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December 2, 2024December 2, 2024

Newsletter #63 for December 2024

Howdy folks!

It’s Tommy time! Community Liaison ThatTommyBoii reporting for newsletter duty!

Long time no see, huh? I’m very happy to be writing to y’all again, so let’s get right into the news!

Love Tropics Charity Stream

Once again hermits have gathered to help charity organization Love Tropics! This year they were benefiting Women’s Earth Alliance, to help support women to gain resources and training required to help their local communities. You can find more about Love Tropics here and about Women’s Earth Alliance here.
And if you missed the stream, here’s the VOD!

TCG

With last spring’s pre-order being a huge success, everything is on schedule to be shipped in a timely manner. If you want to order more cards you can sign up for their waitlist or get future updates on their site here.

Quarterly Meetings

2024 Q3

We had another successful quarterly meeting over on the patreon discord! If you missed the meeting or are curious as to how it went, we have the VOD available as well as the minutes of the meeting on this page.

2025 Q1

Our next quarterly meeting will be on Sunday January 12th at noon US Central time. If you have an item you’d like to request for the agenda, please submit it under Joe Hills Meta> #next-quarter-new-business-agenda-requests.

Minecraft Servers

New Modded Minecraft Server

Server operator ToxxicGlitter and Joe are working on spinning up a new modded server for folks to play starting this holiday season! It looks like Toxxic has just about finished the preliminary stages and is looking to launch this week! You can find more details over in Joe Hills Meta> #feedback-next-modded-server.

September Everstorm

Obituaries:

Cent died trying to be a hero, and was the first victim of the zombie apocalypse.
Joju joined, tried to do something overly convoluted, and died as soon as he took a break.
ChefNutmeg died trying to set up tree fort cause there are shulkers in tree tops. got chased by drowned, slain by zombie.
Kindalas dug a hole and then a zombie got me when I ran out of tnt for mob fighting.
Michaelssocks had a rough night’s sleep.
Jvrrxk died fighting two skeletons in the caves.
Moonroses fell from the trees with horrid screeching creatures after her.
Magenta toured all the nether biomes before coming face to face with a blaze fireball.

Survivors:

SuperStone came by to check out the chaos, built a house, and played with modded TNT.
quilavabucket made a small tower, filled it with necessities, and worked to recall how multiplayer hardcore servers work!
madelinessocks twerked for food, captured phantoms, and memorialized her fallen friends.

October Everstorm

Obituaries:

ChefNutmeg drowned thanks to being too curious on finding a shrine.
Zoey ventured too far into a Nether village and an ornate Brute aggressively made a meal out of her.
Moon was turned into Vex soup after surviving a fall into a witches pit.
Lady Oolong set off to make an end on her own terms and ultimately perished assaulting a haunted bathhouse swarming with masked ghosts.

Survivors:

Joju logged on to honor his fallen friend. He then logged off for similar reasons.
Salem logged in, puttered around mining for a bit, then left before they could bite the dust.
WizardOfDocs totally intended to come back and check out that dungeon, he promises.
Jvrrxk boldly stayed by the side of their comrade, WizardOfDocs.
SuperStone commandeered an airship from its skeleton owners.
quilavabucket dug up an improbable amount of diamonds, tried to make a cliff house, attended a funeral, and then failed to log in for the rest of the month.

November Everstorm

Obituaries:

Lady Oolong got too greedy trying to mine at the top of the mountain and panicked running down to get away from monsters.
Graehart met his end facing down a hoard of the undead deep in the bowels of the Everstorm. A creeper capitalized on the chaos ensuring his death.
fancytoy was making a mad dash to the community hobbit hole when a mean ol’ willie with an unknown amount of eyes stabbed her with a trident.
quilavabucket was building a little hideout in the nether when it got raided by piglins.
Cent did nothing to the dragon after crashing, found some weird crystals, then got knocked off a bridge by a murder pigeon.
Mantua bridged her own way to a sky rat island help clear it then got knocked off the bridge by one she missed on her way back.
moon, after surviving two dragon fights, fell from a great height in despair for there was no food and there were no wings in the city.
Joju logged on to fight to the death. He died honorably in combat with skeletons after not having played much this month.
Mooot decided to log in one day and died the same day to a skeleton in the mines, so sad!

