On the Minecraft: Regrowth front, it’s been more expansion and progression down the HQM book, though I’m getting to that stage where the HQM quests stop handholding and I start cudgeling my brain and running out of ideas for, “Well, I could do anything I want, but what do I really want to do NOW?”
My little hobbit hole is still functional, if cramped, for now.
I finally got to the point of discovering storage drawer controllers, which make sorting out all the little pretty items much easier.
Eventually, down the road, I expect that one could automate the whole chain of growing things, harvesting, sending them along pipes into a drawer controller which feeds into a giant storage drawer wall of everything-you-could-want (that is, until Applied Energistics comes along with their inventory system.)
I live and work so primitively and manually that I often find myself making things I don’t have an immediate use for right now, like the worktable just sitting up on the ceiling. I’m -sure- I’ll eventually have use for it, assuming I remember I have it, but eh, I don’t really have that many recipes I’m repeating right now, beyond a lever, a piston and some magical crop food that have already been stored in the picture frame thingummies.
Function a little limited by form. I made a second drawer controller system for flowers and dyes and seeds downstairs in the experimental breeding chamber. Would it be nicer in one single gigantic storage system? Maybe. Possibly. But it would also mean a gigantic wall of drawers that my hobbit hole can’t exactly accommodate right now.
It was made somewhat brutally clear that in order to get Mutandis to experimentally mutate through different plants to collect all the possible specimens, one was going to need quite a bit of Mandrake.
Problem is, if you pull Mandrake by daytime, they come alive and become a little annoying mob that creates nausea and screams horribly into your ear.
I’d figured out by chance that keeping them in a pit helps to limit all the crazy running around chasing after them, and watching a Youtube video suggested the clever idea of using Punji sticks as mandrake killing traps (they like to run towards you and screech, so you can pull them places.)
A coincidence of sorts, I’d made a little chamber under this room because I’d previously found a rock hive while digging out stone to replace it with dirt for the crops. (The flowing dirt seems to be some kind of texture bug with an Agricraft water pad, but I kind of like the effect as it sort of hides the pit.)
Inside the pit is a little safe zone for me to climb up and down with ladders, and at the far end, a little tunnel that connects to the Mandrake growing zone, filled with Punji sticks.
Basically I can cut down the whole Mandrake zone with a few Scythe swings, and then race up the ladder leading out of the Mandrake area and down this ladder into the pit. Any live Mandrakes that have been humping the walls screeching realize they can path right to me via the tunnel, and run through many many spiked punjis, conveniently falling over dead by the time they get to or near me.
Since I made a Ring of Magnetization via Botania some time ago, even if they fall over dead further away, the delicious Mandrake crop that is looted off their dead bodies floats right to me regardless of which trap offs them.
Further along, I improved my mushroom and nether wart growing corridor from lazy pitch black 1 person-wide tunnel risking mob spawns and blocked by a door to a small low light growth chamber.
Me attempting a little primitive aesthetics, while wondering if it was possible to block the brightness of light emitted by torches with a semi-translucent block or microblock. I ended up with stained glass microblock covers over an empty square with a torch in it.
There’s a page of the HQM quest book devoted to creating life from Spawn eggs.
So I had to improvise little animal holding pens/zoo/stables thingummies.
At first they were just stone chambers with fence and fence gates at the entrance, but the opaqueness of the walls annoyed me. I wanted to be able to look through the pens and see what was being kept as I walked by.
I was debating something with glass dividing up the chambers, but some experimentation later, I couldn’t really find a good shape that would take up exactly the middle point of the block beyond a microblocks pillar or post.
Couple this with the madness of clucking chickens and baying cows doing their best to cross pens (the grass looked greener on the other side, presumably), I soon gave up making it perfect and just went for something, anything, vaguely fence-like and got out of there.
I count my blessings that no one has modded in chicken shit and cow dung yet in Minecraft (not in this pack anyways.)
Can’t seem to find a noise muffler block in Regrowth, sad to say.
Ok, this might be slightly inhumane, but well… it keeps them easily accessible for trades!
I’m contemplating some kind of see-through monster tank/specimen chamber for the other side. Part of said quest line is to make things like Spawn Zombie and Spawn Creeper eggs. Not sure what I would do with those really. It’s not like they’re really endangered species…
The crops chamber has stood up to massive expansion, thankfully.
Presumably one day I’m either going to have to rearrange some of them so that they make sense (flowers together, metal crops clustered somewhere else, etc.) or make an even larger chamber to grow squares of crops and pipe them all to a big storage wall somewhere…
Machinery experiments have been haphazard.
It’s been one Forestry machine after another (Carpenter, Squeezer, Centrifuge, Fermenter, etc) and the odd grey Rolling Machine all opportunistically hooked onto anything that supplies RF power.
The garishly candy-cane colored pipe is a quartz kinesis pipe that transports said RF power.
There’s a starter Hobbyist’s Steam Engine behind that mess somewhere, which I was initially using, and then swapped over to the multi-block steam boilers feeding into a more intermediate steam engine version in the background.
More garishly colored Buildcraft pipes, along with my absolute disregard for linear systematicity.
On the left is a steam boiler consisting of a low-pressure tank block and a solid fueled firebox, and the right is a low-pressure tank block coupled with a liquid fueled firebox.
I’d been working desperately to try and get to the liquid fueled one, because I’d been accumulating a LOT of creosote oil from the coke oven, but progression-wise, the solid fuel one had to come first.
In the end, well, why waste either?
Both are temporarily still manually filled with water and the desired fuel. I’m still looking for the equivalent of an RF storage in this modpack – I’m used to not wasting RF power and storing it all up in a RF cell of some kind – before I start automating it all.
The neon green extraction pipes are emerald fluid transport/extraction pipes – one step up from the wooden extraction ones – that pull a fluid out of the block’s inventories.
In this case, they’re pulling Steam and feeding it into the Steam Engine (blue thing in the center), which then converts the Steam into RF power.
Said RF power is then being pulled out by the neon green kinesis pipe version and fed into the mini-network of rather haphazardly linked machines.
Oh, and the bright yellow pipes are gold fluid transport pipes, which are the more efficient fluid transport versions.
Having been completely defeated in my attempt to hook up the white quartz kinesis pipes adjacent to the green fluid extraction pipes so that the RF power could power the extraction, I threw my hands up and stuck Wooden Engines (with lever attached) onto each and every one of the green pipes. Now they will go and keep going and I don’t have to think about it further, beyond how ridiculous the whole thing looks.
(You may safely ignore the cactus. The cactus is for the bee hives. Turns out the edge of this cobblestone platform was conveniently reaching over into the Ocean biome, which has a conducive temperature/climate for normal-ish bees, and I just used the most available ocean biomes squares I had left.)
Yet another primitive and garishly ugly attempt for me to work through and understand the various machines involved in this cycle.
The block on the left with a whole bunch of Wooden Engines sticking out from it is a Buildcraft Pump, pulling water out of a 3×3 infinite water source.
It is pumping an unlimited supply of water into the (currently green) Combustion Engine, which is supposedly one of the top tier engines of this mod.
Cos if you don’t and it runs out of sufficient water coolant, it goes boom.
Or so they say.
I am frankly not interested in finding out (there’s already enough craters in this ‘ere blasted wasteland), hence an infinite water cooling system first of all.
Said Combustion Engine can run on Oil, to produce RF power, but inefficiently. It does better on Fuel.
In order to convert Oil into Fuel, one needs a Refinery (the red gizmo) and to power it with RF.
Hence the tank of oil on top of it, to constantly feed oil into it. (Much to my exasperation, the pipe was incapable of delivering oil via gravity, and thus yet another clunky emerald fluid pipe with a tail of Wooden Engine+Lever was attached onto it.)
The converted fuel is then extracted into another tank, by way of Emerald Pipe+Wooden Engine+Lever contraption. (Can I shorten it to EWEL from now on?)
One can feed the Fuel back into the Combustion Engine to keep it going, but I’m sitting back on joining more pipes and larger tanks to this for now, mostly because I’m still looking for something that can store up all the RF energy produced.
I pumped up the little oil pool on the left into the big tank too, by the by. I was getting tired of falling into it accidentally and trying to clamber out of it, with its quicksand-like properties.
Turns out it didn’t really have that much oil in there, but well, some is better than none.
I’ve seen much larger geysers and spouts of oil, while exploring out on the ocean, but I’m not 100% sure how I’m going to collect those, beyond a gigantic ugly kilometers-long golden pipe floating in the air and leading to an impromptu pump platform by the spout… I suppose I could lay it down on the ocean floor for a little more authenticity…
This part of the outside is devoted to machines that look a lot less rainbow.
The red brick Bloomery Furnace creating Wrought Iron from Iron is in the foreground, the Tinker’s Construct Smeltery behind it with casting basins and a casting table, while the multiblock Blast Furnace for making Steel out of Wrought Iron is on the left.
Mariculture’s Crucible Furnace, hastily automated via hopper and adjacent ingot caster, is just beside the Blast Furnace.
I’m starting to run out of easily reachable short-term goals, which is a little bit demotivating.
Everything I consider doing next seems like it’s going to take a while.
I still have magic seeds to create via runic altar and grow, but collecting the requisite components is a rather tedious multi-step process. One has to find the ingredients, operate and power the runic altar, dig out further expansion in the seed chamber, fill it with more rows of garden soil and crop sticks, etc.
I can make more spawn eggs of different creatures, but ditto, it’ll also involve a lot of runic altar creation, digging out chambers to house the creatures, and so on.
I could make an upgraded automated farm, but that would mean finding the space, digging it out, laying in the blocks, growing stuff, automating it and hoping it works…
Maybe I’ll run around in the Nether and hope I can find Nether Copper Ore for the next quest in my HQM book… except I’ve already searched the area around my portal in a 50-100 block radius and can’t seem to find any…
😦
Guess I’ll have to think on this a little more.
Why I Game 