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.

Pueblo type city structure in Luanti Minetest Asuna mediterranean biome

 Rolling along.  Doing Japanese and Finnish, mostly.  Still spending a few hours some nights exploring and collecting more plant types into my gardens.  I finally made a 'circumnavigate' road that goes all the way through every place I have been and then circles back (don't ask me how, I didn't plan it) - so I have been backtracking some to spread the important plants through the gardens.  And then I shot off a bit away from the origin point and explored this Mediterranean biome with the olive trees a bit more.   I put up a sign here that says 'Olive Pueblo.'

I really liked how this 'pueblo' type village started turning out - and I found amethyst and amber in the rocks nearby.  Each little 'pueblo' house has a chest of its own and a furnace, and whatever food I collect in the gardens I was distributing amongst the nearest houses.  One house has become the soy milk processing and bakery, while another is where I have ended up storing extra seeds etc etc..

 The natural olive tree that is growing here is not the right kind of olive for making olive oil.  I don't know why there are two types of 'olive' wood trees and saplings - and haven't run into the other type yet.  This type is good for eating the olives, but not for making oil.  You would need that oil to make pasta with wheat flour.  I'm hoping, like the seaweed situation, that there really ARE two types, and not one that was replaced by the other and the other recipes for it are now broken.  Looks like rice has another version, as well, but I have been able to use the rice I have for most of what I need it to do.

The plants I've collected here or 'to here, from a nearby place' are :

blackberry and hazelnut trees (both drop saplings and berries / nuts for food)

palm trees which drop coconuts

kiwi trees (which grow really well here, I found the kiwi very hard to propagate elsewhere - would drop fruit but just wouldn't drop any saplings, but now it really is doing well and I am expanding it up higher on the mountain into a grove.  I am not certain if it makes a difference but I am digging underneath it to harvest, and then chopping the trunk down and waiting in that spot for all the leaves to drop, and getting 1 to 3 saplings off of each one when before - at the original banana house - I was not getting even one)

lemon and banana tree (which have not grown yet, this might not be a good biome for them, but I thought lemon and 'mediterranean' would go well together...) 

garlic, wild onion, rice, oats, bell pepper, tomato, soybean, cotton, chili pepper, potatoes! and parsley

other foods : kelp and raw oysters are nearby in the ocean, fishing with the fishing rod (which is why I went back and got some cotton seeds from another farm, and the rice, as it makes sushi with the fish) and eggs from both chickens and songbirds (which the game makes little distinction between)

I dropped through a hole up the hill a bit and landed in a white marble brick 'mineshaft' type room, with a chest and the only thing in it were a few 'planting potatoes' - which are the special seed type of potato.  It was pure luck, and I'm trying to grow them out slowly here as I almost lost them in another location from not harvesting them at the right time.

 The white brick can be made easily with the white rock, but if you make stairs out of it they cannot be broken again with a stone pickaxe.  That was a bit annoying when I was working, so I started using wooden stairs just in case I messed up a placement.

 Lots of rocks!  : amethyst, jade, amber, yellow travertine, red granite, sygilite? it's purple, orange agate, celestine, chrysoprase and a few others   I've used the yellow travertine for one of the roads and the jade for the spires. There is desert cobblestone and brick as well as marble brick in the caves nearby that I haven't collected too much. There are mediterranean ruins and columns scattered nearby as well.

 

bit of bit

 Still wondering if the little car has a transmission leak - I've put in nearly the full gallon of transmission fluid after I had a day I needed a rescue and still mostly don't see much on the dipstick after a while.  Putting some in it that day was a big difference - it wasn't driveable and now it is - but I'm still worried about running out and having that happen again.  I have some in the car and I have an extra bottle, as well.  I can't see it leaking out - but I don't see it on the dipstick and I can see it get better when I add some more again after checking when it is hot.  I should be seeing it further up on the dipstick than a drop on the bottom - I know that.  When I am making sure there is some in it, it is working okay for now.  I don't know how long it will be until we get the truck and can have this looked at.

