Better Than Wolves

A long time ago, Minecraft had this update that introduced wolves to the game. They're a passive mob, meaning they don't attack you like zombies and skeletons and whatnot. They also have the neat ability to befriend you if you feed them a bone. Then they kind of follow you around and whatnot. Or they can be set to guard a spot from hostile mobs and other players on a multiplayer server. While neat, it isn't exactly a lot of content. So in response, this guy created a mod called Better Than Wolves. 

Normally, mods add things, usually blocks and tools, ores, etc. Usually they're based around some kind of core concept like magic or technology or storage. A lot of the time they mostly add automation or simplification to Minecraft. For instance, Buildcraft adds the quarry, which mines a potentially very large area while powered. Thaumcraft adds little golem dudes that you can set simple tasks for, like harvesting your crops or defending your base. Industrial Craft adds lots of electric tools. Forestry adds multifarms that grow almost any crop and when powered and supplied with the appropriate resources, plants and harvests the crops or trees or whatever automatically and ejects them into a pipe system for storage. 

Better Than Wolves doesn't do any of that really. In fact, it goes to great lengths to make simple tasks harder. Better Than Wolves is almost a complete reworking of most of the game. When you get hungry, you lose the ability to jump or sprint. You can't transport water source blocks in a bucket, you have to dig channels and reroute water manually to hydrate your crops. Trees take forever to grow. You can't mine stone with wood picks or craft wooden axes and swords. Moving through grass slows you down. Etc.

The mod adds a shit ton of content to the game and reworks a lot of recipes and mechanics of the game. The little bit of automation it adds is usually derived from mechanical power and creative applications of cranks and gears and redstone. Like you have to use a hand crank to power the millstone to grind up flour for bread. Or put a water wheel in a spot of flowing water. 

I've been trying out the mod recently and I find it to be almost infuriatingly difficult to progress in. But, everything you do succeed at is that much more rewarding. Even if it is as simple as chopping down some fucking wood. I mean, punching a block of wood for half a minute waiting for it to break is a huge pain in the ass. It drains your hunger bar and doesn't get you much wood. When you finally get enough wood to make enough wooden picks to mine stone and make a stone axe, its awesome. You're not only working faster, you're getting more planks per log and using less hunger. When you finally mine enough iron to make two ingots and make an iron hoe and get farming, well, that's just nuts. 

The mod is on some level fascinating. It forces you to think things through and plan things out in a way that fairly simplistic vanilla never really made me do. But, it doesn't go the route of simply adding a new block or machine to do it for you. Soul Shards, MineFactory Reloaded, and DartCraft all add the ability to craft mob spawners to farm mobs for certain resources, but Better Than Wolves grants you the tools to create pretty neat traps (there's a sawblade machine you can power with a windmill to kill mobs for you), but doesn't do it for you. So you still have to come up with creative methods of getting the game to spawn monsters, and come up with an equally creative way to kill them and collect the loot. Instead of giving you a high cost enchanting table upgrade that lets you pick your enchant instead of getting a random one, Better Than Wolves gives you a high cost enchanting table upgrade, but forces you to provide it with a specific enchantment on a book before it will let you pick it to put on a tool or weapon. 

I don't necessarily know if I am committed to playing the mod religiously and exploring all of its content, but I really like the concept and the challenge of it. I dunno. Sometimes heavily modded Minecraft is super fucking easy, which makes it boring at times. I mean, once you set up a 64 x 64 quarry, you're pretty much set for metals forever. Which means there's no real reason to wander underground and stumble upon abandoned mineshafts, strongholds, or mob spawners and their included loot. 

I dunno. Fucking Minecraft. 

I Hate You, Minecraft, and (Especially) Jason

This post was delayed because I kind of went on a cleaning frenzy of the apartment, and then had to do other unexpected and actually important stuff.

Oh look, pictures.

Oh really?

Oh, ok. That makes sense. 

This place looks familiar... It's the north side of the tower. That's the Goebleen barracks on the left, beyond it you can kind of see the soldier barracks. The tower is straight ahead on the little road. On the right side of the screen is the dual smithy. 

The signage here is oddly straightforward.

Interior of the dual smithy. The corner we see here is repeated in the corner on the left of the screen. That's an armor stand to the left of the door. You can place suits of armor on it for display. That's a row of barrels on the right edge of the screen.

Words.

Interior of the Goebleen barracks. It's pretty cramped. Technically, this place (and the rest of the area around the tower) should be a sludge pile of mud after Andorian battered the area with his schizophrenic hail-lightning-rain storm for a day and a half. There are a few more beds beyond the left and right sides of the picture. I think it fits about sixteen or seventeen Goebleen. Directly ahead at the other end of the barracks is a ladder leading to a storage chamber full of barrels and chests and such. Pretend I took you there and it was an exciting journey. 

