I’ve been hopping around a variety of games for the past few weeks, different types of gameplay but all of them fun. Let’s get into them.

Minecraft

There’s going to be a few modpacks on this list so I hope you’re not sick of me talking about Minecraft yet.

Invasion

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been joining the Froggy & Phoenix crew every Saturday for the past month or so to play Invasion. There’s still quite a few deaths happening (especially now that laser creepers riding robot dinosaurs have now started spawning), we’ve made a lot of progress and are enjoy the whole experience. You can tell just how many things we’ve had to kill from our Wall of Skulls (which only drop rarely from enemies).

We also do silly things sometimes like steal each other’s Minecraft skins to play Doppelganger.

Homestead

This is one of the packs that I’ve been playing solo and it’s not the easiest pack. But when I’m in the mood for something more realistic and laid-back, it fits the bill. It has made me appreciate vanilla horses and wolves more, which are often overlooked in other packs due to mods providing better alternatives. I have to say that one of my favorite features of it is a fact that you can shear creepers, which prevents them from exploding and make them entirely harmless. And their skin is replaced with one of them crying.

There are also some very cool (and sometimes very strange) ruins that spot on the world. For example, I came across a pagoda-style building and found whatever the hell this is inside.

Sprout

I was getting a little sick of Homestead, so I switched over to Sprout. This pack is quite fun for exploring and has a definite fantasy vibe, what with dragons and dwarves roaming the countryside.

I’ve most recently gotten into Ars Magica 2 which is an amazing mod that lets you craft your own spells. I’ve only just started out in it so I’ve just created a fireball spell and a spell that lets me throw a light source from a distance so far. But I really like to unlock more and see what other kinds of combination I can make.

RimWorld

In addition to my more advanced playthrough, I started a new tribal game featuring folks from the Froggy & Phoenix crew as the pawns. So far we have had two raids, a rabid squirrel attack, Froggy and Lord Crumb having a whirlwind romance that lasted all of three minutes, and Lord Crumb attempting several times to burn down the colony in his fire-starting sprees. The last two may or may not be related. The F&P crew have found the whole thing quite entertaining and keep asking me for updates on how the colony is doing.

The Division

Lord Crumb and I have not forgotten the shooty goodness of Ghost Recon Wildlands but unfortunately Lord Crumb’s laggy internet is still an issue. But we remembered that we both own The Division and hadn’t played it since the open beta so we gave it a shot. The story isn’t award-winning but it’s still an interesting premise and I quite like some of the characters like Faye Lau and Dr. Jessica Kandel. The cover base mechanics are quite good and while it doesn’t have Wildland’s drones, the different abilities you can unlock are fun to play with, with Pulse being my favourite. The graphics are pretty nice and I think they did a good job of adding variety with the weather, where it’ll range from clear to foggy to snowy over time.

I’m pretty sure we found a Shaun of the Dead easter egg as well.

7 Days to Die

Unfortunately The Division is rather hard on my wrists so I asked if we could switch to another co-op game every once in a while to help with that. We decided on 7 Days to Die, which we hadn’t played since a brief foray into Alpha 15. After playing for a few days on a new random map, we were joined by mtnpapa (of the F&P crew) and the three of us have made our base inside a strip club. Something of an unconventional choice but the brick walls are pretty strong and a chemistry station was inside. We did indeed have to take care of several zombie strippers before we could take it over.

We’ve managed to survive the 7th night and are just coming up on the 14th night. We all have sledgehammers and plenty of arrows so I think we’ll be able to survive it.

That’s all for now! I’m going to miss out on Invasion this weekend (got a Thanksgiving family dinner to go to) and Lord Crumb won’t have much time for any co-op games but I’m still looking forward to playing more RimWorld and/or Minecraft.

In addition to all the other games I’ve been playing lately, RimWorld has also been getting some attention. Despite having spent 260+ hours in the game, I have yet to actually complete a single scenario. Completing a scenario means that you’ve managed to build your own spaceship or traveled to a downed spaceship that a friendly AI told you about, with the end result of getting your colonist off the planet. With that in mind, I have returned to the game with the goal of doing just that before the next alpha release.

Boreas-by-the-sea of the faction Hinterland began as the standard tribe scenario of five colonists. I’ve been playing this colony for quite a while now; it currently has 16 colonists, is in the Industrial Age, and has electricity.

I’ve been a fan of mountainous maps for a while for a couple reasons, one of them being that it’s easy to set up starting defenses. You just find an area that’s mostly surrounded by stone and build a few walls to fill in the gaps. Having one side of the map completely covered in the mountains also means that you never have to worry about enemies spawning there. In the case of Boreas-by-the-sea, I decided to try a coastal mountain map for the first time and found that it works even more to my advantage. The deep ocean water is impassible so what forms another natural barrier that enemies can’t spawn on. The sandy beaches are also a great location to put wind turbines because they’re large open areas where you never have to worry about trees growing in the way. I also have a few mods that let me put the area to even more use, particularly Water Power which adds tidal electricity and Basic Bridges which (obviously) lets me build bridges across water (and has a fishing add-on for extra food).

I’m particularly happy with the way the colony’s common room turned out. The fridges keep meals in an easily accessible place, the radio provide some soothing music, it has some cool egg-shaped chairs from RIMkea, there’s a gallery of paintings to look at, and the colored LED lights look great above the pool table.

The comms room is looking pretty classy with the fountain and hedges; I mean, we have to impress wherever we’re trading with. The vault next to it had more silver than I know what to do with.

We went through a lot of cloth making sure our animals had nice comfortable beds, but considering how much wool and milk the muffalos provide and how much are smarter animals haul around, it was worth it.

