Zorua

The full Minecraft Version 1.19 is finally out. Community response is mixed; they love the new red wood type, the Mangrove Swamp biome is interesting, the Ancient City is very well-designed, the Warden is a neat boss-in-all-but-name, mud is nice, boats with chests are awesome, and so on, but they think it's also lacking in content, the Allay is complicated, and the Ancient City doesn't have enough worthwhile loot. Overall, they like most of what's there, but they think the Wild Update isn't wild enough. Personally? I haven't updated my main world just yet. I made a copy and updated that one so I could find the new biomes, to prepare for going out to search. The Ancient City is close enough that I can probably walk there in the overworld (which I might do because I don't want my portal to generate right next to the Warden), but for the Mangrove Swamp I'll have to go even further out from one of my Nether tunnels. I'm interested in all the new blocks, so I'm gonna go for it.

A tiny bit late. Oh well. Anyway, so minor Minecraft thing. With 1.19 on the way, I wanted to try and set up a number of automatic farms in different places and finish some other ways of getting a lot of resources. To this end, I decided to work on three things at first: finishing my Villager Trading Hall, building a Piglin farm, and building a Drowned farm. The Piglin farm is a gold farm hooked up to a Piglin bartering station so I can trade the gold for a large amount of resources, including gravel, obsidian, and potions. The Drowned farm will produce tridents, nautilus shells, and the coveted copper ingots. And the Villager Trading Hall will produce...practically everything. Not literally, but there are so many resources you can get out of those, and I want in on them. The main problem is I wasn't sure what to do first. Finish the trading hall? Set up the gold farm? Go for copper? So I chucked named pieces of paper in a dropper and let the Random Number Gods decide. The gold farm is almost finished. Literally the only thing I'm missing is the Piglin to barter with. The problem with spawning one in is the spawn platform is too close to the gold farm, so Zombified Piglins are filling the hostile mob cap. The farm produces all the gold I will ever need, so we're not having trouble just yet. A couple of optional things I'd like to add to this farm is 1) a Cleric-profession Villager to trade the stacks upon stacks of rotten flesh the gold farm produces, and 2) a furnace to smelt the stacks upon stacks of golden swords into gold nuggets into. Those are just nice add-ons, though, and I'll worry about them once I get the Piglin in place. My Villager Trading Hall is divided up into 11 buildings. Ten of them are dedicated to a specific villager type while the remaining one has the three blacksmith-style professions sharing. The main reason for dividing stuff up is entirely for the theme, admittedly; all the Librarian Villagers are in a library, all the Shepherd and Farmer villagers are in a big barn with attached sheep pen, the Leatherworker villagers are in a clothing store, etc. The main issue is resources, as the Shepherd/Farmer hall and Leatherworker hall both require stained terracotta, and rather than mine all of that, I could easily just buy it from the Mason villagers...which I currently have none of. I know I'll end up breeding more than enough villagers and probably recycling some of the excess for other projects. Two more things with this I need to do is first, to move the villager breeder as I think it's too close to the established villagers so it thinks this village is sufficiently populated. If I move the breeder, then it'll probably work better. And second, I need to make a Zombie Cure Station, where I intentionally let a villager become zombified and then cure them so that they will, out of gratitude, permanently lower their prices. Do this a few times, and a lot of expensive trades could be brought down to just a one emerald/resource cost. I need to do this with every villager, and counting how many villagers I'll have...this could take a while. Finally, the Drowned farm. I found a basic tutorial and built this thing in a Creative Mode copy of my world. And thus far...it has produced exactly zero Drowned. Plenty of fish, but no Drowned. I wonder if I did something wrong. I'm honestly tempted to try and copy one of the ridiculously overpowered Drowned farms made by TangoTek on the HermitCraft server, but it seems like a lot more work and I'd at least like something simple. Technically I have a Drowned farm already that funnels zombies from a spawner into a chamber that turns them into drowned for me to kill, but this is incredibly slow. After I make all of these, there's a couple of things I'd like to do. Fix my Iron Farm (should be easy when I end up with way too many extra Mason villagers), make a TNT Tree Farm, improve my Honey farm, a Dripstone farm, Bamboo farm, Blaze Farm, Amethyst, Guardian, Flowers... I have a lot of farms I need to work on. As for actual builds I'd like to work on, well... I like the idea of taking existing Minecraft structures and building them in different build styles. I want to turn an End City into a collection of tree houses and build a Nether Fortress as a futuristic flying structure using colored glass to simulate hard light bridges. Both of these require a lot of wood and glass, respectively. Plus there's making my own custom Woodland Mansion, making one again underwater out of prismarine, making an Ocean Monument on the surface styled after said mansion, and some other stuff. I also have a dumb idea of making a massive city with themed buildings. Nineteen central buildings themed after the superheroes/villains from Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir, surrounded by about ninety buildings that are based on the Super Smash Bros. playable characters, either themed after those characters or lifted directly from their source games. Not sure if I'm gonna do this in my main world or not. And that's just on my main world. I also want to build the Kanto region from Pokemon, but scaled up and more fleshed out with elevation changes and a lot of extra buildings, and there's no way that's going to be a Survival-only world. I'm starting in the middle, in Saffron City, and it's...already a little out of hand. Speaking of Pokemon... New gameplay trailer! Two Professors! Professor Sada if you pick Scarlet Version, and Professor Turo if you pick Violet Version. I wonder if the other one will show up in a minor or even antagonistic role. Could be neat. New rival! Nemona, the player character's friend. Her design is neat. She has a Pawmi. New Pokemon! Pawmi, an electric rodent that, if the cheeks are any indication, is gonna be the new Pika-clone. Lechonk, a Normal-type pig Pokemon. And Smoliv, a small olive Grass/Normal Pokemon. Region details! Looks like Pokemon Center-type kiosks are scattered outside instead of being indoor buildings. New Legendaries! Koraidon in Pokemon Scarlet, and Miraidon in Pokemon Violet. People have noticed that their names refer to past and future, respectively, and that they seem to have an odd wheel-like shape on their chests. Release date! November 18, 2022!

