Games and more
My plans for this post were completely different than what I have to actually write about. Originally I planned to do a post when I finished the interior of my house and my machinery. The game however had other ideas and I just tried to roll with it for as much as I could.
Unfortunately rolling with it didn’t allow me to progress much with the colony. The post is a bit big regardless of that because there is a lot to explain. So, let’s get to it.
As I mentioned in my last post my previous save was gone due to a small human error. In that post I said there were only a few buildings left to place before I got back to the point I stopped.
Well, figuring out where to put those huts were more of a pain than I expected. Even then I am still not sure they were placed in a good way. Time will tell!
Because of the restart and a change to my mod list everything is obviously different. Since everything changed anyway, I took this opportunity to try some new ideas, in an attempt to deal with some problems I ran in my first try.
At the end of last month I finally upgraded my computer. As such I was forced to reinstall both my OSes, Windows and Linux. It is a process I always find tedious, more on the Windows part because it always feels like something will go wrong with it that will annoy me for days.
This time it wasn’t any different and I won’t go into everything that irritated me. Suffice to say it annoyed me so much that I procrastinated to reinstall Linux for a while.
Well, a short while ago I finally did reinstall it, without any major issues. Kinda. You know when you are so used to do something that it becomes trivial to you and then you just don’t pay attention to it much anymore. That is what happened with this re-installation of Linux which led to the tragedy of this post: my Linux install shares the same HD as my games and during the re-installation I accidentally deleted all my games, more specifically, my Minecraft save was completely gone…
This is an overdue post. I kept meaning to write about my on-going shenanigans with MineColonies a while ago but I wanted to finish recreating my usual Create machines first. That however turned to be far more work than I anticipated as I was trying some new stuff.
The majority of the machines, and the most important ones, are done though. There are only a few left that I am still considering and then it is adding finishing touches to each area so it doesn’t look like someone went carving up giant holes underground, placing torches all over the place.
I figured I might as well post about those now before I forget everything that has happened so far.
Confession time: I almost decided to restart my game again. The main reason is that I was highly dissatisfied with the way my colony was being developed as well as the hilly area I decided to settle in. My reasoning was that now that I had a more experience with MineColonies, if I were to restart I could lay out the town in a much better way.
The other reason were some mods that I discovered recently that made it very tempting. They were ChoiceTheorem’s Overhauled Village, Towns and Towers – Structure Add-ons and Integrated Dungeons and Structures. The first one replaces vanilla villages, the second add new ones to different biomes plus some other structures and the last one adds new elaborated crafted structures and dungeons in the world that also incorporate features from other mods like Quark and Create.
But as I thought about it I figured out if I stop being so stubborn and change around where I planned to put some of these buildings it might not be too bad. Also no matter where I end up with it will be pretty much impossible to find large sections of flat terrain thanks to how the world generation works in 1.18.
As I mentioned in my previous post I have been playing a lot with a mod called MineColonies.
My original intention was to take screenshots and write about it as I started the colony then built it up. Unfortunately I got a bit too distracted by all the decision making I was doing that I forgot to take relevant screenshots. I also kept postponing writing about it to play “just a bit more”.
Now it is a bit far ahead than a starting colony but still with very little in terms of self-sufficiency. I will try to summarize as best as I can how I got to this point as well as the troubles I am facing right now.
It is becoming a sort of bad joke in this series that every time I start to get close to accomplishing something interesting I end up deciding to restart for a reason or another.
This time the trigger was when I decided to check what was new in the latest Create mod update, version 0.5. There is some cool stuff in there, more specifically the Steam engine which seems like an excellent replacement for the Furnace Engine (now gone).
The only problem was that 0.5 is only available on Minecrat version 1.18. I was playing on version 1.16 so the change was one of necessity if I wanted to play with the latest Create additions.
But that wasn’t the only reason. There were a lot of little things that I wasn’t happy with and it reflected mostly in the mods I removed this time around.
After a brief break to go through Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion and do the Expeditions Redux in No Man’s Sky, I am back in Minecraft… or so I was planning to say when I started writing this post. Turns out I got a bit burned out from building a lot of stuff and end up taking a break from Minecraft to play some Hitman 2. I will come back to it eventually, just need to scratch this itch for Hitman first.
Anyway, my goal was to build some stuff that I’ve been putting off for a while then get into the magic mods I have installed, Ars Nouveau and Astral Sorcery. I just meant to build a few things too, a stable, a chicken coop, proper farms, an XP farm and some machinery to automate certain things. Also a reorganization of my storage system because it was in dire need of some expansion.
What actually end up happening is that I started to build much more than that. You will see what I mean as I describe what I actually did.
P.S.: All the screenshots in this post were taken with the Complementary Shaders and the Stay True resource pack.
My original plan was to only write this post once I was done remaking my mod list for Minecraft. But with over 100 mods it will take some time to write that list…
So, before I forget everything that happened so far I decided to go ahead and write everything that happened in this restart. Hopefully I am not forgetting anything!
All the screenshots in this post have been taken with the Complementary Shaders.
If there is any proof of how many terrible decisions I can make in a short time and how impulsive I am then these Minecraft posts are exactly that.
Dramatics aside, as I mentioned in my latest monthly game review post, some stuff happened which led me to decide to restart in the game. Well, it is more than restarting I actually changed my mod list so much too that any pretense of a “vanilla plus” experience has been pretty much thrown out of the window now.
Before we get to any of that let me retell the events of what happened as it will explain why I made the decisions I made.