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.
Elevator building and excavating a tunnel
A while back I mentioned I wanted to build an elevator down to my mines and a tunnel connecting my house to one of the villages.
For the elevator I followed this design by RagePlaysGames. I couldn’t implement everything though. For example, the call buttons in each floor was impossible to implement since the difference from the entrance to where my mines were about 30 blocks or so and pretty close to bedrock.
But just in case I died and the elevator was stuck in a different floor, making it inaccessible to me, I also built some emergency staircases leading down. It took some work but in the end it was worth it as it made accessing my mines a much smoother experience.
After that I proceeded to build the tunnel to the nearest village. For this one I used this auto miner design from Rockit14.
This turned out to be way more work than I expected (this will be a theme on this post). First I had do some adjustments to the auto miner build because I wanted it to be 4×4 to match my elevator shaft. The next is that the auto-miner didn’t run forever like I thought so I had to put it away then place it again. There were a few times where I messed up the placement and it went off in the wrong direction making a mess of everything. I think there were also a few other self-inflicted problems but I can’t recall them from the top off my mind now.
Was it worth it? Right now I don’t think so. It took much more effort than I was expecting and it isn’t all that interesting to travel through since it is just a straight line. I know it was enough work in total that I gave up on the idea of building another tunnel connecting to the other village I found.
Maybe trying to build a portal in the Nether and making a path there to connect the two locations would have been better. Or at least it would have been a shorter distance. On the other hand I hate the Nether so it would probably be a nightmare.
Lastly on this part of the project I built an elevator outside the village to access the tunnel. Since I had experience from the mining elevator this one was a lot easier and faster to build. I even build some doors on the side of the hill which…. actually looked ugly as hell.
Rebuilding the village
My original goal was just to come to this village to trade so I could have access to goodies that might have been annoying to get through other means. But as I kept wandering through the village it didn’t have all of the professions which shouldn’t be a surprise to any Minecraft veteran. Also the houses horribly ugly and tiny.
At the time I also stumbled on this video from a very talented guy who is making an incredibly detailed Minecraft world, including remaking the villages. This got me starting on remaking the villages myself. Of course, I didn’t expect to make anything as cool as that guy since I am not that creative or have as much patience. But I thought I could at least make something better than vanilla Minecraft. I should have known better!
My idea was to use mods like The Mighty Architect, WorldEdit and Create’s Creative Worldshaper to save some time in making all the buildings. But the problem with being a crap builder, and I am one right now, is that no matter how good or powerful the tools are you will still end up with crap builds. And that is exactly how it went for me.
So I tried to search for mods to that would change the vanilla villages to something more interesting. I couldn’t find any for 1.16.5. I did however stumble on this guy on YouTube who released videos of new buildings he made for the plains village.
Since I have no shame and it is just for my personal game I just started remaking the buildings just like the video. The only ones that I planned to build with my own design were the farm, the church and the librarian/map maker house as I had ideas for those.
As time progressed I grew increasingly frustrated as this project was taking longer than I expected and there were other things that I wanted to do. Plus some other negative thoughts that aren’t worth mentioning.
To make it all worse when I was creating the buildings in my Creative World I was getting a lot of OpenGL errors. I got those in my survival world too but they were a lot more rare. In my Creative World it was just spamming those errors in the chat box.
I tried to disable and enable the mods I had but couldn’t figure out what was causing the error. I also realized that there were a lot of mods in the Mechanicrafters modpack that I had no idea what it did or I just didn’t find interesting.
To make a long story short, this led me to creating a new instance in MultiMC with only the mods that interested me and a bunch of other mods that I was already thinking about plus a bunch of others I had just discovered.
Of course that meant that I would have to restart to take advantage of the stuff the new mods added. But it was fine, I thought, restarting can be fun and I am a lot more experienced with Minecraft nowadays! Famous last words….
The mods
Before we continue with this horror story I need to mention some of the mods that led me down this path. I will only list the big ones as there are still some other mods I want to test out before saying anything about them. Once I do I will update my list of mods.
