#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 #roleplaying #storytelling #game #tale #1.18 #fun #weekend #hobby #virtual #camping #paleocamping #primitivetechnology

Surprise! I've already abandoned my previous Minecraft campaign after only one update! That's because it was a story-heavy one, reliant a lot on building, but then suddenly things took a big uptick with my freelance book editing services over the last six months. I'm grateful for it, and will talk about what all this new work means in a little more detail at the end of today's update, but the drawback is that I'm now down to playing Minecraft only one evening per week, on Saturday nights when I also get high and play downbeat electronic dance music from Spotify (#dadcore) and just chill the fuck out for like eight straight hours, my one and only moment every week right now that I get a chance to do that. So I decided on an impulse to start a new Minecraft campaign altogether, and to make a much simpler story this time, basically reflecting my real-life situation — I'm now playing a citizen of this virtual world, who lives in a big city and does a sometimes draining white-collar day job, but then on Saturdays gets to drive out to his weekend getaway in the middle of nowhere, where he purposely engages in “primitive technology” roleplay, bringing nothing to the wilderness with him but rather building everything he needs from the wood, stone, ore, clay and water all around him. There's my space you're seeing out there in the middle of the water, that island from which I'll branch out to all the other shores around me.

It all begs a fascinating question: if you're a real middle-ager, treasuring your one moment each week when you can just get high, drink a beer, relax and float off to this rural wonderland, by playing a virtual middle-ager treasuring your one moment each week when you can just get high, drink a beer, relax and float off to this rural wonderland, at what point does it stop becoming virtual and begin becoming the actual weekend getaway experience that you actually wanted in the first place? It gets me thinking about what a funny thing it was to me, originally playing Minecraft in the early 2010s as a way of connecting with my friend Carrie's preteen sons, and how they were exclusively interested in hacking up monsters and finding as many diamonds as humanly possible. I as a middle-ager, on the other hand, was much more about the mechanics of productive farming, inventing clever devices, building out cool-looking residences, and sometimes simply taking a bedroll and fire-making equipment and going out wandering in the wilderness for entire days at a time. That's basically how I now play by myself as a middle-ager, as I slowly count my pennies towards my eventual gamer laptop with which I'll finally switch over from Minecraft to Cities: Skylines; I'm playing purely for the pleasure of starting with nothing and building up to efficient success, a playing style that meshed perfectly back in the day with the tween boys' obsession with hunting and mining, in that they'd bring me crafting ingredients and I'd provide food and housing in return.

It makes me laugh whenever I think of it, because I think of how that's not a new development in the gaming world at all; how back in the late 1970s and early '80s when all my friends and I started playing Dungeons & Dragons for the first time, in our own childish campaigns in the neighborhood we were constantly playing experience point creep (i.e. outright lying about “other games” in “a neighborhood from someone at school” in which we would rack up insane amount of experience points, leading to all of us eventually being at Level Zillion and able to shoot lightning bolts from our fingers and other nonsense). But whenever we'd play D&D with the only other people who played it back then, middle-aged engineering nerds who we would all meet through our dads, who in suburban St. Louis in the '70s all worked for places like Monsanto and McDonnell Douglas and Ralston Purina (in fact, it was my friend John Platt's dad who introduced all of us fifth-graders to D&D in 1977 to begin with), I was always amazed at how gleeful these aging geeks were at being assigned brand-new beginner unseen characters at the beginning of that night's game, and considered it a huge success if they happened to make it to level 3 or maybe 4 before finally dying a fiery death just around 9:50 or so, just in time to take a leak before the D&D Mac User Group event was officially over for the night. So it's universal, I guess; no matter what the time period, kids always love going for the fame and glory in games, while the dads enjoy sitting back and figuring out what makes the game actually work.

As you saw in the overview picture above, I'm taking advantage here of a brand-new thing in Minecraft v1.18, which are brand-new biomes that either shoot up twice as high as mountains used to go, or plunge down twice as low as ocean ravines used to go. In my area of the deep ravines, for example, that makes for fascinating underwater diving, including brand-new structures along the deep bottom of the ocean, roving gangs of the new glow squids, Lovecraftian glowing magma blocks along the bottom of the ocean floor, but also now a plethora of Lovecraftian watery zombie monsters known as “the Drowned,” complete with deadly tridents. The corresponding aboveground jagged peaks have a new surprise as well, which is that Mojang has engineered the new ultra-high mountains to contain a giant crapload of coal and iron, which means you can begin mines now at the beginning of a game way up in the peaks so that you can quickly smelt as often as you want and build valuable iron tools, armor and machine parts.

Another big new thing that's come with v1.18 is that the clever little coders at Microsoft, new owners of Mojang, the company that makes Minecraft, have dramatically tweaked the algorithms that procedurally generate the various “biomes” that mark the various territories of a random Minecraft world, as well as making the placement of special features like villages and temples much more organic and interesting. The effect is seen all over the place, but perhaps none more dramatically than the now proliferation of mysterious “ruined portals” that now have an incredibly sophisticated look to them (it's just mindblowing to me that these are created essentially through math formulas), and now showing up in sometimes highly dramatic spots within highly dramatic surroundings, literally taking your breath away sometimes when you're trudging along at ground-level POV and suddenly turn a corner and spy one. This also harkens back to Minecraft's very beginnings, and how the game's original creator never wanted there to be an official guidebook or rules; he wanted you to figure out how to play merely by accidentally stumbling across fascinating-looking stuff while wandering around, and letting your sense of curiosity nudge you into figuring out what's going on. That's lovely to see Microsoft as the new owners still honor this spirit, within such dramatic details as these half-built portals into the Nether that now dot the landscape.

And of course there's all kinds of other structures to come across in my neck of the woods as well; here, for example, I found a pillager outpost right on the waterfront, which let me paddle up really close to it in my canoe for some photos before the marauding mercenaries finally noticed me and started going all batshit, trying to murder me as quickly as their powerful crossbows would let them. One day, pillagers, your banner will fly proudly on my estate...along with your heads!

I'm not sharing a lot of shots of my property yet, because it's currently a work in progress, more a collection of practical items right now and less a unified design. But as you can see, I did at least need to figure out a way to bring over animals from the nearby pasture, as well as get my horse on and off the island, so for now a big giant stone path in the middle of the sky will do; and I did come up with a cool little new design for a partly submerged enchantment table, brewing stand and anvil, with a low glass ceiling flush with the main floor of my workshop above it. And there's actually been another deceptively big change in the latest version of Minecraft as well, which is that monsters can no longer spawn in light levels 1 through 6 (out of a total number of 15 light levels), but can only appear way down in the light level of 0, after numerous complaints from new players about how they had no idea about this rule, thinking they'd be safe in their new cabin by putting up a single torch for the entire place. Since the fairly new candles can actually be placed in groups of anywhere from one to four individual ones on a block, each with a light level of 3, that means you can now place two of them in an underground mushroom farm to achieve a light level of no more than 6 (4 by the time it actually reaches the mushroom), which is low enough to encourage mushroom growth but used to be so low that monsters could suddenly appear in your mushroom farm out of nowhere, turning every visit to your basement into a mini-horror movie.

There will more of all that soon, including that half-constructed building you're seeing in this farewell image, being built on top of my island's one and only hill, a grand apiary and greenhouse I'm calling the “Crystal Palace.” But for now, I think I will bid adieu from “Xanadu,” to be visited again another happy stoned Saturday night soon.

So as mentioned, big changes are afoot around here, professionally speaking. Freelance book editing continues to go fantastically, so much so that I was actually able to raise my rates on January 1st by 20 percent and still have so many offers that I occasionally have to turn people down, just for lack of time. That has me thinking seriously for the first time about venturing out into the bigger unknown and truly hanging my shingle out to the world, doing a more targeted direct marketing campaign through a standalone website dedicated just to my freelancing, which is then actually advertised to places where self-publishing authors hang out. I've actually been paying for a stupid unbuilt Wordpress space for three years now, but just the sheer complexity of what's in store for me there keeps putting me off from actually beginning work. So as a stopgap measure, I recently bought a Pro account here at the great blogging platform Write.as, which I've grown to be a big fan of precisely for its minimalist, noncommercial spirit, which will now let me not only build out ten separate blogs but also apply my own CSS and Javascript to each, which will finally let me do much more sophisticated designs than this sorta blah default one that comes with all the lower tiers of membership.

So that's coming this spring, a dedicated website just to show off my freelancing services and let people directly book me for an assignment through it; and I'm also starting a complementary newsletter, where I sort of build a community of writers and publishers around me by showcasing my clients' newest books, sharing editing tips, relinking to the funny and weird ESL questions I answer over at Reddit, and share leads with other publishing professionals about great unsigned manuscripts I've recently come across. I hope that will sort of elevate me into legitimate “industry” status even without having a big name behind me as an editor, by basically creating my own ad-hoc literary community around me based around my clients, friends, ESL students, fans of my Goodreads reviews, people who have bought rare books from me, and more. But then like any good direct marketing campaign, I need something of legitimate value to give out for free to entice people to join the mailing list; so I'm actually in the process of writing a book of “tough love” advice to self-publishing and indie-press authors, basically all the lessons I had to learn by failing as an indie-press owner myself, which I'm calling (I kid you not) No One Gives a F—– About Your Novel, which I figure will certainly establish my “personal brand” as an editor with no ambiguity. That's all coming here soon, along with a brand-new look to this main personal journal of mine, so I hope you'll have a chance this spring and summer to keep coming back here regularly for the latest.

