(no subject)
May. 23rd, 2011 06:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysobelIn miscellaneous news of miscellany:
* I have been closing my door at night to keep Suri out, just because getting licked every few hours and/or getting walked across (she's a small cat, 7 pounds something, but when that weight is packed onto four tiny spots of surface area, it's a lot of pressure, and she has a fondness for walking directly on my boobs as an exit route from the wall side of the bed) was not conducive to getting a necessary amount of sleep.
I did this for the first time Saturday night, because I knew I had to get up for church and I didn't want to snore during the sermon or anything. When I got back, Suri spent a lot of time on my lap, about 1/2 enthusiastic licking, 1/4 snoozing, and 1/4 "you ABANDONED me" reproachful looks.
I did it again last night, and Suri has taken the more catlike approach of completely ignoring my very existence.
(But I slept very soundly...)
* Minecraft has eaten my life. In short form, my brain decided that it would be an /excellent/ idea to implement a mob farm that I saw on youtube. The basic first steps are a) find a good center point in an area that's as oceany/icy as possible, b) do four lines, one each direction, of 74 cobblestone, c) fill out the square that those lines form the midline + of, and d) clear out anything within that frame that is not water.
The basic subsequent steps are e) build up the frame to make a sky-high cube, f) fill in one of the quadrants nine layers down from maximum height to be the floor of the mob trap, g) build a middle floor, h) build a ceiling one block down from max height, i) set up some complicated system of water canals to funnel mobs to an exit point (either a hole in the floor, or a door that you can control with redstone wiring), g) make a platform at sea level underneath the exit point that mobs will fall and go splat on, h) make sure any and all underground caves beneath the cube are well-lit to prevent mob spawns, i) cover everydamnthing with half-steps to prevent spawns on the structure itself, and then j) set mode to something other than peaceful, stand in the middle of the cube, and profit.
I have not gotten there. I am still on step d.
(I don't do well one-on-one with mobs, so I have no gunpowder to make tnt, nor creepers to blow shit up for me, so "clearing out" involves a lot of digging and mining and digging and digging and discarding the fucking snowballs. I am up to three double chests full of dirt, one double chest full of sand, one double chest full of sandstone and cobblestone, and three quadrants cleared and the last almost cleared.)
As sidetrack from the Project of Neverending Digging, I decided to create a minecart track between my home base and the mob farm. I got about twenty squares in before realizing that a ground-level track would not do, because the damn cows and sheep kept standing on it, so I did one at the height of my home base, which is elevated 15 or so blocks off the ground. And because a) I am a huge dork, and b) there is currently a bug that randomly drops the player through solid surfaces, I built support pillars. Which aren't necessary for support, but they can be laddered on to get back up.
To give you some idea of scale:
- the bottom level frame for the mob trap takes a bit less than 900 cobblestone to lay out, i.e. 14 full stacks.
- the distance between my home base and the mob trap is 1100 squares, which is more than 17 stacks, just for the track alone and none of the pillars.
- each stack of 64 tracks takes either a) 24 iron and 6 sticks, for normal rails, or b) 64 gold and 11 redstone dust and 11 sticks, for powered
- I am using about 1 powered for every 24 normal, which means that 100 rails are 4 powered and 96 normal, which means that 1100 rails are 44 powered and 1056 normal, which means that to complete the track I need a total of 396 iron (a bit over six stacks), 44 gold, 8 redstone, and a bunch of trees.
(and of course my sense of honor requires that I not use an inventory editor, so all of the digging is manual, and all of the building is out of stuff I've dug, and I'm maybe halfway through the tracks and in desperate need of iron again)
Or to sum up, I am insane.
* I really wish I could shake the writing brainsquid of "I can't do the idea/image justice". Because yeah, what makes it onto paper will never match up to the vaguely shaped ideal in my head, but if I don't write my stories, no one will. Even if they're plots that other people have written, the stories are mine. (Aren't they?)
* I have been closing my door at night to keep Suri out, just because getting licked every few hours and/or getting walked across (she's a small cat, 7 pounds something, but when that weight is packed onto four tiny spots of surface area, it's a lot of pressure, and she has a fondness for walking directly on my boobs as an exit route from the wall side of the bed) was not conducive to getting a necessary amount of sleep.
I did this for the first time Saturday night, because I knew I had to get up for church and I didn't want to snore during the sermon or anything. When I got back, Suri spent a lot of time on my lap, about 1/2 enthusiastic licking, 1/4 snoozing, and 1/4 "you ABANDONED me" reproachful looks.
I did it again last night, and Suri has taken the more catlike approach of completely ignoring my very existence.
(But I slept very soundly...)
* Minecraft has eaten my life. In short form, my brain decided that it would be an /excellent/ idea to implement a mob farm that I saw on youtube. The basic first steps are a) find a good center point in an area that's as oceany/icy as possible, b) do four lines, one each direction, of 74 cobblestone, c) fill out the square that those lines form the midline + of, and d) clear out anything within that frame that is not water.
The basic subsequent steps are e) build up the frame to make a sky-high cube, f) fill in one of the quadrants nine layers down from maximum height to be the floor of the mob trap, g) build a middle floor, h) build a ceiling one block down from max height, i) set up some complicated system of water canals to funnel mobs to an exit point (either a hole in the floor, or a door that you can control with redstone wiring), g) make a platform at sea level underneath the exit point that mobs will fall and go splat on, h) make sure any and all underground caves beneath the cube are well-lit to prevent mob spawns, i) cover everydamnthing with half-steps to prevent spawns on the structure itself, and then j) set mode to something other than peaceful, stand in the middle of the cube, and profit.
I have not gotten there. I am still on step d.
(I don't do well one-on-one with mobs, so I have no gunpowder to make tnt, nor creepers to blow shit up for me, so "clearing out" involves a lot of digging and mining and digging and digging and discarding the fucking snowballs. I am up to three double chests full of dirt, one double chest full of sand, one double chest full of sandstone and cobblestone, and three quadrants cleared and the last almost cleared.)
As sidetrack from the Project of Neverending Digging, I decided to create a minecart track between my home base and the mob farm. I got about twenty squares in before realizing that a ground-level track would not do, because the damn cows and sheep kept standing on it, so I did one at the height of my home base, which is elevated 15 or so blocks off the ground. And because a) I am a huge dork, and b) there is currently a bug that randomly drops the player through solid surfaces, I built support pillars. Which aren't necessary for support, but they can be laddered on to get back up.
To give you some idea of scale:
- the bottom level frame for the mob trap takes a bit less than 900 cobblestone to lay out, i.e. 14 full stacks.
- the distance between my home base and the mob trap is 1100 squares, which is more than 17 stacks, just for the track alone and none of the pillars.
- each stack of 64 tracks takes either a) 24 iron and 6 sticks, for normal rails, or b) 64 gold and 11 redstone dust and 11 sticks, for powered
- I am using about 1 powered for every 24 normal, which means that 100 rails are 4 powered and 96 normal, which means that 1100 rails are 44 powered and 1056 normal, which means that to complete the track I need a total of 396 iron (a bit over six stacks), 44 gold, 8 redstone, and a bunch of trees.
(and of course my sense of honor requires that I not use an inventory editor, so all of the digging is manual, and all of the building is out of stuff I've dug, and I'm maybe halfway through the tracks and in desperate need of iron again)
Or to sum up, I am insane.
* I really wish I could shake the writing brainsquid of "I can't do the idea/image justice". Because yeah, what makes it onto paper will never match up to the vaguely shaped ideal in my head, but if I don't write my stories, no one will. Even if they're plots that other people have written, the stories are mine. (Aren't they?)