This place has seen better days, not gonna lie. It's mostly burned, or at least scorched. The roof is basically pure charcoal. 

A little workstation for a little explosion happy Alchemist. That's a cauldron on the right, along with a brewing stand next to it. Beyond the left edge of the screen is a little bookshelf where Gob puts all of his formulas, and lewd drawings of Asosans, Giants, and various farm animals. 

Interior of the barracks. Fairly standard. The door on the far end leads to a passage that leads to a bathroom. There is a ladder in the far left corner that leads up to the roof. 

The bathroom, with a conveniently placed bar of soap above the tub. The hole on the lower left corner is the actual "toilet" and I spent way too much time filling the hole with liquid sewage. It's a liquid added by a mod that can be processed in a composter when extracted from farm animals and turned into industrial fertilizer. I considered giving the tub actual running water but decided it would take way too much redstone. On the right side you can see the passage that leads through to the hireling's residence. The soldier's barrack and hireling's residence are connected to the same bathroom, but they are separate structures. 

The hireling residence, obviously. I wanted to show the front, rather than do a picture of a featureless stone passage. The hireling residence and soldier barracks are directly east of the tower. 

Interior of the hireling residence. It has five beds and whatnot for the five hirelings (three smiths, a cook, and a quartermaster. The door on the far left leads through to a passage that leads to the shared bathroom. 

This is the east side of the tower, as seen from the front door of the hireling residence. That's a well on the left of the screen, you can also see the stable and smithy attached to the tower. I'm not going to do a screenshot of the front of the stable, but there is a little water trough to the right of the front door. The right side of the screen is a corner of the soldier barracks. 

Signage, it says things. The Goebleen use this place to feed themselves, so they're not a drain on the group's finances like all the pirate followers are. Such foresight, imagine what Gob could accomplish if he wasn't a dumb smelly Goebleen like Eran says he is. As fascinating as the interior is, I'm not going to give a tour. There are mushrooms, probably a creeper ready to explode, and there is no light. This cave is a ways south of the tower directly from the side of the stable.

Interior of the stable. To the right, you can see tools and saddles and barrels and whatnot. On the left, you can see a wooden stall, the wall just beyond the right edge of the picture has three more stalls. The ladder next to the support logs leads up into the loft, where a single, lonely Goebleen sits (when they're in the tower) prepared with a water bucket to douse the lantern if it ignites the barn. The mods I have installed use Minecraft 1.5.2. If this were Minecraft 1.6.x, I'd throw actual horses into the stalls. 

The smithy attached to the tower. The far right door leads outside and the one you can kind of see on the left leads into the tower. This is basically a repeat of the previously seen dual smithy. 

It's the outhouse. There's a hatch and a hole to drop your leavings in. Just like the last one seen, I spent way too much time filling the pit with sewage. The outhouse kind of sits on the southwest corner of the tower, right behind the stable. 

The front door of the tower. There's kind of a shadow at the base of the door on the road, it's a special pressure plate that is invisible to players that do not place it and is also silent when activated. Normal pressure plates click quite audibly when stepped on. I've used a lot of them so I don't have to place levers and buttons on the walls next to all the iron and reinforced doors I've put in the place. In previous editions of the map, the tower itself had a mossy or cracked texture on some of the stone bricks. I've opted to skip this detail this time, as I built the main structure of the tower with a device called a filler that lets you place land marks to outline a space and then places or removes blocks in a pattern you specify when powered. It was a lot easier than placing every block by click to build the exterior walls of the tower.

The first floor of the tower. On the far end you can see the pseudo-kitchen. Racked on the wall are a frying pan, cleaver, and knife. On the far wall are two doors leading to the bedrooms Karl had constructed on the west side of the tower. We can't see it because of the stairs on the right side of the picture, but there is a stove built into the stairs with a ventilation hood and pipe leading out to the exterior. On the other side of the counter is a hatch that leads below the first floor to the storage space. It's full of chests, barrels, and kegs of Kussethian potato rum. I'm not going to show you a screenshot, but pretend it was another exciting journey through a cramped space with poor lighting that was full of storage objects.

This is the second floor, formerly a barracks. Currently, all of Karrak and Karl's followers and cohorts live in the soldier's barracks and the five hirelings live in the hireling residence. As far as I know, no one has done anything with this floor. On the far left side, concealed from our view by the excessive amount of storage lockers and bunk beds are doors leading to the two rooms Karl added to the west side of the second floor. As far as I know, there was no internal stairway constructed for the four new rooms, so they're just attached to the floor they're built on. 