#minecraft #roleplaying #storytelling #game #tale #1.18 #lush #cave #craggy #peaks #safety #conservation #improvement #terraforming #tourism #monetization

Surprise! I'm abandoning my old v1.17 roleplaying story I've been playing along with here at my journal for...nine months now? And that's because version 1.18 just came out, and is featuring for the first time two big major breathtaking things I've been really looking forward to — three new types of massive caves, including the “lush caves” that are full of living things, including new stuff like moss, azaleas, glowberries and more; and three new types of ultra-high mountain biomes known as “peaks” (stony, jagged or frozen), which are now not only twice as tall as the previous tallest mountains, but with a massive amount of coal and iron found in these brand-new ultra-high layers, so that you can start building massive amounts of iron armor, tools and weapons, which will do in a pinch when you're enchanting things, when compared to something like diamond that's so super harder to find in large amounts.

I thought as long as I was rebooting, I would think up an entirely different kind of roleplaying storyline and internal game goals than I have in the past, which were largely about creating giant farms, harvesting a massive amount of raw product, then turning all that into sophisticated buildings, armor, weapons, machines, trainlines and a lot of other stuff. So I got to thinking, what if I lived in a nearby village and had heard about these brand-new discoveries of lush caves and ultra-high craggy mountain peaks? I too would be excited about them, and would surely be happy to spend some of my village middle-class money on taking a smooth ride out to one of these lush caves, where someone had already come along, made the entire space safe from hostile mob spawning, conserved what was there and even added to the interior decorating, then built a structure in the middle that's like maybe hotel rooms looking out at it all, a big 360-degree viewing circle, probably a conference hall or whatever, you know, the kinds of places you find in a tourist spectacle space like this. I'm the dude who's planning on getting rich, rich, rich, by finding one of these rare caves, keeping it to myself, going out alone and making it safe from monsters, then renovating and building everything inside, and making a safe path out that leads to a train ride down to sea level, where the middle-class will come in with their bulging wallets.

So I'm not really worrying too much about setting up a farm, harvesting a lot of raw items, but rather concentrating on digging out as much coal and iron in the peaks as I can, turning the coal into torches and slowly lighting up the lush cave, and turning the iron into tools which I then enchant so I can get through a pile of stones or wood lickety-split. And then the way I manage to put together sophisticated things like bookcases, enchantment tables and the like is by inventing a “house rule” for myself, which longtime readers will remember is basically a fancy way of saying I'm cheating a little, claiming that I'm trading some of this endless iron and bronze I'm digging out of the peaks with the nearby villagers for these more sophisticated items, while in reality I'm just using the cheat code “/give.” I'm a fan of house rules, what can I say? I can easily justify them each time with, “It makes logical internal sense for the game, and is a thing Minecraft really should have, so in a way I'm really kind of doing both them and me a favor!” (Sorry, I forgot to also mention, the only time I play Minecraft anymore is on Saturday nights while high and listening to “dadcore” gentle electronic dance music.)

Let me admit that I cheated a little right off the top as well, in fact, out of frustration; because the way you find a lush cave (which is of course underground and can't be just seen) is to look for the game's brand-new azalea trees (in reality just oak but with pink flowers all over it), because they can only grow directly over a lush cave. And with hand to heart, I tried four different seeds in a row where I walked and walked and walked and walked but couldn't find an azalea tree to save my life. So I gave up and went on THE INTERNET and found a recommendation of a particularly great seed that has a particularly dramatic lush cave, crammed inside a particularly dramatic biome of snowy and jagged peaks, and with a village right by. It's a procedurally generated universe, after all, which means if you have the large number that all the algorithms start spinning off from there, anyone can replicate any billion-block unique universe any time they want by having that 16-digit number that starts it all. Blows my mind sometimes, man. Here I am at spawn point, near the ground, with the peaks in front of me and the lush cave behind and to the left. See that one way, way off in the distance, almost silver-blue in color it's so hazy? That will eventually be the place I end up to establish a top-down strip mining of a craggy peak, for the massive amounts of coal, iron and copper it will yield, since I play in this “Survival Plus” mode where I occasionally add the “legal” use of cheat codes under certain conditions, but otherwise need to mine and build all my stuff like weapons.

Once I slowly climbed my way manually up to the top of the nearest peak, a snowy one, I realized that by now being twice as high from the ground as you ever were before in Minecraft, the clouds are now way down below you, which admittedly looks quite cool. But alas, two problems with the idea of starting a strip mine on the peak I was on: it's full of the brand-new goats, which for those who haven't heard now have the capacity to ram you when you're least expecting it, knocking you off the mountainside to your death; and there's now “powdery snow,” which when you walk on it causes an avalanche that can bury you and kill you that way.

So, I started building, very slowly and carefully, a bridge that would take me straight over the valley and to the nearest peak I could safely strip-mine. That's a hell of a lot easier than manually climbing down the entire mountain, then climbing back up the second one.

And I built.

AND I BUILT!

But finally I reached the jagged peak on the other side, where my mining adventures finally began in earnest.

(Here's a look back at where I started. Remember, I have to keep going back there, because that's where the lush cave is, but this will be a lot easier now that I'm here and can establish a teleport pad [but more on that in a bit].)

Over at the lush cave, meanwhile, I took these first couple of stacks of coal I was able to dig straight out of the surfaces of the mountainsides, and cranked out several hundred torches which I started laying quickly inward from the tiny little surface-level fissure that led me into it to begin with. This has to be done before anything else, because anything lower than a light level of 7 (i.e. seven blocks away from the nearest torch) is dark enough to randomly spawn a monster, so the cave will never be truly safe until I get the entire space lit to at least a level 7. Even then not technically safe, because undoubtedly in some of those far walls too dark to see yet, there will be tunnels over to yet other cave sections, which will need to be completely sealed up with concrete (or glazed terracotta in my case, yet another attempt to add another cool interior design detail to his lush cave space which will serve as the Disney World-like “ooh, wow!” place where everyone will want to come.

As I start making more and more of the space safe, though, I'm discovering more and more delightful things that I didn't realize were going to be in this new lush cave biome, which makes it so worthwhile — carpets of moss and flowers, the new axolotl friendly mob who only shows up in caves, tropical fish who bob and dance in the splash of a 150-foot-long indoor waterfall. I love it, Mojang; I love it all.

At the level where my insane bridge is (which is now officially named “Foolhardy Bridge,” and will eventually be part of the tourist experience here), I've just clear-cut an entire wedge out of the mountain that I'll be replacing with glass walls. None of my living stuff will be there at that point, but moved up to the aerie at the very top of the mountain; this will serve as a reception space, maybe, what, a cafe for the tourists, something like that? And I'm even going to build a giant observation tower and super-crazy spotlight that people will be able to see for miles (eight campfires on top of hay barrels, with a beacon in the middle), in the spirit of the whole Gatlinberg Tennessee – Branson Missouri – kind of genteel Southern tourist trap places built around natural wonders down in the Ozarks area and then east into the Smokey Mountains where I and my family spent a lot of long summer week-pluses on vacation; I want this entire build to have that kind of feel to it, actually, a real Meramac Caverns feel if you know what I mean. And I think you do know what I mean.

But now I need a bunch of glass, and to craft that I need a lot of sand. So I took advantage of yet another “house rule” and allowed myself to use one of those seed mapping services that exist all over the web and are all free. As I said, you only need a universe's beginning seed number, the one that all its complicated algorithms start spinning themselves off from, to duplicate the entire universe in exact detail each time whenever you want; so some clever coders have used this not to replicate the 3D playable space, but rather a 2D map you can quickly scan and zoom in and out of. Nice! Mojang, why don't you have this as part of the official game yet, sheesh?! So staying with the “Survival Plus” rules I'm following, I need to build a boat and actually sail to the closest desert location at least once, where at that point I can utilize yet another house rule and give myself permission to build a “teleport pad” wherever I want to come back. In reality, I'm just using another cheat code, the “/tp” one, which actually does let you instantly teleport to any X, Y and Z location you give it; but I'm pretending that this is an ability that officially exists in the game, once I reach a destination the hard way at least once and can build the teleport pad that will let me go back home.

I only have to make the two-day sail once, southwest of my current mountain base; and once there, I'll have a chance to visit two more villages, hit my first two desert temples that I'll get to raid like Indiana Freaking Jones, visit one of the mysterious ruined portals (that's guaranteed to have a treasure chest full of cool things), and even dig up a bunch of bone block fossils, which I can grind up into magic fertilizer, which for example I can use to grow glowberry vines around the cave in just an insane number. That's an important thing to know about the cave, that the ugly torches are temporary only; they'll eventually all be replaced with glowberries, glowstone, candles and iron torches, to give a very polished and professional look to the entire space, one that commands the big bucks from the village tourists. Over at the desert, I'm also going to start digging down, and hopefully get quickly to the new negative Y levels that have come brand-new with version 1.18. That's right, negative numbers! That's where a growing and growing amount of diamond can be found, the deeper towards -128 you get, and most of the redstone and lapis lazuli (which is what makes the enchantment table I traded with the villagers for work). I'm going to be digging at 200 to 100 in the sky, and then from -64 to -128 in the bowels of the earth, using teleport pads to instantly go from one to another, to get everything I need for a particularly spectacular build.

So all that is coming next Saturday night, the absolute soonest time I have for just stopping everything else I'm doing, getting super high, strapping on my bone-conduction headphones, and really digging into some major mining, smelting, crafting and building. For now, I leave you with two more shots of Foolhardy Bridge, one from sea level (what the tourists will first see when they arrive), and then from the top tip of the universe where my mountaintop aerie and signal flare will be. It will be a spectacular build if I have time to get through everything I have in mind, and I hope you'll have a chance to stop by regularly to join in with the latest.

