sandbox

Iron From Fear and Lava

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Even thought I had used Modrinth to download and install mods, I had not actually been launching the game through it all this time. I had simply been copying the mods over manually into the appdata folder for Minecraft. However, I have learned… Minecraft mods update shockingly often. As a result, I have decided to copy all of my saved games over to a Modrinth profile and migrate to launching the game through it. All in all, it has been a pretty smooth transition save for the very first time I loaded the game. I am guessing there is some process of caching in all of my stuff that had to happen all at once. After that first time though, everything has felt effectively the same as launching through the Microsoft launcher.

I have been undertaking a few massive projects over the last few days. Essentially I decided that I needed a more reliable source of iron so that I could keep building nonsense. This meant that more than anything, probably the best option was to build a villager iron farm. This however is a massive pain in the ass and there are a bunch of competing ideas about how it performs the best. So just to make sure it worked successfully I decided to build it way the hell up into the air. This meant that I needed to get 3 villagers way up there… and a zombie. The zombie is the easy part, because they will follow you without much issue. Villagers however have to be moved either by boat or by baiting them with a work bench of some sort.

Unfortunately, I don’t have screenshots of this nonsense because I keep forgetting that this is what happens every single time I hit my default printscreen key instead of the F2 key. When I am in the middle of doing my nonsense, I fall back upon defaults and keep hitting the key that I hit by rote memory. It was a mess. I used a Composter since I had a few of those lying around, and took him as far away from the village by boat as I could before breaking the boat and dropping a composter… then dropping another one once they had bonded with the first one and then going back and breaking the one they were bonded with. I set the game to peaceful to make the move a bit less frustrating.

The biggest problem with all of this is the fact that the closest village to me is roughly 600 meters to the east of me… across a mountain range. I originally thought I would be making this trek no normal mode and spent some time laying down a pathway of torches… and then got the bright idea to just flip it to peaceful for the time being. I am not entirely certain how I would have dealt with the villagers constantly getting attacked, and I would have kept having to throw them in the boat to keep them from running away. Worse is that I would have had to do this three times, each time just as frustrating as the last.

For the “other side of the mountain problem” I did a bunch of pre-work and dug a straight tunnel from the Village side of the mountain to my side of the mountain, which would get the villagers close to where the Iron farm was going to live in the sky. Again I am coming in and taking screenshots after the fact so that I could have something for this blog post. Thankfully there really wasn’t anything messy in the route I randomly chose. I had to deal with a patch of gravel which is always annoying, but in large part, I could bore straight through the stone to the other side. Again I torched it off thinking that I would have to deal with mobs all along the route. If nothing else this gives me a faster path to get over to the village if I ever need to abduct more villagers.

As for the farm itself, it is the standard affair that you have likely seen dozens of internet guides on how to create. One room has 3 beds and 3 villagers, and then there is another room where you lure the zombie and set up so that the zombie can never reach them but has to have open air between the villagers and zombies so that they can see them at all times. The zombies trigger the spawning of an Iron Golem which then only has one area where it can spawn up top, covered with moving water… that pushes the Iron Golem into a pit with a block of lava that will kill it and drop the goodies into a hopper/chest system for collection. If you are wondering why I have a glass walkway… it is because the Iron Golems cannot spawn on glass making it a reasonable option for building scaffolding to check on things.

Each time you kill a Golem it drops at least four bars of iron and potentially some poppies. I have no clue at all WHY the Golem drops poppies but I guess I will never run out of red dye. It is honestly impressive how fast the farm works, and if I wanted to go through the hassle… I could set up three more of the exact same farm in the space I have set aside, but that would also involve luring 3 villagers and a zombie each time. Maybe I should have set up a Villager breeder farm first… but that sounded equally annoying. In truth I have replaced all of the iron that I used creating the farm already, so mostly I just need to spend some time AFKing in range and letting it do its work.

The placement of the Iron Farm is at least in part so that I can AFK down at the mob drop farm, and should in theory have my Slime Farm, the Mob Farm, The Iron Farm, and all of my automated crop farms running at the same time. At some point, I need to go into my drop farm and spiderproof it, which should be easy enough given that I now have access to moss carpeting from finding a lush biome during one of my nether portal adventures. I already have more string than I can ever really use, and if I need more… it would be more enjoyable to go find a mine somewhere and harvest cobwebs.

In other news, I have expanded my Bamboo Farm upwards considerably in an effort to try and speed up production. This is in large part thanks to the influx of iron I am getting from the Golem farm, allowing me to do more dumb things with hoppers. It takes a TON of hoppers to direct loot from the top two tiers down to the bottom two tiers. I might expand my Sugarcane farm, but really… I am not even sure I need that much Sugarcane. I am contemplating building a Cocoa Bean farm, but again… I am not even sure I need them, and there does not appear to be a good way to fully automate that. The best option I saw was a design where you have pistons holding back water and then letting the water harvest everything before you replant it. In my hardcore series, I did something like this for harvesting fields of crops and it worked well enough but if I am going to the trouble of building something… I want it to run on its own if possible.

