Streamer's Logs Archives — Page 2 of 2

October 23, 2024October 23, 2024

Streamer’s Log: Dirty deal with Docm77 and lower jaw trophy topper

A screenshot of Minecraft showing Docm77 and JoeHills discussing business in front of Docm77's Wash and Fold laundry

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

It’s never too late to unburn bridges. Auto-correct tried to tell me that I should have written “to sunburn bridges” but I’m not letting artificial intelligence write this for me!

Some of you may recall that Docm77 wasn’t thrilled with my defensive strategy during his trial (even though I lovingly rendered it in glorious 360° video).

I wasn’t thrilled about Doc not being thrilled, so after giving him some time to cool off and hearing that he has a huge poker tournament coming up, I reached out to him about trading some of my surplus Hermit Holmdel dirt blocks for a reserved spot at his tournament. I might not strike many of y’all as a huge poker player (because I’m not), but I did briefly get really into Balatro earlier this year.

When we met up, Doc was in good spirits and hyped about his upcoming tournament, as well as for the opportunity to avoid afk farming dirt for a while. I recorded the whole thing for an upcoming episode, so I won’t go into more detail about the convo now, but I will say that Doc directed me to his laundromat’s delivery area as the dirt drop-off location, and promised me a seat at his upcoming event. A most excellent outcome!

A screenshot of Minecraft showing Joe Hills in front of Docm77's Wash and Fold laundry delivery area — It’s all going right here.

After that, I mined a couple geode’s worth of calcite and some extra tuff to ensure I had enough to complete my Tuffest Teef trophy topper. The sketches I drew to mock up the design on this morning’s stream allowed me to hit the roof running and turn around a lower mouth that I’m particularly proud of.

I’m not sure I even should build the top, since most Hermits will be flying over it and that’ll just obscure the lower part.

There’s still room for refinement, but that was all the time I had this afternoon. I’ll revisit this with fresh eyes another day, after I deliver Doc’s dirt. After all, my grass delivery to Impulse the other day was a real highlight of his latest video (starting at 14:47):

If you want to try to catch my next show, you can always keep an eye out for those via my streaming calendar at https://joehills.net/soon/

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

Keep adventuring!

October 23, 2024

Streamer’s log: an introduction to arts and crafts with Cleo

A photograph of JoeHills' journal showing the date Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024 and three attempts at illustrating how teeth might be rendered in Minecraft in increasingly large scales.

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

A bit of background

Since this is my first streamer’s log about Arts and Crafts with Cleo, I wanted to open with a bit of background. My pal ZombieCleo and I have been recording videos together even since I challenged Cleo to a duel thirteen years ago.

Cleo accepted my challenge.

And we battled.

Though we don’t duel regularly, Cleo and I still try to spent two hours every Wednesday to stream arts and crafts.

Our earliest craft streams featured parallel attempts at similar projects, initially paper craft models of Castle Hohenzollern, like this one:

Back to the present

These days, Cleo and I still chat about whatever is on our minds, but we usually work on different projects. Most weeks, Cleo focuses on bullet journal illustrations, and I’m all over the place with my goals and objectives.

I’m optimistic that beginning to log what I work on during these craft streams here will help me bring more intentionality to my projects.

Today, Cleo and I opened by discussing Shoptober on HermitCraft. Due to the urgency of the Permit Office Enforcers demands we all finish our shops, I’m dedicating my arts and crafts time today to sketching models of human teeth. Cleo has chosen to attempt to punt that sort of work until “Shopvember” and is illustrating a bee for her bullet journal.

My initial attempt to render teeth as individual Minecraft blocks was hampered by my inability to keep a proper count, so I made a second attempt.

It was pretty obvious to me that with the base of the shop having a diameter of 19 blocks, a 10×7 footprint for the sculpture wasn’t going to suffice. I took another hack at this at double the scale per tooth, which allowed more subtle diagonals where the teeth met.

That felt a lot better to me, but I realized I’d prefer to have some contrast between the sizes of the molars and the incisors, so scaling the molars up to 4×4 blocks and the incisors down to two or three wide might be worth sketching out.

23×24? That feels about right. I’m looking forward to building that out in 3d on HermitCraft!