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #v1.17 #tycoon #industrialage #farm #decorating #building #architecture #terraforming #bonemeal #lights #virtualmeditation

Things are really starting to come together in my Minecraft roleplaying campaign! But don't forget, a major part of this campaign's goal is to do a lot of complex decorating just for the sake of complex decorating; and while that usually focused on close-up projects like homes and farms, I'm in need now of complexly decorating the entirety of my 10,000 square block “free range pasture” where I keep all my ranch's animals, stretching almost all the way to the village limits of the nearby Forest View. As you can see in this overhead shot, the ground is currently just generic Minecraft flat greenland for most of its distance, plus there are still huge sections that are dark enough at night to spawn monsters. And the whole point of building a fenced pasture like this is to keep out the monsters at night, so that I can actually work here through the night whenever I might want to; so it looked like I had my work cut out for me during my most recent Saturday night of vaping, Minecraft and “dadchill” EDM on Spotify.

But this is where the day is saved by bonemeal, the “magic fertilizer” I was talking about in the last update when discussing the automated industrial farm fields I've built, which grow stacks upon stacks of potatoes which are then roasted for XP and dumped into a composter to be ground into bonemeal. Right-click on a generic green block in Minecraft with a piece of bonemeal, and instantly grass and flowers will grow in the four blocks surrounding it; so for the majority of the pasture, all I really needed to do was go around fertilizing the grass dozens of times in order to turn it into a legitimately wooly wildland. I have to say, I'm super-happy with how this looks, a much more visually dense and interesting view than typical default Minecraft grasslands.

I then added a new type of lighting fixture to my estate, glowstone lampposts that stretch all the way down the straight road that leads north to the edge of my pasture, and then on past that to Forest View. In my storytelling universe, after all, this will be the main road that local businessmen will travel down when coming to visit my ranch in person, so I want to make sure the horse ride in is as impressive as possible.

I then focused in and precisely did one of these more traditional decorating jobs in a small area of the pasture; namely, a pond on the far northern end that was “naturally” generated when the universe was first created, and that I've had my eye on this whole time for turning into a “staycation” get-away camping spot on my grounds for when I want to sleep under the stars. Don't forget, the major defining trait of my character for this roleplaying campaign is that he's a derring-do explorer who's getting rich off mass-producing the exotic resources he brings back from his adventures; so it wouldn't be out of bounds, for example, to think that he has very fond memories of his travels to the Caribbean-like Buena Sea, and would get comfort from terraforming his local pond into a mini-Caribbean biome and occasionally spending a Saturday night sleeping out next to it.

And then finally, way out on the far eastern edge of my estate, I built a fully fortified military-grade watchtower. This is as far as my property gets before turning into the Central-Europe-like Midlands, home of the vast majority of the 12 villages I will end up trading with, so I thought it'd be good to have a way to watch for incoming trouble from here on the edge of the wider world. Plus, this watchtower is in plain sight of Forest View, and it gives the villagers comfort to see me voluntarily providing extra security and protection for the entire community, under the belief that all of us being safe allows us to thrive that much quicker.

And just beyond it, the far eastern gate of my ranch. Beyond that bridge officially lies the wild terrain of the Midlands, and a one-day horse ride northeast to the next closest village.

But like I said in a previous update, where Minecraft is truly shining these days is after sunset, because of the sheer number of interesting light sources that now exist after 17 distinct updates of the gaming interface over the years. It's here where I start thinking semi-seriously about something I've thought idly about before, which is that I'm just so incredibly pleased with how this environment is turning out to look, now that I'm spending all this care and attention on how it's actually being built, that it could realistically stand in for an actual environment from which I might want to meditate. I mean, if I simply ran the image out via HDMI to my 40-inch television, and then sat right in front of it, it would really feel like a full-sized, 1:1 ratio virtual environment I could sit in, relax and be mindful while traversing. Especially since you can easily use a “cheat” code to temporarily turn off all the monsters, so that you could just sit there passively as the day slowly turns into night, and then slowly turns back into day (five minutes for each, meaning a ten-minute real-time cycle for every 24 hours of gametime within Minecraft). Play some river sounds on your headphones, and you might as well be in a Zen garden, albeit a particularly cartoony and blocky one. In fact, that's what I'll eventually be building later this winter in that bamboo-heavy area on the other side of my ranch house, an Asian-style pagoda waterfront gazebo for calm meditation sessions.

So that's it for now, and when next we speak, I should have a big huge update for you: the buildout of my other five automated farm fields, the construction of the underground processing factory, and the creation of my large and richly decorated horse stables next to the house, which will be one of the last things before the ranch is finally complete. Talk with you then!

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #v1.17 #tycoon #industrialage #farm #automated #redstone #dispensers #factory #smelter #furnace #potatoes #composter #bonemeal #magic #xpfarming

Greetings again from my Minecraft roleplaying campaign! This is update #9 of the campaign, so see my blog's main index page for past chapters, if you need to catch up. As I logged in this weekend and awoke at my Zen ranch, overlooking my now completed fenced-in pasture for my farm animals (horse stables coming soon), I thought, “You know, I think today's the day I finally build out the first half of my ten automated farm fields.” This is a major goal of this campaign, after all; since this might be my very last one, before switching over in 2022 to a gaming laptop and the more sophisticated game Cities: Skylines, I'm determined to learn and get good for the first time at using redstone for building circuits and machines, among other reasons to automate a series of mass farming fields, the produce then shuttled off to an underground processing center and factory, where depending on the field it is either gathered up for eventual trading, or thrown first into a furnace and then into a composter, and only then gathered up as bonemeal fertilizer.

The whole thing depends on a series of tics within the Minecraft programming software, sometimes an accident and sometimes deliberately put there by the various Mojang developers that have worked on the game over the years. For example, a block of dirt has to be aerated by a hoe, and then soaked by a nearby water block, in order for it to accept a seed and grow it into a mature plant for harvesting; and the maximum distance for a dirt block to still get soaked by the water is four blocks away, so the maximum width you can have a farming field is eight blocks, as long as you have a block of water on either edge. Build this out for five fields in my case, then add a total of six troughs of water, and that's 46 blocks, almost exactly filling out the 50 blocks I put aside for this particular quadrant of my industrial ranch.

Next, build another field just like it, but one block up in vertical height. Spoiler alert: What we'll eventually be doing here is running buckets of water over these fields, which in the Minecraft universe automatically knocks any produce it comes across out of the ground, so that you don't have to go around manually harvesting it all yourself. If you build the fields as gentle hills, then the water will flow down the entire thing, taking all the produce with it, until hitting those perpendicular water flows down there by the glass blocks, which will do a final gathering up of all the produce and funnel them down the water flow to a hopper, gathering them all in for the processing plant underground below.

For my field, I'm stopping at three levels, because this is all the room I have; but there's nothing that says you couldn't go crazy and build this all the way up 64 levels high to the clouds. Theoretically, just the initial buckets of water at the very top is all you'd need; they should flow smoothly all 64 levels back down to sea level again.

And since the goal is to get all the produce to smoothly flow down the hill and into the gathering pool by the glass splash wall, we don't want any of it to accidentally fall into the water troughs that are aerating the farmland; so you need to build blocking material along the tops of them.

And now for the part that makes them automated, which are dispensers holding water buckets, all of them connected to a redstone circuit with a simple on/off button on one end, complete with signal boosters every nine blocks so that the full electrical charge makes it all the way to the end. One of the really interesting tics in Minecraft is that when you open a dispenser that has a bucket of water, it flows the water away from it using the usual laws of physics for water that exist within Minecraft; but if you click the dispenser again, it will actually gather the water back up, resulting in a full bucket inside again and a complete end to the water flow across the crops. So once you've sown all five fields with potatoes, for example (requiring 176 per field, or 880 altogether here, also expressed as 14 “stacks”), and they've all grown to maturity, when you click the redstone circuit button, it dumps all the water out of the 40 dispensers you've set up, washing the approximate 5,000 potatoes you've grown down to the collector pools next to the glass walls, to be gathered underground for later processing. And when they've all flown down, you click the button again, and the entire system sets back to zero, ready for the next round of sowing and growing.

But it's underground where the true magic happens, which is the automated conversion of this produce into other useful items, basically my invention of the industrialization of farming. And since I'm the first one in my Minecraft universe to invent this, I will hugely benefit from it, by establishing trade partnerships with a total of a dozen nearby villages in my region, and growing this stuff in mass quantities in order to trade quickly and often for first emeralds and then the powerful things emeralds can buy me, like enchanted weapons and armor. This will eventually be a much larger and much more sleekly designed space; but get it actually working first, they always say, and then the decorations can come later.

I'm a little too closed in down there in the factory itself to get a good photo of it, so I reproduced it out in a field for the benefit of this blog entry, which is what you're seeing above. The water inside the glass represents that collection pool you're seeing at ground level in the previous images; as you can see, the water is running at an angle, so that all the potatoes that drop in eventually flow down to those hoppers, which are funneling them into barrels. The barrels then have a hopper below them too, which are funneling the potatoes into a furnace; but that furnace also has a hopper attached to the side, connected to separate barrels, where you can store charcoal to feed into the furnace's fuel slot, which means you can just leave large quantities in each (27 stacks in each barrel, or 1,728 items) and let all the burning happen automatically while unattended. This is also one of the few ways to gain experience points (XP) in Minecraft without being an active monster hunter, which regular readers know I'm not; and XP is important, because you spend some of it every time you cast a magic spell, which is how you turn your weapons and tools into very powerful ones.

The furnace, then, can itself have a hopper on its bottom to funnel items out; so in this case, it's taking the baked potatoes I made in the furnace earlier and funneling them straight into a composter, which is a neat little device the dev team invented several updates back to address the complaint that it's so easy to grow things but there's nothing you can do with it all. With these, you can now feed in almost any kind of organic material, from grass seeds to entire pumpkin pies, and the device slowly but surely churns out bonemeal. And that's really cool, because bonemeal is also known as “magic fertilizer,” which makes most forms of plant life grow almost instantaneously into mature form when you use some on it. That essentially lets me grow mass quantities of something cheap and fast like potatoes, and use the resulting bonemeal to instantly grow mass quantities of much more exotic and slow-growing items, such as mushrooms, cocoa, kelp, etc. You can also use bonemeal on a block of dirt to grow grass and flowers all around it; or you can feed a piece to an existing flower to get an exact duplicate of that flower, so bonemeal is quite powerful stuff, and it was smart of Mojang to invent a device that lets you generate the material yourself.

