Secret Areas

   I love secret areas and easter eggs. Can't get enough of em. I've been playing on a vanilla Minecraft server recently, and I've been working on adding and improving some secret areas in the server's spawn.


Here's just a few screenshots of spawn.



The two secret areas I'm showing off are in the spawn's broken down cemetery. The first one is located inside the grave of the "Killa Wabbit".



Inside of the memorial, there's a secret staircase downwards which only opens at night. Go through, and you'll find a crypt hidden underneath the cemetery.

The crypt includes a small garden as well as many graves hidden underneath the spawn.





Leaving the crypt, there's another secret area located in the broken-down church.




There's a piece of netherwart- a strange red crop from the Nether- inside of the broken-down church. If you feed it an item, a hole opens up beneath the puddle in the church.

















Fall through the hole in the puddle, and you'll find yourself a small cathedral underneath the spawn.









The cathedral also has a sacrificial area, located down a stairwell.






If, for some reason, you decide to jump into the lava pit, you won't die... Instead, you'll land in a secret area inside of a secret area!





A secret hallway leads you back into the sacrificial area.




To exit the cathedral, there's a hallway upwards that has a secret exit out into one of the spawn's walls.







That's everything I have to show right now. I'm currently playing on a modded server with some friends of mine, so I might show that off once our base is finished. Bye!

Virtual Reality

 So recently, because my dad likes buying ALL the gadgets, we got both the HTC Vive and, just a day or two ago, the Oculus Rift. Both are extremely fun, although in my opinion the Vive is better now, as it stands.

The Vive right now has two things that make it much better than the Rift;

1. Hand controllers. I know that Oculus has prototypes and developer models out right now, but the fact that the consumer version of the Vive has it and the Oculus doesn't makes the Vive a whole lot better. There are just so many more things you can do with hand controllers than you can with your standard Xbox controller. Additionally, the camera on the front of the Vive allows the hand controllers to be tracked extremely accurately and portrayed in VR, so even if hand controllers do come out for the Oculus they might not be as good.

2. Good support for room-scale VR. Currently, Oculus only officially supports standing or sitting experiences, with relatively little moving. Comparatively, the Vive has a large space, allowing for so many more things to be done with it. While the Oculus may be able to support moving around, and some could say the blue fence around you in the Vive takes you out of the immersion, banging your knee on a table breaks you out of immersion a lot more.

Anyway, with that said, let's more on to some of my favorite games.

Job Simulator: If you wanted to show someone what you could do with VR, the Lab (Valve's official VR tutorial/training ground) or Job Simulator are probably the best choices. There are multiple "jobs" that you can perform in the game, from office worker to restaurant chef to auto mechanic. You are given tasks to accomplish, but players also have the option to just do whatever they want. Everything that could be done in real life can be done in this game; almost any interaction between two things in an area is possible. It's just a great game for messing around.

Windlands: Those afraid of heights, beware. While Mirror's Edge and such are great parkour games, Windlands takes moving around to the next level. In Windlands, you are given two grappling hooks, with the ability to attach to any type of tree or bush. With this power, you are placed into a world of islands, grappling from one to another and exploring unknown places. There isn't really a plot, just a world to explore and challenges to give yourself. It's a great game for calming down and just enjoying yourself- Unless you're afraid of heights (I've actually forgotten I was in VR multiple times and lost my balance in real life as I missed a grapple and started falling.)

Budget Cuts: While, unlike the others, this is only a demo for a game, it is easily my favorite out of the three. It is a stealth game set in an office building, where you are charged with sneaking through the building, crouching through vents and avoiding (or killing) sentry robots. This game is probably one of the better ones at making you feel "really there"- You feel a sense of panic whenever an alarm goes off, and when you have to crouch down when going into ventilation shafts you really feel like you're in there. Something that makes it really fun is how getting around and item manipulation are handled- You have essentially a teleporter that shows you a place before you go through, which allows you to survey the area before you go in. Additionally, the item handling is incredibly fun- Your main weapon for the whole game is throwing knives, which if you want to take out a sentry robot you have to throw very accurately. It's a great game, and I can't wait to see the full thing.

These are the main games that I've played, although there are a few others (such as Space Pirate Trainer.) While there aren't a huge selection now, getting to see the number of awesome games grow will be exciting.

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!