JaRyCu Plays FTB Presents Direwolf20 for 1.10.2!

JaRyCu · Oct 23, 2016

Time to change up this thread a little! Instead of starting a brand new thread, I'm just changing the title and encapsulating the previous entries. If you want to go back and review the gameplay journal for my (brief) Hermitpack entries, click the spoiler below and have at it. I love what I did there, but just didn't feel as if playing there was really worth it.

I promised myself I wouldn't do this, but I'm having SO MUCH FUN with FTB Hermitpack that I want to share it with any of you who either can't play it or haven't played it yet. This isn't my server - I'm playing on a friend of mine's server, and we started it the night Hermitpack went live, so I'm already around 2 weeks into this build. I didn't document it as I went, so you won't have to watch me chop trees and make cobble, make a mud hut, or struggle to find carrots so I don't starve to death.

Instead, you'll see the adventure well under way. In the very first post, I'm already into late game Botania. I haven't fought the Guaia Guardians yet, but I'm working my way to that. As always, this post will be the table of contents for this thread. You can always come to it and it'll have links to all of the other build journal updates so you don't have to scroll through looking for them.

The only modification I've made to the pack is that I'm using WAILA, WAILA Harvestability, and WAWLA. I've seen where the WAWLA author said this past week that he's adding support for The One Probe, which is in the pack by default, so I may switch back to that once he does.

As always, please make comments and suggestions and even insults if you feel so led. I love reading them all, and I often get cool ideas from what you tell me.

Post 1 - Initial Base Tour
Post 2 - The Great Chicken Culling of 2016
Post 3- Attacking the To-Do List

Now I woke up this morning to a message from @Boqzo1 telling me that Direwolf20 had just released a new video from a BRAND NEW MODPACK with his name on it, FTB Presents Direwolf20 for 1.10!! I was excited! DW20 for 1.7.10 was the first modpack I ever downloaded, so I figured this would give me a chance to go back to my roots.

I immediately hopped over to YouTube and watched the video, which honestly wasn't that exciting. If you've ever seen him start a new season of his LPs, you know that he basically digs a lot and talks about each mod in the new pack. This episode was no different, but it was a new modpack!!!

It took about 8 hours and it hit the Curse Launcher, and I immediately jumped in and started playing. Instead of putting all of my adventures here in the starter post, hit the link below, jump to Post 1, and check out my new starting area.

Post 1 - Starting FTB Presents Direwolf20 for 1.10.2
Quick Update - I'm Finally a YouTuber!

JaRyCu · Oct 23, 2016

Post 1 - Initial Base Tour

Hey hey everyone! As I said in the opening post, there is no starter post. We all logged on the night Hermitpack went live, and I immediately went to work. Our spawn area was in a nice oak/birch forest on top of a hill, so I cleared off a nice spot and staked a claim.

The very first thing I noticed is that our spawn had a Nature Core, meaning we had a constant supply of trees and saplings and animals even. Everyone else on the server didn't like it, so they spread out immediately. I stuck around, but had to leave for 3 days for work. When I came back, the entire spawn area was a solid wall of trees, literally covering 3-4 chunks.

I hacked away with a stone Tinkers ax for probably 3-4 hours to re-clear spawn, and ended up with enough wood that I haven't had to chop down any trees since then.

Then I built this as my spawn house:

Yes, those are pirate flags. About 200 blocks away was a coastline with 2 pirate ships that we raided that first night. I got 11 dispensers, 3 stacks of fire charges, several pirate flags, and the Pirate Captain's Hat. I was stoked!

This is the basement of the house, not the main level. I was going to put all my storage in here. The ladder you see goes all the way down to Y10. I've gotten to where I hate doing staircase mining to go down, so now I just build a 2-wide shaft and stick ladders in it. Much quicker.

I started Mekanism down in the mines and then realized I was doing exactly what I always do: I tech up as quickly as possible like I'm in a nuclear arms race, max out my resources, get AE2 (or Refined Storage since AE3 is still in development), and just go ham on the tech side.

NO. That will not happen this time. No, just no, just no.

I immediately stopped what I was doing, picked a direction, and left spawn. I took only what I could hold in my inventory (basic Tinkers tools, food, and some ores I'd mined already), and just wandered for an hour or two. I didn't know what I was looking for; I just knew I wanted something big and wide open where I could go into the magic tree instead of the tech tree this time.

Right at 2000 blocks from spawn I came across a village in a prairie. The prairie was full of herds of horses, and I liked how it looked and how there were no forests or mountains very close by, so I decided this was where I needed to be. The village was located on a small hill, so not all the houses were laid out just right. Some were high, some were low, and there was even a guard tower. I don't have any screenshots from the village before I took it over, but I really liked it.

The first thing I wanted to do was to protect the villagers. I knew that, since I was living here, lots of zombies and creepers would be coming into the village, so I built a 2-3 block high wall around the entire village. I had a ton of cobblestone, so that's what I used. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. After that, it needed a decorative entry/exit gate.

It's double-gated so that I can ride horses through it. I picked up this trick from iJevin on YouTube.

I'm not going to take the time (yours or mine) to explain every single picture...I'm just going to post the images in a spoiler tag so you can see what I've done with the village. I really want to dive back in and explore the Botania Corporea network, which I just found out about, and see if it's as cool as I think it is.