Our prisoner cells are pretty swanky as well, what with having their own fridges and en suite bathroom.

One of my new favorite mods is ED-ShieldsBasic, which adds much larger versions of the personal shields. The use of a lot of power and can eventually be worn down but being able to shoot enemies without them being able to hit you is a fantastic advantage.

The Centralized Climate Control mod was a little difficult to figure out at first, but I eventually got to work and now all the rooms are pretty easy to keep at the same temperature. I set it up in an ancient structure filled with cryptosleep caskets (after “evicting” the previous tenants) because I didn’t want to remove the caskets but I wanted to use the large room for something.

Getting this far into the game after starting as a tribe hasn’t been the smoothest ride but it’s certainly been an interesting experience. Raids have been plentiful, although some are more effective than others. The one where they were fruitlessly throwing molotovs in the rain and eventually just gave up and went home was one of the funnier ones.

The raids where the enemies are attacked by wargs are also quite amusing to watch.

There was a toxic fallout event that happened fairly early on in the game, which could have been deadly for us because it kills all crops and wildlife. Luckily I knew from watching YouTube videos best thing to do was to stay under roofed areas, leaving only to retrieve the animal corpses for food. Apparently eating toxic flesh does not hurt your colonists in any way.

Also impossible to forget is the time when a psychic ship landed right in our fields, or the time when a toxic ship landed on our beach only to be followed by another psychic ship that ended up right next to it.

This colony has also seen its fair share of man-hunting animal packs. Everything from elks…

…to bears…

…to elephants (So. Much. Blood.)…

…to my personal favorite, cows.

But it hasn’t been all bad. We haven’t lost many colonist. We have some pets with awesome names like Buster the warg, Moustache the timber wolf, and Killer the arctic fox. There’s even been a wedding or two.

As well, the teaching lessons (courtesy of Colony Leadership) must be mind-blowing because everyone wants to attend them, even the traders that just happened to be in our colony at the time.

The good news is that the colony is progressing at a good pace and I think I’ll be able to reach my goal in the not-too-distant future. I just hope that the storyteller AI doesn’t throw too many more curve balls my way.

After spending all that time on Project Ozone 2, you would think that I would be quite sick of Minecraft. Well, that’s half true. In some ways I’ve moved on to other games but in some ways I’ve only immersed myself deeper into Minecraft.

Building my own modpack

Project Ozone 2 is a 1.7.10 modpack just like the first Project Ozone and Agrarian Skies 2, which I have played before. It seems that for that version of Minecraft, it’s not much variation in the mods that pack creators put together. Sometimes they use it for an interesting premise like a skyblock, but after a while it all becomes too familiar. Doing the same thing over again in a different pack get a bit boring after a while. So towards the end of Project Ozone 2, I began watching some Minecraft youtubers who were playing newer packs, made for Minecraft versions like 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12. Due to a lot of 1.7.10 mods not being updated for these newer versions, these packs have a lot of new mods I’d never seen before. I always enjoy learning new things so I was instantly drawn to these strange new mods. I wanted to explore them, to dig into what they could really do beyond videos I was watching. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a pack that had all of the mods that I want to try out. Fortunately I discovered that you can build your own packs relatively easily through the Curse/Twitch client. And that’s how Craft Through the Ages was born.

The description talks about how it has mods for every “age” of Minecraft but honestly, I just came up with that because I needed to have some sort of cohesive description for the Curse project page before the pack would be approved. In truth, I really did just throw a bunch of mods together that I wanted to try out, only removing some because they conflicted with other mods or because the pack had too many of them at first. Once I had something stable, I put it up on the server I was hosting on my second computer for Lord Crumb and I to play on. Eventually I updated to real paid Minecraft server and even invited Froggy, Phenix, and Mtnpapa (another fan of theirs) to play on it as well if they were interested. While Froggy and Phenix have done a few videos on the server, it’s usually just Lord Crumb and I who play on it.

On the server, I’ve been flitting around between a number of projects and have probably spent far too long decorating again. So far the mods I’ve worked with the most are Astral Sorcery (a magic mod based off starlight), Embers (a magic/tech mod with a dwarven theme), and Doggy Talents (because dogs). And I built some airships.

On the other hand, Lord Crumb has done a little bit of Actually Additions but has mostly been working on Futurepack, quite a beefy mod based around space-age tech that eventually leads you to visit other planets. He’s also had a bit of fun with another mod that lets you place pictures from the internet in game. He also drew a pentagram using lasers on the side of a villager’s house because that’s how he rolls.

Moar Minecraft

In addition to playing Craft Through the Ages, Lord Crumb and I have also joined Froggy and Phenix’s new server to play Invasion with them and some of their other fans. It’s been difficult but fun; there have been a lot of deaths (including some of my own) but I think we’ve learned to work well together and I’m enjoying the challenge. Now that we have a base secured with walls and turrets, I think there will be less deaths in a lot more progression. Froggy and Phenix are also recording a video series for this pack.

In my solo time, I’ve also played a little bit of the modpack Sprout which is an exploration/RPG pack that’s reminiscent of Skyrim. I’m also thinking of trying out Homestead, a pack that has slower progression and is said to be heavily inspired by TerraFirmaCraft. Sometimes it amazes me the variety that can be found amongst modpacks. I can definitely see how Minecraft as a game is still popular and has held people’s attention for so long because of it.

