March 2015

A Castle to Call my Own

stargrace March 30, 2015 1 Comment

I’ve never built an enormous castle in minecraft before, but yesterday I decided why not. The one pictured above took most of the day off and on to build, but I adore it. It’s enormous, 33×33 tiles, and probably more than 33 tiles high. It looks out over my property, and right now it’s completely empty but I hope to work on that slowly over time. Right now there’s no way to get to any of the higher floors, something else I’ll need to work on. I have absolutely no idea what to do with the space, but I’ll no doubt think of something.

A new machine has also made its way onto the property. It creates cobblestone, which is fantastic. Basically automating the action of lava and water combining (which creates cobblestone) the machine then harvests and stores it. Apparently this will be used to create some portal that requires a lot of cobblestone, and then a quarry can be set up in the realm that the portal opens to. I don’t remember all of the details, but the friend who is playing on server with me explained it yesterday. I’m personally looking forward to doing much less mining and much more exploring. Especially because this map is really annoying to navigate under ground. It seems like every step or two I’m faced with pools of lava and water, making mining precarious and not much fun. I’m constantly mining away from these enormous caverns filled with danger, but it makes for crooked hallways and I get lost easily.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever built in Minecraft before? How long did it take you to complete? Let me know in comments below!

Infinity on FeedTheBeast

stargrace March 27, 2015 No Comments

I’ve swapped over to a new minecraft mod, this time it’s Infinity on feed the beast. This mod is a combination of everything I was already using on The Dark Trilogy, with some extras. A lot of extras. One of those mods is called ‘decocraft’ and it’s basically just a huge selection of decorations. They’re made out of special coloured clay, red, green, and blue. You arrange the clay in patterns and out pops awesome decorations. Things like Christmas trees, presents, stuffed animals, that barrel of carrots posted above, I have an entire playground created with the stuff. It’s really quite awesome.

The twilight portal has been set up but so far I haven’t ventured in to see where it takes me. I also haven’t created a portal over to the nether yet. There has been so much to do right here – including getting started with bees. That required me to construct a few apiary, and those are not an easy task for someone playing in survival mode! In fact almost nothing I’ve been crafting has been ‘easy’. I have no idea how people manage to play making use of these mods if they’re in survival mode.

I’m having an awesome time though, and that’s good. The mod leans towards long-term play, which is perfect for someone who wants to stick with just one mod for a while and try to experience everything they can.

I tried my hand at tree grafting, too, but so far I haven’t had any luck with it. I had bees trying to pollinate but none of the leaves were discoloured or mutated (that I could see at least). I’ve tried looking for some tutorials but most of them are .. well. Not enjoyable to watch. If anyone has seen a really good one out there, please let me know!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Keeping Busy in Minecraft

stargrace March 19, 2015 No Comments

Progression through The Dark Trilogy is going well so far. A workshop has been set up and in my quieter times I work on my ‘home’ which is compromised of Crayfish house items, like a fridge, microwave, television, shower, and washing machine.

Meanwhile, we’re busy gathering supplies for a few things. We want a quarry so that we spend less time mining and more time adventuring. That requires.. a lot of stuff. So much stuff. I also want to create two magnum torches in order to reduce the mob spawns around the base, each torch works in a 64 tile radius. The recipe for that particular item has changed, and now it requires quadruple and triple compressed cobblestone. That’s a LOT of cobblestone. Each quadruple is over 6 thousand. I think the hardest part of the old model was obtaining the blaze rod. On that note, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the nether. Found a fortress, found a blaze spawner. Spent some time collecting rods because they’re needed for other things.

I noticed that animals were having a hard time climbing the mountain up to the base, so I created a few safari nets and brought some back home. Now I’m breeding horses, along with reindeer from the twilight forest. Also brought back some rams that are multiple colours since I don’t have the force mod that let me create shears that would provide multiple colours. These rams are my sheep, providing wool.

There’s some farming taking place lately. Cactus is rare, so we’re growing some of that along with wheat and barely to keep my animals happy. Then there’s an apiary going on because in order to create the quarry we need a lot of other things and apparently bees are just part of that giant ecosystem.

It’s interesting, and certainly works for long-term game play which is something that I’m quite pleased about.

I also took a walk to the twilight forest and found this beautiful castle.

I think it belongs to the Lich, which is the boss of the twilight forest, but as I was exploring I happened to come across a second castle, exactly like this one. I have no idea if there are more than one, and I wasn’t really prepared to find out. The zone is beautiful, although skeletons and zombie have made their way over because they keep walking through my portals. I’ve since put a fence around both the Nether portal, and the Twilight portal. Nothing makes me jump out of my chair faster than porting over to the nether only to be swarmed by pigmen along with zombies and spiders.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!