With the POE POE on the Hermits’ cases to get all of our unbuilt shops constructed, I opened the stream knowing I’ve gotta stay focused on wrapping this up so I can proceed to my other unbuilt permits before the end of the month: Tuff/Calcite and white wool.
I actually wrote a list of objectives before the stream (in no particular order):
Add a ceiling to the lobby
Extend the walls of the lobby
Set up sales inside the lobby
Add “coming soon” signage to the team hallways and observation deck entrance
Create a proper bunker entrance
Clean up the storage around the entrance beacon
Remove the entrance beacon
I wanted to work fast and started throwing things into D.O.OM. shulkers.
And then I immediately realized that a project at this scale couldn’t really happen without some sort of dedicated storage space, so I dug out a shaft between the green team hallways and the coal shell of the arena.
After that derailment, I was actually able to knock out the rest of the list pretty quickly! Completing the lobby wasn’t complicated now that I had all the materials handy.
Scar even showed up for an inspection and gave his approval, but the details of that encounter will be in an upcoming episode and don’t need to be recounted here.
I closed out the stream by doing some light terraforming around the bunker entrance and bonemealing some tall grass and flowers around it. There’s definitely room for a refinement pass in the future, but I’m excited for now to jump to my next shop build tomorrow!
This week may have some schedule changes, but please keep in mind 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.
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!
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.
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.
I managed to fall next to the lava, not into it!
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:
Howdy, y’all! Joe Hills here writing as I always do in Nashville, TN!
The POE POE have given the Hermits until the end of the month to finish our shops, so today I spent over four hours on a bonus HermitCraft 10 stream developing my NameTag shop, “Hello, my name is Lasertag.”
The core concept of the shop is that the lobby will have a place where Hermits can buy name tags, but the main attraction will be an arena for an asymmetrical team-based attack-and-defend PVP game. My layout design for the arena is still a very early work in progress that is out of scope for the shop month deadline, but I can share now that it will be inspired by the third area of the map CTF Badlands from Team Fortress, which I also enjoyed the Team Fortress 2 interpretation of.
Rough dimensions and terraforming
I love playing Etho’s Ravager Rush game in his froglight shop, but it always felt to me that the observation area could be more welcoming if it was directly accessible from his lobby.
When approaching this project, I knew that I wanted the ceiling to feature alternating layers of air and glass for a fog effect, but a real breakthrough moment was realizing that an extra-tall air gap in the layers of glass could serve as a a broad observation deck for the arena that’s easily accessible from the rear of the shop’s lobby.
There’s three meters between the floor and ceiling of the observation deck that overlooks the future arena.
Sorting the y-levels for the purple glass floor and ceiling there was the last step I needed to determine how deep I needed to dig out and add a grass roof over the lobby bunker.
This is only a rough terraforming pass, we’ll clean this up after all three shops are minimally functional.
Color and material choices
In terms of materials, I’ve decided to use coal for the black shell around the skybox and gathered six shulkers of coal ore from the chest beacons around my Hermit Holmdel area. As my entire coal supply will probably be required for this project, I also gathered some wood to cook into charcoal for fuel for future glass furnacinations.
I also finally selected team colors for the attackers and defenders in the mini-game. Green and yellow don’t appear in TF2, but in Team Fortress Classic they were used as colors for teams three and four in quad-team maps. Green and yellow are better-suited to a lasertag theme in Minecraft than red and blue because of the easy availability of high-visibility green and yellow froglights.
I decided to use quartz for the slabs and white interior accents in the shop. which led me to Impulse’s shop, which sells quartz at a rate of one stack of quartz blocks for 3 diamonds. Impulse’s grass shop sells grass at a rate of 1 diamond per stack, so I decided to text Impulse and inquire about dropping off 8 double chests of grass for 8 stacks of quartz. Until we hear back from Impulse, I’m using white concrete as a placeholder.
Looking forward
This is only one of three shops I need to finish by the 31st, so my plan for my grindy Moby Dick stream tonight is to gather materials for the entrance and shop area of this build.
Best case, the main lobby and bunker entrance door can be completed early this week so that I can shift my focus to the Wool Street collaboration and to my Tuff/Calcite shop.
Don’t forget, 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.
