Mineclonia Minetest with Bees and Wine Mod

 There is a lot to poke around with on this combination - and not all of it actually works.  That makes me wonder more, and keep trying things.  This is writing down some of the things that made me scratch my head to figure them out. 

 I had found out how to make cider, sparkling cider, wheat beer, barley beer, rum and coffee liquer.  I had not yet figured out how to get honey, or how to make it into mead.  I also have, for all it being named 'wine' not found grapes yet anywhere in the world - but I'd like to, and try that out.  It says there is corn, too - and tomatoes, haven't found either of those yet, either.  I've got a little pillager problem on both sides North and South of me in this map but have been cautiously expanding my territory East and West - and now I'm edging North again at one spot to see if I can make it across the sea.  Monsters are on, so I'm having to make safe places and carry enough materials to quickly make a basic house.

A bigger, fancier house - I wouldn't do those stairstep roof quite like that again - it was difficult - and with the 'get comfortable' mod on, it makes it even more difficult to make the stairstep roofs that I do like, like in the below picture.  But, not impossible.  I have just had to use a lot of dirt scaffolding and then break it back out from the inside.

 One of the biggest problems with this combination and survival is that there are two of many things, sugars - one from sugarcane and one from stevia, different flours and uses of wheat, not all that work quite like they should and do in the Asuna mods .. and there are also two honeycombs.  One honeycomb is gotten by shearing a hive (smoke it first and you won't get hit damage, otherwise, take the hit damage) and the other is gotten by catching three bees in a jar and putting them together in a small 'r' formation on the crafting grid.  Both of those make hives by putting three honeycombs across in the center and planks above and below - but they make DIFFERENT hives.

 The hive on the left is made with the hive shearing method.  This is also the type of honeycomb you get out of shearing wild hives.  The hive on the right is made by putting three honeycombs from the 'bee in a jar' method.  And then you have to catch more bees in jars to put them into that hive.  Bee in a jar does not work in the left hive... but it still makes more honey and acts just like a wild hive.

Now, when it comes to making something out of the honeycombs besides hives - you can use the wild type honeycomb in a crafting grid with a piece of string above it to make a candle.  And then you can set the candle somewhere and light it with a flint and steel.  It also makes honeycomb blocks with foursquare, but they are just a building material. I'd really like to see that be more useful, and possibly the honeycomb itself be a foodstuff.

As far as I've seen you can't use either honeycomb as sugar, and neither can be eaten. 

Only the wild bee type honeycomb shows up in your inventory when you are in the fermenting barrel mode from the wine, but I haven't found a recipe with it yet to make mead.  However, the hive on the right (the one from the honeycomb gotten from bee jars) when full can be emptied with a glass bottle, to get a bottle of honey.  That bottled honey can be placed in the below recipe of one drinking glass and one bottle of honey to make honey-mead in the fermenting barrel!  It seemed like it took forever to get that to work out!

honey mead recipe in luanti mineclonia minetest

coffee liquer / liquor recipe in luanti mineclonia minetest

make the glass of rum (bottom left corner) by fermenting sugarcane in the top right and bottom left corners with the empty drinking glasses, and then ferment the rum with the coffee beans

Also discovered : You can dry kelp in the furnace and it becomes a food source. 

I have the 'plant based foods' mod as well - and for some silly reason it does not let the soybeans from the farming redo be made into plant milk - but it will let rice (not the one that grows on silt, but the one obtained from punching grass for random seeds) be made into plant milk.  You place the water filled bucket in the top left corner of the crafting table, and then fill all but the bottom two right squares with uncooked rice.  It turns into a bucket of plant milk.  You can then place the bucket of plant milk in the furnace and it becomes tofu.  But why aren't the soybeans worked into this, since that is the actual way you make tofu?  Make that make sense!  But the tofu can be eaten.  In these mods also cow's milk in a bucket can be put in the furnace to make edible mozzarella cheese.  All of those are correct in giving you back your empty iron bucket.  BUT - beware of the ice cream recipe, because it takes a bucket of milk but does not give you your bucket back.  That's expensive ice cream!

