On types of sites

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

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..

bits of nothing much

Well, Friday was a bit frustrating, but it ended well.  Our mechanic brought the mail vehicle to us around midnight, and a loaner battery for us to get the other truck to town to have a new battery installed in it at our convenience.  And I got to work on Saturday.  Because I hadn't known if I would have a vehicle working, I didn't volunteer for Sunday and here I am, with a Sunday off.

And I'm playing a game - Stardew Valley, that has had a new update and Esme has been playing it for a while and chatting with me about little bits here and there.  I'm playing it in French, and trying to read the wiki in French as well and with lots of new things, that is a learning experience.  You see lots of words that you normally wouldn't - and wonder if they are just translation oddities or if that is the way it would actually translate to French.

my new farm and house have a long way to go, but I spent some time on it already.  Some new crops are carrots, summer squash (yellow) and broccoli.  And there are some very strange new events, like 'Green Rain', in which large fiddlehead ferns grow as tall as trees and moss grows on everything.  You'll also find Demetrius (the local scientist) outside his house in a Hazmat suit doing experiments.

Those are 'tomates marinées' (marinated tomatoes) and I just since those pictures got my little chicken coop with two chickens.  

I've been to my studio table the other day, while I waited anxiously for the mechanic to arrive... and just messed around a little with pens and then with paint.  With finishing the one language course, and feeling generally stressed - I've been doing French on both Duolingos.  However, because of algorithms, that doesn't stop my FB and emails and ads from showing up in everything from German to Greek.  I still find that hilarious.

 

Yes, there are a million other things I could be doing other than playing a game.  My brain reminds me of that every other ten minutes or so.  And yet.  //fall on floor in starfish formation (yoga, ADHD stuff)  Yes, it's been a hard week. 

3pm //we've gotten the new battery... it'll be a family effort to install it

Language geek

I did a few of these charts last year or more ago, just to see how often I return to the activities / switch the activities over the day and was just as surprised then how much I switch all through the day in almost spirals.  They say this 'spaced repetition' is all the rage, but I've been doing it for years.

Typical language geeking while off from post office today, did my Japanese Kanji reviews and a bit of DuoLingo in Japanese and Spanish first thing in the morning. I also took some time to browse and read hiragana and kanji and look up things on signs and advertisements and images that I could not read at first. I took some French tests, Japanese and Spanish review sessions and then played Stardew Valley for an hour in French... and a bit more here and there waiting for things over the day.  I was playing it in Japanese here and there, as well, a few weeks ago.

 

We took Esme out for her birthday dinner after school and also picked up the truck from the mechanic.  It still doesn't feel 100%, but we'll still have to see.  Then I finished the laundry and crashed when we got home, because it is cold and it felt like it had been a long day already.

 

As usual, when the animals wake me up in the night I spend a little time on some language waiting for them to cycle in and out of the house and getting ready to fall back asleep.  I don't do this on my phone, but at the computer desk.

 

Friday : a non-work day : it is now 1:45 am on Saturday (at update)

 

 

Saturday and Sunday will both be 'work' days... we'll see how that goes

Build a stone house in Minecraft

 

I am going to show you how to build a simple stone house, like the ones in my  town here, with these four materials.  You will need lots of plain cobblestone, wooden stairs of whatever type you like (I've used oak), glass pane, and a door of your choosing.  It will probably take several stacks of stone and stairs to do any of these houses.  I'm going to show you a large house I built.

  

Start out with a flat building space 

Lay out a square on the ground, leaving a space for which way you would like the door to face.  You can place the door anywhere you want, but I tend to put it in the middle or a few blocks away from the corner, as shown.

Start to build your walls up, leaving a two-high opening for the door, and if you use 4 high walls, two-high openings for your windows.  In smaller houses, you might use three-high walls and one-high windows.

Finish completing the walls to the same height.  Now, have your stairs ready, and more stone, as we are going to begin to make the roof.

The thing about using stairs is trying to keep what you see happening in the above picture from happening.  If you are too far to one side, the stair you are trying to place will come out as a corner.  You will need to be more 'head on' and aiming towards the bottom of the last stair, to place them properly.


