bloggerthanwolves

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #37 - Withering Heights

Like I said before, I wasn’t willing to risk setting up the Wither arena anywhere near Mitose. So I went out to (1, 0.75) on the Nether Grid (about 5,000 blocks as the crow flies) and dug underground to set it up.

Neither the arena itself (a tunnel) nor the surrounding structures (a ladder down from a jungle tree where the portal spawned, a crappy house made of wood and cobble) were at all glamorous, so I’ll cut to the chase:

(I did think to use a Night Vision potion, since I realized it would be easy for the Wither to put me into darkness by destroying torches. This is why everything’s all red.)

Not exactly one for the history books. I probably over-prepared, but I suppose it’s better to be safe than sorry given the cost of a single attempt (i.e. a bunch of villager trading).

So what’s the reward? With that Nether Star, I can get myself -

The 4x4 crafting Soulforge. Neat. What can I actually make with it?

Block dispenser, for automatically placing blocks.

Buddy Block and Detector Block for automatically detecting block updates and placed blocks, respectively. That blue gem-looking item is a Redstone Eye, another 4x4 recipe involving some gold and lapis.

The reason this matters to me is because these items are 3 of the 4 things a Level 4 Librarian Villager is willing to buy:

(Lens is another automation block that doesn’t require Soulforge).

And once you get a Librarian to level 5, they sell...

And then that’s it - go fight the Dragon, and reach the end of the tech tree.

I don’t actually have a Librarian at the moment. So I have to go find one (hours of walking around!), get them to level 4 (they want mass mob drops from bats, witches, jungle spiders, and regular spiders, none of which I am sure how to create a grinder for), and then get them to level 5 with these advanced block trades, and then I’ll have the Eyes of Ender!

Not quick, not easy, and not simple, Better Than Wolves style.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #36 - Payoff

So, I have all these mob drops, cool, now what?

Well, remember Wolves? Yeah, me neither. Wolves need to eat food, typically meat-based, which is very hard to get in large quantities, so I couldn’t automate feeding them, so they lived until I forgot one too many lunches.

Well, there’s an exception to the meat-based food rule, sort of. Kibble.

Made from dirt-cheap ingredients in a stoked cauldron, completely edible by wolves. Now that I can mass produce wolf food, it’s worth my time to automate feeding them and collecting dung.

Here an overhead diagram of my implementation. On the left, we have a dispenser and a wooden pressure plate. This is an item despawn timer. When the item despawns, the pressure plate lifts, and the redstone is unpowered. The lack of signal goes through an OFF gate, and so sends an ON signal to the left and right.

The device on the left is a pulse repeater (whose schematic I copied from the Minecraft wiki) that tells the dispenser to keep outputting items until the plate is pressed again. I didn’t have to do a pulse repeater here - a regular redstone wire sort of worked, but it sometimes got messed up, and I didn’t want to have to manually reset this thing, that’s the whole point.

The device on the right is a binary counter (which I also copied from the Minecraft wiki) which sends out a pulse every two times it receives a signal. Since an item takes five minutes to despawn, it will pulse every ten minutes. In Mitose, I hooked this up to a dispenser with wolf food, to dispense kibble every ten minutes. Then I just had the wolf sit on a floor of hoppers to collect the dung.

Really, the only clever thing here I came up with was the idea of using an item despawn timer. No idea how else you’d accomplish a long timer in BTW without a disgusting amount of redstone complexity, which is I think what all the other BTW players did. They’re just built different, I’m pretty sure.

(The new wolf’s name is Colonel)

Here’s me feeding the Priest of Mitose my spare Vessel to get them up to level 3.

Oh, they want blocks of bone. Let me explain Hardcore Packing real fast. You know how in regular MC you can just craft nine items together and get a block? BTW makes this a whole thing you have to do, by having a piston shove nine of the item into a confined air block.

And boom, it’s a bone block. I think you’re supposed to use this for mass storage and automation and be really fancy, but the Mitosan Project would have to be way better than it is for that to be worthwhile. You can also use this method to pack dirt and stone and stuff, and I even think you can get gravity-immune dirt this way. Neat tech.

And this is why the chopping block was important, and half the reason the Mitosan Project was needed in the first place. It would be very impractical to try and get these mob heads by hand, and getting this Priest to level four is absolutely necessary.

A butcher back in Athens already has their Runed Skull trade available, so this was no big deal.

And then I was looking at it.

On the right, the Soulforge trade. Your reward for the Wither, the penultimate step on the tech tree.

On the left, the Infused Skull trade. Three of those, four bone blocks, and a soul jar, and you can fight the Wither.

Getting the Infused Skulls took less an hour of getting emeralds and skulls from Athens. I finally have the materials to summon the Wither. What about actually fighting it?

Well, you saw the Smite III sword a couple logs ago. Since then, with the new EXP income from the grinder, I’ve been hard at work. 

Not technically the best I could get under my current tech level, but pretty darn close. Apparently the Wither’s skulls also count a projectile, so the helmet isn’t useless.

As for potions, I’ve got access to basic instant healing and basic strength. Speed potions have been removed, and fire resistance potions won’t help much. I spent the last dredges of my gold supply on a few golden apples:

I originally planned to make a God Apple with eight gold blocks, but without a gold farm it would take a comically long time to gather the gold. So instead of the five minute resistance and thirty second Regen IV, I get a few seconds of Regen I. I’m not sure if it’ll be worth the time it takes to eat it during the fray, but it’ll be nice to have the option. Wouldn’t be a Minecraft boss fight without a few Golden Apples flying around, would it?

(The apples come from village chests and villager trades. I only have like ten total.)

Okay, what about the fight itself? My tactics? The arena?

Having not actually fought the Wither in anything resembling vanilla Minecraft before, I went into my creative BTW world to do some simulated fights.

(Purists can fuck off, I’m not going to doom a region of my world to an uncontained Wither because I was blindsided by some weird bullshit. Information is free game.)

And at first, they all went terribly. The wither would just float above sword range and blast me with skulls until I ran out of potions. I can’t enchant bows yet, so their DPS is low enough that they can’t seriously threaten the Wither. It can’t be contained by Obsidian, so for a while I was stumped. Even if I were to “get really good at Minecraft combat” that wouldn’t solve me not even being able to reach the stupid thing. Any terrain I set up to reach it, it would just blow up. It seemed impossible. Until I tried fighting it underground.

