Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.
The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.
All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.
The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.
Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.
One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.
I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.
The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.
All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.
The post Egg Pitching Machine appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.
The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.
All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.
The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.
Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.
One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.
I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.
The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.
All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.
The post Egg Pitching Machine appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
So I am still on my Minecraft nonsense, and priority one for yesterday was to lure some helpless animals into my custody. We are not going to talk about the deeply disturbing things that I am going to put them through… or at least not until later. The biggest challenge was trying to separate the cows from the sheep because both of them were lured with wheat. It was pretty hilarious me slowly backing towards my base with a mob of five sheep and four cows. I created an impromptu dirt bridge across the pond outside of my base to make it a little easier and was impressed that none of them fell in the water. I did make it three blocks wide which seems to have helped in this case.
I also went out into the world and tamed a bunch of doggos. It is pretty wild playing this game while being trailed by six wolves. It ends up making the entire experience feel a bit more like a World of Warcraft Hunter. I plink something with an arrow and then before the mob can get anywhere near me my team of expert “goodest boys” has wrecked it completely. The only negative is that they won’t seem to attack creepers, which is one of my larger problems honestly. They completely destroy Pillagers though, and they are the sole reason why I was able to rain the nearby outpost and get myself a shiny new crossbow. I have no clue how to destroy said outpost, because by the time I was leaving everything was respawning in full again.
I did have to put my sweet babbos in timeout though, because digging tight tunnels while followed by six wolves… is complete madness. The best part about these kiddos though is that they eat zombie meat and seem to think it is good… which means I get to save all of the steak for myself and heal them up with otherwise useless junk. I specifically parked them under the shelter of my base because it felt awful to have them sitting out in the rain and weather. I have no clue why I am suddenly personifying these puppers, but it is a thing that is happening. This is hilarious considering the sheer animal cruelty that I am committing just across the courtyard from these “goodest boys”.
Since I did not have access to much Redstone, I have opted to instead make a traditional “meat hole” with my chickens. There is a fried chicken machine that works much better but it requires me to have way more resources than I currently have. My hope is that at some point I can convert the current machine over to the automated version at a later date. Essentially both the Chicken and Cow machines work based around the concept of entity cramming, where only 24 entities can occupy the same square of space and when a new entity is created… the oldest entity is killed off creating drops… which get whisked into a chest via a hopper system. So essentially I hop up on the top of the machine and feed the chickens grass seed, which creates baby chickens, which kills off older chickens, and drops feathers and meat into the chest. Additionally, the hopper collects more eggs than I can ever use… most of which I am throwing at the ground to try and spawn additional chickens and then eventually manually killing them. Cows work so much better than Chickens for this purpose… because the drop rates of chicken meat and feathers is much lower than beef/leather.
The sheep are suffering a significantly less dire fate because shears exist and I can just corral them in a small space and then hop down into the pen and harvest all the wool easily. Most of the food that I am using comes from the cows, and the chicken farm exists only to serve as a way of getting feathers to replenish my arrow supply. Were it not for the fact that sheep end up being “bycatch” from my act of trying to lure cows into my base… I would not even have messed with collecting any. Once you have made a bed… there isn’t much use for sheep in general. Sure they drop meat, but they are overall a way less efficient animal. Similarly, I did not even mess with collecting any pigs. However since this batch of sheep so willingly entered my den of horrors… I figured I might as well keep them penned up in case I need more wool in the future.
The other part of the arrow-making routine has involved creating giant towers of gravel and then harvesting it down hoping for flint. I really wish they would add a crafting machine recipe for turning gravel into flint, because honestly… this is a bit maddening to keep harvesting the same gravel over and over hoping for that rare drop. The only real positive is that you get to see some nice above shots of my base while I am up on my tower of nonsense. You can see that I am farming sugarcane out by the water to build up a proper enchanting shack. I think the next big renovation phase is going to be trying to make my base look a little less shit. I also am contemplating expanding out a bit more and doing a land grab to get more “safe” territory. I’ve contemplated moving the entire from of my base out over top of the waterfront so that I can move my sugarcane farm indoors.
In other news, I have finished my spiral staircase down to bedrock, and in doing so found my very first diamond block. Legitimately it was just a single node, which is a bit infuriating but once I got down to bedrock I set up the standard strip mining operation. This quickly yielded enough diamonds to make myself a set of tools. Right now I have Iron Armor, and it will probably be quite a long time before I can get enough diamonds to make a full set of armor out of that material. I found some pointed dripstone and I think one of my next projects is going to be building a renewable lava setup. This will be useful for a few reasons… the primary that I will be able to start using lava buckets instead of coal for cooking the assorted meat that I am gathering. After that, I can start using it for farming obsidian to eventually build a nether portal.
