Minecraft Forums

So… rewind to about a year ago, where I found a server on here known as HorizonCraft. It was a small, community-based, vanilla Realms server, and I just had the greatest time there. I met a number of friendly people there, some of which I still talk to today. I was even able to have some experience moderating and helping out fellow players as well. It couldn’t last forever, though, so around November, the Realm shut down due to money troubles.

In the meantime, I decided to experiment with the modded side of Minecraft, and I was not disappointed. I ended up trying to start a modded journal after reading some of the explorations posted by people like Zeno410 and Empour, but, to be honest… mine wasn’t all that great.

A few months later, the owner, Chamimnya, asked me to return for a bit to help him out with another vanilla server that he had started. We tried some sort of Civilization-like style of gameplay using the Towny plugin, and we had a good deal of fun with it… for a while. The community, myself, Cham, and the other moderators included, started to feel a bit restricted by the plugin, however, and interest in the server died down after a little while.

That’s not the end, however. Cham and I started to talk about modded Minecraft for a bit, and we ended up compiling our favorite mods into a single mod pack. This was pretty interesting for the both of us, because we had completely different playstyles. Cham was more into tech mods, while I was more into magic and exploration-oriented mods. What we ended up with was an interesting amalgamation of our different mods.

We’ve been updating the mod pack as we go, and just recently, we’ve restarted our world to accommodate some new terrain generation. So, after having an idea bouncing around in my head for about a month, I decided that I would restart my modded journal, and make it much better than my previous one.

Mods Showcased:

• Alternate Terrain Generation
• B3M
• Biomes o’ Plenty
• Gany’s Surface
• Hunger Overhaul
• Iguana’s Tinker Tweaks
• Pam’s Harvestcraft
• Ruins
• Thaumcraft
• Tinker’s Construct
• Witchery

Players Mentioned

• Chamimnya
• Funsize

I joined our server for the first time with this modpack, and our spawn was in a walled-in village! I’m acting like this was complete random chance, but, to be honest, Cham took a look at a few seeds beforehand, and picked one with a walled-in village. We decided that this was a good course of action, because we do have a certain project in mind…

Putting that aside, I need to get a grip on my surroundings before night falls, because it's noon and I’ve got about ten minutes until the sun goes down. We have the B3M mod in our modpack, so our days and nights are both 20 minutes long on an equinox day. B3M also makes it so that the day / night lengths are longer / shorter, depending on the in-game day. I’ll go more in depth on that later, when I get to a screenshot with the HUD up.

I start by heading towards what I assume is the center of town, as one of the gates leading out of the village is directly behind me. I’d like to note that, because we’re using Alternate Terrain Generation (ATG), there’s almost no flat space around here. And, with how villages generate, well… this is going to be interesting.

Here’s a view of the area behind me, showing off the village wall and the hill it’s placed on. I believe that it’s a Heathland biome, judging by the blue-leaved Jacaranda shrubs. There’s also a Greatwood Tree in the distance, which will be good as a building material and for some early-game Thaumcraft stuff.

Despite the weird structure generation that comes with the nature of ATG, I do have to say that, as a whole, ATG does look much better than default vanilla generation. It’s very mountainous, but it still retains a degree of realism, unlike some of vanilla’s floating derp mountains.

I decided to go investigate the farm on the hill. Hunger Overhaul allows village farms to grow other crops besides wheat, carrots, and potatoes, even those from Pam’s Harvestcraft. Here, we have some turnips, strawberries, and sugar cane. I collected and replanted the crops where I could (someone took a whole row of strawberries without replanting >.<), so that I have some sort of food source. We’ve got Spice of Life as well, which means that I’ll need to get many varieties of foods.

As a side note, we do have a number of Hunger Overhaul’s features disabled, such as the one that slows down crop growth when they’re not in a specific biome. As for ones that we do have enabled… crops grow slower when not exposed to sunlight, health regen is always active but depends on how many food bars you have, and the changed starvation method are all active options.

Next to the farm, there’s a well that seems to have either been weathered away or vandalized. I’m on to those darn hooligans!

The sun started to go down, so I rushed around to find a larger house to wait the night out. I did find another field that had mustard, parsnip, winter squash, and turnips.

I also found the house that Cham would be temporarily staying in. He’ll probably decorate it later, because he was out exploring when I joined.

