Slowly coming around...

The portal mod has now been updated to 1.8.1 (Buildcraft has been, too, in case you missed it), and few other news I can give you all. Anyway, as usual, the port hasn't been perfect, and the mod's author cannot give it all the time it needs, so there are some bugs. Fortunately, a "no hunger" option has been made, but as always I suggest to wait until things settle up (hopefully in 1.9).

Of course, if Notch keeps the timetable, we've got about a month and a half before the full release of the game, so we'll have a few weeks of 1.9 with all the mods.

In the meantime, go to visit Paulosoaresjr's youtube channel, since he's making some nice videos for farms.

Personally, I'd like to see some more love to the minecart system, for Buildcraft's builders and fillers to be able to place seeds and rails, and of course some more hours on the day XD.

So, until further notice I think I'll slow the posting speed to one post per week, and that I'll devote the (few) hours I play Minecraft to work on an old project I had to put on ice, a small Portal map. With turrents, because we all love them. And cake, of course.

Have fun!

Minecraft mashups!

Well, I was surfing the net and I found this in mmo-champion.com:

Minecraft and World of Warcraft (yeah, I'm an old WoW player... but I stopped playing a while before Cataclysm. Lots of fond memories, however...)

Team Fortress 2:

Metal Gear Solid:

Have fun!

The future of mods in short term

Notch released this tweet yesterday... with the 1.9 preview. So we can expect a 1.10 version of Minecraft before a month or so, so my advice: Stay in Minecraft 1.7.3 if you want to keep all your mods.

For what I saw in the Minecraft forums, we can expect a 1.8.1 version for RedPower and Industrialcraft 2 (meaning a new version of Minecraft Forge, most likely), but I didn't found more mentions about other mods (I didn't checked them all, anyway). What is really important, however, is that unless the code related to the mods remain unchanged, there won't be much mod actualizations for a while, at least until the whole "adventure update" is released (yeah, Notch is releasing that update in minipatches).

In case you want to check the news, by the way, I found some tours made by Paulosoaresjr and updated to Youtube. Here you have them:

• Village monks, swamps and a little of snow biomes
• The update to the Nether
• Snow biomes, and a snow golem

I'll advice to subscribe to his channel, since about 13 hours ago only the first one was up (I'll live in GMT+1, so I was sleeping while he was uploading XD).

Have a nice weekend!

1.8 and mods: Buildcraft & Millénaire

Hi folks, welcome to... wait, I might have been listening too much to Paulosoaresjr videos XD. Anyway, welcome to my little corner of the Minecraft universe.

First, regarding actualizations, Buildcraft has been ported to the 1.8 version of the game. However, it's not the Minecraft Forge version, but the one that doesn't require it. Also it's a first port, not fully tested (the 1.7.3 version of the mod and the forge-dependant versions remain in the page, though), so I'd advice to backup everything before updating.

And there is another mod I'd like to talk about today. It's related to 1.8's empty villages, because I think it was the inspiration to the project. The name is Millénaire, and it's a mod that, like all the ones adding stuff to the world, requires you to explore new, unvisited chunks. I tried this in 1.6.6 or so, with IC and BC installed, and for what I saw in the changelog, the mod is growing and being fixed without losing the original intent.
Millénaire was a mod that added NPC's to the game, living in towns (Norman towns, to be precise, but the current version includes indian towns too. Indian as in Hindi, not native american) that require the player's help to develop, paying for goods that are used to make new buildings, making it possible to get more and better items in the future (items you buy with the coins they payed you before for the raw materials).
The Millénaire wiki is quite useful and up to date, but we don't need it to play (unlike, for example, Industrialcraft; Millénaire doesn't add new recipes, or at least not very complex or with items that need other items to be crafted), but it's good to have at look at it before playing and from time to time. I'd suggest to have a look at the village types page, where we can discover not only the kind of settlements we can visit, but images of how do they look like and what items are they going to need (and what items can we buy later). There is currently 9 different norman settlements, and 5 hindi, and the best part of it it's that you can become the founder of a new settlement (in time and with a special item a village with enough population will sell to you).

In my experience, it's good to have a huge reserve of basic mats before going to the village. The first blocks they will ask for are going to be wood (don't turn the wood into planks... they might prefer it with bark!), stone (be ready for them asking for smooth stone), and sand/glass. Eventually they will ask for iron, coal, and whool (the forge, for example, requires them), so save them all the time. You are going to need a carpenter, too, since a new building block has been added since I last played the mod, and the only way to get it is to buy it from the carpenter... meaning sometimes you will need to explore and look for another village if the one you are trying to develop lacks one or cannot have it for whatever reason.

Another piece of advice, once you find a village, level the terrain all around so they can expand easily. The village's NPCs don't clear place for buildings, sadly...

Well, that's all for today. I'll see if I can add Millénaire to my mix of mods, and come back to you in a few days. Have fun!