If I attack it from a 1x2 tunnel, while it’s in a 3x3 tunnel, it seems to get too busy digging towards me to actually launch any attacks. It only digs in a way that maintains the 3x3 shape, keeping the fight orderly, and it won’t tunnel up and away out of range unless it loses aggro on me.

With this strategy, it’s almost...easy. It feels sort of like cheesing the boss, but if I’m to choose between impossible and cheesy, I’ll choose cheesy ten times out of ten. God knows it was hard enough to get the chance to fight the Wither. Besides, it inherited all of its behavior from vanilla, so it’s more of a symbolic fight than anything. After FC actually touches the Wither I’m sure things will be much better and infinitely worse, as usual.

I’ll still set up the arena far, far away from anything I care about. It pays to be careful. The next log will be the Wither fight, win or lose.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #35 - M.P. Redux, Part Two - Late & Over Budget

Finally went and finished the expansion of the mob grinder, AKA the Mitosan Project. After the most recent log about it, most of the rooms were partially dug, but none of the new canals were done, the water routing was partial, and the kill room wasn’t started at all.

So I went and did all that. It took a long time. Just doing all the canals was, I’d estimate, over ten hours. All in all it was spectacularly boring, so here are some highlights:

I was clearing part of an abandoned mine-shaft to let water through and died to Cave Spiders. Respawned near Potwhole and made my way back in a couple of hours.

Somehow, my items were gone - this keeps happening. I know for a fact that chunks at Mitose couldn’t have been rendered for a full five minutes in vanilla Minecraft rules. I even heard someone on the BTW discord claim that the items you drop after death stay for twenty minutes, though I suspect that’s completely false.

You can see in the screenshot my items did drop - so why were they gone? Was I slower to reach them than I thought? Does BTW specifically render chunks where you recently died? Does vanilla Minecraft still count item despawn timers when you’re outside the chunk? Does BTW? Either way the death set me back a few hours and a few diamonds, but was ultimately of little consequence. Wait, then why did I bring it up..? Whatever.

I discovered this...interesting bit of work I did about a year ago. This is the canal mobs fall into from the east wing. But I have no idea why I made it so deep. I don’t want the mobs to take fall damage, so I have no reason to specifically lower the water canal. But for some reason, this was twenty blocks lower than needed, which 1. messed up my kill room plans and required me to raise it, and 2. meant I probably wasted hours digging this out for no good reason. I really have no idea what I was thinking, since I didn’t mention my rationale here.

The kill room. The bit of redstone on the right is a timer (turntable) hooked up to a chopping block attached to a sticky piston. Every fourth turn, it recedes, mobs fall into the kill chamber, then it pushes back onto the mobs, suffocating them, increasing the saw’s damage, and crucially, increasing the drop rate of mob heads.

The loot collection area. Five different chests, each with a different hopper filter. Made to collect creeper drops, skeleton drops, zombie drops, tool/armor drops, and miscellaneous, respectively. If you’re wondering why I bothered with the sorting, it’s because bones, creeper oysters, and rotten flesh only stack up to 16, meaning that a normal double chest would quickly fill up.

Collecting experience from the Vessel of the Dragon.

The Project now outputs easily five or ten times as much as before. It’s not technically done - once I finished digging and started placing vine traps and closing off rooms, I realized that the nine stack of vine traps I had saved would not nearly cover the entire grinder. It covered, like, one half of one wing. So I’ve slowly been harvesting more vines and activating more of the rooms over the last week. At present, it’s at 75% capacity.

Hey, a rare Arcane Scroll drop. Isn’t useful until after the Dragon, I think, but neat.

So, what did I learn from this year-long sabbatical to build a Minecraft mob farm? A few things. Mostly mistakes that will permanently stain this thing.

1. I built it too close to the surface so it was constantly collapsing the ground and leaving scars where water tunnels are, getting in the way of other stuff I want to do. 1a. I built it under a frickin’ desert so it was extra collapse-happy. 2. I built it outside of the permanently rendered spawn chunks which I didn’t know existed, so it will only run when I’m nearby. 3. I only have a single kill room, which is far away from most of the mob spawning area. This means a lot of mobs are spending a lot of time alive, reducing total spawns, and thus total throughput and speed of production. It would be best to have local kill rooms that kill mobs ASAP and then just transport all the drops to a central area. 4. Like 1/3rd of the kill rooms are close enough to my base to be inactive most of the time.

But for all of that, it works, goddamnit, it works, it gets me the goods in the quantities I need. Tons of bones, flesh, and creeper oysters. Iron income is...nice. Not enough to build an actual railroad, even a small one, but nice.

I built a rail track to the kill room for fun and easy access. The booster rails cost most of the my meager gold supply, but I had to celebrate somehow.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #34 - Semiautomatic Kiln

Kept you waiting, huh?

I took a break from BTW during the semester - as it turns out, the human brain can only manage one source of utter despair at a time. But I’m back.

First order of business? Something I really should have done a long time ago - make a semiautomatic kiln.

Quick refresher, the entire kilning process is as follows: clay blocks are placed on a turntable and shaped into one of a few items. This unfired pottery (as well as a few other kilnable things, like cakes) can then be placed within the bricks of a kiln, heated by stoked hibachis. Once the placed-block is fully kilned, it pops up as an item, and you can pick it up.

Up until now, I’ve just been manually setting timers based on how long it takes certain items to cook, and walking back to the kiln to pick them up before they despawn. I thought that automating the kilning process would be very complex - and that’s partially true. Automating the entire process - shaping clay, placing it in the kiln, and pick up - would be very hard and maybe totally impossible at my tech level.

What isn’t impossible, or complex is automating the kiln-collection, which would remove most of the hassle, by letting me place stuff in the kiln and forget about it. All it really required was some well placed water flows. The fact that it took me...eleven months and one day to actually do this is a testament to my ability to endure arbitrary amounts of inconvenience.

The water flow coming from the lake outside the base’s walls. I had to cut off the water source outside from the surrounding water, to ensure no squids got inside.

The left flow loops around and becomes a collection channel. The right side splits into two and goes into the two kiln slots:

When something’s in the kiln, it blocks the water flow. When it finishes and pops up as an item, the water pushes it into the collection channel -

-where it ends up in this hopper.

The internal bellows-stoking mechanisms. Nothing special down here, just my standard 8-box-delay set up for stoking bellows, repeated twice for two kilns.

Works like a charm. One final point of interest:

While trying for a Looting sword for cow-killing, I got this bad boy. Will come in very handy when I fight the Wither. Apparently there’s bosses in this game you have to fight? Fucked up, I know.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #33 - Nether Grid / Back to Me

I got bored of the Mitosan Project and decided to do other things for an indefinite amount of time.

I revamped the basement at Mitose, turning it into a mass storage room, making more room upstairs. My selection of aesthetic blocks is limited, to say the least, so I ended up going with...redstone blocks. Certainly a unique look.

With the added space upstairs, I made a grandfather clock. Aesthetic and functional.

Onto more significant matters, my nether travel network sucks. The problem is that it's an irregular network which is confusing, inefficient, and often literally dangerous.

As the search for important progression items in increasingly distant regions of the map goes on, a more regular system would be useful. Enter the Nether Grid. 

Located just below the Nether's bedrock ceiling, the Nether Grid is a grid of portals, equally spaced and labeled. This is significant not only because it makes exploring easier, but because of the implications for Hardcore Spawn. If the far reaches of the overworld become populated by these portals, the odds of me being able to find one after a death go up drastically. 

(There is the Nothing To Worry About factor to consider, but that's mostly problems with breeding animals. A caveman has bigger problems.)

Its location at the ceiling is also important. It minimizes the risk of running into caves and lava pockets, and makes the risk of tunneling into the nether at large almost zero.

I've decided to have a grid spacing of 512 blocks between each portal. This corresponds to 4,096 overworld blocks. It'll take about two minutes to walk between portals in the Nether, and about sixteen minutes to walk between portals in the overworld. 

The reason the distance is a power of two and not a multiple is ten is to make spacing easier to measure via netherrack and quartz added to my inventory as I dig the tunnels. A 2-high 512 block tunnel is exactly sixteen stacks of blocks mined. 

As of right now, the grid looks like this:

The space between each line indicates a portal. All of them except for the one at (2, 0) in a coordinate system went into a cave or above an ocean. The one at (0, 3) happened to pop out near a Mushroom Biome, which is neat but not immediately relevant. What happened at (2, 0)? I finally hit land.

Now I can spread out and look for the usual suspects - more Vessels, more Enchantment Tables, more Villagers, and the stupid carrots I still need. The portal's at the edge of land, next to an ocean. That won't be a problem, will it?

Portals turn squids into ghasts, which is funnily enough almost a downgrade in power.

I had to haul over a bunch of mortar and cobble from Mitose to encase the entire outpost in a shell to prevent its destruction and my death.

Once that was taken care of, I was back to pushing the frontiers of the known world, coming across some nice sights like this one. 

I even went through a jungle, for once. 

...what's that on the left? A gravel hut? But I'm several thousand blocks from spawn - it's really unlikely I was ever a cave man out here. 

Following the customary bread crumb trail…

I recognized the architecture. This is Port Portillo, back from Log #23. Which means I should be able to find…

Classic. The first time I got here by sailing across the ocean at an impossible to replicate angle for forty-five minutes. Now I can get here through a ten minute nether walk and a twenty minute overworld land journey. The improvement in time is marginal, but now Me is actually on the map instead of being a faded legend that can't be found ever again. 

(If you recall, I found Mitose by accident while trying to get back to Portillo.)

Speaking of faded legends, let's finally go take Revel.

Modern siege tactics developed in Log #30 while assaulting Athens made it a breeze. Three more zombie villagers contained, and a new continent reconnected to the world map.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #32 - M.P. Redux, Part One - Water and Caves

This is a diagram of the original Mitosan Project.

 It consisted of nine 9 x 13 rooms, each containing six 3x3 platforms (minus the middle pillar block) for spawning, for a total of 432 mob spawning tiles. 

The yellow arrow indicates outside water flow, routed to make it possible to run water through every room in the same way. The blue arrow indicates the water that pushed mobs towards the Killing Point - two saws and some collection hoppers.

The simple, if not easy, solution to low mob farm output is - increase the size. So this is the plan for the Mitosan Project Redux:

A planned 8x size increase, from nine rooms to seventy-two, and from 432 valid tiles to 3,456. Well, approximately - a few logistical concerns mean that I truncated the top wing by two rooms' lengths, so it will be four rooms short of this projection, but it's largely accurate.

Another benefit is moving more mob spawning area closer to my base, Mitose, which is off to the Southwest of the diagram. I'm pretty sure that most of the East Wing is out of mob spawning range most of the time. 

You may notice I didn't include the yellow arrows for external water flow in this plan. Water navigation has proven...inconvenient. 

As I've mentioned before, water source blocks can't be moved by bucket. They can only be created when two pre-existing sources flow into each other. This means no raising water (without the six-iron ingot mechanically powered screw pump), which in turns means any water source has a range limit - the farther it goes, the more it has to drop in height. I've had to make use of four different random water sources around the desert so far, with little regularity in their positioning.

Water routes like this criss-cross the entire desert outside Mitose. Once it's complete, it would be nice to cover these with glass to show them off. But that's a concern for later. 

The largest and oddest terrain artifact of this project is the Jut.

Originally a river that ran into the nearby sea.  I spent a few days carving into the terrain to create new water source blocks, effectively moving the water source closer to the mob trap and increasing its range. The cobblestone ridge represents the original position of the coastline.

Don't think all the interesting mob trap work is happening on the surface, though. While digging out the South wing, I hit a cave. I figured it was a small near surface cave that I could light up in a few minutes. I have, so far, spent about twelve stacks of torches lighting up various caverns, ravines, and abandoned mineshafts, and even two dungeons (zombie and spider). Yields have included six diamonds, eight stacks of iron chunks, ten stacks of coal, and six stacks of logs from the mineshaft. 

But wait, why am I bothering? I could have just cut my losses after lighting up the part right next  to the trap. It's not like I need conventional quantities of coal, iron, redstone, gold, or lapis. The few diamonds I found were nice, but I could have just gone mining for those.

The real reason I'm putting in all this effort is to maximize mob spawning in the Mitosan Project. The more I light up the caves in the area, the less places mobs can spawn that aren't in the trap. Just another way of increasing its efficiency. This principle also means I should light up all the surface terrain in the area, but again, I am waiting on that until the Redux is largely functional. 

To summarize, this entire endeavor has been much more work than I anticipated. I would estimate that my current level of work, just excavating rooms, routing water, and lighting up caves, has taken twenty hours easily. It is my hope that all this effort means the Project won’t need a third revision.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #31 - Project Projections

Log #31 - Project Projections + Mitosan Project 2.0

Trading has so far been quite successful. The Butcher is level 4, high enough to unlock his important trade - the Runed Skull.