So all in all, that's about 20 minutes in real time of hand-planting all the potato seeds; then the eventual processed result is roughly 10 stacks (640 pieces) of bonemeal, since things like baked potatoes generate a lot more composting material than something small and delicate like a grass seed. The roasting also brings my XP level all the way up from 23 to 30 every time I run the entire thing once; and 30's the number you're always shooting for in Minecraft, because that lets you cast the most powerful spells that exist. As you can see, that fills up half of the farm field quadrant of my ranch; so another five fields will be coming pretty soon afterwards, but in those cases to grow mass quantities of wheat, carrots, potatoes, beetroots and sweet berries, to trade with all the farmers at the dozen villages in my trading network. They'll give me things like emeralds in return, and they will also level up into a higher category of craftsman, and eventually as farming masters they will accept large quantities of emeralds back from me and create powerful dishes like golden carrots and melons, full cakes and pies, and enchanted stew. That will entirely fill up the southwestern quadrant of my ranch, and down below it will be the processing factories and my eventual smelting center and machine shop.

Here in the northwest corner, I'll be building a giant greenhouse and apiary, because I'm sick of my bees always wandering off and abandoning their hives, and depriving me of the honeycombs I use for stuff like beeswax candles and honey jars. That's down the road quite a ways, though; maybe Thanksgiving?

In the northeast quadrant, regular readers will of course remember the tree orchard I set up as the first finished section of the ranch. While the potato fields are busy being roasted and then turned into fertilizer, I go in the orchard with an enchanted axe and quickly chop down the several thousand pieces of wood this field yields; then I throw into an automated smelter itself, where it burns into a charcoal state I can use for smelting everything else, instead of burning up the coal I dig out of my mines, which I can trade with the villagers for valuable stuff. For every orchard I cut down, I yield enough charcoal to burn through one and a half harvestings of the potato fields, so I'm gaining quite fast every time I go through another round; and of course this gains me XP as well, so it's serving me double-duty just like the potato fields are.

And then I'm happy to say that I finally finished the filling out of the southeast quadrant of my ranch, which partially dips into a swamp biome which is permanently at a lower light level than the plains, making it a great location to do some mass farming of things like vines and mushrooms. I'm also going to be trying another redstone machine over here, basically an infrared sensor that can trigger an electrical charge if it's lit up. You set this next to the highest (or sometimes) lowest levels that certain vertical produce can grow to, like vines, sugar or bamboo; then once it grows to its full length, it triggers the infrared sensor, which sends off a charge that ignites a piston down at the opposite end of the vine or plant, which pushes the plant and automatically harvests everything it knocked over, which still leaving the base level so it can start its slow growth again. These should be eternal XP and bonemeal generating devices once I have them working right, so I'm excited to figure this complicated plan out later this fall.

And of course with yesterday being Saturday, I gave myself the usual Saturday night permission to get super-high, listen to some “dadchill” EDM on Spotify, and go do something fun and unstructured for several hours in Minecraft. In this case, I finally tracked down and started digging out my first fossilized dinosaur, over in the Death Crescent desert far to the northeast of my ranch (but for more, [see my Lewis & Clark-style exploring]() of the “known universe” of my Minecraft world). Supposedly there's a good five or six dinosaur remains over here next to this desert village, so I plan on slowly doing archeological digs on them all, then turning the entire area into an international nature reserve, including hiking trails between the digs and a visitor's center and small museum to tie it all together. But much more about this far down the road some. Again, maybe around Thanksgiving?

But for now, it's a farewell again from a, er, 30 percent completed Enderman Ranch and accompanying farmland ranch, which is slowly starting to take shape. Next time, a look at a fortuitous event, when an enchantment of a pickaxe accidentally yielded the rare Silk Touch, which let me go over to my Caribbean biome and finally harvest a bunch of coral, kelp and sea lanterns. Along the way I've also built out a bunch of mossy cobblestone, lanterns and candles; and I'll be tying the whole thing together in some major terraformings of my estate's survival pond, pasture lake, and Asian garden river, along with a meditation pagoda along the bamboo at the waterfront. See you again then!

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #v1.17 #tycoon #industrialage #home #house #survival #garden #protected #ranch #pasture #horses #beacon

Another weekend, so another chance to play around in my latest Minecraft roleplaying storytelling campaign! To remind you, this time I'm pretending I'm an derring-do explorer who goes to far-off biomes and brings back exotic resources, to duplicate on an industrial scale at my 10,000-square-block automated ranch, so to trade heavily with all the villages in my trading network, to eventually become a tycoon who gets the armorers to build me enchanted armor and weapons for the coming holy war by my apocalyptic cult (er, maybe, if I get to the very end of the campaign and have done everything else). This was a particularly exciting weekend, because I finally got my personal house finished, so was able to move all my personal items out of the ranch, clean up the ranch quadrants, and build out my northern pasture for my horses and feed animals that will eventually almost join up with Forest View, the village closest to me. That's my pet cat you're seeing in this photo, name still undecided, because I haven't used my nametag yet and made it official. Want to make a suggestion? I'll have a tweet about this over at my Twitter account, so make one there, or just email me at ilikejason@gmail.com.

This is what's called a “survival house,” a very specific thing in Minecraft; this particular one was designed by YouTuber and Instagrammer SheepGG, in an easy-to-follow instructional video over there. As long-time readers know, I'm currently going through what I imagine will be one of my last-ever serious Minecraft campaigns, because the boys I used to play it with when they were kids are now eighteen and off to college, and because I'm currently saving up for my first-ever gaming computer and will officially switch my obsession at that point over to Cities: Skylines (but way way way way WAY more than you ever wanted to know about that in 2022). See, there are different modes you can play in there; “survival,” for example, is the basic form of the “it's an actual game” version of Minecraft (there are monsters and other hindrances you have to get around; you have to actually gather all the raw materials you need to build more complex things), while “creative” is a “let's pretend this is a giant sandbox and you can build anything you want, oh yeah and you can also fly” mode, and there are other modes like “hardcore” where the monsters are even crazier and more dangerous.

So a good survival house, then, is one where you can take care of all the things you might ever need to deal with in survival mode — sleeping, crafting, getting into your mine, growing crops, having storage, making magic potions, enchanting tools and armor — but within a completely enclosed space that monsters can't get into, and is lit up brightly enough that you can work through the night if you feel like it. After scanning through a bunch of YouTube videos on the subject, I thought this was a particularly clever one, that allows you to have a fairly substantial produce garden directly underneath the house itself, and comes up with clever barriers like hedges instead of the usual wooden fences.

But then another part of all of this for me to build purely decorative items, things that sometimes can't even be really used within the game mechanics of Minecraft, but are being done purely for the visual beauty of it. Like, I made a set of chairs and a table overlooking the tiny little pond on my estate, even though you can't actually sit at them in the real game; and I'm making liberal use of the brand-new candles that came with version 1.17 a few weeks ago, a great new thing to do with the underused bees and wax/honey that came a few updates back. The whole pond on my estate, in fact, will be heavily decorated in the future, using mostly items from the Caribbean-style “Buena Sea” once I finally have a pickaxe with the Silk Touch enchantment. This is one thing I've never really explored before now, the purely decorative side of Minecraft (there's no time to, when you play with two nine-year-olds who have an obsessive desire to kill monsters and gather diamonds and do nothing else whatsoever); so as long as this might be my last serious campaign, I thought I'd really indulge myself this time, and especially use it to really sell this roleplaying storytelling I'm doing along with it.

Of course, all good survival houses have a bedroom for hiding from the monsters at night, going to bed, storing your stuff, etc., and usually you'd have a great opportunity to do a lot of interior decorating here too. But I don't know, given that I'm supposed to be this kind of intense explorer-innovator-entrepreneur type, I thought it'd be more fun to imagine my bedroom like how you might imagine it if Patrick Swayze's character Dalton from the classic 1989 Road House was alive in the 2020s and playing Minecraft, just bare except for a bed and a ring of candles, with an opportunity to keep all my stuff up on hidden shelves that are easily reachable but out of the way of everything, a clever detail by SheepGG that's one of the defining traits of a survival house to begin with.

This is all a thirty-second train ride due east of my industrial ranch's center, so I actually have a train line running there, and I built out a lovely little rustic walkway from its terminus to my estate's front gate, including fun little overhang poles with lanterns dangling from them. If you look in the opposite direction, then, you can see the very beginnings of what will eventually be a massive terraforming project, transforming the central European plains around me into a full-fledged Asian garden, including a bamboo forest, the surrounding river stocked with coral and kelp (and including a waterfront meditation pagoda), a Zen sand garden, special tall-pole banners that resemble an Enderman face, and more.

And speaking of the train ride over to the ranch, there are updates to give there too, although I'll save most of them for next time, part 9, when I will hopefully be announcing that five out of my ten automated produce fields are complete. The main thing to report today, though, is that I finally put together nine blocks of solid gold, the minimum amount needed to get a mystical, possibly alien-created beacon going in a survival game, which among other options lets me choose a magic power to emanate from it that allows me to walk at a running level without losing any health for a certain amount of blocks around it (30 in all directions, I think at this level; at its most powerful, when all the metal blocks are a pyramid the size of that concrete plaza currently around it, then a full 50 blocks, which is why my ranch is that exact size itself). It also emits this cool, otherworldly sound and can be seen from insane distances, and I have to admit it's one of my all-time favorite things in Minecraft.