I grabbed a quick shot of the moon rising while I was there, but it seems to be somewhat obstructed by the ugly glass texture. To be honest, the one reason I don’t have a texture pack is because I know that there are other glass textures out there that I could use.

And, speaking of the moon… back to B3M’s varying day lengths! Notice how, in the top left corner, it says the time, day, and date. The date starts at January 1st, 0001 and progresses fro there. The sunrise / sunset times work realistically, so, for example, on January 27, the sun will rise around 7:15 and set around 17:15 (5:15 PM). Sadly, this does not affect the length of time that you can use a bed, meaning that you can only sleep in a bed from 18:00 (6:00 PM) to 6:00.

I ended up running into a bit of trouble towards the top of the village. I was, in no way shape or form, ready to deal with some zombies, so I opted to run away before more started to leak out from wherever they come from.

I hurtled down the hill, injuring myself on a pile of tin gravel. I locked myself in Cham’s home as he and Funsize were getting ready to sleep 2,000 blocks away. Sadly, there were no beds in the village, as far as I knew, so, not wanting to be rude and keep them waiting, I decided to log off so that they could sleep.

Enough of the village, though! I said that it’s about time to head out and get started on some real Minecraft action! Tree! Sheep! Squid! All must be punched!

In all seriousness, though, it seems that someone had a creeper blow up near this entrance to the village. We’ll be repairing that later.

And now, for the epic moment that really should’ve happened a day before… I’m going to punch. this. tree.

I ran around the Prairie, looking for trees to punch down, but I ended up stumbling upon a second walled village about 200 blocks away from the one we spawned in. I asked Cham about it, and we agreed that we probably wouldn’t be doing anything with it. This is because it’s basically situated on the very top of a hill, causing it to be generated rather weirdly. But, for anyone that’s considering joining our server… it’s there.

Also, a small side note for those that haven’t used mods very often… you will probably want to start out collecting some flint as well. You can get flint the normal way, but you can also put three pieces of gravel into your crafting square to make a single piece of flint, which is pretty cool. I promptly forgot about this until I actually needed it, but I’d like to mention it nonetheless.

Moving closer to the shore, I noticed a clump of squids swimming “gracefully” through the water. This might not seem too important, but it all depends on your perspective. Some may see them as useless sacks of crap, while others may see them as annoying marine creatures that they have to chase down to progress in their Thaumcraft studies. Do you know what I see them as?

Food. Muahahaha…

Of course, not a single one of them dropped any edible food, and I wasn’t about to eat ink sacs any time soon. For those that haven’t played with mods too often, Pam’s Harvestcraft makes squid drop a food item called calamari

I end up finding a naturally generated miniature volcano. Reflecting on it now, I have no idea why it’s on a beach, because, to me, that makes absolutely no sense. But this is Minecraft, so I suppose that I have to suspend my disbelief a fair bit.

And, yes, Cham, we do remember when everyone and their grandmother wanted a wolf. As a matter of fact, most of us still do. ;_;

After deciding that I had enough materials to work with, I started walking back to the village to set up my supplies. However, I came across a weird...thing that was just sitting on the ground, looking all sad and dejected. I picked it up and looked into my inventory to see what it was…

Oh my sweet Mother Teresa on the hood of a Mercedes Benz. Why would someone, or something, just leave their poop just lying around in the open for someone to step on?

Of course, my questions are answered when a suspicious-looking sheep just happened to wander into my path and defecate right in front of me. I opted to not put in a screenshot of that, because this is starting to really become an awkward topic that I need to move off of right away.

Here’s a view of the village wall from the outside. It doesn’t look the best, but it keeps out zombies quite a bit better than those phony iron golems. We’ll probably end up decorating it later.

Ugh...moving on.

I decided to set up shop in this house, because it’s one of those larger houses that’s sort of shaped like an “L.” They’re usually pretty good for starter bases.

However, it seems like this house already has a resident. I thought about keeping him in that house for a while, but it would honestly be more trouble than it would be worth. If he was a priest, librarian, or Thaumcraft wizard villager, though… I would’ve definitely kept him. I cleared out the gravel to enter the house, and the villager immediately darted past me, into the rest of the village.

One of the first things I started on was to make several blank patterns, in the fashion shown above. You can find the recipe for these patterns, not only in NEI, but also in the tan Tinker’s Construct book. These patterns are necessary for doing any beginner tool-making, and, upon making them, you get two other books from Tinker’s Constructs. However, as I mentioned before, I needed to gather some flint first, so I went outside to get some more gravel.

