Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

I've got a vanilla Minecraft (v. 1.14.1) game going, on Peaceful mode, and so far I'm enjoying it. I gave up on non-Peaceful survival mode a while back when I realized I didn't find random ambush monsters "fun"--the requirement for constant watchfulness and paranoia made a Minecraft session seriously anxiety-inducing, not fun and relaxing the way a game is supposed to be. It's been over a year since I played a non-skyblock/stoneblock game with monsters enabled, and I still get nervous and twitchy at night in-game, look over my shoulder constantly, and have to fight the urge to rush to bed and make the sun come up. When a game gives you an automatic anxiety trigger that you can't turn off and that lasts for months if not years, that's not fun.

Oops, accidentally posted while editing tags. To continue...

I'm playing vanilla Minecraft because most of the modded world hasn't gotten past 1.12.2, because the Forge modding API and mod loader hasn't been released in a non-alpha state for 1.13, let alone 1.14.1. There's a competing "lightweight" modding API and mod loader, Fabric, that is out for 1.14.1, but not all that many mods yet, and most of them are by people I've never heard of. (Fabric proper includes one dev I greatly respect, though--asiekierka). And, of course, I wanted to try 1.13 and 1.14's cool new features. Mojang has added a lot of things that used to be mod-only to the vanilla game, like campfires and capturable fish and concrete you can mix and pour, and more undersea ruins and undersea "plants" like kelp forests and seagrass and coral reefs. They've added more animals, like polar bears and dolphins and turtles. Over in the part of the game I don't play, they've added more monsters, mostly undead variants. Also raiding hordes of brigands called 'illagers'. (They're like villagers, only they look grey/ill--same guys found in woodland manors in 1.12.2. Now they have outposts and ride buffalo-things)

However, there are mods I miss greatly. Here's what I really hate doing without, and by "hate doing without", I mean "grit my teeth and not scream" when I hit one of the things that I can't do/have to do because I don't have the mod.

1. Fast Leaf Decay! If I never wait on a leaf blocks to rot and drop saplings again, it will be too soon.
2. JEI - without that ever handy 'U for use' button, I'm back to the bad old days of 'look every item up in Minecraft Wiki every 5 minutes'. At least we have the recipe book, and can use it to automatically load the crafting table and make an item in one click.
3. Hunger in Peace - I like food gathering to matter for more than composting. (At least I have that use for wheat bread and apples...) Just because I don't want to be ambushed by monsters doesn't mean I don't want the other things that go with survival. If I didn't want food to matter, I'd play Creative.

Without mods, there's still some major holes in Peaceful mode. Mojang finally put in some alternate methods for getting bone meal, such as composting (easy) and finding fossils (rare). String can be fished up or cut from generated cobwebs. However, you can't do brewing without monsters or cheating things in. There's no way to get blaze rods in Peaceful vanilla, nor spider eyes, nor gunpowder. There needs to be a way to get these items.

...Maybe I should work on pre-porting akkamaddi's Ashenwheat and adding a blaze rod plant to it?

A set of posts to another DBZ fan about Minecrafting, which I will continue as a report on my world:

That sounds like an interesting world. I may have to try that seed. (From Jenny Islander: The seed is (take out the spaces) 7267 5644 6546 4405 901).

Right now, I am playing through a peaceful run of Direwolf20's 1.12.2 2.2.0 modpack. I added "Hunger in Peace" to the pack because I like food to matter even on Peaceful mode, and "Smoother Fonts" because being able to anti-alias fonts and pick the font you want for the tiny print on tooltips and buttons is really nice. I also updated a few mods in the pack before Direwolf20 did, because I don't like keeping known bugs that have already been fixed. The official pack has since caught up. I also set the world to a "rare" Lost Cities with Biomes O' Plenty (BOP) configuration, but someone's definition of "rare" is a lot different from mine, because there are abandoned, crumbling cities at various distances in all directions.

I spawned in a BOP Highlands area right next to a Thaumcraft Magical Forest (which means all the oaks are giant branching oaks, the grass is bluegrass, and there are Greatwood trees--a Thaumcraft (TC) specific tree with huge branching trunks and a very dark wood, like Dark Oak only darker. There are also TC Silverwood trees, which are magical, birch-like trees with branching trunks, and giant mushrooms and weird mushrooms.)