And how do I have one of these notoriously difficult to build items so early in the game, fellow Minecraft veterans might be asking? Well, that will be the subject of part 10, that as part of these “house rules” I've talked about in previous updates (permission to cheat, in other words, as long as I adhere to rules I myself made up about them), I've created two dozen of my own customized crafting and smelting recipes, which is super, super easy to do in the Java version of the game, in that originally Mojang (now Microsoft) built in an option for users to write and easily add their own through JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which is super-easy to write and not like learning a language at all, and lets you change the actual guts of the game without needing to know how to actually enter the guts yourself as an amateur non-programmer. I call my collection the “Combat Haters Resource Pack,” because it's primarily based around constructing things that in the vanilla game you can only and exclusively construct from resources you can only gain by killing a monster. I'm 52, a non-gamer, and not a combat fan at all; so I've built recipes, for example, that let me construct blazerods, glowstone, netherwart, string, gunpowder and more, by putting a basic item in the center of a crafting table (TNT for a blazerod, a glowberry for a glowstone, etc.) that's then surrounded in all cases with a ring of eight redstone pieces around it, “magically” converting it to an item I would otherwise need to go into the Nether, or kill spiders or witches, to obtain. So a beacon in my world, instead of needing a Nether star which you must kill a very formidable Wither to obtain, is made of obsidian, diamond and redstone pieces, because I just love how it looks, and I wanted a chance to build one or two despite me doing almost no combat in my campaign.

That was Saturday; then on Sunday, I built out the northern pasture where I'm going to let all the animals I kill for food and resources roam free, as well as all my tamed horses, which I'll eventually breed and trade with villagers like everything else. Like I've mentioned in previous updates, although I'm automating the crop farming with technology (i.e. redstone, and all the stuff that can be built with redstone), I'm not building slaughterhouses, because I'm just generally against the idea of slaughterhouses even with the innocence of a purely digital game like this. So I have just a big field with some of the animals roaming around to and fro, who I can breed and occasionally kill with a sword manually when I need feathers for arrows, beef for leather, or pork for stew (yet another of these customized recipes of mine... but more on that in part 10, I promise), but otherwise with just an opportunity to roam around eating, getting lazy and fat into old age. (Coming here soon, stables where my horses can be sheltered when fed, cleaned, or all the other things you do in a stable.) The northern edge of the pasture gets us so close to Forest View, you can legitimately call it the edge of town; so I've built a tramped-down dirt path there for now, then eventually will find a cool “modern house” construction video at YouTube to use for my store on the southern edge of the village limits itself, just beyond the gates and stone fence.

Then to the west, a direct bridge that bypasses the ranch altogether, for my coming horse rides to the Shire villages of Bedu (northwest), Magirim (southwest), and City of the Dead (due west), once the ranch is totally complete and I'm ready to start trading with villagers in earnest. This is also the bridge I used to goad/lead all the animals I had saved up in a pen in my ranch over to the new pasture. Cattle are as easy to lead as... well, cattle.

I was also blessed to have the Minecraft Algorithimc AI God-Emperor (Hallowed Be Its Name) plunk down a whole field of wild horses just east of Forest View; all it takes to tame them is a saddle and some apples, just that quite a bit of time and patience is often needed, a particularly lovely tradeoff within the game mechanics of Minecraft, I think. As I saw when I sat and played with two tweens, there are just so many fun, cool, interesting, insightful little tics to Minecraft that tweens love, and feel like they actually accomplished something since the achievement of the goals involves things like patience and smarts. Another is the process of gaining a pet, whether a dog (like I've typically had in past campaigns) or a cat (which I have in this campaign for the first time). To have a cat as a pet, you first have to build a fishing pole and catch some raw fish; then you have to visit a village and find a feral cat; then you have to crouch and not move at all, while holding a piece of fish in your hand, within just a small radius of the cat to get its attention; and if you move in just the tiniest bit while it's creeping towards you, it takes off running in the opposite direction again. So it's a pain! But once it's tame, not only does it follow you around wherever you go, and help finish off monsters that have attacked you, but it literally lays on your chest and purrs whenever you go to bed, and in the morning you typically learn that it went out hunting during the night and brought you back a rabbit's foot or a hide, dead chicken, etc. So it feels totally worth the trouble! The game's full of all kinds of charming details like these, so no wonder it's become now a perennial tween favorite that's sold millions and millions and millions of copies.

Oh yes, and one other thing; on the temporary northern gates, the first part of the estate anyone from the village sees if coming to visit, I hang the banners of the armed Nazi marauder groups I've had to kill while building up my ranch and estate. We have a zero tolerance policy for Nazi marauders; we don't debate them, we don't protest them, we kill them, a message I want to emphasize heavily to the villagers of Forest View so they can rest a little easier.

Where these 1.17 constructions really come alive, though, is the now three different options for lighting at night; torches (which provide a bright and crude light), lanterns (which provide as much lighting protection from monsters as torches, but give off a softer and gentler glow), and the brand-new candles (which can be manually placed in groups of one to four; a group of four give off the same amount of light as a torch or lantern, so you can actually now place lights that are 25 percent the intensity, giving a secondary aura-like glow to certain areas of your build). I have to say, I'm really super-happy with how this estate is looking at night at the moment, and look forward to eventually building this out to be bright enough that no monsters can spawn anywhere on the grounds or pasture.

And that brings us to Sunday evening, which means another week of hiatus, so to devote myself to freelance work and co-op duties and all the other things that lets me have a survivable life. Next update, the completion of first five automated farming fields, which will not only gain me experience points automatically to fuel magic spells, but will churn out bone meal (aka “magic fertilizer”) by the dumpload, which will let me clone flowers, instantly turn baby animals into adults, turn normal mushrooms into giant ones, etc.; then the next update after that, a beginner's guide to what JSON is, how to write it, and how to combine it with item tags to create your own customized crafting and smelting recipes, without needing to know the first thing about how to actually go into the game's source code. See you then!

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #v1.17 #tycoon #industrialage #camping #roughrider #wilderness #travels #lewisandclark #explorer #jungle #badlands #caribbean #warmocean #jungle #resources

So in my last Minecraft storytelling update, I was talking about how, after recently being bogged down with a bunch of freelance work and other commitments, I finally had enough free time this weekend to get really high, sit down on my computer, and do a whole Saturday night of “Lewis & Clarking” in my universe, in which as part of my roleplaying as an explorer tycoon I go travel by foot and boat to various far-flung exotic biomes, and collect up the exotic resources that can only be found there and nowhere else, to bring back to my ranch for large-scale farming and eventually selling to the villagers in my trading network. In that update, I showcased the map I recently “bought” from a wandering trader, and detailed where I planned on visiting; so you may want to read that update first, because today's update showcases the actual traveling I did this last Saturday night.

My adventures began at the village closest to my home, Forest View, which you can actually see with the naked eye from my mansion, about a 60-second walk away. As sophisticated as the village creation method is in Minecraft (and given that the entire thing gets determined and built exclusively through a procedurally generated algorithm, I consider that pretty sophisticated indeed), the fact is that this game's villages are merely in a half-done state when first put together, in an attempt by the original game designers to mimic the feel of an ad-hoc Medieval village that was sort of constructed piecemeal as various needs arose. I find it realistic to believe that, as a trader who gets rich off these four villages that immediately surround my home, as a gesture of goodwill I would pay to have all these villages upgraded, including cleaning up and expanding the road networks, building out a central plaza with a well and an alarm bell, and increasing the number of total houses, so that the villagers will eventually have children who will grow up to be yet more crafts professionals I can trade with; so this is the first village I will be doing this upgrading to, after I finally finish my own ranch and am ready to expand beyond my personal borders for the first time.

And speaking of expanding, that's where I headed next, to the four villages in the “Midlands” area of my known world, northeast of the “Shire” where I and my four closest neighbors live. I'm treating this kind of like central Europe, a vast area of plains, deserts and gently rolling hills, which is not really too important for me to stroll through again once I set up the teleportation platforms at the four towns here I want to eventually trade with. For those keeping track, that brings my trading network at this point up to eight locations, and with more yet to go.

Along the way, then, I kept coming across these mysterious ruined portals that exist all over my known world, which scholars and magicians keep theorizing will open up into a strange, dangerous “netherworld” if we can finally figure out how to use them. They're certainly exotic and mysterious, so I decided that when I got back I would go visit the nearby village of Magirium in the Shire, to see how the reconstruction of theirs is going.

So northwest of the Midlands, I came to the vast desert and accompanying village known as “Death Crescent” (although there are actually two villages here, DC West and East, increasing my trading network now to ten locations). In the real world of the actual Minecraft game, it's highly unusual to see what you're seeing here, a desert temple generating on the exact same spot as a desert village; so I decided to use this as an opportunity to give a sort of modern Egypt feel to this particular village, and to pretend that a once great, now extinct civilization used to live here thousands of years ago, and that their temple is the only thing still standing within the confines of the more modern and much more humble village that has built up around it. According to my map, there are also a dozen fully fossilized creature skeletons in the desert sands you're seeing in the background; so eventually I plan on digging them out, and building a museum/visitor's center next to them.

Northeast of that, then, is the Raincloud Forest Preserve, which all the two dozen towns of my known world have banded together and agreed to leave undisturbed as an internationally recognized natural area. Of course, that didn't prevent me from playing a little Indiana Jones while I was there, trekking to where my map said was a jungle temple and then overcoming all the boobytraps that are found in them. (Those holes you're seeing in some of the blocks are actually automatic arrow dispensers, connected to trip wires and redstone switches, which you must navigate before you can get to the treasure chest on the far end of the room.)

After that it was back down to the Midlands, to establish a teleportation platform at the eastern edge village of Buena (location #11 of my growing trade network). This actually doubles as the western edge of the nearest warm sea, also called Buena; and this is the exclusive location of all the Caribbean-style resources in Minecraft like giant turtles, colored coral, glowing sea lanterns, kelp, tropical fish and more. And these are my absolutely favorite decorative items in Minecraft, so needless to say I'll be coming back here a lot.