Survivors:

Kindalas survived the Everstorm to get the wings and the trims and turned Snow into Slime.
Magenta touched the world’s edges, slayed the dragon, and was the first to obtain the power of flight.
Zoeykinns enjoyed life and broke bread with fellow Survivors in The Hobbit Hole alongside Oliver, a cat from the Everstorm beginnings.
MJ survived a dragon fight for the first and second time ever, battled end birds, shulkers, and men, and carried the memory of a fellow adventurer back home.
Grit helped expand the border and supported exploration, assisted in sponsoring two dragon fights and achievement hunting on everstorm!
Dotty used her survivor tag to applaud Grit, Seanard, and the whole Everstorm community for all the incredible accomplishments they achieved this month!

December Everstorm

This month’s Everstorm is now live! As always it’s an experimental and temporary server, running until January 2nd. Folks can discover details and share with others or coordinate group logins over in Realms And Servers> #everstorm-dec-2024

10th Oreward Parades

We’ve had some parades after the judging of the company towns on 10th Oreward! I’d like to thank Team 15 Years for hosting a wonderful parade, and a thank you to all the participants who made floats!

We also had a parade to celebrate Labor Day! Thank you to Team The Route for hosting the late celebration, here’s the VOD for folks who missed it!

There was also a parade to celebrate World Nuclear Energy Day, hosted by Team Trident Town! I remember it like it was yesterday, which it was at the time of this newsletter going out. Thanks Trident Town, here’s the VOD!

Our next parade will be on Sunday December 15th, at 1pm US Central time. Team 5280 will be hosting their parade in celebration of the Festival of Lights! Folks can join in under Activity-Sign-Ups> #dec-15-parade-5280-festival-of-lights.

Hermitcraft 10 Videos

There’s been a year’s worth of Hermitcraft since I last wrote a newsletter, so I won’t be linking all the videos! Instead, here’s a handy link to Joe’s Hermitcraft Season 10 Playlist, along with his most recent video!

Streams

Upcoming Streams

If you’re looking for a place to find out when Joe is streaming, have I got the answer for you! You can see a calendar of all Joe’s upcoming streams over at this page over here!

Notable streams

Lately Joe has been streaming readings of Moby Dick, and some Hermit Satisfactory! Stay tuned for future notable streams to be mentioned!

Upcoming conventions and events

Unconfirmed appearances:

Tennessee Game Day Spring

If you know any convention organizers in your area and think Joe would be great to hire for an appearance, please have them visit this page on his site, thank you!

So long for now…

As always it is my pleasure to write these newsletters to you wonderful folks in our community. I appreciate y’all being patient while Joe and I were both busy, so I hope you’ll join us as we get back into a steady rhythm of updates.

Thank you kindly!

This has been TommyBoii reporting for newsletter duty.

See you around!

November 21, 2024

2024 Q3 Meeting Minutes

Discord channels
- Added #seasonal channel under >All Specific Except For General category
- Added #life-sim-games and #horror-games under >Games category
- Renamed #⁠identity to #your-identity
- Added #spam-fashion-you-wear under >Create category
- Added #other-meetups under >Meet-Ups category
- Set #current-events to text only and moved it to >All-Text category
- Added new policy to #actual-rules under >All Specific Except For General category
  - Community Addendum 5: You may only post links in #current-events to websites you know to be reputable. If you don’t know enough to vouch for a source, research it before you share it there.
Maintain the current update schedule for the minecraft servers.
- Also discussed rebranding Vanillish as more similar to the Hermitcraft experience to help differentiate it from the Flagship server.

October 28, 2024October 28, 2024

Streamer’s Log: Wool Street Facade and Flag

A screenshot of Minecraft showing the Wool Street from the front. It is a sandstone rendition of the New York Stock Exchange entry with a striped flag with a wolf on it.

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here, recording as I always do in Nashville, Tennessee, and this morning on the HermitCraft server, it was time to start work on the facade of the Wool Street project.

During a previous brainstorming call, Xisuma, who holds the grey and light green wool permits, suggested we base our build on the front of the New York Stock Exchange, but replace their large American flag with one of our own that showcased the colors of wool available.

I had a rough idea going into this that I’d scale the building to be proportionate to a 13m high flag with 13 stripes, seven of which were colored and alternated with white, and then use the remaining colors to render a pixel art wolf in the upper left corner.