I have one so far, but in total I will need at least four. One to level up the First Priest to level 4, and three to turn into Infused Skulls in order to spawn the Wither.

As far as villager progression goes, I still need to find another Enchantment Table and Vessel of the Dragon to bring the Priest up to level 4. Then he'll sell Infused Skulls and offer a way to get the Soulforge post-Wither. 

Then I need to get a librarian to level 4, at which point he'll sell the Eyes of Ender I need to get to the End and beat the Enderdragon.  (I was previously mistaken about the priest selling these directly. Cut me some slack; trying to deduce a critical path out of the less-than-perfectly maintained BTW wiki isn't easy.)

The issue is that, as I've mentioned before, villager trades were designed to force you to make mob traps and unusual farms.  Especially the Librarian - he demands Witch Warts, Venom Sacks from Jungle Spiders, and even Bat Wings. (How do you make a bat farm?)

I've compiled a list of the directly farmable trade goods, as well as the farm I would need.

The top group is farms I basically already have or might as well have, the bottom is farms I don't have or else lack a critical component of, and the middle is farms I sort of have that need a massive update.

HAVE:

Sugar Cane -> Paper, Book and Quill, Sugar

Chickens -> Feathers, Book and Quill, Eggs, Arrow

Cows -> Leather, Book and Quill, Milk Bucket, Chocolate

Pigs -> Tallow, Candles

Sheep > Wool, Painting

Nether Wart -> Nether Wart

Wheat -> Flour

Mushroom Farm -> Brown/Red Mushroom, Stump Remover

Cocoa Beans -> Cocoa Beans, Chocolate

Pumpkin 

Melon

Cactus

Hemp -> Hemp Seeds, Arrow

SORT-OF-HAVE:

Mitosan Project* -> Nitre, Creeper Oyster, Bone Block, Shears, Screw, Flint + Steel, Stump Remover

DON'T HAVE:

Squid Farm -> Ink Sack, Book and Quill, Mysterious Gland

Bat Farm -> Bat Wing

Spider Farm -> Spider Eye, Stake + String, Fishing Rod

Jungle Spider Farm -> Venom Sack, Stake + String

Witch Farm -> Witch Wart

Modified Mob Trab -> All Mob Heads

Tree Farm -> Birch Logs, Spruce Bark, All Logs

Wolves -> Dung**

Brown Sheep -> Specifically Brown Wool

Carrots

Blaze Farm -> Blaze Powder

Ghast Farm -> Ghast Tear

Magma Cube Farm -> Magma Cream

MISCELLANEOUS PROJECTS:

the grid

**Livers of the beast and raw wolfchops are also needed, but since wolves can't be bred, they are not farmable. 

The reason I put the Mitosan Project in "sort-of" have is because one, it doesn't use the BTW mob-head trick, and two, it's far too slow to really "produce" iron or even keep up with my demands for more mundane mob drops. 

Given that a mob-farm tier iron supply allows me to move water upwards via screw pumps, this makes upgrading the Mitosan Project my top priority.  So let's re-work the Mitosan Project.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #30 - Recap: Magic, Athens, & Vessels

Been a bit, huh? I took a bit of a break from BTW, during which the world ended and, more surprisingly, I temporarily convinced another person to play Better Than Wolves. Now that I’m back, I want to bring the blog up to speed with my screenshot backlog.

Made myself a pair of ender spectacles out of some gold and enderpearls. They can be worn, and highlight tiles that are dark enough for mobs to spawn on. Great for building a safe base.

(Smoky particles indicate a mob-spawning tile)

Next order of business was exploring. Pretty much every avenue of progress required exploration. More villagers for progression, an enchanting table, a vessel of the dragon, carrots for better food...

It was boring. Really boring. Obviously as a BTW player I have a higher-than-average tolerance of tedium, but this was still pretty rough. Hours of road paving and tunneling through the nether to try and find new terrain that isn’t an infinite goddamn ocean.

But eventually, it did pay off. In more ways than one.

First, a new village. Fully populated by zombies. I wasn’t about to repeat the mistakes I made at Mitose. I had planned exactly how to approach this.

https://youtu.be/O46YOhqxuNc

Spoilers: I bridged above the village and used gravity blocks to wall off the village and individual zombie villagers. With them contained, I could safely bring them back to life.

Welcome to Athens, population of about 7 (I can’t quite tell from my old screenshots). It’s got farmers and, more importantly, a butcher. A huge find.

Sadly, the farms are all wheat or potatoes. Carrots and subsequently, the Hearty Stew remain out of reach.

Back to exploring. Here’s one of my more unorthodox routes. Jungle up ahead. I decided to peak through it a bit for a shot at seeing another desert or plains.

Instead, I got a Temple.

Finally, a Vessel of the Dragon. Intrinsically useful for EXP farming and also required for a progression villager trade. Guess I don’t need to go back to Double Hell just yet.

Back to exploring. This is what happens 49% of the time you make a portal to exit the nether. The other 50%, you end up in a cave under the ocean. The last 1% is actually emerging on a continent. So I got used to making and breaking portals a lot.

Back to exploring. Hey, another Temple. Best not to get my hopes up - I’ve found several without any enchanting tables so far.

...

Could it be?

Finally, after all these years, enchantments. Well, basic ones. Enchantments have been nerfed and messed with in the usual ways for BTW. I can detail them later. At least I can get efficiency and unbreaking on my tools.

Because books can’t actually be crafted, only found in the world, this is as many bookshelves as I could make. Sufficient for now.

The real problem is that the First Priest needs the enchanter for his progression trade. And there’s no way in hell I’m about to give this thing up now. So I gotta go find another one. You know the drill, back to exploring.

Also, while I was away, Damocles went feral. Very sad.

I’ll end the recap with the fully up to date map of my BTW world.

(Graphic design is, in fact, my passion)

Right click -> View Image for the full size map.

The big names in italics are continents - Sprall, the original. Challen, home of Mitose and Athens, and Portillo, home to Revel and Me.

There’s now a nice Nether network between Cape Carnival, Mitose, and Athens. The route between Cape Carnival and Damascus certainly, uh, exists, but it’s long, winding, and straight up dangerous.

And now we’re all up to date. Future plans include more frickin’ exploring.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #29 - Economy of Scale

With the Era of International Trade coming up, the ability to produce substantial quantities of animal and crop goods is becoming relevant. Most of my work at Mitose has been setting up the industrial base to create those goods, or in less glamorous terms, making giant fucking fields of grass.