 

more bits

 It's been another week went by and I'm not even sure where it went.  Did some things this week - gardening, shopping, going to work and the feed store, of course.  About to make some classic banana bread that is sort of between what I make for 'well I'll eat it anyway' banana flan stuff and madeleines with banana in them.

 I made 'mac and cheese' last night with gruyere and mini penne pasta.  Esme said it wasn't that different - just pasta and cheese, right?  And I reminded her that one has to make a bechamel sauce first  with butter, flour and some of the pasta sauce, then add the cheese into it.  Mark says if I can make it with white cheddar and American cheese he'll try it.  

I made a pot of lentil soup first thing  this morning.  It was cold, and my stomach hurt from eating a fast food ice cream yesterday - while finishing up our postal route and things were very early etc.  I told Esme that I had to think 'what did I eat that WAS NOT food, yesterday, and then .. oh yes, that'  So I was up at three am even on my day off, but took a bath and drank more coffee, did the dishes and the laundry - and then my stomach felt better after a bit, enough to cook lentil soup, and then get ready to go for shopping in town.

Frozen grated carrots and ginger from a few months ago, frozen onions, 1 cup or so of lentils, some herbs de provence, some black pepper and salt, and some beet greens - all cooked down and then ran through the blender.  I needed that.  There is enough for a few more lunches, too.

 Now to go throw my floor rugs in the dryer and make that banana bread, before I decide not to as dinner will be coming up - but I've already had the butter and eggs waiting on the counter bringing up to room temperature.  I had poked the butter a half hour ago and it was not ready yet.

Chopped up a bunch of yellow summer squash and red bell peppers and onions (all from the store), harvested a few more strawberries and sorrel leaves, checked on other things.  Have been studying French and Czech lately on duolingo, with some Greek and Lithuanian (and Czech and French) vocabulary on baba dum. 

 The banana bread recipe says :

 2 cups mashed banana (ha, you'll get what I've got, which is two small mashed banana)

1 full stick of butter, softened at room temperature

2 large eggs, brought to room temperature

1/2 cup granulated white sugar

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

2 cups flour (that seems a bit excessive, we'll see)

1 tsp of baking powder

1/2 tsp of baking soda

1/2 tsp salt 

2 tsp of vanilla (yea, no, we do one teaspoon, this is strong stuff)

 and it gives no baking time or temperature, so I'll wing it at 375 and watch it for when it turns brown, stick a fork in it and see if it comes out clean 

 

 

 

I've also been playing Mineclonia Minetest, with the Wine Mod and the plant based foods and x farming, 'get comfortable' furniture mod and a few other things - some of the mods clash - Esme says the barrels from the Wine Mod (which also makes cider, beer, rum, coffee liquer etc.) look so out of place.  I like the way the barrels on end make something like cabinets or armoires when stuck on top of the tables.  The get comfortable thing clashes with how I make roofs on my buildings, so I have had to learn a new way to get around it by putting dirt blocks and then placing the stairs on top of the blocks and breaking them back out from underneath.  This has monsters on, and hunger, and the snow biome nearly killed me last night because I fell through the powder snow and didn't know how to get back out with it all falling on me and doing damage -- dig down, and then reach rock, so you can stand on something, and then find a way to get out one direction or the other, always standing on rock and never on snow. Scary though.. like having a whole ceiling of sand and gravel fall on you in original Minecraft.

 One of the other things that has happened is the nearby pillager crew has come out with their bannerman to stare at me.  I put up a two high fence around my area between their huge watchtower and me, and also lined the other side of it with sweetberry bushes, which they will take damage from them.  We'll see if that works. 

 

  

columnar basalt in the Outback

 Finally found a place full of the columnar basalt - although it is underground.  It is slightly harder to dig through than the cobblestone around it, but it doesn't shift like sand when it is dug - which I had half expected.  There was lapis lazuli and pyrite right next to this, as well.  I had a few questions I had asked myself about - will gardens grow in the Enverness area, if you bring in regular dirt?  Yes, just like in the marsh and savannah/desert areas if you put water and regular soil, it will grow. 

