EpicProportions 10: from upstate NY to Gardencia

2/15/2022 EpicProportions world

I enjoy the strange disconnect that comes from gearing up in a tough multi-dimensional world full of high-to-boss-level mobs and strange creatures, only to try and camp out, build villages and live a normal live amid the chaos.

Right, back at Brick House, the outside portals/embassies are Gardencia and Deeplands.  The ones where I put the portals in the dungeon hallway way back when, and later connected them to surface portals are: Creeponia, Haven, Precasia and Mysterium.  I have a portal to Ancient Caverns in the Desert Base, but it has a stern warning not to go in there -- I remember having to fudge my way back out using NBTEditor.

I did a major land grab around the Brick House base, which is officially called Endicott now (after Endicott, NY where I was born).  Then I took a mining run in Creeponia to find some gems to finishe a set of armor, only to see it didn't match the rest of my set.  My dark steel pieces have been nearly destroyed, even with the Empowered II buff, looks like the actual durability fails and the anvil pet ignores those when fixing things.  So I had the top half of a set of subterranean armor, found the leggings on a stand at my armor collection (which is mostly empty) and checked over in the Desert Base (now called Yuma (again)) (Village Names mods has dubbed this the Safruville Port, even though it's in the desert, NOPE) and found the pants.  Added some enchants, and an Infinity I on my deep bow (34 max ranged damage).  Now I think my survivability has gone up some notches and I can explore some of those hostile dimensions.

I renamed Plains Base to Elmira, another town in upstate NY.

I made the cool carpentry bench from CustomNPCs.  It has a 4x4 crafting grid.  Barrels (3x4 rectangle of planks) hold 54 stacks.  So do crates even though they are a 4x4 outline of planks, no gain.  There are special banners, lamps, weapons, chairs, stools, tables.  Not a bad selection.  There is a big sign that can hold 10 lines of text and handle pasting, though it's hitbox weirdly takes up the full block.  It has a ton of strage items in NEI, many of them look like story props or quest items, all waiting for recipes to bring them into the world.

CustomNPCs does have access to every creature model from every modpack.  Click the Model button and click right arrows to get through a ton of options.  I made a Bill Gates from Inventory Pets -- I have no idea why it's in there, but he's guarding one of my Yuma mineshaft entrance now.  I could pull in AoA monsters, the pink slime from MFR, you name it.  It also has its own decent library of characters.  You can hold up the NPC wand to the air and rclick to get a list of all your NPCs ... AND TP TO THEM ... I had no idea that was in the mod, but it's a powerful feature.  I can now set characters at key locations instead of using map waypoints or my warp book, and I can tp to the NPC at that location, done.

One of the coolest features of CustomNPCs is the ability to add custom recipes.  Use the NPC wand, r-click the ground to get a guy, go to Global, then Recipes, then Global and Add; add the ingredients and result, give it a name, and it should now work in a regular crafting table.  I have already scripted a bunch of recipes in .zs but this is a good on-the-fly way to test them without having to restart each time and maybe deal with parsing errors on load.  Now, 8 paper around a chest gives a cardboard box, which you can sneak rclick on an entity to wrap it, sneak rclick again to pick it up and rclick to place it back down with all contents and settings intact.  I don't know why the box is not destroyed when you place the item again.  Feels like a waste, since you really only need one of them, EVER.  But until now it had no recipe.  I cheated myself one once, just to see what it would do.

By the way, the Headcrumbs mod which has put all those dropped heads of YouTubers on the loot tables ... well, you can stack two clay blocks and rclick the top one with any head in hand and it turns into a full model of that character.  I had been trying to place it on top like a snowman, but that's not how it's done.  That adds even more levels of fun and strangeness and color to the world.  More things to collect and toy with.

I did manage to get to one dimension tonight.  I also extended roads to my embassies and started putting dimension blocks around the embassies so it looks a bit like the dimension itself is starting to leak through to our world.  A long-term project is to setup a base of at least a few buildings in each dimension made of Overworld blocks, surrounding each return portal.  But I get so distracted by other little things ...

##

2/17/2022 EpicProportions world

I did some dimensional runs.  First, to the Mysterium, where I am still two levels to low to take out the golems which drop the thing I need.  I had some fun in the haunted castle testing two of the guns on undead trolls.  Another spawner I had segmented off was for nightmare spiders, which cause total blindness.  

I changed the portal in Yuma from Ancient Caverns (which are a trap of sorts) to Immortalis, which is just another trap, which sucks.  From there, I tp'd to Endicott to go through to Gardencia, but somehow the return from that portal now pops me out in Yuma where I switched the portal destination.  I hope that's a temporary glitch, because that will be annoying if portals started linking back to the wrong places.

I hopped over to Gardencia, and was surprised how hostile the little plants and veggies were, and how quickly they heal HP.  My portal spawned on a tiny platform over a wide lake of toxic green water, and of course I fell off twice.  I had to creative-fly out of being pummeled at one point.  Boy, this one is not a garden party!   I added bits of walls to one of my little "safe zones" (haha, safe is relative) which was next to a small tower which had spawners for some bug that I need hunter level 70 to touch.  So meh, I came home.

I spent some time over in the Deeplands, which is a dimension I actual enjoy visiting.  The little rockbiters and other mobs are not too bad and give plenty of grunts and snuffles to let you know they're coming.  They're almost cute little buggers.  Plus you get to dig up in the ceiling layers for deep cases, which are fun to find, seeing how some of the deep rock blocks explode when you hit them and others drop the little silverfish-type things that come munching after you.  I now see that's where I got this subterranean armor of mine, since it drops from deep cases, along with gold coins and other stuff.  While holed up in one of the skeletal ribcages that I fortified with cobble walls, a weird thing (case construct) came over to visit and made old-timey computer game noises when I hit it -- bleep bloop -- and woo hoo, it dropped my first new realmstone in ages, to Crystevia.

So I set up a Crystevia portal over at Elmira and went through to find a fairly peaceful place.  Overall dark and purple but with brightly colored crystals, ores and crystal glass pillars.  The first mob I faced was a construct of strength but was ironically the weakest creature I had faced all day.  Come other little green thing flew by and took potshots at me, but it was a mellow visit overall.  I suppose you trade the crystals to some NPC for some thingamajigs, or silk touch them all for building blocks.