#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 #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!