MineTest test runs
1/7/2017 MineTest
I have looked at MineTest a few times. Yes, it's a Minecraft clone. A new version (0.4.15?) came out at the end of the year, and the videos show some really good looking terrain gen. Choose "v7" terrain gen. What's nice about it is that it is completely open to modders, just write Lua files, nothing to hack or compile. A good range of mods are available already, including obvious things like "technic modpack" which is trying to capture all the industrial stuff from Minecraft Technic. Someone invented a mod called "mesecons" that puts a kind of redstone logic into the world, including a microprocessor where you can type in some kind of commands.
Now, MineTest has no mobs by default. So there's really no point having a "survival" mode other than obnoxiously needing food. The graphics are a bit clunky in places, and in some mods. But what I do like: there's a reasonably smooth feel to the movements, you can place and remove blocks from much farther away (7 or 8 blocks?) for faster builds, and the open mod community. Though of course a constantly updating bunch of mods is inherently unstable and if you try to keep up with the updates, any part of your world might disappear or stop working.
My test world has a little house on a cliff at the edge of a desert overlooking the sea. There are big blocks visible from my cliff that look like castles but turn out to be weird towers of dirt from some quirk of terrain gen. Once I know that's a thing, I'm okay with it. I might even hollow one out and make a base out of it.
Somehow this world feels even more alone and empty than vanilla Minecraft. No point growing anything, and not even any sheep to play with. I am trying to find a set of mods that will make it feel more alive. The mods I've seen which try to add animals have had some obvious roadblocks to overcome, like not being able to rotate models or keep pieces together. But it has certainly gained some momentum. There is a lot more in MineTest than 6 months ago when I looked.
Okay, new world. v7 terrain gen, /mods command says the installed mods are: beds, boats, bones, bucket, carts, creative, default, doors, dye, farming, fire, flowers, give_initial_stuff, nyancat, screwdriver, sfinv, stairs, tnt, vessels, walls, wool, xpanes. But that's not really right. Some of those are launcher options. I actually added these mods: homedecor modpack, mesecons, moreblocks, pipeworks, signs_lib, technic and universal_inventory.
I really like the crazy deep caves, though even with all these mods there is still nothing down there except sandstone and desert stone. I followed a crevasse down and down and then dug more, reaching -103y before stopping. Then I climbed a nearby sandy peak and dropped a torch at +94y. I don't see an F3-type screen full of data, but the black DOS in the background dumps a line every time I break or place a block ... which is absurd but at least it gives me my xyz.
Okay, there are some key-based features here.
F1 turns interface on/off
F2 toggles the top messages
F3 turns fog on/off
F5 turns on debug info, then profiler graph, then hides both
F6 turns on profiler page 1 then 2 then 3, then off
F7 toggles viewpoint, like F5 in Minecraft
F8 toggles "cinematic mode", whatever that is, no obvious change in display
F9 turns on a mini map (yay!!) and then changes its zoom level, has radar modes and view modes
F10 brings up a console, useful when typing /help to see what commands are available
F12 saves a screenshot
Dreary endless desert here. Oh look, a patch of coral in the river. Brown and orange coral (did not go to my inventory when I broke it) and white coral skeleton (I was able to pick these up). That's handy. Damn I miss the NEI interface where I can see recipes and uses of items. I can only guess what the coral blocks might be good for. I cheated myself some orange coral, but when exposed to air it turns into coral skeletons. Makes sense.
So there's a "fast mode". See key settings, I set it to F. The regular walking speed is pretty darn slow, so of course the fast mode is a bit TOO fast and reckless and weird, but it sure does get you around. I was able to "/grantme all" and now I can fly around and study the terrain gen. There's a option called "double jump to fly" to use the Minecraft-style flying key.
I finally found some green. Found some cactus but could not break them with pick or shovel or hand. I don't have an axe. Swapped to survival mode for a bit, not sure why. Oh look, if you turn on the F5 little debug at top of the screen it will tell you what blocks you're looking at. Grass, acacia bushes, tulip, default_grass, dry grass, aspen tree (looks like birch), viola. The apples heal one heart of health, no obvious hunger bar.
Snowy wastes with vast ice towers going up to 88y. Holy cow, I found a complex of snow/ice towers with arms sticking out, trees on dirt patches on some of the arms, then a sharp outcrop going way up above the clouds. y=188! You can use a pick on ice, and it does not turn into water blocks. Torch directly on ice blocks, does not melt.
Not much variety of biomes. 75% desert and snowy so far. Deepest natural cave found went from +38 to -42y. No, wait, here's a yawning pit nearby. Flying down into the one reminds me of footage of submersibles going down into deep sea trenches. -102y and still going. Still nothing but rock, gravel, coal and iron ore. Crazy pits at the bottom of other pits. -160y and I see my first diamond ore. Scatter of ores, got 5 diamonds, bronze pick was good enough to mine it. This kind of depth is epic. At -180y another waning black pit. New record depth is -193y. I flew down there, but I bet it would take an hour or more to find my way back up on foot, even though I left a torch every 30 or 40 blocks. Wow.
Unexpected find: cobble and mossy cobble little dungeons at -182y. No mobs of course, but fun to explore, and I could see mossy cobble being a fairly rare resource. Made a diamond pick and 2 stacks of stairs, dug down to -256 expecting to see the bottom of the world. But NO, it just kept going. Found my first gold at -258y.
Hit another dungeon at -270y, with stairs going even deeper! Wow, if someone could put some mobs in here (not the same worn-out stuff as every other game), this would be really creepy. Lowest chamber at -287y. Back to my stairs down ... copper kicks in around -285y, a few more diamonds. Biggest ore vein yet at -296y: about 20 coal, 5 iron, 10 copper and 4 diamonds. AT -310y I found my first mese mineral blocks, in a scatter of 5.
I started a quick branch mine at -310y, and just don't believe it ... I hit a cave. Quick harvest of the walls: coal, iron, copper, gold. No mese sticking out. Just a little air pocket I guess, it bottomed out at -321y. At -340y I found mese and iron and broke into a fairly large cave. ANother huge maze of caves, lowest point -370y. Other direction, outrageous dark slash in the ground, very distant glow ... turns out to be lava down around -400y. Looks like lava pools around -410y. But it still drips deeper from there. A reasonable amount of mese ore at that depth.
Well, I filled up my inventory: 9x99 cobble, 30 copper lumps, 69 mossy cobble, 9 diamonds, 88 coal lumps, 24 gold lumps, 60 iron lumps, 19 mese crystals, some less interesting stuff. The coordinates of my little furnace room in that first dungeon: -1295.5, -188.5, 1347. Challenge: find my way all the way back to the surface, building stairs along the way. Found some copper around -70y. Made a little shack just outside the hole ... -1244, 15.5, 1392.
Well that was a fun session. About 2 hours. Surprised that the world was so deep, and there were empty dungeons way down there. The world could use a lot more ores and gems, maybe some fossils to dig up. Here's an opportunity to define resources over an enormous range of depths, from the tops of pillars (188y) to the deepest depths (-310y or lower??). A bit tricky without any mobs, since that means you don't really need metals for armor or weapons. The only real threats are falling, drowning, lava and suffocating in falling blocks. And I can just turn off damage altogether and never worry about that again. Though, surely a good range of ores can produce a vast range of decorative items.
---
Well, this time I went to the mods pane and clicked Enable All. Duh. Now I have the new-style inventory screen where I can see recipes. And by diving down a hole in a newly generated chunk, I found a colorful uranium block at aroun -34y, and an endless hole with my first sighting of zinc ore and lead ore at -192y. From the inventory lists (search for "lump"), looks like the only ones I haven't seen are clay, chromium and sulfur. Stack of ladders, dug down to -250y. Played with TNT a bit. Vein of mese ore at -272y. Dungeon at -440y, caves and pits down to -490y. I mined down to -512y, still no bottom to the world. Nice.