Secret World Legends

Like I mentioned before, Minecraft isn’t the only thing I’ve been playing. I’ve also been dabbling in Secret World Legends of all things. Its predecessor The Secret World always seem to me that it’s a game I should really like. The idea of myths and conspiracies actually being true in the real world is very interesting and from what others have said, the story of the game is well done which generally I like. Unfortunately, even after two attempts, I’ve never been able to progressed any further than Kingsmouth. So with its “rebranding and relaunching”, I thought I’d give it a third try.

To be honest, I still haven’t gotten outside of Kingsmouth. I do feel as though the base game has improved though. I like the combat more and the fact that I can play it on controller more easily, and I like that they’ve thinned out the mobs and made them little easier to kill. It was rather a slog to get through before. Although it seems like because the combat has improved, the flaws in the story have become all the more apparent. Really, it’s the way the citizens of Kingsmouth talk that really throws me for a loop. They don’t sound like regular people we’re going to the horrors of a zombie apocalypse. I’d expect them to be terrified and having complete mental breakdowns at seeing their friends and family turn into the shambling undead. Instead they go into pretentious monologues that involve a raven poem that they think they said they must have heard on Oprah. I expect that of the people of the Secret World, the ones who actually know that these sort of things can exist, not normal folks who didn’t think that zombies existed outside of movies. Which of course leads me to my own conspiracy theory that they’re actually all in on it and maybe even summoned the zombies themselves. Now that would would be an interesting twist but I don’t think it’s true, I think it’s just the result of bad writing. I hoping that if I progressed further, the story will get better and I’ll be able to enjoy it more.

I also participated in the Whispering Tides event which was overall enjoyable. I died a lot at first and I had no idea what was happening story-wise but it allowed me to play around with the different abilities more. Speaking of which, I don’t like how they changed over from being able to choose your abilities freely to having to choose a class. I wish they just would have explained the different types of abilities more clearly, I think that would have been more effective. From what I’ve seen, The Secret World/Secret World Legends has a difficult time explaining a lot of things clearly and that may be why the game hasn’t been as popular as it could be. It’s like the people who were in charge of creating the puzzles in the game also created the rest of the game and the marketing and just weren’t able to get out of the puzzling mindset. But maybe I just need to get used to the game.

Destiny 2

The open beta for Destiny 2 was this week and I got the chance to play in it for a few hours. Before I go into my experience can I just talk about how Bungie has a strange way of running a “beta”. First of all, they decided to start it on Tuesday and end it on the Thursday. The way I see it, if you want to run an actual beta where testing is done, you want more players to find out the bugs, not less. If they were treating it as some sort of promotional demo, it still doesn’t make sense to have it in the middle of a week and for only 48 hours. Again, you want more people to be able to play it and you’re going to get that on the weekend. The content was also quite sparse and not at all like the game is supposed to be from what I hear from people who played Destiny 1. Half of the available content was PvP and the PvE was a short story mission that everyone had to go through and a single strike. Because I ignored the PvP, I was able to go through all of the PvE content in just a few hours. Luckily I knew enough people who were also trying out the beta that we are able to form groups to do the strike, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have done it at all and the whole beta would have been about 30 minutes of gameplay for me. Which is basically what Ultrviolet from Endgame Viable experienced, after which he had no interest in buying the game. I think if I had went into the game blind as well (Belghast’s posts about the first game have always been interesting to me and Lord Crumb told me his experiences playing it as well), I would have been completely unimpressed as well. Pretty much the whole time two of us newbies we’re doing a strike alongside a veteran from the first game, she was having to constantly tell us that the actual game is going to be better, that it’s not going to be so insubstantial. She was trying to sell the game to us because lord knows Bungie wasn’t. Basically I don’t know what Bungie was doing; if they weren’t trying to bug test/stress test the servers or trying to generate hype for it, just what was their goal? If they think Blizzard will be able to deal with the crowds that will appear at game launch, Bungie obviously never seen a WoW expansion launch. If they’re relying solely on the fact that Destiny 2 is on the Blizzard launcher to sell the game, I don’t think that’s going to be as effective as I think it will be. Not all gamers will play something just because it has the Blizzard name attached to it.

Anyways, overall I had a fun time; I could shoot things in the face, the different abilities were cool, I enjoyed playing with a group, and the game is absolutely gorgeous. Short of some catastrophe before the launch, I’m likely going to buy the game and so is Lord Crumb.

Originally this was just suppose to be a single post but after it became ridiculously long, I decided to split it into 3 parts.

When I was finishing up the last of my decoration projects at the base, Lord Crumb told me that he had the idea to build a village near the base. He had already flattened and portioned a good-sized piece of land, and had laid out a couple of structures. So once I was done my projects, I went to help him out on the village so we can have it done before Froggy and Phenix came to record their video.

Here’s what all the buildings ended up looking like.

Power station (by Lord Crumb)

Burned-out home (by Lord Crumb)

Modern house with pool (by Faeldray)

Tinkerer/engineer’s house (by Faeldray)

Botania/alchemy house (by Faeldray)

Dirt house (by Lord Crumb)

Gold pyramid (by Lord Crumb)

Modern angled house (by Lord Crumb)

Black tower (by Lord Crumb)

Modern house with farm (by Faeldray)

And that is it! We’ve declared ourselves done with Project Ozone. So we have bid a fond adieu to the modpack and moved on to new interesting projects.

Originally this was just suppose to be a single post but after it became ridiculously long, I decided to split it into 3 parts.

The underground portion of our base has had its fair share of updates as well. Our storage room is now filled with a whole lot of drawers and have been completely decorated with marble.

Behind the elevator is a really cool airlock that Lord Crumb designed.

He used the pressure pipes from PneumaticCraft to simulate a decontamination chamber.

