Minecraft

Hey Friends! Welcome to the snowpocalpyse! I realize that you fine folks in Northern climates will snicker but we here in Oklahoma were not built for this nonsense. Nor do we have anything resembling the infrastructure required to remove said snow accumulation. Around this point we are somewhere in the vicinity of ten inches of total snowfall with another system coming in tonight and dumping more snow on us. The snow itself isn’t that bad were it not for the icing we had gotten starting Sunday of last week. Thankfully we are fairly well stocked and have no real reason to leave the house given that we are both working remote at this very moment. I have been for the better part of a year and my wife’s school transitioned to distance learning when the weather started. The snow is super powdery which means that in some places that are some massive snowdrifts that have accumulated.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you have probably encountered me talking about Kenzie my tortie cat that is pretty much my constant partner in nonsense. In fact as I sit here typing this she is laying on “her box” beside me which is a cardboard box that my current computer case came in that I taped back up because she liked laying on it. So it should come as no surprise that when I was able to get cats in Minecraft this weekend, and finally found a nametag down in a Mine… that the first thing I did was name one of the calicos Kenzie. This was easily the highlight of my weekend, and I spent a lot of time roaming around with Kenzie at my side as she scared away creepers. Unfortunately… Grace had a mishap with one of her cats and it accidentally fell in some lava while she was spelunking and as a result… I have been reluctant to take Kenzie out adventuring much. So she is sitting here with my other two cats waiting on me. It feels real bad when the meow at me… but now I am scared I will lose them.

Today’s Minecraft video which should release at 11 am CST, will feature a walk through of the World I have been spending a lot of time playing in. Towards the end of last week I investigated the product offering called Minecraft Realms, and ended up creating one that my friend Grace and I could run around in. Shockingly she had never played Minecraft until recently and after spending some time in a solo world it seemed the time to start experimenting with multiplayer gaming. Effectively this is our base camp, because I happened to turn around this corner from where the spawn dropped us and noticed this mostly clear valley with a mountain at the far end. I dug into the side and the rest was history and have slowly been both hollowing out that mountain and expanding via tunnel and sky road.

Behind our base we have a pond, and it seems like this pond is a magnet for Baby Zombies doing mischief. A few days ago I went out to the back dock because I heard a Zombie groan and encountered this sight. That is in fact a baby zombie trying to use the boat that we have at the end of the pier.

Then yesterday I go out to the dock because once again I hear a baby zombie…. and this time it is one of the rarest natural spawns in the game which is a Baby Zombie riding a Chicken. The Zombie in the boat was more than happy to sit there doing nothing, but this time the chicken Zombie absolutely made a beeline for me… so I unfortunately had to end it.

The other side project that I was super invested in yesterday was setting up a Bee farm. I love these doofy little buzzers in Minecraft and as soon as I was able to enchant a pick with Silk Touch, I ventured out into the wild to try and find a hive that I could transplant. If you look hard enough you can see one hive that doesn’t look like the others, and that is the original wild hive. From that I used it to harvest honey comb and make more bee habitat and finally breed the hell out of them until I have a veritable armada of flying cuteness buzzing in and out of base. The side effect is that everything here grows much faster so our crops mature crazy fast thanks to the influence of my Bee friends. Hammond the pig seems to be completely oblivious to their existence. I have a row of campfires underneath so that I can safely light them and harvest either honey or honeycomb whenever I need… but I leave them unlit during other times as to not risk damaging the bees.

And that’s it friends. I have been spending most of my time on this multiplayer world and I am not sure how much time I will actually be spending in single player from this point forward. I mean I could have in theory uploaded my single player world to Realms, but I opted instead for a fresh start and this world has been VERY good to us given how many rare resources we have been able to pull from it.

Yesterday’s lunch did not go according to plan in the least. My goal was to pop over onto the BotchCraft server that I have been playing on occasionally. My playtime on the server is fairly intermittent between other projects that I have going and I legitimately forget sometimes what I did the last time I was playing. As such I did not remember killing a pillager in the swamp outside of my domicile which apparently put a debuff on me. When I went back to town for the purpose of starting a Minecraft video for my channel I inadvertedly started a Pillager Raid on the Village next door to the spawn. Things sorta just went downhill from there.

Unfortunately I have no screenshots from the event… because things were entirely too intense to be hitting the screenshot button. However I do have a few screenshots from the aftermath. I am guessing these are events designed for a sort of server wide defense kind of thing. If I was counting correctly, we had a total of five waves and the first wave I mostly took care of by myself. Then things sort of went off the rails and harder mob encounters started spawning in. Before long I was desperately trying to run back to my corpse to get my gear since the server has a DAoC style tombstone mod, which is awesome but unfortunately means you have to manually loot the items.