Buildcraft 2.2 preview

Hi people, Spacetoad just released a preview video of the upcoming features in the new version of Buildcraft (I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you waiting for it, though, since Minecraft 1.8 was released a few days ago). Here you are:

For those of you who don't wanna watch the full video (now), here are most of the important parts:

• New pipes: new kind of pipes will be in the mod. Liquids will have their own pipes (I think those will be variants of the existing ones), and energy will be transported through another set of pipes (energy generated by engines, that is).
• The refinery: now we extract oil, but it needs to be refined into fuel (yellow-tinted liquid) before the iron engines can use it. A refinery needs energy to work (and raw oil, of course XD).
• Cooling. Engines will now have a bar for water to cool (at least, the iron engines...).

Personally, the part about energy being transmitted through pipes is something I find a little too premature, since its only use (at least in the video) seems to be powering the refineries right now, while the other "techno-advanced" mod (Industrialcraft 2) have tons of machines feeding from electricity. However, it's more than likely that for BC 2.2's release new uses for energy will be there, so let's wait.

On a sidenote, I found Eloraam has a blog, and new features will come with the new version of RedPower (like new ores and blocks). Since she has tin and copper ores, I was worried about the interaction with Industrialcraft 2, but she's good: there was already an answer in her blog (made by herslef):

Copper and tin ores may be confusing for a version or two if you’re running both RedPower World and IC², but I’ve already designed a solution. I’m working on a module for MinecraftForge called the Ore Dictionary, which will allow mods to share common resources. That way, if you install IC² and RedPower World at the same time, you’ll only have one set of Copper and Tin ores.

So that's all for today. I'm expecting a tiring and busy weekend (not only we have the local festivities, today's afternoon I have to help some friends and we'll go to have some fun later, and tomorrow I have an Eclipse Phase game to master, but I have tuesday's fireworks to count with and more stuff...). However, I'll try to give you something new along next week.

Recycling and matter making with Buildcraft

Hi people, today I'll show you some IC2 and BC2 interactions. Specifically, the recycler and the mass fabricator. Both are old friends, and they seem to work ok in the new version with BC2, as long as we put the pipes in the right places.

About energy, both get it from behind (so you can't see it in the screenshots), the recycler from a batbox and the mass fabricator from a MFS unit, both with default settings and with the relevant cables (remember the basic copper cable can't handle more than 32 EU/s, which is the batbox output, and the MFS outputs 512 EU/s, which require glass fibre cable or HV cable).

The Recycler setup:

As you can see, it takes the items to be recycled from the upper side, and the output is on one side (remember the energy goes in from behind). Other experiments I made show that you can place the wooden pipe in the back of the recycler too.

The green pipe is an Insertion Pipe and the blue & white a bouncing pipe, both from Buildcraft's Extra Pipes mod.

Personally I use a cactus farm to feed a recylcer. A big cactus farm with two chests with two wooden pipes each as buffer (but depending of the size, you might need more to keep fed the recyclers).

The Mass Fabricator setup:
Like the recycler, the output is on the side. The input, however, is under the block, since the scraps are placed in the lower part of the machine.

As a bonus, I'll show you the surface of my latest base, played in a world with the "Industrialcraft2" seed. I spent most of the time getting materials and setting up a really big cactus farm (in truth, I think I should have made the farm wider instead of so high, but since this was the first time I was trying to make a really big one...). By the way, the mass fabricator devours the scrap now, in exchange for not needing almost any energy (in the video there are about three solar panels directly connected to the mass fabricator, all the others being connected to the MFS unit). I'll admit I cheated with the cabling, since I was taking the chance to test the range and energy loss of the fiberglass cable.

And without delay, here is the video:

Farms: a new approach

Hi again people, I've been updating some ideas and concepts to the post-minecraft forge, and refining some ideas. Let's have a look, first, at some of my old designs on farming:

These are the basic designs I shared with you in July, as a compendium of sorts, for a wheat farm, a cactus farm, a sugar cane farm (fully automated), and a mushroom farm (that could be made fully automated, but I prefer semi-automated). I also made an antry for a semi-automated tree farm at the end of august. So now, I present you with the updated version of my tree farm idea and a new version of an old video of mine, the semi-automated food cans factory.

Here we are, the Quarry used to take all trees in an area and not keeping the drilling until reaching bedrock. It needs, as a minimun, a quarry, a builder, the temporary use of a template drawing table, two combustion engines, and the pipes and chests (and blocks) needed to store and distribute the harvested goods. Everything else (the lights, for example) is just some stuff I put to make things easier to manage or faster.
The concept lies around the inhability of the quarry to mine the cables introduced by Eloraam's RedPower mod, and the only "problem" of the video is that I put the quarry too close to the ground. If you use the white-crusted trees, putting the quarry block on the ninth block of elevation should suffice, but if you are using IC2's rubber trees, I'd advice to put it 15 blocks over the surface where you plant them.

