#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.