I am doing Finnish and Japanese.  And I downloaded a chess game, and it is probably on too easy of a level because I won three out of three today and I'm not good at chess - or at least, I never was against anyone I played with.  

Still working with the Asuna minetest on Luanti.  Finding so many things... it's too bad though that they don't have anything but popcorn to make with the corn.  They have rice bread, why not tortillas?  I haven't been back to the mid build to gather up my barley and transfer it to this new castle I made.  And then I went a bit further and made two more separate cabins and gardens in the next two biomes.  The exploration/journey is more important than the destination.

 In a dream I was told 'don't take the arc for the circle' (don't take the part for the whole) and 'don't take the circle for the arc' (don't take the 'whole' you see as not being part of an even larger arc).  It's been that sort of week - have had dreams with messages in them for the past four or five nights, took notes on them.   I almost wonder if I should try to draw something at my board again - but there is just too much to do, and another day to tackle tomorrow etc etc... and the anxiety of worrying about the car that I need to go and get that day done.

bit o bit and Asuna Minetest Luanti

 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!

 

 

postal route

I got a ride for the postal route this morning as no one else would do the route - even with a few days notice... but I was able to get it done fine.  I went through it pretty quickly, actually.  I don't know why other carriers call it 'choppy' and 'too much detail stuff / getting out etc.'... it does have a few things like city routes with the multiple kiosk boxes and such, but I find it breaks it up into manageable pieces before and after each thing etc, not 'choppy'.  Anyway, got it done fairly fast and then the postmaster took me over to where my truck was at the mechanic and I was able to drive that home.  It's been a long and strange week, with lost of frustration but glad that bit is over with now.  And I'm tired.  I didn't sleep well last night, but didn't expect to be getting up and going this morning because I had no way to get there -- was going to have that other person come midday today and help me get the little car to the mechanic.  And then it all ended up going a bit different, but still worked out well.

Mark thinks we'll get propane and groceries tomorrow.  I am going to head to bed as I've done good to be as awake as I am for the past few hours through dinner and an episode of Sherlock.

I'll probably sleep better tonight though. 

Language today : All Japanese, and quite a bit of it, as I had some waiting around to do and did a lot on my phone.  Then, when I got home, I continued in the advanced Japanese on my computer profile.

not good at doing nothing

 

I tried a few things to get the car running today, but I didn't actually take the backup battery out and try to jump it, as there was still glare ice on the driveway and if I did get it started I would just have to shut it back off again after a bit and maybe go through all of that again to get it started when I do have to go.  Although, I might do more with it tomorrow - the weather is supposed to get up to almost freezing 32 degrees tomorrow!  But that won't really fix it.  I did text the mechanic and find out that my other truck is not currently in pieces - and maybe we could swap it out so I can have a reliable transport to work for the next week.

 

Mark says not to worry so much - but I'm not good at not worrying and almost as bad at doing nothing, and I haven't been good enough to fix it, so I'm sort of hanging around in between.  I could have cleaned the house more but I tend to get worked up doing that - artifacts from my  mother's training, the more you clean the angrier you get.  I never understood that one but I do emulate it.  I played a little Minetest, in between taking readings on the car battery, trying to tighten the battery again, and charging up the spare battery (which is the wrong size for that car) that I could jump start the car with if I try to go somewhere.  That doesn't promise I can get it jumpstarted again after I'm done with work there.... or that the spare battery would have enough charge for another jumpstart.  So there's tangles there and not a solved problem just with that, either.  The mechanic suggested just taking the cables off and cleaning them and putting them all the way back on could help - but the battery is worn down below regular charging amount, and will need to be charged back up, also.  I might only get the one start and then be stranded the next time it shuts off.

 

But trading out for the other truck could work for a bit.

And then getting the battery replaced and find out if it is possible for it to stop disconnecting itself every two minutes and needing tightening after that battery is replaced.... gah.

I gave the post office a heads up that I might be having car trouble that could extend into Saturday - which they read the message, but they did not respond.

