide to block up the side caves and explore forward at first. While I'm doing this, however, a witch comes up. My reflex when a mob approaches is to run away to get distance while I decide on a plan to take it out.Unfortunately, that doesn't work with witches, as I realize while going up the slope, because of the slow potions. Whoops.
I run into one of the shack to get away. I'm down to 1 1/2 hearts, poisoned, when I shut the door.
I'm under some pressure, because it's almost sunset and I can't sleep with the witch just outside. After I drink my milk and get a little health back, I open the door and snipe her, intending to shut the door if she tries to pitch a potion. I'm fast or lucky, though, and get her in three shots before she ever get a potion off.
With no more milk, and no more cows nearby I can see, I don't want to continue trying to open and clear the cave. So I decide to head back to the plateau base and do a little more Nether exploration, hoping for a fortress and some Nether Wort.
I explore a little more of the map on the way back.
Next episode: back to the Nether.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
With nearly two stacks of glass, I headed back into the Nether. In Episode 12, my Nether portal had come out on the south side of a hill and I had tunnelled through the hill to the north side. Now that I had some glass, I installed a small viewing gallery on the north side where I'd broken through but saw little of interest. There was a large open area ahead so it would be hard to continue.
Now I went to about the spot in the tunnel that was on the "latitude" for my main base and tunneled east, in the direction of my base. After a substantial distance, I broke through to open space and installed a view gallery.
My tunnel had come out at the level of a shelf that extended some distance and then appeared to slope down. North of me was another hill, very near, and I built a short above-ground glass-walled passage to reach it.
Looking west from this passage, you can see the north side of the hill I originally tunneled into. My first tunnel probably come out a little past the big glowstone chandelier. At least I know I can probably continue that passage by tunneling up. I'm relatively high in the Nether, about 87; I was hoping for that when I built my first portal at cloud level because it's easier for a tunneler to get around near the top of the Nether.
I tunneled through that hill to the north until I came out the north side and installed a partially hanging view gallery.
At this point I ran out of glass and went back to the plateau to get some more. Once back in the nether I spotted a small magma cube outside the big viewing gallery and installed a door to go out and swat it. No drops. However, after I went back inside, a ghost potshotted me.
I wasn't really sure how it spotted me to shoot. I thought my glass walls were solid. I pulled back down the corridor a bit so it could no longer shoot at me and repaired the damage.
I went back to the hanging view gallery and improved it a bit.
The Nether can be a very attractive place.
At this point I decided to put in a Nether connection between my bases. My plan was to build the portal at my main base, come through (which would put me out at the existing portal in the Nether since the bases are close enough) and then head back to where I needed to build a portal in the Nether to get to my main base.
I head back to my Savanna Plateau base and come out at night. I can't sleep because there's a zombie pigman at the portal. I don't want to fight him on top of a mountain because I'm concerned about knockback. I shove him off the top so he won't get in the way.
But, I seem to have lit the place up well enough, and nothing bothers me. It's almost dawn, so I hop in my airship and head for home. At home, I take the dropshaft down to mining level.
Whee!
I mine a half-stack of obsidian from a lava pool. It's been so long in real time since I've been down here that I've forgotten which is the passage I want but I find it on the third try.
Back to the top on the elevator.
Whee! You can't see action in the pic, but the red granite block to my left has just shoved me onto the stair step I'm on. The rhyolite spiral staircase goes all the way down when the pistons aren't activated.
At this point, I'm almost to level thirty. I do a little ranching and then muse about what to enchant. I decide to try armor. I enchant an iron breastplate and get - Unbreaking III. Great. Yeah, in the distant future I can combine it with another enchantment, but for now basically useless.
i console myself watching the dusk from the enchantment room.
I decided to build the portal in the north tower top floor. The racket will probably make the tower semi-uninhabitable but it's far enough from the south tower and I don't really need the space.
When I go up there I find a spider to trash and discover Bane of Arthropods isn't completely useless after all - I get the Overkill achievement!
Here's a big benefit of the variable portal sizes of 1.7. A 1.6 portal would have had to be off center and wouldn't look as good.
I'm close enough to my other Nether portal that if I go through I'll come out at the portal I already have in the Nether. So record my coordinates, (x - 2687; Climate Control moved me a long way to get me out of the ocean when I started) I head through, and then head down to the big viewing gallery to put in the portal home.