Just on a lark, then, and to satisfy my explorer itch, I canoed all the way to the other side of the Buena Sea, established trade relations with the most eastern village of our known world (the harsh, Viking-like Ostland), trekked by foot through the forest due east for two days, then canoed again for another day after that, so I could check out the fabled rumors of a so-called “Mushroomia,” a large island consisting of nothing but psychedelic giant mushrooms, as well as cows that have eaten so many of them that the mushrooms literally grow out of their backs. And guess what — the rumor was true! It was there that I also found a community of clearly insane monks, who stay high on these mushrooms 24 hours a day and engage in strange sexual rituals in deep underground caverns; but maybe we'll be revisiting that subject at a later date (or maybe not).

By that point I was 5,000 blocks east of my home, and at the very eastern edge of where I plan on ever exploring; so it was a quick teleport back to my ranch, and then a long boat ride up through a sea to the northwest of the Shire (plus a stop to establish trade relations with a village called Oasis). Finally I reached my destination, the remote and uninhabited Badlands of the far north edge of our known world, exclusive location of the popular terracotta used for naturally colorful building construction. And the explorer rumors turned out to be true again as well; the Badlands are dotted all over the place with former mines that have now been abandoned, due to the overwhelming number of monsters and other dangerous creatures found within, and a quick peek into a few of them indeed showed riches literally hanging out of the walls and just waiting for a brave entrepreneur to go in and pluck them out. So undoubtedly I will be doing that before too long as well, especially once it's time to expand my railroad network out to all four villages of the Shire.

Once home again, as promised I decided to make a quick jaunt by Magirium to see how their reconstruction of one of these “netherworld portals” is going. An unassuming desert village for centuries, Magirium has recently become a hotbed of activity among scholars and magicians (and the con artists and petty thieves that always follow them), after the top tip of a netherworld portal was recently discovered after a particularly fierce sandstorm, and when excavated proved to be in more complete shape than any other portal yet found (and, since it was completely buried, also lacks the dangerous lava and magma stones typically found around such ruins). It's still not working, and the latest scholarly consensus seems to be that the problem lies with those glowing blocks of obsidian you're seeing (which the poets have come to call “crying obsidian,” due to the rivulets of magic particles that drip off them), and that the portal will likely be workable as soon as a master freemason shows up with their specialty diamond tools to fix it. I find the whole subject fascinating, so I'll be checking in again soon to find out the latest.

And then my last official trek was through the taiga biome found directly south of the Shire, to establish a base for a possible “Camp Enderman” I may or may not build sometime around Christmas later this year, as one of the last objectives of this particular roleplaying campaign. (There are more details in past updates; but basically, if I'm still playing this by the holidays and can't come up with anything more to do, at that point I plan on pretending that my character has gone insane and decides to create a violent death cult around the spooky “Enderman” creatures that show up on the edges of farms at dusk each night.) This location is where I would build a luxury A-frame “glamping” cabin as part of the cult, where I and the other brothers could take out local businessmen for a supposed weekend of hunting, drinking and other manly pursuits, just to introduce them to the eerie glowing purple thing I once found buried back in a cave here when out exploring, and which should effectively terrify them into becoming cult members themselves.

And then that's it; that was a good, I don't know, four hours of my high Saturday night, so it was time to head back home and call it a day. So what's next? The full buildout of my industrial ranch! It's 100 by 100 blocks in size, a perfect square, with a space in the middle for a coming beacon and then four 50 by 50 quadrants around it. Here's the northwest quadrant above, which right now has the first of my automated farm fields, which will be the powerhouse of my plans to trade heavily and frequently with all 14 villages in my now completed trading network; but with a chasm running directly underneath this particular quadrant, I've decided that this wouldn't make for a good location, so will instead be flattening this out and building all my ranch's eventual buildings (including a greenhouse and apiary, a smelting center, a crafting center, and more). The animals will be heading across the river to my personal estate, but a lot more on that will be coming with my next update.

Here's the southwest quadrant, then, where I will be relocating the automated farm fields, ten altogether, whose borders you can currently see with those cobblestone blocks currently dotting the field. Some of these will simply yield produce to trade with villagers; others will drop the harvest one piece at a time into a composter, to turn into bone meal (aka “magic fertilizer”) which I can then use as a catch-all steroid for bumping up the growing speed of anything I want; while yet other fields will first smelt this produce and only then compost it, so that I can get cheap and fast experience points out of the process, which is what you use in Minecraft to cast magic spells (but again, more on this in the next update).

Here's the northeast quadrant, which holds the now completed tree orchard, which I turn into charcoal and use for all my smelting instead of the coal I mine out of the ground (which I instead use for trading with the villagers); but see update #5 for a whole lot more details about its construction.

And then here's the southeast quadrant, the one that still needs the most work at this point. Since this technically lies in the edge of a swamp biome, I'm going to use this quadrant for the industrial growing of vines, as well as fellow vertical produce sugar and bamboo; based on plans I've come across at YouTube, I plan on building contraptions that can use an infrared scanner to determine when each of these items have reached a certain height (or depth in the case of vines), then will automatically push out a piston in order to cut off the item right above its base, so that the extra pieces will fall into a water containment system but the root base will remain and just start growing again. The instructions look complicated, and I'm assuming there will be several false starts; but if it works, it'll essentially be an automatic XP factory for me, so that my experience level will always be up at 30 and I'll always have a chance to cast the most powerful magic spells that exist.

But like I said, the very next step, coming this week, will actually be to finish my mansion and personal estate, which I'm building due east of the ranch proper, with a quick little ten-second train ride connecting the two. You're actually looking at the back of the house in this shot, which is where I'll build my ranch for all my animals, including the stable of horses I plan on eventually having, a huge semi-wild natural space enclosed by a simple fence; at the end of the ranch boundary, then, will be the start of the Forest View village area, making us practically next-door neighbors at that point. I should have this entire space finished by the next time I post an update here, so I hope you'll have a chance to come back and visit again then!

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #v1.17 #tycoon #industrialage #camping #roughrider #wilderness #travels #lewisandclark #explorer #jungle #badlands #caribbean #warmocean #jungle #resources

Hooray! After a long three weeks of endless freelance work, I finally have a free weekend here in Chicago to get super-high, listen to EDM on Spotify, and go on my first v1.17 Lewis & Clark-style camping trip across the “known world” of my universe! This is a major part of the roleplaying storytelling campaign I'm doing with this particular round of Minecraft, that I'm supposed to be this sorta eccentric guy who loves putting together a minimalist kit of camping gear (bedroll, flint and steel, a little food and my tools) and just traipsing off into the wilderness, to go find rare biomes and then collect exotic resources that can only exclusively be found there, establishing a teleportation pad at each new location so that I can then in the future travel instantaneously back whenever I need more of whatever can be found there. (To remind you, part of my roleplaying is the “house rule” that I can use the /tp “cheat” command, as long as I adhere to some logical rules, like only being able to TP back and forth from official TP “platforms,” and being forced to visit all locations by foot first before I can build such a platform. It makes it easier to accomplish my goals, a feature I think should exist in the main official game, which is why I don't mind using the cheat.) Then once I gather this stuff, I always bring it back to my main 10,000-square-block commercial industrial ranch, and use technological innovations to grow massive amounts of the exotic resources to then trade with all the villagers in my network, leading me to becoming a massively rich tycoon.

Another “house rule” I follow, that I also wish existed in the official game, is that I pretend that among the wandering traders who regularly stop by my ranch (an actual real thing in the official game), they rarely but sometimes have the opportunity to sell me an actual detailed map of the 10,000 or so blocks that exist in each direction from my home, which is how it is that I can go out and do my wilderness exploring in the first place. (In reality, I'm using the third-party service Chunkbase, which takes your map's seed number to algorithmly reproduce an exact duplicate of your universe's map.) Here's a look at mine, stretched out to as far as it needs to go to encompass every exotic biome I plan on visiting; and so later this Saturday evening, I'll be sitting down with a few beers and my vape pen, and plan on doing the walking and boating required to go visit all these places, and set the 16 teleport stations I'll need to return to all the ones I want, including 13 villages, two natural formations, and my coming cult camp in the deep woods (but more on this in a bit).

Like the last incarnation in 1.16, before I had to start all over to accommodate the release of 1.17, I was lucky enough to spawn in an area where four villages were all within walking distance, a central circle for myself and my immediate neighbors that in this game I'm calling “The Shire.” As you can see, when you really blow up the map, my 100 x 100 industrial ranch is actually quite large, and I'm just a 60-second horse ride away from my first four sets of trading partners, which I'm giving backstories and descriptions to in order to better play the storytelling game I'm doing out of this particular campaign. Closest to me is Forest View, which is also the first village I'll be building up into master level, rehabbing and improving, and running a direct train line to from my mansion adjoining my ranch; then to the northwest is the Bedu, a secretive group of desert dwellers with a completely different culture and religion from the Medieval-esque Forest dwellers. To the southwest is a village known as Magirium; long ago a half-ruined portal into a magical netherworld was discovered and rebuilt, and now the place attracts a large crowd of magicians, scholars, con artists and petty criminals. And then to the due west is the City of the Dead, a shadow of its grand splendor from thousands of years ago when it was a cosmopolitan mecca in the desert, but now with its main city temple being the only building left aboveground and in one piece.

Heading northeast from here, then, we get into the Midlands; nothing that noteworthy in itself, but where I will eventually build out my trading network to accommodate another seven villages, and also a vast grassland where I'll easily be able to kill the 80 or so cows I need for all the leather needed to make bookcases, an enchantment table, and blank books that can eventually hold magic spells. (To remind those who are new, one thing I'm not industrializing at my ranch is slaughterhouses; so I'm only going to have a small stock of animals free-ranging around my mansion's fenced estate, enough for occasional food and arrow feathers. The one and only thing I need a lot of animals for is my initial build of my enchantment center; but that's a finite number of cows only, so instead of breeding and slaughtering them regularly like normal, for this campaign I'm going out to this humongous area of plains, sunflower plains and savannas (all biomes where cows naturally generate in large numbers), and using “frontier rights” to do a one-time slaughtering of all the cows I'll need for that project, and otherwise only keeping six or eight of them around back at my estate.