 

Sweetie is doing well with her leg -tried to chew on it once today and we put the cone on her.  She was very pitiful.  We do not need her opening that up when we can't drive anywhere to get it fixed.  There are a few first aid things we could do here if we had to, but I'd rather not have to.

 

if you know, you know.... 

300 blocks down and now you've got to get back to the surface after satisfying your curiosity of what is that rapidly rushing water in the deep dark cavern you just dropped into and can only see four or five squares away from you until you've set enough torches to light all the way across.

 

Languages: Czech and Japanese

more February snow

 more snow, more car troubles, but Sweetie's leg had the surgery and she is doing better - not best, as she still has some other issues they can't help with - but better.  She got up this morning after sleeping hard all night and had water and food and went outside, took her medication and begged for lots of treats.

At the vet office yesterday to pick her up, the car died.  We had to call the mechanic, who luckily came even with the weather facing down on us, and jumped our car, tightened the battery again, and told us to call him if we didn't make it home.  We did make it home - but this morning after the snowfall, the car won't start again.  I had just cleaned it off and opened the doors but apparently the battery hadn't had long enough to charge on the drive home with the heater and lights on, and then the cold weather on top of that.  He had checked that the alternator was charging... and I haven't messed with tightening it again or moving it when the lights went out and it stopped dead this morning while starting.  I didn't have to go to work this morning, and Esme didn't have school.  I might be expected at work tomorrow, but I will have to call in, as I still don't think the roads are going to be passable.  Esme does not have school through the weekend - when it is supposed to rise finally above freezing again.

I really do wish one or the other of these vehicles was more reliable - this one had been, until it started doing this.  It still wouldn't have gotten me out on the roads today, because of the slickness, but starting would have been nice.  It's nice when cars start when you turn the key.

 grumble

 and the mail truck is still with the mechanic, or I might try that...

we do have a backup battery in the house and I might try to jump it tomorrow afternoon...

 

 This is what the snow looks like out there, 2 to 3 inches.

 

 and this is the new town I was working on in Minetest  I named the water feature that  spawned into  'Luna Bay', so it is saved as Luna bay town.

the old world got lost in the update and something about my computer is wasting space with errors... I don't mind starting over with a new world, but it is a bit of 'hiraeth' nostalgia now for all those places on the map that no longer exist.  I haven't ventured far from this place like in the other world, this one biome type seems to stretch FAR, and I gave up exploring for a bit and just kept building new houses, and went deep in the mine.  

I found copper, but still no tin or sulfur yet.  That makes iron, coal, graphite, gold and copper so far.  The copper,  like the gold, needs the carbon-steel pickaxe to mine.  The iron can be mined with a stone pickaxe.  

The copper can make pretty things like stairs and blocks, but it can't make the bronze without the tin.

I also found that all leaves are pretty good to burn if (IF) you are making glass - they work pretty well, and not a lot of them per piece of glass.  They don't work well with cooking much else.... even bread takes more fuel - sticks are viable.  The leaves from 'Tree' apple saplings type trees can be made into fiber - but only those leaves.  All the leaves burn.

I also found that the mine turtles can POP into existence right beside you with no warning.  Fun fun.  I ran quickly and then hit it with my spear, but that was a surprise jolt.

 

Made eggs - the chickens are laying very well at the moment.  Made rice, saved some of that for dinner.  Would really like Spring.  Please?  Languages: Czech and Japanese

bits of February (2)

 Sweetie is in at the vet and they will either call us tomorrow to discuss, or do the surgery and call us tomorrow to tell us she is out.  I have to work, of course - and it is going to be an extremely busy day as everyone is trying to ship in and out as there is a snowstorm supposed to hit later tomorrow night, into Wednesday, drop to single digits and not melt for several days.  We filled the propane bottle, have animal feeds and people food.  The boss expects Wednesday will probably be a stuck at home day, but I don't know further than that, as we tend to get snowed in here and it should be gone by Saturday but missing work because we live in the middle of nowhere and get snowed in, when those at the highway can get in... that is more stress on top of Sweetie's surgery.  She may have more wrong.. they said they had to wait for blood work tomorrow to know if they will proceed.  So I have to keep my phone close at work and wait for the call.