Well, my z coordinate guestimate was great - the corridor to the east is almost exactly right for my home base. But my x coordinate is way off - the gallery is only halfway there. Well, I'll just tunnel down through the shelf in front of the gallery. But -
I keep breaking through into large voids. The shelf is apparently just a tongue and only goes about half of the distance I have left - I'm still short about 30 blocks.
Whoops.
My only exit from the Nether will take me to my Savanna Plateau landing - and my airship is at home. I *could* walk home, but it seems ignominious. So I try to figure another way there. I'm mildly concerned I may have a situation like I had with my Thaumcraft world, where I ended up having to climb down to lava level and build a platform out in a lava ocean to get to my basilica base (it took days of play to get it all done)
Looking out of the gallery it seems that south of me the shelf connects to a pillar that goes up into the roof. If I can reach that I should be fine. So I start tunneling south.
I hit two lava pockets but I just use a bucket to pick them up and dispose of each in a furnace, smelting two stacks of nether brick in the process.
My first crossing attempt comes out in the void again; I underestimated the distance. My second comes out in the void too but close enough I can see the bridge across. I'd love to have put in some windows but I'm out of glass. I didn't take pics because Ghast shots would damage the terrain so I blocked up openings as fast as I could.
When I finally go through the bridge I find it's pretty thin - only 4 blocks thick, with some dents I have to patch as I go through. Eventually I break out into another void, but I'm near the desired x coordinate and turn back north. I staircase up some since I know the underside of the pillar slants up and I have to climb some. After a while I breach the roof and continue straight. I do get to the needed z coordinate and turn back east for the last few blocks.
At the very end I run out of cobblestone and have to resort to Nether Brick for my flooring. It works fine, of course; I'd just prefer the corridors to have the same look everywhere.
I build a portal into a wall for convenience (so there's only one way to come out) and head through.
Back home. FINALLY!
I build a little ring of stairs out of Nether Brick around the portal so I don't have to hop up, but it doesn't look very good - it ruins the symmetry. Oh well. I'll keep my eyes open for black granite and try some black granite half-slabs when I find some.
I have a lot of netherrack but not much coal so I head down to the lava pool I've been using for obsidian (whee on the dropshaft again) and set up some furnaces using lava.
Probably should have done more, but I only brought four stacks of netherrack down.
Next episode: back to the village to rescue a town!
( I hope.)
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Back at the Savanna/Desert village one of the villagers has fallen into the well and can't get out. No Lassie to do the rescue so I mine out part of the well walls to let him out.
I set up a fairly standard base in one of the many unused cottages.
The village looks pretty nice in the Halcyon days/ UB32 textures. The Dacite cobblestone in this region has a blue hue, making a nice contrast with the dark brown wood. Martha Stewart would approve.
I snipe a spider and while recovering the string and experience drop a few more torches in the big cave. This actually lights up the central cave enough that I can start dealing with the branches. For some reason, I encounter no resistance as I light up or block off four branches.
This one is definitely staying blocked off for now.
There's a Siltstone stratum around the bottom of the cave and in one of the passages I completely light up. This is good, because Siltstone is a good decorative stone and even goes well with the local Dacite.
I excavate out the caves on the other side of the buried library. The inhabitant is indeed long dead.I had consider making the library into a kind of tongue-in-cheek gift shop for the cavern complex, but the door is 6 blocks in the air. So, instead I rip off everything above ground and everything valuable (mostly the books) and bury the complex instead.
That's a thick roof!
I cover most of the roof of the cave with a layer of Dacite for blast resistance in case a creeper comes by and a layer of sand above that for looks.
I figure the villagers should have calmed down some but they're still panicky. While I'm trying to get them to stand still enough that I can see what their trades are I hear a burning zombie in the middle of the day! There's a zombie walking down the main street! I kill it and look for the source. Just outside the village:
I head in and light it up until I hit a vertical fork (one passage sloping down and another right above it going level. This is more than I care to deal with for now so I block it at that point and go back to the village.
At this point I'm ready to start fencing the village but I left my wood at the savanna landing. So I head out to chop some acacia and some stray oaks.
I find pumpkins and bring them in. As I start fencing, I realize it's a pretty big village and end up having to make another lumberjack run. I leave the cave entrance outside the enclosure on general safety and so the villagers won't fall in like the idiot librarian.
Sunset over my new fenced enclosure.
