what I really do in real life

That's a fire ogre.

In the meantime, between singleplayer stints, I'm still on server nearly every day. My main project this summer has been mining out underneath my player shop. Pretty sure I built over a slime chunk...

So I'm working on a slime farm. I have sold slime balls and blocks to just about every player we've ever had for nearly two years now. I've been so busy with player help, staff duties, and a list of other projects I rotate around on that I haven't been able to keep my slime in stock. Welp, that's about to change.

One of the things I watch for is contraband. This builder hammer can't be crafted, it's only available in creative mode, and we're a survival server. I guess previous staff suped up a few and used them to kick naughty players off server during bans, and I'm still finding them once in awhile in hidden stashes among non staff players. It's kind of funny where I find things sometimes.

"the ban hammer has spoken!!"

lol

Back to school fashion trends 👇

Someone's pet horse that got thrown into solid rock coming back through a glitched nether portal, I'm guessing. I dug it out. For some reason, mo creatures horses will neigh in anguish forever and just never die, so I can only imagine the player living above the screams... Actually kinda cracks me up. I'm horrible. 😂

And stuff like this. Chicken stacking is my favorite warn item. I have culled thousands of chickens over the last year. I don't get the whole chicken farming thing if they collect 4 double chests of eggs and never sell them, and a hundred chickens have piles of egg backlog floating around them. One guy had 3 different claims and several hundred chickens packed in tiny hopper farms on each claim. Took me half the day to clean that mess up. Then players wonder why they have lag...

One of the projects on my list was spreading out some of my very crowded piled up block storage to new expanded rooms. This is my color room. All the wools, dyed and glazed clays, and cements are arranged in rows of kind and color. I'm sharing it with another moderator who likes to build.

Caught this while doing player rounds making sure everyone was doing ok. Happy little chat with the neighbor there. Mo Creatures has all kinds of bears.

Gerald, lol. 😆

Sometimes we do math.

One of the players throws spectacular parties every quarter.

I keep meaning to learn making fireworks, but my to-do list is just really long. I really do overextend myself, more in minecraft than I do in real life. I'm learning a lot about myself doing this.

But I see others dealing with their own personality traits playing out in game and feel ok. We're all good.

Sometimes I just sit there and laugh. Players are good for me.

when smoke gets in your eyes, lalala

Decided to branch out in between projects and start really loading up on the basics so I'll be ready to build bigger when the time comes, and I keep running into strange new things so often that I'm finally caving to the pixelmon wiki. I've always been slow to adapt to anything new, but at least I'm collecting what I find to do more with later.

This is a crazy amount of fruit to have to learn, lol. I'll get there. Apparently the blue banana is a yache berry.

In the meantime, I'm getting the hang of sending Turtwig out. I typo so constantly that he's in and out like a yo-yo, but now I know which key is doing it. 😁

We had a serious mishap today... 😲

I have no idea yet if that would actually have done any damage or even killed him (probably not), but I recalled him and then sent him out again in a safer spot. Eeek!

Fortunately had a bucket of water on me. There he is, whew! 😳

Another side jaunt took me into a ravine full of ores and lava everywhere, so I had fun with my bucket creating obsidian floors. Water over lava 'freezes' into obsidian, the hardest block besides bedrock and a necessary ingredient in several important achievements. I made the mistake of installing a furnace directly over lava...

and then I kept catching on fire standing next to it... The first time was a bit of a shock.

I racked my brain. I've been playing minecraft for several years, but most of it has been on a server with fire spread turned off. Apparently lava can set fire to anything flammable, but oddly, this turned out to look like the obsidian burning. I've never seen that happen before. I don't think it's flammable. I did several experiments, ruled out burning mobs falling off ledges into that spot, assumed it was the door but it never burned, and finally came back to it once with obsidian simply just on fire, which I easily slapped out. Even digging out under the furnace and replacing the lava underneath with cobble hasn't stopped it from flaring up, so I think I've somehow glitched an obsidian block to spontaneously catch on fire. 😂

Guess I'll have to be careful not to use wood to build with in that ravine. I might eventually fix it up to house wyverns once I've made to the wyvern lair.

More to come...

over 3 weeks later...

So last I left off, I had established an easy spot to work in so I could focus on much bigger things. Two days after I wrote that I got real lucky fighting a manticore. It dropped an egg! You can hatch manticore eggs and after they grow up you can ride them through the air, which is awesome when you're playing survival and don't use a fly cheat. You can read more about manticores in this wiki.

That alone really stepped up my time management. I no longer had to run across bits of ground and across water to anything, I just flew there.

There are several creatures that fly in the Mo Creatures mob library, but this really was a lucky break.