This makes unlimited Living Rock. I got the idea from Riskable on YouTube. You should check him out.

This is all the true tech that I have. I wanted to double ores, and I wanted a storage system. There are Mek windmills on the roof that provide power, and a 1M RF battery under the floor for backup.

The bottom train station of my mineshaft. That minecraft has a coal-powered engine, meaning it can go up and down without any redstone track at all. That's pretty awesome, I think!

I'm trying to find all the crops and crop trees for Pams. I have a lot of them here already.

This automagically grows all of the Botania Mystical Flowers. I can fire a shot from my mana blaster and break them all, then Hopperhocks pick them up. Much easier than going out and trying to find more.

My Botania Chicken Mana Farm. I think this was a Riskable idea as well, but I can't remember. All of the chickens lay eggs, which are picked up by a Hopperhock and throw by a dispenser on the opposite side of the pen. When the baby chicks grow up, they're killed, put into a furnace, cooked, and then the roasted chicken is dropped onto a Gourmaryllis which produces massive amounts of mana. I have it chunkloaded, so it never runs out of mana.

My suits of armor like to hand out and talk.

Just in case I need an Ender Pearl or 2, I decided I'd grow some.

Every single row is a different crop, and I use this to supply my Cooking For Blockheads restaurant. There are currently 36 different crops planted.

I don't count this as tech since I don't really know how it works. It produces 64 GP (ExtraUtils2) so that I can fly around using my Angel Ring. I think I could also play Tic Tac Toe on it.

There is a lot of stuff going on in that spoiler. To sum it up, I have a full restaurant based on Cooking For Blockheads; from Botania I have the Terrasteel Agglomeration Plate, Mana Enchanter, a fully-automatic livingrock generator, a fully automatic chicken farm producing mana, a semi-automatic Mystical Flower farm, and the Portal to Alfheim; I have a Refined Storage system up and running; basic Mekanism ore-doubling and smelting; ExtraUtils2 (XU2) GP production using water mills, a massive crop farm for Pam's Harvestcraft, along with the beginnings of an arboretum with a lot of Pam's crop trees (chestnuts, dates, peaches, etc.) growing; an Ender Lily farm; and a modified vanilla minecart that runs on coal and doesn't need redstone. There might be more. Before The Walking Dead premier tonight, THERE WILL BE MOAR.

If you want to see how the village is laid out, here is an aerial view of it:

The glowing orbs are from a mod called Cyclic, which I believe is an awesome mod and has RF-powered wands that seem to do everything. I found one in the nether that puts balls of light everywhere, so I use those instead of torches now.

As I do with my Slightly Modded Minecraft series, I'll put a link to the IMGUR album here at the bottom. Believe it or not, there are still more images I didn't include with this post!

link to the Imgur album

DireChyymeras · Oct 23, 2016

wow looking great so far, It looks like i'll have a lot of catching up to do

Boqzo1 · Oct 23, 2016

If only I could play! Oh wait... I'm the friend who's server you're playing on

Looks awesome! Can't wait to see you get into chisels and bits

JaRyCu · Oct 25, 2016

Post 2 - The Great Chicken Culling of 2016

I logged onto the server this morning to check on my base and finish an expansion I started last night, and I found out that my awesome chicken farm had someone expanded itself.

I'm playing on a server with chunk claiming activated, my chicken/mana farm is contained in fences, and yet I had roughly 5x as many chickens in the "safe side" of the pen as I had when I logged off last night.

Let that sink in for a second.

There were also chickens everywhere running around my base. Apparently fences aren't good enough to contain chicken eggs when they're thrown by dispensers. These chickens were ravenous, too, since I'd quit feeding them. Feeding chickens in Minecraft is like giving your girlfriend an aphrodisiac - they immediately want to get it on. (Or so I've heard. I play Minecraft, which seems to disqualify me from the dating pool of life. I prefer mana pools to dating pools anyways.)

When I got close, they formed into attack formation. I immediately drew my sword and thinned the flock. They flapped and squawked valiantly, and I may never forget the sounds of the great Chicken Culling of 2016, but I had to do it for the sake of the server.

I took all of the chickens and eggs and stuff and threw it back into the mana generation side of the system, and I had to go from 2 mana pools up to 6 with a mana distributor. This produced enough mana today so that I was able to make 8 terrasteel ingots, and I think I figured I want 20 of them total to make the armor plus a couple of toys that I found in the Lexica Botania. Considering the chickens are totally automatic, except for when I step away and they reproduce freakin' everywhere and I have to cull them, getting the terrasteel that I want will not be a problem.

Coolest Thing on the Server (so far)

So I had a great idea last night. Unfortunately it was interrupted by the season premier of The Walking Dead, and I've been a fan of that since episode 1, so I wasn't able to do this project until this morning. When I was building the automatic livingrock creator, it hit me that I could point pulse mana spreaders up in the air. I've seen videos where people use hopper clock timers and do water fountains that launch fireworks, and that's kinda cool, but how much cooler would it be if I had a giant fountain at the entry to my base, made 100% out of Botania materials, that shot periodic bursts of mana into the sky that changed colors as they went up?

