I haven't done anything in my Minecraft world for a while as I have been playing Starbound. That game has had a recent update and a lot of new things were added to it, so I took a break from Minecraft and played it for several hours, both last night and today.
I then went back to playing my 1.6.4 world where I recently added some Apiaries in the area outside my base where my treefarm and Mana Bean farms are at. I need to start making Frames as I have been using those I have gotten from villages, and have not yet found a villager trading for Proven Frames. Any honey I am getting is going into a Squeezer to feed both an Analyzer and a Carpenter. The latter isn't going to be used for a long time, not until I get Imperial bees and begin getting Royal Jelly, an important item used for making the Alveary.
I made the Gravi-Suit Chestplate and found I had soime Iridium Plate left over, more than enough to make an Iridium Drill. I upgraded my diamond drill to it. It has Fortune III on it and can break obsidian in 4.5 seconds. It can replace both my Manyuilyn pickaxe and my shovel, but it will not mine Tinker's Construct Gravel ore, so I going to need to keep the shovel around, maybe put it in my Golden Bag of Holding, which I am now using to keep tools and other items in.
I also had a tunneling milestone today. I don't think anyone has been as happy to see a desert and savannah as I was when I tunneled up from my minecart tunnel to see of I finally reached the end of the Never-ending Jungle of Woe that spans between my Extreme hills/plai s spawn base and this desert/savannah/mesa section of this MCPE map.
I might not have known there was a mesa in this map had I not scouted it out in creative first. There should be a village around here too but I will find it later. I am just happy see the end of that bleeping jungle.
The tunnel goes for over 2200 blocks (roungly 130 chunks), and took about 2125 rails, which aside a few stacks I rummaged from a couple of abandoned mineshafts, I crafted with resouces I mined, much of it along the way, and takes over 4 minutes at MCPE speed to go from the spawn base to where the jungle ends and the desert begins. It is by far the longest, continuous minecart railway I have built in MC and the biggest project I have finished in MCPE.
Me riding the rails on one stretch of the rainway--it required 4 major deviations to get through the jungle and not end up in the middle of an ocean:
Because I built the tunnel a few blocks above bedrock level to avoid any deep water, it got a bit perilous in some places. I died 4 times, all in lava
I'm building solar system on the SMB server. Currently 30% complete on the sun which is made out of glass (27,000 blocks), I'm going to be adding planets asteroids and other spacely bodies.
Moved the nether portal near my witch hut so that creepers wouldn't wander into it anymore.
Connected my tree farm to my nether hub.
I connected my overworld gold farm to my minecart system, so any drops will be automatically delivered to my storage system back at spawn. Then I went AFK.
Since my destop is down again--and likely for good this time (pretty sure it's the CPU)--I will have to get by on Xbox and MCPE a while longer. But in MCPE I needed to build a proper spawn base house, andI had all this lapis from the mega-tunnel so...
I built a big blueberry. Or a purpley diving helmet. Either works, but I'm going to just call it "The Blueberry". It's built on a natural island that had a hue surface cave that I mined for coal and began converting it into a spawn house.
In MCPE, with its limitations, I have been challegning myself to build with the stained clay colors that no one else seems to use much, and I happen to really like how the blue stained clay goes with spruce wood planks. I used a Plotz model to built the the sphere portion as trying to do it on my own was not working at all, and it took about 25 stacks of clay--all collected from swamps and rivers since I haven't made it to the mesa yet. Here's the storage/crafting area that is built where the surface cave had been. There's a room to the side that has stonecutters and furnaces and a ladder going down to the mega-tunnel.
Upstairs is basically a big bedroom. I'm a bit tapped out on inspiration for how to decorate it beyond glowstone and red wool, which I think goes very well with the blue stained clay and spruce combination. There's not a lot that can make me like the vanilla glowstone texture.
I probably won't decorate the upstairs any further as i want to move on to other projects. Making an entrance to the upstairs that wasn't annoying to usw was a pain, so I will just make do with the staircase in the middle of the floor. I just wanted to get a spawn house built and I'm quite happy with this.
I'm back in Age 10 with two goals in mind. One is to find the remaining Symbols I need, in particular the UU Matter block. This is proving to be more and more difficult as in nearly every library I have visited so far, I already have all the Symbols in it. Notebooks appear to be the best bet for getting both solid and liquid blocks.