Not much in terms of games I've played other than adding a little bit to my Nether tunnel, but I did look around (a copy of) the world in Spectator mode and found a cave that had a horde of Zombies. There's a chance that a baby Zombie will appear while riding a chicken, a chance referred to as a Chicken Jockey. If the player gets too far away, the baby Zombie will despawn, but since the chicken itself is a passive mob, it won't. Chickens also lay an egg every 5 to 20 minutes. Since this chicken exists in a pitch-black dark cave, it exists in the same darkness level that Zombies can spawn. Zombies have a low possibility of being able to pick up items that are dropped on the ground, such as...eggs dropped by chickens. If a Zombie is holding an item it picked up, it will not despawn on its own, meaning it will persist in the world. And since this particular cave is entirely closed off, I didn't find it by running around lighting up caves, meaning it had been entirely ignored. In a cave close enough to areas I spent a lot of time in that there were plenty of chances for Zombies that could pick up items to spawn. The result was a horde of zombies some thirty-or-so strong just sitting there in a cave. Now, this might be a good thing. The game has a few mob caps, limiting how many of certain types of mobs can exist at once. The more naturally-spawned zombies exist, the less can spawn anywhere else so long as the others are still loaded in the world. Putting a mechanism setup called a Chunk Loader in the right spot would keep this horde loaded, meaning zombies and other hostile overworld mobs wouldn't be able to spawn, making the game safer overall. The problem is the horde was close enough to a hostile mob farm I'd built, one that relies on dark spaces for hostile mobs to spawn to funnel them into a kill chamber. If the horde is loaded, the horde adds to the hostile mob cap, meaning the farm becomes less efficient, and thus I get less resources out of it. Ultimately, the horde had to go. In terms of game update news, they added the Goat Horn which had been in Minecraft: Bedrock Edition's experimental versions for a little while now. Using it makes a sound that can be heard from a very far distance. They didn't just add one, but eight, each making different noises and giving a reason to make a goat farm. They're also adding a lot of bug fixes in the last couple of snapshots, which is usually a sign that the full version is around the corner.