On the other side of the airlock is our 11 by 11 reactor that he automated using Computercraft.

He may have gone a little overboard on the size considering that we have 40 billion RF stored away.

Our machine room is still rather disorganized but I did take the time to get rid of the bare cobblestone and give the room more of a factory theme. You can’t tell from the screenshot but the fans on the walls and ceiling are actually animated.

Across from the machine room are our living quarters, which includes an opulent living room.

We have some interesting artifacts on display as well as a roaring fireplace, a TV, and a radio.

Down the hallway which is adorned with paintings are our two bedrooms and our bathroom.

Lord Crumb went with a more fiery theme.

Whereas I went with a more calm and serene theme.

Our bathroom is incredibly luxurious, what with the walls and floor being made of diamond blocks and all.

It even has a working regular shower…

… And a working experience shower.

Next to living room is the kitchen.

It includes a bar with a smoothie machine and a nice view of the rest of the base.

There’s also a variety of appliances and storage.

And of course a table set up for Lord Crumb and me.

Lord Crumb’s plate is on the right and has meat pizza, a burger, and pecan pie with tea to drink. My plate on the left has broccoli mac, a perogy, and beef jerky with a strawberry smoothie to drink.

In the back of the kitchen is a door that opens up to an indoor garden that has 63 different crops from vanilla Minecraft and Pam’s Harvestcraft.

Also coming off the living room is a door that leads into our library.

Inside we have a diverse group of authors hard at work, including villagers, ocelots, chickens, and zombies.

There’s a map area that contains a 3 x 3 map of the base as well as a sort of 3D height map of the base.

There’s also an enchanting area that has a variety of machines for enchanting and disenchanting.

And lastly there’s a reading area that has bookshelves filled with some of the books that our authors have written.

Next to the reading area is a innocuous jukebox with a rack of music discs.

Put in the right music disc though, and the secret door opens up.

Through the door is the sparkling alchemy cave.

It contains all the tools needed to make potions, including a bottling machine.

Opposite the work area is a small garden for potion ingredients.

Behind the waterfall is a dark area where netherwart and mushrooms are grown.

That’s all for the base! Just one more part filled with a heck of a lot of screenshots. This time, it’ll be the village that Lord Crumb and I built near our base.

Originally this was just suppose to be a single post but after it became ridiculously long, I decided to split it into 3 parts.

In case the title doesn’t make it obvious, Lord Crumb and I are now finished with Project Ozone 2. We didn’t complete the quest book, but we did get to the point where we were growing tired of the pack and wanted to move onto something new. Still, we had a lot of work ahead of us to finish things up, which for me meant mostly decorating. Lots and lots of decorating. One of the reasons I wanted to get all this decorating done was because Froggy and Phenix wanted to do another video tour in our base. I ended up making a few more projects than anticipated and I don’t believe they expected our base to be so large, so what was supposed to be a single video about maybe 1/2 hour long ended up being 4 videos each about a 1/2 hour long.

They included me again to give the tour, and this time I was actually able to join them through voice chat. So if you’d like to hear me ramble on for an hour and some change while Froggy and Phenix say a lot of oohs and aahs, I’ve included a playlist of the four videos below.

While we have a lot of fun making those videos and it lets you see all of the base in one go, if you don’t want to watch them that’s fine too. In which case I have screenshots for you to peruse instead. So get ready for a big wall of pictures.

In the Botania area, I added the necessary blocks to make terrasteel.

I also created an Elven Gateway.

Now surrounding of the Botania area is an orchard of all the different Pam’s Harvestcraft trees, with a lit path going through it.

Our little pond has a dock setup on it with chests full of root beer, boats, and fishing rods for when we just want to kick back and relax.

One of the extra projects that I hadn’t originally planned on making is a gazebo with a bird bath and some flowers.

Next to the gazebo is Froggy & Phoenix’s Holiday Cottage which Lord Crumb did a wonderful job building completely unprompted.

He put their mini-mes inside…

… And even created custom paintings for decorations.

All of this seems like a really nice gesture…until you look in the basement.

Lord Crumb has a very odd sense of humor. Which would also explain why he built Tiny Cuba in the river going around our base.

Another new building is our Space Center.

Outside is a rocket ready on its launch pad, ready to visit far-off planets.

Inside are all the machines required to build the rocket, as well as a good supply of canned apples for the trip.

The moon buggy on display is also fueled and ready.

In inside an inconspicuous room is a transporter…

…That takes you to the top of the redwood tree.

Our main entrance to the underground base is now an inn/shop whose design inspired by the Riverwood smithy in Skyrim.

It features a wrap-around porch that includes mail boxes for us both and benches to sit on.

On the east side of the house, facing the dock, is a cozy area with seating, a campfire, and food for us to snack on.

Inside is an elevator going downstairs…

…A few beds and some seating for visitors…

…And a little shop run by our mini-mes.

In the next part are all the updates we’ve done to the underground portion of our base!

Today is Canada Day for us Canucks, and this year’s a special one because Canada is turning 150 years old. I actually just barely remember the 125th anniversary, pretty much just the big maple-leaf-adorned cake that six-year-old me wanted to eat all of.

But anyways, I thought that on such an auspicious day, I would take the time to write a post I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. There are many games out there that people may or may not know were created by a Canadian individual or by a Canadian company. Here’s a list of just a few of them, some of which are my favorite games of all time. You should definitely play one or all of them today in celebration.

A sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller. Inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Firefly. Generates stories by simulating psychology, ecology, gunplay, melee combat, climate, biomes, diplomacy, interpersonal relationships, art, medicine, trade, and more.