Nether Fortress at Home

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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.

Luring Defenseless Animals

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So I am still on my Minecraft nonsense, and priority one for yesterday was to lure some helpless animals into my custody. We are not going to talk about the deeply disturbing things that I am going to put them through… or at least not until later. The biggest challenge was trying to separate the cows from the sheep because both of them were lured with wheat. It was pretty hilarious me slowly backing towards my base with a mob of five sheep and four cows. I created an impromptu dirt bridge across the pond outside of my base to make it a little easier and was impressed that none of them fell in the water. I did make it three blocks wide which seems to have helped in this case.

I also went out into the world and tamed a bunch of doggos. It is pretty wild playing this game while being trailed by six wolves. It ends up making the entire experience feel a bit more like a World of Warcraft Hunter. I plink something with an arrow and then before the mob can get anywhere near me my team of expert “goodest boys” has wrecked it completely. The only negative is that they won’t seem to attack creepers, which is one of my larger problems honestly. They completely destroy Pillagers though, and they are the sole reason why I was able to rain the nearby outpost and get myself a shiny new crossbow. I have no clue how to destroy said outpost, because by the time I was leaving everything was respawning in full again.

I did have to put my sweet babbos in timeout though, because digging tight tunnels while followed by six wolves… is complete madness. The best part about these kiddos though is that they eat zombie meat and seem to think it is good… which means I get to save all of the steak for myself and heal them up with otherwise useless junk. I specifically parked them under the shelter of my base because it felt awful to have them sitting out in the rain and weather. I have no clue why I am suddenly personifying these puppers, but it is a thing that is happening. This is hilarious considering the sheer animal cruelty that I am committing just across the courtyard from these “goodest boys”.

Since I did not have access to much Redstone, I have opted to instead make a traditional “meat hole” with my chickens. There is a fried chicken machine that works much better but it requires me to have way more resources than I currently have. My hope is that at some point I can convert the current machine over to the automated version at a later date. Essentially both the Chicken and Cow machines work based around the concept of entity cramming, where only 24 entities can occupy the same square of space and when a new entity is created… the oldest entity is killed off creating drops… which get whisked into a chest via a hopper system. So essentially I hop up on the top of the machine and feed the chickens grass seed, which creates baby chickens, which kills off older chickens, and drops feathers and meat into the chest. Additionally, the hopper collects more eggs than I can ever use… most of which I am throwing at the ground to try and spawn additional chickens and then eventually manually killing them. Cows work so much better than Chickens for this purpose… because the drop rates of chicken meat and feathers is much lower than beef/leather.

The sheep are suffering a significantly less dire fate because shears exist and I can just corral them in a small space and then hop down into the pen and harvest all the wool easily. Most of the food that I am using comes from the cows, and the chicken farm exists only to serve as a way of getting feathers to replenish my arrow supply. Were it not for the fact that sheep end up being “bycatch” from my act of trying to lure cows into my base… I would not even have messed with collecting any. Once you have made a bed… there isn’t much use for sheep in general. Sure they drop meat, but they are overall a way less efficient animal. Similarly, I did not even mess with collecting any pigs. However since this batch of sheep so willingly entered my den of horrors… I figured I might as well keep them penned up in case I need more wool in the future.

The other part of the arrow-making routine has involved creating giant towers of gravel and then harvesting it down hoping for flint. I really wish they would add a crafting machine recipe for turning gravel into flint, because honestly… this is a bit maddening to keep harvesting the same gravel over and over hoping for that rare drop. The only real positive is that you get to see some nice above shots of my base while I am up on my tower of nonsense. You can see that I am farming sugarcane out by the water to build up a proper enchanting shack. I think the next big renovation phase is going to be trying to make my base look a little less shit. I also am contemplating expanding out a bit more and doing a land grab to get more “safe” territory. I’ve contemplated moving the entire from of my base out over top of the waterfront so that I can move my sugarcane farm indoors.

In other news, I have finished my spiral staircase down to bedrock, and in doing so found my very first diamond block. Legitimately it was just a single node, which is a bit infuriating but once I got down to bedrock I set up the standard strip mining operation. This quickly yielded enough diamonds to make myself a set of tools. Right now I have Iron Armor, and it will probably be quite a long time before I can get enough diamonds to make a full set of armor out of that material. I found some pointed dripstone and I think one of my next projects is going to be building a renewable lava setup. This will be useful for a few reasons… the primary that I will be able to start using lava buckets instead of coal for cooking the assorted meat that I am gathering. After that, I can start using it for farming obsidian to eventually build a nether portal.

