Mein Kraft

[Sharkey]

Turns out chickens do actually weigh down leaves, but they don't move enough to not immediately fall through. Then you have to hunt the little bastards down in a forest of stalks. Disappointing, but throwing eggs at people is kind of its own reward.

Had a shitload of moss left over so I built a small hedge maze nearby. As a reward for navigating the incredibly easy maze I have concealed within it a book containing the worst fucking poem ever written.

[Upthorn]

But I never shared that poem with anyone.

[Sharkey]

FUCK. The poppy field over the rainbow should have been in the snowy biome. Goddammit I'm gonna have to move the whole thing.

[atog]

Once you start planting flowers, it replaces the snow anyway...it's FIIIINE jeez *falls off Rainbow Road* shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

y'know what's funny? I was just having a dream where I got mongrel to log in and play Connect Four but I was having trouble getting the sand to settle and the troubleshooter kept switching to Korean as I scrolled down.

also guess who's a huge dunce and didn't bring obsidian to make a portal to the MUshroom Kingdom.

[Sharkey]

Aw shucks. Anyway yeah I wanted it for the falling snow not accumulating because reasons.



(this is what the refrance)

It's cool I can always just build more rainbows, really gay up the joint.

Also, not so fun fact but they used to use asbestos for snow in shots like this, as well as like mall christmas displays and shit. Brilliant.

[Sharkey]

The gunpowder fairy came in the night and left a bunch in the chalet. I turned the giant trash can into a mob farm and idled above it for a day so there's plenty and to spare, along with some string and the usual bullshit. It's not huge and the location is probably bad (I know I haven't bothered lighting all the caves under there) but it's got a pretty elegant timed flushing mechanism so its output is pretty good for a halfassed little thing. Could be useful for bombing the shit out of the nether if you don't want to bother building TNT dupers.

[atog]

I'm working my way back down the Long Tunnel is Long, replacing some of the cladding on the walls with purty glass to showcase the lava.

Mongrel came wandering into the living room and saw me lava swimming outside the tunnel, sealing holes.

"That's my Atog, every time I look over at the screen, shit's on fahr yo. Something something fiery wimmin sorceress stereotypes"

This is apropos of spending a lot of time earlier this evening playing everyone's favourite crappy Diablo-like where my active duty roster includes a templar figure who sets up giant altar censers that shoot a ring of flames around a large area like a roach bomb. It fills the screen with jets of white flame that blot out pretty much everything else. It just happens to be a very effective light source and crowd control tool, as well as proximity healing and removes curses. The screen looks remarkably similar.

[Mongrel]

If she's playing a game, and the screen's not covered in flames, it will be.

[nosimpleway]

If all else fails, after all.

[Sharkey]

Aw, man that's neat. I only just got around to checking out the far fort after spending like a month just sort of fucking around in my amusement park/trash forest and I'm kind of boggled. It never even occurred to me to just set up residence in a nether fortress and live on berries? Motivated me to be less of a pussy about messing around in hell, so I started building an ice road right through the middle of it. Was planning to connect it to the far fort at some point but around 500,-720 I ran into another fortress. This Not Far But Not Very Close Either Fort is in a soul sand valley, so the wither skelly spawns are pretty rapid. I haven't really explored the nether since they updated it like a million years ago so it's been an experience. Feather falling boots and an emergency fire potion/wizerd froot have saved me a few times and made the whole thing a lot less fraught. Got treed up a mushroom by a pack of boars and hung out up there reading a book until a piglin hunting party drove them off. Fun times. Anyway, the terminus is at the shark park portal point and where it's at middling height it runs through some neat terrain. Its open enough that ghasts and shit can take pot shots at you sometimes but fast enough that it doesn't matter.

[atog]

Getting treed by boars isn't so bad, if you can climb to at least 3 blocks higher than their level. They can't knock you off your perch at that height, and you can dump lava on them from overhead - guess what, none of the living porcine species in hell are fire-resistant - and maybe even snag a cooked porkchop at the end of it all.