As the pack also includes Botania, and BOP has a lot of biome-specific plants, there are strange flowers galore, everywhere. Since my base style tends to be "tunnel into the nearest hill before it gets dark" and expand from there, I have my base on the border between the Magical Forest (the lowland entrance to my base) and the Highlands (the mountain interior of my base).

Entrance to my base



My sheep pen is up in the Highlands, as I found dozens of sheep up there.




I also built chicken pits there, after bringing a few stacks of eggs back from one of my major expeditions to the nearest "Lost City".



My current base load power generation is up on the mountain, too, as is my nether portal and, just built last night, my Astral Sorcery crafting table.



I'll explain the power generation another time. You can see a "Lost City" on the upper left, not very far away. The dead "city" (more like a small office park) nearest me has been a treasure trove of glass, iron bars, anvils, bookshelves, crafting tables, furnaces, the occaisional enchanting table and brewing stand, flower pots, and endless stacks of terracotta, which were the Minecraft material used to generate that 'modern brutalist concrete' architecture look. (McJty's Lost Cities mod defaults to using vanilla materials to generate the dead cities). That terracotta has turned out to be useful in some of the other mods, saving me the trouble of digging a lot of clay out of the bottom of local ponds. The dead office park has also been a trove of other junk, such as mob spawners; since I'm doing a Peaceful mode play-through, they are mostly useless and harmless. I guess I'm bypassing the intended difficulty of pillaging the abandoned office park by being on Peaceful; apparently its supposed to be infested with zombies, skeletons and giant spiders. OTOH, I don't get to use the monster spawners to make mob farms. I'm going to have to get mob drops the hard way: breeding BEES!

There were also "feral" chickens; on one of my later visits, I penned some chickens in the bottom floor of one of the abandoned office buildings and bred them until I collected several stacks of eggs, which I took home to start my chicken farm. (Chickens don't transport easily long distances, but eggs do).

The Magical Forest lowlands had wild cows and pigs wandering the forest, so I used some of the extensive supplies of wood I had lumbered off to build cowpens and pigpens, and lured some breeding pairs in. I still haven't found any carrots, but it turns out that pigs can be bred with beetroot, and beetroot seeds drop from breaking grass in this modpack, like wheat seeds do. So I have everything I need to breed my sheep, cows, chickens and pigs, which keep me in meat, wool, eggs, feathers and hides. (And help power my power plant, but that's another, more complicated story). As for the rest of a balanced diet, this modpack includes Pam's HarvestCraft, which has all the fruits, vegetables and recipes to use everything you could want. I have already found and started growing many different vegetables and leafy spices. The main things I am still missing are carrots, potatoes, and orchard trees, though I have found the latter on my travels--they just didn't have ripe fruits for me to pick and take home and plant.

I have far more I could tell you about; Direwolf20 the YouTube guy likes to play around with different tech mods and has a very easy-going style on YouTube (i.e. he's competent at making a good video, but can get too enthralled in the "exciting" tasks of making things in a crafting table). His modpack is what they call a "kitchen sink" modpack: some of this, some of that, mods tweaked as necessary to play well together, no special emphasis on "balance" or "progression". Very much a sandbox to play in rather than a game to play through, if you get my drift.

The pack includes some nifty little tools that make building easier, such as Building Gadgets and MeeCreeps. Also /dank/null turned out to be the most useful device for storing (and/or auto-voiding) all that junk/potential building materials that you dig up when mining--cobblestone, dirt, gravel, diorite, etc.

Building Gadgets include the Builder, which is like a Builder's Wand on steroids--it will let you lay down lines and walls of blocks from your inventory without having to place each one yourself. If you've ever hung off the edge of a roof or cliff trying to place another row of edging, you'll appreciate it a lot. The Builder will work with the /dank/null widget and pull blocks out of its inventory, if they exist. I have found the combination handy in mining--an iron /dank/null holds 1152 of any individual block in it, like cobblestone, so as I mine out all that cobblestone, it gets stashed, and if I need to bridge a chasm, out comes the Builder and I can use it to toss up a quick bridge from that stash of cobblestone. (It also has an 'undo' function, so I can take that bridge back down when I'm done with it).

The other Building Gadget is the Exchanger, which lets you switch a block in inventory with a block in the world, also in walls, columns, etc. This is handy for laying pretty floors and paneling your underground base's walls in something better looking than stone cut by random seams of diorite/granite/andesite.

