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I'll answer this a little cryptically. I'm in sales and I'm also a serial entrepreneur. I learned a few years ago not to reveal too much about yourself in online forums when someone traced me, stalked, me, and got me fired from a job and also cost me my second business. We'll just say that I've built 2 businesses from scratch. The first one made 6 figures for 3-5 years before the economic crash took it out in 2009 and the second one was approaching $50k in revenue in it's second year before I was cyber-stalked. I attempted a 3rd business in 2013 that never got off the ground. I've been studying YouTube marketing, and my second business was in website development and social media marketing, so I'm hoping to combine those into a successful business here in late 2016 and early 2017, starting with Minecraft gameplay and expanding after that into other games (all sim-based) that interest me. (I don't play a wide variety of games, but I really like Prison Architect and I love OpenTTD.)
For some reason Minecraft got my attention back in 2014 for a brief minute, but I didn't know what to do with it and gave up on it a month later. I came back to it last August, discovered modding in September, then FTB in October and have alternated between MC and WoW ever since. I like WoW since it has a lot of character immersion. My main character there is a human warlock, and I really get into character. I play her as an evil wretch who hates everyone, including all of her own guildmates, and they all love it. (I also give away gold and run low levels through whatever they need, so she has a soft side to her.) I have every class in the game at 100+ (I'm slowly working on getting them to 110 since Legion launched, but none are there yet.) Each of the classes that I like, I've developed a personality for that character that's different from the rest. They all share a very egotistical trait, though, which I suspect comes from my own personality.
I've spent hundreds of hours over the last year watching a lot of the Hermit Crafters, Ethos, and even a little of that Captain Sparklez guy (is that his name?), not to mention WTFG33ks, Gaming on Caffeine, and Direwolf20. I started watching them just to see what you could do in FTB Infinity regular, and then I started watching them to see how they broadcast, what they choose to show off, and what type of tone they used to draw in viewers.
Having said that, I expect my first 10-20 videos to completely suck while I find my voice. In the real world, I'm almost a master comedian, playing off of everyone. That makes me very good in sales, and I am always told how good I am at relating things in simple, understandable terms to others. That's the tack I intend to take with my YouTube channel once I start it.
That's a lot more than intended to type when I started this, but the words started flowing when my fingers touched the keyboard. Hopefully it lets you know a little about me.
I suggest one minor but persistent gimmick. Iskandar falls off of things, Direwolf hates endermen... that kind of thing. I do trains. Perhaps more trains than are good for me, but there you go.
I suggest one minor but persistent gimmick. Iskandar falls off of things, Direwolf hates endermen... that kind of thing. I do trains. Perhaps more trains than are good for me, but there you go.
Yeah, I've noticed that each person has a gimmick. Sl1pg8r was always over-excited, DMAC was very "California Cool" as I think of it, Ethos never finishes anything, Gaming on Caffeine sounds like he's racing Death Incarnate to speak every word in the English language, all at once. I'm not completely sure what my gimmick will be, so I'll just kind of see what works out.
First thing's first: I gotta get over the pain of tooth extraction...I was supposed to go back to work today and it still hurts to talk. Can't sell if you can't talk.
Well... you can, but probably not what you're trying to sell.
Sl1p still is awesome, but he doesn't play Minecraft much any more. I wish he'd play some more Farming Simulator, because that one was awesome. GoC I can't quite get into. I'm not sure why.
I prefer guude or vintagebeef to the others. Though beef is mostly a vanilla guy. If you want a laugh... jsano and guude had been doing a series called space chickens. Combine galacticraft and chococraft and see if you can get one to space. Haven't been on YouTube in a while though
Warning: Some of the spoilers will have a lot of pictures.
If you've read post 6 where I found the cave I've been searching for, you'll know why there will be lots of pictures. If my mouth felt better, I'd even consider starting an LP series with this post because this cave is going to turn into a build of epic proportions. I think it's bigger than what iJevin & Etho are currently working with in their LPs. I snapped a couple of screen shots that show some of the mine tunnels. You can compare them to the overworld shot from the previous post to get an idea.
