Michael Gates

We need tropical sandworms, to keep people from just standing in the desert all day.

This forum software needs an equivalent for the old <blink/> tag so I can put up "CROC-O-DILES!!!" in big flashing letters. I might actually have to go south, for once. Yeah, I'm mildly interested now.

I guess this isn't LESS plausible than finding loose salt stones on the ground...

An ilmenite disc is enough to make about half a furnace worth of T3 bricks. Took me a while to realize that because the first couple times I found the stuff were in caves, and the cave would eat most of it. Which is, itself, an interesting thing to know about.

Give it its own chest in your house, maybe on a little altar or something, to keep it appeased.

Okay, I want to build a house out of those.

Having poked at this a bit on 1.20.4 now, I can say with authority: nothing wrong with the ol' hole in the ground. You can fire any clay goods in a pit kiln, and they come out just fine. What the beehive IS good for, is huge quantities With the insta-fire bug fixed (which was the cause of the insta-kiln-break bug), I could see a rational person making a beehive out of fire clay bricks, and then firing an ENTIRE CEMENTATION FURNACE worth of refractory bricks in one go. It would fit; you can jam 36(!!) pit kilns worth of bricks or shingles into the beehive if you use the second shelf. If you actually fill it you also save on fuel, a little bit; that's something like six stacks of grass and two of sticks that you don't have to collect. And then bricks. Even if you just run the kiln into the ground and then never touch it again, you get a cementation furnace and something like four hundred brick blocks. That's enough to do, I don't know, something good-sized. The other thing is the colors, which, cosmetic features are always expensive. Is it "worth" all this work to get the pretty variegated brick blocks? Not really, no... but pretty! variegated! bricks! I feel a little of that urge myself occasionally, and now I've got a nice little church mostly erected with the nice red tile shingles. Once I've got these statues sculpted for the facade I might even be happy with it. Well, okay I won't be. I suck SO HARD at sculpting, these guys look like fat drifters. But actual talented people could!

re: farming temporal gears. Lots of people like to go through pain and suffering to get blue gears, but you can farm them right out of your house and it's not even difficult. Here, look at this: This is a simple Dutch door-- top and bottom halves that can be opened or closed separately. In game terms, it's made from two "solid trapdoors," in this case pine. You can build this as soon as you've got a saw. Once you've got this on your house, wait for dark, get a spear-- bronze is great, but stone is okay if you make several of them ahead of time-- open the top half of the door as shown, and wait for a drifter to walk by. Then.. and I know, this part is complicated.. you stab it. Once all the drifters in front of your door are killed, nip out and loot. I get about one gear per night with this setup, plus string. One note, you can see I'm standing back a little. This is why I use spears for this, they have REACH. You can hurt them, but they can't do anything but throw rocks. If your health does drop below half just close the top part of the door.

It's an interesting notion. Aside from the obvious bottles for wine etc. and maybe some better tableware (we can haz NICE bowl?), the game does seem to be getting a little into chemistry lately? It might be nice to store my sulfuric acid in something a bit less.. organic.. than a wooden bucket. Also, I am now contemplating the process of making a tube for use in glassblowing with the smithing mechanic, and people would scream. They would wail, and howl, and tear out their hair, and waste immense piles of iron ingots trying to get a 6-voxel long tube, and it would be glorious.

I am using 1.20.3... don't think 1.20.4 was available yet when I posted this .. I will update and poke at it again. I really want this thing to work and be practical to use!