Yeah...I did that. It was f'ing amazing. The only problem I have is that it eats mana and I didn't leave myself a good way to get to the mana pool and refill it, so I have to remove the water, open up the center of the fountain, and refill it with a mana tablet.

Totally worth it though.

That's not your eyes playing tricks on you. I used Botania's Rod of the Bifrost to make Bifrost Glass. That slowly rotates through all 16 colors, giving a really cool optical effect at night. I combined mana pearls with the mana lenses to create Rainbow Lenses, which force the mana beams to also rotate colors as they stream towards the heavens. This could possibly be my favorite thing I've ever built in Minecraft. The hopper-clock timer is underneath the far side of the fountain from this picture and it took the most work to figure out. I've never built one of those, either, and ended up finding this really cool picture that laid it all out for me. I set it to send out mana beams every 8 seconds. Between the hopper clock being 4 blocks underground and the sound of the water, you never hear the pistons firing unless you're directly on top of them.

Setting Up the Corporea Network & Base Expansion

Since I'm doing Botania, I decided to DO BOTANIA. I have a love/hate relationship with Applied Energistics 2 (as well as Refined Storage in 1.10). I love having all of my inventory available like in a nice computerized fashion, but I hate how dependent the entire modded community is on that system. It's as if you're not a true player of the game unless you have some sort of RF-powered mass storage system setup. In past modpacks, I've used Storage Drawers combined with JABBA barrels, I've used Logistics Pipes, and I've even used ProjectRed: Transportation, but I've had to come back to AE2 every single time. Part of that is my fault, I've now realized, because I looked at the game as a game of gathering the most resources possible. That's how my favorite YouTubers did it, so that must be the way it's done, right? I mean, if you're a month into a build and don't have 50,000 iron ingots at your beck and call, WTF are you doing?

No. Just no.

All of the stuff I showed off in Post #1 of this journal I built off of 1 mining trip using a Tinkers pick. I've picked up some extra diamond in redstone in The End and The Nether, but that's it. I don't have any form of automated mining. I refuse to just amass raw materials for the hell of it this play-through. I've been building with great thought to doing the least amount of terraforming and land disruption possible. For the most part...when I show you the overview of the base and you compare it to yesterday, you'll see the I moved quite a bit of dirt, sand, and water this morning.

Since I now have unlimited livingrock, I decided to use it as a building material. I formed it into bricks, mossy living rock, livingrock stairs, and I even broke it down with chisels and bits. I built walls out of cobble to expand the base, and then I built short walkways in all 4 cardinal directions from the fountain. Finally, with a little help from @AmethystQueen, I built up a small temple to house the access point for my Corporea Network.

I moved my armor stands in here. I'm currently wearing the all-pink elementium armor, and it'll go on the left-most stand tomorrow once I can craft the terrasteel armor. The manaweave robes, currently on the left, are my favorite armor in Botania so far. I also moved my petal apothecary here. The flower to the immediate right of it is called a Pitcher Plant. If clicked with a bucked or glass bottle, it gives you free water. Since Botania is all about flowers, I like that better than having a water pool close by. This plant isn't a Botania flower, though, so don't look for it in the mod.

I initially lit everything up with my "Flashlight Wand" as I call it, but then I went back and figuring out how to do Glimmer Mystical Flowers that Float and replace a bunch of the lights with those instead. They really looked a lot better in this area, which is going to be all Botania.

Remember the Storage Drawers shed from the last post? Well, I retro-fitted it with a corporea spark (and an underground Corporea pipeline) so that anything I put into it can be accessed from the Corporea Temple back by the fountain. I plan to put all of the Botania stuff into this storage area, and I'll keep all of the non-Botania stuff in the RS system. (At least until I start building out other mods, like Blood Magic and Reliquary.) Vazkii did an absolutely amazing job of writing the Corporea system. I'm only in the beginning stages of it, but I'm blown away. I'll have more to show off later on, once I setup automatic brewing and automatic rune-making.

Teru Teru Bozu

Since I'm in a village that's completely walled off and lit up, meaning that I am in no danger from mobs any longer, I don't tend to sleep at night to fast forward the game. The Minecraft developers, as vindictive as they are, foresaw players doing this and setup a mean little trick: The less you sleep, the more it rains. Well, pre-1.8 that wasn't so bad: just sleep and reset the rain timer every few in-game days. In 1.10, that's a problem. It seems that there is a very publicized bug in modded Minecraft that well get you stuck in your bed if you use any of the game's warping methods. (That means FTB utils "tp" command, JourneyMaps teleport, Mekanism's teleport, etc., all cause you to get stuck in bed if you sleep before logging off and back on after using them.) Vazkii inadvertently fixed this before it became broken by gifting us with the Teru Teru Bozu.

I love this thing.

It looks like a white, 1 block high Pacman ghost. Given his love of anime, I'm sure there's something in that world it references and I don't get since I'm not an anime guy myself. If you know, leave a comment below and tell me what it's all about.

All I know is that plopping it down and setting up a little redstone, it'll figure out when it's raining and then I can feed it a sunflower and it stops the rain. When it starts raining, it frowns, and as soon as I feed it, it smiles and the rain stops.

How AMAZING is that??