The next morning I spot a zombie under a tree next to the fence. I head over to swat him.
Annoyingly he gets in a blow and lights me. Not a serious risk under the circumstances, though.
I harvest the village's crops for trading. It has a lot of farms! Eleven in all - it takes a whole day to harvest. I get carrots and potatoes along with all the wheat.
Every village I ever develop I want to leave "natural" with the villagers free to move around. And every time -
they are so annoying and idiotic I end up having to lock most of them in. I couldn't get the villager with the wheat deal to stand still long enough to trade until I locked him in a cottage. I even swatted another villager once by accident when his interface dropped. I then manage some trading and open up some trades to buy chicken and wool.
Some piggies had wandered into the complex while it was being built. Since I have carrots I set up a pigpen for them. Since my base is secure I can operate through the night without trouble.
At this point some of the villagers finally leave panic mode and start wandering around and setting up in the other houses. So things are starting to look pretty good around here.
Next episode: fetching supplies, a decent enchantment, and maps of all three of my bases!
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Looking forward to the maps! Also you might want to start putting your images in spoiler tags--this page is starting to load a tad slowly.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
At this point I decided to pick up some of the supplies from my starter base (I guess I should start naming my bases now, so I'll call it Seaside). I decided I'd also make maps of all three of my bases. As you'll se, that actually didn't work out too well because Minecraft only starts maps on multipliers for 64 or 128 to make tiled sets more doable, and all three bases ended up partly off the map. I don't need that, because Explorercraft can tile my maps for me, so on my next revision I'll set it so Explorercraft maps can start at any coordinate.
I hopped on my airship and headed to Seaside. I had to go to Seaside to make any more maps because my paper was all there.
Here's the map of Seaside (until I do the ExplorerCraft revision). The gray circle near the center was my original tower - you can see the lapis lazuli spire as a dot in the center and the balconies on three of the sides. The wide brown line above it is the walkway going to the other tower, which is partly on the map to the top. The thinner brown lines are fences for my pens; the big pen is for cows and the smaller one for sheep. Fences don't hold chickens, so they are everywhere. The green fringes along some beaches to the right are my sugarcane plantings.
I decided to slaughter some of my chickens and discovered my leaky chicken ranch isn't working too well. It *looks* like a lot of chickens, but they're scattered enough that I can spend all day butchering and not get even half a stack. I think I'm going to build my standard semi-automated chicken ranch at Obercavern, the recently secured village and eventually dispose of the chickens here for peace and quiet.
At one point I was butchering some chickens that had fallen into a pond just outside my north wall and I heard a creeper explosion! I hadn't even heard the SSSSSS. I'd even searched for creepers out here and sniped one, but I missed it. It could have been game over, because I have no explosion resistance enchantments, but for some reason (perhaps that I was in the water) I took almost no damage.
Here's the hole after I patched it up a bit. This reinforced my intent to give up on ranching chickens at Seaside, since they can get through the exterior fencing and screens and I have to go out into the surrounding area.
I get to level 30 and head up for an enchantment. I decide to get boots and I get Prot 3, Feather Falling 4. Excellent! This means I can do taller buildings and survive a fall up to 36 blocks. No pic because screenshots aren't working in GUI screens - a 1.7.2 bug, I assume.
I went to Savanna Landing, the Savanna Plateau M top, arriving at night so I could check out the lighting safely.
And here's the map for Savanna Landing:
This map is hard to interpret, because although higher regions are supposed to be lighter colors, you can't really see the relief and it's not clear where the drops are. The black line on the right is the Nether Gate. The usable areas are ROUGHLY the brightest-green and brightest-orange regions at the top, to the right, plus some of the more mottled regions they enclose. For example, the region between me, the airship, and the Nether Gate is usable, but the dark brown regions below the two trees there is the slope down. I'll have to put in safety fencing to make the boundaries clear on any map - actually a good idea, now that I think about it.
I next headed off to Obercavern.
There are actually *two* desert temples on the route between Obercavern and Seaside. I haven't gone after them because I've had accidents clearing out temples before. Once when I was opening the chests I accidentally clicked on the pressure plate instead (which was right next to it at the angle I was standing). This is hardcore, I don't really need a bit of gold or iron, blahblahblah. If I ever need something hard-to-get like a name tag maybe I'll give them a go.
