Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week we continue to chip away at the massive list of topics from our time off. We start off the show with an adorable Frog version of Vampire Survivors meets Stardew Valley called Pesticide Not Required. From there we talk a bit about Pokemon Go and what it is like playing it with your kids. Ash continues his dive into rhythm games via the Round1 Arcade, this time with Beatmania. Space Marine 2 has been released and a bunch of the folks on the podcast have been playing Multiplayer Co-Op and have some thoughts. Kodra has been playing Tactical Breach Wizards and shares his thoughts about it, and we have some very early preliminary thoughts about the brand-new Zelda game Echoes of Wisdom. Finally, Bel talks a bit about returning to Minecraft during his recent convalescence and how that game feels like chicken soup in gaming form.
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.
Good Morning Folks! This is probably going to be the last day of Minecraft updates for a while, given that this afternoon the Cycle reset is happening in Last Epoch. I feel somewhat mixed about this because I have actually been enjoying myself quite a bit, and have a number of projects on the horizon that I am contemplating doing. Probably the biggest single project that I undertook last night was utilizing some of the real estate that I cleared outside of my base to set up proper fields. Right now I have pumpkin, potato, beet, and carrot farms outside of my walled area and have also taken the opportunity to move my sugarcane farm into this protected lot as well. At some point, I will probably uproot my wheat farm from inside the base and then expand out the fenced area to move it outdoors. Farms take up large amounts of room to do them properly so it just makes sense to move them outside of the closed-in area.
Other than that I started building out some more themed buildings in the main walled-in complex. I set up a proper smithy with an anvil, stonecutter, grinding wheel, smith bench, and a stack of blast furnaces. At some point, I might modify these to auto-feed fuel but before doing that I really need to set up a blaze farm in the nether. The lava buckets have been great for cooking meat, but this is not as easily repeatable for automating fuel intake into forges. Sadly the lava cauldron setup that I have does not work with either hoppers or dispensers so there is no way of feeding it into a furnace or blast furnace. I found a broken nether portal to the north of my base where I harvested a bunch of obsidian and magma blocks and then decided to use those as part of my design with some copper trap doors over them since I have so damned much copper.
The other new building that I added was a storehouse where I am consolidating all of my stuff. At some point, I plan on massively renovating the central tower and as such I am slowly migrating everything that I was storing up there down into sorted bins at ground level. I’ve incorporated a few barrels just because I like the look of them and on the left side you have spare tools, and on the right side, there are torches and arrows. Just to the far side of the building is a little troth that I set up for making obsidian, which I used to complete gathering what I needed for a nether portal. I also created a quickie infinite water source there so that I can grab it when I need it.
One of the big things that I did this morning was craft and enchant a full set of diamond armor. This means that I have officially retired my unenchanted and heavily battered set of iron armor. I figured I might as well use it as a decorative element so I set it up on an armor stand outside the smithy. I say I made a full set of diamond armor but that is a lie. I am wearing a golden armor helmet to give me immunity to piglins in the nether. While I enjoy killing them… I don’t want them to be aggro on sight. The nether is dangerous enough for me to not add additional difficulty levels. Several years ago when I started a hardcore Minecraft run, I did not know about this… and it summarily ended my run VERY quickly.
That experience has made me take the nether EXTREMELY seriously from that point forward. As a result, I have built my main portal underground and in an area closed off behind both a gate and a copper door. I’ve also been using these new copper grates in lieu of glass blocks because they are considerably more sturdy and I am not going to accidentally break them by swinging my sword to fight a stray piglin that makes it through my portal. At some point, I might fancify my portal room but for now, it works well enough. In general, I want to rethink the core of my base because it is getting extremely cumbersome to climb down the spiral staircase when I want to harvest materials from my strip mines down at bedrock. The spiral is super compact and was extremely efficient for getting down deep early on when I was still breaking the caves and such beneath my base, but the long staircase just works better for general purpose.
I’ve built the most rudimentary of shelters on the nether side, with cobblestone so that it won’t blow up easily and a copper door to wall off the portal chamber to keep it from being destroyed. Spawnwise I lucked out extremely well in that my portal is beside a Nether Fortress in the soul sand biome. This gives me access to a ton of resources and the ability to start farming Wither Skeletons as well as Blaze and the Lava Slimes. I think I might be on the boundary between biomes because a little way into the Nether Fortress it all changes over to Basalt and Black Stone. I wish I were in one of the tree biomes so that I could start farming those resources and I might need to make some expeditions out into the nether to try and find one of those.
For the moment I have limited most of my exploration to the immediate area surrounding the fortress. Last night I found a Blaze spawner really close to my portal, and as such I am probably going to set up a Blaze rod farm there. I will of course have to sort out how best to get from my portal to that area safely, which means a lot of tunneling and general construction. I will probably need to set up a more permanent base camp in the nether with chests full of non-nether materials for building tunnels. All of this is probably going to happen considerably later, and as such I am honestly glad that I have been blogging about my adventures. This will serve as a way of jogging my memory when I eventually return to this save.