The other goal is getting as many Proven Frames as I can. I brough with me a half stack of Emeralds and put them in my Golden Bag of Holding. Since I had chosen to have villages generate in this Age, finding an Apiarist villager who is trading for them will not be too difficult. I have 42 Proven Frames so far from trading.
I may also consider setting up the Ender Quarry again in this Age, but in a different spot away from where the previous site was, so there is no overlap, as any areas that were in the previous site will just get me dirt and nothing else. This will require another Tesseract to be set up, or even another pair of them. I don't have enough Enderium to make 2 more, but have plenty of Ender Pearls, over 500 at this point.
I have my wheat farm dug out, though I'm going to rebuild it one block higher up so that the floor of the irrigation lines is on the higher of the two layers of the floor of that room. I'm going to make one last full harvest of that wheat before doing that, though.
I've gotten some more digging for my animal pen room as well. I'm going to put in the chicken pen first since it's going to be smaller than the cow and sheep pens and I could definitely use the feathers for arrows (Tinker's Construct makes it so that I don't really need flint for arrows since I can make arrowheads out of a lot of different materials, but it also prevents me from using the chocobo feathers from ChocoCraft since those can't be used to make feather fletching).
I've got trees planted. 48 oak trees and 16 birch trees, specifically. I've also gotten a whole bunch of Peaceful Pack flax planted, so I'll have plenty of string as well.
Thanks to Json Recipes, I can make my backpacks (from Backpack Mod) out of the cloth from Peaceful Pack (with some custom recipes including a bunch for colored backpacks), so I've got a few of my usual set of backpacks even though I haven't killed a single cow (much less started farming them). I'll still need leather to upgrade the backpacks, though.
That's the story thus far!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The source of my intention isn't really crime prevention; my intention is prevention of the lie! Yeah, welcome to the Scatman's world!
The Blueberry is really growing on me. I need to build a bridge though--I just don't want to have to move the pumpkin farm.
I decided to do some emerald mining. Emeralds are useless in MCPE but they make a nice trophy. In my last world I mined 21 blocks worth of emeralds and I want to try to beat that. Unfortunately the extreme hills next to the Blueberry are very fragmanted and so when I mine a little bit too far in one direction I end up under the tiaga, or the plains, or the ocean near by. I got 4 blocks worth but I think that's all I going to try to get out of that area. So I gathered some resources, swam across the ocean and found a bigger extreme hills biome and began mining away. I have 19 emeralds so far, not too shabby for a start.
Also, I found a skeleton spawner under the tiaga near the Blueberry and I want try to make a tunnel to it, although that may be tricky without being able to know exact coordinates or at least the Y level (a serious omission in MCPE). I play on peaceful because I hate mob griefing (and most hostile mobs), so a way to farm bones that won't involve risking my builds will be very useful.
That was the first look I got of it - I immediately knew that I'd found a very, very large cave when I saw that, so large that fog is visible at the far end.
Here are screenshots after I'd lit it up and explored the surrounding caves and a mineshaft:
This is the second time I've found a cave this large - the last time I found one was nearly five months ago, although I spent a lot of the time since exploring existing chunks and only recently have I been solely exploring new chunks. Believe it or not, this cave isn't that large compared to the largest they can get - it was about 110 blocks long and 40 blocks wide at its widest - while the widest caves can get up to twice as wide (84 blocks) and three times as long (336 blocks), although the widest caves are very rare, as this analysis I made shows - even in 100 million chunks I failed to find the widest cave possible; caves as wide or wider than the widest in vanilla are several thousand times more common though, although still only one per 1,700 chunks:
As seen here (from a test world), they can cluster though, and the length, and the path they take, also factors into the overall size (the one to the lower of center is the largest cave I've found in any test world):
Also, the day before I'd reached the furthest I've ever gone from spawn (where my main base is), about 3,000 blocks.
I had also found this the other day (as mentioned in this thread):
After returning from my emerald mining trip I discovered the second extreme hills biome is not as far from my nether reactor base, and that base is tunnel-linked to my spawn base. So I plan to mae a tunnel to that extreme hills. But between the extreme hills and the nether reactor base, I found a fairly large natural surface cave in a plains biome and decided to make a hub there to make the tunnelbuilding a little easier. Plus I wanted an excuse to try building something monochromicatic-ish with cyan-stained clay as well as play around with the Plotz modeller some more.
Exterior--lighting it without ugly torches and glowstone all over is a problem--why can't we have better lighting options?