Cows, sheep.

Chickens.

Pigs. Their field is much larger because I anticipated breeding them for food, since Chocolate is easier to come by en masse than other breeding items. (I think this might have been false, considering chicken feed is just seeds and bone meal.)

Current farm set up, sporting potatoes, hemp, and wheat. Subsisting on melons was indescribably annoying, having to much on ten to twenty one-third shank snacks to fill up a hunger bar every few minutes. Potatoes are a huge upgrade. The animal farms are still too underpopulated to support mass production of sandwiches or any higher tier foods, but I look forward to when that stops being the case.

Behold the Four-Cylinder Millstone Engine. Four hoppers connected to four millstones, the output of which is collected into a single hopper at the bottom. Very convenient.

Two saws, because plank mass production is slow and I can’t automate it until I literally beat the game.

Crucible, Kiln, Cauldron, and Stoked Cauldron. I decided separating regular and stoked cauldron entirely was better than relying on myself to toggle it at the right times, given that I’ve already had two incidents blowing up the cauldron.

I also rigged it so that all three stoked-fire usages are based off the same turntable clock, which is now more of a convenience or space saver than a gold saver.

This space was originally meant to be a second underground layer to the cow farm. Once I found out that grass needed sunlight to grow, the space went unused for a few weeks, until I remembered that mushrooms need perfect darkness to grow.

Now it’s a mushroom farm and a marvel of modern redstone engineering.

My newest and longest lived wolf, Damocles.

The functional living space.  Notice the absolute abundance of chests, most containing a stupid amount of cobblestone, sand, gravel, or saw dust from various excavation projects. Bonus: Out the window you can see the church the First Priest originally came from.

While making Mitose Great Again has been alright, I’ve been feeling sort of complacent with regards to overall progression, in that way that I almost always was in the many months before this blog came to be. To combat that, I’m going to clearly enumerate my next few goals, and then begin an expedition.

*Find a Butcher, bring him to fourth level, and get a Runed Skull from him. *Bring the First Priest to fourth level, trade them for Eyes of Ender. 

Find an Enchanting Table (Desert)

Find a Vessel of the Dragon (Jungle)*

Get more enderpearls

*Reach the end, defeat the Enderdragon. 

*Get three infused skulls via trading Runed Skulls with a level four priest, or crafting Runed Skulls with post-End materials. Use these infused skulls to defeat the Wither twice - once for a beacon, and once for the soulforged steel anvil. 

*Make a soulforged steel beacon and bring an end to fear and death.

The asterisk by the Vessel of the Dragon indicates I already have a lead - during one my recent deaths, I respawned in sight of a jungle temple, but was too primitive to raid it at the time. Luckily, I recorded its approximate location, so returning should be relatively simple.

Enchanting Tables would be extremely valuable both extrinsically for trade and intrinsically because I really want enchanted gear. The weight system for armor means being able to squeeze more protection out of leather would be spectacular. While I have found some in the Past, none are in recorded history.

Anyway, for the future, all signs point to exploration and expansion of the mapped world. Meaning some kind of systemic exploration/colonization system might need to be developed.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #28 - The Mitosan Project

As I prepare to enter the Villager trading phase of the game, scale becomes more important. Mass production of goods not only for my own use, but for trading. This is one way FC added value to things like mushroom farms and sheep pens - villagers want mushrooms and wool.

The Mitosan Project is my first real mob grinder, natural spawn platforms and all. BTW’s hard to transfer water source blocks put some heavy restrictions on how I can build it, but constraint breeds creativity.

First, materials.

Typical vanilla mob traps use signs to trick mobs into walking off their spawn platforms into water canals. FC added a new block to serve this function instead - vine traps. Both more consistent in universe and gives a use to vines.

I tried to be clever and make a vine farm that went down to bedrock, so I could break the top vine and harvest fifty at once. Later found out you only get vines from the specific block you break, so all those extras were going to waste. Modern farm looks like this:

Step two is the design. What kind of collection room will I use? I did some experimenting in creative, and eventually settled on this design:

Six three by three platforms in one room. The central block of each platform will be a pillar to prevent spider spawns. I would have liked to include spiders, but managing two block wide canals was impossible, and the only NPC that wants spider drops is unimportant anyway. A problem for later.

Next up was the organization between rooms. I chose to have all the rooms line up so that their 3-paltform-wide axis touched the other, with one block of wall between. Each room would then drop into the same giant canal that leads to a narrow kill room.

A finished spawn room, right before I kill the lights to activate it.

The power control for the two saws and two hoppers of the kill room.

I was very careful when making sure powering the saws was left until the end. I don’t want to pull a Gaster and die in my own machine.

The first automatic piece of mob loot. Beautiful.

As of right now, the Mitosan Project only has about eight or so rooms (I never did a precise count). I might expand it later, but I was hesitant to commit too much to something I could easily mess up.

One particular reason I’m excited for the M.P. is iron. Zombies drop their iron tools when they die, and those tools can be resmelted for 2/3 of the iron it would have taken to craft them. A big enough mob farm is an iron farm. I have enough iron for conventional purposes, but mass iron production would make rail lines possible. Six ingots for sixteen blocks isn’t cheap. I guess I’d also need a pigman farm in the Nether for gold for booster rails.

Anyway, mission accomplished. Next update will detail changes in Mitose proper.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #27 - The First Priest

There I was, wandering eastward through a desert, in the general direction of Me. I had made an alternate turn somewhere while boating and decided to try cutting through on land instead. Say, what’s that on the horizon?

Another village - with a villager zombie in sight. Perfect. I just need to unpack all the raw materials I brought, set up a windmill, return to the Nether, collect soul sand for a filter, set up another stoked Hibachi Kiln to cook urns, and then I’ll have the souls urns to convert them back to real villagers.

Suffice it to say, it took a while.

I knew I would need access to water, so I decided to set up shop at the edge of this nearby swamp. This would turn out to be a mistake.

A couple days later, one of the two zombies wandered within his aggro distance, and I had to put him down. Shame, but at least the other one will remain.

At long last, industry was in place and I had the soul urns ready.

I found the last survivor hanging out the opposite side of my base from the village. They apparently love to wander.

I hit him with a soul urn, and he started emitting some healing particles. This was a problem - I didn’t have a prison prepared for him, and I had no idea how long the process would take.

Turns out their pathing is terrible. I was able to cut him off with a hastily made dirt wall.