Same map, one with waypoints turned off so that you can see the underground structure better. The line going towards the west in the center is dark in the middle because it's ANOTHER ravine that I stumbled into. I lit up the sides, but it was wide enough to look dark in the middle on the map. I think I've gone through 8-10 stacks of torches so far and I still haven't lit up everything. I've even switched into "cheat mode" so that I can use JourneyMap to warp back and forth to get torches more easily.
Deciding on where to put things and even what things to build has been a distressing experience. There is so much room, but a lot of the bigger rooms are separated by narrow tunnels.
I decided to focus on basic needs first. I lit up the entrance cavern, setup a crafting table, furnace, anvil (my tools have cool enchants I don't want to lose), some storage, and a small manual potato farm. I also started enclosing the entrance cavern so that it's easier to defend should hostiles decide to invade.
I thought the iron bars added a cool look and they also gave me more time to fend for myself if I was sleeping or crafting and something decided to come in that entrance. I filled in a stack or two of smooth stone in what I hope looks like a natural pattern. I still have a gigantic opening here and I'm deciding if I want to leave it open like it is or do some kind of cool artwork that I'm totally not qualified to do and close it in. I'm opting towards leaving it wide open.
Now that I'm semi-safe and secure here, I decided the next thing I'm going to need is a large storage and smelting area. There's a tunnel directly under the work area in the last picture in the above spoiler, so I went down it and found a perfect area where I could carve out a storage room. Then I decided that, since it's close to the top and any loot pirates might want to get in, I might as well hide it a little. I'm horrible at redstone, so I hopped on YouTube and started a creative mode test world and tinkered until I got the design right, then proceeded into my cave and got it all wrong. Twice. The finished product is not what I wanted, which was an Etho-style door; rather, it's more like a bank vault. It does work for me, however, so I'm going to stick with it for now.
The door operates on a T flip flop so that the door stay open or stay shut until you trip the switch again. That was neat to me since I didn't even know you could do that until I saw Etho do it on a much more massive scale. I plan to revisit this in a few days and change it from an obvious pressure plate to a less obvious button somewhere so that the room is totally hidden.
I also used smooth bricks all over the room. After I put up 16 double chests (8 regular, 8 trapped so they can be side-by-side), I decided the 4th wall needed to be a showpiece. I wish vanilla had actually fish that swam around because I would've made that an aquarium, but it still looks neat. I put glowstone bricks into it as well. After I go and gather more wood, I plan on putting a label on each chest in order to remind myself what's in each one.
What do you think boys & girls? It's not a lot so far, and I really want some ideas on really awesome things that a) I can build and b) will teach me more about redstone. I love the feedback, both here in the thread and also in the private messages I've been getting. I'm also setting up a Curse community called Craftitude. If you'd like to be a part of it, message me at JaRyCu on Curse and let's get things started!
Very nice! Is that dark oak? Spruce? Looks spiffy, the combination of stone and wood.
My building buddy made a waterfall door for our base, some careful shaping of the water (channel across the ceiling, channel across the floor) makes a nice flowing water wall you can step through. Okay, you have to kind of jump, to get over the floor channel, but it's a short hop. I was reminded of that when I saw your aquarium wall.
My building buddy made a waterfall door for our base, some careful shaping of the water (channel across the ceiling, channel across the floor) makes a nice flowing water wall you can step through. Okay, you have to kind of jump, to get over the floor channel, but it's a short hop. I was reminded of that when I saw your aquarium wall.
For squid, I cheat a bit; capture squid with a Safari Net and release into the tank. Using the Jailer's Safari Net from MFR keeps them from despawning.
I started doing the squid farm when I found out that the MFR Rancher "farms" squid for ink scs, which I find preferable to just killing them. Usually I'll put a tank in the floor, glass top and jack o'lanterns to keep it lit. Hide the Rancher off in a corner, it'll fill a diamond chest with ink sacs pretty quickly, depending on how many squid I have in the tank. I hadn't thought of a wall tank until I saw your aquarium, going to try that next.
I actually created an impromptu vanilla squid farm. I was living underwater, and had fence walls. Log on the bottom, 2 fences, log on top. The squids would swim up, get pushed down by the water and suffocate, then drop the ink sacs. Perhaps line the bottom with hoppers instead of logs, and that would do the trick.
The "gimmick" is already here. @JaRyCu needs to insert books into his world describing secret tunnels/redstone etc that he doesn't mention in his posts and then add world uploads somewhere on the interweb. His words are his weapons!
Hey there boys & girls! I hope you're having an awesome day today. I took a day off from my Slightly Modded Minecraft world to watch COLLEGE FOOTBALL!!!! and play a little Regrowth, but I'm back at it this beautiful Sunday morning. While I was out spelunking, I happened across 2 cave spider spawners AND an abandoned mine shaft. This is awesome! Except, well, cave spiders are a @#$%^ to kill, and their hitbox is only 1x1, so it's kinda tough to trap them somewhere that I can hit them without them being able to hit me. I Googled and YouTubed and got the general idea of what to do, then I set about making my very own cave spider XP farm!
So excited! I searched high and low and near and far near my home base and never found any spawners at all. This spawner's almost directly under my new cave base, so it's fairly close, but far enough away that I don't trigger the spawner when I'm not in the spawning room. That's awesome! After going back to the main base, I came back and started mining out a rather large room. I probably overdid it, but I'd rather have too much room that not enough and have them spawning on top of me. Right?
I didn't get a picture of it, but I basically setup 3 water streams to wash all the spiders to the center of the room and then down a tunnel and out of the room. From there, I dug up to where I'm standing, setup the fence so that the spiders couldn't get out but I could still hit them, and found out they can reach like 2 blocks away from where they are and poison you. Yeah! 2 frickin' blocks! So I added more fence like you see in this picture so that I knew where I could safely stand and AFK while they built up. Then I set about decorating the room up a little.
I also threw in a few chests so that I could store things.
Pretty cool, huh? That's only one spawner...I'm not totally sure, but I think the other one is a little too far away to do the double spawner thing, so I just lit it up and let it be. I have it marked so that I can go back to it later, but really, I'll never need that many spider eyes and string, and this one produces enough XP to make me happy.
Since I have an XP farm now, I decided that I should go ahead and put in enchanting room right next to it. That way I don't have to travel back to the top of the base, then into the nether, then wander the 500-600 blocks to the home nether portal, and then to my home base enchanting building. Yeah...did I mention my home base is a long ways away from here? We're talking 4000-5000 blocks (4km-5km) away. It's a lot easier to just walk 10 blocks and enchant stuff.
I used an online program with my world seed to find a Bryce Mesa biome because I really wanted some colored clay. I haven't shown it off yet, but it's almost 5400 blocks away. I've setup a nether portal for it, too, and I'll feature it in another post later. What do you think about the design?
OK, now back to what this post and Prince Charming have in common: That'd be nothing but sarcasm. Since I have an XP farm now, I need some way to kill these spiders. (Like I said, I didn't setup the redstone timer thing to knock them down to 1/2 a heart...I'm still figuring out how to do that.) I already had a diamond sword, so I decided to enchant it and it came back perfectly!
Bane of Arthropods II!! That's an awesome enchantment for a cave spider xp farm! Combine that with the fact that the combat update for Minecraft gave up AOE damage, and I'm killing these things super fast. I also have Sharpness 2 or 3 on a book, but I can't add it to the sword for some reason. Oh well, such is life. I'll make another sword with that on it for regular use and just use this one for the XP farm.
I know this is a shorter post than usual, but I spent a lot of time setting up the cave spider XP farm and then the new enchanting room. That is so worth it to me, and so exciting because I've never setup my own XP farm before. I'd either spend all night hunting for things to kill, or if I was on a server, I'd use other people's XP farms. This was a neat experience.
It's been a week since I last updated the journal, but there hasn't been a HUGE bit of building going on. I've been tweaking the base and really trying to decide what all to do with this massive cave, and I've been playing with various things.
The first thing I really needed was a sheep farm that's not 4km away from my base. I want to use wool because it has lots of bright colors, vs the hardened clay which has lots of deeper and more drab colors. Luckily there are sheep a couple of valleys over from the base, so I carved out a little sheep farm and brought in 2 to get started.
They're racist and can't stand being around each other. I was able to coerce them with a little wheat I treated with an aphrodisiac, and out popped Baby Dollyham.