The Interior-- I am much happier with it than the exterior:
The tunnel and the proper entrance--that is not quite done yet--will connect here. I have all my chests and crafting stuff hidden down here too. Didn't want it to disrupt the monochromatic theme of the space.
I will likely decorate the interior with quartz stairs and slabs.
I overestimated the amount of cyan stained clay I would need and have over 3 stacks left over. I may build another room with a smaller dome above the surface which would link to the main room via the tunnel.
Started to try and design a spiral staircase for something I want to build, not sure how I like it so far. Might like it more if it didn't go up as fast though.
Today I looked up the location of an ice spike biome, traveled over 5,000 blocks to find the stupid thing, and mined 6 stacks of packed ice for future mob farms and other shenanigans. I then enchanted a Fortune 3 Efficiency 4 Unbreaking 3 God pick.
I then built xisumavoid's chicken cooker farm and then realized that without a large amount of chickens the thing is basically useless. So I built a super basic egg farm and got it working.
Then I started a new branch for my branch mine and my fortune 3 pick got me 16 diamonds from one vein.
I went beast mode and made a cobblestone fortress.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My actual username is Veryek. Not LightRealm. I am an artist that is currently planning on making manga/slideshow videos about Golden Star Frontier. Which is a fantasy world that I made up.
I was testing out the latest 1.8.2 pre-release and while doing so I decided to compare caving in 1.8 to 1.6.4; I just gave myself some equipment (Efficiency V diamond pickaxe, etc) and found a cave, with pretty interesting results; note that the world was default and unmodded (I can easily mod even snapshots to get the 1.6.4 cave generation back):
I probably spent 10 minutes checking things out (in Creative) before actually caving (switching to Survival), so I spent around 35 minutes or so doing so; based on this, even with the smaller caves in 1.7+, I vastly exceed what I can mine in my 1.6.4 world, mining 928 ore in that time period for nearly 1,600 ore mined in an hour - equivalent to around 5,500 ore in a typical play session spent caving (compared to around 3,000 in my 1.6.4 world, around 2,200 across all play sessions) - most notable is the amount of iron I found, which is considerably more common in 1.8 (based on an analysis I did it is about 45% more common than what the Wiki gives, based on an older version; this is largely due to the size of all veins being made one larger in 1.8, plus much less dirt and gravel, which is 4 and 2.5 times more common in 1.6.4, and less common even in 1.7 due to doubling the range from 128 to 256, halving the density; less caves also contribute though the difference in rather small since the change was more in the distribution/clustering; even emerald ore is more common due to these factors despite still being generated the same way).
Also, this is what happens when you have your render distance set to 4 chunks (due to lag, mainly server-side; even then jungles cause server lag unless they were generated in an older version), which also contributed to my ore mining rate (aside from that, the Swiss cheese caves in 1.6.4 are also more difficult to explore than a bunch of mostly separate tunnels):
That's right, I only killed a single zombie (plus a bat I accidentally hit with my pickaxe; the zombie also didn't even notice me) - in sharp contrast to the hundreds of mobs I regularly kill in 1.6.4! In fact, I only used my sword three times and had no armor damage - they would last forever in 1.8 at this rate, no need to even enchant or repair them since there is no need for anything stronger or longer lasting; I also only had to eat two steaks (about three baked potatoes using the pre-1.8 hunger values, about a third of what I'd eat in 1.6.4, not counting bread from chests) - caving really is ridiculously easy in 1.8!
Mostly I have been watching modded Minecraft LPs--Etho and various Hermitcrafters. I'm bored with my MCPE world so I haven't done much but a bit of mining and farming. Had one of those MCPE weird glitches where I was mining in the cave system near my spawn base and the game decided to start teleporting my dyed sheep around the cave system and to the chicken pit. Bizarre finding my red sheep down near bedrock and my black sheep are now BFFs with the chickens. One productive thing is I did at least finally move the pumpkin farm to make room for a bridge to the Blueberry.
Mostly I have been watching modded Minecraft LPs--Etho and various Hermitcrafters. I'm bored with my MCPE world so I haven't done much but a bit of mining and farming. Had one of those MCPE weird glitches where I was mining in the cave system near my spawn base and the game decided to start teleporting my dyed sheep around the cave system and to the chicken pit. Bizarre finding my red sheep down near bedrock and my black sheep are now BFFs with the chickens. One productive thing is I did at least finally move the pumpkin farm to make room for a bridge to the Blueberry.