Then he wandered off and fell into a lake. Night was nearing fast and I had another conundrum - get him in a prison which would keep him safe if he cured in the middle of the night.

My screenshots indicate I failed pretty hard at this, although the details of the case escape me now. I got lucky, and he survived the night, allowing me to wrangle him into an NPC cage.

Look at that, he’s a priest! The highest caste, and also the most useless pragmatically until you can get their tech-tree-necessary item.

The moment of truth. If he doesn’t gain experience from this trade, the game is unwinnable, and I’ll have to start a new world. If he does, I’ve entered a new era.

🦀THE TIMELINE IS SAVED 🦀

The town is named “Mitose,” from “Mitosis,” the process of cell division. The expansion and growth of new settlements reminds me of it.

The future’s bright.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #26 - Cape Carnival II

With access to soul urns, as well as abundant iron and redstone, I realized I could make a map. I’m not super interested in using them to map the overworld for now - I’ve got my own map for that - but I had an unorthodox idea for their use. Usually, maps are basically worthless in the nether, since they look like this.

Unless you’re really into Magic Eye paintings, this isn’t super helpful.

I was thinking about how best to connect Me to Cape Carnival via the Nether, and realized that knowing when I was actually near the Cape’s portal would be hard, since I live in the Nether exclusively in closed off tunnels. Then I found out that the map’s max size displays a 2048 x 2048 area.

So I made a map while standing at the Cape’s Nether side portal, so that I can quickly consult the map to see if I’m within a thousand block radius of the portal. Not perfect, but it should make the connection much easier to establish.

Found a skeleton dungeon. While spawner skeletons don’t have bows or arrows, they still drop bones, which I can use en masse for bonemeal and Kibble for feeding wolves.

Someone on the inside happened to make a BTW forum thread about planters, which as far as I can tell is one of the few places where it is ever documented that Planters no longer hydrate without water, but instead can be watered from below. I am a little upset this information was not available on the wiki or changelog.

Either way, this spot’s obviously no good for farming anymore. Going to have to move the planters over some pre-existing water, probably the north or east coast of the Cape.

My access to chickens for eggs means I can officially make cakes, allowing me to breed cows for reliable leather access.

...or does it?

Okay. Maybe that was a freak glitch? Weirder things have happened with mob collisions.

Next breeding attempt, the baby died instantly again. The third time, the cows gave birth to five silverfish. It was then I realized I might have a demonic possession problem.

The Crow’s Nest apparently wasn’t high enough to prevent demons from possessing my cows and preventing breeding. Okay, I’ll just move my portal, clear out all my animals, and then bring in a new batch, demon-free. Simple.

It wasn’t. The following is an excerpt from me complaining to a friend about this endeavor:

Eventually, it worked out, and I got my portal moved somewhere far away from my vulnerable animals. 

I also decided that then would be a good time to expand the walls of Cape Carnival to make room for each of the four types of livestock, instead of the two I’d been settling for.   I decided then would also be a good time to use the space under the cow farm for sugar cane and cocoa bean farming.

I decided to go overboard and make the device I’d imagined years ago to make cocoa bean farming easy: The Bean Pusher.

A 12 x 3 grid of Jungle logs, doubled sided with cocoa beans to hold 72 total. Harvesting is done by pressing a button to activate the pistons, which push the logs and knock off all the beans. The side you harvest from needs to be alternated to keep the logs within reach.

What I forgot was that at the time I imagined this, I was harvesting the beans with a stone axe, taking both about 1.5 seconds per harvest and some hunger. Now that I have a diamond axe which can harvest them instantly and without a hunger cost, this is pretty much pointless. On top of that, any non-mature beans will be destroyed, so I need to wait until bean growth is almost totally complete to avoid a net bean loss. It was fun though.

Had an incident involving a creeper and drowning in three meters of water while working on a Planter farm over the ocean. Biggest loss were the diamond tools I was using, but I had enough of a stockpile at this point for that to be mostly an annoyance.

Near my respawn, I found a supply cache with some sandwiches. I figured this must be near Damascus, since only Damascus and Cape Cod ever had wheat.

Huh. That’s not Damascus.

I remember this place. Made roughly in Summer 2018.

Holy shit that’s a lot of food and iron for a pre-nether civilization. Animal breeding before they needed to graze was apparently pretty insane.

Anyway, I could have taken a nice historical trip to Evansville, but I had business at Cape Carnival I wanted to finish. I grabbed an iron pick and dug down to get redstone for a compass to head home.

Found a ravine and got some. Took less than 20 minutes. I must have lived here for weeks to accrue so much material and food, and yet I never just took a risk and went digging for redstone or diamond. I continue to realize why exactly it took me 22 (well, 23 now) months to reach this point.

The return to Truespawn and subsequently to the Cape was uneventful, except for the discovery of a Witch’s hut with a brewing stand. Now Cape Carnival can have potions! Wait, I still need Nether Wart. Better go find some in the fortress.

Done. Now Cape Carnival can have potions.

Potion making is mostly unmodified. Nether warts for Awkward potions, Magma Cream for Fire Resistance, etc. Notable changes include:

*Instant Healing potions are now made with Mysterious Glands, an uncommon drop from...Squids. This seems like a cosmic joke made personally at me. At least I have some saved up.

*Potions’ durations are now extended by Witch Wart, an uncommon witch drop, rather than redstone.

*Potion potency is now increased by Brimstone, a post-End item.

Oddly, FC didn’t remove the worthless non-Awkward base potions you can only make Weakness with, which is odd since you can also just make Weakness potions from Awkward potions anyway. God works in mysterious ways.

You can bet your ass that after all the incidents I’ve had drowning in five feet of water after being too injured to swim, I’m carrying healing potions on me from now on.

(Notice that health regen being slow as hell makes healing potions useful.)

After that debacle, I realized that bringing animals to the Cape wouldn’t be super useful. I definitely need to breed them en masse for products to use and trade to villagers, but there’s not going to be any villagers at the Cape for the foreseeable future. Meaning that any village settlements I go out and make have to start up their own animal programs anyway.

Following that realization, I had little reason to linger in Cape Carnival longer than I already had. It’s time to return to Me, modernize it, cure those villagers, and hopefully not find out the entire timeline is doomed.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #25 - Cape Carnival

The Good

With the Compass and Spatial Awareness, I returned to Cape Cod across the infinite vastness of the seven seas. The plan is to get the materials I need, return to Me, and then connect it to Cape Cod via Nether.