The highly addictive (at least for me) RimWorld is developed by Ludeon Studios in Montréal, Quebec and headed by Canadian Tynan Sylvester.

The Long Dark is a thoughtful, exploration-survival experience that challenges solo players to think for themselves as they explore an expansive frozen wilderness in the aftermath of a geomagnetic disaster. There are no zombies — only you, the cold, and all the threats Mother Nature can muster.

The Long Dark is my favorite survival game, especially in terms of realism. The creator is Hinterland Studio, an independent game studio headquartered in Northern Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Hell is an experiment you can’t survive in Outlast, a first-person survival horror game developed by veterans of some of the biggest game franchises in history. As investigative journalist Miles Upshur, explore Mount Massive Asylum and try to survive long enough to discover its terrible secret… if you dare.

I could not bring myself to play Outlast (or Outlast 2) because I’m a wimp when it comes to horror games. But I have watched let’s play videos of it and it is both fascinating and terrifying. This indie game that has sold millions of copies was developed by the studio Red Barrels based in Montreal, Quebec.

Take the role of ARID, the artificial intelligence within a high-tech combat suit. The Fall is a unique combination of adventure-game puzzle solving and side-scroller action, all set within a dark and atmospheric story. Get ready for a disturbing journey as you explore the world of The Fall.

The Fall is a really intriguing game that combines several genres in an eerie (yet sometimes darkly humorous) setting. It’s the first in a trilogy and despite it being years since I played it, I’m still looking forward to the next installments. The developer is the one-man studio Over The Moon based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

I think we all know the master of storytelling and RPGs: BioWare. But before BioWare was bought by EA in November 2015, it was a wholly Canadian studio based out of Edmonton, Alberta. From 1995 until that time, BioWare gave us many RPG classics such as Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire. To this day, Neverwinter Nights remains one of my favorite games of all time. It just goes to prove that even the Canadian prairies can give us amazing games.

Know of any other Canadian games? Put them in the comments below!

One of the ideas Froggy and Phenix had behind their community seed idea that they want to partially remake their viewer’s bases in their own world to show off. Since our base is rather large and already on a server, I invited them to come check it out themselves. I gave them a bit of a tour and when Froggy said she was measuring it out, I said they could just record a video here if they wanted to. Which is how just a day after my post, Froggy and Phenix posted a video where the first third was exploring some of our base.

Like they mentioned in the video, I couldn’t hear what they were saying so I amused myself with trying to figure out what they were saying while they were jumping around and swinging their heads in all directions. I think I did pretty good because I only started jumping at the beginning there because it looked like Froggy was talking to me.

Since that video was made, we’ve made a good bit of progress with the base. But, before I forget again, I finally have some screenshots from the other dimensions that Lord Crumb and I visited.

First is Erebus. I mentioned before that there’s quite a few biomes for a dimension that’s entirely underground, like a jungle next to a savanna here.

For an even more stark contrast, here’s a volcanic desert next to an Elysian field.

And here is the Aether, another dimension we visited that’s entirely made up of floating islands.

This dimension has its own variety of mobs just like Erebus. In the top center of the screenshot above, you see a Zephyr, which is entirely unrelated to my dog Zephyr. Zephyr mobs are aggressive and want to hurt you, while Zephyr dogs are only aggressive about getting pets.

There are also strange passive creatures like a puffy aerbunny that you can pick up by putting it on your head.

Indeed, there are even flying pigs called Phygs.

Although they just more float slowly downwards as I discovered when a flying cow pushed both itself and a phyg off the edge of an island and I watched them slowly descend into the void below.

Moving on to progression, we’ve opened two more portals since my last post. One was to Aroma1997’s Dimensional World AKA the mining dimension.

The original purpose behind the mining world is…well, mining. It’s basically a flat, mostly featureless grass world where aggressive mobs are unable to spawn.

Due to other mods in the modpack, the only things of note are occasional towers that can be looted for goodies…

And fallen skystone meteors that contains items needed to begin an ME system (more on that later).

For us, the mining dimension is a great place for two things: finding fluid cows (although we have a lot already) and breaking chance cubes. Not only can we break the chance cubes we already have without worrying about any craters they’ll leave, there are also many that spawn naturally on the ground.

We got a few interesting ones, including a horde of zombies that tried to murder Lord Crumb and ended up just burning to death.

Another cube built a giant…whatever this thing is one layer at a time.

And in one of the towers, Lord Crumb found an artifact that spawns an infinite amount of cake. All in all, a very silly but fun trip.

The second portal that we opened was the one leading to the End. At first glance, there’s not much different about it compared to the vanilla enperience (an island built of end stone, many endermen, and the End dragon to kill and loot). But when I flew away from the island, I found came across what appears to be comets of obsidian and end stone frozen in time while they were hurtling through the End.

Further on somewhere is another boss called a Chaos guardian that I’ve heard is the toughest in the game. We didn’t even attempt to kill it because I’ve seen unprepared people get one-shotted in let’s plays.

Another major milestone we reached in our progression is the creation of an ME system. At first, it was nothing more than a few blocks in a quickly mined out stone room.

Then I began decorating and went a little over the top with it.

For those unfamiliar with an ME system (AKA AE system because the mod it’s from is Applied Energistics), it’s basically a modular crafting/storage system for Minecraft. There’s all sorts of cables, buses, interfaces, crafting units and storage pieces that can be combined to streamline manual crafting, find items in storage easier, and to setup auto-crafting. I don’t want to go into great detail on how exactly it all works but let’s just say that it lets you do things like craft pistons without having to have the ingredients in your inventory because the ME system can pull the exact amounts from storage. Or if you want to craft 100 chests but don’t want to sit there and make them yourself, you can ask the system to auto-craft them and go do something else while it’s working. There are even wireless terminals so you can access all your items and craft from almost anywhere.

