I tend to get snatches of time during the weekend - 30 min here and there. I don't get to sit down and properly game until after 8pm, once Felix is in bed, we've eaten and the washing up has been done. Boring stuff. Life stuff. My proper gaming has been the engrossing Planetside 2, with it's ridiculous battles. When I get bits and pieces of time, I play Minecraft as I can do a bit and leave it.
Felix likes to sit on my lap while I play. I split the screen, with Youtube or Iplayer on one side (showing whatever crap he likes at the moment) and MC on the other (with sound turned off).
I potter about. Do a bit of this, bit of that.
Pottering is no good for building mega-buildings because it requires concentration and planning. What it is good for is experimenting with interiors, laying roads, lighting areas, collecting gunpowder from the Mob Drop 1000, mining out a bit of BIG CAVE, collecting resources, killing mobs, prettifying.
My recent potterings
My favourite place to potter is in the village. It's not mob free (yet), so you have to keep awake but it is low on mobs and there are lots of beds. It's also rather pleasant to walk around in.
I put in a train line connecting South Castle (on the wall) to Big Cave., it's only a 3 wide tunnel but it works nicely. I need to improve the signage at all the stations and update the station map. There's no direct route from St. Spawcras, you have to change at Big Cave. Not ideal. The station in Big Cave could do with some work.
At the weekend, I tidied up BigR's farm, removing the old wall and putting in a 4-wide path. There was some overhanging section with an old door (anti-mob defense) that I've removed too. The farm is just too handy to get rid of at the moment, but I have a plan to replace with an auto-farm.
I'm currently working on an apothecary which is on the hill to the south of the Cathedral. It'll be another medieval building. It'll end up being an auto-apothecary, but more on that in a mo.
Once 1.5 Bukkit is out
1.5 includes a number of cool things that make automation much easier. Hoppers allow items to be removed from furnaces and put into crates, or minecarts. This allows all sorts of automation: automated furnaces can be used to bake crate fulls of stone or sand. Automated apothecaries build base potions, automated farms grow and harvest food (I believe).
It will allow stone to be moved automatically from Big Cave's store up to the surface. I imagine a bunch of under-the-surface rails moving all this resource around invisibly below the town. Crates will mysteriously fill up with products created from down below. The best thing is, a lot of the infrastructure is already there to serve this!
Comments
Ah, my old farm, I never did quite get round to adding the 3rd dimension to it ... and now it is just out of date :(
It is not out of date! Not yet! I'd fed myself COUNTLESS times from it. It's been a boon. Now we should move it across the map and make it automated. And medieval. I'm waiting to find out if seeds can be sewn automatically from droppers. If so AWESOME farm possibilities!
Sugar and melon/pumpkin farms should be fully automatic with the new stuff they were pretty much there already bar the collection the seeding thing will be the key for wheat
hmmm wonder if using mob drop/grinder technology you could make an automated animal farm
Still pottering. Decided not to use /jumpto any more and put ladders up next to the Cathedral towers. I also put a little house in to sleep in because I kept being killed at night by Skeletons on the towers shooting me off!
Stage 1 of the towers are complete, now to plan stage 2. I think I'm going to put a disc motif in. I also need to do some measurements for the height of the towers so that they are in proportion.
Farming
Wheat can't be seeded with the new stuff, so wheat/carrot/potato fully-auto-farms are a no-go. Semi-auto is still handy, though and the new hoppers will make really huge farms viable. I fancy making a massive auto melon farm now. My mob farmer has been brilliant - have not run out of arrows in ages and am collecting a dangerous amount of gunpowder. I might have to make a little building to put it in. A building with really thick walls!
The amount of stone I'm using, it's going to be great to have a way of auto-baking it all. I'm looking forward to that most. As of 1.5.1, lava buckets can be used in auto-furnaces, which makes my lava baking obsession a reality too. Win all round.
Waiting for Bukkit
Bah. Waiting for bukkit to update to 1.5. It's in Beta at the moment. I do still need it, mostly for the tree-choppy plugin. Mojang really need to sort out the plugin API, so we don't need to use the shiv anymore. I can see why they might not, as they don't really need to.