Wouldn’t it be a shame if I got distracted for twenty hours making Cape Cod cool? I promise I can explain. It all started when I found out that the Crucible can resmelt diamond gear. It can resmelt it for 100% of materials used. Endless diamond gear.

High on the power of the infinite diamond pickaxe, I went mining for a few hours. Then I decided to go into my Test World and try to make a Hibachi switch. 

I found a way to set up a lever that turned a 3x3 grid of hibachis on and off, without using any repeaters (which take four gold each.) This was big enough that I went to go implement it in my main world.

(Don’t mind the odd painting in the background - that’s a story for another time.)

There are three things in BTW that can use a 3x3 grid of Hibachis - the Cauldron, the Kiln, and the Crucible. Since I don’t have a lot of excess leather for more Bellows, right now I have one set of Hibachis with a stoking mechanism set up, and I swap out the device above them as I need to. This was part of the reason I wanted a quick way to turn them on and off.

Immaculate. You may notice the use of sandstone - it’s one of the few blocks in BTW that floats without mortar. The downside is that it takes a diamond pick to pick up without destroying it. Luckily, I just came into an infinite diamond pick, so I grabbed a few stacks from a nearby desert.

(Yes, I am kicking myself for breaking that Diamond Pick in Log #18.)

By this time, I’d been back in Cape Cod for quite a while, and I was running through my supply of melons.

You see, I’ve been slowly replacing my farm with planter-pots since I unlocked them. And for whatever reason, although I can’t find any documentation regarding this, it is an immutable observation: things in planters grow really fucking slowly. See those bonemealed hemp stems on the left? They’ve been growing for at least eight hours, possibly as many as sixteen. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong (I’ve checked the wiki) or what.

Anyway, so I’m renovating this farm, and wheat production is slow. Melons were removed entirely, since they need their own farm setup. They can grow onto nearby plants and crush them, requiring an...odd setup to make them anything resembling neat.

And I was like, man, I could use more melons. What if I spent three hours making a melon/pumpkin farm?

So that happened. And then I thought, man, I’m running out of room for chests in my house, what with all the dirt, cobble, netherrack, sand, and gravel I’m picking up. And I have time to kill waiting for Hemp to grow. What if I spent six hours making the best house I’ve ever made in Minecraft, let alone Better Than Wolves?

Yeah. Not super impressive in the scheme of things, I’m aware, but building was never something I focused on, even in vanilla. Either way, building it was certainly a lot of fun, and it’ll serve me well. And I think it was grand enough to justify renaming Cape Cod to Cape Carnival.

(Fun? In Better Than Wolves? Only took...22 months?)

The Bad

I was spending my evening how I spend most of my evenings - looking over old BTW changelogs - when I found something worrying.

That’s bad. That means Revel is gone, and I need to go find some other village. On the bright side, I don’t have to cross the ocean again. Oh well, win some/lose some.

...is what I was going to write. But then I found this, a couple versions later, while grabbing the screencaps for this blogpost:

Oh, cool. Now all of my long-term villager related worries are over, never to return.

The Ugly

I found something worrying a few weeks ago.

I was in my Test World, trying out villager trading in anticipation. But I noticed something wrong - none of the villagers were gaining exp from trades.

BTW overhauls villagers (as you might guess) and gives them levels. They gain experience each time you trade with them, and once they fill up, they require a special trade to level up and unlock more trade options.

Or they were supposed to. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get my villagers to gain exp. Was it cause they spawned from eggs? I bred them and waited for the kids to grow, but they didn’t gain exp either. What was going on?

On a hunch, I started a second creative world. I spawned a villager, did a trade, and...they gained experience.

Oh no.

Villagers seem to be - broken - in my Test World. For whatever reason, they won’t level up. Maybe this only applies to egg villagers, and natural ones are fine, but I doubt it. This is terrifying.

It means it’s possible for an entire world to have broken villagers.

What if my survival world has broken villagers? I need them to progress in the tech tree and beat the game. They can’t be broken! I’d have to find some workaround, some way to fix it, or else I’d have to go start a new world. And lose everything. All 22 months.

I don’t know if my main world has broken villagers. To be honest, I’m afraid to find out.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #24 - Portillo

I needed somewhere to live on the new continent, so I made “Me”.

Sporting an absolute excess of imbalanced melons for self-sustaining food, and an area that is harshly limited by my finite supply of permanent torches.

Speaking of the new continent, let’s check out the updated map.

(Use view image for readable version)

The expansion onto a second continent meant I had a reason to name each of them. Went with “Sprall” for the original, and “Portillo” for the new land.

Anyway, Me is going fairly well. My vague plan was to get more diamonds, get back to the nether, and then establish a tunnel to Cape Cod’s portal. I still think the tunnel is plausible, but redoing the BTW Down There experience without permanent torches wasn’t my best idea.

Mistakes were made.

Well, that’s it. Half a heart, dying, stuck in a 1x1 with a skeleton. No way I can dodge or kill him first, right?

...funny thing. I decided to go for broke and stand inside of him, and he couldn’t hit me. I wore him down half-a-heart at time, and then chilled out for ten minutes waiting for regen.

Then I pulled my classic tunnel-out strat. While it is safe, it consume a lot of energy, and I ran out of food.

I had to eat rotten flesh just to jump out of my surface tunnel. Luckily, Me was close by.

I had to limp to the door, almost starving, while fending off a creeper in hot pursuit.

In the end, I made it, with only a single hunger shank to spare. Close call. If I hadn’t had any fat stored up, I wouldn’t have made it.

Fat works about like you’d expect - eating food that puts you over ten shanks converts 25% of the excess to fat rolls, and some foods can be eaten while full to produce fat. When your hunger bar is 1 full shank below your fat level, fat will act like a second hunger bar. The risk is that having fat at or above six shanks produces detrimental effects similar to being too hunger. Given this, it’s optimal to keep fat around 5.5 shanks.

Just after my return to Me marks the first time I intentionally acquired fat in BTW. Interesting both on it’s own and in the ongoing BTW/human civilization metaphor.

Other tidbits:

Found pumpkins. I thought I had found some earlier on Sprall, but those were carved as result of being too close to Spawn, and as a result were worthless.

Sheep with pink wool. Rare find.