As I was mocking up the facades with scaffolds, PearlescentMoon, holder of the magenta wool permit came by and advised I construct the building from sandstone with a mix of birch and oak splattered in for texture. That sounded good to me! I’ve only had time to do the base layer of sandstone so by the end of the stream, but I’m happy with how that turned out.

The quartz for the six central pillars came from ImpulseSV, holder of the brown wool permit. The contrast of those pillars against the colorful flag in front of them and the black glass behind them just feels right. Plus, it’ll look fantastic from the interior!

The location is working out great so far. Although we’ll need to extend the building on either side to accommodate all the redstone for the shop, the facade is exactly where I want it!

At the end of the stream, I sent messages to the Hermits asking for help collecting sandstone and for input on the y-level the shopping area should be at so we can avoid unnecessary digging.

I’ll be back to work on this project on my next HermitCraft stream, don’t miss it! You can always find my streaming schedule at https://joehills.net/soon/.

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep adventuring!

October 27, 2024October 27, 2024

Streamer’s log: village re-allocation continues

A screenshot of Minecraft showing Joe Hills hacking apart a villager's home with an axe.

Howdy, y’all!

Joe Hills here, recording as I always do in Nashville, Tennessee!

This was a bit of a recovery stream after an exhaustively packed but productive weekend, so I focused on removing stone and preparing to relocate villagers to new beacon-based accommodations.

While I dug and hacked, I mentioned my need to archive my old Evernote documents and we discussed the need to preserve early HermitCraft notes for later, just in case. We ended up searching for HermitCraft on scholarly search engines and chatted about the results for about two hours.

It was a great time, very chill and just what I needed.

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep adventuring!

October 27, 2024October 27, 2024

Streamer’s Log: Clank and Phasmophobia for NJ’s LLS Charity Stream

The banner from NJCoffeeJunkie's Tiltify fundraiser for LLS.

Howdy, y’all, Joe Hills here, writing as I always do in Nashville, Tennessee!

Today my pal and project manager NJCoffeeJunkie celebrated her 5-year anniversary of streaming on Twitch with a charity stream benefitting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society! I was invited to play as a guest during her Clank! and Phasmophobia segments.

Clank!

I was a bit frazzled from trying to set up Phasmophobia VR right before the stream, so I played two of the most embarrassing games of Clank in my life. During the first game, I wandered too far was only able to grab the seven point treasure before sprinting for the door. NJ got KO’d in the depths and I barely survived with for a win.

On the second game, NJ managed to grab a backpack and two treasures before I even made it to the depths, but I had loaded up on tattle cards that deal other players clank and kept drawing from the dungeon row to trigger dragon attacks. I grabbed a cheap treasure and got KO’d one room away from the exit, but NJ hadn’t quite escaped the depths when the dragon got her.

A screenshot of the video game version of Clank showing that Joe Hills won with 47 points and NJ lost with 0, but would have had 93 if she hadn't died in the depths. — NJ would have had 93 points and beaten me with twice my score if she’d been knocked out within recovery range.

Phasmophobia

VR Phasmophobia is way better than the last time I tried to play it, but still way worse than every other VR game in terms of motion sickness and weird stuttering glitches. I had a great time hunting ghosts with NJ, Mister Joker, and Queen Dark Lady, and got to show off all then VR motion control things I can do, like sipping from a tea cup, chugging from a tea kettle, and raving with glow sticks.

We managed to win both of our rounds with no deaths, and I earned four achievements!

The rest of the folks kept playing, but two rounds of Phasmophobia in VR was all my poor brain could handle.

Thanks so much to everyone who came out to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society! We raised over $200 during the segments I participated in! If you’d still like to help, NJ’s campaign fundraiser page will be open for a bit longer at: https://tiltify.com/@njcoffeejunkie/5th-annual-twitch-aversary.

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep adventuring!

October 26, 2024October 27, 2024

Streamer’s Log: Grind and Read of Moby Dick chapters 78-80

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!

Today’s stream was my weekly Saturday Grind and Read, so we jumped in to inventory management, removing stone, and reading Moby Dick chapters 78-80. This is the one stream a week where I completely avoid music, so there’s even a VOD if you want one!

We got a lot of mining done, but I was hampered a bit on pacing by having to avoid hitting villagers and iron golems. I probably need to figure out a relocation target for all of them.

