Pride Optional

I had a moment of pure anger cheating. It was all...mostly...my fault. Mine and lava. Yet, hear my tale and you can be the judge whether or not I redeemed myself by the end.

The Hexxit world. We're trying to learn the many secrets hidden in these extra mods. For me, the biggest issue so far is the smeltery. Three RW (real world) days to learn how to use the damn thing properly, AND get enough aluminum to make the alloy Alumite. Why? It's one of the only metals that can pickaxe cobalt from the nether. Several days ago I found cobalt ore in the nether, and found I couldn't pick it. Discovered in the red book that the only alloy I could smelt using overworld metals was alumite. Thus the three days learning.

So, last night I finally completed my trusty alumite pickaxe. I gave it accessories of emerald, moss, and redstone. I emptied my inventory and backpack of items I wouldn't need, and I set off into the nether. Of course, I couldn't remember where I found the big vein of cobalt, so I ran down my many 1x2 corridors, popping out occasionally to scan the area for cobalt and flip off any ghasts which may be around. I dug up here... down here, jump... missed the ledge. Run down the stairs which abruptly end... over nothing. I fall and panic. I'm stabbing keys to steer towards the cliff nearby, and like an idiot I'm tapping the jump key. I make the edge, but I'm still oversteering, and with a tap of the space bar, my cloud boots kick in and wheeeeee.... down to the lava below. Not a happy lava beach where maybe some of my stuff might survive, but the lava ocean that I believe makes up the entire bottom of the nether. As I stare at my screen in disbelief, I can hear all of my stuff sizzling.

Once I get back to verify there was no way to save anything, I return home empty-handed. I check my smelting chests, and sigh. I opened Too Many Items, and began to give myself stuff. BUT, my possible moment of redemption... I went through all that crap to pickaxe cobalt, so that I could smelt that and pickaxe even stronger ores. Those stronger ores are right there in TMI. With a click I could give myself all the goodies! Instead, I give myself just what I needed to rebuild my equipment... not even. None of my tools or weapons have fire abilities this time around. And I only gave myself the stuff I didn't have... basically alumite. Everything else I pulled from chests or used iron and stone to rebuild my tools. I did not give myself a pair of cloud boots. I will get cobalt, but I will mine it and smelt it myself, just as I did aluminum, iron, and obsidian (the recipe for alumite). So, that's why I did what I did...judge me if you wish... just remember I didn't get a chance yet to put up a sign on that nether staircase of death!!!   

In my latest Minecraft world, I made a series of sub-basements until reaching the bedrock, where I proceeded to mine. Though many prefer to make the strip mine, starting from the top and working down, I don't: I like to work from the bottom up. If I keep each level two blocks high, there will be no Slendermen or whatever they're called popping in; with enough torches, I won't have to worry about creatures spawning. I have complete control.

In this bottom-most level, I've built a home; sure, I could walk up the flight of stairs and be done with it, but I wanted something closer and more convenient. I've got my group of furnaces, making iron and gold ore into bars and turning cobblestone into brick. I've got my emeralds and diamonds and gawd knows how much redstone, though I'm perfectly fine not using them. Whenever my supplies run low, I head to the surface to slaughter cattle and pig and chickens by the ton, as well as felling forests; I am environmentally friendly in that I plant more trees than I harvest.

Yes, life at the planet's core is good. Perhaps at some point I will think about decorating, instead of living in a simple wood and rock structure surrounded my dozens of chests.

However, there are a couple things that I need to do.

1. Craft direction signs or markers. When your mining away in an area that looks like every other area, it becomes difficult in knowing just where you are. Trying to return to your base of operations, moving from tunnel to tunnel, with no identifiable markers. One could get lost, or at least lose direction. I've been careful in mining only so many blocks in one direction at a time and then removing the filler so that instead of tunnels I have an ever expanding open area... but past experience has shown me that at some point I'm going to mess up.

2. Lava. Nothing like mining a shaft in a darkened tunnel and then asking yourself "what's that orange thing at the end there?" At least lava's slow enough where, should you break through, you have enough time to move back. Unless, of course, you aren't mining a straight line, but rather one with turns and corners.

While mining my lowest level, I've taken to squaring off the lava flows. Fencing them in, as it were. Whenever I come across a new lava flow or pocket, I mine around it, and place cobblestone to fence the flow in. I don't seal up the lava, as it provides additional light (saves on torches) and I can harvest the lava for the furnaces. I just need to keep in mind that I have to mine a path three blocks wide around the lava, one block for the fence and the other two for maneuvering; failing that, there's a good chance of catching fire, should I try to back away from a flow and hit a corner. Only died once, but it was a lesson learned. Instead of respawning, I just reloaded; had to redo a lot of work, but it was worth it, as I didn't want to see a level 39 character die. Which brings me to a third point.

3. Save often when working around lava.

All that talk about saving often when working near lava? Pfft.

Stepped back into my base of operations with some freshly acquired lava for the furnaces, turned so I could close the door. I closed the door too soon; seems I wasn't exactly close enough for the door, but I was close enough to pour the lava out of the bucket. Almost an hour of gameplay gone, up in flames... I know, an hour doesn't seem like much, and it really wasn't, just a bunch of stone baking and crafting and base building. A level or two lost, but no big deal as I just quit the game and loaded up the previous save.

