August 2015

Minecraft mods: Mystcraft

stargrace August 28, 2015 1 Comment

As much as I love exploring the Overworld and the Nether, sometimes I get a bit bored. Especially if I’ve been playing the same world for some time. That’s where Mystcraft comes in. Now, yes, there are lots of other mods that also add worlds and areas to your game, but this is the one I’ve been playing with so that’s what I’m going to talk about. It’s a very simple mod and you don’t need a lot to get started.

I made the basic tools first. I would need a writing desk, a book binder, and an ink mixer. Making ink is pretty easy, a bottle of water and two ink sacs. Then I made a linking book. I found out that this is basically the most important thing ever. You link it to the Overworld, and then when you enter the Ages that you create, you put down a book stand and that book right away so that you can gate back home. Of course you’ll want to make sure you’re in a relatively safe location first, so I tend to take a bunch of bricks with me and build an enclosure before exploring anywhere. Basically you take a whole bunch of pages (which are found in various places in the Overworld, as well as in a library in each age) and then bind those together into a book that becomes your teleportation device to the age. That’s what those books are in the screenshot above. The worlds themselves are a combination of the pages you have put in, and what the game adds on its own. The more of your own pages you put in, the less random stuff the game will put in. You can find pages that control every single aspect of your world, from when the sun rises (or if the sun rises) to what the ground is made out of. Even the colours and weather patterns are mapped out by those pages. The writing table is used to copy pages so that you don’t have to use your hard copies.

The first world I made I had added a few blank pages to fill in the slots so random stuff wouldn’t be added, along with iron blocks. The entire world was filled with areas where I could harvest iron – except the world was also poison if I ever stepped out into the sunlight or the moonlight. Very quick deaths resulted while I figured these things out. Still, I could harvest if I stuck to a tunnel system at least, so that’s what I did. Now there’s no way I’ll ever run out of iron.

The downside to mystcraft is that it’s incredibly random. You might THINK you have created the perfect non-aggro world, but once you get there you discover the air is poison or the ground is corrupted and is being eaten away, or some other downside like acid rain is falling from the sky. Or giant meteors are falling on you.

Best video ever.

Doesn’t that look like fun?!
Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself.

Minecraft Mods: Botania

stargrace August 19, 2015 No Comments

The beginning of my little botania set up wasn’t much, it has changed a lot since the screenshot above, but that’s what I started with. Botania is neat, it’s a mod that doesn’t add a lot to the world (to begin with) so you end up making most of the components. What it does add, is 16 types of mystical flowers that you can harvest in the Overworld and then when you plop those into your crafting window they refine into petals. Then you take those petals and make neat stuff with them. I found a few guides online and that’s what I followed for the first portions. Unlike a lot of mods that require me to be some sort of engineer, this one was simple and straightforward. Those mods are really the best for me, I like complexity but I don’t like things that are so complex they make my play session stressful.

The mods I stumbled into are this one in text, and then this series on youtube (finally, a broadcaster I can stand to listen to). First I harvested a whole lot of mystical flowers. Then I turned those into petals. I set  up an outdoor greenhouse with a good amount of space and surrounded it in glass. Stuck a few chests out there, and I was ready to begin. I already had the lexica botania (book that shows you all the recipes) but I can’t remember where I got it from. In any case, you can craft it if you want.

The first thing I made was a petal apothecary. Very simple, it’s just stones and a petal. Filled it with water, and then used white petals and seeds to create a pure daisy. When you plant these and surround them by stone or wood (not cobblestone, not planks) the wood / stone changes into livingwood / livingstone. I collected a bunch of this before moving on.

Then I made a bunch of dayblooms, those are the flowers pictured above. They generate mana when it’s daytime. I found these flowers died off WAY too fast to be worth the effort. Once I had a method of creating a tiny bit of mana, I created two distilled mana pools, and a mana spreader. The mana spreader takes the mana from the flowers and shoots it towards something (like the mana pool). Once the distiller stuffed enough mana in the pool, I dropped the second pool into it, and created a regular mana pool. They store a lot more mana than the distilled ones. Once I had TWO mana pools and enough mana, I created an endoflame and got rid of the dayblooms. The endoflame turns things like blocks of coals and blaze torches into mana. So now I have endoflames shooting mana into a mana spreader, and the mana spreader shoot that mana over to a mana distributor. This block basically just takes the mana and splits it between any pools that are next to it. I wanted one pool dedicated to alchemy, and another pool dedicated to runes. I stuck an alchemy catalyst under one of the pools, and now when I drop things in there from this list it will transform them at a cost of mana. The other thing I created was a runic altar. This one is a bit different, in this one you take things that you have enchanted (like iron ingots, and flower petals) and combine them into runes. Then those runes can be used in combines over at the petal apothecary. That’s where the fun really starts.

I created a set of manasteel armor, some rings (one stores mana, the other one slowly creates mana), and a weapon. I would create tools, but unfortunately because of the weapon leveling mod I have, base tools are not ‘useable’ tools, they’re only used to craft the next tier. It sucks, but I really like leveling my tools up so I don’t want to get rid of that mod quite yet. I also made a sash that lets me walk up 1 block steps, and created a flower that will create more mystical flowers so I don’t have to hunt all over the place. Finally I created a flower that will fuel my forges that are nearby, and improves the efficiency. Oh, and I made a rod that uses a small amount of mana and creates dirt blocks, and another rod that creates water blocks. Just handy little things like that. It’s not game breaking, and I like that I’ve been able to (somewhat easily) explore the mod and not feel completely overwhelmed.

This is just one of MANY mods included in FeedTheBeastInfinity which is the mod I’m currently playing. I’ll probably make a few more posts explaining the other mods I’ve played with so far, but well there’s that whole “trying to find time” thing that keeps sneaking up. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!