Sunday, November 25, 2018

Creepers Hate Tacticians (Bytesize with player4709 Part 1)

Before reading, it is recommended to watch a tutorial on Tinkers' Construct, like this one by OMGCraft. You'll get a better understanding of what I'm about to show you.

This series has been canceled due to loss of interest.

I have finished my dreadful school work. I have trained for this moment. I am prepared for the challenge. I have started a serious playthrough of Bytesize with player4709.

We started at night with hostile mobs all over the place, which was disappointing considering that I joined as soon as the server started up, but I prepared for the worst.

Thankfully, we spawned on an island with a taiga biome, so I could quickly build a wooden shelter to keep us safe from hostile mobs. (I dislike dirt shelters and hiding underground without a torch.)
I built a simple wooden tower with a ladder and a platform. That way, we're unreachable by zombies and creepers, and if they try to climb, they'd get punched off. It also allowed us to jump onto trees and safely punch wood, so we weren't sitting ducks waiting for daytime.

I quickly crafted and placed the basic Tinkers' Construct tables, complete with a full pattern chest, while player4709 did a bit of mining.
Afterwards, I looked for wheat seeds, since hunger was a big early-game problem in many of my playthroughs. Unfortunately, grass and ferns were so freaking rare, and we didn't have bones. My hunger bar was drained to 0 for several in-game days in a row due to lack of seeds and zombies (and no Mo' Creatures mobs). There were cows and chickens, but there's no point in breeding without the crops to do so. Thankfully, the server was on Easy mode. I got used to Hard mode where starvation can kill the player.
Meanwhile, player4709 was pretty lucky. He found a large cave system and a lot of iron ores, as well as a dungeon. I haven't explored it, though, since I didn't want to "invade his territory", and I had my own mining hole (which I used to get cobblestone for my first Tinkers' Construct tools).

I was short on materials myself, so I continued mining in my mining hole, and I stumbled into a cave with a ton of different ores, especially iron. I also found at least one diamond ore, but I didn't mine it because I don't have Fortune.

When I finished mining, player4709 came back with a finished smeltery, a structure that smelts one ore for double the ingots, and can combine certain metals into alloys. I found a lot of copper and tin earlier, so I combined them into bronze and made bronze tool parts, which have 550 base durability and the same mining speed as a diamond pickaxe, but can only mine whatever an iron pickaxe can mine. Mining speed is important in a multiplayer adventure because it helps the team gather resources as fast as possible.
Unfortunately, a reverse creeper (from the Elemental Creepers mod) blew up near player4709 and shifted a portion of landmass near our base into the air, which destroyed one of our base entry points and made our home terrain harder to navigate.

At around this time, we got more seeds and wheat, so our food supply stabilized. I was able to restore my hunger bar to full. I then brought more cows and chickens to our mini farm (player4709 already brought some chickens in earlier).
But, just as when I thought I was alone, an electric creeper blew up behind me, and for some reason, it didn't just zap me with lightning--it zapped all the animals in our small farm, leaving nothing behind, as all the meat was destroyed. And I thought electric creepers only affected the player? Maybe it also affects nearby mobs?
To add insult to injury, an earth creeper blew up behind me yet again and spawned a lot of dirt around the blast area, blocking off another entry point. I had to dig up the dirt and use a longsword to get back to base. (Longswords in Tinkers' Construct have a special right-click move that quickly launches the player forward. It can be used to climb three-block-high areas or cross rivers.)
Lastly, not one, but TWO spider creepers blew up and not only spread cobwebs around our base, but also poisoned me a little.
For crying out loud, what do you creepers have against terrain advantages?

I got SO mad at our ruined environment, I told player4709 (who wasn't playing with me at this time) that I was going to move our base to a place with better natural terrain, and he agreed. I can't stand the restricted landmasses of islands.

I moved about 3000 blocks to a large plains biome near a desert, a forest, and the ocean. It was fairly hilly but also flat on the surface, making it ideal for a base. It also had a ravine.
I took two round trips to move our important stuff, which was a pain since I needed to do other real-life tasks, but it was worth it. I safely transported about 95% of our important things.

Trying to capture the house's foundation and the scenery at the same time.
Photography is challenging sometimes.

Meanwhile, I set up the foundation for another elevated base, but this time, it's a 13x13 house with a balcony surrounding it. There are two 6x6 bedrooms, and a 13x6 main room with cooking and crafting facilities.
I'm planning to make a basement level for storing items.
There's no roof yet, and the build lacks detail, so I'll put those later as well.

player4709 originally made a two-level, 3x3 smeltery, which can smelt 18 ores simultaneously, but I'm planning to make it into a two-level 5x5 so we can smelt 50. I already gathered a lot of sand and clay, so all that's left is the gravel. Using all three of these together makes the materials for building the smeltery.

I also need to light up a lot of the surrounding area to reduce the risk of being backstabbed.

Anyway, moral lessons: player4709 and I work better when we're split up, doing our own chores. And I should be more vigilant.

Putting the playthrough itself aside: I constantly asked player4709 and his brother Mr. Binary to start up the server yesterday, since I had several important tasks in-between play time.
But I told them I won't bother them on the day I wrote this so I could focus on my blog. After all, I wanted to make up for my hiatus which was forced upon by the oppressive overlord known as school work. Let me tell you: Writing this and Coach G-Force Part 4 was a pain in my brain, since I had to explain details in a way that (I think) can be understood by many people, and the process took hours.
I don't think I have time to fix my teams for Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee!

TL;DR summary: I built a wooden tower as a shelter to avoid mobs. player4709 and I quickly and independently gathered a lot of ores and made a smeltery, but I struggled to find food. Our tower was trashed by several different Elemental Creepers, so I moved to a bigger, faraway plains biome where I partially built a new base.

P.S. I have updated my Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee! team: https://reallunatictactician.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-team-for-pokemon-lets-go-eevee.html

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