On types of sites

 First off, in real life, I have two days off for the first time since Christmas/New Year's... and I'm still up at 3 am.  Hmm.  I went and did the dishes and scrubbed the sink and made some coconut flavored coffee.  I've been enjoying making some more Japanese type dishes, after finding mirin in the store, and buying new rice wine vinegar, and some very tasty seaweed strips with chili in them.  I've got some new stir fry noodles, and some dashi and wakame are coming in the mail as part of my birthday present (which is early, but I decided the big birthday present could be part Mother's Day, and it is a garden item, so why wait).  I've been studying Japanese and one half of the French-to-Spanish set.  The Greek was short-lived review, but good for the week or so I did that.  

 

Oh, that's dark in the alpine night.... but pretty

This was Rimanta, an alpine place I built a farm and then on another mountaintop nearby, a warehouse development center.   There were so many islands around this that had minerals in them I spent a long time fighting bears, collecting wood and minerals, beets, potatoes and carrots and it quickly turned into a place that will be a development center for the entire area around it.  There was over 500 blocks of black granite and I'm not done with a few of those veins.  Not too far away was the place I had first found the salt - Strabo, and it remains a 'farm' but it will likely trade materials and crops with Rimanta until they both have everything the other does.

Volcanic sulfur 'forsaken tundra' biome.  The white and brown blocks are 'volcanic lava rock' and there are yellow blocks that are sulfur.  The ground smokes. Nothing here was particularly harmful, although I used caution walking through and around it.

These blue spots in some of the rocks is 'etherium dust', which is a magic reagent I have collected some of, but haven't used yet.  One of the things that uses it is a flight potion.

 

 I was musing to myself, over waiting for the coffee pot, about the two hundred and fifty some locations that are now in my Minetest world.  Mark has asked me 'well, really though, how many of those are you ever going back to?'  The answer is, not all but quite a few of them.  And they break down (geekily) into a couple of categories.  To mention geekery - I've started up a spreadsheet in LibreCalc about what places have what things, so yes, it's getting to a point where I'm using a map AND a spreadsheet.... it's extensive.

The categories, not that they matter to anyone else, are this:

 

Waypoints : Usually just a spire, three or more easily-identifiable blocks that are not natural to the environment, with a sign and a torch to tell me I'm going from one place to another.  I might actually pass by these frequently, but there aren't sufficient resources or reason to make them into anything else.  Not every waypoint is counted on the map.  A waypoint might turn into something bigger later, after I continue to pass by it again and again - like a set of little islands I kept passing by and then saw a bunch of minerals on one side of it and set up a small farm / mining outpost there which pulled out 1400 blocks of jade.

Harbor :  A waypoint that is on the ocean that I make a specific docking area for a boat, with a spire and torches that can be seen when sailing by.  There might be a chest and a furnace - and I have recorded it on the map.  This might become an outpost or a farm almost immediately, but it's still a harbor because I was sailing along and said 'that looks like a good spot to tie up for a minute and bounce around'.

 

an outpost, up on the flat part of an otherwise quite vertical island, the only things I found on the whole island were a kiwi bush, rye, peppers and a cotton plant
 

Outposts : A simple house with a foursquare interior, chest and a furnace.  These are map points that were important enough to make note of them and build a structure and ensure simple survival (small garden).  I might not ever return here - and yet, there is something to remark upon that might bring me back.  

 Farm : This place is an outpost that has multiplied food resources in several gardens around it, a house with a furnace and multiple chests, and maybe some fences and other homey features.  I've usually lived here for a while- and there was enough resources of some sort or other nearby to keep me busy for that time.  I might have found a wayfarer chest that had interesting things or brought resources from other places, papyrus, cotton, trees of certain types, blueberry bushes, whatever was important, to this place over time, and intend to return here in the future.

 

Owontic Development center.  Those are non native red acacia trees and jack pines that I brought in to provide enough wood to continue making gardens and mining the caves nearby.  There is a small harbor behind me, and the road continues off to the West to the place I crossed a large canyon to get here  - which required a lot of stone but after building the canyon bridge, I thought I had to make something worthwhile nearby and this place seemed right.
 

 Development Center :  This is a farm, or an extra larger building right near a farm, that I have expanded and has enough resources that it now supplies extra materials to other farms in the area - it has many gardens and chests and most importantly I use these places to multiply and/or collect resources to bring to other places. This might say 'Warehouse' on it or development center, depending on what I'm up to.   The first development center was a place I brought six types of saplings with me to see what would grow there and multiply.  I have others specifically for papyrus, or coffee, or cotton - because it grew so well there I made huge fields of it.

 Another harbor, began as a passage through while sailing - but the only thing that is growing fast here are onions - the cotton is twice as slow as the place nearby.  The rye is almost as slow.  I've imported some jack pine tree saplings that are easier to chop down than the native redwoods.  There are some good mining options nearby and because of the geography this is the easiest place to pass from one ocean into a major river - but not without bumping up on the land there first.

 

Mining Outpost : Not enough of anything to be a development center, but has lots of mining opportunities that I want to return to.  Some of these don't even have houses, but I do intend to return here maybe bringing enough external resources to make it liveable in order to make it a development center and mine out the resources I've scouted.

Cities : I have several cities - and the main point here is that they have many, five or more, buildings and specialized storage centers and production.  There might even be a library, blacksmith, research center or city hall or such, depending on how long I lived there.

 Castle : Basically a farm that became a building project and I built something huge there and began to specialize the rooms inside after I built it.  I might not intend to spend much more time there after I finished the building, or might use it as a development center for nearby areas.