This chonky boy is a Ravager and is the stuff of nightmares. It is effectively a mounted battering ram and the Pillagers use it to start breaking down any walls that you might have. For normal Pillagers we had a neat trick of knocking out the ground block from our fence and attacking the mobs through that. Zelibeli who also happened to be on the server at the time got drafted into helping me clean up my mess. The Ravager however would slam into the wall causing an area of effect attack that would shred our health even with armor on. The desperation moment was when we realized that we had no arrows and no real way to go craft them either. It was around or about this time that Zeli remembered the mob farm and the likelihood that the chest near by would have collected a large number of arrows from random skeletons.

Unfortunately the Ravager was guarding the gate and I made a desperation play. I knew she could not get to the mob farm until someone managed to lure the beast away and I sprinted like my life depended on it… because it absolutely did. The beast took the bait with a Pillager on its back and followed me far away from the Village and out onto the fields towards a completely different Village. I am guessing that there are no leashing rules for hostile Raid mobs because it kept following me… only getting tripped up a bit when I swam out to an island and forced it out into the water… where it followed but moved considerably slower. I am super thankful that Zeli took this as the queue to go for the arrows because it was absolutely spur of the moment and there was no way I could type a message during this frantic flee.

The most damaging encounter however was probably the Evokers, which could summon a thing called a Vex. These tiny Grim Reapers could travel over top of the walls and deal stupid amounts of damage. Ultimately we needed the arrows to take them out while they were casting, which seemed to interrupt the casting animation and stop the summoning. However I probably took more deaths to this specific encounter than any of the others. Side note these are also the most annoying mobs when playing Minecraft Dungeons and I have severe hatred for them and their ability to trap you in some pillars of earth.

When we FINALLY beat the Raid… the Villagers started pelting us with random items that they were giving us. Additionally we have a buff that now allows us to get significantly better exchange rates both for getting emeralds and spending emeralds. This entire encounter was hilarious but I will now be way more cautious of when I get this debuff that triggers the raid. I am not certain but I would guess that maybe drinking milk will take it away? As annoying and occasionally frustrating as all of the deaths were, I would not change the sequence of events for the world. Super happy that Zeli happened to be on and we managed to succeed in pushing back the Pillagers.

Today at 11 am CST I will be releasing the 15th part of my “Bel Bungles Minecraft” series on YouTube, and hopefully if things go smoothly I will be recording the 16th part today which will take us to the end of the week. That said I am falling behind in the production of this thing and need to spend some time this weekend catching back up. I had this really great production cadence that allowed me to have several episodes queued and ready to go, and at one point I was three episodes ahead. I had been recording over my lunch break and then editing and queueing it up for the next week day timeslot at what I decided would be my release time of 11 am.

That sort of went off the rails this week because effectively I have been iced in since Sunday evening. This also means that my wife has been iced in and with more active human beings in the house it became a little harder to record over lunch. Similarly I have been dealing with the woes of winter in our house, which means my office is sweltering. There are some things I have done to mitigate this, but even so just from radiating heat through the wall it warms up significantly. My office is the first stop after exiting the heating unit and for some reason has two vents. This means the last place I have wanted to be after the work day is upstairs.

This is not to say that I won’t keep making Minecraft videos, because I am still enjoying myself. The pace of them might change a little bit. I am not sure if I am going to be able to keep up with five videos a week at least until I figure out a flow that works for my changing situation. I will probably be expanding what I am doing as well to more than just my single player world. I’ve been playing some on a friends server called Botchcraft, as well as a private Realm with my friend Grace. I will likely be recording some videos in both of these locations, but I will make certain to clearly state I am doing so in the video to stem some of the confusion.

Largely this is just a heads up that my flow of content may suffer a bit. Additionally I wasn’t sure what to talk about today so I figured this was as good of a topic as any. If you have not already watched any of the Minecraft series, then I will embed the playlist below. I mean it isn’t exactly compelling television, but I had fun making it and continue to enjoy my nonsense.

It is always something relatively simple that sets me down a path towards madness. In this case I was annoyed by just how much time it took to harvest a full field of produce in my Minecraft world. This lead me to research ways of making this work better, namely ways of harvesting an entire field at once. Essentially far as I could tell you have two different methods.

• The Water Method – this involves setting up a switch system that floods your field and pushes all of the produce towards a single collection point, and then allows you to reset the circuit and dam up the river once again. The positive is this collects all of the things that were just harvested but the negative is it requires you to build an incline since water blocks will only spread 7 blocks before needing to switch elevation. To do this most optimally this ends up creating a field that is awkward to plant.
• The Piston Method – one of the interesting characteristics of pushing a block with a piston is that it detaches anything that is on the surface. So say you had a torch on a block and you pushed that block, it would end up knocking the torch off of the surface. The same goes with tilled blocks and crops. The idea is that you push the blocks which causes all of the crops to be harvested allowing for you to collect them.

