The Minecraft Logs #20: The usual machines, bugs and The End.

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.

The house interior, machinery and storage

The first thing I did after my last post was work on the interior of my house. Once again I am just following the design provided by BigTonyMC.

Unlike the exterior I did some significant changes to it, from simple things like using actual tables from mods to using actual blocks as flooring in the second floor. I also intended to turn the attic and extra bedrooms area into an area for Ars Nouveau tables/enchantment and for crafting tables.

I did start on that but paused to go work on my storage and machinery. I figured that since I was going to work on the house anyway might as well have the machinery generating iron and gold.

In the end I decided to build both underground, beneath the house. I guess my dwarvish tendencies won’t die any time soon. :p

For the storage there isn’t much to say, it was just like my last attempt using a combination of Simple Storage Network and Storage Drawers. I also divided it in three floors with the first for metals, minerals, gems and stones, the second for wood and plantables and the third for meat, animal products, mob drops and anything else that didn’t fit in the previous floors.

The machinery also didn’t have that many changes. I did experiment having one separate machine to generate cobblestone both for the iron and gold generators instead of having each with their own way to generate cobblestone. It worked okay.

I also decided to send the output of my generators directly into my storage, instead to a chest like I normally do. Then I just put a void upgrade on the affected drawers to eliminate any excess produce. Funky implementations because of the locations of my generators aside, this worked much better as I didn’t have to keep checking chests to see how full they were.

Lastly was the gold generator itself. I tried to change the design to be more open, easier to fix if necessary and with less mechanical arms. I failed in pretty much all those categories. Even worse, I realized there was a flaw with my design in that it generates an excess of diorite. I think I already know how to fix that but I didn’t want to change anything just yet because it would be a pain to modify it.

This version also only had the new method to generate gold. The reason for that is because MineColonies, at least with the Medieval Oak style, uses a lot of clay but doesn’t have any hut to generate it. So I decided to just collect the clay that the gold generator makes. Same with the flint.

I didn’t make any andesite machine this time, figuring I wouldn’t build that many Create machines this time. Plus the miner from MineColonies was getting a bunch of andesite anyway if I ever needed it.

The bugs

Between working on that I was also expanding my colony. I decided to create two more Builder Huts because the existing two weren’t cutting it anymore. My plan was to have two of them building and upgrading all the huts while the other two worked on building walls.

This is where the bugs start to creep in. Which builder would work and when started to become completely random. Most of the time they didn’t do any work at all.

I tried everything I could think of to fix it: whacking the builder on the head, firing then re-hiring, firing and hiring a different colonist, canceling the building order and giving a different one, rebuilding the hut, giving them all the materials manually and probably other attempts I already forgot about. None of those worked.

But those weren’t the only bugs I ran into. I built a XP farm then every time I returned from a session of grinding for XP I noticed that some blocks from my machinery broke. By broke I mean like someone went to those blocks with a pickaxe to remove them.

It was always the same blocks that broke and I have absolutely no idea what was causing it. Fortunately they were easy to replace so it wasn’t that much of a big deal to fix. It was still pretty annoying.

The worst was with Magitek Mechs. The moment I put in the magicite the game crashed and the world couldn’t be loaded anymore. Fortunately I had a recent backup to restore the world.

With all these bugs the only conclusion I could take is that something went terribly wrong with my mods. I don’t know if it was because of a mod I added at some point or an update that broke them.

Since I didn’t have the patience to try debugging it I decided to focus my efforts to get to the End. Then after that I’d abandon this world and move on. My only fear was if any other bugs appeared to stop me from that but fortunately that didn’t happen.

The End

Confession time: I never reached the End in Minecraft before. It was always my goal but then I would get sidetracked by something else, become unhappy with my mod list at the time or some other event would happen for me to abandon a world before reaching that goal.

My first challenge was the Stronghold. It wasn’t even finding it (although that was interesting in its own way) just navigating it. I was using the mod Yung’s Better Stronghold which I completely forgot about until I got to the place and got lost…

Granted, I am the type that have a terrible sense of direction. In games that usually isn’t much of a problem. But with that mod I just got lost inside the stronghold for a while. Much to my shame I had to resort to spectator mode to find the portal to the end!

After that my next challenge was defeating the Ender Dragon. I believed I was prepared to fight it but the reality was much different!

I knew about the crystals that she uses to heal herself but thought they were something I could shoot from the ground or at least be easy to reach. That wasn’t quite the case in my experience. Fortunately I did have some scrolls of flying from Ars Noveau in my inventory and used those to fly up and shoot the crystals.

After that defeating the Ender Dragon wasn’t too hard. Well, kind of. Turns out I can’t shoot the side of a barn with my bow. The only times I could hit her was when I was flying close to the dragon to shoot or when she would get land on the ground that I could hit it with my sword.

Once defeated I returned to the End to find an elytra plus explore the place. I already knew the End dimension looked fairly empty but I didn’t expect it to be so large too. It took me a while to find a elytra with nothing interesting to explore in the mean time. Now I understand why mods to change the End are so popular!

Flying with an elytra though was an interesting experience. So was playing around with an Ender chest and a shulker box.

What next?

Now that I reached the End dimension I have no more reason to play around with this world. I wanted to build the rest of the huts in my colony as well get them all to level 5 but with all the bugs that doesn’t seem like it will be possible.

It is a shame too because this particular list of mods was the closest I got so far to my ideal version of the Minecraft.

I think I will play some other games for a while then return to Minecraft when I get the itch to play it again. Next time though it will probably be with version 1.19 as well as with Fabric/Quilt mods. I’ve been meaning to explore that side of the mod world for a while so this seems like a good opportunity to do it.

To be honest I already started to look at 1.19 modpacks as well as checking some mods that offer the features I like. However the recent news of the hostile takeover of PolyMC, the launcher I used and loved, pretty much killed all my desire to play the game.

And yes, I know there are other launchers out there but it is always a pain to switch. I will come back to Minecraft eventually. For now I am off to play other games!