I've been rolling, had more vehicle problems with the truck, but the mechanic got the little car working again. Our Sweetie dog is not doing so well now, she has more swelling with the other tumor they can't operate on, and we just gave her a little more time with getting the other one gone. We've started her back on the antibiotics that they only had us use half of before they did the surgery and gave her a different one. If that brings down this swelling I will call them and ask if there is more of a medication solution for this.
I had a 'brain is mush' headache Thursday night, which started out earlier in the day just feeling like a sinus punch to the forehead. I haven't had one of those in a while, so it was worth noting. My truck barely made it home - and then we took the other car out shopping. Mark drove, which worked out really well. I was supposed to drive the truck to the mechanic and then ride with Mark and Esme to the store - but the truck wouldn't even go up the hill - so we called to have it towed to the shop. I was thinking through mud the entire time at the store - really glad Mark and Esme were there to help out, but we got it done and I put my head under hot water when we got home. I was a bit foggy Friday but it all worked out okay. I've been taking that methyl folate nearly every day for more than a month now, have the backup bottle ready for next month. I'm not entirely sure there is a lot of difference. I've taken the time to eat more eggs now that the chickens are laying again (eggs for choline), and I have peanut butter daily (vitamin E and A), and anti-inflammatory spices whenever I can work them in. I have to be certain to drink enough liquid that is not coffee. I started feeling clicky the past week and my left knee was moving wrong when I slept, not always getting back to where it should be even with my routine. My jaw was clicky on the right side, but only the day before that headache (hmm). I've felt better today after having more of a rest and a sleep in an hour or so in the morning (even though it was daylights savings time, so it probably wasn't much of a sleep in).
Besides running all the time and getting work done, I've been doing Finnish (segued from Japanese, through Czech and a couple comparative days with Czech/Russian/Finnish and now I've done just Finnish for three days). Have been listening to more Japanese in some videos we've watched though, and been able to translate what I'm hearing and/or verify the translations given.
Asuna minetest Luanti - a chicken coop, also used the same format of two high fence and two high gate for gardens elsewhere that were being stalled by algae slimes. You can only keep chickens in with two high fences, and two high gates added on. Then you can pick up the eggs and burn them in the furnace to eat them, or pop them back to randomly get a chance to make more chickens.
I've also downloaded the 'Asuna' Minetest world for Luanti. It has all the different biomes, thousands of plants, hundreds of new minerals and wood types etc etc. I've been exploring slowly, after accidentally going through a jungle temple like portal thing and losing my first house entirely! Don't hit that glowing block in those temples unless you want to be whisked away randomly and never return.
Asuna has the better farming and cooking, and fishing that I was definitely missing with Repixture.
Some things I learned so far:
A lot of the typical Minecraft recipes are the same. That's nice. So you can make a pickaxe or a sword, a furnace, chest, hoe or a door all the same way you do in Minecraft. Their recipes tab is pretty good and lets you look up most things and what they are used for. The 'research' tab I'm still trying to figure out. I don't know what the points are for research, but it gives you some of the properties, like letting you know which mushrooms are food items etc. You can make mushroom soup by making bowls (three wood blocks in a V like Minecraft) and placing two mushrooms -of the same type- in the two blocks above the bowl in the crafting screen.
I spent the first 'night' on top of my little banana wood house roof, waiting to see what kind of monsters come out. All I saw in the grasslands biome was slimes of many types. Finally, I decided to come down and fight some of the green slimes. I made some wooden armor and a stone sword, and went about exploring and making farms. I keep expecting to find more monsters in the deep caves or mining, but haven't yet.
Wherever you place a torch, don't put it where you can walk into it. This is tough, while mining. It says on the message screen 'don't touch that' and you lose hit points. Fire is bad! I walked into the torch on my house about eight times before I realized what was happening.
Slimes are these cube or jellyfish-cube things that wander around. They come in different colors, and some of them are aggressive and some are not. The green cubes and the purple cubes are aggressive! And they steal your stuff with every hit, so they can actually steal the sword out of your hand while you're defending yourself. After you kill them, they pop back out whatever it was they stole out of your inventory. The goo they leave behind is edible, but not the purple ones (poison goo) obviously. If you accidentally poison yourself the algae goo is an antidote. If you accidentally eat a poison mushroom, the algae goo can help, as well.
a 'seaside' garden when I was testing how far from water items needed to be. I planted multiples of the same item next to each other and watched the stages they went through. When this garden was five times as large, I put small signs in front of the rows to remember what the plant was. You don't get a screen message about what the plant is until it is broken and is a separate item. Sometimes, if you break a plant in an intermediate growth stage, you don't get a food item or a seed, it's just wasted. Careful gardening with the signs happened after losing a few interesting things. The sheer variety of the plants is astounding.
