Mod updates

So, for all of you who are interested, the 1.8.1 compatible version of several mods has been released. Currently, we have:

• Industrialcraft (with SMP support! Expect a few bugs, however)
• Better tha Wolves
• Minecraft Forge (obviously, since you need it for some of these mods XD)
• Portal
• Mo's Creatures
• RedPower 2

However, you should know some details:

First, Redpower 2 is an ALPHA, a pre-release with probably tons of bugs (according to Eloraam herself), with some nasty possibilities about corrupting your savegames. You have been warned!

Second, Buildcraft's thread seems to not show in the usual URL... nor can it be found using the search... However, I manually found it here, and I updated the link in the sidetab. Also, SpaceToad has opened a contest for the best 5 worlds made using Buildcraft (using the default config file, and maybe only minecraft... sadly).

It also seems like MineFactory has found some loving modder that not only updated the mod for 1.8.1, but also added some really interesting features for those people who don't have machines that can keep up with thousands of tiny blocks flowing around pipes, or laying down a pipe system kilometers in length... now it includes minecart support! so carts will pick up/drop out stuff inside chests! Also, Minefactory reloaded is SMP-compatible!

I'll try to upgrade all my stuff to Minecraft 1.8.1 and make a huuuuge map with all the stuff integrated. Before sunday, I hope. Bets are on the table, I'll start in about 14 hours...

Edit: it's all working, at least for now... The IDresolver mod (see the sidebar for the link XD) has proven to be extremely useful, and my only regret is that I couldn't install Steamcraft (the game runs out of terrain sprites). Right now, I have installed the following mods in my 1.8.1 version of the game:

• Modloader, Audiomod, Minecraft Forge, Modloader MP, IDresolver, SingleplayerCommands, ToomanyItems, and the GUIAPI
• Wireless redstone and Wireless remote
• Better than Wolves
• Buildcraft 2.2.0
• Industrialcraft2 1.15 (plus the "patches". The working sound fix is here (apply last))
• Minefactory reloaded
• Redpower2 (currently disabled, but I'm waiting for a TMI compatible-version).

For now, the only trouble I found was solved by changing the order of the mods in the .minecraft/mods folder (put first Industrialcraft2), and that TooManyItems doesn't show all the goodies after some RP2 ones. Oh, and that the game went from 16Mb of the basic version to 64Mb without any map loaded... and that my texture packs no longer work fine because of the hunger bar ^^.

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: