bits

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

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

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

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

 

Other questions answered :

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

More later.

bits

 We got the taller propane tanks secured into the back of the truck today - which was something we had been working on for a long time.  That meant we could fill up four times the amount I've been getting every other day in the small tanks.  

Then we got some groceries, and came home.  A yellow squash was fifty-nine cents, and the big white onion was one dollar and forty-nine cents.  I bought an apple for sixty-nine cents.  I wanted to compare what the prices were after a while, but really they aren't that high compared to what the news is saying everything is too expensive to buy vegetables.

I made squash and onions with bacon over rice for Esme and I - and a bit of hamburger on the side for each of us while Mark had one.  The other night we made an 'Italian' soup, with a marinara pasta packet and some kale in one pan, and tomatoes, cannellini beans, peppers and onions fried together with some hamburger in another pan - then put it all together into bowls with garlic toast.  That was really good - although I hadn't meant it to be 'soup' until that last moment when I guessed eating it as soup was better than waiting for a much longer time for it to boil down the sauce into a thicker texture.

Tired - headed off to bed.  I played a little bit of Minetest (like Minecraft) earlier while we washed the laundry - and made a good amount of progress.  Yea, it's Luanti, not Lunati but you could understand my mistake.  Lunati looks cool for a name.  Lua-nti makes sense since it is programmed in Lua.

 

A scaffolding (ladder) decoration added to a balcony formation made in the side of my typical stairstep roof.  Another watchtower on a little island across some water - as seen from the balcony.

 

Checked off some new skills / achievements / tests :

Figured out how to sneak finally, and built a long air bridge across a canyon. 

Figured out how to use that shift (sneak) button to descend the ladders - that took forever.

Made the stone spear and then was able to kill the pigs, the creeper things (that looked like saddled pigs but blew up with TNT) and the skunk like creatures.

Found a desert biome and harvested cotton in the wild.  I still haven't seen what else can be made from the cotton except for cotton bales.

Made reed blocks with swamp grass clumps and papyrus.  It can be dried in the furnace to make a different color. Esme said :It's like thatch.

Discovered that potatoes grow in swamp or plains area.  

Found a mixed plains/swamp area where I could plant all of the crops within not too far from each other.

Traded with a villager using the trade book and bought a cactus (still seeing how that will turn out). If only I could find one that would sell me a carrot, now!

Made brick.  It required no clay - just sand and gravel *question mark*

Discovered that yes, indeed, the wheat and cotton and potato will grow two deep away from a water square - but they won't grow well without a water square.

Made two new farms and started naming and completing the interconnection between them so I can travel fairly easily from one to another.  Experimented with new roof styles and using half-blocks as well as the stairs.

Found iron ore and mined it with a stone pickaxe, then discovered how to take the wrought iron ingots to steel and carbon steel using graphite.  I had been wondering what the graphite was for!  Made shears with the carbon steel.  The carbon steel pickaxe cut through rock like butter.

Made flint and steel, and made TNT from base materials (instead of just monster drop).

Made carbon steel and mined gold ore with it.  I kept seeing the gold speck stuff and it would not break with a stone pickaxe.  I didn't know if that was sulfur or gold - because you can't look at things like in the old Minecraft before you break it.  The gold isn't very useful, yet... although one ingot was needed to make the trade book I already had that from the first village having that in a chest.

Still haven't found tin or sulfur, although they are supposed to be out there.  Have found a few locked chests in villages and haven't went through how to open them although there is a tool that can be crafted for that.

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