Good Morning folks! A while back I said that I thought my Minecraft Adventures would be over for a bit when the Last Epoch cycle reset happened… but that has not turned out to be the case. It turns out that the Last Epoch Empowered Monoliths are just not “brain off” enough time for me, and I still need something that I can zone out while playing. Brain fog has been a real problem post-Covid and as a result I am climbing back into Minecraft for some comfortable tedium. One of the big things that I have done is venture forth into mod management land and beautify my experience.
Since CurseForge has turned out to be a bit problematic over the years, a number of mod authors are actively boycotting that site, which meant that I needed to find a new mod management tool. I present to you Modrinth which appears to be the community-supported alternative, with the ability to manage multiple different mod setups at the same time and freely switch back and forth between them at will. So if you wanted to create a hyper-specific loadout just for works utilizing a specific mod like Aether you can do that, and then have a different loadout of more vanilla-friendly mod packs as well. For the most part, I am not doing this and instead am only running a single map. If you are interested here is the totality of the mods that I am running.
- Shader – Nostalgia v 3.0
- Textures – Faithful Venom 32x
- Mods
- Fabric Api
- Iris for Fabric
- Lithium for Fabric
- Sodium for Fabric
- Better F3 for Fabric
- Indium
- Modmenu
- Cloth Config
- Xaeros Minimap
- Falling Leaves
- Make Bubbles Pop
- Bobby
- Reeses Sodium Options for Fabric
For most of these, I have not included a specific version number so this list can be a bit more evergreen going forward. In large part, I will just keep updating the mods as new versions are released.
One of the biggest projects that I have undertaken is making the Nether a bit more save to roam around in. I’ve created these long 3×3 Cobblestone tunnels leading from my spawner to various locations. Though honestly right now… the only real destination that matters is a specific spawner farm that I will talk about in a bit. My goal is to expand this into multiple different biomes because at some point I want to create a pigmen farm which will then fuel a barter farm. I’ve roamed quite a bit from my Nether spawn location and still have yet to encounter any of the warpwood biomes, which are super useful since warpwood can’t burn. I seem to be largely surrounded by Soulsand and Basalt biomes, but my hope is if I keep tunneling in one direction long enough I will hit warpwood.
The entire reason why I started tunneling in the first place was to create a safe approach for building a Blaze rod farm because there was a spawner down here in the nether fortress area surrounding my base. I would also like to potentially set up a Wither Skeleton farm, but everything I have looked into makes it seem like it is way more resource-intensive. The blaze rod farm is fine, but I might shift it into something that is afkable because for the moment it is really only useful if I need to repair my sword or axe via mending. Though I will be honest…. for repairing tools my stupid chicken farm is far more effective. Essentially I take one swipe with the sword and then quickly switch to the tool that needs repairing and soak in massive amounts of experience orbs.
From my time roaming around the Nether Fortress area, I have managed to pick up two Wither Skeleton Skulls, and need one more in order to summon in and fight the Wither itself. Whenever I do this I will absolutely use one of the cheese methods for killing it easily. I’ve also killed two raiding parties, and could have killed way more if I had gone out of my way to do so. Largely I only bother with them when I am doing something and they are actively annoying me. However, since I was showing off trophies that are hanging around my base I figured I might as well include those Ominous Banners. Regardless they kind of look cool to have hanging up. It is weird how close I am to a pillager outpost and how much it does not factor into my day-to-day gameplay at all unless I go over there and kick the hornet’s nest.
One of the things that I have used Xaero’s Minimap to do is be able to point out slime chunks. I have a lot of ideas for things that I want to build and several of them are going to need sticky pistons. To the best of my knowledge, there are no swamp biomes near me, and as a result that means I have to rely entirely on the fickle nature of cave slime spawns. So doing what I had done before I started hollowing out an entire chunk. While it does not show it currently…. this is the above-ground appearance of the area that I began mining down into. The plan is at some point to probably plan a crop above ground just so I can utilize the space. I was waiting for the grass to finish filling in and it seems to have done so finally.
The idea was simple enough… get down to below 40 where the slimes can start spawning… build several platforms and then … ???? Profit? The problem is… as much as I have fucked around with the formula for this farm I cannot seem to produce a reasonable amount of slimes. I’ve tried it lit, unlit, 3 blocks tall, 2 blocks tall… and in all of the variations the only thing that I can seemingly produce a lot of is spiders, zombies, and skeletons. I already have a farm for that however so it does not really help me. I am wondering if I either need to keep making it deeper or mine out the rest of the chunk to make sure nothing is spawning beneath me.
What I have instead created is a very pretty but resource-intensive and generally useless bauble for my world. I used the magma blocks only because I thought they would look cool, and I farmed up a ton of them hollowing out the nether to make my tunnels. There are times when spawns have spawned, because I have about two dozen slime balls in my collection chests, but I have made so many changes to this farm that I have no clue which configuration seemed to produce them. Most recently I have lit up the area in an attempt to stop normal spawns given that slimes can supposedly spawn from zero to seven light levels… and the entire interior of the platforms is 5-6 light levels currently. I am sort of at my wits end with this stupid waste of time, and it has me contemplating the dumber option which is to build several nether portals from the nether side in an attempt to leap frog across the map looking for swamp biomes. I could also really use a jungle biome so that I could get me a bamboo farm going.
Basically mindlessly hollowing out the world seems to be one of those things that my brain can do when it is struggling. As a result, I find myself crawling back into the comfortable numb that is Minecraft. Comfort gaming is definitely a thing that is needed occasionally and lately, I have needed it quite a bit.