I'll have to check out Fort Newfort, meanwhile.

If we had more time on together as a group, it's better and more fun to build in the great open spaces of the Nether rather than digging like bedbugs in the ceiling and floor. One person builds a decently wide and tall "tube", and the other(s) patrol for air harassment. Maybe a third party coming up behind to install windows or ice or lighting or subway billboards or whatever.

[Sharkey]

Heh, guess I shouldn't have assumed everything down here is fireproof. Also, I just checked and by going due north from my portal exit and jiggering east I've managed to place the ice highway 60 blocks directly above the underground route. Like, to the block. I could sink a ladder shaft to one side and it'd connect right up to the side walls below. I think I might do that at points of interest like Anderefort or the funkyforests. I guess making a second ice road down there would be kind of redundant (and it looks pretty cool as it is) but maybe the low road could be used for like a subway loop? Fuck knows the iron farm produces enough to craft the absolute shitload of minecart rails that'd be needed for that, and with chest carts it could be used for shipping tons of material back and forth across the world for projects.

I'd love it if we could coordinate some kind of time for co-op shenanigans. My work and sleep schedule is basically random at this point, trending more toward dusk-to-dawn most of the time, but maybe we could work out like a weekly minecraft night or something. Maybe do some kind of open house to onboard some more people who were initially interested when this thread started. I dunno, I just like seeing what people get up to in here. It's interesting how everyone seems to have their own distinct way of playing.

[Mongrel]

Aw, man that's neat. I only just got around to checking out the far fort after spending like a month just sort of fucking around in my amusement park/trash forest and I'm kind of boggled. It never even occurred to me to just set up residence in a nether fortress and live on berries?

The thing about Hell in Minecraft is that it's secretly the safest place to live.

Of course it also helps if you have a fondness for making giant-ass Hell Cathedrals with gothic windows that run with lava for every wall, as Starr has been known to.

[atog]

Aw, man that's neat. I only just got around to checking out the far fort after spending like a month just sort of fucking around in my amusement park/trash forest and I'm kind of boggled. It never even occurred to me to just set up residence in a nether fortress and live on berries?

The thing about Hell in Minecraft is that it's secretly the safest place to live.

Of course it also helps if you have a fondness for making giant-ass Hell Cathedrals with gothic windows that run with lava for every wall, as Starr has been known to.

vs.


After excavating an 18 x 12 chunk site from sea to lid on a server to build St. Dante's, and cutting down 3 double chests of warped log stacks, gathering/salvaging 25 shulker boxes full of lava buckets, and smelting about 3.3m netherrack blocks, I ran out of steam.

My excitement about 1.16 new blocks and palettes petered out when it dawned on me those cool warped logs and textures aren't light sources, and sidelighting them with lava or shroomlights still gives them that sodium-orange glare that every other light source in shaders is stuck with. And makes the teal and maroon textures look like shit. Perhaps I'll try again another day, but it will likely take a very different form.

[Sharkey]

That's rad. I've never done a crazy megastructure like that unless lava casts count and they don't. I bet you'll probably be able to do something with that with frog lights once they're a thing. Also, I could have sworn I found a shader that didn't turn everything orange but it would have been ages ago. I should probably reinstall them anyway and I'll see if I can't find it again.

I did not expect the nether to be this chill, honestly. At least partly because I'm accustomed to playing with Des, whose main motivations are FIGHT and PETS, so she tosses in basically any mod that adds more monsters and/or makes things harder. So I basically play harvest moon and never step into the forest or ocean lest I get death rolled by a fucking alligator, then at the end of the day she comes back home with broken armor leading a pack of goddamn dragons. Last time I tried going to the nether some kind of fucking giant mosquito thing latched itself to my face and I hadn't been back since. Playing on vanilla has been positively relaxing in comparison.

[atog]

Complementary Shaders is the closest I've come to best showcasing the new ambient light/fog of the new nether biomes. It's still a long ways from a true RTX backscatter and primary/ambient mix. I just built two newish rigs around Ryzen 5900x and Saph Nitro RX6600s, and they don't automagically support raytracing.