1 comparator, 1 piece of redstone (opposite side of the yellow block), 1 dispenser full of bonemeal that hits the sunflower planted in front of it, an open crate with a frame containing a sunflower, and a floating hopperhock all combine to stop the rain with no player input. And the teru teru bozu gets to keep on smiling.

I think that's all the major projects I took on today. I spent a good bit of time actually reading the Lexica Botania cover-to-cover. I've read most of it before, but now that I have the Elven Lexica, there is so much stuff I've never played with previously. Here are my plans for the rest of the week:

Automatic Kekimurus
1 Button Brewing
1 Button Rune Crafting
Botania auto-mining?

I'm sure there will be more stuff that happens, and I'm sure this will get a lot more complicated, but I'm an so excited by Botania. I got into it a decent bit in Regrowth, but playing it through this way is so much fun.

In other notes, I replaced my broken Steel Series headset this afternoon. It was an awesome headset and I got 2+ years out of it before I snapped it in half over the weekend. I went to Best Buy this afternoon and after about 30 minutes, I picked up the Turtle Beach 450s for $99. They're my first wireless PC headset, and I'm loving them. I've been listening to Lindsey Stirling & Hellberg on YouTube while I was writing this, and the sound quality if phenomenal. Why am I sharing that with you? It gets me one step closer to doing YouTube videos myself. In fact, I may do a base tour of this once I get farther into Botania.

How many of you would like to see that?

Finally, here's how the base changed today:

I haven't decided how to gate the entrance yet. I want it to look really cool, so I'm waiting until I make up my mind.

Link to the Imgur Album (twice as many pix as posted here are in the album!)

DireChyymeras · Oct 25, 2016

fun to see you moving to some more decorative elements

Boqzo1 · Oct 25, 2016

Looking really cool! I can't wait to see you eventually replace the cobble walls with something else or chisel and bit them. That is the thing that may tie it all together make it look even better!

JaRyCu · Oct 26, 2016

Post 3 - Attacking the To-Do List

Hey hey boys & girls! When I posted last night, I'd made a small list of things I want to accomplish. Just looking back at it, it doesn't look like much:

Automatic Kekimurus
1 Button Brewing
1 Button Rune Crafting
Botania auto-mining?

When you actually get into it, though, this list gets really complicated. Today I started towards automated cake-making, which means I can feed Kekimurus automatically. Before I did that, though, I had to cull another flock of chickens, and I found that I had 8 full mana pools.

That meant it was terrasteel time! As I often do though, I got distracted from that mission by something pretty I found in JEI: Display platforms. (If you're counting, this is getting to Inception-level distractions and I'm barely 100 words into the post. See how many I can come up with before it's over with.)

So here's what display pedestals are like:

I chose to put the Botania rods and instruments that I rarely use so that I can have more room in my golden bag that I designated for Botania. I think they're nifty, just like the armor stands.

OK so where was I? Let's collapse a level of distraction and go back to terrasteel. But before I can do that, my lava slime sapling looks kinda lonely. I think she needs a friend, so I go and look through my inventory and find a purple slime sapling hiding, so I need to find the slime island and get some slime dirt to plant it in.

This is way more important than terrasteel.

Now that's taken care of, and my base looks just a little less barren from all the terraforming I did yesterday. Terraforming...terra...oh yeah TERRASTEEL!!!

OK so this pink elementium armor is really getting on my nerves, and it's only the mid-grade armor for Botania. Everyone considers Terrasteel to be grindy, but I'm honestly not sure why. If you think it's grindy, you're doing it wrong. Modded Minecraft tends to be about excess. (I talked about this in last night's post.) Botania is no exception...once you get mana production underway, you need to keep expanding it to make more and more because you're going to want more and more stuff that is made wit mana. Terrasteel is one of the biggest parts of that.

So it's time to make terrasteel...but maybe first I should upgrade my mana spreaders from regular to elven. I'm tired of looking at the plain ones, and I've never had elven mana spreaders before. With the 2 stacks of chickens I got from the culling today, I need to be able to process mana more quickly...so why not?

Danged it! More pink! Vazkii!! What's up with the pink?!?

OK yeah back to the terrasteel. I have a 6 mana pool setup with the chicken farm. They're stacked on top of each other and around 2 mana distributors. When one level fills up, I just switch the spreader to the other tier and fill those up. Today both tiers are full, so I stuck sparks on all of them, then on a feeder pool because I don't know the range of sparks, and then finally on the terrasteel agglomeration setup doohickey, and I went for it.

And I had enough mana. Oh man was it glorious!

I didn't take the time to automate the process because the sparks sped it up so much. Drop 3 items, step back, wait 5-10 seconds, grab the ingot and do it again. No grind at all. After I got enough ingots to make the armor, I made the runes I needed, and then BAM. New armor. And it wasn't pink.

Then I needed to enchant the stuff. So I took my Botania enchanting section and added in the vanilla pieces to make it a full service enchanting station.

