I live here now

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Drbretto

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Now the long winded explanation:

Rebecca: Hey, I was mining and I ran into this little pocket with some "nether guys". Could you come help me clear a path?

Me: Sure, why not? Just spent the last couple hours building some armor and a new sword, let's break it in. How hard could a couple of "Nether guys" be?

And that is what I ran into, lol. Made it out of there alive and 43 levels heavier. In a surprise twist ending, you see me depositing my XP back at my base, and meet a new player on this magical journey... (It helps to add your own dramatic music in your head)



One thing in particular that I love about this mod is that I haven't built a mob grinder or quantum quarry, so I have to kill for it, or mine it. Both of these things make it feel more like the extension if minecraft it's supposed to be, rather than a race to mimicking creative mode. It keeps it more grounded.

I desperately need to quit exploring and fix up that lot. The video was originally supposed to be a three oarter, showing off some of Rebecca's base. She's doing great. I'm super jealous if her plot and she's making good use of it. I will try to get a video of it soon.

But my lot looks like trash. I just haven't felt like doing any cleanup. I've just been blasting through and gearing up, and exploring and advancing my colony.

Who all HATE me, btw. I need to reread the happiness rules for villages and get them to start being productive. My happiness level is 1. Which means all my new recruits stays are 1s access the board. They're all clinically dumb.
 

Drbretto

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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.

 
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Drbretto

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Every time I take on one of these huge projects, there's a leap of faith. This is a huge project. This was not possible without the tremendous amount of inventory preparation I spoke about in the last post. And you're only seeing about 8 hours worth of the more interesting stuff. My base is running on potatoes and canola oil and everything is still manual. I am going through a tremendous amount if RF on this. Easily 100 million RF off the drill alone. I'm juggling over here, and taking complete advantage of every edge I have to keep up with everything. Oh, and I even had to stop everything in the middle if this, gear up for and find a water temple, kill all the guards and get a couple of sponges! And difficulty is maxed, I might add. I've seen zombies with 700 hps and full armor.

This was also hours of daydreaming at work. This is the leap of faith part. I have an idea of what I want it to look like, but it's fuzzy and it's all an idea. I have no idea if the work is going to pay off. It's only when you start getting into the trim that I can start to see it. Just like those pain-in-the-ice mountain generators.

Anyway, I'm starting to see it now. It takes all the way up until the grass grows (yesterday, you got to watch me break blocks. Today, you get to watch grass grow!), But I'm seeing the potential.


The last part of the previous video starts this one off because it makes obvious sense to put them together. I will continue to add to it. This is easily my best video if this modpack, so sit through it, lol. Personally, I find it mesmerizing.
 
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Inaeo

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For what it's worth, I like your plot of land. Personally, I would set buildings into the slope, rather than trying to flatten the whole thing out. It not only saves you the work (rather, make your Builder do it for you), but it makes your city flow with the landscape, feeling more natural. But I'm not one to throw stones, especially if you have a vision, so I'll just have to wait and see how you decide to paint your canvas.

I'll have to admit, watching you chew through all that Earth is somewhat mesmerizing and damn impressive. Knowing the sheer quantity of material you're carrying in those videos is nearly mind boggling. It's fantastic that you're able to collect so much, but more importantly you can put it away without spending half an hour sorting it all. I've no doubt that a strong inventory control system is the key to saving yourself time throughout the entirety of your world. Well played, Sir.
 
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Drbretto

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My original plan was to embed the buildings into the natural terrain, bit it just wasn't working out. I visited Rebecca's area that she had flattened out and was jealous of her Natural cliffs. The idea dawned on me that I could kill two birds with one stone. The flat land will make it a lot easier to design an attractive town plan. This ended up being the key to everything, but I don't know if I could pull it off until I got everything set up and got started. I have an idea where it's headed, but it's fuzzy.

Fixed the videos above, btw. No more overlap. There's digging the batcave and there's the landscaping.
 

Drbretto

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Productive weekend!

Here we see a town sprout out of the ground while I learn the very basics of Immersive engineering.

The primary goal was to set up this new camp. I'm overall happy with the direction. This pathways were supposed to affect the pathing but I'm not sure I totally get it. That'll all get replaced. Got some neat ideas for the centerpiece, too. It will be something you've never seen before, but will still seem very DrBretto. Stay tuned for that one.

But, here in the now, we have some movement on town development. And now that I know what I'm doing, the place is starting to really hop. Happiness is slowly on the rise. Overall happiness seems to be related to the stats of new villagers as they've all been all 1s so far. Once that's up, I'll probably replace everyone and micromanage job selection and all that.

Anyway, turns out the solution here is a good segue into the immersive engineering part. I like this mod, I really do. I'm just getting started, but I will have a whole system running off it. I set up some randomly placed powered lanterns and some semi randomly placed IE power generation both for aesthetics and to power the grid. I just gotta figure out where to put it all.

But, it's a much safer place. I couldn't keep happiness levels up because you need guards, and when the difficulty meter rises up, they're no match for the most basic spawns. Eventually, I will have this place 100% safe, but right now, it's at least improving.

So, so much more left to do.
 

KingTriaxx

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Immersive Engineering Powered Lanterns. They should stop mobs spawning within 32 blocks, and require very little power.
 

Drbretto

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Immersive Engineering Powered Lanterns. They should stop mobs spawning within 32 blocks, and require very little power.

Yep. I'm setting up a whole network of them. But, as of right now, they're just in there randomly. I need to plot out where to put them and possibly put up a wall, but right now, even just randomly out there, the difference is huge. I might see a group of zombies pop up if I don't sleep at all in a night, but for the most part, i'm pretty monster free.
 
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KingTriaxx

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Amusingly, LV wires used to be exactly 16 blocks, so you could just stretch them out with those as markers and it'd cover everything, but I think the distances changed.
 

Inaeo

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Amusingly, LV wires used to be exactly 16 blocks, so you could just stretch them out with those as markers and it'd cover everything, but I think the distances changed.
I'm almost certain the cable lengths are configurable. If I'm covering a large flat area, I would use chunk boarders as natural guides.
 

Drbretto

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So, is that the length of the copper wires? 16? If that's the case, I could just pop on the chunk outlines, then alternate repeaters and lamps like a checkerboard. Would that cover everything or is it a radius?
 

Inaeo

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So, is that the length of the copper wires? 16? If that's the case, I could just pop on the chunk outlines, then alternate repeaters and lamps like a checkerboard. Would that cover everything or is it a radius?
As far as I know, that should work. It is a radius, but the radii should overlap at the repeaters.
 

Drbretto

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OK, yeah, I just drew it out on a little bit of graph paper. As long as I do it checkerboard style, it will have overlap and no gaps. This will be simpler than I thought. I think I will cover the entirety of the radius that minecolonies covers (I bumped it up to 200, so if my rough calculations are correct, I will need about 245 lanterns and repeaters and 490 copper coils. I can just run them on the ground for now and worry about making them pretty later. It might even help me design the village better by making natural alleyways to run the lines.

I will likely need a couple more windmills sprinkled in there, but those are easy enough to just find in random villages.

Edit: Those calculations were way off. It's 54 lanterns and closer to 216 relays. That's sooo much easier to work with. This should take like 3 hours tops.
 
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