 

I was exploring more of the jars and the chests that are under the water in the almost endless Enverness pools - lots of weird things there.  Trying to get around and through those areas was a big thing earlier in the game, because there was no food there and I didn't want to hang out.  Now, I'm geared up more and have lots of bases with food, so I'm exploring them a bit more.  Even just running through some of the earlier places I had been in the game, now that I know so much more about surviving there and have built up resources, I'm seeing those old bases with new eyes.

Don't eat the raw calamari it's poisonous! I keep reading that you can catch different fish in different biomes, but so far I am only catching the same types everywhere.  It might be the fishing rod?  I have seen some about an ice fishing rod, as well - will have to check that out when I return to the place that I finally found the ice.  Having a fishing rod and edible fish was one of the things I had missed in the other type of Luanti I had played for a few months - Asuna having that, animals and so much more farming and biomes really pleased me and has kept me playing this modpack.

  a savannah/mesa 'outback' biome home with a garden

near some very good mining locations

I have expanded my network of world locations to almost two hundred - not all of them connected by roads, many with 'pointing' spires like described before, where continue to go in that direction along that x or z axis and you end up in the next location.  I'm using the online Desmos graphic calculator to give myself a rough bare bones map, entering the x and z coordinates from the f5 information window that I finally saw the other day - I don't know why that took me so long to find, but once I do stumble on something to make the mapping easier I will use it.  Although, I may not continue seeking easier and more advanced mapping - once I have something that works.

Mark was looking at all of the graphic user interface (GUI) utilities out there and wanting me to go use one of those, that is his interest, technical programs and utilities and forums to extend the game experience -  but this is 'good enough' and I actually kind of like making myself 'true navigate' like some ancient Viking and keep an idea in my head where I'm going with the Desmos map being almost like a hand-drawn pirate map.  It's part of the fun for me.  I was using the sunrise / sunset and lines of sight and landmarks before finding the coordinate system, so hey - I'm high-tech now, compared to that!  I'm almost ready to exit the Stone Age, right?  And yes, I'm still using mostly stone pickaxes, even though I found some iron in one place I haven't been back there to use more of it in a while, as exploring and working my way through the world and new biomes is more interesting than having a faster working pick axe.  I'll explore more of the technology naturally as I run out of other interesting things.

Going back through the new Alpine and desert areas to build more bases now where it is logical and collect supplies and interesting rocks to transfer along the network.  Mark had been thinking to start playing in the same world with me, but then he got caught up in the politics he is seeing on forum posts and for some reason that makes him not want to play - even just the two of us in the game.  He said that participating in forums about games is really important to him, while I just like to play the game.  I'm having fun with it though, discovering all the things, post here a little when I finally figure something out.  

That is another main draw for me in games, besides the number one thing of being able to really build a little bit at a time, over time and keep inventory/maps etc - is having lots of things I have to figure out for myself (but not a bunch of enemies and deadly bits, more just curious bits, potions to use, herbs etc.), and not a big wiki base that has every answer, so there are things I have to ponder and bash the rocks together so to say, until I find the answer for myself.  I've been told that is 'the hard way'.  I often do make notes, like here on this site, though - so someone else might stumble against at least a little Eureka and then go back and work on the things that have been puzzling them.

Still studying Greek and Japanese, French-to-Spanish and Spanish-to-French.  Mark was wondering if we could buy a small outside shelter soon for the little blind goat and the cats and a hay crib to go in it - we've been thinking about it for a while, and watching a few more farm videos he saw something at an online store that he thought might work. 

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. 

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.

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.

 

Minetest Repixture on Lunati

 I somehow fell into playing Minetest, after of course being very involved with Minecraft until Esme and I could not play different accounts on the same email - so I gave her my account and stopped playing it altogether.  

Minetest is a generic copycat version - and Mark has said I should try it for a while.  The time came up last night and I got it on my computer.

There are several different versions and I tried a few world builders - and the controls seemed messed up on some.  I downloaded Repixture, and it seemed to work for me better.