Redstone circuitry has always frightened me more than a little bit in Minecraft. I could get extremely simple automations to work, like opening a door from a switch but always seemed to struggle when it came to anything more complicated. So I now had before me the task of trying to figure out how to trigger six banks of four pistons all from the flip of a single switch. Pistons can move 12 blocks and if you attempt to move anything more than that they just fail completely. My field is laid out with a row of water every 5th block, though in truth I could have gotten by with significantly less water were I planning a bit better. Four blocks at once however is pretty much the upper bound of what I was willing to attempt to fire as a single mechanism.

I fired up a super flat demo world for the purpose of allowing me to sort out the mechanics in creative mode before attempting to apply the same logic in my single player world. I’ve not reached a point where I have unlimited supplies so I needed to be fairly judicious in the application of my resources. Even then I still built it wrong, but we will get into that later. Essentially my idea was to use sticky pistons and push the blocks to one side and in theory retract everything when I turned off the switch. The above image shows the final circuit design that I landed upon. Essentially a matrix of blocks connected by redstone with a single repeater to help boost the signal strength since redstone will only conduct for 15 spaces.

From there I decided to go ahead and create a larger scale mock up of the final machine, this time doing four iterations of the same modular design instead of the final six. It was around this point that I realized things were not going to work as I had originally envisioned them. This came from a simple misunderstanding of how sticky pistons actually work. In my mind they pushed a column of blocks and then retracted that same column of blocks as I had seen this behavior over and over in builds that relied on them in a vertical stack. When used horizontally they exhibit a completely different behavior of just pushing all 12 blocks and then retracting only the block directly making contact with the piston.

This lead me down the rabbit hole of not only needing six banks of four pistons all firing at once… but at the same time requiring a second series of six banks of four pistons firing in reaction to the first bank firing. Essentially I needed to shift all the blocks to one side and then trigger a counter event that pushed all of the blocks back to the other side. It is through the process of building something that you often learn how you SHOULD have built it. Where I thinking more clearly I would have simply set the circuit up so one side is always on and the other side is always off and the switch just toggles between those two states. However that is not the path I actually went down.

Meet the fearless observer block. The side with the cute little face sets towards a block of some sort that has the ability to change states. When this state changes the observer sends out a pulse of Redstone energy triggered out the backside of the block that can be connected up to some mechanism of your choice. The pulse is similar to that of a button push and I decided I was going to try and harness this mechanism to create my back process of triggering the opposite banks of pistons to fire resetting the playfield back to its normal position.

This ended up being significantly more challenging than I would have expected. In my mind how this should have worked was that I set the observer facing the empty block that I had on one side and as soon as a block was pushed into that spot it would trigger the back loop of the process and push everything back. This did not work in practice I believe because I was using a lever to trigger the entire process. This is the sort of revelation that happens long after you have built the damned thing and not necessarily in the heat of problem solving. So instead I switched to watching the state of the piston on the first bank. In practice what happens is each time I extend a piston or retract a piston it sends a pulse. You can slow this process down a bit by adding an additional observer which I ended up doing to fine tune the order of operations a bit.

The above image is the end result built in my single player world. Now is where I talk about how I did this wrong. Firstly I should have used a button to fire the event, and I think had I done so my original idea of monitoring the empty block state would have made things work perfectly. The second critical flaw that I did was use sticky pistons. This is all due to my earlier fallacy that using a sticky piston would pull the entire column back into place, but instead only pulls a single block. What ends up happening in practice is that on the back leg of the journey… a single block stays attached to the piston when it retracts creating a less than optimal situation.

However since I crafted 48 sticky pistons and lack the materials to craft another 48 regular pistons… I am pretty much stuck with this design decision for the moment. What I did in order to counteract this is dive even further down the rabbit hole and farm up copious amounts of clay and dye and create a rows worth of glazed terracotta. This block has the unique property of not being able to adhere to a sticky piston and as a result gets pushed neatly back into the original position by the second set of pistons. The unfortunate part however is that I have now lost a full row worth of plant-able space due to this design flaw.

At some point I want to replace the pistons at least on the backhaul side in so I can reclaim that row of planting space. I ended up building a way down into the mechanism of the machine that way I could debug any problems that might come up. Additionally there is the off chance that some of the produce will pop off and then get pushed down into the lower machine cavity and this gives me a way to drop down and double check that this did not happen. There are a lot of things that I would change if I ever did this again, namely I would just stick to normal pistons on both sides given that the “sticky” nature only serves to complicate the process. If I find another cache of Iron I will potentially swap them out and then switch the entire mechanism to work off a button.

The problem with redstone is the same problem with most of my development projects. You have to sort of force yourself to walk away from them otherwise you will continue fiddling and “optimizing” them for eternity. I set out to build a machine that would harvest my field of crops in with the single push of a button and I accomplished that. If it weren’t for the water… I would consider building a Minecart hopper system that cycled around the field collecting anything that dropped but that really is a path of madness. As it stands now… I just need to go find some more Iron before I do much of anything else.