My Modded Play Diary
Day 204
I made a simple iron farm with Create!
This fully automatic farm creates and breaks cobblestone, which gets crushed into gravel and washed into iron nuggets and flint. I made it following this tutorial. It's very simple and meant for the early game-- I should have made it ages ago! Just goes to show you how intimidated I still am with Create, but I'm doing my best to learn! The downside of this farm is that it's slow and doesn't yield very much, as gravel has only a 12% chance of turning into iron. Still, this is completely set-and-forget, so I'll have a trickle of iron coming in from now on.
Day 207
After a long time breeding birds, I've got myself a Golden Chocobo! These ultimate chocobos are fast, can swim, and even fly!
Day 209
Now that I've got a flying mount, I think it's time I went exploring! First up is this wizard's tower from Ars Nouveau. It's full of books and wizardly things. There's also magical traps and TNT! I guess whoever lived here wasn't a friendly wizard.
Day 211
Next up is this, uhhh, thing. I'm not sure what mod adds this structure, but it's huge! I'm eager to see what this place is about. Here's hoping it's not too dangerous.
Day 212
The interior was beautiful, like being inside a lush cave. After looking around, I decided that this was from Yung's Better Desert Temples. I guess it adds non-desert temples, too. These temples require you to solve puzzles in order to progress.
Well, that's what's supposed to happen. You solve three puzzles, signified by lit campfires. When they're all lit, the floor opens up and you proceed into the dungeon proper. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, even though I lit all the campfires the floor didn't open. The structure gives you Mining Fatigue, too, so I couldn't dig into the floor. I thought I'd be cheaty and use TNT to blast it open. The designers evidently thought of that, because the TNT set off a chain reaction, blowing a huge hole in the floor! At the center of the hole was a pit full of creepers!
I fended off the creepers and found chests with loot. If I had progressed through the dungeon properly, I would have fought a boss. But I guess that's not happening. Oh well, it was still fun to explore.
Day 215
I've been progressing in Botania. I made Terrasteel and opened the portal to Alfheim. I also made a Terra Blade, a diamond-tier sword that can fire a magical projectile.
In this pack, I have an addon for Botania called Mythic Botany. Mythic Botany changes the progression for Botania, adding a new tier of magic metal called Alfsteel. I'll need Alfsteel if I want to fight Gaia, not that I'm planning on doing that at the moment. I may want some of that Alfsteel equipment, though. But one piece of Alfsteel requires two whole mana pools' worth of mana to create! My Endoflames are going to be busy for a while.
Day 225
I have plans to get started with another magic mod. This time, it's Blood Magic. I haven't played much with Blood Magic before, mostly because I didn't quite gel with it. But I'm going to give it a fair shot in this series!
Now, Blood Magic is one of those mods that needs a lot of space. So much so that just one basement level of my tower isn't going to cut it. Back to digging!
Day 229
To get started with Blood Magic, you need a Blood Altar. You fill this altar with, well, blood (or as it's called in the mod, Life Essence). How do you do that? Well, there's ways to automate it, but to start, you've gotta stab yourself with a knife!
Once you've got some LP in the altar, you can make the first tier of Blood Orb. This orb takes the blood from the altar and stores it into your personal network of energy, which various items draw from. To see how much energy is currently in your network, you need a Divination Sigil, which requires a Blank Slate crafted in your altar. Which needs a lot of blood. Yeah, the beginning of Blood Magic is a bit grindy.
Day 232
Getting into Blood Magic gives me some toys to play around with, items that draw from my LP network. Like Sigils that can place source blocks, or a Lava Crystal to fuel my furnaces. However, there's only so much I can do at the first tier. So I'll need to upgrade my altar.
The Blood Altar becomes a bigger multiblock as you progress in tiers. The first upgrade is a simple ring of runes around the base. These runes are not just for decoration, but can customize your altar depending on which you use. To start, I've got Speed Runes, which increase the altar's crafting speed (you can see I've also got a hopper going into the altar to help with automation, I've actually got a Create smart chute below, too).
Fueling that altar is a bit of a pain, though. To help, I've made an Incense Altar as well. This altar gives a boost to my stabs with the Sacrificial dagger. I can increase the bonus (called Tranquility) by placing certain blocks around the altar, such as leaves, water and farmland. This will certainly help, at least until I can start spilling someone else's blood.
Day 236
I've upgraded to a Tier 3 altar, augmented with runes of Capacity, Sacrifice, and Speed. Those Sacrifice runes come into play because I've relocated a Pillager spawner I found. A Sacrifical Dagger kills them instantly and drains their blood into the altar. Hey, they're Pillagers, bad guys! This is FINE.
Anyway, this marks the middle of Blood Magic's progression. To go any farther, I'd have to venture into the Demon Realm, a dangerous dimension dungeon-delve. That's a bit beyond my capabilities at the moment. I might explore some other Blood Magic rituals later, though.
Day 238
All this Blood Magic is rather antisocial. I think it's time I made some friends!
Supplementaries generates small signpost structures that point the way to nearby villages. According to the above picture, though, the nearest one is 1400 blocks away! Hence why I waited until I had a good mount to look for villagers. I stocked up on food and supplies, and I'm ready for a journey!