Yeah, any time someone on DA posts a multi-page story or comic and doesn't either add next/previous links in the description or put them in order in a folder in their gallery so the left/right arrows work, it's frustrating. Fortunately, Jocelyn does both. I think Rain was hosted on Smackjeeves at one point. The comments on the last page imply that it no longer is, but I can't be bothered to check. (...aaaaand someone beat me to it with the comic's actual site that I didn't even know existed)

The main thing about my Minecraft world is that it's been updated so many times that I have to go really far away to find new stuff. It's at the point where biome-finder programs online don't match, sending me to a biome that doesn't exist. Fortunately there's an in-game command that locates a biome for me. Unfortunately, if I update the world any further, the new terrain generation will completely mess everything up and ruin even that command (e.g. I try to locate a swamp and it gives me the coordinates for a mountain). I've made a copy of the world to see where actual swamp, badlands, flower forest, and mushroom fields biomes can be found. And they're really far away. I'm going to connect them using the Nether, which will be rather perilous as the paths I've found to these coordinates go through open air through a Soul Sand Valley biome. What this means is I have to place a two-kilometer-long covered stone bridge over a lake of lava by hand while exposed to the air in an area in which giant flying murderghosts appear the most often to shoot explosive fireballs at me while staying far enough away that I can't even see where they're shooting from. Fun. Then, when Minecraft 1.19 finally comes out, I have to go out even farther to find the new Mangrove Swamp biome. Or hope I get lucky with the Wandering Trader. At least I have my automatic cobblestone farm now. Progress. Meanwhile in the world of Minecraft snapshots, the Warden now has a ranged attack. A sonic scream that has insane range and hits through walls. ...FUN.

Rain has reached its end. The final page was posted yesterday. I won't link it because it's the literal last page, so here's the literal first page. [link] Suffice to say, it ended on a good note.

Been playing Minecraft some more. I built an Enderman farm. Never need Ender Pearls ever again, plus it's better than any other experience farm I've built yet. I actually got the design from Welsknight from the Hermitcraft server. Also, yesterday I found a spot to sit and idle where mobs wouldn't get to me and left the game running while I went to work. For thirteen hours straight. I basically never have to worry about my iron supplies ever again. I also built a melon/pumpkin farm, which automatically feeds the excess into a Composter to get bone meal so I don't really have to worry about overflow. ...actually, I know I finished building it already, but maybe I could raise it up higher and put stuff underneath, use the excess bone meal for some other farms.

"So why does it feel familiar?" (chanting) Kaoli! Kaoli! Kaoli! Please? Please, Dan? Please? (disappointed) It's probably not Kaoli. I just saw 'familiar' and got my hopes up.

Minecraft has begun official snapshots for version 1.19, starting with snapshot 22w11a. Features include: Deep Dark biome, a new underground biome covered in Sculk. Sculk blocks, including the Sculk Sensor technically added in 1.17 but made inaccessible due to them wanting to work on it more; Sculk, basically a block of experience; Sculk Catalyst, which spreads Sculk if something dies near it; Sculk Veins, which are like a moss layer of Sculk; and Sculk Shriekers, which make very loud noises if triggered by nearby vibrations and will be able to summon the Warden (they don't do this yet because the Warden isn't in this snapshot yet, but give it time) Mangrove, a new wood type. Trees and biome do not generate yet, though. Includes a log, stripped log, bark block, stripped bark block, planks, button, pressure plate, slab, boat, stairs, door, trapdoor, fence, fence gate, sign, and leaves. It also uses "propagules" instead of saplings, but currently these things only create oak trees. Mangrove Roots, a very new type of block. They can also be waterlogged and don't leak water from any angle, which will make some farms a bit easier. Mud, which will also generate in a new biome not yet added. Also includes Packed Mud, Mud Bricks, and assorted stairs, slabs, and walls for said mud bricks. Muddy Mangrove Roots. Also a good decorative block. Frogs and Tadpoles. Tadpoles grow into frogs, but which type of frog grows depends on the temperature of the biome the tadpole grows up in. You can also put a tadpole in a bucket. Froglights, made when a Frog eats a small Magma Cube. There are three colors of froglight, depending on which type of frog does the eating. I'm waiting to update my long-running survival world until 1.19 comes out. Currently it's in version 1.17.1. The main reason is because 1.18 onwards has added 64 blocks of terrain generation below the bedrock layer (bottom of the world has changed from y=0 to y=-64), but 1.19 will eventually add Deep Dark Cities, a new structure, to these sub-subterranean areas. Hopefully one will generate underneath the parts of the world I've already loaded, but I'm not too sure about that. Currently I want to make a number of farms in Minecraft. I want a Drowned farm especially as one of my plans involves a lot of copper. There's a lot of steps needed to make the Drowned farm in the first place, so I think I'll start just by making a Creeper farm for just gunpowder. Think I'm gonna steal a lot of farm designs from the Shulkercraft YouTube channel, but I do have a couple of my own ideas. Honestly, the thing to do is to just...do it.