I smelted 36 blocks of iron ore and built a tool forge (from Tinker's Construct). I'm saving the iron ore for when I have a smeltery (also from Tinker's Construct) so that I can smelt ores (metal ores, at least) with around 2x efficiency compared to a furnace.
I used the tool forge to make a couple of stone hammers and stone excavators (tools that harvest a 3x3 area of either rock blocks or soil blocks, respectively). Harvesting blocks in 3x3 areas is really efficient (even though those tools have a lower harvest efficiency than their single-block counterparts) and the high durability of those tools is really nice (even though they require much more material to repair).
I got some digging done in my farm room and got my gysahl greens (from ChocoCraft) planted. I ran into a cave where I found a few oreberry bushes (from Tinker's Construct) so I will at least have renewable copper and iron. I'm going to explore caves at some point to try to find more oreberry bushes. If I can find aluminum oreberry bushes, I will have renewable aluminum brass and therefore can make as many casts (required to make things from the molten materials produced by smelteries) as I want without worrying too much about finding aluminum. I can also use gold for casts, though, which is easily gotten from a zombie pigman grinder, so it's not a huge issue for me.
I also made some progress on digging in my livestock room, but I ran into another cave. I'm going to be building out the cave a little bit to make the room I need for my cow pen.
I've dug a (fairly long) tunnel to the place where I'm going to build my smelteries. I'm going to make it a really tall room so that I can have really tall smelteries. Smelteries can only smelt as many items as they have blocks of space inside of them (with only one item per slot, not one stack).
That's the story thus far!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The source of my intention isn't really crime prevention; my intention is prevention of the lie! Yeah, welcome to the Scatman's world!
I then went back to playing my 1.6.4 world where I recently added some Apiaries in the area outside my base where my treefarm and Mana Bean farms are at. I need to start making Frames as I have been using those I have gotten from villages, and have not yet found a villager trading for Proven Frames. Any honey I am getting is going into a Squeezer to feed both an Analyzer and a Carpenter. The latter isn't going to be used for a long time, not until I get Imperial bees and begin getting Royal Jelly, an important item used for making the Alveary.
I made the Gravi-Suit Chestplate and found I had soime Iridium Plate left over, more than enough to make an Iridium Drill. I upgraded my diamond drill to it. It has Fortune III on it and can break obsidian in 4.5 seconds. It can replace both my Manyuilyn pickaxe and my shovel, but it will not mine Tinker's Construct Gravel ore, so I going to need to keep the shovel around, maybe put it in my Golden Bag of Holding, which I am now using to keep tools and other items in.
I also had a tunneling milestone today. I don't think anyone has been as happy to see a desert and savannah as I was when I tunneled up from my minecart tunnel to see of I finally reached the end of the Never-ending Jungle of Woe that spans between my Extreme hills/plai s spawn base and this desert/savannah/mesa section of this MCPE map.
I might not have known there was a mesa in this map had I not scouted it out in creative first. There should be a village around here too but I will find it later. I am just happy see the end of that bleeping jungle.
The tunnel goes for over 2200 blocks (roungly 130 chunks), and took about 2125 rails, which aside a few stacks I rummaged from a couple of abandoned mineshafts, I crafted with resouces I mined, much of it along the way, and takes over 4 minutes at MCPE speed to go from the spawn base to where the jungle ends and the desert begins. It is by far the longest, continuous minecart railway I have built in MC and the biggest project I have finished in MCPE.
Me riding the rails on one stretch of the rainway--it required 4 major deviations to get through the jungle and not end up in the middle of an ocean:
Because I built the tunnel a few blocks above bedrock level to avoid any deep water, it got a bit perilous in some places. I died 4 times, all in lava
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/survival-mode/2372609-journal-the-ballad-of-dirtdog
Connected my tree farm to my nether hub.
I connected my overworld gold farm to my minecart system, so any drops will be automatically delivered to my storage system back at spawn. Then I went AFK.
In MCPE, with its limitations, I have been challegning myself to build with the stained clay colors that no one else seems to use much, and I happen to really like how the blue stained clay goes with spruce wood planks. I used a Plotz model to built the the sphere portion as trying to do it on my own was not working at all, and it took about 25 stacks of clay--all collected from swamps and rivers since I haven't made it to the mesa yet. Here's the storage/crafting area that is built where the surface cave had been. There's a room to the side that has stonecutters and furnaces and a ladder going down to the mega-tunnel.