Chatting about Board Games

Cleo and I also discussed board games, which reminded stream viewer (and my project manager) NJCoffeeJunkie that we need to schedule my appearance on her upcoming charity stream benefitting the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. We locked that down for noon to 2pm US Central time this Sunday, October 27th. The first hour will be Clank! and the 2nd hour will be Phasmophobia. If you’d like to donate, you can do so at: https://donate.tiltify.com/67afebbf-454c-461f-9f2a-ac92edf708eb/details

I also mentioned that I was going to be attending Tennessee Game Days Fall from November 1st–3rd, and Cleo recommended I try Give Me The Brain, which apparently I can download for free and print at home. Cleo also suggested I try MLEM: Space Agency, which is about cats exploring the solar system.

At past TGDs, I tried a few decent Pandemic variations I could recommend, specifically Fall of Rome and Reign of Cthulhu. Both mix up the core mechanics of Pandemic enough that I enjoyed them.

Closing thoughts

Since this is my first streamer’s log for a craft stream with Cleo, I’m still noodling on how best to balance presenting discussion topics and project progress. I hope you come back next week and see how I’ve improved.

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

Keep adventuring!

October 22, 2024October 27, 2024

Streamer’s Log: HermitFactory is chuffed about nitrogen

A screenshot of Satisfactory showing a nitrogen pipe extending toward the aluminum factory.

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

I hope you enjoyed my account of yesterday’s HermitFactory stream, where I leveraged our first access to automated smelted aluminum to build a heat sink factory and pioneer a nitrogen pipeline.

I started this stream by giving Hypno a tour of the nitrogen harvesting area, and used that trip as a chance to finish painting the nitrogen pipes grey for consistency.

Hyp was curious about what nitrogen could be used for, and learned that you could combine it with sulfuric acid to make rocket fuel. Since rocket fuel sounds out of this world, Hypno wanted to start blending some up at the petroleum processing facility I agreed to extend the nitrogen pipe there while Hyp started tapping the nearest sulphur nodes.

I reached the petroleum facility so quickly that I decided to continue the nitrogen pipeline toward my heavy modular frames factory. Hyp’s conveyors and my pipeline met under the intersection to the heavy modular frames loading dock.

Once I reached the heavy modular frames loading dock, I ran the pipe up the building to the current top floor. I set up some temporary industrial storage units for the heavy modular frames and aluminum casings until I could properly convey and truck those over and fed it all into a blender to kickstart production of fused modular frames.

Xisuma logged in a bit after us and began adding walls around the aluminum complex. I really liked the skylights and the sloped roof. The shed on the top serves as street level access.

Once those walls were up, it was time to take a hard look at the spaghetti electrical job I’d done when I set up the heat sink production line yesterday.

I removed over a dozen poles and set up outlets along the walls and beams and am pretty pleased with the results:

I was just about to wrap up for the day when I realized that my truck routes had trucks crossing each others depots. I did my best to clean up the mess quickly, then shut the trucks’ auto-pilots down for the day. I’m going to take a fresh crack at that problem tomorrow.

Thanks for joining me for this Satisfactory streamer’s log! If you’re curious about catching a HermitFactory stream yourself, please remember that you can always keep an eye out for upcoming shows via my streaming calendar at https://joehills.net/soon/

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

Keep adventuring!

October 21, 2024October 22, 2024

Streamer’s log: Tuffest Teef signage and shopping area

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

This morning we brainstormed and broke ground on our tuff and calcite shop, tonight we’re building on that success!

The trophy’s columns didn’t feel tall enough to me, so I extended them and added a second-tier base that will soon hold our gums and teeth sculpture.

With all that extra height to work with, I decided to make an attempt at free-handing banners with the letters in the shop‘s name on them, but was a bit frazzled trying to make an S… until I realized I could make the top and bottom look like teeth!

This turned out better than I expected!

Even so, every letter could look like teeth with a bit more work, so I took a crack at that. Voila!

With an amazing sign in place, I used my remaining time in the stream to add some internal signage and stock the shopping area.

It’s not perfect, maybe I’ll add a rug or something to break up the center, but I can re-visit this when I come back to add the teeth and gums to the roof.

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

Keep adventuring!

October 21, 2024October 21, 2024

Streamer’s log: HermitFactory aluminum is go!