So at this point, I have a Diamond Pick, Diamond Axe, and Diamond Sword. I am too cheap usually to make shovels, but at some point, I am sure I will. I still mostly use stone tools because I don’t have tons of diamonds yet. I am just too cheap to waste diamonds right now. I am sure tonight I will probably spend a bit more time down in the mines because there are still a lot of resources that I have not found. At some point, I plan on building a nether portal and start trying to gather some of the resources there. However, I do not want to set foot into the nether without at least some gold armor, because I do not want to deal with massive pigman aggro. I have found exactly zero gold so far, so I am probably going to set up a few different branch mines off my spiral staircase at different levels looking for various resources.
The post Luring Defenseless Animals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. I’m still testing positive for COVID-19 some two weeks after my initial test, and honesty… I still feel fairly awful. Every day is a little bit better, but it is a battle waged in inches rather than feet. While I am actually getting decent enough sleep now, which is a huge positive… my game time is still rather fraught and unfocused. Lately, I have been spending quite a bit of my time in Minecraft. It seems like this is my “sick” game because over the years I have faded back into it whenever I was not feeling myself. I never really stick around terribly long, but it is sort of the experience I can completely shut my brain off for and just build and explore.
This recent bout of Minecraft nostalgia is brought to you by the fact that I remembered that I have videos that I shot eons ago… in deeply potato quality of my very first Minecraft world. I explored with a sense of wonder, in part because I was still figuring out the rules of world creation back then. I didn’t know with certainty where I could strip mine to get diamonds, nor did I really understand how to find key resources like coal or iron, and I just sort of freeform built wherever things seemed cool. I think in some part I wanted to maybe rekindle a bit of that with a new world. There is part of me that wishes that I still had these original files… and quite honestly I thought I had backed them up because prior to us getting a multiplayer server Rylacus and I used to swap our worlds back and forth so we could see what the other was building.
Right now I am very much in the “ugly but efficient” phase of the world where I am building out of whatever materials I happen across. For the moment I have this awkward-looking tower that is nice and safe from all of the monsters that spawn around it. I have no clue how tall I am going to make it, but given my penchant for building Skyroads, I will probably keep building upwards over time. For the moment only one floor is really very active with my bed and crafting machines, but I expect to add in some other stuff at least for storage purposes.
Beneath the tower, I started digging straight down and then began to do my more recent spiral staircase style of digging. Digging straight down is entirely too dangerous, so if you start digging around a central column, with each step going deeper you usually have enough time to react to any danger you might encounter but also it does not take a ton of space. I used to always dig a stairwell down, but it always felt like I was wasting a lot of space in doing so. I’ve not hit bedrock yet, but I did tunnel down into a geode. I spent enough time down there to torch off a large section to make it a bit safer. I similarly hit a natural cave on the way down that had quite a bit of iron, which I have similarly torched off to make it safe.
The tower is technically the first place I attempted to settle in this world. While I was running from the spawn point I built this makeshift bridge and then started digging into the side of a mountain. Given my natural dwarven tendencies, my first bases tend to be similar areas. The big problem here however is that I dug into a very active cave system with a zombie spawner. I was quickly overwhelmed and forced to run back from the spawn. This of course meant that my next priority was to get enough wool to be able to make a bed. However, I did come back to the cave system farm it down, and eventually torch off the zombie spawner so that I could make it a bit more reasonable. This is just around the corner from my tower and I might at some point try and connect the two areas with an underground tunnel.
While it is not the most efficient thing in the world right now, I did set up a very rudimentary zombie spawner farm so that I can come back here when I need experience for enchanting. I am sure I will improve this a bit over time to make it work more efficiently. It works well enough for now and if I need to shut it off I can easily throw a torch inside there to make it safe enough to work on. Right now the zombies have a bad habit of getting caught in the blind corner to the right, so at some point I will optimize this to make it work a bit better. If I ever get a silk touch pick, I might pick the spawner up and move it to someplace a bit closer to my base. Thought like I said above it might be fun to connect the two areas up via a safe underground tunnel.
For the moment I am planning on expanding out the walled-off area to add a bit of a farm, and maybe starting to pen off some animals. Once I get a reliable crop of grain, I am probably going to lure some cows into a “meat hole” which is a truly disturbing contraption that essentially has you feed cows until they overpopulate the number of spawns that can appear on a single block… and then kill off the older entities creating meat and leather. Sheep on the other hand I can just harvest like normal with shears, and potentially I might build a lava-based chicken farm to get eggs and feathers. Essentially I need to build up some reliable sources of food… because for the moment I am running on whatever I have lucked into farming out in the world and some bread that I found in chests.
However, I am somewhat hesitant to go wild on building a bunch of automated farms… because on some level that destroys the simplicity of the game.
The post Block-Based Nostalgia appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