Now to try and get back out! Zinc at -454y. Finally just dug straight up and flew up to reach the surface. Must have left 200 cobble drops behind. Full inventory. Here are the good bits I found: 3 uranium, 73 coal, 11 zinc, 106 iron, 11 lead, 23 gold, 11 flint, 55 mese, 37 copper, 27 diamonds.
---
I tried the basic mod tutorials. I got their example "tutorial:decowood" mod to run just fine. Then started a mod called "packed_things" which I wanted to capture the compressed cobblestone through octuply compressed cobblestone from FTB Unleashed. And compressed dirt and sand. Someone already included "compressed cobblestone" bu not the higher tiers. So I defined "packed cobble" through "packed cobble x8", did a neat series of overlay frames burned onto the original textures (bumped up to 32x32) in GIMP. And there was no error loading my little mod, but my items did not appear in game.
---
Back on my VeeTech world, I did a big land grab around Baltica, then ran home and setup a worktable for forestry machines. Oddly, I could not blend dusts to get bronze, but the induction smelter could take 3 copper ingots and a tin ingot to get 2 bronze ingots directly. Stored recipes for sturdy casing (8 bronze) and squeezer. Brought the squeezer out to Baltica and set it up next to my spruce autofarm, as planned. Darn, it crashes the game when watching the interface at the moment that a spruce log is done. When I logged back in, it had pumped out some resin. Checked the interface and there was something in the byproduct slot, then another log finished and it crashed again. I wanted to get resin for turpentine for wood polish, to get a woodworker and panelworker up and running. But with this crash I may have to just go in NEI and swap out logs for buckets of resin. Or just pump in the logs, pump out the byproducts and never look at the interface? I wonder if the still will also crash trying to render resin or turpentine. Maybe I can make an alternate recipe for it??
Tried again, just not quick enough.
I have looked at MineTest a few times. Yes, it's a Minecraft clone. A new version (0.4.15?) came out at the end of the year, and the videos show some really good looking terrain gen. Choose "v7" terrain gen. What's nice about it is that it is completely open to modders, just write Lua files, nothing to hack or compile. A good range of mods are available already, including obvious things like "technic modpack" which is trying to capture all the industrial stuff from Minecraft Technic. Someone invented a mod called "mesecons" that puts a kind of redstone logic into the world, including a microprocessor where you can type in some kind of commands.
Now, MineTest has no mobs by default. So there's really no point having a "survival" mode other than obnoxiously needing food. The graphics are a bit clunky in places, and in some mods. But what I do like: there's a reasonably smooth feel to the movements, you can place and remove blocks from much farther away (7 or 8 blocks?) for faster builds, and the open mod community. Though of course a constantly updating bunch of mods is inherently unstable and if you try to keep up with the updates, any part of your world might disappear or stop working.
My test world has a little house on a cliff at the edge of a desert overlooking the sea. There are big blocks visible from my cliff that look like castles but turn out to be weird towers of dirt from some quirk of terrain gen. Once I know that's a thing, I'm okay with it. I might even hollow one out and make a base out of it.
Somehow this world feels even more alone and empty than vanilla Minecraft. No point growing anything, and not even any sheep to play with. I am trying to find a set of mods that will make it feel more alive. The mods I've seen which try to add animals have had some obvious roadblocks to overcome, like not being able to rotate models or keep pieces together. But it has certainly gained some momentum. There is a lot more in MineTest than 6 months ago when I looked.
Okay, new world. v7 terrain gen, /mods command says the installed mods are: beds, boats, bones, bucket, carts, creative, default, doors, dye, farming, fire, flowers, give_initial_stuff, nyancat, screwdriver, sfinv, stairs, tnt, vessels, walls, wool, xpanes. But that's not really right. Some of those are launcher options. I actually added these mods: homedecor modpack, mesecons, moreblocks, pipeworks, signs_lib, technic and universal_inventory.
