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Man, that's a lotta villages.

Villages seem better than they used to - although that may be due to the shift to 2D perlin and more realistic terrain - but I wish there were more logic to them. Like, no building that don't have a good path to the town center? That would require a certain amount of recursive generation, but not *that* much, and maybe that would encourage Mojang to make villages a little less omnipresent?

What are your plans for combining map rooms, now that the end of this area is in sight?

Episode 38: Changes Bring Changes

Having cleared the valley of hostile mobs for the day, I finish the pen for the animals I brought over. Then I start luring them in.



The Better Animals birds are right next to the airship, where I left them, and follow me eagerly into the pen. But when I leave, the pheasant chick jumps through the fence gate so fast when I open it that it gets out before I do! So I have to lure it back.

Then it's time for the cows.

The valley isn't *that* big, and cows are, and you wouldn't *think* it would be hard to find them. But it is. I hunt around for a while before I finally find *one* and lure it back. Then I go back and look for the others, which also takes a while. Eventually I find a second, and the third shows up as I'm coming back. I breed one calf (the calf I brought has grown up).



Phew. Then I dye a sheep cactus green, and another blue, and breed the blue with a red for purple. (Teal will have to wait since I need purple for magenta.)

I want to try to squeeze in another exploration, but it's late in the day so I'll start tomorrow.



I put some doors on the upper story and they work OK, so I start dooring the rest of the windows but don't finish before dark.

My plan now is to explore the *mountain* basin that I'm in (not necessarily the same as the river basin).



I'm going to start exploring the area roughly indicated by the red lines. I'm going to travel to this by boat, as it's actually faster than the airship in a straight line (and this is fairly close to straight) and I'm planning to avoid the obnoxious terrains I'd need the airship for. This basin might be very large, so I doubt I'll get it in one trip. I get the working copy of the relevant map and supplies to make two more. Then I sleep to morning.



In the morning I have the usual creeper sniping.



But while walking to the river I get surprised by this Skeleton. I get greedy and decide to go after it with my Lucky sword. But it's hard to overcome the knockback and it takes a while to trash it - although I do get 5 arrows.

Then into the boat and all the way across the chateau map. The other advantage of boating is that I don't need to check my location - I know I just need to follow the river.



It takes a while, but finally I make it to the target map. Shortly after I pull the map out I get a world redisplay, which seems to indicate Serene Seasons has changed months, and I think it's probably to winter. But maybe not, so I continue.



I land here to start mapping.



The ponds are freezing in a classic temperate biome, so, yeah, probably winter. Well, may as well continue until it starts to snow.



But, oops, I forget there was Roofed Forest here, and the old, extremely dangerous one at that. So I go around.



Nice views of the Snowy area on the other side. I continue wrapping around the Roofed Forest.



But soon it runs right up against Extreme Hills. So the mountain basin ends much sooner than I'd expected.



I get around the Roofed Forest and reach a shrubby vanilla-style oak/birch forest (although more birchy than vanilla ever does). I got most of the Roofed Forest on the map, missing that little strip I'll get someday from the air when I use the airship to deal with that next range.



Then a Plains with a view of the mountain range on the west side of the basin. I go along the base of the mountains to get as much mapping done as reasonable.

The mountains run right up to the continuation of the river I'd used to get here. But as I approach the river



It starts to snow. In Swampland, so definitely winter. Well, that's it for exploration for the year. It's also almost dark, so I bed-plop before heading home.



I thought winter was possible, so I brought my Millenaire Ulu to cut ice into Ice Brick. It doesn't work as expected - left-clicking just destroys the ice. Right-clicking, however, does pick up the ice as Ice Brick, so very convenient!



Except not so, because after I'd used up about 2/3ds the Ulu's durability, I check my inventory, and I've only gotten 3 stacks of ice blocks. Once my inventory filled up, it just failed silently and I wasted who knows how many stacks of ice blocks. Feh.

I make room and with the next 1/6 or so of the Ulu's durability I get almost 6 stacks, so I wasted maybe 15-20 stacks.



I stop in to trade with the riverside Norman village. But, they will *never* sell the potion food - it's the wrong type of village to make it - and they still haven't developed well enough to sell the stained glass - the stained glass which won't be so useful for the Chateau after all since I'm dooring all the windows. Maybe I can make sculptural art with it. I sell a couple Jungle logs to make change, since I have excess bronze derniers.



It's getting late, so I race back to the boat and back towards the chateau. Once I reach the end of the river I race up to the Chateau from the back (normally I'd check in on the farm first).



I get to the gate in the nick of time.

And now it's winter, and I'm kind of short of things to do. Interior decoration would be my obvious next step but - I'm kind of short of ideas. Normally I like to combine looks and function, and design rooms or stations for particular activities. Except - I don't really have much I need. In my last journal, I had one wing for Astral Sorcery and associated redstone gear and another for my Psi spells stations plus enchantment room. But I took most of those functional mods out of this pack so as not to distract from the generation changes, and I don't have need for such spaces. All I have is Tinker's, and its stuctures belong in the mines.

