The Mappening

Entry 20 ()

Been playing slowly but steadily – just haven’t done too much that’s screenshot‐worthy. Or story‐worthy, really. I checked some things off the to‐do list, but most of my gaming time has been spent on my friend’s server (we’ve started a brand‐new world, this time on a dedicated host). A number of those to‐dos weren’t in‐game projects, though, but updates to the world map here on the site!

It’s still not perfect, but I’m proud of where it’s at. Here’s what’s what:

  • Replaced the tiny scale in the corner with Leaflet.SimpleGraticule. Now it’s easier to judge distance and position at a glance (at least for me).
  • Added Leaflet.GestureHandling for Google Maps‐style… gesture handling. Now while the map is embedded it ignores the scroll wheel (or a single finger on mobile). Still works normally if it’s in its own tab.
  • Added Leaflet.FeatureGroup.SubGroup so you can toggle each color of banner separately fucking finally. There are currently 121 banners across the Overworld, which is… a lot. Makes it hard to pick things out of the noise. (My fault for insisting on marking each and every structure I’ve looted, but hey, it’s my world, and it saves my sanity when I pass by again and go “ooh, a shipwreck!”) Just disabling the yellow ones cuts that number to a much more reasonable 28.
  • Prettified the layer names. “minecraft@the_nether”? Nope, it’s just “The Nether” now.
  • Thanks to the previous two changes, the layers menu now doubles as the map key.
  • Clickable areas for banners/clusters were way too wide. Now they’re disabled entirely for single banners and sized properly for clusters.
  • Hopping between the Overworld and the Nether is even better. Now the map doesn’t just stay centered, but keeps the same relative zoom level too.
  • Added a tab for major landmarks. Now you’re just a click away from flying to the hot spots.
  • The background for unmapped areas is now map‐colored instead of blindingly bright.
  • Lots and lots and lots of refactoring behind the scenes, both to clean up some of my own codevomit and to get some practice transitioning legacy code to take advantage of ES6+ features.

TL;DR: The map is more betterer go play with it


After all this time I still didn’t have any glow lichen, so I went deep down into the mine and just dug until I found a cave that had some. Easy enough. Bone mealed some more of it up to spread around Roam, particularly in the handful of little covered ponds there. Those still had some pretty bad torchspam underneath, and even though they weren’t super visible, I still wanted something more subtle for mob‐proofing.

Two of those ponds are almost right next to the Spawn marker – one between the station stairwell and the wheat field (actually kind of under the wheat field) and the other, home to a couple axolotls, a little downhill along the path to the mob grinder. They’re now connected by a little babbler of a waterfall under a new baby bridge.

A small oak bridge, just five meters long and three or four wide, continued with dirt paths at both ends. A small stream flows underneath, away from the camera and around one of the logs supporting the bridge. A gold axolotl is swimming downstream.
They’ve got over twice as much room to swim now! (−251 W / −178 N), looking northwest.

Farther south, in Old Roam, I discovered that the old entrance to the mine had fallen into disrepair and collapsed. Or maybe exploded.

The remains of a small stone brick shack at the end of an overgrown dirt path. Most of the walls and floor are missing, with only one corner still supporting any roofwork.
I honestly can’t remember the last time I used this li’l head house, so it’s no real loss. (−291 W / −89 N), looking southeast.

Oh well! This end of the base is due for some more industrial uses anyway… if nothing else, I want to bury a super‐smelter in the mountain and have a chimney or three at the top that puff out smoke rings while it’s running. If I go for an iron farm (do you even really need an iron farm in the Caves & Cliffs era?) it’ll be down here too. Stone generator would be a good fit… and what else? Maybe a copper aging factory? Hmmm…


Most of the D&V stations (i.e. all of them but Roam) still need respawn anchors so they can be safe mini‐bases for exploring the Nether, but I had precious little crying obsidian to craft any, and that stuff is annoyingly rare to get from bartering. I’d recently decided to start scavenging it from ruined portals (normally I try to preserve things as much as possible I am so hype for archaeology y’all), but that decision was made after having already looted dozens of them across the land. Good thing I have a map of all of them then isn’t it

So… yeah. Much of my playtime lately has been spent retracing my steps and checking all those portals for crying obsidian. It was worth it, though; I’ve got over a stack and a quarter now!

I decided it was time to expand my storage a little, too. No, I haven’t gone crazy and built a third module yet… the second one was pretty underutilized (and still isn’t even full). Stuff’s now spread over another 20 chests, though. Moving was less of a pain than I thought it would be. (It was actually kind of relaxing – and all the little shortcuts like shift‐double‐clicking and right‐click dragging make a huge difference.) The biggest problem is I apparently forgot how to count. Multiple times. But it was worth it!

The storage system: Two arrays of double chests, each nine wide by six high. Each chest is labeled by an item frame, and the ceiling along the chests is made up of the same blocks that label the top chests – except for one where a block of red wool tops a chest labeled with TNT. The first array is fully labeled; the other has five full columns but just two chests in use after that.
It bugs me that there’s not a block of TNT above the TNT(/utility blocks) chest.

Not sure what’s next. I do want to build more, but that takes planning and assembling supplies and… so often that just doesn’t feel relaxing to me and I can’t get started.

I’d do some more exploring in the meantime, but with 1.20 coming it feels like I’d be cheating myself out of some of the new stuff. I mean, obviously I’ll have some traveling to do to find any trail ruins or other suspiciousness, but loot chests don’t roll for their contents until they’re opened, and I must acquire all of those sweet sweet armor trims. I know that’s a silly reason when the world is infinite and exploration is already my favorite part of the game anyway, but the creature has spoken.

Idk. Could farm some wood, I guess.