While I was doing that, I stopped at my neighbor’s house, and it turned out that he’s an apothecary villager, from the Witchery mod. I didn’t feel like excavating him from his house, because I had no idea where his door was.

After getting an appropriate amount of flint, I started to make the various workbenches from Tinker’s Construct: the Stencil Table, the Pattern Chest, the Part Builder, and the Tool Station. You can make these with blank pattern and either a wood plank, a chest, a wood log (as shown above), and a crafting table, respectively. These are all required, because it is impossible to make any vanilla tools (as far as I know, someone can feel free to correct me on that) in this mod pack.

I also made a chest, which I plopped down behind me. Gany’s Surface adds a bit more visual detail to these chests, depending on the material that you used to make them. This is my first time using the mod in a while, and I think this looks really cool. It’s probably my favorite part of the mod so far.

Anyways, back to tool making...

I started with the Stencil Table, which, as I’ll repeat again for those that haven’t used mods, is made with a blank pattern and a wood plank. I put the blank patterns into the left slot and selected from the part patterns shown on the left and right sides of the menu. To start out with, I made a Pickaxe Head, Shovel Head, Axe Head, Tool Rod, and Tool Binding pattern.

Next in line is the Pattern Chest, which is made with a blank pattern and a chest. You can store your patterns in here, and, if placed down next to the Part Builder, you can access them from the Part Builder.

Next up is the Part Builder, which can be made with a blank pattern and a wood log. This is where all of that flint comes into play. Thanks to Iguana’s Tinker Tweaks, which is one of the add-ons for Tinker’s Construct that we have, the materials that can be used for the various parts are restricted. For example, I can’t make tool heads out of wood, and I can’t make tool rods out of flint. I could make both out of bone, however, and, while it’s slightly better than flint, it’s usually hard to get without a weapon. I would say that the most important early game restriction is the inability to make a sword blade out of a non-metal material.

Anyways, I’d also like to note that different patterns require different amounts of materials. For example, the tool heads that I have all require one material, but the tool rod and tool binding only need half of a material. In the case that the leftover materials don’t come out to an even number, it’ll usually leave a shard or stick, depending on the material.

So, I brought the flint tool heads, wooden tool binding, and wooden rods over to the next workbench: the Tool Station. Using this workbench, I can assemble the materials that I made into the various Tinker’s Construct tools. I made the Pickaxe, Shovel, and Hatchet to use as a basic toolset. An interesting thing to note is that the Hatchet, which is the TiC equivalent to an axe, also doubles as a fairly decent weapon. My Flint Hatchet deals 2.5 hearts of damage per hit. I also had the option to make a Mattock, which is basically an axe, a hoe, and a shovel all rolled into one tool, but I decided to hold off on making it for now.

And there we go! That’s all of the tools that I needed to get started, and all of the progress that I need to finish up this entry. This has been a pretty long entry, and, honestly, future entries probably won’t end up being this long. I think I’ve got somewhere around 2,300 words on this one, which is about 100 words per page that I’ve written here. Feel free to leave any feedback, especially on things that I could improve on! In the next entry, I’ll be exploring, gathering materials, and revealing our planned project!

Also, here’s a small quip from our IRC chat while I was writing this:

But like, I've only written about ten minutes worth of playtime so far.

...

Granted, it's the first day, and a lot of stuff happens on the first day, but...

Yeah.

We're going to have moon bases before you even finish describing your pickaxe.

Lol.

Haven't made one yet.

.

Front of the cottage

A little smelly garden

The front den and my locker full of tools. Stairs lead up to the attic / bedroom.

Attic / Bedroom

Kitchen with stairs leading into the basement / bar

This area is still a work in progress, it holds my machines that don't have a building to house them. I plan to make the back area for storage and production of alcohol beverages and turn the area in front into a bar room

This is my current storage area, I want to expand more. Maybe like a barn or something, I would really appreciate some ideas on this one

The 'Tree of the Golden Age'

My beloved fields

My tobacco plants that are used for cigarettes and trading

The harbormaster where I will be using CustomNPCs for trading various things. This is a very heavy WIP, this is one of the projects I started today

The docks, which I don't like too much so please give me your feedback! I am happy how my sloop came together though

Interior is still a WIP

This is the ranch which currently houses chickens and cows. I can get cheep but have been too lazy to

