farming — I Am A Camera

Minecraft: Xanadu, part 2: Building out my personal industry.

Sun, 17 Apr 2022 17:28:14 +0000

In which I spend my second Saturday of my newest Minecraft roleplaying campaign setting up my workshop and Zen Room, and building a machine that turns potatoes into magic

#minecraft #roleplaying #storytelling #game #tale #1.18 #fun #weekend #hobby #virtual #camping #paleocamping #primitivetechnology #industrial #redstone #farming #xp #bonemeal

Greetings from “Xanadu,” the name of my latest Minecraft roleplaying campaign, which regular readers will remember that I'm only getting to play once a week these days, on Saturday nights when I'm super-high and listening to chill EDM (aka “dadcore”), in which I'm pretending to be a...um, overworked middle-ager who owns a wilderness location that he gets to escape to on the weekends, where for fun he engages in “paleocamping” in the spirit of the YouTube channel Primitive Technology. To be specific, my patch of land is on an island in the middle of a wide lake within a deep ravine, where four different trails to various rivers spin off; and on its top I've built a greenhouse and apiary I call the “Crystal Palace,” with a pond in its center that I've decorated into a little Zen meditation space, precisely because I thought it would be fun to have a little virtual Zen meditation space out here in my real life in Chicago too, that I could just leave up on my screen during an evening when I'm reading or listening to music, to serve as a literal space for centering myself and being all Zen and whatnot, even though it's just a virtual space. Confused yet? This is what Facebook is hoping to achieve with their coming “Metaverse” virtual-reality platform, the promise that was first given in William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, that eventually we will have digital spaces that feel as “real” to us as real life in the physical world does; and I admit that there's a certain amount of fascinating slipstream stuff going on here with my latest Minecraft roleplaying conceit, and that a very meticulously terraformed space like this one is sort of serving for me as not only a digital space of retreat but a very real emotional one too these days.

As you can see here, I haven't really started building out any infrastructure to the surrounding countryside yet, including the nearby village you're seeing to the northeast of my island there, other than an unadorned walkway to a nearby pasture to gather animals and lead them over to my island. But I'm also not really afraid to just tack on more land to the edges of my island when I need them for things like farming, so that I can maintain the original look and structure of my island's sole hill, instead burrowing out the inside and putting most of my machines and other belongings in there. Infrastructure for traveling nearby is more a late-game idea, to be saved until after more pressing needs are met, and after I've been able to build up the massive resources in iron and gold I'll need to build a railroad that spans the entire long breadth of this ravine.

And speaking of pressing needs, I got my first industrial farm set up this particular Saturday, a big requirement when it comes to the idea of converting raw resources into the kinds of high-end game items like experience points and bonemeal needed to perform Minecraft's version of powerful magic, for granting yourself supernaturally powerful tools, weapons, armor and produce. This is one of the really clever things about Minecraft, and why the game is so addictive for such a large age group, literally from seven or eight to fifteen and even older; for while you can just do normal farming or hunting or mining and just slowly build up experience points, part of the “fuel” (along with lapis lazuli) needed to cast spells, you can also use the electricity-capable redstone to build automated circuits and simple machines, which you can combine with the game's deliberate mechanics and a few accidental tics in order to do large-scale automated industrial conversion from one type of good (say, a very common one like potatoes) into another (say, a much more rare one like experience points or bonemeal, aka “magic fertilizer” that makes produce instantly grow from seed to maturity).