One of the four additional bedrooms Karl had constructed in the event Vanden does decide to have some of his other agents lay low at the tower. The door from the tower is behind us and the door on the right side of the screen leads to the restroom the two rooms on this floor share. The bathroom is basically just a shared shaft  that goes from the second floor to the first, and then down into the earth. Again, time, sewage, etc. Sigh. 

This is the third floor, the bedroom of the PCs. It's obviously a little roomier with a few more comforts. There's a bookshelf over there for Karl, and I've placed some trophies from the group's adventures on the walls. 

I had to use the items I had at my disposal to represent the trophies. I think you get the idea though.

 

This is the fourth floor of the tower, the armory. I've placed armor stands with chain mail suits on them, because the tower is stocked with enough suits of iron chain mail for thirty people, minus however many are currently equipped by Karrak's followers. The racks on the right side of the screen hold longbows. Currently, I have no spears to put in them, as the tower had spears and longbows when the guys claimed it from the Asosans, so I threw in some iron swords. I'm considering using a mod that adds some variety to Minecraft's weapon selection and includes katanas, throwing knives, crossbows, spears, javelins, flintlock pistols/rifles, and cannons. You can place the cannons in the world and they would look really cool atop the tower I think. We'll see. The ladder on the far end of the picture leads up to the roof. I'm not going up there. It looks like the top of the tower.

Oh look, a chunk loading error south of the tower. 

One last shot of the whole mess from the north. Man, I never get tired of those fucking smokestacks. The blocks that create the particles are one of my favorite blocks in the modded game. 

So yeah. That is Fort Jagged Tooth v3.0. I had a lot of fun building it this time. It's something I've wanted to do since I started playing modded Minecraft. The mods give me so many options for building things, and new blocks like the smoking blocks I built into smokestacks over the smithies give me so much creative freedom. Additionally this texture pack I'm using is really pretty and stuff. This Minecraft map is a flat world, so there are no mountains or forests or oceans to get in the way of building if/when the guys expand further. 

You might not have noticed, but things are a bit bigger than the last tower I built. In Minecraft, each block is 1 meter, which translates to 3.3 feet if I remember correctly. Building things based on this block size made the interior of every creative build project I constructed feel cramped and overly full. In this revision of the fort, I've arbitrarily decided that each block is 2.5 feet. I built with this in mind to give myself the illusion of more space when constructing 20 ft. x 20 ft. x 10 ft. rooms (normally 7 x 7 x 3 blocks, but now 8 x 8 x 4 blocks). I also did it because it isn't such a huge change that all the furniture and blocks look overly tiny in comparison to their surroundings. 

I've already shared it with Jason, and I don't know that anyone else who I game with plays Minecraft, but if anyone wants a save of the world or anything, let me know. 

Binders Full of Mods

You know, I never paid any attention to what that whole binders full of women thing was during the presidential campaign. I heard it mentioned, but never actually learned what it was about. I just assumed it was crazy, Mormon, misogynistic, and involved Kolob.

There are so many fucking mods in Minecraft on our server. One problem I have is overlap between them. Each big mod has a system for ore processing, most mods have different systems for ore processing, automating mining, and farming, and a few have different systems of enchantment, or for managing livestock, etc etc etc. 

I tend to like the aesthetics of the Buildcraft based mods like Buildcraft, Forestry, and Thermal Expansion and would likely go with those without complaint. I dunno, I just really like the tube transport system and the moving engines. But, you can't competently ignore the Industrial Craft stuff, which doesn't use the same power as the Buildcraft mods, because it has fantastic stuff like electric rechargeable tools and highly advanced gear like jet packs and armor that uses energy instead of durability. However, all the Industrial Craft blocks are ugly gray metal squares. The engines and blocks of BC based mods tend to have more colorful textures and effects. Which are neat.

There is a mod that creates power converters to convert stuff from one energy source to another, but I haven't enabled it on our server because it feels like cheating to me.

Personally, I prefer power generation based on green resources, rather than burning coal or charcoal or solar power. I use fermenters and stills and tree farms to produce biomass, biofuel, and ethanol to power my shit. I also use a little bit of lava for my quarry engines. If I wanted to be creepy, I could use the MineFactory Reloaded mod and harvest meat products from livestock and create meat. Which is a liquid. Which can be pumped into some Buildcraft engines as a power source. Or I could compress it into meat blocks and cook them for food. 

Ick.

