So what did YOU do today?

servers still down .

Whoops, sorry guys. Read my post on the server updates.

For the first time in a long time....I went online and did some digging in the farm caves.

How dissappointing is it?

Am I the only one having problems with reaching the server? I'm also confused by the whitelist, it appears to be empty. Bren, do you know anything about this? Also, did you setup things like the daily backups? I changed the MOTD and the difficulty which was currently on easy.

I only jumped on long enough to check the world worked. I was still white listed, and still an OP, and still had items. That's all I managed to check

sret wrote:Am I the only one having problems with reaching the server? I'm also confused by the whitelist, it appears to be empty. Bren, do you know anything about this? Also, did you setup things like the daily backups? I changed the MOTD and the difficulty which was currently on easy.

No problems reaching the server yet, but if you're getting a "communication error" message rather than "Unable to reach server", go ahead and try joining anyways. I've had that problem with the other server I play on, as have others, it seems to be a bug with the current version of minecraft. Joining still works as long as the server is actually up and running.

When I was taking advantage of being near the ceiling to go lay a layer of dirt on the riverbed above to cut down on water dripping from the thin ceiling, it was still night. I tried to reset dawn like I can do as an Op on the other server, and it said I didn't have permission. So at least it's not screwed up enough to hand out Op powers willy-nilly.

Did some more digging in the farm caves tonight. That really big ravine near the midpoint is starting to be revealed, and it still needs to be lit up. Killed a skeleton and lit up one end of it.

spectrumwars wrote:No problems reaching the server yet, but if you're getting a "communication error" message rather than "Unable to reach server", go ahead and try joining anyways.  I've had that problem with the other server I play on, as have others, it seems to be a bug with the current version of minecraft.  Joining still works as long as the server is actually up and running.   

I've been getting that for like a year and always just ignore it, this time I was getting timeouts and stuff but it appears to be fine now.

Getting back into the swing of things. My first project i'm undertaking is the recreation of the farm caves rail line. on an off note, when I logged on for the first time after the rollback I was in the forge construction site on the scaffolding above the lava.. and the scaffolding didn't render in. completely terrifying.

Finally got my friend Bane618 whitelisted on the server and took him on a tour of the city. A tour that got cut short by his computer nearly melting trying to keep up with the redstone, flowing water, fire, and flowing lava. We'll try again after the holiday weekend.

Yeah, the store room area seems to really hit hard performance wise! Sorry I didn't get the whitelisting done... Been really snowed under recently

Well, I'm stuck in the city for a few days while I wait for Bane to find time to finish his tour of the city. So I started from this end to try and dig a test-bore tunnel for the minecart rail line out to the farm caves. I don't recall the exact route we used, but the hub station mechanism provides an obvious starting point, and "head straight out until clear of the city and at some point turn left" is the obvious route. Unfortunately, my test-bore tunnel shows that a straight-line path will go right through the water ladder for the giant-spider half of the double-spawner XP grinder. Next time, I'll try to find a route around it. Anyone have the coords for the farm-cave end to aim at?

No clue sorry, you'll have to ask supa about it, he managed to find a way to do it without too many issues

To answer the question of how I managed... well I simply hijacked the main rail pathway that heads in the same direction. I should be able to get it again so don't worry too much about it.

Hey everyone, I have been entirely inactive on both the server and the forums for about the past two weeks. The beginning of school hit harder than I thought it would and my time has been completely consumed lately. Anyways, things are improving a little and I will be checking in here more often.

Since I first discovered Minecraft almost 3 years ago I have played many hours. I have not lost interest in Minecraft, but I have a hard time keeping interest in a single idea or build for weeks at a time. Since our current additions to the city have been in progress for a while now, part of my low-activity has been because of this. Despite all that, I'm still around and will get on at least weekly, hopefully more.

For starters, I'd like to tie up some loose ends in the city. We should really decide on a quartz pattern in the Throne Room so we can get that down once and for all. Also, I'm sure there are other details that need to be redone in the wake of the world file deletion.

You're completely right arrowave... There's a lot of loose ends that DO need tying up in the city. What I'd suggest to you, is to go through the entire city, top to bottom, and make yourself a little list of everything that needs fixing, or still to be done. You'll be surprised by how much there is. Critique it heavily, and be a complete perfectionist with it

Brendanan wrote:You're completely right arrowave... There's a lot of loose ends that DO need tying up in the city. What I'd suggest to you, is to go through the entire city, top to bottom, and make yourself a little list of everything that needs fixing, or still to be done. You'll be surprised by how much there is. Critique it heavily, and be a complete perfectionist with it

Sounds like a plan. When time allows anyways.

Yeah, that's my problem too... Haven't played any compute games for months now

Well, I've started fleshing out a tunnel from the hub station to where the farm-cave line will link up with the dome-station line just short of the dual-grinder water ladders. For the time being, I'm using the rail-tunnel design I am familiar with from my other server, a simple 3x3 smoothstone tunnel with jackolanterns and torches up at the ceiling level staggered every four blocks for my usual over-saturated light levels. We can dress the tunnel fancier later, but I'm so used to this design that I can dig it fairly fast, and it will do as a placeholder for now, nicer than a rough unfinished tunnel but not as slow to build or resource-hungry as a fancier tunnel. I'm only putting down a power rail every 33rd block because A) I doubt we'll be sending many cargo carts all the way to the farm cave, and can just use a furnace cart to push a train if we do, and B) this provides maximum speed for near-minimum resorces, with a bit of a buffer. Once I reach the existing line, I'll switch over to the rails-on-planks design of the existing tracks, creating a 3-tracked system. I assume the return rail will, as before, hit that line from above and drop hub-bound riders onto an existing return line, so with clever use of a turn, we can avoid needing dual tracks all the way out to the farm caves.

Hopefully I can finish Bane's tour of the city at some point soon, so I can safely return to the farm caves to start digging the rail from that end, as I forgot to note the destination coordinates before leaving.

In other news, I got jury duty this week and the next, so I may not be online all that much.

Dammit.  Was going so well, until my new third rail line ran smack dab into the water ladder for the skeleton half of the dual grinder.  I coulda sworn I'd surveyed the path and found it clear of obstructions.  Ah well.  I'll just have to thread the rail line between them and meet up with the existing rail tunnel a bit further out.

EDIT: Threading between them proved impossible. Detouring around them ran into the redstone for the spider-drop pistons. Which I managed to repair after accidentally breaking. Trying to get back into there to retrieve an enderchest I put there temporarily led to me falling into a section of abandoned mineshaft that took quite a while to find my way out of. We should probably make a concerted effort to clean those out, eliminate remaining dark areas, and finish looting the planks, fences, and ores in there. I saw iron, coal, obsidian, and redstone that I couldn't grab because my inventory was full of construction crap and the enderchest I brought along for such eventualities was stuck in the redstone wiring for the spider drop.

Started clearing out the mineshaft area around the rail line, which finally has a clear path to the main line. Too bad it joins up pretty much right before the end so as to not run into anything immovable on the way. Ended up on a fairly epic spelunk through caves and mineshafts, came out with 8 diamonds, 7 gold, about half a stack of silk-touched redstone ore, and two or three stacks of silk-touched coal ore. Threw around a dozen or so stacks of torches along the way as well. Eventually came up through a large lake behind the mountain, nearly drowned trying to swim up what turned out to be a deep sinkhole in the bottom of said lake.

Looks like you're getting some good work done SW! Wish I could be online to actually do a bit more. Hopefully over christmas I get myself some free time

Got a little bit more work done on the rail line, but not much.  Pushing the line through a chaotic semi-looted abandoned mineshaft that's had three dungeon grinders built and redesigned and rebuilt through it is not easy.  In addition to the several-times-rebuilt double grinder, the old original zombie grinder still has some shafts and staircases and other infrastructure left behind.  Somehow, we did all that without ever finishing looting the mineshaft around it, or even finishing lighting it up.  Only been attacked once so far while working on the rail line, and thankfully by a skeleton and not a creeper.  

I also took a break to do some XP grinding.  One of the things that got eaten by the revert was my prior grinding session's output, so I tried to make a few picks and swords and bows.  The picks mostly came out okay, got a pair of good mining/digging picks (unbr3/eff3 and unbr3/eff4) and a fort3/eff4 fortune pick, but no silk touch so far.  I unfortunately managed to screw up on one of them, someone had placed torches to lower the max enchant level of the enchanting table and I didn't notice, absentmindedly just clicking on the bottom row enchantment...and thus spending 7 instead of 30 xp levels on a diamond pick, and just getting Efficiency I.  Whoops.  That one was mostly my fault, but my first sword attempt came out with nothing but Fire Aspect II on a diamond sword of level 30.  Was hoping for at least a good smite IV or something useful against the Wither, instead got something mostly useful for cooking chicken as you kill it.  Got a nice bow of Power III/Punch I/Flame I/Infinity I, left that in the weapons chest for someone else and took the lesser Power III/Flame I second bow I made for myself.  I also merged a bunch of skeleton-dropped Power I bows to make a Power III bow that I plan to later merge with one of the nicer Power III bows to make it Power IV.  While I was down there, I installed an enderchest and some additional storage chests for mob drops.

Remember how we made a bunch of glistering melon just before the update that changed the recipe for that from 1 nugget to 8 nuggets? That got eaten by the revert, too. So rather than my usual potion-flinging methods, I've been grinding mostly in smaller batches with stone swords.

This morning I tried to do some more rail tunnel digging but it devolved into another fairly epic spelunk. I ended up coming out to the surface via a cave into the sugarcane farm near the main entrance, with over a stack of iron, some redstone, and several stacks of coal ore. I think I'm gonna cancel the plan to have the rail line meet up with the dome line on the way out, and instead start the long slow slope upwards right away, and just have a short connecting line for the city-bound line to meet up with the return line from the dome/farm lines.