After that, I decided that I needed sharp and spikey things, so I built an automatic cactus farm. Luckily cactus can be harvested without redstone, so it was pretty easy to setup.
The cactus farm is close enough to the main part of the base that it's always loaded when I'm there, so it should produce a lot of cactus now that's it has grown out. I'll have green sheep soon!
I've added more things that grow as well.
I plan on automating this later, but for now it works. Those melons grow fast, too!
Can you automate cocoa beans?
You've seen this before, but now I've doubled the size and added wheat to the 2 new rows. Those sheep gotta eat. I haven't found any villages close by or I'd bring in a farmer villager or two and have them work the field for me.
Another change I've made is that I was forced to close in the entrances some for safety reasons. I've had countless creepers, zombies, and skele-archers come running in on me, and I'm sick of it. I loved the wide open space, but I don't want anything blowing up my hard work. I also got tired of getting rained on in my bed...this isn't Guantanamo Bay here.
I didn't close it all the way in - I still like the view. There is an iron rail beyond the front wall so nothing can get in, and a deep ravine is right on the other side of what you can see so nothing can just wander up from there. It's very safe now.
Finally, I did something I've never done before. I installed shaders. OMG my world looked amazing, but I dropped from 100+ FPS down to 10. I decided not to play with shaders on, but I'll drop into creative and fly around and take screenshots for each new journal entry so that you can admire my world. Here are a few shots, along with one non-shader shot for comparison.
Before
After
Other Notes:
Hermitcraft and FTB joined up this week and released the Official Hermitpack through FTB and Curse. I plan on attempting to launch the first Craftitude server next weekend (Oct 14th), using the server version of that pack. If you're interested in taking part, please PM me and let me know.
Sorry for the lack of content this month. When FTB released Hermitpack, I contacted @Boqzo1 and he setup a server for a few of us to play on, so I've been busy with that. I didn't launch the Craftitude server yet - since Boq is running Hermitpack, I'm waiting on FTB Infinity 1.10 to launch Craftitude.
My Slightly Modded Minecraft world has not been forgotten - I'll be going back to it soon to build more stuff and possibly even use ideas I've come up with on the Hermitpack server. I'm still looking for more people to join the Craftitude community on Curse with me, so you can still feel free to PM me if you're interested.
Hey hey guys! I'm returning to my Slightly Modded Minecraft play through today. After going full bore into the Hermitpack for the last few weeks, I've noticed that are some basics that I was really missing in my mostly-Vanilla playthrough, so I've added those to the pack:
Biomes O'Plenty (I love to walk through the world, but I missed the BOP variety from my 1.7 maps.)
Quark
Chisel
Chisels & Bits
Tinkers Construct
Tinkers Tool Leveling
Iron Chest
Storage Drawers
Bagginses
Forestry
JEFB (Just Enough Forestry Bees)
Why did I add all of these mods today? I loved having access to the extra building options they provided in the Hermitpack. I don't want to get stuck with just different shades of stone/cobblestone - I want totally new and different blocks. I wanted better storage than just wooden and trapped chests. I want tools that can let me spend less time mining and more time building.
Now I'm going to go and dive into the game and hopefully build something really cool later tonight to show off to everyone. Don't expect me to update the builds that already exist for a while...I'm going to pray my world doesn't break (it's backed up!) and travel a ways out to get the new biome and ore generation. Be prepared for some cooler things, though!
I was pleasantly surprised today when I got a message from @Boqzo1 letting me know he'd taken my suggestion and started a 100% vanilla server! I immediately stopped what I was doing, cooked some IRL cheeseburgers (OMG were they good!!) and then hopped on the server. I was in paradise. As you can tell from watching this thread, there's something I find so fulfilling about playing vanilla Minecraft. Modded is a ton of fun, but nothing beats vanilla to me. You don't have many blocks to choose from, but the things you can make out of those blocks is just amazing.
So, let's get this out of the way first: We are looking for more builders! Send a message to @Boqzo1 here on the forums and he'll link you in to the Curse group where you can apply to get onto the server. We're running 2 servers currently: 100% Vanilla and FTB Infinity Skyblock. I'm playing both, but I'll be spending most of my time on the Vanilla server.