So at this point, I have a Diamond Pick, Diamond Axe, and Diamond Sword. I am too cheap usually to make shovels, but at some point, I am sure I will. I still mostly use stone tools because I don’t have tons of diamonds yet. I am just too cheap to waste diamonds right now. I am sure tonight I will probably spend a bit more time down in the mines because there are still a lot of resources that I have not found. At some point, I plan on building a nether portal and start trying to gather some of the resources there. However, I do not want to set foot into the nether without at least some gold armor, because I do not want to deal with massive pigman aggro. I have found exactly zero gold so far, so I am probably going to set up a few different branch mines off my spiral staircase at different levels looking for various resources.

Rescuing Tradesfolk

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I guess I am digging into Enshrouded as a primary game… after saying that I was mostly casually playing it on the side. The Path of Exile league is winding down a bit, and we are a ways out from the launch of Last Epoch so I am finding myself gravitating towards this game more and more. Last night I pretty much only played it and as a result made a ton of progress. They recently added a hide HUD option in the menu, but I really wish it was something that I could hotkey quickly as the game can generate some really breathtaking vistas. That is a general comment though, because I wish ALL games had a hide UI button that was easily hotkeyed or better yet… have the ability to configure in-game screenshots that by default hide the UI. I don’t remember which game had that but I loved it.

Mostly I have been focused on collecting the various tradespeople from around the map so that I can flesh out my trade hall. At the moment I have unlocked the Blacksmith, Alchemist, Hunter, Carpenter, and Farmer… with Carpenter probably being the most difficult to get to. I’ve been using the waypoint tower that I unlocked as a way of gliding down toward various map objectives and at least getting part of the way there. I’ve also been using the fact that I could craft flame altars cheaply as a method of creating a waypoint network to get around the map quickly. Unfortunately, I seem to have reached the point where I can no longer place down any more of those. I am not sure if that number goes up as I upgrade my primary altar or if it is a fixed number of “bases” you can have around the world.

I guess I will have to reassess where I have placed them. Unfortunately, I built a bit of a base near the one furthest to the west, so that one is probably stuck where it is currently. The others are just a flame altar without anything build around them, and in theory I really need to move one of those to the north. That is the direction I need to explore now because apparently that is where I can find clay. I need clay in order to craft the Kiln that the Carpenter is requesting, which in theory should unlock additional stuff that I can craft. I also have a slew of fetch quests for the various tradespeople that I already have, and in theory, should probably focus on those now to unlock additional recipes. I also need to find a more reliable source of tar than just crafting campfires and letting them burn out.

I veered off the Tank path a bit in my character build in order to pick up some utility abilities. Double Jump is something that pretty much makes EVERY game better, and Enshrouded is not an exception to that rule. In theory, going forward I would probably rush that ability because it makes that much difference while trying to traverse dangerous areas. I think Double Jump is probably as far into the Survivor tree as I want to go for the moment and there are still a number of beefy abilities in the Tank tree that I want to pick up. I like that I can pretty easily respec my character completely by spending some of the runic coins that you get off monsters and from salvaging weapons. One of my bases is next to the spot where a legendary sword can be obtained, so in theory, if I ever get short I can just go there and keep looting that sword to salvage it.

Speaking of weapons… I’ve picked up a number of very nice items along my travels. In truth, the only one of these I can say for certain where it comes from is the Wailing Blade, which started a neat dialog with the Smith because apparently he crafted it. I found it originally because this video showed up in my YouTube feed, and in truth, it is pretty straightforward to get early on and I leaned on it heavily for some of the harder areas I have been adventuring in. I am not sure if the Wand or Bow are from fixed locations because they are named similarly to green or blue quality weapons, so I think I might have simply hit the jackpot there. One thing that I did not appreciate early on is just how good wands are in this game. They auto-target things… making them super freaking easy to kite mobs while plinking away at them. The range is really short so if you want to snipe… you still need a bow but once you equip your bow in the ranged slot you can access it from whatever weapon you have equipped currently by holding down Q.

Other than that I have been starting to do some renovations on my keep. I am trying to make it a bit less “big generic stone box” so I will likely be spending some time trying to improve the outside now. The main crafting hall works pretty well and I ended up replacing chunks of the wall with wood just to vary the appearance a bit. The little annex I built off the side was originally just a way to have an entrance on the other side of the building but I’m contemplating closing it in and opening it up to the inside and turning it into a treasure vault. I just unlocked magic boxes when I rescued the Carpenter and those allow you to draw from those boxes automagically when you are crafting in your base. So in theory I am going to want a room with nothing but a ton of boxes in there, potentially one box for every item type. Having it off the room where I spawn into the keep would be extra handy because it would mean depositing loot is pretty straightforward.

I’ve also spent a bit of time trying to craft out some living quarters and something resembling a proper bedroom. Most of this was to get my comfort buff up a bit, but also because it felt like I needed something down here. I am looking forward to whenever I can craft some bookcases or something like that. I just unlocked the ability to make rugs so I am probably going to focus on getting one of those which I think will bump up that buff a bit more. All in all I find myself going through phases of serious crafting and other phases where I am adventuring. I need to figure out where best to park some of my flame altars to make farming resources a bit easier.