But anyways, back to decorating, the most important thing in Minecraft. The whole idea for this room came from one style of block: the purple/magenta maze blocks. You see, ME controller blocks (the CPUs of the system) have the same maze design but flash through all of the colours of the rainbow (seen two screenshots up, it just happened to be on orange when I took the screenshot). I always loved the design but the flashing technicolours can be a little overwhelming. So when I saw a decorative block in the same style but with more subdued pulsing purple and magenta, I knew I had to use it to decorate the ME room. It was from there that I found the hexagonal purple and magenta blocks to make futuristic wall panels. Then the purple caged lights for the ceiling and magenta lights built into the floor. The black and grey blocks that provide a neutral background are various types of skystone, and skystone is one of the things needed to make an ME system so it worked out perfectly.

As I said on Twitter before, I don’t even like purple and pink really, but I have to say I’m pretty happy with how this room came together.

Rather than keep gushing about that, let’s move onto some other rooms that got decorated. When Froggy and Phenix made their video, I had just started on prettying up the walls and ceiling in the main lower basement area. This is how it looked once it was done.

A lot of different kinds of white marble but I like that it’s a more subdued look.

Up around the highest ceiling and the base of the roots, I used more marble and these really cool lamp blocks I found to make a pattern on all four walls.

Lord Crumb didn’t play as much as I did (he’s actually playing other games in his solo time) but he still did a wonderful job of replacing the viaduct with a PneumaticCraft elevator and closing it in glass and basalt.

Up on the surface, I built an good old red barn to house our various animals.

The paddock and vine-covered stable out front is for horses and moas, large birds from the Aether that you can ride and are capable of gliding and jumping several times in the air.

Inside are two floors of pens holding our various fluid cows.

The Botania area next to the barn finally got some attention, although not of the decorating type. Instead I learned how to make runes on the runic altar and completed a few quests.

Well, I may not have done any more decorating in the area, but it was tangentially related. I needed some runes to make a mana blaster, a Botania gun that can do a variety of things depending on the type of mana lens inside it. The mana lens I put in it makes it shoot mana flashes, coloured light sources that attach to any surface and look like mystical flames or will-o-wisps.

At first I just put them on the glowstone crystals in the lower basement.

Then I realized they would be perfect for adding a magical vibe to the redwood roots coming down from the ceiling.

And last but certainly not least, I finally decided on how I wanted to decorate the portal room after much waffling.

Contrary to what you see, I did not relocate the portal room to be in orbit. What you see are a whole lot of Sky Blocks, which do exactly what their name says: they match what you’d see in the sky box if you were outside. And they do indeed change depending on the time of day.

I love how it makes the portal room look like it itself is a portal to another dimension. It’s a really cool and pretty effect.

I can’t take credit for coming up with the idea though. Froggy and Phenix showed it in another of their videos and as soon as I saw it, I knew what it would be perfect for.

That’s all the updates for now but there will be more coming soon. I’m very close to finishing the kitchen and other living quarters area will be done soon after that. I suppose there’s also quests and such that I should be doing…but those can wait, they’re not that important.

I go AFK for a few minutes and come back to a skeleton…wool…man?

Lord Crumb and I have been busy in Project Ozone 2 over the weekend. Here’s some of the things we did…

I expanded our power generation by adding 8 wind turbines on top of our redwood tree. At that height, they generate 2,000 redstone flux per tick, giving us 16,000 rf/t total. Basically, that’s enough power to last us for a good while.

I increased the size of the automatic farm so we could get more resources, although I found that when I breed crops up to 10/10/10 (the best stats they can have), we get so many resources that it overloads our storage. That’s why I’m only using not even a third of the farm currently.

I don’t have any minicio planted anymore because we have more than we could ever use. By the way, minicio can be combined to better tiers of essences. 4 minicio makes 1 accio, 4 accio makes 1 crucio, 4 crucio makes 1 imperio, and 4 imperio makes 1 zivicio. By the time I removed the minicio plants from the farm, we had over 700 zivicio.

So that meant that we could make zivicio armor which gives you 96% damage mitigation, the ability to fly, and negates falling damage.

In order to get to zivicio, you need to first make a certain tier of jetpack for the chestpiece as well as diamond armor for your head, legs, and feet. Then you need to go through 3 tiers of essence armor to get to the zivicio armor. So pictured above, from left to right, is my character in no armor, artifact armor, accio armor, crucio armor, imperio armor, and finally zivicio armor. It’s too bad that you can’t chose what colour you want the armor to be because I think I would have stuck with the blue from the imperio armor. But flight is way too good to pass up.

Still, I’m going to keep my hang glider, because Lord Crumb and I had a little race and it’s twice as fast as flying in zivicio armor (with the downside of constantly descending). Also because it’s a freaking hang glider.

I found out that the signs from Biblocraft are pretty damn cool and you can add items to them, so I improved our labels after I reorganized the farming/miscellaneous storage.

On the topic of decoration, I created this crystalline structure around our water pool to complement the root hanging down from the ceiling. It’s made of glowstone glass so it’s also a light source.

I also got started with the Botania mod and spruced the area up with some golden oak trees that I got from our trip to the Aether (note to self: remember to get screenshots the next time I’m there).

I absolutely love the golden oaks because their leaves have these gold particles that are always drifting down from them. I also used some of the leaves to make a few hedges and bushes on the ground to make the area more interesting.

