Category: HermitCraft 10 log

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!

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

My upcoming Lasertag arena is going to need a ton of coal blocks, so I spent most of tonight’s grind and read stream creating a stack-high wall of coal ore as wide as the shop itself.

Since I’m planning to create a neat time-lapse of placing and harvesting all this coal, I decided to place the wall just above the word “Hello” so I could have that in-frame for my render.

Since the Haste II beacon for the arena dig was at the bottom of the name tag, and the wall was at the top, my work area for the coal harvest turned out to be just out of range.

Moving that beacon underground to improve the look of the bunker entrance and widening it to accommodate additional effects had always been in my queue for this project, but this immediate need bumped it to the top of my queue. I centered myself on the top of the name tag, and dug straight down until I found a perfect spot for it in a tunnel just above the deepslate level.

After that side-track with the beacon, it was a challenge to harvest each column in a predictably-paced manner that I think should make for a most excellent time-lapse in an upcoming episode.

Regarding the reading, I was able to complete those repetitive tasks while reading aloud chapters 73–77 of Moby Dick. The VOD is available below if you’d like to hear:

If you enjoyed that, you can check out my entire Moby Dick playlist , also 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!