It's the Forsaken Desert, and the living ain't easy

 

Well, it's possible, though - as long as you bring your own dirt and seeds, a fishing rod, and some tree saplings.  I was bouncing through this Forsaken Desert area when I found a hamper (wayfarer chest) that had a kiwi bush and a beetroot seed in it.  So I thought, let's see if this stuff grows here.  It does.  I fished for a few meals, and grew and replanted that kiwi bush a few times.  Kiwis are hard:  eventually, it always seems you get less and less in return from the sapling over time, and then end up with none.  

 

I brought some apple tree saplings, some cotton seed, watermelon, papyrus, and happened upon another hamper with pumpkin seed and corn and grapes in it.  I used my inventory with red granite in it to make a little base house, and the furnace was on the shore as I had been cooking the fish in it.  I've had the trees grow in the little dirt squares that I made for them - vs. 'dry ocean dirt' which is there naturally, and forsaken desert sand, which is the pink stuff.  

 

I knew I'd need the cotton later for making the string for more fishing rods.  The fishing is odd, too, here in this biome.  I am getting all the regular fish, but there is also an 'other' category, usually broken swords, bottles, bits of building materials etc etc. and tnt sticks, among other things.  The percentage of 'other' seems to be a bit higher here than I've had elsewhere.

 

And I'll include a picture of the desert gate not too far from this base - it is a cool design.   I have not gotten up the courage yet to go worldgating - although with the coordinate system I think I'd do okay now in finding my way back?  Maybe.  I have over 200 locations now networked and mapped - so I really don't want to lose that and end up so far away I never get back.  Maybe make another little world at some time, and test it... maybe just be happy with my map.

 

I had also made a 'road to nowhere' that I stumbled across while making some north / south journeys.  I began cutting down the lemon trees to complete that road (and replanting all the saplings) and ended up with a huge lemon tree grove - and finding other things there, watermelons, coffee, etc etc... so I brought some of the papyrus there and started making lemonade.  That place has now become a huge base surrounded by useful trees, and roads up and down to ruins and places to mine out interesting rocks - all started from intersecting it again and again - until it made sense to build a real outpost there. 

In real life:  I've got a dentist appointment tomorrow morning.  Somehow, because I wanted to 'turn back on' the part of my brain, I'm back to studying Greek for the past few days, with bits of  Japanese thrown in.  My Greek level is pretty low - maybe 13? compared to 20 in Japanese, and I'm doing it on my phone atm, which is actually even lower than that and most likely counts as simple review.

Luanti Asuna Minetest - the two kinds of rice, and the two kinds of salt and sugar

 I am still quite enjoying the Asuna mod pack for Luanti Minetest.  There is still a LOT that I have yet to explore.  I've spent the past month or so looking for the 'other' kind of salt and the 'other' kind of rice - and finally, found them, or at least, part of the puzzle.

 I could find nothing about the other kind of rice for a very long time - then I realized that it wasn't just 'Asuna', it was probably part of the X Farming or the Farming Redo.  One of the rice forms is from one, and the other from another - maybe even one of the biome packs.  So, they clash a bit and it is hard to tell what comes from what.

 The one rice is a white seed that comes from jungle grass, when it doesn't break into cotton, it breaks into rice seed.  This rice is easy to harvest and easy to replant.  It is a 'normal' crop.  It can be used with a raw fish to make sushi, or can be mixed with green beans and tomatoes and a few other things to make chili etc.

 The other rice I have not found the actual source biome or location for, but I finally found a few of the grains in a hamper (wayfarer chest) in a jungle environment, and then went on a trek to figure out how to plant and harvest it.  After some vain attempts to plant it in regular dirt, or dirt under water, or dirt surrounded by water etc etc... I found by accident the 'silt loam' block, which says on the description, used to grow rice!  The silt loam block can be made with a block of clay (4 clay lumps on the crafting grid), a block of any Enverness sand or dirt, and a block of any regular type of soil / dirt.  Those three things together make the silt loam block.  Then, those blocks can be planted underneath a layer of water, and the new rice grains can be planted in it.  They take about five stages to grow, but then they can be harvested and will yield the rice sheaf and also more seed.  The sheaf can be put in the oven to make it into cooked rice - which can be used with kelp, fish and other things to make more food.

 

 how to make silt loam soil used for farming rice

It must be placed one block under the water in order to plant

 

 a rice to the left that is almost, but not ripe - two rice seeds just planted on silt loam soil blocks under the water

Finding out about this, I also found info about Palm Wax and candles - which had not come up before, and also about more potions, including flight potion, requiring etherium dust and a fire flower powder (those flowers in the ethereal red desert that bite when you hit them, still haven't harvested one yet).  The etherium dust is found in some desert environments inside blocks, showing up as bluish purple dots in the block.

 

 

this is the second or third stage of growth right here - it begins underneath the water

It does not grow well when you are absent, you have to stick around.   Some crops grow while you are absent in Minetest, and some are greatly accelerated or only grow when you are present in that area.