So now, I think I will risk the Nether after all. This will be my first go at the Nether in hardcore without the backing of a heavy-duty magic mod since my first 1.7.2 journal back in 2014. But I am still pretty geared up with my Tinker's gear, which overall is a little better than maxed vanilla, plus the almost-always-one-shot crossbow, which is distinctly better than anything from vanilla for sniping. And in my Return to Minecraft journal, my techniques did manage to avoid any hostile mobs whatsoever until I broke into a Nether Fortress. So I think I'm up for it.

Next episode: Time to go deeper - from high up

I don't think the considerable effort to get Netherite is justified by its greater durability. You'd probably be better off just remaking diamond as necessary.

The cognoscenti know that it's not particularly dangerous to boat on dark *water*, unlike walk on dark dry land.

I wouldn't think Dark Oak islands would be any more or less common relative to Dark Oak's frequency than any other forest type. It is less common as a forest, so it will be less common as an island, so you've probably missed out on seeing them.

There is a lot of "stuff" in modern village generation (as I found out looking at it considering some block alterations). It's just a lot to see, and if you're not looking carefully at villages because there's so many of them you get bored - well - easy to miss.

The good part of Taiga villages being so hard to see is - you don't see them all. There's probably been even more of which you were blissfully unaware.

Rivers being unaware of ocean is an obnoxious problem. My system has it too, and I've never thought of a good way to avoid it.

That would have been an uncharacteristic Hardcore death, because it would have happened during intentional risk-taking. My experience is that Hardcore deaths are weird and flukey.

First, in general, what do you like - developing, building, exploring, fighting, or something else? I personally like exploring and building. I run around, find places that inspire me, and then do historically oriented builds there.

I normally hate that crazified terrain, but per the usual rules, now that it's rare, it becomes interesting rather than annoying. And oh yes, the dark spots. How I hated those. RTG doesn't do that kind of stuff, so I'd kind of forgotten about them.

I don't remember any other floating islands in your quite extensive explorations, have I forgotten something?

The Taiga villages look pretty dour in your texture pack.

That was a heck of a fight! Congratulations!

This sounds pretty interesting but - I can't see the pictures.

Looking at the html code, I see the img links have "temporaryattachment" in the name, so maybe that wasn't the right link?

That bridge did work out pretty well, and nice detailing. The half-slab detailing is something I wouldn't have thought of.

Cool that you are trying hardcore. Looking forward to hear how it goes. I do advise being more careful - don't cave unless your back is secure, fence your yard with at least five blocks of space between fences and buildings (for space from creepers), and in general when things get hairy, back up. Cave spiders you can fortunately stay away from - just avoid the spawners.

Princess Garnet said the philosophy nicely. Hardcore isn't for mighty accomplishments - it's a game, to see how much cool stuff you can do before you (inevitably) die, generally in an embarassing way (that's how it works, weirdly). I have died in every hardcore world I stuck with except one, which had a lot of mods and where I eventually got really, really, geared up. But it is much more exciting when what you do really matters, and I find the start of a Minecraft game to be some of the most fun. A hardcore death lets you tackle your next world with a clear head - the old world isn't nagging at you to come back.

I think the appearance of small zones is something of an optical illusion from a zoomed out map. Those zones are in the neighborhood of 2K across, or bigger. I say something because the 2D perlinesque noise Mojang uses does permit some variety of sizes - you can have smallish blips above the threshold, clustered together in a generally almost-extreme area - and then sometimes massive extreme areas. I've noticed it in my tree variety system, which has a similar driver.

It's a pity that warm zones aren't really visible on map coloration.

Do you have a schedule on gearing up with enchantments for the ongoing pillager hazards?

It's a pity you can't cave- some of those do look interesting - but I agree with the decision.

(Replying to two things here)

You're right there's a cold biome without snow: temp 0 + humidity 4 = snowless taiga. So maybe that's it.

That is an interesting cave opening.

I got shot my an elder guardian once while standing on the beach; so there is some kind of variability in how far they shoot and it can be very far.

The terrain looks like beta because it's a relative; the new system combines 2D perlin and 3D perlin; usually 2D is dominant but sometime 3D is and when the parameters are high it's somewhat similar to old beta. A good touch for people who like that old crazified terrain (and there are quite a few).

The big map has a certain grandness to it.

I think that sharp turn in the cold region is a result of the combination of cold-due-to-climate and cold-due-to altitude. Looks to me like two nearby cold climates with a strip, or at least indent, of cool in between which ends up almost all cold due to altitude. I think the maps would look better if they just had the altitude adjust the temperature parameter (to scramble up the straight lines a bit).

With ice boating, I'd think that the frozen oceans would be pretty fast to map. It ought to be possible to keep falling into the open areas at a minimum. I wonder if that's why they left them?

I've found the current rivers are fairly useful for exploration, although not often for travel. Between oceans and rivers I think you could have done about 90% of that last map from the water.

Your inventory must be a big pile of maps at this point.