Better than Wolves review, MC Forge 1.0.0!

Minecrat Forge for Minecraft 1.0.0 has been released! Grab it at MCForum! But keep in mind that, while MC Forge and ModLoader might be up to date, the mods themselves might not. And make backups before any actualization! That includes the mincraft.jar file! And of the big mods that use MCForge, I thing only Buildcraft has been actualized, and it's a version 2.2.6 (not 3.0, which seems to still be on beta).


So I was a little "saturated" from the let's play (frankly, I don't know what the hell I'm doing wrong, but I tend to face heavy FPS losses every now and then... maybe it's the outrageous amount of engines I use, or the huge concentration of teleporting pipes, or...), and I decided to go check some of the new parts of Better Than Wolves I had missed the last time I was able to play it with other mods. It's a pain in the ass, by the way, because the mod has to be injected inside the minecraft.jar file and uses a lot of itemIDs, but it is also a great mod, with a lot of interactions between its components ouside of machines (kinda like Buildcraft 2's interactions between the engines and the blocks).

Anyway, I was looking some awesome videos made by Battosay52 and I really wanted to make an automated pottery "factory". Well, not really automated (but changing the button for a timer would have made it fully automated) but I liked the way it looked at the end. Hell, I even installed a second .minecraft folder and I've been playing around in a clean world trying some stuff. And truth be said, Redpower 2 is a lifesaver (aah, those gems that you can only use to craft diamond-level tools... sadly, they don't seem to be hooked at BTW, unlike the Nethercoal working into an alloy furnace, but oh well...). Anyway, I'll stop the rambling and show you the final product here, in two videos. Yes, I know FlowerChild (BTW's developer) has decided to drop out from the MC Forge project.

And don't worry, tomorrow you will have your dose of Tale of Kingdoms ^^

Redpower 2: The Deployer and a cobblestone generator

Ok, I've been toying around with the machines from Redpower 2, and the deployer, while it's quite interesting, it's not the godlike machine I thought it was going to be XD.  First let's take a look at the block, and its innards:

 The funny thing of a deployer is that does almost the same thing Steve? does with a right click of the mouse wehn receiving a redstone current pulse. However, some items require a little care (for example, you can use the deployer to empty a bucket of water, or to retake the water source if there is an empty bucket inside the deployer, as long as there is a block to support the water, the same way you cannot place a water source in the middle of the air). Doing this allows me to place a music disk when I want:

And here we go with Portal: not only can the deployer put turrents in front of him (yeah, it can put 9 turrets in the same block), but he can fire portal guns too!!

 This made me though about IC2's mining laser...

And yes, it works. It also consumes less energy (I had put the laser into long range... but it was consuming like mining only).
The deployer can also plant seeds, however, it only plants in the block in front of him, so it's not really efficient.

Let's make a catapult... with Portals, again:

The range is a litte short, but it's an easier way to make a catapult than the usual with pistons. Also, I checked and the deployer accepts Buildcraft's pipes, allowing for endless supplies. And with the block breaker, it also allows for other things (but you can usually do that kind of things with one of the blocks from Better than Wolves, so it's not as useful unless you don't want to install that mod).

And since we are talking about the block breaker, I made a small video about making a cobblestone generator with this machine. Quite more efficient and cheap than Buildcraft's based ones were!

I'll now try to complete my small world, since I now have RedPower 2 cabling and logic gates (but I still miss the extra pipes... oh hell... XD).

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!

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!

Mod Review: The Laser Mod

Hi once again, people, and today let me show you a small review of a mod I found to be quite interesting: The Laser Mod (forum link here). The mod is quite simple, yet interesting in some of its ideas.

So let's begin: the mod provides five new blocks (and with TooManyItems we can see it provides, in fact, about seven). One is a sensor, other is a tube and the other three are laser generator blocks (and the rest are just "behind the scenes" stuff).

First, the emitters: they are crafted from stone, iron and diamond. As usual, the more advanced the materials, the more powerful the tool. As we can see in the video at the end of the post, the stone laser is just a red beam that damages any mob (or player) that touches it; the iron laser, besides doing more damage, can ignite wool and wood, and destroy water and glass. Finally, the diamond laser causes 15 hearts of damage to anything that touches the beam and vaporizes any block but stone and iron blocks. Incidentally, ores count as stone blocks, but for the clay, that seems to count as dirt.