What am I looking for? I want someone who can help me build cities. Not towns or villages, but entire cities. The one I'll be showcasing for my next few posts in this journal will be a village that started as a fishing outpost and grew into a regional trading center. As this server progresses, I want to setup more cities with roads and possibly even rails to transport people, animals, and stuff in-between them. This will be like the Silk Road back around 500-1000AD. Each city will specialize in different commodities, so you won't find the same thing in each one. Obviously the one I am building will specialize in things that come from the ocean: fish, salts, etc. Later on, I may build one that has massive quantities of gold, or lapis, or wool, or leather...all the different goods that Minecraft offers. I have a feeling, though, that this will be so much more fun if by having more players online and helping to build. We'd like to build a nice-sized community, so let Boq know you want to get boqqed up and play with us!
Now on to the journal entry:
I decided I wanted to change up what you've seen me build. I've been toying around with the idea of a fishing village since I started this journal, but today I had true inspiration hit me. For my IRL job, I do route sales for convenience stores. Today's route had me driving close to 200 miles, and on days like that I like to listen to Audible. I bought one of the Great Courses over the weekend, History's Greatest Voyages of Exploration, and proceeded to start it this morning. Now, this might not be your cup of tea, but I love history. This one offered a lot more than the Western Civ approach I was taught in school, going over Pacific exploration, exploration in the Middle East, and even covering Oriental trade, all of which I knew hardly anything about. This is a 12 hour course, and I planned on having it last me most of the month - that's not going to happen. I listened to 1/3 of it today.
I was captivated by listening to the professor talk about both the Polynesian people and about the Norsemen and their Vikings. He did an amazing job of describing the ancient civilizations, and it was almost like watching a movie as the words hit my brain.
And it inspired me to build in Minecraft.
For tonight's initial build, I didn't think I was going to add it to this build journal until I was halfway done, so there aren't a lot of pictures. I started off by wandering, which is what I do best. I found a tiny village, then a desert village, then a desert (a BIG desert), then a Savannah biome. As far as I can tell, I'm the only Minecrafter on Earth who likes Acacia wood and the Savannah biome. I love them, though. The one this one is setup, there are two Savannah mountains, a valley in-between, a few sand dunes, and they lead onto a beach facing the ocean.
The hill on the right of the picture is where I took the first shot from. This way you can see the valley from both sides.
What could be more perfect after what I listened to this morning??
I let Boq know that this was where I was founding my city and I went to town on it. I started off by building a mine and smelting area because I needed blocks and mats. I went on and did this mine tunnel the right way, going 3-wide all the way down to level 10 and putting stairs on both sides of the shaft. I left the center unfinished because I plan on putting a rail line down like I did back in my other mine a few posts ago.
I didn't actually do any mining -- I got enough iron as I went down to build the tools I needed, and obviously I got a ton of cobblestone from a shaft that size.
After that, I did some Googling to get ideas for huts and houses, and I found one on the Minecraft Forums that I knew would be the perfect Governor's House for this city. My version isn't identical to what Snoggi showcased in that linked post, but it's not far from it. (I'm going to take a second look at the roof later. Mine's OK, but I like his better.)
The way the valley I'm in was naturally formed, I didn't have to do much terraforming at all, but there was a ton of grass I had to mow. I ended up with 3-4 stacks of wheat seeds, so I built a 9x8 wheat garden. Right next to the mine was a natural hot spring, so I slabbed the edge of it and made it look good. Here's how the Governor's House, Mine, and Hot Spring look after 2-3 hours on the server:
The house has 4 wings coming off the center. I like this shot because it shows that along with how close the beach is. Right behind the house (on the left of the picture) I started an Acacia tree farm. I actually cleared the entire valley of Acacia trees to get the wood to build this with. I haven't done details inside of the house yet because I have no materials. After I have animals and do some more mining, I'll go back in and add details and show those in a later post.
If I can talk Boq into it, I'm going to get Chisels & Bits added to this so that I can really customize each city. I've got all kinds of ideas of what I can make with it, especially after seeing a special block that was made in one of Etho's Hermitpack videos. (If you click that link, pause the video immediately because I set the link to the exact second the block is shown off.)
TLDR: I want a few good builders to help me build multiple cities, starting with this hub of commerce based on fishing. I found a cool area. I built stuff.