Yep. Much like The Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto, each new Pokemon generation brings a new setting to the table. Red and Blue have the Kanto region based on, well, the Kanto region of Japan. Gold and Silver introduced the Johto region based on the Kansai region. Ruby and Sapphire added the Hoenn region based on Kyūshū. Diamond and Pearl added Sinnoh based on Hokkaido. Black and White's Unova region broke the mold by being based on somewhere outside of Japan, specifically New York City. X and Y's Kalos region is based on northern France, Sun and Moon's Alola region is based on Hawaii, and Sword and Shield's Galar region is based on Great Britain. All of which have some tweaks and include things from surrounding areas, but yeah. Now it looks like Scarlet and Violet's new region will be based on Spain, but we're still missing a lot of details (including the name) so that's just a very best guess at this point.

I mean, we already have Psyduck and Ducklett, though I do think the former is a platypus instead. Alright, so the starter trio's names dropped, and between them and the region's architecture, people are saying this region is based on Spain. The Grass-type cat is Sprigatito. Sprig is an agriculture term for, quote Wikipedia, a type of plant cutting used for propogation. Gatito is Spanish for kitten (gato "cat" + -ito, a diminutive suffix). Its Japanese name is Nyaoha, which appears to be nyā (onomatopoeia for cat noises) and ha (leaf). The Fire-type reptile is Fuecoco. If we're assuming Spanish (and since it has "coco" in the name, I think after one of Pixar's recent endeavors that's an easy thing to think), then "fue" comes from fuego, Spanish for fire (it's the Fire-type starter, after all), and "coco" comes from cocodrilo, Spanish for crocodile. It does have that vague crocodilian shape, now that I'm looking at it, though it admittedly does also have a theropod dinosaur shape too. Its Japanese name, Hogēta, appears to be a combination of hot and gator as well. The Water-type duck is Quaxly (ENG) or Kuwassu (JP). Nothing overly Spanish about its name here, though; it evokes the word "quack" which is pretty self-explanatory for a duck. Its feet are blue, however, so Quaxly might also be based on the blue-footed booby (wait, will the forum censors let me say that?). [Edit: yes they will, apparently.]

After ignoring video games for a bit, I decided to boot up Raft again. I've explored the next two story islands and acquired all the blueprints. Now that I've researched everything available until the next big update, my plan is to do the same thing as before: float around, gather resources, and build up my raft. Currently I'm working on an actual area for my biofuel setup. The main thing is I don't know if making a room completely enclosed with walls will stop the seagulls from getting in. I've heard that having multiple layers of ceiling will keep them out entirely, but that means putting it right in the middle of the entire raft, which means I'd have to move a lot of things. Afterwards, I need to make places for animals, and the bottleneck for that is dirt, of all things. Nintendo also dropped a Pokemon-centric Nintendo Direct. First, there's either an animated or animatronic Pikachu in Mr. Ishihara's office, probably the former. It blinks weird. Pokemon Go is getting an update featuring Alola region Pokemon. The whole lot of Sun/Moon Pokemon will drop on March 1, but until then we'll get Alolan Exeggutor all over. Pokemon Masters EX will be getting a Victory Road update and a few new characters. Pokemon Cafe Remix will get some new Pokemon, a delivery service in the form of Pelipper (Mystery Dungeon flashbacks, anyone?), and a few limited log-in bonuses starting now and lasting for a few days. Pokemon Unite is hosting a Pokemon Day event, featuring "Full-Fury Battles", a new quick battle mode that appears to give access to every Pokemon currently available with every move they can use. Hoopa is also unlocked as of this event, and Duraludon will be unlocked in the future. Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will have the Shaymin event for the next month. From now until March 27, the Oak's Letter will be available as a Mystery Gift item, letting players access the location in which Shaymin is caught, just like in the original Diamond and Pearl. Pokemon Legends: Arceus will soon (as in, today) get a Version 1.1.0 update, titled Daybreak. This free update will involve mass outbreaks of Pokemon and battles with other trainers. Production of an online animated series set in the Hisui region has begun. Finally, an interesting production starting with something live-action as the lead-up to the next thing. It looks like a new region. Big open world design, new locations... ...Yep, new starters. Grass-type cat, Fire-type reptile thing, Water-type duck. Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet! GEN 9 ON THE WAY, BOYS! Late 2022.

