Mountain Laboratory in Minecraft

So now we're moving out of the medieval realm and into the 21st century. For my most recent base, I've built a laboratory into the side of a mountain. Here's a look:

Let's start at the bottom.

This is my Blood Altar, for which the room is still a work-in-progress. It's from the mod Blood Magic, where you can use either your blood or the blood of other creatures to infuse items with power and drive magical contraptions.

These Travel Anchors are incredibly helpful. When you step on one, it shows you the location of all nearby Travel Anchors, and you can teleport to any of them. It's the quickest way to get around the base. Anyways, on to the Workshop.

This is the machine room, where I put all the pulverizers, smelters, alloy furnaces, phytogenic insulators and more.

There's a large amount of wiring behind the walls here. There are two systems here- The energy system, powered off a small reactor and going to all the machines, and the ME system, the center of which is the green box, that allows me to store my items in drives and access all of them from anywhere in the base through terminals. The ME system can be complicated to wire, because it's based off a channel system, where 1 wire can only handle so many connections (Terminals, import buses, interfaces) before it shuts down. This means that you have to plan your layout carefully and make sure you don't use too many channels in one area.

This is where I store the drive bays that hold my items. Currently, I don't have too many items and so only need 1 drive bay, but I'm planning on filling up the room eventually.

Some lasers working on etching a diamond chipset.

I have a small hallway full of villagers, each of which have some very good trades.

It's relatively deserted right now, but this is the Bee room, one of the few open to the air but also one of the more important. The machines in the back use energy and materials to allow me to mutate bees, isolate traits from them, and add those traits to other bees. It's still a very tough process to create new species of bees, but it helps a lot.

Here's a view inside one of the Industrial Apiaries. It's more expensive than normal ones and runs off of energy, but you can customize it with upgrades that can simulate the biome the bees normally live in, decrease their lifespan, prevent mutations, increase productivity, and more. You can see the queen bee on the left, and on the right are all of the things that have been produced, including combs and a large amount of drones.

This room is also unfinished, but this is the room I use to mess around with Botania. Botania is essentially flower magic, manipulating the enviroment and producing mana using specialized flowers you create. It's pretty cool.

This is easily my favorite room, used for Thaumcraft. It's my favorite of the magic mods, and I've spent a lot of time on it. On the left is my research area and crafting workbench, along with a crucible. In the middle is the infusion altar, and on the back wall is a sorting system that sorts types of essentia into jars.

The infusion system is a really cool way to craft complicated items, and I'll be demonstrating it by making this item: A Portable Hole foci I can attach to my wand that allows me to create temporary holes through walls. In the middle, you can see the order in which I'll need to place the items around the center pedestal. The bottom has two things; 4 symbols, depicting what types of essentia I'll need and how much, and an Instability indicator that tells me how likely it is for something to go wrong in the infusion. It's only Minor instability, so nothing should go wrong.

I've gathered up all the items and placed them in the correct order, so I'm ready to start the infusion.

Easily the coolest thing about the Infusion system is the particles in it. Here the altar is drawing out one of the essentia types it needs (Iter) from one of the jars.

Once it absorbs the essentia and items, and if nothing has gone wrong, it'll transform the item at the center into the crafted item.

Some infusions can get a little complicated...

This is my node room, where I store the nodes that power some things in my Thaumcraft room. My work with bees paid off, as I've developed a type of bee that can superpower nodes (Normal nodes grow up to maybe a size of 100 in one essentia type, but I've created one that grows up to 500 in 6 essentia types!) As the one I'm currently growing has become bigger than the one I used to have, I'm going to replace it soon.

At the top of the mountain, I've got an Osmotic Enchanter, where I can use the energy from my wand to enchant my armor and weapons with very specific enchantments. Normally, with an enchantment table, you get random enchantments, but for the cost of some extra vis you get to pick and choose.

 Well, that's about it for my base. I might add a bit more to this in the future, but for now I'm heading out. See ya!

Building in Minecraft

Recently, I've been working on a building project on a server I play on, and I wanted to share the process I go through when building some of it.

The building project will end up being a stone castle on top of a gigantic snowy mountain. Here's a view of the basic layout:

I wanted to show how I went about making the walls of the place, since I spent a decent amount of time designing them. The most important thing when it comes to making buildings is depth and variety. A flat wall doesn't look very interesting, especially if it's only made of one kind of material.

Let's start out with a normal wall:

Pretty bland, pretty boring. Let's make it out of 2 materials instead:

Looks OK, but it's still very flat. Let's fix that.

It's better, but still pretty flat. It's always better for it to have too much depth than too little.

That looks better. Two things still need to be added: The top needs some crenellations, and the middle is just a solid block of cobblestone, not broken up by anything. Plus, if I was building a castle, I'd want to reinforce it with stronger stone.

And there we go! That's our wall completed. Here's a picture of it at night:

Sometimes, taking the extra 30 minutes to make a wall detailed can completely change how a project looks.

In future blog posts, I'll probably continue with updates on the building. But for now, see ya!