 

I think I'll call this Horsehead Bay Farm

I already added potato and cotton in another fence

That being said : Their recipe finder leaves a lot to be guessed at - so some of the key elements to survival were hard to figure out.  Plus, you get hungry - and if you don't eat, you start taking damage.  So - finding and being able to make adequate food supplies was pretty important.

I spawned near a village, which meant I could take some bread from their chests and get some wheat seed from their field - and there were a few apple trees nearby.  So I wasn't starving at first - but the pigs were very tough - bit back hard, and I gave up on that. 

Here is what I figured out on the food, crops and cooking.

All that grass that keeps coming up when you hit it?  Keep it - put it on your crafting screen and make fiber from it.  So many recipes need fiber, and sticks - sticks of course come from the wood blocks becoming planks and the planks becoming sticks.  If you're trying a regular minecraft recipe and it doesn't seem to be working (torch, door, pickaxe, bucket etc.) you probably need fiber.

4 wheat makes a flour, the flour has to be baked in a furnace to make bread.  It doesn't require anything else except burning in a furnace.  The furnace was available in the town - and the recipe finder did have a good way to learn how to make one.  I spent a long time with a bucket (also in the recipe finder) and water trying to figure out how to craft bread.  Nowhere does it say anything about how to do anything with the flour - but that was it, burn it in the furnace, it makes bread. Wheat stacks at 60.  I'm pretty sure it can be used to feed sheep - and it can be blocked to make straw bales.

Growing the wheat is time consuming but possible.  8 wheat grow around a single water square.  If you let it grow to maturity you either get back one wheat and a seed or maybe two seeds.  I haven't seen if animals eat the crop yet - I've put fences around the wheat fields by instinct from the original Minecraft game.

I didn't go after the sheep, but when I tried to dye one with a thistle plant it hit it instead and it didn't attack back like the pig did.  I really don't like killing sheep - much better to keep them for wool -  so I am just waiting to finally find some iron and get a pair of shears.  I've seen how to make rope with some dried grass clumps but haven't found enough of those and the regular grass clumps don't dry in the furnace.

The apples come 4 or 8 from a tree, and chop the tree down, and get more saplings.  Plant all the saplings, they grow if you spend enough time near them - and get more apples.  Apples cannot be cooked.  

Oak trees can grow acorns, just like the other trees grow apples.  Acorns are only one food point a piece, but you can make a good sized forest and the acorns do respawn but they take a good while.  Or you can chop down the forest and replant, and get more acorns that way.  Pigs can be fed acorns. Acorns cannot be cooked, or made into flour.

There are also wild skunks running around.  They don't attack - but I bet if you hit one they do something nasty.  Just an instinct.  There is a 'net' that says it is used to catch small animals - and I think maybe it means the skunk.  Haven't tried it yet.  I haven't seen a single chicken in five different biomes and towns.

There is wild asparagus that looks like a tall seaweed thing on the swamp plains with a yellow flower.  It reminded me a lot of sunflowers in the original Minecraft.  It pops when it has the flower on it to be an asparagus and one or two asparagus seeds.  Asparagus can be cooked and gains a food point in the process.  Asparagus stacks at 60. The asparagus  seeds only grow in swamp dirt.  BTW : wheat seeds do NOT grow in swamp dirt.  I made myself two farms with a long road strung between them.

I still need the roads - built of stone or wood planks - because I still get lost otherwise.  I was sure on my first farm which was just wheat and cotton that I wouldn't get lost - set off in a westward direction, haven't found that place since.  Luckily, I found the asparagus and the clams soon after that or I might have starved before I got another farm going.

 Asparagus Farm in the swamp - which was where I found the pig creeper thing

There was also cotton and cotton seed in the village.  I see you can make cotton bales from it - and grow it just like the wheat and asparagus.  You can't eat the cotton.

I was in the highlands and I found a small white bush flower thing that I popped and it was a potato plant. It yields 2 to 4 potatoes, and you can replant them both in swamp dirt and in regular dirt.  It is pretty easy to plant a whole field of potatoes from just finding one bush.  You can cook potatoes to increase them one health point each - from 3! to 4.

