If you like blocks getting broken, this is the update for you!
Explanation first: This is all about my backpacks, but if I showed you a timelapse of me building an entire inventory system out of iron backpacks, you'd just watch me go back and forth between chests and the Crafting table. So, instead, what I could do was demonstrate the fruits of my labor with a demonstration.
First part is just digging the tunnel. I finally had a chance to use the Similsax Transtructor, which I totally had to just look up how to spell. This was a godsend when my tunnel ran into a canyon. It mad it a hell of a lot easier to build descending stairs over empty space. I thought it would look cooler with the camera angles but, eh.
Anyway, next part is the demonstration. I had everything firmly established. An AA drill with 5x5, speed 2 and fortune because I didn't just want a hole, I wanted the loot as well. I also had a magnet so I wouldn't have to chase any blocks, and an 18m RF capacity quintuple battery in my inventory to fuel both devices.
The entire exercise is to see what can be done on a single trip. Not one block can get destroyed or left behind. That included the probably 100 stacks if granite I picked up, which was the only thing that even made me break stride as I filtered them into my dump bags manually a couple of times. Everything else was pick up, compressed, processed and sorted on the fly. Maximum convenience, full scale test.
So, if you're wondering how big of a hole you can dig on one charge under these optimal conditions, that hole is it. I'm somewhere between impressed and disappointed. But I'm very happy with the inventory management portion of it. This was a total stress test and it passed with flying colors. Other than raw blocks that can't be condensed, like granite here, I could have been out there all day. It took less than a minute to dump all of it into permanent storage.
Absolutely loving Shneeky's idea to have a builder's bag that auto replaces common building blocks, thought about to make some serious use of that thanks to the final act of this video.
Here's the problem. Rebecca's plot is prettier than mine and that makes me angry and jealous. Since I can't just make her start all over again, I have one choice: time to do some major landscaping.
And boy do I mean major. This is just the first part of it, and to doesn't even come close to capturing how much digging this is going to be. I have a tendency to underestimate the amount of work involved in stuff, lol.
I think it will be worth it, though. It's encouraging so far. This will create some nice flat areas to build colony stuff on, but also adds some nice little cliffs like the game generates. I'll fix them up over time so they don't look as rough as they do now, but it's promising. I need to go a little bit deeper here, then replace a layer with dirt. This is where that builder's bag will come in handy. That is a WIDE area that needs to be filled in. Don't you worry, I have room. My mining bag compresses the dirt as it comes in. It's a diamond bag and had about 40 slots to work with. I had to empty it 3 times. Luckily, I can just convert it all to quad compressed for space.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed watching me break and store half a million blocks as much as I enjoyed spending 5 straight hours breaking them. We're finally getting to the parts where I can do stuff, so there should be more interesting updates along the way.