MeeCreeps are summoned by a widget craftable by vanilla stuff you will collect in deep mining, such as diamonds. They are turquoise-blue enderman looking dudes who will carry out simple tasks, depending on where you summoned them--if you summon one by clicking the widget on a tree, it will offer to cut the tree down for you. If you click on the floor, it will offer to flatten the area, or build a cobblestone platform, or dig down to bedrock, or whatever. Extra materials do need to be provided by you: if you want a platform, throw stacks of cobblestone at it if the local area doesn't have stone.

More to come, I hope...

No post about today, because I'm still reeling from the game. Wow, that was one hell of a Superbowl! Free football, records broken, edge-of-the-seat nail-biter game. The Pats won, but I don't feel too bad about that, because they earned their victory. It was an incredible game between two very good teams, and the Patriots showed why they are champions. Atlanta did pretty well too, with an impressive early lead, but I think they got complacent with the lead they had going into the second half, and the Pats showed them why that was a mistake.

Just, wow! Awesome, incredible game!

I see I forgot to post yesterday. Well, I don't post about work, but I will say that yesterday I took some time in the middle of the day to attend a lovely retirement luncheon for a co-worker--specifically, our office manager and de facto "office mom". As far as I can tell, everyone in the local office turned up for the luncheon, including some of our retired guys, which was held at a nice beachfront bar & grill. It was a perfect day--beautiful, sunny, not too hot and not cold, and the sun just glittered off the water. Just lovely. Everyone was nice, it was a wonderful and moving get-together, (her out-of-state kids who couldn't be there sent videos) and we'll all miss her. Seriously, she was one of those wonderful "office moms" who hold things together and helps everyone find their shit when they've lost it. I don't know what we'll do without her.

As her husband tells it, it was originally supposed to be a temporary gig, just 3 months. Over 20 years later, she's retiring from that "temporary" job. So, you never know...

I crashed early last night, after all that. I'm still under the weather a bit, and seem to run out of energy easily. Going to finally take my doctor's advice and see a specialist about these recurring, chronic sinus infections; I'm getting tired of being debilitated and tired all the time.

I ran one of my EQ2 dudes through a bunch of tradeskill quests he'd fallen behind on, and yet again mused on all the decorating I want to do when I have the time. After being inspired by DW20's Let's Play series yet again, I built a Buildcraft Filler, and used it to clear the ground for my giant stable wherein I will move the sheep to. I also used to lay the foundations; it's a serious labor-saver. I built a Malisis' Carriage Door for the stable entrance, and will build the rest of it sometime soon. It's visible on the map. I need to find some spruce so I can make medieval castle doors for the main entrance of my lair, though.

I've been reading some old mystery novels I found in a used booksale, or possibly inherited. This time it's George Simeon's Inspector Maigret. It'll be interesting to compare and contrast with the other stories in the omnibus, all published in 1958. Simeon is French; I'm pretty sure the other authors are not. Cultural differences are always interesting; for example, the French justice/legal system is quite different from the American or the British one.

Now I see why certain acquaintances are so fond of this game. Echo Bazaar is addictive, if you have a taste for gothic, indeed Lovecraftian, Victoriana, and many of us do. Think of it as a choose-your-own-adventure game set in a fantastic 19th century London that's fallen into the Underdark.

It's a web-browser game that uses either your Twitter account or your Facebook account for login services. I don't have a Facebook account--no real use for one, and I don't like attaching my Real Life info to a public social network--but Twitter turns out to be happily unconcerned with my anonymity or lack thereof. It's also very easy to set up an account--all you need is an e-mail address that works and the ability to imagine a suitable username/password pair. So now I have a Twitter feed--though about all I use it for is Echo Bazaar snippets.

EB keeps you from racing through the content by restricting your actions per day and per hour; it's a turn-based game, and without turns ("actions" in EB parlance), about all you can do is look at your options for what you could do if you had spare actions, and trade in the Bazaar. This does somewhat ameliorate the common MMORPG problem of players "beating the game" (i.e., experiencing all the content) in hours or days, getting bored, and quitting or worse, trolling/griefing other players for lulz.

So far, it's fascinating, and there is some opportunity for social interaction with other players, though most of the action is solo vs. the world. Or something like that.