Lord Crumb saw the trees and path that I had laid and created 4 gorgeous street lamps along the path using a combination of white lights and microblocks.

Back on the topic of portals, I made another one in the portal room, this one going to Erebus.

I also forgot to take screenshots while exploring in here (note to self 2: seriously, remember to take screenshots when entering new dimensions), but to summarize, it’s an underground world (dirt roof and floor) that has a variety of unique biomes with a whole host of different mobs. Most of them insect-related and eager to devour you alive.

The one place I did remember to take some screenshots when we were going to fight one of the bosses, the Antlion Overload. First we needed to find a pyramid that spawned rarely in a volcanic desert biome.

Then we needed to navigate a gigantic underground maze, kill the four golem guardians within, and use the idols they dropped to open the top of the pyramid. Then there’s a series of portals that you need to open by placing certain mob drops in slots on the floor.

And finally we were able to get to the Antlion Overlord who has abilities that include reflecting ranged attacked, blinding players, and pounding the ground to send out shockwaves that knock you back.

It honestly took way longer to find the pyramid and all the golems within the maze than it did to open the portals and kill the boss. But Lord Crumb got a cool hammer that has the shockwave ability and we also completed a quest to get an item we need to open a portal to the Aroma mining dimension! That’ll be coming up in another post soon I imagine.

Lord Crumb’s been very busy with PneumaticCraft and has expanded his room for it.

His pressure chamber has also gotten larger.

His oil refinery has gotten more complex and now includes processing to make more of the liquids he wants.

There’s also now robotic arms that make better…things for him. I don’t really know what. I do remember him showing me that they can make better pipes. Either way, some of the arms have lasers!

He’s also built jefferies tubes…

…that lead to a massive heat sink.

Lord Crumb did take the time to open a few chance cubes. Chance cubes give random “rewards” that can either be good, useless, bad, or absolutely devastating. One of the cubes that Lord Crumb opened definitely fell in the last category.

That, ladies and gentleman, is what a nuclear explosion looks like in Minecraft. Thankfully, he did not do it near our base. He did however do it right next to our first base.

To give you a sense of scale, each section of this map grid represents a chunk, which is 16×16 blocks. There’s a lot of chunks in that crater. The little blue dot with label that you see slightly off the center of the giant crater is the waypoint that I had for our first base. It’s been completely obliterated.

The only remnants I could find of that base was some ladders I had placed to climb into a nearby ravine.

Lord Crumb is no longer allowed to open chance cubes in the overworld. Once I get the mining dimension portal up, he can open them in there to his heart’s content.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this before but I usually have two different games going (not at exactly the same time but you get my meaning). Lord Crumb and I will be playing some sort of co-op game together and then when our schedules don’t work out, I’ll play a solo game. For a good while, Ghost Recon Wildlands was our co-op game and RimWorld was my solo game.

My dive back in RimWorld came because I was watching Aavak’s Alpha 16 Let’s Play and also because…it’s just a really fun game. This time around, I decided not to go with the live tweeting and naming pawns after Twitter folks. As fun as it is, I feel like I have to perform/entertain (for lack of a better word) and it can get in the way of my enjoyment of the game if I’m stopping to take screenshots and tweet them every 10 minutes. Plus I wonder sometimes if I’m annoying the heck out of people who have characters in the game with all my mentions. But anyways, I got so into it that I even made three mods for it.

Then Mass Effect Andromeda came out and everyone was talking about it. While I did indeed end up buying it (20% off through Amazon was pretty nice), I still have not played it and probably will not play it for a while since they’re still working out bugs and making improvements. It did give me an itch to play something Mass Effect related though, so I opted to do something I rarely do with non-sandbox games: I started a new save in Mass Effect 1.

The graphics looked a little dated but after cranking them up, turning off the film grain, and installing improved textures, it was looking pretty damn good for a game that’s nearly a decade old. It still plays pretty well too, even though sometimes Shepard has issues using cover correctly. UltrViolet over at Endgame Viable mentioned on his ME1 replay post that he thinks FemShep doesn’t move like a woman but I didn’t see that at all. I’m not even sure what “moving like a woman” even means, unless he’s referring to the hip sway that comes from wearing high heels (which thank god Shepard is not). To me, she moves exactly how you would expect of a confident, skilled, and high-ranking special forces solider. In other words, she is so badass and I love every minute of it.

So while those were my solo games, Lord Crumb and I were playing Wildlands. Neither of us had ever playing a Tom Clancy game before (beside the short stint in The Division open beta), so it’s something of a novelty to us. The story isn’t amazing but it’s still interesting to follow; the graphics are gorgeous; the world is large, open, and varied; and there’s so many different guns to play with, as well as toys like vehicles, night vision, explosives, drones, and explosive drones.

There was a slight problem though. Long story short, Lord Crumb has only his phone’s data as internet access every other weekend. In most games, it’s not an issue but in an FPS like Wildlands, it makes for some rather large and annoying lag spikes. Traveling is especially laggy and not good when Unidad likes to launch missiles at you.

So the other weekend, I made a suggestion. Froggy and Phenix, a pair of Minecraft Youtubers that I watch, had started a series where they played the modpack Project Ozone 2. They gave out the seed they were using and were encouraging others to play along and share their progress and landmarks they found. Lord Crumb and I quite liked the first Project Ozone so I figured we’d like this pack as well. I set up a server for us on my second computer and we got started.

Project Ozone 2 is a skyblock mod so usually you begin in a void with only a small piece of dirt under your feet. However, Froggy and Phenix went with a standard Minecraft world this time. So as is standard with this type of map, we began with the punching of trees and built a wood hut pretty close to spawn.