I haven't touched Thaumcraft at all this time around, simply because I haven't felt like investing the time. I have started experimenting with the ME (matter energy) storage system. Basically you build some special blocks and storage media and store all your shit as data and create a bunch of interfaces to craft and store items. It's super neat. One of the big issues with Minecraft is all the crap you end up collecting and having to store or find a convenient way to get rid of. So you end up with rooms and rooms full of chests. The ME system is super expensive and uses primarily gold and diamonds, which are hard to find in large amounts, but I have several thousand items stored in one block that took up an entire 9x9x3 room in my base full of barrels. Barrels are an item from another mod that can store up to 4,096 of a single item. Not even half of my barrels were full, but most were at half full. I have lots of crap. Having a storage device that not only stores a shit ton of stuff, but condenses the space, is really glorious.

I haven't really figured out what I want to do now that we've rebooted the server. I've experimented with a few of the new mods, which has been interesting and fun. There's one called Dartcraft that seems to be inspired by the Zelda games. The ore it installs looks much like the triforce, and the armor you can create with it strongly resembles Link's outfit from the games. 

I've basically just been getting my base situated and automating resource collecting, but I don't know what I want to do with all the shit I have. Once again, I find myself groping for a sort of creative project to engage. I still have some work to do on power generation and getting that completely squared away. I think I just came up with a decent solution though. We'll see. 

I've kind of been toying once again with building something iconic from DnD. But once again, I come to the realization that most people aren't really aware of what all the iconic legendary dungeons are or what they look like. Still, it might be kinda cool to say that "Yeah, that's Castle Ravenloft." over there. I dunno. I'll figure something out, or I'll get bored. I might end up slipping into creative mode, which I can do as an admin, and create dungeons all over the place for people to stumble upon and sneak through. That might be cool. 

Still Moar Minecraft

I don't even. What?

So I've been playing a lot of Minecraft lately, perhaps you've noticed. I really really like the vanilla version of the game. I've spent countless hours just digging holes in the ground looking for ores I don't precisely need because I never really do anything other than dig holes and build towers and glass structures and stuff. Nonetheless, I love the game. It's so much fun. 

This guy from work bought a server, as I've said before, and we started using all these mods and stuff, and those have added and ridiculous amount of new content. Trains and engines and magic and all sorts of fun things to expand the crafting and building you can do in the game. You can breed trees and bees with Forestry and make golems with Thaumcraft and make quarries with Buildcraft. 

That's a picture of my quarry. You can see on the lower left where I've built solar panels to power it and also a series of chests and tubes for extracting the mined resources. I built it over water so the water would cascade down into it to nullify any lava nodes, which stop the quarry from mining. I built it next to a volcano (a biome addition that can sometimes explode with lava) because I wanted some basalt and obsidian. 

So there's all this new cool shit that I think is neat, so now I think the game is neater and have been playing it a lot. Obsessively, one might say. Oh well, we all have our hobbies. Looking at things and how the server runs, I've thought about getting a server for myself. Not with any real intent to make it public per se, but just as a large space to dick around in that occasionally a friend could join me in or wander around to see what I'm up to. Plus, I'm kind of thinking I'll need a back up. The guy running our server right now is unreliable.  

One of the neat thoughts I had was just wandering around in creative mode just building dungeons. With all the tricks you can pull with redstone, making a deathtrap dungeons would be pretty easy. There are tripwires and levers and pressure plates and machines that can shoot arrows or exploding potions and pistons that can retract blacks and so on and so forth. It's kind of a neat concept. I mean, in theory, anyone wandering in could just deconstruct your dungeon layer by layer, but there are various operator and admin plugins you can use to keep people from altering anything in a certain area. 

Basically, this amounts to setting up something like an RPG server. Essentially create a safe spawn zone and then build a world around it using some of the neat stuff some of the mods can do accompanied by admin powers. I just watched a guy who goes by Direwolf20 on YouTube set up a program that has his little ComputerCraft robots build towns (apparently if you build specific types of buildings, villagers will start spawning and colonize them). Towns. He used computers to program robots in Minecraft to build a town. I dunno, I thought it'd be really fun to wander through the world doing things like building the Desert of Desolation and The Keep on the Borderlands or The Black Mountain. 

I mean, that'd be pretty neat. If someone I knew was doing something like that, creating dungeons to dig through for treasure, in Minecraft, I'd totally be into it. With the mind I have for dungeons and trapping, it could be like FourthcoreCraft. I dunno, I've got some interesting thoughts in my head about interesting things. We'll see, I guess. 

Eventually I'll do a post about Pathfinder, I promise. 

