VeeTech 1.5.2 - Farlander Fields, gazeteer, storage update

2/19/24

I had some play time last night, and spent most of that time in Farlander Fields.  I did a bunch of clean up, got rid of a ton of grass, and walled off the whole south end of the peninsula.  I guess technically it doesn't need walls, since the land is completely lit and mobs that need walls don't spawn in the water, but they could spawn further up the coast and walk around.  There is a lot of new space to build now, and two new roads, one leading out to a tiny dock on the east side.  I am not sure whether I should build my own buildings there or bring over more farlander huts with the capsule stations -- but I haven't done one of those in years, and it's so easy to make a mistake and cause a big mess.  And those guys are noisy.  There is no sound muffler in this pack.

After that, I updated my town directory TXT file.  It's tricky trying to list buildings along a network of roads in an orderly fashion.  In the end, I list the roads alphabetically, and each building has an address based on either the X or Z coordinate, whichever one changes in that direction.  Below each road, I list the addresses in ascending order and give the "address" where crossroads happen.  So, under Sea Street, there would be entries like:

123 Sea Street: building
    description

127 Sea Street >> Bay Street heads West

140 Sea Street: another building

I really enjoy making these gazeteers of my settlements.  I include what is in each building (roughly), which recipes are on which worktables, which crops are in the farm plots, and any trades being offered.  In theory, I could then search the text files for an item and see where it's grown or made or traded ... but I never do make use of them after I write them up.  Although I include the Notes mod in most of my packs, I don't really like writing these in-game.  I would rather alt-tab to Notepad, because I can keep the F3 screen or full view visible beneath the Notepad window by hitting /t to bring up the chat window and freeing up the mouse.  I add a /notes folder under the world save folder, so when I do backup Zip files, the notes are included.  The Notes mod puts them in a /notes/local/WorldName folder that's not in the world save path, and in those worlds I often forget to include that file in my backups.

This address system is way better than my old system of just naming every building with "FF-1", "FF-2", etc, since a new batch of buildings might put new numbers "FF-20" on the other side of town from where I left of with FF-19 months before.  The only Achilles' heel in this system is: if a road makes a 90-degree turn, it needs a new name, or all the buildings along that stretch will have the same number.

After that, I tp'd back to the Cathedral base and dropped off some chests.  The area must be chunkloaded, since the furnaces finished the 5 stack each of cobble and gravel that I put into them.  From there, I took a door out to the Pyramid and explored a bit.  There was part of a village showing in the woods NW of there, so I walked over and saw a village called Tanglewood, which was a perfect name, since the trees were so dense and there are half houses, houses partly underground -- a weird place.  I walled it off at some point, but it doesn't appear to have anything to offer.  Maybe I can go back some day and add treehouses for a more vertical feel.  On the way back, I dropped some TNT in the desert so I could bring home 6 stacks of sand, since my main storage was almost out of sand and glass entirely.

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Last night I pictured an update to the deep storage in the basement level of the Cathedral base.  I wanted to add some automation that feeds into the main drop chest right above, but the line of DSUs was in the way.  So instead of 4x8 lengthwise, I pushed out the walls and made is 4x8 straight ahead, which gave me the right half of the expanded room for 4 furnaces with hoppers, 2 stacks of pulverizer+furnace, two "Pulverize only" machines, and 3 automats.

It took a while but it's all running smoothly now.  Note that you can break the Deep Storage Units and they don't spill their contents -- which would instantly crash a server if it had the full 2 billion items stored -- they just go into your inventory with a tooltip saying what's inside.  This is a lot like the caches from Thermal Expansion, though this early 1.5.2 version of TE doesn't have those yet.  So I guess if I do a run to stock up on clay, I can pop out the DSU and bring it with me, then put it back when done, but considering how many distractions are out there in the world, I will probably get carried away and forget, and leave the DSU in some far-off town or desert.

I did spend some time with an iron chest, going from town to town cleaning up the local chests.  In other words, if the chest was in a mine, leave the stones and ores behind but take out the mish-mash of wood and saplings and fruit.  If the chest was in a farm area, take out the stones and logs and mob drops.  Force wrench the chest and bring it with me.

Funny how I can always think of more things to build and more tasks to do.  Other times, it's just fun to run around the world and do the harvests, or choose to grab two stacks of marble, or build that apartment building outside Cayuga Lake for all the invisible NPCs around town.

Of course, every "build" is open-ended.  Sure, I can build a 6 room office building tomorrow night.  Then I can add a second floor or basement later, or expand it if I left any open space around it, or add tunnels to connect it to other buildings.  For an apple orchard, the build might be four trees and two stacks of apples in a chest as the initial goal, later to be expanded to 10 trees and a full chest with apples (and no other junk), at which point it might feel done today but when I pass through sometime next year I might see a way to improve it more.