As with so many resources, you've got to train your eyes a bit to see the red clay. It looks like this:

I've seen salt pillars in cliff sides a couple times, but I don't think it's supposed to stick up by itself like that, no.Worldgen should really poison the land for a couple hundred squares around when you get salt out in the open like that

I set one up in my current relatively-serious world, and... it is not great? Losing six refractory brick blocks and a grating every run is excessive, although the bit where you get to INSTANTLY fire 128 shingles or 48 bricks for every stack of four firewood is neat looking. If you follow the directions, you end up with a kiln embedded a square down in the ground. The documentation seems to , indicate that if you make a kiln out of fire clay bricks, it's going to eat HALF of them on each run? I'm not even going to try that. So I decided to poke it in creative mode, started up BoringFlatnessWorld, and built a couple of kilns THERE. The kiln's behavior is very different. Zero brick blocks destroyed, ever. If I don't put a full stack of 32 firewood under each grating it doesn't fire at all; putting down 4 or 8 wood lights, but my pottery just becomes "Raw Bowl - 1200.0 degrees" and then stays like that. If I do put in the full 32, it works and insta-fires again, but then I can just pull all the wood out losing only 1-2 firewood per stack. Also it seems like the third door on the kiln should really be a regular open hole, because no sane person is ever going to light this business with all three doors closed. Yes, I do have a huge pile of boring tan shingles now, why do you ask? It doesn't feel like any of this is quite the intended behavior.

Bears are common, but they're also *really* easy to drive away now. Nerdpole up four blocks and throw half a dozen stones at Mr. Brown, and he will run a hundred blocks thataway and STAY there unless you go poke him. Personally I'm kind of annoyed at it because I've gotten to the part where I want MOAR BEAR HIDES, but I recognize that I'm kind of a special case.

Those are really nice! Kind of low-res because chiseling isn't THAT fine, but you've made 'em look good. I'm trying to sculpt a couple guys in robes to put on the wall of my cathedral, and.. well. I am not as good at this as I would like

I've made farms and gardens in desert/barrens areas more than once and it works fine. Could this possibly be a mod?

There isn't a table because the growing season varies continuously based on your latitude and altitude. Average temperature seems to increase by one degree every 1000 blocks south from the temperate starting point; it's about five degrees warmer at z=5000 as at the temperate start point. Temp also decreases as you go up, about one degree for every four squares. if you go 15000 squares south of the start point, build a tower up to y=170, put gardens on the top of that tower, it's pretty close to the same growing season as back home. I once did something like that, thinking it would be cool to build my farm ABOVE the tops of the trees. Looked good, was not practical. I can say that temperatures transition from winter to summer-ish sometime during April for most of the temperate band (z=-5k to +20k from normal start), and then slam down to the winter temp again in late November usually. So you plant as soon as four-in-the-morning temp goes above freezing and stop usually in mid-August or so? Turnips can be a little later, maybe up 'til the start of September because of their short growing cycle. Also things grow very slow in October, I always have a bunch of flax that just SITS there at stage 8/9 right up until freeze day. Because those temperature changes are relatively fast, greenhouses just aren't worth it usually for crops. November 3 the low is +1 degrees (so greenhouse isn't needed), by November 5 it's -6 (so greenhouse doesn't help). Mostly greenhouses are useful for fruit trees in very particular spots. The classic example is that peach trees die at -15; if your local low temp in winter is -18, you can put peach cuttings in a greenhouse and they can survive the winter. But you've got to KNOW your local conditions before you can say if that's going to work in your area.

There's the related problem where the server sends that text notification, and the client doesn't switch to showing the correct tab, so you have no chance to see it at all. It's probably the same issue that causes prospecting results not to show up, only you know the prospecting SHOULD have said something so you poke the tabs. Anyway, yeah, a real in-game effect would be more.. effective.

The fancy new leather also needs saltpeter, and it seems like wherever it is, there are bells

That reminds me, I need to make about fifty bowls. For reasons. Also, my "protein" health meter is full, but the other ones are all empty. For, perhaps, related reasons.

I don't think either of us is the real target for this warning, no it's one of those "think of the CHILDREN" moments.

The recipe for making glue warns you that you end up with a residue'd pot. The recipe for candles should have that same warning. Honestly I suspect that candles are going to come up first for almost all players; ruin-bits are kind of a niche cosmetic item, but EVERYBODY needs lanterns.

Spearheads. Spears are great for stabbing things through an open window in your house, and bronze is the endgame spear.

...you married an elk?

With the books, floating off into a hideous brownish void... it's weird. It's really weird, and I approve of this.