Minecraft Stuff

So a few posts ago I said some stuff about Minecraft and how I was playing on a multiplayer server with a few guys from work and their friends and whatnot. Shortly after that there were some problems and the server was down for most of a week. After it went back up, it was wiped of our world and buildings, but the guy who owns the server decided on the urging of his friend to use something called Feed The Beast. FTB is this program that uses a bunch of mods and collects them into packs and loads them into Minecraft for you and runs the game for you. It's all legal and above board and you still need to own Minecraft to play because it uses your normal Minecraft account and everything. Plus, Notch and Mojang made the game to be heavily used and abused by the modding community.

FTB has these modpacks that include various mods from various people that have done various things to the game. Some of these are useful utilities like a minimap mod that allows you to set up waypoints and stuff on the overworld so you always have a good idea where you are or at least know which direction you should start walking to get back to your base of operations. Others have useful utilities like using increasingly expensive ores to create increasingly spacious inventory items. Others add neat things like new biomes with new plant life and different textures and colors for stone and dirt. Redwood forests are pretty fucking crazy looking and volcanoes are as well. Others add new resources and subsystems to the game like copper ore, a better system for managing rails and carts, electricity, magic, nuclear power, power armor, flying armor forcefields, or teleportation.

Normal Minecraft is pretty basic, you have a furnace, anvil, crafting table, enchantment table, and cauldron. You refine ores by burning fuel (wood, coal, etc) in the furnace, you craft things in the crafting table (by arranging various amounts of materials in a pattern on a 3x3 grid), you brew potions in the cauldron. You can also use levels to enchant with the enchanting table or use the anvil to repair tools or combine enchantments. I think that's about it. You can do a lot with redstone circuits and running power to things, but its pretty complex once you get beyond pulling levers and powering carts as they move along rail tracks. I mostly settle for lever operated lava pits and redstone operated secret doors. Other people are crazier and create huge clocks and calculators with it.

So now we're playing Minecraft with all these mods (the Direwolf20 modpack, specifically) and I am completely lost because I knew nothing of these mods or FTB. I'm a vanilla Minecraft guy, I've figured out pretty much everything in the base game and nowadays I just like playing around on creative mode placing blocks and building neat things or things from my Pathfinder campaign. Which reminds me that I need to update the Orcunraytrel save to reflect the new additions that Karl put on the tower while the guys were in Cantellen.

There's all this new stuff and it's all insane. You need to harvest resin from rubber trees to combine with smelted copper to make wiring to connect your coal fueled generator to your battery box to store electricity then connect it to your extractor to get a better resin to rubber ratio. You'll also need to use an electric furnace so you're not burning through all that coal because coal can be ground up and hydrated and compressed and put into a container then extracted to get a coalfuel cell, which can power your generator for longer than a normal piece of coal. Or you can run a windmill and solar panels and a water mill to power everything. Or you can break down plant matter to run your generator.

So there are some interesting aspects to these mods and there are a few beefy ones that change a lot, while others are just minor tweaks or additions. My favorite one is the Thaumcraft mod. It adds magic into the game. Basically, what you do is destroy materials to release various essences of magic into the air and then you use a wand to create something out of them. Sometimes it is a useful building material like arcane wood, which you can craft a door out of that can only be opened by you. You can also build warded building blocks and glass, which are immune to destruction at the hands of other players. Handy on a multiplayer server. Other times, you can create more mundane resources. Like you can throw tin into a cauldron and wave your wand and create gold and such.

There are also useful utility magic items like the portable hole, which creates a magic tunnel that lets you pass through blocks. There's also a wand of excavation that blasts the earth with a beam of magic so you can collect the blocks. You can also create little golem dudes to guard and attack other players or hostile mobs (or peaceful mobs) or pick up stuff for you or refill your cauldron. You can also build swords and tools out of a magic metal that is more easily enchanted than other materials and has almost as much durability as diamond and deals almost as much damage as diamond. 

It's a pretty neat mod that takes some work to get into. You can't just find a recipe online and make stuff. You have a little spellbook and you have to create a research table and kind of research the various essences. So gold has the metal and valuable essences, so I had to research (destroy) valuable objects, metal objects, and objects related to change (like seeds and eggs) to shift my progress bar on research before I could actually transmute metal into gold. It's kind of a neat process that is a little more involved than the normal construction of objects in Minecraft. It's also kind of pretty. Most of the new objects and resources are very shiny and colorful and feature little auras of particle effects. 

Another of the main mods, and one I am currently focusing on quite a bit is the Industrial Craft mod. This one mostly centers on the inclusion of advanced machines and technology and runs on electricity. The basic device is a generator that you burn fuel in to generate electricity, which you then transmit to machines via gold, tin, and glass (I think) wiring. You can also transmit electricity by powering up batteries and then placing them into the machine you need to run. It's just easier to run wire all over the place frankly. My base is kind of a rat's nest of the stuff. Wiring is a little complicated, each wire can only take a certain amount of electrical output or it melts. If your wire isn't insulated enough, it damages you when you're next to it. If it is too high of a voltage for the machine to handle, it explodes the machine. Luckily, there are transformers to downgrade voltage, so you can use a high capacity/high voltage storage device and downgrade the voltage it outputs to power your basic machines. 

The mod also gives you access to some tools that have unlimited durability, but they run on electricity. My diamond tipped drill only stores enough power to use it about 150 times, which isn't a lot during a mining run. However, you can create batteries and other storage devices. I actually crafted a battery pack to wear that stores 30 times as much energy in it as the base amount the drill can hold. It's handy, because I also run around with a chainsaw. The chainsaw and drill are also super fast at mining and cutting wood, so it speeds things up considerably. Until I need to charge up that battery pack. 

The generator isn't your only means of electricity production though. You can pump lava for a geothermal generator, run water through a water mill (or sink it into a lake), you can put solar panels of varying degrees of power on the landscape, you can even put up windmills. I mostly use plant life to generate biofuel and some solar panels. The mod also allows you to build a nuclear reactor, if you can find some uranium, and the power output on those is pretty significant, but you have to manage them real well or they explode and spew lava all over the place and destroy a lot of blocks around you. You can also use the uranium to build nukes, which destroy a space about 80 - 100 blocks horizontally and 100 - 130 blocks vertically, and is accompanied by a poison and hunger effect. 

There is also some pretty advanced technology in the mod. You can create a jet pack and some composite armor and a mining device that will automate mining for you in a 5x5 or 9x9 square till it hits water or bedrock. But it takes power to run it. There's also the force field, which kills any players other than you that are inside of it unless they have a special access pass you craft for them. There's also a portal gun and weighted companion cube, and a teleporter. The advanced technology is fairly expensive in terms of resources, so I haven't really played with it yet. I'm still trying to figure out all of the basics of the mods, so I'm still figuring out my power grid needs and what I'll need for long term play on the server, so I haven't built any of the higher end stuff. Plus, one of the smaller mods adds a bunch of new biome types, so I've been doing quite a bit of exploring instead of mining and resource collection. 

One of the other bigger mods is Buildcraft, and it does a lot of the same stuff that Industrial Craft does, but in a different way. You still have machine types that improve upon the furnace and operate with better speed and efficiency, but they run on Minecraft Joules and are generated by various types of engines you can build.  Minecraft Joules and Industrial Craft electricity are not compatible, but can be converted by some devices from one to the other. It also tries to automate mining with the quarry, which looks kind of cool, but does about the same thing as the Industrial Craft miner. The engines are as tricky as the electrical system, they can overheat and explode and cause conductive tubes (wires, basically) to exlode. One neat thing from Buildcraft is transportation tubes. You can build tubes of various types to move resources around. So you can set it up so that your combustion engine is pumped water to keep it cool and then use it to power your pulverizer to break down ores (so you can refine them for more the a single ingot per ore) then connect a tube from the pulverizer to a chest or furnace to keep moving the ores out once they're pulverized. Industrial Craft and Buildcraft are real big on automation.

Another mod is Forestry. It is about trees and farming. Using this mod you can automate the harvesting and planting of trees and crops. Right now I'm trying to set up a automatic farming process to farm peat for me (so I can power some peat fired engines to play with more Buildcraft stuff), along with some trees, wheat, and reeds (so I can convert them into biofuel for my electrical generators). If I can automate basic resource collection with a quarry and some farms, I should be able to just wander off and dick around doing whatever and not have to worry about needing wood or food or fuel for a project. Forestry also includes a crazy system of bees, breeding bees, and breeding plants. I have no idea how it works or what the benefits are, but I guess there are like 132 different types of bees (Thaumcraft actually adds 72 new species, so the base number of bee breeds is like 60). One neat thing that Forestry adds is the electrical engine, which can be powered by Industrial Craft electricity to pump out as Minecraft Joules. However, it doesn't output much. To modify and improve its output you can use a Foestry crafting device to build a soldering iron and circuit board and put different electron tubes into it. Farms can also be modified this way. The types of crops your farms can grow is determined by a circuit board and electron tube set up. 

There are other mods in the game (including one based on Myst, which allows you to generate and travel to what are essentially other Minecraft worlds that you can rape for resourcs), but these are the only ones I really have any experience with so far, other than building neat items to see what they can do because I have a shit ton of resources for them lying around because I don't use them. One interesting thing of note is that all this new and shiny shit has completely killed my desire to create anything in terms of neat structures and buildings. This kind of bums me out, because I was all excited to create that floating castle and stuff, but I figure that once I get a handle on all of this new stuff I'll probably want to craft something neat looking. Like a flying castle with smokestack factories as the corner towers of the walls and a nuclear reactor cooling tower as the main fort, with a force field around it all. 

Moar Minecraft

So I started playing Minecraft again. A friend from work decided to get a server so we could do multiplayer. So myself and a few work friends and a few of their friends are fucking around on a multiplayer server building insane shit. I haven't played Minecraft in quite a while, so I was like five or six updates behind and they've added a few interesting mechanisms and features and such. I'm pretty excited to play again. I've never played on a multiplayer server before though, and it is a survival mode server. So there are monsters that spawn and you have to worry about hunger and health in addition to the monsters ruining things for you. Plus, other players can trash your buildings or steal your shit. For instance, I logged on before work a few days ago and found the whole side of my stone hut blown apart as if a creeper had exploded next to it. Nothing was stolen or anything, but its still irritating that someone was wandering around and not paying attention and destroyed my stuff.  

Like I said, I've no experience with multiplayer servers and the guy running the thing, Kyle, is basically a narcissistic sociopath. So yeah, there's that. Anyway, I've played survival mode for hours and hours and constructed fantastic things like underwater fortresses of glass, glass mountains with small castles inside them, etc etc etc. I much prefer creative mode and just flying around and building whatever the fuck I want without having to worry about death or an exploding creeper leveling my building. Plus, other players can just open your chests of shit and steal all your valuables. 

I'm really paranoid about other players, I have issues with paranoia. Kyle has said this is a trust server, so he does not have anti-griefing enabled and has no intention of doing so. I assume this means that if a player places something, it becomes indestructible to other players. 

Anyway. I've never played on a multiplayer server, so I had no idea what to expect. I expected it to be a lot like WoW with players killing and looting each other and just wandering into buildings stealing stuff. That hasn't happened, aside from my partner Ryan, who is a noob, stealing a bunch of higher end shit and promptly starved to death and lost it all. Talking with Kyle, I've learned there are these things called plugins you can install to modify the game. So we can enter a command and teleport back to where we died and pick our shit up off the ground. Which is handy. He also installed a plugin that ties your chests and smelters and doors to you when you place a sign on them and no one else can open them and it makes them invulnerable so an exploding creeper can't blow up next to it and destroy all your shit. Other players can destroy the sign that ties you to the chest or door, but that pings the admins with who is breaking what chest. There's also this plugin he installed where you fight waves of mobs after choosing a class (just determines what gear you start the fight with, nothing else) and gain rewards based on how many waves you survive. It's kinda fun.

So I've been playing around and digging and generally just fucking around and I've come up with a building project I want to work on. It's kind of involved and time consuming, but it isn't something I've done before and building it in survival mode presents some challenges. So it should be pretty rewarding to finally get the thing. 

The project is a flying castle over a lake with a moat around it that looks like it has been ripped up out of the middle of a lake. So there will be this big lake with a castle above it and a bunch of water streaming off of the castle down into the lake below. Should look kind of cool, hopefully. My goal is to also surround it with aerial islands with like crops and farm animals and that sort of thing on them, all kind of interconnected by wooden walkways and that sort of thing. I'd like to kind of scatter dirt chunks in the air around the islands as well to kind of like debris that fell off of the island as it was raised and that sort of thing. If I can end up building it in a non-boring, somewhat decorative way, it should end up looking fairly neat. If I make any progress on it, I'll of course post pictures and that sort of thing. 

I'd also like to create a sort of involved way of accessing the place. No, with the essentials plugins, we can set warp points that you can warp to, so all I really need is a warp point command like /warp clintscastle. Boom. However, I don't want people I don't know swarming all over this place doing whatever they want, because it's kind of my base. So what I'm going to do is set up like a little ground level fort inside of it with a portal to the nether. The nether is a lightless place full of lava and powerful bad guys. Dangerous as fuck. However, every step you travel in the nether is equivalent to eight steps in the surface world. So what I want to do is build another portal to the nether in my castle and then connect the two portals via a tunnel (probably of obsidian, maybe) so there is a sort of neat little way of accessing my castle from the ground. Additionally, I'd probably set up locking mechanisms around my castle entrance, like build something like a Stargate iris around the nether portal using pistons and such so it is secure and people can't surprise me through it. 