I really like the crazy deep caves, though even with all these mods there is still nothing down there except sandstone and desert stone. I followed a crevasse down and down and then dug more, reaching -103y before stopping. Then I climbed a nearby sandy peak and dropped a torch at +94y. I don't see an F3-type screen full of data, but the black DOS in the background dumps a line every time I break or place a block ... which is absurd but at least it gives me my xyz.
Okay, there are some key-based features here.
F1 turns interface on/off
F2 toggles the top messages
F3 turns fog on/off
F5 turns on debug info, then profiler graph, then hides both
F6 turns on profiler page 1 then 2 then 3, then off
F7 toggles viewpoint, like F5 in Minecraft
F8 toggles "cinematic mode", whatever that is, no obvious change in display
F9 turns on a mini map (yay!!) and then changes its zoom level, has radar modes and view modes
F10 brings up a console, useful when typing /help to see what commands are available
F12 saves a screenshot
Dreary endless desert here. Oh look, a patch of coral in the river. Brown and orange coral (did not go to my inventory when I broke it) and white coral skeleton (I was able to pick these up). That's handy. Damn I miss the NEI interface where I can see recipes and uses of items. I can only guess what the coral blocks might be good for. I cheated myself some orange coral, but when exposed to air it turns into coral skeletons. Makes sense.
So there's a "fast mode". See key settings, I set it to F. The regular walking speed is pretty darn slow, so of course the fast mode is a bit TOO fast and reckless and weird, but it sure does get you around. I was able to "/grantme all" and now I can fly around and study the terrain gen. There's a option called "double jump to fly" to use the Minecraft-style flying key.
I finally found some green. Found some cactus but could not break them with pick or shovel or hand. I don't have an axe. Swapped to survival mode for a bit, not sure why. Oh look, if you turn on the F5 little debug at top of the screen it will tell you what blocks you're looking at. Grass, acacia bushes, tulip, default_grass, dry grass, aspen tree (looks like birch), viola. The apples heal one heart of health, no obvious hunger bar.
Snowy wastes with vast ice towers going up to 88y. Holy cow, I found a complex of snow/ice towers with arms sticking out, trees on dirt patches on some of the arms, then a sharp outcrop going way up above the clouds. y=188! You can use a pick on ice, and it does not turn into water blocks. Torch directly on ice blocks, does not melt.
Not much variety of biomes. 75% desert and snowy so far. Deepest natural cave found went from +38 to -42y. No, wait, here's a yawning pit nearby. Flying down into the one reminds me of footage of submersibles going down into deep sea trenches. -102y and still going. Still nothing but rock, gravel, coal and iron ore. Crazy pits at the bottom of other pits. -160y and I see my first diamond ore. Scatter of ores, got 5 diamonds, bronze pick was good enough to mine it. This kind of depth is epic. At -180y another waning black pit. New record depth is -193y. I flew down there, but I bet it would take an hour or more to find my way back up on foot, even though I left a torch every 30 or 40 blocks. Wow.
Unexpected find: cobble and mossy cobble little dungeons at -182y. No mobs of course, but fun to explore, and I could see mossy cobble being a fairly rare resource. Made a diamond pick and 2 stacks of stairs, dug down to -256 expecting to see the bottom of the world. But NO, it just kept going. Found my first gold at -258y.
Hit another dungeon at -270y, with stairs going even deeper! Wow, if someone could put some mobs in here (not the same worn-out stuff as every other game), this would be really creepy. Lowest chamber at -287y. Back to my stairs down ... copper kicks in around -285y, a few more diamonds. Biggest ore vein yet at -296y: about 20 coal, 5 iron, 10 copper and 4 diamonds. AT -310y I found my first mese mineral blocks, in a scatter of 5.