So here, for example, you're seeing fields of potatoes holding a grand total of 434 potato plants, which when mature will yield anywhere from 434 to 1,736 potatoes, depending on random odds. But one of the weird tics in Minecraft is that if you run water over any piece of produce currently in the ground, it will automatically knock it out of the ground; so if you build your fields on a gentle hill, then dump a bucket of water on the top, the water will flow down the field, knocking out all the mature potatoes and floating them all the way down to the bottom. Once there, I have another small tilted trough of water that directs all the hundreds and hundreds of potatoes into a hopper and then into a barrel, where it starts the process of industrial transformation, but more on that in a minute; for now, let's just note that the way you can automate the flowing of this water is through an in-game device called a dispenser, which is then hooked up via redstone to an on/off switch and a source of power. I press the button, and eight buckets of water are dumped on each side, ensuring a smooth downward flow to the bottom of the fields and the collector barrels. And then through yet another tic in the Minecraft game engine, if you click the power button again for a dispenser with an empty bucket in it, it will actually gather the water out on the field back up into it; so there's no need to keep refilling the buckets inside the dispensers, essentially making this a machine that works perfectly over and over again, every time you press the on/off switch.

Then down underneath these collector barrels is where the literal magic happens; as you're seeing in this shot (believe me, you are), the potatoes then get funneled into two ovens, which themselves have sideways hoppers that let them store up to five sources of oven fuel (buckets of lava in my case), so to run theoretically perpetually as long as you keep occasionally replenishing the supplies. Cooking potatoes is one of the non-combat ways you can earn experience points in Minecraft, although most people earn it through things like killing monsters (no thanks), slaughtering animals (ugh), and smelting ore and stone (yep, doing that too); so by building this automated system that's smelting up to 1,700 potatoes each time I press a simple button, I boost up my XP level at an accelerated rate, which is important because you can't cast any of the really useful spells unless you're at level 30 or higher, and then the enchantment table subtracts XP each time you do cast a spell, which means you're back under 30 again by the time you're done. That's just clever and difficult enough to keep a kid at the end of their tween years busy and engaged, which is why it seems that Minecraft has such this huge span of ages who love to play it, and why it seems that so many kids play the game for sometimes up to an entire decade without getting tired of it, while most first-person shooters grow stale after just a few months.

Then not only this, but the baked potatoes are then dropping into yet another hopper and landing in a composter, which Minecraft introduced a few updates back as a way of productively getting rid of the sometimes massive amounts of organic material that builds up during a typical game. Composters eventually turn produce into bonemeal, which before their invention could only be gained by killing monsters; it's a magic form of fertilizer, if you will, which among other things can grow most produce from seed to maturity with a single click, turn regular trees and mushrooms into giant trees and mushrooms, produce a glowberry on the game's brand-new glow vines, and grow wheat and flowers if you click on a piece of grass with one. That's incredibly clever, basically proof of concept behind the entire Industrial Age of real Western Civilization's 1700s and 1800s, the idea of taking a common and cheap item and literally transforming it into something rare and expensive, which along with the customized recipes in my datapack (but more on that in a future update, I promise) even lets me convert potatoes into non-food items like glowstones, fuel for my furnaces, wooden construction pieces like ladders, trapdoors and trip plates, scaffolding for building, and a lot more.

Ultimate, the average 1,000 potatoes these fields yield at each harvest eventually convert into an average of 100 pieces of bonemeal, as well as just enough XP to top me up again at level 30 after recently spending some XP on a 30-level spell. That should give you a good sense of exactly how powerful and rare XP and bonemeal is, and how interesting it can be to work out in your head how to gain such powerful and rare stuff merely from your ability to be clever.

With this new industrial farm jutting way out into the water now, I'm closer than ever to the nearby shore where I set up my initial bamboo farm. Regular readers will remember that this is a longstanding “rule” of my roleplaying games; that I play Minecraft in “Survival” mode, which means I have to physically travel to exotic locations like jungles if I want to harvest and use the exotic resources found only there, like bamboo, melon and cocoa in this particular case. Bamboo is an incredible newish addition to Minecraft, because like the real world, it grows insanely fast but is insanely strong, and not only in the vanilla game lets you build very useful scaffolding for your construction projects, but under my customized recipes lets me construct books without needing the leather from slaughtered cows for their covers. (As you might be deducing, my particular datapack is for genteel middle-agers like me who don't have much interest in killing things or going to dangerous places like the Nether, but who need the exotic resources that otherwise only come from those activities.) I chose this particular location for the bamboo farm because it's right at the mouth of what promises to be a fascinating nearby cave, and I like the idea of maybe later in the game going over and terraforming that too, and being able to call it “Hidden Bamboo Cove” or whatever.