Effects:

• The lasers will vaporize any block that are not placed, regardless of their type. This means that they can be used to clear an horizontal lane quickly, but not to destroy any block up or down.
• The lasers are redstone-sensible (they turn on when receiving redstone current).
• The sensor gives redstone current when receiving a laser.
• The lasers vaporize all the blocks they can  in an instant.
• A laser ray gives light.
• Lasers can be placed looking only the horizontal plane (so they cannot point up or down).
• Sandstone can resist the diamond laser (it's most likely an unintended bug), neither it can destroy soul dust or netherrack (I tested it for the stone and iron laser too).
• If, by some miracle, you break one of the laser lanes (instantmine, for example), the lane will be replaced instantly.
• Range: too much. I think it's infinite... anyway, it crashes the game when you turn on or off one laser that reaches farther than the chunk of world you are in, so be careful.

Installation:

Unzip the mod file, and find the other one inside. That is the one you have to copy to .minecraft\mods, and it's done (unless you have some ID conflict somewhere).

Applications:
The first use that comes into my mind are traps. However, I took this mod into my array because, aside from some limitations, it goes quite well with the Portal mod (lasers, laser sensor and laser tubes were introduced in Portal 2, so...). It's also great because the Portal mod now is SMP fully compatible, thanks to some pork chop you add to your portal gun, making the portals exclusive for the player.

Oh, and the version 1.7 of Eloraam's Redpower is out! However, wait for the Minecraft Forge to get v1.05 published before updating, because, as far as I understood, somewhere in the Redpower thread's latest posts there's the link to that version... that hasn't been updated in the minecraft forge thread, at least while I'm writing this.

Anyway, have fun!

Mob of the Week: Mo's Creatures' Ogre family

So I was planning on a new video... but for some reason Fraps refuse to record today XD. Let's hope I have it solved for the weekend, when I'll try to give some spotlight to an underground base and some wiring basics for Industrialcraft. In the meantime, I'm gonna share information with all of you regarding one of the most dangerous family of mobs from Dr Zhark's Mo's Creatures: the ogres.

First, their "measures": 3 blocks high and 2 blocks wide, and 1 block in the remaining coordinate. That means they don't fit into a door's space, but this is quite irrelevant unless your house is made of ores or obsidian (or if you use Industrialcraft, reinforced stone/glass/doors). The good news, however, is that by default they don't show on easy difficulty unless you choose to.

They attack in a wide area (about 3 blocks in all directions, sparing the ground), destroying (as in "first turning them into the dropped version you can loot, and then consuming the blocks like lava") all blocks but obsidian and ores, unless you tweak their strength level in the mod's ingame options, making them weaker. They will use that attack each time they are damaged (and they won't always make the attack animation of raising their arms), and the damage will affect other mobs.

As for their agresiveness, during the day they are passive until they despawn, and during the night you need to get fairly close to attract their attention, and you can outrun them easily (as long as you don't run into another mob, of course XD).

All this has some interesting implications to our usual gameplay:

First, your best defense at the start of the game is to keep your distance from them, since the walls that are effective against all other mobs are useless in this case.

Second, Cacti are useless: they will break them in less than three or four seconds.

Third, if you make a skeleton to hit an ogre, or an ogre makes his attack in the middle of a mob group, expect a massacre.

Fourth, the usual grinders are useless against ogres unless you adjust their strength to a weakened state. You might think "well, they will break cacti, but a lava trap in an obsidian room will work". False: the lava trap requires two ladders to keep both water and lava out of the collection pit, and the lava from consuming the drops aswell.

As for effective defenses, pits might work, water currents will work, and lava will work. Again, distance is the most effective protection against this mobs.

Now for the three types of ogres in the mod, we have the standard ogre (in the screen above), which is the most frequent and weaker of all, and drops obsidian blocks (from 0 to 3...); we also have the fire ogre, which is red, rarer and stronger and drops fire (so you can craft chainmail... personally, I tend to disable this one); and finally we have the cave ogre, a blue mob with a single eye that drops diamonds, and will spawn only under a certain layer (thing of a super slime, if you want). However, the cave ogre is so rare and requires a ceiling of 3 blocks high, meaning it's quite difficult to run into one (but not impossible).

The best tactic to kill one of these is to be out of their reach, so for example in a high position with a bow. They also seem to be quite blind, so they won't usually move if you attack them from out of their range of aggro.

So you see, these are quite dangerous. However, they are very straightforward. I hope the next spotlight will be the werewolf (again from Mo's Creatures), and then I'll go over some "vanilla" mobs like spiders and creepers.

See ya, and please comment!