This is what it looks like riding one. The perspective makes them look bigger, so you feel like you're on a really powerful pet.

So of course, I found more stuff more quickly, with easy getaways.

Finding the monument so quickly after I got the manticore made it much easier to task out another huge project on the side. I've always wanted to drain an ocean monument, so I level several nearby islands collecting sand to sink around a border of dirt I made. This is an easy wall that I can build a more permanent wall next to later.

This dolphin just missed spawning in water, so I killed it. If I'd had a net ready, I could have snatched it up and used it later to ride around any body of water.

This maggot is part of the insect collection. Maggots, snails, and slugs all drop slime balls, which come in very handly for making leads, which you can use to drag vanilla mobs and some Mo Creatures mobs around.

Later on I was in the nether for more glowstone and quartz when I killed a fire manitcore, and it dropped an egg! That's actually pretty thrilling when it's your first time. The nether is really dangerous in Mo Creatures, so that was cool.

They're so cute when they're tiny.

Growing fast, though.

Aside from manticores, I'm still widely avoiding certain pokemon interactions since I'm one of the rare clueless. This is the first time I had seen a Klink.

I haven't been on single player that much in the meantime since all this, summer being summer and stuff, but hopefully that monument will be a cinch. I'm thinking about killing guardians in creative, but we'll see what happens when I get that far.

Sometimes you just need more

Continued from Where have I been?

One of the neato things about playing multiplayer is you get to see other people struggling with the same thing. Where am I going with this game in my life? What are my limits? Can I achieve a personal nirvana?

Another neato thing is getting to see behind the scenes building and configuring, the constant push and pull between plugin updates and manually coded settings, the messy layers of stacked mods code smashing into each other. I see people learning to bend these to their wills nearly every day.

The absolutely neatoest thing I have learned is that mo creatures and pokemon can fit together really well via pixelmon. They have the same basics and don't mow each other over so much that the game must stop to be fixed, unless you want to tweak configs here or there.

My %appdata% > Roaming > .minecraft > mods folder looks like this.

The mo creatures downloads come from here, and I think the pixel with pokemon features comes from here. It makes a fun singleplayer combining so many creatures, plus the extra kinds of blocks get incorporated as well, so you have a much bigger variety of armors, tools, and weapons, and of course more kinds of blocks and other things to make on your crafting table. The ruby, sapphire, amethyst, and crystal blocks are a really nice addition without having to incorporate another modpack.

I play basic default, mostly because I see so many people bumping heads with modpacks that sometimes don't play well with mo creatures or sometimes require manual config just to do so. For me, it's enough that I'm playing survival. Well, I did get advice as staff on how to see without slowing down for viewing obstacles. In your .minecraft folder go to options, then to gamma. If you set it to 10000 you'll be able to see through just about anything in the dark.

Survival is actually really rough sometimes on more emotional days when I'm trying to get away from real life, but I finally figured out how to do '/gamerule keepInventory true' so I wouldn't have to grind back to where I died so hard only to see it all despawn as I arrived. Yes, I know you can change the tic countdown, but I'm just wanting easy play without having to do so much homework first. Multiplayer had the added luxury of '/gamerule mobGriefing false', but after trying that on a few singleplayer worlds, it took too much edge off for me. Survival is even more excruciating in mo creatures singleplayer since you get so many more destructive mobs than creepers and slime blocks, but it's still part of the strategy and planning that goes into block usage for more than just decor and aesthetics, plus it's a great challenge for wiki study finding out block strengths.

One of my goals is structures and layouts with enough integrity to protect and yet delight the eye without sacrificing the adrenaline of conquering and the fulfillment of accomplishing. I've seen so much overkill with cobble and torches on multiplayer that basic 'camp' almost galls me now. I'm really great at hole in the ground and rock hut survival, or super fencing, but the sheer work going into that kind of reinforcement is ridiculous. It's really not hard leveling up enough to reach glowstone or sea lantern lighting, leaving room open for more decorative torch lighting without feeling the overkill. After that, a pleasing mixture of a variety of blocks can create the distance you need from play being blasted or shredded to smithereens. It's amazing what kind of power a single stick of glass just hanging in the air at face level can do. Color it for sweet glitter effect.

Other goals are to work my way up through breeding fairy horses, making a portal staff to get to the wyvern lair, and then flying those pets around the End after I find a stronghold. Yes, I can do most of these in multiplayer just fine, but sometimes I just want to chill in a quiet place on my own without watching the chat while dying gruesome deaths and creating beautiful things against all the odds on my own time where my head can roam free.