I had to add in 2 more pylons because none of the Botania Enchanter pylons were at the right distance to work on the vanilla table. I tried, though. So here's how this works: The vanilla table can go up to level 30, which is normal. No big deal. Find an enchant, stick in an item or a book along with some lapis, enchant away. If you're enchanting, say, your brand new terrasteel helmet with no enchants on it, just do it at the table. Let's say it already has enchantments on it because you enchanted the manasteel helmet you used to craft it, well, you need that handy dandy anvil to add enchantments to it. On the other hand, if you want to save some XP, you can use the Botania Enchanter to combine enchanted books with un-enchanted items at the cost of some mana. Everything you need, all at one stop. Bring your own lapis though. I guard mine jealously.

OK so now I have a fully-enchanted terrasteel armor set. What did I start off doing while ago? Oh yeah, automating cake.

Wait...cake...green armor...wtf. If you're keeping up, congrats. This is how my brain works and I'm barely keeping up.

There was an un-documented adventure at this point where AQ & I had to help another server member who lags like crazy get his stuff out of the nether. His armor is limited, we'll say, and he was like 2k blocks into the nether when he was bum-rushed by a herd of ghasts and blazes. (Ender zoo!!!) Well, I have the top tier Botania bow with unlimited arrows, it's enchanted to power 3 or 4, and I have the Reliquary charm that nullifies blazes and ghasts, and I have flight, so I am the biggest bad ass in our nether regions. (hehehehehehehe nether regions) We go down, I end up getting 10-15 ghast tears and 1/2 a stack of blaze rods while he got his stuff, and it was fun.

So now...cake. Yeah...I'm getting there.

I've got armor. I upgraded my tinker sword to the point that it has life steal 2, sharpester (level 4 sharp), mending 1,...blah blah it does 18 damage, heals me, and gets massive rewards. It's only rivaled by my bow. Now it's time to build.

I'm going to make this a stacking cake farm because, well cakes stack, so why shouldn't the farm?

First I laid out the sugar cane because that's easy. Dirt, water, dirt dirt, water, dirt dirt, water, you get the idea. Leave a walkway down the middle, do it again.

BTW, there are 30 sparks just on that level. There are 10 recessive sparks in the middle and 20 un-augmented sparks on the sides, along with 10 hovering hourglasses each containing 5 soul sand (5 minute timers). I put mana in the far pool and it automatically spread it to all the rest of the pools. Coolest thing I ever saw. Kinda. I had to go blaze farming before I could complete it. I ended up with a stack of blaze rods in 5-10 minutes due to the awesome sword I have. What you don't see in the pictre are the floating hopperhock, iron chest, corporea spark, and 2 floating agricarnations I added in after I put the roof on. I forgot about them at this stage.

Well, that was the easy level. Now it was time to do some wheat farming.

For this level, I needed 3 force relays, 20 dispensers, 4 agricarnations, 20 corporea funnels, 20 corporea sparks, a drum of the wild, a mana pool, 2 mana detectors, a ton of livingrock bricks, a master corporea spark, 2 more hopperhocks, 2 iron chests, 3 item frames (which involved a cow hunting expedition), and a regular chest. There might've been more. Oh yeah, there's also a pulse mana spreader and another hovering hourglass.

The next-to-last picture in that spoiler is the coolest thing to me. I'm so used to AE2 where you open a system and see how much stuff you have. I love how Botania gives you these blocks where you can set them to show you exactly what you have and you never click on it once you set it. Every time my sugarcane and wheat harvested, those numbers were instantly updated.

The way the system works is like this: The hourglass trips the pulse spreader, which fires a beam of mana through the drum of the wild, breaking all the wheat that's grown. The pulse hits the middle relay, gets sent to the side you can see in the last picture in the spoiler, where it trips the mana detector. That detector sets off a redstone line on two sides of the farm, bringing in seeds and planting them automagically, then it sends the pulse to the other side where the same thing happens. The final force relay sends the remaining mana back to the initial mana pool where it's stored to be used again later, saving me a ton of mana. There is an agricarnation on each corner, helping to speed up the growth of everything.

That's 1/2 of the farm done, and that's where I left off tonight. Tomorrow, after work, I'll go back in and get more chickens and cows so I can get the milk and eggs, and then I'll see about making the cake. There are a lot more images in the Imgur album for this post so you can see more angles of the wheat farm. Make sure you take a look.

JaRyCu · Oct 28, 2016

Post 4: The Return of Chuck & The Automation of Cake

Queue the theme music peeps - it has happened. Two things have happened actually. Do you remember Chuck from my Slightly Modded Minecraft build journal? Chuck was a chicken who thought he was a duck. He swam around the Isle of Sheep, guarding them from the super-predatory squid that surrounded the island. Well, when I logged on yesterday morning to the daily Chick-A-Pocalypse and inevitable chicken culling, I found a single chicken swimming in my mana fountain. I knew as soon as I saw his beady little eyes that that chicken was Chuck. I don't know how he made it into this world, but I knew I had to save him from the daily culling. I quickly built him a private enclosure and moved him to it so that he wouldn't see me slaughter his friends.

After @Boqzo1 picked on my cobblestone wall o'protection that covers the entire perimeter of my base, I've been slowly knocking it down in favor of other materials. Since this corner of the base has giant Botania structures, and I have an unlimited supply of livingrock, I opted to make livingrock fencing and proceeded to surround my gardens (the veggie and cake) with it. I'll admit that it does look a lot better. I also stopped using the RF flashlight and started making floating glittering Botania flowers as lights - they look more natural and really fit my base a lot better than glowing balls of light. You can see a few in the pictures of Chuck above.

Let's Make Some Cake

Alright let's think for a second. It's Thursday night as I type this up, around 8:30pm Eastern time. I started this Botania farm 2 nights ago. I built the sugar cane farm and the wheat farm and called it a night. The next day I worked my IRL job, then came back and automated chickens and milk, which honestly were really easy to do. With chickens, you just throw them in a pen and have a hopperhock pick up the eggs. I only have 20 chickens for this, so I just ignore the feathers and let them despawn. There's not enough to cause lag on the server, so it's a non-issue.

1 cow is all it takes. To get the redstone to work correctly, I actually have 18 buckets of milk. She fills them all at once and she's good to go. The system picks up the empties and, once there are so many on the golden pressure plate with her, triggers the horn of gathering, which scares her into shooting milk everywhere, filling all the buckets. Then another hopperhock picks up the full buckets and puts them in the chest on the left, where they wait to be called out by the cake maker.

And chickens...well...they just do their thing. They lay eggs, a hopperhock picks them up. That diamond chest on the left is literally half full after 24 hours.

Now that I had all the raw ingredients, it should be child's play to combine them into cake, right? I started off by making my first ever kekimuru.

I've been playing modded Minecraft for over a year and I've never made a kekimuru. This was a moment of pride.

As you can see in that spoiler, I also realized right before I made the flower that I hadn't converted any of the sugarcane into sugar. Ooops. I automated that process and now all of the sugarcane is automatically converted as soon as it's plucked. I have an entire diamond chest full of sugar.

Now to make the cake. I honestly had no clue where to start. I didn't let myself go on any side adventures, and I literally spent 6-7 hours yesterday trying to build a small, square, automated thing to make the cake and I failed no matter how I did it. I eventually quit and shut down Minecraft entirely. I played a little Factorio, and then a little Civ 5, and then watched the Cubs smack the Indians in the 2nd game of the World Series. I'm a Red Sox fan, so it was nice to see the Cubs knock around the Indians some.

As I lay in bed, drifting off to sleep, I couldn't get this cake maker out of my head. I fell asleep thinking about it and woke up around 4:30AM with the answer. I didn't get up because I had to work this morning, but the idea stuck in there. I thought about it all morning at work. I got home after lunch and watched a little YouTube, turning over the idea in my head again and again, then played some more Civ 5, and finally logged into Hermitpack.

All of the videos I saw on YouTube showed everyone making this ultra compact Botania cake maker farm. Honestly that's what inspired the first half of my farm. The problem I ran into was that I couldn't get the mana to travel through all of the force relays. It would peter out about halfway through and my cake would fail.

My solution: screw all the force relays and the compactness. If it doesn't work, who cares how small it is! First, let me show you the picture of what I came up with in my head:

Very detailed explanation: I setup a mana battery consisting of 16 mana pools on the left. Pool #16 has a recessive spark on it. (It's the one you see that has the mana spreader shooting into it.) When it gets mana, it automatically shares that mana with every pool within range until they'll all equal. At the bottom of the battery, you see a hovering hourglass, mana pulse spreader, and a force relay. I've set it so that the timer triggers the pulse spreader every 35 seconds. (30 was a little too short.) That force relay throws the mana beam up to the livingrock brick in the top center of the picture, and it passed through the mana detector to the next force relay on the right of the picture, which sends it back to pool #16 to recycle the leftover mana. The detector triggers the redstone repeater, which fires off all the redstone on top of the corporea funnels. I have every ingredient setup in order from the top left to the bottom right of the recipe. Each funnel pulls its item from the corporea network and drops it into a hopper. The way I have it setup, everything is deposited in order into the crafty crate, which drops 3 buckets and a cake down onto the blue block. The rannucarpus has a blue block buried under it, so it puts the cake on that block and the kekimuru eats it, throwing mana to the elven spreader. I threw a solegnolia in after I completed it so that no one will accidentally pick up a cake or bucket with their magnet should they come to look at it.

I initially set the timer to 30 seconds because Jansey said the kekimuru can eat 2 cakes per minute. In Hermitpack, it seems that it's more like 1 cake every 30-35 seconds, so I opted for a slightly slower option so that I didn't have cakes just hanging around.

I also setup an off switch for the entire thing.

I honestly don't know if this will work, but I think it will. A mana pool gives off a signal when it's full. That signal is either a 15 or 16. The torch in the picture is giving off a 15. A hovering hourglass will turn off with a signal of 16. What I'm hoping will happen, and I'll find out later tonight, is that the pool will trigger the comparator when it's full, which will send a signal to my repeater with will throw a 16 and turn off the hourglass. In theory (and ad hoc testing) it should work, but it might need tweaking. I also plan to expand the battery to 2-3 stories because why not?

Did Someone Say Giant Cake?

In celebration of finally getting the cake farm to work, I decided it would be fitting to build a large 3D pixel art of a cake.

That cake is 14 blocks on each side and 4 blocks high. It is hollow, so I'm sure that there are mobs spawning inside of it. (I forgot to light it up.) I made the entire thing out of anti-blocks, which are 8 smooth stone in a donut around 1 glowstone. It can be chiseled into any of the 16 base colors.

Culling of the Chickens, Part II

I have got to figure out how the chickens are getting out. I'm going to raise the fences on the Botania chicken mana farm and see if it helps; if not, I may convert the farm to a cow/steak mana farm instead. That'd be a lot quieter and more compact, too.

This is what I found when I logged in. How TF are they getting out?

4 stacks of eggs, 4 stacks of feathers, and 3 1/2 stacks of raw chicken after I killed them all. The hopper got stopped up because a feather somehow made it's way into the furnace, so nothing could cook until I figured that out. That was a blessing in disguise because all 6 of the mana pools were full. I added a 3rd tier, so now the chicken farm has a 9-pool battery to go with it.

That's pretty much it for the last few days. Now it's time to start gearing up for the Guaia Guardian 1 & 2. I've got to farm wither skulls because I want to make a couple of beacons to really help out in that fight. I also want to do all of the Botania challenges. That means push button autocrafting and even a quarry that moves itself. I've almost worked out in my head how to do that, but it'll take some tinkering. We'll see.

After I that, I think I'll be starting into Blood Magic. I think I'm going to start a new base just for Blood Magic and leave this village as my Botania Village. What do you think? Should I mix the mods together or keep them separate? Should I try a different mod first? Maybe Roots? Let me know your thoughts.

Make sure and check out the Imgur Album for this post. There are A LOT more pictures for this post showing the details of the entire cake farm so you can get a better idea of how I did it. If there are more angle you'd like to see, let me know. Also contact either myself or @Boqzo1 if you'd like to apply for access to the server. My entire base is chunk-guarded, but it's still free for anyone on the server to come and look at. If I'm on, I'll even port you out to it to make it easy on you.

RenzosNips · Oct 28, 2016

I literally just got done automating my kek-flowers. It's interesting to see a pure Botania set up.

JaRyCu · Oct 28, 2016

RenzosNips said:
I literally just got done automating my kek-flowers. It's interesting to see a pure Botania set up.

I think I want to complete all of the challenges in the Lexica Botania. @Vazkii built the mod to be completely workable with only his mod and vanilla, so I'm really against adding in ender conduits and dimensional transceivers to get things done this time around. I'm still got some reading to do and some figuring out to comtemplate, but I'm going to start working my way through the rest of the challenges when I log back into the server in a little bit.

JaRyCu · Oct 30, 2016

We held a server vote this morning and the general consensus was that Hermitpack is just not that good of a modpack. I really hate to say that, especially given that I play Minecraft nowadays mostly due to the work of a lot of the Hermitcrafters on YouTube, but this pack was nothing more than a small kitchen sink pack. There was no sense of progression, no gating, not even any goals to work towards besides artificial things that you came up with yourself.

And things tended to break too easily. My last journal update in here documented how I spend 2-3 days working on automated kekimurus using nothing but vanilla and Botania items. Well, I ran through all the wheat I had in reserve, so I simply turned off the machine by taking all of the sand out of the hovering hourglass. I didn't change anything else. The next afternoon, maybe 18 hours later, I logged on and the machine no longer made cake when I started it back up. The ingredients went into my hopper line in one order and came out in a different order for no reason that I could find. That means they went into the crafty crate in the wrong order, and nothing but a jumble of ingredients came out the other side.

I think that the team at FTB really rushed this modpack since they've had nothing in the works for quite a while. I know there are videos where select players are showing Infinity 1.10 alpha play, but there's literally been no communication on Twitter, no FTB Newsletter, nothing in quite a while. It really feels like FTB merged with Curse and then died, and this pack was a last gasp to try and stave off that death for a while.

For now, @Boqzo1 has switched his server over to Infinity 1.7.10 Skyblock, and I'll be playing that, but I think I'll also take the plunge and build my own modpack. I don't know what that entails, but a lot of the big mods are jumping up to 1.10 now and it seems like a good time for me to learn how this works.

Thank you for reading, and I know I'll be back soon with another build journal.

Boqzo1 · Oct 31, 2016

Could not have worded it better myself

JaRyCu · Nov 15, 2016

Post 1 - Starting FTB Presents Direwolf20 for 1.10.2

Hey hey hey! It's time for a new build journal, and this time it's one I've been looking forward to for a long time. If you read the first post, you'll know that DW20 for 1.7.10 was the very first modpack I ever played. It introduced me to Buildcraft and Thermal Dynamics and all of the really cool YouTubers who "taught me" how to play all the different mods and maps in the 1.7.x world of modded Minecraft. I was captivated. (Side note: this also led to my current YouTube addiction...I now watch approximately 10x more YouTube than I do actual TV, Netflix, and Amazon combined.)

I was also late to the game. I didn't understand how it worked back then, but my vanilla, non-modded client was 1.8 and I was stepping backwards to play all of the 1.7 packs. The Direwolf20 pack for 1.7 had been out for quite a while, so everyone was playing this new Infinity pack, and then Infinity Expert came about and I really jumped in with that pack, even starting a server here on the forums. (I closed it down months ago, so don't ask to join! LOL) Since last summer, roughly 16-18 months ago, I've watched tons of Direwolf, Hypno, Jevin, Sl1pg8r, DMAC, WTFG33ks, GamingOnCaffeine, and who knows else play Minecraft on YouTube and then try to recreate what I've seen.