And as mentioned in the last update, I have this really fascinating ruined Nether portal just a five-minute walk away from my place, and I'm thinking pretty seriously about devoting another Saturday evening soon to repairing it, upgrading the surrounding platform, and turning it into a working portal for “community” use. See, that's part of my roleplaying scenario here; I'm pretending that this entire region is owned by some big company, and that they're selling off little pieces of it to urban middle-aged middle-classers like me, but doing it mindfully so that none of us are ever too close together or impede each other's views. I like the idea that we're all out here wandering around on the weekends and maybe bumping into each other and whatnot; so I thought it'd be fun to roleplay getting this back into workable shape for the good of the “community” of weekending middle-classers out here in the wilderness, so that we can all hop over to the Nether for whatever supplies or dungeon runs we might want to do. That'll be coming in a future entry (or maybe not), so keep your eye out for that.

And like I said, instead of building a ranch in this particular campaign where all my tools, machines and storage barrels are, which I would normally do in a campaign where I'm on level ground, this time I've hollowed out the inside of the sole hill that comprises my island, and this weekend finished all the basic interior design of the floors and walls. I'm a big fan of these new glowberry vines that have come with Minecraft's newest update, essentially the very first light source in the game's history that can actually be organically grown from scratch, instead of crafted out of a finite resource like coal or glowdust, so I'm now using them to not only decorate the walls of my space but to light it up. That said, some of the stuff you're seeing here (like the barrels in the floor or the underground enchantment table) are leftovers from when this space was only that smaller size, so one of the things that will be happening next Saturday is finishing up all the rest of the interior decorating here, including the construction of an aboveground barrel configuration that will span the length of this giant room.

But the main project next time, however, will be the construction of the space you're seeing here, essentially the other half of the hollowed-out hill, which I'm turning into my first-ever indoor ranch for cows, sheep, pigs, chickens and horses. I'm being forced to in this case, because there's literally no room for a large amount of animals on the outside of the island; and although I've never actually done it this way before, I believe that as long as I have the eventually finished space lit well enough, there shouldn't be any problems with luring animals in and out of the space, growing food for them in here, and breeding offspring. I've decided to really do it up right, and devote an entire Saturday to decorating the inside of this space into a traditional wood-paneled barn area with fluted columns, hanging iron lanterns, individual pens for livestock, and a large stall section for what I hope to eventually be an entire stable of horses. That's all coming with the next update, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by here again next week for that.

Minecraft Enderman Ranch 01: A campaign is born.

Thu, 20 May 2021 00:32:41 +0000

The start of my newest video game storytelling project, using Minecraft to tell the tale of an eccentric adventurer who eventually became a manufacturing tycoon

#minecraft #videogame #roleplaying #storytelling #narrative #ongoing #series #building #crafting #mining #farming #EndermanRanch

So after a decade, it's probably my last year of being a daily player of Minecraft, because my fiftysomething mind has started gravitating more and more to Cities: Skylines over the last year for its added complexity in “universe creation,” to the point where I'm actively saving as we speak for my first-ever gaming computer (which I will be building myself, at the insistence of my friend Carrie's 18-year-old twin sons, who have each done so as teenagers themselves). So while I slowly put together the several thousand dollars I'll need for that (and patiently wait to get my hands on a high-end graphics card, which are impossible to find these days), I wanted to play at least one more campaign of Minecraft and also document it here at my blog, also in anticipation of doing so in a more thorough and interesting way once I start playing Cities: Skylines, and begin building more photorealistic communities that work with a much bigger gaming engine and thus have much more potential for interesting storytelling.