Chapter 78 was kind of horrifying, but 79 and 80 were just old-timey weird. I’m looking forward to chapter 81, about a few ships converging and all chasing the same whales. but it seems like it’s one of the books’ longer chapters and we already had spent 2/3s of the stream on the first three chapters.

With chapter 81 too long to start tonight, I decided for the last third of the stream to disassemble and clean the keyboard I spilled soda into a few days ago. Thanks to Badger helping me find cotton swabs, I was able to make short work of the clean-up, removing about a quarter of the keycaps to clean up the soda residue. Only two switches were sticking themselves, so I swapped those out with fresh ones. I’m not sure if I can repair those somehow.

If you enjoyed tonight’s stream, you can also check out my entire Moby Dick playlist. Plus, you can keep an eye out for my next show via my streaming calendar at https://joehills.net/soon/

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee.

Keep adventuring!

October 26, 2024October 26, 2024

Streamer’s Log: Ten Bells v 2.1.3 on Normal Mode

A screenshot of the title screen of Ten Bells showing Joe and Lauryn's cameras int he foreground. Joe wears a pumpkin scarf handmade by Laxmi13 and Lauryn wears a Sally from Nightmare before Christmas costume.

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!

We’ve had a lot of extra expenses recently because of emergency dental work and the filing fee for the next step of Badger’s immigration process, the Green Card, so we decided to take time out of the last Saturday before Halloween to do a bonus stream of one or two spooky games (tips are welcome via https://paypal.me/joehills).

Ten Bells: Strongly Recommend.

It turned out, we only had time for Ten Bells today, but it was a lot of fun! If you don’t want any spoilers, I’ll just provide my review up front: strongly recommend for fans of spooky games. It took me about three hours to complete the normal mode, and there’s a nightmare mode that I haven’t gotten to yet, but probably would take me another few hours at least.

Are bells good or bad?

Badger and I both enjoy horror, but have never played a game from this emergent genre that I’ve been told is called “anomaly hunt” but which I believe should be called “aberration examination.” The player needs to explore the space of The Ten Bells pub and determine if anything has changed from the last walk-through. It’s harder, and spookier than it sounds.

Since we didn’t know how the game worked, it took us a while to figure out what counted as an aberration and what was merely an indicator of how progression was tracked. For example, the name of the pub above the bar changes from “The Bell” to “The Two Bells” to “The Three Bells” and that’s a progression tracker, not an aberration.

I’m the sort of person who loves deducing the rules of a game by playing it, so this was a lot of fun for Badger and I to puzzle out, but if you’re the sort of person who gets frustrated by things like that, it may be worthwhile to watch someone more experienced play a round or two before you jump in yourself.

Hitting a rhythm

Once we figured out that bells are good and that there were changes to the hallway near the restrooms that marked progress through the story, everything kind of clicked into place and the only person I could blame for not knowing if a carpet had always been there or not was me.

The core gameplay loop is simple and elegant, and the pacing make this a great choice for streaming. The predictable opportunities to breathe each time we finished a walk through the pub really helped make this a fun show, but also created a lot of tension every time I was about to turn the corner and walk through the door.

End-game bug

We only planned to stream for three hours, so once we hit our scheduled stop time Badger headed out of the studio to take a break. I was so immersed in trying to completely finish the last few scenarios, I decided to go into overtime and try to wrap up the entire normal mode.

Unfortunately, I made some sort of mistake by trying to walk back and look at the progress board after the bells rang and things went a bit sideways. I ended up in some sort of broken end-game state, and one of the devs, Acrylic Pixel showed up! Here’s how that bit went:

Thanks so much again for joining me for this log, but if you wanna catch a stream live, you can find my streaming schedule at https://joehills.net/soon/.

Until next time y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, Tennessee!

Keep adventuring!

October 25, 2024October 26, 2024

Streamer’s log: Joe’s got an xB shop at spawn!

A screenshot of Minecraft showing Joe Hills mining calcite

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!

My stream this morning was only an hour, but I got so much done that I wasn’t sure I could top it this evening… until I developed a terrible idea for an illegal shop while mining tuff and calcite.

I already knew that I wanted to build an xB shop at spawn, but after discussing the best angle for all this with the chat, I decided that the funniest possible thing would be to package that as a lagniappe with a pitch to trade Joel a bunch of empty shulkers in exchange for Joel building a silverfish experience farm at the Hermit Holmdel Project.

