Game review: Modded Minecraft

I have played an ENORMOUS amount of Minecraft. I’ve spent the kind of time you really shouldn’t spend on mining for diamonds, building castles, setting up supply chains, optimizing power generation, building massive factories…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve done way too much in Minecraft using a wide variety of mods to talk about in one single post. But what I can do is give a little tour of my most recent foray into the blocky world of endless possibilities. Now, I haven’t played seriously in quite a while, and I left many of my various projects only partially completed. But what is there does fill me with a certain pride, as I certainly built quite a lot.

First, my pig farm. You may notice there are no pigs in there. That is intentional. I made the mistake of leaving it running while connected with my completely autonomous farm which supplied it with unlimited carrots. The pig population exploded out of control, and nearly crashed the game. I managed to eventually kill them all, but until I create a method to properly monitor and keep the population within manageable levels, I’m not going to leave it running. The fate of my digital world depends on it.

You may wonder, why build something like this at all? Well… there is an item called pink slime, a byproduct of creating liquid meat from a slaughterhouse, which is used to make meat ingots/blocks(gross, but also useful as food items once cooked). Pink slime is a crucial ingredient in making laser drills, high tier machines for basically making metals renewable. You need an absolute metric ton of pigs to get enough, hence the automation.

Here is the previously mentioned carrot farm. It’s completely automated, and is only inactive because I reached critical mass of pigs and had to shut down the whole operation. Luckily, carrots are very well behaved, so I can let it sit here with maxed out inventories without it causing issues. On the edges I have fertilizer and harvester machines, which speed up growth and harvest fully grown carrots respectively.

...And here is the underbelly. Not much here, but you can see the tubes I use to connect things together. The gray block in the center is the planter, which plants crops. In the back, I have composters which take sewage from the pig farm to turn into compost, which is then used by the fertilizer.

Now, this thing is really complicated, but I will try to summarize. I have a setup using a bunch of mods that turns potatoes into magic for a magic wand I have. The wand has a variety of abilities, from shooting ice and fire to letting me walk through walls. Thaumcraft with Botania integration is one heck of a combination, as this magic generation is completely automated after the truly extensive and convoluted setup that you only see part of in this one screenshot.

Now we get to the factory… I built it into the side of a mountain, and these stairs lead right up to the top. I have methods of flight, but this guarantees I can still get up there easily should I somehow lose them. I don’t use keep inventory, so this can occasionally happen.

Here we have my power generation, using a mod appropriately called Big Reactors. I’ve got two turbines being powered by a nuclear reactor, which cools using pumped in water that it turns to steam and then pumps into the turbines. This took a lot of experimentation and fine tuning to get it working right, especially since turbines and reactors are multi-block structures that can be built in all kinds of configurations to optimize different parameters. I won’t go into all that… it’s very convoluted.

My pride and joy… the quintuple ore multiplication facility, feeding the output into a mass storage energistics computer system. What does that mean? It means, while in vanilla minecraft you get one iron ingot per iron ore, this system produces FIVE iron ingots per iron ore. This entire process is the single most complicated thing I have in my base, so not to sound like a broken record… but I won’t get into the whole process.

What I will show you, though, is just a fraction of the machinery supporting the quintuple ore multiplication facility. These pipes pump different fluids and gasses required in various processes, all of which need to be adequately supplied. This setup I have is designed to be scalable, so I can add more machines to increase generation speed for any part of the process if necessary to remedy bottlenecks.

Here are those previously mentioned laser drills… pretty cool, huh? I had plans for six, but when I last stopped playing I only had two built so far. They absolutely guzzle energy, which is the main reason I need such large reactors. In fact, I will probably build more reactors if and when I build more laser drills to keep up with the energy demand.

Final stop, the caverns. I have several massive chasms from running automated quarries that I’ve since covered up with cobblestone and dirt, which form large flat areas that are useful for building things like the auto farms I previously displayed earlier. Underneath, they are mostly empty space down to bedrock, except for this one which I built as an arena for spawning and fighting dangerous mobs, such as the Wither. That way, they are kept in a convenient location, but without threatening the rest of my base.

And that’s it! I hope you liked this little tour of one of my digital playgrounds. As an aside, if anyone is interested in watching me stream a game sometime, let me know. The games I’ve been thinking of include Minecraft, Cuphead, and Getting Over It. It’s just a thought at the time of this writing, so I don’t have a time set up, or any of the necessary technical stuff figured out, but I’m confident I could sort it out if that is something people want to see.

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Same post on Minds