Now the second encarnation of my food factory using a wheat farm, I had to encase it because I'm playing with Mo'Creatures and birds seem to be able to mess with the farmland. Sadly, right now the interaction between IC2's machines and BC2's pipe system is a little messed up, and IC2's mod team's priority seems to be the release of a stable SSP and SMP version. This means that extracting the finished product with pipes is out of the question, sadly.

Here we can see the insertion/extraction distribution I've been seeing with my pipe distribution (I'll post the screenshot next): numbers are the spots where stuff goes in, while the letters indicate the order of extraction. Yeah, it's a mess...

Here is the attempt I made to fix the problem, without any success, I'm afraid... (the idea is that if the wooden pipe extracts the wrong item, that item would be reinserted in the right pipeline). Not because the idea was wrong, but because it extracts too quickly and it tries to extract first the item being canned (2A in the previous image), quicker than the machine can process it.

Oh, and as a final reminder, porting IC2 to 1.8 will take about 4-5 weeks, so don't update your minecraft too quickly.

Enjoy the game, and leave comments!

Industrialcraft 2: first impressions

First of all, the wiki has been updated. You can found it here, and it's quite interesting because it has a lot of recipes.

Ok, so I've been playing for some hours in a newly generated map, and these are my conclussions (I also checked some of the new stuff in a testing map using TooManyItems):

Map Seed: Industrialcraft2
Coordinates: 19, 85, -183
Time played: around five or six hours.
Mods used: Industrialcraft2, Buildcraft 2, RedPower (with all "addons"), Mo' Creatures, and some more that had no impact over the game, because I didn't use anything (in fact, from Buildcraft I still have to make something, but I can see oil around).

What I have now: some rubber trees plantation, a normal tree subterranean plantation, 11 solar panels, 2 batboxes (I'm only using one), an extractor, a macerator and two electric furnaces. And tons of cobblestone, of course XD. I also have more raw materials (inlcuding about 5 uranium ore), but it would be of small interest.

One of the first changes I noticed is that copper and tin ore are quicker to mine using the non-IC picks, and that you now need at least an iron pick to harvest the uranium ore. I also noticed in this map that, while I found lots of redstone in the lower levels, I found nearly no iron, and about minimun quantities of iron; coal, however, was nearly everywhere with in big veins.

Another thing I noticed (and I think it's a bug) is that the rubber trees grow insanely fast.

About my thoughts on the new ways the mod works, I'm happy to see the cabling is now more easy, setting solar plants is also more simple (no more need for the flowers!), and things look much more smooth. The only downside I found was that, coupled with Buildcraft's piping system, things work randomly regarding blocks inserted/extracted (no matter if you cannot put those items manually, with the pipes they will be put wherever there is free space).This means that a battery has to be put in the powering hole, and the item extraction might be something a little complicated. Hopefully this problem will be solved in the next release of Minecraft Forge, Buildcraft or Industrialcraft.

On monday I'll share with you all a new video about my Food Factory idea, with the new IC2 and BC2, so until then stay tuned and enjoy this small video about the new block of IC2 called "induction furnace" (it can take two blocks different or equal and process them quicker the longer it's burning).

Oh, and a good youtube channel with some videos about IC2 is this one, which has a lot of the new stuff showed up and explained. Enjoy!

IndustrialCraft 2 released!

And you can download it here! It requires Minecraft Forge 1.0.6, so download that aswell.

However, remember to visit Alblaka's blog, in http://www.industrial-craft.net/

How to install the mod: right now it seems (I cannot promise anything) to work like buildcraft and redpower: ypu download the file, put it in your mods folder, and profit. Alblaka advices to inject the contents of the file inside the minecraft.jar (remember to keep a backup in order to not need to make a clean install from scratch).

I'm curently testing the mod, but this month is quite a busy one for me, so it will be small updates most of the time. Meanwhile, I can tell you that a new suit (a quantum one) has been added, with some more machines (like an induction forge, able to work with two ores at once, and that requires time for warm-up, after which it will burn the items faster and faster), and new cable types. I'll add some data: the gold cables don't seem to transmit current, and there are insulated and uninsulated versions. Oh, and the new cables look a lot like Builcraft pipes, since they no longer use a whole block.

And by the way, a heads up: Industrialcraft2 has block ID conflicts with Better than Wolves. There goes my dream of having them together, at least for now...

Heads up: the new wire crossing blocks

Ok, here they are, the new three blocks. Personally I don't really found much use for them, but then again I'm not in the "circuit building" part of the game, if I can't use it for something applied to gameplay, I usually don't waste time with it. Plenty useful for really complex circuit building, however.

On the good news, I found a way to use the quarry for wood farming without fearing it to reach the center of the earth. And you can plant stuff manually if you want... or use a builder with a plan. I'll post it next week.

Have a nice weekend!