Progression

The new metalworks and construction shop. A couple automatic miners can be seen sitting in the yard off the side of the metalworks too.

I spent most of my time today making a metalworks, construction shop, stone smelter, and an electronics factory. I can really feel myself advancing. These new buildings will help my progression by a lot.

The electronics factory isn’t really operational yet, but the basic layout is already placed. What stopped me was the fact I needed redstone engines.

This leads me to the next thing I plan to for the next time I play: Expanding the laboratory and moving the workshop there while also developing and microchip facility. The reasons for this is because the workshop is usually a place I go to for creating newer tech. Then as they become common, specialized buildings such as factories are erected—like the electronics factory. I believe it’ll fit best in the lab.

The windmill and smeltery is slowly becoming abandoned as I move to the bigger, better buildings.

The watermill power plant is sustaining my new development well.

I’ve also been getting a ton of iron and a few diamonds from those automatic miners. They have made a great investment to me.

My main goal now is the pave the path to the Immersive Engineering’s excavator. The rock crusher makes that possible. I just need to construct a facility for the industrial squeezer, refinery, and diesel generator. But first, the lab will have my attention.

Improvements

My settlement so far.

In preparation for the upcoming goals, I decided to made a bunch of improvements and complete the constructions of the unfinished buildings.

I also wanted to test those powered lanterns—which guaranteed to repel enemies in a 35 block radius around it—by building them in the cattle and sheep pastures. It worked really well! A couple nights passed and no enemies spawned on the grounds.

One thing got me thinking however, was how I need to start pushing now. I feel like I’m hitting a plateau. Maybe I’m afraid of expending resources on expensive projects that might not work out. Nonetheless, I should focus on a simple miner machines to speed up the ore collection or stick to the tunnel bore.

Furthermore, during my wiki research, I discovered the steam boiler. I can power it with coal and it definitely looked promising. It might be a good idea to build one if the water mill plant isn’t enough for those miners.

Windmill

The windmill now under construction!

I haven’t been doing a good job keeping up at these entries. Despite that, I’ve made a lot of progress in the past few days. I expanded the workshop, constructed the metal former, and the windmill is finally built.

The power it produces is very small, but it’s a renewable and constant source of energy. I think it’s sufficient for now.

My settlement is growing, crammed, and disorganized. I believe the need to specialize the industries is becoming an important need.

I envision that railroads will prove to be in wide use in the future, so a rail factory would be nice. I’m already in the process of building a barn to manage a wheat farm, cattle ranch, and someday, a sheep ranch. The research facility for general tech will be expanded to house microchip assembly manufacturing. And finally, I’m going to make a goal to build a watermill power plant to power various machines I will be using.

Besides all this, once I move the railroad machines out of the workshop and into that factory, I plan to use it for the next big thing: Modern machinery.

This is my plan: To get automation for the basic industries so I can focus with ease on the upper tier industries. This means I will first automate the wheat, then timber, then ores.

Immersive engineering has a good low tech ore excavator, but it expensive in terms of iron required to build and the energy needed to run it—I might explore my options a bit before committing to it.

Getting an automated hemp farm is something I’m considering as well.

Clearer Idea

My workshop near the smeltery. This place will someday contain the machines.

After much running around and trial and error, I think I finally got a good idea of what to do. It seems that many of the technology I want require late game ingredients such as diamonds and items from the Nether. My best bet is the immersive engineering mod and most basic agricultural tech. This could change again, but this is my goal for now.

I’ll still need to find a way to the Nether since I need stuff to make the blast furnace—the lack of steel is a major roadblock right now.

In the meantime, immersive engineering uses a generator that runs off of biodiesel. There are two options: An industrial squeezer and a fermenter. The latter uses apples, cane, and melons to create fuel while the former uses wheat seeds, pumpkin seeds, melon seeds, and hemp seeds. I have three of latter requirements but only one of the former, so I’m going for the squeezer. It does not require steel to make, so that’s good.

My agricultural areas are becoming more refined. For example, I separated my first garden into different specialized fields for pumpkins, candleberries, wheat, and hemp. I might build a small garden for random food such as carrots, potatoes, berries, and so on. I still have a single cow ranch I haven’t done much to.

And now there’s that mine. I tend to mine in an unconventional manner than what most Minecraft players do. I won’t do any mining efforts unless I have a lot of wood to develop and build a mine with. So another goal is to build a good tree farm. The picture in the previous entry is a fine example of what I like to do with the wood in the mines.

On a side note, I built a good workshop that has a powered carpenter and a project table that records recipes (similar to the cyclic assembler). I still need one more tool for the railroad tracks however: the rolling machine. I just need to get around putting it together.

I also took some time exploring this world. I ventured pretty far out. If I had known how beautiful this world is, I would have done it a lot earlier. I think I found a place where I might build a vacation house someday too. Found cane too.