Christmas with Angel Zombies & Space Base

251225 VeeTech2

A quick visit on Christmas ... it's fun to see all the holiday-themed surprises added by different mods.  It's the last day of the 12 Days of Petmas from the Inventory Pets mod, but in this world I never set up a Pets HQ.  I really needed a cloud pet to visit the underside of the upside down RFTools world, so I tossed six blocks of diamonds to get one.  It's less cheaty than going into creative mode.

That is such a fun dimesion, with all the terrain, trees and ponds facing down and a flat slab for the bottom of the world up around 120y.  There were ice spikes pointing down, and a few other non-birch biomes down here.  On the flat topside, I just flew around grabbing ore veins, and I used another material absorber to absorb the blocks of a few labs, and showed Anne how to properly make new dimlets from those parts.

I showed her how the red sandstone maze dimension was a bit useless, but I made a feature absorber to see if I could capture the Maze feature.  It took about 10 minutes to power up to 100% and when I got back home, I did make a new Maze dimlet.  But while we were there we saw the strangest thing: zombies with angel wings, and after they die, there's a ghostly spirit that rises up for about two seconds.

We started googling what mod could possibly be adding that for the holiday.  The most plausible to me is Extra Utilities, since they add the angel ring and angel block, and these textures looked very similar.  As we explored that maze dimension, it had its charms: lush caves poking out from mountains and walls of the red sandstone, and the dimension labs were either perched on stone outcrops or half buried in between walls.

I tried one more dimension, using the Checker feature dimlet ... and got a bizarre world that is just the frames of every chunk rendered in stone brick, with emptiness in between.  BUT this dimension had structures from almost every dimension.  I found desert temples and swamp temples next to sprawling Nether fortress, all over Void space.  We even saw an igloo.  I added a dimensional cross block in front of a canyons dimlet and got canyon-shaped solid deposits of that block.  And, the Nether fortress had way more zombie pigmen than usual, all with the same angel wing buff.  I tried to get the blazes to hit one of the pigmen to see if they have the ascending moment, but it was a dangerous place to hang out.  No other mob that we saw had those wings.  I called that dimension (Dim 17) "Scaffold" and while I was trying to sleep last night, I picture going back to rescue the fluid cows and livestock that spawned on those one-wide perlious lines of blocks.  The maintenance cost is 531 RF/tick.

The Ender IO generators show snow over the power meter, and give Christmas greetings in a few dozen languages.

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251226 VeeTech2

I went back to the Scaffold dimension.  The framework is made of 2x2 wide horizontal and vertical beams with the bottom layer at 2y and the top at 128y, with the layers 32 blocks tall.  I got a builder's wand from a Nether chest, and realized I had never used one of those before.  Seriously.  So nice to be able to highlight a line or group of a single block type and r-click to extend in the direction of my choice.  I quickly filled in one of those 32x32 areas with dirt, added some fences, and grabbed some animals.

When I got back my whole power network was down, and I had to do a review of how the Flux Networks work.  Flux plugs add power to the network, flux points extract power, and it's supposed to work across dimensions.  My reactor was out of fuel.  I need to get some more power gen online one of these days.  I think I left the dimension tab in the power block, and it might actually have drained my whole network.

I loaded up more uranium, saw the teleport link to Luna and figured I should try to get back to space.  This time, I wanted a space station, and it was quite a drag to get through all the steps.  I made a bigger launch pad (11x13), a space station builder, and 8-high structure tower.  I built my station out of hardened glass, quite clear glass, iron blocks, tin blocks and a few laboratory blocks.   Scanned the station, and after finding out the satellite bay and space station id chip go in the station builder, I got an ok.  Then clicked Build and it's a good thing they warn us that the whole thing you built will vanish.  Poof. Then a satellite builder to make two copies of my station id chip.

My machine was grinding away on some kind of automated process, probably virus scans, so gameplay was very choppy tonight.

I reassembled the rocket parts I brought back from Luna after the Space Cobweb Incident.  Put the station in the guidance computer, and I think it's good to go.

The hard drive is grinding so badly, I had to log out and wait until later to try again.

Hard drive has been crunching for a half hour now.  Guess I'm done for the night.  Hope I can get out safely without corrupting world files.

2225: took 40 minutes to escape back to main menu.  Machine is still grinding.

2236: looks like SysMain was the process eating all my resources.  Non-stop 12-15% on Task Manager.  Described as a superfetch program that analyzes system usage and tries to preload crap you don't want it to touch.  I also stopped a few other services and the hard drive is finally quiet.  WTF.

2243: World is up and running again.  All those automated services are such a waste of time.  

I followed all the steps in this video and the rocket launched fine, but never deployed the space station.  Never got the "Press space to Descend" option.  Whatever.  I'm trapped in orbit with no fuel, no way to get home.

Well ... I managed the same crazy escape.  I had to disassembled the rocket, only to find that the space station was in fact right below it, sitting quietly in orbit.  

I never did get the jetpack in the spacesuit to work so it was my cloud pet that saved me and let float on down to my front door.  I used regular iron doors, saw that I needed to replace those with proper airlock doors (made from 6 steel).  And I didn't add a place to stand in front of the doors because my launchpad was so cramped.  Then the escape: I cheated the transmitter & receiver & dialing device from RFTools.  Had a capacitor and spare generator and some coal in my tools backpack.  Was able to dial back down to my lab.

But when I tried to teleport back, I was "killed by magic" because the receiver failed to power up.  Guess I forgot to connect the energy conduit to that one extra block.  I actually thought that was powered from the remote base.  Dang it.

So I woke up back in one of my old bases in the endless city, as if it was all a bad dream.  I will have to take another rocket back up there and hook up the power to that receiver.  I'm not sure why the rocket would not let me r-shift to dismount.  I always have to disassemble it, and then it's just a bunch of parts without a lauchpad and rocket assembler to put it back together.

At least my base is there.  Nice view!  Will continue tomorrow.