I Am A Camera

Part 4 of my newest storytelling project, in which we resume my roleplaying of an adventurer and industrial-farming tycoon but now with the brand-new cool stuff of version 1.17

#minecraft #storytelling #roleplaying #videogame #new #version #1.17 #117 #cliffsandcaves #endermanranch #copper #industrialfarming #bees #amethyst #geode

Greetings from the brand-new version 1.17 of Minecraft! As we discussed last time, I essentially did a soft reboot of my storytelling project after the last update, keeping the theme and the persistent timeline but starting over with a new map so that I could update the entire thing to the latest version of the game that just got released, since as always it came with a bunch of cool new stuff that I just like everyone else want to be able to start using right away. So the first three entries in this storytelling project (which you can see, along with all the other entries, at my main index at write.as/jasonpettus) are still following the same timeline and storyline you'll see my talking about today, but we're getting used for the first time to a new place where I'm building everything, sometimes using the new stuff that's coming right now with v1.17.

Right as you come in the front gate, for example, you see one of the major ones, a brand-new ore to the Minecraft universe, copper, which has the distinction of being the only decorative block in the game right now to change colors and textures based on its age. Like everyone else, I wanted to start doing something right away with it, so I'm incorporating it as accents into the perimeter wall I'm building quickly around my property. One of the big goals this time is to quickly have a space that protects us all from nighttime monsters and daytime pillagers, so I'm trying to get up a border as quickly as I can, and light the interior of that space in a way so that it suppresses monsters from appearing. To further accent the pillars I'm using the similarly brand-new deepslate, which can now be found all over the very bottom 16 layers of the planet's crust where we all go mining for diamonds, an attempt by the Minecraft dev team to make those bottom layers more dangerous and interesting (in that these blocks are harder to cut through, and there's a brand-new highly dangerous monster that lurks down in that bottom level now too). And right in the middle of the main front gate you're seeing my first block of the also brand-new amethyst, but more on that a little further down the page.

Like most of these larger builds, my first housing is temporary only, so I'm taking it even one step further this time and making the very walls out of the various tools I need for my early crafting, smelting and stonecutting. I've got a horse tamed and saddled early too, because I'm in a huge area of plains with three villages a short ride away, so with a horse I can get too and fro without any other technology at all.

Here, Industrial Farm Field #1, 172 squares of wheat. There are dispensers filled with water buckets under the glass blocks way in the background of the image, which when they dump will disrupt all the mature wheat from the dirt and sweep it all into that water channel you're seeing in the foreground; the channel sweeps it all into the hopper you're seeing at the top of the second image, which then inserts the produce one piece a second into a composting machine, which churns the whole thing and outputs a piece of bonemeal, which then funnels through that second hopper into a barrel for easy pickup later. The composter finally allows there to be something useful from these industrialized, automated redstone farms that are so easy to build in Minecraft; because bonemeal is otherwise known as “magic fertilizer” in the game, because it sometimes literally acts like magic, including (I recently learned) cloning an exact copy of a flower if you feed a piece to a flower that's planted in a flowerpot. This essentially provides me with unlimited food for breeding bees, which finally makes industrial farming a reality; for I'm now using wheat not for its natural purpose, but for processing it into something that feeds an entirely different animal altogether. And that's kind of fascinating!

Like I've said in a previous update, even with the automated farming, I'm still not planning on building any slaughterhouses, because I simply don't like the subject of slaughterhouses whatsoever, so don't even want to play a cartoon version inside a videogame. So I only need enough cows and sheep and pigs and chickens around for my personal use, like leather for books, wool for banners, feathers for arrows, pigs for...um, riding around on, etc. There in the background of this image you're seeing my first sustainable tree orchard (but more on that in a moment), and I'm pretty seriously thinking about building my main mansion for the estate up there in that area too; so I think I'm just going to throw up a fence around the entire thing (including a lake that can be found back there) and make the whole thing a free-range field for all my livestock and horses (with an eventual ranch on the grounds as well).

A closer look at the orchard. If you plant a tree sapling within a block or two of a flower, you have a 5 percent chance of generating a beehive with that new tree as well; introduced in a very recent update, just one or two versions back, the ever-pleasant creatures are turning out to be one of the most useful little helpers in the entire game. Not only do they gather up honey in their hives that you can scoop out with shears (although only if you've built a fire underneath it to smoke the bees into submission), that you can then not only eat but now use for brand-new candles to finally replace torches in your home; but as they fly over the ground back to their hive after pollination, they drip their pollen along the way, accidentally helping anything it touches to grow faster at the same rate that bonemeal does too. So as long as I'm cutting down a lot of trees right now, to create a sustainable form of fuel for my various furnaces (as opposed to coal, which you dig out of the ground and has only a finite amount), I'm planting flowers everywhere and trying to coax up as many bees as I can, because one of the first enclosed buildings I'll be constructing is a greenhouse and apiary, where the bees will be trapped inside and can't just wander off to never be seen again (which almost always happens with bees in the wild).

And then like I said, one of the most anticipated details of the new 1.17 is the introduction of amethyst, which now grows in these huge walk-in geodes that can be found all over the place underground now, anywhere from Y level 70 all the way to 0. There are special amethyst blocks that can grow shards, that can only be found in these geodes, and stop working if you ever mine them; so if you carefully leave one of these in their original shape, you can theoretically keep coming back to it over and over and cutting off shards, which grow back regularly just like vines or sugarcane, making it now the only block in Minecraft as hard as stone but that can be organically grown in unlimited amounts. It's surrounded by two other brand-new decorative stones as well, so needless to say that everyone's excited about this one.

So that's it for now, and hopefully for my next Minecraft Stoned Saturday Night (patent pending), I'll have my finished greenhouse and apiary to show you. We'll see!