 

 

 

 

This is the final stage of the growth of the sheaf rice 

Notes on the two kinds of sugar : one comes from Stevia, which is found growing wild in highland grassland near jungles, and it is made by putting four Stevia sheafs on the crafting grid.  It is used with fruits and flours and soy milk to make baked goods.  The other kind of sugar only comes from burning papyrus, and is not used in recipes, but can be made into a block.

 

The first kind of salt comes from putting a bucket of water in a furnace.  The other kind is made by using a mortar and pestle on salt crystals, which come from the ice tundra regions near Alpine areas.  Watch out in Alpine areas, the bears bite (and take a good amount of hearts away when they do).

In real life?  Rolling along.  Planting in the garden some more, beans and nasturtiums and cucumbers are coming up, along with the kale, arugula, summer squash and mizuna.  Some marigolds are coming up in a pot that I had thought definitely wouldn't - having been planted weeks ago.  I'm bouncing between the Spanish-to-French and French-to-Spanish and picking up some Japanese and even some Greek lessons here and there.  Other than that - trying to get enough sleep and not eat junk.  

 

 

bits

 cucumbers came up in the seedling pots, put them in the garden, bought some tomato plants and put those in the garden, getting a few strawberries every day, the kale and arugula have grown to the point where I can tell them apart at a glance now, which is good

 

Found this 'forsaken desert' biome today, very odd hollow trees - and in the distance there was a three story house with a chest at the top, but not much in it.  There is another biome next to this called an 'ethereal desert' and it has red grass and a strange red wood bush.  It also has flowers that bite you back when you try to hit them with a pickaxe, and obsidian and lava here and there.  There are a LOT of rocks / ores and minerals in the desert - and I've put up two posts simply for the mining opportunities, so I can get back there and pick up the minerals that I couldn't fit in my inventory.

Reached over ninety named positions on my Minetest map, and used an online platform called 'Desmos' graphing calculator to put in all the coordinates and make myself a good map.  Why did it take me so long to find out that F5 showed the coordinates?  Mark said you know - there are graphical programs made for Minecraft / Minetest that will take your save file and do that for you, nicely in graphics and everything.  If you used one of those, would it take away all the fun or something?  I don't know, my response was that I don't need other people to draw the Last Supper for me with a stub pencil, but for some reason, it's fun when I do it that way.  

I took this picture to show Mark and Esme where I fell off a cliff so 'unexpectedly' the other day - and now I've put up a fence.  I was up on the top of the mountain only 86 blocks up, acc. to the coordinates, feels like more - and looked down and saw the little fence and said 'oh yea, that is the place'... 

I was growing five types of trees here and starting a 'lumber and development company', along with a mining shack further down by the water.  It actually took me a very long time to add this to the map because it is in the middle of an area I was doing a lot in - but I just hadn't been back through the middle or recorded much of it.  Once I was doing the map, I had a good idea where it 'should' be and eventually found it again.
 

Using my map I found the 'Northwest Passage' around the dead Enverness biome that has no food, just 'miles and miles' of dead white stone, enverness sand and pools with an occasional house / temple and empty pottery jars.  It was tough to get around/through that but now that I have done that I've made several more connections and harbors and can get around pretty easily between the places I want to go.  I have coffee beans planted at one place and they are multiplying, but I need to hang around the place where I have cocoa longer if I want that to ripen.  Another task I might want to do is sail up and down more of the rivers - as I've found a few more travel routes that way that I hadn't really thought too hard about before.

Also, related, drawing the other night I realized I don't have the endurance that I once did in my hands to draw for so long - and I used to, I used to make engraving like drawings with little Micron pens over huge sheets of paper.  It is just that I don't get the practice anymore.

I want to remember that I bought that book about the retired mobster that buys a little cottage with a garden and then learns how to take care of it.  I haven't read past the first chapter because it is an online book and I keep forgetting about it.

Need to get to sleep, and remember to take the clothes out of the dryer in the morning...  We did Grandma's big grocery run today, and it was raining off and on and colder than it had been.  Have been doing the Spanish-to-French and French-to-Spanish still, although I'm thinking I might switch and do Japanese for a day or so.. will see what I think tomorrow. 

bits of notes

 Just bits of notes (to be updated later)

 

I found a very large savannah today, on the edge of jungle, mesa, desert and dominion biomes.  So I've found a lot of new things, as I've had bits of these biomes show up here and there but not a savannah as large as this.

Rye seed comes from the savannah grass, where there are also pumpkins, sunflowers, corn, cotton (and probably more) naturally spawning.  I found that out the other day.  I broke a lot of grass though and only ever got rye seed there.  In the plains and sakura environments, the grass breaks to wheat and oat seed, randomly.  In the jungle environments, the jungle grass specifically breaks to rice or cotton seed, randomly.  AND I finally did find the barley growing wild in the Savannah, much like a corn plant.  In the savannah, the dirt can be tilled with a hoe without needing to be replaced (which you must do in dominion and marsh environments before the hoe will work).  The tree saplings that would grow in regular jungle and grasslands do grow here.  A single piece of coal, in a furnace, will toast 4 quantity of sunflower seeds, and there are 5 seeds from every head.

