Seed Research

The crops in the greenhouse I did my crossbreeding with.

I improved a lot of the unfinished buildings I had around here and started work on the blast furnace. It seemed that getting gunpowder and pearls are a difficult task, but I’m managing.

Most of my time was done in agricultural research and getting to the Nether.

The reason why I did extensive agricultural research is because I wanted the presser to make cooking oil badly. My life would have been easier if I could just use a juicer, but there were no olives or sunflowers at my disposal.

It was mainly crossbreeding different flowers and crops. There were a lot of bonemeal on hand, so it wasn’t long before I got the seeds I needed to make the presser. Still hard though. The seeds for the flowers were the most tedious. I had to venture out into the world to a flower field I discovered in my last adventure.

It wasn’t there. Disappointing! However, I stopped by at a village on my way back and found they had the seeds in their greenhouse there. I was so glad to see that! Once I had the blue orchid seeds, everything else fell in place.

I made a flowchart of all the seeds I had to crossbreed. Perhaps I’ll hold this here for future reference. The orange boxes mean I already had those seeds at the start of the game from foraging the forest grasses while the blue boxes are the seeds I needed to make the presser.

Anyway, I finally made that portal to the Nether too. I housed it in a general research building—I intend to use this building to research various things I’m unfamiliar with before putting it to widespread use.

It turns out that the Nether doesn’t really supply me with enough iron I had hoped for. To add to that, it’s more dangerous than it was compared to Tekkit! There’s flaming bats, spiders, wood that doesn’t burn, skeletons that spawn from graves, and so on.

I think I’m going to resort back to my mines in the overworld. I might consider an investment in the tunnel bore machine. I really need iron.

Blast Furnace

I’m cutting down trees like crazy.

I finally got railroad tracks and put them to use. A mineshaft with an elevator track down was partially built too. It feels great to have some good transportation now. I’m getting all sorts of ideas for future constructions involving those tracks such as subways between facilities.

Aside from that, the only other things I did was chop down trees for wood, mined, built a greenhouse for agricultural research, and improved my house.

In the meantime, I found out that I can get steel before the Nether after all! I just need one of the three: glue, enderpearl, or TNT with sand and clay—I can’t get to the Nether without flint and steel anyway, that’s how I found out the blast furnace can be made without the Nether stuff.

The next time I play, I hope to expand my smeltery, build a blast furnace, finish the mineshaft, and make a way to the Nether for its plentiful ores.

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.