Most crops in most biomes need to be near water, within four squares of it, in order to grow. There are some exceptions, and in other biomes, that same plant may not grow away from water. For example : I was able to harvest a crop of oats in a grasslands biome away from water, but was not able to in the Alder swamp. In the Alder swamp, you must be within the four squares of water, and replace the dirt with the regular soil brought with you from another biome. Then you can use the hoe and plant the seed. In the Alder swamp you can find single squares of water scattered throughout, and use them to make fenced-in gardens with double-high fences and gates. The algae slimes, otherwise, will come and congregate on your gardens and hover on the plants, making them not grow as quickly. If they hover on regular dirt that does not have anything planted in it, even hoed dirt ready to plant, they turn it into Alderswamp dirt. It makes for quite interesting living there, along with the Poison slimes wandering about.
Some plants need supports, which are called bean poles (for green beans, but not for peapods) and trellis, which are for grapes. I'm running an experiment if you can grow grapes away from water in the grassland. I know that you cannot in the Alder swamp. Blueberry saplings DO grow in the Alder swamp, and once they expand the hedge, you can take one leaf block a few blocks away and place it and smash it repeatedly until it gives you another blueberry sapling. One smack with a tool or a piece of wood will give you blueberries off the hedge, more will break the block. A blueberry sapling has the chance to make three or four more blocks of blueberry-producing hedge.
green beans on bean poles, shown with the ripe stage on the right hand side, the flowering stage is the middle-stage, and the growth stage is in the middle. There are pea pods plants in the foreground with the ripe one being on the left. This is in one of the Alderswamp gardens with the two-high fences and two-high gates.
Lots of the plants have multiple stages they go through until they are ripe. Some will produce a ripe food item and seed when you hit them, but only when they are in full formation. You will have to plant as many things as you can and watch them and see what the full formation is. Sometimes plants in the wild will have their younger stages around them, and it will look like two different plants - pineapples and onions are good examples. I busted a lot of young pineapple and onion plants, yielding nothing, before I realized they were immature forms.
Cactus can only be broken with an axe. You might find some free cactus blocks in some of the little 'hampers' (chests, that look like wicker basket hampers) that are scattered in the biomes, with random things in them that you can scoop up and then use. Cactus needs to be planted on sand and then allowed to grow. Papyrus can be found growing wild or in these hampers, as well. It can be used to make sugar, or paper, just like in the original Minecraft. Papyrus, oddly enough, did not multiply when I placed it on sand at the water's edge. I left it like that for about an hour play time and I was there and back harvesting other plants around it. It didn't grow an inch. When I replaced the sand under it with regular soil, then it began to grow in minutes. Watermelon grows in the wild but sometimes there is a glitch or something that they do not bust into multiple melon slices when they are broken. The watermelon plant is small and has yellow flowers, and when it is in full formation it will drop one melon slice and seed for making the plant. The blocks drop eight slices or so, but no seeds.
I have found coal, tin and copper - but still no iron. I tend to explore and make roads for a long time and get the food and survival figured out before I go deep into the mining. I found a few steel ingots in the first hampers that were lost in my first house. I haven't been able to make a bucket of water to transfer water to other places and make gardens that way. So, I've had to grow on the coast, around lucky water formations, or around the single squares in the Alder swamp.
Making bread : Requires 4 of wheat or oats (I'm still growing my barley, that is a bit different) Then you need to make a mortar and pestle using three burned cobblestones (smooth stone) and a stick. First you will need to make a furnace, to put the cobblestone in, and make it smooth. Then place the stones in a V formation with the stick above it. Place the mortar and pestle in the middle of the bottom row, and place one grain item to the left of it, and three above it. This makes flour. Place the flour in a furnace, and bake it to make bread. You can use ferns, grass or many other flammable items as fuel. There is a hemp plant that you can use the seeds to make a fuel oil. I haven't grown enough of that yet. Apparently you can turn the plant leaves into fiber with a bucket of water (which I don't have yet) and then make building blocks with it, as well, similar to the thatch blocks that were in Repixture.
Soy milk : If you collect five soy beans, and a glass bottle filled with water (make the bottles the same way as in Minecraft) you can make raw soy milk. Put that in the furnace and you get regular soy milk. This can be drank or used in baking recipes.
Stevia : This is a plant you find that looks like small white flowers on long stems. (Rice also looks similar) When mature it will yield a sheaf of stevia and some seeds. Four stevia make sugar. Papyrus also makes sugar (in the furnace, I think, haven't done it yet). Rice yields seeds, which can be planted or burned in the furnace to make rice food item. Sunflower seed head yields five seeds on the crafting table, which can be replanted or put in the furnace to make toasted sunflower seeds (food item). Sunflower seeds are also used in baking some things, with barley for bread.
At the edge of a 'Mediterranean' biome and a Jungle biome, and an Enderman never-ending city biome. That one olive tree on the left yielded 47 wood blocks and three saplings, along with olive food items, which have a variety of uses. There are so many interesting blocks you will need multiple multiple chests along your road network to sort things into, as your personal inventory is only so big.
This is just a tiny bit of what I've discovered working with this so far - there is a LOT more. I highly recommend trying Asuna Luanti!
