I Am A Camera

Part 10 of my new Minecraft storytelling campaign, in which I terraform my ranch and pasture using lots of decorative items and interesting hacks

#minecraft #videogame #storytelling #roleplaying #adventurer #v1.17 #tycoon #industrialage #farm #decorating #building #architecture #terraforming #bonemeal #lights #virtualmeditation

Things are really starting to come together in my Minecraft roleplaying campaign! But don't forget, a major part of this campaign's goal is to do a lot of complex decorating just for the sake of complex decorating; and while that usually focused on close-up projects like homes and farms, I'm in need now of complexly decorating the entirety of my 10,000 square block “free range pasture” where I keep all my ranch's animals, stretching almost all the way to the village limits of the nearby Forest View. As you can see in this overhead shot, the ground is currently just generic Minecraft flat greenland for most of its distance, plus there are still huge sections that are dark enough at night to spawn monsters. And the whole point of building a fenced pasture like this is to keep out the monsters at night, so that I can actually work here through the night whenever I might want to; so it looked like I had my work cut out for me during my most recent Saturday night of vaping, Minecraft and “dadchill” EDM on Spotify.

But this is where the day is saved by bonemeal, the “magic fertilizer” I was talking about in the last update when discussing the automated industrial farm fields I've built, which grow stacks upon stacks of potatoes which are then roasted for XP and dumped into a composter to be ground into bonemeal. Right-click on a generic green block in Minecraft with a piece of bonemeal, and instantly grass and flowers will grow in the four blocks surrounding it; so for the majority of the pasture, all I really needed to do was go around fertilizing the grass dozens of times in order to turn it into a legitimately wooly wildland. I have to say, I'm super-happy with how this looks, a much more visually dense and interesting view than typical default Minecraft grasslands.

I then added a new type of lighting fixture to my estate, glowstone lampposts that stretch all the way down the straight road that leads north to the edge of my pasture, and then on past that to Forest View. In my storytelling universe, after all, this will be the main road that local businessmen will travel down when coming to visit my ranch in person, so I want to make sure the horse ride in is as impressive as possible.

I then focused in and precisely did one of these more traditional decorating jobs in a small area of the pasture; namely, a pond on the far northern end that was “naturally” generated when the universe was first created, and that I've had my eye on this whole time for turning into a “staycation” get-away camping spot on my grounds for when I want to sleep under the stars. Don't forget, the major defining trait of my character for this roleplaying campaign is that he's a derring-do explorer who's getting rich off mass-producing the exotic resources he brings back from his adventures; so it wouldn't be out of bounds, for example, to think that he has very fond memories of his travels to the Caribbean-like Buena Sea, and would get comfort from terraforming his local pond into a mini-Caribbean biome and occasionally spending a Saturday night sleeping out next to it.

And then finally, way out on the far eastern edge of my estate, I built a fully fortified military-grade watchtower. This is as far as my property gets before turning into the Central-Europe-like Midlands, home of the vast majority of the 12 villages I will end up trading with, so I thought it'd be good to have a way to watch for incoming trouble from here on the edge of the wider world. Plus, this watchtower is in plain sight of Forest View, and it gives the villagers comfort to see me voluntarily providing extra security and protection for the entire community, under the belief that all of us being safe allows us to thrive that much quicker.

And just beyond it, the far eastern gate of my ranch. Beyond that bridge officially lies the wild terrain of the Midlands, and a one-day horse ride northeast to the next closest village.

But like I said in a previous update, where Minecraft is truly shining these days is after sunset, because of the sheer number of interesting light sources that now exist after 17 distinct updates of the gaming interface over the years. It's here where I start thinking semi-seriously about something I've thought idly about before, which is that I'm just so incredibly pleased with how this environment is turning out to look, now that I'm spending all this care and attention on how it's actually being built, that it could realistically stand in for an actual environment from which I might want to meditate. I mean, if I simply ran the image out via HDMI to my 40-inch television, and then sat right in front of it, it would really feel like a full-sized, 1:1 ratio virtual environment I could sit in, relax and be mindful while traversing. Especially since you can easily use a “cheat” code to temporarily turn off all the monsters, so that you could just sit there passively as the day slowly turns into night, and then slowly turns back into day (five minutes for each, meaning a ten-minute real-time cycle for every 24 hours of gametime within Minecraft). Play some river sounds on your headphones, and you might as well be in a Zen garden, albeit a particularly cartoony and blocky one. In fact, that's what I'll eventually be building later this winter in that bamboo-heavy area on the other side of my ranch house, an Asian-style pagoda waterfront gazebo for calm meditation sessions.

So that's it for now, and when next we speak, I should have a big huge update for you: the buildout of my other five automated farm fields, the construction of the underground processing factory, and the creation of my large and richly decorated horse stables next to the house, which will be one of the last things before the ranch is finally complete. Talk with you then!