This Game Is Dumb

Entry 8 (June 14, 2022)

Hello again! With the Wild Update just around the corner (for me, anyway – I know it’s been out for a week already; I’m just waiting for any sign of game‐breaking bugs… and an Optifine update), I’ve mostly spent my recent Minecraft time just making some improvements around home, not going out for more exploring. I think in the process I’ve added more to my to‐do list than I’ve checked off, though…

First up were some much‐needed quality‐of‐life improvements to the railways. I came across this wonderfully overengineered system by CR3WProductionz which, among other features, can send up to four chest carts with the player to their destination. (A tutorial and world download are also available.) Four carts (and all the other bells and whistles) are a bit overkill for my little single‐player mining shuttle, but that didn’t stop me from stealing bits and pieces of his design.

A new look in the vault. The redesign is two meters shorter, less than half as wide with no need for separate arrival and departure tracks, and even ensures the passenger cart always arrives next to the launch button. The original not only took up more space, but required manually breaking and replacing carts at each end to switch direction. (−254 W / −221 N), looking south.

This may be less functional than its inspiration, but that also makes the hidden redstone pretty straightforward. There are only two circuits: All the button does is activate the passenger track’s powered rail, then after a three‐second delay, the chest’s; and either detector rail simply switches the line from the passenger track to the chest track, with a slight delay before deactivating and switching back. On departure, this briefly sends the passenger cart onto the opposite track, where it rebounds off the chest cart and out onto the line to be followed. On arrival, it goes directly onto its own track, setting the switch for the chest cart behind it to arrive on the other track. (−321 W / −90 N), looking south.

I don’t think I’ll end up using such a design anywhere else, though – neat as it may be, once I’ve got shulker boxes, it (or any other method of long‐distance item transport) will be rendered virtually obsolete and just not worth the effort, cool factor aside. Plus, chest carts on level track need about nine times the powered rails to keep their momentum up than (occupied) passenger carts do, which makes long stretches of diagonal track even uglier, which really discourages me from wanting to flex and build it anyway. (On the other hand, I would eventually like to have an automatic routing setup like this one by CobblestoneAndDirt, but that design also relies on chest carts, and the main alternatives are either building many redundant point‐to‐point lines or paralleling the rail network with a redstone network including frequent relay contraptions…)

The Nether’s network has been upgraded as well, again eliminating any need to manually reposition a cart. The (still temporary) Spawn station now has a simple switch for destination selection. (−30 W / −22 N), looking northwest.

All stations have been upgraded with the simple slope launcher/brake. Because skeletons in the Nether will be able to spawn up to light level 11 as of 1.19, and Intersylva’s station is in a soul sand valley, the floor here has been lowered to half‐slabs for safety. (−274 W / +184 S), looking southeast.

The branch to the stronghold now features this bypass for eastbound carts. Instead of having to spiral down to get below the lava sea to the stronghold station, they’re simply dropped right down the middle! (+28 E / −189 N), looking northeast.

It’s fast, fun, and free!

Back at the house, Meowth and Domino have joined Ghost on the couch, where, appropriately, they can all listen to “cat” on the new jukebox. (−251 W / −227 N), looking southeast.

The enchanting loft no longer has lanterns, as the glowstone and candles are enough to keep it moody and spawn‐proof (though of course the latter won’t be an issue as soon as I update from 1.17). And hey, what’s that new building out the window? (−253 W / −222 N), looking northeast.

Yes, four months later, Bedrock and Muffins finally have their stable. Didn’t I say something last month about not wanting to build anything around here much bigger than the house…? Ah, well. They’re good horsies. They deserve it. (−254 W / −234 N), looking northeast.

This build is where I begin to feel dumb, for multiple reasons.

For one, 1.19 is coming soon. I’m still on 1.17, where you need a decently high light level to keep the great outdoors safe. As of 1.18, any block light is enough to keep the Overworld free of hostiles. But at least taking those poles back down will be quick enough, and I’ll need to spend some time addressing torchspam across the area anyway.

For two, 1.19 is coming soon. It has nice red mangrove wood. I could go on a grand adventure to find a mangrove swamp and come home and build a classic red barn.

For three, 1.19 is coming soon. Mud will be a thing.

The stable floor already has some texture to it, but a splash or two of mud would add to the palette. (−242 W / −251 N), looking east.

The other reason I feel dumb is, hey, remember last time, when I found that spider spawner in the jungle almost two kilometers from Spawn, and then turned it into a farm, and then built a Nether railway all the way out there? Remember that? Yeah haha well so turns out

(−152 W / −134 N), looking northeast.

There’s one just 129 m from Spawn. The distance across a freshly‐crafted, unzoomed map. It’s about as far as that desert temple you can see from my house, except southeast of Spawn instead of northeast. It’s not even deep enough to find gold and lapis!

And the irony is I found it while exploring a cave system that I ran into while out mining because… I was low on iron after having used so much of it on expanding the Nether railway to the spider farm. (Also on compasses for maps, but rails and iron bars take a lot of iron too.)

(Incidentally, all that mining has driven home the need for a better storage system – I’m about out of space in the basement where I keep all the less‐valuable stuff. In particular there’s three full double chests of stone, and those aren’t the only ones overflowing. Yes I know it’s renewable and I could just throw it out but I won’t)

I haven’t done anything with this new dungeon yet. Partially because I don’t wanna deal with turning it into a farm when I just did that come on, and partially because I wanna wait to open the chests until after I update – I mean, maybe one of ’em’ll have “otherside.” Hey, a player can dream…

There’s the usual miscellany this time, too:

• The enchanting and upgrading continues. My sword finally has Looting!… I. Looting I. And it was an expensive addition. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get this one perfect without starting over. I did get another Unbreaking III book, too, and used it to complete my shield, Calamity.
• Did some more digging underneath the map room at Spawn to get an idea of what clearances I’ll have to work with when it finally comes time to start that Overworld rail network. That’s a project for later, but now I know where the tunnels can come to the surface, and that’ll help with laying out the station and finding a new home for the Nether portal.
• The site should load a bit faster on these image‐heavy pages now that I know about ImageOptim – all those screenshots are now about 12% smaller on average without any loss in quality. (For this post I also tried going with WebP instead of JPEG, but wasn’t happy with how that affected color and contrast, so JPEG it is. Oh well.) It actually made the maps about 65% smaller than what Papyri spat out, but that’s only going from a total of 9.1 MB down to 4.2 MB. I’ve also minified the CSS by 30%… from 9 KB down to 6.3 KB. Hey, it’s something…