Down by the water edge there were small tan and white spotted squares that were clams.  I popped them and was able to eat them raw.  They cannot be cooked.  Sometimes they yield a pearl when you are popping a lot of them.  They respawn.  Four clams will fill you up from starving.

That's what I've found so far - experimented some with the papyrus plants (like sugar cane, but no food value), growing them, making paper and making reed blocks (which can be cooked to make dried reed blocks) which I think are only meant for a building material.  The paper can be used to make maps and books and labels etc etc..  The reed blocks need 'swamp grass clumps' to be used with the papyrus in the recipe.

Got algae blocks out of the water, and 'airgas' plants - haven't figured out what to do with either of them.  Graphite sheets seem to be used in labels and books etc.  Coal can be made into torches and used to burn things (which you can burn sticks, wood, planks, stairs etc etc. as well).  Thistles and Daisy flowers are probably to use with the paint stuff - but I have to find tin first to try that.  I have only mined a bit down from the surface, and haven't found any monsters but I've been bringing torches with me.  The only monster I found on the surface resembled a saddled pig, green with a red saddle - and it blew up like a creeper.  Yikes!  Don't want to meet that one again.  It chased me, too.  And I haven't found iron yet to make a sword!

So here I am bouncing between two farms - and building roads out from them into new biomes.  I've found birch trees, fir trees, oak trees, 'tree' trees (which give the apple saplings) and seen another kind of tree up on a mountain that I haven't gotten to yet.  I took a boat for a short excursion, but didn't want to get lost.

I've been using the large stone arch method over the roads - at every place I think is significant, and at turns in direction - and so far have went very far... but been able to find my way back.  And it looks like the map is only sticks and paper - so maybe I'll make one soon and see what that looks like.

A pretty lagoon

A two story square house - start to finish in Minecraft

 I started this with a face 9 squares wide, and then went back for a total of 9 x 11.  So, no, it's not entirely square.  But, it has a very cool roof style that I didn't find easy, but might definitely try again.  I also really like the way the interior turned out.

I started out with a standard stairstep face, and repeated it on the opposite side.  Then in each corner I added an upper facing that began at three blocks high on top of the 'normal'; wall height of the bottom story.

I filled in windows in both upper facings and then began to resolve the roof, which is always the hardest part, to make it look 'natural' and not have holes in corners etc.

It took a couple of tries to get the bottom corners working properly, and a structure inside as well (shown below) to fill in the gaps properly

And then I could make the glass and door and torches and begin to work on the interior rooms.

now it is ready for beds, rugs, banners and tables and chairs.  And this is what it looks like from the outside, with what is built nearby so far.  This is my "Zayama Railway world" in 1.16.5, vanilla, survival mode (currently on peaceful).  I've still got a lot more iron to find to connect all of the stations that have been made, including a big seaside one to the North (you'll see that listed as Windgrass in an upcoming post).  But I thought I'd play with some interesting houses while waiting for other things the past few days.

Resolving a Four-Way roof on a Minecraft House

 

 Often I just make the bottom half of a building and then 'run with it' and try to resolve the roof.  Since I made the side wall areas of this building on the second story seven wide instead of five, there was a height difference to make up for if the stairsteps were going to meet up evenly and not have gaps.

My husband came and looked at the screen halfway through (I was complaining it was being a pain, and I should have screnshot it then) and said something like h*** No and went back to his own project.  

 

 

I ended up using cobblestone walls to make the edge points match up to the ground and give some stability to the side roofs (if they were real)   I really like the way it turned out, and will make a few more buildings in this area to connect up to the local bridges and road crossroad here.

and for a kicker - here is the interior (undecorated) version of the house, as well.  It has two rooms on the main floor and one upstairs room.

The back room is perfect for a kitchen area, and has another door out, as well.  Upstairs there are room for a double bed or two or three singles, and chests.  This room also leads down into the mineshaft below the town.

Location : near Milliken in the Zayama Railway World, which doesn't have a story, I'm just sort of doing it for the joy of mapping and building.