And here's the map for Obercavern where ONCE AGAIN the base doesn't completely fit, here extending just a bit off the bottom. You can see the large number of farms (11) scattered about. The entrance to the big cave is the gray area adjacent to the left side of the enclosure. The gray strips are roads. My little house is the second from the top. The villagers are mostly crammed into the shack two behind me.
I'm considering building a church in the region encompassing me, the farm in front of me, and the airship -partly for looks, and partly as an excuse for breeding doors. It's actually pretty empty, although that's not clear from this map. I had a similar plan on a village in my first long-term hardcore world - right before a creeper fell out of a hole in a cavern and killed me. Grrr.
That night a mob shows up in the village! I'm wondering how it could have gotten in and I think - maybe it's spawning on the roof. I pillar up and -
Yep, that's the problem. I wonder why I haven't had trouble with this before. I think, just by luck, I haven't had many of these flat-topped roofs before. And at least once I *did* think to light the roofs; I just forgot this time. I snipe this bad boy and pillar up to light all the flat roofs.
As I'm doing this I get into a bit of a fight with two spiders that come over the walls and a skeleton giving them arrow support. But I'm geared up pretty well, so I manage.
Next episode: a mining shaft at Obercavern, and a semi-automated chicken ranch.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
For the church I want to build I'd like to use at least similar materials to the village, and that means a fair amount of quarrying Dacite. I'd rather get diamonds as I quarry so I want to do it by my standard level 11 branch mining. I've actually got nearly a full stack of ladders, so I decide to dig a laddered dropshaft right next to my cottage.
Down I go, with 2 block platforms every 3 blocks, so I don't have to dig straight down. It's very uneventful until just before the bottom I cut into two successive mineshafts.
I have no desire to go caving right now so I just block them off.
After I finish the shaft I head back to the surface for a round of farming. I do it at night, hoping to collect some monsters in the morning, but I hadn't thought about the fact that so many of the farms are right next to the fencing. I'm having to watch my back as I farm that and it's pretty annoying.
In the morning as I swat some monsters I get lit by a burning zombie *again*. Grrr.
I want to build a chicken farm here as the fenced one isn't working and I'd like the chicken where I can sell it. My plan is a fairly basic one: an automated egg farm dispensing eggs into a pen. I also want to build the farm *before * I build the church so the chickens will breed as I build.
I carve the farm underground, right off the dropshaft, so I get to quarry as I build it. For the egg farm, I'll use water to push the eggs into the hoppers.
After I carve out the egg farm area, I go to my next platform down and start carving out a big room.
I knew this was the level of the cave but I thought I had enough space.
I was wrong.
I seal off the breach and build the room mostly away from the center of the village rather than towards it.
At this point I need to go back to Seaside to pick up some eggs, feathers, and sugarcane, which I'd forgotten to bring. It's kind of a waste going back and forth but to be honest I rather enjoy looking at the scenery on the flights.
Although the off-centered base maps don't look as good as they could, they're very useful for landing the airship. I can see almost exactly where I am even when I'm high enough I can barely see the base by eye. It's like flying by instruments!
I head back to Obercavern and make another night instrument landing. I head over to feed the pigs and get ambushed by a spider
And then a skeleton.
I get greedy and drop a dirt block to get out and grab the bones. I get swarmed by zombies and have to pillar up to get back in.
But I forgot the dirt block would let the pigs out too and while I'm fixing that *another* skeleton shows up and things get completely out of hand with escaping pigs, sniping skeletons, a zombie mob at the fence, and some more spiders getting in.
With dawn I manage to get things under control, lure some of the piggies back in and butcher some stragglers, and collect some drops.
I finish the egg farm pen with glass blocks to seal it off and use the dispenser to dump in my eggs.
Unfortunately the water is pushing the chickens in front of the dispenser so I'm killing them as I dispense. Four stacks of eggs gives only 6 chickens. Oops.
I put in an intermediate floor to access a hopper and dispenser underneath the chest for the hoppers. That dispenser I put on the third level so the chicks will drop down and not remain targets in front of it.
A basic redstone clock with off-switch completes the setup.
As soon as the chickens start dropping eggs I realize how hopelessly inadequate my breeding population is. I relocate the dispenser in the egg farm section to the other end so I can breed more egg-layers. One chicken escapes during the process, which is frankly better than I expected.
Now, though, I have a decision: do I make another trip to Seaside to get more eggs or do i do other stuff here and let the eggs collect?
Next Episode: - um - actually I haven't decided yet - later!