To begin with, world generation. Terraforged is the one that pretty much sealed me into this whole restarting idea. Basically what it does is generate a world that tries to have more realistic shapes for its mountains, hills, rivers and biome transitions. It also has built-in support for other mods and has some options if you want to customize it.
Next is Oh, The Biomes You’ll Go which as the name implies adds a bunch of new biomes to the game. Rounding up the biomes part I installed almost all of the Abnormal Team’s mods.
For structures I installed Repurposed Structures and Valhesia Structures.
To fill in the world with creatures I installed Alex’s Mobs. To add a bit of fantasy I decided to give a Ice and Fire: Dragons a try which didn’t work out as I hoped for. I will get to that a bit. Lastly in this category was Mowzie’s Mobs just because they look cool.
Although I am not that big into magic in any kind of fiction there are a few exceptions. And the two magic mods I decided to test fall into that category.
The first one was Astral Sorcery. I had my eye on it for a while and finally decided to pull the trigger on it. I just love how they picked a theme and ran with it.
The other one was Ars Nouveau, which is based on one of my oldest tabletop RPG crushes1 Ars Magica.
I have barely done anything with those two but Ars Nouveau seems to not only be very fun in itself but may also have its own enchanting system that solves all my annoyances with the vanilla enchanting system.
To finish everything off I decided to go with Storage Drawers and Simple Storage Network for my storage needs. I was a bit apprehensive that Storage Drawers would be a bit annoying to remove items from in quantities that weren’t one or a full stack but so far it has been working very well for me.
Simple Storage Network I haven’t actually tested yet and might even be redundant depending on how I end up building my storage area. I will try to test it soon though.
I almost thought about using Occultism for my storage needs but it would come with a lot of magic baggage that I am just not interested in right now. Maybe some day I will give it a try too.
Phew. That was about it for the biggest ones. There were a lot of other little mods but listing all of them would take a whole few posts by themselves. If anyone is really curious just wait until I can update my list, please.
Restarting
Like I always do when testing a bunch of mods I first started with a Creative world to see if everything was working as expected. In my short tests I didn’t see anything that seemed like a problem, except for some Cyclops out in the wild near the spawn point which I found odd. They were easy to avoid though so I didn’t consider that to be too big of a problem.
Then I re-created the world as a Survival World and off I went to happily explore it…. except I got sniped by a dragon. “No problem”, I thought, “I will just try to find the village I found near here when I made this world in Creative and start from there”…. except the village wasn’t where I expected it to be.
I think the problem is when I created the world in Creative mode it was with the regular world generator but when I used the same seed to re-create it with Terraforged and Survival mode things moved around a bit. That or it was just my usual terrible sense of direction.
Whatever the case was I decided to try to backtrack a little to see if I could figure out the location of the village… only to be sniped by that stupid dragon again! I tried to take refuge in a shelter building added by, I believe, Valhesia Structures near the spawn point but the dragon still killed me even there.
“No, problem”, I thought, “I will just re-start the game with a different seed generator.
This time I started on some kind of snowy mountain. It looked like a challenging but interesting starting point so I was willing to go with it.
Walking down the mountain a bit I found what looked like to be some evil structure which a big locked door on it. Thinking that they would make terrible neighbors I decided to walk away, trying to find a suitable location to build a house… only for a creeper to sneak on me and blow me up! I figured that was a sign that world was cursed and I should retry with a different one.
Third time is the charm, right? And for a while it was with this new world. I end up in a Meadow biome with a nice shelter already built in not too far off and two villages nearby.
In the tradition of every JRPG hero, I barged into the houses of those villagers and stole everything in their chests. That made for a nice start but also made my storage needs considerably higher.
I decided then to make a temporary base by digging a hole in the ground in front of a big tree added by Valhesia Structures. To organize my stuff I started to make some storage drawers and they proved to be such a better way to achieve it than regular chests.
The next step was to make some Create machines to get the most out of my ores. But to do that I needed some kelp and there was no ocean nearby. So off I went on a small journey to find it!
