Answered some of my own questions. Posting in case it comes up in a search.
...Is there anywhere I can go to learn more about the actual mechanics of fish farms...
Forge specifically disables one or more of the vanilla bugs that allowed fish farms, so making one for 1.7.10 was tricky, but possible. I tried several before I found Panda's design for 1.11 would work. It uses a slightly different bug than the one Forge patched. It uses an iron door and a music box, so 2 redstone and 7 total iron ingots from a dark room mob farm. It uses a hopper too, but I was able to eliminate this by changing the water to flowing water and adjusting for the change to the fishing sweet spot. There is also another bug in using this design in 1.7.10 relating to tripwire mechanics, which I fixed by changing a few more solid blocks to slabs under the tripwires.
***Bonus hint*** Infinity Evolved Expert dark room mob farms will drop Thaumcraft treasure bags with diamonds, gold, emeralds, etc., at least with player-kills. Two diamonds can make a Thermal Foundation version of a fishing rod that lasts about ten hours in this farm, eliminating the need for more hardware to spit out spare rods at you.
Panda's farm without my modifications:
...I can't seem to find a lot of info on fishable plastic bags to see if this is even possible...
The good news: MFR makes fishing very valuable on a non-Ex-Nihilo skyblock. There are two big rewards: 1. Filled safari bags which not only give rare mobs, but also give other entities. I got a hopper minecart from one of three. 2. Plastic, which, even on expert, gives you safari net launchers, a syringe to make converting zombie villagers much easier, and even rednet if I could figure out a use for that. I also got a rubber tree sapling which might come in handy if I got a lot further.
The bad news: Plastic bags are exceedingly rare. I was very lucky and got one in five hours. I finally resorted to digging through the source code but I'm not sure I know exactly what to look for. In the code I can see, I can't differentiate between the fishing loot and the plastic bag loot itself, but either way, I see no reference to clay anywhere in the code.
https://github.com/skyboy/MineFacto...efactoryreloaded/loot_tables/factory_bag.json
...Is there some other way to get clay?...
The only other thing I can come up with is villager trading. Unfortunately, finding a comprehensive list of possible IE:E villager trades seems impossible at this point. Other possibilities might include a villager selling enough to get started with bees (never checked the bee villager in the past, know nothing about bees yet), or maybe a villager would sell something like a cauldron, petal apothecary, or crucible to push me along, but that seems unlikely.
Oh right, you are going the hard mode route.... Damn, do you hate yourself? LOL
Sorry Gusy!
My initial, overriding problem with Minecraft is that it encourages you to destroy the world to get resources. Branch mining in particular is just awful, boring and ugly (I know it is called MINEcraft
). Skyblock teaches you a lot about how to get resources by creating rather than destroying. I'm thinking of starting a new standard IE:E world for my friends, but wanted to give myself an extra challenge to avoid outpacing them, so I came up with a no-destruction policy. I just thought trying that idea out all by myself on a skyblock map first would be a good bootcamp introduction to accomplishing this. My friends would never play skyblock, but that doesn't stop me from playing skyblock-ish on a regular map with them.