Well, I’ve messed around at Me for long enough. It’s clear the diamond->nether->Cape Cod plan is far too dangerous without permanent light along the way. I’m going to return to Cape Cod (simple enough with a compass, if not risk free), get what I need (obsidian, cauldron, saw, windmill, hoppers, hibachis, and crucible at the least), and then make my way back to Me (less simple - it’s possible I’ll dock somewhere else and be lost.)

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #23 - Out There & Ancient Sins

The next stop on the tech tree is villagers. I’ve never found a village that wasn’t zombified, so I decided to sail out east in search of one, as well as other things you can only find naturally - a brewing stand in a witch’s hut, an enchantment table in a desert temple, and a Vessel of the Dragon in a jungle temple.

I sailed for quite a while - maybe forty total minutes of direct sailing altogether.

I found not one, but two mushroom islands. Interesting, but not really important in the scheme of things.

Once I found a substantial continent, I managed to breach a witch’s hut and grab a brewing stand. One down.

Finally, a village. I just traveled thousands of blocks away from spawn, so they’ll be real villagers, and then-

No. They’re zombie villagers. What? I have to be outside the semi-abandoned radius. I was confused and checked the wiki.

There was an...error in my understanding. All villagers are zombie villagers, even infinitely far from Truespawn. You have to cure them with a soul urn to get real villagers.

This is bad news in many parts. One, I didn’t bring a soul urn out here. I didn’t bring obsidian for a nether portal out here. I didn’t bring diamonds or a hibachi out here.

Two, trapping zombie villagers isn’t easy - they’re dangerous and fast, so I had to kill a couple, both before and after I realized their importance. Breeding them takes diamonds, and even I’m not guaranteed to be able to get all villager castes from the survivors.

Three, I have killed multiple zombie villagers in the past. Damascus had zombie villagers. Potwhole had zombie villagers. Place I don’t even remember had zombie villagers. But I thought I could always find real ones later, and I’d never expected to get to the soul urn point in the tech tree, and so I killed them and wasted the villages. 

I’m leaving the village alone for now - me being there only risks the villagers and myself.  I don’t know what to do. Traveling back to Cape Cod to get what I need would not only take multiple hours, but be dangerous as well - if you get caught out on the open ocean at night, you’re basically guaranteed to die to squids and drowning.

Guess I’ll figure something out.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Digression: Stoking Mechanisms

As I mentioned in Log #22, the Bellows can be used to turn Hibachi fire into Stoked Fire. When the Bellows is unpowered mechanically, it expands. When it receives mechanical power, it contracts, shooting air in front of it. This air stokes the fire.

But if you want the fire to stay stoked, you need to alternate power to the Bellows - off and on and off again. There are a couple ways to do this, but what seemed easiest to me is to use a turntable.

If a redstone torch is placed on the turning block, it will rotate along with the turntable. So every loop of the cobblestone block, the redstone torch will send power to the redstone clutch for a few seconds. Redstone clutches block mechanical power transfer when powered, allowing the Bellows to re-expand. This stokes the fire repeatedly. Problem solved? Not quite.

The Turntable has four speed settings. The third-fastest one works the best for this purpose, but its timing is off. One turntable and one bellows won’t keep a fire stoked constantly. I really didn’t want to invest the gold for more redstone clutches or turntables, so I came up with a solution that’s either dumb or ingenious.

Gear boxes have a power transfer delay - about half a second. So chaining multiple of them increases the overall delay. I used this fact to set up a second bellows next to the first, which takes the take mechanical power input, but routes it through eight gear boxes to offset the timing and keep the fires stoked constantly.

This takes up a lot of space, but it works, and it only costs additional hemp and wood.

[bloggerthanwolves]

Log #22 - Iron Age

Blaze powder allowed me to craft the element, allowing me to create a Hibachi, in combination with some redstone, stone bricks, and concentrated Hellfire derived from netherrack.

The Hibachi creates fire when supplied with a redstone current. That’s neat, but what makes it important is its ability to be stoked by a Bellows, a device made of leather and wood. Stoked fire unlocks two things directly: new cauldron recipes, and the Kiln.

The Kiln is a structure made of a few brick blocks, fueled by stoke fire. It can cook placed bread dough, placed iron chunks, and it can fire pottery.

Pottery is made using another device - a Turntable. The Turntable takes four gold to craft, so it’s not cheap. I hadn’t made on until now, since it was useless without stoked fire.

The turntable rotates the block on top of it when supplied mechanical power. If that block happen to be clay, it will shape the clay.

Clay have five forms - from left to right, they are: Crucible, Planter, Vase, Urn, and Mould. Placing the soft clay pottery onto the Kiln will cause it to harden and become usable.

Vases are purely cosmetic. Moulds are used for mass crafting.

Urns can hold souls. Remember how grinding netherrack in a hopper with a Soul Sand filter produces screams and nausea? That’s from the souls. If an Urn in underneath the Hopper, it will become a Soul Urn. Soul Urns are used to create Snow and Iron Golems, as well as having some very important crafting recipes - most of which are either ahead in the tech tree or not useful to me. The only ways I can use at this moment are making cement buckets for mass construction and pistons - which require three gold each, and so are verboten at the moment.

The Planter is more useful, and is what I was looking forward to. If dirt is placed in one, it will 1. automatically be tilled and hydrated, and 2. not grow weeds. This makes large farms feasible, and means I don’t need to clear my farm of weeds everyday. Not game-changing, but very convenient. It’s also the only way to plant cactus, if you fill it with sand. So there’s that.

The Crucible was, I thought, just “useful”. It requires Stoked Fire, just like the Cauldron and Kiln. It can make Glass with sand and Nether Quartz. It’s needed to make endgame materials, and it can smelt down iron and gold items into two-thirds of what you used to make them. This means any spare minecarts or rails you find in a mineshaft can be converted into a serious iron supply - 8 rails to 18 nuggets, and 1 cart to 30 nuggets.

What I missed, and the real game-changer, is that the Crucible always returns two-thirds of materials used to make an item, regardless of that item’s current durability. You can make an iron pickaxe, use it until it has one durability remaining, then resmelt it and get two ingots back. This is huge. It effectively cuts the cost of all iron tools and armor by 66%.

So all these tools I either got from zombies or irrationally held onto...

...can be recycled.

With this in mind, I made myself a set of iron armor and tools for use in deep caving and the Nether Fortress. You don’t want to just walk around in heavy armor - it increases food consumption and makes you sink in water.

I was shocked that the Crucible was this powerful, and surprised the wiki didn’t explicitly point this out. I would edit the page but, like the forum, the wiki doesn’t allow new users to register. Ah well.