I had just switched over to an xB skin to sacrifice myself with fireworks to drop player heads when Scar logged in and killed me over a hundred times with his bow. Cubfan135 helped with the slaying and even added some unicode to my pricing emeralds.

The build is pretty simple, but since I’m giving it away if Joel takes the deal, I didn’t want to over do it.

We hung out by that map for a while chatting and choosing points of interest to fly out to, including an X-marks-the-spot treasure chest next to Scar’s base that contained a diamond block we all split three ways.

Scar and Cub had to call it a night, and I did too, so I wrapped up the stream by recording myself mailing a letter to Joel with my offer to trade this shop and 40 shulkers for him to build a proper xp shop. I think it’s a fair deal, and I hope he takes it. It’s too late at night to think of anything else to throw in there, and I’ve gotta get to bed.

Before you go too, just as a heads up, I’ve got some spookier than usual streams coming up for the Halloween season. You can always find my schedule at https://joehills.net/soon/.

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN.

Keep adventuring!

October 25, 2024October 25, 2024

Streamer’s log: HermitFactory truck station improvements

A screenshot of Satisfactory showing two truck stations on the same road. The nearer station has an adjacent billboard that reads "outgoing aluminum casings."

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!

My last HermitFactory streamer’s log concluded with me realizing I’d created a huge mess by building multiple truck stations aligned with each other on the same roads. The trucks were loading and unloading from inventories I expected them to drive right past, and machines were ingesting the wrong parts for their recipes!

Truck station removals, replacements, and improvements

Today I kicked things off by adding new side roads for loading on the north and south sides of our aluminum processing plant intersection. Welsknight improved on my design by creating a cool billboard frame, which I tried to replicate on other stations, but couldn’t get the painted beams to snap correctly. I’ll need to ask him how he pulled that off!

While I intentionally moved truck stations for loading and unloading parts away from the road, Hypno automated turbo fuel production and helped me add new a refueling station on the main road that most trucks routes hit. They should pick up a bit of fuel every time they go past, even if the other stations have run dry.

The receiving truck stations for unloading raw quartz and aluminum casings at the modular frames factory also needed some improvements. I removed the center divider between the road sections there so trucks could go in and out without passing too close to the wrong truck stations. I also added cleared signage and better refueling there. The most stressful part was trying not to mess up while re-recording all the truck paths, but in the end, it all came together better than before!

Joe Hills in the sky with with crystals

Several stories above, I realized that automating crystal oscillators wasn’t just good for build gunning billboards, but that we could create crystal computers and radio control units with them! To get us on track, I added three more manufacturers tasked with creating crystal oscillators and cleaned up my raw crystal processing.

I left plenty of space a future expansion into on-site silica processing, which opens the door to create silicon circuit boards for crystal computers. I mean, how hard can it be to process additional copper for copper sheets anyway?

If you don’t want to miss my next HermitCraft 10 stream, don’t forget you can always find my schedule at https://joehills.net/soon/!

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN.

Keep adventuring!

October 25, 2024

Streamer’s log: storage improvements on a 1-hour HermitCraft bonus stream

A screenshot of Minecraft showing Joe Hills building a roof for the storage area of his bunker. The inner liner is depilate and Hills is layering grass over that.

Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!

Due to forces beyond my control, I had to forego my routine Friday morning HermitCrfat stream in favor of a 1-hour bonus stream, so I jumped right in on a small project that I could see results on quickly: improving my lasertag arena’s storage and workshop area!

The grass ceiling was a huge liability, so my first objective was to give the space more of a bunker feel (and level of security). I ripped out all that grass above it and added a one-meter thick layer of cobbled deepslate.

During that process, I realized I’d made a storage layout mistake by including two chests for wool when one wool’d do. The ten shulkers worth of stone I’d accrued digging yesterday called for me to deposit them in the POE POE impound lot, where I continued to fill in the crater iJevin left when he ripped out his shop with a snailocopter.

After leaving that space better than I found it, I returned to the storage area and installed a few hanging lights to make it feel more like a classy bunker a rich person would have.

The floor still needs carpet or something, but I’ll come back to that another day, I only had an hour!

If you want to be sure to catch my next HermitCraft 10 stream, don’t forget you can always find my schedule at https://joehills.net/soon/!

Until next time, y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN.

Keep adventuring!