View from the bottom of the mountain

The first floor of the tower. It's a little under furnished

My spell crafting altar

Views from the top of the tower

Chicken Shed

Ars Magica 2

Antique Atlas

Archimedes Ships

Artifacts

Attained Drops

Growable Ores

Backpacks

Better Storage

Biblio Craft

Carpenters Blocks

Chisel 2

Colorful Portals

Complex Crops

Craftable Horse Armour

Crafting Table IV

Crossbow Mod

CustomNPCs

Decocraft

EnderCompass

Exotic Birds

Fossils Archeology Revival

Hardcore Ender Expansion

Herdcraft

Hopperducts

Infernalmobs

Invasion Mod

ItemPhysics Full

Just a few fish

Lantern

LittleHelpers

MrCrayFish's furniture mod

Necromancy

NEI

Pocketcraft

Psychedelicraft

Rideable Spiders

Schematica

SimpleEnderThings

Soul Shards TOW

Storage Drawers

Streams

Tinkers

Vein Miner

Weaponmod

So here we are, at Night 1. The sun has set, and as I don't have a bed
yet, nor the ability to twiddle my thumbs for 10 minutes, I decided to
explore the upper parts of the cave, and collecting the plentiful iron
deposits now, starting with the one I didn't have time to collect in the
smaller tunnel.

The aforementioned vein I found earlier.

After collecting that vein (and then being chased out of the caves by a pair
of zombies and a skeleton, who were quickly dealt with), I began to
explore the tunnels, taking a torch from somewhere else and putting it
down here. Turns out this cave gets even weirder.



The two tunnels merge at this point, and then they split again here.

Cave, Y u so random

After mining another vein or two, I emerged from the dark and damp cave to see the sun had risen again. It was time to do some hunting, foraging and exploring (in the exact opposite order). I eventually traveled back to the courtyard with the cave. The animals had dispersed somewhat, but fortunately, the sheep hadn't been killed by wolves, so that was good. As I was starting to get really hungry at this point, I killed one of the sheep for lambchops (there were 3 or 4 sheep, and I would find even more later, so don't worry)



After more exploration, I found out some information about the taiga and it's neighbors. To the south, there was a typical oak and birch forest (I didn't explore so deep into the biome to get a F3 reading). After some exploring to the west, the taiga is replaced by some Extreme Hills (or one of it's subsets, again, didn't do a biome reading), with a bunch of pigs and sheep, and a good grouping of cows on the border of the biomes, enough for me to kill two. On the way back, I began to attack the ferns to get some seeds, as I couldn't keep killing animals forever. By the end of my travels, I had collected quite a lot of resources.



On my way back, I happened upon a spider who was apparently really interested with the tree it was climbing on, even continuing to do whatever it was doing as I began to stab it in the stomach. It eventually turned around and fell from the tree (I hit it before I saw it turn around), and naturally went splat.

Rest In Pieces: Tree Spider

Eventually I returned home to refine the spoils of my adventure. There was enough iron to make a sword, a pick, shears, a helmet, and still have one ingot left over. And I had only barely explored the uppermost part of the cave... who knows what awaits below? I made a chest, eventually shoving most of my stuff it it, when I released the thing I had forgotten: a bed.



Night had fallen again, but I was ready this time, with my iron sword ready to slice through the rotting flesh and blank eyes of the undead. Besides, I was cold and not that hungry, and I wanted a goddamn bed. Although my first go-to place was the courtyard, that wasn't a option after three creepers had appeared, surrounding the only sheep I could see, so that was out. I eventually found a brown sheep near the Hills-Taiga border, without any surrounding mobs, and got the needed two wool to make my bed. I also got a chance to climb one of the hills for a survey of the forested area.



To the north lay a tiny typical forest, and what appears to be a Plains biome. To the south, I saw the large forest I described earlier, and behind me lay the hills. Only the west lay unexplored, and seemed to be only the taiga. On the way back, I seemed to bump into every monster in the area, so by the time I reached the cave, I had attracted this loose horde of mobs:

Stay away! I don't want any girl scout cookies!
I did make it inside without a scratch, and quickly made my bed. It was a waste, as the moon was halfway set (being like 3 in the morning), but I didn't care, and neither did the monsters that had followed me to the door. Because it was on Normal difficulty, they couldn't break down the door, but they would be very noisy and run my attempts to sleep.



But as for now, I had completed my mission, and logged off.