On my way to the ocean I found another village that I immediately proceeded to loot. While I was doing that I noticed it was under attack by a dragon! I immediately ran inside one of the houses hoping that the dragon would eventually go away. But as I saw the dragon annihilating every villager from the window of the house I got scared and decided to try to flee the village.
Somehow I managed to escape from that unscathed. The next village I found on the way I wasn’t so lucky. This time I saw another dragon attacking another village from a distance. I tried to take a longer route to avoid it but the dragon saw me and decided I looked better roasted.
Trekking all the way back there was annoying but fortunately I was able to get my stuff back and keep going while the dragon was busy burning something else.
Not too long after I was able to find the ocean, get my kelp and then start the trip back to my temporary base.
On the way back I tried to take a different route away from the latest village I found only to be roasted by a third different dragon!
Another run to grab my stuff and get back to my base. On the way back I found another village which surprisingly enough wasn’t under attack by a dragon. But later on, when I returned to loot it, I did find some indication it had been attacked at some point. However I didn’t find any sign of a dragon besides an empty roost nearby.
Anyway, despite all those deaths I did find fun with this little adventure. I was also fine with treating that area of the world as dragon kingdom and not set foot there again until I was ready to fight some dragons.
What turned to be a real problem was an event that happened a while later. On the way back from some exploration I was one of my two initial villages being attacked by dragons. I just tried to avoid it and went back to my temporary base.
On the next day I went to the village to check things out. Fortunately the dragon didn’t do that much damage and once again there was no sign of it besides an empty rooster nearby.
From what I read of the mod it was supposed to have an area around the spawn point that was safe from dragons. I admit I am not entirely sure if that village was inside that area or not. All I know is I didn’t want to risk spending time on that save, making a lot of progress only to find out a dragon spawned near my house and destroyed everything I built.
I even tried to change the config files to make dragon spawns on the overworld a bit more rare then re-created that world in Creative mode to test it out. But as far as I saw during that test the spawns happened in the same places.
I don’t know if the mod was just ignoring my changes to the config file or if there was some kind of incompatibility with another mod that was making the dragon spawn too aggressive or something else.
All I know is there is a lot of other mods I want to test and as much as it breaks my hard to give up on Ice and Fire I don’t want to keep spending more time figuring out what is going on with it. Maybe at a later date I will return to this mod or maybe even play a modpack built with it in mind. Despite all the deaths and breaking my heart, I still think it is a mod with a lot of potential for fun.
I also almost thought about giving up on Terraforged because it was making every other type of stone super common while making regular stone rare. While I was playing my dragon-cursed world I decided to roll with it, figuring out I could make a cobblestone-generator later on.
But as there were quite a few important stuff early on that requires stone to make I decided it was not worth the effort to hunt it from other places nor did I like the idea of a machine just to generate stone.
I spent some hours trying to google if there was a way to change that behavior or alternative world generators without any luck. When I was about to give up I discovered there was a customize button under the world type choice. It has an option called “Strata Decorator” that if set to false makes it generate a world with stones and ores just like in vanilla Minecraft. That solved my quibble with Terraforged and the mod is staying in my list.
Anyway, after all that disappointment with Ice and Fire I restarted again. This time I almost decided to install MineColonies or Immersive Engineering or even a modpack for 1.7. I decided to not install the first right now because I feared I might just spend a lot of time of it instead of other things… like finally going to the End dimension or exploring those magic mods I installed!
As for Immersive Engineering, it has an industrial look which isn’t I am not too fan of. Despite that I still have enough of a curiosity to give it a try at some point. It seems to be a good addition to a late game Create and there is a mod to make them compatible.
I might try these two at some later point. For now I just want to enjoy the ones I already installed, which are already a lot on their own.
As for a 1.7 modpack… I figured there isn’t anything that interesting with update 1.7 to make me want to switch versions. Maybe 1.8 comes out and a lot of mods upgrade to it I will test that version out.
I will make a post with these new adventures whenever I catch up to my previous progress. How long that will take will depend on how horrible my experience on the Nether will be this time around. :p