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
My bridge mod from the old version of Climate Control to the new version was ready for testing. The new version allows changes to world configs and adding biome mods to existing worlds without chunk boundaries and I was VERY eager to test it on this journal world. I really wanted to add Highlands biomes to this world, and I wanted to fix my earlier mistake of a really high Roofed Forest incidence, which has been crowding out the other biomes in its climate.
I needed maps, of course, and most of my paper was back at Seaside, plus I didn't have enough iron. I could have gone back, but instead I chose to plant a sugarcane farm here and mine for iron under Obercavern. I got lucky and found a lot of iron right away, but the sugarcane took time. While waiting for the sugarcane to grow, I busied myself with routine activities like wheat farming, lumberjacking, pig ranching, and the occasional overnight mob hunt.
Eventually I ran out of routine activities and started on the church for Obercavern, building most of the front facade. I'm going to hold back on the pics from that until the next episode, because this episode is pretty long and complicated.
First, I backed up my world because I expected some degree of problems. It's a hardcore world, but I have to make allowances for the fact that I'm constantly testing my own mods. If I really die (other than to a bug), I'll follow the honor system.
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
I get about 1 map away and:
Chunk walls.
WTF? I had tested on starter worlds literally more than a dozen times. Well, I set up some logs and after a couple hours figured out I needed to use world coordinates, not chunk coordinates, for recording existing worlds. I hadn't seen the problem before because when you're close to (0,0) world and chunk coordinates were close enough for everything to work.
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
I reach the boundary where I've explored before and push on. After about 800 blocks, I expect to see new stuff and I see - same vanilla terrain. So I go another 1000 blocks and - same vanilla terrain. Another 1000 - same.
Sigh. Something else to fix.
After some code review, I realize I'm calling GenLayerRiverMix, not GenLayerVoronoiZoom, so I need to adjust my multipliers. (Again, with the tests everything was close enough to 0,0 to make no difference.) Well, that's easily fixed...
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
This time I pass into new terrain and spot an Extreme Hills. No big deal -except -
It's not Extreme Hills, it's Highland Cliffs! It works!
(And, BTW, the Cliffs look really good - better than in 1.6.4)
No chunk walls between old and new! Perfect!
I take a triumphant selfie at the cliff edge.
At this point, Minecraft crashes.
Well, that's pretty routine even in vanilla. Out of heap space. But, after increasing my heap space, when I restart my airship is gone. And all the supplies in it. That's NOT routine. Minecraft is pretty good about crashing gracefully. I consider just lumping it but I realize I'd forgotten to change my Roofed Forest incidence…
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
The first night I set the airship down in a forest on top of some trees, as I've done before. In the morning, I can't take off. It turns out Archimedes' Ships has attached about a dozen trees to the airship. I check the configs and discover Minecraft:leaves isn't on the exclusion list (which I fix). But, no matter what I do, I can't get the airship to move, or to disassemble back to blocks. I consider lumping it, as before. But i don't want a possible corrupted airship sitting around my world...
So - to the BackupMobile!
(sound of tape rewinding).
Then, off in the airship for new vistas!
This is a look back at the town as I'm leaving.
I get to where the cliffs had been before, and they generated in the same place.
Still look great!
I am getting some odd juxtapositions that at first look like chunk walls. On closer inspection, they're not; rather they seem to be odd sub-biome juxtapositions. I suspect sub-biome locking is generating these oddities. So, it seems the choice is biome locking (for smoother transitions) or sub-biome locking (for faster transitions) but no benefit from the combination.
I am, however, having trouble with my airship. It turns out Highlands is very demanding on my machine.To me, it's tolerable - 1/10 to 1/2 second pauses. But, Archimedes' ships makes a lot of assumptions and calculations to generate an illusion of smooth motion and it can't cope with these delays. I'm having a lot of trouble controlling it in the more complex terrains. So…
No. I'm lumping it this time. I get out and explore on foot. I can explore on foot and use the airship for fast travel where I've already explored. Sometimes Highlands terrain makes it hard to get around, but I'm a big boy.
And for all the frustrations with performance, Highlands is very seductive…
A bog I'm forced into by sheer cliffs.
Deliciously disgusting!