A screenshot of Satisfactory showing a few concrete floors with aluminum processing machines in the desert. In the foreground is an array of eight furnaces smelting ingots.

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

This is my first attempt at a streamer’s log for Satisfactory, so if you’re unfamiliar with the game, I recommend checking out my video where I run through ten minutes of the tutorial before Welsknight, Hypno, and Xisuma show me around the HermitCraft HermitFactory world here.

When we all last streamed together on Friday, Welsknight took the lead on launching our first aluminum factory. Wels tasked Hypno with acquiring water and piping it into the factory, and asked me to run power and conveyor lines out to remote bauxite and limestone deposits. By the end of that stream, the factory was running, which opens a lot of doors for what we can accomplish now that we have automated aluminum production.

Heat Sinks: a good use for Aluminum Sheets

In particular, Wels’ plant is already producing a surplus of Alclad aluminum sheets, so I decided to check the codex for anything I could automate producing with them. Given the abundance of nearby copper nodes, heat sinks seemed the best candidate, requiring only copper ingots and aluminum sheets to assemble.

After receiving permission from Wels, I added another copper miner to a nearby node adjacent his smelter setup and tripled the ingot production west of the aluminum plant.

While I was laying those buildings out, Xisuma, Hypno, and Wels started experimenting with larger blueprint machines to design factory facades. I helped run some power lines out that way to keep the hover-packs from falling out of the sky, but mostly left them to it.

Nitrogen is next

With Wels’ factory looking great and my prototype heat sink production line running smoothly, I started looking for a way to use the surplus aluminum casings currently backing up the aluminum factory. What do you know, heat sinks can be used to create radio control units, which are a component in creating resource well pressurizers to harvest gases like nitrogen.

A screenshot of Satisfactory showing a Joe Hills looking down at a Nitrogen resource node from a high-tension powerline tower. — A nitrogen resource. I don’t know what I expected.

I learned nitrogen can be blended with aluminum casings and heavy modular frames (which I previously constructed a line for and have a huge stockpile of) to make fused modular frames, so I headed north past the end of Wels’ coal conveyor line to seek nitrogen and run. a pipeline back.

We had to wrap up the stream before I could build those pipes all the way back to the aluminum factory intersection, but when it comes to Satisfactory, a big part of playing the game is accepting that there’s always more to do!

I hope you enjoyed my first Satisfactory streamer’s log! 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!

October 21, 2024

Streamer’s log: Tuff and Calcite shop groundbreaking on HermitCraft 10

A screenshot of Minecraft showing a sign in front of of creepy cartoonish portal in the HermitCraft 10 shopping district. The sign reads: "future home of @JoeHills' Calcite and Tuff shop.

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:

Review how much space is still available at our planned plot for the shop next to Mumbo’s iron
Check out what’s left of the pop-up shop in the POE POE impound
Gather stock for the shop
Brainstorm shop concept, layout, and materials
Gather materials that suit that hopefully brilliant idea
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!

October 20, 2024October 20, 2024

Streamer’s log: let’s open the name tag shop!

A screenshot of Minecraft showing a bunker with no entrance and a mess of shulkers atop a beacon in the darkness.

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

Earlier this afternoon, I gathered all the quartz and coal blocks I’ll need to complete the lobby of my name tag shop.

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.

Keep adventuring!

October 20, 2024

Streamer’s log: UFO 50 and HC10 Nametag shop progress

A screenshot of Minecraft showing Joe Hills in front of Iumpluse HermitCraft 10 grass shop, with a circular train track with several chest Minecraft's.

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!

October 20, 2024

Grind and read: Moby Dick Chapters 73–77

A screenshot of Minecraft showing a 64-block-high wall of coal partially completed above a 81-block-wide name tag that says "Hello"

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.

A screenshot of Joe Hills in Minecraft standing on a double-wide iron beacon in a tunnel with lava. — 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:

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!

October 19, 2024

Streamer’s log: Hermitcraft 10 nametag shop choices

A screenshot of the game Minecraft showing an 80-meter wide concrete name tag that reads, "Hello my name is Lasertag"

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.

A screenshot of Minecraft that shows that dirt and grass covers the sides of the building that were exposed at the beginning of the stream. — 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.

Keep adventuring!