In this campaign, I'm an eccentric adventurer, who has set up an HQ for myself out in the middle of nowhere, in anticipation of far-off travels from here to go collect exotic resources from jungles, Caribbean reefs, painted deserts, icy tundras and more [1]. As I set up farm fields at home for growing all these things in bulk and selling to local villages, I will begin automating the process more and more, inventing my own version of the Industrial Age to build redstone machines for mass production, harvesting and processing of vast acres of produce. (Although note that I will not be building automated slaughterhouses for animals, or sex-slave “breeding farms” for villagers; even as a game, I find it disturbing to think of living creatures as soul-dead “content units,” so I don't like building those kinds of automated redstone machines even in a fictional universe.)

At the same time, I will be building little mini-biospheres around my estate to mimic the look and feel of the various exotic locations I visit for my career; the idea is that, as a full-time adventurer, I'm highly fond of these locations, so I “bring a bit of it home” with me anytime I come back from a trip. This will essentially give me an excuse this summer, autumn and winter to build a bunch of cool-looking ideas I'm always coming across over at YouTube (which, by the way, is an excellent location for Cities: Skylines roleplaying videos as well). I did some of these in my previous campaign, so might be bringing them back to this one — a Japanese pagoda with bamboo forest lit by iron lanterns strung on tall poles, a Frederick Law Omstead unstructured lagoon with live coral, kelp and sea lanterns — and some were planned but never constructed, so I'll definitely be getting to those — a pumpkin patch, a Zen sand garden, a combination apiary-greenhouse.

And then finally, a possible late-stage addition to the campaign if I start getting bored is that, elderly and rich, I become more and more obsessed with a doomsday cult that's built up around the strange “Endermen” all us farmers have seen with our own eyes out on the far edges of our fields at twilight and daybreak. So the name of my entire estate would be “Enderman Ranch,” and I would build in references to it wherever I could; as banners to hang over the walkways, blocks to work into building cornerstones, maybe a big gateway as you approach it from the water. And if I get really bored, I can build one last insanely grand architectural folly that I financed with my now billions of dollars at the end of my life, a sort of combination lighthouse, imposing religious structure and Modernist sculpture, all based around a 100-block-tall abstract construction of an Enderman.

So, not much to show as of the moment, other than starting the campaign itself, spending a few days hiking around and building temporary shelters, and eventually finding a space to call home. Here above, we're looking south, off into a large body of water and then a mountain range in the distance. Just poking above the water's surface in the background is a sunken pirate ship, which means that I'll find all the other Caribbean accouchements just beyond, while this large island in the middle of the cove would make a nice location for the eventual Enderman Death Temple if I ever build it. Most importantly, this will be the launch site for many of my exotic trips, because travel by boat is insanely faster than by foot, so it's your planet's oceans and seas that mostly let you travel in realistic timeframes to any other type of biome you may want to visit.

Here we're looking north into where I'll build the ranch itself. I'll essentially cut down every tree you see here, then flatten the earth as I go, and eventually build infrastructure and then the small village that will comprise my entire estate. I'm doing so under the same justification as many of the actual people in the 1600s who first moved into wilderness spaces and did this themselves — hey, there's so much untamed stuff still around, my little bit won't possibly hurt. Plus it's suffice to say that the lone settler humans who were around in these environments then were very much the underdogs as far as survival — don't forget, one of my burdens even here in the game is to create a community that can be traveled at night without death from wandering or magically generated monsters — so I feel a little “civilization-building” clear-cutting justification can be excused in this case. So in that spirit, in this particular campaign I won't be building a self-sustaining orchard like I usually do, since I'll have more than enough natural wood to last me a long, long time.