Mod's review: Industrialcraft

First of all, apologies for the wall of text from the previous entry. Second, apologies again: Industrialcraft cannot be described in detail in a single blog entry (not to mention, Alblaka, the mod's author, already has a blog, and a wiki). So I will just give a fast course about the critical points of the mod, starting with Alblaka's words: Industrialcraft is a second tier mod, meaning you won't get to see all the goodies in a fresh map without a lot of time and effort.

• New resources:

The most important new resource implemented by the mod is Energy (measured in "Energy Units" or EU, usually in a "per second" basis, so you will see a lot of EU/s). You can collect energy from lots of sources (burning stuff like in a furnace, from lava, water, wind, the sun, or nuclear reactors, but my favourite is solar energy, using the burning of stuff as a previous step or as an emergency backup). Energy can be an endless and self-supporting resource, and can allow you to never need to craft a pick, shovel or axe again (so you will save some diamonds), and if you go for renewable energy sources, never waste coal in the furnaces again (you will use it to craft solar panels and artificial diamonds instead).
The other three new resources in the mod are Tin, Copper and Uranium. The first two have independent uses or can be merged into bronze (which will act as Iron, only with more durability in armor, sword and tools, but can be used to craft rails, for example. This is great because Iron will be used for a lot of other stuff), and each uranium ore can be refined in a nuclear reactor (keep those surrounded by water or they will explode) into four uranium bars, and you can use those to craft bigger explosives or provide energy.

• New items:

More than a hundred new items. See the wiki for a detailed description (my only complain here is the absence of a complete recipe guide like the one in the Minecraft Wiki, you will have to look a lot of pages), but the most important are the chainsaw (use it to never need an axe again, it runs on energy), the drill (same as the chainsaw, making obsolete the shovel and the pick, and can be upgraded with three diamonds to make a diamond drill), and an endless string of upgrades for the base, to an extent that you will, most likely, either move to a new location after some time to mount a real base, of demolish entirely your old one to make it again with new mats.

• Buildcraft integration:

Industrialcraft (IC) and Buildcraft (BC) work great together, specially thanks to the automation the latter provides for resource gathering and the automation of an endless cobblestone factory (because Industrialcraft includes a recycling machine, and the recycled stuff can be either used to make a box that will spawn something random or to power another device). The only point where they "fight" is the mining well (BC)/miner (IC): both do the same, yet IC's one is more efficient (instead of a 1x1 hole to the bedrock, it explores a 5x5 shaft, getting only minerals -or liquids if you want-), being its only downside the need for energy instead of a redstone clock, and the need of mining pipes, which are not really cheap to craft (but you can get all back after the drilling).

While I think the mod is extremely great, it can also be extremely frustrating, also because the recipe to make artificial diamods requires obsidian... which requires diamonds to get in the inventory. When I tested the mod for the first time, well, I spent about five hours and never found any diamond. I ended crafting them from "universal matter", a new item you can make with a lot of time and energy (but fortunately it can be done with stuff you can mine with an iron pick). I'll give it an 8/10, and tell you that there is a SMP server with both IC and BC implemented, called Industrial Rage.
The only improvement I would ask for right away would be an automated wood harvesting method, since you will end going out of your mine a lot just to gather wood to be able to keep mining and building stuff. There was a mod that included it, but sadly it has fallen behind, being made for the 1.5 version of Minecraft.

Mod's review: Buildcraft

Short version: superb mod. Get it here (also there are some videos, and the building recipes). The autor's nick is Spacetoad.

Now with the more elaborated version:

• Components:

This mod can be broken into three different parts: pipes, machines and markers.
Markers are just that: placeholders that are used to select an area. The area can be a line (using two markers), a surface (using three) or a block (using three). The markers must be aligned in the same line with another, and their range is about 63 blocks (you can test this by making a line, and feeding the filler with two stacks of anything for rapid counting). They have an extra functionality very interesting for unrelated reasons: by placing a redstone torch near a marker, the marker will emit a blue line (that can go through solid blocks and liquids) to the max range of the block, in the six possible directions. I've used this to make a grid so I didn't had to count blocks to place trees, but there are more possibilities.
Pipes are, again, just that: tubes. They go from a machine or chest to anywhere you want, and are best used with the included machines in the mod. You can see what items go through them, also. There are several types of pipes:
Wood: when receives redstone current it takes one item from the attached block (usually a chest, forge or automated crafting table) into the pipe system. Using a clock seems to not be necessary, but it also seems to bug after 10 minutes of use in SMP, so I'll stick to clock using. They are brown-colored.
Stone: the battle horse, they are just black-colored pipes.
Steel: this steel-colored pipe acts as blocking pipe, allowing all the stuff going through it to exit only in one direction (so you will use it when two or more pipes join into a main lane). You can change the exiting pipe by right-clicking on the steel pipe, which also reacts to redstone current.
Gold: this yellow pipe works like powered rails, but it doesn't break any block inside it.
Diamond: light blue, with up to six colors added to parts of it, it's a sorting pipe. After right clicking on this pipe, you will see a window quite similar to the one used by large chests, but with color rows. You place an example in a row, and all the blocks of that type will exit the diamod pipe through that exit (or, if there is an exit without any example, the blocks which don't match the other filters will go through there). I found the only non-wasteful filter here is making cobblestone go into one exit, dirt, sand, sandstone and gravel into another, and everything else in a third one when using a quarry.
Obsidian: this purple pipe will suck any item dropped in front of it. However, the item needs to be in the same block, but you can add redstone current to enlarge the range to one extra block. Very useful if you don't want to be in the collection spot of a farming machine.
Redstone: this pipe has been added by Eloraam (the author of the Integrated Redstone mod), and it's a pipe that emits redstone current anytime a block goes through it. It can be found in here.
Machines: The Automated Quarry, the Automated Miner, the Automated Crafting Table and the Filler are the four machines in the mod.
automated Quarry: It's a machine that makes a hole in the ground every time it takes a right click or a redstone tick (so a clock is needed to leave it in automatic). The mined items go out from its upper side, and using a pipe system is very advisable since the machine will make a big hole all the way to the bedrock (or a lava lake, which is good if you have a water source falling into the bottom when it comes to harvesting obsidian). You can use three markers to select an area and thus deciding the size of the quarry, or you can let it be its default size. The olny downsides to the machine is that you require 11 diamods and 8 gold bars (plus 20 iron bars, 20 cobblestone and 22 wood sticks), which can be difficult. However, the machine can be picked after it has finished and positioned somewhere else.
Automated Miner: anytime you right click or apply a redstone click, this machine will dig a block downwards, leaving a placeholder pipe you can't retrieve but can easily break by hand (easier than leaves, I think). Like the Quarry, you can retrieve the machine after it has reached the desired depth (or bedrock), expels the mined block by its upper side, and can put what mines directly into a chest by its side (much more practical than doing that with the Quarry, since there won't be more than one stack of each block in the game). Since I have Industrialcraft (with a much more interesting mining machine), I only use this one to make infinite cobblestone machines that automatically output 2 cobblestone blocks to large chests (by placing 3-4 large chests, I can be sure it will take 23+ hours of continous gameplay before the chests get full).
Filler: the king of the realm, this machine will fill any area delimited by the markers (line, surface, volume...), but won't substitute any present material. Remember, it fills, so if you want to make a big house or a castle's walls, you need to make several vertical/horizontal surfaces, or you will get a big cube you will have to manually empty. And a 60x60x60 cube is 216.000 blocks, or 3.375 stacks!!! Also, since its top speed seems to be 1 block/second, you would need 60 hours of continuous gameplay (two days and a half) just to fill that.
Automated Crafting Table: this one, while very interesting, is (in my opinion) the least useful part of the mod. You put a recipe inside it the same way you would be using a regular crafting table, then exit (the machine won't spit the contents), and everytime you feed the table with the components you put in the master recipe, the table will craft it after receiving a right-click or a redstone click. So you would usually make a chain of  1 chest/large chest per used input, one wooden pipe per chest to get the items out, several stone pipes to get the stuff to the crafting table (plus a single steel pipe to ensure the items won't go through the wrong pipe), another wood pipe exiting from the table, and a chest/large chest to store the finished product.
While awesome, I think this is not really a practical machine, because... What crafted thing in Minecraft you need in enourmous quantities? Torches, sure, and steel pickaxes (or diamond ones), but it's better to carry 32 wood logs and 64 charcoal, using 2 slots to make 4 stacks of torches, for example.
Also, there is a problem in the table: you need to be able to stack the items for the Automated Crafting Table to work its magic, so forget about anything that uses buckets, and remember there are 3 different logs of wood, so you can't put several stacks of each one in a single chest and then feed it to a single table, it will only make wood planks from a single stack (and leave the other logs in the floor near the table).

I personally give the mod an 8/10, and commend the effort of the modder by making the latest version a SMP one.
I also think it would be awesome to be able to feed the filler with some predefined building plan, made from a .schematic file (and that would tell you how many blocks it would need of each material, both in single blocks and stacks), and let the machine run the job, also using the markers to define the area of the .schematic file to be made.