Zen and the art of Mining

[Someguy]

A while ago, someone in a thread (I think it was Saice) mentioned how he liked digging looong straight tunnels, found it quite relaxing, almost a sort of meditation.

And just now, I was sitting here for the nth time, *manually* draining yet another giant puddle-o-lava from underneath my home volcano with cans... and at first I thought, jeez, there are so many "easier" ways to do this... and then I thought, but wait... I *like* doing this.

For some reason, I get a kick out of just puttering along, holding down right-click with a stack of cans in my hand, pulling lava out of the ground, trying to hit the source blocks in a big flow, while trying to avoid falling in (made easier by a jetpack, but there is still the occasional... accident). Not as easy as it sounds, try it... it's fun.

What kind of zone-out, y-u-no-efficient stuff do you do?

 

[Poppycocks]

Everything. But only until it starts to bore me, then comes automation.

However, I do reserve mining for myself. It's one of the reasons why I'm so pissed off at all the no-enchant nerfs for rechargeable tools.

Speaking of mining, I prefer to do either bum-rush spelunking or phoenix mining. Phoenix mining is great, it's kinda like branch mining, but you end up with a very appealing pattern which just makes you want to continue on and on ad infinity.

Spoiler

 

[AlanEsh]

I like to fire up a quarry (often a 64x6 trench) then spend about half its time hand-mining stuff out of the exposed walls. I bring a fortune pick for any quartz it exposes, and a silktouch for things like Uranium. Zipping around maximizing the output from my quarries suits the OCD in me

 

[Virgoddess]

Mining. I rarely, rarely use any automated mining set up. I just love to get down in the caves and find stuff. It's always been my very favorite part of MC.

 

[Hoff]

Everything. But only until it starts to bore me, then comes automation.

However, I do reserve mining for myself. It's one of the reasons why I'm so pissed of at all the no-enchant nerfs for rechargeable tools.

If you still want to enchant them you can use Enchanting plus to enchant any item with any enchant so it takes a bit of willpower to not making something ridiculously good but it allows you to circumvent that nerf.

 

[Peppe]

Everything. But only until it starts to bore me, then comes automation.

However, I do reserve mining for myself. It's one of the reasons why I'm so pissed of at all the no-enchant nerfs for rechargeable tools.

In 1.5 i have gotten back into mining --- more caving than anything. I try not to branch mine after the first few diamonds of the world, but do find it relaxing too.

Thaumcraft has awesome rechargeable tools

One world i started, but reset I didn't even have to do any research. Found enough thaumium ingots in chests to enchant my first 2-3 picks and got a super pick: fortune 3 + repair + unbreaking + efficiency. Even if you do have to do research it doesn't take much --

Spoiler

iron + seeds to unlock thaumium and 12 Chiseled sandstone + 3 iron

is not bad per pick

I now use my power gloves for shovel + sword duty and use the fortune pick most of the time. Don't have a super silk touch pick yet, but if I do eventually get one I can just mine everything with it then pulverize everything.

Now i have my adventuring ender pouch setup (infinite supply food, torches, wood, +some villager trading materials). Think i was out 4+ hours last night caving and looking for villages. Whenever I ran out of space or torches i could dump my inventory into another pouch that goes to my storage system. I am down to just using the hotbar, so I can space + shift click everything into my base's input pouch and then grab torches from the other pouch and have almost no pause in caving. Like a 2 second pit stop.

Today i also added the universal charger to the supply enderpouch. I can put my powersuit in and charge it anywhere in the world -- though it tends to stay full on its own.

 

[Poppycocks]

If you still want to enchant them you can use Enchanting plus to enchant any item with any enchant so it takes a bit of willpower to not making something ridiculously good but it allows you to circumvent that nerf.

The problem is that I don't have that kind of willpower, and is why I eventually removed it . Same for treecapacitator and its ilk. I also think that there should be some work involved in getting all that nice stuff (and trust me, getting the GOOD books is A LOT of work, which is yet another reason why the nerfs piss me off so much, the investment in time is incredible, but no, because fuck you, jeeze).

 

[Katrinya]

It's less of a relaxation method and more of a compulsion, but once I have my first outdoor home built, I obsessively flatten the terrain around it. I keep telling myself to stop and wait until I have a shovel of earthmoving, but I just can't help myself. Must... fill... in... ALL... the holes.

 

[Hoff]

The problem is that I don't have that kind of willpower, and is why I eventually removed it . Same for treecapacitator and its ilk. I also think that there should be some work involved in getting all that nice stuff (and trust me, getting the GOOD books is A LOT of work, which is yet another reason why the nerfs piss me off so much, the investment in time is incredible, but no, because fuck you, jeeze).

