Building things is great fun and I could probably spend hours (and in fact have spent hours) doing it – but there’s more to minecraft than just that. Especially if the server you’re playing on is using mods (which of course as I have mentioned, mine is). One of the fun things to do is randomly find these dimensional doors and step through them. If you’re lucky you’ll end up in this really awesome dungeon looking type place (I may have stolen some of the lights) with neat things all around to look at – but eventually you’ll probably walk through a door and end up in limbo, which is not so fun. Limbo includes eyeballs teleporting you as you frantically try to walk towards a spot of red water on the mostly black map – that will port you back to civilization, some place also random.
I escaped, without any new treasures to boast of besides the screenshot but where I ended up was just a few feet away from another bandit castle. I had to be sneaky, their ranged arrows always hurt me pretty bad (what do you mean I need to get some armor..) so I built myself a little fortified wall and dug my way into their castle after they killed me the first time. See, I can be taught.
I was richly rewarded for my adventure in their domain, and it was awesome. I found another catapult which I placed atop my own fortress of laughter, a bag of force, a music CD and last but not least – an entire boat.
I’m on a boat!
I love exploring. There’s so much to see, especially when that involves going over to the neighbours (who are a few thousand paces away from my location) and nosing around their homes. I found a cow and chicken on the road (the chicken of course was attempting to cross it) and accidentally stole some potatoes. My neighbours place take advantage of the tech mod packs, which I have no idea how to even get started with. Automatic mob farming systems? Complex power grids and all sorts of weird awesome stuff that I have never heard of before. I know it won’t be too long before I sink my teeth into all of it, but for now I have been focusing on the ‘basic’ aspects of the game.
I set up a farm, started breeding cows for meat and leather, and have a few chocobo hanging around while I grow their food of choice so I can attempt to breed them (my ultimate goal at this time) because I want different coloured ones. Why? Because I can.
While all that is going on, I’m also attempting to decorat my (so far) very bare castle. I added a rainbow bed and a beautiful desk yesterday, but besides the craft room which is completely covered in storage chests (plus my forge and craft station of course) the place is empty. It’s time to fix that!
I’ve used several tech mods, but eventually I started to prefer Thermal Expansion, MineFactory Reloaded and Applied Energistics. My old favourites were BuildCraft, IndustrialCraft2 and LogisticsPipes. The former are a more expensive up front, but they’re more space-efficient and more reliable later on than the latter.
If there’s an overriding philosophy behind my builds, it could be described as pre-emptive laziness; If there’s a chore that I don’t want to do, I might spend a bit more effort to automate it. The first high-tech thing that I usually build is a couple of machines to grind & smelt ores and some power generation & batteries to make ’em work. Once that’s up and running, I tend to build a storage system that automatically grabs those processed ores and other crap from the machines. But the key is autocrafting, which lets you focus more on the actual building. If you need something, you can just order it from the system instead of manually having to build every intermediate item. And if you’re missing some ingredients, it’ll let you know and resume crafting once you’ve gotten them. It’s especially useful in building those complex machines with lots of intermediate parts. Eventually I automate most basic ingredient acquisition too; Quarries, mob farms, automatic fields, the works.
And at that point, the way you build changes completely. You can start planning large-scale construction projects and just order ingredients whenever you’re running low.