A copse of Autumn Woods in a Pinelands, next to a Forest. Highland smartly includes a lot of open forests, which are much more attractive to walk through than the closed forests than dominate vanilla, especially in 1.7
The spectacular Flying Mountains. These need airships to truly do them justice - I'll come back for some pics later after I've explored them more thoroughly and don't have to deal with so much lag.
Highlands Tundra pokes above adjacent normal-height terrain, and creates an imposing and ominous effect Ice Plains just can't do.
I have to do a long detour around this daunting glacier.
I'm repeatedly reminded exactly how much easier the airship makes getting around. I have to pay attention to holes in the ground again. Rivers and lakes are proving surprisingly useful.
I'm not sure how this bridge formed. But I like it.
Eventually I head back toward terrain I've explored before. As I get close, my old terrain settings come back into effect, and it's back to all vanilla biomes. But no chunk boundaries. I'm not even exactly sure when I transition back. Climate Control is splicing two totally different world generations together, almost flawlessly.
Jungles also look great in Halcyon Days. I've been avoiding them with the airship, but I pretty much have to go through this one to get back to my airship.
Mind the gap!
Finally I get back to the hill I left the airship on.
This show most of the ground exploration I've done. The path going NW was my outbound leg and above me is the vanilla Roofed Forest and Jungle I explored to get back. The Flying Mountains and most of the snowy region are on the map to the west (not shown here.) I was struck by how much more slowly I explored on foot. I'd gotten pretty used to overflights.
I board my airship and head home, exploring on the north coast of my continent. The unexplored areas are not large enough for any Highlands terrain to generate, so the lag is manageable in an airship.
I discover and overfly a village at night. Oops. Hope they survive.
I probably should head back to Overcavern game wise, but I make for Seaside for a pic of my map wall.
I've gotten this section of the continent mostly explored. The new Highlands terrain doesn't look distinctive on the map, but you can see than the climate smoothing is working - no weird climate junctions. Yay! Success!
But, just in case, no triumphant selfie this time
Next episode - working on the Church at Obercavern.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Edit: I initially uploaded a version that takes too many pics. That's been fixed. Two people downloaded it before I fixed it and you'll probably want to re-download.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
I haven't made an airship yet but I did make the boat with the Archimedes helm. I did experience some weirdness with it, especially when it hit some ice--It popped up one block above the water, making it hard to get back into but it eventually righted itself. But since the ocean by my homestead isn't very big, I'm going to build an airship to explore further beyond where the ocean ends. Since I tweaked what the BoP biomes that can gen in my world, a lot of the landlocked areas near my homestead were easily explored on horseback (well, donkeyback--donkeys' slowness makes it easier for me to avoid holes, pits and ravines in unfamiliar areas, plus I don't speed past resources I'm looking for). It's just the reaches beyond the ocean that might require the airship.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
There's a large open space in the middle of the village with only one farm in the middle. I decide to build a large church here and tear out the farm.
I'm going to leave 3-wide roads on either side (for iron golems) and that leaves enough room for a building 13 blocks wide. I want to make the church fit in with the village so I'm not going to try to make it look super-good. I'm going to use the village palette of dacite cobble, oak logs, and oak furnishings, plus I'm going to add dacite brick and siltstone. I was really iffy about using the dacite cobble, because cobble is generally not a great-looking construction material, but eventually I decided to go with consistency and just not use too much cobble.
My overall plan is a nave with an entrance facing that path, with a quire at the far end. I'm not sure I'll have room for much of a quire so for now I'm just building the nave.
This is how I build the entrance. Unfortunately since the church is an odd number of blocks across I can't have centered double doors. I'm using brick as a framing element and oak logs as the primary structural element, with cobble being the filler. I have the oak log supports out one block to provide some relief.
I'm going to have double doors all around the building. Above them will be large glass windows. I'm going to have a large round window over the entrance and tall rectangular windows on the sides.
Originally I'd been planning a larger window but I decided to keep with the brick framing in a cobble wall, and that forced me down to this 7 across circle. I haven't decided what to put in the window but I'm thinking about a crescent or half moon.
Obercavern certainly looks different from 20 blocks up.
At this point I embarked on the adventures and meta-adventures of Episode 20. I ended up back at Seaside and while I was there I wanted to pick up some supplies, pick off some chickens (now that I'm farming them at Obercavern) and enchant something, since I'm near level 30.
I get rid of most of the chickens but I'm still not to level 30 so I butcher some cows as well. By then it's night. As I head up to my enchantment room a skelly snipes me but I ignore it as it's outside the walls and it's not yet midnight, so if I kill it the drops will decay before I can pick them up. But as I step into the tower --
BOOM!
