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Greetings everyone, and welcome back to a long overdue episode of Keybounce's Overkill:
Construction Disorder. This episode will be a talkie, while I finish building the minecart
elevator.
First, I want to apologize for the long gap. I will do my best to make sure this does not
happen again.
Second, I can now state that I understand the issues of running a multiplayer server
as compared to running a single player world. I've also come to understand that a multiplayer
world does not mean that you cannot play solo.
Looking back, one of the biggest changes in my world was the decision to switch to multiplayer
so I could play with a friend, Alex Zang. Many things have come out of that. Overall,
I think it was the right decision, but I also think that I need to treat this more as a
single player world that has other people playing in it at times -- like an "Open to
LAN" world, rather than as an "only play with friends" world.
So, where am I at this point, and what's happening now? Back in episode 203, in version 125,
the big thing was that the new base had been built by Anon Firefly and Alex Zang, and the
central staircase needed to be replaced with a high speed elevator. I tested a variety
of up and down systems; the one thing I did not test on the down, that probably would
work perfectly, was vines; unlike ladders, they have no collision box, so you cannot
hit them and die, and they slow you down. But vines cannot support the minecarts that
are needed to go up. That episode ended in 132. In the process of building, the iron
supply got used up. Episode 204 was some mining in the caves; then, 205 was the start of a
trip to Twilight Forest, to rob a hollow hill of iron to resume the building. 4 sessions
later -- the first two produced and uploaded, the third lost, and the 4th to be uploaded,
from version 132 to 145, twilight forest versions 11 through 13.2, and now there is enough iron
to finish -- and, as you can see, I'm working on that now. And, I'm trying to schedule a
4 or 5 person session (well, at least three) to finish off the silverfish infestation that
still exists in the hill.
So what happens next? Our forest has a number of issues with being developed over several
different revisions of the mod -- it is now at 15.1 -- and I'll attempt to wipe all the
chunks that are not in this hollow hills base; if I can't get that to work, the whole forest
will be wiped. And, the next thing to deal with is Mystcraft, and Custom Ore Generation.
Many of you will know about Vanilla Minecraft's ore behavior -- no matter where you dig, you
find stuff, and there's no reason to go searching. Digging down lower is always better than digging
higher. Digging at 10 and 11, dodging lava, in a straight line is the best you can do.
I hate that. Custom Ore Generation gives a choice of Veins, or Clouds, and veins are
at different height levels, and works much better. I have been thinking about this, and
while I want to have us building stuff in the overworld, there needs to be a reason
to go elsewhere -- so I will probably set up the configs to give more ores in Mystcraft
ages, using them for mining, as well as clouds in the Twilight Forest -- just so that there
is a difference between the various worlds that we can mine in.
And this is a point to consider -- do we set up the overworld to use veins, which will
give us many extra tunnels when dug out, or clouds, that will give us a few large rooms?
A quick look over the config seems to indicate that about 4% of chunks will be the center
of emerald clouds in the extreme hills, and the base is pretty much in landscape dominated
by extreme hills -- so that would mean one, perhaps two cloud rooms in the area of the
base -- assuming I find them. Very likely, yes; guaranteed, no. And while there's a lot
of ocean chunks around, lapis has drastically lower generation. So clouds in the overworld
would pretty much force us to use ages or the forest for mining, while veins would give
us some overworld resources. I plan on giving clouds a try, and if we wind up being totally
frustrated, going back to veins. Note that this really hurts iron -- clouds of iron are
only found in cold biomes, and there are NONE within reasonable distance of our base. As
I said, if we are totally frustrated -- and there are both Twlight Forest hollow hills
and clouds, and Mystcraft ages -- we can go back to veins.
I have two old construction episodes to produce and upload. One is our overkill wheat farm,
and the other is the half overkill doorbell. The wheat farm works; it only depends on water
flow. In fact, with -- was it 132, or 142 -- a bug where the water flowing down would
destroy objects was finally fixed, and that actually made it perform better. I want to
convert the top of it to a completely overdone mushroom farm. Every lets play series needs
an overdone pointless project, whether it's a boat to planks sawmill, or something else.
The doorbell, however, depends on redstone, and doesn't work properly. More on that in
a moment.
