There were quite a few developments in my Minecraft playthrough since my last post on the subject. So many that I probably should have wrote about it before, breaking it into smaller posts instead of leaving everything to this one.
Oh, well, I will try to not ramble too much so the size of this post doesn’t get out of hand.
Here is what has been happening…
I mentioned before that I used a cheat code to find the coordinates of a village. I even started to build a tunnel to reach those coordinates. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the coordinates given to me were about 1000 blocks away…
Still I kept trying to build the tunnel, figuring that with some rails and a cart the travel wouldn’t be too bad once the work was all finished.
However digging that tunnel was turning out to be soul crushing work so I decided to give a try at exploring my surroundings again. This time I noticed that on the back side of my shelter the mountain wasn’t as big as I thought and I decided to check it out.
On the other side of it I found a small lake connected with two rivers. That looked like it might lead to some place interesting so I took a boat to explore them.
One of the rivers just led to more high mountains that would be too much of a pain to explore. The other river gave better results leading me to a snowy taiga biome with an actual village!
I was able to loot some good stuff from there, including seeds for pumpkins, blank maps and papers, potatoes plus a few other things I already forgot about.
Next I decided it was about time to rebuild my ugly cobblestone box shelter into an actual house.
Since my ability to build houses in games is equivalent to an alien trying to pass as human I felt I should watch some videos on YouTube first to learn building techniques.
The ones I liked the most from my search I would recreate in my creative world to get a better feel for the layout, scale of the buildings and how the materials looked in my computer.
Despite all that I still had a bit of creative crisis as I couldn’t come up with a good house design myself. Eventually I just gave up and built this house by One Team. I did make some tweaks for personal preferences and materials available though. The interior also still needs a lot of work.
Finally I decided it was time to try exploring the Nether. I built my portal and went in, excited to see what I could find in there.
Well, if I thought exploring a mountain biome in the overworld was bad, doing so in the Nether is even worse. Oh, and since I am dumb and clumsy I obviously felt in a sea of lava in there losing all my stuff.
That left me so salty I rage-quit when once I respawned at my house. Not because of the stuff I lost since those could be replaced but because of all the experience that was gone. I just needed a few more bars to reach level 30, which I wanted to do so I could try some enchanting.
This latest fiasco mixed with my frustrations with exploration made me to seriously consider restarting a third time, in a different biome, or give a modpack a try. I even downloaded SkyFactory 4 and Create just to take a peek on what they offered. In the end though I figured out I’d probably just get frustrated with both of those options but for different reasons.
Besides I figured I can just make a new base in a different biome in my current world if it really bothers me that much. I just need to find an interesting place to relocate to first.
For now I will just continue to explore the Nether. Maybe even try to build some safer pathways there so I don’t end up falling in the lava so often!
More impressive a house than I ever built in Minecraft. I am a master of rectangular boxes, be they a cobblestone wall forming a compound, or quarry shaped holes in the ground.
This reminds me that I wouldn’t dare go back to vanilla after being able to fly around the Nether with jetpacks. 😉 But eh, everyone needs the experience of trying to build a cobblestone bridge block by block while trying not to fall into the lava while ghasts do their best to blow you off.
There’s a keepinventory console command if losing your stuff annoys you after some time. I shamelessly swap between normal and peaceful mode sometimes if spawns have gotten too annoying. Minecraft is great for adjusting stuff how you like it. I’m mostly partial to having modded gravestones left behind to not permanently lose stuff, but still require a corpse run adventure.
Skyblock modpacks are possibly not the best start unless you’re looking for something that feels different. Years ago, I really enjoyed the Regrowth modpack as a very chill modpack for just camping out somewhere and building/learning bits of mods slowly. Heard fairly good things about the Peace of Mind modpack, but haven’t had time to try it out yet. Idea is to still have world and ground available while tinkering around.
However, the good thing about skyblock modpacks is that it quite limits the learning curve at the beginning because one is literally starting with a single block or thereabouts. So the rate of learning is throttled by the rate of grinding for resources and vice versa. The original Agrarian Skies was quite good at steady guidance. Not so sure about the sequel, I suspect not, as it modifies more things and makes it harder.
My friends said something similar when I posted the screenshot over at Discord. But like I said to them it is a matter of creative pride. The other reason is that I started playing Minecraft in part to do creative stuff. Copying builds from the internet kind of defeats the purpose.
But being stuck on an ugly cobblestone box was bugging me too much so I chose a solution that would bother me less.
After spending some time on the Nether I can see how a jetpack would make exploring it a lot more enjoyable! But yeah, I think experiencing vanilla Minecraft at least once, even if some of those experiences are painful, can be quite the adventure. If nothing else it should also generate some interesting stories to tell!
Losing stuff isn’t what bothers me much because like I said in the post they can be replaced. It was the loss of experience that made me salty as it took a while to get all that. Granted there are ways to gain experience fast, I just avoided it before because I felt like it would trivialize the game. But with the way I’ve been dying in the Nether those XP farms are looking mighty tempting now.
That gravestone mod is also sounding tempting, specially since it also holds the XP dropped during death.
My interest for Sky Factory 4 is partly because it appears in a lot of best modpack lists and because it *is* different. But it is exactly because of that second part that I am saving it for the future, once I am done with vanilla Minecraft and I am looking for a different experience.
I haven’t heard of those modpacks you mentioned but I will give a look at them too once I feel like venturing into modded Minecraft.
I will admit though that playing around with Create has been tempting as some of those machines would make my life easier. The only reason I am resisting the temptation is because I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface of vanilla Minecraft and I believe that a game should only be modded once you have a good grasp of it and what you like and don’t like about it. I don’t feel like I got to that point with Minecraft yet.