If anything, this taught me a valuable lesson: shit happens. I have now installed pools of water near the lava fields and my base for moments just like this.

Lava. Red bitch of the underground. Didn't realize one could make saves on the PS3...sadly we cannot on the PC (unless we go into the game folder and backup the 'world' folder), and of course saving on a server is nigh impossible unless you want everybody on the server to lose hours/days/weeks worth of building.

But this reminds me of a tale. Woe and sadness, I think I literally shed a tear and felt the red rage, and did in fact do a bit of cheating which didn't accomplish anything. We were running a Hexxit world, one of the early servers we had running. I had found one of the abandoned barns which I fixed up into my home. I say this because the first time I played Hexxit, the barn was the first building I found before nightfall and since then it seems every Hexxit world I wind up in one of these barns, with roughly the same layout, and the same set of stairs going down into my sublevels. ANYWAY... we had this world running for WEEKS.

Don't remember if I had built my cloud-height stone warrior statue on the hill behind my house yet, but I did have a timber farm behind my house with almost every tree from the overworld and the nether growing me a steady supply of various woods. I had full gardens, and a nicely organized berry garden with bushes full of food. I had my sublevels with chests lining an area twice the size of my home, a full underground garden for mushrooms and oreberries, TWO(2!) Tinker's Construct(mod) smelteries, a display armory, and a huge redstone and quantum mechanics lab... And on the south side of my house I had a huge Chocobo farm, with all but one color of chocobo, and I had started breeding the other colors. I was leeving dee high life, Stimpy!

Hexxit carries with it a mod called 'Falling Meteors' which causes...yep, you guessed it... meteors to fall. There are, I believe, 4 different types of meteor that fall at random times and locations. Various sizes, and each of the 4 types has a different danger and perk. For example, a Kreknorite meteor has block of kreknorite that can be picked for the raw kreknorite flakes that can be made into weapons that freeze slow enemies, or armor that can freeze water as you cross it, meaning you can basically walk/run on water. One of the other meteors spawns space creepers, which have antenna, glow, move faster, and blow up about 4 times bigger... but those creepers give awesome meteor related loot.

I had decided to gather as much meteor related stuff in order to make a shield barrier to protect my home from meteors, then I set about understanding the meteor mod by learning to craft meteor summoners. By using parts of meteors, it was possible to make an item which could be thrown on the ground to cause a meteor to fall right there. I had set aside a small chunk of the desert south west of my house as my testing ground and had called down several meteors already. Now, I had the parts, and I had successfully made my first summoner for a meteor type that came down in fire. Obsidian, nether brick, fire, lava, all in a huge crater, with a nether portal floating above the crater. I had seen them, but I wanted to see how easy it would be to create a network of portals simply by calling down the meteors. MAKE IT RAIN!!!

In glee, I ran down the stairs, ran out the front door, turned to close the door, turned too far...with the summoner selected in my toolbar... right clicked for the door, and watched the summoner land in the middle of my house. I didn't know what would happen with my shield, so I ran far enough away and turned to watch..... my house turn into a burning skeleton. With a BAWOOOMF, my roof was gone, and my second floor was gone, and there was the nether portal. Everything wood (my whole barn) was on fire instantly. Lava was creeping through my chocobo farm. I ran into the house just enough to catch on fire and grab a bucket from a chest, and then lava took my chests. I saw lava start creeping down the stairs to my sublevel. I ran to my nearby fountain and started hauling ONE bucket of water back and forth, trying to throw it where it might do some good. Luckily I was at work, because somewhere between the BAWOOOMF and the lava running through my house, I remember slamming my hand on the table and yelling NO, and maybe shed that tear. After about 10 minutes of trying to fight the fire, I went creative so I could fly and drop water from above, dousing my whole house with a couple bucket fulls. Back to survival, and started rebuilding. I was soooooooooooo pissed!!!! Half of my fence work around the chocobos was gone, but only about half of my chocobos escaped. All of my berry bushes were gone. Most of the trees behind the house were gone. My house was basically 4 cobblestone cornerposts. Where the lava ran down my stairs, the water had turned it to cobble, so I had to re-mine my stairs, and sighed in relief when I found my sublevel untouched. But holy crap, that feeling was NOT cool! Like I said, I had about 3 weeks into repairing that barn and then adding all the touches that made it home. All the chests, my bed, everything I had on shelves on the wall....if a container burned, all the stuff popped out, and the lava devoured it. Makes me wonder if I still have the screenshots of that fateful fuckery....

Oh....reserched it later. The meteor shields only work on natural random meteors. The shield does NOT work on meteors called by summoners. Good to know if we ever ran a PVP server. That would be one hell of a way to ruin somebodies day!!

You know how, if you crouch, you won't fall off the edge?  Well, apparently the crouching fail safe doesn't work when descending stairs.


Keep in mind it wasn't as if the stairs led me to an edge; I wasn't at the bottom of the stairs and then fell. I'm talking about falling off the side of the stairs. You know, like if you were mining a shaft and had stairs along the shaft's walls.