 

Yay (sarcasm + stress).

I'm going to bed now.

bits of February

 and February is ... running down that hallway over there, go catch it.  We are feeling better from that flu-like thing that knocked us all down.  My one ear was clogged for a long time as a remnant of it, but it feels almost normal now.  It was like walking around with a cotton sock stuck over my ear - just slightly dulled and nothing I could do about it.

Doing Japanese and French and a little Romanian, work, cold and rainy but there were a few days almost 70 degrees in there, too -- trying to get Sweetie dog into the vet for something we couldn't afford before, but she really does need.  We knew it would be a good sized vet bill to do it, and were trying to find when we could do it for her.   Got Grandma to the store after getting the little car back, Esme helped in the store and unloading all the groceries.   Grandma's puppies are fat and energetic!  It's not easy at all getting things in and out of the house with them running around.   

 

Our chickens had taken almost two months off of laying any eggs, while this egg shortage 'crisis' is in the news all over... but just about a week ago they started laying again, one a day (for 15 hens), then two, then four, now five... they must have liked those 70 degree days quite a bit, too.  We'll have some more cold nights coming up.Hoping it doesn't sleet, ice or snow soon, so I can continue getting to work.  

 

Got the little car back from having the radiator fixed.  It's hard to get parts for a twenty-five year old car.  Put the mail truck in the shop to try to fix the headlights taken out by the deer and a few other things.  It will be the same with that except it is a Toyota and that is a little easier to find most parts for.   Doing laundry.  Trying to get enough sleep, and it's cold.  I keep telling Mark sarcastically 'I have all these bones that are unhappy with me'... hip, elbows... the other day I dreamt that I was having a bike custom-fit for me (because Mark was telling me the day before about such a thing he did in his youth) and the technician while swapping parts on the bike also took off my arm at the elbow and replaced it with another one.. woke up and that elbow was hurting because I had twisted it strangely (hEDS, yay sarcasm) and it had finally hurt enough to wake me up.  Roll over, sleep for another hour on the other side, and it clicks back into the right place.  (hEDS, yay, no sarcasm).

/still expanding my map in the minetest game, found out those green saddled pig things are called 'mine turtles' in the game... made a lot of new places by sailing down rivers and putting new farms wherever I could land with resources - then found them again by road and stairs and now my map is much more interconnected, it's actually really cool to bounce around from place to place   

 elbows hurting right now, make another pot of coffee and off to bed

They won't do Sweetie's surgery until next week, but they did drain the area a little and give us antibiotics and set her up with some shots so they can hold her overnight there and make sure everything is good.  It should just be a few stitches, they say, after they use a laser, and she will be so much more comfortable and probably add years onto her life.  That is what we hope.  She'll be twelve next month - I looked it up.  And, bonus.. she let them do the shots and all of the other things without even getting upset, because she realized we are trying to help.  When she was spayed, she bit someone and was very upset with us for a good while.  This time, she was really good with the vet and even asked us when we got home 'why didn't they fix it?'.... but when we started giving her the pills she is taking them like a trooper.  I hope all goes well until next week comes.  They couldn't do the surgery until next week - and the other place wasn't even going to give her an exam for another week.

bits

 There was a flu like thing going around the schools here and it is still going through the community - last week was our week to go down, one by one - but not with the full thing so far luckily.  We're still not taking any unnecessary trips but I missed half a day of work and I allowed Esme two days off school although she was well on her way to better after the first day - that was the day I was starting to feel bad and if she was still not well and went to school and had to be picked up, that wouldn't have worked out too well.  My boss sent me home after a few hours, and I slept off and on after that all the way to dinner, and then went to bed and slept another ten hours.