There was a creeper. INSIDE MY TOWER! I have no idea how it got there. I've spent hours of night wandering about this enclosure and I've never had anything inside except spiders, which it's not designed to keep out. I'm guessing that somewhere in the 3D maze underneath the tower that I created while building the piston elevator, there's a spot with block light 7. Looking at the damage, it seems to have been coming up the stairs from the mine, which is consistent with that. I'm also close enough to it while in the tower or even the cow pen that I'm suppressing spawns there, so maybe that's why it happened before. But why did it have to be a creeper? Couldn't I have gotten a zombie or skelly first? Sigh.
The real problem is that it blew a hole in the screen and the monsters can now come through. I get a skelly
And then an armed zombie
Before I manage to plug the breach with dirt. There was a spider outside too and honestly I think if the creeper had blown a hole 2 wide as well as 2 tall I wouldn't have made it and that would have been the end of this journal.
After getting things under control, I head up to the enchantment room and enchant a bow, getting Power 3/Punch 1. Decent, nothing special. I plan to use up my current Power 1 bow before switching.
Still shaken by my near-death experience, I grab the stuff I wanted (eggs, leather, and trade goods) and head for Obercavern. Rather than a straight line, I take a route along the coast to fill in some blank spots on my map.
I discover and overfly another village. Oops! Sorry guys!
I arrive at Obercavern at dawn.
I dump half the eggs into the breeder pen and the other half into the redstone egg hatcher. I'm short of fuel so I go down to the mine to look for coal.
I immediately find *3* veins. Well, that worked out!
I head upstairs to farm and ranch. That night I run around trading, getting a half-stack of emeralds. A lot of zombies are hanging around the fence so near dawn I head over to knock some heads.
A creeper wanders up to the fence so I pull back to snipe him.
But not far enough.
So, it's night, and there's about a dozen zombies that can get into town now. Great.
Fortunately my security measures - lighting inside and a jump up to all doors - suffice to save the squidwards. The zombies can't get inside and, since the villagers are around, don't even bother me, so I can dispose of them one at a time.
This zombie villager came in that way; he wasn't converted.
After killing a LOT of zombies I patch up the fence. I leave the hole - one less place for mobs to hang out by the fence.
I head back into the mine to collect more siltstone for the floor.
I start building one of the walls. I build two bays on the side, each consisting of a door framed like the once on the entrance flanked by the protruding oak support columns.
Here's the first bay, completed.
After finishing those two bays I'm running low on brick. While some is roasting, I head down to mine. When I come back up I get sniped. I move into the center of the complex so I won't get shot while I figure out where it is and - I still get shot!
A spider jockey! On the roof - of MY house, which is almost insulting.
This is another first for me - I've never had to fight a spider jockey. But, after reading all these posts about how dangerous they are I don't find it much of a problem. I feather the spider and then the jockey and climb up to collect my loot.
Come morning I have to deal with a skelly in gold armor. He's actually more of a problem than the jockey was.
I'm also running low on oak, so I spend the day chopping acacia outside the walls so I can plant oak. I'm getting a little low on space for trees inside the walls, since if a tree grows up against a log in one of the houses the leaves won't auto decay and I have to chop then manually, which is a pain.
I finish the two bays and take a shot from the inside to see if it works.
Hmm. Didn't think about this. I made my windows and walls in symmetrical groups from the outside, but since the outside is 1 block further out it's not symmetrical on the inside. This is problematic because the sides are on alleys, essentially, and these walls will probably get seen mostly from the inside. I consider rebuilding, but it's a fair amount of work and the church isn't *supposed* to be a masterpiece; it's supposed to be a village church.
I head outside of town to see how the church looks from a distance. From this it looks pretty good. It does look like it belongs in the village. Actually it might blend in too well, but not to the point that I have to change it (although, next time, I'll have less overlap with the village palette). So I'll stick with the current plan and not do any rebuilding.
