Overgrowth 1.10.2: Highland Valley Chickens & Long Road

11/27/23 Overgrowth 1.10.2


I did get an hour last night to login and sort more chickens.  I expanded the metal chickens roost inside the tunnel wall going into Vee City: added hoppers all around the room going into item conduits down to that row of storage drawers.  Now the central dirt-floored pen with the vacuum chest is empty, and it looks a bit like a boxing arena to me for some reason.  Wooden fences all around, dirt floor with strange logo in the middle.  I figure I can move critters down there for breeding if needed.  It looks much more refined in there now, especially since I had to dig up a bit to get walking space above the hoppers so the ceiling is now the floor of the mob grinder tower overhead.  All the soularium and signalum chicks are in there now, leaving more empty pens in Midvale.  I wanted it to be just the pure metals, but also have conductive iron and electrical steel from Ender IO.  Future project: move all those somewhere else.

Out in Highland Valley I checked on my emeradic chicken.  What's funny is that you really only need one of a new species, since you can breed it with any other type for a 50% chance of getting another of the ones you care about.  The hard part is culling the dozens of excess critters that you no longer need; sure, they will still produce items, but it just gets out of control. I spent a while mining in the abandoned mineshafts way below that town while they clucked away happily.

It's not like I need a steady supply of any of these things, although pulsating iron would be nice so I can make more item conduits.  But they are good side projects and fun to revisit after a while, and if I do run out of diamantine alloy, I know right where to find a batch.  It all simulates the imaginary population actually having jobs and producing things.

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I had an extended session (maybe 2 hours instead of 1) in the world and I mostly left the cluckers alone.  I set out from Highland Valley to complete a road all the way back to "that village on the map" that turned out to be called Argyle.  The waypoint said it's 550 blocks diagonally.  I saw enough landmarks along the way that it seemd like it would be fun.  I started with 4 stacks of cobble for slabs and made stacks of torches as needed.  It passed 3 ravines, and a lava lake.  I put a little house named "Jason Camp" at the top of the first ravine.  Just past the second revine are the stairs going way up to the Brain Stone lab on top of the cliff, which I started redesigning a few weeks ago.  The last stretch was a wide field swarming with slimes, and I had to check the name on the sign at the town well to remember what I called it years ago.  A swiped one of the bulls while fighting slime babies and it chased me all over town headbutting me.

Right across those fields there is a small pair of lakes.  I can picture a little settlement there called Argyle Lakes.  And then next to the lava pool, my mind's eye sees a little camp called Redpool with the lava and obsidian chickens and a mob grinder tower (Prefab mod).  I should have brought a Villager Houses generator (Prefab) to start these settlements quickly, but I want to design unique walls for each one, not just my usual single layer of cobblestone wall, which is the quickest, cheapest, dumbest barricade, but I always use it.  Once you get to the post-scarcity phase of a world, more elegant builds should be possible.

Sure, there are map waypoints I can teleport to, and I have an Ender book with a dozen more teleports saved in it, but sometimes it's fun to just run across the slime-infested wastes to get somewhere.  It also lets these places between the main waypoints  be forgotten and be rediscovered on a future date.  I can see scrolling on the Journeymap a few years from now and seeing these little bases and settlements and either recalling what was there or wondering who built those?  Sure, it was obviously me, but short-term memory is a fickle thing.  I can visualize hundreds of places across my 12-15 big game worlds, but not EVERY little place every time.

From Argyle there's already an established road past the Salt Mine (future home of salt chickens if I can ever get them) to Cherry Grove (side street goes past the dye chicken farm to Limestone Ridge and Midvale) over to Spawn Town, then hang a left to Vee City just over the hill.  Along the way to Vee City from Spawn Tower there is a road on the right that goes all the way out to Acacia Village and White Sands.  A few thousand blocks of roads.  I enjoy building large connected networks of places.  Once again, each place should have a specialty or at least look at bit different.  Lately I have been using whichever Rockhounding stone blocks occur locally, so the buildings in the new settlements may start out as Prefab generic structures but end up with all wood or cobble replaced with some local purple stone, or blue slate from Earthworks.  Whatever is locally available.  It almost feels like those blocks do spawn in certain areas: out in Highland Valley I got at least 5 stacks of a pale purple stone, with more outcrops visible, and only a few deposits of other stone types.

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