As for adrenaline junkies like Des, the nether is appallingly boring and they've rightly pointed at its relative safety and predictability as a glaring design shortfall. As originally designed by Notch it was supposed to be hostile beyond compare - no food, no trees, none of this glowing fungus shit, no blocks that could withstand a ghast barrage - but in a way that tested your patience more than your reaction speed.

Anyone with the sense of a hamster could pack their cheeks with acorns and burrow happily about, digging warrens and carving out rooms for tree growing and pits to trap pigmen to extract their golden prosthodontics to turn into useful tools. One precious bucket was all the iron you really needed (until a stretch of beta, when smelting with lava sometimes ate the bucket along with the fuel).

Its main problem now is that it's still pretty safe - even after adding straight-up hostiles to most areas because they simply didn't have any - and players don't need any planning or patience to make a go of it, they just fall through a purple portal into a candy-coloured lush fungal forest 40% of the time and have instant wood and sometimes (with a little effort) very high quality porkchops and leather for all purposes.

Basalt deltas aside - they are a bitch kitty to traverse but have little in the way of unique reward - the new nether feels like Mojang lost their way a bit. I don't mind it one whit though, because the new ambiences with flying ashes and distant cheering football stadiums and Geiger counters or dial-up noises are funky and interesting mental furniture for the person who wants to stay a while.

One day they will give THE END some love and hopefully it will remain a stark moonscape but gain some nice ambient tracks and tall boys will have villages and farms of their own (and baby dragons, for that special someone who loves to come home with new pets).

[Sharkey]

We can only dream. Back in beta I used to do update/tutorial videos for IGN and one of the sillier things I recommended was making a bunch of snow golems and letting them just wander the nether aimlessly, so when you inevitably got lost you could usually find a snow trail to backtrack to your portal. I imagine snow golems surviving there at all is an oversight that's probably since been corrected. If nothing else the place is a lot more navigable now with different biomes acting like landmarks (though the first world I tried the new generation in was a pissass mean seed that stuck me in a nearly endless basalt delta that tested the shit out of my patience.) What I wouldn't give for an end update, but with the latest one showing off a suspiciously portal shaped structure it seems like we might get a new dimension before they ever get around to gussying up the old ones.

Anyway, I noticed we don't seem to have much in the way of glow ink or even convenient nearby undersea ravines for hunting squid so I set up a modest farm for the things.



If you drop down the Giant Fucking Hole and go up the stairs a bit there's a geode with a door that contains a tacky little waiting room for idling in.



Up the stairs a little way further than that is a spawning/collection room where you can watch axolotls do squid murders. It doesn't have crazy rates or anything but it's cute and honestly how much of this stuff does anyone really need. I left a half dozen stacks in the chalet though, so we shouldn't want for glow frames for the map room or whatever.

[Grath]

Aw, man that's neat. I only just got around to checking out the far fort after spending like a month just sort of fucking around in my amusement park/trash forest and I'm kind of boggled. It never even occurred to me to just set up residence in a nether fortress and live on berries?

The thing about Hell in Minecraft is that it's secretly the safest place to live.

Of course it also helps if you have a fondness for making giant-ass Hell Cathedrals with gothic windows that run with lava for every wall, as Starr has been known to.

Hell's about to get a lot less safe in 1.19, where skeletons and endermen will be able to spawn at light level 11 (aka three blocks away from a torch) so you'd need light sources every 5-6 blocks.

[Mongrel]

Not if you pave every flat surface with slabs, the way Starr already does. :3

[atog]

Not every block gets a slab. Some get treated with Super-Gro and have non-solid entities on them. :)

To be fair, skeletons are limited to the Soul sand Valley biome pool, and won't normally spawn in non-Soul Flats chunks. If you find them outside it, it's cause they wandered across from a nearby soulsand biome.

Enderbros are everywhere except in crimson biome, which is the only one that actually restricts them; but they are replaced by hoglins so that's kind of worse unless you're hungry and can climb.