Upstairs is basically a big bedroom. I'm a bit tapped out on inspiration for how to decorate it beyond glowstone and red wool, which I think goes very well with the blue stained clay and spruce combination. There's not a lot that can make me like the vanilla glowstone texture.
I probably won't decorate the upstairs any further as i want to move on to other projects. Making an entrance to the upstairs that wasn't annoying to usw was a pain, so I will just make do with the staircase in the middle of the floor. I just wanted to get a spawn house built and I'm quite happy with this.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
The other goal is getting as many Proven Frames as I can. I brough with me a half stack of Emeralds and put them in my Golden Bag of Holding. Since I had chosen to have villages generate in this Age, finding an Apiarist villager who is trading for them will not be too difficult. I have 42 Proven Frames so far from trading.
I may also consider setting up the Ender Quarry again in this Age, but in a different spot away from where the previous site was, so there is no overlap, as any areas that were in the previous site will just get me dirt and nothing else. This will require another Tesseract to be set up, or even another pair of them. I don't have enough Enderium to make 2 more, but have plenty of Ender Pearls, over 500 at this point.
I have my wheat farm dug out, though I'm going to rebuild it one block higher up so that the floor of the irrigation lines is on the higher of the two layers of the floor of that room. I'm going to make one last full harvest of that wheat before doing that, though.
I've gotten some more digging for my animal pen room as well. I'm going to put in the chicken pen first since it's going to be smaller than the cow and sheep pens and I could definitely use the feathers for arrows (Tinker's Construct makes it so that I don't really need flint for arrows since I can make arrowheads out of a lot of different materials, but it also prevents me from using the chocobo feathers from ChocoCraft since those can't be used to make feather fletching).
I've got trees planted. 48 oak trees and 16 birch trees, specifically. I've also gotten a whole bunch of Peaceful Pack flax planted, so I'll have plenty of string as well.
Thanks to Json Recipes, I can make my backpacks (from Backpack Mod) out of the cloth from Peaceful Pack (with some custom recipes including a bunch for colored backpacks), so I've got a few of my usual set of backpacks even though I haven't killed a single cow (much less started farming them). I'll still need leather to upgrade the backpacks, though.
That's the story thus far!
The source of my intention isn't really crime prevention; my intention is prevention of the lie! Yeah, welcome to the Scatman's world!
I decided to do some emerald mining. Emeralds are useless in MCPE but they make a nice trophy. In my last world I mined 21 blocks worth of emeralds and I want to try to beat that. Unfortunately the extreme hills next to the Blueberry are very fragmanted and so when I mine a little bit too far in one direction I end up under the tiaga, or the plains, or the ocean near by. I got 4 blocks worth but I think that's all I going to try to get out of that area. So I gathered some resources, swam across the ocean and found a bigger extreme hills biome and began mining away. I have 19 emeralds so far, not too shabby for a start.
Also, I found a skeleton spawner under the tiaga near the Blueberry and I want try to make a tunnel to it, although that may be tricky without being able to know exact coordinates or at least the Y level (a serious omission in MCPE). I play on peaceful because I hate mob griefing (and most hostile mobs), so a way to farm bones that won't involve risking my builds will be very useful.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
That was the first look I got of it - I immediately knew that I'd found a very, very large cave when I saw that, so large that fog is visible at the far end.
Here are screenshots after I'd lit it up and explored the surrounding caves and a mineshaft:
This is the second time I've found a cave this large - the last time I found one was nearly five months ago, although I spent a lot of the time since exploring existing chunks and only recently have I been solely exploring new chunks. Believe it or not, this cave isn't that large compared to the largest they can get - it was about 110 blocks long and 40 blocks wide at its widest - while the widest caves can get up to twice as wide (84 blocks) and three times as long (336 blocks), although the widest caves are very rare, as this analysis I made shows - even in 100 million chunks I failed to find the widest cave possible; caves as wide or wider than the widest in vanilla are several thousand times more common though, although still only one per 1,700 chunks:
As seen here (from a test world), they can cluster though, and the length, and the path they take, also factors into the overall size (the one to the lower of center is the largest cave I've found in any test world):
Also, the day before I'd reached the furthest I've ever gone from spawn (where my main base is), about 3,000 blocks.
I had also found this the other day (as mentioned in this thread):
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Exterior--lighting it without ugly torches and glowstone all over is a problem--why can't we have better lighting options?