Once you get to the east edge of the Midlands, then, you hit the first warm ocean closest to my spawn point; and that's the exclusive location in Minecraft for finding the “Carribean island” type resources that were introduced in v1.13 (“Aquatic”), like turtles, sea lanterns, coral, kelp, tropical fish, and more. Luckily there's a village right on the water's edge, known by the locals as Buena, so I'll just build a cabin for myself at the edge of town and be able to grab more warm-water items whenever I want. This is my personal favorite stuff in all of Minecraft as far as cool decorative items, so I'm always excited to get some of this Caribbean exoticism back and transplanted into my private lake back at my home estate. Across the ocean, then, is the most eastern civilized end of what all of us in these two dozen villages consider the “known world,” the woods-dwelling harsh military society that runs Ostland. And of course, before leaving the Midlands, visiting explorers are always encouraged to sneak out north of Buena one afternoon to spy on the fortress of one of the bloodily violent private militias that exist out here in our rough and lawless universe. They're a constant problem and will never go away, tough men with few morals and no squeamishness, who will just rush in and kill everyone at a place for the purpose of stealing all their stuff. Me? I kill these damned pillagers whenever they cross my path at my libertarian ranch; frontier law gives me the right to do so legally, and I fly the purloined banners of the roving gangs I kill to warn off potential new ones (which, admittedly, rarely works, which is why I'm also in the process of building a fortress wall around my entire 10,000-block ranch as well).

If you go north of Buena, you'll hit both a desert and a village named the Death Crescent, full of both desolate settlements and the fossilized remains of massive prehistoric creatures that once roamed the land. There are so many, in fact, and in such exquisite shape, that there's an entire museum out here at the edge of the village, with paved roads that lead to entirely excavated skeletons and active digs further out from them. (The fossils are real things in the game, introduced back in version 1.10; so I'll actually be able to virtually dig the sand around them until fully unveiling them, and also be able to actually construct the tourist paths from there back to a cabin-like sandstone “museum.”) Then northeast of that is the first jungle biome closest to my spawn point, known as “Raincloud Forest” and mutually agreed by all two dozen villages of the known world to be left alone as a protected international nature preserve. This is the exclusive biome for such exotic resources as cocoa, melon, parrots, pandas, and of course the all-important bamboo, the only thing you can make highly useful scaffolding out of, and which provides this hauntingly beautiful decoration for an untamed Asian garden back at my estate, complete with tall flowing banners, swinging lanterns, red gates, a landscaped pond with bridge, and a Zen sand garden.

Ah, but Ostland's only the last civilized stop of the eastern known world, not the end of the universe! According to the handful of foolhardy far-edge explorers like yours truly who have been out that far and lived to tell the tale, if you tramp east of Ostland through the woods for two days, then ride a canoe eastward another day, you'll come across a fabled village of religious monks who live on an entire island made exclusively of magic mushrooms and the mycelium soil needed to grow them. The monks, both men and women, eat the mushrooms in order to go into feverous trances, then perform dark sexual rituals at their co-ed monastery, which supposedly involve the ritual killing of cows that roam the land with magic mushrooms growing right out of their skin. But this is all stuff of legend, fanciful tales to scribble into the sketchy edges of explorers' maps like my own, so who knows what I'll actually see once I actually get out there?

So after that, 5,000 blocks away from home, I'll just teleport directly back to the Shire instantaneously, drop off all my gathered exotic goods, then start making my way northwest for a while by foot, and then shoot up north by canoe until reaching the Badlands. This is the exclusive biome in Minecraft for finding colored terracotta, which can be used on their own for really cool sold-colored walls or patterned adobe huts in building construction, or to represent massive Indigeneous decorative wall hangings in giant ranches and cabins and places of that sort; or dyed into whatever color you want, if you don't like the ones that generate naturally in this biome; or glazed into amazingly colorful patterned decorative blocks, that can be laid out in specific larger patterns to make up the bottom of pools and fountains, a mural, a decorative sidewalk and more. It's also claimed by my brotherhood of far-edge explorers that there's an abandoned massive mine in these badlands, still full of riches but with so many monsters that it chased off all the traditional mining companies. There's supposedly treasures just to be yanked right off the wall, or by opening hastily abandoned treasure chests; but it's also supposedly a terrorizing place where deadly creatures exist around every corner, and not for the faint of heart.

And then finally, a late addition to the game if I end up needing it will be the idea that I've finally gotten my industrial ranch all built out, have finally traded with my neighbors enough to get them all leveled-up into masters, and have nothing else left to do; so my storytelling idea at that point would be that I as the now billionaire tycoon go insane, and decide to start this violent religious cult around the otherworldly Endermen I and other rural settlers swear we see at the edges of our farmlands every evening at dusk. I would follow some online instructions I found for making banners that look like Enderman faces, then plaster them all over my estate; build a tall, narrow tower in the shape of an Enderman to serve as a landscape focal point, cult headquarters, and the storage space for the enchanted weapons all the master villagers around me make for me; and also build a massive luxury A-frame cabin resort in the middle of the tall-tree taiga biome directly south of my ranch, where the cult would entertain business guests from the dozen villages of my trading network, then that night would introduce them to the dark cave I once found out here while exploring, and the mysterious, glowing purple portal to a netherworld I found in the back of it. Who knows what dark treasures lay beyond...

I was going to space out all this exploring over several weeks; but then I thought, “You know what? I think if I dedicate a Saturday night to this, I could do all the stops and TP platform constructions in one evening,” so that's what I'm doing tonight, while I drink beer and smoke cannabis and listen to electronic music, hell yeah, now there's a great Saturday night. So in reality, this is actually part 1 of a two-part bigger blog essay; and I'll link to part 2 here tomorrow once I finally go on the journey, take a bunch of screenshots along the way, and get another write-up like this one done of the adventure's highlights. I'm looking forward to it, so I hope you are too!

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #trader #villages #villagers #v1.17 #industrial #automated #hopper #smelter #composter #trees #orchard #victorian #tycoon #industrialage

Hey, sorry I haven't gotten a Minecraft update posted in a while! Between all the reading I've been getting done this summer, all the movies I've been watching, and publishing a new book, gaming just hasn't been on the forefront of my mind for the last few months. I do, however, finally have some major news to share with you, perhaps the greatest engineering feat now accomplished in human history...

Behold! A GIANT FREAKING GLASS CEILING!!!!!!1!!!

I exaggerate for humorous effect, of course, although admittedly this was a giant pain in the ass to actually accomplish, and took literally days upon days of patient digging for the 2,400 blocks of sand I needed to smelt enough glass to cover this large an area. And it was all for a good cause as well...

Behold! My industrialized tree orchard, the first fully completed part of the 10,000-square-block industrial farm I'm in the process of creating in Minecraft this year!

See, like a lot of the algorithm-based details of Minecraft, the oak trees in this game have kind of a screwy detail to them, as well as an algorithm-based way to overcome the screwy detail. Most of the times that you plant an oak sapling, you get a nice normal tree out of it, one that's easy to chop down from top to bottom while still just standing at ground level with your axe; but every so often, the math behind the game's procedurally generated universe decides to grow a giant oak instead, which is twisting and winding and can often grow up to 15 or 20 blocks high, making it a huge pain in the ass to try to cut down in its entirety so to get it out of your way and be able to plant a new sapling to replace it. The workaround is actually quite simple — you just place blocks above where the tree is going to grow (in my case, seven blocks above ground level, which is the maximum height you can reach with your naked hand in Minecraft), which then forces the tree to grow only that tall and no taller — but the problem is that you need such blocks above every tree that you want to stunt like this, which in my case took a massive 49 by 49-block ceiling to cover the full 50 by 50-block area of my industrial farm that I've decided to devote just to trees.

And why am I devoting an entire quarter of my 100 by 100-block farm to trees? Well, that's because I've decided to put aside and save all the coal I've been digging up in my mine, so to trade later with the villagers of my international commerce network — which regular readers will remember is the eventual end goal of this particular campaign, to level up all the villagers in a total of 10 or 15 villages into “master” status, so that they'll be regularly churning out enchanted weapons and armor for my coming Enderman Cult apocalyptic holy war (but see my previous entries for more on that), which you do by regularly trading raw goods like coal and clay and leather with them in return for what at first is pretty pedestrian items like stone tools and leather armor, as they slowly accumulate experience points with each successful new trade. But I need some sort of burnable fuel to power the industrial smelters that will be churning out the stone bricks and other material for my coming massive building projects; and it turns out that in Minecraft, you can actually burn wood logs using wood planks in order to create charcoal, which in the game works almost exactly like the coal you mine down in the earth with your pickaxe. And since, unlike real life, trees in Minecraft grow from saplings to full maturity in just a few “days” (in Minecraft, one game day equals ten real-time minutes in our reality), this makes the concept of a self-sustaining orchard devoted to charcoal production actually quite doable, and in fact rather easy, if not admittedly time-consuming.

(For what it's worth, my orchard contains 143 trees, a 12 by 12 grid but with one tree missing due to my ranch's central plaza [which will eventually be a beacon with a 50-square power radius, which is how I determined the size of my ranch in the first place]. The first time I tried a full growing and harvesting of this orchard, all the tree trunks grew to a height of exactly four blocks, no more and no less, which led to a total of 572 logs, which then got smelted into a total of 492 pieces of charcoal [or seven and a half stacks], once you subtract the 80 logs that got converted into planks to serve as smelter fuel. I went through four iron axes to do so, and it took three full game days to accomplish it [or half an hour of my actual real life]. The decaying leaves then produced 299 saplings, about twice as many as I need to reseed the entire orchard, as well as 29 apples. So not a bad yield at all, when all is said and done.)