That's another thing I'd like to play with, traps and mechanisms. I've got an idea for something like a portcullis trap that locks someone in place and then unloads arrows on them. I've also got an idea for trapping a tunnel where you pull a lever and four dispensers pop out of the walls and block off a tunnel and fire arrows down it. Dispensers are tricky though, I think they need a charge every time they fire, so you can't just give them power and have them fire until they hit empty. 

I dunno, like I said, I'm having fun getting back into Minecraft. As stuff develops, I'll post more and probably add some pictures once everything is completed. 

Fucking Minecraft

Everyone knows of my obsession with Minecraft and how much I love digging and building and crafting things. I also love city management/economy simulation games like Anno 2070 and Patrician IV. I dunno exactly what it is about those games, but they make me happy inside and I can spend lots and lots and lots of hours puttering with them.

So a several months ago I bought this game called Towns on Steam for cheap. It was still in like the alpha or beta stage, but preordering it allowed you to play it. They're still updating and patching and refining the gameplay and so on. The premise is a bunch of people found a town in the middle of a wilderness and you organize them and give them tasks and set up resource collection and production facilities and building houses and such for them. The game's graphics are pretty low end, kind of pixelated and you observe the various levels of the world in an isometric view and use like a mouse wheel to scroll up or down to the next level of the map. Periodically monsters invade from the borders of the map and if you dig too deep too quick, you can find progressively stronger monsters beneath your little town. I spent a lot of hours playing that game.

A few days ago I discovered a similar game called Gnomoria. Same concept as Towns, it's just gnomes instead of human villagers. There are also fairly hearty RPG elements to Gnomoria. There are heroes that gain levels in Towns, but in Gnomoria there are no levels, just skills and stats that improve through use. This includes stuff like healing wounded in the hospital, farming, dodging, wearing armor, and hauling stuff from point a to point b. Even your yaks have stats. There are no classes, but each gnome can be assigned a profession, which isn't really a class. It's more like a guide for the game to determine what the gnome does, as you have no direct control over your gnomes. Gnomes you designate as soldiers will attack a target if you direct them to, and you can assign different priorities to the various farm fields and pastures and workshops you build to determine which of them get more attention from the gnomes with professions that allow them to use them. Professions don't really matter, as you can make up your own or just click a bunch of boxes and have everyone doing everything. This is kind of counterproductive though, as it means no one will specialize and the higher a gnome's skill level, the quicker they perform a given task.

Every so often goblins and other nastiness wanders onto your map, along with wandering gnomes and merchants. This isn't exactly a strange or unique mechanic. What is interesting and unique is what drives the immigrants, traders, and enemy attacks. You have this stat called kingdom worth. It is based on the value of all your workshops and buildings and the resources you have collected. As the kingdom worth value goes up, you attract stronger and stronger enemies. It's kind of a neat concept. Of course, the easiest defense against enemies is to just put a wall around your little village without an entrance inside of it. The enemies will eventually starve to death outside of it, but so will immigrants, if the collected enemies don't get them. Additionally, all those enemies will drop all their weapons and armor on the ground when they die, which will add to your kingdom worth and draw progressively tougher types of invaders to your kingdom while your soldiers sit inside the walls not improving their combat skills on weak enemies.

Additionally, there is a tinkering mechanic to the game. If you build a tinker's bench, periodically a gnome will sit down and tinker and develop mechanisms. You can use those mechanisms to put together mechanical doors and walls and hatches and guns and stuff. I've seen some stuff online and there are some fancy mechanisms for defending your kingdom and such. Pit traps and collapsing walls and bridges that the bottom drops out of into a pit. It's all pretty nifty.

Anyway, I dunno, it is a fun little game that I have enjoyed spending stupid amounts of time on. Took me forever to get the hang of surviving the first few goblin attacks though. For some reason, it never occurred to me to put a dirt wall around the village to make a constricted access point and guard it with soldiers, rather then leave everything open and have the goblins kill my working gnomes before my soldiers could get there. I may have ragequit the game several times. I never stooped turning down the enemy stats and making metal deposits shallower though. That's one of the things you can do when you create a new game. There are a whole bunch of things you can tweak when you create a new map. You can determine the size of the map, how flat it is, how mountainous/hilly and how wide the bases of hills and mountains tend to be. You can also reduce the frequency and strength of invaders, along with determining what kinds of invaders can be on the map.

I think it is a neat game with some interesting mechanics and a bit of charm. It is also still in alpha or beta or whatever, so I'm very interested to see what the final product ends up looking like and what additional features they add. A bell to wake up sleeping soldiers would be really fucking handy, just saying.