 

 You know how long I've looked for that?  But this is only the third time I've been through a savannah, and this one is a bit larger than the others.  So, it must not be a high spawn rate in them.

I did finally find some cocoa beans in a wayfarer chest (the hampers) and am trying to grow that on a jungle tree.  I keep looking for the new biomes, I know by the achievement list that I haven't found them all.  I haven't even seen a tundra biome yet, or seen the Giant's Causeway basalt flats that I've seen pictures of.

 

 

 

An interesting 'dungeon' brick formation in the Savannah, and some pinkish-red stone called 'Sconia' that I was impelled to go mine

 

 

On Slimes : I'm gonna tell you, in the Savannah environment the slimes are VERY hard to see, compared to the grass ones the color of the slimes here are almost exactly the same as the grass - and in the dark, it's almost impossible to see them.  That could be because my color vision sees more greens and blues - but I've noticed it again and again.  You CAN eat the savannah slime, as you can the grass slime - but not the purple ones.  Also, while I'm on the subject, the purple slimes can climb trees, which in a jungle environment, is pretty far up - I've been way up in a tree not even thinking about that - the noise in other biomes is usually that they are near, but down on the ground and can't get you.  Nope - purple slime come right behind me through the leaves and start attacking.  Purple slimes leave a purple poison trail as well - and if you touch it before it dries it also gives you a hit.  There are also Dark slimes, which I'm not sure if you can eat that - but they aren't much worse than the others.  Mineral slimes are red, and deep underground.  They aren't aggressive (that I've seen, Dark slimes are, they are gray and also tough to see where they live), which is good, because they are TOUGH compared to the others.  You can eat mineral slime.  Anything that was that tough to kill I took that to a house with some food and tried it out in case it was poison.

 

The Sconia rock apparently produces red dye, as well.  I mined all of it.  I went into the brick cave and saw this.  The dunegon was a bust, as the only chest in it had dirt and a stick.  However, the whole dungeon is made of travertine brick - which I may come back and get some if I can remember that.

 

Magenta dye comes from thistles, lilacs and a 'Chiana' purple celosia-looking flower that is actually purple.  Irises give blue dye.  Plantago gives brown dye.  There is a 'Savannah Flowergrass' that also gives a brown dye.  Some of the other magenta-colored flowers come out to pink dye.  Magenta glazed / fired clay is interesting looking, but not so much that I will want a lot of it.  I prefer the orange, white and blue clays.  I am wondering if I should go back and find the dark gray dye (basalt, and slate, I think?) and see if that makes a glazed clay. 

Mesa and Savannah biomes meeting up, Eucalyptus trees and something I haven't yet experienced there on the left.

and yet another one - Eudalite?  It is very pretty.

The colored granites have been hard to find - just a smatter of blue and red so far in the entire world - but I found a whole hoard of green granite today.  I really like the 'lots of rocks' mod that is included with this Luanti Minetest package 'Asuna'.  There are so many things I'm poking around and say 'oo, what's that' and then go dig out the entire vein.  Amber, Amethyst, Vivianite, Covelite (blue), Lapis Lazuli, Sygilite (purple) and much more...  There is a bright pink stone that is scattered in ones and threes where I have found it - but I can't remember the name of it.  Then there are other just interesting things like the blue limestone, slate, shale, amazonite (bright blue-green), chysophase (bright green-blue), travertines and calcites.  I found some orange calcite the other day and although it wasn't enough to make anything big out of - it made a pretty and unique spire for the place. 

 

 Did I find Calcifer, or what?  I think it must be some sort of burning bush.  It went away when I hit it with a pickaxe.  The black block to the right of it is coal dust.  I hadn't found that before, either.  This was in a desert cavern.

 

My spire mapping technique is working exceptionally well.  And I've settled another large quadrant of the world.  I'm using the term 'vast' for when I have an area that is all homogeneous and no good reason to call the cross-point anything else - but I really don't want to build a lot there.  It isn't wasted space, but it is a vast open area that I just have a road through, where four or five cities could have been built, but I don't see any reason to.  

 

update : Oh my, I just found out that F5 brings up a debug window that shows you your coordinates - so now I'm going back to each spire and recording the coordinates there in a notebook.  It was a different key in the original Minecraft.  When I noted this to my daughter she said 'you didn't know about debug?'  Well, apparently not.  It will not replace getting around on the road network, but it will be interesting to see the actual distances.  The first seven coordinate locations that were all supposed to be on the same z were all within 30 paces of the same line - most of them within 10, but apparently that one had a big cliff-face I had to avoid and didn't get quite back to the same z.  I'll also have to go back to the place I called 'Kappa High Point' and record the y.

I've wondered if the fish are specific to the biomes or if they are just entirely luck.  I haven't found anything to suggest they are not just random.  I'd like to find out where the jellyfish are, or if it just a very very random lucky guess.  I got a stick of TNT fishing today - which was unexpected.

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.  Juniper trees are a great wood type - and drop lots and lots of saplings, you'll have stacks and stacks of saplings, but the trees only have 3 to 4 blocks of wood in each one so you have to really want juniper 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..

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.   Rye seed comes from savanna grass, in a savanna biome.

 

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.

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!