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

We had a great HermitCraft brainstorming call earlier today, during which I spent hours digging out the LaserTag observation deck and placing glass, so the stream kicked off with me showcasing my progress there. The game may not be ready, but the view from the lobby is much better!

During that call, ImpulseSV reminded us we can come start checking out the HermitCraft History timeline areas of his Metro Mayhem game, so I flew out his way to look for that. It took a while to find the entrance, so I added some signage.

There was also a really cool pumpkin nearby with a pedestal challenging us to make our own Halloween decorations, which intrigued me, but I’ll have to come back to that!

Inside the Hermit History tunnel, I measured out that each plot was 31x31x20H, and realized there were no ender chests! It would be trivial to go get a single ender chest, but there are nine plots, one for each season, so it would be better to get nine ender chests. And, oh, another to-do item I had from our meeting today was that Etho needed 10 stacks of obsidian for mail network expansion. The End was soon in sight so I could gather enough obsidian for both Etho and Impulse.

After harvesting all that obsidian from towers on the main End island, we sent Etho his in the mail and added the ender chests to the Hermit History tunnel with a bit of glow ink for flair.

After that, I excavated a bit more of the arena back at the name tag shop and called it a night after spending ten hours total working on the server today.

It was a long day, but I’m optimistic all my work on my shops this week will leave me freer to jump into Wool Street and Halloween stuff moving forward.

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

Keep adventuring!

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

Shop month continues! On last night’s stream, we wrapped up work on our name tag shop for now, and this morning it’s time to get tuff!

The rough plan

As far as I see it, we need to do the following to get our tuff shop open:

1. Review how much space is still available at our planned plot for the shop next to Mumbo’s iron
2. Check out what’s left of the pop-up shop in the POE POE impound
3. Gather stock for the shop
4. Brainstorm shop concept, layout, and materials
5. Gather materials that suit that hopefully brilliant idea
6. Just build the dang thing

Looking back

I had always intended to build a permanent shop where I’d staked my first couple tents at the beginning of the season.

Unfortunately, because I didn’t break ground on a permanent shop there as soon as I struck my tents, Mumbo grabbed a large chunk of that area for his iron mine, leaving me to assess how much usable space was left, which turned out to be 19m x 23m. That’s enough to work with.

After that, I headed to the POE POE impound to see what remained of the pop-up shop I’d constructed in the base of Pearlescent Moon’s shopping district nether portal. I threw together the whole thing in one take back in episode 25, so I wasn’t optimistic.

What remained was mostly nether-themed blocks, which made sense underneath the portal, but won’t as a standalone permanent shop. I pocketed those and 8 diamonds worth of sales for later.

Tuff Brainstorming

I grabbed a few empty shulkers and descended back into the ravine by the name tag shop in search of tuff, and I found plenty! Mining all that out gave me a chance to consider the composition of tuff as a volcanic ash-derived stone and its history as a Roman building material.

By the time my shulkers were full, though, I decided to make a giant sculpture of calcite teeth with tuff gums and to call it Tuff Teeth.

Construction storage and workroom

It seemed a shame to let the hollow under Pearl’s portal go to waste, so I re-dedicated the home of my former pop-up Calcite and Tuff shop as the workroom while constructing Tuff Teeth!

Groundbreaking

I decided to use the entire 19 length of the 19×23 space available to me to create a large circular base for my teeth sculpture. A few polished tuff variants were selected as the building material, as I hope to contrast it against the unpolished tuff for the gums.

After completing that flat circular foundation and trying to envision how to mount the giant teeth sculpture in relation to the shopping area, I realized I could use my work so far as the base of a trophy for “Tuffest Teef.” I quickly set to work on a three pillar design that used calcite for the supporting side pillars and additional polished tuff for the central pillar.

This is only the beginning, though. I’m off to the dentist again tomorrow afternoon, so I’ll try to photograph some models and posters of teeth to use for reference. I’m also probably going to double the height of the trophy’s pillar. I’ll need to examine some trophies for reference between now and then too.

Thanks for reading, but if you ever want to join the stream audience yourself, please remember that you can always 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, TN.

Keep adventuring!

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

Replaymod and UFO 50

The Replaymod export of last night’s coal wall time-lapse recording was still rendering when I was ready to stream this afternoon, so for the first hour of the stream I played around with a few UFO 50 games requested by my Patreon patrons after they watched Matt Wilson‘s review of all fifty UFO 50 games, which I recommend y’all check out:

I warmed up with a couple games I’d played before but am not very good at, Onion Delivery and Rail Heist. I don’t think my brain operates on the right wavelength to ever learn to drive that little car in Onion Delivery so I may give up on that one for now, but I do feel like I’m improving at my train robbing skills the more I play Rail Heist.

Viewers also requested I play Vrainger, which is a Metroid-style game with a neat gravity flip when you double-jump mechanic that I was enjoying. I died a few times in a row in the same room there and decided to move on to the next request: Mortol.

Mortol is  a puzzle-platformer where you sacrifice your characters in ritual deaths that create ledges, weights, and explosions to allow their successors to proceed (and hopefully succeed) at driving out the demons from your land. I liked it enough to come back to it, but didn’t feel competent enough at it to keep the tempo of the stream at the pace I’d like.

Party House was our final UFO 50 game of the stream, and was requested both by Patreon viewers and the Twitch and YouTube chat participants. It’s a high-speed push-your-luck game that I found really clicked with me. Even after only about fifteen minutes of playtime, I felt I understood the mechanics of the game well enough that I could play faster than I could talk about it, which means it might not be a great fit for me to stream. I’ll have to see if there’s a good way to adjust my narration around that speed of play.

Back to HermitCraft 10

The server restarted last night before I could remove the last few columns of the coal wall, so I mined that out to conclude the final segment of that time-lapse and cleaned up my work area.

With that loose coal collected and crafted into blocks, the next step in my materials-gathering journey for this project was to acquire eight stacks of quartz. Since ImpulseSV owns both the quartz and grass shops, I offered yesterday to exchange sixteen chests of my surplus Hermit Holmdel dirt for eight stacks of his quartz. He accepted my proposal, so I gathered all that dirt and brainstormed ways to leave it outside his shop that might be fun and visually interesting. I initially was envisioning a model truck, but after considering chest boats, llamas, and donkeys, settled on a rail circuit.

In search of gold for powered rails, I returned to the cave I discovered yesterday and scrounged for gold ore. I found a ton of tuff veins, which will soon come in handy for my upcoming Tuff and Calcite shop build, but ultimately ended up heading to Mumbo’s gold shop. I was shocked that he’s selling stacks of gold blocks for only 4 diamonds per stack. What a bargain!

I unloaded the shulkers of grass into the chest mine-carts, powered up the rails, and added a little passenger mine-cart in case Impulse wanted to ride around with them.

After collecting my quartz from Impulse’s shop, I returned to the lobby of “Hello my name is Lasertag” to get to work. I added quartz slabs to the stairs into the arena’s observation deck and replaced yesterday’s placeholder white concrete with quartz blocks. I’m excited by the progress!

I ended up concluding the stream by sending my audience over to check out Cubfan135’s Satisfactory stream.

If you haven’t seen Satisfactory before, I’ve got a video of Welsknight, Hypno, and Xisuma introducing me to the HermitCraft HermitFactory world here:

I’ll be streaming Satisfactory later this week with my friends and sharing write-ups of it here as well. As always, 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, TN.

Keep adventuring!