I started a quick branch mine at -310y, and just don't believe it ... I hit a cave. Quick harvest of the walls: coal, iron, copper, gold. No mese sticking out. Just a little air pocket I guess, it bottomed out at -321y. At -340y I found mese and iron and broke into a fairly large cave. ANother huge maze of caves, lowest point -370y. Other direction, outrageous dark slash in the ground, very distant glow ... turns out to be lava down around -400y. Looks like lava pools around -410y. But it still drips deeper from there. A reasonable amount of mese ore at that depth.
Well, I filled up my inventory: 9x99 cobble, 30 copper lumps, 69 mossy cobble, 9 diamonds, 88 coal lumps, 24 gold lumps, 60 iron lumps, 19 mese crystals, some less interesting stuff. The coordinates of my little furnace room in that first dungeon: -1295.5, -188.5, 1347. Challenge: find my way all the way back to the surface, building stairs along the way. Found some copper around -70y. Made a little shack just outside the hole ... -1244, 15.5, 1392.
Well that was a fun session. About 2 hours. Surprised that the world was so deep, and there were empty dungeons way down there. The world could use a lot more ores and gems, maybe some fossils to dig up. Here's an opportunity to define resources over an enormous range of depths, from the tops of pillars (188y) to the deepest depths (-310y or lower??). A bit tricky without any mobs, since that means you don't really need metals for armor or weapons. The only real threats are falling, drowning, lava and suffocating in falling blocks. And I can just turn off damage altogether and never worry about that again. Though, surely a good range of ores can produce a vast range of decorative items.
---
Well, this time I went to the mods pane and clicked Enable All. Duh. Now I have the new-style inventory screen where I can see recipes. And by diving down a hole in a newly generated chunk, I found a colorful uranium block at aroun -34y, and an endless hole with my first sighting of zinc ore and lead ore at -192y. From the inventory lists (search for "lump"), looks like the only ones I haven't seen are clay, chromium and sulfur. Stack of ladders, dug down to -250y. Played with TNT a bit. Vein of mese ore at -272y. Dungeon at -440y, caves and pits down to -490y. I mined down to -512y, still no bottom to the world. Nice.
Now to try and get back out! Zinc at -454y. Finally just dug straight up and flew up to reach the surface. Must have left 200 cobble drops behind. Full inventory. Here are the good bits I found: 3 uranium, 73 coal, 11 zinc, 106 iron, 11 lead, 23 gold, 11 flint, 55 mese, 37 copper, 27 diamonds.
---
I tried the basic mod tutorials. I got their example "tutorial:decowood" mod to run just fine. Then started a mod called "packed_things" which I wanted to capture the compressed cobblestone through octuply compressed cobblestone from FTB Unleashed. And compressed dirt and sand. Someone already included "compressed cobblestone" bu not the higher tiers. So I defined "packed cobble" through "packed cobble x8", did a neat series of overlay frames burned onto the original textures (bumped up to 32x32) in GIMP. And there was no error loading my little mod, but my items did not appear in game.
---
Back on my VeeTech world, I did a big land grab around Baltica, then ran home and setup a worktable for forestry machines. Oddly, I could not blend dusts to get bronze, but the induction smelter could take 3 copper ingots and a tin ingot to get 2 bronze ingots directly. Stored recipes for sturdy casing (8 bronze) and squeezer. Brought the squeezer out to Baltica and set it up next to my spruce autofarm, as planned. Darn, it crashes the game when watching the interface at the moment that a spruce log is done. When I logged back in, it had pumped out some resin. Checked the interface and there was something in the byproduct slot, then another log finished and it crashed again. I wanted to get resin for turpentine for wood polish, to get a woodworker and panelworker up and running. But with this crash I may have to just go in NEI and swap out logs for buckets of resin. Or just pump in the logs, pump out the byproducts and never look at the interface? I wonder if the still will also crash trying to render resin or turpentine. Maybe I can make an alternate recipe for it??
Tried again, just not quick enough.
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