efaardvark

Welcome!

Added the Distant Horizons mod to my Minecraft setup. It eats memory and CPU cycles (all of them ) but now I can drop my render distance to below 10 and get a nice FPS boost while still enjoying the view.

Finally got around to detailing my city's walls. I'd wanted to get away from the traditional stone-brick look so I started with white concrete but the huge expanses of flat white walls made it a bit more of a challenge than I was prepared for. I've never been great at making things look good either. It did look a lot better once I got the crenels / merlons on the top and the embrasures in the walls however. I bought a bunch of normal lanterns from the town's librarian and liberally placed those on top as well, then crafted up a bunch of soul lanterns to hang under the merlons. All that distracts enough from the otherwise blank exterior that I think it turned out ok. This being minecraft I'm sure I'll continue tweaking things as new ideas occur to me but at least for now I'm calling it "done". It's functional and looks halfway decent. I also went back to the "Complementary" shader, which resulted in a cool visual while collecting stuff from my allay habitat.

Got 2 new mob heads... and two big holes in the front yard that will need filling in.

I removed the center flowers in that allay habitat / melon farm and turned it into a small pond. Then below that I dug out a large chamber and added an 8x8x8 tropical fish aquarium and viewing gallery. I read somewhere that there's over 2000 combinations of fish shape, type, and pattern for tropical fish & I wanted to have someplace large enough to collect them all. jk And now that there's water I'm going to try adding a few tadpoles. Do fish eat tadpoles? Guess I'll find out. I also cleared out an underwater geode. If you get rid of all of the amethyst blocks that don't have cracks in them and all the calcite and basalt then you can maximize the growth of the buds and clusters on the remaining cracked amethyst. The amethyst crystals will grow underwater and the water makes it easier to collect them so I like to do this when I find one underwater. (Unfortunately you can't transport the cracked blocks so you have to do this wherever the geode happens to be. Trying to mine the cracked blocks even with silk touch destroys them completely.) This geode is really deep too. Just at the level where deepslate starts to form. That's deep enough that glow squid (and Drowned) also spawn in the water nearby. That usually gives me a couple glow ink sacs as a bonus every time I make the trip to harvest the amethyst.

Socializing is not really my thing either but I can handle doing it once a year for the fam.

Holiday here too but I'm the designated driver responsible for getting this half of the family to the other half for holiday dinner. That's about 1.5hrs one way (depending on Los Angeles freeway traffic) plus dinner itself and a bit of socializing afterward means I'll probably be getting back late and tired so no games for me today. I do have tomorrow off as well tho so maybe some more minecraft or kerbal space program then. Fingers crossed.

After a bit of playing with allays and reading of wikis I discovered that allays can be directed to give their items to a note block instead of the player. Normally if a player gives an item to an allay it will follow the player around, pick up any items that match the one the player gave to it, and deliver the item(s) to the player. I went and built a pumpkin farm that used allays to collect the pumpkins after they were "picked" by pistons. To keep them from following me or wandering off while waiting for the pumpkins to grow I tied them to leads. This worked but I wasn't too happy with the production rate due to the limited reach of the leads. I decided to make a bigger version, but glass it over so the allays can fly freely within and seek for their item(s) over a larger area. While I was at it I planted a few flowers and added a couple beehives. This new version not only produces melons and pumpkins, but honey, honeycomb, and sugarcane as well. The honey and honeycomb are collected by hopper but the melons, pumpkin, and sugarcane are collected by the allays after being broken by piston. The same redstone signal that triggers the pistons also pings the note block. For about 30 seconds or so after the note block is triggered any items collected by the allays are then thrown at the note block, under which is a hopper that collects the items and transfers them to a chest for storage. The whole thing works surprisingly well. It produces enough that I can trade the melons and pumpkins to a nearby farmer for enough golden carrots to sustain my night vision potion habit and use the 'cane to make paper to sell to a cartographer for a steady supply of easy emeralds.

Not much time for games lately but I did spend a couple hours exploring an underwater cavern/cave complex in minecraft. Actually it started with finding & looting an ocean ruin looking for suspicious sand & gravel but one of the ruined buildings was down at the bottom of a nearby canyon. One end of the canyon dove underground then opened up into this huge cave complex. Interesting scenery. Got a lot of glow ink sacs, a bunch of copper and iron ore, and even a few diamonds. A few copper bars from the numerous Drowned as well. Unfortunately no more tridents. No armor templates from the ruins either.

Welcome!

Extremely windy overnight and this morning. Not so bad here at lunch time but a brushfire warning has been announced now as well.

My SIL has been on a kick to collect and source all the dyes in minecraft so she can decorate her base with colored items like concrete, carpet, and terracotta. We recently - finally! - completed that quest a couple weeks ago. Anyway, she played a bit with colored concrete but the texture of concrete is apparently "too boring" for large-scale construction use so last week I helped her & her husband put together a "mud room", a two-deep pool for turning dirt into mud and a nearby drying rack using dripstone for converting the mud to clay. I also showed her how to set up a lava farm to help fuel the clay -> terracotta firing process. (And bricks.) She's since been happily filling her base with all the colors of terracotta and glazed terracotta. She also wanted a wool farm but they're not good with the redstone bits for an automatic shearing setup so this week I helped them with that project as well. Of course she had to have one sheep for every color. She says, "it's a sheepery, rhymes with brewery". Aside: Sunflowers were a pain to find! They can only be found in the extremely rare sunflower plains biome. They produce yellow dye. which can also be obtained from dandelions. However, obtaining dandelions involves bonemealing dirt in certain biomes and hoping you get one mixed in with the grass and other flowers. Double-tall flowers like sunflowers - once obtained - can be replanted in any convenient nearby location and can be bonemealed to produce a copy of the original flower directly. They're also more efficient in bonemeal use, reliably producing 2 flowers for every bit of bonemeal applied. Bonemealing double-tall flowers is therefore the much more desirable method if you're into the dyeing thing. Assuming you can find them! The other two-tall flowers - roses, peonys, and lilacs - are pretty common in forest biomes but the biome where sunflowers grow is apparently quite rare.

Welcome!

Tearmoon Empire passes the 3-ep test. (In spite of feeling a lot like an isekai.) I'll come back to this one later.

Butareba. Really? Dropped.

I heard that the performance leaves something to be desired. Did you notice anything?

Made an allay-assisted melon / pumpkin farm. (Also ate some s.)

I Remember - Psychotic Waltz

Went night hunting with a flock of allays.

Welcome!

What did the ghost buy at the bar? Boos.

way too much coffee

Gack! (I think that’s the correct technical term.)