This Week's "Work" - Week Ended 7/07

I'm not sure if any of these things count as "work", since I don't get paid for them and I don't always have a good reason to do them besides its own sake. Hobbies, I guess, but they consumed my time and my attention this week, so they go in!


Project 1: Minecraft Server Tweaks
Maybe a bit lame as hobbies go (I keep trying to find cheap, time consuming hobbies in the physical world!), I none the less have been a busy little bee on the private MC server I've been playing on. Let me give you a quick little tour of my world.

So this little wonderworks here is a part of the nether hub. It's not my construction, so I can't really claim it as my own, but it's where all of our regions are connected by rapid transit. There are eight of us playing in seven active regions with one region yet unclaimed. I'm really only responsbile for having changed the border around my tunnel entrance.

This is my portal back out into the overworld, at the far end of my transit tunnel. I'm actually responsible for this one: I'm the one who's changed the walls and floor to sandstone.

Alright, so a quick skip through the portal and you arrive at my base! I've constructed this particular base in the form of a settlement and given it the rather silly name of Communabi which doesn't mean a darn thing. See that pyramid there? That's my house!

The pyramid from another angle. It really is a lot less spacious than it looks and that's a big part of the reason for my planned move.

This road is the road from the previous shot, the wide one running to the left. It leads toward my spider spawner, which was a big part of this week's work and a really handy thing to have.

This is that squat, grey building beside the pyramid, where I'm growing cane. Cane's really useful for making both books and cakes and it's always nice to have an incoming supply.

This is a shot looking down my quarry shaft, which is right in the middle of my settlement. I've actually sunk it a bit too deep and I need to raise the bottom level by about 2 metres in order to make the mineshafts branching out to the sides sufficiently lucrative. Because of my reluctance to CONTINUE working on the mine, I'm actually mineral-poor.

This lovely contraption is a semi-automatic wheat farm. When all the wheat is mature, I flip a switch, and a water current funnels it all down to one end for me to collect. Then it's just a matter of replanting. I set this up in about an hour and so far it's the most efficient way of farming wheat in my opinion. There are FASTER ways, but they require my direct intervention, and this produces more wheat than I really need.

This is that wheat Autofarm from outside, with my obelisk in the foreground. I've constructed these obelisks throughout my region at or near points of interests. My hope has been to make them sufficiently tall (with a light source at the top) that I can see them from a distance, though now that I've started to lay my roads, it's a bit of a moot point.

This is just my treasure-house. A room full of boxes where I store overflow from the house. Mostly this is netherrack, sand, and cobblestone.

Mm, the foundations are done! For what, exactly, I cannot say, but suffice it to say this will be the largest above-ground structure I have ever constructed in survival mode.

This here is another quarry, which is going to become my slime farm. Slimes are a monster type in the minecraft world that drop slime balls, which are useful for making sticky pistons... essential in many mechanical designs! Slimes are a rare spawn, spawning according to an algorithm in only about 10% of chunks... the administrative divisions of the game. This 16x16 quarry shaft is one such "slime chunk" and I'm in the process of sinking it deep enough that slimes will spawn. Then it's just a matter of adding the lighting, glassing in the roof, and installing my water elevator. This has taken up most of the week so far and I estimate it'll be about another week before I can put my stamp on it.

This is not my work, though it does look like the work of human hands. This is a large region, a little bigger than a chunk, where some unknown force has stripped much of the desert away from my desert. The biome indicator on the stats page still says it is desert. I personally blame Endermen.

Just the same phenomenon from a different angle. This really creeped me out!

 And finally, the spider-spawner, coming from the direction of what will be the slime farm. The spawner (below ground) immediately drops spiders into a water stream, that carries them up the column and then drops them into the "kill chamber", where they have one HP left. I whack them with a loaf of bread, and collect the experience and any items they might drop. I built most of this last week but I made improvements this week by extending the wooden chute up the sides there, which helps keep the spiders from falling OUTSIDE and getting loose.


Project 2: Cleaning House
So I've taken some time today to clean house. Mostly, I've just been cleaning up my room, and the area of the livingroom most immediate to my desk, but I did manage to clean the bathroom. Speaking of which, I've got more laundry to do. Unfortunately I don't have too many photos of the house because I can't get my brother to approve the idea of posting them online. You lose!


Project 3: Writing Prep
I keep a folder. This folder is about three inches thick most of the time. Yesterday I sat down and discarded about an inch of what was in there. What's in the folder? Writing notes, for everything from D&D adventures with my friends to novella ideas and support materials. A lot of the notes I really do need, but a lot of them are half-formed ideas like "We should write a science fiction novel" or "Consider changing Character X's hairdo." Yeesh.

And so, a sneak peak on some of that writing prep is on the right. I really like the format my new phone takes photos in. Nice and tall and narrow. Perfect for inserting into these blogs.

The image on the right is tea! Can you guess what kind of tea?

This Week's Work is hosted by Cam's Blog: A Woman's Place Depends on her Vocation. Travel on back with this link in order to view other posts of the work people did this week!