Day 241
Following the direction of the signpost, I eventually found a small village in a taiga. While I was exploring, I also found this huge tree-village in the jungle! I plopped a Waystone down for easy travel.
Day 245
I kidnapped invited this villager over to my base. After a long time cycling his trades, he now offers me Mending books! I'd never actually bothered with getting Mending from a villager before, and boy is it some thrilling gameplay! What a good mechanic.
Day 250
I've been infusing my Hellshelves and incrementally upgrading my enchanting setup. At last, I've gained the ability to infuse Honey Bottles into Bottles of Enchanting. With those, I crafted a Scroll of Ageless Wisdom from Enigmatic Legacy, an item that can store my experience! Now I won't be so nervous about losing it all on an adventure.
Day 253
The first resource-producing bee I want to create is a Coal Bee! This requires a couple steps of breeding different bee species. Rather than breeding them in a pen, I can use Productive Bee's Breeding Chamber to breed the bees in a controlled environment. This requires RF power, which I don't have a lot of ways of generating in this pack. Thankfully, the mod has a Honey Generator, which I can fuel with the products of my vanilla bee farm!
Day 256
My new bees are bred and buzzing in their new home! Unlike normal bees, these bees pollinate not flowers, but coal blocks! I don't know the optimal setup, so I just scattered a few around their enclosure. Their comb product will be automatically sent to be centrifuged into coal.
Day 261
I'm building a huge windmill!
I've a new Create contraption to build, but it'll require a lot of power. A maximum strength windmill, with 128 sails, should be enough to supply me with what I need. I've got it functional, though obviously not very aesthetically pleasing. That can come later.
Day 265
In order to make my big contraption, I need Rotation Speed Controllers, an advanced item from Create that in turn requires Precision Mechanisms. This is created by a looping conveyor belt process that seems really complicated! So I copied this design for manufacturing them. Now that I made the thing, I can make the other thing! To make more things. That's Create!
Day 270
Here it is, a new iron farm! This one is larger and faster than my other farm (here is where I got the design). It still doesn't match the rates of vanilla iron golem farms, but between my two sources I should hopefully have enough iron for my needs.
Day 274
I want to do more exploring, but I need to upgrade my gear! Apotheosis has a lot of content devoted to just that. Gear can spawn with Affixes, which add effects like more damage, health, speed, etc. To recycle some of that affixed gear, I've created a Salvaging Table. Salvaging gear turns it into materials that can be used in a Reforging Table to re-roll an item's affixes.
But to make a Reforging Table, I need Netherite! I'm running into other recipes that need Netherite, too, so it's high time I go mining for some. I've never actually done it before, but it looks pretty tedious! We'll see how lucky I get finding debris.
Day 283
After a fair bit of time mining beneath the local Nether Fortress, I now have 32 Ancient Debris. I didn't bother to use beds or TNT, just mined along chunk borders. It was slightly less painful than I thought it would be, helped greatly by Botania's mana-using tools. 32 debris isn't a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but I have ways of stretching it out.
Day 284
Just Another Ore Processing Compatibility Attempt adds a crushing recipe for Ancient Debris to Create's Crushing Wheels. This is the most efficient way for me to process the results of my mining expedition. But Crushing Wheels are crafted from a large array of powered Mechanical Crafters, as seen in the above image. More building things to build other things.
Day 286
My crushing wheels now have a home! I tried to make it look somewhat nice, and not just wheels in a field. And now I have nearly two stacks of ground-up debris! I'll start putting it to good use shortly.
Day 293
I now have a full set of enchanted Netherite armor! With the Reforging Table, I've given it a set of Rare affixes. This isn't the top tier of power in Apotheosis, but in order to get stronger affixes, I'll have to scrap the gear of powerful bosses. I also made an Emblem of Monster Slayer from Enigmatic Legacy, which gives me a level of Looting, higher damage against hostile mobs, and 2x experience drops! That'll help me get more levels for further enchanting.
Day 295
I decided to put my new armor to the test! These Battle Towers are filled with spawners and loot! I'll have to collect keys from each floor to unlock the final boss at the top of the tower. This should be a worthy challenge.
Day 297
To be honest, the default loot tables for the Battle Towers are a bit underwhelming, so I've customized them with items from other mods! I took my time looting the tower as I went up. At the very top was a stone monolith with three key slots. I inserted the keys I'd gathered from the tower's chests, and the monolith transformed into the tower guardian, a giant with 250 health! He was immune to arrows, so I used my trusty Terra Blade. Eventually, he fell, and I was able to loot his boss chest.
I didn't have long to savor my victory, however, as without the guardian's energy, the tower soon collapses! So it was a quick scamper down to the bottom to watch the tower crumble. There are more towers throughout the world, some more dangerous than the one I conquered. I'll have to do more exploring!
Day 300
I've finally made it 300 days in this world! To be honest, I'm starting to get tired of it. There's plenty left to do, but I'm losing motivation. I don't want to completely abandon the world, but I might take a break. There's lots of adventure left when I come back to it!