As you move farther up the roof, you will place more stones into the side wall to meet the height.  You can leave a couple of gaps in the side wall to add more windows later, and it will bring more light into the room.


In some houses like this, I will choose a place to make a second story, and build stairs up to it.  The second story will then be an attic room.

Continuing to build up the roof

Make sure to place lots of torches inside the bigger houses, to keep monsters from spawning.  Where there is no light there can be spider!

On this house I stopped the roof at this point and finished off with polished andesite.  You can change this up and make your houses all a little different, or all the same.

Good luck building your town!

How to play Build an Empire style Minecraft Survival 1.15.2

This is another flavor of Minecraft I play in Survival, by myself, or on multiplayer LAN.  If you are playing multiplayer you will have to make some considerations for destruction or anti-griefing.. but this game can be a challenge against yourself if you do not have others to play along.

The biggest thing is that you are expanding from your spawn point, not dying from monsters (much), and increasing resources from 'town' to 'town' as you build across the map.  And roads.  I build roads in all directions eventually, leading to each new 'town' with its own resources, mines, crops and animals.  Each village not only become self-sustaining, but also provides 'exports' to other villages of things it specializes in, or has been lucky enough to have a lot of in its area. 

For example, when you find a village with carrots and beetroot etc that is the time to send those 'exports' to the gardens of other 'towns' you have built, and bring some of their excess materials back to this 'town'.  It is kind of like the Spanish explorers bringing tomatoes back to Europe after finding them in the New World.

Be sure to light all new structures, as you can see there is a skeleton in the unfinished building in this town!  This town was lucky to have a black sheep that could be caught, and the black banners then get different dyes put on them that are available all around the building site.

Start with a single house and garden in each location, for survival.  Build up your tools, your food supplies (We're on MONSTERS mode, and we have to eat!), your bed, your mine etc.  Each additional house you build in the area gets a small stock of food, resources and tools, as well as the furnace, chest, minecraft table, doors, windows and bed. 

Why more than one building?  To make it a town.  To store more stuff.  If you were on Creative you could throw a few villager spawns in each one, but really - I just imagine that the more resources I can build up, the greater the buildings expand, crops, streets - and that town starts exporting colonists (me) to another location via another road, and building again.

Experiment with each 'town' having its own building style, and using natural resources from the area.  See how your own building style develops as you progress building your Empire.

 Some basic supplies in a chest

 A second garden in this town expanding more wheat, sweet berries and sugar cane.

Each town also gets a sign on its main building telling the name of  the town and its own banner motif to tell it apart from others.  In 15.1 you will need to kill a spider or two and build a loom - as well as have sheep and dyes, to make the banners.   The colors of the pattern should represent whatever sheep and dyes are available in that area.  This town was pretty rich to start - so each building got a copy of the banner.

 

As resources increase, the rooms get fancier, buildings might get taller or rebuilt, and specialty buildings like a town hall, library, blacksmith or magician might be built.  Really really rich areas might have a castle surrounded by several small peasant village homes.

 A castle being built with the resources from two towns

This town had three completed buildings after a week of Minecraft days since the 'colonists' moved from the main complex.   When I set off from the other complex I had some food, my tools and armor, 3 wool and some wood.  Everything else at this complex came from the land surrounding it.

The road from the original town, with an unfinished building three houses and the start of a tower.

The original town also had a pen full of sheep

The second town has a road continuing off into another biome, and ready to start again or continue to build in either one.  I might go finish the tower now, or add two more buildings to this one and a sheep pen before I continue on.

The nice thing about the Build an Empire style is that the road is endless, the accomplishments are what you decide on for yourself and over time, it rises and falls at each place.  Just imagine - what happens when a creeper destroys half your village?  Do you build again?  Do you make another colony?  Can you transfer your livestock between towns, or your riches to some central castle?