This has given me the added bonus, then, of finally learning about hoppers in Minecraft and the process of automated smelting systems, which I've never used before this campaign because frankly I've never needed that much transformed material before. I'll have nicer setups once I finally build my underground processing factory devoted to the subject, but here above you can see two fairly ugly setups I'm using at the moment to churn out my first material for eventually building said factory. In the top image, note how you can actually attach two hoppers to smelters, one on the top that feeds in the material to be burned, and one on the side that feeds in the fuel to burn it; then if you place a chest or barrel on top of those hoppers, whatever's in those chests will slowly drop one item at a time into the hopper and then the smelter, which means you can load up those barrels with a theoretical maximum of 1,728 pieces of charcoal, wood, cobblestone, sand or whatever (27 slots multiplied by 64 items per slot), and then just let it work while you go do other things until eventually you have 1,728 pieces of stone or glass or whatever you're trying to make, which as you can see then drops out the bottom of the smelter into yet another hopper, which then automatically funnels it into a collection barrel at the very end of the process. Clever!

The bottom image, on the other hand, is the official first contraption I've built in my underground processing factory, which takes the wheat and grass seeds from my first of six coming industrial farming fields and drops them one piece at a time into a composter, which then converts them into “magic fertilizer” (aka bone meal), which can be used for everything from cloning flowers to making baby animals instantly grow into adult ones, speeding up the growth cycle of produce, dying white fabric, making white stained glass, creating white concrete, and a lot more. This will be a huge key in my plans to eventually become a business tycoon, using plentiful and fast-growing things like wheat and transforming them into ingredients that will make much rarer and slower-growing items duplicate at a fast rate themselves, such an important part of the plan that I will eventually be devoting another entire 50 by 50 quarter of my farm just to this.

“But Jason,” I hear you saying, “isn't all this automation and industrialization of the natural world around you kind of dehumanizing? Aren't you just basically copying the worst practices of the first Industrial Age tycoons of the real world, who back in the early 1800s essentially destroyed the land in their bid to make their millions? You bet your sweet bippy, sister! In fact, this is one of the things I'm very much purposely trying to embrace in this particular campaign, to picture myself as this lone adventurer and entrepreneur living all alone at the end of the Medieval Age out in the middle of this extremely dangerous and seemingly endless wilderness that surrounds me on all sides, and imagining what people in the real world back a few centuries ago must've faced when it came time to taming a little patch of this wilderness in order to make nature work for them instead of the other way around.

Remember, in the context of Minecraft, I am basically surrounded by tens of billions of blocks of such untamed wilderness, as well as all kinds of dangers that could kill me at any moment (zombies, giant spiders, exploding creepers, supernatural Enderman who will kill you for the crime of looking directly into their eyes, horse-riding skeletons armed with bows and arrows, not to mention the recent addition of wandering hordes of armored barbarians who will just show up in the middle of the day with no notice whatsoever, shoot you in your freaking face and steal all your crap, thanks a lot, Minecraft coding staff); and so a big part of the pleasure of this particular roleplaying campaign is the challenge of how to best protect myself in this endlessly hostile world, how to eventually protect and improve the villages I'll be trading with, and how to carve out a relatively tiny 10,000-square-block industrial ranch for myself within the middle of these tens of billions of blocks of untamed wilderness. (Although remember, like I've mentioned in past updates, I've put two limitations on this industrialization in my case — I'm not going to have any slaughterhouses for the industrialized killing of animals, which I consider an unnecessary cruelty even within the harmless world of video games, and I won't be building any rapey “breeding centers” for the industrialized creation of new villagers, which is so morally problematic I don't know where to begin.)

So that's it for now, and hopefully I won't go so long again before I have another update for you. But before I leave, I would be remiss if I didn't share the news that a derpy Enderman has managed to get stuck in the stairway down to my mine, where it's been hanging out pretty much for the entire time my universe has now existed. I actually learned that if you use a nametag on an Enderman, it will follow you around like a pet dog or cat, so I just may do this to poor little “Endee” simply to have some fun, and within the confines of my roleplaying to impress/terrify the local business owners who I will eventually be inviting over to my ranch when it comes time to recruit my cult army. As always, I'll keep you informed of the latest!

#minecraft #storytelling #roleplaying #videogame #new #version #1.17 #117 #cliffsandcaves #endermanranch #copper #industrialfarming #bees #amethyst #geode

Greetings from the brand-new version 1.17 of Minecraft! As we discussed last time, I essentially did a soft reboot of my storytelling project after the last update, keeping the theme and the persistent timeline but starting over with a new map so that I could update the entire thing to the latest version of the game that just got released, since as always it came with a bunch of cool new stuff that I just like everyone else want to be able to start using right away. So the first three entries in this storytelling project (which you can see, along with all the other entries, at my main index at write.as/jasonpettus) are still following the same timeline and storyline you'll see my talking about today, but we're getting used for the first time to a new place where I'm building everything, sometimes using the new stuff that's coming right now with v1.17.

Right as you come in the front gate, for example, you see one of the major ones, a brand-new ore to the Minecraft universe, copper, which has the distinction of being the only decorative block in the game right now to change colors and textures based on its age. Like everyone else, I wanted to start doing something right away with it, so I'm incorporating it as accents into the perimeter wall I'm building quickly around my property. One of the big goals this time is to quickly have a space that protects us all from nighttime monsters and daytime pillagers, so I'm trying to get up a border as quickly as I can, and light the interior of that space in a way so that it suppresses monsters from appearing. To further accent the pillars I'm using the similarly brand-new deepslate, which can now be found all over the very bottom 16 layers of the planet's crust where we all go mining for diamonds, an attempt by the Minecraft dev team to make those bottom layers more dangerous and interesting (in that these blocks are harder to cut through, and there's a brand-new highly dangerous monster that lurks down in that bottom level now too). And right in the middle of the main front gate you're seeing my first block of the also brand-new amethyst, but more on that a little further down the page.

Like most of these larger builds, my first housing is temporary only, so I'm taking it even one step further this time and making the very walls out of the various tools I need for my early crafting, smelting and stonecutting. I've got a horse tamed and saddled early too, because I'm in a huge area of plains with three villages a short ride away, so with a horse I can get too and fro without any other technology at all.

Here, Industrial Farm Field #1, 172 squares of wheat. There are dispensers filled with water buckets under the glass blocks way in the background of the image, which when they dump will disrupt all the mature wheat from the dirt and sweep it all into that water channel you're seeing in the foreground; the channel sweeps it all into the hopper you're seeing at the top of the second image, which then inserts the produce one piece a second into a composting machine, which churns the whole thing and outputs a piece of bonemeal, which then funnels through that second hopper into a barrel for easy pickup later. The composter finally allows there to be something useful from these industrialized, automated redstone farms that are so easy to build in Minecraft; because bonemeal is otherwise known as “magic fertilizer” in the game, because it sometimes literally acts like magic, including (I recently learned) cloning an exact copy of a flower if you feed a piece to a flower that's planted in a flowerpot. This essentially provides me with unlimited food for breeding bees, which finally makes industrial farming a reality; for I'm now using wheat not for its natural purpose, but for processing it into something that feeds an entirely different animal altogether. And that's kind of fascinating!

Like I've said in a previous update, even with the automated farming, I'm still not planning on building any slaughterhouses, because I simply don't like the subject of slaughterhouses whatsoever, so don't even want to play a cartoon version inside a videogame. So I only need enough cows and sheep and pigs and chickens around for my personal use, like leather for books, wool for banners, feathers for arrows, pigs for...um, riding around on, etc. There in the background of this image you're seeing my first sustainable tree orchard (but more on that in a moment), and I'm pretty seriously thinking about building my main mansion for the estate up there in that area too; so I think I'm just going to throw up a fence around the entire thing (including a lake that can be found back there) and make the whole thing a free-range field for all my livestock and horses (with an eventual ranch on the grounds as well).

A closer look at the orchard. If you plant a tree sapling within a block or two of a flower, you have a 5 percent chance of generating a beehive with that new tree as well; introduced in a very recent update, just one or two versions back, the ever-pleasant creatures are turning out to be one of the most useful little helpers in the entire game. Not only do they gather up honey in their hives that you can scoop out with shears (although only if you've built a fire underneath it to smoke the bees into submission), that you can then not only eat but now use for brand-new candles to finally replace torches in your home; but as they fly over the ground back to their hive after pollination, they drip their pollen along the way, accidentally helping anything it touches to grow faster at the same rate that bonemeal does too. So as long as I'm cutting down a lot of trees right now, to create a sustainable form of fuel for my various furnaces (as opposed to coal, which you dig out of the ground and has only a finite amount), I'm planting flowers everywhere and trying to coax up as many bees as I can, because one of the first enclosed buildings I'll be constructing is a greenhouse and apiary, where the bees will be trapped inside and can't just wander off to never be seen again (which almost always happens with bees in the wild).

And then like I said, one of the most anticipated details of the new 1.17 is the introduction of amethyst, which now grows in these huge walk-in geodes that can be found all over the place underground now, anywhere from Y level 70 all the way to 0. There are special amethyst blocks that can grow shards, that can only be found in these geodes, and stop working if you ever mine them; so if you carefully leave one of these in their original shape, you can theoretically keep coming back to it over and over and cutting off shards, which grow back regularly just like vines or sugarcane, making it now the only block in Minecraft as hard as stone but that can be organically grown in unlimited amounts. It's surrounded by two other brand-new decorative stones as well, so needless to say that everyone's excited about this one.

So that's it for now, and hopefully for my next Minecraft Stoned Saturday Night (patent pending), I'll have my finished greenhouse and apiary to show you. We'll see!