Yeah I never minded not having to work for the enchants. Well your next best option is tinkers since you can make the tools EU powered

Coming up versions I might even remove Eplus with tinkers becoming more of a finished product.

 

[Poppycocks]

Yeah I never minded not having to work for the enchants. Well your next best option is tinkers since you can make the tools EU powered

Coming up versions I might even remove Eplus with tinkers becoming more of a finished product.

Waitwhat?

Why?

HOW?

 

[Hoff]

Circuit + battery

It's also doubly good because after the EU runs out it just runs on normal durability.

 

[Someguy]

Speaking of mining, I prefer to do either bum-rush spelunking or phoenix mining. Phoenix mining is great, it's kinda like branch mining, but you end up with a very appealing pattern which just makes you want to continue on and on ad infinity.

Spoiler

That looks pretty cool... is that a minimap view or something?

 

[Poppycocks]

That looks pretty cool... is that a minimap view or something?

It looks even better on a minimap actually, especially if make it a hundred blocks long on each side. That was made by... someone else, some other way. Read about it here!

 

[YX33A]

I have three main Zen situations in Minecraft. First is caving. Yes, all the mobs can get on my nerves, and yes, I FUCKING HATE THOSE WATER BLOCKS IN CAVES WHICH FLOW DOWNWARDS AND I HAVE TO SWIM UP STREAM TO PLUG ITS SORRY ASS, but when you find a good cave system, you can find all kinds of cool things.
I might end up adding Underground Biomes to spice it up even more. And if I can find a updated version, Wild Caves would make it even more interesting.
Second, is, oddly enough, farming. I LOVE farming. But I have to use Pams Harvest Craft to make farming a Zen activity for me. Because at that point I have a rainbow of crops and I can arrange them in exotic and aesthetically pleasing ways. Kind of like how some people have sand gardens(or gravel, or whatever) and make amazing patterns, I try to do that with my crops.
Last is exploring. I don't mean caving in this instance, because I also am looking for things to mine when caving. No, I mean just getting out of my base and wandering around looking for new things. Sometimes I find villages. Sometimes I find crazy mountain ranges. I have on occasion found crazy villages on crazy mountain ranges that part of me demands I fix up for these poor bastards. That same part of me is upset when I find a village but there's a ravine running through it.

 

[khorozm]

the very main reason that i dont have a vanilla survival world is because i dont like mining
i usually do the windmill branch mining

 

[GPuzzle]

Farming is my favourite thing to do.
I got that after playing BTB (Better Than Buildcraft).
My routine was:
Cut some trees, mine cave.
Then I would go to the garden.
The garden was an area with the wheat, the pumpkins, the hemp, the melons and the sugar cane.
I got so attached to the garden I learned how to farm.
Back in Tekkit, in a SkyBlock with an alchemical chest, a transmutation tablet, copper, clay, tin, iron, the stuff you would find in SkyBlock, a rubber sapling, reed and pumpkin seeds challenge I did with my friends, I was the first one to get melons via crops (and wheat, we couldn't use bone meal).
To this day, I have a 25x25 wheat field daily harvested by hand.
Altough that doesn't mean I dislike stuff like Steve's Carts farms.
I love them.

 

[StreetKing]

There's a mod for underground biomes ? I am so dowloading that. Also,I love making huge farms and harvesting them manually. I am not sure why but i just hate those automated farms(Except maybe tree farms because they're so annoying to chop down and consume lots of time.)

 

[plzent3r]

I love building awesome, huge buildings or structures. Most of them aren't even functional, I just like to build them to make things look nice and to pass the time. So I guess building would be my zen activity. Also I just love watching my arcane bore go.

 

[Jess887cp]

My Zen would be building, if I have a design. If now then I stress out hard. Otherwise I sometimes like to just zone out with a nanosaber and good armor in the middle of my wasteland and take on the unwashed masses. Sure, I could use my farms for bonemeal and things, but where's the fun in that?

Also tree breeding. Sometimes. Meh.

I love building awesome, huge buildings or structures. Most of them aren't even functional, I just like to build them to make things look nice and to pass the time. So I guess building would be my zen activity. Also I just love watching my arcane bore go.

I do the same thing. In fact, because of that I am stuck in the mid-early game.

 

[RedBoss]

Mining is relaxing but I also lean toward it being more of a compulsion. In vanilla, branch mining was a necessity for me just to have resources but in modded MC it was actually more interesting with the other ores. Caving became more worthwhile because a good system would have everything you needed, scattered about like a cubed Wonka's Factory.

I rush to quarries because I can actually build stuff with the resources coming in semi-automatically. But there's something really fun about branch mining with a turtle and a good mining program. I can cover 4X the territory with half the time of mining by hand