Which Lord Crumb exploded once by opening a chance cube in it and we had to rebuild.

We spent quite a while building up our initial resources, which was made slightly more difficult by the fact that vanilla Minecraft tools have only 1 durability, making them mostly useless. Instead we made paxels (pickaxe/axe/shovel combo tools) until we could make tools from the Tinkers’ mod. On the flip side, the game throws lots of loot bags at you and many of them contained some pretty nice artifact armor with different effects. So we were able to armor up pretty fast.

Once we had enough resources and were beginning to outgrow our hut, I mentioned that I wanted to set up a base around one of the giant redwood trees that sometimes spawn in the plains. So we both went searching far and wide, and it was Lord Crumb that found the perfect spot.

(The windmill and wires attached to the leaves were not originally there, I added those.) This area is unusually in that it’s a plains biome that has 4 redwoods in almost seeing distance of each other. Typically the redwood are quite spread out and you’ll only see one or two per area.

I picked the redwood furthest south for our base because it has a river making the area into a peninsula, thus giving us a natural barrier from hostile mobs once we lit the place up.

On the side not cut off by water, I built a wall to keep mobs out, which Lord Crumb amused himself with naming.

At ground level is where we currently have pens of the many fluid cows we’ve found.

A mod called Moo Fluids makes these randomly spawn through the world and instead of giving milk, they give buckets of whatever fluid they are. The different kind of cows we have include lava, oil, fire water, molten silver, molten nickel, destabilized redstone, energized glowstone, gelid cryotheum, blazing pyrotheum, and molten manyullyn. Manyullyn is one of the best metals in the game so we were very quickly able to make the best tools you can get. And the lava, oil, and fire water are all great varieties of fuel.

Next to the cows are my essence farms.

The large field with a few bits of light green tops is my minicio farm, minicio being the base for making a lot of different kinds of seeds as well as other items. The small center field in the front is cotton, which is used to make string and wool (and is the one plant here that has nothing to do with minicio). To make the seeds for the other fields, I just had to combine minicio, regular seeds, and whatever I wanted to grow. Next to the cotton, in their own small fields, are my dye, cow, lapis, and diamond farms respectively. And the other large field in the back is full of redstone and enderman plants. These are all very useful for us: dye essences make different dye colours depending on how you arrange them on a crafting table; cow essence makes milk, leather, or raw beef; and the rest are pretty self-explanatory. The crop sticks you see around the plants lets me cross-breed as well, creating plants that grow faster and produce more essence. It takes a while to breed each plant but in short, we have an unlimited supply of all those things now. And Lord Crumb has already pointed out the irony in using cows to get metal and using plants to get milk.

On the opposite side of the redwood are our 2 sets of 3 waterwheels.

We made them for a quest so I figured we might as well use them to get us power. And that’s exactly what they do, provide the majority of the power for our base right now. We don’t have many machines running yet so I’ll have to get more power generation going soon.

My original plan was to build up and around the tree trunk but when I couldn’t really decide how I wanted that to look, I carved out a large room around the roots of the tree.

I didn’t realize just how deep the roots went until I reached the bottom. I found my Tinkers’ hammer very useful as it allows me to clear out a 3×3 sections of blocks. The tube on the left in the screenshot is a viaduct, essentially a vacuum elevator that allows us to travel to and from the surface rather quickly. Because ladders are slow, man.

The bottom floor was built first and where all of our basics are. There’s our wall of storage drawers next to some crafting tables, a hell furnace, and a grindstone.

Our coke oven (right) produces coke coal and creosote oil, the oil being used to make treated wood, which in turn can make things like the waterwheels. The coke coal going into the blast furnace (left) with iron to make steel.

There’s the Tinkers’ section with its various special crafting stations and smeltery (useful for doubling the amount of metal you get from ore and making alloys). There’s also a bunch of weapons and artifact armor that we store while we’re not using them.

Next to that is our metal storage in compacting drawers.

And finally there’s our farming/miscellaneous storage area with chests of bits and bobs that don’t really fit anywhere else yet. I really need to get this area more organized.

On the upper levels, there’s our portal room which currently only houses the Nether and Aether portals.

Then there’s the machine room that doesn’t contain much right now. Mostly just some power storage and a series of machines that creates cobble, crushes it into gravel, and sieves it for ores.

Lord Crumb has his own room where he’s been playing with the PneumaticCraft mod. I’m not sure what it all contains really. I do know that the machine in front is a pressure chamber for creating compressed iron.

And that the towering inferno in the back actually encases a refinery that he uses to crack oil into various different products. He’s said to me that this mod is Factorio, just in Minecraft.

There’s a fourth room on the upper floor that’s currently empty but I’m planning to turn it into a kitchen and living quarters, mostly just because I can.

So in the end, Project Ozone 2 has taken over as both my solo game and our co-op game for the past 2 weekends. I’m having quite a lot of fun playing it so I don’t see that changing for at least the immediate future. While at first I wasn’t sure about playing a regular world in a skyblock modpack, I’m actually finding I enjoy it now. It has most of the skyblock challenge and complexity without all the grinding and having to lay out a whole lot of cobblestone as a platform to live on. And it’s nice to have a more interesting environment than just a void. I’m finding that I actually want to decorate the place, as opposed to when we played the first Project Ozone and never even built a house. Our beds were just sitting out in the open with not even a roof over them.

I’ll try to write more posts as we progress, hopefully shorter ones because ow, my hands hurt. Oh yeah, and to finish things off, here’s Lord Crumb’s obligatory “I claim this for Great Britain” gesture: