Jade pyramids, tree farming and spire mapping

 

This is basically because I found 1400 blocks of jade in an island near here - and well, what do you do with that much jade? The pyramid was built over a cavern entrance and still didn't use up even half of my new stash of jade.  So, I started seeing what else I could make with the blocks.

 They are sort of like ziggurats, more than pyramids - but the little house ones were an interesting puzzle to solve.  I had never had REASON to make glass stairs before, but having seen some in a loot chest a while back, I had a light bulb that they could work really well to put a window in each of these little houses.

 

   

The little pyramids are fully viable houses in their own right, with furnaces and chests in them, each having a window and a door.  The floor is sunken one block inside with a stair from the door - although it didn't have to be it made it feel more like the regular house size inside.  The regular house is in the background above.

  

the inside of the small jade pyramid houses

Aspen farming : when you don't have enough trees, similar to this that had been a treeless plain full of vegetable plants and animals - aspens are a great go to.   Each one will drop 2 to 6 saplings, more likely 4 to 6.  Acacias are pretty prolific, as well, but a bit harder to plant near each other as they spread out more.  Cherry (sakura) trees also have that sideways sprawl.  Aspens grow most always straight up, and only require about 4 to 6 spaces between them to drop full saplings when you cut them down. (no leaf overlap, which can cause problems with some trees).  Silver birch trees grow straight up, and quite tall, but the leaf overlap means you might have to cut down three or four of them before they begin to drop their leaves into saplings.  Fir trees are a great wood type - and drop lots and lots of saplings, but the trees only have 2 to 3 blocks of wood in each one so you have to really want fir wood as your material.  Lemon, orange and banana trees do not grow well in some biomes.  You can quickly turn an area into a forest if you work at it with the right kind of saplings, and have plenty of wood for any project that you might need, pick axe handles, torches, bean and grape supports etc etc.  Since there had been no wood in this location when I arrived - I made the house here with dirt, and a willow wood roof that I had left over blocks from the last place.  

Island life and the living is easy...

 I kept passing these three little islands grouped together, and the largest of the three had a lot of minerals showing all over the sides of it as I zoomed around it in my boat.  This was a mid-point between four other places, so eventually I gave it a name and a spire with the directions indicated just so I could remember that yes- this is the place.  Then I saw the minerals, and pulled the 1400 blocks of jade out of just one of the sides of the caverns - along with seven other minerals in different amounts, and there is even more in there.

I made a little 'island life and the living is easy - the sea is full of fish' base and decided it didn't even need a full house - just a roof and a small garden.

 

How the spire mapping system works :

When you get to a really interesting place it gets a spire, 4 to 12 blocks high, with a torch on top hopefully, and then a sign with a unique name on it.  The sign on the spire that faces the actual feature, where a house might be built, has the name of the place on it.. for example 'Shurl Island'.  The sign on the opposite side says both the name of the place and 'cross (Place)' with the name for the place that is exactly opposite.  IE: If you see the sign, turn around and go straight in the other direction - you end up in Place.  And of course, the other two sides of the spire are also 'cross (Place)' for where you would end up if you walked / boated in that direction.  

 

Building an actual road between the places is the best - but sometimes the terrain is such that you cannot easily build roads and bridges, or you do not have enough resources to build a road between two good points but still need a good way of navigating a long distance between them.  This spire system helps you not get completely and totally lost while exploring the known Universe - everything has some sort of constellation relation to each other like breadcrumbs, and you can track your way back or realize you've somehow gone in a circle.  Some spires have all directions marked with 'cross' as well as the location name - and it gets really useful when you do lose your way and have no idea where you are, but then pass a cliffside with a spire on it that was founded on the other side.   Ah, that is where I am - but how did I get here?  And then you can complete the circles and know how to get from one place to another easier.                                      

In this world, I came across blindly from three different established places and hit the same long narrow island with jungle trees.  I did not know that the Tidaris island was so large - and had started two different houses with small farms and mines.  But, because I had a spire with a torch on top in the second location - I saw it when I climbed up the roof on the other house and was able to realize that it was all the same place, and yet, still large enough for both locations to exist (one with a good mountain to mine and harbor straight across from the city, the other with resources of bamboo and clay and a flat inland route that led through to another biome).

Some places will also have signs with arrows that indicate a string of places that are in that direction, in the order of appearance.  This particular world has maybe seventy named places, not all of them with full towns and gardens in them.  This little island itself was a rarity in that it was a named place for a very long time, that I came through often, but had not seen any reason to settle it - until I saw inside one of the caves on the back island and saw a whole shelf of blue covelite (which looks like lapis lazuli).  Then I saw a jut of purple sygilite, and some silver sand (which makes lovely silver sandstone), and the jade, and blue limestone and a wall of coal and a wall of shale etc etc..

more bits

 

 I should do more productive things with my time off.  I keep thinking I should make some 'real art' in my studio area, instead of Minetest towns and gardens - but then I think what will I do with that - and I fall back into exploration mode and go off in another direction in the game.  Mark is playing his Old West game, and enjoying it.  A mountain lion tried to attack his character's horse last night and it was such a loud noise - then he said one of our cats sat there and watched him on the floor for a long time after that because it had been so loud.  On the other hand, the dogs barking in his game is not bothering our dogs one bit - it doesn't 'have anything to say' in dog language, it is the right sound but meaningless etc.  When I put up a video of a baby fox at a rescue telling the rescuer 'food now please' and he was saying not yet, but soon - both of my dogs sat right up and looked for the puppy.  What does that say about the sound engineers of the game?

There is a small turkey in the oven, and I've been trying out some new house construction types on Luanti Minetest.  I am a bit sad that the creator did include a tatami mat square, but did not include any recipe to make it. *what is with that?* while you can make sakura doors which are shoji screens, and bamboo doors and I've found a few other neat ones to make out of Alder wood and Willow wood.  I made a circular first story out of galena brick and then used Alder wood tree trunk to make stairs to make the rough roof texture.  I put the little beach houses on stilts along a long dock, and then used some white granite to make brick to add with the willow wood and make a little town out of it. 

Not too far from here I found 72 iron ingots in a chest and now they are stashed here.  In all the digging I've done in the game so far I have only unearthed the equivalent of 30 some iron ingots total.  But then, every time I get settled somewhere I pick a direction and say 'what's over there?'  I'd also like to find the right corals to make the breathing helmet and get underwater and explore the sunken ships.  There is so much in this Asuna Luanti Minetest to discover.

 

And yet, no recipe for the tatami mat.  And the fish soup recipe doesn't work.  And the salt used in the actual recipes is not the salt you can make with the water bucket - and they really should be the same. I don't know where to get the other salt or if it is even possible.  Same with the seaweed, and the olives.   Little things like that are broken.  But it is still a very fun game.

 It is Easter. I work tomorrow, and there is a lot going on.  I've done the laundry and we got the groceries, and there are bits of green plants coming up in my real garden outside.   Esme wanted a gift card for something online for Easter - and we were able to do that.  Besides that and the turkey (because it was already in the freezer) I made tonkatsu ramen last night with green onion, carrot slivers, orange pepper, green peas and boiled eggs.  That was pretty good.  Studying French-to-Spanish on one profile and Spanish-to-French on the other.  And they are sort of matching up.

the bits

 

 

 

the bits.  Moving along with that walled city - filling it in, transferring more crops from elsewhere to the newer gardens I'm making.  It is flowing pretty well - although I had to put names on signs on every house to remember where I was keeping certain things.

 

I have been working on the French-to-Spanish on one Duolingo account and the Spanish-to-French on the other.  And work is hopping and rolling along, getting things done - they are opening a new production line and it has been a good while coming getting things done one by one for it - my part is just ordering certain things and calling certain companies to come do tasks - the maintenance people are  doing everything they can that we don't need to call other companies for.  Hopefully it will be up and running in a few weeks - and then I have LOTS of paperwork to rewrite and reprint and redo my spreadsheets to accommodate the new daily information.

 

 

I like the little stone square houses - they are a different style.  One house has a second story room inside, but most of the rest are single rooms with a chest and a furnace.  I'm trying not to do the same thing all over the place - and use what I pull out of the ground most recently while I was digging out stone for furnaces and the roads and the wall etc...  I went to the other towns and picked up barley and onions, strawberries, green beans and peapods and cucumbers etc etc... I should go back and get pineapples and wild onions sometime soon.  

 

There is a little 'market' area in the corner there at the bottom with four extra chests in it, and a park beside it with a cherry tree, a bench and whatever flowers I had picked around there and didn't use as dye stuffs.  I planted blueberry bushes in a lot of places from the town next door.  That bare area on the left outside the little door should probably be a dock, but I need to work more on the other side as well where I did make a dock to go to the jungle island across the way.  The lagoon to the other side is contained with nowhere to go from there, so it doesn't need much - but maybe a few small houses could be outside the wall there on the beach.

 

 

Was out in my real garden planting a few things today, mustards, and mizuna (Japanese mustard) and cucumbers and morning glories etc etc...  I watered the carrots and saw that the arugula and kale are starting to come up.  I watered the strawberries, which are blooming.  It is almost as hot as summer out there - but that does mean storms.

 

And I did some cleaning, not much - organizing a few things and cleaning a few things.  And I told Mark that I must be quite old now because it is an unusual paid day off and I just want to plant a few things, clean a few things, cook an egg and wash my laundry.  He found a turkey in the freezer we put in there a few months ago and is thawing it for Easter dinner.  We also have been watching Red Dwarf reruns again - it has been years since I first showed him those.  The other day I saw a meme and asked him if we still had that - and he found it.

 

Esme is off of school today as well, and playing a game.  Mark bought Red Dead Redemption? some cowboy old West game and we both tried out the controls on it.  I would just so much rather play Minecraft.  Esme did better than either of us at the story mode though, mostly because the controls are intuitive to her, but then she couldn't read the cursive script that is in the game and we had to translate.  I played a little more once Mark had unlocked it to more of a Skyrim type experience - but still my instincts immediately went to more Stardew Valley I want to build a house and a farm and go fishing and put up food for the winter, instead of travel around and gunsling, sell furs and game and avoid being robbed.  Mark says that could be available with some mods he saw.  These are reasons I really do like the Minecraft (or Luanti Minetest, which this is on Linux), it matches those instincts and there isn't any stress or pressure to do story quests.

 

 

 

 

 

rar (bits)

 Busy days, things getting done - started in the garden a bit over the weekend, planted carrots and turnip greens, kale and arugula, took some pictures.  I also bought a few new kitchen tools and will need to find a time to use them after they've been through the dishwasher.  It's going to be Easter soon.  Rar.

the snowball bush

 

 

bought some vegetables, and cut them up and cooked them

one of the new kitchen tools is a potato grater, and the other is an onigiri mold

 Beets :

cut up thin, olive oil drizzle, salt and pepper, put in ceramic pot with foil over it at 350 degrees for about an hour, ate some of it with rice and sausage, and put the rest in the freezer to try to use soon another way.  Cut up the beet stems and will see how that works in stir fry.

 

was visited by Grandma's dogs while gardening

Languages :

tried to get into learning Spanish again with SaySomethinginSpanish and learning backwards through the French side of Duolingo.  Fussed with new speakers and old headphones and the sound on my Linux machine. *growl*  I had good response from using SaySomethinginWelsh way back when, and I -CAN- remember much of what I am supposed to say in the lesson or two that I've taken in SSiSp...   There are a lot of truck drivers that come and try to tell me 'no English' where I work, and then they make me speak into their phone and translate for them. *sigh*  I told one today that I had more French than Spanish even after trying to learn Spanish and he thought that was painful/funny.  I can understand a lot of Spanish, but trying to produce it the French comes out instead.

 

 I've been working on a 'walled city' very near that other town of Barva, although I have not given this town a name.  It is a bit patterened after the idea of Monemvaias? the Greek city that means 'One Way In'... but of course, there are several ways into this.

I discovered a moonstone geode with gray calcite and white limestone down below it - cool, my first time seeing this in Luanti Minetest, Asuna   Basically a huge spherical room with glowing moonstone crystals inside, and three layers to it.

 

 

Luanti Minetest Asuna - farm stuff how to grow barley

 

One of the farms that I ended up making pretty large as I was trying to cook specific things and needed to collect the ingredients.  This farm has what, maybe twenty different things growing in it? I hardly ever plant it as 'field specific'.  I guess it would look neater that way but I'm scared of losing an entire area - even though there are no creepers to do that like in regular Minecraft.  There are also blueberry bushes all around the town, which are a good thing to have and carry around as 'walking food'.  Each little house has a chest or two and a furnace, and although I could do that with one big house it just felt more natural to bounce around.

 

the soybean is ripe - but the stevia is not until it shows really white flowers on top - don't waste it as you might not get back enough seed to try again.  You need four stevia to make the type of sugar that the baked goods below requires.  You can not use the sugar made from papyrus to make them, and I don't know why *sigh*

 

Making soy milk from soybeans is a process, too.  First, you have to make the glass bottles, then fill them with water, then use FIVE soybeans each with the bottle (soy soy soy/ soy soy waterbottle) to make raw soymilk, then put that in the furnace and it becomes soymilk.  And if you pick the soybeans before they look like the above picture they don't drop a replantable seed.  Soy milk is used to make a few things, and you can drink it.  Regular cow's milk can be gotten with a bucket from a cow, like in vanilla Minecraft, but it doesn't get used in any Asuna recipes.  You can still drink it as a food stuff but it ties up your bucket as you can't put it in other bottles etc.  As a note, I tried the cactus juice recipe that is in the game and it didn't work.  Bummer.

 

One of these is strawberry tart / strawberry pie and the other is pumpkin pie.  Both are very 'expensive' game wise, in the amount of resources to gather in order to make it.  The strange thing, is there is no way to even EAT a pumpkin until you do all of this to make it into pie.  I find that very strange.  But, it was also incentive to find these things.

The barley seed I have was found in a hamper - (unbreakable wayfarer chest that shows up on mountainsides etc. and looks like a wicker hamper) so I don't know where it comes from 'naturally' - for completeness, wheat and oats comes from regular grass, and cotton and rice comes from jungle grasses 'naturally'.  I'll come back and report if I ever get barley naturally.  

 

The intermediate stage of barley is shown here in the front by the path, forming the nodding heads, but still green.  It takes a very long time to get to this stage, and it still has another few stages to go through before it is ripe and will drop seed and grain.

The next stage after the above intermediate.  It is NOT ripe yet.

The picture below is also not ripe - but shown from another angle.

Barley is not easy to grow.  It takes 'forever', and if you try to grab it when it is NOT ripe, you just lose it entirely.  

 

Not ripe! (above picture)

This barley is standing up 'straight' and it is not yet RIPE.  I was wrong the first time I tried this - as it goes through a nodding stage and then it stands up.. and I thought 'for sure' that has to be it?  But no, very rarely will you get some grain from this but no seeds - and that means losing the crop.

 So, this is the ripe stage - it is dried up and olive looking on the stems, with yellow and brown nodding heads.  It will drop seed and grain. 

It should drop seed and grain both and be replanted.  It is quite rare for it to drop two seeds - it does happen, and you hope for it.  This is why barley is very hard to grow a 'field' of in survival mode - but it is worth it for the number of things you can make from it. 

 the pumpkin seeds were also in a hamper, and they grow slowly, then blossom with this yellow flower, much like watermelons.  Also, like watermelons, you have to leave some space around them for the separate pumpkin fruits to 'pop' into - or they will never fruit.  So, the picture above shows space left near every pumpkin vine with the yellow flowers to assure the pumpkin has somewhere to spawn when the plant is ready.  The pumpkins, like the watermelons, need to be hit with an axe.  However, the watermelons split into something edible (watermelon sections) and the pumpkins are not edible unless you make pumpkin pie recipe with them.  The seeds in both watermelons and pumpkins come only from the finished grown plant (which means no more fruits until one grows mature again) and you may or MAY NOT get a seed when it is broken, so be careful! 

Pumpkin that has spawned out into the open space left for it

a bamboo jungle biome that I found across the ocean, bordered by an apple tree/ mushroom forest (not shown), Asian biome and Japanese tree biome (Seen below)

 

Barva farm (the name of the Smurf village like one above with the four houses) because I couldn't bear to put 'Smurf village' on a road sign *ha* but Barva means 'colorful' so that works.

Cotton

Eggplant

Barley

Oats

Pumpkins

Wheat

Cabbage

Rice

Bell pepper

Stevia

Papyrus

Blueberry bushes

Strawberries

Grapes

Soybeans

Mint

Cabbage

Onion

Wild Onion

Vanilla (oddly, not used in any recipes) 

Ginger root

 Rhubarb

Garlic

Chicken eggs (sometimes)

Cactus (square type) 

Bamboo

Cherry Trees 

Silver Maple (Birch) trees 

-other things nearby I should go grab and transfer here are tomatoes, cucumber, coffee, sunflower seeds and pineapples are available but I didn't bring them with me from the nearby farms.  I have parsley nearby but I can't remember where the lettuce is.  I had one major fall in one of the Japanese forest biomes and lost all of my inventory - woke up in the last bed that I had made in a little desert house and sighed, then went on back to the Asian biome castle and started gathering things up and headed off in this direction for now... and have had lots of fun with making the new region.

In real life: There have been tornadoes and flooding around here the past week - it has been a bit stressful.  I've been rolling along.  We had power outages and one morning was rough as I was supposed to be in to work even earlier to get the coffee cart and breakfast ready for a meeting, and there had been tornado weather and heavy rain the night before, rain still falling, flooding conditions, and woke up to no power.  But, it seems that was the end of this storm system, we hope?  I'm still doing Japanese and Finnish lessons daily.  The Finnish is not too hard, but still second section in Duolingo, which is not beginner.  I've made a few really good 'real life!' cabbage recipes with cabbage from a local farm.

Luanti Minetest Asuna brushland biome ranch house and garden

 

Brushlands - very liveable area - which have hazelnut trees (hazelnuts) and blackberry bushes (edible blackberries) and rose bushes (that have edible rosehips)  - and I imported some of the Mediterranean pine saplings from the next island over (with the pueblo).  The house is made of the pine wood and some yellow cobbled travertine for the roof.   I also found the mese trees with the mese fruit for the very first time, way up on the top of the mountains - they glow, until you pick the fruit.  That is pretty cool - the wood is a bright golden color, even more yellow than the stone I ended up using for this roof. 

Around this area I found : cotton, hemp, onion, grapes, sunflowers, parsley, strawberry and spinach.  In chest hampers and a dungeon chest I found planting carrots, pumpkin seeds, garlic, bell pepper and pineapple.   The grapes were way up on top of one of the  mountain hills here, and the cotton was near that.  The strawberries, onions, spinach and parsley were growing down in the valleys.   There is a savannah a long way back behind those hills, covered in sunflowers.  Usually the pumpkins are on the savannah as well, but I had never gotten seeds from one so far.   There are chickens and eggs, sheep and pigs, and of course as there is cotton growing naturally it would have been easy to make the fishing rod and live off of fish.  The spinach was a nice surprise - I only found that in one other place in the world and I lost that first house - so I hadn't seen it since then.  It doesn't look like much growing wild, but I broke it anyway as I didn't remember what it was, and it was spinach!

It  seems in order to make any use out of the pumpkin I will really have to go back and get my barley plants from the alder swamp and hope I can propagate them further out -- I still haven't done that as I almost lost them twice from bad propagation there.  But, that was before I had my bucket of water and could plant more.  It's also a long way back along the road - halfway around the circle, maybe.  I've been hoping to find barley naturally again since that first bit was from a hamper chest - but I haven't yet.

 

// In real life: Rolling along, getting the work done and the bills paid.  Ordered some spices I had once before, because Mark wanted a computer part as well.  I made fried rice with water chestnuts, red pepper, onion, zucchini and green peas last night for Esme and I, using the last bit of the beef with rice from this last Monday's dinner.  Studying Japanese and Finnish.  

We bought a big butternut squash at the store and I showed Esme how to peel it and chop it into small pieces to freeze for use in meals.  I am thinking about making something like pasta carbonara on Sunday, but with a different cheese.  

I have to kick myself to put more coolant in the car when it is not hot - as at idle it has been going a bit over the center again and it started doing that a bit before it really needed coolant last time.  I've got it in there, but I need to do it.  The Haynes manual for that car came and lo and behold, it has a picture of the undercarriage in it - with the transmission items labelled in the picture - I couldn't find that anywhere when I was trying to figure out what to call a certain part talking to the mechanic.  

The weather is finally nice, I should repair that hose in the yard and plant my kale and other seeds that I ordered a few weeks ago.  It's going to rain quite a bit this week.  Four years ago I had edible big leaves already from planting kale early.