Anyways! For now, I will be venturing forth into Last Epoch and starting a new cycle character. If you are so inclined for that nonsense I will hopefully see you there.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I think I said some nonsense about wanting to clean up my base and make it look less shit. That is not a thing that happened. Instead, I decided to take it upon myself to remove most of an entire mountain in a massive terraforming project. I did not take any before images but here is an in-progress shot before I started filling back in the copious amounts of dirt that I removed. Most of the mountain was dirt, and I sacrificed a diamond to make a shovel to speed the process up considerably. When I got down to harder blocks it was mined out pretty quickly and I did manage to pick up quite a bit of coal and iron that was hidden under the surface.
The reason why I did this is that I wanted to make sure that I had plenty of room to expand my base perimeter out without having to worry about things dropping down from above. I removed way more than I actually needed but I do like that it gives me a pretty clear approach to the base so that I can see things clearly from a long way off. I’ve been using this recently to bait Endermen to attack me by staring at them… before running down into a safe area that they cannot get into and killing them to start building up an Enderpearl reserve. I am not sure that I will actually play this world long enough to find an end portal, but having a stockpile never hurts.
All of this extra space meant that I could now expand out my wall structure the same distance from all sides of the central tower. Essentially I was feeling cramped in the amount of free area that I had to build little projects. I am probably going to start building some additional buildings to house things like a smithy and such. I need to create an area so that I can grow some other crops like pumpkins, but I am not entirely certain I will do that within the walls of the structure. It is easy enough to pop out during the day and harvest those and they take an awful lot of space. I still have my sugarcane farm outside the walls and it seems fine.
The first building that I built was an enchanter hut, with a maximum-level enchanting table. This has allowed me to start getting some enchants on my weapons and eventually on my gear when I make a full set of diamond armor. Next up will be a smithy so that I can start repairing items. After that probably a consolidated storehouse. Right now a lot of my chests are up in the tower, and the longer I play on this world the less time I want to spend climbing up inside the tower to get items. The tower design was a good start because mobs can’t use ladders and it allowed me to zip up into safety. However, it is getting to the point where it is just cumbersome, leading me to store things in whatever random barrels and chests that I have lying around rather than a core storage area.
Probably the most useful thing that I built yesterday was a dripstone lava farm. I talked a bit about this in yesterday’s post but this essentially allows me to have a renewable source of lava buckets allowing me to use those for cooking up meat and smelting ore instead of relying on coal. This means I have more coal for creating a relatively endless supply of torches. Generally speaking by the time I am ready to cook up full stacks of meat again, I have all five buckets ready to go. At some point, I am going to move my row of smokers/furnaces over to beside the lava machine just to speed the process up.
One of the big problems that I had after building a “meat hole” for chickens was that I had a near-endless supply of eggs. Truth be told… eggs are mostly useless. You can only craft two types of food with them and both require a large outlay of resources. Part of the fried chicken design involved throwing eggs against a wall with a dispenser causing them to occasionally hatch into new chickens. Rather than rebuild my existing machine into the fully automated version, I made a bit of a half-step. I now have a pen for chickens and created an automated pitching machine that I can turn off and on. When I load the hopper/chest up with another batch of eggs I flip it on and let it spawn a pen full of chickens. When they fully mature I hop down into the pen and kill them with a few swipes of my sword and then reap a massive amount of experience that I can turn into enchants… and more feathers and meat than I can realistically use.
I’ve almost entirely stopped cooking steak because the chicken farm is just so damned plentiful. Sure it is a bit twisted that I am creating a killing pen for chickens, but if I was willing to create a “meat hole” I am already morally bankrupt when it comes to Minecraft. I’ve managed to get a Fortune II Diamond Shovel like someone suggested on Mastodon yesterday, and while I would love to have Fortune III instead it is good enough to make a big difference. This alone has made the process of converting Gravel to Flint infinitely easier. When this shovel breaks I will probably craft another one and try for efficiency and fortune on the same tool which should in theory improve my yield. Suffice it to say however I have crafted like eight stacks of arrows which will hold me for a long time and I have more feathers than I need.
The last thing that I built before calling it for the night was a drop farm. This is essentially a chamber with multiple platforms that lure mobs to drop down a center shaft… into a waiting pad of campfires on top of hoppers to collect the loot. It is not working terribly well yet, and I figure this is largely because I did not build it super far away from my base, and also made zero effort to hunt for caves and torch those off to prevent spawns underground. This might be a project for tonight, to dig down and attempt to spawn proof the general area of this farm. It isn’t like I really needed a lot of things from this farm, and mostly built it just because I had copious amounts of cobblestone and deep cobble to burn through. I did quite a bit of deforesting to create all of the trap doors required for it to function, however. I am not super concerned though because I have massive forests in every direction from my base.
All of this said though… I know tomorrow is the release of the Last Epoch cycle restart, and my attention will be drawn elsewhere for a bit. I am not sure if I will return to this world that I labeled “Please Be Good”, but if not I had a lot of fun over the last few days. It filled a gap that I needed filling of having something to do that was pretty low-key and brain-dead. If I continue playing I do want to start excavating some underchambers beneath my base and track down enough obsidian to craft a Nether portal. I tend to prefer to craft these things underground and in a very secure area in case something comes through from the other side.