I took a look at Direwolf's current season. I had heard that he was using Mystcraft, and
wanted to see what he was doing with it. Instead, I see him building 9x9 rooms with automation
and tech mods as the primary focus, and magic mods as a secondary focus.
I won't do 9 by 9 rooms. I'll just say no. I like to build stuff with the landscape,
not against the landscape. I build in caves, in mineshafts, etc, because for me, part of
the challenge is to work with the existing landscape, and fit into it. The south wall
of our hill has plenty of places for me to work. Many places in the old island are cramped;
several places in the landscape were altered by Alex during his early days of "I'm just
going to do this", and I did just make those bigger. And while I've managed to get him
out of this behavior, I'm looking forward to working down in the mineshaft and hillside
without major alterations like that.
This does not mean I won't build rooms or cavities. Depending on what happens with the
mineshaft, I may not need to. As I said, "Part of the challenge". For some things that I
want to do, such as that wheat farm, I need a smooth canvas of solid blocks to dig into;
the almost complete lack of caves in the base's hill is why we chose that hill in the first
place. I'm not yet decided on using a nether hub for linking books and portals, or if I
should carve a "launch room" in the base. Some things will need tall rooms, more than
the 4 or 5 meters that I can find in naturally occurring caves; more than the one or two
emerald and silverfish clouds turned rooms I expect to find while mining. Other things
can be above ground. The sheep farm that Alex built underground did not behave any better
than the above ground one, and is seriously short on grass. Now that sheep don't have
significant leaks, I'm going to actually make one work; I'll probably fix up the old one
on the island, and leave Alex's for him to play with. Equally, I'll probably put cows
and chickens on the island, just to have them out of the way. And, I still need a few large
cavities for "statues" and other decorations -- and there's one good looking one under
the ocean that needs to be lit up.
Regarding redstone and automation: I'm looking forward to 1.5. I'm looking forward to redstone
devices and circuits actually working properly in multiplayer. You've probably seen my doorbell;
it worked perfectly in 125 single player, and nothing later. The whole problems with
circuits and loops in 1.3 pretty much made me give up on non-trivial redstone. While
1.4 works better, it still is not nearly good enough. Fixing the doorbell into the original
planned overkill -- using instant wire to send the door signal deep into the caves and
mines so I would know when to head home, is probably pointless if I do move to the new
base. So, it's probably going to stay half finished, although I will finish the off-timer
to force it to reset. Beyond that? For 1.5, I will be using redstone, hoppers, and droppers;
I will be doing something with inventory cleanup and furnaces, something with automatic sorting.
I don't know what can be done in vanilla yet.
If you don't know, I dislike automation. It's not that I can't do it. I could put in computer
turtles and program them to play the game for me. I could design grinders, or gravity
falls, or anything of the kind -- but then, I may as well just fetch stacks of supplies
out of TMI (Too Many Items) or NEI (Not Enough Items). I'll use those to recover from game
bugs and game problems, but I am going to play this game. The only thing I cannot get
in reasonable quantities without a grinder up til now has been gunpowder, and with the
new witch huts, and attacking witches, suddenly there is what looks to be a reasonably workable
source of gunpowder. And there really isn't any other need for a grinder. Of course, that
means finding brand new swamp chunks, or getting McEdit to unload existing swamp chunks. Or
ages. Probably Mystcraft ages.
I don't like the behavior of villages, villagers, and trading. I'm really hoping that 1.5 sees
some sort of fix to that behavior; if not, I will make something to exploit it. There
really is no reason to try to do fair trading with villagers right now. I'm not sure if
I'll be using it for emerald blocks, or what.
Now for another topic: Donations. I am going to ask for donations, but that does not necessarily
mean money donations. What I'm going to request is stuff to help my channel out. What is being
offered to donors is either dedication plaques in the tree farm -- and yes, this means getting
Lost Relto set up in this world -- or mining veins. I won't be offering tunnels in the
branch mine, because we're not going to be doing that. COG makes it pointless. There
will be actual veins in ages, and the overworld if we get too frustrated with clouds; there
will be cloud sections in twilight forest and overworld.
And, on the topic of ages, I'm also going to let donors write books. Yes, I said, let
donors write books. Until the symbol learning overhaul comes out, we work with creative
mode notebooks. And the question of what's a decent world to make is a serious question.