Anyway.  I got back to asking a few more questions in the Minetest.  Mostly 'what's over there?' and going there.  I found a few more interesting biomes, and started actually giving places names again so I could remember one from another.

I've been orienting myself with the sunrises and sunsets, as well as my road network, which has become quite large.

some of the roads are more like 'death stairs', though - but they do work and I can make them a bit safer as I actually need to go that way again.

 

Other questions answered :

Yes, you can make coal in a furnace with just tree trunk bits burned by anything else wooden.  Leaves also burn, but very very fast, so you'd need hundreds of them to do anything other than bake a loaf of bread maybe.  

 Yes, so far I see that wheat grows out to three deep from a water source - someone told me it should really do it to four.  Will check.

Found a locked chest in a half-abandoned brick building in the middle of nowhere - made a lockpick and opened it - but it kept shutting again before I got everything out of it.  Bug maybe.  I was able to pick it again and again when it would stop letting me take things and back out of the inventory.

 You can mine overhead while sitting in a boat - but you might not be able to collect the drops based on your velocity and where it decides to fall.

 

What are those ferns for?  You can mix them with fiber (made from grass) and make fertilizer to improve your crop squares.

 

In order to make plain 'fiber' all you need is types of grass - lots of types work. But to make rope, you need to go break some dirt in the desert biome.  It gives the dry grass clumps you might have been wondering where they come from - I was.  And then the rope can be used to make a lasso, which I still have the fun of experimenting with.  I haven't even used the net yet that I made in the other biome.  

I also miss fishing in the original Minecraft.  /thinks  This is a bit like fishing for things that are already on land.

 

 

Well it took like ten minutes - I went and tried the net out on things.  It works on sheep, pigs, skunks but not clams (roll eyes) yes I try things like that.  It doesn't work OFTEN - there are a lot of misses.  It makes the animal a 2D icon and you can pick it up, carry it somewhere, and drop it again, like in a fence.  The lasso works the same way but I had much better luck with it on the pig right away.  Interestingly the pig came up as 'boar' when it was 2D, and the sheep as sheep.  I wonder if there are pigs that are sows, and sheep that are rams?  Maybe not.  I haven't successfully bred any yet.  I don't even know if this version has that.  With these tools to move them around, it's hard to tell either way.

The pigs (boars) can get out the fence easily.  The sheep didn't.  Also, in my inventory, the sheep do not stack - they each need their own inventory slot.  I could not get to them to breed with hay, straw or wheat - although they looked at me and ate the wheat from my hand.  I put the hay and straw both in the pen for a bit, and tried to feed it to them.

 

 sometimes it feels like it is always dark and/or raining except for a few rare times.

I hadn't seen any monsters except that green saddled pig creeper thing - did take down several more of those with spears, because once you see them it's a good chance they see you and come after you.  Then, I ran into trouble in a desert biome at night.  I guess I'll call this one a sort of skeleton-sounding desert spider walker thing, from now on to be referred to as a desert spider-walker.

 

it's a bad screenshot but it's at night and they come jump through the air in a huge leap straight onto you after this... so needless to say, I have a sword and steel armor now.  They don't drop anything (unlike the pig creeper which drops tnt) but they sound like bones when they fall over.  The first one jumped down on me when I was mining a shallow hole in the desert at night and it would have finished me off if I hadn't started hitting it with the pickaxe.

Also found this sort of jungle biome.  There are potatoes there, some wheat, and the trees drop apple saplings.  It wasn't too far from a place with clams, and pigs are wandering around.  I didn't build a base there, but there would have been plenty of food for one.  Clearing some of the trees would have been the job.  I built a road halfway through and then went back and decided it was time to go check out the new desert I had found.  It had some gold ore just laying on top of the ground, which was unlike the other desert with the village that was on the other side of the map.

I am still looking for the sulfur, tin and copper which the online player manual does not talk about but I see in the creative menu.  Where are they? That is why I thought 'let's check in the desert'.... and then the desert spider walker made me rethink my wandering strategy and I came back better armed.

More later.