The tunnel and the proper entrance--that is not quite done yet--will connect here. I have all my chests and crafting stuff hidden down here too. Didn't want it to disrupt the monochromatic theme of the space.
I overestimated the amount of cyan stained clay I would need and have over 3 stacks left over. I may build another room with a smaller dome above the surface which would link to the main room via the tunnel.
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
I then built xisumavoid's chicken cooker farm and then realized that without a large amount of chickens the thing is basically useless. So I built a super basic egg farm and got it working.
Then I started a new branch for my branch mine and my fortune 3 pick got me 16 diamonds from one vein.
My actual username is Veryek. Not LightRealm. I am an artist that is currently planning on making manga/slideshow videos about Golden Star Frontier. Which is a fantasy world that I made up.
(this image was rendered using MCMap)
I probably spent 10 minutes checking things out (in Creative) before actually caving (switching to Survival), so I spent around 35 minutes or so doing so; based on this, even with the smaller caves in 1.7+, I vastly exceed what I can mine in my 1.6.4 world, mining 928 ore in that time period for nearly 1,600 ore mined in an hour - equivalent to around 5,500 ore in a typical play session spent caving (compared to around 3,000 in my 1.6.4 world, around 2,200 across all play sessions) - most notable is the amount of iron I found, which is considerably more common in 1.8 (based on an analysis I did it is about 45% more common than what the Wiki gives, based on an older version; this is largely due to the size of all veins being made one larger in 1.8, plus much less dirt and gravel, which is 4 and 2.5 times more common in 1.6.4, and less common even in 1.7 due to doubling the range from 128 to 256, halving the density; less caves also contribute though the difference in rather small since the change was more in the distribution/clustering; even emerald ore is more common due to these factors despite still being generated the same way).
Also, this is what happens when you have your render distance set to 4 chunks (due to lag, mainly server-side; even then jungles cause server lag unless they were generated in an older version), which also contributed to my ore mining rate (aside from that, the Swiss cheese caves in 1.6.4 are also more difficult to explore than a bunch of mostly separate tunnels):
That's right, I only killed a single zombie (plus a bat I accidentally hit with my pickaxe; the zombie also didn't even notice me) - in sharp contrast to the hundreds of mobs I regularly kill in 1.6.4! In fact, I only used my sword three times and had no armor damage - they would last forever in 1.8 at this rate, no need to even enchant or repair them since there is no need for anything stronger or longer lasting; I also only had to eat two steaks (about three baked potatoes using the pre-1.8 hunger values, about a third of what I'd eat in 1.6.4, not counting bread from chests) - caving really is ridiculously easy in 1.8!
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
Formerly known as ORabbit around these parts.
Etho is love, Etho is life.
I am an artist. All the art you see on my profile is by me, if it's not I will say so and whom its owner is.
I smelted 36 blocks of iron ore and built a tool forge (from Tinker's Construct). I'm saving the iron ore for when I have a smeltery (also from Tinker's Construct) so that I can smelt ores (metal ores, at least) with around 2x efficiency compared to a furnace.
I used the tool forge to make a couple of stone hammers and stone excavators (tools that harvest a 3x3 area of either rock blocks or soil blocks, respectively). Harvesting blocks in 3x3 areas is really efficient (even though those tools have a lower harvest efficiency than their single-block counterparts) and the high durability of those tools is really nice (even though they require much more material to repair).
I got some digging done in my farm room and got my gysahl greens (from ChocoCraft) planted. I ran into a cave where I found a few oreberry bushes (from Tinker's Construct) so I will at least have renewable copper and iron. I'm going to explore caves at some point to try to find more oreberry bushes. If I can find aluminum oreberry bushes, I will have renewable aluminum brass and therefore can make as many casts (required to make things from the molten materials produced by smelteries) as I want without worrying too much about finding aluminum. I can also use gold for casts, though, which is easily gotten from a zombie pigman grinder, so it's not a huge issue for me.
I also made some progress on digging in my livestock room, but I ran into another cave. I'm going to be building out the cave a little bit to make the room I need for my cow pen.
I've dug a (fairly long) tunnel to the place where I'm going to build my smelteries. I'm going to make it a really tall room so that I can have really tall smelteries. Smelteries can only smelt as many items as they have blocks of space inside of them (with only one item per slot, not one stack).
That's the story thus far!
The source of my intention isn't really crime prevention; my intention is prevention of the lie! Yeah, welcome to the Scatman's world!