Jan 2025 on Overgrowth 1.1: sea tunnels

250114 Overgrowth 1.1

Every now and then I get an evening where I can sit down for an hour or two and add to my endless Minecraft worlds.

On my laptop, I play the largest world I have ever explored, my old VeeTech 1.5.2 world.  For some reason I hopped out to some tiny islands, started a small base on island, and ended up digging networks of tunnels connecting over a dozen islands stretched over 600 blocks of ocean.  There were a variety of ships to plunder along the way and two galleons left intact for some future exploit.  This whole network leads just offshore from my tiny village of Clayton, where I tried doing the Refugee to Regent Challenge years ago but it never got past a few dirt & clay hovels.

On my desktop, my Overgrowth 1.1 world is still a blast.  That whole area around Lakeside is so built up, there seems to be a building for almost every mod and set of blocks, plus bees, butterflies, tree breeding, Inventory Pets, every Harvestcraft tree, Ebon Arts, you name it.  And from there, it's connected to a network of villages and towns by an extensive roads network.  I used to lay slabs down for roads, but these days, the super-minimal roads are just right-clicking with the shovel on the grass.

Around Xmas, it's the perfect time to fly around and look for all those Inventory Pets chests hiding in tiny oak trees around the world, but for the holidays the chests turn into bright red gift boxes -- so easy to spot.  Those were some fun expeditions with my cloud pet letting me fly around collecting more pets.

I have moved a few of the resource chickens to new locations, and recently added two big cherry wood longhouses to Cherry Camp.  Just last night I setup some glowstone and snowball chickens on the harbor at Vee City to slowly make resource for glowballs.  Glowballs are a great little-known item, where you can throw tiny balls of light that stick to blocks and give as much light as a torch with the ugly stick.

I explored the continent north of Vee City over the last two weeks, and found a few more villages, one which I had to call Hommlet as a callback to the first D&D module with a home village to base your adventurers in.  Then I flew around and surveyed a string of minor islands (none bigger than about 20x40 blocks) between there and Vee City, so I got it into my head that these islands could all be connected by an underwater tunnel, which I have now built out about 800 blocks.  It's a simple 1x3 tunnel with 1x2 side tunnels to the islands and occasional windows.  But it has been quite a construction project.  I want a simple rail line in there eventually, but mostly forgot to add any niches where redstone torches could help power the rails.

Tonight I finished a big part of the tunnel and fixed the windows to stick out one block from the 1x3 tunnel, so I can put redstone torches in those nooks in the future.  While building past La Crescenta Island (and moving 4 more fluid cows over there), I saw some oddly dark blocks at the bottom of the deep ocean with bubbles coming out.  They turned out to be treasure chests from Actually Additions, though, considering how OP most of that mod is, these treasures were pretty simple items: gold bars, gold nuggets, name tags, fish, nothing fancy.  But still, that's the fun of exploring these worlds.  I don't think I have ever seen those before.

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250116: Overgrowth 1.1

So, the big Sea Tunnel starts by the pier at Vee City:

-493 53 192 start of tunnel

-599 53 192 under the tiny sand isle, ladder going up

-629 rail currently ends here

-643 53 192 ladder up to big sand isle

-660 cuts through caves

-690 49 192 drop lower to cross Deep Ocean (but not so far that it's underground)

-892 ladder down to cave

-1081 right passage to island, -1081 67 155 Sandy Isle Sea Tunnel Stop, empty island with a few cactus

-1106 tunnel ends just the baseline now

-1181 tunnel resumes

-1220 49 192 right passage to La Crescenta Island, small base, liquid cows, a few crops

Branch 1: tunnel through the island

-1220 49 92 deep cave below, unexplored

-1220 49 76 tunnel base only, back over Deep Ocean

-1220 49 -115 turns left

-1257 49 -115 ladder up to Hommlet Harbor (built 1/1/2025), from here there are dirt roads to Hommlet & other villages

-1387 66 -319 Hommlet (discovered 12/26/2024)

-1493 66 -742 dirt road intersection: Scarsdale to west, Stirling to north

-1852 69 -719 Scarsdale (discovered 12/26/2024)

-1513 65 -956 Stirling (discovered 2/15/2024)

Branch 2:

-1224 49 192 tunnel ends just the baseline now

-1251 49 192 tower ladder down to seafloor, down into unexplored caves

-1420 49 192 tunnel base turns right, just above the seafloor in a large coral reef biome

-1420 49 164 tunnel resumes

-1420 64 148 ladder up to surface: Birch Isle Sea Tunnel Stop

-1420 49 114 tunnel ends, just the baseline now

-1420 49 50 tunnel runs under another island

-1420 49 23 ladder up to White Isle Sea Tunnel Stop

I finally worked out an effective build method for these:

Start by extending the 1-wide base of the tunnel to some new distance.  

Every 10 blocks (use coordinates), put two blocks on each side at base level.  

Extend the existing tunnel toward me with 8 stone bricks per row, then a layer of bricks, layer of glass, layer of bricks.

How to clear out the water: put 3 fence gates at new opening.  Use dirt to fill the top internal layer (it is 3 high), break the dirt, clear the middle layer with dirt, clear it, clear the bottom layer.  Take down the previous 3 fence gates.

You now have a 10-long extension of the tunnel with dry interior.

Also, the materials worked out perfectly because I had an auto-smelt efficiency III shovel.  So when I needed more glass, pop down to seafloor and dig sand, for bricks, dig clay.  And for more stone bricks, well, stone is everywhere.  I gifted myself maybe 1/3 of the stone bricks for this, but also took thousands from the storage network at Vee City.  And my squid pet made all the time underwater possible.

I really did this as a fun big project and to connect those new towns on this other continent to the north of Vee City.  

Yes, I can just fly around with my cloud pet, but I do enjoy walking the land sometimes.  I found lots of new caves to explore and mine along the way, so I will end up putting chests at the top of each of those and see what I can bring up from the depths.

After Stirling the only other villages on that continent are Dundee (-745 75 -682) and Benton (-207 71 -140) most of the way back around to Vee City.  Benton is the town just north of Spawn Tower.  And far to the north is Aberdeen (-188 70 -1729) which I don't think even has walls or torches yet.  The road from Scarsdale hits the north-south road and could continue due east for 753 to hit Dundee.  A project for another day.

And there are still about 1000 blocks of tunnels to actually complete and remove the water from ...

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250121: Overgrowth 1.1

Well, duh.  If I'm going to be building a sea tunnel, build one or two 10-long sections and use 2-3 sponges to clear each section, drop a furnace, throw wet sponges inside with a piece of coal, and by the time the next 10-long section is done, the sponges will be dry again.

Last night I made a new shovel and completed a dirt path 750 blocks over to Dundee, so now that's on the road network.  I added my usual town inventory files for these villages, not naming every building (yet), just who's selling what in the markets.  As useless as the villagers can be, I sometimes get in the mood to feed them items to unlock more trades.  I know I can find everything in the world, but I like the variety of getting items different ways.

I keep forgetting we've got the Cubic Villager mod in this world.  I should turn some village into a factory of input/output heads.  I wouldn't have to put a sound muffler down in every market house.  The Wand of Villager Blocker needs two blaze rods, a block of emerald and two diamonds, but I think it has a decent amount of charges.

After saying I wasn't going to catalog these towns completely, I did put up street signs and catalog Dundee before completing the 750+ block dirt road & tunnel under desert to Benton, my original Village #2.