Next episode: finishing the nave.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Your problems with Highlands scare me, because it would be quite a project to strip Highlands out at this point. When were you playing with it? I notice in the logs there's a fair number of crashes that Highlands is intercepting and ignoring, and I suspect that's at least part of the lag. From my own modding experience I can tell he's having trouble with multi-block decorations, which Minecraft handles incorrectly. I'm hoping you were playing before he put in the try-catch blocks to keep that from crashing the game. I seem to have developed a workable set of solutions for the problem; maybe i should pass them along.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
I know they made some fixes with the 1.7 version, but I've read here and there with other people putting together private SSP modpacks that they couldn't include Highlands because of it crashing. Pity because I think it's a very good-looking mod.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
I actually managed to keep to my self-commitments to build a simpler roof for once. I built a pitched roof with oak slabs rather than the domes or elaborate staircase roofs I usually build. So, no elaborate dome scaffolding and no finicky stair placement. Yay!
After I was done I headed out to take a shot.
I was a little disappointed you could barely see the roof. Between the height of the building and the low pitch you have to be a long way off. In the village you can't see it at all.
From the inside, though, there's a nice patterning effect due to lighting oddities on the underside of slabs. With half-slab domes this has been a detriment but here it's an asset.
The views convince me the building needs to be longer than my originally plan. Originally I was aiming for 4 bays and that last pic in particular makes me think that's too short. In addition my original idea included a really high quire but I now think that will look ridiculous. I decide for a cruciform plan, with the two bays I've already built as the nave, the next two bays protruding out as the arms, and then the last bay as an (unremarkable) quire. This will make the arms about as wide as the nave, but shorter, which is the ideal proportions.
I start laying out the plan on the ground to make sure it works. I immediately discover some problems. The fifth bay goes beyond the fence - that's no big deal, since I can move the fence. But the arms are on top of two houses, including one that already has trading villagers locked in. I consider ripping down the houses but eventually decide to keep them and make the 3rd bay part of the nave and only the 4th protrude for the arms. That will make the arms pretty narrow, but I figure that will only be an issue from an aerial view. On the ground they'll still break up the church so it's not one long repetitive corridor.
I try putting a moon up in the round window. This is my first attempt at pixel art, and I'm not too happy with it. For now I'll leave it (the glass would be lost on a replacement anyway) and maybe somebody here will have some bright ideas.
I put up the third bay and check the looks. Coming along; I think 5 bays will be about right. The height-length ratio will be about the golden mean (1.6something) and that's good.
As I've been doing this I've been doing routine stuff like farming, sniping, mining supplies, and raising chickens. I'm getting chickens both from the egg farm and from breeding with surplus seeds.
The population is getting up there!
I hit level 30 and head back to Seaside for an enchant. I don't have diamonds at Obercavern for another enchant table; they're all at Seaside.
There's a skeleton in the piston elevator! I also get a zombie coming up the old stairs. Clearly I'm having a spawn problem. I look around in the diggings under the tower and can't find any spawn spots. I decide for starters I'll block up those areas, but I put that off for later.
I enchant a helmet and get Respiration 3. Bah, just a specialty helmet,.
Back to Obercavern, arriving at dawn again. I bring some diamonds so I can make an enchantment table here, if I want. I also bring some dyes for the stained glass.
My doors have (contrary to my expectations) enabled an Iron Golem to spawn. But he's pretty useless inside the church so I push him outside.
The villagers have discovered the church and seem to like it. Which is kind of a bad thing, because they make quite a racket.
I start on the windows. 7 pixels by 2 isn't much for representational art, but I have a go at it. Can anybody figure out what this is supposed to be? Hint: it's related to my start. In this pack, brown glass is just 2x2 glass panes, which would be good for some things but isn't right for my plans.
I try a simple pattern on another window. As so often, I build different parts of a building different ways to see what works best. Usually I tear down and rebuild the choices I like less, but sometimes I leave them.
Even though the representational pattern isn't very representational, I like it better than the simple pattern so I use a similar idea for the rest of the nave windows.
Individual windows aren't spectacular but the overall effect is acceptable, at least for a first try.
These two probably let you know what I'm trying to do.
I add some pews and it's looking like a pretty respectable village church.
The outside is working too. Any stained glass is good just for eliminating the see-through affect that plagues Minecraft buildings with big windows (like most of mine.) It also reduces the problem of the church being *too* similar to the other village buildings.
If you look carefully there's a burning zombie in the pic. Like in Seaside, I'm seeing spawns in places that have been safe for a while - in this case the lit-up cavern. A change in Forge? An effect from Highlands? A bug in one of my mods? Just plain luck? No answer for now.
Next episode: a break from building; off for exploration, and testing Climate Control.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.