And then here's looking west and east, which is essentially more of the same, although notice the horses in the far background, one of the reasons I chose this place as my stopping point during my nomadic first days in this universe. I try to tame and saddle [2] a horse in Minecraft as soon as I can, because it's just so much faster to get around a large flat space using one than it is to walk, which is crucial when you're planning on having a large estate like mine. Yes, those are ice spikes you're seeing in the background! But there are no structures or mobs to be found in that biome, no trees and no grass, so there's not actually much reason to visit other than to build a platform on top of one and maybe a Ra's Al Ghul winter version of the Enderman Death Temple. We'll see, anyway.

So, there's the next...um, nine months of my life? Until maybe February 2022, when I maybe will have enough money saved up to bite the bullet and build my own gaming PC? And then start OBSESSIVELY PLAYING CITIES: SKYLINES? Hmm, we'll see! As always, more updates here at my Write.as blog, as I start gearing up this summer to finally build out my long dormant jasonpettus.com over at my un-setup WordPress space.

[1] I feel that most people probably play Minecraft the way we all used to play Monopoly during my childhood in the 1970s, with a series of “house rules” that essentially let everyone involved “cheat” a little from the official rules. One of my house rules is that teleportation exists, which is basically the way I justify using the “TP” cheat command within a strict roleplaying survival world, but I build persistent rules about using it. I have to first visit the space on foot (or, you know, by horse or boat); I then have to build a “teleportation platform” consisting of eight blocks of polished diorite surrounding a center block of redstone; and I can then only TP from one platform to another, not anywhere else or under any other circumstances. That said, this lets me sort of have my cake in Minecraft and eat it too; I have all the fun of exploring by foot to find various exotic biomes and the villages I'll eventually be trading with; but once I visit all of them once, I can just build me a little TP platform then instantly come back whenever I want. This will also let me trade with a dozen villages like a legitimate manufacturing tycoon, so that I can do a quick turnover of my industrialized farming produce and build up all those villagers into “master” levels, so that they'll produce things for me like diamond armor, golden carrots, enchanted arrows, enchanted books, enchanted tools and weapons, enchanted bottles of XP, and pillars of quartz.

[2] Another “house rule” for me is that I've built my own datapack, which is essentially the old owner Mojang's way to let players very quickly and easily build these exact kinds of house rules for themselves, written in plain old JavaScript Object Notation (or JSON), which like HTML is considered one of the simplest “programming languages” that exist. So I in late middle-age, for one notorious example, am not a big fan of the combat aspects of Minecraft, and prefer to stick to building, farming and planning; but there's a whole lot of stuff you can't build in Minecraft except with raw materials you can only get through combat, often in scary mystical locations with ominous names like THE END and THE NETHER. So I've built my own wrinkle to my roleplaying universe in which redstone can be used not only for electricity and circuits, but as a “magic ring” of eight pieces you can put in a circle in a crafting table and then insert ordinary things to make them extraordinary, the kinds of stuff you usually have to gain through combat or that otherwise have a strange random history of being way too unusually hard to obtain even though they should realistically be easy enough to craft.

So a ring of redstone surrounding a block of TNT makes a blaze rod in my world, for making into brewing stands and the potions you make in these brewing stands; swap in a piece of string to get a horse lead, or a piece of leather for a saddle, which are both ridiculously hard to naturally find and unable to be naturally crafted; or a piece of wheat for a piece of netherwart; or a poisonous potato to make black dye; or cobwebs into string. Is it “cheating?” Technically, yes it is. Does it make the game more fun for me as a result? Yes it does! Will new owners Microsoft get rid of this ability when they finally phase out the Java-programmed legacy version from Mojang for good? Um, maybe. (The “Bedrock” version, which now fuels all the mobile versions, console versions, and the official Microsoft laptop version, is built in C++. The company has just started making the first overtures towards the idea of finally shutting down the Java version for good, but there's been no timeline and nothing official said.) We'll see, I suppose. But for now, I continue to use my “Combat Hater Datapack” guilt-free.