Let's talk world creation. I like choosing survival with cheats on. I've tried just about every which way making new seeds, and I seem to last the longest in a world where I'm challenged and on my toes but can still pause and switch to creative so I can fly back to a spot I forgot to mark coords down on for teleport. Part of the frustration that I think gets more players giving up is losing something and feeling that facepalm regret. Simply being flexible enough to allow oneself that '/gamemode creative' fix once in awhile is enough for me to keep going in survival. I think we can all agree it's no fun working really hard on something for 3 days and then suddenly just losing where it is on the map. One other nice thing I like with cheats is allowing myself to grab a shulker box once in awhile without having to spend a week or two finding a way to go fight for one and dying a lot along the way. I love fighting shulkers, but sometimes getting a load of overmined coal home is crucial when you're racing a clock in real life before you have to slam out a door for something like work or picking up a kid from school.

World Options is very important. Having created at the very least a hundred different worlds, I have developed a pretty good sense for ores. Current default is pretty worky, and although I love survival, I don't have time for that. I pick Worldtype: Customized and pull up the World Settings. I have played with all of it, and can say with profound experience that what you might think you love can become pretty wretched when you overdo it. Part of the draw of minecraft is that the human brain thrives on anything that alleviates boredom, which means you need a change of scenery and tasks every little bit if you aren't going to burn out. I've learned that most of the default settings are about right, but I do tweak the ores.

I've had several worlds where the ores were more prevalent than dirt. I don't advise that. I actually got sick of it, and ores became meaningless. Yes, it's pretty here and there, but everywhere...? NO. Nothing like diamonds becoming flat out boring. Nothing will cure you of diamond greed like making a diamond world. Anyway, I usually leave page 1 where it's at and move on to page 2.

You need dirt, leave it. You don't have enough green and bushy stuff to break up the blockiness if you don't have dirt. Sometimes I minimize the gravel a smidge, but it's harmless and actually useful once you figure it out. Granite, diorite, andesite- you'll miss it if you reduce it and hate it if you increase it. I have learned to skip it. Coal and iron- I usually raise the heights on these a bit, especially iron, and I do increase the spawn size OR tries a little. If you increase both size and tries, you start looking at your watch wondering when a vein is going to run out so you can move along. Gold, redstone, diamond, and lapis are all surprisingly pretty when you raise the height, and I definitely slighty increase spawn size or double the tries on diamonds, simply because you really need it for so much stuff, particularly in mo creatures. Pet amulets are made with diamonds, for example. Otherwise don't go too overboard or after awhile you'll be tired of ores, kind of like how you see rhinestones and at first they're pretty and after awhile it's ridiculous.

Sample pix of ore settings being slightly adjusted to appear higher up once in awhile.

I don't even mess with pages 3 and 4. After I click Done on World Settings, I make sure Allow Cheats is on. Bonus chest is up to you, I don't even use that any more when I start a world.

Coming up with a seed is fun. Capital and lower case letters make a difference in world generation, as do numbers and figures. My current play and build singleplayer world is called SantaClausConquerstheMartians and I originally landed smack in a jungle surrounded by snakes, panthers, a manticore, and loads of poke plants making it really colorful and extra jungley. I started with the basic hut collecting everything I could get hold of, including getting my enchant table, bookshelves, and anvil set up.

After that I branched out and got my nether portal going at my next hut.

A creeper did take out a good chunk of this second place, so I got more diligent on keeping my tp coords handy and getting another bed set up to hold creeper spawns down.

One sweet deal with pixel is that you quickly realize you can cannibalize way more than villages, lol. Also handy for setting up more teleport points.

I have another singleplayer called SlimShadyHarleyQuinn that I use mainly for testing. Even though it's set up for survival, I stay in creative and fly around and test commands. You can see how nicely pixel melds the best of both worlds, and mo creatures adds the extra mobs, like that fox down there on the right.

Sometimes the poke seem a little overdone, but the sudden fight sessions still amuse me to no end, so I'll probably keep the settings they came with. Now my real life is turning into little chores around the house being like That was super effective!

I'm currently leveling up to a more aesthetic work area. I love the feeling of being able to look out on the world, so I am using a bit of glass now.

Eventually I'll have a stable of fairy horses and wyverns down there.

To be successful, some of the breeding must be at or higher than cloud level. I'm not fond of clouds cutting through builds and fogging up my vision, so I'm getting ready to build up higher. This roof will probably become a floor for other exotic pets just below cloud level, and then the floor above will be the sky breeding.

This is still just a basic start. Total time on is only at one earth day (minecraft days are only around 20 minutes). I know it looks like I got a lot done, but I've played with people who are so good that they build really sweet really fast, so this looks nooby to me by comparison. Once I reach the wyvern laid and the End I'll be expanding my variety of blocks and have a lot more to create with.

Guess we'll see how far I get in another day or so.

:edit: 6-22-19 Removed link, spam issues on other end.