So, I'm going to let the people who help the channel out with their time decide what to
put into the books that we will play with. So if you want to see us playing in highly
unstable ages, you can. Or, if you think we need to work with something else that isn't
unstable but has some other point of interest, let us know. I suspect that viewer written
ages will be one of the more popular aspects moving forward. And, it's something I'm looking
forward to. I sort of imagine "An Idiot Abroad" type of "Ok, go here to this place, and do
such-and-such" type of things.
So what am I looking for for donations? I'm looking for people to transcribe episodes,
for captions. I'm looking for people to provide helpful and useful advice for building and
exploration, or editing. I'm looking for people willing to play "Find the base", and download
our world map -- and locate the hidden new base whose coordinates we have not revealed.
If you help publicize my channel -- just get three people to subscribe -- that counts.
And, if you want to send me money, you can. I'm really very flexible here -- my primary
goal is to drive the channel. Help with the series, and you can get a plaque in the tree
farm, a mining zone, your name on an age, or perhaps you have a better idea.
On the subject of videos, I have two new techniques to try, to try to make them come out faster
and with less editing work. The first is a mod that gives in-game recording support,
that in initial testing manages to maintain about 20 fps at short, to short plus 32 render
distance. If this does work, that's sufficient to film caving and building -- let me know
if you think this episode is sufficient, for example. The second approach is a better way
to mix my voice audio with the game, to speed up my editing. Sadly, it will distort colors
a little -- reds, such as the nether, go grayer, and greens, such as grass, go darker. I did
find an editor that will do this without distorting colors, but it wants to make a 90 thousand
Kbps temporary copy using an Animation codec -- and 90-plus gigs of temp space for a 48
minute source recording is really hard for me to work with, especially considering that
I'm usually working with 2 to 3 hours of source recordings. To put this in perspective, Quicktime
Player normally records at about 24 thousand kbps for motion jpeg, and even apple's intermediate
codec is around that same level. 90 is overkill even for me. I normally find that 6,800 kpbs
lets me have near-perfect playback quality of a minecraft recording during editing, with
no loss of quality.
One more, low priority item that I'd like feedback on. There are a number of very interesting
survival or construction challenge maps that I have considered bringing in as ages. Doing
so would be done in a non-damaging manner; a "disarm" book into that world, so I don't
bring anything unearned into the challenge, with a normal linking book back home. If and
when I am able to (eventually) make a normal linking book back into that challenge world,
then I can and would bring normal supplies in. This would permit playing those challenges,
without having to rebuild everything from scratch. I hate having to rebuild pointlessly.
Note that I cannot do this for any challenge map that uses a nether, or special custom
rules, without some serious work -- there's a nice one, zombie island, that is supposed
to be played with mob griefing off, for example; and there's the new ocean block that has a
custom nether. On the other hand, there's at least two good-looking "Continental Discovery"
maps for my next Overkill concept.
Finally, and now something that is important: Mod blocks in the overworld. Up until now,
I have had a 100% pure vanilla overworld for blocks in the world. Items from mods, yes;
blocks no. If a mod does not update, and we move forward, we want things to continue to
work. That was the original idea. For example, shelfs, worked in 125 single player, and has
died since. Since then, there is something kinda important: I want to build with the
colored wood and redrock from EXBL. Seems simple, right? Not only do things like fences,
gates, etc. require depending on Custom Stuff 2, Scott Killen has confirmed that EBXL 4
has a very good chance of no backwards compatibility at all. While that may not be until August,
that means that in 6 or 7 months everything I build will become full of holes. So ... do
I risk being forced to say "Start over"? Do I put construction with EBXL or twilight forest
blocks in ages? Should I stick them in pocket dimensions? -- that's a nice new mod, by the
way; small finite dimensions basically big enough for one construction project each.
Do you viewers have any recommendations?
Well, that's the current status of the world. I will be regarding it as 75% my personal
world, 25% our shared world, at least until summer. That means more solo play, that means
simpler, and faster but less editable voice recordings. And, as I said, let me know if
this is good enough video quality, especially those of you that watch 480p on youtube -- I
normally view YouTube at 360p, and can only tell that the source looks worse this way,
with no clue about the final result.
Alright, thank you for watching, thank you for listening, and please leave your comments
and feedback. My goal here is to entertain, and your responses help. Have a good night.
Thank you. Bye bye.