So I've gone back to Raft and messed around a bit with it. Two things: One, I finally managed to explore the next story island, the one with bears and the recipes for biofuel stuff. First, a bear killed me and I lost like four spears, a bow and all my arrows, two water bottles (deceptively expensive), a metal axe, and some other stuff. That's a good majority of my metal supply gone. Being a bit more cautious, I managed to go back through the island, kill that bear and several others, distract the Mama Bear with story progression items, find all the notes and blueprints, grab a bunch of new materials, and got the code to track down the next story island. My current objective is to restock my supply of planks and metal and improving my raft (especially my storage system) before moving on to the next story island. No, seriously. Planks are the resource you're gonna be using the most. You can't build pretty much anything without it. Rope is also a deceptively high-demand material as well. Metal is another big one and easily the hardest of the three to obtain, as you can only find it around the islands. Underwater. With the shar- Two, I went into a creative-mode world (infinite health resources and the shark ignores you and your raft, but the raft doesn't move and there's no trash or islands) to mess around with raft designs. I built a little area to see what I can do with a bee hive, tried to recreate my current house, messed with water tanks and water pumps, tried to build and subsequently destroyed a giant wedge with a huge sweep of collection nets as a potential raft design, then made a line of engines hooked up to a few biofuel tanks to see if that would work and built a biofuel setup near it. All well and good. Except... Remember when I got killed by the bear? The game autosaved right as I was dying (or maybe dying triggers an autosave), and I didn't like that, so I disabled the autosave. So I'd done a lot of things without saving. Then the game crashed. And I lost all that stuff in that world. Ah well. It's a creative mode world. It's not like I lost any actual progress. So instead I just built a storage room on my recreation of my survival mode raft. I later went to my second creative mode world where the objective is to have the raft supported by as few platforms as possible, with a large platform raised above the small ones. The main point of this world is to see if collection nets count towards the engines' limit. One engine is needed for every 100 foundation pieces, and I didn't know if the nets counted; turns out they don't, so I can have a lot of nets and only really need 13 or 14 foundation pieces and I'll be golden. The original plan was to have basically an inverted pyramid for my raft platform. Then, while I was messing around, I made a very important discovery. Did you know that if you place a foundation and a collection net, place a wall or support beam on the intersection between the two, and break the foundation, the wall or beam will still be there? You can't place the wall or beam on the net by itself, but this setup bypasses that quite nicely. My current plan for this world, and a potential second survival file, is to have it so there's one platform in the center to start, four spokes of 25 collection nets sticking off from that, all in troughs of walls, and then twelve more platforms for the important stuff--eight for the anchor, three for the sole engine, one for the water purifier...and maybe a thirteenth platform for a paint mixer if I can ever be bothered to go that far (spoilers: I can't). Everything else will be raised up on higher platforms in two intersecting valleys or something. It's gonna be an interesting engineering problem.

So a friend of my Mom's found a stray kitten but couldn't take him in because someone in the house is allergic. We offered to foster him until we could find him a home, keeping in mind that I wouldn't mind our home being his home. But when my brother came home and saw the kitten, he basically called dibs. So... Meet Midnight. (also official Zorua fingers reveal) We think he's about a month to five weeks old and possibly self-weaned. We need to get him a bright reflective kitten harness because his fur is basically pitch black and blends in with the darkness. We also probably need to take him to the vet soon-ish. He is currently sprawled out on my lap as I type this. (discarded name suggestions: Chat Noir, Adrien, Bagheera, Ghira, Grue, Brian)