Zen and the art of Mining

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Someguy

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Jul 29, 2019
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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?
 
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.
24q8jro.png
 
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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 :)
 
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Poppycocks said:
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
Poppycocks said:
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.
Click to expand...

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 --
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.
 
Hoff said:
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.
Click to expand...
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).
 
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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.
 
Poppycocks said:
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).
Click to expand...
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.
 
Hoff said:
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.
Click to expand...
Waitwhat?

Why?

HOW?
 
Circuit + battery ;)

It's also doubly good because after the EU runs out it just runs on normal durability.
 
Poppycocks said:
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.
24q8jro.png
Click to expand...

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

plzent3r said:
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.
Click to expand...
I do the same thing. In fact, because of that I am stuck in the mid-early game.
 
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
 
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