After a while, what is the history of your Empire?  There is one - you were there.  Form a story in an actual Minecraft book or signs saying what happened where and when, and come back later to read it.  In what year did the Illagers come and attack?  When did you build the cathedral with the stained glass?  When did you set off on your first ship across the ocean?  etc.

Biomes o Plenty 1.12

I really like to play this style of Minecraft in Biomes o Plenty as well, with HarvestCraft - except that it just keeps adding so many windy gardens and so forth that the landscape gets flooded (I've heard there is a settiug to town that down but then I hear there isn't...)   Biomes o Plenty really lends itself well becasue there are SO many different region-specific resources, and different kinds of food etc ..try really hard to get oyster sauce as an export good!  It takes so many ingredients it is difficult to even have one to put in an item frame - if you are doing it all on survival!

I had one game of this style that had more than twenty different towns , each with more to offer, different crops etc.  Eventually, when 1.13 came along, I tried to play this way there but it just wasn't as fun in Vanilla 1.13.  Now with 1.15 they have fixed a bit more with bees, fishing, turtles, ocean environments and more villager things that I have started to play vanilla again. 

Rex and his adopted mom and aunt

Can you tell that Minerva is his adopted Mom?  They have been chewing up the blankets this winter and Rex seems to think that all the toys belong right next to Mom's butt.  I have a cartoon almost ready for Monday for the comic strip - tune back then and see it :)

Rex loves! He ate several of the pretzels as a puppy and now carries his dumb-bell toy everywhere as his 'happy thing'. The Kongs are the very best - they bounce and can be carried and dropped down the stairs to great effect. If you have an aggressive nervous chewer the Kongs are really the best thing ever!

Theatre scenes

 

Painting theatre scenes for her play 'Tiger and Pig Go to Space'.

 

Look, I have a brush!

Painting waves

Why do you need to keep taking pictures? 

To show what it looks like now you're done.

Oh.

So we started on our play for the stick puppets today, after doing some initial reading and math work.  We wrote a script, her dictating and me showing how it should be laid out and making comments.  Then,  we had made 8.5x11" plans for the scenes drawn  out with crayon.  We painted two of the scenes on the big box I brought home from work.

We also played Minecraft and built 'bird city', a place with birds nests, shops and a birdbath. I added a purple martin house, and we looked up info about flamingoes, moas and dodos as well as toucans.

My inventor makes her own fun

 Esme gets super bored on the weekends... but she does make her own fun.  Today it was a 'cake' out of blocks, lego parts and pom pom balls that was to be served up to a dragon after I got home from work - and lots of K'nex inventions.  She was also putting pricetags on her coloring book pages she brought home from Grandma's house.

I'm still working on several blankets, a rug, and small stuffed dogs for her and a birthday party gift for April.  So, she gets the creative energy from somewhere ;)

Other:  She asked me why earth was a small word, but it had five letters which was almost as much as dragon which was a big word - 'earth' vs' dr-aaag-on'.. she meant the syllables...  Right after that she was dipping water into a container, throwing it up in the air, dropping the container and trying to catch the water with both hands.  She said she wished she had three hands.  I was flabbergasted for a moment.. but responded with: 'Yes, many people have wished they had three hands, before.' She said: 'Yea, three would be good, for this.'  She said the birthday party girl would not like a stuffed dog because she only likes princess stuff..I said 'so ... doesn't matter.  she's getting a stuffed dog, because we don't have money to go buy a toy - and you like it, right?'  She agreed... and thinks it is perfect as it is although I said I would change a few things on the next one.  As I finished sewing it she said 'there, right there, perfect, it doesn't need anything else, stop there.'  Ha.

Two days off starting Monday.  Yay!

New blue shorts set and calico puppies growing up

 This is the matching set she asked for the other day... she needed more playclothes and said she wanted them to match each other like the purple set I made a while back.  She is playing Minecraft on the computer.

Caught a shot here with Daddy and the calico puppies Sweetie (left) and Spud (right).  They are growing up, and so is Esme.  She is getting so tall.  She had written a letter to Gw today and begged me to deliver it to her father at my work.  It was the first thing she asked me about this morning.. and the first thing she asked after I got home from work.