This time I'm going to get ahead of the game and start doing my own thing before I see it built out. I may even LP this onto YouTube if there's enough response on here. Yall let me know if this is the pack you'd like to see me try to record.

For this entry, there's nothing really unusual. I walked around. A lot. Like, 1000 blocks a lot. The seed for my world is "JaRyCu" (no quotes) because, well, that's my name. I spawned into a cool area, but I wanted something else. It didn't take long to come to a gigantic mountain, but I didn't like that side, so I just walked around it and I eventually found this:

This is going to be my home for quite a while. Tons of materials to build a smeltery, nice plains all around this side of it and forests not too far off. I later found a desert less than 400 blocks away, so I have all the sand I could ever want. This is perfect!

I immediately punched some wood, made some basic tools, and then dug into the corner of the mountain. I didn't do the Hypno thing and go way, way, way in. I like the sunsets in MC too much, so I dug just deep enough to get some chests, furnaces, and a bed down, upgraded my tools, and then dug down to Y10. Well, almost. At Y30, I ran into a ravine, so I just placed cobble steps down the rest of the way. I didn't take pictures because we've all seen underground ravines. There was nothing especially cool, either, so you might see it later on, but don't count on it unless I find a dungeon with spawners while I'm mining.

Next up, I realized I'd gotten 3 stacks of clay while I was mining, so I found the desert and got sand and just dug up some of my lakes to get the gravel, and ended up with 6 stacks of grout. Mega smeltery and tool forge time on day 1?? What??

I carved a hole in my base's inside wall and placed down a 3x3x3 smeltery and then proceed to make the tool forge.

Except.

There's no tool forge recipe in this pack. The item is right there in JEI, but you can't craft it. So no lumber axe, beheading sword, or massive hammer of stone death! This is going to really disrupt my standard gameplay. Normally I take a hammer, add some modifiers, and whack down miles of stone tunnels to find all kinds of stuff. I looked through the modlist, and there are tons of other things I can, so I'm going to stretch myself a little and go down another rabbit hole in the next few days. I haven't decided which pack's tools to use, but I'll pick one and run with it.

In the meantime, I'm going to play around with Actually Additions and see what it's all about. I made a coal generator tonight and the laser thing, set them up, and then decided I'd played enough for one night. In actuality, I spent 2-3 hours in my world. My normal tendency is to go balls-to-the-wall and really immerse myself, but it burns me out. That's why I haven't updated my Slightly Modded journal in a bit - I'm still playing it, but there hasn't been anything of note to show off. I don't want to do that here. I'd rather play a little less each day and play for a lot longer in the long run.

Anyways, here are a few shots of my base and what I accomplished today:

small canola farm

small tree farm too

This is my base from the outside. I dyed the glass blue because it looked cool.

KingTriaxx · Nov 15, 2016

Tool Forge recipe hasn't changed, so it should be fine to just craft it like normal. JEI sometimes has a hissy.

JaRyCu · Nov 15, 2016

KingTriaxx said:
Tool Forge recipe hasn't changed, so it should be fine to just craft it like normal. JEI sometimes has a hissy.

I'm actually not even going to check to see if I can craft it. Whether I can or not, I like thinking that I can't and forcing myself to explore different ways of doing things. I've never built the Immersive Engineering drill, and it seems amazing, so I'm going to angle for that. I know there are other mods with drills, and I can always do the Tinkers modifiers that expand both the vertical and horizontal areas that a pick can mine, so I can get the same effect with different tools if nothing else.

At least, until I see Direwolf20 do it himself on his LP series, and then I may revisit these thoughts.

JaRyCu · Nov 18, 2016

Quick Update: I'm Finally a YouTuber!

I've finally done it! I am now a YouTube LP'er. I decided to start with DW20, but it's not the same world that I'm showcasing here. As of this morning at 7A Eastern, my first video went live. After work today, I've uploaded 3 more, and I've set them to release at a rate of 1 per morning at 7A each morning. If you'd like to see me play and actually hear what I sound like, please click over and have a look!

Thanks everyone!

GamerwithnoGame · Nov 18, 2016

JaRyCu said:
Quick Update: I'm Finally a YouTuber!

I've finally done it! I am now a YouTube LP'er. I decided to start with DW20, but it's not the same world that I'm showcasing here. As of this morning at 7A Eastern, my first video went live. After work today, I've uploaded 3 more, and I've set them to release at a rate of 1 per morning at 7A each morning. If you'd like to see me play and actually hear what I sound like, please click over and have a look!

Thanks everyone!

I'm definitely checking this out! Woo more series to watch!

Hurst_Quayzar · Nov 22, 2016

Subscribed! Liked! And following... LOL!

JaRyCu · Nov 22, 2016

Hurst_Quayzar said:
Subscribed! Liked! And following... LOL!

Thank you! I really appreciate that! I'm also starting a Vanilla 1.10.2 series...recorded the first 2 episodes this afternoon, will set them to release starting tomorrow.

JaRyCu Plays FTB Presents Direwolf20 for 1.10.2!

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